Amen, brother!  I've got religion, do you?  In all seriousness, John is right.  A lot of BigCo's want to exert their market influence over the Internet, which they have no control over nor the skills to master.  Power on the Internet is directly proportional to an entities reach in terms of distribution, redistribution, and readability of content, applications, and services.  Additionally, an entities control over physical infrastructure and services also creates power.  Most companies don't know how to operate in efficient marketplaces where information flows freely or almost freely.  As a matter of fact, most companies create barriers to prevent distribution of information in order to create a perceived competitive advantage.

Here is something I am hearing again and again.  People want control of the Internet.  They want the Web to be as big and dumb as possible.  As few smarts as is necessary.  They want all the smarts on their desktop in their control.  This is exactly the opposite message the big co's and the neo-glasshouse technical guys in the Web world are saying.  They keep going on and on about scalability, performance, and excessive amounts of security (that only they can provide)

Well, I and the rest of the world want control.  We don't need our hands held.  We want to publish our own content, control our data, and safeguard our own PCs.  We don't want to wait in lines at overcrowded websites -- we want to speed up our interactions up to the limits of the best hardware we can afford.  We want to turbo-charge my interactions with every source of content and interactivity on the Web.   We want it to be easy and run in our browsers, but we want it local on our desktops.  We want the centralized Web to get out of our way.  I could go on, but I think you know what I mean. 

How to do this?  Desktop Web apps, Web Services, and two-way publishing. [John Robb's Radio Weblog]

11:50:05 PM   comments ()  

Could this be the catalyst that China needs to catch up with the rest of the world?  I know a few companies better billions of dollars on it.

Gartner: Look to China for outsourcing services [IDG InfoWorld]

9:38:15 AM   comments ()  

I know guys there were there; some lived, some died.  It's about time that the nation heard about this in the detail that these guys dream about every night.  The Clinton administration stifled this for years.  On a lighter note, Hollywood did call upon most of the survivors to be consultants during the making of the movie "Black Hawk Down."  A friend of mine spent two months out there training some of the actors.

Somalia, 1993. The Washington Post has a special section with much of its reporting on Somalia, and the failed 15 month intervention there. These are all stories and commentaries that were written at the time of the events, the classic "rough draft of history". [kuro5hin.org]

8:28:22 AM   comments ()