Credit Bureaus' Disdain for Accuracy. Hartford Courant: A credit trap for consumers. The nation's credit reporting business is built on a system so seriously flawed... [Dan Gillmor's eJournal]

Another example of how a business model based on controlling information, no matter how poorly, has been allowed to succeed. Credit bureau's will have to change but do not expect them to go without howling for governmental regulation, just all all failing business plans do.  11:47:02 PM    

'Off the Record' Gates/Jobs Comments Posted Online. The organizers of the Wall Street Journal's D -- All Things Digital conference made reporters promise that all sessions were... [Dan Gillmor's eJournal]

An example of how they just do not get it. Professional journalists were asked not to write about the meeting, to keep it all off the record. But individual attendees blogged to their hearts content, giving information to anyone who wanted to know. So why keep the professionals in silence? It makes little sense except to those who think they can control it all. Jobs may get it. He does not seem to be afraid of what MS or others will do to compete with the iTunes Music Store. It is not an easy thing to create but if someone does, they will have to be smarted than Apple and Jobs. Doesn't happen too often.  11:43:32 PM    

Andromeda on OS X. Instructions for setting up the streaming MP3 server Andromeda on OS X are now available, which should placate those bemoaning the loss of internet sharing in iTunes.... [HubLog]

Streaming music is not that hard. The hobbling of iTunes by Apple gave them a lot of bad publicity and will not really placate the media companies. I think the ability to listen to your personal playlists via your own copy of itunes via the internet is perfectly acceptable. Sure you can use an iPod but that is really a stop gap measure. In 10 years, we will all be able to stream our own music, assuming the Internet of ATT, Worlcom and Comcast still allows that sort of things.  11:33:01 PM    

SJ Mercury: FCC's Powell must be held to his word. Dan Gillmor. It's not alarmist, given the plain-as-day trajectory of policies -- including the FCC's own recent actions -- to suggest that the Net's promise is in jeopardy. A few giant media and telecommunications companies could well grasp full control of the Net. [Tomalak's Realm]

The scary thing is that the Republican side of the FCC is saying that allowing the Media Cartel to own everything is okay because diversity in viewpoint will be maintained in the Internet. Yet its own policies are moving to an era where the companies who have depended on monopolies for their whole existence (telecoms and cable) will be able to manipulate the Internet and its very diversity. When these companies exert their ability to control and bless internet communications, where will diverse viewpoints go? This is part of the continuing battle of information flow and knowledge creation. The fascist companies that want to control who gets to see what for how much will eventually fall to those who realize that, in the end, there is no control. The statists will fall to the dynamists.  11:26:06 PM    

RSS' Growing Importance.

The RSS feed is growing in importance. Two recent comments are an indication of the attention being paid to the fact that RSS may become the new way to dissenimate information.

Writes Jon Udell:

Direct one-click access to RSS sources is suddenly a lot more interesting. It used to be that RSS aggregators were few. Now they are many -- because every copy of Radio is one. The people running these aggregators can now start to trade channels as we used to trade links.

The benefits of this new RSS fluidity, which kicks things up a level of abstraction, seem obvious to me, and will seem obvious to anyone who finds their way here to read this. But those benefits will not be obvious to most people. Casual use of ordinary links is still not nearly as prevalent in routine business and personal communication as it ought to be. The kind of meta-linking possible with channel exchange will seem even more exotic. The challenge -- and opportunity -- is to make all this as easy and natural as most people think email is.

Adds Tim Bray:

Eventually there will be business models built around weblogs, with more popular ones being more lucrative. And while the Pagerank-style ratings produced by Technorati, Daypop and so on are important, the big question is going to become: ?how many subscribers do you have??

[E M E R G I C . o r g]

RSS, aggregators and weblogs have benefits not immediately obvious. As in all paradigm shifts, if you are on one side of the paradigm, you simply can not understand what the person on the other side is talking about. People forget that email was not intuitively obvious for most when it first began to be used. I watched it take 2 years at Immunex before you could be certain that another scientist would read your email at least THAT day so that you would not have to walk down the hall way to ask if they had read your email. We forget just how long it can take for these sorts of empowering technologies to filter through even the most creative and innovative communities. RSS and blogs are even more non-obvious to many. But the power they provide, their ability to increase information flow, will make them extremely useful to those who use them.  11:08:46 PM    

Blogosphere Dynamics.

Mark McLuhan: "Blogs that come to be noticed are those which are cited, that is linked-to, interestingly mirroring the best academic tradition. This is the highest form of editorial oversight - peer review. Those bloggers who establish a reputation for themselves by virtue of their insight, wittiness and general wisdom gain attention, which, after all, is the most valuable commodity in a world of instantaneous communications. The community edits itself; those whose contributions merit mass distribution via the unique dynamic of the blogosphere will see such distribution. Those whose contribution remains in the realm of navel-gazing and news-about-their-cat will be 'modded down' in the best tradition of Slashdot, a site whose membership dynamics is a major archetype for community moderation."

Mark also points to a story on Microdocs and says:

How does a story hit the big-time, and why aren't I famous yet? The most interesting comment in the article is the conclusion: "Blogs cannot be read in isolation from each other. Blog stories are understood and appreciated in aggregate and not in isolation. On the other hand, mainstream media stories tend to be read in isolation rather than read and compared. This is the key to understanding why blogs provide the most appropriate form of journalism in a world of instantaneous communications, and the fundamental difference between conventional mass-media and a journalism formed of connectedness.

Blogs are part of an ecosystem, just like conversations. There is a symbiotic relationships between bloggers themselves, and blogs and mainstream media.

[E M E R G I C . o r g]

Blogs are like a conversation between people several light hours apart. The interaction is delayed so the conversations seem as though they would lose the immediacy of pure conversation. But what they lack in immediacy, they gain in permanency. A good idea can gain strength and spread in ways that are much more difficult via analog means. You see tipping points all the time with ideas discussed on blogs. This will become a more common occurence as blogs penetrate the social networks of the world.  11:03:53 PM