Thursday, February 19, 2004

Video game to help flood planners. A special SimCity-like game has been devised to help plan for Britain's future flood defences. [BBC News | Science/Nature | UK Edition] 10:19:00 AM      Google It!.

The Self-Tuning Guitar [Slashdot] 10:17:13 AM      Google It!.

On the Therapist's Couch, a Jolt of Virtual Reality. Therapists are using software to create virtual environments that can help people face down their fears. By Sam Lubell. [New York Times: Technology] 10:14:55 AM      Google It!.

1,000 Gigabytes Appease the Multimedia Glutton.  supersizing your system with an external hard drive ordered for $1,199 at www.lacie.com. with typical music tracks could spin out tunes for the next two years.By J.d. Biersdorfer. [New York Times: Technology] Time to come to grips with the reality of cheap digital storage $1.19 per gig.  The notion of  charging for  space on the server begins to seem  ever so quaint.  You personally  will never type a gig woth to characters in a lifetime.   This  represents the thin edge of the wedge of the digital utility that will combine both computing power and storage in interestng ways.  Issues of human usability will be key in the era of the digital utility even more than they are now. BL 10:13:31 AM      Google It!.

Videophones Revisited, by Way of the Modem. The Internet offers video chat and cheap (if not free) telephone calls. Now those functions have been married not in a PC but in an appliance called the VisiFone. By David Pogue. [New York Times: Technology] 10:00:59 AM      Google It!.

Using the Yahoo! search plugin in Mozilla. Somebody was looking over my shoulder the other day as I was using the dropdown list of search plugins in Firefox (nee Firebird nee Phoenix nee Mozilla), and was surprised to see it. Which reminded me that in IE and Safari, the built-in search isn't extensible. ... [Jon's Radio] 9:58:07 AM      Google It!.

No Moore's Law for Software?. Dana Blankenhorn sees a tipping point in the fact that the basic Microsoft software (Windows and Office) for a new PC costs more than all the hardware. [Werblog] 9:56:29 AM      Google It!.

The fundamental business challenge of our times. Eli Noam of Columbia Business School has an important Financial Times column pointing out the fundamental business challenge facing the tech sector: commoditization. "The market failure of the entire information sector is one of the fundamental trends of our time, with far-reaching long-term effects, and it is happening right in front of our eyes." Eli is by nature a cynic, so what he has to say is often not pleasant. But he has the unfortunate habit of being right much of the time, and ahead of the curve virtually all the time. I've disagreed with some of his conclusions, but I'm with him on the core insight: there is a basic structural disconnect in the economics of information industries, with painful consequences. We saw it first in telecom, where VOIP is now bringing the issue to a boil, but it's broader than that. Jeff Jarvis and Ross Mayfield would like to think we can make it up on volume. I'm as excited as they are about new bottom-up markets and content forms like blogs. The problem is simply that you can't get there from here. A hundred Nick Dentons wouldn't pay for one floor of the Conde Nast headquarters building where Jeff works. (Jeff knows that, and is working both sides of the equation, but Gawker will never be Entertainment Weekly.) There's no scenario that doesn't take a substantial amount of money from the traditional media sector -- and telecom, and IT -- and replace with with a smaller amount of money in distributed alternatives. One answer, which Noam thinks may be inevitable, is consolidation to the point of monopolization. Ma Bell held back the tide of commoditization in an industry characterized by high fixed and low variable costs, and Microsoft is doing the same thing in the PC business. That outcome isn't all bad... but it's far from good. And, I believe, far from assured. Is there another answer? I think there is. I proposed it four years ago in the Harvard Business Review (and a year earlier in Release 1.0): syndication. At the time, the idea may have sounded like new economy hype. In reality, syndication is a roadmap for pulling out of the commoditization death spiral. It won't be simple and it won't be painless, but syndication will provide a foundation for new growth in the information sector. Just look at the performance of the two Web-based companies most heavily built on the syndication model: Google and Amazon. Another useful test case for syndication will be the development of the RSS/RDF/Atom ecosystem around Weblogs. [Werblog] 9:55:05 AM      Google It!.

New CMS Forum. We have launched a new forum, based on Drupal software, to collect interesting threaded discussions from the CMS List. It also has a set of CMS vendor forums, arranged in a taxonomy. Finally, it has a news aggregator that collects CMS news feeds from 17 sources, the largest collection of CMS news By bobdoyle@skybuilders.com (bobdoyle). [CMS Review Blog] 9:50:44 AM      Google It!.

An Online Assistant for Remote, Distributed Critiquing of Electronically Submitted Assessment - Penny Baillie-de Byl, Educational Technology & Society. Abstract: This paper outlines the architecture for an online assessment management system implemented at the University of Southern Queensland. The system assists teams of academics in the management and marking of electronically submitted student assi [Online Learning Update] 9:43:46 AM      Google It!.

Cisco gets into video conferencing. Sound and vision [The Register] 9:37:27 AM      Google It!.