15 June 2002

Music Piracy Doesn't Hurt Recording Industry SALON -- Economist Stan Liebowitz says music piracy should be hurting the recording industry, but it isn't -- and he doesn't know why.   [Comment on Shoptalk]

Comics Online   COMICS - Their place online. Comic strips are still trying to find their place online among the jumble of concerns about money, popularity, syndication and aggregation. [Lockergnome Bytes]   [Comment on Shoptalk]

The Smother of Invention Forbes ASAP: The Smother of Invention. Branches of the government are intervening where they never have before. Opposing camps, many with money and influence, are forming. Small inventors are diverted from where they can make the greatest contributions. And a culture of litigation, circumvention, and secrecy has evolved from an area where openness and law had long ruled. [Tomalak's Realm]   [Comment on Shoptalk]

Social Network Analysis HBR article on social networks. Harvard Business Review has an [article in their June issue] about Social Network Analysis and how to tap into the power of informal knowledge & action creation in a company. This is an important field of study for us to keep up with, because it provides a new context for us to consider how we structure shared information spaces -- according to the 'official networks' or to support the informal ones? [ia/ - news for information architects]   [Comment on Shoptalk]

What We're Doing When We Blog Meg Hourihan, author of an upcoming O'Reilly book on Weblogging, gives some insight on this blogging thing. She looks beneath the content of weblogs, observing commonalities. Format:  The weblog format provides a framework for our universal blog experiences. It differentiates between the myriad content produced for the Web. Blog posts are short, informal, sometimes controversial, and sometimes deeply personal. They can be characterized by their conversational tone and unlike a more formal essay or speech, a blog post is often an opening to a discussion, rather than a full-fledged argument already arrived at. Updates: Bloggers frequently update content. The blogging publishing mechanism makes it easy to do. The Collection: Blog posts appear in reverse chronological order. Newest info is at the top. It attracts through its immediacy. The Anatomy of a Post: A weblog post has a date header, a time stamp, and a permalink. Oftentimes the author's name appears beneath each post as well, especially if multiple authors are contributing to one blog. If commenting is enabled (giving the reader a form to respond to a specific post) a link to comment will also appear. The Links: At a time when newspapers kill links, blogs include them as the distinguishing characteristic. Blog scrapers use the trail of links to tell the community the most popular topics and blog sites. Blog systems, like UserLand, LiveJournal and Blogger, enable us to quickly write, link, and assume part of a dynamic. The Time Stamp:  By its very presence, the time stamp connotes the sense of timely content; the implicit value of time to the weblog itself is apparent because the time is overtly stated on each post. Without the time stamp, the reader is unable to discern the author's update pattern, or experience a moment of shared experience. The Permalink: The permalink (the link to the permanent location of the post in the blog's archive) plays a critical role in how authors participate in distributed conversations across weblogs. The permalink allows for precise references, creating a way for authors to link to the specific piece of information to which they're responding.     [Comment on Shoptalk]

Declan McCullagh Moves to CNET Declan McCullagh has Wired News to assume a new job as CNET News.com's chief political correspondent. He continues working in Washington DC, writing on the same topics in the ever-growing intersection of technology, law, and politics.   [Comment on Shoptalk]