09 October 2002

P2P Organisations Paolo Valdemarin -- Like Paolo, I have bumped into some very smart people electronically. They hail from all parts of the world. They work with technologies and are involved in projects that interest me. So, how can we operationalise a method that would increase the opportunities for these kinds of contacts? How about encouraging the development of omnipresent expertise through collaborative technology?

Community Wireless Network in London LONDON -- Ben Hammersley just installed a community wireless network that covers all of South Molton Street in London. Help yourself to his generous bandwidth.

The Illusion of First Mover Advantage BOSTON -- We're talking in the MIT Enterprise Forum about first mover advantage and I cannot help but think it's a myth. "I would argue the first mover advantage is largely illusory," says Steve Jurvetson, of Draper, Fisher Jurvetson. "A company may say they are the only one doing something, but we usually assume there are at least twenty others doing a similar thing." So it puts added importance on establishinng the patent rights and protecting unique intellectual property. Being first in Ireland Valley or even the U.S. is no small feat, but can you be sure you beat the rest of the world?

Sighting: Logitech io Digital Pen LOGITECH -- The io Digital Pen is a lot like the digital pen I use with the TransNote. With the io pen, you must download its contents into a USB device. With the ThinkScribe, it transfers into the TransNote automatically. The software for the Logitech io pen was deloped by Anoto, a company whose pen-and-paper technology is emerging as a new standard for digital writing. The pen itself is the key component of an ecosystem that includes paper manufacturers Mead Cambridge Notebooks from MeadWestvaco, Post-it® Notes from 3M and productivity tools from FranklinCovey® in the US. The suggested U.S. retail price for the complete system starter kit is $199.

Eden Faster with WiFi GUARDIAN.co.uk -- Ben Hammersley wrote this story in The Guardian last week, but my local news agents didn't get the copy. Thanks to my news aggregator, I caught the story on the rebound. It's about bringing the net to Eden. In the village of Kirkby Stephen, in the Eden Valley, on the border between Cumbria and the Yorkshire Dales, getting on to the internet is a major effort. With phone lines shared between remote farmhouses, and mobile phones a cruel fantasy, an internet connection here can drop as low as 12Kbps. [...] But all of this is about to change. EdenFaster, a local community organisation, is about to supply broadband internet connections to the entire valley, bringing 10,000 people, 500 businesses and 50 schools online with an internet connection 20 times faster than ADSL for half the price. They're doing it on their own because of a perceived lack of demand by telecoms companies. They're doing it wirelessly, and they're one of the leaders in the new revolution in ways to deliver the internet in the UK.

Everything Can Be a Link EVHEAD.com -- Last year, Ev Williams wrote about browsers linking to specific chunks of text instead of linking to pages or pointing to adventitious content in entire websites. Brian Donovan has taken the idea further, developing JavaScript to hyperlink specific areas on pages. This is worth considering, but the companion JavaScript must be on the pages containing link text.

Movement and Action Ernest Hemingway -- "Never confuse movement with action."

You Might Be a Longhorn TAMPATANTRUM.com -- You might be a Longhorn, if: The Halloween pumpkin on your porch has more teeth than your spouse. You let your twelve-year-old daughter smoke at the dinner table in front of her kids. You've been married three times and still have the same in- laws. You think a woman who is "out of your league" bowls on a different night. Jack Daniels makes your list of "most admired people". You wonder how petrol stations keep their restrooms so clean. Anyone in your family ever died right after saying, "Hey watch this." You think Dom Pérignon is a Mafia leader. Your wife's hairdo was once ruined by a ceiling fan. You think the last words of the Star Spangled Banner are, "Gentlemen start your engines." You lit a match in the bathroom and your house exploded right off its wheels. The bluebook value of your truck goes up and down, depending on how much gas is in it. You have to go outside to get something from the fridge. One of your kids was born on a pool table. You need one more hole punched in your card to get a freebie at the House of Tattoos. You can't get married to your sweetheart because there's a law against it. You think loading a dishwasher means getting your wife drunk. Your toilet paper has page numbers on it. Your front porch collapses and kills more than five dogs.

Googling Your Email Jon Udell -- Interesting thoughts on implementing local host web services.

Three Good Reasons to Stop Using PowerPoint PRESENTATIONS.com -- How about teaching three good reasons to stop using PowerPoint? Make it a short course in Flash MX and give people a powerful option to the PowerPoint mafia. Harry Waldman makes his case in an October 2002 Presentations.Com article.

Water, Slush, Ice and a Slice Andy Chen -- Innovations funnel from ideas to implemented projects. Here's a diagram that illustrates this process: If your Weblog is part of a knowledge network, you're also encouraging innovation. I think the "water to ice" metaphor describes the aggregation process that fills a meaningful portion of my day.

How Open Should Company Mail Be? Ray Ozzie -- What if all e-mail done on company time was open to all in the company? Ray Ozzie thinks "people would be shocked at not having private email, and private hotmail addresses and Groove Spaces would appear when people wanted to do something privately." But people are creatures of convenience and habit, and more and more work would be done in the open. And what would be the benefit to the collective productivity if we could all watch and listen to the thought processes of the stars on our teams? What kind of interesting bots would emerge that started to watch and subscribe to relevant queries? Customer support interactions with customers should be watched by engineers every bit as closely as the public forums.

Alexa Ranks Topgold at 280,438 ALEXA -- Topgold slips out of the first quarter million. Alexa ranks Topgold at 280,438. I've watched the site slip from 116,018 years ago to its current position. It's more to do with established users of the Alexa client not visiting the personal site.

Gartner's IT Predictions COMPUTERWORLD -- Thomas Hoffman explores Gartner's IT predictions and summarises them. Adding bandwidth will become more cost-effective than buying new computers. Most major new systems will be interenterprise or cross-enterprise systems. Despite the complexities, interenterprise systems will provide a macroeconomic boost to companies. Companies will lay off millions of employees. The consolidation of vendors will continue in many segments of the IT market. Moore's Law will hold true through this decade. Banks will become the primary providers of "presence services" by 2007. Business activity monitoring will hit the mainstream within five years. Business units, not IT, will make most application decisions. The pendulum swings back to decentralized IT operations by 2004

Essential Blogging O'REILLY -- My aggregator scrapes content from three of the authors of "Essential Blogging," a no-nonsense guide to the technology of blogging. The book gives detailed installation, configuration, and operation instructions for the leading blogging software: Blogger, Radio Userland, Movable Type, and Blosxom. Without reading the book, Tim Kirby has chopped and changed a Radio local host. It also includes practical advice and insider tips on the features, requirements, and limitations of these applications. Chapter 6, "Advanced Blogger," is available free online.

In Praise of Evolvable Formats Mark Pilgrim -- Dave Winer calls this "a beautiful essay" as Mark writes, "If it were April Fool's Day, the Net's only official holiday, and you wanted to design a 'novelty format' to slip by the W3C as a joke, it might look something like RSS 0.9x/2.0." In Winer's words, "If you aspire to design real-world formats and protocols, or if you just want to understand how they evolve, this is a must-read."

War in Any Language The U.S. military is being equipped with PDAs and other mobile devices loaded with translation software. Lt. Col Kathy DeBolt, a senior officer at an intelligence technology lab, says: "Should we, God forbid, go into Iraq, we'll have to ask 'Are there any chemicals here? Are there any facilities used to develop chemical or biological weapons?'" Translation software has been developed to assist conversations between speakers of English, Arabic, Kurdish and Farsi. The military's laptop war kit includes 1,500 briefcase-sized document scanner-translators, which could be used to make on-the-spot rough translations into English of documents written in Dari, Pashto and Arabic.