Linux wars: Big Blue strikes back. IBM argues that SCO's demands for Unix license revenue are undermined by its earlier shipment of an open-source Linux product. [CNET News.com]
11:22:08 PM  #   your two cents []

Reality check: Jupiter Research has published some interesting figures on blogging. Somewhere between 2.4 and 2.9 million active blogs exist, but they remain a tiny slice of web life. Only 2% of web users have created a blog, and only an estimated 4% read them (which is a good reminder to bloggers and media people to always explain the word weblog and blog and not assume your audience has any idea whatsoever of what you're talking about :^) ...). Blogging is split fairly evenly between genders, but more men than women read them (a 60/40 split). Nearly 3/4ths (73%) of blog readers have been online for 5 years or more, suggesting (to me) they are either fairly young or the more techie crowd that first jumped online.

Of the live weblogs, Blogcount believes 1.6 million are part of three main services:

How Many Blogs?
	Registered	Active	As of
LiveJournal	1,121,464	526,535	June 2003
Blogger	1,500,000	705,000	June 2003
DiaryLand	850,000	400,000	March 2003
TOTALS	3,471,464	1,631,535
Note: Based on management reports
Source: Blogcount

(chart from Jupiter CyberAtlas)

And here's a chart on blog languages, based on the 655,631 Weblogs currently indexed by the The National Institute for Technology and Liberal Education (NITL) BlogCensus. Granted, that leaves at least about 2 million of them unevaluated by language...

Top Blogging Languages
Language	Count
English	350097
Portuguese	54496
Polish	42677
Farsi	27002
French	10381
Spanish	9509
German	7736
Italian	7017
Dutch	3684
Icelandic	3542
Source: NITL BlogCensus

All of this suggests a very, very small -- but growing -- phenomenon. Read the full piece here.

11:21:25 PM  #   your two cents []

Hee hee!! Letter to the Editor from today's Irish Times:

Madam, - Now I know what the spire is for - it's for holding Liam Lawlor's receipts! - Yours, etc.,

GERARD LEE, Crumlin, Dublin 12.

4:20:34 PM  #   your two cents []

Moving news: OK, I'm going to try and port my site over to my new domain, which is (taaa-daaa!) www.techno-culture.com. Probably over the weekend, and I'll be using other Radio user's suggestions on how to do this and leave the old archive up to the changeover point on Userland's servers, while also pointing to my new domain.

I need to think about how I will organise the site but am quite excited at the prospect of finally having a proper domain of my own and getting rid of the unwieldy URLs of my existing sites. I'll put my links site over to the domain, too. And have a section for my privacy archive and I'll at last get my doctoral dissertation onto the site under a Creative Commons license (for all you Seamus Heaney/Irish Studies scholars out there...).

So be prepared to re-bookmark me!

1:18:25 PM  #   your two cents []

The software contrarian. Sybase’sJohn Chen on why total cost of ownership is a farce, industry consolidation is not inevitable and why Larry Ellison is not everyone’s idea of the software messiah. [CNET News.com]
1:10:21 PM  #   your two cents []

Darwinian Poetry: From Bad to Verse [Slashdot]
1:08:51 PM  #   your two cents []

Fonts derived from old-school videogames. "Super-frag-olicious. This website offers free, downloadable font sets derived from classic 8-bit computer games."

Link, Discuss  [Boing Boing Blog]

10:53:03 AM  #   your two cents []

Gartner Says Delay Linux Deployment Due to SCO [Slashdot]: ...Wearing my journalist's hat, I've raised this as a business point with Linux people (including those at big Linux partners like Oracle) a couple of times and they routinely dismiss the impact. But businesses have to consider potential outcomes. So this doesn't surprise me. I'm not sure if Linux companies actually underestimate the threat (which would mean many don't really understand business imperatives in the enterprise market) or if they've decided to treat the threat with a deliberately placid front. I don't think the suit can simply be waved away just because almost no one has viewed the suspect code. Big companies must always consider, "What if..." when making an IT investment if a lawsuit could have an impact on the investment.
10:19:14 AM  #   your two cents []

Desperately seeking Kraftwerk. The creators of electronica are back at work - and not accepting visitors. Alexis Petridis goes anyway. [Guardian Unlimited]
10:11:29 AM  #   your two cents []

Ouch: Sony's Profit Falls 98% on Weak Demand. Sony reported quarterly profits plunged 98 percent. Nobuyuki Idei, the chairman, said the company has pledged to generate stronger profit margins by 2006. [New York Times: Technology]
10:09:15 AM  #   your two cents []