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Thursday, March 20, 2003 |
Killer Virus Tracked to Hotel. Health officials have identified a Hong Kong hotel as the likely starting point for a mysterious outbreak of the pneumonia that has killed 14 people. [Wired News]
3:20:23 PM 
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"Where is Raed" Iraq blog: hoax? real?. Interesting blog post by Paul Boutin regarding whether the much-talked-about "Where is Raed?" blog is a hoax or not:
Speculation continues that Dear Raed, the weblog of a young man in Baghdad who posts under the name Salam Pax, is a hoax, perhaps even a disinformation campaign by the CIA or Mossad. A month after Computerworld published a story quoting a "terrorist" who turned out to be a one of their former writers pranking them, it would be foolish not to wonder.
Rather than guess, I emailed Salam and asked for proof of his location just before the first attack on Baghdad this morning. "how can i do that?" he emailed back. "you don't expect me to run out in the street and take a picture near something you'll recognize." Actually, I pointed out, a +964 phone number where I could reach him would do. Dialing into Iraq from here is tough right now, but not impossible, and rerouting a phone number would be much tougher than posting a blog from outside the country. Salam hasn't given me one, but that's understandable.
Instead, I mixed what I learned as a Unix sysadmin in the 80s with what I learned as a daily reporter in the 90s. A barrage of late-night phone calls and emails to bloggers, Google, and network engineers produced the following evidence... Link, Discuss [Boing Boing Blog]
3:08:04 PM
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SearchTools News for 2001. "XMLData"
They Say: News and current information about web site search tools, portal search engines, intranet indexing, and related topics such as information retrieval, web user experience, and site directories.
I Say: Meaty, in-depth reviews of all kinds of interesting search sites and tools.
Notes: Each description starts with an ugly set of four asterisks. The site is updated once or twice a week.
Syndic8 Link: Find out more about this feed at Syndic8 [newsfeeds]
3:06:11 PM
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DNA Lounge. "XMLData"
They Say: Upcoming events at the DNA Lounge nightclub in San Francisco.
I Say: This is definitely cool. The DNA Lounge is the brainchild of Jamie Zawinski (Netscape Navigator, Mozilla, X-Emacs, etc.). He has live events most every night; this feed lists them.
Image: 
Syndic8 Link: Find out more about this feed at Syndic8 [newsfeeds]
3:04:22 PM
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Warblogs. In many ways this will be the best-covered war ever, with hundreds of journalists in the field -- many "embedded"... [Dan Gillmor's eJournal]
1:21:40 PM
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Switzerland Bans Planes From Airspace. Switzerland on Thursday banned American and other military planes from its airspace during the war in Iraq, expressing regret the United States acted without U.N. approval. The airspace ban is similar to one enacted during the 1991 Gulf War - although Switzerland did allow some U.S. ambulance flights to cross during that conflict. [Associated Press war headlines via GoUpstate.com]
1:13:49 PM
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Is Iraq's Internet still functioning?. There's a thread on Declan's politech list today about the status of Internet service within Iraq. Brian at pc-radio.com posts:
Despite the ease with which the USA could unplug Iraq from the Net (article link), the country's Internet services appear to functioning as of this moment. Web surfers have encountered intermittent problems reaching Uruklink.net, the Iraq government's main website, after the US launched its initial attack Wednesday night. But those access difficulties were apparently due to a surge of Internet visitors rather than to damage from the bombing.(...)
Iraq's two main e-mail servers, mail.uruklink.net and mail.warkaa.net, were still responding to pings today. The website of Iraqi's satellite TV service (reachable at http://62.145.94.28 since it lost its domain iraqtv.ws), as well as BabilOnline.net, a major newspaper, were also reachable. While Iraq's sites are available from outside the country, it's not immediately clear whether Iraqis are able to access the Internet since the initial attacks. Link to reply posts, Link to original query, Discuss [Boing Boing Blog]
1:07:01 PM
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New Manila Feature: New Server-Level Aggregator Preferences. The new preferences allow server managers to automatically subscribe to all sites on the local server (making them available to ME's of all Manila sites on the server), and also allow the server manager to configure Manila to allow ME's to subscribe to any feed by URL. [Frontier News]
1:05:49 PM
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America's $400bn war bill. Economic dispatch: The US is spending more on this war than it raises in taxes, paving the way for a nasty surprise for its taxpayers, writes Randeep Ramesh. [Guardian Unlimited]
1:03:14 PM
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Online Journalists Jailed in Cuba. The Cuban government has arrested 10 independent journalists, most of whom publish their work on the Internet. Havana says the reporters are part of a U.S. effort to foment political opposition in the country. By Julia Scheeres. [Wired News]
8:46:34 AM
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Blogging from Baghdad. I don't know how appropriate it is to draw even more attention to a probably overloaded server, but this guy's ability to blog is probably already somewhat sketchy due to oh, about 25 different reasons you or I can think of right now, so here it is: Blogging from Baghdad. [kuro5hin.org]
8:45:36 AM
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An Unusual Week For Apple : If Apple sends teams of salespeople to firms referred by the former vice president, maybe we'll begin to see lots of Xserves and Macs penetrating the business market. (Mac Night Owl via MyAppleMenu) [MyAppleMenu]
8:39:30 AM
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Eat your spinnage 
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I get the LA Times every day, but I didn't learn about yesterday's Tim Rutten's blog piece by reading the paper. The heads-up came from The Heritage Foundation, which saw the piece as "the latest example of the traditional media's newfound appreciation of the growing influence of bloggers on America's public policy debates." That line came in a friendly email from the organization, which continued... |
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Our job at The Heritage Foundation is to provide useful resources - objective data and conservative analysis and commentary - to journalists, analysts and commentators of all stripes. But we aren't quite sure how to do this with the blogger community. |
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So this email is an invitation for you to participate in an experiment. For the next month, we will periodically email to you short notices about significant Heritage studies, publications and events. At the end of the month, let us know if these notices were helpful. If not, tell us at any time, and you won't get any more. If you find you only want those notices regarding specific issue areas - foreign policy, welfare reform, etc. - we'll limit our future emails to you thusly. If you want to continue receiving all of the notices, let us know that, too. |
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Regardless of your perspective on the issues of the day, we are confident you will find Heritage materials useful in your effort to provide the kind of incisive, immediate and thoughtful commentary and analysis made possible by blogging. |
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I wrote back thanking them for their offer, and asking permission to blog it, which they kindly gave. I also suggested they start blogging themselves, much as Jupiter Research does. |
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This is a first (for me, at least), and I believe The Heritage Foundation deserves kudos for its gracious combination of permission- and gonzo marketing. |
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Not too coincidentally, Heritage is a conservative think tank. On the whole, conservative thinkers are far more clueful about the Web and its authority structure than their liberal counterparts — as both the Rutten piece (which was almost entirely about warbloggers) and this emailing attest. |
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In fact, I believe liberalism is largely absent from the blogging world. The only voice on the left with any firepower on Web is Michael Moore, and he doesn't blog. Want to see how little peaceblogging actually counts? Wagging the Tale of War, which I wrote yesterday, got a whopping eight inbound links on Technorati. Total visits for the day were 1908, which is somewhere between half and a third of what I get on the average Wednesday. As a percentage of my Technorati Cosmos (all the inbound links in the last 24 hours or so), my peace post attracted far less linkage than my three others: Sixth Column (about blogging itself), RSS for Webcasts and Book support. |
In the fun house
Handy
Welcome ablog!
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...built in camera, takes videos, ships with the real audio player... But so far my carrier here in the US (Cingular) won't let me use GPRS... so even though I have a phone capable of sending data to a website like Blogger, my phone company's network won't let me... | [Doc Searls Weblog]
8:36:33 AM
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RSS for Webcasts?.
Two nights ago we were driving back from a St. Patty's Day celebration downtown, hitting SCAN on the radio in faint hope of finding music as Irish as what we'd been hearing the past several hours. The radio stopped at KFAC, the local repeater station for KUSC, the classical music station from the University of Southern California. The music was something of an orchestral jig, but the overall sound brought Gustav Holst to mind.
When we got home I went to the KUSC On Air page for 3/17 and found that the music in question was Suite No. 2 in F Op. 28.
Then I thought... What would happen if every selection KUSC played carried an RSS notification? How about if it had a tie-in as well to the CDDB? How about if there were automated aggregation services that did nothing but construct ad hoc radio dials bases on what stations are actually doing right now? How about if talk stations and programs kept blogs? (Do any? I wonder.)
Anyway, it made me think about all the businesses that might suddenly be possible if broadcasters began putting Net- and Web-bases standards to use.
For example, I'd love a wi-fi radio like Kerbango tried to make before 3Com bought and killed them. Maybe it could be a TiVo-like "RiVo," like David Sifry describes here.
I'd love to see products like Apple's iTunes put this kind of stuff to use too.
But I think the key is what RSS stands for: Really Simple Syndication. Because syndication itself is an extremely powerful idea — potentially one of the most far-reaching infrastructural add-ons the Net has seen.
[Later...] Here's a nice follow-up note from Dave. [The Doc Searls Weblog]
1:46:25 AM
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US military leaflets dropped over Iraq, take two.. US-led forces have air-dropped 17 million leaflets over Iraq this year, and nearly two million were dumped over southern Iraq yesterday. This gallery displays the six types dropped yesterday -- new ones since the last time we blogged this. From a CENTCOM press release:
 Three contained several references for Iraqis to tune to radio frequencies where Coalition forces are broadcasting information about United Nations Security Council Resolution 1441, United Nations weapons inspectors in Iraq, Iraqi President Saddam Hussein's reign and other topics. Another type of leaflet warned Iraqi troops not to use weapons of mass destruction, emphasizing that "unit commanders will be held accountable for non-compliance." One leaflet warned Iraqi troops that the Coalition will destroy any viable military targets and does not wish to destroy any Iraqi landmarks, and that the "Coalition forces do not wish to harm the noble people of Iraq. To ensure your safety, avoid areas occupied by military personnel." One more leaflet type told Iraqi troops "not risk their life and the life of their comrades," and to "leave now, go home, and learn, grow, prosper."
Link, Reuters story, Discuss [Boing Boing Blog]
1:44:41 AM
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The conversational enterprise. Bottom-up vs. top-down taxonomy is an old, ongoing KM struggle. But the emerging architecture of business process automation may help us cut that Gordian knot. XML documents, produced and consumed by Web services but also by people running a new generation of XML-savvy applications, will be the currency of the information economy. Richly structured, easily captured, and embedded in well-defined business contexts, they'll be a godsend for tools that mine knowledge from documents. Full story at InfoWorld.com
Here's Edwin Khodabakchian's take on InfoPath, an example of the kind of "XML-savvy application" I had in mind:
Infopath is a kind of Blog++: the manipulated data is rich and structured (expense report, travel request, hotel reservation, employee review), meaning that when the data is published back to the server can be processed by an array of services, processes, agents. [Collaxa's Take] Exactly. Collaboration tools have to move heaven and earth to mine knowledge and infer social networks from email traffic. While it is notionally private, many email exchanges -- "here's the revised version with the changes we discussed" -- are really semi-public in scope. The same holds true for many voice interactions. ... [Jon's Radio]
1:31:38 AM
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© Copyright 2003 Bernie Dunham.
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