Tuesday, September 23, 2003

Go for it Ray - I hope you get some more value for your innovative work. Weblogs, prior art, and virtual machines. Ray Ozzie recently posted what may prove to be the single most influential weblog item ever written: Saving the Browser. As you probably already know, Ray makes a compelling argument that the 1993-era Lotus Notes should have been considered prior art for the Eolas patent filed in 1994 and issued in 1998. Ray's extraordinary essay might conceivably save Microsoft ten times what it invested in Groove, should the argument prove decisive in an appeal of the recent ruling in favor of Eolas. Of more interest to those who weep only crocodile tears for Microsoft in this case, it might prevent a bunch of other applecarts from being upset: Flash, Mozilla, Safari. ... [Jon's Radio] 8:00:27 AM

[Vanguard] Knowledge in a box. Daniel Bobrow from PARC says that Xerox tried to support its repair folks by modeling the machines in software. The repair people were impressed but didn't find it useful. The conclusion: You can't put the right knowledge in the box. (He goes on to explain the social life of information, as fellow PARC-er John Seely Brown put it.) Cool way of putting it. And why did we ever think we could put knowledge in a box? It must have something to do with the fact that we think our human knowledge is in the box of bone that sits atop... [Joho the Blog Commented as follows: Hey, how bout the concept of folks at theBrain. These guys have a sense that information organized round a central thought mimics the "attention" element of your consciousness model. And then jumping or moving to other thoughts is done either because they are linked, or because the attention is distracted to a completely different thought... Thoughts are organized and reorganized by end users (much like real brains) How is it that ones attention shifts? that is the interesting question - perhaps the mystical one - or just the one that has mystified marketing executives;-) But perhaps some way to spider or identify resonant thought threads and weak thoughts (unsticky ones) that are often jumped away from.. That could be interesting!   7:30:29 AM

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