Tuesday, September 23, 2003

The Internet Traffic report shows a nice map and a sense of the quality of information flow - packet loss etc.  Discovered this while reading about Skype (the VOIP - telophony thing).  Odd thing is that this is the second Skype read and post today!  Never heard of it yesterday.  Something to think about as the product proliferates Items like this are driving my need for more computing power. Along with the article I read about watching HD movies on Windows Media Player 9.0...  Need 2.4Mhz system (about 10x faster than currently using!). 12:30:08 PM

Just downloaded the Chris Lydon mp3 interview of Julie Powell - think I'll listen to it before I dive into the actual reading of it (if ever...) The Julie/Julia book. Add The Julie Powell to the list (along with Salam Pax) of bloggers whose weblogs have landed them sweet book deals. Congratulations to Julie for conceiving of her brilliant project and then - most importantly - executing it. So now, is the book going to just be a slightly edited rendition of the yearlong cooking project or is it some other kind of derivative work? [Radio Free Blogistan] 8:32:59 AM

Entering the flow. While one technically savvy core of the blogosphere strives to develop structure and hierarchies and semantic richness, the leading edges of the churning cloud of webloggers is all about flow. One reason why blogging works as well as it does for a growing number of people is that the barriers to entry are low and the requirements are slack. Sure, a well crafted post can pay off with readers, and proofreading is always nice. And while for some a web aggregator is a personal goldmine of archived weblinks to be searched and massaged, data-mined and enshrined for all eternity, for others it's just an ephemeral blur. Here today, gone tomorrow. Whenever I feel that I'm accumulating too big a backlog of links to write about or ideas I want to stick somewhere on the web, I either get on with it or dump the links. Sometimes I find an old file where I jotted down a half-baked idea or three. If it still makes some sense to me, the ideas are sure to come up again. Sometimes I've already covered the big idear on another try. If it's expired, then so be it: It just wasn't meant to be for me to comment on that particular meme du jour. At best, I'm very unselfconscious when writing in this format. Browsing the web, skipping from link to tangential link, grabbing and bookmarkletting items that stick to the velcro in my brain, framing a reply or extension or riff on the quoted or linked-to item from the Web, pushing the post button and resuming my mental grazing, sometimes it all feels like a nice hypnotic alpha state, very similar to the way I feel when I'm painting or working on a puzzle. Letting go is part of surrendering to the flow. Weblogs just aren't a very graspy medium. The archives may grow more concrete, but the living coral fringe of the web is about the next post, not the last one. [Radio Free Blogistan] 8:30:41 AM

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

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