btw.net Weblog

	Saturday, December 14, 2002

Network Business Model

It's the neutrality, smarty.
Larry Lessig on Net neutrality: It would be a strange and bad thing if the electricity grid discriminated against Sony television sets by serving reliable electricity only to Panasonic TVs. [source: The Doc Searls Weblog]
Financial Times: A threat to innovation on the web. Lawrence Lessig. But increasingly, the providers of internet connectivity are pushing a different principle. US broadband companies are trying to ensure that they have the power to decide which applications and content can run. [Source: Tomalak's Realm]
12:50:03 PM

Selective Privacy

Frank Boosman: Privacy rings for weblogs. Frank Boosman has a great idea about adding some selective private placement with conditional access to certain portions of a weblog.

The tool that I use for this weblog, Radio UserLand, allows me to configure something like that capability -- but it's reasonably hard to do (involves changing selected configuration files, etc). A more general and open solution to this requirement would, I think, be well received and expand the usage of weblogs into new territories. [Scott Loftesness]

Frank Boosman: The more I think about it, the more convinced I am that two of the essential aspects of the future of blogging will be selective privacy and privacy rings -- respectively, the desire and the ability to easily and precisely control access by others to one's data.

12:38:55 PM

digital Architecture

Customizing our software worlds, Jon Udell, InfoWorld, Dec 14, 2002

I've often wondered why we insist on using the word "architecture" to describe the design of software systems. Maybe one reason is that, in a quite literal sense, we inhabit them. "For millennia," Williams writes, "the fact of settlement -- humans living with other humans in a place over time -- has shaped our ideas and practices of work, family, time and space, and society." The transition from nomadic to settled life must have taken generations. Now, of course, we're going the other way.

I've traveled a lot since joining InfoWorld six months ago, but have yet to visit the home office in San Francisco. A number of my colleagues are elsewhere, such as Texas, New York, and Virginia. Like many virtual teams, the "settlement" we inhabit is an artificial world made of business processes and sustained by technology.

We're often surprised by how much people care about the architectures of these artificial worlds.

5:56:55 AM

What better way to unite people spread out geographically for common cause than access?

English countryside doing it for themselves: This story by Ben Hammersley, written in October for the Guardian (but missed by me), tells of how rural areas in England are prompting entrepreneurial efforts, often involving Wi-Fi, to bring high-speed connections to areas that British Telecom says are too far below their radar. In Wales, a community effort inspired by Dave Hughes is rapidly transforming the picture of connectivity, and the secondary effects are apparently already cropping up. What better way to unite people spread out geographically for common cause than access? [source: 80211b News]

5:43:14 AM