Monday, March 10, 2003

A New Set of Social Rules for a Newly Wireless Society: "One college student I spoke to described leaving one’s phone at home or letting the battery die as "the new taboo." Teens and twentysomethings usually do not bother to set a time and place for their meetings. They exchange as many as 5 to 15 messages throughout the day that progressively narrows in on a time and place, two points eventually converging in a coordinated dance through the urban jungle. To not have a keitai is to be walking blind, disconnected from just-in-time information on where and when you are in the social networks of time and place." "Keitai-wired youth are in persistent but lightweight contact with a small number of intimates, with whom they are expected to be available unless they are sleeping or working. Because of this portable, virtual peer space, the city is no longer a space of urban anonymity." 6:42:09 PM

The Tyranny of Email  In a hurry?  Then please see the rules for avoiding email tyranny and the guidelines for being productive. Email is one of the greatest things the computer revolution has done for personal productivity.  Used improperly, it can also hurt your productivity.  This article discusses ways to use email effectively.  Then it goes beyond that and talks about how to be productive, period. 6:28:47 PM

Doc Searls and David Weinberger: World of Ends. What the Internet Is and How to Stop Mistaking It for Something Else 6:20:47 PM

In "Smart-Mobbing the War", a story in the Sunday magazine, the following quote appears: "Internet democracy allows citizens to find one another directly, without phone trees or meetings of chapter organizations, and it amplifies their voices in the electronic storms or 'smart mobs' (masses summoned electronically) that it seems able to generate in a few hours." 6:12:08 PM

From Dan Gillmore: Tom Freeburg and his colleagues at Canopy Wireless Broadband Products, a unit of electronics giant Motorola, are telling one of the most intriguing stories of all. They've come up with a system that could bypass, at least for the near term, the wire-line duopoly in urban and suburban areas. The technology may also turn out to be nearly ideal for deployment in rural areas. The radio-based Canopy system uses unlicensed spectrum, so no one has to ask for regulatory approval. The price is low enough -- a company or Internet service provider can serve hundreds of customers for about $20,000 in start-up equipment costs -- and it looks easy to deploy. Best of all, it offers excellent data-transfer rates, in the range of 6 to 7 megabits a second, which is much faster than the cable and phone-based alternatives today, though ISPs offering Canopy-based services commonly ratchet down individual customers' capacity to some extent. A Canopy ``access point'' -- the base station serving end users -- has six radios, each of which covers 60 degrees of a circle, so the six can radiate and receive signals in all directions. It's sensitive to barriers such as groves of trees and most modern buildings, especially as the range -- which can be as far as 10 miles from the access point -- increases. An Internet service provider can set up as many access points as needed to serve an area if the population density and customer demand are too high for one access point to serve everyone. 6:10:56 PM

Fron Dan Gillmore: This reduced-size image is from the work of Perry Hoberman, an artist who reflects on today's world with real wit. The graphic above is part of his "Infringement" series. 6:06:36 PM

New York Times: AOL Is Planning a Fast-Forward Answer to TiVo. The essence of AOL Time Warner's Mystro TV is a technology that uses a cable system itself to provide viewers capabilities similar to computerized personal video recorders like TiVo: watching programs on their own schedules, with fast-forward and rewind. But it also lets networks set the parameters, dictating which shows users can reschedule, and it also creates ways for networks to insert commercials. 5:58:06 PM

This is a very interesting article that may be the key to understanding the US strategy.  It reflects my thinking on the issue in that it focuses on the right thing:  what is the long term solution to the loose nuke problem?  The answer, of course, is to work on extending the network of connectivity and prosperity we enjoy here to the rest of the world.  The author's view and the DoD's view is that this should be done through aggressive military and diplomatic action, particularly against the rogue states that destabilize entire regions.  This seems to be too direct a method and one unlikely to accomplish the goal.  We have to be smarter.  Our current track is causing entirely too much damage to the world's economy, organizational infrastructure, and good will to be sustainable over the long term. [John Robb's Radio Weblog] 5:37:58 PM

How Important Is Copy Protection? By David Pogue. "I'm guessing it's because DVD's were born copy protected. We, the consumers, just accepted copy protection as part of the DVD's definition-like books.... Music CD's, on the other hand, were never copy protected to begin with. What we're witnessing now is the ugly spectacle of an industry trying to stuff the genie back into the bottle, to take away something that its customers had already come to take for granted. " [New York Times: Technology] 5:35:49 PM

© Copyright 2003 rwhitson.