According to Steven Levy, Dr Pepper is going to use pseudo-weblogs to promote a new milk-type drink they're coming out with. Doc Searls is quoted as saying it won't work. I suppose it's fair play, I borrowed their I'm A Pepper song for the title of an essay I ran saying it's okay to be new at something. My song goes like this. "I'm a newbie, he's a newbie, she's a newbie, we're all newbies, wouldn't you like to be a newbie too?" [Scripting News]
7:36:15 PM    

David Davies: Mobile weblogs go multimedia. [Scripting News]
7:35:22 PM    

AutoCAD revamp aims to cut out paper. Software maker Autodesk is set to launch an update to its flagship drafting application that is designed to make it easier for owners to use digital documents instead of paper. [CNET News.com]
7:34:36 PM    

Wireless Speed Demon Hits Homes. The new souped-up wireless home networks work at lightning speeds. But can the average user's network handle the blazing increase? [Wired News]
7:33:19 PM    

Iranians arrested for net dating. Dozens of young Iranians are detained for having "illegal relations" after using a website to chat and arrange meetings. [BBC News | Technology | UK Edition]
7:32:49 PM    

Eden plans new greenhouse. Plans for a £75m development, including a third 'biome' at the Eden Project, are going on display. [BBC News | Technology | UK Edition]
7:32:08 PM    

Massive growth ahead in Net traffic. BB migration [The Register]
7:30:06 PM    

The Real Shopping-Cart Revolution. Today, a 5-pound bag of flour costs about 69 cents, an amount that half a millennium ago took three days of work to earn. A commentary by J. Bradford DeLong from Wired magazine. [Wired News]
7:29:30 PM    

Meet a Rising Star in Game Design. This 26-year-old former pre-med student finally found his calling as a video-game designer. Now, a game he created with fellow students at the DigiPen game-design institute will be showcased this week at the Independent Games Festival. By Elisa Batista. [Wired News]
7:28:43 PM    

Beaming Video at Speed of Light. A New Zealand company's twist on free-space optics -- which broadcasts data over visible light spectrum -- promises to make wireless data transfer faster and cheaper. It can even beam high-quality video. Kim Griggs reports from Hamilton, New Zealand. [Wired News]
7:28:11 PM    

Why criminalizing Crypto is wrong [The Register]
7:27:30 PM    

Party notes.

Wonderful party last night in Palo Alto thrown by Joi Ito and friends. Haven't been to a tech party like that since the early days of Wired. Had great talks with Ben & Mena, the Pyra guys, Doc, Howard, Chris, Dave, Lessig, Anil, to name just a few. It feels like something is rebooting. There's also a sense of loathing that the bigs are coming and are likely to screw this up just like the screw up everything. Let's not let that happen this time.

Virginia Postrel: "Everybody has theories about what makes Silicon Valley special."

At dinner last night, sitting next to Chris Pirillo, who is fucking brilliant; and across from Doc Searls who is that and wise and loving, and across from Howard Rheingold who is all that and has a hit book out now, I designed a new industry. Chris Pirillo is a super-product manager. He's got so many great ideas that he is passionate about. His 29-year-old brain is racing at 150 mph. It's like an encyclopedia in there. A bunch of programmers work for him. He brings them Chinese takeout every night. Chris listens to the users during the day, uses the competitors products, and he tells the developers what to do. Of course they don't listen but he argues with them on behalf of users until they get tired of arguing and give him what he's asking for so he'll just shut up. When they give him what he wants he hits the ceiling and it isn't acting because he really loves this stuff. What do old farts like Doc and Howard and myself do? Well we kick back and enjoy it and help Chris any way we can.

[Scripting News]
7:26:20 PM    

Observation at the Spectrum conference. The vast majority of laptops were Macs. Second place seemed to be Sony Vaios. Apple had a good idea in putting a backlit Apple logo on the top of each laptop. Makes it easy to see how many there are in a room at a quick glance. [Scripting News]
7:24:20 PM    

Texting troubles teachers. Concerns over the use of text messaging language in exam answers are voiced by markers and teachers in Scotland. [BBC News | Technology | UK Edition]
7:22:28 PM    

IBM bolsters integration [InfoWorld: Top News]
7:21:56 PM    

Kodak pictures color OLED in cameras. The company will include a color OLED display in its next digital camera, adding to the short list of products that already use the next-generation technology. [CNET News.com]
7:21:00 PM    

Cautious IT spending predicted for 2003. According to two reports out today, IT spending this year is expected to grow -- but slowly. [Computerworld News]
7:19:16 PM    

Useit.Com: Persuasive Design: New Captology Book. After ten dark years of fighting (and partly conquering) user-hostile design without much theoretical progress in HCI, Dr. Fogg has now opened the field's next frontier with his work on "captology" -- computers as persuasive technologies. [Tomalak's Realm]
7:18:42 PM    

Intel's New Mobile Tech Blitz. Intel introduces a new mobile-computing technology that provides high performance and wireless capability with slower battery drain. [Wired News]
7:17:58 PM