Microsoft Takes Wraps Off SourceForge Competitor. Workspaces 1.0 offers .Net developers a place to collaborate. [Microsoft Watch from Mary Jo Foley] 
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Dr. Web verordnet. Dr. Web heute: "Wie man einen Newsfeed in die eigenen Seiten einbaut und damit Content Syndication betreibt", anhand des OpenSource-Readers und -Parsers MagpieRSS, und "XML Datei selbst gebaut - Einen RSS Feed kann man sich einfach selbst basteln und ihn händisch pflegen." [Industrial Technology & Witchcraft] 
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Voices. So many voices in this most tumultuous of the many tumultuous moments I've lived through, in my five years of involvement with the RSS phenomenon. So many people taking time away from friends and family, this weekend, to consider the matters at hand. So tempting to simplify it all as a silly-season little-endian/big-endian tempest in a teapot. So much at stake. Update: So sad the voice that started it all has, for now, gone silent. Further update: And now is back, thankfully. ... [Jon's Radio] 
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Specification and emergence.

Dynamic views of the WWW Architecture document

The WWW Technical Architecture Group (TAG) has been gradually codifying a bunch of principles and best practices in a document entitled The Architecture of the World Wide Web. One of the authors, Tim Bray, asks:

Mystery Why, I wonder, did nobody ever get around to writing this stuff down in one place before? [ongoing]

... [Jon's Radio] 
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Is the Web Democratic?.

David Hornik at VentureBlog takes on a question from the Internet Law Program: Is The Web Inherently Democratic?

...In an interesting exchange this afternoon, professor Charles Nesson led a discussion on the Internet and emergent democracy. The discussion was principally focused on the question of whether the Internet aids democracy (or perhaps is a democracy in and of itself). In typical lawyer fashion, the discussion stalled almost immediately while everyone debated the definition of "democracy." But once Professor Terry Fisher had created a definition framework, the conversation was back on track -- Fisher made the distinction between political democracy (the ability of the people to have a say in political process), economic democracy (the ability of the people to have a say in their ways and means of making money) and semiotic democracy (the ability of the people to influence mass culture).

... And, as a tool, the Internet can be used to empower each of Professor Fisher's democratic forms: individual political voices (e.g. MoveOn and the MoveOn Primary), individual economic voices (e.g. GetActive as an organizing tool for the AFL-CIO), and individual cultural voices (e.g., HotOrNot and Are You Hot?, the awful TV show spawned from HotOrNot).

... My strong opinion is that blogging is indeed an excellent example of the democratization of information.

... The efficiency with which blogs are now spreading points to a discussion earlier in the day led by Professor Lawrence Lessig. Lessig argues that one of the primary forms of regulation in cyberspace is architecture. ... The difference between bulletin boards and blogs is simple: RSS. The architecture of RSS feeds and modern publishing platforms make the dissemination of information created on an individual level potentially massive. It makes it possible for someone like me to became a source of news that is cited in the mainstream media. Thus, to Lessig's point, by virtue of the architecture of modern blog tools, the limitations of bulletin boards are removed and the information can flow freely.

Despite the potentially democratizing nature of the Web, I think one of the important lessons learned from the Internet and this afternoon's discussion is that the Internet and blogging are indeed just tools. They can be tuned to better promote a point of view or better disseminate information, but they are only as good as the "content" they are spreading. VentureBlog is cited by other blogs when we have something interesting to say. And the more interesting the things we say, the more referrers and traffic we get. But it is not the inherent nature of blogs or of the inherent nature of the Internet that causes that dissemination of information. Similarly, while MoveOn may be able to give Howard Dean a better platform from which to disseminate information about his campaign for the presidency, MoveOn can not make Dean a better candidate. Howard Dean using MoveOn will never have the impact that Bill Clinton would have had using MoveOn. So I think that the democratizing nature of the internet is one of access -- the Internet empowers a vast array of participants to produce and share their own content, the most successful of which will rise to the top and become a mass phenomenon by virtue of the power of that content and the robustness of the tools that allow the virus to spread.

[Ross Mayfield: On Blogging] 
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Personality, Tools and Getting Things Done.

A must read by Clay on how blogs and wikis differ as tools for getting things done, using the Echo wiki as an example:

RSS, Echo, Wikis, and Personality Wars. The weblog world has taken the 4 elements of organization from mailing lists and usenet -- overall topic, time of post, post title, author -- and rearranged them in order of importance as author, time, and title, dispensing with topics altogether. (Choosing a formal topic, as Many-to-Many does, is both optional and rare.) This "author-first" organization gives the weblog world a huge boost, as the "Who said what" reputation system we all carry around in our head is a fantastic tool for organizing what we read, as well as acting as a kind of latent bozo filter.

...Most wikis that matter don't operate on a public scale, being used for coordination of small and focussed groups. (IAwiki.net is about the largest I've seen.) Most wikis that operate on a public scale don't have much impact -- the social facts of the wikipedia are far more interesting than the content itself. The Echo wiki, though, is an interesting experiment in when, why and how to use a wiki to convene a large and heterogenous group to deal with a thorny and contentious problem, as well as possibly providing an antidote to personality as an organizing principle. [Corante: Social Software]

[Ross Mayfield: On Blogging] 
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Chris Pirillo's Amazon feeds are just the first step towards demonstrating what I would like to see:  a single site with all feeds available in combination with the ability to create synthetic feeds on the fly (from Google, Amazon, etc.).  [John Robb's Technology Weblog] 
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Dear Sir: Your Credit Card Number Has Been Owned. An anonymous reader submits: "California has become the first state in the nation to require companies victimized by malicious computer attacks to disclose ... [Slashdot] 
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Duplicate feeds from freeroller folks. I don't know about you, but I subscribe to some nice folk who blog on freeroller.net. However, my aggregator seems to like to download the same RSS items again and again (from time to time). It seems to get tricked by the URL changing in the RSS feed from: http://roller.anthonyeden.com/* to http://www.freeroller.net/* and back, and also http://freeroller.net/*. Is this just me? How come the URL changes on some of the RSS feeds? [Meerkat: An Open Wire Service: O'Reilly Network Weblogs] 
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Library of Alexandria Internet Bookmobile. The Internet Archive's Ashley Rindsberg is in Alexandria, Egypt, setting up a print-on-demand system based on the Internet Bookmobile. Check out his progress at his Egypt blog. [Meerkat: An Open Wire Service: O'Reilly Network Weblogs] 
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Clay Shirky on the structure of the blogosphere: "[The] 'author-first' organization gives the weblog world a huge boost, as the 'Who said what' reputation system we all carry around in our head is a fantastic tool for organizing what we read, as well as acting as a kind of latent bozo filter." [Corante: aa Corante on Blogging] 
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Chris Pirillo's Amazon feeds are now customizable. [Scripting News] 
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The tangled web of blog conversation. via Web Dawn - Rebirth of the Social Marketplace: Last week I blogged about the new Forum View that I have added to this blog. It seems like there is some interest in this approach. Thanks in large part to links from Marc Canter and Many-to-Many, the entry has... [Channel 'social_software'] 
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The Semantic Web would be great. Alas, it is not going to happen unless.... [Der Schockwellenreiter] 
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A nice collection of computer related wisdom from Joel via Scoble.

Joel has a nice page of funny quotes about the computer industry.

[The Scobleizer Weblog]

Much fun and a bit of wisdom to be found there.

[McGee's Musings] 
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Movable Type's installation conflagration. Weblog entries from Stephen Den Beste and Burning Bird cover a controversial provision in Movable Type's licenses that may prevent people from installing the software for others and charging for the service.

Mena Trott, one of the cofounders of the company that developed Movable Type, said that the provision will be changed:

... I agree we're being too restrictive now and I want to change that. People should be able to charge for their time and work. We will allow people to do this. All I'm asking is for people to see that yes, we're going to change things and we just need some time to do this.

Though it sounds like the situation is being corrected, it illustrates one of the benefits of Nucleus, Blosxom, Drupal and other weblogging tools that offer licenses without commercial use restrictions. [Workbench] 
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Cleaning up for AdSense.

I wanted to play with AdSense so I applied for it just now and started obfuscating four letter words in my blog so Google won't think I am a porn site.

[Don Park's Blog] 
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A Critical Look at Trusted Computing. mod12 writes "After just attending a two-week summer program on the theoretical foundations of security (one of the speakers was from Microsoft research), I ... [Slashdot] 
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Michelangelo masterpiece goes online:. "The Vatican is expanding its rather dry website - the 50 million visitors a month may be enthralled by the section headed Vatican Secret Archives, but will find it is still 'under construction' after eight years - to include virtual tours of the Sistine Chapel and many of the miles of galleries containing treasures from all over the world." Guardian/UK [Follow Me Here...] 
4:45:17 AM      comment []   trackback []  



Bloggers, email list moderators gain libel protection. An appeals court ruled last Tuesday that bloggers, website operators and e-mail list editors can't be held responsible for libel for information they republish. I covered the story for Wired News:

Online free speech advocates praised the decision as a victory. The ruling effectively differentiates conventional news media, which can be sued relatively easily for libel, from certain forms of online communication such as moderated e-mail lists. One implication is that DIY publishers like bloggers cannot be sued as easily.

"One-way news publications have editors and fact-checkers, and they're not just selling information -- they're selling reliability," said Cindy Cohn, legal director of the Electronic Frontier Foundation. "But on blogs or e-mail lists, people aren't necessarily selling anything, they're just engaging in speech. That freedom of speech wouldn't exist if you were held liable for every piece of information you cut, paste and forward."

The court based its decision on a section of the 1996 Communications Decency Act, or the CDA. That section states, "... no provider or user of an interactive computer service shall be treated as the publisher or speaker of any information provided by another information content provider." Three cases since then -- Zeran v. AOL, Gentry v. eBay and Schneider v. Amazon -- have granted immunity to commercial online service providers.

Link to Wired News story, Discuss [Boing Boing Blog] 
4:41:53 AM      comment []   trackback []