Blogs That Aren't Blogs. Ernie Svenson, whose Ernie the Attorney site was featured in my article on blogs for lawyer marketing, may have had the most thoughtful comment on it: “[S]ometimes weblogs are most powerful when the people who are reading them don't perceive anything different from a regular website.” He mentions a couple of example pages at… Continue reading Blogs That Aren't Blogs

AOL and Jabber. AOL Wants to Back Out of IM Promise.  AOL has been playing monopolist with its instant messaging for as long as the genre has been popular, pretending to want interoperability but largerly refusing to let other IM operators interconnect with AOL Instant Messager. One of the condititions of the buyout of Time… Continue reading AOL and Jabber

Acrimony at Telecom Conference. MCI deserves death penalty, Wi-Fi flash in the pan at telecom conference: Read the article and then consider Verizon's position. If you're a monopoly player restricting access to DSL customers and your principal rival, Comcast, hasn't quite figure out how to offer the right mix to its cable customers at the… Continue reading Acrimony at Telecom Conference

St. Petersburg Times, FL –Technology's gains produce losses of privacy, rights. Okay, maybe when following someone took three shifts of police, the lack of a warrant did not seriously endanger civil liberties. The extraordinary outlay of resources kept it from happening to too many people. But here, three shifts of police are traded in for a $100… Continue reading Technology's gains produce losses of privacy, rights

Wi-Fi in 2M+ Homes. Reports show many users, especially with broadband: Wi-Fi networks were added in 2 million homes in the last two years or so, and a quarter of all broadband subscribers have wireless networks. (Broadband adoption just ratcheted up in the last year significantly, too, although analysts think that the curve will become… Continue reading Wi-Fi in 2M+ Homes

Hotels with Broadband/Wi-Fi. New directory of hotels with wireless and wired Internet service: The directory is extensive, but it doesn't note which hotels have wired or wireless, or costs. It's a great starting point for planning a bandwidth-necessary trip, however. (Also, I can't get the JavaScript popup menus to work in the latest Apple Safari… Continue reading Hotels with Broadband/Wi-Fi

Exploring Myst's Brave New World. When the enigmatic video game arrived a decade ago, millions booted up to explore lush forests, ancient cities and mysterious ports. Now Myst's creators are at it again, with Uru: Ages Beyond Myst. By Suzanne Ashe from Wired magazine. [Wired News]

Ask For A Second Cup.  Good to the Last Drop: Dimensions and Cultural Implications of Coffee Service in Libraries “A paper on coffee services in libraries, written by students of the School of Library and Information Science, University of South Carolina. The paper covers 'the general history of coffee and coffeehouses, the history of the… Continue reading Ask For A Second Cup

Scale-free network searching. Social networks have the surprising property of being “searchable”: Ordinary people are capable of directing messages through their network of acquaintances to reach a specific but distant target person in only a few steps. We present a model that offers an explanation of social network searchability in terms of recognizable personal identities:… Continue reading Scale-free network searching

Last stop before the media monopoly. FCC chairman Michael Powell is likely to get media ownership deregulated — even though public comment is running 97 percent against it. [Salon.com]