Here are the Top Ten or So Signs that RageBoy Is on the Mend:

11. When he puts in a link to a bloody, angry, foul-mouthed CD, he remembers to put his Amazon affiliate code at the end

10. He's got enough strength back to type out all of "motherfucker"

9. Remembers that if he's a "babe magnet," he's got his polarity reversed

8. Uses elegant CSS definitions to put "Fuckhead" into 64pt green san serif font rather than messier inline notation

7. Drops "Big Lou Gerstner" from his blogroll

6. Winer and Lessig take out joint ad in Variety to complain about him

5. Hand writes a note to each of his EGR subscribers to apologize for not calling them fucking hosers enough recently

4. His blog entry on why the DayPop Top 40 eats motherfucking shit makes it onto the DayPop Top 40

3. When you click on his photo, it no longer takes you to a John Denver play list

2. RageBoy clips his page boy

And the number one sign that RB is on the mend ...

1. No one's safe any more

TeleTruth.org has filed a complaint alleging that Verizon (and the companies that merged to form it) have vastly inflated the amount and cost of missing equipment to the tune of $20-$80B. Why? Presumably because this "vaporware" counts as an expense that can be passed on to the consumer in the former of higher rates.

This one, if true, would scrape the field clean.

Dave writes in response to my blog that asked for some empirical basis for the software copyright spat:

For crying out loud David, it's super simple. If I build a house I can live in it as long as I want. If I want to rent out rooms I can do that too, as long as I want.

I don't know what the right answer is. I am hugely suspicious of arguments by analogy when the things being compared are different in contentious ways...like houses and software. I do think we'd get closer if we looked at some data. And I am 100% positive that the issue isn't super-simple because if it were, smart, well-intentioned people like Winer and Lessig would agree about it.

Dylan Tweney in his newsletter ups the ante on the number of bloggers:

...most published estimates put the number far lower, at half a million [9] or less [10]. But leading Weblog provider Blogger.com has more than 700,000 registered users, LiveJournal.com (which most weblog news stories overlook for some reason) boasts more than 650,000, and Radio Userland has upwards of 50,000 users. Freeware/open source blogging tools such as Movable Type and Greymatter add even more to the total, though no one seems to know how many.

I asked Steven Levy where he got the 500,000 figure when he interviewed me for his Newsweek article. He said it came from Blogdex. It seemed low to me. I'm glad to see Dylan come in with new numbers.

I particularly enjoyed this week's missive from Hank Blakely. He turns from his weekly W bashing to the news from Pat Robertston:

Pat (actually his real name is "Marion," but that's just a bit gender ambiguous, so he substituted "Pat") and his American Center for Law and Justice (they do both!), have come up with this simply nifty idea they call the Houses of Worship Political Speech Protection Act*. Wow! Huh? We mean, wow! How many loaded words can you get into one title? Do these guys know their business, or do these guys know their business?

Word Ways, the oddest journal on the planet, and available only in print, has at last put up a website at www.WordWays.com. WordWays is a small-circulation journal for people who treat words as objects. They set themselves challenges and then create enormous word lists of, for example, all the words that can be broken into pallindromic sets. And that's one of the simplest examples.

The site is scandalously out of date, though! It runs Jeff Grant's 10-word word-square that relies on people's proper names but does not yet run the 10-word word-square in the current issue, the first such square with all authenticated sources. It's from Rex Gooch in Letchworth, England. Here it is, with the source of each word to the right:

A B A P T I S T U M     Pulliam

B A H R A M T A P A     in Azerbaijan

A H L E R B R U C H     in Germany

P R E P A R A T O R     Oxford Eng. Dict.

T A R A D A N O V A     in Russia

I M B R A N G L E S     OED

S T R A N G F O R D     in England

T A U T O L O G I A     qv in OED

U P C O V E R I N G     OED

M A H R A S D A G I     in Turkey

I wrote a brief reply to Dave's "It's simple" reply to the following blog entry...

Dave Sifry thinks carefully about the arguments being advanced by Dave Winer and Larry Lessig about software copyrights. As Doc says, Sifry is moving the discussion forward, a good thing.

In a nutshell (i.e., annoyingly inaccurately), Lessig proposes a 10-year copyright for software, after which the source code would be released into the public domain. Winer thinks this would unduly damage small software houses: "If we have to publish our source code the users won't pay for it. Ten years isn't enough time to create a new market." And that would mean the end of the major incentive for innovation.

Sifry disagrees with Winer on this: "I can't think of a single example of software that generated revenue 10 years after it was written, unless you're talking about software for the Space Shuttle or some other old piece of hardware..."

That's the swerving point in this debate, the point at which the conversation starts to head into the weeds. All contending parties agree, I believe, that (1) the goal is to build a marketplace that encourages innovation and (2) that the way to do that is to let the market reward innovation. Unfortunately, to spread the value of innovation, two things have to happen that are contradictory from the market point of view: First, someone has to have a great idea for which she is rewarded. Second, you want that idea to spread and be built upon as raidly as possible and requiring that the creator be rewarded slows down the spread. Much butting of heads ensues.

So, the reasonable compromise (as I think all the disputants agree) is to set some number of years during which a copyright holds. The question is: What's the right number of years? More important, how do we decide the right number of years?

We can't merely be guided by individual instances where a copyright of n years would have been clearly too long or too short, for the essence of the compromise is that we'll tolerate some inequity in service of a larger growth in equitable innovation.

Further, n is going to be different for different industries, applications and hardware platforms: Some areas have the metabolism of hippopotami and others of hummingbirds. There is no n that is optimal for each body type.

So, how do we move forward? Some numbers would help:

What is the average/typical revenue curve (dollars vs. time) for software?

What's the curve in various industries, hw platforms application areas?

Do we have reason to think that the curve is about to change its shape or that it could change its shape in desirable ways?

What is the curve for software that we (subjectively) consider to be innovative?

I'm a humanities major and thus won't understand the numbers even if someone has them, but otherwise it's hard to see how the discussion can go much further.

Lessig's reply to Charles Cooper is a superb piece of rhetoric in the best sense: clear, persuasive, entertaining. He even uses one of Winer's proudest software creations as his example of why we want to limit the term of software's indentured servitude.

Distributed expertise

The current issue of Vanity Fair has an article (by David Rose) on the crash of AA Flight 587 a few months after 9/11. The point of the article is that the FAA's explanation (pilot error in reaction to turbulence from the aircraft in fron of it) is very likely wrong. And the FAA is being suspiciously protective of the data it holds. In fact, suggests the article, there are structural problems with the aircraft. (I could swear I read this same article a year ago, maybe in the NYer.)

Anyway, the article supplements the data the FAA has released with information from a site where "a network of aviation experts, former crash investigators, pilots and engineers" analyze information from multiple sources, trying to piece together what actually happened.

Networked markets are smarter than the companies they're talking about and networked experts know more than the government wants them to know.

Conversation is In

Because I am a Cluetrain guy, I am unnaturally alert to the discovery of convesation, for the central idea of that decentralized book builds on Doc's insight that "markets are conversations." So are businesses (as Fernando Flores said, although in a different way) and so is the Internet itself. This idea struck us four authors as especially worthwhile given business' insistence on understanding the Net as a type of ultra-cheap broadcast medium.

So, it is almost certainly only a coincdence that in the current issue of The New Yorker (a double issue for Aug. 19 and 26), Adam Gopnick's excellent-as-usual article on cooking ends with this insight:

Searching for an occult connection between cooking and writing, I had missed the most obvious one. They are both dependencies of conversation. What unites cooks and writers is that their work flows from the river of human talk around a table...I enjoy the company of cooks, I realized, because I love the occasions they create for conversation.

Not all that sensible, perhaps, because Gopnick should then equally enjoy the company of furniture makers and farmers. But, I like the reveling in conversation.

Then, putting that magazine down, I picked up the NY Times Week in Review and read an article called "The Selling of America, Bush Style" by Victoria de Grazia about the Bush administration's attempt to "rebrand" the US. She points to two obstacles. First, "there are now so many competing mesages..." Second,

...advertising messages in themselves have so little bite. They are like one-way streets. Effective cultural exchange, by contrast, depends on engaging others in dialogue.

Joe Mahoney — whose weblog I'd missed despite the fact that Joe is an old friend, the most literate amateur I've ever met (as opposed to professional professors), an astounding musician, and a role model — and I ended up arguing in email about W's twisted psychology. Joe has run the correspondence. Although he says I trumped him, his last paragraph, with its Frenchification and Lacan reference, is a thoroughly enjoyable classic of intellectual rug-pulling.

Here's my "analysis." It is, as always, highly scientifical.

The family is dominated by Babs. She is a classic bitch-tyrant, passive-aggressive mother. Jeb was the favorite. W was the drunk ne'er-do-well who had to be propped up by his father's cronies; his only validation, as a "successful businessman" he knows came through his father's largesse, which he hates because he hates his dependence on it.

Once in office, he has surrounded himself with Dad's pals because that's the only way he knows how to succeed, but he resents it and can't feel like a success (or a man) so long as he does what they say. (But he is afraid not to do what they say). He has to do Poppy's job better than Poppy did. Why? So he can beat his two rivals - Dad and Jeb - for the approval (= fucking) of his mother. So, it won't be enough for him to beat Dad at the presidency game. He's also going to have to do it in the face of the advice of Dad's Greek chorus that's been guiding him so far. The defection of elder Republicans from the Bomb Iraq cause only gives W a bigger hard on for it.

He has had two opportunities to beat Poppy. Only two people have ever caused Poppy to fail: Clinton and Saddam. Having beaten Clinton, it's on to Saddam. W has a love/hate deal going with Saddam because although Saddam humiliated the father who never loved him (and who still has the good graces to appear embarrassed with him), Saddam has also given W the opening he needs to win Mommy. He's not after revenge. It's approval he's after. In support: his overwhelming need to be liked is all too obvious, right down to the juvenile nicknames he gives people. His infantilizing of global politics (Putin is "Pooty-poot," the comic book rhetoric of "evil doers") undoubtedly (hah!) goes back to his failure to win approval as an infant. He is stuck there.

The Oedipal nature of the Iraqi threat (or opportunity, as it appears to W) implies that he will penetrate Iraq violently, preferably by inseminating it with sperm sprayed from above . His operative metaphor is probably (i.e., I'm making this up) "shoving a smart bomb up Saddam's ass" to degrade him (= Poppy) sexually so that the Mama Bush will prefer him. W's no bush! He's a bomber!

Your comments on his oral fixation ring true to me (which unfortunately does not mean they're any more likely to be true) and I assume that the oral sex with Laura - and whatever other Dallas Debbies he did during the Drunk Years - was one-way, brutish and unreciprocated.

So, if we could just persuade Babs to blow him, preferably after Dad's gone limp while trying to perform his husbandly duties, the world might yet be saved. Why don't you write to her and suggest that?

Go to Joe's site to read his concluding comment. Stay for the poetry and the voice and the ideas.

Based on nothing but what I saw this morning on the talk shows (when my family's away I snap on the TV first thing so I can hear voices I can ignore) the public discussion of Sami Al-Arian isn't asking the basic question: Is he a good teacher and scholar? If he's doing illegal things outside of the classroom — and according to Al-Arian, a judge last year declared that the groups for which he participated in fund raising were not supporting terrorism — then the legal system should deal with it and, if convicted, he should be bounced from the university. Otherwise, he should be free to say and do what he wants outside of the classroom.

1. They can't tell the difference between a party and a market.

2. They think it's their party.

About #1. Marketers think that we on the Web are markets. They define a market as a group of people who will respond favorably (i.e., 2% will twitch their eyebrows in reaction) to a message. For example, "urban males 18-24" is a market if they will respond favorably to an ad with a babe touching a pen to her lips, and "people who read Parade and own a weimeraner" is a market if they respond favorably to a jingle that rhymes "wet good" with "pet food." These markets have no existence as a group except as a statistical abstraction. They are not real groups, much less communities on conversations. The Web, on the other hand, is a set of global parties where people are talking with others only insofar as we find one another interesting on some topic. Marketers look at these parties, these real groups of real people, and see only opportunities to deliver messages.

About #2. The fundamental mistake business insists on making over and over on the Internet is to think that their Web site is theirs. Even if they have learned that the Internet is not driven primarily by business, just about every business thinks about its site as a piece of property they own. When we enter it, we are now subject to their rules and their messages. While this is legally indisputable, it's also what makes business sites feel so alien on the Web.

[For further reading: Cluetrain, Gonzo, Doc.]

In response to our call for names for the invasion of Iraq, Joe Mahoney writes:

I don't really like Operation Oedipus. Oedipus is a patricide, not an avenger. Even in Freud's appropriation, Oedipus is all about dissolution of the patriarchal order (or something like that). I'd vote for Operation Orestes.

I'm less enamored with Operation Oedipus than I was. I'd prefer something like Operation Oedipal Blindness or maybe Operation Oedipal Apocalypse.

Norm Jensen meanwhile suggests Operation Blatant Hypocrisy.

Oliver Travers points us to Fred Langa's column at InformationWeek about the new Microsoft EULA. Fred's reading of the EULA is less paranoid and alarming than the Registers' that I cited.

AKMA says he disagrees with me. I beg to differ.

At issue are the comments from Ha Jin I ran approvingly:

Chinese is very rich in describing feelings. For sadness there are some words English doesn't have. So too for taste. ... [But] there are some abstract words that Chinese doesn't have, such as 'truth,' 'identity,' and 'solitude.' Obviously, English is a more speculative language, whereas Chinese is more earthly, closer to things.

AKMA's beef (well, since we're both vegetarians, maybe we should switch to a different metaphor, perhaps something spatial) is that he has "little patience" for

the attitude that cultural groups have intellectual or spiritual tendencies that can be read off the vocabulary or syntax of their languages.

In this there are two objections AKMA may be registering: (1) Cultural groups have tendencies; (2) These tendencies are deterministically determined by their language. The "read off" implies the second objection, as if we could look at a language out of context and "read" the intellectual and spiritual tendencies of its people.

AKMA then says that he doesn't think Ha is so dumb as to believe in #2, a simple and "tedious" linguistic determinism. But neither is experience independent of language. Rather, says AKMA, "I agree that social life, thought, and language are closely related , and that they affect one another." But, AKMA says, he rejects what Ha says because English speakers do manage to say earthly things and Chinese speakers manage to say speculative things.

It seems to me that this objection is to a third statement that Ha doesn't make: (3) The intellectual and spiritual tendencies language non-deterministically influences are not tendencies but hard limits. That is, AKMA seems to be taking Ha as saying that if Chinese is a more earthly language than English, then English speakers can't say earthly things.

I find it unlikely, based on the snippet I originally posted, that Ha is saying that English can't be earthly and Chinese can't be speculative. He is talking about tendencies and uses the comparative "more." So, I think AKMA is attacking a strawperson interpretation of Ha. And I thus am able to agree with AKMA's subtantial point while disagreeing with his critique of Ha's statement.

AKMA's got some excellent comments on The Dispute and Alex Golub takes apart and then puts back together Lessig's rhetoric in a remarkable display of insight. (AKMA has some later comments here.)

My opinion? We need to back Lessig and we need to develop 100 others who approach his passion, intelligence and stamina. His rhetoric at OScon is that of desperation, and we all want Lessig to win the struggle in which he is engaged. (Yes, I am now open to dispute from those who don't agree 100% with Lessig's aims. My response: "we" in the prior sentence means "those who want Lessig to win the struggle in which he is engaged." Try getting out of that one, Mr. Smarty-Pants Communist!)

By holding my thumb over the first letter of my JOHO business card, I have obtained the transcript of the recent strategy meeting at Toho Corp.

CEO: Tell me, my loyal subordinates, what our greatest asset is here at Toho.

CFO: It is without doubt Godzilla.

CEO: Most assuredly. And what is Godzilla?

Jr. Mktg VP: It is a 110-foot high dinosaur imbued with the ability to breathe fire.

CEO (smiling indulgently): Foolish one. Anyone else?

CTO (hesitantly): It is an archetype called up by the Japanese in response to the deep guilt, shame and horror of having initiated the Second World War in the Pacific, which ended in holocausts that destroyed two of our cities as surely as the mighty Godzilla would have?

CEO: Not even close. Anyone else? No? I'll tell you what Godzilla, our greatest asset, is. It started as a movie so poorly made that when the man in the dinosaur suit rampgaged through a city, we didn't bother painting the inside of cardboard buildings he knocked over. We then ran this character into the ground in a series of movies that progressively lowered the production values and became famous for being so blatantly without originality. Because these movies were so bad, "Godzilla" became branded as standing for cheeziness. He is a monster who exists only as a laughingstock.

VP Mktg: Yes, Godzilla is a brand.

CEO: Yes, but unlike any other, he is a brand-in-itself. Toyota is a brand, but they make cars that are the object of the branding. Sony is a brand but they make electronic equipment. Godzilla is a brand but there is no Godzilla.

Jr. Mktg VP: There isn't?

CEO: Godzilla is pure brand. And that means he exists only because people remember the movies and continue to refer to him when they need to talk about something large, lumbering and ridiculous.

All: Ah. Very true. So wise.

CEO (intensely, as if in another world): So, here is your challenge. If we are to slay this mighty monster that has ravaged our land, let us today pledge to keep anyone from referring to Godzilla. Where the army has failed, where the navy has failed, let us bring on the lawyers. Together we shall rid the world of this scourge named Godzilla. And then, Toho's noble mission will have been accomplished.

CFO: I thought our mission was to increase shareholder value ...

CEO: Silence, mortal!

The transcript ends with the sound of a single gun shot.

Gary Unblinking Stock tells us that mnftiu.cc's new Get Your War On is out. The strip is proof of the genius of telling the truth.

Brian Dear has started a blog, called Nettle, about design and marketing.

Nollind Whachell has started a blog. His initial entries are dominated by personal thoughts about the promise and peril of the Net's openness. His professional background is in the gaming industry (Sierra, not Vegas).

Likewise, Mike Melduke has begun blogging, primarily about the financial side of life, such as a comparison of Elvis and the bull market.

Finally, Andrew Hinton has given Small Pieces Loosely Joined an excellent review (in both senses) over at Boxes and Arrows.In the first sense, it's a long and thoughtful engagement with the ideas in the book. In the second sense, he says things such as "... if you think you're an architect of anything vaguely Internet-related, you should read this book." Thank you, Andrew.

And, one-past-finally, Carole Guevin at netdiver.net blogs and recommends Andrew's review. Carole is also involved with AfterChaos, a new media collective: "Afterchaos is a new concept collaborative lab whose core vision + mission is to explore, theorize and prove new business models to apply to our new media industry."

Two-past finally, I've joined BlogCritics. The site's looking really good. Now I just have to remember to blog some criticism.

I'm back in dial-up, low bandwidth doldrums. It is so hot here. I'm reminded of a joke from Prairie Home Companion that my children resolutely refuse to find funny:

"It was so hot that I saw a dog chasing a rabbit...and both were walking."

Jonathan Peterson briefly summarizes a new Forrester report on MP3s and the recording industry:

Forrester has a new report stating the obvious: the music industry needs to let customers decide when, where and how they listen to music. Unsurprisingly, Big Content isn't listening:

The music label executives we spoke with are so sure piracy is destroying their business, that they seemed strangely uninterested in the truth. After citing statistics about the sales of recordable blank CDs and threatening technical interdictions that would force pirates to reboot their PCs, one averred that "Research is useless at this stage."

Interestingly Forrester forecasts a $2.1Billion business in downloadable music, led by a reinvigorated pop single marketplace and big fans who are willing to snap up productized digital "bootlegs", singles, and live versions of major acts.

Peercasting is completely beneath the Forrester radar at this point. They are predicting that the egregious CARP fees can be made up by the revenues generated by selling singles while listening. Unfortunately, no internet radio station has the deep financial pockets needed to build the

Doc points to a commentary in the same general area of Lessigness: Ed Foster writes in Infoworld on the spread of end user license agreements to printed material. His example is a book on "Geriatric Care Guidelines" from Omnicare, sent unsolicited to physicians. A label warns you not to open the shrink-wrapping unless you agree with the license which, basically, forbids you from telling anyone what's in the book.

This is an egregious but not unique example. Lots of printed documents have conditions attached to them. Consulting companies routinely put a footer on every page of their reports that forbid photocopying. And non-disclosure statements routinely preface business documents. We usually don't feel there's anything wrong with that, perhaps because the inefficiency of the real world ensures a reasonable leeway: nobody's going to know if you run off a copy of part of the report to distribute at an internal meeting or if you tell your spouse about the interesting proposal you heard today. In both cases, you're violating the license, but far from doing any harm, you're actually furthering the author's interests — the consulting firm is further entrenched and you have a chance to think out loud about the proposal with someone outside your limited perspective.

The digital world affords the new possibility of zero leeway. The problem with digits is that they're so simple. That is also their great strength, of course. They're so simple that they can be tracked perfectly. They're so simple that we can't tell just by looking at them whether they are helping an author's cause or subverting it. So, we are desperately trying to make the mistake of erring on the side of strictness.

Why is this a mistake? Because "Moving my ideas into a purchaser's head" is only rarely the real intent of a creator. Far more often the intent is much richer than that: to have her ideas make a difference, to be appreciated and even loved for her ideas, to have her ideas start an open-ended process of development. Digits don't know from that ambiguity. We — by which I mean the distribution industries, the government and even most of us "content creators" — are doggedly trying to reset the default to what is simple and unambiguous. But, defaulting to the simple and the unambiguous is nothing but a definition of stupidity.

What we thought was an undesirable weakness of the real world — its inevitable leeway — in fact is a strength because it accommodates the basic point of communication: to be ambiguous enough in meaning and scope to provoke results, growth and innovation in unpredictable ways.

I spent some time on the telephone with the folks at Endymion who are excited about their ZNow search capabilities. And I have to admit, it's pretty durn cool in the non-flashy-but-useful way. ZNow is a search engine that does the usual stuff (indexes HTML, Word, PDF) but also does quite a reasonable job of dynamically suggesting categories by which you can refine your search. (Note: My comments are based on a few minutes of kicking at a couple of demo sites.) For example, at a demo site that uses the content of the Open Directory project for its contents, if you search on "Jazz," the right side lists the results but the left side lists about 20 categories by which you can further specify your search. The list is quite reasonable: arts, styles, dance, instruments, blues, band, performing args, classical, rock, guitar, etc.

Most interesting, the list is developed dynamically. Other engines suggest categories and folders but they require specifying the categories ahead of time. ZNow instead uses the word usage patterns of the pages in the results list to dynamically compute suggested categories.

Click on the fragment of an image below to see my pop-under...one that might just end the threat of terrorism. [Hint: Can you spot Osama?]

If you don't have the Flash view, click here (350K) to see a Gif version of it.

Mary Lu links to my Anti-Terrorist PopUnder (Hint: Can you spot Osama?) and points out that DLink has introduced a camera that doesn't need no stinkin' computer to broadcast to the Net.

By the way, Mary Lu is in Palm Springs looking for a Wifi connection on which she can piggyback. Does this make her a WiFampire? or a WiFasite? (But only in the best senses, I assure you.)

Meanwhile, in the miscellaneous world, I hear that the Danish Board of Technology has published a positive review of Small Pieces ("Sm� elementer l�st forbundet") on their Web site. Since my knowledge of Danish is limited to "med syltet�j" and "udder syltet�j ," I'm afraid I'll have to take the editor (Mette Bom) at his word...

Ole Andersen responds quickly to my Danishism:

Correction I: it is "uden", not "udder"
Correction II: 'at her word' - Mette is a girl's name..

Apart from that - yes, it is a positive review.

Martin Roell has blogged a pithy quote from Curt Cloninger in an article that responds to the cry: ""Man, you dudes are taking this online stuff waaaay too seriously. You need to unplug, turn off your computer, and go for a walk or something. Get some perspective."

But the online world is not a game of Mario Brothers. The online world is networked, which means there are living PEOPLE out there. Yes, the computer is the interface to this network, but the network itself is comprised of people, not computers. Any place where people share beliefs and concerns and humor and friendship and commitment — that place is a real world.

That's not a bad way of summarizing Small Pieces Loosely Joined. Of course, the interesting thing about the Web is that it is also a game of Mario Brothers and an infinite variety of possibilities not real enough for the Real World^TM.

Dave Rogers is taking his need for glasses as an omen for advancing age. Yo, Dave, the real sign of advancing age is that everything becomes an omen of advancing age.

And I've got more bad news for you, Dave: Wait till you get bifocals. After I got my first pair ten years, I went back to the optometrist twice because they weren't adjusted right. He conscientiously reground the lenses. But still I'd get fisheye effects looking at near things through the top and blurring looking at far things through the bottom and funhouse mirror effects off the sides. "So," said the weary optometrist who by now had lost any possible profit from his work for me, "you're telling me you'd like your eyes to work as well as they used to."

Trellix, a pioneer in easy-to-use online authoring tools, has integrated weblogging straight into its Web site design set. Why doesn't every web site creation system come with blogging tools? Seems so natural.

Joseph Zitt writes with regard to my mentioning Howard Rheingold's "smart mobs" idea:

Larry Niven, in a sense, predicted this in 1973. Linking it with teleportation, he called them "flash crowds". It's already in the Jargon dictionary

Mark "SpassMeister" Kelly points out an article by the always-interesting Joel Garreau on cell-phone swarming (or what Howard Rheingold calls "smart mobs"). A taste:

This is the precise opposite of a 1962-style "American Graffiti" world. Then you had to go to a place — the strip, the drive-in — to find out what was going on. Now, you find out what's going on by cell phone, and go to the place where it's happening.

Mike O'Dell has been psychedelicized by The Technical Web of Sound, a "60's Psychedelic Radio." For example, 'twas there that he heard the marvelous tune, "The Gong with the Luminous Nose." (Mr. O'Dell has confirmed that this was not a mis-typing of "The Bong with the, etc.")

Paula Hatch-Sato points to the "Engrish" site that displays infelicitous uses of her mother tongue by speakers of her adopted tongue.

I recently noted Jamie McCarthy's concerns about the Windows XP service pack 3 end user license agreement that gives Microsoft the right to install whatever updates it wants — including Digital Rights Management stuff — without asking you.

Mark Dionne has found the source of the Scandalous Diagram I ran a few days ago: http://www.markpoyser.netfirms.com/diagrams.htm. Mark is disappointed, however, that Lernout & Hauspie once again is ignored by those listing companies wounded by lying, scheming, greedy bastards.

Greg Allen writes:

While I realize you didn't create the map, but it's worth noting how much more central Jack Grubman is to the whole scheme. He was a literal "kingmaker," the hub of many telecom partnerships (Juniper/Worldcom) and CEO transfers (ATT > Qwest). And as the NYTimes reported recently, he also doled out IPO shares to client/potential client CEO's and other telecom Execs.

Of course, when I posted on my weblog, about Jack Grubman, it was the shocking theatrical aspect of Grubman getting accosted by (of all people) a CNBC reporter on the street.

Jamie McCarthy writes to a particular newsgroup:

Microsoft again wants root access privileges on your Windows machine in exchange for providing you a more-secure operating system.

To install Windows 2000 Service Pack 3, you must click that you agree to this text:

You acknowledge and agree that Microsoft may automatically check the version of the OS Product and/or its components that you are utilizing and may provide upgrades or fixes to the OS Product that will be automatically downloaded to your computer.

"Upgrades or fixes" will almost certainly include Digital Rights Management in the years to come; in short, clicking "I Agree" means you "agree" to have your computer transformed into a Gameboy that can run only whatever code Microsoft wants you to run and output only those bits Microsoft allows you to output.

And if you don't install Service Pack 3, you are so totally screwed I can't even tell you. So many security fixes...

http://www.theregister.co.uk/content/4/26517.html

In an email giving me permission to run this tidbit, Jamie adds:

You might add that, reportedly:

a separate EULA for W2K's SP3 contains this nasty bit: 'You may not disclose the results of any benchmark test of the .NET Framework component of the OS Components to any third party without Microsoft's prior written approval.'

Forwarded via Tim Hiltabiddle via an unknown source, apparently initiating somewhere in Juniper Networks, here's a map of the unfolding scandals. (Click on the snippet below to see the entire illustration.)