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March 17, 2003
What’s your favorite web site by and for a startup? Who’s done a great job presenting themselves when there are only five people in the company and one of them is a cat? I have some friends more or less in that situation who are looking for ideas and lessons…
Eric has created a white paper on why digital ID matters and why PingID (the paper’s sponsor) gets it right. It’s well written and lays out the issues clearly. Nice job, Eric.
Eric certainly makes the case that a federated approach is preferable to a centralized one, but I remain unconvinced that the drawbacks of having any Net-wide digID are worth the benefits. But, Eric would say: Tough. DigID is happening, so you’d better pick the approach that’s more user-centered. Yeah, probably. But this remains one bandwagon I think I’d rather be dragged behind than hop on board. (“World of Ends” is interesting co-reading.)
David Isenberg just called to tell me that there’s an article on the first page of Section B of the Wall Street Journal today about how we’re running out of spectrum.
What, you mean my article in Salon about David Reed’s ideas didn’t settle this question once and for all?
Aaarrrggghhhh!
March 16, 2003
A haiku:
Winding in the kite,
it pulls up so hard, it writes
a line in my skin.
Christophe Ducamp points to an article on World of Ends on the site of a French TV network. Google’s automatic translation service tells me that the author finds our article “corrosive and didactic,” although as far as I can tell, between the rest of Google’s translation and my limited French, they actually sort of like it.
There’s an excellent article on Open Spectrum by Sir Lawrence Lessig. For example:
Property systems are not free. To make sense, their benefits must outweigh their costs. Party members count two sorts of benefits from a property regime. The first is coordination?making sure that users of the spectrum don’t conflict with each other. The second is allocation?making sure that the right to use a bit of spectrum is given to the highest valued user. Both benefits are indeed important. Yet both come at a cost. And if we could achieve at least some of these benefits without suffering the worst of these costs, then the gain from propertizing spectrum becomes harder to justify.
Tom gets at something true in his blogging about writing that creates a sense of community. It’s the sort of thing you think you must have always known even though you didn’t until you read it.
March 15, 2003
I’m the subject of an open interview at The Inkwell.vue. We’re mainly talking about Small Pieces and I’m braying like a puffed-up, vacuous ass. Come join the fun!
Frank Field, in worrying about one of Arnold Kling‘s points in his extension of World of Ends (Frank thinks that “Intermediaries add vaue” needs to be amended to say that they sometimes add value and users should be able to disintermediate themselves), points to a really good example of how to violate the End-to-End principle: an article at InternetNews.com says that the next version of Microsoft Office will require users to lock into Windows XP in order to get the benefits of the new release. Forced agreements aren’t agreements.
Mike O’Dell, Finder of Funny Sites, recommends Ridiculopathy, an Onion-esque offering that today features a gleeful announcement by Microsoft that the new version of Office won’t be compatible even with itself.
And while we’re at, this issue of The Onion is pretty funny. I enjoyed the article about Ted Turner sending himself back in time to prevent the AOL merger with Time-Warner — it’s not just the premise that’s funny. And I also liked the one on the accidental funding of the arts…up to and including the last line.
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