Small Pieces Loosely Joined gets reviewed as part of CIO Insight‘s “Reading Library” (as opposed to the Library of Books Carefully Left Casually Lying Around to Impress Subordinates?):

The foremost problem with books about technology is that they are deadly dull. Not this one; Weinberger, a coauthor of the overhyped Cluetrain Manifesto, provides an entertaining interpretation of the true effect of the Web. His conclusion: We haven’t even begun to understand how it has changed just about everything and everyone’s lives. In his view, the Internet represents democracy in its truest form. This just reinforces something CIOs already know when it comes to business: The more choices people have, the harder you have to work to keep those people as customers.

Can’t complain, although I wouldn’t have said that the conclusion is that Internet represents democracy. Maybe something about the Web being so popular because it more truly reflects our connective human nature than our modern beliefs do. But if I could have said in a phrase what the conclusion is, maybe the book would have sold better.

PS: It’ll be out in paperback soon. But don’t let that stop you from buying the hardback if only because its cover is so much prettier than the new design. Not to mention that — as is typical — my hardback royalties are 15% of the cover price while I only get 7% of the cover price of the paperback. For those who are keeping track, this means that each of the authors of the overhyped Cluetrain book makes about $0.11 for every paperback copy sold. Damn coauthors!

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Here‘s a “fun” test for school kids. Drag ‘n’ drop names onto a blank map of the Middle East and north Africa. Listen to the “fun” bleep every time you get one wrong.

Heck, I didn’t so badly. There were only two countries I’d never even heard of. Sigh.

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PC Gamer has a list of free games they forget to mention in their Tiop 50 Free Games story in their March issue. The list incudes:

Javanoid, a breakout game, along with Radial Pong which is what it sounds like.

Mean Cuisine and Eternal Daughter, an arcade and platform game respectively that I have not tried.

A bunch of “topical” (Saddam Statue Smashfest) and semi-offensive (e.g., Retarded Baby Animals) games and movies here.

RuneScape (not Run-escape as I at first thought), a free massively multiplayer 3D adventure that was as annoying as the best of them, as well as chess, checkers, and some scrollers.

Yet more scrollers and shooters at miniclip.

Hybrid games such as Billiard Boxing, Kung Fu Chess, Sumo Volleyball, etc. at shizmoo. I tried Word Ninja, which is non-turn-based Scrabble. Fun even though I lost real bad to everyone I played against.

FreeArcade has a bunch of games, including one that I like: TextTwist.

The DOSGamesArchive has 150 games you can download, many of which are shareware but some of which are freeware. I tried to walk down Memory Lane with Rise of the Triad but I couldn’t get it to run on my Win XP laptop. Same with Duke Nukem 3D. (The truth is that I didn’t try very hard.)

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Have some fun and go read Halley’s short story.

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A new strip is out.

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David Reed has an important, brief piece on the way in which the government’s Total Information Awareness program is similar to the ESP research done in the 50s and 60s.

… the so-called scientists (including Adm. Poindexter) who are leading this are about as clueless as the ESP researchers were, as to their biases, etc. Clever computer science, even powerful and correct computer science, will serve the same role in this process that the powerful statistical methods served in the Dr. Rhine’s ESP research enterprise. The math was not wrong… but it helped create a delusion.

The result in the TIA case will be very dangerous pseudo-scientific bullshit, I suspect. Unfortunately it will be turned on us.

As David points out, the civil libertarians among us (and why aren’t we all civil libertarians?) who are raising alarms about privacy in the land of the TIA “tend to reinforce the belief that there is any real investigatory information that can be extracted by inference from a very noisy and randomly selected pile of information.” In short, TIA needs to be debunked as well as denounced.

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There seems to be a revival of interest in ThreadsML, a standard Steve Yost of QuickTopic proposed be developed. The revival is mainly due to Matt Mower and Paolo Valdemarin‘s Easy News Topics (ENT) proposal. ENT lets RSS 2.0 include metadata about the topic of the news feed, and seems to be an open and generous standard allowing pointers to the existing topic metadata standards. For example, Marc Canter writes (in an email): “ENT is … something any software developer can add in very quickly. It would also be 100% compatible with any parallel RDF or XTM efforts. That’s KEY!”

ThreadsML would, in theory, enable discussion threads to be shared among instant messaging, email, chat, UseNet style discussions and anything else that wants ’em. Marc suggests that we alter ThreadsML to get it to work with ENT. A new branch of the ThreadsML discussion is here.

I’m favor of anything that will help preserve the value of threads. (FWIW, I get credit as ThreadsML’s first official booster. I think there’s a T-shirt involved.)

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Seth Gordon has posted an excellent explanation of TrackBacks that puts them in the context of the history of the Web. Very interesting.

Added bonus: It even includes some Perl scripts.

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Ding Dong!
The Witch is dead.
Which old Witch?
The Wicked Witch!
Ding Dong!
The Wicked Witch is dead.

A murderous tyrant has fallen. The symbolic money shot was carried live, and it was thrilling. So why isn’t my breast filled with naught but joy? For bad reasons and good.

Bad Reason: Because I hate seeing Bush win a bet that he should not have made. There are political reasons to hate this, but my real reasons are petty and small-minded.

Good Reasons: 1. That we would win the war was pretty much certain, although the price of the war might have been much much higher. That we will succeed at peace is more in doubt and failure is more dangerous. 2. Having kicked Iraqi butt, we will now look for more butts to kick.

So, I am, as usual, ambivalent.

Interesting article in today’s Boston Globe about why the Shi’ites worldwide oppose our Iraqi adventure even though Shi’ites were the object of extra special oppression by Hussein. (Note: the link will rot in about a week.)

I like Steve Johnson‘s ambivalent comments on this topic.

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Wow! Apple in talks to buy Universal Music. So many ways to go wrong and so many ways to go right! Wrong: View the combination of content, distribution and player as enabling a music lock-down strategy. Right: View the access to music as an opportunity to open up distribution and play with access/pricing models until they get it right.

I find Apple a mix of 100% wholesome open fun and the persistent insistence that the earth come to its senses and revolve around Cupertino. But this only means that Apple is not driven first and only by greed. As Doc has pointed out (including in that Cluetrain book), Jobs is about art. So, this will be a good, old-fashioned, unpredictable ride. (Think about how you’d react if you heard that Microsoft was in talks to buy Universal. Scary!)

More than cool! Actually goddamn fun!

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