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December 10, 2005
Ricky Gervais, creator and star of the original The Office and now Extras has started a weekly series of half-hour podcasts, along wth Stephen Merchant and Karl Pilkington.
I haven’t heard one yet — I’ve got to get some drive-time into my life — but I suspect it’s probably pretty damn funny. [Tags: podcast RickyGervais]
December 9, 2005
The fact that the most visited site on the Net has bought the premier tagging site should confirm that tagging is going mainstream.
Yahoo has profoundly not screwed up Flickr, so I have confidence that del.icio.us users are not going to feel betrayed or de-featured by Yahoo.
Most important, Yahoo is now in a position to become a tag broker, adding value to the act of tagging, thus driving more tagging, thus increasing the Web’s memetic value. With widespread tagging, the Web means more.
Congratulations to Joshua Schachter and the rest of the Delicious folks. [Tags: tagging yahoo delicious]
After Hoder’s blog was held against him by American Immigration, Canadian Brent Ashley holds it against him in a “Canada: Blog it or leave it!” sort of way.
Michael O’Connor Clarke blogs a paper by Howard Levitt on how Canadian employment law applies to blogging. For example:
Whereas internet use and email use from a personal email account which is done after work hours on a personal computer may not form the basis of a harassment claim because of the reasonable expectation of privacy that exists, because a blog is in the public domain, harassing blog entries made on a person computer, outside of company time, and not using company resources, may still have the potential to result in disciplinary action because they have the potential to create a hostile work environment as there is greater potential that co-workers and management will encounter the harassing material.
Howard isn’t necessarily recommending this; he’s trying to anticipate how court decisions might go. His recommended (and generally quite reasonable) corporate policy on blogging, however, seems to apply also to blogs created or viewed at home, on one’s own time, and includes a prohibition on viewing blogs that contain “inappropriate or offensive material.” Does he really think that that’s a reasonable or enforceable proposal? Or am I misunderstanding him? [Tags: hoder canada MichaelOConnorClarke BrentAshley]
In 1999, Chris Locke called a chapter of The Cluetrain Manifesto “Internet Apocalypso.”
In July, Mel Gibson announced he has written and will direct a movie called “Apocalypto.”
Last night, a show opened in Boston to excellent reviews. Its title: “Apocalpyso.”
Oh, Johnnie Cochran, where are you in our hour of need?
[Tags: cluetrain apocalypso ChrisLocke rageboy]
December 8, 2005
I just came across this copy of the Columbia University Spectator from 1967 when I visited as a participant in a day for high school newspaper editors. I spent the entire time outside the Library arguing about the Vietnam war. Despite what the caption implies, I was arguing against the War, i.e., on the same side as SDS.
Hoder, the remarkable Iranian blogger and force for good got googled at the US Border and was denied admission because something he’d written in his blog was used against him. Read it and be amazed/depressed. [Tags: blogosphere hoder]
Melvil Dewey designed the modern library catalog card, sizing it at 7.5 x 12.5 cm. As far as I can tell, that makes it a Golden Rectangle (AKA the Golden Mean), but I have never ever ever gotten a math problem right. Anyone care to check my math? Thanks! [Tags: EverythingIsMiscellaneous MelvilDewey libraries]
December 7, 2005
I’ve just published an issue of my newsletter, the Journal of the Hyperlinked Organization. Here’s the table of contents:
| The year of unique IDs: We’re about to get very interested in assigning meaningless numbers to lots of things. Very interested.
Living
My
|
[Note: What follows is my opinion. No, there is no reason on earth why you should care.]
The American version of the BBC’s excruciatingly wonderful “The Office” isn’t nearly as bad as I thought it was going to be. In fact, I’m enjoying it.
In its second season, it seems to be moving away from the British original, which is a good thing: I’m a Steve Carell fan, but he can’t touch Ricky Gervais, the creator and star of the British version. Gervais’ office manager was a masterpiece of unself-knowingness. You could see what he was thinking even as he ran from what he was thinking. Just a gorgeous performance. Carell is funny, but he’s not half the actor that Gervais is.
So, this season wisely has focused more on the ensemble dynamics, and there are some fetching performances — I’m liking Jim (John Krasinski) and Pam (Jenna Fischer) almost as much as Tim Freeman and Lucy Davis.
So, “The Office” is definitely on our TiVo list. It’s sillier than the British one, not as deeply funny, and not as squirmtastic. But it’s better than I expected and getting better over time.
Two criticisms/concerns, though. First, Dwight, the buffoon, is too buffoonish for my taste. He’s buffoon all the way through. Gareth (Mackenzie Crook) in the British version verged on caricature, but, as with Gervais, you could see through him. Overdoing the buffoon is practically a national pastime on American TV.
Second, the British version only ran two seasons, which meant the Tim-Dawn flirtation could come to a conclusion. I don’t know how the American version is going to sustain the tension over multiple seasons. [Tags: TheOffice television comedy bbc SteveCarell]
December 6, 2005
Barbara van Schewick asks at a Berkman lunch whether we need network neutrality rules that prevent carriers from preferring or excluding particular applications or content. She is today going to present the theoretical case for network neutrality rules. (Here is her paper.)
Network providers say that they don’t want to discriminate against applications, so “network neutrality rules are just regulation in search of a problem.” She says there are three questions you need to ask to make the case: 1. Is there a threat of discrimination? 2. If there is, what’s the impact? 3. What’s the impact of regulation on social welfare? She is going to argue that there’s a real threat, it’s more common than often recognized, and the cost in reduced innovation is significant. Fostering competition is not the solution. “Network neutrality rules are the only possible and sensible remedy” to this problem, she will argue.
The potential impact, she says, is on independent application development. That’s important because (she says) the Internet is a “general-purpose technology” and thus has the potential to be used in many places in the economy. Without apps, the Internet has little value precisely because it’s so generic. So, app development “is key to the promise of the economic growth.”
She concludes that there are real costs to introducing network neutrality regulation, but the benefits outweigh them. She says there are still important questions — e.g., what should the rules look like, what are the exceptions, etc. — but “the case for network neutrality is made.”
Q: (David Isenberg) Don’t we really need structural separation (the separation of the wires from the content – e.g., SBC would be forbidden from offering any content or apps), not just network neutrality? Neutrality was the compromise to avoid structural separation, but we’ve seen over the past decade that the carriers will do everything they can to avoid neutrality because they have the opportunity to make billions and billions of dollars at the expense of the country and economy. Just saying “network neutrality” is the wrong thing from a pragmatic and political point of view. [Much discussion ensues.]
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