One of the revolutionary ideas of the last few years in the technology industry is that the poor are a market. C.K. Prahalad’s “The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid” has helped businesspeople realize that people in poor nations have both disposeable income and investment income. People will buy goods that will better their lives, if the right goods and the right business models are made available….

Which brings us to Microsoft’s recent announcement of FlexGo(TM) “pay as you go computing”. While FlexGo is endorsed by Prahalad in Microsoft’s press release, it appears to me that it’s far more likely to be an exploitative than a liberating technology for most users.

Read more… [Tags: ethan_zuckerman microsoft flexgo poverty]

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Flamenco, the pioneering faceted classification system, has gone Open Source. Woohoo!

Faceted classification allows users to browse a complex tree of data by dynamically deciding which branch is a branch of which branch. (Demos here.) Flamenco is a project led by Marti Hearst at UC Berkeley School of Info. It was an important influence on commercial providers such as Siderean.

FLAMENCO is an acronym that stands for FLexible information Access using MEtadata in Novel COmbinations. Or, as I prefer to think of it: FIAUMINC. [Tags: faceted_classification flamenco open_source taxonomy everything_is_miscellaneous marti_hearst]

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Pito Salas, the person responsible for the free, open source aggregator, BlogBridge, has a new project underway. I wasn’t so impressed with it until we had coffee together this morning. (Disclosure: I’m a BlogBridge user, and I’m also on its board of advisors. If Pito offers his new project commercially, there are unlikely circumstances in which I could make a little money from it. Frankly, my friendship with Pito is more likely to distort my opinion than the far whiff of money.)

The idea behind BBL is so simple that my first reaction to Pito was: Surely this has been done a thousand times already. But I think maybe it hasn’t. BBL is designed for a group that wants to build a shared online library with some degree of centralized control and management. So, someone comes up with a way of slicing up the topics, hierarchically. BBL has tagging built in so if you prefer to skip the tree, you can. (Or at least you will be able to — BBL is still quite draft-y.) Different branches can be administered by different people. Everything is RSS-enabled. BBL inhales and exhales OPML. Dynamic folders can show the current contents of a remote OPML structure, raising the possibility of creating interlibraries. The aim is to make it dead easy for a group to build, maintain and make accessible a structured online library. It’s cooler than I at first thought.

If you’ve got comments, go to BlogBridge and let Pito know. He’s an open-minded, open-hearted sort of guy.

(Ironically, the links for posts about BlogBridge Library need to be organized better. Here’s a link to the tag. And here are some key posts: 1 2 3 4. A preview is here. And there’s a SkypeCast about it on Thursday.)

[Tags: blogbridge libraries blogbridgelibrary pito_salas taxonomy everything_is_miscellaneous]

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I’m on my way to San Francisco for the Supernova conference. I expect to spend almost all my time in the hallways, once again grabbing people to video-interview for CNET (with AT&T as a sponsor). The links to the podcasts, livecasts, etc. will be here.

I expect there will be some lively discussion of Net neutrality, but not just that. Supernova attracts a great bunch o’ folks… [Tags: supernova vblogs]

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The Wall Street Journal has published a conversation on the effect of DRM on innovation. On the one side is Fritz Attaway with the MPAA. On the other is Wendy Seltzer, law prof and Berkman fellow. Wendy was formerly with the Electronic Frontier Foundation (did you remember to renew your membership?). It’s a terrific exchange and Wendy’s responses, one after another, are so crisp and insightful that she had me chuckling with delight. This is a must read, IMO.

The WSJ wisely — and somewhat ironically — is allowing unsubscribed access to this exchange. [Tags: drm copyleft copyleft digital_rights wendy_seltzer mpaa fritz_attaway berkman]

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Environmentalists and workers unite! No, that’s not an imperative. It’s a description. The Blue/Green Alliance brings together the Sierra Club and United Steelworkers.

This makes sense to me since it’s recently come to my attention that we’ve just got the one planet and no do-overs allowed. [Tags: blue_green_alliance environment labor politics]

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Gutenkarte mashes together the public domain literature at Project Gutenberg and MetaCarta’s geolocator that scans the text and plots the place references on a map. Pretty durn cool. It’s even AJAX-y. There are some other projects of a similar Web 2.0 ilk over at MetaCarta Labs. (Disclosure: I did some consulting work for MetaCarta a while ago.) [Tags: project_gutenberg maps gis metacarta web2.0 gutenkarte]

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Bank of America’s phone support person just asked me four questions to verify that I am who I am: My name, the last eight digits of my ATM card, my home address, and the amount and date of a recent ATM withdrawal. After I complied, she said that if gave her a one-word verification, the next time they could verify me much faster. And what is that one word that will open my bank account to anyone with a touch-tone phone?

My mother’s maiden name.

When I suggested that an enterprising felon, a malevolent family member, or anyone who has ever worked at any of the 12 million other companies that have asked for my mother’s maiden name would not have much trouble getting my mother’s maiden name, the support person said I could supply another word, but that they would not be able to give me a hint. Apparently having a hint field in their database would cause an information overload with cascading effects that would bring down the world economy.

Besides, aren’t we embarrassed talking about our mothers’ maiden name? [Tags: whines banking digitalID security]

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I’ve been working for months, on and off (mainly off, occasionally on), trying to get MythTV — Open Source TiVo — working. Bit by bit, I’m making progress. (I should note that for some people – better people than I – MythTV simply installs and runs.)

I am a slightly competent Unix user who can grep his way out of a paper bag, so long as no regular expressions are required, but that’s about my limit. So getting Linux-based MythTV installed feels like it requires me to issue complex magical incantations. Get one syllable wrong, and instead of the mouse turning into a white charger, you’ve given your sister boils for seven years.

Nevertheless, progress has been made, including last night when I actually got the Linux box to output to the TV. Rather than having to watch TV on the computer screen, I could actually watch on my TV. Woohoo! Of course, I don’t yet have sound, the IR Blaster required to control the cable box still doesn’t work unless you shell out of MythTV and give it a raw Linux abracadabra, and it doesn’t record the shows you’ve told it to record. (I’m guessing that that last problem has to do with how I’ve set up Zap2It, the publicly-available channel guide.) One step at a time, my friend, one step at a time.

Last night’s breakthrough in getting “tv out,” as it’s called, was achieved by following instructions at WriteMe. I have a Hauppauge PVR-350 card, so I was able to take the instructions verbatim, especially when it came to the lines updating /etc/modules.conf. (If you use KnoppMyth to install MythTV, as I did and which I recommend, you’ll want to brush up on your vi, since that’s the only text editor it comes with, at least AFAIK.) And before you do anything else, make sure that within the MythTV graphical interface, you’ve gone to the TV setup page and have clicked the box saying that you want the video card to output to the TV. Not that anyone would be foolish enough to miss that step and then spend hours cursing MythTV, Linux, Open Source, and the post-Industrial Age.

Now that Congress is about to reinstate the Broadcast Flag, requiring digital hardware to prevent the unlicensed copying of digital content — i.e., you can’t record a frame of the Simpsons unless The Man lets you, and you may not, by the force of law, skip over the commercials (no kidding) — MythTV is a better idea than ever. Plus, once it’s up and running, you have free TiVo with all the innovations that clever hackers can devise. It’s TiVo with a future. Reclaim your eyeballs! [Tags: mythtv]

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This is from the weekly roundup of new stuff from Berkman fellows:

* Ethan Zuckerman questions coverage of Internet filtering in Africa.

* Derek Bambauer praises the virtues of inefficiency.

* Bill McGeveran provides background to the Science Commons Addenda.

* Dan Gillmor questions the Sharesleuth.com statement of intent.

* Rebecca MacKinnon digs into corporate filtering differences in China.

There’s lots going on at the ol’ Center… [Tags: berkman ethan_zuckerman dan_gillmor bill_mcgeveran rebecca_mackinnon derek_bambauer africa china yahoo science]

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