Interesting interview with Sharon Gillett, Commissioner of the Massachusetts Department of Telecommunications and Cable in the Boston Globe.

Q The big news is the state’s $25 million broadband incentive fund, which will help bring broadband access to 32 towns that don’t have high-speed Internet. What are the details?

A [The fund] is to be used to invest in hard capital assets with long lives — things like conduits, fiber, wireless towers. Those are big parts of the up-front capital required to serve communities, and the idea is having the state invest in those assets lowers the cost for private companies to come in and do the rest of the job. The state is not a service provider . . . We’re also technology neutral — whatever works.

This sounds like Boston’s admirable plan of providing access to the backbone to anyone who wants to be an ISP, although I don’t know if it’s as aggressive as Boston’s plan. In any case, the state’s map of how many providers there are in each region (to which Gillett refers) seems to me to promote the idea that if you have a couple of big incumbents duking it out in your town, that counts as a competitive market. Boston’s plan may show us what it’s like when anyone from big businesses to non-profits can try to entice you to sign up with them.

Brookline, where I live, is rolling out its muni wifi. I occasionally get a signal in my house. It’ll be free in public parks, and there will be a relatively low fee ($20/month — but they don’t say what the speed will be, and they don’t say how much the daily or hourly fee will be) for access elsewhere. It’s being installed and managed by Galaxy Internet Services [Tags: brookline wifi muniwifi broadband massachusetts sharon+gillett net+neutrality ]

1 Comment »

David Isenberg points to the toothlessness of the FTC and writes that the lesson of AT&T’s censoring of Pearl Jam is that the providers of content ought not to be allowed to own the Net tubes through which that content moves [Tags: david_isenberg at&t net_neutrality ftc pearl_jam ]

1 Comment »

Of course, this was before we unearthed the stockpiles of nuclear, biological and chemical weapons we found after we invaded. Otherwise, this war would have been a folly knowingly entered into.

Impeach Cheney first.

1 Comment »

I just tried to post a comment to one of my own recent posts. It came back with the page that announces that the comment has been put into a moderation queue, which is only supposed to happen if you’re commenting on a post of a certain age, and if you aren’t on the cleared list of commenters. Worse, it didn’t even put the comment into the queue. It just threw it out.
I apologize if you’ve tried commenting here over the past few days. I’m afraid your comment was tossed aside like mere fish wrap. Truly sorry :(

I think it was a problem with one of my spam filters. I think it’s fixed now.

9 Comments »

Here are 60 tools that may make your gMail experience better… (Thanks to Henk Nouwens for the link, via Twitter.) [Tags: gmail ]

3 Comments »

Although I disagree with Chris Heuer‘s overall conclusion that the phrase “conversational marketing” debases conversations, I think he puts well the concerns we should have about how marketers are going to respond to the growing recognition that markets have indeed become conversations. Here’s what I said in my comment on his post:

Marketing has to change. It has to recognize that market conversations are now the best source of information about companies and their products and services. It has to recognize that those conversations are not themselves marketing — you and me talking about whether we like our new digital cameras is not you and me marketing to each another. Neither is our conversation a “marketing opportunity.” But the temptation to see it as such is well nigh impossible for most marketers to resist.

Fortunately, the people leading the thinking about this generally do honor the conversation as the thing that must be preserved. How the meme gets taken up, however, should worry us. We need to help marketers resist their deeply bred urges. We need to make preserving the integrity of the conversation as central a marketing tenet as is not lying about product specs or prices. [Tags: chris_heuer marketing conversational_marketing cluetrain business ]

2 Comments »

Consuming Experience tells the long story of how the BBC came to demand that YouTube remove the video she had posted. The take-away: The DMCA is an abuse magnet.

The short version of the story: The anonymous author of Consuming Experience was in the beta program for a BBC media player. After carefully reading the agreement she’d signed with the BBC and figuring that the player had already been pretty widely publicized, she posted a clip of it. The BBC asserted that the clip violated its copyright and demanded that YouTube remove it under the terms of the DMCA. YouTube complied, as it always does. If YouTube doesn’t comply, it’s legally liable if the material is found to infringe copyright. Hence, complying with take-down notices is a legal reflex action.

The Consuming Experience blogger eventually was put in touch with the right people at the BBC. They apologized. It is, to the BBC’s credit, the first take down notice they’ve ever sent to YouTube. Someone at the BBC — we don’t know who — apparently had panicked, thinking the clip gave away trade secrets. Or maybe they just regretted not having written the beta agreements more carefully.

This is not just yet another case of a big media company sending out takedown notices for material that it turns out does not violate copyright. This represents a temptation to abuse the DMCA in a different way. The DMCA isn’t about trade secrets. There are other remedies for that. The DMCA is about copyright. But it’s so easy to send out take down notices that its use will inevitably expand in every dimension. Don’t like a clip for whatever reason? Send a take-down notice. And, although victims can send a counter-notification if they think their stuff was taken down inappropriately, they are Davids facing well-heeled Goliaths.

The DMCA does allow hefty penalties to be levied against those who knowingly abuse it. I hope we’ll see some judgments. [Tags: copyright dmca bbc ]

3 Comments »

Just in the nick of time for moi, Google has decided to let us pay it money to increase the storage space on our gmail accounts. If you want to go from 2.8G to 9G, go here and pay $20. You can use the extra 6G for any Google service you want.

I am at 97% of capacity at gmail. So, a few days ago I began the ridiculously contorted dance required to boost your gmail storage. I paid Google $50 for a Google Apps account, which gives me 10G. But, at least as of a couple of days ago, you couldn’t apply that gigabytage anywhere except within your new gApps account. No problem, I thought. I’ll just move my 82,000 messages from my old gmail account to my new gApps mail account; I use gmail primarily as a pop server anyway, so there’d be no visible change in my email address. Besides, you can always forward your mail.

Amazingly, Google does not provide a way to transfer mail content from one account to another. (It also provides virtually no tools for managing large volumes of mail — just try deleting all your attachments from before, say, 1996, if you have a couple of thousand qualifying attachments.) So, I downloaded gxfer, a free software tool that does the deed. It’s simple and it works, but it’s sloooow…at 200 messages per hour, the transfer time is often measured in weeks. (The folks at LimitNone who make for this freeware were really helpful when I had questions. The throttle is not their software but the fact that Google doesn’t provide an API for doing the transfer. They stepped into the breach. Thank you, LimitNone!)

Then, yesterday I woke up to discover that gmail said I had 9GB available to me. Was Google starting to upgrade everyone, starting with the maxed out users? Did Google just like me for who I am? Nah. It turns out that I had bought an upgrade for my free Picasa account about a year ago because we were storing our extended family’s photos, and Google had made that extended disk space available to gmail as well.

Yay for Google. At last they figured out that the only thing keeping us from paying them money was them. Heck, I would have been willing to pay them money to let me pay them money to get the disk space. [Tags: google gmail ]

Be the first to comment »

The box of the HP Photosmart R847 digital camera advertises that it’s “A powerful, easy-to-use 8-MP camera with pet-eye fix and slimming feature.”

Yes, the camera removes the “white eye” that steals all our love for our pets, and lets us shave off those extra pounds that steal all our love for our loved ones.

These are the features that sell cameras? We are doomed.

Pretty nice little camera, though.

3 Comments »

According to Wendy Davis in MediaTimes:

The New York Times plans to scrap its two-year-old TimesSelect subscription service and once again make all of the newspaper’s columns available for free online, according to a report in today’s New York Post.

The move comes amid speculation that under Rupert Murdoch’s ownership, The Wall Street Journal will stop charging for content in favor of an ad-supported business model.

…

Speaking at an industry summit in February, Nicholas Ascheim, the company’s director of entertainment, video and audio products, said that younger users might never read the paper’s columnists if they had to pay for them. “New generations will never get exposed,” he said.

Now if they just opened their archives, they could hold down a unique, persistent, useful and beloved spot on the Web. [Tags: media new_york_times everything_is_miscellaneous ]

2 Comments »