Misc. Canada’s Globe and Mail
Misc.
Canada’s Globe and Mail newspaper has an article that actually gets it right about the intellectual ferment on the Web.
Rather than saying that it’s just a bunch of foul-mouthed teenagers ranting about sex, drugs, rock ‘n roll and sex, Jeff Warren writes:
Instead of self-contained essays, the Web’s new intellectual hothouses offer diverse networks of opinion, and active participation.
Reader power is where the Web really comes into its own.
Other than Jeff’s focus on Mature and Respectable blogs (presumably to legitimize blogging to his readers), this is piece is a welcome alternative to the hostile crap
the media has been writing about blogging. (Full disclosure: He quotes me a couple of times.)
Some lovely maps of the Internet at Albert-László Barabási‘s site. He’s the Notre Dame physicist who found that there are 19 degrees of separation between any two randomly chosen sites on the Web. (This is back when there were only a billion pages on the Web.) More significantly, he and his team have discovered a pattern of nodal clustering that seems to pertain not just to the Internet but to any self-organizing network. I had a chance to talk with him a couple of weeks ago — a very enthusiastic and engaging fellow. He has a new book, Linked, coming out soon.
Kevin Marks responds to my posting of a little Oscars-scoring program that I wrote in <shame>Visual Basic</shame>:
You don’t wanna use that, you wanna use this:
Makes binaries for Mac, Windows, Linux and load of other Unixes. Free trial version that lets you have 10 lines of script per element. The scripting language is HyperTalk, give or take.
Or if you really love Basic, use this:
No, I don’t love Basic. Back when I was running DOS I far preferred C. (I could never master C++ or Java.) But VB has one compelling strength if you’re strictly an amateur programmer: Microsoft has made it really easy to bash together a UI. (Make your OS too hard to develop in and then sell the dumbed-down kit so people can develop in it! It worked!)
Ah, let the flames begin.
Jock Gill, White House Technology Advisor to Pres. Clinton, has a fiery, enjoyable partisan column at Democrats.com that paints a picture of
An incumbent corporate elite determined to establish a risk free, global regime without regulation, with guaranteed profits for owners and with all disputes resolve in secret without appeal.
Note: I’ll be on the road to Nashville the rest of today and tomorrow, so the blogging may be a little thin. I’m giving a talk at SHARE, an IBM national user support group.
Categories: Uncategorized dw
