Senator Paul Wellstone’s death has narrowed our
political vision yet further. We’re down to
about what can be seen through the sights of a gun.

He was a mensch.

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MIT Technology Review just posted a column of mine on why we should be scared of Microsoft Palladium.

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I was at the Newseum, a site that thumbnails newspaper front pages from around the world. (Thanks, Dan Pink.) I clicked on the Australia’s Courier Mail and saw their tag line:

Unfortunately, I freudianly misread it as:

Two letters can make the difference between marketing and truth, eh?

And while we’re discussing news about news, J.D. Lasica has asked various digeratti what they read for news. For extra fun, try to guess the answers the ecelebs give; I bet you won’t be far wrong. (Kudos to Henry Jenkins for mentioning TheOnion as a news source.)

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Adina Levin, having read my ramble about Stephen Wolfram’s presentation at PopTech, recommends Kurzweil’s appreciation of him, which she has summarized here. The Kurzweil piece is well-written and leave us humanities majors behind about a third of the way in.

There’s also a good article — again only two-thirds beyond my comprehension — by Steven Weinberg in the NY Review of Books.

Steve Yost writes pithily about reading Wolfram. He says:

The repetitiveness of Wolfram’s style led me to think that near the end he’d reveal that the book was generated using his main thesis as the initial condition of a CA algorithm. Now that would be a substantial example.

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1. Go to google.com
2. Type in your phone number, in quotation marks
3. When it finds your name and address, click on “Maps”
4. You are here.

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I’ve posted a review of Michael Moore’s “Bowling for Columbine” over at BlogCritics.org. I found the movie entertaining and righteous but willing to sacrifice coherence for the sake of a good stunt.

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The debate continues over how to solve the DNS mess. The mess exists because there are more people than there are names. So, who gets davidweinberger.com? (Hint: I didn’t.) Not to mention who gets Disney.com, Schwarzenegger.com, and PamelaAnderson.com.

Dan Gillmor a few months ago said that Google had solved the problem, at least for now. If I want to find my pal Bob Smith, the Mulholland furrier, I google him with a query like “bob smith furrier mulholland.” Very likely, Google will get it right.

So, why not build on this? Google could enable us to fill out a standard form with fields for name, email, web pages, parents, town, high school, college, jobs, employers, hobbies, publications, summer camps, etc. Then add a tab to Google.com called “People.” Weight the form very heavily when searching for names, so that if you searched for “david weinberger herricks,” the Google engine would notice that “herricks” is listed on my personal form as my high school, and thus would move my web pages (the ones I’ve listed on the form) way up the list. No one besides me would ever see my form itself.

Google has the heft to pull this off. If you know someone at Google, wanna pass this along? Alternatively, you might want to point out the gaping hole in my logic that makes this idea not just implausible but actually humiliating.

Either way, thank you.

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Proposed neologism:

Google URL (n) A phrase sufficient to bring a desired Web site to the top of the returns list at Google. E.g., “My real address is weird, so I gave him my Google URL: ‘Locke die cast'”; “I couldn’t remember the dictionary’s web address so I used the Google URL ‘American Heritage'”

[Note: Vernor Vinge gave out Google URLs in his talk at PopTech, as reported, but didn’t use the term itself.]

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Dan Bricklin has a touching appreciation of his aunt, Hinda Gross, who died last Friday. It’s a reminder of how remarkable we can make our lives if we choose to.

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Scott Kirsner writes in yesterday’s Boston Globe about two Boston-area companies coming out with anti-spam products. The founder of one of the companies, Spamnix, was one of the founders of the other company, InterMute. (InterMute is best known for AdSubtract.) Even though the Spamnix guy signed a non-compete, he claims it only pertains to ad-blocking software, not spam. Nevertheless, it’s easy to imagine InterMute suing, if only to slow the launch of competitive software.

Nah:

“We’re both attacking spam because we both hate it,” Jaspan says. “There are a zillion people using e-mail, so there’s room for lots of [anti-spam] products. If I do pretty well or they do pretty well, maybe one of us will acquire the other.”

“My passion against spam is even greater than my competitiveness,” says Paul English. “I think there can be lots of good solutions, and I wish him luck.”

Now, that’s the way it ought to be.

[Disclosure: Paul English at InterMute is an old friend of mine and a sometime business partner. I’ve been a beta for his upcoming spam product, SpamSubtract.]

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