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December 12, 2003
Here’s Britt’s pithy summary of Dick Morris’ interview with Chris Lydon:
He’s saying that the Dean campaign is Netscape and the Republicans are Microsoft. Done deal. Next question.
The rest of Britt’s analysis of Morris is well worth reading, too.
Tom Peters was in town to talk about his new book, Re-Imagine, that “walks the walk” when it comes to arguing that business ought to be in technicolor, not black and white.
I’ve been a fan of his since I first entered the business world with the academic’s prejudice that business must be boring and the people must be not as smart as the ones in academics. Hah! As I used to say, what academics believe about businesspeople is false about businesspeople but true of academics. Peters’ books, starting with In Search of Excellence, helped open my eyes to that, for he painted a vision of business that said human values work.
He’s always surprising. Last night, in response to a question, he expressed enthusiasm for self-help books. They’re all good he said. Surely, objected someone in the audience, many are a total waste of time. Not so, said Tom. If for the price of a book you can get a single idea, the book is worth it. His larger point was that these self-help people, with their peculiarly American call to re-invent ourselves, are the heirs of Emerson. (Take that!, Chris Lydon :)
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I’ve been notified that Joho has received The Blog Site‘s first Blog of the Month award. I assume that it’s a joke, a scam or a typo, but well, here’s the plaque:
December 11, 2003
Jeff Pulver writes that the FCC is on the verge of skipping those pesky public comments in its haste to regulate Voice over IP:
it is incredibly disappointing and dismaying to me that the federal government—or states, for that matter—would even consider applying traditional phone regulations to any type of Internet communications at this early stage. Instead, they should reaffirm the longstanding U.S. policy of keeping information and Internet services unregulated—especially as technologies mature and broader phone policies are reformed.
Kevin Werbach (thanks for the link!) writes in an email:
As I said at the FCC VOIP hearing last week, the real issue is the transformation from the Internet as a subset of telecom to telecom as a subset of the Internet. That means treating voice as an application that can run on any platform, not as the platform itself. The regulatory status of VOIP is just the tip of the iceberg.
I’ve blogged a review of Trollope’s The Warden at Blogcritics.org. Here’s the beginning:
Richard Rorty says that fiction is superceding philosophy as the place of moral discourse, and he’s glad of it because novels raise questions of what to do within a human context, guiding us not by principles but by our lived sympathy. Anthony Trollope’s “The Warden” could be the poster boy for Rorty’s position, for it not only develops its moral ideas within a context of love and strong personality, it even reflects on the inadequacy of principle as a guide to behavior.
It also tells a compelling story with Trollope’s usually wit and an eye for human foibles that stops just short of cynicism.
December 10, 2003
Tony Perkins at AlwaysOn is writing a book online about Google, soliciting ideas, information and comments from readers:
The goal is to finish the book in the next 60 days, speed-produce it, and get it to market before the Google IPO, to complement the company’s red herring prospectus.
Interesting project.
Kevin Marks suggests that the Church Turing Thesis — any computer can emulate any other — means we’ll be able to emulate our way around any DRM scheme. He points to the MAME emulators that let you run old games.
But — despite Church, Turing and the Darknet paper — will DRM, combined with digitalID and “trusted” computing, raise the bar so high that you’ll have to be a hacker to get around DRM even for Fair Use purposes? If so, then DRM will have forever altered the economics and ethos of the Internet, primarily (IMO) for the worse.
(Kevin also points to the wonderful Bayeux Tapestry Construction Kit.)
December 9, 2003
Miles over at the TinyApps blog points us to the Helloworld Project:
“Send in your message, and see how it is projected by a laserbeam onto a mountain overlooking Ipanema Beach in Rio de Janeiro, onto the UN building in New York City, onto the most prominent building in downtown Mumbai or onto a 140 metre tall water fountain in Geneva.”
David Akin of CTV and The Globe and Mail points out that if you search on “What is the worst blog in the world” (without the quotation marks), you get the weblog of the next prime minister of Canada. And he’s not even a miserable failure yet!
Salon is running transcripts of speeches by John Kerry and Howard Dean. And Joe Conason has what I think is the most plausible explanation of why Gore is endorsing Dean.
This just in: Dan Gillmor’s analysis seems totally on the mark to me.
And this in just after that one that was just in: Howard Kurz has a snarky roundup of what the media is making of Dean and the Gore enorsement.
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