Fascinating informal discussion at the Berkman Center this morning about the effect the next billion users will have on the Internet. What will it mean if and when standards are no longer driven by the US and Europe? Which devices will dominate? Whose routers? Will the new dominant hardware come with control hooks built in? (As noted in the discussion, CALEA and Intel‘s burned-in DRM capability show that it’s not only non-US/EU states that want to control and/or monitor communications.) Will GSM becomes the basis for non-mobile communication? Will government filtering of access become the unassailable norm?

By the way, Googling “China’s effect on the Internet” (with the quotes) turns up zero hits.

Rebecca has a scary post about the Chinese effort to control all blogs. She cites a report from Reporters without Borders:

Reporters Without Borders voiced alarm today at the Chinese government’s announced intention to close down all China-based websites and blogs that are not officially registered. The plan is all the more worrying as the government has also revealed that it has a new system for monitoring sites in real time and spotting those that fail to comply…

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A new report from eMarketer (reported by the Center for Media Research) says boomers are kicking 65-and-over butt when it comes to Net participation:

The full report will set you back $700, so let me boil it down for you: Out of our way, grandpa and grandma! Boomers rule! Booyah!

[Disclosure: I am 54 and a half and still have some of my own teeth.]

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I can’t believe I understood this correctly, but, here goes:

I have had a minimal AOL account for many years. Until wifi came around, I sometimes used it for dialing up when traveling. I haven’t used it for that for years now. But two of our kids have aol email accounts as their default, so I’ve kept it since it was just a few bucks a month.

This month, I got a bill for $68. The customer support person carefully explained to me that that was because I’ve been on AIM a lot this month. For every hour over my service plan, they charge me $2.50. But, she said, had I downloaded my AIM client from www.aim.com instead of www.aol.com, it would have been free.

So, let me get this straight. If all I use is AIM, I can pay AOL about $70/month or I can get it for free. Hmm, let me think…

Hey, kids, you’re about to get a great opportunity to make up new email addresses.

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InTrade, an online market where you get to put your money where your opinions are, reports that shares on MJ being found guilty have plummeted to their lowest point ever.

Meanwhile, shares in Zarqawi will be captured are up.

Anyone want to bid on shares in David will be fatuous? [Technorati tag: knowledge]

David Miller, my literary agent, passes along the first Nigerian-style “419“ spam scam I’ve seen that uses a dead American as the source of the supposed millions:

It is obvious that this proposal will come to you as a suprise. This is because we have not met before but I am inspired to send you this email by the huge fund transfer opportunity that will be of mutual benefit to the two of us.

However, I am Barrister Phillip Andrews,the personal attorney to the late Senator Paul lane Wellstone, a Citizen of the United states and he was into politics.

On the 25th of October 2002, my client,his wife and their three children were involved in a fatal Plane Crash near Eveleth-Virginia Municipal Airport.

Unfortunately they all lost their lives including other people in the Plane.Since then I have made several enquiries to several Embassies to locate any of my clients extended relatives, this has also proved unsuccessful.

After these several unsuccessful attempts, I decided to trace and locate any member of his family but of no avail, hence I contacted you.

I contacted you to assist in repartrating the money and property left behind by my client since I have no place to locate any of his relatives. I can easily convince his bank in the Europe with my legal practice that you are the only surviving relation of my client.Otherwise the Estate he left behind will be confiscated or declared unserviceable by the bank where this huge deposits were lodged.

Particularly, My late client had an account with one of the banks in Europe valued at about US$9.3Million…[etc.]

Paul Wellstone??? Well, we already knew these people have no shame.

By the way, the return address is to the .az (Ajerbijan) country code. [Technorati tag: spam]

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Jonathan Peterson points out the irony of Hillary Rosen chewing out Steve Jobs for the iPod’s DRM. He also really really doesn’t like the new Huffington blog in which Rosen’s piece appears. I actually do like the blog. I wouldn’t want all blogs to be like that, but since blogs will fill every available niche, I’m enough of a celebrity whore to want to read blogs by Ellen DeGeneres, Jon Cusack, Quincy Jones, etc. I would never point to it as an example of what blogging is about, but hearing celebs talk in their own voices is, arguably, a useful reminder that we all put on our blogs one leg at a time, so to speak. [Technorati tags: huffington drm]

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Scott Matthews’ Bitty has a very cool bit of code that lets you embed one page in another, sort of like an iframe (in fact, it uses iframes) , but with better formatting and browser controls. For example, here’s what Joho’s RSS feed looks like as a Bitty window:

And here is IT Conversations:

And here’s a chiclet that launches a separate Bitty window. In this case, it launches the entire page, not the RSS feed:

It’s free.

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From BradSucks:

[01:01] very very soon it would seem that preleaking an album will be like a band leaving the stage before their encore

[01:01] just totally expected, even though everyone can see it for what it is

All part of the way the Net is disintermediating time.

Ok, so that phrase means absolutely nothing. But it sounds damn good. In fact, the Net is making time more complex, smudging it, interlineating it, hyperlinking it, depriving it of its gatekeeping function.

Ok, that didn’t mean much. Here’s what’s actually happening, IMO: We have social conventions that let us act as if there are moments that strictly divide one state from another, especially when it comes to making things public: products, artworks, selves. But now the public revelation of a work happens as the work grows. And after it’s made public, many objects are fluid enough that they remain in process. Time is not as neatly divided as it used to be.

But “disintermediating time” sounds so much better!

Also from BradSucks:

Uncyclopedia on Air Guitar – the Uncyclopedia (it’s like Wikipedia, but all lies) article on air guitar is worth a read.

Also from BradSucks: New songs, including

Certain Death
Total Breakdown
Understood By Your Dad
You’re Not Going Anywhere
Dropping Out Of School

All free of course. Which is why you ought to buy them. [Technorati tags: bradsucks music time]

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danah blogs enthusiastically about her time in Austria being a judge for Prix Ars Electronica. Apparently, the discussion of what constitutes a community was vibrant and informed by a sense of the differences in the world. A snipppet:

We had a long conversation about what it means to think about two axes – the process of giving people access and the process of allowing people to make their voices heard. So much of what we considered sat in this narrative. We talked about technologies themselves vs. the communities that take the technologies to a newer, deeper level. We talked about work from around the world that fit into so many different cultural contexts with so many different languages.

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Thanks to work and prodding by Mitch Ratcliffe, Audible is now on the RSS bandwagon. You can subscribe to a feed of their bestsellers, NY Times Bestsellers, free audio, and lots more… [Technorati tags: audible rss MitchRatcliffe]

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