A collection of news clips and film clips. A reaction to the infamous swiftboat veterans for truth, and a pro-Kerry entry at the end of the American presidential election campaign. I dislike the inclusion of 9/11 - arguably some of the most over the top propagande of the election - but this TV-clip (Quicktime) from the floor of the House of Representatives is power rhetoric.

I think (one of) the next project(s) here will be a searchable database of lists of good advice. There are so many floating around the net, of very variable quality (I started writing this post through finding this decent one).

Lists are a sad genre really, as a form they are what you can do when you've given up constructing some real structure for your words. Everything is a list. Words come in an order after all. But in the age of LifeHacks and ubergeeks approaching their lives as engineering problems, lists are here to stay.

A good example of this approach to knowledge is ChangeThis, in itself a database of good advice. They've disguised the poverty of the term lists by calling their lists manifestos, but it's the same thing: The final redux of some idea for those too busy to embrace a unique choice of narrative structure for the idea. Lists are almost always crib notes.
On the other hand the many varied uses of lists are fascinating which is why we need a database of lists.

(p.s. to ChangeThis staff: It absolutely, positively sucks that all your material is only available as PDF's)

This is more funny than meaningful, but an astute political ad-watcher discovered mass re-produced pro-Bush star troopers in a TV ad. They simply copy-pasted images of a few soldiers a couple of times to generate a really big crowd. While the notion of exact clones of combat ready troops is disconcerting, it's hard to conceive of a political message in this, but of course in this campaign it get's done none the less as the story gets picked up by the general media. Score one more media point for weblogs.

Obviously Hunter S. Thompson supports Kerry:

Did you see Bush on TV, trying to debate? Jesus, he talked like a donkey with no brains at all. The tide turned early, in Coral Gables, when Bush went belly up less than halfway through his first bout with Kerry, who hammered poor George into jelly. It was pitiful. . . . I almost felt sorry for him, until I heard someone call him "Mister President," and then I felt ashamed.

Efter nogle år med tidlig 80er revival (skrigende farver, synth pop) - så er vi nu nået til en retur til slutningen af firserne. På hitlisterne kan man se det på den måde at Britney Spears nyeste single er Bobby Browns New Jack Swing kæmpehit "My Prerogative" og Korns nyeste single et usandsynligt cover af Cameos elektrofunk klassiker "Word Up". Det kan umuligt være et tilfælde.

Den menneskelige evne til at få sammenhæng ud af hvadsomhelst er en fantastisk gave og et uhyggeligt våben i de forkerte hænder.

Came across this lengthy and partially excellent list of songs that make you cry.

Interestingly, the emotions music brings to you are best described by the physical reaction you get, e.g. crying, goosebumps, and that strange energized, unsettled state that is best simply called "funky". Music is a very immediate, physical thing. In contrast, "states of mind" seem better adapted to describe the consequences in storytelling (including our personal story) - e.g. somebody dies, it makes you sad. This is a very different type of description of emotion, much less physical.

The spam wars got personal here at classy.dk today For the first time since I reopend comments 5 days ago a comment spammer took the time to sit down at his computer, handcraft a piece of spam, enter my anti-spam checkcipher and hit POST. What a sorry life to lead. Fortunately I audit comments also, so the only person the spammer was able to spam was me personally.
I'm surprised it took only five days. I was expecting, by past experience, almost all comment spam to be automated.

Ingen kan fortælle dig om det du laver er godt, meningsfuldt eller umagen værd. Jo mere uimodståelig din vej er, des ensommere er den.

Den idé, der er kærlighed ved første blik, når den møder Zeitgeist.

Den idé, der skaffer dem invitationer til alle de rigtige selskaber, metaforisk eller ej.

Så naturligvis spørger du dig selv, hvis og hvornår du endelig kommer på Den Store Idé, efter årevis af slid, slæb og tvivl, hvordan ved du så, at det er "Den Rigtige"?

Svaret er: Det gør du ikke.

Du blusser ikke op i strålende eksistentiel triumf.

Det er ikke det, der sker.

Det eneste du får er, denne her kværulerende stemme inde i dig, der lyder som om den siger "Det her er dumt. Det her er helt ekstremt tåbeligt. Det her er et totalt tidsspilde. Jeg gør det alligevel."

Og du gør det alligevel.

Andenrangs-idéer er mere til strålende blus. Det holder dem i live længere.

(råd nr. 5 fra Om At Være Kreativ)

Boston Red Sox er ikke længere forbandede.
Følgere af amerikansk baseballhistorie vil vide at få ting er sikrere end at Boston Red Sox ikke vinder The World Series. Red Sox' elendige sejsstatistik er legendarisk, berømt fordi Red Sox før den lange tørke havde verdenshistoriens mest berømte spiller Babe Ruth på holdet. Salget af ham har forfulgt dem lige siden - under navnet The Curse of The Bambino (altså Babe).
Amerikansk kultur blander som ingen anden sport, massekultur og finkultur i en stor pærevælling, og mytologien omkring baseball har intet sidestykke i nogen anden sport (i vesten - jeg tør faktisk ikke svare for Japan og Kina), og i den mytologi har denneher forbandelse ikke noget sidestykke. At Red Sox ikke kan vinde er sådan et fact som folk har elsket i årevis, men nu er det altså ikke rigtigt mere.

I'm getting ahead of myself in at least one respect and possibly in more than one, but it seems as if gapingvoid in fact just quit his day job.

Hvis din plan er at du pludselig bliver "opdaget" af en stor kanon, så vil den nok gå i vasken. Ingen opdager noget pludseligt. Alt bliver til langsomt og pinefuldt.

Ringede til forlaget. Bad om uddybninger af nogle af punkterne i kontrakten. Hørte aldrig fra dem igen. Aftalen døde.

Det var et velanset forlag. Du har måske endda hørt om det.

De gik ud fra, at jeg måtte være ligesom alle de andre i deres stald - sultne og desperate, og villige til at skriver under på hvad som helst.

De ville eje mig, uanset hvor godt de lavede deres arbejde.

Sådan er det med nogle af de store forlag. De kræver 110% fra dig, men tilbyder det ikke selv. For dem er kunstneren bare endnu en nudel i en stor skål pasta.

Det de gør er egentlig bare at kaste pastaen op på væggen og se hvad af den, der bliver hængende. Dem der falder ned, bliver glemt.

Forlæggere er bare et mellemled. Ikke andet. Hvis kunstnere huskede det noget oftere, ville de spare sig selv for en masse ærgrelser.

Og ja, jeg kan godt forestille mig gapingvoid som "produkt" en dag. Bøger, t-shirts og hvad ved jeg. Jeg tror der er mange penge i det, hvis det bliver gjort rigtigt. Men jeg er ikke bange for at gå min vej, hvis jeg synes personen med tilbudet er fuld af varm luft. Jeg har allerede en god stemning omkring mig, osv - for slet ikke at nævne en anden karriere - der går ret godt, tak.

Jeg tror idéen om "gapingvoid som en række produkter" er ret uundgåelig med tiden. Hold øje.

(råd nr. 4 fra Om At Være Kreativ)

Neal Stephenson gets asked 11 questions by slashdot readers and answers - at very, very great length. Stephensons books have been growing for years. The "short" teaser essay "In the beginning was the command line", that warmed up to Cryptonomicon runs to 36000 words (that's something like 60 dense pages). Cryptonomicon itself was huge, and most recently The Baroque Cycle has grown to a 3 volume doorstopper. Stephenson simply likes to talk. He's good at it, and not necessarily chatty - he just likes to pilo on the details.

No wonder then that the answers to the Slashdot questions also run on and on.

The bulk of the material is actually an answer to one question on the esteem and livelihood of writers.IT illustrates perfectly the quality, and at the same time the problem with Stephensons writing. He simply can't begin to answer the question without a history of writing since before the printing press, establishing a nomenclature of independence and esteem, a telling personal anecdote from a book convention (actually two) and a discussion on the merits of literary criticism. This is the concept of the interview as far removed from the spoken word as you can possibly get.
It is fascinating to read, but one can't help but wonder if there isn't a shorter answer hidden in there that captures almost perfectly what Stephenson wrote pages to explain.

Excellent point by Seth Godin on why blogs aren't just something people with "old media access" should do:

Here's the problem. Blogs work when they are based on:
Candor
Urgency
Timeliness
Pithiness and
Controversy

(maybe Utility if you want six).

Does this sound like a CEO to you?

Short and sweet, folks: If you can't be at least four of the five things listed above, please don't bother.

Holger har startet en ny lovende kategori af posts på sin weblog. Det handler om de politiske partiers designprogrammer. Første post her - om det konservative redesign af de konservative. Den bedste del af indlægget er slet ikke om grafisk design, men om mission statements, og navnlig Konservatives (det hedder ikke De konservative, eller Det konservative fokeparti mere) nye tagline:

"Mod til at skabe sammenhæng". Her må tekstsnedkerne hos Kunde og co da have arbejdet på meget stærk kaffe i lang tid. Man ser det for sig: Der er tre core values: Mod, arbejde og sammenhæng - de kan samles i sætningen: Mod til at skabe sammenhæng. Ikke særlig mundret og helt umuligt at huske. Så tæt på at være meningsløst, man kan komme uden at gå over til at tale sort:

Konservative: Efterkrav gelejder hydrograf

eller det mere mundrette

Konservative: Indpak emblem og cockerspaniel

God tackling, brormand.

Apropos vattede formuleringer af målsætninger, så synes Guy Kawasaki at man skal droppe mission statements. Der er ikke nogen der kan huske dem alligevel. I The Art of The Start foreslår han at man sparer en masse tid og holder sig til Dilbert's mission statement generator

What's with the Bloggers Making Money meme (Starting I think with a Making Money session at Bloggercon. Also JoHo, Battelle)? I am reminded of gapingvoids Sex & Cash Theory. Almost all the bloggers have dayjobs (the cash). So blogging for them is supposed to be the fun extra curricular stuff (the sex). What's with the sudden interest in getting paid for sex?
There are exceptions to the rule (Denton, Calacanis), but the discussion seems forced to me. It's not media types discussing a new publishing model so much as it is people introduced to publishing via blogging who are thinking "Whoa - I've got eyeballs. Quickly, I have to monetize them". It's a bubble instinct, and it's wrong. Not every personal activity needs a businessplan.

Alt der er værd at gøre tager en evighed. 90% af det der adskiller succesrige mennesker fra fiaskoer er tid, indsats og udholdenhed.

Standardsvar: Kun hvis de kan tegne flere end mig, bedre end mig.

Det der giver kortene et forspring er simpelthen at jeg har brugt år på at tegne dem. Jeg har tegnet i tusindvis. Titusindvis af mandtimer.

Så hvis nogen vil stjæle ideen fra mig så værs'go'. Hvis nogen vil prøve at overhale mig i visitkortkrusedullekrigen, så prøv bare. Du har mange lange år foran dig. Og modsat mig, så gør du det ikke for fornøjelsens skyld. Du gør det af en eller anden selvhadsk, ugennemtænkt, lam, grisk grund. Så årene vil virke endnu længere, og vil være meget mere smertefulde. Heldige asen.

Hvis nogen i din branche er mere succesrig end dig, så er det sikkert fordi han arbejder hårdere end du gør. Måske er han mere talentfuld end dig, skrappere til at networke, men det opfatter jeg ikke som en undskyldning. Over tid betyder den fordel mindre og mindre. Hvilket er grunden til at verden er fuld af talentfulde, networkende fejlslagne middelmådigheder.

Så jo, succes betyder at du har en masse arbejde foran dig, ligemeget hvad. Hvordan styrer du bedst det?

Som jeg har skrevet andetsteds: Behold dit job. Jeg beholdt mit. Jeg arbejder hver dag på kontoret, ligesom enhver anden kontorrotte. Jeg har en lang togtur til arbejdet. Altså er det der jeg får lavet de fleste af mine tegninger. Da jeg var yngre tegnede jeg mest ved en bardisk, men det blev jeg træt af.

Pointen er at jeg kan overkomme:en time eller to på toget. Det at jeg har arbejde samtidig gør at jeg ikke føler noget pres til at lave noget jeg kan sælge. Istedet får jeg lov til at gøre hvad fanden jeg har lyst til. Jeg gør det for min egen skyld. Og jeg synes det gør arbejdet stærkere i det lange løb. Det gør det også nemmere at arbejde på en afslappet måde, hver dag, uden at gå amok i sindssyge kreative udladninger påtvunget af pengeproblemer.

Mit job, som jeg virkelig holder af, giver mig noget produktivt og interessant at lave sammen med ligesindede voksne. Det får mig ud af huset i dagtimerne. Hvis jeg levede af at tegne, ville jeg være bundet til tegnebordet hjemme hele dagen, og tegne en tilværelse frem af kruseduller i stilhed, kun afbrudt af hyppige besøg på cafeen. Nej tak.

Sagt ligeud: Min måde tillader mig at holde ud i det lange stræk, og det er vigtigt.

Udholdend er afgørende. Og udholdenhed er kun muligt hvis man passer på. Folk tror alt de skal er at holde til én sindsyg, intens, job-fri, kreativ udladning og så vil deres drømme gå i opfyldelse. De tager fejl. De tager meget fejl.

At være dygtig er som kunstskøjteløb. Definition på at være dygtig er at man får det til at se let ud. Men det er aldrig let. Aldrig. Det er det vildførte mennesker bekvemt glemmer.

Hvis jeg skulle til at gå igang med f.eks. en roman eller et filmmanuskript, eller måske starte et nyt softwarefirma, så ville jeg ikke sige mit job op for at lave denneher store heroiske mission ud af det.

Jeg ville gøre noget meget enklere: Finde den ekstra time eller to hver dag som tilhører mig og ingen anden, og jeg ville sørge for den var produktiv. Læg timerne i det, gør det længe nok og så vil magiske livsforandrende ting ske til sidst. OK, det betyder mindre tid til TV, websurfing, gåen i byen og hvad ved jeg.

Men er det ikke ligemeget?

(råd nr. 3 fra Om At Være Kreativ))

Yes. This is me. I am a Slacker@Work. What that means is that I'm not motivated by what's good for the company I work for, I'm motivated by what interests me. When that works out to mutual advantage (for self and company) it leads to lots of stuff getting done with good speed and good quality, simply because I wouldn't have it any other way. But I'll be the first to admit that it doesn't always work. On balance it's a good deal for the company if they remember the most important thing: Slackers are best at doing what is important to them. Use that power and you'll get a lot of mileage from your slackers.
The ChangeThis slacker manifesto lists plenty of good on-the-job tips, and I can honestly say I have used all of them (except the sucking up. I went for "be nice all around instead).

• I've sent tons of off hour email (at 4AM, before showing up at the office at 9)
  
• I might as well admit I have had questionable sickdays (I don't have that many - I'm a bargain in terms of sick days, so what if some of those were stress relief and not the flu)
  
• I've kept strange work hours:
  
  (this shows my source code commit stats - the only hour I have not registered commits (i.e. work) in is 20-21)
  
• I use keyboard shortcuts religiously (I have custom apps to add more shortcut actions)
  
• I also use the keyboard shortcut that switches between work and weblogging
  
• I procrastinate with the best of them (is October 24. a few days after August 4 I ask you?)
  
• I make lists (obviously)
  

Excellent: Creative Commons has defined licenses specifically for sampling of music, legalizing mash-ups. Name brand artists are currently promoting the license on a Wired sponsored CD

OK, det med udvalget passer ikke ubetinget, men altså....
På e-butikken Øltorvet kan man købe udenlandsk specialøl i ordninger a la mad hos Aarstiderne. MEN det er sørme dyrt, og når nu det er øl så er der jo, som Andy Warhol sagde om Cola, ingen forskel på varen uanset hvordan man køber den. Øltorvet kan ikke levere mig en bedre Leffe. For nylig tog jeg mig det besvær at tælle efter nede i min lokale ISO: De havde over 50 forskellige slags udenlandsk øl, uden at være en specialbutik. Så Øltorvets udvalg på 200 slags øl lyder af mere end det er, og kigger man på hvad de kommer i kasserne, f.eks. den belgiske så er der ganske rigtigt ingen øl i den jeg ikke kan få i enten min lokale Prima, ISO eller Irma. Til gengæld er prisen højere hos Øltorvet end i supermarkedet.
Levering om et par dage. Dyrere priser. Samme udvalg. Det hænger jo ikke rigtig sammen. Hvis jeg boede i en lille provinsby hvor man ikke kunne få alle de her øl, så måske - men med bopæl i København er Øltorvet meningsløst.

Det er ikke det samme.

Og vi bruger endnu mere tid på uden held at forsøge at hamle op med dem. Vi prøver selv at starte egne selskaber, lave egne produkter, egne film, egne bøger eller hvadsomhelst.

Jeg er lige så skyldig i det som hvem som helst ellers. Jeg har prøvet masser af ting gennem årene i et desperat forsøg på at vriste min karriere ud af middelmådighedens gab. Forretninger, kunstprojekter og andre ting.

En aften, efter endnu en mislykket begyndelse giv jeg simpelthen op. Siddende ved en bar, udbrændt af arbejde og af livet i al almindelighed, gav jeg mig til at tegne bag på nogen visitkort uden noget særligt mål. Jeg havde ikke brug for noget mål. Jeg gjorde det bare fordi de var der. Fordi det morede mig på en eller anden ubestemt måde.

Selvfølgelig var det dumt. Selvfølgelig var det usælgeligt. Selvfølgelig ville det aldrig blive til noget. Selvfølgelig var det komplet spild af tid. Men, når man ser tilbage på det, så var det det der gav kraft til ideen. Det var det stik modsatte af alle de Store Planer mine venner og jeg var vant til at lave. Det var så frigørende ikke at skulle tænke på alt det til en forandring.

Det var befriende at gøre noget der ikke skulle gøre indtryk på nogen til en forandring.

Det var befriende at have noget der tilhørte mig og mig alene til en forandring.

Det var befriende at føle fuldstændig suverænitet til en forandring. At føle fuldstændig frihed til en forandring.

Og naturligvs var det først på det tidspunkt verden udenfor begyndte at få øjnene op.

Den suverænitet du har over dit arbejde vil inspirere langt flere mennesker end arbejdet selv. Den måde din selvbestemmelse inspirerer andre til selv at bestemme på, til at finde deres egen frihed og egne muligheder, vil forandre verden langt mere end dit arbejdes objektive kvaliteter vil.

Din ide behøver ikke være stor. Den skal bare være din alene. Jo mere din ide er din alene, jo mere frihed har du til at gøre noget fantastisk.

Jo mere fantastisk, jo flere mennesker vil forstå din ide. Jo flere mennesker der forstår, jo mere vil den forandre verden.

Det er det jeg lærte af at tegne kruseduller på visitkort.

(råd nr. 2 fra Om At Være Kreativ)

Another of the Pop!Tech talks at the amazing ITConversations website is Thomas Barnett's presentation on American security policy in a globalized world. The most interesting thing about this presentation is that you can hear the no nonsense tough talk delivery one assumes is required in a military environment.
For his actual message on new international strategies go to his website.

Fascinating talk by Malcom Gladwell from this years Pop!Tech on the difficulty people have in explaining their preferences, and in forming opinions of new things. Gladwell points his message in a slightly diffferent direction, but to me the communications angle is the key thing.
New stuff is always mainly about imagination. Even when you have it in front of you, before you begin to get an informal feel for what it does through using it, you rely on your imagination, and this might just be something I think - but i do think that our imagination is tied up in language. And it is not a natural ability to be able to express "new stuff", it takes skill and training.
Even with my limited experience in designing new stuff for direct use, the inability people have in verbalizing what they do, and consequently in imagining how it could be different, is the most basic thing you have to adjust to.

Så nåede jeg endelig frem til den lovede oversættelse af Gapingvoids How to be creative.. Oversættelse vil udkomme som individuelle posts fra nu og hen igennem November. Første råd får du lige nedenfor.

Jo mere original din ide er, jo færre gode råd vil andre kunne give dig om den. Da jeg begyndte med vittighedstegninger-bag-på-visitkort, troede andre jeg var vanvittig. Hvorfor prøvede jeg ikke med noget der var nemmere at afsætte - nuttede postkort eller hvad ved jeg?

At spørge gode venner om råd virker heller aldrig så godt som du håber. Det er ikke fordi de bevidst nægter at hjælpe. De kender bare ikke dit arbejde en milliontedel så godt som du selv gør, lige meget hvor hårdt de prøver, lige meget hvor hårdt du prøver at forklare dem det.

Og en stor ide vil forandre dig. Dine venner elsker dig sikkert, men de vil ikke have du forandrer dig. Hvis du forandrer dig, så ændrer du også dit forhold til dem. De kan lide dig som du er - det er derfor de elsker dig. Sådan som du er, ikke sådan som du måske kunne blive.

Altså: De har ingen grund til at ville se dig forandret. Og de vil sætte sig imod hvad der katalyserer forandring. Sådan er mennesker. Og du ville gøre det samme hvis situationen var omvendt.

Med kolleger er det endnu værre. De er vant til at samarbejde med dig på en bestemt måde. De er vant til en bestemt grad af kontrol i samarbejdet. Og de ønsker sig det der gør dem rigere. De foretrækker måske at du OGSÅ bliver rigere, men det er ikke deres topprioritet.

Hvis din ide er så god at den forandrer dig nok til at du har mindre brug for dem, eller - gud forbyde - at MARKEDET har mindre brug for dem, så vil de modarbejde dig ved enhver given lejlighed.

Sådan er mennesker.

GODE IDEER FORANDRER MAGTBALANCEN I ET FORHOLD MELLEM MENNESKER. DERFOR BLIVER GODE IDEER ALTID MODARBEJDET I FØRSTE OMGANG.

Med gode ideer følger en tung byrde. Det er derfor der er så få mennesker der har dem. Kun få mennesker kan klare det.

(råd nr. 1 fra Om At Være Kreativ)

When you live in a country with proportional representation elections you find the representational system a bit quaint, considering the Gore/Bush election probably unjust, but not least entertaining. And in fact the entertainment value, one thinks, ends up being one of the attractions of the system (another it the immediacy, and the direct consequence of local votes which should help foster personal responsibility).
Take this post on the Daily Kos. It is a careful pro-Kerry listing of what the election looks like in terms of electoral votes. It has as many numbers as the baseball stats. It is interesting in how many ways the american media turns the election campaign into numbers and 'plays'. The Electoral vote counting. The incessant polling. The focus on the fund drives. The notion of 'plays', football style, comes up in this treatment on the campaigns:

President George W. Bush rolled out a new stump speech this morning featuring tough criticism of Sen. John Kerry's leadership, as the stopwatch ticks down in the presidential race

So after having shut down comments a good while ago (not exactly a 'couple of days' as I originally intended), I have now introduced two anti-spam systems and opened my comment system again. The two systems: Manual auditing and the world's simplest anti-robot turing test.

My first idea was to do comment auditing. All comments would enter the greylist and I would only publish comments after accepting them. I figured that would take care of comment spam mostly. Previously I had only been subject to a few targeted spam attacks, easily identifiable since the spam messages arrive in bulk when they do. I thought I could easily handle the email notification flood of these attacks.
While that is probably true, I was surprised to find that approximately 20 minutes after I reopened the comment system I had receieved the first 5-10 pieces of spam. They didn't make it to the weblog of course, but it was still a notification hit to my email and attention system.
I figured that there was no reason to assume that this was some magic coincidence, but rather that I could expect spam like that for as long as I got notifications.
This led to a new front in the spam defense further from myself. I did what many people suggest you do: Make sure your comment system does not have the standard moveable type signature. Some people change the name of the comment script, but the new name can still be crawled automatically. I introduced instead the world's simplest captcha: A new required field in my comment form where you have to enter a specified numerical value manually.
It works like a charm. My blog pages are still static html. It is not important that the secret manual sauce is random and noncomputable - it just has to be something they haven't already encountered on a 1000 different weblogs. The auditing scheme I also have in place means there is no incentive to actually implement automated circumvention of my scheme. The spam comments won't make it onto the weblog anyway.
Obviously I have the luxury of being able to audit my comments manually, since volume is low. If that weren't the case I would have to go for a full blown non-machinable comment entry system.

I think it is absolutely true that a corporation is better of with comments-open weblogs running. Conversation is always good, and the naysayers who say that you never know what negative stuff will get said or what loons will abuse the comment system clearly haven't been paying attention to the worldwide mass experiment in voluntary collaboration that is building e.g. Wikipedia.
But I still have doubts about the consequences for the corporate bloggers of actually blogging for their corporation. To keep it short, I believe that people's distrust of corporation will rub off in a distrust of the corporate blogger. I know it's my personal instinct to think so. People accept roles in corporations and do things they wouldn't do if they weren't there. That's all fine and dandy when I am able to recognize that they're in that role. I think corporate blogging blurs that.
I think I'm also repeating myself. You might want to follow the discussion attached to this post.

Such was the amazing award-winning title of a paper presented at the 2003 convention of the Modern Language Association. Like the award comittee I have no idea what title really means, but this is a very funky accumulation of names and concepts.
It reminds me of my own lifetime paper-title favourite: "Rudolf Rocker - A german anarchist missionary to the emigrant jews of London"
Is absurd accumulation of paper "plot points" simply required in the humanities?

Blogging in English from Europe is a sometimes disorienting experience, in particular if you occasioanlly blog about technology, technology policy or global issues like the war in Iraq.
What's disorienting about it is that you find yourself having difficulty distinguishing properly between issues that are, at least initially, purely of American interest and issues that have broader interest. This is an obvious consequence of a discussion that has such an American bias: Most of the world's tech-bloggers are American and when they don't distinguish between issues that are local to their situation and issues that are of concern to them as well, because they are of global concern, then why should you?
At a deeper level of course it is also difficult, because issues that are important in an American context tend to end up having a European importance as well. The EU tries to match even the horrible aspects of American copyright law. The War on Terror is global, as are the remedies used to address - if for no other reason then because of American pressure. IT is largely an American culture.
But still: I find myself writing posts about the proper calculation of losses from file sharing bases on American not Danish or European statistics. I write about the Presidential elections as if I could vote - because it is really important for us as well who wins.
I can't really figure out if I'm doing something reasonable, something strange or in fact something imprudent. I can easily understand if people are annoyed by it. But conversely, many American run websites do actively embrace this dual role of being all-american and international at the same time. When you surf around the web, you come upon the occasional comment (usually from right wing traditionalists) that assumes that the Internet, in particular the large focal media portal sites, like amazon.com for books or IMDB for film are American sites and foreigners had better behave themselves when they're visiting out of town. But imdb.com lists lots of films produced in Denmark that have never been shown in America cinemas.
I am glad not to be the only one who is confused.

This lack of proportion in the Cornyn-Feinstein anti-piracy bill - and the fact that it still was passed through the Senate - boggles the mind. Five years in prison for filming in a movie theater? This is a copyright war nuclear weapon that just got fired. But of course it was already fired months ago, only in California. While not quite as bad as the proposals to make it legal for record and movie companies to hack back vigilante style, it's pretty bad as it is.
Meanwhile were still waiting for reasonable computations of "losses" in the file sharing lawsuits.

[Sidenote: How apt that NATO was in favour of this nuclear strike]

[Sidenote II: Among other things, the law is making this artists work illegal. Demonstrating that there are fair uses of the kind of action this is outlawing. A clear indication something is wrong]

You only need to have a casual acquaintance with baseball mythology to realize exactly how historic an event it was that the Red Sox beat the Yankees 4-3, up from 0-3, this week.
If you like American culture, in particular American writing, you simply need to know a little bit about baseball, which is quite a chore. It's one thing to understand the enormous amounts of baseball derived idiom - but then you start reading Philip Roth and get to The Great American Novel and have to dig deeper.
The problem with that is that baseball is, as is well known by most every European, one of the most boring sports ever to get wildly popular. Games take forever and nothing really happens during the games. When I studied for half a year in Canada, I had to go to Toronto to see the Blue Jays play. This was back when they were champions in the early 90's, but as far as I recall they were reigning champions going into the great strike, and this was after the strike a good while since the last World Series, so their finest hour was a while back, and in fact in the game I went to in Toronto they sucked and lost big.

Amen to this post on intertwingly. Sam Ruby notes that while the SOAP based web services specifications allow for all kinds of things, they don't allow for not doing all these things but keeping it simple instead. They really should. The desire to build something that lasts is a good one, but simple things have to always stay simple.
The standards stack around email is a good example both of why one tries to build something extensible (if you use every tweak of the standard you're sending around some very contorted messages with every possible type of encoding and character escape you can think of) and an example of how to build something that's extensible, but where the extensions don't hurt the simple implementations. If you don't use all kinds of fancy features of email the standards are really, really simple.

Amazon, the flexible e-commerce giant has specific offerings both for web site owners and for software developers. The choices are staggering.

We interrupt this broadcast to repeat the message that Software patents are evil.

While I am not an expert on the matter I hold the following basic facts on patents to be true:

Proponents of patents would have you think that patents are a natural extension of property law, and by analogy a natural extension of common rights we have under traditional Western ideas of law, but that is not the case. Quite the opposite is true.

The history of Western power is the history of the free exchange of ideas
Patents run counter to that idea

Patents introduce artificial scarcity. Artificial scarcity is good for the few who can exploit it to their advantage, but bad for society. Unfortunately, there's a lot of money in running a scarcity racket, so there's a lot of pressure to introduce more schemes.

There are legitimate uses for patents, but software isn't one. Patents were never meant to introduce the notion of property, but to protect innovators from free riders. This makes sense in industries that have a skewed distribution of cost, so that almost all the costs in innovation are accrued before any profits are made.
The opposite is true for software
In general, the cost of innovation is low compared to the cost of exploiting the innovation commercially. If this wasn't true you simply would not have many upstarts. New pharmaceutical companies don't ship product while having less than 10 employees. New software companies do that all the time.

What allows free riders in innovation to operate is a situation where the cost of 'second invention' is marginal compared to the cost of 'first invention'. This is true for the pharmaceutical business, where most of the cost accrues in proving that the innovation works at all, and only the first innovator has to do that.
Software re-innovation is expensive
This is so because of the observation above, that the cost lies in the commercial exploitation, not producing the actual patentable innovation. A reinnovator still has the exploitation cost.
Copying software innovations is simply not something that happens a lot. Instead the common scenario is the one described in the landmark book The Innovator's Dilemma. New, small, agile companies introduce new products often significantly simpler than the dominant product in a category, but cheaper - catering to new market segments that the dominant player is incapable of feeding. Only gradually do these new companies evolve to the same quality as that of the market leading offering.
Patents kill this dynamic where technology, through reinnovation by new players, finds new applications in new markets. This dynamic is not a problem, it is a good thing. Without it, we wouldn't have PC's running Windows but would still have an 80% IBM market share and would still be working on mainframes.

It takes one look at the market for operating systems to see the chilling effects the speed of the legal system could have in stifling the natural speed of the software evolution process (and the SCO case is not even about patents).
There is another skewed economy at work in patents: The cost of applying for a patent and the chance of getting it, even if the claim is later found to be frivolous, is significantly lower than the cost of challenging a patent. That introduces an incentive to mass-patent broad ideas. As more and more people do so, the patent process becomes increasingly poor, incapable of handling the increased accumulated complexity of the claims made.
Patents are slow, software is fast.
If you slow the software process by running it through the legal process, you're not only introducing a capital cost manageable for the few, you're also dropping the software innovation cycle from it's current speed to something several times slower than that.

Is I say, I'm not a legal expert in any way, but I think the evidence for these basic claims are visible in plain sight all over the place. I plan to expand on them, and document them more tightly in the near future.

Look here for ways to say no.

It's just a hope, I'm not sure it's right but gapingvoid is moving along with his wholesale cluetrain adoption and now says that branding is dead. I hope so. There are some specific people in the danish media landscape thriving on glib branding ideas, who I'd really like to see the shit kicked out of. I think, that if it's true it's because merit can be bought, and passion can't. Do not mistake a purchased "brand" identity and your true grown, organic personality. The advertising agencies don't have a take on the organic, internalized bit and it's all that really matters.
Even a company as good at surfaces and marketing as Apple is first and foremost good at building products. The iPod is not just the best looking player, its also the best player. OS X is true innovation.

Personally I don't really care a lot about advertising at all (I hate most of it), but this idea that there's a difference between looking good and being good is important all over the place.

The political material in the movie of Che Guevara's motercycle diaries feels grafted on - a clumsy afterthought, mostly. But that doesn't detract from a charming road movie with brilliant scenery from Argentina all the way up to Peru. For the first hour or so the film is a comedy, mostly, about two adventurous young men, but then somewhere in the atacama desert they run into the poverty of the indian population and the preaching begins. Fortunately, the sermonizing does not last long and the films final sequence at a peruvian leper colonoy works quite well.
An interesting aspect of the film is that Che Guevara's companion, Alberto Granada, is still alive and took part in the making of the movie.
Unanswered question: Granada is played by Rodrigo de la Serna. Che Guevara's real name is Ernesto Rafael Guevara de la Serna. Are these two men related, or is 'de la Serna' an Argentinian equivalent of 'Smith'?

You might remember the science fiction magazine Strange Horizons' guidelines on cliche ideas that are not interesting to submit as new stories. As a follow up, here's another compendium of overused science fiction cliches.
This list is particularly nice. It gives us some facts on each cliche answering questions like "Did it also appear in Star Trek?", "Is it overtly racist?". It rates cliches on one of five levels of acceptability (e.g. still usable when done right, not so bad the first time around but now...). In addition to plotpoints it also lists classics in bad visual storytelling - one of the more memorable cliches is "Only bad guys have goatees". And yes, that too did happen in Star Trek.

(via Just's linkpool)

As reported in Wired, the device TV-B-Gone (copy of website here) is like an anti-TV handgrenade. When activated, the device will send a minutes worth of different shut down signales to televisions in the vicinity. It knows most every major make of television.
The Wired piece recounts the story of a succesful field test at a local Best Buy, where all the televisons in the store turned off one after another after one click on the device.
This reminds of that geek fantasy, the cell-phone jammer, but obviously this device is much less harmful. After all you can't call the emergency line on your television.

Gapingvoid's How to be creative has been turned into a PDF. That's a good idea. What's not so good is that it is a PDF that maximises that formats ability to suck. It's not a book-like version (something we would like to have by the way) but rather a full-screen-by-default thing with page transitions. In other words, it's slick. In my opinion, that's just what gapingvoid's drawings doesn't need and just what the message of How to Be Creative doesn't need. Isn't "Slick ain't so important" almost part of the message?

The Danish translation I'm working on is just about to be ready by the way. Stay tuned.

[UPDATE: In email Mr Gapingvoid himself makes the reasonable comment that the PDF is just abiding by the ChangeThis house style. I guess that's a fair reason for the style even if I still think my comments are valid, and still dislike formats that take control of my desktop instead of leaving the control to me.]

One of few dissatisfactory features when shopping on Amazon.com is what happens in the period after you make your order and before the order ships.
I often find myself buying books that "usually ships in 8-9 days" as it says on the website. Most of the time this involves buying from amazon.co.uk books that were really published in the US market (ie they have a same day delivery status on Amazon.com), so they have to be moved to England first which takes time.
Once you've submitted such an order you rarely get any information on the progress of those 8-9 days until the day the books ship.
There's an "expected shipping date", but right up until the actual shipping date that often seems to just be the current date + the known average delivery time (so for today it's October 27th for books shipping in 8-9 days)
What would be nice is some more structure to this information, so you could tell what kind of progress had been made in the flow that usually takes 8-9 days, and progress for each book in the order preferably.
This is especially interesting, since in my experience the variance on this 8-9 number is quite high - much higher than the variance in delivery time once the book is shipped and the postal service is in charge (even if that takes 3 days).
The variance in itself would be an interesting number to know btw. I wonder if the "8-9" is supposed to account for that or simply to represent an average of 8.5.

If you want to take my advice, and combine Google Desktop and Slogger then there are some good features and some bad features to consider.

First the good: Google uses file modified timestamps to order results. That works well with Slogger, since the time you browsed by is the time the slogger cache is modified. You still don't get the original URL of the site. You can modify sloggers behaviour to include the URL in the filename, but that gives funky filenames that may not be legal on your system.

Now the bad: Slogger caches everything and Google caches everything, so there's a bad interaction with the Slogger cache and the Google cache taking up tons of space. Also, if you just use the defaults, each lookup via Google in your slogger cache gets logged by Slogger! So each time you click the search history button, the number of hits grows by one. You need to disable the Google desktop search specifically (and probably google.com as well) from Slogger caching. Simply add 127.0.0.1 and www.google.com to your Slogger block filter (part of the Slogger settings accessible from the extensions menu in Firefox).

Undecided: Google Desktop assumes an extension of .html means that the file in question belongs to your "web history". That means that the Slogger files get listed as web history, but it also means that all kinds of Javadoc does I would guess. I don't know if that's annoying or not.

Or so it would seem. I absolutely hate new windows. I use tabbed browsing aggresively. When Firefox 0.9 came out, the Mozillans had changed the standard behaviour from allowing me to control what tab new URL's were accessed from, to automatically opening a new window. Fortunately the Single Window plugin fixed that (almost). Now they've changed the behaviour again and broken the Single Window plugin. I really, really hate that - to the point of switching browsers.

So it was time to freshen up the look of these kitchen notes. My thanks to helpers (who shall remain nameless for fear that they would somehow be considered responsible for any decisions I've made) who provided among other things the nice red logo above.

Inspireret af Jesus - Always With You har jeg lavet et lille "Find Jesus" spil. Hvor tror du Jesus er?

Brilliant idea, The Computer Can Heal, a piece by Ivan Pope, involves a pulled apart but still functioning computer observing itself and broadcasting images of its own interior to the web.

Hvis ikke det er at ofre sig selv for sin sag: Scott Ginsberg har gået med et navneskilt altid, hver dag, hele dagen, i de sidste 1445 dage (det er næsten 5 år)
Desværre er det ikke et kunstprojekt, men en hard core personlig salgsgimmick for Scott Ginsberg, motivational speaker.
(Via Seth Godin, som var via bowblog, der også havde A4 historien.)

Man vidste jo at siden var derude et sted, men derfor er det alligevel skønt at finde den, websiden hvor en fyr går amok og giver dig alle detaljer om A* formatet i en lang tekst. Timevis af underholdning venter.

Og som om det ikke var nok, så er der såmænd også denne her side, hvor en anden fyr har påtaget sig at genfinde dyrets tal, 666, i A4 formatet. Man er i tvivl om han selv tager sin teori alvorligt.

This is just Sad news. A mindnumbingly simple political quiz was given to a lot of people and viewers of Jon Stewart's Daily Show news satire came out on top.
Good job for Stewart - although you would obviously have to be interested in these things to even consider watching his show, which gives some bias.
I think it's more sad that people on average scored only less than 50% correct on a really simple test (If you can figure out who favours tax cuts, who favours gun control, and who favours labor unions you're well on your way to acing the test).

Certainly the most entertaining one - it has cartoon foxes - is Why's (Poignant) Guide to Ruby. If you don't believe me check the sidebar on this page. It is a rather involved story on copyright, that ends up suggesting that we (the readers) could do a lot worse than copying the book and redistributing it. Why goes on to give an example of what we might do:

IDEA ONE: BIG TOBACCO

Buy a cigarette company. Use my cartoon foxes to fuel an aggressive ad campaign. Here’s a billboard for starters:

Make it obvious that you’re targeting children and the asthmatic. Then, once you’ve got everyone going, have the truth people do an expose on me and my farm of inky foxes.

Sensible Hipster Standing on Curb in Urban Wilderness: He calls himself the lucky stiff.

(Pulls aside curtain to reveal grey corpse on a gurney.)

Hipster: Some stiffs ain’t so lucky.

(Erratic zoom in. Superimposed cartoon foxes for subliminal Willy Wonka mind trip.)

Yo. Why you gotta dis Big Smokies like dat, Holmes?

(Why's main weblogging gig is good fun too (it has the motto "Hex-editing reality to give us infinite grenades!!"). Bookmarked.)

The least surprising recent development I can think of, is Google Desktop search. Nice idea, but this FAQ answer on Mozilla Firefox is a joke.
It says "we may choose to support Firefox later" where it should say "We'll have Firefox support in a few weeks". We're supposed to be thinking that Google are the good guys, and here they are as "Microsoft only" as you can get.
It's even easy to do. Using the Slogger plugin for Firefox I've been archiving my Firefox history for a couple of months now. I run the Swish-E indexer on that from time to time, and then a perl CGI script gives me in-browser indexed search history. If the indexer API of Google Desktop is hackable, then there you are - simply replace Swish-E with Google Desktop and you're done.

[Obviously just letting Desktop Google index Slogger's cache will get you halfway there - but you don't get the browsing history metadata]

[UPDATE: Continue here for some Google specific Slogger tips]

An exciting story on plants, plant installation, people, beverage remains, coffie (sic), and insurance policy watering unfolded here at the office today. In the lingo of corporate broadcast email PLEASE READ THIS CAREFULLY!!!!:

From: Reception

To: Staff

Subject: watering the plants

Hi everyone
I have received a request from the nice lady who comes here once in a while and check up on our office plants:

Please do not water the plants. Not in any way. Leftovers, even small amounts, from beverages and coffie etc. that someone might water the plants with before refilling a cup or something like that, is enough to damage the plant. The plants do only require small amounts of water or they will drown.

It should therefore be the be the nice lady alone who water the plants (with water) so she can control the watering.
A recently installed plant is actually in a bad condition due to overwatering. The insurance/serviceagreement does not cover if we water them ourselves, and we will have to pay for a new ones if we kill them.

Best regards,

John Doe
Receptionist

(a Just/Classy cross post haste project)

Nej hvor er det sindssygt
Nej hvor er det sindssygt
Nej hvor er det sindssygt

Vi ender hos HuskMitNavn, hvor vi skriver gå aldrig tilbage til en loser ud, men før da mødte vi ham på ploggen hos afsnit p (store bogstaver er ikke moderne mere) i selskab med Per Arnoldi. Længere tilbage i tiden var vi også hos Øverste Kirurgiske (undtagen hos nogen) hvor vi hørte gamle oplæsninger, fordi der ikke var nogen nye. Blandt andet hørte vi den overgearede Jens Blendstrup (let sjofel RealPlayer), Pia Juul (der lyder som om hun er ved at blive parodieret af Martin Brygmann), og Janus Kodal (der læser med en kunstlet, selvhøjtidelig småsyngende flæben faretruende tæt det decideret naragtige).

Og før det startede vi med at læse om Rasmus Nikolajsens "Frihed og sex på rejsen" og et uddrag derfra.

((c) klager til dee (at) classy.dk)

I'm not sure how I feel about being the leading resource on how to run a cult.
On the other hand, if you're a part of The Cult of Claus, please get in touch. If you're magically drawn to me, as cult followers are, you'll know how.

If you're a part of The Cult of the White Shirt, please read below.

The idea with getting out of the blue suit, and loosening the corporate tie is to get out of the uniform. I don't think they got that part of the casual message in the Sonus Networks management team.

An overlooked point from the much talked about long tail feature in the most recent edition of Wired is that it is in fact only Amazon that makes more money from "not in physical stores" inventory. But the good question is whether Amazon in fact created that phenomenon by aggresively pursuing a big catalog.
As far as I know Amazon publishes quite simply everything available in print in English. Even a lot of stuff not in print is available second hand through Amazon's interface. In contrast, the Netflix 25000 film catalog is only 8 times that of a typical Blockbuster according to the article; where Amazon has 18 times the catalog of a typical Barnes & Noble. Is Netflix offering everything that is available at 25000? That seems like a low number (Hitchcock made 50 films, do you mean to tell me there's only 500 times as many in total?).
Same thing with Rhapsody's 735000 song catalog. At at 19 multiplier against Wal-Mart they seem to have a lot, but is Wal-Mart who you want to compare yourself to in music retail? I doubt very much that 735000 songs is really a very full catalog. I have about 1000 albums on tape, disc and vinyl, so my collection is maybe on the order of 10000 songs. I would expect even a half way decent record shop to have at least ten times that number, possibly more, and someone offering a full catalog to have several million tracks, just in popular music (The Rolling Stones catalog is over 300 songs. Do you mean to tell me there's only 2000 times as much music as that put out by The Stones?).
Isn't Rhapsody and Netflix in fact failing right now at capitalizing on the law of the long tail?

About 10 months ago I published the browser market share for classy.dk users as 14%. Since then Firefox has really caught on. That percentage is 19% today.
Since the preview release came out Firefox has been downloaded more than 4,000,000 times. That's a lot of browsers...

It seems the mind is almost incapable of "getting" power laws. In the context of the fat tails of financial markets, Nassim Taleb makes this point. In the context of weblogs Clay Shirky does. And in the context of ecommerce it's made (in a roundabout way) in a a feature in the current issue of Wired.

[UPDATE: Good commentary (but in danish) by Henrik Føhns.]

De to "opfindere" af hentehåret, to amerikanere der har patenteret en særlig friseringsteknik for hentehår, har nu fået en pris for opfindelsen. I virkeligheden skulle prisen vel have gået til det amerikanske patentsystem.

Greed got in the way of good manners, when the original developer for The .NET port of the Lucene indexer pulled the original sourceforge project, and started marketing his open source software as a closed source commercial product!
It's one thing if he had actually come up with an independent idea and just regretted his open source licence, but he's just ripping off the (free) work of others. What an asshole. He even had the poor taste of leaving advertising for his commercial rip off at the original sourceforge project page (Google Lucene.Net - I'm not going to add Google juice). Thankfully this didn't go down quietly - the open source project is back as another sourceforge project in less greedy hands.

There's a reason us geeks still like PCs over other media devices: Having hackable general purpose networked devices make rapid innovation possible. Witness the buzzword right now, Podcasting. What this is is simply applying RSS to MP3s, offlining audio in the way text got offlined. RSS 2 is smart enough at this that there's an emerging standard for how this is done, i.e. automated, early entries in this new software category is iPodder. So iPod is audio TiVO on an open network.
I'm not that big on radio in the first place, so I'm not really the target market for this kind of thing, but obviously I'll need to have a look. Please remember though the truth of the audio blogging manifest.

I think I've finally come up with the business card of my dreams at that non-existent company that just get's it

Claus Dahl
Knowledge and Information Motherfucker at large
dreamcompany.dk/classy

What's on the card: My name obviously. The title simply means that job where I'm supposed to just run around the company and get it; know everything. I maintain as broad a presence as I can manage while still keeping on top of my knowledge load and then run around and implement that knowledge wherever possible and/or useful (Obviously knowledge is a value in itself. Usefulness is a byproduct). This is not evangelism. The knowledge I'm supposed to have and share and grow in myself and others is the hard core stuff that's the core business of this knowledge company.

At this dream job, I don't talk much on the phone, and I don't have to answer 200 emails a day so we don't need that data on the card - but obviously this company has employee newsfeeds, and all the boring stuff that clutter businesscards is kept in FOAF documents on the employee website.
The .dk website is because this job is probably physically in downtown Copenhagen. I like it here.

Fra classy.dk's vidt forgrenede kildenet har vi modtaget dette nyhedstelegram: Horsens Folkeblad, og Dansk Folkeparti i Hedensted, har fået pornolizeren galt i halsen og tror at denne side simpelthen er en hærværksramt udgave af deres egen hjemmeside lavet af "Én eller flere hærværksmænd med en åbenlys sygelig trang til at bruge obskure udtryk hentet fra porno-litteraturen". Den lokale partiformand er ikke tilfreds:

- Den eneste formildende omstændighed, jeg overhovedet kan finde, er, at man ikke direkte via vores egen web-adresse - www.dfhedensted.dk - kan få den verbale skraldespand smidt i hovedet, fortæller Knud Madsen.
Men slår man derimod via en engelsk søgemaskine op på adressen www.pornolize.com, kan man se hærværket mod den lokale partiforening.

[Min kilde oplyser at linket er fundet her]

No it's not the software (or the computer) that's micro: It's the company and the company idea: Eric Sink builds a miniscule company as an MSDN feature.
Along the way there's a lot of notions along the same lines as gapingvoid's How to be creative - including, I guess that means it's important, "Don't quit your day job", a version of "Put the hours in" on persistence and in fact also a version of all the discussions on making sure the creative stuff is fun, not duty - Sink simply calls it "I think this is a great way to fail", but it's almost the same thing: Don't make your creativity a death march project.

It turns out there's a buffer overflow in MS Word also, so Word documents are now to be considered possible carriers of vira. So it's not just script vira anymore. Opening a word document with scripting turned off is still unsafe.
This has got nothing to do with Outlook or IE security. No saving to disk first will protect you. It's simply Word being unsafe.
This must be the best news the Open Office people have had in years!

(Link: Simon)

OK, they're not really consistent - but at least their BASIC error codes are.
In an ironic comment to Joel's comments on .NET - this 30 year backward compatibility of error codes is also gone in .NET...

Tim O'Reilly's Web 2.0 conference - has brought a new entry in the race to be the most important instant, hosted, gamechanging revolution. From the description I like Jot as at least a nice try.
It's a wiki built out to basically be a write/read CMS. Templates allow for structured data, so that websites grow a data model in a natural "no code" way.
In addition it integrates with email, so that you can move all the 1-1 private conversations into open forums without a great hassle.

The "no code" moniker is unfortunately often another name for "no design" and I have doubts about how much value the data that ends up in this wiki in forms other than text really has.
I guess a test is in order to get an idea of that.

(as reported by Jon Udell. He also has a live recording as a flash movie at the end of that link.)

(Oh, and this by the way appears to be the stealth mode upstart Excite.com co-founder Joe Kraus is talking about on his quite good weblog Bnoopy)

Weblogs, GMail, Amazon web services (I should probably continue by naming e.g. salesforce.com, but I don't know anything about that so I won't) etc. According to Tim O'Reilly these are all examples of a new maturing conception of the web. The web is growing in perceived capability very rapidly these days, and consequently people are moving more work to the web. Its certainly true that the variety of data consumed over HTTP is growing rapidly. So is loose integration of helper services consuming and processing this data, e.g. feedburner, bloglines, and technorati when it comes to blogging infrastructure.
Meanwhile from the outside, the whole WS-* process still looks like a moneyhole to me. But I'm strictly on the outside. I think that's also Loosely Coupled's point here. The simple, easy to integrate, non "enterprise computing" services are winning at this point, because they're there and usable if not optimal. It's de-facto REST in most cases and REST by principle elsewhere that's getting used by most clients. The web service revolution isn't in the future. It was yesterday.

This kind of attack from below is pure Innovators Dilemma. The road ahead sketched by Phil Wainewright is too: The simple, but good enough, services will eventually mature to the point where they will be useful for everybody. If the big players keep insisting on firming up heavy, hard to implement, enterprise models of web services, then maybe I was wrong back when I said that the incumbents get it.

Why does Bruce Eckel and the editors of AlwaysOn call single log entries "weblogs". Are they simply clued out, or is there a precedent from the age of logbooks?

I haven't read through it yet, but this looks like an interesting read on being Jewish here in the dark ages. Reminds me that I only bought, but didn't yet read Nothing Sacred, Douglas Rushkoff's attempt at presenting judaism to us non-jews instead of sacrificing the interpretation to fundamentalists.

(via Doc Searls)

Brilliant collection of hand drawn maps of places, real and imaginary. The maps reflect inner as well as outer worlds.

(deep link complaints to dee (at) classy.dk)

(via Angermann2)

Is the real attraction of GMail perhaps that it looks a lot like the bridge on a Star Trek Federation starship?
No nonsense. Data rich. Lots of rounded corners. And with an always-on super presence running behind the screens.

In fact it looks as if the interface was stolen from Joe Reiss' Spoiler-free Opinion Summary of TV shows based on the Star Trek universe.

En ny meningsmåling viser at et kun et fåtal af vælgerne synes at Mogens Lykketoft har statsministerpotentiale. Det har de jo ganske ret i, ikke fordi Lykketoft ikke er det fuldkopmne magtmenneske man er nødt til at være. Heller ikke fordi han ikke har hjertet på rette sted, det tror jeg skam han har. Næh, grunden til at han ikke kan bruges er at selv en afbarbering af fipskægget ikke har forsynet ham med den nødvendige basale afrundethed.
Vi husker alle Lykketofts katastrofale manglende evne til at forstå modviljen mod bare at krone ham som konge uden valg efter Nyrups afgang. Han vidste jo han var stærkest, så hvorfor kunne de andre ikke bare indse at han var det og stikke piben ind? Det er mig en gåde at man kan være så tonedøv overfor sin egen fremtræden som egensindigt magtmenneske og alligevel have en karriere i politik.
Forleden gik det så galt igen, da Lykketoft - ufatteligt - tog sig til til at sige om Brian Mikkelsen at han nok var for dum til at forstå den første gang - siden Mikkelsen i begejstring (og fordi man skal når man er minister) havde set Kongekabale 3 gange og synes den var god.
Tænk at han gider. Det er den slags latterlige, uprovokerede, studentikose udfald som får folk til at droppe enhver idé om Lykketoft som statsminister.

I was just gone for 20 minutes. Needed the cable...

Not that that's what it's about - but I just checked (as part of my regular backup) how much text is actually here on classy.dk. It comes out at about 1 MB of text, not counting headlines. That's a lot. I pasted the combined entry bodies into MS Word and got a page count of 334 pages (A4 format, 12 pt font). Book pages come out at maybe half that size, so if somebody had the bad idea of printing the blog it would come out at 700 pages.

I used to write my notes in longhand in A5 format notebooks. I think the old notes, made over the course of 16 years (and still growing in fact) come out at about 3000 A5 pages. Longhand takes up a lot of space, so one of these pages comes out roughly at 0.5 K (probably a little less on average) which means that the paper notes and the blog notes are comparable in volume.

What's funny about that is that I remember my time as a student as one where I was always writing these notes, and yet I think in my most productive longhand years I topped out at maybe 500 pages of notes. With luck, thats 250K text. In contrast I remember the last two years as partial work hell, where I've often been completely unable to do anything but work. During the last two years blogging has been only a fraction of my entire output, dwarfed by software and reports/specifications done as part of my job. And still it would take 4 longhand years to match 2 blog years.

Obviously, the value of text is not its length. It's closer to the opposite in fact, and I think the Pascal adage applies. I've been to busy to be brief on this weblog. But another thing that applies is that no matter how hard it is to admit, the simple truth is that I did not know how to work hard when I was at university. I do now. I've learned - not an entirely pleasent experience - to put in the hours. It's not always magic that happens, but bulk also works.

Som jeg vist har sagt, så synes jeg at Hugh MacLoeds bag-på-visitkort tegninger er fremragende og at føljetonen How to be creative, om den barske men interessant virkelighed for det kreative menneske er helt fantastisk god
Derfor skrev jeg forleden til Hugh (OK, det var ret sent) og foreslog at jeg oversatte hans fantastisk menneskelige, brutale og helt igennem rigtige gode råd til det tænkende menneske til dansk. Han sagde ja, så nu må jeg jo hellere se at få oversættelsen lavet. Forvent nyt snart.

(Heldigvis har Just lovet at hjælpe)