Godt logo-remix ovre hos Pollas.

James Hong, der har tjent sine penge på noget så usandsynligt som Hot or Not har givet sig selv en skatteforhøjelse på 10% topskat:

We, James Hong and Josh Blumenstock, hereby make a personal promise to you that we will give 10% of whatever we make over $100,000 each year to charity.

(bemærk: Angiveligt er James Hong faktisk i en income bracket hvor han beskatter sig selv med 100.000$ ved at agere på den måde)

Microsoft seems to be trying to do the right thing with respect to fair access to implement the MS Office XML specifications, but frankly, they get trapped in all the legalese. Taking the high road works best using simple, emotional, unmistakeable terms like "Don't be evil".

(Yes, simple, emotional terms are just a form of trickery - you need behaviour to back them. But no, I don't feel more reassured by cut and dried legal language that it is hard to even understand the legal scope of)

Og heller ikke de andre søgemaskiner, der er nemlig ingen disallows i robots.txt filen på jp.dk. Det kan man forvisse sig om ved kigge efter, eller ved at søge på siden. Hvis så bare

• Nogen kunne lære JPs webudviklere at tage artikeltitlen med i <title> tagget på siderne
  
• Avisen var mindre rædselsfuld
  

Jeg tog en tur gennem avisernes robotblokader.

Forsvarsværkerne er i forskellig grad oppe hos de fleste aviser. Nogen af stederne er det rimelige mekanismer for ikke selv at komme i problemer (e.g. blokering for indexering af professionelle pressefotos)
Jyllands-posten (kom bare ind)
Politiken (nej!)
Ekstra-Bladet (nej! og for billederne mener vi NEJ! det andet nej er iøvrigt unødvendigt når man har sagt nej første gang)
Berlingske Tidende er uden for konkurrence fordi de har indført en global paywall på deres nyhedssider.
BT (så kom da bare en smule ind. eksempel)
Blandt de regionale aviser man af og til ser i søgeresultater er Fyens Stiftstidende og når man søger ser man at de også har lært at bruge <title>.

The last talk of the day dovetailed nicely with one of the slides from Jason Tester's presentation a fake Newsweek cover from the future on bodyhacking. What Aubrey de Grey was proposing was the ultimate bodyhack, engineered immortality (or 1000 year life span at least).
There's no way around saying it, de Grey is the ultimate mad scientist - but in a good way.
The mad: Wild hair style, wild bio (de Grey is only a biologist by accident and circumstance), wild project, wild methods (includes harnessing the genes from microbes adapted to decomposing human remains. The microbes harvested from actual graveyards).
The good: Like I said in the intro, de Grey taps into a particular hacker mindset that's only getting more and more important these years. He does this not only mentally, i.e. by adopting this mindset, but also socially, by speaking a lot and by organizing the Methuselah Mouse Prize (an X-prize for mouse aging). His projects is very well thought out and very precise, at least rhetorically. It's impossible for me to have any idea of his scientific prowess of course but he talks very well on his subject, with care, lucidity and humour. He is very precise in not stating anything but a very specific goal that he plans to reach by very precise means. He is well avare of the social implications of his science as well.

Clearly the stand out talk of the day. The world needs more mad scientists - or at least an event like NEXT05 does. I find it ironic that de Grey, simply by giving a better talk that really jolts your mind ends up being the speaker that is able to present by far the most tangible idea of a future. Its a good thing that the event at least closes on a high note.

(sidenote til danske læsere: Forvent en Lone Frank helside i næste uges Weekendavis om de Grey. Hun var der ihvertfald, og mon ikke evigt liv kan få lov at trække en side)

After lunch Jason Tester from The Institute for The Future presented the 2005 Map of the Decade. They may have another view of what they do, but judging from the presentation IFTF watches trends and extrapolates these ideas on a 10 year time scale. To visualize the results they produce artifacts from the future in the style of the Wired regular feature Found.
Some of the trends in focus for 2005 were consumer activism (a la web outrages over Sony BMG/Kryptonite locks/etc etc), 'smart consumers' i.e. hackers and remixers and bedroom scientists, pervasive use of RFID and via an equally pervasive network envisioning an environment consisting entirely of informed objects.
I'm not sure I think 2005 was a good vintage for looking forward - a feeling I've had all year mind you, Reboot also seemed to be about last years progress - but the presentation was nice enough.

As an aside, Bruce Sterling has recently written a book that touches on RFID (what he calls spime).

Next up at NEXT05 was a presentation from a Nike designer on their work with the future of clothes. I thought the ideas he presented were kind of basic. In a really thought provoiking idea 'basic' means 'very well executed'. If the idea has a ring of simplicity but really does something new then 'basic' is really a quality. But this I felt was just basic. I was expecting interesting new uses of fabrics or some extensions to the kinds of sensorware you can wear even today, e.g. heartrate monitoring, but most of the ideas were simply these ideas, along with a presentation on how Nike works with partners. I was probably not the intended audience.

Norbert Streitz gave a presentation of some of the ideas in pervasive/ubuquitous computing. It's interesting, but it's also old news if you follow the news of the future at all. Heck, even I wrote a piece about this in the only issue we ever managed to put out of UCmag (in danish). That was 5 years ago and basically there has been no news since then - or that's what I was led to think by the presentation.
Some of the points made in that connection: As information is virtualized buildings no longer have to contain organization in the way they do today - the virtual world does that for them. So the role of buildings change. They become instead pure social spaces. Another good point was the role of sound in physicalizing the virtual - but of course we've all had audible mouse clicks for years so again this is hardly surprising.

I would like to point out some social aspects of this intensifying projection of our state of mind that I don't think were touched upon in thsi talk but that will be essential to us sooner rather than later. The war over the future of ideas will only intensify as pervasive computing is adopted.
What happens when we work through 'informed objects' is that more and more of our thought processes come into a scope that the content industries have succesfully turned into a commercial space rather than a free space. Specifically, as we digitize our personal space more and more, expression will be carried to a greater and greater extent over digital devices, so that the act of thought will be external, published and visible (witness the weblog phenomenon). The current fights over the meaning of ownership and copyright will only intensify as we gradually inform more and more of our surroundings. (some of this paragraph is a hidden quote from a longer discussion of this problem here)

Vi skal være mindre elitære, og det gælder også vores udstillingsudtryk. Vi vil være meget mere fokuserede på i den kommende tid at undgå indforstået sprog for at sikre, at vi henvender os til den forudsætningsløse

The nice people from Innovationlab were kind enough to provide me with a bloggers pass to the NEXT05 conference. I'll have notes on the conference a little later today, but sofar all I have to say is that the robot DJs were super cool (pic, movie (QuickTime 17MB). The exhibition is easily worth the metro ride and the 50DKK entry and it is still open tomorrow.

Nok den mest clever udstillingsposter jeg har set online, ever!

(nærmest via FunzaFunza)

Ku' han ikke have haft et efternavn der var nemmere at huske.

A week ago I commented (in Danish) on the approval, in fact encouragement, Google Print was getting from a small danish publisher. For her there was no question her company was getting increased interest in the books they put out from the added exposure.
My take on that was that this rather obvious squeeze from the long tail of publishing would eventually lead to a ceasefire in the war against google print from big publishers also. The force of being available online will quite simply outcompete the quality of popular books. Easy digital availability and searchability may turn out to be a more important quality than whatever quality it is that makes popular books popular tree carcasses.
This is classic Innovator's Dilemma material: The big publishers are failing to realize the disruption of online. The small publishers are unencumbered by having bestsellers to protect and can adapt to the reality of online without any worries.
If the RIAA ever has any success with the anti-piracy campaigns it will be faced with the same problem, and - as we all know - piracy is good for Microsoft for the exact same reason. In a world without piracy Microsoft's market share would be much, much less than it is now.

It just struck me that Wikipedia should be seen in this light also instead of the tedious "but it's not The Encyclopedia Britannica" stories that people keep writing. It isn't (not always, anyway). It doesn't have to be. The success of Wikipedia is in fact not the success of the wisdom of crowds at all. It's the success of good enough. It's an encyclopedia disruption. For many uses shoddy Wikipedia articles are easily good enough. It doesn't matter that there's no signed author, no scholarly review, no locking of a final 'approved' text. In fact these safeguards would cost money and hurt Wikipedia's ability to access the economics of free, which will eventually blast the other models for that kind of knowledge out of the water.

If you don't see flash and are using the Adblock extension in Firefox or if you uninstalled Adblock because you couldn't get flash to work with Adblock, you should use Adblock Plus. It works. The links pointed to on extensionmirror.nl don't work - but the install from the Adblock Plus website does. The original Adblock project has been dormant at least for a year.

This web 2.0 checklist is a nice opportunity for me to recycle my Web 2.0 matrix. The original got caught in over heavy posting back when I did it. On the checklist my favourite item has to be the (thanks, Waxy!)

Once again we have to say though: It's way to easy to laugh about these things. And secondly, when I run over the check list: What's not to like? All of the practices/features mentioned really work very well. Does it matter that everybody is doing them?

(link: (thanks, Tveskov!))

Det var ikke bare mig der ikke kunne få det til at passe. Carsten Jensen viste sig at være for skrap kost som fast kommentator for Berlingerens læsere. Han var simpelthen ikke borgerlig nok. Inden det kom så langt satte debatredaktør Jeppe Duvå sin stilling ind på det og er derfor nu eks-debatredaktør. Måske var det derfor hans irritationstærskel var lidt lav i forbindelse med P3.
Historien giver et svagt ekko af den berømte med Jørgen Schleimanns højpandede frihedsslogan i Jyllands Posten.

Morten kan åbenbart noget med at sove over sig. Selv er jeg også forsynet med et virkelig godt sovegen, det meste af tiden.
Da jeg var yngre brugte jeg aldrig et vækkeur. Jeg havde lært mig selv et mentalt trick hvor jeg ved selvsuggestion kunne overbevise min underbevidsthed om at vække mig efter et bestemt antal 2-timers søvnblokke. Det virkede forbløffende godt. Jeg havde et bestemt mentalt billede jeg brugte, hvor søvnen var en slags kraftige gulvplanker. Ved at lægge 2, 3, eller 4 af dem ved siden af hinanden kunne jeg styre min søvn så jeg vågnede præcist efter 4, 6, eller 8 timer. I måske 5 år fra jeg var 18 til jeg var 23 virkede det upåklageligt. Af en eller anden grundt virkede det kun med et lige antal timer - jeg mistænker at det har noget med vores naturlige søvncyklus at gøre, eller også er det noget pseudovidenskabeligt pjank at sige.

Desværre har jeg mistet talentet. Det er spist op af rigtig honest to goodness træthed og måske også af dårlig fysisk form. I dag er jeg havnet i den modsatte grøft. Jeg har et udemærket vækkeur. I non-stress perioder hvor man kan tillade sig solid sovning virker det fortræffelig. Når søvnen ryger ned på 5-6 timer i døgnet begynder det at knibe med præcisionen og alarm 1 bliver overhørt. Så bruger jeg mit armbåndsur som alarm nr 2. På det sidste er mit sovegen desværre blevet resistent over for lyden af begge disse alarmer. Jeg skyder selv skylden på det ret støjprægede Vesterbro. Hvis man skal sove fra narkomanerne der råber om natten og fra underboen der skændes med konen på de sindsygeste tidspunkter så er man simpelthen nødt til at filtrere en masse lyd ud.
Jeg er derfor begyndt at bakke alarm 1 og alarm 2 op med alarmen i min mobiltelefon. Jeg ved det er en stakket frist, et spørgsmål om måneder før jeg må investere i den næste lydgiver, men indtil videre har telefonen klaret selv de mest hårdnakkede forsovninger.

(del af en serie)

Sony BMG as a major company has lots of Google Juice so they still own their Google search results. The news results page is another matter. It's all bad press due to the rootkit scandal.

For nylig kritiserede Berlingeren P3 i en leder. Jeg kan ikke fordrage P3 så det kan jeg egentlig godt forstå. Hvad jeg derimod ikke kan forstå er at det skal være nødvendigt for DR at lave en side som denne her fordi Berlingeren ikke vil publicere DRs svar på kritikken. Det giver jo ikke mening at sige noget grimt om folk og så ikke lade dem svare.
Ovenikøbet var kronikken ikke særlig intelligent - den foreslog i ramme alvor at man da snildt kunne klare P3s public service profil ved bare at pålægge de kommercielle kanaler nogen regler. For det første er det en dårlig idé at lave den slags overhovedet, for så er de kommercielle kanaler jo ikke frie til at være et alternativ. For det andet har vi set med Sky og Radio 100 hvor helt utroligt umuligt det er at håndhæve den slags. Det skulle Kenneth Plummer naturligvis have bemærket i sit svar.

Iøvrigt er historien endnu en anledning til at sige hurra for blogs og farvel til aviserne. Jeg har selv haft lejlighed til at afvise masser af kommentarer, men det fine ved blogosfæren er at jeg ikke kan forhindre andre i at deltage i den offentlige debat på den måde Berlingske Tidende har forsøgt at styre debatten om P3.
Lad os tælle sammen: Hvis ikke aviserne er villige til at agere offentligt idémarked med passende selvdisciplin og hvis de i højere og højere grad er ligeglade med hvad de skriver så kan selv Søren Kragh-Jacobsen næppe hjælpe dem.

Det er da en titel man kan bruge til noget.

Er det bare mig eller er Kok opfinder verdens dyreste tærte ikke sådan en historie man forventer at finde i Andeby-Posten snarere end i Politiken?
Jeg kan levende forestille mig hvordan Guld Iver Flintesten har ladet tærten fremstille kun for at irritere Joakim von And og venter hvert øjeblik at se svaret på udfordringen. Måske noget med verdens største spandauer eller noget i den stil.

Inspireret af Tveskovs historie om den daglige tvangsalarm vil jeg da gerne supplere med følgende tip for de der er ligeså distraherede som jeg selv er.
Jeg har det problem at på de 25 minutter det tager mig at komme hjem fra kontoret er jeg i stand til at glemme alt jeg skal nå, hvis jeg ikke allerede havde glemt det før jeg forlod kontoret. Det meste af tiden er det OK, for så vigtigt var det heller ikke - eller nogen vil minde mig om det. Men når ting er langt over deadline begynder det at blive et problem.
Det eneste system jeg har der er en virkelig slagfast og stresstestet løsning på problemet er at indtale beskeder til mig selv på min telefonsvarer derhjemme. Når jeg så kommer hjem ser jeg, som regel til min store overraskelse, at der ligger en besked - og så er den altså fra mig selv i fortiden. Hvis jeg også kunne sende mig selv over ledningen til faktisk at løse problemet ville jeg gøre det.

På festsange.dk fandt jeg følgende vrøvleversbarnedåbssang med den til dato sejest fejlplacerede apostrof jeg har set

Mel: "Se min kjole"

Se jere's pige,
hun er mild og kærlig,
alt hvad jeg laver,
synes I er så sjovt,
det er fordi I elsker, når
jeg pludrer
og fordi en bager er min far...

Jeg har stadig ikke helt regnet ud hvorfor det er at bagere netop har sjove børn, men mens I tænker over den gåde kan I nyde denne kavalkade af overflødige stavelser, omvendte ordstillinger og minsandten også et enkelt sæt "anførselstegn"

MEL: " I en kælder sort som kul."

Nu I alle kommet er
for mit navn at hylde
og jeg er det hele værd,
sikke noget. . .gylle.
Ja, jeg bruger ble og sut
er også god for gylp og prut,
men når jeg til jer smiler
I alle til mig iler.
Lidt på skrå mit hoved stå
og jeg rynker næsen
løfter læben ligeså,
et yndigt lille væsen.
Ja, jeg ved hvad I kan li'
og jeg er "mand", for det at gi'
skruer op for charmen,
gi'r den hele armen.

Morten fandt andet guld.

It does.

Dan Kaminski is the maker of the awesome OzymanDNS "ssh over DNS" toolkit that lets alpha geeks use the airport WiFi for free. Lately he's been using DNS to give the world a glimpse of a digital zero-privacy future by tracking the spread of the Sony CD malware throughout the world. He's got lots of pretty pictures.

Det er dobbeltlamt at Søren Pind ikke engang kan finde ud af selv at tage ansvaret for sit nederlag. Fejlen er nok snarere Ritt Bjerregaards klart stærkere personlige vælgertække, og den effekt fik en ekstra skrue op i kraft af Søren Pinds gennemskuelige og hadske forsøg på at score lidt stemmer på noget latent fremmedhad.
Helt ærligt Søren. Det er så taberagtigt at skyde skylden på andre. Særlig når det ikke passer.

Kære læser: Vil du ikke gøre mig og det læsbare dansk en tjeneste: Bare drop den nymodens apostrof på fordanskinger af engelske bøjninger eller decideret kunstigt dannede bøjninger. Eksempel: Man googler man googl'er ikke. Det er ok. Man behøver "heller" ikke de der "jeg mener det ikke så alvorligt" "anførselstegn".

Bedst som bogbranchen lægger op til at lave en lige så stor dumhed som RIAA og MPAA ved at gå i krig med Google Print kommer den gode nyhed herhjemme fra at Museum Tusculanum kan se ideen. Det er ikke Gyldendal, bevares - men det er så meget desto rigtigere for forlaget at støtte Google Print.
Hvis man ikke følger med på nettet og derfor ikke har læst Chris Andersons The Long Tail så er det nu man skal gøre det. Museum Tusculanum er, som det fremgår af de citerede besøgstal, der ligger på linie med classy.dks, langt, langt ude i halen af bogsalgsfordelingen. Det er en indlysende fordel for Museum Tusculanum at komme i kontakt med nye læsere via services som Google Print. Og det de store forlag åbenbart ikke indser er, at når de små forlag har en konkurrencefordel i det her, så vil de gøre det - og når millioner af bøger pludselig faktisk er at finde på Google Print så er man, som sælger af de 7% af bogmarkedet der kan kaldes bestsellers, ilde ude hvis ikke man følger med.

Markedet for køb af en bog er anderledes end markedet for interesse om det der står i bogen. Interessemarkedet er klart det største. Når de små forlag via Google Print kan få fingrene i det langt større interessemarked via Google Print så vinder de også ind på bestsellerne på købsmarkedet. Så volumen-forlæggere kan kun tabe på langt sigt ved at sætte sig imod Google Print - interessen for deres produkt vil blive marginaliseret og før eller senere vil det betyde at også salget bliver marginaliseret.
Den observation er også rigtig for avismarkedet btw, og det er aviserne, som tidligere nævnt også ved fuldstændig at misse.

Lige en hurtig status; mens I allesammen overhaler mig indenom med jeres skidesmarte interesse i nye enormt lette sprog og frameworks har jeg desværre siddet fast i tonstungt arbejde uden mulighed for weekendprojekter. Det fortsætter året ud. Jeg satser på en vinterbedring.

I'm sorry but it is completely impossible for me to stomach the combination of pure marketdriven opportunism and communist totalitarianism in the press release from Verso Technologies on how they are helping the Chinese goverment curb free speech by filtering Skype in China.

"The trial is representative of the significant opportunities for Verso's products in the Chinese market, where VoIP is highly regulated and the use of Skype software has been deemed illegal," said Yves Desmet, Verso's senior vice president of worldwide sales, in a statement.

Scumbags.

Meld dig ind i dag.

Props til pollas for årets kreative klassewebsite. Det er totally web 2.0 at skære den kreative klasse ned til sine absolutte basics.

Og ja, jeg lover.

So Google's rebranding of Urchin as Google Analytics and the lovely new price tag of 0 is definitely going to be construed as a watershed moment of sorts, when Google decided to take out an entire sector. Expect an acceleration of the already happening "Google is the new Microsoft" meme - including all the antitrust lingo that goes along with it.

Held ude på begge de politiske fløje vil politikerne gerne forsøge den umulige tryllekunst på en og samme tid at være medlem af folketinget og stadig kunne sige at man er uden for indflydelse, sådan man har adgang til at råbe MODMAGT af magthaverne. Man husker i rollen som skizofren Pernille Frahm, der klarede jobbet ved at sige 'de' om medlemmerne af folketinget mens hun sad i det selv og den strategi har Frank Aaen nu forstærket ved simpelthen at demonstrere mod sig selv.
Det er jo ikke andet end komisk.

En grund til at blogs vil vinde over aviserne til sidst er at aviserne er fuldstændig ligeglade med om det de skriver er vigtigt eller sandt. Dagens eksempel er en helt i gennem lam historie i politiken om at Uffe Elbæk skulle have stjålet en valgrap fra en københavnsk SF rapper (jep, så dum er historien). Det tager ca 5 sekunders lytning at afgøre at historien absolut intet har på sig. (Eneste forbehold i historien er at Andy (som rapper for SF) på Google ejer udsagnet "din by, dit valg"). Hvorfor skal den overhovedet i avisen.

Når det er sagt så er der ingen tvivl om at Uffe Elbæk er pisseirriterende, faktisk endnu mere irriterende end den lækre kandidat Klaus Bondam, og det siger ikke så lidt. Og man forstår godt at det er en SF'er der er særlig irriteret på Elbæk. Han er, som det fremgår af før-linkede interview, en klar SF overløber, der har skiftet parti og nu hellere vil være radicool. Interviewet fra P1 er fra dette årtusind og alligevel sidder Uffe Elbæk fast i et verdensbillede anno 1978. Man mistænker derfor velmenende ideologisk fallitbo af værste skuffe

The quotes by Gil Evans, that he always liked Jimi Hendrix' music, accompanies any Jimi Hendrix reissue as a stamp of approval by the Higher Music Police , Jjazz Division. But even so, I only recently caught up with Gil Evans' recordings of Hendrix and what a treat I've been missing! Recorded in 1974 the album suffers from some of the ills of the era (including the presence of David Sanborn), but it is tremendously groovy and powerful and well played. "The ultimate cocktail party album" was a moniker I and some friends attached to it almost simultaneously. Evans makes Hendrix sound luxurious. Evans chooses, wisely, to let other instruments than the guitar (there is one in the band) cover obvious Hendrix solo-moments. No one could match him on that instrument, so it's much more interesting to arrange his parts for other instruments.

Let the class actions begin.

Udover at fastholde magten hos socialdemokratiet og at give Søren Pind de enorme valgtæsk han har gjort sig fortjent til så kan Ritt Bjerregaard også til enhver tid fremprovokere en kraftig reaktion fra venner og modstandere. En af dem jeg har set i denne valgkamp er en nærmest systematisk kampagne med forvanskninger af sloganet fra Ritts kommunalvalgs-plakat skrevet i sort tusch på plakaten. Ovenstående er den bedste jeg har set, men der er mange flere over hele byen.

Brilliant post that attacks whomever hacks nasty and/or foul DRM for the copyright cartel. Obviously these people employ hackers. Not very good hackers, but still - hackers. Hackers value hacker ethos, so if you want to strike back at the copyright cartel here's something you can do: Call their hackers on their bad hacker ethos:

It's really not too late. You can stop RIGHT NOW, you can get up and walk out the door and turn your back on the forces of REACTION and of GREED and of SMALL-MINDED CONSERVATIVE ASSHOLISM that say that the most important thing in the world is keeping some tweaked housewife in South Dakota from sharing a goddamn CELINE DION TRACK with her mom or friend or neighbor. You can stop. You can do it. YOU ARE BETTER THAN THIS.

(via boingboing)

Per Holms pludselige fravær fra internettet får en til at tænke i en pendent til DR's serie Forsvundne Danskere. Der er masser af materiale at tage af til det nye show Forsvundne (Fiktive) Danskere. Prevn. Per Holm (måske), Ole fra slagsbloggen, ham med nedturen fra Synk Snottet, listen er endless.

Er det noget trivielt og dagligdags som en serverfejl, eller er Per Holm (dødt link, desværre), Danmarks bedste bud på en internet-only celebrity, forsvundet fra jordens overflade?
Måske blev opmærksomheden for meget eller også har hans skilsmisse givet ham enten en optur så stærk at han ikke længere føler sig fed og misbrugt, eller omvendt måske en nedtur så tung at han ikke synes det er (tragi)komisk længere. Er der nogen der ved noget?

Det lader til at det kunderne vil, når de vælger IP telefoni, er ikke at være kunder hos TDC. Ihvertfald er tele-monopolets markedsandel i denne sektor kun 1%.

Han har bl.a. købt forskellige smagfulde Google Adwords som voitures brulées (brændte biler) og reklamerer så for lov og orden i højremargin.

(va Parisist)

Mandag aften var jeg til Echo & The Bunnymen koncert i Lille Vega. Det var lidt som at være til en Beach Boys koncert, bortset fra at det var britisk 80er rock og ikke surfhits der var i centrum. På scenen er 6 musikere. 4 anonyme og ikke introducerede unge mænd og så Ian McCulloch (i morke solbriller hele tiden og modlys det meste af tiden) og Will Sergeant (tavs ovre i hjørnet). Efter en laang energiløs start om hvilket det eneste pæne man kan sige er at de spillede nogen hits kom koncerten endelig lidt i omdrejninger et par numre før bandet gik af scenen før de obligate ekstranumre. Herfra og ud var bandet mere inspireret og sangene derfor sjovere at høre på. Men hovedindtrykket står tilbage: Det bedste ved aftenen var at jeg nu kan krydse Echo and The Bunnymen af på min koncert TODO-liste.

Sony BMG's response to the music CD malware scandal is unbelievable:

Most people, I think, do not even know what a Rootkit is, so why should they care about it?

In the words of Mark Russinovich:

Instead of admitting fault for installing a rootkit and installing it without proper disclosure, both Sony and First 4 Internet claim innocence. By not coming clean they are making clear to any potential customers that they are a not only technically incompetent, but also dishonest.

If I were an SBC shareholder I would be very worried since Edward Whitacre, the CEO of SBC, quite simply does not understand the internet. As mentioned on Nikolaj Nyholms' blog (and elsewhere, one place I saw was eWeek). SBC's CEO seems to think he's in a position to charge internet information service providers like Google or Yahoo for access to SBC's DSL customers.
There's two things wrong with that. First of all, I can't imagine the DSL customers wouldn't complain or even sue that they're not getting what they're paying for. While SBC may have a stranglehold on their customers right now, by owning the copper to their homes, technology just marches on to fast for any purely tech-driven monopoly to last. Your customers have to actually like you too or they'll switch to cable or WiMax or The Next Great Thing.
Second, Whitacre seems bizarrely unaware that the model he proposes has been tried - and failed - before. Many companies tried - notably AOL. I learned how similar the AOL model was to what Whitacre proposes, and why it failed, by watching this excerpt of the Brewster Kahle interview from the PBS Nerd TV series. I learned that rest of what I needed to put together my post title from this Nerd TV excerpt with Tim O'Reilly.

Niall Kennedy took a lot of photos at the Microsoft Live Platform technology preview. My favourite is the one I've blatantly stolen (and doctored) above (original here).
Why do I like the image? It gives you a good idea of how important you can hope to become as an alternate device/software/service vendor).
One thing that's unclear to me: Is Microsoft Live the cunning application level master plan that is supposed to be leveraged by Microsoft's bold reinvention of every web standard in Longhorn, or was the powerpoint show at the unveiling in fact the stack of slides some poor bizdev Microsoftee could come up with when she got the order to scramble so that Stevee Ballmer could "fucking Bury Eric Schmidt" and "Fucking kill Google"?

(Niall: Leave a comment to complain about my use of your image, if it's a problem)

A while back I referenced Just's insightful comment that one of the memes driving the Web 2.0 companies is simplify, which is to say they're targeting your attention sweet spot, not your attention capability - or in Just's words "Web 1.0 was about 7 +/-1. Web 2.0 is about 2 +/-1".

It turns out there's a whole movement about attention ownership and preserving your right to your attention, The Attention Trust, which exerts exactly what you want to assert: "You own yourself. You own your data. You own your attention."
Having a non-profit to guard your attention like your privacy and your money may sound like a joke, but the founders are not kidding. They even have a declaration of gestural independence. I see a collision coming along at some point in the future with the RIAA and MPAA jerks on the analog hole, and of course there's going to be a collision with all television people on the obvious attention problem of advertising.

Found while digging around for info on the soon to be cool Riya.

Lovely story on a ridiculous class action lawsuit against Netflix for not honoring obviously bogus marketing nonsense. The suit has been settled with the following consequences.

• The sucker who sued got $2000 cash
  
• All other Netflix customers unwittingly included in the lawsuit got a "settlement" comprising a marketing offer to get the first month free if they upgrade their Netflix package to a more expensive package.
  
• The lawyers for afore mentioned sucker get paid $2,528,000. Yes. Two and a half million dollars. On the order of 1250 times more than they were able to secure their client.
  

Of course all the poor Netflix subscribers unwittingly included in the legal threat to scare the money out of Netflix in the first place get nothing at all - except an invitation to be at the receiving end of a Netflix upsale opportunity.

(via gothamist)

Jon Udell's summary of the web 2.0 meme bubble is, as always, very good.

When I first read about Amazon's mechanical turk. I hadn't realized that this wasn't just human data mining for Amazon properties but in fact was an open system (according to techcrunch). That's great! I remember reading (but not where, so the story may be apocryphal) about chinese typing factories that did manual OCR for western companies. The way they dealt with errors was by simply doing all the typing in triplicate and voting - which reduced the error rate enormously.
Now everyone can play - Amazon has effectively set up an open market for routine office/terminal work. Whether this would make sense for anyone not in Eastern Europe or Asia I don't know. It might make sense for teenagers or kids as a game-like activity that is also economically rewarding.
Actually, I remember having a problem with data washing something like a quarter million phone numbers. We had to come up with a cheap way to reformat all kinds of strange ways people write their phonenumbers into ISO format. We used to dream of an making an online service where would get people to do the work as a recreational activity - but this is much better. If I had that problem again I would experiment with sending it to the Turk.

Og dagens triplewhammy er selvfølgelig Sonys installation af malware når man spiller deres plader på en PC. Hvis ikke det er ulovligt må vi se at få det gjort ulovligt.
Man kan kun håbe at Sony bliver sagsøgt af hver eneste pladekøber der er påvirket af dether.

Den idé-økonomi vi er ved at få virker mere og mere som en økonomi for dårlige og ondskabsfulde ideer.

Ja, de er skøre de amerikanere, men desværre ejer de også underholdningsindustrien. Derfor er det en katastrofe [UPDATE: endnu kun under opsejling] at USPTO nu har udstedtoffentliggjort det første patent på en historie.
På et eller andet tidspunkt må nogen af underholdningsindustriens rent-a-politicians da for helvede se sig selv dybt i øjnene og sige at de ikke vil være med til denneher mafiavirksomhed mere.

[Mere fra groklaw: Bemærk at en offentliggørelse af et patent ikke betyder at patentet er udstedt/gyldigt. Ifølge nogle kommentarer på boingboing er offentliggørelse en mekanisk proces og finder sted 18 måneder efter ansøgning, så USPTO har endnu ikke haft anledning til at afvise patentet. Man skulle tro de havde en slags straksafvisningsskraldespand som de har undladt at komme ansøgningen i, dog.]

A while back I mentioned the ridiculous notion of 'the analog hole' - which is the "priacy problem" of reality it self. Sooner or later music and video passes through the ether towards our sensory inputs and along that route it can be intercepted and pirated. We all know this and it is why DRM will never work. However, ridiculous legislation is being proposed (not yet here in Europe, but that can only be a timing issue) to stop even this.
Idiots. Bloody dangerous idiots.