Category — Internet Research

The End User: What came before blogs

Usenet newsgroups, recognizable by their unique naming system, like rec.crafts.jewelry or comp.sys.hp.misc, came to life on the Internet around 1979 as semipermanent bulletin boards. You could post a question to alt.animals.dogs.collies, and answers from fellow collie devotees from around the world would be available for anyone to read.

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If that sounds familiar, you’re right: It is essentially how today’s Internet blogs work. But advances in software make blogs easier to create, design, customize, navigate and control. Since newsgroups predated even the World Wide Web, they are design-free – simple text entries, one after the other, sometimes “threaded” into back-and-forth postings.

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well… i personally wouldn’t say usenet is a predecessor to blogs, but it is an argument that could be made….

Significant Developents in Global Internet Law in 2004:
This assessment attempts to edit a complex universe of dazzlingly diverse issues down to a manageable analysis — the past really is prologue, and thinking about the most crucial issues from 2004 can help to bring 2005 into clearer focus. As Covington & Burling approach their tenth year of reporting on global Internet legal issues, Covington & Burling have decided to distill our analysis even more: this year, Covington & Burling are publishing an assessment of the Top Ten Issues in Global Internet Law.
http://www.cov.com/download/content/brochures/internet_2004.pdf

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it is worth a review.

European Union IT research is failing:
Viviane Reding, European Commission information society and media commissioner, said, “Fast-changing IST research is, and must remain, a key driver for the rapid economy-wide technological innovation on which Europe’s skilled jobs ultimately depend.”

She said, “I intend to respond very quickly to the panel’s concerns about red tape, which is a general problem of EU research programmes, but felt most directly in IST research where we operate in a particularly dynamic and fast evolving environment.”

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this will be good, but there still needs to be some solid oversight.

European Union IT research is failing:
Viviane Reding, European Commission information society and media commissioner, said, “Fast-changing IST research is, and must remain, a key driver for the rapid economy-wide technological innovation on which Europe’s skilled jobs ultimately depend.”

She said, “I intend to respond very quickly to the panel’s concerns about red tape, which is a general problem of EU research programmes, but felt most directly in IST research where we operate in a particularly dynamic and fast evolving environment.”

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this will be good, but there still needs to be some solid oversight.

Digital Learning Cultures in the Information Landscape – Clifford Lynch, Syllabus Keynote: “As executive director of the Coalition for Networked Information, Clifford Lynch has an exceptional view of the changing landscape of information in the digital realm. In these excerpts from his July 19 keynote at Syllabus2004, Lynch takes a look at t”

(Via Online Learning Update.)

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this brings up some oft forgotten issues and questions.

Maybe I’ve Been Asleep for a While…: “

…but when did Amazon start tracking blogs? It’s weird to see a screenshot of my old template, but it’s also interesting to see their ‘recommendations,’ i.e., people who visit my website might also enjoy Liz Lawley, Unfogged, Culture Cat, and Arts and Letters Daily. At least I’m in good company.

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(Via the chutry experiment.)

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amazon bought alexa alexa archived the internet, the archive they made became archive.org, the company and tools went to amazon, so, amazon has had, other than a9, a search engine, site analysis and traffic analysis tools. internet history this is… coming back to remind us. amazon has integrated alexa.com tools into their site. neat, but not new. not even new that they do blogs, because they do tons of stuff, if you have a unique url, you are probably in alexa.com.

Mueller comment: “

“You have not tried a free and market process. You have done almost everything else. You have shut the market down completely. You have tried trickling in additions through painful and laborious beauty contests…. However, there is a glimmer of hope…I heard Kleinsin say he saw no technical stability concerns about the addition of ten to 20 new TLDs to the root a year. …It’s clear that these technical concerns go away if we add something in the neighborhood of tens of top level domains per year.”

“I submitted a paper a year ago calling for the annual addition of 40 TLDs. Isn’t this something we could agree to? Something between 10 and 40 a year? This is progress. . . . The one part of this that doesn’t fit into a smooth transition is the board’s involvement in the content of a TLD. My proposal talked about a trademark-oriented dispute resolution process for new TLDs. You can set up a challenge process, and that can deal with a lot of the issues.”

Kleinsin: “From a technical restriction standpoint, I could throw my shoe at you. [milton: you've done that] There are a number of policy constraints that keep me from doing that. The ability to do something technically is not a reason to do it.”

We’ve been talking about new TLDs for some time today. It’s 1999! Joe Sims is here. Ken Fockler is here. Where is Chris Ambler?

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(Via Susan Crawford blog.)

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but here’s the rub: money, surplus and devaluation. which can be real or imagined. right now some people make good money off of people’s imagination that there is limited domains. it is a constructed market deficit condition, and lots of people who profit want it to stay that way.

UNESCO Free Software Portal: The UNESCO Free Software Portal gives access to documents and websites which are references for the Free Software/Open Source Technology movement. It is also a gateway to resources related to Free Software.

http://portal.unesco.org/ci/en/ev.php-URL_ID=12034&URL_DO=DO_TOPIC&URL_SECTION=201.html

(Via Information Policy.)

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this could be handy.

EU invites applications for IT grants of 1.12 billion euros: “The fourth call for proposals under European Commission the Information Society Technologies (IST) Research Programme has just been published.

The total financial allocation for this call is 1.12 billion euro. It funds 5 types of projects: Integrated projects (IPs), Specific Targeted Research Projects (STREPs), Networks of Excellence (NoEs), Coordination Actions (CAs),Specific Support Actions (SSAs).

The areas addressed within this call include applied IST research addressing major societal and economic challenges, communication, computing and software technologies, components and microsystems, knowledge and interface technologies, knowledge and interface technologies, IST future and emerging technologies.

http://www.cordis.lu/ist/“

(Via Information Policy.)

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this is pretty big… games, open source, etc. etc. are covered.

Linus, Monty, Rasmus: No Software Patents: “Jan Wildeboer writes “The three most famous European authors of open-source software have issued an appeal against software patents on NoSoftwarePatents.com. Linus Torvalds (Linux), Michael “Monty” Widenius (MySQL) and Rasmus Lerdorf (PHP) urge the EU Council, which will convene later in the week, not to adopt a draft directive on software patents that they consider “deceptive, dangerous, and democratically illegitimate”. They also call on the Internet community to express solidarity by placing NoSoftwarePatents.com links and banners on many Web sites.”"

(Via Slashdot.)

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This is one of those core political decisions that will transform the power structure of europe, not the big P political power structure but the small p political power which actually has more power than big P, it just is not as visible.