January 17, 2003
Hard stuff for smart people
This slashdot piece certainly reinforces what I was mentioning earlier this week. Surprise, surprise, more pleasant evidence that we haven't figured everything out yet. While breakthroughs of this nature are eminently predictable, they bode well for the future of wireless communications. We may not see innovation occur at the pace here that it has in the chip space, but any progress in areas such as these, the high-resistance areas I call them (just another way of saying "hard stuff that smart people still have to figure out"), have a profound influence on the applications we will be using tomorrow. And I look forward to that.
Hard stuff for smart people
This slashdot piece certainly reinforces what I was mentioning earlier this week. Surprise, surprise, more pleasant evidence that we haven't figured everything out yet. While breakthroughs of this nature are eminently predictable, they bode well for the future of wireless communications. We may not see innovation occur at the pace here that it has in the chip space, but any progress in areas such as these, the high-resistance areas I call them (just another way of saying "hard stuff that smart people still have to figure out"), have a profound influence on the applications we will be using tomorrow. And I look forward to that.
Some thoughts on "Commons assumptions"
via Doc, Arnold Kling states in an article that "If you want to overthrow incumbent publishers with Internet-based alternatives, you are better off starting from the assumption that Content is Crap" in reference to Dan Gillmor's enthusiasm for Creative Commons. "The economics of content are that most of the value-added comes from the filtering process, not the creation process." Kling says.
Doc notes that "much snot flung in the general direction of the old content companies" - which I suppose is what comes next from me in Arnold's direction :)
Kling is right in stating that there is a lot of crap out there, but he's mistaken in assuming that a lot of the value-add comes from the filtering exercise. The filtering exercise has only become a value-add exercise because of the crap that is being passed off as content. To be more precise Arnold, lets start off with the assumption that Crap can be Content. Which is a wonderfully compelling illustration of why Creative Commons is "a good thing" (or "productive" as Searls says). We're talking about my Crap here, and now I've got access to a license, a commons, that will provide others with an accessible opportunity to use my Crap in a manner that we can both agree on. And perhaps, just maybe, their use of my Crap will evolve my Crap into our Content - which could be re-licensed, reused, reissued and repurposed under Creative Commons for the benefit of those that appreciate the Content (or view it as more Crap). I guess what I'm getting at is that given enough eyeballs, filtering all crap becomes trivial.
Now get on with it.
January 16, 2003
Scientists discover how embryo "catches" in womb
When I see news pieces like this I am always intrigued by the sheer number of things that we simply don't know anything about. Puts knowledge in context; even smart people don't know anything - relatively speaking.
PlayStation 2 shipments top 50 million
PlayStation's are selling like gang-busters. So why are all of the console gamers that I talk to still getting turned on by the XBox? I can't remember the last time someone said "PS2" to me in a casual conversation.
January 15, 2003
Ringtone royalties top $71m
The Register reports that Ringtone royalties paid to songwriters topped $71m last year. Ummm. Wow. Gets me to thinking about how different things would have been if Napster and RIAA had been able to come to a friendly royalty agreement (or whomever would have had to be at the table to make it work out...)
Lazy is not the word.
Tima says that "Lazy is not the word." I'd tend to agree, but also add that "Web is not the word either". Its just a bad term altogether. Customers aren't lazy and its not about the web. Something that describes the interplay between developers and customers would be more interesting methinks...how about "Communication"? "Iterative Development"? "Demand Driven"?