September 22, 2003
RSS is wonderful, but it punishes the popular. The more readers you have, the more your server bleeds bandwidth every fifteen minutes. Three pieces still missing: a BitTorrent-style way for aggregators to share the load, collaborative filtering so we read what we should rather than what we know, and a back-channel so readers can do more than just receive.
September 20, 2003
A friend asked for some party CDs. Easy. Until Easy CD refused to burn, citing a song under four seconds long. Five CDs worth of music stranded in a proprietary playlist format, unportable, uneditable, useless. The fix involved a laptop and a cable, but the real question is bigger: who certifies that an app is using the right standard for the job?
September 18, 2003
Verisign has decided that mistyped URLs should redirect to their own page. The internet is unamused. Try following a particularly honest link to see what their new service has to say for itself.
September 18, 2003
Fashion moves fast, copying is rampant, and almost nobody sues. Designers find it cheaper to stay ahead than to lawyer up. Software and music used to work the same way. Now we have four flavors of IP law and a familiar argument that they spur innovation. The opposite case is at least as plausible, and harder to answer than it looks.
September 15, 2003
Audiogalaxy got me listening to music again, and then it got shut down. The record companies are a cartel, sure, but stealing from thieves still counts. So I am trying to go legal without surrendering to DRM. Turns out the Netherlands offers more loopholes than you would expect, ranging from the public library to a Russian site that may not last the year.
September 14, 2003
Clay Shirky says micropayments are doomed: with infinite free substitutes, nobody wants to stop and decide whether this article is worth a dime. He has a point, but iTunes and European pay-by-SMS suggest the story is messier. What if there is a third model hiding between micropayments and ads, where readers pay flat and the back-end splits the proceeds?
September 12, 2003
A festival called The Next 5 Minutes promises that media, art and politics will somehow set us free. Anyone with a webcam can broadcast, anyone with a blog can publish, and bandwidth keeps getting cheaper. That is the optimistic half. The new revolutionaries are starting to notice that the same technology hands Big Media a much bigger lock.
September 10, 2003
Ten thousand public webcams already, with cameras shrinking and bandwidth getting cheaper every quarter. Soon the tiny independent robots arrive, lenses included. Physical anonymity, the kind we grew up with, is heading for the dustbin. The interesting question is what we will wear once everyone can see us. Seinfeld had a theory. The Burqa might too.
September 08, 2003
Google has been a good friend for over five years — the brand that brought sanity back to the web after the dot-com boom. Lately, though, the stories sound more like the end of a beautiful friendship. Quietly delisted sites, secret algorithms, governments leaning in. Maybe it's time to imagine what comes after a single company decides what the internet contains.
September 05, 2003
A map is never just a picture of the world — it's a picture of the mind that drew it. That's why Europe sits at the centre of European maps, and China at the centre of Chinese ones. So what happens if you let thousands of strangers, one tile at a time, vote a world into being? A small experiment in collective cartography.
September 04, 2003
Half a billion computers in the world, one and a half billion cell phones — and most of the phones still just make calls. For now. Moore's Law doesn't care about your living room or your desktop habits, it just keeps halving the price. Five years from now, what does the world look like when the phone in your pocket is the internet device of choice for two billion people?
September 02, 2003
Hundreds of millions of people are now reachable, anywhere, any time — and somehow it has barely moved the productivity statistics. Strange, for an economy that runs on talking to other humans. Maybe the negative effects cancel it out. Or maybe we just haven't figured out what cell phones are actually for. The telephone, after all, was first imagined as a way to transmit music.
September 01, 2003
Throw enough random chemicals together and life eventually shows up. Throw enough people together and you usually get a dictatorship — at first. But run the simulation a bit longer and odd little feedback loops start to form: art, science, civil society. Stuart Kauffman's self-organization seems to apply to politics too, which suggests democracy may be less fragile than it feels. Hopefully.
August 31, 2003
The Netherlands is a kingdom, and as the saying goes — you wouldn't invent it if it weren't already there. But abolishing the monarchy is a lot of work for not much gain. Unless, of course, there's a sneakier route. What if the Netherlands simply seceded from its own Kingdom, and left the crown to rule a tax-haven in the Caribbean? Two problems, one elegant manoeuvre.
August 30, 2003
Everyone marvels that a four-year-old can speak fluent Chinese. But really — four years is a long time. Given four years and nothing else to do, most adults could manage it too. And honestly, four-year-olds aren't all that articulate. The truly amazing thing about children learning languages turns out to be something other than the speed.
August 29, 2003
Next year's American deficit could hit 500 billion. Sounds big. But how many people could tell you, off the top of their head, how many $100,000 donations it would take to plug it? Politics is mostly conducted in numbers, and numbers are the language of every issue at once. So what happens to democracy when most voters cheerfully admit they don't speak it?
August 28, 2003
Bentham dreamed up the panopticon: a building in which everyone is visible from a single central point. Turns out he was about two centuries early, and the building is called Google. Everything I type here is indexed within a day. There are no more distant lands, no more genuine discoveries — just the next search result. Which makes the internet a curiously un-poetic place.
August 27, 2003
If you own a thing, surely you can do what you like with it — play a CD in your microwave, take a gadget apart, see what makes it tick. Apparently not, if the European IP Enforcement directive has its way. Tinkering, it turns out, is the father of innovation and the grandfather of economic growth. So why is Europe quietly preparing to make it illegal?
August 23, 2003
The North American blackout cost a billion dollars. Sounds like a damning indictment of deregulation, until you remember that Americans spend 400 billion a year on electricity. Why do humans consistently fail to weigh many small gains against one dramatic loss? From flickering lights to farm subsidies, a quick tour of the math nobody wants to do.
August 20, 2003
A modest proposal for a new top-level domain: .ianal, the I-Am-Not-A-Lawyer corner of the Internet. By entering you agree not to sue anyone for anything you find there. A return to the playground before the suits arrived, enforced by the same shrink-wrap logic the lawyers themselves invented.