Posts from July 2002

[untitled]

Another from Quotes of the Day: Isabel Colegate.

"It is not a bad idea to get in the habit of writing down one's thoughts. It saves one having to bother anyone else with them."
The great thing about weblogging is that it's a pure meritocracy. Other people can ignore your ideas if they find them worthless.

Russell Beattie is audioblogging

[Original Link] This is another of those good ideas that I also thought of but never got around to implementing. There are lots of these. I'm better at the inspiration than the perspiration, which means, in Edison's terms, that I'm 1% of a genius where Russell is 100%. :-(

Anyway, the reason I wanted to do this was because it would have been another excuse to buy an iPod. Imagine an audio news aggregator, which would dump the audioblogs you'd subscribed to onto your iPod whenever you synched it. You could then peruse them using the nice iPod interface. A build-your-own radio station. And yes, it would be even better if real radio stations incorporated RSS-type subscription mechanisms. They should be less concerned about syndication than other online publications, because they would still be able to embed advertisments and jingles in the audio.

I'll get around to it one day. The same goes for that wheel thing I invented a while back...

[thanks to John for the link]

Views on Linux in Business

[Original Link] Doc Searls quotes Vint Cerf: "The history of the Net is the history of its protocols".

And then in this Linux Journal article he emphasises

...that the real virtue of Linux and other forms of infrastructural software...is not only that it's open and free, but that it's transparent. It is see-thru infrastructure. In fact, what makes it infrastructural is the fact that you can see through it. You can trust it because it has no secrets. ...Bill [Gates] says, "Trustworthy Computing is computing that is as available, reliable and secure as electricity, water services and telephony." We should note that all those services are pure infrastructure whose workings are mostly transparent.

Half the world has never used a telephone

[Original Link] Clay Shirky has written a splendid article, discussing this well-known maxim, which teaches us something about statistics, something about catchphrases, and quite a bit about telecoms. [Found on Michael Gilbert's excellent Nonprofit Online News.]

Update, twenty years later: Clay's article is no longer at its original location but can be found on the Internet Archive here.