Wednesday, January 8, 2003
- Clay Shirky: Customer-owned Networks: ZapMail and the Telecommunications Industry.
The service fees charged by the average telephone company (call waiting, caller ID, dial-tone and number portability fees, etc) add enough to the cost of a phone that a two-line household that moved only its second line to VoIP could save $40 a month before making their first actual phone call. By simply paying for the costs of the related services, a VoIP customer can get all their domestic phone calls thrown in as a freebie. As with ZapMail, the principal threat to the telephone companies’ ability to shrink costs but not revenues is their customers’ common sense. Given the choice, an increasing number of customers will simply bypass the phone company and buy the hardware necessary to acquire the service on their own.
- Clay Shirky: LazyWeb and RSS: Given Enough Eyeballs, Are Features Shallow Too?
Thus the LazyWeb is currently limited to those environments that maximize the likelihood that a developer with a social itch and a good grasp of the problem space will happen to read a particular LazyWeb description. In practice, this means that successful LazyWeb requests work best when posted on a few blogs read by many developers.
- Joe Hughes: Clay Shirky on LazyWeb.org.
I would attribute much of the early success of the LazyWeb meme to the fact that those who’ve invoked it have been relatively well- known in the blogosphere (i.e. Steven Johnson, Cory Doctorow). They have large audiences, which means that they’re more likely to find a taker, because more people see the request, and they have more fame to offer the taker. Without this “star power”, I don’t think that LazyWeb requests will be substantially more successful than requests posted to ShouldExist.
- Re: LazyWeb and RSS.
Corporate users saw there was money to save by using free software, *if only* there was a free word processor. Word processor! You had emacs, CVS and LaTeX and you wanted a *word processor*! Why? Because the better software wasn’t “familiar enough”. Ok. After several years we have, what, 5 good free wordprocessors? Repeat ad infinitum. Now we find ourselves in the peculiar situation where new users are introduced to lookalikeware such as GNOME, Evolution and Openoffice — and they complain they are just pale clones. Well of course they are! That’s why they were created!
- Sam Ruby: WIBNI Trackback 2.0.
Now along comes another application which would like to extend this [Trackback] API. Wouldn’t It Be Nice If instead of URL encoded parameters, one could simply POST the RSS item that contains all the yummy goodies that one could imagine and let the server decide what pieces it wanted to keep and what pieces it chooses to ignore?
- Aaron Swartz: Re: WIBNI Trackback 2.0.
xmlns:foo=http://foo.example.net/&foo:bar=baz
- Jeffrey Zeldman: This Reporter.
What’s profoundly striking to anyone who’s been paying attention is that every browser maker today knows standards compliance is not an optional extra but a baseline requirement.
- Les Orchard: More code toward the Personal Web Proxy.
It works, and does stuff, but I’m sure it demonstrates a complete lack of understanding of large portions of the Twisted framework, Python itself, and likely causes forest fires.
- On a side note, remember that flap just before the holidays about the Coders-Only Club? Well, look at it this way: some people have strong opinions about the way computers should work. Other people have strong opinions about the way computers should work, and back them up with code. It seems obvious to me which people deserve more attention. Maybe that’s just me.
- Brian Donovan: More about the dead cats.
Lest there be any confusion : I am not advocating XML-based content management or the pursuit of the “separation of content from presentation” Holy Grail. It’s not about purity or building a site using DocBook and XSL-FO. It’s about reducing your own suffering over the long haul. … I don’t think that my hypothetical cms exists yet. It (or something like it) will show up eventually. Given enough time, I will evolve one of my tools in that direction.
- Daniel Bogan: Move your Chimera bookmarks to Safari.
- Mac OS X Hints: Import Omniweb and Chimera bookmarks into Safari.
- Checky for Mozilla and Netscape.
With Checky you can now easy setup, combine and use 18 different online Validator and Checker services. Simple choose your services with Checky-Agent than browse to a web resource and press F10 to display the results of the selected services in a new browser tab or window. Service-Interfaces available for HTML, XHTML, CSS, RDF, RSS, XML, SGML, WAI, 508, various viewer, valets and purifiers.
- VersionTracker: Metallizer.
Haxie to add or remove brushed metal in Jaguar
.
- Mac OS X Hints: Show Safari’s keyboard shortcut list
- Paul Ford: Gorge.
There was fighting in the car when we came to the gorge. All had been fine, then we stopped for some elk jerky and something changed. I made a joke about Christmas - “I wonder if Santa eats elf jerky” - and then something was said, and something else, and suddenly 6 exchanges later, including a short speech by me explaining how certain things were never changing, we were sullen. The sign for the gorge appeared, and she parked.
- In the comments of an unrelated article, it was pointed out that the new 17-inch TiBook is actually aluminum, clearing the way for years of endless debate on the correct way to spell
aluminum
.
- The Hacker FAQ.
The following list is an attempt to cover some of the issues that will invariably come up when people without previous experience of the hacker community try to hire a hacker. … DISCLAIMER: The author is a hacker. Bias is inevitable.
- Sam Ruby: Re: Some Obligation Required.
I’ve found that rebelling against foolish social norms is not conducive to my inner peace. On the other hand, lampooning them is a blast.
- I currently Google-own the phrase cat urine, which links to my story of how I turned 30 (
surrounded by loved ones, and cat urine
).
Filed under clayshirky, jaguar, lazyweb, linkdump, mozilla, muse, netscape, osx, rss, trackback, utilities
