Saturday, August 31, 2002

Where's the (third) party?

Fred Grott wonders on the eve of the eve of Labor Day.

Lots of other interesting stuff in the Discussion Group. Much more than ever before.

CARP Day

September 1 is the first day that Webcasters wishing to stay on the air will owe the new CARP-set royalties for every tune they stream to every listener, not only going forward, but retroactively to Octobr 1998. That's hundreds of thousands of dollars in many cases.

Here's what Lou Josephs says about it.

Unintended creepvertising

Go to Topica.com (home of the Cluetrain list). On my two browsers, a pop-under window manifests itself. All one sees peeking out from under the top window is a visual of what appears to be a dead baby.

It's actually a live baby, but without going to the window and reading the whole headline, you'd never know.

Jabber hits critical PR mass, interop finally hits IM

News.com: Out with AOL, in with Jabber. It had to happen eventually. Now it has. The non-interoperative closed doors on IM systems from AOL, MSN and Yahoo are now fated to open. The sooner those companies realize this is a Good Thing that their customers have always wanted, they better off they'll be. (Remember when you couldn't send an email from AOL to, say, Prodigy or Compuserve? These guys are still there with instant messaging. It's about as anti-Net as you can get and still operate in reality.)

Apple shoud take the lead in opening up IM, as it has with so many other standards (USB, SCSI, FireWire, wi-fi and now Rendezvous). The company's new iChat already makes some use of the Jabber IM protocol. I suspect the only reason iChat is closed (except to AIM) is due to some contractual agreement with AOL. But that also puts Apple in a unique position to tell AOL the gig is up.

Thanks to Wes for the link.

Pro-industrial rethinking

Jerry has a good idea that perfectly brings blogs and wikis together: industrial briefing books. Think of them as open source aggregated knowledge around every business subject you can name. (For those who don't know, wikis are joint web publications by any number of interested authors.)

When anybody points at an entry, Google's bots follow and rank the links. Watch what happens with this one for the music industry, for example.