Thursday, February 20, 2003

Say hello to the commodity laptop

I filed this report this morning to Linux Joural, live from the Desktop Linux Summit in San Diego. It's pretty neat news: for the price of a digital camera, you can have a nice 2.9 pound Linux laptop. Blog bonus: Chris Pirillo plays a starring role in the piece.

Peace out

Weldell Berry is one of the most thoughtful and flat-out-excellent journalists of our time. His latest is A Citizen's Response to the National Security Strategy of the United States of America. An excerpt:

Unless we are willing to kill innocents in order to kill the guilty, the need to be lethal will be impeded constantly by the need to be careful. Because we must suppose a new supply of villains to be always in the making, we can expect the war on terrorism to be more or less endless, endlessly costly and endlessly supportive of a thriving bureaucracy.

I think both sides represented here: the Bush Administration's National Security Strategy (more of a policy, actually) and Berry's response, typify both the Strict Father and Nurturant Parent modalities that George Lakoff talks about here.

Harbingery, cont'd

Ready to have your blogs data mined? An excerpt:

Kleinberg suggests that the method could be applied to weblogs to track new social trends. For example, identifying word bursts in the hundreds of thousands of personal diaries now on the web could help advertisers quickly spot an emerging craze.

Way newer

Jonathan interviews Marc Canter.

On the Glooger thing, he adds, On the plus side, every VC on the planet is now wondering what this blogging thing and how they can get a piece.

Once again, OR logic at work

Jimmy Guterman also has a bigjo take on the Gloogle thing at Business 2.0:

With Google -- the site that everyone you know visits every day -- sponsoring a blogging tool and hosting service, blogging could now become as mainstream as sending e-mail...

The Blogger hosting service will become faster and more reliable when it's moved to Google servers, and millions of people who have never given a thought to blogs will be exposed to them when they visit Google. The intense bloggers, that small group of correspondents who seem to sit in front of their computers posting all day and all night, have begun the expected insular conversation about what this means for them. I expect that what it means for them, more than anything else, is that they are about to get a lot more company. Some bloggers have carved pleasant, comfortable niches for themselves that are about to get challenged. That might not be great news for the individual bloggers affected, but it's great news for the many thousands of blogs that will be born as a result of this development.

He goes on:

There have been some early rumblings in the blogging community, which tends to value speedy postings over considered ones, about whether Google's purchase of Pyra will lead to Blogger-created or Blogspot-hosted blogs somehow getting preference over those created using different authoring tools (like Radio Userland and LiveJournal). I have no idea what Google plans to do, but the examples of previous new services from the company (like Google News and Google Groups) suggest that it is maniacal about delivering "pure" results. Other early rumblings have centered on the notion of including blog postings in the Google News service. This would further tear down the wall between "professional" and "amateur" reporting. Depending on your point of view, this prospect is either very exciting or the end of legitimate news. Either way, it will be fun.

Does anybody know what this "expected insular conversation" is, or how it implies that incumbent bloggers don't welcome company?

And why does he think "millions of people who have never given a thought to blogs will be exposed to them when they visit Google"? How, exactly?

He's certainly right about the walls coming down.

[Later...] Here's Dave on the subject. So Google bought into this idea. Thanks Google, seriously.

Danny Sullivan of SearchEngineWatch.com says I'm guessing one chief reason Google has done this is for ad distribution reasons. The Blogger network features plenty of high-quality web sites where Google could place contextually-relevant paid listings. I agree. Google knows how to create a demand market for advertising — one where you the reader may actually want some of those little unobtrusive results that show up on Google, off to the side of your latest search results. Think of these as paid text messages and nothing more — something you might like to see but doesn't get in the way. Or as a class of stuff you would like to see. Very interesting possibilities here.

He adds,

Google has long said it has no intention of becoming a portal, but so far, it's hard not to see the acquisition of Blogger as adding a portal feature in the same way that Yahoo did when it bought GeoCities. We'll almost certainly see an eventual option from the Google home page inviting visitors to create their own weblogs using Blogger. It will be discrete. It won't get in the way of searching at Google. Yet, it will have nothing to do with search, a giant departure for the company.

I think he's way off base there. How about looking at blogs as a whole search category, like images and catalogs and newsgroups? Then blogs become another tab on the search page. I doubt Google would cull blogs out of the main search area (though perhaps they could). Blogs are too much what the Web is all about. By involving themselves with blogware, however, Google will be able to do a better job of understanding what blogs are all about as a species of journal. There is a much better chance for blogs to be added to Google News, and perhaps also to the tab roster, than to be subtracted from general searches. The chance that we'll see a blog portal on the Google search page is about zero.

More proof it's just nanoseconds after the Big Bang on this blog thing

Kevin Burton just came out with Newsmonster. He explains:

NewsMonster is an advanced weblog manager, reputation system, micropayment economy, and semantic web application. NewsMonster allows the user to keep track of news and use reputation within the blogging community to help discover track of news and use reputation within the blogging community to help discover new weblogs, important articles, and other compelling relationships.

Song of the month

Michael Taht helps us remember Columbia, and the deep human urge to fly equally far and free. The song is Rhysling and Me. Here's the original MP3. Here's the version he made after Columbia went down. Here are the lyrics. Both are relesed under a Creative Commons ShareAlike license.

Try to hear and read it with dry eyes.

It helps if you look up.

As seen off TV

Lisa Rein: How do you put a price on our priceless past? About Jeb Bush's proposed closing of a historic collection at the Florida state library. (Woops! It's the whole library.)