December 31, 2002
New Year's moblog going
The New Year's Moblog is going. Please take a look...
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Democracy 101 with Professor Lessig
16:12 UTC » Japanese Policy - Privacy
As I struggle to prepare my thoughts for the Davos Blueprint for Japan 2020 panel, I keep ending up at the conclusion that Japan is not a functioning democracy. Although it is a loop, the lack of transparency, the lack of an open function market, the lack of a free and independent media, the lack of a functioning judiciary... All of these things point to the fact that we don't have a democracy. I'm not blaming anyone for this and I think that many people are sincerely trying to reform Japan, but I do believe that it is much deeper than just some stimulation packages and lip service to transparency.
Larry talks about the "Framers" in "The Future of Ideas" and what he says about them sounds pretty good. It sounds like the "Framers" really tried very hard to structure a democracy that is robust against corruption and able to self-correct. So, I decided to ask Professor Lessig about democracy. (It sure is nice having a comparative constitutional law professor in the neighborhood. ;-) )
Professor Lessig gave me some great things to think about which I thought I would share. (This may not be very new to people who don't live in a totalitarian state... if there is such a think these days...)
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The struggle for privacy in Japan
I'm sure it's bad everywhere, but the struggle for privacy is very tough in Japan. The privacy bill as it is currently written has the risk of limiting the freedom of journalists in collecting information. For this reason, privacy advocates have been at odds with the mass media generally and journalists in general tend to be negative about privacy issues. (Although some journalists have been doing a great job covering stuff.) Privacy debates in Japan tend to be rather emotional without dealing with the technical issues very much. It's kind of like arguing in court without an understanding of the law. Since I began protesting the national ID in Japan I have found that I am now able to convince most technical people about the merits of having privacy built into the system and it is now mostly non-technical and "interested parties" arguing...
Having said that, there are people who ought to know better, who are probably our greatest enemies.
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Hidden face recognition cameras in Narita and Kansai international airports
The Asahi reports (in Japanese) that Ministry of Finance has installed hidden cameras in Narita and Kansai international airports. They were installed for the World Cup but are now used to automatically match your face against a database consisting of their blacklist as well as blacklists from other ministries. It appears that the cameras are installed in the passageway after people get off of the plane and are on their way to baggage claim and customs. The Asahi points out that people are constitutionally protected in Japan from being photographed secretly by the government except in special circumstances and it is unlikely that this would qualify. The Japanese government is notorious for being sloppy with sensitive information often leaking secrets to foreign governments and personal information to criminals. Recently a tape containing records from the National ID system were stolen from a car. My question is, WHY WERE THEY IN THE CAR IN THE FIRST PLACE. The procedure for handling the destruction of the tapes in the airport is still a black box. I assume this is a security measure. bah!
Thanks for this link Tai
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Hiroo Yamagata's translator's notes for The Future of Ideas
Hiroo's notes are worth reading. It's a good summary and frames the issues in Japan well. Activism in Japan died with the student activists of the 70's. It's quite "un-cool" to be an activist. If Larry can get people like Hiroo to become activists and support important issues, I think we still have a chance.
Larry LessigThe Future of Ideas has been translated into Japanese. As sometimes happens, the translation improves the book. Not only is the title better ("Commons", which the American publisher vetoed), but it also has a great and revealing introduction by the translator, Hiroo Yamagata. As always, the translator reveals as much about the work he translates as the world he translates into.
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December 29, 2002
Dinner with Kazuo Shimizu
21:58 UTC » Energy - Joi's Diary - Photo
Today I had dinner with Daiji Hirata, Tai Watanabe and Kazuo Shimizu. Daiji, Kazuo and Neoteny are investors in Tai's company MediaProbe which is working on an auto community site. Shimizu-san is probably the most famous auto journalist in Japan. He is invited by all of the big auto companies to test drive cars and write about all the cool new stuff. He's a BIG fan of the hydrogen economy and is the leading journalist in Japan on fuel cells. We talked about ECD and their hydrogen technology. The US lead in a lot of the electric vehicle research as well as a lot of the early fuel cell work, but Japan is clearly putting a lot of effort behind the hydrogen economy and Toyota is probably leading the pack in hybrid cars. I hope that my next car will have a hydrogen component...
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PGP key transition announcement
14:57 UTC » Computer and Network Risks
This is my pgp key transition announcement. If you don't know what this means, you should. You can go to the pgp web site and Rich and Bob explain the key transition process to my on my blog.
The key is here.
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Hacking traffic lights
14:28 UTC » Computer and Network Risks
I love that the "tone" of phrack articles is the same as Cook's Illustrated articles. ;-)
A more environmentally friendly way of traveling by car. As some of you might recall in almost all the hacking movies, books, TV shows, etc. there has been a case of someone fiddling with traffic lights. Well we all just giggled at the unrealistic aspect of it and didn't think twice. Well in my quest for a more appealing planet for our children I felt compelled to think of a way in order to reduce the amount of pollution emitted by vehicles of today.Standing at a intersection, nobody else around, you're still stuck behind the red light, and this invisible barrier of governmental guilt has enough power to let you wait there and pollute the air more and more, just for a measly green light. Wouldn't it be leet having a laptop in the car where you could just select the intersection off a list, change the timing or current stream running, and ride off with fewer time wasted and fewer pollutants exhausted and a clear conscience.
Now, enough crap about the reasons, now for the technical shit.
Today's traffic controlling system is a well oiled redundant network that utilizes the same protocols that we are all aware of. Yes it is hackable and it is like in the movies. :) here we go!
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Moblog New Year's Countdown!
We're going to have an open moblog for people to post pictures to on New Year's Eve to welcome 2003. It is "open" but please use common sense when sending stuff. The URL is http://www.bloggers.jp/. The email address to send stuff to is mailto:misoka@bloggers.jp. The site and the email address will be running between GMT 2002/12/31 0:00-23:59.
Send jpeg images as attachments with the title of the item as the subject. The template will resize the height to 120 pixels. 120x120 is probably the best size.
Pass it on. ;-)
"Misoka" comes from "Omisoka" which means New Year's Eve in Japanese
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Low cost GPS jammer
This may not help Sadaam, but just in case you're put under GPS surveillance house arrest by an oppressive government, you'll need to learn how to build your own GPS jammer.
A low cost device to temporarily disable the reception of the civilian
course acquisition (C/A) code used for the standard positioning service
(SPS)[1] on the Global Positioning System (GPS/NAVSTAR) L1 frequency of
1575.42 MHz.This is accomplished by transmitting a narrowband Gaussian noise signal,
with a deviation of +/- 1.023 MHz, on the L1 GPS frequency itself. This
technique is a little more complicated than a simple continuous wave (CW)
jammer, but tends to be more effective (i.e. harder to filter) against
spread spectrum based radio receivers.
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The about Time and CoValue of eBay Reputation: 7.6% of Price
12:47 UTC » Emergent Democracy
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December 28, 2002
Why the US dropped the bomb on Japan
 |
Santa Barbara News-PressThe historical record holds that Japan surrendered in response to the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki by the United States. Revisionists argue that the Japanese were already defeated at the time, and the atomic bombs were used simply to intimidate the Soviet Union.Mr. Hasegawa dismisses both views as "very, very American-centric."
...
It was Josef Stalin's final-hour declaration of war on Japan that marked the end of the conflict in the Pacific, according to Mr. Hasegawa, whose specialties include Russian and Soviet history as well as Russo-Japanese relations.
Obviously, this is very relevant to the current "War-on-Terror" and is an important part of Japanese history. Japan is still struggling with Russia over the islands that the Russians claimed as theirs after the war...
Doc's entry has a bigger quote and some interesting thoughts. Go there for more info...
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December 27, 2002
moblogging resources
11:10 UTC » Blogging about Blogging
I'm starting to get bashed about not crediting for or getting too much credit for moblogging. A lot of stuff is out there and stuff is happening in parallel. I've tried to organize what I know about moblogging into an outline of stuff about moblogging and stuff about how to moblog. This is by no means complete. Can people please take a look and help me complete this resource list? I will keep it up to date.
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Dinner with Governor Domoto
00:17 UTC » Joi's Diary - Photo
 Governor Domoto on the left and Merle Okawara on the right |
Domoto-san talk about what a great time she was having. Being governor in Japan is much like being the president of a country. Chiba has 6 million people and she basically calls the shots. It's very different than when she was working in the central government. She also won as an independant so she has very little exposure to political pressure. I'm trying to work with her to get some sort of special project for Hydrogen in Chiba as well as trying to figure out how to work with the biomass energy folks.
We talked a alot about renewable energy, bio mass and food. The food was VERY good. It was all from Chiba. We agreed that we would all take a weekend trip into the countryside to see the rural area of Chiba and enjoy the flowers and the food sometime in Feb.
Merle, Domoto-san and Morita-san. Today's been quite a "strong-woman" day. ;-)
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December 26, 2002
Lunch with Mrs. Morita
15:24 UTC » Joi's Diary - Photo
 Shigeaki Saegusa and Yoshiko Morita |
We talked a lot about cooking and I got a chance to brag about my Turkey recipe. She said that she always has Christmas Turkey made at the Maxim's in the Sony building based on her recipe. I told her I would send her my recipe.
Mrs. Morita is a very dynamic and interesting person. She is involved heavily in the arts, and loves great food and interesting company. She is also a great social dancer. When I first met her, she was doing a the jitterbug at Saegusa-san's birthday party.
It was also fun visiting the house that described in such detail in John Nathan's book about Sony. We talked about John Nathan who she liked. John is the father of an old friend of mine, Zack. John is also a well-known translator of Japanese works such as the works of Mishima and Kenzaburo Oe.
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mail2entry script for MT moblog
I've been getting a lot of attention for my moblog even though it's not such a big technical feat really. All you need is a script to convert email into MT entires. We're going to make the code available so that hopefully more people can experiment with moblogging. It's being made available under a standard GPL v.2 license. Please let me know what you think. We hope to continue to improve it. The file is available at: http://joi.ito.com/archives/src/mail2entry-2002-12-25.tgz
Here are some notes about installation.
WarningThanks for all the work on this SenThis is a first attempt -- there are some things missing, but someone w/appropriate UNIX experience should be able to succeed in installation and configuration. I may update the instructions as I get feedback.
Prerequisites
The ability to read English and follow simple instructions.
A host connected to the Internet which can receive email [1] and:
Python >= 2.2.2
MT
enabled w/ the XML-RPC interface
a blog (determine your blog id)
a blog user, the associated password [2]Please note that this code was designed to run on the host which the blog itself is running on. Other configurations may be possible, but I don't recommend them and don't plan on supporting them at the moment.
Please send feedback to me for the moment. We may designate someone to be in charge of the code later. Also, since it uses XML-RPC, it should be easy to get it to work with other blog platforms.
PS The GPL license on this code overrides the CC license on this site.
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December 25, 2002
Steve Mann on glogs
 image by Steve Mann |
Steve MannThe main difference between weBLOGS and cyborGLOGS is that blogs often originate from a desktop computer, wheras glogs can originate while walking around, often without any conscious thought and effort, as stream-of-(de)consciousness glogging
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Japanese National Police Agency General Security Response Council
14:35 UTC » Computer and Network Risks - Photo - Privacy
 This is a picture of Suguru Yamaguchi smiling when I told him I'd blog him. |
I said that the US is taking a very different stance towards security since 9/11 and that many of the new security measures that the US are taking may in the long run end up hurting national security since a great deal of privacy is being breached, agents are being allowed to work with shady characters for short term gains which may end up being long term losses and the whole TIA thing may not work. I suggested that we do an extensive analysis of the US anti-terror measures and identify whether each of the measures are 1) things we should copy, 2) things we should ignore, and 3) things that are bad for the Japanese people. I urged everyone not to allow Japan to get suckered into doing something stupid in response to US pressure. In particular, I pressured the person from the Foreign Ministry to be aware of these risks.
There is a chart that the NPA (Japanese pdf) produced showing which countries many of the portscans and pings were coming from. Yamaguchi-san pointed out that this didn't necessarily reflect the source and I concurred.
I talked a bit about the financial services sector problems with organized crime and hacking and that we should focus on and analysis of organized crime rather than do general surveys of smaller crimes and hacker rings.
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December 24, 2002
Yahoo getting ready to kick Google off portal?
saw this on David Winer's Scripting News
Dave WinerPress release: Yahoo to acquire Inktomi. Clearly they're getting ready to kick Google off their portal.
Yahoo! to Acquire InktomiI had heard rumors that Yahoo was trying to steal stuff from Google and was being generally un-supportive even though they were an investor. (Unconfirmed theory. Will edit this if someone tells me this is wrong...) But I think that Google News probably shocked everyone who though that search mean... search. To a blogger, everything looks like a blog. To a search company, everything is search. ;-) Well, it will be interesting to see what happens when Google vs. Yahoo becomes no-holds-barred.
Monday December 23, 9:19 am ET
Creates the Most Comprehensive Search Offering on the Web with Largest Global Audience, Unmatched Breadth and Depth of Online Services and World Class Technology
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December 23, 2002
Time Magazine Person of the Year - The Whistleblowers
saw this first on Dave Winer's weblog
The whistleblowers at WorldCom, Enron and the FBI, Cynthia Cooper, Sherron Watkins and Colleen Rowley won the honor from Time Magazine this year. This is great. They deserve it. They must be protected and honored.
You can't have whistleblowers without privacy and the whistleblower protection bill that I am working on is also an important component. I've missed the last few meetings and I feel guilty. I see the bill headed towards bureaucratic mumbo-jumbo that won't help anyone. Mental note to myself to make comments on the current draft which I don't agree with. I wonder if the day will come when Japan honors whistleblowers like this. Time says, " They took huge professional and personal risks to blow the whistle on what went wrong at WorldCom, Enron and the FBI—and in so doing helped remind us what American courage and American values are all about." I hope that some day I can say this about Japanese values. Today, I don't think I can.
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December 22, 2002
Moblogging update
The Guardian ran a piece on moblogs and I got a link. Cool.
Thanks for sending me this link Howard
We recently moblogged a wedding for Kana & Toshi. It's in Japanese, but you can get the idea. It was fun because a lot of people posted.
Planning to have a massive New Years Eve moblog. I will post the email address and instructions one we have the site ready...
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December 21, 2002
Blogmapping
My brother-in-law Scott Fisher is really into location based stuff and does a lot of stuff with augmented reality and virtual environments. He's at USC now, but is visiting for Christmas with my sister Mimi. Anyway, we were talking about blogs and location and he sent me the link for Blogmapper which lets you associate blog entries with locations on a map. Scott interested in doing something in the area and so am I. Does anyone know of any other work going on in the area of tagging blog entries with location data? Obviously, location based moblogging is something we MUST do.
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The Turkey
23:31 UTC » Eating and Cooking - Joi's Diary - Photo - Technology Controversy
Just finished brining the turkey, drying it, and stuffing it into my fridge. This year, as always, I am using Cook's Illustrated as my guide. Cook's Illustrated is THE BEST cooking guide. It is extremely scientific and even a bit geeky, but really wonderful. Since last year, I have started putting it in the fridge uncovered to dry the skin before cooking it. This, according to Cook's Illustrated helps give you crispy skin. I started brining a few years ago after reading an article on Cook's Illustrated about the effect of brinig.
Cook's IllustratedJane Bowers, head of the Department of Foods and Nutrition at Kansas State University, says salt is used in meat processing to extract proteins from muscle cells and make these proteins more viscous:“Brining turkey causes a change in the structure of the proteins in the muscle. They become sticky, which allows them to hold more water.” Citing a similar example, she says frankfurters without sodium are limp. “It is the salt that gives hot dogs their plumpness,” she says.
Tina Seelig, scientist and author of The Epicurean Laboratory (W. H. Freeman, 1991), says salt causes protein strands to become denatured, or unwound. This is the same process that occurs when proteins are exposed to heat, acid, or alcohol. “When protein strands unwind, they get tangled in one another and trap water in the matrix that forms,” says Seelig.
And Dr. Bill Schwartz, director of technical services at the Butterball Turkey Company, adds that when these unravelled proteins are exposed to heat they gel — much like a fried egg white — and form a barrier that prevents water from leaking out of the bird as it cooks. The capillary action that draws blood out of the meat and gives it a milky-white color also helps the brining solution penetrate deep into the meat, according to Schwartz. This accounts for the pleasant salty flavor even of the inner breast meat.
You need to pay to search their database, but it's worth it.
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Wanchan@Hotel Okura
This is Mr. Watanabe (we call him "Wanchan") who is the head doorman at the Hotel Okura. He's always very friendly. I met him on his first day on the job as a bell boy when I as probably around 10 years old or so. My mother was doing a lot of work in Japan for ECD and we stayed at the Hotel Okura. I hung out at the game center and with the staff. I remember even eating in the staff restaurant "behind the scenes" at the hotel. Mr. Watanabe showed me the secret doors and stuff and even took me to watch the Hotel Okura baseball team when he was a pitcher there. We've both grown up since then. I helped him find a cheap computer for his son when he was going to college and he makes sure I get free parking in front of the hotel.
Anyway, if you see him, say "Hi Wanchan!" and tell him you saw him on my blog. ;-)
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December 20, 2002
The Science of Christmas
Very funny
The Science of ChristmasAn analysis of Christmas has been wending it's way across the Internet for a few years now. This analysis purports to debunk Christmas by showing that Santa could not possibly visit each and every house to distribute presents on Christmas Eve. But the analysis is deeply flawed because it is written from a pure physics perspective
Full Story
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Sean Penn's visit to Iraq
Penn's trip into the heart of enemy territory disgusted many Americans and won him the nickname "Baghdad Sean," a takeoff on the "Hanoi Jane" moniker Jane Fonda earned by visiting North Vietnam in 1971.Good for Sean. It tooks guts for him to go to Iraq and I commend him for it. Shame on Iraq for screwing it up.
I first met Sean in 1991 or so when I was associate to the executive producer for the movie, Indian Runner which Sean Penn directed. The movie did OK at Canne, but ended up not doing well in the box office. The movie was a lot of fun starring people like David Morse, Viggo Mortensen, Charles Bronson, Dennis Hopper, Patricia Arquette, and Valeria Golino. It was my first and last job on a movie set, but I learned a lot and had a lot of fun. Later, when we were promoting the movie in Japan, I also took care of Sean in Tokyo and acted as his interpreter. I found Sean to be a really funny and very intelligent guy who I now greatly respect. He also introduced me to Heather, a good friend of Winona Ryder's, who was living in Tokyo at the time and who I still keep in touch with.
Anyway... I think this took a lot of guts and makes my previous entry about my fear of criticism seem quite trivial.
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Report: up to 1,000 Mideast immigrants jailed yesterday in So. CA
saw Xeni's post on Boing Boing
According to Xeni, "Representatives of some local Iranian-American groups were quoted yesterday as saying they understand that the detainees may be shipped off to Arizona." There is an LA Times article as well.ReutersTop Stories - Reuters
Hundreds of Muslim Immigrants Rounded Up in Calif.
Wed Dec 18, 8:47 PM ET
By Jill SerjeantLOS ANGELES (Reuters) - Hundreds of Iranian and other Middle East citizens were in southern California jails on Wednesday after coming forward to comply with a new rule to register with immigration authorities only to wind up handcuffed and behind bars.
Shocked and frustrated Islamic and immigrant groups estimate that more than 500 people have been arrested in Los Angeles, neighboring Orange County and San Diego in the past three days under a new nationwide anti-terrorism program. Some unconfirmed reports put the figure as high as 1,000.
The arrests sparked a demonstration by hundreds of Iranians outside a Los Angeles immigration office. The protesters carried banners saying "What's next? Concentration camps?" and "What happened to liberty and justice?."
I remember after the arrests following 9/11, the Japanese-American community made a public comment condemning the unfair imprisonment of Arab-Americans. This is really the 1940's all over again. And I was just starting to think about moving back to the US again. When are the American people going to wake up, read history and realize that they're headed down a pretty well trodden and terrible path? I complain a lot about the Japanese people being apathetic and unaware, but I wonder if this might be better than thinking you're aware and wishing for war and treating immigrants as if they were "enemy combatants" with no rights. Amazing.
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December 19, 2002
Karuna and Horace
21:09 UTC » Joi's Diary - Photo
Karuna and her husband Horace visited my sister for dinner at our house and I got to say hi and chat a bit. Mimi and Justin did an interview of Karuna on Chanpon. Horace works for the US government and Karuna is now taking care of their new baby, Justin. Before that Karuna was an anchor for CNN on their prime-time news show and before that for other news agencies such as NHK. I remember when she was broadcasting Japanese news in English for NHK, all of the Japanese students in the US who watched her show became HUGE fans of hers. She's quite an amazing person. I first met Karuna at the American School in Japan when for some reason, my trig teacher decided that my algebra sucked and made me take an algebra class with the class below me. The only good thing was that I got to sit next to Karuna. Anyway, all of Karuna's fans can rest assured. Horace is a great guy and worthy of his new position as Karuna's husband. ;-)
Horace, can you do something about the treatment of Arabs immigrants in the US?
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Talking to Howard Rheingold
07:11 UTC » Introspective - Joi's Diary - Photo
Howard and I have known each other for a long time. I visited Howard often when he was at the Whole Earth Review and I was hanging out in San Francisco with Timothy Leary and the gang. Howard turned me on to a lot of really interesting thoughts and was one of the first people who helped me started writing. Howard wrote THE book on Virtual Reality which influenced me and the rest of the world and I ended up working with (my now step-brother) Scott Fisher at Telepresence Research who Howard writes about in the book. After the Virtual Reality book, he wrote a book on Virtual Communities in which I appeared. (Maybe the first time I appeared in an English Book.) Howard has always been a great visionary for the future and I'm happy to be a part of it. When the www started to happen, my Eccosys team and I set up one of the first web sites in Japan. Howard writes about how this influenced his thinking. These days we talk about Smartmobs ubiquitous computing and the future of embedded systems. As always, community and empowerment are key.
Howard and I talked a lot about how to be an evangelist for the future. We talked about the issue of how to give credit where credit is due, but how it is often difficult to credit people who you do not know about or who haven't influenced your thinking directly. (As I've recently discovered once again, when Japanese diary community criticized my description of blogs.) Howard told me that there was a saying in the I Ching that says something like, "If you climb up on the wall, you can see farther, but you also become an easier target." This is extremely relevant. We talked about how some criticism is very important, no matter how hurting it is, to internalize, since it will help us grow. Some criticism is important in order to understand how people will view us, and some criticism should just be ignored. Sorting this out is quite a task, but necessary and important. We agreed that learning from your critics helps you fix sloppy thoughts as well as prevent mistakes in the future.
On the other hand, what's a pioneer without critics? One chairman of a large company I know said, "I don't trust ANYONE who doesn't have some enemies." I don't know who to credit this to, but "You can identify the pioneers because they are the ones with the arrows in their backs." Stan Ovshinsky says this often.
So, my conclusion? Give credit to those you influence you or are doing important work. Listen to the critics, be thick-skinned and keep on truckin'.
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December 18, 2002
Interview with Cameron Marlow of Blogdex
05:22 UTC » Blogging about Blogging
Blogdex is one of my favorite tools which is now an essential part of my morning RSS fix. This meta-blog space is quite interesting. I have a feeling that blog space is screwing up Googles Page Rankings a bit because there are so many links inside and between blogs. On the other hand, if you think blogs are important, I guess the rankings aren't screwed up. I guess as blogs start creating more metadata, the method for ranking can be tuned more. It will be interesting to see what Google thinks of this space. At Supernova, Sergey Brin said he would consider taking input from weblogs.com to trigger updates. This would be a big first step...megnut.comThere's an interview with Cameron Marlow, creator of Blogdex and researcher at MIT Media Lab over at kiruba.com. Good stuff. Also, that's where pb was interviewed last month.
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December 17, 2002
Leonard Liu
18:04 UTC » Joi's Diary - Photo
a bio from the ASE web page that I edited a bitLeonard Liu, Ph.D.Leonard Y. Liu was President of ASE Inc. since November 1999 and announced his retirement December 6. He was also the Chief Executive Officer of ASE Test and Universal Scientific Industrial Co. Prior to joining ASE, he was Chairman and Chief Executive Officer of Walker Interactive System Inc. Dr Liu has held other top management positions at leading technology companies, including Chief Operating Officer of Cadence Design Systems, President of Acer Group worldwide and General Manager of IBM's application enabling software business unit.
Leonard visited today and we spent the day brainstorming. Leonard is on my advisory board and is one of my most helpful business advisors. I met him through his daughter Peggy Liu. Digital Garage invested in his daughter's company and he invested in Digital Garage and later Neoteny.
Leonard was the chief hardware and software architect at IBM at one point and architected SNA and SQL. He moved from research to management and left IBM to become a well-respected serial turn-around/take-to-the-next-level CEO. Leonard is tremendously energetic and is extremely execution oriented and visionary at the same time. I'm always impressed with Leonard's focus and his willingness to spend time to coach me when I have something specific to talk about. I always felt very guilty taking big chunks of Leonard's time when he had a $3bn company to run, but now that he is "retiring" I hope I will get to see him more often and feel less guilty. ;-)
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Blogger API v2
09:49 UTC » Blogging about Blogging
For you serious bloggers...
Blogger announced their new API 2.0 to the developers mailing list. Dave Winer urges Blogger to support the MetaWeblog API. Ben Trott comments as well. Evan explains that it is a preliminary release and they are requesting feedback. On the other hand, Evan explains that the feedback is generally positive. Ben Trott says he have received feedback from Steve Jenson. Ben talks about security a bit. For those of you who don't know, Ben wrote some of the PGP stuff for PERL I think...
So, here is an amazing dance. One of the greatest things about blogs is that they are not being developed by huge evil companies, but by individuals who are members of a community. The blogs tools are amazingly compatible from a data format and API perspective. Hats off to Dave for getting a lot of this started. I think that the phenomenon of creating really useful tools that we all actually use without thinking about where we put the banner ads or creating "barriers to entry" has really pushed this medium forward and I thank the bursting of the bubble for some of this. As everyone begins to add feature sets, grow more quickly and become more commercial, the ability for everyone to maintain compatibility and still compete will be a difficult but important effort.
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George Bush Talking to Condoleeza Rice
I just got this in the mail from Louis. Sorry if you've seen it, but I thought it was really funny. I don't know who wrote this, but would be happy to credit them if someone knows.
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the FUD of QoS
Gen Kanai weblogJoho the Blog: Quality of Service
First, QoS is impractical.
Second, QoS is the wrong solution.
Third. QoS violates the principle of the Internet's architecture.
David Weinberger ruminates effectively on why "Quality of Service" is essentially FUD (fear, uncertainty, doubt) that the phone companies use to confuse customers. It's important to understand that the phone companies want to confuse you and make you buy stuff you don't need. So ignore this QoS stuff whenever you hear it- or at least investigate it carefully.
Totally agree. I have many friends that use VoIP over regular Internet for everything and we use it quite a bit. I've never heard of any real problems. It just isn't as big of a problem as circuit-heads try to tell you. Also, IF people really care so much about QoS, why do we use crappy cell phones even in our office? QoS is GENERALLY not worth losing end-to-end control over.
I guess with video, there will be new issues, but I think that many of the end-to-end oriented solutions should be able handle the QoS issues without trying to create a smart or circuit oriented network.
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December 16, 2002
World Blogging Forum and the Tao of Conferences
07:48 UTC » Blogging about Blogging - Introspective
After returning from a week in the US and realizing how important the trip was and how useful Supernova was, I started thinking about next year. I have enough conferences and meetings to fill the whole year with schmoozing. How do I cut this down to a few high quality meetings? If I am in conferences all year, I surely won't get any REAL work done. A healthy balance of networking and real work is essential.
When I was at Supernova, Dave and I talked about the World Economic Forum. He wrote a nice essay on an idea to create a bloggers conference. I think this is a great idea. The trick now is to get enough interesting people to agree to come, but to keep small enough to make it fun.
The best conferences I attended this year were the Fortune Brainstorm in Aspen, the Global Leaders for Tomorrow Annual Meeting in Geneva and Pop!Tech. They were all in the 100-200 people range. I think that 100-200 is the right size. The Trilateral Commission meeting was about 300 or so people and it was interesting too, but the group was less diverse... (Although I would go if they ever invited me again.) The World Economic Forum meeting in New York was a bit too big to be cozy, but Japan related sessions are essential for me... Supernova was great from a "meet everyone interested in this space" perspective, but I think it could use more diversity. The fact that everyone was blogging was cool. It pushed the envelop from the conference blogging perspective and it's great to see friends.
This year, I have committed to going to The WEF meeting in Davos to deliver our Blueprint for Japan 2020<