April 30, 2005
Tiger break
I just installed Tiger on my computer and it's now importing all of my email to Apple Mail from Entourage. It's been importing for about 24 hours, but it's still only about half way through. I don't feel like reading and writing on a slow machine so I'm going to take a blog break until my new Tiger machine is running properly... See you on the other side.
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April 29, 2005
Baqu
09:46 UTC » Eating and Cooking
I do not have any direct interest in this restaurant, but I know the owner quite well. I told the chef I'd plug his restaurant on my blog, and was rewarded with an extra large portion of soup. I apologize for compromising my ethics as a blogger... However, it's a good restaurant and I'm happy to recommend it.
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April 28, 2005
Censorship through boycotts
15:52 UTC » Global Politics - Marketing
The American Family Association recently pressured P&G to drop ads on pro-gay shows and web sites through boycotts. I'm glad we don't have them "protecting" us in Japan.
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Japanese punctuality
The IHT is running a story on the front page about the Japanese obsession with being on time. The recent train accident in Japan that has caused over 50 deaths was probably caused by the train engineer trying to make up for a 90 second delay. (He had recovered 30 seconds so was actually only 60 seconds behind when the train derailed.) The editors at the meeting I attended at the IHT were talking about running a story on the front page about the Japanese train wreck with the punctuality angle so I was thinking about this on my flight returning to Tokyo. I waited to blog the idea because I didn't want to steal their story. ;-)
I definitely enjoy the punctuality in Japan when I'm doing business, although not necessarily when I'm trying to relax. I think it's a generational thing as well. My sister describes the Japanese mobile culture kids not having as much of an obsession with time tending to self-organizing on the go. It reminds me of our previous discussion about p-time. Organized delineation of time and space helps structure things and make things scale, but are not very good at providing context or flexibility. For instance, in my Silicon Valley meetings people tend to allow important meetings to run overtime and eat into the next meeting whereas in Japan, I will often be ushered from a very important meeting to a completely worthless meeting in order to maintain punctuality.
However, as I get ready for my day at this moment, I am very happy to know that I can leave home at 11:10 to catch the 11:27 train and I will arrive at the train station in Tokyo at 12:28. (In 2004, the 40th anniversary of the bullet train, it was announced that the average delay for the train was only 6 seconds.) My 13:00 appointment at Pia will start on time and that I will be able to leave at 13:45 to get to my 14:00 meeting at Neoteny. In Tokyo I schedule meetings in 15 minute increments, some being scheduled for as little as 15 or 30 minutes. This is anecdotal, but I find myself sitting around in conference rooms a lot in Silicon Valley and can never expect a meeting to start on-time. I usually calculate a 30 minute cushion for meetings in Silicon Valley. In Italy... well, I only schedule a few things per day and everything else is coordinated on the fly. I never expect anything to start on time. I recently spoke at a conference in Italy where everything was 1.5-2.5 hours late. As someone who is generally against cultural stereotypes, punctuality is one thing that I believe can often be generalized because one is forced to adapt to a standard level of punctuality for a particular culture. (I'm sure different people and communities in the different countries have their own level of punctuality and that there is some sort of bell-curve-like distribution of people and groups that are more or less punctual than the norm.) For awhile lack of punctuality stressed me out enormously when I was traveling, but now I've gotten used to it. However, I'm happy to be back where the trains run on time...
I'm in a hurry and can't find the IHT article link. If someone has it, I'd appreciate it if you could post it here. Also, apologies to all of the punctual Italians and Americans that I've just offended.
UPDATE: IHT - An obsession with time
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April 27, 2005
Visiting the IHT
19:56 UTC » Blogging about Blogging - Media and Journalism
I just visited my friend Tom Crampton, a reporter for the International Herald Tribute, who just moved to Paris. Today was his first day in the Paris office. He showed me the computer system that gave him access to all of the stories and pictures filed by reporters and photographers all over the world. The computer system also had all kinds of databases including the news wires. The stories had "slugs" which were the shorthand names of the stories named after the actual lead slugs they used to use. Some had notes that said, "DO NOT SPIKE" which comes from the spike that editors used to have on their desk that dumped stories were spiked onto. These slugs were printed up onto "skeds". They let me sit in on the editorial meeting where all of the editors got together and discussed what stories might lead and which stories ended up on the front and second pages. Many of the stories hadn't been written yet. What was interesting was that, at least during the this meeting, there was a lot of non-verbal communication. There was clearly a lot more thinking than talking going on. It was the sound of NPOV.
It is definitely unfair to compare this process to blogging, but there were similarities. I scan my news feeds in the morning. Then I look at what other blogs are posting. Then I think about various things that might come up during the day that I might blog about and decide what if anything I will blog. It's a lot about timing, context and a larger narrative.
Some of the issues about what to lead with and what to balance with remind me a bit of the Prix Ars Electronica jury process (which danah just blogged about) where we chose 1 Golden Nica, 2 Distinctions and 12 Honorary Mentions from 400+ nominations.
I snagged a copy of tomorrow's IHT Japan edition which is just now being printed. I will be able to read tomorrow's paper on my flight back to Japan, which seems pretty cool.
I talked to the editors about blogging and explained that I'm a big fan of the IHT and thought a lot about how bloggers can work together with MSM and what we could do to transform their business model and preserve their craft.
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April 26, 2005
Plazes tracking map
20:52 UTC » Cool Web Sites - Joi's Diary
Plazes has just added a tracking features that uses IndyJunior maps to visualize where you've been based on locations from which you have logged into Plazes. Plazes is a cool site that allows users to register access points to physical locations.
This is my Plazes tracking for the last 90 days.
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sms.ac C&D letter posted on Chilling Effects
17:25 UTC » Blogging about Blogging - Intellectual Property
Chilling Effects has posted the Cease and Desist letter that I received from sms.ac. I know a number of other bloggers have received this letter. Take a look at their analysis if you've received this letter. Chiling effects has done a great job explaining it. Since I received the letter, some email has been exchanged with the lawyer and I extended on olive branch on a forum to a sms.ac employee, but I'm still not sure exactly where their threats stand at this point.
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Off to Japan
15:01 UTC » Blogging about Blogging - Joi's Diary - Technorati
Had a wonderful time yesterday at Les Blogs in Paris and enjoyed meeting all of the new people as well as old friends. I haven't been to many blogger conferences for awhile so I found the presentations and discussions a good way to catch up on what people were doing and thinking. Thanks for organizing this Loic.
Take a look at the lesblogs tags on Technorati and Flickr for pictures and posts from the conference.
I'm off to Tokyo today for some meetings and eventually a few days off next week.
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April 24, 2005
PR-Speak Translation of Adobe’s Acquisition of Macromedia ‘FAQ’
;-) Funny.
via Dvorak
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Happy Birthday, Free Culture Movement!
11:05 UTC » Activism - Creative Commons
Happy Birthday!!!Lessig BlogHappy Birthday, Free Culture Movement!One year ago -- April 23, 2004 -- about a hundred students gathered at Swarthmore College to begin "an international student movement to free culture." (Dan Hunter described the event in LegalAffairs). The event was organized by the students who had sued Diebold after Diebold sued them. The movement now has about ten chapters around the country.
Happy Birthday, Free Culture Movement! Creative Commons has a present that we wanted to announce today. Bizarrely, we're still waiting for the license. More soon (we hope).
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Video from Shanghai of start of Anti-Japan protest
07:09 UTC » Activism - Global Politics - Global Voices
The video was taken April 16, 2005. I have created Prodigem page with a BitTorrent torrent. It is a 18.4 MB AVI file that runs for 30 seconds. If you download the file, please keep it seeding for awhile so that we can have a few other peers.Anonymous friend in ChineseThe video shows the initial gathering and starting to march of the protesting in Shanghai. It was taken by my family member while I was not in Shanghai.
There is no violence or anything so don't download it if that's what you're looking for.
UPDATE: Oguradio has converted it into a 3.11MB QT file. Thanks!
UPDATE 2: And also now on archive.org...
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April 23, 2005
Vive les Blogs!
22:11 UTC » Blogging about Blogging - Joi's Diary
Tomorrow I will be going to Paris to attend Les Blogs the day after tomorrow organized by Loic. Many friends will be there. I'm looking forward to it after going mainly to conferences outside of the blogging community these days. Wired News has a nice article on it.
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David Weinberger quits MSNBC
19:37 UTC » Media and Journalism
I can't begin to imagine how hard MSM'ing about blogs is. It reminds me of the line from Jon Stewart on his show about blogging, "And that's CNN reporting on why blogs are much more interesting than CNN." (The quote from memory might be slightly inaccurate.)Joho the BlogThe spit fight that ended my career at MSNBC[...]
They want reports on what moderate left and right wing bloggers — "Nothing out of the mainstream," the producer told me yesterday — say about a "major" topic. What the hell does that have to do with blogging? And when two of the producers yesterday independently suggested that I report on the blogosphere's reaction to a Vietnam veteran spitting on Jane Fonda, I blurted out — because the flu had lowered my normal Walls of Timidity — that this wasn't a job I'm comfortable with.
What makes the blogosphere interesting to me is not that there are moderate left and right voices talking about mainstream topics. Mainstream major stories are about issues such as freakish celebrity pedophiles, a spit match over a fight from 30 years ago that the press is hoping to revive, and whatever unfortunate child has been reported missing and presumed (better for the story) murdered. I'm in the blogosphere to escape from this degradation of values.
[...]
So, fuck it. I quit.
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April 22, 2005
Amazon directory of free MP3 downloads
Excellent!Cory Doctorow @ Boing Boing BlogAmazon directory of free MP3 downloadsAmazon has put together a single page listing all the free, no-DRM MP3s you can download from their site, as promos for CDs.
(Thanks, Ben!)
Update: Erin sez, "Amazon actually launched Free Music Downloads in February of 2001. The page mentioned is just the top 200 downloads, there are a lot more available here.
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April 21, 2005
Prix Ars Electronica jury duty begins
22:35 UTC » Art - Joi's Diary
Although I missed two years or so, today marks ten years since I started working with Ars Electronica. I think this is my 16th time in Linz, Austria and for this reason I know Linz better than any other European city. I know taxi drivers, hotel staff, shop owners and it feels sort of like coming home when I visit now. I was on the first World Wide Web category jury in 1995 and we gave Idea Futures the Golden Nica that year. I remember getting a lot of "that's not art" feedback which marked the beginning of my struggle to forge my own definition of "art". The year after that we gave the award to etoy which continues to lead the way in the alternative digital art scene and with whom I continue to have a active relationship since meeting them at Ars Electronica. Last year Ars Electronica started a new category with the leadership of Howard Rheingold called Digital Communities and the two Golden Nicas went to Wikipedia and The World Starts With Me. I met Jimmy Wales and many of the Wikipedians for the first time at this Ars Electronica and we've become good friends since then. I've met many amazing people through this process and there are many people I ONLY see during the jury or the festival of Ars Electronica.
This year I am on the Digital Communities jury again and I've just started looking over the hundreds of projects we will be reviewing over the next few days. The jury is really hard work, but it is always a great way for me to catch up on all of the cool things going on on the Net and engage in rigorous discussion with fellow jury members about all of the projects. I both dread and look forward to this and imagine I will be drinking a lot of strong Austrian coffee.
I have a flickr set that I'll be adding to with photos.
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April 20, 2005
More Bad Behavior by 'Journalists'
08:28 UTC » Media and Journalism
This is depressing. How can these people shake their fingers at us about our lack of blogging ethics. Would any blogger get away with secretly taking money for mentions?Dan Gillmor on Grassroots JournalismMore Bad Behavior by 'Journalists'Once again, we read a story of improper activities by people who appear to be journalists.Wall Street Journal (subscription)How Companies Pay TV Experts For On-Air Product Mentions. Plugs Come Amid News Shows And Appear Impartial; Pacts Are Rarely DisclosedThe most depressing part of this story isn't the individual behavior, though that's bad enough. It's the way these commentators' big-network employers -- maybe that should be enablers -- go through such contortions of logic to defend what's going on.
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Skype removes Kerli from Echo / Sound Test Service
Update: There is now a Japanese soundtest. (soundtestjapanese) The voice is definitely a Japanese woman, but she is also incognito. Also, if you IM "callme" to any of these sound test accounts, they will call you.
via Kengo
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April 19, 2005
Happiness is a warm puppy
Mizuka took this awhile ago. Just found it on my camera.
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MetaBrainz goes 501(c)3 and announces board
The MetaBrainz Foundation is a 501.(c).3 tax-exempt non-profit based in San Luis Obispo, California that operates the MusicBrainz project.This is a very important project because, unlike CDDB, MetaBrainz is protecting the data from capture by corporate interests and if successful, will allow us to make information about music interoperable and the data will provide a foundation for this interoperability. This will allow people to share playlists across languages, meta-search on music across services, etc. I have joined the board together with Dan Brickley, Cory Doctorow, Lawrence Lessig and founder Robert Kaye. They are doing a fundraiser and we'd be happy for your support. Congratulations Robert.MusicBrainz is a user maintained community music metadatabase. Music metadata is information such as the name of an artist, the name of an album and list of tracks that appear on an album. MusicBrainz collects this information about music and makes it available to the public.
With the creation of the MetaBrainz Foundation, the MusicBrainz project enters its second phase of life. In the first incarnation, the project was privately maintained and focused primarily on basic music metadata described above. Today the MusicBrainz project has the legal backing and infrastructure of the MetaBrainz Foundation, which will allow it to embark on a mission to expand its scope.
Listening to: 
You Trip Me Up
The Jesus and Mary Chain
Psychocandy
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Chinese Anti-Japan Protests
14:10 UTC » Global Politics - Global Voices
There is a good blog post by Andrea about bloggers in China talking about the anti-Japan protests.
As a Japanese who has a great deal of sympathy and empathy for China, what I find difficult is trying to understand the various threads and how Japanese people can try to make a difference. In particular, the hateful and extreme actions of some of the Chinese make it difficult, if not scary to even try to open a dialog. At the same time, the extremes in China are fueling the nationalists in Japan and not helping the cause for the more moderate voices. I believe hate will never help communications.
One of the biggest problems is that most Japanese don't understand the issues. Another point is that most Japanese are not great supporters of the military. When I think about the military in Japan, I don't think dirty nationalist thoughts. Rather, I think about May 15, 1932 when Prime Minister Inukai was assassinated by the military which ended party-based politics in Japan until after WWII. I think about the Japanese military taking over the government and sending Japan into one of the worst periods in its history. I think about the small children being sent off to war as Kamikaze or human torpedos and I think about the letters homes from them that are enshrined in Yasukuni Shrine. There are letters from terrified little boys writing about how scared they are about going to war. Most Japanese do not trust the military and most Japanese believe that the military run government of the 30's was an illegitimate government as a result of a coup. Many Japanese believe that the Japanese people were victims of the military.
Having said that, I do think that the text books and teaching in Japan underplays the actions of the military in China and I believe the Japanese text books are a real problem that should be addressed. I really think that the Japanese don't understand how victimized the Chinese and Koreans were and I believe this education needs to occur. I would point out that it is not just this aspect of Japanese textbooks that is broken. Japanese text don't use the word "revolution" or "civil war". It was the "Meiji Restoration", "The American fight for independence", the US Civil War is the "North South War" etc. There was a move to simplify Pi to just 3. In other words, the Japanese ministry of education needs an overhaul. Maybe they should use Wikipedia instead.
I'm not trying to trivialize the issues that are being protested by the Chinese, but if they are trying to cause change in Japan, maybe some of them can try to talk to their allies in Japan like me instead of trying to force or scare into submission their enemy. A reasonable bridge building effort between activists and experts on both sides to try to address the issues through tactical maneuvers might be useful.
Or am I missing the point completely?
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April 18, 2005
Off to Kuala Lumpur
I'm off to Kuala Lumpur today. I've been invited to give a talk at a Philips meeting tomorrow. I will be meeting up with some bloggers tonight in KL. Sign up on the wiki if you'd like to join us.
UPDATED: I uploaded the pictures, but I need help with people's names. Sorry. Can someone help me?
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April 17, 2005
Dancing with DEFCON
I was a technical advisor for a Japanese movie called "The Negotiator" which will be opening here on May 7th. They recently did a press conference with the key stars including Prime Minister Koizumi's son who plays one of the cyber-police. They showed the laptops sporting the stickers that everyone sent me. Thanks again! The title of one of the stories about the press conference is, "The Negotiator Mashita, dancing with DEFCON?" (The nickname of the series is "Odoru" or dance, from the original title "Odoru Dai Sosasen" or "dancing scan lines".) The text is in Japanese, but there are some pictures of the actors and the laptops on display.
And of course there is a blog. (Japanese)
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Remix Nine Inch Nails
09:29 UTC » Creative Commons - Music
How excellent. This is almost like open source music. It's one thing to say, "hey it's OK to sample this." It's taking it to a totally different level to publish it as a Garage Band project. Now if only they would put some kind of Creative Commons license on it, it would be perfect.Phillip Torrone @ Make:Make your own Nine Inch NailsMacMinute has a story about Trent Reznor of Nine Inch Nails making the band's new single, "The Hand That Feeds" available to download for Mac users with GarageBand to mix and mash up (an actual multi-track audio session). "For quite some time I've been interested in the idea of allowing you the ability to tinker around with my tracks -- to create remixes, experiment, embellish or destroy what's there," Reznor says. Here's a screenshot of it on my Mac (View image) and here's where to get it (70MB file). Here are a couple of the first remixes!
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April 16, 2005
Comic Life a-go-go
02:18 UTC » Joi's Diary - Photo
I just saw this cool image in my 1001 flickr stream... which lead me to Comic Life which turned into this and this. I really should be packing. I'm off to Japan today. Special thanks to Master Willem and his team for letting me stay at their chateau.
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April 15, 2005
All Marketers Are Liars
The book reminds me of Don't Think of an Elephants by George Lakoff which is about how the Republican Party is successful at telling their story because it fits the frame / worldview of their voters.
Interestingly, Seth is telling a pretty strong story that I believe doesn't fit the worldview of many of the marketers he is talking to. I hope they believe his story. ;-)
He has a blog about the book called Liar's Blog for the book.
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April 14, 2005
IFTF 10 year forecast
I'm in Berkeley at the Institute for the Future 10 year forecast retreat. Tomorrow I'll be doing a breakout session and a talk with Howard Rheingold on the Sharing Economy. I'm not sure what the blogging policy is, but if it is allowed, I'll try to blog something tomorrow.
----
Jerry Michalski to Steven Weber: "If you started a Linux project you could call it SWINUX and use a pig as a logo."
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April 13, 2005
The Narutrix Re-Ninja'd
16:38 UTC » Intellectual Property - Japanese Culture
Amazing example of remix culture. It is rumored that fan remixes or derivative works are more tolerated by Japanese publishers than in the US. Hopefully this fan community won't be shut down like many fan sites for US works.Mimi @ ChanponThe Narutrix Re-Ninja'dThe Matrix continues to be great fodder for transnational cultural ping-pong. While the Matrix creators acknowledge their debts to Japanese anime culture with Animatrix, Japanese fans re-domesticate the Matrix again with Matrix re-enactments. Now, UK anime fandom has brought us The Narutrix Re-Ninja'd, a brilliantly edited parody of the second Matrix trailer, staged in the world of Naruto. Check out manylemons.co.uk for some more fun anime music videos.
Thanks Rachel!
Does anyone know more about this community? I hear that fan base is incredible.
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April 12, 2005
CIS Amicus Brief Asks for Legal Rights for Internet Journalists
14:40 UTC » Activism - Blogging about Blogging - Media and Journalism
The Stanford Center for Internet and Society filed an amicus brief today which I signed together with a number of others. Go CIS!
Amicus Brief Asks for Legal Rights for Internet JournalistsCIS filed an amicus brief today on behalf of The First Amendment Project, Internet journalists and bloggers and others asking the court in the Apple v. Does case to treat online publishers the same rights as their colleagues who publish in more traditional formats. Download file
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del.icio.us takes outside funding
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April 11, 2005
Contagious Media Showdown 2005
Announcing the world's first Contagious Media Showdown. Do you have what it takes to corral enough traffic to win the cash prizes? Can you make the next Dancing Baby, All Your Base, or Star Wars Kid and ride into the sunset with the bounty? This is your chance to prove you are the best in the West.Organized by the Contagious Media Group at Eyebeam R&D with some sponsorship from Alexa, Creative Commons, Technorati and Datagram. Eyebeam know for their super-cool often-viral art should be sending shivers down Search Engine Optimization (SEO) companies' spines.
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Prodigem Marketplace
22:47 UTC » Intellectual Property - Marketing - Movies - Music
Stanford graduate student Gary Lerhaupt has created Prodigem Marketplace. It's basically a Bittorrent non-DRM'ed media marketplace.
via Howard @ SmartmobsProdigem MarketplaceThe Prodigem Marketplace allows Prodigem users to sell their independent media (videos, music, etc) while not concerning themselves with traditional bandwidth costs associated with repeated large data transfers. Content providers (YOU!) simply upload their work, set a price, and Prodigem does the rest. Once customers pay for access to the bit torrent peer-to-peer session for your content, Prodigem grants them access so they can begin their download (no DRM). Prodigem collects this revenue, removes 10% + transaction costs (PayPal) and then sends you a monthly check. Ever considered making a living as a Long Tailor? Check out this example for-pay torrent to see what it looks like.[...]
Mechanics Of Becoming An "Ecommonist"
The process of becoming a media retailer couldn't be any easier. To accomodate this new method of transfer, we have added a Copyright Plus Prodigem license to the available licensing options. This simple license allows you to retain copyright over your work while making a specific grant of rights to Prodigem and its users. In effect you are saying that it is fine to share your work so long as it's only through the torrent you created, and since access to the torrent is only granted when payment is received, you get exactly what you are looking for.
You are also free to instead license your work under the Creative Commons. Though with a CC license you are technically granting everyone redistribution rights regardless of venue. This is fine by us if it's okay with you, but does mean that people are free to share without payment. Realizing this conundrum, we are busy mulling over something akin to a "Delayed" Creative Commons license, where Prodigem users will be able to stipulate their work as covered under Copyright Plus Prodigem license, and then on some fixed date of their choosing (eg. 1 year, 5 years) it automatically switches over to a CC license of their choosing. It's like peanut butter and chocolate.
I'm very interested in the economics of the end of the long tail. My theory is that people will pay, even if they are not forced. I think price, the experience and the lack of DRM should have an impact. There is some data from the unencumbered shareware software world, but it will be interesting to see how this fares for media content. I would also be interested to see how artists using Creative Commons fare against artists using the more restricted Copyright Plus Prodigem license. If this is successful, this will be yet another good example of non-infringing use of P2P to highlight the idiocy Hollywood's position on the Grokster case. (Note that NASA has also started using Bittorrent.)
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April 9, 2005
Off to San Francisco
21:23 UTC » ICANN - Joi's Diary
Thanks to everyone who showed up in Mar del Plata to participate in the ICANN meeting. I thought that the discussion was healthy and productive and although we moved forward on a number of things, we are left with a lot of work to do based on the feedback we received on the strategic plan, the board governance guidelines, .pro, .net, IDNs, transparency, process and a number of other topics. Special thanks to staff for running such a great meeting in the absence of our CEO Paul Twomey. I think you did an excellent job.
Thanks to everyone who showed up for dinner last night and special thanks to Mariano for organizing everything. It was great to meet the Argentine bloggers. I'm sorry I was late. Our bus from Mar del Plata broke down and we had have them send a new one.
Thanks to Mookie letting me stay at his place in Buenos Aires.
I'm off to San Francisco today to do my usual rounds and to go a Institute for the Future retreat.
Since my flight doesn't leave until this evening, I hope I can do a bit of moblogging in Buenos Aires.
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IDNs
21:17 UTC » Global Voices - ICANN
IDNs (International Domain Names) have been the subject of a great deal of discussion. IDNs are a way to allow non-ASCII scripts to be used in URLs. There are a number of difficulties with IDNs. One is that there are letters or punctuation that look similar to normal ASCII characters or punctuation. This allows people to spoof other URLs and use it to fool users and steal their banking information for instance. The other criticism is whether people really need them. The argument (which until recently I agreed with) is that everyone in the world reads ascii and can't people at least type the URLs in ASCII.
Fellow board member Hualin Qian said that the Chinese were using IDNs using a browser plugin and that since most Chinese read only Chinese web pages, it seemed to be doing quite well. I would have to concur. I think one thing that we forget is that the type of people who come to ICANN meetings and argue about this stuff tend to speak multiple languages, care about what is going on in other languages, and are trying to get everything perfect. We are not the norm. I remember when we set up Infoseek Japan, we decided to index only Japanese pages. I argued that we should index English pages, but I was overruled by the people who said most Japanese don't read English web pages.
Many of the problems of IDNs come from trying to do multiple languages at the same time or languages one can't read. The biggest difficulty is implementing them in gTLDs like .com or .org. I think that if we focus on helping the country level TLDs (ccTLDs) get going with IDNs in their own native languages, we would be solving the problem for 80% or so of the people. My concern is holding up the ability for these people to use IDNs because we can find the perfect solution for the edge cases.
This is a philosophically opposed to my "Global Voices" position which focuses on building bridges between cultures and languages, but I believe that the benefit for the digital divide to get something running soon is worth it. Also, once we have a lot of people using IDNs in different regions, I'm sure we can use this experience to come up with more creative ways to solve the more difficult IDN problems.
Again, this is my personal opinion and not any sort of consensus of staff or the board of ICANN. I am mainly pointing this out because until this meeting, my position (privately) was "why the hell do we need IDNs?" On the other hand, I think we are moving forward and the discussions during this meeting in MdP were very helpful.
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April 8, 2005
.Pro problems
As people have reported widely, there has been a great deal of abuse of .Pro. .Pro was supposed to be a top level domain dedicated to creating a credentialed area for verified professionals and profession related domain names. People have been registering obviously unrelated domains and going as far as selling them on eBay. This clearly violates the spirit of the agreement, but it is still unclear whether anyone is technically violating the agreement. ICANN has been criticized for not policing .PRO especially in light of ICANN approving new sponsored top level domains. As Michael Palage pointed out in his comments during the board meeting, ICANN staff is currently investigating the issues and they will come back with the facts and the board will discuss any appropriate actions.
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Yay AfriNIC!
22:15 UTC » Global Voices - ICANN
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.travel
There have been some severe allegations about foul play inside of ICANN with regards to the .travel sTLD allocation. Staff, counsel and the board have reviewed these allegations and I am convinced that these allegations are unfounded and have just voted in favor of .travel.
I have talked to several independent participants who are also puzzled by these allegations but I have asked them to dig around for more facts. I will report back if I find anything, but until there is some third party corroboration of these allegation, I would hope people would stop spreading this rumor as if it were fact. I understand that people don't like to give ICANN the benefit of the doubt, but these are quite severe allegations from a single source. Please be responsible.
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IPv4 address space
Ray Plzak of ARIN pointed out during the board meeting that 45% of available addresses have been allocated to the RIR's (Regional Internet Registries). There are number of studies about how much longer we have before we run out of addresses. The estimates range from 10 years to 40 years of time left.
I'll write more about this later, but IPv6 seems to be moving forward, but the efficient reallocation of addresses and unanticipated technologies such as NATs (Network Address Translation) has taken the pressure off of IPv6 adoption from the "running out of addresses" perspective. However, IPv6 has many benefits, not just increased address space and we should move forward with adoption. I would also like to point out that the rumor that a single US university has more addresses than China is an urban myth. This was true in the past, but many universities and early Internet address users with large allocations have returned their address space and China has one of the largest address allocations today.
UPDATE: Hmm... This report seems to suggest that the allocation is a bit higher. Maybe I misheard. It appears that 45% of the addresses have NOT been assigned to the RIR's.
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ICANN Board Governance Committee update
There has been a great deal of discussion about the Board Governance Committee's draft of the Core Principles and Corporate Governance Guidelines. Section 5(e) says "Having given the chief executive delegated authority, Board members should be careful – individually and collectively – not to undermine it by word or action." The idea behind this is that the board should not be undermining the activity of the CEO after it has delegated a task. As a CEO, I can understand this intention, but I believe that it should be decided operationally and should not be in a guidelines document to be signed by the board. In addition, I think the word "undermine" is vague. In many ways, the role of the board is to "undermine" management if management is not doing the right thing.
During the public forum (which is going on right now), Alejandro Pisanty, the chair of the committee, pointed out that there were a number of comments and that the committee is working on revising the draft. If you have comments, I suggest you submit them through the link above. There were a number of constructive comments from other participants during the forum and they will be posted on the site soon.
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April 7, 2005
Nokia announces Ryuichi Sakamoto phone
21:25 UTC » Music - Wireless and Mobile
