January 17, 2003
Hard stuff for smart people
This slashdot piece certainly reinforces what I was mentioning earlier this week. Surprise, surprise, more pleasant evidence that we haven't figured everything out yet. While breakthroughs of this nature are eminently predictable, they bode well for the future of wireless communications. We may not see innovation occur at the pace here that it has in the chip space, but any progress in areas such as these, the high-resistance areas I call them (just another way of saying "hard stuff that smart people still have to figure out"), have a profound influence on the applications we will be using tomorrow. And I look forward to that.
Some thoughts on "Commons assumptions"
via Doc, Arnold Kling states in an article that "If you want to overthrow incumbent publishers with Internet-based alternatives, you are better off starting from the assumption that Content is Crap" in reference to Dan Gillmor's enthusiasm for Creative Commons. "The economics of content are that most of the value-added comes from the filtering process, not the creation process." Kling says.
Doc notes that "much snot flung in the general direction of the old content companies" - which I suppose is what comes next from me in Arnold's direction :)
Kling is right in stating that there is a lot of crap out there, but he's mistaken in assuming that a lot of the value-add comes from the filtering exercise. The filtering exercise has only become a value-add exercise because of the crap that is being passed off as content. To be more precise Arnold, lets start off with the assumption that Crap can be Content. Which is a wonderfully compelling illustration of why Creative Commons is "a good thing" (or "productive" as Searls says). We're talking about my Crap here, and now I've got access to a license, a commons, that will provide others with an accessible opportunity to use my Crap in a manner that we can both agree on. And perhaps, just maybe, their use of my Crap will evolve my Crap into our Content - which could be re-licensed, reused, reissued and repurposed under Creative Commons for the benefit of those that appreciate the Content (or view it as more Crap). I guess what I'm getting at is that given enough eyeballs, filtering all crap becomes trivial.
Now get on with it.
Fri, 17 Jan 2003 06:47:48 GMT
via icann.blog, Sen. Burns "Tech Agenda" causes me some concern. Not only is it a no-win proposition as Brett points out, but it sounds more like something written by a hysteric. Whomever is paying the lobbyist that wrote this certainly got their money's worth. I just don't like the agenda.Good night...
...and good night. Dropped in a ton of small tweaks tonight. Still haven't really started messing with the real structure of the templates or the stylesheets - I'm still figuring out what I want to do with the site as far as look and feel is concerned.
I have decided however to keep as much of the content as possible within the content management system. It only makes sense. I can say that I'm quite surprised that things like blogrolling.com don't live inside MT (or at least, that someone hasn't developed a plug-in...at least one that I've seen ;)
I've also spent a little bit more money this time around. Convinced that this exercise needs to be as sane and reasonable as possible so as to ensure that I spent more time writing and thinking than I do maintaining, I'm looking for tools that assist me, rather than tools that sort of assist me that are free...
Anyways, it has been a good night, and with that, I bid you all a good night.