Hmm...so internal weblogs, tied to Outlook via RSS and Newsgator. None of these pieces are new, but together they make for something much more interesting than each of the parts.
NewsGator Case Study: Triple Point Technology
via Sippey
A quick link to Joi's post on his day of silence reminded me of my trips to the desert which were often a day of silence for me.
This is the text of a cogent/intelligent article by Bruno Giussani of the WSJ Europe on camera cellphones and the increasing loss of privacy.
Some interesting thoughts from this are:
- "when will people become 'phone-shy' as they may be camera-shy?"
- when will camera cellphones be able to operate remotely as suggested in the article? Seems like still a ways off?
Jennifer of scriptygoddess reviews the new buymusic.com website. She has problem after problem after problem. This is a very technically able person. If she can't get the site to work for her, it's basically unusable.
scriptygoddess product review: Buymusic.com - BUYER BEWARE!!!
Here's the other thing I love about the web - user comments that are WAY MORE INFORMATIVE than anything else you'd ever get. Like this one in that same thread:
I used to work with Buy.com which buymusic.com spawned from. Their "customer service" reps are not qualified to answer any technical questions...or any questions for that matter. They are not educated in the field. They are waiters, out of work actors, etc...people who just needed a minimum wage job. If your question cannot be answered by their canned responses, it cannot be answered by them. Congrats on the refund, you are lucky you got that!
UPDATE: The inimitable Matt Haughey weighs in with a great parody. I should also mention that BuyMusic seems to have violated copyrights by selling online music from Orchard Distribution artists who never agreed to that distribution scheme (I met those guys in NYC- seemed slimy to me then and now.)
Dave Winer points us to the fact that Amazon has now begun to offer some of the functionality that they have with Amazon Web Services via RSS. This is an interesting step...I need to study this further.
Technology at Harvard Law: Amazon RSS feeds?
Gary has a good overview of the new functionality:
Gary Burd: RSS feeds at Amazon
Amazon developer Alan Taylor tells us a bit more about this new feature:
Eintagsfliegen ... Workblog - Amazon.com gets RSS
Paul Bausch tells us how to use this new feature if you have an Amazon Associates account at onfocus.com
Andrew Odlyzko's (University of Minnesota) new paper "Privacy, Economics, and Price Discrimination on the Internet" (PDF) considers "the main questions in communications, namely how open or closed networks should be, should the end-to-end principle prevail, etc., they are really questions about price discrimination, as in 'should your cable TV company be able to charge you more for a bit of voice traffic than for a bit of video?'"
Here's a bit that touches on the loss of privacy via moblogging:
And ordinary citizens, armed with an array of increasingly powerful and versatile tools, such as cameras in cell phones, are beginning to collect massive amounts of information that, if combined and analyzed, could lead to dramatic decreases in privacy.
Odzylko looks at price disrimination by computer retailers through the lens of the airline industry, which survives by selling seats on the same plane for different prices to different people, as well as pricing by the railroad companies in the 1800s. He also posits that companies are driving this desire for price discrimination and that these practices erode privacy by their very nature.
Abstract in more:
Howard French's third article in a series on the possibility of change in Japan covers the role of women. The scariest aspect of the whole article is the graph that shows how inequal the gender gap is here in Japan.
While it is unfair to look at a country merely by statistics, it is clear that the gender gap is so wide that is hurting the nation. Cutting off the future of women in Japan to spite the face of Japan, so to speak. I've worked in two of the most prominent Japanese firms and the lack of female executive management is starkly obvious.
Whether it is immigration, national defense, or the role of women, Japan has tremendous potential in front of it IF the nation as a whole decides to embrace it. However, the pace and amount of change needed to even reach parity with other nations is staggering, especially for a nation where change comes slowly due to consensus decision-making and a culture of unclear decisions.
I hear rumors that French is moving on to other offices in Asia, and I hope that whomever replaces him, if anyone, will be half as phenomenal as he has been. Between Ken Belson and Howard French, I've really enjoyed the NY Times coverage of Japan in the recent years.
Japan's Neglected Resource: Female Workers
also please note an earlier post I did on the status of women in Japan based on an excellent post on the NBR mailing list.
Lisa Guernsey of the NY Times does a timely article on how wireless networking and instant communication apps are changing how people are learning and teaching, both in the classroom and at conferences.
Liz Lawley responds at the Social Software blog with a great post about how this has affected her directly as she is a professor. Liz reminds us that lectures are a pretty poor way to learn in the first place. Also she explains that she saw 3 modes of IRC communication at Supernova 2003 including: 1) virtually no communication when an excellent speaker held the audience, 2) moderate, directed and focused communication during some speakers, and 3) a "free-for-all, untethered from the room entirely" when there was an uninteresting speaker.
We can't benefit from wireless networking and instant communication tools without having those technologies affect us in other ways we may not have accepted or realized.
The other thing to note is the comment on Liz's post wherein another professor speaks about his experience with the issue of class and money surrounding technology and tools. That is definitely something I need to ruminate on much more.
