David Weinberger‘s new book, “Everything is Miscellaneous: The Power of the New Digital Disorder” is now available. The prologue and chapter 1 is on his website for you to peruse.
Full disclosure: I am proud to know David via Jerry Michalski.
UPDATE: Scott Rosenberg interviews David at Salon.
Politicians (not all of course) are corrupt all over the world.
Corrupt Japanese politicians seem to favor suicide as their last course of action.
What I just cannot understand is this logic: pretend you are a politician in Japan. You’re in your 50s or 60s, married, kids, maybe even grandkids. I’m sure the corruption slope is a slippery one, but if it ends up with suicide (for whatever reason) then what’s the use? A whole life spent in civil service, that family will be forever tainted by that suicide. What a waste.
UPDATE: Now there are 3 suicides interconnected. Matsuoka, Shinichi Yamazaki, and Yukihiro Uchino who Fukumimi writes about.
LEAD: Former exec linked to J-Green scandal falls to death
Matsuoka’s reported suicide ｫ from the inside, looking in
Facing Inquiry, Japanese Official Commits Suicide – New York Times
Observing Japan: Matsuoka Toshikatsu, RIP
Japan’s Agriculture Minister Offs Himself – Japan Probe
Observing Japan: "An indispensable man of talent for agriculture administration"
Matsuoka death shocks politicians
UPDATE 2:
Observing Japan: Whitewashing Matsuoka
Mutantfrog Travelogue – Reactions, Speculation on Matsuoka’s Suicide
Liberal Japan – Toshikatsu Matsuoka commits suicide.
This news is interesting.
Google Korea plans to introduce an age-verification system to its search engine later this year that will restrict adult-themed searches to those 19 years of age and older, it said Thursday.
Users will be asked to verify their age when searching for any of about 700 words in Korean judged to be adult and supplied to the portal by the Korean government, said Lois Kim [cq], a spokeswoman for the company in Seoul.
Users will have to enter their name and national resident registration number, which will be checked against a database to verify the user– or at least the person whose data has been entered– is old enough.
The article does go on to say that all the other Korean portals already do this kind of age verification. I wonder if this age verification is based on language or location (i.e. if you search in Korea, you’ll be prompted to verify your age, or if you are outside of Korea, you can search on adult terms without a prompt.)
Can you imagine Google trying this in the US?
Google Korea Restricts Search – Yahoo! News
UPDATE: Searchengineland had 5 questions about this new age-verification system answered by Google. Most interestingly, it only affects Google.co.kr. If a person in Korea accesses Google.com, they won’t be prompted for the age verification? Seems like quite a nonsensical filter.
Searching For An Adult Topic? You’ll Have To Prove Your Age To Google Korea
This is why Silicon Hutong is in my daily reading. He takes the news about Yang speaking at the Hua Yuan Science & Technology Association meeting (it was 2 years ago at this same event that Jack Ma and Jerry Yang discussed the $1 bil. Alibaba-Yahoo! China partnership) and properly breaks it down for all of us.
First, he [Yang] decided to sneak Yahoo! into China – take the stealth approach, as it were. That worked so well that Yahoo! was stomped by local players like Sina, Sohu, and Netease who did not feel compelled to fly low and avoid the radar.
Then, he got talked into having Yahoo! buy local search engine 3721 and turning over Yahoo! China’s future to the control of 3721′s mercurial founder. Eighteen months and over $100 million later, that imploded, and Yahoo!’s position in China had slid even further.
Finally, he handed the China business and $1 billion to Alibaba. That hasn’t failed yet, but the jury is definitely still out. Yahoo! China has apparently fallen to a distant third in the search engine rankings behind Google and Baidu. Yahoo!’s Chinese landing page looks like a rip-off of Google’s, so there is no pretense of competition with the portals anymore.
Any other executive with a similar track record would have been reassigned, if not fired, long ago.
And now Jerry wants Yahoo! China to be in the advertising exchange business.
Is anybody at Yahoo! the least bit concerned?
Silicon Hutong: When Jerry Yang Talks China, Run for the Doors.
Just a quick note to let everyone know that I’m slow replying to emails because I’ve caught a cold and am running slow. I went to the doctor on Friday and he reminded me that it was a year ago that I last saw him for a cold.