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October 4th, 2003FETGEAR EA401 WAREDNESS
September 29th, 2003Technology Attachment Disorder (TAD)
September 24th, 2003I saw the following in someone’s sig and loved it:
“TAD (Technology Attachment Disorder) is an unshakable, impractical devotion to a brand, platform, product line, or programming language. It’s relatively harmless among the rank and file, but when management is afflicted the damage can be measured in dollars. It’s also contagious — someone with sufficient political clout can infect an entire organization.”
–“Enterprise Strategies” columnist Tom Yager.
emusic.com lists
September 23rd, 2003emusic.com now has user created album lists. I’m a huge fan of emusic (all of the unencumbered 128kb mp3s you can download for $15 or $10 per month!), but the one drawback to the system has been the lack of community features that make the process of finding new music easier and more fun. They have staff reviews of some of the albums, and a few genre based discussion boards, but that’s been it. It’s very hard to browse for music with no information about what other folks like. Where are the user reviews and ratings? Where are the ‘People who like this album/artist also like this album/artist’ links? These are the key features that make the process of finding music a fun experience rather than a frustrating chore (and keep them coming back to the site and paying the subscription!). None of these features is particularly hard to implement (a summer intern could add user reviews in a couple of months, for instance), so I’ve always been puzzled about why they aren’t there.
They seem to have made a first step in the right direction recently, however, by adding user album lists. Any user can make a list of related / interesting / whatever albums, including a small note with each album. When looking at a given album, you see what lists that album is on and therefore, only a click away, what other albums folks associate with the one you are browsing. This is a great feature, and led me to download about 8 new albums yesterday for the first time in a month or so.
Let’s hope emusic.com keep moving in this direction. I desperately want emusic.com to succeed. Its financial success could solve a huge number of the fights over the future of the music industry, since it would show that there need not be a conflict between commercial and consumer interests.
fill your hard drive with porn – porn software
September 23rd, 2003I just got a piece of spam with the above title, which I of course excitedly opened to find out how to fill my drive with porn. I was horribly disappointed that the body of the email was actually about “Bullet Proof Bulk Email”. Come on. It’s bad enough that you spam me. It’s bad enough that you send me an email that includes ‘porn’ in the title at work. But then you don’t even deliver on the title’s promise. At least give me the porn tool! It’s the decent thing to do.
Pioneer DVR-810H — TiVo meets DVD burner
September 22nd, 2003Say goodbye to your VCR! Pioneer is coming out with an 80GB, and 120GB TiVo + DVD burner this month.
Apparently, you can’t edit out commercials before transferring programs to disc, but an extrafine recording quality is available. It’ll be interesting to see how much of a dent this puts in DVD sales. Early adopters will need to invest at least $1200 for the device, and then there’s still the regular monthly TiVo service fee…
Pioneer DVR-810H — TiVo meets DVD burner
September 22nd, 2003Say goodbye to your VCR! Pioneer is coming out with 80GB, and 120GB TiVo + DVD burner this month.
Apparently, you can’t easily edit commercials before transferring programs to disc, but an extrafine recording quality is available. It’ll be interesting to see how much of a dent this puts in DVD sales. Early adopters will need to invest at least $1200 in the device, and then there’s still the regular monthly TiVo service fee…
Classroom Advantages of H2O
September 19th, 2003Henry Farrell has written an interesting story about the various possible uses of blogs in the classroom. H2O would work nicely for some of the scenarios he mentions, particularly the ones involving student participation. For instance, having a student post a reading review as a question once a week as a rotisserie would allow the professor to structure the resulting discussion (ensuring everyone responds by a certain time, how many rounds the discussion takes, etc). Or more interestingly, the rotisserie would allow for each student to prepare a reading summary every week and have that reading summary critiqued by another student, setting up a nice peer review process with very little work on the part of the professor, since H2O takes care of all the details (deadlines, assigning the responses, collecting critiques, etc).
Project Skins for H2O?
September 4th, 2003As fall courses are entered into the H2O system, we are discovering what we knew already: it’s unclear how to use H2O for syllabus construction. The projects/topics/resources nomenclature in its generality and inclusiveness is unfortunately obtuse in an academic setting — not only for instructors, but more importantly for students. I’ve heard concern expressed that when students visit the site they won’t know what they’re looking at, or where to find certain information. Course websites such as Jonathan Zittrain’s old Torts website have 4 simple links: home, syllabus, courseware, discussion. These links make it clear where to find information. Of course, it remains to be seen how confusing the current system will be to students — perhaps concern is premature.
We already have plans to add a tutorial page to the site explaining how to enter a syllabus, but this doesn’t address the problem students face in making sense of the syllabus once it is entered.
Here’s a crazy thought: we could offer an academic “skin” for projects — a feature that project leaders could turn on/off to substitute academic nomenclature such as course/syllabus/readings, for the current, more general projects/topics/resources nomenclature. Optionally, this academic skin could be made visible only to project participants, with guests seeing the more generic skin lessening the system wide impact of the different look.
Florida House Spam
September 4th, 2003I’ve just gotten yet another piece of spam from the Florida House of Representatives. What could possibly motivate an elected representative to indisctiminately spam his constituents? First, I don’t live in Florida and never plan on doing so, so this spam clearly doesn’t help the Florida House (though it also doesn’t hurt them, since I can’t vote in Florida). If I was a Florida citizen, though, the spam would upset me even more, since it would have been sent by *my* elected representative. The spam would definitely give me a strongly negative opinion of whoever is responsible (seems to be Johnnie Byrd, the speaker of the house, just from poking at the http://myfloridahouse.com/ web site linked from the spam). My being upset at the speaker would have a direcly negative effect on him (I would be less likely to vote for him).
The fact that I could so affect the spammer fundamentally changes the economics of spamming for the spammer. Most spammers spam becuase even though the number of people upset by the spam is much greater than the number of people who respond, the upset folks can’t hurt the spammer in any way. Spammers don’t care that they piss of 999 recipients for every 1 recipient that actually responds, because the 999 pissed off recpients can’t hurt them. For an elected official, those 999 pissed off folks are their constituents, so the spam has a hugely net negative effect on their electability. Spamming the folks who need to vote for you seems to me to be a monumentally stupid act. Leaving alone the personal animosity over having fotten spammed, I’d be less likely to vote for a political spammer simply because to send political spam demonstrates either a terrible ignorance about technology and digital issues or just plain stupidity, neither of which are qualities I appreciate in a representative.
I have graciously written several emails explaining this fact to Johnnie Byrd, but he evidently disagress because he keeps spewing out the spam.