Internet Changes Everything

December 31, 2003

Web shopping boom: the top presents

Times Online - Online Specials

As retailers complained of low numbers of shoppers in the run-up to Christmas, online sales were predicted to be taking up the slack. Ellen Connolly reports on online shopping's "biggest year so far".

Online shopping scored an unprecedented success this Christmas as Britons opted to snap up presents from the comfort of their swivel chairs.

The trend was echoed worldwide with amazon.com, one of the world's biggest online retailers, setting a single-day record of more than 2.1 million products ordered, or 24 items per second, worldwide.

Britons are predicted to have spent £3.3billion on shopping over the Internet this Christmas, a rise of 80 per cent, according to retail trade body IMRG.

It says that online sales rose 44 per cent in November, 12 times as fast as the bricks and mortar retail sector.

The trends were reflected in shops across the UK - retailers reporting a drop in trade as people decided to avoid the expected high street crush.

A spokeswoman at amazon.co.uk said: "It's our biggest year so far."

Some of the best sellers on the Internet were electronic goods such as digital cameras, PlayStation 2, DVD players and the Apple i-POD digital music player.

Food shopping over the Internet gained in popularity. J Sainsbury, the supermarket, said it had noted a large increase this Christmas in people using its online shopping service – for essentials such as toilet paper as well as the heavy Christmas staples including champagne and turkey.

The retail giant also said that customers were planning ahead for the new year with an increase in sales of condoms and Alka Seltzer.

Kelkoo.co.uk, one of Europe's biggest price comparison sites, said that sales of lingerie and clothes were up fivefold on this time last year.

Amazon.co.uk said that DVD players were the most popular electronic item for UK shoppers. Worldwide, digital cameras topped the electronics list and in amazon.com's the home section the iRobot Roomb robotic vacuum cleaner, and James Bond's Shaver of Choice were top sellers.

During the second week of December, spending by US online shoppers was up 48 per cent compared to the same period of 2002, reaching close to $3 billion, according to a study by Goldman Sachs, Harris Interactive and Nielsen NetRatings.

As a result, online sales in the United States for the first time were expected to surpass $100 billion in 2003, compared to $76 billion in 2002, according to the Forrester Research institute.

December 31, 2003 at 11:08 PM in eCommerce | Permalink | Top of page | Blog Home

The revolution should not be eulogised

Guardian Unlimited | Special reports | The revolution should not be eulogised

Weblogs may not be as innovative as some claim but they do have real potential as a form of personal publishing, argues Rebecca Blood

Thursday December 18, 2003

It is becoming obvious that no one really understands weblogs.
Lots of people know what they are; the number of these reverse-chronological collections of entries has grown exponentially since 1999, when the first automated blogging tools were released. These tools brought online publishing, once the province of the technophile, to the common web-surfer, and in 2003 they are functioning as desktop printing presses for an estimated 1.5 million people.

Weblogs have enraptured masses of people and are routinely described in outrageously overblown terms. They have been discussed quite seriously as the future of academia, journalism, and even democracy. But many over-enthusiastic commentators seem blinded to historical precedent or blinkered by their insistence on describing the new form in terms of familiar institutions.

Enthusiasm abounds. Bloggers enjoy describing themselves as pioneers, though their ideas of innovation are sometimes suspect. "We are writing ourselves into existence," some ecstatically proclaim, as if Pepys and Boswell and the historic legions of their fellow journal-writers had never existed. These bloggers, who tend to use their weblogs as public, interactive diaries, are as enthralled by their discovery of online community as were those who stumbled upon the early computer Bulletin Board Systems in the 1980s and Usenet in the 1990s. The communities that weblogs create and the act of writing every day to a real audience have transformed lives, but such experiences are not unique to weblogs, nor even to the Internet.

Some can conceive of weblogs only in terms of their own experience. "Weblogs are a new form of journalism," cries one such group, composed primarily of professional and aspiring journalists. To be fair, their argument seems to be aimed at peers who might otherwise dismiss their new activity as a frivolous, amateur pursuit. News organisations now frequently maintain their own weblogs - a practice pioneered by the Guardian - and a few independent weblogs contain original reporting, but these are comparatively rare. Weblogs can be used in journalism, but they are not, in themselves, works of journalism.

A weblog is something fundamentally new. Something no one can quite put their finger on, not yet. And those who try to define the phenomenon in terms of current institutions are completely missing the point.

Consider the average weblog. Maintained by an unpaid enthusiast, this site will be updated perhaps a dozen times a day with links to interesting news stories and entries on other weblogs, accompanied by a few lines - or paragraphs - of commentary. A blogger interested in current events may include links to several accounts of one event, noting differences in tone or detail, another may post the occasional recipe or pictures from a recent trip. A blogger may have a thousand readers, but more likely a few hundred or a couple of dozen, some of whom will offer comments of their own, right on the site. The weblog is at once a scrapbook, news filter, chapbook, newsletter, and community.

This is not passive news consumption. Neither is it broadcasting. The average blogger has time to surf the web, but no resources to report stories. Some bloggers will follow a news story to the end, some may lose interest after a few days. Commentary will range from the fully-formed to the random blurt and can freely mix the public and the personal.

All this represents something new: participatory media. And it matters. Not because of its resemblance to familiar institutions, but because of its differences from them.

Weblogs are just too varied, too idiosyncratic, to fit into an existing box. Industry analysts might call this disruptive technology because weblogs have changed personal publishing so profoundly that the old rules no longer apply. We are at the beginning of a new age of online publishing - and I predict that this generation of online pamphleteers is just the first wave.

· Rebecca Blood is the author of The Weblog Handbook: Practical Advice on Creating and Maintaining Your Blog (Perseus, 2002). She has maintained her weblog, www.rebeccablood.net since 1999.

December 31, 2003 at 08:25 PM in Blogging & feeds | Permalink | Top of page | Blog Home

AOL Debuts Lower-Priced Internet Service

Yahoo! News - AOL Debuts Lower-Priced Internet Service

In the continuing saga of, "we are dead, but just don't know it yet", AOL hangs on for dear life with yet another diluted offering, as they transition to a real ISP. Its only a matter of time before the traditional AOL offering loses all its members.

The one thing AOL should/ could think about, is enhanced security for their AOL (non www) offering. Given the issues with phishing and spoofing, it suddenly strikes me that this is one area they could lever their proprietary service. But I see no signs they are thinking of that.

NEW YORK (Reuters) - Time Warner Inc.'s (NYSE:TWX - news) America Online unit has launched a preliminary version of a lower-priced Internet service it can pitch to penny pinchers who call to drop the flagship service for a cheaper rival

The modem dial-up service, which debuted earlier this month under AOL's Netscape brand, costs $1 per month until the end of February, according to details on its Web site. It will cost subscribers $9.95 a month beginning in March, compared to $23.95 a month for the full-fledged AOL service.

The new service is a stripped-down and lower-cost version of AOL's flagship service, minus extras such as original programming and high speed Internet music videos.

America Online is offering current subscribers a cheaper alternative after watching millions of irate subscribers flee to lower cost competitors such as the Juno and NetZero services owned by United Online Inc.(Nasdaq:UNTD - news)

In the third quarter alone, AOL lost 688,000 subscribers, or 2 million on a year over year basis.

"At the end of the day, the AOL service just costs too much," said Mark May, an analyst at Kaufman Brothers. "AOL has estimated 10 to 15 percent of the customer that called to disconnect cite price as a reason."

He added, "The Netscape product attempts to address that user."

Time Warner shares lost 8 cents at $17.90 on the New York Stock Exchange (news - web sites).

December 31, 2003 at 05:08 AM in Internet evolution | Permalink | Top of page | Blog Home

Are you sophisticated enough to recognize an Internet scam?

Mercury News | 12/19/2003 | Are you sophisticated enough to recognize an Internet scam?

Computer attacks have moved into the third wave, named by Bruce as "semantic" attacks. ie attacks against the user, whereas the first two waves were against computers and systems.

By Bruce Schneier
Posted on Fri, Dec. 19, 2003
MercuryNews.com

Recently I have been receiving e-mails from PayPal. At least, they look like they're from PayPal. They send me to a Web site that looks like it's from PayPal. And it asks for my password, just like PayPal. The problem is that it's not from PayPal, and if I do what the Web site says, some criminal is going to siphon money out of my bank account.

Welcome to the third wave of network attacks, what I have named ``semantic attacks.'' They are much more serious and harder to defend against because they attack the user and not the computers. And they're the future of fraud on the Internet.

The first wave of attacks against the Internet was physical: against the computers, wires and electronics. The Internet defended itself through distributed protocols, which reduced the dependency on any one computer, and through redundancy. These are largely problems with a known solution.

The second wave is syntactic: attacks against the operating logic of computers and networks. Modern worms propagate and can infect millions of computers worldwide within hours. Traditional computer security has focused on this second wave, which aims to exploit programming errors in software products. It would be a lie to say that security experts know how to protect computers absolutely against these kinds of attacks, but we're getting better. Better software quality, more pro-active patching capabilities and better network monitoring will give us some measure of security in the coming years.

But this new wave of semantic attacks targets the way people assign meaning to content.

Many worms arrive as e-mail attachments. A user receives an e-mail message from someone he knew. It has an enticing subject line and a plausible message body. Of course a recipient is going to click on the attachment. And that's exactly what causes the infection.

People tend to believe what they read. How often have you needed the answer to a question and searched for it on the Web? How often have you taken the time to corroborate the accuracy of that information, by examining the credentials of the site, finding alternate opinions or other means?

People have long been taking advantage of others' naivete. Many old scams have been adapted to e-mail and the Web. Unscrupulous stockbrokers use the Internet to fuel their ``pump and dump'' strategies. In 1999, a fake press release circulated on the Web caused the stock of the Emulex Corp. to temporarily drop 61 percent. More recently, we've seen newspaper archives on the Web changed and fake Web sites purporting to be something they're not.

Against computers, semantic attacks become even more serious, simply because the computer cannot demand all the corroborating data that people instinctively rely on. Despite what you see in movies, real-world software is incredibly primitive when it comes to what is known as simple common sense. Ever increasing numbers of sensors and data collection devices are on the Internet. What happens when hackers realize that these devices can be fed bad data?

People have long been the victims of bad statistics, urban legends and hoaxes. Any communications medium can be used to exploit credulity and stupidity, and people have been doing that for eons. The difference is the scale. A single forged e-mail, a single fake press release, can affect millions.

Current computer security technologies are largely irrelevant against semantic attacks. These attacks aim directly at the human-computer interface, the most insecure portion on the Internet. Defending against them will take more than technology -- it will take education, experience and skepticism. Too many Internet users don't have enough of those three qualities.

BRUCE SCHNEIER is the chief technical officer of Counterpane Internet Security Inc. in Mountain View. His new book, ``Beyond Fear: Thinking Sensibly About Security in an Uncertain World,'' was published this fall. He wrote this column for the Mercury News.

December 31, 2003 at 02:34 AM in Online crime, Security, Virus | Permalink | Top of page | Blog Home

December 30, 2003

An Unrepentant Spammer Vows to Carry On, Within the Law

An Unrepentant Spammer Vows to Carry On, Within the Law

By SAUL HANSELL
Published: December 30, 2003
New York Times

lan Ralsky, according to experts in the field, has long been one of the most prolific senders of junk e-mail messages in the world. But he has not sent a single message over the Internet in the last few weeks.
He stopped sending e-mail offers for everything from debt repayment schemes to time-share vacations even before President Bush, on Dec. 16, signed the new Can Spam Act, a law meant to crack down on marketers like Mr. Ralsky.

Alan Ralsky, who has made a successful business of spamming, is on a hiatus, but says he will soon resume bulk e-mailing in compliance with a federal antispam law. He calls the law unfair, but adds, "You would have to be stupid" to try to violate it.

He plans to resume in January, he said, after he overcomes some computer problems, and only after he changes his practices to include in his messages a return address and other information required by the law, the title of which stands for Controlling the Assault of Non-Solicited Pornography and Marketing.

That is quite a switch for Mr. Ralsky, who has earned a reputation as a master of cyberdisguise. By his own admission, he once produced more than 70 million messages a day from domains registered with fake names, largely by way of foreign countries - or sometimes even by way of hijacked computers - so that the recipients could not trace the mail back to him.

Most experts in junk e-mail, known as spam, have dismissed the new federal law as largely ineffectual. And many high-volume e-mailers say the law may even improve the situation for them because it wipes away a handful of tougher state laws.

But Mr. Ralsky, who lives in a Detroit suburb, says the law's potential penalties - fines of up to $6 million and up to five years in jail - are making him rethink his business.

"Of course I'm worried about it," he said after the law was signed. "You would have to be stupid to try to violate this law."

No one is saying that e-mail in-boxes will be clean of spam any time soon. But the world is getting to be a much more hostile place for spammers, particularly those who send some of the most offensive messages. The biggest threat is not so much the new law, though it is expected to play a role in stepped-up enforcement, as the increased willingness of prosecutors to go after spammers.

In recent weeks, federal and state authorities have finally gotten the attention of spammers with a series of tough civil and criminal actions.

"These suits sent a shock wave through the spam world," said Steve Linford, the director of the Spamhaus Project, an organization that tracks bulk e-mailers and tries to thwart their moves. "Lots of spammers are asking, 'Are we next?' "

Some bulk e-mailers, like Scott Richter, who was a principal target of a civil suit filed last week by the New York attorney general, Eliot Spitzer, vow to continue. But Mr. Richter has lost some major clients, including mainstream companies like Omaha Steaks.

Still, in the week after the suit was filed, Mr. Richter's company, OptInRealBig.com, was actively sending e-mail messages promoting dozens of products, including laser guns, breast enlargement pills and Christian dating services.

Others say they have been beaten down by blacklists created by antispammers and filtering systems run by Internet service providers.

"E-mail is not working any more," said Brendan Battles, a longtime marketer who has sold CD-ROM's containing long lists of e-mail addresses. "More people are mailing and you get less and less response." Mr. Battles says he has virtually given up the business.

"E-mail marketing is a good thing," Mr. Battles said. "I create jobs. But the media has made e-mail out to be some sort of terrorist plot."

Not long ago, Mr. Ralsky, like many other bulk e-mailers, had high hopes that the new federal law would help legitimize his operation. Just after Thanksgiving, he sat on a cream-colored couch in the basement of his large home in Bloomfield Hills, Mich., an affluent suburb of Detroit, talking of how he expected the new law to make his business easier. He would identify himself, as required, and would honor any requests to be removed from his mailing lists, he said. He said that he was counting on Internet providers, in return, to stop trying to block his messages.

But more recently, Mr. Ralsky said in a follow-up interview by telephone, he has come to the conclusion that the law is more one-sided than he originally thought. Internet providers, he figures, will be able to tag and discard his mail with more certainty.

"The law was not written for a commercial e-mailer," he said. "I don't think what they are doing is fair." He suggested that the law was largely a plot by the big companies that connect homes and businesses to the Internet to keep all the profits from online marketing for themselves.

"I have never once been ashamed of what I do," he said. "I feel this is a business that has afforded me and my customers a better way of life."

At the age of 58, Alan Ralsky seems an incongruous character in an industry largely made up of men from the Nintendo generation.

"I am the oldest spammer you know of," Mr. Ralsky said. "You have a bunch of kids in their late 20's doing this with a lot more technical knowledge than I have. But they don't have any business sense."

Mr. Ralsky started delivering newspapers in his native Skokie, Ill., at the age of 7 and has been working ever since. Both his parents are deaf.

"It was a wonderful thing that I had deaf parents," he said. "I was proud of them and tried to be as helpful as I could, but you do grow up fast."

After a stint in the Army, Mr. Ralsky had a career as an insurance agent and sales manager. Then things began to go awry. In 1992, he served 50 days in jail on a charge related to failing to deliver documents to a group of investors. Two years later he was convicted of falsifying documents that defrauded banks and was ordered to pay $74,000 in restitution.

"I was in a bad business with bad partners," he said.

In 1995, he discovered e-mail messaging.

"I took my last thousand bucks and I bought a thousand dollars worth of spam," Mr. Ralsky recalls. From the e-mail messages he was able to send for that amount of money, he said, "I got nothing, but I said, 'You know what, there is something to this. It can take a small guy and make him the equal of a Fortune 500 company.' "

His first real customer was in the business of selling remote backup systems for computers. The fee was $1,000 to send a million e-mail messages. He found 400 customers for his client. Soon Mr. Ralsky hooked up with a time-share promoter, sending out offers of three-day, two-night Florida vacations.

"From there it just got bigger and bigger and better," Mr. Ralsky said. Travel clubs and time-share offers are a staple of his business, as are debt consolidation services and e-books on how to win government grants. He says he does not deal in pills or pornography.

Mr. Ralsky's mailing list now exceeds 150 million names. Unlike many high-volume mailers, Mr. Ralsky does not claim to send only to people who ask to receive marketing pitches. He says he sees nothing wrong with sending unsolicited mail. He insists, though, that he has always honored requests for removal from his list, something now required by the new law.

"If someone is mad, all they need to do is unsubscribe," he said. "If you don't want to get it, I don't want to send it to you."

This claim is impossible to verify, because nothing in Mr. Ralsky's e-mail messages indicates that they are from him. Anyone who unsubscribed from one of his mailings had no way to know if he stopped sending messages or doubled his mailings to them, as some spammers do.

That will change if he identifies himself, as he says he will to comply with the new law.

As Mr. Ralsky's business has grown, so has the backlash. Antispam organizations, like Spamhaus and the Spam Protection Early Warning System, work diligently to identify the addresses from which Mr. Ralsky is sending e-mail messages and to urge Internet providers to evict him from their networks.

And in 2001, Verizon Online, a unit of Verizon Communications, sued Mr. Ralsky, claiming he violated its policies by sending spam messages by the millions to its Internet customers. Last year, Mr. Ralsky settled the suit, paying an unspecified amount of damages and agreeing not to send mail to Verizon Internet customers again.

Mr. Ralsky then redoubled his efforts to use fake names and other techniques so his e-mail could not be easily traced.

"I have changed the way we mail totally," he said. The spam fighters, he added, "have no idea what I'm mailing. They could never pinpoint it and say this is from Al Ralsky."

Mr. Ralsky said that he was uncomfortable about this deception, but that he had no choice. "Is putting bogus information in your registrations the right way to do business?" he asked. "No. But the Internet world has forced me to do that."

He has done business in two dozen countries, and has never visited any of them. He buys mailing lists from people in Sweden and India. And these days, he says, he sends his mail from computers in China and three other countries.

"I have been hosted in strange places in the world," he said. "For some reason the I.S.P.'s out of this country are a lot more liberal."

But, he acknowledges, they are not necessarily more reliable.

"You get good and bad in this business, and I have had all sorts of people try to rip me off," he said.

Mr. Ralsky also acknowledged that he had used "open proxies"- computers with improperly configured software that allow spammers to relay messages without the knowledge of the computer owner.

"I personally hate mailing with proxies," he said. "It's rough. But you do what you got to do."

Even before the new law was passed and the prosecutors stepped up their actions, Mr. Ralsky said the business was getting harder. It was taking more mail to get the same response. His target is to earn $500 in profit for every million e-mail messages sent; his commission is often 40 percent of the price of each product sold.

And the cost of his carefully arranged international network is going up, even more so now.

"The Chinese have decided that they will follow the law," he said. "We will have to put in our address and a real 'unsubscribe' list,'' at an added cost, he said, of $3,000 a month.

For all the obstacles, Mr. Ralsky said that he did not intend to stop sending bulk e-mail in some form.

"There is too much money involved," he said. "I'm a survivor. And when you are a survivor, you find a way to make it happen."

December 30, 2003 at 12:59 PM in Spam | Permalink | Top of page | Blog Home

Bank of England Hit by Hoax E-Mail Scam

Yahoo! News - Bank of England Hit by Hoax E-Mail Scam

LONDON (Reuters) - The Bank of England said on Tuesday it had intercepted over 100,000 fraudulent e-mails masquerading as computer security software issued by the central bank.

The bogus e-mail, which appears to come from a Bank of England administrator, instructed recipients to download a file attachment designed to protect individuals' banking details from fraudsters.

The Bank of England said it received scores of queries from companies and individuals asking about the e-mail's authenticity. It advised recipients to delete it immediately.

The e-mail comes amid a string of e-mail and Web site hoaxes posing as British banking institutions.

In the past few months, a rash of fake e-mails claiming to be from some of the world's biggest banks have appeared in e-mail in-boxes, attempting to dupe banking customers into divulging their bank details.

A spokeswoman from the central bank said technicians were working with the UK's National Hi-Tech Crime Unit to determine what -- if anything -- the file attachment was capable of, and who may have sent it.

"It appears to come from somebody outside the UK," the spokeswoman said. She added the email address used -- admin@bankofengland.co.uk -- does not exist.

December 30, 2003 at 12:53 PM in Financial Services, Security, Spam | Permalink | Top of page | Blog Home

A Better Longhorn Through Blogging

A Better Longhorn Through Blogging

An old article which I just came across, but a good one.

October 17, 2003
When Microsoft (Quote, Chart) kicks off its Professional Developers Conference (PDC) in Los Angeles Oct. 26th-30th (http://msdn.microsoft.com/events/pdc/agenda.asp), the event will in many ways mark a major shift in transparency about its core products, as well as a major victory for a subtle public relations build-up ahead of the event.
That's because when the software giant hands out DVDs and CDs containing pre-beta builds of core products -- its Windows operating system, SQL Server database and Visual Studio developer tools -- many if not most of the PDC attendees (the savvy ones at least) will already have a working knowledge of what to expect.

That's because when the software giant hands out DVDs and CDs containing pre-beta builds of core products -- its Windows operating system, SQL Server database and Visual Studio developer tools -- many if not most of the PDC attendees (the savvy ones at least) will already have a working knowledge of what to expect.

Thanks to a growing number of Weblogs (blogs) by Microsoft employees, many PDC attendees will arrive with some working knowledge of why the new APIs (define) in the pre-beta version of Windows (code-named Longhorn) are helping to form a radically new development environment, as the blogs say.

Like a developer's version of "Where's Waldo," careful readers of Longhorn-focused and PDC-themed blogs (even "official" sites in Microsoft's own PDC Web pages) can find leaks and juicy tidbits about the builds they will see for Longhorn. The same is true for Visual Studio, code-named Whidbey, and Microsoft's database application, SQL Server, code-named Yukon.

As a result, many might arrive at PDC aware that their own skill sets in the .NET platform could use some upgrades in order to help them develop applications more quickly in a newly-streamlined Windows runtime environment.

Developers that set-up RSS (define) feeds into their own blogs or blog aggregators might arrive already armed with questions about how and why Whidbey is truly more intuitive with code-writers compared to past versions of Visual Studio.

Others will have watched how swiftly Microsoft executives themselves answer questions in the blogging community about whether Longhorn's new file system, WinFS (short for Windows Future Storage), is all that new -- or an older version of its prior NT-based NTFS file system with a SQL Server attached.

If they have read just some of the blogs, developers could arrive at PDC having already held blog conversations about how the use of metadata and relational database formats in the WinFS file system should improve searches for Word files, Excel files, photos or any number of programs that run on the operating system.

By some counts, some 300 of Microsoft's roughly 50,000 employees maintain a blog. Many of them, especially ones run by developers, are filled with tidbits about Longhorn, Whidbey and Yukon and other code-names for key components of Microsoft's products. (Some are listed here, and others can be read here).

That's in addition to the hundreds of dedicated enthusiasts and non-Microsoft employees alike that have launched their own blogs about PDC and Longhorn, which is expected to represent a "major change" in the Windows operating system, now expected in the market in 2006.

The sheer number of employee blogs is enough to make any company watcher sit up and take note, analysts say. But add to the trend the fact that Microsoft is about to hand over to PDC attendees early builds of not just one but three of its major products, and they say what you have is a culture shift of more openness at Microsoft.

But are these mushrooming Microsoft blogs just a calculated PR move by a company that spares no expense on corporate PR and marketing? Or is Microsoft's image just benefiting from a popular form of communication that has hit a zenith in popularity?

Indeed, some company watchers point to internal e-mails to employees by Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer that effectively encouraged the use of blogs as a reason the number of employee blogs keeps growing.

But avid bloggers such as Chris Pirillo, who runs the popular Lockergnome technology journal, as well as his own personal blog, argue that the growth of Microsoft-employee blogs is more organic than manufactured.

First of all, he says, if a blog entry about, say, Microsoft's latest Office 2003 release starts sounding too corporate, other bloggers not affiliated with Microsoft "will call it out." The blogging community "has a pretty good bull---- detector," he says.

What has happened over the past year, Pirillo adds, is that non-Microsoft bloggers, some of whom characterize themselves as naturally suspicious of the largest software company in the world, are getting to know a different company through the blogs.

"The more freedom they are given to communicate their thoughts, ideas, frustrations, joys, the more they become a person. That's part of the draw, the power of blogging," he says.

And for a company like Microsoft, with its endless stream of public relations issues, from customers frustrated over weekly security patches for IE buffer overruns, to the lingering anti-trust case over its Windows monopoly, the blogs are helping it manage its image in a new way.

After all, as effective blogs are in "humanizing" a company, they are also an effective instant feedback tool on product reviews, Pirillo says.

Take Office 2003, he adds. "The other day, I was testing and reviewing it -- I happen to live in Outlook," he says of the main e-mail and scheduling client in Office. But Pirillo uses a POP3 (define) server protocol for receiving and sending his mail; he soon realized the latest version of Office 2003 works best with Microsoft's Exchange servers, which are geared for businesses.

He went to his blog. "It annoys me to the point where I believe I'm going to have to switch back to Office 2000. Outlook is not designed for POP3 users. It's only for Exchange users, especially in the new version. This sucks."

Pirillo also noted how he doesn't like the larger font sizes in subject lines in Office 2003 e-mail.

"I don't need to see subject lines from across the room! Eight-point fonts were fine. There was no need whatsoever to change that. It was an idiotic decision," says Pirillo, who also co-authored a Web guide called "Online! The Book."

Give-and-take comments such as Pirillo's are just as important to Microsoft's developers as they are to outside developers that are trying to make sense of a new way of coding for the next-generation Windows operating system, agrees Robert Scoble, whose four-year-old Scobelizer blog is among the more popular Microsoft blogs.

"For one, it's a decentralized community and everybody can participate," says Scoble, a technology evangelist who has been with Microsoft for about five months. "Longhorn blogs were started by a community. The PDC blogs were done by two [non-Microsoft] guys before they started taking off."

As to whether the blogs helped contribute to a sold-out PDC show this year, Scoble says they have helped advance developers' interest and understanding about what could be at stake with the latest pre-betas of Longhorn.

"People believe other individuals, more than, say, a PR firm, or even a press release, because they know the PR has gone through a process," he told internetnews.com. But when Chris Anderson says something about Avalon (the code-name for the new Windows User Interface) on his blog, developers know they're speaking to one of the lead developers of the .NET framework, he says.

Scoble calls this year's conference "an aligning of the planets that I don't think has ever happened in the history of the PDC. Usually there is one major product" at the conference. "Here, the PDC is rolling out three."

With their peek at the builds already waiting in the wings, developers will also be able to give Microsoft critical and early "feedback on the direction of products. We want to make sure they nail it, such as on security, and give developers enough time to realize where the industry's going so they can shift their own skill sets."

And in that regard, he says the Microsoft blogs represent a shift for the company.

"Usually, executives would just leak something or talk about something," he says. "And that would be the only statement you heard from Microsoft until the product came out. Now, an executive can announce something, and immediately the guys working on the product who know the product well can amplify those statements."

Joe Wilcox, a Microsoft analyst for Jupiter Research (whose parent company also owns this publication), doesn't see the Microsoft blogs as a calculated move on Microsoft's part.

There are tons of blogs about PDC, he says, and tons of blogs about Longhorn, and many of them were not set up by Microsoft. "Plus, the Microsoft bloggers have been doing it for a long time. But you could also argue there's blog evangelism about Longhorn and particularly around the developers conference," Wilcox says.

"If you look at the blogging phenomenon it goes back to the early concept of the Web. It wasn't about e-commerce. It was about self-expression. Blogging has revived that."

Now you can read about people's opinions, how they even disagree with those of their employers, says Wilcox who also "finds it funny, ironic even, that Microsoft employees are such prolific bloggers but not necessarily using their own company's software to blog."

But Scoble says Microsoft has not produced blogging software because, for all its popularity, it doesn't represent a compelling business opportunity for Microsoft, at least for now.

The bottom line, he adds, is that the company's PR employees, whose goal is a unified corporate message, are coping with the growth of blogs because for one, the blogs represent their opinions and don't speak for the company (as the blogs' disclaimers say). Plus, he says the PR gatekeepers know that the blogging community is fair about what they write.

"Corporate PR staff want to keep a tight rein on every message. But now they're realizing that this is not their domain anymore," adds Richard Laermer, founder of RLM Public Relations and the author of the PR how-to book "Full Frontal PR."

For all that one reads and can find in the blogs, Scoble says they are helping to convey the message that "Microsoft is moving towards more transparency in the developer process."

December 30, 2003 at 10:46 AM in Blogging & feeds, Corporate Blogging, Microsoft | Permalink | Top of page | Blog Home

Software called Grokker could be the future of search

CNN.com - Going deeper than Google - Dec. 17, 2003

Going deeper than Google

(FORTUNE.COM) -- Loyal readers may remember my passionate enthusiasm a year ago upon the release of a new Web search product called Grokker (Making online searches more useful).
This software tool takes the data culled by an online search and organizes it visually into categories that enable you to quickly dig deeply to find the exact site or information you need. Grokker broke new ground, but later ran out of gas when the Northern Lights search engine, on which it was based, went out of business.

Now Grokker is back as a smarter and less expensive ($49 instead of $99) application that works on top of many different databases, including the all-important Google. I'm as excited this time as I was a year ago. This really could be the future for finding information.

The new Grokker was released Monday by startup Groxis. It makes me wonder if Google really does have search as sewed up as we often assume. When you use Grokker you realize just how brain dead even the best search tools are today.

Grokker is not a Web service but an application that sits on your PC. (A Mac OS X version should be ready in about four weeks, say executives.)

Grokker takes the raw output of a search and organizes it into categories and subcategories. Groxis has put more intelligence into the software this time, so it is not dependent, as it was with Northern Lights, on categories established by others. This means that a wide variety of types of databases can be Grokked-now Grokker can search with six different engines simultaneously -- Yahoo, MSN, Alta Vista, Fast, Teoma, and WiseNet.

It also can organize searches for products on Amazon or for files on your own desktop. Google capability is coming within weeks, Groxis says, as a separate software component that users will add. Soon you will also be able to use it in conjunction with AskJeeves, eBay, social networks like Linkedin, and job site Monster.

Grokker creates a visual representation of a search. When you type in, say, "nanotechnology," Grokker starts organizing data from the multiple search engines. You see a big circle, within which are smaller circles with labels including "conference," "technology," "science," "research," "reports," "news," "molecular," "material," and so on. Each represents a subset of data on nanotechnology.

Click on, say, "molecular," and that circle will enlarge so you can see several further subcircles, one of which is "molecular assemblies." Click on that, and another category becomes visible entitled "molecular assembly sequencing software."

Now you could, in theory, have typed that exact phrase into Google and gotten to the same Web sites. However, in many cases you can't be sure what you're looking for because you simply don't know what's out there. Grokker gives you an easy way to delve into a data set, and it often leads to info-revelations.

For example, a Grokker search of the Amazon database, also using the initial term "nanotechnology," included a category circle labeled "children's books." I would not have predicted that children's books on nanotech existed. But a few further clicks reveal a book entitled "Nanotechnology: Invisible Machines," for 9-12 year-olds, as well as -- even more unexpectedly -- "Submarines and Underwater Exploration," for kids 4-8. If you didn't know to look for it you'd never have found it, most likely.

A search using Amazon's own onsite search tool, in which I asked for books for 4-8 year-olds related to the subject of nanotechnology, found no matches.

Says R.J. Pittman, CEO of Groxis: "Google has indexed several billion pages, but there are between 550 and 600 billion in total on what's referred to as the invisible Web or deep Web. Within a year Grokker will have ten times the reach of Google in terms of available Web pages."

Adds Paul Hawken, the environmentalist and entrepreneur who is chairman of Groxis: "Google can't do it because their technology is based on lists." Hawken came up with the idea for Grokker a couple of years ago when he grew frustrated with the difficulty of finding information about environmental issues. He hooked up with some ace programmers and Grokker is the result.

Groxis may get traction first in the education market. Both the Los Angeles and Chicago school districts have already taken trial licenses to see whether Grokker would be useful for their students. The University of Nevada bought a license for 500 seats, and is putting Grokker in campus computer labs.

The real competition for Grokker is the amazing ability of Google and other search engines to place at the top of a thousand-site list just the one you were looking for. If you're good at stipulating the terms for a Google search you may find Grokker unnecessary. When I used the inferior predecessor I found that there was no reason to use Grokker for the vast majority of searches.

But for some very important projects -- like finding a certain type of real estate broker in a specific region -- it was incomparable. I was able to find a broker in minutes with Grokker that had been completely absent from my Google searches.

In the most personally gratifying moment of the demonstration CEO Pittman gave me last week, he typed in "David Kirkpatrick." There inside the big circle were two other circles representing me and my work at FORTUNE. A smaller circle was labeled "New York Times." That's where a much younger (and very talented) business journalist of the same name writes. Since I've been writing for more than a decade longer than the other DK, it's nice that Grokker figured that out.

Grokker can be downloaded for $49, or you can get a 30-day free trial, at Groxis.com.

December 30, 2003 at 10:06 AM in Web lifestyle | Permalink | Top of page | Blog Home

E-Banking, Online Bill Paying Growth Ahead

Finance: E-Banking, Online Bill Paying Growth Ahead

A substantial increase in the number of U.S. households paying and viewing bills online suggests a growing comfort with the medium and less concern over the security of such transactions. A report from Jupiter Research (a unit of this site's corporate parent) found that 18.9 million households viewed and paid bills online during 2003 — up from 12.2 million in 2002 — and the figure is expected to soar to 60.6 million by 2008.
The number of U.S. households engaged in online banking will nearly double between 2003 and 2008, according to Jupiter. Well over 29 million households currently take advantage of the convenience of online banking, which is expected to grow to 56 million in 5 years.

Jupiter's forecast indicates that the percentage of U.S. households that only view, and not pay, their bills online will shrink to near extinction. While 30 percent were viewing their bills online in 2001, only 1 percent are expected to still do so by 2008.

Jupiter analyst Bruce Cundiff, the author of the report, explains that the number of "view onlys" will overwhelmingly become online "view-and-pay" (VAP) households as they become more comfortable with online payments in general, and also as more households engage in online banking for bill paying and other banking activities.

"Once consumers begin to receive bills online, we see the logical progression from view only to VAP (the pinnacle as far as billers and consolidators are concerned). We anticipate very little (if any) regression to offline bill viewing and payment, as the number of bills presented online and the number of households engaging in online bill payment will grow dramatically through 2008," Cundiff said.

November 21, 2003

Online Banking Households and Those That Pay Online
	# that Bank Online	% that Pay Online
2003	29.6 million	50%
2004	35.3 million	57%
2005	40.9 million	64%
2006	46.2 million	71%
2007	51.3 million	78%
2008	56.0 million	85%
Source: Jupiter Research

December 30, 2003 at 08:51 AM in Financial Services | Permalink | Top of page | Blog Home

Sweet smell of failure

Guardian Unlimited | Special reports | Sweet smell of failure

Slightly off topic here, but its New year. There is a certain understated sense of accomplishment in failure which only Brits can understand so as a Brit, this end of year review of Brit's "success" in this arena is a pointed reminder for me!

Tuesday December 30, 2003
The Guardian
That rugby business confused things for a while, but now the stubbornly silent Mars probe Beagle 2 has reminded us what Britain does best: heroic failure. And Stuart Jeffries, for one, is grateful.

Four reasons have been given to explain why the Beagle 2 hasn't sent a signal from Mars. One: it is possible that a computer glitch may have affected transmission timings. Sounds plausible. Two: the probe has a misaligned or obstructed antenna, which thwarted the Beagle from cheering us up with interplanetary signals during the bleak midwinter. Quite possible, if you think about it. Three: there was some catastrophic systems failure during landing. You can see how that could come about. Four: maybe the Beagle made it down, but is in a crater or tilting badly. This sounds the most likely.
These are all good reasons, and any one of them might account for why the probe failed. Instead of phoning home like a good extraterrestrial on Christmas Day, the Beagle snatched defeat from the jaws of victory. But there is a fifth possible reason that none of the experts has considered. It is that the Beagle is British. The Beagle's mission may have been to boldly go where Nasa probes had been before, but let's put that aside for the moment. If there's one thing the British know how to snatch it is defeat and, unerringly, they know where to snatch it from. Britain is a place where trains are cancelled because of such apparently unforeseeable things as snow or leaves; where one of our greatest living sailors (Tony Bullimore) is revered as Captain Calamity; where our leading contribution to the sport of skiing is a man (Eddie the Eagle) who, were he sitting next to you on the bus, might prompt you to get off a few stops earlier than usual; where Alfred the Great let some cakes burn and thus ushered in Britain's virtuoso contribution to world cuisine.

Britain is a land that, when it comes right down to it, is a bit rubbish. The playwright Patrick Marber noted as much when in his play Closer he had one of his characters consider the carpet at Heathrow airport. How could Britain deserve to be taken seriously when the first experience of the place it offered foreigners was the mankiest flooring in Christendom or beyond? It is a place whose devotion to failure is symbolised clearly by its commitment to missing penalties: even when English footballer Stuart Pearce achieved psychic closure at Euro 96 by sticking the ball in the onion bag, shortly afterwards Gareth Southgate reopened newly closed wounds by missing the large net thing a few yards in front of him. Why hasn't the Beagle sent a signal? Because it is British, and because Mars has the wrong kind of clay on its surface. Terribly rich in iron, you see, completely unsuitable for Martian probe landings. British ones, at least.

You may think that you get off the hook because you're Scottish or Welsh. Failure is the English disease, isn't it? Sadly not: to be Scottish, for instance, is to be like the English in terms of failure only more so. Thus, in Irvine Welsh's novel Trainspotting, Renton makes the following point: "Some people hate the English, but I don't. They're just wankers. We, on the other hand, are colonised by wankers. We can't even pick a decent culture to be colonised by. We are ruled by effete arseholes." The Welsh suffer just as much from colonisation by nearby Wankeria, as do those Irish people who have the misfortune to live under England's post-imperial yoke. Indeed, one might well argue that the ability of the effete English nation to colonise anybody is the exception that proves the rule, a rare historical example of Britain transcending its historical destiny.

"Oh really! Come on!" I hear you cry. "I mean, think of Jonny and the boys. Doesn't that remarkable triumph over one of the greatest winning machines in sporting history (Australia) signify that one of the greatest losing machines in said history (England) is emerging in to a bright new future?" It's a good question and one that I can best answer by saying: no, it doesn't. Consider the dreary ineptitude of Chris Tarrant's TV paean to that team, We Are the Champions - The Nation Celebrates on ITV. Britain is a failure at celebrating success, arguably because we are temperamentally ill-inclined to be anything but good losers and are lavish celebrants only of defeats (hence those items of national history you've been expecting to come across for some paragraphs now, namely Dunkirk, the Charge of the Light Brigade and Scott's race against Amundsen).

With the failure of the Beagle 2, one might argue, normal service has been resumed. Britain is back where it likes to be, failing and meticulously analysing that failure. Whole British industries are devoted to this analysis. One of the great postwar British industries is the sitcom, and that industry's greatest products are failures. Basil Fawlty, Del Boy Trotter, Harold (and possibly Albert) Steptoe, Rab C Nesbitt, Frank Spencer, the characters of Dad's Army and Are You Being Served, David Brent and Alan Partridge are all ground-down anti-heroes whose role is to remind the British, reassuringly, of themselves, to confirm what we all know - that we suffer from a British Leyland of the soul.

Perhaps, though, the story is more complicated than this. Perhaps, for every British failure there is a corresponding success. Consider one of the great failures of recent public life in Britain, namely rail transport. Before that was a failure, it was a British success thanks to George Stephenson who, in a very real sense, invented the thing. Rail transport was quite a success for a while - but then there was a very British coup. Let's select just two examples from rail transport's troubled history to clinch that point, and not even mention how long it has taken Eurostar to get up to speed on the British side of the Channel Tunnel. In 1981, British Rail launched its successor to the Rocket, called the Advanced Passenger Train, which swerved so dramatically that it made a trainload of VIPs sick on a demonstration run, a sensation made worse by the gallons of free hooch they had consumed before they approached the first bend. Nicknamed the "queasy rider", the APT was scrapped four years later. No matter. Two decades later, Richard Branson bought a fleet of £11m Italian-built Pendolino tilting trains to trim journey times on the west coast mainline so that trips between London and Manchester would be 38 minutes shorter and those between London and Birmingham 17 minutes less. The problem is that the British track isn't ready for these Pendolinos: only 17 miles of track (between Rugby and Atherstone) is currently capable of serving these state-of-the-art trains and replacement work is more than a year behind schedule. Worse yet, some passengers on Pendolino test drives have complained of vibrations that turned their stomachs.

Then there is our glorious record in martial matters. Before we waded into Iraq, Tony Blair praised the professionalism of the British armed forces. "There is no greater strength for a British prime minister and the British nation at a time like this to know that those forces are among the best in the world," he said. What a success story! No matter that it was the British army that bought 67 Apache helicopters which could not fire their Hellfire anti-tank missiles because debris from the weapon system could hit rotor blades and thus cause the aircraft to crash. No matter that the SA80 rifle, developed by Royal Ordnance and anticipated as a breakthrough assault weapon that would be the best of its kind in the world, jammed repeatedly in hot and sandy conditions. No matter that a naval destroyer, the 3,500-tonne HMS Nottingham, hit a clearly charted rock off Australia. Behind every British success story, perhaps, there is are a clutch of failures jostling for recognition.

Sometimes British failure can be ascribed to our old friend, woeful misfortune. For example, four years before the Wright brothers conquered the skies, a British inventor almost beat them to it. But days before his first attempt at powered flight, Percy Pilcher died in a gliding accident, his design untried. But then, the British have never really eluded misfortune when they have sought to dominate the skies. Concorde was at best a mixed blessing, an innovative triumph that meant the likes of us subsidised the likes of them to have supersonic high jinks. And consider the Comet. The Comet was the world's first jet airliner, designed and built in Britain. After a successful first year in operation in 1952, manufacturers De Havilland had orders for 50 more Comets. Then disaster struck. The British Overseas Airways Corporation temporarily suspended all Comet jet services following the crash off Rome while checks were carried out. Modifications were made and the Comet went back into service. Then another Comet fell into the sea in 1954, killing all on board. Comets were grounded again. Tests found that the plane's fuselage was unable to withstand the pressures of flying. Cracks appeared in the bodywork that caused the plane to blow apart during flight. Although the Comet was redesigned, the Boeing 707 had gone into service by the time it was back in operation and the British jet was doomed to oblivion.

The British are virtuosos at rubbishing their inventors' attempts at attending to our transport needs. Who can forget the C5 ? Not Sir Clive Sinclair, who invented it and became as much of a standing national joke as that C5 of British politics, Iain Duncan Smith, as a result. Only the other day, the C5 was in the news when thieves who had stolen one from an antiques shop gave the cops the slip, even though the C5 runs on pedal power backed by an electric motor. That's how rubbish Britain is: even our police officers can't catch a getaway car that has a top speed of 15mph. Which, personally speaking, is why I kind of like the place.

So normal service has been resumed. The Beagle continues a grand British tradition. Or does it? After all, the Beagle 2 isn't the only Martian probe to go awol. Nasa's have done so with considerably regularity for five decades, but you don't hear Americans whingeing about national failure as a consequence. In fact it would be nice if they did.

Meanwhile, there's another possibility we haven't considered, namely that reports of the Beagle's failure have been exaggerated. "We need to get Beagle 2 into a period when it can broadcast for a much longer period," said Colin Pillinger, the Open University scientist behind the Beagle project. "This will happen around January 4, after the spacecraft has experienced a sufficient number of communication failures to switch to automatic transmission mode." Victory may yet be snatched from the jaws of defeat. It would be delightfully un-British if it was.

December 30, 2003 at 01:09 AM in World Affairs | Permalink | Top of page | Blog Home

December 29, 2003

PEW: How many people have created a blog

Daily and Overall Internet Population

Seven percent (7%) of internet users have created a blog at one time or another. On any given day this percentage drops to one percent (1%).

December 29, 2003 at 07:34 PM in Blogging & feeds | Permalink | Top of page | Blog Home

America's Online Pursuits; who's online and what they do

Pew Internet & American Life Project

PEW are a great source of publi opinion, and as it relates to internet & society. This latest end of year report, covers who is online, and what they do.

Interesting takeaways:
- growth in online base is slowed
- those online have embedded internet as part of their life, especially high-speed users, who now account for 31% of all users.

- Online activity has consistently grown over the course of our research.
Internet users discover more things to do online as they gain experience and
as new applications become available. This momentum often fuels increasing
reliance on the Internet in everyday life and higher expectations about the
things people can do online.

- Despite this growth in activity, the growth of the online population
itself has slowed. There was almost no growth over the course of 2002 and
there has been only a small uptick in recent months to leave the size of the
online U.S. adult population at 63 percent of all those 18 and over.

- Different people use the Internet in different ways. The report is full of
examples of how people in different demographic groups use the Internet for
different purposes.

- Experience and the quality of online connections matter. Those with more
experience online and those who have high-speed connections at home
generally do more online more often than those with lower levels of
experience and those with dial-up connections. The growth of the cohort of
veteran users, those with at least three years of online experience, has
been striking. Nearly three-quarters of Internet users have at least three
years of experience.

- Online Americans' experience with the commercial side of the Internet has
expanded dramatically in spite of the economic slump. Financial and
transaction activities such as online banking and online auctions have grown
more than any other genre of activity.

- Email continues to be the "killer app" of the Internet. More people use
email than do any other activity online. Many report their email use
increases their communication with key family and friends and enhances their
connection to them.

- Big news stories drive lasting changes in the news-seeking audience
online.

Other findings in the report:

- The size of the online population on a typical day grew from 52 million
Americans in March 2000 to 66 million in August 2003 - an increase of 27
percent.

- 87 percent of U.S. Internet users said they have access at home and 48
percent said they have access at work in our August 2003 survey. 31 percent
of Internet users who go online from home have broadband as of August 2003.

- 31 percent of those who use the Internet at home have broadband
connections.

December 29, 2003 at 07:26 PM in Web lifestyle | Permalink | Top of page | Blog Home

The economy according to eBay

Yahoo! News - The economy according to eBay

Mon Dec 29, 6:20 AM ET

By Kevin Maney, USA TODAY
In 2003, the nation finally felt worn out. That's the conclusion when looking at the year through the unique lens of eBay, the gigantic, freewheeling online marketplace where one can buy anything from a Beanie Baby to a backhoe.

In a year of lives lost at war and jobs lost to a difficult economy, of a crisis of faith in two institutions - mutual funds and the North American electrical grid - that previously seemed unshakeable, judiciousness took hold.

At the beginning of 2003, BMWs, Gucci and Prada reigned supreme on eBay (EBAY). All were among the 10 most-searched terms. Last year, the No. 1 search was for Gucci.

Here at the end of 2003, the most-searched items have shifted to Fords, anything pink (forget which designer), and gold (the kind you store in a wall safe as a hedge against geopolitical or economic disaster).

There are many ways to analyze 2003. You can sift through major news events. You can chart best-selling books and top-rated TV shows. You can dissect the stock market. But if you want the gestalt of America - the unified essence of this nation at this time - there might be no better place to turn than the massive databases that run eBay.

There sits a repository of culture and commerce unlike any before it. No executive decides what eBay sells. Instead, millions of individuals post items on the Web site in response to shifting nuances in the marketplace. Because it is so fluid, the site captures the collective mood and unique extremes of the 86 million people who use it.

"EBay is the perfect manifestation of everything the Internet makes possible," says Aliza Sherman, a Web pioneer now teaching and writing in Laramie, Wyo. "It is for and by the people. It is organic."

So USA TODAY came here to eBay's campus, where the lobby features a Pez dispenser collection and conference rooms have names like Fiestaware and Matchbook, and asked the company's computer wizards to cut the site's data every which way, looking for trends and oddities that help define the year we're leaving behind.

Of course, it's not perfect. As much information as eBay collects, there's still a lot it doesn't yet know about its marketplace. The company is in the process of installing better ways to mine its data. At this point, conclusions are less an exact science and more artful extrapolation. Using eBay's data to find larger trends is a little like watching a movie trailer and trying to figure out the whole movie's story. Then again, people do that all the time.

In that spirit, some tidbits about 2003 from the eBay files:

• The Aug. 14 blackout in the Northeast shook confidence in the power grid. In the week after the blackout, sales of portable generators jumped 67% vs. the previous week. But it wasn't just a knee-jerk spike. Generator sales on eBay are running at an annualized rate of $12 million, up 191% over 2002. It seems we're sure another outage is coming, and we want to be ready.

• Wireless home computer networks have hit the mainstream. Sales on eBay of equipment for so-called Wi-Fi networks, which can let computers connect to the Internet wirelessly, have grown 243% over 2002. It is the hottest technology category.

• SARS (news - web sites) scared the pants off a lot of people. At the height of the epidemic, in May, eBay's "protective masks" category shot up 118% for the month. Sellers were listing masks singly, by the box and by the pallet.

• People are just stinkin' weird. One listing offered to sell Paul McCartney's germs from a used tissue. After baseball fan Steve Bartman interfered with a pop foul ball in the Chicago Cubs' playoff series, someone tried to sell his personal contact information on eBay. (EBay pulled the listing.)

Currently, you can, if you wish, buy a kangaroo scrotum. It costs about $10.

Downshifting in vogue

Skulking through all the eBay data, though, is the mounting weight of persistent economic malaise.

Though government numbers show the economy is rebounding after more than two years of doldrums, the eBay economy suggests something different. In fact, it seems to show a lag effect. People and companies downshifted as 2003 wore on.

For instance, eBay tracks searched words, which in turn are indicative of what buyers are looking for. Word searches for all of 2002 reflect a society still spending freely. Among the top 10 searches for the year were BMW, Louis Vuitton, Prada and Coach.

Similar terms dominated the top 10 into early 2003, until August, when there was a sudden shift. The Iraq (news - web sites) war was dragging on. Companies were still cutting jobs and keeping raises flat. The blackout hit. California was in political chaos with its recall vote. And just then the luxury names dropped off eBay's top 10, replaced by more mundane words such as Ford, Chevy and diesel.

In September, "salvage" made it to the top 10.

Meanwhile, the economy drove individual sellers to eBay, hoping to make extra cash in tough times. In July, Bill and Peterene Stanhope of Pembroke, Mass., listed a 14-acre island they owned off the coast of Maine. Bill's importing business was suffering, as was Peterene's business of making bookmarks. They needed to sell the island, which they'd bought years earlier, to make ends meet.

For similar reasons, eBay's industrial products market took off in 2003. As an example, doctors and dentists, squeezed by insurance companies, turned to eBay in 2003 to buy medical equipment. In general, medical professionals are wary of buying used equipment. But the category is up more than 100% over last year.

"I don't see any huge economic recovery," says Neal Sherman, whose company, The Advantage Group, uses eBay to liquidate goods for companies and public entities. It recently listed the entire contents of a supermarket, minus the food, and sold a yacht for the state of Maryland for $275,100.

"Take coffee equipment and mixers - a good operator in flusher economic times would buy those new," Sherman says. "When times are tough, they save money and buy it in the aftermarket."

From everything Sherman sees, the aftermarket for used business stuff is turbocharged. For that matter, the economy is exactly why Maryland went through Sherman and eBay to sell the governor's yacht. The state needs cash to offset its budget deficit.

War, Cubs, Arnold

If America 2003 hasn't exactly been a nation of peace, eBay shows we were a nation of pieces.

The war in Iraq began March 19. Those of us at home seemed to want a piece of it. Some individuals tried to use eBay to sell fragments of Baghdad's toppled statue of Saddam Hussein (news - web sites). (This was another time when eBay pulled the listings, citing its policy of not allowing profiteering from disasters.) Also after the war started, the site did a brisk business in military model toys, up 50% vs. the year before. Items such as the Iraqi most-wanted trading cards sold well, too.

The war proved a boon to eBay's category for pieces of gold. Sales are up more than 70% over a year ago. People generally buy gold when they believe bad times will drive down the value of the dollar.

In October, when the Cubs seemed on the way to their first World Series (news - web sites) championship in more than 80 years, everyone wanted a piece of that, too. EBay's sales of Cubs paraphernalia shot up more than six times over the year before.

During Arnold Schwarzenegger (news - web sites)'s campaign for California governor, everyone wanted a piece of him. EBay's sales of Schwarzenegger-related items - from a 1969 Iron Man magazine with him on the cover to Terminator 2 talking dolls - climbed 1,500%.

Finally, there was the Feb. 1 Columbia disaster, when the shuttle disintegrated on re-entry. Fragments were scattered across the Southwest. EBay landed at the center of controversy when some people tried to sell pieces of Columbia on the site. The listings were pulled. More legitimately, sales of space-related model kits jumped 95% in February, compared with February 2002.

Best buy? Maybe eBay

Overall, the success of eBay itself says something about 2003.

First, it shows that the Internet revolution didn't end when the 2000 dot-com bubble burst. Sure, a lot of things didn't work and went under - Pets.com, online grocer Webvan. But businesses that made it are transforming markets.

Just look at what eBay and the Internet have done in 2003 to the $300 billion used car business. About $7 billion worth of cars, most of them used, will sell through eBay this year. About 30% of used cars will be sold on the Net. A market that used to be local has become national in a year or two.

The eBay concept is even transforming politics, as seen in the campaign of Democrat Howard Dean (news - web sites). "You can draw a clear connecting line from eBay to Google to the Dean campaign," says Steven Johnson, author of Emergence: The Connected Lives of Ants, Brains, Cities, and Software. "All are bottom-up systems organized by lots of individuals acting in small ways, as opposed to top-down systems where a small elite calls the shots."

As a company and phenomenon, eBay continued to grow in 2003. In 1998, its gross merchandise sales - the total value of all transactions - were $700,000. In 2000, at the height of dot-com mania, they hit $5.4 billion. This year? The number should pass $20 billion.

The stock market values the company at about $41 billion - about $11 billion more than the market value of Ford Motor. That says a lot about what society thinks of eBay and its future.

Speaking of the stock market, eBay is in sync with developments there, too. After nearly three years of stock market gloom, the Dow Jones industrial average and Nasdaq turned upward in 2003 - but eBay did even better.

With such news comes the possibility that our humbling will not last.

At the close of 2003, mad cow disease in the USA is a worry. But Saddam Hussein is captured, stocks are up, companies are reporting better profits, and managers seem poised to hire once again. IBM this fall said it will create 10,000 jobs in 2004.

Perhaps we'll soon be in a different mood, and eBay will be there to capture it as the likes of Gucci, Prada and BMW once again rise to the top of our desires.

December 29, 2003 at 10:53 AM in Web lifestyle | Permalink | Top of page | Blog Home

Cyber Blackmail Wave Targets Office Workers

Yahoo! News - Cyber Blackmail Wave Targets Office Workers

Here is a new issue ... targeting of office workers with threats to compromise their PC, and therefore their job. Easy to understand how people could be scared by this tactic, but I hope anyone who gets this, reports it immediately.

Mon Dec 29, 7:21 AM ET

By Bernhard Warner, European Internet Correspondent
LONDON (Reuters) - Cyber blackmail artists are shaking down office workers, threatening to delete computer files or install pornographic images on their work PCs unless they pay a ransom, police and security experts said.

The extortion scam, which is believed to have surfaced one year ago, indiscriminately targets anyone on the corporate ladder with a PC connected to the Internet.

It usually starts with a threatening e-mail in which the author claims to have the power to take over a worker's computer through an exploit in the corporate network, experts said.

The e-mail typically contains a demand that unless a small fee is paid -- at first no more than $20 or $30 -- they will attack the PC with a file-wiping program or download onto the machine images of child pornography.

"They prey on the nice secretary who wouldn't do anything wrong. When she gets one of these e-mails she thinks 'Oh, my goodness what am I going to do?' So she puts it on her credit card and transfers the funds to the (suspect's online bank) account and hopes it goes away," a British detective specializing in cyber-crime told Reuters.

The officer advised against cooperating with the fraudsters. "If a person pays up, say it's just 20 euros, then they have identified a soft target. They may come back for more, next time demanding more money."

HARD CRIME TO CRACK

In the annals of cyber-crime, investigators acknowledge the racket is one of the most difficult to crack. Because the ransom is small, people tend to pay up and keep quiet.

Police said the number of cases is tailing off but because it so often goes unreported, there is little evidence the crime is actually in decline.

According to Finnish computer security firm, F-Secure, a large Scandinavian university was hit earlier this month.

Several university officials received an e-mail from a fraudster who appeared to be based in Estonia, said F-Secure research manager Mikko Hypponen.

The e-mail said several security vulnerabilities had been detected on the university's network and that unless the e-mail recipient transferred 20 euros ($25) to the author's online bank account, he would release a series of viruses capable of deleting a host of computer files.

Hypponen said he advised the university to take the necessary precautions, alert police and not pay. "A lot of these cases are simply bluffing. But I'm sure there are both bluffs and actual cases," said Hypponen.

Police say crime gangs have turned cyber extortion into a tidy business of late.

A preferred tool is the crude, but effective denial-of-service attack on a company's network, capable of crippling it with an overwhelming flood of data.

There are scores of cases of companies -- particularly small and medium-sized firms -- receiving extortion threats that demand the victim transfer money to the fraudster's bank account or the attacks will grow in severity, police said.

Fraudsters also send out streams of menacing e-mails with hollow threats of cyber sabotage. The scam works even if only a handful of the countless recipients follow through and pay up.

"It's getting simpler," said Hypponen. "If you wanted to extort money from a small company you would have had to hack them and convince them you have stolen their information. Here, you don't have to do anything but send an e-mail around."

December 29, 2003 at 10:51 AM in Web lifestyle | Permalink | Top of page | Blog Home

Andrew Sullivan: If it didn't come true, you read it here first

Intelligence: Andrew Sullivan: If it didn't come true, you read it here first

Andrew Sullivan: If it didn't come true, you read it here first
December 28, 2003
It's well known that pundits are always right. We never get a thing wrong. Everything that happens is something we foresaw. That's why you spend good money to read our scintillating thoughts, after all.
If you’d read the prestigious New Yorker only a couple of weeks ago, for example, you would have been informed of the near-impossibility of finding Saddam Hussein in Iraq: “The taskforce’s search for Saddam was, from the beginning, daunting. According to Scott Ritter, a former United Nations weapons inspector, it may have been fatally flawed as well. From 1994 to 1998, Ritter directed a special UN unit that eavesdropped on many of Saddam's private telephone communications.

“‘The high-profile guys around Saddam were the murafaqin, his most loyal companions, who could stand next to him carrying a gun,’ Ritter told me. ‘But now he’s gone to a different tier — the tribes. He has released the men from his most sensitive units and let them go back to their tribes, and we don’t know where they are . . .’ The taskforce, in any event, has shifted its focus from the hunt for Saddam as it is increasingly distracted by the spreading guerrilla war.”

Days later, a tribal ally betrayed Saddam and he is now the most famous captive in the world. The analysis? Courtesy of Seymour Hersh, one of the most celebrated investigative journalists of our time.

Or if you’d read the liberal American Prospect last summer you would have seen the prophetic words: “Every so often in life you have to go out on a limb. So here goes: Arnold Schwarzenegger will not be the next governor of California. What’s more, his loss will represent an important moment in a shift in American politics that has been in gestation for some time now — toward a politics in which voters make decisions more on the basis of their cultural affinities than in response to a candidate’s charisma or fame.” Oh well.

At least they got the war right. Here’s Simon Jenkins in The Times on March 28. The title of the piece was: Baghdad will be near impossible to conquer. Here’s the key paragraph:

“In Baghdad the coalition forces confront a city apparently determined on resistance. They should remember Napoleon in Moscow, Hitler in Stalingrad, the Americans in Mogadishu and the Russians at Grozny. Hostile cities have ways of making life ghastly for aggressors. They are not like countryside. They seldom capitulate, least of all when their backs are to the wall.

“It took two years after the American withdrawal from Vietnam for Saigon to fall to the Vietcong. Kabul was ceded to the warlords only when the Taliban drove out of town. In the desert, armies fight armies. In cities, armies fight cities. The Iraqis were not stupid. They listened to western strategists musing about how a desert battle would be a pushover. Things would get ‘difficult’ only if Saddam played the cad and drew the Americans into Baghdad. Why should he do otherwise?”

So you can’t win them all. Robert Fisk, for one, is sometimes known to have let his disdain for the Americans overshadow the crimes of Arab tyrants like the great leader Saddam. Here he was, once again on the ball, fearlessly using his imagination in the thick of the Iraq war:

“Anyone who doubts that the Iraqi army is prepared to defend its capital should take the highway south of Baghdad. How, I kept asking myself, could the Americans batter their way through these defences? For mile after mile they go on, slit trenches, ditches, earthen underground bunkers, palm groves of heavy artillery and truckloads of combat troops in battle fatigues and steel helmets. Not since the 1980-88 Iran-Iraq war have I seen the Iraqi army deployed like this; the Americans may say they are ‘degrading’ the country’s defences but there was little sign of that here on Wednesday.”

It’s worth remembering that Fisk is still published in semi-serious papers and magazines. A man who has got pretty much everything wrong about the Middle East, who spent much of this year writing complete gobbledegook about Iraq, is still a hero of the liberal journalistic class.

But Fisk was in good company this past year; 2003 was, perhaps, best remembered as the year of living erroneously. Even your humble correspondent, who predicted success in Iraq, a Schwarzenegger victory and a strong American economic recovery got a few things wrong. Yes, I thought there would be real, live actual weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. Instead, we found merely the infrastructure, history, and plans for future development. Although the case for war rested on deeper foundations — namely, Saddam as the most dangerous weapon of them all — it behoves me to say I got it wrong.

So, of course, did the UN, Hans Blix, MI6, the French government, the CIA, The New York Times, the Democrats and — possibly — Saddam. Maybe his terrified underlings fibbed to him about what they had or didn’t have. Maybe he kept the lie going for fear of being revealed as a paper tyrant. All we know now is that he lost the bluff.

The biggest surprises? No one accurately foresaw the extraordinary rise of Howard Dean and the strength of his internet-based insurrection in the Democratic party. He remains the biggest domestic American story of the year.

No one predicted the amazing resilience of the American economy, powering back to an annual rate of 8.2% growth in the third quarter. Almost no one predicted the astonishing productivity gains either — gains that have kept the recovery relatively job-free but have brought the markets back to frothy exuberance.

Few foresaw the emergence of Schwarzenegger as the governor of the most populous state in America. Few would have predicted no large Al-Qaeda attacks in America. Few could have predicted that The New York Times would admit to having published dozens of fabricated stories by a young affirmative action product, Jayson Blair, in a scandal that helped bring down one of the most arrogant editors in that paper’s history. Or that in such a short time, Hillary Clinton would have emerged as a Democratic leader in her own right, swiftly out of the shadow of her presidential husband.

So, ahem, the predictions for 2004. Bush will be re-elected in a landslide, a revolution will topple the mullahs in Tehran, the Nasdaq will reach 2,500, and . . . oh, never mind.

You wouldn’t believe me anyway. And you shouldn’t. See you next year.

December 29, 2003 at 10:10 AM in Blogging & feeds | Permalink | Top of page | Blog Home

Disappearing Links

Re: Blogging: Disappearing Links

This from Re: Blogging highlights a problem the web has suffered from since inception. The average lifespan of a web page is 100 days .... 100 days has no permanance at all. Internet should be a library, and we should be able to rely on links forever. This is a fundamental flaw, and frankly one of the reasons I maintain this blog for myself. I have all these links archived in my own database ... but then what if I lose interest .... hmmmm.

Electronic archivists "are playing catch-up in trying to keep documents from landing in history's dustbin," says the Washington Post, reporting, on research published in the journal Science last month, found that footnotes from scientific articles in three major journals - the New England Journal of Medicine, Science and Nature – included many Internet references that were no longer valid links, not many months after publication. "Another study, published in January, found that 40 percent to 50 percent of the URLs referenced in articles in two computing journals were inaccessible within four years," says the Post. Brewster Kahle, digital librarian at the Internet Archive in San Francisco: "It's a huge problem. The average lifespan of a Web page today is 100 days. This is no way to run a culture."

December 29, 2003 at 08:57 AM in Blogging & feeds | Permalink | Top of page | Blog Home

We've Got Blog: How Weblogs are Changing Our Culture

We've Got Blog: How Weblogs are Changing Our Culture and The Weblog Handbook - Fall 2002 issue of Student Affairs Online

Weblogs, or just plain Blogs, are one of the more recent phenomena of the Web. Simply stated, Weblogs are frequently or regularly updated web pages that can be constructed in a variety of formats--as an online diary, offering observations and revelations on daily life; a filtering of Web links with commentary, possibly organized around a central theme; or a site with longer, though-provoking treatises.
Weblogs are the subject of two recent publications by Perseus Press - We've Got Blog: How Weblogs are Changing Our Culture and The Weblog Handbook. Both books offer an excellent primer on this emerging Web-based platform.

Reading through both books one is struck by the different ways Blogs are characterized. An off-beat description by Julian Dibbell, in We've Got Blog, compares weblogs to the Wunderkammer, "a random collection of strange, compelling objects, typically compiled and owned by a learned, well-off gentleman…that reflect[ed] European civilization's dazed and wondering attempts to assimilate the glut of physical data that science and exploration [unleashed] during the Renaissance." Rebecca Blood, the author of The Weblog Handbook and creator of the Weblog "Rebecca's Pocket," (www.rebeccablood.net) sees these creations as a personal vision, with a "focus on whatever is of interest to its maintainer." The appeal of each Weblog, she writes, is "grounded thoroughly in the personality of its writer: his interests, his opinions, and his personal mix of links and commentary."

Most of the almost three dozen essays (excellently cited in the back of the book) in We've Got Blog have appeared on various Weblogs over the past three years. They range from stream-of-conscious ruminations-"Credo of the Web Log Writer," by GeekMan; to more introspective pieces on the nature and purpose of Weblogs - "Portrait of the Blogger as a Young Man," by Julian Dibbell; to published interviews-"The State of the Blog: Parts 1-3," by Giles Turnbull; to other less quantifiable topics.

The writings vary wildly in content and quality, from earthiness and plain-speak to more professionally polished prose. Some of the texts come across as too defensive and preachy, begging for the acceptance of Weblogs as a bona fide form of social, cultural and political commentary, thereby justifying their place in the online world. But, for the most part, We've Got Blog provides the Weblog neophyte with a superb introduction to this realm. The book also contains a helpful glossary of terms and abundant list of Web-based references.

In The Weblog Handbook, Ms. Blood, who entered the Weblog realm in 1999, gives the reader a well-structured, meticulously mapped out tour of Blogs. Chapter 1 delivers a thorough description of Weblogs, providing the newbie with enough information to comfortably understand its underpinnings, variegates, and nuances. From here, the author deconstructs the entire Weblog experience. Subsequent chapters comprise such topics as the motivation in conceiving a Blog, the time and energy required for its upkeep, and a how-to guide in creating a Weblog from scratch.

For most of this highly readable book Ms. Blood is a combination of coach and cheerleader for individuals seeking to enter the Weblog domain. Her enthusiasm for the form can be infectious-I felt like hammering out my own Weblog after completing the book! Throughout she stresses the necessity in finding one's true voice, no matter how the Weblog is organized. Terms such as distinctive, unique, and independence are apt descriptors.

While some of the latter chapters-"Finding An Audience" and "Weblog Community and Etiquette"--may seem elementary to long time denizens of the Web they do contain solid, practical information for those new to Weblogs and the Web itself.

As with We've Got Blogged, there is a plethora of referenced Web sites at the end of each chapter.

Weblogs allow individuals to become publishers. They are personal soapboxes, cable access television programs and Hyde Park's Speaker's Corner all wrapped up into one. Even though Weblogs have begun to be unmasked by the mainstream press their identification level still hovers just below the radar of common acknowledgement by the masses, With the publication of We've Got Blogged and The Weblog Handbook Weblogs, flickering at the edges of societal recognition, should come more into focus for the uninitiated.

Blood, R. (2002). The weblog handbook: Practical advice on creating and maintaining your blog.Cambridge, MA: Perseus.

Editors of Perseus Publishing. (2002). We've got blog: How weblogs are changing our culture. Cambridge, MA: Perseus

December 29, 2003 at 08:47 AM in Blogging & feeds | Permalink | Top of page | Blog Home

Role of blogs in Trent Lotts downfall is not a one off event

This thoughtful piece on the role of internet in current events (Clinton / Lewinsky) and blogs (Lotts downfall) makes a compelling case that traditional media cannot ignore if they wish to survive.
Download file

December 29, 2003 at 08:19 AM in Blogging & feeds, Business Models | Permalink | Top of page | Blog Home

America Idle - part 2

The Doc Searls Weblog : Sunday, December 28, 2003

Great update to the America Idle piece ... as Doc says ...... gotta think about this some more.

Last June, Simon Dumenco wrote American Idle, a piece that blamed both blogs and TiVo for second-hand opinion manufacture:
It¹s important to know what you¹re supposed to know but you don¹t actually have to know it firsthand...

I¹d argue that certain information-delivering technologies‹like TiVo and blogs‹up the ante so dramatically, and so seamlessly, that they create an entirely different sort of interpassive lifestyle, one that¹s, well, hyperpassive.
A home video library, or a physical collection of information of any sort, exists. The pleasure derives from the ownership of objects, but those objects—the piles of unread papers and magazines and books, the stacks of unwatched videotapes—also constantly taunt you, reminding you of their presence.
A machine removes that punishing presence. A blog, for instance, constantly pushes even slightly stale talking points to the margins (or the bottom of the homepage, or the archive). And while in hope-springs-eternal obliviousness you can always think, in the back of your mind, Oh, I¹ll go back and catch up on what I missed or I¹ll go back and read the article that was linked to, chances are it¹s not going to happen because there won¹t be any tangible evidence of your failure to do so.
What¹s more, a machine erases not only physical boundaries (the information object vanishes) but psychological boundaries as well. The point where you begin and where the machine-generated awareness ends begins to blur. (I¹m starting to feel like I really have watched Tina and Clay.)
The blog reader isn¹t thinking, Jim Romenesko is smart about media for me or Elizabeth Spiers is drolly engaged in Manhattanism for me. The reader is thinking, I¹m smart about media and I¹m drolly engaged in Manhattanism.
And I really hate to do this, but I can¹t help but bring up that kid, Jayson what¹s-his-name, at the Times, who sat in his apartment with a laptop and a cell phone, collected all manner of information from disparate sources, and said to himself not only I am knowledgeable but I am a reporter.
For him, firsthand experience was secondary: Life was blog, blog was life.
I wrote this (among other things) in response to that:
Wtf? Let's get this straight: A TiVo is a machine. A blog is a journal. Like comparing apples and noises.
Phil Wolff responded with an extremely quotable line: RSS newsreaders are TiVo for blogs. He explained,
Newsreaders like NewzCrawler and Radio UserLand do TiVo things. Time shifting. Easier, more complete channel and program selection.Season pass for your favorite shows. Record in the background while playing in the foreground. Save a post to your blog instead of to your VCR.
TiVo needs blogspace community tools: add social filtering (recommendations), feedback, and threads of commentary.
I responded with commentary on the very non-bloglike nature of the consumer electronics world, where TiVo lives:
In our habitat, the one that lives on the Net, we have NewsCrawler, Radio Userland, NetNewsWire Technorati, Blogdex, Daypop and all those other commercial conveniences (among the most inventive of which are commercial entities)l because they build on an underlying environment that nobody owns, everybody can use and anybody can improve. Hence all the invention and innovation.
The consumer electronics habitat, largely defined by cable, broadcasting and entertainment conglomerates and the regulatory agencies they essentially govern, broook no invention or innovation that doesn't come from inside their own labs, from their own engineers, for their own purposes as suppliers, distributors and facilitators of "content."
The fact that TiVo came out of Silicon Valley rather than Japan doesn't make it any less a creature of its category. Nor does the fact that it clearly threatens the business models (e.g. TV advertising) of many of its fellow market inhabitants.
But Phil's metaphor didn't die. Just two days ago, Suman wrote this in response to Phil's post:
And now I want functions in RSS aggregators to record between dates. Record Jon's Radio from December 22nd till today and cache the referred pages so that I can take it on my laptop and read it offline. Or, I will leave my workstation running during holidays and please record all channels that mention the word "HyperChip".
Well, well, we are getting there. With blog recording, page caching and text filtering at our fingertips, the day is not far when we will finally be able to take long holidays and not worry about what we are missing.
The implication: that blogs are indeed media of some kind, and not just journals.
I've always believed that journals were not inside the media circle. There was something about them that was outside, looking in. That they were exceptional, somehow, to the Great Media Machinery by which stuff is pumped from a few producers to a zillion consumers. That the whole producer/consumer industrial model didn't apply. Or at least applied with a degree of conditionality. Now I wonder.
Gotta think about this some more. Meantime I gotta go make breakfast.

December 29, 2003 at 07:57 AM in Blogging & feeds | Permalink | Top of page | Blog Home

American Idle

American Idle

A thoughful view of modern plagiarism, and who thinks what first.

That Blair kid isn't the only faker in town. With a little creative use of new technology, you no longer need to experience anything firsthand—and people will cheerfully let you get away with it!
By Simon Dumenco
When it comes to pop-cultural literacy, I've lately discovered, it's the thought that counts. It’s important to know what you're supposed to know” but you don't actually have to know it firsthand.

“Oh, my God, did you see Clay Aiken butcher that ‘Starry, Starry Night’ song last night?” a friend asked the Wednesday before the American Idol finale.

“Not yet—I TiVo’ed it,” I said.

My answer somehow satisfied my interrogator. Woo-hoo! I thought. Spared again! I had shown that I wasn’t so clueless I didn’t know that the deeply uncool American Idol had somehow become mandatory viewing for the pop-cultural literati. My response signaled that I was planning on being part of the national conversation surrounding so-bad-it’s-good Idolmania—but I’d been so busy I hadn’t had a chance yet.

The only problem is, I wasn’t really planning on watching it.

Over the past several months, my TiVo had dutifully collected 39 hours of American Idol episodes. And then, just as dutifully, my TiVo had systematically deleted those 39 hours, mostly unwatched. (Unlike a VCR, TiVo can be programmed to automatically erase shows it’s automatically recorded—to make room for more shows you probably won’t watch.)

Tina Brown helped me figure all this out. In Manhattan media circles, awareness of the April 30 debut of her quarterly CNBC talk show, Topic A With Tina Brown, was unavoidable. Endless pre-show hype had culminated in a sweaty-palmed story in Section A, of all places, of the New York Times—as if the television debut of the buzzy British magazine-world refugee was news of national import rather than the Manhattan-chattering-class curiosity it turned out to be.

Talking Tina was a preordained talking point, so I TiVo’ed her show.

And then I didn’t watch it.

“Did you see Tina’s show last night?” more than a few friends and colleagues asked me.

“Not yet—I TiVo’ed it,” I replied. I’d discovered my digital “Get out of jail free” card. Everyone was all too happy to engage me in conversation about the show I had (sort of) planned to watch but now didn’t need to.

The beautiful thing is that by collecting their observations and mixing them together with a few blogged opinions culled from the Web, I was able to hold my own—with ever-increasing authority—in the conversation about Talking Tina.

The blog thing, especially, was key. Because I didn’t have to read, in long form, the endless pontificating about Tina’s TV debut either (it’s a bit like not even bothering to read book reviews but still being able to talk about books). In the same way I delegated the task of watching Tina’s show to my TiVo, I delegated the task of forming an opinion about it to media-news blogger Jim Romenesko (www.medianews.org)—who, come to think of it, had delegated the task of actually thinking and writing about Tina to the assorted opinion-makers he’d linked to and summarized.

“I delegated the task of watching Tina Brown’s show to my TiVo—and the task of forming an opinion about it to bloggers.”

Now I’m very much looking forward to not watching the next installment of Topic A With Tina Brown. Not to mention not watching American Idol 3.

Okay, so as a seemingly knowledgeable conversationalist on any number of pop-cultural and media subjects, I’m a fraud. But I’m perpetrating what’s become a very commonplace deception.

In fact, I first became conscious of the faking-it phenomenon in regards to my own “content.” As a writer for this and other magazines, I find my stuff often gets linked to by assorted bloggers. Over the past year in particular, I’ve noticed more and more of my friends and colleagues saying things along the lines of “I saw you on Gawker” (Gawker.com, the Manhattan-centric and media-crazed white-hot blog du jour). There is, increasingly, no pretense of actually having read what I’ve written, or even having the intention to read what I’ve written. This is a qualitatively different declaration from the pre-blog-era “I saw your piece in New York”—which, if the person hadn’t read it yet, was always tinged with a mixture of guilt and faux anticipation, as expressed in a follow-up statement (“Haven’t had a chance to read it yet, but . . . ” or “Can’t wait to read it”).

“I saw you on Gawker,” though, has a certain hermetic finality. The person saying this, of course, already has a rough idea of what I’ve written about, thanks to Gawker empress Elizabeth Spiers’s pithy summary. So there’s really no pressing need for my purported readers to actually read what I’ve written. Spiers has done that for them! There is therefore no need to feel guilt or any further obligation. Engaging by proxy is virtually as good as actually engaging.

More to the point, though, “I saw you on Gawker” (or Romenesko or iwantmedia.com or mediabistro.com) is a way for the blog reader to say, “Good for you that you wrote something that somebody in a position to know has decided is interesting or relevant or mildly amusing.”

And it works at a subtly self-congratulatory level, too, of course: It’s a way of saying, “I’m clever enough to know that all the clever things I need to know are on [insert blog name here].”

As it turns out, there’s a circle of European-philosopher types—mostly self-described Lacanians (adherents of the theories of French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan)—who have recently been parsing this sort of thing. Chief among them is Slavoj Zizek, a Slovenian philosophy professor and worldwide academic cult figure who has promoted the concept of “interpassivity”—a catchall term that Lacanians use to describe everything from laugh tracks on sitcoms (the sitcom laughs for you, relieving you of the obligation of deciding what’s funny on your own) to people assembling home film libraries. “Although I do not actually watch [them], the very awareness that the films I love are stored in my video library gives me profound satisfaction,” Zizek has written of his own interpassivity.

But I’d argue that certain information-delivering technologies—like TiVo and blogs—up the ante so dramatically, and so seamlessly, that they create an entirely different sort of interpassive lifestyle, one that’s, well, hyperpassive.

A home video library, or a physical collection of information of any sort, exists. The pleasure derives from the ownership of objects, but those objects—the piles of unread papers and magazines and books, the stacks of unwatched videotapes—also constantly taunt you, reminding you of their presence.

A machine removes that punishing presence. A blog, for instance, constantly pushes even slightly stale talking points to the margins (or the bottom of the homepage, or the archive). And while in hope-springs-eternal obliviousness you can always think, in the back of your mind, Oh, I’ll go back and catch up on what I missed or I’ll go back and read the article that was linked to, chances are it’s not going to happen because there won’t be any tangible evidence of your failure to do so.

What’s more, a machine erases not only physical boundaries (the information object vanishes) but psychological boundaries as well. The point where you begin and where the machine-generated awareness ends begins to blur. (I’m starting to feel like I really have watched Tina and Clay.)

The blog reader isn’t thinking, Jim Romenesko is smart about media for me or Elizabeth Spiers is drolly engaged in Manhattanism for me. The reader is thinking, I’m smart about media and I’m drolly engaged in Manhattanism.

And I really hate to do this, but I can’t help but bring up that kid, Jayson what’s-his-name, at the Times, who sat in his apartment with a laptop and a cell phone, collected all manner of information from disparate sources, and said to himself not only I am knowledgeable but I am a reporter.

For him, firsthand experience was secondary: Life was blog, blog was life.

The truth is, I’m getting a little blurry myself on some of the boundaries (maybe this column is a cry for help), including the shape and scope of my own argument. If I’m lucky, a clever blogger will summarize this column and crystallize its meaning not only for other readers but for me. (I can’t tell you how many times Romenesko has blogged me and I’ve thought, Oh, so that was my point.)

Meanwhile, I have to ask: Did you read this essay or did you read about it?

December 29, 2003 at 07:54 AM in Blogging & feeds | Permalink | Top of page | Blog Home

6 Months old

So ICE is coming up on 6 months old now. When I began, I was on Blogger, then moved to Typepad, and now running on Movable Type. MT has expanded the usefulness of the blog immensely because of categories, and their extensive XML library, which when combined with external plug ins provides a powerful tool, which will meet my needs for a while.

I started off with the concept of gathering information which I fond interesting in one place. The best part of blogging for me, is the ability to seamlessly capture other articles or information at the point of hearing/ reading it. Layer on the ability to voice my own opinion and reaction at the time, and thats all there is to my blog.

This replaces the old way of seeking out historical documents when I need something, but the blog makes information gathering seamless and easy.

My original premise was that internet has changed business models for ever, and while I now have only one caegory on that, the other categories seem to have evolved into representations of the changes which bring about the change to old business models.

So one of the attractions for me with MT is the ability to host the site and the data myself. After 6 months, and 311 posts, there is an immense body of knowledge here. Prior to blogs, I would have had all these thoughts, but they would have been fleeting, and later relegated to the "what was that about (insert idea here) again?"

December 29, 2003 at 12:07 AM in My Blog | Permalink | Top of page | Blog Home

December 28, 2003

Blog Tools - Movable Type is rated #1

Blog Tools

Opinion columnists may not have views any better than your own, but they have one thing you probably don't—an audience. Fortunately, you don't have to convince J. Jonah Jameson to hire you. A blog can help you disseminate your views, and a hosted blog service can help you get started cheaply and easily. You can write about politics, gardening, your cats or anything you like. Depending on the service, you can post to your blog by browser, e-mail, or even phone. Enthusiastic bloggers can post breaking news before Peter Parker makes the scene.

Blogs are everywhere. Doonesbury's Zipper Harris is a blogger. Howard Dean tracks his presidential campaign in a blog (www.blogforamerica.com). Dan Bricklin, father of the electronic spreadsheet, shares his thoughts in a blog at www.danbricklin.com.

For every celebrity blog, thousands are maintained by ordinary people. Launching a blog is about the simplest way to create a personal Web site. Once you've configured your blog's appearance and characteristic options, you simply start posting. The blog software organizes your posts with the newest at the top and a calendar linking to older posts. You can keep the whole thing private, like an old-fashioned diary, or let a few trusted friends view it. But for most bloggers, the challenge is to attract as many readers as possible, and they let in anyone who stumbles upon their blogs.

Themes or skins let you configure your blog's appearance to reflect your personality; if you know a little HTML, you can do some fine tuning. Many services include interactive elements to keep visitors engaged, like the ability to rate or discuss posts. A search function may help you find bloggers with similar interests. Exchanging links or joining blog rings helps drive traffic to your blog. A few services make it easy to display the books and music that currently interest you, with automatic creation of thumbnails and links to Amazon.com. If you sign up as an Amazon.com Associate, you can even make a little money when visitors click through to buy books or CDs you recommend.

You may well need that extra cash from your Amazon affiliation. A successful blog can outgrow a free or low-cost basic service, forcing you to choose a premium service or even set up your own Web site to host the blog. Some bloggers self-host because of concerns about retaining ownership of their blog entries, though hosting services make it clear that you retain all rights to your posts. But like any Web hosting service, a blog host retains the right to delete content it deems obscene or illegal. And some users may simple enjoy hosting their own.

Scholars today study the famous diary of Samuel Pepys for insight into everyday life in 17th-century England. Will your blog be just as famous in a few hundred years? No one will ever know unless you try. You will have some competition: Pepys's diary is back, as a blog, with annotated copies of the original entries appearing daily (www.pepysdiary.com).

You can choose from an assortment of tools that can host your blog for you; we tested the best of the bunch. In addition, we looked at one application for those who prefer to host their own. Read on to see what we think.

A: A picture of the blog's author graces each page.

B: Visitors click on a linked calendar day to view the day's posts.

C: Blog posts are displayed in order, newest at the top.

D: This permalink will still link to the post after it's moved into archives.

E: Visitors click on this link to comment on the post.

F: This link gets an RSS feed of the blog's content.

G: This link goes to the author's profile.

H: Posts from earlier months are automatically archived.

I: This thumbnail links to Amazon.com. If a visitor clicks through and buys the book, the blog's author gets some cash.

J: Recent comments are automatically listed here.

K: Recent posts are automatically listed here.

Blogger, Blog*Spot

December 30, 2003
By Neil J. Rubenking

Category: Blogging Services
Product: Blogger, Blog*Spot
Price: Free
Company Info: Pyra Labs, www.blogspot.com

Editor Rating:

Google purchased Blogger and the Blog*Spot hosting service from Pyra Labs earlier this year. Blogger and Blog*Spot are free now, with features of the former Blogger Pro premium service gradually moving into the free, ad-supported service. But until a feature has been transferred to the free service, there's no way for a new blog to use it. As a result, we couldn't test some premium-service features that haven't yet been transferred.

Posting to Blogger is a snap: Just enter plain text or HTML code in the editor, spell-check it if you like, and click a button. Previous posts are handily listed below, in case you want to edit them. You can click the BlogThis! button on the Google toolbar and quickly post a link to the page you're viewing, with your comments. By the time you read this, the mail-to-blog feature should be available. With a separate subscription to audio Blogger ($3 a month), you can even phone in audio-only posts.

Blogger doesn't emphasize community interaction; it alone among our contenders doesn't let visitors discuss or rate posts. Another serious lack in the service: Your Blogger blog is also completely public, with no means to limit access. And the ability to host images hasn't yet trickled down from the premium service to the current free service. But it's free, and that may suffice to convince you to join its 1.5 million registered users.

LiveJournal

December 30, 2003
By Neil J. Rubenking

Category: Blogging Services
Product: LiveJournal
Price: Basic, free; premium, $25 a year
Company Info: Danga Interactive Inc., www.livejournal.com

Editor Rating:

LiveJournal is strongly community-oriented. In fact, you can get a free basic account only if a community member invites you; otherwise you have to pay. You can engage visitors with polls, and the comment system provides a fully threaded discussion area. Visitors can even get e-mail notification of responses to their comments. Enter a full user profile and search for other users with similar interests, link to friends' blogs, even exchange text messages with other LiveJournal users. If you want, you can specify who's allowed to access your entire blog or even individual posts.

Community and content rule in LiveJournal, not fancy formatting. Users typically post entries to their blogs using one of several simple clients, though it's possible to post using a browser. In either case, there's no WYSIWYG editing and no hosting of images, and the spell-checker offers suggestions but can't insert them. This combination of community interaction and simple editing apparently appeals to many. The LiveJournal site's running statistics show over 600,000 active users and over 100 posts per minute.

Radio UserLand

December 30, 2003
By Neil J. Rubenking

Category: Blogging Services
Product: Radio UserLand
Price: $39.95 a year
Company Info: UserLand Software Inc., http://radio.userland.com

Editor Rating:

Unlike in the other services we reviewed, a Radio UserLand blog is created locally using desktop Web server software and then "upstreamed" to the Web, so you always have a local copy of all your content. You can optionally configure it to allow browser-based posting from other locations or posting via e-mail. With the free Picture Tool add-in, uploading a picture is as simple as copying it to a specified folder. If you frequently type particular sequences of HTML or text, you can save them as named shortcuts; a quoted shortcut name in a post will be replaced by the specified HTML or text.

UserLand controls the RSS 2.0 specification, so naturally this product emphasizes RSS (to learn more, see the section "RSS Tools,"). Your own blog is automatically accessible as an RSS feed, or as multiple feeds if you use the Categories feature to organize your posts. The built-in News Aggregator can pull in RSS feeds from any source, including other blogs you subscribe to. Just click to post a news item to your blog and add comments. A HotList displays the 100 most subscribed-to news channels.

Visitors can comment on your posts, but there's little else in the way of community or interaction, and you can't limit access to specific users. Radio UserLand is especially handy if your aim is to air your views on current events.

Tripod Blog Builder

December 30, 2003
By Neil J. Rubenking

Category: Blogging Services
Product: Tripod Blog Builder
Price: Basic, free; premium, $10 to $15 for setup, plus $4.95 to $19.95 a month
Company Info: Lycos Inc., http://blog.tripod.lycos.com

Editor Rating:

Tripod Blog Builder is available to any of the 32 million Tripod/Angelfire members. If you decide to host your blog here, you'll get all the features of a complete Web site. Basic service is free (with ads); premium service drops the ads and adds more storage, bandwidth, and some features. Premium members can have multiple blogs or multiple authors and can control access to an entire blog or to individual posts. Even basic membership includes image hosting, but premium members get an Image Aide tool to automate insertion of images in posts.

Your blog can include a Buddy Page with links to friends and their blogs. Visitors can comment on posts in a fully threaded discussion system, and owners get e-mail notification of new comments. You can enhance your blog by taking advantage of the services available through the Site Builder: Set up a photo album or guest book and link it to your blog page, for example. If you're looking to create a complete Web site, not just a blog, Blog Builder is a good place to start.

TypePad

December 30, 2003
By Neil J. Rubenking

Category: Blogging Services
Product: TypePad
Price: Basic, $4.95 a month; premium, $8.95 to $14.95 a month
Company Info: Six Apart Ltd., www.typepad.com

Editor Rating:

TypePad, the hosted service corresponding to Six Apart's well-regarded Movable Type, has