Ten Reasons Why

Washington Post: Virginia Blocks Bulk E-Mailers

Gov. Mark R. Warner (D) traveled to the Dulles headquarters of America Online, the world’s largest Internet service provider, to ceremonially sign recently enacted legislation that establishes five-year prison terms and other criminal penalties against chronic, large-scale senders.

Yay! Having grown up in Virginia this makes me proud. This is significant for a few reasons:
1) Don’t confuse this measure with many of the existing anti-spam laws, which only provide recourse to recoup expenses spam caused in civil court. This new bill makes spam a crime, punishable by a state-funded vacation in the lovely Virginia Penitentiary.
2) It’s significant that it’s Virginia making this law. Both AOL and MCI are based in northern Virginia, outside of Washington, DC. You know AOL, of course, and the number of sunscribers they have. MCI (previously MCI, then Worldcom, now MCI again) is also a large ISP, but more importantly owns UUNet, a major backbone provider. A lot of Internet traffic flows through those two providers, who both may be subject to the new law and in a good position to enforce it.
3) It’s significant that it’s Gov. Mark Warner putting this into action. Warner is a high-tech governor; he was co-founder of Columbia Capital, a northern Virginia VC outfit. He “gets it.”

Politics, Technology & Internet

I was invited to the Open Education conference call that was scheduled for this afternoon, but like David Carter-Tod, missed it. Thanks to David for posting the link to the Open Education presentation on DLORN (Distributed Learning Object Repository Network) by Stephen Downes. The DLORN system is live apparently.
UPDATE 04/30/03: As Stephen points out in a comment on this post, the presentation was authored by George Siemens (of eLearnspace) and Stephen together. George did the Open Education part, Stephen the DLORN part.

Education

A new group weblog on social software, Many-to-Many was launched today. [link via Ross Mayfield's Weblog]
Isn’t there something off kilter about launching a social software weblog on a tech news service (Corante) that won’t distribute the content as an RSS feed?
MyRSS, a service that “enables anyone to build custom RSS channels for virtually any news site,” does offer an RSS feed for some Corante channels.

Weblogs

I’ll third Sebastian’s seconding of Oliver’s comments on Dave Winer’s theory on news aggregators. Dave said:

RSS readers that work like Usenet readers are a waste of time, imho. Aggregators should not organize news by where items came from, just present the news in reverse chronologic order.

In reality, a news aggregator should do both. I don’t want my RSS feeds all filtered into separate little folders, but like Oliver, I’m subscribed to a whopping number of feeds — 77 to be exact! And I just started using a news aggregator last week! My only previous experience had been Radio; I’m now a big RSS convert thanks to SharpReader.
SharpReader allows me to collect them into categories, in a Windows Explorer style set of folders. I can click on a folder and read a reverse-chronological list of all the feeds in the sub-folders (or chronological or sort by title or by weblog & category). I can even click on the top-level folder and read all of the subscribed feeds in reverse chronological order, a la Radio Userland’s only option for organizing feeds, or a variety of other orders. If I just want to see what, say, D’Arcy is up to, then I can peek at just that weblog’s folder. Much more flexible!

Syndication & Aggregation

Matt Haughey writes of revelations about at the O’Reilly Emerging Technology Conference:

“Amazon looks poised to take on eBay/paypal as they build a public merchant platform that can be used by all.”

It’s like Godzilla v. King Kong in the e-commerce world.

Technology & Internet

Slashdot reports on Invisiblog, a new service for anonymous blogging. Why anonymous blogging? I can think of several reasons, including the politically persecuted in countries with oppressive governments, hackers, and whistle-blowers.

Weblogs

Six Apart, the company behind Movable Type is launching a new service, to be called TypePad. (And they hired Anil Dash as VP of Business Development…although damned if I can figure out where his TrackBack link is to ping that post. And they got cash! From Joi Ito!)
Meanwhile, Blogger, a Google company now, is putting the new version of their Blogger service, codenamed Dano out in limited release.
Not a lot of news out of Userland, except that Dave’s supposed to have TrackBack working soon in Manila.
I’m kinda interested in all this development, particularly in the evolving business models for weblog tools. There are really two “vectors” related to weblogging: where the tool lives and where the content lives….

Read more…

Weblogs

A Return to Common Sense: interesting article posted to Internet Time Blog.

As learning becomes increasingly central to our lives and more complicated, a growing array of templates, methods, blends, objects and knowledge repositories have been created to facilitate wider distribution of information. This is both useful and inevitable, but is it all that learning should be? This article looks back at memorable times when learning was enjoyable, meaningful and relevant. It looks at both formal educational and training settings as well as at informal, real-world learning events that can happen anywhere at anytime. Nine common sense learning principles, often overlooked in many of today’s programs, are presented for possible inclusion in future programs and events.

Education

How many takes are we up to now?
George Bauer responds to my earlier post:

It’s not ‘Desktop Servers, Take Two’ but ‘Non-Hosted Blogging Software, Take Two’ – as the very same problems arise with every solution that’s not running on a central host.

He’s hits the nail dead-on. However, as with Radio, most of his solutions for Python Desktop Serverall require an always-on machine, always-on Internet connection, and remote access. If you’re someone (like me) who blogs from multiple computers, none of which can effectively be set up as a server (which is what an always-on, always-connected machine is), that doesn’t help.
He does say you can “run PyDS on some central machine with static internet connection and set up remote access (this would make PyDS into a central hosted solution much like MT).” If by “remote access” he means via HTTP (and not something like PC Anywhere, then we’re cooking with gas. That’s something Userland told me you couldn’t do with Radio.
Bottom line: could I install PyDS as a Python app on my web hosting provider account, and log in to it via a URL just like I do with Movable Type (which is installed as a Perl CGI app on my web hosting provider account)?
[Update: Hmm. I just realized if you draft something in MT, when you post it later, it's posted "in the past" at the date you drafted it. I've updated the 'Authored On' field for this post, so I think it will show up closer to the time when I actually posted it, e.g during my lunch today, 04/23/03]

Weblogs

Note to self: This Slashdot article, Machine Learning and MP3s, reminds me of an idea that I wanted to expound upon here regarding recommendation technologies.
Note to readers: Don’t let me forget!
[See above post for note re: drafting and post timing. Same applies for this one. Sheesh.]

Technology & Internet