Unpredictable. Unfocused. Just like life.

Halley Suitt noticed that lots of the clocks in her home adjust themselves these days. I noticed this too, though my cell phones did not correct themselves. I also noticed, as I do twice a year, just how many devices I have that tell time. There are clocks (digital and analog), phones, televisions, VCRs, light timers, cars, watches, and computers. I've probably even forgot some things. We have between two and three clocks per room, and in some rooms I have to remember that my wife sets the time ahead by a few minutes so that we can all be ready early.

What is even more bothersome is the fact that no two items have the same method of changing the time, meaning that I must remember how to change the time for each one twice a year, or try to recall where I put the manual. Digital clocks are not new by any means. Why is there no international standard for how to set the time? At this point I'd even be happy to only be dealing with three competing standards.

This is an awful lot of work for millions of people to go through. Let's just assume there are roughly 300 million people in North America, so perhaps 75 million households, at just 10 minutes per household, this comes out to about 1426 person-years of effort twice a year. All so that we can pretend we have an extra hour each day? Seems like a lot of effort to me. I'm looking forward to having a little atomic clock in all of my stuff so I never have to change the time again.

Lately when I've been using Google my results have included one or two spyware removal companies. Curious, I clicked on them, yet they had absolutely nothing to do with my search. I just got a brand new laptop, so it seems hard to believe that this could be the work of spyware if that is even possible. I'm now scanning my software, and wondering if this is some new trick by spyware companies.

Driving home tonight CBC Radio Canada (sort of a Canadian NPR) was broadcasting an excerpt from a "town hall" session of prominent Canadians discussing the upcoming American election, and comparing attitudes of people on both sides of the border. Unfortunately I didn't catch who the participants were, but one woman commented that "Canadians can imagine what it is like to be from Idaho, but Idahoans can't imagine what it is like to be from Canada."

The meeting became unintentionally hilarious when the same woman stated that "The difference between Canadians and Americans is that Canadians know the difference." The resulting peals of laughter from the studio audience suggested that they found it humorous as well.

In Canada the monthly price for my mobile phone service is nowhere near the advertised price. Among the fees added on is a $6.95 charge per month per phone. So with my four phones I pay about $28 for that item alone. When I moved to Canada I was led to believe that this was yet another government tax; there are so many it would not be surprising. Apparently the fee is a levy to cover network costs, licensing fees and other regulatory costs. Shouldn't that be covered by my monthly charge? To put this in perspective, voice mail ($8) and call display ($7) are in addition to my basic charge as well.

Apparently some people got tired of being charged the fee, and being misled as to what it was for. They have filed a class action lawsuit against Canada's four biggest cellphone carriers. Those operators will make more than $800 million from the special fee this year alone.

This wouldn't be so bad if Canada at least had some decent choices in mobile phones, but we are perennially behind what is available in other countries. I have to suffer through reading all about Robert Scoble's new Audiovox phone without any idea when, or if, I'll be able to get one.

I was thinking about Robert Scoble's comment that "watching blogs gives you an indication of what the greater society is doing and talking about". I made an earlier comment that bloggers represented a younger well-educated group, not indicative of society at large. Loic Le Meur provides an excerpt of an eMarketer report with the following statistics:

"Exactly 61% of the blog readers that responded to the survey are over the age of 30, and 75% make more than $45,000 a year. In fact, nearly 30% of the respondents are between the ages of 31 and 40, and over 37% spanned the ages of 41 to 60. And nearly 40% have a household income of $90,000 or higher."

Both of my kids have grown up on the internet. The communicate with friends and acquaintances via email or instant messaging. They use the web for everything. Yet the oldest one is just beginning to use blogs, I'm guessing because he now feels the need to share thoughts with friends. A few of them have blogs too. But they don't blog the way I do; theirs are mostly personal as opposed to commercial or political.

I also haven't seen a lot of discussions about supermarket prices, factory work, or other non-media non-technology work, yet this is certainly well represented in the society at large.

David Weinberger proposes how Google might build a browser - a world browser he calls it. To quote David:

It would not be a Web browser. It'd be a world browser. It would find pages on the Web, of course, but it'd also find the ones on my desktop (Google desktop). It would know about my email (Gmail). It would know that my own photos are categorically different from all the other jpgs on the planet (Picasa). It would let me browse the physical earth (Keyhole) and show on a map the documents that talk about any particular place (Keyhole + Google Local).

Stretch a little further and think that Google could also find locate services either locally or remotely and connect me to them. Services could be applications like Word, my intranet, or my VPN. I could locate a report, view, comment, and then save it. And of course Google remembers the services I use typically - my preferences.

So I could find information wherever it was, and select the appropriate service to work with it wherever I am - remember we're in a browser here - why would I need my traditional Windows desktop at all? And as someone who switches machines all too frequently, think of your entire environment traveling with you, without the pain of installing an configuring applications yet again. With access to services, for a price of course, like software subscription services.

With the purchase of Keyhole I also think it would be a great opportunity for Google to sell location-based services, like giving me the closest selection of hotels when I'm traveling somewhere, or where the closest five star restaurant (or Jack in the Box) is located based on proximity to where I am. And perhaps the friendliest bloggers nearby to chat with.

Queen of Sky, a flight attendant who writes an entertaining blog about her adventures on and above the ground, was suspended without pay and benefits for posting pictures of herself in her uniform.

Over at gapingvoid, Hugh "branding is dead" Macleod says that branding is dead. In fact, it's his middle name. He bases this proposition on the fact that companies that support blogging suck at branding while companies with superlative brands suck at (or don't even allow) branding.

I don't agree that branding is dead. Branding is really all about creating a set of feelings and beliefs about a product. It takes a great deal of money and effort to do that, and it only works if the company continuously maintains the image. Tylenol's brand could have been destroyed years ago (long before blogging) when product tampering occurred, but through swift decisive action focused on customer safety they maintained their product image. I haven't seen blogs build a full scale brand yet, although they have certainly contributed to raising awareness of the good or the bad of some products. Even recently created brands like Google have were not created by blogging, although bloggers are certainly working to keep them honest.

He also quotes Robert Scoble on the subject. Robert says:

One, watching blogs gives you an indication of what the greater society is doing and talking about (if you read enough of them and they are randomly enough selected -- I'm not there yet, but I'm getting close).

Two, blogs can feed the conversation and amplify it. Look at all the talk about Audiovox cell phones in the past five days. Did you notice that AT&T is sold out? I did.

I've noticed a number of discussions on the subject of using blogs to advertise suggesting the influential blogs will help to push your products. Robert Scoble thinks its fine as long as the blogger declares that they are advertising. Marc Canter and David Weinberger are having a discussion as to how unbiased a blogger can afford to be when someone else is paying the freight.

Following the Cluetrain Manifesto concept that markets are conversations, then the value of blogs is that they present honest personal opinion - something other people trust. Regardless of how pure you remain, if you take money from a company there will certainly be some level of perception that your honesty my be less than total. And if you are brutally honest, yet not supportive of the company paying you, then that relationship may not last.

To reuse the Kryptonite example that Robert suggested, it would have been really intelligent for Kryptonite to buy space on an influential blog even if they were being portrayed negatively, and used that to get their solution out to the public. Unfortunately there are very few companies who are willing to be honest about themselves. And until companies start to take themselves less seriously, then ads on blogs may suggest a lower reality quotient, even if the advertisement is clearly identified. Halley Suitt calls it a very slippery slope.

Freedom of speech on the internet tends to get blurred by the laws of different regions. on behalf of Swiss authorities, the FBI paid a visit to the Seattle law office of Devin Theriot-Orr, a member of Indymedia, the Independent Media Center. A week later over 20 Indymedia Web sites were taken down when the London office of Texas-based Rackspace Managed Hosting servers hosting them were seized in Britain. The case involves undercover Swiss police officers posing as protesters at an anti-globalization rally, posted in response to groups like the Swiss police posting images of protesters, labeling them "troublemakers" and asking for information about them. There was some question as to who has issued the order, as the original order was sealed.

Keith Bankston, a lawyer for the Electronic Frontier Foundation, who is fighting to unseal the order, had this to say:

"The significance of this is that apparently, a foreign government, based on a secret process, can have the U.S. government silence independent news sources without ever having to answer to the American people about how that kind of restraint could happen. Every press organization should be asking, 'Am I next?"'

Starting November 6 Billboard Magazine will start publishing a list of best-selling ring tones. The "Hot Ringtones" chart will list the top 20 selling ring tones for each week. The market for ringtones is expected to hit $250 million in the U.S. alone, and the world market was about $4 billion last year.

Glenn Fleishman is researching the use of Wi-Fi in public libraries and indicates that many are providing the service for patrons only. I've been trying to convince my local public library to offer Wi-Fi, but we hadn't considered limiting it to patrons. It was going to be open to everyone. The one difference may be the fact that in Canada libraries cannot charge patrons for services, so there is no real fee collection system. The system was essentially planned as a proof of concept to bring more people into the library.

Down The Avenue has some interesting thoughts about the effects of too many choices. Sometimes may of these choices are from the same company. When my kids we in diapers I was surprised to learn that both Luvs and Pampers were Proctor & Gamble products. How different could these product possibly be? They merely succeed in giving the company more shelf space, but probably don't increase the real choice at all.

Sometimes when faced with too many choices I just fall back on the old predictable popular brands. I may be missing out on some great new thing, but I just don't have the time or inclination to make such a difficult decision.

In Canada the selection is substantially more limited. We don't even have Victoria's Secret or TiVo, and it is illegal for us to have DirecTV.What bothers me most is the selection of Tabasco Sauce. I like the green chile sauce, which I can only get in the small bottle, yet I can get the Smoky Chipotle in the big bottle. I can't get the Garlic flavor at all. Having too many choices may be bad, but it's worse when you can't get the one thing you really want.

By now I'm certain that everyone in the world has heard about Ashlee Simpson lip-synching her performance on Saturday Night Live the other day. What is impressive is the world-class spin control that is now happening. Many pop stars lip-synch - there's no way Britney Spears could dance the way she does and still have the breath to sing flawlessly - but Ashlee Simpson got caught. On the positive side, she certainly drove a lot of traffic to her website, where there are now over 18,000 postings on the topic.

Mohamed Elmasry, president of the Canadian Islamic Congress, stated in a television interview that all Israelis above the age of 18 are legitimate targets of attack because they are part of the Israeli army. The Canadian Islamic Congress issued a statement over the weekend saying controversial remarks from its national president Mohamed Elmasry last week were "regrettable and misunderstood."

Try as I might to understand terrorism as a legitimate struggle from those who have no other means, I just can't. It sometimes just seems to me to be an entrenched hatred of an entire race.

I heard an odd commercial in Canada today. A product named Laker advertises itself as the number one value-priced beer in Ontario, at the lowest price allowed by law, $24 for 24 bottles. Brewed near my home in Waterloo, Canada, it isn't the best beer you can buy, but it is the cheapest. The typical case of 24 costs around $35.

What I found odd was the fact that there is a minimum price for beer set by law. This guarantees that there won't be any competition in the beer market. In fact, by law domestic beer can only be sold at the provincially licensed Beer Store which is controlled by the two largest breweries in Canada, Molson (merging with Coors) and Labatt (owned by Interbrew of Belgium). Smaller domestic breweries have no say in the operation. Generally any non-domestic product is brewed under license to one of the larger breweries with the exception of some premium brands like Guinness or Sam Adams. So dumping isn't really a potential problem.

So why does the government feel the need to ensure that companies cannot compete on price by setting an artificial floor on that price?

William Shatner wants to fly on Virgin's planned commercial space flights. You'd think he would be tired of it by now.

Cogeco offers unlimited usage for their broadband internet over cable. However at least one user has been shut down for downloading 150 gigabytes of data. While this may be excessive, is the company has advertised "unlimited" use, then is this not false advertising?

Of course in Canada, products containing less that 5 milligrams of Sodium can be labeled as "Sodium Free", which ought to be illegal, but is clearly misleading unless one reads the fine print.

Have you ever noticed that the police don't sit in school zones to watch for speeders? Instead they seem to prefer to sit on expansive four lane roads more conducive to faster speeds. Wouldn't it be prudent to be where safety is a serious concern?

In Toronto there are two major freeways. The 401 is older with no shoulders most of the way, typically very congested, but it still moves along quite a bit above the posted limit. It is rare to see a police car on the 401.

The 407 is a new private highway with great road surface and wide shoulders, with no congestion at all. I've seen as many as 30 police cars in a 15 mile strip of freeway, ticketing any car that exceeds the posted limit.

Just my little thought for the day.

This article in The Globe and Mail describes how handwritten notes detailing evidence of political influence in Canada's federal sponsorship scandal were systematically purged from the files, leaving no records.

According to staff, it is standard operating procedure to destroy documents after a shuffle of government ministers. The judge presiding over the inquiry into the scandal seemed somewhat stunned by this admission.

Meanwhile, the three political parties with intervenor status at the inquiry asked for increased funding, complaining the fee schedules were too low. They were looking for about three times the amount of $500,000 currently provided for.

David Sifry, founder of Technorati says here that there are currently over 4 Million weblog around the world. To show the rapid growth he points out that Technorati tracked 3 Millionth weblog on July 7, 2004. Approximately 12,000 new weblogs are being created each day, or on average, a new weblog is created every 7.4 seconds. About 45% of all older weblogs have not had a post in 3 months, possibly due to abandonment or other factors.

Yet there are currently only about 5000 corporate blogs. David breaks them down by company with Microsoft, followed by Sun, clearly the dominant players. He doesn't suggest why so few companies have taken advantage of weblogs to communicate with customers and other interested parties. I've personally companies who were afraid to let information out freely without vetting it first. Robert Scoble also believes that some folks may be afraid to blog. If you sincerely believe in the value of your product, then you should be willing to let people speak freely about it. If you are afraid of what might be said about your product, then the weblog isn't the problem - the product is.

A while ago my local supermarket changed how they packaged their ground beef, chicken, and pork. Instead of the typical one pound size packaging, they switched to one and a half pound packages. In the case of the ground chicken, they switched to one third of a pound size packages. And when beef prices were at their lowest as a result of the Mad Cow scare, they actually raised their prices, blaming it of course on the price of oil.

Ok so they're greedy. My real problem though is the fact that the packages are very inconvenient sizes for my use; either too much or too little. Also, I like to use medium fat ground beef. Yet that is what they are typically out of, leaving only the much more expensive and not all that much better lean and extra lean. So I asked one of the staff if people had suddenly started to consume larger quantities of ground beef. I also asked if I could get some smaller packages. Their response was "that's how it is shipped to us". No real concern for what I the customer want or need. Just the convenience of the supermarket.

Now contrast that with little family farm place I often buy my meat. It's about a ten minute drive away; the supermarket is about three minutes. I get friendly personalized service, much nicer meat not pre-packaged but doled out as needed, and a pleasant albeit crowded shopping environment. Yet the prices are the same or lower for much better products. Guess where I shop a lot more.

So if you don't like what someone has to say, or in this case what they might say, then you'll just ensure that they are unable to say it? This Worldchanging post basically explains how free speech has been suspended through economic force.

Sinclair Broadcasting Group is planning to air a documentary on Kerry. As Larry Lessig points out, the documentary may not even be complete yet, so likely nobody knows exactly what it will say. Yet regardless of not know what will be said, many people are working together to boycott Sinclair in an effort to keep them from saying it.

I don't recall this kind of outcry when Michael Moore's Fahrenheit 9/11 was released. Imagine if the same effort had been directed to ensuring that film was never released. The situation is similar; there are really only a few movie studios with the power to market a movie and get it into your local cineplex, though not by FCC decree. So I guess it only depends who the documentary is about.

It matters little to these people whether the documentary has any value or provides any useful information; their minds are closed and they don't want to hear it. They also want to make sure that you and I don't hear it either, regardless of what it says. It is abhorrent that anyone would want to limit free speech in this way. It assumes that people are studid; that they cannot tell fact from fiction and make a decision, or even just change the channel.

I'm trying not to be biased to either side, but why are these people pushing so hard? What are they afraid that we will hear?

It is a well known fact that it costs almost ten times as much to get a new customer as it does to keep an existing one. Yet cell phone companies, internet service providers, and web hosting companies seem to use the opposite model. They provide great deals to get you signed up and locked in, and then they ignore you. From a purely financial point of view that makes sense; it creates a fixed revenue stream, and in the case of cell phones, the manufacturers subsidize the sale of new phones to increase market share.

However, most customers (myself included) don't think of themselves as revenue streams; they think of themselves as people. And I know that I bristle when I realize that somebody who walks into a store gets a brand new free phone with cool features while I, the loyal long-term customer, get nothing. Now a friend of mine at a cell phone company tells me that some people cancel their contracts just so they can resign and get the new phone. This seems counterintuitive though. Why not set aside some of the huge marketing budget that puts commercials on every 3 minutes and create a program to allow existing customers to upgrade their phones?

It costs very little to keep me, but the other company if willing to pay ten times as much to get me.

Every month I open my Bell phone bill and glance at the list of long distance calls I made last month. As I do this I notice that the phone company lists the duration of each call, my rate (10 cents per minute), and my savings. They arrive at this savings by subtracting the cost of the call from what the call would have cost at their maximum charge rate, one that no sane person would ever pay. So basically my savings are more than three times the actual cost of the calls. Yet have I really saved anything? On a per call basis, it seems like I'm doing alright. Yet twenty years ago my bill was about the same in total. I probably call more now that it is cheaper, so Bell sees about the same revenue overall from me as a customer as they did years ago.

When you consider the incumbent local carriers like the Baby Bells (what's left anyway), they have a existing telecom infrastructure that is mostly if not completely paid for, other than maintenance costs. Yet the cost of local phone service has increased. And they could provide long distance service at a lower price. Yet they are letting Voice Over IP cannibalize their customer base. They have the power to lock these customers in, yet they don't. They may protect their revenue for the short term but the long term picture doesn't look good.

Every day another company jumps on the Social Networking bandwagon. The Washington Post (free registration required) talks about two more today. But I still don't see the value.

I love technology dearly - when it solves a problem for me. Yet that isn't happening for me. There are several Social Networking players that want to manage my networks, but in reality they only want to interlink my contact list. That really doesn't do anything for me. Oh sure, it might show me my connection with the CEO of that company I'd love to work for, but it won't get her to take my call. And with no common formats, I can't easily move my information from one service to another. I think that would be a great selling feature; the ability to allow me to easily migrate from another service to theirs.

The other problem is that I have multiple networks of different kinds. There are the people I work with, my friends, listserv users, IM users, blogs I read, and more. All of these lists are maintained in different ways in different tools, though there are some things like Blogrolling, del.icio.us, and OPML that help me share and reuse this information effectively.

For me the ideal Social Networking tool would provide me the ability to aggregate all of these chunks of information sort of like del.icio.us, with the ability to publish or secure my information. It would also provide a standard XML-based encapsulation for the data so that it could be imported or exported. It would provide me a single point from which to reach out to all of my networks. While the connections may be the perceived value for the company, it is the simplification that I value.

Like many of you, I get my fair share of spam, most frequently of the mortgage approval, stock market tip, or pornographic variety. The CAN-SPAM act has made absolutely no difference in this area.

I never click on the "remove me" links; my Yahoo! account has proven that to be a waste of time. Today I got a stock tip spam that originated from the host adsl-69-148-69-230.dsl.rcsntx.swbell.net, which I can discern from the name to be an SBC DSL customer. So I decide to let SBC know that one of their customers is spamming me so they can put a stop to it. Unfortunately, their site provides absolutely no way to do that. Their Help link asks me to select Residential or Business service, then provides customer services but no spam policy. Their Contact Us results in a page not found. Luckily their Site Index lists yet another Contact Us page that lists the following:

Junk E-mail/Spam – Southwestern Bell Internet Services (SBIS) has a strict policy against unsolicited commercial e-mail (also called "spam"). We aggressively investigate all complaints about SBIS customers who are violating this policy. If you have any questions or reports about SBIS customers, please direct them to abuse@swbell.net.

I'm off to report some abuse now. I'll let you know how it turns out.

Global warming has become such a cause celebre that it is virtually impossible to ascertain if it really is fact or fiction. The famous plot (shown below), published by University of Massachusetts geoscientist Michael Mann and colleagues suggests that we are now experiencing the warmest climate in a millennium, as evidenced by the "hockey stick"-like uptick on the graph . MIT Technology Review has an excellent article about a couple of Canadian scientists, Stephen McIntyre and Ross McKitrick, who have uncovered a fundamental mathematical flaw in the computer program that was used to produce the hockey stick. It seems that improper normalization emphasizes any data that has the hockey stick shape, and suppresses all data that does not. This means that virtually any data will produce the hockey stick curve.

They sent their detailed analysis, extensively refereed, to Nature magazine for publication, and it was rejected. Obviously an unpopular opinion, you probably won't see too much about it. However, if you still have an open mind about the subject, they have put the entire record of their submission and the referee reports here. Other and different criticisms of the hockey stick are starting to emerge as well.

At the DigitalLife show in New York this week Brad Anderson, chief executive of the retailer Best Buy, said that connecting refrigerators, security systems, and other devices to the home network was the next big thing. That may seem far fetched, but isn't that strange when you think about it.

We can already have lights that go on when you enter a room and turn off when you leave. In our home we have the problem of televisions and radios left on after everyone has left the room. Imagine a home entertainment network where all DVD players and tuners could be routed to screens in each room. As you leave one room and walk into another one screen turns off and the next one turns on. The audio and video feeds would also be available in multiple rooms, so that I wouldn't need a player in every room. The remote controls would work through the network as well. The screens could also function as monitors for computers on the network as well. Touch screens would be handy in the kitchen as well for things like recipes, groceries, and shopping. The phones, Voice over IP of course, could be connected as well and dialed from any screen.

As product packaging increasingly incorporates RFID chips, the intelligent refrigerator will be aware of what is inside it. Having learned what you typically use it can warn when quantities are low. When you select a recipe for dinner, your intelligent kitchen can read the recipe to determine if you have all of the ingredients. If you subscribe to an online grocery service, then the fridge can order what you need for both the recipe and regular use. The oven can preset temperatures as per the recipe. And an audio and video message can be flashed on whatever screen you are watching, or via the intercom system, so that you don't forget to take the muffins out of the oven like I always do.

I think that pretty much all of the pieces are available. I can even imagine controlling everything from my cell phone. So what are we waiting for?

Over 600,000 U.S. citizens live in Canada, enough to swing a tight election to one side or the other. Diana Kerry, sister of presidential challenger John Kerry, has headed up to Canada to see if she can secure some of those votes for her brother. Who knows, Canada could be come the swing state for this election.

The Washington Post (free registration required) has a great article about some new intuitive technologies. My favorite is something from the MIT Media Lab tangible media research group called "Topobos". Topobos are simpler and easier-to-use versions of Lego's MindStorms programmable robots which can record their movements and then replay them later.

Having painstakingly assembled many of those Lego toys when my kids were younger, I can pleasantly envision a day when you take the new toy out of the box, hit the play button, and have it build itself. Of course then future generations wouldn't have the joy of attempting to find that one little piece that you need to build the thing.

We've come a long way from my first Lego set that had square and rectangular blocks and gears. Then you really had to use your imagination when you built something. As I look at the toys available for kids today, it seems that they do everything for you, removing the requirement to use any imagination whatsoever. I wonder if that will affect how kids think as they grow up. How will their imagination muscles be if they've never exercised them?

Services that help you locate people using their mobile phones are becoming more common. This one in the UK provides a service that offers to help companies locate their employees for less than £1 per phone per month.

Mobile operators and tracking providers are creating a Code of Practice indicating that staff can't be tracked without their knowledge and have to consent to the tracking. And the Managing Director of the company suggests that the employee can turn their phone off if they don't want to be tracked.

While this kind of service probably seems like a benefit to employers, it sounds like a massive invasion of privacy. In fact, it likely violates the right to privacy as provided for in the Fourth Amendment. Realistically, if you refuse to agree to be monitored, or turn your phone off, how long do you think you'll remain employed by the company?

Trucking firms already monitor the location of their trucks via satellite; this makes sense where load optimization is critical. But if I am doing my job, does my employer really need to know where I am all of the time? In fact, I think it would be a big selling point for an employer to tell me that they don't monitor me - they trust me. Which employee is happier and harder working - the monitored one or the trusted one?

You need a wingwoman. Wingwomen.com will provide a woman to accompany you to a bar or event to help you meet women, given that women are more comfortable talking to men who are accompanied by a woman. According to this article in the New York Times (free registration required), the site's founder, Shane Forbes, said that he has had more than 200 customers, and that his wingwomen have a "conversion rate" of 65 percent of clients getting phone numbers.

MarketingProfs talks about the power of the industry blog as a way to market your product, using these "sneezers" to push the ideas.

Pleasantly, the first thing the article suggests is to make the product good. An unconventional idea, but a great one.

Something Seth said got me thinking. Whose spectrum is it? Years ago the FCC doled out spectrum to radio stations, essentially giving them a license to print money. As Seth says, computers have changed the way we use spectrum. However, until we all throw out our car radios and switch to XM or Sirius satellite receivers, and get rid of our old televisions and analog cable boxes, then we are still stuck with the allocated spectrum. The FCC is clearly struggling to remain relevant as more content moves to services like satellite radio.

The use of the spectrum doesn't concern me as much as the fact that we have allowed broadcasting and media to be concentrated in the hands of a few companies. He doesn't like the fact that Sinclair Broadcasting wants to broadcast political messages using the spectrum, but the fact is those few companies get to select what we hear and see. I believe that Sinclair will still have to offer equal time for the other side, but I'm more concerned about subtle messages - like not playing artists who support one side or the other.

Just because someone has built a business around it, should it stay that way? Well airline flight routes and landing rights work in a very similar fashion. They were doled out to the airlines and effectively prevent competition at some airports. The value of the routes also accrues to the airlines, and not the public. Why should this stay the same? Smaller airlines like Southwest and JetBlue have proven that they can do a better job. Why should they be limited?

A UK poll of the 100 worst jobs puts IT Managers at number three, after phone sex operator and North Sea Ferry cabin cleaner. Internet consultant came in at 72, behind maggot farmer, though there may not be a lot of call for either these days. It's all detailed in the new book "Crap Jobs".

It's really a bit surprising. I would think that phone sex wouldn't be that bad. Imagine telemarketing where the customers call you. And you can close every sale.

Sony Pictures Entertainment made more than $1 billion internationally, the third year in a row they've accomplished the feat, and setting history for the company. Yet they continue to fight the concept of file sharing, instead of finding a way to make money from it. In the 1980s they fought the VCR, only to eventually realize s substantial revenue stream from VCR rentals. Wouldn't it be a good idea to emulate the success of ITunes and beat companies like Blockbuster and Netflix to the punch, by providing a reasonably priced movie download service over the internet?

You may have noticed the rapid proliferation of DVDs of television series in your local store. I've seen everything from Friends to Gilligan's Island. These shows have certainly been paid for many times over through their original airings, and then again through ubiquitous syndication - Friends and Seinfeld are on five times a day where I live. More recent shows would pay residuals to the actors; the earlier ones probably would not. So what's my point? The movie studios are selling DVDs with a single season for $30-$50 each, raking in a stream of virtually pure profit. At the same time they are pushing the FCC for a broadcast flag to ensure that you and I cannot record a high quality copy of these shows, so that we are now forced to buy the DVDs if we want to watch the shows again. Thankfully, I just don't feel the need to see those shows any more than I already have.

These shows generate substantial revenue through syndication as well, starting usually with the 100th episode. When your favorite show has a 100th episode special presentation it means nothing to you, but a lot of cash for them. That's why they are celebrating. It occurs to me that with the constant stream of reality shows, which lend themselves to one watching only, that syndication revenue stream will soon evaporate.

It's nice to know that I'll soon be able to get ads via RSS. I can't tell you how many times I've wished for a commercial break while I was reading the news. Otherwise I would forget to stop and get a coffee.

Years ago when radios were first installed in automobiles, the law required that when the radio was turned on the engine shut off. Apparently people were unable to listen to the radio and drive at the same time. Look how far we've come. Now we can drink coffee, talk on the phone, read the newspaper, and put on lipstick while we drive. Okay I still have a bit of trouble with the lipstick. The radio/engine law is probably still on the books too.

The pace of technology change is far more rapid that the development of new laws, or the repeal of existing laws, to govern that technology. The current patent crisis is a symptom of that. Today a company need only file a patent to be able to threaten others. Sun's loss to Kodak in a patent infringement case is a $92 million example. The three patents in question, as many others, were overly broad, but Sun or course realizes that it is much more efficient to settle now rather than fight and risk a large judgement.

There is now a full blown industry where companies who do nothing but own patents generate revenue purely by threaten other companies who actually produce products. The end result will be a chill over the development of new products. There needs to be a compromise whereby companies can protect patents and ideas, but not at the expense of any kind of new products. Otherwise it would seem pointless to create anything new and risk that someone previously created something even remotely like it in the past.

I wonder if the idea of suing someone for infringing on a patent has been patented. There could be big money in that.

David Weinberger gives a nice description of the search tools that Microsoft is working on presented as part of their Search Champs initiative. It clearly indicates that Microsoft has given a great deal of though to the problems of search. However, it is also clear that they are targeting those who search frequently for information, rather than the casual users.

Casual users, likely in the majority, are the ones that drive the value of the single keyword Vioxx up to $11.88 per click on Yahoo's Overture network. They expect to type in a single keyword and find what they are looking for, which is exceedingly difficult. The individual searches they do are probably not related to each other, so profiling, or stuff they've seen, may not be all that useful.

I've also been chastised for earlier making the comment that social networks, or what my friends are searching for, is not helpful in this situation. I still agree with that. On my single keyword search the search behavior of others will not be a good predictor.

Perhaps there is no way to improve the single word search, but it would be useful to perhaps guide people by clustering the potential results and then asking them which direction they would like to narrow toward. This could be an iterative procedure allowing the ideal result to be arrived at through a more passive approach.

As more of a power searcher myself, I love the idea of "Stuff I've Seen", but again I would like to be able to group the "stuff" into logical collections, so that my search might be focused differently depending on what I am looking for. For example, when I am researching companies I do so in a particular pattern, which I would love to have replicated automatically. When I am researching a subject area or person I do it in a different fashion.

Maybe what would be useful is "Ways I Search" that mapped these search paths and then allowed me to apply them as I wish. In fact, the passive result narrowing I described would be just another "Way I Search".

Cory Doctorow talks about Brewster Kahle's presentation at the Web 2.0 conference, called Universal Access to All Human Knowledge. Cory suggests that it would be quite possible to digitize all of the 26 million books in the Library of Congress. Amazon and Google are already doing it.

This of course assumes that the sum total of all human knowledge has been captured in books, which isn't the case. Lots of information is considered proprietary and resides inside the secure walls of corporations and other organizations. A lot of information also sits in patents, journals, and university research libraries. A tremendous amount resides in people's heads. And as quickly as we can digitize it, we are creating more at an exponential rate.

That said, it would certainly be extremely useful to have a library of at least every book that exists to start with.Can

Seth Godin finds some pretty entertaining stuff, like a guy who wears a nametag each and every day. Scott Ginsberg, a professional speaker, has been wearing a nametag every day for almost five years. In Scott's words, his nametag has become his "effective tool for incre