Unpredictable. Unfocused. Just like life.

Copyright brings up an interesting point:

Remember, the goal of copyright is not to maximize the profits of any one industry, but to foster creativity by regulating just enough to ensure an adequate incentive to create.

Public Service: You can do your part to save Ashley Simpson from future embarrassment.

(Tip of the hat to SiliconValley.com)

Something has always bothered me about the euphemistically termed "wardrobe malfunction" at last year's Super Bowl.

A black woman is dancing when a white man suddenly rips her top off - assault, maybe even sexual assault - and the black woman gets the blame.

Maybe it's just me, but that just seems wrong on so many levels.

Today's San Jose Mercury News (free registration required) highlights the fact that we often pay twice for research; taxpayers provide the funding for the initial research, which is then provided to journals which sell it to research institutions, libraries, and the public at large. And those journal costs are rising:

According to the Association of Research Libraries, the price of the average journal subscription shot up 215 percent from 1986 to 2003, more than three times the rate of inflation. The average chemistry journal cost $2,695 last year; the average health science journal, $975.

The other day the Toronto Star (free registration may be required) had a little item about the province of Ontario, in Canada, providing $7 million to develop a new Web-based forum, dubbed International Governance Leadership Organizations Online, to allow scientists and governments from around the world to share their findings.

There is a wealth of collaborative technologies like blogs, wikis, RSS, and Atom available. Colaborative projects like Wikipedia are working very well.

Why do some feel the need to build yet another proprietary environment, the result of which is probably less sharing, not more? And at the very least, why not piggyback on some other proven efforts? The goal ought to be to get as much information as possible to as many people as possible. They've already paid for it anyway.

A site called NONOFOLLOW has sprung up, providing 12 reasons against the use of the "nofollow" tag. The first and most obvious reason is that "nofollow" does not prevent comment spam, though that was the impetus behind its development.

Robert Scoble has a post in support of the tag in which he refutes each of the twelve reasons, with a pretty lively comment section both for and against.

It does seem that given substantial opposition to the tag, its creators are somewhat glib about the dissent, with Robert really basing his support on the benefits to him, as opposed to the upside or downside for others.

The nofollow tag does not block comment spam for you and I; it makes it easy for Google to block it. Nofollow applied to all comments may limit my ability to find interesting blogs in the future. And though it is great to see competitors work together, the tag was developed with little consultation.

The concerns need to be aired and not just dismissed, if only to guarantee that we do better next time.

I rarely tag my posts. I do have categories set up, but I often either can't decide what category they fit in, or I just forget to tag them. I'm not really bothered by this, though Dave Winer felt so guilty about it that he stopped using categories, and AKMA isn't convinced of the value.

Other people extol the virtues of tagging and the resultant social effects - whether people will want to be aggregated into larger groups (i.e. humor) or smaller groups (humor of former standup comedians whose television shows lasted more than five seasons).

I know that I'm going to forget to tag occasionally (okay mostly) but I probably want by posts to show up, so I want to be aggregated. It would be nice if my publishing software could analyze my post - latent semantic analysis perhaps - and automatically tag it if I ask it to. Or maybe Flickr or Technorati could auto-tag it for me. This would allow "tagsonomists" to impart some hierarchichal tag structure if I let them, while still allowing me fine control if I wish it.

In the same spirit as the "nofollow" tag, couldn't there be an "autotag" tag?

Though Google's percentage of searches is up to 51.9% from 46.6% last year, Yahoo is making significant gains according to Danny Sullivan, editor of Search Engine Watch.

At the same time Google has dropped to the number two brand, after Apple.

Bad news is relative though. I'm sure most companies would kill to be in Google's position. There's no reason to be concerned about second place when you're up against someone like Apple.

Kuro5hin has a great post about useful dead technologies - technologies that have been replace by something else or just allowed to go away.

The one that caught my attention most was the loss of the Volume Control Knob on car radios. My car still has the volume knob, but I really miss the tuning knob, which has been replaced by Seek/Scan buttons. I really hate being at the whim of my radio's ability to find a station. If I happen to be in a poor reception area my radio refuses to lock the station, or even if it does the signal is poor. I miss the days when I could find a weak station, or just tune the radio slightly to improve reception.

Does this kind of change really make things better for anybody?

A Superior Court judge in the province of Ontario, Canada, has ruled that politicians are not required to keep the promises they make. The judge said that anyone who believes a campaign promise is naive about the democratic system.

During the 2003 election Dalton McGuinty, now premier of Ontario, signed a written pledge that he would not raise taxes or implement new ones "without the explicit consent of Ontario voters." Soon after being elected, he presided over the largest tax increase in the province's history.

An attempt to disguise the new tax by calling it a health care "premium" has also backfired. Many unions have clauses in their contracts requiring that their employers pay any health care premiums, so courts are now forcing employers, including the government itself, to pay the tax on behalf of the employees.

We had guests this weekend so I finally got around to reading the Saturday and Sunday Toronto Star newspapers. Having read net coverage indicating that about 60 percent of the 13 million registered voters went to the polls on Sunday to vote for democratically elected leaders, I was surprised to see Linda McQuaig rather harsh column declaring that "today's charade is simply about Iraq's oil".

She states "If large numbers of people are too terrified to vote, the results won't reflect the popular will". Apparently a majority of Iraqi citizens do believe in democracy, though I suppose that a 60% turnout still would not be legitimate in her mind.

Yet just the day before, the Star had this to say:

Canada may have given the war itself a wide berth, but our nation's fingerprints are all over this first brush with democracy. From the secret conference in Ottawa, which last month mapped out international oversight for tomorrow's election, to the ballot boxes themselves, the Maple Leaf will, in its own way, play midwife to what will likely be a turning point for Iraq.

The Toronto Star can't seem to decide. Is this democracy or not?

Officials suggest that the turnout of voters in the Iraq elections has surpassed the 57% that had been expected, despite the threat of violence. Preliminary figures indicated 72 percent of the 14 million registered voters had turned out even three hours before polls closed.

You can read Husayn's feelings about this day at Democracy in Iraq (is here!).

The reports I've seen appear to show citizens overcome with the joy of being able to make their voices heard.

Computerworld has an opinion piece by Michael Gartenberg suggesting that business users carefully consider a potential switch from Internet Explorer to Firefox, since Firefox doesn't run Microsoft ActiveX code. While some businesses use ActiveX controls, ActiveX is still the primary distribution mechanism for spyware and viruses.

I have used Firefox in various forms for over a year now and have had no problems. I am still forced to use IE for some things like Sharepoint, but these are few and far between. The cost of scanning for viruses and spyware, keeping current with updates, and fixing the inevitable problems caused by IE just became too high for me. If business users start adding up the real total cost of ownership of fixing all of the problems inherent in IE, they would be concerned as well. How many hours did you spend scanning for, and removing spyware this year?

I also find Microsoft's Anti-Piracy plan somewhat ironic. Microsoft plans to stop pirated copies of Windows from downloading patches and security updates. Had Windows been written with security in mind, then people would not require the updates that Microsoft wants to prevent them from downloading.

(Link from Groklaw)

Thirty-eight things you'd really, really like to say at work.

I've commented before on the two Canadian researchers who found a flaw in the hockey stick model used to predict global warming. Obviously an unpopular opinion, there work has not exactly been accepted by scientific journals. But now there work is going to be published by Geophysical Research Letters. FuturePundit talks about it here.

Rather than attack this research with the oft-quoted line that a concensus of scientists believe global warming to be true, it would be interesting to see an open-minded analysis of this research.

Jack Layton, leader of the Canadian New Democratic Party (NDP), wants Paul Martin, Prime Minister of Canada, to force the entire Liberal caucus to vote in favour of same-sex marriage. The NDP members have been ordered to vote in favor of same-sex marriage, considering it a human-rights issue.

Given that a Decima Research poll showed that 57% of those polled in Ontario sided with preserving the traditional definition of marriage compared to 38% who believe same-sex couples should be included, forcing elected members to vote a certain way doesn't seem to agree with the concept of democracy.

Finally I can get my razor and my shaving cream from the same company. Though they'll probably have to raise the price of the blades - if that's possible.

Furd Log explains Digital Rights Management (DRM) simply and elegantly, using snowfall in South Boston as a metaphor.

Mark Cuban wants a lot in his future cellphone, including the ability to save receipts. In this digital world, why do we still have to save receipts at all?

We save receipts for a couple of reasons. One is for proof of purchase for rebates. Another is so that we can return a defective product. I might also use it to get a refund when I find a lower price within 30 days.

Amazon knows my entire ordering history. Best Buy and Circuit City always ask for my name when they sell me something, so I'm guessing they do too. If I can remember where I bought something then I ought to be able to go to that store and have them know the product purchase history.

In fact, when I purchase something that has a rebate, why doesn't the retail establishment just forward the information electronically to the rebate center? And when the price drops in 30 days, why don't they just mail me a cheque, or credit my account?

The truth is that they don't because they count on us not bothering with the rebates. Yet this would cut the manual work required to provide rebates. And it would make my life so much easier.

One of the key points in the seminar I attended this morning was to repeat, repeat, repeat your message. Jeff Jarvis brings up an excellent point - Advertisers are no longer in control of their message.

So rather than repeating their message, smart companies should listen to the echo of their message from the world, and then adjust the message to suit the echo.

I was in a seminar this morning on the use of competitive intelligence in corporate marketing. The presenter explained that they gathered the information, aggregated it, and distributed it via email. I asked if the company ever looked to see how the market evaluated and digested the message, and if they made changes as a result. She said the they listened to what the analysts and the competition said and revised their message. They weren't looking any further than that.

This company, and many like it I'm sure, is preparing a message for the wrong people. By not looking for what users are saying about their product, they will miss a key piece of the puzzle. I suggested that they search Google for "kryptonite". And by trusting email to get the message out among all of the other daily noise, they are missing an opportunity to inform their own staff.

I asked if anyone had ever hear of a wiki. Many heads nodded no. I asked if they knew what blogs were, which many did, so I described a wiki as a group blog that allowed collaboration, and pushed out new information in the form of RSS feeds. I promised that I would give everyone an overview of blogs, wikis, and RSS at a future meeting.

Renee Blodgett must have heard us because she has some comments today on the usefulness of wikis for collaboration.

From Wikipedia:

Hair is capable of recording medium to long-term or high dosage substance abuse. Chemicals in the bloodstream may be transferred to the growing hair and stored in the follicle, providing a rough timeline of drug intake events. Head hair grows at rate of approximately 1 to 1.5cm a month, and so cross sections from different sections of the follicle can give estimates as to when a substance was ingested. Testing for drugs in hair is not standard throughout the population. The darker and coarser the hair the more drug that will be found in the hair. If two people comsumed the same amount of drug, the person with the darker and coarser hair will have more drug in their hair than the lighter haired person when tested.

This post at Down the Avenue really bothered me. The mere thought that someone would have to pitch a well-known blogger to promote an idea suggests that there is an awful lot of power concentrated in a few bloggers.

That's not really a big thing - after all they've earned it. The subtext was more concerning though. If you don't pitch your idea well, or they don't like it or disagree with it, then the idea goes nowhere. The idea dies. Or perhaps they provide a negative view multiplied by their influence. That bothers me.

Renee wasn't happy with the word pitch either, and I'm dying to know why.

I love Tom Peters' stuff. It is always entertaining and informative, but sometimes it fails to mirror reality. His current rant "CEOs Are Idiots19" comes to mind.

Companies don't seem about to stop hiring MBAs.

I've worked for plenty of companies, and I've yet to see one that wants to hire deviants or freaks - they are difficult to manage. Most companies want more of the same generic people who do their work and don't rock the boat.

I'm definitely a radical and it has merely gotten me restructured - often. It's my real world experience that many companies do not want to be pushed out of their comfort zone.

Tom Peters is the business guru, so he can certainly say this stuff, and there are probably lots of C-level execs who nod in violent agreement. For instance, David Ogilvy says:

Our business needs a massive transfusion of talent, and talent, I believe, is most likely to be found among non-conformists, dissenters and rebels.

By the way Tom on the subject of DESIGN!, this is the web, so why did I have to download a PowerPoint?

Cory Doctorow also asks why newspapers insist on charging for yesterday's news. I commented on the same thing the other day, though Cory goes into a bit more detail, also bringing up the possibility that agreements with Lexis-Nexis may be the root of the problem.

Russ Beattie says:

"Imagine what will happen when corporations realize how important it is for their workforce to have mobile phones, and how much they will benefit from those people have access 24/7 to their back end infrastructure via mobile data services."

To be fair, we create software for mobile infrastructure, so we probably get the value clearly, and we are our own beneficiaries as well, but it is far more forward thinking than anyplace else I've seen.

Several people have Blackberries as well, where it makes sense. What I found odd is that people with Blackberries also have cell phones because the cost of the combined voice and data plans were outrageous compared to the deals available for voice and data separately.

A key issue in the way of enterprise mobility is the desire of the carriers to wring every last nickel out of all of their customers, without being able to see the potential returns if large companies provided every employee with a cell phone. It's even worse in Canada, where every service such as voice mail or call display is an additional charge, and there is a extra $7 service charge per phone. Plus tax of course.

As well, the truth is that not every employee really needs 24 hour email access or a data-connected mobile device given the current cost structure.

Though companies sometimes make some pretty ridiculous choices about about who needs mobile access. I once worked for a medical software company, a nine to five software shop. This company decided that the software project managers needed mobile phones in case something came up. Keep in mind these were people who never left the building between nine and five except for lunch, when everyone else was out too. Yet they were deemed critical.

This New York Times permalink generator will generate a perrmanent, and free, link to articles, and does not require the user to sign in.

(Link from Boing Boing)

A list courtesy of Business 2.0.

It seems that if a movie wants to be in contention for an Oscar, then it should be released about two months before the Oscar nominations, as these people seem to have extremely short memories in most cases. I have a sneaking suspicion that the movie industry works that way anyway.

I haven't seen The Aviator but honestly, if the movie had been released last spring, would it have been nominated? Or even remembered? And does box office success guarantee that a movie will never be nominated?

There are two kinds of people; those who divide people into two groups, and those who don't.

Realistically though, there are two ways people look for things. There are browsers and there are searchers.

Browsers will look at the Table of Contents of a book to browse its contents.

Searchers will only pick up the book if it is relevant, and then they will look at the index to find what they are looking for.

Browsing the web is equivalent to walking through the library glancing at the shelves, except that the library add several million books - while you are walking by the shelves. On the other hand, search engines allow you to target and locate exactly what you want.

Blogs are a form of intelligent agent that crosses the boundary between browse and search. Certain bloggers aggregate interesting current and new content in specialized areas, meaning that you can locate desired information, while at the same time become aware of new relevant information. Comments and trackbacks allows that information to be filtered, corroborated, or enhanced. Then the use of RSS feeds let users do a very targeted browse, essentially eliminating all of the library stacks that you aren't interested in.

The recent Pew Internet & American Life Project report on Search Engine Users found that:

Nearly half of searchers use a search engines no more than a few times a week, and two-thirds say they could walk away from search engines without upsetting their lives very much.

I seem to have inculcated this same method into my wife and kids as well. We are all frequent searchers, and it isn't just Google, Yahoo, or Alta Vista. For examle, we frequently use IMDB to identify TV and movie actors, and their filmography. We use Amazon to locate books and to shop. After all, aren't these just another for of search engine?

Clive Thompson at collision detection has made a similar point, though he is a journalist and I am not. The comments about the post seem to reflect similar feelings. Of particular note is a comment that people using search boxes in the various browsers may not be aware that they are searching. Another comment suggests that this could be the result of people underreporting their actual use, or forgetting how may times they actually do searches, much as people understate how much television they watch.

I watch a lot of television, and I also do a lot of searching.

Dan Gillmor also thinks that newspapers need to open up their content, especially archives, to the web and the world.

Newspapers wall off their content in order to preserve their subscription revenue. Unfortunately there isn't a lot of published research that validates this idea.

Dan points our that the San Francisco Chronicle does open up its archives, putting ads on the site.

He also mentions a recent post on PressThink about permanence. By comparison, newspapers are transient; their content is not always available at a permanent web address - when it is available at all.

It could be argued that newspaper content can be sold twice; once for readers and once for research. Yet if the revenue from research is negligible, then it would be reasonable to make the content available on the web the day after the paper goes to print. Ad revenue should more than cover the costs of hosting the information.

It would be interesting to work with a newspaper to do a proper cost-benefit analysis of the advantages of being open and permanent.

Apple is selling over one million songs per day through iTunes, with over $250 million in sales so far. So there is a market for music.

Today my local paper contains the first of several editorials that I am writing. The topic today is that of the current attacks on copyright and fair use. Canada is considering levying a fee for educational use of the internet even for free sites, if the site does not provide explicit consent for its use.

The topic of the editorial is initeresting, but inconsequential, and anyway, unless you are a subscriber or willing to pay for the article then you can't read it. My local paper is firewalled off unless you are willing to pay. This means that information and opinions have limited distribution, and therefore limited ability to spread ideas.

Search engines can't crawl and index my paper, so its use for research purposes is limited. In fact, it is just becoming more marginalized. It can't reasonably be linked to either.

While I certainly understand the desire to maximize revenues, it seems that as print subscriptions decline, the paper should be considering ways to become more relevant and extend their reach - not shutting down avenues of communication.

The entire northeastern US and eastern Canada are digging themselves out after a massive snowstorm. It didn't really hit the Toronto area. Yet on my drive home tonight west of Toronto I was temporarily stuck behind a road maintenance truck that was salting the dry road.

As the entertainment industry, assisted by the government, attempts to control technology, the EFF wants you to know just what might be at stake for the consumer. By way of illustration, they have created an Endangered Gizmos list.

(Link from CopyFight)

Seth Godin posted a link to a rather pointless video referred to as Numanuma on his blog last night at 8:59 pm. As of now, Technorati has 388 links from 352 sources to the video.

Does this qualify as an ideavirus? Not much of an idea really.

Were it not for blogs, stuff like this would otherwise be blissfully ignored, but will now become outlandishly famous.

And yes I am contributing to the virus, but I only linked to Seth, and not the video itself.

So is Hugh saying that every blogger secretly wants to be a corporate PR person?

But if every company suddenly gets it, then why would they need bloggers? Isn't the current value of blogging to bring a valuable counterpoint to the status quo?

For example, if Microsoft started to tell customers exactly what is going on, then Robert Scoble wouldn't really add much value for them at all. Right now he provides a channel for that real communication.

A couple of weeks ago I started writing code again, after a five year hiatus while I've spent time in Marketing. Java has changed a bit - ok a lot - since I last looked at it, and I was worried that I'd forgotten how, but it seems to be coming back rather easily.

I'm working on a couple of interesting projects. My biggest problem is that I find myself coding constantly, unwilling to sleep. Well I guess there are worse problems I could have.

After the 2004 federal election in Canada resulted in a minority government, I recall reading a newspaper story about Liberal sources that they were already planning to create a carefully timed crisis that would forced a no-confidence vote, followed by an election.

In The Globe and Mail today, Paul Martin, the Prime Minister of Canada, said vehemently "It is not my intent to go to elections with that [gay marriage]. We want — I want — to govern, if the question that you are asking me, are we ready to go to election to support the Charter of Rights, against people who want to attack it, the answer is absolutely yes."

So I predict Canadians will be going to the polls yet again. I expect they will see commercials with the Liberals as knights in shining armor astride white horses, carrying the Charter of Rights aloft, and defending it against the Conservative Party, all in black (well dark blue anyway). Liberal red can be used for the bloodshed.

Mr. Martin stated that he feels so strongly that same-sex marriage should be protected under the Charter of Rights and Freedoms that he would be prepared call a vote to defend the Charter. It seems odd then that four successive Liberal governments have taken no action on the issue, preferring to leave it to the courts. Mr. Martin had said that when legislation was introduced, it would be a free vote for backbenchers, but cabinet would be forced to vote in favor of same-sex marriage.

In noticed in the local paper yesterday that a local hospital CEO said that he was still dialoguing with the government over proposed health care funding changes. Doesn't anybody talk any more?

It's not only marketers that feel the need to overcomplicate their messages.

City planners have jumped on the concept of Smart Growth. Apparently the American Dream of a nice little house in the suburbs is now considered to be urban sprawl. High density central growth is the new way to go.

Smart Growth brings a completely new language. Roads are now "corridors". Highways are "economic corridors". Dense residential or commercial areas are called "nodes". Determining the future course of a community is called "visioning", or "placemaking".

One of the groups behind Smart Growth is the Sustainable Communities Network, directed by CONCERN Inc, though they provide only email contacts. Here's a blurb from one of their documents on placemaking:

Comprehensive stakeholder representation is the human embodiment and tacit knowledge of a given community in its natural, built, economic, and social domains. Comprehensive representation allows communities to capitalize on all their assets, assure buy-in to the Placemaking process, and strengthen capacity to implement community plans. Process tools are critical for bridge-building and collaborative design.

That's the way Pete Blackshaw, chief marketing officer of Intelliseek, describes blogs in today's San Jose Mercury News. He and others believe that monitoring the blogosphere is a good way to measure whether a Super Bowl ad is a bust or buzz.

Scientists now believe that global warming cause a mass extinction - the "Great Dying" - 250 million years ago, rather than an asteroid a previously thought.

At first glance this would appear to suggest that global climate change is a naturally occuring phenomenon. If so, then how can we determine just how much humans are actually contributing to it, if they are?

Every day this week I have heard someone in the media - either radio or newspaper - use the "slippery slope" argument to advance their idea. Sometimes they even argue that the slippery slope is a fallacy; one thing does not necessarily lead to another.

Today in Canada the Ottawa Citizen ran a story entitled "Polygamy, the next debate". As the Canadian government prepares to legalize same-sex marriage, they are launching a study of legal and social issues related to polygamy. Critics suggest the government is concerned that legalized same-sex marriage may lead to constitutional challenges from minority groups who claim polygamy as a religious right.

Conservative party justice critic Vic Toews, a former Manitoba constitutional lawyer, says:

"Once you change the definition of marriage from one man and one woman and you move to two persons, what then is the distinction between two persons, or three or more persons? If I was a lawyer defending polygamists, I'd say 'hey this is a constitutional right, a freedom of religion.' Why can't freedom of religion trump this new definition of marriage?"

(Link from bound by gravity)

Looking for a vast collection of language that pretends to say something - while saying nothing at all? Or maybe you already have too many examples. You can find it, or comment on it, at weaselwords.com.au.

Thanks to Johnnie Moore for the link.

CBC Radio had Ellen Simonetti on the other day, talking about her Bloggers Bill of Rights. I've mentioned it before.

The more I think about it though, the less I get it. I notice that Jeremy Zawodny agrees. He's a little more blunt about it though.

Average employees really have no rights. They can be downsized at any time, for numerous reasons, and often are. While it would be nice to be given a rational reason why you were let go, that doesn't always happen.

So if the average employee has no rights, why the heck would we expect bloggers to?

Ellen's case may be questionable given the fact the she did not mention or make derogatory comments toward her employer. But if you identify and insult your employer in writing, what do you really expect to happen? You certainly won't be employee of the month.

A while ago I suggested that companies could post their open positions via RSS feeds from their sites, or perhaps a jobs subdomain - jobs.companyname.com for example. I suggested that it might be called "jobcasting".

Silicon Beat reports that Feedster is now doing this.

No sooner does David Weinberger write a humorous yet all-too-real piece in Worthwhile about how marketers can' t get their message across in plain English, and CMO Magazine shows exactly where this insanity comes from.

David Weinberger noticed that Bill Gates is now using the concept of confidential medical information to further his digital rights management (DRM) agenda. David quotes the Gizmodo interview:

Gates: ...Take medical records: is it your position that rights management for medical records is evil? ... We remind people that, like if there's a medical record that has somebody's AIDS status in it, we have software?which is identical software?that says, 'Hey, if you're trying to forward to someone,' that, 'No, this is restricted. You can't forward this to someone. They don't have the right to see this.' It's the notion of 'should there be confidential information?'

According to the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act of 1996 (HIPAA):

"... the Privacy Rule generally requires covered entities to make reasonable efforts to limit the use or disclosure of, and requests for, protected health information to the minimum necessary to accomplish the intended purpose. See Sec. 164.502(b). Additionally, Sec. 164.530(c) of the Privacy Rule requires covered entities to implement appropriate administrative, technical, and physical safeguards to reasonably safeguard protected health information from any intentional or unintentional use or disclosure that violates the Rule.

DRM protects the information by limiting the things you can do with it. Enforced security ensures that you don't get it in the first place if you aren't supposed to. Sharing of medical information between two parties, given that the information consists of the minimum necessary, should not then have additional limits placed upon it. Any other situation might lead to a delay in providing medical care, which is completely unacceptable.

Fear, uncertainty, and doubt are never an acceptable strategy. And it isn't acceptable now.

Benjamin Franklin was way ahead of his time when he said (loosely) "those who trade their (digital) rights for a little temporary security, deserve neither."

World Wide Online Creator's Registry Inc. will digitally time stamp and archive your your intellectual property, creating a "poor man's copyright", much the same as physically sending something to yourself by registered mail.

For $20 annually they will encrypt and time stamp your intellectual property return the file to you as well as archive a copy. If you lose your copy they will retrieve it for you for an additional $20. You can only open the contents of your file with the use of their (currently) free decryption services.

John Battelle seems to be the only blogger with the ability to evaluate the different sides of the "rel=nofollow" tag discussion.

Robert Scoble doesn't. From the comments section (linked with a "nofollow" tag) of his post regarding the tag:

CW: that's the fun thing about technology. You never know how it'll be applied.
PageRank is earned, not an entitlement. I think this is most excellent!

What if everyone suddenly decided to put the "nofollow" attribute on links to him? Drastic PageRank change, and the blogging world would lose a powerful voice.

Yet he advocates this for others. He will now decide who is deserving of a link, and therefore the ability to be seen by others.

There are now two classes of bloggers - the "A" list, and everyone else. The growth of blogs happened because of the ability to hyperlink. This link has now created a means to censor the web. It won't just get rid of spammers. It will also eliminate the ability to find new and interesting bloggers.

It also eliminates pretty much anyone who disagrees with a popular blogger, as they certainly won't be ranked in Google.

So you could say we've eliminated the way for Google to record conversations from the blogosphere. Congratulations! We've just created the web version of the FCC Broadcast Flag.

According to The Globe and Mail, music industry sales are up by 5% after a 6 year downturn. Of course the Canadian Recording Industry Association (CRIA) was quick to indic