Unpredictable. Unfocused. Just like life.

Last week I wrote about my one year anniversary at a company called Redknee. But things change, and as a result of restructuring I now find myself no longer at Redknee. I shouldn't be surprised; when they hired me a year ago they were also going through restructuring.

So now I'm looking for a new opportunity. To that end, your help is graciously requested and appreciated. Tomorrow I'll post some background on me and what I'm looking for. I'm going to try an experiment in finding a job via blogs. I'll let you know how it turns out.

I'm in the process of buying a new laptop, and I'm waffling between a Mac 12" Powerbook and a 14" widescreen PC laptop. A report from Nielsen/NetRatings found that those who use Macs tend to be better educated and make more money than those using PCs.

Now does that mean that smarter, richer people buy Macs? Or does it mean that if I buy a Mac I'll suddenly get smarter and make more money? Here's hoping for the latter.

Tip of the hat to Kathy Sierra at Creating Passionate Users.

James Robertson comments on Robert Scoble's discovery that RSS usability sucks, based primarily on the fact that people use different icons and words to indicate how to subscribe. James suggest that shouldn't really matter:

The icons are for the minority of the audience that knows what they are. Most people are going to interact with RSS in one of two ways:

• Their favorite browser will do auto-discovery for them, and offer to subscribe for them
• They'll try to subscribe (in their aggregator) to the main page, and the aggregator will do auto-discovery for them. BottomFeeder does the latter already; is there an aggregator out there that doesn't?

27% of Internet users consume RSS syndicated content on personalized start pages (e.g., My Yahoo!, My MSN) without knowing that RSS is the enabling technology.

Then it occurred to me that these days the format shouldn't even matter. The software should just know what to do. Just as Microsoft Word opens word processing files, my newsreader should just know to subscribe when faced with an RSS or Atom file. Why do I need to know what to do with a particular type of file or feed? That's the job of software.

Usability isn't about the right icons or words. It's about software that does what it is expected to do, without depending on a human to interpret something the software should already know how to deal with.

For anyone who has ever wondered why Microsoft Word randomly changes your bullet points or fonts, or adjusts your tabs anyway it pleases, Smalltalk Tidbits, Industry Rants has this to say:

I have a simpler solution for MS - how about you whack the Office team with a clue by four (especially the morons who dreamed up that gosh awful ribbon), and get the team to start from scratch - with the simple mission of creating something that doesn't make users pound their heads against the wall with every usage?

The other day I commented about ma.gnolia, a new search tool, and I tool them to task about the fact that their signup page asked for a VIP code. Not having a VIP code, I commented that this gave me the first impression that I wasn't important to them.

Todd Sieling, product manager for ma.gnlolia responded first in the comments, and then personally via email, to apologize for giving that impression. The VIP code idea was really a tongue in cheek salute to early friends and family users, and Todd said that they realized that the label did sound a bit elitist, apologizing for the perceived snub.

It's always nice to discover a company that listens to what customers are saying, even the average ones, understands the problem, and then takes action to ensure that those customers are satisfied. It doesn't mean that the customer is always right, but it does mean that the company is willing to admit they might not be.

ma.gnolia scores points from me for listening and reacting.

Tags: ma.gnolia service

A while ago it turned out that the Canadian minister of immigration had a special fast-track program to give preferential treatment to strippers coming to Canada because clubs were having a hard time finding staff. When this became public, an embarrassed government said that the program would be cancelled immediately.

That seems to be just another broken promise:

Canada's welcome mat is still rolled out for foreign strippers and lap dancers who can get quick visas to fill a domestic "labour shortage."

Last December, the Liberal government announced it was cancelling a controversial program that allowed exotic dancers to gain temporary work permits based on a national labour market opinion.

But it was quietly replaced by a process that permits strip club owners to bring in foreign dancers just by filling out the proper paper work.

NDP MP Pat Martin called the stripper visa policy "deplorable."

Both of my sons collected hundreds of AOL CDs when they were being given out so freely a few years ago. We even got them with snacks on airlines. In fact, I still find them in piles around the house, which makes me realize - sadly - that I actually paid a moving company to move them.

If you have the same problem, you might find this list of 61 things to do with an AOL CD useful. My oldest son has actually tried this one:

Target for your BB gun! Tape a piece of paper over the hole in the middle, so you know if you got a bull's eye.

Via digg.

I'm playing around with the Sphere beta. Sphere is a blog search engine with a difference - they seem to aim for relevance at all costs. I've shown a screenshot of a Sphere search next to the identical Google blog search, for the term "web 2.0".

While Google Blogsearch seems to bring back items from online magazines and other media, Sphere ruthlessly eliminates anything that I wouldn't consider to be a blog. And while Google just provides a list of search results, Sphere breaks out a list of related blogs (though I'm not sure what the relation criteria are) and a list of relevant news articles, keeping them out of the purified list. Pleasantly, Sphere appears to be completely free of spam and splogs.

Clicking on the profile icon beside each blog gives a little synopsis of the blog, with posting metrics and recent links, as seen below:

Sphere also offers the ability to search within a particular blog or site, which would often be useful for me when I know I've seen a post but can't find it in a particulat blog.

All in all a pretty nice first impression. Sphere promises, and delivers, a relevant list limited to blogs only. My only negative comment is that I don't see an RSS feed anywhere. Given the recent problems with splogs, a clean list of relevant information would be excellent as an RSS feed.

According to SiliconValley.com, Digg has gotten some funding:

Digg, a new San Francisco Internet start-up, seeks to rank news items by letting people choose which stories they like anywhere on the Web.

And it just received $2.8 million in venture capital from some big-name investors, including Omidyar Network, the outfit led by eBay co-founder Pierre Omidyar, Netscape co-founder Marc Andreessen, and Greylock partners.

According to the Business 2.0 blog, oil companies are reporting record profits this quarter:

Exxon Mobil, the world's largest oil company, said yesterday that its third-quarter net income jumped 75 percent, to $9.92 billion. Its profit in the first nine months of this year - $25.42 billion - already equals its full-year earnings for 2004. This year's sales, which topped $100 billion in the last quarter, are expected to exceed those of Wal-Mart.

That said, I still don't understand why the change in gasoline pump prices is nearly double that in the US.

Workopolis is a job search site in Canada. I signed up years ago and they occasionally send me list of open positions. But tonight they sent me a particular job advertisement that started off this way:

We only promote those opportunities which are legitimate. We are very passionate about protecting you from companies that don't deliver what they promise. We understand that our reputation is at stake.

Be among the FIRST in your area to take advantage of this once-in-a-lifetime opportunity.

Make More Money
Be Your Own Boss
Work When YOU Want to
Live the LifeStyle You Deserve

Agent's work consists in receiving payment from customers (Royal Bank of Canada or TD Trust Bank bank transfer or direct deposit) and making further payments to our main office or to one of our regional affiliate departments, depending on the customer's location.
Being a part-time job, it should not take more than 2 hours per day.
Agent's commission is 6% from each transaction (for instance: you receive $1500.00 to your bank account, you will withdraw the money and keep 6% as payment for your service). All further money transfer charges and fees are covered by our company. So you will be responsible just for making proper payments in time.

Since yesterday I've been using my own client to post to my blogs. Of course I'm adding features and fixing bugs as I go, but it is working out pretty well.

It lets me post the same entry to multiple blogs, preview it, and see it in a browser when I've posted it. It also lets me type in a list of tags.

So far it supports Blogger and Movable Type, since those are the only blogs I have, but it uses the Blogger and MetaWeblog interfaces so it should support pretty much anything.

Pretty nice so far though.

Tags: startup dogfood

Andrew at Bound By Gravity lists some classic software mistakes. I've seen these a million times in almost as many companies. This is my favorite:

In Case Study 3-1, Bill had no reason to think that the Giga-Quote program could be developed in six months except for the fact that the company needed it in that amount of time. Mike's failure to correct that unrealistic expectation was a major source of problems. In other cases, project managers or developers ask for trouble by getting funding based on overly optimistic schedule estimates. Sometimes they promise a pie-in-the-sky feature set. Although unrealistic expectations do not in themselves lengthen development schedules, they contribute to the perception that development schedules are too long, and that can be almost as bad.

Andrew Wooldridge has graciously provided a tool to help you create your own Web 2.0 company.

Tip of the hat to Xeni Jardin at Boing Boing.

Tags: web2.0

Apparently Catholic high school students in Sparta, New Jersey, aren't allowed to blog:

The Reverend Kieran McHugh stunned the 900 students of the private Pope John XXIII Regional High School at a recent assembly when he told them that, effective immediately, they would have to dismantle their personal pages on sites such as MySpace.com and Xanga.com and any other blogs, or face suspension.

McHugh said he was taking the unusual measure to protect students from online sexual predators who may be lurking in cyberspace looking for personal information on children, including their pictures, diaries and gossip, according to a report in New Jersey's The Daily Record newspaper.

"I don't see this as censorship," McHugh told the Record. "I believe we are teaching common civility, courtesy and respect."

"If you look at the policy itself," said Bankston, "it's not preventing children from releasing personal information in a way that might be harmful to them. It's trying to restrict information related to the school and its staff on the Internet, including private communication, like e-mail. So it's a blanket ban on discussing school at all using the most common modern medium for discussion of things."

I've been playing around with a new blogging client that I'm posting from now. Actually I'm coding it as I go, but this is the first successful post to my live blog - hopefully.

I'll let you know more as it happens.

It's all Rick Segal's fault. He said "go code something".

The featured item on CNN.com right now is about the deaths of US soldiers in Iraq. The article is titled 'Everyday folks' dying in National Guard:

It is an unwelcome, sorrowful number: 2,000. That is the number of U.S. military deaths in Iraq. One of the faces behind that number is James Kinlow. During his 18 years in the Georgia National Guard, Kinlow settled into a peaceful, small-town life focused more on being a citizen than a soldier. Before he deployed to Iraq, he wrote his own obituary.

More than 78 percent of 9.8 million voters in the October 15 referendum approved the document, officials said Tuesday. Turnout was 63 percent.

Rob at Say Anything mentions the comparison as well, and notes that the military would prefer this not be viewed as a milestone:

"The 2,000th Soldier, Sailor, Airman, or Marine that is killed in action is just as important as the first that died and will be just as important as the last to die in this war against terrorism and to ensure freedom for a people who have not known freedom in over two generations," Boylan wrote.

[U.S. Army Lt. Col. Steve Boylan, director of the force's combined press center,] complained that the true milestones of the war were "rarely covered or discussed," and said they included the troops who had volunteered to serve, the families of those that have been deployed for a year or more, and the Iraqis who have sought at great risk to restore normalcy to their country.

Perhaps ScrappleFace is most appropriate:

"The Bush foreign policy continues to be fatally-wounded by clarity of purpose, dogged persistence and a pathetic failure to capitulate in the face of opposition," the source said. "At a time when a real leader would be paralyzed with self-doubt over the meaningless deaths of 2,000 American troops, Bush continues to act as if freeing 25 million Iraqis from decades of oppression, torture and death is somehow worth the price paid by those who volunteered to fight."

John Battelle points to a screen shot of what seems to be a new service - the Google database - which may or not be there when you check.

Google Blogoscoped has a little more detail.

Update: Charlene Li points to a WSJ article that refers to Google Base as "the long-anticipated Google classifieds and listings service":

The WSJ’s take is that this is Google’s assault on eBay. Others will be sure to look at it as a way to link classifieds and the anticipated Google Wallet. But I think it’s actually much, much bigger. Google’s main search index relies on spiders to crawl the Web and the much bally-hooed Page Rank system to understand relevancy. Neither work well in a database environment where pages are generated dynamically and linked pages don’t exist. I believe this is Google’s way to not only build a lucrative listings business but also to flesh out other areas like Froogle and Local with deep content that’s otherwise inaccessible or just plain doesn’t exist.

Examples of items you can find in Google Base:

• Description of your party planning service
• Articles on current events from your website
• Listing of your used car for sale
• Database of protein structures

Dave Winer doesn't like Google Print. In fact, lately he doesn't like Google much at all:

When I watch them aggressively push the toolbar, in distribution deals with Sun (for example) I wish they would just die, because I so detest how they're exploiting the web.

But that is just a technology limitation. We couldn't include the entire book contents in the card catalog, even if the card catalog is electronic. Yet even when I seemingly have the appropriate book according to the card catalog in the library, I still look in the book (if it is available) to see if it has what I need. If it isn't available then I've wasted a trip to the library, and I'm all the more frustrated if my local bookstore doesn't carry the book for me to check there.

The other day I bought two books from Amazon on wireless technology. I spent about $275, but I ended up returning one of the books. Why? Because it just didn't have the detail I needed, though the contents and index certainly suggested it would. Had I been able to search to contents of the books I might have chosen a different book entirely. And a lot of the content of the books is already available on the web, but I wanted the books for reference purposes.

The ability to search for what I want in a book will just allow me to purchase books more effectively. It will help me in the research I do, and it might help sell more books. But I think it is really about better ways to find information. Especially for out-of-print books or books that my local bookstore does not carry. Isn't that the long tail? Books with niche audiences and no marketing; books that I would never know about.

Eric Schmidt wrote about the mission of Google Print:

That's the heart of the Google Print mission. Imagine the cultural impact of putting tens of millions of previously inaccessible volumes into one vast index, every word of which is searchable by anyone, rich and poor, urban and rural, First World and Third, en toute langue -- and all, of course, entirely for free. How many users will find, and then buy, books they never could have discovered any other way? How many out-of-print and backlist titles will find new and renewed sales life? How many future authors will make a living through their words solely because the Internet has made it so much easier for a scattered audience to find them? This egalitarianism of information dispersal is precisely what the Web is best at; precisely what leads to powerful new business models for the creative community; precisely what copyright law is ultimately intended to support; and, together with our partners, precisely what we hope, and expect, to accomplish with Google Print.

One could argue the semantics, but as long as they are not giving away the book content, how is this different?

Much like record companies, is this a case of an industry trying to protect an outdated business model? There is at least one author who feels differently. iTunes is a bad comparison here as well because it is a store - it wants to provide the product as well. Google just wants to find what you want and send you to it.

John Battelle points to a screen shot of what seems to be a new service - the Google database - which may or not be there when you check.

Google Blogoscoped has a little more detail.

An interesting idea from Nivi:

Wikipedia defines LazyWeb as

“The idea that if you wait long enough, someone will implement that wacky idea you had… (or already has!)”

I define LazyPhoto as

The idea that you don’t need to take photographs anymore because someone will take the picture for you and put it on flickr.

My local Starbucks has a new WiFi service called a hotspot, a national partnership of all of the major Canadian carriers. That means that I can use a single service wherever I go, which makes a lot more sense that the piecemeal services that existed before. My provider - Rogers - doesn't list the price except for this cryptic note:

Hotspot sessions are billed in full minute increments at a rate of 15? per minute from the time you connect to the time you disconnect.

» $7.50 for 1 hour
» $13 for 24 hours*
» $25 for an unlimited monthly subscription

Strangely, the service used to be $4.95 per hour with the previous provider. Is there some reason network costs would be going up? Really, we are talking about a single connection, perhaps $75 per month, and a couple of wireless routers here, maybe a few hundred dollars in total expenditures. $7.50 an hour seems a bit ridiculous. Is the goal to convince people to begin to use the service long term, or turn a huge and immediate short term profit?

Seriously, when I go to Starbucks I stay for around an hour. Am I really going to pay $7.50 to use the internet when I'm there, if I don't absolutely have to? And I just don't spend enough time in hotspot areas to justify the monthly subscription - my use is too unpredictable. Now if they were to blanket the city then maybe I would.

My local Williams Coffee makes coffee almost as well as Starbucks in a similar atmosphere, but the WiFi is free. You get your coffee, sit down, open the laptop, and you're working. Guess who's been getting a lot more of my business lately.

I read about ma.gnolia, a new search tool, over at TechCrunch and I thought I'd take a look. Of course they're pre-launch, so they are only accepting you email address so that they can notify you when they are ready.

But... they also ask you to enter your V.I.P. Code. There is no mention of this anywhere, and I don't have a V.I.P. Code that I know of.

So on my first visit to the site, the first message I get from this company is I'm not important to them.

I'm sure when they launch all of the usual suspects will rave about them. And the average users - the ones that make up this democratic web - won't really matter.

Unfortunately you never get a second chance to make a first impression.

Today I've been working with Redknee for one whole year. Time flies when you're having fun, and even when you're not.

For those who don't know, Redknee is a medium size (~300 people) wireless infrastructure software company based in Mississauga, Canada. The website says this:

Redknee's next-generation software delivers innovative services to over 25 top tier network operators, with over 185 million subscribers worldwide. Redknee's global headquarters are located in Toronto, Canada.

I'll probably have a little more to say when I'm more awake.

Tags: redknee

Donna Wentworth at Copyfight has aggregated some thoughts about Google Print. The prevailing opinion, with which I agree, is thet Google Print falls into the category of fair use. There is also a feeling that authors and publishers aren't really clear on what Google is actually doing, but suing before the problem is proven seems a bit premature.

Yes Google may make some more money as a result. Is making money somehow evil now?

The LA Times asks:

How can a hit television series like "Frasier" gross $1.5 billion and yet be $200 million in the red?

Since then, the suit states, the agents have been keeping an eye on the accounting behind "Frasier." The suit claims that Paramount has reported collecting more than $1.5 billion in gross revenues for "Frasier." That includes almost $830 million in network licensing fees paid by NBC.

Yet "Paramount has taken the position with the [plaintiffs] that the series has never produced 'net profits' under Paramount's definition of the term and that the series has actually lost over $200 million according to its latest calculations," the suit says.

Peter Forret has created a Meme Map generator so that you can build you own Web 2.0 Meme Maps. There's also a gallery to showcase them, and you can add your own.

Tip of the hat to Om Malik.

In today's New York Times Ben Stein, a Yale alumnus, notes the size of Yale's endowment. Ok I couldn't resist a little humor. Mr. Stein asks if Yale has $11 billion in the bank, does his meager contribution really matter?

Gifts of these sizes are virtually meaningless to Yale, so why bother giving to it? My resources are very far from limitless, so why not give where it makes a difference?

Is it possible that giving to Yale right now is a bit like giving gifts to Goldman Sachs or Brown Brothers Harriman? I am sure that there are fine people in those places, and investment bankers are almost always intelligent, hard-working men and women. I enjoy their company. But they really don't need my money, and other people do.

I love Yale, and I am deeply grateful to Yale. It is a star in my sky every day and night. But at this point, is it an investment bank or a school? I am really not sure, and this troubles me. I would love to be shown that I am wrong, but I am not certain that I am.

TechCrunch notes that PostSecret is about to become a book:

Frank Warren the creator of the increasingly popular postsecret website is now coming out with a book entitled PostSecret : Extraordinary Confessions from Ordinary Lives.

In response to John Battelle's musing about why Google is pulling so far ahead of competitors, Robert Scoble says it's just because Microsoft isn't as good yet. He suggests that it's all about best of breed products and services.

Or is it? A couple of paragraphs later he says that it isn't about search:

See, Google isn’t a search company. It’s in the audience aggregation business. Get an audience together and then figure out how to serve advertising to that audience. Lots of people think Google is a search company. It’s not.

Nobody cares about better technology. To make people switch from Google there needs to be a quantum leap. Something bigger, better, faster, or radically different in the way it meets my needs. Google seems to get that idea and is just providing me more and more services, and people are using them. Google Maps mashups are a perfect example. Are there any MSN mashups?

He also comments on what Google wants:

Google just wants to make sure they have the biggest audience (and smartest, and richest, and youngest).

Google is pretty good at giving people what they want, and they are very good at allowing advertisers to target those people. It's as simple as that.

I was watching the movie Jerry Maguire on Bravo, a Canadian cable channel. Just after Tidwell was hit and left unconscious in the big game, with about 10 minutes to go, they went to a commercial. They returned after about 10 commercials and went to a filler called Bravo videos. They never returned to the movie.

I can just imagine how frustrated people who had never seen the movie would be right about now.

In an interview with Frank Ahrens of the Washington Post, Russ Wilcox, CEO of E Ink Corp, suggests that newspapers will give away free E-Ink devices. The reason is economic; they currently spend about $150 per subscriber printing the paper. Assuming that the devices cost less that $300 or so, they would be paid for in a couple of years. Giving the devices away would the reader to have a completely personalized newspaper.

That presupposes that the newspaper model still exists. For $300 I'll probably buy my own E-Ink device. Given the rich content already available on the web, why would I want to limit myself to one newspaper, or just to newspapers at all? My local newspaper for example consists of one or two articles written by staff writers, and then a lot of AP content. I can get most of that anywhere, so why pay for the paper. I would still want the op-ed section and local information and events. And occasionally local sales and advertising would be great as well. And I'm sure that Best Buy or Sears would be happy to deliver the sale flyer to me electronically rather than on paper.

Perhaps in the future my E-Ink page will just start at Google News, which will aggregate the remaining newspapers along with citizen media. Classified ads will be a combination of craigslist and EBay. That and maybe an events database and I'd be happy.

Wisdom from Warren Bennis, from his book On Becoming a Leader:

I would argue that more leaders have been made by accident, circumstance, sheer grit, or will than have been made by all the leadership courses put together.

According to the Canadian Security Intelligence Service (CSIS) says some Canadians are fighting on the side of the insurgency in Iraq.

Unlike the US, where such an act would almost certainly result in the loss of citizenship especially as ths insurgency is attacking US forces, Canada has no such provision.

Though the government suggests that these people will be prosecuted to the full extent of the law if they return, Canada has already taken one such family back with no penalty. And that came from no less that Prime Minister Paul Martin himself:

The Khadrs can call Canada home despite their past ties to al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden, Prime Minister Paul Martin said yesterday, after days of public demands for his government to strip the Toronto family of their citizenship.

Mr. Martin told reporters in Halifax that the Khadrs enjoy the same rights and freedoms as other Canadian citizens.

Some entertaining algebra (intended humorously I assume) courtesy of Dick Hardt proves that Woman=Problems.

Tip of the hat to cameron reilly.

Keynote provides the Internet Health Report. It seems to be feeling just fine today.

Dare Obasanjo has already had enough of the new and improved Web 2.0:

As I mentioned in my previous post on Understanding Web 2.0 the "web 2.0" meme isn't about technology or people, it's about money and hype primarily geared at VCs and big companies looking for small companies to buy so they look hip. The recently launched Flock web browser is one of example of a "Web 2.0" product which looks like it's creators just played a game of buzzword bingo when deciding what to do with their millions in VC funding. It is built on Firefox (bing), integrates with del.icio.us (bing) and Flickr (bing), plus it comes with blog posting (bing!) and RSS reading features (bingo!).

Tags: Web 2.0

Here is the original Web 2.0 Meme Map from Tim O'Reilly.

Here is a more accurate version from Bubble 2.0.

The funniest dichotomy is the fact that you can start a Web 2.0 startup for $100k, but it costs $2800 to attend the Web 2.0 Conference. But it isn't about money, it's about community, right?

Tip of the hat to Alex Barnett.

Tags: Web 2.0

Apparently a company named Scientigo owns two patents (No. 5,842,213 and No. 6,393,426) they believe cover XML, and in the words of their CEO Doyal Bryant :

Scientigo intends to "monetize" this intellectual property.

Scientigo is a world leader in the science of information capture, storage and retrieval.

We have numerous elemental patents issued and pending in the field of Enterprise Content Management with a revolutionary artificial intelligence we call Business Process Automation.

MARKET CENTRAL: Auditors Raises Going Concern Doubt
---------------------------------------------------
In April 2005, Market Central, Inc., entered into a binding commitment to sell its call center operations. The Company's call center operations were contained within eCommerce Support Centers, Inc., its subsidiary. In May 2004, the Company sold a subsidiary, U.S. Convergion, Inc., to Sylvia Holding Co., Inc., a Nevada Corporation, in exchange for 500,000 shares of Sylvia's common stock, and other goods and valuable consideration.

The Company's on-going operations are conducted within Market Central, Inc. Market Central, Inc., will be changing its name, with appropriate shareholder approval to Scientigo, Inc. This change is expected to be effective in May 2005. The Company is now primarily focused in intelligent Business Process Automation technologies, specializing in developing and licensing intellectual property to partners whose products and services complement the Company's technologies for the benefit of clients.

[...]

Scientigo product strategy is to focus on developing and licensing technologies from its valuable intellectual property portfolio.

Tip of the hat to techdirt.

You know that you're focused at bit too much on techology when you see an item in an RSS feed entitled "Logging threat to Amazon much greater that thought" and you immediately wonder how logging could affect an online bookstore. Then you actually answer yourself theorizing that a logging problem could affect the production of paper and eventually books.

Then you realize that you're reading New Scientist, and they probably aren't referring to Amazon.com.

The oil companies like to say that they have to raise gas prices because of the soaring price of oil, but they have a hard time explaining the math. Perhaps that's because they neglected to mention all the profit they are making:

Surging earnings at its refinery operations and buoyant commodity prices helped drive Imperial Oil Ltd. to the biggest quarterly profit and highest revenue in its history.

The Calgary-based integrated oil and gas company said profit rose to $652-million or $1.91 a share in the quarter ended Sept. 30 from $544-million or $1.53 a share a year ago. Revenue soared to $7.7-billion in the quarter just ended from $5.8-billion a year ago, and breaking the previous record of $6.8-billion in revenue set in the second quarter of this year.

This post is coming to you courtesy of Flock, a new browser which also includes a blog editor. You can add tags.  It lets you drag stuff into a window to blog it, which didn't work for me.

It also lets you drag things into something it calls "shelf", which seems to be a temporary holding area.

Based on Firefox, it does seem a bit prettier, but I'll have to try it out for a while.

Cory Doctorow mentions Meghann Marco, an author who is begging her publisher, Simon and Schuster, to include her book in Google Print. They apparently don't do that. Meghann had this to say:

Someone asked me recently, "Meghann, how can you say you don't mind people reading parts of your book for free? What if someone xeroxed your book and was handing it out for free on street corners?"

I replied, "Well, it seems to be working for Jesus."

We've been recording songs from the radio for decades. We've been recording movies and television shows on videotape for almost as long. We've recorded records and CDs on cassette tapes. In fact, we've all made mixtapes for girlfriends. This has never been a problem.

Now that it is easy to digitally record, copy, and move information, it is suddenly a problem.

It used to be that sharing music with thousands of people was a problem. I can see the concern there. But now it's about what you are allowed to do, all by yourself:

The language, circulated by the Public Knowledge – which lobbies on digital copyright issues -- also would allow the FCC to prohibit the use of software programs to snag segments of programming from broadcasts. An RIAA spokeswoman declined to comment.

The language appears to address the concerns that the RIAA, songwriters and others have with regard to software programs that enable consumers to record specific songs from digital radio without having to pay fees -- as they would for digital downloads over the Internet.

The Paris-based U.N. Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation (UNESCO) approved a treaty to protect cultural diversity. The vote wasn't exactly close - 148 countries for and 2 against. Only Israel and the United States opposed the agreement.

The treaty would allow countries to justify quotas to protect their film industries and cultural identities, generally a protectionist move against the US. It "also promotes the rights of women, various social groups, minorities and indigenous peoples to cultural expression" though I'm not sure what that means.

In Canada, this seems to be justification for spending millions of tax dollars on movies and television shows that couldn't possibly make any money. It also seems to be a justification for restricting what television channels Canadians are allowed to watch, as well as the percentage of Canadian content that MUST be played on those channels.

This is generally a justification for limiting consumer choice. If people really want to listen to Britney Spears, they should have every right to do so.

After working for decades to bring about the convergence of technology - computers, audio, video, and the web - some people would now like to bring about divergence. Technologies like Digital Rights Management (DRM) are being used to limit what you can do - to limit convergence and undo interoperability.

As Lawrence Lessig says:

The point is that however good free access is, sometimes, at least some think its not very good, at least for them. And the most powerful of these some have therefore pushed for technologies that would be layered onto the Internet and enable them, or content owners generally, to control how digital content gets used. So if you buy a song from an online music store, perhaps you can copy it to four or five of your machines, but you can't copy it 20 times, or post it on the Internet for others to access. Or if you are sent a confidential report, the technologies might disable your ability to print the report, or to move it to a different machine. The ability to control is essentially limitless — imagine any control you'd like, and there's someone out there working on adding that control to the technologies of the Net.

What bothers me most is the undoing of all that effort to make everything interwork. It's as if after finally creating a Java-based application that works on several platforms, we arbitrarily say that it can't be used on Linux.

Apple is the dominant music player. But companies such as Microsoft insist on using DRM that isn't compatible, making life difficult for customers who have already spoken with their wallets. Record companies do the same thing. The recording industry in general wants to ensure that the customer has no control over media they have purchased by ensuring that they have no right to copy it.

After spending years making like easy for people, they've decided to now make it hard, just because "easy" is inconvenient for them.

I had the distinct displeasure of using McDonald's Wireless today, at a roadside stop on the 401 freeway just outside of Cambridge, Canada. While waiting for an accident to clear, I grabbed b