Unpredictable. Unfocused. Just like life.

The San Francisco Chronicle interviewed Dave Barry, a guy who made his name through his newspaper column, and captured his stunning proclamation:

"Newspapers," he said right off the bat, "are dead."

"The era of the writer in the newspaper was in the '70s and '80s," Barry said, "when newspapers were making money no matter what. They'd send somebody off to Fiji for a story. If you knew you had somebody good, you'd just send them. You knew they'd come up with something."

Dave suggests that blogs and podcasts are the future:

"About five years ago, I went to the Herald and I told them, 'I've got this blog and maybe you'd like to run it,' '' Barry said. "And they said, 'It's a what?' But then they had a committee meeting or something and now they want everybody to have a blog. They want the security guard to have a blog."

While I don't believe that newspapers are dead yet, I do believe that they need to find a way to interact with their readers if they want to remain relevant in the future.

Robert Scoble wants to be able to tag his personal information in such a way the search engines can find it and make it available for people looking for him.

I'd just like to know why there is no way to indentify a phone number on a web page. There is the mailto: prefix for email, but why not a phone: prefix? Or an IM: (or AOL:, Yahoo:, MSN:, and Google:) prefix?

With the proliferation of VoIP and products like Skype and Gizmo, why can't I just click to call somebody?

To be fair, it seems that microformats are the answer to this question, but it just seems like it has taken a long time to get there, and we aren't there yet.

You can read about Bleezer in today's edition of The Record:

Larry Borsato's Bleezer is generating buzz. "It is not very pretty but does a damn fine job with most of the major blogging tools," Business 2.0's Om Malik says.

Like their US counterparts, large Canadian ISPs are now considering tiered internet service:

The free ride may be over for consumers who download movies and music files and play video games, as Internet service providers consider a move toward a "two-tier Internet.''

Companies that carry the data are talking about charging Canadians extra for everything from streaming audio and video to Voice-over-Internet Protocol (VoIP) phone calls and online gaming. Anything that uses bandwidth is under examination.

This is not about providing better service. This is about charging you more for the service you already get, and pay more for than most countries in the world.

These are companies that have been promising unlimited bandwidth for years. The Bell High Speed Internet Access page lists the key features of the service:

Key Features

Unlimited bandwidth usage    Y

Now that you are actually starting to use what they have been promising for years they suddenly want to charge you more for it:

The added charges being discussed are the result of too much traffic riding on the networks for free, says Lawrence Surtees, director of Canadian telecom and Internet research with Toronto-based technology analysis company, IDC Canada.

"If it's just a blip, they don't care. But if it's big, then all of a sudden I'm an ISP with infrastructure. I'm on the hook for carrying that stuff and equipping the network to handle it and I'm not getting paid for it.''

This is merely the act of desperate companies who see their business model crumbling, and they are trying to protect it by increasing prices drastically for what we already get. How can you possibly justify price discrimination and a massive increase in price for the same service we get today?

Would it be reasonable if operators suddenly started charging ten times as much for long distance calls? That's pretty much what we're talking about here.

The internet has become as useful as it is because of non-discriminatory pricing. To introduce tiered service now will simply end the ability of North America to compete with the rest of the world.

Professor Michael Geist has more here.

The Globe and Mail has an excellent article on the background of the NTP versus RIM saga.

Via Engadget.

Dan Gillmor quotes the first paragraph of a NY Times article to make a point:

NY Times: Climate Expert Says NASA Tried to Silence Him. The top climate scientist at NASA says the Bush administration has tried to stop him from speaking out since he gave a lecture last month calling for prompt reductions in emissions of greenhouse gases linked to global warming.

He must not have read the rest of the article though, because I did and at no other point is Bush even mentioned, and there is certainly no proof of any kind given of such a charge. The headline seems more accurate insofar as NASA appears to be doing the silencing, but it wouldn't surprise me if NASA was merely trying to protect their appropriations as any government department would.

The facts of the article just don't seem to support the message and the point that Dan is trying to make.

The at&t ad on page 19 of the Sunday New York Times says that the merged companies of at&t and SBC can deliver "cross platform convergence". I hadn't heard that term before so I Googled it, and found 368 hits, many of which are actually a differently punctuated version. Perhaps it's telling that the fifth hit is the Corporate Gibberish Generato on AndrewDavidson.com:

We will generate the capacity of client-focused cross-platform convergence
monitoring reports to mesh. Imagine a combination of Unix and SMIL. ...

After searching the ad for their website TheNewATT.com - printed in tiny font in faint white print on the orange background at the top and far awar from the rest of the text - I found it wasn't much help, only having this to say (in an image, as opposed to text):

Your world. Delivered. AT&T's passion to invent and SBC's drive to deliver have come together to create the most complete and secure network, delivering what matters most in your world. Introducing the new AT&T.

Click here to learn more about the merger.

Apparently the must feel that customers are more concerned about the merger than their service, because they never actually mention what matters most to me.

But back to the original question, I can logically work out what they might have meant; that they can help you work efficiently in a world of multiple platforms like different operating systems, networks, phone services, and other things. But what do they really mean?

Is it possible that there exists today a company that doesn't deliver cross-platform convergence?

My local paper, The Record, is taking down their pay wall starting this Wednesday, and allowing people to read the paper online for free. Now that search engines can see them they can finally become relevant, and I can link to them.

Publisher Fred Kuntz had this to say:

Why are we opening up our website? It's because growth in The Record's readership and circulation gives us confidence that our printed newspaper will continue to thrive, even as the Internet grows.

When the Internet first blossomed, some newspapers feared that migration of readers to the Internet might erode their audience, and therefore advertising revenues -- but the opposite is happening, especially here where we live.

Surprisingly, research shows that people who read news online are even more likely to be newspaper subscribers. Many people use all types of media, including newspapers, magazines, radio, television, the Internet.

This makes them more aware of current events, more engaged in community affairs and, therefore, better citizens,

Or course he also points out that the money doesn't hurt:

Not only is newspaper readership growing in Waterloo Region, but more businesses are putting their marketing dollars into advertising on the Internet. The Record's website has among the highest traffic in the region, and we'd like to continue to make it even more popular.

Each month, our website at TheRecord.com has more than 90,000 unique visitors and more than 2 million page views.

I've been trying to convince them for two years to take down their pay wall. Just imagine how ecstatic they'll be when they start to appear in Google and people from all over the world start to hit the site.

I'm trying to help VC Rick Segal to pump up the hits for Venture Capitalist Killer.

Maybe Rick's been out in the cold in Canada a bit too long because he's starting to have these radical ideas about the VC business, even suggesting that VCs should treat their portfilio companies as if they were valued customers.

Rick's a smart guy, and he's probably noticed the fact that these days companies don't need VC finds to create, market, and sell products. Suddenly you can do that for next to nothing. I released a blogging client called Bleezer less than two weeks ago. Already people around the world are downloading it, trying it, suggesting great enhancements, and blogging about it.

The other day my local paper called to ask if they could interview me for a story about it, which they did today. Other than the cost of the Powerbook and my time, everything else has been free, so my cost to build and market Bleezer has been virtually nothing so far. And the marketing has been all word of mouth, and of blog.

So VCs are reduced to giving money to companies that are already successful, instead of having companies beg for their money. It's putting VCs in the position of being evangelists for the products, instead of bankers.

The VCs that can adapt well to that situation - like Rick - should do just fine.

Apparently the RIAA does not represent all record companies. Nettwerk Music Group, home to Sarah McLachlan, Avril Lavigne, and others, has joined the fight against the RIAA on behalf of consumers who wish to download music:

"Suing music fans is not the solution, it's the problem," stated Terry McBride, C.E.O of Nettwerk Music Group.

[...]

"Litigation is not 'artist development.' Litigation is a deterrent to creativity and passion and it is hurting the business I love," insists McBride. "The current actions of the RIAA are not in my artists' best interests."

Nettwerk is supporting 15-year-old Elisa Greubel, whose family is being sued by the RIAA. Nettwerk will pay all legal fees and fines should the family lose.

Tip of the hat to Michael Geist.

NBC has cancelled The Book of Daniel after just a couple of episodes.

It was a funny show, and it's unfortunate that certain groups refused to give it a chance.

President Bush spoke with the Wall Street Journal, and the subject of the recent troubles at GM and Ford came up:

WSJ: Now speaking of competitive, we have some problems. GM and Ford are experiencing some of those problems themselves these days. And to that end, I wonder if you could talk about your thoughts about what their situation is and what the government might or might not be able to do for them.

Mr. Bush: ... In terms of competitiveness, we live in a world in which a Ford or GM has got to compete with other manufacturers that are able to deal with costs in a different way than they are, as well as coming up with product that is relevant.

Tip of the hat to Asymmetrical Information.

So Google has decided to censor search results in China. This may at least be an improvement from no service at all.

Rebecca MacKinnon say that by censoring results Google is committing evil and comments:

One of the big problems with the search experience in China right now is that if you use Yahoo or Baidu or Sina search, you have no way of knowing that information exists out there that you've been denied access to.

I hate to be the one to point this out, but no matter where you are you never really know if you've been denied access to something.

I'm not sure that following a country's laws can actually be deemed evil, even if it involves democracy. If anything is every going to change in China it is going to have to change from within. If Google and Microsoft don't play along for now they will just be excluded, and that won't help anyone.

So does that make every television and radio station evil if they comply with FCC regulations on speech?

There's been a lot of discussion about telecom operators and tiered internet service. Martin Geddes at Telepocalypse notes that we accept differential fees for airline travel:

I landed at SFO yesterday. My airfare included some charges for airport fees which the airline itemises separately.

British Airways also got charged some money by the airport to land their plane. And because it was a 747, they got charged a lot more than the turboprop that followed us.

Not only that, but assume SFO is the only Bay Area airport with runways long enough for a 747. A local monopoly on longhaul traffic.

Yes, and we also accept differential costs for different tiers of airline service - first class, business class, and coach. But the airport charges Martin mentions are really taxes, consumption or otherwise, being passed along to the user. They used to be included in the ticket price. Breaking them out just allows ticket prices to be artificially lowered.

For example, in the telecom world, we all pay the Federal Universal Service Charge. And there are tariff agreements - telecom landing fees as it were - between the carriers. And we are willing to pay for more services, such as call display and voice mail, just as we are willing to pay more for first class comfort.

But the analogies I've seen for far are poor. There are a lot of ways to look at this, but just ask yourself this question:

What would things be like today if 75 years ago I could have paid more to have my phone call go through before yours?

Everyone is talking about presence these days, most recently in connection with the launch of Tello, a new service. Om Malik, TechDirt, MobileCrunch, and Mathew Ingram have commented.

The problem I see with presence is that current solutions treat every service - IM, landline, mobile, etc. - differently, and they provide a separate presence for each service.

Presence should be capable of telling others that I am available regardless of how, and perhaps note that I can accept voice or text or both. And it must be possible for me to turn presence off, much as I do when I set my status to "Away" in IM.

Elisa Camahort has some thoughts on Halley Suitt's analysis of American Idol:

Her biggest question is also fascinating to me: do the untalented one really not know they're untalented?

Sure it may be the person with the most singing talent who wins American Idol, but many other people may benefit from the exposure, even if they have no talent at all. Does the name William Hung come to mind?

Hung was so classically bad he was funny, and he made a pretty decent short career out of it. And that of course qualifies him for Dancing with the Stars.

Speaking of Dancing with the Stars, or Skating with the Stars, am I the only one who's noticed that the stars are more like celebrity has-beens?

The Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) has been accused of making a copy of a movie without permission:

The MPAA admitted Monday that it had duplicated "This Film Is Not Yet Rated" without the filmmaker's permission after director Kirby Dick submitted his movie in November for an MPAA rating. The Hollywood trade organization said that it did not break copyright law, insisting that the dispute is part of a Dick-orchestrated "publicity stunt" to boost the film's profile.

They gave the following reason for making the copy:

"We made a copy of Kirby's movie because it had implications for our employees," said Kori Bernards, the MPAA's vice president for corporate communications. She said Dick spied on the members of the MPAA's Classification and Rating Administration, including going through their garbage and following them as they drove their children to school.

"We were concerned about the raters and their families," Bernards said. She said the MPAA's copy of "This Film Is Not Yet Rated" is "locked away," and is not being copied or distributed.

That excuse is contrary to rules the MPAA sets out for everyone else:

The standard the MPAA is using for itself appears to be at odds with what the organization sets out for others: "Manufacturing, selling, distributing or making copies of motion pictures without the consent of the copyright owners is illegal," the MPAA's website says. "Movie pirates are thieves, plain and simple.... ALL forms of piracy are illegal and carry serious legal consequences."

Via digg.

Techdirt wonders if Canadian MP Sam Bulte, friend to record and movie companies everywhere (but not so supportive of the citizens who elected her), plagiarized her rationale for stricter copyright laws:

As Geist points out, her "defense" only proves that she only listens to one side as almost every point is taken directly from materials, announcements, speeches and studies done by the content industry she's accused of being too close to. Over at Boing Boing, it's pointed out that this could be considered plagiarism, since she takes the points directly from content industry publications, barely paraphrases them, and yet doesn't give credit for where she got the points.

It doesn't really matter though, because Canadian news stations are projecting that Ms. Bulte will not be re-elected.

Recruiting.com is worried that there may be a shortage of IT workers in Canada on the horizon:

Students think IT jobs are scarce so they don't go into IT. And that might cause a shortage of IT personnel.

Colleges have reported a 30 - 50 % decrease in program enrolments since 2002. Universities have experienced declines of 20 %.

Yet people I've spoken to who are looking for work tell me that companies don't even get back to them at all when they've applied for a position. Or they get the standard "we have identified other applicants whose skills and experience are more aligned to the specific requirements of this position" response. I recently had an HR person interview me for a position they wanted to hire for immediately, never to hear back from them again.

I've been through times of IT shortage, and we were deperate to hire people. This is not what is happening now. And there are still layoffs happening.

I don't think that we're going to see a shortage in Canada for quite some time, if we ever do again.

Tonight's episode of CSI Miami has a story reveolving around a company blogger. It seems that by entering the blog link and the times of the posts theye were able to obtain an IP address, albeit one starting with 310 (each octet can't exceed 255). They were then immediately able to obtain an email address for that IP address.

This is about as realistic as the episodes where they are able to interpolate full photographic resolution in a single magnified pixel, often allowing them to read a license plate on a speeding car hundreds of yards away.

Google News no longer displays the beta tag, but there don't seem to be any other differences.

Update: John Battelle has more details on what it does do.

Every week the Saturday edition of my local paper includes a copy of TV Week, television listings for the upcoming week. Up until a couple of weeks ago that insert contained chronological listings of shows along with excerpts of the shows including the stars, as well as a grid of prime time shows in a much smaller font on each night.

Now the TV Week consists only of a grid listing in a fairly large font the names of the shows organized by the channel and the time.

The new format provides basic information, but it doesn't feel as nice as the old version. And something about the repetitive lists of shows in the grid format, without the spaces and breaks provided by the paragraph format, makes it more tiring to read and harder to find information from.

What I don't understand is why the change occurred. The insert didn't get any smaller, so it is unlikely that any costs savings were achieved. It's just... different.

Diabetics need insulin. People need decent healthcare. The Buffalo Bills need a new head coach. But nobody needs Windows Vista.

Hmmm. Maybe that's not completely true. Microsoft needs you to buy Windows Vista. Oh, and they need you to buy more Office 2003 while you're at it.

My apologies to Manuel Clement and Robert Scoble, but they are only presenting reasons why the geeks among us might want Windows Vista. I have yet to see a single compelling reason why I might need Windows Vista.

It's likely that more than 95% of users use their PC to read mail, surf the web, and create and share word documents. A small percentage of those people may also develop software. All of the tools that they might find in Windows Vista are already available through third party applications. Will Windows Vista actually improve their productivity? The only things I ever see described about Windows Vista consist of new technology - not new benefits for the user.

It seems to me that the only reason that we use Windows XP today was because PC manufacturers began shipping it on their new PCs, and refused to provide older operating systems. I can remember the problems this led to in corporate IT. Getting a new PC meant having it wiped and an image of the current corporate OS installed, wasting the time of IT staff everywhere.

The IT discussion was never "Windows XP is great! We need it. Let's get it!", but instead "Every new PC comes with Windows XP and it's a pain to re-image every one. What would it take to support Windows XP?" And then being faced with having to deal with things breaking unexpectedly in different places than the last system.

And can somebody please explain the difference between Windows XP Home and Windows XP Professional? Other than the price?

My father, going on 80 years old, still runs a dual boot system - Windows XP and Windows 98. He does it because he says that Windows XP doesn't allow him to do some of the things he could do in Windows 98. Microsoft would probably tell him that those things aren't important, as I frequently tell him. But after all, he is the customer. Shouldn't he be able to do what he wants?

Every new version of Windows has introduced more critical flaws, created more IT and service issues, and cost corporations even more in terms of support and lost productivity. With Windows Vista an even larger codebase, there is no reason to suspect that it won't be worse. And the first major user interface change since Windows 95 is certainly going to require substantial new training.

I feel sorry for Microsoft though. In many ways they are a victim of their own success. The widespread use of Windows means that Microsoft is forced to ensure backward compatibility with previous versions of Windows. If only they could start from scratch.

In the meantime folks, instead of telling me about all the new gizmos, please tell me how Windows Vista is going to make my life better, or my work more efficient. Please tell me why I really need Windows Vista.

Just like Kelsey Grammer says, I'm listening.

What? You weren't aware that HTTP needed fixing? You probably never give HTTP a thought, even though you use it every day. How about SMTP? Any problems with that?

Scott Karp builds on Paul Kedrosky's rant that RSS sucks:

RSS sucks. I’m with Paul Kedrosky. Let the technodweebospehere rain fire and brimstone. I could add to Paul’s rant, but instead here’s a Really Simple three-step Solution (of course, the real first step is admitting that you have a problem):

1. Call it “subscribing”

2. Encourage everyone to get a reader

3. Use the iTunes model — Search, browse, recommend, remix

Do you want to know the best way to fix RSS? Two simple words:

Ignore it.

Like HTTP, users should be able to ignore the fact that something called RSS even exists.

First of all, if "subscribe" is the best word to use then so be it. Syndicate refers to creating the feed anyway, not reading it. But don't make me do anything proactive if I don't have to. If the software finds a feed then it should just ask me if I would like to subscribe to the feed. Allow users to be passive and still get something.

Secondly, make this thing work with software I already have. The web really took off when the browser was included with the operating system. Same thing with email. iTunes became commonplace entirely due to the success of the iPod. Telling users that they have to get new software without a compelling reason is a barrier to widespread acceptance.

And third, the one source "best of" subscription is a good idea, but it probably won't provide the perfect solution. If that were true, then about.com would have become the most used site on the web rather than Google. However, services like Squidoo will become powerful sources of aggregated information. I still think that a blog search engine that provides feeds will be more dominant in the end though.

For RSS and Atom to become universal they have to become invisible. And when we achieve that, new applications will start popping up like crazy.

This site has an excellent and very complete list of Google query commands.

Via digg.

A computer algorithm has suggested that Paul Martin is the least trustworthy of the three major candidates running for election as Canadian prime minister:

According to a new computer algorithm, Prime Minister Paul Martin, of the Liberal Party, spins the subject matter of his speeches dramatically more than Conservative Party leader, Stephen Harper, and the New Democratic Party leader, Jack Layton.

Spin, in this case, is defined as “text or speech where the apparent meaning is not the true belief of the person saying or writing it”, says the algorithm’s developer, David Skillicorn at Queen’s University in Ontario, Canada.

He and his team analysed the usage patterns of 88 deception-linked words within the text of recent campaign speeches from the political leaders. They then determined the frequency of these patterns in each speech, and averaged that number over all of that candidate’s speeches. Martin received a ranking of 124, while Harper and Layton scored 73 and 88, respectively.

This implies that Harper is the most honest politician, followed closely by Layton. Martin, on the other hand, is a pretty distant third.

Yesterday, January 19th, was the 20th anniversary of the computer virus.

Just imagine if all of the ingenuity and energy that has gone into those viruses could have been harnessed for the advancement of computing, rather than its destruction.

I spent the better part of the day trying to fix a problem with Bleezer, my blogging client. I had to set a Java system property. Of course everything worked just fine in the development environment, but it failed miserably outside of it.

Turns out that I had the property name spelled incorrectly, and what do you know - apparently that matters.

A new version with a few new features should be available in the next few days.

I've spent most of the day determining that a problem with Blogger support in Bleezer was the fact that Java on the Mac seems to use the Crimson parser while Java on Windows uses the Xerces parser. And for some reason the Xerces parser is not working for me.

Once I had that item out of the way it was simple to default to the Crimson parser, which worked fine inside of Netbeans. However outside of Netbeans I seem to have a classpath issue which I just can't seem to resolve. The biggest problem is this:

Exception in thread "main" java.lang.NoClassDefFoundError: org/jdesktop/layout/GroupLayout$Group

So now I'm upgrading to the Netbeans RC1 release to see if that helps. There isn't a lot of cogent documentation about this stuff.

Today Corel released the newest version of Wordperfect Office, a competitor to Microsoft's Office Suite. Unfortunately at this point I think that there are few people who notice or care about Wordperfect, the one time market leader.

NBC credits higher ratings for the show The Office to iPod downloads. Jeff Jarvis comments:

Imagine what would happen if you put out an episode for free (on Bittorrent) without restrictions (but with ads): You’d get a gigantic audience. Let the people distribute your show. Wires and towers and cables aren’t your network. The people are your network.

This seems like such an obvious thing. After all, the combination of TiVo, Bittorrent, and almost non-stop reruns of shows like Seinfeld and Friends don't seem to have diminished the sales of DVDs of those shows.

Just treat reruns and downloads as a marketing campaign for the shows and their eventual DVD releases. You could even market it as your gift to fans of the shows. You'll get more people talking about and watching the shows (higher advertising rates and more advertising revenue) and you'll get their money later (higher DVD revenue).

There are three people who deserve thanks for suffering though the early incarnations of Bleezer:

• Andrew Anderson (Bound By Gravity)
• Ken Dyck (Ken's Meme Deflector and Startup Fever)
• Mack D. Male (MasterMaq's Blog)

Their comments have helped me improve the product tremendously in a very short time.

Though not all of us have the courage and fortitude to dream the way Martin Luther King, Jr. did:

I have a dream that one day this nation will rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed: "We hold these truths to be self-evident: that all men are created equal." I have a dream that one day on the red hills of Georgia the sons of former slaves and the sons of former slaveowners will be able to sit down together at a table of brotherhood. I have a dream that one day even the state of Mississippi, a desert state, sweltering with the heat of injustice and oppression, will be transformed into an oasis of freedom and justice. I have a dream that my four children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character. I have a dream today.

Martin Luther King died in 1968, almost 40 years ago. Since then we've come a long way, but we still have so very far to go before all men are treated equally.

I've already had some nice comments on Bleezer, including an excellent post from Mark Evans of the National Post. All in all a pretty good first day.

But there's more to come. :)

The project I've been working on for the past couple of months - Bleezer - is now ready for prime time! Well, as ready as it's even going to be. :)

If you are a blogger, Bleezer will give you the ability to post to all of your blogs, regardless of what service you use, on any platform you want. The Bleezer website also has a blog so that you can keep up with new features and versions.

By shipping now I'm putting into action something Guy Kawasaki often says:

Churn, baby, churn. I'm saying it's okay to ship crap--I'm not saying that it's okay to stay crappy. A company must improve version 1.0 and create version 1.1, 1.2, ... 2.0. This is a difficult lesson to learn because it's so hard to ship an innovation; therefore, the last thing employees want to deal with is complaints about their perfect baby. Innovation is not an event. It's a process.

Hey, it may just be crappy software today, but It's going to churn like crazy. Planned features include WYSIWYG editing, structured blogging, and more. And it's free!

Dare Obasanjo mentions Dave Winer's comment about Microsoft and 2.0, and comments on the culture of improving, rather than creating, at Microsoft:

New employees to Microsoft are sometimes frustrated by this aspect of Microsoft's culture. For some it's hard to acknowledge that working at Microsoft isn't about building cool, new stuff but about building cooler versions of products offered by our competitors which integrate well with other Microsoft products. This ethos not only brought us Microsoft Office which Dave mentions in his post but also newer examples including XBox (a better Playstation), C# (a better Java) and MSN Spaces (a better TypePad/Blogger/LiveJournal).

A long time user of both Microsoft and competitive products, I'd argue that Microsoft products aren't always better; just different. Except for the force of marketing and corporate pressure that Microsoft often uses to crush the competition. They do eventually improve the product, but often just to give customers a reason to upgrade. And then sometimes, as with Internet Explorer, they just stop improving the product until another competitor threatens.

After all, if C# is a better Java, why is Microsoft still using C++? And if MSN Spaces is a better TypePad/Blogger/LiveJournal, then why haven't users of those services switched over to MSN Spaces? Better depends on your point of view. I guess you could honestly say that those products are better for Microsoft, even if customers don't always agree.

Mark Cuban thinks that we need multiple tiers of internet service:

There are some basic facts about the internet that remind me of driving on the 405 in Los Angeles. Traffic jams happen. There is no end in sight for those traffic jams. The traffic jams are worse at certain times of the day. Whether its the 405 or the internet.

Unless of course we add multiple tiers of service so that users, companies and applications that want to, or need to avoid those traffic jams have alternatives. We need HOV lanes and toll roads on the net as badly as we need the HOV lanes on the 405.

What is rarely mentioned is the fact that the phone and cable companies have been selling us unlimited usage for years; they just had no ability (and possibly no intention) of delivering. We've all heard stories of companies who limit customers who exceed what they feel is "reasonable" usage, even though their advertising clearly promises "unlimited" usage. Rogers Communications in Canada seems to be throttling back Bittorrent, but they aren't exactly forthcoming about it.

It is completely possible today to have multiple tiers of service; virtually all routing hardware on the internet offers that option, and I've personally worked on software to manage that service. But there is currently no guaranteed quality of service on the internet today. There is merely a "best attempt to deliver" service. You can see this anytime you have to reload a site that didn't load properly the first time.

Mission critical services usually avoid the internet, running instead over dedicated lines. If these services migrated to the internet then they would need a guaranteed quality of service, and the phone or cable company would have to live up to a service level agreement. Unlike phone service, which is regulated and required to provide 99.999% uptime, these companies currently have no regulated service levels.

It isn't difficult to add bandwidth. It's just costly. These companies don't want to add bandwidth or increase costs at all. Their intent in offering tiered services is to generate more revenue from their existing bandwidth, instead of the current "all you can eat" mode of operation.

And when they do that, home users will get whatever bandwidth is left over. If Mark thinks that we have traffic jams now, he has no idea what he's in for. Then if you can't afford the HOV lane or the freeway (and there will be a tiered cost for the freeway) then you'll be consigned to the breakdown lane.

Perhaps the answer isn't just tiered service but better use of the bandwidth that we already have. Bittorrent is a perfect example. Instead of requiring multiple simultaneous full bandwidth connections to the sourc, Bittorrent makes use of bandwidth sharing among a community of users trying to download the same thing. This is very effective for media that we know will be a bandwidth sink, like the latest epidode of Desperate Housewives.

By the way, I notice that while the phone companies think that Google should be paying for the use of DSL, they haven't asked NBC to cough up any cash even though they are charging viewers $1.99 per episode to download television shows which are probably the biggest bandwidth killers.

That said, I would love to see phone and cable companies held to some guaranteed level of reliable service, instead of constantly telling customers that it's their problem.

Tom Foremski says that Yahoo Music could kill the iPod:

I hate my CDs even more now. I bought a year subscription to Yahoo Music just before the holidays and for $5 per month I have access to an amazing amount of music streamed into my hifi.

[...]

You can even load music onto a portable MP3 player–except for an Apple iPod. And that is why I am giving up my Apple iPod. Apple won't allow Yahoo Music onto iPod because it has its iTunes store to protect. [emphasis mine]

His logic is a bit flawed. Apple has nothing to do with allowing Yahoo Music onto iPod. I have gigabytes of music on my iPod but I've never bought a thing from iTunes. I just ripped my own CDs. Apple lets me put any MP3 I want onto my iPod.

If it is impossible to put Yahoo Music onto an iPod that is because Yahoo chooses to make it impossible, likely through the use of an incompatible Digital Rights Management (DRM) format. In fact Tom alludes to that when he says this:

If I were trying to unseat Apple's iPod iron grip on the industry I would ban iPod from Yahoo Music and only allow it on my player(s).

Apple's iron grip comes because the majority of people chose to buy that particular device. Most companies would have the common sense to try to satisfy the market, rather than work directly against it. I'm surprised that Tom was so easily convinced that he had made the wrong decision in purchasing the iPod.

I'm quite happy with my iPod. Then again, I've always preferred having something to show for my money. When I pay for music I like to own it. With Yahoo Music I only get to use the music as long as I'm paying for it. If I stop paying I have nothing.

Regardless of how you choose to pay for your music, or what device you want to play it on, this all comes down to a problem of incompatible DRM. And the problem will only get worse as companies try to further limit what we can do with out music.

When I was a kid I recorded songs from the radio which as far as I know was perfectly legal (for personal use anyway). I recorded those sings with as much fidelity as I could at the time, and that fidelity improved as my recording equipment got better.

Twenty years later I can now record songs digitally from satellite radio. This merely represents another improvement in the fidelity of recording equipment. But now, as Furdlog notes, the recording industry no longer finds this rational.

So let's forget the technology details and resort to common sense. What is different between now and then? Then I recorded songs and listened to them. Now I record songs and listen to them.I'm just doing the same thing I've always done. Why should I have to give up this right?

I've been writing a Java application lately. For Windows users I decided to package the .jar file as the more common .exe file. There are several excellent tools to accomplish this, ranging from $25 to $100 for a license. Since my application is free, I obviously want to minimize my costs. Then I found something called JSmooth, an open source .exe wrapper. It's quite a nice program, working as well as the commercial versions, and of course it's free.

Joe Kraus wrote a while ago that it's a great time to be an entrepreneur because, among other things, infrastructure software is free. He's right. I've been able to go through this entire project without any cost other than hardware. Software, information, documentation - all free. It's enabled me to bootstrap on a shoestring, without having to raise funds. It probably enables a lot of people to create things that they otherwise couldn't.

Of course that doesn't bode well if you are trying to make money from your software, unless your software really solves a problem for me that nobody else can.

There may be no such thing as a free lunch, but there's never been a better time for free software.

Update: Nicholas Carr has his own thoughts on the subject.

From Doc Searls Weblog:

We are enamored with technology. We should be focusing on the people, places and events around us. Instead, we are focused through our laptops, cell phone updates and Blackberry messages ... I have some advice for this new generation of techies, of which I am included. Keep your eyes open and take your headphones off every once in a while.