In a wide-ranging interview this week about the upcoming changes to her commission's mandate, she [Barbara Hall, chief commissioner of the Ontario Human Rights Commission] stood firmly by her position that media have a responsibility to put their writings through a "human rights filter" before publication, and said the commission is keen to call out those who do not, jurisdiction be damned.

I'm not sure exactly what a "human rights filter" is, but it appears that anything that might potentially offend someone is off limits. Actually that isn't quite correct. It must be something that might offend a visible minority. Being a white male, it doesn't matter if I'm offended.

Of course given that I live in Canada currently I should be very careful what I say lest I offend someone.

Frankly I prefer free speech without limits. I think that we do people a great disservice when we assume on their behalf what might offend them.

Thanks to Kathy Shaidle for reminding me about this travesty.

If they give that up then they are just a poor iPhone clone in a game where Apple makes the rules.

Almost one year ago Facebook announced the Facebook Platform, unleashing an assault of applications on unsuspecting users. At first those applications were silly, even bothersome. But now they are beginning to provide real value to groups of connected users. Currently there are approximately 15,000 applications, and 350,000 developers have signed up so there will probably be more on the way.

Read the whole thing.

Social games might be multiplayer games that you can play with friends on your favorite social network. But some companies are looking to those free casual games as being a core component of something bigger -- and a revenue-generating business, too. Companies like Mytopia and J2Play are building communities around the games, and spanning multiple social networks, which means that you can play games or issue challenges to your friends across different networks. And in a world of applications that grows more crowded every day, it provides an opportunity to discover new games.

Read the whole thing over at The Industry Standard.

What if someone decided to take your RSS feed and republish it on their site? A company named Shyftr did that a couple of weeks ago, creating a fury of comments from bloggers around the internet. Louis Gray likes the fact that there are more places for conversations to take place. Tony Hung doesn't like people stealing his RSS feed. And Robert Scoble says that bloggers no longer have control of their content.

Read the whole thing over at The Industry Standard.

We have better communications technology now than at any point in human history. We have email. We have instant messaging. We have website feedback forms. We have blogs. We have Twitter. All of these services can be used to communicate information about products or services to a company. Yet customer service really hasn't improved at all, and few companies make the effort to use any of these technologies to make it better.

Read the whole thing over at The Industry Standard.

I guess that it had never occurred to me that my mom might want a domain and web hosting service for Mother's Day. Unfortunately worldsbestmom.com is already taken.

So what happens on August 31, 2008? On that day, Microsoft will turn off the servers that they maintain for the sole purpose of validating that the songs that people have already “purchased” through MSN Music are still theirs to play. Those people (hereafter “the victims”) will not notice the change right away. The victims will only notice it when they purchase a new computer, or when they upgrade the operating system on their current computer, or when the hard drive in their computer dies and needs to be rebuilt/reinstalled. At that point — transferring the music files they have “purchased” to another drive or a new computer — the Microsoft music player running on the victim’s PC (like iTunes, but all Microsoft-y instead of Apple-y) will make a call to Microsoft’s validation servers to verify that the music files were legitimately purchased. This call will fail, since the servers are not responding, since Microsoft has intentionally turned them off. The Microsoft music player will then conclude, incorrectly but steadfastly, that the music files were downloaded illegally and that the victim is a filthy pirate, and it will refuse to play them. In this case, the left hand knows exactly what the right hand is doing: they’re both giving you the finger.

It looks like the name "PlaysForSure" was a very, very bad choice.Not for Microsoft though. Only for the customers who trusted them.

Everyone should be aware of RSS today.

And everyday. Just imagine how much time you would spend visiting websites if not for RSS.So ROI saves you hours each day so that you can spend more time with the family.

Yes, RSS actually improves your quality of life!

When there’s a simple box to fill in with your search term, and you know exactly what you’re looking, why bother to use the address bar? If statistics on popular searches are anything to go by, it looks like many people aren’t bothering with that inconvenient “www” and “.com” and are just going straight through Google.

When my wife asks me for the web address of a particular company and I tell her she often mistakenly types it into Google, rather than the address bar, which usually frustrates me.

But maybe she has it right and I have it wrong. For example, I no longer bother to guess the URL of a company when I don't know it. I just search for the company in Google, and their website is usually the first result. And today I caught myself telling someone to just Google a product because I couldn't remember the name of the company.

Maybe with Google we don't need URLs at all anymore. Why bother with something cryptic that I have to guess at when I can just ask by name?

Today, betas are instantly available to everyone worldwide; there are rarely limits. They are used to attract free publicity, or to drive user demand through "invite only"-style launches. And a beta is not a one-time event. The software changes frequently; new features are added constantly. If problems occur the answer is often not to fix them, but to state that "the product is only in beta". But people use the product as if it were final. At best, the service might not work exactly as advertised. At worst, your data could be lost, destroyed, or leaked.

Read the whole thing here. And while you're at it, take a look around. Make a bet on the current predictions. You'll rarely find so much information, and so many viewpoints, all in one place.

Which is usually greeted by blank stares and comments like "Why would anyone want to do that?"

Then a few months later I meet people and they ask me if I've heard of this thing called Twitter, or whatever the new thing is. Happens every time.

Update: Robert Scoblesays it doesn't matter if Kara Swisher's friends aren't on Twitter, because plenty of people are. But Kara didn't ask her friends; she basically asked 100 random people at a wedding in Washington, DC. You'd probably get the same response pretty much anywhere else. I on the other hand typically find myself in a room full of technology folks and get the same response.

“Free” is disruptive. It can create value. User generated content, in the form of videos provided for free by users to YouTube, created a valuation of $1.65 billion when they were purchased by Google. Or it can destroy value. The easy availability of free music, though not always legal, has decimated the music business.

You can read the whole thing here.

“Space and time are tangled together in a sort of a four-dimensional fabric called space-time,” said Charles Liu, an astrophysicist with the City University of New York, College of Staten Island and co-author of the book “One Universe: At Home In The Cosmos.”

[...]

Mathematically, you can certainly say something is traveling to the past, Liu said. “But it is not possible for you and me to travel backward in time,” he said. [emphasis mine]

It's a bit dangerous to make judgements on what is or isn't possible based on the knowledge you have today. It's this kind of statement that gets quoted and remembered forever.

It was once impossible that the earth revolved around the sun. Cars were impossible. Space travel used to be impossible.Computers smaller than room-sized were impossible.

He's going to seem a bit dumb when we're all travelling backward and forward in time.

It's not just a lack of compelling features that are keeping people from buying new software. It's also a fear of change. Customers are forced to abandon old processes and relearn new software as it changes substantially from version to version -- for instance, Office 2007 users were presented with a distracting "ribbon" interface for commonly used commands, instead of the tried-and-true drop-down menus at the top of an open window. Consumers buying new software also have to worry about unknown bugs and performance issues.

Are you rushing to upgrade your software to the latest and greatest? Or are you just fine with what you have right now?