the tweney review

Spacewar! Fanatic life and symbolic death among the computer bums. “Ready or not, computers are coming to the people.” by Stewart Brand –Rolling Stone, December 7, 1972.

MouseSite: featuring video clips from Engelbart’s famous 1968 demo, in which he showed off the mouse, a graphical interface, WYSIWYG editing, shared-screen remote collaboration, hyperlinks, and lots more.

BT loses hyperlink patent case.

Just found this interview with Userland’s John Robb that explains pretty clearly and succinctly the benefits of knowledge management weblogs, or, as Robb refers to them, k-logs.

I just posted a new tweney report, which tries to clarify my thinking about weblogs as knowledge management tools.

Telcos enter the copyright fray: “Verizon and other telecommunications giants have ordered their phalanx of lobbyists to oppose the entertainment industry’s demands for new copyright laws,” Declan McCullough writes in this interview with Verizon VP/general counsel Sarah Deutsch. Why is this such big news? Well, consider the size of the industries involved in the debate:

The Weblog Metadata Initiative is trying to interconnect information about weblogs from different sources, such as Blogdex, the Blogosphere Ecosystem, and weblogs.com. So far, they seem interested primarily in collecting data about various blogs’ popularity and the links between blogs — but this seems like an important first step towards making weblog information more manageable and searchable.

RSS syndication is very useful for aggregating current weblog posts, so you can see what’s new on a whole bunch of weblogs at once. But what if you want to do a search across many weblogs for a single term, or for posts relating to a certain concept? Your best best is to use Google, clicking on search results and following links, one after another. What I want is a way of aggregating weblog content on a single page — not just the most current posts, but archived content that meets various criteria I specify. Is there a way to do this now? I don’t know of one.

This looks like a good introduction to the semantic web and RDF.

Fellow PC Computing alumnus Rafe Needleman is convinced that big, national wi-fi providers like T-Mobile spell the end for small, local wi-fi service providers. I’m not so sure. People have been predicting the demise of the mom-and-pop ISP for years now. The truth is, however, local ISPs increased in number in every year from 1997 to 2000, showing a slight dip (to about 7,300) in 2001. (Here’s a directory with the relevant stats.) I suspect the reason for the continued strength of the local ISPs in the face of overwhelming competition from AOL is that some people just appreciate having a local phone number they can call, where they know they’ll get a real, live human being who will answer their questions. In other words, it comes down to service. Why should the wireless ISP market be any different?

This looks like a good introduction to the semantic web and RDF.