the tweney review

Werbach critiques the accepted wisdom that sorting out the digital copyright mess is a prerequisite to widespread broadband adoption. According to Werbach, it’s a mistake to think that video-on-demand will be broadband’s killer app:

“Real killer apps tend to surprise people. No one in the early 1990s thought that interoperable email would be the driver of the Internet boom. And who would have predicted that the most successful of the countless Internet startups was the one that made it easy for people to swap Pez dispensers? eBay looks obvious only in hindsight.”

Rashly ignoring Kevin’s warning, I hereby present my nomination for broadband’s true killer app. The app I’m proposing is fast and low-band — you certainly don’t need broadband to use it. But when you’ve got a DSL or cable modem connection, you don’t need to wait for modem dialups any more. Leave your computer on, and the Internet is as instantly and easily accessible as a dictionary sitting on the dining room table. And what do people turn to first when they want to look up something online? Google.

Daniel Radosh has just published the excellent PowerPoint Anthology of Literature, featuring one- or two-slide PowerPoint versions of Hamlet, Lolita, Goodnight Moon, and others. (Thanks to Dan Pink, who also recommends Abe Lincoln’s PowerPoint presentation for the Gettysburg Address.)

Mark Pilgrim and Sam Ruby have posted a useful RSS Validator on the Internet Archive’s site. It validates both RSS 1.0 and 2.0, which is nice and nonpartisan of it. It even detected that I was using Movable Type and provided me with templates to fix both my RSS 1.0 feed and to upgrade my old 0.91 feed to an RSS 2.0 feed within MT. Thanks, guys!

Now all I have to do is re-code the PHP that generates my old RSS 0.91 feeds for the recent articles I’ve written and for tinywords.com’s daily haiku feed. That’s a little harder than replacing an MT template, I’m afraid. Ive been trying to avoid actually having to learn about RSS 1.0 and 2.0, but it looks like I may be forced to, now. At least those two feeds, despite being based on an obsolete version of RSS, are still valid.

Several bloggers have recommended Kevin Werbach’s paper on open spectrum. “Almost everything you think you know about spectrum is wrong,” Kevin begins.

A paper by T.D. Wilson at the University of Sheffield tackles The nonsense of ‘knowledge management’.

Quote: “‘Knowledge’ is defined as what we know: knowledge involves the mental processes of comprehension, understanding and learning that go on in the mind and only in the mind … . Whenever we wish to express what we know, we can only do so by uttering messages of one kind or another … . Such messages do not carry ‘knowledge’, they constitute ‘information’, which a knowing mind may assimilate, understand, comprehend and incorporate into its own knowledge structures.”

This is why I’m more interested in ‘information management’ than ‘knowledge management’ — because knowledge can’t, strictly speaking, be managed. It’s inside your head.

The late Michael Dertouzos once quipped, upon meeting someone who said she was in charge of managing her company’s “knowledge assets” — So, do you also manage the company’s knowledge liabilities? And can you account for them on a knowledge balance sheet?

(thanks to Weinberger for the link)

Here’s a transcript of the Eldred v. Ashcroft arguments that took place earlier this month at the Supreme Court. (via Gillmor)

Remember when Sinead O’Connor committed career suicide by ripping up a photo of the Pope on TV about ten years ago? She was protesting his position on abortion, right?

That’s what I thought, too — but I was wrong. Turns out she was protesting the Catholic Church’s complicity in covering up child abuse by priests. Salon has the story, but you have to be a subscriber to read it. Here’s a free interview with Sinead that covers some of the same ground.

It happens every December. The holiday season brings with it hordes of online shoppers, and — despite having months to prepare — many websites aren’t able to keep up. Learn how you can avoid this fate in my latest column for Business 2.0, The Santa Slam.

Vic Norton, a mathematician (and my stepfather), has published a paper on how you can use a weighted Sharpe ratio to optimize your investment mix and beat the market.

I don’t have the mathematical chops to evaluate Norton’s approach, but it looks pretty good: If you had used this investment strategy over the past eight years, you would have nearly matched the S&P 500 during the boom years, and your investment would have continued to grow during the 2000 - 2002 bust.

This week’s New Yorker has a banjo cartoon.