Rough Drafts

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 1990

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 […]

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

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 abu

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

This week’s New Yorker has a banjo cartoon.

Former Oracle business analyst Mei Lin Fung reflects on a bit of Oracle’s sales history, circa 1990. “After five to eight years — with the benefit of distance, hindsight and detachment — it eventually worked its way to my consciousness that we had changed the way things worked in one part of the sys

Some Features you may Need on your Computer.