July 1, 2002
Clay Shirky: Half the World. The Phrase establishes telecommunications access as a Big Problem and, by extension, validates the speaker as a Thinker-About-Big-Problems. But saying "Half the world has never made a phone call" makes no more sense than saying "My car goes from 0 to 60" or "It rained 15 inches."

MSNBC: Microsoft’s Freon project is an Xbox, with extras. Though it is unclear whether such a product will ever be built, its core concept appears to have the backing of Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates, who wrote in an internal memorandum in January that he was a “big fan” of a machine that would combine video services with gaming.

NY Times: Grudgingly, Music Labels Sell Their Songs Online. Increasingly desperate to woo customers away from an Internet music piracy party that shows no signs of abating, several major record labels have resolved to make more music legally available for less money online — even if it means sacrificing lucrative CD sales.

MSNBC: Cyberlaw: Cybersmart or cybersilly? The skeptics start by questioning the very existence of cyberspace, which they say is no more real than a “phone space” involving all the people on the telephone at a given time. They go on to argue that something happening online shouldn’t be treated any differently by the law than if it occurred on Main Street.

July 2, 2002
Salon: It's time for ICANN to go. Q&A with John Gilmore. The culture of secrecy and unaccountability has festered in there ever since. They hold "open public meetings" where the public is free to shovel its comments into a dumpster. But then they ignore the comments and do what they want in closed-door meetings.

MSNBC: Online ads, e-mail don’t click. But the latest data on the ineffectiveness of e-mail could damp any interest on the part of major marketers to commit big bucks to e-mail advertising campaigns. Other new forms of online advertisements already appear to be sour disappointments.

EE Times: India moves to deregulate wireless LAN usage. A notice suspending licensing regulations is expected to be issued this week. A plan to deregulate outdoor use of 802.11b WLANs is also in the works, but may take until the end of the year to complete, said Pramod Mahajan, India's communications and information technology minister.

July 3, 2002
MSNBC: Music labels go after song-swappers. The new legal tack would be a departure from the entertainment industry’s strategy so far. Companies have been reluctant to take legal action against individual Internet users, in part because they have feared the possible backlash that could result from big corporate interests dragging individuals into court.

The Chronicle of Higher Education: 'Superarchives' Could Hold All Scholarly Output. Several colleges are now looking to share more of that work by building "institutional repositories" online and inviting their professors to upload copies of their research papers, data sets, and other work. The idea is to gather as much of the intellectual output of an institution as possible in an easy-to-search online collection.

July 4, 2002
NY Times: New Chips Can Keep a Tight Rein on Consumers. Hal R. Varian. But Palladium can also be used for digital-rights management on your PC. This means that only certified programs could be run, and only certified content could be displayed. At the level of bits, censorship and digital-rights management are technologically identical.

July 5, 2002
News.Com: Copyright fight comes to an end. Hacker publication 2600 magazine won't appeal a ruling prohibiting it from linking to code that can crack copy protections on DVDs, bringing a closely watched digital copyright fight with Hollywood to an end Wednesday.

July 6, 2002
Washington Post: Court Backs Danish Papers' Linking Ban. Copenhagen's lower bailiff's court ruled Friday that Newsbooster.com was in direct competition with the newspapers and that the links it provided to specific news articles damaged the value of the newspapers' advertisements.

July 7, 2002
Useit.Com: User Empowerment and the Fun Factor. We need much better methods for testing enjoyable aspects of user interfaces. Such methods should be both robust and easy to apply, since people with relatively little expertise do the vast majority of user testing in the world. That said, ease of use must remain our first priority.

MSNBC: Labels to Net Radio: Die Now. Steven Levy. Instead of instating the kind of royalty already paid to songwriters by both broadcast and Web radio—about 3 percent of revenues—the tariff on digital music is based on the number of listeners . So it’s possible for the fee to exceed revenues, especially in a fledgling business where ads are scarce.

July 8, 2002
O'Reilly Network: Cable Modems: Less Boon Than Beast. Andy Oram. But the limitations of cable modems would render them unattractive if alternatives were available at a reasonable cost. And wait--there's more. Cable modems keep us in the dark ages of Internet access, seriously distorting Internet usage, economics, and policy.

CNN: Internet father warns of its problems. "I do consider myself a kind of advocate for understanding as much as possible about the Net, even if it's just a matter of having a kind of cartoon model of how it works," Cerf said. "Even cartoon models can lead you to reason correctly about the effect of various decisions."

LA Times: Dealing With Customers Online--Not on the Line. After weighing the matter for six months, TMH Chief Executive Friederich Koenig in June yanked TMH's phone lines after sending out an e-mail notifying its 4,000 customers that "the telephone will no longer be a good way to contact us for general business."

July 9, 2002
USA Today: FBI uneasy about plan to deregulate fast Net. The FBI and Justice Department are concerned that the Federal Communications Commission's decision to classify broadband as an "information" service could disrupt their ability to trace the e-mail and Internet activity of terrorists and other criminals.

The Economist: Tinkerers' champion. Now, on sabbatical leave at Stanford University's Centre for Internet and Society, he is trying to develop the theoretical basis for what he calls the “freedom to tinker”. As a result, Dr Felten embodies the growing tension between academic freedom and stricter copyright rules...

July 10, 2002
SJ Mercury: Control freaks tightening their grip on the Internet. Dan Gillmor. Lawrence Lessig, a Stanford law professor and author of several important books on our technology-influenced future, was the program's pessimist. He's been jetting around the world for several years, warning of what's coming. And what's coming, he keeps saying, is a victory of the control freaks.

Network World: ACLU says cable could close Internet. As Americans move from dial-up Internet access to logging on via cable broadband networks, they're also moving from the open, regulated telephone network to proprietary cable networks that are controlled by a few large companies, according to an ACLU report issued Wednesday.

July 11, 2002
Salon: Can we trust Microsoft's Palladium? Could Palladium function as a kind of technological straitjacket, a Redmond-operated remote control over your data and, in consequence, your life? According to those who've looked closely at the proposal, the answer is a definite, unhelpful "maybe." But the better question is this: Why would Microsoft want to build such a restrictive system?

News.Com: Lawmakers: Keep your tunes to yourself. Legislators are readying a bill that could sharply limit Americans' rights relating to copying music, taping TV shows, and transferring files through the Internet. At the same time, the draft legislation seen by CNET News.com would place the struggling Webcasting industry on firmer legal footing.

July 12, 2002
Wired News: Palladium: Safe or Security Flaw? Earlier this week, Palladium architects from Microsoft and AMD provided Wired News with separate under-the-hood tours of the software and hardware technology plans behind Palladium's high concept pitch. The good/bad news: As described, Palladium won't meet most of the hyperbolic claims being made for it.

MSNBC: Welcome to the site, can I help you? Chat is one of the Internet’s oldest, simplest technologies, and as early as 1997 was promoted as an idyllic customer service solution that never seemed to materialize. But chat has enjoyed a resurgence of late thanks in part to increasing familiarity with instant message systems among Net users.

July 13, 2002
The Chronicle of Higher Education: Appeals Court Rules Against Researcher Who Claimed Patents on Online-Database Use. A federal appeals court on Tuesday ruled against a researcher employed by the University of California who maintains that, a decade ago, he invented and patented a key aspect of Web surfing: using a database from a distance.

July 14, 2002
Computerworld: Advocacy groups claim free speech imperiled. Levy said the group wants all service providers to handle such subpoenas the way America Online Inc. does. When AOL gets a subpoena, it informs the individual that a company is making an attempt to discover his or her identity. This gives the person a chance to take action against the subpoena and the company.

July 15, 2002
Computerworld: Users Must Beware of Legal Trends. Dan Gillmor. The IT user community has never thought of itself as making laws, except to the extent of setting down rules inside the enterprise. This is a natural consequence of doing a particular job. Maybe it's time to think more broadly. The way you do your job is going to have more impact on society at large than you may want to know.

Web Informant: You may not have received this email. George Carlin once had a bit about the seven dirty words that couldn't be said on TV: if only our email systems were as discrete and predictable about the nature of their censorship. Indeed, I can almost guarantee that if I include certain words in this message, many of you won't ever get this email.

John Patrick: The Spam Has Got To Go. People are going to demand that their political leaders do something about spam. This will lead to regulation of the Internet. I think most of us feel that Internet regulation can be costly, limit innovation and hurt productivity. I believe that an ingredient of the long-term answer to the problem is authentication.

July 16, 2002
Ask Tog: Call Center: Profit or Loss? More and more companies, however, are looking at their call centers as two-way devices, both supplying customers with information, as well as feeding information back into the company itself, both from the call center's experience and their customer's suggestions.

Fast Company: Can TiVo Go Prime Time? Alas, the real world is messier than TiVo's perfect living room. The company is experiencing firsthand the brutal realities of introducing a disruptive technology into a marketplace filled with obstacles.

NY Times: Talks Weigh Big Project on Wireless Internet Link. But the companies involved in the talks anticipate a more ambitious effort based on building a new wireless communications infrastructure that would also tie in the nation's cellular carriers, offering a seamless transition from low-speed cellular data standards to 802.11.

July 17, 2002
SJ Mercury: FCC news isn't all bad on telecom. Dan Gillmor. Fans of competition in telecommunications are getting distinctly mixed signals from the Federal Communications Commission. Some days you'd wonder if the FCC was a subsidiary of the telephone industry, but on others you'd suspect the commission was plotting a genuine revolution.

David P. Reed: Open Spectrum and Spectrum Policy. I'm really excited by what may be starting to happen at the FCC. A new Spectrum Policy task force was launched earlier this year, and on a very accelerated schedule the FCC called for comments on a wide range of interesting subjects.

New Architect: The Culture of Usability. It is possible to do less work and get better results while spending less money. By bringing usability testing in-house and breaking tests into more manageable sessions, you can vastly improve your online offering without affecting your profit margin.

News.Com: Amazon opens Web services shop. Web site operators will be able to incorporate Amazon's product reviews and descriptions, as well as its search system, wish lists and other features. Amazon will not charge Web site owners who use its features.

July 18, 2002
First Monday: After the Dot-Bomb. Described below are some "pet peeves," some problem areas identified in the design of Web information retrieval to date. These problems are accompanied by suggested solutions, or, at least, directions to go in to develop solutions for the next round of Web information retrieval development.

LA Times: Music Companies Seek New Piracy Protection. This approach would require changes to millions of computers and other Internet-connected devices. Because computers convert digital audio files to analog in order to play them, it may be impossible to stop pirates from making fresh recordings with no digital protections.

The Register: JPEGs are not free: Patent holder pursues IP grab. A video conferencing company based in Austin, Texas says it's going to pursue royalties on the transmission of JPEG images. And it's already found a licensee: Sony Corporation. Formerly known as VTEL, Forgent Networks acquired Compression Labs in 1997, acquiring this patent into the bargain.

July 19, 2002
The Economist: The great telecoms crash. The one thing that keeps would-be monopolists on their toes is viable competitors. It may be hard to imagine just now, but such competitors are sure to re-emerge in telecoms one day. And when they do, governments must ensure that the regulatory door has been left open to let them in.

InfoWorld: Forgent claims JPEG patent; others cry foul. However, Håkon Lie, chief technical officer of Opera Software ASA of Oslo, Norway, said Friday that he doesn't believe the patent can be enforced. "I would encourage people not to pay up if they are asked to. We have done a technical evaluation of this patent and we don't believe it applies...

July 20, 2002
EE Times: Content protection debate reaching do or die. Many of the stakeholders in the digital-copyright debate are beginning to wonder how long the discussion will drag on and when the content and technology industries will agree to launch standards that satisfy all of the sides.

July 21, 2002
SJ Mercury: Hollywood, tech make suspicious pairing. Dan Gillmor. But even if you assume that Palladium will bring serious improvements to today's notoriously insecure systems, it's important to understand that it also brings the potential for vast anti-customer, anti-competitive mischief by the entertainment and software industries.

The Register: Fair Use advocates silenced by Big Brother. Advocates trying to speak for regular Internet users were basically told to sit down and shut up during a "public" workshop on digital rights management dominated by IT heavyweights and Big Hollywood at the U.S. Department of Commerce Wednesday.

July 22, 2002
Useit.Com: Becoming a Usability Professional. Usability expertise is mainly an issue of talent and experience rather than theory. Much of usability work requires pattern matching, which is why it's so dependent on brain power and past experience: Once you observe slight traces of a usability issue in users' behavior, you must deduce the underlying implications for design.

USA Today: Royalty fees killing most Internet radio stations. On June 20, a copyright appeals board set a rate of seven-hundredths of a cent per song, per listener. For many stations, run by music fans for music fans, that works out to thousands of dollars more than they make.

July 23, 2002
News.Com: Can the Internet survive filtering? Jonathan Zittrain. It is becoming, in part, a plea not to overlay one filter on top of another within the collectively hallucinated cloud that is the Internet. In the meantime, it's important to show where the filtering is happening within the network cloud, and if possible by whom.

EE Times: MIT prof critiques Europe's wireless efforts. The "big deal" Negroponte was keen to stress was that the emerging world of ad-hoc, peer-to-peer wireless networks will lead to a world of intelligent devices that will in fact serve as a network. "For years, we have been saying we can get the intelligence from the network, but we have not thought of these devices as being the network..."

SJ Mercury: Q&A: Cammy Huang, director of Stanford's Virtual Labs project. With new computer technology and the Web, in terms of distribution, what you can do is now make learning more visual and interactive. I think that since we are visual creatures -- I'm definitely a visual learner -- we can use the Web to use visual teaching as a new mode, instead of text teaching.

July 24, 2002
Library Journal: Copyright in the Balance. Q&A with Lawrence Lessig. We need to be much more aggressive in calling people on this rhetoric, because it's just wrong. It's just not the case that copyright has ever been understood to mean that if you use a copyrighted work in a way unintended by the copyright owner that's "theft."

InfoWorld: MIT scholars predict shift in telecom model. Keeping the Internet an open entity will depend largely on users' abilities to set up ad hoc networks among themselves, instead of large telecommunications companies controlling the infrastructure and therefore the bits that travel across it, according to some members of the famed MIT Media Laboratory.

July 25, 2002
News.Com: On trial: Digital copyright law. Companies that make filtering software typically include an encrypted list of sexually explicit or otherwise banned Web sites. Inventing and distributing a utility that circumvents that copy protection, which Edelman says he would like to do, would run afoul of the DMCA's legal prohibitions.

July 26, 2002
SF Chronicle: Bill would allow disuption of file sharing. The bill by Rep. Howard Berman, D-North Hollywood, would grant legal protection for movie studios and record companies that employ technology to disrupt the millions of files being traded on popular Napster-style peer-to- peer networks like KaZaa and Morpheus.

July 27, 2002
Forbes: Bad Connection. Even as the Bells stand triumphant, the 20th-century foundations of their business have begun to fracture. The Baby Bells could one day be exposed as the last great telecom illusion, undone by a combination of an overwhelming wave of new competition...

July 28, 2002
SJ Mercury: Hacking, hijacking our rights. Dan Gillmor. The goal is to give copyright owners profound control over music, movies and other forms of information. The fact that this control would do enormous damage to your rights, and to the future of innovation in a nation that desperately needs more innovation, is apparently beside the point.

July 29, 2002
NY Times: Digital Cockpits Track a Corporation's Performance. Thanks to continuing efforts at digitization, a growing number of companies are now able to use the Internet to monitor many or all of their key performance indicators daily, or even minute-by-minute. This is done through what have come to be called digital dashboards, or digital cockpits.

The Register: Microsoft man seeks US Net Radio reprieve. A bill to protect grassroots Internet radio has been offered before Congress. The Internet Radio Fairness Act would exempt webcasters with less than $6 million in annual revenues from the additional RIAA royalty and from future royalty requirements.

EE Times: German operator drops 3G network plans. Dutch mobile network operator KPN Mobile and equipment suppliers Nortel Networks and Ericsson are the immediate losers from the decision by Group 3G, one of the six license holders to operate UMTS services in Germany, to abandon plans to start a 3G network next year.

July 30, 2002
Salon: Sour notes. If the industry were smart, it would seize this moment. Instead of trying to hack its customers, it would seduce them with a pitch that goes like this: Getting free music is a dodgy affair -- pay us a little bit, and we'll give you a Napster-like free-for-all. But the music business isn't doing that...

Cooper Newsletter: Learning from the mistakes of Internet banks. No doubt these tools have potential, but without a solid understanding of what must be accomplished, it is next to impossible to predict how successful these initiatives will be. Customers don't care about the latest technology if it doesn't satisfy their basic goals.

July 31, 2002
News.Com: Want to share Wi-Fi? Just ask. The organization has begun keeping a list of such ISPs, which it deems unlikely to shut down the accounts of customers sharing access to their Wi-Fi networks free of charge. The move is in response to Time Warner Cable's recent crackdown on such customers.

Boxes & Arrows: Adventures in Low Fidelity: Designing Search for Egreetings. Rather than moan about why my designs were not implemented, I want to share my story because it illustrates the value of employing user testing techniques during IA design and applying ideas about facets and controlled vocabularies to creating a search interface.