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March 1, 2003
USA Today: Microsoft 'science fair' offers glimpse at technology's future.
"It's a backup to your brain," said Bell, a senior researcher for Microsoft Research in the company's Bay Area center, who exhibited his project at Microsoft Research's annual TechFest Wednesday and Thursday. Referring to the popular Internet search engine, he called it technology to "Google your life."
March 2, 2003
SJ Mercury: Senator seeks full copyright disclosures.
Dan Gillmor. U.S. Sen. Ron Wyden, an Oregon Democrat, has a strikingly simple idea to bolster customers' rights to freely use software, movies and music that they've paid for: Force the sellers of such products to tell the truth about the restrictions they're imposing on users.
March 3, 2003
Useit.Com: Persuasive Design: New Captology Book.
After ten dark years of fighting (and partly conquering) user-hostile design without much theoretical progress in HCI, Dr. Fogg has now opened the field's next frontier with his work on "captology" -- computers as persuasive technologies.
NY Times: E-Music Sites Settle on Prices. It's a Start.
But for now at least, the $10-a-month and 99-cent-a-song price list is letting the marketing side of the business take over from the deal makers. And Internet users will start to see increasing promotion for the first time for the online music services.
Washington Post: AOL Aims to Cash In on Instant Messenger Success.
So it is no surprise that America Online's new senior management, led by chief executive Jonathan F. Miller, has focused on IM, as it is known, as a powerful tool with the potential to provide the company with the fresh revenue needed to restore growth.
March 4, 2003
Bob Frankston: Dim Copper.
The Internet isn’t just an upgrade to the phone network. It needs its own path. The existing copper infrastructure is a valuable resource that can be used as a native medium for Internet connectivity. We must take advantage of the opportunity to provide universal connectivity very quickly at a low cost, we get vastly improved telephony as a free bonus.
SJ Mercury: Handspring holding on until Treo gets a grip.
It's the Treo on which Handspring's future lies. The first version wasn't successful. A new version is due late this summer, the company says. Handspring's fate may rest on whether business users are willing to pay for a high-end phone that does e-mail and Web browsing along with other Palm-based functions.
March 5, 2003
USA Today: Hello, tech designers? This stuff is too small.
But how will we operate such marvels? We struggle with what we own today. Our fingers are already too thick and clumsy to stab the buttons on our gadgets, and, as our eyes age, we squint even harder to see the shrinking screens on our stuff.
InfoWorld: Spectrum allocation draws intense debate.
Academics, activists, and regulators at a conference here on Saturday debated the future of the U.S. Federal Communications Commission's allocation of radio spectrum, with some arguing that spectrum shouldn't even be the issue in most cases.
March 6, 2003
LA Times: Library Software Filters Debated.
Two years ago, Congress said if libraries receive federal funds, they must install software filters. Most of the justices sounded supportive of the law. "They say some of this is garbage, and we don't want it," Justice Antonin Scalia said.
March 7, 2003
MIT Technology Review: Untapped Networks.
Q&A with Duncan Watts, Columbia University sociologist. Theories of networks have been around for a long time, so the science itself really isn’t new. What is new is the synthesis of ideas from a variety of disciplines: math, computer science, sociology, biology.
Wired News: Court Nixes Child Net Porn Law.
The court said that in practice, the law made it too difficult for adults to view material protected by the First Amendment, including many non-pornographic sites. The law, signed by President Clinton and endorsed by President Bush, has never been enforced.
March 8, 2003
Cooper Interaction Design: Design Research: Why you need.
Simply handing them a report generated by someone else is not nearly as effective. If the design team is truly immersed in the user research and models that come out of that research, it will be much easier for them to design a product that meets the needs of the users rather than themselves.
Washington Post: Relevant Ads No Illusion, Google Says
Google executives, however, insist their mission hasn't changed. "Our core is still search," Rosenberg said. "What it is about is marrying a user to the right information. . . . In this context, I view ads as another form of information on the Web."
March 9, 2003
SJ Mercury: Broadband competition might still be possible.
Dan Gillmor. Tom Freeburg and his colleagues at Canopy Wireless Broadband Products, a unit of electronics giant Motorola, are telling one of the most intriguing stories of all. They've come up with a system that could bypass, at least for the near term, the wire-line duopoly in urban and suburban areas.
March 10, 2003
Clay Shirky: Social Software and the Politics of Groups.
Our centuries of experience with printing presses and telegraphs have not prepared us for the design problems we face here. We have had real social software for less than forty years (dated from the Plato system), with less than a decade of general availability.
NY Times: AOL Is Planning a Fast-Forward Answer to TiVo.
The company's system, called Mystro TV, is AOL Time Warner's gambit in an imminent battle over the future of the television business. Satellite services, cable systems and television manufacturers are all racing to promote their versions of the TiVo-like technologies...
Good Experience: Google and Branding.
Google has done none of these things. Instead, it has focused on the EXPERIENCE. The user experience, customer experience, searcher experience, whatever you want to call it - Google knows that online, the brand is the EXPERIENCE.
Useit.Com: PR on Websites: Increasing Usability.
A company's website must clearly be a key component in any modern PR strategy. Luckily, many companies seem to be recognizing this, and corporate PR areas have improved significantly during the two years since our previous study.
March 11, 2003
NY Times: Software Pioneer Quits Board of Groove.
Mitchell D. Kapor, a personal computer industry software pioneer and a civil liberties activist, has resigned from the board of Groove Networks after learning that the company's software was being used by the Pentagon as part of its development of a domestic surveillance system.
SJ Mercury: Lofgren bill backs digital copying for personal use.
The bill, dubbed the Balance Act, would establish consumers' rights in the digital world. It would formalize the right to make backup copies of digital works for use on other devices -- like the car stereo or portable player -- and protect consumers who bypass technological locks to view a DVD movie on their laptops.
March 12, 2003
NY Times: AOL Providing Software to Customers to Block Pop-Ups.
The new AOL software will be automatically installed on computers using the latest version, 8.0. A button on the bottom of every window in AOL's Web browser will let users turn the pop-up blocking feature on or off.
March 13, 2003
Salon: The myth of interference.
Rethink completely the role of the Federal Communications Commission in deciding who gets allocated what. If Reed is right, nearly a century of government policy on how to best administer the airwaves needs to be reconfigured, from the bottom up.
Adaptive Path: Conducting International Usability.
Peter Merholz. Maintaining global consistency requires centralizing these Web efforts (usually within corporate headquarters), yet this must accommodate distinct approaches to working which vary from region to region.
March 14, 2003
CIO Insight: Spectrum for All.
Lawrence Lessig. Yet the more I see of his son, the chairman of the Federal Communications Commission, the more convinced I am that Michael Powell could shepherd us to perhaps the most important policy change to affect the technology industry, and hence the economy, in 50 years.
March 15, 2003
News.Com: Tech firms tackle spam.
While the group has yet to formalize or outline an agenda to fight spam, attendees of the forum all have a strong incentive to begin a cooperative discussion about technological solutions to various pieces of the problem.
March 16, 2003
Fast Company: How Google Grows...and Grows...and Grows.
If it takes too long to deliver results or an additional word of text on the home page is too distracting, Google risks losing people's attention. If the search results are lousy, or if they are compromised by advertising, it risks losing people's trust. Attention and trust are sacrosanct.
March 17, 2003
Useit.Com: Do Productivity Increases Generate Economic Gains?
There is no doubt that paying more attention to usability in user interface design can make a system easier to learn and faster to use. Still, some people doubt whether such improvements lead to actual monetary gains for the company.
March 18, 2003
Crypto-Gram: Practical Cryptography.
In "Practical Cryptography," we took a single problem and discussed it deeply. The most common problem cryptography solves is what I call a secure channel: Alice and Bob want to communicate securely over some insecure communications line, so they need to establish a secure channel on top of that insecure line.
March 19, 2003
SJ Mercury: Newest phones show promise of wireless.
Dan Gillmor. While it was amusing to hear all the breathless talk of mobile messaging and camera-equipped phones, which are yesterday's news in places like Japan and Finland, it was clear that the United States is starting to catch up in service and function.
March 20, 2003
EE Times: Display investment looking up in a down market.
At the latest venue meant to attract display investors, Matt Medeiros, former head of Philips Electronics' Components Division, said there are only two technologies worthy of investment: displays and wireless. "These two technologies will serve as the basis for inputting and outputting all future information," Medeiros told investors.
March 21, 2003
News.Com: LookSmart bets on distributed computing.
In January, LookSmart quietly bought the assets of Grub, an Oklahoma-based developer of technology that lets people donate their computers' otherwise unused processing power to run spiders, or software programs that continually crawl the Net, indexing pages and words.
March 22, 2003
Fortune: There's a Killer App on the Loose--But I'm on the Case.
Stewart Alsop. The most innovative products I saw at Demo were programs designed to keep e-mail away from me, organize it, or make the information it contains accessible to colleagues who need it.
March 23, 2003
SJ Mercury: Web offers varied perspectives on war coverage.
Dan Gillmor. This time around, however, a minority -- but a growing one -- had learned a lesson from the aftermath of the Sept. 11 attacks. They had a robust online alternative. The Web, e-mail lists and other online sources offered content with context and nuance.
March 24, 2003
NY Times: Start-Up Aims to End Spam.
John Markoff. Mr. Goldman said he had come upon the idea independently in 2001, only to discover there were already many patents in the area. He contacted the inventor who held the first patent covering the idea and acquired that patent, as well as another in the same field.
News.Com: E-mail patterns map corporate structure.
The researchers said graphing e-mail flow not only correctly identified communities within the organization, but it also provided insight into who the leaders of those groups were. It also helped to identify informal communities that arise when people need to communicate across departments or work collaboratively on projects.
March 25, 2003
PC World: Gaggle of Consumer Gadgets Unveiled.
The division between computing and consumer electronics products continues to narrow, a point driven home by the wide range of gadgets unveiled at the recent CeBIT trade show. These devices prove that technology once related only to the PC is now moving into the mainstream, even among non-PC users.
March 26, 2003
InfoWorld: Microsoft plans Palladium demo in May.
Microsoft in May plans to show early prototypes of computers using its Next-Generation Secure Computing Base technology, a combination of new hardware and software that Microsoft says will boost PC security but that critics fear could be a scourge for user freedom.
March 27, 2003
InfoWorld: Macromedia to extend Flash to offline use.
The Web development software maker later this year will offer Macromedia Central, an extension to its widely used Flash player that allows users to run Flash applications outside a Web browser and when offline, the San Francisco company said Thursday.
News.Com: AOL Time Warner pulls free Net magazines.
The move has been expected since AOL Time Warner executives unveiled the plans in December. The idea is to boost AOL with content from the parent company's vast media and entertainment properties...
March 28, 2003
Clay Shirky: Permanet, Nearlynet, and Wireless Data .
Everyone wants permanet -- the providers want to provide it, the customers want to use it, and every few years, someone announces that they are going to build some version of it. The lesson of in-flight phones is that nearlynet is better aligned with the technological, economic, and social forces that help networks actually get built.
The Economist: Launching Telecoms II.
By voting in effect to maintain the status quo, rather than embark on reforms aimed ultimately at dismantling the country's antiquated regulations that govern the telephone network, the Federal Communications Commission has consigned the telecoms industry to further floundering. Call the missed opportunity "Telecoms II".
March 29, 2003
InfoWorld: Caught you!
With all the Internet scams and hoaxes out there trying to trick you into divulging useful information about yourself, it’s getting hard to know whom you can trust to guard your privacy -- even if the company bills itself as a partner in protecting it.
March 30, 2003
SJ Mercury: Cellular pioneer still causing stir.
Dan Gillmor. Many carriers still exhibit the monopolistic attitudes of legacy telecom companies. They control the networks and the service, a combination that holds back the kind of furious innovation we need, Cooper says, not to mention the essential basics.
March 31, 2003
Useit.Com: Intranet Portals: A Tool Metaphor for Corporate Information.
Most importantly, at all the companies we studied, the key issues in building a good intranet portal were political and organizational -- not technical. Basically, buying software won't get you a good portal unless you also manage internal company politics.
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