7/2/2003
Now is the winter of our discontent
Made glorious summer by this sun of York
- Richard III
Several weeks ago, after writing a rebuttal to a blog antagonist at The Register, I shot an email off to Dr. Jenkins over at Microdoc, asking if he would like to participate in a collaborative blog. The primary purpose of which, is somewhat broad:
- educate others as to how anyone can blog (as seen in this fine post)
- explain why individuals such as Mr. Orlowski are flat out wrong
- demonstrate as to how blogs are the closest to the ideal of what the Internet was meant to be: personal empowerment, low-barriers to entry, etc.
- and much much more (for only $599.99/month)
He accepted the proposition, as did several others (see below). To that end, I whipped up a declaration, a schematic (which most should be familiar with already), a manifesto as to the current conditions of this New World Order (Second Superpower):
A spectre is haunting the Fourth Estate — the spectre of blogginism. All the powers of the old Establishment have entered into a holy alliance to exercise this spectre: O’Reilly and Orlowski, Rosen and Hatch, Toolan and Iranian police-spies.
Where is the party in opposition that has not been decried as blogginistic by its opponents in power? Where is the opposition that has not hurled back the branding reproach of blogginism, against the more advanced opposition parties, as well as against its reactionary adversaries?
Two things result from this fact:
I. Blogginism is already acknowledged by all Establishment powers to be itself a power.
II. It is high time that Bloggers should openly, in the face of the whole world, publish their views, their aims, their tendencies, and meet this nursery tale of the spectre of blogginism with a manifesto of the party itself.
To this end, Bloggers of various nationalities have assembled in Cyberspace and sketched the following manifesto, to be published in the English, French, German, Italian, Flemish and Danish languages.
Well, I’m not so sure about the Flemish part, I mean, do they even exist?
Anyways, that is my hastily adlibbed Makeshift Manifesto of Doom™ (Dr. Jenkins has a great one, I’ll link to it when it’s finalized).
Currently the team is comprised of seasoned bloggers (though, I am by far the weakest link in terms of longevity):
- Dr. Elwyn Jenkins, who among other things has put together a great service called Blogging Headline News, which is a compilation of thousands of blog posts updated throughout the day
- Michael Fagan, creator of the Fagan Finder (a handy search utility) and soon-to-be college superstar
- Richard Giles, an all-around web geek, currently works for Sun in the land down under (is moving and about to become a dad)
- Stephen Dulaney, in addition to having attended A&M at one point, this Jack-of-all-Trades is a developer of SocialDynamX (software that enhances Radio Userland)
- Roland Piquepaille, currently a computer consultant for Savoir-Faire & Cie however, he also has a great deal of experience with super-computing projects — a hot topic in the blogosphere
- Tim Swanson, he fulfills the equal opportunity quota for this organization and enjoys writing about himself in third person immensely
Note: We each plan on updating ProBlogs.org periodically throughout the week; the site layout and design is not complete.
So If you know of someone (Waltz partner, Carpool associate, Pool Man, etc.) that you would like to start blogging, be sure to send them our way — we do pro bono work, for a price.
This is John Milton talkin’ to you live from the Bronco Bowl, where we’re partying like its 1667. The Millers wife is getting down and dirty, so much so that we’ve had to stop playing Nude Twister and Crab Limbo due to too much baby making.
Err, none of you read Paradise Lost or the Canterbury Tales, did you?
Well you might have run across another classic epic, Beowulf, sometime in your career as a human, including the translation from Seamus Heaney. Mr. Heaney made the news once more, not for winning another Nobel Prize (or a Swanson Prize), but for his endorsement of rap, specifically Eminem:
“There is this guy Eminem. He has created a sense of what is possible. He has sent a voltage around a generation. He has done this not just through his subversive attitude, but also his verbal energy.”
And he’s not the only member of academia to gush figgity fat phrases:
Professor Paul Muldoon, professor of poetry at Oxford University, said that Heaney’s comments were “perfectly reasonable”.
“One thing I would say about Eminem and rappers in general is that despite the fact that the subject matter is sometimes more than near the knuckle, they do valourise the word in a way that lyricists generally don’t,” he said. “In general, the language is perhaps more important than the music in the rap genre.”
The Poetry Society, formed in London in 1909, was equally gushing. “Eminem harnesses the power of word and language and that’s what a poet would do,” it said. “That’s why the society is not surprised that Seamus Heaney would speak favourably.”
The society’s support for the rapper has increased following feedback from children entering its annual schools-based performance poetry competition. “Many of them have been absolutely inspired by Eminem,” it said.
All I have to say:
May I have your attention please?
May I have your attention please?
Will the real Blog Meister please stand up?
I repeat, will the real Blog Meister please stand up?
We’re gonna have a problem here…
I’m testing out a new segment of my blog, which is tentatively titled: I post pictures I think are funny and you look at them. Feedback is appreciated:
There’s much more where that came from honey, just let me know when and where you want it.
Today’s post was brought to you by the words cliché and ad nauseam:
Boycott Microsoft Search!
Microsoft is building a Web search engine, and they intend for it to become the industry standard. Given Microsoft’s track record during the browser wars, there is every reason to believe the company will again use its monopoly power to eliminate competition by building a Web search service into the next version of Windows.
You can wait for the court challenge, or you can help make a difference now by declaring your site off-limits to the Microsoft crawler. All it takes is a file called robots.txt in your top-level directory, and these two lines:
User-agent: MSNBOT
Disallow: /
Read more about the boycott here.
While I’d probably be in the same van that carts Stallman and Raymond away to the “I love MS re-education camp,” you won’t see me joining something like the boycott mentioned above.
Look, Business 101: any company with a profit motive will seek to eliminate competition, whether it is by innovating, marketing or the time honored integrated freebie (I don’t hear Adobe clamoring about MS Paint or Eudora developers brow-beating over Outlook Express). That said, what is so terrible about MS entering the search engine arena? If nothing else, they will force others to compete and innovate — including themselves (subsidizing will go only so far…).
And so what if MS decides to integrate the search function into their OS, it is their software, they can do what they want (hence: ownership). And damn their desire to bundle web services with other products, I guess you are also boycotting: IBM, Oracle, Sun, Novell, etc.
Indeed, I could see a class-action lawsuit against MS in this market, I can see it occur in any market they decide to enter. So as long as individuals continue to believe that MS should not be allowed to grow or enter other channels, there will be lawsuits such as those brought on by Netscape.
Additonally, the link this particular blogger references makes some of the same statements, including this Warm & Fuzzy statement:
…Google won on quality. Right now, another search engine could come along and win on quality again (perhaps even Martin’s own effort). But as soon as Microsoft reaches a critical mass, the game is over. No one will be able to compete with a search service embedded in Windows. Microsoft will make sure of it.
Well go ahead and slap a QED on the end of that, the war is over… so sayeth Mr. Ceglowski.
Currently no search service is embedded with Windows, so Microsoft or anyone adding that capability would be doing everyone a favor. At the same time, what does that matter, why would you stop: visiting Google.com, installing the Google bar or using a browser (like Safari, Opera, etc.) which have Google built in? Does the power of MS compel you too… (I can just see their tin-foil conspiracy consisting of IE crashing every time you type in www.google.com).
I actually would enjoy seeing what exactly see the hypothetical examples as to how a search engine war of today can and will be the browser war of yesterday (which never ended and is still going, give it some time). They are two separate, very distinguishable machinations – apples and oranges.
I met a friend over at Starbucks (T-Mobile) this past weekend, he was working on a project and brought a laptop. I asked if he was surfing the web using his WiFi connection and he showed me the price: $6/hour – wowza (no he didn’t). And that doesn’t even come with beer or carnal images.
Which brings me to what Marcos Lara commented on in my last WiFi entry regarding McDonald’s test driving wireless connectivity in their resaurants:
“Why would I go through this if I can use those other networks?” said Lara, who is co-founder of a New York WiFi start-up called Skywire Networks.
“It’s a fun experience, but I’m fearful that none of these companies can survive the capital expenditure or infrastructure costs to roll out a big enough footprint to create a network worth subscribing to at the prices they charge.”
That quote is actually from an article discussing the grim realities that this Economist article spells out clearly, commercially deployed WiFi hotspots in areas such as airports and coffee shops are having a less than stellar ROI:
Around 25,000 people access the [T-Mobile] hotspots each week, which works out at an average of less than two users per day per hotspot. But the cost of connecting each hotspot to the internet is several hundred dollars a month. The Wi-Fi hotspot at Amsterdam’s Schiphol airport is used by only a dozen people each day.
Glenn Fleishman at the Wi-Fi Networking News blog punched the numbers and figured that it would take 1,000 years before these companies pay back capital expenses.
The number of years for a break-even-point, like many other investments, can be reduced in the long-run if various variables are taken into account (which the Economist article discusses), however, I have no plans as a consumer to pay anything more than maybe $1/hour for broadband access via my laptop, cell phone or PDA (ala, the 20% they mentioned).
Here’s yet another good spot to plug initiatives like LanLinkup and FreeNetworks.org — they’re painless and are not contingent upon shaky business models. Plus, the Jones’ are doing it.
