I found Kevin Werbach‘s white paper explaining the open spectrum concept to be a great quick introduction to this topic. Open spectrum advocates maintain that with today’s technology we need to stop thinking of spectrum as a scarce resource that must be strictly regulated and begin to figure out ways to open up vast swathes of the radio band to new uses. According to this view, Wi-Fi is just the beginning. The apt analogy for wireless spectrum, Werbach argues, isn’t a clogged network of highways, but rather the open seas. Better read his paper — it’s not that long — than try to grasp this in digest form.
$40 billion, but nothing for the shareholders
Dan Gillmor posts about Microsoft’s latest financials, pointing out that the company is now sitting on a $40 billion cash hoard. What most companies do when they are making as much money as Microsoft does these days is distribute some of those profits to shareholders in the form of dividends. But like most technology companies, Microsoft has never much believed in dividends. (Technology companies typically see themselves as “growth” companies that need to reinvest all their profits in the business.)
Gillmor says this is because Gates and other key Microsoft owners don’t want to deal with the tax implications of dividends given the size of their holdings. Maybe — I can’t say I’m an expert on tax management for billionaires, never having had such worries.
But I also think the Microsoft hoarding instinct is a weird function of the company’s ingrained, perpetual paranoia. As numerous insider accounts and much testimony at the antritrust trial have shown, Microsoft’s culture imbues employees with the sense that disaster is always around the corner — if they make one misstep, the competition will eat their lunch. This paranoia is a sort of management tool, to be sure, but it’s also an attitude that emanates directly from the company’s leadership. Microsoft is hanging on to its $40 billion because, hey, who knows how much money it might need when the next big seismic shift in the technological landscape threatens to unseat its monopoly? Think of that $40 billion as one big Windows replacement fund.
Redesign blues (and neon greens)
Wired News has redesigned its site and gone back to at least some aspects of the old-school Hotwired color-scheme and look. Pulling off any kind of redesign in the post-dotcom-boom Web doldrums is a coup. Douglas Bowman of Hotwired and Terra Lycos has posted some interesting comments on the reaction to the redesign here (link courtesy Dave Winer):
| What’s interesting about the negative feedback is that, aside from the aesthetic — which is always subjective — none of the feedback is consistent. One user wants one thing, another user wants it the exact opposite. |
Here at Salon we recall our last major redesign in summer of 2000, when a combination of technical snafus on launch and a couple of bad choices that we reversed within a week or so led to a massive reader outcry. Those problems obscured the deeper reality that we’d pulled off 95 percent of an extraordinarily complex project, and that we’d put in place a design that still serves Salon well two and a half years later. Someday, of course, we will revamp our site again. And when we do, I expect many of the same readers who told us back in 2000 that we’d destroyed their dearly beloved Salon to write in again and defend the current design — the very same one that they so detested in 2000 — from our awful innovations. It’s okay! It’s just the nature of user response. The most important thing is that the readers actually care; they feel a sense of ownership of a site that they visit regularly. Wired News should take considerable consolation from that.
Lessig is more
Stanford law professor Lawrence Lessig recently argued the case of Eldred v. Ashcroft before the Supreme Court. This is the “Free the mouse” case — the argument against letting Congress continue to extend the term of copyright each time (to cite one example) Mickey Mouse is on the verge of entering the public domain.
The case has been covered widely and deeply, but I found Lessig’s notes on his blog, posted after the oral arguments, fascinating and well worth reading for anyone interested, not only in the substance of the case, but in the process of Supreme Court jurisprudence.
The Zoe explanation
Probably because I’ve written about “personal information managers,” I’ve occasionally received e-mails about Zoe — an innovative e-mail indexer. But I could never make much headway from Zoe’s site toward figuring out exactly what it did. Now, thanks to this Jon Udell column from O’Reilly, I get it: Zoe Googles your e-mail stash, turning it into a permanently accessible, organized, useful, Web-formatted archive.
This is fantastic. I can’t wait to set it up — though “Release 0.2.6” makes one wary, and I worry how much volume it can handle. (There’s quite a bit of old e-mail in my archives.) In the meantime, here’s a bit from Udell’s column:
| Zoe doesn’t aim to replace your email client, but rather to proxy your mail traffic and build useful search and navigation mechanisms. At the moment, I’m using Zoe together with Outlook (on Windows XP) and Entourage (on MacOSX). Zoe’s POP client sucks down and indexes my incoming mail in parallel with my regular clients. (I leave a cache of messages on the server so the clients don’t step on one another.) By routing my outbound mail through Zoe’s SMTP server, it gets to capture and index that as well. |
Metatags, R.I.P.?
Andrew Goodman writes that metatags — those labels hidden in Web pages’ HTML that are supposed to help search engines determine what the pages are about but that have become a tool for out-of-control online marketing — are dead.
He’s probably right. As he points out, Google has managed to create the most useful search engine to date by downplaying metatags. But note that he qualifies his conclusion fairly narrowly: “Metatags as we know them today – I refer specifically to the meta keyword and meta description tags inserted into the head of an HTML document – don’t factor into this future.” This qualification is important, because, while HTML metatags have proved far too easy to abuse, the concept of meta-information — information that describes what other information is about — will only become more important as the Web continues to grow in both volume of information and complexity of available services.
Brian Dear’s Nettle.com
Brian Dear’s Nettle.com: Random Notes on Experience Design is a collection of user-oriented comments and reviews of software and services. Recent posts include commentaries on iTunes, OSX 10.2, Netflix, Salon’s community The Well and other sutff.
The mind of the engineer
David Weinberger tries to explain why engineers seem to be so cynical — and why that’s not such a bad thing, for them and us: “Cynics believe there is an ideal that humans choose not to live up to. For engineers, the ideals often are those of rationality: they like their work relationships characterized by the interchange of objective information unsullied by subjective, selfish motivations.” It’s a short piece, worth reading in full.
Marc Canter’s output
I can barely keep up with the stuff Marc Canter is blogging about broadband these days — he’s an idea spitfire. This post is a good starting point.
Axis of [Your Country’s Characteristic Here]
Pick any three countries and this cool applet tells you what they are an “Axis” of. (Link courtesy David Weinberger.)