the new google toolbar not only blocks popup ads, it comes with a "blog this!" button for blogger integration.

William Gibson TOGGLING TO NON-PROMO MODE

Will necessarily involve that which Fashionpolice already seeks to avoid experiencing: the complete and utter cessation of blogging.

One thing that was immediately clear to me, from the first blog, is that this is not an activity, for me, that can coexist with the writing of a novel. In some way I only dimly apprehend, it requires too much of the same bandwidth (yet never engages anything like the total *available* bandwidth).

But, definitely, the ecology of novelization and the ecology of blogging couldn't coexist, for me. It would be like trying to boil water without a lid. Or, more like it, trying to run a steam engine without a lid. (I wonder if that would be the case for a native of the blogosphere -- for whom, as Lou Reed once said of heroin addicts, "the needle is a toothbrush"? Maybe not.)

So, fair warning: I will indeed stop doing this at some point, though not until I return from England.

Prelinger collection

Stephen Downe's OLD daily newsletter linked to a short article on textbook theft using scanners.

There wasn't really much evidence of this happening on a wide scale. I tend to think that this sort of thing happens in response to new technologies and grossly overpriced products, like CDs or Mach III razors.

Although I don't condone it, I know someone who can put a good-sized book online using a basic scanner and Abbey Finereader in about 45 minutes.

Part of me likes the idea of blackmarket textbooks converted to .pdfs being shuttled about via p2p networks.

John Dvorak has a very interesting column on email and the recent shuttle disaster:

With the new e-mail world and Columbia, we immediately find out that the space crew was e-mailing friends from the vessel. Thus, Douglas Brown found out that his astronaut brother Dave Brown was concerned about Columbia's wing. Douglas discussed this concern with his US senator, George Allen. Wasn't it suspicious, then, in a NASA press release, Douglas said his brother never wrote about concerns with damage to the left wing?? We must conclude there was an obvious cover-up. Why would Douglas Brown discuss anything with his US Senator if there were nothing to discuss? This is all happening too fast for the agency. It's harder to buffalo the public in compressed time.


Also, because of e-mail, we found out that NASA made an informal request to have the Air Force shoot pictures of the underside of the Columbia with one of the spy satellites floating around. This request was pulled back for undisclosed reasons. Some surmise that the withdrawal came because the informal channel itself was a bad idea. This little episode needs an investigation, if you ask me. Again, e-mail was flying.

Google bought Pyra labs, makers of Blogger.
From Dan Gillmor:

Silicon Valley - Dan Gillmor's eJournal - Google Buys Pyra: Blogging Goes Big-Time

Weblogs are going Googling.

Google, which runs the Web's premier search site, has purchased Pyra Labs, a San Francisco company that created some of the earliest technology for writing weblogs, the increasingly popular personal and opinion journals.

...

For Williams and his five co-workers, now Google employees, the immediate impact will be to put their blog-hosting service, called Blog*Spot, on the vast network of server computers Google operates. This will make the service more reliable and robust.

How Google manages the Blogger software and Pyra's hosting service may present some tricky issues. The search side of Google indexes weblogs from all of the major blogging platforms, including Movable Type and Userland Radio. Any hint of proprietary favoritism would meet harsh criticism.

Hopefully Blogger's quality of service will improve, and perhaps blogging will be introduced to a wider audience.

IA Wiki is devoted to Information Architecture. Anyone can contribute immediately, and it has some nice resources tucked away in its corridors.

TouchGraph is a way cool app that takes a url and draws a picture of who is connected to that url. Go check it out and type in the Kairosnews URL. It requires the Java Runtime Environment 1.3

Did I mention that it's way cool?

From OLDaily:

Almost 100 online journals in the field of education. "To
the best of our ability to discern, we have included only
links to electronic journals that are scholarly,
peer-reviewed, full text and accessible without cost. We
have excluded professional magazines that are largely not
refereed, and commercial journals that may only allow
access to a very limited number of articles as an
enticement to buy." With this list, it's hard to see how
any school or library justifies spending any money
on fee-based online publications in education. By Various
Authors, American Educational Research Association, May 10, 2000

http://aera-cr.ed.asu.edu/links.html

I really don't know how to spin this so that it has an educational application, but it's important, morally and financially that people are reminded of this. What is it? Multi-level marketing? Have I joined a cult? No, it's simply the settlement with the music industry regarding price fixing and cds.

Here's how it works: if you've purchased a cd in the past few years, fill out the form at the above link. You'll get about 20 bucks. It's not free money, because you've already overpaid for CDs your whole life. The problem is that not many people are signing up for the settlement.

Ok, I suppose this is sorta kinda pedagogically interesting inasmuch as it touches upon the music industry, intellectual property (and its abuses), the mechanisms of compensation, and the microeconomics of free money--what is our aversion to it? Because, if you think about it, you're getting paid $240 an hour to fill out an online form.