My Observer column (about predicting the tech future by watching kids) is on the Net.

Something’s up with the recording studios who eviscerated Napster. According to this New York Times report, “the major record companies, which two weeks ago surprised analysts by seeking a temporary suspension in their copyright lawsuit against Napster, were about to face potentially damaging inquiries into their own behavior on maintaining copyrights. According to transcripts made public today, the judge in the case said on Jan. 16 that she intended to grant a request by Napster to explore whether the record companies might have colluded to prevent Napster and other online music competitors from licensing music to sell on the Internet. The judge, Marilyn Patel of the Federal District Court in Northern California, also said she would allow Napster to explore whether the record companies might not control all the copyrights they claimed to own.”

The battle between AOL and Trillian, Cerulean Studio’s instant messaging application that allows people to chat with users of all major messaging systems through one interface, continues. AOL is claiming that security concerns prevent it making its IM system compatible with others.

“Terrorism really flourishes in areas of poverty, despair and hopelessness, where people see no future.” Colin L. Powell, US Secretary of State, quoted in The New York Times.

Right on, Colin. Now why not do something about poverty, despair and hopelessness?

More on the postmodernism generator… The abstract for A.C. Bulhak’s paper (“On the Simulation of Postmodernism and Mental Debility using Recursive Transition Networks”) describing the engine reads:

“Recursive transition networks are an abstraction related to context-free grammars and finite-state automata. It is possible, to generate random, meaningless and yet realistic-looking text in genres defined using recursive transition networks, often with quite amusing results. One genre in which this has been accomplished is that of academic papers on postmodernism.”

Terrific Harvard Business School article on the way newspapers responded to the disruptive technology of the Web. First really intelligent discussion of this I’ve seen.

Useful general introduction to the history and technology of Instant Messaging. Interesting as a possible model for iBytes.

One of the funniest spoof papers I read in the 1980s was entitled “Toward the Automatic Generation of Excuses”. I thought that there was a germ of an idea there — in that if we could design a program that could generate plausible excuses then we would have taken a useful step on the road towards truly intelligent AI. But now here’s something even better — an engine for generating postmodern essays. Some details from the footnotes:

“The essay you have just seen is completely meaningless and was randomly generated by the Postmodernism Generator. To generate another essay, follow this link. If you like this particular essay and would like to return to it, follow this link for a bookmarkable page.

The Postmodernism Generator was written by Andrew C. Bulhak and modified slightly by Pope Dubious Provenance XI using the Dada Engine, a system for generating random text from recursive grammars.

This installation of the Generator has delivered 436593 essays since 25/Feb/2000 18:43:09 PST, when it became operational.

More detailed technical information may be found in Monash University Department of Computer Science Technical Report 96/264: “On the Simulation of Postmodernism and Mental Debility Using Recursive Transition Networks”. An on-line copy is available here. ”

News.Com: AOL blocks instant messaging start-up. An elaborate game of cat and mouse has developed between AOL and Trillian creator Cerulean Studios–as the start-up has repeatedly released new software designed to get around the block, prompting AOL to rush in and stop people from using it.

At last, an answer to the question: how does Google make money? According to this interview with its CEO, half of its revenues come from selling those discreet ads, and half from licensing its technology to companies like Yahoo.