Monthly Archives: March 2006

Milosevic: the mystery deepens

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Curiouser and curiouser… Milosevic Possibly Manipulated His Medication to Fake Illness…

A top toxicologist in the Netherlands said that he believed Slobodan Milosevic, the former Yugoslav leader, was manipulating medication to fake a medical condition, a plan that might have played a role in the heart attack that caused his death.

That theory was advanced by Dr. Donald Uges, professor of clinical and forensic toxicology at the University of Groningen, who posited that Milosevic was seeking to demonstrate that Dutch doctors could not cure him and that he should therefore be allowed to seek treatment, and freedom, in Moscow. He was imprisoned here on charges of war crimes and crimes against humanity including genocide during three Balkan wars in the 1990s.

Uges based his theory on his detection in Milosevic’s blood of a drug that had not been prescribed for him and that was not only inappropriate but, under the circumstances, dangerous. He was found on his bed in his prison cell on Saturday morning. The drug at issue is an antibiotic known as rifampicin, used to treat serious bacterial infections, such as tuberculosis. It is known to interfere with medications he was taking for high blood pressure.

Impossible to summarise…

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… so you’ll just have to see for yourself. But the title conveys the essence:

The Slow and Painful Collapse of a Relationship Over the Course of a Weeklong Vacation as Expressed by the Names Each Partner Gave Their Digital Photos Taken During Said Vacation.

Very clever idea — by Matt Hulten.

Dave Winer bows out

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Yep. One of the Founding Fathers of the Blogging movement has decided to quit…

So there’s the first part of my reason. Blogging doesn’t need me anymore. It’ll go on just as well, maybe even better, with some new space opened up for some new things. But more important to me, there will be new space for me. Blogging not only takes a lot of time (which I don’t begrudge it, I love writing) but it also limits what I can do, because it’s made me a public figure. I want some privacy, I want to matter less, so I can retool, and matter more, in different ways. What those ways are, however, are things I won’t be talking about here. That’s the point. That’s the big reason why.

I will miss him. Dave is a good sort. He was also the person who led me to start my Blog (in 1997/8: It was a private notebook for a few years). I used his Userland Radio software for years.

So…?

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Reminds me of a joke much loved by the kids.

Q: What’s the difference between dogs and cats?
A: Dogs come when you call. Cats merely take a message and may get back to you.

The move to user-generated content

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More evidence of changes in the ecosystem — from The New York Times…

Increasingly, the new, new thing in media is getting paid for the homemade. Reflecting the surge in the popularity of user-created material, both online and traditional media companies are opening their wallets to make sure that the best of it finds its way onto their television shows and Web sites. Even Yahoo, the nation’s most-visited Web site, has signaled a change in its strategy by moving away from creating its own professional content in favor of user-generated material — and it appears willing to pay for anything its users deem worthy. All this is part of a trend seeking to turn conventional media business models on their heads in the digital age. Typically, media content was either paid for by consumers in the form of subscription fees or by marketers through advertising. In offering to pay users for creating content, companies like Yahoo are not looking to turn every amateur into a professional so much as acknowledging the growing appeal of homemade material to audiences and hence its value to media businesses.

The Da Vinci Code case

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Nick Cohen has an interesting piece in today’s Observer.

Initially, he was indifferent about the outcome.

How much of The Da Vinci Code is – ahem – ‘borrowed’ from Holy Blood, Holy Grail is the subject of the plagiarism case at the High Court in London that enters what should be its final week tomorrow. ‘Too bad they can’t both lose,’ said Henry Kissinger about the Iran-Iraq War and I felt the same when I went to the court.

But, on reflection, Cohen alighted on a spot-on appreciation of the significance of the case for free culture.

David Hooper, a specialist in intellectual property, said the case was something new. The Holy Blood authors are not saying that Dan Brown had copied chunks of their work verbatim. Instead, they are suing him for taking some of their ideas, researching them, playing with them and turning them into a novel. If they win, Hooper believes a chill will go through cultural life as publishers face the next to impossible task of separating original thoughts from other people’s thoughts.

“I hate to be the one who has to say it”, Cohen concludes, “but Dan Brown needs to win. If he doesn’t, free thought may be stifled in the name of protecting ideas.”

Amen.

The madness of record labels

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And I thought I was critical of the music industry. (Well, I am, in the sense that I think only the skills of a psychiatrist can explain how the industry failed to spot the opportunity offered by online music.) But here’s a rant that’s far more dismissive than anything I’ve managed to date. Sample:

It continues to astonish, but the recording industry STILL does not have a clue WTF they are doing. Utterly amazing.

A story in the NYT Thursday reveals that the actual levels of business knowledge and economic understanding that exists in the recording industry. The answer, it turns out, is nonewhatosever.

Proof for this revelation is what the RIAA braintrust now thinks is hurting CD sales: it’s legal digital downloading that is holding back CD sales. Not illegal P2P, as the RIAA likes to tell us, but legal sales!

Like I say, it needs a psychiatrist…

The significance of the Writely acquisitiion

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More on Google’s acquisition of Writely, the web-based processing tool, about which I wrote briefly the other day. I’ve just come on an interesting (if slightly hyperbolic) essay describing the acquisition as Microsoft’s “Pearl Harbour”! I think that’s overblown, but it’s interesting to remember that Bill Gates chose Pearl Harbour Day way back in 1993 to alert his company to the threat posed by the Internet and Netscape.