Feckless in Amsterdam

Yesterday we set out with the best of intentions — to sample the high culture of Amsterdam, visit museums, etc. Instead we spent a delightful day mooching around canals, having lunch in a proper Dutch cafe, visiting a friend and seeing round her institute, taking frivolous trips on trams. And when we eventually reached the Museumplein — where the main art galleries are located — the kids spotted a pedalo and we then spent an enjoyable, but freezing, hour churning our way round the canals. We did finally make it through the wonderful gateway of the Rijksmuseum, though, where I took this photograph.

Venice of the North

It’s what they used to call Amsterdam, and it’s true. It’s one of my favourite places and I’ve been away too long. Today, walking along the Utrechtestraat with my kids I took a photograph in the evening light, and then later Photoshopped it. It captures the atmosphere of a magical place.

Reactions to the Google-Blogger deal

Dave Winer is, predictably, somewhat cynical. (After all, he sells a rival product.):

“What did Google buy? Pyra claims to have over 1 million Blogger users, with 200,000 active users. But Google didn’t buy their content, because Pyra doesn’t own it, the users do. They didn’t buy access to the content because they already had it. The purpose of Blogger is to publish stuff, in other words to make it publicly available. Google’s search engine routinely indexes Blogger sites, along with Manila, Radio UserLand and Movable Type sites. It doesn’t know the difference.

Blogger is not open source, in fact ordinary people can’t even purchase a binary license, so there’s probably the reason they did the deal — to get the source for Blogger, which is now written in Java, and to license it to their corporate users, along with the Google search appliance, which goes for about $25K per box. If this is true, then you will be able to add, say, $1K to the price of the box and get a copy of Blogger along with the search engine, allowing people to create weblogs on a local network. This is very important for business use of weblogs, which is growing now at a fast clip. However, Google will find this is already a competitive market, UserLand already offers a deeper product, Manila, as does Movable Type, another leading competitor….”.

Forbes thinks that “that the blogging as a cultural phenomenon is about to enter a new phase in its growth. Those who last year had never heard of it will start handing out personal blog Web addresses alongside with their e-mail addresses. And that means that along with nearly everything else about the Internet, the mild cachet that came with being among the first to publish a blog will quickly evaporate with the mass stampede that follows….”.

Dan Gillmor sees it as a big boost for Blogging.

Other comments here and here plus an interview with Evan Williams (Blogger’s founder). Douglas Rushkoff is not entirely delighted.

Online suicide: a new trend? Or just a gift to the Daily Mail
BBC Online story.

“Brandon Vedas, a 21-year-old computer expert from Arizona, USA, killed himself with a lethal dose of prescription drugs in January while chatting to online buddies.

In a macabre twist to the story, a transcript of his final hours found by his family a week after his death shows that his online friends egged him on to take more and more drugs.

The cocktail of prescription drugs which killed Mr Vedas, who spent much of his spare time on the net, included Klonopin, Methadone and Restoril. …”

Now the dead man’s brother has been speaking out against his ‘buddies’ and the fact that no one tried to stop Vedas from taking the drugs :

“You look at the actions of people and there is such a disconnect from what was really happening. You see people laughing about it and encouraging him to take more,” Rich told the BBC World Service’s Outlook programme.

“As time progressed and they could see and talk and see that the drugs were taking an effect and that he’d taken large quantities, you see them beginning to question whether or not they should contact the authorities, what they should do.

“Ultimately you see everyone stepping back and doing nothing.”

Hmmm… Not sure what this tragedy proves — is it about human stupidity; or human callousness; or the disconnection between real and virtual life?

The Dick Cheney Business Plan: first bomb them flat, then get the contract to rebuild them

Arianna Huffington writes about Dick Cheney’s deals with Iraq:

The two were clearly on the outs back during the Gulf War, when Cheney was Secretary of Defense, and the first President Bush dubbed Saddam “Hitler revisited.” Then Cheney moved to the private sector and suddenly things between him and Saddam warmed up considerably. With Cheney in the CEO’s seat, Halliburton helped Iraq reconstruct its war-torn oil industry with $73 million worth of equipment and services — becoming Baghdad’s biggest such supplier. Kinda nice how that worked out for the vice-president, really: oversee the destruction of an industry that you then profit from by rebuilding.

When, during the 2000 campaign, Cheney was asked about his company’s Iraqi escapades, he flat out denied them. But the truth remains: When it came to making a buck, Cheney apparently had no qualms about doing business with “Hitler revisited.” Link

From [[ t e c h n o c u l t u r e ]]

The three stages of blog-awareness

1) There must be something to blogs because so many people are into it, but I don’t have a clue.

2) OK, it does seem kind of cool and there is much, much more to it than I expected. I just don’t see any really practical applications.

3) Oh my God, the things I can do with this are coming to me faster than I can keep up with.”

From Ernie the Attorney — a well-known law Blog.

Blogging from a mobile phone? Surely not

But Karlin Lillington says so:”Dublin-based NewBay Software, with its new application that lets people create weblogs entirely by mobile phone, is getting a lot of interested press lately on the back of the company’s appearance at the big 3GSM conference in Cannes.” Source: [[ t e c h n o c u l t u r e ]]

Glenn Reynolds on the Blogging phenomenon

Nice Guardian Online piece emphasising the way blogging calls traditional media to account.

A review of five (yes, FIVE) books on Blogging

Steam media catching up?

Son of Patriot — coming soon from Ashcroft Productions Inc
Anita Ramasastry’s analysis of the next piece of Orwellian legislation in the Ashcroft dogpile.

“Soon after the terrorist acts of September 11, Congress passed the USA Patriot Act, which conferred broad new powers upon the federal government. Now John Ashcroft and his scribes at the Justice Department have been working secretly to create new, 120-page draft legislation that, if enacted, would expand greatly upon these already sweeping powers.

This daring sequel to the USA Patriot Act is known internally as the Domestic Security Enhancement Act. It is also nicknamed Patriot II (the name by which I’ll refer to it here), or Son of Patriot. On February 7 of this year, a January 9 draft of Patriot II was revealed to the public – but not by the government. It was made public only through a leak.

[…]

Perhaps the Bush Administration is looking to repeat its experience with the original USA Patriot Act. Amidst the emotional turmoil after September 11, the Administration introduced the Act and got it enacted in a matter of weeks. The Senate Judiciary Committee had only a brief, one-and-a-half-hour hearing on the Act, in which Attorney General Ashcroft testified but took no questions. In the House, meanwhile, there was no testimony from opponents of the bill.

After September 11, there was at least some rationale for this expedited consideration. Now, however, there is far less exigency. If the introduction of Patriot II in Congress coincides with the Iraq war, it may well be because the Administration has planned it that way, to take advantage of circumstances to ram the bill through both Houses quickly.

Even if Patriot II does end up being introduced in wartime, citizens and their representatives should fight this legislation tooth and nail, for it threatens to take even more of our liberties away. It is a wholesale assault on privacy, free speech, and freedom of information…”