I’ve been thinking about interactive TV for my column, and so started to look at the market research. Came on this, a perfect example of pusillanimous ‘research’. It sets out to ask the right question — “Does Interactive TV make sense?” — but manages to avoid giving the answer, even though the author clearly knows what it is. (“No”.)

LinuxUnited launched
Press release here.

“According to research firm IDC, a 2001 survey of 800 North American and Western European companies found that 40% of the respondents were either using or testing Linux in their organizations. UnitedLinux will help further speed enterprise adoption of Linux by providing businesses with a greater choice in the number of applications and hardware certified to work on the uniform version of Linux. Customers will also benefit from the global sales, localization, education, support and services that all four UnitedLinux vendors will collectively provide.

The collaboration of the four leading Linux companies will result in an enterprise Linux offering, which is truly global by virtue of the companies’ ability to provide local language support, training and professional services, in addition to the support of strategic partners. UnitedLinux will provide one unified Linux code base for IBM’s complete eServer product line, AMD’s current 32-bit and forthcoming 64-bit AMD Athlon and AMD Opteron processor-based platforms, and Intel’s x86 32-bit and Itanium processor family platforms. UnitedLinux supports LSB, Li18nux, and GB18030 standards, as well as enabling installations in English, German, French, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Portuguese, Spanish, Simplified Chinese and Traditional Chinese languages. ”

Interactive TV proves disappointing
Guardian story.

Well of course it is. TV isn’t an interactive medium, stupid. Meanwhile, Kingston Communications — the subject of the story — is here.

Tim O’Reilly: “William Gibson said ‘The future is here, it’s just not widely distributed.’ The shape of things to come is already implicit in a thousand small clues. Then, in a sudden shift of mindset, it becomes obvious to everyone.”

Underpinnings of Creative Commons

The project’s initial goal is to provide an easy method by which creators can indicate, in a machine-readable format, how others may use their intellectual works. The project uses JavaScript, Perl, HTML, and XML to create a web-based application for generating metadata, associated with digital works in a machine-readable format. The metadata corresponds to innovative and flexible licenses designed to help creators of intellectual works share their work with the public on generous terms. Search engines, file sharing applications, digital rights management tools, and other emerging technologies recognize the terms on which those works may be used. [More…]

What a Good Idea Department

Fed up with those three-line URLs generated by content management systems? Well, here’s an ingenious solution: MakeAShorterLink — which enables you to generate a short URL which points to an incomprehensible one. Why didn’t I think of that?

Virtual teamwork is harder than it looks. Tell me something new
FT report.

“When technologies such as e-mail and videoconferencing first began to enable communications between groups of people in different locations, many senior managers rubbed their hands with glee: project teams would be able to work virtually as easily as they could face to face, saving money on airfares and promoting the global nature of the company’s operations.

It has not proved that easy. And as managers of virtual teams struggle to build loyalty, resolve conflicts and prevent turf wars – issues that arise when people are in the same office but that are magnified when they work remotely – they are turning to business schools for advice….”.

Jakob Neilsen on paying attention to what users actually do
From his latest newsletter.

“About half of the users now access the Internet from more than one location. Despite the implications of this for service design, many systems assume that users remain bound to a single computer.”

I used to be one of those vagrants. But since I got an iBook, I just take it with me and access the Net from it wherever I happen to be.

My Observer column about epiphanies in Cyberspace is here.

Hollywood’s control freakery

When I tell people about the Hollings Bill and then say that it’s only the tip of the copyright thuggery iceberg, they look at me as if I’m crazy. But Cory Doctorow’s chilling account of the studios’ long-term ambitions makes even my blood run cold.