Useful when depressed. Late Night Political Jokes. Sample:
“Tony Blair, prime minister of England, is stepping down. He said he wanted to spend more time humping Bush’s leg. … He said he hopes people remember him as the people’s poodle.” –Bill Maher
“They didn’t have the heart to tell Bush. They didn’t say Blair was gone. They just said he went to live on a farm.” –Bill Maher
Following my post of yesterday, James Cridland has done some really interesting digging into the statistics from his Media UK site, which gets over 2m page-views a month. Since it’s his site, he knows what’s going on. He then compares what Google Analytics, Alexa and Compete claim is happening on the site.
He found some curious discrepancies, and concluded that
Compete is under-representing my traffic by over two-thirds – as well as demonstrably not following any trends in mediauk.com’s site traffic. The figures are almost entirely unrelated to my website’s traffic. This is bad. Are websites basing purchase decisions on Compete’s data? In which case, do I have a legal case against them?
We’ve not, yet, mentioned comScore. That’s a blog post for another day, I suspect: because there’s so much more there than meets the eye, it’s not funny.
And to think that investors and VCs base valuations on these numbers…
From Tech News on ZDNet
Microsoft claims that free and open-source software violates 235 of its patents, according to a magazine report published Sunday.
In an interview with Fortune, Microsoft top lawyer Brad Smith alleges that the Linux kernel violates 42 Microsoft patents, while its user interface and other design elements infringe on a further 65. OpenOffice.org is accused of infringing 45, along with 83 more in other free and open-source programs, according to Fortune.
It is not entirely clear how Microsoft might proceed in enforcing these patents, but the company has been encouraging large tech companies that depend on Linux to ink patent deals, starting with its controversial pact with Novell last November. Microsoft has also cited Linux protection playing a role in recent patent swap deals with Samsung and Fuji Xerox. Microsoft has also had discussions but not reached a deal with Red Hat, as noted in the Fortune article.
Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer is also quoted in the article as saying Microsoft’s open-source competitors need to “play by the same rules as the rest of the business.”
“What’s fair is fair,” Ballmer told Fortune. “We live in a world where we honor, and support the honoring of, intellectual property.”
The story notes that some big tech proponents of open source have been stockpiling intellectual property as part of the Open Invention Network, set up in 2005 by folks like Sony, Red Hat, IBM, NEC and Philips. The article surmises that if Microsoft were to go after open source, these companies’ combined know-how might give it some patent weapons to go after Windows…
From David Pogue’s Blog
It seems to me, though, that we haven’t even scratched the surface. We’ve picked the low-hanging fruit, but there are dozens or hundreds of huge Web 2.0 ideas that have yet to materialize.
I was thinking about this — a LOT — as I lay in bed last week, sicker than I’d been in years. I hadn’t eaten for two days, and I was nervous about being well enough to travel to a speaking engagement the next day. (Is it just my imagination, or are the bugs getting a lot nastier these days?)
I kept thinking: Surely I caught this from somebody — somebody who now knows what this virus’s course will be.
[…]
Somebody should come up, then, with a Web 2.0 site where people could report what they’re catching and what you can expect from it. You could see a map of your region and watch the red cloud or the blue cloud spread closer and closer to your neighborhood, the better to step up your hand washings. As you lay in bed, miserable, you’d know that at least you had only 24 hours to go. Or whatever.
[Update: Yes! A number of people have alerted me to the beta version of http://whoissick.org, which appears to be exactly what I’m describing!]
Hmmm… yes it is. Here’s a screenshot:
Robert Scoble has an interesting post about the unreliability of Web stats.
Almost every entrepreneur I talk to lately whines privately about the stats they see on places like Compete.com, Comscore, and Alexa. Today Tom Conrad of Pandora told me that they are extremely low. He says his service requires registration, so he has very accurate stats of who’s signed into Pandora and he can’t figure out why the stats services are so far off of the real stats.
Lots more in the post. It’s also attracted some very thoughtful comments.
From Ed Felten…
People have had lots of objections to Digital Rights Management (DRM) technology — centering mainly on its clumsiness and the futility of its anti-infringement rationale — but until recently nobody had complained that the term “Digital Rights Management” was insufficiently Orwellian.
That changed on Tuesday, when HBO’s Chief Technology Officer, Bob Zitter, suggested at an industry conference that DRM needs a name change. Zitter’s suggested name: Digital Consumer Enablement, or DCE.
The irony here is that “rights management” is itself an industry-sponsored euphemism for what would more straightforwardly be
called “restrictions”. But somehow the public got the idea that DRM is restrictive, hence the need for a name change.Zitter went on to discuss HBO’s strategy. HBO wants to sell shows in HighDef, but the problem is that many consumers are watching HD content using the analog outputs on their set-top boxes — often because their fancy new HD televisions don’t implement HBO’s favorite form of DRM. So what HBO wants is to disable the analog outputs on the set-top box, so consumers have no choice but to adopt HBO’s favored DRM.
Which makes the nature of the “enablement” clear. By enabling your set-top box to be incompatible with your TV, HBO will enable you to buy an expensive new TV…
Well, blow me down! The Daily Torygraph reports that:
Men find photos of the opposite sex much more “rewarding” than women, new research claims today.
According to the study men take the same pleasure out of looking at an attractive female form as they do from having a curry or making money whereas women do not take any significant reward from looking at pictures of men.
The survey published in the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society B said that brain scan studies show that “reward centres” are triggered in men when they gaze at a woman’s face or body whereas they are not in females…
Reward centres, eh? Now that’s what I call leading-edge research. (Or should that read ‘world class’? I’m always getting the two mixed up.)
Code forking is something that often happens in Open Source software development. Perhaps it will also become common in blogging. At any rate, I know of several people who maintain different blogs for different purposes. For example, Ed Felten, in addition to his impressive Freedom to Tinker maintains a Links blog. And the amazing Jon Crowcroft maintains no fewer than four — and manages to have interesting stuff in each one. But then he’s a law unto himself.
(Aside: Quentin used Yahoo! Pipes to funnel the entire Crowcroft output into a single channel.)
Following some conversations with my OU colleagues Tony Hirst and Martin Weller, I’ve decided to spin off a blog where I can post stuff likely to be of interest only to edu-geeks. There will be some duplication between it and Memex, but the two will gradually diverge over time. It has the stunningly unoriginal title Thinking aloud.
Memex 1.1 will continue on its traditional eclectic (i.e. scatty) way.
Incidentally, Ed Felten uses Dashlog for his Links Blog.
For serious masochists I’ve rigged up a combined feed (via Yahoo Pipes). Find it here.
I never thought I’d find myself agreeing agreeing with John Howard, but in this case I’ll make an exception.
Australian Prime Minister John Howard has ordered the country’s cricket team to pull out of a planned tour of Zimbabwe later this year.
He said the tour would be an “enormous propaganda boost” to Zimbabwe President Robert Mugabe.
My only complaint is that his description of Robert Mugabe as a “grubby dictator” was too mild.
Wonder what my colleague Ray Ison thinks about it. He’s no admirer of Howard either.
This morning’s Observer column…
The strange business of the ‘takeover’ that never was – that of Yahoo by Microsoft – raises some interesting questions. First, who benefited? The story originated in an unexpected place – the New York Post, a lively tabloid publication owned since 1993 by Rupert Murdoch, where one would rarely look for a big technology story…