Category Archives: Net Culture

Spam-Be-Gone

Cloudmark has the best idea I’ve seen yet for eliminating spam. Their SpamNet product is basically a kind of distributed computing application. It plugs into Outlook XP and helps users identify incoming spam using a set of rules — the system communicates back to a central server about which messages have been marked as junk. As more users contribute, the rules get refined, the system gets smarter and a kind of global understanding of what is and isn’t spam develops. Brilliant. Hope it works.

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Blogging Heads

More Lessig:“Right now we have a culture where the most creative and important builders of freedom in the 21st century have zero political savvy and (so far) zero political effect.” This is from his recent blog posting, one communiqué from a very interesting online squabble between Lessig and well-known Userland impresario and knee-jerk blogging evangelist Dave Winer. The debate’s heating up, and this is a good thing.

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Old Media in a New Media World

This Is a MagazineThis Is a Magazineis a curiosity; an old media concept in a new media context. It’s a Web magazine, but not like Salon.com or even Newsweek, as it’s very literally a magazine that just happens to be on the Web. Your mouse-clicks ‘turn’ itspages, and it lacks true interactivity in a way that suggests a committed principle (though its designers can’t resist the occasional, spartan suggestion of acknowledging its online milieu). It’s a strange idea, but the abundance of evident visual talent behind the whole thing is ultimately winning. Worth a look.

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Free Culture Has a Price

Lawrence LessigNoted cyber-age legal authority Lawrence Lessig has a wake-up call for anyone frustrated with the way media companies are trying to dominate copyright controls. He laid it down in his powerful presentation at the O’Reilly Open Source Convention: it’s in the old guard’s interest to try and control creativity and innovation; they have the power to do so and they are excercising it, and it’s our responsibility to fight it.

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Word to the Weiserman

Buddy WeisermanIt’s hot enough to fry an egg in New York, and therefore hot enough to fry a dog’s brain. It’s so hot it’s got to be unhealthy.Anyway, I’m staying indoors, staying cool, and reading crap like the hilarious adventure of Buddy Weiserman and the Gold Treasure of Sierra Leone. The name Buddy Weiserman, a riff on ‘Budweiser,’ is a prankster’s invention, and this site details Buddy’s hilarious email exchanges with a so-called prince that claims to have a stash of gold to unload at below-market prices. It’s a classic Nigerian 419 crime, and you may have received spam along these lines yourself, which makes it funnier to see someone turn the tables on the con artists. [Human error screwed up this post, which was supposed to have appeared on Wed 03 Jul, so I’m appending it here.]

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Open for Business

OpenOffice.orgFor kicks, I installed a copy of the Microsoft Office alternative OpenOffice.org 1.0 on my laptop running Windows 2000. The installation process is notably slick for an open source project, and it’s a nice feeling knowing that one can download, install and use this software suite for the price of absolutely zero. The programs performed acceptably, too — my Microsoft Word and PowerPoint documents were passably (though not perfectly) translated by their OpenOffice.org counterparts. With luck, this suite will become a viable alternative to Microsoft’s, but it has a long way to go before it can quit playing catch-up merely to achieve parity with Office’s ever-widening range of bloatware features. I wish them luck.

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Save It

SaveInternetRadio.org: “America’s fledgling Internet radio industry could be effectively killed on May 21st if the Librarian of Congress (1) accepts the recommendations of its recent Copyright Arbitration Royalty Panel (“CARP”) concerning Internet radio royalty rates and (2) sets impossibly-complex recordkeeping requirements.”

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