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Tuesday, October 02, 2001 |
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Washington Post: Turmoil in Afghanistan. Here is an interesting snipet:
""In a city in which television sets and the Internet are banned, the news arrived by way of the BBC's Pashto radio service. Within minutes, neighbors burst from their houses breathless with the reports they were hearing. Eleven-year-old Fazal Ahmad raced out of the tiny shop where he worked after school and ran to find his mother, Shaima, who, like many Afghans, uses only one name.
"The radio says Osama bin Laden attacked America and America is going to attack Afghanistan," the youngster told his mother, using a homegrown sign language and emotional facial expressions. His mother has been deaf since birth.
Within hours, the neighborhoods surrounding the houses and offices of the Taliban leadership, including the militia's leader, Mohammad Omar, emptied completely. Even Taliban officials sent their wives and youngsters dashing for safety toward Pakistan or more remote home villages, according to Ullar Sadiq, 23, a Kandahar resident who was visiting Pakistan on family business this weekend. He spoke as he passed through the border crossing here, which remains open to people and goods despite Pakistan's claim to have shut down such traffic.
Relief workers said they are perplexed by the disappearance of an estimated 10,000 to 20,000 refugees reported to be massing along the Pakistan border in the days immediately following the attacks in the United States. Rupert Coleville, a spokesman in Quetta for the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees, said that while some are believed to have straggled across the border, others likely returned to their home towns under pressure from the Taliban (sounds like human shields).""
6:27:03 PM 
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Excellent. Carnivore substitute to keep feds honest emerges.
6:06:08 PM
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Zopesites.com offers free sites. The biggest difference between UserLand and Zope hits you in the face, right out of the starting blocks. Zope doesn't have a Manila interface. If your interested in building and easy-to-use personal site, without having to know anything about HTML (99% of people that are on the net today), nothing beats Manila or Radio....
4:33:05 PM
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Knowledge management and desktop Weblogs. The biggest trend in business right now is the move to find ways to more effectively manage knowledge workers through knowledge management. This is akin to what Taylor did to improve the poductivity of the manufacturing workers but applied to knowledge workers. Surveys claim that over 50% of businesses will take steps to buy software that improves knowledge management. Why? Necessity. Companies want to improve knowledge worker productivity and improve the return on technology investments in networking and desktop computers. It is critical to the top and bottom line.
Unfortunately, most knowledge management initiatives merely improve the quality of document search, document directories, and data analysis. While that is useful, it doesn't capture the vast amount of insight, tips, points of view, and real-time feedback that is generated by knowledge workers everyday. Most of this knowledge is lost in e-mail inboxes, talks around the coffee maker, and in IM chats. Additionally, day-to-day insight and direction provided by corporate managers is often lost in the same manner. The solution to this is the employee/manager Weblog.
Why Weblogs? Well, to begin with, Weblogs are an easy way to publish to the Intranet. Radio, for example, runs on the desktop and provides an easy to use WYSIWYG interface in the browser. Using Radio (or Manila), anyone can publish content to the Internet. In addition, Weblogs are automated Websites. All of the hassle associated with building a Webpage is taken out of the process so publishers can focus on building great content.
The ability to easily post content (written words, documents, pictures, video, and audio) changes the landscape. Any employee can now publish their insight onto the Web with little effort, and thereby make that knowledge available to everyone else in the company. Further, since Weblogs are automatically archived, that knowledge is never lost and is always available (unlike e-mails and IM).
Here at UserLand (disclosure: I am the COO at UserLand if you didn't already know) we have taken the knowledge management value of Weblogs a step farther. With Radio, we have included support for RSS newsfeeds. That way employees can have the option to subscribe to the Weblogs of employees they trust and have Radio automatically collect the news in the background. This news is different than the standard AP and Reuters feeds found on most Intranet portals. It's relevant and specific to getting the job done. Using Radio and personal Weblogs, companies can automate and formalize the process of the development of corporate knowledge networks.
We have also developed some interesting community features that make Radio interesting to corporations. We have stats that track the populartiy of Weblogs, the number of subscribers to a Weblog, the referrers to a Weblog, and REAL-TIME search functionality (which is critical in a high velocity enterprise). By tracking this information, managers can quickly see who in the company is a valuable source of knowledge for other workers, which specific items of knowledge are gaining traction, and get a good sense of the velocity of information transfer withing the company.
If you are serious about knowledge management in your company either as an independent project or as part of your Intranet initiative, consider employee Weblogs.
BTW: since Radio is a fully functional content management system on the desktop, you can build additional functionality into your employee Weblogs as additional Web pages viewable on the desktop. For example: These additional tools can pull information from corporate information systems via XML-RPC and SOAP, that enable employees to view real-time results from financial systems, sales systems, inventory systems, and corporate knowledge databases (Lotus and others). Since these tools are Web apps, they can be built in days not months and take minutes to install.
9:12:01 AM
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News.com. Bill Gurley makes a good case against encryption controls. It just won't work.
""There are an increasing number of ways to move files on the Internet. To name a few: e-mail, FTP, instant messaging, chat, file lockers, Napster and Gnutella. In the next few years, the number of e-mails and instant messages sent each year will be measured in the trillions (for each). Peer-to-peer file transfers will easily number in the billions. How do you monitor all of this? Where could you even store the log data? The pin is small, the haystack is large, and astute cryptographers can use Steganography to increase the size of the haystack. "" I agree. All encryption bans will do is prevent decent people from protecting their data.
7:41:22 AM
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WSJ. The Fed is expected to shave another 1/2 point off of interest rates. Hopefully, the banks reduce the prime rate too. One note of caution. This rate cut will put interest rates below inflation. Which means that safe bonds will cease to be an inflation hedge. It could drive people to hoard cash since bank account yield little value. That would be bad news for everyone.
It also means, that the Fed has very little wiggle room left, 5 more cuts and we are at zero. Japan is close to zero as was the US during the depression. Scary stuff.
Two other tools available: purposeful inflation (where the gov't prints money to inflate the money supply) and programmed investment in the stock market (where social security funds are invested in a broad index of stocks monthly). Both of these solutions aren't being used in Japan, but are things we should consider.
7:21:34 AM
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NYT. United buys 30 luxury jets. United sees an opportunity to compete with Executive Jets, a Berkshire Hathaway company. They will sell shares of the jets to wealthy individuals and corporations (for their executives). Why the rush? Fear of hijacking in America's wealthy classes has radically increased demand for this service. The cost of a flight? $10 to $50 k.
""People are disgusted (with this move)," said one United manager who insisted on anonymity.""
This is part of a growing trend here that I saw a lot of while working in the developing world. In those countries, the rich live in a separate world. They live in walled homes (with shards of broken glass embedded in the concrete), drive with armed escorts, and fly on private jets. Unfortunately, the events of 9-11-01 will accelerate the trend here. When the rich and the powerful don't experience the pain felt by the rest of the society they live in, it can only be bad.
7:16:46 AM
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Mindjet. Visual thinking software.
6:56:40 AM
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Google has a new interface that includes image search, group search, and directory search as menu tabs.
6:43:32 AM
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Adam Curry. Information literacy. Excellent. People need to be literate about data. What it is. How it's stored. How it's collected. What you can do with it. Clearly, we are moving towards a world where everyone has a personal database. They need to know how the basics to be able to function.
I just watched a video by Vernor Vinge (the fantastic SF writer). One of his visions of the future (he is usallly very good at prediction as was Clarke) is a world where every bit of physical detritus (everything you own including food) in your life is tagged with ID nanoparticles. The results are mapped by physical location and stored in a database. You would then use a wearable computer to interact with your environment in a more efficient way. Nothing would ever be lost again. You would auto order food as you use it. Etc.
The next extension of this would be to have public ID nanoparticles at airports, malls, etc. You would then be able to navigate to your plane without reference to a map, buy goods without going through a clerk at a cashier, etc. His warning: the firm that controls the wearable computer will own the last two millimeters and thereby represent the ultimate monopoly. So, there is one more chance to unseat Microsoft.
6:40:32 AM
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© Copyright 2004 John Robb.
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