Posted on by lhl

Seb keeps a blog with pointers and thoughts on the evolution of knowledge sharing and scholarly communication. Here’s a recent followup to a Richard MacManus piece asking: why would normal people want to publish to the Web?

MacManus writes:

While I agree wholeheartily with the sentiments expressed by John and others
like Phil Wolff, I wonder how
practical it is to expect business people to write k-logs. It’s all very well having
tools like k-collector to aggregate Intranet
content, but the real issue is how do we get people to create the
content in the first place? Interestingly, this is the exact same problem
the Semantic Web has getting off the ground, people currently aren’t writing
enough metadata to make the Semantic Web happen.

Seb elaborates:

Accurate observations in there. I honestly believe blogging as we
currently know it will never become mainstream. The reason is that it
is a poor fit for anyone who isn’t the (hyper)text-driven, infovore kind of
person.

However, that doesn’t mean that the more general practice of broadcasting information of personal relevance will not become mainstream. My vision of the future in this respect is closest to what Marc Canter.s been pushing under the moniker of .digital lifestyle aggregator.; this also seems to be where Meg Hourihan is heading with the Lafayette project.

Think about restaurant/show reviews, recipes, pictures. The Web is
already full of user-contributed stuff like that; most of it currently
resides on centralized sites like
Amazon. The individuals who help build those sites do so most of the
time with no reward other than a high local profile that is generally non-transferable
(how many Amazon reviewers are on your blogroll?). I.m willing to bet
that many of them would prefer keeping control over their contributions
and putting themselves at the center of their content if systems were available that made that easy.

Posted on by lhl

Just got around to reading Dell’s Dud, John Gruber’s a very interesting analysis on how the Dell DJ and the Apple iPod.

But the iPod is not merely an engineering and usability success. It’s also a marketing success. Everyone knows what an iPod is, and what it does. And everyone knows that they’re cool.

Andy Warhol said:

What’s great about this country is that America started the tradition
where the richest consumers buy essentially the same things as the
poorest. You can be watching TV and see Coca-Cola, and you can know
that the president drinks Coke, Liz Taylor drinks Coke and, just think,
you can drink Coke too. A Coke is a Coke, and no amount of money can
get you a better Coke than the one the bum on the corner is drinking.
All the Cokes are the same and all the Cokes are good. Liz Taylor knows
it, the president knows it, the bum knows it, and you know it.

The iPod is the Coca-Cola of music players. It’s not an expensive
computer peripheral – it’s a low-cost luxury item. For $500, anyone can
buy the best MP3 player in the world, the same one used by the world.s
most famous, most talented music stars . like Moby, Beck, and Shaq.

Posted on by lhl
Posted on by lhl

Looks like Valve got pretty well buggered. Gabe Newell:

Ever have one of those weeks? This has just not been the best couple of days for me or for Valve.

Yes, the source code that has been posted is the HL-2 source code.

Here is what we know:

1) Starting around 9/11 of this year, someone other than me was accessing my email account. This has been determined by looking at traffic on our email server versus my travel schedule.

2) Shortly afterwards my machine started acting weird (right-clicking on executables would crash explorer). I was unable to find a virus or trojan on my machine, I reformatted my hard drive, and reinstalled.

3) For the next week, there appears to have been suspicious activity on my webmail account.

4) Around 9/19 someone made a copy of the HL-2 source tree.

5) At some point, keystroke recorders got installed on several machines at Valve. Our speculation is that these were done via a buffer overflow in Outlook’s preview pane. This recorder is apparently a customized version of RemoteAnywhere created to infect Valve (at least it hasn’t been seen anywhere else, and isn’t detected by normal virus scanning tools).

6) Periodically for the last year we’ve been the subject of a variety of denial of service attacks targetted at our webservers and at Steam. We don’t know if these are related or independent.

Followup thread pinpointing the leaker?

Posted on by lhl