Blue Sky On Mars

Amy Wohl writes about Blogs in Knowledge Management. This article acknowledges that there may be people that are not willing to just share all of their knowledge. Sharing of knowledge is important in a successful organization today, and should be strongly encouraged. I think the more success people have reading weblogs, the more they’ll want to write.

Congratulations to Dave Winer for winning at Wired’s Rave Awards. He won the top honor of Tech Renegade, an award which went to Shawn Fanning last year. Dave won for his work on and in support of SOAP, which is a much deserved award. As “web services” become more pronounced, we’ll all have Dave to thank for getting it started.

D Magazine has this article about the failed Cue Cat. Most amusing. I actually installed my Cue Cat (but not the spyware software), and use it to illuminate a rose encased in glass that sits on my desk. It looks quite nice.

I just found dotmarketing’s nifty project management tool. It’s version 0.2, but has a nice polish to it. It’s written in PHP.

Dave Winer says the following about the music industry wanting to delete files on people’s computers: “What they’re doing is pathetic, not evil. The evil is within me, for wanting to strike at them for their sad state. Much better approach. Make a pledge to not buy any music until they reinstate Napster, in all its glory. I’m good at keeping those kinds of pledges. So that’s what I’ll do. I hope you join me. Cut off their air supply. No industry has ever deserved it more.”
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There are all sorts of opinions floating around. This one, from Muqtedar Khan of Adrian College is interesting because it is by a Muslim. I’m certain that there are many Muslims who disagree with him. I think he’s right that bad things can happen anywhere in the world and people can choose to read meaning into those things and lay blame where they choose.
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I didn’t get around to these yesterday. First, the music biz wants to hack your computer. And, they wanted the USA (Anti-Terrorism) Act to protect this activity. Plus, the recording industry is under investigation for possible collusion and anti-competitive activity regarding the contracts of their MusicNet and Press Play services.
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An interesting manifesto about Autonomic Computing comes from Paul Horn, VP of IBM Research. The concept is that we need to start programming computers to handle complexity in systems automatically, similar to how our heartbeat and breathing are managed automatically.

This is definitely still research territory, but it makes sense. One interesting aspect of this manifesto is that the author calls for an end to proprietary systems, saying that customers deserve better. That seems to be the exact opposite of what Microsoft tends to do in practice… we’ll see if IBM continues to support open systems in practice.
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The FBI has concluded that 11 of the hijackers did not know they were going to their deaths. Granted, there is no way to know this for sure, because the first hand witnesses are dead. But, the information at hand does seem to point to the terrorists following a “need to know” policy of information dissemination.

Tim Paustian at the University of Wisconsin has an informational page about Anthrax. This page dispels many of the myths that are floating about concerning the disease.