Blue Sky On Mars

The LA Times has an article about the popularity of blogging (more than 250,000 served!)

Here’s a neato, small app: Make A Shorter Link. So many resources out there have such long URLs. This app can take one of those long URLs and make a nice, small one out of it.

It’s common practice in Congress to attach potentially unpopular legislation to a “guaranteed to pass” bill. This isn’t a case of that… According to this Wired article, the FBI has linked online gambling with fund raising for the terrorists. Therefore, a bill in the House would give credit card companies the burden of watching out for online gamblers.
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There is an interesting look at blogs as a way to transfer knowledge within companies. The discussion of tacit knowledge seems true to me. I stumbled down that path via the K-Log mailing list. The notion of a K-Log is the idea of using a weblog for knowledge management.

Microsoft has invested in Groove. This means that Groove will only become a cross-platform tool if it suits Microsoft’s wishes and if .NET gets ported elsewhere.

The Register has retracted Monday’s story about the RIAA calling for tougher laws. Everything in the original article, including the quotes, was a hoax. The attitudes portrayed in that message seemed close enough to reality that many people (including myself) were taken in. The quotes said the things that many of us believe that the RIAA members feel.
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The Register brings us an article about the RIAA’s desire for tougher laws. It’s written in The Register’s typical, biased style… but the quotes in the article speak for themselves. We’ll leave the last, chilling word to Sony Music Entertainment’s Steve Heckler: “Once consumers can no longer get free music, they will have to buy the music in the formats we choose to put out.” My comment to Steve Heckler: consumers don’t have to buy anything.
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Not surprisingly, the RIAA has sued the three companies using the FastTrack p2p network. Hopefully, the FastTrack protocol is open enough that people will be able to make new bootstrap servers. (FastTrack is a self-organizing network, but it does need a bootstrap node.)

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