October 05, 2003
A contrarian case: every freedom-loving person should be cheering on Digital Rights Management. Yes, it would be an economic disaster. That's exactly the point. Lock Office down hard enough and people will discover OpenOffice. Make music unshareable and they'll find bands who don't mind. The fastest path to freedom may run straight through the cage.
October 01, 2003
Poetry is supposed to project images in your mind. What if you outsourced that part to Google? Feed VisualPoetry any text and it hands the words to Google Image Search, then plays back the results as a slide show. Whether the images match what the poet intended is another matter entirely.
September 26, 2003
Growing up in the Netherlands there were two state channels, and that was that. Now there are dozens — and somehow the programming feels worse. The doomsayers warned us about American-style commercial TV, and they were mostly right. Mostly. Because something strange is happening across the Atlantic that hints at how this evolutionary process actually ends.
September 25, 2003
Malaria kills 3000 children a day. If ten 747s of kids crashed into Kilimanjaro every morning, someone would do something. Instead, the world spends less on malaria research than a single cruise ship costs to build. Bill Gates — the man the Internet loves to hate — just doubled the global budget out of pocket. So who's the evil one again?
September 24, 2003
Everyone knows Islam is harsh and Buddhism is the religion of peace. Everyone is wrong. Before the Chinese rolled in, Tibet was a medieval theocracy with slavery, severed hands, and a Dalai Lama whose circle of friends included some surprising names. A look at why we keep hoping the East holds a secret the West has already found.
September 23, 2003
Twenty-five million camera-phones shipped in six months, mostly in Japan. My phone does 640x480, which is fine for blog photos and not much else. But once they hit two or three megapixels, the standalone camera starts looking like a dedicated MP3 player in an iPod world. A rough timeline for when carrying one becomes silly.
September 22, 2003
RSS is wonderful, but it punishes the popular. The more readers you have, the more your server bleeds bandwidth every fifteen minutes. Three pieces still missing: a BitTorrent-style way for aggregators to share the load, collaborative filtering so we read what we should rather than what we know, and a back-channel so readers can do more than just receive.
September 20, 2003
A friend asked for some party CDs. Easy. Until Easy CD refused to burn, citing a song under four seconds long. Five CDs worth of music stranded in a proprietary playlist format, unportable, uneditable, useless. The fix involved a laptop and a cable, but the real question is bigger: who certifies that an app is using the right standard for the job?
September 18, 2003
Verisign has decided that mistyped URLs should redirect to their own page. The internet is unamused. Try following a particularly honest link to see what their new service has to say for itself.
September 18, 2003
Fashion moves fast, copying is rampant, and almost nobody sues. Designers find it cheaper to stay ahead than to lawyer up. Software and music used to work the same way. Now we have four flavors of IP law and a familiar argument that they spur innovation. The opposite case is at least as plausible, and harder to answer than it looks.
September 15, 2003
Audiogalaxy got me listening to music again, and then it got shut down. The record companies are a cartel, sure, but stealing from thieves still counts. So I am trying to go legal without surrendering to DRM. Turns out the Netherlands offers more loopholes than you would expect, ranging from the public library to a Russian site that may not last the year.
September 14, 2003
Clay Shirky says micropayments are doomed: with infinite free substitutes, nobody wants to stop and decide whether this article is worth a dime. He has a point, but iTunes and European pay-by-SMS suggest the story is messier. What if there is a third model hiding between micropayments and ads, where readers pay flat and the back-end splits the proceeds?
September 12, 2003
A festival called The Next 5 Minutes promises that media, art and politics will somehow set us free. Anyone with a webcam can broadcast, anyone with a blog can publish, and bandwidth keeps getting cheaper. That is the optimistic half. The new revolutionaries are starting to notice that the same technology hands Big Media a much bigger lock.
September 10, 2003
Ten thousand public webcams already, with cameras shrinking and bandwidth getting cheaper every quarter. Soon the tiny independent robots arrive, lenses included. Physical anonymity, the kind we grew up with, is heading for the dustbin. The interesting question is what we will wear once everyone can see us. Seinfeld had a theory. The Burqa might too.
September 08, 2003
Google has been a good friend for over five years — the brand that brought sanity back to the web after the dot-com boom. Lately, though, the stories sound more like the end of a beautiful friendship. Quietly delisted sites, secret algorithms, governments leaning in. Maybe it's time to imagine what comes after a single company decides what the internet contains.
September 05, 2003
A map is never just a picture of the world — it's a picture of the mind that drew it. That's why Europe sits at the centre of European maps, and China at the centre of Chinese ones. So what happens if you let thousands of strangers, one tile at a time, vote a world into being? A small experiment in collective cartography.
September 04, 2003
Half a billion computers in the world, one and a half billion cell phones — and most of the phones still just make calls. For now. Moore's Law doesn't care about your living room or your desktop habits, it just keeps halving the price. Five years from now, what does the world look like when the phone in your pocket is the internet device of choice for two billion people?
September 02, 2003
Hundreds of millions of people are now reachable, anywhere, any time — and somehow it has barely moved the productivity statistics. Strange, for an economy that runs on talking to other humans. Maybe the negative effects cancel it out. Or maybe we just haven't figured out what cell phones are actually for. The telephone, after all, was first imagined as a way to transmit music.
September 01, 2003
Throw enough random chemicals together and life eventually shows up. Throw enough people together and you usually get a dictatorship — at first. But run the simulation a bit longer and odd little feedback loops start to form: art, science, civil society. Stuart Kauffman's self-organization seems to apply to politics too, which suggests democracy may be less fragile than it feels. Hopefully.
August 31, 2003
The Netherlands is a kingdom, and as the saying goes — you wouldn't invent it if it weren't already there. But abolishing the monarchy is a lot of work for not much gain. Unless, of course, there's a sneakier route. What if the Netherlands simply seceded from its own Kingdom, and left the crown to rule a tax-haven in the Caribbean? Two problems, one elegant manoeuvre.
Familiarity breeds attempt.