Month: September 2002

China is blocking Google and the issues could be bigger than they appear at first glance.
Yahoo has already capitulated to pressure from China to censor the database it presents to Chinese citizens. NewsCorp has suppressed books it planned to publish in the US in order to do business in satellites with China. Has China already asked Google to join the team?
This goes beyond French and German objections to Nazi paraphernalia, and Scientology tracking down every reference to its sacred nonsense. This is about participation in tyranny.
Ultimately, every online publisher, web host, backbone operator, isp, and software company will have to come to terms with the moral dimension of its business.
This is not an issue of cultural sensitivity, or loyalty to shareholders. Eventually, Google may have to ask itself the questions that Yahoo has already answered for itself: What value do you place on your humanity? How can you demand the protections of democracy while conspiring to deprive a billion people of their human rights?

NetNewsWire has changed my thinking about RSS aggregation. Until now, I’ve been using HTML-based aggregators: Radio Userland, Amphetadesk, and Newsisfree. Although, I liked each of them, they seemed difficult, slow and clumsy; no better than visiting the original sites themselves.
NetNewsWire is stand-alone application, and it makes it far faster and easier to review news sites, looking for interesting stories. It’s so fast, it’s guaranteed to increase the amount of news I’m going to be able to review.
RSS still overwhelms me with the amount of available information, and I still prefer to visit some sites (Slashdot, News.com) to see stories in context. But it’s beginning to feel useful to me in a way that it didn’t before.
NetNewsWire also shows that HTML is not always the best way to deliver information, especially if speed and interaction are important.

Pat Brown, a biochemist at Stanford University, is looking for $20 million in foundation money to publish scientific papers on the web for free., instead of in print journals.
For those who aren’t familiar with the issue, most academic journals are owned by big media conglomerates, take articles and editorial labor for free, and charge tons of money for the result. This structure makes converts public information into a private resource, retards access to scientific information, and impoverishes university libraries. It’s a classic case of plundering the commons by creating artifical scarcity.
Creating the database and the peer review process is the easy part of this project. The hard part is changing human behavior when the stakes are so high.
It’s really difficult to disintermediate existing relationships. The prestige of being in certain journals has a direct impact on the careers of the authors. There is no advantage to an author to being in some big database.
Nothing will change without collective action on the part of academics.
It would help if the heavy-hitters in specific fields would agree to publish only in journals that allowed them to contribute their information to a public database, or if academics bargained collectively for a contracts that permitted online republication, or if academic departments based career evaluations on citations and not publications.
Probably, all this (and more) must happen. Until it does, the shame lies with academics and not with journal publishers who exploit them. [via Slashdot]

Using Moveable Type has given me a lot more insight into what I’m looking for in a content management system
I used to think that it ought to run on the Mac and be built into FileMaker, or even AppleWorks. While I still think Apple should bundle a good, simple CMS with Mac OS X; it seems a lot smarter to make it server-based and give it a web interface so that it can be installed on Macs, Unix hosts, or even Windows.
The idea CMS will be easy to install and users shouldn’t have to worry about a the Unix command line.
The ideal CMS should make it as easy to manage tables as it is in FileMaker. I don’t care what database it uses underneath, as long as it’s free, relational, and common.
The ideal CMS’s templates should be easy to create, and sets of default templates should be included for multiple applications (Weblog, database, magazine, and so on). The templates should be designed from the bottom up to use Cascading Style Sheets for formatting.
The ideal CMS should make entries as easy to create and maintain as they are in Moveable Type.
And it ought to be cheap. OK, free.