This is a revolution in standards I'd like to see but don't expect in my lifetime.

Someone on the de-centralization list said "Standards shouldn't be built by amateurs". Well frankly the professionals have made a complete and utter hash of it. For a variety of vested interests, the standards we're trying to work with are either broken or have grown so vast that they might as well be. Or there are an infinite number of standards to choose from, so they're not really standards are they.

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This is an essay inspired by Dave Winer's call for comment on the shape of the next technological revolution for the Seybold 2001 conference. I don't think I'm really saying anything new here. But I feel that as technologists (or geeks!) we are as guilty as everyone else of failing to see the woods for the trees. It's so easy to get wrapped into tracking Microsoft or arguing over the most elegant way to design a network API that we lose sight of the big picture. Much of this is just recapitulation of trends that others have seen but I do offer some implications and technologies at the end. The cynic is welcome to dismiss it all with "that's so 5 minutes ago". But it's still true nonetheless.

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In the last 15 or 20 years most western governments have attempted to encourage private industry to streamline itself and improve efficiency. They have also made election promises to improve efficiency and cost effectiveness in the public sector. The private sector has put a great deal of effort into initiatives such as computerization of basic processes, BPR, TQM and has largely succeeded with the result that productivity is now as high as anywhere in the world. But the public sector has failed dramatically with the result that public sector spending has grown with every year that goes by. Despite this increase in spending, (and by implication, taxation) the quality of basic services continues to decline and in the UK at least, public sector infrastructure projects have been notable failures.

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We all read William Gibson's Neuromancer, and then Neal Stephenson's Snowcrash and became captivated by the idea of a shared consensual 3D space accessible through our computers. A few people started to try and build it and there were various experiments with more or less success. Personally, I can remember during the early days of MS Windows wondering why the prevalent metaphor being used was layers of paper on a desk. I wanted to step through a "Window" and jump (like Alice) into a 3D world of exploration. I keep coming back to this idea, and whenever another set of technology appears that might allow me to do this, I eagerly download it, and play for a few hours before becoming frustrated by it.

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In the last 6-9 months the internet has seen another sea change in what can loosely be termed Peer to Peer journalism (P2PJ). First let's take a few trends. Is it a new form of Journalism? Or just a sea of messages in bottles?

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This is a BigCo vs LittleCo story. A few years ago there were a bunch of companies and organizations developing Email and New readers. They were developing into some nice, powerful but easy to use tools. And then one day, both Netscape and Microsoft started giving away email/news readers with their browser. This helped to grow the population of email users rapidly. This was no bad thing but it also took the state of the art several steps backwards. And it pretty much wiped out the market for commercial development of these tools. It wouldn't be so bad except that the early free versions were terrible and although they've improved, they still have some awful flaws. This essay is a suggestion that maybe we should just stop using them and support the independents.

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Weblogs such as Manila and Blogger (and of course, voidstar.com) provide probably the fastest, easiest way to get a website up and on line. They can provide all the content management and even workflow that any company could ask for. And yet they have a reputation for being the verbal diarrhoea of sad souls who really ought to get out more.

Well here's an article that suggests that "Ancien-regime PR agencies have legitimate uses for Weblogs". There's a whole set of useful suggestions for ways in which companies and PR Agencies can use a comparatively unstructured tool to improve communications.

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De-Centralization in B2B and Collaborative Commerce
The last few years have seen a series of attempts to build B2B systems that are fundamentally centralized. The belief was that B2B could be handled most effectively by imitating eBay and building a single central marketplace site that brought buying and selling organizations together in one place. This became known as the "Fat Butterfly" model; wings of buyers and sellers linked by a fat market in the middle. At the same time, the principal vendors were also producing e-procurement systems aimed at the internal needs of large corporations. At the core of both of these types of systems is an aggregated catalogue of products, suppliers and prices. While this has been happening, the suppliers have been putting their stall out on the web with storefront systems, that also hold a catalogue of product information.
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A useful way of understanding many Internet based systems is to consider how many people, companies or systems interact with it as providers and how many as consumers. For instance in B2B e-Commerce, we can look at a particular market and decide if there are one, few or many suppliers and one, few or many buyers. In this case, few probably means 3-100, whereas many is probably more than a thousand.

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I recently received this inquiry.
I've bought another Ariel 3 from Ebay in very good condition, but in Florida so far. Now, I need some advice and am thinking of Julian Bond. Since he is from England, perhaps he can advise us as to properly eccentric attire to wear while riding such a 'unique' looking 50cc machine with pedals. I keep picturing a crushed felt bowler hat which is the same color as the bike and perhaps a similarly matched suit with very wide lapels. Sort of like the actors in " A Clockwork Orange " . However, we Americans are not as dress - savvy as the English and so I'd prefer to defer to Julian or some other Englishman to be certain that I am tastefully attired for this social situation.

Being somewhat unsure of how to answer I referred this to my aesthetic advisor, Cecil de Cashmere, who provided the following advice. Make of it what you will.

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