The Republic of FreeA couple of Aussie teenagers  have planted a flag on the abandoned Tuvalan island of Asau (which is sinking) and have declared The Republic of Free, a sovereign nation.  [thanks, bOing bOing] You know that big iceberg that separated off from the Antarctic? Has anyone claimed that yet? This is prime Loompanics stuff. There's still "Free" land out there if you're prepared to search for it.

Borg Journalism - We are the Blogs. Journalism will be Assimilated. As a journalist covering the weblog beat, I officially love weblogs. But sometimes that love can be sorely tested. Weblogs scoop you at every turn,  [thanks, Microcontent News] Excellent analysis of what it means to be a journalist competing with the Blog hive mind to cover an internet story. One thing I think it points up is the need for better Blog aggregators to provide the 10,000 foot overview of what the Blog Hive mind is up to. Blogdex, Daypop, Weblogs.com are all excellent first attempts, but they are just that, first attempts.

The EFF starts using blog technology to highlight particular issues. See Consensus at Lawyerpoint

Another of those puzzling questions (like how do you know what time you went to sleep?). Where are all the French websites? I stumble over German websites quite often. And there's plenty of Polish websites selling Delphi shareware. I find quite a lot of Japanese and Italian websites when looking for motorcycle information. But I never seem to see French ones. 

A Spyware free version of Kazaa. KaZaA Lite

According to Andrew Orlowski The Register (1-April-2002 ), AOL has bought two hundred of the most popular blogs. "In related news, MetaFilter was said to be signing a merger agreement with Kuro5hin to pool content between the two sites. We'll bring you more news as soon as we hear it.".

But shouldn't this be on NTK? "In-jokes for outcasts".

Do you belong to lots of Yahoo! Mailing lists? Do you have a Yahoo! account? Then go to "Account Info, Edit your marketing preferences." You will probably want to set all the options to NO. You have about 55 days to do this, before they start spamming you.

Deaddog's doo-wop rarities I just got a shipment of fantastic doo-wop and swing rarities from Deaddog music, a microlabel bringing back old 78s and singles. ... I have one other disk of his stuff, but most of his vast catalog of 78s is lost to history.[thanks, bOing bOing] I wonder if there's a thing like the Gutenberg Project, but instead of digitizing and archiving, doing the same for early recorded music. If there isn't there should be. A quick Google turned up the Mutopia project to digitize music scores, but I'm thinking of a library of MP3s of old out of copyright 78s for free download.

I can't help but be amused by a post at Scripting News talking about Jabber in appreciative terms, that is followed four paragraphs later by a piece decrying the hype around Open Source. Last time I looked, Jabber, just like those other successful software projects such as Apache, Linux, PHP and many others was Open Source.  As usual, everybody's right at the same time as everyone's wrong. It just depends on which side of the argument you want to be and what point you're trying to argue. It's undenyably hard to make a living out of programming in an Open Source stylee. But that doesn't seem to be stopping a large number of programmers churning out code because they've got an itch to scratch.

The kind of website that really brightens up your day. s o r t a k i n d a . c o m "Jesus, always with you" was perfect as long as you're not too easily offended...

Want to see what music I like? Check this out.  [from, Scripting News]. Walk into almost anybody's house, saunter over to the record collection and surreptitiously scan the titles. Even if they lie about their age, you can immediately tell in which era they were 17-22. This is something I've never quite understood, because even though I still have all the records I bought then, I never stopped buying new ones and listening to new musics. Grateful Dead Live in '72 and Beefheart's The Spotlight Kid sits cheek by jowl with The Kruder and Dorfmeister Project and The Thievery Corporation. Anyway regardless of cheap shots about people's taste in music, it's nice to see the return of "Ourfavoritesongs". Hmm, that doesn't look right? That must be the wrong link into the mad scientist's lab ...

Dan blogging PC Forum : [Intel's] Barrett sees Moore's law and its equivalents lasting "at least 15 or more years more" with current technology. "No question about that.", Like he says Wow! Think about that. 2^10 times as much processing power as we have now. The equivalent of a 2048 GHz Pentium 4. Now will we have an equivalent increase in bandwidth? 512Mbps broadband?

The Internet is Missing A cluetrain.

The lack of addresses in IPV4 means that most systems can only be secondary participants without a public presence.

The .COM mania has hijacked the DNS and we no longer have the ability to maintain a stable presence and the net is guaranteed to unravel as registrations expire. And, worse, the gets scrambled as they names get reassigned.

The lack of encryption has encouraged meddling by those who second-guess the content, whether in a misguided attempt to help or a misguided attempt to have an Internet free of disruptive innovation.

When elephants dance We, The Consumers get trampled on. Tight analysis of the The Anti-Mammal Dinosaur Protection Act also known as the CBDTPA and previously as the SSSCA.

One of those conferences has just happened that just everyone has to be at. The PC Forum. Doc writes,  Here's how thick the wi-fi is here: I'm posting this from a stall in the men's room. There are two other stalls here. I hear keyboards tapping in both of them (I think... hard to tell).  How much you wanna bet that this gets quoted more than anything I'm writing today that's actually meaningful?  [Later...] Rafe Needleman just told me, "You're full of shit." and later, Nearly everybody here, it seems, has a laptop, and is listening with their fingers. I'm imagining a nation of court stenographers... (I just did a count.. it's about a third.)

This is all very techy cool and next minute, but I can't help but think that there must be a better way to get instant reporting. It's just a shame that real time web casting is so bandwidth, processing and money intensive.

What is it about Gnomes? Here's the Gnome Liberation Front (GLF)

Dan Gillmor: Bleak future looms if you don't take a stand : So, here's my line in the sand. I've bought my last CD from any major label or independent label that puts copy protection on any of its music. Or supports and pushes for absurd copyright protection legislation.

So that's no more CDs then. Is the slogan "Stop buying music, it just encourages them"?

Currenty listening to Timo Maas : Loud. on Perfecto Records.Which is great except that it's published by EMI.

Starbucks as clueless as KPMG? Starbucks joins the KPMG Memorial Hall of Cluelessness for sending a registered lawyer-letter to the community site Backwash demanding that they remove links to the giant coffee-chain because Starbucks believes that linking to them without permission is a copyright violation. Starbucks needs a clue.Link [thanks, bOing bOing] Quoted verbatim.

It's a link, It's a link! So sue me! Bwahahahaha. I'm not in the USA so I'm not in your jurisdiction! What is it about companies that they want to stop people linking to them? Don't they know how Google works? Anyway, I never did like their coffee. I'd rather go to Coffee Republic or Costa. But having seen what Spiders do on Caffeine, maybe I should cut down.

Google Relists Operation Clambake Update from yesterday's blog. The story about Google and CoS got blogged, linked, covered, commented on and announced by huge numbers of private and public websites. It would appear that Google has either allowed clambake back in to the listings, or perhaps is unable to exclude it without excluding big parts of the web. Any road up. Do a google search for "Scientology" and Operation Clambake - The Inner Secrets Of Scientology comes up number four. 

Anti-Copy Bill Hits D.C. : The completely absurd SSSCA has been renamed the Consumer Broadband and Digital Television Promotion Act (CBDTPA). What a fine piece of Orwellian double think. "Promotion" indeed. but changing it's name doesn't make it any less absurd. Just so we're clear here, it will mandate that any electronic device that can play copyrighted digital media will have to contain US government approved anti-piracy hardware or software. In theory of course, this only applies to goods sold in the USA. Hah! I don't you need any hints as to exactly why this is absurd. Just try thinking about where these goods are made, Linux, Government approval, hacker challenges, digital to analog to digital recording and so on. and on. Then you might want to ask who provided funding and campaign money to the key backers of the bill. Hollings, Ted Stevens (R-Alaska), Daniel Inouye (D-Hawaii), John Breaux (D-Louisana) and Dianne Feinstein (D-California).

It would seem that like the US Steel industry, the media barons are spending more time these days on lobbying than adding value.