Author Archive

There's nothing more depressing than watching a bear cub take a swipe at a gigantic, planet-eating corporation, but that's exactly what we saw today.
Ask.com took to its blog today with an open missive titled "Ask.com Makes More Moves on Privacy." In the post, Ask.com references the letter sent to Google from 14 privacy watchdog groups including the EFF and the ACLU demanding that Google add a link to its privacy policy on their home page to comply with the [...]

For those looking for legal precedent to confirm that the First Amendment doesn't provide carte blanche when posting on line, they need look no further than Doninger v. Niehoff, — F.3d —-, 2008 WL 2220680 (2nd Cir. May 29, 2008). Doninger v. Niehoff will probably be cited several more times this year in the U.S. court system as people slowly begin to realize that just because the Web makes it easy to harass people, it doesn't mean you can do [...]

First came the Tweets: is such-and-such down? Can anyone else get into Google App Engine? Then came the blog posts and the endless discussion of "giving up your app to the cloud."
The simple fact is that web sites will go down. All web sites will fail to work at some point, because 100% uptime just doesn't exist. Software will be buggy. Hardware will fail. And the best anyone can hope for is that the site is large enough and [...]

The BBC has an interesting article today based on a report out of the University of Washington. The report notes that 64 people have been arrested since 2003 due to blogging activities, which doesn't sound like a very large number, does it? However, three times as many people were arrested last year than were in 2006, which may imply that blogger arrests are on the rise.
The report indicates that the majority of blogger arrests take place in Egypt, China, and [...]

I am in love.
I realize that most of the apps that I absolutely go nuts over tend to have nice visuals. Use those nice visuals as an overlay on something I'm already loving and you just may have yourselves a hit. I'm a big Amazon fan, but I never browse there; I visit the site for specific things and then buy them. I may look at the suggestions they give once I've added an item to my cart, but even [...]

The line between online and desktop applications seems to be blurring all the time. We want office apps online to share them, but we want to bring them back down to the desktop for offline use, never mind that's where the functionality started in the first place. We like Twitter and FriendFeed, but we want to be able to use an AIR app rather than a Web interface. Such is the best explanation I can come up with PodiPodi, a [...]

Two events this week are conspiring to ferment a theory. Unlike Louis Gray or Robert Scoble or even that traitor Duncan Riley, I still don't like FriendFeed, and I definitely don't think it's the next Google. But I've grudgingly grown to accept that FriendFeed is the Pet Rock of the early adopter set, and if you want to see and be seen, you need to be there.
A little over a week ago, FriendFeed added "personalized recommendations," three links accessible on [...]

Gawker notes that Chelsea Alvarez-Bell has quit blogging for Slog. The reason given in her post was the vicious commenters who were allowed free rein on her posts, and the first several comments lend credence to her complaints, with virtual high-fives at her resignation.
Haven't we seen this all before, though? History repeats itself again and again. Natali del Conte. Kathy Sierra. And every time a woman blogger turns tail and runs it makes a dent in the news cycle, and [...]

The AP isn't wrong.
For some odd reason, there is a viewpoint in Web 2.0 that as long as everyone seems to be doing it, the laws should be changed, or somehow re-interpreted. High on the list of those laws that the horde is clamoring to overturn are those dealing with copyright infringement and libel.
The issues regarding copyright and fair use rear their collective head fairly regularly when it comes to online content, with the music industry as well as the [...]