Year: 2002

Evhead links to me and hundreds follow. But Ev’s link begs the question: “related thoughts?” Related to whom? To what? Come on, Ev! Spill the beans! Seriously, though – thanks for the plug, Ev. (One question: now that I’m part of the club, does this mean I have to post something about Dvorak?)

John Hiler discusses the powerful effect blogs have on searches at Google.com. Because blogs contain “fresh” content and frequently contain numerous links, they tend to be weighed more heavily by Google than other sites. Why? This is essentially proof of what I wrote about on Monday – Google’s Page Rank technology treats links as “votes”…

John Robb’s Radio Weblog recaps an interview on the Charlie Rose show with Lord of the Rings director Peter Jackson. John wants to know: “Where is the Bob Shaye of the software industry?” By the way: Charlie Rose doesn’t archive his shows online, but NPR’s Fresh Air does. You can listen to yesterday’s Terry Gross…

Berkeley Professor Richard Muller teaches Physics for Future Presidents, aka Physics 10. I’m no physicist (nor am I a future President, most likely), but this is a pretty fascinating site. I’d say he’s angling to replace Richard Feynman as the people’s physicist, and this site certainly goes a long way to establishing his capabilities. Prof.…

Jason Kottke discusses blogging and the development of peer-to- peer journalism. He asks “is the weblog network efficient at journalism?” He grants that the question may be beside the point, but I think he’s on to something. Blogging, whether it’s used for journalism or for knowledge management (John Robb’s K-Logs group at Yahoo! Groups explores…

The New York Times reports that Plantronics used IP.com to protect an idea it had last year. The idea is to take advantage of what’s known as “prior art” – if prior art exists that adequately describes the subject matter of the patent application, the patent will not be granted. IP.com allows companies to register…

Bloomberg.com : Technology News reports that the trust-busting folks in the European Union want to now limit the protection afforded software companies through the granting of patents. This is the same commission that prevented G.E. from merging with Honeywell last July. The commission seeks to disallow business method patents (like Amazon.com’s 1-Click patent). (Side note:…

Here’s one founder’s take on why her start-up failed. Talk about bitter! Now, there’s almost certainly another side to this story (like the VCs who would probably say that the founders didn’t know how to run a business, couldn’t shift the business model fast enough to respond to market conditions, and couldn’t expand their customer…

MIT Comparative Media Studies Director looks at blogs as the “digital renaissance”. I just came from a dinner in L.A. with a friend who spends a lot of his time thinking about knowledge management, and got to explain the concept of blogs to him. This article does a good job of explaining the concept to…

Last Saturday, I wrote about (and linked to) a Slate article about the Dvorak keyboard and its apparent superiority to the standard “QWERTY” keyboard. Many thanks to tins reader T.A. for a pointer to this Reason magazine article from June of 1996 debunking the Dvorak myth. The article is a lengthy and entirely worthwhile read…