Tom Delay doesn't think the Judicial branch is a check and balance over the Legislative branch, George W. Bush thinks he is above congress and its laws. What's going on in this country? Are we slowly loosing the checks and balances that keep this country great and stable?

As always I rail against the notion of DRM and the media industries use of copyright to limit the rights of consumers. I thought this piece on the BBC had an interesting overview of how DRM won't work and the realities that the media industries need to wake up to unless they want to die.

Gaming is good for you! For every article out there about game violence and ADD there's an article about military applications for gaming and hand eye coordination.

The US space exploits continues to depress.

Round 5
everyone else 5, Microsoft 0
Microsoft delays Windows Vista again.

On another tech note you can read this interview of Tim Berners-Lee.

Notable: Chatology

MPAA gets ripped a new one during an sxsw session. Listen to the audio. Organ harvesting Chinese Concentration Camps. Did the Blackstar exist? Should we have open internet tests?

Notable: Chatology

Getting this out late, was busy all weekend.

I listen to a couple podcasts and one of my favorite is the Gillmor Gang. I was listening to his latest one when yet again Steve Gillmor mentioned that we should show respect for Earthlink, which he advertises at the beginning of each podcast. The problem isn't that we should have respect for Earthlink, it is his constant reminder at the beginning of every podcast. He needs to let the advertisement stand on its own now, possibly he should diversify to other advertisers. I'm all for advertisements on podcasts and blogs, I have google ads on my site, but I think the advertisements have matured enough that we don't need a constant reminder about them. What needs to happen now is the continuation of the advertisement movement for the correct context. This leads things to intention vs attention and google ads.

Speaking of which Doc Searls put words to a concept I've been trying to describe for a while now. The idea of attention vs attention vs intention. Where advertisers for a long time now have been spending billions to get our attention. Whether its a billboard or TV or spam alot can go into trying to get peoples attention and sell their product. However most of this money seems to me to be wasted, and in fact not only wastes money but wastes time. My time to view an advertisement for a product I will never buy and companies time in creating flashy advertisements to grab such a low percent of buyers who would otherwise not have bought their product where otherwise a very simple promotional advertisement or blurb that they exist would get a majority of their buyers to indeed buy their stuff.

In recent years we have seen two kinds of movements around attention. One side has been the context movement which is things like google advertisements where the advertisement is geared towards the content of the page itself thus perhaps leading to higher click rate. The other side, promoted by people such as Steve Gillmor and others over at attentiontrust.org, is a sort of vault where click streams or previous buys are recorded in a central place and the potential buyers can at their own will allow other companies to find out that information to be able to show advertisements or promotions that are very specific to that potential buyer.

The last piece to this evolution, as I see, is the idea of intention. When I know I want to buy something I can let vendors know my intention of buying something and they can then compete for my business. It can be as little as I am interested in buying an RPG game or a Java programming book or a plasma screen. It can be sorta vague or very specific and depending on that intention I might be a few advertisements and promotions or many. To me this should be where businesses are heading in the future of trying to get buyers.

On a different note reporters may need to watch out for Bush as he may be attacking reporters on the very idea that they report things.

Notable: Chatology

I've been doing TWI... for a couple weeks now. TWI... is sort of a play on TWIT though I never could cover as much as they do and as good as the people over there could. However, the point of my friday TWI... is to post the various things of interest that I find on the internets every week as well as any comments I've made on other peoples posts.

The guy over at Erratic Wisdom wonders how anyone could not understand the importance of studying history. (My comment: here).

I take this post to heart. Part of the reason for my site is communication with the outside audience. Not necessarily for personal gratification of other people viewing my content, but being genuinely interested in peoples comments about various topics I am interested it. Whether that's some bit of philosophy, science, code, or application I put out there I wanna hear what other people have to say about it.

Doc Searls continues to talk about and advocate the new journalism.

Notable: Chatology

I continue to expand the code for indeepthought and have implemented more of wiki markup. If your curious about wiki markup you can see two competing standards here and here. Which one am I using? Neither really, there are parts of both I don't like and since neither is an excepted standard by the community of wiki I am basically using my own derived form based off wikipedia itself.