Tabloid Marketing?

I originally wrote this entry on October 7, 2004, and published it on blogs.sun.com.

Attitudes about what "we" do and do not "want the industry to devolve into" can be really novel and original, and yet totally false.

Yes, and as if, the industry, is at "our" exclusive disposal. As if, it exists because "we" are here. Obviously, the industry goes on, and "we" are not gods.

Imagine some copy machine manufacturer stating that "we really do not want the industry to devolve into electronic chit-chat" by way of expressing his opposition to digital document exchange replacing hard copy exchanges. "No e-mail please, it is chit-chat!"

Well, this sort of we-know-it-all-and-are-superior-to-all-the-others-who-just-dont-get-it attitude does happen in the real world. It happens too often.

"We don't want the industry to devolve into tabloid marketing," says (to the WSJ, Oct. 7, 2004, page B3) a marketing vice president for one of H-P's server computer units. (Let's keep the name out of this blog.) According to him, Sun has "crossed the line" with its latest comments about H-P on blogs.sun.com . . .

So, what's more of a tabloid, People or blogs.sun.com? And what about full-page ads on the WSJ and elsewhere? They are literally tabloid marketing. Aren't they?

It is funny how words resist those who insist on changing their original meaning . . .

On SOA and OOA

I originally wrote this entry on October 7, 2004, and published it on blogs.sun.com.

It may be unfair to pick on a 12-month-old friendly piece on the concept of Service Oriented Architecture (SOA); but I'm pointing to Hoa He's article because it is one of the more well-written ones, comparatively speaking.

The distinction Dr. Hoa He draws between SOA and OO programming (or should I say OOA, Object-Oriented Architecture) is interesting but seems to have some basic flaws, the primary one being that of mis-taken analogies, particularly the CD analogy of service.

To say that OO programming is about shipping code with document or data ("every CD would come with its own player and they are not supposed to be separated") is a bit of an over-simplification of OO principles if not pure and simple red herring. Furthermore, in the CD analogy, the CD sometimes stands for the consumer of the service and sometimes for the data sent to the service. The latter, of course, is of greater interest. In most cases of SOA, however, something does happen to some data. Nothing seems to happen to CDs as they move from player to player and they leave no trace in the service cosmos (unless of course they're copied and sent off to digisphere). To draw a more complete picture of SOA, it seems, one would have to account for those traces and come up with better analogies.

Now, to idempotency: How can idempotency be achieved without any state in the service or some other service on which the responding service depends? Again, idempotency seems O.K. with CDs which leave very little trace behind on the "player service" after having been played. But if a trace is left behind, which is always the most interesting case for an enterprise or an exchange of one sort or another, then how can you have idempotency if that trace is unavailable to the service, i.e. if the service is "stateless".

Moving on to exchange and document-centric view of things: "SOAP RPC web services are not SOA; document-centric SOAP web services are SOA," Dr. He writes. Not much of a controversy here, only an anticipation: Documents are usually exchanged. So, would it have been better to jump to EOA (Exchange Oriented Architecture), i.e. the IETF model of "architecture" (a large number of useful exchange protocols for plug and play) than to SOA, specially when the concept of "service" is so loaded as the mis-taken analogies I discussed above prove? Just a question to wonder about . . .

Here is another point having to do with the essentiality of WSDL, which I don't think is drawn clearly in the article: In a "SOAP Web Service," the description of a service must be in WSDL, the article says. This aspect of it has always confused me quite a bit. Let me give an example, one that I have given before in other forums.

MMS-Cs (Multi-Media Messaging Service Centers) have now been in production and deployment for more than 3 years, but the MMS specs (at least up to 23.140 v. 6.7, September 2004) produced by 3GPP have never defined the service in WSDL. In plain English, they do lay out, in great detail, the format of SOAP messages and how they are used. So, what is the problem in not specifying a WSDL specially if the choreography of the service cannot even be captured in WSDL?

It would be an odd thing to claim MMS-C architecture is not a SOA architecture simply because it does not define service in terms of WSDL unless we want to say that the "S" in "SOA" is not quite about "Service" the way we know of it from deployments.

Concluding on a positive note, here is an interesting quote from the article: 'Ironically, SOAP was originally designed just for RPC. It won't be long before someone claims that "SOAP" actually stands for "SOA Protocol".' I don't know why but I like that quote.

And last, but definitely not least, it may be worthwhile to see if there are any points of comparison between REST and (a categorical lift of) Linda with particular attention to the HTTP GET, DELETE, POST and PUT interface semantics in REST as described in Dr. He's article.

"New Media"

I originally wrote this entry on October 5, 2004, and published it on blogs.sun.com.

Two years ago (before Dan Gillmore wrote We the Media), North Gate Hall (the Graduate School of Journalism, at U.C. Berkeley) held a course on weblogs. The reading resources may be of interest in discovering some early journalistic responses to weblogging.

Blogging in Esperanto and Virtues of Multi-Lingualism

I originally wrote this entry on October 1, 2004, and published it on blogs.sun.com.

Jeff Licquia's translation into Esperanto of his earlier commentary on what I'd written regarding Balkanization of the Web and the virtues of multi-lingualism proves my original point still stands: Having a multitude of living languages is actually much better than a world with a single universal language. The existence of different (human) language communities should in fact be considered, literally, as a God-given opportunity to be introduced to diverse peoples and cultural possibilities. In a single-language world, we'll be immersed in assumptions and biases that are particular to that language, never finding an opportunity for their evolution in the dialog that occurs between languages and cultures.

Note (added October 4, 2004): Please read Jeff Liquia's comment below. As he notes, he never advocated a single universal language. If I implied that above, I stand corrected. His commentary below actually amplifies that on which we both agree, and I'll take his challenge and will learn the mechanics of blogging in Persian (the problem is getting an appropriate keyboard and editor), probably on a different weblog server. More on this later, as time permits.

George Soros Starts a Blog

I originally wrote this entry on October 1, 2004, and published it on blogs.sun.com.

George Soros, financial wizard and author, has just started a blog, where he has professed an eagerness to hear from his readers.

The Failure of Search (or the Fallacy of Abundance)

I originally wrote this entry on October 1, 2004, and published it on blogs.sun.com.

So, what's going on with web search? Why is it giving such high rank to (at best) marginal material, such as the one on this weblog on certain topics? Or as I asked earlier, why do we even feel that we get anything relevant when we perform a search on the Web? How much better material are we actually missing when we limit ourselves to the findings of a search engine?

It is in asking those sorts of questions that we can arrive at modest discoveries or at least novel explanations of what we see around us.

To further the investigation I reported earlier, I went back to the chapters on search in Hubert Dreyfus' little book, On the Internet. According to Dreyfus, given the immense size of the Net, it is "estimated that search engines can recall at most 2 per cent of the relevant sites." (The number might have changed in the last three years but I don't believe that the changes, if any, would affect the arguments in any drastic way.)

We need to ask why "content" (or "information") retrieval systems are receiving the hype they are receiving even if they are hardly adequate when it comes to searching for specific content. How could my weblogs, even if they are somewhat useful, be ranked as the third most useful or important content on certain scholars I've only occasionally quoted and on whose works I still consider myself a novice?

Surely, this sort of system behavior cannot be good if we have hopes to be able to find important bits of documents or knowledge through search and information retrieval.

To explain the hype regarding search and information retrieval, Dreyfus quotes computer scientist David Blair, who cites information retrieval (IR) pioneer Don Swanson:

IR prioneer Don Swanson observed this phenomenon decades ago, and calls it the "fallacy of abundance". The fallacy of abundance is the mistake a searcher makes when he uses a large IR system and is able to find some useful documents. Swanson pointed out that on a sufficiently large system . . . almost any query will retrieve some useful documents. The mistake is to think that just because you got some useful documents the IR system is performing well. What you don't know is how many better documents the system missed.

And so . . . since my weblogs can be ranked highly by Google for certain subjects, they may be perceived (by some searchers) to be more important than they really are.

Do Google Rankings Mean Anything

I originally wrote this entry on October 1, 2004, and published it on blogs.sun.com.

Simple errors and break-downs often lead to new discoveries . . . The type of break-down is almost immaterial.

Error:

A few days ago, I accidentally removed all records of referers and hits on my weblog, all 106,500 of them.

This simple push-of-a-button dropped me out of the hot list you see at the bottom of blogs.sun.com.

Curiosity:

Before this incidence, I'd never thought much about the referers list but deleting all the hit records made me curious. So, I have now gone back to the gradually accumulating referers list for this weblog and have tried to learn something about the referer URL distribution. A significant majority of the hits on this weblog are direct and an equally significant minority are from Google (and competing search engine) searches.

Example:

Although I'm not sure how persistent this sort of system behavior is, this weblog is currently (as of early Octobor, 2004) receiving high (Google and other) search rankings on subjects in which the author is barely a novice.

The rankings this weblog is receiving from Google (as well as other competing search engines) for certain specific queries, for example queries on Oliver Williamson (see Ref.1) and on Chester Barnard (see Ref.2) truly amaze me. As of earlier this week, I've consistently been ranked third on both (and their varient orderings) on Google. See Ref.1.1 and Ref.2.1 for the relevant Google searches.

I may have had the good fortune of having studied with Oliver Williamson for a very short period of time but I'm still a novice learner of his ideas. I may have studied portions of Chester Barnard's classical book, because Williamson recommended it, but I do not deserve to be read diligently as serious commentary on either. So, why is it that what I have written about both is receiving high Google rankings. Surely, I myself know better written material on both topics.

Questions:

What's broken down? What's amiss about search, whether of the Google variety or not? Why do we even feel that we get anything relevant when we perform a search on the Web? How much better material are we actually missing if we limit ourselves to the findings of a search engine?

A Modest Discovery:

Web search and information retrieval fails us more often than we know or realize !

In Search of Chester Barnard

I originally wrote this entry on September 29, 2004, and published it on blogs.sun.com.

As Google's stocks surge in price, the WSJ reports:

Indeed, Google shares now are at heady prices, trading at a whopping 55 times next year's expected earnings of $2.29 per share, compared with a price-to-earnings multiple of 15 for the Standard & Poor's 500-stock index. And part of the reason the shares are rallying is that Google has fewer shares that are freely available to trade, compared with comparable companies, so buying interest goes a lot further in pushing the stock higher. Google has a "float" of almost 30 million shares, compared with more than one billion shares of Yahoo that trade freely.

But how good or useful is Internet search?

I certainly use it all the time but I also end up having to filter a great deal of nonsense. There are also cases that produce some amazement. As of last week, Google has been ranking this Sun weblog third among 110,000 finds on Chester Barnard. Another search site (A9, which I believe must be using the same Google technology for search) gives this weblog the same ranking on Chester Barnard.

How good of an expert am I on Chester Barnard? Do my very casual writings on his work really deserve to be of such high ranking in search results? I doubt it very much. I'm just a novice and an amateur reader of Barnard's essential writings on organizational theory. I guess the only thing I've brought into the fold is to connect Barnard's work with others' and to give a few useful URLs to follow, but reading what I've written about his work will not make any one an expert either. For that, a different kind of practice and training would be required. To begin with, one should probably start reading Oliver Williamson's "Chester Barnard and the Incipient Science Of Organization" published in his The Mechanisms of Governance and also in his Organization Theory: From Chester Barnard to the Present and Beyond.

Spyware Vote in the Congress

I originally wrote this entry on September 22, 2004, and published it on blogs.sun.com.

The U.S. House of Representatives is expected to vote next week on a measure to crack down on spyware. (The relevant bills originally took shape in the Commmittee on Energy and Commerce.)

Reuters reports the measure has wide support.

I've not been able to find and read any of the two proposed bills (which are supposed to be merged by the powerful Committee on Rules) but I'm wondering about their scope and how severe the punishement will be for the offenders.

The Smoothest Transition in the World

I originally wrote this entry on September 20, 2004, and published it on blogs.sun.com.

On the PC:

IE to Firefox.

Roller--How to diplay recent entries on

I originally wrote this entry on September 16, 2004, and published it on blogs.sun.com.

Try using the Roller macro:

    #showRecentEntries(n)

where "n" is the number of titles you want displayed.

What I get is what you see on the right hand side of my weblog web page, here. I haven't had time to figure out how to reduce the font size and include a marker before each title, which are the changes I'd really like to make. So, I don't like the looks as it stands, but it allows me to show fewer of my entries on the left side, which reduces the jumble.

Note: Thanks go to Richard Burridge, for pointing this to me.

Weblogging is not a panacea, particularly in politics

I originally wrote this entry on September 15, 2004, and published it on blogs.sun.com.

Some webloggers are prone to the fallacy that weblogging is a panacea, specially in the political arena.

I had to post some comments on this in response to one of Dan Gillmor's recent notes.

Despite some people's conviction (see Howard Rheingold) that cybercommunities could improve democracy, the jury is still out. We had an enormous number of cybercommunities, many of a political kind, in the period just preceding March of 2003 (when compared to what we had before 1995), and yet, a war most unjustified and unpopular at an international scale still took place despite all the weblogs blasting it.

I've written about this issue from different angles before: 1 and 2.

Children Should Vote, Too, in Ranked-Choice Elections !

I originally wrote this entry on September 8, 2004, and published it on blogs.sun.com.

Here, I'd like to discuss a proposal for a possible java.net forum project on a voting system that could be made available to school children to experiment with voting which includes a certain degree of formality and complexity. It will not only introduce them to voting on the web but also to some of the less-than-apparent issues in our current voting system.

We're approaching a national election in November, and a number of people have been writing about voting systems on blogs.sun.com and elsewhere, including at planetsun.org.

For example, Professor Lawrence Lessig has pointed to ranked-choice voting in San Francisco this November.

SeongBae ("Bits and pieces") has written about the use of SunRay machines as voting tools. Azeem Jiva has echoed SeongBae's idea.

On my part, I've been writing about ranked-choice voting and the mathematics of elections and like SeongBae and Azeem Jiva have been thinking about possible ways to host a project for bringing Sun technology into the voting foray.

My suggestion is slightly different from Azeema Jiva's and SeongBae's but I think it can complement theirs.

Basically, what I'd like to do is to help some people to start a java.net forum project that would focus on bringing Condercet or Ranked-Choice voting to schools across the nation, as a Web Service which can host both pre-configured and configurable elections.

[The pre-configured one would, for example, be a national election, say a presidential election. The configurable ones are minor elections held for various purposes. More on this below.]

In other words, this is an almost-real voting system that allows school children to participate in all national votes and educates them regarding ranked-choice and Condercet voting.

What is interesting about this project is that some server-side computation will be required to resolve voting result ambiguities.

On the client side, we could use Java Card, we could distribute voting numbers to each school principle who requests it, we could use SunRays or whatever else to make it practical. The most practical approach may be the distribution to school administrators of unique voting numbers and "ballots" which could be entered by teachers or students who own them through the web.

This could be a very exciting project because it brings together a great deal of ready-to-go technology, allows for a twist on the voting system by its inclusion of ranked-choice / Condercet and has a great deal of social value which could motivate contributors. Finally, multiple people from various companies can collobrate, to implement and host the web service system on the server-side, possibly in different geos if it involves competing companies.

I think the first version of the application could be decently implemented by two to three engineers in less than three months.

Furthermore, the Web Service which will be hosting this voting system, will be available for people to configure or create votes of their own upon registration. It could even host a voting service for mobile devices. (Even silly votes, for example on who should lead a soccer team or be the captain, etc., could be hosted and carried out through any web-ready device.)

Finally, I'd be surprised if such a system doesn't already exist! If it doesn't, it should be started as a java.net forum project.

Return on Weblog Investments ( ROWI ? )

I originally wrote this entry on September 8, 2004, and published it on blogs.sun.com.

Sharij asks whether the economic returns on (company) Weblogs are justified by the required investment to produce them. In other words, is the bang worth the buck when it comes to weblogs?

Not everything done by employees or a company is for direct purposes of making a sale although almost everything that a company and its employees do will have some effect on its sales and revenues. The key phrase here is "market perception" and the key concept is the role business entities play in influencing the way market perceives them.

Furthermore, the improtant thing about Weblogs is the fact that they enable human beings (hopefully, with some expertise, interest or concern) to participate in the formation and digestion of (mostly random) information.

So, while there has been a lot of hype about search, nothing can replace a good dose of reality. For example, see a recent weblog by Colm Smyth who has written on bridges to and from RSS. No amount of search would have enabled me to have access to the type of information Colm has put together in a simple paragraph. This is the irreplaceable, human-factor part of weblogs.

The effect of company weblogs on sales is subtle, unpredictable and uninformative at best.

Digital Rights Management, Where is the Big Question

I originally wrote this entry on September 7, 2004, and published it on blogs.sun.com.

Digital

Rights Management (DRM) is one of the big technology questions web engineers have to deal with today. [For some introductory material, see this Australian Government guide to DRM. Also, ACM has held some workshops on DRM.]

In my view, a workable DRM system should allow some reasonable amount of content sharing. [See my notes on content sharing: To Share or Not to Share, That's the Question and To Share or Not to Share (II).]

Digital content distribution services continue to grow.

RealNetworks, for example, reports that its content business has grown more than 50% (at $99 million) while its enterprise software business has fallen by 14% (at $26 million). This shift in revenues goes back to 2000, the WSJ reports.

Many companies see their content services as a cash cow they need to protect at any cost. They are developing propriety systems that could be perceived as closed off to other content distribution systems. On the other hand, some may argue that distribution systems need to be protected to ensure their healthy evolution.

Looking to bridge that gap, RealNetworks recently introduced Harmony, a technology that lets consumers purchase songs on its RealPlayer Music Store site and transfer them to iPods or dozens of other players. Apple has threatened to sue RealNetworks and alter its technology to block such transfers.

(Marcelo Prince, The WSJ, Sept. 1, 2004.)

Is it in the interest of content owners for there to exist incompatible systems of content distribution and digital rights management?

This is a hard question to answer. On the one hand, more incompatibiltiy means greater barriers to wanton content sharing. On the other hand, more incompatibility may mean greater reluctance to join the digital music market as a buyer.

Finally, as I've said earlier, the most important question to ask in designing a DRM system, besides those very important questions related to limited-term copyright issues, is whether the system will allow some reasonable amount of content sharing.

Most blogs have trade value ! ! ! . . .

I originally wrote this entry on September 3, 2004, and published it on blogs.sun.com.

If you write a blog, you may want to check out Blogshares on your own and see what your trade value is. All blogs have some trade value calculated according to rules given in Blogshares. However, to trade in others' blogs, I think you need to be registered.

Geoff Arnold has written a note about being traded on Blogshares. I have also written a brief note on Blog trading at Blogshares that may be of some interest to you.

How Important is Anonymity?

I originally wrote this entry on August 31, 2004, and published it on blogs.sun.com.

It has been argued that anonymity is an important and very subtle feature of a minimally acceptable identity management technology.

In fact, the Liberty Project has designed its network identity management protocols to preserve a certain degree of (partial) anonymity acceptable to the European regulatory regime, which is (or used to be?) more strict in its anonymity requirements than the U.S. regulatory regime.

When is anonymity good to have and when do we have too much of it? Perhaps, it is better to ask when anonymity is justified and when not.

Criminals like to be anonymous, and the administrators in Washington often release, to the press, anonymous tips regarding their friends and foes, policies and avowed intentions.

What if someone anonymously releases information (say on the comment section of a weblog) that could cause harm to the person about which the information has been released?

For example, is this subpoena against Indymedia (for pointing to a public list of RNC delegates) even justified or meaningful?

If we take these cases far enough, do we end up with grand jury subpoena against a person who has aggregated (for release) dispersed but publicly available information.

In summary, does the act of aggregation and organization of information become criminal? Does offering the possibility of posting anonymous content on web sites and web logs become criminal?

I'm afraid, when bearing in mind that for some individuals security can be used to justify any limits on rights, there may be no satisfactory, working answers to any of these questions.

RSS, The Acronym . . . to Search

I originally wrote this entry on August 30, 2004, and published it on blogs.sun.com.

Acronyms often have multiple uses, and I have been wanting to write something about the multitude of things for which "RSS" stands.

I first ran into "RSS" as "Received Signal Strength." It is still used in that sense. For example, in Anthony J. Weiss' "On the Accuracy of a Cellular Location System Based on RSS Measurements" published in Vehicular Technology, IEEE Transactions on , Volume: 52 , Issue: 6 , Nov. 2003.

Then there is "RSS" standing for "Radar Support System." For example, see B. O'Hern, et al.'s " The Radar Support System (RSS): a tool for siting radars and predicting their performance" published in Aerospace and Electronic Systems Magazine, IEEE , Volume: 12 , Issue: 12 , Dec. 1997.

There's also "RSS" as in "Resource Sharing System." I won't bother with an IEEE citation. I think by now you trust it can be found.

Last but not least is "RSS" as in Really Simple Syndication, possibly the most favorite use of the acronym for those of us who spend a good deal of our lives on the web.

Acronymfinder gives IBM as the user of RSS as an acronym for "Retail Store Solutions." How Acronymfinder got that fact into its index remains a puzzle. Perhaps, they used the same investigative techniques that they employed to associate "Remote Surveillance System" with Tom Clancy. Frankly, I've read absolutely nothing from Clancy. But why was I not surprised to learn he gets a kick out of generating acronyms? Perhaps, they make his novels more "real," at least for some people who must matter. I do know some people who live through his novels, and can testify that they do love acroynms but my sample size is quite small.

I just wrote this weblog because I don't think everyone out there really uses RSS in the same way as the blogging community does. It's important to know about such differences and variations.

I'm sure there are a number of other things "RSS" stands for.

Now, here comes the catch--a question about search.

If I've heard RSS used in one of these senses and do a search on Google, how do I get what I want? Try it yourselves. For example, try to see if you can find any mention of RSS as received signal strength in a context associated with AT&T Wireless.

Devices Profile

I originally wrote this entry on August 26, 2004, and published it on blogs.sun.com.

Quite a number of my friends working for mobile device vendors (or with Sun partners who are mobile device vendors) have approached and asked me what I thought about Microsoft's Devices Profile for Web Services.

My immedate reaction is that I'm not sure if the approach connects to a good idea.

Why invest such amount of effort at the Web Services protocol level when many high-market-share device vendors believe their devices will soon be able to handle the whole WS protocol stack? Second, I point people to JSR 172, where Java APIs such as JAX-RPC and JAX-P have been "profiled" for use within J2ME environment.

JibJab: Kids Love Comedy

I originally wrote this entry on August 25, 2004, and published it on blogs.sun.com.

Last year, when I ran into the works of Mark Fiore, The Village Voice web cartoonist, I immediately showed it to my 10-year-old daughter who loves comedy.

Now, she is becoming a web cartooning aficionado herself.

This summer, she was attending a language camp in Germany, where everyone seems to have learned or already known about JibJab.com. JibJab's This Land cartoon and parody has become a world-wide hit, and its owners will probably make a good deal bringing even more comedy to the web.

Ineffectiveness of automated translation on the Web

I originally wrote this entry on August 18, 2004 and published it on blogs.sun.com.

On the Lessig Blog, Tim Wu has written about the Balkanization of the Web, and in a later post, he writes about the ineffectiveness of automated translation to solve the problem. As I noted earlier, what is needed, practical, effective and possible is not automated translation but multi-lingualism and multi-cultural upbringing, or one that has a built-in tolerance for the other. This naturally occurs in some cultures. Others have a way of avoiding it with a great pull to conformity of ideas. For example, if one watches 10 hours of television a day in a particular language from a particular culture, it is highly likely that person will grow with a great degree of identification with his own culture and language as learned from the television environment, particularly when the programming is (mechanically) designed to be highly attractive. Whether a culture which is primarily propagated through television could be an authentic culture or not is a serious matter for consideration.

A London Blogging Directory

I originally wrote this entry on August 18, 2004 and published it on blogs.sun.com.

Writing weblogs has a tendency of drawing one to other blogging communities.

It's a form of participatory, or popular culture rather than a mass culture.

Personally, I'm still trying to understand the role of blogging directories (see here) such as the London Bloggers which organizes blogs on different dimensions, including their "originating" tube station sites.

Perhaps, someone can explain the significance of associating blogs with the tube stations on the London Bloggers.

Of course, there are other blogs that are devoted to life on the London Underground. Presumably, this would be best readable if it were easily accessible through mobile devices. Perhaps it is. I have not checked it.

The Ranking of Persian Weblogs

I originally wrote this entry on August 5, 2004 and published it on blogs.sun.com.

I had heard that Persian language weblogs are a big hit but only learned how big when I looked up the top 100 weblogs on blogshares.

The number 2 spot was taken by PersianBlog ! (August 8, 2004)

Those who are veteran webloggers have probably known about blogshares for some time. For me, it was quite a new discovery.

The blogshares system was conceived and programmed by Seyed Razavi in Java and PHP. Side note : As a curiosity and in case you wondered about the similarity of names, my last name, "Mortazavi," is an inflection of "Reza," as is "Razavi". Both of us have the honorific "seyed" as part of our last name. (All of these quoted words are of course in Arabic.) What all this means is that we're very distant relatives with our commonality of ancestors diverging first from a few to several centuries ago.

Blogshares includes ranking of weblogs and a set of rules and strategies for exchanging "shares" of weblogs.

The Persian-language PersianBlog contains such diversity of opinion and topics that it is guaranteed to dazzle and satisfy all Persian-speakers (or more precisely, Persian-readers) who visit it. I found quality material on just about every topic I looked at. Not only the content but the quality and quantity of outgoing links are truly incredible. They open up truly new vistas for the Persian reader. One curiosity, perhaps for the non-Persian, will be the tradition of many Persian-language weblogs (as well as web sites) to include music as background for the textual material, often the music accentuates the reading of the text or category.

Blogshares even posts the ranking of some inconsequential weblogs. Its weblog stock market rules are rather egaliterian and no big IPOs are necessary ! ; - )

Wiretapping VoIP and PoC

I originally wrote this entry on August 5, 2004, and published it on blogs.sun.com.

In a 5-0 preliminary ruling, the FCC has extended the wiretapping requirements of CALEA (Communications Assistance for Law Enforcement Act) to VoIP (Voice over IP) and PoC (Push-to-talk on Cellular).

(The preliminary rulling does not affect, non-service-provided, peer-to-peer VoIP.)

See Tim Wu's blog for a brief on the economic and legal issues the ruling raises.

See Declan McCullagh and Ben Charny's report on news.com for a report and related material.

ACLU, Americans for Tax Reform, and Center for Democracy and Technology have already expressed their reservations against extending the CALEA to the Internet service providers.

What I want to highlight here briefly is some of the technical difficulties of wiretapping on the Internet as opposed to the traditional PSTN networks.

The major difficulty arises because of the built-in routing flexibilities in the Internet. In other words, what makes the Internet resilient to local failures also makes it harder to wiretap.

Packets can take different routes. For example, RTP (the real-time transport protocol), the most common protocol for conveying VoIP packets, does not require a reservation model along the lines of RSVP. The main thing about RTP as compared to TCP is that it does not retransmit "droped" or "lost" packets composing its "voice" or other media payloads.

Some of these difficulties of wiretapping could lead to business models where consumer devices have modules capable of actively participating in wiretapping. These business models are broken from the start.

Requiring that such devices be put in the consumer's hands may discourage use of the Internet and make it more expensive. Furthermore, alternate non-conforming but smart devices could be installed to defeat the purpose of wiretapping or to skirt it all together.

Taking the non-device-dependent approach, the level of coordination required for wiretapping on the network, through firewalls and other intermediaries, not to mention through a variety of routers and switches, is truly mind boggling.

Wiretapping solutions (independent of end-point device participation) will only be available at considerable cost. (As recorded in Declan McCullagh and Ben Charny's report on news.com, Verizon Wireless' lukewarm response to the FCC's preliminary ruling confirms these difficulties.)

Same technical issues and difficulties hold for Wiretapping PoC.

Finally, while congress appropriated $500 million to reimburse traditional PSTN phone companies for CALEA compliance, such compensation will apparently not be available to VoIP and PoC providers.

We the Media

I originally wrote this entry on August 4, 2004, and published it on blogs.sun.com.

The full content of Dan Gillmor's book, We the Media, is now available. The book discusses weblogs and more.

I would say the title is exaggerating the power of web-logs.

As I've noted below, the vast majority of the public relies on the common mass media (e.g. TV, Radio, etc.) as source of news, views, culture and more.

WSJ's RSS feeds

I originally wrote this entry for blogs.sun.com on August 3, 2004.

The Wall Street Journal, the newspaper of business record, has finally rolled out their RSS feeds as of last week.

If you have access to the electronic WSJ, you may also want to check out the following article by Thomas Weber: Blogs Help You Cope With Data Overload (WSJ, July 8, 2004, B1).

Here's a list of blogs and descriptions provided by Weber in his article:

• 
  GENERAL INTEREST: Boing Boing (www.boingboing.net) is one of the Web's most established blogs, and one of its most popular, too. By "general interest," I mean of general interest to your average Internet-obsessed technophile. The focus isn't explicitly on technology, but expect it to skew in that direction -- over a recent week, posting topics included robots, comic books and a cool-looking electric plug.
  
• 
  ECONOMICS: EconLog (econlog.econlib.org) offers a thoughtful and eclectic diary of economics, tackling both newsy developments (the real-estate market, taxes) and theory. It also includes a list of other good economics blogs -- there are more than you might think.
  
• 
  GADGETS: Engadget (www.engadget.com) can be counted on for a good half-dozen or more news morsels each day on digital cameras, MP3 players, cellphones and more. When it isn't the first to stumble across something good, it isn't shy about linking to another blog with an interesting post, so it's usually pretty up to date.
  
• 
  POLITICS: WatchBlog (www.watchblog.com) has stuck with an interesting concept for more than a year now. It's actually three blogs in one: separate side-by-side journals tracking news on the 2004 elections from the perspective of Democrats, Republicans and independents.
  
• 
  TECHNOLOGY: Lessig Blog (www.lessig.org/blog). OK, this one's about politics too. More specifically, it covers the intersection between regulation and technology. Its author, Stanford law professor and author Lawrence Lessig, weighs in on copyright, privacy and other challenging topics in high-tech society.
  

Hyper-Learning or Hype

In the second essay in his book, On the Internet, Hubert

Dreyfus focuses on the following question: How far is distance learning from education? Answering this specific question leads, by extension, to answering a more general question: Can we learn anything on the internet? The reason I draw that conclusion is that much of "distance learning" is going to be powered by the internet.

Dreyfus' answer to this question is: it all depends!

First, he notes that learning has many stages:

• The novice can understand tasks decomposed to their context-free features. The teacher says: Here's a tennis racket. Here's the handle. Here's the head. You hit the ball with the head, not the handle.
  
  
• The advanced beginner learns some of the more subtle features through examination of examples and exercises. The teacher says: Look at how this champion or that champion of the game plays it. Try this move or that other move.
  
  
• The competent goes beyond the beginner. The beginner is missing what is important in any given situation and finds it tedious and nerve racking to perform, wondering how any one could master the skills. A competent individual is more involved and discerns what is important in any given situation. The tennis player knows when to come to the net and when to keep his distance.
  
  
• The proficient has reached a stage where intuitive reactions have replaced reasoned (or calculative) responses. Situational responses become more important than the performer's theory of the skill. The tennis player comes to the net and keeps his distance without any concern for the theory of tennis.
  
  
• The expert not only sees what needs to be achieved but "thanks to his vast repertoire of situational discriminations, he also sees immediately how to achieve his goal." The expert can make more subtle and refined discriminations than the proficient.
  
  
• The next stage is practical wisdom which has to do with exercising ones skills within a cultural context. Practicing the art of team work and programming in China, India and U.S. have subtle differences. Only through practical wisdom can one operate within each culture.
  
  

So what's the upshot?

Well, Dreyfus says that even if telepresence works really well, it is still quite hard to have a committed master-student relationship and the involvement which is necessary for gaining expertise and practical wisdom. Hyper-learning becomes mere hype. Dreyfus says that at best competence can be gained through distance learning but even that depends on how much presence can be had through telepresence . . . It turns out, the answer is "not much."