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."