Categories
Copyright

Google, YouTube, and the Good and Bad

Recovered from the Wayback Machine. I’m not one of those piling on the sack cloth and ashes over today’s ruling directing Google to turn YouTube user records over to Viacom. Was the ruling overreaching? Oh, probably without a doubt, but it also justifies the worries we’ve had about Google’s storage of our user information. In fact, it was […]

Categories
Critters

Squid Friday, early

A friend sent me a link to a Slate article, How Smart is the Octopus?, discussing how to measure the intelligence of a creature from a completely different world. So much of our intelligence measuring is based on tools, but tools are, themselves, nothing more than devices helping a species survive in a hostile environment. How […]

Categories
HTML5 RDF SVG

Son of Blob

Recovered from the Wayback Machine. Adobe has decided to partner with Yahoo and Google, specifically, in order to enable search engine access to Flash contents. In other words, web builders that use bad web practices have been rewarded, and can continue to use Flash to completely build their sites, without regard for accessibility or an open web. The […]

Categories
Weblogging

Watch the Birdie not the Hand: Scandal in Weblogging

Recovered from the Wayback Machine. There’s pile-ons, and then there’s pile-ons. Just when the people who owned Techmeme tried to generate a controlled burst of activity related to Loren Feldman, Shel Israel, and some stupid puppet (actually covered by the Guardian as news, to the ever lasting embarrassment of the British), the real story was going […]

Categories
Writing

O’Reilly and the goodies

Kathryn Barrett recently responded to an O’Reilly’s author who was unhappy about not having Safari Online access. I’ve seen these complaints before, which puzzle me because I’ve had Safari Online access since the online site was first launched. Which, I guess, means I’ve been an O’Reilly author for a long time. O’Reilly is also good about sending […]