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Radio's Outliner: Google Outline Browser. "It's a different way to crawl through The Mind of Google."   Here's a screen shot of my G.O.B. I started with the outliners.com home page. It took me to Primeval C, then a TechWeb article about classic software, then to Dennis Ritchie, and from there to Bjarne Stroustrup, Don Knuth, Richard Stallman, Linus Torvalds, Andrew S. Tanenbaum, Woz, Brian Kernighan and Ken Thompson. BTW, this is very much like something I played around with in MORE in the 80s. We licensed a thesaurus. I wired it into the outliner. Type in a word. Double-click to see its synonyms. Repeat until exploration is done. It was a great way to think up product names. Browsing Google the same way is different. Sjoerd Visscher did a G.O.B. in HTML. He also offers some possible insight into Sam Ruby's light bulb. I added the three G.O.B.s to the apps sub-directory. I came across the word telegraphy in dictionary.com as I was Google Outline Browsing, and found many of the related pages were mine! Somehow it seems to have figured something out about me, or how I am perceived. The Mind of Google. Adam Curry is GOB'ing too! David Watson is combining Google with Swing. David Davies released a new version of his assetManager tool for Radio. Adam Curry released the long-awaited picture of his helicopter flight crew.  I had dinner with Adam Green last night. He just showed up in Calif out of the blue. We had sushi and talked about old times and current events. Adam, who is now a Boston-based angel investor, talks about how the software industry is wrecked. I agree of course, and I hope we can get back on track. Then I asked Adam a rhetorical question. What if, in 1979, the RIAA had sued Personal Software and shut them down. Could the PC revolution have happened without its breakthrough product? Something to think about. On this day in 1999, Jakob Nielsen advised that we were stuck with old browsers until 2003. Coool. Only eight more months. On this day in 1998, Bob Atkinson, one of the designers of XML-RPC, said that the debate over HTTP-POST was a red herring. Chuck Shotton agreed. "No disrespect to Jeff Allen, but his comments are FUD." The debate continues to surface from time to time on mail lists and weblogs. Kazaa, Morpheus, Brilliant  What really happened between Kazaa and Morpheus? Who owns Brilliant? I stopped watching Music-on-the-Internet when Napster was shut down. I'm back in the loop again, reading, asking questions, learning. I am not running the software on my desktop yet. Are you? 3/4/02, News.Com: Morpheus' downfall: Bills weren't paid. 4/8/02, Register: "Since late last year KaZaA downloads have contained 'sleeper' software which let Brilliant Digital Entertainment, a 3D advertising and modelling software start-up to activate Altnet, its own P2P network." 4/18/02, Wired: "Kazaa users, angered by the network's inclusion of secretly embedded spyware, can now connect to the peer-to-peer network using a hacked version of the application called Kazaa Lite." Who do you trust? The Wired article, linked above, may be the worst news yet for the RIAA. Their theory so far has been that they can shut down music sharing by shutting down companies like Napster, MP3.Com, Morpheus and Kazaa; and whatever pops up next. Their technologists seem to be telling them that there is no such thing as decentralized file sharing. But what if there is? And the music industry strategy may have a twist. Consider this possibility, and it's just a possibility. As they say on TV, this story is based on real events, but the story itself is fiction, real people are not portrayed. Let's say a popular music sharing network starts up. Call it Music For The People Networks (MFTPN). It's popular, millions of people download and use the software. MFTPN is low on money (of course) so a group of Hollywood producers, (apparent) renegades, start a new venture to capitalize on the flow of creative material over the Internet. They approach MFTPN, and say "Include our software in the package and we'll give you $3 million, no questions asked." MFTPN reviews the software and sees that it is what it appears to be, and says yes. But there's a back door, because the software can update itself over the Internet. Now behind the scenes, the renegade Hollywood group is actually funded by Disney, AOL and other members of the RIAA. Why would they give so much money to fund a company who develops software that they so despise? Fade to commercial. Tune in next week for the next episode  |
 
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