Friday, May 28, 2004

Frontline interview with rock star David Crosby. 

Rory Kaplan: "I've been in the music industry for 30 years." 

Steve Gillmor: "Bill Gates chose carefully his first public comments on RSS and the tectonic shift it's rending across the technology landscape." 

Engadget: A $50 iPod from Microsoft? 

Michael Gartenberg: "There is no $50 iPod from Microsoft." 

Still cleaning up. The next thing is to figure out how to get rid of popups that are watching where I go, and popping up ads that are related. I've run Ad-aware several times, asked it to remove everything it finds, but somehow it's not catching this demon. 

Four years ago, twenty-two pictures from Venezia. 

Five years ago today, Scott Rosenberg, writing in Salon, wrote a milestone piece about the then-nascent world of weblogs.  

In response to Scott's essay: "Salon (justifiably) brags that they've matured to the point where they could send a reporter to Yugoslavia. But the web was already there. People on the ground all over the world. Some of them are great writers and have passion for the truth and aren't serving the same masters that the bigtimes at WSJ, NYT and CNN. And most of them don't have websites, yet, largely because it is too complicated and expensive to have one. When this bubble bursts we'll get a new burst of diversity in thought and vision on the web." 

BBC: "Californian senators have approved a bill that limits Google's plans to scan messages and include ads based on what it finds." 

Political Wire: "Kerry is expanding the use of biographical ads to introduce himself, while President Bush is running negative ads to try to define his opponent first." 

Still working on the clean-up. Last night before the Berkman meeting I mentioned what happened to John Palfrey, he said he had a Kazaa computer, one he never boots. Come on it can't be that bad... Maybe it can. Here's a screen shot of the Windows Task Manager. Note that the window is gone. No menus. No tabs. Just a list of processes. Something is hosed. And the computer goes into limbo periodically. Doesn't respond to mouse clicks or keystrokes. Lasts a few seconds, then unsticks. Very hard to work with. My machine has done both things before, without Kazaa. Hey to make amends I bought a couple of $20 music CDs yesterday. Maybe I should pray to the RIAA.  

Postscript: Several people wrote to say that the apparently-broken task manager can be fixed by double-clicking in the gray border of the window. Sure enough, it worked. Thanks!!