onfocus

Post Office Gargoyle - Corvallis, OR

A fantastic and well-researched article by Janis Ian about the horrible state of the music industry: The Internet Debacle - an Alternative View. [via MeFi] "There is zero evidence that material available for free online downloading is financially harming anyone. In fact, most of the hard evidence is to the contrary."

I'm not into baseball, but I always get suckered by the playoff games. I go from casually listening to a few innings early in the season—to screaming at the TV through the entire game by the end of the season. Nice work Giants. Last time they were in the world series there was a horrible earthquake in the Bay Area. I'm sure that's a coincidence. It's not like MLB controls the tectonic plates. (They will someday, but not now...)

I'm against preemptive military strikes. And I vote. (A bit long for a bumper sticker.) I won't be voting for anyone who approved the Iraq resolution. I don't believe they were listening to their constituents...and they didn't even amend the White House's wording or put in an expiration date. (Bush 0wNz3rz Congress!) Beyond voting them out, all we can do is hope that this bit of legislation doesn't become this generation's Gulf of Tonkin resolution, and keep public pressure on our representatives to make sure it doesn't happen.

Now, about that economy...

With a tagline like that, it's gotta be good. (Jason is writing a weblog about the new Spike Jonez movie Adaptation.)

I've been listening to the Senate debate the resolution that will authorize the President to use whatever means necessary to preemptively dismantle Iraq—in whatever way he sees fit. The debate has been spirited, and the best part has been listening to Senator Byrd from West Virginia. You can read a transcript of some of his comments, but to get the full effect, check out the MP3 of his speech on that page. This speech was only the beginning of a series of his passionate speeches about this issue. He is almost the lone voice of dissent in the Senate, and I admire his conviction. (I predict that the kids will soon be trading political speeches on Kazaa.)

btw, if you're interested in listening to the Senate debate this issue, check your local NPR radio station. The Bay Area NPR station (KQED) has been preempting their regular programming to air the audio of the debates when they're happening. For some reason, CSPAN doesn't seem to be covering it.

Beautiful sunset at the coast tonight...

Where have you been all my life, Kraftwerk?

There's a great article on Boxes and Arrows about Microsoft's intranet. (The article was written by the authors of Information Architecture for the WWW.) Microsoft has over 3 million intranet pages, content created by over 50,000 employees, and over 8,000 separate intranet sites. Aggregating all of that data into a useful whole is an interesting problem. (Not unlike trying to aggregate information across thousands of weblogs.) They're using a single metadata schema (borrowed from the Dublin Core) to facilitate searching and browsing across the intranet. Applying some of these methods to weblogs could increase their usefulness as a whole. [via Information Nation]

Part 2 of Microsoft's intranet series is worth reading as well. It has some good advice from one of their knowledge management analysts about how to develop a system that will be adopted: "...Improving information systems affects people, process and technologies. To not recognize that will spell doom...Another key is to have a multi-disciplinary team. Just one discipline does not have the answer."

Tonight on the NewsHour, Naomi Klein did an excellent job of articulating why people are protesting the IMF in Washington today (and around the world). They don't have a transcript up yet, but you can listen to the audio of the debate. I think the protesters are most often portrayed as a loose collection of trouble-makers without any defined agenda, but there are substantive issues behind their efforts.

Update: Here's the transcript.

New Software Quietly Diverts Sales Commissions (NYT): "The amounts involved are estimated by those in the industry to have mounted into the hundreds of thousands of dollars and are likely to continue to grow — in part because most users are unaware that the software is operating on their computers."

speaking of things being absorbed into mass culture—MSNBC Weblog Central.