So I'm at home today, listening to a radio station from Munich, Germany streamed over the web.
A friend of mine in Boston called me on his speakerphone at work.
The guy sitting in the cubicle next to him was on the phone with a colleague in Tokyo.
The guy in Tokyo apparently heard via my friend's speakerphone speaker, the Guns n Roses song being broadcast from Munich.
How amazing is technology?
I get to be a beta tester of MSFT Office 2007.
Here's a screen shot of Excel 2007:
16000+ columns and over 1 million rows.
A lot of changes from previous version of Excel.
Color me underwhelmed*:
I'm a pretty heavy Excel user, and this interpretation of a spreadsheet doesn't seem to offer much other than the ability to create data tables, simple calculations, etc.
I suppose it may have utility for people looking to share simple data via a spreadsheet, and not have to pay MSFT's licensing fees. This offering will have to become much more robust before I would consider using it regularly.
See some of my other questions about the offering here.
*Please note I don't have any special connections at Google and so I can't get you an invite to this offering. I just sent them an email asking to be a beta tester and they granted me access.
Google has announced plans to offer a web-based spreadsheet program.
Being a so-called power-user of Excel (VBA, pivot tables, financial modeling, the whole nine yards) I will be curious to see if (1) the software offered by Google is as deep and functional as that offered by Microsoft Excel; (2) what advantages, if any, Google's offering has over Microsoft's; and (3) how well their spreadsheet program integrates with various database packages (MySQL, Access, etc.)
The New York Times Magazine has a long article about Google's investment in China. The message of the article seems to be that the Chinese are docile when it comes to government-inspired censorship, either because they are intimidated or merely don't know any other way of living:
It was difficult for me to know exactly how Lee felt about the company's arrangement with China's authoritarian leadership. As a condition of our meeting, Google had demanded that I not raise the issue of government relations; only the executives in Google's California head office were allowed to discuss those matters. But as Lee and I talked about how the Internet was transforming China, he offered one opinion that seemed telling: the Chinese students he meets and employs, Lee said, do not hunger for democracy. "People are actually quite free to talk about the subject," he added, meaning democracy and human rights in China. "I don't think they care that much. I think people would say: 'Hey, U.S. democracy, that's a good form of government. Chinese government, good and stable, that's a good form of government. Whatever, as long as I get to go to my favorite Web site, see my friends, live happily.' " Certainly, he said, the idea of personal expression, of speaking out publicly, had become vastly more popular among young Chinese as the Internet had grown and as blogging and online chat had become widespread. "But I don't think of this as a political statement at all," Lee said. "I think it's more people finding that they can express themselves and be heard, and they love to keep doing that."
Of course, anyone can say people don't "hunger" for democracy if those people either do not know what democracy is or are intimidated into not "hungering" for such.
Natan Sharansky's memoir, The Case For Democracy: The Power of Freedom to Overcome Tyranny and Terror, is a good place for Mr. Lee to start reading about the human mind. As the author of the article implies, it's hard to know where Lee's real feelings end and his public persona (both as a Chinese citizen and Google's public face in China) begin. Surely those who have fomented democratic revolutions in, say, America, or Poland, or Turkey*, or Indoesia, would argue that their hunger for democracy outstripped their desire to be oppressed.
Were it not the case that man did not yearn to be free, there would be no Rouseeau, no Boston Tea Party, and, obviously, no Tiananmen Square. Surely we are not to believe the canard that Chinese man is somehow inherently different to those American, Polish, Turkish, and Indonesian agitators for freedom.
*Before you say "But wait! Turkey is an Islamic country and therefore is not democratic", consider (1) the relative freedom of Turks as compared to their Saudi or Egyptian neighbors and (2) the secular precepts upon which Ataturk founded modern Turkey.
First: A map of public restrooms in Manhattan.
Second: Google Finance, showing information for Pfizer. A very cool application of Google technology. Seems more interactive than other finance sites, such as Yahoo.
Lost in all the hand-wringing over Yahoo, Microsoft, and Google's capitulation to Chinese demands, it seems inevitable that the great censorship debates will fall by the wayside. The internet's distributed architecture, combined with the ingenuity of expatriate Chinese and their sympathizers, will allow so-called "hacktivists" to devise ways to circumvent China's censorship efforts.
The Wall St. Journal reports:
Roughly a dozen Chinese government agencies employ thousands of Web censors, Internet cafe police and computers that constantly screen traffic for forbidden content and sources -- a barrier often called the Great Firewall of China. Type, say, "media censorship by China" into emails, chats or Web logs, and the messages never arrive.Even with this extensive censorship, Chinese are getting vast amounts of information electronically that they never would have found a decade ago. The growth of the Internet in China -- to an estimated 111 million users -- was one reason the authorities, after a week's silence, ultimately had to acknowledge a disastrous toxic spill in a river late last year. But the government recently has redoubled its efforts to narrow the Net's reach on sensitive matters.
It has required all bloggers, or writers of Web logs, to register. At the end of last year 15 Internet writers were in jail in China, according to the Committee to Protect Journalists, a New York group. China also has gotten some U.S. Internet companies to limit the search results they provide or the discussions they host on their Chinese services. A tiny firm Mr. Xia set up to provide and maintain Freegate had to lobby computer-security companies such as Symantec Corp., of Cupertino, Calif., not to treat it as a virus.
In response to China's crackdown, and to restrictions in many Middle Eastern countries as well, a small army has been mustered to defeat them. "Hacktivists," they call themselves.
Bennett Haselton, a security consultant and former Microsoft programmer, has developed a system called the Circumventor. It connects volunteers around the world with Web users in China and the Middle East so they can use their hosts' personal computers to read forbidden sites.
Cross-posted at Blogger News Network.
Google is getting into the advertising business in a much more sophisticated way than it had been previously, and Madison Avenue is getting nervous:
Once an industry backwater reserved for wonks, media-buying has become more glamorous -- and crucial for clients. Worried about the effectiveness of traditional TV ads, advertisers are putting more emphasis on new marketing methods including the Internet and mobile devices. Media buyers serve as a guide to this tangled landscape. In recent years, ad companies have poured increasing resources into their media-buying units in an attempt to attract clients.Enter Google. The company became an online ad powerhouse by selling search-related ads both on its own Web sites and elsewhere on the Internet. Advertisers like what Google has to offer because not only can they target their ads to a very specific audience -- people interested in their products -- but they pay only when users click on their ads.
Seeing an opportunity to expand that expertise into traditional media, Google in recent months has purchased ad pages in two technology magazines and made the space available to some of its advertisers. Google has also indicated that it is thinking about extending its ad-placement services to other areas, possibly including TV.
Details of its plans remain fuzzy. Google co-founder Sergey Brin told investors earlier this month that its magazine-ad deals are part of a test, although he added that "hundreds of other publications have expressed interest in participating." The company won't discuss further specifics of the magazine "test" or any other possible ad brokering activities under consideration. But it is likely that any Google system will provide tools to make it easier for advertisers to target a susceptible audience and track the ads' performance, as Google's online ads have done. One possibility: a system of counting the phone calls to toll-free-response numbers featured in Google-placed print ads. That way, advertisers could gauge the success of their ads and Google could charge advertisers only for each response they get -- as it does online.
Sounds good to me. The advertising business has long seemed rather old-fashioned and insular, replete with heavy costs and little profit. If Google can shake up the status quo, why should we care? Creative destruction is, after all, the byproduct of capitalism.
Quick question: if a company offered to give you quick access to snippets of all the books ever published so that you could make an informed decision about whether the whole contents of the book you are thinking of buying is relevant to your purpose, you would want that service, right?
Wrong, according to the publishing industry. The Wall Street Journal publishes an opinion piece by one Cameron Stracher, a writer and publisher of the New York Law School Review:
Publishers contend that Google is depriving them of opportunities to create their own searchable index -- and of a revenue stream from their own property. They sound just like the music industry, which abdicated one of the greatest opportunities in tech history to the Napsters. Lawsuits can't stop innovation by bottling it up in court. Consumers want content; authors live to provide it to them. When corporate interests get in the way, the only people who are hurt are the public and the creators of that content. Authors may think they're protecting their rights; but they're protecting the rights of publishers to make another dime off their backs. Authors might even welcome such exploitation if publishers really had plans to make a dime (and pay them their 12% royalty). But history teaches us that you can't teach an old dinosaur new tricks.
Publishing is a sentimental industry run by quasi-academic, urban intellectuals who dare not muddy themselves with the dirt of commerce. They are insular, anachronistic, and not at all technologically savvy. (That this description also fits many music executives should not go unnoticed, as implied in the passage quoted above.)
It is high time that the free markets and technological innovation forced the publishers' hands and modernized the industry.
Apparently, there is a lot of concern among parents today about kids' reliance on technology. The concern is that kids immersed in the digital world know nothing of the analog world.
Consider this tidbit from the Wall St. Journal:
Yes, we should encourage kids to read books and newspapers. But we also must recognize that they collect information from unorthodox sources: blogs, cyber gossip, advertising, comedians. The Internet is filled with shady truths, and kids try to determine which outlets are trustworthy, says generational marketing consultant Ann Fishman. "If it's good, they go with it. If not, they don't. It's called 'Internet thinking.' They don't have a Walter Cronkite." We can help kids sort through the Internet cacophony by discussing with them what they find there, says Dr. Simon.Six million young people are using America Online's Red service for teens, which is designed to ease parents' concerns by controlling Internet access. Still, AOL's service is purposely edgy, with its teen Q&A offering titled "Truth or Crap." A Web page called "True or False" wouldn't work for today's kids, says Malcolm Bird, senior vice president of AOL's youth area. "You have to speak to them in relevant terms." The lesson for parents: Even "safe" sites mimic the coarseness in our culture. Know what's there.
The special AOL service just sounds lame--can you really imagine any techno-savvy kid using AOL and feeling cool about it--and the concern about kids getting information from "unorthodox" places is unfounded. Consider why AOL calls its web page "Truth or Crap": because kids are savvy enough to know that they are being marketed to, AOL is trying, lamely, to be "edgy." But if kids are savvy enough to know when they are being manipulated, and AOL has to try to emulate their hipster patois, then surely kids are savvy enough to separate truth from fiction.
Yes, there will always be kids too stupid to tell rumor from fact, but this ignorance is not a function of technological pervasiveness. Ignorance is a universal human phenomenon and has nothing to do with the spread of technology. Ignorance is a function of a lack of critical thinking, and people have shown a resolute refusal to engage in critical thought long before the internet became the primary medium through which kids communicate and interact with the world.
This kind of technophobic fear-mongering is irresponsible. The implicit criticism of blogs as a source of information--"unorthodox"--is absurd.
The email address of the journalist responsible for this trite recitation of Luddite fears is: Jeffrey.Zaslow@wsj.com
I wouldn't think it is, but apparently, some lawyers seem to think so.
Shanti Braford quotes a letter from a Los Angeles law firm representing Dreamworks SKG (Spielberg's, Katzenberg's, and Geffen's production company), which was sent to a BitTorrent site hosted in Sweden, alleging violation of the United States Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA).
I hear the next thing on the lawyers' agenda is to send a letter to Pyongyang informing Kim Jong-Il that he has abrogated his citizens' First Amendment rights.
Techdirt posts an interesting story:
Apparently a rape conviction has been overturned and a retrial ordered after a member of the jury used the internet to research the crime of rape. That juror apparently printed out the documents and brought them into the jury room as well. This gets increasingly tricky in an information age, when doing additional research has become like second nature to many people. For some people, it's probably almost impossible not to call up Google and do some extra research if they're asked to make a difficult decision, such as deciding someone's fate as a juror. The problem, of course, is that the defendant's lawyers have no chance to see what the jurors are reading or to rebut the claims they make. However, in an age where Google seems like an extension of the brain for many people, this sort of issue is going to come up more and more often.
I was on jury duty a couple of years ago, for a personal injury case. The first day we went into the courtroom, the judge laid out the rules of the game so to speak, and one of the first things she said was that when we deliberate we were to foucs only on instructions given by her to us, not on any preconceived notions of the law that we had, etc., etc. We were not, we were explicitly told, to do any legal research on our own, especially via the internet.
Of course, given my temperaments, the first thing I did when I got home from jury duty that day was to disregard the judge's instructions and do precisely that because, well, when a lawyer speaks it is always good to have a second opinion. (Do not read into that statement that I hate lawyers; my father worked in corporate litigation for many years, after all, and the education I received was a direct consequence of him being a lawyer. I'm just a skeptical person.) In any event, my experience, I am sure, is far from atypical.
(The case was eventually settled out of court, without us deliberating at all. After the judge told us we were excused, she told us that the lawyers on the case wanted to meet with us briefly, if we did not mind, and ask us about our reaction to the case. I told the lawyer for the plaintiff quite explicitly that her client didn't seem reliable and I would have argued for the defense in deliberations. An interesting lesson in jurisprudence.)
Check out this picture of the Gates, taken by a satellite.
Coolest thing is you can see my apartment building at 94th & Broadway.
How cool is technology?
[UPDATE: The link above inexplicably links to a Michelle Malkin column, not the relevant picture. I'm not sure how I did that; I will have to figure out where the picture is and link to it. In the mean time, just trust me. It's cool. Apologies.]
The phenomenon of network effects is pretty cool. A thing used to connect a person to another person, such as a phone or a fax machine is only good in proportion to the number of other such things in existence. If there are two fax machines in existence, their utility is small because the two fax machines can connect only to each other. If there are three in existence, that many more connections can be made; if there are millions of fax machines (or phones, or email addresses, or blogs) the total number of connections quickly exceeds hundreds of billions, if not trillions. To put this more succinctly, via Wikipedia, "[network effects] means that the total value ofa good or service that possesses a network effect is roughly proportional to the square of the number of customers already owning that good or using that service."
One implication of this is the idea of "six degrees of separation," which states that, roughly speaking, one person can be connected to any other person in a maximum of six steps. Example: Chelsea Clinton knows Bill Clinton who knows Bill Gates. Therefore, Chelsea Clinton is separated by two degrees from Bill Gates. The utility of her network, therefore, is dependent on the connections of the people to whom she is directly connected, such as her father. The value of her network, it could safely be said, is far greater than the value of my network, by dint of the kinds of people to whom she is directly connected.
This is all very interesting stuff. The blogosphere works in much the same way; Technorati's "authority" rankings works on the assumption that the connectedness of a given blog defines its position in the blogosphere firmament. I'm going on about this because I found Discover the Network! which purports to draw a map of the political left in the United States, showing all the connection between its various factions. It describes itself thusly:
This site is a "Guide to the Political Left." It identifies the individuals and organizations that make up the left and also the institutions that fund and sustain it; it maps the paths through which the left exerts its influence on the larger body politic; it defines the left's (often hidden) programmatic agendas and it provides an understanding of its history and ideas.The site is made up of two principal data elements along with a powerful search engine to locate and explore the information stored. The first of these elements is a database of PROFILES of individuals, groups and institutions, which can be accessed through the heptagram on the home page, or the DTN DIRECTORY on the navigation bar. The PROFILES provide thumbnail sketches of histories, agendas and (where significant) funding sources. More than 1,500 such groups and individuals have already been delineated in the PROFILES sections of this base. The information has been culled from public records readily available on the Internet and other sources, whose veracity and authenticity are easily checked.
The second data element of this site consists of a library of articles, which analyze the relationships disclosed in the database and the issues they raise. These analyses are drawn from thousands of articles, both scholarly and journalistic, that have been entered into the base and linked in the TEXT columns that appear on the PROFILE pages. The judgments that inform these analyses are subjective, reflecting informed opinion about the matters at hand. In every case possible, their authors and sources are identified so that users of the database can form their own judgments and opinions about the reliability and value of the analyses.
I'm testing Typepad right now. Looks cool to me so far.
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