Email badly needs some extras - a way to send money (which paypal has) and a client that prioritises mail based on the money included...
Also, a client that incorporates PGP properly, and prioritises signed mail above unsigned, and mail using your public key higher still.
Until then, there'll be lots more doomy articles like this one.

Fascinating piece on ebay, and how they realise they must listen to their customers or vanish.

Marc Canter steps up to defend fair use. He does it in a particularly strong form. The new terms the music biz is trying to impose go further than preventing you sharing music with friends, by making it hard or impossible to copy or play the music yourself. Defending the right to copy music for friends is harder than defending my right to play it myself on more than one device, in the order I want.

In the name of Digital Rights Management, corporations prevent you from editing or saving stuff they have published to you. This is odd, and at at odds with the spirit of Copyright.
No-one can tell you how much of their book to read, or the order you can read it in. Why do they presume to do so with sound or video? Why must I look at a green FBI notice for 15 seconds at the start of a DVD?

It is the act of re-publishing where the potential copyright violation occurs, not the act of viewing or editing.

Reject uneditable content and say why. Rights are for people, not digits or management.

Dan Gillmor is complaining about that old chestnut, the discrepancy between Hard Drive sizes as sold based on 1 GB=10⁹ bytes and computers that report sized based on 1 GB = 2³⁰ bytes. This is explained by the NIST in this helpful note that defines the SI prefixes of kibi, mebi and gibi for 2¹⁰, 2²⁰ and 2³⁰ respectively.

I therefore propose that complaining about this issue henceforth be known as 'kibibitzing'

Winer and Locke are having a spat about memes, and the 'meme' meme. Those of us who actually read about evolution rather than using it as a trope, realise the Richard Dawkins invented the term in The Selfish Gene, and returned to the meme theme in The Extended Phenotype. In the latter he describes:

... a completely non-genetic type of replicator, which flourishes only in the environment provided by complex, communicating brains. I called it the 'meme'.[...]
"I was insufficiently clear about the distinction between the meme itself as replicator on the one hand and its 'phenotypic effects' or 'meme products' on the other. A meme should be regarded as a unit of information residing in a brain.[...]
"The phenotypic effects of a meme may be in the form of words, music, visual images, styles of clothes, facial or hand gestures, skills such as opening milk bottles in tits, or panning wheat in Japanese macaques.[...]

Dawkins later quotes correspondence between Wallace and Darwin, wherein Wallace suggests that Spencer's term 'survival of the fittest' is clearer and less question-begging than Darwin's 'Natural Selection'. Darwin liked this new phenotypic expression for his meme, but he said:

the term Natural Selection has now been so largely used abroad and at home that I doubt whether it could be given up, and with all its faults I should be sorry to see the attempt made. Whether it will be rejected must now depend on the 'survival of the fittest'...

Dawkins parenthetically notes "Darwin clearly understood the meme principle".

I can sympathise or at least empathise with Winer though. Too often the best storyteller for a particular audience can win out over someone who is constrained to telling the truth. A current example is the DRM debacle. Any competent engineer knows that the notion of locking up content from those who purchase it and view it on their own computers is technically impossible (setting aside the moral bankruptcy for a minute). The 'content owners' so much want this to be true that they are creating a market for snake-oil that appears to give them what they dream of. Which I suppose is poetic justice of a sort.

Tracing over pictures -

David Hockney's new book .Secret Knowledge is all about how old masters used camera obscura techniques to achive their realism, or so I read

meanwhile, the new movie Waking Life was made by a mob of animators drawing over video footage shot by the filmmaker.

Christopher Locke took exception to my Johnson quotes below. Could he be jealous because Johnson was gonzo long before he was?
He even defined network more concisely and clearly than Locke:
Johnson:
"anything reticulated or decussated at equal distances with interstices between the intersections. "
Locke:
"The net is a planet-spanning virtual ecosystem, a cognitive rain forest teeming with new concepts and connections, issues and inquiries, studies and speculations, proposals, predictions and unlimited potential. "

At 9:56 PM -0800 10/30/01, Geoffrey Nunberg wrote:
>Thanks for your note. Samuel Johnson said of his Dictionary, "[I] do not form, but register the language,"
>and it has always seemed to me rash for lexicographers to imagine they could improve on his program.

You have just inspired me to read Johnson's preface to his Dictionary, and I notice that he also said:

"...every language has likewise its improprieties and absurdities, which it is the duty of the lexicographer to correct or proscribe."
[...]
"Much less ought our written language to comply with the corruptions of oral utterance, or copy that which every variation of time or place makes different from itself, and imitate those changes, which will again be changed, while imitation is employed in observing them."
[...]
"Language is only the instrument of science, and words are but the signs of ideas: I wish, however, that the instrument might be less apt to decay, and that signs might be permanent, like the things which they denote."
[...]
"Our language, for almost a century, has, by the concurrence of many causes, been gradually departing from its original Teutonick character, and deviating towards a Gallick structure and phraseology, from which it ought to be our endeavour to recal it, by making our ancient volumes the ground-work of stile, admitting among the additions of later times, only such as may supply real deficiencies, such as are readily adopted by the genius of our tongue, and incorporate easily with our native idioms."
[...]
"...the licence or negligence with which many words have been hitherto used, has made our stile capricious and indeterminate; when the different combinations of the same word are exhibited together, the preference is readily given to propriety, and I have often endeavoured to direct the choice."

Now we get to the bit you elide:

"Some senses however there are, which, though not the same, are yet so nearly allied, that they are often confounded. Most men think indistinctly, and therefore cannot speak with exactness; and consequently some examples might be indifferently put to either signification: this uncertainty is not to be imputed to me, who do not form, but register the language; who do not teach men how they should think, but relate how they have hitherto expressed their thoughts.

The imperfect sense of some examples I lamented, but could not remedy, and hope they will be compensated by innumerable passages selected with propriety, and preserved with exactness; some shining with sparks of imagination, and some replete with treasures of wisdom."


And a little further on:

"Nor are all words which are not found in the vocabulary, to be lamented as omissions. Of the laborious and mercantile part of the people, the diction is in a great measure casual and mutable; many of their terms are formed for some temporary or local convenience, and though current at certain times and places, are in others utterly unknown. This fugitive cant, which is always in a state of increase or decay, cannot be regarded as any part of the durable materials of a language, and therefore must be suffered to perish with other things unworthy of preservation."
[...]

A long passage on how languages decay, followed by this exhortation:

"If the changes that we fear be thus irresistible, what remains but to acquiesce with silence, as in the other insurmountable distresses of humanity? it remains that we retard what we cannot repel, that we palliate what we cannot cure. Life may be lengthened by care, though death cannot be ultimately defeated: tongues, like governments, have a natural tendency to degeneration; we have long preserved our constitution, let us make some struggles for our language."

You were right; I don't think you could improve on this programme. Please re-read it in full, and follow it closely.

In late 1995, I got a headhunter call for a tech management job at a big flash Brand and Identity company whose name I can't remember. Having worked with the weirdos at Wolff Olins, I went along for a chat. I explained they didn't know it, but they were in the memetic engineering business. They looked blank. I didn't take the job.

Anyway, this blog entry is in honour of RageBoy, who is putting the emetic into memetic engineering.

It's 3 in the morning, and I should go home instead of getting into this.