A Joneser's rants and riffs, ideas and trends, musings and innovations - all for your perusal and reuse. Steal it. Use it. Tell others.

Wednesday, November 19, 2008

Oooh - I like this: News as a public service

In today's NYTimes:

“Information is now a public service as much as it’s a commodity,” he said. “It should be thought of the same way as education, health care. It’s one of the things you need to operate a civil society, and the market isn’t doing it very well.”
- from NYT, 11/19/2008, Web Sites That Dig for News Rise as Watchdogs
Laid off journos are being redeployed by guerrilla startup news services aimed at covering very local news in order to keep corrupt local pols and businesses in the community spotlight.

Monday, November 10, 2008

OBAMA!

Enough said on that for now - he is in, and I could not be happier about being an American in the 21st century.

In an op-ed piece in the NYTimes Nick Kristof wrote entitled Obama and the War on Brains, in which he discusses the reinvigoration of intellectualism in our Whitehouse and ergo in our country after an eight-year drought. I share his sentiments overall, and was inspired to fire off the below posting on his blog. After re-reading I thought I'd add it to my own collection - as so often happens articles I read coalesce my thoughts about various topics and out pops something I like.

Could it be that historically speaking the reason intellectual leaders tend to live in the shadows of leaders with lesser grey matter gifts is because intellectual horsepower is negatively correlated with political eptitude :-) ?

I mean, how did a nincompoop, mental midget like The Shrub get elected to Governor and then POTUS in the first place? Sure he had some help from Daddy and oil-sodden friends in that great southern republic. But still, he had to get to the finish line and somehow he did - beating out intellectually superior opponents - twice.

I see this in in the workplace, too. Intellectuals assume forthrightness and honesty more frequently, I think, and therefore are easy prey for those who would use those qualities to advance their own agendas. Just a thought. Oops - there I go again - laying myself wide open for political assault. Story of my life…
I've been wanting to get that off my chest for a few years. Feels good.

Wednesday, January 30, 2008

935

935 - that is the number of lies that Bush and seven of his top officials made in the two years following the 9/11 attacks, leading the US into the war with Iraq, according to research conducted by two different independent agencies. A trillion dollars and 4000 lives later the war is still underway, and the damage to our nation's reputation globally is incalculable.

You can read more about it here: http://www.publicintegrity.org/WarCard/ They are not making up the number. They are not playing with words or hyperbole. They are documenting the lies that are easily obtainable in the public record by anyone who cares to look.

We're not talking about lying about having sex with an intern here. We're talking about lying about a foreign nation's policies and actions, and using those lies as the basis for making a trillion dollar, 4000-life decision. Egregious. Heinous. The enormity (look that word up, folks - it doesn't mean large) of this administration's actions is on a par with just about any other evil propogated by a government in the last few hundred years.

And if you're wondering who the Center for Public Integrity is, just click on the "about us" link at the top of the page - you will find they are a non-partisan research group.

I am disgusted. This is disgraceful.

Sunday, January 13, 2008

2nd Amendment (again)

So the NYTimes once again has an article about the 2nd Amendment. This one does a nice job of analyzing the syntactical structure of the Amendment, stating that the first part (about an armed militia) is a "purpose clause", while the second part is an "operational clause." The reason for the article is the Supreme Court is presently evaluating the 2nd Amendment and is expected to decide something about it shortly.

Here's the 2nd Amendment:
A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, [purpose clause]

the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.
[operation clause]


Waxing oratorical, I drafted up this note to the editors at the NY Times:
To the Editor -

The reason for ensuring people have the right to keep and bear arms being encoded in the purpose clause, the need for this right should rest on whether it can be stated that an armed citizenry is capable of ensuring our nation's security today.
Reminds me of my college days studying Cicero.

Saturday, January 05, 2008

evhead: The Focus Paradox

RE: Focus

So EvHead wrote on his blog:

Both Facebook and Google had early success in (large?) part because of their focus. Google in terms of what they did, Facebook in terms of who could use it.

That success provided both pressure and opportunities to grow in new directions. Expansion is always tricky, and each company has handled it in different ways.

Discuss.
Reminds me of an article from the early 90s about the degree to which tech companies can successfully vertically integrate. For instance, in computers you've got

hardware components
hardware systems (ie, computers)
operating systems
middleware
software (apps)
content


The argument was that companies that tried to go farther than two levels above or below the one that was their core business would struggle. So take IBM. Core business initially was hardware. They also quickly got into components, like hard drives, which made sense for them. And they had to write their own O/S because no one else built the big boxes. Made sense. Same thing with some of the middleware apps, like DB2 (if that could be considered middleware). But look what happened when they tried to do software apps - when they bought Lotus. Notes could be considered a middleware app - it really is just a development environment, not an app. Most companies didn't appreciate that. But the real Lotus apps - 123, WordPro, and Freelance Graphics - are pretty much gone. IBM paid around $3 b for all this stuff, and couldn't make a successful run on Big Bill.

So....If I was Google or Facebook, I'd be thinking about the levels thing. First, what *are* the levels in the webworld? I've seen lists of them before, but I don't have them at hand. Then, what would represent "two steps" in either direction from search?