Some thoughts on censorship and the internet

Earlier this week, the MPAA and BT returned to court to agree subsiduary terms around the court injunction that BT is to use its Cleanfeed technology to block the newsbin2 web site. In considering the events in court and the judgement, I found an article I had written but not posted about the case and the politics, including the governments announcement to back the Hargreaves Review and Ofcom’s reticence in pursuing the use of the Digitial Economy Act’s web site blocking powers.

I have now published the article, called Censoring the Internet as at the 7th August, which is roughly when I finished it. …

Just one more cadre

I recently wrote to Loz Kaye, the leader of the UK Pirate Party, to congratulate him and his party on their brother’s and sister’s victory in Berlin. I pointed out that in Europe they were at a cross roads. As they grow in maturity and power as a political party, something yet to occur in the UK, it will become harder to talk to and work with supporters in other political parties. There is a mature balancing act to be taken in advancing their ideas, most of which I agree with, and winning political power. In my mind, they have to find a route between supporting the growth of broad campaigning groups such as the ORG or building their own organisation. There is a tendency in both the Liberal Democrats and the British Trotskyist movement to consider each new party member a victory for the cause. Both parties often win these cadres at the cost of those they create, dispirited by defeat who give up on politics. Each person who gives up on politics and hope is a loss to democracy, and we are not winning. …

The new ‘delicious’, startup pains

Delicious, the social bookmark site was taken over by avos.com during the week. They have rapidly refreshed the javascripts used for storing one’s bookmarks directly from the browser and are communicating with their new users via their beta blog. There remain some problems with the Firefox Addin but the Chrome extension seems pretty solid now. 4th Oct 2011 …

Maybe snipsnap is not the answer

It was good to meet up with Mike Ramchand and Phil Harman last week at the Oracle User Group where Phil was presenting a talk entitled “Virtualisation Fever”. The conversation turned to personal web sites. Mike advised me to get off Snipsnap because its resource implications are too costly. It should be noted that there are a number of additional weaknesses due to its age.  It is written in Java and while it has an extensibility framework, using it requires Java and possibly Groovy, and I code in neither.  …

Why did Amazon take so long to deliver SQL in the Cloud

The storage market has been complexifying, (Is that a word Ed.) over the last few years; I have for a while considered the databases to be just another software abstraction layer between the hardware and the application i.e. completely equivalent to a file system. Also more recently it is clear  that the highly scalable solutions builders have moved beyond relational databases. I conclude, today’s application designers and storage consumers are no longer always prepared to accept the compromises  buying an RDBMS requires, it’s about Storage not SQL. …

Plazes

So, having started a new job, I have registered the new office at Plazes and can now use both the web site and the ipodtouch, using the iplazer app, to update my plazes atom feed with my location. My recent travels can still be seen at my i’m here page, and I am now likely to keep this more up to date than over the summer.

The Plazer seems to have disappeared from the internet, so I have put one of my windows installer copies on my downloads page. (I expect I’ll move it to a mirror page at some point, but I was in a hurry as I expect to ‘need’ to install it soon).

I wonder how much longer I’ll bother with this, they seem to have lost interest since being bought by Nokia.

ooOOOoo

I have no idea why I brought this forward to the wordpress blog; all the links are broken since Plazes died in 2012. …

Are blogs losing their infuence?

Are blogs losing their infuence?

Richard Morgan sent me this article, “Are Blogs Losing Their Authority To The Statusphere?” dated March 10th 2009, which argues that while blog authority ranking according to Technorati remains fairly static, the scores of the various blogs are declining. Technorati uses an inlist scoring algorithm which may be part of the problem, but it would seem to me that micro-blogging is impacting the strength of the voice of blogs as a communications tool, which is what the article argued. In some way’s not just micro-blogging, but the various places where people can and do record what they do and think. …  …