Douwe Osinga's Blog: September 2003

Friday, September 26, 2003

TV has to get worse before it gets better

When I grew up, we had two TV channels, both run by the state and filled by special foundations with members to cater for. If you didn't...

Thursday, September 25, 2003

Evil Bill strikes again

If ten 747s packed with young children would crash into the Kilomanjaro every day, you'd think people would notice and try to do somethi...

Wednesday, September 24, 2003

Buddhism good, Islam bad?

It is common knowledge that Islam is a harsh religion where the hands of thieves are cut off routinely, while Buddhisme is the religion of ...

Tuesday, September 23, 2003

PhoneCams outsell conventional cameras

It is official. PhoneCams have outsold conventional cameras. According to Mobile Commerce Worldwide, mobile phone makers shipped 25 million...

Monday, September 22, 2003

Completing the RSS Revolution

RSS is great. Recently we've added a RSS stream to our companies website tracking all changes. So now anytime somebody modifies an artic...

Saturday, September 20, 2003

Copying CDs and open standards

Somebody throwing a party had asked us whether we couldn't put some of our music on CDs to play at the party. Should be legal, right? As...

Thursday, September 18, 2003

The fashion world innovates without copyright protection

NPR has an article about the fashion world . Like in the software world, here things happen fast. Stuff that is new now, is uninteresting to...

Verisign's self-describing webservice

Verisign succeeded in pissing off a lot of people by redirecting mistyped urls to their own page. Go to this link to see what they say about...

Monday, September 15, 2003

Making MP3s legal

Music and the Internet make a cool combination. Audiogalaxy, now defunct, got me back interested in music. Before that, I just played the CD...

Sunday, September 14, 2003

Micropayments and Free Content

Clay Shirkey's latest essay asks a valid question: why Micropayment schemes don't work. Even if you don't agree with Shirkey...

Friday, September 12, 2003

The Next 5 Minutes

The next 5 minutes is a festival that brings together media, art and politics, according to the site. If you visit the site and think '...

Wednesday, September 10, 2003

10.000 brothers are watching you

SOS Camera Watch has a database of 10.000. publicly available on-line web cams, observing public places in the US. In the coming years, cam...

Monday, September 8, 2003

Why we should leave Google behind

Google has been a good friend for over 5 years now. It has taken the Internet world by storm. They have build a brand purely on the quality ...

Friday, September 5, 2003

A Map is the eye of the beholder

I have always been fascinated by maps. Maps are not only a picture of the world, they also picture out mind. Let somebody  draw a map of the...

Thursday, September 4, 2003

The impact of tech and Moore's law

Somebody reacted on my bit yesterday that cell phones hadn't had that much impact on his life compared to the Internet at large. But on ...

Tuesday, September 2, 2003

The revolution after the cell phone revolution

Bob Solow lamented that computers where everywhere, except in the economical statistics. He meant that a lot of money was spent on IT withou...

Monday, September 1, 2003

Evolution, Self organization and Democracy

Stuart Kaufman discovered the principle of self-organization. If you have a complex enough system, with lots of subsystems that have random ...