Hard drive data recovery companies have starting hiring counselors to help customers who've lost valuable data

When the company receives a call from someone who's clearly lost it -- which can happen several times an hour -- Chessin comes on the line to help the caller rediscover their happy place. Then the engineer returns to discuss the technical problem in detail.

One of the things that the entertainment industry refers to often in their arguments for digital rights management and broadcast flags and other restrictions on intellectual property and copyright is the idea that digital television will immediately create a world where someone can 'beam' their friends the latest movie 'just like that.'

Raffi Krikorian has done some testing of this idea and sent the following comments to the FCC in response to their request for public comment on the proposed broadcast flag for digital television:

The initial comments of the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA), et al., in this docket, assert that the Digital Television (DTV) transition will create a series of risks to their intellectual property interests, and propose the "broadcast flag" in order to address those risks. They provide a laundry-list of new risks from clear-text free-over-the-air Advanced Television Standards Committee (ATSC) broadcasts, including the prospect of redistribution of captured ATSC programming by:

electronic mail
"shared folders"
a web site, and by
P2P networked file-sharing software6

As a skilled and experienced technologist, I greeted these claims with immense skepticism as they seemed at direct odds with my longtime experience with designing, deploying, and using P2P and networked applications. In response to my skepticism, I undertook a series of experiments in recording and attempting to redistribute ATSC terrestrial broadcast programming. The results of my research are presented below

...

What should be noted is that all the numbers presented in this paper exhibit a linear relationship between program length and file size (or program length and transfer time). So, a four-hour recording is about twice as large, and takes about twice as long to copy, as a two-hour recording. The 43 GB file is for a five-hour recording, which means that a one-hour recording occupies about 8.6 GB of space -- this still means that it would take

a full day for a hour our television show to move out of my house network (because a standard broadband connection only has a 200 kilobit/sec upload speed instead of my 800 kilobit/sec upload -- this means an average customer would take 4 full days to ship out),
6116 floppy disks,
14 CD-Rs, or
2 DVDs
to transmit or to hold all the data received over the air. This is still impractical for routine transfers of a short television program, and, in the case of recordable media, still implies a significant media cost and recording time.

In this document, I have shown that the MPAA's view of the capabilities of current and foreseeable networking technologies is misinformed; they have provided a series of reasons to argue that their intellectual property will be distributed more readily as a result of ATSC terrestrial broadcast service than it is presently today, and I have stated why, in my opinion, I deem this to be incorrect and actually impossible. I conclude that there is no practical evidence that an ATSC broadcast flag mandate would address a real problem.

TCS has a recent article on using Smart Mobs for homeland security:

We learned on 9/11 about the effectiveness of individuals who were empowered by personal technology.

...

The market research firm Telephia estimates that 53 percent of urban Americans now have mobile phones. However, the Homeland Security program has failed to capitalize on that private sector resource to deliver actionable information when and where people can use it, which would both lessen the demands on first responders and help people avoid panic because they feel they know what to do and have the real-time information they need.

...via Scripting News

Ernie the Attorney quotes a friends who's recently discovered blogging:

Here is my take on the 3 stages of blogging:

1. There must be something to blogs because so many people are into it, but I don't have a clue.
2. OK, it does seem kind of cool and there is much, much more to it then I expected. I just don't see any really practical applications.
3. Oh my God, the things I can do with this are coming to me faster than I can keep up with."

Mcrosoft Watch reports:

It will come as a surprise to many that, with little fanfare, Microsoft officially entered the blogging-tool space last week. At the VSLive! developer conference, Microsoft unveiled five new sample applications built on top of its ASP.Net scripting environment. One of these five--the ASP.Net Community Starter Kit--is a blog builder.

"You could use this (Kit) to build a Weblog," confirms Microsoft developer division product manager Shawn Nandi.

The Community Starter Kit consists of application code, templates, documentation and forum-based help. According to Microsoft's own definition of the kit: "The Community Starter Kit enables you to quickly create a community Web site such as a user group site, a developer resource site, or a news site."

...via Scripting News

Someone told me recently that when they offered an online course through WebCT, the biggest issue they had was helping people use the interface.

A recent article in e-Learn Magazine discusses the difference between learners and uers:

Think of it this way: In a history course, a learner needs to know how to write an essay—that is forming ideas, doing research, synthesizing information, and presenting cogent arguments on a position. A user, on the other hand, needs to know how to submit the essay—what tools to use to create it and where and how to transmit it so that the instructor receives it on time.

A snowflake maker

Web search powerhouse Google has jumped headfirst into the popular web logging (blogging) phenomena, inking a deal to acquire Silicon Valleysoftware firm Pyra Labs.

Medscape has a list of medical weblogs at their Technology & Medicine Information Center

To quote:

Our editors have prepared the following collection of medical Weblogs authored by physicians or other health professionals. Weblogs, otherwise known as Blogs, are online diaries that are frequently updated with links, commentary, or personal diatribe. We think you'll find these Blogs interesting, entertaining, and definitely addictive

Holy crikey! John Palfrey's linked to me from his weblog (nobody ever links to me so this is pretty noteworthy).

He also adds some thoughts on the Weblogs at Harvard project:

a) that we begin with a principle that we seek to advance the use of technology in a teaching and learning environment; b) that we want to make blogging technology easily accessible to members of the Harvard community to see what they do with it; c) that we see some benefits out there in this technology for free exchange of ideas, friendship, collaboration, possibly even *democracy* (careful, yup, I know) -- could be semiotic democracy; d) and that we want to stay flexible enough to adapt as the interests of creators and readers and listeners and watchers change. And maybe even have some fun in the process.

In addition, he has some thoughts on the current sketchiness (or 'fuzziness' for those who like that word better) of the project. One of the things I like about this project currently is that it is going forward with fuzziness attached. Things can be discussed to death. Anticipating objections can, in my experience, become like self-fulfilling prophecies and can easily suck the life out of the project and more importantly suck the energy out of the people who are enthusiastic about the project.

I wrote up some additional thoughts yesterday after reading summaries from Donna Wentworth and others about the live blogging meeting on Tuesday. Among other things, I wrote this:

And finally, there is a piece of the discussion that is inevitably about how to suck this back into a ‘process’ instead of a ‘thing that actually happens.’ You can see this when the talk turns to rules and principles and whether people will use it or not and what they’ll be worrying about when they do. Some of this is important (and some of it really isn’t). What I’d like to see with Weblogs at Harvard is what they appear to be doing, going forward, implementing things, letting it disrupt and adjusting as it does.

There's also an 'About' page up now at the Weblogs at Harvard site, which says in part:

Welcome. This is the place where we point to the developments in the developing World O'Weblogs at Harvard University. You won't find any biting commentary here, or insightful ideas, or even logical breakthoughs, our job is to help you do that, and help spread the word about your accomplishments. We're studying weblogs and evangelizing them. We're excited about how this technology might be used in all the activities of the university, for faculty, administration, students, alumni, staff.

The NY Times has a good summary of the plusses and minuses of different PDAs and in particular discusses the PocketPC vs Palm OS issue.

Dave Winer (Scripting News) and Donna Wentworth (CopyFight) are involved in a project to open up blogging at Harvard University.

The details are still sketchy (at least to me) but the concept is exciting and looks like an attempt to jumpstart blogging on education, subject matter, and the ongoing thoughts and analysis of Harvard students, professors, and others. A meeting was held last night to discuss the project (the meeting was, of course, blogged live).

Steve Gillmor talks about disruptive technologies that were significant in 2003 and in particular whether the trend is toward more or less freedom.

About the terrific upsurge in blogging, he says:

In turn, blogs have nurtured a growing circle of trust, the mulch for building directories of digital identity based on expertise, communication skills, and critical intangibles -- sense of humor, ethical infrastructure, shared values, and contributed resources. Weblogs provide a variety of Web services for the community: a kind of protective gauze for standards warriors, viral marketing for independent developers, and a watchdog mechanism for legacy media.

On the positive side, he identifies such disruptive technologists as Tim O'Reilly who has donated 200 book titles to the Creative Commons licensing model, Dave Winer, who has contributed the development of SOAP and ongoing analysis via Scripting News, and Bill Gates who has promoted TCP/IP, XML, and Wi-Fi.

Cory Doctorow's new book, Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom, introduces us to whuffie:

It's the great conundrum of the web. Why do so many people do so much for free? What do people get out of it? Whuffie - that's what. Coined by writer Cory Doctorow for his novel Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom, Whuffie embodies respect, karma, mad-props; call it what you will, the web runs on it.

The idea of reputation systems that can help to filter information is discussed further on Howard Rheingold's blog, Smart Mobs -

One of the critical uncertainties about the future of smart mobs is whether or not workable, transportable, trustworthy reputation systems will evolve and spread. The potential for collective action in any population cannot be realized until the trust level rises above a threshold, and reputation can multiply the number of ways people trust each other. So far, eBay's and Slashdot's reputation system , or the more geeky trust metric used by Advogato have been the exemplars of reputation management systems.

An interesting article in Information Week on San Diego's use of a Google appliance and the impact it's had on their systems usability.

It's difficult to imagine getting more from a $23,000 investment in search technology than the city of San Diego has gotten from its deployment of a Google Inc. search appliance.

Whenever we attempt to make sense of information visually, we first observe similarities and differences in what we are seeing. These relationships allow us to not only distinguish objects but to give them meaning. For example, a difference in color implies two distinct objects (or different parts of the same object), a difference in scale suggests one object is further from us than the other, a difference in texture (one is more blurry) enforces this idea, and so on. Once we have an understanding of the relationships between elements, we can piece together the whole story and understand what we are seeing.

Boxes and Arrows has an excellent article on Visible Narratives: Understanding Visual Organization