Ars Technica reports that there's been a significant surge in spam in the last few months (and it's not like we weren't getting any spam before):

The volume of spam being sent has seen a significant increase recently, and the jump is being attributed to the increasing use of botnets by spammers. Symantec reports that in a recent survey of small businesses, 64 percent reported an increase in the volume of spam received over the last six months with a third saying that the increase was "significant." Jay Best, help desk manager of ihug in New Zealand, said that the ISP had seen a spam increase of 40 percent over the last month alone, and that a spam explosion over the weekend has caused some 37,000 customers to experience e-mail delays of up to 24 hours.

If you want to see a graph, check here

Six Apart, makers of Movable Type and Typepad, have launched a new blog service called Vox.

Don't forget the community:

When they announced the acquisition [of YouTube], Google executives said they were happy with how their own service, Google Video, allowed people to upload and watch clips. But they said YouTube had become the clear leader in assembling an active community around videos, which presented a big business opportunity and gave Google more advertising inventory.

"It's a great deal for Google in that they now have the power of a network that can act promotionally, which is something they lacked," said Ian Schafer, chief executive of Deep Focus, an ad agency that has promoted movies on YouTube. "No one is able to monetize traffic like Google has."

But Li, the Forrester analyst, said Google needed to tread carefully and not try to turn the site into a moneymaker by filling it with ads. Google has always shown restraint with its highly targeted search ads, she said.

That's how many copies of IE7 were downloaded in the first four days of its release.

Lithium-ion batteries have been around a long time. There are some 1.8 billion Li-on batteries in laptops and cameras and other devices. There are also about 6.5 million of Li-on Sony laptop batteries currently under recall for explosive tendencies (though most of them haven't and most likely won't burst into flame).

In addition to no-explosions, we all want lighter laptops, bigger hard drives, brighter screens and a longer time between charges and lithium ion batteries are probably approaching their limits. So, what's on the horizon:

In September, Zinc Matrix demonstrated a six-hour prototype for an Intel-based laptop. If all goes well, Dueber says, that battery could be on the market by the end of next year. Among those funding the effort are Tyco Electronics and Intel. Dueber says he has received about $36 million to date.

At best, though, Dueber's battery is only a sort of electrochemical methadone – same addiction, just slightly longer-lasting, with no flameout. No matter how much the industry toys with a single box of electrons, it will eventually encounter the same predictable roadblocks: too many components demanding too much power for any one battery. That's why Solicore decided to think small.

Based in Lakeland, Florida, Solicore is developing Li-ion batteries in ultracompact forms that can sneak into places batteries have never gone before. This might allow Solicore's cells to act as secondary batteries in a device. For example, one could be slipped behind a laptop's screen, where it would power just the backlight, taking some of the load off the main battery. To make such versatile Li-ion cells, Solicore has developed a new type of lithium polymer.

Lithium-polymer batteries use an advanced gel rather than a liquid to separate the cell's positive and negative poles. Solicore's proprietary polymer restricts electron flow so it can't be disrupted by heat or even a violent blow from a hammer, which means the batteries won't get caught in a thermal runaway cycle. This lets engineers make batteries without standard safety features, which means they can be made in virtually any shape or thickness. Some of the early models are as thin as sheets of paper, essentially printed and cut like credit cards. In fact, they are already being used to power a new breed of smartcards, which come with their own onboard display and may someday even have wireless capability. Solicore is working with Visa and others to bring the cards to market next year

It'll be awhile though before any of these batteries make it to market.

MIT has established a Center for Collective Intelligence, which is attempting to explore group intelligence (such as discussed in The Wisdom of Crowds by James Surowecki):

The focus on collective intelligence appears to have been inspired by a number of indications that the internet is transforming the ability of people to work together, and enabling new forms of collaboration. CCI's literature specifically cites Google, Wikipedia, and Innocentive as examples of new forms of collective accomplishment, and they have appointed Jimmy Wales of Wikipedia and the CEO of Innocentive to their board. Their Handbook of Collective Intelligence, which attempts to both define the field and provide a moving snapshot of its current state of knowledge is, in fact, a Wiki.

...via ars technica

Sometimes taxonomy is a tool and sometimes it's a cage:

The task of the taxonomist or information architect is not to provide absolute consistency and standardization, maximum tidiness, and complete information efficiency. Optimizing efficiency in a complex system, as Jacobs noted in regard to cities, destroys the resilience of that system and its capacity to adapt to new circumstances. So the task of the taxonomist or information architect is not to optimize efficiency, but to optimize effectiveness, and that always means sub-optimal efficiency. Consistency and standardization must be sufficient for effectiveness and the meeting or your goals and no more than sufficient.

To remain resilient and adaptive, a knowledge environment must always also be hospitable to alternate mechanisms of knowledge organization, access and use – which to a degree will compete for attention with the formally privileged mechanisms such as taxonomies.

Folksonomies are a case in point. It is not especially healthy just to try to bend folksonomies to the needs of taxonomies as vocabulary harvesting devices as several organizations have done, and leave it at that. If the conditions are right to support healthy folksonomies, then the organization will get far greater value by actively exploiting their potential for providing rich serendipity as well. [I’ll talk about folksonomies and rich serendipity in another post]. They can by all means be used to harvest vocabularies, but this is just icing on the cake, not the substance of the cake.

Also:

To see an example of this plethora of competition between knowledge organization devices we need go no farther than online bookseller Amazon. Look at any Amazon page for a given book, and you will find a taxonomy (represented by formal subject categories), user-contributed tags, links to other books bought by other people who bought this book, booklists compiled by users on related topics, suggestions for other books based on a complex algorithm combining your past behaviours and those of others, and so on. All of these mechanisms for purposefully finding – or serendipitously discovering – books, co-exist, and compete. You can bet that Amazon watches the intensity of use of each of these mechanisms, and as any single instrument gets used more or less intensively, Amazon will adjust its investment in supporting it accordingly. As Amazon has grown, so has the number of ways of locating and suggesting books. Taxonomies form only part of this complex web, and rightly so.

Wikipedia has refused to censor themselves in China, however, it appears that the Chinese government has unblocked Wikipedia:

"We'll see how long this lasts," said the company on its site. "Chinese Wikipedians have expressed fears about the detrimental effects that a permanent ban would have. First of all, the block deprives a useful resource from the majority of Chinese speakers in the world. Moreover, since Mainland Chinese form a significant portion of the Chinese Wikipedia community (46% of all users in March 2005), a long-term block could severely stunt the growth of Wikipedia similar to the block in June 2004."

The Chinese government still can and indeed appears to be, blocking certain articles within Wikipedia, but Wikipedia itself has consistently refused to take censor Wikipedia themselves. It should be noted that both Google and Yahoo have acceded to Chinese government demands that they filter their searches for the Chinese market.

Great article in the Washington Post about how cellphones are changing the lives of fishermen, farmers and many others in India:

A convenience taken for granted in wealthy nations, the cellphone is putting cash in the pockets of people for whom a dollar is a good day's wage. And it has made market-savvy entrepreneurs out of sheepherders, rickshaw drivers and even the acrobatic men who shinny up palm trees to harvest coconuts here in Kerala state.

"This has changed the entire dynamics of communications and how they organize their lives," said C.K. Prahalad, an India-born business professor at the University of Michigan who has written extensively about how commerce -- and cellphones -- are used to combat poverty.

"One element of poverty is the lack of information," Prahalad said. "The cellphone gives poor people as much information as the middleman."

According to recent studies, teenagers generally use instant messaging and text messaging for talking friends and email for complex messages and communicating with people who can't be contacted other ways. It's likely not just the technology but also the increasing problems of irrelevant mail and spam cluttering mailboxes:

87 percent of teenagers in the US now use the Internet, and many of them prefer instant messaging to e-mail. According the report, "Teens who participated in focus groups for this study said that they view e-mail as something you use to talk to 'old people,' institutions, or to send complex instructions to large groups. When it comes to casual written conversation, particularly when talking with friends, online instant messaging is the clearly the mode of choice for today's online teens."

This is a problem for institutions that use e-mail as an official communications tool, since students often miss announcements or deadlines. Unfortunately, IM isn't great for sending out reminders with lots of specifics, such as instructions for registration. What's a college to do?

For some schools, the correct answer is: set up a MySpace page. After all, there's nothing hipper for students than being "friends" with your college registrar or school principal. The intriguing thing about this method of reaching students is that it's most often not "instant" at all; students receive messages when they log in or they visit the school's MySpace pages—the equivalent of using e-mail and a Web portal.

There are many ways to organize the same things. Every arrangement tells a different story. We often order things in categories, but those same things could be organized by environment or history or function. Each type of organization tells us things and gives us a different picture. And thus is information architecture born:

Buffon’s great gift then, was in the recognition that there are many possible ways to organize the same things, and that every arrangement tells a different story. This is what brings us to information architecture.

The inventor of the term ‘information architecture’ is Richard Saul Wurman, a ‘real’ architect by training and avocation, but who has increasingly turned to the design problems involved in providing access to information. Wurman points out: “The ways of organizing information are finite. It can only be organized by location, alphabet, time, category, or hierarchy” (Wurman 2001:40-41).

But what Wurman also points out is that the same set of things can often be arranged in each of those ways, and each arrangement tells you different things. If you consider an arrangement of pedigree dogs, for example, an arrangement by size displays its own patterns and suggests its own questions (like “why are there so few large pedigree dogs compare with tiny ones?” ). An arrangement by country of origin tells another story, while an arrangement by date of Kennel Club recognition tells a tale of changing tastes over time.

The task of the information architect therefore is to find the arrangements that will be most instructive and useful for any given context of use. Arrangements, not classifications, are the primary name of the game.