Slashdot Mirror

I've never cared for the term "blog," but gee, I can't really argue with the idea of a siteful of short newsy items updated several times a day. And everyone seems to agree Blogger is a great way to run your own such site, much better than the crappy alternatives. As Dan Bricklin says, "I didn't like the idea of Blogger being lost in the dotCom crash. Personal web sites were growing and important." So he got his company Trellix to license it. Go check out his account "How The Blogger Deal Happened" (and/or read the press release).

Anonymous reminds us that we haven't looked at ICANN for, oh, a week or two - so here goes: "Ted Byfield's roving_reporter is carrying a story today that Carl Bildt, the UN Secretary General's Special Envoy for the Balkans and former Swedish prime minister, is under consideration to be the new CEO of the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers. The hiring of a career politician certainly puts the lie to the idea that ICANN is about "technical coordination," but it would certainly be a change for the better."

Sacrifice writes "For the last seven years, no new network has been able to peer with UUNet without paying for transit. This looks to change, as they now publicly offer, in clear, publicly stated terms, their requirements for bilateral (no tribute) peering! Genuity paved the way for this three months ago with the announcement of their own publicly stated peering requirements (Genuity had a difficult time years ago with achieving bilateral peering with UUNet, and was the last major network to manage it)." Update: 01/10 02:44 PM by J : TBTF has the one good explanation that I've seen.

The property struggle of our generation will be fought not in the streets of Matewan but in the tiny print in license agreements. Glassbook is Adobe's attempt to e-books, but they have a few details yet to iron out. Take Alice's Adventures in Wonderland for example -- check out the permissions you acquire when you "purchase" this "book." Thanks to Art Medlar and TBTF for this one. Update: Curiouser and curiouser. Apparently I misinterpreted the meaning of "this book cannot be read aloud"; Glassbook tech support tells me this refers to its capabilities, not, as labeled, permissions. I apologize for that. But I don't understand why, after this story was posted, they decided to change this. Now if you download Alice, you'll find it can be read aloud.

Incidentally, Adobe is using the text of Alice as transcribed by the awesome Project Gutenberg, whose entire purpose for existence is to bring reading material to as many people as possible. One of the first things I did when I got a laptop was to download a couple dozen of their books. In ASCII format. Say what you like about vi, at least it doesn't tell me to shut up.

The property struggle of our generation will be fought not in the streets of Matewan but in the tiny print in license agreements. Glassbook is Adobe's attempt to e-books, but they have a few details yet to iron out. Take Alice's Adventures in Wonderland for example -- check out the permissions you acquire when you "purchase" this "book." Thanks to Art Medlar and TBTF for this one. Update: Curiouser and curiouser. Apparently I misinterpreted the meaning of "this book cannot be read aloud"; Glassbook tech support tells me this refers to its capabilities, not, as labeled, permissions. I apologize for that. But I don't understand why, after this story was posted, they decided to change this. Now if you download Alice, you'll find it can be read aloud.

Incidentally, Adobe is using the text of Alice as transcribed by the awesome Project Gutenberg, whose entire purpose for existence is to bring reading material to as many people as possible. One of the first things I did when I got a laptop was to download a couple dozen of their books. In ASCII format. Say what you like about vi, at least it doesn't tell me to shut up.

A few more bits about ICANN's latest meeting, where they picked several new .tld's: The BBC has a report about the demands made by ICANN upon country-code registrars. They seem pretty peeved about not having any voice whatsoever within ICANN. Ted Byfield has some good coverage of the meeting itself, distilled down from his roving_reporter column for TBTF.

Until this week, I've been unconvinced by those who say the U.S. election process needs to be conducted with computers instead of paper, pencil, and punchcards. I've changed my mind. It's time to take a good hard look at our ancient voting system, and bring it up to date. When today's 14-year-olds go to vote in the 2004 elections, will they still take the pencil from the volunteer, slide the punchcard into the molded plastic, and turn the weird knobs? Or will they use the technology they've grown up with?

My change of heart came while listening to an NPR story last night. Election results for one county in Michigan were held up for two hours because some volunteers with ballots were barricaded in the building by a bear. A bear! What century is this?

There are some fair concerns about moving to a more-than-just-dead-trees voting system. We have to consider what the impact will be on voter enfranchisement. A change that makes it possible for the rich to vote by telepathy, for example, while the poor have to drive a hundred miles uphill both ways (to access a non-telepathic voting booth) would not be exactly democratic.

Would it have been fair, in 2000, for the middle class to be able to vote from the comfort of their homes and jobs, while the poor and homeless had to get to a voting booth? I don't know.

But my best guess is that, by 2004, this won't be a question anymore. Plot the percentage of lower-income homes with internet access from 1996 to 2000, and then extrapolate another four years. So if it should be done, how can it be done? There are five key issues to solve: authorization, anonymity, data confidence, UI, and security.

I propose a system in which each voting booth runs a webserver which logs votes (without identification) to two internal media (hard disk and floppy would be good, see below). Once the polls close, each booth's computer can be totalled and sent over the internet to the state's central server.

Meanwhile, any computer that speaks https on the internet would become a voting booth of its own, running slightly different software.

Each state's official results could be in an hour after its polls close. Which beats the ten-day waiting period we have now for our overseas ballots.

Authorization isn't really that hard: When you register to vote, you (by default) get a password delivered by snail-mail a week before the election. Tampering with that mail is a federal offense, of course. On election day you use secure http to sign in from anywhere with your name, address and password. Lose the password? Sorry, you don't get the comfort of home/work; you go to the voting booth with everyone else.

Anonymity is trivial; any logs with identifying information either don't get stored, or get wiped immediately.

Computers crash. Data confidence means the servers write the votes to multiple media: network, hard drive, flash RAM. A dot-matrix printer makes a good emergency backup medium.

This system also needs a dirt-simple GUI for voters connecting from home or work. No butterfly webpages necessary; click a name, and get a confirmation screen that shows you name, party, (importantly) photo, and big "yes" and "no" buttons.

At the voting booth it can be even simpler, using touch-screens.

Security is, of course, always a problem. Secure http effectively eliminates the man-in-the-middle attack, so the main worry are that an attacker will be able to run unauthorized code on a government computer which could (read) correlate my name with my vote or (write) change my vote. I'm going to go out on a limb and say that a completely open-sourced system, from the kernel up, combined with clean-room installations at a secure location, can make these concerns minor by comparison to existing vote-fraud concerns.

(My vote would go to OpenBSD, Apache, and Mozilla, though of course good luck predicting what will be best four years from now.)

Also, net admins overseeing the effort need to have enough access to track and lock out attackers, but obviously they can't have access to change the election results. Lock them in a room for the day with a hundred video cameras tracking everything they do, like the officers on missile-launch duty. Many net admins will find this a relaxed and enjoyable work environment compared to their current jobs.

There are many problems that have to be solved -- please bring up the ones I haven't mentioned here, let's start the debate! My hunch is that they can be solved. And the overriding question must be, will it be an improvement over the current system?

Given that Florida's election is being decided by a 400-vote difference, with 19,000 botched votes thrown out, I'd say the impossibility of clicking on two presidential choices at the same time makes this system a huge win.

The broken user interface on our existing punch-cards system is probably going to give us the wrong President of the United States. How much worse could a digital system really be? I don't claim to have all the answers, but I know what century it is, and the time for Little House on the Prairie nonsense is over. Let's make this happen for 2004.

I'll give my last word to Andre Uratsuka Manoel, a partner at the internet firm Insite, in Brazil. (Props to TBTF for putting Andre and me in touch.)

Brazil has a 100% electronic election. On election day I go my "electoral section," identify myself, sign my name. The "section president" then types in my code and I walk to the booth which is in a corner of the room where no one can see my vote. I then type the number of my candidate, see his/her photo and press "confirm."

The voting machines store the votes in at least three different places: a floppy disk (which is locked), a flash card and the internal hard disk. There are written procedures for any kind of failure I could think of and back-up machines readily available. Those machines can connect to a phone line and send their results to the Election Court of the state.

The results are proclamed extremely fast. On the mayoral run-off elections that happened 2 weeks ago, results were out 2 hours after the election in the city I live in (Sao Paulo, with about 6 million voters) and 6 hours after it in the last city in which there was a run-off. In my home city the results came out a little after the election sites closed and the result was proclamed with the winner having 40 thousand votes more than the second place (0.4% of 1 million votes).

In the first round of elections in Sao Paulo, the third place contestant lost the ticket for the run-off elections by less than 0.1%. The one who lost didn't even think of contesting the results because no one thought there were any kind of frauds.

In the first round, 100 million voters (about the same as the active voters in US) in 5 thousand cities chose their mayors and councelors. All the results were proclaimed 30 hours after the voting closed.

This happens in a country that has a much lower level of literacy, technology-savvy and of money as the U.S. Remember that some mayors were chosen in places hours away from anyplace else (even by plane), i.e. in the middle of the rain forest. Those places don't have electricity.

Of course there were complaints, but not because of the electoral process. Mostly they were due to campaigning on the election day, voter transportation and coercion.

(Updates: Dave Riesz mentioned Riverside County, California, which has an electronic voting system already in place. Their 2000 primary turnout was the highest in 20 years, which may or may not mean anything. That led me to the California Internet Voting Task Force which looks interesting. Don Wegeng pointed me to RISKS thoughts by Douglas Jones. Brian Dunbar points out "Hurrah for Slow Recounts" by the always-interesting Ellen Ullman.

Lee Coursey passes along Elizabeth Ferrill's Discussion of Electronic Voting. James McCann, a programmer at VoteHere.net, says my description is "not terribly far off but very incomplete" -- I'll take that as a compliment -- check out his site and SecurePoll.com too. And finally, a story in Salon that makes my point better than I could: "Confessions of a Florida Poll Worker."

If you have more links or information, emailme.)

cygnusx writes: "First saw this in the TBTF blog: an excellent 2-part article on the legal legitimacy of ICANN itself. You can read the (PDF) drafts: part 1 and part 2. The article (being a draft) forbids quoting without permission, but the essential argument is that the U.S. government has acted irresponsibly in exercising federal power, whether ICANN is an independent entity or not. Incidentally, Part 1 contains one of the best for-laymen introductions to the DNS I have read so far." Professor Froomkin is an occasional Slashdot contributor who has kept a closer eye on ICANN than ICANN would have preferred. This is an excellent paper for anyone who cares about how the Internet is and will be governed. Update: 10/13 5:58 PM by michael : Only the first link works; it contains the entire paper.

Interested in a free domain for your open-source project? Huh, are ya? "Too bad, sucker," says the .cx registrar. On the other hand, you can drink beer (or sarsparilla) and talk tech with folks smarter than your average bear, create poetry using such fine poetic-sounding things as "Python" and "Java," and even let other people know the names of those who you would call Spammers. Read on, if the gist is really not enough.

See, what we really meant was ... From the inimitable jamie: In February we reported that the .cx registrar was offering free domains to open-source projects. Now, their Board of Directors claims this is "inconsistent with the basic principals [sic] of fairness...this policy has been cancelled." Their FAQ has been changed from this to this accordingly. The board meeting promises "existing registrants will be 'grandfathered-in' and a new second level registry for the oss community will be established." Presumably that means new applicants will get YourOpenSourceProject.free.cx or something. Props to jmason and TBTF for the above links.

LinuxBierwanderungenrundeninkreisen, oder? One of the cool things about Free software is that there's an attitude of joviality and conviviality among its users and developers -- as evidenced by the recurring Linuxbierwangerungen, as reported in Slashdot last week. Even the WSJ notices, evidently: alanw writes "This article is fairly accurate, although we were mostly drinking real ale, not lager."

The article also mentions the oh-so-intriguing idea of simultaneous, net-linked Bierwanderungen on different continents. I vote for the mountains of Maine, New Hampshire or Tennessee as good trial U.S. locations -- if you know any organizers, make sure they leave comments below about a U.S. Bierwanderung!

Opting in, Sir? Opting out? Headphones, Sir? Red Wine? White wine? discHead writes "The Mail Abuse Prevention System has announced that a temporary restraining order filed to prevent them from listing Harris Interactive in the Realtime Blackhole List has been denied."

So long as no one is required to abide by the list that MAPS creates of mail abusers, would a restraining order preventing them from listing a spammer (by their definition) ever work? I rather hope not.

No, not the envelope with "those" pictures, the envelope with the winners! Tim McNerney writes: "The second round winners in the Software Carpentry competition have been announ ced. Though the test harness category got dropped in the process, the config, build and track categories all have winners along with judge's commentary. Next step is to choosing developers to implement the winners." And speaking of lucky winners (you may not already be a winner, in this case), at0m writes "The Haiku Generator Challenge has been completed, and the results have been posted. For those who are not familiar with the contest, the goal was to create a program that used a user-inputted RDF file and created three lines with 5, 7, and 5 syllables respectively. To see the winning entries, visit the challenge page. dotcomma has also announced a new, less difficult challenge, which can be found here."

Nater writes "I guess it's official now that ICANN is the authority on domain names in the U.S. This article is about a report made by the General Accounting Office that validates the Department of Commerce's authority to designate ICANN. According to the article, the report was prompted by certain members of Congress who didn't like that Commerce put the DNS in the hands of an international body." Not too many surprises in this. Here's the GAO report itself.

Interestingly, the report waffles on whether the government actually has the authority to transfer ownership of the A root server to ICANN. Here's their 180-word answer:

"The question of whether the Department has the authority to transfer control of the authoritative root server to ICANN is a difficult one to answer. Although control over the authoritative root server is not based on any statute or international agreement, the government has long been instrumental in supporting and developing the Internet and the domain name system. The Department has no specific statutory obligations to manage the domain name system or to control the authoritative root server. It is uncertain whether transferring control would also include transfer of government property to a private entity. Determining whether there is government property may be difficult. To the extent that transition of the management control to a private entity would involve the transfer of government property, it is unclear if the Department has the requisite authority to effect such a transfer. Since the Department states that it has no plans to transfer the root server system, it has not examined these issues. Currently, under the cooperative agreement with Network Solutions, the Department has reserved final policy control over the authoritative root server." (p. 4)

Translation:

"Nobody knows."

That second-to-last sentence is interesting. It's repeated on p. 45 more explicitly:

"The Department also states that it has no current plans to transfer policy authority for the authoritative root server to ICANN, and therefore it has not developed a scenario or set of circumstances under which such control would be transferred."

I'd assumed, perhaps like many, that ICANN wanted to end up with some kind of control over the A root server itself. Whoever knows that machine's root password controls the internet. But there are a lot of other ways that control can be had; I suppose it's possible that a private corporation like NSI will continue to administer the machine, with ICANN exerting the force of law from a distance.

On the other hand, as TBTF comments:

"This may only reflect the reality that NSI's contract with Commerce runs for another three years before the question of control of the root server even comes up again."

Or hey, if you're in the mood for conspiracy theories, it might mean something else. Set phasers to speculate.

Anonymous Coward writes: "Tasty Bits From the Technology Front says that Sprint PCS phones leak your phone number when browsing the Web. The unique ID number each phone has to help assure privacy is ... your phone number." (And TBTF is a good read anyhow.)

Anonymous Coward writes: "Tasty Bits From the Technology Front says that Sprint PCS phones leak your phone number when browsing the Web. The unique ID number each phone has to help assure privacy is ... your phone number." (And TBTF is a good read anyhow.)

Scientists at the University of Rome claim they have discovered evidence for Weakly Interacting Massive Particles (WIMPs). Their paper will be presented on Friday, and of course the verification process will take a while. The claimed particles weigh as much as a nickel atom, and could turn out to be the dark matter that astrophysicists have sought for so many years. All you touch and all you see may be only 20% of the universe. Read the NYTstory (free reg. req.) and then visit the TBTFblog for detailed information.

Today's TBTF has interesting data and links on the state of X-ray astronomy; ABCNews has an overview. For five months, the orbiting Chandra observatory has been producing great data and potential desktop art. Now, by focusing on a small area of sky, Chanda has resolved what was formerly just known as "X-rayglow" into distinct sources (photo), many of which even Hubble can't find in visible light. The American Astronomical Society will talk about this and other Chandra findings in a live webcast today at 2P.M. EST. For a two-year overview of our universe's secret life in invisible radiation, check out All-Sky Monitor Movies. And oh yeah, in visible-light news, microlensing provides strong evidence for stellar-size black holes being numerous.

Internet Freedom ("the voice of free speech") announced its winners of the 1999 Journalism Awards. Awards went to Courtney Macavinta for investigative journalism on the net, Salon for being an organization with high standards in writing, and my friend Keith Dawson for being an individual with high standards in writing. We won't embarrass the winner of the award for "Internet Article of Shame" by repeating it here - if you want to know, go see for yourself.

Time for an etoy.com news roundup. The Etoy artists are still operating under a ridiculous injunction that bars them from operating a website at their domain. NSI caved to what they perceived as a court order and put the entire domain on hold, so email is blocked too. And Monday's meeting with the judge turned out to be merely a status conference which, according to Etoy's lawyer, "took all of 45 seconds." Nothing was decided, and the injunction remains in effect. But there's good news about the trademark. Click to read more.

The status conference was scheduled for 8:30 AM on the Monday after Christmas weekend, and Etoy's lawyer wasn't able to attend. Essentially it was the judge checking in with eToys' lawyers; the next meeting is scheduled for Jan.10, but that will probably also be just a status conference.

Here's the good news. According to Etoy's lawyer, one of eToys' major claims to trademarked ownership of "etoy" has been shot down.

eToys had purchased the trademark "ETOYS" from Etna Toys, a New York importer which had secured the mark for itself in 1990. In this way, the company which hadn't formed a website until 1997 could claim that it owned a trademark older than the art group which had been operating on the web since 1995.

Fortunately for Etoy, the Trademark Office decided that "ETOYS" was too generic to be trademarked, and invalidated it. According to this decision, prefixing "e" to the generic term "toys" is not enough to make it trademarkable. This decision may yet be overturned, but it's looking more promising by the day.

Meanwhile, Wired reports that John Perry Barlow and Douglas Rushkoff have joined the etoy crisis advisory board. Barlow calls this domain name dispute "the battle of Bull Run." He's got a point - NSI has taken a highly unusual action based solely on the bullying of a legal firm and a single clueless judge. If that matters more than the time-tested rules of the internet, we're all in trouble. Barlow says that Jon Postel, who worked so hard to establish those rules, would be in tears.

TBTF points out that eToys' stock has been plummeting since Dec.1 and asks why. Since that story, it has continued to fall. Some think this has something to do with their bullying Etoy; others disagree; there are some good comments in the Take It Offline forum that TBTF started.

Etoy's supporters' website at toywar.com promises "TOYWAR.com 1.0 will leave the etoy.BETA-LABS in a few days" but it's been saying that for weeks.

Finally, Etoy's friends at RTMark have taken it upon themselves to wage a game against eToys. The point is apparently to drive their stock price to zero. To me, this sounds about as fun as Quake over a 1200 baud modem, but maybe I'm just too bourgeois.

Time for an etoy.com news roundup. The Etoy artists are still operating under a ridiculous injunction that bars them from operating a website at their domain. NSI caved to what they perceived as a court order and put the entire domain on hold, so email is blocked too. And Monday's meeting with the judge turned out to be merely a status conference which, according to Etoy's lawyer, "took all of 45 seconds." Nothing was decided, and the injunction remains in effect. But there's good news about the trademark. Click to read more.

The status conference was scheduled for 8:30 AM on the Monday after Christmas weekend, and Etoy's lawyer wasn't able to attend. Essentially it was the judge checking in with eToys' lawyers; the next meeting is scheduled for Jan.10, but that will probably also be just a status conference.

Here's the good news. According to Etoy's lawyer, one of eToys' major claims to trademarked ownership of "etoy" has been shot down.

eToys had purchased the trademark "ETOYS" from Etna Toys, a New York importer which had secured the mark for itself in 1990. In this way, the company which hadn't formed a website until 1997 could claim that it owned a trademark older than the art group which had been operating on the web since 1995.

Fortunately for Etoy, the Trademark Office decided that "ETOYS" was too generic to be trademarked, and invalidated it. According to this decision, prefixing "e" to the generic term "toys" is not enough to make it trademarkable. This decision may yet be overturned, but it's looking more promising by the day.

Meanwhile, Wired reports that John Perry Barlow and Douglas Rushkoff have joined the etoy crisis advisory board. Barlow calls this domain name dispute "the battle of Bull Run." He's got a point - NSI has taken a highly unusual action based solely on the bullying of a legal firm and a single clueless judge. If that matters more than the time-tested rules of the internet, we're all in trouble. Barlow says that Jon Postel, who worked so hard to establish those rules, would be in tears.

TBTF points out that eToys' stock has been plummeting since Dec.1 and asks why. Since that story, it has continued to fall. Some think this has something to do with their bullying Etoy; others disagree; there are some good comments in the Take It Offline forum that TBTF started.

Etoy's supporters' website at toywar.com promises "TOYWAR.com 1.0 will leave the etoy.BETA-LABS in a few days" but it's been saying that for weeks.

Finally, Etoy's friends at RTMark have taken it upon themselves to wage a game against eToys. The point is apparently to drive their stock price to zero. To me, this sounds about as fun as Quake over a 1200 baud modem, but maybe I'm just too bourgeois.

Weblogs -- described by one of their creators as the "pirate radio stations" of the Web, are a new, personal, and determinedly non-hostile evolution of the electric community. They are also the freshest example of how people use the Net to make their own, radically different new media. A look at Weblogs plus a list of a few identifiable existing species in the electric community. Feel free, of course, to add your own.

Electric Community Part Two:

Here Comes the Weblog

The members of electronic communities like Slashdot come together in the first place because of some shared interest - in this case a complex, sometimes highly technical range of acquired knowledge - Linux, open source, programming. An individualistic community with a common purpose, sites like this attract focused, like-minded participants, programmers and developers whose shared experience was mastery of a complex operating system, a willingness to endure technical hurdles, and an almost secret common language.

Newcomers, drawn to see what's going on or foraging for information themselves, often enrage the established dwellers of an e-community. They don't know as much, ask stupid questions, speak a different language. Intruders, they throw the ecological balance out of whack.

Mark Stefik of the Information Sciences and Technology Laboratory at the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center, likens this resentment to the problem of assimilation when natural disasters or wars cause mass exodus to new lands. When the rate of immigration exceeds a certain level, the resulting chaos in the host country can evoke tremendous resentment and backlash.

Size is a factor, too. As an electric community grows, so do the maintenance costs - hardware, bandwidth, the pressure coherently present more and more information, the need for revenue to support all these functions. As more and more people move through the site, it's harder to recognize addresses, message styles, or individual personalities.

So an electronic community faces, from the beginning, a serious dilemma --- whether to stay small, but remain marginal, or to grow, and becoming more profitable and acquiring more bandwidth and software. In a sense, it suffers either way. If a community stays small, it starves. If it grows, it suffers in a different way. The WELL, one of the first and most important electronic communities (I've been a member for years) has survived by remaining small, smart and simple.

Many of its members have reasons for avoiding too much hostility. They have continuing, powerful, very personal ties to one another. Topics range from science and technology to culture, movies and parenting. And the WELL has been successful in part by providing strong, experienced moderators with authority who discourage eruptions of hostility and keep conversations on track without discouraging free speech.

E-communities without personal forums - jobs, parenting, family life - have a tougher time forming a sense of community, since there's no real way for members to get to know one another. People aren't attacking human beings they know, but disembodied voices and messages.

From the beginning, the Net and the Web have been about individuals creating their own media. This process evolves constantly as people online struggle to find communities where they can glean information, keep up with new technologies, receive help, make human contact.

Some online sociologists use the club analogy when it comes to differentiating large and public versus small and exclusive e-communities.

Exclusive discussion groups - those that limit membership and topics - are like private clubs in that they offer membership by invitation or even fees. In these smaller e-communities, people can speak more freely, perhaps say things they wouldn't say in public.

Stefik writes: "To take the private-club idea another step forward, consider the possibility of private clubs with exclusive memberships, rules about confidentiality with real bite, and limits on the ability of the excluded public to post'There might be private newsgroups for people who are generally inaccessible - for example, major financiers, philanthropists, leaders of powerful companies, or even scientists."

The recent surge in classy, well-designed, intensely-linked weblogs - almost all, essentially reflecting the interests and tastes of their creators and a small number of like-minded people -- suggests a non-commercial version on Stefik's idea.

The weblog isn't a new term on the Net, but it's being used in a new way. One previous definition of weblog is an archive of activity on a web server. Another is an online diary. But in the context of the e-community, the weblog is new, and evolving rapidly, despite the fact that specialized and idiosyncratic sites have been around for some years.

On Camworld.com, Cameron Barrett has written about and developing his notion of the weblog - he calls it a small, eclectic site, usually maintained by one person, with a high concentration of repeat visitors, plentiful WWW links, and a zero tolerance for flames.

Barrett, an interactive designer, writes on Camworld ("Anatomy Of A Weblog" ) that he heard the term "weblog" for the first time a few months ago, but isn't sure who coined it.

Weblogs are a perfect example of the biological evolution of electronic communities. Very personal foraging sites, they are limited in membership, their links continuously updated, and are often focused on a single subject or theme.

They seem to almost all be ideologically opposed to hostility, including essayish commentary and observations. Because the site creator limits and approves membership, they don't need to be defended as intensely as bigger sites, nor do they attract - or permit - posters who abuse others. One obvious payoff is that the flow of ideas is strong, uninterrupted and impressive.

Barrett calls weblogs "microportals. Some weblogs: Smug; Flutterby; Scripting News; ; Stating the Obvious -- I was startled to come upon a column by Rogers Cadenhead about why I don't belong on Slashdot (weblogs may be less hostile, but don't look for sweet, either); Obscure Store, and Joshua Eli Schachter's very smart memepool.

Some webpools are designed by their creators simply to revolve around what they find interesting. Writer Keith Dawson describes webpools as "filtered news," but as with anything having to do with the Net and the Web, there are lots of different points of view.

The Christian Science Monitor newspaper, e-mails Christine Booker, was "weblogging" their own publication earlier this week. That is, an editor provided synapses of articles of interest, with links and particularly notable quotes. The editor was providing pre-digested highlights of his paper, only without commentary. Thus "weblogging" has even come to journalism, not usually an institution on the forefront of digital change.

The point is, Booker wrote, instead of asking readers to scan headlines to decide what to read, they have a section at the top of their World report that says, in effect: our international editor puts foreign news coverage in perspective so that you can go straight to the meat. In a different way, that's what weblogs do - interesting stories for pre-selected communities.

Booker, who designs and manages websites for the University of Washington Department of Surgery, and is an avid reader of weblogs, says it's important to convey their personal nature. "Even sites that don't contain any original content or much commentary give me a glimpse into the mind of the weblogger. What someone chooses to link tells me what they're interested in, what they think is funny, what they find absurd. Some webloggers offer links embedded in one or two lines of more or less oblique commentar" (jjg.net) Booker says that as far as she can tell, many, if not most of these sites started very informally and then, one way or another, the URL got passed around soon these "hobby sites" developted devoted audiences, readers who visit them at least daily, sometimes more.

Jesse James Garrett, content editor for Ingram Micro's Web site and editor of the weblog jjg.net says that "weblogs are the pirate radio stations of the Web, personal platforms through which individuals broadcast their perspectives on current events, the media, our culture, and basically anything else that strikes their fancy from the vast sea of raw material available out there on the Web. Some are more topic-focused than others, but all are really built around someone's personal interests. Neither a faceless news-gathering organization nor an impersonal clipping service, a quality weblog is distinguished by the voice of its editor, and that editor's connection with his or her audience."

One of the best weblogs I found was Peter Merholz's peterme.com. "How freakin? cool is this?" he asks in the lead item for May 12, writing about tracking satellites live and real-time using a 3D Java applet. The site mixes the best of web design and technology - interface, design, web development - with pop culture: movie reviews, an essay on the late cartoonist Shel Silverstein.

Merholz has decided, "for what it's worth," to pronounce "weblog" as "we? - blog."

While weblogs don't have the reach and influence - thus, the commercial potential -- of larger, more inter-active and open sites, it's easy to imagine them as powerful supplements to the major foraging sites. And, depending on their members, could be influential at sharing memes, essays and ideas.

Cameron Barrett's thoughts on weblogs can be found here, along with his list of favorites. Keith Dawson, who runs the Tasty Bits of Technology Front site - in some ways a pioneer, classic weblog, also has written about weblogs at here.

To me, weblogs may embody personalized media on the Net - enterprising geeks creating interesting new sites that set out to define news in different ways, to be both interesting, coherent, and more civil. This is the complete opposite structure of conventional media, which is top-down, boring and inherently arrogant.

They may be among the first e-communities to successfully overcome online hostility and abuse as well. That alone could make them highly popular.

Weblogs, however personal, are foraging sites in the classic sense of the term.

But Weblogs aside, the idea of electronic communities as encompassing distinct biological types is irresistible. And it makes sense. I'd identify these species of electric villagers. Add your own:

FORAGERS ( Stefik would call them Wolves): the people running sites or submitting and linking to discovered information.

LURKERS (Stefik's Spiders): The largest group, professionals, academics, researchers and others whose needs for information is practical, and who wait for it, usually in silence.

FISHERMEN: People who trawl selected sub-topics or discussions for specific data, such as information about a kind of information or software.

HELPERS: Electronic communities often have a compliment of knowledgeable veterans who welcome newcomers, and are happy to counsel them in the ways of the site. The helpers don't see newcomers as a threat, but an opportunity for the village to grow and prosper.

IDEOLOGISTS (as in priests and theologists): Vigilant for deviations from what they perceive as the site's purpose, they disagree and criticize, sometimes sharply, but rarely with venom or cruelty.

DEFENDERS (as in warrior bees or ants): Ideologically- driven flamers who seek to keep their communities pure, free from intrusive outsiders, whom they see as threatening and de-stabilizing.

ANONYMOUS COWARDS (Spies, informers, information bringers and Braying Hyenas): Two types, people with legitimate information that they can't share under their own names, and exhibitionists who get to express hostility without consequence. The single biggest cause of the destruction of communities, they are the most frequently cited reason newcomers flee, veterans tire and advertisers move on to more hospitable environments.

TECHS (worker bees and ants): The people in any community for whom the construction of the site is its own reward. They are constantly working to offer options and services, improve software and access.

Some questions: What does an electric community need to work? Are there other identifiable types of e-community members? Are new kinds of sites like weblogs the future, or a minor step on the evolutionary chain?

An anonymous reader linked us a Tasty Bit from Tasty Bits about the eBayla virus: an auction item that contains some Java Script that will email your private eBay info to the creator of the auction. Eek.

An anonymous reader submitted a link to a Tasty Bits piece that talks about how 263 members of the House of Reps supposedly voted for both the CDA & the release of the Starr Report. Posting the Starr report to the internet could have had up to $250k fine or 5 yrs prison if the CDA had passed. Those wacky politicians... "

An anonymous reader submitted a link to a Tasty Bits piece that talks about how 263 members of the House of Reps supposedly voted for both the CDA & the release of the Starr Report. Posting the Starr report to the internet could have had up to $250k fine or 5 yrs prison if the CDA had passed. Those wacky politicians... "

Stan Seibert has written a piece addressing a very key issue in the Linux community. In the beginning there was Linus. Back then, 100% of the users contributed to Linux. As it grew, the percentage of programmers dropped as the number of 'end users' grew. This will only continue as Linux grows. This is great because it means that proves that Linux is more than just a hacker's OS. But the growing number of users unable to actively contribute puts more pressure on developers (email pleas for help, bugs discovered, feature requests etc). The Linux community needs to adapt to this in order to succeed. Hit the link below and read what Stan has to say about it.

The following is an Editorial by Slashdot reader Stan Seibert

Harnessing the Linux Labor Force By Stan Seibert
The Problem

Recently the author of Kirc expressed his frustration with answering all of the bug reports, installation questions, and patch submissions. Under the all of these pressures, he has now decided that he can no longer continue the development of Kirc. His frustrations are probably not unique; most developers are feeling the crunch of increasing demands on their time.

Ironically enough, this probably results from the increasing popularity of Linux. As Linux receives more press, more users try it out and experiment with it. Unfortunately, this creates a culture clash in the Linux community. Windows users (as most of these new converts are) pay for software and expect tech support; there is no other interaction with the developer. You give them money, they give you help. The protocol is part of the DOS/Windows culture. Even in shareware, most authors will only provide tech support to registered, paying users. The Linux community does not work that way (see Eric Raymond's Homesteading the Noosphere).

Linux (and all associated software) originally was written by programmers for other programmers. Since nearly all of the users were also developers in some way or another, the community was ideal for the free (think beer and speech) exchange of ideas. Programmers are used to digging through sparse documentation and cryptic source code files to find the answers to their questions. When completely stumped, they can at least phrase their question precisely in terms meaningful to other programmers, making it much easier to answer. Thus, everyone was able to use each other's tools with little or no burden on the developer, and in turn, made their own programs available.

The shifting profile of the Linux user now upsets the balance. No longer a Unix programmer, the new Linux user has a pretty good sense of how computers work, learned about computers on a Windows machine, and does not know how to program fluently. Such a user is probably baffled by the confusion and chaos that surrounds Linux development. Relying on their prior understanding of user-developer relations, they assume that software authors will have the time and inclination to provide them with complete, beginning-to-end tech support. As the number of users increases, this becomes harder and harder for developers to do. Paradoxically, the popularity of Linux could actually halt development.

Yet, if the proliferation of projects is any indicator, we have not reached that point yet. Here on Slashdot, we hear about new projects everyday to fill some software niche. Though some will succeed, many will fail, not for lack of ideas or worth, but for lack of manpower. It is probably safe to say that every live project in existence could use more help. I have lost track of the number of pieces of software still stuck in the "0.1 pre-alpha" stage of development. These projects could use an infusion of talent to help them get where they need to be.

The Solution

I do think that the changing situation can benefit Linux greatly. My solution to the problem relies on three assumptions:

1. There are lots of Linux users.
2. There are many development tasks that don't need programming skills.
3. Most Linux users who would be willing help do these development tasks.

The first assumption has been well established by surveys and polls. For evidence of the second, we simply need to look at the frustration of people like the Kirc developer. These projects need tech support, documentation, and targeted beta testing as well as coding. The third is just a guess. I think most users would not mind donating a little time and talent to helping the Linux community. There are probably numerous users who would like to help but do not know how to get involved. We need to change that if the Linux community is to survive. Since not every Linux developer can be lucky enough to get paid full time for what they do, we have to distribute the work of development among more people.

I want to create a web site that will act as a sort of project clearinghouse. Project developers could register and periodically update their projects with a database, including the skills they currently need. Users would have a place to learn how to get involved in development. It would have resources to help users educate themselves and learn new skills. They could also register themselves as potential volunteers, also listing They could also register themselves as potential volunteers, also listing their skills and desired type of work. At this point, some nifty Perl scripts would crunch and munch the two databases together, producing a match between talent and project. This would be a powerful way of leveraging the Linux Labor Force (as the title of my article calls it) to improve the Linux community. A developer that needs people with network programming skills, documentation ability, and Ensoniq soundcards to test their network sound system could automatically be informed of people who could do these things. With a better host than my ISP can provide, we could even expand the services to include roulette-style mailing lists (as I saw suggested in a comment here several weeks ago) where a single e-mail alias randomly distributes questions on a given project to one of several qualified people. All registered projects could provide a list of tech support people and an alias (ex: gmoney@linux.yada.org) would send general project questions (installation, etc.) to one of the people on the list. We could even have the mother of all such mailing lists, a newbie-linux@linux.yada.org (these are only example addresses) that would instantly forward a newbie question to one of a thousand Linux gurus around the world.

I don't have time to start this for another 2 weeks (until after finals), so I'm looking for someone willing to help me jump start this. I have 50 meg of web space, though I don't know if I can execute scripts, and I am certain I cannot set up any mailing lists without paying them some silly amount. So I'm looking for someone to help me who can set up a discussion list and a preliminary web site to get this thing started (See, I already need this site. :) ). So far as I know, other people have tried parts of this idea, but none have integrated the parts together or implemented the script idea.

Your input

• What do you think of this?
• Has it been done?
• What should be included/excluded?
• Are some of you out there uncertain of how to help linux development and would like this sort of think?

I am interested to know what the Slashdot readers think. Please email me if you want to help or have any longer ideas that wouldn't fit in a Slashdot comment.

Justin Chapweske wrote in with a link to Tasty Bits (The best nerd news besides Slashdot out there :) where you can read about the governments of the world, and the fact that they have been evesdropping on the majority of phone calls since 1981 and noting key words. Pretty scary. Time for phone encryption I'd say.

It's impossible to accurately say how many Linux boxes are out there. Estimates range from a half a million to 10 million. TBTF has an interesting writeup in their latest issue using various estimates to guess at how many boxes there are. Alessandro Russo recently sent me an email saying we should make a small kernel patch that sends some sort of registration information to a central server occasionally. Such an idea has amazingly complicated issues (forging? dynamic IPs? bandwidth? privacy?) associated with it, but is certainly interesting. Back when I first installed slackware I remember it telling me to send email somewhere to track installations. Various other Linux Counting Projects have been underway, but maybe it's really time to get into doing this. Linux Installations potentially outnumber MacOS! Let's prove it.