Cat out of the Bag

One of the funniest things over the past few weeks has been the results of the attempts by the Advanced Access Content System Licensing Administrator (AACS LA) to suppress the publication of the number that unlocks the copy protection on HD-DVD disks.  They sent out letters to various web companies demanding that they take down pages containing the number.  Google received one of these letters, their reaction was apparently to post a copy of the letter at the Chilling Effects web-site and to leave the page that the letter explicitly complains about untouched.  Indeed, entering the number into Google search returns "about 1,670,000" hits.  But the most interesting reaction was at the user-driven news site Digg.  Initially they started to comply with the AACSLA demands, but then the users started posting and 'digging' (ie: voting for) lots of news items mentioning the number.  Eventually, the Digg front page was filled with such items and founder Kevin Rose chose to give up and just let them stand, apparently preferring to face litigation rather than commit commercial suicide.  He must be left wondering at the power of the monster he has created.

Something New on the Web

Over at Planet Lisp I came across these little graphs being used to indicate the posting history of blogs.  The software to produce them was written by Zach Beane.  I think they are a rather effective application of Edward Tufte's 'sparklines'.  Various other implementions of sparklines are available out on the web.

Experiences with News Aggregators

In an attempt to reduce the amount of time I waste scanning my favourite blogs, I have been playing around with some news aggregators.  I am afraid my experiences are not good:

• Akregator running on Ubuntu 6.06  frequently crashes with a segmentation fault.
• Sage, a Firefox extension, does not remember which posts you have read.
•  Thunderbird seems to be more mature but I an unable find how to get it to use Firefox rather than Internet Explorer as its default browser.

Note added 2007-01-28:  I have just come across Google Reader which looks very promising.

The Search by John Battelle

An account of the rise of Google with some mentions of Altavista, Yahoo! and other search engine companies. I found it most interesting where it was covering the early days; the last few chapters of speculation about the future of search, I thought less good, in particular, I don't think there will be any financial incentive for the creation of a historical archive of the web.

The success of Google can be seen as an example of a technically clean solution (the PageRank algorithm) triumphing over messier, technically inferior ones. I admit, though, that the good business judgement of the Google founders also had something to do with it (also, the algorithm that Google uses has probably now evolved into something hideously complex).

Not Part of the Conversation

Paul Graham is really a very good writer: he has interesting things to say and he says them clearly.  Here is an example I came across today:

On the web, articles you have to pay for might as well not exist. Even if you were willing to pay to read them yourself, you can't link to them. They're not part of the conversation.

 Exactly.