a crank's progress

MediaGuardian.co.uk | New media | Signs of the times

Douglas Rushkoff writes in the Guardian:

[ . . . ] a company like AOL never had a future. AOL was a training ground: an introduction to the internet for people who didn’t know how to deal with FTP. None of us thought it could last, because once the technological barriers to entry for the internet had been lowered, no one would need AOL’s simplistic interface or it’s child-safe, digital content wading pools. People would want to get on the “real” internet, using real browsers and email programs.

I remember the early days of content programming at both TBS and CNN where ideas were shelved because AOL’s customers — a large segment of the market even then — couldn’t use them with AOL’s neutered interface. It got better/easier when they dumped one Spyclass-based browser for IE’s version.

If the union of AOL and TWX is annulled, it will be interesting to see what AOL has to offer. Can they offer a valuable dialup service and a viable content presence without the content TWX provides? The only upside I can think of has been the cost savings to the internet properties: CNN was a big stick to use on vendors when negotiating bandwidth pricing, and AOL/TWX is even more effective.

MediaGuardian.co.uk | City | Case moots AOL Time Warner demerger

AOL Time Warner chairman Steve Case has floated the idea of spinning off the troubled America Online internet unit, prompting renewed speculation that the company could demerge next year.

via Wade

my first call from a funeral service telemarketer today . . . . . I don’t even have my AARP card yet, and already I’m being solicited for longterm (really long term) real estate purchases.

Fierce Highway: Carter to blame for Hussein?

A college undergrad opines:

Is the recent Nobel Laureate Jimmy “Aww Shucks, Looky There Ah’m President” Carter to blame for our recent problems with Saddam Hussien? This editorial from UPI certainly thinks so.

President Carter’s shilly-shallying over Saddam in 1980 led to Western coffers being enriched by a $1,000 billion of Iranian/Iraqi arms purchases and uncounted millions of Iranian and Iraqi dead; fuelling Saddam’s conviction that he could get away with invading Kuwait as he had got away with invading Iran; U.N. sanctions at U.S. insistence that have killed close to a million Iraqi children to avenge Saddam’s capture of Kuwait, though that invasion ended more than a decade ago; and the impending destruction of a civilization where Hammurabi first taught humankind the Rule of Law. And this is the man now honored by a Nobel peace prize. O tempora! O mores!

Huh? Carter was out of office in January 1981, and the Iran/Iraq war continued until 1988, when Carter’s successor was completing 8 years in office. The next occupant of the White House had a Mideast adventure, which seems more of a root cause of the current situation than anything Carter may been done.

In reviewing this this document, I don’t see how the blame for Hussein’s current power can be laid at Carter’s door.

Further reading gives a different side to the story than this suggests.

In its war effort, Iran was supported by Syria and Libya, and received much of its weaponry from North Korea and China, as well as from covert arms transactions from the United States. Iraq enjoyed much wider support, both among Arab and Western nations: the Soviet Union was its largest supplier of arms.

So the US was supporting Iran, the nation which held US hostages for 444 days and humiliated its military, by selling it weaponry on the quiet (proceeds from this went to support insurgency in Nicaragua, investing in two wars for the price of one).

None of this happened on Carter’s watch, and as near as I can tell, his successors did little or nothing to halt the bloodbath (estimates of the dead are around 1.5 million): the US and then USSR got involved when oil shipments were imperiled by the increasing desperate combatants, but the spilled blood was of no interest.

Perhaps this is realpolitik at its purest. Sounds more like encouraging two kids to beat other up so you can take both allowances, instead of just one, and not having to bloody yourself into the bargain.

Nonprofit to Create Open Source Software

“I haven’t seen any evidence that there’s a hole in the market here,” he said. “But all the rational people have been completely wrong about most of these markets. So the fact that this sounds loony is probably a good thing.”

It must be my time spent as a newspaper copy editor, the best part of which was writing headlines and looking for good “pull” quotes, that makes this fun.

what’s in rebecca’s pocket?

Surely it would be a good thing if people were encouraged to climb outside their milieu. It would be nice, for example, if AmeriCorps became a rite of passage for young Americans, so that at least for a year of their lives they would be with people unlike themselves.

Rebecca quotes David Brooks.

Go here and here and here for more.

There’s more to this, of course, than the timeliness of this notion of a broader and more inclusive national service.

The unforeseen side-effects of being able to select your own information or build your own newspaper means you may never get the Recommended Daily Allowance of stuff you should be aware of. Like it or not, you need to be aware that the president is agitating for a war with a tyrant halfway around the globe while a sniper moves freely around the nation’s capitol killing almost a dozen civilians in public places.

On the one hand, the mainstream press may miss a story completely where overseas outlets or small independents (On the internet, no one knows you’re not the NYTimes) may cover it. Browsing and undirected serendipitous reading is still important.

Insolitology : the study of crackpots on the Internet

Welcome to Insolitology, the site about web oddities. Some people say that humour is only veiled derision – here at Insolitology, all of our derision is explicit.

The proprietors seem interested in the ongoing thread about the Voodoo Magick Box.

Some funny stuff here . . . .

Salon.com News | An ad George Bush should love

Imagine a soccer mom in a Ford Excursion (11 mpg city, 15 mpg highway) saying, “I’m building a nuclear bomb for Saddam Hussein.” Or a mob of solo drivers toodling down the freeway at 75 mph shouting in unison, “We’re buying weapons that will kill American soldiers, Marines and sailors! Yahoo!”

Think globally, act locally, indeed.