rsax writes "Bell Canada recently announced that it is launching a downloadable video store just as it is caught up in a government inquiry into its traffic-shaping practices. Some consider this a conflict of interest since several content providers were in the process of distributing TV shows using P2P technology before the Bell throttling issue started getting media coverage. Bell's FAQ states that it is not available for Mac users right now (and not Linux either of course) because they are using Windows Media DRM. They do, however, invite feedback on their site."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

One of the points we've been making for years is that advertising is content. That is, as people have more and more media options, advertisers can no longer assume they have a captive audience who will watch ads because they have nothing better to do. Rather, advertisers have to make their ads entertaining, so that people will want to watch them. The latest example of this is a New York Times article about how TV networks are bringing back the live commercial. For example, Jimmy Kimmel has been doing amusing live pitches for Nikon, Pontiac, and Quiznos on his late night show, and Jay Leno hosted a silly American Gladiators segment on his show to sell Klondike bars. Hollywood executives have a bad habit of viewing commercials as the spinach viewers have to eat in order to get the content they're actually interested in. But these examples illustrate that commercials don't have to be boring. With a little ingenuity, and funny pitchmen like Kimmel and Leno, commercials can be made interesting enough that consumers are actually interested in watching them. Part of the reason people hate commercials is that they're so repetitive, but live pitches can help break up the monotony by performing the pitch differently every time. And once commercials are actually interesting, the TiVo "problem" goes away, because even most consumers who have PVRs with commercial-skipping functions won't use them because they're actually interested in watching the commercials.

Timothy Lee is an expert at the Techdirt Insight Community. To get insight and analysis from Timothy Lee and other experts on challenges your company faces, click here.

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XRay says:

Sometimes it seems like the members of ACM SIGGRAPH (Get ready for a long acronym: Association for Computing Machinery Special Interest Group on Computer Graphics) don't know about the local Maker culture in Los Angeles and I'm not sure how much the local Makers around Los Angeles know about SIGGRAPH. As the Chair of the local Los Angeles chapter of ACM SIGGRAPH I'd like to bridge the gap and extend and invitation to interested folks to come on down to Santa Monica and participate in a sort of science fair social hour and maker night that I'm hosting at Bergamot Station on Tuesday, June 10th. If you've got a home brew electronics/robotics/whirring/buzzing/blinking/tactile art project/plaything you'd like to share then get in touch with me via makers@agentxray.com to reserve a space. Participants get free admission and we'll feed you.

We've got an exciting evening planned. Boing Boing's own Mark Frauenfelder is giving a talk on "The Rise and Fall and Ride of Modern Making" and we're featuring a circuit bending performance by Jeff Boyton who's going to create an immersive audio environment honed from his hand crafted electronic instruments built from leftover consumer electronic detritus.

Space-Time Coordinates to follow:

LA SIGGRAPH presents "Maker Night"

When:
Tuesday, June 10th, 2008
5:30 pm - Makers Load In and Set up
6:30-7:30pm - Social Hour Science Fair
7:30-10:30pm - Presentation

Where:
The Writers Boot Camp at Bergamot Station
2525 Michigan Ave., Bldg #1
Santa Monica, CA, 90404

Contact: makers@agentxray.com

Related Links:

LA SIGGRAPH (Yea, I know. We're working on it...)

ACM SIGGRAPH

Jeff Boynton Circuit Bending

pottercw writes "Trucking may not seem like a high-tech industry to the casual observer, but major carriers are starting to adopt an array of emerging technologies to combat rising fuel costs, tighter regulation and fierce competition. The technologies include systems that monitor and communicate vehicle conditions and performance, enhanced GPSs that keep tabs on tractors and trailers, and safety systems which issue warnings or even take action to help drivers avoid an accident — all working in real time. Computerworld has a cool mouseover diagram highlighting some of the gadgets we're beginning to see on high-tech trucks."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Back in January, we noted that due to a lack of any kind of anti-virus law in Japan, officials there had twisted copyright law to charge a guy who had embedded a virus in a graphic -- where the graphic used was infringing. While it's nice to see the government go after malicious virus writers, it's troublesome to stretch a different law for that purpose. However, it appears the Japanese courts didn't agree and have now convicted the guy. It's always troubling when governments twist laws to serve a different purpose.

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A lot of entrepreneurs are inspired by Google, Apple, Microsoft, Amazon, Facebook and other megacompanies. But let’s face it — these are outliers. They are exceptions. They are the rarest of rarest cases.

That’s not to say they aren’t worth paying attention to, dreaming about, and otherwise admiring, but it’s handy to have success stories that are a bit more common scale. A company doesn’t have to earn billions to be a great inspiration for budding entrepreneurs.

So, ignoring the usual suspects for now, which companies inspire you? Which companies do you respect enough to say “I love what they’re up to. We’d like to achieve their level of success.”

An interesting but mysterious new feature appeared today in FriendFeed, rooms, and of course we have to try it out.

I created a room for Scripting News. What shall we use it for? I have no clue. Help me figure it out.

Something just jumped out at me. Is this the Digg-in-a-Box that I was asking for many months ago?

These guys always confuse me, in a fun way.

Today Twitter began to communicate with their users, which they are to be commended and congratulated for. A journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step, there's a long road ahead, and everyone's going to learn a lot as we travel down it, and no doubt it's awkard at first. Now we can look back at the first step and think how much we accomplished, and look forward to the second.

There were two posts, one from Jack Dorsey, the CEO and another from Alex Payne, an engineer at "Twitter HQ." Payne, by pointing to a piece that dismisses decentralization and says we don't understand it, thereby shows (sorry to say) that he doesn't understand Twitter. It's like the elephant being described by a million blind men. Each of us sees something different and thinks, incorrectly, that we have the whole picture. In fact, none of us do.

It's easy to prove that Twitter is different for everyone. I'll start with myself. I have 9644 followers on my main account, and I follow 663 people and have updated 7870 times.

When I post something to Twitter it's an act of publishing. I can't keep up all the people I follow. Back when I only followed 100 people, Twitter made it possible for me to learn about the people I followed. It was remarkable. Today I never make it through all 10 pages of history, the rope slips through my hands. This wonderful feature of Twitter, that I reveled in last year this time, is now lost to me.

So even with just that one account I already am three or four of the blind men who think they grok Twitter, and each of them sees something different. I could write a 5000 word article for each of them, the experiences would be very different.

Dennis Metzcher lives in new Jersey and describes himself as an "iPhone-toting super-hero." He's updated 216 times, has 36 followers and follows 48. His posts are thoughtful, and he seems to communicate with lots of A-listers but also quite a few people with relatively small number of followers. When he goes to Twitter it probably doesn't look like a firehose. I'm sure he sees it very differently from me. Maybe when he sees this he'll post a comment here describing his experience.

Alex Payne -- the Twitter engineer -- follows 319 people, has 3181 followers and has updated 3430 times.

Cliff Gerrish is a website builder in SF, follows 350 people, is followed by 309 people and has updated 1650 times.

I can't explain how each of these people sees Twitter, but I'm absolutely sure we all see it differently.

To me, Twitter is a publishing medium. I wish it weren't so, I wish I had the bandwidth to really follow 663 people. I have no idea how to thin out the ranks of the people I'm following, and I don't plan to do it. But to the extent that the company is having trouble scaling it for me, I think they should stop worrying about it. Further, and this is important, most of the things I post are not especially time-sensitive. If it took 1/2 hour to deliver each one to each of my 9644 followers it wouldn't be the end of the world. However, a week ago I had a news scoop, the first report of an earthquake in Falls Church, VA. That was a high priority message.

I have to stay on the air when Twitter goes down. I have to have a Plan B, because I intend to build a business that depends on this service, or something like it. I want to start that business in the next few weeks (actually I started it quite some time ago, but it's about to evolve). My solution, since I do understand what I need, will involve decentralization. If you think decentralization isn't part of the solution, you are wrong -- it is. Not from Twitter-the-company's point of view, perhaps, but from this user's point of view, certainly.

It won't do any good for any of us to dismiss anyone else's point of view. That's what I would like to get through to the people who run Twitter, who work there, their investors, and all the developers and users of the service and its competitors and potential federators. I've been in the tech industry for over 30 years and nothing is so frustrating as people who think they understand better than others, when they don't. Please, don't fall into that trap. Remember we're all blind men, you too -- and keep in touch with your humility.

I look forward to a long, interesting conversation about this stuff!

lgmac brings us a story about how NASA will bring information from the Phoenix Mars lander to the internet in the coming days. CIO Magazine speaks with JPL's chief knowledge architect and others about how they'll provide massive amounts of data from the lander to suit the needs of an audience ranging from professors to 8-year-olds. We've been discussing the Phoenix mission for quite a while now. The landing is on schedule for Sunday at roughly 5PM PDT. "'In previous missions, a system like this didn't exist and people were sharing images via external drives,' Bitter says. Some of the images are put up immediately and captioned, or sent to museum audiences, while others are made part of huge mosaic pictures that display the majesty of what the NASA spacecraft encounters, she says. In addition to the sheer volume of data that must be sifted through, challenges included the large, dispersed team, Holm says. 'The content management system has to be easy to use and agnostic,' she says, 'It's all about speed and accuracy of data.' Video on the Web represents one of the biggest changes for modern-day missions for the public, Holm says. 'There's a visceral response we get from people. They feel like they're really there.'"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Good news for consumers as Yahoo announces (via Rob Pegoraro) that it's dropping those annoying ads it appended to Yahoo Mail customers' outgoing emails. The move brings it into parity with GMail, with Hotmail and AOL now looking like laggards. This illustrates a point I made last week: competition doesn't end when the price of a product gets pushed down to zero. Some websites seem to think they're doing their customers such a big favor by giving a service away for free that they're entitled to bombard their customers with annoying ads. But smarter companies have figured out that when they can no longer compete on price, they start competing along other dimensions, like convenience, speed, and features. Paring down the number and intrusiveness of ads is just another way that companies increase the value of their offerings to consumers. Indeed, we've argued before that one of Google's key strengths has been its willingness to change its products in ways that improve the customer experience even if doing so reduces their short-term revenues. That has paid off in the long run for Google with an enhanced brand image and strong customer loyalty. Yahoo seems to be learning that lesson and realizing that it's in its long-run interest to improve its users' experience even in ways that might hurt its bottom line in the short run.

Timothy Lee is an expert at the Techdirt Insight Community. To get insight and analysis from Timothy Lee and other experts on challenges your company faces, click here.

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Stony Stevenson points out an iTnews summary of a security researcher's account of the cyber-attacks on Estonia last year. The full report [PDF] is also available. We've discussed this internet-based conflict in the past. From the report: "In the days leading up to the attack, numerous clues pointed to a large-scale operation that was being planned online. Russian-language Internet discussion forums were abuzz with preparations for an online attack. Three days before the expected onslaught, Estonia planned to release the news of the coming strike in hopes that European media attention would oblige the EU to pressure the Kremlin to intervene, whether or not the attacks emanated from the Russian authorities."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The MPAA has been aggressively suing websites that merely link to infringing content claiming that linking is "inducement" to infringe -- which appears to be an attempt to stretch the Supreme Court's Grokster decision beyond its intended meaning. However, when staring down the barrel of a big Hollywood Studio lawsuit, it's no surprise that some sites cave. The MPAA has happily announced that two more such lawsuits have been settled. These are actually consent judgments, meaning both sides agreement to the judgment, but also likely worked out a separate settlement. That way the MPAA gets to claim huge fines found in the judgment, but which the real settlement was probably much less.

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Steve Cisler, the quintessential "digital librarian," died last week of cancer. Steve was a pioneer in the kinds of information retrieval and global knowledge sharing that have become the platforms of today's Web. My colleague Michael Liebhold at Institute for the Future worked with Steve for years at Apple, where Steve ran the Library of Tomorrow program. Mike writes of his friend:

Many people's lives were touched by Steve; Steve is widely known and beloved across many communities around the world for his years of work worldwide, initially as leader of Apple's Library of Tomorrow, and later leading programs worldwide for a broad network of international groups helping people in developing communities understand and do practical and interesting things with computers, networks and the web.

We worked together during the 1980s and 1990s, and then over the last decade he and I traveled widely over different paths, but e-mailed or talked almost daily, and celebrated often in person with our families or friends whenever we could. For me he was simply a kind, generous friend, a fascinating character, a wonderful conversationalist, a great cook and a great gardener. We shared many wonderful times together talking about books, music, culture, over meals including wine, tortillas, and fresh foods he made himself. Even up until the very difficult end, Steve was always cheerful and intently interested in talking about the world. His passing leaves a great void in my life, that leaves me almost speechless.

Others on the web, have written more eloquent retrospectives than I could, including these:

• Steve Cisler - first Internet librarian
• Steve Cisler is gone
• Steve Cisler RIP
• Steve Cisler Passes

And this e-mail posted to the Nettime list by Ted Byfield, one of Steve's many dear friends around the globe. Link

An anonymous reader writes with a link to "an offline Wikipedia viewer for the iRex Iliad e-ink e-book reader (similar to Amazon's Kindle). Take it anywhere — and you don't need to be connected to the Internet in any way!" (You'll need a 4GB flash card and the ability to follow the directions.)

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Charles Platt says: "My friend Michael Blumlein, who has written some of the most disturbingly surreal and quietly subversive stories in the English language, has established a web site at www.michaelblumlein.com. The site is modest, like Michael himself, but includes a couple of his stories as PDFs. They're worth reading." Link

Ken "I was reading an article this morning on the new American Airlines luggage charge (THAT's gonna go over well), and noticed an aside starting on page 3. Las Vegas is using RFIDs in outgoing luggage now to help move bags more efficiently. After realizing that...um...I had bags that just got back from Vegas about 20 ft. from me, I realized I had to check it out. Oh yeah, there's a RFID. Freaky. And does the tag mention that? Nope. And it's not like airports don't have scanners..." Link (Thanks, Ken!)

danah sez, "The Social Science Research Council has made 'Structures of Participation in Digital Culture' available for free download. This is a collection of fabulous scholarly article