This week’s column is about The Slashdot Effect, (subscription only, I’m afraid) which I’ll mention in more detail in subsequent postings. This first supplement is about the commercial potential of blogs, and a case study those of you reading blogs will probably already know about: Is it possible to harness this new kind of information… Read More »
Just when I started agonizing about the privacy aspects of MessageTag, a company has come along with a service that makes the mail-receipt monitoring service look like chicken-feed. MessageTag allows users to see whether and when their emails have been read by recipients. It does this by inserting what privacy advocates called a web-bug into… Read More »
Burn and Foam. Starbucks is now offering a service where customers can browse music on computers in their outlets and then burn a CD of the music they like. Using its own Hear Music brand, Starbucks has launched the service in its new Hear Music Coffeehouse in Santa Monica, Calif. The service will be extended… Read More »
The story of electronic voting machines, and the company that makes many of them, continues to roll along. I wrote in a column a few weeks back (Beware E-Voting, 20 November 2003, Far Eastern Economic Review; subscription required) about Bev Harris, a 52-year old grandmother from near Seattle, who discovered 40,000 computer files at the… Read More »
The folk at AlphaSmart tell me that yesterday they showed off the next generation version of Dana, the cool word-processing keyboard I reviewed a few weeks ago, at the National Educating Computer Conference in Seattle. (Their website has no details so far.) The new model offers built-in Wi-Fi technology (802.11b), allowing Dana users to… Read More »