News and views from a software developer's perspective
Saturday, June 08, 2002Yahoo to give home page a makeover. After holding on to the same basic framework for seven years, the Web portal is hoping to court advertisers with a redesign, according to sources. [CNET News.com]
Alas, poor Yahoo. I don't use Yahoo anymore. I used to use Yahoo frequently. They were different from their competitors Excite, Lycos, and others I can't remember now, because they had the most complete and easy to use directory. I think they would have done much better to stick with a business focused on a directory. They could have done that without the conflict inherent in a business that also offers it's own content. But in the late 1990s, it was the popular thing to do to acquire lots of other web companies, which is what Yahoo did.
There is an alternative to Yahoo's directory. It's the Open Directory Project.
I opened a new project on SourceForge. It's called MAIF -- Mail Archive and Interchange Format. The idea is to promote a standard file format for email archiving and interchange that is simple, yet overcomes some of the problems with the Unix mbox format or other similar formats. Another goal is to develop open source software that works with MAIF files. I want to develop software for exporting and importing MAIF files from popular mail clients such as Outlook Express and Mozilla Mail. I also want to develop software to process the MAIF files: convert them to HTML, sort them, filter them, and so on. (I just searched for the project on SourceForge, and it doesn't come up under a search. I guess I have some work to do before it's really public.)
Getting a lock on broadband The Federal Communications Commission is quietly handing over control of the broadband Internet to a handful of massive corporations. [Salon]
It seems the world is full of unimaginative businessmen, journalists, government bureaucrats, and politicians who just don't "get it" about the Internet, and broadband Internet in particular. Who does "get it"? Net nerds do -- in particular, the nerds who designed in Internet.
Let's get one thing straight about broadband Internet: it's not video on demand.
This is an important point, because video on demand is a service offered primarily by Big Companies. So, when policy makers equate broadband Internet with video on demand, they concern themselves only with BigCo business.
This view is unimaginative, because it fails to realize that the Internet is the Great Equalizer. I mean that in this sense: The Internet ignorantly passes packets from originating computer to destination computer. I say "ignorantly" because the routers that transmit these packets across the Internet examine only the source and destination addresses -- only the information that is necessary to accomplish the delivery of the packet. The routers do not examine the contents of the packets, and they do not try to be clever. At least that's the way the Internet was originally designed. When the Internet is viewed in that way, it is understood to be completely content neutral. It's that property of being content neutral -- and therefore nondiscriminating -- that has made the Internet so successful in the past, and that must be preserved if we are to see innovation in the future. Thus, the Internet is the Great Equalizer because it doesn't care if the communicating devices are owned by BigCos or small companies.
The reason we need to get policy makers to "get it", is that they need to look to small companies for innovation and get past their focus on BigCos. BigCos don't innovate, they control.