The Hypocrisy Weblog

cnet’s web 2.0 blog, “Webware” has announced it’s Webware 100 winners-list. The question is now; how is this list relevant to anyone in the Internet-business? Each and every category, 10 of them, has 10 winners each – and each and every site on the top 100-list anyone who’s involved in working with the Internet (in any way) have heard of.

The categories are; Browsing, Communications, Community, Data, Entertainment, Media, Mobile, Productivity and Commerce, Publishing, Reference.

Surely, it is a good ego boost for the people behind the services to get recognition, but does it serve any journalistic purpose? I am not so sure about that; Rafe Needleman and the Webware crew are preaching for the already saved. There is no internal ranking of the sites in the individual categories – so how do I as a visitor know which site got more votes than the other? (Yes, alright – they do have a list of the over-all top 10 and the sites that got over 1000 votes, though it doesn’t show the internal ranking in between the sites within each category. Perhaps the over-all statistic material wasn’t enough?! I don’t know…)

From my own perspective I am glad that the swizz army-knife-like site Netvibes, which deserves more media coverage – as it is a really nice service to keep track on all your communication needs ranging from rss-feeds (sites, forums, email, blogs etc), to email, to skype, to.. yeah – you get the idea.

Google was the company with most services in the top 100-list, yet this is not surprising as they are the biggest site on the Internet.

To the Webware authors; Please make the list more detailed the next time and get a broader statistic foundation (aka get more people to vote on the list), then we’re talking about a relevant list.

The co-founders of Dreamhost, Josh&Dallas, gets interviewed by the ISPcon-moderator Joey deVilla, where Dallas&Josh talks about Dreamhost’s brilliant affiliate program, and how it gives them revenue despite their crazy offers and high affiliate payout.

A personal reflection on this is how friendly and down to earth they both seem, it is such a relief to see a bunch of “caring geeks” (yeah yeah, I know… ) doing what they love, and making money out of providing the Internet community with such a great service!

Boing Boing picked up on the story of Canadian Internet Service Provider Shaw blocking iTunes store and / or their podcasts due to the content coming from multiple sources.

Over the past month Rogers (ISP) in Canada has put some software on their networks that prevents activity for BitTorrents, P2P, IRC, and also along with that is a rule that if you are trying to download a large media file from more then 1 server it will be dropped. When you download a Podcast from iTunes it downloads that file from multiple servers in the background (I confirmed this by watching my cable modem logs). As soon as it tries to use more than 2 different servers for the download, it just stops. That’s the reason why Podcast downloads stop at random places – it’s the point where a 2nd server is involved in the download. The same issue causes timeouts and cut-offs in the iTunes music store.Here is the problem – when anyone calls Rogers about the problem they say it is either a router, firewall or Apple problem and they shrug you off.

Hundreds or thousands of people in Canada can no longer get Podcasts or purchase music from the iTunes Music store. This is BAD. Please, Apple, contact Rogers and sort it out. So many people have called Rogers with no luck.

The question I ask myself is why an Internet Service Provider should be capping bandwidth or limiting net-services in any way?! For security issues I do not mind certain restrictions, such as blocking port 25 for outgoing email to reduce spam coming from the network, and/ or blocking the ports135 to 139 in order to reduce common worm-threats – but there should always be some kind of user agreement where the advanced user should be able to sign a paper and taking all responsibility for unlocking these ports.

What your Internet Service Provider should do is to deliver you an unfiltered Internet-connection, if you choose to have this. With no traffic limitations or other restrictions. What you do with your Internet connection should be your business and responsibility, no-one else should be able to dictate what sites you surf to, what content you choose to download and so on. What should be applicable is the laws of the country you reside in, not the arbitrariness of your Internet Service Provider.

So, if you are a customer of Shaw or any other Internet Service Provider that is limiting your Internet-access, vote with your feet and with your wallet: switch to a provider that will provide you with un-filtered access. Sooner or later, your old provider will be forced to change their policy.

Tim Grieve writes:

“When Tom DeLay appeared on “Hardball” this week, he complained about the unfairness of the grand jury process that led to his indictment. “You know, grand juries, it’s all one-sided,” DeLay said. “It is all what [the prosecutor] presents to the grand jury, how he spins, how he presents it.” DeLay said that Travis County District Attorney Ronnie Earle has had him under a cloud for two years while “never talking to me, never talking to me, never asking me to testify.”

It’s a good story for someone who could use a little sympathy just now. It just happens not to be true. “

Read more here.

On the Salon.com Blog, Geraldine Seale writes about the reasons of Paul Wolfowitz being appointed the head of the World Bank after working close-knit to the Pentagon.

A short yet informative piece.

PS. Salon.com is ad-supported, so you might have to look at an ad before getting to the actual Blog.

Here’s an IT-related post about Katrina:

DirectNIC, a datacenter company in New Orleans rode out hurricane Katrina. Brave employees at this Internet Service Provider is keeping power on, repairing the uplinks to the Internet etc.

If you want to follow their work, go to “The Interdictor” at LiveJournal. There you can follow their struggle (one man operation?) to keep operations running via text, a webcam live-feed and also get amazed of the fans that this relatively anonymous provider is getting.

For further information and comments, visit Slashdot, read the Wired-article, Netcraft’s coverage (Uptime graph) and browse their photo gallery.

Annica Tiger listed The Hypocrisy weblog in her “Three-leaf clover” (meta?)blog-roll.

Swedish newspapers Aftonbladet, Expressen and Svenska Dagbladet (SvD) all have blogs in one form or another, though these don’t feel like “blogs” at all. Why?! Well, that is an easy question to answer; They do not contain a comment function!! How hard can it be to administer a comment system? I know, it costs money to have some poor bugger monitoring every reply that comes in, due to the fact that the publisher is responsible for every word written on their site(s), but the void where reader-comments should’ve been is too large to ignore!!!

Also, Aftonbladet have their co-worker Fredrik Virtanen writing his “stop smoking”-blog, which in fact isn’t interesting at all. It just feels like a publicity-stunt from Aftonbladet. (Virtanen gave up it looks like) Of course, their political commentators Helle Klein and Lotta Gröning have a blog each… but a brilliant concept where their readers could interact directly with them is shattered due to the lack of comment-functions whatsoever..

So please, take a chance… let the readers speak their minds too, or else you could stop already and push out your static (printed) words instead.

Over and out!

After having read the article ‘Podcasters’ look to net money over at the good old BBC, I can not see what Adam Curry is thinking about.

Adam says; -”It is totally going to kill the business model of radio,”

I say it won’t! I may sound like a grumpy old man now, even if merely 26 years old (haha), but just because Adam Curry is a remarkable DJ and host in his podcast (and in his past as well), I doubt that he’ll have an easy job getting the visitors and advertisement-base that is needed to be able to live on his pod-cast.

Look; Adam is the top-name of podcasting, and yes – the concept of being able to subscribe to the programming of your choice into your portable mediaplayer is cool and I support his mission with all my heart&mind, yet podcasting will never threaten traditional radio. (Note that “never” can be transcribed to ~10 years, even if I am right most of the time, I can be wrong! (I know, tragic is it not?! ))

“Why won’t podcasts threaten traditional radio?”, you might ask yourself… I say it is very elementary; individual podcaster do not have the marketing muscles that tradional media has. It is very rare that a new radio company comes up from nowhere and cuts a large (if even any) portion of the market, and this is impossible without both marketing know-how and capital.

What I personally am looking forward to is an al� carte-type of television, that I can obtain fast and for a moderate sum of Euros (yes, I’m a Swede in mourning) – after this is introduced with a working business-model and with a demand for this kind of service, then I think that the market is ready for Adam Curry&his fellow podcasters!

Over and out

The swedish organization “Svenskt Näringsliv” (swedish trade and industry) and their md Ebba Lindsö has stated that one of their lobbyists Johnny Munkhammar must stop writing in his own Blog due to the fact that Munkhammar’s opinions not always goes hand in hand with the ones of Svenskt Näringsliv.

The obvious reason that something will be done about Munkhammar’s Blog is because his private opinions might bleed over to his role as a lobbyist for Svenskt Näringsliv. Though now, there is a minor buzz within the swedish Blog-community that Munkhammar got silenced because he and his Blog is a powerful factor within swedish society and business life… I personally think that this is wishful thinking.