Interesting post, and lots of comments from people who probably wish they had her job.  Maybe Jen's bosses thought that if they hired a Social Media Editor they could edit stuff like this....

Hehe - angry little article about a clever tool to "defeat" Paparazzi.

Beating up your paparazzi stalkers is so last century. The modern celeb might instead turn to non-contact (and non-litigious) means of protection, simultaneously spoiling the paparazzo’s pictures and destroying their parasitic, leech-like livelihood.

CompuServe Classic, the legendary online service that once dominated the industry, will close June 30 after 30 years in cyberspace. CompuServe 2000, a newer iteration of the service, will remain online.

When you succeed with Free, you are going to die by Free. Your best bet is to recognize where you are in your company’s lifecycle and maximize your profits rather than try to extend your stay at the top.

For nearly three decades, there has been talk of a high-speed train between Las Vegas and California but the Secretary's announcement makes it more likely.

The XHTML 2 Working Group charter, scheduled to expire at the end of 2009, will not be renewed. By discontinuing the XHTML 2 working group and increasing resources in the HTML 5 Working Group, W3C hopes to accelerate progress of HTML 5 and clarify the organization's position regarding the future HTML.

Each year gaming brought in up to $7 billion and paid $1 billion in tax, a gap the industry says will cause the state a budget headache. The development replacement zones -- in southern Krasnodar, the Baltic enclave of Kaliningrad, east Siberia's Altai region and the Far East -- require investment of up to $40 billion and have not been built. "The zones have no roads, water or electricity. We fulfilled the law by shutting, the government did not fulfill it as the zones are not ready yet," said casino director Boyev.

via Las Vegas Now

Officials also are reminding owners just how scary the upcoming Fourth of July holiday can be for pets. ""Especially with the fireworks and the barbecues and more people playing outside. The animals can get really scared and they have a tendency to run away more," said Musso.

I’ve had an interesting week dealing with a package that was supposed to have received by now.

-On Tuesday my wife orders a book form a publisher in suburban Chicago, with 2-day shipping
-On Thursday the book does not arrive
-On Friday morning she calls the publisher and discovers that they screwed up, and sent it to the wrong address
-The book is in transit, not delivered yet
-The publisher calls FedEx to change the delivery address

So far, none of this is FedEx’s fault.  But here’s where things get crazy:

Great!  So now we can make sure we get it, and we will get it a day sooner because we are picking it up instead of waiting for it to be delivered!  Not so fast….

Amazing.  There was a screw-up here on the part of the sender, but we’re trying to work with FedEx to fix it because we want to receive the book.  Nobody we talked to on the phone at FedEx seemed interested at all in working with us to make sure that the package is delivered to it’s intended destination, or appreciated the fact that this is an unusual delivery because of the address change and the two “traces”  on the package, and it may get delivered to the wrong place.  They seemed more interested in explaining the internal intricacies of how things work at FedEx.

So how is this worse than the post office?  Easy – FedEx and their customers have access to an amazing amount of information that you just don’t have at the post office.   But that information is not being used to its full potential.  Yes, we can see some information on the Web site.  But it’s the one-way Web, there’s nothing interactive.  It’s pretty far from the Web 2.0 world we now live in.

 If all is going well, yes, the one-way Web is usually enough.  But when there is a hairball in the system, and we the customers make the effort to fix a mistake, we can only find apathetic and/or uninterested people on the phone who can not/will not help us. 

In the meantime, electronic delivery replaces much of what used to be delivered by courier, and the post office is actually improving its online services…..

Maybe FedEx has jumped the shark?  We’ll let you know on Monday, if the delivery goes to the wrong place despite all of our efforts.

It is here that we see manifest the split between the Live Web and the Static Web. I’ve been writing and talking about this split since my son Allen first mentioned the term in 2003.* He saw the World Live Web then as an absence, as unstarted business.

Like Car or Home or even Life Insurance, we don't really think about IP issues enough - until we need them.  I for one appreciate the efforts being made in the OpenNTF steering groups, but hope that things don't go too far into a thorn patch that they can never get out of. 

Personally, as a devleoper/author/trainer who has been around the block a few times with IP issues (The XML Programming Bible is a huge hit!  Yay! - Oops, wait - in PDF format, on Bittorrent.... ), my thinking is along the lines of this piece in the Reuters Editors Blog Archive:

I think the idea of an OpenNTF directory/registry vs a repository is a good one, and that's why I'm leaving OtherNTF up, for, if nothing else, an example/reference implementation of what things could be like.

"We have a problem with wallabies entering poppy fields, getting as high as a kite and going around in circles," The Mercury newspaper quoted Giddings as telling the hearing. "Then they crash. We see crop circles in the poppy industry from wallabies that are high."

“We have contacted them through official channels about concerns about the similarities between Bing and Kayak,” Kayak’s chief marketing officer Robert Birge told Wired.com “From the look and feel of their travel product, they seem to agree with our approach to the market.” That’s careful language for “Microsoft copied our stuff wholesale.”

In an era when technology allows personal health information to be more easily stored, updated, accessed and exchanged, the following rights should be self-evident and inalienable. We the people:

I've been reading a lot of unpleasant and negative things about OpenNTF lately.  Too bad, it was an inspirational idea, executed well by the willpower and labor of some very intelligent and skilled experts in the field.  But I can't help thinking - is it an idea whose time has passed? 

OpenNTF absolutely made sense when it was started.  Back then it was hard to find free places to store, share and discuss notes apps.  But now there are alternatives available and blogs and aggregation sites like planetlotus.org make it easy to find information delivered anywhere that we used to have to go to the well for (think Notes.net).

So after visiting openntf.org a while ago and seeing what it appears to have become - a monument to eye-watering bureaucracy and an advertising vehicle for steering committee appointees - I decided to see if I could create an alternative.....Took me a few hours, mostly to get the colors right, but I think it's not too bad....

I've signed up for and redirected otherntf.org tonight, but the DNS is probably not active yet. UPDATE - I didn't know that ning charges for a URL redirect, so I won't be setting that up for now....the link is almost the same, http://otherntf.ning.com/

Feel free to post anything you'd like there, preferably code related to Notes and Domino. 

NOTE - If you need to post downloadable apps and code, please don't post the code, just a description and a link to the code posted at better places like SourceForge, Google Code, your own Web page or blog or anywhere else you'd like to post it.

When posting Apps, Code and Tips, please tag them as Apps, Code and Tips for easier searching.

One request - Ning charges for bandwidth in $10 increments, so if we get a lot of traffic over there I may need some help with that - if anyone can pitch in it would be greatly appreciated.  The money is paid directly to Ning, not to me.