Legacy

Someday, some future owners of our house will tear down the wall in the new alcove, and blurt out in astonishment: "what the hell did he think he was doing?!"

The BSD license explained

A concise definition of the BSD License.

Audio blogs -- why?

Dave Winer has had blog posts in mp3 format for a while. All I can say is: why?

Listening to a person talk is much less efficient than reading something. You can't skip back and forth, sometimes you miss a word or sentence due to differing accents, and if the speaker is talking in a language you don't understand, you can't babelfish it to get something vaguely understandable.

In Dave's case, it's not always easy to hear what he says. Part of the problem is his American accent. I speak and write English fluently, but I learnt it in British schools. I seldom hear "real" American accents, i.e. not those on TV or movies. This means that I find it hard to understand what Dave says sometimes, even though my English is very good. It must be even harder for someone who is more comfortable reading English than listening to it.

Audio posts are a step back. They don't encourage information exchange, like text does. You can't hyperlink to a specific audio segment. You can't quote it without transcribing it first. The bandwidth requirements are absurdly high for the limited amount of information they contain.

Let's hope the trend doesn't spread.

A break in the ritual

Usually I get The Economist on Mondays, but not today.

Damn.

Update It arrived today, so I could enjoy my post-prandial coffee with it. (Yes, snail mail usually arrived at 11:00 here in our part of Stockholm.) Nothing really attention-grabbing, though.