greenpoint design

Pre-emptive Recycling

A big part of information management is filtering out the crap you don’t need. This morning, NPR’s excellent Marketplace program mentioned an IM tool whose time has come: Catalog Choice.

Catalog Choice is a way to opt out of many of the catalogs that are crammed into your mailbox each day. Each year some 19 billion catalogs are mailed to Americans. And each year 18.9 billion of us chuck them straight into the recycling bin. That’s a lot of wasted paper, time and energy. Catalog Choice gives consumers the option to say “no thanks” in advance.

Unlike the National Do Not Call Registry, which is maintained by the FTC, Catalog Choice is a private non-profit venture. The project is funded by the Overbrook Foundation , the Merck Family Fund and the Kendeda Foundation. The well conceived and easy-to-use site design was done by Makalu Media.

Wikipedia’s 2 Million Milestone

An alert nerd over at Slashdot noticed that Wikipedia had clocked its 2 millionth article in the English edition on Sunday.

Whatever reservations you may have about Wiki-reality and consensual knowledge, you have to admit it’s a resounding success in terms of participation.

I just want to find the guy who dumbed down my article on the Nor’easter of 1978.

The Future of Mobile Communications?

Among the major mobile networks in this country only Sprint is investing in WiMax. Industry pundits, like Kim Hart in the Washington Post, have cast the move as an act of desperation, but it may turn out to be the next big step forward for mobile communications.

Currently the implementation of so-called 3G services with mobile devices leaves a lot to be desired. Anybody who has ever tried to download a music file directly to their mobile, or browse a web page on their Treo, knows that the experience is reminiscent of the old World Wide Wait as accessed through a 14.4 modem. Using the predominant CDMA networks, it amounts to the same thing: digital information from the web has to be rebroadcast over the cellular network before it can be received by mobile devices.

This is backwards. There’s only one network now: the internet. Locking devices to privately owned cellnets actually impedes the flow of information. Sprint’s move to WiMax is a bold step toward uniting mobile communications with the rest of the net. If it succeeds, carriers like Sprint will see a dramatic decline in operating costs and consumers may finally get mobile communications at a reasonable price.

Google’s announcement two weeks ago that it would support Sprint’s WiMax venture lent some net cred to the whole project. It also suggests that Google may be looking to end-run big telcos, like AT&T, who have been lobbying to institute pay-to-play internet access (see earlier Network Neutrality rants) .

All this remains to be seen, but the Sprint-Google WiMax project presents some interesting possibilities for the future of mobile communications.

Gone 403

Sorry we were offline for about six weeks. It looks like the server got hacked. Until I could sit down for  a day to sort it out, I locked the permissions down. That’s why you were getting 403 errors.

I’m going to reinforce the security on my end. There have been a number of PHP/MySQL exploits in the past months, which could account for the intrusion. Or my host’s security is just slack.

If it happens again, CID will be moving to a new host.

Somewhere in Colorado a Cat is Having Kittens …

. . . and here in NYC it’s a rainy Wednesday afternoon. Del.icio.us led us to the Yahoo Time Capsule. For 30 days, from October 10 to November 8, Jonathan Harris and Yahoo are collecting a digital record of life on earth. The archive assembled will then be handed over to the Smithsonian.

One day this will be an advanced search feature on Google — ‘give me all of the MP3s uploaded to Asian IP addresses last Sunday morning’. For the time being it’s a user-generated record. So chip in your little piece of reality.