Don’t neuter the Net

Oliver Rist provides some additional ammunition for network neutrality (not the same as network castration) in his InfoWorld column: Don’t neuter the Net. He highlights the new legislation introduced by Oregon senator Ron Wyden with the spectre of what might happen if network neutrality is not preserved:

consider what your outsourced Exchange hosting costs suddenly become when Verizon gets to crank up the hosting provider rates — with no cap. Or your outsourced spam filtering. Or your Web hosting. Or that off-site Internet-based backup solution you’re using for disaster recovery. Or your branch office VPN costs. Or that neat little Web-based team collaboration and wiki service

For more info on the bill introduced by Senator Wyden, see details from the Library of Congress S.2360.

Email – Can you trust it?

Could be interesting for implications with respect to long archive lifetimes for email – and its value (or not) as legal evidence:

Wired News:

According to recent research published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, I’ve only a 50-50 chance of ascertaining the tone of any e-mail message. The study also shows that people think they’ve correctly interpreted the tone of e-mails they receive 90 percent of the time.

"That’s how flame wars get started," says psychologist Nicholas Epley of the University of Chicago, who conducted the research with Justin Kruger of New York University. "People in our study were convinced they’ve accurately understood the tone of an e-mail message when in fact their odds are no better than chance," says Epley.

Knowing your business

Mark Cuban has a very interesting post at What business are theatres in? where he writes:

It
didn’t take me long to realize that the business of the Mavericks was
not selling basketball, it was selling a fun night out and creating a
favorable brand identification with our team and our players, with the
hope that people would be excited to buy merchandise , products and
services from us.

    

It didnt take me long to realize that the business of   Landmark Theaters was very similar.   At Landmark, our business is not showing the biggest movies from the biggest studios…

He goes on to look a the benefits to be gained by employing multiple
revenue streams. In one of the comments, a respondent points out that
whenever you go to a concert, you can always buy the artist’s latest CD on the way out. Not so at a movie.

(Migrated from a previous life blog, originally posted on 2005-01-25)

The Cognitive Style of Powerpoint

I’m reading Edward Tufte’s The Cognitive Style of Powerpoint and found this quote to be a provocative summary of his observations. If you’re not familiar with Edward Tufte, he has written a number of fabulous and beautiful books on information visualization.