adoption curve dot net

With 298,000 of the things sold, surely there must be a fair chance of knowing someone who owns one. But I can honestly say that I’ve never seen an em@iler (their dorky spelling, not mine) anywhere but underneath a layer of dust in a Dixons window.

Maybe all the ZX Spectrum games addicts prefer to keep quiet about it…

Another interesting article outlining why the YASNS haven’t got it right yet. White sans-serif font on a dark grey background makes it hard to read, but worth the effort.

Just shows what you can do with some imagination and a copy of iLife. Hilarious.

Oh, we’re getting geeky this morning. This post sums up one of the major problems that I’ve got with Orkut and Friendster and LinkedIn and all the rest of the social networking services/sites – they’re all too damn granular.

I can’t reduce my social relationships to a series of binary “I know this person” / “I don’t know this person”. It’s actually more complex than that – “I Knew This Person Once But Now I’ve Lost Touch So I’d Be Embarrassed To Contact Them Asking A Favour” through to “I’m Sleeping With This Person So I’d Actually Be Able To Blackmail Them”. The last one’s an exaggeration, by the way.

A couple of things that did make me wonder – if FOAF is XML-based, and XML is designed to handle this kind of extendable ambiguity, what’s to stop me defining my own definition of relationships? And if I did that, what would stop FOAF becoming tag soup as everyone did that?

Courtesy of BoingBoing, a summary of a speech given by Michael Powell, chairman of the Federal Communications Commission.

Which quite frankly amazed me – could it be that a regulator actually gets it? If this is a genuine statement of principles, it’s 180 degrees in the opposite direction to the way that Big Content would want to take the internet – in which case I suddenly feel a little bit more optimistic about the world…

Now we can know exactly how many of these can be blamed on Arthur C Clarke.