Picture : Its a Planet Not an Empire
(via nocarbon)
e-devices, e-content & e-vendor-tactics
I bought a kindle e-book reader six months back… I have read more books in the last six months than I have read in three years before that. I am happy about that & really admire my gadget. However this post is about the disadvantages. These are not technical limitations per-se. They are imposed limitations rather.
Here are a few for instance.
I recently read a book and wanted my friend to read it. Unfortunately I cant lend my e-book like I could lend a paperback from my wooden bookshelf. However Amazon has come up with a lending service which is welcome, though none of the books I’ve bought so far can be lent yet. And I think even if Amazon e-books would eventually become lendable, I don’t know if I’ll be able to lend them to non-kindle users. What if my wife bought a Nook?.
I can easily donate all my paper books to my village school library, I can sell them to a used-book re-seller, in fact, I can sell them on Amazon. However I cant do the same with my kindle e-books, even though I own them.
Here is another shocker, I was checking out the e-book “Uncertainty: Turning Fear and Doubt into Fuel for Brilliance [Kindle Edition]” which is priced at $14.92 (as of today), It is an expensive e-book but, what surprised me is that, this e-book is more expensive than the Hardcover edition, which is priced at $14.35 on Amazon. I couldn’t see any justification for this whatsoever and I thought of buying the same e-book from someone else for a reasonable price. And I found the same book at B&N which was slightly cheaper at $12.99. But you know what? I cant buy it from there because, that e-book can only be opened on a Nook.
This is making me think hard about the money I am spending on e-books which, continuing at my current rate, will far exceed my investment in the device eventually. Because of all the books I have bought or might buy from them, I don’t want to be locked-in with Amazon for my life and be forced to buy books at the prices they set. If I wish to switch to some other device in the future, I must be able to.
What we must see is, these are not inherent technical limitations of e-book formats or e-book readers but more to do with evil-vendor-tactics for locking in consumers and controlling markets. Which we as consumers should be conscious of.
The Web is critical not merely to the digital revolution but to our continued prosperity—and even our liberty. Like democracy itself, it needs defending
“The Web evolved into a powerful, ubiquitous tool because it was built on egalitarian principles and because thousands of individuals, universities and companies have worked, both independently and together as part of the World Wide Web Consortium, to expand its capabilities based on those principles.
The Web as we know it, however, is being threatened in different ways. Some of its most successful inhabitants have begun to chip away at its principles. Large social-networking sites are walling off information posted by their users from the rest of the Web. Wireless Internet providers are being tempted to slow traffic to sites with which they have not made deals. Governments—totalitarian and democratic alike—are monitoring people’s online habits, endangering important human rights.
If we, the Web’s users, allow these and other trends to proceed unchecked, the Web could be broken into fragmented islands. We could lose the freedom to connect with whichever Web sites we want. The ill effects could extend to smartphones and pads, which are also portals to the extensive information that the Web provides.
Why should you care? Because the Web is yours. It is a public resource on which you, your business, your community and your government depend. The Web is also vital to democracy, a communications channel that makes possible a continuous worldwide conversation. The Web is now more critical to free speech than any other medium. It brings principles established in the U.S. Constitution, the British Magna Carta and other important documents into the network age: freedom from being snooped on, filtered, censored and disconnected.”
Shashi Tharoor writes about Gandhi in Deccan Chronicle.
"One-Worldism is just a disguised brand of xenophobia"
— excerpt from Fierce invalids home from hot climates by Tom Robbins.
Cats are Cats - splendid creatures, whether big or small are graceful and majestic.
(via:allcreatures:clusterpod:)
Measuring the worth of Natural Diversity in a narrow economic sense is like measuring ‘Mona Lisa’ by the tubes of paint or the size of canvas. We wont know the worth of what we mindlessly destroy (or fail to protect) without understanding it scientifically & holistically in light of a broader value system with an inclusive attitude.
By ‘inclusive attitude’ I mean that we humans should look at ourselves as a species cohabiting and depending on many other life forms on this planet. We cant continue to think of ourselves as an exclusive species with the right to consume and exploit every possible thing (irrespective of it being unsustainable).
- Rawjeev
"I couldn’t have made a fortune even if I’d wanted to. If I’d patented my idea and tried to make money, other people would have just set up rival networks and it wouldn’t have worked. The web only happened because everyone pulled together."
— Tim Berners Lee (via rodp)
"…mildly secular, imperfectly democratic, and with a messy economic focus that is neither capitalistic nor socialistic. It is from the messiness of Indian ideas that the world could stumble into a new world order after a few decades because the world is done with ‘isms’. There is no capitalism worth hanging on to , and communism is anyway discredited. The world is searching for a new type of pragmatism that is driven by reality. Which is where India comes in."
— R Jagannathan (DNA, Bangalore 18-03-2010)
The Pull Model
A pump pushing sewage at you is a good metaphor for what’s wrong with the marketplace we’ve constructed in the late 20th century. Doc has built the VRM project as a means of exploring better ways of building markets for the 21st century. Something I hadn’t considered until I was going through David Siegel’s book Pull is that “pull” is the right metaphor for this new marketplace and it’s precisely why Doc’s metaphor of a sewage pump rings so true. David’s book is about the Semantic Web and the use of data standards to enable you to “pull” the information, services, and products to you. An example from the book that really hit home for me is this: in 2010 if you order a package from Amazon, you have to give an address where it will be delivered. Wouldn’t it be better if instead, you just gave Amazon an identifier and then the package would find you at the place you wanted it to go–even if that’s the hotel you’re currently staying at? In essence, you pull the package to you with online data. This isn’t a pipe dream, but a perfectly reasonable way to think about how the world ought to work–and one that’s doable now from a technical standpoint. Doc uses different language to describe this same idea when he talks demand leading supply. The pump is all about supply leading demand. The key idea that both Doc and David would agree on here is that “If demand leads supply…, customers need to be the points of integration for their own data.”
