Brij Singh's Random Musings

Not Funny

This is new for me and I am wondering how to handle this.

We all quote others work according to the fair-user principle but to see the complete blog getting hijacked and served elsewhere is new to me.

This website Etamp.net (apparently hosted  from South Korea) takes the complete blog and serves it under their domain - My blog served from their site !

Quick whois check gives this:

Registrant : Ha Jea Eung
	815-8 Hwagok-dong Gangseo-gu SEOUL
	(157010)

	Domain Name:  ETAMP.NET
	Registrar:  Gabia,Inc. (GABIA.COM)

	Administrative, Technical, Billing Contact:  
		Ha Jea Eung	[email protected]
		815-8 Hwagok-dong Gangseo-gu SEOUL
		(Tel) 02-2653-7327	(fax) 

	Record created on 	MAY       07, 2004
	Record expires on 	MAY       07, 2006
	Record last updated on 	MAY       09, 2005

	Domain servers in listed order: 

	ns.softcan.net	
	ns.newseoul.com	

Now I have three options -

tell this guy not to do this (what if he points to Google caching as a legal precedent ?)

if he refuses then I can just sit back and wait for my lawyer to give me better hourly rate to go after this fellow.

OR I can request Typepad to help me here. After all if 10 more Etamp.net type site-jackers show up then not only content producers who suffer but also the infrastructure provider's integrity takes a hit as well.

Funny thing is this post will also show up there in this fellow's site.

Grassroot disconnect

Seth Levine quotes his father on grassroot level changes in China:

I would predict that within the next five years the disconnect between people's economic aspirations and their ability to achieve them within the boundaries of government policies could lead to a political crisis

Information awareness is growing at a pace never seen before in that part of the world. I dont see why this same tension won't show up in other places such India, Brazil, and Russia. Governments in emerging nations will have tough time catching up with their citizen's aspirations.

So many years of locked-up ambition. Years of borrowed ideologies have made certain sections very hostile to any controlled growth models as well.  Though too early in the cycle to interpret it that way but Godfather scene comes to mind:

Michael Corleone: I saw a strange thing today. Some rebels were being arrested. One of them pulled the pin on a grenade. He took himself and the captain of the command with him. Now, soldiers are paid to fight; the rebels aren't.
Hyman Roth: What does that tell you?
Michael Corleone: It means they could win.

Emerging nations need to be careful about their have-nots going forward ! We are living in a very transparent society - thanks to all the information in our hand.

Bloggers beware !

World over governments are waking up to the power and disruptive impact of blogging -

China Digital Times quoting NYT:

In its latest measure to tighten policing of the Internet, China has begun requiring bloggers and owners of personal Web sites to register with the government or be forced offline.

Read on the legal mailing list I subscribe to:

Austrian government is coming out with a law to bring down anonymity on several media sites.  Now every website needs to have  an "impressum" - which will provide name and venue of the media site.

Whereas India is planning a  sophisticated way of keeping track of all blogger-journalists:

We are framing the rules for giving accreditation to dotcom journalists

It's hard to trust government bodies and bureaucracy on matters of free expression. Knowing all the evolving/available tools on both sides - hiding your identity (anonymizers, proxy etc)  and finding out the sites geo-location  etc (geo-location services, keyhole etc)  its futile to even attempt all these measures in the first place. Good things in life have their own self-organizing model.

My note to government policy makers, manage violations using modified read on the legal and intellectual property  principles but stay out of the growth curve of this new media.  Don't try to manage it. It's decentralized at it's very foundation.

Update: Darren Barefoot reports  similar controls coming up in Canada.

GNU Radio

Something tells me we will be hearing about this a lot.   From their website:

The big idea is to give ordinary software people easy access to 'hack' the electromagnetic spectrum, that is, to understand the radio spectrum and think of clever ways to use it

This can open up a whole new world

Trust bottle

Nature reports on new research finding related to trust:

A Swiss-led research team tested their creation on volunteers playing an investment game for real money. When they inhaled the nasal spray, investors were more likely to hand over money to a trustee, knowing that, although they could make a hefty profit, they could also lose everything if the trustee decided not to give any of the money back.

This should surely help those trying to work out the strategy on closing the  date !

Google News

Joi Ito writing  about Google News:

The derivative conclusion you can come to is that Google News is just amplifying or reinforcing systemic biases in MSM editorial and NOT helping to address these issues

More transparency in  the underlying algorithm will help Google build media trust.

Biz dev via blog posts

New language of business partnership.  Idea is to have a one- on- one conversation in a public space.

What's next ? Private trackback ? Yes Jonathan lets meet in a private wiki to brainstorm on this further.

Blogosphere is all ready for big MacTel announcement. I doubt it will be a big bang kind of announcement. Expect a small product line (maybe entry level laptops) to be ported to Intel in the begining.

Update: Leander Kahney has a credible theory on MacTel marriage. According to him its all about Pentium D, Hollywood and DRM.

If true, this will confirm my firm belief  that the next generation architecture and vendor alignment will happen around intellectual property protection and desctruction models.

Boxed, Just Outside Of It !

Ever wondered why enterprise customers keep asking for "out of the box" (lets call if OOTB to save some typing hassle) features ? OOTB feature usually means the software had that feature at the time of shipment. It was there for customer to use it right from the beginning and doesn't require any expensive consultant tweak.  Consultant's manicured touch blows the spreadsheet. Hence enterprise customer's insistence on OOTB.

This is a conflicting desire.  On one hand there is this strong desire to create a competitive barrier using better and highly differentiated IT solutions, whereas CIO mandate is to keep cost low by rapidly demanding commodity type plain vanilla offerings. If you are following the debates around innovation and IT-is-dead then this dilemma could very well mirror a hypothetical battle between Christensen and Nicholas Carr  over IT budget allocation in front of the CEO !

Similar to Geoffrey Moore's Core Versus Context prescription, this dilemma is not properly resolved at the rank and file level in many big companies.  Somewhere in the politics of selection, maintenance and budgeting "organizational mind" shifts its attention to other concerns.  And Core gets all wrapped around the commodity software.  There is no organizational level API record of what is core and what is context.  UDDI ? Process Network ? Enterprise architecture blueprint ? This is no clear winner here so far.

ERP world doesn't provide all the answers, though it claims  all the available application real estate. I am getting tempted to call SAP as the world's biggest commodity software ! Everybody has it and everybody needs it. Just like MS Office. Whenever customer customizes the heck out of one SAP module it becomes core to their business process. Much to reinforce the common refrain - we do that differently here !   Core is mostly customized. It makes sense. Dell's famed supply chain or Walmart's inventory management systems are probably highly customized and home grown. They are not OOTB.

So ideally customer should not be expecting Core as OOTB.  For the best-of-breed (note to self: remember to parse this term best-of-breed in another post and understand  how this is similar to best-of-flip in current m&a environment) vendors their best bet is to get a sneak preview of customer's core requirements  and bet your life on it. And say NON to every other features. Say it with confidence cause you are trying to be core not contextual. Contextual comes from customer master which is their  SAP.

And then keep working the spiral.

Tip Jar - A type of open source business model

Tip Jar - A type of open source business model, originally uploaded by Brij.

Oldest business model, works best when the service offered matches the emotional needs of the donor.