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December 27, 2004
The Philippines Contemplating a Step Towards Greater Connectivity
Thomas Barnett would call this article about a bill before the Philippines' Congress to reclassify VoIP an impending "rule-set rewrite." If you follow Barnett at all, you'll know that he places countries in what he calls the Gap or the Functioning Core. The Gap is the set of countries who are disconnected from the functioning Core in many respects. The Philippines is inside the Gap.
This bill represents a change to the laws of the Philippines that would make it easier for network provides to offer VoIP phone services in competition with established telecom providers. Monopoly telecom providers are one problems that Gap countries face. Telecommunications are expensive and often shoddy. This bill represents a small step in connecting the Philippines. Don't expect the telecom providers with franchises to take this lying down. I've set up a Google news alert to try to follow this bill and see what happens.
One of the reasons I like reading things like Barnett's The Pentagon's New Map and Bobbitt's The Shield of Achilles is that the give me a framework for understanding events like this Philippines telecom bill. Without that framework all this news is just so much noise washing over you. With a framework, it starts to paint a picture.
01:03 PM | Comments (0) | Recommend This | Print This
Open Source Audio
Jon Udell has create a podcast he calls open source audio. In it, Job gives us a tour of the Internet Archives open source audio collection and introduces us to OddioKatya and other WebJay's. Jon asks the question:
What if there were a significantly large space of alternatively licensed music floating around on the Internet? Music that was explicitly intended to be shared.
One of the things that the music industry has failed to capitalize on is the kind of collective discovery that is one of the foundational pillars of blogging. Blogs are a way of building awareness around interesting ideas. Flickr is doing that with photos. There's no good way to do this with most music. When I was a kid, we spent countless hours talking about what music was good and playing it for our friends on our 8-track players (yes, I'm that old). My teenage son does the same thing now, with his local friends, but he has plenty of friends on the net as well and music isn't part of their collective experience. This is a huge opportunity wasted.
Jon also points to Chris Armstrong's Long Tail article from Wired. The idea is that Amazon and other Web sites enable sales of material that have a limited audience. I was out looking at sales rank at Amazon the other day to a number of books. Try it for some of the books in your library. I was fascinated to see how popular (or unpopular) some books are that I've loved.
Jon did a great job on this Podcast; its content is good and its well delivered. Listen to it.
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Evelyn Slammed By Tidal Wave
Evelyn Rodriguez, whom many in the Utah Tech community will know for her work organizing several events on Web Services over the last few years, was on a boat in Thailand when the tsunami struck. She's in the hospital for what appear to be minor injuries and is well enough to blog. I'm glad she's OK and wish her well in getting all her belongings, including her passport back.