In short, Ozzie has no interest in re-inventing e-mail. "The question," he says, "is: 'What new and more appropriate paradigms
will emerge to reflect the fact that, in this world of ubiquitous computing and communications, the nature of work is fundamentally
changing?"
From: Dave Winer
Subject: RSS to the Rescue
As one of the Net's top bloggers and a leading contributor to the RSS standard for online content syndication, Dave Winer,
chairman and founder of Userland, recently reinvented himself -- as a Harvard fellow at the law school's Berkman Center for
Internet and Society. When it comes to rethinking e-mail, Winer's goal is the same as Ray Ozzie's but from the opposite direction.
"You have to go up a few levels," Winer says. "There are two sides to it: reading and writing. At the core, RSS is about publishing.
It's philosophically opposite to what Ray Ozzie does. Ray is about privacy [for shared files and work spaces]. The root word
of publish is 'public.' "
But Winer agrees on the endgame: "E-mail is over as a publishing medium. You're better off publishing a Weblog with RSS feeds
people can subscribe to." For one-way information flows, the protocol enables companies to set up archived, searchable feeds
rather than leaving it to employees to fish old messages out of the inbox. "You can subscribe to things created by other workgroups
or to the person who sends around e-mails with links to articles, saying 'you gotta read this.' What another division is doing,
what your competition is doing -- these are all information flows in a company that you can make into feeds, rather than mass
e-mailings."
Having seen his own inbox get out of hand, one of Winer's design goals was to keep RSS unspammable. He did that, he says,
by making sure the system stayed opt-in at both ends. "Once someone sends you something you don't want, you can vote them
out with your cursor." If you've ever tried to unsubscribe from a mailing list that just keeps coming, you know the problem.
"There's one RSS publication I subscribe to that had no ads in it when I started," Winer says. "Then they began having one
ad per day in the feed. Now practically every other message is an ad. I'll be unsubscribing soon. One click and they're gone."
From: Brewster Kahle
Subject: Book 'Em!
Serial inventor and entrepreneur Kahle created one of the first Internet search engines, WAIS (wide area information server),
and then built a system, Alexa, for tracking Net users' behavior en masse and sorting Web sites automatically based on the
traffic. Now, as head of the Internet Archive, he has embarked upon a quest to build the modern online equivalent of ancient
Egypt's library in Alexandria.
Kahle thinks that people who abuse the basic openness of the Net should simply be busted. "Fraud strikes me as something that
we should put people into jail for," he says. "If someone sends you a letter saying, 'Hi, I'm Bill Gates, and I want to sell
you something,' how would that be greeted? Right -- as a crime! What are we missing here? What happens if we nail the top
100 spammers? Why haven't we used normal law enforcement?"
Yet Kahle thinks the current focus on anti-spam legislation is misdirected. "We don't have to reinvent law. We might already
have the pieces together that we need." He cites the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) as an example of legislative
overreaction to new technology.
Instead of passing sweeping new laws like the DMCA, Kahle says, "We can just apply normal law to this situation. Look at what
happened with packaged software in the early '80s. This was software that was valued at hundreds of dollars that was being
copied for free. They tried copy protection. They tried to create all these technical fixes. It didn't work. Instead, they
fell back on the law. Now, people who steal expensive software go to jail."
How would that apply to spammers? For those who don't use their real names and addresses, Kahle says, "You should be able
to go to the FBI and say 'Hey, I'm getting forged documents.' Will this stop everything? No, but it would discourage people
from using fake addresses. We just haven't made it a priority to crack down on them."
Kahle's different from most spam-bashers in that he thinks online advertising is just fine. "It's always going to be a mini-industry
to advertise to people on the Net," he says. "And I don't think we should make everything completely pristine, because a lot
of good ideas come from the shadows. We just want to know when we're dealing with the shadowy areas of the Net and when we're
not."
To that end, one of Kahle's proposals would require e-mail senders to list the jurisdiction under which their messages are
sent. "If you get something from the .uk domain, you're pretty clear on the rules its sender operates under in England. But
if the mail is from .to, you might not know, and you could be a lot more suspect about it. It's the same reason ships fly
flags of different countries."
Internet entrepreneurs tend to be leery of government involvement. Kahle, by contrast, is all for it, citing Ben Franklin's
30-year role in shaping colonial American's postal systems. "E-mail is as important now as the postal system was in the Revolutionary
days," Kahle says. "Why aren't we taking it that seriously now?"
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(InfoWorld) - In the litigious world we live in, deploying a unified communications platform in your enterprise could...
