Susan Mernit's Blog: Navigating the Info Jungle

More news items and blog posts today on yesterday's AOL/Microsoft announcements and the possible impact of this new alliance on Netscape and open source browsers:
--O5O, OS Opinion writes:
Is the Microsoft-AOL Time Warner browser settlement the beginning of the end for open-source and alternative browsers? Does it represent a threat to the open standards of the Internet? What about the fate of Mozilla.org, the open-source group tightly connected with Netscape? All these questions are on the minds of alternative-browser industry insiders as the ramifications of Microsoft's (Nasdaq: MSFT) settlement with AOL (NYSE: AOL) began to sink in.
David Smith, research analyst for Gartner, quoted in Boston internet .com story: The IE-Netscape "competition has been way overblown in past couple of years. The two companies really only compete on the fringes," said David Smith, Microsoft analyst for research firm Gartner:
"Microsoft is a supplier of technology. AOL is a user of technology as a media company." To talk about browser wars now is ridiculous, he said. "It is so off the map these days and out of the world of issues that people have. Very few people use [Netscape], very few care."
Reuters News: Clock Ticks for Netscape...
Forrester Research analyst Rob Enderle said that, now, it's only a matter of time before AOL sells Netscape. "Clearly the clock is ticking for Netscape as a Web property owned by AOL Time Warner," he said. "This is an asset that has become nonstrategic in a company that is doing some massive cost cutting."

Netscape executives declined to comment. AOL Time Warner Chief Executive Dick Parsons shed little light on the company's plans for Netscape. "We're still exploring other opportunities with Netscape," he said in announcing the deal. Asked if he was planning to sell the unit, he said, "Not at this point."
National Post of Canada:
...This spells the end for Netscape, whatever it means for our ability to police our own homes and computers. There is no a longer a reason for Netscape to exist, with its market share dwindled to nothing, and with it not fitting into AOL Time-Warner's plans to refocus on media properties and their distribution.

And while no one has apparently noticed, the deal is also a strike against the open source software movement. AOL Time-Warner no longer needs to bankroll Mozilla, the nonsensical browser promoted by the evangelical fans of collectivist code. Without its support, that browser will languish, at best, and more likely founder.
Forbes: Microsoft clears the Netscape history file:
Microsoft has wound back the clock to 1995 and paid $750 million--in cash--for Netscape so it could put it out of commission.

Anil's next speaking gig: Nigerian E-Mail Conference
Marl Fraufelder is moving the fam to the South Sea Islands for a year and chronicling their experience at The Island Chronicles. I predict this will be as good as HBO!
Pets with their heads in bags of food, via Camworld.
CNN: Online divorces growing on popularity.
Pocourante: Wanna know who spelled it and won?

A recent BetaNews article says:By agreeing to the continued use of Internet Explorer, AOL effectively puts to rest the company's longstanding plans to transition AOL client software service to its own Gecko browsing technology used in Netscape. AOL's original license to use IE expired on January 1, 2001, and the companies failed to reach a new agreement.
AOL says it will not close its Netscape unit "at this point," which means development of Gecko and support for the open source Mozilla browser are likely to continue.

Is the "we're friends now" announcement from Parson and Gates a first step toward selling off the AOL unit to a technology company that would clearly love to have their subscription list?
AOL has roughly 32 MM subscribers (a drop from 18 months ago), Microsoft has 9 million. AOL is owned by a media company that would love to have a business justification to cut it loose (my opinion), Microsoft is a technology company that has been trying to beat AOL in the online business for the past 7 years.
My prediction: Look for AOL and Microsoft to look for ways to develop stronger and more profitable partnerships, including teaming up or bundling on ISP access in some way., and watch for a possible sale announcement down the road.

The end of Netscape?
Now that AOL and Microsoft are best friends, the Netscape browser's in a tough spot.
Sold for $750MM in potage , AKA settlement charges, the browser--once touted as AOL's strategic alternative to Explorer--seems like a pretty lame duck product right now. Since AOL is going to continue indefinitely using IE as their core platform, is there a reason for AOL to fund Netscape and the Web properties team?
Back in the day, like 2000-2001, Netscape was going to be the bright hope for the non-AOL subscriber, the web alternative and flanker brand. But those days are long gone--Time, Inc content is moving onto AOL as a sop to the subscription price, AOL is facing hard choices about making their business work at the right margin, and Netscape's development path has slowed.
When you think that AOL purchased Netscape for $4.3 billion back in the day, the $750MM that AOL is getting from Microsoft in settlement charges is chump change--but if you're a cashed-strapped company, it's manna from heaven.

The rise of Mozilla?
As some of you know, I was VP for Programming at Netscape during the peak of the boom. At that time, hopes and plans for the browser and Netscape.com were bright. I was much more focused on Netscape 6.0 than on Mozilla.
But now I am running Mozilla with my news aggregator and strongly preferring it to Netscape and finding it better in some ways than IE.
Will one by-product of this AOL/Microsoft development be a backlash that pushes more people to Mozilla? With the development of Linux, and the move away from browser as the only web-based platforms, having an alternative browser may feel less critical than in 2000, and yet, having strong multiple browser platforms does matter.
I am going to watch and see what happens to Mozilla in the light of these announcements and see if the Phoenix will fly again.

Reuters Story today:
NEW YORK (Reuters Health) - Psychopaths who have committed murder do not equate violence with something that is unpleasant, UK researchers said Wednesday.

This relatively positive attitude toward violence was not seen in either murderers who were not psychopaths or other men with personality disorders who had committed different crimes, the authors write in the journal Nature.

Psychopaths, despite evidence of charm and skill, are commonly unable to maintain affectionate relationships with others, while routinely engaging in impulsive, amoral and hostile behavior unhampered by guilt.

And while psychopaths who commit murder may often claim to think violence is wrong, the current findings stem from the results of tests designed to measure people's underlying attitudes toward a concept, and not simply what they say they believe, the researchers note.
More here.
If you substitute deception and unscrupulousness for murder, it sounds like some business folks I've known.

Blending profit and nonprofit values--a piece from Stanford Business School.

Wynton Marsalis, the talented jazz trumpeter from New Orleans, has a weblog with an RSS feed (thanks, Ernie the Attorney!)

News just in that Rick Bragg has resigned from the NY Times over his recent suspension. More stories here. Seems to me the old grey lady is taking a major hit. UGH.

Yawn, more blogging stories in big media today. Time published a piece on Friendster and dating.
As some of you may know--and as everyone should know now, Friendster is a 6 degrees of separation hook-up service for friends of friends and their friends--and their friends, too, of course. Jonathan Abrams, the guy who started is, is an ex-Netscaper (I love keeping track of the legion of ex-Netscapers, they must number in the thousands by now.)
Times says Friendster is about dating, and it can be, but it is also about meeting friends of friends--something that also goes on at Ryze, another networking and social connection site.
I love Ryze, but I am neutral on Friendster--I have an account, but haven't really gotten in to it.

So, remember the item I posted this morning about the salt marsh the city of San Jose bought from Cargills?
Well, that very same Cargill's is the company that helped McDonald's roll out the flavorings for its new McVeggie Burger.

Is it a real Veggie Burger if it's cooked on the same grill with McDonald's hamburgers, chicken, and ribs? If you answered yes, you might feel great about McDonald's vegetarian burger as part of a light choices menu rolled out across Canada and a test in Southern California.
If you don't think bacon grease should mix with your soy protein and veggies, you might not be as thrilled about the new dish.
Accoesing to a recent story in Veggie's Paradise, the McDonald's rep said the burger was "geared to the lighter side of McDonald's. It' s for people who are working on their weight. It's not intended for religious-based or serious vegetarians."
Furthermore, while the McVeggie Burger features a vegan patty made exclusively for McDonald's by Yves Veggie Cuisine , the bun and the patty are vegan, but the barbecue sauce contains egg yolks, chicken fat, beef stock, beef extract, and rendered beef fat. Not exactly vegan

After more than 10 months of planning, AOL has launched a new area for African Americans.
"We can't speak to all 30 million members in the same voice," says Belinda Hankins, AOL executive director for African-American business, in today's press release. "We want to be the brand of choice and provide compelling and relevant experience for African-American members."
Congrats, Belinda!

Okay, just when I thought it was safe, suggestions that the big one is coming--this weekend San Jose, Santa Rosa and the SF coast were all hit by quakes.

Here's another New York/San Jose item, from the San Jose Business Journal. For those of you who'd just assume, logically enough, that New York City has some of the country's worst potholes, the word's just in that San Jose--along with Los Angeles--snags top worst road honors.

According to The Road Information Program, a lobbying group, San Jose and Los Angeles are tied at the top of a national list of which cities have the bumpiest roads, with 67 percent of their major roads delivering unacceptable rides.

Close behind are San Diego and San Francisco-Oakland, tied at third and fourth with 61 percent unacceptable. Sacramento is sixth on the list with 50 percent unacceptable. New Orleans, Baltimore, Detroit, Kansas City, and Oklahoma City also are in the top ten. New York, not even close!

The city of San Jose is planning to purchase an 865-acre salt mars, a plot about the size of New York's Central Park, for $13 million dollars. According to the Mercury News, " the 856-acre pond, ringed by levees and bordering Coyote Creek, is the same size as New York's Central Park. Its purchase comes two months after a $100 million state and federal deal to buy and restore 16,500 acres of Cargill's other bayfront salt ponds. "
I've done a lot of hiking around in the Alviso wetlands, and that area feels like one of the few areas in the Valley that hasn't been totally developed--thought the housing developments are rushing in. It's good to hear the city will protect those lands, and perhaps one day turn them back to marsh for wildlife.

"In a few weeks, I'm outta here," suspended Times journo Rick Bragg tells the Washington Post.
"I will take it from a stringer. I will take it from an intern. I will take it from a news assistant. If a clerk does an interview for me, I will use it. I'm going to send people to sit in for me if I don't have time to be there. It is not unusual to send someone to conduct an interview you don't have time to conduct. It's what we do.

"And this insanity -- this bizarre atmosphere we're moving through as if in a dream -- we're being made to feel ashamed for what was routine. . . . Reporters are being bad-mouthed daily. I hate it. It makes me sick."

Steve Case tells the press he might be in favor of spinning off the AOL unit. In a NY Times piece today, David Kirkpatrick discusses Case's position and motives at length, concluding it is impossible to tell whether Case's ideas still have any influence.
I've wondered all along if all the reorgs and layoffs at AOL were not destined to make the unit shipshape, neat and tidy for sale. There is no way to know, but I suspect there are people at Time Inc and CNN and Warner Bros who think the stock price mght go up if AOL wasn't part of the mix. On the other hand, the company is profitable, so, dunno.

The Berkeley Art Museum has a show about “The Black Panthers 1968,” an exhibition of 45 photographs, on display through June 29, exploring this time and a movement it gave rise to through photos taken by Ruth-Marion Baruch and her husband, Pirkle Jones, white liberals.
Articles about the exhibit here and here., info from the museum here.
The photogs donated $1MM of their photos to UC Santa Cruz

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Zuza Glowacka, Jayson Blair's galpal, has published an essay in Newsweek about her relationship with Jayson and the Blair scandal.
I understand what Elizabeth Bishop meant when, in her poem “One Art,” she wrote, “The art of losing isn’t hard to master.” In the weeks since I’ve had to resign from my job because a close friend of mine, Jayson Blair, was caught plagiarizing and fabricating, I’ve lost my privacy, my credibility and many of my longtime friends. A few weeks ago I was a young employee of The New York Times, one of the most respected newspapers in the world. Now I’m known to the world as the 23-year-old mysterious Polish emigre, caught up in possibly the biggest scandal in the history of journalism and certainly the biggest scandal in the history of my life thus far.
More here from this really persuasive and well-argued essay. Man, she's clearly not only smarter than Blair, but much more stable.

I'm about to confess that there is no way I can keep up with all the bloggers and postings that interest me--there, I've said it. Even with a newsreader, there is just too much to read--and too much to think about. That's why I'm particularly interested in Tom Coate's analysis of a Microdocs story on how information is tracked through the blogosphere. Tom's got some smart diagrams charting the process and a tidy explication. Thanks!

Cory Doctorow shot a funny sign.

A school board member and a grandmother in Riverside, California propose to ban Dav Pikley's The Adventures of Super Diaper Baby, part of the Captain Stinkypants series written by Dav Pilkey and published by Scholastic, because the book has poop as a character and doesn't meet their critical standards (always a good reason to ban a book, doncha know).
The book..." has poor grammar, poor spelling, poor content, and it's an extremely poor example of what I would want my student to learn," said Gayle Cloud, the school board member. "I think Dr. Seuss would be rolling over in his grave."
BTW, Riverside is the school district that banned the highly regarded The Chocolate War, by Robert Cormier from middle school libraries in the Riverside, California, Unified School District after a district committee decided the book was inappropriate for seventh and eighth graders to read without class discussion.
What fools.

A long and intricate dream this morning in which many things were Chinese and had long white strings of thread attached.
Dreamt I was living at the beach, with many other people, and we had a wide, gauzy silk crepe curtain across the big picture window; it was opened and closed by pulling on the thin strings in the warp of the fabric.
Second part of the dream was a flotilla of people gathering to demonstrate about something and they had these amazing mobiles floating in the sky, very intricate kites of birds, all attached together by thin white strings.
I woke up and went, "Wow, that was amazing, what does it mean?" and then I stepped back and said, "Oh, everything has strings attached. Hmmnn, that's a comment on my life."

The New York Times has yet another blogging piece by a reporter, this one about photo blogs. Most annoyingly, there's no service box or sidebar that would make it easy to go visit all the blogs Sarah Boxer talked about--all of which were entered in the Photobloggies by the way. The Gothamist piece pretty much echoes my feelings--qwould be nice t have livelknks, this is trendy stuff, etc. Nevertheless, piece is worth checking out.