Bayosphere

I’m taking a few days off, and don’t plan too many postings before the latter part of next week.

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I visited Dave Sifry yesterday at his office. By day he’s deep into one of the more interesting wireless experiments, Sputnik, and in his copious (not) free time he’s put together Technorati, a service that keeps track of weblog links to each other.

He’s created a new site called Top 50 Interesting Recent Blogs with Context, basically taking current conversations and showing who among “authoritative” bloggers is linking to them. The more I look at this stuff the more I think it’s part of the emerging journalism I’m trying to chronicle.

More soon…

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Los Angeles Times: Koufax Shuts Out Dodgers. Hall of Fame pitcher Sandy Koufax, whose brilliance on the mound captivated fans in the 1960s and defined the Dodgers’ greatest era in Los Angeles, has severed ties with the club in protest of another News Corp. subsidiary. Koufax, a very private man who established a standard for pitching excellence in four of the most dominant seasons in the game’s history from 1963-66, recently informed the Dodgers he would no longer attend spring training here at Dodgertown, visit Dodger Stadium or participate in activities while they are owned by the media conglomerate, because of a report in the New York Post that apparently intimated that he is homosexual. The Post is owned by News Corp.

Keith Olbermann (Salon): Rupert Murdoch Strikes Out. With the Sandy Koufax gay rumor, the News Corp. synergy sewer finally overflows.

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A reader alerts me that the domain registrar everyone loves to hate, Verisign’s Network Solutions, has cut prices on renewals. My informant says he asked NSI for a lower price but was told no way. He then started the switch-registrar process, and NSI, asking for confirmation, offered this lower ($15 a year for two years) deal.

Now you know about it, too.

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The Hill: GOP threats halted GAO Cheney suit. The controversy with Cheney came to a head in December after U.S. District Court Judge John Bates, citing separation of powers, ruled that Walker lacked sufficient grounds to compel Cheney to disclose the records of a White House energy task force that he had headed.

It may seem like old history at this point, but the Bush administration’s stiffing of Congress — and the American people — on this matter set a tone that has persisted. We have no right to know what corporate influence there has been on administration policies.

The Bush crowd is secretive for good reasons. If the public understood what was going on, there would be hell to pay.

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AP: Death row case raises insanity defense paradox. In the latest bizarre turn in a nearly 25-year-old death row case, a federal appeals court ruled that a mentally ill inmate can be put to death even though he would be too insane to qualify for execution without his medication.

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Register: MS patents .Everything. Historically Microsoft has not used patents to protect its business, preferring to tinker with the APIs themselves. Quite explicitly, as Brad Silverberg told Andrew Schulman in 1993: if Microsoft stops “evolving” the APIs they become commoditized. This policy, we can assume, is changing.

(UPDATED)Ominous, even though this is just an application, not a final issuing of the patent (though the current U.S. Patent & Trademark Office is prone to issuing absurdly expansive patents). And it makes you wonder if Miguel and his compatriots at the Mono project got snookered when they based their framework on .Net.

Of course, as you may have noticed in recent weeks, .Net has been disappearing from sight. It’s all just Windows again — and it probably always ways just Windows.

Now that the U.S. government no longer enforces antitrust laws in Microsoft-related businesses, the company is free to leverage its Windows monopoly without any restraint. Some observers always thought .Net — with its supposed openness and interoperability — was a con. I thought that was a cynical view. I seem to have been naive, a foolish move when it comes to guaging the intentions of Microsoft.

(NOTE: Thanks to reader Jim Taylor who pointed out that this was an application, not a final patent.)

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Cnet: Office for Macs to get Exchange update. The update will give Mac customers access to corporate calendar and contact information stored on a server running the software giant’s Exchange software.

This is long overdue, but for many people it will be good news.

I’ve been puzzled that Microsoft was willing to see Mac users migrate away from Exchange. Entourage remains the best OS X mail/calendar/address-book client I’ve found, and by quite a margin. Had it supported Exchange fully, rather than only by IMAP e-mail and nothing else, I wouldn’t have been so inclined to try other solutions.

Now I’m not sure I even want to reconnect to Exchange. Having gotten out of that lock-in, I’m pretty happy.

Incidentally, one of the greatest virtues in unplugging from the Exchange calendar is that when someone wants you to go to a meeting, they have to actually call you first. That leads to fewer meetings…

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