"In Africa people are much more attuned to blogs than you'd think." Ethan Zuckerman just said that. (You might remember Ethan from GeekCorps.) It's one quotable line among a cascade of them. And he hasn't even gotten around to the remarkable Eric Osiakwan yet. Both are talking about The Climate of Innovation Around Information Technology in Sub-Saharan Africa, the topic of today's luncheon at the Berkman Center. It's being streamed live, and it's so different from the usual geek fare — yet both geeky and extremely important for both Kenya and Africa.

Back in the mid-90s, when Linux was still at 1.something, website design was a simple exercise that left matters such as font choice up to the user. It was blessedly free of the Tyranny of Typography, the Legacies of Layout, and other controlling influences from the Provinces of Print. Better yet, it was free by design from withering rebuke by aesthetes whose high-minded "taste" made life miserable for both writers and readers. Back then

Photos from Linux World Expo are up.

Heard about Knol yet? It's Google's Xth new service, and it's a place where you can put up "an authoritative article about a specific topic". That's a knol too. Article=knol.

My first encounter with Knol was at Pointless Games

Jeff Jarvis is working on a book called What Would Google Do? Since Google just did something good for me — and for a market that needs help desperately — I thought I'd share my experience with Jeff and the rest of you.

What Google Did for me was radically improve one of the most annoying experiences in the Webbed world: registering a domain name.

How long before the carriers and the FCC admit that the new transmission medium for radio is the cell system? And how long before they also recognize that the cell system is properly part of the Net's infrastructure and not just cordless telephony with messaging tacked on?

Andrew Leyden has some killer ideas about radio. Literally. For example, he correctly identifies the iPhone as a radio, and says it will kill off XM and Sirius:

Online identity management and single sign-on still doesn't work. Not well enough, anyway. OpenID is a good step forward. So are a bunch of other less familiar approaches. But we still haven't arrived.

Can we save what we don't understand? That's the challenge for those who wish to save the Net — both from those that don't understand it, and froin those that understand it too well, in wrong or inadequate ways.

Remember television? For most of its history, TV wasn't cable, satellite or YouTube. It was radio with low-res moving pictures.

It's time to get ornery again with the FCC. Fortunately, they're asking for it, by soliciting comment on this FCC rulemaking proposal for "Service Rules for Advanced Wireless Services in the 1915-1920 MHz, 1995-2000 MHz, 2020-2025 MHz and 2175-2180 MHz Bands.

It's a chocolate-covered spider.

Health is personal. Health Care is not. The term is a euphemism for Condition Treatment, and it's not about patients. It's about systems, and most of those are both proprietary and closed.

So what's up with Linux in Amsterdam? That's a front-burner question for me right now because I'll be spending the next three days there, and would like to pick up on a story or few while I'm there.

The main problem with "social networking" isn't just that your "social" life has corporate boundaries. It's that your personal choices do too.

I'm looking to compare how much money is made with Linux, vs. how much is made because of it. While I know it'll be hard to find the former and impossible to determine the latter, I think comparing the two will still be revealing.

It turns out that hard infrastructure is softer than the name suggests. This is good, since I want to make the case that both LInux and the Net are forms of infrastructure no less legitimate than water, electricity, roads, sewers and waste collection.

Does it matter who pays the salaries of Linux kernel developers? If so, how much, and in what ways?

That's the question raised by Britt Blaser in “Oh, if only government went in for an open source make-over…”. It's also one suggested indirectly by Phil Hughes in Our Internet.

Is Linux infrastructure? Or is it just another operating system, like Windows, MacOS and various Unixes?

How about the Internet? Is the Net infrastructure? Or is it just the #3 "service" in the "triple play" sold by your local phone or cable company?