ralpress.org

As the world and his dog now knows, Tim Berners-Lee has a Twitter account.

Paul Graham has published a broad list of entrepreneurial ideas that YCombinator is interested in investing in. It’s a very interesting list for not only does it target the often-cited broken models (e.g. traditional media news, DRM-protected digital media, shopping guides, etc), but also many of the first wave of “new” solutions, such as EBay, Craigslist, Wikipedia, photo-sharing sites, and other applications that are often regarded as web-era success stories.

Pointing out that the traditional news media model is broken is trite now, but even so, I thought this was a good summary of the situation:

“As Marc Andreessen points out, newspapers are in trouble. The problem is not merely that they’ve been slow to adapt to the web. It’s more serious than that: their problems are due to deep structural flaws that are exposed now that they have competitors. When the only sources of news were the wire services and a few big papers, it was enough to keep writing stories about how the president met with someone and they each said conventional things written in advance by their staffs. Readers were never that interested, but they were willing to consider this news when there were no alternatives.”

Dominic Connor writes on The RegDeveloper about the battle for hearts and minds in higher education computing departments:

“University computer science departments are rapidly becoming Microsoft-free zones, as Linux, Apache, MySQL and PHP (LAMP) combine with Java to become the de-facto standard environment for students of programming.

Microsoft knows from history that this will be fatal in the long term, hence its decision to extend free availability of core development tools to students. Most of my generation of computer science students quite literally never touched any IBM kit, even though - back then - it had a bigger share of the IT market than today is enjoyed by Microsoft, Dell and Hewlett-Packard put together.

We did C and Unix, and as we spread like plague rats out into employers, infecting them with the new wave …”

Dominic makes a particularly interesting point about the scope of Microsoft’s efforts in his concluding paragraph, but I won’t spoil it for you if you haven’t read it. The full article is here.

The story so far: w3c.org HTML 5 differences from HTML 4