Welcome. Please leave comments and any links of note to other sources that might be of interest to me and anyone else who may stop by.

Definitely the most logical thing to do... it would probably be pretty easy to implement as well (from a tech standpoint, at least). For example, Scient makes the website for mlb.com as well as ALL of the MLB teams...

http://www.mlb.com
http://www.yankees.com
http://www.dodgers.com

Regarding the Council For Excellence in Government post: Sounds like the US is going good stuff, but according to a 2002 study conducted by Morgan Stanley, only 15% of US households subscribe to broadband internet service. (Western Europe even lower, at 8%.) For possible clues on how eGovt services might evolve, it would be interesting to look at countries that are already more "wired" than the US. For example, Hong Kong's percentage of wired households is more than double that of the US (at 32%). There should be plenty of literature in this area, here's a case study and a press release:

http://h18000.www1.hp.com/casestudies/stories/hongkong/story.html
http://www.sap.co.jp/hk/company/doc/press/..._e-govt_service.asp

Edited by author 04-28-2003 01:13 PM
The Accenture report actually points to Singapore as a global leader in eGov. I'm not sure, specifically, how wired they are, but it seems like they are relatively advanced in that regard.

We could have a whole conversation about broadband, about how it hasn't lived up to its promise in any industry, but that doesn't matter. I think it is fair to say that there aren't any eGov iniatitives in the US yet that would require broadband for success. The White House website, for example, allows you to stream press conferences, but other than similar uses, there doesn't seem to be a great need or use for broadband in this sector yet.

Funny, the MLB website was exactly what I had in mind. It is the perfect model for Congress - each club has enough freedom to do its own thing, but exists within the greater whole, just as it should. Most of the Senate/Rep sites are floating out in nowhere land. It is embarrasing to have a US Senator's website look like it was designed in 1995.

Having recently visited Seattle, I learned that Washington state is doing some very cool with their traffic webcams. They take it one step beyond what NY has done (as far as I can tell) by providing a "Flow Map," i.e. color codes an Interstate map to show "wide open," "stop and go, "heavy traffic," etc.

http://www.wsdot.wa.gov/pugetsoundtraffic/cameras/

Along the route, you can click on the nearby webcams for a view of the traffic.

PS- Would it be possible to get comments attached to a particular post instead of a general comment board?

About the banner ad... you know that Google bought Blogger, right? Google has a feature called "Content Targeted Advertising," so my guess is that your banner ad is Google doing its thing w/o any human intervention.

I didn't consider the Google/Blogger aspect. I was just thinking about how Google doesn't use a thesuaurus on its search results, and realized that it is probably just the company purchasing the ad choosing multiple related keywords, rather than Google, or whatever Blogger is using to serve their ads doing anything fancy on the backend. Duh.

To me, spam is not such a hard problem to solve. I think that within a few years, spam email will no longer be a problem and ultimately, the solution will be more technical than legal, but likely a combination of both. Consider these approaches:

(1) Whitelisting: Already available on Hotmail. You can choose to receive emails only from "whitelisted" addresses, e.g. your addressbook. This is an extreme solution, so I dont think many people use it. I heard from a friend at Microsoft that the next version of Outlook will support whitelisting as well. If you think about it, adding known addresses to your addressbook is really a win-win. You can use shortcuts when you send email and it also blocks spam.

(2) Challenge and Response: Any email not from a whitelisted address is "challenged." You never see the email unless the challege, probably a CAPTCHA of some sort, is completed successfully. I love CAPTCHAs. They are neat. Yahoo already uses them for creation of new accounts. Check out CAPTCHAs here:

http://www.captcha.net/

(3) Server-side hardware and software: If you work at a big company, like say, Morgan Stanley, you're probably already benefiting from specialized hardware and software on the server side that filters out spam mail. There are bunch of companies that now build "anti-spam" boxes. That's all they do. Common players are Brightmail and CypherTrust, but there are a bunch.

Lastly, I'd like to add that the end-user is also becoming "smarter," or at least more techno-socially responsible. A lot of people wont post their email addresses on blogs and such, so that the address doesn't get "scraped." Also, if I'm ordering stuff online from a not-fully-trusted retailer (e.g. Amazon), I wont give them my email address, because I now know that they'll just turn around and sell it. (For example, www.smartinventions.com sells stuff that are "Seen on TV." They are legit, but I also learned the hard lesson that they sell my email address and phone number. Nice additional revenue stream for them.)

Help on the legislation side would be nice, but (a) legislators are hardly tech-saavy, (b) the legislation process cant keep up with technology changes, (c) enforcement is an issue (e.g. moving your spam server to another country).