Response to Micah Sifry's comments on O'Reilly's Digital Democracy Teach-In.

The Internet is a different kind of media environment than broadcast, pluralistic and highly interactive, a potential platform for civil discussion and debate where, says Wes Boyd if MoveOn.org, "you can win by saying things that are sensible and moderate, not crazy." This is what MoveOn has tried to do.

There may be prior art to prevent Microsoft from patenting its patent-application-generating machine.

FOAF (Friend of a Friend) is the decentralized answer to social software systems like Friendster and Tribe.net. Using XML/RDF and well established bottom up tools, FOAF is the best tool for giving users power over their own data in social software systems.

Why not license your commercial application free to charities?

David Sifry's presentation at ETech showed how Technorati has its finger on the pulse of the blogosphere and the impressive data that Technorati can pull from its vast database.

I have recently started devoting more energy towards becoming financially literate. You may wonder, "What does financial literacy have to do with the O'Reilly audience?" Well, after spending some time playing around with the different financial web sites and reading a really interesting book, I started to contemplate a new web site (destination) and web service (APIs).

Brian Goetz reckons that garbage collection in modern Java Virtual Machines is so good that we Java programmers do best by leaving it alone. I don't buy it.

Here's one approach to better memory allocation for shrink-wrapped desktop Java applications running on Windows

John Hanna's introduction to Unicode and XML, like most good introductions skirts the dirty secret: Unicode gives us exciting new opportunites for corrupting data. Text is broken. Some harm-reduction measures, in particular not allowing the characters of the C1 control range in text formats, would help.