In which your intrepid podcaster breaks the first rule he set for himself and then thinks out loud about the upcoming .NET rebid. (Liner notes: link to downloadable mp3s played in podcast here.)

Ross writes about several new Blogware features. I've implemented two of them. You should now see a "cosmos" link below each post which will link into the Technorati search engine (so you see what others are writing on similar subjects). And on the ol' icann.blog.us page, you'll see a left margin full of syndicated headlines (order determined by how often the publisher writes on the topic of ICANN).

UNITED NATIONS:  "Secretary-General Kofi Annan announced today the establishment of the Working Group on Internet Governance...."  Nice to see ICANN ALAC-er Vittorio Bertola on the Working Group. More: Also good to see ICANN Board Member Alejandro Pisanty on the panel.

Still, I'm still skeptical over whether the Internet needs to be governed.  And even assuming that a need exists, I'm equally skeptical about whether the Internet can be governed in any meaningful way. In the press release, Markus Kummer, Executive Coordinator of the United Nations secretariat of the Working Group, says: “Issues that we expect to address include the management of Internet resources, network security, cyber-crime, spam and multilingualism.” That's an enormous agenda. Just think of the resources that ICANN has tried to bring to bear just on the first issue.

"Governance," in my view, is too bold a word for what reasonably can be accomplished. For every category except "cyber-crime," I think we're talking about, at most, a set of "best practices" or "aspirational goals" for users and infrastructure providers.  

More: A different version of the press release, circulated today by e-mail, contains a more explicit reference to ICANN: "The establishment of the Working Group was requested by the first phase of the Summit, held in Geneva last December. At that time, countries agreed to continue the dialogue on the management of the Internet, at both the technical and policy levels. Many countries were happy with the current minimalist arrangements under the aegis of the U.S.-based Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN). But others felt there was a need for some intergovernmental framework, as with telecommunications, preferably under a United Nations umbrella." I thought the word choice of "minimalist arrangements" was particularly intriguing. I wonder if the people and companies actually bound by ICANN-agreements would agree with that characterization. (CircleID has the entire e-mail version of the press release here.)

LexisNexis for Blackberry: "Continuing its innovation in providing and delivering authoritative content and integrated information services to the legal community, LexisNexis U.S. today announced the availability of LexisNexis content to attorneys and law firms through the BlackBerry® wireless platform...."

This is cool.

Free2Innovate.net: "Former FCC commissioner Harold Furchtgott-Roth says there are high stakes for the Internet's future in ICANN's upcoming decision on who will run the .Net registry."

And, as a reader pointed out, Mr. Furchtgott-Roth also says "This research paper was sponsored by a grant from VeriSign."

Heard on Earningscast's podcast: "The future of Tucows is no more about domain names than the future of Volkswagon is about the Beetle." Great sound bite. Glad I own stock.

Neulevel's Richard Tindal on the usefulness of endorsements for the .NET rebid.  

Fairfax Digital (Australia):  "New rules for domain transfers will come into effect on Friday, making it easier for people to hijack domains, according to the security and network services company Netcraft...."

This is a good thing: Dispute Resolution Providers for Transfer Dispute Resolution Policy.

Bruce McCabe, writing in AustralianIT:  "The biggest joke of the past fortnight was the announcement by the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers that it has made progress on approval of the new sponsored top level domain .travel. Just who does ICANN think this will benefit, and what kind of drugs are they smoking?...Another weird day in the artificial economy of cyberspace."

Mark Cuban: "It probably was just a matter of time till it happened, but I didnt want it to go unoticed. I got fined for my comments in a previous blog entry regarding opening night in the NBA."

Here's a feature request for Blogware (and other blogging tools) that would make podcasting more effective. First, let me create several "shows" at once and queue them up for future posting on my website. In other words, let me "post" something today that will publish to the rest of the world at a time I specifiy tomorrow. Second, let me set a TTL value ("Time to Live") for my podcasts. For example, set the podcast's TTL to "7 days" and the podcast is automatically deleted from the server after a week. The podcasts are too big to store forever and a TTL would make my housecleaning easier (and keep my hosting costs down).  

I wish I could be there in person, but the quality of the webcast for today's BloggerCon in Palo Alto is excellent.  

Architecture of the World Wide Web, First Edition: "The World Wide Web uses relatively simple technologies with sufficient scalability, efficiency and utility that they have resulted in a remarkable information space of interrelated resources, growing across languages, cultures, and media. In an effort to preserve these properties of the information space as the technologies evolve, this architecture document discusses the core design components of the Web. They are identification of resources, representation of resource state, and the protocols that support the interaction between agents and resources in the space. We relate core design components, constraints, and good practices to the principles and properties they support...."

With apologies to both our President and Madonna, here's my remix of today's Presidential press conference and the wrap-up of my excursion to Nevada to act as a poll monitor. This is also known as Audio Lextext, Podcast #4.

The NY Times has a terrific map that shows the divide in the United States by geography and by electoral votes. At the top of the map is a button that says "View Map by...Geography or Electoral Vote." Click on "View By Electoral Votes." Each box represents one electoral vote.

November 2, 2004 Audio Lextext.

http://www.reviewjournal.com/lvrj_home/2004/Nov-02-Tue-2004/news/25155397.html

http://www.cnn.com/2004/LAW/11/02/toobin.election.lawyers/index.html

My second Lextext radio piece, from Las Vegas, Nev-add-a (not Nev-odd-a).