An 'ohiogozaimas' and 'shalom' to readers coming in fron the two latest AOLiza stories on opposite ends of the planet, one from Hotwired Japan and another from Nana Israel!

In a couple days when school and work mayhem level off I'll put up a list of articles on the AOLiza page.

It amazes me the fervor people get over domain names. One company sues another company (or, all too often, an individual) because the second party has a domain name that the first party wants. Nissan Computers is a good example, as they are currently being sued by Nissan Motors, both of which have the trademark "Nissan" for their area of business. If the lawsuit doesn't put the domain in the hands of Nissan Motors, you can bet their next stop will be ICANN, to try to take the domain name by force.

Why does one company or individual have a greater right to a domain name than another? the US Courts recently declared that a domain name isn't property (by judging that it can't be stolen), so how can it be taken away from one party and given to another by court order? If Nissan Computers starts selling cars on their site, I could understand an injunction ordering them to stop, but not one ordering the domain to be transfered to another company. And if they don't even try to sell cars, then there should be no basis at all.

If I start my own ISP (called, for the sake of argument and lack of imagination, AOL), and I give each user a unique screen name, can Apple Computer come in and demand that I take away Joe Blogg's account name ("Apple") because it's the same as their company name?

But I seriously, seriously digress from my intended topic...

Subdomaining: TLDs are a little overrated. We are all children of the dot-com. Woe betide the lesser children of the dot-org or dot-net. It's yourcompany.com or bust. Along with that of course come the obligatory domain names www.yourcompany.com, ftp.yourcompany.com, and all too often shop.yourcompany.com and my.yourcompany.com. Now wouldn't it be a nice thing if, say, your company name was Nissan and you sold cars, you had a domain name like cars.nissan.com, or even better, nissan.cars.com. That way there's room for audi.cars.com, and nissan.computers.com, and even ford.tea.com.

This wouldn't have to take place overnight, but if a few significant industry domains could be purchased (then again, try prying news.com from c|net's cold, dead hands) the relevant subdomains could be rerouted to their more 'conventional' URLs.

If nothing else, it would be a nice service if, in addition to an index.htm (php, html, cgi, whatever) page and, often, a robots.txt page, there could be something like an others.html page that lists other companies or sites which might easily be confused with the domain name, along with links to those sites.

This would provide a 'near miss' functionality to web navigation, and code checking for the existance of an others.html document would likely see quick inclusion in several web browsers so that along with a 'search', 'security' and 'shop' buttons there would be an 'others' button.

Well, it's late and I'm rambling. I just wish big players (even people who I'd otherwise respect, like Sting) would stop trying to take things away from people by force. The net shouldn't work that way.

I was browsing Amazon's e-cards, looking for a suitable card to send to those who've donated to my grad school fund (thanks!), and I noticed that one of Amazon's 51 e-card catagories is Wiccan, and the Wiccan cards are actually pretty nice.

I just think that's really cool.

For those intent on keeping Star Wars in your personal memepool until Episode II comes out in '02, there's Star Wars Telent, a Win95/98/NT/2K telnet client that displays output in 'star wars opening credits' format.

Almost makes me want to set up that Win98 box just to play with it... Just the thing for watching those scrolling web logfiles in realtime.

Also, be sure to check out NetPong on the same site. As an owner of an actual functioning Magnavox Odyssey 300 (circa 1977) I can absolutely respect the necessity of this project.

Argh. 1:40am, asleep for only an hour before Bam. The kicker is that he may have brought along a few friends.

Now you can rate the AOLiza conversations on a scale of 1 to 10, and see how the others rate, and how many votes they've received.

It's funny how systems advance, cater to the user's needs, evolve, and eventually find more complicated ways of doing what they did so well in the first place. It's even funnier when people don't seem to realize that it's happening.

This morning's case-in-point is a CNN article on Nokia's phone-net strategy. The article is titled "Nokia steps up pressure with 'chat' phone". Now, just for a second forget that you're a geek and put yourself in the shoes of a normal person:

• Normal: Aren't all phones chat phones?
• Geek: No, this is really new!you can send messages to people and back!
• Normal: You can't talk on a normal phone?
• Geek: Oh, "chat!" Haha, funny. No. What this does is let you instant-message chat! See now? It lets you chat by typing!
• Normal: Why is this good?
• Geek: Because you can connect with anyone, anyhwere, over the Internet!
• Normal: So, anyone in front of a computer, right?
• Geek: Yeah, or anyone else with one of these phones!
• Normal: Why wouldn't I just call them?
• Geek: Well, say you're in a meeting, now you can chat during the boring meeting without it being obvious that you're not paying attention.
• Normal: Do you really think I can't tell the difference between when you're using your pilot to take notes and when you're using it to play klondike? Now try typing on the 10-digit keypad and convince me you're contributing to the discussion.
• Geek: Well, you could always use it while driving to let people know you'll be late...
• Normal: sigh...

Anyhow, a little longwinded, but hopefully I make a point. Now that chat rooms are starting to support voice, marketing decides that it only makes sense that voice devices are supporting text chat, especially when you can bill by the byte.

Actually, the funniest part of this whole phenomenon is how marketing can get people to put up with things they'd never normally tolerate. The Newton wanted you to print a little neater so it could understand your handwriting and people wouldn't tolerate that. Graffiti came out for the Newton (before anywhere else) and people berated it, saying it was ridiculous to learn new letterforms just to input text. Then the Palm comes out and people LOVE it, even though Graffiti is the only stroke-based input method available! Soon it's hip to know Graffiti.

Even worse, Dvorak keyboards have been at a standstill for decades, even though they're 10-20% more efficient than Querty keyboards. People don't want to switch because it's too much work, but now people are putting up with the slowest, most painful, concentration-stealing 10-digit cellphone numeric-to-alphanumeric input method, one that requires (counting...) FOURTEEN buttonpresses just to get an '@' symbol (Nokia 51x0), and they think it's super cool that they can send a two line email that took them 12 minutes to compose!

What's next? Java applets that run on your phone allowing voice-over-ip tunneled through your cellphone connection, billed by the K?

Rereading my previous post, I suddenly realized the reason the world needs a 'chat phone' is so people can talk to AOLiza anywhere, anytime.

Hoorah! The Wired article is up, and they even tracked down Mr. Weizenbaum in Germany to let him know what his child has been up to and get his opinions on it. I'm really impressed by how the news stories have gone deeper than just the humor, interviewing sociologists, getting great quotes from AOL spokespeople, and generally doing a really fair job of reporting.

Gotta love Salon. (thanks Liz!)