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Intervention for broadband

On a tangent to Frank’s discussion on the costs of corruption, I asked myself a slightly related question.

While I am of the opinion that government should be kept to a minimum, and that the market should be largely left to it’s own devices, I am dismayed by the lack of broadband in this country. I would like to put existing arguments concerning the legacy of state monopolies and local loop unbundling aside for a moment and ask a straight forward question.

Should the government have mandated several years ago, that all new housing estates be piped for fibre to the kerb or even fibre to the home technology? I ask that given that the housing boom has led to something like half a million houses being built in quite a short space of time.

Now I can imagine that a person in favour of free markets would say – if the market does not demand this technology, then developers will not provide it. And if people do demand it, they will either ask for it, or specifically choose a development that does incorporate it.

But is there not a bigger picture? Is there not an argument that says economies that have implemented such policies (Korean and Scandanavian models come to mind) have benefitted from the foresight, and that such government interference has actually led to the market benefitting from something that, if left to it’s own devices, may not have happened?

I know it sounds like I’m saying the governments knew best, but it puzzles me that given such massive house building we are still in the same situation we were a decade ago – copper to homes where DSL may not reach.

It may have been sensible for developers to approach ISP’s or TV stations and offer a deal to cable homes with extremely fast connections, both to save money digging roads up again later, and give companies instant access to customer’s homes without a proxy like eircom – or even to enable a huge amount of homes to have technology that may not be available to them over copper.

Did Korean people demand super fast broadband and then benefit from it, or did the government see the benefits in advance and force it on a market that did not see the potential positive future effects on the economy?

Incidentally Cringely’s piece this week covers a similar subject.

Comments welcome!

Scientology orientation video

Looks like someone smuggled a video camera into a Scientology induction screening, fascinating stuff. These guys are nuts.

Best quotes:

You are at the threshold of your next trillion years. You will live it, in shrivelling agonised darkness or you will live it triumphantly in the light – the choice is yours, not ours. If you this minute say I will, for better or for worse, go on in scientology, you will open the door to your own future. If you say otherwise you slam tomorrow shut in your own face. I’m sorry, but that’s the way it really is.

If you leave this room after seeing this film, and walk out and never mention scientology again, you are perfectly free to do so. It would be stupid, but you can do it. You can also dive off a bridge or blow your brains out. That is your choice.

Haha. I can see this becoming a ‘cult’ classic!

This story outlines how some of the stuff mentioned in the video actually works…

Comment spam issues

In the last few weeks I have noticed an increase in the amount of comment spam coming my way. Akismet catches most of them, now standing at over 37,000 comment spam caught. It increase by between 500 and 1000 a day.

Today I came across this. It appears to be a log for spammers, of whether their comment spam were successful or not. If you change the 1 in ‘log1’ in the address bar to 2 you see more pages of it.

More interestingly, if you go to here, it appears to be a form for actually sending spam. If you try to access the actual domain you get ‘directory listing denied’. You can send 1000s of comment spam per second…using various text formulas.

Evil spammers!

Orlowski on photo communities

Andrew Orlowski over at El Reg penned an article his week where he claimed Flickr was getting far more publicity than it’s due. He cites a Hitwise survery that suggest Photobucket is the biggest of photo sharing sites, while Flickr lies in 6th place. He suggests that Flickr, being a Web 2.0 darling, receives far more publicity than it’s bigger competitor.

Web 2.0 arguments seem weird in this instance, do even half the people using Flickr know what web 2.0 is, nevermind that Flickr uses it’s technologies? And do Photobucket users realise their site doesn’t have snazzy AJAX, but still works anyway …?

Survey aside, I had a quick look to see make other comparisons.

Google trends puts Photobucket ahead, but not by a huge margin. While Alexa gives Flickr a traffic rank of 50, with Photobucket getting 76.

The survery itself appears skewed. There are other arguments in the comments after the survey suggesting that Photobucket isn’t really the same as Flickr, one being a place to store and display photos for Myspace users, and the other being a photo community in it’s own right.


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