A couple of days ago Ben Hammersley was noting that difference between the Internet and the Internet in the US. While there's plenty of "warm and cheap places" where developers could write all the software they want, sometime our rights might change when a company moves. Check out this interesting post by Tris Hussey (via Strange Attractor) about Flickr moving their services from Canada to the US.

Under the Patriot Act, the FBI, CIA, Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and compel Yahoo/Flickr to open up the data doors to them on the basis of "national security" or that a "person of interest" has photos there.  They don't need a warrant.  Yahoo/Flickr will not be able by law to inform you that this has happened, going to happen, etc.
 
And it goes beyond this.  Given the right-wing politics of the day, how long will it be before Yahoo is forced to close or restrict the tags "nude" and "erotic"?  This would not happen in Canada.

I've been very busy in the last couple of weeks. Among many other things I got a new camera to take pictures at an event I was helping to document.

The Nikon 4500 I was using previously is a fine camera but it wasn't very good in low light conditions and the lenses could barely keep up with the 4 megapixel resolution.

So this time I decided to go reflex: big camera, big lenses. After some digging, with the advice of a few friends, I ended up choosing the Nikon D70s.

It's my first digital reflex and it feels great. I did waste my part of film with reflex cameras a few years ago, the camera I used most back then was a Nikon FE.

After many years of small digital cameras it's nice to have again a camera which you can hold like a camera, weights like a camera and most of all "clicks" when you shoot (this one clicks quite fast: up to 14 pictures at a rate of 3 per second, you feel like a paparazzi ;-)

I'm very happy with the quality of the images, very sharp with great deep colors (my latest cats pictures on Flickr  have been taken with the D70s). It's a working camera, not something that you can take always with you, but given this quality I might end up bringing it along even in non-working trips.

My friends Stowe Boyd and Marc Canter think that the notion of conference is now passe and they should be replaced by "a brand. An IRC channel, a Wiki and a marketplace".

Maybe you guys have been going to too many conferences (well... actually you seem to be going to all conferences).

I think that meeting at conferences from time to time is nice, you hear voices, see and smell people in 3D, eat together, discuss in ways which are simply not possible on an a wiki.

You simply don't have to go to all of them.

;->

Dave: There might be a mug on Scripting News before the end of the week. How about that!

:-)

Looks like IBM is doing some interesting experiments with RSS on their Intranet [via Corporate Blogging].

We have been promoting a blog/rss based tool for almost two years now and it's amazing how big companies are still the leading market. Since in most cases we are talking about small, cheap and easy to use tools you would have expected SME to jump on board pretty quickly, but at least so far they haven't.

Also if it's true that SME generally don't have a knowledge management & sharing culture, they do have a lot to gain by embracing social software both for internal and external communication.

We developed our first scenario based on large number of small companies building value syndicating content to aggregators back in 1999 (back then it this scenario was called "Evectors", because I kept drawing a lot of vectors while explaining the concept, while the name of the company was still StudioIdea), 6 years and a lot of tools later we are still waiting to see it happen.

How comes that in June 2005 I'm sitting in front of a bunch of computers with plenty of bandwidth but I'm struggling to get some information about what's going on at wwdc on the other side of the world? I keep uslessy hitting reload buttons in all my browsers trying to get some valuable bits to no avail.