Distributed journalism

An interesting alternate future near-history, in the form of a Flash animation, explores the possibilities of an 'arms-race' between:

1) Microsoft (and Friendster)
and
2) Google (and Blogger and Amazon)

Talks a little on the ideas of automatic recommendation, and multiple preferential filters (e.g. preferred editors, in this context)

A new theory of war

The New York Time has an article on the Pentagon's network upgrade.

In it, it is claimed that "military intelligence - including secret satellite surveillance covering most of the earth - will be posted on the war net and shared with troops".


Good to know that the well-trained members of the US military will be able to take advantage of this promising new thing called the Intar-web.
[An interesting paper on friendly-fire inspired by Gulf War 1]


How will they manage the changing tension between:

1) The chain-of-command

• Alternate instructions from the ERDC's TeleEngineering Operations Center
• Strategic vs tactical views might impel soldiers to act in their immediate best interest (staying alive?) instead of acting to achieve strategically or tactically important objectives
  

2) The chain-of-reporting

• Secrecy-management problems suggested by the Times article
• Leakage of operational details via request analysis (cp Google's potential for log scanning)