With so many mergers and acquisitions going on, many of which involve younger companies buying older ones the way CNET bought ZDNet in October of 2000, such "negative employee badge numbers" are probably not unusual. But for some reason that I can't put my finger on, I've always found a strange surrealism in them. Slowly though, as the years have gone by, these anomolies on CNET's HR books have given way to Father Time who, today, is claiming me as his next victim.

I am moving to CMP where I will be deeply involved with events while at the same time continuing to blog about my second love: technology (the first is my family). As such, this will be my last post on ZDNet.

I've already written and rewritten this farewell notice several times. In an attempt to credit the giants on whose shoulders I've stood during my last 17 years of tech journalism (not to mention the thousands of readers who have helped to shape my opinions on tech), the initial draft of this blog post was never ending. I wiped it out. At first there were 10 people. Then 15. Eventually 30 and then more . I gave up. There simply isn't a way to do everyone the justice they deserve without creating a unreadable tome.

So, I will keep the list very short -- down to the biggest giants who have, in their own way, enabled my success in fuzzy ways that cannot be easily quantified or characterized: my wife and three children (a fourth is on the way). The media business is intensely competitive and journalism is a travel and time intensive career-choice. The phone can ring at any time with the sort of news that the presses as well as breakfast, lunch, dinner or some other outing must be stopped for.

Thanks to this job, I've also been able to travel the world. But it's never easy leaving the house for the airport when your kids are hanging onto both legs saying "Don't go!" or you know your going to miss something important while your gone. So, to A, D, S, and N (it's been my practice to refrain from using their names in this space), thank you for your support from the bottom of my heart.

Finally, it is with incredibly mixed emotions that I am leaving the CNET family of talented and dedicated journalists, editors, staff and readers that I have been with (and who have been with me) for so very long. This company, its managers and my colleagues with whom I've worked have always been incredibly kind and generous to me in ways that are simply impossible to enumerate. To them, I say thank you as well for all that you have done for me, both personally and professionally.

Although OLW does in fact contain a browser-based text editor that closely mimics the rich text capabilities of Microsoft Wordpad (a rich text editor that's built-into Windows) and a rudimentary list editor that includes rows and columns that can be exported to Microsoft Excel, Microsoft is in no way pitching it as an online office suite of the sort that Google offers in Google Apps (see my interview with Google App 'founder' Rajen Sheth) or that Zoho offers (at nearly 20 separate applications, Zoho could very well offer the widest breadth of productivity apps of any offering, Web-based or desktop). In my in video interview and demo with Microsoft product manager Kirk Gregersen, I learned that Microsoft really just views OLW as a collaborative infrastructure that's designed to give users a better way to collaborate on documents than many do now with e-mail and/or USB keys.

But much the same way Google is barely willing to admit that Google Apps is designed to compete with Microsoft Office, Microsoft seems barely willing to admit that Office Live Workspace is a response to the pressure that its Web competitors are bringing to bear.

While the Web is accessible from a range of client-side technologies that's more diverse than what is supported by any other platform, the range of Web-based collaborative offerings from Microsoft for working with productivity documents has been limited to two offerings; First, Sharepoint which is primarily a Windows Server- and Office-based solution that's ideally suited to behind-the-firewall collaboration and second, Groove -- the far more Internet-driven (than any of Microsoft's existing tools) collaboration solution that became a part of Microsoft's overall software portfolio when the software giant acquired Groove Networks in 2005.

But, despite Groove's strengths as a collaborative solution that works within and across organizations, its brand equity in the marketplace, and more importantly, the clout of former Groove Networks CEO (and now Microsoft CTO) Ray Ozzie, Groove seems more like Microsoft's forgotten stepchild rather than a brand and a platform on which to build as Microsoft looks to offer a compelling collaborative solution that works on organizational intranets as well as it works on the Internet and the Web. While Microsoft has finally recognized the strengths of the Web as a collaborative platform, especially for ad hoc organization of behind and/or outside-the-firewall collaboration, it has chosen to put its muscle behind Office Live Workspace -- a free offering that is more like what WebEx offers in WebOffice than it is like Google Apps or Zoho.

Even so, that doesn't mean Office Live Workspace doesn't narrow the gap against Google and Zoho's Web-based productivity offerings. Microsoft believes that the desktop is still the domain of productivity applications which is why, taken together, the company believes that Microsoft Office and Office Live Workspace make for a better aggregate solution than does Google Apps or Zoho -- both of which build many of OLW's Web-based collaborative capabilities directly in to the application.

While some activities, such as real-time collaboration are doable with the Microsoft Office/OLW duo, they may be more elegantly implemented in Google Apps and Zoho. On the flip side, Microsoft Office has its own strengths. Namely, it works well, even when you're not connected to the Internet (thanks to Google Gears, Zoho has some offline capabilities as well) and its core applications are far more robust than anything found on the Web. For this reason, Microsoft's introduction of OLW may very well be enough to keep the Google/Zoho-curious from straying too far from the comfort of Microsoft Office in order to take advantage of Web-driven collaboration.

That said, for those users seeking Web-driven collaboration around productivity documents, one question is "Why not WebEx's WebOffice?" Not only has the service already been through some battle-testing (whereas OLW is in beta, WebEx is "shipping"), its neutrality in terms of supported applications (for point-and-click editing of Web-stored documents, OLW only supports Microsoft's Office) means that WebEx has some comforts of its own to offer users.

Now that OLW is out, cutting a circuitous swath between Google, WebEx, and Zoho, I decided to spend some time in Silicon Valley talking to the three companies about their philosophies when it comes to Web-based computing and what if anything they had to say about Microsoft's OLW. As you can see in the attached video, WebEx's president of products and technical operations Gary Griffiths and Zoho evangelist Raju Vegesna were not shy in discussing OLW relative to their own offerings. But Google, as a matter of practice, rarely if ever discusses the companies or offerings that others see as the search giant's competition. In the video, Google's Rajen Sheth was happy to entertain questions about Google and the way it thinks about applications and collaboration. But Microsoft was not a part of the discussion.

Check out the video and feel free to comment below on what you saw.

Well, given today's compliance laws, the harm could be huge because of how those numbers can easily bubble up into an quarterly or annual earnings report. If such over-ridden cells end up corrupting some bigger picture report, the results could be disastrous (literally and figuratively). To help organizations and auditors keep spreadsheets from inadvertently (or even purposely) running amok, ClusterSeven has come up with a solution called Enterprise Spreadsheet Manager (ESM). In the attached video, ClusterSeven's vice president of product marketing Ralph Baxter demonstrates how ESM can be configured to keep a watchful eye over any cell or range of cells in any spreadsheet.

As the contents of those cells change, ESM keeps track of when the changes were made, what the new values are, and who made the changes. In other words the audit trail is extremely tight. As you can see in the demo, one of the cool things ESM does is it monitors if cells are switching from their original programming type to another: for example from a formula to a hard-coded number (a sure sign that a spreadsheet and anything that depends on it could end up in a state of corruption).

ESM also graphically presents trends in cell and spreadsheet integrity. The advantage, which Baxter shows at the end of the video, is that those charged with compliance or auditing can build a single graph that includes trend lines for dozens or even hundreds of spreadsheets. Where a cell exceeds company-set thresholds for integrity (eg: varies from some number by a certain percentage, or a formula is suddenly overridden with hard-coded numbers), the trend-line fluctuates from its steady state wildly (making it easy to spot). Why would this be helpful? Well, if your annual report doesn't look right but it depends on data coming from 100 or 1000 spreadsheets scattered throughout the organization, a single graph that monitors the integrity of all the spreadsheets that feed into that annual report can help spot the needle in the haystack that's causing the problem. Otherwise, auditors and financial analysts might have to manually sift through every spreadsheet -- a process that could take days or weeks.

All this whizbang functionality would be of limited help if it couldn't be attached to an alerting mechanism. According to Baxter, there are ways to connect it to e-mail, internal LAN-based alerts (like Netsend) and SMS. ESM supports other spreadsheets beyond Excel (Google Spreadsheets for example). It also doesn't come cheap with the average starting price ranging between $50K-$100K. But for some large companies where compliance is king, that could be pocket change given the sort of risk it mitigates. Finally, it requires the installation of two servers: Windows Server and Microsoft's SQL Server 2005.

When most people hear the phrase Google Apps, they see it as a colloquial reference to some of the browser-based applications that Google serves up through the Web such as Google Documents and Google Spreadsheets. However, that's not really what Google Apps is.

Yes, Google Apps involves Google's browser-based productivity applications such as Google Docs, Google Spreadsheets, and Gmail. But, more than that, Google Apps is a branded bundle of those and other applications (Page Creator, Web site hosting, calendaring, Google Talk, etc.) that Google targets at organizations. When accessed via Google Apps, that bundle of applications behaves in more of an organizational context than do Google's applications on the standalone basis that the general public has access to. For example, the apps can be accessed directly through an organization's Internet domain (eg: http://mail.yourdomain.com or http://docs.yourdomain.com) and, for every such domain, certain users get administrative privileges to globally configure most of Google Apps' options for all of an organization's users.

Google Apps is available in two flavors. First, the Standard Edition (GASE) : a version of Google Apps that's free, but that bears advertising in the Gmail portion and that limits the e-mail storage to 5GB per user. Second, the Premier Edition (GAPE): a far more functional $50 per user per year version with no ads, 25GB of storage per user, 24x7 telephone support, a 99.9 percent uptime service level agreement for e-mail, access to plug-in software from third parties, and more.

In the big picture of the industry, Google Apps is viewed by many as the only suite of productivity software with a real shot at cutting Microsoft Office's dominant market position down to size. Yes, Google Apps does some things more efficiently than does Microsoft Office. For example, as opposed to the downloads required by Microsoft Office, almost all updates to the service involve little more than pressing the refresh button on a browser (the downloadable Google Talk application is one exception). But even though Google Apps has loads of compelling features, most view its ability to compete with Microsoft Office as having more to with Google's powerful brand name and its virtually unlimited warchest (a luxury that none of Microsoft Office's competitors has had).

The result of that warchest is a value that makes it difficult for organizations not to try it out. With GASE being free and GAPE costing only $50 per user per year, just use of the e-mail service alone could end up yielding savings. The availability of GAPE's 24x7 phone support is reminiscent of the free support provided in the 1980's by Wordperfect to users of its namesake word processing software -- free offering that Wordperfect was eventually forced to abandon in favor of a more expensive paid service. With its deep pockets, Google can much afford to offer Google Apps at any price and, according to Sheth, more than 500,000 organizations are currently using it.

In the interview, we cover a wide range of questions -- everything from how Google manages to offer GAPE users a whopping 25GB of storage when most corporations can only offer their own users a fraction of that to questions regarding the potential consolidation of currently bifurcated functionality (for example, tagging taxonomies and HTML authoring). Along the way, Sheth shows me some really interesting functionality including an autofill feature in the spreadsheet that draws upon Google's experimental Google Sets functionality. In the interview, Sheth says that Google uses code to dialog with its users. Updates to the service are very frequent and sometimes significant.

Sheth also shows off how Google has made Google Calendar extensible with Gadgets. In the example he shows, a Google Gadget automatically populates the calendar with new movie openings and locations. The idea, according to Sheth, is to offer the right extensibility in the right context. It made me think a bit about how FaceBook is in many cases a collection of functionality, a lot of it without context.

Check out the video, and let me know what you think.

The story draws attention to a complex Web of potentially conflicting interests involving Federal Trade Commission Chairman Deborah Platt Majoras, the law firm she used to work for, her husband who still works for it, how that law firm represents one of the big three credit reporting bureaus, and whether or not the FTC has morphed into an agent of the credit reporting bureaus' success from the consumer guardian that The People have entrusted it to be.

While the targets of this follow-the-money like inquest deny any impropriety, I can certainly understand the position of Robert Kuttner, author of The Squandering of America: How the Failure of Our Politics Undermines Our Prosperity who, who in response to the USA Today inquiry, said:

Federal agencies that are supposed to be looking out for the consumer are really protecting the companies that do bad things the agencies were set up to prevent.

I felt precisely this way when virtually all the real teeth were removed out of the proposed legislation that eventually turned into the Can Spam Act. At one point, the legislation included language that prevented senders of bulk commercial e-mail from sending that e-mail to anybody but those individuals with which they had pre-existing relationships. In other words no blind prospecting or solicitations of your inbox.

But, arguing that benefits of unsolicited commercial e-mail (aka SPAM) outweighed the harms, lobbyists for the advertising and marketing industry fought tooth and nail to get that piece of the legislation removed and succeeded. It my mind, it was the ultimate selling-out whereby the government ended up representing the interests of big business rather than those of us in consumer-land who must endure those harms -- the worst of which today is that we have no idea whether our e-mails are reaching their intended recipients due to over-zealous spam filters on the other side. It's a mess.

According to the story:

In February, the National Association of Mortgage Brokers lambasted the FTC for giving the credit bureaus tacit approval to keep selling listings — called "trigger lists" — containing personal and financial data of prospective borrowers. Some unscrupulous lenders used trigger lists to contact people who recently filled out a loan application, and then pitched them subprime mortgages, higher-priced loans aimed at people with spotty credit histories but also marketed to borrowers with good credit.

I have been wondering for a while why, during the earlier part of this year, I received so many solicitations promising to beat my current mortgage rate and how these outfits that I never heard of managed to get a hold of the data that was intimate to me. Now I know. In other words, this is unquestionably one of those data stories involving the thorny question of who gets to control what happens to our personal data when. What this story demonstrates (that's not readily apparent to the naked eye) is the role that the government can play in protecting us, or perhaps giving the companies it's protecting us from the carte blanche they want to take advantage of us.

Earlier today, in response to a blog post I wrote earlier this year about the waning anonymity of cash (and how we are sometimes accosted for personal information at the point of sale the way Radio Shack used to do) and how I didn't mind terribly being asked for my zip code, one ZDNet reader wrote to me:

I used to think this information was used so that stores could figure out where there customers were coming from. But I've learned a lot about data aggregation companies like Axciom, Experian, etc. and I've learned exactly how the zip code is used.

The zip code is most useful to the retailer when you use a credit card. Because they have your name from the card, and also have your zip code now, you are generally findable on the massive consumer databases housed at Axiom, InfoUsa, etc. For instance, there is probably only one Keith Goodman in my zip code of 20001. The retailer now has a valuable piece of information that they can sell to a consumer database firm: your purchase history. I don't think they sell the information about the specifics of what you are purchasing, but the general category you purchased. For instance, if you buy something at a sporting goods store, the store probably reports to the database firms that you are "A purchaser of sporting goods." Don't be surprised if you start getting LL Bean, Cabellas, and similar catalogs since the consumer database firms are selling your purchase history to buyers.

Well. Now I have a little bit more insight into why trees are dying to fill my mailbox (snailmail box) with catalogs that I never requested. And they are. I have back pain to prove it (back pain from carrying a recycling bin full of heavy stock catalogs to the curb). All of these stories (including the recent FaceBook Beacon debacle) fall into the same category of APD Syndrome: Abuse of Personal Data. The question is, what will be that next evolutionary step that resets things so that we have the final word on such sensitive information.

The recent addition of IMAP support demonstrates that philosophy in spades. Normally, when third party clients are used as a front-end to an e-mail service like Gmail, it is done through a protocol known as POP3. But POP3 is extremely limited in what it can do. For example, if you receive a Gmail e-mail into your copy of Outlook and file that e-mail into a folder, your Gmail account remains oblivious to that organizational context. That e-mail may reside in a folder in your Outlook, but it stays in the inbox on Gmail.

Although Gmail's full support of IMAP is limited to certain clients (as far as mobile is concerned, only Apple's iPhone is "officially supported"), IMAP support is what makes it possible for mail items that are filed into certain folders on the client side to be automatically tagged with a label on the Gmail side. Today, Gmail eschews folders in favor of what are referred to as "labels" (considered by many to be "tags"). That said, I'm relatively certain we'll see folders pretty soon in Gmail. In the interview, Coleman says the company is hoping to add foldering capabilities soon -- capabilities that would include the ability to drag and drop emails from the inbox to a folder. According to an entry on the official Gmail blog regarding colored labels (mentioned below):

We actually kinda like folders. In fact, we're doing some work to add some folder-y-ish functionality. Stay tuned.

Going back to the broader discussion of IMAP, enhancing client-side functionality with something as powerful as IMAP when the client-side essentially strips Google of its ability to contextually serve advertisements onto the e-mail page does speak highly of Google's willingness to set users' data free.

According to Coleman:

One of Google's core philosophies is that user data should never be held hostage. We want people to be able to take their data and do whatever it is they want with it. This isn't something that's really standard for e-mail services. Particularly Web mail services that rely on ad revenue. There's a risk if you let people get their mail in Outlook or some other client that they'll stop using the Web interface and they'll end up just reading their mail in a desktop client. We believe that if we give users the best possible product and if we create a good Web interface, and let them use their data in these clients like Outlook or like their BlackBerry, that they'll overall have a better experience and be happier with the product. So, we've made a point throughout Gmail's history to give people this freedom with their data.

We launched POP access back in 2004 which lets users read their mail in these clients and then just recently, we launched IMAP [support] which is a lot like POP except it keeps your data in synch no matter where you are. Let's say you're reading your mail in Outook and you read a message and when you go back to go back to your Gmail, you want that message to [to be marked as having been] read there as well. That works with IMAP. With POP that doesn't work.

Regarding the updates to the underlying Javascript engine, Coleman talks about how, as a result of those changes, not only has the Gmail team been able to add eight new features in as many weeks (colored labels [mentioned above], keyboard shortcuts, instantly opening e-mails [via prefetching], integration of AOL Instant Messaging, group chat, etc.), but about how the pace of change will be very fast which means a great many more enhancements (barring foldering capabilities, none of which Coleman would let slip in the interview) are coming Gmail's way (some experimental, some not). However, one feature that's here now, that Coleman did slip-in, is that the storage limit for users of Gmail currently exceeds 5 gigabytes.

One downside to all this upside news is that, for users of the Google Apps-based version of Gmail (the one that organizations would subscribe to), many of the features being rolled out to the larger Gmail population -- for example, prefetching and colored labels -- are not yet available (I tested this and was disappointed to see that, as a Google Apps, some of these very cool and useful features didn't work for me). Off camera, and via e-mail, Coleman confirmed this and said that the reason is that the new Javascript engine hasn't yet been introduced to the Google Apps-based users of Gmail. Wrote Coleman:

Colored labels are currently only available on the version of Gmail that uses the new Javascript implementation. The new Javascript is currently live for Gmail accounts on Firefox, IE7 and Safari 3, and we're actively working to launch it for Google Apps accounts and IE6....As with colored labels, you'll see the speed improvements [from prefetching] once we roll out the new [Javascript] to Google Apps accounts.

Finally, as we were packing our video gear up, I asked Coleman why Google still refers to Gmail's status as being "beta." After all, the service has been running since 2004. After a bit of joking around about this, Coleman mentioned that the company would like to stabilize a few more of Gmail's features before officially declaring the beta program over. Although he made no promises, from what I heard, it sounded like that too could be expected relatively soon -- probably sometime in 2008.

Bebo claims to be the third largest social network in the world behind MySpace and Facebook and also claims to be the most popular social network in the UK, Ireland and New Zealand. Glazer's attendance to the Bebo event was particularly interesting given that one of Bebo's key messages from yesterday's launch was how applications that are written to run on FaceBook will run without any recoding on Bebo. The FaceBook developer platform is by no means a standard in terms of programmable social networks. But Bebo's choice to be API-compatible with FaceBook in many ways proves why a standard for interoperability between social networks (interoperability of the sort that's the supposed province of the OpenSocial framework) can be important.

For example, given the sort of interoperability that's being demonstrated between the FaceBook and Bebo contexts of Web-based games from Webs.com and Bunchball (described in yesterday's blog about the Bebo launch), the benefits are pretty clear. If you have an account on multiple social networks, you can have your constituents in social network #1 (perhaps one you use as a consumer) and a separate set of constituents in social network #2 (one that you use for business). To be able to be on the first network and connect to you constituents on the second network without leaving the context of the first can, at the bare minimum, offer a much better user experience than the one we have today where you have to jump from one network to the next just to connect. This sort of interoperability is one of the goals of OpenSocial and not surprisingly, Bebo CEO Michael Birch told us yesterday that Bebo would be supporting OpenSocial next year.

I asked David Glazer to riff on the idea that the interoperability between Bebo and FaceBook could be a proofpoint for why a standard like OpenSocial makes sense. In the course of getting the answer, I learned that just a couple of nights ago, the first open source implementation of the OpenSocial framework was published on the Apache Web site under the name "Shindig." On Wednesday, under the headling Let's get this Shindig started, Google OpenSocial API product manager Dan Petersen posted a blog regarding the code's availability. Glazer also told me that the framework which can be found on Google's site at code.google.com had advanced from version 0.5 to 0.6 (as it heads towards 1.0 in 2008). Since announcing OpenSocial in November, Google has been digesting feedback from developers and has synthesized that feedback into several change to the framework.

Glazer and I also talked about the business model once something like OpenSocial takes off. For example, will s/he who houses the data or s/he who has the biggest containers of data win? It seems like they might. But Glazer points out that we could have said the same thing about HTML and things worked out there. Clearly 2008 is going to be year that we'll get to see what sort of impact OpenSocial will have on the Web.

According to the consortium's home page:

The Green Grid is a consortium of information technology companies and professionals seeking to lower the overall consumption of power in data centers around the globe. The organization is chartered to develop meaningful, platform-neutral standards, measurement methods, processes and new technologies to improve energy efficient performance of global data centers.

Helping to drive that mission are some of the biggest tech titans in the IT business; server companies such as IBM, HP, Dell, and Sun, chip companies such as Intel and AMD, and software giants such as Microsoft. Not on the list of Green Grid supporters so far, however, are two key Internet players both of which are running and/or building huge datacenters right now: Google and Yahoo! Although they could eventually join The Green Grid, it's not clear whether the efficacy of their membership is a fair trade for their involvement in a consortium where they may be expected to share some of their secrets around datacenter efficiency.

After all, at the size and scale of the datacenters they run, some of Google and Yahoo!'s competitive advantage lies in the degree to which they can efficiently run their datacenters. Sharing their secrets with the world may help to reduce the aggregate carbon footprint of the world's datacenters. But in terms of maintaining their competitiveness over each other, one aspect of that competitiveness lies in how well they can control datacenter costs without compromising the quality of the end-user experience.

Nevertheless, The Green Grid is fully committed to arriving at standards that its membership can rely on when talking about how green something is. According to AMD senior strategist Larry Vertal and SprayCool founder and CEO Don Tilton, the organization which is divided into three committees (technical, communications, and liaison) has been making progress throughout 2007 since its initiatives were last reported here on ZDNet. Included in that progress were (1) a multi-vendor plugfest involving the measurement of a system's power efficiency according to standards established by one of the working groups in The Green Grid's Technical Committee and (2) the scheduling of the consortium's first major event where a lot of the white papers and findings of the various working groups will be shared for the first time, but only with member organizations and the press. So far, it hasn't been determined exactly how that information is going to be made public.

To hear my interview of Vertal and Tilton, press the play button in the Flash-based audio player above. Or, feel free to download the MP3 through the Flash-based player's menus. If you are subscribed to ZDNet's IT Matters series of podcasts (see how to subscribe), the podcast should show up on your PC, your MP3 player, or both, depending on how you have your podcatcher setup.

As you can see in the attached video, the big news is that Bebo (which Birch claims to be the 3rd largest social network in the world behind MySpace and FaceBook, and first in London, Ireland, and New Zealand) has opened up its network to third party application developers (like what FaceBook has) through a series of APIs. Perhaps even more interesting is how Bebo has chosen to make it so that any application that's written to run on the FaceBook platform is seamlessly portable to the Bebo platform without any recoding.

In the video, Birch talks about the typical painpoint of developers who sometimes must recode their apps to run in different platforms and how this decision will ease the burden of developers building social applications (a good example of this burden can be found in the way that Web pages are often recoded to support different browsers such as Internet Explorer, Firefox and Safari).

The result of this cross-social platform portability can be seen in some of the 40 or so developers that were present at the launch whose applications are already showing up in the Bebo application directory. For example, two gaming companies -- Bunchball.com and Webs.com (publisher of The Social Gaming Network) -- both of which had FaceBook applications, now offer their applications on Bebo in such a way that a user in Bebo can invite any friends they want to a game, regardless of whether those friends are their friends in Bebo or FaceBook. If a Bebo user invites one of their friends listed on their FaceBook account to a game, that invitee can participate in the game without leaving their FaceBook context (and vice versa).

This sort of interoperability of friendship and personal information across social networks is also the province of the OpenSocial framework (an open source framework announced by Google on November 1, 2007). Today, neither Bebo nor FaceBook support OpenSocial. But, as you can see in the video, Birch says that Bebo will be coming out with support for OpenSocial in 2008.

Also in the video, NBC Universal vice president of Digital Product Strategy and Development Sab Kanaujia demos how NBC (one of Bebo's launch partners) is taking advantage of Bebo's programmability with an application that essentially immerses Bebo users and their friends into the hit TV show The Office.

Check out the video and feel free to comment below on what Birch and Kanaujia had to say.

For example, I've often wondered why someone does't print big bold text on the side of the recycling truck that says "Thank you for doing your part to save Mother Earth." I'm a rabid recycler. It's not uncommon to find me fishing used yogurt containers and the like out of our garbage can, rinsing them out, and saying "tsk, tsk" to who ever forgot they're recyclable. I'll spend half my Sunday with a box cutter if that's what it takes to make sure that every box we've gotten in the mail gets recycled (if it doesn't get re-used first). On recycling day, it's not uncommon to see 2-3 cubic yards of recyclable material sitting outside the Berlind household. But I have no real sense of the difference I'm making. Not even a "thank you" can be seen on the side of the recycling truck (even something small like that would make me feel better about all that effort).

Enter Freecycle.org.

Freecycle.org seems to me to be the biggest of all the grassroots movements on the Web that seeks the Earth's sustainability through re-use. The idea? Instead of throwing something out (perhaps something that can't be picked up by the local recycling truck), post it on the Web to other members of your local Freecycle group as being free for the taking. Looking to get something for free? You can publish wanted ads too.

A friend of mine recently turned me on to the existence of the Freecycle group in my area. I'm not sure if all groups work the same but the one I'm a member of uses Yahoo Groups as the place to which four different types of posts get posted: OFFER, WANTED, TAKEN, RECEIVED. As a member of the group, I elect whether to have new posts forwarded to my inbox as they are posted to the Yahoo Group, or aggregated in summary form twice per day.

If one man's junk is another man's treasure, then nothing proves it more than freecycle.org. Knowing that one of my daughter's favorite things to do is play pretend make-up (and knowing that her preference would be to use real make up brushes instead of the toy ones... but not real make-up), I decided to buy her an inexpensive blush brush at the local drugstore. Its cost was $3.99. But just before going to the check-out counter, I spotted a huge make-up kit with about 10 different brushes for different sorts of applications and a boatload of real make-up (blush, eye-liner, nail polish, etc.) for $9. Just to have the brushes for $9 was a far better deal than the one brush I had in my hand. So, right there, I made an executive decision. I decided to get the kit, take the brushes out for my daughter, and give all the make-up away through Freecycle.

When I got home with the kit and explained to my wife what I'd done, she bet me I'd have no takers. Not having an ounce of femininity in me, how was I to know that make-up (even new unopened make-up) is of limited appeal to make-up buyers? But I accepted her bet because for the last couple of weeks, I had been watching as items were being offered (items that I never dreamed anybody ever wanting) and subsequently taken. I sat down at my PC and wrote my first Freecycle.org offer advertisement:

OFFER: Stocking Stuffers? A bunch of unopened make-up from CVS

A whole bunch of unopened, still-in-the-original box, brand new (purchased today) make-up (blush, mascara, eye-liner, lipstick, shimmer powder, nail polish, etc.) that came with a kit that I purchased from CVS because of the brushes that were included. I'm keeping the brushes for my daughter to play with (with her dolls) but you can have all of the make-up. Would make great stocking stuffers!

Within 4 minutes, I had my first response. I couldn't get a TAKEN post into the Yahoo Group fast enough. By the time I did, six more people responded saying they'd pick it up with in the hour if they could. My wife was astonished. To be honest, so was I. Not that the make-up is junk. But if one man's junk is another man's treasure (figuratively speaking), then Freecycle is like the Internet's junk-treasure exchange. Even better, by joining, you get some sense of the movement that you're a part of. On the home page, the Freecycle.org Web site says:

Welcome! The Freecycle Network is made up of 4,188 groups with 4,177,000 members across the globe. It's a grassroots and entirely nonprofit movement of people who are giving (& getting) stuff for free in their own towns. It's all about reuse and keeping good stuff out of landfills. Each local group is moderated by a local volunteer (them's good people). Membership is free. To sign up, find your community by entering it into the search box above or by clicking on "Browse Groups" above the search box. Have fun!

And the bit about the local moderators being good people is true. The local moderator of my group just put out a note about how many members are in our group and how prolific those members have been in posting ads: everything from used wallets (yes, used wallets) to, well, make-up! It's just the sort of feedback that makes me open every e-mail I get from the group, hoping that maybe, there will be something I need, or something I have that someone else has asked for through a WANTED posting. If there are global grass roots movements on the Web that can keep stuff out of landfills -- ones that you can join in a way that your personal contribution can make a difference to the Earth as well as to someone else, then Freecycle.org is one of them. Consider joining.

We still believe that when you're dealing with TVs 50 inches and smaller, the added resolution has only a very minor impact on picture quality. On a regular basis in our HDTV reviews, we put 720p (or 768p) sets next to 1080p sets, then feed them both the same source material, whether it's 1080i or 1080p, from the highest-quality Blu-ray and HD DVD players. We typically watch both sets for a while, with eyes darting back and forth between the two, looking for differences in the most-detailed sections, such as hair, textures of fabric, and grassy plains. Bottom line: It's almost always very difficult to see any difference--especially from farther than 8 feet away on a 50-inch TV....

....The extra sharpness afforded by the 1080p televisions he's seen is noticeable only when watching 1080i or 1080p sources on a larger screens, say 55 inches and bigger, or with projectors that display a wall-size picture. Katzmaier also says that the main real-world advantage of 1080p is not the extra sharpness you'll be seeing, but instead, the smaller, more densely packed pixels. In other words, you can sit closer to a 1080p television and not notice any pixel structure, such as stair-stepping along diagonal lines, or the screen door effect (where you can actually see the space between the pixels). This advantage applies regardless of the quality of the source.

Even though the headline of his story makes it sound as though it's primarily a discussion of 720p vs. 1080p, it's really much more than that. Carnoy very authoritatively discusses the 1080i as well, describing in most excellent layman's terms what the difference between "i" and "p" are, what it means to you and me, and how many of the displays are capable of resolving differences between the resolution and type of signal being fed into a display and what the display is capable of (for example, feeding a 1080p signal into a 720 display).

What you don't get in this particular story of Carnoy's is a discussion of LCD vs. Plasma (or for that matter, the other display types such as CRT and DLP). For that, I suggest checking out David Katzmaier's Four styles of HDTV (make sure you click through all the pages and check out the plasma vs. LCD table on the second page).

One rule of thumb that has suprisingly changed this year has been the maximum size of LCD flat panels. In January, while at CES, we learned that except for Westinghouse which had gone LCD-only and was doing what it could to break the size barrier for LCD, pretty much all the major manufacturers had LCD's that went up to 47" in diagonal size and plasma displays that started at 42" in diagonal size and went up from there (some to more than 100 inches). Already today though (as evidence of how quickly things are changing), all you need to do is visit your local electronics superstore to see LCDs from many of the majors that are 50-55 inches in size.

Speaking of shopping in superstores for these bad boys, one thing I've learned is that you don't want to eyeball the image quality of these displays in a typical showroom setting where florescent lighting is used. Chances are that your viewing will involve incandescent lighting which, to the human eye, produces different results than florescent lighting when watching TV. You're probably better off going to a home theater store that can reproduce the lighting situation you're most likely to use your TV in.

Attached to this blog is a video of a demonstration of Office Live Workspace (OLW) given to me by one of the directors on the Microsoft Office team, Kirk Gregersen. For those of you who just want to listen, we've stripped the audio off the video and made that available as a podcast that can be heard by pressing play on the podcast player above. Or, you can download the MP3 through the player's menu. If you're subscribed to ZDNet's IT Matters series of podcasts (see how to subscribe), the audio should automatically get downloaded to your PC, MP3, or both depending on how you have your podcatcher setup.

The demo was given to me last month (November 2007) and I've been embargoed from discussing any of what I saw then, until now. As you can see from the demo, OLW is primarily designed to use the Web as a shared workspace through which people collaborate on Microsoft Office-based documents. Much the same way the standard edition of Google Apps is free, OLW, which includes 500MB of free storage, will be available to users for free. Though they may not get to take full advantage of all that OLW has to offer, users need not have a copy of Microsoft Office to initiate and use an Office Live Workspace. Microsoft plans to support the service with advertising and no plans exist yet to offer an ad-free version for a fee. Gregersen told me that the company would consider such an offering if enough customers requested it.

Office Live Workspace is most definitely not a Web-based productivity suite like what Google offers in Google Apps. That said, between a lightweight Web-based word processor that includes most of the basic formatting controls (boldface, underline, text justification, indentation, fonts and typeface sizing) for writing and collaborating on what Microsoft refers to as "notes" (see image below) and a list maker that's as close to being a spreadsheet without actually being a spreadsheet (it doesn't do calculations, formulas, or macros), it's clear that Microsoft is really only a few lines of code away (code that's probably already finished, but not activated yet) from offering a fully Web-based suite of its own (continued below)

The fact that Microsoft isn't yet offering the basic integrated suite (word processing, spreadsheet, presentations, email) online, if you ask me, is a matter of choice more than it is any inability to produce such an offering. While Google Apps, Zoho, WebEx and others get all the attention in the press, the truth is that Microsoft can afford to wait. Its Microsoft Office franchise has such a giant global footprint that the company's beancounters will probably know long before anybody else does when and if the tide starts shifting away from desktop software to something more along the lines of Webware. Should that day come (I think it will), anybody who doubts whether Microsoft will be ready with an entry is just fooling themselves. For now, the company is content to offer OLW as, what Gregersen called, "an extension" to Microsoft Office.

This isn't the first time Microsoft has offered a Web-accessible technology so that users of Microsoft Office could more easily collaborate over documents. Microsoft's SharePoint has been around for a while and then there is (or was) of course Groove, the company that Microsoft acquired from Ray Ozzie (now one of Microsoft's top execs). In many respects, some of OLW's fundamentals are the same as those of SharePoint. For example, from within Microsoft Office, users can check-out documents (Word, Excel, etc.) from the shared workspace for editing at which point others must wait until that copy is checked back-in before they can edit it. Documents can be edited offline and, when loaded back into a workspace, OLW will attempt to resolve hard and soft conflicts (a feature I haven't tested yet). Whereas SharePoint is a solution that you must host yourself on your own servers (or that someone else can host for you), Microsoft is the host of OLW, and its free. No Windows Servers are required.

Microsoft Office documents can be opened directly from Office Live Workspace and saved back to it just the same way you might save an Office document to your hard drive. Although the equivalent of a plug-in was required to get it working on our test PC, the fact that we were dealing with the Web instead of our hard drive as a filesystem was seamless and transparent to us. OLW supports versions of Microsoft Office going back to Office XP.

Today, although any document type (including images and music) can be stored in a OLW-based workspace, you cannot plug third party document types that require other productivity software (eg: Corel's WordPerfect, OpenOffice.org, etc.) into the solution and get the same seamless operation with them as you do with Microsoft Office-based documents and Microsoft Office. Like wikis (which can track any given document back to its first version), OLW keeps track of previous versions of a document. Unlike wikis, OLW's "previous version" feature only goes back five versions. Gregersen told me that Microsoft would be willing to change this if enough customers said it needed to go further back.

If you've played around with Google Apps at all, you'll see a lot of similarities in how the two (Google Apps, OLW) organize documents. Entire workspaces can be shared with others of your choosing. Or, if you want you, you can share specific documents with specific people. Like Google Apps, documents can be published to a URL for anonymous viewing on the Web. But, also like Google Apps, all anonymous viewers can do is view such a document. In both cases (Google Apps or OLW), editing requires users to log into the services which in turn require users to establish IDs (with Google or Microsoft). A Windows Live ID is a prerequisite to getting into (or establishing) an Office Live Workspace but a Microsoft-based e-mail (eg: Hotmail) is not a prerequisite to getting a Windows Live ID. Your e-mail address can be in any domain. Not available yet to OLW users is the idea of a domain oriented context (like what Google Apps has). For example, where the main URL to reach your documents is something like http://documents.YourDomainName.com.

In a bit of a wizard-like way, Microsoft has templates for different types of workspaces to help people get started. For example, borrowing from Office, OLW has templates for a class workspace (for students that might be working together), an event workspace (that includes invitations, flyers, event planning lists, attendee lists, agenda, etc.), a household workspace (includes family to-do lists, contact lists, monthly budgets, etc), job search workspace, (contact list, resume template, etc), a meeting workspace, a project workspace, etc.

Lists in an OLW-based workspace (lists that can be edited directly online) aren't just your everyday ordinary lists. Reminiscent of Jotspot's early days (Jotspot, which was eventually acquired by Google, had spreadsheet-oriented lists), not only do OLW lists have some spreadsheet qualities (they are organized into rows and columns), they can be edited right within the Web browser and, unlike notes created with OLW's Web-based notetaking feature (other than copying and pasting, notes can't be exported), lists can be exported to spreadsheets. "Cells" (Gregersen doesn't refer to them as this) can be formatted in a variety of ways: numbers, single line of text, multiple lines of text, yes/no (a boolean field), and date.

Also, just like spreadsheets, columns can be sorted according to ascending or descending order. As Gregersen shows in the video, OLW columns will play an evolving roll for collaborators through their integration with Outlook. For example, if a shared-list in an Office Live Workspace is a contact list, Microsoft Outlook can use that list as one of its address books (Wow!, this is cool!). Longer term, it isn't hard to imagine these lists playing other interesting rolls (in terms of Outlook integration). For example, perhaps they could house data that goes with an Outlook form.

Not only is a copy of Microsoft Office not required to view a document, it's not required to comment on a document either. Both can be done via the Web. Viewers for example who might have to log into an OLW workspace from an airport Web kiosk that doesn't have Microsoft Office installed can view a document stored in an OLW workspace and make comments on it without ever having to invoke Microsoft Office itself. We gave this feature a try in Firefox (attempting to emulate the fact that a great many kiosks might not have Windows or Internet Explorer) and it worked.

If there's one area where Microsoft has some ground to cover when it comes to collaborating on documents, it has to do with where OLW is relative to Google Apps. In Google Apps, collaboration is so baked-in to the application's DNA that when I'm editing a document, those edits simply appear on the screen of other people who might be editing or viewing it. Here, Microsoft's legacy is quite evident. In the Microsoft world, you basically engage in screen-sharing through a downloaded piece of software that makes me think of Microsoft's NetMeeting. Whereas nothing special is required with Google Apps for a bunch of people to be able see the changes in near real-time (just a browser is required and anybody can make those changes at any time), Microsoft requires what is essentially a plug-in where control is passed around to people, each of which, when they get control, can make changes while others look on.

Whereas Google's approach to this sort of collaboration drives like a platform-independent Ferrari, Microsoft's is still the same old Edsel. Microsoft will of course argue that there's a big difference between real-time group editing of Microsoft Office-based documents (using Microsoft Office) and that of Google Apps-based documents. Office-based documents are far more robust than documents based on Google Apps' Web-based editors. Even so, the notes and lists functionality offered by OLW as Web-based tools could have the same sort of collaborative abilities that Google's Docs and Spreadsheets have, but don't. Give it time. The two will eventually meet in the middle and the shortcomings in either case are not dealbreakers for their intended audiences.

It's still very early to tell (and very early in OLW's beta program). But if your question is, is Office Live Workspace enough to keep existing Office users from defecting to Google Apps?, I'd say, at the very least, organizations who were considering Google Apps will probably have to take a look at OLW to see if it meets the bulk of their needs. Whereas getting the most out of Google Apps (particularly the collaborative parts) sort of requires you to go cold turkey on Microsoft Office (if that's what you have), OLW offers an intermediate step that will likely give some the best of both worlds they were looking for.

Make sure you check out the video and comment below on what you saw.

See also (other coverage):

• TechCrunch: Office Live Workspace (Beta) Finally Goes Live. Still Needs Work.
• Robert Scoble (includes video): Microsoft brings collaboration to Office
• Mary Jo Foley: Microsoft's answer to Google Docs: What it is and what it isn't
• InfoWorld: Office Live Workspaces misses the mark
• CNET's WebWare: Office Live Workspace (almost) brings Office 2007 online

(continued from above) The corrupted screen eventually went away after I clicked the Kindle's Home button (a button on the keyboard that takes you back to the Kindle's home page where all the content you have loaded into it is indexed). I'm not exactly sure what sequence of buttons I pressed to arrive at this corrupted display in the first place (so I've been unable to reproduce it).

I've been sending a ton of questions Amazon's way as I prepare to do a much more exhaustive write-up of my findings. But one of those questions that's relevant to issues like this is whether Amazon can patch the Kindle with new software (for added functionality or to correct bugs). It should be noted that the Kindle is a Java-based device and, just like with other runtime platforms (Flash, .Net/Silverlight, etc.), the Java architecture is really well-suited to devices like the Kindle into which new software may have to be securely loaded over a network. That doesn't mean that all of the applications on the Kindle are based on Java. When asked about that, Amazon spokesperson Andrew Herdener told me that "Many of the applications for Kindle are written in Java."

Even if some of the applications are not written in Java, that doesn't mean that the Kindle can't be updated. When asked if Amazon could update the Kindle's firmware, Herdener said "Yes, we can do updates over the air, over USB, and from SD memory card."

More to come. And if you're interested in discussing the Kindle, feel free to chime in on the raging debate taking at the end of my last blog on the ebook reader.

Dad: Oh, you have the Kindle?

Me: Yes. It's pretty neat. Raises a lot of interesting questions though

Dad: Based on what I've read, it sounds like a catalyst that's really going to change things in the publishing industry.

Me: True. But bear in mind that it's not the first ebook reader.

Dad: But you can get the newspaper with it.

Me: Yes. For example, the New York Times.

Dad: When you read the New York Times on the Kindle, does it have advertising?

Thud.

Leave it to an ex-media exec who hasn't even touched a Kindle -- my father no less -- to ask one of the most incredibly obvious questions that the Kindle raises; a question that completely escaped me until last night's phone call. It's a brilliant question because of the answer's implications and for anybody who's involved in the media industry or who likes to watch it (like me), it's a real conversation starter.

Looking at a typical New York Times story on the Kindle -- which I did today (see image, right) -- the answer is no. What could that mean?

Before the blogosphere, RSS, and even the Web rolled around, the established media had most of its business model questions answered. To get the New York Times, you had to pay a nominal fee. But the majority of the Times' revenues came from advertising.

When the Web came around, you didn't have to pay to get your "copy" of the Times (and you still don't) and that convenience of reading it online, for free, is brought to you, courtesy of the Times' online advertisers. Along come blogs and RSS and the business model gets a little dicier. The Times' runs a great many RSS feeds (as we do here at ZDNet) but they don't carry the full text of the story. They don't have ads in them either. It's a pain point for any media company: could the nugget of information you pass for free, through your RSS feed, be enough to satisfy your readers' informational need and might they stop visiting your Web site as frequently as they were before? What's the remedy if RSS is doing more harm than good? Perhaps you do like InfoWorld: you send the full text of the story down the RSS pipe with an advertisement. It's more convenient for the end-user (no additional clicks necessary to get the entire story) and the advertising is embedded.

Finally, every established media company (and even the newer ones) has at one point or another fancied the idea of charging a subscription fee for access to online content. Some have stratified it: this new stuff is free, but the old stuff (if you're researching) isn't. Like I said, they've fancied the idea. Most media companies have been paralyzed to come up with a way to wrangle a subscription fee out of audience members for the digital version of what they have to offer. The same goes (or is going) for the non-digital versions.

I remember when the Village Voice in New York City once charged money for its newspaper. Now its free (this change happened in the mid 90s). Like other papers in its genre, the Village Voice is an ad-supported venture, both online and in print. This, if you ask me, is where most newspapers (and probably most media companies) will end up. And if you also ask me, Amazon's release of the Kindle could be the watershed event that pushes them there.

Maybe not right away, but eventually.

That's because no reader is going to put up with ad-bearing content on the Kindle. The screen is just big enough (and the range of user-selectable typefaces for displayed text is just wide enough) to support very easy reading. Any bigger and Amazon would have missed the sweet spot it targeted: the basic size of a paperback. Any smaller and, especially at the larger typeface sizes, the display would have been too small. Users would have been aggravated by the number of times the Next Page button had to be pressed to read anything (today, they're just aggravated because of how the Next Page button is too easy to press -- which it is). There's really no room for ads. And besides, there are plenty of other opportunities in the Kindle (some being taken advantage of already, others not) to pimp something off on Kindle users. Amazon already sells books through it. There's no reason Amazon can't sell everything else that's available via Amazon.com through the Kindle as well.

So, where are we?

Thanks to the Kindle, you can now read the New York Times without any advertising. Let me repeat that. Thanks to the Kindle, you can now read the New York Times without any advertising. The same goes for the Wall Street Journal and other newspapers. The user interface for finding stories of interest is still a bit Neanderthal. But, the Kindle's size and form factor make it just right for consuming the digital versions of a newspapers. Given how convenient it is (subscribed-to newspapers just show up in my Kindle now matter where I am) and how ad free it is, the Kindle version of the New York Times and Wall Street Journal represent the first time in more than a decade that I'm seriously considering paying for a subscription to both (NYT: $14.99 per month, WSJ: $9.99 per month).

Now let's put the shoe on the other foot.

It took Amazon to do it (and the Kindle's convenience is the enabler). But finally, media companies have a way to charge subscription fees for the digital versions of their content -- fees that given the convenience and ad-free environment, I'm guessing many people will be willing to pay. Amazon, of course, gets a cut. But when I look at this and realize how CNET as a media company (ZDNet's parent) has at times struggled with that same question of how to offer existing or premium content to our audience members on a paid subscription basis, Amazon is showing us the way. It just took a client device like the Kindle -- with all that networking and commerce infrastructure so transparently tucked behind it -- to make it happen.

So, where do things net out?

For starters, the Kindle makes it very clear that, provided the convenience factor is right and the usability is good, content consumers will very likely trade their money for non-ad-bearing content. On the other hand, you don't need to read many newspaper stories on the Kindle before arriving at another important question: "Now that I can do this with the Kindle, why would I ever pay for ad bearing content again?" In other words, why would you ever pay for a printed newspaper or magazine that's full of ads when you can have the same exact content in your Kindle for less money?

As scary as that may sound to anyone relying on ad bearing content to make a living (newspapers, magazines, bloggers, podcasters, etc.), the Kindle really makes the business model question simple: There's a paid version of the content with no ads and there's a free version of the content with ads. When a Web browser was the only choice for consuming a potentially ad-free digital version of some media outlet's content, the end-user devices (PCs or PDAs/Smartphones) simply weren't compelling enough to break the business model into these two separate approaches. PCs (even portables ones) aren't really designed with reading in mind and such reading is nearly impossible on PDAs and smartphones. Perhaps Nokia's N810 wireless tablet comes close to being such a device. But even that is more a general purpose device than one designed with reading in mind.

The Kindle (along with the accompanying infrastructure) really breaks that mold. And to be fair, the Kindle won't be alone. There will be other devices like it, some from Amazon, others not. As a result, content consumers will very likely be inspired to accept nothing but the two alternative approaches. As it turns out, that might not be so bad for publishers either since finally, there's a consumption device out there that's compelling enough to motivate audience members to actually pay to get the content.

<sidebar> One question I have asked Amazon is, if I'm a content publisher (big or small) and someone subscribes to my content on a paid basis (for consumption on the Kindle), what if any information do I get about that new subscriber. When I get the answer, I'll publish it here. </sidebar>

Finally, the Holy Grail would be if this model rubs off on application providers as well. Today, when I see a new Web app that's ad-supported, one of my first questions is "Can I get the non ad-supported version by paying a fee?" Today, the official public relations handbook instructs most execs to respond with the boilerplate "That's something we're considering." We'll maybe now that the Kindle might be setting the expectations of end-users, they'll consider the idea a little more seriously.

As I reported earlier this week, Adobe announced version 3 of its low and hi-end Flash Media Servers. As a part of that announcement, Adobe announced new pricing for the more clusterable of the two servers: the Flash Media Interactive Server (FMIS). FMIS involves a load balancing architecture whereby the server that receives a request to deliver a Flash stream (for example, a video) is different from the server that services that request. In Adobe's parlance, the "receiver" is called the "Origin" server and the "servicer" is called the "Edge" server. Prior to this week's announcement of FMIS 3, this sort of configuration -- what I refer to as quasi-clustering (Adobe's Flash Media Server product manager Kevin Towes didn't use the term "cluster" in my discussions with him) -- was not cheap. A copy of FMIS cost $45,000. If you needed to configure a cluster of five servers (one Origin, five Edge) to handle a certain load of video requests, that would set you back a cool $225K before other costs (hardware, a high performance Storage Area Network, high performance Internet connectivty, etc.).

In other words, as markets go, FMIS was really only available to a small niche of customers with a lot of money to spend. Now that the price of FMIS has been slashed by 90 percent (to $4500), that niche could easily grow. When you realize at who's expense, it isn't hard to see that price drop for the brilliant power play that it really is.

For I don't know how long, Adobe's Flash has dominated the market as the go-to platform for delivering rich content to the desktop. Many of the original implementations (by content providers) delivered animation to end-users. Earlier this decade, when we invented something called the Internet X-Ray here at ZDNet (case studies that animated business processes and data flows on the networks of end-user corporations like UPS), Flash was the only developer solution on the market that could accommodate our needs. It didn't hurt to know that most of ZDNet's readers had the plug-in that was needed to consume the content. The Flash plug-in is on more desktops than any other plug-in, ahead of Sun's Standard Edition of the Java Runtime Environment (JRE) which never was a real contender for delivering Flash-type content. As platforms go (platforms that developers would target), only Microsoft's Windows enjoyed more ubiquity.

In terms of total global footprint though, Java has reigned supreme thanks to the presence of its Mobile Edition (JME) in handsets. Invariably, in public appearances, Sun CEO Jonathan Schwartz is always quick to remind his audiences that when most Internet users experience the Internet for the first time, it will be through a handset (phone, PDA, smartphone, and now, other devices like Amazon's Kindle) and how Java's presence in more handsets than developer platform greatly increases the odds that Java will play some role in most Internet user experiences. This point invariably leads Schwartz to the logical conclusion that lots of Sun-built Java infrastructure will be sold as a result, the profits of which will accrue to Sun (although I should point out that Sun's competitors such as IBM and HP have solutions that can also scalably drive large Java-based user populations).

One challenge for Sun (and Java) however is that more and more of those first time Internet experiences are rich in nature. They're either rich applications (now called Rich Internet Applications or RIAs) that involve lots of animation and graphics or they involve the delivery of video and or audio. Today for example, there's a lot of video getting delivered to handsets in a way that bypasses Java altogether. It's a spectrum of content and applications that Java was never really well-suited to. At least from the content developers point of view. But Flash is. Not surprisingly, in recognition of its market disadvantage from a functionality point of view (and looking to leverage its existing relationships and dominating global footprint), Sun is looking to fill the gap with a much more Flash-like version of Java called JavaFX. Conversely, in an effort to attain the same sort of global footprint that Java has across desktops, notebooks, and handsets, Adobe wants in on the handset business and is now driving hard on a mobile edition of Flash called Flash Lite.

The results of this battle (where Sun and Adobe are coming from their relative positions of strength)? Handsets like the Model 6263 that Nokia just unleashed through T-Mobile may look like your run of the mill handset, but they're anything but. The 6263 has both the mobile Java and Flash Lite platforms built-into it. Not only that, even though T-Mobile doesn't yet have its HSDPA high-bandwidth 3G network in place for pumping all that rich content and applications (rich content and apps that could be consumed by either the Java or Flash runtimes on a phone), the phone is 3G-ready for when that day comes. The phone is also a music machine, supporting stereo music as well as the stereo wireless headset profile of Bluetooth and it has a microSD slot for expanding its memory.

I'm not saying that this is the only device of its sort on the market. But, clearly, we're at that tipping point where ordinary looking clam shell handsets like the 6263 are anything but ordinary. They can simultaneously support 3 distinctively separate Web applications platforms (Java, Flash, and one that I failed to mention: XHTML for Web browsing) and can connect to wireless broadband networks -- making them capable of doing most anything on the Internet and doing most of it pretty well.

But with both Java and Flash looking to steal the other's thunder (and let's not forget Microsoft, who with Silverlight, will want to join the party and probably can given how robust handsets like the 6263 are getting), who is going to win?

Enter the 90 percent price drop on Adobe's Flash Media Interactive Server.

It's a shrewd move by Adobe but it makes perfect sense if, now that Sun and Microsoft are both presenting market threats to its Flash platform, it wants to leave nothing to chance in terms of that platform's popularity. By dropping the price so dramatically on the high-horsepower version of Flash Media Server, Adobe is making it accessible as a rich content delivery platform to thousands if not hundreds of thousands of rich content providers -- especially providers of video and audio -- who might never have invested in those servers before.

In true wag-the-dog fashion, provided the price drop works and content providers buy-in, Adobe's $40,500 per server price cut will not only help guard Adobe's existing global Flash footprint (those considering Java or Silverlight for their applications will really have to think twice), it could help improve it by driving up the amount of Flash-based content being served up through the Internet which in turn will drive adoption in Adobe's weakest spot: mobile. For example, how many more Flash-based content providers would it have taken for Apple to realize it had no choice but to support Flash in the iPhone?

Shrewd move Adobe. Very shrewd.

With the Kindle, it only takes a few book purchases to notice the same degree of convenience. In fact, it's even more convenient than the way Apple's technologies work. With an iPod, you need a Windows machine or Mac running the iTunes software to act as an intermediary for gathering content from the iTMS and loading it into the iPod. It's up to you to set that PC up and get it networked. With the Kindle (which, given Amazon's participation in the digital music and video business, could easily be a harbinger of an Amazon-built iPod-competitor to come), the only thing you have to do is establish an account on Amazon.com, enable it for one-click purchases, and turn the Kindle on. There's no intermediary required and the networking element of it isn't even remotely your problem. It's all built-in. Just turn on the Kindle and start shopping for books.

Nothwithstanding problems with its industrial design (the "Next Page" button is too inadvertently depressed, causing indigestion for many), from a user's point of view, the Kindle's turnkey lack of friction is something to behold. It works better than Apple's approach (although we could argue that, compared to ebooks, multimedia is far more demanding on a device's battery and therefore, excluding a wireless radio from iPods was a good design decision). To Apple's competitors, not only do certain Apple technologies (like its FairPlay Digital Rights Management [DRM] system) lock them out, all that whizbang under-the-hood integration represents an impenetrable enigma. In the Kindle, not only does Amazon's flavor of DRM play a role, given the built-in networking, the whizbang under-the-hood integration is even more of an impenetrable enigma than what Apple has to offer.

So, naturally, the next question is whether or not the Kindle's iPod-like rise to stardom (the $399 devices are already sold-out at Amazon.com) will also result in an iPod-like ecosystem where the Kindle becomes a defacto e-book standard and Amazon becomes the the power that the rest of the book industry must reckon with. Given how collegial he is, you could argue that Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos is more the "do no evil" type and would therefore be more predisposed to allow his competitors to participate in the Kindle ecosystem than Steve Jobs is to allow Apple's competitors to compete in the iTunes ecosystem. Then again, right now, the only place a Kindle can get its ebooks from is Amazon.com and the only device that can access the Kindle service online is Amazon's Kindle. In this respect, the Kindle is actually worse than the way Apple has things set up. At least in the Apple world, you can experience the content you've acquired on your PC (in fact, on multiple PCs) and you can even burn some CDs (although the feature has its limits). With the Kindle, there is no corresponding software client for Windows or the Mac so that, in the event the only device you have with you is your PC, you can still read the same books that you have on your Kindle.

Another step backwards for the Kindle, relative to the iPod ecosystem, is that when iPods came out, they supported the prevailing music file format (and the one that still has the biggest global footprint): MP3. The Kindle, on the other hand, eschews the book industry's international standard for ebooks, the International Digital Publishing Forum's epub standard. Epub formatted books are not consumable on the Kindle nor are PDF files (PDF files can however be e-mailed to your Kindle's dedicated e-mail address and Amazon will attempt to convert them and load them into your Kindle. For PDF the email conversion feature is experimental). The Kindle is capable of viewing its own AZW file format, TXT files, and unprotected .MOBI files or .PRC files. It can also consume audio content formatted in MP3 or Audible.com's AA format.

In terms of the power-play like questions that Amazon's Kindle raises, most of them start with the unique relationship that Amazon has with book publishers. It's already a force to be reckoned with in the book business. Now that the Kindle is out, does Amazon represent even more of a threat to the status quo than it already did? While I know enough about standard and proprietary file formats to know that they're often the tools of vendors looking to establish market advantage, I hardly know enough about the book industry to say whether Amazon's Kindle is good or bad for it. So, to the extent that the Kindle is very much a Dell-like supply-chain story, I asked Fran Toolan, the president and founder of Quality Solutions to indulge me with a podcast interview. Quality Solutions is deeply involved in the supply chain side of the book industry. According to the company's home page:

Quality Solutions offers the most powerful and comprehensive integrated Title Management database available for tracking book titles from acquisition through editorial, marketing, production, and other processes.

It sounds very supply chain-esque to me which is why I asked Toolan to come and share some of his insights into the Kindle and the impact it will have on the book industry. To listen to the podcast, all you need to do is press the play button on the Flash-based player above. Alternatively, you can manually download the MP3 file via the Flash-based player's menu. Or, if you're subscribed to ZDNet's IT Matters series of podcasts (see how to subscribe), the podcast interview should already have been downloaded to your PC, your MP3 player, or both, depending on how you have your podcatcher setup.

So, one question I had when I first unboxed the Kindle and starting using it was, when it crashes, what's the recovery like? How graceful is the comeback? Will resetting the device wipe out its memory? And if it does, will I be able to log back in to Amazon.com and re-acquire an content that I had previously paid for and downloaded. Well, I didn't have to wait too long to find out the answer to that question. Yesterday, after connecting the Kindle to my PC (via a USB wire) to test the Kindle's file transfer and viewing capability (in addition to its own .AZW format, the Kindle supports .TXT, .AA, .MOBI, .PRC, and MP3 file types), it crashed. The user interface simply froze in place and as you can see in the attached video, the digital paper continued to show the last page that was on the Kindle's screen just before the crash. Toggling the Kindle's on/off switch did nothing to revive the device. So, I turned to the manual which instructed me to remove the Kindle's back cover (in the video, you'll see how this reveals the battery and an SD slot) and insert something sharp like a paper clip into the reset hole.

What happened next? The Kindle's screen went blank, then it flashed a bunch of times, then it presented the Amazon Kindle splash screen and then, it booted to the home page where, as you can see, all of my content (admittedly, not much, but I have so far purchased two books) was still there. Cool! The Kindle gets good marks for crash recovery.

On one side were the principals of the shuttered ODf (again, an organization that's not to be confused with "the Format") who claim that in conversations or e-mails, both IBM and the W3C have, independently of each other, validated the notion that the W3C's Compound Document Format specification (CDF) could play a role in storing and retrieving productivity (a.k.a. "office) documents (word processing, spreadhsheets, presentations, etc.).

Gary Edwards and Sam Hiser, two of the principals behind the former ODf (Foundation) -- an outfit that was once a proponent of ODF (Format) -- now claim ODF to be inviable as a global open standard for office documents and that CDF is the better strategic target as for such a standard. They claim that, in private conversations with IBM officials, they learned of how IBM shares this vision; so much so that a derivation of CDF (what Edwards call CDF+) is one of the linchpins to Big Blue's grand strategy when it comes to the office productivity and collaboration tools coming out the company's Lotus division. They also claimed that despite public comments to the contrary, the W3C also agreed that CDF could serve in a capacity that ODF (Format) has been designed for.

Both IBM and the W3C went on record with me last week to say that Edwards and Hiser's version of events were grossly misleading. As a result, near the end of my analysis, I wrote:

As for the differences over what was said, I don’t want to say anyone is a liar. I wasn’t in the room or party to the relevant threads. So all I have to go on is what everyone on both sides of the debate is telling me. I can repeat that here (which I’ve done) and leave the decision as to which one of the three following things is true to you: (1) Hiser and Edwards are accurately representing their interactions with the W3C and IBM and the people they communicated with like IBM’s Heintzman and the W3C’s Schepers are part of a well-organized conspiracy to discredit them, (2) Hiser and Edwards are purposefully misrepresenting the content of their communications, (3) it’s all a big mix-up — an honest misunderstanding.

Why all the fuss over something that's seemingly so obscure in nature? Especially when it involves just two people out of the thousands that stand behind ODF (Format) at organizations like OASIS (the consortium that oversees ODF's technical evolution) and the Open Document Alliance? The stakes are unbelievably high. In fact, if there's one industry battle that could be classified as a modern day Armageddon, the war between the backers of ODF (Format) and Microsoft which has put forth an alternative to ODF called Office Open XML (OOXML) is it.

In one corner are companies like IBM, Sun, Google, and Red Hat that believe the key to loosening Microsoft's grip on the desktop lies in the file formats behind Microsoft Office. The way the thinking goes is that if the world's addiction to Microsoft's file formats can be broken, then so too can the world's addiction to Microsoft Office and from there, then the addiction to Windows -- thereby paving the way for organizations and consumers to consider competing productivity and collaborative solutions such as IBM's Lotus Symphony, the open source-based OpenOffice.org, Sun's StarOffice (essentially, a commercial implementation of OpenOffice.org), and Google Apps, all of which are compatible with Microsoft's Windows but none of which require it.

For example, Google Apps which includes a word processor, a spreadsheet, and a presentation solution runs in a browser, thereby freeing customers to choose among desktop operating systems. Conversely, although Microsoft offers Mac-based versions of Microsoft Office, most businesses that standardize on Microsoft Office also run it on Windows because of how the Mac version often lags in support of important features. Case in point? Although the OOXML file formats are now natively supported in the last three versions of Microsoft Office for Windows (2003, XP, and 2007), not only doesn't the current version of Mac Office support it natively (Mac Office 2008, due in 2008Q1, is scheduled to natively support OOXML), Microsoft's only solution for bridging compatibility in Mac Office -- a downloadable converter -- is still in beta (v0.2).

Although Microsoft is loathe to acknowledge the threat that ODF (Format) poses to its franchise, actions speak louder than words. While the company has contributed resources to an open source-based ODF conversion utility, it doesn't natively support ODF in any version of Microsoft Office. Should Microsoft choose to support ODF in Office, it would be enabling its customers to more easily switch to competing solutions from companies like IBM, Sun, and Google. But more importantly, although there is much debate over how open OOXML really is (degree of "openness" has been central to the ODF vs. OOXML debate), Microsoft's move to make OOXML open and royalty-free for implementation in competing products happened only after ODF garnered serious attention from influential customers (like the Commonwealth of Massachusetts) for its openness. With other organizations around the world watching the Massachusetts test case very closely, Microsoft had only two choices: offer native support for ODF in Microsoft Office or open up its own file formats. In a move that echoed Microsoft's resolve to head ODF off at the pass, it picked the latter route. The war was on.

Since then, the two corners (Microsoft in one, the ODF [Format] camp in the other) have been engaged in an unrelenting battle that's offering the world a rare glimpse into the tenacity and influence of all the companies involved and that has cost both sides millions in marketing and lobbying dollars. Not suprisingly, where ever in the world ODF turns up as an issue (along with its backers), so too does OOXML and Microsoft.

For example, through a very special status afforded to the OASIS consortium, the ODF specification was put onto the fast track for consideration as an international standard by the International Organisation of Standardisation (ISO). At the international level, ISO standards play an important role in government purchasing decisions. ODF passed and is now listed as an ISO standard. Not to be outdone, Microsoft managed to get OOXML on the ISO's fast track as well, but through a separate consortium (Ecma) that is afforded the same very special status to put specifications on the ISO fast track that OASIS is afforded. Only in OOXML's case, its first lap around the ISO's fast track was not nearly as successful as ODF's first run. Today, although OOXML failed in its first bid to become an international standard, it is due to return to the ISO stage in February 2008.

Along the way, both sides know that there is little margin for error. All it takes is for one slip-up in messaging, one missed appointment, one mistake or one technical snafu to create a hole that the other side will gladly drive a Mack truck through. The stakes are so high that both sides have done a remarkable if not awe-inspiring (though not always commendable) job in executing their global full court presses. For the ODF community, it's relatively minor to have a few dissenters like Edwards and Hiser break ranks. But, should the W3C concur with Edwards and Hiser that CDF is the more sensible candidate (than ODF) to be the world's international open standard for universal document interop and portability, solidarity around ODF could weaken. And any weakening of solidarity around ODF is exactly the sort of hole that Microsoft would look to drive a truck through.

If an indicator from the W3C that CDF is better-suited for ODF's job than ODF could lead to such a hole, a similar indicator from IBM would be disastrous for the ODF community. Although it's nothing more than a wild guess on my behalf, I'm willing to bet that IBM is probably responsible for more than 40 percent of the global resources being brought to bear on ODF's behalf, if not 50 or 60 (percent). Microsoft wouldn't need a Mack truck to take advantage of an IBM insinuation that ODF is non-strategic (or, "transitional" as Edwards said to me in an e-mail). Global support for ODF would very likely unravel because of how many people from governments to businesses to the ISO would feel betrayed and Microsoft's OOXML would be left as the only format standing. The ODF coalition might live to see another day and another battle with CDF as their savior, but the damage would very likely be irreversible given the long memories of most of those who were betrayed.

This should give you some idea of the Battle Royale being fought right now. Speaking of long memories, it's a Battle Royale that stretches almost all the way back to the day that IBM decided that Microsoft's DOS would be the chosen operating system for Big Blue's first (and subsquent) PCs on the market. IBM was a kingmaker that day and Microsoft founders Bill Gates and Paul Allen became industry royalty overnight. Microsoft later leveraged that royalty status to successfully jilt IBM at the alter after the two initially agreed to collaborate on a 32-bit graphical operating system known as OS/2. Microsoft, who, thanks to IBM's kingmaking, had the advantage of a distribution channel (all the clone makers) for its operating systems that IBM did not have, went its separate way with its own 32-bit OS (Windows NT) and IBM was left dumbfounded at the alter with OS/2 and almost no channel other than its own systems to market it. Since then, Microsoft has whittled away at IBM's customers, successfully leveraging its desktop popularity into opportunities for the NT code-base to go after IBM's big iron business (on Intel-based servers). Now, in the coalition it has helped to build around ODF, IBM could finally be in a position to seek revenge. That is of course, so long as that coalition survives.

Whereas the W3C has very little riding on ODF (Format), IBM has everything riding on it. Alright, not everything. IBM is involved in plenty of other businesses. But, after investing so much in ODF and now being so close to its best shot at seeking the aforementioned revenge, the last thing Big Blue can afford is a material breakdown in the world's interest in ODF.

As of last week, both IBM and the W3C remained resolute in their opinions that Edwards and Hiser had it wrong: that they were reading far too deeply between the lines of the conversations and e-mails that had taken place. Without having been a fly on the wall or having had access to those e-mails, it was impossible for me or anyone else to make a ruling on who is right and who is wrong. One thing I was sure of though was that after publishing that treatise last week, more facts -- probably the e-mails in question -- would come to light. I wrote:

Today, I just wanted to get to the bottom of the he said/she said and, to the extent that more facts are needed, my sense is that additional information will come to light once I press the publish button. That is after all the beauty of the blogosphere. The mob usually finds the truth, eventually. Someone will be vindicated.

The question now is whether that moment has arrived for Gary Edwards and Sam Hiser in whole or in part, or maybe not at all. In response to my post, Doug Schepers, the primary contact at the W3C for CDF commented that in his eyes, it was simply an "honest misunderstanding on their part, and perhaps overenthusiasm." Edwards, who over the weekend, disclosed to me the exact content of his e-mails with Schepers clearly had enough and simply published those e-mails here on ZDNet under the heading An Honest Misunderstanding? Hardly! Play the tape!. You can read the e-mails yourself. But, if there's any text in them that vindicates Edwards and Hiser, it's the part where Schepers wrote the following to them (I've boldfaced the most salient point):

We'd like to thank you for your interest, and your consideration (Sam, in your blog) and praise of CDF and the W3C. We are glad to see you embracing our shared vision of a royalty-free, open, interoperable presentational and logical format. Of course, CDF is designed primarily for the Web, but we see no reason it cannot serve the dual purpose as part of an office interchange format.....This is just a friendly note to start a dialog rolling.

As can be seen from my initial post on the matter last week, the W3C characterized this first outreach to Edwards and Hiser as cursory in level; a par for the course transmission whenever the W3C sees promising work being done on its standards by third parties. But as can be seen from the text of the e-mail, Schepers appears to suggest that CDF could indeed serve as "part of an office interchange format." In Schepers' favor (that it was an honest misunderstanding), "part of an office interchange format" isn't the same thing as saying "an office file format" or "a replacement for CDF." But, in saying "dual purpose," Schepers does seem to suggest that CDF could be viable in a role other than the one originally conceived for it.

Edwards and Hiser argue that Schepers' e-mail contradicts statements about CDF made by the W3C's Chris Lilley -- statements that were reported in the blog of Andy Updegrove, general counsel to OASIS - an organization that, as chaperone to the ODF (Format) specification, would rather not see an evaporation of support for ODF:

So we were in a meeting when these articles about the Foundation and CDF started to appear, and we were really puzzled. CDF isn’t anything like ODF at all – it’s an “interoperability agreement,” mainly focused on two other specifications - XHTML and SVG. You’d need to use another W3C specification, called Web Interactive Compound Document (WICD, pronounced “wicked”), for exporting, and even then you could only view, and not edit the output.

The one thing I’d really want your readers to know is that CDF (even together with WICD) was not created to be, and isn’t suitable for use, as an office format.

On first blush, the Schepers' e-mail and Lilley's comments appear to contradict each other regarding the potential of CDF. But this is where the technicalities of CDF surpass my ability to say whether the two statements are mutually exclusive, or not. That, I'll leave up to you and other experts to decide. Secondarily to that, I think it's fair to say that Schepers' note involves a bit more than standard outreach for the W3C. There is a bit of an assessment in there -- a specific one at that. Is it still cursory in nature? I'd like to hear from you on that as well.

Working against Edwards and Hiser for now is a reference they made to W3C director and inventor of the Web Sir Tim Berners-Lee. According to a post Edwards published on the OpenDocument Fellowship's Web site, Schepers indicated to him that Berners-Lee was now involved in the process as well. So far, there's no evidence to suggest this is true which in turn speaks to the credibility of Edwards and Hiser as we continue our search for the truth.

But one thing remains certain: We are working our way closer to the truth on this matter and we're doing so in a fashion that's ready-made for the blogosphere and that's hard to duplicate via traditional media approaches (as a student of the media, I had to throw that in there).

So, what do you think? Do Edwards and Hiser have more credibility now that this e-mail has come to light?

So what's significant about that? For starters, running a streaming media service, be it for your own content or as a host for others', thanks to Adobe, may no longer be the province of outfits like YouTube, Brightcove or media companies like CNN or Disney. Prior to shaving the cost by more than $40,000 per server, assembling a cluster of Adobe-based Flash media servers in a way that can scalably service hundreds if not thousands of simultaneously connected clients could easily run into the hundreds of thousands of dollars. Today, for what used to be the cost of one Flash Media server, companies with ambitions to be the next YouTube can now buy 10 such servers: one an "origin" server (the server that receives the initial request from a client), and the others "edge" servers (the servers to which the origin server, in an act of load-balancing, off-loads requests for servicing). Adobe's media servers run on Intel/AMD-based machines that run Windows Server or Red Hat Linux. Of course, just because the cost of Adobe's servers is now dirt cheap doesn't mean that the high-bandwidth storage and networking infrastructure that the servers must connect to won't set you back some serious coin.

To find out more about where Adobe is heading, I caught up with Kevin Towes, the company's product manager for Flash Media Servers for a podcast interview. To listen to the interview, you can stream it from the Flash-based player above (it's a coincidence our player is Flash-based - we've been doing it the same way via CastFire for a long time), manually download it through one of the player's menu options, or if you're already subscribed to ZDNet's IT Matters series of podcasts (see how to subscribe), it will be automatically downloaded to your PC and/or your MP3 player.

One of the issues Towes and I cover is the shift from delivering what has been traditionally thought of as low-def video on the Net (and on-demand) to hi-def. What is hi-def video on the Net? In the TV world, hi-def is thought of as being at least 720 lines of vertical resolution if not 1080. But on the Net, the definition of hi-def is the subject of some debate. In the the interview, Towes defines 480 lines of vertical resolution as being hi-def for the Net, a full 2x the lines of vertical resolution found in the 320x240 sized video windows that were once commonplace on the Net, but are now less so (YouTube video windows are approximately 480W x 362h). Just for grins, take a look at ABC's self-described HD channel for streamed content. I'm not sure how they do it (well, it involves a plug-in), but they do it well and wouldn't it be something if all Net-based video-on-demand involved as many bits and full-screen video without caching problems.

Speaking of "streaming," Towes and I talked about the differences between streamed video and progressively downloaded video and why today, so much Net-based video is still choppy when, with some better caching, it doesn't have to be that way. From Towes' point of view, there's no single culprit since so many factors play a role. But, while the company's servers support 1080 and 720 modes, Adobe's sweet spot for streamable "HD video," if you ask ask him, is apparently 480 lines of vertical resolution that require no more than a 3 Mbit/second bit rate (preferably 2 Mbit/sec).

Not to be forgetten, Towes and I also talked about the Flash Media Interactive Server's little cousin: Adobe's Flash Media Streaming Server -- a far lower cost ($995), non-clusterable solution for streaming stored or live video in on-demand fashion. Towes and I covered a wide range of other video related topics and talked about the other measures that content providers can take to improve Net-based video performance as well as something called Device Central -- a technology from Adobe that, once a handset running Flash Light 3 communicates its profile (handset manufacturer, model, network type, screen dimensions, etc.) to an Adobe media server, dynamically selects the most appropriate version of the content to ensure the best user experience on that given handset.

The pair of servers, announced today, won't be available until the end of January. Sometime between now and then, I hope to get a demonstration up close and personal. In the mean time, check out the podcast interview.

In the Berlind household, the Kindle inspired a lot of discussion. My wife has a voracious appetite for books about raising children. I honestly think she has ordered and read every one that's in print from Amazon.com. She often has three or four books "going" at any given point in time. In this respect, the idea of an ebook like the Kindle is perfect for her. Just the thought of being able to carry so many books in her purse without having to actually carry so many books made her giggle with delight.

One point; ebooks aren't new. There are other ebook technologies from companies like Sony and Adobe. But Amazon has far deeper and longstanding business relationships with book publishers than does anybody I can think of in the book publishing industry and personally, I think this gives the Kindle a huge advantage over everything that came before it to become a near defacto standard for the market. That's both good and bad. It's good because it's about time that some company is able to bring an ebook to the market that will get accepted by the masses. It's bad because right now, it's not clear just how much Amazon will open the platform up over time. For example, as a Kindle owner, will I be able to buy ebooks from other merchants or open ebooks that are formatted differently? For good reasons, librarians have serious issues with proprietary ebook technologies. The whole point of a library is public access to books. The Kindle helps open the same debate about books that the OpenDocument Format raised about the government's public documents: should the public be required to have a certain technology to access a book or a document?

Anyway, what better way to test the Kindle than to hand it to someone with an appetite for books like my wife. In one or more separate blog posts, I'll write about our findings. But before I get started on those (and going back to the librarian issue), I want to focus on the one "finding" that led us to a really interesting conversation about the public's access to books and ideas.

Although Ray Bradbury vehemently denied it, many people believe that the classic book Fahrenheit 451 is about government censorship through book burning. The book's title represents the temperature at which paper burns.

When my wife first giggled at the idea of being able to carry so many books in her purse without having to physically carry so many books, it lead to one of those green conversations and how good for Mother Earth a successful ebook entry into the marketplace might be. Think of all the trees that could be saved.

But that led me to another thought. Might a successful ebook be the first step towards a world where many if not all new books are never printed on paper? Why not? Right? Well, today, the "why not" is that not all books are well-suited to something like the Kindle. For one, any book that relies on color to get its message across (biology textbooks, guides to gardening, children's books, coffee table books, etc.) would be ill-suited to the Kindle which can't support color. But we'll get there. Along the way, there may very well be some books that never come out on paper just the same way so many ideas, articles, and stories are already told on exclusively in bits (on the Web).

While reading the first book she purchased through the Kindle (Hidden Messages: What Our Words and Actions Are Really Telling Our Children), my wife mentioned how she could see the Kindle as a replacement for paperbacks, but not hard cover books. Her reasoning was that there's something about the experience of holding a hard cover book in your hands and reading it that can't be reproduced with a paperback or an eBook. It probably has to do with the publisher's choice of paper stock, but I agree; hard cover books are cozy. Paperbacks are less so and the Kindle is not even close.

Books, particularly hard cover books, have another thing going for them: permanence. Yes, they can be burned. But one thought I had, in the context of how Earth-friendly ebooks are, is that it would take a really really long time before some government could deprive its people of thoughts and ideas through burning books. To burn them all, the government would first have to find them all. The minute any citizenry, even a fictitious one, gets hip to the idea that their government is attempting to rid the culture of information not under its control, that citizenry moves to preserve that information. From the Wikipedia's entry on Farenheit 451:

.....Beatty says that all firemen are bound to steal a book at one time or another and that they can turn it in or burn it within 24 hours. Montag argues with his wife over the book, showing his growing disgust for her and for his society. It is soon revealed that Montag has hidden dozens of books in the house, and he tries to memorize them so their contents can be preserved,...

Perhaps you can already anticipate where I'm going with this. What if some of those books or all of them were only available in digital form and tied to some sort of digital rights management system (a form of which is undoubtedly running as a part of Amazon's Kindle infrastructure). Instead of hunting down all the books, the censor would need little more than a mouse click. And for good measure, maybe the censor might destroy the public networking infrastructure. Fahrenheit 1981.4 is the temperature at which copper melts.

Not that I think the world would ever get there, but suddenly, the same technology that holds promise to ease many burdens including those on Mother Earth is also the technology that lowers the barrier to censorship. Conversely, once books are digitized into bits, it's easier for those bits to sneak into highly censored societies.

That is is just one conversation that the Kindle inspired over the weekend. Feel free to jump in with your comments below.