Orkut has done a lot of things “right” like its user-friendly interface. Unfortunately, when it comes to “what next”, it fails quite miserably. It does not know whether if it should be a casual social network like friendster or commerical social network like linkedin. It also not able to tell its users (like me) what it offers other then joining to be “part of the network”.

In my opinion, there are a lot of potential in this new social network software. Sitting here at the lounge, I can think of a dozen of ideas…You can develop new form of email system which filters based on certain level of trust. Or use the relationship to control “blogspam” (anyone >2 degree away, sorry :-). I can use it to gather information about demography. And so on…
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Paul Hoffman send me this paper published by David Graddol of British Council which does a scenario planning (futorology :-) and went on to discuss what to do if English is slipping in influence due to demographic and technology trends.

Scenarios are not predictions. The point of scenario planning is to help us suspend our belief. Then we can prepare for what we don’t think is going to happen – Peter Schwartz in the Art of the Long Term View

Hmm…

I am now sitting in the bar in the Hotel Lotte with fellow IETFers in Seoul. Beer and WiFi..what more could we ask?

ps: Oh, dda come over my place for dinner. Yes, I have the Zaurus sync charger cable for you :-)

I fall off my chair when I saw this news today. Are they nuts!?

The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers has no authority to prevent VeriSign from rolling out a search engine for users who mistype Internet addressees, VeriSign said, as well as another feature that allows users to sign up for a waiting list for desirable domain names.

Well, Verisign has no authority to roll out search engine using the .com DNS server in the first place! They forget they don’t own .com!

ps: I have no comments on WLS. That has no impact to the technical operation of the Internet.

First thing first, a friend pointed out that the ITU comissioned paper didn’t missed the point about “Internet Governance”. I went back to look at it again in detail and realized my mistake. My sincere apologises.

I started the day very early with APRICOT AC discussion of the venue for APRICOT 2006. It was a tough decision with two excellent bid from Australia and India. It was a tough decision but at the end, we decide to hold 2006 in India. I hope WAIA would try again in future..their bid was one of the best we seen ever.

Next, I attended the IPv6 Summit where Arano-san announced the formation of Asia IPv6 Task Force. I was on the keynote panel chaired by Prof. Jun Murai and my fellow panelist include Dr Vincent Chen (TWNIC and IPv6 Taiwan) and Dr Mohamed Awang Lah (CEO of Jaring). Prof. Jun Murai was excellent in guiding the discusison of the panel and we concluded with a couple of initiatives to promote IPv6 in the region.
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It is a busy day packed with meetings from 8am to 11pm. With an early meeting with PIKOM followed by keynote panel (Dave Crocker and Suguru Yamaguchi) then Internet Exchange SIG before skipping lunch to attend APIA AGM.

After an hour break, I hop into VoIP session and then went off chair the the ENUM/SIP BoF (which is pretty well attended), then IPv6 Panel briefing (Oh, I met the CEO of Jaring, the first ISP in Malaysia) before getting to a long dinner with the Asia IPv6 Summit attendee. I sat with Prof Jun Murai during dinner and we have many interesting conversations on a wide ranging topic. I am still trying to digest our discussions but I would say it is very enlightening…

Too many things happened, too fast and too many beers… Let me sleep on it first…

I was reading a article by Steve Gillmor (via Dan Gillmor) where he discuss the problem of having too many updates. Oh boy, how I understand this problem…

How I wish there is an RSS reader that can filter and sort feeds into categories so I can read those interest me most. I don’t want them to be sorted just by dates and authors..I want it by categories because some are more important to me then others.

ps: And I wish people will start publishing full feeds and not just excerpt so “download” them and read them offline.

I woke up early this morning, maybe too much beer last night. Or perhaps I was excited over the panel I am suppose to be with Dave Crocker on SPF and antispam. Our offline debates have been colourful so I couldn’t wait for the real thing. But as it turned out, the panel was shifted to Thrusday :P

We have a APIA board meeting tieing up some loose end before our AGM tomorrow. This is followed by a presentation from WAIA to host APRICOT 2006 in Perth.
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ITU comissioned a paper Herding Schrödinger’s Cats: Some Conceptual Tools for Thinking about Internet Governance for its up coming workshop on Internet Governace. (via ITU Newsblog)

The paper missed touched on a point which I have ranted before: ICANN is not Internet Goverance.

While public see ICANN = internet governance but I see it as a public perspection problem rather then ICANN. ICANN does not deals with (internet) crimes, does not do legistration, does not do enforcement (beyond the contracts they have with registries), have no police force, no army etc etc.

At best, ICANN is a coordination of industry self-regulation.

Update: to be fair, the paper is not written by ITU.

While I am not directly involved in this, I am proud to see this announcement from IDA today! Well done! Congz to all all my friends who been working on this!

The Infocomm Development Authority of Singapore (IDA) today announced the allocation of dedicated spectrum bands for trials and commercial deployment of wireless broadband. This move is timely as various wireless broadband technologies are now ready for trial or deployment. When deployed, these new technologies could provide Singapore with an additional broadband infrastructure, thus giving consumers more choices and options when going “broadband”.

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