Free Culture

Lawrence Lessig is making his latest book available free on the Internet. The book can be downloaded online at free-culture.org/freecontent.

Reverse BPO

Indian company taps IBM in outsourcing deal - IBM plans to take over the information technology operations of Bharti Tele-Ventures, an Indian telecommunications company, in a deal that could be worth $750 million over 10 years.

Web Service Specs

Over at Burton Group Weblogs, Anne Thomas Manes (author of Web Services: A Manager's Guide) is writing about the current status of Web services standards and specifications. Good read for anyone who wants to keep up the pace with the everyday emerging standards.

Everything You Always Wanted to Know about Life in a Mall

This book review from Knowledge@Wharton caught my eye. Lots of interesting detail on why the malls are, the way they are.

In his new book, Call of the Mall, Paco Underhill explains that the reason the rest rooms in America's shopping malls are typically located at the end of a long, gloomy corridor : the suburban equivalent of a city alley : is because malls are built by real estate developers, not merchants.

Real estate developers, says Underhill, so resent having to dedicate any space to a non-revenue producing amenity, that they tuck it out of the way. If you are looking for a rest room at almost any mall in the U.S., Underhill advises, look for an uninviting, dimly-lit hallway. You're there. ....

Underhill explains why the stores closest to mall entrances tend to be occupied by hair salons or banks, not shops catering to impulse buyers: "When we enter any building we need a series of steps just to make the adjustment between out there and in here," he writes. "We need time to allow our eyes to adjust. We are not ready to make any buying decisions. If there is a sign close to the door, you won't read it."

Thus the best locations are further in the mall. And since the mall owner charges tenants a flat rent based on space plus a percentage of sales, it is in the mall's own interest to have the hottest stores in prime locations, says Underhill.

He says every mall has a food court because they prolong a shopper's stay. The food court is usually noisy and the offerings not exactly gourmet. But, he asks, "is there another place where the quasi-foodstuffs of Mexico, China, Italy, Thailand, Greece, Japan and South Philadelphia come together like this?"....

SOA Editor

Cape Clear has released a new version of their popular WSDL Editor called SOA Editor. Haven't tested it yet but according to Cape Clear, It is designed to help developers take a SOA-approach to SOA development!
Download link: Cape Clear's SOA Editor

Overview of the .NET CLR and Friends

Great to see, Sam will be presenting his highly regarded talk, .NET CLR and Friends, at the Maryland and Pennsylvania Microsoft Developer's UG on 29th April. Although, Shrewsbury is about 40 miles drive from Harrisburg but what the heck, How many times do you get to see a .Net guru so closely.

Blog Maverick [via Robert Scoble]

Mark Cuban has a blog. Although Mavericks are not my favorite team but if anyone has seen Mark during a game will know how passionate he is about his team and basketball. Great to see him writing and hopefully he will write more about the world of managing an NBA team and what goes on behind the scenes during the Draft.

Great CSS Articles

ALA is churning out some great CSS Articles over the last few issues. These are all real world problems and solutions that anyone can apply to his/her design.

CSS Drop Shadows: Much used, oft maligned but always popular, drop shadows are a staple of graphic design. Although easy to accomplish with image-editing software, they’re not of much use in the fast-changing world of web design … until now.

CSS Sprites: Image Slicing’s Kiss of Death: Say goodbye to old-school slicing and dicing when creating image maps, buttons, and navigation menus. Instead, say hello to a deceptively simple yet powerful sprite-based CSS solution.

This article combines several of the freshest CSS and markup methods the web design community has devised over the past two years, blending them into something shiny, smart, useful, and new.

Zebra Tables: While misused tables are becoming increasingly rare, the table retains a legitimate role in data formatting. A little CSS and JavaScript magic can make tables better at what they do best: displaying tabular data.

This one is for all designers who have ever wanted to differentiate table rows by color without hacking up their markup. Until all browsers correctly support all of CSS3, Zebra Tables are the answer.

Google and You

Couple of articles on how to improve your rankings on Google (in turn The WWW):

Help the Googlebot understand your web site
Case Study: Using a Weblog to Achieve #1 Rankings in Google

What is Scoble?

Over at .Net Weblogs, Cameron Reilly is asking,

I recently finished reading "The Tipping Point" and I came away from it wondering if Scoble is a connector? The ability of a popular blogger to create a memetic epidemic seems plausible. Especially if they are connected to other connectors. Are bloggers influential just because they are widely read? If Scoble says "read this book", will you read it? Well, I read "The Tipping Point" after I read about it on someone's blog and I've ordered quite a few other books from Amazon after reading about them in various blogs lately. I don't think this in itself is enough to cause a global epidemic. But the impact of this "word of mouth" promotion of new technologies is something I can imagine.

Well, For me, Scoble is definitely a Sneezer (read Unleashing the Ideavirus to find more about it). To all unintiated ones, A sneezer is a person who is believed when he tells large number of people about some new thing. So when, people like me and Cameron follow his blog(RSS) and finds a good review of software like Lookout, they try with full trust that this guy will not fool us. Scoble is a Powerful Sneezer.

Note: You can read an excerpt of Unleashing the Ideavirus book here which discusses exactly this topic of Sneezers.

Who is Mr. Enigma?

PCMag has the answer.

How to Give Feedback

Seth Godin provides rules of How to Give Feedback.

Give great feedback! Most people don't. Here are four rules for making your input count.

Does Microsoft .Net measure up?

Infoworld Reports:

Microsoft's bet-the-company initiative turns 4 this year. Are developers happier? Has the Windows experience improved? We take stock of .Net's tools and technologies for a top-to-bottom evaluation