The deal to sell Knight Ridder closed today. So the San Jose Mercury News is officially on its way to its new owner - it actually has to get sold twice before its over. Its too bad. As a longtime reader, I can see the energy and quality leaking out. The editorial page is a fraction of what it used to be. Its a case of shareholder value and editorial value in conflict. I'm more than a little worried about newspapers these days...we need them, but they don't seem to be able to find the new formula for life in

Back to the blog...after a few weeks of travel.

Following the debate on the question of internet regulations. the house voted yesterday as reported here. The OK news...the house bill would allow telcos to use the internet for delivery of video - putting them even more in competition with cable. The bad - the house rejected a provision that would give oversight on the "first come-first served" nature of the net to the FCC. Unless modified, this may lead to classes of service which would inevitably push out new and innovative services in favor of services which deliver reliable profits to the telcos.

ISO is the international standards organization — most well known I suspect for the ISO 9000 quality certification, but active in lots of other areas as well. I noticed today an article in which ISO announced that they are preparing a standard for software asset management. Their web site does not have a lot of detail at this point, but the fact that they are actively pursuing this area is important. My reading of this is that they are addressing the acquisition and license management of commercial software — i.e. "How many copies of Microsoft Office do I have and did I pay for all of them?" Obviously this is an important question to vendors of commercial software.