An Auckland man was left partially blind because of an infection as a result of wearing a pair of coloured contact lenses for several days.

President of the Cornea and Contact Lens Society Dr Trevor Gray says the industry needs to be more controlled to prevent similar tragedies.

One option is to make all contact lenses prescription only.

While in no way minimising the tragedy of the loss, nor impugning the motivation of Doctor Gray, I think this might not have been the best example to use as a media lever for greater regulation.

The victim borrowed the novelty contact lenses from a friend. How would the legislation proposed by opthamolgists influence that? It wouldn't, it wouldn't have as much effect as the now well publicised risks will have. And I doubt there'll be any water drinking contests run as a result of the "Hold Your Wee For A Wii" in the US.

Even regulation would not prevent further occurrences, many things occur even when there is regulation and information in abundance.

We don't need regulation and experts forced on us, it is probably sufficient to publicise the problem, and its regrettable that the publicity only arises from our media, and/or that we pay attention, when there is a tragedy.

My basic tenet is that decentralisation and collaboration of small pieces loosely joined is a model that exceeds in many ways the hierarchical monolith of centralisation with its architectural tension between the center and the edge.

The fragmentation of the monolith into smaller pieces is a trend which continues and the latest example I have is the widget. Once standardised, this will allow you to assemble any number of functionalities in interesting ways. Standardisation is critical to extracting the full value of this technique, until then it remains a scattering of smaller or larger ponds in which every boat has to be rebuilt to float in another. We need the ocean.

This is the bite-sizing of the web, extending the power RSS gave us, and beefing up the IFRAME capability of HTML (standardised) and turning web top construction into a drag and drop task.

But that's not what I set out to write about. Currently I'm visiting a few new sites that I might want to use further, Geni.com for example. And every time I do, its the registration, profile population and configuration rigmarole all over again.

Then I read this. Could 2007 be the year of social network fatigue?

It sure is for me,

The number of sites I've been to recently that offer me one service I want, then lard themselves up with a whole lot "Web 2.0 Community" functionality that I already get somewhere else.

Building a community can happen external to almost any service, and if you do want a little more by way of profile from me, let me give it to you from another site. Now that other site is not likely to be MySpace, there have been some hints recently that they are contemplating isolation and freezing out some services that make them more desirable, duh! But from a site I control.

Now this must be sounding OpenID-esque, (not without critics) about which I know very little despite guru Doc Searls being heavily involved. I tried Sxipper, I hated it, which probably means I don't understand it well enough, but it was intrusive, gigantic and not much help.

When I go to a new site, if I register, I want to give them a password, a URL, and have them suck my favourite movies, books, etc. etc. into their application (and sync it if I change anything). Then in the small pieces loosely joined widgety world, I can hook together the various parts of my presence without repeating myself to every web site I meet from Amazon to Weebly.

Something at the data/information rather than functionality, operating in an X11-like "I am the server" mode and you are my client. Resonates with Doc's VRM musings well.

One of my gurus, Martin Geddes of Telepocalypse is Chief Analyst at, and led me to, Telco 2.0.

By and large they come up with sensible ideas about the future of telecommunications, though they take that difficult position of straddling the disruptive divide between the incumbent past and the faster moving future. The risk of having one foot in the grip of large, slow moving, comfortable monopoly incumbent from the past, and the other in the future agile novel disruptive world of diversity can easily be imagined.

But a recent post to their blog showed their savvy about the trend, and I was happily reading away, as one does when the content is agreeable, until I struck this line, and I acknowlege I may misunderstand and/or put too much weight on a single phrase, but:

The uncertainty of regulatory intervention ultimately works against the carriers, as it drives away risk capital.

Doesn't "uncertainty" = "risk?" or is this some use of either term with which I was not previously familiar?

Isn't uncertainty precisely where risk capital is supposed to be invested?

This of course is one of the many hypocrisies of our brave infrastructure capitalists, risk rewards for gilt-edged security. Champagne on a beer budget.

They bloviate about the risk, while its arguable there is zero risk in frequencies, copper or fibre. They will all return, not at the monopoly rent level that may be their wish, but how much more sunk could a cost be than copper?

Yes, there have been losses on all those infrastructures, but I would argue it was because of over-enthusiatic investment based on monopoly rent returns on stove-piped services that didn't arrive.

Even fibre's cheap, if you're not a Telco ("How we paid the construction guys 18 pints of beer and they gave us a free metro fibre network in Palmy North")

Not sure of the situation in the UK, but our roads, sewers, water pipes, electricity lines, ie all transport infrastructures are funded by the commons, the services over them from a range of suppliers. Telecommunications at the fibre, frequency or copper, is no different.

You can debate the options, but its done when AT&T do it.

Having proprietary service/carriage integration in this day and age is like banks issuing their own currency.