Ho John Lee’s Weblog

The recent problems with spontaneously combusting lithium-ion batteries in Dell and Apple computers appears to have turned up in IBM Thinkpads now.

Engadget reports

the ThinkPad (which was quoted to be an IBM, not a Lenovo) apparently had a number of death throes as the fire went through various phases, until eventually a United employee busted out the fire extinguisher and laid the laptop to rest. Apparently the machine’s owner already checked its battery against the recalls and it was not listed — and why would it be? IBM and Lenovo aren’t flagged for bad batteries — yet.

I cleaned up the photo a bit to get a better look. Based on the battery placement and connectors it looks quite a lot like my T42P. It will be interesting to see whether that battery was an original IBM-supplied battery or from a 3rd party. My notebook has a Sanyo battery. The recent battery fires have all been in Sony-manufactured units. There are also a lot of low quality generic batteries available in Asia, but the Thinkpad is mostly purchased by corporate and consulting users, who are likely to stick with original equipment.

Dell is recalling several models of notebook batteries, due to several incidents of spontaneous combustion. The batteries in question were manufactured by Sony, which also supplies batteries to other notebook vendors. Lithium-ion batteries are widely used today, so I’m expecting to see additional recalls from other notebook vendors, or at least a raft of press releases verifying that they do not have a problem. Dell has already set up their own web site for battery recall information.

I haven’t heard of any episodes other than various spontaneously combusting Dell notebooks and exploding Powerbooks in recent weeks, but I’m keeping an eye out for news about my Thinkpad’s battery.

The battery issue is compounded by the recent changes to airline security screening. It would be unfortunate if this got all lithium-ion batteries banned from the cabin. On the other hand I don’t see any way to create a completely accident-/terrorist-proof high density energy storage device, which is going to make some people unhappy now that they’ve noticed the issue.

The search query data that America Online posted over the weekend has been removed from their site following a blizzard of posts regarding the privacy issues. AOL officially regards this as “a screw up”, according to spokesperson Andrew Weinstein, who responded in comments on several sites:

All –

This was a screw up, and we’re angry and upset about it. It was an innocent enough attempt to reach out to the academic community with new research tools, but it was obviously not appropriately vetted, and if it had been, it would have been stopped in an instant.

Although there was no personally-identifiable data linked to these accounts, we’re absolutely not defending this. It was a mistake, and we apologize. We’ve launched an internal investigation into what happened, and we are taking steps to ensure that this type of thing never happens again.

Returned this afternoon from Gnomedex. There was a lot of external interest in John Edwards’ session, which made the front page of the Seattle Post-Intelligencer on Saturday.

For myself, I enjoyed getting away for a few days to think about blogs, social media, and also enjoying Seattle. It was interesting to meet various bloggers in person. Mostly good, although from time to time I wished for the super remote from “Click”, to turn down the volume or fast forward.

There wasn’t a World Cup video feed on the first day of the conference, so Jeff Clavier and Halley Suitt offered to sponsor a big screen television at the conference center, which was running on the second day for the England-Portugal and France-Brazil matches. Conveniently, the dramatic penalty shootout ending the England-Portugal match started just after a session break, allowing many fans of the English side to be disappointed in real time. Jeff was pleased with France’s win, however. No conference feed in the World Cup TV room, but the IRC backchannel was busy.

AT&T announced this weekend that they will be purchasing BellSouth for $67 billion. (Light Reading)

The pieces of the original AT&T system continue to reassemble. (AT&T was recently purchased by SBC, which was Southwest Bell merged with Pacific Bell). The companies declare that this will not reduce competition:

“Since AT&T and BellSouth are not actual competitors in the local, long distance and video markets, and because BellSouth is not a significant competitor with AT&T in the enterprise market, the merger will not reduce competition in any of those markets”

If we end up seeing the return of monopolistic carrier practices, I hope they think to fund something like the original Bell Labs while they’re at it.

More from Om Malik.

Brad Feld summarizes much of the ongoing discussion about user-generated content into three points, in a recent post. Here’s a recap, with some additions:

1. Trust
2. Attention
3. Relevance
4. Authority (added in a reader comment)
5. Intent (added by me)

These are recurring themes for the current generation of collaborative, intent-capturing, tagged, social-network-based, “web 2.0″ applications.

It’s interesting to look at the difference between Trust and Authority. As an example, Wikipedia is clearly not “Authoritative” on any subject, yet people ascribe “Trust” to the content there. Topics that are strongly subjective or open to interpretation can sometimes be organized based on Trust more easily than through Authority. The “disputed content” mechanism on Wikipedia allows for a little of this, but part of the confusion comes from the underlying model of an encyclopedia, which is generally intended to be authoritative.

Spent a few hours this afternoon at Chris Heuer’s BrainJam event. Wasn’t able to make it to the morning sessions, but arrived in time for the end of lunch and the “youth user panel”, consisting of four college students. They all love Facebook. Not sure how representative they are of the general student demographic, since two of them are trying to put together a web startup. They all use free online music and movie access, mostly through sharing within the dorm networks.