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Lisa Katayama of Wired reported today on 2-channel, Japan’s largest Internet forum. It’s like Howard Rheingold’s smart mobs, but much better organized. Now I want to see the movie Train Man.

Brad Stone of the New York Times reported today about Tuesday’s Blackberry blackout. Approximately 5 million Blackberry users were affected, not 8 million as I had estimated yesterday. However, the article notes that 3 million new users had signed up in the last 12 months. Perhaps RIM’s systems were running beyond their capacity.

Some users thought their Blackberry devices were broken. The article describes one user who field stripped and cleaned his Blackberry.

Of course, how could RIM or the mobile carriers notify Blackberry subscribers of an unscheduled mass outage? Voice mail was one option, of course, as Blackberries are mobile phones. Some users learned about the outage through TV and radio reports, or notices posted on the web and blogs.

A few users enjoyed their impromptu Blackberry vacation, including Congressional staffers.

I almost always turn off my Sidekick and computer in the evening. I check my messages in the morning.

Back in March, I presented the IS 6100 course material on e-commerce. In my Thursday night class on March 15, I tried to explain non-repudiation. I could have done a better job.

Non-repudiation addresses a key component of e-commerce. Neither the merchant nor the customer should be able to deny that they entered into a contract regarding an exchange of goods or services. Receipts and other financial records are evidence of the contract.

Short version: if you bought or sold something, you can’t get out of the deal by saying you didn’t do it!

Here’s an article from today’s New York Times that is a great example. Michelle Slatalla chronicles her discussions with customer service reps and e-commerce experts as she tries to determine what cryptic merchant names like WLI*RESEREVATIONREWARDS.CO. were doing on her credit card statement. Her husband had subscribed to a discount rewards program in 2005 when he bought movie tickets at Fandango, with a recurring $10 monthly charge.

PayPal users often see entries like PAYPAL* on their bank and credit card statements. PayPall does have a resolution center and a security page that can help people dispute or research transactions.

I make many online transactions each year, and my card statements are loaded with these obscure line item details. So I’ve cobbled together my own knowledge management (KM) system to help me find these web transactions quickly.

Use a webmail account from Gmail, MSN or Yahoo as the primary email address for the transaction, and most web merchants will email the receipt there. Use the search feature to find the transaction details when needed. As a bonus, the webmail service’s spam filters provide additioanl protection from merchants who resell customer information.

For years, I’ve saved the web receipt for transactions as PDF files. It’s easy to do with a PDF program like CutePDF. I mentioned this on February 21 when I discussed how to submit papers to TurnItIn.com.

On a Mac, this process is even easier. Macs come with a standard folder called Web Receipts that Safari can use to store these PDFs. Just select Print to Web Receipts in Safari.

Firefox users can just use the Save to PDF in the Print dialog and save the page as a PDF.

Quicken and QuickBooks users can store PDF receipts as a part of their transactions. It’s a great way to consolidate this information. This can also help when preparing income tax returns, because the PDF receipts will be easier to find.

I won’t be in my office during my scheduled hours this afternoon from 2-4 PM HT. I’ve been invited to a sustainability workshop at the rRed Elephant coffee house at 1144 Bethel.

Geoffrey Chase of San Diego State University will lead a discussion about campus sustainability. In 2004, Dr. Chase co-edited a book on the subject, Sustainability on campus: Stories and strategies for change (Amazon, bn.com, Froogle).

On Saturday at the Kaneohe campus, from 9:30 am to 3 PM HT, I’m attending the student symposium, HPU as a sustainable campus.

My students are welcome to attend either event. My thanks to the HPU Global Leadership and Organizational Change group and Art Whatley for inviting me.

CNN reports that millions of Blackberry customers in North America lost their data services late Tuesday. Phone calls were unaffected, and data services were restored a few hours later.

Verizon claimed that their Blackberry customers were not affected. BlackberryCool believed the outage was caused by a failure in RIM’s server farm, which provides data services to almost every Blackberry customer. Reuters Canada noted that Blackberry services in Europe were not affected.

Blackberrys receive email through a server-based push service hosted by RIM. Companies can purchase and install Blackberry enterprise server softtware that will work with existing email and IM solutions. Small business and individual customers can purchase these services through the mobile carrier, or install a desktop application to push email from Outlook to their Blackberry. However, all of this software still depends on RIM’s server farm to perform the push. The RIM servers also handle web page requests from blackberry devices, reformatting the pages as needed so that they will fit on the small screen.

According to FCC documents filed by RIM, the developer of the Blackberry service and devices, almost 8 million devices are in use worldwide. The US Congress purchased thousands of Canadian-made Blackberry devices after the 9-11 attacks to give senators, representatives and their staffs an integrated mobile communications solution. Blackberry was one of the few mobile services that worked in the New York City area after dozens of cell antennas were destroyed when the Twin Towers fell.