An astute Stowe Boyd points out - it's not about us nerds, but the humans out there.....

Dana on Ev Williams: Give It Time.  

May 11, 2004

Dana on Ev Williams: Give It Time

Dana (over at Moore's Lore) thinks we should hang Ev Williams because of the recent Blogger release. I haven't yet fooled around with the Picasa integration (see yesterday's story) but it looks like the push is toward mass market appeal, as opposed to more features for weenies like us.

The jury will have to remain out a while on that one, and perhaps it will be better to look at the next series of releases, to see if the numbers creep up and if defection rates (always very high for blogging tools) go down. [Get Real]

BUT OTHERS DISAGREE

Blogger's RSS Decision: Atom Only.

(Geek alert: This may be boring to people who don't care about the innards of technology.) I'm sorry to see that Blogger's latest incarnation doesn't support multiple kinds of syndication formats, and is going with Atom only. It would be trivially easy to do so. (Blogger Pro users can still create RSS 1.0 feeds, as I understand things.) A couple of months ago, someone from the Blogger team suggested to me that this was a server issue -- that several million users creating more than one kind of XML file would somehow be problematic from a resources standpoint. Really? A problem for the company with (best guess) 100,000 servers and plans to offer anyone who wants it a gigabyte of disk space for e-mail? Google has a right to do this, just as UserLand has a right not to support Atom (and Movable Type not to support RSS 2.0 and so on). It would be nice to see a resolution to this fork in the RSS road, though.

[Dan Gillmor's eJournal]

I myself kind of wish Blogger did support RSS - but then again, you have to see it from their POV.  By ONLY supporting Atom, they'll help force Atom adoption.  Nothing wrong with that.

Develoeprs are like stubborn mules.  But Atom is here to stay - they might as well bite the bullet and support it.  But that doesn't mean RSS goes away.

E3 - First Nintendo DS Pic [Slashdot]

This is one of the hot stories at the show I'm attending right now. 

It's refreshing to get away from the echo chamber and hang out with people - who never even heard of blogs. 

And they're making over $12B - thank you very much.

Alan Turing, the Inventor of Software [Slashdot]

I really enjoyed reading this article flying down to Lala yesterday.  I didn't realize Turing was gay.  Just goes to show what a whitewsh "coverup" they did on him, and how they fucked him over for his sexuality.

Ultimately I think his detractors were just jealous.

Alan Turing, the Inventor of Software

Posted by CmdrTaco on Tuesday May 11, @09:06AM
from the i-broke-my-turing-machine dept.
Roland Piquepaille writes "BusinessWeek celebrates its anniversary with a series of articles about the great thinkers and innovators from the past 75 years. The series stars with a profile of Alan Turing, "Thinking Up Computers." In case you forgot, Turing is the man who created the concept of a "universal machine" which would perform various and diverse actions when given various sets of instructions. In other words, he laid out in the 1920s the foundations of software. You'll find the introduction of Turing's profile, plus more details, photographs and references in this overview."

Sony's 1TB digital video recorder with seven TV tuners.

And almost as if to taunt us, one more from Sony today: a massive digital video recorder called the Type X with more than 1 terabyte of storage and not one, not two, and not even three TV tuners, but SEVEN TV tuners for recording up to seven different shows at the same time (we defy you to even find seven simulataneous TV shows worth recording). This one looks like it might not hit stores for a while. And yes, it'll probably only be for Japan.

[unmediated]

OK _ so who told them that we want 7 channels to be recorded - at the same time?

Oh god - now I'm starting to fell sorry for them.

I wonder if they have a clue how much they're damaging their brand and rep?

Whatever happened to Joi talking some sense into them?

Sony Gets Stupider.

Unbelievably, Sony seems to be getting more clueless as time passes. Clueless about digital music. Clueless about consumer experience. Clueless about values. A week after launching the horrible Connect music service which seeks to turn the musty MiniDisc into the next iPod, Sony has released its first branded music portable, the Vaio Pocket VGF-AP1. 20 gigs, a nice screen which can display album art, and a touch-sensitive panel. All well and good. Except… this private-format little devil plays *only* ATRAC3 files— that’s Sony’s proprietary music-file format. You heard me. It doesn’t play MP3s. Using bundled software, you can convert MP3 to ATRAC3 for playback in the Vaio Pocket.

Please understand my vitriol toward Sony, and why I think the company’s music products are worthy of boycott. If it were a simple matter of Sony being clueless, we could merely laugh at it. The infuriating part is that Sony believes the consumer is clueless. Sony believes that we should forsake the de facto standard of music files (MP3), with its gargantuan installed footprint, in order to bless our lives with Sony’s format and Sony’s hardware. The arrogance is breathtaking and insulting. Even Apple, second-place winner of the Arrogance Prize, allows plain MP3s into the iPod.

Sony’s pathetic Connect service will be crushed by consumer indifference. The Vaio Pocket will be granulated by the erosive power of a smart marketplace. And, if there be a technology god, Sony will sink into the dinosauric quicksand, never to torment us with its foolishness again.

[The Digital Music Weblog]

Looks to me like Leonard Lin wants a DLA.

Hmmmmmmm.

Here's his post.

OK, Blogger isn't a good fit right now I don't think. But neither is anything else out there really. pb made really good points about filtering and post templates, both things I've been thinking about with twine (also, about properties, and a model for restricting views [ie, can capabilities be applied to networked nodes [see E]).

It's easy when working with these issues to completely scope out (at least that's what I've found whenever I've had a chance to actually rub some neurons on it). My new take is to try to set concrete milestones, ant to also target very specific features, and then refactor as each feature requires so that it makes sense as a whole. In theory, at each step of the way you have something that does something at least marginally useful.

Ahh, hubris. Brainfart on goals for an advanced blogging system:

• Links (target URIs) as first class data structures; xref'able; obviously must be m:n; have aggregate properties
• Faceted, filtered entries
• Entry+Output customizable (or better yet, adapting)
• High level creation of custom data entry, behaviors
• Combining: journal, blog, linklog/bookmarks, outliner, knowledge base into single kspace
• Handling multimedia
• Personal aggregation (ie: things I've posted elsewhere)
• Collection of all the implicit metadata possible
• Smart parsing of sources, relationships

Of course, this development effort is sort of independent of having a decent blog. I'll be trying to pull an overhaul that'll link up some upcoming, del.icio.us, blo.gs, feed on feed functionality.

[random($foo)]

Flickr adds image annotation.

Flickr -- the fantastic social image-sharing Web app from Ludicorp -- has added image annotation; you can draw boxes around bits of the photos you post and mark up the contents of each box. When a viewer mouses over the box, a tooltip pops up with the annotation. Super cool.

Link

(via Kottke)

[unmediated]

Congrats to Stew and the crew over at Ludicorp!  I bet Greg Elin likes this!

Electronic Arts embraces Xbox Live. Electronic Arts embraces Xbox Live

Last year the buzz at E3 was all about how EA was NOT supporting Xbox live. What a difference a year makes. This, of course, explains why Microsoft Studios is getting out of the sports game business (a shame since I liked their title better than Madden, which I think is way too complex). Big win for Microsoft but on loss for Sony as it's not an exclusive to Xbox. Financial terms were not disclosed but you can imagine that this must have cost Microsoft something other than killing home grown football titles.

A holdout no longer, the market-leading game publisher says it will bring its games, including the "Madden" football franchise, to Microsoft's online service.
[CNET News.com]

 

I share the enthusiastic thumbs up support and right on to Reuters.  Now we're talking.

This will be a benchmark for the future.  There's no reason why pseudo on-demand, streaming video can't be built into all webapps and services - in the future.

So excited about Reuters TV RSS!.

I must break from my research paper-writing to gush with excitement over Reuters' video RSS feed. As Dave Winer points out, it could be better by using bitorrent, etc. Still, I love it. I use Sharpreader as my main aggregator these days because I like the way it notifies me with a little newsflash pop-up when feeds are updated. Now I get my Reuters video that way.

It's already having an impact on how I follow news events. Take the Rumsfeld testimony. I've banned myself from TV in order to get some work done, which means I didn't watch Rumsfeld testify live. But I got to watch a long video clip of his testimony later on the Reuters video site, at my own convenience during a writing break, without having to listen to annoying anchors and pundits yammering on before and after showing the video clip. Plus the clip was much longer than I would ever have gotten in a network or cable TV news replay.

I got even more excited just now when my Sharpreader notified me of the Reuters TV headline: "Congolese Soldiers, Hutus Clash". Clicking on the link, I got to watch a raw Reuters feed of video and soundbites from the aftermath of the latest violent mess in Congo without some reporter's narration, accompanied by a text story that explains what I am seeing. Somehow I doubt this story is going to be on the network or cable TV news shows this evening, or if it is, it will be a brief 30-second anchor-read. Being a very visually-oriented person, I found that the video compelled me to read and learn more than I might otherwise have done about how the Interahamwe - a militia group that orchestrated the 1994 Rwandan genocide - continues to operate and terrorize people in Congo.

I also find it valuable to be able to watch the latest raw video from Iraq, as opposed to the highly packaged and narrated version we get on TV. All this from a person who has worked in TV news for over a decade.

[unmediated]

The Petabox: A Million Gigabytes of Storage.

In a phone call yesterday, Brewster Kahle mentioned that the wonderful Internet Archive's Petabox was up and running. That's one million gigabytes. What is a million petabytes?

[Dan Gillmor's eJournal]

Internet Archive's Petabox: a 1,000 terabyte array. The Internet Archive has just installed its first Petabox, "a machine designed to safely store and process one petabyte of information (a petabyte is a million gigabytes)." Bookmark this entry and come back to it in five years, when you get a Petabox's worth of storage (with, say, high-resolution scans of the contents of the entire Library of Congress) free under the lid of your lucky Super Big Gulp. Link (via Hack the Planet) [boingboing]

Now you know why I've been hanging out at the Internet Archievs recently.  What Brewster is doing will clearly change the world.  You don't see Bill Gates using his money to give us all free storage.  I saw 100T is one rack, which is 1/10th of a petabox. 

The whole thing draw as much power as four hair dryers.  Since you can store the entire Library of Congress in 25T - that means you can power the library of Congress with one hair dryer's worth of power.

Now that Blogware has shipped, look for Tucows to step up to the bar - as well.  the combination of Tucows and Internet Archives is going to create an amazing infrastrcture for open standards and open projects.

Shirky: Cameraphones are today's Gutenberg press. Clay Shirky has written an excellent entry on the appearance of unmediated photos from the Iraqi front on a Friendster-like service called YAFRO. He likens this -- and other instances of undmediated communication -- to the Protestant Reformation.

The spread of images from Iraq, both relatively plain ones like most of what's on the YAFRO blogs to the horrifying images of torture and abuse from the Abu Ghraib prison are all part of the removal of bottlenecks that will change the political structure in ways we can't predict.

And it isn't just military affairs, its politics and business and everything else, from attempts to coordinate evidence of Apple's manufacturing errors (previously handled case-by-case, but now becoming a kind of grass-rooots class action protest, to Apple's horror) to the distributed amicus brief on the SCO case conducted by the Linux community to the recent right of Americans to get their medical records on request and within 30 days to the publication of spoilers for popular TV shows. (Read this last link now — its from the Times and goes away in 5 days, and although on the surface its about TV, its really a musing on life in a fully disclosed culture.)

Link [Boing Boing]

(ENT2.0 mod RSS1.0) = 0.

Time for ENT 2.0?. It's very interesting to read Danny's toughts about ENT and RSS 1.0. Maybe it's time for a new release of the ENT specs, RSS 1.0 compatible. Oh... and what about Atom?
[Paolo Valdemarin: Paolo's Weblog]

I've certainly thought about things which, with the benefit of hindsight, I would have done differently.  I was never comfortable with having the topic name as the text content of the <topic> element and I've no idea why I did it, there are other bugbears in there too.

I'd also like to give more thought as to how ENT feeds can be supported by topic map resources in real applications.  At the moment we don't publish XTM or XFML maps out of K-Collector but we could (I used to publish XFML from liveTopics but those files got big!)

Lastly I would really like to make a push for ENT support in other applications.  It seems a shame to me that, more than a year on, no other applications seem to have picked up on the benefits topic based aggregation offer to users.
[Curiouser and curiouser!]

Right on to Paolo and Matt!

Here we go!

I highly endorse using ENT as a way of us all standardizing on attaching keywords to RSS feeds.  On both sides.