Friday, July 25, 2003

I wish Six Apart had taken a hard look at About.com ad practices before they mentioned About.com's use of Moveable Type. I'm assuming it was a financial deal as well. The pop-up and under ads are horrible; you get several of them with one click. I will boycott them. The analysts say the up and under ads are the most effective ad vehicle on the Net at present. But it is not The Blogging Way I tell you. [Harvey Kirkpatrick: itopik.com News] 5:40:48 AM  comment []       In the Lecture Hall, a Geek Chorus In the Lecture Hall, a Geek Chorus. Enabling wireless technology in university auditoriums has led to a back channel of communication for students to reveal their thoughts. By Lisa Guernsey. [New York Times: Education] I do not agree with the premise of this article. The article hypothesizes that Wi-Fi access in University lecture halls and classrooms is good because students can interactively send instant messages back and forth discussing the lecture. The premise that students will use IM to discuss the lecture is totally false. I have taught college classes in computer labs - usually because we do a lot of hands-on computer work in the class. But I also taught one lecture class that was mistakenly scheduled into a lab. Big mistake! At least one-third of the students engaged in IM, web surfing and checking email - and their grades showed it too. Not only did they allow the computer tools to distract themselves from learning, their actions also distracted other students in the class. Because of that, I've changed my class policies for this coming Fall: you are welcome to use IM and surf the web during class - however, you will be marked as "absent" if you do. [Edward Mitchell: Common Sense Technology] 5:30:15 AM  comment []       VOIP over WiFi gettting cheaper VOIP over WiFi gettting cheaper?. The Register: "Chipmaker Agere Systems today announced plans to integrate wireless LAN and VoIP technology on a single integrated chipset." [Werblog] Also stated in the article was that an Industry analyst expected worldwide shipments of voice over wireless LAN handsets to grow from 90,000 units in 2002 to more than 1 million units by 2007. 5:20:34 AM  comment []       David Galbraith: "There are many things that (Not)Atom is doing that are absolutely necessary and very good from a technical perspective, but from a market perspective, surely it would be better if Atom worked around a core of RSS and if need be then the RSS 2.0 core should be amended to include necessary things like the encoding type of content." The time has come not to bury RSS 2.0, but to embrace and extend it. The thought of having to rip out the RSS infrastructure now in place is unpleasant to me, and the forces aligned with (Not)Atom have done a poor job of engaging the ordinary RSS-using public (people like me). Instead, we have technobabble, smoke and mirrors, and secretive beta products such as TypePad. While I appreciate the need for companies to develop their products with some veil of secrecy, when they try to upset a widespread standard at the same time without a healty public discussion of the motives for doing so, I take offense. Anyway, it probably doesn't matter what I think. RSS is quite possibly too big a phenomenon to stop at this point. Galbraith is right. Let's start from there and extend it. Let just as many voices contribute to the conversation as RSS has enabled to speak. [Scott Mace's Radio Weblog] 5:00:56 AM  comment []

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