Friday, January 10, 2003

Kottke.org: Why are Safari and Sherlock two different applications? So much comment for a single blog entry! check out this weblog entry at Kottke.org about web browsers verus web services. The comments run for pages and pages, like a SlashDot posting... With Watson, Sherlock, and NetNewsWire, you "browse" the web for specific kinds of information with interfaces custom built for each task. and D says: Yes. It's funny how in some ways (iTunes, iPhoto) Apple realizes people dislike having thousands of windows open, but in other ways (Safari, the proliferation of tiny one-purpose apps such as Address Book) they ignore it. That's called task-centric software design. When you're in a task, everything is in one window. "I am printing pictures" (in iPhoto), "I am editing my video" (in iMovie), and "I am preparing and guiding my musical entertainment" (in iTunes). I think the new tabbed browsing interface (ala Chimera) comes the closest to putting "browsing the Internet" into a single window. Too bad Safari doesn't have the same feature! 10:06:00 PM

Michael Powell: Tivo is God's Machine "FCC chairman Michael Powell discovered what everybody who owns a TiVo already knows, which is that it's God's machine. He received a TiVo for Christmas and seems to be a rapid convert. Hopefully FCC rulings will reflect how nice it is for consumers to be able to watch programs at a time of their own choosing." [rc3.org Daily] Whoo-hoo! Excellent move on someone's part. Why haven't we thought of this before? Give every legislator a DVR and watch them fall over themselves to switch sides in the copyright debate! Brilliant! From the article, since it's on Yahoo News and will disappear in a week: "'My favorite product that I got for Christmas is TiVo,' FCC chairman Michael Powell said during a question and answer session at the International Consumer Electronics Show. 'TiVo is God's machine....' Powell said he intended to use the TiVo machine to record TV shows to play on other television sets in his home, and even suggested that he might share recordings with his sister if she were to miss a favorite show. 'I'd like to move it to other TVs,' he said of his digitally recorded programming. A number of products already allow that." [The Shifted Librarian] Very cool. Now all we need to do it smoke a load with Ashcroft, and we can be done with my domestic agenda. 10:03:27 PM

blogfame I'm still trying to figure out exactly what blogfame is or is doing, but I have to love any site that is attempting to rank blogs based on something called "authority" (a sacred word to librarians) and has the chutzpah to name the truth-in-advertising help section the Pathetic FAQ. Maybe I'll figure it out after the beta period. Interesting things I found at this site: I'm at the top of the list because I've linked to myself so many times, which makes me my very own link-whore; Ernie the Attorney has a twin; I have the same number ranking (of what, I don't know) as Southern Appeal. I'm not really related to that blog, but I like being able to equate Jenny appeal with Southern appeal! "A convicted killer serving time in Florida has sued the state because lightning knocked out the prison's satellite-television service. The inmate must now watch network television programs, which he claims often contain profanity, violence, and other offensive material." (check out the other (f)lawsuits!) [The Shifted Librarian] More importantly, where is the business model for blogfame? 9:58:16 PM

wish I could search my blogroll, and other feature requests i remember reading articles about MS SPOT and how the whole thing has been tried before. But, of course, I don't remember which weblog. Sure do wish I could search my entire blogroll to find the item again. I suppose there would have to be some sort of aging process to the blogroll data, since older weblog items would be less relevent to me. Of course, entries that I clicked on should be rated at a higher level, and preserved for a much longer time. Perhaps NNW could also analyze how long I spend on an item. short items, or items I skip would get a low rating, while anything more would rate higher. A combination rating would include reading time plus clicks, plus referral, plus... weblog and weblog entry filters would be nice. I'd set up a filter on a group of news feeds for just the words "PuppetTime", for instance. Another feature would be the thumbs up/thumbs down UI from Tivo. I could rate each weblog and weblog entries as either thumbs up or thumbs down, which would somehow affect filters on future weblog entries. It could also be used to recommend other weblogs... blogchalking should be handled from NNW. image upload, as is being discussed elsewhere in the blogosphere... 8:14:07 PM

Media Objects in Weblogs There has been an active discussion recently amongst blog software vendors about a proposed extension to the MetaWeblog API for handling binary media. It appears to be getting traction and perhaps we'll see it soon in MoveableType and Radio, if not others. [snip] The solution we've come up with is very simple --- don't use the weblog to store or deliver any of the binary data, just use it to encapsulate HTML fragments that do live in pages and therefore can apply category meta-data and participate in RSS feeds. But this just doesn't feel right, it's sort of hacking around a system that hasn't yet been designed to handle multimedia conversations. [Jeremy Allaire's Radio] OK, so there are two sides to the problem. One is on the weblog editor side, where the client app wants to insert a piece of binary media inside a blog entry, and have the right thing happen. Then on the weblog server side, such as Radio, you want a plug-in solution for binary data, such that you could plug in Flash Server as the media container, and Radio server would pass media blobs to it? 10:08:05 AM

Ads in blog entries interesting. embedding them in the entry probably reached more people in the short term -- but as soon as that entry scrolls off the blog, hits will probably drop dramatically. whereas putting it in the window dressing would probably reach fewer people -- but at a fairly continuous rate. So, it looks as though RoUS wondered why bloggers don't put advertising on their blogs, then Stevenn tried an ad inside a blog entry as an experiment. I think Stevenn has it right, that blog entries can/will have ads embedded in them, so that aggregators will see them as well as website visitors. The trick will be to manage which blog entries get ads, and which don't. Rhetorically: Why not have an ad for every blog entry? No, the issue is how OFTEN to put ads in blog entries, based both on the rate of blog entries being added to the blog, as well as how often individual aggregators are refreshing from the news feed. This is why RSS links need to be individualized: you need to know who's reading your stuff, and how often. 9:55:37 AM

iTrip: iPod FM broadcaster You are looking at the coolest iPod accesory in the world. The iTrip FM transmitter for the iPod can play your music through any FM radio... OK, now we're talkin'! I always thought an iPod would be in my future, but combine this with the Burton snowboard jacket, and it's just too damn awesome! 9:30:15 AM