Monday, February 10, 2003

Jackson discovers playground A new photo album has been posted. Jackson @ Playgrounds 2:30:46 PM

Edgewood 2003 A new photo album has been posted online. Edgewood 2003 2:26:36 PM

whitelining ...that is, driving your motorcycle between the lanes of cars on the freeway, effectively riding the white lines that separate the lanes. As I was driving to Macromedia today, I made a lane change, and then heard the screech of tires behind me. Then a motorcycle pulled up alongside me and started making all sorts of hand gestures. Now, I can't say for sure that he was whitelining... if I saw him at all, I would not have changed lanes in his path. Being a motorcycle rider myself, I take great pride in being aware of riders around me. But I didn't see him at all. All I can think is that he was whitelining thru some stopped traffic, and just barely missed hitting my backside as I changed lanes in front of him. Whitelining isn't illegal, but that doesn't reduce the risk... 12:35:10 PM

PowerBook update So, over a week ago, I send my PowerBook back to Apple for replacement. I haven't seen or heard anything in that time, so i called the number on the RMA letter. I was politely told that, yes they received the defective unit, and yes the replacement model was in stock, and yes they will now send me a replacement. Why did I have to wait a week and call them first, before they would send me a unit? If I'd waited another week, would they have waited as well!?!?! This now brings my personal productivity downtime to 6 month! Hopefully, by the end of the week, I'll have a new machine configured they way I need it, and I can get back to my various side projects again... 12:29:02 PM

Jackson @ 10mos An update on Jackson, since it's been a while... He's standing all the time now, and he loves things with lots of buttons on them: phones, remote controls, etc. This last week, we started taking him to playgrounds around our neighborhood, and he loves the swing. All kids do, it seems, but it's such a great feeling to see him grinning from ear to ear as he experiences the periodic motion for the first time. More pictures coming online soon... 12:25:58 PM

How blogs got an A-list This sounds like the first mover advantage to me. Yahoo was one of the first destination websites, and held that position by continuously refining their offerings. Webloggers, if they want to remain in the A-list, will need to continue to refine their journalism skills. Otherwise, news aggregators make it very easy to drop old/tired feeds as easily as it is to add new ones. Clay Shirky's latest piece on the "A-list" of blogging and the means whereby power-law distributions emerge in all online communities is fantastic. A persistent theme among people writing about the social aspects of weblogging is to note (and usually lament) the rise of an A-list, a small set of webloggers who account for a majority of the traffic in the weblog world... Prior to recent theoretical work on social networks, the usual explanations invoked individual behaviors: some members of the community had sold out, the spirit of the early days was being diluted by the newcomers, et cetera. We now know that these explanations are wrong, or at least beside the point. What matters is this: Diversity plus freedom of choice creates inequality, and the greater the diversity, the more extreme the inequality. In systems where many people are free to choose between many options, a small subset of the whole will get a disproportionate amount of traffic (or attention, or income), even if no members of the system actively work towards such an outcome. This has nothing to do with moral weakness, selling out, or any other psychological explanation. The very act of choosing, spread widely enough and freely enough, creates a power law distribution... If we assume that any blog chosen by one user is more likely, by even a fractional amount, to be chosen by another user, the system changes dramatically. Alice, the first user, chooses her blogs unaffected by anyone else, but Bob has a slightly higher chance of liking Alice's blogs than the others. When Bob is done, any blog that both he and Alice like has a higher chance of being picked by Carmen, and so on, with a small number of blogs becoming increasingly likely to be chosen in the future because they were chosen in the past. LinkDiscuss (via Hack the Planet) [Boing Boing] 12:00:23 PM

NetNewsWire Zooming to 1.0 Brent Simmons must be coding like mad up in Seattle right now. Each of the last few days seems to have brought a new beta of NetNewsWire. It looks like he is coming down the home stretch towards an official 1.0 release. I'm really interested in seeing how he does with registrations of the Pro version. I know that I'll be registering just to support the work he does. More so, I'm a big fan of the small software vendor and I'm interested in seeing how the dynamics of the marketplace for small scale—but damn useful—OS X software look. Posted: 2003/02/10 11:31 [James Duncan Davidson] The question is, would sales of his product grow exponentially if he had a boxed product that sold thru retail stores and mail-order catalogs? 11:50:42 AM

What type of OS are you? I'd never have guessed I'd be a Palm OS! Which OS are You? 11:45:19 AM

How fast are news aggregators taking off? I got to wondering about browsers vs. aggregators coming to my blog. ... in the last 24 hours, /blog/ has had 1,012 hits while /blog/index.rdf has had 3,170. ... the surprisingly high number of visitors to my blog home page (as opposed to individual posts, which is what most aggregator users seem to hit) makes me wonder. ... What I'm really wondering is this: Is my blog unusual in this repsect? Or to most folks see this? I've not seen it discussed much, so it's hard to really know. [Jeremy Zawodny's blog] Interesting numbers. His blog is getting his three times as much by aggreagators than by browsers, but his browser count is still very high. This tells me that aggregators are still a secret among hardcore webloggers. 10:01:33 AM