Tuesday, April 15, 2003

Central Park HotZone Wi-Fi as Urban Renewal [via 802.11 Planet] Wi-Fi Clouds Over NYC Phil Belanger, marketing vice president for switch-maker Vivato, says the company is already working with members of NYCWireless to provide a cloud of Wi-Fi connectivity over the 843-acre New York City's Central Park. With 58 miles of pedestrian paths, 26,000 trees and more than 20 million visitors yearly, Belanger says the park has iconic importance to the public perception of Wi-Fi. Belanger believes four outdoor switches could blanket the park. He wouldnt offer a date when Central Park would go wireless, saying roof rights and other permissions have yet to be obtained. Belanger says people are coming out of the woodwork expressing interest in his companys Wi-Fi switching gear. Interest in the devices is coming from as far afield as the Caribbean, where island leaders are investigating the switches for providing public Wi-Fi services. But Vivato is not alone is fielding inquiries from communities interested in exploring Wi-Fi as an option for urban development. [Jeremy Allaire's Radio] There is something so symbolic in blanketing Central Park in wireless connectivity. I think TonyG's point of WiFi cell phones could be closer than we think. 11:43:57 AM

'Blogs have killed the newsletter business' Regarding yesterday's post about new owners for the Venture Reporter, Rafat Ali of PaidContent.org has an interview with editor Jason Calacanis on the buyout. Jason's rejoinder at the end includes several interesting observations: That is the big lesson I think.. blog + database + research reports = big business, blog plus nothing = a hobby. In my mind blogs have killed the newsletter business. You can't be just a newsletter any more because some talented and ambitious fellow who has been laid off will spend $99 to host a blog to kill his former boss. The only protection you have is to build something bigger and better then a blog. Blogs are killing the weak publishers. [JD's New Media Musings] I think Jason is right. A weblog is just another communications tool, that can be used alone or in conjunction with other tools to build something "bigger and better". My proposition is that there are classes of weblog tools that can be brought to market for a premium price which deliver premium services and features. 11:39:35 AM

Disney Wastes No Time in Capitalizing on Iraqs Newfound Democracy and Commercialism Courtesy of Viralmeister [Adrants] Almost funny. 11:33:45 AM

Hibernate implementation done. As Matt reports, I have finished the Roller-Hibernate implementation and committed it to CVS. Tonight, I will upgrade this site to the latest code from CVS. Matt wants to know how it works, but I don't know yet. Hibernate has been a pleasure to work with and the results seem fast, but I have not done any benchmarks yet. Right now, Roller has a pluggable persistence layer with two implementations Hibernate and Castor. I'm not sure how long that will last as it is no fun maintaining two implementations of the very same thing. [Blogging Roller] One more reason to reconsider Roller. MetaWeblog API, TrackBack-enabled, and now Hybernate instead of Castor. 11:32:39 AM

ENT - topics in an RSS feed Announcing: ENT v1.0 Easy News Topics for RSS2.0. Paolo and I are pleased to announce the release of the first public draft of the Easy News Topics (ENT) specification. ENT1.0 is an RSS2.0 module designed to make it really easy to incorporate topics into RSS feeds. Why would you want to do that? Because it will help to enable a raft of new, smarter, aggregator products. [Marc's Voice] I think I get it. I just received "RSS for Content Syndication", so the overall architecture of RSS is starting to come into focus. RSS 2.0 modules seem like a powerful way to extend for the format in interesting ways. Nice to see a solid module be produced... now lets see which aggregators adopt it. 11:31:16 AM

Re-code.com * We in no way endorse the theft of products or services. Re-code.com was created as satire. We intend only to make aware the prevelance of barcodes and begin a critical discussion about what their pervasiveness means. This is not a product designed to be used in any malicious or illegal manner. Any such use is strictly prohibited. You should not use any of the barcodes available from this site for any illegal activity. They are here for your amusement only. Funny! Basically, it shows the concept of creating your own UPC bar code stickers to place on top of the bar codes printed on consumer goods packaging, in a "name your own price" priceline.com type parody. The video is a nice touch! 11:28:20 AM

RSS? OPML? ENT? Mark pointed to Matt who's talking about a new module (ENT) for RSS 2.0. Sounds neat, but what I really need someone to do is evolve the spec for OPML. Instead of me having to re-categorize my feeds every time I install a new RSS parser, the OPML file should have pre-definied categories. And, instead of me having to maintain separate OPML files for all of my parsing applications, programmers should start enabling the user to dynamically load feeds from a centralized (local or remote) OPML file. C'mon folks - let's get smart with this stuff. I understand the need to maintain a proprietary database for the program in question, but your app shouldn't require me to maintain separate feed subscriptions. I'm not a programmer - I'm a user. And damnit, why can't "you" help make OPML smarter and more convenient for me?... [C:PIRILLO.EXE ~ Chris Pirillo] The feature request above is one that I have as well. I discovered it when I exported my RSS feeds from NetNewsWire, and tried to re-import them, only to discover that my categorization information was stripped bare. The more I follow the blogosphere, the more feature requests I see! There are a ton of desktop news aggregators out there, but none of them are taking a serious commercial approach to creating software. How much is a feature like this worth? Probably not much by itself, but in aggregate, I think a commercial desktop news manager could sell for several hundred dollars per seat. 11:26:19 AM

A Beginner's Guide to TrackBack By popular demand, we wrote up A Beginner's Guide to TrackBack.... [Movable Type News] Hey, I'm cutting edge, and I don't even have this stuff sorted out yet... so off I go! 11:22:46 AM

SARS could be biological weapon: experts ABC News: SARS could be biological weapon: experts Russian infectious disease experts say Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS) may be a man-made biological weapon. [...] The virus, according to Academy of Medicine member Sergei Kolesnikov, is a cocktail of mumps and measles, whose mix could never appear in nature. "We can only get that in a laboratory," he told a conference in the Siberian city of Irkutsk, quoted by RIA Novosti news agency. It may have spread because of an "accidental leak" from a lab, he said. Via Ben Hammersley [Joi Ito's Web] Our deepest, darkest fears are now vocalized. 11:21:33 AM

Trackback support in Roller. I just committed the code for Trackback to Roller. Roller now acts as a Trackback server, accepting Trackback pings, and Roller can also act as a Trackback client. The Roller Editor UI now includes a Trackback page that allows you to send Trackback pings for each of your weblog entries and that allows you to view the response from the target Trackback server. Trackbacks are displayed along with other referers (which are harvested using a Java version of Mark Pilgrim's Linkback technique) via the new #showDayReferers() macro. I will now test Trackback by sending a ping to the Movable Type Trackback test server. It worked! Please send me a Trackback so that I can test my ability to accept pings, the Trackback URL for this entry is: http://www.rollerweblogger.org/trackback/roller?trackback_support_in_roller [Blogging Roller] So, it looks like I'm back at the drawing board for my own hosted weblog. Roller seems like a contender again. 11:18:44 AM

MetaWeblog API support in Roller Turns out, I didn't have to steal much code from Blojsom to get MetaWeblog API support going in Roller. I ended up only stealing method signatures, Javadocs, and logging statements (thanks guys!). Roller and Blojsom are so different and the Blogger and MetaWeblog APIs are so simplistic that no further theft was necessary. In the process, I learned about the simple and clean architecture of Blojsom and I learned that XML-RPC based Weblog APIs are a bit of a mess these days. [snip] In the end, I was able to implement all of the Blogger and MetaWeblog APIs except for the MetaWeblog API newMediaObject. Blojsom implements everything except getUserInfo, deletePost, getTemplate, setTemplate, getPost, and newMediaObject. I'm not sure all of those APIs are really all that useful anyway. [Blogging Roller] Just when I thought I had decided to go with a bloxsom/blojsom approach, Roller comes storming back into the mix. 11:17:26 AM

The Role of Emotion in Online Advertising iMediaConnection: Emotional Connectivity In this week's iMediaConnection/MSN Best Practices piece, Joe Jaffe discusses the role of emotion in advertising. Creating an emotional response to advertising offline has been a staple of the business since time began. Creating this emotional response online has been a challenge. Limiting factors have to do with both the medium itself and the creative talent doing the work. In this article, you can read how Travelocity and Pepperidge Farm Milano Cookies worked towards creating an emotional connection and how that connection affected brand awareness. [marketingfix] If any of my classmates are reading this, this is an interesting article that relates to last week's reading. 11:14:31 AM

PowerPoint: Just Don't Unimpress Us When we see presentations (needless to say, a daily occurence), we are looking for a many things: a good idea and a team that can convince us of its ability to execute on the idea; an interestingly big market; a hard technical problem and the right engineers to solve it; a nice revenue model with a defendable sales channel. We are not looking for brilliance in PowerPoint design. The job of your PowerPoint slides is to not unimpress us. I'll give it to you in engineer-speak: if there is a chart where the X-axis is time spent on your PowerPoint and the Y-axis is amount we will be impressed by your PowerPoint, then the curve asymptotes at adequate. You can never impress us with your PowerPoint presentation building skills, you can only do damage to your message. I give it to you in engineer-speak because it's actually marketing and sales guys who tend to get cute with wipes and builds and whizzy animation. I'm hoping that the engineers in start-ups will now do a better job of telling these sales and marketing guys to spend more time thinking about channel development and product positioning and less on building slides. Presentations by all engineer teams tend to be utilitarian and simple but effective. And that's really all we want to see. [VentureBlog] This was a lesson I learned early on in my PT days. Keep the presentations simple, stupid. I see the same thing over and over again in my UoPhx studies. Various learning teams submit PP slides with all sorts of horrid animations and transitions, and they look like crap. Focus more on the content and less on the glitz, and you might actually learn something! 11:09:34 AM