Thursday, June 26, 2003

Rendezvous as a gateway technology for collaborate spaces Steve just IM'ed me about our great Hydra experiences yesterday, and suggested that PhotoShop/Illustrator could incorporate Rendezvous as well. Being more loyal to Macromedia these days, perhaps FireWork, Freehand, and maybe even Dreamweaver could find new markets with collaborative canvases/workspace...? Eric, thoughts? 11:26:28 AM

Hydra as a brainstorming tool Yesterday (during a rather dull presentation on J2EE under Panther at WWDC) Steve and I used Hydra to brainstorm several documents related to BloggerJack. I must say that this was a new and compelling experience for me, and I encourage everyone to try Hydra during their next brainstorming sessions. We captured a lot of great information and was able to quickly organize them. 11:19:23 AM

WWDC 2003 thoughts Macromedia was very kind to let me attend WWDC on their dime this year, and it was a real pleasure. The new space at Moscone is impressive, and I'm really happy Apple moved the event closer to home. As it happens, my brother is working at Apple these days and got a pass as well. We spent yesterday hitting some Safari and Rendezvous sessions and talking about weblogs and such. It was his first WWDC, so he had no idea how fun the "Stump the Experts" panel would be :-) And I must confess, being a new dad, I had a tear in my eye at the end of "Finding Nemo". 11:08:46 AM

Jackson's sunglasses The other morning, Jackson was playing with his various collection of toys. When he picked up his sunglasses, I said "Sunglasses" and he turned to me in recognition. Then he crawled over with them, stood up, and literally handed them to me and tilted his head forward. I put them on, he smiled a bit, took them off, then tried to put them on himself. Of course, he doesn't yet understand how to keep the stems folded out and such, but he definitely demonstrated an understanding that I haven't really seen before. 10:50:17 AM

Thinning the blogroll I tried to thin my blogroll today. Somehow I had accumulated over 230 feeds, and I was only able to pare that down to 211. I did re-organize my folder sets, broke out my Coders into Coders-Java and Coders-MacOSX. I also made a folder specifically for blog-related tools and services. Some of my feeds really should belong in two or more folder. That's a big problem waiting for a good solution. While a weblog may be a person, i want to mostly want to read about topics. Where one person writes about more than one topic of interest to me, I want those entries to propagate to the appropriate folders. Perhaps what I want is a list of feeds separate from a list of topics, and the aggregator would route and filter incoming entries. Currently, there are only a few people who's blog I want to read in its entirety (shout outs to steve, tony, greg, eric, and jud. now if tony would add an RSS feed and jud would start blogging again... :-). 10:47:20 AM

iPhoto plugin for photo-blogging Eric Sigler is today's hero - he's made an iPhoto2 plugin that can post photos to weblogs using the metaweblog API. It works rather well too. Yay Eric! [Ben Hammersley.com] Sweet! Downloading now... UPDATE: nice idea, but I don't want full size images in my weblog. To be really compelling, I'd want options for thumbnails and/or reduced sizes, options for where to put the binary file, as well as being able to annotate. Ah well, it sounds like a job for a real weblog authoring tool. 10:25:22 AM

The Holy Duh of Weblogging When I asked Brent Simmons whether he thought there was any way for people to making money via weblogs other than providing software or services, he actually answered a much bigger question when he responded: "... I probably wouldn't hire anybody for anything unless they had a weblog." He continued: ... The main thing is: if you don't have a weblog, I probably don't know you, and I don't have an easy way to get to know you. If you have a weblog, I'm either reading it already or I can read it and look in the archives a bit to get a sense of who you are. " After sitting staring at the ceiling thinking about this comment, I realize it crystallized, for me, a very basic question about how to think about weblogs. The painfully simple question is, "What is a weblog?" The painfully simple answer is, "A weblog is the representation of a person on the Internet." [Rands in Repose] This is a good definition of a weblog (that's my emphasis, not Rand's). Just don't forget that an RSS feed is not weblogs, but a weblog is an RSS feed. RSS feeds can also be news feeds, server status feeds, CMS change feeds, etc... 10:06:29 AM

Benihana's new ads The Benihana's new TV ads show people bouncing up and down on a large trampoline. As the camera cuts to different people, we finally see a chef, then we cut to a scene of the chef cooking for the people around the table. Interestingly, the people are rather calm as the chef dances at the griddle, a rather stark change from their last ad campaign. You may remember it, where the chef is dazzling the crowd and the crowd roars with delight. Now, the ad separates the experience from the more likely reality... in other words, under promise and over deliver. 10:01:38 AM

Fish - the last wild food "Fish are the last wild food, so follow the Monterey Fish Guide", which lists which fish populations are healthy, and which fish populations are in danger. The quote is from a chef from a fish restaurant (sorry, missed both names) during a KTVU.com report on dangerous fishing practices off the US coasts. And sorry, no link either; the KTVU site is down! Fish - the last wild food ...that's a sad epiphany in some ways 10:01:01 AM