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Sunday, May 12, 2002 |
 "Finished Piloting Palm last night. Great book. Well-written and fascinating. If you're interested in Silicon Valley workings, starting companies, inventing things, or tech gadgets, highly recommended. Most of the time, I make a point of reading non-business-related books when I go to bed in order to fall asleep. Otherwise, the brain just keeps going. I broke that rule this week and suffered many late nights. But it was enjoyable—and inspiring.
Though I've had a couple Palms and never used them consistently, I'm certainly tempted to get one again, after reading this book. Or, rather, a Handspring, since that's where the heros of our story—and the real soul behind the Palm phenomenon - now reside. I'm very curious about the Treo, since the book ends with that possibly being the Next Big Thing." [EVHEAD]
Don't mind me... just adding to my "to read someday" and "gee, I wish Audible had this" lists.
11:47:29 PM Permanent link here
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"Scott Johnson is downloading the new Star Wars movie, with some help from News.Com." [Scripting News]
How did he get started trying this?
"A friend just IM'd me 'Can you find me attack of the clones? I heard it's on the net...". Never, ever challenge a search geek.'
Scott also asks, "Is the media partly culpable in the piracy since they literally told me how to do it?" Well, according to a judge, yes, so now I'm waiting for the MPAA to sue News.com.
Oh, and if you think challenging a "search geek" is a big no-no, just try challenging a librarian!
11:42:06 PM Permanent link here
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"Richard Kelly who wrote and directed Donnie Darko has a new movie in the works called Knowing. And the premise is: 'When a time capsule from 1958 is opened prematurely accidentally, the chairman of the town's historical society is shocked to find drawings by a child inside that predict historical events of the last 40 years... with one prediction yet to come. Now, it's up to this historian to try to prevent the child's final chilling vision from coming true...' " [Memo To Myself]
This brief paragraph intrigues me far more than everything I have read about The Scorpion King.
11:29:50 PM Permanent link here
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I don't read AKMA regularly, so tonight was the first time I noticed on his site a link to Aaron Swartz's Syndicate Your Page service. I've always pointed folks to Voidstar's RSSify site, not knowing there was more than one out there.
I'm following an RSS trail outbound from Aaron's site, starting David Carter-Tod's Wytheville News Service. This is another piece of the puzzle I've been missing - how to display a feed in a regular web page, so I'm thrilled to find that someone is providing this service. Is there a Perl script (or something besides ASP) I can run that would do something similar?
Aaron also maintains RSS Info, which provides information about Readers, Feeds, Tools, and Resources. Hey Andy, check out XML::RSS ("a Perl module to read and write RSS files") for our future project proposals for INAC and our other project ideas!
11:23:45 PM Permanent link here
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"AKMA: Exposed! Dorothea is not simply displaying my nude template, she's volunteering to perform the surgery necessary for my site design to grow in health and beauty.
Dorothea Salo: The remake is on! What we're going to start with, then, is dumping the giganto-table.
Jonathon Delacour: AKMA drinks the CSS Kool-Aid. What Dorothea fails to mention ... is that she has proffered (and AKMA has perhaps unwittingly imbibed) a chalice filled with CSS Kool-Aid.
Feels a bit like a bunch of teenage girls getting together at a slumber party to do a makeover on the awkward-looking virgin. Only with adults, across two oceans, with markup instead of makeup. That's it! It's a markover!" [dive into mark]
Dorothea over at Caveat Lector has volunteered to re-design AKMA's web site, and we on the outside get a glimpse into what she is learning in the process. It's an interesting running commentary, all the more so for those of us who will be going through our own version of this in the near future. A must-read for those of us who can see the higher plain and would like to reside there someday.
11:03:48 PM Permanent link here
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If you're a blogger, referer logs are wonderful friends. Thanks to my friend, I just came across the most fascinating site - An Illustrated Speculative Timeline of Future Technology and Social Change.
"The Timeline is a general outline of future history, and somewhat conservative and circumscribed in what it offers the reader. The Timeline is meant to be the 'harder' of the two works, in terms of science and predictions. But this also means the Timeline must be more generalized, more risk-averse-- and also peter out entirely as we venture into the deep, deep future, where everything must ultimately give way to outrageous guesswork (partly due to technology advancing to levels indistinguishable from magic, as a famous quote by scientist and author Arthur C. Clarke suggests).
Perspectives takes up where the Timeline leaves off, offering more risky speculation and outright fiction about what the future may bring, than is suitable in the Timeline. Perspectives helps illustrate some of the possibilities implied by the Timeline, as well as how certain select personalities of various periods might perceive (and exploit or respond to) their circumstances. Recently Perspectives was expanded to include facts and speculation about mankind's past, in addition to its future. Virtually all credible historians and archaeologists agree that there's many puzzles and mysteries regarding our past that have yet to be resolved."
The timeline is divided into five sections:
And that's just for starters. There's much, much more behind WebFLUX site. I'm hoping - hoping! - that I'll be able to tear myself away from this site long enough to catch up on the weekend's news in my aggregator.
6:53:28 PM Permanent link here
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"The collective future of blogs lies not in dethroning the New York Times -- but in becoming a force that can make sense of the Web's infinity of links." [Salon.com]
Although I've already referenced it a couple of times, I finally had a chance to sit down and really read through Steven Johnson's article, and I think we'll look back on it and see it had some seminal ideas that helped articulate a new phase for blogging. I like his vision but as I read the article, I couldn't help thinking that RSS news aggregators are already providing some small portion of this functionality. For example, take the following idea he expressed:
"Many blogs out there possess the standards and intelligence of conventional journalism, but there are already too many of them to keep track of the way we subscribe to old-style magazines or habitually tune in to favorite TV networks. If the blogging population expands at the current rate, soon enough you'll be able to spend an entire day just reading the front doors of all your bookmarked blogs. Better to do away with the dependence on front doors, and let your favorite bloggers come to you."
My news aggregator is bringing the front doors of 136 sites to me every hour. Granted, it's still based on time and I don't think there is any aggregator software yet that is deliberately providing subject or URL cross-references yet, but it might be a good starting point. I've chosen far more than the 20 "guardian bloggers" that Steven proposes in his article, and I think most people that have found the aggregator & blog loop are subscribing to more than 20 sites. (This would be an interesting survey to undertake!)
If I could keep a massive database of the URLs, comments, and ideas running through my aggregator every day, that might be a foundation for Steven's idea. A search could run against that database first since I've specified those are the guardians of information that I trust the most. If I want further information, then it could run against the wider database Steven proposes.
I guess my question is if some of the building blocks are already falling into place. Backlinks could definitely be one building block, while personal aggregators might be another. And I still think the blogging tools can build simple fill-in-the-blank forms for general meta data about a site's subjects. It wouldn't be granular enough to help with the topical posts Steven wants to link together, but it would help organize and cross-reference the guardians.
If you haven't already read this article, please make sure you do. I think I'll be referring to it quite a bit in my future presentations.
2:55:38 PM Permanent link here
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"Mom - she's priceless.
Which is another way of saying she doesn't get what she's worth.
According to one estimate, that's half a mil a year.
Edelman Financial Services Inc. added up all the jobs a mother does--cook, nurse, bus driver, financial planner, psychologist, etc.--and figured out what each of those jobs pay.
The total: $508,700.
'You don't have enough money to hire a mom as good as yours,'' said company Chairman Ric Edelman.
So instead, we devote this day to her--Mother's Day, the 95th in our nation's history.
Some deal. . . ." [Chicago Sun-Times]
Lots of interesting statistics in this piece.
12:50:26 PM Permanent link here
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© Copyright 2004 Jenny Levine.
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