23 July 2002

Blogs as Disruptive Tech WEBCRIMSON.com -- Weblogs are flying under the radar of the Content Management Giants. There are very few companies that will want to implement a content management system that starts at $150,000, especially since many CMS installations encounter snags.

Dave Winer on the Fall of AOL SCRIPTING.com -- Dave Winer calls it a "self-induced fall." The bubble of the 90s was due to misdirected enthusiasm over technology. AOL, a leader, hasn't kept pace. Microsoft will overtake them if they don't refocus on giving new features and performance to users. The music industry, of which AOL is a major player, holds some if not all of the keys. They refuse to use them to give the users what they want. AOL should also be investing heavily in writable-web technology. When we look back five years from now, after MS forecloses on the music industry for pennies on the dollar, we'll realize that AOL, like Netscape, actually had the lead when it capitulated.

Ballmer and Gates Go Wardriving INFOWORLD.com -- Steve Gillmor writes in his column of a recent discussion with Ballmer: "I was in a hotel in Sun Valley last week that was not wired," Ballmer recalls. "So I turned on my PC, and XP tells me there is a wireless network available. So I connect to something called Mountaineer. "Well, I don't know what that is. But I VPN into Microsoft. It worked! I don't know whose broadband I used," he chuckles. "I didn't see it in Bill's room. I called him up and said, 'Hey, come over to my room.' So soon everyone is there and connecting to the Internet through my room."

Weinberger on Hermeneutics HYPERORG.com -- David Weinberger has an interesting take on the two hermeneutics. "Hermeneutics, usually explained as the study of interpretation, is actually the study of how we make sense of things, where things includes texts and the world. Integral hermeneutics thinks that to understand X is to see the simple, unambiguous, single meaning behind X; it is fundamentalism and literalism applied beyond the realm of scripture. Differential hermeneutics not only notices that there are many ways of understanding X but thinks that the best way to proceed is to pay attention to the differences among those interpretations.

Who Invented Weblogs? TEMPLE BAR, Ireland -- There's a lot of discussion about Dave Winer (the blogging community's factotum and the history of weblog tools. In 1998, we used a Web browser to write a Web page when using Composer in Netscape Navigator. Dave Winer wrote about his idea for Edit This Page in late 1998. In June 1999, he implemented posting via bookmarks.

Sighting: Adobe Premiere 6.5 Adobe updates Premiere with new Adobe Title Designer, MPEG-2 export, DVD authoring, and some tweaks to its suite of audio tools.