Tuesday, January 14, 2003

I can foresee a day when Wi-Fi phones are as ubiquitous as bic pens. Ok not really but that was the design driver behind the work on the Sharper image Clip phones. The phone rings you open a draw to see a bunch of bic phones and colored clip phones pic one and go.  Bring those things back but with access to wi-fi that might be fun. 3:46:36 PM    comment []

Blog Browser Blog Browser.  OK - there's a Blog Browser available in Zeepe Applications. Dave Winer is still working on the definition of files.xml so this may or may not work at the time of reading this if his format has changed and the software hasn't caught up yet. The format is a little tricky because it just lists all archived files via pathnames, with no information within the xml as to what the file pointed to contains. Currently the Blog Browser assumes that anything stored in a directory 'posts' or 'archives' (because two different systems are using different conventions) is a weblog archive and that the year and month are encoded in the path name as yyyy/m.xml. If anyone can tell me I'm being daft and there's a really easy way to tell what's what, then I'll be glad to know. [Pete Cole: Zeepe Toolkit] 12:00:37 PM    comment []

A nice review of 2 Photo Archiving software applications both falling short of iPhoto. 11:59:46 AM    comment []

Blogging space. http://www.martinepage.com/bloggersspot/bloggersspot_start.html " People who maintain blogs can post from any place with an access to the Web, but most of them choose to do it from a specific spot, often found in their home. I have always had a fascination with the way people tend to personalize their computing environment and when I read a blog, I like to imagine the surroundings of the writer. Out of fun and sheer curiosity, I have decided to gather photos of bloggers' favorite spots. " I thought this was an interesting artistic endeavor and one worth sharing. [Rob Dulaney's Radio Weblog] 8:41:30 AM    comment []

Hitting P2P Users Where It Hurts. Overpeer's name doesn't call up images of Big Brother for nothing. Entertainment companies hire the tech startup to stamp out online file swapping by degrading content on peer-to-peer networks. But some say P2P users can always find a workaround. By James Maguire. [Wired News] RIAA's motto   "if you can't beat em, then cheat."  I wonder if overpeer really distinguishes between legal and illegal data or if it simply destroys everything in sight? [Rob Dulaney's Radio Weblog] 8:39:38 AM    comment []

Introducing the Internet Topic Exchange. Phillip Pearson is in the process of creating the Internet Topic Exchange (http://topicexchange.com). This is a service that enables anyone to easily create blog channels like Lazyweb.org, Blogpopuli, and KMPings. Once a channel is set up, people can send links to their weblog posts to it using TrackBack or using a simple form. The resulting feeds can be read on the web and they are also available as RSS. To see what it looks like, have a look at the new "Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom" channel. Matt Mower: "What Phil has done is to implement a very simple, elegant, solution along the path of the BlogPlex idea I've been working towards.  With the Topic Exchange, it will be simple for users to cluster around topics simply by using them." This is indeed, I believe, a good way to facilitate group-forming among bloggers. Hopefully, people will set up channels corresponding to interests close to their heart and will subscribe to them. As I have pointed out earlier, this is a sociality-driven way of building what has been called "shared categories", "shared topics", or "distributed metadata". One way to see it is that this extends the notion of RSS feeds. An ordinary RSS feed is easy to listen to, but "hard" to speak into. Blogchannels correct the asymmetry by making it easy both ways. Phillip has also put up what he calls a vague history of the concept. [Seb's Open Research] 6:45:10 AM    comment []