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Monday, May 5, 2003
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Several years ago Karen Marcelo was a topic of conversation on the old mailing list. She has been blowing things up forever and has a certain coolness about her.
Now she has been named as one of the Bay Area's ten sexiest people.
11:33:48 AM 
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Apple's iTunes Music Store topped a million tracks in its first week - not a bad showing considering this is an OS X only service.
Several sources claim total sales of all other online music services were about 500,000 tracks for the past twelve months. One would expect 30 to 50 times that much if their business model and implementation was the same. Of course it should be pointed out that any of these numbers are small when compared to the number of CDs sold in the US yearly (about a billion) - there is much room for growth and any service needs to prove that it can continue to grow.
I would assume that Apple will accelerate the release a Windows version of the store if these results continue to improve.
9:46:46 AM
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Sam is heavily into RSS news aggregators and notes the best Windows software is Wildgrape NewsDesk.
I use OS X and am still very happy with NetNewsWire Pro.
Try one of these and see if it doesn't change your way of using the Web.
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On the production end one has to worry about making the RSS feed. Most blogging tools handle this automatically, but enabling a website may be an issue. This link, should you choose to roll your own, may be useful.
6:56:54 AM
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Several years ago the visual thesaurus popped up. I remember being excited when I first came across it as it was a neat frontend to WordNet. Unfortunately I prefer simple text queries and displays for such things.
Someone mentioned it in a discussion, so I'll point it out to those of you who haven't used it.
6:16:32 AM
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The FCC has recently given its nod to considering power line communications. This is problematic for a variety of reasons, but I guess the current FCC hasn't met a large company they don't like (actually I'm hoping to see some people go after it as it I think they'll be parted with considerable sums of money).
It turns out if you use HF radio (amateur radio operators and shortwave listeners) there are problems with interference.
In the meantime we are finally seeing the local phone companies take an interest in DSL to counteract the cable companies. With 384 kbps going for $25 a month in some SBC areas and 1.5 mbps going for $35 a month in much of Verizon territory, one would guess that AOL and some of the cable companies aren't happy. I would be very surprised if more than a quarter of normal net users noticed a difference between most cable modem service and 384 DSL - it would be such an improvement for AOL and other dialup users that the extra few bucks a month might seem much more attractive than twenty to forty more to their cable provider. We haven't seen much competition here - hopefully this will get the ball rolling.
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It is interesting to think about what is possible. DSL is generally slower than cable (although there are many factors that go into this, so your performance might vary). Schemes for making data to the home much faster have generally been greeted with closed wallets everything ... except Korea. Performance is seriously better than anything widely available in the US and the cost is lower. Canada and Japan have also lept beyond the US.
Meanwhile, in the US, some people are finding caps on their broadband service along with some rather high prices.
6:15:59 AM
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The National Academies Press publishes reports issued by various national academies. We've noted it before, but a recent visit revealed that they have over 2500 titles that are free and searchable (although you can pay a lot of money for a physical version.
Lillian and Tom may be interested in Beyond Productivity: Information, Technology, Innovation and Creativity from the Computer Science and Telecommunications Board.
I much prefer paper, but the price is right and there are more than a few interesting reports.
recommended!
6:15:36 AM
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