Friday, March 07, 2003

From Scripting News: SocialDynamX: "FM RadioStation is a desktop application that enhances the Radio experience by integrating 3 applications: news aggregator, blog publishing tool, and web browser into a single, easy-to-use, unified experience."   Worlds of Ends is a Cluetrainish manifesto by Searls and Weinberger. Of course what they write is right. The Internet is not complex and it resists being made complex.  Joi Ito raves about NoteTaker for Mac OS X.  A Seattle Times review of NoteTaker confirms that the president of the company is the same Scott Love who worked at Living Videotext. Scott understood outliners in ways that no one else did at the time, and I bet he still does. Very smart guy, doesn't cut corners. I'm sure it's a great product, worth buying a Mac to run. And it's nice to see that it supports OPML and can exchange outlines with Radio. Excellent.  5:57:54 PM

Channel Storm's TV Station in a Box Channel Storm 2.0 allows real-time video capture, compositing, titling and rendering; streaming the result out to the web or into an analog video network.  Channel Storm isn't cheap (US$999), but it's an all software solution requiring nothing more an a Mac, a DV camera or web cam with mic.   You could cobble all the peices together yourself, but putting it all in one place ensures both ease of use and continued downward price pressure.  4:30:15 PM

Hello, tech designers? This stuff is too small "We've gotten used to phones with tiny buttons and screens, digital cameras the dimensions of an Altoids tin and smaller, and music players the size of our two middle fingers. Projects still in the lab promise even more minuscule products: cell phones worn like rings, digital cameras hanging from our neck like a pendant. But how will we operate such marvels? We struggle with what we own today. Our fingers are already too thick and clumsy to stab the buttons on our gadgets, and, as our eyes age, we squint even harder to see the shrinking screens on our stuff. " 10:22:07 AM

WhatsaWiki What's a Wiki? When Tim Berners-Lee created the World Wide Web, he envisioned and built an environment that all participants could browse and edit.  The original Web was two-way. Later, when Marc Andreessen created the Mosaic browser (later renamed Netscape Navigator) as a grad student, he omitted the editing capabilities and added graphics, making the Web visually much cooler, but changing it from a collaborative medium to a "browsing" medium -- more like publishing than communication.  Wikis are collaborative.  Any participant can edit any page in a Wiki (by clicking on "edit" in the menu near the top of the screen).  To create new Wiki pages, jam two words together that have initial caps.  The wiki will generate a new entry, then put a question mark after it.  As soon as anyone enters information in that new page, the question mark disappears and the new Wiki word becomes a link to that page, whenever anyone in that Wiki uses that term.   Building a Wiki is not as easy as blogging, but it is potentially more powerful.  And it's certainly complementary.  I'm using a Wiki for stuff I'd like to build with others and regular Web pages or Weblog entries for stuff I just want to put in the world.  10:11:33 AM

Steven Johnson references Vannevar Bush's seminal essay in the Atlantic and suggests it may hint at why Google acquired Blogger: "Right now Google is a kind of information detective, and a brilliant one at that. But it could be something more: an extension of your memory." 10:07:51 AM

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