Joerg Rheinboldt: Update

Subscriber Stats and Web-based Feed Readers.

[Joystiq]

Mon, 05 Sep 2005 08:14:53 GMT

Last night while looking at the new Feedburner design (well done guys!), I noticed that my subscriber stats figure has suddenly jumped. My current count of RSS subscribers in Feedburner is 3744. The main reason is that Rojo has just been added to Feedburner's numbers - previously it was missing. What surprised me is the extent of Rojo's impact on my stats. Rojo has overtaken Bloglines as the number 1 RSS Aggregator for my readers. Here is my current top 10:

Rojo
Bloglines
NetNewsWire
Newsgator Online
ThePortNetwork
Firefox Live Bookmarks
MyYahoo
Google Desktop
FeedDemon
SharpReader

A few quick comments on that:

- 7 of my top 10 are web-based RSS Readers (I'm counting Google Desktop in that). And 7 of the top 8 are web-based! Possibly that reflects my own bias towards web-based apps, which presumably a lot of my readers share.

- On the other hand, NetNewsWire is still going strong in 3rd place, which probably reflects my geek cred ;-)

- Rojo and Bloglines dominate my stats, which suggests to me that the other web-based readers have a lot of ground to catch up (and there are tons of new web-based feed readers on the market currently).

Coincidentally yesterday, before I found out about the Rojo numbers in my Feedburner, I decided to give Rojo another try. I've been increasingly frustrated by Bloglines - it doesn't cut the mustard anymore in terms of organising one's feeds, tracking topic feeds and in general adding value to my feed-reading existence.

Already I've noticed that Rojo's performance has improved since I last checked (that was my number one complaint about Rojo) and its added some neat new functionality - e.g. you no longer need to physically click the "Mark as Read" button. So I'll be using Rojo for the short term and perhaps in time it will convince me to stick around :-)

My question to Bloglines: when are we going to see these new improvements you've promised in the past? You'd better hurry up, because it's clear that Rojo is eating your lunch.

PSP downloads won't be free for long.

Mon, 05 Sep 2005 07:56:36 GMT

It turns out that Wipeout Pure’s free content downloads were just a test case. In 2006, Sony plans to move to pay-per-downloads, according to comments made by SCE’s European vice president Phil Harrison in Edge magazine. This will be made possible by a digital rights management system (similar to iTunes) that Sony is in the process of constructing. What concerns us is that new features that in that past would have been included in firmware upgrades (e.g. the web browser) might end up costing us extra.

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© 2005 Weblogs, Inc.

Fame for you and your gaming alter-ego.

[Joystiq]

Mon, 05 Sep 2005 07:54:18 GMT

Almost a year ago now, we took note of the work of artist Robbie Cooper, who took photos of real people and put them next to screenshots of the Everquest avatars that those people controlled. Pictured at right is one of those juxtapositions. (For the rest of them, click here.)

In an update to his Alter Ego project, Cooper has teamed with writer Tracy Spaight to put together a book featuring Second Life players who, according to blog Clickable Culture:

Look like their avatars
Make real money through virtual businesses
Are males playing females or vice versa (”Manginas” and “Shenises”, in MMOG parlance)
Express themselves creatively online (fluent l33t doesn’t count)
Met a significant other online
Have a zany tale to tell about an online experience

The artists can be contacted at tspaight@gmail.com. Include your location, contact information, and why you think you’re worthy of their artsy interest. Just don’t brag about that one time you and two wood elves shacked up for an entire fortnight in Kelethin. Virtual gentlemen never kiss and tell.

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© 2005 Weblogs, Inc.

[Joystiq]

Tue, 30 Aug 2005 13:33:08 GMT

Biofeedback music.

Developed by Sonic Studio, BodyRest is a wearable device (PDA + headphones + sensors) that produces customized music for relaxation. Thanks to the bio feed-back system, music changes in real time according to the listeners physiological parameters, i.e. stress level.

This music does not have a beginning or an end, and sounds different from time to time and is composed as it is needed âo[base "] the developers call it just-in-time-composition.

The concept of BodyResT is based on a biofeedback technique that trains individuals to improve their health by listening to their own bodyâo[dot accent]s signals. The prototype will measure the individualâo[dot accent]s stress level through a physiologic parameter. This will then be reï¬[not equal]ected in the music. The continuous feedback between the music and the individual enhances relaxation response.

In the ï¬?rst prototype the heart rate is measured by a sensor attached to the ear lobe. The sensor is connected to a small EIS (Embedded Internet System) platform with Bluetooth capabilities. Sensor data is sent via wireless connection to a software application which controls a music generating sound engine.

In the next generation of BodyResT we will measure a second physiological parameter.

Movie presentation on the website.

Web 2.0 Weekly Wrap-up, 8-14 August 2005.

Tue, 30 Aug 2005 11:03:58 GMT

RSS Brand Morphs Into Feeds

A lot of interest this week in how the label 'RSS' is being usurped by 'feeds' or 'Web feeds'. Once the accepted brand name for syndication technologies, the big 3 Internet companies are all now using the term 'feeds' (or 'web feeds' in Microsoft's case) as their preferred method of promoting RSS technologies to their mainstream users. Most other RSS-related companies are doing the same: Feedburner, Six Apart, Bloglines are just a few high profile examples. And judging by all the comments on my initial post about this, a majority of people feel that 'feeds' is a better brand name for Web syndication technologies than 'RSS'.

But still, the term 'RSS' won't go out of usage amongst the geek set. RSS 2.0 is the dominant feed format - and is likely to remain so, unless Google can push their preferred Atom format onto the masses. And the RDF-derived RSS 1.0 will continue to have its fair share of disciples. Feeds is the way we'll be promoting all of these formats to mainstream users, but it won't stop us geeks from continuing our religious battles over RSS vs Atom and so forth :-)

Web 2.0 Definition Rolls On

There were some very interesting discussions about the meaning of Web 2.0 this week, sparked by Web legend Tim Bray's post entitled Not Web 2.0. Tim O'Reilly replied to Bray's post - see also the fascinating comments thread. I especially liked this comment made by someone called "pb":

"Web 1 was the period up to the dot bomb. Web 2 is what has been emerging, what has been succeeding, since that big implosion. I believe that this is the way most "average" people -- if not the technical elite -- will perceive the terms."

I'll be writing LOTS more about all this in the near future (that message brought to you by the Subtle Hint Department). For now I just want to point out that the term 'Web 2.0' seems to be generally accepted now. There still isn't a canonical definition, despite the best efforts of the Wikipedia contributers. But the conversations about Web 2.0 are helping everyone grok the term.

Spam and Fake Blogs

Dave Sifry has been running a series of thought-provoking posts on the "State of the Blogosphere". I particularly liked the 4th in the series, on the topic of Spam and Fake Blogs. The two most contentious posts I've ever written on R/WW were on this touchy topic, because it riles people up (including me!).

Dave wrote that Technorati has been "tracking an increase in the number of people who are trying to manipulate the blogosphere." He goes on to say that spam and fake blogs are almost always created by automated programs, not by people. They're driven by affiliate or advertising money and high search rankings. So Dave and others are working hard to "eliminate economic incentives" for these types of blogs.

Of course I heartily endorse and applaud this action by Dave, because as I mentioned in my (in)famous Bots post - these automated spam or fake blogs are polluting the Web and cluttering up search engine results.

MBA Blogging Success

The results are in for Bud Gibson's recent blogging bootcamp for Michigan MBA students. Over 6 weeks the students created and maintained blogs that competed with "cleaning and restoration services" websites. The results are interesting. All of the blogs ended up with a Google PageRank of 5, which was better than three of the old school websites. According to Bud, this suggested "that bootcamp sites would come out ahead of these two sites in searches where their content is equally relevant". The blog sites also had encouraging results in keyword tests.

Bud concluded:

"The bootcamp results demonstrate that with moderate but systematic effort bloggers can achieve search visibility that outperforms established local players for relevant searches."

This is what could be termed The Good Side of blogs for businesses. The Dark Side is the spam and fake blogs I wrote about above. It seems to be relatively easy nowadays for both sides to gain search engine ascendancy over old-school websites.

Nevertheless, it is great that up and coming business people are being taught the value of blogs and social software. You may've noticed that in my Weekly Wrap-Ups, I try to highlight non-techie manifestations of Web 2.0 as well as the geeky stuff. If the Web really is a platform, then we want to encourage as many people as possible to build on it.

Techie Post of the Week

Instead of a single post, this week I'd like to give a shout-out to the TechCrunch blog. Their regular profiles of Web 2.0 companies is exhaustive and wide-ranging.

They also have a weekly review of Web 2.0 news, modelled on my own Weekly Wrap-Up. But whereas I generally pick a few topics or a theme and drill down, the TechCrunch weekly provides broad coverage. So I think we complement each other in that respect. OK yes, we did have some friendly words about the name of their weekly review - but we've sorted that out now :-) I recommend you add TechCrunch to your RSS Aggregator.

That's a wrap for another week!

Tue, 30 Aug 2005 11:02:59 GMT

Web as Platform Mash-Ups.

There have been a lot of excellent posts and articles this week about APIs, the Web as Platform, web sites as software companies, and so forth. Here's my own mash-up of some of the highlights:

The Philosophy of Web 2.0

To set the scene, let's consider what the essence of Web 2.0 is. Peter Merholz has been thinking about this: "The point isn't the features, it's the underlying philosophy of relinquishing control." He pointed to Barnes & Noble's failed attempt to replicate Amazon's features and also cited Blockbuster trying to copy Netflix.

New blogger Sergey Schetinin has a 2.0 twist on an old theme: The Web is Atomic. I particularly liked this remix of Paul Miller's words:

"Web 2.0 presages a freeing of data, allowing it to be exposed, discovered and manipulated in a variety of ways…
Web 2.0 permits the building of virtual applications, drawing data and functionality from a number of different sources…
Web 2.0 applications work for the user, and are able to locate and assemble content that meets our needs as users…
Web 2.0 applications are modular …
Web 2.0 is about sharing; code, content, ideas…"

So the philosophy of Web 2.0 is to let go of control, share ideas and code, build on what others have built, free your data. It's actually a difficult philosophy to live by, when you consider how capitalistic Western society is. But more on that in another post...

btw, I've gotta love a new blogger that puts me on their v0.1 blogroll alongside just 3 other people: Clay Shirky, Kevin Kelly, Tim Berners-Lee. :-)

Mash-Up Theory

ZDNet is calling the current generation of the Web the "recombinant Web". Although that term is too much of a mouthful to catch on, the explanation is spot on:

"...the recombinant Web, Web mash-ups, Web 2.0 or just the next phase of Web evolution heralds the use of the Web as a platform for creating new kinds of user experiences and businesses. Jon Udell calls it remixable Web applications."

In a CNET article entitled Catching up to Web 2.0, Martin LaMonica gives us his definition:

"Now programmable Web sites are becoming more widespread, a change that unleashing all sorts of intriguing combinations, or "mash-ups." Some people call that Web 2.0."

LaMonica wrote more on that theme in a follow-up CNet article entitled From Web page to Web platform. His bottom line:

"Experts predict Web site owners will increasingly resemble software companies: To generate traffic and sales, they will encourage add-on products and Web services."

Hmmm, there is an overarching theme developing here. In CNET's words:

"The effect is to put a great deal of power in the hands of outside individuals and to transform Web sites into programmable machines."

Web sites as software companies, programmable machines... I like that way of expressing the power of Web 2.0 sites/entities such as Google and Amazon.

Web as Platform implementations

The second CNET article also has a paragraph devoted to eBay's use of APIs. Apparently 20% of eBay's listings come from the APIs - mostly for "high volumes". There are now 18,000 people in eBay's developer program, up from just 300 in 2003.

Robert Scoble recently visited eBay and was so impressed he was moved to comment:

"I think we're about to see a revolution in retailing. Someone could build an interesting new store using a combination of Google Maps or MSN Virtual Earth, Amazon, eBay, and other Web services."

But as usual, Robert's commenters had some interesting counterpoints. Developer Morgan Schweers said:

"There are some questions to be asked about the openness and design of eBay's API. [...] As for the people who are making $1Mil/mo., they are most likely spending $750+K/mo. to make it."

On the topic of implementations of API services, Feedburner has just released its FeedBurner Feed Management API. It's described as:

"...sort of like a universal remote control for FeedBurner services. You can create, manage and remove feeds in your account without ever visiting feedburner.com."

The quintessential Web 2.0 application

According to Rashmi Sinha, the quintessential Web 2.0 application is Flickr. She explained:

"Its data and metadata is contributed by its users; while the interface is its own. Its API's are used by developers who tend to use its data, but not the interface (such as Mappr, Color Pickr)."

Flickr is certainly a great example of a small company using Web 2.0 technologies to its advantage, although on a larger scale I don't think you can go past Google, Amazon and eBay as quintessential Web 2.0 entities. I also liked this line by Jon in the comments to Rashmi's post: "When web sites start acting like software companies, then you have your Web 2.0."

The Future of the Web, according to its Creator

Finally, to end this mash-up on the topic of mash-ups, let me go right back to the original source of the Web - Tim Berners-Lee. In a recent interview with the BBC on the topic of the read/write Web, Sir Tim had this prediction for the Web in 30 years time:

"My goal for the web in 30 years is to be the platform which has led to the building of something very new and special, which we can't imagine now."

'nuff said.

Tue, 30 Aug 2005 11:00:51 GMT

RSS 3.0?.

This is news to me. Apparently there's a version 3 of RSS, which purports to be "a derivative work which is meant to replace the 2.0 version." That'll please Dave Winer, I'm sure. A guy called Jonathan Avidan is behind RSS 3.0 and he seems to be the only one contributing to the RSS 3 MessageBoards at this time.

Mr Avidan also posted an article at Slashdot, which seriously makes me wonder if there is any decent editing going on there - because frankly this RSS 3 looks to be a load of bunk. As one Slashdot commenter said:

"There is zero community behind this "standard", it's just a spec some guy decided to write of his own accord. In contrast, a real community effort, Atom, has just reached 1.0 and is standardized by the IETF. Nobody should take this "RSS 3.0" seriously."

Indeed just yesterday the Atom Syndication Format was approved by the IESG as an IETF Proposed Standard. In English, that means Atom is officially an alternative RSS format to RSS 2.0.

In comparison to Atom, which is a real community effort backed by some very smart and distinguished people, RSS 3 looks to be simply a publicity stunt for its author.

But let's be fair to Avidan and hear him out. In Slashdot he defends RSS 3 and answers the obvious question, why not support Atom? Avidan wrote:

"...why not Atom? I don't like Atom and believe that with more documentation, RSS stands a good chance. Competition, if moderately friendly and not destructive, is beneficial to both parties."

He doesn't like Atom? That's his reason for starting yet another RSS format?! He explains more in the "official blog":

"...it is my belief that RSS 2, given further documentation and reworking, can compete with Atom. Why do I want to compete with Atom? That would be too long to explain here, unfortunately."

Perhaps I'm being too harsh, but I can't see the point of RSS 3 at all. Jonathan, at the very least you need to explain to people why you're not supporting a true community standard, which Atom undoubtedly is. RSS 2.0 already has significant uptake as the main RSS format, so why are you starting yet another fork of it?

Web 2.0 Weekly Wrap-up, 15-21 August 2005.

Tue, 30 Aug 2005 11:00:01 GMT

New Apps on the Block

Lots of start-up action this week. Two ones that caught my eye were Flock and Wordpress.com.

Flock is described as a "social web browser". Considering that the browser market hasn't had any decent innovation since Firefox burst onto the scene in November 2004, Flock sounds intriguing. Indeed Flock started off as a company, then named Round Two, building Firefox extensions (I wrote about them in this April post). SiliconBeat reports that Flock is a browser "aimed at making it easy for the Web 2.0 crowd to blog, post photos, etc." Roland Tanglao has more details - he was blown away. Will Pate also has a write-up. So yes, Flock sounds fascinating and I've signed up for an invite.

Wordpress.com is a hosted version of the open source blogging tool, Wordpress. It sounds like it'll give Six Apart's TypePad product a run for its money, especially if it's free (as SiliconBeat say it is). Not that Six Apart is standing still - Movable Type 3.2 sounds like a big step forward in functionality and TypePad has new features too. Andrew Watson is tracking the Wordpress.com news.

P.S. Keep an eye out for the TechCrunch profiles of Flock and Wordpress.com. The TechCrunch crew have been making their presence felt over in Silicon Valley - my brothers! Also check out their latest Web 2.0 This Week.

Schools and the Web

One of the kicks I get out of my blog is tracking how people in The Real World are using Web 2.0 technologies. One of the most active groups is teachers and people in the education system. Cole Camplese's Learning & Innovation blog is a good example. Cole works at Penn State University, in the School of Information Sciences and Technology (IST). Web 2.0 is at the core of a class he teaches called IST 110. He explained:

"I will once again use the class blog for the primary communication area, but will extend it to give each their own accounts and spaces. I will be doing quite a bit of podcasting - both my own and expecting them to produce a bunch. I will be testing my enclosure bundles with them as well! I’ll use digital video again so they can communicate their solutions in ways beyond text - and I think I will do a little more of it."

Man, I wish my INFO 110 course in the early 90's had been that exciting (for the record, it was more boring than ECON 101).

Another recent educator that has been talking about Web 2.0 is Noah Brier's Mum, Barbara Rubin Brier. Noah posted an email from his Mum, which outlined her thoughts about how schools are using the Web. Looking ahead 25-30 years, Barbara thinks "the people in our classrooms will not be teachers of content knowledge, but facilitators of learning that will be entirely web-based."

Kids and Web 2.0

Alexander Muse asks an interesting question:

"...does the fact that many of us who were active in the first Web boom now have children affect the direction of the web?"

I'd say the social nature of the current Web and the maturity of the industry now (compared to the craziness of dotcom times) is indeed affecting how Web 2.0 is panning out. Our little Web is growing up ;-)

The magic of APIs

This week I wrote a post summarising some recent articles about APIs. I want to highlight that theme again here in my Weekly Wrap-Up, so I thought I'd provide a few more examples of APIs in action.

Firstly James MacAonghus' analysis of Expedia, the online travel planning and flight-booking site. James thinks Expedia is more than that, saying it's "a heavyweight ecommerce and search website in its own right". He thinks that APIs would help Expedia compete with the big Internet companies:

"If Expedia could roll out an API platform of its own, it could at least fight it out with Google (and Yahoo and anyone else who will join the fray). At best, Expedia could increase its reach and range of services in ways impossible to a single company."

Of course Google, Yahoo and others won't sit back and wait for Expedia to catch up - they will forge ahead with new APIs. As Mark Sigal wrote in his RSS as a Web 2.0 platform article:

"... I would expect that fierce competition for developer mindshare between Microsoft, Google, Yahoo, Amazon and eBay will continue to push these folks to open up more and more of their APIs. [...] My bet is that before too long, the filtration, personalization and ad serving functions get reduced to an API that a developer can plug into their application."

Finally, Brad Feld's been thinking of APIs too. He wants a "CIO dashboard" view across all his data:

"Much of this data is “open” and freely available via APIs and web services although some isn’t easy to get."

Which would be a great example of a web app built on top of APIs from various companies - Google, Yahoo, Feedburner, etc. Ben Barren says KlipFolio is an example of this kind of app.

Techie Post of the Week: Outsource your PC

John Clingan has an interesting view on how to reduce spam and viruses on the Web - outsource your home PC by having all its software hosted on the Web. As Stephen O'Grady pointed out in the comments, this is known as the "thin client model". John wrote:

"I haven't been following the Web 2.0 discussion at all, but when I think of Web 2.0, I think of a web with security first and foremost. Every client has a certificate. Every server has a certificate. Email is safe. No spyware. No SPAM. OK, not entirely true, but there is some level of accountability. We have a thread to follow. If you want to be anonymous, back out to Web 1.0 and die a death by a thousand paper cuts. Support yourself, don't come to me."

I'm not entirely sure I follow John's reasoning here - it would be great if he explained it a bit more. But I think I see where he's coming from. It's similar to my SoulWeb post, in which I mused that one's PC will in future be hosted on the Web.

In many ways that will be the zenith of Web 2.0 - when the Web is a platform for our entire computing experience.

That's a wrap for another week!

Tue, 30 Aug 2005 10:58:40 GMT

9rules Network.

I've joined the 9rules Network, a community of high quality weblogs and websites. Here's the announcement from Paul Scrivens, 9rules' inspirational CEO. The 9rules Network is very similar to what I described as my ideal blog network a few weeks ago: "a group of niche bloggers, each with their own unique look n' feel but collectively part of a branded network of like minds." In fact that was what attracted the attention of 9rules to my blog in the first place.

Here's how it works. I keep 100% ownership and control of my blog, which is very important to me. But I get to join a community of quality websites, which has opportunities for network advertising. It also gives my blog wider coverage, especially in the design community. Best of all, the network members help each other out - e.g. I could use some design help and in return I'm happy to give writing advice and tips.

The 9rules community is very strong in web design - there are a lot of beautifully designed websites in the network. I'm hoping to learn a lot from the community in that respect, because to be frank my blog design looks plain in comparison. On the other hand, I pride myself on writing top quality and original content on the topic of Web Technology. So I hope that my content inspires others and that I introduce some of the 9rules community to my niche interests (Web 2.0, Social Media). I think there'll be a lot of quid pro quo.

Tue, 30 Aug 2005 10:36:15 GMT

How-to: download new tracks to your PSP via WiFi.

This could come in handy to swap out some new tunes on the go. The how-to essentially involves a shareware application called Dot Tunes to serve your iTunes library over the web. The interface includes a method for downloading new tracks, so you can suck down new tunes to your PSP from the local wifi coffee shop or wherever.

[Thanks, Mark]

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© 2005 Weblogs, Inc.

Retro look at expensive computer gaming systems.

[Joystiq]

Tue, 30 Aug 2005 10:34:54 GMT

With all the buzz about Gamestop’s super stupid Xbox 360 game bundles there’s been a lot of speculation that the packages are the most expensive in the history of video games. Well, I had an inkling that this was probably a bit naive. So I dusted off my retro gaming books and loaded up Firefox and set off in search of the most expensive video gaming systems. Suprisingly, some of the most expensive systems were the most popular and groundbreaking. So here’s the list with the prices at the time of release as well as prices adjusted for inflation, as they would be today. I used The Inflation Calculator to help me with price conversions. The main references I used were “High Score: The Illustrated History of Electronic Video Games” and Wikipedia.org.

The 3DO Interactive Multiplayer - $920.36 (originally valued at $699.99 in 1993)

This games console was the result of a partnership between Panasonic, Sanyo and Goldstar. The console featured an advanced feature set for the time, which was largely under utilised by games developers. All the titles of note were ports from other games platforms. This is a good example of where sticker shock really did put people off; $700 (or nearly $1000 today) was too much for people to pay for such an unoriginal game collection. The one legacy that the console left behind was the start of many of game franchises by EA and Crystal Dynamics. Whilst the system completely flopped, franchises such as Fifa, Need for Speed, Soul Reaver and Gex made their debut on the console, which later led to extended franchises on other (more popular) 32-bit consoles.

Neo Geo - $966.77 (originally valued at $650 in 1990)

The Neo Geo, released in 1990 by Japanese game company SNK, was technologically years ahead of its time. It features colorful 2D graphics and high quality sound at the level of arcade machines of the day. However, there was a downside, the price. At just under $1000 of today’s money, the Neo Geo was an outrageously expensive console. It also featured cartridges that would cost $300 dollars today ($200 then). The console gained a niche following of rich gamers that could afford to buy the console and the games. The main innovation was memory sticks that players could plug into arcade versions of the console, which they could save to, take home and continue on their own console. Neo Geos still reach relatively high prices on eBay.

Commodore 64 - $1207.04 (originally valued at $595 in 1982)

Despite being the most popular computer model of all time, selling between 17 and 25 million units, the Commodore 64 was a relatively expensive games machine by today’s standards. However, it offered extremely good value for money by offering unprecedented sound and graphics quality. Around 10,000 titles were created for the computer, including thousands of video games. Even today it has an established following, with several emulators for multiple platforms in development. The C64 would win the prize for best price/performance ratio ever.

Apple II with 48KB RAM - $8560.26 (originally valued at $2638 in 1977)

Ironically this system was extremely popular due to it’s low price, relative to the computers of the day. It was the first time middle class families could actually afford a computer. Like it or not PC lovers, this computer practically single handedly created the personal computer gaming market, inspiring home computer/gaming systems like the Commodore 64. Apple Computer itself released some popular titles, like versions of Hangman, Breakout and the popular ‘Adventure’ game. Steve Jobs’ and Steve Wozniak’s experiences at the early Atari helped make the Apple II such a popular gaming machine.

PDP-1 with SpaceWar! - $760,410.51 (originally valued at $120,000 in 1960)

This $760k behemoth tops our chart as the most expensive video gaming system of all time. Later on in 1971, Nolan Bushnell created a coin-op version of Spacewar called Computer Space. A series of events with this space game led to him founding the revolutionary game company Atari. Of course there were dozens of university computers used to create games, but Spacewar was the first. It also set the groundwork for game creation today. Spacewar was derived as a way of taxing the MIT super computer as well as demonstrating a consistent framework in a pleasurable and active way. You could say that today’s games creation is carried out with exactly the same aims. Game developers are still trying to fully utilise the hardware of their chosen platform, whilst creating bigger and more diverse game worlds all the time keeping the game fun and active! So was the $120,000 that MIT paid for the computer worth it? Well since the Spacewar title developed for the computer kicked off a several billion dollar industry over the proceeding 40 years, I’d say so!

[Update: Due to a reader’s request I’ve put up a preliminary listing of systems with their prices at release and their prices today. I wasn’t originally planning on putting this with this article but whatever! I’ll add any extra numbers that people want put in, so submit your numbers to the comments thread. Make sure to head over to The Inflation Calculator and calculate how much it’s worth today.]

[Update #2: Added Neo Geo]

Year of Release	System	Original Price US$	Price Today US$
1960	PDP-1	120,000	760,410.51
1972	Maganavox Odyssey	100	456.11
1976	Fairchild VES	169.95	583.47
1977	Atari 2600	200	649
1979	Atari 800	999.95	2831.58
1980	Intellivision	299.99	759.36
1981	VIC-20	299.99	669.04
1982	Commodore 64	595	1207.04
1985	NES	299.99	512.19
1986	Sega Master System	200	342.6
1989	TurboGrafx 16	199.99	311.73
1990	Sega Mega Drive Neo Geo	199 650	295.98 966.77
1993	3DO	699.99	920.36

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mlle. malaprop, the proxy server that suffers from Alzheimer.

[Joystiq]

Tue, 30 Aug 2005 10:29:40 GMT

mlle. malaprop (english version) is a female proxy server affected by Alzheimer. She suffers from the first symptom of Alzheimer: aphasia, i.e. a dysfunction of the usage of language that arises from forgetting words, especially those that were learned rather late.

mlle. malaprop is very old and she only speaks German. She has forgotten all the words she learned after 1900, so she replaces every word she doesn't know with the word in her mind that is most similar to it. The basis for her word memory is the first edition of the dictionary of the German language by Konrad Duden, published in 1880. All the words that are not featured in it are lost to mlle. malaprop.

Her malapropistic anachronistic method of filling the blanks of her mental dictionary is achieved by an algorithm that replaces every word of a website that cannot be found in the Duden dictionary of 1880 by one that is featured in it and that is similar in an orthographic, phonetic or morphologic way.

By Sascha Brossmannand Thomas Goldstrasz.

Who owns the acres on the moon?.

Tue, 30 Aug 2005 10:28:36 GMT

As part of George Bush's push to revisit the Moon by 2018, Nasa is using the Hubble Space Telescope to scout possible locations for a moon base where humans can live, work and breathe.

While there is no law in space, a claim of ownership has been made by US entrepreneur Dennis Hope, who in 1980 spotted a loophole in the 1967 United Nations Outer Space Treaty. Plots have been put up for sale ever since. Thus in the 18 months since Bush's announcement, he has received numerous letters from lunar property owners, which typically read thus:

"I do worry that the future space station might be built on my lot. So I would like to inform you that I might allow the US government to do so, but only if I am paid for that area. If this should happen, I would be ready to enter into negotiations with the US officials."

UN lawyers say Hope's claim is without merit. But Lunar Embassy has sold nearly Â£5m worth of plots, with 3.4m owners worldwide, including Carrie Fisher, William Shatner, the Pope, George W Bush and 30 Nasa employees.

Via archinect < BBC News.

Microsoft debuts RSS in IE7 Beta 1.

Tue, 30 Aug 2005 10:26:32 GMT

Facebook: Pouty-mouth poses for narcoleptic dudes. Xeni Jardin: The Los Angeles Times invited me to contribute a commentary about the popular student networking site Facebook. It ran today, and here's a snip:

You could describe Facebook.com as a digital yearbook, or the Internet equivalent of Greek T-shirts on frat brothers.
But most dead-tree yearbooks don't have 3.6 million members or party construction systems. Real-world sororities don't have names such as "Alpha Mega Pimpin," "The Divine Innocence of Jessica Simpson" or "I Just Tried to Ford the River and My [Fucking] Oxen Died," in homage to the 1980s video game "Oregon Trail."
Facebook does. And it conquered college America instantly.
Like its paper predecessors, the site provides students with tools to stay in touch, proclaim school pride and scrawl in-jokes next to head shots. Pouty-mouth glamour puss is the favored female photo pose. Male portraits often capture narcoleptic undergrads mid-kegger, adorned with live animals, football-foam headgear âo[per thou] or other narcoleptic undergrads.
But a glance at growth stats shows that as membership spreads âo[per thou] faster than strep-throat bugs at a spin-the-bottle session âo[per thou] the service is becoming a popular extension of real life at campuses across the country.

Link.

Previously -- Facebook: just poke me

Reader comment: Ian says,

A group of Northeastern University students made a commentary on Facebook as part of Campus Movie Fest 2005 in Boston, MA. Their submission didn't win the contest, but it did make it to the finals. It's another good example of how Facebook has cemented itself as a part of campus life. Link

Denise Nelson Nash of Caltech University in Pasadena, CA tells BB,

[Facebook founder] Mark Zuckerberg will be speaking at Caltech on Thursday, November 10, 2005 at 8 p.m. in Beckman Auditorium. He will be sharing his thoughts on the future of thefacebook and digital interactive yearbooks. Link to event info.

[Boing Boing]

Wed, 10 Aug 2005 15:23:10 GMT

First Excerpt. This post will be the first of a number of excerpts from my book. Over the next month I'll post as many as I can. This first one is from a chapter I wrote on Bill Gross, who has founded many search companies (his latest is Snap), but Overture (nee GoTo nee Yahoo Search Marketing) was his biggest hit. I think Bill makes for one of the best stories in the book, and I hope I did him justice. This is a small portion of the chapter, titled "A Billion Dollars, One Nickel at a Time." Each chapter in the book is broken into sections, this excerpt starts with a section, about a third of the way through the chapter, which focuses on Gross's early insights into market economics. As with all things book related, I look forward to your feedback and clarifications/corrections. The Sugar Daddy: It’s All About Arbitrage When he was twelve, Gross lived in an apartment building in Encino, California, outside of Los Angeles. There were hundreds of kids in that complex, Gross recalls. “We all roller-skated together, played baseball together, swam together, did everything together,” he tells me. And when they had saved up enough money, they all made the pilgrimage to a local pharmacy, where they’d buy their fix of candy. “We used to hop the cinder-block wall surrounding the complex and go buy candy for a dime at the West Valley Medical Center,” he recalls. “We’d go there all the time.” Now here’s where it gets interesting. In Gross’s words: “One day I was at Savon [pronounced Save-on] on Ventura Boulevard and saw they had a special on candy, three for a quarter. So I bought five dol- lars worth—at eight and a third cents each—and brought them back to my apartment, where... [John Battelle's Searchblog]

Wed, 10 Aug 2005 09:57:41 GMT

Jane Kim, program manager for RSS in Internet Explorer, has written a useful post detailing the new RSS features in IE7. A few comments from me...

1) Microsoft has decided to call RSS "web feeds", at least for now. Jane says they're "still actively exploring what is the right name to use for RSS feeds". Although I agree that end users need not be concerned with knowing what RSS is - they just need to see the benefits of syndication and subscribing to information - I don't think 'web feeds' is any clearer than 'RSS'. Personally I think RSS and its orange branding has gotten too much traction on the Web already and it's too late to change it now.

Don't mess with the brand Microsoft - it's bigger than you. Even the Atom proponents admit that RSS is the brand name.

2) Discovery: "If a web feed is found, the web feed button on the toolbar lights up." Additionally it can play a sound. Bing! This is good stuff - it will help promote RSS feeds to normal Web users if it is highlighted in this manner. Apparently publishers will be able to control this setting. Naturally the user also can tweak their browser settings.

3) That format thing: "Beta 1 of Windows Vista and IE 7 for XP currently supports the web feed formats RSS .9x, RSS 1.0, and RSS 2.0. As Sean mentioned, Atom 0.3 and Atom 1.0 support will come in a later release."

I suppose the Atom folks will be slightly miffed. But how many feed-enabled blogs and websites don't have at least one varient of RSS .9x-2? (I actually don't know the answer to that, so someone feel free to enlighten me).

4) IE7 will display a browser-friendly version of the RSS feed - much like Feedburner does with my RSS feed. Again, this is a good way to make sure RSS gets adopted by the mainstream.

Summary

Not a bad start by Microsoft. It doesn't appear they have all the functionality they promised at Gnomedex ready to roll out yet - e.g. there was no mention of support for Simple List Extensions. This Beta 1 seems to be aimed at users, rather than developers. Having said that, there was also little mention of the RSS Reader functionality that IE7 will have. I expect we'll hear more soon.

[Creative Commons Blog - rss]

Wed, 10 Aug 2005 09:54:18 GMT

53 million pages licensed.

Yesterday Yahoo! announced that their search index had grown to 20 billion documents. That, along with continued adoption of Creative Commons licenses, explains 53 million linkbacks to our licenses according to Yahoo! linkback queries. In May, when Yahoo!'s index apparently consisted of 8 billion documents, we found 16 million pages with license links. So discounting the growth of Yahoo!'s index, the number of Creative Commons license links have increased by approximately one third in the past three months alone -- 53/(16*(20/8)) = 1.325. Take the exact numbers with a lump of salt, but the indication of growth is impressive nonetheless.

You can search for Creative Commons licensed content at Yahoo! Search for Creative Commons.

Wed, 10 Aug 2005 09:52:50 GMT

Stock Market Dependant Self-Watering Plant.

In most cases I would naturally say an idea like this would be completely worthless, but this only escapes the grasps of worthlessness by being an extremely cool. This plant, purchased at Home Depot is controlled by the stock fluctuations that the Home Depot stock is taking. Once a week a wifi adapter checks the stock and sends the data to electronic components that controls the watering. The idea is if the stock were to go low enough that the plant dies, then the plant is simply returned back to Home Depot and replaced free of charge thanks to their unconditional plant guarantee.

Rubber tree plant's health tied to Home Depot's stock price [BoingBoing]

[Gizmodo]

Wed, 10 Aug 2005 09:51:22 GMT

eBay Deal of the Day: WiFi Speed Spray.

Somebody is making something up, I think. However, anything scientific has to be true, including intelligent design, so this stuff must work. But don't take our word for it.

As your computer sends data, each bit also carries hundreds of invisible WiFi Speed Spray™ "scrubbing" molecules. It works at the speed of light. and even penetrates lead walls (not even Superman can do that!). Within .0025 seconds, the entire path between you and the receiver is cleaned, scrubbed, polished, and sanitized. You'll notice the improvement immediately as your productivity soars!

I could use some increased productivity. I could also use a beer. [Thanks, Scott]

Wi-Fi Speed Spray DramaticalIy Increase Data Throughput [eBay]

[Gizmodo]

Wed, 10 Aug 2005 09:46:22 GMT

Worldwide wonder.

The 10th birthday of the internet as a mass phenomenon is rightly being celebrated this week to mark a decade since the explosive stock market debut of Netscape, which triggered the dot.com boom and unleashed a friendly browser to navigate the web. The Guardian reports.

To understand the extraordinary revolution that swept the world so quickly, existing users need simply to imagine what life would now be like without email (on which corporate life depends), search engines such as Google, web companies such as Amazon, eBay and Yahoo, the ongoing explosion of online commerce, not to mention the burgeoning world of personal journals (blogs), downloaded music and films, free newspapers, web cameras, internet telephony (now the hottest thing on the web) and the growing convergence of the net and mobile phones.

... Although, contrary to the instincts of its early protagonists, the web has long since been colonised by commerce, it still nurtures its founding community spirit.

Wed, 10 Aug 2005 09:45:02 GMT

Buddyping.

[Thanks David!]

Inspired by a mobile social network system named Dodgeball, UK-based Buddyping also brings social networking to mobile communications:

If you're out on the town and want to find your friends, use buddyPing and your mobile phone (or the internet) to broadcast your whereabouts and to receive notification of your friends in the same area.

Just log into buddyPing (either via text message or using the "Your Location" feature once you have logged in via the web site) and we will scan your designated local area for friends and notify you of their location. We'll also notify them of your location so all your friends can find out what you're up to and where they can join you. This all happens in real time, and will continue until you logout of buddyPing.

Seeing that link's performance on del.icio.us.

Wed, 10 Aug 2005 09:42:49 GMT

Michal Migurski of Stamen Design has this site that gives a "visual analysis of del.icio.us popular links.The collection of stripes are a near real-time cumulative view of popular sites posted to the del.icio.us social bookmarking service,arranged left-to-right as old-to-new,in the order of first appearance.Color refers to relative growth (green) or decay (red) of the site's popularity on that day.Selecting a color chip shows a small graph of that link's performance over the previous month".

vox delicii

Quick del.icio.us search with Firefox.

Wed, 10 Aug 2005 09:38:41 GMT

RFID: To Tag or Not to Tag. Companies and government agencies increasingly use radio frequency identification technology to track products and people, and RFID opponents say it poses privacy risks. Here's what the technology is all about. By Kim Zetter. [Wired News]

Wed, 10 Aug 2005 09:36:56 GMT

Sorting the Uproar Over Downloads. It seems like Hollywood won in the Grokster ruling, but the file-sharing universe will be largely unaffected, at least for a while. What the federal ruling against Grokster really means. By Jeff Howe from Wired magazine. [Wired News]

Wed, 20 Jul 2005 09:48:06 GMT

Del.icio.us user Daniel Miessler searches del.icio.us bookmarks and tags from the Firefox address bar by typing d searchterm in the Firefox address bar.

Here's how to set it up:

Using Firefox, go to the del.icio.us tags page here (or your del.icio.us bookmarks page, or ANY page with a search box on it.)
Right click inside the search box. Choose "Add a Keyword for this Search."
Set the name to "delicious tags" and the keyword to dt

Now type dt lifehacks into the Firefox address bar, and you will be magically transported to the life hacks del.icio.us tag. Useful!

[Lifehacker]

Wed, 20 Jul 2005 09:45:08 GMT

Tattooed fruit en route. Xeni Jardin: Produce industry service company Durand-Wayland, Inc. developed a system for identifying produce with laser-etched codes in 2002. These "fruit tattoos" would replace those little stickers that always get stuck in your teeth when you bite into a nice, crisp apple while distracted. The technology's beginning to catch on, according to this NYT story.

A pear is just a pear, except when it is also a laser-coded information delivery system with advanced security clearance. And that is what pears - not to mention organic apples, waxy cucumbers and delicate peaches - are becoming in some supermarkets around the country. A new technology being used by produce distributors employs lasers to tattoo fruits and vegetables with their names, identifying numbers, countries of origin and other information that helps speed distribution. The marks are burned onto the outer layer of the skin and are visible to discerning consumers and befuddled cashiers alike.

Link to NYT article. 251

[Boing Boing]

Wed, 20 Jul 2005 09:43:06 GMT

Free Software for Busy People. Cory Doctorow: Free Software for Busy People is a new book from Mohammad Al-Ubaydli, a Bahraini MD who is on a mission to help information-civilians understand why they should use free/open source software. The book tells the story of six people from six walks of life (government administrator, MD, corporate exec, entrepreneur, Arab teacher, primary school teacher) who adopt free software. The book simply and clearly states the case for adopting free software and provides equally clear and simple explanations of how to switch and what to expect when you get there. You can buy a printed and bound copy of the book, download a PDF, or read it as a hyperlinked html file. Link (Thanks, Mohammad!)
[Boing Boing]

Wed, 20 Jul 2005 09:41:55 GMT

Web 2.0 Weekly Wrap-up, 4-10 July 2005.

A bit of admin before I start. The Web 2.0 Weekly Wrap-Up is looking for a new sponsor, now that ThePort Network has completed its sponsorship arrangement with me. Dan Backus from ThePort Network told me they had a lot of positive feedback to the sponsorship and their product offerings - which I was very pleased to hear. I want to thank Dan and ThePort Network for sponsoring me and I wish them all the best with their Web 2.0 product range.

So now I'd like to put a call out for a new sponsor. Please contact me to discuss.

This week: Big events and news on the Web, automatic content for the people, things you can do with RSS, API round-up, Techie Post of the Week: Social principles of Web 2.0.

Big events and news on the Web

It was a tough week for the Western world, when London was struck by a bombing attack. I don't want to use this tragic event as a backdrop for tech talk, but I do think it's noteworthy that the Web has become a crucial tool for news dissemination and discussion nowadays. The Wikipedia page on the London bombings was a comprehensive and thorough work-in-progress as the news unfolded. As was the BBC's Web coverage, so it's not like mainstream media is being run out of business. But it's clear that the Web is a key platform now when it comes to covering big news events - at least on a par with television and newspapers.

So-called social software websites played a big role too. Flickr was used extensively by people to post photos and for discussions. Personally I found myself visiting the sites of bloggers I read who live in London, are British expats and even kiwis who were in London at the time. And when you consider things like the LiveJournal Moodgrapher, which recorded a mood of "sadness and shock" amongst LiveJournalers following the attack, well you realise how integral the Web has become when dealing with such events.

On a less serious note, the Live 8 event was also covered very well on the Web. Indeed, apparently AOL's Web coverage was far superior to MTV's on the television. PaidContent.org quoted this from an AP person: "AOL's coverage was so superior, it may one day be seen as a historical marker in drawing people to computers instead of TV screens for big events." The latest Gillmor Gang has some interesting comments on this, particularly from guest Susan Mernit.

Automatic content for the people

This week I wrote a musing post about the new age of automated content we're seeing on the Web. I looked at (what I deemed to be) both good and bad examples of this phenomenon and concluded that my decisions about such matters are more moral than legal. It turned into a very interesting discussion, which is still open. As I noted in a comment I made later in the thread, my goals for this post were to come to an understanding of:

a) where my own content fits in with this new era of automated websites - I've established that I'm comfortable with sites like Planet Web 2.0 and Memeorandom, and even [Article Bot-generated] Stock Pick Report to a degree; and

b) what things should we, as users of the Web, be wary of in this new era of automation. And I think we should be wary of hundreds of thousands of robot-generated pages that have no redeeming social value for the Web and will clutter up search engine results.

It's a great discussion about Web 2.0 morals and ethics. Join in, the conversation's still happening!

Things you can do with RSS

Tim Yang continues his run of excellent tools and resources - he was the bloke who created the Google News To RSS Scraper called scrappygoo. Now he's come up with a Wiki featuring an extensive list of things you can do with RSS. Things like:

- Track Fedex packages
- Get bargains at Ebay
- Get stock updates
- Get the weather reports
- Find out what people are saying about you, your company, your products
- Track Music, radio shows, TV clips
- Stay updated on someone's schedule
- Get cinema schedule updates
- Read your favourite comics

Check out the wiki for the whole list.

API round-up

But wait, there's more! I also want to highlight Chris Campbell's round-up of APIs (via Eric Lunt). As Chris wrote, "if you're interested in adding to the Web 2.0 goodness, you've got to start understanding APIs." Too right - go check it out!

Techie Post of the Week: Social principles of Web 2.0

Ian Davis (of Planet Web 2.0 fame) wrote a great post about what he calls the Web 2.0 principles of "participation, openness and communication." Here's how he defines this:

"Web 2.0 is an attitude not a technology. It's about enabling and encouraging participation through open applications and services. By open I mean technically open with appropriate APIs but also, more importantly, socially open, with rights granted to use the content in new and exciting contexts."

Obviously this theory has a lot to do with the whole automated content issue I raised this week. Often when we talk of Web 2.0, we mean APIs and RSS and XML and all those other acronyms. But the whole idea of the 'read/write' Web is that everyone can and does contribute thoughts and ideas to the Web. So the social aspects of Web 2.0 - participation, openness, two-way communication - are just as important as the platform and the acronyms. On this I heartily endorse Ian's position.

But we all have a lot of work to do yet, when it comes to defining what is socially acceptable use of content and the Web - and what is not. I myself am still working it out and I'm only just beginning to get comfortable with the idea of other sites re-publishing my writing. The Remix Culture requires a big mindshift for everyone, so we're all figuring it out as we go along.

That's a wrap for another week!

Web 2.0 Weekly Wrap-up, 11-17 July 2005.

Wed, 20 Jul 2005 09:41:10 GMT

New Sponsor & Special Offer For R/WW Readers

I'm pleased to announce Onfolio as the new sponsor of the Weekly Wrap-Up! To celebrate, Onfolio has a special offer for Read/Write Web readers. The following coupon code entitles the bearer to $30 off a purchase of Onfolio Professional before August 31st, a 30% saving off the normal $99.95 price. To use the coupon, enter it at the time of purchase. Coupon Code: RM857202

RSS Growing Up So Fast

A number of posts came out this week with thoughts on how RSS is evolving and the need for new kinds of feed management tools. VC Fred Wilson thinks centralised RSS Readers (like Bloglines) are on the way out. What's needed, according to Fred, is new ways to manage our feeds and make them available to other apps to use. An example he gives is "applications and services that can use the [RSS] infrastructure that Microsoft is building into the operating system layer to add value."

Don't miss the comments to Fred's post, there are some excellent points. e.g. Charlie Wood says that Feedburner is a great example of a "value added service" (they would be my prime example too). Heather Green then comments "What I am interested in watching develop are the services that are created on top of RSS, like maybe a service that parses for resumes or job listings."

In a similar vein, Tommy Lee look-a-like Nivi wrote an interesting post entitled RSS is the TCP/IP Packet of Web 2.0. In it he asked: "will RSS become the fundamental building block of Web 2.0 and the Internet Operating System?". See also his follow-up post, featuring an analysis of Jonathan Aquino's "command line for the Web" app YubNub.

Other thought-provoking posts on these themes include David Beisel's musings, Heather Green's The Evolution of RSS, According to Yahoo, and Michael Parekh's theory about "Broadband Content End-Runs". All of this is head-spinning stuff, but well worth pondering if you're interested in finding out how RSS is beginning to outgrow its blogging roots.

Oh and incidentally, Atom (an alternative RSS format) was all but officially released this week. I'll review this further once the techies have finished their latest bout of handbags at ten paces :-)

Amazon Turns 10

This week Amazon celebrated its 10th birthday. Amazon is in a way is the quintessential Web 2.0 company, because they've been using the Web as a platform for all of their 10-year existence. They recognized the power of the Read/Write Web before most Internet companies, by inviting their users to contribute reviews and rank products - amongst many other community-enabling features. They were one of the first bigco's to open up their data with APIs and they made it easy for third-party sellers to become affiliates (currently more than a quarter of Amazon's sales are via a third party). Not to mention that Amazon sold products from The Long Tail long before Chris Anderson popularized the term.

And boy did Amazon celebrate in style! They ran promotions for a Hall of Fame, Wish List Spree, Special Deliveries and finished up with A Show of Thanks - a live concert with "Bob Dylan, Norah Jones, Bill Maher, Hall of Fame writers, and exclusive, behind-the-scenes footage from the Lord of the Rings trilogy."

nb: I have a post brewing about Amazon's future, which hopefully I'll publish this week.

Yahoo's Job Search Engine

This week Yahoo announced a new "jobs search engine" - and it's a shot across the bow for the online jobs market. Yahoo HotJobs crawls the Web looking for job vacancies and automatically adds them to its index. Although this will probably "cannibalize" its paid listings, it'll also take a big bite out of its two main rivals in this market - Monster and CareerBuilder.

Forrester analyst Charlene Li predicts that the next big thing in online classifieds is social classifieds, "where the ability to connect people to each other will be the hallmark of success." This is actually already a feature of social networking sites such as LinkedIn and niche market blogs like PaidContent.org.

Professional Blogging Pays Off

My Australian cousin Darren Rowse announced recently that he got a Google Adsense cheque for "between $10k and $20k ($USD)" for the month of May. Holy Gamoly! Darren works extremely hard on writing content for his 20 or so blogs, so full credit to him for the financial rewards.

The income revelation led to a Slashdotting and the inevitable blog-trashing comments from the /. community. But some commenters had good things to say, like this one: "He [Darren] is just an info junkie who has happened to find a way to make a living at his passion."

Professional blogging is different things to different people. For some, it's part of their day job. For me, it's my way of trying to get a day job like those guys ;-). Reputation is my currency in the blogosphere and I'm hoping it pays off in the long run.

Techie Post of the Week: RSS is for creating systems

I'm still spinning my wheels on the future of RSS. Dave Winer wrote an interesting riff on this. Here's an excerpt:

"RSS is more than a format, it's an approach to creating systems. [...] The whole point of RSS, Jim [Moore] argues (imho correctly) is to make connecting systems together so easy that users can do it themselves, without any help from system managers or vendors. This is a brilliant observation, in all my years thinking about RSS, I had never approached it from this direction."

I'm not entirely sure what that means yet, but if Dave says it's a brilliant observation - then obviously the rest of us need to think seriously about it.

That's a wrap for another week!

Wed, 20 Jul 2005 09:40:31 GMT

Web 2.0 Sampler.

I'm making yet another attempt at a regular branded list of Web 2.0 links. Let me admit straight up that I've copied the following format from Ypulse, Anastasia Goodstein's excellent site that covers New Media for Generation Y. Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, as I have discovered, so I thought it's worth giving this a go on my blog.

- Mash-Ups the wild wild west of the Web (pretty good business overview of Web 2.0 and Remix Culture - and don't miss the slide show 'Sampling the Web's Best Mash-Ups')
- Steve Rubel wants Microsoft to bet the company on Web 2.0 (in the comments, I pointed to my own analysis of Microsoft and Web 2.0 - in short, I think millions of Windows-run 'devices' will be their interface into Web 2.0)
- Om Malik gets cozy with Marc Andressen (I like Marc's point that new minds and new tech talents will grow in places "we would have never looked before". right on!)
- Latest Harry Potter book digitally pirated within 12 hours (a fully scanned + proofread ebook within 12 hours... I still don't want to read it though) (via waxy)
- More great Tim O'Reilly Web 2.0 quotes (someone advised me recently that I need to work on my "pithy quotes", if I'm to get any mainstream press coverage as an analyst - see Red Herring link below)
- RSS Goes Corporate (I gave some background info for this Red Herring article, but I don't rate a mention)
- You can't sell content online (Mary Hodder says selling services that help manage data and content - such as filtering, search and aggregation - is where the money is)
- Charlie Wood forsees the rise of post-processing feed services, such as inserting ads into feeds. (what's really interesting will be the non-advertising services. e.g. how about more remixing functionality)
- News Corp buys MySpace owner for $580 million (I hadn't realized that mainstream music groups like Black Eyed Peas and R.E.M. streamed their latest releases on MySpace)
- Does MySpace sale signal Web 2.0 peak? (I agree with Adam Rifkin in the comments, it's only just begun!)

Wed, 20 Jul 2005 09:40:00 GMT

Web 2.0 Sampler.

- There are 1.2 million feeds in Bloglines that "matter", says Ask Jeeves Blog (meaning at least 1 person subscribes to it. nb: SEW and Niall both point out that some blogs have multiple feeds)
- Feedburner begins to expand into "major media accounts and global relationships" (fulfilling all the hype I lavished onto them in my Best Web 2.0 Companies of 2004 post last year)
- Comparing tech companies to countries (check out the comments - there are some funny comparisons. e.g. "delicious is Chechnya: Comprehensible only to those inside.")
- Profile of Bokee, China's top blogging network (they're planning a "virtual currency", a la Korea's Cyworld, which will enable Bokee bloggers to charge their readers)
- Study finds usability issue with blogs (if you're a blog consultant, the PDF report is well worth pondering)
- Tony Gentile tells us to expect continued integration in Yahoo's network (yes the social networking, aggregation, RSS, media, etc pieces are all coming together quite nicely for Yahoo)
- PaidContent.org on Yahoo's Silicon Valley and Hollywood goings-on (see also WSJ.com and Om Malik)
- Greasemonkey has a serious security flaw (Mark Pilgrim sounded the warning and the Greasemonkey blog has details)
- Slashdot community debates the future of Firefox (as one commenter said, "I want to know how firefox devs plan to address security concerns with the browsers.")
- Backing up your Gmail account (use pop3 or the auto-forward feature)

nb: The photo of the dog and its long tail is from Anil Dash's Flickr photo stream.

NEC debuts Litebird mobile router for high-speed access on the road.

Tue, 19 Jul 2005 14:53:02 GMT

We spend more time than we like on commuter trains, and we’ve gotten used to the vagaries of wireless access on the move. Though solutions like EV-DO and EDGE are adequate, we still long for the kind of reliable, sustained connection that makes you forget you’re sitting in a sardine can. While T-Mobile has started hooking up London-bound commuter trains, it looks like the next big step is coming from — no surprise — Japan, where the trains are faster, cleaner and are actually used by a majority of commuters. NEC is working on a new mobile router, the Litebird, designed specifically to be used in moving vehicles. According to the company, the Litebird can offer connectivity at 6 Mbps in vehicles going up to 125 mph. NEC is a little vague about how Litebird actually works, saying it offers “seamless roaming” by using mobile IP technology. This would make it a different solution than what T-Mobile is offering in London, which is basically a network of train-based hotspots that works with base stations positioned along the tracks. It also makes NEC’s routers usable in a range of vehicles, and the company is already planning to offer it for ambulances and other emergency-response vehicles.

Read | Permalink | Email this | Linking Blogs | Comments
© 2005 Weblogs, Inc.

Scottish group develops e-paper prototype.

[Engadget]

Tue, 19 Jul 2005 14:51:58 GMT

Here’s yet another group working on e-paper, for those of you keeping score at home: a team at Scotland’s Paisley University Thin Film Centre has produced a working prototype of what they say is a working e-paper prototype, which can download info into a lightweight, high-contrast device that the developers refer to as “cheap and flexible.” The research is being funded by DuPoint-Teijin Films and plastic electronics developer Plastic Logic. As with other similar projects, we assume this one is a long way from developing anything that can be commercialized. For the record, though, it’s worth noting that the local paper, The Scotsman, has breathlessly declared this to be a “potentially life-changing creation.”

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© 2005 Weblogs, Inc.

[Engadget]

Tue, 19 Jul 2005 14:50:32 GMT

The Engadget Interview: Blake Krikorian, CEO of Sling Media. For this week’s Engadget Interview, veteran journalist J.D. Lasica spoke with Sling Media CEO Blake Krikorian about the rollout of the Slingbox, its disruptive effects on Hollywood business models, the notions of place-shifting and personal broadcasting, and an announcement he’s making right here on Engadget about support for a new operating system.

This week I’ll be combining my questions with a few that our readers have posted on the site.

I saw those, and I was like, “Wow! Pretty impressive.”

Let’s start with the basics. How many employees do you have, where are you located, and when did Sling Media get started?

We have 30 to 40 folks. We’re headquartered in San Mateo in the Bay Area, as well as in Bangalore, India. We merged with DiTango a year ago.

How did you get interested in this space personally?

Myself and several other folks on the team have been in this digital convergence space for about 15 years. I started out in this field at a company called General Magic—a spinout from Apple—back in the early 90s. We were out to create an operating system and programming language for a variety of devices as well as a new electronic marketplace. This is before the Web came along.

Where did the idea for the Slingbox come from?

Five years before founding Sling Media, I had a company with my brother Jason called id8 Group Holdings. We were advising many large, established companies in this convergence space: Microsoft, Samsung, Toshiba. We helped them define new products. We were traveling quite a bit in the summer of 2002 and we were pretty diehard San Francisco Giants fans. That was the year they finally wound up going to the Series, before falling apart in the sixth game. We were on the road and just dying to watch the ballgames.

I signed up to hear the Giants on Real before I discovered that the fine print said you couldn’t listen to your local teams. Then I was on CNN.com and once again there was a virtual hand reaching out to ask for another $10 a month. Then I got a new mobile phone with video services for another $10 a month. But none of them gave me what I wanted to watch: the Giants, or Comedy Central, or any of my shows.

I said, you know, I’m paying $80 a month for cable, and for high-speed data in and out of my home. I’ve got a TiVo and all these display devices — laptops, PDAs, cell phones. Why can’t I just watch and control my living-room TV wherever I am? So the Slingbox was born out of consumer frustration.

We created Sling Media, and our view is that, with a lot of hard work and a little luck, we will be able to scale the business and create families of products for the digital media lifestyle.

Can you describe what the Slingbox is in 20 words or less?

It’s a $249 box sold at retail that lets you place-shift your living-room TV experience to wherever you happen to have a broadband Net connection.

The Slingbox place-shifts that TV experience—whether it’s cable TV, a TiVo, satellite receiver, anything. It will redirect your TV signal to a laptop or desktop PC now. Eventually we’ll have other handhelds and platforms. You can be halfway across the world in a hotel room in China, or in the backyard in the hottub with a wireless laptop.

What do you need for this to work?

You need a home network—and a lot of consumers say, “I don’t have a network but I have a wireless router.” So OK, you have a broadband router. You also need a TV signal, and a Windows XP laptop or desktop computer.

So what Tivo did for time-shifting, you hope to do for place shifting?

Exactly right, couldn’t have said it better. The DVR, especially pioneered by TiVo and Replay, delivered on the original promise of the VCR, to allow you to time-shift and watch when you want. We’re just taking that and extending it to the next level, so you can watch TV wherever you want to be. Importantly, it doesn’t have to be pre-recorded, it could be live TV.

Can you explain “personal broadcasting’’?

We needed a term to explain this new category. We call it a Slingbox personal broadcaster because it place-shifts your TV experience, but it can also be used for a variety of other forms of redirecting content. Maybe you want to personally broadcast some of your own content. I may want to film my daughter at her swim meet and broadcast it to my parents halfway around the world.

With the notion of place-shifting and the core technologies in the Slingbox, we have visions for where this can go beyond the TV application. But at the start, it’s important for us to focus on one or two core scenarios to help people get their arms around it. Given that people absolutely love television and their TiVos, we wanted to focus on that solution first.

Can you sling your personal video to friends or family today?

Technically, it’s possible to do that now, but it’s a pretty kludgy solution. We’ve seen people who wanted to immediately use the Slingbox to broadcast a live amateur rock band. You need a video camera, a Slingbox, and you need to configure it manually, but it can be done. But we want that functionality to come with utter simplicity. The people who read Engadget have the sophistication and they’ll probably go start using the Slingbox for uses like this now and start demanding that we accelerate some of our development efforts.

How are early sales going?

They’ve been overwhelmingly brisk, we’ve been blown away. It’s still early, but the sales are bordering on insane. We launched the product on June 30 nationwide at CompUSA’s 300 stores. BestBuy just brought it out on July 11. Within the first four or five days, we were sold out.

[Note: The interview was interrupted for a few hours while Krikorian appeared on the TV program “Access Hollywood.”]

Welcome back. How did the TV taping go?

Man, it’s been insane today. We were taping right next door to Jay Leno’s show, with a whole bunch of crazy people running around. The thing that’s interesting is how mainstream the interest in our product is. Typically you’d think it would take a long time for the non-geeks to get excited about something like this. But for whatever reason, I think people kind of get it.

With DVRs or TiVo, you’re talking about time-shifting, something that’s abstract. But people know their TV experience and they can visualize themselves in some place other than their living room. They just go, ah ha!

Who are you targeting at the outset?

Clearly the overall market is large. It’s people who just love television and have broadband. Yes, there are the heat seekers who love doing cool stuff with their media, and they’ll be there no matter what. There are also the mobile professionals who are on the road frequently and want to watch TV.

But we see two other core groups: There are also people who are TiVo or DVR users who are interested in having that experience in other rooms in the house. There’s another set of people who are tethered to their desks at work and they have a keen interest in television, whether it’s news junkies who want to be tapped into world or financial news, or avid sports fans at work, or those who want to watch their local team on their laptop while barbecuing in the back yard. We’ve gotten emails from people who say they love it because they can watch their team in the bathroom. There are also those who may be living abroad for an extended period.

Mike Langberg in the San Jose Mercury News wrote the other day, why wouldn’t you just burn your recorded TV shows onto DVD and watch it on your laptop?

Sure, that could be done. The Slingbox isn’t the only way of enjoying media. But there’s something about having the instant gratification, not having to worry about planning ahead and burning a DVD. People want instant access to stuff, they don’t want to have to deal with it.

You mentioned TiVo. Why would TiVoToGo be a better solution than buying a Slingbox?

No. 1, I’m a huge TiVo fan. Unfortunately, TiVoToGo applies only to the Series 2, which is like 15 percent of the TiVo market. Besides that, TiVoToGo is a solution that’s good for planning ahead. It takes hours to dump the stuff over. So while it’s useful, it doesn’t address the kind of instant gratification the Slingbox provides.

But the two are pretty complementary. In the future, you may see TiVoToGo functionality built into the Slingplayer client. We don’t have a religious issue about it — we just love TV and we think there’s a lot of different ways to watch it.

Let’s talk business model briefly. Without subscriptions, are you depending just on sale of the boxes to make money?

That was a major decision for us, and consumers are responding positively to it. There’s subscription fatigue out there, and it’s a barrier for products to be adopted. When we set out we said, we need to hit a certain price point, and we need to create a business model where we can make money selling a box. That’s counterintuitive, especially if talk to the VCs on Sand Hill Road, but we said, “It’s time to get back to basics and keep it simple and sell a device.”

Over time there could be additional features and applications we could add to a Slingbox for incremental revenue. It’s hard to tell. After people start buying our boxes, we’ll make a bunch of other products, some hardware, some software, some service.

It sounds like you’re willing to take the Slingbox places that TiVo fears to tread, but perhaps not quite as far as ReplayTV. Tell me about that delicate balancing act you’re doing with Hollywood.

When we set out to make this product, you can bet we did a whole lot of homework up front to make sure that what we were doing was under the fair use provisions of copyright law. After all our analysis and the functionality we introduced and the limitations, we feel really, really comfortable. Some of those limitations include making sure the Slingbox is not a one-to-many device. Certainly it will stream to multiple devices, but it will only do so one at a time.

The very first fear you heard from the folks in Hollywood was, my God, now J.D. is going to serve up television to 50,000 of his closest friends with one Slingbox in his house. When they started to dig into it, interestingly the discussions we’ve had have been incredibly positive, and the light starts to go on when people see this is additive and not a cannibalistic application.

Let’s take the television networks. We recently had a sit-down with one of the national networks. One of the execs said, “You’re tripling the number of television sets on the planet. Look, we’ve got our decades-old distribution model, where we have the content, it goes through the pipes into people’s homes. What you’re doing is selling this $250 device to a consumer to let him watch our programming more often than he used to and helping extend our reach. The TV business and ratings have been hemorrhaging for the past 20 years. This is an opportunity for us to regain those eyeballs.”

Yet, a recent article in the Hollywood Reporter quotes a CBS executive as saying they see you as a threat.

Historically, when you look at how the television industry came about, the industry was built on a notion of exclusivity for certain geographies. You had these affiliate stations and you had the right to get “Oprah” for this part of the Bay Area while another station aired it in Carmel. But the Internet has changed our notion of geography and boundaries.

Look, any time a new technology comes about, it disrupts old business models. Any time there’s a new technology that empowers the consumer, some people in the industry get nervous because it’s all about control, and there are a lot of people in the industry who don’t want to see the consumer have control. But you gotta deal with this. Let’s look at the benefits that come out of this.

In a lot of ways, a DVR is much more disruptive than the Slingbox, because the DVR empowers consumers to skip commercials. That’s not really what we’re doing.

We hear complaints that it’s possible for someone on the West Coast to get a friend on the East Coast to beam them “Desperate Housewives” three hours ahead of time. But you could do that today without the Slingbox. With a DirecTV account, I get a Vonage account with a New York area code and I can watch it early in high definition.

We don’t condone piracy, and we’re not out to say, “Screw you” to the broadcast community. Our focus is: we know who our customer is—the end user—and we’re not going to forget that. We think there are win-win solutions, but we’ve also seen companies that are more concerned with serving the industry than solving the consumers’ problems.

Fred von Lohmann of the EFF fears that after Grokster, companies like Sling Media will begin putting DRM, or “hobble-ware,” into your products. Unfounded?

We haven’t had any requests by anyone saying, “Please do this or make the product in a different way.” Who in their right minds will stand up and say, “You the consumer don’t have the right to watch a television program you’re paying for”? You ask the man in the street and they’ll say yes 100 percent of the time.

I think Fred’s right that there’s a battle going on and it will only heat up further. It’s going to be about control and does the consumer get control, or does the industry get to decide everything? It concerns me. Those are battles that need to be fought. If we start going down the path of hobble-ware, no one knows what implications that has for us in the future. It could start to stifle innovation. We could get surpassed by other countries who start out-executing us. Or new technologies are not going to come to market.

Does the Slingbox have fast-forwarding and skipping-ahead capabilities?

All we want to do is give you the exact TV viewing experience of your living room. If I connect to my TiVo, the Slingbox’s virtual remote control comes up on my wireless laptop and the remote looks exactly like my TiVo remote. Our UI is fully skinnable, so you’ll see more of these customized UIs that will evolve. We now support 5,000 devices out there — tons of DVD players, set-top boxes, cable and satellite receivers, DVRs, VCRs.

If you happen to have a 30-second skip button on your remote control, we’ll give you the same experience. If on your TiVo you’ve figured out how to create your 30-second easter egg thing, we’ll do that. You know, I think DirecTV blows it out every week.

That happens to you, too?

Yeah! They’re sending something over the airwaves to delete it. I’ve been going online and haven’t seen anyone report or blog about this. It’s weird. Why is this being deleted?

The other thing I’ve never figured out is, the Microsoft Media Center has a 30-second skip built into it, and why don’t they get shit about it? You record shows on your Media Center, those suckers are in the open. You can take those MPEG-2 files and email them to people. Why hasn’t there been a big uproar about that?

One of our readers asked how much bandwidth you need for a satisfactory viewing experience with the Slingbox.

You definitely don’t need a T1 line, though it would be sweet. One of the core requirements for us was we had to make sure that the product works with the existing infrastructure. To watch TV over the laptop over your home network, all you need is 802.11b. Some people say that’s impossible, but we’ve created some proprietary algorithms and optimization technologies, which we call Slingstream. It dynamically will adjust your video stream to work within whatever bandwidth conditions you have, which change in real time. The same thing applies with your upstream bandwidth outside of the house. It’s subjective, but I think you really need a DSL or cable service with a minimum of 256K up, which most people have these days. If you’re watching it on a smaller screen, then even 100K looks pretty darn good.

Will you be bringing the Slingbox out in the UK market soon?

Yes. We’ll probably have it by the end of the year. We’re soliciting feedback from consumers to determine how we want to roll out in that market.

We made our first delivery to a UK customer last week. We had a guy in a forum who was dying for it, and he got some NTSC-to-PAL converter and figured it out. Our VP of operations was flying through Heathrow, so I had him bring a unit and he met the dude in Heathrow and the guy’s going crazy on it. We’ll have a PAL version in the third quarter. We might just sell it online at first.

When will a Windows Mobile and Palm version come out?

We’re looking to have Windows Mobile in the next few months. It’ll clearly be there by the end of the year. Palm is an interesting one, I’ll be getting together with members of their executive team later this month. The first Treo sucked in terms of video performance, but the new 650 has actually got a lot more horsepower and it’s pretty sweet. No date on that yet, but it’s looking like we’ll support the Palm sooner rather than later.

What about a Mac version?

We don’t have any announcement yet. We intend to release it in the next few months. Sometimes working with Apple involves getting our Slingstream technology to fully work on a Mac, which means we might need some cooperation from the company that holds the keys to that. That company is not necessarily the easiest to partner with. But it’s great to see the demand from the consumers, because that gives us a lot more ammunition when we approach them. So I actually love the Mac guys complaining and pounding on it, so I urge them to keep it up.

Would Virtual PC be a solution?

I’ve tried to run Slingstream on my G5 iMac with Virtual PC, and the performance is terrible, but I’ve heard from others who run it on Powerbook, and they say the performance with Virtual PC is pretty good.

Is there a way to know if someone else is watching the TV while you fiddle with the Internet-connected version of the Slingbox?

What happens is, the N on the front of the Slingbox lights up when it’s slinging, so you can look at it and say, “Hey, man, someone’s watching my TV, what’s going on?”

Can I watch U.S. television when I’m in Europe, or vice-versa?

Today you can be traveling in Europe or anywhere in the world and watch your U.S. programming, no problem. Now, to use the Slingbox in your home in the U.K., if you want to plug it in and use the built-in tuner, you need a PAL tuner. The Slingbox currently uses NTSC only.

If you’re in the U.S. and wanted to watch programs from your home in the U.K., there are no requirements on the player side, it’s all about that Slingbox back in the U.K. needs to support the PAL video standard, so there’s a PAL-to-NTSC converter you can get.

Can one Slingbox stream to multiple desktops in a corporate setting?

Right now, because of the limitations we’ve imposed, the Slingbox does only one-to-one, but we’ve gotten a lot of requests, and we’re considering building a corporate box that would allow multicasting inside a local area network.

Is it possible for a ground-breaking technology to find acceptance in the U.S. marketplace without a BestBuy distributorship or a name brand like Sony?

We’re really proud of the fact that, from day one, we’ve launched in over 1,000 stores at BestBuy and CompUSA. Companies like BestBuy will typically not take your product if you’re a new company and if they do they’ll work with you on a trial basis. Here, they’ve rolled it out nationwide, and that’s a pretty rare thing. They’re one of the few retailers that do their own user testing before they decide to carry a product.

What about OEM relationships?

In the convergence space, it doesn’t make sense to plant a religious flag. One day you’re a product, and the next day you’re a feature. You can’t take a religious stance, you have to embrace where the market goes. Should this technology be a feature that’s embedded into a set-top box someday? Sure, why not?

From day one we’ve basically built it as a core place-shifting engine in the Slingbox and a core set of software that can be applied to a variety of other features and products.

What about the ability to place-shift other media like images, jpegs and music on a home network?

Video, from a technical perspective, is the real hard one. So then if you decide you want to support other forms of media, by all means we can go do that. I want to hear from the users and consumers on whether they want that. When I hear of things like place-shifting your audio or pictures, there are a lot of great ways to do that already. I have all my pictures on my laptop and my music on my MP3 player. I don’t want to start supporting all these features that will confuse the heck out of consumers. You want to do one or two things really, really well.

What about supporting high definition?

We have stuff in the labs right now. It’s a question of when is the right time to do so and at what price point. It’s dangerous for a startup company to make a product that costs $1,000 from the get-go. You might see a hi-def version from us sooner than you might think.

One of your readers asked about connecting 1394 from an HD cable box to the Slingbox. That’s really cool, because then you could take the native HD MPEG-2 and the Slingbox can be a real-time transcoding engine. Technically, it’s absolutely possible. The question is, what’s going to happen with the broadcast flag with copy-once, copy-never content, which is still tied up in the courts.

This is where it gets scary. There is a law out there, the DMCA, that states very clearly that you cannot circumvent encryption schemes, and if you do you’ve violated federal law. Depending on how some of these battles play out, consumers may not be able to do what they’d like with their media. Today, we’re taking in analog video so we’re not violating that law.

Why did you decide to use the Windows Media format rather than a video codec like H.264?

That was a funny question. If anything, Windows Media is the most open of those standards—it has the best quality, performance and has the most straightforward licensing. H.264 we might support in the future, but licensing H.264 is kind of a nightmare because there are several patent holders and it’s not clear who do you pay.

What’s ahead for Sling Media?

First, we’ll take direction from our customers and let them know we’re responding to their needs. For example, when we initially shipped the product, we were getting tons of requests for Windows 2000. Our VP of software spent a few all-nighters, created a new build, and as of tonight we’re going to release a new beta that supports Win2K.

As a company we’ll be focusing on better video quality on a Slingbox, some new upgrades coming soon will improve the codec, supporting more clients. But besides that, our vision for Sling Media is we want to become a brand that people expect great products from. We want to create a family of products that address the digital media lifestyle. With a little luck and a lot of hard work, we’ll have some other interesting products that could be quite different from the Slingbox, but that will empower the consumer to enjoy that lifestyle.

Any chance you or one of your managers can stop by and post answers to some of the other questions our readers have asked?

Absolutely.

J.D. Lasica’s new book about the digital media revolution is Darknet : Hollywood’s War Against the Digital Generation (Wiley & Sons).

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© 2005 Weblogs, Inc.

Mobile community design: MoSoSo for backpackers.

[Engadget]

Sat, 21 May 2005 22:04:22 GMT

While mobile devices may not have been designed with community use in mind, several researchers in Australia are investigating how to create devices and services useful for community media. My latest article for TheFeature covers this mobile community media design research:

Jeff Axup, a Ph.D candidate in the University of Queensland, Australia's Information Environments program, specializes in Mobile Community Design. He's working from a challenging foundation: although mobile telephones -- both devices and services -- were never designed to support community uses, more and more SMSers, mobile IMers and Mobile Social Software experimenters are using their small-screen, tiny-keyboard devices to kludge together roving social networks, smart mobs and other forms of mobile community. Axup and his colleagues believe good design begins with observing users in their natural environment.

Web 2.0 News: Firefox, VCs, MSN Spaces.

Sat, 21 May 2005 22:01:15 GMT

25 Will Enter, 5 Will Leave (with Books). From around 25 entries received in the book giveaway, four copies of Radio UserLand Kick Start were mailed today to Rod Kratochwill, Ole Olson, Gary Secondino and Nick Starr.

Steve Kirks is working with UserLand Software on Radio 9, a major upgrade to the software. Though I suspect that the upcoming release will affect weblog publishing features covered in early chapters of my book, Kick Start emphasizes two aspects of Radio that are important to learn and unlikely to change much in the future: the object database and UserTalk scripting language.

A fifth copy of the book will be sent to Marinus as soon as I find one. I accidentally gave away more copies than I own. [Workbench]

Wed, 13 Apr 2005 16:28:11 GMT

A daily shot of news from your favourite Web 2.0 blog. Each item has a main link, one or two lines of R/WW commentary, plus views of the story from other bloggers.

Start-up building on top of Firefox

ZDNet reports that a company called Round Two is building "a new crop of products and services that will enhance your Firefox experience."

Views:
Slashdot: "...they are offering extension support and bundling for corporations which want to adopt Firefox"
Round Two website - doesn't have any products yet, but they're sponsoring a number of Firefox extensions and add-ons.

My comment:
This is a great example of using the Web as a platform for business. It's been said before that Open Source provides opportunities for new businesses to bundle OS products into user-friendly packages, along with providing support. This looks like such a play - and they'll add new products to the mix too.

Venture Capitalists Bullish

AP reports: "Venture capitalists ended 2004 on their most profitable run since the dot-com bust, continuing a gradual recovery that has coincided with the stock market's renewed interest in young companies."

My comment:
If VCs are happy, then we're all happy :-) There don't seem to be as many IPOs these days though - start-ups are more interested in getting bought by a bigco. A sign of a more risk-averse Internet climate nowadays?

Volvo Sponsors MSN Spaces

According to the press release, Volvo partnered with Microsoft's blogging service "to reach users who are engaged in telling the stories of their lives, mirroring the "Volvo for life" brand campaign."

Views:
Andy Lark comments: "Maybe that's a reason not to use MSN Spaces - the fact you don't get to choose who is advertising in your personal space."
Steve Rubel sees "three distinct groups of blog advertisers forming".

My comment:
MS and Volvo think these adverts on MSN Spaces will "add value to consumer's experience". Hmmmm. Well I guess it's better than all those pop-up ads we used to get in the Tripod days ;-)

Other Web 2.0 Links Today

The Aggregation Kool-Aid - points out that aggregation is only part of the solution; relevance/matching are the key problems to solve.

Is the Internet Under-Hyped? - sure, we can always use more exaggeration and overstatement...

Yahoo! News Adds Custom RSS Feeds - this was from last week, but I didn't mention it at the time. Yahoo one-ups Google News (which has email notifications, but it's not the same).

Google top home for blogs - Google's Blogger.com, LiveJournal.com and Xanga.com lead the blog authoring tool market. MSN is about to crash the party though, driving their fancy volvos no doubt.

Hook you up with whoever and whatever's local.

Wed, 13 Apr 2005 16:24:46 GMT

MEETRO is an online meeting place that lets you find new friends, events, restaurants, etc [^] based on wherever you are when using MEETRO.

You can chat on AIM, Yahoo, MSN, ICQ with Meetro users in your vicinity, whether you're at home or in a foreign city, find out what's going on in their area, share photo gallerie, etc.

First time i read about an idea that might make me love IM!

Via del.icio.us/tag/socail_software.

Sun, 20 Mar 2005 08:51:57 GMT

Instant message a phone. Old news but still good news - you can send a text message to any SMS-enabled phone via AOL Instant Messenger. Just IM the screen name +17185551212, where 7185551212 is the phone number you want to SMS. Add the number... [Lifehacker]

Sun, 20 Mar 2005 08:46:13 GMT

AdSense Click Tracker.

PHP Click Tracker - Track Ad Clicks Free: This little script claims to log what AdSense ads are being clicked on your site.

It appears to put an event handler on clicks in the AdSense DIV, then looks for the words "go to" in the status bar when something is clicked (I think anyway [~] I'm no JavaScript ninja...). It then redirects the request through an interstitial PHP page (there's an ASP version too) that logs the click to a database.

Sat, 19 Mar 2005 08:05:32 GMT

Digital Play: Reloaded.

Digital Play: Reloaded opens on March 18 at the Museum of the Moving Image in New York. The exhibit will festure Pac-Mondrian , Katamari Damacy and eight other innovative digital games.

Other new installations include Arcadia, an arcade-style PC game from Gamelab, which challenges audiences to play four retro-inspired video games at one time.

Stepmania, an independently created, open-source version of the arcade dance game Dance Dance Revolution. Unlike its commercial counterpart, Stepmania incorporates audiences[base '] music collections and dance patterns, which are shared online.

Music-, dance-, and movement-oriented video games originating in Japan constitute a shift from traditional, often violent game scenarios. Classic arcade games from the 1980s are paired with current home-based games to contrast their approaches to such action-related topics as driving and waging battle on land and in space. Though the graphics have changed significantly, patterns of play remain similar.

In the lobby of the museum, Paul Johnson's video game sculpture, Maiden Flight, shows how the habits of a "snacking couch potato" determine the fate of a far-away space station under construction. Each scenario plays out in real time without the possibility of human intervention. The work uses techniques of automation that reflect the latest innovations in commercial computer-game and simulation software.

One of Johnson's other works, Trauma (was at the Museum last year, picture above) displays the sophistication and automation of commercial computer-game software, such as "persistent world" games, which continue to evolve when nobody is playing them, and NPCs (non-player characters), which are driven by artificial rather than human intelligence.

Two screens show self-playing video games: military combat and household simulation. Each is affected by the amount of "trauma" generated by the other. In the military game, trauma is determined by a mission[base ']s success or failure, or by a character[base ']s proximity to violent events. In the household simulation, trauma is determined by the need for maintenance and cleaning. The third screen is a composite of the two games; it displays the aggregate amount of trauma [~]the trauma index[~] as a red, gaseous cloud.

Via Rhizome.

Sat, 19 Mar 2005 08:03:40 GMT

Notepad Invaders.

Better played at work with the sound on.

Rob Manuel has also a fabulous Krankie sings Bowie.
Via del.icio.us.

Sat, 19 Mar 2005 08:02:02 GMT

Lifehacker.

Lifehacker: I'm not real quick to add things to my aggregator. I only have about 20 feeds in Bloglines. But this new addition to the Gawker family of blogs is really top-notch. If you like Gadgetopia, you'll love Lifehacker.

Computers make us more productive. Yeah, right. Lifehacker recommends the downloads, web sites and shortcuts that actually save time. Don't live to geek; geek to live

I knew that I had to post about it when I found five separate things out there yesterday that I felt you all needed to know about:

I'll post further about some of these today, as they relate to stuff we've talked about here quite a bit.

Sat, 19 Mar 2005 08:00:45 GMT

Ektron WebImageFX.

Ektron.com :: Web Image Editor : Ektron WebImageFX: I haven't seen an embedded, Web-based image editor before. Have I just not been looking hard enough? Are there others I'm not aware of?

If not for the IE-only problem, this seems like a good one. There are some Flash demos here. There's an online demo here, but you'll need to install the whole client-side Ektron system (it rides on top of their flagship product: eWebEditPro).

Whenever I come across Ektron, I get a little nostalgic as I think we were one of their very first customers. Seriously [~] we used it on the a project in 2000, and whenever we called for tech support, I think the guy's Mom answered the phone. We used to joke that we were calling some 16-year-old in his parents' basement.

Speaking of that project, here's an old Internet Week article that talks about how Ektron was used:

But the Vikings still needed outside help, so the sports team turned to BankFirst e-Business, the South Dakota Web development and consulting division of BankFirst Corp. The firm integrated Ektron Inc.'s eWebEditPro into a new Vikings.com administrative interface. The new software lets the team update its content quickly, without any intervention from a Web developer and without any knowledge of HTML.

Gosh, those developers must have been amazingly good. I bet they're all rich now, living on some island in the Pacific. (Especially the lead developer. I bet he was pretty good-looking too.)

Sat, 19 Mar 2005 08:00:06 GMT

MSN AdCenter.

MSN to offer search ads through AdCenter: Microsoft is going to add contextual pay-per-click ads to MSN Search. Who didn't see that coming?

Internet search giants Google and Yahoo no longer have the red-hot search advertising market all to themselves.

Microsoft's MSN on Wednesday will unveil its answer to Google and Yahoo's pay-per-click text ad programs, called MSN AdCenter.

Sat, 19 Mar 2005 07:59:26 GMT

User Agent Index.

List of User-Agents (Spiders, Robots, Browser): I posted about this site two years ago, and it's been actively maintained all this time. I've been checking it for the last couple days, and there are new additions every day.

I assert that this is the largest and most accurate index of User Agent strings on the Net right now (note that the front page is merely letters A through F). Does anyone know of anything better?

Sat, 19 Mar 2005 07:56:49 GMT

Google Rips Off OS X Dock.

Those guys in Google Labs have great taste, but they must have a bit too much time on their hands. The latest of their brainchildren to be cut loose is Google X, which bears more than a passing resemblance to the Dock in Apple's Mac OS X.

"Roses are red. Violets are blue. OS X rocks. Homage to you."

Not nearly as smooth or as customizable as the Dock, but just give them time.

Bloggies winners announced

Sat, 19 Mar 2005 07:55:34 GMT

Congratulations to all the winners of the 2005 Bloggies ! While I'm sure BoingBoing was nervous, they managed to pull it off and win the category popgadget was nominated in, Best Group Blog. Just kidding, it was absolutely an honor and quite surprising, frankly, to even be a finalist. BoingBoing also won Best Blog of the year. Regine was twice robbed, as best European blog and Best Technology Blog, but all the nominees are good and worth checking out.

Thank you so much, everyone, for reading and supporting popgadget. This was exciting!

- Mia [Popgadget: Personal Tech for Women]

Sat, 19 Mar 2005 07:49:18 GMT

Flickr and the Ransom Notes.

As you know, I've put out a call for guest bloggers to help out during my skiing holiday next week. One will be Dennis Hettema, from Sweden's OP3.

OP3 are particularly into bar code scanning, with camera phones, which I believe will be incredibly important, as it's a way of joining the real world with the digital. Check out this article I wrote for Net Imperative about this area.

Dennis' first post is really cool!

Most people are probably familiar with flickr. It's an awesome service and a great testimony to the growth of digital photography.

Flickr has got a lot of hardcore/die-hard fans and they've started developing their own applications based on flickr. Meta Atem allows you to spell words using images from the flickr database. It's amazing to see the amount of different variations you can create. This application, that only seems to be useful to professional ransom note writers, is probably one of the best forms of free advertising the flickr service could get. It shows of the enormity of their database, the speed of their service and the love its users have for flickr.

Mobile phone photography will make services like flickr and fun/useless/useful applications such as spelling with flickr more and more commonplace. Yes MMS still isn't much of a success - I seriously wonder if it ever will be a success - but that's food for another post. Yet making pictures using mobile phones is rapidly becoming mainstream.

The other side to this is, just like webcam's, our most intimate moments can be observed and recorded by others. Privacy is dead, get over it.

Russell adds: and here's a message using the service - you can have hours of fun with this:

Web 2.0 Weekly Wrap-up, 7-13 Mar 2005.

Sat, 19 Mar 2005 07:16:09 GMT

This week: Microsoft's RSS Aggregator, mobile web 2.0, open source web 2.0 (stats, adverts, topics), Structured Blogging, ETech.

Well this week has been a blur of activity for me and my server. First off I launched an RSS statistics project with Jon Udell and Feedburner, then later in the week I had fun riffing on what Microsoft was up to with start.com, their sandbox development of a web-based RSS Aggregator.

Microsoft Makes A Start On RSS

When I read the short SiliconBeat post about Microsoft's sandbox development of a web-based RSS Aggregator, I immediately blogged it and took screenshots (which became a popular attraction when Microsoft briefly pulled the site). I thought it was big news, and still do, because of what the prototype revealed - Microsoft intends to integrate an RSS Aggregator with its MSN Search product. That's important because their main rivals, Google and Yahoo, are primarily search companies.

We all knew Microsoft would eventually come out with an RSS Aggregator product, but most of us thought it would be integrated into Outlook. Well it seems that search is instead going to be the platform from which Microsoft will challenge its main rivals in the RSS war.

I updated my post about start.com 5 times during the week, so my other thoughts are there if you're interested.

Mobile Web 2.0

Scott Gatz, senior director of personalization products for Yahoo, emailed me (and others) during the week to break the news about Yahoo's new mobile RSS service. This is an extension of the My Yahoo! re-design which was launched in November. Scott said: "Basically we redesigned My Yahoo around RSS and now we brought it to the mobile world (and we have a desktop ticker too). Really all about getting whatever you want wherever you want." Interesting stuff and Russ Beattie has more details about how to actually use the mobile service.

Who else is doing mobile RSS? I've been aware of Bloglines mobile service for a while now and I've even tried to use it on my mobile phone. And I read in Susan Mernit's blog today that Google has a new mobile service. Susan says: "the deal is that Google's put up a new mobile start page with links to all their current mobile services--SMS, web and image search, imode interface."

No mention of RSS, but it wouldn't surprise me to see it introduced soon (ditto Google News).

Open Source Web 2.0

Bit of talk about open source things in the Web 2.0 world this week. Most importantly of course, there is my open source RSS statistics effort :-) But also Jeff Jarvis has a great idea for an open source ad network. And Marc Canter has been writing inspiring stuff about Open Topics. Plus for the geekier amongst us, there are now a heap of resources for Ajax web development (how GMail and other great web apps like it were developed). My favourite resource, for its claim to handle 99% of the development work for you, is SAJAX - Simple Ajax Toolkit.

Structured Blogging

A couple of weeks ago I wrote about Bob Wyman's (of PubSub) post on what he calls "structured blogging". As he described it then: "The basic idea is to go beyond "mere" text in blogs and include structured XML that describes job-openings, events, new prices, press releases, updates to phone numbers and contact info, requests for proposals, etc."

Now PubSub has come up with a new weblog called structuredblogging.org. It currently offers a WordPress plug-in to carry out structured blogging. It also has some XML schemas and further technical resources. Looks pretty interesting and I'll be following its progress. Would be great to get a Movable Type plug-in for this.

Etech

Finally, the coming week promises to be a good one for Web 2.0. The O'Reilly Emerging Technology Conference is being held March 14-17 and the sessions sound like Web 2.0 Geek Nirvana to me :-) What a pity I can't be there... sob! However I look forward to lots of reports from the bloggers who do attend and I sure hope Heath Row (or someone as thorough as him) will be there to transcribe the sessions. Better yet, I hope IT Conversations records them and publishes them soon after. C'mon, I'm relying on the blogosphere to be my ears and eyes for ETech - don't let me down people!

How not to crash a plane with your mobile phone.

Sat, 19 Mar 2005 07:02:20 GMT

Like Toby Ziegler of The West Wing, the ban on mobile phones on airplanes has never made sense to me:

Flight Attendant: You can't use your phone until we land, sir.

Toby: We're flying in a Lockheed eagle series L-1011. It came off the line 20 months ago and carries a Sim-5 Transponder tracking system. Are you telling me I can still flummox this thing with something I bought at Radio Shack?

Shoe checks and bans on knitting needles don't make a lot of sense if a passenger can bring down a plane with 3G, so it's nice to know it's not the plane in the sky that's at risk; rather, it's mobile phones on the ground:

Contrary to popular belief, the main impediment to the use of mobile phones on planes is not interference with the aircraft's avionics systems. On a typical long-haul flight, 20 mobile phones are left switched on. Instead, the problem is that airborne mobile phones disrupt mobile networks on the ground. An airliner with 500 phones on board, whizzing across a city, would befuddle the network as the phones busily hopped from one base-station to the next.

Since one of those 20 mobiles left on is normally mine, it's good to know my absent-mindedness hasn't brought me and my fellow passengers perilously close to a disaster of which we were unaware.

In any case, new on-board base stations called picocells have now been developed, and are expected to be approved in 2005 for a 2006 service launch. Which means that ET can phone home while on the way, though the matter of in-flight telephone etiquette will still need to be sorted out.

[Wanda Lust: First Class UK Travel Blog]

Sat, 19 Mar 2005 06:54:02 GMT

When Several Small Jobs Are Better Than One. Many executives who've left high-level roles are making a living doing several different things simultaneously. Find out whether this might work for you. [StartupJournal.com]

Sat, 19 Mar 2005 06:40:42 GMT

And the Winner for Most Luxurious Brand Goes to.

When you are at the top of the luxury food chain, you must be doing something right. The Luxury Institute (yes, something like this actually exists), in their latest Luxury Brand Status Index (LBSI) , determined that Ritz Carlton ranked first among 52 luxury brands by wealthy consumers across four categories. To get to this conclusion, more than 200 households, each with a minimum of $200,000 in gross annual income and a net worth of at least $750,000, were surveyed. (Did anybody get a call[sigma]I don[base ']t remember my phone ringing.)

Runner ups to the Ritz included Porsche, Mercedes, Armani and Four Seasons.

[Luxist]

Sat, 19 Mar 2005 06:32:32 GMT

Dog LED tail light broadcasting.

If elephants can send SMS, we may as well outfit our dogs with some airtexting equipment, right? This ultra-bright LED that attaches to Fido[base ']s tail and uses that whole persistence of vision thing to display programmed messages is still on the fanciful tip, but clearly some technophile dog owner noticed the gaping void that remains in the growing dog electronics market (there are already doggie cellphones and digital cameras).

[Via Protein Feed]

[Engadget]

Sat, 19 Mar 2005 06:31:48 GMT

Apple wants a 10% cut of all Made for iPod accessories.

There was nothing too nefarious about Apple coming out with their new [base "]Made for iPod[per thou] seal of approval program a few months ago[~]it was pitched as a convenient way for consumers to know for sure that the accessories they[base ']re buying will work with their iPod[~]but according to CNET there is a dark side to the program: Apple is now demanding a tithe of 10% of the wholesale price of any Made for iPod accessory. No one is forcing anyone to participate in the program (it[base ']s not like you need Apple[base ']s permission to make an iPod accessory), and it[base ']s completely normal (and expected) for manufacturers to drop a little coin for the licensing rights for a logo or to pay for the certification process, but a 10% cut? Sounds less like Apple is trying to look out for consumers (who may end up paying a little more for Made for iPod accessories unless manufacturers decide to take a hit on their margins) and more like they[base ']re just looking for a way to get a nice chunk of the rapidly-growing market for third-party accessories without actually having to sell anything extra themselves.

[Thanks, Mazo]

[Engadget]

Sat, 19 Mar 2005 06:29:57 GMT

The cellphone gravestone.

Yeah, but does it do 3G?

[Thanks, Shaya]

[Engadget]

Wed, 09 Mar 2005 08:51:24 GMT

Collaborative Feedburner Stats Project.

Last week I wrote about my blog's subscription growth, inspired by Jon Udell's analysis of Bloglines Public Subscribers. In a subsequent email discussion with Jon Udell, we both wondered whether Feedburner data would show similar trends to the Bloglines data. Jon suggested a collaborative project could be launched in the blogosphere with the aim of calibrating the Bloglines data. Of course I thought this was a great idea, so I contacted Dick Costolo and Eric Lunt from Feedburner to ask if they'd be willing to help. Dick and Eric were very enthusiastic about the idea and Eric soon whipped up a couple of templates for us, accessible via RESTish URLs.

How to access your Feedburner stats in XHTML or XML

Eric came up with two new templates for Feedburner users to output their statistics in XHTML and XML.

1. The XHTML template is similar to the format Jon used in his Bloglines analysis. Here's the URL to get to it:

http://feedburner.com/fb/a/stats?id=12345&;dateRangeName=
all&format=table

Note: replace the "12345" above with your Feedburner ID

2. The other template provides pure XML and you can get to it using this URL:

http://feedburner.com/fb/a/stats?id=12345&;dateRangeName=
all&format=xml

You need to log in to your account to use these URLs - and don't forget to replace the "12345" bit with your own Feedburner ID. You can specify the date range too.

This is basically an alternative interface to your Feedburner statistics, for those of you who have an account there. It's a way to output your Feedburner statistics as well-formed XML, making it ripe for analysis! Here are my Feedburner stats to show you what it outputs (I'll analyze my own stats in a future post): R/WW xhtml and R/WW xml.

Call for Data

For the next part of this collaborative project, I'd like to ask Feedburner account holders to publish their data on the Web in one of the above formats. The idea being that those analyst pundits amongst us can combine the contributed data to get a better view of RSS subscription growth in the blogosphere.

To do this, post your data in either the XHTML or XML format to your blog - or elsewhere on the Web. Make sure you tag your post so people can find it - e.g. link to the Technorati tag feedgrowth, or tag it in del.icio.us as feedgrowth, or ping The Topic Exchange's new feedgrowth page.

Anyone can then collate all this data and do their own analysis on it. So not only are we collaboratively sharing our Feedburner data, we'll hopefully collaboratively analyze it too. I'm kind of hoping some people create cool visualizations with the data, much like folks did with Tom Coates' MT data last year. I will certainly link to you if you do, but more importantly perhaps Jon Udell will too!

btw if you do want to participate, but don't want your data to be public - you could strip out the identity details from your XHTML/XML data and email the file(s) to me at readwriteweb AT gmail DOT com. We're interested in the aggregate trends and how they compare to Bloglines data.

Finally, it should be noted that Feedburner circulation data is not quite the same as Bloglines subscription data. Circulation is "an approximate measure of the number of individuals for whom your feed has been requested in the last 24 hours" and it can fluctuate a bit (particularly in the weekends, when circulation routinely drops). However there are potentially a lot of useful trends and insights about RSS subscription growth to be gained via this project - so I encourage you to contribute your data! :-)

Wed, 16 Feb 2005 21:08:28 GMT

How-To: Make a cheap portable espresso machine.

Thought we[base ']d mix things up this week with a low tech How-To courtesy of Hack A Day editor Jason Striegel:

I spent the weekend trying to design a small espresso machine that you can make from readily available parts. What has a homemade espresso machine got that an $800 Williams Sonoma special doesn[base ']t? $770 dollars in your bank account, high-design PVC tubing, and a caulk gun. You probably have a caulk gun anyway, so let[base ']s just make that $785 in your pocket and a fine piece of caffeinated gagetry that you can impress your friends with.

A caulk gun? Hey, if it[base ']s good enough for Taco Bell guacamole and sour cream, it[base ']s good enough for a fine and delicate espresso, right?

If you just want a nice strong cup of coffee, you can use the homemade espresso machine sans caulk gun too. Just force the plunger manually and don[base ']t tamp the grounds as hard. It[base ']s perfect for backpacking! There[base ']s nothing like brewing a shot or two of espresso atop your favorite 14er[sigma] so I[base ']m told.

Ingredients

Lengths of 1 1/4-inch and 2-inch PVC tubing

Various pipe joints shown in the above picture (hereafter reffered to as a, b, and c from left to right). You[base ']ll need two of the bottom right, and a part that mates two 2 inch pipes together (d, not shown).

PVC cement, and teflon tape

Some sort of stopper that will make a sealed fit in a 1 1/4-inch tube

2 inch diameter portafilter cup

Caulk gun

Hot water and finely ground coffee

Construction

Feel free to skip this section if you want to see the device in action and don[base ']t care about the details of its assembly. The assembled product is shown above and is comprised of three parts: the plunger, the portafilter attachment (where the coffee goes), and the seal/compression chamber. Joint b on the portafilter attachment and joint a on the compression chamber screw together to form as seal and can be seperated for cleaning. The portafilter is sandwiched between joints d and b (which are cemented together with a small length of 2-inch pipe.

The seal is provided by two c joints affixed end to end. Part c has a small ridge inside of it which exactly accommodates the 1 1/4 inch plunger. I use two of these end to end so that the dead space between them provides a small buffer for any water that slips past the first seal. We don[base ']t want anyone getting squirted with pressurised hot water. The very top of the seal unit is removed and affixed to the bottom of the portafilter unit. This keeps the length down and prevents the filter basket from striking the end of the caulk gun.

Preparing Your First Cup

Just like any espresso machine, you[base ']ll want to grind your coffee and place the appropriate amount in the filter basket.

You can then tamp down the grounds with the plunger unit. The amount of coffee you use and the pressure with which you tamp it down will determine how much pressure is needed to force the water through the grounds and out of the machine.

To operate, the two halves of the machine are then screwed together and filled with water to just below the bottom seal. The plunger is inserted and the entire unit is loaded into the caulk gun.

How It Works

A typical espresso machine circulates water past a radiator, heating it to just under boiling temp. The water is then pumped through the coffee at about 12 atmospheres of pressure. When the coffee exits the system and depressurizes, small co2 bubbles form and rise to the top, creating a reddish-brown foam.

With this machine, you[base ']ll heat your water seperately and then just pour it in. I highly suggest you pressure test the unit for leaks with cold water before trying a hot water run. You are the pump, so you will control the pressure in the system. It[base ']s all dependent on how hard you tamp the grounds and what rate you force the plunger through. You probably won[base ']t be producing 12 bar and I double.. no.. triple suggest you pressure test the system if you are even going to attempt that kind of pressure.

It takes about 20 seconds to produce a couple shots of espresso. It[base ']s black, strong and, surprise, it tastes like an espresso. You probably wont be winning any taste-test competitions, but the hack value counts for something, doesn[base ']t it?

[Engadget]

Wed, 16 Feb 2005 21:04:08 GMT

Augmented Reality.

Technology Review comments on developments in Augmented reality.
"...Unlike Virtual Reality, which immerses users in a new digital environment, Augmented Reality (AR) -- a broad class of user interface techniques intended to enhance a personâo[dot accent]s perception of the world around them with computer generated information -- aims to enhance the analog world...Users, via wearable display screens, see the non-virtual world around them with digital information superimposed into their surroundings. But since each person experiences the world differently, AR developers face some tricky programming and design problems..."

Gizmodo Chat: irc.gizmodo.com.

Wed, 16 Feb 2005 21:03:09 GMT

IRC: it's not just for BDSM cyber and warez kiddies anymore! It's my pleasure to announce our support of that archaic, text-only communication protocol, Internet Relay Chat, via Gizmodo's new irc.gizmodo.com server. I'm not quite sure what will come of this experiment, but something tells me a group of portable technology fans heavily into communication will be able to start creating some interesting and useful tools using an easily accessible, data-lean system like IRC.

If you already have an IRC client you like, come on into #gizmodo[~]let's dish. If you haven't used IRC before, I've pulled out a few IRC clients that I've had good luck with over the years. All the usual etiquette applies. Hope to RUMORF ASL you very soon.

[Gizmodo]

Fri, 28 Jan 2005 14:14:58 GMT

Statistics on Boat Ownership.

We[base ']re going to the Los Angeles Boat Show on Sunday to check out the latest models. To celebrate the boating lifestyle we have a few facts on boat owners. Surveys conducted for the National Marine Manufacturers Association in 2003 and 2004 show that the average boat owner is a 40 year old male, homeowner with a household income of over $60,000. The surveys also reveal that boat owners feel that boating has brought their family closer together. Other results show that boat owners are healthier, more satisfied with their lives and feel that owning a boat has contributed to their general well-being.

[Luxist]

Fri, 28 Jan 2005 12:20:46 GMT

Deloitte's Trends of 2005.

Deloitte Research have been joining the trend-spotting/prediction game, with their top 12 for 2005. Since 8 deal directly with mobile phones, the main conclusion seems to be that this will be the year of the mobile.

Here's what they say about mobile stuff:

# Electronic viruses will run rampant in PCs, cellphones, PDAs and gaming consoles. Nuisances such as unsolicited e-mail (spam), unsolicited instant messages (spim) and attacks on Bluetooth-enabled devices (bluejacking) will become common. These will cost businesses billions of dollars in lost data and downtime. However, it will also offer opportunities for companies that sell IT security solutions.

While I certainly think that mobile viruses are a huge opportunity to sell security solutions, I also think that the actual threat is negligible for most phone owners, unless exceptionally stupid and unfeasibly unlucky in the first place.

If you look under the bonnet of all the mobile virus stories to date, there's no real substance. This may change obviously, but I think we're pretty safe this year.

The Bluejacking thing is showing no sign of slowing down at all. Just because it's not in the press all the time, doesn't mean it's not happening.

I also predict we'll see more idiots trying Bluespamming this year (commercial messaging via Bluetooth) before they realise that spamming people who are near enough to hit you, don't make sense.

# Music downloads will become respectable with the growing quality of online stores, rise in digital music players, the inclusion of CD burners as standard features in PCs, and the exceptional quality of legal downloads.

While legitimate, paid for downloading has surely always been "respectable", it doesn't mean that the free stuff will go away. It's just too tempting for most cash strapped teens to download and the risk of copping a legal suit is so remote.

While the music industry is furiously congratulating each other on their sagacity of finally accepting digital downloading, the rest of us can't help but smirk as they're 4 years too late to really benefit from the party.

This is an industry that alternates between the anger and denial stages of loss.

# Ads will be embedded with text hyperlinks, software toolbar buttons, video games, software (particularly freeware), web browsers and even on mobile phone screens. These ads will be precisely targeted, updated via Internet connections based on time of day and user activity, and will be far more subtle and sophisticated and less intrusive.

There's a big difference between "should" and "will". Most advertisers are still wedded to the in-yer-face disruptive model and that's not going to change soon. Another industry in denial.

# Simplicity will be the key to selling content on cellphones. Faster networks, better processors and brighter screens will make content over cellphones more appealing. 'But many experiments will fail, due to a lack of understanding of the way mobile phones are used, the social context of mobile usage, and the limitations of the mobile device,' the study notes. What will sell is simplicity - small, relevant packages of content that customise the device such as ringtones, screensavers and wallpapers. All this will contribute to a multi-billion dollar industry.

Yes, finally one I can agree with wholeheartedly. I'd go further though and say micro-segmentation of content is also key. Why oh why does all wallpaper get merchandised together? People don't buy wallpaper, they buy (for instance) Busted Wallpaper and a Busted Ringtone. So why not put this together?

And if I buy an Eminem ringtone, it's pretty unlikely that I'm going to buy a Britney ringtone, but I might buy an Eminem call back tune. So why not put the product in danger of being sold by better thought through merchandising?

# Small talk by billions will add up to big revenue as there will be nearly two billion mobile subscriptions worldwide by end-2005. Subscriber growth will be strongest in developing countries (including Asia and Latin America) where mobile phones are both a transformational technology and a status symbol.

Pretty much what I said in my predictions.

# Voice will be the primary source of revenue and profits in cellphones and will account for more than 80 per cent of total revenue. Cellphone penetration will surpass 100 per cent as more customers take a second subscription for data or for personal use. The most compelling and lucrative mobile content will revolve around personalisation, such as ringtones, real tones, wallpapers and basic games.

# The vast majority of voice calls will continue to originate and terminate the traditional way, on the public switched telephone network (PSTN), due to superior call quality and overall reliability. PSTN operators will cut prices in response to competition from low cost providers (mobile and VoIP), causing margin pressure.

# VoIP (Voice over Internet Protocol) will see both call volume and the user base increase significantly among consumers and businesses. Its adoption and growth will be limited by shortfalls in VoIP's quality, consistency and reliability and the resulting slightly negative image in the marketplace. And for enterprises, cost savings will often be less than anticipated.

So, all in all, not a bad effort for a bunch of professionals :-)

Source: Asia One via Moco News

Fri, 28 Jan 2005 12:19:49 GMT

Search for People.

Business.com has an interesting spin on search. You can search for people to put together an historical resume for them.

Unfortunately, it's not that good. While it correctly identified some of the stuff a do/did, I have never been in the US airforce or a teacher.

I still reckon that Googlism is the best thing like this - it tells you what Google thinks you are.

For me it has:

"russell buckley is a leading authority on the theory and practice of wireless market"

Nuff said :-)

This linking convention is a little over the top sometimes; spotted on Om Malik, who saw it on Business 2.0.

Interesting project in Chinese Blogosphere.

Wed, 26 Jan 2005 14:18:22 GMT

Kevin Wen points Smartmobs to an interesting online social movement from the Chinese Blogosphere.

"10 Places of My City" is a social blogging project by using Technorati tag system to encourage bloggers to showcase the top 10 places of their own.

Three days after initialed this idea, over 20 Chinese blogger from all over the world joined and blogged "10 places of my city". It's really interesting to see that some of them are living in the same city, sharing their favorite places with intersections. Look at the 10placesofmycity on Technorati, bloggers come from different major cities in China such as Beijng, Shanghai, Chengdu, Xi'an, Wuhan, Xiamen etc, were sharing local experiences. Some of them wrote as a love story with emotional sense, reviewed most sweet places in their memory. I saw a blogger's post marked his 10 places with growing history, from childhood playground to modern office. I'm sure that more interesting post will keep coming in the next couple days.

Thanks Kevin !

Wed, 26 Jan 2005 13:17:40 GMT

Making History.

TJ and I came up with a pretty cool idea recently, which I think is unique - but I'm sure we'll find someone who'll claim it's been done before :-)

Why not auction off advertising space on blogs on eBay? So I placed an ad this morning to sell off the ad space you can see on the top right of the blog for a month. You can see it - and bid on it! - here.

It's a bit of a punt, but if it works, it could be a great way to connect advertisers with bloggers, which is what eBay does so well. And if it enables bloggers to be rewarded for their work, I'd be delighted.

If you're a blogger reading this, I'd really appreciate a link to this post - the more people see it, the more likely it is to work and the more likely it is that it'll start something big for all of us.

And for eBay, it could be a new billion dollar market.

Advertising on blogs is going to be the next big thing, in my opinion. It offers very tight targeting, no wastage and offers the same accountability that has resulted in online advertising growing like crazy in the last few years. All that's needed is a way to connect the buyers and sellers and there you are.

Of course, the next problem to manage will be how a professional media buyer manages the millions of potential blogs in the inventory. This will require a whole new skill set that doesn't really exist right now.

My interest is twofold. Yes, I'd like a little money for blogging (who wouldn't)?

But I've also been working with TJ on a business model based on helping bloggers monetise their efforts, so it could have wider implications. Creative Weblogging is a new breed of micro publishers and publish this site along with about 20 others you can see listed on the right.

We find great bloggers (or potential great bloggers), help them find their voice and help them build an audience for the blog. Then, we sell advertising on their blogs to give them an income.

I love businesses where everyone wins. Bloggers win. Readers get great blogs. Advertisers get great audiences.

So if you've got an idea for a blog and want some help monetising it, get in touch russell at creative-weblogging dot com

Otherwise, get bidding :-)

Tue, 25 Jan 2005 13:14:26 GMT

Rap Meets SMS.

The artist, Frank Plant, wrote to me to tell me about the new installation, F2T (Free to Talk) he's created with his colleague, Thomas Charveriat. It's kind of rap meets sms meets robots! Check out the link here and watch the video.

Viewers interact directly with the artwork by sending it a short text message from their mobile. Once received, the SMS is scanned for frequently used words and, when a match is found, the four elements are activated. The main piece, "Rapper" begins to twist and wave his hand while mouthing a rap based on the message sent, the new lyrics culled from more than 130 different hip hop phrases written by Amsterdam-based lyricist and composer Jim Barnard. The rest of the piece is simultaneously set into motion: "Boom Box" starts flashing and blasting out the song while "Joy Ride" a bouncing low-rider, and "Shake Ass" (looks like it sounds) begins to move, triggered by ambient sound sensors. When the song is finished, a thermal printer spits out a souvenir with the original SMS and the words of the "Rapper".

Pretty cool!

On a personal note, my 12 year old is disgusted that someone of my age likes Jay Z. Check out the fabulous Collision Course. I also like DJ Dangermouse's mash up of The Beatles' White Album and Jay Z's Black Album - the Grey Album, which EMI are currently trying to ban. They won't be able to, of course, as it's on all the file sharing networks. Gotta keep the lawyers busy, I suppose.

Tue, 25 Jan 2005 13:13:54 GMT

eBay Problems.

'Integrity of eBay markeplace' at risk - sellers' group | The Register: All is apparently not well in the house of eBay.

It has been a bad few days for eBay. Last week more than $12bn was wiped off the value of the dotcom auction house as it warned that its financial performance for 2005 is unlikely to live up to bullish expectations.

Now discontent is growing among its big traders, who are dismayed with recent price rises imposed by ebaby and alarmed about the reputation of the online marketplace.

Mon, 24 Jan 2005 11:26:51 GMT

New virus levels Symbian phones.

The same rule applies to every platform, everyone should know this by now. It[base ']s freaking 2005. Unless you[base ']re 100% sure what is, simply do not open any mysterious files, especially ones literally asking to be opened. So if you[base ']re one of the ones who ran patch.sis, which claims to be a Symbian OS patch that needs to be installed, you[base ']ve probably already noticed that your phone crashed. Oh, and it may not even turn on anymore, too. So, what you had was Gavno, and if you had Gavno.b you may have given it to your surrounding friends who for god knows what reason left their Bluetooth on discoverable mode. See to it that they don[base ']t give it to anyone else, yeah? We might pity these people, but we[base ']re starting to see this as Darwinian natural selection for gadgets.

[Engadget]

Mon, 24 Jan 2005 09:32:21 GMT

Atari XL Screenshots.

This is how Photochoppers rolled in the olden days: Put hood on Atari; take a screenshot; develop film; paint edits on prints with watercolor; invent scanning device to transfer image into digital 16 color file that spanned 200 floppy discs; upload to BBS over 300 baud modem, giving yourself enough ratio to download ever phreaker howto; bear witness to the first recorded invocation of the term 'ROFL.'

You've Come a Long Way Baby [Core77]

[Gizmodo]

Mon, 24 Jan 2005 09:28:00 GMT

Back Seat Gaming.

Backseat Playground , developed by John Paul Bichard, Liselott Brunnberg and Oskar Juhlin at the Interactive Institute in Stockholm, is a mobile gaming research project that will enable kids to play with the world outside their window from the back seat of a car. This augmented reality game uses a digital compass and a GPS-receiver to connect the game to the passing landscape. By aiming the device towards objects, players can defend themselves against creatures or pick up magic artefacts.

4 core areas are investigated:

1 Episodic Narratives: a way of building narratives that work as fragmented and incomplete episodes, informing an overall plot depending on the journey traveled. It will be combined with on and offline actions that will encourage players to further explore their environment and the in-game objects and stories.

2 Real World Game Engine: where the game engine is embedded in the "real" - using GIS database objects as game objects and assigning game properties to these real objects. This will allow objects in the real world to function as game objects with multiple properties, like the ability to combine objects, to query them, affect the narrative and allow the player to collect resources from the real environment.

3 De-focusing technology: how to turn the player's attention away from the small screen and onto their everyday surroundings through the use of lightweight mobile devices.

4 Fuzzy Learning: to encourage children to explore their environments through "real world" gameplay.

Thanks John!

Mon, 24 Jan 2005 09:21:00 GMT

Nofollow May Be a Rank Solution. I had no idea how important Google PageRank was to the business world until I did some PHP/MySQL programming for a local ecommerce retailer. The boss watched search rankings on product-related keywords for the company and its competitors on a daily basis, and you could see the immediate effect on sales of a rank move.

Multiply one small St. Augustine company by one million and you have a huge worldwide economy, utterly dependent on the vicissitudes of an algorithm.

Google's support for a nofollow attribute throws a wrench into comment and referral spam by adding a huge new concept to the Web: a link of no confidence.

Web publishers can now link to a site without improving its PageRank. Robert Scoble enthusiastically explains one reason that people will do this:

... last year a carpet store in Redmond ripped off a lot of people. The store is now out of business, but back when it was happening I wanted to link to the store but couldn't.
Why not?
Because one link from my blog would have automatically put the store at the top of the search page on Google for "Redmond carpet store." Why is that? Because of my Page Rank.

This sounds good, though it officially abandons the pretense that Google's search algorithm is tailored to the linking behavior of Web users, rather than the other way around.

I read some search engine optimization forums this morning to see how they're responding to the change, figuring that these panicky PageRank Kremlinologists might see the implications beyond weblogging.

One pointed out that the change breaks the first principle of Google's recommendations for webmasters: "Make pages for users, not for search engines." This may not be a big deal, because weblogs themselves are one big feedback loop in which humans and Google conspire to make each other happy. We feed it links to webloggers and current content; it moves bloggers up the ranks and feeds us traffic; we become more motivated to publish. do { } while (true).

Wikipedia has the same circular relationship with the one true search engine:

We write a thousand articles; Google spiders them and sends some traffic to those pages. Some small percentage of that traffic becomes Wikipedia contributors, increasing our contributor base. The enlarged contributor base then writes another two thousand articles, which Google dutifully spiders, and then we receive an even larger influx of traffic.

Overnight, a handful of weblog companies have implemented a change that touches the entire Web: How people trade the most valuable unit of currency in the attention economy, the hyperlink.

Before this change, every outgoing link on a Web page lowered its rank, leading some optimizers to view them as a leak:

Outbound links are a drain on a site's total PageRank. They leak PageRank. To counter the drain, try to ensure that the links are reciprocated.

The most far-reaching impact could be from publishers who adopt nofollow on external links to boost the effect of their internal links, taking a bajillion rank suggestions right out of Google's algorithm. The subset of the Web devoted to making as much money as possible, properly optimized to plug leaks, becomes as searchable as AltaVista in 1997. [Workbench]

Wed, 19 Jan 2005 14:36:36 GMT

License to seat.

Steve Mann 's Seating License is an internet chair with magnetic stripe card reader and spikes that retract when you slide your credit card into a slot on the chair to download a "License to Sit".

The chair illustrates what Mann calls deconomics, the sabotage economics.

You don't buy the chairs. You instead buy the seating. Likewise, "pay per wear" clothing could also save money.
Deconomics makes economic sense. So much sense that it's ridiculous!

If you look at this on purely economic grounds with cold calculations you're missing the human element. Deconomics also provides for chip implants. Those without implants remain standing indefinitely.

Thanks Rheinhold!

In the chairs series: Communicating via chairs, How to have fun with a simple Ikea chair, Zizi the Affectionate Couch, Wearables for everyday objects, Heartbeat monitoring armchair and shirt, Remote furniture.

ANyone has heard of others?

John Doerr at Web 2.0 Conference.

Wed, 19 Jan 2005 14:25:25 GMT

Here are some notes taken from John Doerr's talk at the Web 2.0 Conference, held October 2004 in San Francisco. Thanks to IT Conversations for recording it!

John Doerr is a well-known venture capitalist, who apparently had the foresight to back Google in 1999 when few others did. His Web 2.0 speech had a lot of insightful nuggets and tantalizing snippets of insight. I got the feeling he was holding a lot back, but that's to be expected from someone who is on the board of both Google and Amazon. Still, very worthwhile listening to. Or if you can't be bothered listening, here are my notes:

Parallel Webs

After about 10 minutes of banter and rambling, it got interesting at the 11.40 minute mark. That's when Doerr launched into his Web 2.0 theories. He started by saying "...take the idea of the string theory and apply it to the Web", which led to his suggestion that there are "at least 6 parallel webs." Although this caused a round of titters in the audience, I think everyone was on tenterhooks! So the 6 parallel webs are:

* Near Web -> the PC upfront; "innovations are around services"; examples: Friendster, Visible Path

* Far Web -> tv web; people don't interact with it as much; e.g. Akimbo.com, which delivers video to your tv set

* Here Web -> one that is "ubiquitously pervasive"; e.g. phones

* Weird Web -> "talk to and it talks back to you" e.g. 3D VRML where the perspective changes; An example company is TellMe, which offers voice recognition over your phone (e.g. directory assistance - AT&T uses it)

* B2B Web -> the plumbing behind the scenes (xml, rss, web services - eg amazon); example: "companies building and promoting wikis".

* D2D Web -> Device Web (e.g. RFID info, remote sensors, smart dust)

He puts the 6 Webs under rubric of "EverNet". The most interesting one sounded like the "Weird Web", which John said had "opportunity for innovation" further into the future.

Platforms

Doerr talked a bit about platforms. The OS as a platform was followed by databases (eg p2p), and now we have web / web services / "search in particular" ("a very powerful platform").

He said browsers are not so much a platform, but "a great enabler". People in the Netscape era used the browser as a thin client. He said that "most of the old web-based services [Web 1.0] are in the process of being systemically reinvented - including the browser." He reckons "browsers are going to come back", but dismissed the likelihood of Google doing a browser.

Opportunities

When questioned what are the opportunities or markets open for entrepreneurs, Doerr said there is scope for "lots of web services-based companies". In particular "really targeted services for the explosive Hand Web" [aka the Here Web] - for example, social services and tracking services.

"We live in time and we're assaulted by events", Doerr went on to say. He wants filters to be developed so that we're only assaulted by "the most relevant information". That's a "Google-sized" technical challenge, but an example of something he'd invest in. There are also opportunities to tackle information that is not currently on the Web - he gave the example of a video company that could aggregate all the backlist info about videos.

But he cautioned that a lot of those types of opportunities will go to "the larger companies" and the smaller innovators should be wary of "getting in the way" of Google, Amazon, EBay or Yahoo!.

dmp3 CD Ripping Service Reviewed.

Wed, 19 Jan 2005 14:24:38 GMT

LiveDigitally reviews the dmp3 CD ripping service, which stands out from mail-in services like RipDigital by also providing the option of a live technician to pick up your and deliver your CDs, as well as help you set up iTunes and your iPod and the like. It's cheaper to just mail the CDs in, of course, but if you've got the cash to drop (and you live in the San Francisco area), you can have a real nerd come to your door and walk you though digital music step by step. And it sounds like they will rip burned CDs, too, which is something Rip Digital will not, out of a desire to not get sued (I don't know the legality of ripping burned CDs; I'm just saying).

dmp3 CD ripping services [LiveDigitally]

[Gizmodo]

Wed, 19 Jan 2005 09:04:52 GMT

iTorrent?.

This may turn out to be nothing, but...

A week or so ago, an app named iFlicks 1.0 was released by Helixent Technologies (of Mitchell, SD, of all places!) iFlicks was designed to help you organize digital movies, in much the same manner as iTunes does for music. It's unique in that it also integrates with Netflix to keep track of the movies you've rented. The app was available for download until late last week when Helixent mysteriously pulled the plug on downloads.

Unfortunately, at this time, we cannot provide further details as to why we have made the decision to halt distribution of iFlicks. As soon as we are aware of further details which we can make public, we will post the information to this page. If you are concerned or otherwise interested, just periodically check back to the iFlicks web site.

Maybe I'm reading too much into this, but might Apple and Netflix be collaborating on offering an iTunes Music Store-like experience for getting movies and TV content, and politely (with a wad of cash in hand) asked Helixent to step out of the way? This guy is thinking along the same lines as me, that last week's release of the Mac Mini is the first step in a process to supplant the VCR, DVD, and TiVo in many an entertainment center. But perhaps Apple is thinking one step further, using the Mac Mini with BitTorrent-like technology to speed up access to movies and television content.

Or maybe it's just wishful thinking on my part.

This rabbit trail initiated by a MacSlash post.

Wikipedia Votes for Deletion.

Wed, 19 Jan 2005 09:04:09 GMT

Wikipedia:Votes for deletion: Every couple of weeks, I go browse Wikipedia's "Votes for Deletion" page, which is where veteran Wikipedians decide which articles stay and which go. You wouldn't believe the things that people try to put up. You get a lot of comments like these on an entry for a band:

A vanity article about a non-notable singing group. There's just no evidence that this group is notable outside of its immediate circle - no albums or even original songs are listed. [...] Delete, definitely not notable, even among college singing groups [...] weak keep apparently have produced an album Wolfman [...] Keep. They are slightly more than three men in a garage, selling CD-RW discs (as one recent VfD candidate was).

They have to get to some things quickly, as the comments on the entry for "U.S. Nuclear Test Causes Tsumani" attest:

Tin-foil hat POV BS [...] Speedily deleted as incoherent nonsense.

Or [~] here's an odd one [~] some friends of some guy from Turkey posted a little obituary. Comments about the deletion were regretful:

A very sad memorial page for someone who sounds like a genuinely nice man who was, unfortunately, completely non-notable. I'm sure that his wife and friends still miss him, and I know that his friend had the best of intentions in putting up this page for him. But Wikipedia can't have an entry for absolutely everybody ever.

And, finally, an article apparently used by someone to write a college paper. The title: "Class assignment for Gov 337 at Berry College in Rome Georgia." Seriously.

Recycled phones and "blood Tantalum".

Wed, 19 Jan 2005 08:44:44 GMT

Hotlinking. 'Just found this item from trying to click on a blogdigger enclosure link. This is an issue I was meaning to get into with my reBlog hack, but I planned it too soon - didnt have enough time to write everything up - still thinking about it. Anyway, reBlog displays images on their pages that are 'hotlinked' to the images on the servers of the referrers. Its not that big of a deal with reBlog, but actually may in some cases cause some problems and especially with video, which is where this message comes from - it's a questionable practice. It's a difficult question because sometimes hotlinking is more benifical for both parties. BTW, I hotlinked the image above instead of the usual method Julia Set employs which is to d/l the image to the parsons juliaset server folder. Why? I dont know, maybe it will door-bell the human behind the message to tell us here now more about how (s)he feels.

Via juliaset

[Eyebeam reBlog]

Wed, 19 Jan 2005 08:40:16 GMT

Eric Lin explains why recycling mobile phones is important

(Via Mobitopia)

There is an even deadlier reason why it is critical that old phones don't get tossed away- people are literally dying for them. The legacy of "blood diamonds" is well known, however the fact that a similar arrangement exists to mine coltan (Columbium Tantalum) is lesser known. Tantalum is a superconductor, one of the best on Earth. It is used to coat capacitors to help them create more power from less energy so that your cell phone no longer needs a battery larger than the phone itself. In war torn central Africa, people are forced into modern day slavery to mine this rare element, which is then sold to fund the wars in this region. Recently the majority of Tantalum production has shifted to Australia, however it is a rare element, so decreasing demand helps decrease the likelihood that manufacturers will turn to African supplies.

Sadly, it is very difficult to reclaim Tantalum once it has been manufactured into an electronic component. Because of this, and these other environmental factors, we strongly recommend that no matter how you choose to get rid of your phone, you donate it to an organization that will make all efforts to re-use it rather than simply "safely disposing" of it. Luckily current economics dictate that it is more lucrative to refurbish phones rather than safely recycle them.

Interview with founders of Dodgeball.

Wed, 19 Jan 2005 08:38:44 GMT

The Future of Wireless interviews the founders of Dodgeball.

(Thanks, Hylton)

The gist of the service: Go to any restaurant, nightclub, or movie theater lobby, and you will see large numbers of people on their phones, talking to and text-messaging their friends. And if you happen to overhear these conversations, you'll notice that many of them involve spontaneous planning. A couple could be at a music club where the first set absolutely rocked - and they want to SMS their friends to come down for the second set.

That's the premise that dodgeball.com is built on, enabling you to broadcast your whereabouts to friends by sending a text message stating your location. And if you have a camera phone, the service can send a photo of where you are as well as send you pics of nearby friends-of-friends or pics of users within 10 blocks that have a crush on you (we do not allow people to send photos from their cameraphone in a moblog type fashion). If your friends are registered with dodgeball.com and have their cell turned on, they get a message stating where you are, and where they can join you if they wish.

Wifi technology is shifting power away from traditional carriers.

Thu, 13 Jan 2005 11:14:08 GMT

For wireless coverage across the entire city Philadelphia chose a wireless "mesh" system, which allows the Wi-Fi cells to provide continuous coverage by sending data to each other. The usual architecture has each hot spot connecting back to a central switch or router.

The mesh concept is a popular way of delivering affordable broadband to urban communities. Ultimately, you don't pay companies for phone lines when you can do it yourself. More than 100 communities worldwide are using mesh technology in some way. Mesh can cover a whole town for just $16 per user, half the price of the local digital subscriber line broadband technology provided by many phone companies.

Municipal mesh networks could prove a real threat to the regional companies that dominate local phone service in the United States because the mesh networks can carry low-price voice calls using VOIP, or voice over Internet protocol.

The telecom industry "lobbied aggressively" to prevent cities from offering noncommercial broadband services. Philadelphia's $10 million project clashed with a plan by the governor of Pennsylvania, to speed the adoption of broadband Internet access across the state by providing financial incentives for telecommunications companies.

read original article by Robert Clark in the Herald Tribune International of Monday January 10

The Centralization of BitTorrent Networks.

Thu, 13 Jan 2005 11:12:19 GMT

Andrew Chen writes: "A couple friends and I did some analysis on the degree of centralization between BitTorrent sites, and put it up on the web. Interestingly, the distribution has a very obvious Long Tail pattern:

Key conclusions:

* Torrent files are extremely centralized, and do follow a Zipf Law-like distribution
* However, instead of 20/80, the distribution is more like 4/80.
* The long tail is very, very long - The number of sites with under 100 torrents numbers close to 87%.

However, on the plus side, BitTorrent has lowered the barrier to creating new P2P networks down to zero..."

Thank you Andrew !

Amazon, Web Services, Sharing Economy.

Thu, 13 Jan 2005 11:11:28 GMT

Harry Chen blogs for eBiquity Research Group about an article in Technology Review (subscription required) that describes the way Amazon has prospered by opening its API to more than 65,000 developers. A great example of a "sharing economy" -- Amazon prospers by making it easy to partner with them and prosper yourself.

For example, Alan Taylor (a former Amazon programmer) has developed Amazon Light, a less cluttered Amazon web store that also offers product links to external web sites. For example, if the item you are viewing is a DVD, there will be a button that let's you see in a single click whether the same disc is for rent at Netflix. If it's a CD, you can check whether Apple's iTune music store has a downloadable version.

Technical standards for mobile presence.

Thu, 13 Jan 2005 10:57:12 GMT

This article gets into SIP, the technical standards that enable mobile presence -- a key smartmob technology.

(Via Mobitopia)

A traveling worker hears a unique ringtone on his cell phone, checks the screen and finds a presence notification that a colleague is awaiting a plane in the same airport.

A 'soccer parents' presence channel' on a dadâo[dot accent]s SIP softphone shows all the teamâo[dot accent]s parents are available to share a group voice or IM session right now.

A teenager who just wrecked his momâo[dot accent]s car checks the family presence channel on his mobile phone to find out his motherâo[dot accent]s current mood.

These examples only hint at how presence technologies will enable a large class of services not achievable on existing mobile networks.

More Thoughts on RSS Aggregator Market Share.

Thu, 13 Jan 2005 10:45:26 GMT

Internertnews.com quoted me in their article entitled Benchmark For RSS Client Market Share?, a news story covering Feedburner's RSS Aggregator stats. It's the first time I've been used in the media as a source, so I'm quite chuffed. They didn't contact me, just quoted from my blog - which is fine by me. It's a good write-up and it summarizes some of the caveats involved in trying to measure RSS share. I've been surprised there hasn't been more comment in the blogosphere about Feedburner's stats, but I think that's mainly because people don't know what to make of it. So in this post I'll review a few of the caveats and in future posts I'll address some of the others.

Default Subscriptions

One of the more controversial caveats from the Feedburner post was that some of the Aggregators "ship with one or more of our top 10 feeds as a default" and that this may be skewing the data. Bloglines CEO Mark Fletcher emphasizes this issue in the Internetnews.com piece. He is quoted as saying "...there's a red herring created by default subscriptions (built into desktop software) that can skew results in ways that don't reflect the real user base."

Now, I'm not so sure that default subs is as big an issue as the some of the browser-based aggregator caveats (more on that in a minute). Brent Simmons of NetNewsWire, which was second in Feedburner's list, left this comment on my blog yesterday about the default subs query:

"In the current release version, NetNewsWire 1.0.8, there are 15 default feeds. Of those 15, there are just two FeedBurner feeds -- MacMerc and MacMegasite, same as in 2.0 beta."

He also notes that users can of course unsubscribe from the default feeds at any time.

We don't know how many people do unsubscribe, but given that NetNewsWire is an aggregator exclusively for the Apple Mac OS X then I'd say a lot of users would not unsubscribe from those two Mac feeds. But the real question, perhaps, is how many of Feedburner's big customers are Mac publications? Brent's mentioned two that may be, but how many others are signed up to feedburner's service? Mac publications are known to have large and devoted readerships, so it's quite possible Feedburner's data is skewed to a degree towards the most popular Mac aggregators - if there are a number of popular Mac feeds in their data.

Mac users big RSS users?

Another thing. If Mac publications are over-represented in Feedburner's data, then this would account for the interesting fact that the second-place getter in Feedburner's stats is an aggregator that is exclusively for people on the Mac OS platform. The vast majority of computer users are Windows users and NetNewsWire is, as far as I know, not an option for them. So it's quite amazing that an aggregator that only a relatively small percentage of people can use, turns out to be the number 2 aggregator for the whole market - and by a healthy margin too! I suspect it's got something to do with Macs being very popular amongst the sort of geek likely to read RSS feeds. Is NetNewsWire the iPod of RSS Aggregators? :-)

Yahoo and the mainstream users

Quick note on MyYahoo, which may be best positioned among the current crop of aggregators to get mainstream users to subscribe to RSS feeds (simply because that's their user base). It's interesting that Firefox Live Bookmarks places third in the Feedburner stats - and my stats for that matter. Firefox users are generally of the geek persuasion. Yahoo is a fair way back in 9th place, which seems to me another indication that geeks dominate these stats - i.e. Mac users come second, Firefox third! I mean come on, Macs and Firefox are minority products still and it's mostly geeks who use them. I use them (I rest my case).

Bloglines Caveats

Lest I be seen as picking on the desktop aggregators, I should point out what I think are two pretty big caveats for browser-based aggregators (and let's face it, we're mostly talking about Bloglines!). One caveat is that Bloglines subscribers don't take into account abandoned accounts, another is that a lot of desktop aggregator users do not poll for feeds every 24 hours (the timespan of Feedburner's study). In the first case, Bloglines stats are probably being overstated. In the second case, desktop stats (like NetNewsWire's) are likely being understated. Those are two pretty big caveats in my opinion.

Measuring Value

We've opened up a whole can of worms in this business of analyzing RSS Aggregator market share. But that's a good thing! The RSS world has long needed a way to measure hits and readers. If blogging is to be monetized with advertising and getting paid for niche content, then we need ways to measure the stats. How else will advertisers and media companies, and investors for that matter (IPO anyone?) know how to value RSS-based companies and RSS producers?

So that's why I'm so enamoured of Feedburner - I think they've opened up the market for RSS-based measurement and are leading the way for us all. Interestingly, Feedburner threw out a broad hint that they're about to release a service that will solve some of these stats caveats:

"Clearly, there's a need to dive deeper on stats tracking to start to get a better sense for how widely viewed an item is, how many registered subscribers are actually viewing the content as opposed to just retrieving it, etc. Since we wouldn't mention this unless we were doing something about it, look for a premium offering on this front in the near future."

Summary

I've only scratched the surface of the many caveats and issues surrounding the RSS aggregator market share data that has been released by Feedburner. But that's good, because it means I get to keep digging into and analyzing the data! Now, Feedburner: about those stats minus the top 10 feeds... how about giving those to us? ;-)

Wed, 12 Jan 2005 22:30:15 GMT

This Old T-Shirt: Fading.

I'll probably catch a bunch of shit for this, but the instructions for this week's This Old T-Shirt are from YM. Yeah, the teen girl's magazine. Quit laughing. It's not like I read it or anything, honest. Seriously, shut up.

I would have reprinted them as they appeared in the magazine, but I decided to see how the instructions stacked up in the real world. After checking over some forums, I found plenty of people who messed up their tees by following the instructions to the letter. A lot of folks turned their shirts white after soaking them in regular bleach for two days. Others crowed over how using coarse grit sandpaper chewed screenprinting and iron-ons off. So by taking the best bits out of all the suggested modifications to the instructions, I feel that we've cooked up a more comprehensive How To.

The only problem is, we haven't had any time to test the instructions. Since I only added suggestions from forums that garnered positive results, you should be okay. We advise that you try these instructions on a shirt from the thrift store before you try to rough up the Ramones tee you just spent $20 on.

Standard Fade

Soak shirt in a solution of 8 cups of water and 1 1/2 cups of salt for 3 days. To make a solution, bring the water to a boil and stir in the salt. Let the solution cool before soaking your shirt, or your shirt may shrink.
After 3 days, wring your shirt out and give it a quick interior and exterior rubdown with extra or super fine grit sandpaper. Tread lighly over any silkscreening or iron-ons, unless you're going for that look.
Hang your shirt to dry in sun. If you live in a place where there is no sun, consider moving.
Give the shirt a quick rinse and wring in your sink. Salt's really not that good for your washing machine.
Wash and dry your shirt as you normally do. We suggest you don't throw any additional clothes in the load unless you're adventurous. Heaven forbid there's any collateral damage.

Industral Strength Fade*

Soak shirt in a mixture of 6 cups water, 2 cups color safe bleach and 1/2 cup salt for 2 days. To make this particular mixture, heat the water and stir in the salt until it has disolved. Let the water return to room temperature and mix in the color safe bleach.
After 2 days, pull your shirt out of the mixture and immedeatley throw it into your washer. Wash and dry your shirt as you normally would. As we suggested for the Standard Fade, it may be a good idea to let your shirt fly solo on this load.

* Please note that the industrial strength fade is only suggested on a 50/50 cotton/poly blend. Bleach will weaken the cellulosic fibers on your shirt, so please don't leave the shirt in too long. As with any bleach, it is advised that you check for color fastness as per the instructions on the container before using the above method.

Keep in mind that Preshrunk is not responsible for any shirts that you happen to hose beyond all belief. If they turn out awesome, we'd appreciate any props that you send our way. Reguardless of how it went, we need some feedback to dial the instructions in even further. Cheers!

[Eyebeam reBlog]

Wed, 12 Jan 2005 18:37:14 GMT

Turn your iPod into an iPod shuffle.

Three easy steps for turning any iPod into an iPod shuffle, courtesy of [base "]mhusson[per thou]:

1. Get a Post-It note

2. Get your iPod

3. Put the Post-It note on the iPod

Now you can enjoy the iPod Shuffle[base ']s cool new feature without having to go buy a new player. Enjoy!

See, you just saved yourself a hundred bucks.

[Via kottke]

[Engadget]

Wed, 12 Jan 2005 18:32:13 GMT

TextWrangler Is Free!.

Boy, the MacWorld Expo is just full of goodies. First all the new stuff from Apple. Then Bare Bones Software cuts loose version 2 of TextWrangler [~] a text editor for Mac OS X [~] and announces that it's available for free!

While TextWrangler doesn't have quite the feature set of BBEdit, it's still a dandy piece of software. And you can't beat the price.

Load it up on your shiny new $500 Mac Mini and you'll be coding like Deane in no time! (well, maybe. No guarantees, though.)

Collection of political graphics.

Wed, 12 Jan 2005 12:37:19 GMT

Anthenea.

Anthenea habitats are more like a raft than a boat. The UFO-styled pods have mainly been used on water so far but the self-contained Anthenea can actually be placed anywhere. They are best suited for water however, where their glass windows provide deepsea viewing without the need of a wetsuit. There are three models, the cozy studio, two-story loft and the 1,900 square foot king which provides room for all the comforts of home. They all feature posh interior details like Bang & Olufsen stereos and flatscreen TVs. I[base ']d still prefer something with a motor but it[base ']s a neat idea for anyone who likes to stay in one spot.

[Luxist]

Wed, 12 Jan 2005 09:27:22 GMT

The Center for the Study of Political Graphics is the largest collection of Post World War II graphics in the United States. It collects, preserves, and exhibits posters relating to historical and contemporary movements for social change.

Via AEIOU.

Web 2.0 Weekly Wrap-up, 2-8 January 2005.

Wed, 12 Jan 2005 09:23:01 GMT

MSN Search supports RSS. This is very cool, and it's a differentiator for their search service because Google doesn't do it, nor does Yahoo, Jeeves, etc. It's also nice because they listened to us at the design review meeting late last year in Redmond. It was nearly unanimous among the bloggers that RSS support should be part of the search engine, both on the sending and receiving sides. Now one half has been taken care of. I'm sure this feature will gain wide use among bloggers. Very good. [Scripting News]

Mon, 10 Jan 2005 08:41:33 GMT

I thought I'd trial a new feature on Read/Write Web, a weekly summary of news and views relating to Web 2.0 (Web as platform). Most of the links will be sourced from my linkblog, which btw I'm now managing with del.icio.us. So here are some highlights from this week:

1. Weblications is a must-read article by Adam Rifkin, that clearly explains the benefits of using the Web as a platform. He cites Gmail in particular, which I too cited in my Best Web 2.0 Companies of 2004 article. Choice quote: "They don't see that the power of Weblications is that "simplicity and flexibility beat optimization and power in a world where connectivity is key", as Adam Bosworth put it." NB: see also The Web Way by Adam.

2. Tim Porter on morph, re content and containers. Continuing the Tom Curley discussion, Tim gets to the nub of the issue for journalists: "Adaptation, flexibility, innovation, intentional decision-making, distinctive content, recognizable point of view Â[^] these are the qualities of the news organizations that will flourish in the coming decade."

See also this great post by Jay Rosen from PressThink and a Simon Waldman article on Permanence (also from PressThink).

3. Mitch Kapor converts to Web 2.0! This is big news because of course Mitch made his fortune with the first killer app for the PC - Lotus 1-2-3 - and now he's building a smart client app called Chandler.

Choice quote from Mitch: "For 25 years, I've preached the superiority of the PC as an application platform, but times change and reconsideration is in order. The web browser and the infrastructure of the World Wide Web is on the cusp of bettering its aging cousin, the desktop-based graphical user interface for common PC applications."

4. Shore Communications: 2005 Content Business Models. Quote: "All-singing, all-dancing proprietary content vendor interfaces and exclusive distribution are "out": being able to deliver information built to "just-in-time" custom client specifications, facilitating the collection, distribution and linking of content from individuals and institutions and providing content through any and all distribution channels desired by a wallet-holder are "in" - especially those that build upon the search and aggregation tools which enable users to create content value on their desktops and in portable devices."

5. Six Apart acquires LiveJournal. You will have heard this news already, but here are some good quotes and stats:
- Six Apart pov: "Many of our weaknesses are LiveJournal's strengths and many of LiveJournal's weaknesses are our strengths."
- LJ pov: "...we'll continue to focus on technology and they'll help us make our stuff pretty and usable. They want LiveJournal to stay LiveJournal..."
- LJ stats show what SA is getting: Age Distribution is clustered around 15-20 year olds; 67% female users; 2.4 million "active in some way" accounts (5.6 million total).

Mon, 10 Jan 2005 08:40:36 GMT

Business Blogging.

I mentioned before Christmas that I'm starting a new business and now's the time to let you all know what it is. It's a new business blogging company, called Weblog Solutions Ltd. It's a 50/50 venture with another New Zealand blogger, who's a bit shy about revealing his identity right now (but a lot of you will be familiar with him and his work, because he's developed some products which many bloggers all over the world use on a daily basis). We're targeting New Zealand companies in particular with our new business venture, but we're also looking for overseas work - to take advantage of the exchange rate! You can read more about us and our services on the blog - which has recently soft-launched. Comments and advice greatly appreciated, especially if you're a New Zealander who is interested in our company!

Anyway for this week's paid Marqui post, I thought it'd be timely to review Marqui's new blog - called Marqui's world. My new company is all about business blogs, so what better topic to write about in my sponsored post. Let's take a look then at Marqui's effort at setting up a blog and compare it to another recent company blog on the scene - General Motor's GM Fastlane Blog (which I wrote about on the Weblog Solutions blog this weekend).

Content

They both started about the same time - the first post for Marqui's world was on 30 December and GM Fastlane Blog's first post was January 5. In terms of content, GM's blog got off to a voluminous start. They've already posted 9 items and some of them are lengthy. It looks like they had a bunch of posts pre-prepared (a couple of speeches converted into posts, links to interviews, biographies, plus some actual conversational posts). Pre-preparing content is a practice I'd recommend if you're launching (any) new blog, so top marks to GM for that. And what's more, the content is compelling - evidenced by the 68 comments (and still growing) that have been made to a post about GM's new Saturn brand.

Marqui's world has only 3 posts so far - and none in the New Year. So they're off to a slow start. The one piece of advice I'd give to them straight off the bat is to post regularly - momentum is vital in keeping blogs afloat. I should note though that GM probably has more resources to throw at their blog, being a huge multinational company and all.

Target Audience

GM are obviously targeting car enthusiasts and, judging by all the comments they're receiving, they seem to be striking a chord with that audience.

As for Marqui, they are targeting marketers. The 3 items so far have been an introductory post, a post entitled Firing up the imagination, and a post about an SEO paper. Nothing yet that will bring marketers scurrying out of their business lunches and commenting on Marqui's blog. And remember that one of the main goals of an external business blog is to get conversations going with your customers.

However I do think the tone of Marqui's blog is encouraging. It's conversational and informal - that's good. But the subject matter isn't compelling enough yet. Nothing against SEO papers, but it's hardly the sort of thing that your customers are going to get all excited about. Actually, the best piece of content I've seen from Marqui isn't even on the blog - it was a write-up by Janet Johnson about "a fascinating breakfast meeting in Portland about innovation and risk taking in marketing [which] yielded surprising insights". OK, that's the kind of thing you should be blogging! Talk about your marketing theories, about innovation in your field, about "surprising insights". That is much more likely to get marketers conversing with you, than a dry paper about search engine optimization.

Links

If you look at the GM blog, you'll notice they've started to compile a list of links to other car enthusiast websites and "blogs we like". In the blogging world, this is known as a 'blogroll' (they may be going out of fashion on the homepage, but generally most bloggers keep a blogroll somewhere). It's particularly important to maintain a blogroll on your homepage if you're a new business blog looking to connect to a community of readers. My suggestion to Marqui is to find out which are the marketing blogs that interest you, then link to them on the side of your blog. What's more, regularly read what they're blogging about and comment on that on your own blog (and leave comments on theirs). Two-way communication is important not just with your target audience, but your community of like minds.

Design

I mentioned above that GM probably has many more resources to throw at their blog - and it shows in their slick design. It's a bit unfair to ask Marqui to match that, but one thing I suggest to Marqui is to differentiate your blog more from your main website. Currently it looks too same-y. For the blog to capture the imagination of your customers, and compel them to converse with you, it needs to have its own identity and (most importantly) personality.

Summary

GM's new blog is off to a great start and the conversations with their customers (and potential customers) seem to be flowing like wine already. Marqui is by comparison off to a slow start, but I think the tone of writing they've adopted is promising. They just need to come up with some more compelling content that their target audience (marketers) will be excited by. I also suggest they find out who their blogging community is (other marketing blogs, primarily), and regularly read and link to them. Also a distinct design for their blog, to give it its own personality, would not go amiss.

That's just a start... OK here's where I add a plug for my new company, Weblog Solutions Ltd :-) Marqui, we're available to help you improve your blog! That invitation extends to any other company or organization wanting to get started in the blogosphere, or wanting to put some pep into their current blog. Feel free to contact us to talk.

Disclosure: I mentioned and linked to Marqui as part of my sponsorship arrangement with them. See here for details.

Mon, 10 Jan 2005 08:38:47 GMT

Low-tech "Hipster PDA" (cards and a paperclip) hacks. Cory Doctorow: Merlin Mann's "43 Folders" blog is devoted to turning the advice in David Allen's amazing productivity book Getting Things Done into material that is suited to people who lead technological lifestyles (Getting Things Done barely mentions computers and doesn't have anything on stuff like hacking producivity with perl scripts).

But sometimes Merlin goes low-tech, as he did with his amazing post from last September on the "Hipster PDA" -- a bunch of index cards held together with a binder clip. Now he's extending the Hipster PDA with tips and tricks he's derived since then. It's great stuff -- Craig of Craigslist carries around old business cards in his shirtpocket with notes to himself in tiny writing on the back of it. Hipster PDA is like that on steroids.

The Hipster PDA (Parietal Disgorgement Aid) is a fully extensible system for coordinating incoming and outgoing data for any aspect of your life and work. It scales brilliantly, degrades gracefully, supports optional categories and beaming, and is configurable to an unlimited number of options. Best of all, the Hipster PDA fits into your hip pocket and costs practically nothing to purchase and maintain. Let s make one together.

Link

[Eyebeam reBlog]

Sat, 08 Jan 2005 22:40:11 GMT

Fact-Check: Who Created RSS?. A fact-checker from Business 2.0 contacted me this week, seeking clarification about who created RSS for an upcoming story on podcasting.

My response:

A few years ago, I did some research on this subject for the preparation of a book on weblogging software.

The creation of RSS is a huge can of worms. One of the ironies of the format is how well it spreads arguments about itself.

My take, as someone who was around when no one cared who took credit: RSS was co-created by Netscape and Dave Winer.

In 1997, Winer introduced a site syndication format called scriptingNews, a simple XML dialect for viewing a Web site with different browsers.

Two years later, Netscape offered RSS 0.9, a more complex XML dialect for syndication that used the Resource Description Framework (RDF), an XML standard created by the World Wide Web Consortium to make it easier for software to mine documents for information.

Later that year, Netscape dropped RDF from RSS, releasing a new simplified version, 0.91, that adopted elements of scriptingNews format and publicly acknowledged Winer's contribution. To support the effort, Winer dropped his format and threw his considerable energy for evangelism behind RSS.

That protocol lives today as RSS 2.0.

If not for Winer, it wouldn't matter who created RSS, because the format would be as dead as Channel Definition Format, an early attempt at site syndication by Microsoft. When Netscape gave up on RSS and dropped the specification page from its site, Winer promoted it relentlessly on his weblog and in his software, Frontier and Radio UserLand.

Full disclosure: I'm a member of the RSS Advisory Board, the group that shepherds the RSS 2.0 specification, and have worked on a weblog hosting project with Winer. So at this point I'm closely associated with one side of the debate. [Workbench]

Thu, 06 Jan 2005 15:29:04 GMT

tis the season: II. So here's something cool that I'm happy to be able to announce. Five years ago, I published Code. It's time for an update. But rather than update in the old fashioned way, Basic Books has agreed to the following: Beginning in February, we'll be posting Version 1 of Code to a Wiki. "Chapter Captains" will then supervise updates and corrections. Depending upon the progress, sometime near June, I will take the product and edit and rewrite it to produce Code, v2. The Wiki will stay live forever (under a Creative Commons license). The edited book will be published in the fall. I have donated my advance for Code, v2 to Creative Commons. All royalties beyond the advance will be donated as well. At this point, we're collecting "Chapter Captain" (CCs, of course) volunteers. CCs should be expert in the subject of the chapter, and willing to work through the Wiki to produce an updated chapter. (Here's the table of contents.) My aim is not to write a new book; my aim is to correct and update the existing book. But I'm eager for advice and expert direction. If you're interested in volunteering, email me at this address. I am grateful to Basic Books to allow me to try this experiment. I worked very hard five years ago to learn enough to write Code. I'm extremely eager for the book to gain from the collective wisdom of at least part of the Net. No one can know whether this will work. But if if does, it could be very interesting. [Lessig Blog]

Thu, 06 Jan 2005 14:51:43 GMT

Adopt a robot.

By adopting one of derstrudel 's robots, you accompany the creation of the robot and the projects it will be involved in.
Once their experiments are completed, the artists will send you the robot and it will be your own.

The services include a web site with information about your personal robot, and a robotergarten where you can watch your robot play with the other robots and chat with the other stepparents.

The price for an adoption is 50,- euro.

Sebastian Noth and Christian Faubel from derstrudel will head one of Transmediale's workshops, on Februaray 4. They will teach people (including me!!! hopefully) how to create a robot out of electronic parts, wires and a soldering iron.

Thu, 06 Jan 2005 14:50:05 GMT

Content and Containers.

One of my favourite articles of 2004 was a transcript of a speech by Tom Curley, CEO of the Associated Press. In it he said that "...content will be more important than its container in this next phase [of the Web]". Why? Because "killer apps, such as search, RSS and video-capture software such as Tivo -- to name just a few -- have begun to unlock content from any vessel we try to put it in."

Curley's speech was timely for me, because a couple of weeks earlier I'd launched a series of posts on a theory I called Design for Data - which was inspired by a Jason Kottke post and before that a Tim Berners-Lee article. Another inspiration was Joshua Porter's article for Digital Web Magazine entitled How Content Aggregators Change Navigation and Control of Content. All those things, plus my own ideas fermenting in my head! :-)

I wrote about Tom Curley's speech in a November 23 post on Read/Write Web entitled Branding Microcontent. I said then that "RSS flow is creating a need for the data itself to be 'designed', not into HTML containers but into chunks of branded microcontent that will probably be XML."

And that's where I left the theory, until recently when Joshua Porter and I began an email exchange to nut it out some more. At the same time I noticed, via a PressThink post entitled Top Ten Ideas of '04: "Content Will be More Important than its Container", that the journalist blog fraternity is still talking about Curley's speech and its implications.

PressThink is an influential media blog by NYU professor of Journalism, Jay Rosen. He summed up Curley's speech by saying that "we who make news content have to re-locate where we brand it, and think about adding our voice at every step."

Rosen and a number of other media bloggers are looking at Curley's speech from the point of view of news organizations - traditional Content Producers (in 20th century speak). I'm probably taking a more broader view - where a Content Producer is any person who publishes content on the Web (e.g. bloggers, corporate web publishers). I'm also applying Curley's insights to the Web 2.0 world of web services such as Flickr and Amazon. However despite our different points of view, we're all converging on the same thing - I believe.

Firstly, I liked this observation from Rosen:

"With RSS, readers get my post, the headline, the subhead-- but not the blog environment of PressThink. Therefore the content has to be good enough on its own, without the house. It has to "say" PressThink: no logo, as it were."

I find the "house"/place metaphor to be a fascinating one on the Web. I explored it (in a different context to this) in my Digital Web Magazine article The Evolution of Corporate Web Sites from April 2004. Corporate websites in the 90's were usually designed as 'places', but nowadays they're more likely to be a group of services. For a media website, this may mean a news subscription service where the news travels out to users - rather than users traveling to the website 'container' to view it.

Another media person to articulate this well is Tim Porter, in a recent Morph post:

"...the future of news media is the content, whether it be strong, in-depth journalism, witless pap or cogent analysis and conversation. The container, the vehicle that moves that content from producer to consumer (and remember, that distinction now is more and more a semantic one), is completely fungible."

The next piece of insight from Rosen's PressThink was this:

"Publishers and media owners hate spending money on people because deep down they don't believe their business runs on people. (They're wrong, by the way.) They believe they own the news franchise, and the franchise--or brand--is what's valuable."

I think he's making a few points here and one of them is that the value in content is increasingly the personality of the writer - the voice. And so the voice then becomes the design/brand. Of course that's what blogs are good at - and what traditional corporate websites are not so good at (think of all that horrid corporate-speak and bland design from a recent as a few years ago). At a deeper level, Rosen is saying that content is a truer representation of people - and their influence on business - than the franchise 'containers'.

Lastly, the following quote from Rosen is a nice way to tie-in with the techie crowd (which I belong to):

"'Content will be more important than its container' is thus a disruptive idea in journalism. In a way it is similar to that cross-platform battle-cry in the software biz: write once, run anywhere. (Originated by Sun Microsystems as a slogan for Java.)"

'Write once, run anywhere' is nowadays a basic underlying principle of Web 2.0 (i.e. the Web as Platform). Given that the Internet is the driver of most (if not all) of Tom Curley's insights in his November '04 speech, it's fitting that news media organizations are adopting the same philosophy as Web designers and developers.