Web 2.0 Calendars?
Mike Arrington waxes poetic about 30 Boxes, an entry in the, apparently, red-hot online calendar space. I 'm not sure I get it. It seems to me that working even when off-line , even when away from my computer, would be top requirements for any calendar product. In other words, a downloadable application (Outlook anyone? iCal? Blackberry?) I'd be worried if I could only access my calendar on live web connection. Sure, GMail is hugely popular, and you could make that same argument there. But GMail lets me synch with any POP-client of which there are many. I use GMail with Apple (Mac OS X) Mail when I am at my primary computer, and over the web everywhere else (including my cell phone.) Technorati Tags: mikearrington, calendar
RSS Alley Geek Dinner: March 29th – 6:30pm – Harvard Square? Should be even more fun than the last one!
Hello sports fans. We are having another super-informal-geeky-but-not- exclusively-geeks geek dinner, this time using the well-known PaB/Free Pattern. Who is we, again? Bela Labovitch, Adam Green and me. We are fortunate that the folks at Top Ten Sources and RSS Labs are again letting use their space. Thanks! What happens at this thing? Well this is the second one that we are organizing. Basically we just hang out, casually munch on cheap food and compare notes on stuff that people are working on. Everyone is welcome, and people who came last time : invite along a friend who didn't come or didn't know about it. Really! It would be nice to have new faces. There's no agenda. We might go around and show off folks latest creations, or not. At any rate we will provide projection facilities for you to use. But this is not primarily a demo-rama, it's more of a network-o-rama. See you there! Here are the coordinates:
When : March 29, Wednesday, 6:30pm to 9:30pm Where : 66 Church Street, Cambridge (near Fire and Ice) Topics of discussion: Web 2.0, RSS, OPML 2.0, AJAX, Ruby, Mashups, Web Services, Startups, etc. To RSVP, click here
Technorati Tags: geekdinner, RSSAlley
Check out Doc Searls Suitwatch newsletter
There are a few really good newsletters that have not moved over to a blog which I read religiously. One of them is Doc Searls' Suitwatch. Doc writes a fairly long essay approximately monthly. It's always interesting and well written. Here's how his most recent episode, about CES in Las Vegas, begins:
"What could be more ridiculous than a city that wants to be like everywhere else? Venice, Paris, New York, Rome and Monte Carlo are all in Las Vegas, embodied as giant hotels, each as cliched as a travel brochure. Nearly all the big theme hotels front The Strip, a wide paved line in a desert no less arid than the hundred empty basins between the hundred stony ranges that comprise the rest of Nevada." (From "The Produced Electronics Revolution, Part I")
You should consider subscribing to this. It's always a good read. It just shows that the form (blog or newsletter or whatever) doesn't matter if the content is great! Technorati Tags: docsearls
Mac OS X Hacked?
This is only a little funny because Mac fans (and I am one of them) can be very smug about OS X security, saying things like: "There has been not a single case of a virus on Mac, ever." Hard to prove or disprove but intuitively it's kind of hard to believe. So when I saw commentary somewhere earlier today that Mac OS X was hacked in less than 30 minutes I hesitated to post about it, thinking that it was yet another urban legend. But now ZDNet has picked it up, and with raised eyebrows and a smile (or is it a smirk?) on my face, I share the link to an article I just saw:
"Gaining root access to a Mac is "easy pickings," according to an individual who won an OS X hacking challenge last month by gaining root control of a machine using an unpublished security vulnerability." (from"Mac OS X Hacked in less than 30 minutes")
RSS is not a goal…
glenn has been busy today. A series of very intriguing posts, all made today, a Sunday no less. I can remember when glenn insisted on keeping his Sunday's clear of anything non- recreational. You should check out his blog, there's lots of good stuff there. This one caught my eye - "RSS is not a goal" wherein I encountered this especially meaningful (to me) paragraph:
"And in the meantime, if I were working on any kind of RSS/OPML-related application, I would take a day or two to stop and think about my goals, not in terms of today's syntaxes but in terms of the flow of information between human beings, and between machines as our facilitators. I'd want, and maybe this is just me, to be working on something that not only improves the lives of people using the imperfect tools it has to work with right now, but would improve the lives of people even more efficiently if the world in which it operates were itself improved. Sometimes a broken window demands plywood, but as a tool-maker I dream of making something you won't just throw away after this crisis passes." (from "RSS is not a goal")
Indeed - while I spend (too many of) my waking (and sleeping) hours thinking about how to make BlogBridge better , more useful, more compelling, at the same time I agree that RSS, aggregators, Feeds, Blogs, OPML, and all dat stuf are transitionary. They are definitely doing something that humans find very useful, but the whole thing is too much of a hairball. There still is work to be done. Lots of it. glenn, want to help? Technorati Tags: blogbridge, RSS
Pandora helps me discover Beth Nielsen Chapman
I've experimented with all kinds of novel music related services and products. My favorite is Pandora. This is a a site that helps me discover new music that I like. It's introduced me to several artists that I had never heard of before which are now favorites. In this case I am plugging Beth Nielsen Chapman. A wonderful singer songwriter, I think from Europe, that has the sound I really like. It's quite wonderful to create a Bob Dylan or Joni Mitchell or Bill Evans channel discover new artists. It 's great! By the way, also of interest are:
Last.FM - An application that is supposed to do something similar. In this case it's integrated with iTunes, and just watches what you play. Also quite cool, although so far I haven't discovered any new artists with Last.FM
EMusic - This is a majorly large music library (a-la- iTunes store) but with a twist. The music is much much cheaper, and you get it without any DRM. The catalog is spotty but I have found lots of music for my iPod at a fraction of the price. And, here's the clincher: they just gave me 50 songs to download just for trying the service - free of charge!
Technorati Tags: music
How clever is Mac OS X?
I guess because deep down I am still a paranoid Windows user, my OS X is configured to automatically reboot every Saturday at 7:00am, "just to clear out the cobwebs." A very handy setting by the way, which I wish that Windows XP also had. Am I imagining this? Last week I turned off my Mac - turned off the power - because I was going to be away for a week. When I returned I found that it seems to have rebooted itself on Saturday as it does every Saturday. Can this be? It was off! I dunno, maybe I just imagined having powered it off a week ago… Technorati Tags: osx
Rim and NTP Settle Blackberry Dispute!
From the Wall Street Journal: (subscription required)
"Research In Motion Ltd. agreed to pay $612.5 million to settle its long-running legal dispute with patent firm NTP Inc., according to NTP lawyer Jim Wallace."
Hello from Curacao
I've discovered how hard it is to work on a laptop with a tiny screen, 1.2GHz and, esepcially, 256Mb of memory. Sloooooow! I've been keeping up with emails but not really getting into a blogging mindset. This is just a cheat post to make my blog not appear dead 🙂 Curacao? Those of you who know me, know. Those who do not, probably don't know where Curacao is. Look it up on a map. A little island (and I mean little) in the Caribean, right off the coast of South America. It's where I was born and grew up,so I get back here regularly. Nice.
Insights on the world of mashups
Adam Green has two very insightful posts about Mashups inspired at Mashup Camp:
All of this is very cool. At least that is what one side of my brain says. The other side is saying "How the hell is the average person going to understand any of this?" I even doubt if the average blogger is going to be able to follow all of this data flying around the Internet. (from "Cognitive dissonance at Mashup Camp")
and also about business models in the new world of Mashups:
"At the end of his pitch we had a standard joke. "Do we pay them or do they pay us?" These conversations were going on in board rooms all over the country" (from "Who pays whom?")
Read them both. Good stuff. By the way this stuff is somewhat relevant to BlogBridge, even though it's not your conventional mashup, if you think about it BlogBridge, and it's relationship to the BlogBridge Service, and other services such as del.icio.us and Technorati raise very similar questions. Technorati Tags: mashup, mashupcamp