Blog Posts

March 2005

• 2005-03-31

  [GEEK] Java Web Start {again}

  There’s another flame-up on the WebStart commentary on the web, this time under the title *“Webstart, now I see why people don’t use it.”

  Even though I’ve spoken out about this once or twice, I couldn’t resist weighing in.

  Here’s what I wrote:**

  *

  I have written so much about this in Blogs, newsgroups, etc that I won’t rehash it here; however I will put some links below for those who are interested.

  My Bottom lines:

  WebStart is a very promising (I would call it tantalizingly close) approach. The problem is that when you are t...

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  #programming
• 2005-03-30

  Another VC is blogging – what’s going on?

  If you are interested in some thoughtful perspectives about the world of Venture Capital, from a reformed (or is it a corrupted?) entrepreneur, you should check out Jeff Bussgang’s (of IDG Ventures) new blog, “Seeing both sides.” He’s off to a great start!

  #business
• 2005-03-29

  Attention.xml

  Steve Gilmor muses about the history of the Attention.xml spec in his blog. Steve thought up Atttention. xml as way to capture what feeds and items people do and don’t spend time (their attention) on, collecting, aggregating and then mining this information for all kinds of purposes. (This is my interpretation, but I think it’s pretty accurate.)

  BlogBridge is a feed reader with a primary goal to save the reader’s time by collecting and using any information possible to help the user focus on what will be useful to them and...

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  #blogging
• 2005-03-28

  Web Radio is not the same as Podcasting

  Here’s a really interesting article by Hiawatha Bray of the Boston Globe about Web Radio, reminding us that there’s a whole other world out there that is related to but quite different from PodCasting.

  “Thousands of others share a similar affliction, thanks to Internet technology that lets anybody with a little money set up an online ”radio station.” The term isn’t quite right, since the Internet uses wires, not radio waves, to transmit music and chat. But Internet broadcasting has grown in popularity to the point where it’s become a significant alternative to traditional radio, and an appealing venue for major advertisers.”

  #blogging
• 2005-03-25

  Remix Remixed

  [I wrote this in response to this post, which had generated a lot of commentary. I liked what I wrote so much I decided to post it here too :-)] I can’t count the ways when someone looked at some great new product and said something like, “I did something just like that 20 years ago as a PhD thesis”, or comments like that.

  “Visicalc, oh that was just like some mainframe financial modeling system I used on Mainframes…”

  “Quicken, oh that’s just a glorified spreadsheet…”

  “Windows XP? Oh a total ripoff of the Mac, which in turn was a ripoff of the Star.”

  “Salesforce.com? Big deal, nothing more than Siebel running as an ASP”

  “Oracle – gee ...

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• 2005-03-24

  Interesting blog survey

  Blogads has conducted a survey of people who read blogs. The results are quite interesting. One thing that stood out to me was that 72% don’t use RSS (i.e. an aggregator) to read blogs. This is consistent with another finding, which is that people who read blogs typically read about 10 of them every day. When reading “only” 10, using a web browser is more than fine.

  Check it out, there are lots of other interesting tidbits!

  #blogging
• 2005-03-22

  [ETECH] Taxonomy of Folksonomies

  There’s been a lot of talk about tags, folksonomies, taxonomies, etc. Trying to make sense out of this can be confusing. At the recent ETech conference there was more than one presentation on the topic, each of which helped me understand the subtleties a little better, and organize them in my mind. [What follows is fairly inside-baseball so if you are not particularly into this topic it will probably be somewhat obscure and likely not very interesting, so you are warned!]

  What are we to do with this term ‘Tags’? It is used in many different places, sometimes to mean the same thing and sometimes something subtly different. This is not surprising about a set of ideas that are morphi...

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  #blogging
• 2005-03-21

  Busybodies and Crybabies

  height=”250″ width=”200″ align=”right” hspace=”20″ />I caught on Dan Gilmor’s blog apointer to an article by Tina Brown which talks about the Eggshell Era,

  **“…in which everyone has to tiptoe around because there’s a world of busybodies out there who are being paid to catch you out…”

  I don’t know why but that thought pinged a deeply lost link** in my brain to an article in Time Magazine 14 years ago (!!!) about how we had become a nation of Busybodies and Crybabies.

• 2005-03-21

  Blogging and journalism … again?

  If you are a blog aficionado then you’ve followed this debate, ad something. I don’t have any pearls of wisdom to add, but did come across this quite good article discussing the issues (via MacNetJournal)

  “Or in Walsh’s words, in trying to tell if a blog is serious journalism or the rant of a pajama-clad windbag, “It’s kind of like art. You know it when you see it.”

  Hmm. I thought that was pornography 🙂

  #blogging
• 2005-03-17

  [ETECH] Yahoo Buzz Game – Hacked!

  There was some buzz here at ETECH about Yahoo Research’s announcement of the Buzz Game. It’s one of those online, simulated markets, ostensibly to extract “the wisdom of crowds” about Technology trends. It looks like a relatively complete immitation of a real trading site – a very nice job, and realistic. The cool/amusing development is that hours after it was announced a player called “gogogo” posted did some really clever cheating. Given that this is a game, I can’t be mad, I think it’s a an impressive and interesting demonstration of how ‘easy’ it is to hack one of these things, if you are clever and dedicated enough. He ...

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• 2005-03-16

  First Class/Anachronism

  On a lark, I used my frequent flyer miles to fly First Class on American Airlines today, heading out to the O’Reily ETech Conference. I hadn’t done it in quite a while.

  It felt so ‘eighties’ to me – faux luxury dining in a tin can at 40,000 feet:

  “Mr. Salas, would you like a drink before take-off? Mr. Salas, what would you like for dinner tonight? Spinach and Cheese Pasta or Chicken Kiev?” …I am handed a heated towlette to wipe my weary brow… *“

  Mr. Salas, is there anything I can do for you? Mr. Salas, what would you like to drink before dinner?”*

  …I get a nice bowl of mixed nuts, heated! And my diet-coke… …Dinner is served. Linnen napkin, nice salad with capers and vinnigraite…

  “Mr Salas, white or red wine with dinner? Mr Salas, is there anything else I can do for you? Mr. Salas can I take that for you?”

  It’s just a little bit too subservient for my taste. But at least the legroom is excellent, even though the silverware was plastic.

  #places
• 2005-03-15

  [ETECH] Reasonableness

  A memorable quote (from George Bernard Shaw) “The reasonable man adapts himself to the conditions that surround him… The unreasonable man adapts surrounding conditions to himself… All progress depends on the unreasonable man.”

• 2005-03-15

  [ETECH] A9 as a search portal – Amazon defines “Searchlets”

  Jeff Bezos talked about a new feature of A9 which allows the basic A9 Search Page to be extended by anyone, using what I am calling “Searchlets.” Here’s an explanation…

  If you’ve looked at A9 you’ve seen the various “vertical” result regions that you can ask for – there are a handful built in, including for example the yellow pages result which shows you photographs of the establishments identified.

  A9 is now providing an API allowing anyone to extend this with their own, specialized search result engine – a cute pun on “vertical.” Here’s how you choose from a collection. What they are letting users do is to add “searchlets” to the A9 “Sear...

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• 2005-03-14

  Rosie O’Donnell has a blog

  Another sign that “something big” is going on here. It seems like not a day passes but that there’s another article in either the Boston Globe or the New York Times about some aspect of blogging. Latest example, Need Some New Luster? Try Rosie O’Donnell’s Method: Create It by the Blogful.

  “Ms. O’Donnell’s Web log, “formerlyrosie,” began appearing late last month and is described as at the top of the page as “The unedited rantings of a fat 42-year-old menopausal ex-talk show host married mother of four.”

  Not that I am a fan one way or another, but, who would have thunk!

• 2005-03-11

  Microsoft buys Groove: New York Times gets a significant fact wrong?

  Scoble (and everyone else) comments: “We bought Groove and made Ray Ozzie our CTO.”

  Except, according to the New York Times:

  “Mr. Ozzie will join Microsoft’s two other chief technical officers, David Vaskevitch and Craig Mundie”

  Interesting definition of “Chief”. I wonder whether the New York Times got it wrong?

• 2005-03-09

  Switcher’s Log, Part 5: Man does this machine scream.

  For those who are following this narrative, this is a continuing narrative of my experiences after having switched from Windows XP to Mac OS X. One of my big concerns before switching to Mac was that it was going to be sloooooow. Of course this is an unfair comparison, between:

  a 2GHz Pentium on a 2 year old Dell with 1 Gig of Memory and a brand new G5, 1.8 GHz x 2 (dual processor), with 2 Gigabytes of memory.

  But you wouldn’t believe the rumors and legends out there about Macs being slow, or the fact that you can’t compare a Pentium MHz to a G5 MHz… I was worried: perhaps the Mac OS was slower or different; and anyway would it actually be able to take advantage of the dual CPU for day to day use?

  The bottom line: it screams! Builds are fast, opening apps is fast, moving windows around is fast, Ripping CDs is really fast.

  It’s really fast!

  #computing
• 2005-03-09

  [BlogBridge] Screencast tutorials, so far

  There are two very brief audio-visual overviews of ‘cool’ BlogBridge features.

  BlogStarz feature:in this brief screencast I introduce and explain a handy way to rate which feeds you find most useful, and at the same time benefit from the experience of other users. Automatic highlighting in articles: In this brief screencast,I show how BlogBridge will highlight words and phrases in green (link to a feed I am already following), red (link to a feed that is new to me) or blue (specific words or phrases which are interesting to me.)

  Let me know what you think. Useful? Does it work with your browser on your platform?

  #blogging
• 2005-03-07

  This is not a religious blog

  I thought this was an interesting article even though I don’t agree with it: “There is no reason for believing that any sort of gods exist and quite good reason for believing that they do not exist and never have. It has all been a gigantic waste of time and a waste of life. It would be a joke of cosmic proportions if it weren’t so tragic.”

• 2005-03-06

  I love Microsoft too, but I can’t hold my tongue

  Dave Winer points to Kevin Shofield’s defenseof an “unfair, infamous post saying that Microsoft can’t ship software anymore.” Scoble links to the thread, without comment (which is understandable, not wanting to be too partisan.) In my opinion, and agreeing with Kevin, Microsoft actually shows an absolutely amazing ability to develop, test, and deliver software of mind boggling com...

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• 2005-03-05

  I read Dowbrigade for the articles

  Do you know Dowbrigade? An almost always interesting blog, intellectually stimulating and thought provoking. Check it out! Wait, read more closely. There’s good stuff there:

  “This story has almost everything we look for in a good blog posting. It features an innovative use of one of our favorite technologies, libraries and librarians, and a money-saving move by a public institution. Everything, that is, except an opportunity to feature a little artfully exposed flesh. So we decided to exercise a little creative licence, at the end of the story..”

  What I want to know is where is Michael’s secret stash of iPod photographs?