Blog Posts

March 2005

• 2005-03-01

  [DEMO 2005] Top Demos

  There’s already so much written about Demo 2005, it seems like there’s not much to add. First off, let me recommend Conferenza Premium Reports. It’s a very reasonably priced subscription service that provides first hand reports of all the major and not so major conferences. Shel Israel’s report on Demo 2005 is comprehensive and excellent.

  My list of top demos, extremely briefly A word about methodology. As I watched the 7 minute demos, I would write 2 or 3 bullets of what struck me, and a grade from A+ to F. Of the 60 or so demos, these rated an A- or better.

  ...

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• 2005-03-01

  RSS Feed Advertising

  From News.com, about Kaboodle BrightAds RSS **On Monday, the company introduced a self-service system that lets online publishers pair advertising with their RSS feeds. Called BrightAds RSS (after the technology format known as Really Simple Syndication), the service takes advantage of Kanoodle’s keyword advertising system to match Web content to relevant ads. Once a publisher signs up, an advertising link will piggyback on its syndicated feed sent to third-party news readers.

  Echo’s of the Google Toolbar debate? It sounds like Kanoodle BrightAds RSS will create and host RSS feeds for their customers, and intersperse Ads in the feeds. I am not sure this is a good idea, but I suppose it was inevitable**.

  The question is, will the inserted ads be distinguishable so that an aggregator could strip them out?

  #business

February 2005

• 2005-02-27

  Luck

  A neat little quote from a good, yet not well known movie, “The Kid Stays in the Picture”, about legendary Paramount producer Robert Evans (the film shares the same name as Evans’s famous 1994 autobiography.) It’s an idea that I’ve heard expressed in many different ways, but this one is new to me, and good:

  “Luck doesn’t just happen, it’s when opportunity meets preparation.”

• 2005-02-26

  Two Best TV shows that no one has heard about

  There are two TV shows that it seems no one knows about, and yet, I think, are the very best on TV today. Better than West Wing. Better than CSI:xyz. Without further editorializing: MI-5 – A british show about spies. Brilliant.

  24 – A US show that covers a single 24 hour period over the whole season. Each of 24 episodes covers 1 hour in 1 hour. **Outstanding. **

  ‘Nuf said.

• 2005-02-25

  [BlogBridge] New Weekly Release – 0.11

  Just a quick note that we’ve updated the weekly build to 0.11. Given that we are wrapping things up for our 1.0 Release, which is imminent, changes are going to be mostly on internals – bug fixes and performance. Still there are a few goodies here for you:

  Right clicking on an Article offers a “Copy Link to Clipboard” command. There is a preference to cause the text on the clipboard to actually contain the HREF notation to allow easy pasting into your blog. For Mac users, we have tweaked the color scheme to be even more OS X compliant. Drag and Drop of shortcuts onto BlogBridge automatically try to subscribe to them as a new Feed. There are various other, even smaller items, not worth listing here.

  Enjoy!

• 2005-02-24

  The Gates: What’s the point of taking pictures?

  As I mentioned a few days ago, I went to see “The Gates” – Environmental art by Christo. My reaction: much better and cooler than I thought it would be. Not that there were any surprises – it’s exactly what it was said to be: a whole bunch of orange (oops, sorry, safron) rectangular ‘gates’ all over many of the paths and byways of Central Park in New York City.

  • The impact of the scale of the project is perhaps what was the surprise. You stand one a path, under the canopy of one Gate – and for as far as your eye can follow the path, more and more gates. *

  *

  But then you look around you, and in the distance, almost along the horizon, m...

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• 2005-02-23

  screencasting – Screen + Voice = demo

  Jon Udell coins a term, screencasting: creating little informal movies from screen captures plus audio, used particularly for demonstrating softwaree and web features. He’s had several really good ones, most recently showing off a really cute Google Maps hack. Well more than cute: impressive and very instructive.

  Anyway, I’m trying my hand at this in practice, both to learn about the new medium and to ...

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• 2005-02-20

  Letter to all BlogBridge users

  Dear users, ex-users, and future users of BlogBridge, As we are approaching our 1.0 release, we are starting to plan what comes next! It is a good time to take the pulse of people using BlogBridge regularly and tap into your collective wisdom! Before getting into that, there are a few preliminaries…

  We just released our 0.9 Beta, and 0.10 Weekly build. Check out the Weekly at http://www.blogbridge.com/install/weekly/blogbridge.jnlp. It is quite wonderful on all platforms 🙂 People say it’s extremely fast and responsive. I regularly run it with 400 Feeds and it’s snappy as anything. (I don’t read 400 Feeds, it’s more to stress test the app.)

  Also, have you seen these new features?

  BlogBridg...

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• 2005-02-19

  Article about Podcasting in the New York Times

  If you haven’t heard about Podcasting (what, are you living under a rock?) the New York Times has a good introduction: “Their show, mostly ad-libbed, is a podcast, a kind of recording that, thanks to a technology barely six months old, anyone can make on a computer and then post to a Web site, where it can be downloaded to an iPod or any MP3 player to be played at the listener’s leisure.”

  Link to New York Times.

• 2005-02-18

  We’re going to see “The Gates” in New York

  We’re going to see the “The Gates” installation in Central Park, New York.

  Want to see an amazing satellite picture of it? Click here. It’s a really huge file though. The image on the right is a little extract.

• 2005-02-17

  Have you seen Google Maps?

  Unless you have been living under a rock (or have better things to do with your time) you will have seen Google Maps. Well, I only just tonight looked at them for the first time. Stunning! A spectacular web application. Highly usable and useful. And easy on the eyes!

  Here’s a really good quick introduction to Google Maps from Peter Merholz’s blog.. You’ll find some screenshots illustrating key features, and some user interface commentary.

  And here’s a link to google maps themselves.

  Check it out!

  #maps
• 2005-02-14

  [Demo 2005] The Enron Corpus

  The demos at this year’s DEMO are quite good. One interesting thing I noticed is that there are several productsconnected to keeping companies out of legal trouble due to problematic internal and external emails, or to help get them out of trouble if they get into it. In several demos we were treated to examples based on the “Enron internal emails.” The first two times I thought I was seeing a coincidental picking of the same humor by two seperate companies.

  But when it came up again, I went searching, and wouldn’t you know that during the discovery process of the whole Enron ...

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  #legal
• 2005-02-12

  Modesty isn’t dead

  If you are interested in blogging you certainly have come across Robert Scoble’s blog, the most prominent blog written by a Microsoft employee. Recently The Economist wrote a story about Robert Scoble at Microsoft. Nice article. Tip o’ the hat to Robert Scoble for his response to this column:

  Finally, I really don’t deserve the credit for humanizing Microsoft. There were about 100 bloggers already doing that work when I got to Microsoft. In particular, Joshua Allen deserves that title more than anyone. He is our Jackie Robinson of blog...

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• 2005-02-12

  Switcher’s Log, Part 4: So what software DO I use on Mac?

  This is a topic of continuing interest to people who hear that I switched. Here are some general comments:

  To a first order approximation what allowed me to switch at all was that I wasn’t working on primarily Microsoft (C#, .NET, etc.) software, but rather open sourc-y, java-y, unix-y stuff which found a natural home on Mac. I’ve been able to find all but one of my major, daily use applications on the mac. Either the Mac version of the same app, or an equivalent counterpart. (The missing link? Microsoft Money.) Speaking in sweeping generalizations, I think that Mac OS X applications are prettier to look at, simpler and often simplistic compared to their XP counterparts. As far as the more ...

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  #apple
• 2005-02-09

  Two really interesting bits missed by MSM

  Here are two practical examples of how mainstream media (“MSM”) sometimes overlooks really interesting or engaging stories which are well covered online (and I don’t mean just blogs.) Have you seen these?

  Here’s a really touching set of photos of Pope John Paul II shooing away some doves who were released as a peace symbol at some event. I bet you never saw that one. And wouldn’t you have liked to see it somewhere, on TV, in the newspaper?

  How about this article? It...

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  #politics
• 2005-02-08

  [BlogBridge Tip] New Weekly Build Available

  We just put up a new weekly build of BlogBridge with many new features. Here are some of the more interesting ones:

  Community Fields. Right click on a Feed, and choose Feed Properties. Click on the community tab, where you will see our initial pair of fields, Country and Tags. What’s interesting is that whatever you set for these two fields will be seen by all other users. If you know the country where this feed originates you can set it. And if you feel like tagging (classifying) this feed you can do it too.

  Discover Other Feeds (on the Tools menu) is greatly enhanced (and there is more to come!) First of all, some people are not sure what this discovery business is about, so a qu...

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• 2005-02-05

  VCs and Aggregators

  An interesting article in News.Com: As the number of blogs, news services and other syndicated sources of online information balloons, a new crop of start-ups has emerged promising to improve the signal-to-noise ratio.

  Very relevant to BlogBridge, of course.

  #business
• 2005-02-03

  Social Networks and RSS Aggregators

  Dave Winer says that there’s a bit of buzz about social networks and RSS aggregators. I haven’t seen it myself, but I am glad to see it brought up, because it’s one of the things that’s evolving nicely in BlogBridge and will be available in the next weekly build. What do I mean by “Social Networks and RSS Aggregators”? Briefly, here’s what we are doing with in in BlogBridge:

  Any Feed being accessed through BlogBridge can be given a rating (one through five stars) by a user. Also, the user can attach one or more Tags to the Feed. Also, the user...

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• 2005-02-03

  Learning from others – Making choices

  Dave Winer makes a point which I totally agree with: it is important to learn from what has come before – or more more provocatively – to steal good ideas wherever you can find them. And secondly that the only way to do that is to make it a point of being very familiar with other products, other approaches. As a designer of software I certainly believe in that. In fact,I have lived that over and over again: Improv learned from 1-2-3, eRoom learned from Lotus Notes, etc. And similarly, BlogBridge has...

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  #eroom
• 2005-02-03

  Switcher’s Log, Part 3: What I miss from my PC Days

  In the continuing saga of the switch from Windows XP to Mac OS X, here is where we find our hero…. I have more or less gotten all the applications I use over onto the Mac. Almost all of them. I will be forced to leave behind Microsoft Money, X1 and Plaxo. Of all the stuff I ran on the PC, those are the only three that I miss. And in each case I can get by.

  Microsoft Money – well there’s Quicken for Mac, which is analogous. But transferring the data over seems like it will be a huge mess costing time, frustration and in the end producing an unsatisfactory result.

  X1 – My wonderful desktop search. I already miss it. My ...

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  #apple