Blog Posts

April 2004

• 2004-04-06

  Welcome to Movable Type

  If I did things correctly, you should not have noticed too much different. But today, with the help of Dennis Doughty, I’ve switched to using Movable Typeas my blogging software. It’s no picknick, let me say that. My only reason to switch really was to make it easy for me to post from different computers. Other than that, I was happy with Radio Userland, and in fact I will miss certain things I’ve gotten used to in Radio. We’ll see how it goes. Please let me know if anything breaks!

  #blogging
• 2004-04-06

  Some miscellaneous links and pointers (WTF Series, 4)

  I am at the WTF conference (more of a retreat.) IN addition to the more cogent posts that follow, here are some links and pointers that may be of interest.

  About Venture Capital and Innovation: http://www.signallake.com/innovation/ About Telecom: http://www.telepocalypse.net/ Lof details about the WTF meetingFast Company Blog. Blog about Iraq: The Iraq War Reader

  Books:

  Who Really Matters – Art Kleiner

March 2004

• 2004-03-30

  Going to college?

  Having someone in the family who applied to college (and got in) I really appreciate this article. Not to mention that I agree totally with the point of view.

  #education
• 2004-03-29

  RF-ID uptake slower than expected?

  I’ve been a quasi-believer about RD-ID technology for a while now. I know more than several people who are investing their time and money into this space, but I am a fence-sitter. Briefly, why?

  From what I hear and read, it doesn’t quite work reliably yet. The readers can easily be confused by multiple tags, mis-counting or mis-identifying. While the advantages over bar-codes are very real, they don’t strike me as real enough to effect the kind of rapid industry change that fans of the technology are betting on. The backbone infrastructure that will be needed to process all this super-detailed new data doesn’t exist yet. It strikes me that it might be an effort of Y2K propor...

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• 2004-03-23

  CBS News’ Bob Schieffer

  CBS News’ Bob Schieffer Speaking at Cambridge Forum 7:30 p.m March 31. Should be interesting. Here’s the schedule of the Cambridge Forum.

• 2004-03-23

  Overview of Collaboration

  I had the opportunity to be a guest lecturer at Brandeis University today, which was fun. Brandeis of course is my Alma Mater, so I was quite at home there. The course was about “Internet and Society” and the section was about Collaboration. Here are my slides, for those few who might be interested.

  #education
• 2004-03-21

  Behavior Signature Analysis (Demo Series

  Behavior Signature Analysis (Demo Series 10) This is a little arcane but I thought it was an interesting pattern among several products launched at Demo 2004. “Behavior Signature Analysis” is the idea of learning something about the intent or higher level purpose of an activity by doing pattern analysis on some aspect of it’s low level behavior. There were several companies showing products that tried to do this at the Method invocation and HTTP Request levels: that you can tell something about meaning strictly by analyzing patterns of low level.

  Memento: BC Krishna has built a really cool new solution to measure and understand the actual use of busi...

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• 2004-03-18

  Outlook 2003 Rant.

  Outlook 2003 Rant. What were those guys thinking? Don’t get me wrong, I am not one of those Microsoft haters. I love Microsoft. I admire their work. But in this instance, and one that affects me directly and daily, boy do I feel let down!

  I’ve been using Outlook 2003 for a few months now. While it has some nice new features, the one feature I use the most and arguably the most important because of its prominence is so-called ‘Navigation Pane.’ Not to rub salt in the wound, but, why, oh, why

  Can’t I resize the ‘Favorite Folders’ panel? Can’t I hide the ...

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• 2004-03-17

  BlogBridge has spiffy new icons.

  BlogBridge has spiffy new icons. More progress the last week or so, with the addition of some nicenew eye candy. It’s getting closer and closer to being usable for real. If you want to try it out, send me an email and I will tell you where to download it. (It’s not ready for prime time yet, though, just for playing around.)

• 2004-03-17

  Open Source Icons and BlogBridge

  The beat goes on. Now that we have Unread working, the time was ripe to add several new commands to the user interface. With the help of Everaldo, I am now using the Crystal Icon Set, which has provided a wonderful face lift for BlogBridge. Feedback welcome! Also with the help of one of our offshore developers (in the Ukraine) there are major improvements (and more coming) in the rendering of the Blog Aricles, which now include support for a larger subset of html, including images and soon links.

  #blogging
• 2004-03-15

  Stewart Alsop ” the best

  Stewart Alsop ” the best political columnist of the past century”: Well, that’s high praise from William Safire in a New York Times editorial today. Stewart of course has been known as a technology columnist, author of a great Tech newsletter “PC Letter”, and inventor of the “Vapor List” where he tracked software vendors’ promises against reality. Stewart has since gone to the dark side and the world of Venture Capital.

  What I never knew was that Stewart had been, apparently, a political columnist of some note!

  Correction: In fact, the reference by Safire was to another Stewart Alsop, the father of the Stewart Alsop that I know and I mention above. Oops. Stewart Alsop the elder in fact was a political columnist of some renown until he passed away in 1974.

• 2004-03-12

  BlogBridge update. In the last

  BlogBridgeupdate. In the last few days I’ve made some reasonable progress on BlogBridge, both from my own personal efforts coding, as well as getting another developer involved in a small way. As time frees up, I am planning to invest more of my own time as well as getting others to contribute on this thing. Still Fun! (If you don’t know what BlogBridge is, check this out.)

• 2004-03-11

  BlogBridge Major architectural progress

  We made some major new progress since the last update. Unread Management. The persistent RSS layer (Informa) has been updated to support Unread management. This has been carried through the rest of BlogBridge, using Bold in the Channel Guide and in the Article list in the usual way to show read and uread. A set of new commands, Mark Read, Mark All Read have been added as well. Some of the other variations still need to be implemented.

  Refined background processing. The various background processes have been moved into their own subsystem making it easier to manage them. Also a simple activity indicator has been added to the status bar so the user can see that there’s background activity...

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  #blogging
• 2004-03-11

  What you may not know

  What you may not know about Eclipse. (Demo 2004 Series 10) If you are a Java developer and you haven’t checked out the Eclipse Development tool from www.eclipse.org, then you owe yourself a treat. Who knows if you get excited about that kind of thing, but it gives me chills. Here are some claims to fame:

  It’s free.

  It’s open source

  It’s as good as better as that paragon of tools Microsoft Visual Studio

  It’s fast

  It’s visually stunning as a Windows desktop application

  And … It’s written in Java!

  Check it out, you won’t be sorry. **But that’s not really the topic of this post. **

  ---

  Back at Demo 2004, mValent demonstr...

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• 2004-03-10

  RSS/Atom: An idea whose time

  RSS/Atom: An idea whose time has come. Dave Winer is reaching out to the Atom people to try for the grand unification of the two formats. If you look back at the history of how Atom came to be, and the public record of the debates, disagreements, potshots that have come before you see that this is a couragous step for Dave to be taking. It’s a first step which we all hope will lead to something great.

  People should read what was written closely: particularly that this is not meant to be a final proposal but an opening set of ideas on how the unification might be accom...

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• 2004-03-09

  Update on Digital Photography. When

  Update on Digital Photography. When I wrote a few days ago about OurPictures Network. a new service that was launched at Demo 2004, it wasn’t available yet. I just found out that they have started running a free trial. I haven’t experimented much with it yet, so I don’t know how good it is.

• 2004-03-08

  Flipstart from Vulcan (Demo 2004

  Flipstart from Vulcan (Demo 2004 Series – 9): This is a weird little device. It’s essentially a Windows XP computer using thumb keyboard. The dimensions are (from memory, now 4″ x 6″ x 1″) It has a 30Gig disk, and fast chip. It also has built in Wi-Fi. It has a port replicator allowing full size keyboard and screen to be attached. The screen is very high resolution. All in all it looks attractive and kind of useful.

  But the pitch was that this was a new approach to mobile computing, what you would come up with if you started with a blank slate, etc.

  Watching the demo and then playing with it, I have to say that it didn’t really live up to that...

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• 2004-03-06

  Open Source, BlogBridge and Offshore

  Open Source, BlogBridge and Offshore Development. I’ve been using several neat offshore development options in my work on Blog Bridge, a new kind of Blog Reader that I’ve been working on (very) part time. You can read all about it: here.

  There’s a developer in Russia, a designer in China, a programmer in Norway and one in California (ok, not really offshore.) I don’t want to exagerate, each of these folks has done one project for me, mostly pretty small. It’s been an experiment for me to see how this works and how effective it could be. So far so good.

  The designer in China redesigned the www.blogbridge.com ...

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• 2004-03-05

  David Coursey’s back! Well, I

  David Coursey’s back! Well, I guess I may have been the last to notice. David wrote what was my favorite punditry column when he was at Anchordesk. Then he stopped, and I unsubscribed. Now via a pointer from Kevin W.’s blog I come to see David’s back at it, and right there is his analysis of Social Networks. How apropos!

  David says that he’s been getting tons of LinkedIn invitiations and that he’s flattered, but he often doesn’t even remember the person. Oops. I will send him an email. Let’s see if he remembers me 🙂

• 2004-03-05

  Social Networking (Demo 2004 Series

  Social Networking (Demo 2004 Series – 8) I’ve written a few times about Orkut and LinkedIn and the kind-of-funny-kind-of-strange infatuation with Orkut among the Digerati that seems to have peaked and now died off. Anyway, Friendster was demoing at Demo, so I had a chance to look and talk to them. I learned a few little things:

  First off, Friendster has a strong Yahoo influence. I sense that maybe some of the people there came from Yahoo, which tells me that a likely direction for them is to be **acquired by Yahoo at some point. **

  Friendster tries to position itself away from a dating service and more as a general purpose Sociall Networking service. When asked to compare themselves with Orkut and LinkedIn, they claimed to have some millions of users and far more than the other guys. Their comment about Orkut – “it’s 85% men” – tells me something about how they really perceive themselves.