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  • 1 min read

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.

  • 1 min read

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!

  • 1 min read

[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 products connected 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 debacle, an aparently extensive (perhaps complete) collection of their internal emails during the relevant periods were collected, and subsequently made public on the web. Here's an interesting paper, one of many, about te Enron Email Corpus So just watch out what you write in email!

  • 1 min read

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 blogger

And also, previously, this one:

The thing is, business is a team sport. Not one guy. If one guy could do it all Bill Gates wouldn't have hired 57,000 of us. So, these articles need to be shared by the more than 1,360 Microsoft bloggers who work in public.

  • 2 min read

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 optional, less mainstream applications -- the little utilities -- many of them don't exist on Mac. For example Plaxo, SecondCopy, GetAnagram - three of my favorites on XP. These omissions are not enough to make me regret having moved.

Ok, now the list:

  • Applications I use every hour of every day:Mail, Addressbook and iCal , which together are supposed to replace Outlook , but don't quite. Eclipse, which is essentially identical on Mac OS X. BlogBridge of course, which is identical and wonderful on all platforms 🙂 Safari , replacing Internet Explorer and Maxthon -- not quite as nice. Adium , replaces and is nicer than Tillion.

  • Applications which I use very often: Photoshop, Dreamweaver, iTunes, Skype , which are identical on Mac OS X. iPhoto , replaces and is almost identical to Picasa.

  • OS X only applications which I use regularly:MarsEdit , which is the editor that I am using to write this post. QuickSilver , an app launcher, and Konfabulator , a visual trinkets app.

  • Windows XP applications which I really miss: Plaxo, SecondCopy, GetAnagram

  • 1 min read

Two really interesting bits missed by MSM

capt.rom10501301246.vatican_pope_rom105.jpg 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 talks about "Deep Throat", the secret source that gave Woodward and Bernstein key information that led to the whole Watergate scandal being blown wide open:

"Key Watergate witness turned Deep Throat sleuth John Dean is standing by his report in The Los Angeles Times that Bob Woodward has notified his masters at The Washington Post that "Throat" is ill."

Why isn't this covered anywhere else? Certainly a story of great interest to many many Americans. My point? MSM can overlook some of the best, most interesting stories.

  • 2 min read

[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 quick intro. It's kind of one of the raisons d'etre of BlogBridge - helping you discover other feeds that you might find useful. There are several strategies, the first two which are available in this release. In both cases BlogBridge will analyze articles in feeds, looking for references to other feeds, on the assumption that if you like this feed, chances are good that you'd be interested in feeds that this one refers to. You can either analyze one particular feed, or all the feeds in a certain guide. The process runs in background. Whenever an interesting feed is discovered, BlogBridge can either tell you proactively or simply add the discovered feed to a list (Tools/Show Discovered Feeds…)

  • Look and feel. We've given the whole application some more polish, especially on Mac OS X. The most visible change is in the toolbar and icons available.

Those are only some of the enhancements that you will find in the latest weekly release. Check it out! p.s. If you are not sure which one you are running, you can refer to the title bar. You will either see "BlogBridge Weekly" or "BlogBridge Beta". And if you click on the preceding two links you will get the corresponding applications.

  • 1 min read

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.

  • 1 min read

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 begged, borrowed and stolen from all sorts of other applications, including NetFlix, Del.icio.us, Wiki's, numerous email clients and on and on. And not by accident but by conciously studying what others have done. That said, there are certain design choices which you can't straddle: they are fundamental - you have to pick. To bring it home with an example, many people far prefer web based aggregators (like Bloglines) over client based aggregators (like BlogBridge.) Each brings their advantages and will appeal to a certain subset of users, and this is important : they will be a turn-off for another subset of users. As a designer you have to make such choices while knowing that you will alienate some of the users you would hope to get, but counting on the fact that there is enough diversity in taste and work style to allow more than one model succeed.