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.
[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!
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, more and more gates, everywhere. It evokes the feeling of being part of a huge parade or ceremony. Surprisingly powerful. What's the point of taking pictures? I had forgotten my camera and as I was walking around it occurred to me: Flikr! Check this out! There are over 4000 pictures, and that only under one tag. Other than perhaps a picture with Me in it, I don't think there's any picture that I could have taken that is not already in this collection!
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 illustrate some BlogBridge features. After a bunch of false starts , playing with tools and utilities and microphones that aren't on here's my first quasi-successful attempt. I don't think it's quite practical yet. For one, at 6Meg it's way too big. But it is an interesting start. I will continue to look at it and report as I go.
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?
BlogBridge Themes allow you to tune the UI to what you want it to look like.
When you Subscribe to a Feed, or create a new Guide, you can get a list of suggestions
Discover Feeds can now run as a one shot command, or you can have BlogBridge constantly look for interesting feeds for you
A new command on the Tools menu to send us feedback
When you set up your keywords, they are now also synched to the BlogBridge Service so you have them wherever you are
Take a look at the Feed properties. There are several cool new things there
There's more but I want to keep this email short!
By the way, the Weekly is almost always the one you should be running because it will have the latest features and bug fixes. The Beta is there for when we mess up and release a broken Weekly, because we are more confident in its stability. Tapping into your collective wisdom: the main point of this email We are organizing a small meeting in the Boston (USA) area to talk about what happens next with BlogBridge. It will be a chance to chat about your experiences with BlogBridge. But more importantly we'd like to talk about what direction to take the product and the project, in terms of both features and strategy. You will really be able to influence what comes next, both in terms of that little feature you always wanted, or a major new direction for the project. As a practical matter, I realize that many of you are far away from the Boston area and wouldn't be able to attend. But I am hoping that there are enough BlogBridge users in the Boston area to put together a good meeting. Date and location have not been set yet, but I would expect it to be some time in March, and likely in Waltham Massachusetts. Of course we'd be very glad to also engage in an email discussion on the BlogBridge developers mailing list: blogbridge-devl@lists.sourceforge.net. (Those of you on the yahoo groups list will notice that there's almost no traffic there.) I will publish interesting nuggets on my blog as well as things develop. Please let me/us know as soon as possible how interested you are in participating in this meeting. By the way, the meeting will happen no matter how many or few people decide that they can make it, but of course we would especially like YOU to come. Best, Pito Salas and the BlogBridge team
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."
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.
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!
[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!
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.