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  • 1 min read

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?

  • 2 min read

[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.

  • StreamBase - StreamBase Systems. From Michael Stonebreaker, one of great innovators in releational databases. StreamBase is not a database at all. Instead of stored data, it's a server for processing. mixing and matching, huge and voluminous streams of real time data. Why hasn't anyone done this before?

  • My iControl - iControl Networks. A plug and play home automation network, based on wireless sensors and a box that sits in your basement. The sensors include door opening, temperature, cameras, and lots of others.
    <li>NanoChromics Display - NTera LTd. A replacement for the good old conventional LCD display. Cheaper and brighter. Basic technology not something you would go out and buy.

  • Instant Scene Modeler - MDA Very interesting: handheld contraption with two cameras is used to 'film' a scene. Within seconds the software creates a 3D digital model of the scene that you can look at from all directions.

  • GiftWorks- Mission Research Inc. Financial and fundraising management software for non profits. MS Money for charities.

  • Ovation - Serious Magic. Converts PowerPoint presentations to broadcast TV quality animated slides.

  • Tricaster - NewTek. From the guys who did Video Toaster. A video production truck in a box. Hardware and software. $5,000.

  • In the Chair - Digital Monkey. Unusual and very cool music education software. Lets a soloist read music and play their instrument while on the screen they follow the score, see a live conductor and the rest of the orchestra follow along while giving audio cues.

  • QuickSite- Homestead Technologies. Web site design and hosting service from Homestead. The new twist is that they offer a huge collection of professionally designed sites for $200 each.

  • Demandware Ecommerce Platform - Demandware. Basically ATG Ecommerce software packaged as an ASP service. Excellent.

  • **Real Basic- Real Software.** A VB knockoff, which runs on Windows, Mac and Linux. Looks complete and powerful.

  • Xcelcius- Infomersion . Create direct manipulation graphical models with graphs and controls, using an Excel spreadsheet as the underlying model.

  • LiveVault - LiveVault Corporation. Just Backup and offsite recovery. But beautifully implemented via an on-site appliance which includes lots of storage, plus an offsite service, all of them very nicely integrated.

Those are my picks!

  • 1 min read

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."

  • 1 min read

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.

  • 1 min read

[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!

  • 2 min read

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. _H1U4252T.jpg

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. _H1U0870T.jpg 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!

  • 1 min read

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.

  • 3 min read

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

  • 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.