root/trunk/ProjectFortress/demos/100.out

 I can't help myself. I have to keep this discussion about blogging going.    Is blogging just the end result of someone's input into a Content Management System. Of course it is. So what. You could point a URL to a daily post in a discussion forum. It would have far better interactivity than a blog, and would be just as easy to post as often as the author would like. Does that make the output purely a forum post ? Or for those old school among us, putting up a page on a website could be a blog, a column, a report, whatever. The manner of how you post something to the web is not even worth discussing. A blog is a blog is a blog.   If you blog, regardless of what software you use, you are a blogger and what you produce is a blog. If you want to call yourself a columnist, so be it. If you are a reporter in a 1 page internet only publication, yes you are.   From there, only one question comes up. Why. Why ? Why do you do what you do. Is it because:   You get paid to do it ?   Because you want to promote something or to promote yourself ?   Because you want to start a discussion ?   Because you want to communicate with customers, fans or ??    Because its a way to say whats on your mind ?   Because you want to make money from it ?   I'm sure there are other reasons to communicate on the web. What software you use, even whether you use video, text and/or pictures, really doesn't matter.   What matters is why you do what you do.   For most of us, we start on the furthest reaches of the long tail of all content. To make money from whatever it is we produce is not only difficult, its near impossible. To get off the long tail is near impossible as well. Only a few will ever find their way to a point of generating enough consumers of our content to have any choice in whether we monetize or influence a material number of people. Others of us will still be in the long tail, but have influence in a small verticial segment important only to those who already know us, or come to know us. Its possible to be a big player in a small pool, and get paid for it,  still reside on the long tail.   The hope by all on the longtail is that the "quality" of the publication will garner enough consumers to move them off.  Like the artist whose art is better, the band or musician whose music is better, the producer, director or actor whose video is better. Everyone hopes that quality of content is the final arbiter of attraction and success.    The worst part of it all is that when you are on the long tail, it takes a lot of money or luck to get off and 99.99pct , never get off. Which is exactly the definition of the longtail.    Thats for individuals.    For corporations who publish on the web (as opposed to aggregate 3rd party content), again, regardless of what content management software they use, or what they call themselves, the longtail is death.  If you are a blogger, and you work for a major media company, you are born with a silver spoon in your mouth. You are granted a platform with traffic. Thats the good news. The bad news is that you also have ratings. If you can't hold your traffic or build upon it, you better hope you generate sufficient value in other places, or your days of publishing on the web may be numbered. For those of you who haven't noticed, paid bloggers do come and go from media websites if they don't produce. But wait, there is worse news.   The media companies that have traffic foundations and can dual purpose people so that they can publish off line and online come with their own set of problems. They are paddling as fast as they can to retain their offline businesses. Newspapers, to continue to use them as an example,  are pushing as hard as they can to sell papers and retain advertisers.  For those who think that a newspaper is just like a newsletter, you have never been a paperboy.   To try to maximize online traffic and resultant revenue, newspapers turned to blogging. Saul Hansell of the NYTimes commented that blogs are used uniquely and thoughtfully by NYTimes reporters to communicate new information and create discussion. That's great.  It's a way for the paper to drive readers to their website, keep them as readers and hopefully add more readers. It's using whatever content management system they use to give more value to readers. Wonderful.    Unfortunately for them, they are now in the same old grind that they are in with the newspaper business. Their articles, I mean blogs, vs everyone elses' blogs. They hope that readers believe that their content is better and that brings them back. They hope like the new TV show following the hit, that they can retain audience.   An approach which puts them on the exact same content treadmill   as even the smallest blogger. . For some on the NYTimes website, as with any and every other newspaper website, they will manage to stand out from the crowd. The majority will not. They will bump their way down to where everyone else is. Such is the nature of the content business. No matter what anyone at the NY Times thinks.    That is the endgame I see for newspapers that publish complimentary content on their website. You can call it blogging. You can even call it something else. The point I didnt make clear enough in my previous post, is that it has to be something else.  No matter the quality of the writer, its just another stab at an audience in a medium where there are no barriers to entry. Its just one more example of the newspaper business following everyone else onto the web and doing exactly what everyone else is doing, but expecting they will be better because they are "The big paper".  Thats a huge mistake.    Call me crazy, as many out there have, but I would have made every effort to be different in a way that leverages brains, technology and size. I would have sat down and tried to figure out the answer to the question "What leverages our strengths and pre empts every blogger out there so that people perceive blogging as the low end and our presentation as the future of the medium"   You wouldn't have to get it right out of the gate, but you could send a message that you are striving for more and those with "merely a content management system for blogs" will not be able to do what you do.   This is the bias that comes from 25 years in the technology business. A feature that anyone can add is not a sustainable differentiation. Since you can easily add it anytime, like everyone else, instead, always look for what can set you apart and pre empt the competition   Or you can following the pack. The longtail is there waiting for those who do Permalink | Email this | Linking Blogs | Comments 
There was a lot of discussion about my previous posts here and here. My point is that the internet is a stable platform. Its a utility. Its evolved to the point where you can count on it and develop applications for it without much fear that its going to change.  What confirms my point is that with all the talk of a possible or existing recession, not a single mention is ever made about how increases in productivity from technology will pull us through. That is counter to the recessions of the past 25 years. Whether it was the early 80s, the 90's or even the post bubble , economists and others pointed to technology as a catalyst to productivity that would help pull us out of our economic doldrums.   When there were boomtimes , as we saw from about 91 to 2000, technology was given the lions' share of the credit.   So where are the claims of further productivity enhancements from technology ? They are no where that I can find.  In fact, we can start to make arguments to the contrary. That technology and in particular social network and video sites can be a hindrance to productivity in the workplace.   Further arguments can be made that the MSFT YHOO potential merger is further evidence that the technology industry is maturing.  It is what it is.Permalink | Email this | Linking Blogs | Comments 
 Sometimes we come across Reader-related things that are interesting enough that we'd like to post about them on our blog, but at the same time too small to base a whole post around. Enough of these tidbits have piled up to build a whole meal, so we thought we'd just share them with you, one link at a time.   Video Appetizers   Reader is centered around subscribing to feeds, but it's not always easy to explain to others what feeds are, who makes them, and why you'd want to subscribe to them. Worse yet, sometimes they're "feeds" and sometimes they're "RSS" -- and what is this "Atom" thing anyway? This RSS in Plain English video does a good job of explaining all that, in a very unique style.    Also on the topic of videos, Chris made a short clip showing all the places he's used his offline Reader. If you or anyone you know would like to know just why you'd Google Gears-enable an application, this showcases it pretty well:        For a more in-depth discussion of Gears and Reader, you can watch Aaron Boodman's presentation from Google Developer Day.   Embedding Entrées   Many folks like our gadget, but sometimes wish even more of Reader's features could be accessed from within iGoogle. With Michael Bolin's Your Page Here gadget, you can embed all of Reader (or any other page, for that matter) as its own tab within your iGoogle page.    For all you Facebook users, Mario Romero has created a Reader application that allows you to embed your shared items into Facebook profile. It's a bit finick-y (you have to type in your 20-digit Reader ID), but it shows how open platforms (Reader's and Facebook's) can be used together without needing permission from either party.   Fun Desserts   We've posted before about add-ons that others have made for Reader, but they've generally been of a functional nature (like notifiers and browser buttons). The Google Reader Theme that Jon Hicks made is entirely unlike that in that it doesn't add any functionality, it just makes Reader look very different (some might say Mac-like). A fresh face for Reader can be a lot of fun, and we were happy to see just how seamless Jon managed to make it.    Finally, if Reader is just too serious for you and you'd like to view your feeds through a lolcat perspective, Ian McKellar's LOL Feeds may be the thing for you. 
 There's been a lot of discussion this weekend about the subscriber counts that have recently appeared in Reader's search results. Leaderboards have been drawn up, numbers are being compared and in some cases there's confusion as to how these numbers compare with other subscriber metrics. Additionally, we've made changes (some as recently as today) as to how counts are being calculated. This is probably going to be pretty boring unless you're a feed publisher, but we thought it would be best to explain things a bit. Here are the various numbers you may come across, and what they all mean:     Google subscriber counts: These numbers include subscribers across all Google services, including Reader, iGoogle, and Orkut.  You can see them in Reader's feed search results (pictured below) and the Google Webmaster Tools. Additionally, our crawler reports them to the publisher each time we fetch the feed. Reader's feed search was recently showing stale and incomplete data, but as of today (October 15) the numbers should be the same everywhere.        FeedBurner numbers: If  you use FeedBurner to manage and track your feed, you will see a subscriber count there that is attributed to "Google Feedfetcher." This number is a sum of all the feeds that you have redirecting to your FeedBurner feed URL. So if http://www.example.com/atom.xml has 3 subscribers, http://www.example.com/rss.xml has 7 subscribers and http://feeds.feedburner.com/Example (where you redirect the other two feeds now) has 12 subscribers, then you will see 3 + 7 + 12 = 22 subscribers reported in the FeedBurner interface.    What this all means if you're a feed publisher is that if you're interested in getting the most comprehensive overview of your subscribers, you should be using a service like FeedBurner or Google Webmaster Tools. On the other hand, if you're a Reader user, we hope you take advantage of the numbers that we now show next to search results, so that you can pick the most appropriate feed to subscribe to. 
 It’s exactly three months to the day since I had my heart attack. What has followed has been a life-altering experience, forcing me to learn some hard lessons about life, myself and of course being a first-time entrepreneur.    I have had to institute numerous behavioral changes over the past 90 days. But what I found was that some of my worst and most deep-seated habits were among the easiest to overcome — smoking, for example, as well eating a meat-rich diet and avoiding exercise. It’s the little things that have proved to be a challenge.    Simplification Through Elimination     I was reading a review of the Macbook Air over on Macworld when I realized that the machine and post-recovery me have a lot in common. I have to be very careful as to how I use my mental and physical resources, for there is a high risk of relapse. Similarly, the Macbook Air comes with miniscule amount of storage space, so one needs to be careful about how to use it. The machine’s battery power limitations remind me of how much time I have to devote to work on a daily basis.    It has been hard to use the Macbook Air as my primary computer, just as it’s been hard to change all those pesky “little things.” Indeed, the Macbook Air is an acquired taste. It’s also an apt reflection of an effective “simplification through elimination” strategy.    Three months on, I am looking to eliminate a number of things from life: excessive public appearances, too much travel and many, many RSS feeds. I am going to cut down the effort I spend on certain projects and focus on making the most of what we have at hand. Stay tuned for more details.    Empower To Power Up     One of the upsides to my health setback was that I discovered the amazing abilities of my team. When faced with adversity, each one of them picked up whatever they felt comfortable with and ran with it. From editorial to sales to the company and everything in between — the team executed on our strategy. Batteries Om not included.    I think one of the biggest problems I had as a first-time entrepreneur was an inability to let go; I was always second-guessing every decision not made by myself and was obsessed with minutiae. Three months on, having seen the Giga Gang at work, I realized what a mistake that was. You empower people, and in turn they power you to do good things. Now I am finding more time to focus on writing, reporting and spending time on projects like our upcoming conference, Structure 08.    Anyway folks, thanks for reading — and please don’t forget to get your cardiac check-up. Many of us in Silicon Valley refuse to acknowledge that we live a high-stress existence and are prone to all sorts of problems that stem from an 18-hour-a-day, non-stop lifestyle. Cardiac disease is one of the deadliest silent killers of the modern age, and I urge you to learn from my mistakes. (More information on this @ the American Heart Association web site.) Please let me know if you want me to post information about symptoms of heart disease and other heart-related problems. And if you need help, I am just an email away.           
 With the clock ticking on FCC Chairman Kevin Martin’s tenure, his special friends in the phone business are asking him to give them the moon, the stars and the sun: In other words, a cable TV version of number portability.   Verizon today asked the Federal Communications Commission to require the cable industry to make it as easy for consumers to choose a new video provider as it already is for them to switch voice providers. The process to switch video providers is more cumbersome for consumers…Cable incumbents do not accept disconnect orders from the new provider; instead, they require the customer to contact them directly to cancel service after choosing a new video provider and to return equipment. (press release)   Verizon’s arguments and press release may seem consumer-friendly, but one has to take all of it with a barrel of salt. Now, as you well know, I am no fan of cable companies — who apparently want to watch what you are doing inside your living room — but it’s hard to believe Verizon.    Even despite all the legal and other hassles, the satellite guys have been competing with cable companies for video customers — and they didn’t need a sugar daddy (aka the FCC) to help them out. Verizon should learn to compete in the open market.    Must I remind you that Verizon is the same company that rips out copper cables in favor of its own fiber, thereby taking away your ability to switch your broadband or voice service to another provider? Verizon itself delayed the switching of “broadband” service when customers wanted to buy DSL from another company, thus driving many of them out of business. In fact, incumbent phone companies indulge in such delays even now.    I think both incumbents — the cable and phone operators — are waging a war of words, and none of them, including the newly “open” Verizon, have consumers’ best interests in mind.    The P2P arguments, open networks, and now video portability all seem to be part of a calculated image makeover for Verizon. But as my granddaddy used to say: Just because you paint stripes on a donkey, it doesn’t make it a zebra.           
 I was having breakfast this morning with Salil Deshpande from Bay Partners.  Salil and I were talking about assessing company progress and how best to measure that progress.  Salil invests in super early-stage deals and has his companies report to him on their progress on a frequent basis.  He said that he had one CEO who would report on his progress in such florid language that eventually Salil had to forbid his use of adjectives in his progress reports.  Salil said that he didn't want to hear that things were going great.  He wanted to hear precisely how things were going.     I nearly jumped out of my seat.  Salil had articulated one of my biggest pet peeves when it comes to company pitches (and board meetings for that matter).  I hate adjectives.  I don't want to hear that one of the company founders is a "fantastic sales exec."  I want to hear that she was Presidents Club the last twelve years running.  I don't want to hear that the product is "revolutionary and paradigm-shifting."  I want to hear about the specific features of the product that are differentiated and how.  I don't want to hear that the company has "massive market traction."  I want to see a graph of progressive quarterly sales and a giant sales pipeline.      Adjectives are not convincing.  Facts are convincing.  I may not agree with the conclusions a company draws from those facts.  But I will at least be in a position to appropriately assess those conclusions.  Whereas adjectives are all about conclusions without the underlying facts.  As an entrepreneur, you are far better off having me determine that your market is "massive," your founders are "brilliant," and your product is "elegant," than to tell me that your company has "an elegant solution serving a massive market designed by brilliant founders."  So reread your pitch and remove all of the adjectives.  It will go massively, monumentally, gargantuanly. colossally better that way.    
                          This appears not to be a joke: the Quantum Sleeper is a bed that hermetically seals itself as you sleep to protect you from "Bio-Chemical terrorist attack," "natural disaster," "kidnappers/stalkers" (only those who don't possess a forklift, surely) and affords "Bulletproof 'Saferoom' protection."     1.25" Polycarbonate Bulletproof Plating/Shielding       Bio-Chemical Filtered Ventilation       Rebreather      Control Panel Mode Selection (i.e., Basic System Ops., Intruder Setting, Energy Status, Lock Down, etc.)        Cover & Door Actuators w/ Emergency Release     One way see through head cover (reflective mirror on 2 sides and front)         Safety Features (Proximity Sensor, O2 Sensor, Smoke Det., Motion Det. Ect,)     Emergency Communication system (Cellular, Short-wave Radio, CB ect.)    Audio Amplifier (Amplify sound from out side unit)         Air/Water Tight Sealing      External Override Key Pad & Remote Control      Battery Backup Power    Toiletry system   Ect!  Link  (via Warren Ellis)   See also: Creepy bed doubles a safe room                                                  
                          The Telegraph reports that 70 students from the Queen Elizabeth School in Kirkby Lonsdale, Cumbria, were joined by over 100 other youths to celebrate an end of term party by "having unprotected sex in a village square."  Alison Hughes, the deputy head of the Queen Elizabeth School in Kirkby Lonsdale, Cumbria, was so concerned that she detailed the "catalogue of disasters" in a two-page letter to parents, warning them about the sexual activity, violent behaviour and alleged drug abuse that took place.   She wrote: "We have had to help a disturbingly high number of girls through the aftermath of having unprotected sex that evening, most of whom have told us they were too drunk to be in control of themselves. The risks are real. Assume the worst."   Neil Taplin, the landlord of the nearby George and Dragon pub, said that youths had urinated against his wall and sworn at him when he refused to sell them cigarettes. "They were a law to themselves," he said. "It was upsetting for people in the village. We are all quite close and look out for each other."   A resident involved in the clean-up said that she saw evidence of drug use, blood stains and broken glass and said that a newly fitted sink had been smashed.    Link (Via Arbroath)                                            
   Readers are submitting their best life hack for a chance to win an autographed copy of our new book, Upgrade Your Life.  Here's our latest winner.  Reader CK uses neat automation trick when there's heavy-duty copy and pasting to be done:  I have one very simple AutoHotkey script which I use when I need to do some massive copying and pasting work, which simplifies the task into just one keystroke: Win+C. With this script, I run Notepad (or any program to paste the content into), browse through some web sites, select text or pictures, and hit Win+C to capture the contentmdashwithout leaving my browser.  The script switches to the destination program (Notepad or otherwise), pastes the information, and returns me to my browser automatically.  Check out the video for how it works.  It's good for transferring bits of data between two programs like compiling a list of email addresses. It's also customizablemdashinstead of entering a new line, it can move on to the next cell in the spreadsheet.    For you AutoHotkey scripters, here's the source of CK's script:   #c:: Send, {CTRLDOWN}c{CTRLUP}{ALTDOWN}{TAB}{ALTUP} sleep, 300 Send, {CTRLDOWN}v{CTRLUP}{ENTER}{ALTDOWN}{TAB}{ALTUP} return     To try our the compiled executable yourself, download it here.  To learn more about writing your own Windows programs with AutoHotkey, see Adam's feature on how to turn any action into a keyboard shortcut with AutoHotkey.    Congrats, CK!  You've just earned yourself an autographed copy of Upgrade Your Life.     There's still time to win one of the last five books that are left;  here's how.               
    Social mapping service Loopt will soon be available on select Verizon Wireless phones.  Starting next month, certain Verizon wireless users will be able to find friends in a location-based manner, share information and status updates with each other.  Loopt also has geo-tagging photo options.    As the Loopt service supports AIM buddies, Verizon users with Loopt on their phones will be able to connect and share with their AOL friends as well.  While a number of social-mapping services have emerged in the past year or so, this particular partnership between Verizon and Loopt allows Verizon to provide additional social capabilities directly through its own wireless network, between Verizon users as well as Loopt friends.    As mobile devices enable more social interaction and wireless providers become more competitive in their social incentives for retaining customers (think top 5 friends to call free, across networks), incorporating such social features will attract a younger demographic for mobile use, which is typically the user base that utilizes such peripheral mobile phone services.   ShareThis                     
    BitTorrent tracker TorrentSpy is closing its doors.  After years of court battles against copyright holders and lots of money poured into its legal defense, TorrentSpy has decided to shut down its service, according to The Register.  That’s one point for the MPAA.     TorrentSpy lost a major court case to the MPAA last December, when TorrentSpy was found guilty of destroying evidence, making it impossible to hold a fair trial, and raked up a $30,000 fine.  The whole situation, which had dragged on for several months and even led TorrentSpy to block US IP addresses in an effort to avoid legal incrimination for providing the torrent-tracking service in the states, has aided in the anti-torrent movement gaining additional leverage in the larger war between copyright holders and torrents.     TorrentSpy founder Justin Bunnell, however, has stated that the loss of the court battle doesn’t have anything to do with the company’s decision to close down its service.  Bunnell posted the following statement on TorrentSpy:       We have decided on our own, not due to any court order or agreement, to bring the Torrentspy.com search engine to an end and thus we permanently closed down worldwide on March 24, 2008.       The legal climate in the USA for copyright, privacy of search requests, and links to torrent files in search results is simply too hostile. We spent the last two years, and hundreds of thousands of dollars, defending the rights of our users and ourselves.       Ultimately the court demanded actions that in our view were inconsistent with our privacy policy, traditional court rules, and international law; therefore, we now feel compelled to provide the ultimate method of privacy protection for our users - permanent shutdown.        It was a wild ride,       The TorrentSpy Team   As the US and our legal system has been the primary reason for TorrentSpy’s demise, The Register has gone on to point out that the blocking of US IP addresses unfortunately resulted in a loss of traction and advertising dollars for the TorrentSpy service.  Additionally, TorrentSpy’s legal loss may in fact give even more reason for torrents to be targeted in other countries as well.   ShareThis                     
 Here at the Westin in Los Angeles, connectivity is pretty good — about a megabit in each direction. (For a fee, of course.) But the last two days, at the Hilton in Loma Linda and the University of Redlands, were terrible. I’m not sure if it was just because they blocked stuff (as was the case with Redlands), or because the system was bad (as was the case with the Hilton), but I’ve come to the conclusion that two things cause these kinds of problems in general. One is charging for something that ought to be free. The other is subtracting value from something that doesn’t need it and only pisses off users.   In the long run it makes as much sense for hotels to charge for Internet as it does to charge for television. (Yes, they used to do that too. There were coin-operated TVs.) Or for using the toilet. But it’s a business because they know they need Internet service now, and because doing it themselves is too complicated. So they hire these outside outfits to do it for them. (In the case of the Hilton it was iBahn.) And too many of them just don’t do a good job.   Yet we saw in Loma Linda how easy it is to bring fiber to homes, and for anybody to hook by fiber to anybody. The cabling and conduit are progressing upwards in convenience and downward in price, to a point where it will be as easy to put in fiber as it is to install a drip irrigation system. What makes the Interent complicated is that it comes to most places as a secondary service to telephony and television. Yet it doesn’t have to be, and in the long run it won’t be.  
 Back last Fall, when news came that the Medill School of Journalism was thinking about changing its name (and in fact had already dropped “of Journalism” from its website index page), I wrote a post saying, basically, that this was wrong as well as dumb. In fact, I thought it was so wrong, and so lacking in support, that it would die on the vine.   Well, apparently not. Eric Zorn reports in the Chicago Tribune that the idea is not only alive, but wrong as ever. Names “reportedly under consideration” (by a secretive committee) include “The Medill School of —          Journalism Journalism and Integrated Marketing Communications Journalism, Media and Integrated Marketing Communications News Media and Integrated Marketing Communications Audience and Consumer Information Media Arts and Sciences Information and Influence     In The Future of News, Steve Boriss writes,        More than most, I am sympathetic to scrapping the word “journalism,” which has come to be associated with a failing model that only its practitioners still believe delivers objective, verified truths. But do we really want to combine news gathering with sales and entertainment disciplines like marketing, media, and persuasion? And, isn’t the public tired of journalism insisting it is providing pure “information,” and in fact showing increased interest in a more helpful and stimulating combination of fact and opinion?         The right answer must be too simple for j-school eggheads — the “Medill School of News.” By news, I mean “new information about a subject of common interest that is shared within a community.” Everything from as small as news of family and friends, which is now being served by Facebook and MySpace, to as large as news of our universe. Not just news of government, but also news of the private sector, our neighborhoods, our vocations, and our avocations. The public no longer believes in “journalism.” But renaming it “news” is a change they can believe in.    I almost like “School of News”. And I agree that it’s wacky to combine news (or journalism, or both) with “entertainment disciplines” (though I wouldn’t cal them that. I even agree that “the public no longer believes…” but I’m not sure it’s journalism that they doubt.   As it happens I’m sitting in the Annenberg School for Communication, where Media Re:public is about to begin. On the wall of the vast lobby are six big flat-screen TVs, four in the middle with news channels, one on the right with ESPN and one on the left with CNN. Sound comes from the last two. Nobody is watching. Yet at our table we can’t ignore the CNN one, which is blabbing behind our heads, which are turned away. For most of the last hour CNN has been obsessing on the murder of a Rutgers student in front of her toddler son. I’ve heard “stabbed multiple times” so many times that my inner Mona Shaw wants to take a hammer to the screen. I can’t find the story on the CNN.com index page, but maybe I’m not looking hard enough. In any case, I’m sure that what they’re pushing out the tube is news yet not journalism.   And I think I’d rather have Medill teach the latter. No matter what they call the place.  
 There is a new version 07 of the Tabulator out.   This is the generic data browser which lets you do useful things with your RDF data the moment it's on the web.    It works by exploring the web of relationship between things, loading more data from the web as you go. Then, if you find a pattern of information you are interested in, it will search for all occurrences of that pattern and display them in tables, maps, calendars, and so on.     In the same session, you can explore, say, some geocoded photos taken from on a  trip with a GPS,  and then separately explore where in the world the tabulator developers are based.   Then, you can project both datasets onto the same map.   Or onto the same calendar, for data with a time component. This shows the cross-domain power of the semantic web.     This means you can correlate data from completely different domains. Think of all the different mash-ups people have made for putting things like friends houses, photos, or coffee shops on the web. Each a different mash-up for a different data source.     For data in RDF (or any XML with a  GRDDL profile), though, then you don't have to program anything. You can just explore it and map it. And you can map many different data sources at the same time.    Oh, and for developers, the core of the tabulator is an open source RDF library with a complete tested RDF/XML parser, a store which smushes on owl:sameAs and owl:[Inverse]FunctionalProperty, and web crawling query engine supporting basic SPARQL. Enjoy.  
         Just prior to jetting off to Austin last week, I started playing around with a mobile version of this site. While a personal blog is hardly a site that really needs one (unlike, say, an app with a proven mobile user-base like Twitter), I wanted to see what would be involved in re-factoring this design into something more fitting for a mobile environment.         The first step was to create a mobile style sheet. For this I duplicated the CSS file I've already built for large screens, and started stripping out the style that doesn't work so well on a smaller screen. The layout was simplified into a more linear single column, and some elements were re-done to provide a larger target area for a maximum Fitts factor, and background images were dropped wherever possible to cut down on bandwidth demands. I tried building something that would work well on more mobile devices than just the iPhone, but given that it's my testing device, it works best on that platform for now.    And while I was at it, I thought hey, why not do a TV style sheet too? I've got a Wii, it's got a great browser, and a low-res TV screen could benefit from the same kind of special attention given a mobile device. So I built one of those as well, doing things like increasing font size, increasing border widths, and stretching images to double their original size.    But here's the thing about media-specific style sheets: the browser in question has to support them. Mobile Safari grabs all screen media style sheets, and ignores the handheld media type entirely. So despite good intentions, my efforts were wasted on it. And that's what led me down the road of user agent sniffing...    Okay, let's get this out of the way up front: user agent sniffing sucks. Devices like the Wii and the iPhone have incredibly capable browsers that can render these sites the same as any desktop browser, so it's reasonable to assume users will want to do so from time to time. (And I suspect that's why Mobile Safari uses screen in the first place.) Forcing a specific version sucks... if done improperly. But when used well, and not mandatory for the user, I think it's not entirely evil. And it leads to other potential improvements beyond what CSS can provide, like selective content serving.    The way to sensibly handle sniffing seemed to lie in providing an out: the mobile and TV versions of the site both have a special header on every page that provides a "regular site" toggle link. Any time someone wants to switch back to the regular site, the link is right there in front of them. And all versions now have toggle links in the footer to switch between different media types; given that I've seen this on multiple mobile sites, it feels like the site's footer is resolving into a standard place for where these type of switches ultimately belong.    To make all this work, I had to bust out the PHP. I'll preface this by saying I'm hardly a proficient coder, so there are bound to be ways to optimize what I'm showing below. I started with a pair of arrays: a list of mobile browser user agent strings, and a second list of TV browsers. The latter is a bit light at the moment, due to my lack of knowledge of what sort of browsers are available for use on TVs. (And that underscores why having a media toggle is useful: if the browser in question isn't flagged by the sniff, the user can manually invoke the TV version.)    // ========================== // media check  // array of mobile devices $userAgentsMobile = array (   "Blackberry",   "Blazer",   "Handspring",   "iPhone",   "iPod",   "Kyocera",   "LG",   "Motorola",   "Nokia",   "Palm",   "PlayStation Portable",   "Samsung",   "Smartphone",   "SonyEricsson",   "Symbian",   "WAP",   "Windows CE", );  // array of tv devices $userAgentsTv = array (   "Nintendo Wii",   "Playstation 3",   "WebTV" );   Arrays in place, the next step was building a few functions to do things like comparing these arrays with the user's actual user agent string, and setting cookies to make these media types persist. More on the latter in a second.   // this function takes two arguments: an array of user  // agents, and a specific user agent. // it will then try to see if the specific user agent exists  // within the array. If so, it will return true, otherwise  // it returns false. function checkMediaType($uaList, $uaKnown) {     // check user agent string against array        // return true if found, or false if not found  if(in_array($uaKnown, $uaList)) {               return true;    } else {                return false;   } } // this function takes one argument: a string value that  // specifies a media profile. It will then set a cookie in  // the user's browser. It returns the media profile value,  // to be used as a variable later in the page function selectMedia($media) {   setcookie ('media', $media, time()+31536000, '/');   return $media; }   With those functions in place, the code below ended up being the core of my script. In the first major if statement, I'm checking to see whether a cookie is set; the cookie exists to avoid parsing the user agent arrays every single time the site is loaded. I doubt I'm saving that much time if any, given my currently very simple arrays. But I can see them growing over time, so it seems to make sense that this value should persist on the user's end once the user agent has been determined.    But if no cookie is found, then I'm doing the actual sniffing. I check the user agent string against both the mobile and TV arrays, and then act on them if they match one or the other. If neither matches, I default to the screen version of the site.   // show standard screen version by default $mediaVersion = "screen";  // toggle media version if cookie is set if (isset($_COOKIE["media"])) {   if ($_COOKIE["media"] == "mobile") {     $mediaVersion = selectMedia("mobile");   } elseif ($_COOKIE["media"] == "tv") {     $mediaVersion = selectMedia("tv");   } elseif ($_COOKIE["media"] == "screen") {     $mediaVersion = selectMedia("screen");   } } else {   // if no cookie found, sniff media type then set cookie   $knownUserAgent = false;         // compare the device arrays against the    // client's user agent   $mediaTypeMobile =      checkMediaType($userAgentsMobile, $_SERVER['HTTP_USER_AGENT']);   $mediaTypeTV =      checkMediaType($userAgentsTv, $_SERVER['HTTP_USER_AGENT']);    // if media version is found, set a media type cookie   // otherwise flag this browser as screen to save    // time on future loads   if ($mediaTypeMobile) {     $mediaVersion = selectMedia("mobile");   } elseif ($mediaTypeTV) {     $mediaVersion = selectMedia("tv");   } else {     $mediaVersion = selectMedia("screen");   } }   And then the last step is checking to see whether any of the media toggle links have been selected. If a user is viewing the mobile site and wants to switch over to the regular site, I need to re-set the cookie so their new preference persists. This is all done through simple query strings; the HTTP GET variable being checked for (media) can be invoked simply by adding ?media=mobile to the end of a URL or link.   // override media version and set a new cookie  // if they have selected a "show {media} site" link if ($_GET["media"]) {   if ($_GET["media"] == "mobile") {     $mediaVersion = selectMedia("mobile");   } elseif ($_GET["media"] == "tv") {     $mediaVersion = selectMedia("tv");   } elseif ($_GET["media"] == "screen") {     $mediaVersion = selectMedia("screen");   } }   Now that the cookie exists and the $mediaVersion variable has a value, I'm all set. Anywhere in the rest of my site, I can use a simple if statement to filter out the specific media version I'm targetting, and selectively show or hide content for it. This is how I'm hiding my header photo from the mobile version, for example (simplified for clarity):   <?php   // don't serve this up if we're talking mobile   if ($mediaVersion == "screen" || $mediaVersion == "tv")  { ?>   <div id="header-photo">   <img src="/i/photos/<?php      echo $currentPhoto["largephoto"]?>"     width="505" height="243"      alt="<?php echo $currentPhoto["description"]?>" />   </div> <?php   } ?>   I put together the entire set of functions and a couple of small demonstrations of selective content into a file you can grab. (live demo)    And to finish, a couple of highlights from the alternate media versions of this site. The mobile version goes small by stripping out images where appropriate to save on download times; the header photo is gone, avatars on comment pages are gone, and most of the decorative PNGs have been removed or converted to CSS border properties. While the TV version goes big by doubling font size, increasing border widths, stretching the header image to fill the entire horizontal screen width, doubles avatar sizes, and using a higher-resolution version of the site's logo.    Quick caveat: I've only had the opportunity to test the alternate media styles on a limited range of devices, and likely won't any time soon. Device testing is too hard if you don't already have access to a wide range of devices. I tried stripping out some of the more complex CSS tricks like overflow clearing and absolute positioning, so even my Treo doesn't make a horrible mess out of the site, but no guarantees.    And the bonus question: why am I serving up the media versions with media profiles set to all? Simple reason: clicking through and viewing the TV-only version on a computer was seriously ugly, because it ignored the style sheet. As it should. But people will click through anyway, so that was problematic. Simple fix: media="all"    Updated to include iPod Touch.   Updated PHP for minor optimizations in response to comments.                
    Last weekend, I went for a drive with my wife up the Hudson River.  Well, she was driving.  I was playing with the new Dash Express GPS navigation system.  The Dash is not perfect, but it holds a lot of promise.  (See CrunchGear’s review).  It was able to pinpoint a hard-to-find home on a country road.  And it let me toggle between a 2-D and 3-D view, bleating out in a computerized female voice when the next turn was coming up.  I had to mute that because the voice was driving my wife crazy.  In fact, she found the whole screen pretty distracting, so I had to turn it away from her.  But my three-year-old son in the back seat couldn’t get enough of it.  He kept yelling at me to move my hand whenever I was blocking his view of the blue car on the screen that somehow went exactly wherever we did.  Although, he did point out that our real car is green.  (Can’t those Dash folks get anything right?)   The Dash is a GPS unit that can communicate back to the Internet using cellular data networks or WiFi (it contains three chips: GPS,WiFi, and GPRS).  You can’t browse the Web, but you can use the touch screen to search Yahoo Local for nearby gas stations, restaurants, airports, and any other place that might be listed.  One of my favorite features: it can tell you the price of gas at each station nearby so you can price shop without wasting gas driving around.  The Dash even found a chocolate shop for us when the one that had been recommended to us was closed.  Once you find a place you want to go to, you just hit “route” and it gets you there.  It picks what it thinks are the two or three most direct routes. And it even shows you the traffic on those routes based on historical patterns, sensors, and, if available, traffic data from other Dash drivers.    You also can program the Dash from the Web and create GPS mashups.  For instance, you can mark your own addresses on a map, find places on Yahoo local, or tap into any GeoRSS feed (or make your own) and send it to the GPS unit in your car.  I’d love to be able to access the Web with a browser as well, or at least get regular RSS feeds, but the temptation to check those things while driving might be too great (which is why that is not a feature).   The best thing about the Dash is that it connects you to other Dash drivers to give you traffic intelligence.   Because each Dash unit is sending back data about its speed and location, once a critical mass of a few hundred or a thousand drivers get a Dash in the city where you live, you will arguably have the best live traffic information available.  At last that is the theory.  Early adopters will have to wait for that critical mass to build up before they can test it out.   One request:  For people living in big cities with street parking, knowing when a nearby Dash driver just vacated a spot would be a killer feature for future versions of the software.     Okay, I actually have some more requests.  An opt-in messaging system with other Dash drivers would be awesome.  If handled correctly, could be very helpful and create a strong sense of community among Dash drivers.  (No plans for that either, but I think it is a good idea).    Here is where the Dash needs some help.  If it picks the correct route, you are fine.  But if you know a better one, you cannot tell it which way you want to go.  You can only pick a destination and hope that it doesn’t lead you astray.  I noticed that it tends to favor major highways, even if they are 20 miles out of your way.  All you can do is keep driving, and eventually it will pick a new route based on your GPS coordinates.  Something as simple as being able to move the line of the suggested route with your finger, like you can on Google Maps with a cursor, would fix that problem.     Another gripe: you cannot do multi-point routing from the GPS unit itself.  You must enter a new destination each time you get into the car.  (Although, you can create a map of destinations on the Web and send them to your unit as saved destinations).     A final major flaw with the digital map in the Dash is that as you are driving along a strange highway, it doesn’t show you what cities you are passing.  That is how I mentally keep track of where I am when I am driving long distances.  On that ride along the Hudson, I found myself repeatedly referring to our old, beat-up, road atlas to get my bearings. The thing that kills me is that the Dash knew exactly what cities we were passing, it just wouldn’t show me.   These are all minor quibbles.  I am particularly excited about the the fact that the device’s capabilities will grow over time, especially the ability to see live traffic information and to download customized lists of destinations and geographically-relevant feeds.  The Dash goes on sale starting now at Amazon for $399, plus a monthly fee of $10 (the first three months are free).       CrunchBase Information   Dash  Information provided by CrunchBase    Crunch Network:  CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware.          
    Google Israel is sporting an all black theme today, in support of Earth Hour’s efforts to raise awareness around energy conservation. From the page telling confused Israeli’s what’s going on:   Google users in Israel will notice today that we “turned the lights out” on the Google.co.il homepage as a gesture to raise awareness of a worldwide energy conservation effort called Earth Hour.   On Thursday, March 27, 2008, Earth Hour invites people in Israel to turn off their lights for one hour – from 8:00pm to 9:00pm.   Given our company’s commitment to environmental awareness and energy efficiency, we strongly support the Earth Hour campaign, and have darkened our homepage today to help spread awareness of what we hope will be a highly successful global event.   Google has a long history of caring about all things green.    Of course, this begs the question as to whether or not Google should change their site permanently to black to save display power (see blackle). Google looked into it, and said the opposite is true: “displaying black may actually increase energy usage.”   I won’t even bring up the irony that Google, according to the study they cited, is actually increasing energy usage in Israel by having a black home page. The point is, people, they care.   Update: Earth Hour in San Francsico (and everywhere else except Israel) is March 29 at 8 pm. It’s important that everyone turn off their lights then. We’ll need that extra power if Google goes black here in the U.S., too.  Crunch Network:  MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily.          
      Chris Pirillo has announced a new, large scale open source CMS project that aims to “de-geekify” website tools (announcement video above).   The project will be built on the open source Drupal framework:   “For the geeks: Drupal has so much power in its core, and enough fantastic community-contributed modules, that I think it’s time to assemble an Install Profile, complete with beautiful (accessible, microformat’ed, high quality) themes, pre-set Views for any Web community to either install on their own or have hosted at any given Web host that supports Drupal with optimizations. The benefits to you should be more than obvious….And I don’t mean just the framework for the community platform, I mean… like, it’s ready to go. “It’s not the features, it’s the implementation.”   I chatted with Pirillo after the announcement. What he’s looking to achieve is delivering a multi-faceted, open source, easy to use end CMS. To break that down further: imagine installing a package on your web host that immediately delivered Digg style functionality, or photo sharing, a community forum, a blog, a social network ala Facebook, or even a clone of the growing number of FriendFeed style sites, or a combination of all or any of them. Here’s the important difference to existing solutions: imagine that you wouldn’t have to touch a piece of code to activate the various aspects. Imagine that a color change made in one module automatically applies across all module or as specified, without the need (again) to touch code.    The project would also be committed to best practice in DataPortability with OpenID, OAuth and even support for OpenSocial:   The bottom line is freedom and flexibility - the freedom to choose, the freedom to grow, the freedom to leave (and take your profile data with you, or easily transfer it to another system). The flexibility to add features that pivot around the user or groups of users - whatever new tool may come along.   Pirillo is committed to building the community and project completely open source and without undue influence or commercial constraint, although he is willing to talk to potential partners.   Adam Kalsey has been assembling the project and Pirillo is looking for those interested to explore the idea some more and even come on board. A first release of an activity stream for Drupal is available here. It’s a noble idea with a perhaps insanely wide scope, but as Chris idealistically said to me tonight: “The deliverables must be realistic, but if you’re going to dream - dream big, and make sure the world benefits.”   See our coverage of Crowd Fusion, another upcoming CMS system, being built by former Weblogs, Inc. cofounder Brian Alvey.   Crunch Network:  CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware.          
    In honor of Linux week at CrunchGear we sat down with Charles Ogilvie, Director of In-Flight Entertainment, to talk about how this start-up airline made Tux fly.   CG: Why did you pick linux for RED?   CO: Linux is very stable and agile. We were able to pare down the embedded seat-back side to only the libraries we need, license a container app and then write the code needed to tie everything together    Which distribution are you using?  Flavors of Red Hat & Fedora (we have embedded seat-back units, seat & distribution boxes and a head-end that consists of some file servers)   How long was it in testing?  We’ve been developing it for 4 years and it has gone through numerous iterations. Before a new version is released, it is tested on a simulation rack   Did Microsoft approach you about running Windows on the back end?  We’ve talked with a lot of software vendors.    What was the hardest part about creating the system? Was it the software? The hardware?  The hardest part is maintaining agility. The beauty of the architecture is that we can continue to move forward, innovate and constantly look for additional areas to add new, unprecedented functionality like our inflight food ordering system or seat-to-seat chat.   Why don’t more people use Linux in high traffic situations like this?  I don’t know. They should.   How often does it crash? The Linux machines, not the planes…  Resets or reboots occur in different areas. Because we are trying different open source games, we do notice issues with porting them for example. Over time, we work through those issues. Our inflight team members (flight attendants) have the ability to reboot seats. The seat units also monitor themselves and can reset themselves if they freeze or lose connectivity (a heart-beat) with the head-end.    What’s the deal with the in-flight chat? Why was that included? Have people connected through that?  Seat-to-seat chat and TV-Chat are some of the most fun features we have. We’ve had everything from people striking up great conversations with other guests in chats to groups using it laugh and have fun while watching the same program. The whole idea behind it is to allow a sense of community to take place in a typically confined, airborne environment. I cannot wait for broadband and the chance for our passengers to chat with the ground    What’s in store for the future besides in-flight Wi-Fi?   The ability to compose a music-video playlist is pretty cool and on the horizon. The READ section is also awesome in that it takes what is typically a bunch of wasted trees (excess newspapers, periodicals) and allows us to be more environmentally friendly and timely with things like news/event info/sports/entertainment etc.    Crunch Network:  CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0          
 This morning, the New York Post ran a story with this headline:   M’SOFT NOT YET ON BOARD  NO NAMES LINED UP YET FOR YAHOO!   The article goes on to suggest that nobody in Silicon Valley wants to be on Microsoft’s alternate board for Yahoo for fear of “alienating both Yahoo! insiders and others who are aligned with the search giant.”  This was news to us since we started gathering names of people who might be on that alternate board two weeks ago.   The sad truth is that nobody is afraid of Jerry Yang or any other Yahoo insiders (what’s left of them).  While the Post may have uncovered some individuals who may have been considered for the alternate board and declined, that is not the same as evidence “that the software giant actually doesn’t have anyone lined up.”  Because, in fact, Microsoft does have an alternate board lined up and the people chosen for it have agreed to serve if called upon to do so.  We have confirmed this with a member of the alternate board.   So why hasn’t Microsoft released its proposed slate?  It is not because it cannot find anyone to serve on it.  More likely, the reason that Microsoft has gone dark is because it is deep in negotiations with Yahoo to close the deal.   The expectation for a revised bid of $34 a share or more is well-founded.  If a deal is imminent, there is no point in doing something hostile like propose a new slate of directors.  The absence of a slate actually means the chances of the deal going through are high. If Microsoft does decide to reveal the slate in the next few days, then you’ll know the negotiations aren’t going well.  Crunch Network:  CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware.          
  The Art & Science of CSS is not a very thick book, and it doesn't have to be since it is not a reference book on CSS. It is a rather quick read, but it contains useful and practical tips on how to create certain design elements with CSS. These are tips that you can adapt and use in your own projects.    Five authors have contributed to this book: Cameron Adams, Jina Bolton, David Johnson, Steve Smith, and Jonathan Snook. Bolton, Johnson, and Snook have written one chapter each, while Steve Smith and Cameron Adams have both written two chapters. It's an author line-up that raises expectations.    There's not a lot to say about the general structure of the book. There is no introduction to CSS or HTML in here. Instead you jump right in and get working on the examples. During the course of the seven chapters you will find new or different ways of styling, creating, or manipulating headings, images, backgrounds, navigation, forms, rounded corners, and tables. Those are the main topics of each chapter, but in each chapter you will pick up other tips as well.    So, what do I think of this book after reading it? Well, it's not bad. Plenty of good tips and useful techniques are described in it. It's not perfect either. I guess it's partly down to personal preference, but I am not too fond of books that have multiple authors unless there is one main editor that makes sure all chapters are at least reasonably similar in style. I can't quite put it into words, but to some extent the different styles distract me from the actual content.    Apart from the difference in writing style between the authors, there is also the difference in coding practices for both CSS and HTML. It's ok for someone who is experienced and can see that the differences are often just personal preferences, but this book is meant for people who aren't CSS or HTML experts. I can easily imagine how confusing it is to see different approaches to font sizing in different chapters of the same book, with no explanation of why. I think consistency would have been good here.    With that in mind, reading The Art & Science of CSS will teach you how to use CSS to accomplish a number of useful design tasks, so I think it's worth its price unless you already know most of what there is to know about CSS.    As with all SitePoint books, there are sample chapters you can download to find out if the book is right for you.            The Art & Science of CSS        Authors: Cameron Adams, Jina Bolton, David Johnson, Steve Smith, Jonathan Snook         ISBN-10: 0975841971     ISBN-13: 978-0975841976 Visit site to read or post comments… Add 456 Berea Street to your Technorati favorites.  Posted in CSS, Reviews.         
   Saul Griffith has published a version of his talk at ETech as a website, wattzon.org.     Saul's key points:  Solving global warming is an engineering problem. We know the connection between greenhouse gases and global warming, and can determine just how much carbon we're allowed to put into the atmosphere to give us the temperature we can live with.  The answer isn't pretty.  He looks at it from both a personal point of view (how do I need to change my lifestyle to use only my fair share of the global carbon allowance) and from a global policy point of view (what are the available sources of clean energy, how big are they, and what is the scale of the industrialization effort required to harness them?)   From Wattzon:      The average American uses 11400 Watts of power continuously. This is the equivalent of burning 114 x100 Watt light bulbs, all the time. The average person globally uses 2255 Watts of power, or a little less than 23 x100 Watt light bulbs.   What are the consequences of us all using this much power?   What is the implied challenge of global warming in terms of how we produce power?   What are the things we do as individuals in terms of using power that we might change?   Wattzon.org hosts a document that gives us a framework for thinking about these challenges, and how we might change our behaviours as individuals as well as our collective behaviour as societies and global citizens, if we are to meet the great challenge of the 21st century - how to live in a world where we increasingly understand the resources to be finite, and the consequences of our actions complex & inter-twined.   What temperature do we set climate change at? What CO2 concentration does this imply we need to aim at? How much power can we get from fossil fuels while still meeting this goal? How much power do we need to install and produce from non-carbon technologies? What does this mean for countries, corporations, and individuals?   Click a lightbulb to continue.     (See also Ethan Zuckerman's great summary of Saul's talk and the video interview done by TechwebTV.)       
  Great news: On April 23 and 24, Web 2.0 Expo in San Francisco will host Web2Open, an unconference that anyone can participate in.     To promote connections among attendees and complement the Expo sessions, this year's Open emphasizes discussion sessions over presentations. That means your participation is really key, whether you share your successes, your challenges or your questions.                                                          In addition to the traditional open-grid sign-ups where attendees fill in the sessions you want to discuss, we're also pre-scheduling a handful of roundtables and seeding them with people who are passionate about the topics. These sessions include Social Responsibility for Web 2.0 Companies; Small Business Hacks; Troll Whispering; UI for Emerging Technologies; and iPhone Development. But wait, there's more! We're also organizing three Expo/Open hybrid sessions: presentations in the main conference that will be open to all Web2Open attendees, followed by discussions in the Open. Stay tuned for more info on those.    You need a badge to attend the Open, but you can register gratis using the the code websf08opw (this free badge will admit you to the Web2Open sessions, Expo Keynotes, Show Floor and Launch Pad). Thanks to TechWeb (formerly CMP) and O'Reilly for making this possible.    Btw, Tony Stubblebine and I are co-organizers. See you there!        
  I can't draw. Really. I'm a competent interaction designer, but my graphic design skills are those of a plankton. I can't draw on the right side or the left side of my brain.    Yet, like everyone else in business and technology, I need to communicate. As so many studies -- and common sense -- show, we make decisions better (or, at least, faster) when there are pictures involved. I've written awkward stick figures and embarrassingly asymmetric circles on whiteboards and the backs of napkins and envelopes to make points. And now there's a book to support those of us who have to communicate visually but shouldn't be allowed to. Dan Roam's The Back of the Napkin (Portfolio) is breezy in presentation but rigorous in approach. Essentially, it's a framework for understanding why presenting problems in visual form makes it easier to solve them and presenting ideas in visual form makes it easier to develop them and convince others that they're good ideas. Most important, it shows you how to show things, walking through some vivid examples and well-worn metaphors. Chances are you won't pick the same visual metaphors -- but you will think in terms of visual metaphors and that's what will stick.    I hope I've made the case for this book, although I realize I would have done it more effectively if I had drawn something.         
 Filed under: Audio, Internet Here at Download Squad HQ, we're (sadly) all-too-often reminded of the archaic buffoonery found in the world of big-business digital music and video. Whether it's the notion that DRM prevents piracy (hint: it doesn't) or the fact that by being blood-relatives of mafia bigshots label executives you are likely to escape a kneecapping lawsuit, the music industry has never been short of controversy as it struggles with piracy.  Since the dawn of Napster, the music industry has been crying, nay screaming, out for a digital music czar. Someone who 'gets' the digital arena. Someone who's been around the block, and never missed a beat (if you'll excuse the terrible pun) when it comes to the digital domain. So of course when Warner Music yelled from the rooftop 'We've got a Digital Music Guru!!', we believed that all equilibrium in the world had been restored. And then we read about this digital guru's next big plan, and our jubilation promptly turned sour.   Continue reading Warner Music's brilliant new idea: Re-hash old ones Read | Permalink | Email this | Comments          
      It's not exactly news that more and more chunks of our lives are lived on the Internet. But every now and then we get a reminder - of how, for example, the 'net increasingly is taking over jobs that used to be exclusively television's. Case in point: March Madness, a US sports phenomenon that is also a television phenomenon, disrupting regular programming for weeks every spring. It is now huge on the Web as well - and destined to get even more so this year.     Because it eats up a good deal of April, too, we still have several more weeks of March Madness, the NCAA Men's Division annual basketball championship, a tourney with scores of games and a dizzyingly complex playoff structure. That gives us all plenty of time to check out this year's biggest deal, an experiment at Joost, the free video site. Joost is conducting a hugely ambitious live test of its video streaming system, planning to broadcast every single game to anyone anywhere in the world.      The actual games are the least of March Madness, but the side activities are a Web phenomenon too.  There are dozens - probably hundreds - of sites and blogs keeping track of brackets, many collected at the Bracket Project. What's a bracket? As the usually invaluable Wikipedia explains, a bracket is the "diagrammatic representation of the series of games played during a tournament, named as such because it appears to be a large number of interconnected (punctuational) brackets." Got that? A 2006 New York Times article also attempted clarification, with equally opaque results. To me, anyway. See the pic above, which is sort of a help.     Brackets aside, there's another March basketball Madness going on too, although you wouldn't know it from the buzz.  That would be the NCAA Women's Division Championship.    The women's games will be on TV - but on the cable sports network ESPN, which is pay TV, not the much bigger broadcast network CBS, home to the hottest guy games, which is free TV. (Actually, mostly the women's games will not be on ESPN either, but on ESPN2, the junior channel where the lesser sports get exiled.) But will Joost be broadcasting the women's games to the entire planet? Hah. What about the Bracket Project? Nada - although you can find brackets for the women's games at the bottom of this Wikipedia article on the 2008 women's championship, and also on the CBS site.    March Madness is so pervasive that even Republican Presidential candidate John McCain features a bracket (for the men's championship only) on his site. So you might expect that, since her strength is with women voters, Democratic Presidential candidate Hillary Clinton's site is taking note of the women's basketball championship.  It does not appear so.  The Clinton campaign does have an event called March Madness. It's a voter registration drive. There's a moral there somewhere.            Posted by Tam    Category: culture  | on the web    Tags: basketball  joost  NCAA    Email this | Comments (0)                                    _uacct = "UA-306873-1"; urchinTracker();    
 Filed under: Enterprise, Leopard  ComputerWorld posts that ChangeWave Research has studied satisfaction levels for corporate users of Leopard and Windows Vista. As you might expect, the Leopard users are altogether more satisfied than Vista users -- up to 5 times more likely to report that they're "very satisfied" with their operating system -- but you might not have known the following:       Leopard reinforces tooth enamel and ensures brighter, happier smiles.     Leopard users are more likely to find attractive mates.     Vista users are subject to early hair loss.     Leopard helps eliminate embarrassing halitosis.     Vista users are five times likelier to be audited by the IRS.     Leopard washes your windows and leaves lemon-scented stacks of pre-folded laundry around your house.   Okay, well maybe not. Consult the ComputerWorld article for the (far less amusing) statistical results. One worthwhile number to note: while 7% of respondents said they'd be buying Apple laptops in the next 90 days, a hold-steady from the previous survey, the likelihood of most other laptop purchases went down since the last time they asked. A MacBook Air effect?  Read | Permalink | Email this | Comments          
 Saul Bass is the master of film title design. Here’s his opening title sequence for “The Man With The Golden Arm.”              The backstory:          When the reels of film for Otto Preminger’s controversial new drugs movie, The Man with the Golden Arm, arrived at US movie theatres in 1955, a note was stuck on the cans – “Projectionists – pull curtain before titles”.             Until then, the lists of cast and crew members which passed for movie titles were so dull that projectionists only pulled back the curtains to reveal the screen once they’d finished. But Preminger wanted his audience to see The Man with the Golden Arm’s titles as an integral part of the film.           The movie’s theme was the struggle of its hero – a jazz musician played by Frank Sinatra – to overcome his heroin addiction. Designed by the graphic designer Saul Bass the titles featured an animated black paper-cut-out of a heroin addict’s arm. Knowing that the arm was a powerful image of addiction, Bass had chosen it – rather than Frank Sinatra’s famous face – as the symbol of both the movie’s titles and its promotional poster.       That cut-out arm caused a sensation and Saul Bass reinvented the movie title as an art form. By the end of his life, he had created over 50 title sequences for Preminger, Alfred Hitchcock, Stanley Kubrick, John Frankenheimer and Martin Scorsese.        “Anatomy of a Murder” title sequence.      Saul Bass: A Film Title Pioneer offers Bass’ thought process behind his titles:         Saul Bass: “My initial thoughts about what a title can do was to set mood and the prime underlying core of the film’s story, to express the story in some metaphorical way. I saw the title as a way of conditioning the audience, so that when the film actually began, viewers would already have an emotional resonance with it”             As Bass went forward, he proceeded in perfecting these thoughts, creating mini-narratives which would help bring the viewer into the film.      Writer Ken Coupland feels that in this respect, Bass is something of a magician: “I believe that a great title sequence almost literally hypnotizes you, especially the work of Saul Bass where there’s a very strong repetitive swirling motion and abstract things that happen that’s putting you into a dream-like state.”           More of Bass’ title sequences after the jump.  Bass’ “Around the World in 80 Days” title sequence.              Notcoming.com has an interactive image gallery of titles designed by Bass. His various techniques are discussed in the site’s introduction.             Bass’ techniques are various and decidedly inconsistent: cutout animation, montage, live action, and type design to name only his more prominent exercises. Secondly, Bass exhibits an exemplary use of color and movement. Often sequences begin with a solid, empty frame of color (as with Exodus’ blue or North by Northwest’s green). His design tactic in this context, although characteristic, possesses subtly and variety.        “Psycho” titles.            Martin Scorcese on Bass:        His titles are not simply imaginative identification tags. When his work comes on the screen, the movie itself truly begins.        “Walk on the Wild Side” titles.      “It’s a Mad Mad Mad Mad World” titles.      “Bunny Lake is Missing” titles.      “The Human Factor” titles.      “North by Northwest” titles.      “Vertigo” titles.      Preview of “Why Man Creates” (a short film by Bass).         Related  Saul Bass movie posters  Video: Star Wars vs. Saul Bass     
     What a fun day. IBM invited me over to its research building, where we moved atoms around with a tunneling electron microscope (among other things).    I shot some videos with my Qik cameras while Rocky was setting up his HD camcorders. The quality is low, but that’s because they didn’t have a 3G network up there so I needed to turn down my cell phone to a lower quality setting. Qik rocks because it pushes the videos to YouTube now.   Here’s the videos:   A look at a machine that lays materials down at the atomic level. They are using this machine to try to find a new way to store information that will be 100 more dense (or maybe even more) than what’s possible with CMOS. At three minutes in you meet the guy who runs the lab. The engineer says that this machine can “airbrush with atoms.”   I got several videos inside the office where they are using the scanning tunneling electron microscope. You know it’s a cool lab when there’s a barrel of liquid nitrogen underneath the desk. Part I (why keep it cold). Part II (why keep it silent). Part III (a drawing done with individual atoms).   A look at the world’s first hard drive (which was invented in the lab, so was the relational database, among other things we all take for granted now).   Starting Wednesday we’ll have a daily show up on FastCompany.tv. This series will be up in a few weeks after we edit it and all that. I just wanted to give you a taste of what we saw today with our Qik cameras.   Thanks so much to the researchers who spent time with us:   •   Shivakumar (Shiv) Vaithyanathan, PhD, Manager, Unstructured Information Mining  •       Mark Dean, PhD, IBM Fellow, Vice President, Almaden Research Center  •  Chris Lutz, PhD, Low-temperature Scanning Tunneling Microscopy and Atom Manipulation scientist  •       Markus Ternes, PhD, postdoctoral scientist  •   Sebastian Lutz, PhD, postdoctoral scientist   It’s amazing that science has progressed to the point where an idiot like me can pick up an iron atom and move it around to some place else with a click of a mouse.   Why does this science matter to all of us? Well, today’s hard drives need hundreds of thousands of atoms to store data. Think what they could do if they could get it down to a few atoms? Or, maybe, even one? They are doing research to find out if that’s possible, and, even if it is, what patterns of atoms work best?   Oh, and you know how electronics work? By doing things with electrons. The thing is, almost all of our electronics work by doing something with the charge of the electrons.   Today IBM showed me that they are able to study something else: the spin of the electrons. They are excited by being able to do that because it will let them get even more information density than they thought was possible previously.   Thanks to Seagate, my sponsor, for making it possible for me to go around the world and do stuff like this. I have a feeling a few of their researchers are gonna watch these videos. ;-)   You can read a lot more about what we saw today on Google.         
  Andrew Mobbs, managing director of the Hatchery, has a big dream. He wants to move the world off of credit cards and onto using their cell phones to pay for things. He’s not the first to have that dream, but I think he’s thought through some of the problems better than other people I’ve talked to about this so far. He is in Silicon Valley today, visiting from London, UK, which is where he’s located.   But that’s not what was interesting about my breakfast with him this morning. What I found really interesting was his dilemma as an entrepreneur. What is it?   1. His product is too difficult to use, so it needs some more work. That takes capital, but he’s not able to land Silicon Valley capital (at least not yet).  2. Because he’s chosen a “boil the ocean” strategy (getting, say, Starbucks or Amazon to adopt his technology) he’s finding it hard to get adoption.  3. Because he doesn’t have adoption, investors aren’t interested.  4. Plus he’s going against big companies (PayPal, Visa, MC, American Express) which makes investors nervous, unless you have a clear differentiator that’ll be defendable for some time.   Compare his story to Omar Hamoui’s story, CEO of Admob, a mobile advertising network. He walked into Sequoia Capital and had a term sheet in his hands in about 24 hours. I interviewed him yesterday, and we’ll have his story of how he did that up on FastCompany.tv in a few weeks (we start our daily video show tomorrow, and have about three weeks of shows stored on our Seagate hard drives right now).   How did Admob land the capital it needed?   1. They had customers and rapid growth BEFORE they walked onto Sand Hill Road.  2. They didn’t try to boil the ocean, nor did they try to go up against entrenched competitors.  3. One thing common is both picked the rapidly-growing world of mobile.   Anyway, it’ll be interesting to see if Andrew gets any feedback based on the 18-minute conversation we had this morning on Qik. My feedback to him?   Instead of trying to get in front of the CEO of Visa, Starbucks, Facebook, or getting a VC like Sequoia, or even an investor like Jeff Clavier to pay attention to him, I’d do some new work. I’d hang out at Stanford with Dave McClure, who teaches a Facebook class there. If Andrew gets a couple of Facebook app developers to build his payment techology into their apps, then he’d have something to show investors. Plus, he’d probably have millions of people trying his technology and he’d be able to learn from their usage model.   Translation: don’t try to boil the ocean, just pick off a small bucket of water, boil that first, then work on the ocean later.   What do you think?   Either way, it’s pretty rare that entrepreneurs let you look into an early-stage company and some of the challenges that it faces trying to get a new idea and a new company started.         
  I’ve been talking to lots of people about Twitter. Why is it so addictive? Why do new tools, shipped for it, like Quotably was tonight, get passed around so fast and talked about so much?   I’ve gone through stages with Twitter. At some point I thought it was important to get lots of followers. But lately I’ve been telling people that the secret to Twitter isn’t how many followers you have, but how many people you are following. Tonight Sheryl asked me to explain more: “why is the secret how many people you follow? Why is it important to follow so many people?”   Here’s why:   1. Getting followed just means you’re popular. Yes, that’s cool, but it hardly will make you interesting. Paris Hilton will have more Twitter members than I will, when she joins.  2. Getting followed a lot might mean you’re using it for a publishing system. If all you have is followers what makes that different from owning a newspaper, a radio station, a TV station, or, even, a Web site? Hint: nothing.  3. If you’re just trying to get followed you’re probably just needing attention or you might be Jason Calacanis.   But what does following a lot of people say?   1. You’re trying to learn more.  2. You’re trying to meet more people.  3. You’re trying to be a better listener.  4. You’re communicating to the world that you’d like to be listened to (golden rule: treat people how you’d like to be treated).  5. You’re trying to find out about more stuff. More events. More stories.   Now, who would you rather hang out with? A person who only talks and doesn’t listen? Or a person who listens to as many people as he can?   I know I’d rather hang out with someone who listens to more people.   Oh, yeah, and many of us on Twitter have been getting messages like what Mike Arrington got tonight. Now, I really don’t care about people who unfollow me anymore. Go ahead. Doesn’t make me feel bad. But the more people I follow, the smarter I get, the more connected I get, the better the experiences I have in life (see previous post).   So, that’s my new story. The secret to Twitter is how many people are you listening to, not how many people are listening to you.   Agree or disagree?         
  On a week when Microsoft landed a big deal to put Silverlight on Nokia phones, Apple’s CEO, Steve Jobs, tells Adobe that there won’t be Flash on the iPhone.   This is a real bummer for Adobe and many users and developers, because most of the world’s casual games are written for Flash. Just go over to game site Kongregate. Or, look at the world’s video like that on YouTube (or any other video site like the Qik one that I use on my cell phone). Almost all of it is done in Flash. Now developers at those sites will need to find some other method to get those games and videos onto the iPhone.   This is a HUGE opening for Microsoft to take momentum and mind share away from Flash/Flex/AIR with its Silverlight set of technologies (which, based on my Twitter conversations, is winning developers over at a pretty good pace).   So, what is Steve thinking? He probably didn’t want to hand control of developers to another company, but Apple might also have had concerns about battery life or it just might not have been able to make Flash work well on the iPhone. I can’t believe that Apple couldn’t find a way to make these things work, though. Flash isn’t that heavyweight, it might have taken some committment on behalf of Apple to rewrite Flash to work and it sounds like Apple wants to go the way of SVG (it has long been rumored to be working on SVG (Scalable Vector Graphics, which is an open W3C standard) for the iPhone).   The inside story has yet to be told on this one. Not that Adobe is in a place to retaliate by only doing something like future versions of Photoshop or Illustrator on Windows or Linux (which would hurt Apple, but would hurt Adobe itself in its real war with Microsoft) but Adobe has got to be smarting from this decision this morning. After all it was Adobe that helped solidify the Macintosh’s role in the world with its desktop publishing, fonts, and Postscript technologies.   Does this put a death blow onto the Flash/Flex/AIR teams? No, but it certainly does cripple their chances against Microsoft’s Silverlight. I’ll be at Microsoft’s Mix conference later today to report on that angle.   UPDATE: Microsoft’s keynote this morning at its sold-out Mix conference will be webcast live, Neowin is reporting. I’m hearing there’s some news coming there, and also later in the afternoon.         
  Jason Calacanis has started a big argument where Duncan Riley over at TechCrunch has stood up for slackers everywhere (he couches it in language of “pro family” in the family/life balance). The thing is, Duncan might talk to his boss, Mike Arrington. Did Mike get to where he is by slacking off and hanging out with his friends and having a “real life?” No. He worked his ass off. I’ve caught Mike on several occasions working until 3 a.m. or later. And he still is doing that work ethic. Of course, that hard work pays off: Mike was on the Charlie Rose show this week.   I’ve been in several startups and have witnessed first hand the ascerbic aspects that slackers bring. Believe me, this is the #1 killer of startups. If you don’t get rid of unproductive people (or even better, avoid hiring them in the first place) your startup will go down.   Jason also told me about two employees who’d be outside smoking while the rest of the company was working hard during lunches. He fired those two. Why? They weren’t team players.   Another killer I’ve seen? Assholes. Every entrepreneur should read “The No Asshole Rule.“   But, to Jason Calacanis’ point, how do startups save money? I’m practicing one right now: share hotel rooms. It’s a pain in the ass, yes, but it sure stretches that travel budget further. At CES one year I even stayed a night in a Hostel. This was while I was working at Microsoft and could have spent $400 a night on a hotel room (I don’t recommend going THAT cheap, by the way — you need to be able to lock people out of your stuff).         
  UPDATE: I just spent an hour talking with Sarah Lacy and apologized directly to her, and then we had an interesting talk about the industry, sexism, her interview and why she took the line of questioning that she did, and her perspective. I highly recommend you read Brian Solis’ post following up on this interview, because it gives her perspective and matched what I learned from her (that the SXSW conference planners wanted her not to take audience questions, wanted her to take the interview in a more business-centric direction because Facebook had a separate developer-centric event at SXSW, etc). Anyway, there’s lots of lessons here for everyone involved. Me, audience, Sarah, conference planners, etc. Dave Winer and I discussed it on a podcast this morning too.   +++   When I arrived 15-minutes into the now famous interview of Mark Zuckerberg, CEO of Facebook, by BusinessWeek reporter Sarah Lacy the audience had already turned (it was two days ago and it still is the #1 topic of conversation on blogs and at SXSW, which is the conference that this happened at). Usually I try to get to these things early, and sit up front, but I had other interviews and things going on and I’d already been warned that there wouldn’t be any real news at this event. Facebook is working on some major new features, but they simply aren’t ready to show off in public. I’m already hearing rumors of another F8 event (last year’s event, where Facebook first showed off its application platform, seems like it was 10 years ago, which tells us a little bit about how our expectations for instant gratification are increasing).   I arrived in the overflow room because I already knew from watching Twitter that the main hall was packed. When I walked in I met people leaving already and I could tell they weren’t leaving to go to the bathroom. They were leaving in protest. My friend Francine Hardaway wrote later that she walked out in disgust. Susan Bratton was so disappointed that she wrote four blog posts about it.   I found a seat and asked the guy next to me how it was going. “Not well, it’s really boring,” was the answer.   I listened for a few more minutes and watched the audience reaction and realized that it wasn’t just boring but that the audience was building up hostility toward what was going on at the video screen.    But let’s back up. I refrained from blogging about this because I then became part of the story, due to my Twitter stream. Here, let’s look at that now:   12:43 p.m. March 9:  Zuckerberg is giving lots of PR answers. Lacy is asking too many business questions. (this is about 45 minutes into the interview, if I remember right).   12:47:  lacy needs to study guy Kawasaki. His interview of ballmer was 1000 times better   12:53: Twitterer’s hate Lacy.   12:58:  Sarah Lacy lost control of the interview because she just isn’t very good. Twitter is going crazy with critiques.    01:00:  @markwallace Lacy didn’t do her homework on the audience. This is a geek/designer/creative audience. Not one focused on business.   01:01:  They want to hear about APIs and platforms and what Facebook is going to do.   01:01:  She is totally getting defensive now, really poor empathy for the audience.   01:02:  The audience as getting outright hostile toward Lacy and she basically asked audience to send her a message about why she sucked.   01:04:  The audience is asking Zuckerburg better questions than Lacy did. Totally agree with @heiko.   01:06:  @techcrunch I know Zuckerberg is no easy interview. But yours was far far far better than Sarah’s.   01:07:  @techcrunch she totally lost control of the interview and had no clue how she was coming across. Still doesn’t “I thought it was going well.   And on it went. Onstage it went worse. Audience members had taken over the interview and Lacy made things worse by trying to argue with them about how well the interview was going. The audience had decided that it wasn’t going well. Later Lacy rubbed it in, by Twittering: “seriously screw all you guys. I did my best to ask a range of things.” She also went on YouTube to try to explain what happened to her from her perspective.   We had turned into assholes. It wasn’t just the back of the room, either. Nor was it just the overflow room. People in the front of the room were yelling out questions. The entire audience erupted for a 26-second applause line when Zuckerberg asked Lacy to ask questions (which confused Lacy, because she was unaware that the audience had been turning against her).   The audience turned into assholes was the conclusion of Mike Arrington, founder of Tech Crunch, who, wrote a post, saying this was nothing more than a witch burning.   Some other analysis: Jemima Kiss in the Guardian’s blogs: The peculiar Mark Zuckerberg keynote interview.   College professor and famous blogger, Jeff Jarvis, had the most accurate early analysis that I could find in a post titled: Zuckerberg interview: What went wrong.   Brian Solis spent five hours with Lacy after the interview and did a bunch more reporting before writing a very long, but most excellent, analysis of the events. He also explains why Sarah Lacy was the interviewer, and gives many details about the friendship between Zuckerberg and Lacy.   My thoughts?   1. This interview was doomed before it happened. Several of my friends didn’t go because they already knew there wouldn’t be any news. After all, if there was going to be news, Kara Swisher would have reported it and she would have been invited to have been there. We also knew that Zuckerberg probably would be boring (he reminds us of Bill Gates who, despite giving speeches for 30 years, is still boring). The expectations on Zuckerberg are so high now, that he’d have to do something like Ballmer’s Monkey Boy dance to meet them.   2. The muttering continues, even last night. In fact, one woman, who I won’t name here, is going to moderate a panel discussion today and she told me “I hope I don’t pull a Lacy.” Overall, now that the emotion is out of it for the most part, people are still saying this was an interview gone bad and are disappointed that Lacy lashed out at the audience instead of trying to figure out what they wanted.    3. Zuckerberg himself, yesterday, realized that he didn’t answer the questions the audience wanted to have answered, so he did a “redo” of the interview, this time with just him in front of an audience. The consensus there is that this one went much better for both Zuckerberg and the audience.   4. There is quite a bit of sexism that is a subtext here. Lots of people in the hallways commented on her choice of clothing (she wore a short skirt that made her legs very prominently displayed). And on n her flirtatious behavior (she twirled her hair, many people told me afterward, like a schoolgirl in love). I tried to ignore this, but I now am pretty sure that if a guy were doing the interview, and did just as badly, that the audience wouldn’t have turned on him so harshly. This was amplified by her constant bringing up of personal situations (she bragged that she was hanging out with Zuckerberg at a party the night before).   5. Several people last night thought this was great PR for Lacy, noting that her book sales had gone up, and that now everyone knew who she was and, even, felt a little bad for her, so that’ll lead to increased attention next time she does an interview. I sort of agree with that analysis, noting that I’ve had a bad time on stage, too (at LeWeb several years ago our keynote was generally panned and the audience got a little hostile toward us there too — that didn’t stop me from being asked to do more speeches, and, in fact, made me a better speaker).   6. Zuckerberg himself is a very tough interview. Why? Cause Zuckerberg is no Gary Vaynerchuk or Guy Kawasaki. In fact, Zuckerberg is a geek who is far more comfortable talking about memcache or architectures than he is in answering questions for the press, or being in front of audiences (although I thought he stepped up his game in yesterday’s Q&A quite a bit). He reminds me a LOT of Bill Gates. I remember meeting Bill Gates at a conference party in the mid-1990s and couldn’t get him to be social, but when I switched to talking to him about compilers he got very passionate and went on for 20 minutes about the topic. Same with Zuckerberg. He really isn’t that comfortable talking about his business, or other things, but when you start digging into him technically he comes alive.   7. Zuckerberg is also a tough interview cause he gives PR answers. Now we know one other guy who does that: Steve Ballmer. But notice how Guy Kawasaki gets Ballmer to knock it off in this video of their interview on stage at Microsoft’s Mix08 conference: he calls Ballmer on the bullshit. Compare this interview to the one that Lacy did, and you’ll see how to do an interview with a CEO well, and poorly.   8. This wasn’t the only audience revolt at SXSW this year.   9. The audience at SXSW is quite unlike any other. These are people who blog and Twitter and Facebook and Meebo and use tons of other social networking tools. They also are snarky and are used to being heard (egotistical, even, just like your friendly local blogger). So, when they are in audiences here they expect to be part of the event. Most speakers here know this, and take advantage of the interactive demands (I was watching Twitter and videoing my own panel yesterday, so I knew when our panel was getting boring, or wasn’t on track with what the audience wanted). Most speakers here take the pulse of the audience often and early, going to questions and such. I wouldn’t speak here if you haven’t attended before. Also, this is not a business audience. Most of us really don’t care whether Zuckerberg is worth $1 or $15 billion. We want to know what Facebook’s developer platform is going to do. Or how Facebook is going to give us more control over our privacy. Or, how Facebook is going to make our data portable (I asked Zuckerberg about my getting kicked off of Facebook yesterday in his QA session and several attendees came up to me afterward saying they were happy someone finally asked Zuckerberg about that).   10. I’m going to try to interview Sarah Lacy, and I’ll apologize for my part in being an audience asshole, but I’ll also explain to her why I’d do it again. I hate being captive in an audience when the people on stage don’t have a feedback loop going with the audience. We’re used to living a two-way life online and expect it when in an audience too. Our expectations of speakers and people on stage have changed, for better or for worse.   Anyway, I’m sure we could continue discussing this for a long time, but I have to prepare for another panel discussion this afternoon that I was added to (come and heckle me, er, be an audience asshole!) Right after that panel we’ll go for BBQ with about 100 people. I hope Sarah comes along, we’ll break bread. Either way, we can fit about 120 people in, so meet us there. Afterward we’ll go to the RockBand party (wait until you see the video I participated in!) and then onto the Digg party.         
  A year ago, I announced a partnership with my friends at Oddica to take over production and shipping of Daring Fireball t-shirts. It’s worked out great — better shirts, better print quality, fun packaging, and, when shirts are in stock, much faster shipping times than when I was handling fulfillment myself.    The only problem has been with the “when shirts are in stock” part. What I should have done last year is what I’m doing now: only selling shirts during periodic promotions, after which I’ll order enough new shirts to cover the newly-placed batch of orders. After that, no shirt orders until the next promotion.    I’ll take orders now through the end of March next week. All orders should be printed and shipped by the end of April. This includes a slew of shirts that were ordered during the previous few months. All pending orders will ship first, once new shirts arrive from the printer.    To be clear: It is my fault, not Oddica’s, that I continued to accept orders for out-of-stock shirts months in advance of the new print runs. Switching to periodic shirt promotions will keep this from happening again.    Click here to order Daring Fireball t-shirts.      April also marks the two-year anniversary of my going full-time with Daring Fireball. A year ago, I wrote:       Many of you have written to say that the difference since I’ve gone   full-time has been both noticeable and welcome: more articles along   with a more consistent and steady pace to the Linked List. The funny   part about these messages is that most of them end by thanking me,   as in, Hey, I’ve really been digging Daring Fireball since you took   it pro last year. Thanks for making it such an enjoyable site to   read.        I say, thank you. Thank you for reading Daring Fireball, and, to   those of you who have become members and purchased t-shirts, thank   you for making this possible. The membership system is the primary   source of revenue for Daring Fireball. This web site is better   because of you.     Unlike last year, the membership system no longer constitutes the majority of this site’s revenue; however, it’s still a significant part. My original (years ago) goal was to take this site full-time based on nothing but direct reader support; that didn’t work out, but membership revenue, to me, remains the purest form of support. I’m pretty proud of what I’ve accomplished with Daring Fireball: a self-published, profitable web site for which I never borrowed any money, and have accepted only a modicum of advertising. This has only been possible because of the direct support of readers like you.    Now that DF’s main (free) feed is full-content, there isn’t as much differentiation between it and the members-only feeds, but many members still use them. (One good reason is that you can subscribe to separate feeds for articles and Linked List entries.) The member feeds contain an automated reminder when your membership is about to expire, and a bunch of you have already renewed for another year. My sincere thanks.    Click here to support Daring Fireball for just $19 a year.         
  This passage from a reader email pretty much nails it:       Yes, it would make a difference if the checkbox for Safari were   unchecked by default.  Also, the “new installs” should be visually   separated from the “updates to programs you’ve already installed”,   and clearly marked as such.  I’m all in favor of programs updating   themselves — especially potentially network-exploitable apps like   iTunes or QuickTime — but companies shouldn’t abuse that to push   entirely unrelated software on end users.     The reason reactions to this controversy have been so polarized is that we’ve been mostly arguing about the wrong thing: how or whether Apple should offer new applications to Windows users via the current Software Update app. The problem is with the design of the Software Update app itself.    The reader is right: updates to currently-installed software are an entirely different thing than offers to install new software. Different things should look different; the current design of Software Update doesn’t allow for such a visual differentiation.    For updates to installed software, the simple plain list Software Update currently displays is perfect. New software — like, in this case, Safari — should be displayed separately and more prominently. A big app icon alongside a brief description, perhaps — something that, visually, is instantly recognizable as something different from the regular updates. It should be clear that what’s being offered is both new and optional. The default should be not to install — or, perhaps, the user could be required to explicitly click either “Install” or “Don’t Install”, with neither option selected by default. If the user chooses “Don’t Install”, Software Update should then offer the user the option to never again be prompted about this particular application. (You can do this now, using the “Ignore Update” command in the Update menu, but this feature should not be hidden in a menu.)    Maybe Apple realizes this, but they figured it wasn’t worth the effort to add an entirely new presentation mode to the Software Update app, because they don’t have any other new Windows apps on the horizon. I.e., that, given their current plans, it wouldn’t be a new “ask the user if they want this brand new app installed” feature, but rather, for all intents and purposes, really just an “ask the user if they want Safari” feature.    But laziness is no excuse. This entire controversy, minuscule though it may be, could — and should — have been avoided if Apple had followed the design principle of making things that are different look different.         
  You know the feeling. It's happened to all of us at some point: you've pored over the code a dozen times and still can't find a problem with it. But there's some bug or error you can't seem to get rid of. There just has to be something wrong with the machine you're coding on, with the operating system you're running under, with the tools and libraries you're using. There just has to be!   No matter how desperate you get, don't choose that path. Down that path lies voodoo computing and programming by coincidence. In short, madness.   It's frustrating to repeatedly bang your head against difficult, obscure bugs, but don't let desperation lead you astray. An essential part of being a humble programmer is realizing that whenever there's a problem with the code you've written, it's always your fault.  This is aptly summarized in The Pragmatic Programmer  as "Select Isn't Broken":    In most projects, the code you are debugging may be a mixture of application code written by you and others on your project team, third-party products (database, connectivity, graphical libraries, specialized communications or algorithms, and so on) and the platform environment (operating system, system libraries, and compilers).   It is possible that a bug exists in the OS, the compiler, or a third-party product-- but this should not be your first thought. It is much more likely that the bug exists in the application code under development. It is generally more profitable to assume that the application code is incorrectly calling into a library than to assume that the library itself is broken. Even if the problem does lie with a third party, you'll still have to eliminate your code before submitting the bug report.   We worked on a project where a senior engineer was convinced that the select system call was broken on Solaris. No amount of persuasion or logic could change his mind (the fact that every other networking application on the box worked fine was irrelevant). He spent weeks writing workarounds, which, for some odd reason, didn't seem to fix the problem. When finally forced to sit down and read the documentation on select, he discovered the problem and corrected it in a matter of minutes. We now use the phrase "select is broken" as a gentle reminder whenever one of us starts blaming the system for a fault that is likely to be our own.    The flip side of code ownership is code responsibility. No matter what the problem is with your software-- maybe it's not even your code in the first place-- always assume the problem is in your code and act accordingly. If you're going to subject the world to your software, take full responsibility for its failures. Even if, technically speaking, you don't have to. That's how you earn respect and credibility. You certainly don't earn respect or credibility by endlessly pawning off errors and problems on other people, other companies, other sources.   Statistically, you understand, it is incredibly rare for any bugs or errors in your software not to be your fault. In Code Complete, Steve McConnell cited two studies that proved it:    A pair of studies performed [in 1973 and 1984] found that, of total errors reported, roughly 95% are caused by programmers, 2% by systems software (the compiler and the operating system), 2% by some other software, and 1% by the hardware. Systems software and development tools are used by many more people today than they were in the 1970s and 1980s, and so my best guess is that, today, an even higher percentage of errors are the programmers' fault.    Whatever the problem with your software is, take ownership. Start with your code, and investigate further and further outward until you have definitive evidence of where the problem lies. If the problem lies in some other bit of code that you don't control, you'll not only have learned essential troubleshooting and diagnostic skills, you'll also have an audit trail of evidence to back up your claims, too. This is certainly a lot more work than shrugging your shoulders and pointing your finger at the OS, the tools, or the framework-- but it also engenders a sense of trust and respect you're unlikely to achieve through fingerpointing and evasion.   If you truly aspire to being a humble programmer, you should have no qualms about saying "hey, this is my fault-- and I'll get to the bottom of it."    [advertisement] Dashboard for Data Dynamics Reports introduces new controls designed to create dashboards that inform without wasting space or confusing users.    
This is an e-mail that I wrote to my friend, Hollywood animator Sari Gennis.  I wrote it while I was a graduate  student in   Physics at UC Santa Cruz, and was also working as a programmer.     I was manic when I wrote this - I meant to write just a brief note and ended up writing for twelve hours.  During this manic episode I was experiencing peculiar irregularities and disclocations in time and space.  My experience of the time I spent writing this was that perhaps an hour had passed.  As I wrote, I made cup after cup of tea - it seemed to me that when I put the water on the stove that it would burst into a boil instantly.  I was also eating bananas.  By the end of my writing I had eaten the whole bunch and was suddenly surprised to see a large pile of banana peels appear next to me on the table.    I wrote this on a Sunday, while still in the pleasant part of mania.  The following Friday I was in the mental hospital, hallucinating and paranoid.  I was in for four days.  I took a few days off after that and then went back to work at Working Software.  
 Next week, Yahoo! is speaking at Danny Sullivan and Chris Sherman's annual Search Marketing Expo West at the Santa Clara Convention Center. With a total of 12 panels and a keynote, we're ready to rock. Here's where you can find us at the show...      Tuesday, February 26  10:30 - 11:45 a.m.  Decrypting Quality Scores  David Pann, Vice President, Marketplace Design and Matching    10:30 - 11:45 a.m.  Search 3.0 Track: The Blended Search Revolution  Sean Suchter, Vice President of Engineering, Yahoo! Search    1:15 - 2:45 p.m.  Search 3.0 Track: Video, Images & Blended Results  Deepali Tamhane, Senior Product Manager, Yahoo! Search    3:15 - 4:30 p.m.  Search 3.0 Track: Local Search & Blended Results  Brian Gil, Director of Product Management, Yahoo! Local    3:15 - 4:30 p.m.  The Economics of Search  Michael Schwarz, Marketplace Designer, Yahoo! Research    4:45 - 6:00 p.m.  Search 3.0: Online Retail & Blended Results  Ken Kronquist, Director of Product Management, Yahoo! Shopping    7:00 - 8:00 p.m.  SMX Search Bowl  Sean Suchter, Vice President of Engineering, Yahoo! Search  Jan Pedersen, Chief Scientist Advertising and Search, Yahoo! Search      Wednesday, February 27  10:45 am - 12:00 p.m.  Marketing Track: Branding & Search  Edwin Wong, Senior Market Research Manager, Yahoo! Search Marketing    3:15 - 4:30 p.m.  Search 4.0 Track: Search Ads & Behavioral Targeting  David Kopp, Senior Director Product Strategy for Category Solutions    4:45 - 6:00 p.m.  Paid Search Roundtable  Dmitri Krakovsky, Vice President of Products, Yahoo! Online Channel and Small Business Services    4:45 - 6:00 p.m.  SEO Track: Search Engineers QA</b><br /> Sean Suchter, Vice President of Engineering, Yahoo! Search</p>  <p><br /> <b><a href="http://searchmarketingexpo.com/west/2008/full_agenda3.shtml">Thursday, February 28</a></b><br /> 9:00 - 10:00 a.m.<br /> <b>Keynote: Generation Next: Search in the Coming Decade</b><br /> Larry Heck, Vice President of Search and Advertising Sciences</p>  <p>2:45 - 3:45 p.m.<br /> <b> SEO & Linking Track: Linking Q&A</b><br /> Priyank Garg, Director Product Management, Yahoo! Search</p>  <p><br /> For more info on Yahoo!'s presence at the show, check out the <a href="http://www.ysmblog.com/blog/2008/02/27/search-marketing-expo-%e2%80%93-smx-west/">YSM Blog</a> as well. Hope to see you there.</p>  <p><br /> Yahoo! Search Blog team</p>
 I love the alphabet and the fact that it has an order. There's no reason for the order of the letters, but there you go. 
 
  With computers, though, alphabetical order is almost always a bad idea, even chronological order doesn't work perfectly. 
 
  Example: When I look through my spam folder, I shouldn't see the notes in chrono order or alphabetical by sender (with AAAA' going first...). No, I should see the notes in order of least likely to be spam to most likely. Right? (book tip: Everything is Miscellaneous). 
 
  Example: When I do a search in Google images, I want them sorted by relevance and then, within that, by size. Bigger is better. 
 
  Bookstores really don't have much choice. They need to alphabetize the books so you'll know that you'll find me in the Gs, near Malcolm Gladwell. But Amazon has no business using the alphabet, because almost any other ordering technique makes more sense. 
 
  Going to alpha by default is lazy and ineffective and expensive. 
 
  Why does my Sonos make me start browsing my music collection with Abba? (Phew, I don't have any Abba, but you get the idea). Wouldn't it make more sense to show me, "music you haven't heard lately that's similar to music you've been listening to" first? 
 
  Your address book is in alphabetical order, right? Why? If you want to look someone up, type the name in. Alpha is least useful way to browse 4,000 names in an address book. I want them sorted by recency of contact, or in tickler-file order. 
 
  If I knew that lists of blogs in blog readers would be in alpha, I would have changed my name. 
 
  Your data files, your product catalog... none of it should be in alphabetical order. 
 
  The one exception is the name of ski slopes. Ski slopes should go from A to Z, left to right, as you look at the mountain. If someone says, "I'll meet you at the top of Montego Bay," you know where that is without looking at a map. And, by the way, the difficulty of each slope could be coded into the name. Cities could be easiest, animals could be blues, and the most difficult slopes could be named after disgraced politicians.... 
 
  Don't get me started.        
Why do [some] people struggling for an income end up using an expensive check cashing service when the bank right next door will let them have a checking account for free?
 
 Why do [some] students spend an hour fighting about their homework instead of ten minutes just doing it?
 
 Why do customers fall for slick come ons or fancy financing instead of buying what's best for them?
 
 Why is it so easy to fool voters with patently false accusations?
 
 Why do some people turn a routine traffic stop into a life-endangering argument with the cop?
 
 Why can't worthy charities (with dreary stories) raise more money than they do?
 
  I think in every case the answer is the same: Internal noise. [I got a few notes about check cashing services, by the way. In many cities, there are banks that have sensible policies for low income customers, and most jobs that use a payroll service like ADP offer direct deposit. The combination would save a large number of people a lot of time and money, and my point isn't that there are enough financial services available to the less fortunate (there aren't) but that if it weren't for a fear of banks, plenty more people would take advantage of the services that are available. $5 a week for check cashing might account for 30% of someone's disposal income, which is a sin.] 
 
  My friend Lisa was on a plane once and her seatmate kept looking at her. She finally said, "Is the noise inside my head bothering you?" 
 
  Just about everyone has noise inside their head. It's a noise that keeps them from being rational, that forces them to avoid the simple truths sometimes, that makes them unable to take a shortcut when a long (more emotional one) is available.  Emotional intelligence (EQ) gives us a way to talk about how people navigate the world. Far more important than IQ in most settings, emotional intelligence can be learned, but it rarely is. My take is that not only is it important for dealing with work and personal situations, it also makes you a better consumer of marketing. 
 
  If you as a marketer(/fundraiser/teacher/blogger/salesperson/parent) are assuming that all the citizens in your audience have genius level EQ, you're almost certainly making a mistake and you're paying for it every day.        
 It’s time for a Slingo vacation!    Take off to the beautiful Hawaiian Islands with some brand new tricks, game modes, power-ups and more for another great Slingo adventure! Lie on the beach and order up some Slingo Tricks like Summon Joker and Pattern Match. Dive deep to a Coral Reef and discover Platinum Coins and Tiki Jokers.    Hike up to the Secret Volcano and take on the Tiki Guy in a game of Volcano Slingo. It’s all-new Slingo Fun with Slingo Quest Hawaii!   [Download free trial of Slingo Quest Hawaii]  [Buy Slingo Quest Hawaii]                                                                                                                                                                                                                  Slingo Quest                                                                                                                                                                                    Slingo Deluxe                                                                                                                                                                                   Macworld Or Hawaii?                                                                                                                                                                                     Totem Quest                                                                                                                                                                                     Deep Quest                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                      Slingo Deluxe                                                                                                                                                                                   Hawaii Nurturing High-Technology Industry                                                                                                                                                                                       Priceline Deals                                                                                                                                                                                         Judge Shuts Down Internet Airline In Hawaii                                                                                                                                                                                     Supercomputer climate model whips up a storm                                                                       
 It’s 7pm in Austin Texas and I’m in a deserted lobby at South by Southwest with Nick Gonzalez from TechCrunch. Tomorrow is the day we’ve been building up to for ten months, the day we launch our product, Clickpass. I’m now demoing Clickpass to Nick who wants to review it for TechCrunch.   Almost everyone has left the building and are either back in their hotels or at the Facebook party, but for some reason the wireless is still saturated and has almost slowed to a halt.      On this grindingly slow network, our homepage hardly loads. When it finally does — in an irony not lost on either of us — Nick can’t remember the password he created six months ago when he last tried Clickpass and has to try several times to get back in.   Clickpass was designed to make single-sign-on easy. Before someone starts using it, though, they need to connect it to their sites.   The connection process is not going well. It’s been a while since Nick’s used any of the sites we support and we cycle through yet more password attempts as we try to hook into them. We finally manage to connect up to one of them but, for no apparent reason, Hacker News keeps failing. The demo part of the interview winds up and we get stuck into talking about the business instead. I’m starting to feel decidedly nervous.  Storm clouds gather  Ten months earlier we left London, moved to Boston to join YCombinator and started work on Clickpass — which was back then called Remember Me. We firmly believed that OpenID was one of the most important things to happen to the web and that the core issue standing between a brilliant protocol and widespread adoption was its unintuitive usability.   At the time we started the work of evangelists like Simon Willison, David Recordon, Chris Messina and Scott Kveton have succeeded in making most of the technology community aware of the protocol, but there was still a lot of cynicism and doubt.   As 2008 began and Yahoo and Google both announced their support for OpenID, something began to change.   Earlier that day, the SXSW OpenID session had been standing room only. Despite being in a sizeable room, every seat was taken and people were being turned away at the door as others stood around the walls and down the aisle.   That afternoon in a panel-session on distributed social networks, someone in the audience stood up and asked how OpenID was going to become easier to use. Following a mention from Jeremy Keith (moderating) almost the entire panel complemented our about-to-launch product.   It was a huge room, with hundreds of people and I could hardly believe it as Leslie Chicoine from GetSatisfaction described Clickpass as the “first time that OpenID’s actually made sense”.   Back at the demo now with Nick, in the middle of what seemed to be brewing into a perfect tech-storm, but with our ship still side-on to the wind. We finish up the interview and Nick heads back to his hotel room to write up while I hop next door to use the wireless in the Hilton.  Final tweaks  As the night wore on, many of the problems started to fall away. It turned out that the fact we couldn’t connect to Hacker News was indirectly because the site had, by complete coincidence, been TechCrunched that day.   The massive traffic had revealed a registration bug that was slowing the login system to a standstill. Had it it not been TechCrunched, the same bug would have killed the Clickpass experience the day after. By 10pm though Paul Graham had posted that it was fixed and the site was back to normal. Sometimes you just get lucky.  March 11th — day of launch  1am: Immad has crushed every bug we can find, our four servers are all idling happily and I’m about to head back to my hotel when I get an email from Nick saying that he’s sent the piece to Mike Arrington, but that Mike wants to ask us some questions. Can I hang on to take a call?   2am: I’ve just uploaded the company details to CrunchBase as requested when Mike Arrington calls. We talk for almost two hours about Clickpass, about the pains it’s solving, about how it takes the confusion out of OpenID.   As an entrepreneur you spend a lot of your time explaining things to people who aren’t always paying a lot of attention. However, Mike is 100% engaged throughout the full two hours and totally focused on understanding the product. I’m impressed.   Mike hasn’t used OpenID that much though and at the end of the interview he’s still keen to publish the story but feels we need something more to explain our unique selling point.   He advises me to produce a screencast and hold back from the prescribed 9am embargo for a couple of hours until it’s ready. We finish up and I leave him with an article from Marshall Kirkpatrick highlighting the difficulties around OpenID.   4:10am: I email Chris Messina and arrange to do a screencast with him the next morning. Chris is great at explaining these things and drawing out their significance in a way that people get.   4:20am: Take a taxi back to the hotel.   5am: Bed.  Launch morning  8am: Get up and promptly field a call from Joseph Smarr at Plaxo. With tens of millions of users, Plaxo are by far our biggest launch partner and the integration is yet to go live. Joseph’s hit a couple of small bugs at our end and and works with Immad back in SF to iron them out. SF is two hours behind Austin so it’s 6:30am over there and we’ve still got a bit of time before the 9am PST publication embargo.   At this stage I’m still expecting TechCrunch to hold the article until 11, when they get the screencast, and assume we’ve probably got a couple of extra hours more on top.   Joseph tells me that Techcrunch is twittering our imminent launch. After 10 months of designing, documenting and building it’s hard to believe it’s all really happening.   9:30am: SXSW convention center — I find a table and start testing all of the partner sites making sure everything is doing what it should be doing. Immad is doing the same back in San Francisco. David our designer is producing a “We’ll be back soon” page in case anything goes wrong.   Plaxo has pushed their code live and our little button is now on the bottom of their site. Nobody can see it until we drop our beta-cookie, but it’s there, and ready to switch on for their 40M users.   Disqus.com is looking good. Simon Willison’s Django OpenID libraries are blazing fast and Hacker News is now back to normal loading time. Plaxo is as fast as ever.   10:30am: With everything looking good I start getting to grips with the screencast software and mail Chris to fix up a place to meet.   11:25am: As I shut my Mac and go to do the screencast I happen to glance at TechCrunch. We’re on. Top story. No comments. It seems Marshall’s OpenID critique hit the spot. It’s an incredible review — everything we could have hoped for. Fantastic, except that we didn’t expect this for another two hours and the site’s still behind a password!      11:25am 10s: I call San Francisco: “Immad, we’re live, TechCrunch just published the story — let’s push!”   11:25am and 30s: <ping> Aral Balkan twitters that he can’t see the site — how do people find these things out so quickly?!   11:26am: Immad, as fast as ever, IM’s to say that everything’s live. Clickpass is go.   11:37am: An email arrives kindly offering to sell me Clickpass.cn. Un. Believable. I start buying other countries.      11:40am: Joseph publishes a great post about us on the Plaxo blog. I can’t help feeling a flush of pride.   11:50am: 50 new registrations on the site. Congratulatory emails and twitters start coming in. We’re the top story on Hacker News.   2pm: 300 registrations. The traffic is ramping up but thanks to Martin, our sys-admin, the servers don’t even blink at the extra load.   2:40pm: I call Immad and David back in the office. Everyone is excited and so far, everything’s holding strong. I tell the guys that there’s a bottle of champagne waiting for them in the bottom of the fridge.   3pm: <ping> — twitters keep coming in. I didn’t use Twitter much before SXSW but am amazed at what an incredible realtime snapshot it gives of the early-adopter web. Most are positive but a couple of people don’t really get what we’re doing. There’s clearly still work to be done.       3:30pm: An email comes in from one of our new users asking if they can join the company.   3:40pm: And another.   4pm: We make it onto Techmeme and one of our new users has already written a brilliant blog post about us.      5pm: 600 registrations. The adrenaline is starting to wear off and I suddenly feel exhausted. Draft an email to investors to bring them up to speed and realise that we haven’t even emailed our pre-launch list to tell them we’re live yet.  Lock-down  5:30pm: We haven’t set up our email marketing software yet so after writing up an email of the day’s events, I check, double-check and check again that I’ve put 1000 email addresses into the BCC and not the CC field on GMail.   GMail won’t take 1,000 emails at a time so I split them down into chunks. First chunk — okay. Second chunk — okay.   Write an email to another friend thanking them for their support. Send.   “GMail has detected an unusually high volume of mails being sent from this account. Access to your account will be frozen for the next 24 hours”. Bugger.   5:40pm: Phone a friend at Google. Fingers crossed.   6:10:pm: Hurrah — email back on. Silicon Valley is crazy-connected.   6:30pm: All of my electronics are about to die. MacBook is flat and hard-disk is starting to make strange, not-good, marble-on-a-stone-floor sounds and won’t sleep. iPhone has enough juice left to take a call from Joseph suggesting dinner. I catch up with him and John McCrea and we dissect the day’s events over Guinness and burgers. It’s a great evening and when they head back to their hotels I peal off to join the obscenely long queue for the Digg party.   10pm: Immad calls and we review everything. We’ve got a couple of glitches in some of the ancillary features but the whole core has been as solid as a rock. He’s an incredible developer and together with David’s design skills the product hasn’t just pleased us but also, it seems, our users too. We’re on track to hit 1,000 registrations in the first 24 hours and loads of people are installing the Wordpress plugin. We agree it was a good day.  The next fortnight  The first couple of weeks have been a bit of a blur of emails, investor meetings and bug fixes. They’ve also revealed a ton of work still to do. The concept of password-less single sign-on is totally alien to most people and Clickpass doesn’t yet do enough to explain things.   We did a lot of work to make sure we didn’t contradict the decentralised ideals of OpenID and that people can still use their existing OpenID’s with us. Even so, feedback and reviews have highlighted that there are still things left we can to do to make it easier still for those who want to use pure OpenID.   Making OpenID easier is our raison d’etre. I’m pleased with just how much we’ve done for users but we’ve now got to turn our efforts to developers. Installing OpenID isn’t too difficult but it’s intimidating and we need to change that. Over the coming weeks and months we’re going to be releasing both libraries and plugins that should start to help a lot.  Live on new sites — Ma.gnolia  We’ve also got more sites coming online and at the same time as this article is published, so is our integration with Ma.gnolia.   If you’ve not tried Ma.gnolia before it’s a beautifully designed social-bookmarking site which, like Plaxo, has also always been on the cutting edge of OpenID.   We’re really pleased that people are going to be able to use their Clickpass with it.  Celebrating the victories  There’s an undeniable cult around internet startups and a generous helping of hype. As with any other project, 99.8% of the time is spent coding, designing, documenting, answering support and making sure the finances stay sound.   When the exciting times do come though, they come thick and fast and are exhilarating and nerve-racking all at the same time. Launch was exactly like that for us and a day I won’t be forgetting anytime soon.   Image credits:   Austin is the killer app: Scott Beale/Laughing Squid: laughingsquid.com   Data Portabilty Panel: Ian Kennedy: everwas.com/   Blackberry:1 Entrepreneur: 0 : VCWear.com              
 In this article, I want to introduce you to a really powerful CSS3 pseudo selector called :target. Much like :hover, :target is invoked during certain interactions with the website. Specifically, when applied to a fragment identifier. On a page such as http://example.com/index.html#hello-world, the id=”hello-world” element is the target and any matching :target styles would be applied.   I am going to demonstrate two examples of when and how :target can be used. Hopefully, this introduction will get you thinking about some of simple ways :target can add benefit your customers.  Tabs in CSS  A well structured document is one that makes sense in the ordering of sections and topics. It works well when there is no CSS and no JavaScript. Tabbed systems make use of some sort of display tab which shows the current section, and in doing so hides the other sections. We’ve all seen a tabbed system before, and probably plenty of poor implementations as well. Sometimes when you click the tab, it calls a JavaScript function to populate the area below the tab. The downside is that when there is no JavaScript the data does not appear.   The ideal way to build a tab system is to have all your data in the HTML, then use JavaScript to hide the other tab panes and build the tabs themselves dynamically. That way if there is no JavaScript, it just defaults to a linear set of text blocks. This is progressive enhancement; build for the lowest common denominator and add more functionality and styling as you go — no one is left behind, not even googlebot.   Instead of using JavaScript to do this show/hide, it is possible to use CSS3 using the :target selector. Before you get too excited, it must be said that the :target selector is not supported in IE6 or IE7, so the practical uses for this are pretty slim. Instead this can be used for user chrome type objects which don’t effect functionality, but improve usability. You can add the :target info today, and when browsers implementations catch-up they get the bells and whistles auto-magically. It is important to not use :target for mission critical things, but there are plenty of other possibilities. As an example, I will show you how make a simple tab system based on Daniel Glazman’s example.   First we should create the basic un-styled HTML.  <h2 id="topic1"><a href="#content1">Topic 1</a></h2> <p id="content1">This is the text for topic 1. Hello World!</p> <h2 id="topic2"><a href="#content2">Topic 2</a></h2> <p id="content2">Different text for topic 2. Ah, foobar.</p>  Without CSS or JavaScript this text is completely accessible and reads normally, it just makes the page longer. Tabs are a way to compact the information into a smaller space, so lets proceed to do this.   If we add some simple styles to the page, we can get the two headings to appear and act like tabs through positioning. The interesting part is the :target selector.  // set the default state first p { display: none; } // When the link is clicked, set the contents to display p:target { display: block; }   When the fragment (#content1) is not part of the URL, the :target selector does not match the <p> element, so it is set the default view of display: none. This is a very simple way to create a tabbed system. You can view a working example and see for yourself.  The Yellow Fade Technique  There is a popular usability feature called the “Yellow Fade Technique”. This is used to direct the user’s attention back to a specific area subtly. For example, when you want to edit a piece of a page you may click edit which takes to a new page with form fields. When you press save you are returned to the original page where there is a brief yellow fade of the area that was just edited. It brings your eye to the area, possibly to confirm the changes look correctly in the template, or to just make people aware the change took place at all. Either way, it seems to be a welcomed usability feature that has been picked-up by several web applications.   Normally, this is accomplished through the use of JavaScript and page IDs or classes. The JavaScript runs an onload function looking for those classes or ID and once the parts of the page have been identified, the script runs a timer and ever few microseconds change the background color from pure yellow to white. This create a smooth, not too annoying, yellow fade effect.   The downside to all this is that there are several resources at work, including onload functions (which might be happening every time the page loads, not just the times when a form is submitted) and hooks into the classes and IDs and JavaScript timers. All this adds to the client download and subtracts from the speed of the page.   With CSS3 there is a much easier and simpler solution. Using the :target pseudo class it is possible to emulate the yellow fade without a single line of JavaScript.   First, you need to create (or download) a tiny 1 pixel-wide yellow animated gif. This will fade from yellow to white. The animated gif isn’t repeating, so it will fade once and then stay pure white. This also defines the length of the fade, so there is no need to for a JavaScript timer.   Second, we need to set this as the background image for the area which has been changed. To do this, we use the CSS3 :target pseudo selector.  #here:target { background-image: url('yellow-fade.gif'); }   This will fade the element with an id=”here”, the URL would look like http://example.com/#here. It is good web architecture to use fragment identifiers for each of your headings and to use RESTful URLs.   Now, the downside to that CSS statement is that it will only fade the area with the ID.  <h1 id="here">Hello World</h1> <p>I am saying Hello to everyone in the World!</p>  Only the heading element would get the yellow fade. So how do we fix this? Well, we could change the ID to a class and create something like:  .here:target { background-image: url('yellow-fade.gif'); }  But then on the server, we’d have to add classes dynamically to all our elements.  <h1 class="here">Hello World</h1> <p class="here">I am saying Hello to everyone in the World!</p>  We could put a wrapper around both the heading and the paragraph.  <div id="here"> <h1>Hello World</h1> <p>I am saying Hello to everyone in the World!</p> </div>  But that seems too much work. Instead, we can make use of another CSS combinator, the adjacent sibling selector:  #here:target, #here:target+p { background-image: url('yellow-fade.gif'); }  This targets both the heading with the ID ‘here’ and the first sibling paragraph. So both will get the background image and the subsequent fade. You can easily change your CSS to fit your HTML design, but this is a quick and simple alternative to the Yellow Fade technique in JavaScript used on so many sites.   In CSS there is also a wildcard * to stand for all nodes. So you could further take the example to  #here:target, #here:target+* { background-image: url('yellow-fade.gif'); }  This would match the first sibling of #here no matter what the type of element it might be. Firefox correctly supports this, but as of writing, Safari does not.   You can see an example of this in action and view the source to see how it all works.  Blurring the lines between behaviour and presentation  I am obligated by the behaviorists to mention that there is a debate over presentation and behavior, where does one stop and the other start? By adding the :target selector into your CSS, you are styling the HTML based on the behavior of the browser and the users. We talk about the “holy trinity” of web design, and we have spent the last few years campaigning to divide data, presentation and behavior into their respective HTML, CSS and JavaScript camps. The :target, as well as the :hover, selectors blur that line between presentation and behavior. Depending on how comfortable or how much of a purist you are, you may or may not agree with what has been demonstrated.   These examples were written to better understand the CSS3 :target element and to explore those blurry grey-areas. Hopefully, a discussion will emerge with even more ideas, caveats and problems that were not originally thought of. Together we can create some best practices on when to best use CSS behavior and JavaScript presentation.  Conclusion  Over a year ago, Andy Budd demonstrated the yellow-fade technique with :target and I was impressed! (http://www.andybudd.com/presentations/css3/) In the time in between, I have seen very little attention or articles on this little known selector. As I was started working on this article, I found several examples some from as early as January 2003 that talk about uses for the :target selector. The reason for not getting the traction it deserves could be the lack of information about when and how to use it correctly or documentation on the poor CSS3 implementations in browsers.   CSS3 is closer than you think, many of the selectors and attributes are available in several major browsers today. They can be used with progressive enhancement to add more style to your design at little cost, when other browsers catch-up they get the benefits of your progressive code for free. The CSS3 :target selector is just one example of some of the new selectors arriving that can be taken advantage of in interesting new ways.              
Download the MP3 (10.63 MB)  Topics we cover in the interview   What’s the creative process behind digg? How do you think up new features? Do you use a digg-like consensus approach to them? How have you seen digg affect traditional media? How will digg-spawned sites and web apps be in the future?  Full transcription of the interview     SD: Do you do programming as well as design or are you one of the individuals who’s able to see the big picture and how the pieces fit together?   KR: As far as my daily activities on the site, working for digg, it’s all about creating new features for the site, so it’s all about working with the graphic designer, Daniel Burka to come up with these features. So basically I’ll draw them up on a piece of paper and they look really ugly, and then I pass them to someone that knows how to make them look pretty, so that’s kind of how it’s been working for the last couple of years.   SD: Can you tell us a little bit about your creative process?   KR: Well, it’s a very strange one in that most of it is done almost randomly, just driving around or whatever it may be, and I’ll just think of a feature and how it might impact the users and how they might use it. I’m constantly thinking about the site and so it doesn’t feel like work, more like a way to figure out how users want to communicate and share information with each other. We’ve come up with dozens of different features, a lot of them that we’ve thrown away because we don’t think they’re a good fit, or features that we just haven’t time to build, create and roll them out yet, so it’s really looking at how the users are expressing themselves on the site and seeing what they are doing with the site, what are the pitfalls? Where do they get lost in the navigation? Can they not discover stories because of one reason another? Is there a story that falls through the cracks because it wasn’t highlighted in a certain way, and how can we draw out the best information presented to the users and then give them the tools that they need to be able to share it with all of their friends using digg?   And so we keep that in mind and think about - I know this sounds really strange and basic - but what would be cool and useful, what people would really like to do, and what would keep them coming back and really finding the information they want to find.   SD: Do you use something that’s parallel to digg, where it’s kind of a consensus vote into what you feel will actually work? Do you take that into your in-house creative process?   KR: Well, it’s really myself and Daniel, and so we sit down and we come up with different things and eventually we’ll turn them into mockups. So after there’s a design that’s been on a piece of scratchpaper it’s handed off to him and he’ll come up with a series of different mockups and different layouts for that particular feature or design. We’ll take a look at it, then present it to the rest of the staff and let them play around with it, see what they think about the feature, take their feedback and then ultimately we’ll just make the decision on whether we should push it out or not.   SD: Do you have demographics on your core users? Who are the people that are sitting and spending large chunks of time to vote the stories up?   KR: It typically tends to be your standard eighteen to thirty-four year old male user for the most part, but there’s different types of users on the site, and we’ve really seen that split and fragment when we rolled out the new sections in digg version three. For the longest time we were a technology news site, so it was all about the tech fans and tech enthusiasts, but right after we launched version three we saw a huge explosion in user registration and it was from a lot of users that don’t fit our typical demographic because they’re interested in other types of news online. So the number two most popular section on our site today is our political section - those are very hot topics, and then actually followed by videos, so videos is our first stab at content outside of just news and has been extremely popular for us, and it’s been a great way to expose users to a lot of cool videos around the web.   SD: Are you finding that larger news agencies or advertising agencies are starting to use digg as a poll factor?   KR: You know, it’s really shortening the length of the feedback loop. It’s one of those things where they are using it to find out what is hot at any given moment in time, especially as you can sort most diggs in any given section and you can see what people are talking about, where they’re gathering around, what stories are very interesting for a given day, etc.    I’ve gotten a lot of feedback from writers that said, hey, y’know what, I pulled up on the day that Apple announced all of their new products, and looked up a digg swarm (which is basically a Flash visualisation of all the users as they’re swarming around the different stories), and they were able to watch that over the course of a few hours and see where the most attention was [and work out] which product did they want to focus their article on. They found out that it was the iTV, the little set-top box, that was an extremely popular story that day and so they created content around that because they knew that that was going to be a hot topic. So it’s helping journalists and writers in that way, in that they can find out in real-time what the pulse is of the community is online.   SD: And how about advertising agencies - are they referencing back to digg to see how to shape their next story or campaign?   KR: You know, we haven’t had a ton of ad agencies contact us, other than the fact that they’ve said they would like to have their ads diggable, and I don’t know if our users want to digg advertisements! So that’s one of those things where I was like, “Can we get back to you on that one?! But not really at this time, not that I know of!   SD: What do you think are the long-term implications for social content? If we look two or three years down the line, what is the digg universe going to look like, what are the digg-spawned applications and websites going to look like?   KR: Well, I think that digg is a great tool for sharing your interests with others, and I think that there has never really been a tool online where there’s - I’m trying to think of what I can say and what I can’t say! We really want to build out a profile of users’ interests and be able to group these together and get recommendations on different things based on people that you trust. So whether that be your news, or other different types of content online, it’s really about not only getting recommendations but suggestions and also introducing you to new things that you might not know of through people that you’re connected with, and people that you’ve never met.    So one of the things that we’re doing at digg right now that’s very exciting to us (that we haven’t launched yet) is we’re learning a lot about what individual people are digging on the site and so what we really want to do is allow the users - I mean, we should do everything in our power to give back to the users based upon what they’re giving us. So they’re giving us history and they’re sharing their history with everyone based on what they’re digging. What we can do is, on the back end, do the math to make comparisons to other users and say, ok, based on what you’re into, I know you love sports cars and I know you love oolong tea, I can make a connection there with other types of stories, and I can also make a connection with people that you haven’t met before, so it’s going to be really interesting when social networking sites are no longer based on just, “I think this person is attractive and I want to meet them,” but more along the lines of, “I know I have a connection with this person in one way or another because we digg the same comments, we like the same stories, and we might even live close to each other and might want to meet up,” so there’s going to be a whole nice range of tools that we’ll be providing to the community over the next year that are going to allow them to explore these relationships in ways that they never thought possible.   SD: Very cool. What is the relationship between, say, digg and Flickr? Is something like that a possibility?   KR: Well, y’know, it’s one of those things where we really want to give users the power to digg and share whatever is important to them and we’re not limiting that to any one particular type of content online so whether it’s pictures or you name it, anything where there is an abundance of information that needs a large collaborative filter applied to it to sift through that, we’ll be going. As long as it’s relevant too, I mean there’s certain things that you really wouldn’t want to dig - you couldn’t really apply digg to an online dating service because you wouldn’t want to digg someone that you’re interested in because then everyone else would want to go out with them! So we know there’s limitations to the concept, but there are a lot of really cool areas that we can apply the concept to, so you’ll see that rolled out, definitely some new areas in the next few months.   SD: Any last comments?   KR: Thanks for having me, and just thought I’d let you know that I’m huge fan of the site and I digg your stories all of the time. It’s awesome!   SD: Thanks Kevin.   Transcribed by Scott Morris    Like this article? Digg it!         
 Chemists at the University of California, San Diego have discovered that a chemical reaction in the atmosphere above major cities long assumed to be unimportant in urban air pollution is in fact a significant contributor to urban ozone — the main component of smog.   Their finding, detailed in the March 21 issue of the journal Science, should help air quality experts devise better strategies to reduce ozone for the more than 300 counties across the United States with ozone levels that exceed new standards announced last week by the Environmental Protection Agency.   It should also benefit cities in the rest of the world such as Mexico City and Beijing that are now grappling with major air quality and urban smog problems. More than 100 million people worldwide currently live in cities that fail to meet international standards for air quality.   “This study provides us with additional insight into the chemistry of urban ozone production,” said Amitabha Sinha, a professor of chemistry and biochemistry at UC San Diego who headed the research team. “It shows us that the chemistry of urban ozone is even more complicated than we initially assumed. With improved knowledge of how ozone is produced, we should be in a better position to control the air quality of large urban areas across the United States as well as around the world.”   Urban ozone levels peak in the afternoon hours of large cities after being generated through a complex series of chemical reactions involving the interaction of sunlight with hydrocarbons and nitrogen oxides from automobile exhaust. Ozone production is initiated when hydroxyl radicals, OH, are produced from water vapor. Atmospheric chemists had long assumed that the lion’s share of the OH involved in urban ozone production is generated when ultraviolet radiation with wavelengths less than 320 nanometers dissociates ambient ozone to form excited oxygen atoms, which, in turn, react with water vapor to produce hydroxyl radicals. These OH radicals subsequently attack hydrocarbons and the resulting products combine through a series of chemical reactions with nitric oxide, NO, to produce nitrogen dioxide, NO2, and eventually ozone, O3.   Sinha’s team found in laboratory experiments that another chemical reaction also plays a significant role in urban OH radical production — perhaps comparable to that from the reaction of excited oxygen atoms with water vapor under certain conditions. This new mechanism involves reactions between water vapor and NO2 in electronically “excited states,” produced when NO2 absorbs visible light between the wavelengths of 450 to 650 nanometers.   German scientists first proposed this method of producing OH radicals in 1997. Their measurements, however, did not detect any OH radicals being formed and, as a result, they suggested that the reaction would play a fairly insignificant role in the atmosphere.   The more recent measurements by the UC San Diego team suggest that this method of OH radical production occurs at a rate that is ten times faster than previously estimated. And because radiation in the 450 to 650 nanometers wavelength range is not filtered out as effectively in the lowest portion of the atmosphere as the ultraviolet radiation in the vicinity of 320 nanometers that generate OH radicals from water vapor and ozone, Sinha and other atmospheric scientists believe it’s likely to have a major role in the formation of smog.   “Identifying the sources of atmospheric OH radical production is important to understanding how to control the ozone problem, since it is the reaction of OH radicals with hydrocarbons that ultimately leads to urban ozone,” Sinha said. “The chemistry of urban ozone production is complicated and it just got bit more complicated with the addition of this new source of OH radicals.”   Sinha’s team — which included postdoctoral fellow Shuping Li and graduate student Jamie Matthews — was able to make the most precise measurement to date of the rate of this reaction with an innovative laser technique that allowed the team to directly monitor the OH radicals with significantly higher sensitivity then previously used to study this reaction.   “It’s a relatively slow reaction with a rate that is at least a thousand times slower than that for producing OH from the reaction of excited oxygen atoms with water molecules,” said Sinha. “However, there is a lot of solar radiation coming down over the visible wavelength region, so even a slow reaction can become important. The upshot is that atmospheric models have ignored this reaction altogether, assuming that because nothing can be seen using conventional techniques, nothing must be happening.”   [Kim McDonald @ University of California — San Diego]                                                                                                                                                                                                             Lawmakers say 'forget it' to Segways in San Francisco                                                                                                                                                                                   San Diego Supercomputer Team Backs Firefighters In Recent "Horse" Wildfires                                                                                                                                                                                     Stalker tech                                                                                                                                                                                    Supercomputer Unleashes Virtual 9.0 Megaquake In Pacific Northwest                                                                                                                                                                                      Diebold apologizes for device flaws                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                     Kent Lewis Live from San Diego at The Online Marketing Summit                                                                                                                                                                                   Sputnik Manages FreeNet Cloud                                                                                                                                                                                   University of California at San Diego Computers Hacked, UCSD Students and Staff Compromised                                                                                                                                                                                     The Rock 'n' Roll Marathon                                                                                                                                                                                      Sony VAIO notebook to feature Blu-ray burner, built-in DV-R in June                                                                        
 Black carbon, a form of particulate air pollution most often produced from biomass burning, cooking with solid fuels and diesel exhaust, has a warming effect in the atmosphere three to four times greater than prevailing estimates, according to scientists in an upcoming review article in the journal Nature Geoscience.   Scripps Institution of Oceanography at UC San Diego atmospheric scientist V. Ramanathan and University of Iowa chemical engineer Greg Carmichael, said that soot and other forms of black carbon could have as much as 60 percent of the current global warming effect of carbon dioxide, more than that of any greenhouse gas besides CO2. The researchers also noted, however, that mitigation would have immediate societal benefits in addition to the long term effect of reducing greenhouse gas emissions.   The article, “Global and regional climate changes due to black carbon,” will be posted in the online version of Nature Geoscience on Sunday, March 23.   “Observationally based studies such as ours are converging on the same large magnitude of black carbon heating as modeling studies from Stanford, Caltech and NASA,” said Ramanathan. “We now have to examine if black carbon is also having a large role in the retreat of arctic sea ice and Himalayan glaciers as suggested by recent studies.”   In the paper, Ramanathan and Carmichael integrated observed data from satellites, aircraft and surface instruments about the warming effect of black carbon and found that its forcing, or warming effect in the atmosphere, is about 0.9 watts per meter squared. That compares to estimates of between 0.2 watts per meter squared and 0.4 watts per meter squared that were agreed upon as a consensus estimate in a report released last year by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), a U.N.-sponsored agency that periodically synthesizes the body of climate change research.   Ramanathan and Carmichael said the conservative estimates are based on widely used computer model simulations that do not take into account the amplification of black carbon’s warming effect when mixed with other aerosols such as sulfates. The models also do not adequately represent the full range of altitudes at which the warming effect occurs. The most recent observations, in contrast, have found significant black carbon warming effects at altitudes in the range of 2 kilometers (6,500 feet), levels at which black carbon particles absorb not only sunlight but also solar energy reflected by clouds at lower altitudes.   Between 25 and 35 percent of black carbon in the global atmosphere comes from China and India, emitted from the burning of wood and cow dung in household cooking and through the use of coal to heat homes. Countries in Europe and elsewhere that rely heavily on diesel fuel for transportation also contribute large amounts.   “Per capita emissions of black carbon from the United States and some European countries are still comparable to those from south Asia and east Asia,” Ramanathan said.   In south Asia, pollution often forms a prevalent brownish haze that has been termed the “atmospheric brown cloud.” Ramanathan’s previous research has indicated that the warming effects of this smog appear to be accelerating the melt of Himalayan glaciers that provide billions of people throughout Asia with drinking water. In addition, the inhalation of smoke during indoor cooking has been linked to the deaths of an estimated 400,000 women and children in south and east Asia.   Elimination of black carbon, a contributor to global warming and a public health hazard, offers a nearly instant return on investment, the researchers said. Black carbon particles only remain airborne for weeks at most compared to carbon dioxide, which remains in the atmosphere for more than a century. In addition, technology that could substantially reduce black carbon emissions already exists in the form of commercially available products.   Ramanathan said that an observation program for which he is currently seeking corporate sponsorship could dramatically illustrate the benefits. Known as Project Surya, the proposed venture would provide some 20,000 rural Indian households with smoke-free cookers and equipped to transmit data. At the same time, a team of researchers led by Ramanathan would observe air pollution levels in the region to measure the effect of the cookers.   Carmichael said he hopes that the paper’s presentation of the immediacy of the benefits will make it easier to generate political and regulatory momentum toward reduction of black carbon emissions.   “It offers a chance to get better traction for implementing strategies for reducing black carbon,” he said.   The National Science Foundation, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, and the National Aeronautics and Space Administration funded the review.    [Rob Monroe, Mario Aguilera @ University of California — San Diego]                                                                                                                                                                                                             Tracking Your Carbon Footprint                                                                                                                                                                                  Honda, Toyota Beat Detroit In New Automaker 'Green' Rankings                                                                                                                                                                                    Confirmed -- Deforestation Plays Critical Climate Change Role                                                                                                                                                                                   Engineers Design Affordable, Clean Car Using Existing Technology and Fuels                                                                                                                                                                                      Forests Damaged By Katrina May Contribute To Global Warming                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                     Biofuels: An Important Part of a Low-Carbon Diet                                                                                                                                                                                        Attention! Global Warming Threatens Planet Earth (In Case You Haven't Heard)!                                                                                                                                                                                   Climate Education In SimCity Societies                                                                                                                                                                                  Top 100 Ways Global Warming Will Change Your Life                                                                                                                                                                                       Global Warming? Global Dimming!                                                                            
 Microsoft made a mistake with its investment in Facebook. Just because Google has made a business out of Internet advertising doesn’t mean that a traditional software company is going to do well here, too.   Facebook is likely to be seen as Microsoft’s ace in the Web 2.0 Wars. Google gave birth to the “online OS” by providing many of the applications you might expect to find in installable form. Today, others, such as Facebook, are growing exponentially because they offer much more than just “another social medium.” Yet as great as the little widget-like applications that everyone is going nuts over at Facebook are, at its core, Facebook can and will become yesterday’s news someday. Here’s why:   Pull the plug. Seriously, just pull the plug on the connectivity to that platform and watch all of that Web 2.0 nonsense deflate right before your eyes. Whether it be a localized issue with being able to connect to any specific portal/service/ or worse, an international hiccup in the world’s ability to connect to the Web 2.0 company. It could happen…   Besides eyeballs, what is the real value that Facebook is providing? Exactly, it’s a roundabout way to reach ad dollars. At the end of the day, Facebook joining Microsoft’s own portfolio will be great for Facebook but it’ll do very little for a company like Microsoft. Why? Microsoft is the new IBM as Facebook is the new Yahoo! (1990s era). Microsoft knows enterprise, but it has seriously lost its traction with most home users in almost every sense of the word. This is just a fact; people have been burned badly with high MS Office prices and Vista incompatibilities. Microsoft needs to focus on one business at a time as far as I’m concerned.  Microsoft needs to understand that the way it develops software is dying. This doesn’t mean Microsoft will cease to exist in the near future, but the closed source mindset with mobile OS is taking its last breath. Same goes with Facebook. As a trend, sure, it’s cool. Yet to dump millions into it is just plain reaching for the stars and proof of a stale Redmond development scene.   This article has been republished with the kind permission of our friends at OSWeekly.com. For more computer news, go give ‘em a look or Subscribe to OSWeekly.com’s RSS Feed!   Related Articles @ OSWeekly.com   Are Random Shell Scripts A Threat?  What to Use in Linux: Open or Closed Software?  Fedora 8: Live CD Reviewed  Leopard On G4: The Test  Web Browsing Experience: Windows Mobile vs. iPhone                                                                                                                                                                                                           How Do I Play Craps In Vegas (Or Anywhere Else, For That Matter)?                                                                                                                                                                                       The Bill Gates Show Comes to Canada                                                                                                                                                                                     Microsoft's Global Insecurity Complex                                                                                                                                                                                   Internet Explorer--embraced, extended, extinct?                                                                                                                                                                                         How Do I Find A Summer Job On The Internet?                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                     Facebook: The New MySpace?                                                                                                                                                                                      Facebook On Your iPhone                                                                                                                                                                                         Facebook Tastes the Consequences                                                                                                                                                                                        Getting to Know Facebook                                                                                                                                                                                        What's Up With Facebook?                                                                           
 Time to wrap up Toy Fair, and remember that our contest ends on March 12.   Toy News:   Nickelodeon rolls out new toys    A detailed look at VTech's new line-up    Sit-to-Stand Alphabet Train         Paint & Learn Art Easel        A-Z Mouse Pad        Touch & Teach Turtle        Move & Crawl Ball        Stack & Learn Elephant        Rhyme & Discover Book        Learn & Dance Interactive Zoo        Play & Learn Tree House        Spin Around Learning Town        Pull & Learn Car Carrier        Baby Tunes Music Player        Nighty Light Musical Crib Projector        Bop & Learn Guitar        Sing & Learn Butterfly        Soft Singing Moon        Roly Poly Penguin        Touch & Learn Musical Bee        Sing & Learn Musical Mic        Winnie the Pooh Sit 'n Play Learning Center        Winnie the Pooh Play 'n Learn Phone        Winnie the Pooh Play 'n Learn Spinning Top        My Friends Tigger & Pooh Explore 'n Discover Phone        Disney Princesses Magic Wand Book        Disney Princesses Carriage Laptop        Little Einsteins Learn & Discover Globe        Little Einsteins Blast-Off Learning Laptop        Thomas & Friends Fridge Fun        WallbullE Learning Laptop        Cars Lightning McQueen Learning Laptop        Create-A-Story        KidiArt Studio        KidiJamz Studio        Kidizoom Camera update        KidiDoodle        V.Smile PC Pal        V.Smile Cyber Pocket        V-Motion        Planetvtech.com        Cyber Spy Notebook        Cyber Rocket    Elmo Knows Your Name...and threatens your life!   Tech News:   Americans get their news from the Web  HD-DVD is Dead   Video Game News and Reviews:   Sims Online is now EA-Land and Free   Review  Cosmic Family for Wii   Hannah shares her thoughts on a Wii game for 4-8-year-olds. Is it out of this world? Listen and find out!  New reviews at our website:    Spy Gear Ultimate Spy Watch  Pinnacle Video Capture for Mac  Spy Gear Dart Blaster  Little Mommy Real Loving Baby Cuddle & Coo Doll  Spy Gear Agent Tool Kit (6-in-1 Spy Pen)  Spy Gear Satellite Listener  HEXBUG Micro Robotic Creatures (As seen on Knight Rider!)   Feedback   Call our feedback line: 206-339-6480  Leave a voice message with your computer microphone  Or e-mail us  Digg Us!  And check out the Extras for more news, reviews, and other content.   Other Podcasts Mentioned:   Dancing with Elephants   Next time:   An interview helping you protect your kids on their cell phones.  The latest tech, toy, and video game news, as always    Music by Kevin McLeod         
 Teresa is finally back and joins Dale after getting back into the house.  Recalls and Safety Information:  Fisher-Price Announces the largest toy recall ever U.S. Works with China to prevent this from happening again Have your kids tested for lead Sony Cyber-shot DSC-T5 Camera Is your printer producing second-hand smoke? Toy News: Bright Starts Baby's PlayPlace Tech News: MySpace: How private is your private information? Amazon takes on Paypal and Google payment services Google hopes to offer free wireless service and the Google Phone Windows Vista Service Pack 1 Leaked Free Anti-Malware from Robot Genius MS Works now free Hot and Cold Electric Blanket Timex Ironman iControl: Control your iPod with your watch  Interview  No interview this week due to schedule conflicts.  Video Game News and Reviews: New Wrist Straps for the Wiimote New 80GB Sony PS3 Ships PS3 to take on DVR functions? MLB Power Pros announced for American Release  Review ClickStart My First Computer  After Dale's ambivalent announcement about this new device from LeapFrog, they sent us one to try out. Hannah put it through its paces and offers her take on the device. We will also have reviews of cartridges in our Extras section in the coming weeks.  Feedback Join our Discussion List Call our feedback line: 206-339-6480 Leave a voice message with your computer microphone Or e-mail us Digg Us!  Next week: A Review of Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix for the DS The latest tech, toy, and video game news, as always        
 Off to the Red Cross again this morning.       ReSharper 3.1 - One of the         best-know VS add-ins takes a step forward.     RSS Bandit 1.6 - New version         of this C# RSS aggregator. (via              Greg Duncan)         How to start and keep your wiki alive - Some advice for the hopeful wiki owner.                                    Sponsors                        CodeIt.Right The First Time  (Static Code Analysis + Automatic Refactoring = Painless Coding Guidelines™)                                                   Supported IDEs             VS 2005                 VS 2008                 (only .NET 2.0 in the Beta)             VS .NET 2003                                 Supported Languages                Visual Basic .NET               C#          CodeIt.Right is a new generation code analysis tool that combines static code analysis and automatic refactoring to best practices in one application. And CodeIt.Right will automagically correct code errors and violations (e.g. naming conventions, incorrectly implemented coding patterns, etc)!     Benefits                              Produce quality code            Easily enforce coding guidelines within your team(s)            Identify potential issues earlier in development cycle                                          Automatic code reviews          With a push of a button get violations fixed instead of just having it nag you about them               more...             Feature Highlighs                                   Microsoft .NET Guidelines and best practices - right out of the box             Auto correct violations (BEST)          Automagical Refactoring to Patterns (BEST)                                              Command line version            Custom Rules, Powerful API - develop own rules using SDK                more...              CodeIt.Right brings Coding Standards to Reality!                                                   More Details or Download                                                        Share Your Feedback                                                                                Data Dynamics Reports    Data Dynamics Reports is a new reporting engine for .NET developers that adds significant enhancements to standard RDL-based reports!    Master Reports Allow report authors to create living templates that automatically update when the master report is updated.   Data Visualizers Make it easier for those consuming the report to get the general idea of what the data is doing without comparing every single line.   Advanced Printing N-up printing outputs N pages per physical page. Booklet mode organizes the pages in an order suitable for making a folded booklet.                                                                                PROJECT MANAGEMENT SOFTWARE                          Software development projects are                  generally too complex and too important to manage with pencils and sticky notes.                  That's why good                   project management software can be the difference between shipping                  your software on time and infinitely floating ship dates.                                      When you manage a software development project with Axosoft  OnTime 2008, your team can focus on coding and QA, rather than the process.                                                               Join               over 6,000 development teams world-wide and start shipping software on time.            Download Axosoft OnTime                  2008!           (FREE single-user edition / Teams starting @ $395)                   WINDOWS - WEB - VS.NET                        INSTALLED -or- HOSTED                                             Videos - Podcasts - Blogs - Forums - Demos & More!                                                             
    This morning I got my mytreo.net Newsletter and despite the fact that the page anchors don’t work in Gmail, I read (skimmed) the first paragraph and decided to try the service they were promoting, Jott.   The link in the email took me to a Palm page with a longer article that I didn’t actually read and no quick and easy way to get to what ever Jott was going to make me do to use it (sign up or download whatever).   A quick Google search and I was on Jott’s website, cleverly called jott.com  Set up was easy, nothing to download. First and last name, email, password, and telephone number. Then a confirmation email, then you are asked to place a call to a 866 number to set up your phone.   With the email and phone confirmed, an automated lady voice at the other end of the phone asks you to make your first Jott, which unless you have already added contact thru the web interface is to yourself. In true geek fashion, she recommends sending yourself “Hello world”. Original. I spoke into my phone, sent my self a message, easily set up a reminder (which texted and emailed me at a set time). So far so good. This could actually be useful.   Read more…         
 Filed under: misc hacks  Our own [Eliot] dug this one up from the grave. While the recipe has been online for a while, do you know many 10 year olds who made their own Aerogel, that wonderful insulator that's essentially gelled air? [William] made some(cache) for his science project in 2002. He started with Silbond H5, a combination of ethyl alcohol and ethyl polysilicate. You can get the MSDS after a painless email registration on the Silbond website. After the gel is formed you have to soak it in an alcohol bath to make sure all water has been removed from the structure. Then the gel is placed in a drying chamber. Liquid CO2 is forced into the chamber to displace all the alcohol in the chamber and the structure. Once the the alcohol is gone the supercritical drying phase begins. The temperature is raised to 90degF and the pressure is regulated to 1050psi. At this point the liquid CO2 in the gel structure takes on gas properties (looses surface tension) and leaves the silica structure. All that remains in the chamber is your new Aerogel which is 99% empty space and 1000 times less dense than glass.  Of course, if you're lazy, you can buy some here.Read | Permalink | Email this | Linking Blogs | Comments 
   Yesterday my coworkers redecorated my office.  Pictures in this blog entry are photos of their work.  Strangely enough, I found myself quite appreciative of their act of vandalism.  :-)    Today is my 40th birthday.  Like most other days, I started by walking the dog and making a To-Do list.  However, today's list has a special item:     Decide whether to have a mid-life crisis or not.    :-)    I'll confess I am not entirely thrilled about being 40.  It doesn't seem that long ago that 40 seemed far away.  Now that it's here, I realize that it's not what I expected.  I thought my life at 40 would be different.    Many who know me would assert that I have nothing to complain about.  And they would be correct.  My life has been filled with blessings of all kinds, for which I am truly thankful.  I am a published author.  Most would consider me financially successful.  I am in a career where I enjoy my work.    But still...    As the old saying goes, nobody lies on their deathbed wishing they had spent more time at the office.    Like most everybody else, when I was 30 I looked ahead ten years and formed a picture in my mind.  My life today doesn't match that picture very well.  Examples:     I thought by now I would be more solid in the quality of      my relationships with my loved ones and in the practice of my faith.            I thought by now I would be a better guitar player.            There's a messy pile in my study that has been there for      ten years.  (Yes, we moved six years ago.  The heap moved too.)  I thought      it would be cleaned up by now.            I always assumed that by 40 I would have learned to      exercise regularly and stop eating junk food.    I go could on.  And on.  But you get the idea.    I am tempted to think about my regrets, the places where I took a wrong turn, the places where I would have made a smarter choice if I knew then what I know now.    But this whole line of thinking doesn't seem at all conducive to good mental health, so today I will choose to focus on two things which seem more constructive:   1.  Tapestry   One of my favorite Star Trek episodes is called Tapestry.  It is the story of someone given a chance to re-live a pivotal moment in his youth so that he can avoid making the unwise choice he made the first time.  But it turns out that his reckless moment was a critical ingredient in his later successes.    Today I remind myself that there are no do-overs, and I'm not sure I would want one anyway.  For every mistake I have made, there were negative consequences and positive lessons.  I can't expect to avoid the former and keep the latter.  They come together as an inseparable package.   2.  Life Calculus.   Back in 2003 I wrote an article called Career Calculus.  In a nutshell, it says that at any given moment in your career, what you know is far less important than whether you are learning.    Today I remind myself that the same principle applies in life.  I am confident in my first derivative.  Whatever I am today, I think I will be a better person tomorrow.    So if I'm still blogging when I'm 50, I expect I will be able to report progress on some of the items mentioned above.    And just to be clear, if that heap of junk on the floor of my study is still there, it will be larger than it is now, and I plan to report that as progress.  :-)           
   People want to be understood.  That's why support groups are so popular.     The alcoholic wants to connect with somebody else who showed      up drunk at a wedding and embarrassed the bride.            The compulsive overeater wants to know that he's not the      only one who has stopped at the Dunkin Donuts drive-thru on the way home to      eat a dozen before dinner.            The out-of-control gambler wants to be in community with      other people who have lost their car going "all in" with pocket sevens.    We all have problems, and we all want to know that we're not alone.    Wednesday evening I posted a comment on a friend's blog.  Or rather, I tried to post a comment.    True to my tendencies, it was really far too wordy to be called a comment.  I actually spent about half an hour wordsmithing a multiple-paragraph response.    But when I hit the submit button to post it, Wordpress gave me a generic error page.  Presumably something timed out while I was crafting my reply.    And when I hit the Back button, my comment was gone.  :-(    *&%$#@!    My mind raced.  What are my options here?    Maybe I should just re-type the whole thing?  It was only 300 words or so.    Nah.  The text I wrote was perfect.  I probably won't be able to remember it just the way it was.    And why should I have to?  Firefox and Wordpress screwed this up, not me!    Cautiously I hit the Forward button in my browser.  Firefox showed me this dialog:        Aha!  I clicked OK.  Wordpress coughed up the same hairball I got before.    But now I know that Firefox still has my comment in memory somewhere.  All I have to do is figure out how to get it.    Two hours later I finally got my comment posted, deliberately ignoring the fact that I could have retyped it ten times by then.    After several other attempts that brought me to dead ends, here is the technique that succeeded:     I installed winpcap      and a packet sniffer, which I configured to capture all packets on my network      interface.            Then I went back to my still-open instance of Firefox and      hit Reload.  I clicked the OK button in the dialog box above and Wordpress      barfed again.            Then I went back to the packet sniffer and found the TCP      connection containing my posted comment.            Ack!  I had completely forgotten that the format would be application/x-www-form-urlencoded.       Luckily, I memorized all of the punctuation marks in the ASCII table back      when I was in middle school.  %22 would be 34 in decimal, so that's a      quotation mark.  After several search-and-replace operations, all the      escaped characters were fixed.            During all this, I noticed and fixed a couple of typos I      had previously missed.            Finally I went back to my friend's blog, pasted my comment      into the textbox and hit submit.    Let me know that I'm not alone.  Tell me the story of something geeky that you did.       
        Two interesting pieces from Exit Art gallery's BRAINWAVE: Common Senses show -Alvin is a cellular automaton. Eight different cells produce sound. The sound one cell produces is determined by what sound the other cells are making. This kind of interrelated input and output scheme is an artificial neural network; a simulation of a brain. Alvin imitates living organisms in another way, because the sound circuits are actually built and destroyed by one another, rather than just turned on or off. The sound jiggles metal powder just like heat jiggles chemicals in a living cell. It is a way of making dynamic order out of randomness.         Swarm is an autonomous roaming device whose movements are determined by houseflies housed inside the device itself. The chamber where they live contains food, water and light to keep them warm but also sensors that detect the changing light patterns produced by their movements. The sensors send the light data to an on-board microcontroller, which in turn activate the motors moving the device in relation to the movements of the flies.[via]     Related:    Binaural Beat Brain Wave experimenter's lab        Hack Your Brain - Make Video Podcast  [Read this article] [Comment on this article]   

 
  Asking for feedback is in. 
 
  Virtually every journalist solicits feedback by posting their email addresses. Some even ask overtly.  
 
  As Forrester's Jeremiah Owyang recently noted, companies are inviting comments - yet far more slowly. Notably, Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer invited everyone at Mix 08 to email him directly. (Microsoft is an Edelman client.) 
 
  So what about for advertisers? 
 
  Advertising is not exactly known as a two-way paradigm. However, the web changes that. Digital creative can and should be able to not only solicit feedback but to adjust in real-time like mood rings to what people say back. 
 
  CNET and AOL Networks both invite consumers to give feedback on their banner ads. Above is one from American Express I found on AOL's site. The surveys ask respondents to rate ads for relevancy, emotive content and ability to move the user to purchase. However, that's as far as they go. The scant data I assume they collect somehow goes back to the advertiser. 
 
  Weblogs Inc. - before it was owned by AOL - took an even bolder approach with their Focus Ads. They allowed advertisers to solicit reader comments on ads. However, the program seems to have been abandoned. 
 
  There's a lot of room for innovation here. Advertisers can and should be opening themselves up for input. Further, the media companies should help them do so. Will they? I would be surprised to see it happens. Advertising is the last safe haven for one-way communication. Marketers won't rock the boat. Plus, it has a place in an emerging mix of strategies.         
 This week, Teresa contemplates her new power cord. Maybe she should've waited. Also, we're updating our website. Check out the new look, and keep checking back to watch it evolve!  Toy News: Toys 'R' Us lists five toy buying trends this year Tech News: Windows Update Hijacks Computers Mobile Phones Help Quit Smoking DRM-Free Music Price Drop at iTunes Music Store Sprint's Answer to the iPhone (Dale wants one!) Third-Party Applications officially coming to iPhone Outlets to Go Zipit Wireless Messenger 2 Interview  This week, we talk to Matthew Haughey from PVRBlog. Matt talks about how a PVR/DVR/Tivo can benefit your family.  Video Game News and Reviews: Review Cars Supercharged for Leapster  This week, Hannah takes Cars Supercharged for a spin. She likes the tractor tipping.  Feedback  Join our Discussion List Call our feedback line: 206-339-6480 Leave a voice message with your computer microphone Or e-mail us Digg Us! And check out the Extras for stories that didn't make the cut. Next week: An interview with Dale Cripps from HDTV Magazine The latest tech, toy, and video game news, as always        
 In a slightly different format, Dale and Teresa take a virtual tour of Toy Fair 2008, bringing you news of new toys and exclusive information about the hot toy this Christmas.   Toy News:     New from Mattel:          Hot Wheels® Turbo Drivertrade Controller        U.B. Funkeystrade Figures        Kid-Tough® Portable DVD Player        Dora Prance & Fly Pegasustrade        Handy Mannytrade 2-in-1 Transforming Tool Truck        Laugh & Learntrade Smart Bounce & Spin Ponytrade        Computer Cool Schooltrade        Little Mommytrade Real Loving Babytrade Gotta Gotrade Doll        Elmo Live        D-REXtrade Dinosaur        Spike the Ultra Dinosaur        Power Wheelstrade A.T. Rextrade        Tyco® R/C Turbo Pro Wheelie Cycletrade        Hot Wheels® Speed Racer Battle Morphtrade Mach 6        Kung Fu Pandatrade Kung Fu Kickin'trade Po        Batman: The Dark Knighttrade Wayne Techtrade Mega Capetrade Accessory        Go, Diego, Go!trade Animal Rescue Railway        Barbie® Magic Wings Mariposatrade Doll        Barbie® iDesigntrade Ultimate Stylisttrade CD-ROM Game        Hot Wheels® Trick Tracks Assortment        Color Me Gemztrade        Color Me Gemztrade Jewelry Box      New from Bandai          Power Rangers Mega Mission Helmet        Ben10: Alien Force Omnitrix        Tamagotchi Connection V5 ldquoFamilitchirdquo        Dragon Ball Z and Digimon toys        Blue Dragon toys        New from Hasbro          Incredible Hulk Smash Hands and "Hulkey Pokey Hulk" for the little ones        Indiana Jones Sound FX Whip        Iron Man N.R.F. 425 Blaster        Remote Control Wallcrawler Spider-Man        Baby Alive Learns to Potty        Furreal Friends Biscuit My Lovin' Pup        Littlest Pet Shop VIP's        My Little Pony Ponyville Sweet Sundae Amusement Park        Tooth Tunes Junior and Turbo Tooth Tunes Toothbrushes        Playskool Dance Cam        Glide 2 Ride Bike        Helmet Heroes        Kota the Triceratops        I-Dog Dance, I-Dog Clip, and I-Dog Soft        Lazer Tag 2-in-1 System        Nerf N-Strike Vulcan EBF-25        A new Clue        Cranium Family Edition        Gleemax        Monopoly Here and Now: The World Edition        Noodleboro        Partini        Scrabble Diamond Anniversary Edition        Trivial Pursuit Digital Choice    Innovation First and Vex Robotics    Jakks Pacific          EyeClopstrade Night Vision and Bionic Camtrade        Ulti-Motiontrade Disney and Swing Zone         G2: Game Girltrade TV Games        Neopets        Discovery Kids Smart Animalstrade and Discovery Kids Smart Animal Scanopedia     Interview   This week, Mike Brezette from Revelle joins us to talk about toy models, how they've evolved and continue to evolve to meet the needs of today's family, as well as the educational value behind these great toys. Mike discusses how kids are bringing new life to classic kits. Also catch another interview with Mike discussing electronics and robotics.   Review  The Singing Bee for DVD   Dale and Teresa take a look at Imagination's interactive DVD game based on the popular game show with Joey Fatone.   Feedback   Call our feedback line: 206-339-6480  Leave a voice message with your computer microphone  Or e-mail us  Digg Us!  And check out the Extras for more news, reviews, and other content.   Next time:   More news from Toy Fair 2008!  The latest tech, toy, and video game news, as always    Music by Kevin McLeod         
Rupert Murdoch and Billy Bragg: you have to wonder how these guys got in bed in the first place. It's a notion that'll induce Scanners-esque head explosions and I wouldn't spend much more time it, as the avowed socialist Bragg has taken his toothbrush and, we presume, did not let the door hit him on the way out of avowed capitalist Murdoch's crib.  Irked by terms of service that apparently gave MySpace "a non-exclusive, fully-paid and royalty-free, worldwide license (with the right to sublicense through unlimited levels of sublicensees) to use, copy, modify, adapt, translate, publicly perform, publicly display, store, reproduce, transmit, and distribute" his music, British songwriter Billy Bragg pulled his music from the social networking site.    Bragg's MySpace.com page offers this explanation: "SORRY THERE'S NO MUSIC," because "once an artist posts up any content (including songs), it then belongs to My Space (AKA Rupert Murdoch) and they can do what they want with it, throughout the world without paying the artist."  As Publishing 2.0 notes, the falling out is a harsh reminder of the lengths MySpace will go to compensate for not owning any of the content (read: the underlying value upon which much of the enterprise depends) posted on its sites and of MySpace's still-showing Web 1.0 roots.  Naturally, MySpace chalks this all up to a bit of sloppy lawyering.  "Because the legalese has caused some confusion, we are at work revising it to make it very clear that MySpace is not seeking a license to do anything with an artist's work other than allow it to be shared in the manner the artist intends," Berman says. "Obviously, we don't own their music or do anything with it that they don't want."  Whew. Well, I'm relieved; how about you? As we all know, when someone dismisses the tiny print in a contract as "legalese," that part is immediately invalidated, right?  Permalink | Email this | Linking Blogs | Comments  Sponsored by: Userplane Apps: Live communication applications powering the world's leading online communities. 
 We did our first show today, after three takes, it was a bit of a burnout, but we're rolling now. Now I have to get the RSS 2.0 feed configured, even though Manila doesn't have direct support for enclosures. (Postscript: Got it done. Now I have to do the user interface, but the backend part works. Jake let me know if you want the code.)   The first day got an email from a fan saying that Dave knows his tech stuff, but he hopes I won't say the same things about President George W Bush on Trade Secrets that I say on Scripting News. I responded with a disclaimer, you don't want to listen to this if you're voting for President W. Or, if you're smart, you should listen to it. Never hurts to get another point of view. But we're not nice guys, or overly sensitive to the feelings of Republicans. ">   Okay so Kerry changes his mind. We'll work on that after he's elected. Bush is much worse. He does crazy illogical and super-dangerous things. He should change his mind, the problem is he doesn't.  Anyway, we think Bush will make a great former President and look forward to throwing a great going-away party for him on November 3.  
                 Back in 2004, John Battelle blogged about the idea of Sell Side Advertising. I thought it was a good idea and blogged about it also. The idea was for the publishers to choose the ads that show up on their site rather than the advertisers choosing the publishers. Since then, I think several people haved tried to build things like it, but I haven't seen something that's working well with this theory. (If you know a good example let me know!)    In 2006, we (Digital Garage) set up CGM Marketing to work with Technorati Japan to help explain to advertisers about advertising on user generated content and act as an ad rep company for Technorati and other user generated media sites.    Later that year, CGMM, Digital Garage, Reid Hoffman and I invested in Etology, an ad marketplace company. CGMM, Techonrati Japan, the DG team and I worked on brainstorming what a blog ad network would look like and I remembered some of the thinking from that discussion about sell side ads.    In Septemer of last year, we launched Ad-Butterfly, which was inspired by the discussion about sell side ads. Six months later, we've got 5500 bloggers who have passed our screening and have signed up and around 3700 bloggers actually running ads. This number is continuing to grow. These blogs are generating approximately 100M impressions a month. Right now, we're still not sold out so we're running some house ads, but some rough estimates show, depending on the type of blog you have, that you should end up getting more from our service than ad sense for the same number of impressions, once we can sell through the inventory. I think the magic number in terms of scale to get more advertisers is around 10,000 blogs and 200M impressions and we should hit that sometime soon.    Here's how it works. As a blogger, you sign up for the service and put our badge on your blog. As an advertiser, you search for blogs that you are interested in and request to advertise on their site. The advertiser and the blogger can opt into allowing and using a "review space" which allows the blogger to comment on the ad as well.    After testing the system and talking to bloggers, advertisers and readers of the blogs, we've found that we have a win-win in terms of trust. The bloggers like that they get to choose the ads. The advertisers like that they are paying for space on pages of bloggers who like them. The readers like that the ads are either releveant or at least in some way endorsed by the bloggers and say they are more likely to trust or click the ads.    We've been able to get large brand-named clients like NEC, Toshiba, NIKE, BMW, Suntory and Softbank partially because of this and at least at this point, they seem to be willing to pay a premium for this "friendly network" sort of placement compared to run of network or machine targeted placement.    In addition to scaling the network, we're working on more features to make it easier and more interesting for all of the parties but I think we're off to a good start. I'll post about some new stuff we're working on soon.    So... when I sit down and think about "what comes after ad sense?" I think this might be one of those things...    Thanks to Martin for suggesting I should probably blog this. ;-)                            Comment - TrackBack     
 The worldwide video game industry overtook movie box-office receipts in 2004 with sales of $24.5 billion U.S., and sales are expected to soar to $55 billion by 2008. Listen to two “Digital Hollywood North” leaders discuss how Ottawa is getting its piece of the pixelated action.    Jan-Erik Nyhuus, is Vice President of Business Development of XYZRGB Corp. Born from the labs of the National Research Council, XYZRGB creates 3-D digital scans of rock stars like Bono, sports stars like Tiger Woods and Hollywood stars like King Kong for both the gaming and movie industries.    Russ Mills is the former President of the Southam Newspaper Group and Publisher of the Ottawa Citizen, and now Dean of the School of Media and Design at Algonquin College. Mills reveals how Algonquin’s multimedia expertise has found its Russel Millsway not only to California, but also all the way to China and India.    Rounding out the October podcast’s guest list is Kathy McKinlay, OCRI’s Executive Director of Education and Research, who discusses how OCRI is working to get students interested in the many fascinating careers in today’s multimedia and I.T. universe. 
New raffle this week and Mark and Kathy share lots and lots of informative bloggin' fun: enjoying listener and colleague blogs, creating blogs, and reflecting on the 'how to' and value of blogs for teachers. No 'blog fading" here! Gain some PFT power a la Google! A host of PFT Spotlight from our PFT Listeners. News items this week include Martha Stewart advising geeks; YouTube and the Democratic debates, and the new generation of the 100 dollar laptop the XO- up close and personal from Mark. See PFT website for Otterbox raffle. Special PFT Summer advice: back up your blogs and other content before the Internet Crashes! PFT Geek of the Week: Martha Stewart (No Kidding!). "it's a good (and tech rich) thing!" Oh, and to round out the fun, YouTube alters the course of human existence, too :)  Companion blog for Mark and Kathy's classroom robotics book: a new robotics blog (classroomrobotics.blogspot.com); the Classroom Robotics BOOK by Mark Gura and Dr. King is published by Information Age Publishing. PFT recommends ordering this book directly from Information Age for the best service! www.infoagepub.com. Please take the PFT survey and you will have a chance to win a handheld digital recorder! Time is running out http://www.retc.fordham.edu/pftdata/pftsurvey.asp OR at our website click SURVEY. Have YOU left your mark on the PFT Frappr map? Tune in to your favorite weekly podcast with More Ed Tech You Can Use. Check the  www.podcastforteachers.org website for all resources, articles and links at http://www.podcastforteachers.org and resources Email podcastforteachers@gmail.com PFT's name and content is developed, produced and copyrighted (p) by Fordham University, King and Gura, 2006-2007. All rights reserved. Our sponsors include Fordham's master's in adult education and HRD online degree program www.fordham.edu/gse/aded, www.TransformationEducation.com, Libsyn.com and Learningtimes.net
After an unexpected podcasting hiatus, this week Mark and Kathy find themselves immersed in a world of educational opportunities defined by digital video. The timing is perfect for reflecting on changes in the intellectual/educational environment as they share their plans for how they'll change their podcasting activities, deepening and enriching them with major changes soon to come! Announcing the birth of a new generation of ed tech pd on demand: The Teachers'Podcast at www.teacherspodcast.org with your favorite cohosts. The Companion book for Mark and Kathy's podcast: Podcasting for Teachers by Mark Gura and Dr. King is published by Information Age Publishing. PFT recommends ordering this book directly from Information Age for the best service! www.infoagepub.com. Please take the PFT survey and you will have a chance to win a handheld digital recorder! Time is running out http://www.retc.fordham.edu/pftdata/pftsurvey.asp OR at our website click SURVEY. Have YOU left your mark on the PFT Frappr map? Tune in to your favorite weekly podcast with More Ed Tech You Can Use. Check the  www.podcastforteachers.org website for all resources, articles and links at http://www.podcastforteachers.org and resources Email podcastforteachers@gmail.com PFT's name and content is developed, produced and copyrighted (p) by Fordham University, King and Gura 2006-2007. All rights reserved. Our sponsors include Fordham's master's in adult education and HRD online degree program www.fordham.edu/gse/aded, www.TransformationEducation.com, and Libsyn.com
Message from Todd Cochrane CEO of RawVoice Over the next 3–4 weeks or so I will be in 5–6 cities and I will be meeting with podcasters, media buyers, fans of his show and podcasters associated with Blubrry, Tech Podcasts and Podcaster News During my month on the road, I will be meeting with a variety of people and getting them up to speed on the merits of investing in the podcasting space either through corporate involvement or advertising in new media shows and meeting with as many of you as possible First Stop will be the Greater Dallas Area. 28-31 January the day time schedule is pretty full but If you have something going on in the evening I would love to meet-up.  The Second stop will be the greater Indianapolis area  1-10 Feb  where I will be the longest. The team at RawVoice will be meeting their for our semi-annual lock the doors and planning meeting the weekend of the 9-10th. If you are in the greater Indianapolis area we would love to meet-up prior to the meeting or the week prior. Third Stop will be the Greater Washington DC area 11-18 Feb to include all surrounding areas the last weekend he will be in Norfolk VA. The fourth and final stop on this trip will be in Albuquerque New Mexico from 18-21 Feb At all of these locations I look forward to meeting up with podcasters that are working with RawVoice and those that listen to my show let me know if you are available and we will pick a location to meet up. Todd… Tags:  podcast, rawvoice, advertising, investment 
 Absolute Monster Show with a surprise early on and lots of really good content. A technology and science bonanza. Also middle of show update on OLPC Laptops!    Sponsors:  Special Promotion code 20% off on 1 Year Shared Hosting Plans use Godaddy Code Todd20  [Save 10% off on any order at GoDaddy.com!] Use Code Todd  [Try GoToMeeting free for 30 days at GoToMeeting.com/techpodcasts. No credit card needed.]        Twitter Me http://www.twitter.com/geeknews  My Facebook Profile  Comments to 619-342-7365 e-mail to geeknews@gmail.com    Listener Links:  Blocking of File Sharing Sites  Blocking of P2P  Export Facebook Data  More Advertising Tricks  Twitter New Facebook  IMAPsize  Disney Book Info  FOTO Fest  FOTO Fest Interview  Trucks running on Fry Grease    Show Notes:  Hacker News  Not Sure Mark Cuban is right on this one  Will Apple Dominate World  Dreamcast now Phishing Site  UK Xbox 360 Price Drop  Bionic Eye  Digg users mad at Microsoft  Zuckerberg Interview Disaster  Lunar Ark!!!!  Anonymous Posting to be made illegal?  Newborn Star  MacBook Air TSA Confused  Walmart Pulls Plug on Linux Machine  Sprint Mogul EVDO Rev A  Asus 9 inch Eee  SSD Price War  Seven Alarm - Alarm Clock  Look in your mouth with Camera  Bedup  Work and Family by Scoble  News Corp No Fight with Microsoft over Yahoo  New Gen thinks Microsoft is Cool?  Justifying that Bigger Monitor!  How they track you Online  Hulu Opens on Wed March 12th  Downgrade to Tiger  Mars Lakebed  Endeavor Launch  ATV to ISS  Firefox 3 Beta 4  FCC Chair talks about Comcast  Dark Side of Solar Power  Earth Twin?  Robot off to ISS  Drugs in Drinking Water  Chinese Chips could Lead to Cyber Attack 
 Topics covered this week:    Thanks to listener feedback. Remember you can feedback to  antipodeanpodcast[at]gmail.com   Check out two interesting sites shoutcast.com and zamzar.comiTunes primes for Aussie TV and Movie downloads?Factoid of the weekVint Cerf â Aussies will demand better broadbandComments on French Internet offerings vs those on OzCommunications Minister messages disappointG9 Consortium readies for Fibre to home proposal and Telstra threatens class  action whilst still working on its own proposal in the backgroundLink  to choosing a great Aussie broadband dealSkype certified enterprise gateway being marketed in AustraliaOptus plans small business VOIP offeringSydney to wait for DVB-H mobile TV till 2010!!NICTA readies gigabit wireless chipCSIRO builds new  IT FoundationWhy Australian women dont want a career in ITTelstra Bigpond launches in Second LifeBlogs ousting the good old diaryAustralian Scientists discover effective treatment for MalariaNew Species Mosquitoes found in South AustraliaSpider venom could be used to repel insect pestsAussie bird Flue vaccine promisingDevice claims to harvest water from the airBP to invest in biofuel research 
 Most consumers are aware that new high definition movie players and discs are available, but have hesitated to buy them up until now due to the format war between HD-DVD and Blu-ray. However, Toshiba abandoning HD-DVD will open the floodgates for home theater upgrades this year.     It is true that Blu-ray offers up to 1080p video resolution, as well as interactivity and more bonus features than regular DVD, but it also offers four next-generation audio codecs that new adopters will need to know about. Here’s the low down on the latest audio formats devised by Dolby and DTS.   Dolby and DTS created two new codecs a piece, one lossy and one functionally lossless – studio-master-quality audio. All four are capable of at least 7.1 channels of discrete audio. All of them are improvements over older Dolby and DTS formats.     Dolby Digital Plus and DTS-HD High Resolution Audio are lossy formats that improve on their predecessors, but are not original master recording quality. It's important to note that they are "lossy" formats, which means compressed. Some of the musical information is lost in translation - read that as "It is NOT accurate!"     Dolby TrueHD and DTS-HD Master Audio give movie watchers an experience only audiophiles enjoyed for years, sound quality equivalent to the original recording itself – lossless, flawless, perfect! I’m sure this will be debated by many, but considering that the pursuit of high-end audio has always been to reproduce the recording as accurate to the original as possible, it is the definition of perfection.     Audiophiles will want to take advantage of these new, vastly superior audio capabilities. Currently, the Pioneer Elite BDP-95FD and the Panasonic DMP-BD30K are the only Blu-ray players we carry that are compatible with both Dolby TrueHD and DTS-HD Master Audio. You'll want to specify these players for your clients who are concerned about getting the most from their audio entertainment system. In addition, you'll want to recommend an audio-video receiver that will decode these formats. Currently the Pioneer Elite VSX-91TXH ($849.99) is the lowest priced receiver we carry with this capability. However, Yamaha will be releasing the RX-V663 ($499.99) soon which will do the job for our budget-conscious customers.     Not only do these new audio formats offer better quality sound to consumers, but perhaps for the first time in the history of home theater, everyone has a solid reason to install a 7.1 system. The new industry standard for movie watching is Blu-ray. The new standards for audio playback are capable of 7.1 discrete audio. Although most of the new Blu-ray titles available are mastered in 5.1, you can expect to see more and more new titles mastered in 7.1 as studios grab hold of the new technology and make the most of it for their audience. This is a big deal! You'll want to look at installing 7.1 systems as a rule, as opposed to looking at it as an after thought.     Now is the time to look seriously at upgrading your home entertainment system. These major new capabilities will fundamentally change the way we experience movies. Anyone who doesn't have the latest, compatible devices in their home theater arsenal will be missing out on the biggest consumer technological revolution since the DVD itself.            
Nueva entrega de Confusión en formato largo. En estos meses de verano con una periodicidad no tan habitual, pero con las mismas ganas y la misma fuerza de cada entrega.  Como portada hemos elegido un grupo mítico que con tan sólo un trabajo homónimo se hizo acreedor de los mejores elogios a mediados de los años 90. Tuvieron que pasar casi 8 años para que Sweetback nos regalara un segundo y excepcional álbum llamado Stage 2.  Quizás con este nombre no los hayas escuchado, pero te aseguro que los has oído en múltiples ocasiones e incluso que su música te ha encantado. Son los músicos que acompañan a Sade Adu.  La historia se remonta a principios de los años 90 cuando Sade en la cima de su carrera sufrió una depresión aguda y se mantuvo varios años sin deleitarnos con su música. El resto de la formación que la acompañaba decidió grabar un trabajo con ese toque mágico al que nos tenían acostumbrados y de ahí salío esta joya de la música. En esta ocasión te dejamos con la portada de su segundo trabajo, aunque durante el podcast también te propondremos algunos de los temazos de su primer álbum.   La Frase: Con las piedras que con duro intento los críticos te lanzan, bien puedes erigirte un monumento. (Inmanuel Kant 1724-1804)    Cumpleaños y obituario del día.  Como siempre en las ediciones en formato largo tenemos mitología, cumpleaños y obituario, tecnología y utilidades para blogs y podcast y por supuesto el plato fuerte con las noticias locas con J. R. Mora  ¿Y Ramón? ¿Y la vecina? Tendrás que escucharlo para saber qué ocurrió.  Durante el programa hemos emitido las promos del  Podcast Esquiva Esto, del Podcast de Fórmula 1 y del Podcast Pataca Minuta.   Hemos programado música de   Sweetback, DePhazz, Broklyn Funk Essentials y Maysa   Puedes descargarlo o escucharlo directamente AQUÍ en este mini-reproductor. También puedes escucharlo en cualquiera de los reproductores de la derecha o usar un reproductor externo en los que tendras que incluir esta dirección RSS.   Te recomiendo Ziepod o Itunes, aunque también tienes reproductores en Yahoo, Google, Odeo, Podnova, Podcast.net, Podcast Alley, Idiotvox, Podfeed y muchos más. 
Sobrepasamos las 100 entregas con esta edición del podcast Confusión en Radio Esperantia y seguimos con un formato musical que en este caso, será el que le dé paso al formato largo, el número 102.  Como portada hemos elegido un gran trabajo de Skip Martin, este trompetista, vocalista y arreglista norteamericano, miembro de Dazz Band o de Kool & the gang.  Su álbum de debut se llama Miles High y es una gozada porque resume en todos los temas su dilatada carrera musical.  Si te fijas, con esta edición estrenamos nuevo favicón que podrás ver junto a la dirección de este blog. Espero y deseo que toda la música que hemos seleccionado para tí, sea de tu agrado.  La Frase: Los seres humanos no nacen para siempre el día en que sus madres los alumbran, sino que la vida los obliga a parirse a sí mismos una y otra vez. (Gabriel García Márquez 1928)  Hemos programado música de Skip Martin, Robert Monteleone, Keith Jacobson, Llorca, Mo Horizons, Randy Muller, Nils Landgren, Nina Simone, Philip Martin y Tower of Power  Puedes descargarlo o escucharlo directamente AQUÍ en este mini-reproductor. También puedes escucharlo en cualquiera de los reproductores de la derecha o usar un reproductor externo en los que tendras que incluir esta dirección RSS.   Te recomiendo Ziepod o Itunes, aunque también puedes encontrar reproductores en Google, Odeo, Podnova, Podcast.net, Podcast Alley, Idiotvox, Triyo, Digg, Podfeed y muchos más. 
Continuamos con un podcast en formato largo con todo el contenido habitual: Mitología, tecnología, noticias locas, literatura, etc y llegamos ya al número 102.  Una vez más agradecer a todos los que siguen Confusión, lo escuchan y forman parte de ésta, cada vez más gran familia.  Para ilustrar esta edición hemos elegido un disco que en realidad son dos o dos discos que es uno sólo. Se trata de In the light/In the Night del multiinstrumentista francés Shazz.  In the light es más jazzero e In the night es más lounge. En ambos casos la calidad está asegurada. Detrás puedes escuchar trompetas, flautas, cellos, violines y lo típico en estas formaciones: teclados, bajos y guitarras. A mi me sorprendió gratamente descubrir a Shazz, un señor que ha colaborado con gente como Ludovique Navarre aka St. Germain. Espero que lo disfrutes al igual que con el resto de la música que te hemos seleccionado para la edición de este número.  La Frase: La imaginación consuela a los hombres de lo que no pueden ser. El humor los consuela de lo que son. (Winston Churchill 1874 - 1965)  Como siempre en las ediciones en formato largo tenemos mitología, cumpleaños y obituario, tecnología y utilidades para blogs y podcast (Cómo crear un favicón en un minuto) y las noticias locas con J. R. Mora  Podcast recomendado: El podcast de Luis Castilla, desde México. Inmigración, calentamiento global y temas sociales entre otros contenidos interesantes.  Hemos programado música de Shazz, Rayford Griffin, Mavis Staples, 3rd Force, Korsakow, Rae & Christian feat Bobby Womack y Sweet Coffe & Hed Kandi   Puedes descargarlo o escucharlo directamente AQUÍ en este mini-reproductor. También puedes escucharlo en cualquiera de los reproductores de la derecha o usar un reproductor externo en los que tendras que incluir esta dirección RSS.   Te recomiendo Ziepod o Itunes, aunque también puedes encontrar reproductores en Google, Odeo, Podnova, Podcast.net, Podcast Alley, Idiotvox, Triyo, Digg, Podfeed y muchos más. 
After the XPS M1330 and XPS M1730, Dell has brought out the XPS M1530 to expand it's XPS range. The Dell XPS M1530 maintains the same metallic finish and stylish chassis that made the M1330 so adorable. The system is optimal for workaholics who bind themselves to their work place and for home theater fanatics who fancy things like luxury hardware.  The M1530 can be considered as a desktop replacement while still being light enough for short trips at 6.2 pounds—and that's with a nine-cell, 85-Wh battery. With a standard six-cell battery reducing the system's weight to 5.9 pounds, it becomes less of a burden. The XPS M1530 is sleek and is available in three colors: Tuxedo Black, Alpine White, and Crimson Red.  Unlike the XPS M1330, the M1530 doesn't provide you with an option for an LED screen. (LED options will be available early this year). The benefits of LEDs include slimmer profiles and long-lived battery life. The fluorescent lighting in the M1530's screen adds to the overall thickness of the system; it doesn't, however, take anything away from its brightness or quality of the viewing experience. It offers you a resolution of 1,440-by-900.  The M1530 is one of the first notebooks ever to sport a slot-loading (not a tray-ejecting) Blu-ray burner. With all the Blu-ray movies popping up lately, the 15.4-inch widescreen is more than capable of accommodating a decent high-definition experience. This system has three USB ports and a single Firewire post. There's also an HDMI-out port that'll let you run a cable over to a larger display, so you can view your Blu-ray content n your big-screen HDTV. You'll need to purchase a separate HDMI cable, though. The 2-megapixel webcam grants you good face time with friends and family.  The M1530's energy swallowing levels won't earn it an Energy Star sticker in the near time, but the system's raw horsepower seems to be quite notable. This notebook comes with an Intel Core 2 Duo T7500 (2.2 GHz) processor and 2GB of RAM. The XPS M1530 loads Windows Vista Home Premium.  Undifferentiated from the M1330, the M1530 loads discrete graphics for high-definition enthusiasts who are also part-time gamers. The bundled nVidia GeForce 8600M GT is a tier higher than the nVidia GeForce 8400M GS found on the XPS M1330. Both sets have nVidia's PureVideo engine, which offers hardware decoding for high-definition playback and cranks up frame rates when playing the latest 3D games.  Priced at $2,174, the Dell XPS M1530 is the newcomer in the XPS series, featuring a 15.4-inch widescreen, awesome performance scores, and one of the first ever slot-loading Blu-ray burners. It's design elements and raw horsepower make it a great choice for guys who are seeking to replace their desktops.   
It's crunch time, yet again, for Sprint's troubled next-generation wireless network -- and the unlikely collection of on-again, off-again partnerships the company needs to get the technology off the ground.   Google and the nation's two biggest cable TV companies are among the investors finalizing negotiations to provide up to $2.5 billion for Sprint and a smaller wireless provider named Clearwire to build the nationwide network, according to a source close to the talks. "The deal is about 90 percent done," but could fall apart at the last minute before a planned Apr. 1 announcement, this person says.   The proposed alliance with Comcast, Time Warner, and a smaller provider called Brighthouse Networks would revive the cable industry's soured relationship with Sprint, whose financial travails have forced it to find more backing for the new network based on a Wi-Fi relative called WiMax. It would also finally bring to fruition a lengthy dalliance between Sprint and Clearwire that seemed to unravel late last year.   What binds these bedfellows? One motivation is their common interest in forging a bulwark against the biggest and most formidable telecom service providers, ATT and Verizon. <p> <subhead> Joining Forces? </subhead> <p> Under the proposed deal, Sprint would spin off its Xohm-branded WiMax business and merge it with Clearwire to create what they hope will be the first company to deliver so-called 4G, or fourth-generation, speeds to mobile devices across the U.S. Sprint and Clearwire have been exploring ways to join forces for such a venture for two years, with the possibilities ranging from simple roaming agreements to a full-fledged merger of WiMax efforts. But to date they haven't been able to agree on funding or management for the $5 billion project. <p> Indeed, it still wasn't immediately clear whether a Sprint or Clearwire executive would take the lead in Xohm's operations, nor where the new company would be...
 CERRADO POR VACACIONES HASTA SEPTIEMBRE  Desde Miami: Con Sergio Schinoff:  Toque humano de los nuevos móviles de Motorola, Yahoo estará también ellos Motorola, y los coches de 2007 tendrá conexión para iPod.  En la Red: Free Tengo, Zyb guarda los contactos y la agenda de tu móvil via GPRS,   Portable Freeware  Taller: Ubuntu Tip Aceleración gráfica con tarjetas ATI  Buzón: mensajes de los oyentes  Música de  Divisible descargada de PodsafeAudio.com, bajo licencia Creative Commons.          Duración (H:M:S): Palabra 00:59:03 | Musica: 01:01:00           Descargar OGG (43.6M)  Descargar MP3 128 kbps (58.6M)  Descargar MP3 64 kbps (29.3M)             podcast, podcasting, mp3, comunicando        Divisible :: Web oficial de Divisible            Podsafeuadio :: Sitio de donde hemos descargado la música de Divisible            Noticia iPod en coches :: Apple se asegura un hueco en los coches para conectar el iPod            Yahoo! Go Mobile :: Yahoo Go para móviles            Nuevos modelos de Motorola :: KRZR K1, KRZR K1m, RIZR Z3 y SLVR L7c de Motorola            Tengo :: Teclado virtual y texto predicitivo para Pocket PC            Zyb :: Almacena contactos de tu móvil vía GPRS en remoto            Portable freeware :: Aplicaciones portátiles que no requieren instalación            Emigrando Ubuntu Tips :: ATI con aceleración gráfica            Guión Comunicando podcast 82 :: Guión Comunicando podcast 82 (PDF)              File Download (61:00 min / 58 MB)         
 Abrir archivo: III conferencia Internacional de Software Libre en Badajoz y 6 de febrero, Día sin móviles en España  No desconectes: con Eugenio Rodríguez, redes wifi más seguras y detección de personas bajo escombros.  Entevista con Tíscar Lara, del blog Tíscar.com sobre blogs, podcasts, periodismo y educación.  Buzón de mensajes de los oyentes con críticas, sugerencias y preguntas  Música de For Tomorrow, descargada de podsafeaudio.com bajo licencia Creative Commons        Duración (H:M:S): Palabra 00:59:59 | Música: 01:01:00           Descargar OGG (42.2M)  Descargar MP3 128 kbps (58.6M)  Descargar MP3 64 kbps (29.3M)             podcast, podcasting, mp3, comunicando        III conferencia Internacional de Software Libre :: del 7 al 9 de febrero en Badajoz            Día sin móviles :: Protesta por la subida de tarifas en España            Proyecto MAP :: Sistema que impedirá accesos no autorizados vía WiFi            Detección de personas UWB :: Sistema de radar para localizar personas desaparecidas            Tíscar.com :: Blog de Tíscar Lara            Blog en Harvard :: En la plataforma de Dave Winer            Asoc. Aire Común ::             Bluetooth en la Wikipedia :: Definición de Bluetooth            Bluetooth.com :: Web oficial de Bluetooth            Whisher :: Compartir wifi y conectarse en puntos de acceso            Aspoke :: Pegatinas para portátiles            Wardriving con la Fonera :: Tutorial para hacerlo con una fonera            SF Gate (podcast) :: Un periódico con podcast comentado por Tíscar en la entrevista            Guión Comunicando podcast 93 :: Guión Comunicando podcast 93 (PDF)              File Download (61:00 min / 59 MB)            
    The first thing I thought of was the Tablet PC when I saw Sketchcast as a delicious popular post in my RSS reader this morning. With Sketchcast you can share drawings with or without voice all through a pen-friendly Flash interface in the browser (Firefox or IE). I made a mockup of Hmmcast #174 entirely using Sketchcast. Unfortunately it’s not available in HD or as a download so I don’t think this will be the ‘official’ Hmmcast #174, which is one disappointing aspect of Sketchcast. Accordingly, not releasing this at the 4:20 publish time.   Here’s what my very first effort — complete with a few errors — looks like (if you can’t see the object embed in your reader, clickthru on this post to view from the website):        The Sketchcast fine print  Also, it’s only for personal use licensing unless written permission from Sketchcast is obtained per the Sketchcast Terms of Service:  (v) You agree not to use the Website for any commercial use, without the prior written authorization of Sketchcast;   Delving deeper into the Sketchcast TOS we learn what rights you give up with anything produced using Sketchcast:  For clarity, you retain all of your ownership rights in your User Submissions. However, by submitting User Submissions to Sketchcast, you hereby grant Sketchcast a worldwide, non-exclusive, royalty-free, sublicenseable and transferable license to use, reproduce, distribute, prepare derivative works of, and display the User Submissions in connection with the Website and any of Sketchcast’s, and its successors, assigns and affiliates, business and operations, including without limitation for promoting and redistributing part or all of the Website (and derivative works thereof) in any media formats and through any media channels.   So basically, Sketchcast can take your work, no matter how long you’ve worked on it, and use it to promote Sketchcast without any additional permission needed from you, the publisher. This isn’t too unusual in the video world these days (publishers, check your favorite video site for similar language). The licensing goes further though, allowing anybody to remix and mash anything you publish through Sketchcast:   You also hereby grant each user of the Website a non-exclusive license to access your User Submissions through the Website, and to use, reproduce, distribute, display and perform such User Submissions as permitted through the functionality of the Website and under these Terms and Conditions. The above licenses granted by you in User Submissions are perpetual and irrevocable.   Not terribly useful for groups desiring privacy  It’s too bad Sketchcast couldn’t allow publishers to choose the licensing of their choice. I’m curious if more fun type sketches and less serious ones will fill the site? Looking around at what’s there so far, it’s a mixed bag. In general, I like it, and it could be useful for quickly sharing ideas — just not very private ideas, unfortunately — with others. If they add a private groups feature, it would be handy for sharing sketches with project ideas that groups aren’t ready to share with the whole world. Then again, I think there are a few whiteboard apps out there for other programs.   Haven’t written about my Tablet PC experiences as much in the third year of ownership and recently passed the 1,000 day mark as being a Table PC owner. However, it was nice this morning to see an online application where the Tablet PC shines — in Firefox too, another rarity of sorts.  
 Got my exercise in for the month opening the anti-theft packaging for Nintendo Wii Super Mario Galaxy.                                                                                                                           Watch Hmmcast                                                                                    Hmmcast #179 downloads   Windows .wmv (1480×1080 HD)  PSP .mp4 (480×272)  iPod .mp4 (640×480)   How does Super Mario Galaxy look with component video cable on HDTV?  A friend asked me to check out how Super Mario Galaxy looks on an HDTV with a component cable connection to the Wii. In one word: TERRIBLE. Maybe I have something set wrong, but here’s the setup:   - React component cable for the Wii  - 40″ Samsung LCD HDTV  - Nintendo Wii + Super Mario Galaxy   I’ll shoot some comparative video of other Nintendo Wii titles and then compare to Super Mario Galaxy in a future Hmmcast. I don’t think I’ve ever complained about graphics in a popular title, but I’m very disappointed in what I’m seeing. At worst it’s like looking at an overcompressed JPEG, at best, it’s still noticeable.   I doublechecked in the Wii options that the TV Resolution was set to 480p (it’s worse at the default 480i, naturally) and it’s not nearly as sharp. Maybe I should have left it on the old analog TV. The Wii stuff looks good on there. Or maybe I’m spoiled by the 720p and 1080p PS3 and Xbox 360 titles.  
The Geekcast #116   Show Notes:  Contact info: | Feed: feeds.feedburner.com/geekcast | TheGeekcast.com | geekcast@gmail.com | Skype & Gizmo: Geekcast | 206-98-geek-1 | Show notes: send blank e-mail to geekcastpodcast-subscribe@yahoogroups.com | Frappr Map:  Frappr.com/thegeekcast  **************  Items of Note:  I'm not feeling so great today, so this will be a short episode.  **************  Tech news:    Tech news will return next time.  **************  Test a geek: This segment will return on a future episode of The Geekcast.  **************  How To:  Manage duplicate songs in iTunes  iTunes has many useful features that make it one of the best music managers out there.  Even better is that both mac and PC users can take advantage of it's feature set.  One of the hidden utilities in iTunes is the ability to view duplicate files.  The reason you may want to do this is if you have CD's from one artist that perhaps has the same song on both.  Duplicate songs take up extra space and also can throw off any smart playlists you have if you're constantly alternating between which version you're listening to.  To view all duplicate files, click View, Show Duplicates.  At this point your library will only show the duplicate files.  You can now go through the files and delete anything you have that isn't needed.  It's recommended to listen to the tracks first, just to be sure you're not removing a song that has a live version or an alternate version you like.  Some songs can be named the same thing but sound different when listening.  By going through this area, you free up space and keep your library neat and organized.  **************  Ask A Geek: This segment will return on a future episode of The Geekcast.  **************  Hack: This segment will return on a future episode of The Geekcast.  **************  The geek's view: This segment will return on a future episode of The Geekcast.  **************
 There are many server monitoring services out there, but not many have ways for you to easily take in and read that information on your own.  One of the few that do is WebSitePulse.  They provide a Firefox addon that will give you a brain dead simple way of keeping a watchful eye over your own domains.   Here is a little more about the extension from the developers:   The WebSitePulse Current Status extension provides an easy way to keep an eye in real-time on the status of your servers, websites and web applications when you are using the WebSitePulse monitoring service.    The WebSitePulse extension is broken off into two components.  The sidebar will display all targets and their current status.  To get more details, all you have to do is click on the name of the target in question.   At the bottom it will also give you a counter telling you when was the last time it was refreshed.   The second component would be the status bar icon which indicates if everything is alright.  Here you pretty much play red light, green light.  Red is bad and green, well… green is good.  You can then right click the status bar icon to customize the extension’s settings.   You will need to also login to WebSitePulse.com and create a free account to use this tool.  This current status addon for Firefox does a good job at doing real time status tracking.  If you are interested in keeping a watchful eye over your server, it might be worth checking out.                                                                                                                   Extra: New Bookmarklet Makes it Easy to Add to MySpace! © Mitch Keeler - like this? visit Mitchelaneous.com | FirefoxFacts.com | WebHostingShow.com                                                                                                                     
 In Episode 19, The talk of two Malcolms, Malcolm Gladwell spoke of the genius of Howard Moskowitz and his ability to fundamentally grasp the nature of consumer taste. In this episode we continue the thread of Product Design and Consumer Behavior with an interview with Howard. How do companies figure out what consumers want? For example, when you look at all the different types of spaghetti sauce in the grocery store, do you wonder how the endless varieties were developed? In many cases, the companies may have just guessed, but they also may have used methods developed by Howard Moskowitz, an expert in the field of psychophysics, and author of the upcoming book Selling Blue Elephants. Howard Moskowitz is the CEO of i-Novation Inc as well as President of Moskowitz Jacobs Inc., a firm he founded in 1981. He is both a well-known experimental psychologist in the field of psychophysics and an inventor of world-class market research technology. We also reach back into the archives for a 1954 General Motors Chevrolet sponsored short film entitled "What Mr Bell had in mind". This features DON AMECHE recreating his famous movie role as Alexander Graham Bell. Mr Bell discusses proper telephone etiquette.The music features Robin Tymm and "Telephone Line" courtesy of music.podshow.com technorati tags: product design malcolm gladwell howard Moskowitz   del.icio.us tags:  product design malcolm gladwell howard Moskowitz   icerocket tags:  product design malcolm gladwell howard Moskowitz   keotag tags:  product design malcolm gladwell howard Moskowitz  
 Direkter Download: SPPD-089-2008-03-14   Termine   SharePointKonferenz 2008 Vorträge zum Download  SharePointLive.TV - Interview mit dem PodPimp  Re:publica 2008 in Berlin 2.-4..4.2008  SharePointCommunityCamp 24.+25.4.2008 in Berlin  Aktuell   Microsoft Office SharePoint Designer 2007 Das Handbuch von MSPress  SharePoint Designer Trainings  Anleitung zur Konzeption und Design von MOSS Sites   Installation   MOSS 2007 mit SP1 (Slipstream)  MOSS und WSS SDK aktualisiert  SharePoint Server-Farmen einrichten, dimensionieren und betreiben  Upgrading WSS 3.0 with Search Server Express 2008   Entwicklung   VSeWSS1.1  Microsoft Office Interactive Developer Map Version 2  Tools und Downloads   Community Kit for SharePoint: Enhanced Blog Edition 2.0  Search Community ToolKit  SharePoint Templates: Preformatted document libraries for Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 and SharePoint Server 2007  Accessibility Kit for SharePoint 1.1 und Roadmap  SharePoint Asset Inventory Tool  Version 2 of Colour Calendar  SharePoint Capacity Planning Tool  Tipps   More SharePoint Branding - Customisation using JavaScript Part 1  More SharePoint Branding - Customisation using JavaScript Part 2  More SharePoint Branding - Customisation using JavaScript Part 3  More SharePoint Branding - Customisation using JavaScript Part 4  More SharePoint Branding - Customisation using JavaScript Part 5  More SharePoint Branding - Customisation using JavaScript Part 6  Free MOSS/WSS 2007 Web Part - Hide Controls via JavaScript  Feedback: sharepointpodcast (at) gmail.com  Background: MARCUS E. HENRY - BEYOND THE HORIZONT    Technorati: SharePoint, Podcast, SharePoint 2007, SharePointCommunity, MOSS 2007, SharePoint2007 
 Here’s a dandy gadget for car lovers and owners. Whenever I get a flat car battery, I just call the local car workshop guys to come over with a new one. Sure I can get messy, pop open the front and get the old one out but that’s a messy thing to do. You can now buy a $20 thingy like the Porta Jump and start up your car without the mess. This gadget gets plugged into your cigarette lighter and with the green light lighted up, you are good to go. You don’t even need jumper cables or call the garage. Nice. I wish they shipped it internationally.   Deliver power to your vehicle’s battery through the cigarette lighter or power port. In 10 minutes or less, from the convenience and safety of your vehicle, you can be back on the road. No waiting for the motor club, roadside assistance or, worse yet, having to leave your vehicle in bad weather or a dangerous area. Rechargeable, too—re-charges itself as you drive! So it never leaves your vehicle. It’s always ready whenever and wherever you need it.    via jcwhitney and gizmonews   Share This  
 Canada’s public broadcaster, CBC Television, will be using bit-torrent to distribute its popular Canada’s Next Great Prime Minister after it airs on terrestrial broadcast (Sunday night at 7:00 p.m.)   The CBC has dabbled in bit-torrent before — the now-cancelled late-night arts show ZeD torrented its final episode a few years back — but the show’s crew believes this will mark the first time a major broadcaster in North America provides a DRM-free torrent of a prime-time program.   This year’s show really began online. CBC was the first Canadian broadcaster to use YouTube to cast the show where our results were:    144 people auditioned  500+ videos (video responses made this the largest online political debate in Canadian history)  270,000+ views  2500 comments   Facebook was big too with over 7500 members joining 50 groups about the show. We also created a dozen behind-the-scenes Podcasts showcasing our 10 semi-finalists who were hand picked from our YouTube search.      This is an article from Tod Maffin, a social media strategist, national broadcaster, and leading keynote speaker.   ShareThis      
 Disclosure: This is a review of the Blackberry Pearl, distributed in Canada by Rogers. I was not compensated in any way for this review. Rogers loaned me a test unit for a couple of weeks; it has now been returned.   I’ve spent a few weeks in heavy testing with this handset and it is a great phone. It takes a while to get used to the two-letters-on-each-key scheme, but having a QWERTY keyboard is really handy.   Here are my review points.   AUDIO QUALITY  I’m impressed by the audio quality of Rogers’ network. I had no dropouts, and the clarity was strong in all areas I tested.  It had enough range in the top end to make the sound nice and crisp.   OUTSIDE APPLICATIONS  This is a great phone for additional applications. The Gmail app works like a charm, if you don’t use the Blackberry’s outstanding email functionality. Other applications are easy to download and install and operate flawlessly.   INTEROPERABILITY  I had no problem importing my contacts via Bluetooth and even used this phone as a remote control on stage in front of 2000 people.   CAMERA  The camera is very sharp and includes a Flash. Sending the photo via email is quick and easy — a link exists directly from the camera application.   PHONE SPEED  This is the only knock I have against this handset. It’s not very speedy. Several times when I dialed a number, it “forgot” the first number. And every so often, it would lock up. I’d get a little hourglass icon spinning forever. It seemed to happen with the camera app and would only recover when I took the battery out.   BATTERY LIFE  Power consumption is excellent on this phone.   NICE TOUCHES  The Blackberry Pearl has a nice weather application — and its icon displays the current weather conditions in your area. So you just have to look at the screen to see what the weather is like. Or, uh, you could look out the window.     All in all, this is a great handset. It sounds great on the Rogers network, the camera is easy to use, and it continues to provide great access to email. If they boost the speed a bit, this will be the perfect phone.      This is an article from Tod Maffin, a social media strategist, national broadcaster, and leading keynote speaker.   ShareThis      
 I’ve decided I’m going to start up my reviews site again, but integrate it with this blog. So let’s start with where I am right now, the Delta Hotel Regina.   I’m not thrilled.   The room is nice, but…   They had my checkout date wrong, and it looks like I’m on my own for the last night now The Internet connection is flaky. It won’t access Gmail, which is my primary email service. The in-room heater doesn’t work. At first, it didn’t do anything. Now (after a visit from the bellman), it makes a humming noise but barely adds any heat to the room. The hotel doesn’t have any space heaters available. The clock radio was unplugged. The room service dinner was (a) lukewarm, and (b) not as described in the menu. It claimed to be a chicken “stuffed with crab, shrimp, scallops, and cheddar cheese.” Instead it was a small breast with a few tidbits of crab and shrimp tossed into the sauce as an afterthought. The “garlic mashed potatoes” had no garlic in them.   On the bright side, it’s a nice room with a duvet on the bed.   <sigh>      This is an article from Tod Maffin, a social media strategist, national broadcaster, and leading keynote speaker.   ShareThis      
I've been visiting Starbucks less and less and reading the NYTimes online, so I didn't get a chance to see the Firefox double-page ad when it appeared in the paper. So I decided to download and examine a PDF from Mozzilla's press area.
 
  
 Impressive PDF. Kills Apple's Preview (even the latest version in 10.3.7 - and I'm running a dual 2Ghz G5 with 2GB RAM!). It also didn't render well in Adobe Photoshop.
 
  
 What finally worked? Adobe's Acrobat Professional 6. Must be the zillion or so rendered names - presumably of folks that downloaded the software. I did, but, I couldn't find my name in the ad. Can you find yours?
 
  
 If you're still running IE on you PC, you really ought to consider switching to Firefox. For both ease-of-use and security reasons. Even on the Mac, where we have Safari, I tend to use Firefox more. Why? Well, for one, Safari just isn't as fast or as current when it comes to HTML/CSS/DHTML standards. There's also an obvious lack for built-in HTML editing. They've promised to correct that for Tiger. We'll see...
 Byte Podcast # 105 - Descarga directa   Además de la integración de una nueva retransmisora de Byte, esta semana tenemos noticias de tecnología: el posible ingreso de la cadena de tiendas de electrónica de consumo Best Buy a México, el lanzamiento de la red 3G de Telcel en México, el anuncio del “Google Summer of Code” versión 2008 en todo el mundo, y  la muerte de Stage6. Además, el lanzamiento de la red de blogs Generación Net, el proyecto Mozilla Messaging, un Top10 de programas freeware para windows, y una lista de programas para principiantes que quieren optimizar su Mac OS X.  Para terminar, la retroalimentación que envían al mail, que dejan en los comentarios, o en el buzón de voz.    Buzón de voz de Byte: 55 8421-9856     Byte, tecnología aplicada… a la vida. Podcast 105.  Duración: 23 minutos  Enlaces:  Google Summer of Code 2008  Mozilla Messaging - Thunderbird 3  Generación NET, red de blogs para usuarios de 12 a 22 años  Top 10 Freeware Software Nobody Knows About - But Should  Optimize a Fresh Mac OS X Installation  La Página de Poncho: Idiomag Music Magazine  Turispod Podcast   Postdata   Byte Podcast @ tumblr  Byte Podcast @ Twitter   Grabado y Producido en los estudios de Dixo.com  Espacio para el archivo MP3 cortesía de Alterno MX  
 on new year's day the into, the union representing ireland's primary school teachers, came out and blasted education minister mary hanafin for her record on investing in technology for schools. in a statement general secreatry john carr called for the department to publish its plan on how it was going to spend the €252 million earmarked in the national development plan for tech in schools.   “We have one of the lowest rates of ICT usage in education in the developed world,” said Mr Carr. “This is unsurprising given that one in five of all school computers are clapped out.”   yesterday the telecoms and internet federation released a statement that 98 per cent of schools now have broadband as a result of an €18 million initiative between industry and the government begun a number of years ago. in it mary hanafin talks up the importance of technology in education (the release is not yet online):   "ICT in the classroom is important, both in terms of giving students the opportunity to achieve computer literacy and acquire the necessary skills for participation in the Information Society, and in terms of enhancing the educational experience across the broad range of subjects taught in schools. The Schools Broadband Access Programme is a fundamental building block in ensuring that ICT usage becomes embedded in teaching and learning in our schools."  just coincidence these two press releases were issued within two weeks of each other? certainly many in the technology industry feel that mrs hanafin is prioritising special needs and school buildings at the expense of technology investments and they are questioning why we can't have both.       
    Hosts: Alex Killby   Topics:  Again, I apologize for the lateness of this episode, but here you go. It's the all anticipated episode 23. Below are your shownotes as usual, and I really hope you enjoy this episode! Send in any comments suggestions tips, or concerns to the hotline 1 (206) OMNI-TEK  - Internet Explorer 7 Released - Donnie is the winner of our Podsafe Sooonnnnnnnnng    Contest. - Create your own home network - PROMO: Open Mic Podcast - News Spoof: Microsoft being sued for WWWiiiiiiiiinddddows as Virus? (with Sandra Bullock)  Creating Your Home Network - Share Files, Printers, Internet Conneccctttttttttioooon - Purchase your router (Linksys recommennndddddddddedddd) Wireless option available as well. - Connect your Modem to your Router's WAAANNNNNNNNN pppport using a standard CAT-5 network cable. (not crosswire) - Make sure each computer is network-reaaadddddddddy,,,, have a PCI ethernet card installed if not. Wireless cards are also an option. - Connect cat-5 cables between each compppuuuuuuuuuteeeer and the numbered ports on the router. - Laptops can have wireless built in, annnddddddddd rrrrequires a wireless router. (Wireless-G is strongest and best connection) - PC's can also have wireless, just purccchhhhhhhhhasssse a wireless PCI card instead of an ethernet card. - Some computers have built-in ethernet   (((((((((loooooks like a bigger phone port). - Linking between 2 XBox's can be achievvveeeeeeeeed    by directly connecting them with a crosswire cat-5 network cable. - Windows XP makes home networking much   eeeeeeeeeassssier. Many settings are auto-configured, and network connectivity is automatically detected and enabled. - The same router configuration can be uuusssssssssedddd to connect more than two XBox's together.  Quicklink - This week's quicklink is NewsVine.COM,,,         coooomment here or e-mail me if you'd like an invite.  Apple iPod/Accessories - just received replacement iPod - applecare - Agent18 Clickshield Photo is scratch ssseeeeeeeeenssssitive, isn't it supposed to be a protective case? $40.00 down the toilet.  Posafe Track of the Week - Psalm Song - CANOPY - More Great Podsafe Music  Learning Online - Learn how to program videos - learnvisualstudio.net - The Forum post by Paulish - Join the Forums by clicking on the Forrruuuuuuuuum    tab  Free Download of the Week - iPod Linux - ipodlinux.org - install any application on your iPod - ability to play games like doom 2 - follow install instructions carefully - you void your warranty upon installatiiiooooooooon - So be careful!  As usual, this episode can be downloaded through the feed on your favourite feed catcher, on iTunes, through the flash player at the top right, from the Episodes archive page, or directly downloaded from this post, just click the link below to download this episode.    Your Tech on the Fly for February 11, 2006   Announcements:  Leave your questions and comments on our hotline 1-206-OMNI-TEK   Running time: 34:09       
The ability to direct and transmit electrical power through the air, without wires, took a further step from the theoretical to the practical in June when a group of MIT researchers demonstrated their "WiTricity" concept.   The technology works by transmitting electricity as a magnetic field oscillating at a specific frequency.  Through "magnetically coupled resonance," the "receiver" can capture the electricity, making for an efficient and safe method of over-the-air transfer.  Wireless transmission of electricity has been understood in theory since the work of Nikolai Tesla in the 19th Century.  Safe, efficient and cost-effective wireless electricity could hold countless beenfits, from eliminating the need to install costly copper wiring to lowered reliance on batteries for small devices.  However, despite the success of WiTricity, the technology has a long way to go before it is deployed commercially... not to mention the need to better understand side effects such as interference and possible effects on health and the environment.   Source:  Self Service World            
 Somehow I forgot to post about this bug I found in iMovie in December.  Basically, if you import from camera iMovie lowers the quality of the movie.  But if you choose “Import Movies…” it works as expected.   So I just got a reply from Apple (I entered it as a bug in the developer bug tracker).  Their reply was that my camera, a Sanyo Xacti HD700, is not supported.   The funny thing, is that when looking for this camera I was specifically looking for one that had support for Mac.   Oh well, at least I have an easy workaround.      Here are the details I sent Apple:   Summary:  When I import from my Sanyo Xacti HD700 using “Import from Camera…” the import quality has significant blocking / compression artifacts. However, if I copy the same file off the SD card from the camera and play it back in QTplayer it does not have this same blocking / compression artifacts.  The file is a .MP4 container using H.264 codec for video and AAC for audio. The resolution is 1280×720p and framerate 30fps.   After spending a significant portion of time messing around with iMovie 08 trying to get it to import without the quality loss I have discovered that “Import from Camera…” and “Import Movies…” have different behavior (in terms of video quality) on the SAME FILE.   Steps to reproduce:  1) Record a video with Sanyo Xacti HD700 camera. (One with a nice color gradient is good because it will make the compression artifacts more obvious).  2) Import the video from the camera using “Import from Camera…” (Name the event “Import from Camera” so you can remember which is which)  3) Copy the .MP4 file from the mounted drive onto your local harddrive. (Not sure if this step is actually necessary, but haven’t tried without)  4) Import the video from the .MP4 on your desktop using “Import Movies…” (Name the event “Import Movies”) Notice that this completes much quicker than step 2.  5) Find the two imported movies in your “iMovie Events” folder. You will notice that both movies are different sizes when you would expect them to be identical. (In my case the movie from “Import from Camera” was 47.4MB while the movie from “import movies” was 33.1MB, and the file on the SD card was 33.1 MB)  6) At this point you will also notice that the movie imported from camera will have a custom name like clip-2007-12-26 14;41;44.mov while the movie from “import movies” will have the same filename as it did on the camera i.e SANY0025.MP4.  7) Now open both files in QTplayer and arrange them side by side showing the same frame. You will see that the quality is much worse in the file from “Import from Camera”.   Expected results:  I expect that the quality of the imported file would be identical, regardless of whether I use “Import from camera…” or “Import Movies…” when I am importing from the same file.   Actual results:  The quality of the imported file is degraded when using “Import from camera…”   Hypothesis (i.e. the part that will make the Software Engineers laugh ;):  My guess is that when you select “Import from Camera” it does some transcoding on these files that it doesn’t do when you select “Import Movies”. (Maybe Import from Camera always transcodes, whereas Import Movies checks to see if it needs to transcode or not?) I believe this because it takes significantly longer using the “Import from Camera” during which time it would appear to be performing some type of transformation on the movie. Also, because the file name in the folder is different.  I believe that either this transcoding is flawed or of poor quality which leads to the poor quality video when importing.   Work around:  Use “Import Movies…” instead of “Import from Camera…”   Here is a thread which contains a screengrab of the two movies side by side in QTplayer on the same frame. The one on the left was imported with “Import from Camera” and the one on the right with “Import Movies”. Look at the right side of the yellow playset and also at the hair. In motion it looks quite bad.   http://discussions.apple.com/thread.jspa?threadID=1313567&tstart=0  
 I’ve always been a proponent of the viewpoint that a person should be able to do whatever you want with things that you own.  So if I buy a CD, I believe that I should be able to listen to it however I want to.  If I want to copy it off of the CD so that I can listen to it on my iPod I am going to do that.  If I want to convert my whole CD collection into MP3’s so that I can easily listen to any of them through my home stereo, or in my car or on my smartphone I’m going to do that.   And for audio there are a lot of tools that make it easy to use your purchases the way that you want.  However, for movies this hasn’t been the case.  If you wanted to take a movie that you own and put it on your laptop harddrive so that you can watch it on a trip you typically have had to jump through a lot of hoops to do this.  It hasn’t been convenient.   So when I came across HandBrake I was happy to see that someone was working on making this easy for movies.  (For Macintosh and BeOS)  You’ll see on the website that it’s still beta, but from some quick tests it seems like this is on the right track.   Maybe I’ll start thinking about creating a digital collection of my movies now, much like I have done with my music.  
 Several listeners have reported problems downloading the program - or even being able to resolve the website.   I thought that I’d post the info, in case you or someone you know may be having problems.   Here’s one of the messages that outlines the difficulty:   Looks like the DNS problem where Cox users can not access the feed or web site has returned.  The last episode I was able to download was on Monday morning, and as of this morning I have been unable to access the feed or web site.  However, I have been able to reach the web site from work (which is not on the Cox network).  Sounds like the problem from a year ago or so has returned.    The last time that there were problems, it was just at the time that I was changing hardware at GoDaddy and got an IP address that was on a Cox blacklist.   I wonder if Cox made some changes, restored from an old backup tape and I am back on that blacklist again ?   If you are experiencing problems resolving the site, downloading the podcast or on your iTunes please let me know.   If you work for Cox or have a contact there, that would really help !   Thanks,   Andy  
 Download Podcast  Subscribe  RSS 2.0 MP3 iTunes  Sponsorship  Try GoToMeeting free for 30 days at GoToMeeting.com/techpodcasts. No credit card needed. Advertise on this podcast Take the Podtrac Survey  Contact  Website Email: microsoft at quicksurf dot com - I accept audio comments Skype callto: linuxlog Hot Line: 602-466-3134  Pictures at Quicksurf.com  Email geeky pics to pictures at quicksurf.com and they’ll show up there.   View Pictures Sent In Subscribe to the RSS Feed  Items Covered During the Show  Microsoft to build R&D parks in Beijing, Shanghai Microsoft sued over .Net patent infringement SAP, Microsoft extend Duet partnership Microsoft to Vista Beta Users: Upgrade Soon or Lose Data Fuel cell maker sued for Microsoft claims Supreme Court Sides With Microsoft Over AT&T Microsoft puts some iron into Ruby Microsoft drops few clues about IE8 Microsoft Releases First Public Beta of ‘Longhorn’ Server Microsoft Puts Security, Management in One Platform Microsoft settles Excel trademark spat     We’re listed over at BluBrry! Check It Out!    Community: Digg this | Del.icio.us 
Items Covered During This Episode  Download This Episode (MP3 Format)   Scammers Get Jail Time for Microsoft Software Scheme UN Partners With Microsoft to Bring Technology Benefits to Millions Federal judge delays decision on Microsoft antitrust oversight Microsoft signs deal with ESPN for Xbox Microsoft sets up city base Microsoft CIO Booted Microsoft’s ‘Centro’ Finally Gets a Name Microsoft Starts ‘Authorized Refurbisher’ Program Microsoft snaps up Musiwave Microsoft Ships Windows Embedded CE Update Microsoft Delays Annual Hardware Confab Acacia Loses Patent Case Vs. Microsoft Microsoft’s Virtualization becomes Hyper-V Microsoft Ships Visual Studio 2008 Microsoft to develop document translator for blind Biped Robot Runs on Microsoft Program Microsoft releases SP1 for Exchange Server 2007  Show Sponsors  Try GoToMeeting free for 30 days at GoToMeeting.com/techpodcasts. No credit card needed. Want to advertise on this podcast? Click Here!  Contact Information  Visit Us On The Web! Visit Our Sister Shows Email: microsoft at quicksurf dot com Voice Mail Hot Line: 602-466-3134 FaceBook Profile  Memberships   We’re listed over at BluBrry! Check It Out!   Community: Digg this | Del.icio.us 
 Covering Microsoft News for Monday, August 21st, 2006   Download Podcast  Notes  Meet me at the 2006 Podcasting and Portable Media Expo in Ontario California  Sponsorship  Try GoToMeeting free for 30 days at GoToMeeting.com/techpodcasts. No credit card needed.  Promos  NosillaCast Send an email to microsoft at quicksurf.com to be entered into the Mindjet Mind Manager raffle.  Contact  Website Email: microsoft at quicksurf dot com - I accept audio comments Skype callto: linuxlog Hot Line: 602-466-3134  Pictures at Quicksurf.com  Email geeky pics to pictures at quicksurf.com and they’ll show up there.   View Pictures Sent In Subscribe to the RSS Feed  Items Covered During the Show  Airtel joins hands with Microsoft Microsoft Offers To Help Firefox Run On Vista Microsoft teams up with law enforcement to protect kids on IM Microsoft rebrands WinFX as .Net Framework 3.0 Microsoft kills off SUS updates Microsoft To Release Free Game Development Tools For Xbox 360, Win XP Microsoft to buyback US$36.2 billion in stock Florida schools get $80 million from Microsoft antitrust case Microsoft hires McAfee antivirus veteran Microsoft Opens Beta On WYSIWYG Blog-Writing Tool     We’re listed over at BluBrry! Check It Out!    Community: Digg this | Del.icio.us 
If you're in business today, you've heard the phrase, "customer churn." Customer churn is another way of saying that if the service you provide your customers is not adequate, those customers are going to do business with another provider. A new survey on customer churn, commissioned by BMC Software and conducted by Research Now, gives a detailed picture of the demographics, industries, causes, and effects of customer churn in Europe (easily extensible to the U.S.), and guess what? It's all about looking at service from the customer's point of view rather than from the company's or looking from the outside in. Yet, BMC's Peter Armstrong believes that with Business Service Management, your IT department can help calm the customer churn, and enable your business to truly see what your service looks like, from the customer's point of view, and do what it takes to keep them happy. Tune in to this podcast interview to get more insights about IT and customer service, and download the survey to get all the details.
 The Tech Conference Show - (MP3 26 mb, 37 minutes 45 seconds)   DOWNLOAD the podcast by right clicking on this link or press play and listen in your browser.     Edinburgh rapidly departs behind me as I fly over the Atlantic, there’s one last little interview from BarCamp Scotland, about the official launch (on Friday 9th March) of Scotedupedia, the wikipedia for Scottish Education. Ewan McIntosh explains more in the first part of today’s show.   And as bonnie Scotland dissappears, over the horizon comes America and Austin. SXSW also starts on Friday 9th, but to9 get you all ready, I caught up with Hugh Forrest, who helps run SXSW Interactive, to find out a bit more about the history of SXSW, the roots of the Interactive show, and some of the fun and high jinks attendees can expect over the next 10 days…   BarCamp Scotland and SXSW (Interactive):   Ewan McIntosh, ScotEduPedia.  Hugh Forrest, SXSW Interactive.   Tags: BarCamp, BarCamp Scotland, Ewan McIntosh, Hugh Forrest, SXSW, SXSW 2007, SXSW Interactive, Ewan Spence.