Posts
-
Blog for Business
Small Business Trends reviews Blog for Business, and in the process drops some great quotes:
-
RSS Neighborhood
I went to the RSS Neighborhood event on Monday, where Scott Young did a great job guiding a free form discussion about RSS in general. The group was pretty varied, but most had some knowledge about what RSS is already. Some people were looking for the description of what exactly RSS should be used for and how it is different than existing methods, and the group never came to a consensus on that. I personally think that’s a good thing. RSS is not a technology with existing well defined boundaries. It’s at the start of adoption for a whole new set of tasks. RSS was originally developed at Netscape to allow embedding headlines from one site into a portal site. We’re seeing it creep out into new areas of usage. I asked about adoption numbers, how many people read RSS of any sort? The rough response was 1% of the “internet public” consume RSS. Bill Flitter is supposed to get back to me with info about where that number came from, I suspect that even that number is somewhat inflated. Other people asked about the format itself, why use RSS instead of other delivery methods? There is no good answer to questions like that. I personally think that RSS is too early in the adoption cycle for us to be able to make predictions about what effect it will have on the enterprise. As such, there is no umbrella answer to when you should abandon other techniques and start looking at RSS. So why bother with talking about RSS at all?
-
Dan Gillmor Speaking in Palo Alto
Dan Gillmor is going to be speaking in Palo Alto on May 20th. This is part of the SDForum Distinguished Speaker series. All of the speakers I’ve gone to see before are engineers or business people working in high tech. I’m very interested in hearing what Dan has to say. In particular it looks like he’s going to be talking about public authoring:
-
Smarter, Simpler Social
I already posted this in the linkblog, but I think it deserves another posting. The Smarter, Simpler Social essay is outstanding. Not only does it do a great job of laying down and explaining concepts, connecting them together, and giving literally dozens of pointers to other great reading - there’s also great original editorial commentary in there. Take this quote for example:
-
PalmTorrent 1.1
I’ve put up a 1.1 release of PalmTorrent at the SourceForge site. The app is just a simple application/database downloader for the Palm OS environment. It’ll download a file over HTTP and give the option of installing it directly onto the handheld, basically providing a way to get content onto your PDA without having to go back to your PC. Just a bunch of minor updates really, save and restore the URL field, get rid of buttons for functions that aren’t implemented, stuff like that. The raw .prc file is at Bitsplitter also, at http://www.bitsplitter.net/projects/ptorrent-1.1.prc if you would rather have a URL that you can use directly.
-
Stange Behavior of Cellular Automaton
There’s an entry at Lambda the Ultimate pointing to notes from a talk given by Stephen Wolfram. I’m just skimming through it myself, so I’m not sure where it eventually ends up :-) But even just some of the information on the first page is worth mention. Almost immediately he starts explaining cellular automaton, and certain automaton that display behavior which seem to display random behavior. The explanations have been amazingly simple and accessible. Peppered throughout the talk are references to A New Kind of Science, a book with what looks like the full text available online.
-
UW Calendar
I saw this linked off of Hack the Planet, an online calendaring system called UW Calendar. It provides for multiple calendars aggregated into a single feed, and is meant to feed data out to all sorts of systems (open source, open standards, yay!!). I need to write a palm application that communicates with this directly, not some sync through a PC hack.
-
Jaron Lanier On The McLuhan Ramp
I went to the presentation by Jaron Lanier yesterday and it was very interesting. This Future Salon thing is pretty cool, I’ll definitely go to more of them. The main thrust of the talk was that there are lots of different “ramps” which people can use to judge progress. There’s a ramp of technology, which progresses from the most basic innovations such as fire and the wheel and moves out to a life that looks something like the Jetsons or something called the technological singularity. Of course we’re not sure exactly where the ramp ends up, which is part of the reason we as humans find satisfaction in advancing it. There’s also a ramp of morality, starting with brutal kill-or-be-killed life and progressing to some kind of rainbows and sunshine perfect existence.
-
Many-to-Many Birthday
Clay Shirky reflects on the start of Many-to-Many, providing pointers to some of the initial posts that kicked it off a year ago. Go back and read them, they’re very interesting.
-
Intelligence Augmentation and Notebooks
After seeing the interview with Ward Cunningham linked to from a post in Many2Many I started wandering through the archives of the luvly mailing list. There’s some great stuff in there. For instance an interview with Lion Kimbro, who has released a book titled How to Make a Complete Map of Every Thought you Think. The book looks great, and it’s released under the Share Alike Creative Commons license. So of course I had to create a Plucker version so I can read it on the go. Trying to download the pdb file using palm-torrent has exposed some kind of bug there as well.. so I’m off to try to crush that.
subscribe via RSS