Posts
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Update Complete
And here you have it, the updated Bitsplitter Blog. The minimalist view is still the default, but now featuring such coolness as valid XHTML, valid CSS, and a valid RSS2 feed. And this time instead of destroying the normal setup, I left the desktop version available as well. So those of you who are into that kind of thing should be made a little happier.
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Test Posting From Vagablog
Just trying out Vagablog with my spankin new WordPress 1.0.2 install. Looks like it still expects the category as a number … I don’t like that. But in general the upgrade was smooth as silk. Go WordPress!!
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New Version of WordPress
I just installed the 1.0.2 release of WordPress (kick ass open source weblog software). I need to go through and revamp the pages so that I have my minimalist PDA friendly layout working again. Everything should be back to normal again pretty soon.
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Businesses Trying New Approaches
Novell has announced a very strong move recently, as reported in eWeek and The Register. Novell has decided to take their flagship product and rearrange it so that it runs on top of the Linux kernel:
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Public Authoring and Geolocation
MobileCommunityDesign has a post about the Urban Tapestries project. The report linked is interesting, they seem to give the honest feedback from what users said. Not too surprizingly many users said they would not use the system on their own yet. This is something that’s to be expected with the first few trials of a radically new service however. Not only does the technology look cool, but their techniques such as bodystorming and their approach to prototyping and experimentation are very interesting to read about.
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Solutions not Acronyms
A post from The Feature indicates that the mobile market might be waking up to presenting better value propositions to users. The signs mentioned in the article are great, and I’m happy to hear about it. But I would personally like to see many of the crappy mobile service commercials (here in the US) turn into real marketing attempts. The way that data services are presented tries way to hard to just be hip. People in the most ridiculous situations sending text messages and images to each other, no description of mobile access to the web or other services. Being cute and somewhat flippant is fine, an occasional off-the-wall commercial is fine. Spice things up a bit, I’m down with that. But the last serious mobile data services commercials I can remember seeing are from when mLife hadn’t yet failed horribly. Is everyone still reeling from that flop? Sure, it was a spectactular failure, but that doesn’t mean that the only way to sell mobile services is by telling jokes or appealing to the youngest crowd you can find. Maybe now that handset providers have gotten over selling acronyms the service providers will get over selling humour.
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Open Source Desktop Debate
There’s an interesting debate going on within the GNOME and Mono communities. The main thread is a debate between Havoc Pennington and Miguel de Icaza. Lots of other people have contributed to the conversation, but here’s a list of some of the main posts (I may have missed some messages in here, but hopefully this will give a decent flow):
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Effects of Size on Physically Distributed Groups
I don’t have much time to comment right now, but this study of “Effects of Team Size on Participation, Awareness, and Technology Choice in Geographically Distributed Teams” makes for interesting reading.
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mo:Blog
Brian Cantoni has a post about mo:Blog, a mobile blogging application that looks to be a lot more feature rich than my Vagablog application. I’ll have to fool around with it at some point, it says it can even upload binary attachments (like images). That definitely kicks ass in general, but it does mean some pretty stiff competition for Vagablog. I’ve been sorta wavering on the whole issue of adding Atom support into Vagablog. It would be a cool hack, but there’s no economic incentive. Vagablog just isn’t making enough money to make it worthwhile. I might keep Vagablog at the slim and simple (and cheap) end of the scale. So for those of you looking for advanced capabilities like image uploading and post editing, check out mo:Blog. It seems like it’s already quite advanced, and should fit the bill for those of you who said you were looking for some more features in a Palm weblogging app.
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Intellectual Property Protections
Larry Lessig gave a presentation on why the protection of IP is important for the creative process. It sounds like it was the same set of material that he tried out on us over at Stanford. Lessig has a new book on the market called The Future of Ideas, something I’m certainly going to pick up and read. There was a quote I particularly liked in there:
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