Microsoft owns the desktop. At one time it owned the command line, the C:\ prompt, and now it must own the command line that connects away from the desktop to the Internet.
This is the core of what Microsoft is about, its unstated mission statement, and this was why Microsoft had to react quickly to the threat posed by Netscape.
Google owns the command line to the Internet and Microsoft cannot afford to concede that to them. That is why they may indeed have explored buying Google. Even if the reports of this are not true, as is probably the case, the rumor itself signals a warning shot that Google are on Microsoft's turf and so perhaps lowers the price that they could buy them for post IPO.
Google is set to battle two giants, Microsoft and Yahoo. Google have the brand, Microsoft the ability to put search directly into the computers that people buy and Yahoo have the portal extras that are very difficult to introduce without losing focus.
Google, who has done everything right so far will do everything it can to avoid becoming a Netscape to Microsoft and an Altavista to Yahoo. It will need to lock in customers by making it difficult to switch rather than relying on brand alone.
"Analysis of radiation left over from the dawn of creation, estimated to be some 14 billion years ago, found the sound generated from shifting matter made a noise like 'a large jet plane flying 100ft above your house in the middle of the night'... The professor had to scale the frequencies billions of times to make them audible - the frequency of sound waves at that time being too low to be heard."
"
1. Do jet planes sound different at night?
2. Do jet planes that have their frequency shrunk billions of times sound like jet planes?
3. Do jet planes that are flying in a vacuum or a medium other than air, sound like jet planes?
The Land Management Information Center has compiled a series of ancestry maps showing ethnic/national heritage for each US county, based upon data from the 1990 census. via Metafilter via Crabwalk.
(Scroll down to "ancestry groups in the United Sates")
The data is not always what you would expect. For instance, the highest concentration of people of English decent is in Utah, and Irish ancestry is highest along the east side of the Mississippi.
Boundaries of the Contiguous United States is a fascinating animation sequence that shows US state and national boundaries as the US and US colonies grew westwards from 1650 onwards.
Letter From America, The pledge of allegiance
"...such was the fear of the time that from Moscow to Asia "godless Communism" might prevail.
President Eisenhower, many public men and women, used that phrase over and over.
And it was by executive order on Flag Day 1954 that President Eisenhower ordered the pledge now to read 'I pledge allegiance to the flag' and so on, 'and to the republic for which it stands, one nation under God indivisible.'"
Fox's Simpsons show ran a joke banner at the bottom of the screen:
The cartoon ticker read: "Pointless news crawls up 37 per cent ... Do Democrats cause cancer? Find out at foxnews.com ... Rupert Murdoch: Terrific dancer ... Dow down 5000 points ... Study: 92 per cent of Democrats are gay ... JFK posthumously joins Republican Party ... Oil slicks found to keep seals young, supple ..."
But Fox news didn't get the joke and therefore Fox threatened to sue itself.
Doh! Murdoch's Fox News in a spin over 'The Simpsons' lawsuit
The main reason I don't feel I need to live in the UK is that I can listen to BBC radio 4 all day via the excellent BBC radio website.
Currently listening to BBC radio 4 piece on Cuba:
"Havana must be a real student town, because there are pictures of Che Guevara everywhere"
Why is it that in IM conversations some people stick to you like flies to the proverbial crap?
New to IM Person: OK we'll meet there
Other Person: Cool, bye. [conversation is over in theory]
New Person: Cheers see you then - its at 6 right?[nope, its started again. Rule 1. do not end with a question]
Other Person: Yup, Cheers
New Person: what do you think of Swedenborg's Arcana Coelestia? [it was over, you should have stopped and you've started again. Rule 2. look for hints]
Other Person: I think its total bollocks, gotta run
New Person: Yeah I guess so, BTW, did we say 6?[GOTO line 2340, please sod off now. Rule 3. don't ever read philosophers, they can't write and they create more questions than people can answer - a bit like some people on IM]
etc, etc.
"Among the features shown off were transparent windows, animated windows that pop open and a new taskbar on the righthand side of the screen that displayed a clock, buddy list, and news and other information streamed onto the desktop via an RSS feed."
I must admit I'm not fully up on what's happening here (if someone could give me a brief digest I'd be eternally grateful). However, my 2c:
An XML database is the logical backend for a weblog publishing or aggregation system.
Whatever the back end, XQuery is the logical front end for rendering weblog style content metadata - as XHTML, ATOM, RSS whatever - it can do so on the fly.
If you have a weblog application layer written in XQuery it is human readable and extensible. Plus you can have an entire weblog style content management system written in XQuery.
If you have XQuery you don't need SOAP or XML-RPC - or Atom for that matter, unless... the Atom API can be expressed in XQuery directly.
So my question is, can Atom, API's and content be expressed entirely in XQuery as it stands?(Inserts are not covered by XQuery - but there are XQuery-like syntaxes for this).
If not I think it would prove to be a major benefit if that were the case.
Sean Neville is on a roll with some great ideas: Project Atom, Amazon, Mobile Web Services, and Fireflies at REST via Jeremy Allaire.
"…a J2ME camera phone application that acts as a bar code scanner to transform all physical goods into mere floor demos"
I have always fantasized about what you could do with ubiquitous, network enabled barcode scanners, but this solution is so beautifully simple - effectively using the camera in a phone to OCR a barcode.
So imagine the application, (Sean already has - but unfortunately Jeremy Allaire has pointed out that its patented) - Snap a barcode - it looks up an online product database then checks the product on a price comparison site, displays the cheapest price and asks if you want to purchase using your details already stored in the phone.
Two clicks shoot and buy, and anything you see in a store can be purchased and delivered to you for the cheapest possible price.
Low-Cost Supercomputer Is Among World's Fastest
It is common wisdom these days that because of economies of scale Linux running on cheap Intel boxes is much cheaper than dot com era Sun Hardware.
The Big Mac, clustered Apple G5 supercomputer is the world's third fastest and makes government supercomputers look like a colossal waste of money. But it uses chips that are a tenth of the price of equivalent Intel processors, so doesn't this make those Intel boxes look like a waste of money?
Does OS X on PowerPC 970 mean that Apple has a real chance at the server market?
"The IBM processors in Apple's G5 Macs cost one-tenth as much as Intel's Itanium 2 processor and also less than a 64-bit chip from Advanced Micro Devices"
Kendall Grant Clark: A Web of Rules
"if the Semantic Web is to happen, it will be because of a loosely coupled collaboration between three communities: the academics, the industrialists, and the hackers. This view gives me some pain, however, since the hacker community (by which I mean people who develop open source software for fun and for profit) is perhaps the one least engaged in the Semantic Web effort."
"There are some obvious inflection points at which hackers are engaged with the Semantic Web; these points include FOAF, RDF, RSS 1.0, and n3. By and large, however, the hackers are not engaged with the Semantic Web effort and, more to the point, it hasn't yet generally ignited their technical imagination."
Even if the "hackers" aren't involved in the formal semantic web effort, my guess is that this is where it will evolve in a 'survival of the fittest' fashion rather than by committee.
Weblog publishing tools and weblog analysis tools are moving towards the idea of the semantic web as they extend away from journals and news, to other types of data such as job postings, reviews and classifieds.
Cory Doctorow points out the real story on Broadcast Flag:
"it makes a whole class of general-purpose open source software illegal, including code that's already in the market, and that it will give the companies who called home taping and peeing during commercials theft a veto over the design over DTV devices, including parts of your PC."
Copying digital media will always be possible since human beings respond to analogue signals, whether they are air-pressure fluctuations or lights that shine on our retina.
Any hi-fidelity analog signal can be reconverted to digital without copy protection.
However... as more and more protection schemes are embedded in the devices we use to manipulate and transfer digital files I wonder whether there will be a market for obsolete uncompromised hardware in the future.
Ebay in ten years: "Clean" PC from 2003.
Calatrava's Vision for a Trade Center Transit Hub via Anil
Architecture is like computer programming in that the details suck you in, and its sometimes difficult to see the big picture, the overall design. In fact ability to see the wood from the trees is the principal skill that architects have to offer when they use their skills in other disciplines.
Detailing has become a fetish in architecture as projects follow where the money is. Corporate buildings are designed like Porsches, but there are still architects like Rem Koolhaas that don't get drawn into details at the expense of the space they are trying to create. Even Corbusier's detailing wasn't that great.
Calatrava is undoubtedly a master builder, but sometimes the overall form is dictated by impressive structures rather than the space they create, and as such shows the difference between great engineering and great architecture.
"'There are two figures you need to know. One is what our estimate of how many civilisations there are in the universe that are sending out signals into space [about 10,000] and the second is how long will it take to search through enough stars in the universe to statistically have a chance of picking up those signals.' Put these numbers together, she claims, and we will encounter aliens by 2025."
I'll put it in my diary.
EducationGuardian.co.uk | Research | Aliens are out there, say scientists
I am an atheist, and pro-choice, but unlike Hitchens, Mother Theresa is a personal heroine of mine and her views on abortion had integrity.
Despite being a non-Christian, I voyeuristically attended a church service in the Tenderloin this Sunday where the sermon was on the subject of making actions out of your convictions. This church spends $25,000 feeding poor people each week. I don't think I need to believe in god for this to make sense. The singing was also a whole lot better than other places of worship I've been to.
Because I don't believe that there is a spiritual moment of conception I think you have to choose at what point a life is a life and until birth the interests of the person carrying a child are paramount. The necessity to let women choose seems sensible to me.
Two weeks ago the House approved a partial anti-abortion bill again, something I personally don't think is a good thing. But the difference between conservative politics and Mother Theresa is that she said that she would personally look after any unwanted child that was brought to her - and the evidence is that she would have acted on her conviction.
Right or wrong, Mother Theresa had integrity. A political stance that is anti-abortion and does not provide a welfare state to support unwanted children, has no integrity, right or wrong.
My Diana conspiracy theory is that Dodi Fayed never existed because his father is too preposterous to be real. Even if he were, Siegfried and Roy's stylists already have all their work cut out to have time to cultivate such an entity.
Today, the UK tabloids are all a flutter with the publication of a note written by Princess Diana that predicts someone would try and bump her off by tampering with the brakes on her car.
In this note, she names the person but the press are refusing to reveal who it is. Only a matter of time before someone blogs it - but until then, Conspiracy Planet have a large picture of Prince Phillip under the headline" Princess Diana Names Her Killer".
Diana conspiracies are particularly entertaining due to the aforementioned weirdness of her partner, Dodi Fayed's father, Al Fayed, who is often to be found fueling them.
The photo accompanying this post is actually endorsed by big Al. Check out this and other hysterical items on the utterly bizarre official Al Fayed website.
Great Independent interview with maverick, Robert Hughes, the worlds most renowned art critic who has just written a book about Goya.
"I think he [Goya] is genuinely anti-war, anti- the degradation caused by war, which is a function of human desire for cruelty, which is at least as deep-rooted as mankind's desire for sex".
Hughes is a superb writer and a no-bullshit critic, with a distaste for the fashion driven whims of the art world, so I can't wait for Hughes' next book which is about my old boss, Norman Foster.
Web fosters prolific product reviewers:
"I'm rethinking things," says the prolific 43-year-old Epinions.com free-lance writer. "I've written 664 reviews. It's a book, and I didn't really get paid for producing it. I should really be getting royalties for all that work."
If product reviewers all had weblogs, and a weblog tool that had forms for posting information specifically for product reviews that syndicated review metadata, then you would have the same functionality as Epinions, in decentralized form.
The difference would be that traffic would go back to the reviewers' site where they could control things like ad revenue.
Weblogs allow all the social advantages of a distributed system: control over individual identity, branding and revenue.
Pings to central servers and metadata enriched RSS syndication allow for all the technological advantages of a centralized system - real-time updated search and structured querying.
Isn't this decentralizing of publishing and centralizing of aggregation, inevitable? There is now a clear revenue model for this type of system and doesn't it look very much like the semantic web?
Ping Identity - who are sponsors of the SourceID open source identity project has secured $5M in Financing from General Catalyst Partners - who Jeremy Allaire is involved with.
Phil Wainewright has a very thorough and thoughtful piece on Loosely Coupled. Phil looks at Webmethods' recent acquisitions within the broader context of what happens when enterprise software all starts to communicate through standardized web services based API's, rendering a whole industry (EAI) obsolete.
Its an interesting mirror of what is happening at a grass roots level with syndicated content and standardized API's for weblog style publishing systems. RSS aggregators beware - the future is not in aggregating or aggregation tools, but services building value-add on top.
One of the benefits of 'CPC' based online advertising, where you pay for clicks rather than impressions, is that if the advertiser works out the average number of clicks that result in a sale she knows how much a click is worth for it to be profitable.
Tracking this kind of 'conversion' used to require custom code, or use of a third party service such as GoToast, but now that Google have built it into Adwords, things should be a lot simpler.
In theory, if you have an ecommerce site you should be able to setup Adwords so that you are guaranteed not to lose money.
Google Adwords: Conversion Tracking FAQ
PC Advisor has an interesting use of text ads - certain keywords are green, underlined and show text ad boxes when moused over. Rather like the defunct MS Office contextual links system but for paid for links.
This would be very interesting in the blog context as it would allow ads that are correspond to individual posts. On the downside it breaks the church and state separation of ads and content.
"Apple looks set to introduce its long-awaited iTunes music download service for Windows users on 16 October at a special event in San Francisco".
Article in the Guardian on the use of RFid in the UK.
"in the early summer, at its superstore in Newmarket Road, Cambridge, Tesco began the world's first trial of a so-called "smart shelf".
Razor blades are one of the most frequently shoplifted items. Small but relatively expensive, they can be slipped into a pocket. The smart shelf was designed to house packets of Gillette Mach 3 razor blades, each augmented with a tiny RFid tag. The shelf contained a reader and - controversially - a small CCTV camera. Each time a pack of razors was removed, the tag triggered the camera and a picture was taken.
Tesco began the trial without much fuss but within weeks, a determined knot of protestors appeared outside the store..."
Labour Member of Parliament Tom Watson (who has a weblog) "has applied for a parliamentary debate on the use of RFid. What he will advocate, and what Chris McDermott and Caspian are supporting - at the very least - is something like a code of conduct for RFid. A set of guarantees that the tags, if introduced, will be deactivated at the point of purchase."
I wanted to send an email to Jon after having watched the webcast of his aggregators session at BloggerCon but unfortunately can't find it.
In the presentation Jon said that RSS was one possible step towards solving the problems in email, something that was perhaps worth $1Bn.
I am personally interested in being the proud owner of a billion dollars, so was paying attention.
Since the question I wanted to ask via email was on the very topic of how RSS really offers something different than email then if Jon reads this through his subscription to this weblog, then perhaps this will illustrate the point.
The problem is this: the email channel is too noisy for people like newsletter publishers to use.
Assuming for a moment that RSS readers are commonplace in email clients. For pure opt-in Newsletters then RSS works, (Jon is subscribed to this weblog, so he has opted in to read this - and even if he doesn't really read my weblog, perhaps the mention of his name in the headline will help and because it is RSS the mention of Viagra and huge amounts of cash won't matter). For pure opt-in, email works much like RSS - someone could whitelist my email address in much the same way that they may subscribe to my weblog. Not everyone uses whitelist filters, but even less people have RSS readers. The problem can be solved technically by both, but RSS would actually need more people to start using new software.
A more interesting problem is unsolicited information. This need not all be pernicious - I would hope this email to Jon wouldn't be considered as such, and I would assume that suggested RSS feeds for weblogs based upon a personal profile would also be OK. But if the channel is open for suggested feeds then how does this avoid the spam problem.
In short, I am missing something, sorry two things, I forgot the $1Billion.
A few weeks ago I posted a piece on the threats of a software monoculture, a New York Times journalist saw the post and interviewed me:
'Was I an expert? Er - no, its not a new idea and its kind of obvious if you look at argriculture'.
Thankfully the CCIA then published a report which levelled the same argument but from a much more authoritative stance.
Michael Gartenberg, a Jupiter analyst, posts that the monoculture threat is groundless.
His argument: "The fallacy is that diverse systems will not have security issues or holes".
Nobody has claimed that diverse systems would not have flaws, but diverse environments are not prone to the same catastrophic failures that monocultures are susceptible to.
Thankfully Gartenberg is a Jupiter analyst and not a farmer.
You may be in breach of Google’s new Adsense terms and conditions – but their principal revenue model may also contravene your content license.
Matt Haughey looks at how to make money form a weblog by focusing on one thing and using Google's Adsense.
But Google itself makes money from text ads based upon this content. Following Matt's argument, the best model for a weblog search engine or aggregator is Adsense - aggregate weblogs into specific focused categories or search returns and run Adsense along the side. If more focused content drives more Adsense revenue, then let the aggregator create that focus through topics.
But there is a problem with this. If you aggregate from sites that are funded by Adsense then you are, in effect, ripping them off by making revenue from other people's content and denying them their principal revenue in return. Tough luck perhaps, but in actual fact many weblogs including Matt's PVR blog explicitly prohibit using the content for commercial purposes, via a suitable Creative Commons license.
If your site is funded by Adsense and has a 'no commercial use' creative commons license, then any search engine or aggregator that in turn uses text ads based upon search returns or aggregated topics, is making money out of your content in exactly the same way that you do, but with less effort.
One solution to this would be a revenue share on ads served against your content (and this requires ads at the individual post level). This isn't going to happen on standard search engines, however weblogs have one valuable asset that gives leverage - ping server notification.
Ping servers allow real-time search of weblogs unlike the 15 minutes or older returns for most search engines. Perhaps bloggers should only allow access to ping information, if there is revenue split on text ads served against their content?
Revenue-split advertising models may sound too complicated to play out in the real world, but if content providers and search engines both make their money out of contextual ads, or content providers allow repurposing and syndication by serving up full-text RSS content, without branding or ads, then this will be inevitable, in order to avoid the circular mess of when both parties serve up ads e.g. in RSS feeds themseves as well as in searches accross RSS feeds.
I predict that within two years most business weblogs will be based on 'Adsense-like' advertising revenue and that weblog aggregators and search engines that offer searches accross content as soon as it is posted will split revenues on ad clicks between the publisher and the aggregator.
Netflix market cap as of today: $1.04B
A new report by Perseus has some interesting statistics:
Weblogs updated less than once every two months: 66%
Weblogs updated once a day: 1.2%
Active blogs (as defined as those which are updated more than once every two months) are updated on average every 14 days.
26% percent of weblogs created are never used more than once.
Weblog freshness, like weblog linkedness, follows a power law, something that is important when designing a weblog aggregator, see: 'Blog Metrics'.
The BBC outlines a project to create a website with photos from 16,146 confluences of latitude and longitude in order to create a unique picture of the world.
To do:
Afghanistan (64)
Bangladesh (15)
Bolivia (93)
DR Congo (189)
Ecuador (32)
Kyrgyzstan (18)
Libya (155)
Madagascar (60)
Paraguay (35)
Reunion (7)
Seychelles (4)
Svalbard (71)
Turkmenistan (53)
Yemen (48)
BBC Radio 3 looks at a variety of architectural subjects for the remainder of the year. Check out the archive links for interviews with Rem Koolhaas, Renzo Piano and Daniel Libeskind.
BBC - Radio 3 - Architecture on 3 homepage
"The mayors of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the only two cities in the world to have suffered atomic bombings, blasted Russia on Friday over its plan to consider restricted use of nuclear weapons to deal with regional conflicts and international terrorism"
Japan Today-Hiroshima, Nagasaki mayors protest Russia nuke plan
I don't think I've been at a conference lately where someone hasn't mentioned the words 'Dave Winer' within 10 minutes.
Even those who may not always agree with Dave have to admit that he is one of the prime connectors in the tech. world, and therefore organizing a conference is something that he is a natural for. I can't make it to BloggerCon, but I'm sure it will be a success and that as a result there will be others.
Blogger Con: Blogroll for BloggerCon
f8dy categories are so easy to to badly
f8dy to do
f8dy and so hard to do well
jcgregorio yup
My categories on the right suck:
1. they don't match other people's so they don't really offer anything that a search on Google doesn't - categories that aren't standardized are useless.
2. nobody looks at them
So I'm thinking of: using less categories and ones that map to something else; branding the categories so that they look like specialist weblogs.
Libby Miller has an excellent piece on strategies for combining foaf and geo with RDFical.
Plan B: Combining foaf, RDFical and geo, and maybe RSS 1.0...
How was this photo fo a someone holding a nuclear fuel rod taken?
1. tiny, very brave photographer sitting inside containment chamber?
2. vanity mirror on other side of containment chamber?
3. deluxe double aspect containment chamber with windows on both sides?
4. fake containment chamber for publicity shots?
Doc Searls reverses the idea of taking print journals and doing them as weblogs. Amazon has done pretty well out of using the web to shift a rain forest of dead trees, maybe there's something in this.
"I'm predicting that within a year there will be print journals that start on the Web, harnessing blog energy, putting the blog posting, vetting & editing process to work, and running it through to publication with ink on paper."
Jeff Jarvis loves The Week, the readers digest of newspers. I'd probably subscribe to a weekly roundup of the best of Weblogs in print format.
0xDECAFBAD has a very nice example of RSS 2.0 and RSS-Data alongside.
If you use schemas with RSS, you get eveything that RSS-Data provides and more to the point, you make the data structure definitions optional.
The only downside as far as I can see is that with RSS-Data the structural definitions are inline.
Surely, however, since schemas are in XML themselves they can be inline - rather like CSS being inline or referenced?
Jeremy Allaire is having some interesting ideas about RSS.
I like his idea of RSS-Data, but isn't the idea of a generic aggregator separate?
Rich metadata in RSS isn't happening at the moment, the spec is there but the tools to create and read the content aren't:
1. there are no end user tools to create modules (why not allow people to build their own forms, where each form field is an RSS tag in a namespace that is their email address by defaut?)
2. there are no aggregators that read extended metadata (there are no aggregators that filter by a MoveableType category, for example).
Both these issues are as much to do with UI as data modelling. RSS module builders could use a web forms that build forms approach, (the 'metacrap' syndrome would be a problem but there are hundreds of person-years work that have already gone into this with EDI standards such as EDIFACT (I had a go at this a few years back, with a proposal for the fields in webforms)). An RSS meta-aggregator would have to allow users to preselect which new autodiscovered metadata to display in order to avoid innevitable UI issues such as sparse columns etc. In fact the best interim hack for this would be a Excel import tool that read RSS modules on the fly.
Current RSS readers are more or less similar, differentiated on interface features rather than core functionality, and sold, where applicable as software tools.
Over time these features will surely be a commodity and any business model around RSS aggregation will be based upon the value add on top of aggregation.
My guess is that this value-add is in efficient searching, categorizing and personalizing rather than discovery and display.
Categorization and personalization can be done by adding metadata to existing feeds (the tokenization process of search could arguably be considered metadata a tokenized content tag would allow local searching). This can be entirely independent of the tool used to view RSS, providing that RSS readers can read this metadata.
The time is probably about right to start looking at this from the various initiatives such as FOAF and RSS topics that are out there and building features based upon them into aggregators.
Nick Bradbury'sFeedDemon is very nice.
The 3 pane interface is clearly the way to go for RSS reading.
What's really interesting about FeedDemon however, is that it is basically an RSS enhanced browser rather than a separate app. admittedly the distinction is blurred, but seeing FeedDemon does lead me to believe that RSS features could become standard, collapsible components of a browser.
When the joint Moreover/Blogger tool Newsblogger launched, it had a similar 3 pane view, but was definitely an online app. Blogger then decided to make it function through an Explorer bar in IE, which is more similar to the path that FeedDemon is going down.
There are four types of aggregator: online (Bloglines); separate app (Newzcrawler, Newsmonster, Amphetadesk; Netnewswire); enhanced browser (FeedDemon); and enhanced email app (Newsgator).
Until now, I was convinced that the online approach was best, but I'm not so sure.