Well, I can understand that, but on the other hand, THEY INVENTED THE BLOODY THING.
Tag - web
Backup for all your web-based services ….
‘Nuff said.
I see that Alan went to see Serenity. That’s something I need to do soon as well …
I went and viewed the first 9 minutes online (in some weird proprietary but apparently fairly compatible video format, doubtless locked down like Fort Knox) and it looks GOOD.
Of course, that’s all I know about the movie so far …
Very cool idea to make the first bit available online. I know I’m dangling on the hook.
I’m not going to say much about it, but this looks seriously cool.
Rastin Mehr emailed me this link to the Joomla logo and brand standards
Joomla is the open-source project that used to be Mambo. The company originally behind Mambo, Miro, basically tried to control the uncontrollable and seize control of the open source project that they spawned from the developers who were carrying it forward.
(Note the astroturf campaign going on at the Miro and Mambo home pages. Nice try, guys. Meet the cluetrain. It’s the light at the end of the tunnel that’s rushing towards you.)
It didn’t work, and Joomla was born. And now they’ve got a very cool logo, identity, brand standards, etc.
Rastin said:
These guys didn’t spend thousands of dollars developing their guideline. Although a team of experts worked on it. And members voted the logo from the selected top 5 entries. It was just a while ago that John and I witnessed the birth of Joomla and it’s community, from Mambo.
There are currently 22 people in the core development team ( http://www.joomla.org/content/blogcategory/13/29/ ) with 7552 registered user in their community ( http://forum.joomla.org/ ). Not bad for a Month old Fork
I’m amazed, frankly, at how professional their logo, identity, and standards are. Incredible.
There are some talented people behind Joomla!
Yesterday I just had one of those prototypical blasts from the past.
It was way back in 1998 that Bruce Sterling, the excellent author, who has been online long enough to have (and keep) a @ well dot com email address, started the Viridian movement.
I followed it for a couple of years, subscribed to the emails, enjoyed them, and then kind of dropped out after a couple of computer changes, email address changes, etc. etc.
But somehow, somewhere, I must have seen something about it or something that twigged my memory … and so yesterday I googled ‘Viridian’. Lo and behold, Bruce and the Viridian movement are still alive and kicking!
If you like green, plants are your friends, and you appreciate great writing, check it out. Here’s a classic example, right from the very first post of the Viridian manifesto:
Maybe our native version of neurasthenia is what Arthur Kroker calls “spasm,” which is that violently oscillating 1990s state when you feel totally hyper and nauseatingly bored. That gnawing sense that we’re on the road to nowhere at a million miles an hour.
Am I the only one who’s noticed, or have I been living under a rock?
Google has started a blog search section. Whoa. Now we know why they didn’t buy Technorati … they thought they could do a better job themselves.
Interesting how it seems to find stories – it’s very time-sensitive – rather than locations. For instance, searching for gilgamesh brings up a variety of stories from my site, and recent ones too, but does not bring up sparkplug9.com, the home page.
There’s is, however, a “related blogs” thing at the top, where ads typically run on Google web searches, that is NOT paid sponsorship, at least not yet, but simply direct links to the home pages of blogs that Google thinks are mostly about what you’re searching for.
Very, very interesting … the blogosphere will probably become much more slicable, dicable, and searchable as a result!
I can’t believe that no-one else seems to seems to have noticed that Google Blog Search is live.
[ update ]Well, I seem to have been scooped by half a month or so, by Boing Boing. Odd that I haven’t heard anything about it lately, though.
Rastin is blogging, and it’s A Good Thingâ„¢.
At very least, you now have an outlet for those feelings of unrequited love, Rastin.
😉
OK, maybe that’s overstating the case a little.
Dave is blogging again.
I guess once you’ve had your first hit, you’re hooked.
I see that, as of 30 minutes ago, he is not at home. Bad boy, cool app.
My only question, Dave, is: why Movable Type? Was it preinstalled or something? WordPress is clearly superior (ok, I’m somewhat biased) and certainly much cooler.
Wouldn’t you like to have your own store online, with your own products?
No, not the kind of store that is really someone else’s, filled with someone else’s products, that you just advertise and hope somebody somewhere buys something on so you can take a couple nickels of the sale.
Your stuff, your store.
When I get a few minutes, that’s what I’m going to do.
Yahoo! has a story about a man who built up 40,000 volts of static electricity in his clothes …
“We tested his clothes with a static electricity field meter and measured a current of 40,000 volts, which is one step shy of spontaneous combustion, where his clothes would have self-ignited,”
I wonder if this is one possible cause of all those X-files-like stories of spontaneous human combustion?
Well, there goes a great partnership.
I watched the Stevenote in which Jobs announced the new iPod Nano yesterday. And saw what I hadn’t heard earlier: that Harry Potter is on iTunes. J.K. Rowling is putting her annoyingly adolescent but immensely popular books on the iTunes music store in audiobook format.
Hmmm. Guess who has been a great Apple partner – and who is still promoting iPods left, right, and center?
The biggest and the best
Audible is the biggest name in audio books … and unsurprisingly, Audible is the first link when you google for ‘Audio book’. They’ve promoted iPods for years now.
Not out of some strange altruistic impulse, of course. iPods are what most people are using to listen to audio books. Well, at least those who are regularly spending money on new audio books.
That’s why iPods are plastered all over Audible’s homepage. And why you get a free one when you sign up for Audible’s service.
Whole new ballgame
But now Harry Potter’s on the iTunes, um, music store …. and I’m betting it’s just the beginning. What, functionally, is the difference between recorded music and recorded books, to a computer? None.
iTunes could become the biggest audio book seller overnight, if the right contracts could be signed, the right legalities observed, the right priorities set.
Money, money, money
I’m not guessing that Apple’s in any hurry. After all, the audio book industry is a fraction, and probably a miniscule fraction, of the music industry.
However, the potential profits are bound to be MUCH better – audio books sell for $10-25 – and my guess is that Audible takes a very retail-like 30-50% of that. A little different than the pennies Apple makes on song sales!
Harry Potter today …
My guess is that Harry Potter is simply a test case. If it doesn’t take off, no big deal. Jobs will try anything, once.
But if the $249 audio book package sells, and sells hard, Apple has a success story to take to book publishers all over the world. Publishers who are concerned about declining book sales. Publishers who are looking for ways to jazz up their industry. Publishers who are going to be interested in new revenue streams. And publishers who see an opportunity to increase their own profits as well.
A high-profile success story would be just the thing to get the ball rolling and speed up all the contracts and formalities … to get the publishers pushing each other out of the way in their rush to sign a deal.
If I was Audible, I’d be very, very worried.
Ummm … if you have even the slightest interest in digital freedom, piracy, and/or consumer rights when it comes to electronic devices and products, you need to read this.
It’s gold, Jerry, gold!
Yes, yes, it’s expanding, increasing, growing so fast it’s exploding, but that’s not the subject of this post. Rastin Mehr is blogging, and that’s A Good Thingâ„¢.
Rastin is in the Technology Solutions department at Premier, which I used to lead, and he’s doing all kinds of cool stuff there and on his own.
He’s got at least 2 great sites, but just started blogging recently. Congrats, and looking forward to more, Rastin.
This is a very cool idea – outsourcing to rural USA – that I hope catches on.
The cost of living in rural USA is a quarter what it might be in a major city, so the wages can be lower, but the people are smart, local, able to communicate, and in a convenient time zone. Plus you’re not sending jobs overseas.
Smart.
I just saw this software in Macintouch’s RSS feed.
Very cool – great software for web developers and bloggers.
The app is called DreamCatcher, which couldn’t have anything to do with a certain web design app, could it? DreamCatcher is desktop software that runs on Mac OS X – Just set it up with a URL, it’ll go and follow local links, and spellcheck for you.
Nice.
OK, I’m not quite here:
I blog/Flickr/Del.icio.us, therefore I am.
But it’s great to remember, and it’s fun to share, and it’s interesting to peek.
I am so sick of Technorati searches ending in this pitiful statement:
[ update August 16 ]Sorry, we couldn’t complete your search because we’re experiencing a high volume of requests right now. Please try again in a minute or add this search to your watchlist to track conversation.
See assorted links. Now the rumors are that it’s not going to happen.
I still hope it would …
Umm … what gives with story leads like this: Apple blunder gives Gates iPod royalty?
The story is here. And here. And other places – it’s probably off the wire.
Now, the reporter knows that Microsoft isn’t claiming or getting any royalties on the iPod (yet).
She also knows – or should – that many patents are first rejected, then refined, resubmitted, and accepted. And finally, the reporter should also know that Microsoft filed the patent much later than Apple actually came out with the product … meaning that prior art exists and would be a strong deterrent to any royalty claim.
So the title of the article is patently bogus. It’s just a rabble-rousing, wolf-crying, attention-seeking, dishonest ploy.
[ update ]Fred at A VC has a very interesting article on free as a business model.
I commented on his site, then realized that the comment was far too good to not post here too … So go read his post, then come back and read this.
😉
OK, time to chime in:
I’m starting up a division for Premier (premier.us/family) and do some marketing consulting for a start-up (thelinguist.com) so I read this article with interest.
I think that if you’re considering free as a marketing strategy, there are three key question to ask ask and answer in a very hardcore way:
1) who’s your customer?
2) how do you define your customer?
3) how will you attract that customer?If you define your customer as the person who pays you, Google’s customer base just shrunk 99% – their customer is the advertiser. Everything else is just honey to bring in the bees.
To me, the lesson that the guy above with the Wiki isn’t getting is that giving the product away isn’t a good way to sell it.
Google’s product, from this perspective, is NOT search. It’s audience. Attention. That’s what Google manufactures. And then they sell it to their customer: the advertiser.
Fairly simple, really.
But it’s based on a very hard-nosed no rose-tinted-glasses focus on answering the key questions.
So, Trump has a blog.
I guess we have to watch him strut if we want to watch The Apprentice, which I happen to enjoy, by the way. But is anyone going to read his blog if there’s too many more massively brown-nosing posts like this one.
Quick gut check: visit the cluetrain.
Oh, and by the way, everyone knows that director of communications means PR flack. And everyone knows what that means (but I’m too polite to mention it here).
I hate hate hate when propellor-heads take the easy way out. Like not taking the time or trouble to initialize this date-picker at WestJet’s website with the current date.
I’m on a trip to Winnipeg right now and found this beauty while investigating flight insurance for my airline tickets. Actually it’s probably RBC’s site with the error, since they provide flight insurance for WestJet.
Whoever it is, it’s lazy, lazy, lazy.
How do you store stuff?
That’s a perennial problem – just look at the garages of North America. Or the closets. But the kind of stuff I’m talking about is data stuff. Information stuff.
That website that you can’t get into right now but would love to *someday.* The software that you just found that you’d love to invest a couple of hours in, just playing with it, can’t right now, but want to in the future.
I’ve used a lot of different methods over the years: folders and text files on my computer (complete waste of time, never seen again until you’re cleaning up your hard drive); PIM or calenadaring tools (outta sight, outta mind); stickie notes (very small half-life); hard-copy (get’s trashed when you get sick of the mess).
One I’m kind of sticking with is my blog.
It’s convenient, reasonably quick, accessible wherever I go, and searchable. I can back it up, archive it, and save it. Plus, others can see it too, speading the wealth.
Let’s see how long this one lasts.
This is absolutely huge. Somebody buy it, quick.
I’m talking about Podscope.
This is a search engine for podcasts, and if the technology they are building actually works, it will be enormous. I’ve tried searching on Podscope for a variety of topics, and have been getting very good results.
Software that automates spoken language transcription to text quite reliably: very cool.
You know the sushi that you see on a conveyor belts running around the whole sushi bar on movies?
Well, no need to spend the 8 bucks. Herro of Japan (is that like Lawrence of Arabia?) has posted a video blog entry of precisely this fascinating phenomenon …
I just happened to wander over to Scoble’s post on Virtual Earth and clicked a link …
It’s kind of cool that MSN Virtual Earth works on Safari. Kudos to Microsoft on this one!
It’s alive. Click on the pic:
Yummy.
I am getting way too many hits from bloody casino, poker, and drug (the pharmacy type) sites.
Typically, they come in, look for the comment forms, and try to submit comments to the site. So I – and anyone else who has a blog and doesn’t want it clogged with comment spam – have to disallow posting except by members, automatically kill any comments that contain words like poker etc., and still have occasional hassles with garbage posts.
Not to mention the bandwidth and server time that these requests burn.
Somehow, there’s got to be a nice clean way of blocking unwanted visitors. Here’s a typical example of my referrers for the first few days of July 2005. I seriously doubt that any decently updated blog will be any different.
Naturally, I’m aware that you can block people or agents coming to your site by IP (like this guy), but that’s laborious. I’d have to check each of these referrers, run a traceroute, and enter the IP in my block file.
That’s too much work, and it’s too draconian. What if 2 months later the person or entity with that IP address is kosher? I’m very unlikely to follow up and check my blocked IPs months and years later.
We, the web, and bloggers in particular, need an open and collaborative system of identifying comment spammers in real-time and pushing a common list of them to all the nodes (blogs) on the network. A P2P model such as BitTorrent could be a workable archictecture, with no one central node from which the entire system can be controlled.
Each node would need to run a local copy of the software which would analyze incoming requests, flag suspicious ones, and report the list to other nodes at regular times. The software should be able to be run in PHP and Perl, and interface with common blogging software such as WordPress, Moveable Type, pMachine, Textpattern, etc.
Anybody willing to take this up as an open-source project?
It must be a scandal of some sort:
Google leads the web in so many things – search, Ajax, web-based email, location & map services, you name it. But why on earth does Google not support RSS?
RSS (Really Simple Syndication) is the best and easiest way to keep in touch with a lot of different sites. Everyone and his dog is coming out with RSS feeds. It’s particularly useful for news sites or blogs, which change often.
Such as Google News.
Unfortunately, you can’t get an RSS feed for that site. Nor for this one, or any of the other Google News sites. Just image how useful RSS would be for Gmail. Or saved searches on Froogle.
[ update July 12: Gmail does support RSS – my mistake. I believe this is the only Google service that does … ]So why is it not happening?
Well, the answer is fairly obvious: Google has not yet perfected its ad-serving technology in the RSS world.
Google has a beta program in place right now – which I’ve signed up for but have not yet been accepted into – for putting ads into RSS feeds. This is absolutely essential for Google, since more and more web traffic is moving to feeds – as I’ve previously noted. And, as we all know, ads represent more than 95% of Google revenue.
What’s taking Google so long? One would think that traffic must be suffering at non-RSS sites. I can very clearly see a difference in my own visiting patterns – I hardly check Google News lately. I used to check it several times a day, and now if I’m lucky, I may check it a couple times a week.
Actually, if Google is lucky. After all, Google only makes money when people visit its sites. And when I’ve got RSS, I’ve got a lot less reason to go on random trolling expeditions. News comes to me, not the other way around.
So for Google, this is mission critical.
Somehow, somewhere, today I ran across the longest domain name on the internet:
wiemenschlichmenschensindzeigtihrumgangmitdermuttersprachefrsch.de
And that’s with the “http://www” taken out! Anyone who can pronounce, spell, or even read that: you deserve a medal.
Naturally, it’s in German. Everything is longer in German.