Tuesday, November 29, 2005

Overhaul for Firefox web browser. A big marketing push is planned for the latest version of Firefox, the main rival to Microsoft's Internet Explorer. [BBC News | Technology | UK Edition]
7:54:01 PM    
 Tuesday, November 22, 2005

Vienna's open source desktop migration takes off. Thousands of city employees have started using OpenOffice.org and hundreds are running Linux, less than two months after the 'soft' migration started. [Meerkat: An Open Wire Service]
6:36:37 PM    

Dueling simplicities. Most of my writing goes straight to the web, but my column still takes a detour through the print magazine. Usually that's no problem. I'm not a news hound. And while I'm comfortable editing myself, I enjoy the thoughtful feedback I get from Neil McAllister who, in addition to editing my column, writes his own. Every now and then, though, I wish I could have bypassed the print loop. Case in point: next week's column on two-way RSS. I wrote it last week; it will appear on InfoWorld.com tomorrow; magazine subscribers will get it after the holiday. In that column I discuss how both Microsoft and Google plan to use XML syndication for two-way data exchange and, more broadly, to bring database-like capabilities to the web of linked documents that we are all collectively building. If I'd blogged it last week, I'd look really prescient now. ... [Jon's Radio]
6:34:58 PM    

Hauppauge Live TV Tuner.

WinTV-HVR-900_1.jpg

Add live TV to your PC with the WinTV HVR-900 TV Tuner, a very small USB 2.0 stick that plugs right into your laptop or any computer to let you receive analog and digital terrestrial TV. Not a bad thing to have when you're stuck at the airport and don't feel like watching Fox News, the HVR-900 comes with a high-gain aerial, letting you receive up to 40 digital channels. It also lets you record live TV to your hard drive and burn DVDs at 1.68GB per hour. Of course, the bundled travel aerial, which is really what you probably bought the thing for, may not bring video up to your usual standards. Plug-and-play and easy to install, check for the HVR-900 by end of month.

Hauppauge Digital 'TV Stick' [Bios Magazine]

Pricing and reviews for Hauppage TV tuners [CNET]

[Gizmodo]
6:32:09 PM    

Still in the First Coming of Library Feeds.

The Second Coming of Content and RSS Feeds

Dave Winer recently pointed to a post by Adam Green, which explored similar territory. Adam thinks 2006 will be the year the Web explodes:

"The explosion I am talking about is the shifting of a website's content from internal to external. Instead of a website being a ‘place’ where data ‘is’ and other sites ‘point’ to, a website will be a source of data that is in many external databases, including Google. Why ‘go’ to a website when all of its content has already been absorbed and remixed into the collective datastream."

His post specifically referenced Google, but I think this trend is much larger than even Google. The thing which is going to tie all this together is of course feeds. Mainly RSS, but perhaps Atom's much-vaunted extensibility will come into play too.

This gets to the heart of the matter and I think Feedburner is onto something big here. Feedburner now views the item (e.g. a single post from your blog, or a specific search result in a topic feed) as ‘the atomic unit of measure in the feed’, which will in turn lead to Feedburner managing syndicated content ‘at a more atomic level by attaching 'threads' to the item.’ It reminded me of the Design for Data and ’content will be more important than its container’ themes I was big on at the end of last year and beginning of this (and which I will be re-focusing on now)[sigma].

If you think about it, focusing on the feed item is a profound change in how we think about RSS feeds. Up till this year, most of us thought of RSS feeds as a way to subscribe to single sources of content. But over 2005 it's become apparent that content is being remixed, mashed up and re-published across many sources - leading to heated ethical debates over content rights and confusion amongst publishers on how to 'monetize' (sorry I can't help but use that word) their content. Fred Wilson had a nice post on this theme recently, entitled The Future of Media (aka Please Take My RSS Feed).” [Read/Write Web]

Ask yourself if your library is ready for this type of shift, because overwhelmingly, the answer is no. Librarians just aren’t thinking like this yet, and we need to change this. It’s at the very core of the whole “Library 2.0” discussion, and this is why it’s so critical. If we keep our content locked up on our own websites and don’t get it out there for people to use as they want to use it, then our content will fall by the wayside.

[The Shifted Librarian]
1:34:14 AM    
 Monday, November 21, 2005

TiVo Connects with IPod, PSP (NewsFactor). NewsFactor - Digital video recording pioneer TiVo (Nasdaq: TIVO) has tweaked its TiVoToGo service to let subscribers transfer recorded TV content to Apple iPod or Sony (NYSE: SNE) PlayStation Portable (PSP) devices. [Yahoo! News: Technology News]
6:45:15 PM    
 Saturday, November 19, 2005

Ray Ozzie is blogging again at:

http://spaces.msn.com/members/rayozzie/
7:10:38 PM    


Ruby the Rival. Bruce Tate's Beyond Java picks Ruby as the front-runner among languages that could succeed Java among enterprise developers. But what's so great about Ruby--and frankly, what's wrong with Java? We asked some top Java bloggers, authors, and developers what they think of Ruby's challenge. [O'Reilly Network Articles]
7:37:54 AM    
 Thursday, December 2, 2004

Personal soundtracks. Online: Ben Hammersley on how audio programming led to the rapid spread of the podcasting phenomenon. [Guardian Unlimited]
7:16:57 PM    

BBC: Blog picked as word of the year. Slow news day. [Scripting News]
6:57:17 PM    

Decentralizing Bittorrent. An anonymous reader writes "Exeem is a new file-sharing application being developed by the folks at SuprNova.org. Exeem is a decentralized BitTorrent network that basically makes everyone a Tracker. Individuals will share Torrents, and seed shared files to the network. At this time, details and the full potential of this project are being kept very quiet. However it appears this P2P application will completely replace SuprNova.org; no more web mirrors, no more bottle necks and no more slow downs. Exeem will marry the best features of a decentralized network, the easy searchability of an indexing server and the swarming powers of the BitTorrent network into one program. Currently, the network is in beta testing and already has 5,000 users (the beta testing is closed.) Once this program goes public, its potential is enormous. " [Slashdot:]
6:43:32 PM    
 Wednesday, December 1, 2004

Google Local. Better than the yellow pages [Cool Tools]

like the man says, my wife and I like East Indian food, typed in that put in our city, Edmonton, Alberta and bingo bango a map with a list of East Indian food restraunts.

I will never let my fingers do the walknig again!!!!YAHOO FOR GOOGLE LOCAL!!!


8:17:57 PM    
 Wednesday, October 27, 2004

Google's Windows-Centric Stance. Google, one of first of the truly Web companies, is increasingly a Windows-Web company. Consider:
  • In July, Google acquired Picasa, a digital photo management company. The application only runs on Windows PCs.
  • Google's Desktop Search application, launched earlier this month, is Windows-only.
  • Today, the company announced it had acquired keyhole, which does digital mapping in amazing ways. You guessed it: Windows or nothing. Actually, this is the same old story in some ways. Given Microsoft's monopoly status, it's almost impossible to compete with Microsoft without simultaneously boosting the monopoly. I don't think Google is abandoning its Web roots. But its increasing Windows-centricity, at least on the desktop, sends an unfortunate message to Mac and Linux users -- and to those who believe in diversity and open standards. [Dan Gillmor's eJournal]

  • 11:11:36 PM    

    iPod Photo is Alive.

    ipod_photo.jpg imageIt lives: iPod Photo. Back in a minute with details.

    Lots of tasty details in this post, if you're coming in from a direct link.

    iPod Photo: First Details [Gizmodo]

    [Gizmodo]
    6:58:18 PM    

    Yahoo, Adobe Team Up for New Web Services (AP). AP - Stepping up the heated battle of online search and services, Yahoo Inc. and Adobe Systems Inc. have joined forces to tap each others' customers and put Web search features into Adobe's popular Acrobat Reader software. [Yahoo! News: Top Stories]
    6:56:07 PM    

    Google Desktop Outshines Windows' File-Search Capabilities (washingtonpost.com). washingtonpost.com - Google is famed for its Web search engine, but over the past few years it has acquired a different role: Microsoft's No. 1 foreign aid donor. First, Google fixed some of Internet Explorer's worst defects with its Google Toolbar, a free add-in that blocks pop-up ads and provides a shortcut to (naturally) Google's search engine and an auto-fill option to complete Web forms. Now it has released the Google Desktop, another free program that fixes an equally glaring weakness of Windows: its woeful file-searching capabilities. [Yahoo! News: Technology]
    6:54:12 PM