US Generals say they will "quit" if Bush starts Iraq war: "SOME of America’s most senior military commanders are prepared to resign if the White House orders a military strike against Iran, according to highly placed defence and intelligence sources. "
When sense has to come from the military, things have gone far.
18seconds.org, which redirects to http://green.yahoo.com/, wants to encourage people to install energy saving lights. Like it.
Doc Searls points to Dave Winer thinking about the podcast device. Features that matter to Dave:
1. Self-contained, untethered synchronization, much the same way a Blackberry gets email.
2. Read-write, two-way, should be able to record and connect with a publishing system for automatic upload and feed production.
3. Must be a platform, that is, people other than the manufacturer can add apps.
About the third one, to be a platform, I wonder if being able to read RSS and OPML and let users access that would be sufficient? In other words, the device can access OPML directories and RSS feeds, and that way anyone can make directories and content available.
Or do you need to be able to program it? I'm not sure how much extra hardware/complexity/price that would involve (would it have to be a webserver itself?).
You would think there would be a website where you could browse webdesigners' work and find a freelance webdesigner? People always ask me if I know a good designer, coz they can't find any. But I haven't found that website yet.
Peter Forret emailed me with an idea: Yahoo Pipes + a query language = SWQL (structured query language for rss).
I think it's great, this could be implemented as a library for which we could then develop a PHP wrapper. The PHP would look something like:
$swql_connect("http://pipes.yahoo.com/api", "username", "password"); // where the yahoo pipes API serves as the database engine.
$res = swql_query("SELECT title, description, enclosure FROM rss:http://podcast.example.com/feed/ as rss_feed WHERE len(rss_feed.enclosure) > 0 ORDER BY rss_feed.title");
Brilliant!
I'm old. I mostly understand Myspace, but that's because I asked friends who are still young to explain it to me, and I still think I only get it 80 or 90%. My site doesn't have a picture of me. Hey, if I was young, I'd have a Myspace page, not a site. I've always felt kids should have blogs, when they seem to prefer to do IM and hang out on the social networks.
This NYT article explains why I'm old. It compares the new generation, with their lack of privacy concerns, and the *old* generation's reaction to them to what happened with rock&roll int he 50s.
I'm quite happy actually, a good old fashioned culture shock between young and old! The world has been way too boring for the last 40 years.
Ev is selling Odeo. Which makes sense - for similar reasons I sold Mefeedia last month: not a bad website, but it needs attention I'd rather spend somewhere else myself. I'm very happy with how selling Mefeedia turned out: the new owner is improving it and running it with the same vision that we always had when we started it. Which is kind of a good feeling.
Here's a thought: why hasn't anyone made a better UI for mailing lists yet? No money in it? I could totally see how it should look and work, and it shouldn't be crazy hard to implement.
- Yahoo pipes is just the first visual db editor.
- It'll be built on RSS, with some additional namespaces taking off (like MediaRSS, the iTunes extensions, ...). If you provide data you want to open up, open it up in RSS and add metadata with your own namespace if needed.
An interesting article that compares Yahoo Pipes with the invention of relational databases.
I love the "Everything Else" category, so I love the idea of "Everything is Miscelaneous", which now has a blog, which is in "beta".
From a mailing list today: "Also, we haven't covered topics such as graphics design, interactive design, creative production...which might be of more interest to female members."
My mom's chocolate mousse recipe:
200 gram PURE chocolade
50 gram butter
2 egg yellow
5 egg whites
75 gram cream
50 gram sugar
melt the chocolate and butter on a low fire.
Whip the cream.
Whip the yellows + 25gr sugar.
Whip the whites+ 25g sugar.
Take warm (but not too warm) chocolate, mix in yellows first, then cream, then carefully the whites.
Put in little cups 2 hours in the fridge.
A smart post by Jorge on his new culture blog: "One method Iâm exploring for studying other cultures more objectively
is to focus on a single âalienâ? element that the other cultures (and my
own) share in common, and then try to understand the ways in which they
engage with this element. I call this alien element a âbogieâ?.
Was reading this thoughtful post on gift giving in Bloglines, and I thought, Hey, that could have been written by Danah Boyd! Turns out it was, I just didn't know I was reading her feed.
A UK think tank has reports on where innovation will come from in the future, you can download the PDF's on Asian innovators. Interesting stuff.
Michael started a Flickr group for design patterns. I love them, but some more text would be useful with each.
A video podcatcher in Nokia phones: "The Nokia Video Center comes pre-installed on new Nokia Series 60 devices such as the newly announced N95 and N93i but also available as a separate download for compatible devices. You can load videos onto the phone through your home computer or receive updates over-the-air at HSDPA speeds or using open WiFi while you're on the go."
This is a big step. Supports H.264 and MediaRSS. Wow.
Here's a business idea: long term storage. And by long-term, I mean 5, 10, 20, 50 years. The economics change. I don't want to pay 12$/month. I want to pay x$ now to have my pictures stored for posterity, long term. So I can order them in 20 years and have a reasonable chance of getting them.
The technology changes too. If you don't need fast access, you could store on offline dvd's or something, instead of on connected storage like harddrives. It'd be an interesting challenge. I wonder if you can make it cheap enough.
In an IM conversation, Raymond asked me why I quit mefeedia, and after a few tries I think I nailed it: "I'd rather dance in the party than organize it." There are a lot of positive things to being just a hobbyist.
Meet the new boss, same as the old boss
Hey, Mike stepped down as Blip's CEO and has been replaced? By a potted plant. Does this spell bad news for the vlogosphere?
OK this is weird: I am getting 100 results on 1 page for this Google query. Are you getting the same?
Google has alway (afaik) had their 10 results, perhaps they are testing what listing more does? Or perhaps it's a bug, because 100? That's just too many results to comfortably use.
Yahoo pipes is something I'd expected to come out of Google. But then again, so was Amazon's S3.
I guess Google is focused on rolling out their online G-office. Just get that offline editing working guys, that'll make all the difference!
I don't find myself going to Technorati when I want to see what the blogosphere is saying.. their results are just usually dissapointing. Their UI is also full of stuff that distracts. If only they'd had the restraint Google has always had.
I find it rather cool that Google pulls out wikipedia content to show you the area codes of a state in the USA.
It's nice to see that they rely on outside providers of content, instead of trying to provide it themselves (which would be easy in this case), especially someone like wikipedia.
Designing systems is the new black in IA and Peter Merholz is as usual on top of it.
There's definitely something to it, too. The thinking about ecosystems around your product can use some of that hard-hitting analysis that IA's love to do, so this should be fun.
My prediction: sure, Google will add a powerpoint app to their office suite. But here's the kicker, before the end of the year, I expect (hope) that they'll add some type of offline access to their products too. That'd be the real kicker.
I find myself using Google write and excel regularly... but there's still the offline thing. And downloading docs is soo oldskool.
This looks like fun: soon you'll be able to buy small wifi boxes for less than 100$ that create a wifi mesh that yo can spread in your community. I'm sure legal means will be used to try to stop this by various parties, but at the same time, I can think of a lot of places that'll spend money on this.
A good list of RSS feeds with videos of the Superbowl of 2006 and 2007
Cool new stats coming up at Blip.tv.
Using Amazon's Mechanic Turk service, this job is to look through lots of satlite imagery to find the boat of a famous scientist who went missing at sea.
A good chance to see how Turk works for "workers", and perhaps you'll find him too.
Although Joost is annoyingly focused on television, there seems to be some videoblogging DNA in Joost after all: Jay says
Daniel Salber, the original mac developer for FireAnt, is now the lead developer for the mac version of Joost.
An opinionated Vista wiki. ("Wait until you need a new PC, then get one with Vista on it.")
Barcamp Antwerp anyone?
Yahoo's new brand strategy feels all wrong. Repurposing content? What will differentiate this from any other aggregating website?
This is all based on the faux idea that this content is somehow "theirs", because they "own" Flickr etc. But they don't (the users do), and it's not (it's out there in RSS and other formats). I could duplicate their brand platforms in an afternoon (ok, a few weeks of work perhaps), and so can anyone else. You don't build a destination on aggregation. Aggregation without value add is not a viable strategy.
Instead, Yahoo should build more tools to let people easily create and aggregate content themselves. I'm pretty sure that this initiative will fade away within a year and will mean more opportunity cost incurred for Yahoo.
Another note on editing interviews: with English interviews, I can increase the playback speed to 1.5, in Spanish interviews (my Spanish isn't as good), I can't, I need to play things at speed 1.0 to understand everything.
The 5 smallest countries in the world. Vatican City is the size of a golf course. I always felt one of the reasons the Catolics became so powerful is that they pulled off starting their own country (in 1929, in a deal with Mussolini). What other religion can say that?
Of course, their first pull to power was to act as a multinational and own property worldwide. That tends to make organizations long-lasting (I have this plan for a whole book on why organizations/ideas become long-lasting or not, and the catholic church would be a great case study). But then they pulled of the country. Pay yourself taxes. Make your own laws. Plus, all power in the country is centralized in a dictator (the pope has legislative, executive and judiciary power). It's brilliant.
Today's editing tip: the last statement.
While editing the interviews for the Colombia Migration Project, I've learnt a few simple things about editing. Even when you simply string a bunch of statements together (the simplest form of editing), the last statement in the interview (the one before the closing credits) has a kind of extra, lingering power, just because it's the last. I guess because that's when the new stuff stops, it kind of frames everything that came before. The viewer takes that last statement and reviews everything that came before and perhaps that's when they store it in their memory, I don't know. In any case, there's power there. So if you choose that last bit wisely you can give an extra twist or meaning to the interview.
Update: This one looks even better, can handle large uploads without putting everything in memory, and handles Amazon's other services too.
I plugged in my iPod for the first time in a while and the newest iTunes is really getting better.
Still no links back to podcasters though. Damn Apple!
Sull follows up with his personal history of videoblogging.
I like personal histories. At least there's not the presumption of being *the* history, it's just a personal account. And by reading various ones you can kind of make an infered overal history. I encourage others to chime in too.
Drupal follow-up: why I still think Drupal or any generic CMS is dangerous for many startups.
My previous post about Drupal generated a lot of discussion, and it's Sunday eve with not much else to do so let me clarify why I still think that using Drupal can be dangerous.
There are a few arguments, and I'll try to be more practical in this case.
First, let's look at the node system. I start my startup with Drupal, basic content items are nodes. All's good. I get lots of functionality for free.
Next, I want to do something different with nodes, like, order them in a different way or something. That requires a database change and some extra indexes on the nodes table, say. I can hack Drupal to do this, but now I've forked Drupal and my upgrade path.
Forking is almost inevitable. (ps: note that I'm not talking about some plain content site, but a startup that'll likely require some pretty specific functionality.)
That means no more security fixes. No more upgrading from Drupal, unless I hack the new version too. I've lost a main reason to continue to use Drupal - all I've gained now is some initial work at the start of the project.
Next, my startup gets more popular and I need to optimize for performance and scalability. Drupal provides a few built-in optimization methods, I try them, they're not enough perhaps - especially because I now have a hacked Drupal.
So I need to start changing the innards of Drupal. Perhaps the node table needs to be federated. Perhaps the user table needs to be federated. Who knows these things in advance. Drupal does a LOT of stuff, and I probably don't understand it's innards as well as I would understand a system that only does what I need that I built myself. I'm in trouble now.
That's what happens to startups, and that's why I still consider Drupal dangerous for many startups. I've seen it happen again and again.
It's not the fault of Drupal. It's the fault of the expectations that it sets ("it'll be easy"). You really are better off building something lean from scratch, as far as I can tell. Am I wrong?
PS: to be clear, if you are creating content sites with a specific set of functionality (forums, user profiles, ...), and if you're not looking to create the next myspace, but instead are looking for something fairly standard, Drupal IS a good choice. It's flexible enough, fairly scalable and easy to customize. There are a few companies that are doing exactly that (customizing Drupal for clients who needs those kinds of websites) and are doing a great job.
Wow, my Drupal unfit post is really generating some discussion.
Mike also wrote a brief and personal history of videoblogging.