Wednesday, February 11, 2004

Andrew Sullivan, like many conservatives, are frustrated with Bush over his borrow and spend philosophy.  This is a great line-by-line critique of the second half of Sundays MTP episode. 4:12:34 PM    Comment_ Trackback []

MIT.  Interesting article on the toxicology of nanoparticals. 11:39:58 AM    Comment_ Trackback []

Dave is right about Google and RSS.  Unfortunately, I think they will win unless there is a blogging tool and RSS aggregator built into IE.  As an independent author, my goal is to have a slick (non-Web) interface for publishing my weblog built into the same app I use to read weblogs (a Web interface sucks for publishing).  A browser-based RSS aggregator would compliment bookmarks nicely.  The synergies of the combination of weblog publishing, RSS, bookmarks, browsing, enclosures, and even potentially P2P would unlock lots of rich feature functionality that can't be done easily now.  For the good of the weblog and syndication world, Microsoft should do this.  This capability should have been been part of the browser from the start.  11:14:52 AM    Comment_ Trackback []

Even smart people get scammed now.  Evan Williams details how he was duped on an e-mail paypal scam.  My son (13) got slammed by a download on Blizzard Entertainment's online service Battle.net last night.  He is one of the top players of Diablo (a popular Blizzard game).  Recently, he found the most rare objects in the game.  He was showing it off to another player when it was suggested he download a tool to analyze the synergies of the virtual equipment he was using.  He did and it immediately caused him to drop all of the objects on his virtual character and froze his system.  The other players scooped them up and left the game. He took it well and has learned his lesson -- never download anything from people you don't trust.  I have told him this again and again, but it didn't stick.  So now, he is $350 poorer (the value of the virtual equipment that was stolen on eBay) and much smarter.  The troubling thing is that the person that stole it was probably 13 too.  So much of this is going on in games like Diablo it makes me fearful that lots of kids are learning that stealing has few repurcussions.  Hopefully, our notification of the team at Blizzard will result in the deletion of this kids account and CD key (I don't hold out too much hope of help). 8:50:23 AM    Comment_ Trackback []

Disney and RSS enclosures: 2 m served!  Excellent!  Ross Mayfield also reports (via a presentation by Disney execs) on Disneys use of weblogs and wikis.  Very interesting stuff.  It seems that Disney is using RSS enclosures on a huge scale to distribute video: Using RSS Enclosures to deliver video to 2 million broadband users. Some argue that enclosures don't scale and their not enough bandwidth, but >500M videos have been delivered in less than one year an have been able to scale bandwidth to demand, now moving towards caching at the edge. Most of the delivery is off-peak hours, especially from them to the cable head end, so bandwidth cost is nominal. P2P like Bittorrent and others may broaden this. Wow!  This is great,  It closely parallels our discussion yesterday!  Disney is really on the cutting edge.  This would be very fun to work on.  Given that they use Newsgator, it is likely that Greg may be selling us a bittorrent interface soon.  BTW, Comcast is going after Disney.  I am sure they must be looking at the combination of tons of great content and RSS enclosures to zoom their core business model. 8:02:56 AM    Comment_ Trackback []

Ross Mayfield has dissected how people blog conferences (this may apply to any live blogging of events).  Very nice.  It really does mirror how people's brains work.  Which one are you (check his site for extended descriptions)?  I think I am running commentary. Dedicated Transcription -- word for word. Impressionistic Transcription -- paraphrase with flair. Running Commetary -- paraphrase with opinion. Poignant Reflection -- pure commentary. Coverage -- producing a report. Backchannel -- chat without content. Remote amplification -- fact check and amplify. Refactor me -- group voice. 7:40:22 AM    Comment_ Trackback []

Lance Knobel gives a blow by blow account of the UK Democratic caucus.  If you haven't been to a caucus before, this is a good tutorial. 7:32:07 AM    Comment_ Trackback []

Andrew Grumet's RSS TiVo system is very interesting.  Increasingly people are getting high definition TVs (Plasma, LCD, or Projection) that display text that is crisp and readable.  Additionally, the vast majority of programming doesn't broadcast in full screen HDTV format and therefore leaves lots of screen real-estate unused.  It would be great to put RSS into that empty space.  This may be something that the HD versions of the media center PCs should look at.  That way, if you see something interesting you can zip away to the site to read the rest of the post/article.  An HDTV is a wonderful 42 inch wide-format computer monitor (at least mine is). 7:03:02 AM    Comment_ Trackback []