Web tech, citizen journalism, and more

Sometimes information is all that stands between eating and starving (Philly Future).

Must read: Dan Gillmor’s talk at the University of Michigan: Grassroots Media’s Potential: Better Journalism and Democracy.

Labs Macromedia launches and gives a sneak peek at upcoming releases. Check it out. Macromedia stopped by work the other day to give a few of us an intro to Flex and let me tell ya – it’s going to revolutionize web app UI development. The first time – the first time – I have seen a technology that comes close to the simplicity of old fashioned desktop client server app development (with tools like Delphi or VB) for the web.

Seth Finkelstein: Cites & Insights: Recently, Yahoo search started pointing to some blogs for “News”. Now, I am arguably the world’s expert on censorware – and if not, certainly up there. What I write is likely orders of magnitude more accurate than popular pundits. But my material won’t appear in those search results (a yes/no decision). For the simple reasons that I don’t have the voice that A-listers do (and, no, personal tone isn’t the reason, that doesn’t exclude the big blogfish). Which means the hierarchical organization just got a little stronger.

Related: Inside Google: How Weblogs Inc. Games the System. Which I think is perfectly fair to tell ya the truth. It’s simply applying the power of their network to spread attention across their other blogs. Nevertheless – what of folks who are not part of such a powerful network who deserve to be heard?

John Gruber in “The Life” describes why it’s so hard being an independent software developer – who is successful: So the conundrum is this: once a developer gets enough paying users to consider quitting his day job so he can devote full-time effort to writing code, he’s quite possibly got so many paying users that he’ll spend much of his time helping customers in ways other than writing code. That’s why so few developers pull this trick off.

Barry Diller plans to challenge Google: NYMag.com: Diller’s Foxy Strategy.

Best open thread intro ever: A poor player that struts and frets his hour upon the thread and then is heard no more: it is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.