Author Archives: Karl

Tuesday grab bag

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GoogleBlog ushers in the launch of Google Video: “The era of the couch potato is so over. We’re rooting for the desk (and laptop) potato”. Speaking of Google Video check out the “everybody hates Chris” premier. The quality is good (not great), but it is very easy to use, and since it is Flash, no new plugin to install or some external app to load. Nice. Another great example is Google’s Recruiting Video – no really!

Rafe Colburn and Ted Leung (who deleted my comment while cleaning out spam – I can relate – did that myself quite a few times), second a thought I’ve had on improving Memeorandum – feeding it a group of RSS feeds that you care about. They are thinking in terms of a personal aggregator – I would like to make that personalized page public as as service.

Microsoft is taking radical steps to beat itself back to life. It’s facing facts – Windows was broken – and Longhorn wasn’t going to fix it – and taking bold corrective measures that should pay off down the line. The folks at the Register aren’t very optimistic.

Jason Calacanis gives his thoughts on recent moves by Microsoft and Google, Fox, Yahoo, and AOL.

Speaking of Microsoft, Steven Sinofsky gives us a behind the scenes look at MS’s dev team management structure.

And look at this – Internet ad revenue climbs 26 percent.

Did you know it’s Banned Books Week. Check out the discussion at Metafilter and buy one.

Oh, and a Saudi Prince Buys a 5% Stake in Fox how ironic is that?

Ummmm… Michael Brown, former head of FEMA, is still getting a paycheck there – as a consultant.

Bush wants to expand the role of the military on domestic soil, giving authority over to the Pentagon in disaster response (Washington Post), overturning the Posse Comitatus Act of 1878 that baned the armed forces from participating in police-type activity on U.S. soil. John Scalzi calls it the mother of all bad ideas.

Speaking of bad ideas… read “Bush administration threatens veto against Geneva Convention” at Metafilter.

Rest in Peace: Don Adams, TV’s Maxwell Smart, Dies at 82.

I’ve been ‘bit-blogging’ a a little too much these past few days…must step away from the keyboard…

News Roundup

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September’s Philly Blogger Meetup was another success. Lots of new faces. Wish I could have been there. I’m looking forward to October’s.

The Eagles had a hell of a fight on Sunday, but they pulled it thru.

The FBI’s War on Porn has struck its first well known site: the Goth haven Suicide Girls has been forced to take down a number of photo sets. They urge donations to the EFF.

Thousands of people fill Washington’s streets to protest the Iraq war, and nary a mention in broadcast news. More at Brad Blog.

Memorandum continues to win me over. It really is the Google News of blog produced content and conversations.

It looks like the music labels want to put the squeeze on Apple – they want a cut of iPod sales!

There is a new hosted blogging solution on the horizon at Six Apart, so far called Project Comet. Mena Trott says: People are always saying that they want to make a product that’s “easy enough for their mom to use.â€? Well, we want to do something more. My mom knows how to use a computer so it’s not just about ease of use: I want to make a product that my mom actually wants (emphasis mine – Karl) to use.

Dan Gillmor speaks about the NYTimes Anti-Columnist Pay-Wall: By rendering the publication’s most interesting assets invisible on the Web — if I were a Times columnist I would be furious — the paper is reducing its authority in the real world in an understandable effort to show better numbers for the online operation.

Dan was formerly a columnist at the San Jose Mercury News, and a former Knight Ridder coworker of mine – the corporation continues the bloodletting that started last week as it announces plans to shrink the Merc newsroom by 52 jobs.

Rumor: MTV & Warner Prepping For “Big Announcment” This Morning (PaidContent.com).

Speaking of Time Warner: CNet: It’s Not TV, it’s Yahoo: Is Terry Semel, Yahoo’s chief executive and the former co-head of Warner Brothers, trying to turn Yahoo into the interactive studio of the future? The short answer is yes, but Semel’s ambitions are far bigger and more complex than that. He wants Yahoo to be seen as more akin to Warner’s parent, Time Warner, which mixes content like Warner and CNN with distribution, like its cable systems. Yahoo is both of those and a lot of software, too.

Speaking of video at Yahoo!, have you checked out Google Video? They are using Flash video! A fun example vid going around is Bill Gate’s Coke commercial.

More on GoogleNet – Google’s broadband WiFi plans – can be found here.

Speaking of video search, Truveo looks very interesting. Check out a recent article in MIT’s Technology Review.

Watch Battlestar Galactica? No? Shame on you man. Anyway Shelley Powers checks in with a review of Friday night’s season finale. One of the best episodes to any show I have ever watched. And at times wanted to turn away from.

Matt Raible is evaluating open source CMS solutions: see part 1 and part 2 so far.

Roland Tanglao has put up a mp3 of his Remixing RSS presentation he gave at a recent conference in Vancouver.

Web 2.0 is already here. Has been for some time actually. Time to get over the hype curve, recognize the reality – the mashup web is flat out awesome and here.

In what kind of world is ‘dumping’ of homeless and mentally ill into a part of town, to fend for themselves, acceptable?

Morning bits

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My prayers go out the folks in Rita’s way this morning. Remember to give.

The Commission on Federal Election Reform has released its report – urging paper trails (Wired). More at VerifiedVoting.org. Locally, check out the Committee of Seventy for information on voting rights and reform.

via Global Voices, Ma-Schamba, a Mozambique blogger shares that Live 8 is nothing but broken promises.

Atrios gives an update of his efforts in DC to convince the powers that be not to regulate free speech on the Internet as ‘political speech’.

Jay Rosen gives his thoughts on TimesSelect and shares a compliment for mine on this week’s newspaper staff reductions (thanks!). Me? I will never link to a TimesSelect article. It’s bad enough linking to something that eventually falls behind an archive wall, but I can’t link to a for-pay article. It’s what keeps me from linking more often to The Atlantic as well.

The news is that Cheney killed testimony on Able Danger.

And for more frightening news, there are 115 sick of avian flew in Jakarta.

AOL is to begin its VOIP rollout October 4th. Speaking of AOL, it has dropped the ‘beta’ tag from its new portal and has begun marketing.

At Fool.com, by Seth Jayson: “Why I Fear Google WiFi”: “How much of your life do you want to put at Google’s disposal?”

And for you porn hunters – a job for you – the FBI is looking for recruits: “The new squad will divert eight agents, a supervisor and assorted support staff to gather evidence against “manufacturers and purveyors” of pornography — not the kind exploiting children, but the kind that depicts, and is marketed to, consenting adults” War on terror? Got that handled. We have other priorities. Your tax dollars at work.

If you need a giggle (and I do man, I do), check out JWZ’s guide to turning your hamster into a fighting machine.

Morning tech/web/citizen journalism bits

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Dan Gillmor rips Google for its hubris in putting together an event for 400 special guests to be ‘off the record’ – including to invited journalists and bloggers. More from Doc Searls and Dave Winer.

A lot of folks have started to point to Truth Laid Bare blogger driven anti-pork campaign. The funny thing is Citizens Against Government Waste has been around for a long, long time and this looks to simply duplicate the effort of a non-partisan non-profit.

You can now get your My Yahoo! subscriptions as OPML. About time 🙂

GoogleRumors: “Google will soon launch a security tool for WiFi users, perhaps as a precurser to GoogleNet.” More from Jeremy Zawodny and Inside Google.

I haven’t read this yet, but plan to: Global PR Blog Week: “Adding Blogs to an Existing Non-Profit Community”.

Morning news bits

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Katrina has opened up an opportunity to talk about class and race in America. If you read anything today, read “Still Separate, Still Unequal: America’s Educational Apartheid” in Harpers magazine. There has been terrific progress in Philadelphia, but there are many, many factors stacked against us. A recent article in the Philadelphia Inquirer shares a major case in point – “Philadelphia (is) among the nation’s poorest counties and Chester, Burlington and Bucks among its richest”. How do you think this helps or hurts education funding? And don’t you think that’s self-reinforcing?

Ed Cone takes note of John Edwards who has been championing how “Personal responsibility combined with smart government can beat poverty, that’s the message. Don’t have babies out of wedlock in your teens and we’ll make sure you’ve got a chance.” That’s Bill Clinton’s old message. Notice the two part goal here: Personal responsibility and smart government. It’s a message I believe in.

Speaking of Bill Clinton, he has finally begun to share his views on how things have been going – and it’s not pretty. Tellingly, if you watch Memeorandum it appears that most folks talking about this are Republicans who are appalled that Clinton opened his mouth. And most Democrats are just sitting idly by when they should be cheering him on. Just like old times. Pandagon tears apart one of the popular ones.

America’s response to Katrina, and the two-tier society it exposed for all to see is not looking so good abroad, even in Britain. Just look at the tone of recent articles in the Mirror or Sky News.

Amongst the stories of system failure that have come out of Katrina, folks should recognize there are many more times the number of stories of survival (Washington Post) that tell of strength, ingenuity, quick thinking, courage and compassion.

Rita is growing to hurricane strength and Galveston might issue an evacuation order today.

A shout out of thanks to all who have been donating and finding ways to help in the wake of Katrina. There are so many great examples to share across the web, but one I’ve been meaning to mention is Shelley Powers and her Critters for Critters campaign. The auction she is running I believe ends tomorrow, check it out. And if you can donate to the Humane Society.

Monday morning web tech bits

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Anyone have tips or tools to help move a MovableType blog to a new host? So far I’ve found TypeMover a MovableType plugin that: “adds backup, restore and migration features that let you get your data in and out of your servers”.

Gallery 2.0 is out, and from what I hear, it is a great upgrade for the venerable PHP based photo gallery organizer. There is a module that enables Gallery to Drupal/CivicSpace integration, so maybe I will use this at Philly Future down the line.

WSFinder.com is a Wiki for finding web service and open APIs. 109 APIs at last count.

Good fonts + sIFR = typography goodness? Or a mess counting upon your point of view.

Huge list of Flash examples for download at sephiroth.it.

And this is very, very interesting: Neighbornodes:

Neighbornodes are group message boards on wireless nodes, placed in residential areas and open to the public. These nodes transmit signal for around 300 feet, so everyone within that range has access to the board and can read and post to it. This means that with a Neighbornode you can broadcast a message to roughly everyone whose apartment window is within 300 feet of yours (and has line of sight), and they can broadcast messages back to you. Boards are only accessible from computers that go through the local node.

Additionally, Neighbornodes are linked together, making up a node network to enable the passing of news and information on a street-by-street basis throughout the wider community.

Oh I gotta play with this.

Another articles of note:

O’Reilly.net: Opening the potential of OpenOffice.org. How to get involved in helping develop the open alternative to MS Office.

Speaking of Microsoft: BusinessWeek documents some employee defections that must be concerning. Mini-Microsoft, a blog written by an anonymous Microsoft employee, gets some press in the article. One thing is for sure – I would expect some bold moves out of MS. One rumor floating about is buying AOL. Yep, you read that right – and Google is thinking about it too –follow the coverage at PaidContent.com.

More on Memeorandum and Google Blog Search

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Yesterday a news story hit, an editor was near my station, and overhearing the discussion I went to Memeorandum to find out if it was breaking among bloggers – and it was. Memeorandum has quickly become a must visit site for me, multiple times a day.

Now for some thoughts on Google Blog Search….

Lets get something clear right away – it isn’t blog search – it’s RSS/Atom search. Google is indexing RSS and Atom outputs to build this search engine. Our RSS and Atom and only that. It places heavy emphasis on titles and seems to ignore tagging and categories assigned to posts. There does not seem to be a PageRank-style algorithm at play here. It is fast, and it gets updated far more frequently that Google’s main search index by taking advantage of the fact that most blog toolsets automatically ping third party services when posts are made. For more see Google’s FAQ.

Some are arguing that how this works will actually diminish blogger influence. Some think that it foretells removal of bloggers from its main search index (Joël Céré). Others believe that Google didn’t go far enough and should include results from this new engine in its main search output (Dave Winer). Some are saying this is marks the end of tagging (Jeff Harrell).

A few things are clear however:

It is not fully baked yet, many features bloggers demand are missing.

Full-text feeds have an advantage (rc3.org) over partial summary feeds, since only content in feeds are indexed.

And lastly blogs have a new source of traffic and for those who care – a new source of recognition that they matter. For far too many I personally know – if it is not on Google – it doesn’t count. That probably makes a lot of you uncomfortable. Believe me, I understand.