Just a huge list of favicons.
Author Archives: Karl
How do I resolve social mobility?
An interesting question: Ask MetaFilter: How do I resolve social mobility?:
Any anecdotes about fitting in with a new class that’s not the one you grew up with? This isn’t so much “selling out” versus “keeping it real,” but just the ways that people adapt to the change.
I’ve found the people I meet and spend time with are more and more from a higher social class than the one I’ve grown up in (we’re college-age, here). Further, the more ambitious I get, the more I notice the effect. So how does one resolve the issue of living in “two worlds?” It’s started to feel like I need to make a choice between alienating all my old friends/family, or giving up on whatever big, important things I want to do with my life. Obviously, that just ain’t gonna work, so I’m looking for advice from people who have felt the same way at some point.
One other thing to note: at least into the forseeable future (next 5 years), I’ll be in the same socioeconomic class, in that I’ll still a college/professional student, without some new level of income. It’s not that I’m nouveu riche all of a sudden, I’m just socially conflicted.
A Millennium Falcon that flys!
No, really! I have just got to get me one of these.
10 Days till this year’s Sleeping Angel Music Fest
On September 15th 2001, just four days after 9-11, our nephew, Hunter, 3 and 1/2 months old, passed away from SIDS.
As a response, my brother’s family started the Sleeping Angels Fund to help families who cannot financially afford a burial memorial after losing a child so young. Sleeping Angels will be holding its second annual music fest in ten days, August 5th and 6th. Various bands across our area will be playing to help support the fund – including – possibly – my own on August 5th. I hope to see you there.
Flash Tutorial Screencasts
Three great sites now feature screencasted Flash tutorials. A wealth of stuff here to chew on:
BlogBridge and Google adds RSS
Tim Bray has some good words and criticism for BlogBridge – the only desktop RSS reader I know that has a server component that allows you to save subscriptions across devices.
Google’s custom home page will now all you to add – My Yahoo! style – RSS feeds.
My Yahoo! and Google stand in rather stark contrast to where Microsoft appears to be going.
Mark Cuban on IceRocket
Blog Maverick: How many bloggers love me… let me count the ways:
…Its deja’ blog all over again.
Today, there are what seem to be thousands and thousands of bloggers who spend most of their time writing about what other bloggers blog.
Thats not a bad thing.
There are people who read my blog and often link back. In fact, its a good thing. It expands my audience to the upstream bloggers’ audience.
What is getting a little wierd, and I have to admit entertaining, are the “incentuous networks� and how they sometimes try to game blog search engines to increase their rankings.
Some of the blog search engines try to rank “authority” based on links to a blog post. Thats cool , and its a valuable tool
Lots of bloggers like to show how many other sites have “linked in”. Again, thats cool and its a nice little ego boost, even though because of the different ways to count the links, its not really of much use beyond bragging rights. But hey, if someone stumbles upon your blog and there are lots of big numbers, they are more likely to read. So I guess its useful from that perspective alone
But all of which has led to an interesting type of pressure occurring in the blog search engine market.
Bloggers want blog search engines to have features designed for bloggers.
Thats not a bad thing. As different bloggers do evaluations of different search engines, we will find out more features that are desirable for bloggers and how best to implement them.
But it leads to a question.
Should a blog search engine be designed as a tool for bloggers, or as a tool for people who happen to blog and everyone else.
Of course they arent completely mutually exclusive. You can have features that support both, but as the number of features grow, the responsiveness of engine declines.
And since blog search engines are relatively new, It could create a lot of confusion for those who dont want to use a blog search engine as a blog reference tool, but rather as a more traditional search engine that is keyword based.
This post of course is a long way of saying that despite all the evaluations going on around the blogosphere, blogs.icerocket.com will focus on providing a service to the majority of internet users who dont blog, or who blog as a social experience.
In particular we will focus on supporting business users who want a continuous feed of fresh information relating to those things that are important to them.
So far it seems to be working well. Our traffic is exploding.
Hopefully the bloggers who use our tags , scripts and other tools we will be providing will notice lots of new traffic driven to their sites. Hopefully it will be mostly first time blog readers experiencing all the great content bloggers create every day and they will love your site so much , they will subscribe to it.
One terrific photoblogger interviews another terrific photoblogger at Philly Future
First check out Kathleen Connally’s breath taking pictures of rural Pennsylvania at “A Walk Through Durham Township“. Then read Albert’s great interview with her at Philly Future.
Yahoo! buys Konfabulator
Smart. Very smart. Good move Yahoo!: Yahoo Buys Maker of ‘Widget’ Applications – Yahoo! News:
Hoping to pave a new path to its popular Web site, Yahoo Inc. (Nasdaq:YHOO – news) has acquired Konfabulator, a tiny software maker that provides a computer platform for monitoring the weather, stock prices and a wealth of other customized information without opening a Web browser.
The deal, finalized late last week for an undisclosed price, gives Yahoo access to a toolbox of mini-applications — known as widgets — that have built a cult following since Palo Alto-based Konfabulator first introduced them for Apple Computer Inc.’s Macintosh in 2002.
Apple liked the concept so much that it includes a widgets dashboard in the Mac’s operating system. With just three employees, Konfabulator designs its widget software to run on the ubiquitous Windows operating system as well.
…To help popularize the widgets, Yahoo plans will give away the Konfabulator software that empowers the applications. Konfabulator had been charging $20 for the software. Anyone who bought version 2.0 of the software since mid-May will be given refunds, said Konfabulator CEO Arlo Rose.
Yahoo can afford to be generous, having made $755 million in its most recent quarter, including a $563 million profit from selling its remaining stake in Google.
The Sunnyvale-based company still expects to make money from Konfabulator.
Yahoo is counting on the widgets to make users more curious about certain topics, services or events, ultimately driving more traffic to its Web site so it can serve up more moneymaking ads and expand its current base of 10.1 million subscribers who pay for premium services, Schneider said.
Konfabulator’s widgets can be programmed to perform a wide variety of tasks. The most popular applications are local weather and stock quotes, Rose said, but third-party developers have developed thousands of other uses.
For instance, there are widgets that monitor the local traffic or show the remaining power left on a laptop computer’s battery. Other more whimsical widgets serve up comic strips and horoscopes.
The Yahoo deal “gives us whole new buckets of content to grab stuff from.” Rose said.
More:
Om Malik’s Broadband Blog: “Yahoo will keep the app as a free product, and apparently Yahoo will refunding people who purchased it in the last couple of months). Pixoria was just 3 guys – Arlo Rose, Perry Clarke and Ed Voas. This will clearly be a way for Yahoo to spread its API (OpenYahoo) into various desktop applications. Apparently the deal closed last Tuesday”
Paid Content: “The company had built a cult following since it first introduced these “widgets” (geek-speak for these customizable dektop apps) for Apple’s Mac in 2002. Apple liked the concept so much that it includes a widgets dashboard in the Mac’s operating system.
The widgets are designed to make it easy for outsiders to develop and share new applications – a concept that Yahoo wants to encourage as it experiments with new ways to make the wealth of information on its site more useful, the rationale goes.”
Slashdot: “The reason they purchased Konfabulator was they wanted an easy way to open up its APIs to the developer community and allow them easy access to the information on the Yahoo web site.”
Roland Tanglao’s Weblog: “Awesome! Go Yahoo! go!”
Jeff Jarvis: “I think it’s part of feedthink. The difference is that widgets are dynamic; they get current information; they gets feeds…Widgets should be available anywhere, anytime, on any device…Widgets should also be collaborative…It’s all part of feedthink. Yahoo taking this over means that it could do both those things to widgets. We’ll see.”
Yahoo! has already launched widgets.yahoo.com.
Egyptian Bloggers Against Terrorism
Global Voices Online posts links to Egyptian bloggers who attended a pro-peace/anti-terrorism rally.
Their voices are needed, as our ours, for peace. Especially in the face of radical fundamentalists like Sheikh Omar Bakri Mohammed, an Islamic cleric in Britian. He said, after the London attacks, “I would like to see the Islamic flag fly, not only over number 10 Downing Street, but over the whole world” (Washington Post).