Category Archives: Communications, Connection, Internet, Web, Media

Two at Ask Metafilter

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Ask Metafitler: Desktop video capture:

What’s the best program to use for capturing video from the desktop? Say, if I wanted to provide a visual tutorial in Photoshop that I could save as a video.

Wink sounds cool.

Ask Metafilter: Independence or stability?:

What’s the best way to finance a small business? Or should I, at this junction?

I’m looking at the possibilities of financing a business. I have a pretty clear idea of the business concept, and a fair idea of the business potential. However, my debt-to-investments ratio is just about 1:1, and both numbers are not terribly high. The business wouldn’t, in and of itself, cost a whole lot to start up but I’d have to support myself and my family (wife, with an upcoming child) while it got going. The debts I have will be paid off within 1 year. The opportunity I see in the business could be taken over by someone else within that timeframe.

What questions should I be asking myself in order to gauge my financial ability to start this business? Or, with a child coming up, should I just stay at my current job (which is fairly stable, if not possessing any expansion capability whatsoever) until debts are paid off and kid is born?

AOL gets RSS religion with My AOL…and Feedster’s help

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SiliconBeat: AOL gets RSS religion with My AOL…and Feedster’s help:

It’s slightly ironic that AOL is just now introducing an RSS feed aggregator service, since it was Netscape that led development of RSS waaaay back in the day, and AOL owns Netscape. But we digress. The news tonight is that AOL has finally hopped on the RSS bandwagon, now that it’s pushing it services out from behind its fabled walled garden.

The service is called My AOL, and it’s not unlike My Yahoo, in concept, we’re told. It’s a page that users can customize with content from RSS feeds.

…Interestingly, the service will not require a user to log in. Instead, it will use cookies to identify users. If someone wants to use the service on another computer, they’ll have a unique URL that they can use. Seems a bit clunky, but Parkins said it fits in with AOL’s move away from subscription-only services.

Parkins stressed that My AOL is a beta, and that many more features are planned.

There’s a Silicon Valley angle. The new service is a major coup for Feedster, the San Francisco RSS search engine. In its biggest deal to date, Feedster is providing the technology that lets My AOL users find feeds they want to subscribe to, CEO Scott Rafer tells us.

My AOL users will also be able to subscribe to searches, again using Feedster technology. So if you wanted to follow news about the Supreme Court justice confirmation, you could subscribe to a search with those terms and watch the headlines flow in automatically. AOL also tells us that Feedster is adding an “Add to My AOL” button next to search results to make it easy to subscribe to news sources and blogs — much like the the “Add to My Yahoo” button that we’re seeing so much of these days.

Technorati in BusinessWeek

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David Sifry and Technorati in Business Week: Tracking the Blogs:

Q: You say you welcome competition from Google, Yahoo, and MSN, should they decide to offer blog search. Why would you welcome such Net heavyweights as rivals?
A: The larger question is, is it really competition? I look at what Google and Yahoo and other companies in this space are doing, and they’re really fantastic at helping you pick out what’s the best reference site for something. You go to Google and type in wine, and it will tell you the best places to buy wine. But if you really want to find out what the world’s leading wine experts are talking about, Google isn’t really built to do that.

Q: Why can’t they build themselves up to do that with a blog search engine?
A: Well, good luck. We’ve been doing it now for almost three years, and it’s a lot harder than you think. Doing it on a small scale is not terribly difficult. Doing it to scale becomes pretty hard, and every day the blogosphere is growing by leaps and bounds.

The blogosphere today is about 30 times as big as it was three years ago. So just to give you some ideas on what that means: Every single day we’re seeing about 80,000 new people who are starting blogs. And we’re seeing about 900,000 new posts every single day. So that’s about 11 posts every single second that you’ve got to now index, you’ve got to score it, you’ve got to make sense out of all of its relevance, and you’ve got to push it to your servers really, really fast so people can stay up to date with what’s going on.

…Q: You say Google can’t tell you what wine experts are talking about, but Technorati can. How do you do that?
A: When you think about the words that we use when we talk about the Web, we talk about pages, we talk about documents, we talk about directories. What does that mean, the language, the metaphor we use when we think about the Web today?

Q: It’s a print culture metaphor.
A: Exactly. But there’s a long way to go. We’re really trying to do something a little different from that. What Technorati is trying to do is looking at the Web in a different way. And the way that I like to think of it is, it’s like this big river, it’s like this conversation flow. It’s about people and conversations.

Just as Google invented page rank, reordering the way that we sort the Web, what we did was say, “O.K., why don’t we take the same idea and apply it to people.” So the way that Technorati calculates what we call “Net attention” is we look at how many people are linking to you.

…Q: What are you working on that business users might be excited about?
A: First, there’s advertising and sponsorship. Business users can advertise on search results that have something to do with their company.

Second, we’re unveiling a new service in August that’s currently in beta testing that’s geared toward professionals — people who need a deeper view of a company or its products, such as PR people, people in marketing or advertising, financial analysts. [Basically,] people who need to track buzz, how it changes over time, who are the influencers who is talking about their company or their product. These will be subscription products.

Motherhood and Apple Pie

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lesscode.org: Motherhood and Apple Pie [@lesscode.org]:

The internet is not an accident. The internet was not bound to happen. There was no guarantee that the internet would reach its current state as a side effect of emerging digital processing and communications capabilities. We did not recover complex alien technology.

The internet, that place where all eventual business will be transacted, all content and media will be distributed, all correspondence will be exchanged, all history will be recorded, and all pornography will be is being admired, has a design – and its meant for exactly these purposes.

Many of the principles that led to this design are still with us today, although I would challenge you to ascertain them by observing the mainstream technologies being peddled by leading vendors, publications, and analyst firms. Those who rose to power in a much different environment, where the short-term profits of disconnected, dead-end business software was deemed more important than laying a fertile ground where millions of new ideas (and hence new profits) could bloom.

But the dead-end has long been reached and so these industry leaders have turned their attention to this new place, built on principles and values very different from their own, and have somehow reached the conclusion that this thriving ecosystem must be re-arranged such that they have somewhere to place their baggage. Instead of embracing the people, principals, and technologies that gave rise to this phenomenon they have chosen to subvert its history and to implant the ridiculous notion that it is â€Ŕincapable of meeting the stringent demands of the business community.â€?

Not only have these business radicals claimed the internet as their own but they have also somehow gained the confidence of all the worlds industry in their ability to deliver a new and sparkling internet, one no doubt capable of reproducing the complexities and flaws that plague existing mediums so as to make it feel more like home. They’ve brought their own principles and agendas, asserting them as obvious and correct while ignoring the wisdom we’ve gained and shared and gained and shared over years of collaborative practice and observation of working systems at this scale.

A great essay. I don’t agree with some of his conclusions, but it and especially its source material are must reads.