TagCloud:”Essentially, TagCloud searches any number of RSS feed you specify, extracts keywords from the content and lists them according to prevalence within the RSS feeds. Clicking on the tag’s link will
display a list of all the article abstracts associated with that keyword.”

Very, very nice. I gotta check this out. Some nice features we can use for Philly Future.

A physical object oriented data interface. Interesting and eye opening. Download the mpg movie right here. via ericd.

I’m not sure if this is a public url or not, but Yahoo! has a terrific guide on how publishers can use Yahoo! to distribute content. Lots of RSS related tips.

The more I look at this, the more I think Yahoo! intends to compete with Feedburner and BlogAds.

Speaking of Yahoo!, Jeremy Zawodny gives us a real peak at product development at companies like Yahoo! that should be an eye opener for bloggers and journalists alike who are not familiar with how these things happen at large companies (like my own employer).

…I’m going to let you in on a little secret about how products are developed at large companies–even large Internet companies that some people think are fast on their feet.

Larger companies rarely can respond that quickly to each other. It almost never happens. Sure, they may talk a good game, but it’s just talk. Building things on the scale that Microsoft, Google, AOL, or Yahoo do is a complex process. It takes time.

Journalists like to paint this as a rapidly moving chess game in which we’re all waiting for the next move so that we can quickly respond. But the truth is that most product development goes on in parallel. Usually there are people at several companies who all have the same idea, or at least very similar ones. The real race is to see who can build it faster and better than the others.

Think about this the next time a news story makes it sound like Yahoo is trying to one-up Google. Or MSN is “responding” to last week’s launch of a new AOL service.

It’s easy to get caught up in the drama of it all. But reality is often quite different than what you read.

The man tells the truth.

Deep Throat, J-School and Newsroom Religion – PressThink:

…she “loved chasing stories and exposing public corruption and giving a voice to the downtrodden.” That’s the lord’s prayer in the mainline church of journalism right there. And I think it’s dead on too when McGrath (now a happy freelancer) adds: “I’m still that idealistic.”

Deans of Journalism, scribble a note: Investigative reporting, exposing public corruption, and carrying the mantle of the downtrodden were taught to McGrath not as political acts in themselves–which they are–and not as a continuation of the progressive movement of the 1920s, in which the cleansing light of publicity was a weapon of reform–which they are–but just as a way of being idealistic, a non-political truthteller in the job of journalist. (Which is bunk.)

This kind of instruction is guaranteed to leave future journalists baffled by the culture wars, and in fact the press has been baffled to find that it has political opponents. Well, jeez louise, so did the progressives of the 1920s! As far as the religion knows, none of this is happening. And J-schools–by passing the faith along but making little room for non-believers–are part of the problem.

In the newsroom faith that I have been describing, Watergate is not just a big, big story with a knock-out ending. It is the great redemptive tale believers learn to tell about the press and what it can do for the American people. It is a story of national salvation: truth their only weapon, journalists save the day. Whether the story can continue to claim enough believers–and connect the humble to the heroic in journalism–is to my mind a big question. Whether it should continue is an even better question.

With the Mac moving to Intel and with the spate of stories on income mobility, I think the timing of my posting Influences – Wanamaker’s, the Mac and Me to be downright funny.

Flash Platform announcement.

Even with the terrific writing I’ve seen encouraging the deprecation of blogrolls, I don’t think I could go on without one (or two). I’ve brought it back, on its own page (I had it there long ago), and added the Philly Future list. The urge is to turn it into a personal public aggregator. I mean – why use Bloglines when there are tools like Planet that make it easy for me maintain one myself?

Macromedia aligns with Eclipse | CNET News.com:

Macromedia said it will join the Eclipse Foundation and create a “next-generation rich Internet application development tool,” code-named Zorn, based on Eclipse.

“This is a big move for us because we’ve always used our own tools,” said Kevin Lynch, Macromedia’s chief software architect. “Now we’re adopting an open-source approach to build a new tool. It’s important for the Flash platform because there’s a growing community of developers adopting Eclipse and we would like to enable developers for the Flash platform to take advantage of it.”

For the past few years, Macromedia has been trying to transform Flash from a Web design and animation tool into a technology for creating Internet-based applications. Against heated competition by everything from existing Web technologies to Microsoft’s long-delayed new operating system, code-named Longhorn, Macromedia has claimed some success with the adoption by more than 300 enterprises of its Flex application server software, which is used to create Flash applications.

Now Macromedia, which Adobe Systems in April announced its intention to acquire, is taking the Web application fight to developers, many of whom have long regarded Flash as a design language.

“Historically, one of the challenges Macromedia has faced is that the Flash development metaphor has been foreign to people familiar with (Microsoft’s) Visual Basic and Visual Studio,” said Burton Group analyst Peter O’Kelly. “These people think in terms of projects and forms and code modules, as opposed to timelines, movies and scripts that Flash’s creative designers know.”

I was playing hooky from school, which I was apt to do from time to time. I was consistently on the honor roll in class – yet never did homework and only haphazardly showed up. A combination of boredom, social awkwardness, and lack of supervision drove me to cut class and do a rather odd thing with my time – explore the city. The year was 1985 and I was 13.

Getting around Philly was an amazingly cheap thing to do for someone so young and so small. Timing your run under the turnstiles for the leaving of an El, just before its doors were to close, or blending into the flow of passengers crossing between shuttle busses and trains, or entering thru the back exit door on certain busy bus routes – it was easy. No one stops a 13 year old kid in a crowd who looks like he knows what he’s doing and casts an innocent glance when looked at. They think your parent must be somewhere.

I loved people watching and one of my haunts was Wanamaker’s on Market Street. Wanamaker’s was a very upscale department store, still is in its current incarnation as Lord & Taylor’s (the renaming is a crime I tell ya). Folks who shopped here were of a different world then mine – the pace was slower and the faces brighter – yet they did not notice me as I passed thru, while I munched on a soft pretzel with mustard.

They had opened a display on one of the upper floors for the Apple Macintosh. Ten of them arrayed in a semi circle, in a darkened atmospheric alcove. A chair invitingly in front of each. The upper floors of Wanamaker’s by day were pretty empty. Quiet. And seeing that display – well it was like I was suddenly presented with the entire Star Wars action figure collection… well close. That might be going too far.

I remember the walk to a chair and sitting down. The effort it took to be nonchalant – important if I wasn’t to raise a stir with staff and get thrown out – was very hard. It had to be only around five paces for me yet it felt like forever. I remember sitting down. I remember taking the mouse and opening up MacPaint – and I remember drawing! A couple of store hands came over to watch – one clearly said – “he seems to know what he’s doing – I think it’s OK” – and let me go. I felt empowered. I knew nothing of computers yet here I was manipulating one and folks observing asking “hey, how did you do that?”. I think I sat there for a couple hours. I recall a tutorial to familiarize yourself with the Mac that I took. I headed out when the major shopping crowd started to shuffle in.

I wouldn’t own a computer for a couple of years later – it was a Commodore 64C since the Mac was way out of reach. But it’s impact on me was undeniable.

Rafe, I hope you don’t mind me riffing off of one of another of your posts again, but I found myself in the same situation as you over the book post – there were no books that got me inspired about computers – it was the computers themselves that got me hooked.