More details of Namex which allows high precision, fuzzy search for people by name.

About NameX

I know that Dave probably won’t agree with me but now that the big guys are interested in weblogs, weblog software need patents. Search software has long been a patent rich environment, Google has them a plenty and one of the reasons why Overture bought AltaVista was because of their patents.

Weblog software is elegantly simple and depends on innovation that is easily copyable by the bigger companies. All the more need to protect and continue to foster this innovation.

Although patents are often seen to be an anathema to the collaborative world of the developer community, they do offer protection for smaller companies. Perhaps a compromise would be a patent system analogous to the Creative Commons approach to copyright which protects against exploitation whilst preserving the developer community ethos. In other words patents which are not infringed if they are used within open source or non-profit development.

Kevin Lynch has started a weblog.

Kevin is one of the few people who can lay claim to be a true software designer or architect. A Brunel of software design.

Dave Winer boils down the argument for switching to CSS driven layout, its all about getting rid of the damn awful HTML ‘table’ element which has been slowing down page loads for the last few years.

“People responding to the query about a CSS version of Weblogs.Com are asking why I want to nuke the table. Performance.”

Scripting News

Apple gear up further to removing their reliance on Microsoft products with a rumored word processor, back to the old days of Claris then.

Why follow the same product breakdown as Microsoft at all? Do you really need fully fledged applications for ‘word processing’, spreadsheets, presentation?

I rarely use a fully fledged ‘word processor’ and would rather see a completely different view of software, built around a modular framework with a plugin architecture for developers. These plugins could be local or distributed, like locally cacheable web services. I.E. you could remotely load a French spellchecker on demand whilst editing text.

Why not take the principal activities of desktop computing: editing (text, bitmaps, grids, video etc.); publishing (to HTML, XML, PDF); retrieving (a full text database filesystem) and make them modular components of a universal framework application, an extension of the operating system. Microsoft tried this a way back with OLE, but design innovation aside, Microsoft are constrained by their own packaging and revenue streams. I would trust a company like Apple to pull off an architectural rethink such as this with elegance and flair, it seems a shame that they are just cloning the Microsoft product line with added bells and whistles.

MacWhispers.com - Whispers From Around The Mac Community

Ben Hammersley.com: Safari Review
Ben Hammersley posts a to-the-point review of Apple’s new browser:

“Sadly, at first glance it’s shit - No tabbed browsing. Which is now an *ESSENTIAL* part of the UI, and without it a modern browser is just pants. The CSS support seems shoddy too. It’s pretty though.”

Please, please may this browser be shite - near total browser monopolies are great for lazy web design.

via Dave Winer. This year’s Wired awards nominees are up.

What makes the Rave awards special is the focus they put on design in an industry that often treats design as a superficial afterthought.

It is especially gratifying to see that true software architectural design, as opposed to graphic or interface design, is the criterion for the software designer of the year.

Wired Rave Awards

Jim McClellan sees blogs as a newsgroup replacement:Survival guide 2003: Blogs as newsgroups - exactly.

Usenet had two flaws - 1. it was unintuitive for non-techies to setup a new group. 2. People are individualistic and would rather carry on a discussion by posting to their own site and linking to others. EGroups, now Yahoo Groups, solved 1., weblogs solve both 1 and 2. A distributed discussion with individuality intact.

Technical reasons aside, the web took off largely because web pages can now be designed with pretty pictures, otherwise we would all be using something that looked like Minitel.

The year is 2002, I am sitting in front of a computer that 10 years ago would have filled a large bunker and could model the aftershocks of a thermonuclear explosion and I want to find something on this computer.

I have two choices: I can use ‘Start:search:for files or folders’ or I can type something into a browser window. The first will clunk and whir and a couple of seconds later will search the few thousand file names on the computer but will not search the contents of those files. The second will fully search over 3 billion files from other computers and return the answer within 0.2 seconds.

Microsoft Windows is badly designed.