Speaking of AOL, I’m always amazed at how large companies don’t really have to react that fast to threats from better technologies, products or services. In fact in some cases the worst technology actually wins. Email me if you have any suggestions of examples of ‘non-design classics’ that are still around.

Here’s a start:

1. PC Laptops - is it my imagination or, other than Apple, is laptop design actually going backwards?

2. Windows - the original Apple Os was more elegant. We are stuck with impossible uninstalls and no full-text search.

3. Office - I have to fork out $200 just so that I can add comments to other people’s Word files -and Powerpoint - aaargh - the greatest crime in design history, a substandard piece of shareware that pollutes the world with blue blends and horrible fonts.

4. AOL - how did a nasty dial-up service to a walled garden network with ‘get rich quick’ style branding manage not only to survive the Web but acquire a decent media conglomerate?

5. Cadillac - every Cadillac since 1970 looks like a refridgerator on wheels, with a similarly plastic interior and an engine with no engineering finess.

6. VHS - OK DVD’s are finally getting rid of this monster that killed Betamax for the consumer market.

7. Cell phone interfaces. OK, you can get a tricked out Java cellphone with a million added widgets, particulalry if you live in Europe or the Far East, but why can’t you do simple things like store your address book at the provider end - so that you can move to a new phone (on the same network).

8. Stamps - why don’t some mail boxes have franking machines (this personal annoyance is somewhat overcome in the US where you can actually get stamps out of an ATM).

9. Checks - they shouldn’t exist unless the bank personally transcribes all the details into account statements so you can see what the hell has been going on with your money.

10. Retail banks - In a parallel universe, I wish that Paypal had brought them all to their knees.

So it seems that as Yahoo has acquired or de facto acquired Inktomi, AltaVista, FAST and Overture in order to compete against Google, Microsoft is building search in-house.

Google has the brand and focus, Yahoo has the community and customers for value-add extras and Microsoft have the ability to easily combine web and desktop/intranet full-text search. But where have AOL been in all this? AOL is looking increasingly vulnerable with no visible plan for search and a dial-up service that looks expensive when compared to broadband.

Here’s a thought, regularly I pick up second hand vinyl LP’s for $1 from the wondrous Amoeba records.
So why do I have to pay the same per track for MP3s to avoid getting legal action from record companies? What is to stop me buying or selling MP3 tracks ’second hand’ for 10c.?

The latest issue of AIR tackles the problem: is Kansas flatter than a pancake?.

“…For example, the earth is slightly flattened at the poles due to the earth’s rotation, making its semi-major axis slightly longer than its semi-minor axis, giving a global f of 0.00335. For both Kansas and the pancake, we approximated the local ellipsoid with a second-order polynomial line fit to the cross-sections…”

Great article by Matt Welsh on the disenfranchisement of felons.

“the democratic world’s largest pool of adult citizens living under a system of taxation without representation”.

I can never manage to label Matt Welsh’s politics, which means he must have integrity.

Get a move on Apple - please don’t let a crappy half-baked service like BuyMusic.com steal your thunder and get any gullible customers before you launch your Windows music service.

Everything about Buymusic.com looks second rate; its like Tony Soprano hadn’t heard of the dotcom crash and thought he could make a few bucks.

And its not just the service that sucks - the marketing manages to rip off Apple’s TV ads so badly that you think you’re watching a skit on Saturday Night Live, but most of all it’s the product that stinks - music you can’t listen to on an iPod or burn onto a CD.

I feel better now that I got that off my chest.

Most of the RSS feeds that are around are basically feeds from a single source, and few take advantage of metadata within them. However a few more interesting tweaks are happening. One is on-the-fly RSS generated from a search term.

Wired now allows this and Moreover has been allowing customers to create on-the-fly RSS feeds based on parametric searches over metadata contained in its database for some time. The interesting thing is that a feed based upon a query over metadata, further creates metadata that can enrich the original source. This ’round tripping’ of XML metadata potentially allows for enriching information as it flows around the web - this round tripping can be an infinite virtuous circle.

As a simple example: Suppose an RSS feed contains the full content of articles and an on-the-fly RSS feed can be created by searching this full content. If you create an RSS feed of articles mentioning the term ‘80211.b’, then all articles returned can have a topic tag attached that labels them as being about ‘wireless’, based upon a thesaurus lookup. Tagging the articles with this metadata as a topic is enriching the original source with further metadata.

Yesterday I had an unexpected treat from a friend, Addy, who gave me a full tour around Ideo in Palo Alto. This tour made me wistful of architecture, so many tech offices are so boring or like Google’s HQ, have slightly forced and oh so obvious eccentricity - bean bags and lava lamps and a Segway.

Ideo, like many design operations has a real feel of creativity, an Exploratorium for grown ups - it has all the toys, from video editing suites, photographic studios, model shops, paint shops, electronics assembling etc. but there are some nice touches. Everywhere you look, gleaming high-tech bicycles hang from the ceiling - each desk has a pulley to hoist your bike above your desk and drawers full of high tech goodies are scattered around the office. My favorite of these was the ‘tech box’ which had drawers marked ‘cool mechanisms’ and ‘amazing materials’ full of - well what they said. All the items within were catalogued and could be looked up in a database via the intranet.

The highlight, however, was a demo of a thing called a Sound Spotlight - an invention that Ideo have been given the task to productize. A foot square rectangular box, rather like a speaker, is attached to a CD player - in this case playing bird noises. Point the box at any surface and the sound appears to emanate from the surface rather than the box. By moving the box in our hands we had a flock of birds appearing to be nesting in the rafters 50 feet away and then in the palm of my hand a second later.

“BERLIN (Reuters) - A giant catfish that ate a dog and terrorized a German lake for years has washed up dead”.

So much better than a ‘man bites dog’ story.

Reuters | Latest Financial News / Full News Coverage

Apparently Mark Twain used to call his immaculate white linen outfits his ‘don’t give a damn’ suits.

Jeff Jarvis blogs verbatim and tears apart a sub editor’s changes to an article for a ’scholarly journal’.

“Aw, to hell with it. I decided to just put the piece up here, for you are the audience I care about, not the handful of insular souls who’ll read a self-referential, self-reverential faux scholarly periodical about weblogs”.

I have this fantastic image of a drab, librarian-type cowering behind a stack of old books, dust flying, as a 6′ 4″ Jarvis in a don’t give a damn suit slams his original manuscript on the top of the pile. Weblogs allow you to do that - but without getting dust on your jacket.

BuzzMachine… by Jeff Jarvis