Oct 27 2005
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Web 2.0 = Dotcombomb 2.0 = Bollocks 2.0 = Over: Joel Spolsky revives the infamous architecture astronauts metaphor to mark its end.

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Joel is “starting to see a new round of pure architecture astronautics: meaningless stringing-together of new economy buzzwords in an attempt to sound erudite….I’ll do my part. I hereby pledge never again to use the term “Web 2.0″ on this blog, or to link to any article that mentions it. You’re welcome.” Most of what is ‘Web 2.0’ is based around ideas of a few people who had to ride out Web 1.0 with no buzz or funding, while people selling fresh mangos online were talking to VCs. This time perhaps the good people, the Evan Williams’ Dave Winers’ (yes, dammit, Dave Winer), ‘Ian Clarke equivalents are in their garretts building the real next generation web. Those people will be beavering away, building instead of talking. On that note – I’d guess I’d better get back to work. Joel on Software – Friday, October 21, 2005

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Oct 19 2005
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Yahoo picks Cribcandy

Posted by | diary | No Comments

Cribcandy is today’s Yahoo pick: “A sleek catalog of nifty gadgets and hip furniture… like a Gizmodo or Engadget for Eames chair enthusiasts. You may also be looking at the future of online shopping — this site uses “wists,” or bookmarkable thumbnails, to create its constant feed of tiny images from boutiques and blogs across the Web.”

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Oct 18 2005
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Deconstructing Jakob Nielsen’s ‘R.I.P. WYSIWG’.

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Jakob Nielsen says that the new UI paradigm to replace Apple’s will come from Microsoft: “Macintosh-style interaction design has reached its limits. A new paradigm, called results-oriented UI, might well be the way to empower users in the future…The next version of Microsoft Office (code-named “Office 12″) will be based on a new interaction paradigm called the results-oriented user interface” Results-oriented UI turns out to be templates. Because there are too many options in MS Office to have individual commands the idea is that the results of groups of them are displayed. It is, perhaps, a bit rich for anyone to champion Microsoft over Apple in terms of design at the moment, but design is subjective, I guess. Where Nielsen is provably wrong, however, is where he confuses User Interface with User Interaction (isn’t he supposed to be an expert in Interaction?): “rather than typing in commands and parameters, users…

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Oct 18 2005
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What the Moreover, Weblogs.com, Verisign deal means.

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This is my personal opinion and does not reflect any company policy. Most web content is published and then indexed when a search engine finds it, taking up to 30 days. In the past submitting your site to a search engine was the done thing – now its coming back, only better. Search engines have completely different indexes for news and weblog search, because the indexes need to be updated more quickly, to be able to do this they cannot search the entire web every few minutes but need to be alerted – or pinged. Currently, ‘pings’ to sites like weblogs.com or ping-o-matic or blo.gs say that SOMETHING has been updated on a weblog or news site. Specs such as RSSPing change this to a ping that says WHAT has been updated. If all pages being published on the web did this (and there is no technical reason why they…

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Oct 14 2005
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LED lighting to transform architecture

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Today’s Cribcandy has a list of some of the most recent innovations in LED lighting from being directly embedded into fabrics, bathroom tiles and translucent glass. LED’s are currently only in widespread use for applications with high maintenance costs such as traffic lights, but as their performance increases over the next 5 to 10 years, they will eventually replace standard home and office lighting and transform the way that interiors can be designed. Aside from the tiny size of LED’s (or the even newer LECs (Light Emitting Capacitors), LED’s are approaching the lifespan of standard building materials, making it cost effective to embed them directly in structural components and architectural finishes. The biggest change, however, is that because the currents involved are tiny, LED lighting can be directly controlled, digitally, meaning that there are almost unlimited effects that can be produced cheaply and controlled wirelessly. Given that transparent wiring can…

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Oct 11 2005
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How DRM will kill the recording industry.

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When IBM approached little Microsoft to supply them with an OS to service a market for computers that individuals owned, they did not see the lock in that would mean that Microsoft would soon be telling IBM what to do. The combined hubris and stupidity of the record labels is repeating this game of switch with Apple. The music guys thought that they could test the waters with electronic delivery with an also ran like Apple and use tight DRM to make sure that they weren’t fueling the file sharing networks. As this excellent piece in brainwash points out, AFF’s Brainwash :: The recording industry’s new clothes, they have created the Microsoft of music. Apple now owns the customer, even if you have most of your music as MP3s on an iPod but a few songs you have bought from the iTunes music store, you have a real dollar value…

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Oct 10 2005
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Verisign acquires Moreover Technologies

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The company that Nick Denton, Angus Bankes and I started on my kitchen table in Shoreditch, in 1998, sells to Verisign – I can’t comment, but Tom Foremski has the scoop and Rafat Ali more details, including a link to a good piece on Moreover by Jason Kottke, who use to work in my team: Moreover was early on some things, news search before Google news and RSS and weblog search. The thing that we did with Evan and Meg, from Blogger, Newsblogger, was kinda cool – and we almost bought Blogger, but who knows. I have been banging on about the importance of ping servers for a while, perhaps Versign with Moreover and Weblogs.com can do something or perhaps another startup will. Whatever happens, the architecture of online publishing is changing and with it, the entire architecture of search – pinged instead of crawled. That is a very big…

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Oct 10 2005
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An iPod for books

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Of all the gadgets which must be coming soon, this is what I want: A super high res, digital paper, ebook which boots instantly and allows web browsing with lower resolution bitmap images and print quality vector text. This news.com article shows why it hasn’t happened yet. Forget blogs–print needs its own iPod | CNET News.com

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Oct 06 2005
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What was ancient Rome like

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1. Most Romans were on welfare. 2. Many Roman citizens living in Rome were not ‘Italian’, but anything from German to Indian. 3. Rome had an African Emperor, Severus. 4. The last Roman Emperor had the same name as the first – Romulus. 5. Rome was only ever defeated by the French and the Romanians. 6. Rome had a population of a million. 7. Julius Caesar wiped out a million French in genocide. 8. Romans thought that pants were girly. 9. Pagan Rome could absorb other cultures by absorbing their gods. Monotheism made this impossible, and martyrdom made it impossible to attack. Christianity was one of the major reasons that Rome ultimately fell and Europe slipped into the dark ages. It only really emerged when secular culture and scientific reason developed in Italy after the middle ages with people like Galileo. Frontpage — The Ammianus Marcellinus Online Project

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Oct 05 2005
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Is Yahoo more Web 2.0 than Google?

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Whatever Web 2.0 really is, and in some ways its an empty ‘container meme’ for a meme that will morph into whatever is most convenient and successful, Yahoo are looking pretty well equiped to give Google a run for their money in the more media centric worlds of social applications and publishing. When did you last use Orkut? When did you last use Flickr? With a media savvy exec. team and some small but smart acquisitions: Oddpost; Flickr and now Upcoming, Yahoo have the people, the components and the technical approach to create a synergy of social applications with next generation UI. It used to be that using online apps. was a trade-off of functionality and performance vs not having to worry about maintenance, upgrades or backups or ability to move from one machine to another. With Gmail or Oddpost, there is no trade-off, my desktop email client crashed when…

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