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
19th Century Salons were stuffy places that disappeared, today as much ‘intellectual’ chit chat takes place in saloon bars and cafes. [OK this is actually just to post rationalize the headline]. Ken Layne spies some changes at Salon and identifies it with the current trend to what Jeff Jarvis calls ‘nanopublishing’ and Nick Denton is doing in serial fashion. “Maybe someone or something is buying Salon. Maybe they’ll run it cheaply, like the group Web log that it is. “
Bruce Bartlett: I think they [weblogs] are going to revolutionize politics and news gathering permanently. via Doc Searls
As the Apple faithful gather in San Francisco, Merrill Lynch rains on the parade and advises Apple investors to sell. This should be a great time for Apple, people are increasingly buying PC’s and software because of good design, something that Apple excels at. As the PC market saturates, Dell and Gateway and the likes are selling peripherals, again, with the iPod, Apple has demonstrated its prowess. Thirdly Apple has successfully courted a new market, developers, with the popularity of its Unix based operating system. Merrill’s gripe is that Apple’s hardware product pipeline is stymied by the fact that it cannot compete with Wintel PC’s on price/performance. So what is the problem? Answer, Intel not inside. Apple went with Motorola, and Motorola got distracted elsewhere and could not match the price performance of Intel. Although Apple are switching away from Motorola, it is not to AMD or Intel, but to…
Interviewer: Have you always prided yourself as a master of self-deprecation? Toby Young: I wouldn’t describe myself as a master of anything. I guess that no means yes. mediabistro: content: so what do you do? via Gawker
Although not very well known in the US, Espotting has search engine paid placement sewn up in Europe. As Overture faces pressure from Wall St. to maintain growth to justify its current valuation, Espotting looks like an obvious acquisition target to improve Overture’s position in Europe.
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.
1. Verity will dominate enterprise search trailed by Autonomy with Google nipping their heels at the low end. 2. The categorization space will cease to exist other than a few niche players, possibly Stratify and InXight. 3. The enterprise portal space that effectively vaporized with the acquisition of Epicentric and mundane performance of Plumtree will be replaced by EAI vendors. They will raise the portal idea to the next level, linking enterprise applications that have standardized web services based APIs. 4. There will be an inevitable weblog backlash as big players show interest but get it wrong. 5. There will be an XML backlash as people realize that companies have been paying lip service to standards whilst building a colossal Tower of Babel. 6. Telco’s that did not get burnt by 3G licenses such as Italia Telecom will go on shopping sprees and get some good stuff cheap. 7. Japan…
Ian from Sweden answers my question as to whether you can close attributes: Is this legal?. Thanks Ian – and damn I hate the fact that you have to count tags to find which one a closing tag relates to. Style sheets might as well consist of curly brackets. “Unfortunately, David, classified span endtag isn’t legal. Not in HTML 4.01, which is the latest standard I stick to, and thus hardly in newer, that tend to be ever more restrictive than previous ones. I created a shell html doc with that item and sent it to validation…. alas, the syntaxnazis have again won this time. Validator So your only legal parsable recourse is this kludge: <span class="foo">bar</span><!–</span class="foo">–> “
Jeff is right about Vlogs, in fact blogging will become the de facto standard for any type of online publishing – because its simple and easy. Imagine for example, the effects of digital camera attachments to cellphones and ‘picture messaging’ – currently on free trial in the UK. Now imagine an SMS to blog gateway and a picture weblog posting pictures of celebrities snapped by passers by. Ubiquitous digital cameras and simple publishing will give way to a new type of Bloggerazzi – celebrities beware.
Aaaanyway, so I was sitting in a ludicrously trendy bar somewhere in the ‘Schmillage‘, feeling mildly inadequate, when it was pointed out that because there were two people with Mohicans, this was clearly the start of a global trend. My first instinct – bollocks, but now I am seeing them everywhere. Conclusion – I have either lost my mind or everyone else has. This time the Mohican is different – it is not the six inch, superglued, punk rebel thing, but a sort of ironic, wear it with designer clothes, look – a post modern Mohican or Pomohawk. The genealogy of this haircut is different too – clearly there has been a progression from 1. the mop-top messy haircut that it now mainstream to 2. the ‘Hoxton fin‘ where the mess is brushed into the middle currently claiming victims all over London, leading finally to 3. shaving the sides off…