PC Advisor: “Apple looks set to introduce its long-awaited iTunes music download service for Windows users on 16 October at a special event in San Francisco”.
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Article in the Guardian on the use of RFid in the UK. “in the early summer, at its superstore in Newmarket Road, Cambridge, Tesco began the world’s first trial of a so-called “smart shelf”. Razor blades are one of the most frequently shoplifted items. Small but relatively expensive, they can be slipped into a pocket. The smart shelf was designed to house packets of Gillette Mach 3 razor blades, each augmented with a tiny RFid tag. The shelf contained a reader and – controversially – a small CCTV camera. Each time a pack of razors was removed, the tag triggered the camera and a picture was taken. Tesco began the trial without much fuss but within weeks, a determined knot of protestors appeared outside the store…” Labour Member of Parliament Tom Watson (who has a weblog) “has applied for a parliamentary debate on the use of RFid. What he will…
I wanted to send an email to Jon after having watched the webcast of his aggregators session at BloggerCon but unfortunately can’t find it. In the presentation Jon said that RSS was one possible step towards solving the problems in email, something that was perhaps worth $1Bn. I am personally interested in being the proud owner of a billion dollars, so was paying attention. Since the question I wanted to ask via email was on the very topic of how RSS really offers something different than email then if Jon reads this through his subscription to this weblog, then perhaps this will illustrate the point. The problem is this: the email channel is too noisy for people like newsletter publishers to use. Assuming for a moment that RSS readers are commonplace in email clients. For pure opt-in Newsletters then RSS works, (Jon is subscribed to this weblog, so he has…
A few weeks ago I posted a piece on the threats of a software monoculture, a New York Times journalist saw the post and interviewed me: ‘Was I an expert? Er – no, its not a new idea and its kind of obvious if you look at argriculture’. Thankfully the CCIA then published a report which levelled the same argument but from a much more authoritative stance. Michael Gartenberg, a Jupiter analyst, posts that the monoculture threat is groundless. His argument: “The fallacy is that diverse systems will not have security issues or holes”. Nobody has claimed that diverse systems would not have flaws, but diverse environments are not prone to the same catastrophic failures that monocultures are susceptible to. Thankfully Gartenberg is a Jupiter analyst and not a farmer.
A new report by Perseus has some interesting statistics: Weblogs updated less than once every two months: 66% Weblogs updated once a day: 1.2% Active blogs (as defined as those which are updated more than once every two months) are updated on average every 14 days. 26% percent of weblogs created are never used more than once. Weblog freshness, like weblog linkedness, follows a power law, something that is important when designing a weblog aggregator, see: ‘Blog Metrics’.
The BBC outlines a project to create a website with photos from 16,146 confluences of latitude and longitude in order to create a unique picture of the world. To do: Afghanistan (64) Bangladesh (15) Bolivia (93) DR Congo (189) Ecuador (32) Kyrgyzstan (18) Libya (155) Madagascar (60) Paraguay (35) Reunion (7) Seychelles (4) Svalbard (71) Turkmenistan (53) Yemen (48)
BBC Radio 3 looks at a variety of architectural subjects for the remainder of the year. Check out the archive links for interviews with Rem Koolhaas, Renzo Piano and Daniel Libeskind. BBC – Radio 3 – Architecture on 3 homepage
“The mayors of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the only two cities in the world to have suffered atomic bombings, blasted Russia on Friday over its plan to consider restricted use of nuclear weapons to deal with regional conflicts and international terrorism” Japan Today-Hiroshima, Nagasaki mayors protest Russia nuke plan
I don’t think I’ve been at a conference lately where someone hasn’t mentioned the words ‘Dave Winer’ within 10 minutes. Even those who may not always agree with Dave have to admit that he is one of the prime connectors in the tech. world, and therefore organizing a conference is something that he is a natural for. I can’t make it to BloggerCon, but I’m sure it will be a success and that as a result there will be others. Blogger Con: Blogroll for BloggerCon
Dive into mark: f8dy categories are so easy to to badly f8dy to do f8dy and so hard to do well jcgregorio yup My categories on the right suck: 1. they don’t match other people’s so they don’t really offer anything that a search on Google doesn’t – categories that aren’t standardized are useless. 2. nobody looks at them So I’m thinking of: using less categories and ones that map to something else; branding the categories so that they look like specialist weblogs.