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Aug 07 2003
0

An RSS driven marketplace

Posted by | rss | No Comments

CareerBuilder, which is a joint venture by newspapers, outbid a $25 million per annum deal, struck at the peak of the dotcom bubble, between Monster and AOL, where the jobs service pays the portal for exclusivity. The reason: “newspapers’ jobs classified ad revenue, which dropped by half from $8.7 billion in 2000, to $4.3 billion in 2002”. Imagine if the entire classified ad business not only went online but decentralized and was based around RSS syndication and aggregation? Newspapers: Help wanted in Net ad battle | CNET News.com

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Aug 06 2003
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Light relief from a ‘hand-blog’

Posted by | Uncategorized | No Comments

Don Park reveals the future of Blogging – writing on a note pad. How about a Rube Goldberg (Heath Robinson) device for this. Imagine a retractable ballpoint pen with built in moblogging and character recognition – click the top, start writing and everything is posted to a weblog as a new post when you click and retract the ballpoint.

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Aug 06 2003
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Email – the medium where the viewer pays for the advertising

Posted by | technology | No Comments

Wired discovers that an exposed log file for a ‘penis enlargement pill vendor’ showed that they made $600,000 in one month. Email is a perfect example of the nothing is for free principle. If email cost 1c to send as Evan Williams suggested then spam would be less of a problem. Perhaps in any free network where there is implicit economic value then cost emerges. In the case of Email, the cost of marketing is so low that an undirected shotgun approach is viable. On the receiving end, the effort, and therefore cost, associated with spam filtering make Email like watching a TV channel where the viewer instead of the advertiser has to pay for the commercials.

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Aug 04 2003
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Anglican website links to porn site.

Posted by | religion | No Comments

Conservative Anglican activist, David Virtue, has caused an investigation into gay bishop-elect Gene Robinson because he was “affiliated with a youth Web site that had a link to pornography”. However, applying David Virtue’s criteria to his own site shows that he also links to porn. Read the small print: “The link is on an unaffiliated site that had resources for gay youth. That page provided resources for bisexuals that, a few links away, provided access to porn.” A ‘few links away’. OK lets look at the accusers website: http://www.orthodoxanglican.org/Virtuosity/headlines.html links to: http://pppp.net/links/news/ click: http://pppp.net/links/news/NA.html then: http://pppp.net/links/news/NA.CurrentIssues-Gay_Lesbian.html which links to: http://www.multicom.org/gerbil/gerbil.htm – a hardcore porn site (a straight one).

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Aug 04 2003
0

RSS jobs

Posted by | rss | No Comments

With things like: RSSJobs, it’s good to see two things finally happening: RSS being created on-the-fly from searches; RSS being used for things other than news. At the moment, however, aggregators are largely read-only, and do not read RSS modules’ metadata on-the-fly. The latter will happen as there is more and more metadata available, however, for the former, weblog APIs and RSS need to merge. In theory, one the the things that Atom may provide is a way to automatically bind to and configure any service such as RSSJobs from within a combined ‘meta-aggregator’/weblog publishing client.

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Aug 02 2003
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Clocks can never tell the correct time

Posted by | science | No Comments

In a paradoxical situation that is similar to some of the more bizarre quantum effects, ‘Leap seconds’ are needed because atomic clocks are more accurate than the motion of the earth, against which time needs to be calibrated. “The problem arises because the Earth cannot keep time as accurately as modern atomic clocks, which count the steady shaking of atoms. These atomic clocks replaced the motion of the Earth as the world’s official timekeeper in 1967. The pull of the moon is gradually slowing our planet down, so every now and then our clocks are halted for a second to let it catch up.” “GPS time is now running 13 seconds ahead of coordinated universal time – which includes all added leap seconds and to which most clocks on Earth are set – but is some 19 seconds behind international atomic time, which is based on atomic clocks and ignores…

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Aug 02 2003
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New York Times imitates The Onion

Posted by | trivia | No Comments

The New York Times is a good newspaper – but the headlines are so dull that they border on parody. Today’s priceless example: “No Anthrax found in pond”. Fark however, points to a cracking headline from the Australian News Interactive site: “Dalai Lama misses sex, shoots guns” Sometimes tabloids are just much better fun.

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Jul 31 2003
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Non-Design Classics

Posted by | design | No Comments

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…

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Jul 31 2003
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Microsoft to build its Google/Yahoo rival in-house

Posted by | search engines | No Comments

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.

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Jul 29 2003
0

Reselling MP3’s

Posted by | half baked ideas | No Comments

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.?

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Jul 28 2003
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Kansas is proven to be flatter than a pancake

Posted by | trivia | No Comments

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…”

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