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Jul 26 2003
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Buymusic.com: Ripoff, Cash in and Burn

Posted by | software design | No Comments

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.

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Jul 25 2003
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Round-tripping RSS

Posted by | rss | No Comments

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…

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Jul 25 2003
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A gadget freak’s heaven, tour of Ideo

Posted by | design | No Comments

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…

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Jul 23 2003
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Jeff ‘don’t give a damn’ Jarvis

Posted by | Uncategorized | No Comments

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

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Jul 23 2003
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I just love Matt Jones’ diagrams

Posted by | software design | No Comments

One of the treats of the last O’Reilly Emerging Technology conference was to see Matt Jones’ excellent presentation design (along with some on stage air-guitar antics). Within software, design is often treated either as a superficial veneer or as a reductionist process where aesthetics seem to disappear altogether. Unlike Jakob Nielsen, people like Jason Kottke and Matt Jones are true information architects. ideal_process2.gif 773×544 pixels

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Jul 22 2003
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(Not)Atom and RSS

Posted by | rss | No Comments

In some ways RSS could be accused of being the Emperors New Clothes of standards – the acronym has more than one meaning (including the Hindu Nationalist one), there are multiple versions, extending it via modules makes its use as generic as XML itself, and if you normalize the data flowing around in RSS, then the lowest common denominator is some text with a link surrounding it – hardly metadata, more like hypertext links. But to some extent, all standards are like the Emperors New Clothes in that they are not so much about specs and technical precision, but the virtual mindset that they occupy and the people and tools that use them. To this end, RSS is a winning meme, people outside of the grass roots weblog community are starting to talk about and use it and RSS 2.0 passes the good enough test (with a couple of tweaks…

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Jul 22 2003
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Lindows PC for less than $200

Posted by | technology | No Comments

What I like most about this is that the latest version of Lindows runs off a CD so there is no need to install the OS and you can run it on a machine with another OS installed without having to mess around with dual boot settings. Techweb > News > Lindows Powers $169 Web-centric PC > Lindows Powers $169 Web-Centric PC

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Jul 19 2003
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BBC says that WMD scandal is enough to cause the UK governement to fall.

Posted by | politics | No Comments

A few days ago Tony Blair had possibly reached his zenith. basking in 17 standing ovations before congress. How quickly things change. Today the BBC reports on the scandal surrounding the suicide of the WMD report whistle blower: “Governments have fallen and prime ministerial careers have collapsed over less.” Even members of Blair’s own party are calling for his resignation. The most likely outcome is that Blair’s spin doctor and/or defence secretary will resign, but if the UK governement falls because of a scandal surrounding false evidence over weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, then Bush may have a problem. BBC NEWS | Politics | Kelly death ‘changes everything’

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Jul 18 2003
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France bans ’email’

Posted by | trivia | No Comments

The French language police have decided that people shouldn’t use the word email but instead the term courriel, based on courrier electronique which they claim has common currency. Unless you check Google.fr of course. So here’s a thought – France has a lot to offer, without its language – it’s famous for Food and drink and sex for gods sake – and the English (read American – this is not a patriotic rant) language accepts this: restaurant, beverage, embrace. A siege mentality about the French language doesn’t really preserve French culture at all, in fact if anything it prevents its appeal spreading – from the lack of a French originated point of view during the Iraq war (due to lack of english language transalations of French newspapers, most french opinion was propogated through anti-French, english speaking commentators) to the absence of decent cheese, manadatory kissing and high-speed railroads in the…

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Jul 18 2003
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RSS resolution

Posted by | rss | No Comments

For the record, I am onboard with Dave’s move to take RSS to the next level and appointing Brent Simmons and Jon Udell to an advisory board. At some point it would be good if this went through a standards organization like the W3C, however. I would suggest that it would be good if all RSS development focuses around a 2.0 core and that the developer community focus on RSS modules on the one hand and a message wrapper for RSS content based upon weblog API’s on the other. With this any RSS 1.0 community work or Atom (Echo) work should fold into this arena. RSS 2.0 meets the requirement that I see as key (extensibility through modules) and any fragmentation of effort will be counter productive. There is plenty of work to do with defining modules and message wrappers – and to that I would add ‘ping’ server architecture,…

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