technology

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...

Evolution Robotics: Robot kits, personal robots; design & build robots

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.

Good Experience - Interview: Rick Robinson, VP of Community Products, AOL "Weblogs, over the last several years, have migrated to replace, in some cases, people's home pages. It's natural that the blog and the home page would combine. And when you remember that AOL has the largest collection of home pages in the world, it kinda gets interesting." via Anil

Everybody's talkin... about decentralization at Supernova. Chris Gulker posts some fascinating weblog metrics which demonstrate that in ultra networked communities like weblogs popularity shows a power law distribution where traffic naturally centralizes. So although the Internet may be a meritocracy of equal opportunity, some become more equal than others.

Jeff Jarvis, who knows much more about publishing than most, looks at the New York 'Cityblog' and explains why listings on their own don't pay. My issue with Cityblog and with collaborative blogs like Boingboing is that weblogs are primarily about people. Weblogs are publishing taken to its ultimate extreme in terms of efficiency where there are no distribution or production costs other than the time and effort of the writer and its ultimate utility in terms of benefit for the reader - I read to hear what the writer has to say, and as I get to know the writer the nuances are easier and the communication better. This is why the byline free Economist is so damn frustrating. With weblogs I'll read whatever Jon Udell says about web services or Jason Kottke says about web design and, because they are all published separately, I can jumble them up...

Jon Udell: Scale-free networks and mirror worlds The inimitable Jon Udell writes about networks - about Javaspaces and Tuplespaces, loose coupling and grid computing - and I can't help thinking that these uber trends which would seem to be profound leaps and bounds in the punctuated evolution of computing are often to do with very banal issues, often involving the relative strengthening and weakening of various points in the information processing chain that only exist because of cost. Is there a trend towards clustered cheap servers because the weak link between disks and RAM (that justified expensive Sun hardware with a fancy BUS) is no longer needed if you keep things in cheap memory? Is it in turn, the availability of these swarms of cheap boxes that is really driving the possibilities of grid computing? What would happen if the on board memory on a chip were as cheap as...

I just had to find out what 'reality is a robotic fish tank driven by Siamese' was. For a peek into the mind of the criminally insane - or alternatively the mind of installation artists, look no further than this project by Ken Rinaldo: Augmented Fish Reality is a robotic fish tank driven by Siamese Fighting Fish Here is the gist: 1.Siamese Fighting Fish can apparently see out of their bowls. 2.Siamese Fighting Fish can see other Fish in other bowls. 3. Siamese fighting Fish will swim towards the other Fish with the resoluteness of a search and destroy mission. 4. A lunatic/genius artist puts several bowls of Siamese Fish in a room, each bowl is on a minature electric cart and contains sensors to move the bowl in the direction the fish is swimming in. 5. The whole fish-eye view of the impending carnage is projected on the walls...

The Epicentric/Vignette deal is interesting. Portals are about aggregation and CMS is about publishing. It links the portal and content management space and demonstrates that webservices will be a part of content management - no big surprise. More interesting, however, is that this is the model that was innovated on a grass-roots level with hybrid RSS news aggregation and weblog publishing systems like Dave Winer's Radio Userland. Weblog publishing via standard XML based RPC API's coupled with RSS aggregation are perhaps the template for all future enterprise content management systems. On a secondary note, it is bad news for Plumtree, with Epicentric, their nearest rival, selling for $32M it proves that they will have to go way beyond the current portal space into EAI (Enterprise Application Integration) to validate their $70M market cap (already way below their peak of nearly $300M). To do this quickly will involve developing adapters into...

Grauniad: When did you encounter the internet? Chomsky: In the early days of the military Arpanet, my daughter was studying in Nicaragua. Because the US was essentially at war with them, contact was difficult. I managed to use MIT's Arpanet connection and she found one, so we could communicate thanks to the Pentagon! David: When did you buy your first anorak? Chomsky: I was living with the Eskimo's in Northern Canada, and was presented with one made out of woven seal's whiskers. The Guardian | Working IT out: Noam Chomsky