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Guest DaveNet: A Personal Look at Blogging.  Steve Gillmor: "At the intersection of two disruptive technologies lies the Bermuda Triangle of the Digital Age. Wi-Fi (802.11 wireless communications) and Weblogs (the untethered journalism of the immediate) are comingling to produce an intoxicating blend of chaos and innovation." Almost parenthetically, in the piece linked to above, Steve announces that Jon Udell is now writing for InfoWorld. Best wishes to both Jon and his new colleagues. David Hyatt: "The single biggest contributor to Mozilla 1.0, and without a doubt the driving force without which Mozilla would not have been possible, is AOL." Survey: How do you find new stuff to read on the Web?  Daniel Berlinger suggests I might be happier with an iPod. In some ways I agree. I like that Apple solved the problem that I have. I'm sure it's a great music player. But. Does it have an FM receiver? I was disappointed that the NEC palmtop does not. Why not make the device accessible only over TCP/IP, with WebDAV or something like that as the synchronization protocol. Is the hardware prohibitively expensive? Does it add too much overhead? The perfect product would be one that didn't care if I used a Mac or PC. I'm tired of devices that only work on one machine or another, or require that I install software on my desktop to be able to connect to it. I like the idea of a palmtop that's optimized for personal stuff like music. I'm not interested, yet, in a palmtop for reading email or browsing the Web.  Worth mentioning as an aside. Someday when we design products on weblogs by thinking aloud and stating our wants, some company somewhere is going to make the product we want and make money doing it. Please read the above paragraph with that in mind. That is imho, the business model for weblogs. (Do I make money when someone makes a product I want? Yes, in the sense that instead of spending money for a product that is something like what I want, I spend the same amount of money and get exactly what I want.) A sign of the times. There's an iPod weblog, and it's good. Meta Linker: "The future of the internet may be reciprocal linking, the semantic web, a whole self-organising mesh of information that encompasses everything. But let's be honest - it's not going to happen tomorrow." Jon Udell: Social networking in Radiospace. Great job Jon. Very interesting stuff. Derek Powazek: "Writing on the Web can be more like conversation than performance." Real-time weblogs: "So many new ways of flowing ideas become possible when the audience members have voices. They cease to be an audience in any recognizable sense." Matt Mower: Creating communities from thin air. I spotted this before seeing Jon's piece. Amazing how these thing synchronize. Larry McVoy: "I've never bought into the open source model as a self sustaining model for all software." Tristan Taormino: "I don't want any state legislature telling me how I can or cannot come." New software. Radio 8.0.8 is out. If you're running a fully updated Radio, there's no need to upgrade, you've already got all the parts. And a new macro for editing a blogroll in the outliner. Jake is coordinating, and observing. I tried it out on my Radio weblog. I keep forgetting to remind everyone about Tuesdays and what you do then. Take a programmer to lunch. If you're in the Northern Hemisphere, the weather is probably nice enough to eat outside. Look at the flowers. Listen to the birdies sing. Ask a few questions. Listen to the answers. Make a feature request. Eat. Drink. Teach. Learn. I want to do more guest pieces, let's spread the flow, and get more voices talking about the new power of people who use the Internet to create and publish, not just read and consume. BTW, today's piece is the 1000th DaveNet. Started in 1994. Still going strong. Takes a lickin, keeps on tickin.  John Robb: "Individuals, armed with the Internet, will continue to chip away at the old moats and barriers corporations have erected in order to gain pricing power." At my request, Paolo published a Mac OS X script that keeps Radio running. Two years ago on this day -- pics from Paolo's hometown. Last year on this day: "In ten hours, just enough time to make your butt itch, you can travel over the top of the world from London to San Francisco and form an instant comparison. California is paradise. Not saying Europe isn't great, but it ain't California. Nine times out of ten I'm glad to be home." Adventures with software  Part One. Over the weekend, Robert Scoble, who now works at NEC, brought me one of their palmtop computers to try out. I have one immediate application for it, I want to put MP3s on the computer and listen to them on my daily walk. I also like the idea of listening to audio books. The setup sounded ideal. When you dock the palmtop, a folder shows up on the desktop. Any files you copy into the folder are copied to the palmtop. This is called ActiveSync. So this morning I plugged it all in. It started out pretty well. A dialog popped up. New Hardware Found. Do I want to search for the driver. OK. Inserted the CD. It found it. Excellent. Install. Restart. I looked all over the place for the folder. Nowhere to be found. Opened setup.exe on the CD. It wants to install Outlook. I don't want Outlook. Scoble says I have to install it. Grrr. OK. Midway through the install it says it can't find a file. Do I want to Cancel. No. Can't find the file. Do I want to Cancel. No. Can't find the file. Do I want to Cancel. Yes. The first two letters of the activation code, ironically, are FQ. I should have had a clue what was coming. Part Two. Called Scoble. Got some good advice. Unplug the device. Restart the desktop machine. Follow the install instructions exactly. I did. Bingo. It works. So far. Fingers crossed. (It seems to matter that the device be unplugged at a certain point in the installation. The prompts don't say this.) Also, I did not need Outlook. Postscript. Why did I think it would work if I did what the software told me to do? Because I was trained by the Macintosh where things like this just work. Next step: Figuring out how to play music on the palmtop. Does WinAmp run there? How do I get apps onto the thing? Of course I want to know how I write apps for it too. |
 
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