Wednesday, March 02, 2005

Steve Gillmor: "The RSS Bubble is here." 

Rob Fahrni did a design for a Morning Coffee Notes logo. Yeah the one I came up with was pretty, er, ahem cough, rushed. If anyone else wants to try this out, please do. Rob's design is great, but "morning" is an important part of it. I want a bright logo, something optimistic and fun. And it wouldn't hurt if it were about traveling, since I seem to do the best work while driving some place. See if you can work the South Carolina sunrise into it? How about the blue sky of Saskatchewan? 

Pieter Overbeeke did a nice logo with all the elements. Cooolio! 

Haaretz: "Podcasts are infiltrating beyond the Internet realm, into types of media that existed beforehand." 

USA Today: "Brenda Spoonemore, NBA senior vice president, says the league is planning podcasts for news." 

In 2001, when Smart Tags was the topic, Connie Guglielmo wrote a column for ZDNet, demoing how a Microsoft-filtered Web might read.  

Scott Granneman: "When Google changes the links on this web page, Google changes my writing, without any input from me, and for commercial gain that certainly doesn't benefit me, or SecurityFocus." 

John, it's okay with me if Adam does the book. I'd happily help him or his ghost writer. I've had lots of offers to do books. I've never had the patience for it. I like instant results, that's the kind of writer I am. 

Anonymoses: Charlotte to host Bloggercon. 

Welcome to the Nooked RSS Directory. "You can search for corporate RSS feeds by keyword or browse the categories below. If you publish corporate RSS feeds, you can submit them to our directory." 

This, as far as I know, is the first cat to appear on Scripting News. 

Dr Lorianne DiSabato was one of four callers on the hour-long show we did yesterday on New Hampshire Public Radio. 

From the Isn't-It-Totally-Obvious Department 

Business 2.0 wonders why Sequoia Capital invested in a startup founded by the 19-year-old who turned Mozilla into Firefox. Isn't it obvious? Adware. The best place to bake it in is in the browser itself. He who controls the browser gets the money, now that Google has broken the barrier. The ads move from the Web page into the browser, and so does the money. How long before the "content industry" figures this out? All of a sudden the NY Times buyout of About.Com looks like a really bad deal.

One side goes down, the other goes up 

On yesterday's radio show, the host, Laura Knoy observed that as blogs are decentralizing, the mainstream media is centralizing -- coalescing into fewer and fewer larger and larger companies. I said it's always that way. Today someone will die, and on the same day, someone else will be born. The ebb and flow. Arteries and veins. Yin and yang. In and out.

Now, while it's easy now to visualize the end of the Web, the great experiment in public access to the text airways, because the geeks at Google have figured out how to put ads everywhere, even inside other people's web pages; we are starting up a new medium, podcasting, that's immune to their devilish trickery! There are no links in podcasts. Heh.

Another totally obvious factoid 

Okay, we don't know for a fact that Google is working on an operating system, but the tea leaves are pretty damned clear. Why else would they have hired Microsoft's operating system architect, Mark Lucovsky? Surely not to write a spreadsheet or word processor.

Publisher's note 

This is one of those times when we have a story way in advance of other bloggers, and way in advance of the business press. Google is counting on it staying that way. I'm sure Trent Lott, Dan Rather and Eason Jordan did too. And that my friends, is where a kernel of hope resides. Integrity in printing presses was never an issue. You didn't have to worry about the story changing as it left the editorial department and was printed by the presses and distributed on delivery trucks. As we've seen before, electronic publishing is different in every way. And just when you think you have it figured out and you can relax for a bit on the beach and make some new software, the rules change, radically.

Say this with a heavy New Yawk accent: So what else is new?