Saturday, March 04, 2006

A new feature this morning for OPML weblogs. 

Bpedro is editing his blog with OmniOutliner. It's as easy as I thought it would be. Just save the file in OPML in the right folder and the rest is automatic. 

University of Wisconsin howto on podcasting. 

Anne Zelenka is a geek-mom who says we can find better ways to express "how intuitive and appealing software should be." 

The podsafe music movement gets a surprising boost from Tower Records. Nice! 

A couple of observations on Thursday's conference. 1. There was a time, not too long ago, when a conference about technology would be all about Bill Gates. He'd be the elephant in every room, in the middle of every presentation and every conversation. "What about Microsoft?" has been replaced by "What is your business model?" Either they were going to kill you or buy you. They were the menace that was everywhere. This conference was different, even though it was held in a Microsoft office, they weren't mentioned (except by me, with irony that they weren't being mentioned) once. 2. I'm so tired of people talking about how their mother wouldn't understand something. I've been hearing this for 20 years, and it's sexist and ageist, and wrong and unfair, and how about let's get rid of this offensive idea. I'd never say that about my mother, who has a PhD, and is pretty smart. I certainly wouldn't want to encourage her helplessness! At one point I leaned over to Tara Hunt and expressed this sentiment. Then I realized that she's a mom, and said so. I wonder how many mothers were in the room and how they feel about always being held up as the paragon of cluelessness.  

For ten points whose mom is pictured in the margin above? 

Doc Searls: "The only blog I read every day is Dave Winer's." Wow. That's nice. It's funny, I keep missing Doc. This year I'm going to PC Forum for the first time in ten years. This is the first time he's missed a PC Forum. At least we visit virtually, I read every post on this blog. Today Doc snarks back at Ryan King's snark at David Berlind, which is right, although the camp concept has run its course, imho. I'd like to see Doc apply his desnarking logic everywhere, not just where and when it's convenient. Anyway, to Doc, here's the pointer you're looking for. 

One of my ego-filters caught an article in Red Herring, and strangely, the article has no byline. I found out later that this is a policy of the publisher, who doesn't want his competitors to hire away his reporters. In this case I'm pretty sure the author is Liz Gannes, who I met at Thursday's conference. I actually probably met her when she was six years old because she's the daughter of an old friend -- Stu Gannes, who now teaches at Stanford. It's a funny feeling to be so old that daughters of friends of yours write articles where you're quoted. I guess that's yet another thing I'll have to learn to live with.  

Amyloo is working on the download page for the new OPML Editor support site. Another project we should start soon is a directory of tools that understand OPML. It would be a perfect demo of OPML, don't you think? 

Chris Clark has the answer, and it ain't simple, to yesterday's query about images to make Macintosh DMG's pretty. 

With my 23-inch Cinema display I now fully understand why power Mac users are so into keyboard shortcuts. You spend so much time moving the mouse from one side of the screen to the other, from top to bottom. It makes you wonder why anyone thought a mouse was a time-saving innovation. Seriously, it's a huge PITA.