Friday, August 18, 2006

Talking Point Memo notes that the NY Times has gotten side-tracked by the JonBenet story too. 

Emotional BBC interview with Sha Xu Kang, Chinese Ambassador to the United Nations in Geneva. I recorded the last half of the interview as an MP3. The quality varies (there was static on the radio), but it's well worth a listen. 

Scoble: "Now I can read TechCrunch while walking around tonight's TechCrunch party." 

pda.scripting.com gets an overhaul. Now that I'm spending serious time using my Blackberry, I can see how unnecessary some of the ideas I implemented for the PDA version of Scripting News are. Now I have it as a simple uncrufty, unadorned list of posts. Now of course if all the sites I pointed to had mobile versions. We need to work on that. I also have mobile versions of TechCrunch, GigaOm, PaidContent and Scobleizer. If you see me at the TechCrunch party tonight, ask for a demo. And I have one more little goodie I'm not even going to write about here, now, it's so damned sexy.  

I'm having lunch today in Mountain View, so I expect to get a chance to try out the Google wifi coverage of the city and will report here.  

When I went to Yahoo Maps to get directions, they were able to show me there's no traffic on either route (Bay Bridge, or Dumbarton), and they happily sent the driving directions to my cell phone. Now, to really get cool, they'd send them to my Toyota with GPS. 

Google Reader has a mobile feature.  

Jeff Cohen: "In a media system dominated by entertainment conglomerates, it's no accident that we're served up a steady stream of 'top' stories saturated by sex, violence and celebrity." 

Of course I wasn't happy that Boeing cancelled its plans for in-flight Internet access, and on reflection, I wonder how much of a trial it actually got. I have never been offered Internet on a domestic flight, and had it been offered, there's no doubt I would have taken it, as long as the price wasn't too unreasonable. I've never even heard of anyone using Internet on domestic flights. Only on a few international flights, and as Scoble says, without power, it was good for two hours. I don't doubt that Scoble would have used it. Considering how many laptops and cell phones you see on flights these days, I really doubt they know that it wouldn't be profitable.