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December 2005 - Posts

Right, enough cataloging of everyone else's 2006 predictions ...with about 4 hours to go before the start of my 2006 (flakey drum roll please)...I now unveil my own, er, predictions... My Eleven Techie / Web and One non-Techie 2006 Prediction(s) 2006 Read More...
For Christmas I bought myself a Zen Microphoto (well, technically I received it as present). At first I was pretty happy with it, but things went awry. Four things specifically. First, the Microphoto touch controls were useless. And I mean useless . I Read More...
Chris Anderson has posted on the relation between the Long Tail and the Zipfian distribution . It reminded me of a comment Jakob Nielsen wrote in response to my Long Tail post ( 'How RSS thickened my Long Tail' ). Jakob wrote: "It's quite likely that Read More...
Erid Dolecki asks : "If you could choose two people to have dinner with, each on their own on different evenings, who would they be and what would you have for dinner?" What a great question. Now, before I answer, I want to make clear that I'm not interpreting Read More...
I'm blogging this at 36,000 feet. No dramas though . If it goes pear-shaped between now and touchdown, I'll let you know . Read More...
Via Kevin I heard that Dave Winer is up to something new for 2006 ...OPML at the heart of it is seems.... Read More...
The Stars of CCTV? "When the Austrian government passed a law this year allowing police to install closed-circuit surveillance cameras in public spaces without a court order, the Austrian civil liberties group Quintessenz vowed to watch the watchers. Read More...
"This appeared to be some kind of sealed fish or meat product, certainly not a state-of-the-art MP3 player." A story about an iPod and some kind of meat . Read More...
As Business Week's Rob Hof has noticed , I've been trying to keep up with all the 2006 predictions going on this month. But it's no good if you look forward, only not to look back, and see how you did in retrospect. If you see what I mean. So, here is Read More...
Bernarn Moon writes up an interview he had with Lili Chen , Microsoft's Social Computing Group group manages and discussed with her some of the cool stuff her group is working on in the space of social computing, blogs, virtual worlds and a couple of Read More...
Beta News has a good review of 2005 from a Microsoft perspective - it reminds me of how much has been going on this last year including some major product lauches (Visual Studio 2005, SQL Server 2005, Xbox 360, Windows Live, 64-bit Windows, MSN Spaces Read More...
"Most people don't even know what a rootkit is, so why should they care about it?" -- Thomas Hesse, president of Sony BMG's global digital business division This and other gaffes of 2005 . Read More...
David Swedlow has posted his reaction to a couple of podcasts he's been listening to that Joshua and I put together.. On the Structured Blogging podcast : "But here's what I notice the most about this last podcast: no Attention! What the hell guys? Such Read More...
I love this time of year. It gives me chance to get through some of books I've been been meaning to read and some podcasts I've been eager to listen to. One of these books is The Social Life of Information , originally published at the end of the last Read More...
Phil Wainewright provides a reminder of what all these nines mean : 99.5% — 43.76 hours (an entire working week, and more) 99.7% — 26.30 hours (more than three working days) 99.9% — 8.77 hours (more than one working day) 99.95% — 4.38 hours (half a working Read More...
Bob Wyman on Tim Berners-Lee's ('TBL' - father of the Wonderful, Writeable Web) first blog post : "The idea of a read/write web had been motivating the work of many hypertext developers like TBL long before the web was born. But, the last 10 years experience Read More...
My Flickr network seen through Flickr Graph . Read More...
Michael Affronti, Microsoft's Outlook program manager: "RSS Aggregation in Outlook is aimed at providing the user with a consistent look, feel, and experience while interacting with RSS feeds and related information. While RSS can be a complex technology Read More...
I met up with some interesting people last night in London. I did a quick straw poll and asked what percentage of the RSS feeds they subscribed to were generated by professional writers (by professional writers I meant news organizations, journalists, Read More...
Here's my tag cloud, ripped from my Technorati profile page . API ... Attention ... attention.xml ... AttentionTrust ... Blogging ... identity ... microformats ... opml ... opmlfreak ... opmlwishlist ... RSS ... screencast ... semantic web ... SSE ... Read More...
Google's Yu Chen has posted info about how see you can view your trended Google search data: "To use it, you have to turn on Personalized Search and be signed in to your Google Account while you search. (If you don't have a Google Account, it's easy to Read More...
Don't talk and drive. Well, don't talk about stuff that's hard to talk about, that's the message that Dave Munger's post conveys about how the cognitive demands of conversation can affect our awareness of the world around us. So much for effective multi-tasking.. Read More...
Joshua Porter is continuing the Structured Blogging (SB) conversation with Joe Reger . In thinking through what it will take for SB will take off or not, he's come up with an acid test, what he calls the Del.icio.us Lesson - "From now on I’m going to Read More...
I've become predictable. At least that's what Paul Montgomery says - he's laid out his 2006 predictions , one of which includes me ranting on about one of my favourite topics, attention, and one of my favourite thinkers on the topic, Steve Gillmor . He's Read More...
Anjo Anjewierden has analyzed some interelated blogs posts and drawn up the data - the visualization of blog conversations. "Left to right is time (the data was 2004 posts of KM bloggers ). Top to bottom is chronological order of a blogger entering the Read More...
James Corbett : "...by sharing an OPML based Reading List Piaras would be providing an "attention lense" which could be applied to many services going forward. Take Kevin Burton's TailRank for instance. It allows me to build my own Memeorandum and import Read More...
Ed Batista of the AttentionTrust: " Last.fm is one of my favorite " attention data " use cases. After installing their plugin, your iTunes playlist metadata is shared with Last, which creates a set of charts that depict your listening habits, a list of Read More...
Why I'm not missing London...tube hell. Read More...
Richard MacManus outlines the difference between REST and SOAP Web Services . Bottom line: one is 'Simple' the other is 'Complex'. Read More...
Back in June I asked my blog readers to help me decide what to eat one night...I was stuck, not sure whether to go for either Chinese, Indian, Wendy's, KFC or Pizza. One concerned commenter pointed out that none of the above were particularly healthy. Read More...

Zen

I'm off to catch a plane soon. Long-haul flight, so need something to do. Instead of lugging CDs around (believe it or not this is how I have listened to podcasts while on the road, so sad) I decided to get digital. (!) Went to the Circuit City and saw Read More...
What is a modern marketer? Riya has a modern marketer called Tara Hunt . Her official title is Online Marketing Manager at the start-up that's still in Alpha, but she's done it all on a shoestring - when you don't have a $100 million dotcom marketing Read More...
Here are the scenarios I care about when it comes to blogware interop : Background (these are scenarios , I'm not actually in this situation!): I run a blog. It runs ok, the software misses some features, but I'll make do, because I have so much invested Read More...
Well, it is time for a change for me. On January 16th I'll be starting my new job (moving outside of MSDN and TechNet team but still within Microsoft and still at Redmond) within the Data Programmability (DP) team (within SQL / WinFS). I'll blog more Read More...
Gerardo Dada points out a new Microsoft event taking place in Las Vegas, MIX 06 : "Microsoft is organizing a new event called MIX 06 in Las Vegas on March 20-22nd, 2006. A lot of things are going on the web including new business models, new technologies Read More...
Joshua has posted the second part of the Structured Blogging podcast with Marc Canter and Joe Reger. Tags: structured blogging , microformats , semantic web , Blogging , Web2.0 , RSS Read More...
Sir Tim Berners-Lee is now blogging . Via Justin Thorp . Read More...
Bill Gates, and his wife, Melinda, were named Time magazine’s “Persons of the Year” along with Irish rocker Bono for being “Good Samaritans”: “For being shrewd about doing good, for rewiring politics and re-engineering justice, for making mercy smarter Read More...
I found this sitting in my archive somewhere. It's a sketch I drew up in August 2002 and published to an old blog (since died), called 'memecloud'. This was my 'memecloud' - a collection of memes that were dominating my thought-space at the time. I used Read More...
Emily Hambridge has advice for those wanting to date a geek . My favourite: \5. If you love him you will be standing by with a lot of caffeine. Yup. Via Jack William Bell . Read More...
Richard MacManus continues the end of year wrap-ups with his Top 10 Web 2.0 Moments . In a nutshell : 10. Ask Jeeves buys Bloglines 9. The Return of Amazon (Mechanical Turk and Alexa Web Services) 8. Microsoft embraces and extends RSS with Really Simple Read More...
You might have heard of the Structured Blogging initiative announced earlier this week by Marc Canter and others...there was certainly plenty of buzz and reaction to the news , but not all the reaction was rosy . So Joshua Porter and I thought we'd give Read More...
ACM Queue has published an interview with Microsoft's CTO Ray Ozzie. Worth a read. " WK Tim O’Reilly, founder of O’Reilly Media, coined the phrase “the architecture of participation,” meaning a lot of amateur and casual programmers piling on and building Read More...
The Microsoft RSS team has an update on the RSS icon to be used in future versions of IE. How they came to the decision may surprise some: "My last post shared some of our conceptual designs of the feed icon and expressed some of the criteria that we Read More...
Assaf has provided a thought-provoking post about Structured Blogging . He discusses merits of XML / HTML vs. Microformats and has other critisisms of Structured Blogging (SB). I've quoted this portion of his post (my bold) because it really nails the Read More...
I've waiting for an excuse to point to the Fat Cyclist (I'm not being offensive - that's the blog's name). Anyway, the excuse for blogging about Fat Cyclist today is that the blog's author has now realised that he is in fact more important and authoritative Read More...
Jason Boog interviewed J.D. Lasica and Lucas Gonze last week for his Darknets vs. Lightnet piece in Publish , studying the ways that online publishers will interact with the Napster generation. The Lightnet meme is gaining momentum...It has been interesting Read More...
Jeff Clavier covers the Structured Blogging initiative announced yesterday: "Marc Canter is on stage to announce the launch of StructuredBlogging.org , a non-profit initiative supporting the development and deployment of micro-formats in blog posts. The Read More...
Technorati's Niall Kennedy has posted about their experimental server called Technorati Kitchen : "an area where we can post projects we have been working on that we do not feel are ready for integration on the main site. The first project available in Read More...
Unfortunately I wasn't able to attend Rok Hrastnik's RSS Industry Night Roundtable (Rok invited me but I couldn't make it - he got way better than me - I put him in touch with Sanaz Ahari of Start.com and Sean Lyndersay of the Microsoft RSS team who are Read More...
MSN Messenger history visualization : "an interactive data visualization displaying the timeline of several textual conversations simultaneously, enabling the discovery of utterance lengths & specific reoccuring keywords. the application reads up Read More...
Here is Part 2 ( mp3, 27mins 26mb ) of the two-part Attention and Identity podcast recorded with Joshua Porter , Dick Hardt, CEO of Sxip and Kim Cameron, chief identity architect at Microsoft . Part 1 (background) ( mp3: 29 mins, 28mb ) Part 2 ( mp3, Read More...
Steve Rubel has complained that there are two sites reproducing his blog posts without permission. One of the sites, Advertising news & Information, has posted his complaint on its blog, automagically, I presume. Earlier this week I mentioned that Read More...
Interesting. Came across Charlie Wood's post this morning about a new service called opmlworkstation.com . Jim Moore's RSS Labs is the team is behind the new venture ( the same crew behind opmlsearch.com ): "Why convert PowerPoint into OPML? My own rationale Read More...
A couple of weeks ago Joshua and I had a conversation about attention data (as podcasts ). In that conversation we kept touching on the topic of online identities and their management, so we thought we'd invite two pioneers of the identity space, Dick Read More...
MindJet unveils an OPML Editor product that supports SSE: "The Mindjet Labs has just released a new Mindjet MindManager Pro 6 OPML Editor . The Editor enables users to open, edit, and save Outline Processor Markup Language (OPML) files in MindManager Read More...
I loved the start to Johnnie Moore's latest post , and then it got better: " James Cherkoff and I were in the pub yesterday, celebrating a recent success... to say nothing of marking the birth of his first born, daughter Maggie." Congratulations James! Read More...
Information aesthetics : "a toaster that parses meteorological information from the web & then browns bread with an image of what weather to expect, readable & consumable on the way to work" Read More...
Steve Sloan : "OPML allows us to organize all of our content, and the content of anything else that can be linked to into hierarchies that make it easy to find information by topic. And, we get to choose the topics and those hierarchies can be linked Read More...
Chris Anderson, ex-editor of Editor in Chief of Wired magazine and chief pusher of the Long Tail meme ran into some issues relating to Xbox 360 as a Media Center extender. The bad news is that the usual support channels weren't able to help out. The good Read More...
George Moromisato of the Microsoft RSS team : "the chance of a standard being adopted is inversely proportional to its complexity" Bingo. Read More...
Alex Daley has posted news that the MSN Virtual Earth site (now called Windows Live Local) will go 'live' on the web tomorrow (Thursday, December 8th). Press release here , coverage here and here . When it goes live (it hasn't yet!) you'll find it at Read More...
Thanks Tommy , I now know what I'd like in my Christmas stocking this year - an rsstroom reader. DJ Spyhuner has the 'scoop' : "The 'rsstroom reader' is a bathroom gadget that prints news feeds onto your T-P - that's right, your TOILET PAPER! The best Read More...
I think this a gem. Seattle PI reports that Francisco Pinto Balsemao, the head of the European Publishers Council, said: "consumers were drawn online by free content but this needed to change" Isn't that just lovely. A great way to wrap up 2005. You can Read More...
John Porcaro points to a screencast created by Amanda Murphy showing off the Xbox Live Dashboard. Tags: screencast , xbox 360 Read More...
Dr. Georg Kolb, a VP at PR firm Text100 emailed me this evening regarding a post I published in October. In a nutshell, I had criticized some of the advice George was quoted to have given about RSS communications in this 06 Oct PR Week article ('Technology: Read More...
Channel 9 video : "Chris and Jeff debug one of the largest Web sites in the world: microsoft.com. Millions of pages. More traffic than Slashdot.org. A huge data farm. We have an interesting conversation about how they do it all." Via, er, Slashdot . Read More...
You might know Ricky Gervais from the original UK Office comedy series . Behold, The Ricky Gervais podcast . This is going to be a hit. " Episode 1 December 5 2005 In which Ricky, Steve and Karl discuss ...the pros and cons of technological invention, Read More...
John Musser : "Have you ever looked at a mashup and thought you’d like to try your hand at making one someday? But perhaps you weren’t entirely sure where to begin, or, since you’re busy, how to get from concept to completed mashup quickly? Then you may Read More...
Danny Ayers: 7 reasons 2006 will be a big year for HTML , in reference to this . Danny, very good. ;-) Have updated the 2006 predictions post accordingly. Read More...
OPML in Chinese, or OPML 中文 . Via my del.icio.us inbox . Tags: OPML Read More...
Time for some weekend fun. SimplyFired.com is running a competition . How do you win? You need to send in an 'amusing' video relating to a termination experience. I'm entering the contest, but not with a video of my own. I'm nominating this real life Read More...
Top Tech News: "Extortionists now have a new type of victim to pick on: podcasters. U.S. podcaster Eric Marcus has fallen prey to a hijacker who has diverted his really simple syndication (RSS) feed and is allegedly demanding money to release it. Marcus, Read More...
Universal Gadget : "I can imagine using my OPML and other feeds to display things I’m interested in, such as tailored Amazon products I might want to buy that are on sale and new content on the sites I like to get my information from. I can imagine, in Read More...
Robert Scoble had the good fortune of having dinner with Doug Englebart a couple of weeks ago. Luckily for us he recorded some of it on video to share with us . "Douglas Englebart, the inventor of the computer mouse that we all take for granted by now, Read More...
'Oook' listened to the 3-part Steve Gillmor and Dave Winer AttentionTech podcast and reflects: "Attention is much more multifaceted, being both multidimensional and volatile too: from week to week and over months my attention is assigned to many different Read More...
Smart Mobs : "In Pennsylvania there are even "cyberwidow support groups" for partners of those having online affairs, treatment for addiction to auction site eBay and behavioural counselling to help clients wean themselves off the web. Internet addicts Read More...
Last year I collated several predictions for 2005 . It turned out to be quite a popular post. So I've done the same for 2006. I'll update this page for a while as December brings out the crystal balls. Several Predictions for 2006 Predictions for 2006 Read More...
Gabe Rivera of Memeorandum left a couple of comments for me to wake to this morning. They relate to my antics a few weeks ago. Hacking Memeorandum 101 Hacking Memeorandum - the Screencast Memeorandum hack - the return I think it is only fair to Gabe that Read More...
 
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