Archive for the ‘Web/Tech’ Category

Posted on February 19, 2003 - by deCadmus

And more on Doctorow.

I pre-ordered Cory’s Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom from Amazon. Round about the time I got it, Cory announced that the novel would be freely available for download in its entirety. [His publisher must love him.] When it comes to reading a novel, I still prefer books to bits, and - either way - this one is a spiffy read.

I was unavoidably transported to my twenty-something days, sneaking a Disney job interview into a business trip to Anaheim. I got a short “insiders” tour that I’ll never forget. [Did you know there's a small half-court inside the Matterhorn?] After a second interview that day I learned that all Disney cast members had to be clean-shaven. [!] I wonder how many other would-be-Imagineers have chosen other paths, unwilling to give up their beards? But I digress.

The ‘lectronic version of Down and Out is made available via a Creative Commons license - a new way to protect as little or as much of your copyright as you care to. I’m intrigued, and as I learn more I’m increasingly inclined to make the entirety of Bloggle available under a similar CC license. It seems a nifty way to make my lil’ contribution to the Public Domain.

Posted on February 18, 2003 - by deCadmus

All the news that’s fit to blog…

Cory Doctorow wonders out loud whether Reuters’ decision to cut 3,000 jobs is in any way a result of the disintermediation effect of the blogosphere. I’m inspired to wonder a little further out…

The evolution of the modern journalist [don't snicker, that'd be rude] had long been toward an unbiased, dispassionate recording of events: who, what, when and where. At some point in the not terribly distant past, this grew to include interpretations of why, and speculation on what it all means. Our dispassionate observer became involved in the event; a hollow, shadow-participant… and then only until a bigger and better event came along.

Enter the amateur journalist… better still, millions of them. No casual observers here, these are folk who recount with vibrancy and passion - and often surprising clarity - events in which they are fully engaged. Bias doesn’t much matter, as another point of view is only a click away, found on the blog of yet another fully-involved party.

Me, I think we’re seeing journalism redefined by a new medium… yet another step in the curious evolution of journalism.

Posted on March 25, 2002 - by deCadmus

Sometimes you need a better hammer…

The current crop of web authoring tools don’t build standards-compliant pages. That is, unless you tweak them. And, there’s some hope for next-generation tools. Both brought to you by the fine folks at A List Apart.

Posted on February 28, 2002 - by deCadmus

Bad Analog

In Chapter 31 of Douglas Adams’ The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy the author recounts the tragic story of a freak wormhole, an accidental insult, and the consequences of gross miscalculation of scale — in which the joint battle fleet of the Vl’Hurgs and the G’Gugvuntt’s tear through space for a thousand years and descend upon our lonely blue planet only to be accidentally swallowed by a small dog. [Full text here.]

I bring this to your attention because it’s the only analog in memory to describe the grave miscalculation recently made by PC Magazine’s John Dvorak in his fateful decision to take on the collective not only of webloggers everywhere, but the authors of the Cluetrain Manifesto. That’s right kids: Dvorak, vs. Rageboy. This one’s got my vote for the Darwin Awards.

Posted on February 7, 2002 - by deCadmus

On the horns of a dilemma…

Like a great many web sites, I’ve got some difficult decisions ahead. New HTML specifications offer promising glimpses of compatibility and extensibility — XHTML, in particular — while at the same time widening the gap between current standards, and the hordes of folks still using 3.x and 4.x browsers. I have always maintained a rule of strict backward-compatibility, but for the first time I find that rule is getting in the way of progress… it’s unusually difficult to build pages — much less entire sites — that are congruent with, say, Netscape 4.07 and a 3G handheld device.

To gather some data for the decisions ahead I’ve embedded a script further down the page that reports Bloggle’s site statistics to WebTrends. After examining the mechanisms and privacy characteristics of a number of on-line statistics tools, I’m most comfortable with WebTrends’ method of aggregation — I think it has very little impact on user privacy. Moreover, I like it’s performance and its reliability. I *do* wish they offered a machine-readable privacy policy.

So, in the coming weeks I’ll be able to determine what the Bloggle aggregate looks like… in terms of browser versions, support for JavaScript, color depth and screen resolution. It’ll also be nifty to compare off-site statistics with those generated from my own web logs to get an idea how much caching is going on these days. I expect I’ll see a 20 to 30% difference in the page-view counts between the two mechanisms.

Meanwhile, Bloggle will be offering you a cookie or two… which you may accept or refuse as you like. Again… I have no desire to interfere with your privacy — or even your perception of privacy — I hope only to make Bloggle a very useful resource, and one that’s in-tune with its audience.

Posted on February 1, 2002 - by deCadmus

A grain of salt…

Pop used to zing me with the old saw to “believe 50 percent of what you read and 90 percent of what you see” — though I’d wager that in this age of digital photography and computer-based video wizardry, the latter of those number might tumble. It would seem that a fair number of would-be Net reporters [and fellow bloggers] either never got that advice, or failed to heed it.

The web is abuzz this week with news that Yahoo has sold out — adopting payola practices for search engine placement — leaving Google as the solely virtuous, unbiased search and directory service on the Net. Tracing the link hoopla to its source reveals that a single article on SFGate.com is the seed of this meme… and actually reading the article in question reveals that it’s packed with misleading information and erroneous assumptions.

Fact is, Yahoo has been soliciting dollars for express placement for quite some time… it’s only just recently raised its rates. And, it should be noted that such placement is strictly for commercial listings, none of which is mentioned in the “Doom Ahead” article on SFGate.

Whether Yahoo should or should not charge for placement [oops, for express review] is largely beside the point… it’s done. It’s been done for a year or more. It’s old news. The real news here has more to do with the reflexive twitch of so many web chronicles to speedily spread the dirty word. Miss Manners would not approve.

Posted on January 29, 2002 - by deCadmus

LCD Convergence

Pundits have for some time suggested a least common denominator approach to the convergence of mobile phones, PDAs and increasingly feature-laden devices. “If you can talk into it,” they say, “it’s a phone.”

A new generation of products, from Handspring’s Treo to Palm’s i705, to Nokia’s 5510, are at once exploring new niches, and entirely new modes of operation — always-on email access, digital music players, hand-held gaming — at the same time boasting increased screen resolution and color displays.

Draw a line between these new capabilities and the launch of long-promised 3G networks [Verizon is now online, and Sprint pledges to be only months away] and you’ll find yourself at the intersection of something that is decidedly new and promising. No least common denominator here.

Posted on January 11, 2002 - by deCadmus

CES 2002 is underway

CES 2002 is underway — 1.2 million square feet of shiny new consumer products — in the city that itself typifies America’s lust for style over substance, Las Vegas. How utterly appropriate. And, given that the show is reportedly bigger and better than ever, how refreshing. What our alarmingly recessional, fear-riddled economy could use most right now is a warming dose of blatant consumerism, and — dare I say it? — irrational exuberance.

Posted on January 11, 2002 - by deCadmus

Anti-SPAM SPAM?

How profitable can it possibly be to spam millions of email addresses with advertisements for anti-spam software? And yet this week it’s the clear leader the junkmail folder. Along with every single message from the yahoo.com domain, which apparently has become a haven of sorts for spammers — or at least a favorite forged return address. This week I’ve received offers to enlarge things, to copy things, to refinance things… but no offers of employment thus far.

Posted on January 8, 2002 - by deCadmus

It’s The Picture, Stupid

Thumbs-up to TechTV for their coverage of the entire MacWorld keynote [hereafter known as the 2002 Apple Lovefest]. Thumbs-down to TechTV commentator and long-time PC columnist John C. Dvorak for whining afterward about Steve Jobs’ extensive demonstrations of Apple’s new iPhoto technology. I think Dvorak just doesn’t get it…

Steve Jobs has once again fired up his crystal ball, this time tuned not to the hearts and minds of unwilling technology users, but to their wallets. And he’s found something intriguing. Whether that wallet is stuffed with cards of platinum, gold or green, nearly all of them are filled with…wait for it… photos. Photos of children, grandchildren, dogs and cats. Photos of vacations remembered, brides and grooms eternal. Photos of cars, boats, planes and trains… even photos of beautifully prepared cappuccinos.

Introduce a household of technophobes to a personal computer with Internet access and within a week the whole family is emailing photos to friends and family — whether they’re on the other side of town, cross-country or around the world. Despite the fact that web-based photo sites have proved famously unreliable, users have flocked to them in droves, largely because off-line tools for building and hosting photo albums have proved difficult to use.

With a single stroke, Jobs has launched a service that eases import, organization, editing, printing and distribution of digital photos — which paints a very compelling picture for millions currently using a jumble of mis-matched utilities on a PC. Killer app, indeed.

Oh yeah… I understand Apple launched a new iMac, too.