http://www.helloworldblog.com/2005/06/when_words_fail.html?rss
There’s a time to read, and a time to stop and smell the flowers, that’s why it rocks so much that alexoid pointed me to Drawn, the tag line says it all “inspiration is everywhere”.
Be sure to check out these two gems.
Seriously, there’s only so much business reading you can do, get this feed…!
http://wesnerm.blogs.com/net_undocumented/2005/06/ebook_happening.html
Here are some quiet happenings as e-books struggles to cross the technological chasm. This is what technology looks like when it struggles under the radar years before mainstream acceptance.
By the way, new cool electronics always show up in Japan first. My trip to Japan in 1999 put me in gadget paradise, full of useful widgets that I never knew existed. The Japanese population is addicted to this stuff. For instance, check out Japanese button-controlled high-tech toilets with numerous features such as a cockpit-like control panel, seat warming, bidet, butt-cleaning spray, air freshener, artificial flushing sounds (to hide certain other sounds), etc. There are a number of sites on the Internet that showcase and sell Japanese gadgets like gadgets.3yen.com and dynamism.com.
http://hoppsan.org/jamesb/blogger/2005/05/commenting-in-rss.html
http://www.evilgeniuschronicles.org/wordpress/2005/06/17/suggested-listening/ | Comments
Here’s some things I have listened to lately that I really liked:
Actually I’m still listening to this one and am really liking it - Chuck Tomasi has an interview with Leo Laporte.
My brother has a podcast and he’s done a great variety of stuff. For some reason, the show that has tickled me the most has been his odd/bad music show. I listened to it in O’Hare airport on my last Chicago trip and was giggling all the way to the gate.
Elvis Mitchell, my newest interview hero, interviews Christopher Nolan about the new Batman movie. I loved this interview especially, and I love every episode of this show so this is good even above that baseline.
DVDTalkRadio did an interview with John Waters. Waters makes me laugh in everything he ever does, be it interview or book or movie or Simpson apperance. This interview rocked and although I didn’t really need selling, it has definitely sold me a copy of the Dirty Shame DVD.
Technorati Tags: batman, christophernolan, chuckchat, dirt, elvismitchell, jamesslusher, johnwaters, leolaporte
http://weblog.cheskin.net/blog/archives/000686.html
When I flew into Beijing International airport yesterday evening, it was obvious that the city is already gearing up for the 2008 Olympics. From what I can see, this preparation is not just limited to the official Olympic organizing team. The entire city seems to be collaborating to pull this off.
The first sign are the dozens and dozens of billboards from proud sponsors like Visa, GE, Budweiser and Samsung, crowded side-by-side from the terminal to the main highway. This is followed by unending construction in preparation for the influx of visitors the event is expected to bring-new highways, more trees, a new Ritz-Carlton. In the city itself, preparation for the Olympics is a topic that everyone can discuss. An article in the China Daily today talks about the Olympic Volunteer program the government put in place to attract recruits. The book “Knowledge our Citizens Need to Know about the Olympics” is prominently placed in bookstores, and includes a detailed history of the Olympics, descriptions of the opening and closing cermonies, a list of Chinese gold medalists and other topics intended to raise the population’s awareness.
The world seems to easlily accept that China can efficiently produce a wide range of products. What we often don’t see is how efficiently they’ve been able to transform their cities, not only for the upcoming Olympics, but throughout the country. China currently has 166 cities with populations exceeding 1 million. The US has 9.
http://radio.weblogs.com/0124955/2005/06/16.html#a869 | Comments
I read an article today “Alarm over slow digital take-up” reporting on the Goverment committee investigating as to why the take-up of digital TV has been so slow.
I’ll tell you why. No need for a committee. The curent content is crap. I am one of those early adopter folks who has a digital tuner and there is nothing compelling about it. The networks are so arrogant they dont do a good job at the basic stuff regarding program information listings. Channel 7 doesn’t bother having any information, Channel 9 has it all in UPPERCASE, with only Channel 10 providing any additional information, as do the ABC and SBS (but I guess they HAVE TO since they are government bodies). Each network has multiple channels and apart from ABC and SBS (again) they don’t provide anything extra. It is just crap, crap, crap.
The dumb networks have grabbed special channels - 100 for Channel 10, 77 for Channel 7, 99 for Channel 9 to act as their EPG channel which is a static channel showing what’s on that particular channel. There is another channel which shows what’s on all the channels. So we have all these channels telling you what’s on but in reality there’s nothing really on. It’s a good thing my digital box has a bunch of games on it too.
The fact that a committee is sitting in Canberra pontificating on this is even more amusing. Ask a consumer not the folks with vested interests.
http://www.flutterby.com/archives/comments/8001.html
Dan Lyke:Tossed up here so I can close off the tab: Kind of like WorldWind but with real-time weather and geologic event info: EarthBrowser.
http://feeds.feedburner.com/FeldThoughts?m=431
My RSS world continues to be busy as both Technorati and Feedburner had lots of action this week.
Technorati released the beta of their new site. Dave Sifry has a post up about the features as does Niall Kennedy, who includes some fun old Technorati designs from 11/02, 6/04, and 7/04. Awesome progress guys (as of today: 11.2m weblogs watched and 1.2 billion links tracked.)
On Monday, the Feedburner guys put out an analysis of their existing aggregated podcast metrics. Feedburner now manages feeds for 6,000 podcasts and are seeing solid growth in the number of per-podcast subscribers (average of 33 – up from 15 in February; average of 65 if you eliminate the podcasts with less than 4 subs).
On Thursday, Feedburner announced their SmartFeed Mobile Server. This allows commercial publishers to publish once to all their feed subscribers across a wide variety of mobile devices. It augments Feedburner’s SmartFeed service that deploys the right format of your feed to various user-agents (so – it’s “subscriber aware, rather than “publisher driven”). I’ve heard lots of folks complain lately that feeds are starting to look goofy in different devices (e.g. I love stuff on the web, but my Trio sucks). If you are a feed publisher, Feedburner’s services address this issue automagically for you.
On Friday, Feedburner responded to feedback from several notable RSS folks that Feedburner was inappropriately creating “lock in” when someone had Feedburner start managing their feed. Specifically, if you changed your mind for some reason and didn’t want Feedburner to manage your feed, there was no simple way to get your subscribers redirected to another feed. While the Feedburner guys had not heard this request from very many of the customers, it became clear about a week ago that this was something we should address as part of “being a good citizen.” Eric Lunt cranked on it and rolled it out in less then a week of determining the importance of it. The Feedburner gang is clear that “it’s your feed” as evidenced both by this functionality as well as Eric declaring “[While] we think we have the best feed management service, we think that providing publishers with the ability to do whatever they want is always the right answer, and most importantly, we think your subscribers are your subscribers, not ours or anybody else’s.”
And – for those of you that like tagging, podcasting, and the ability to quickly roll new functionality by combining different services, Fred Wilson figured out how to use del.icio.us and Feedburner to create his own podcast/playlist from the music he’s been listening to. Eric took it one step further and inserted an elevator pitch (Fred is a VC after all) into the stream, so Fred created a feed for “fred’selevatorpitch”.
Who said VCs aren’t nerds.
http://feeds.feedburner.com/FeldThoughts?m=435
Royal Farros is has now joined the swelling ranks of Microsoft bloggers. Microsoft bought Royal’s company (MessageCast - which we were investors in) a month ago. Royal has been a long time friend and collegue – he was my partner Heidi Roizen’s business partner in their first business (T/Maker – thanks for the clip art Royal) and then we backed his previous company iPrint.
Royal is endlessly delightful, insightful, and often – as Amy (my partially Irish wife) would say – full of the ole St. Nick. He was on the receiving end this year as Heidi pulled one of the greatest ever April Fools Day jokes on Royal this year – it’ll be echoing in the halls for many years to come. Let’s just say that since the MessageCast deal closed in mid-April there was a linkage between the April Fools Day joke and Royal’s soon to be future (and now current) employment at Microsoft.
MessageCast (and Royal) totally get blogging and RSS – so look for some good stuff from him about what he and Microsoft are up to. Plus – Royal’s got the mind of a maturing Jedi Knight when it comes to the software industry, as witnessed by the following recent post on his blog from a speech he just gave at an OMMA panel:
For years, I would say, “I’m Royal Farros and my company, MessageCast, does real-time alerting.” I found myself blurting out my standard opening… but stumbled as I remember I’m now Microsoft. I recovered by saying: “I used to say that we did real-time alerting… but now that we’re Microsoft, I guess we pretty much do just about everything in the entire world!” That’s another thing you can’t say everyday, eh?
Royal – dude – can you send me one of those cool Microsoft Office T-Shirts?
http://feeds.feedburner.com/FeldThoughts?m=439
Amy has a magnificent photo of her old Mercedes CLK55 on fire up on her blog. This apparently complements the thrill she got from driving 120 mph in my SL55 tonight on her way home. And – yes – Mercedes did the right thing and eventually replaced her car (that’s a long story for another time) and my car appeared to still be in one piece when she parked it in the driveway tonight.
The second time Greg Reinacker and I got together, we had a nice three hour dinner and covered a wide range of topics. One of them was that he loved to race cars. As we were heading back to my office from dinner to pick up his car, I tossed him my keys and said “have at it.” It was a spectacular Boulder early summer evening (80 degrees, zero humidity, clear sky, bright moon), we put the top down, and he took off on Highway 36. Within 10 seconds I grabbed onto my door handle and looked over at the speedometer – 130–something. I think I said something like “holy shit, Greg.” I vividly remember him turning his head slightly – as he kept his foot on the gas – and giving me an amazingly silly grin.
Note to self: Do NOT let Amy and Greg get in a car together.
