"Imagination Environment," created by David Ayman Shamma and Kristian J. Hammond of Northwestern University, reads a television stream's closed caption feed and displays related images and other media to complement the television feed. Matthew Mirapaul profiles "Imagination Environment" in The New York Times....
IETF Atom working group is now official. "The proposed WG schedule calls for release of initial Internet Drafts for the Atom Feed Format and Atom Editing Protocol in June 2004. These Internet Drafts would be submitted approval as Last Call drafts in March 2005, and would be submitted to the IESG for consideration as Proposed Standards in April 2005."...
Paul Boutin compares RealNetworks' Starz downloading service to the BitTorrent and DivX solution in an article for Slate. "Starz offers fewer movies than BitTorrent, at lower quality, for a higher price."...
Nick Littlehales is the official sleep consultant for the English Football Association during the Euro 2004 championships. The Financial Times profiles Nick and his efforts to help the team turn less times per night. "The England team's bedrooms were adapted to create Kingsize and Superking sizes providing more room to sleep and relax. A visco-elastic foam pressure relieving layer was added to each mattress to improve comfort and support. The traditional hotel bed coverings were replaced by hypoallergenic pillows and breathable duvets covered in a pure Egyptian white cotton linen to provide coolness."...
Giles Turnbull of Mac DevCenter reviews three RSS software applications for Mac OS X: NetNewsWire, Pulp Fiction and Shrook. (via Scripting News) I am still waiting on NetNewsWire 2.0, due any day now....
Bob Garfield of NPR's On the Media interviewed Anna Marie Cox, editor of Wonkette. I think that blogging, as a form of journalism, or as a form of writing doesn't have a lot of rules yet, and it's clear that it doesn't need to try and, and hang, you know, the AP Libel Guide on a blog would be a mistake -- to try and, like, apply your standard journalistic kind of ethical code seems too constrictive for what blogs are. There has to be something that you figure out maybe just on a day to day basis....
The Simpsons Season 4 DVD set is now available. 22 episodes from my favorite Simpsons season. Selma's Choice (the Duff Gardens episode) is my favorite episode....
Andrew Leonard of Salon.com delivers a social networking primer and profiles the different approaches of big name social networking sites such as Friendster, Tribe.net, and Orkut. Marc Canter is mentioned as social networking taken to the extreme but there is no mention of FOAF or how to move common data between social networking providers. The article does a good job examining the privacy trade-offs when a user provides a profile to an online site. "Promise someone a date, or a chance at a job, and they'll happily expose their most intimate secrets."...
Today's Wall Street Journal has excerpts from last week's Walt Mossberg interview of Steve Jobs onstage at D: All Things Digital. The article is available to subscribers only, so I will quote at length. [W]e've gone from pretty much zero a year ago to about 2% of the legally sold music in the U.S. That's not a giant number, but if you look at it and say it's been accomplished in a year and you look at the trajectory, it's not inconceivable to see it breaking through 5% in the next 24 months as an example, maybe sooner. We got...
Tom Zeller Jr. of The New York Times writes about copyrights and multimedia in academic institutions. "Many scholars, librarians and legal experts see rich promise for the use of multimedia materials in research and education. But the possibility of litigation over file-sharing and confusion over digital copyright protections have scholars feeling threatened about venturing beyond the more familiar world of printed texts."...
Niall Kennedy is a web technologist in San Francisco, California in the United States. I am very interested in the world of... MORE »