Posts from December 2004

I am meeting more and more people dissatisfied with their jobs. The top gripe is not job function, but management environment. Are you encouraged to learn new things? Attend conferences? Do you feel like you make a measurable difference? All interesting things to think about heading in to 2005 from the perspective of the employee as well as the employer. Companies are too busy to post articulate job listings and interview candidates. Most of the good job candidates are passive seekers since they cannot send an explicit signal that might get them fired or make life uncomfortable in their current...

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CBS News will air a segment about Google on this Sunday's 60 Minutes. John Battelle is a featured commentator....

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Nathan Yergler announced ccPublisher, a tool that allows content creators to upload Creative Commons licensed audio or video files to your site or to the Internet Archive for free hosting. ccPublisher will embed a license claim in MP3 audio files. The OS X version is a whopping 60 MB. The application is written in Python and is a part of the Creative Commons Tools project on SourceForge.net....

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Feedster announced its contest winners today. Two out of three of my picks were correct. Feedster's contest seemed like a developer relations failure. The submission date and announcement date were moving targets, and when the winners were announced there was no explanation of the tool beyond a link to the author. What are your thoughts? What would you like to see from a developer contest?...

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Technorati is hosting a developer chat on IRC this Wednesday night at 7 p.m. San Francisco time (03:00 UTC). If you are working on an entry for the developers contest ending this Friday the chat is a good opportunity to receive live answers to any problems you may have. Join #technorati on irc.freenode.net. I will be in the chat room and try to answer any questions or explain how the site and services work. Any really difficult questions will be left to the Technorati employees to figure out....

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Opera released a beta version of its Opera desktop application last week. The new version features improved RSS handling including address bar support similar to Apple's plans for Safari RSS. A user can choose between RSS feeds declared as alternate links of type application/rss+xml. After you subscribe to one or more feeds a Feeds menu appears showing your subscriptions and unread items per feed. The Opera RSS browser treats each RSS item as a mail message, complete with the e-mail address of the item's author. I did not check to see which RSS element is pulled here but I...

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I tried to leave a comment on Marc Canter's weblog in response to his post reacting to requests for reasonably priced geek dinners, but his weblog is not setup correctly. If you want to use TypeKey you have to edit your Movable Type weblog preferences and add your TypeKey token. You're not enabling a conversation! I was motivated enough to post here since Marc unfairly targeted some people trying to make the event work for everyone. Tantek's idea was to try somewhere new and to make the event as inclusionary as possible. He's been to geek dinners all around the...

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Today Six Apart moved into its new offices. No more interviews at the Tokyo Star, or driving to work for a lot of people. Moving into new space closer to home must have a big "we made it" feeling and make you realize how you have created something where there was nothing before. Congratulations Six Apart, and may your new pad be full of many bits of moving type....

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Forbes has a brief article about RSS feeds changing the business landscape. Some inaccuracies in the article: "Instead of searching for information, you get RSS to push it to you." RSS is a pull technology, not push. A user requests the data and is sent a response. "Technorati.com is now monitoring more than 5 million RSS-enabled blogs." Technorati claims to watch over 5.2 million weblogs, but Technorati builds its database primarily by parsing HTML. Technorati is not a RSS-based searcher as the article claims....

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The Technorati Users Group went well. Nine people learned new things about Technorati and five Technorati employees had a chance to interact with potential power users. I enjoyed making it all happen. I tethered myself to a projection TV and stepped through my prepared slides -- my first time using the S-Video output on my PowerBook. I highlighted some features of the Technorati web site, showed how to create a watchlist, introduced the developer wiki, and showed the API responses. I briefly showed the Java SDK and an application I put together just minutes before the meeting. I did not...

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