Visual Studio 2005 Express
Microsoft released beta versions of its Visual Studio 2005 product, including a new line of low cost Express products. All downloads are free for now, but Microsoft does plan to charge for the products in the near future….
Writing on feeds, search, widgets, and the social web.
Niall Kennedy's weblog, newest first. Page 46 of 72.
Mac OS X Server 10.4 Tiger serves weblogs
Mac OS X Server version 10.4 (codename Tiger) will feature a weblog server. The Weblog server provides users with calendar-based navigation and customizable themes, is fully compatible with Safari RSS and enables posting entries using built-in web-based functionality or with weblog clients that support XML-RPC or the ATOM API. The Weblog Server, based on the popular open source project “Blojsom,” works with Open Directory for user accounts and authentication….
Mac OS X Tiger: Safari RSS
Mac OS X Tiger, Apple’s next operating system release, will include a RSS aggregator as part of Safari. Support for “RSS 0.9, RSS 1, RSS 2 and Atom.” Apple has a movie online demonstrating the new RSS functions. Interesting that Atom is a side note on a supported format list. What does the bundling of an RSS aggregator with a Mac OS mean for independent software developers? Safari RSS, in its current form, looks like Bloglines. Desktop applications will have a year to innovate and make their products more attractive to power users. There is still room for applications…
Apple OS X 10.4 (Tiger) targeting Microsoft Longhorn
Gizmodo has a picture from Apple’s Worldwide Developers Conference of banners directly targeted at Microsoft and its upcoming Longhorn operating system….
NY Times: As Doctors Write Prescriptions, Drug Company Writes a Check
New York Times: “A code of conduct adopted in 1990 by the American Medical Association suggests that doctors should not accept any gift worth more than $100, but the guidelines are widely ignored.”…
Tantek is now at Technorati
Tantek çelik is now working for Technorati. The move means good things for the Web, as Tantek can utilize indexing semantic web data from the Technorati database. He also has a much shorter commute, allowing more time for side projects. Tantek was formerly Microsoft’s Web standards ambassador and responsible for much of the work on CSS….
SpaceShipOne flight a success
Mike Melvill piloted SpaceShipOne to an altitude 100 kilometers, opened a bag of M&Ms, and returned to the Mojave Desert. The first non-governmental rocket ship to reach the edge of space….
An amateur in the New York Philharmonic
Daniel J. Wakin of The New York Times played clarinet with the New York Philharmonic. He had 16 days between receiving the music and stepping on stage to perform but luckily he received help from Stanley Drucker. “I was told I would be treated like a regular substitute. The brochure for subs that I was given listed payment of $1,980 for a week of rehearsals and concerts, or $198 for a two-and-a-half-hour rehearsal and $396 for a single concert, although alas, I was not to be paid. (The base salary for a regular player is $104,000, though many earn far…
Imagination Environment
“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 Forms New Atom Working Group
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 movie download services for Slate
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, official sleep consultant for England’s Football Association
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.”…
Mac DevCenter reviews OS X RSS software
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….
NPR’s On the Media interviews The Wonkette publisher Anna Marie Cox
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….
Simpsons Season 4 DVD set in stores today
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….
Salon.com on social networking online
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.”…
Walt Mossberg interviews Steve Jobs
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…
New York Times on fair use in the digital age
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.”…
Scientific American on Microsoft Research
Gary Stix wrote about Microsoft’s Research division and its history in Scientific American June 2004 issue: “Can Microsoft’s assemblage of all-star researchers transform computing?”…
News.com adds description to its RSS feeds
News.com now has descriptions (not just headlines) in its RSS feeds….
Cal Athletics LookSmart search partnership
LookSmart will develop a branded search property for Cal Athletics available at CalBears.com, CalBearsSearch.com and via a toolbar application. “Each time users click on a paid listing, a portion of the revenue will go to support Cal Athletics.” It would be nice if they had a Grub promotion to help utilize all those idle computers and open bandwidth. If all search engines provide a similar impression of a result to their users, the move towards cobrand benefits could be big. Think of iWon.com of years ago….
Bridging the Internet and the TV
Today’s announcement from TiVo regarding downloaded Internet content available on a personal video recorder got me thinking about how independent content authors now have the same path to the end consumer as Viacom, Disney, and General Electric. As I read the New York Times article profiling the new TiVo service, RSS enclosures came to mind. Microsoft might still use IPTV, but other software manufacturers can build support for RSS enclosures into their software with little overhead. What does this mean to the average user? Average users are able to push content to targeted subscribers. It could be the latest video…
Ask Jeeves Purchases Tukaroo Inc.
Ask Jeeves acquired Tukaroo Inc., a San Jose-based desktop search technology company founded in 2003. Tukaroo was founded in 2003 and launched their first product January 20, 2004. Tukaroo’s desktop and local network search bar includes a preview window for photographs and all documents. Advertisements are integrated into the local search window….
Salon: Invasion of the spambots
Sam Williams of Salon writes about the emergence of intelligent agents crawling pages and inserting content in weblogs and wikis. “[B]ot writers and copiers find that there are enough newbie operators out there to serve as unwilling page-rank boosters.”…
CC Lemon Simpsons ads
Japander.com has CC Lemon ads online featuring the Simpsons family! (via Boing Boing)…