Writing on feeds, search, widgets, and the social web.

Niall Kennedy's weblog, newest first. Page 67 of 72.

Monopoly money

Hasbro released high quality PDFs of their Monopoly money. Print your own money!…

FeedDemon Beta

Nick Bradbury posted a new FeedDemon beta last night. Aggregate your RSS feeds!…

Macromedia – Central

Macromedia now has a public beta of its Central product. Create smart clients heavily loaded with Web services, and place them on any system supporting Flash….

Amazon.com developing Web search technology

According to an article in today’s Wall Street Journal, Amazon.com has a new subsidiary, A9, to develop its own Web search technology. They are supposedly hiring 30 software developers but I cannot find the company’s Web site and there is nothing listed in Amazon’s jobs section….

Joel on Software – Bionic Office

Joel Spolsky has a very cool new office design, as well as ideas on what it takes to keep employees working optimally….

The Royal Society – Tim Berners-Lee

“The future of the World Wide Web”, a speech given to the Royal Society by Tim Berners-Lee on Monday, is now available as video-on-demand. RealPlayer required….

Sun’s software influence

The September 18 edition of The Economist carries an interesting article on Sun. “Sun is sending an unmistakable message to customers as well as to rivals such as Microsoft and IBM: software is shockingly overvalued.” “Sun now sees Java, a software brand, as a prime asset to be exploited.” Sun and Java have more brand weight in a corporate board than Red Hat. Sun is able to tout that it knows enough about security for its software to be deployed in the front lines of Iraq and inside the CIA that a corporation should entrust them with their data. The…

World-Wide Media eXchange

World-Wide Media eXchange is an experimental research project run by the Interactive Visual Media Group at Microsoft Research. Take a photograph, stamp it with longitude and latitude, and users can find your photographs on a map….

Cheeseburger fries

NY Times article today about cheeseburger fries, the beef industry’s way to get more beef into snacktime. A beef industry R&D document shows the full ingredients and prep info. Sounds nasty, but I am curious to try one….

Fortune : Geek Eye for the Luddite Guys

The October 6 issue of Fortune examines a gadget makeover at the hands of a team of geeks. (Dean Heistad, Ted Larson, and Paul Ross) “all they wanted to do was send digital pictures of the kids to Grandma. Heistad came back with a shopping list that would get them that, plus a home theater, a wireless network, new computing, a tricked-out music system, and GPS positioning capabilities.”…

Anschutz Entertainment Group to buy Manchester United?

The Anschutz Entertainment Group admits to a meeting with Manchester United officials, but no word whether a club purchase was discussed. Manchester has been unloading some big salary stars, which should make them more attractive for a takeover. Current market cap (MNU.L) is £488.4 million….

Yahoo Comparison Shopping

Today Yahoo released its new and improved shopping site, complete with comparative shopping. A search for a Sony Cyber-shot camera on Yahoo yielded 89 merchants and a PriceGrabber search found 69 results. Lowest final price on Yahoo was $520 compared to PriceGrabber’s $598, a 15% savings. Does this make PriceGrabber a prime takeover target? Yahoo and Google now have their own comparison service. PriceGrabber provides Ask Jeeves with a cobrand. AOL and MSN have the cash to spend….

Nature : Monkeys sense fairness

Nature profiles the work of Sarah Brosnan of Emory University teaching monkeys to exchange tokens for food. 80% of the monkeys rebelled if they did not receive an equal or better reward. Female monkeys were much more sensitive to the inequalities….

US News : How the Internet is Changing the American Dating Scene

U.S. News & World Report has a cover article covering Internet dating. It’s long but interesting. One expert comments that online dating “is as important as the automobile was in the 1920s and birth control in the 1960s.” I have not had much luck with Match.com, Yahoo Personals, Craig’s List or related services. Yes, maybe it is the product being sold and not the sales method that is the real downfall. Friendster tries to remove some of the online dating stigma but I expect them to fail once their business model kicks in. Is there a better solution? Everyone everywhere…

Philip Greenspun’s Weblog:

Philip Greenspun says “Java is the SUV of programming tools.”…

COMPAQ Support Library

COMPAQ Support Library on where to find the “Any” key….

Britains are Europe’s top binge drinkers

Reuters : “A report by Downing Street’s strategy unit found that while Britons drink less than most of the continental neighbors, they drink more intensively.” Ireland is not even mentioned as a competitor….

Zagat’s Guide to WiFi

LA Times (free registration required) : “Computer chip giant Intel Corp. and the leisure class bible Zagat Survey have produced a guide to the best restaurants and hotels in America that offer wireless fidelity, or Wi-Fi, Internet access.” full article…

Mozilla 1.5 RC1

Mozilla 1.5 RC1 is now available….

Milton Friedman interview

John Hawkins interviews Milton Friedman. “all of the progress that the US has made over the last couple of centuries has come from unemployment” “Roosevelt’s policies made the depression longer and worse than it otherwise would have been.”…

Spidering Hacks goes live

Spidering Hacks is now available for pre-order around the world. $20 adds these 100 tips and hacks to your library. 400 pages. Currently ranked 432,937 at Barnes & Noble. ISBN is 0-596-00577-6. UPC is 636920-00577-3. ASIN is 0596005776. As previously mentioned, I wrote a hack using Java to gather traffic statistics from Alexa. It will most likely come out in November, not October, but it’s still cool to see it hit the virtual shelves as a pre-order….

Google Code Jam

Google has a new coding competition, sponsored by TopCoder. Bypass Google HR and get your code recognized!…

WUSA Suspends Operations

WUSA, the Women’s United Soccer Association, suspended operations this afternoon….