Congratulations to Scoble for cutting down on his Blog entries. I’m now able to keep up with your rants.
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iTune Obsession.
Posted on February 28, 2004 by Richard
I’ve been mildly obsessed with iTunes and my iPod in the last couple of weeks. First ensuring that all the tracks are correctly dated to the year they were recorded, and now adding the beats per minute (BPM). That way I can utilise a fabulous feature of the application, creating Dynamic Playlists. Having the date correct means I can get very nostalgic and listen to the tracks from the 80s. Having the correct BPM means I get to listen to tracks that pump me up, or calm me down. I’m currently testing Ask the DJ in finding the correct BPM count. It seems to be fairly accurate.
If anyone has some great ways of utilising iTunes, I’d love to hear them.
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No Longer Black And White.
Posted on February 20, 2004 by Richard
Tuesday, February 24 will be a day of coordinated civil disobedience: websites will post Danger Mouse’s Grey Album on their site for 24 hours in protest of EMI’s attempts to censor this work.
DJ Danger Mouse created a remix of Jay-Z’s the Black Album and the Beatles White Album, and called it the Grey Album. Jay-Z’s record label, Roc-A-Fella, released an a capella version of his Black Ablum specifically to encourage remixes like this one. But despite praise from music fans and major media outlets like Rolling Stone (”an ingenious hip-hop record that sounds oddly ahead of its time”) and the Boston Globe (which called it the “most creatively captivating” album of the year), EMI has sent cease and desist letters demanding that stores destroy their copies of the album and websites remove them from their site. EMI claims copyright control of the Beatles 1968 White Ablum.
For all the details visit Grey Tuesday.
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Googleblatted.
Posted on February 5, 2004 by Richard
There is a highly amusing page at Paul Bourke’s Swinburn University home page. You see, Google added a new artistic logo in the form of fractals. When the logo was clicked, it linked to Paul’s page. The massive increase in traffic overloaded the server, and he had to reduce the size of his main web page to reduce the load. Paul suggests that it maybe a good idea if Google asks first before linking like this.
This in itself is funny, but what really adds to the fun is Slashdot adding an article, and the page being slashdotted. You’d think Slashdot would have more sense.
Anyway, just looking forward to his next page when he gets more traffic from Bloggers.
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Eastern Standard Tribe.
Posted on February 4, 2004 by Richard
Cory Doctorow, author of the brilliant “post-human” sci-fi novel Down and Out In The Magic Kingdom, has announced that his latest novel Eastern Standard Tribe has begun shipping. He’s also releasing it for download under Creative Commons, and asking for people to supply him with formats. It’s already available in ASCII, HTML, PDF and PDB.
I read “Down and Out” while on honeymoon at Disney World. It made the story so much more real. When I mentioned to Cory that this was the plan, he was fantastic enough to suggest a few romantic places at Disney for my wife and I to go. He’s a great guy.
I’ll be buying EST. I love Cory’s writing style, and think he deserves compensation despite his download offer.
Good luck with the new novel Cory! Once again your Whuffie has gone up.
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From Perth To Ljubljana.
Posted on February 1, 2004 by Richard
I found this site, IP2Location, on Blogdex, which it seems, after a little investigations, is spamming comments on blogs. It claims to track an “IP Address to Country, Region, City, Latitude, Longitude and Internet Service Provider”. I know that Perth (Australia) is in the backwaters of the world, but Ljubljana in Slovenia I’m not.
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Weblogger Meetup.
Posted on February 1, 2004 by Richard
Calling all Perth Bloggers. Interested in a Meetup?
Filed under: Blogs | 1 Comment »
Frozen, A Future Network.
Posted on February 1, 2004 by Richard
Last night I mentioned on the #joiito IRC channel my idea that Social Software was at the cusp of potentially taking off (Social Chasm). Someone suggested that it isn’t yet fully developed and that it’s got more to come. So I had a think about where it may be headed, and it occurred to me that it’ll become a built in feature to everyones address book, or your Personal Information Manager (like Chandler).
Eventually you’ll have a check box in your application’s settings, which allows you to tap into social networks. It’ll be federated, so a collection of servers will collect information about people for others to search. It’ll be secure, requiring digital certificates to to allow access to personal data, and it’ll allow relevance searches so you can find the people within your network that matches some thing that you are interested in.
Let’s say you are writing a paper on a particular subject. You click on your social network icon and up pops a collection of links to people doing something similar to your paper. They’ll have chosen this information to be public when they saved or submitted the information, just incase it’s private. Your computer already knows what your interests are and what the paper is that you just finished writing, because its been taking note. It finds you a collection of people that are contact-able through others you know, and just like todays social software allows you to contact them through your friends or if possible directly.
Of course some people may want their whole life private, so there’ll be that option to.
Federated Relevant Social Software Networks. FRSSN, or Frozen. How’s that, even a great acronym.
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