It’s been a huge mystery for the past 6 months. I figured it was either TextDrive or something else I’d done to make blogging to FactoryCity so painfully slow (something invisible to everyone but me). But, after stumbling upon a great list of plugins (via Digg) I discovered a plugin called NoPingWait that solves the problem by delaying the ping action until after the post has essentially cleared the runway. MarsEdit is also running a good clip once again.
Category: Technology
OmniDrive back for the Mac
Ah ha! Finally you lugwarts…! You promised me weeks ago, and only today do you make good on that promise… Well, that’s ok Nik. I forgive. Now just remind me where to get that OmniDrive Mac client?
Welcome to the party, Sun
With rumors flying about an Apple-Sun merger (not likely), the release of Sun’s “open source” single sign-on code got brushed to the wayside. As an OpenID fan, I’m wondering where this came from (oh yeah, the semi-irrelevant Liberty Alliance). Well, throw another identity protocol on the barbie.
Someone roll me a MeTube
So apparently those crafty cats up at BarCampVancouver were chattin’ up an open source alternative to YouTube, smartly backed by Amazon’s S3 mass-storage service.
Serve the files with Drupal, passing the media files into the open source Flow Player or aptly-named Flash Video Player, and you’re nine-tenths to bein’ illegal (as they say).
Now, that’s pretty hawt, if I do say so myself.
But, here’s what I pitched to the Flock guys last night at their SF meetup: why isn’t there an extension for browsers that takes any media file (I’m primarily referring to video, but audio support tends to be flakey too), sends it off to some server-side transcoding service and re-embeds a Flash file in place of the original media — that’ll play no matter what system you’re on?
I mean, this would be better than just distributing a player with the browsers… it would actually solve the cross-platform issue entirely (okay, so the Linux folks still need an up-to-date Flash player).
I’ve never been a big fan of Flash (for a number of reasons) but as it’s clearly the most cross-platform compatible format for sending out video and it’s not always possible for producers to generate Flash video, this solution would reside on the client-side, perhaps as a subscription-based service (owing the costs of licensing the all the codecs and so on).
I mean, until we get wide-spread adoption of open source video codecs and formats that are as good as the proprietary ones, this seems like a good stop gap solution. Don’t it?
developerID to connect the folks who build stuff
Not sure what developerID is gunna be, but the description sure is enticing: “a social identity network for programmers, designers, engineers, sys admins & others working in the professional developer community.” Nothing’s public yet, so I’m eager to see what it turns out to be… Oh, and a sweaty Ballmer is always sure to attract the right audience.
Ruminating on GPPLE
It’s fun to speculate (i.e. Will gBrowser 2.0 be built on WebKit?) on what the cozying up between Apple and Google means. Is it really about search box revenue? Or is it a more insidious and calculated move, intended to push other folks to “show their cards” (so-to-speak) as to which major player(s) (or team) you want to side with?
Om’s media guess is as good as any, but I’m more interested in what this means for both search-as-platform and the future of browsers.
As we know, it’s long been speculated that Google is developing its own browser, yet the primary manifestations of this seem to be Mozilla Corp’s physical proximity to Google “All Your Base” HQ and the loving partnership on the Google Toolbar and the I’ll-pay-you-a-dollar-to-stop-searching-with-the-search-box campaign (because it’s costing us more than us giving every Firefox user a dollar!).
Could it be Mozilla’s resistance to pledge allegiance to Teh GOOG that’s causing them to look for another browser partner similarly predicated on open source roots (and thereby easily swayed with the right amount of “bought” — ahem! — I mean employed developers)?
Could it be that Apple’s iTunes Evil DRMpire is too attractive for Google to ignore and that, in wanting to gussy up before an all out Microsoft MediaCenter assault, is stacking its actors accordingly, aiming to not only deliver all the world’s information to you in a single click, but all its DRM’d content as well? Are ya feelin’ lucky?
Well do ya? Punk?
I do see some potentially significant ramifications for the browser space as more and more it’s become a search space, with very little to do with software whatsoever. While the relationship between Google and Mozilla is likely to remain strong, there may be chinks in the armor still, with Google and Apple being more 2.0 strict companies and Microsoft and Mozilla trending towards the heavier 1.5 transitional model.
Think of it this way: Mozilla and Microsoft do not have the same kind of content leverage that Google and Apple have. In fact, Mozilla has no content to sell and Microsoft, well, they’re situated squarely atop and albatross OS that promises to be a media panacea… that requires hardware most of the world doesn’t have. In the other court, Google content is already available cross platform and Apple music files have been downloaded a bazillion times into their proprietary iPod players. Would it not make sense for Google and Apple to control the entire distribution mechanism, soup-to-nuts, across all platforms? Isn’t that what Boot Camp is all about? Is that what open sourcing Darwin is all about?
Well, in all seriousness, I have no idea. But as I said, it sure is fun to conjecture! Y’know, this whole arrangement probably is just a good-natured relationship where two companies who value user experience and simplicity and are pioneers in their fields are getting together to form a union of trust and mutual support. It’s all about the users, y’know? — and doin’ what’s right for them. (If only I had a John Edwards drawl!)
Deserving each other?
Two companies that I actually like, but are more secretive than most, now share a chromosome. What this will mean for the computing industry is yet to be seen, but with Amazon’s entry into the storage market and Apple’s flailing attempts at going Web 2.0, this should certainly be an interest Judas moment, given Microsoft’s bail-out of the fruit a few years back.
Microformatique + MF Icons
For quite some time I’d wanted to start a Microformats news blog, that would talk in more plain terms about microformats, acting as a sister to the Practical Microformats wiki, preserving the Microformats dot org blog for technical news and discussions. Of course I never got around to it and instead have used my blog or postings to the microformats-discuss list to spread news of new adoptions or implementations.
Now, however, it seems that John Allsopp (of Westciv fame) has picked up the ball with Microformatique — covering all things regarding “data at the edges”. On top of that, there have been a number of good articles and posts recently worth a read:
- Jeremiah Owyang: Understanding Microformats for the Non-Technical Web Professional or Marketer
- John Allsopp: Add microformats magic to your site
- also by John: The Big Picture on Microformats
Meanwhile, I figured I would finally release some icons I did for Tantek awhile back. Nothing special, but might be useful for some. And if you’ve got microformats icons, please post’em to the wiki!
The coming war against microspam
Off the cuff:
as microformats diffuse throughout the web, malevolent uses will inevitably rise.
if you imagine that microformats allow you to use the web as a database or as a file store, you can begin to see the parallels to the malware, spyware and viruses that have wreaked havoc upon every operating system and storage device that there ever has been.
thus it will become important, perhaps at some later juncture, to consider the importance of fighting microspam in the microformatted ecosystem.
i don’t know how, i don’t know what that fight will necessarily look like, but i do know that it’s coming and that we ought be ready when it comes.
to this day, humans have not irradicated the common cold. nor is it likely that they’ll prevent or end the onslaught of a contagion like spam. thus as with the great potential that the lowercase semantic web brings, it is also our responsibility and charge to begin to think about how we might prevent its abuse.
Reminiscing about Nintendo and Sega
Watching Google and Yahoo! compete is like watching Sega and Nintendo back in the day when it was SegaCD vs Super Nintendo (wow, now I get to date myself with “obscure” references to old skool technology!). Oh yeah, and meanwhile Microsoft is pricing itself out of the market, just like NeoGeo did.
With Google’s more staid bundle of desktop-cum-web applications being the talk of the town, Yahoo!, (represented by upstarts Flickr and Upcoming) not wanting to be upstaged, has launched its own cross-application barrage of new features.
It’s funny, because I use many of Google’s services but I actually like Yahoo! better. I mean, maybe it’s because they actually come to my events or because I’m friends with many of their WebTwenny staff or because if I were reincarnated as a web app, I’d want to be Flickr… I dunno.
It’s like I used to have a SegaCD but I still always played my Nintendo because it felt like it had a heart. It was about more than just the game. It was subjective for sure, but you can’t really rationally argue against intuition.
Maybe that’s the key to Robert’s question… and my criticism. Google has a ton of blogs and newsgroups, but I just don’t connect with them the way I do with the blogs, services or people of Flickr and Upcoming… I mean, I know there is, but it just makes me wonder, “Gee Tinman, is there really a heart in there?“
Factory Joe 