everwas

a blog by Ian Kennedy

Month: November 2005

  • What’s Scoble Reading

    We’ll get <meta> on you today. Here’s a link to Robert Scoble’s Blogroll.

  • Richard Scarry’s Cultural Commentary

    Richard Scarry’s Best Word Book Ever

    Flickr user Alan Taylor finds some interesting differences between his 1963 edition of Richard Scarry’s book and the more recent version he got for his kids. Annotated photos show point out the details. The “brave hero” rescues the “beautiful screaming lady” in 1963 but in 1991 its the “fire fighter” rescues the “cat in danger.”

  • Original Content from Yahoo

    Last week I met one of the editors of Yahoo Sports and he gently reminded me that Kevin Sites and Richard Bangs are not the first instances of original reporting coming from Yahoo. Yahoo Sports has had it’s own exclusive analysts providing original coverage for several years and have blazed many of the trails faced by new media companies such as securing credentials for events and getting access for interviews.

  • Remix as a Business Model

    My friend Alex has the coolest job. His company, Rock River Music (throw on the ‘phones, cool streaming music on their site), puts together compilations of music for retail stores. You know that CD you saw by the register at The Gap? That’s a collection of tracks selected, licensed, and packaged by Rock River.

    The LA Times has a piece on them which gave you a peek
    at their business. Rock River charges the store about $4 per CD and the store sell the CD for about $15. They can also use the CDs as a promotional giveaway to their best customers. Talk about cheap advertising, this stuff not only pays for itself, it turns a profit.

    I loved making mix tapes when I was in college, everything from the song selection & sequence to the tape covers. In the digital age when it only takes a few minutes to rip a disk, it’s a lost art. Alex has found a way to do this for a living. Nice work if you can get it.

  • RSS for Data Synchronization

    Exciting news out of Redmond. Ray Ozzie is bringing his experience and approach to synchronization that he applied to his earlier products Lotus Notes and Groove to Microsoft’s implementation of RSS. We can look for future products such as their hosted Live products suite to include these synchronization features and Ray has published a post which points to an FAQ of these new extensions that Microsoft is proposing. Simple Sharing Extensions will add to the RSS specification to use it to do multi-directional synchronization of data sources. From the FAQ:

    What kinds of scenarios does SSE enable?

    Just as RSS enables the aggregation of information from a variety of data sources, SSE enables the replication of information across a variety of data sources. Data sources that implement SSE will be able to exchange data with any other data source that also implements SSE.

    From the user’s perspective, this means that you will be able to share your data (such as calendar appointments, contact lists, and favorites) across all of your devices and with anyone else that you choose, regardless of infrastructure or organization.

    SSE is particularly useful for scenarios in which there are multiple masters and/or asynchronous updates. For example, SSE could be used to share your work calendar with your spouse—either of you could enter new appointments, even if not currently connected. Similarly, SSE could be used to replicate a set of calendar entries among a group of people, each working in a different company and using different infrastructure.

    To do this SSE, “introduces concepts such as per-item change history (to manage item versions and update conflicts) and tombstones (to propagate deletions, and un-deletions).” Microsoft is clearly taking the lead of embracing and extending the functionality of RSS. I saw a little of this back in June when they demonstrated a hacked version of an RSS reader that added sorting widgets to an RSS feed. I believe Microsoft is actively looking to RSS as the proxy for Exchange in the open and standards-based world of Web 2.0.

    But the best part is that these extensions are going to be released under a Creative Commons license so that their initial work can be expanded by third parties and avoid vendor lock-in.

  • Are we there yet?

    So if Microsoft and Yahoo are cross-linking their two IM networks and now AOL and Microsoft are set to announce a link up on Monday, does that mean that someone with Microsoft Messenger may be able to see both the AOL and Yahoo IM networks?

    We’ll have to wait for the conference call on Monday.

  • The $100 laptop

    The MIT Media Lab has released photos of its $100 laptop designed for children in developing nations. It features a handcrank for back up power in rural areas, wireless access via a peer-to-peer mesh technology, and (much to the disappointment of Appple & Microsoft) runs Linux.

    From the FAQs:

    Why do children in developing nations need laptops?
    Laptops are both a window and a tool: a window into the world and a tool with which to think. They are a wonderful way for all children to “learn learning” through independent interaction and exploration.

    Why is it important for each child to have a computer? What’s wrong with community-access centers?
    One does not think of community pencils—kids have their own. They are tools to think with, sufficiently inexpensive to be used for work and play, drawing, writing, and mathematics. A computer can be the same, but far more powerful. Furthermore, there are many reasons it is important for a child to “own” something—like a football, doll, or book—not the least of which being that these belongings will be well-maintained through love and care.

    Initial orders are being negotiatiated with Brazil, Thailand, Egypt and Nigeria with each government purchasing at least 1 million units each. They are expected to start production early next year.

  • What would you do with unlimited bandwidth?

    If you’re Time Warner/AOL, you’d use it to clean out your attic and broadcast re-runs. Actually, that’s not quite accurate as they’re going to ask folks to participate in a peer-to-peer network to access the video files. AOL and peer-to-peer, that’s not a union I would have imagined but a new dawn is upon us.

    I’m not quite sure what to make of this move. It’s great that they’re serving up all this old stuff (much to the chagrin of established actors and actresses who’d rather we forget their early appearences on Kung Fu) but it all seems tentative to me.

    The company will offer a changing selection of several hundred episodes each month, rather than providing continuous access to all the episodes in a series, Mr. Frankel said, so as not to cannibalize potential DVD sales of old TV shows.

    This breaks a cardinal rule in my book. If you’re going to take advantage of the amplification effects of the internet (you know, the Long Tail stuff), you need provide a permalink to this content. If you keep changing the lineup, that’s never going to happen.

    Why not even go a step further and free this stuff up as source material for mashups as the BBC has done? I would gladly watch an episode of Welcome Back Kotter if someone dubbed in muppet voices and a Shakesperian plot line. Yes, I’ll even watch the advertisements.

  • Deleted

    Tyler told me yesterday that he learned a few new songs at school but couldn’t remember some of them because his brain "deleted" them.

    I’m not sure if I should be more worried that he used a technical word out of it’s normal context or that he referred to his brain as something beyond his control.