Author: rich.campoamor

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More On Flock

This Business Week article has a bit more substantive information about what the Flock browser is and what it will do:

The Flock browser, which is expected to be released to the public in test form in about two weeks, does everything a regular browser does, but with several important additions.

For one, it makes blogging a snap by eliminating the need to do arcane coding in order to post, change fonts or add photos. Right click the mouse on a Web page, and a blogging wizard comes up that automatically creates links, citations, and quotes that are ready to insert into a blog. A horizontal bar on the browser also can load photos from the photo-sharing site Flickr, so they can be simply dragged and dropped into the blog post.

Moreover, Flock makes it easy to create online bookmarks for Web sites. Visit a Web site and click a “+” button on one of the browser’s toolbars, and that site is saved to a personalized list on the social bookmarks Web site http://del.icio.us./.

Those bookmarks can be tagged with useful descriptions and shared with others. Flock also lets people create watchlists of people whose bookmarks they like and form groups with people who link to particular tags. Flock also keeps a history of every Web page a user visits, so they can be found easily later.

I can’t wait to get my hands on this and see how it does with all of the ‘stuff’ in my own infocloud.

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Incredible Vanishing Nokia 6682

For whatever reason, the long awaited Nokia 6682 is no longer available on Cingular’s web site. The 6682 is now ‘available’ on Amazon for $99 with a shipping date of ‘4 to 6 weeks’ (!?). Nokia thoughtfully has it available on their website for $599.

What is going on with Cingular and the 6682?

Update 2 October 2005: The 6682 is available once again on the Cingular site for $299; Amazon still has it on a 4 to 6 week delay.

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Freaking the Tipping Point

I recently finished reading Blink, The Tipping Point and Freakonomics. I would highly recommend any/all of these books. One curious tension that comes from having read these recently is that the ‘Broken Window’ policing strategy that is extolled in The Tipping Point is rigorously discounted as having no effect on crime in Freakonomics. Curious. How did Malcolm Gladwell get this so wrong?

The other theme that hit me was how several of the topics covered in Blink and The Tipping Point start to sound like what gets discounted (and in some cases disproven) as ‘conventional wisdom’ in by Levitt in Freakonomics. Makes me curious that if Levitt were to write a book examining each of the assertions in Gladwell’s works, how many of them would stand up to the economists vetting? No matter the outcome, the result would be an interesting read.

One topic that I would love to see Levitt cover is this: does the increased level of violence in movies and video games desensitise people to violence or does it desensitise people to violence in movies and video games?

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Protopage

I just discovered another custom web page creation site called protopage. It seems that it is (for now) really only intended to be a startup page (unlike the more functional netvibes). As such the functionality is limited to creating groups of web page links and small note snippets. Still, it seems great that being able to create web pages has gotten this easy.

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Mac: Jewelcase

Jewelcase is another incredible utility for the Mac. Jewelcase is a plugin for iTunes that displays the CD cover art and artist/track title/album title info in a very cool 3D spinning display.

My only grumble with it is that it doesn’t automatically retrieve the cover art; if it is not already in your iTunes library, it simply displays a generic CD cover. In the mean time, you can always use something like the FetchArt script to nab cover art for you.

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Yet Another Cool Web App

LibraryThing is sort of like flickr for books. You can enter in titles and it will search the Library of Congress and Amazon for matching information to allow you to build you library without having to manually enter in all of the fiddly little details.

What would be really impressive is if something which allows you to easily scan bar codes for books (like Delicious Library) would also allow you to export to LibraryThing, the upfront input ramp-up for LibraryThing would be greatly eased.

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Learn From The Webgoat

If web security is at all of interest to you then get yourself over to the webgoat project at the Open Web Applications Security Project. Installers are available for Linux, OSX and windows.

WebGoat is a full J2EE web application designed to teach web application security lessons. In each lesson, users must demonstrate their understanding by exploiting a real vulnerability on the local system. The system is even clever enough to provide hints and show the user cookies, parameters and the underlying Java code if they choose. Examples of lessons include SQL injection to a fake credit card database, where the user creates the attack and steals the credit card numbers.

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Netvibes Rocks!

I stumbled across netvibes this morning. This is very cool. Though Netvibes is currently in early beta, you can create your own web page that aggregates RSS feeds, local weather, gmail, and the ability to add notes to your site (sort of like web stickies. You can drag and drop to arrange things as you like. There is definitely a huge amount of potential here to make this a very compelling tool.

Alas, no Safari support (yet). Firefox for OS X works fine, though.

Looking around a bit more, this seems to be very similar to start.com functionality wise. Start suffers from being a MS sponsored project as well as not having as clean an interface as netvibes.

I also discovered meebo , which is apparently trying to be a web-based IM aggregator (much like I wished that google talk was web-based).

Overall, it looks like commercial grade AJAX apps are starting to take off. And, no, Microsoft, we don’t need your bloated, ill-conceived, proprietary ‘rich client’ software. Thank you very much.

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Shameless — Disaster Profiteering Act

In light of all of the other questionable activities post-Katrina, this is absolutely reprehensible (emphasis below added):

Project on Government Oversight – Big federal contractors have scored a major victory with yesterday’s news that House Government Reform Chairman Tom Davis (R-VA) and Representative Kenny Marchant (R-TX) introduced legislation that will waive meaningful taxpayer protections and competition in contracting whenever Congress or the President declares a national emergency or there is a disaster. It is rumored that the legislation will be included in a manager’s amendment to the next Katrina relief bill. Project On Government Oversight (POGO) has donned the legislation (H.R. 3766) the “Disaster Profiteering Act.”

The Davis legislation would allow agency heads across the federal government to treat all purchases related to national emergencies as “commercial items,” meaning that contracts can be made under a no-bid process and that the government would not have the authority to audit purchases after they have been made. A second, unrelated provision deals with Katrina volunteers.

via Agonist

The only hope is that this ‘proposed’ legislation won’t actually pass.

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What the Flock is Flock?

According to Wired:

Flock advertises itself as a “social browser,” meaning that the application plays nicely with popular web services like Flickr, Technorati and del.icio.us. Flock also features widely compliant WYSIWYG, drag-and-drop blogging tools. The browser even promises to detect and authenticate all those user accounts automatically. It’s a clear attempt to be the browser of choice for the Web 2.0 user.

Interesting that they are attempting to aggregate all of that stuff in the browser — that was one of the reasons that I created this site was to have one place that I could link in all of my ‘social software’ (del.icio.us, flickr, last.fm, etc). Maybe Flock is a tool that we help me do what I am already doing better (or maybe I just don’t have a clue).

In addition to linking in some other functionality on the web, I have also been toying around with adding some information to the site using FOAF and some of the microformats that I have been reading about.

I signed up to be notified of when invites were going out. Maybe I’ll be one of the lucky early testers.

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WiredReach Content Sharing Platform

WiredReach looks like an interesting idea for sharing content without using shared servers:

The WiredReach Platform allows users to selectively share content with others in a completely decentralized and secure manner. That means your content does not have to be uploaded to any central servers but rather can be shared right from your desktop or device. We use the term “content” very loosely to include things like presence, blogs, bookmarks, documents, calendars, music, photos… virtually any type of social media.

From following the download link, there is a wiredreach.com which provides the development support for the opensource project.

It appears that it is all based on opensource using Java JXTA for some of the underlying network capabilities. There are a number of plugin projects going on to add blogging and various other content type sharing to the core project.

Downloading the Mac OSX version now. More when I have a chance to work with it a bit.

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Updated 14 September 2005: Granted I didn’t dig too far, but there is really not much to see from what they have available at this point. It looks like many of the plugins and other functionality is not quite there yet. The ability to add a few links to a page and have some rudimentary ‘forum’ functionality is not terribly compelling beyond what you get ‘out of the box’ with a Wiki. The claim in their blurb above about supporting ‘any type of social media’ appears to be a forward-looking statement at this point.

Without setting it up on several machines and emailing notifications to myself, there didn’t seem to be much meat. It would have been nice if there were one or two ‘sample’ sites available that one could connect to get a better feel for the software.

I’ll check back on this in the future, but for now (for me) it doesn’t seem very compelling (and I had high hopes of an awesome JXTA-based application).

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Using ‘War’ to Sell More Arms To The World

Apparently the US and Britain are taking some flack for staging a huge arms exhibition in London and using the Iraq war as a sales point:

The spokesman said the invasion and occupation of Iraq had been “good news” for the major arms companies.

“It has allowed them to label their arms as battle-tested and provided them with promotional material for their missiles, bombs, fighter aircraft, artillery, tanks and armoured vehicles.

“They will be marketing their weapons to countries with the full support of the UK Government and the perverse promotional assistance provided by Iraq.”

I suppose there is nothing to keep this sort of thing from happening, but it does have that sort of perverse quality to it as if Louisville Slugger said ‘look at how well our baseball bats cracked skulls at the last riot’.

Not surprisingly, these same activities went on during previous hostilities in the Middle East.

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Nokia 6682, Finally

It looks like Cingular has finally (and quietly) released the long awaited Nokia 6682 with a sticker price of $299. I still think that this a better all around phone than the hyped up ‘iTunes Phone’ (aka Motorola ROKR E1).

Considering that I have only had my 6620 since early July (and have been completely happy with it aside from the low resolution of the camera), I think I will wait a bit and see if Cingular drops the price (as they always do). No need in paying the first mover penalty as many people did with the Motorola RAZR when it first came out. Besides, getting my 6620 through Amazon and cashing in on the rebates at the time, I basically earned $25 dollars in buying the phone.

I just checked on Amazon, and they have the 6682 listed at $174.99 with a $150 rebate. Unfortunately, it is also listed as ‘not currently available’. As the phone was just released today, that will likely change in the next few days.

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New Book on Founding of Google

A new book by John Battelle titled The Search: How Google and Its Rivals Rewrote the Rules of Business and Transformed Our Culture should provide an interesting read and some insight into this ever growing company. The review on Wired.com sounds promising so I’ll probably add it to my wishlist.

The last book like this I read was supposed to have been on the startup of Netscape, called Competing on Internet Time. However, I found this book to be a real dissapointment as the dubious premise the author took was that everything that Netscape did was in reaction to Microsoft. I can’t count the number of times the author kept using the tired phrase ‘…locked in a life and death struggle with Microsoft’. The fact is, at the time Microsoft had no clue about the Internet and where happily flogging away on the virtues of video on demand over cable (remember the blinding success that turned out to be).

Startup: A Silicon Valley Adventure was a fascinating look at how real innovation (in this case in the early days of pen based computing) can be choked to death by ‘partnering’ with Microsoft.

I still think that my favorite book on technology companies was Tracy Kidder’s The Soul of a New Machine. This is a book that I picked up an read many years ago and continue to re-read it now and again.

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Semantic MediaWiki Implementation

I was interested to learn that enhancements to Wiki are being formulated to allow for the inclusion of semantic annotation of articles.

Wiki has proven itself to be an effective means of collecting information (look no further than the wikipedia). Coupling something like wikipedia with a means of being able to make machine readable sense of the collected knowledge is a pretty potent combination.

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Massachusetts Open Document Format

Not surprisingly, Massachusetts has long-standing concerns over Microsoft’s XML schema based document formats and is seeking an open format to preserve current and future documents from patent and other encumbrances by Microsoft. This is actually part of a larger effort to minimize the states dependence on proprietary technologies.

Perhaps one of the most ridiculous parts of this situation is Microsoft’s refusal to support the Open Document format. They already have over twenty different import and export filters in Word. The OD format is similar enough to their not-quite-XML format for it not to be a huge effort for them to create a filter to support OD.

It is pretty easy to see that MS is trying to use it’s market dominance to encumber others intellectual property via their closed, proprietary (and not terribly efficient) document formats.

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More Katrina (Less Angry)

This article which appeared in National Geographic in October of 2004 raises some interesting questions for the ‘we couldn’t have known this was going to happen’ apologists that I pointed out in a previous posting. This quote from the article was particularly striking:

“The Federal Emergency Management Agency lists a hurricane strike on New Orleans as one of the most dire threats to the nation, up there with a large earthquake in California or a terrorist attack on New York City.”

I am glad that Colin Powell is out of office and can speak his mind about Katrina and it’s aftermath as well.

This is a pretty amazing slide show of the before, during and after of a photographer who was in New Orleans the entire time of the storm.