I'm copying all my music from the Windows machine to the Mac. Should take about an hour.

...

I still wish the iPod just used 802.11b or 10-Base-T to connect. [Scripting News]

This is the whole point: synchronizing on an ethernet takes hours (and you're probably moving files at 100-Base-T), on the firewire connection it takes seconds.

On the other side, since the iPod is nothing more than an hard disk with MP3 files stored in some hidden folders, it should be relatively easy to build a Radio tool that would synch and keep track of your music... hmmm....

Naturally, most people expressed their support for him via a specially created weblog, and this week Winer was back at his desk. His weblog is likely to be dominated, at least for a while, by talk of pursuing a healthier lifestyle.

In some areas we have deep respect for the techies. I saw that at the hospital. It's deserved resepect. What these people do is rocket science, beyone the comprehension of people who don't have deep and specialized training, and talent and perseverence. When the time comes we put our lives in their hands. While in the hospital, contemplating the piece I will certainly write at some point, reluctantly I came to the conclusion that the lead of the story would have to be this: They saved my life. So are techies worth it? Hey, if they can save your life, yes, certainly. [Scripting News]

Synchronicity

Just yesterday I wrote on my Italian blog about Pietro Amante (article in Italian, sorry, if you want you can try this funny babelfish translation). Pietro is the webmaster for the Pharmacia Italia web site, he's a professional journalist and he's a surgeon. I don't mean trained as a surgeon but a real surgeon who works as a volunteer in an hospital in Milan, often for whole nights before drinking a coffee and going back to the office to take care of a huge web site. Between one post and the other, he saves lifes!.

So, since he has so much free time between managing the site and saving lifes, my next mission is to get him to open a weblog .

[Jakob Nielsen's Alertbox] Over the last 1.5 years, the average compliance with established usability guidelines increased by 4%. If we can sustain this level of improvement, we'll reach the ideal of 90% guideline compliance in 2017.

So... does this mean that in 2017 instead of holographic imagery, 4D immersive reality and 3DVideoBlogs, 90% of the web will be made of boring text only html pages???

After the Daveless week I'm closing this site, Dave is back and getting better.

The site has been running off an old PC with just Radio and some glue to get posts from several rss feeds, from a set of comments and from e-mail messages, it's just incredible what you can do with less than $40 worth of software. Now Dave is back and I can revert the computer to its original use. Of course, this site will remain availble forever .

Thank you to everybody.

Follow up on the introducing monday story.

1. Searching "introducing monday" on Google does not show any match to the real site: all links are from weblogs to the http://www.introducingmonday.co.uk/ site;
2. The broken link on the "Monday" word is still there.

Now, it's not simply that they don't understand, but they don't even learn!

PS: It's time for another laugh on http://www.introducingmonday.co.uk/

Recovery in Technology Spending Is Still Elusive. While other areas of business are showing tentative signs of strength, technology remains in a deep funk. And the reasons go beyond the weak economy. By Russ Mitchell. [New York Times: Technology]

At least to me, for once it's better than it appears.

IBM, Intel & C. are not selling iron to their customerss because what they sold yesterday was powerful enough to handle today's needs. Oracle, SAP, Siebel and PeopleSoft are not selling software because what they offer today does not significantly improve what they have sold yesterday (for millions of dollars).

So it's our time: time for small smart companies to sell small smart software that makes a difference

Today I met a generative artist. All artworks that you can see on on his site have been generated by code he wrote and are unique: there's no way you can create two identical images, once rendered, if you loose the file it'is gone forever.

Yet another example of how stupid these BigConsultants can be...

NPR.  Hypoallergenic cats.  Transgenic cats for allergic cat lovers.  It's amazing to see the number of transgenic animals/plants that are being developed.  From healthier Papaya's (resistant to herbicide damage) to fast growing salmon (5x faster growth rates) to hypoallergenic cats.  The future is already here.   Here is a round-up of the uses of transgenic animals from NPR. [John Robb's Radio Weblog]

We used to have an hypoallergenic cat named Sissi, no kidding. Of course, mine was an Organic Hypoallergenic Cat, not one of these modern transgenic gremlins.

Now we have Durandal. She's incredibly cute but if you are allergic to cats you't better stay a couple of miles away. As any good cat lover, I have a picture at hand.

PS: yes, she's named after the videogame.

Busy day yesterday, I had no time to post anything here. Curiously yesterday's top referers has been Scripting News, that had not been updated too.

JRo essay: Telecommunications Implosion [John Robb's Radio Weblog]

What else can I say... I totally agree: fiber should get to homes!

The most important issue, however, are applications (applications, applications, applications!). Nobody will ask to have fiber to their home to see flat web pages. Large amount of bandwidth will create the environment for a new breed of interactive applications, somebody has to start working on these new applications ASAP.

Ask Marc Canter

As usual, Google is up to date.

Temporarily Filling A Hole In The Blogosphere.

Paolo is also going through Dave-withdrawl, so he's suggested that we all try to fill the void until Dave returns. His idea is to create a place where Everybody Blogs It, "it" being anything from "get well Dave" messages to "anything else you think that might interest other members of the community. Give it a whirl!

Question: is there a way to pipe the get well comments on John Robb's site to the blog?

[The Shifted Librarian]

To answer to this last question I went to The Shifted Librarian site to post a funny comment like "Yeah, I could use cut'n'paste-rpc".

As I opened the comments, there already was a comment by Dane Carlson who had already generated an rss feed from John Robb's blog using a tool that *we* have developed: RssDistiller. I had not thought of using it.

The comments from John site are now automagically routed to the http://everybody.blogs.it site trough a filter running on Dane's PC. Please, notice that this is happening between people who have never met, sitting on different side of oceans, using less than $120 of software!!!

An idea to use some of the free time that we have since we can't read Scripting.com, while waiting for Dave to get better.

Here is an update on my friend and boss Dave Winer.   He is in the hospital and will remain there until next weekend.   To those that are sending notes, he should be OK, but in the meantime send positive healing thoughts in his direction.  He will be providing more details when he is able. [John Robb's Radio Weblog]

This explains it.

Dave, get well soon!

This may sound silly, but I'm a little concerned that Dave hasn't updated Scripting News in over 48 hours. That is unlike him. [Adam Curry: Adam Curry's Weblog]

I agree. It does sound silly, but I'm concerned too...

Checking my aggregator, I see that the only news coming down are the ones from "official" news sources. This is probably another difference between amateur and professional journalists: amateurs can take a weekend off without asking anybody .

Mac OS X people who can do Radio scripting -- want an interesting project that people would really appreciate (not for me, I still use Windows) -- wire BBEdit into Manila through XML-RPC. Talk with Paolo. I bet he would like to sell such a widget. [Scripting News]

Oh yesssss!

Ziv Caspi:With this I take issue. I think that the real power of aggregation chains (an information feed aggregator possibly preceeded by an RssDistiller-like stage that takes care of subscriptions, periodic pinging sources, scraping, etc) is that it bring all the relevant information to your client, not that it brings links. [more...]

Wait: I agree that aggregators should bring contents on the user's desktop database, I hate links to relevant news too and I would like to never have to leave my fast and efficient personal application server.

What I wanted to say is that the original version of that content is (and hopefully will remain) available on some server somewhere on the net. Items in aggregators are temporary, they are deleted as soon as they are pushed "out of the window" from newer contents. The personal aggregator offers a personalized view of contents that are actually stored on other servers. I think that personalized is the keyword, the one we need to concentrate upon.

Here's how the process should work in this new information economy:

1. Content is created on somebody desktop or from some other kind of intellgent bot
2. Content is stored on a server
3. I get the content in my aggregator for immediate reading
4. If I need to recover that same content at some later time, I use google.

Important notice: This applies also to intranet environments, actually I think that at the moment is almost more important for restricted group of users, such as companies, than to the whole big internet. Users in a company will always (hopefully) be much more focused, thus making this kind of set-up much more valuable.

[Paul Holbrook, about news aggregators] At first blush, this sounds great. But how do you prioritize those kinds of items? At what point does your news aggregator start to resemble the fire hose that email has turned into?

Paul is right, in fact I did not mean that the current Radio aggregator is going to be the final solution, but it is showing us the way. Using Mark Paschal's Kit set of tools, for example, you can already categorize items in a news aggregator, and suddenly everything starts making more sense, just like we use filters to manage email.

The point is that with tools like Radio, users can move a significant part of the content management workflow to their desktop, they can choose how to visualize it and define the flows of information. Most of all, they can decide how to visualize those contents.

While some might choose to keep all work feeds in one category and news feeds in another, others might prefer to see the New York Times news next to their budget updates.

Besides, unlike email, where the message is only stored in your local mailbox, aggregators are just a way to be notified about updates, the actual data still sits on the New York Times site, your accounting software, intranet server, other weblogs, etc.

Somehow I had totally missed this feature of Yahoo Groups. In the case that somebody else might have missed it too, if you submit:

http://groups.yahoo.com/group/Group_name/messages?rss=1

to your aggregator, you will get all posts submitted to that group in your favourite news reader.

Just subscribed to: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/klogs/messages?rss=1 and it works perfectly. Getting rid of more mail!

[Phil Wolff in a comment] Plumtree and others defined the intranet portal. Maybe [Radio] starts moving that portal to the desktop.

This is exactly what I meant. While corporate portals tend to centralize information and to create the need for some kind of editorial process, using tools like Radio lets users not only produce but also decide how to aggregate contents on their own desktops.

This make the whole system highly scalable and lets users have a very high degree of customization in terms of how and when the access their information.

I'm not saying that corporate portals are dead, I believe that there's a need for a set of centralized resources and contents. Applications like scheduling, document distribution, manuals, instructions, and similar still belong to a central server. Everything that does not need to be distributed to every single users of an Intranet can be decentralized.

At the end of the last century we all believed that portals needed personalized GUIs and we were developing them on servers instead of where they belong: clients.

Radio and applications like Radio are the ultimate GUI customization tool. I can decide how I access my contents because the interface is actually sitting on my own desktop, I don't need to change anything on the server, I can build the tools (or use others' tools) to decide how I want to interact with all these contents.

Of course, given this approach, news aggregators as we know them today will need to evolve, but a journey of a thousand miles begins with the first step, and this is definetly the first very important step.

Scripting News: A news aggregator is "software that periodically reads a set of news sources, in one of several XML-based formats, finds the new bits, and displays them in reverse-chronological order on a single page." 

It's important to consider that "set of news sources" could also mean reports generated by your accounting software, status of your servers, posts in a discussion group, orders from your e-commerce site, updates from your co workers workflow management software ... got it?

As I saw the ads I started searching on google to check if this was really real people or not. It looks like it is.

Very bad idea, I ended up not only with a computer that was not booting, but the installer CD does not "see" the hard disk, so I cannot install anything.

So I installed good ol' MacOS 9 on my iPod (using it just as any other external HD), and now I'm running the Norton Utilities from my iPod, trying to get it fixed.

When will I learn that this is serious stuff that I should not play with?

Never

Urldir: Blog Tool Feature Comparison Table.  (via Scripting.com)

For what is worth, replacing "yes" with 1 and "no" with 0, these are the results:

• b2/CafeLog: 32
• Blogger: 13
• Blogger Pro: 18
• Bloxsom: 15
• MovableType: 37
• NewsBruiser: 15
• Nucleus: 31
• pMachine Free: 35
• pMachine Pro: 36
• Radio Userland: 37

For days I've been getting lots of hits from people looking for Dreamweaver serialz on google (however nothing compared to the kind of traffic that Dreamweaver blogs get). Even if it's defintely not a nice view, it definetly shows a very high interest for the new Macromedia program.

For the first time today I found somebody in my referers looking for a Radio serial number.

I know where you can get it for only $40.

Since I found out abot tabbed browsing with Mozilla, I have found myself using this browser very often. I cannot say that it's my main browser, but let's say that we are 50/50 with IE.

Anyway, the last trick I found out about is the ability to save a bunch of bookmarks in a single button, clicking the button will open a set of tabs in a window.

So I created the blog! bookmark which creates a window where, in different tabs, I get:

1. my Radio desktop home page
2. the news aggregator
3. a radio directory listing of my images folder (I use this to easily copy and past links to uploaded images)
4. Google
5. Dictionary.com

Most probably is not my final setup, but so far it's very useful and it gets zero windows clutter: check this screenshot. To create your own set, open the pages that you need in different tabs, form the Bookmarks menu choose "File Bookmark" and in the pop up window that you will get click on the "Save as group" check box.

Today I was preparing a set of screenshots for Matt Brown, to show him how ThemeTool (the tool formerly known as RemoteEdit) works with Dreamweaver.

As usual I was taking notes in a Radio outliner while working, using the timestamp (crtl/command+4) to time different operations. As I finished writing it I realized that it was perfect for a Radio Point presentation.

So here it is.

After the last aggregator update I can find my subscribed readers' weblog addresses checking the referrals in the server's log files. The links to my readers have been added to my blogroll (the names are as they appear in their rss feeds copyright tag). Don't know where all this will lead, but it's fun.

DaveNet: Is it marketing or journalism? [Scripting News]

At the beginning of this week I have asked to three people working for me to open public weblogs, you can find the links at the bottom of my blogroll. Of course, this is marketing, not journalism (also in one of them is a journalist). I admit that I was (and somehow still am) a little worried about what and how they will write on their blogs, but I do believe that the advantages that we'll have sharing our POVs are worth the risk.

Marc, I know that you have been waiting for the next multimedia revolution for so long and that you are totally bored with what is happening today and what you most probably call shitty web pages.

You taught me to embrace and extend, so instead of living as a parasite inside comments of other people weblogs, why don't you publish your own stuff, your comments, your suggestions and your rants? Teach us how to make new tools, there's a lot of people listening out there, willing to learn and maybe willing to implement the what you envision.

Try asking, don't give for granted that everybody knows what's up your mind, share your vision. This is a great community with a lot of very smart people, give us a chance.

paolo

PS: you know how much I 'love' you, don't you?

Oh yeah. Here's a wizzy text editor in Flash. Bing. Thanks to Jon Udell for the link. (For Radio/Mac users, this could be the way we get a wizzy editor in MSIE/Mac.)  [Scripting News]

Hey, somebody finally did it! Great!

The first experiment we did with xml-rpc back at the end of the last century was a Director wizzy editor for UserLand's discussion group (sorry for the missing image...). Then we switched to the server side and abandoned the project.

It's totally cool to have something like this, it could go waaay further than the current wizzy editor!

Web Services on the Desktop via riccardo poli

Network Means Clients and Servers One of the keys to understanding Web services is to recognize that they enable the distribution of functionality throughout the network. Unlike the first generation of ASPs, today's leading-edge practitioners realize that the client is as much a part of the network as the server, and that the purpose of Web services is to enhance the role played by the client rather than eliminating it.

Next time I'll be on the phone with one of their support people trying to convince them that "indeed yes, you DO produce MacOS software" (no jokin'), I will tell them that I know Ziv .

ameliorate: Dictionary.com Word of the Day. ameliorate [Dictionary.com Word of the Day]

Dictionary.com is back. I love this site, it ameliorates my writing...

Warning, PNG experiment, this slides template will not work with IE6/Windows. It does work with IE/Mac and Mozilla/Mac&Win. Well... didn't somebody recently said that a Mac is a great presentations computer? This is another reason.

If you download this template you'll be able to change the background color of the slide simply editing the "bgcolor" inside the <body> tag at the beginning of the template. All soft shadows will gracefully blend to your background color.

• bgcolor="white"
• bgcolor="gray"
• bgcolor="darkblue"

PS: Want to have different templates for different sets of slides? Simply duplicate the #template.txt file from the /slides/ to the /slides/presentation/ folders. Very UserLand .

DaveNet: The Googlish way to do Directories.  [Scripting News]

OPML as the standard format for directories, I like this.

It could also be extended, directories are not only collections of sites, but can also represent complex sites.

For example, in our Frontier based content management system, IdeaTools, we are using OPML directories to manage compex sites.

Take this e-commerce site, for example. It's in Italian, sorry, but anyway it's a standard e-commerce site, where you can navigate trough a... directory to find what are you looking for, then add it to your shopping basket and buy it.

Now, guess how the editor manages this directory.

Yup, with Radio UserLand! Here's how this site looks like to the editor in Radio:

At this point, adding a link to the xml directory into the html code of the home page would be very easy.

In the global directory, this site would look like a sub-directory, managed by the editor of the site.

Thoughts?

Everybody seem to have discovered wireless networks. I agree that it's cool to be able to use you laptop anywhere in your house, office or other places, I bought an AirPort base station a few weeks after Apple introduced it and I have been happily surfing wireless since then.

I like it because as Nicholas Negroponte once said, it allows you to be part of your household (you can work while sitting on the couch with the rest of your family), and as Scott Johnson says, your cat can sleep on your lap when you work.

Before wireless, I used a somehow simpler and cheper technology that I called "very long wire network". It was based on having long ethernet cables in most rooms and just pluggin' in. It worked, but everybody kept tripping in the cables.

No more tripping with wireless? Well, not exactly.

I still need power, and also if my PowerBook does work for up to 3 hours without wires, then I have to plug it in somewhere, and there's again a cable linking me to a wall.

So, let's say that wireless networks have solved half of the problem, going from two to one cables. Now I want wireless power .

Scripting News: "I hope people start exchanging templates. Paolo already has a template for people to use. Thanks Paolo, as always, a pleasure working with you."

My pleasure, really. The reasons I enjoy playing (somebody might even call this working) with UserLand's software is that it allows me to do all kind of tricks without being a programmer, and that this is a great community. Yup, I'm not a programmer, I could not write a 4 lines script, I have never learned and most probably I would not be good at it because I don't have the kind of discipline that is necessary for this job.

I work with a lot of incredibly smart and skilled programmers and together we have created some very good stuff, imho.

However, with Radio I could turn a static piece of graphics into a dynamic template for outline-driven presentations in minutes, just cutting and pasting a few macros. It's true that I am a power user, but I see people doing this kind of nerdy stuff every day, it is a great way to empower people.

But there also is people who don't want to see this stuff.

In the last few days I have helped a few friend to get on-line with their Radio weblogs. They can use a computer, but they have no clue about what an html tag is. This allowed me to see where there is still room for improvement.

The main issue is with images and links: there is a lot of people out there who is just scared by code, they don't want to use it. This is especially true for Mac users who don't get the wysiwyg text editor in the browser, so we need a solution for these users.

I guess that now I know what our new tool will be about.