Earthquake destroys Italian school. Rescuers try to pull out some 50 children from the rubble of a village kindergarten[cedilla] as reports say at least three children have died. [BBC News | WORLD]

Back from lunch I found an IM message from JY saying "did you get the hearthquake???". I thought he was referring to the hearthquake that happened a couple of days ago in Sicily, and he wasn't on-line anymore so... I didn't find out until a few minutes ago, when I read my aggregator. Btw: it happened in Southern Italy, quite far from where I live.

I'm playing with Evocam. The image that you see is captured in real time. A motion detector analyzes the camera signal and saves a jpeg file every time anything happens on the screen (meaning: I move). This won't be updated for long I think, but so far is cool.

PS: I switched the camera off, tomorrow is a national holiday in Italy and I won't be back until Monday. Leaving the camera on in a dark and empty office doesn't make much sense. Now you can stop reloading this page

Remember my ramblings about p2p companies? Well, when I wrote that piece I wanted to use the "loosely coupled" metaphor, but then for some reason I didn't. This article gives a some very interesting perspectives on the idea. You should also read the white paper.

PodNews 3 is an aggregator for Apple's iPod. [Scripting News]

Curiously what I was asking for my Palm just a few days ago, is now available for my iPod. Cool.

Written by Matt Brown at the Dreamweaver MX Application Development Center. This article is very helpful both if you have purchased the Developer Resource Kit CD and have the special version of ThemeTool for Dreamweaver, or if you have downloaded the standard ThemeTool version.

So, Palm has introduced a couple of new toys. I've been using Palm products since 1998, the last one I got is a m505 which has been sitting idle on my desktop at least for the last six months. What happened? Well, nothing special, it's just that it simply kept doing the same stuff that it did in 1998. Yes, with colors but... my addresses look about the same with colors or in black and white.

What I mean is that while my other "user experiences" have changed quite a lot in the last few years, Palm software has not. It's probably a usage issue: there's only a limited number of features that you can invent around a bunch of appointments and contacts, but still, it's not as sexy as it looked once.

From this point of view, I'm somehow more interested in the Treo which, at least, merges a cell phone with a PDA, allowing you to get rid of one little box and some batteries to remember to charge.

But still, they have to do something better than using some weird metal for the case if they want my money again. I want the killer app. How about an rss news aggregator??

Ok, after filling up everybody's news aggregator with my QuickTime movie, I decided to create a new category and to move video posts there. It's here, and of course it has its own rss feed you can subscribe to if you like.

Terry Frazier highlights in this piece the most relevant challanges that we face about this kind of organizations.

I basically agree, most issued have already been risen with almost all the people I discussed about this.

Most of these people are also saying that it would be nice if it could work, so it's probably worth trying.

I also agree that the main challange is

That may seem strange if you're reading knowledge-focused weblogs because you're already using it. But you are among a tiny minority, and there are a whole bunch of folks out there -- with skills we need for success -- who aren't in that group. Experienced, talented people in sales, marketing, fulfillment, service delivery, training, customer service, research, legal services, education, and other areas could be a boon to our efforts, but may have no clue how or why they should collaborate.

So, ok, we've plenty of challanges... any solutions out there?

These two machines are about 5 years apart. The first one has 2Gb of HD, 64Mb of Ram and leather on the keyboard, the second 60Gb of HD, 512Mb of Ram and a great OS. The Bose speakers sound still better than the Harman Kardon ones. They both look great imho.

APPLE -- I SWITCHED FROM USING & WRITING ABOUT PCS FOR A LIVING, TO USING & WRITING ABOUT APPLE. Fix, this, please!!

--Nancy C. Hanger
Columnist, BYTE.com

I was tempted to write something like "I only write on my weblog, I have only about 300 regular readers, 22% of them are Mac users, but please Apple, fix this also for me!".

I didn't post it there, but I'm posting it here.

There are about 10 tcp connections open at all time, web, mail, a few IM clients, Radio doing its things. But also things like the help system of MacOS X relies on a connection and doesn't work if it cannot ask something to a central server. Same with all .Mac based services (iSync and Backup).

The thought that so many people still live on a modem connection makes me wonder why I don't hear more people saying that the Internet sucks.

Diego Golberg: On June 17th, every year, the family goes through a private ritual: we photograph ourselves to stop a fleeting moment, the arrow of time passing by.

It's one of those things that everybody has probably thought at some time that it would have been cool to do, but nobody has ever done it. Well, Diego did, 26 years of pictures of him and his family (via Capitain Nemo).

Aromaphones from Scotland. A Scottish company is working on cellphones that can generate odors on demand, so that users can send each other smells, as well as getting stinky "ringtones" from their handsets.

Dr Dodd told the Glasgow Herald his plans include distilling and delivering aromatherapy products by phone.

Link

Discuss

(Thanks, Steve!) [Boing Boing Blog]

So, is your brain really hierarchic? I think it is. Here's the informal demo.... [Scripting News]

I agree, our minds tend to be hierarchic, especially regarding where we store things. But it's also a matter of user interface. In Dave's example, the user interface is our house, which is (usually) friendly and something we are aware of.

A simpler example could be made with files: usually we should be able to find a file because it's stored in some directory, contained in another directory, contained in another directory according to a path that makes some sense to us, right? Wrong: most computer users have no clue about where they have just saved their files, and also if it would make for them easier to find them, most users do not categorize the email messages that they receive. It would make sense, but operating system and email clients GUIs are not making this easy.

It's not only a matter of organization, it's also a matter of how the structure is represented to our minds. The house is a good example: different things are stored in different containers, in different rooms. A very easy way to remember.

Now, are files stored in hundred of folders that all look the same or lines of texts stored in outlines wedges that still all look the same as easy to find as objects in our house? Is the folder/documents metaphore the best we can do? Do current outliners go as far as we could get?

Transclusion Breakthrough: The Endless Web Page. The links you can see on the Endless Web Page demo, with [img] icons, are the result of a long research.

Now, this is the beginning of something very important!

But it only works if your first name begins with "M"

There are a few very interesting comments on the P2P organizations piece.

I think that to be able to become a system it has to grow a little further than a simple network of people knowing each other. We need to find the balance between the solid links between people that a traditional company requires and total anarchie. It's this balance that will make the difference.

While the market might not be ready yet for this kind of structures (most customers probably would still feel safer with a "real" company), it could probably work well in terms of back-end system for small shops and professionals, who could then afford to approach larger projects. Of course, these people would need to be guaranteed in terms of quality, costs and timing, after all it's their face the one that the customers sees and they are the ones managing the deal. At the same time, partners in a project would need to be sure that they would be paid. After all, this is the kind of safety that a company provides (or at least it would be supposed to). But is there a way to make everybody feel reasonably safe without having the weight of a company?

I think that total transparency in how such projects would be approached is one of the keys. The other might be a some kind of reciprocal "authentication" that would help to create trust inside the group.

Ben Hammersley writes:

Combine this with some digital social network theory, and we're onto something very cool.

Digital social network theory? I guess I'd better start doing some more research.

It's official: Radio UserLand is available in French, with hosting provided under the leweblog.com domain. The big translation work has been made by JY, and as with the Italian version, the translation is distributed as an updatable tool, meaning that you will be able to use new Radio features in your own language very shortly after UserLand releases them.

After sending my TiBook to Germany back in August to have the screen fixed, I've experienced some random problems with the new LCD screen: from time to time it locked up and started showing beatutiful red and purple shadows. Shaking it a little usually fixed the problem, until this morning, when everything stopped working.

So now I'm sending the machine back to Apple (in the Netherlands) and I had to back everything up to keep going from my G4 tower, and I'm now blogging again with Radio running off my iPod.

Here is a wonderful new French language Radio weblog:  Quebec Urbain. [John Robb's Radio Weblog]

Almost a prefect match for the newly released Radio UserLand Francophone!!

eVectors launches Radio UserLand in Italian. What's next, Dutch? :) [Adam Curry: Adam Curry's Weblog]

Nope, next is French (hopefully later today), but we can definetly discuss about a Dutch version.

Starting today, we are distributing the Italian version of Radio. It took longer than expected to localize (have you ever noticed how much text there is in the help pages of Radio???), but now it's done.

The great thing is that since the localization is done on a tool, we'll be able to keep it up-to-date with new Radio features (and to fix translation errors that we'll find).

We are also providing hosting service under the blogs.it domain, running our own RCS.

If you are an Italian blogger, you can download Radio in Italian now and try it for 30 days. You'll be up'n'bloggin in just a few minutes.

Special thanks to Jake who helped us a lot trough all the process.