2. Read Doc Searls on Rivers of News

I don’t know how many times I have had this discussion on rivers of news with clients in the publishing business. I don’t think that I have ever been able to convince them, especially journalists, to go with a river approach of just displaying posts with a simple reverse chronologically order.

Because they want control. They want to decide what goes at the top of the page. They truly and deeply believe that the home page of a site is sacred ground where they can unleash all their editorial power.

The fun fact is that more and more they are seeing these precious home pages (at least from the advertising point of view) being skipped altogether by users who find deep links on social networks…

…all of which display posts in what is in all effects a “river” format.

The only explanation I could think of is that last week a bunch of people posted on my FB wall on my birthday.

This is serious stuff, uh?

I have installed Google Drive this morning, hoping that we could use it as an alternative to Dropbox for an upcoming product we’re working on.

The need is simple: let users publish an RSS feed.

From a first analysis (I hope I’m wrong), it looks like even if I make an item in my Google Drive public, it doesn’t have a permanent URL, which means that it’s impossible to subscribe to it.

Now: companies have not been understanding links for all the story of the Internet, but you would expect that Google of all big and stupid companies would be the one able understand the value of permanent URL and how this empowers others to build things, layer after layer. The fact that you can’t easily link to an object in your Google Drive so that another piece of software (and not a browser) could read it makes this service a dead-end.

Btw: this is exactly the contrary of being open.

When conferencing with multiple parties, the first 5 minutes of every call can be used in one of these two ways:

1. everybody is commenting how wonderful modern technology is and how amazing it is that we can see and hear each other across the world;

2. one of more parties repeat a hundred times “can you hear me?” and “no, I cannot hear you!”

I hate calls of the second kind.

20 minutes later, I’m still waiting to be able to edit the picture with PS. Both Aperture and Photoshop (CS6) are wedged. Mine might not be the freshest of MacBook Pros, but it still has a 3.06 GHz Intel Core 2 Due processor and 8GB of Ram, most of which is available.

Can’t really say why this is taking so long, but with every new version these apps seem to be slower and to use resources less efficiently.

Okay… it looks like I can finally edit my photo. 23 minutes. Not even in 1988…

For example, this is Gorizia:

I have played with OpenStreetMap lately, and it has significantly improved since I had last checked it a few years ago. The fact that any map can be exported as a pdf file, and that you can fix details on the map is making it much more useful than Google Maps for some of my projects.

It’s pretty cool to see it embedded, but it’s absolutely awesome if you open this link on your iPhone and you click on the “gyroscope” icon: http://360.io/B5T3K5.

At that point just hold your phone in front of you and turn around, and you will experience the panorama in a completely different way.

Now I could tell you the story of the early QuickTime VR shots, using cameras, tripods with custom-built mounts, actual film, Philips PhotoCD, and controlling the stitching application via command line in MPW. But I won’t.

I’m very happy about this, the 2008 edition was a huge success, but the following years we had not been able to find the resources to run it again, then we all had our other priorities and crises, and we did not organise it anymore.

This year, mostly thanks to Beniamino’s endless energy, we’ll do it again.

I think that this is a good time for another Sotn, there are just too many things that need to be thought again, and even if we have just started putting the agenda together, we can already see that it will be a very interesting event. How could it be any different? We have great partners, sponsors, and the most beautiful location in the most beautiful city at the end of June.

How can you possibly not come? See you all in Trieste.