Category: Internet

I’ve written about PhotoPeer, a peer-to-peer photo sharing app, before, but this is a whole new ballgame: AOL’s next version of their instant messenger client will include picture-sharing features. That’s an interesting way to approach the main challenge that I saw with a pure peer-to-peer approach, which is how to build a compelling network of participants that’s larger than your immediate friends and family. The AIM approach avoids that problem by piggybacking photo sharing as a feature on top of an existing social network.

A few odds and ends that have cluttered my desktop for too long:

• The Decameron Web at Brown, a “growing hypermedia archive of materials dedicated to Boccacio’s masterpiece”
• A Place for Everything—inspiration for turning our basement into something other than a dusty falling-plaster zone
• Holllinger: How the administration’s former chief hawk, Richard Perle, gets to play innocent while getting paid an undisclosed $3.1 million “performance bonus” to run Hollinger’s internal venture fund into the ground
• Slate’s Back to the Future: how Bush gets to skate away from all the stuff he f___ed up during the last three years: by pretending that it was someone else’s fault!
• Youssou N’Dour’s Egypt album, definitely on my “must listen soon” list

I managed to buffalo Esta into spending a few days with us before she starts classes next week, so I expect blogging to be relatively light. I do want to point to Shel’s new web site, where (despite a lack of structured blog software) she’s doing a fine job of documenting the scouring of their new house in Oregon. I want to hear more about the police evidence bag they found in the garage!

Once again, someone has stolen Edvard Munch’s “The Scream.”

What’s that saying? “Steal me once, shame on you. Steal me twice: fix the damn museum security already.” (Actually, this is a different version, stolen from a different museum, than the 1994 theft)

(Link courtesy BoingBoing.)

Dave Hyatt at Surfin’ Safari: XSLT in Safari. Dave is working on adding XSLT support to Apple’s browser. Dave, one simple example of a publicly accessible XML file styled with xml-stylesheet is the RSS feed for the Windows XP Expert Zone on Microsoft.com.

US Representative Rick Boucher (D – VA) is guest-hosting Larry Lessig’s blog this week and asked for feedback about the Induce Act. He got feedback, in spades. Reading the comment threads, it’s fascinating to trace the industry’s shifting the legal battlegrounds from “vicarious and contributory liability” (which can be defended under the precedents of the Sony case that ruled that VCRs should be allowed to timeshift network television) to “intent to induce infringement.”

Today I spent the evening reading the convention blog portals: ConventionBloggers.com, Politics @ Technorati, and Politics @ Feedster. Yep, there are three of them and they all launched this week.

To be fair, we’ve seen this before. Every participant in BloggerCon (including myself) was part of an aggregated RSS feed published by Feedster. And both TechEd and PDC, the Microsoft conferences for IT Pros and Developers, respectively, have had their own aggregated blog sites. The roots reach further back, to 24 Hours of Democracy, which in 1996 predated (most) blogs and any concept of XML content syndication, and to the late lamented my.netscape.com which pioneered RSS feeds in portal sites (O’Reilly’s Meerkat and the various iterations of UserLand’s Frontier-based aggregator, from Radio to Manila, must also get the nod in this context). The roots reach forward, too, to the blog portal on Microsoft.com, which I helped launch a few weeks ago and which aggregates blog content from people across the company, on a myriad of blogging platforms, and lets people slice and dice the content via keyword searches and content scoping.

But this week, with three sites launching independently that aggregated content about the same event, special-purpose aggregation sites could be said to reach critical mass. If triangulation in the blogosphere is the art of reading three or more sources who write about the same event from differing viewpoints to arrive at the truth, what do we call this? Hyper-triangulation?

Sometimes (with no disrespect to my colleagues at Microsoft, or our friends at Technorati and Feedster, and certainly no disrespect to the Bloggfatha) it seems that there is an evolution of programmer cred. First everyone had to write their own weblog software; next, everyone had to write their own aggregator client; now everyone has to write their own scalable aggregator portal.

But all snidery aside; the reason everyone writes an aggregator portal is the same reason that everyone wrote a weblog client: because it’s massively useful and in the best interests of everyone. Reading the convention blogs, one gets a feel of life on the FleetCenter floor that network TV may never again deliver. Because it’s too boring for live TV? Perhaps, but reading the blogs, one finds the pockets of excitement because everyone is talking about them: Barack Obama’s speech, Ted Kennedy’s damn-near-valedictory panegyric to the Massachusetts roots of the American Revolution, Ron Reagan’s apolitical call to revive stem cell research, and the pulpit pounding furor of the Reverend David Alston (former Vietnam boatmate of John Kerry). Plus photos and discussion of the Free Speech Zone.

And what does the Washington Post see fit to give column space to? The TV production values of the convention and Ben Affleck.

What’s a bad thing to see after your search company has announced its stock ticker symbol and you’re getting ready for your IPO?

I know it must be just a transient outage but it’s still scary as hell.

Update: Coverage on News.com says that it’s “sporadic.” This Slashdot thread is fingering the latest MyDoom variant as the culprit. (And I just received a copy of the MyDoom.M virus in the mail (fortunately my webmail client didn’t execute the payload), so it looks like another round of joy is en route.)

I think this will likely be my last post about SENT for a while. Please forgive my enthusiasm; I rarely win anything, even simple things like video games, so getting my pic selected as an NPR phonecam contest winner has me a bit giddy.

• The article and audio for the NPR discussion of the Day to Day phonecam contest award winners has been posted. Best quotation about my photo, starting at 2 minutes and 40 seconds: “Alex: It’s a fairly ordinary landscape… some very interesting shadows in the foreground… Xeni: You think of phonecams as crude devices, but the images in this photo are–they’re very saturated colors, very rich. You almost feel like you could bite into them, they’re so bright.” Lest you ever doubt your ability as a photographer, just get Xeni to describe your photos. Also, thank god it was a bright day when I took the photos, since I have absolutely zero control over exposure or saturation or anything with the camphone.
• Another winner, Mark Beck (who took the very album-cover-looking barbed wire photo), is a photoblogger, and apparently a serious photographer. I couldn’t find any links for David Berge (pig photo) or Jim Younkin, who took my favorite of the four, the firefighter looking across at the bus.
• Unbeknownst to me, there was also a spread about the contest in mMode Magazine (the 3G phone culture magazine of the phone company formerly known as AT&T wireless). The spread, in PDF on the SENT site, features two more of my photos.
• In addition to Xeni, other exhibit organizers included Caryn Coleman and Sean Bonner (the collective known as Sixspace). Sean is also the creator of the wonderful mug below.

A few goodies:

• Everyone is doing home improvement. Everyone.
• How can you expect me to complete this photo assignment with the man bringing me down: Brown = Terrorist (via BoingBoing).
• Space 1999. The models still look like 2001. Still looks cooler than any space hardware we actually had in either 1999 or 2001.
• Almost forgot: Who needs plogs when you have Amazon reviewers like Henry Raddick?

Well, it didn’t take until Friday to spill the beans. Sent Online is now showing one of my contest photos as an NPR Phonecam Challenge winner. Thanks to Alex Chadwick at NPR, Xeni Jardin at BoingBoing, and the rest of the curators of the exhibit. The contest will be discussed on tomorrow afternoon’s Day to Day show at half-past the hour; audio should be available shortly thereafter.

The photo was taken last summer at the annual Brackbill picnic at the hereditary Brackbill/Hershey farm in Lancaster County, PA (the rest of the photos are linked from the article).

And the rest of the links in that list? Well, now I really have to get better at taking photos, both with the phonecam and my digital camera. The heat is on…

A list whose relevance will become apparent on Friday today:

• Camera Phone Tips
• PicturePhoning.com – blog about camphone usage
• Nokia 3650 Tips and Tricks at TextAmerica, including a tip for sending more than one photo at once via BlueTooth that I would have liked to know about a year ago
• Depth of Field in Digital Photography – list of resources about this composition technique
• Digital Photography Composition Tips
• Sent Online – professional, celebrity, and amateur phonecam photo exhibition, to which I submitted photos
• NPR Day to Day radio program, on whose site I learned about the exhibition
• Article in The Guardian about the exhibit; my photo was in the print edition

Stay tuned…

Jeremy Zawodny at Yahoo! responded to my post from yesterday (and to Dave’s comments about it) with a note that has started a dialog around ping services in general. I appreciate his position. It’s true that strictly speaking you don’t have to ping Yahoo’s web service. But I still think there are some customer experience issues (both from the point of view of My Yahoo! customers and RSS feed producers) with the way this whole ball of wax is shaping up. See my comment on Jeremy’s post for more.

(By the way, this appears to be my week for having posts into which I didn’t put a lot of thought picked up and widely disseminated. A bunch of Mac sites are now linking to my gripe about AirPort error messages.)