blackrimglasses

SixApart to launch blogging platform
Said to bring blogging into the mainstream, kind of like Blogger mixed with LiveJournal. Wordpress is also starting something similar. I do wonder how bringing “blogging” to the masses will help matters? Blogger sucks, as we all know, but still, how will this help? I can see a few scenarios when I would want to use this. Maybe I want my entire family online and blogging, but in reality, I really don’t. So yeah, not for me.

Questioning Google Adsense
Paying more does not necessarily get you more. I’ve always found Google Adsense to be a bit voodoo, but it pays the bills.

Sony uses Bubblewrap as a promotional tool
Playing with everyone’s latent desire to pop things

Disecting the Nano
Evidently raw material cost is $90.00

Microsoft’s Nightmare Inches Closer to Reality
What is that nightmare? Simply the convergence of the web as a platform for business, with less reliance on the operating system. This one is very interesting to me. I remember in 1997 or so, going to a Microsoft video conference in San Diego where they were talking about Internet Explorer 4.0, the convergence of the web into the OS and Windows 95 OEM SR2 (with Active Desktop, etc). At that point, Microsoft was saying that the Internet was their platform, and a logical extension of the desktop. IE4 became a true UI platform through ActiveX.

Here’s a history lesson: In 1996, Microsoft was beta testing Blackbird. Blackbird was a rich application development environment intended for the use on MSN 1.0. If anyone remembers, MSN 1.0 (which launched with Windows 95) was an extension of Explorer. Anyhow, Blackbird was for multimedia content in that, with Visual Basic as the programming language.

Then it went silent, and Blackbird was scrapped, only to resurface as Visual Interdev, a system that used ActiveX to create dynamic web pages. Think of it as a crappy, buggy, early Ruby on Rails without any elegance. Murmurs.com was programmed with it in 1997. At this point, Microsoft was basically giving companies a few options for rich application development, but producing code parity over the entire line (minus Visual C++). Access, VB6 and Interdev 4 were all code parity for things like ADODB, ODBC, etc.

And now, Microsoft’s grand vision has come to pass. The web is a platform, databases do power everything. However, the clincher is, and why Microsoft is annoyed is that its the IETF and W3C driving this movement, and not people in Washington state. Have you heard of ActiveX lately? Interdev? No. We have Ruby on Rails (open source), AJAX (moving toward non-proprietary on all platforms), PHP (open sourced), etc.

The threat of loss of hegemonic control has Microsoft upset, not Web 2.0. Web 2.0 is not new, per se, just recontextualized (more on that later).

Bronfman not happy with iTunes
He wants variable pricing depending on the popularity of the track. I can’t comment on this except to say… um, nothing.

GVisit
Track visitors to your site on a Google Map

More awesome visualization of image data
Kind of like our Flickr browser, but more information rich
more