“Paper is a slow, expensive, and cumbersome way to transmit news, and as online news sources mature, more and more users will find they no longer have any use for dead tree publications.”

[From Techdirt: Your Website Shouldn’t Be Just An Electronic Version Of Your Print Publication]

I can’t, for the life of me, understand why we are reading this in the year 2008?

So. I worked in newspapers from the age of 16 to 22. I was the first Webmaster in fact for the Orange County Register. I wrote a lot of mini-manifesto’s when I was there to vent frustrations with the glacial pace of movement, as well as frustrations that the same people who went to school, studied Marshall McLuhan and Baudrillard the same ways I did, couldn’t apply Understanding Media to their own media tools.

Plus, I also loved Futurist Manifestos.

Choice quotes from manifesti circa Ethan in his formative years (this circa 2000):

“The Internet is not a medium for the presentation of static pages of content, where you expect a user to just read it and not react. By its very construction, the Internet lends itself to people communicating with other people, and as far back as the beginning of the technology, e-mail and discussion groups formed the core of the online experience. When you provide your visitor with a “voice” in the context of your website, you are not only engaging them in a way that is much more tangible and active, but you are also promoting the notion that your site is a unique place where the user has a say in its construction. Too often websites are constructed under the “if we build it, they will come, buy and leave” philosophy. What this fails to do is engage the user in active participation, which is the fundamental model for Internet “surfing” in general. “

And hell, in high school (circa 1997):

“The newspaper paradigm is executed in such a way that growth into the new media industry is hampered by lack of resources and funds. However, with the use of a common database subsystem and a minor alteration of newsroom and newspaper development workflow, the execution of a standard print media version of a newspaper, as well as a new media (i.e. Internet) version of a newspaper could be seamless and indistinguishable from each other.”

This is my desktop right now, showing all Safari Windows. I need someone to write a piece of software treats my browsers/tabs as if they were stacks of paper I could sort at a desk. I keep things on the screen because I need information from them. There is a tipping point where I you get past the point of knowing where your information is.

You’d think now with Core Animation, someone could come up with a way of shrinking windows/tabs to stacks, plus auto-logically grouping tabs according to thematics? Please?

[Regarding The Holy Grail: How to Outsource the Inbox and Never Check Email Again | The Blog of Author Tim Ferriss]

If there’s one thing that I really don’t want, its to appear all big-headed executive, but after reading this article, I’m more and more certain that I need to change and adjust my e-mail habits.

I make it a point to respond to each e-mail that I get, if it warrants it, and to do so in a timely fashion. However, within the last two months, my ability to do so has been outpaced by the shear volume of e-mails coming my way. Its almost hard to delegate to the extent I need to, because I can’t get my head above water.

One thing that I’ve noticed is that the linear fashion that e-mail and indeed all web-based information comes in is not condusive to prioritization in any way. I can’t understand why no e-mail client, and no RSS client has yet implemented, seamlessly, some bayesian clustering algorithm. It’d auto-group threads of messages and group those threads according to implicit thematics. You would be able to weight whether to group more by sender, by subject, by lexical analysis, etc.

The same would apply to RSS.

Better yet, how nice would it be to have an Apple-ish interface, attached so some fine AI based communication software that managed not only e-mail, but RSS info, web history, chat transcripts and random notes.

You’d think, that with the power of a small super computer on my desk, I’d have this by now. The interface of The Brain came close to an ideal, but someone needs to apple-fy it.

So there’s my challenge. Someone with the UI chops of Delicious Software, with the data analysis/organization chops of OmniFocus/iGTD, and integration of software to form a nice universal CRM type solution.

That is my challenge. Help me manage my information.

nice…. plastics? real estate? everyone be happy you have a nicely paying job? maybe it’ll be like 1992 and we’ll at least get some music out of it.

[From John Battelle’s Searchblog: Google Drops More Than 160 Points]

self-aggrandizing, non-revolutionary wankfest. wow. there has to be a better way. this just cry’s “give me money for me to tell you something you already know.” aka, every O’Reily conference in the last year and a half.

[From 2007 Crunchies: The Winners]

I managed to hook up a MacMini to a plasma and hook the Wiimote up as a pointing device and run Joost full screen. This actually translated into a meaningful application of Joost, as well as a peak at what user interaction with more complicated visual experience in the living room could look like.

[From ParisLemon: Buzz Doesn’t Pay. Is Joost Dying?]

My great-grandma Bertha turns 95 today. 95! And she e-mailed me to remind me about it.