Okay I've pretty much deep sixed my game engine hacking for ubicomp dreams, but every now and then something comes across the transom that's worthy of note.
Don't know how good GarageGames Torque Game Engine is but it must be halfway decent if Tribes 2 was done in it. The price ($100 USD) is pretty good. I wonder how extensible, if at all, the core engine is though.
Dreaming on...
Link parkin: A while ago Dave Winer of UserLand posted a collection of the BBC's RSS feeds.
John Siracusa writes some of the most in-depth, informative reviews I've ever seen. Recently he got a new Aluminum PowerBook G4 from Apple. The synopsis of his review? Lot's of minor niggling problems, but overall a keeper.
Link parkin: A blast from the past from 1994: Paul De Bra and Reinier Post's Fish-Search was one of the earliest manifestations of dynamic/focused crawling.
Interestingly, nine years ago the WWW Conference prominently included Mosaic as part of the title. Too bad client end innovation has pretty much ground to a halt.
Kewl!! Zeno Crivelli has put together a Palm OS developers toolchain out of the GNU tools and running on Mac OS X.
Adam Engst is one of the proprietors of the Macintosh oriented TidBITS. He discusses their decision to move to WebCrossing as the basis of their content management.
This is no joke since TidBITS has 700 pre-existing back issues, and tons of readers. Probably a good case study for online production types.
New to Me: Scott Detherage is yet another blogging Northwestern professor.
Except that all the posts are by Cori.
Hmmmmm.
I just finished reading Michael Schudson's books, The Power of News and Discovering The News. I wasn't a mass communications major, so maybe these are standard reading for those types, but the texts should be on the list for anyone who seriously claims to be impacting the field of journalism.
Most salient point. Journalism and journalism culture have changed quite a bit in a relatively short period of time. The press we have today might actually be quite different in the future. Maybe in our lifetimes.
Link parkin: Ran across an archive of Henry Baker's papers. A young hacker could do worse than to read all of them closely.
Link parkin': Spidering Hacks may have to go on the bookshelf. Maybe it has the answer to the question I've been pursuing for the past few days: Where can I get a decent, off-the-shelf, extensible Web spider/crawler? All I've seen with potential is Harvest-NG.
Hmmm, maybe I just have to change my Google search from "crawler" to "spider".
Perseus Development Corporation conducted a survey of the weblog landscape. The methodology is not described in any way, but assuming the numbers are correct I'm not sure if they're dire or exciting.
The white paper notes a high level (66%) of abandonment. Basically there's been a lot of tire-kicking going on.
On the other hand, that's 66% of 4.12 million sites. So we're still talking over a million that are regularly maintained. Then again, maintained, here is a very loose term, including blogs that only update about once every two weeks.
Again, interesting numbers, but not enough context to be insightful. For example, what time scale is the study on and how do these numbers compare to the growth of other online communication tools.
I'm guessing answers to some of these questions can be had for a small fee.
Thanks to Scripting News, which has just rediscovered the concept of social capital.
Link parkin': Vendors such as SMC are starting to make it ridiculously easy to connect computers with home studios through devices like the EZ-Stream Universal Wireless Multimedia Receiver. Only downside I can see is that you may need proprietary software to stream to the device.
I need to chew on this a bit, but Leonardo Chiariglione's Digital Media Manifesto may turn out to be a landmark effort. For those scoring at home, Chiariglione is a central figure in the development of digital media standards such as MP3 and MPEG4. He's got a little bit of credibility.
Dating back to July, but new to me, is Rebecca Blood's essay on how weblogging isn't journalism but has its true essence in discourse amongst engaged citizens. I've pretty much reached the same conclusion, but still think of weblogging as part of "The News". Those personalities striving to unify journalism and weblogging strike me as seeking validation through entry into a very guarded priesthood.
Lot's of other juicy bits too including the separation of the weblogging tools and content, and the potential for new Web native publishing forms. I would argue that photos and photo galleries will next find their natural authoring form on the Web. The outer limit is digital video. We can't do much more than put a big wad of bits up and either batch download them or stream them.
Link parkin': I need to get serious about spam on my TiBook. I need Michael Tsai's SpamSieve.
Link parkin: Marc Smith, Research Sociologist at Microsoft Research.
Ned Batchelder discusses the definition of "metadata" and makes it much clearer then technologist's lame "data about data". Key bit, it's additional data separate from the original object.
Thanks to Simon Willison for the link.
Giles Turnbull has gathered a nice collection of luminaries' MacOS X Dock contents. Since I was an Apple newbie, when I first got my TiBook, (2 years ago, wow has it been that long) I used to ask this question all the time. Turnbull's article just reaffirms that peeking over other's shoulders is oft a good idea.
Xen is virtualization technology similar to VMWare and VirtualPC. The Xenoserver project, led by Ian Pratt, generally seems to be much more focused on widely distributed, Grid style computing. They also made the interesting choice to eschew a host OS and require modifications to the virtualized OS kernel. This decision apparently leads to increased levels of performance.
Link parkin': Rob von Behren, Jeremy Condit and Eric Brewer attempt to debunk John Ousterhout's long standing claim that most programmers really don't need threads. Their HotOS IX paper is entitled "Why Events Are A Bad Idea...".
Synopsis: it's a matter of poor implementation, not conceptual stupidity.
Robert Hayes and B. J. Feenstra of Philips Research have devised a scheme for paper thin electronic displays that can refresh fast enough for video. The technique is first documented in the linked abstract from Nature, but the full article is behind a pay wall. However, Chappell Brown of EE Times has an indepth description of the core technique called "electrowetting".
At face value, this looks like something to experiment with for media companies with a 3 to 5 year outlook.
Not hot off the research press, but I haven't seen Soumen Chakrabarti's idea of focused Web crawlers percolate into end user technology. Might be interesting to combine with an RSS aggregator.
Gizmodo has the summary of how Nokia (a phone company remember) is going berzerk on new products incorporating personal imaging.
NewsFan, yet another RSS aggregator hits the scene. Competition is starting to heat up in this space, even on Mac OS.
Link parkin': I was looking for Mark Pilgrim's demands of any RSS aggregator client, but couldn't find it. Mostly because I was looking for stuff related to robots.txt.
Thankfully, l. m. orchard just linked to it.
I had a mild epiphany while reading Lessig's "The Future of Ideas". What I've been advocating media companies do is take their archives, and permit free access, as Lessig defines free, for short periods of time. Instead of letting this stuff lie fallow, induce bursts of innovation with the material.
I'm not even thinking altruisticly. Media organizations could charge fees, and even keep the results, thus providing more grist for later mills.
Tricky bits: preventing excessive copyright infringement, and providing tools that encourage innovation.
The latter sounds like an interesting research question. Given what we now know about social structures, media, and innovation, is it possible to build culturally aware software that encourages creativity?
Over at the Online Journalism Review, Staci D. Kramer scores an interview with Krishna Bharat, creator of Google News.
Wow, Google News is only 1 year old.
Previously, the New Directions for News think tank produced a report on "participatory journalism", available in PDF. Now the authors of "We Media" have made it available in a much more Web friendly format.
According to Tim Bray, James Clark wrote over twelve thousand lines of Emacs Lisp to implement a full XML 1.0 processor as part of a new XML Emacs mode.
Sick.
I don't know what's weirder, that PhilG would go to the extreme of comparing Lisp Diehards to Holocaust revisionists, or that his comments on the posting are surprisingly flame free.
Maybe that's the ultimate statement about the relevance of Lisp these days.
Link parkin': AbleStock.com is an accessible (not cheap) collection of stock images. Now if I could only find a good collection of stock computer related illustrations and figures.
Link parkin': Google Labs is experimenting with searching by location.
Adam Pasick, a correspondent for Reuters, documents the usage of BitTorrent to share recordings of TV shows. Ultimately, I think this might be a means by which smaller news organizations could distribute rich media. Using such technologies let's them handle potential Slashdot rushes, but doesn't force them to hitch their wagon to Akamai.
Link parkin': Steve Gillmor latches onto a good idea, services based upon looking at sets of subscriptions, blogrolls, and reading behavior. Warning: buzzword compliant and ridiculously optimistic about the transformative properties of RSS.
I subscribe to Daypop top 10 news in my favorite RSS aggregator. I've been somewhat suspicious of what comes across the feed though.
Today, half of the top 10 pointed to Salon section fronts, e.g. Salon.com Books. What gives? Is Salon really that popular amongst bloggers?
Digging through the citations I discovered that all of the references came from Salon blogs. The default template for the service links to those section fronts.
This puts a bit of a damper on the "collective wisdom of bloggers" trope kicking around. Granted this is probably a case of initial conditions (not enough input), but if people are going to be seriously relying on Daypop or similar services there's a lot of room for improvement.
Duck as people start firing off "So do better!"
Scott McCloud, argues eloquently for the potential of micropayment schemes. In particular, he makes a case against Clay Shirky's clams that micropayments are dead.
My quick react is that the two are talking past each other. Shirky seems to be fighting against an automated, metering scheme, called micropayments, that enables content producers to maximize the value of their production. McCloud seems to be fighting for an explicit transaction scheme for low pricing, called micropayments, that enables content producers to recover some of the value of their production. Ed. this may need revision.
Same planet, different worlds.
Over at The Register, Tim Richardson reports some interesting broadband penetration numbers. There are 20 million broadband lines in the US. Don't know what that translates to in terms of households or users, but that's a nontrivial (but small) number. And there's double digit growth in both DSL and cable.
He also relays that the ITU is claiming one in ten Net users worldwide has broadband. Again, small but non-trivial.
Yes this announcement was a few days ago, but at long last, a new AlBook that I'd actually put down hard earned money for