Apperceptions

Internet Archive Tonight - 2005.02.28

Wow! You never know how much will be on the Internet Archive RSS feed.  It was a little slow over the weekend.  But today there is more that I can possibly sample!

I've never discussed what motivates listing an item in this column (show?).  I'm not sure it would help to discuss my taste in music, except to say it is eclectic with a strong emphasis in movie soundtracks and scores.  I like all kinds of music.  And videos and photographs.

But the IA RSS feed is like a river and so we get up each day and see what new has come our way.  We fish the stream throughout the day and if we see something that is fun or interesting then we tag it for this show.  At the end of the day, we review what we have found, post it to WebJay (we do that throughout the evening, before blog items like this are posted - all times are PST, btw).  So, if we are lucky, we have had a few chances to listen to the new items before we push the links out to you.

Where will this all go?  I'm not sure at all. I had no real plan when I jumped into this other than to sample and blog about new items found in the IA RSS feed.  Will we add audio of our own?  Possibly, I sometimes think about making this more like a radio broadcast.  What about video of our own?  Possibly, it would be interesting to make the experience more visual.

On the other hand, I'm not sure how much I want to review things.  Sometimes I just like to say "here, try this, what do you think?"  and leave it at that.

Another question: can I keep this up every night?  Probably not.  So expect a break once in a while.  Also, while it's hard to imagine, it's conceivable that there is nothing from the feed worth posting (sorry, at some point I draw the line and do not intend to post record breaking video game runs or just anyone's wedding movies -- they have to be interesting wedding movies!)  There are lots of other great things coming in on some days, but they may not interest me (sometimes because the recording quality is so poor).  It takes a bit of time and I need to streamline that with some tools.

I will be traveling next week and that may effect my ability to post new items, but we will see what happens.  If that is the case, enjoy the exiting shows, explore the IA yourselves and know that I will try to get back to a regular schedule ASAP.

Please let me know your thoughts about this column.  What do you like?  What do you dislike?  What works for you and what doesn't? 

Anyway, just some thoughts about what we are doing here.

I'll post the discriptions of the music shortly (this is "live" folks) -- The playlist is up and more is being added to it by the minute ...

As usual, you can find links to all these items on our WebJay playlist.  Enjoy!

Addendum:  I had so many items that I could not link to them all with the level of detail that I have been in the past.  So I added a good number to the list for tonight as usual, PLUS I created a few new lists to hold the overflow:

• Ambient, Electronica & Eclectic
• Podcast This!
• Internet Archive Overflow

Also, check out the playlist named

• Travelogue

I found this great little recording of Italian marketplace sounds and placed it in the Travelogue list.  It's like a trip to Italy.

Sorry, no photograph tonight!  We need more photos submitted to IA (seems like all the photos are hanging out at Flickr).

Internet Archive Tonight - 2005.02.27

Hello once again and welcome to our nightly post of Internet Archive submissions.

As usual, you can find links to all these items on our WebJay playlist.  Enjoy!

Tonight we have a vivid little music video called "waiting" from Rebekka Troller & Tobias Buenter that was shot near Lucerne, Switzerland in September 2004 for "Krankenzimmer 204".

Another music video uses a hip-hop soundtrack to show highlights from Youth Sounds first year of programming.  Thanks to gabriel at youthsounds.org for uploading this one.  Check out the entire Youth Sounds Collection at the Internet Archive.

Shinkuro Experiment Continues

I've been hoping to get some more time to share my continuing Shinkuro Experiments.  I made a new friend today and more people have joined the "Shinkuro Experiments" group, although it is not clear to me how they found me (I think they read one of these blog posts).  Sky (the newest friend - Shinkuro terminology - we say member in SpinXpress) claims to know Joi Ito and is interested in collaborating on music projects. Cool.

I've been taking some rough notes and I hope to share those later in the week.  I hope that these notes will be useful to others and will not ruffle too many feathers.  Some may find it discomforting that a developer for one collaboration product might write about and compare it to a "competitor".  While I plan to be very candid in my observations, it is not so much my intention to dwell on little "bugs".  However, I may mention some (in my product, as well as others) so that people will be able to work around them and to help developers find and correct them (or me if I'm being a dope).

I am interested in the bigger issues that are common to collaborative tools.  For example, it seems clear that one of the central issues yet to be addressed by any secure personal internet is that of finding groups or spaces.  Same for people and resources.  Once we have a large number of groups, each containing a number of resources (files, urls, people, etc.), how do we locate them?  Also, when we first start using a product like Shinkuro or SpinXpress, how do we connect with others?  These are the main things I want to look at in future posts.

In the meantime, join in on the fun.  Get a copy of one of these products (Shinkuro, SpinXpress, etc.), create a group and invite me to it.  I'm app.etitio.us!shinkuro.com (for Shinkuro) and markus@outhink.com (for SpinXpress).  If you use another tool that you think I should try out, please let me know and I will.

A Bookmark!

I was cruising through the stats listing for this weblog and noticed a referral from del.icio.us to the IAT page!  WooHoo!!!  These are the tags that the person who bookmarked us so generously used on us: media music audio movie video streaming Webjay netlabels live photo creativecommons internet archive blog.  Wow!!!  So I added it to my list too.  Thank you, thank you, thank you.  Needless to say (but I will), more bookmarks from other listeners would be appreciated to the max.

We're also getting some good hits on our IAT WebJay playlist.

Free Labor

It seems that something is bothering Marc Canter to the point of his posting the same rant twice (I've done that before without even being in a lather and Marc tends to be very animated -- spouting broad reaching proclamations and constantly making wild gestures with his hands and arms -- it's easy to understand how this sort of thing can happen).

What's not so easy to understand is the reason for Marc's apparent frustration over the failing of what he terms "free labor".

Back in January, I met with Marc, Mitch and Dave to discuss Digital Lifestyle Aggregators (DLA's) and Secure Personal Internets (SPIN's). Marc and I got into a rather vigorous discussion of the "value" of "free labor" after Marc told a similar story about an earlier project that had failed to come to fruition.  Again, it was due to "free labor" not being there "at the end of the day". 

So it seems like we have been here before and the question arises as to why are we doing the same thing over and over again?  I say "we" because I've been here too.  On both sides of the fence (coin? whatever).  I've been a developer who has given lots of "free labor" to far too many projects and I have been the "producer" who often tries to get the creative talent to contribute more to projects (I'm not a 9-to-5 kinda guy).

What is "free labor" anyway?  Is it "volunteer" work?  There's all kinds of volunteer work.

Are you providing "free labor" if you drastically cut your rate or billed project hours in order to get work during leaner times?  If you get cut back in revenue, do you really cut back the same amount in effort?  I wish it were that simple.

Is it "free labor" if you "toss a little money" someone's way (especially when the emphasis is on "little") and expect them to do a lot.  Is it "free labor" if you give them a lot of "equity in lieu of cash?"

The Trott's say they lost their jobs and worked together on their own to create MovableType.  Before they started charging for their open-source product, they say they averaged 38 cents in donations for each download.  Was that "free labor"?

What if you work on several projects and get paid for some and not for others (at different times); is some of it it "free labor"?  Who decides how your time is best spent?  Are you really able to separate all that you do into nice little discrete buckets?

I think what we are doing over and over again is kidding ourselves about the notion of "free labor".  They say "you get what you pay for".  So does that mean we should not expect much or does that mean that labor is never really "free"?

On the other hand, Mick Jagger says "you can't always get what you want ... you get what you need". 

I say that "free labor" is getting the short end of the stick (and the blame).  A situation that none of us should either want or need, no matter which side of the fence you're currently on (or straddling).  What do you say?

Internet Archive Tonight - 2005.02.26

Good evening and welcome back once again.  Glad you could make it (no matter what time it is where you are).  Being the weekend, I thought a little DIY was appropriate and the Internet Archive RSS feed served up a nice treat: Podcasting 101.  The description for this brief and entertaining podcast states:

Podcasting 101 is a primer for basic podcasting. Follow the Promiscuous Bullet team as they show a novice just how it's done, podcasting that is. This production covers the basic tools for creating audio content for distribution through Internet subscription channels.

Internet Archive Tonight - 2005.02.25

Hi and welcome back for another set of IAT goodies.  It's Friday night!  Party time!  Let's dance!  There's some good tunes being added to the Internet Archive tonight.  I don't pretend to carefully listen to every item that comes in (I don't have much time, all this stuff came in today!  Fresh meat!).  But I do try to check out as much as I can and listen as long as I (or my speakers) can stand it sometimes.  There are lots of interesting things coming in every day and all I care about is finding something new and interesting for you each night.  What have I got myself into?  64 new entries today alone.

As always, you will find IAT's finds on our WebJay playlist or in the links below.  The playlist is nice, because you can just sit back and listen to the whole show.

More CC

Creative Commons just published an interesting view of the distribution of CC licenses.  They state:

Last week we mentioned there were over 5 million web pages linking to Creative Commons licenses. This week, it has come to our attention that Yahoo! has updated their index to find well over 10 million web pages that link to our licenses.

We'll have to see how this compares with our Internet Archive Tonight data (see here) over time.  It will be interesting to see if there are any interesting differences between Internet Archive contributors and general CC adopters.  Here is their distribution chart (click for full sized version and complete CC article):

Little Things and Old Lessons Relearned

It's always fun to notice the little things we do that end up mattering to someone.  Last night, Gordon Gould of Weblogs Inc. stopped by and was prompted to write a great little post about SpamPoison, an item in my sidebar.  Then Gordan linked back to me, which is just too cool.

When I started this weblog, I was certainly influenced by other people's blogs.  Being a developer, I tended to look first at the "toys" that blogs had and then the content.  I was originally more interested in how people created and used weblogs than I was in actually writing one (that has all changed, now content is important to me and I find a desire to express myself). 

Internet Archive Tonight - 2005.02.24

Tonight, I hope to start one of many regular features for this blog: Internet Archive Tonight (ta-da!).  The thought here is that this will be a nightly post about the wonderful things I find submitted each day to the Internet Archive.  If this works out, perhaps I will set up a separate weblog for it.

WooHoo!

I'm stoked.  One of my WebJay playlists topped 100 hits (wow!) and made it to the home page popular listing.  Oops, my fifteen minutes of fame is up; i've already dropped from fourth to seventh place.  I better keep that content fresh!  Here's a piece I pointed to this morning from the Internet Archive.  It's in my derivative works playlist.

Aftermath

This is too funny.  A video of a student escaping out the window from his oblivious math teacher. 

Shinkuro Mac

OK, more on Shinkuro; I downloaded the Mac OS X version.  The install was a little rougher than the Windows version, but not bad (ANT has a GREAT OS X install, btw).  On the other hand, I really like the UI on the Mac over the one on Win2K.

Shinkuru

Joi Ito recommended looking at Shinkuru. As you may know, I work with Outhink, Inc. on their SpinXpress product and services.  As applications, SpinXpress and Shinkuro share a number of common features, but they also have a number of interesting differences (more on that in a later post).  Joi says:

Off By 1 Error?

I noticed another oddity with Technorati today.  When I search for "apperceptions", one of the entries (the second at this time) indicates "2 links from 1 source" but when you click on that link, you see a listing of three items and the phrase "3 links from 2 sources".  Hmmm.

On the good side, I see that the extra item is someone who put a link to me on his blog (thanks!).  However, I see from my stats that the bulk of my traffic comes from Google searches and trackbacks.

Free Plublicity

If the old adage "any publicity is good publicity" is true, then could it be the case that a bunch of well known bloggers (Ito, boyd, Ratcliffe, others) have been prodded into referencing and linking to a certain messaging company lately?  Using Cease and Desist letters like this reminds me of the first email spam back in 1994.  Now wait a moment, wasn't that done by a pair of lawyers? 

V Comments

OK, so how about an application that allows one to record (short) video clips as comments to vblogs?  I mean, lots of folks have web cams and consider how Collab.nl works using Flash Communications Server MX (plus Unity 2 Multiuser).

Of course, we can just all record our own videos and then link back to them in comments, but that is fraught with issues too (e.g., nofollow or links turned off in comments).  Either way there are challenges, but also options and opportunities.

Raging Waters

Got a little break in the rain today.  Here are some photos of the Ventura River as it goes by Ojai.  This is the same area that I've shown in my river preserve photos.  So far two people have told me that we've gotten more rain than Seattle (Oregon in the second case).  Not sure about that.  Does anyone have a source for that?  Alicia and I are warm and dry inside with the cats -- we're both sick again with cold or flu -- damn! I thought we were over this :(  Here are some Ojai & weather links: BLM, Ojaiblog, Ojai Weather Center, Random Jottings, Make it Count (actually, I just love this one for the eHarmony stories) and CBS LA.

To CC or not to CC

I moved from Outlook Express to Thunderbird recently.  So far, so good.  While not quite as feature rich in some areas, it excels in others (no pun intended).  I really like that it runs on both the Mac and the PC and, even better, that it includes an integrated RSS aggregator.  So I hooked in my news feeds (less than a 100, but look out Scoble) and now I have more "messages" to keep up with than than ever, but this is definitely an improvement over using bookmarks and the older style newsreaders.

Some of the feeds are from the Internet Archive and keep me informed of the latest submissions to the IA.  Based on a relatively small sample so far, it seems that most of the contributions are from young people experimenting with music and videos.  But there are lots of other interesting movies, images, texts and audio there too.  There are a lot of live performances.  I love this place.

I was curious to see how licensing was working out, knowing that the IA supports a Creative Commons interface.  So I just tallied some rough stats from a small feed update.  There were 73 items and, licensing wise, they broke down as follows:

36 Nothing (copyright or ?)
15
9
8
3
1
1

Key:
- work is in the public domain
- must give attribution
- can't use commercially
- can't make derivatives
- must sharealike (use same license)
- sampling license
- sampling+ license

Aside: Makes me want an application to query the feeds and look up the licenses from the IA page (seems like an easy URL pattern to pick off).  Does anyone know the easiest way to do this using Java or something simpler?  (I confess that I am an old fogey who has yet to learn the in's and out's of Python, Zope or whatever the latest hot new language I should learn when there's time - ha!).

As I said, this is just a small sample and hardly random.  However, it makes me think that people are a little reluctant to allow others to modify their work.  No surprise.  It would be interesting to look at these numbers broken down by media type, genre, etc.

Hunter S. Thompson

WOW!  On my attorney's advice, I think I better have another shot of that tequilia.  Thanks Hunter.

An acute observer of the decadence and depravity in American life, Thompson wrote such books as "Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail" in 1973 and the collections "Generation of Swine" and "Songs of the Doomed." His first ever novel, "The Rum Diary," written in 1959, was first published in 1998.

Link: Yahoo! News - Author Hunter S. Thompson Kills Himself.

Psych 101

I enjoy Ben Hyde's posts but I'm a bit dismayed by the number of common misconceptions appearing in his column this morning.

First, I've always been amazed at how many people do not understand the meaning of "negative reinforcement."  I hear people use it as a synonym for "punishment" all the time.  Here is yet another example of someone who seemed to miss the intro lecture on operant conditioning. 

OK, one more time: if it's reinforcement, then that means it will strengthen the behavior.  Positive reinforcement is when you introduce a pleasantly perceived stimuli and negative reinforcement is the the removal of a noxious stimuli (e.g., that could be me in this case ;p). 

Second, Ben also states "You get normal distributions whenever you have long series of random binary success and failures".  I won't even go into this one, but let's just say that the myth of the normal distribution is still alive and well, even if B. F. Skinner is not.

R.I.P.  Burrhus, some of us remember you well.  We also remember that many classic simulations and studies from the 70's relied not only on false assumptions about distribution shapes, but also on the "minimally tested" uniform number generator (URAND) that was distributed to so much of the academic community.

Addendum: Ben must be editing live (I confess, I do that too at times) as the statement about normal distributions seems to have disappeared from the front page.  Oops, now it's gone from the archive page too.  Good choice!

Blogging and Academia

An interesting post from the Northern Voice conference in Vancouver (picture from Marc Canter) about the "Blogging and Academia" session.  Topics included: identifying educational application areas, barriers to educational blogging, downsides of blogs in education, blogs as genre and academic blogging projects.

Link: Infocult: Information, Culture, Policy, Education: Blogging and academia panel in Vancouver.

Scobleizer: Microsoft Geek Blogger

Interesting post from Scobleizer today:

I'll say it again. You should be fired if you do a marketing site without an RSS feed.

Link: Scobleizer: Microsoft Geek Blogger.

ANT (Ant's Not Tv)

Here is the feedback I sent to ANT after using it for a few days:

"I love it.  I have had no problems what so ever.  Great install.  My biggest desire so far is (1) be able to  sort playlist and feeds (by name, date, etc) and (2) allow for easy import from del.icio.us (or directory when it is available) and (3) allow playing downloaded files in proper date order (i.e., if I download file1.mov and file2.mov and file1 was published before file2, then I have to rearrange the order of the files in the playlist if I want them to play in the proper order).  Item (3) could be effected by (2) if downloaded files where added to playlist in the proper sort order (i.e., if sorted by date ascending, then new files would be added to the end of the playlist in proper date order and playing "down" the list would play them in the correct order.  Hope all that makes sense and is helpful.  Thanks for a great product."

They say a Windows version (Linux too) is coming soon.  According to Jay Dedman over at Momentshowing, the name ANT is "a funny play of the GNU" (GNU's Not Unix) phrase.

Fun with Video

OK, just a quick update on various video issues.  First, the Win2K box ate it big time after a major update (thanks Microsoft).  So I reinstalled the OS and the good news is that it is like having a new system and the bad news is that it is like having a new system.  I did get a video cam up and running and so I can at least record and send simple low res videos.

So I went back over to Collab.nl, a great little Flash-based community where you can find some cool folks and tunes (and some idiots).  A funny thing happened tonight while I was there.  One guy put on a sombrero and so I put on mine.  Then another guy put one on and finally a forth guy put on a snow cap (I guess his sombrero was at the cleaners).  What a sight!  Four freaks around the world with hats on.  I snapped a picture of one of them just before he went totally native.

I also got Ant (Not TV) installed on the Mac and now I am downloading lots of cool vids from a variety of vlogs.  I'll just mention a few that I liked and post more later: Chris Koehn, karmagrrrl, mmeiser and, of course, Ryanne.  Having recently met Marc Canter, I particularly got a kick out of Eric Rice's visit to The City to eat and meet with Eli Chapman and Marc.  Marc says he loves to come to Tiburon and eat at Guaymas. (click to see cool flash video on their site).  There's a truly great concina down the street, but I'm not telling anybody more than that (go there and find it for yourself).  It's too good to share with anyone except my wife and the good friend who first took me.

Search Results

I just added the two search forms down near the bottom of the sidebar.  The Google one works well, but the Technorati one sucks.  Am I not getting something here?  Does it only work with tags that Technorati tracks?  It sure doesn't work as expected, which the Google one does.  Thanks to the folks at 6 Apart for making it easy.

Malcolm Gladwell on IT Conversations

More about "Blink".  You can find a recent 20 minute interview with Malcolm Gladwell on ITConversations about the book.  You can also find an earlier related interview from late last year.  Now stick that in your pod!

Do The Right Thing

Seth's Blog points to a wonderful post by Joe Taylor about slow cooking that I wish lots of people I know would read.  I can hear Ossie Davis as Da Mayor telling Mookie "Doctor, always try to do the right thing!" 

So often, I see companies adding poorly thought out features to a product in order to chase some newly recognized opportunity that will supposedly catapult the product to a wild success overnight.  Oops, now I hear Zappa.

I'm reading Malcolm Gladwell's new book "Blink".  One of the main points that the book advocates is "decisions made very quickly can be every bit as good as decisions made cautiously and deliberately".  This is interesting in light of the most recent C-SPAN Library of Congress discussion with David Levy, where there seemed to be a consensus amongst the discussion panel that there was a need today for time for greater reflection in the ever increasing pace of the modern world. 

These days, we want to (have to?) move at Internet speeds, but often this just results in half-baked ideas thrown against the wall to see what sticks.  Many development strategies suggest continuously making small improvements.   Like any good cook, we need to be able to plan ahead, deal with sudden flare-ups and, all the while, keep slowly stirring the sauce until everything is ready to be served to our guests.

Interactive Family Tree

While doing some research, I recently stumbled across this interesting item in a 1997 paper about Philips' vision of the future.

This multimedia family tree is an interactive picture frame which brings together existing archive material: videos, photographs, letters, names and dates with current information about the family. It organises all the material and presents family relationships. This is received and updated, through the 'family network', from other family members who have a similar device. It can also act as a reminder for birthdays, anniversaries and special occasions.

It seems like several people I know have had this vision.  I even wrote a short piece of speculative fiction back around the same time that described such a device.  So where are they?  I know there are some DIY style postings over at the Channel 9 Forums, but I don't see anything like this for the consumer over at that cool Gizmodo site.  Seems like a perfect match with Flickr! and will require what people like Marc Canter and Dave Toole refer to as "the glue" or "the sauce" when they talk about digital lifestyle aggregators and secure personal internets.  A device like this seems like the kind of thing that Creative Memories should be using to help preserve and share our family stories.

Marc Blogs It and Ryanne Vlogs It

I agree with Marc about Make magazine's use of Flickr, Del.icio.us and Technorati: where's the Webjay?  It ain't Digital Lifestyle Aggregation, if it leaves out something as important as my playlists.  Here's a recent pic of Marc at Vloggercon that I found on Flickr (thanks to paulmooney).  Thanks to Ryanne Hodson (pic by condor) for contributing this video (and several others) to the Internet Archive of this session at Vloggercon.  I really like Ryanne's video blog (my favorite one is this video).   She makes me want to vblog.

(I think that this post contains a record number of hyperlinks for me.)

The 80-20 Rule

Kevin Werbach mentions a great quote from Tommy Lasorda:

I've stopped telling people about my problems. 80% of people listening don't care, and the other 20% are glad I'm having problems.

Recruiting Tricks

An interesting post on the thep2pweblog:

Travis Kalanick from Red Swoosh (and formerly from Scour), caused some stir over the BitTorrent Yahoo! Group. Some of the regulars didn’t think it was too ethical of him to use the list to recruit P2P “demi-god developers”. Specially to work for a company that was showcased by the MPAA during the announcement of a series of lawsuits last year.

David Levy on C-SPAN

David Levy, a UW Information School professor and the author of  "Scrolling Forward" will be speaking live on C-SPAN today from the LOC at 3:30 PST.  Here is description from the C-SPAN site:

Monday, February 14 at 6:30pm ET - David M. Levy, professor at the Information School of the University of Washington Levy is the author of "Scrolling Forward: Making Sense of Documents in the Digital Age," and he will discuss the shift of the experience of reading from the fixed page to movable electrons and the effect that has had on language.

You can email in questions. Here are some links to bone up for the event.  Ramana Rao's Information Flow blog has an interesting review (see quote below).  He was a fellow researcher at Xerox PARC.  An article index entry can be found here and the Seattle Times has an in-depth review here.

Starting from a simple definition of documents as "talking things," Levy explains how they act as our social delegates, in particular, speaking for us in social settings. This broad perspective offers insights into how documents participate in the functioning of culture, and consequently, what might or might not happen across technology shifts.

Sounds interesting. More on this after the broadcast ...

Playlists

OK, I've added my WebJay playlists to the bottom of the sidebar on this page in my eternal quest to aggregate.  Promises, Promises seems to be getting a few hits.

Webjay and the Internet Archive

Ok, it's official: I'm having too much fun using WebJay and the Internet Archive.  Now I'm creating playlists centered around the videos people point out to me (usually visions of possible futures), together with wonderful old pieces from the 50's and 60 that I find in the Internet Archive's Prelinger Archives. Thanks again to Jon Udell, who originally pointed the way here with his great screencast.  So, if you don't find me posting here, I'm probably busy adding media links to my playlists.  Darn!  That means it's time to figure how to get those lists showing up over here too.  More of what Marc Cantor calls Digital Lifestyle Aggregation (DLA).

Cocoal.icio.us

Another great tool for del.icio.us, this time it's an OS X based client.  I like it, but wished it sorted tags the same way del.icio.us does (a common problem).

Barbie Does Linux

Technology Insider has an article on BarbieOS, based on Debian Linux.  Too funny.  They also have a very lame article on the Mac Mini.  Here's a much better one from Ben Guild that my friend Eric sent me.

Technorati Tags

I was catching up on TheyBlinked and that led me off on a little Technorati tag tangent/experiment.  Here is a link from them for the tags theyblinked, apperceive and apperceptions.  I'm a little confused too (but Dan seems to be getting better results than me; maybe I need to add some tags to Flickr!).

Addendum:  It worked!  This post now shows up for TheyBlinked. Also the Flickr! tags helped for me.  So now I get it, the Technorati page is showing posts, Flickr and del.icio.us all at once.

Always read the contract!

Ben Hyde points to a truly sad story about copyrights and MathWorld.  Not being one to burn books, I was thinking that I should paste a copy of this story in all my old CRC's and donate them to the library.

Congratulations!

Some time back, I met with the great folks at Webfeat.org.  They do very interesting work with federating search results for libraries.  Back when we met, it was an important goal to lock down their valuable IP.  I see that they have been granted their first patent.  Way to go Webfeat! 

Apprentice TNG?

From Stewart to Star in New 'Apprentice'

Since Stewart is not allowed to conduct business while in prison, Burnett made it clear his deal with Stewart was completed before the domestic mogul entered prison — although he's made monthly visits to her.

Are these considered conjugal visits?

Another del.icio.us Tool

Ahhh, another great tool for the truly anal del.icio.us user:

This page uses Porter stemming to show where you've made different del.icio.us tags with the same English word stem. You can use it to help clean up your personal fauxonomy.

See also extisp.icio.us.

TIVO vs PVR

The other day a colleague sent me a link to a open-source TIVO SDK.  I took a brief look at it and responded with:

The SDK is less than "alpha" and has far too many limitations to be useful (according to the fine print, most of the images they show are vaporware and the important functions to control and read the Tivo are not available at this time).  Publishing mechanisms and licensing have yet to be worked out (probably GPL if published thru Tivo).  It might get better, but I doubt it will matter in the long run.

Even if one of us has a Series 2 Tivo (you have to put one on your intranet in order to work with this API - the Tivo acts as a client to the PC), I would not recommend putting any time into this until it shakes out (if ever).  I think it's generally pretty accepted that Tivo is rapidly on it's way out (PVR's are here to stay of course).

If Tivo were smart (no indication so far) they will strike a deal with someone fast (but they recently turned down the deal of the century to be in every Comcast cable box and it looks like the top brass are jumping ship fast now - morning news).  Also, there are too many alternatives now and RSS has trumped the Tivo service differentiation.  They better have their IP down tight.  The brand will probably be valuable for many years.

Today I noticed this post in werblog.  Addentium: love those trackbacks; I see Mitch has been there too.  Jeremy Zawodny feels differently.