This is fantastic: “A total of 20 mature students at Strathclyde University’s Senior Studies Institute took part in a tutorial on the various uses of a mobile phone.”
In Defense of E-mail
Nice defense of e-mail by Matt Blumberg of Return Path. I agree. There are definitely flaws in the medium, but efforts are underway (spam filtering, e-mail authentication, reputation services) that I think will make a big and positive impact. For person-to-person communications online, what else is there? There are instant messaging apps, for sure, and some suggest they will take on e-mail traffic. That’s a possibility, I suppose, but I think e-mail in its current incarnation (as seen from the end-user perspective) has become too important to abandon. Those who think it’s on its way out probably take it for granted to the extent that they don’t realize what life would be like without it.
Anil Dash: On Leaving New York
*sniff* Anil Dash gives me a preview of what it feels like to leave New York City for San Francisco. I can already feel myself disengaging from this place in some ways. Yet, there are other parts of my life here I want to grasp onto more tightly than ever.
Seattle
Lunch at the Pike Place Market. A simple fresh delicious halibut sandwich. Amazing. More pictures to come if I can figure out how to work this thing.
Pike Place Market, Seattle
Pictures, pictures pictures
Wow, everyone seems to be getting all… visual, all of a sudden. First Google buys Picasa, then CNET purchases Webshots. Needless to say, this is driven by the growth in broadband access along with the further development (and price-lowering) of digital cameras and cameraphones.
Along the same lines, Dick Costolo of FeedBurner turned me on to an interesting deal his company did with photo sharing firm Flickr. (Flickr seems quite similar in mission to Picasa.) The gist of it is this: you can “splice” your blog’s XML feed with your Flickr public photos’ XML feed to create a unified entity. Subscribers can then follow your every little XML move — be it visual or textual.
As Dick said:
Basically, we’ve created a feed splicing service that allows
anybody with a flickr account to splice their public photos with their
blog’s rss feed so that they have one resulting feed with all their blog
posts and their public photos. It’s a request we’ve heard from a bunch
of people and we really liked the way the team at Flickr was innovating
around photo sharing, so there you are…
UPDATE2: Have just tried it out (http://feeds.feedburner.com/the-river/testblog is my playground) and it is really fascinating. It really brings the whole “the feed is the thing” reality to the fore. After all, your Web presence — blog, flickr public files, etc. — are completely separate, but on the feed… it all comes together. The mythical unified blogging tool will solve all these problems, of course, but until then….
UPDATE1. Also very interesting from the release:
The two also announced co-development of syndication namespace extensions for richer photo display and metadata. The draft specification is undergoing final internal review and will be published for public comment shortly. The namespace extensions will facilitate the emergence of next generation RSS clients that enable sophisticated display and sharing of photos.