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Apr
2
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As I mentioned in my etech notes - APP (Atom Publishing Protocol) needs something to overcome the Chicken and Egg problem; well Tim Bray just announced the something - Google are hosting an APP interoperability event on April 16th and 17th.
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Dec
31
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I started this last year and though I'd do it again.
Best Moment
Last year it was a toss up between Jack learning to use the potty and England qualifying for the World Cup. This year - the kids win again - this year (over the course of a long weekend) - my five year old daughter Lilly learned to ride her bike without training-wheels. Watching her cycling off into the distance made me feel very proud. If anyone needs advice on teaching kids to loose the training-wheels - leave a comment.
Worst Moment
Watching England's performance in the World Cup and realizing we were going to blow it.
Best Blog
I still read many of Sun's bloggers but the one blog I have read consistently is Seth Godin's.
Best Gadget
Last year it was my (very inexpensive) GPS receiver for my Treo - something I still use a lot of the time - and something I find invaluable when travelling. This year it's pretty tricky. The two contenders are my home SunRay (something I use every day and I still think it's one of those game-changing products that way too few people are aware of); the second is the Logitech Harmony 880 Universal Remote (a Christmas present) - five remote controls was driving my wife crazy - harmony has been restored. I think the Harmony wins.
Worst Gadget
I had to think hard about this one. This is tough - it's my beloved Treo650 that I've ranted about over the last couple of years. Here's why. I recently had to replace my Treo (having dropped it too often) - before I shelled out $300 I looked at a couple of other smartphones and they all make the Treo650 look really dated. The reason I stuck with the Treo is that I have 3 or 4 applciations I use a lot that aren't all available on other (newer) models and makes. Unless Palm gets their act together - it's probably the last Palm I'll buy - the competition looks too good. My initial infatuation with the Treo meant I tollerated the crashes and out of memory errors - not any more.
Best Book
Last year this was easy - this year I'm struggling between Blink and Freakonomics - looking at my Audible library - I gave Freakonomics 5 stars vs. 4 for Blink - so Freakonomics gets the prize this year.
Best Film
No films really stood out this year - though I've enjoyed watching TLOTR trilogy again - now in HD (OK - upconverted DVD). I'm going to break the rules a bit and vote for Lost - over the Autumn we watched the entire Season 1 & 2 on DVD (via NetFlix) and season 3 on HBO - I can't wait for it to restart in February.
Worst Film
Da Vinci Code - I enjoyed the book and decided to get the DVD as my wife hadn't read it. Great story, great actors - what happened ?
Best Application
I've been using Google calendar for the last six months and have completely given up the various other calendars I'd been maintaining. It almost rocks and I have high hopes for it continuing to improve. I just hope Google doesn't become big and evil - I'd hate to have to look for place to park my appointments.
Biggest Disappointment
World Cup 2006 (Soccer / Footie). England had some of the most hyped and over-paid players in the game and played like a bunch of guys who hadn't played together before. Overall - the tournament was great - and England's part was pretty minor.
Have a great new year, Rich.
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Oct
16
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I just installed and had a quick play with Google maps on my Treo; for a first release it's pretty good; but it's along way from being a replacement for TomTom navigator - ie. no GPS link and the maps are a little slow to download. One neat feature is the (presumably) live traffic updates - though I'm not sure it will route around traffic hotspots like TomTom does.
It's a shame mobile browsers aren't more capable - downloading a native app. for every neato AJAX-heavy application isn't really the answer IMO.
That said, I'll definitely take another look in the future.
Technorati Tags: ajax, google map, treo|
Sep
14
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I only just noticed that Google/ig now has tabs and you can drag content (channels) between tabs - that's a pretty significant small change. How long has it been there ? Anyway, thanks Googlers.
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Oct
12
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[from blog4mantero's FlickrStream]
OK, maybe that's a bit harsh - it can't be that bad, after all, people (including myself) use it all the time. But it is fair to say that search on the web is a problem yet to be solved.
Google, Ask, Y!, MSN, AltaVista - they all do a fairly basic job of locating simple strings on web pages (and in the case of Google embedded in other rich document formats) but the way search works is pretty basic today and it's common for the user to have to repeat the search process multiple times to get what you want - ie. the user has to adapt to the machine's results and try again (and again). So basically - search is a largely human endeavour but we get some help from machines (Google, etc.) to help with the volume problem.
There are other problems :
- The Problem is growing very fast The More people are adding more stuff to the Web and much of it is not good quality (in terms of correctness of content / authority) - eg. this post - I know very little about 'search' - I'm far from being an expert on the subject - but even the most powerful search algorithms can't really tell you whether I'm an authority on the subject or just someone with spare time and an opinion. Max has commented on the more general issue in his post on Existential Phenomenology.
- Much of the decent content on the Web is Opaque to Search. Historically, much of the content on the web has been text (HTML, XML, XHTML, etc.) which is handy as it's trivial for a search engine to access; but now we're seeing more rich document formats - PDF, MS Word, OpenDocument in the future - these present a problem but that's being overcome. The real challenge comes when more of the content is in the form of audio (pod casts, etc.) and video. This is important because (traditionally at least) the quality of this content has been greater because the production costs were higher. So, for example, if you wanted to learn about "The feeding Habits of Mountain Lions" - I would suggest getting hold of a video documentary by the BBC Natural History Unit (world renowned for being good at this kind of thing) as opposed to spending an hour or so searching the web for something appropriate and authoratative. The problem is, that video is completely opaque to search engines - there is a little bit of meta-data describing the video but that isn't enough.
- Old habits die hard / searchers are lazy The people doing the searching have adopted a bad habit - type a word (or two) into the box and click (repeat as necessary) - there are more effective ways to find what you want - ie. go to the place likely to have a good answer or somewhere you trust and start your search there.
- Yahoo! Research - I saw a demo of the mindset feature - pretty cool - as long as I get to choose the sliders.
- Google Labs. - the personalized search feature of Google already works pretty well but I haven't tried the Video Search.
- Sun Labs - Search Inside the Music
There are plenty of other promising technologies and services out there (too many to list) - this is clearly an area where a winner is yet to emerge.
Technorati Tags : search, web2
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Sep
14
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Max had his own reasons to drop Technorati, here are mine :
- I think tagging (ie. users deciding what their posts are about) is unfortunately being abused - you can see a despicable example on Flickr where people have tagged the pictures with "Katrina" and "Hurricane" just so they get picked up by more people. I'm also really questioning the tagging concept as a whole (especially when applied to textual content) - I need to think about this more
- Getting Technorati to work correctly requires my time - adding the tags, manually pinging, contacting support when I fall off the map - I simply don't see the justifaction for spending this time.
- Google now have a blog searching feature - blogsearch which seems to do a good enough job of finding my blog entires and I don't have to do anything (but sure Google can be exploited too)
- My experiment with StatCounter has shown that I get very few referers from Technorati - most come from Google / Y! - it will be interesting to see how BlogSearch changes that.
Note the lack of Technorati tags !
