Category: Contemplation

I changed my strategy for advocating weblogs in my local educational setting: Each member of the group is supposed to run his own weblog and the group weblogs aggregate and form intersections. The immediate response from one student: »I don’t see a need for that.«. Why is it that some people see the immediate appeal…

The first weblog from a student of our product design department went online. I instantly subscribed his RSS-Feed with NetNewsWire. Looking forward to what is coming from there…

Yesterday I had the first chance to examine the 12″ inch PowerBook. It is really very well designed. There are little glitches in the production of it (small gaps that are wider on one side than on the other), but generally it feels much more solid than my 1st generation 15″ inch PowerBook. I wonder…

»What the Internet Is and How to Stop Mistaking It for Something Else« (by Doc Searls and David Weinberger) I don’t know for how long this document is online, but I just found out about it. Weinberger is the author of »Small pieces losely joined« and he will be a keynote speaker on the Blogtalk…

This is really something the world has waited for! [Plasticthinking]

I just checked out the new newsaggregator feature of Manila – and it seems I can’t make much use of it. The most important issue (somewhat typical for Userland): I can’t design the result page (no template) and it is English only. The site managers can’t extend the feeds they can subscribe to. I don’t…

»Somewhere in the process of evangelizing user-centered design, user experience professionals seem to have forgotten the value of vision-driven design.«

I wonder if these tablet PCs that Microsoft wants to promote are really going to work out. I doubt you can use them with a pen very well for writing. And if you need a keyboard most of the time anyway – why not buying a Laptop right away? (The biggest problem of course is…

»This article is a guide to trends that are already in full motion and well known by technology specialists, but are far from obvious to most business managers. I can’t tell you what to do about them, without studying your particular business, but it will cast some light on what you should be looking at.Much…

Jeff Bozo strikes again: Two days ago the Amazon CEO recieved a patent: A method and system for conducting an electronic discussion relating to a topic. And here is another one that stinks: A method and apparatus are provided for dynamically organizing and tracking website content during its deployment This is ridiculous!

It seems Google starts to implement first prototypes of something that explains the Pyra interest. WebQuotes seems to show who is quoting who and how. [WebDEV]

Dennis G. Jerz wrote an article for »Dichtung Digital«, which could light up the questions about what Google might want with Blogger. Quote: »Google initially began as a tool for rating annotations, according to Larry Page (inventor of Google’s eponymous PageRank): “We wanted to annotate the web–build a system so that after you’d viewed a…

I just corrected the RSS link in the membership box. (Thanks to Marian) By the way, Marian: The RSS client I talked about is Syndirella. Maybe that is better than FeedReader.

»Courtesy Typographi.ca, a pointer to Victor Gaultney’s Gentium project. Purpose: to build a free multilingual font to bring better typography to thousands of languages around the globe. I can think of no higher calling.« [Jarrett House North]

I don’t know what the Google people had in mind when buying Pyra/Blogger. But I can say what I have in mind: a system that integrates meta-structures blogdex, blogtree, myelin, geourl with publishing. Of course Google could use the weblogs to improve ranking. Of course Google could have done this without buying Blogger, couldn’t it?

»QuarkXPress software users can look forward to many powerful new features in QuarkXPress 6 including enhanced undo functionality, full-resolution previews, and an intriguing way to manage complex projects, which will be described in a future update.«