details of a global brain

  • Bogus patents

    What if you invent a web site creation and maintenance system that permits distributed control and centralized management of a web site? What if the physical implementation of the web site resides on a database maintained by a database administratorand the web site system permits a site administrator to construct the overall structure, design and…

  • MP3 blogs

    Many independ music composers circumvent the labels completely. But publishing their music online is just one part. They need to become a hot tip also. And there are many that help by running weblogs about this music and that link to the MP3 files and videos of these artists. There are some examples collected in…

  • Groovy hen & egg

    Groove Networks released version 3.0 of its application suite. Unfortunatly it only runs on Windows. Concerning the Mac version their FAQ says Right now, the vast majority of our customer and prospect base is Windows based. No wonder. When there is no version for Mac available there will be no Mac customers. But the issue…

  • Outfoxed

    When I was in New York on 9/11/2001 I was stunned by the news program FoxNews. US people know that program: I didn’t at that time. The only US program we see here is CNN Europe (which is very different from the US as I learned that time). Now it seems (some) Americans start to…

  • The cognitive style of parallel writing

    Stephanie Booth is reflecting on the experiment with writing a summary of a conference session as a group in SubEthaEdit (which allows users connected to one host to write together on a single text file; it looks like this -each user has a seperate color- and when finished the result can be published on a…

  • GMail invitations left

    I have some GMail invitations left. Comment if you want to have one (by clicking on the date above).

  • Top ten truly obscure but useful Java projects

    In response to the top ten obscure java projects list someone (who does not have an about page) replies with an obscure but useful list. I like this a lot – there aree so many gems hidden on the net that deserve more attention.

  • Notebook conferences

    I remember when there was a discussion about “Notebook universities” in and around some universities in my area. They were supposed to conceptualize how they would utilize notebooks. These concepts were evaluated to decide which universities get funding for WLAN and Laptop equipment. If I remember correctly the concepts were usually not very inspired. Few…

  • BlogTalk 2.0 – comments

    I am trying to get the best out of the net about BlogTalk. Currently there is the Q & A session of the first panel. I missed the presentations because of the streaming issues noted before. See: BlogTalk topic exchange channel Good coverage from Roland Tanglao Lilia Efimova

  • contentEditable in Safari 2.0

    Dave Hyatt – the core developer for Apples WebCore that drives the HTML rendering engine of Safari – is leaking some details: The new WebCore also supports HTML editing. You can specify editable regions in a page using the contenteditable attribute (which maps to a CSS property behind the scenes, so you can even set…

  • BlogTalk 2.0 – live stream problems

    BlogTalk 2.0 is just about to begin. I regret I couldn’t make it this year to the conference although I would be happy to contribute to the discourse and meet Mark Bernstein and the Trotts. So I was happy to see that there was a live stream prepared, but unfortunatly even the modem stream doesn’t…

  • Designed for authorship

    Mark Bernstein posts a thumbnail of the way he takes notes on conferences. I was at last years BlogTalk trying to use my weblog to report. It didn’t really work: there was too much hassle fiddling with the software and not thinking about the words. I am using Tinderbox for some time now and it…

  • Weblog names

    I sometimes stumble across a weblog that has a wonderful name. Do you know a weblog with a cool or funny name? Help me to collect these here.

  • Weblogs and propaganda

    Mark Bernstein quotes a question by Karin Tzschenktke from the BlogTalk press conference: How do we keep weblogs from becoming merely a channel of propaganda? Mark thinks this is an interesting question but answers by speculating about intrinsic motivations of weblog authors, that fundamentally are against propaganda and that the attention economy will filter most…

  • Facetop video conferencing

    Now that’s a nifty idea for video conferencing: The video conferencing partner blended semi-transparent over the shared desktop like a reflection on the screen.

  • Temporal comments

    Dave Winer suggests to solve the comment fraud problem by adding expiration dates to comments: Here’s a free idea I had the other day while cleaning up a spewage of comment spam. What if comments, by default, were deleted after 24 hours? What if the owner of the site had to check a box in…

  • Bootstrapping with Tinderbox and Zope

    I am bootstrapping: The start page of my weblog now renders through a homemade skinning system based on Zope and Page Templates. This means I do not design this pages with the template files Tinderbox uses for the HTML export. For example here is the template of the current start page: There is still a…

  • WorldKit

    I haven’t seen this application before: WorldKit WorldKit is an easy to use and highly flexible mapping application for the Web. It’s a Flash based app, configured entirely by XML, data fed by RSS, and requires no programming or extra software. It’s in the style of World as a Blog, with many more features: customizable…

  • Project Looking Glass fallacy

    Sun released a public version of their 3D desktop Project Looking Glass. There is a demo video with Jonathan Schwartz (weblog), Executive Vice President of Software at Sun Microsystems, who claims: The dominant company that provides the desktop doesn’t want to show you that [innovation on the desktop] because they do not want to do…

  • OS X Tiger preview

    I just had a look at the WWDC 2004 keynote (did I see Francis Ford Coppola in the audience a couple of times?). The upcoming release vo Mac OS X 10.4 Tiger comes with a collection of features that in general appear to be focussing on productivity and efficiency. Spotlight – the instant searching –…

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