Agent Frank wants to learn about the user, observe preferences and habits, and become capable of automating many of the tedious tasks infovores face. Eventually, this will come to involve various forms of machine learning and analysis, & etc.

Note to self: Check this out when you get a chance.

I added a RSS 2.0 feed to hatch.org. The feed also includes a <comments> element for those aggregators that support it (like NG ;-)

Patrick from TechTV tries the “Switch”

“The biggest problem with switching isn’t the Mac or OS X. It’s when you have to deal with the Windows-centric parts of the world. If you can avoid them (most folks don’t need compatibility with odd applications in the office), you could be all set right out of the box with your Mac.”

The Slashdot thread about the article is also interesting

Yoz reviews Microsoft’s Three Degrees Beta, which is a new IM/chat/P2P/MP3 player designed for and apparently by teens.

Great quote: “As you’d expect, it’s all wrapped up in the kind of huge lurid skinnable UI that will have Alan Cooper wandering around the Redmond campus with a rifle.” (link via Ben)

Don Box’s Spoutlet: “I have seen the future and it combines SOAP and spell-checking.” (via DW)

Everything is coming up XML for Microsoft this year …

I don’t know about you, but I think the hype machine out west has me under a spell, because I am starting to feel giddy when I think of the future business user of Office 2003 creating InfoPath docs that are passed around by Exchange, integrated into the enterprise workflow via BizTalk and spit out into digestible chunks to SharePoint.

Oh, the productivity ;-)

Greg Reinacker has released NewsGator — .Net-based RSS news aggregator for Outlook.

Congratulations Greg! I’ve been using NewsGator since the early betas and my favorite feature has always been its tight integration with Outlook.

However IMHO, it would make the experience complete if you could also post to a blog via the MetaWeblog API or some-such.

Dubbed ‘Information Rights Management’ in the upcoming Office relesae, which is described as a ” … persistent file-level technology from Microsoft that allows the user to specify permission for who can access and use documents or e-mail messages, and helps prevent sensitive information from being printed, forwarded, or copied by unauthorized individuals…”
(via Microsoft Watch and Slashdot)

Technorati has an interesting new ranking of blogs by number of new links from blogs in the last 24 hours

Jon Udell on the 10 things you need to know about InfoPath (aka XDocs)