Please! Let’s make 2004 the year we retire the retched fax machine!

This is despite some of the valid points Paul Rubens of the BBC NEWS makes in his article Fax - the technology that refuses to die (via Gizmodo)

“The fax machine is an ancient piece of office equipment - it was invented in its earliest form by one Alexander Bain in 1843. It transmits the contents of pieces of paper, but these days the chances are high that anything on paper started as an electronic document. So why print it out and fax it when you can e-mail the digital version?”

And this point which drives me truly insane!!

“It’s also likely that at least some faxed information will be typed back into a computer at the other end. So why convert it from digital to analogue and back again when you can keep it digital and save time and paper? Even if you fax directly from your computer, this still effectively turns a digital document into an analogue one.”

I know-I know! In comparison to signed faxed documents, digital signatures are not yet widely admissible as legal documents … Blah! Blah! Blah! Fix that!

My New Years Resolution is to make 2004 the year I stopped sending and receiving faxes … for good!

You should too :-) Please!

Since the hardware is now on order, I suppose I have committed myself to building what Catherine has branded “STeVo“, which is my feeble attempt at a constructing a homebrew PVR (personal video recorder).

Wish me luck!

Call it a prediction or stating the obvious, but I believe in the coming year corporate search solutions will be generating a steady buzz — driven primarily by innovative products that focus on unlocking the terabytes of knowledge squandered away in the reassess of the corporate network data stores. A position John Battelle seems to agree with in a recent post on the topic:

“…the overwhelming presumption of webwide search on your desktop is certainly rewiring how corporations think about their more private databanks. A robust market has grown up around “enterprise search,” (some companies, such as FAST, were spun off from consumer search companies, and Google maintains a unit focused on the market). There’s a crop of interesting startups to boot, including Tim Bray’s company, Antarctica. It’s entirely possible some of the next big ideas in search may well be developed in this more focused, less public field.”

As others have predicted, we will see more an more of these…

“MUTE File Sharing is a new peer-to-peer network that provides easy search-and-download functionality while also protecting your privacy.”

I haven’t tried it yet, but it seems to be similar to Waste

IO2 Technology has demonstrated a 42″ prototype of what they are calling “Heliodisplay- Interactive Free-Space Display“, which is essentially display without a “screen” …

“The Heliodisplay projects full color streaming video into free space (i.e. air). It is plug-and-play compatible with most video sources (TV, DVD, computer, etc.). These non-holographic images can be fully interactive, allowing a hand or finger to select, navigate and manipulate — as if it were a virtual touch screen.”

Note to self: Add to wish list :-)

Last night I hacked together a bit of JavaScript to add a right-click context menu posting option to Joshua Schachter’s Social Bookmarks Manager.

It works in a similar fashion to the bookmarklet, but is accessible via the right-click context menu in IE. It also adds the feature of pulling in any text selected on the page into the “extended” description field and remembers your del.icio.us/user path after the first invocation by storing it in a cookie.

Installation should be easy…

I’ve created a windows registry script to add the necessary registry key as well as a removal script to delete the key if you would like to remove the context menu option.

• Simply click on the following link: post-to-del-icio-us.reg
• When prompted, click save to download it to your local system (desktop is fine)
• Close your browser (important step)
• Double-click on the post-to-del-icio-us.reg registry script and then click ‘Ok’ on the two message boxes
• Start-up your browser, select some text on a page, right-click the text and select “Post to del.icio.us”
• When first run, you will be prompted for your del.icio.us/user path, which is in the format: http://del.icio.us/[your-user-name] (e.g. mine is http://del.icio.us/hatch)

Some other notes:

As for as I know, this only works in IE (or derivatives like MyIE2) and it’s definitely specific to Windows.

There is a way to delete the cookie that contains your del.icio.us/user path. You can do so by using this link

As I mentioned above I also have a removal registry script, which you can use to delete the context menu from IE.

• Simply click on the following link to remove the menu and follow a similar procedure to what was mentioned above: remove-post-to-del-icio-us.reg

If you would like to run the script locally from your system, I have provided a zip archive containing all the necessary files.

To customize the script for your local system, drop the post-to-del-icio-us.html into your Windows directory and edit the post-to-del-icio-us.reg file to point to the local path instead of my server.

• Post to del.icio.us zip

That’s it.

Enjoy.

Update: 2004/09/17
Dan Grigsby has created a Windows Installer for this script. Do check it out!

Thanks Dan!

Others have mentioned the impact of the embedded RSS capabilities that will be in Longhorn. This time however, it’s Scoble talking about the broader implications of a syndication friendly OS

“In Longhorn you can store a ton of metadata with your files. You can also find those files much more easily. Why is that important to syndication? Because now you have a file system that supports sending files out via a syndication feed, storing them locally, and then letting users get to them in new and interesting ways.”

Ephraim Schwartz writes in InfoWorld about how Social Networking Software is targeting the corporate enterprise, with startups such as
ZeroDegrees,
Interface Software,
ContactNetwork, and
Spoke targeting CRM…

“Leveraging advances in communication and integration, a new kind of application — corporate social networking — is being folded into the CRM feature set.”

“Companies like Siebel and Salesforce.com are watching this space. These social networking companies will be gobbled up real quick,”

In addition, I believe that Microsoft and IBM are watching this space as well, because in my opinion Social Networking Software is a natural extension to enterprise messaging software such as Exchange and Domino.

Ray Matthews of Utah State Library Division has published an excellent tutorial on the various methods for searching RSS feeds. I think the best part is the comprehensive list of RSS-related search engines and tools.

Build a test Open Groupware server simply by rebooting your system with the
OGo Knoppix CD!

“OGo Knoppix CD is a bootable CD which contains a complete Debian GNU/Linux system, a fully configured OGo installation, a Cyrus server and some more Linux software.

I think this is worth a burn and reboot!