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)
Heh, this is probably old news to some, but I just read about this clever hack in PC Mag to block ads by modifying your local host file
Ha! This is very cool. Mark has created a Magnetic Poetry Generator that will create a word list based on the content found within a page you reference at the end of the path.
For example:
http://diveintomark.org/magnetic/http://news.google.com
BTW, Mark also has a hilarious 404 page as well.
Matt Williams of Micosoft says, “DUDE! Sharepoint is not a weblogging tool!” (via Scripting News)
However, as I mentioned back in November that SharePoint Team Services could be used as a Weblogging tool and that many Office users didn’t even realize that have it.
Dan Gillmor: “Google … has purchased Pyra Labs, a San Francisco company that created some of the earliest technology for writing weblogs, the increasingly popular personal and opinion journals.”
I’m sure this is going to be interesting.
For Cat’s birthday, I got her tickets to the Matisse Picasso exhibit at the MoMa in Queens and I definitely recommend checking it out if you’re in the NYC area before May of this year.