June 13, 2003

Spike You!

Catherine rants about Spike Lee’s suit against SpikeTV. I’ll have to add to Cat’s “Spike” list with Elvis Costello’s album Spike from 1989.

And what about all those dogs named Spike? What will we do?

June 12, 2003

Retro Computing Magazines

I’m certainly feeling nostalgic with all the retro talk lately about early experiences with computing technology.

Given the reflective talk, it’s not surprising to see a mention of some of my favorite computing magazines like
Softside,
Antic and of course Creative Computing

In fact, I still have a few issues of Creative Computing and Softside from the late 70’s early 80’s. Perhaps when I post my “Newly Digital” experiences, I’ll include pictures of these zines.

June 12, 2003

OneNote as a Wiki front-end

It just occurred to me that Microsoft’s OneNote, the application “for capturing, organizing, and collaboratively sharing information”, would work well as a front-end to a Wiki.

For example: A Wiki server could act as repository for publishing shared OneNote pages that in turn can be collaborated on either via the browser (in the true Wiki sense) or within the OneNote application itself.

IMHO, this type of integration would push Wiki’s into corporate environments where knowledge management seems to involve too much post-processing work.

June 11, 2003

FrontPage 2003 as a blogging tool

I didn’t see this feature in the latest beta of FP 2003, but according to this article on CRN FrontPage 2003 will include a blogging tool.

However, what I also found interesting is that FP 2003 will also “incorporate a full WYSIWYG editor for Extensible Stylesheet Language (XSLT)”,

Very cool!

Hmmm… Perhaps I missed that in the beta. (note to self: re-check FP 2003 beta)

June 10, 2003

Gizmodo 1983

Feeling old? Check out some “cool” Gadgets from 1983.

It’s interesting to note how long it took many of these to catch on en mass and then to apply that logic to some products that we are just starting to see in the consumer markets. (e.g. PVRs, WiFi and even Blogging in the relm of social acceptance)

June 9, 2003

Get the Yahoo Buzz via RSS

Jeremy Zawodny spills the beans about Yahoo’s Buzz (search) indices now being available via RSS, which is very cool indeed.

It would also be cool to see Google’s Zeitgeist rankings to be available in RSS as well. Ideally with a greater update frequency.

June 8, 2003

RSS Marketing

Greg Reinacker talks about companies using RSS feeds to market products instead of opt-in lists and/or the dreaded spam…

“If I could subscribe to a RSS feed that’s personalized for me, containing advertisements and offers of stuff I might actually be interested in, based on information I’ve given, I’d be all over it. Not only would I read it, but I might even buy stuff from it. And it’s all under my control – if I decide I’m no longer interested, I just remove my subscription.”

June 5, 2003

See SPOT run this fall

It would be pretty cool to get an RSS-2-SPOT gateway up and running so we can read our newsfeeds inbetween trips to the fridge for that next beer ;-)

“Microsoft has revealed details of its wireless service for personal devices as it tests the network prior to the availability of products due in the fall. “(via CNet)

June 4, 2003

Microsoft granted US patent for “interactive entertainment”

Martin sent me a link to this article by Alexander Wolfe of EmbeddedWatch.com about Microsoft newly granted US patent for “interactive entertainment”.

To quote Alexander…

“[Microsoft’s]… patent [number 6,571,390] appears to claim the invention of networked interactive entertainment.”

Hmm, I wonder what this will mean for video-on-demand systems and perhaps even network-capable PVRs like Replay and hacked TiVo’s.

June 3, 2003

eBay search to RSS feed

Nice! Just enter an eBay search phrase and this little script will turn the results into an RSS feed that you can subscribe to in your favorite news aggregator

The code is based on this script from waxy.org (if you’d like to run it on our own server)

For some additional RSS goodies and more check out Fagan Finder’s using RSS page