Month: January 2005

TiVo is fighting to protect its name from generic usage (December 13, 2004 article from NYT… in the $ archive already, sorry). I don’t really care whether they are successful or not, but I imagine they are doomed to failure. In the long term, inventing a new word and creating a new category of service/product…

Read on →

I enjoyed reading Jeff Barr’s Syndic8 2004 retrospective. Jeff and I had lunch at Il Fornaio in Levi’s Plaza here in San Francisco (it was convenient… food isn’t that special) maybe three years ago, and I’ve kept in sporadic touch since then. I think Syndic8 is a resource, and I’m glad Jeff and his colleague…

Read on →

I installed WordPress (blogging software) with a new webhost today, and the testbed blog is up and running. It wasn’t five minutes, for a few reasons, but it wasn’t brutal. Still, not something I’d encourage anyone to try who doesn’t already know a little bit about FTP and databases. The host, TextDrive, was incredibly responsive…

Read on →

We did a bit of re-arranging today, and moved the computer desk. During the move, I un-plugged the six-year-old Alcatel ADSL 1000 “modem” and switched the phone cord for a shorter version, since it was now closer to the jack. A few frustrating hours without internet access later, I switched back to the original cord,…

Read on →

I read Folksonomies – Cooperative Classification and Communication Through Shared Metadata after seeing a link from Peter Merholz, and then I read Clay Shirky’s Notes from ITP: Flickr-as-web-services edition. Nothing here is formally peer-reviewed, in the academic sense, but all of it gets reviewed publicly all the same. By the way, I’d choose between “tagonomy”…

Read on →

While in New York City last week, rambling around on my own for an afternoon, I went over to the New York Public Library. I feel confident I’ve been there before, but it felt like the first time all the same. I had no specific ideas in mind beyond checking out the reading room and…

Read on →

I’ve docked my O’Brian ship, as noted. Yet, I’m still reading about the Napoleonic wars from the British side, but this time on land. Bernard Cornwell’s Sharpe books are probably almost as well known as the Aubrey-Maturin books, so I thought I’d give them a try. My first entry is Sharpe’s Tiger. I had a…

Read on →

Time to clear the bookmarks bar, and close some of those open browser windows without losing the reason I opened them in the first place. Without further ado (’cause there’s lots here): Mark Glaser wraps up the year in blogging at OJR. Gets some interesting folks to comment, and predict. I do share Peter Krasilovsky’s…

Read on →

I won’t claim I’m back up to speed, but all the home email is read, the aggregator is showing only a day’s worth of new items, and I’ve got fewer than ten open browser windows. (I’m not a fan yet of tabbed browsing.) That means that with some focused time (ha!), I could be caught…

Read on →