netzooid

Dave Winer asks whats wrong with the iPod? I posted a comment on his blog but I felt the need to expand on my gripes. My gripes with the iPod:

• You have to hit the menu button too many times to do anything useful, like change a setting. There should be a “top menu” button as well as a button to bring you back to the previous menu.
• You can’t create playlists on the fly on the iPod. How frustrating is that.

I think Apple tends to oversimplify things too much and create what I call “naive interfaces” like the iPod. Interfaces which are too simple. I’m still skeptical of Apple even in light of OS X, because a lot of the power OS X (read: Unix) was not their doing. It was the FreeBSD team and their Unix forebearers. Because it is based on Unix they had to support the advanced use cases, which I feel they normally ignore.

Things should be as simple as possible but no simpler. I think they went too simple with the iPod.

Search engines were the first automated web discoverers. HTML and HTML metadata were processed and indexexed making it searchable. Then advances made Word documents, PDFs, and other files searchable. Then RSS. Now search engines have been adding more metadata beyond the pathetic HTML metadata that has always been.

I think this could be taken a step further though. Search engines are a short distance from indexing FOAF – which would make everyone who publishes a FOAF description available via a quick search. This info could also be available via a browser plugin like how Firefox has become RSS aware showing you an orange icon whenever a feed is found.

One could imagine descriptors for all sorts of things – for instance a descriptor for merchandise which contains a pictures, description and link to buy. Aggregate this and you could have a distributed Amazon. Or there could be a descriptor for contact information for organizations. All this information would then be available to both the browser and the search engine.

So I have a couple questions:

• Why isn’t this being done?
• What other XML vocabularies are there out there that pertain to this?
• Are there better to discover this information than brute force web crawling?
• How do web services (particularly WSDL/SOAP/UDDI) fit into this?

1. Create a peer-to-peer network under your wireless card’s network properties (Wireless Connection -> Poperties -> Wireless Networks -> Add -> type in any name for the SSID)
2. Connect to your LAN
3. Share the LAN (Local Arean Connection -> Properties -> Advanced -> Share this connection)
4. Connect to the wireless network you created in step #1.

I was pointed to Yahoo’s video search engine today via Micropersuasion. At first, I was like – great, another media search engine. Then, I noticed Media RSS:

An RSS module that supplements the element capabilities of RSS 2.0 to allow for more robust media syndication.

It adds the ability to specify bitrates, thumbnails, duration, categories, transcripts, and more. I think this is really great. First, it enables a richer description of the content – making it more friendly to the end user. Second, its refreshing to see search engines using XML metadata to make search better. I’ve always wondered why search engines don’t work more on creating standard xml metadata for web content. For instance, Google doesn’t appear to be taking particular advantage of RSS/Atom. Hooray for moving forward!

Stages to email hell:

Stage one is configuring your email client to present alerts when you receive an email. Don’t do this. Stage two is configuring your email client to make noise when you receive an email. Don’t do this. Stage three is running your email client all the time. Don’t do this, either. To be effective, you must pick the moments at which you’re going to receive email.

This is why I’ve stopped running my email application 24/7. Although I still check it compulsively (working on that…). For the RSS junkies out there, I think this applies to you too!

Sidenote: Speaking of email, I’m looking for cases of people using SMTP to transport things such as SOAP messages, etc – where the receiver isn’t a human. Leave a comment if you have a good example.

For those who don’t know, Blockbuster is dropping late fees. But,

…customers will be given a one-week grace period after that to return the product. After that grace period ends, the chain will automatically sell them the product, less the rental fee. If the customers don’t want to purchase the movie or game, they can return the product within 30 days for a credit, less a restocking fee.

Oi. Also, John Antioco, the chairman and CEO, admits that “the rental business is under a lot of pressure” – i.e. Not Doing Well, i.e. the whole business is decling with the exception of online rentals.

There is another video on Sirrius focusing mainly on its stock on wsj.com. Evidentally cable companies took “30 years to become pre cash flow positive on a regular basis.” Being young I missed those decades. The other great tidbit is that for the Sirrius stock valuation to worth it, there should be 45 million subscribers. Now there are only 800,000. Putting that in perspective, cable has 67 million subscribers.

About 12% more Americans die from heart attacks and other natural causes on Christmas, the following day and New Year’s Day than on any other days of the year, researches wrote in the journal Circulation.

From todays Wall Street Journal.

Just when you thought reality TV had hit its top, Microsoft decides to catch on to the bandwagon with (what I think is) the first geek reality TV show – The Code Room.

In this new reality show, three MSDN event attendees are taken to an inner-city warehouse, equipped with a partially-charged laptop, and tasked with designing and developing an e-commerce Web site.

There are sooo many things wrong with this – beyond the fact that it isn’t in rss/enclosure format. However, they do have an RSS feed for MSDN TV.

I’ve been made aware of the recent appearance of rss enclosure aware (read: can find video, audio, etc) search engines from the recent Wired article Video Feeds Follow Podcasting. Currently we’ve got feedster.tv and Blogdigger.

I went to their sites and was presented with a search box. I am stuck on what I would want to search for. Searching the web is straightforward – I’m trying to find out about some particular topic. Will people do the same with video? Will I search Feedster or Blogdigger to find out about George Washington in video form?

I am suspecting not. Video is a medium which passively engages people. Whereas people are actively searching for particular things on the web, videos are usually brought to our attention through someone else. RSS/Atom seem to be the web version of video bring us content passively. This seems to work with all forms of content as well – web, audio, video, etc.

However, once you start processing video or audio content, things change. While it is passive (this does not mean non-participatory) it is time consuming. Audio/Video is being funnelled into you and thats about all you can handle. For example, I can’t listen to the latest trade secrets and browse the web (at least I’m not that good at multitasking). The other big difference is that I can’t skim video/audio content. I find this extremely frustrating as I skim just about everything to read.

All this to say that I think search engines are great when you’re actively engaging yourself in the web, looking for a particular bit of information. However, I don’t think that that works for video. Can someone show me otherwise? But maybe this depends on what type of content we are going to see. Maybe there will be micro-documentaries of George Washington that I could run across, who knows.

My name is Dan Diephouse. I have my hand in too many buckets to count right now – open-source, software, media, logistics, and more. Trained as a Chemical Engineer, I love solving problems. I especially love using technology to solve problems (although it is not the solution to every problem). Currently I am an independent consultant. Outside of the web and work I like playing/writing music, drinking fine wines, and reading.

open-source
Things I’m involved with in open-source:
The Codehaus
XFire
Plexus