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Unmediated.org: "tracking the tools that decentralize the media".
Technorati Tags. Damn they are chruning out so much cool stuff. Thanks to Tom for pushing me to get us hooked up with Technorati more closely. It's coming. And I'm very interested in these tags.
This is one example of the larger debate raging in the metadata world (what? you didn't know?) pitting folksonomies against controlled vocabularies. Back in the day I used to go on and on about 'controlled vocabularies', although I didn't call them that at the time (I'm thinking of all the semantic web future XML stuff I used to talk about.) But now I'm firmly in the folksonomies camp (although I'm not so sold on the name itself.)
The basic debate is about how to add descriptions to the information blurbs we are constantly posting to the web. Flickr and Del.icio.us got it right, I think, in that these metadata descriptions - or 'tags' - need to emerge from the bottom up. That is, you don't start with a controlled vocabulary of allowed tags, you just let people use any words they want for tags.
In short: the downside of this uncontrolled tagging is that some people will choose 'NYC' while other people will choose 'New York City' for what should be the same tag (the goal is to facilitate grouping similar posts by searching for similar tags.) The upside is that if you let people just choose whatever tag they think is best they seem to actually add the metadata!
Or, in other words, controlled vocabularies make sense in a theoretical way, but they don't actually work in practice because people always find the controlled vocabulary to be too rigid. Anyone have a counter example?
Verizon is turning on the fiber in Tampa. Here is a quick overview of the Verizon FIOS service. Ridiculous ridiculous speeds. Finally the U.S. is joining the rest of the developed world.
5 Mbps down / 2 Mbps up for $34.99 a month
15 Mbps down / 2 Mbps up for $44.99 a month
Yum. We'll see this in the NYC area this year, but maybe not inside the city until next (Nassau and Westchester first it looks like.)
I'm giving RSS another shot. It's obviously superior for browsing lots of sites, but there is something about ripping all content out of it's web page context that I don't like. So I doubt I'll drop the browser all together, but I expect to continue with RSS for a lot of sites that aren't my absolute favorites but that I want to keep track of anyway.
I'm using the very good and very free NetNewsWire Lite (the free lite version is at the bottom of that page.)
And speaking of RSS, CNN has a ton of new RSS feeds.
Well they did it. Yesterday Apple introduced the Mac Mini. Starting at $499. For that price you get a 1.2 Ghz G4, 40 Gig hard drive, and combo DVD player / CD burner. Slightly faster processor, bigger hard drive, and DVD burner are all options. As are keyboard and mouse which don't come with the machine (nor monitor, of course.)
It is absolutely tiny at 6.5'' x 6.5'' x 2''. Aluminum sides with a white plastic top which sort of splits the difference between their pro aluminum look (used on PowerMacs, PowerBooks, and the Cinema displays,) and the white plastic consumer look (iMacs, iBooks, iPods.) It's nice I think, and certainly the smallest PC on the market. Remember the Apple Cube? The Mini fits in the small air space underneath that machine! It's really pretty ridiculous.
Not including a monitor, keyboard, and mouse helps cut costs, and answers long time requests from potential customers who already have these items left over from their last machines (macs can use standard PC components.) The eMac, for instance, has been pretty cheap for a while (around $800,) but a lot of that cost is for the built in CRT monitor which is wasted on a lot of people who already have a decent monitor, but just want a new machine. The Mini Mac now gives people a chance to try out a Mac for a price that might cross into some people's impulse buy range.
The other not so obvious advantage to not including a keyboard is the small size this allows the packaging to be. Check out the box. Cute, no? Classic Apple. I'll bet they'll be stacked up next to the cash registers in the stores. Just grab one and go. About the same price as buying a Kate Spade bag.
Performance should be fine. It will lose in benchmarks to the latest PCs, but that is all theoretical. For email, web surfing, iTunes, a little photo editing, home video editing, etc., the Mini is more than powerful enough. It's not going to run the latest 3D video games that well, but that's not really what it is for. Everything else will be fine. I would bump the RAM to 512 megs for an extra $75, otherwise the base specs look good.
I think the only possible criticism is the use of 2.5 inch notebook hard drives. They obviously needed to do this to achieve the small form factor. But a lot of geeks will probably moan that they would rather have it be slightly bigger, and use faster 3.5 inch drives. I have to admit that I am in this camp, since with a 3.5 inch 7200 RPM drive the Mini looks like a very cheap OS X server. But again, that's not the market they are going for. For home use (or even business use) the smaller drives are fine.
Here is a fantastic primer (geeky but plenty comprehensible) on Smart Antennas. This technology holds the key to faster wireless data connections.
One specific way people talk about this is with the acronym 'MIMO' which stands for "Multiple In - Multiple Out". What this means is that
devices can now use multiple antennas on both the handset and base station to grow the data rates linearly. It was thought that adding antennas would need exponentially more power to get linearly higher data rates, but they've worked around those problems and now MIMO is being pushed in all upcoming wireless standards.
Gee [Rittenhouse, Lucent Technologies] talked about how Lucent has been driving around a New Jersey suburb where Bell Labs is located, testing the connections and are getting reliable 35-44 bits per second per hertz, as opposed to the half to 1 bit per second per hertz on current cellular networks. Where we can see 1 megabit per second in 1.25Mhz of spectrum (like a CDMA2000 channel), we can soon expect to see 30 megabits per second in that same type of spectrum. I can imagine that WCDMA which uses a broad 5Mhz wide band would see massive gains as well.
It's CES time (yearly consumer electronics show in Las Vegas,) which accounts for all the geek gadget news.
Anyway, Kodak introduced something very cool (can you believe?) The Easy Share One is a 4 megapixel, 3x optical zoom digital camera with the option to add a WiFi card to upload photos directly to the web.
Nikon did this on a high end camera back in 2003, but the Kodak is (almost) reasonably priced at $599 (WiFi will be another $100 or so.)
I've been keyed in so much on phones getting better cameras that I forgot about the opposite trend: cameras getting wireless connectivity. I don't really want to talk on my cell phone anyway, I just want mobile internet access. And if my camera can give it to me then maybe that's okay.
Still, if it's WiFi and not cellular it means it's not going to work in too many places. I'd love to think we (the people) are going to blanket the world with grassroots free open WiFi networks, but I'm coming around to Russell Beattie's position. If I can get 200 Kb/s of nationwide cellular data coverage for some reasonable price ($50 a month for Verizon EV-DO service on 3G phones,) why would I mess with WiFi?
But in any case, this Kodak camera is cool, and I hope more manufacturers follow suit.
Of course I love this headline: "Samsung Unveils Unprecedented Line Up of Wireless Phones for U.S. Consumers. More Breathtaking Product Designs and Capabilities in Store for 2005." Sounds like some breathless marketing speak, but check out the list:
Damn. I'd say that qualifies as "unprecedented". Speech to text? I hadn't even thought of that. I'm skeptical it would work very well, but it wouldn't even have to be that great to solve a bunch of problems with mobile phones as computer platform. And 5 megapixel camera phone with 3x zoom??? OMFG! I wasn't joking last week when I said Samsung is kicking ass.
- The world's first speech-to-text dictation phone, allowing consumers to speak their message and have the phone convert the words to text.
- The U.S.'s first multi-mega pixel camera phone line up, including a two mega pixel and a five mega pixel camera with 3X optical zoom capabilities.
- The U.S.'s first two mega pixel camera phone with QVGA screen resolution and TF-R external memory card, which allows for extensive video clip recording space and crisp, vibrant viewing of pictures and video taken with the phone.
- The U.S.'s first line up of phones to operate on the next-generation high-speed wireless networks known as EVDO, allowing consumers to send and receive pictures, video and data at speeds comparable to cable modem or DSL connectivity.
- Video-on-demand (VOD) devices that allow consumers to wirelessly stream videos onto the handset from the network or download and store the videos on the handset for convenient playback.
- Music-on-demand (MOD) devices that give consumers instant access to digital music, allowing them to download or stream popular tunes directly to their handset.
- Phones with Bluetooth wireless connectivity capabilities that will make transferring pictures, music and data files from computers to wireless devices quick and seamless.
- Phones with integrated Wi-Fi technology allowing users to roam onto corporate networks from their wireless device while away from the office, at the airport, cafe or hotel.
- Phones with integrated BlackBerry push-email capabilities that allow consumers and business users to send and receive emails from anywhere.
You can now query Technorati for advanced search terms such as tsunami AND ("red cross" OR "red crescent") and it will give you all of the blog posts in order by how long ago they were posted that include the word "tsunami" and either "red cross" or "red crescent". You can then click "Make this a Watchlist" and create an RSS feed so you can track all new posts that match that query in your news reader.That part about the custom RSS feeds blows my mind. Again: simple, clever.
In light of my massive world domination plans for 2005 I have joined Apple's streaming server mailing list. After a few days my impression is that streaming video, especially to mobile handsets, is still in it's infancy. If it's even that advanced. I guess I haven't missed the boat yet.