...more recent posts
Jon Udell has been making posts in a new style he is calling a screencast. He does it with flash, which I like to bash, but this is a very nice use of the technology. Basically he just talks about something web related and you hear his voice while watching a flash movie of his screen. Here is his most recent screencast which he describes as "a whirlwind tour of del.icio.us from my own perspective as a power user."
Check it out. Screencasts are a great way to explain web related technology, and del.icio.us is an important addition to the blog world that deserves a wider understanding.
Comvu has a Windows Mobile solution for streaming video from your (Windows Mobile) video phone. Here's a slightly more technical page.
I wonder if Quicktime broadcaster will ever run on a phone? Apple seems dangerously shut out of the cellular game. Maybe something like a mobile iSight plus Quicktime broadcaster plus wifi could work, but that would be an extremely niche product compared to a cellphone.
I think streaming video from your phone will be a more compelling app than watching some prepackaged video content on your phone. But we need one of the cellular companies to knock the walls around their garden down a bit. I want to stream to *my* server.
Mr. Technorati, Dave Sifry, has posted a new State of the Blogosphere report compiled from their huge mine of blog data:
Technorati is now tracking over 7.8 million weblogs, and 937 million links. That's just about double the number of weblogs tracked in October 2004. In fact, the blogosphere is doubling in size about once every 5 months. It has already done so at this pace four times, which means that in the last 20 months, the blogosphere has increased in size by over 16 times.Lots more interesting numbers and graphs at the link above.
Things don't appear to be letting up either....
Samsung a970 EVDO swivel 2-megapixel cameraphone. Or should it be called a camcorderphone?
Very very nice. No release date, but it is coming to the U.S.
New whitepaper from the honeynet project: "Know your Enemy: Tracking Botnets"
Honeypots are a well known technique for discovering the tools, tactics, and motives of attackers. In this paper we look at a special kind of threat: the individuals and organizations who run botnets. A botnet is a network of compromised machines that can be remotely controlled by an attacker. Due to their immense size (tens of thousands of systems can be linked together), they pose a severe threat to the community. With the help of honeynets we can observe the people who run botnets - a task that is difficult using other techniques. Due to the wealth of data logged, it is possible to reconstruct the actions of attackers, the tools they use, and study them in detail. In this paper we take a closer look at botnets, common attack techniques, and the individuals involved.
The long tail:
The most interesting statistic however, was that while the top 10 searches were thousands of times more popular than the average search, these top-10 searches represented only 3% of our total volume. 97% of our traffic came from the “long tail” – queries asked a little over once a day....
You know the real reason Excite went out of business? We couldn’t figure out how to make money from 97% of our traffic. We couldn’t figure out how to make money from the long tail - from those queries asked only once a day.
The site feels a little spammy, but this guy has been around for a while and I think he's legit. And he is now selling a dual EV-DO wireless solution that he claims will get 256 kb/s up and 3.2 mb/s down. Takes two PC card slots, and he has to saw the antenna off the bottom card. It's ridiculously expensive, but this is the bleeding edge.
After living joyfully without fear of pop up ads for quite some time now (between Safari and Firefox's excellent pop up killing powers,) I have been dismayed recently to see these ads appear again. Although I guess they are more 'pop under' than 'pop up'. The trick they have found to beat the blockers is to spawn the new windows using our old (*cough*) friend Flash. Ah, isn't Flash wonderful?
I don't know if Macromedia (Flash's parent company) is going to do anything about this. Or, it would be nice if the browser makers would let you keep Flash installed, but toggled off, and then let you activate it if you really want for a specific site through a menu item (I hear Omniweb can do this.) But until someone does something to fix this problem you will either have to live with some pop under ads once again, or, and I admit I am severely tempted, uninstall Flash. Thanks to Macromedia for at least providing these uninstaller programs (for all platforms.)
Completely bizarre. Sony Ericsson launches the ROB1, a bluetooth wireless roving robot camera you can control from your bluetooth cell phone:
The ROB1 has a range of up to 50 meters (165') and streams what it sees back to your mobile phone so that you can control it properly. The ROB1 should be quite maneuverable, able to move forwards and backwards, and turn on a dime - literally. The ROB1's camera can be pivoted up to 70 degrees up or as far as 20 degrees down, so that you can frame the shot just perfectly. There is even an assist light up front to light up your way as you navigate.Here's a flash demo from the Sony Ericsson site.
Ping-o-matic is a meta pinging tool for notifying multiple sites that keep track of recently updated weblogs. I'm trying to get the XML-RPC interface to work from our posting script here. It is responding as if it is working, but I'm not seeing myself show up in anybodies 'recently updated' lists. I'll get it eventually though.
Rogers Cadenhead has a free PHP class that does all the heavy lifting.