"meme wars" entries

Bradley Horowitz from Yahoo! posts about the ratios of people who create content to those who consume. Despite this great contra-argument, I end up agreeing with Horowitz. It'd be great if everyone produced, but they just don't–most people who visit a blog don't leave comments, let alone run a blog of their own. This meshes in perfectly with my experience…

Another week of Firefox tabs to close: At last, someone's trying to drag the travel industry into 1998. The primitive booking systems we have at the moment drive me nuts–yes, there's a lot of complexity hidden beneath the surface but the user interfaces and feature sets are appalling. I liked kayak and the other similar "find the best price for…

Reading Dion Hinchcliffe's blog, I found this interesting nugget buried away: [W]ith attention scarcer and scarcer, people are also less willing to spend time installing, upgrading, and patching all the instances of the productivity software, e-mail clients, and PIMs they use. I'd never seen the appeal of web apps in the attention light before, but it makes perfect sense. The…

One of the interesting aspects of the rise of Mac OS X is the fall from favour of the Macintosh Human Interface Guidelines, the bible for desktop applications developers looking to create applications that looked and felt Mac. In the old days (pre-OS X), any deviation from these norms were severely frowned upon. And while we still encounter apps that…

I have a full Firefox tab set, so it's time to unload: The Tyranny of Structurelessness: Danah sent this link to the geowanking list. While written about the 60s feminism movement, it resonates strongly with my experiences in open source and non-profits. The Prejudice Map: search Google for "Germans are known for", repeat for many other nationalities, and chart the…

Over on VentureBlog this morning, David Hornik has an impressive list of Web 2.0 startups presenting at the "Under The Radar" event next month (at which our own Rael is speaking — he's the Radar this event is under, of course :). There are a lot of cool companies in David's list, doing a bunch of cool things. Some of…

What caught my eye in the last weeks of the year: Google opens up Google Talk–libjingle is the library behind it. A lot of work to be done to make it an easily reused component, but it's already underway. Lots of possibilities. Google Feed Reader API To Be Released–now I know why the reader application was so underwhelming. It was…

I had about thirty-five Firefox links saved, then upgraded to Firefox 1.5 (go fighting … foxes) only to find that the SessionSaver extension didn't work in 1.5. So with a clear conscience I now resolve to post fewer links at a time, but hopefully post more often as a result. Hear From Your MP: I'm just grooving on the great…

More quick pointers to things that crossed our transom: Microsoft acquires Net calling start-up–another piece of their voice strategy snaps into place. Microsoft want telephony as tightly integrated into your computer experience as images have become now (remember back when multimedia was a very forced concept–who had the expensive scanner to put images onto computers?!). This is definitely fodder for…

A week of Firefox tabs, a pile of No-Doz tabs, and an open bar tab … it must be time for another collection of things that caught my eye this week. Forbes Piece On Open Source–full of fascinating tidbits: 50% of JBoss deployments are on Windows boxes, Salesforce.com has competition through hosted SugarCRM offerings, Pfizer found LAMP cut development costs…