Still more news about GeoURL.
Joshua Shachter, who is responsible for GeoURL, has created a simple interface between it and Movable Type. This allows individual archive entries in MT to automatically generate the appropriate tags, and to ping GeoURL.
I’ve already begun putting this to work in a local blog-thing, so that local real-world places of interest can get in on the GeoURL action. Things are still very tentative and rough, but check it out: AustinURL.
Sometimes a bit of software just blows your mind iCommune is one. A seemingly mild-mannered plug-in for Apple’s iTunes music software, it turns iTunes into a streaming peer (that also, incidentally, allows you to copy MP3 files).
The weak spot is that the user must manually enter fellow peers to stream from/to: there’s no auto-discovery. But once they’re in there, your friends’ music is just as available to you as the music on your hard drive, through the same interface. The simplicity is very powerful. This may be part of the reason Apple forced the author to pull the plug-in. But if you can find a copy, check it out.
And let me know what your IP number is so we can share.
For whatever reason, people eat a lot of soup when sick. Especially the canned stuff, since the invalid is feeling too lethargic to put together real soup. Having just gotten over the flu, and with Gwen ping-ponging back and forth, there’s been a fair amount of soup consumption in our lives lately. A lot of canned soup.
But here’s the thing: it’s a terrible over-extension of the word “soup” to use it to describe both the stuff that comes in a can or styrofoam container, and the stuff you actually make yourself. The two things really have very little in common, I’ve decided.
As of last night, Gwen was still sick, and when she asked what I could bring over food-wise, she suggested we could have soup. I’m not much of a cook, but I’d be damned if I had another can of Progresso or whatever. Bleah. Off to Central Market, where I assembled ingredients for something vaguely Thai-like. Okay it had lemongrass and ginger and cilantro and shrimp, and some other stuff. That’s about as Thai as my unculinary Jewish ass can get. It wound up being pretty good. A damn sight better than anything coming out of a package.
Bush Declares Sanctity of Human Life Day. I leave the jokes as an exercise for the readers, but in case you’re feeling lazy, Megnut has a few prepackaged for your convenience.
We (as in “We the people”) have lost the Eldred v Ashcroft case before the Supreme Court. This fought the Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act of ’98, which was passed at Disney’s behest so that Mickey Mouse would not fall into the public domain.
We’re on the cusp of something interesting with blogging in Austin, I can feel it.
I attended the first local blog meetup some months ago, and have gone somewhat erratically since. A result of that meeting was the Austin group blog, which hasn’t seen a great deal of action. There’s also a quirky index of local bloggers (some quirk has omitted me from it, anyhow).
More recently, GeoURL has blown things open, as local bloggers everywhere have been able to semi-automatically discover each other merely by registering themselves. This has created a rush of enthusiastic energy here in Austin (and quite likely elsewhere). It prompted Adina to put together a self-aggregating local blog that uses trackback technology to harvest entries from independent blogs. And I’m working on something that is not yet ready for prime time, but will use GeoURL as a way to create pins on a virtual map for local attractions. Next step will be to merge that with Adina’s project, somehow.
I think the Economist is a great magazine, but man, when they’re wrong, they’re wrong
Or look at the looming war with Iraq. Mr Bush’s critics could not get it more wrong when they charge him with exploiting Iraq for domestic reasons; in fact, the easiest way to secure his popularity would have been to ignore Iraq and concentrate on al-Qaeda. If Mr Bush is right, and Iraq possesses weapons of mass destruction, then America risks huge casualties; if he is wrong, and Pandora’s box is empty, then he risks looking like a fool.
In no particular order: Bush risks looking like a fool every time he opens his mouth (whether to speak, or merely to eat a pretzel), so there’s nothing new there. I have written before that winning the war on al Qaeda is not a good way to make political points, since A) it wasn’t going very well, and B) success in this “war” is defined by an absence of news. It isn’t very impressive to report “no buildings blown up today.” In a war against Iraq, you can show clear results — which the military can completely stage-manage. Part of the problem here is that the “war on terror” is not a real war. If Iraq possesses WMDs, they still lack the delivery system to reach the USA, and so would have to use them on their own soil (which they’ve done before, admittedly). If they don’t, Bush will simply say they’re well hidden.
A lot of people use my favorite coffee shop, Flight Path, as their office away from home, as it were. They bring their WiFi-enabled laptops, their cellphones, etc, and set up shop (one guy brings a vase of flowers, even). Many people plug their headphones into their laptops to zone out to whatever they have cued up on winamp or iTunes.
Today, I noticed one such cyberdude, his sculptural little clip-on headphones in place, rattling away on his keyboard. His phone starts ringing. He can’t hear it.
There’s a post at kottke.org, taking Apple to task for not integrating more specialized interfaces into its new browser Safari.
This got me to thinking. A few years ago, Netscape was predicting that the browser would become the OS. After all, you could run a Java app inside the browser and do almost anything, right?
Obviously it didn’t turn out that way. But more interestingly, things have gone the other way. Rather than one web browser that does everything, I have multiple different web apps. I’m writing this post in a specialized blogging program called Kung Log. It does one thing: post to Movable Type blogs. I read a lot of blogs in NetNewsWire Lite. Although I don’t use it much, I’ve got Sherlock for specific kinds of searches, and it has an excellent competitor, Watson I can read the funny papers in Comictastic. And I’m sure there are lots of other specialized clients out there for extracting and presenting a specific data type from the web.
And of course, I’ve got, what, four general-purpose web browsers on my hard drive.
The profusion of specialized tools makes sense in a broader picture. Each tool can focus on being good at one thing. With the availability of a reasonably fast and always-on Internet connection, the Internet becomes almost like a feature of the computer–like the CD drive or the mouse. Nobody says “if you’ve got one program that interacts with the CD drive, why would you need two?” Also, although this isn’t as polished as it could be, different applications can interact with each other so that separateness doesn’t necessarily need to get in the way of integration. And increasingly, that integration is actually between applications on different computers, communicating over the Internet. Pretty nifty.
I recently wrote about a new site, GeoURL. In the course of corresponding with that site’s instigator, I also wound up making up the little green badge you see in the obligatory badge zone on this page (and which is appearing in many other blogs, now that GeoURL has been slashdotted).
Some random observations:
There are a lot of interesting things that could be done with GeoURL. First thing that occurred to me is this: create a website where anyone can create a page (sort of like blog meets guestbook?). All they have to do is write up a description of a place in physical reality, give its coordinates, and ping GeoURL. Those places would then show up as links in a GeoURL “neighborhood report.” You could have categories like “park,” “restaurant,” “WiFi hotspot,” etc. Obviously there are problems with this. It would be easy to spam it, so either you’d need an administrator, or you’d need some kind of karma-point voting system (which could also be abused). And some kind of robot-thwarting scheme preventing more than one new entry from a given IP every, say, 10 seconds, and perhaps one of those “distorted graphic” reading tests to sign up. But apart from these implementation problems, this could make interesting things possible. If these categories were part of the tagging for each page, and GeoURL indexed those categories, then one could do a GeoURL search just for restaurants around my neighborhood (for example). This would allow you to bypass Citysearch-type sites with distributed/aggregated tools created directly by regular folks. Hmm. I think many of the tools needed for the front-end of this are probably available already — it’s just a matter of putting them together.
It’s an ego-stroke seeing my little badge being used.
I originally patterned the badge after the XML badge you see here, but I created it using straight CSS markup rather than as a graphic. Joshua (the man behind GeoURL) decided to make a graphic file version of the badge available, and it’s interesting to note that although this is less convenient to put on one’s web page, the majority of the sites using either one seem to be using the graphic. I suspect this correlates to how well their browsers render the CSS: “Oh, that’s ugly. I like the graphic better. I’ll use that.” Or possibly they look at the CSS code and think “Okay, I know a little HTML, but I don’t know what all that gobbledygook is. I’m scared and confused. I’ll use the graphic.” The graphic is actually a screenshot of the CSS, and the two are pixel-for-pixel identical on my screen.