If you’ve been thinking about Web 2.0, Tim O’Reilly has a great post and some solid thinking as usual. Nice timing (ahem), given the Web 2.0 event next week…
NerdTV
Cringely has released NerdTV and I’ve been listening (I am at work) to the first show, an interview with Andy Hertzfeld which is really excellent. I look forward to the rest of the series as it develops.
“Podfather†gets Sirius
Nice piece in the NYT about Adam Curry’s deal with Sirius… He’ll be hosting a daily 4 hour show on channel 148, Talk Central. The show will have advertising (designed to fit in with the flow) and will be all about Podcasting as you might expect. Adam Curry’s Podshow starts on May 13…
No word on whether you’ll actually be able to download the show. If nothing else, Sirius subscribers can stream if for free online if you are out of reach from your satellite radio.
Technorati Tags: Podcasting, Adam Curry, Radio
Getting Things Done
Getting Things Done is finally available as an eBook!
I have the audio and paperback versions.. may add this to my library as well. Always good to have around.
ISBN RSS Search Feeds
Inessential: A cool thing at isbn.nu—RSS search feeds for books. Any search result that lists books can be subscribed to.
Totally cool way to keep tabs on books by subject, author key words and of course the ISBN. Great if you do research professionally or as a student.
Jeff Hawkins Brainstorms
Palminfocenter has an excepted interview with Jeff Hawkins from EETimes where he talks about his book On Intelligence (in my eBook queue) and what he’s up to at palmOne…
EET: How do you see your job as CTO for PalmOne?
Hawkins: I’m really a product guy. I tend to focus on the next big thing.
I was very involved in the Treo 600. I was almost not involved at all in the Treo 650. [Now] I am working on something else which is completely different. My value is trying to figure out how to get the next thing going.
Ka-Ching! I like the sound of that! Though apparently the next thing will be about 2 years away… Hawkins has a very high hit rate: The Original Pilot, Handspring, and Treo. Interesting that he was not involved with the Treo 650, which is really an iteration more than a true advance (still need it though right?). I wonder if he had been involved what would have been different. I’d bet the memory would be a non-issue for sure.
Serialized eBooks via RSS
Russ expands the already super cool Mobdex…
I just had an idea for a system where you could choose any one of the public domain eBooks out there and have a small chunk delivered daily via RSS. Many of us are too busy to read classic books out there, instead choosing “page turners” or books that are more applicable to our every day lives (like a some new marketing book). But we do have time to zip through our aggregator daily, right? So by taking a 500 page novel and distributing it, a few pages at a time, via RSS, we could read a new book in a month or so without even trying. [Russell Beattie Notebook]
BusinessWeek on Video Blogging
With the right aggregator and enclosures within feeds, you can enjoy video and audio quite easily…
Though the movement is only in its early stages, it’s easy to imagine that video blogs could have as big an impact as the text blogs. Indeed, they’re already doing what has been the real strength of traditional blogging — promoting one another’s work. And even if the vast majority of the videos remain a novelty, the explosion of experimentation is a welcome sight. [BusinessWeek]
The Long Tail blog
Courtesy of the Scobleizer …
Chris Anderson, the guy who wrote the “Long Tail” article for Wired that got blogged all over the place is now blogging about writing a book on the same topic.
State of Fear
I finished reading Michael Crichton’s State of Fear last night and would definitely recommend it. If you are a fan of his previous work, you know Crichton does his homework, this time making some compelling arguments against many popular environmental theories we all patently accept. If nothing else, it gets you thinking and certainly kept me turning the pages – well clicking the pages as it happens with an eBook.
The Long Tail
In case you missed reading The Long Tail either in Wired or online, you can now download a PDF thanks to ChangeThis. It’s a great read and now in a well structured format for either screen or printing.
Shadow Divers
I recently finished reading Shadow Divers by Robert Kurson and wanted to recommend it to anyone interested in Scuba, History or Adventure. My dad actually recommended the book to me recently and I picked up my copy digitally to read on my Treo via eReader.
As I started the book I was hooked right away. While it’s a non-fiction work, Shadow Divers reads like a novel and I found myself completely living through the lives of the divers as they explored the dangers and mystery lurking below. There are many amazing things about the book, but the fact that it takes place so close to where I live really puts the relative dangers from WWII into perspective. It’s amazing that a Nazi submarine simply disappeared off the coast of NJ in 1945, but even more amazing that you can feel compassion for these men who died, even though they were Nazi soldiers.
While I am a certified PADI Diver, I have never dreamed of doing anything like what was described in this book. The depths (~230′) and risks associated with the discovery are so intense, I found myself thinking about things even when I was not actively reading.
The story compelled quite a few others to follow including a Nova Documentary, which I have not yet been able to find a copy of, but the interative components are live so you can still experience some of the details. I also explored a site dedicated to U-boats referenced in Kurson’s notes on sources, which has a good page on the sub from the book if you want some more info.
Just Scratching the Surface
I’ve started reading Getting Things Done and feeling quite good about this approach to organization… I’ve also been playing with a copy of Life Balance on both Mac and Palm and this method seems to be very compelling for a total information view. I’ll have to write a more formal review of my system once I’ve got everything tweaked, but so far I like where it’s going.
Joi Ito — Memory Lane
This is a nice interview with Joi Ito … great with the morning espresso.
Halley Suitt interviews entrepreneur and venture capitalist Joichi Ito about the way the web, cellular, social software and other technologies developed concurrently in the US and Japan from the 1980’s up to the present. [IT Conversations]
Ron Reagan in Esquire
Politicians will stretch the truth. They’ll exaggerate their accomplishments, paper over their gaffes. Spin has long been the lingua franca of the political realm. But George W. Bush and his administration have taken “normal” mendacity to a startling new level far beyond lies of convenience. On top of the usual massaging of public perception, they traffic in big lies, indulge in any number of symptomatic small lies, and, ultimately, have come to embody dishonesty itself. They are a lie. And people, finally, have started catching on. [Esquire]
eBooks for Palm and Pocket PC
Great news! As I had written earlier today… having an eBook handy is great and this resource makes it easy to always have something for free.
The University of Virginia eBook Library sports 1,800 eBooks for slurping down and reading on your PDA. While mostly overlap with the great e-library of Project Gutenberg, the UoV library’s books are all in Microsoft Reader and Palm format while the latter is mostly plain text and HTML. Together they make sure you always have something to read at the bus-stop or in the DMV line. [MobileWhack]
Summer Reads
I’ve been happily reading some eBooks lately on my Palm and just thought I’d share…
First, thinking about the movie release, I picked up a copy of I, Robot, which I really enjoyed. It’s a series of stories all involving Robots of different types with some character overlaps through time. The main focus is on the robopsychologist Susan Calvin, who comes in contact with the robots in most of the stories to help debunk issues that occur. She’s not in all the stories exactly, but she is telling about them, prior to flashing back into story mode. I’d definitely recommend it… From what I’ve gathered regarding the movie, there is not much in common other than the name and perhaps the 3 laws of Robotics:
- A robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm
- A robot must obey orders givein to it by human beings except where such orders would conflict with the First Law.
- A robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Law.
I just finished reading Digital Fortress by Dan Brown. I actually had no idea he was the writer of the Da Vinci Code (which I am currently reading), and really enjoyed this one. It started out a bit weaker than I would have liked, but I quickly got sucked in… I was turning the pages pretty quickly as the pace of the book heated up. The premise is this… the NSA discovers an unbreakable code, which of course must be cracked in order to preserve not only National Security, but world order… There were some hokey parts, but I still could not put it down…
This is actually why I was pleased t o discover that Brown was the author of The Da Vinci Code. I had of course heard of the book, but had passed on previous opportunities to read it. Now, I am fully engaged with the book and looking forward to seeing where it goes!
One of the great things about using the eReader software is that I literally always have a a book handy. I’ve grown quite used to reading on the smaller screen and find that it’s easy to do in both well lit or dark rooms.
eMarketer Launches RSS Feed
Thanks for the pointer, Steve! I’ve been bummed about Apple Mail deciding I can’t handle the HTML on this one for a long time and have not read it as much as I would have liked.
I just learned that eMarketer now has an RSS feed. You can get the feed here (RSS). [Micro Persuasion]
The NY Times (new) RSS Feeds
Now I know when the links in my aggregator were not working today… have to update the old and add the new…
The NY Times is now providing its own RSS feeds, with several new categories including media and advertising, most-emailed, real estate, theater, Times on the Trail, multimedia, theater, Circuits, Week in Review and the Sunday magazine section. Unfortunately the education, dining and wine feeds and perhaps others are gone. The continuing feeds redirect, so most aggregators should adust automatically. [Scripting News]