Wow! iPod eBooks Creator…
This utility/PHP script loads a large text file and splits it into notes for use on iPod. It is easy to read your book in plain text format on your iPod via Notes functionality. All notes will be automatically linked, so you can move from one to another with absolute ease. It’s as simple as turning pages of the book…
Very nice New Yorker piece by Stacy Schiff about Wikipedia. And an interesting comment on it by David Robinson, who was a guest blogger on Ed Felten’s Freedom to Tinker.
Big developments at Ndiyo — Hubster – a new Ndiyo model. It’s interesting how useful USB can be.
Lovely, thoughtful piece by Andrew Brown on how much we divulge to Google & Co. Best thing written so far IMHO on the AOL search-data release fiasco.
In March this year, a man with a passion for Portuguese football, living in a city in Florida, was drinking heavily because his wife was having an affair. He typed his troubles into the search window of his computer. “My wife doesnt love animore,” he told the machine. He searched for “Stop your divorce” and “I want revenge to my wife” before turning to self-examination with “alchool withdrawl”, “alchool withdrawl sintoms” (at 10 in the morning) and “disfunctional erection”. On April 1 he was looking for a local medium who could “predict my futur”.
But what could a psychic guess about him compared with what the world now knows? This story is one of hundreds, perhaps tens of thousands, revealed this month when AOL published the details of 23m searches made by 650,000 of its customers during a three-month period earlier in the year. The searches were actually carried out by Google – from which AOL buys in its search functions…
Web 1.0 was all about connecting people. It was an interactive space, and I think Web 2.0 is of course a piece of jargon, nobody even knows what it means. If Web 2.0 for you is blogs and wikis, then that is people to people. But that was what the Web was supposed to be all along.
Tim Berners-Lee, in a fascinating interview (transcript here) conducted on 28 July, 2006 and published as an IBM podcast.
He goes on to talk about his original concept of the Web:
And the original World Wide Web browser of course was also an editor. I never imagined that anybody would want to write in anchor brackets. We’d had WYSIWYG editors for a long time. So my function was that everybody would be able to edit in this space, or different people would have access rights to different spaces. But I really wanted it to be a collaborative authoring tool.
And for some reason it didn’t really take off that way. And we could discuss for ages why it didn’t. You know, there were browser editors, maybe the HTML got too complicated for a browser just to be easy.
But I’ve always felt frustrated that most people don’t…didn’t have write access. And wikis and blogs are two areas where suddenly two sort of genres of online information suddenly allow people to edit, and they’re very widely picked up, and people are very excited about them.
And I think that really for me reinforces the idea that people need to be creative. They want to be able to record what they think. They want to be able to, if they see something wrong go and fix it…
Now here’s a really good idea.
Slivers-of-Time is a new way of working. You list the hours you would like to work and local employers buy them.
New web sites are making this way of working easy to organise and less likely to go wrong. They remove all the overheads of booking top-up workers at short notice, for short periods. The web technology to achieve this is only now viable.
The Slivers-of-Time programme is funded jointly by the UK government and private companies. It’s low profile at the moment but working with far sighted government agencies, employers and recruitment agencies to launch a new way of working for the UK.
The interesting thing is that it’s funded by the Office of the Deputy Prime Minister. So that’s one thing John Prescott is good for, then.
Like many people, I’ve been brooding on my domestic energy use and wondering what to do about it. I’m fascinated by what Peter Armstrong has been doing to reduce the carbon footprint of his family (and keep warm while saving money). Likewise, I’m intrigued by the potential of small wind turbines (and if I lived in Ireland I would certainly have one already). But this post by Tim O’Reilly suggests another way of looking at home generation.
In a conversation the other day, Ed Kummer of Disney made a really thought-provoking observation: the spread of solar energy units to homes and businesses is an analog to other forms of user-generated content, and the overall trend towards a two-way network. While it’s possible to set up a solar system completely off the grid, most of the new customers feed power into the grid during sunlight hours, and draw from it when the daylight wanes. If we move to a solar power economy, it will be much more distributed and cooperative than the current one-way model…
This is simply wonderful: a flight simulator written in Flash which uses Google Earth to provide the backdrop. I’ve just flown round London!
Thanks to Tom for finding it.
Apropos my post about Boeing’s decision to drop in-flight wi-fi, James Cridland, who’s a serious earner of air miles, has an interesting view about the service.
As someone who’s used Connexions (the brand it went under) twice, there’s very little wrong with the service. The $20 for a flight’s worth of internet – nearly nine hours – seemed quite reasonable; it was reliable enough to make VoIP calls from while in the air; and it made a long flight much more bearable. If making flights like that in future, I’d make my choice based, to a large part, on whether the flight had internet access.
The problems with the service were pretty simple: power sockets. Wifi saps your battery, and without the business class power socket, you’re paying $20 for about an hour of use. That’s clearly not great value. If there were more power sockets in planes, and it was promoted more heavily to passengers before getting on the plane, then it would be onto a winner. I do hope the service is bought; it’s an excellent thing and a real boredom stopper.