Free Newsletters
Technology & Business Daily
InfoWorld
Log-in | Register

  Monday, September 23, 2002 

The analog hole

Dan Gillmor paid a visit to Jack Valenti, who has put his finger on the real problem: human beings are not (yet) digital:

Another problem for the entertainment companies is what they're calling the ``analog hole.'' This recognizes the fact that human beings are not digital, so digital programming has to be converted to a format, known as analog, that we can see and hear. [Dan Gillmor]

If Ray Kurzweil has his way, Hollywood may be able to close the analog hole sooner than Jack suspects. Kurzweil thinks we'll be able to port consciousness to new hardware by 2020. We just have to make sure that it's trusted hardware.

 

Yahoo Finance RSS feeds

A couple of months ago, I encouraged Jeremy Zawodny to check out the blog scene. I knew he'd flourish in the environment, and guessed it might have some interesting effects on Yahoo!Finance where Jeremy works. Sure enough, check out this wonderful hack:

Yahoo Finance RSS Beta. Got a stock ticker for which you'd like to have an RSS news feed? Help test the beta RSS feeds we've put up on Yahoo Finance. Take your favorite ticker, say YHOO, and put this URL in your news aggregator:... [Jeremy Zawodny's blog]

Excellent! Immediately, a whole family of feeds becomes available. This isn't the first Yahoo service to do this, by the way. For some time now, Yahoo!Groups has done the same kind of thing on the pattern:

groups.yahoo.com/group/decentralization/messages?rss=1&viscount=10

Just swap out "decentralization" and swap in any other group name.

 

Will Microsoft hop on the Cluetrain?

Duncan Wilcox ruminates on how blogs can help implement the communication strategies outlined in the Cluetrain manifesto:

Of course it's not as if starting a weblog automatically opens a corporation up to conversations, but it's a good start. For example reading Ray Ozzie's weblog has made me very interested in Groove (the product) and generally makes me feel good about Groove (the company) — in long term that would make me trust both. [Duncan Wilcox's weblog]

Absolutely. On Friday night after the InfoWorld conference, Tom Yager and I went to dinner with John Montgomery, a former BYTE colleague who's now a Microsoft group product manager deeply involved with the .NET platform. According to John, it is a daily requirement in his division that everyone -- himself included -- spend an hour a day helping customers, for example by answering questions on newsgroups.

Cool! But nobody seems to know this, which understandably frustrates John. Well, now there's an easy and direct way to handle these kinds of strategic communications. As Duncan indicates, a few more well-placed Microsoft blogs won't automatically humanize the company or guarantee trust, but it'd be a great way to start depolarizing the conversation.

Some numbers:

"microsoft blogs" : 3

"apple blogs" : 107

"linux blogs" : 522

 

 


Recent Entries

Why can't Johnny download? Because he's stuck in a semantic muddle.

Justifying the feel-good labels

Screen-sharing's long tail

Why can't Johnny download?

A conversation with Rajiv Gupta about fine-grained access control

XBRL use cases: better late than never

Tantalizing hints of the Knowledge Navigator

Denise Getts wires the web

Beyond the election news cycle

A conversation with Jim Russell about the Pittsburgh diaspora

The SALT talks

All roads lead to VNC

Mobile speech recognition

The Screening Room #10: Dabble DB

Scaling the Tufte effect

A conversation with John Schneider about Efficient XML

What's the video threshold for face-reading?

So many social networks, so little time

Conversational dynamics in the blogosphere

Intense, simple, active demonstrations

A conversation with Cricket Liu about the Domain Name System

Drowning in a rising tide

DRM by asking nicely

In search of non-gratuitous 3D

A conversation with Mark Ericson about communications-enabled business processes

Levelator!

Talk to the avatar

WordPress for loosely-coupled comments, part 2

Compound documents for the web

A conversation with Ellen Ullman about living close to the machine

At the Paris SOA Forum

ID card anthropology

Second Life, MTurk, and on-demand education

The Screening Room #9: Windows Live Writer

A conversation with Tim Fahlberg about mathcasts, clickers, and the future of education

A conversation with Jeff Bezos about Amazon web services

Kim Cameron on why business protocols aren't user-centric yet

Show me my account activity!

WordPress as a loosely-coupled comment engine

How translucency could defuse the Turnitin/McLean High controversy

A conversation with Cyril Houri about annotating the planet using a GPS/WiFi/cellular hybrid

Turk work

Screencasting of tacit knowledge

Ongoing discussion of translucency and selective disclosure

Half-baked ideas

Google Earth live and in realtime

The politics of data control

Audio editing on the move

A conversation with Phil Windley about identity in the real and virtual worlds

Sponsored Technology Links

 
 
 HOME  NEWS  BLOGS  PODCASTS  VIDEOS  TECHNOLOGIES  TEST CENTER  EVENTS  CAREERS   About | Advertise | Awards | RSS | Contact Us 

Copyright © 2008, Reprints, Permissions, Licensing, IDG Network, Privacy Policy, Terms of Service.
All Rights reserved. InfoWorld is a leading publisher of technology information and product reviews on topics including viruses,
phishing, worms, firewalls, security, servers, storage, networking, wireless, databases, and web services.

 CIO :: ComputerWorld :: CSO :: Demo :: GamePro :: Games.net :: IDG Connect :: IDG World Expo
Industry Standard :: IT World :: JavaWorld :: LinuxWorld :: MacUser :: Macworld :: Network World :: PC World :: Playlist