Designing from the outside in
Jason Fried believes that contrary to the normal expectation that applications are built on top of frameworks, applications should always be designed "from the outside in."
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It was only a matter of time, but Google is apparently experimenting with embedding AdSense ads in RSS feeds. Yahoo has been experimenting with RSS ads since last fall. We imagine that by the end of the year, most serious publishers will have at least tried ads in their feeds (Forrester analyst Charlene Li hosted two standing-room only sessions on RSS ads at AdTech this week). This could significantly change the complexion of the RSS experience, which has been blessedly light on marketing to this point. On the other hand, here's hoping that this new money-making opportuninty encourages more publishers to offer full-text RSS feeds. It'll also be interesting to see if the ad networks can figure how to do a better job of contextually matching the ads to the content (why so many Bob Marley and mortgage ads in Fred Wilson's feed, for example?)
More coverage: Tony Gentile, Battelle, Technorati, Feedster.
(Via SiliconBeat.)
Netscape veterans launch video startup: "Two Silicon Valley entrepreneurs who helped ignite the dot-com boom in the late '90s have launched a startup, open media network, that aims to let independent film makers, public television broadcasters and anyone else distribute video over the Internet."
The Amazon RSS Feed Generator at oxus.net is very simple to use, and quite handy.
(Via Amazon Web Services Blog.)
This is part of the Eclipse 3.1 migration series that I have put up on my blog. The previous blog post on 3.1 migrations can be found at
Hope you have found those information useful.
In Eclipse 3.1, the WorkbenchAdvisor has been refactored to move out window-level responsibilities to a new window advisor - WorkbenchWindowAdvisor, and further division is the new ActionBarAdvisor to handle actionbar related functionalities. These changes lead to a cleaner and easier implementation.
(Via nice3z -.)
Building Cocoa-Java Apps with Eclipse: "Eclipse is a gloriously powerful, open source IDE, which is a joy to use when working with Java. It makes sense, then, when writing Java-based Cocoa apps, to use Eclipse. But how? What does Eclipse know about the esoteric world of Cocoa-Java? Well, with a little help from Ant, the flexible build system, you can tell it everything it needs to know. Mike Butler shows you how."
(Via O'Reilly MacDevCenter.com.)
jLibrary, your desktop CMS (1.0 beta2 released):
Yes, finally jLibrary 1.0 beta2 has been released. jLibrary is a new kind of CMS tool. Based on Eclipse Rich Client Platform, jLibrary is a rich client application that allows you to work with your documents, and media, in a very easy way, allowing categorization, export/import operations, cut/copy/paste, drag&drop, favorites, security constraints, etc. etc. etc.
-martin
(Via Martin Perez's Weblog.)
The Simple Queue Service has been updated with performance and bugs fixes, most of it driven from the developer community that has helped shape it since its introduction in November, 2004.
The Amazon Simple Queue Service Beta 2 provides a means for web service applications to quickly and reliably queue resources generated by a component to be consumed by another component. A queue can serve as a buffer for data flowing from one component to another even when the producer is generating output faster than the consumer is retrieving it. Also, a single queue can be used simultaneously by many distributed application components with no need for those components to coordinate with each other to share the queue.
The following new features are available:
To learn more and get started today, visit the Amazon Simple Queue Service page.
(Via Amazon Web Services Blog.)
Want to know your online social reputation?:
Go to Opinity, which has just launched a Web site that tracks a user's reputation based on their behavior on classifieds and auctions sites, and on social networking Web sites. Apparently they want to partner with sites like eBay or Slashdot. We get the heebies when thinking about this stuff, but maybe it's just us -- or because of all the news lately about cookie and pie.
Anyway, these guys are serious. The San Jose-based start-up just raised $2.7 million in venture capital from SoftBank Ventures Korea, which led the round, and Solborn Venture Investment, Korea Investment and Valmore Partners, according to a story today in Venture Wire (sub req)...
'When you have established a reputation on one site, there's no way to transfer your reputation to another site,' [CEO Ted] Cho said. 'Opinity provides a way to efficiently transfer your reputation by verifying identities at Opinity.'
To build a consolidated reputation, users can create a profile that can also be reviewed and rated by third parties. While users can dispute reviews on themselves, they can't edit them. But a user can register separate reputations on Opinity for each of their identities. For instance, users can establish a reputation related to their eBay account and at the same time can also set up a different reputation for their online dating identity.
(Via SiliconBeat.)
The Missing Sync for hiptop released: "Mark/Space has announced the availability of The Missing Sync for hiptop, new software that synchronizes contacts and calendar information between a Mac and the popular T-Mobile Sidekick..."
Software as a service: have it your way:
Last week I mentioned Greasemonkey, a Firefox extension that enables scripts to run in the context of web pages. Since then I've written a few of my own Greasemonkey scripts. The first, which I've shown in a screencast, is a next-generation LibraryLookup. Originally you had to click a bookmarklet in order to jump from an Amazon page to a book's record in your local library. Now, if the book is available in the library, the Greasemonkey script automatically inserts an alert into the Amazon page. As I discuss in the screencast, page rewriting is a hot topic that's about to go nuclear.
Two components make this possible. One is the scriptable DOM (document object model), which enables in-situ alteration of web pages. The other is the XmlHttpRequest object which is now available in all the major browsers, and which supports asynchronous interaction with remote services.
Combine the two and you get a powerful system for delivering realtime alerts in the context of web pages. AJAX (Asynchronous JavaScript and XML) is the new name for this strategy. But it's an old idea, and XML is optional. At its core this is about web pages that communicate autonomously and update themselves dynamically. You'll soon see a lot more of these, and you may well find yourself creating some too. [Full story at InfoWorld.com]
(Via Jon's Radio.)
Kleiner Perkins' latest start-up: Zazzle:
Zazzle.com -- Kleiner Perkins and Google board member Ram Shriram invested $16 million in the series A round of this Menlo Park, Calif. startup, which provides a marketplace for buying and selling custom goods on the Internet. Consumers can use the site to design a custom T-shirt, poster, print, or card and make money every time it sells. Zazzle was founded in 1999 and launched its service in 2003. Kleiner Perkins managing partner John Doerr and Shriram serve on the board.
For the uninitiated: This is notable because John Doerr is arguably the most successful venture capitalist around (backed Sun, Amazon, Netscape, the list goes on). He and Shriram invested in Google together.
(Via SiliconBeat.)
'This Handbook was created by the Lemelson-MIT Program to address the independent inventor's and aspiring entrepreneur's most frequently asked questions regarding United States patents...
Chapter 1: What Is Intellectual Property?
Chapter 2: What Can Be Patented?
Chapter 3: Is My Idea Patentable?
Chapter 4: How Do I Conduct a Patent Search?
Chapter 5: Is My Invention Worth Patenting?
Chapter 6: How Do I Apply for a Patent?
Chapter 7: How Do I Prove the Idea Is Mine?
Chapter 8: What Are Some Options to Commercialize My Patent?
Chapter 9: How Do I License My Invention?
Chapter 10: What Are Some Guidelines in Developing a Business Plan?
Chapter 11: How Do I Raise Capital?
Resources for Inventors'
Some recent news from the Corporate IM sector:
"Worm attack forces Reuters IM offline" .. that is a big one!
"AIM knocks on offices' doors" .. that will be a hard sell.
"Jabber, Inc. and AOL announced today that they are going to be doing Server-to-Server (S2S) interoperability" .. don't exactly know, what the benefit for Jabber is .. AOL isn't used for "between-company"-IM, thats usually done via Yahoo and MSN.
"IM specialist Jabber gets new CEO" .. it really sounds like the IM Market is going thru some shake-up phase.
Ten Ideas for Corporate RSS Feeds:
Here are 10 ideas for corporate RSS feeds to (mainly) external audiences. Most of these reasons are good ones for deploying RSS internally as well as part of your employee communications, knowledge management, content management, and other systems. [Cross-posted at Blogging Planet]
1) Email is an increasingly problematic communications tool due to the growth of spam and the overwhelming amount of email most businesspeople receive. More effective spam filters can also create a greater risk of missing important emails. Today, RSS offers a way for users to organize incoming information – on their terms (they have to actually subscribe to receive anything). While ads are increasingly entering RSS feeds, but they remain relatively free from spam at this point. Therefore, organizations should consider offering RSS feeds for many different information categories. Ideas follow!
2) RSS is perfect for the online press room. Added to your newsroom, RSS provides a great channel for delivering press releases to the journalists and analysts who are covering your company without clogging up their email inboxes. You can also use this channel to deliver information that might not be worthy of a press release, but which you deem could be interesting to press/analysts nonetheless. For example, you can post information about an upcoming show your company is exhibiting at and offer interviews.
Some companies using feeds successfully for their newsrooms include:
3) Keep your partners informed. Add an RSS feed to your extranet or partner area and keep it populated with press releases, announcements, product detail, meetings, etc. This works great for user groups as well. Organizations doing this include National Public Radio, which uses RSS feeds in its extranet for station owners/managers and Genesys Telecommunications Labs which offers RSS feeds for its user group.
4) Keep your customers informed. Journalists and analysts aren't the only people who will subscribe to your news release feed. Customers are very likely to as well. You should ask yourself what kind of information your customers want, besides news. One likely target is product support information. Product tuning, specs, troubleshooting and security updates are just a few of the topics that companies like IBM, Oracle, Microsoft and UserLand Software provide in their RSS feeds.
5) Provide specific informational categories so people can just receive what they are most interested in. Most companies deploying RSS today are using it in newsrooms and for product support. Some also offer feeds for overall website changes, for new articles or white papers. If you have multiple products or services, having a feed for each product might make sense.
6) Make your resource centers/online libraries dynamic! Use RSS to inform audiences of new case studies, white papers, and presentations. By providing a feed specific to your library, people don't have to visit the website to see what's new.
7) Put your events to work for you online. Create an RSS feed for each event you plan, as well as a general event feed that keeps your audiences up to date on where and when your organization will appear. Populate the feeds with executive schedules, photos, onsite reporting, and news. You can even produce an audio podcast with interviews from the show floor.
8) Capture and publish the buzz. By setting up an RSS feed that captures and publishes everything that is being said about your organization online, you can keep your audiences up to date on the buzz in an automated, easy-to-manage manner. This also provides a great way for your employees and executives to listen to what people are saying about your organization. Now, clearly, this type of automated feed will also capture negative commentary as well, and may not be for everyone (do a manual feed in that case). But in the growing spirit of communications transparency, it might be a great way for your organization to acknowledge issues and address them publicly. You can easily capture feeds from Feedster, PubSub, or Technorati about your organization and make them available to internal and external audiences. Or, hire a company like Intelliseek to do buzz tracking for you.
9) Set up a feed for special promotions. Provide limited-time only product discounts, early-bird specials to events, prizes and more to key customer sets.
10) You can just as easily create private (password-protected) RSS feeds as public ones. These can be a great way to keep employees, partners, customers informed of company happenings, events, promotions, office closings, and other information you don't necessarily want widely available. You can use a feed for a final press release distribution 24 hours before it hits the wire, for example. [Update: This would be for internal audiences for final approval and/or executive knowledge, not to external audiences. You don't want to run afoul of SEC laws. Thanks to Bill French for pointing out this needed to be clarified.] Many content management and knowledge management software vendors are planning on adding RSS to their product suites in the near future.
(Via CEO Bloggers' Club.)
Object Centered Sociality: "Wow. I just read this mind-blowing post by Jyri Engeström in response to my post about leaving Linked In. It's very well thought out and opens a whole new perspective to social networking for me that I completely, 100% sign on to:
Basically I'm defending an alternative approach to social networks here, which I call 'object centered sociality' following the sociologist Carin Knorr Cetina. I'll try to articulate the conceptual difference between the two theories and briefly demonstrate that object-centered sociality helps us to understand better why some social networking services succeed while others don't.Russell's disappointment in LinkedIn implies that the term 'social networking' makes little sense if we leave out the objects that mediate the ties between people. Think about the object as the reason why people affiliate with each specific other and not just anyone. For instance, if the object is a job, it will connect me to one set of people whereas a date will link me to a radically different group. This is common sense but unfortunately it's not included in the image of the network diagram that most people imagine when they hear the term 'social network'. The fallacy is to think that social networks are just made up of people. They're not; social networks consist of people who are connected by a shared object. ...
This is one of those days when I love blogging. I thought when I wrote the Linked In post that it would spur discussion and it did. First, it was just people defending various social networking engines, telling me that I used it incorrectly or somehow misunderstood the function of the network. But this post is exactly what I was looking for, it explains in an obvious, yet insightful way why Linked In didn't work for me, and the reason most social networks don't make sense to me.
Having objects be at the center of your connection with others is exactly what people do when they try to 'categorize' their contacts. I know some people from work. These other people are my family. These people are my friends because I went to school with them, these others are my friends because of some shared interest. There's always something tying us together. And the cool thing is you can look at your contacts by other ways such as a date and location as well.
Basically what Jyri has done has added the 'there' to the social network which I said was missing. I think this is what my initial reaction to Yahoo 360 was as well. By making the contacts the primary focus, to me there is no 'meat.' By making blogs the primary focus, you add that artificial object which can then tie people together. Not just a relationship which stands on its own, but a real relationship based on some actual object: a blog post, a photo, a forum, etc.
Very cool. Sign me up to this way of thinking from now on. It just makes sense.
-Russ
(Via Russell Beattie.)
Google Video (Beta) Upload Program launches:
Long Tail of video? Meet Google: Google just launched their Video Upload Program.
It's crazy to think that searches on Google Video will now include random people's own video and hopefully you won't be limited by what you can search for and they highlight the good stuff. I suspect the main Google Video site will look less like google.com and more like Google News someday, as they showcase video of all types.
The coolest part is that you can even charge for downloads/viewings of video. I can't wait to see what comes out of this, perhaps Google was trying to one-up companies in the bittorrent and IP-based TV space before they could even get going.
(Via PVRblog.)
A directory of cool stuff for the podcasting community.
RSDP: A Really Simple Proposal by Brian McConnell -- Anybody who has written software knows that communicating with databases is a nettlesome task because of difficulties with installing and configuring them. Brian McConnell proposes a Really Simple Database Protocol (RSDP) that would provide developers with a way to prototype and build database-driven applications that are more independent of back-end systems. Weigh in with your thoughts on his proposal via the Talkback section at the end of the article.
BlackBerry 7270 for Enterprise WLAN: "The long awaited BlackBerry 7270, which features 802.11b wireless access for companies that have deployed BlackBerry Enterprise Server 4.0 is in customer trials as we speak. If you're interested (and you presumably meet the requirements), you can fill out this..."
(Via Blackberry Blog.)
Teen Blogging: "Jupiter Research stats: '28% of teens keep blogs, the Web logs that are fast becoming a prominent alternative source of news and commentary, while only 16% of adults do the same.' (reported here)...."
(Via Get Real.)
The Best Kept Secret : NetBeans' Successful (Rich Client) Platform: "Alot of the focus has been on the IDE portion of NetBeans, but there is a powerful NetBeans Platform framework that many have used to create rich client applications."
(Via cld.blog-city.com.)
'Podcasts' Catching on with iPod Owners - Survey: "WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The home-brewed audio programs known as 'Podcasts' are catching on with people who own iPods or other digital-music players, according to a survey released on Sunday."
(Via Reuters: Technology.)
weblogs.com as portal to MSN Spaces: "Scott Isaacs, an architect at Microsoft, explains the new weblogs.com listing for MSN Spaces. For me, it's fascinating to watch the idea percolate through the Spaces community. This kind of 'anchor' page is an essential part of the bootstrap of a blogging community."
(Via Scripting News.)
Team ITC has been evaluating a whole slew of collaboration tools to manage our projects. One that grabbed our attention is Basecamp, a hosted service which we’re using in addition to our secure wiki. It’s a new service, and there are still some kinks to work out, but I’ve been very impressed with how easy it has been to setup and use as well as the responsiveness of their customer support. Check it out.
"(Via Blogarithms.)