Cox Crow

Would that the iPod had audio in!

4:51:19 PM #

Impossible Things

One of the things that I learned from Mark Pilgrim the other day was that the cite attribute of the blockquote and q elements is an URI. Do you know how hard it is to find an URI for a citation? I guess the folks at CiteSeer would.

`I ca'n't believe that!' said Alice.

`Ca'n't you?' the Queen said in a pitying tone. `Try again: draw a long breath, and shut your eyes.'

Alice laughed. `There's no use trying,' she said `one ca'n't believe impossible things.'

`I daresay you haven't had much practice,' said the Queen. `When I was your age, I always did it for half-an-hour a day. Why, sometimes I've believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast. There goes the shawl again!'

IE doesn't render the q appropriately; it should. Weblog tools should, when posting a quote, automatically complete the cite attribute. But I suppose that neither of those things will happen.

3:19:45 PM # Google It!
categories: Writing Online

Adaptation

John Gilmore said, The Net treats censorship as damage and routes around it. Don't we, as humans, do the same with all obstacles?

2:41:58 PM # Google It!
categories: Layer 8

gr33tz

I'd like to take a few moments and welcome the interesting contributions to this pamphlet-strewn sphere from folks in the Utah Education Network: Troy Jessup, Pete Kruckenberg, and Jim Stewart. Thanks to David Fletcher for pointing them out. They've posted lots of words that are now waiting in my queue.

11:52:22 AM # Google It!

We Are TiVo

"What we found in our market research was that consumers found it awkward to have to manage digital content in two places," said Brodie Keast, a senior vice president at TiVo. "The PC has won as the center of digital content."

The company was surprised by the popularity of 802.11b wireless-based home networks and decided that the best way for TiVo subscribers to access and share digital content was to simply piggyback on wireless networks, Keast said.
— c|net: "TiVo wants to join the home network"

It's nice that they did market research, but don't you think that this is obvious? Consider your address book. Isn't it time-consuming and annoying to keep various bits of contact information in your desktop computer, your phone, your PDA, post-it notes on the refrigerator, and a couple of dead-tree address books? Rather than let the data move smoothly through a general purpose network, it was duplicated and used on multiple special purpose devices. And why? Because each thought it stood alone, the Sun revolving around it.

Let me put it this way: THE NETWORK HAS NO CENTER. The network is. Once you realize that you can see that the trend is toward ubiquity, toward things that live on the general purpose network, speaking to each other regardless of make or model, and which can act on data anywhere: Things which are more like you and I than like that stack of electronic components in your living room.

9:44:07 AM # Google It!
categories: Industry, Media