Links of the Week – November 23rd
Everybody loves links, so here are my links of the week:
The Wind Cries Cloud Computing
An interesting analogy comparing the recording industry with the cloud computing industry. A thoughtful read.
Google Lively Is Dead-ly – ReadWriteWeb
In an economic environment where a number of companies are stumbling, it’s important to remember that sometimes even Google makes bad decisions. Such would be the case with Lively, a browser-based virtual world environment – and purported Second Life killer – that Google launched this summer to great fanfare.
Etherpad Shows Google Docs How It’s Done
A team of ex-Googlers, with backing from Y Combinator, the Friendfeed founders and others, have created what might be both the ugliest and most useful group productivity app we’ve seen.
Seadragon Ajax : Microsoft Live Labs
Seadragon, implemented as the Deep Zoom feature of Silverlight, allows you to do that. But what if you’re not using the Silverlight platform? That’s what Seadragon Ajax is for.
Metacafe Bets Its Future On The Power Of Wikis
Put simply, WikiCafe is everything you’ve come to learn to love about Wikipedia but attuned to video. It is a collaborative video metadata editing tool built on top of WikiMedia, the Wiki platform originally written for Wikipedia. Its purpose is to foster collaboration and aggregation of standardized, categorized knowledge on a single “document”-in this case a video.
Microsoft Vista Emails: No Scandal Here
Those who were hoping for the discovery of super-scandalous emails showing that Microsoft lied about Vista’s capabilities, however, will so far be disappointed.
Putting Flash on iPhone is Easy. Here’s How:
Can’t say that I agree with the author’s conclusions, but an interesting point of view, nevertheless.
It’s Official. Facebook Is Running A Protection Racket On App Developers
So how do you get into the Verified App category? You pay. $375. Well, you have to pass those tests, but then you pay… But unless you pay that $375, you ain’t getting the badge.
And then you pay again. Each year. The Verified designation is good for just twelve months.
There’s a word for this kind of system. I just can’t remember what it is. Oh yeah. Protection Racket.
yax-958 One party good, two parties bad
“As long as the People’s Action Party (PAP) changes itself and continues to provide clean and good government…” the Straits Times reported Lee Hsien Loong as saying. But what if they don’t? How do Singaporeans then get the good government they want from another party in the absence of a two-party democracy?
Update on Silverlight 2 – and a glimpse of Silverlight 3 – ScottGu’s Blog
Over the last 4 weeks, the final release of Silverlight 2 has been downloaded and installed on more than 100 million consumer machines. It has also recently been published to corporate administrators via the Microsoft SMS and Microsoft Update programs to enable them to automatically deploy across enterprises. Over 1 in 4 computers on the Internet now have some version of Silverlight installed.
Introducing: The Common Craft Explainer Network
Brought to you from the folks who did the highly popular series of “In Plain English” explanatory videos. The basic idea is anyone looking for custom video producers will be pointed to the Explainer Network members. However, these members pay a fee to be listed in the Network.
Jinni Helps You Pick The Perfect Flick
The site has created what it calls “The Movie Genome” – a database of movies tagged by a team of humans aided by a computer algorithm, with attributes spanning fifty categories. The database is reminiscent of Pandora’s Music Genome Project (which is also sorted by human professionals), though it is significantly smaller at this point.
Perhaps Hulu is losing less money than YouTube. Hulu has fewer than 1/10th as many users as YouTube and serves an even smaller fraction of streams, so that is entirely possible. But by that measure, most companies are more successful than YouTube.
Speaking of the Great Depression . . .
Those chat boxes once commonplace on a computer desktop amid documents, Web browsers, and spreadsheets are giving way to a new breed of user-friendly, real-time conversation tools that Internet companies hope will keep users engaged with their content – and the advertising that appears alongside it.
The end of instant messaging (as we know it) – Digital Life
Those chat boxes once commonplace on a computer desktop amid documents, Web browsers, and spreadsheets are giving way to a new breed of user-friendly, real-time conversation tools that Internet companies hope will keep users engaged with their content – and the advertising that appears alongside it.
Dear Social Media: Don’t Tell Me What to Be Offended By
One mother’s take on the Motrin fiasco: “I’m absolutely fine with the idea that the advertisement may not have offended you, or that you disagree with my analysis of the PR storm Johnson & Johnson is dealing with over it. But you can just shut right up if you plan to tell me I’m wrong.”
DECONSTRUCTING THE FINANCIAL CRISIS (so far)
An excellent attempt by Bill Werner at creating a timeline of the current economic crisis.
Other ways of getting my links in real time: Twitter, Google Reader, Delicious or FriendFeed.
I may leave out certain links from my feed if I feel the stories have already been covered ad nauseam this week.
I picked up on Etherpad too! Did you see the screencast? I opted to showcase that in my weekly links cos it’s quite impressive!
Yeah… that is some wicked demo. And to accomplish that real time collaboration effect without the use of a browser plug-in is just simply amazing.
I think you will begin to see more real time document collaboration tools coming out in the coming days. For example, I think the new Office Web Applications in Microsoft Office 14 will have something similar, although it may not be as “real time” as Etherpad.