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Wired just published an article on Digg replacing Slashdot as geek news source of choice. The article also pointed me to a site I hadn't seen before, digg vs dot, a running comparison of how fast news breaks on each.

Now for some commentary. I wouldn't say I'm a heavy user of either. My user ID is not amazingly low on Slashdot, and I haven't posted one new story to Digg. But as a casual user, it seems to me that there might be a place for both of these sites. The Wired article seems to scoff at Slashdot for the control editors have over what stories get published, implying its less authentic or representative of people's real interest. But what people need to remember is that social sites can be gamed and can take on whole new directions quickly. A lot of people still do not use the net. A slight change in Digg's demographic profile could have it take on a different flavor of news that we cannot predict today. Slashdot, on the other hand, by keeping its editorial staff geek pure, has less chance of swaying with the winds of the day. I'm not saying one is better than the other; that would be akin to saying broadcast news is better than blogs. What I am saying is that most of us seek balance, and both sites might fill a need for a long time to come in our media diets. And as the net population continues to grow, the real number of geeks will, too. Both could see real audience increases over time. But maybe that's not as news-worthy as a clash of the titans story.

Posted by chris at 09:43 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Possible business opportunity where technology could play a part: real estate transaction management. The state of current solutions, if this link is any indication, has not matured to full CRM functionality yet.

http://www.rebuz.com/Directory/transaction%20management.htm

Posted by chris at 05:13 PM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

http://catb.org/~esr/faqs/smart-questions.html

Nothing more to say.

Posted by chris at 09:08 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Dave Winer has posted on Audible's announcement of a podcast listening measurement system, with two quips on how the scheme might work.

If he is correct that the Audible requires both content producers and media users to lock into Audible's proprietary .aa format, it seems they've drastically missed the mark on what fueled the podcast medium. First let me say that good content and the lack of better alternatives in terrestrial radio and satellite no doubt is the primary driver. But the MP3 format also had a bit to do with it, especially after users became comfortable with the format during the Napster days.

MP3 worked for two reasons. First was that it provided quality at a reasonable cost. The integrity of the sound was just good enough at the cost of a 3MB+ download, which was nothing to scoff at in the days of dialup. If I was going to spend 30 minutes downloading it, it better sound good. Second was the relative openness of the format. By openness I mean that media device manufacturers were not stifled from enabling their devices to play the MP3 format through a restrictive central organization with whom they had to have a formal agreement. (NOTE: this seems to be changing as Thomson, the current patent holder, realized what they had. See http://www.mp3licensing.com/royalty. The lack of anyone actively enforcing patent rights and extracting royalties kept things moving at a fasat pace. Media software players were in the same boat.

Yes, MP3 has limitations, notably its lack of bookmarking capability and that its compression and quality have been superceded in recent years. But it's now a standard and standards, once they've taken hold, are tough to change. As just one example, ask Novell and Microsoft about TCP/IP.

Posted by chris at 02:05 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Not too surprised on this, but Microsoft embraces Agile now. I would be interested to hear from insiders if this started as a sort of grassroots movement, as I've experienced and others have described. Some would suggest that is the best way for it to truly take hold vs. being perceived by the troops as just another management fad.

This quote tells me at least someone there gets it:

Yet, "one thing we find is that you can't excessively mandate software development processes on a broad scale," Treadwell said.

"It's most important to mandate levels of quality. You have to give teams some flexibility to achieve those results as is most effective for those teams."

Posted by chris at 08:55 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Been spending a lot of time looking at SugarCRM, an open source PHP-based CRM app. I remember looking at it over a year ago to determine if it would be a good fit for my wife's graphic design business. At the time, it seemed to make more sense for small sales teams who need a way to collectively track and collaborate and overkill for a single person to keep track of leads and contacts.

But I've had to go back and take a look at it because at my day job we're evaluating CRM concepts for our web-based sales proposal application, and I wanted a refresher on the basic data/object model, etc. In doing so, I've come across a lot of press about Sugar, its founders, and a new community of add-on developers that has sprung up. To be blunt, I think this dog might hunt.

Unrelated, today I came across www.symfony-project.com. I happened upon it through Digg, which had a nebulous reference to AJAX (doesn't everything these days?) and PHP5. Having spent no time developing on PHP5 yet, I figured it was worth a read. Based on a cursory glance and watching an online video they have, symfony has more than a passing resemblance to Ruby on Rails, which I downloaded and toyed with a couple months back when working on a grad project. I know it's no accident, but this has to get you wondering about whether the open source community and language zealots specifically spend too much time rebuilding what already exists and not enough time coming up with new, better ideas.

Anyway, dumping this hear as a reminder to go look at these again someday when I need them.

Posted by chris at 08:39 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Loudoun County, where I live, has an excellent public library system despite its notoriety for a little Internet censorship lawsuit that went through the federal courts a few years back.

Yesterday I discovered that our library has a new agreement with www.netlibrary.com to provide access to electronic books and audiobooks. Paging through the catalog, they have a lot of technology books the library generally doesn't carry because, one would guess, they become obsolete too quickly. They also have a decent selection of bestsellers in the audiobook catalog. Best of all, I can access all this content from home.

Now, yes, it is laden with DRM techniques and tools to prevent theft, but I kinda expect that from a public library system. They are using Microsoft's Windows Media Audio (WMA) format to expire audiobooks after 21 days (unfortunately forcing one to use Windows Media Player 9 or higher), and the online books which are in PDF format are broken down so that each page is a separate PDF file to be downloaded. Neither are impenetrable, but they raise the technical barrier for the average joe who might be looking to steal content at the slight cost of technology platform lock-in. Nothing that iTunes/iPod does not already do.

My only point in posting this is that I often hear people grumble about tax dollars and how they perceive they do not see the benefits those tax dollars provide. In this case, I'm awfully glad to see my tax dollars put to work this way.

Posted by chris at 11:07 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Got really tired of my otherwise great ATI Remote Wonder, which is connected to my MythTV system, receiving each button press multiple times, making it a fine balancing act to navigate just one item in the menus.

A lot of people on the Myth users list are running a patched version of the ati_remote module that ships with the kernel. I put the version in this thread (http://www.gossamer-threads.com/lists/mythtv/users/100939?search_string=ati%20remote%20double;#100939) on my Red Hat box running 2.6.10 and started receiving errors about the usb_unlink_urb() calls, saying its been replaced with usb_kill_urb(). So here is the file with those three calls changed: ati_remote.c. Here is also a copy of the Makefile I used. Just drop those two into a directory, run 'make,' 'make install,' then 'depmod -a' and you should be set. To unload a previous version of ati_remote, run 'rmmod ati_remote', then reload the new with 'modprobe ati_remote.'

After about 30 minutes testing, it makes a big difference and I get no errors.

Posted by chris at 08:16 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)