Interesting post about the top 100 feeds this year compared to those of last year. It is interesting just to see who is in the top 100. A lot are really techie feeds which just goes to show the readership of RSS at the moment.
http://www.tnl.net/blog/entry/Technorati_100_Here_Today_Gone_Tomorrow
To follow on from my page and other posts about moving to Norway, I thought that I would just mention that I got some new home insurance the other day from DnB Nor, the largest Bank in Norway, as they have a deal which is cheap when you have internet banking with them.
As they are one of the easiest banks to setup with when you are a non-norwegian this is probably quite relevant information.
However there can be even cheaper deals to be had if you are a member of a union of some description.
All in all, Insurance here seems to be cheaper than that in London and that can only be a good thing!
For quite a while now Robert Scoble has talking about supplying full content on RSS, and quite often the arguments boil down to a branding issue. After all you are not exactly driving people to your site with RSS, supplying them with your well prepared graphics, and giving them much experience outside of the comfort of their RSS reader.
Or are you? When I was away from my RSS reader the other day (the excellent NetNewsWire) with five minutes to spare I was thinking, what sites shall I check. What shall I do. Shall I go to BBC news?
So it occurred to me, I wasn’t get the experience that I would do from my feeds, I knew that I wanted to do some reading, and I knew that I wanted the experience of my feeds in that 5 minutes.
But as we all know 5 minutes going from website to website is hardly time enough to do the DNS lookups, whereas with NetNewWire I can go from Dilbert to National Geographic, to a flickr feed, to my friends blogs, to Reuters, and further taking everything in, and distinguishing between the feeds.
This is the experience that I am after and this experience is good branding, I have stripped away everything that I don’t need – the non related graphics, the extra features, the speed of getting there and I am presented with what I value most. And this creates a positive image of feeds that I am subscribed to. And with this comes positive brands.
When I can read these feeds in full and get excellent information I don’t need to jump ship, but I am held by the content of what is being produced but I want it in that 5 minutes, already downloaded, not an extra click away, not a bookmark in my firefox. Long live full feeds.
I need a pop3 server for osx for testing an application that I am thinking of building. I would like it small as in lightweight, osx switch on/switch offable and with little dependancies. Anyone know of one?
These students rock.
In 1976, a Frenchman made a film called ‘C’etait un Rendezvous’ consisting solely of some guy driving a Ferrari really, really fast through the streets of Paris.
The idea is that the guy wanted to meet his girlfriend (hence the title) and the film ends with him parking the car and getting out to meeting a pretty young thing on some hillside.
The entire film is shot from the bumper of the Ferrari (a 275 GTB) as it jams through the streets of Paris in real time. The film is nine minutes long, and was shot early one morning, without any permits, on streets open to the public. While it’s great fun to watch, it was irresponsible as hell to film — the driver runs red lights, drives the wrong way up one-way streets, etc.
What’s geeky about this is that a group of physics students (I think they’re students, anyway) did some calculations on time and distance to determine exactly how fast the car was traveling at certain points.
To make a distance-time graph for Claude Lelouch’s trip, we tried to mark off Paris landmarks such as large boulevards and restaurants. Between each landmark, we would record the times then, using MapQuest and Expedia, recorded the distances between each landmark
Lelouch traveled down some roads in the wrong direction, making our job tougher. When he was nearing his destination, the Sacred Heart Basilica, he made a number of twists and turns down streets we could barely find on maps. Luckily we found a large restaurant, Le Consulat, on a one-way street.
There’s a chart on this page, and the bottom line is that the guy was absolutely flying at some points in the trip. For example —
At second #171, the driver passed a landmark that was 5,190 meters into his trip. Eighteen seconds later (second #189), the driver passed a landmark that was 6,290 meters into his trip. This means he traveled 1,100 meters in 18 seconds, or 61 meters per second. That’s almost 140 m.p.h.
You need to watch the film to really appreciate the analysis. You can see it on iFilm or Google Video. Wikipedia also has some good information about the film.
These students have done other analysis of films. They’ve figured out the speed of cars in Bad Boys II, The French Connection, The Blues Brothers, etc. Better yet, they’ve tried to figure out the tensile strength of Spiderman’s webs from a couple of scenes in the films.
(Via Gadgetopia.)
Now this looks really cool.
Democracy: a new platform for making and seeing TV on the net: “Cory Doctorow:
A new suite of free and open tools let you watch TV, make TV, and recommend TV in a way that’s easier, cheaper and more accessible than ever before. Democracy is a new Internet TV viewer that combines RSS (so you can pull a ‘channel’ of programming), BitTorrent (so you can download TV from indie producers without gonking their site by sucking down all their bandwidth) and VLC, a multi-format player (so you can watch video no matter how it’s encoded). Combine that with Broadcast Machine, a simple tool for publishing channels of video, and Videobomb, a social video service a little like Digg or delicious, and you’ve got a tremendously exciting development in democratic access to media.
Democracy has been available in beta for the Mac for months, but as of today, Windows users can play along too (the Linux player is just a little ways behind).
The experience of Democracy is great. Fire it up, pick some channels, and leave it running. Flip to it whenever you want to watch your video — it’s as easy as turning on a TV, but you can recommend the videos you like to your friends, make channels of them and save them.
What’s more, you can hack the player, the publisher, all of it — it’s all free, open source software that’s ready for your code contributions.
Democracy strikes the same balance that great free software tools like firefox achieve: an elegant, simple tool for everyone to use; a powerful, active developer community that anyone can hack in.
(Disclosure: I am proud to serve as a volunteer on the Board of Directors for the Participatory Culture Foundation, the nonprofit that created Democracy)
”
(Via Boing Boing Blog.)
There are some really excellent podcasts of The Future of Web Apps One day conference/summit hosted by Carson Workshops.
Ryan Carson has really put together an excellent summit, pity being in Norway that I couldn’t go, but luckily for all of us he has made the podcasts available on the carson workshops website at:
http://www.carsonworkshops.com/summit/
All are worth listening to I think, and there is something for everyone thats involved in development whether web based or not.
And if you haven’t done so recently, I would seriously suggest checking out his application, dropsend which is just so useful.
Others at the conference included:
Joshua Schachter from del.ici.ous
David Heinemeier Hansson from 37 signals
Steffen Meschkat from google
Cal Henderson from flickr
Tom Coates from yahoo
Shaun Inman from Mint
Wow these are rather nice.
distellamap: “Atari 2600 code operations rendered as art. So awesome. via Coudal.”
(Via What Do I Know – Enjoying.)
I went skiing after work on Friday night, took about an hour to get the slopes from Bergen and although the slope was dark it was extremely well lit. In fact it was in some ways better than in the day – very clear to see what lay ahead.
I think its great that one can get down to the slopes and ski where as I used to go down the pub and have a few too many drinks!
Just spent ages looking at this little blue ball going around the screen!
Its one big 500px x 500px repeating animated gif.
http://blueballfixed.ytmnd.com/
Some people just have too much time on their hands.