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Diffstat (limited to 'old/published/never published')
| -rw-r--r-- | old/published/never published/microformats4.txt | 37 | ||||
| -rw-r--r-- | old/published/never published/songbird.txt | 33 | ||||
| -rw-r--r-- | old/published/never published/tech-histories.txt | 35 |
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diff --git a/old/published/never published/microformats4.txt b/old/published/never published/microformats4.txt deleted file mode 100644 index c8e9b6c..0000000 --- a/old/published/never published/microformats4.txt +++ /dev/null @@ -1,37 +0,0 @@ -Tiny Tags Power the Semantic Web - -Yesterday's promise of the semantic web remains largely unfulfilled -- machines still aren't very good at understanding the code they're rendering. Microformats want to change that and the next version of Firefox aims to lead the way. - -Alex Faaborg believes microformats are next leap in the evolution of hypertext. Unlike the web we know today where a contact link automatically opens your mail client, microformat data has no predetermined association. In the third stage says Faabord, "the user has control over the associations." Which should music to the ears of webmail users tired of accidentally opening an email client they don't use. - -<a href="http://microformats.org/">Microformats</a> are tiny pieces of code which add contextual meaning to HTML tags. They give browsers and other web software tools easy signposts to help understand what data is being read and rendered. - -Specific pieces of web content like dates, addresses, product reviews and resumes can be tagged with simple microformat codes. For instance, whenever an author places an event listing on a web page, he can append it with the appropriate piece of code. For every phone number or street address, the microformatted code can tell the browser, "this is somebody's contact information." - -Tantek Çelik, CTO of Technorati and creator of microformats, describes their purpose as a way of "making web pages both more useful and more usable to the average person." Currently to use microformats you'd need to know HTML, but Firefox 3 is hoping to change that. - -Alex Faaborg of the Firefox team believes that the browser should be responsible for parsing microformated content, "then the user won't have to worry about microformats." - -Çelik agrees and says the future of microformats lies with browsers. "I think it is an essential step -- it makes it much easier for both users and content/site publishers." - -While microformats are easy for HTML authors to use, for the average web user microformats remain a an untapped mystery. The developers behind Firefox would like microformats to become as familiar as RSS. - -"If the browser provides a consistent way of displaying microformatted content, then the user doesn't have to worry about a chaotic UI where every type of information is displayed differently," Faaborg says. - -The Firefox 3 developers have not settled on an implementation yet, but they are committed to including them in the popular browser. - -According to Faaborg, "we are still figuring out how we are going to allocate developer resources, and if we will need to rely on open source contributers for some parts of the microformat detection implementation." - -For now Mozilla is watching two extensions for Firefox evolve: <a href-"https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/4106">Operator</a.> by Michael Kaply and <a href="http://webcards.whymicroformats.com/">WebCards</a> by Andy Mitchell. But Mozilla would like to eventually role microformats support into the browser. - -One idea Faaborg has proposed is to include a toolbar icon to notify users when a page contains microformatted data. Still he believes that "it would be considerably easier for users to apply actions to microformatted content (like adding an event to their calendar) if they could directly click on the information, instead of finding it in a menu in the browser UI." - -Faaborg has blogged extensively about microformats and found his favorite idea in user comments on his site. Two users suggested changing the mouse cursor to show the associated application when you hover over a piece of microformatted content. - -"So if you moved the mouse over an address, a small icon for Google Earth (or Yahoo maps, or what ever application you choose to associate with addresses) would appear to the side of the mouse cursor." - -Clicking the link would then take you to whatever page or program you decide to associate with that type of data. Addresses lead to your favorite mapping service, event listings to your online calendar and so on. - -But Faaborg doesn't think Firefox should stop at detecting and handling microformats, he's like to see creation tools as well. "If it takes 30 seconds to put information in the right structure to add it to a calendar, then the single person who created the information should spend that 30 seconds, not each of the 100 or 1000 people who want to add the information to their various different calendar applications." - -Faaborg thinks that if the browser takes care of the full life cycle of structured information, from creating it to detecting it, "we could improve the functionality of the web by simply releasing a new version of Firefox."
\ No newline at end of file diff --git a/old/published/never published/songbird.txt b/old/published/never published/songbird.txt deleted file mode 100644 index 86872e2..0000000 --- a/old/published/never published/songbird.txt +++ /dev/null @@ -1,33 +0,0 @@ -The verdict is in. The RIAA has won its first jury case and is already gloating about having struck fear in the hearts of file sharing music lovers everywhere. But it doesn't matter. When an industry reaches the point it must sue its customers to maintain its business model the industry is already dead. - -For many that have come up in the era of web-based music there's a certain glee in watching the old guard fall. But there's no need to dance on the music industry's grave. Its final collapse won't be pretty -- people will lose their jobs, companies will go bankrupt. - -But something new will be born. As any anthropologist can tell you there was music before the recording industry and there will be music long after it is gone. Rather than debate the finer points of the industry's inevitable collapse, I want to tell you about the future. - -The future of music will look something like the Songbird application. Songbird is essentially a music player -- playlists, libraries, all the things you'll also find in iTunes and similar applications. - -But where iTunes is still representative of the old guard -- every recent revision has primarily been about offering new ways to sell you music -- Songbird incorporates the old and gives direction to the new. - -The future is free. The future is on the web and its primary model is not selling you music, but helping you discover it. And that's why Songbird features a built in web browser that enables you to seamlessly browse and listen to music from MP3 blogs, radio stations like Pandora and music history and culture on sites like wikipedia and last.fm. - -With MySpace currently boasting far more bands than any record label can offer, is it any wonder that we turn to the web for music? - -With Songbird you browse the web looking for music and, provided the site is properly coded Songbird will discover all the linked MP3s and put them in a playlist just below the browser window. You can pause and play tracks as if they were already part of your music collection. - -Find a track you like on the web and drag it to your library -- it's yours now. Songbird doesn't support DRM files and hopefully it never will. - -As Michael Arrington recently wrote, the whole digital music industry is making an inexorable move toward free. In part this is driven by the relatively low cost of today's recording equipment, but it's also a nature result of the online market. - -Earlier this year the going rate for a DRM free track on iTunes was $1.29, but now, Amazon has jumped into to compete and the price there has already fallen to just $.89 in many cases. Sites like Amie street offer music at whatever price the demand for a song will bear. Radiohead recently skipped its record company and decided to offer its new album online for whatever you'd like to pay. Prince is giving away his music with the Sunday paper. - -At the moment these are isolated case, but Arrington is right, an epidemic of free is not far off. - -And Songbird anticipates this with it's web features. Sure, it can still manage your iPod and music collection, but more than anything Songbird encourages you not to listen to the same tracks you already know, but to explore and discover new music. - -Songbird is often called the Firefox of jukebox applications, in part because it falls loosely under the Mozilla umbrella, but also because Songbird makes music exciting again in the same way that Firefox made the web fun again. - -At the moment Songbird is still a developer release, not really meant for the public, but in the two weeks I've been using it, it's been just as solid and considerably snappier than iTunes, which is currently sitting at version 7. - -So if the recent RIAA case has you down, a bit disappointed perhaps that the companies in charge of supplying you music are in fact more interested in policing how you use it, head over to the Songbird site and give it a try, you just might discover what the future of online music looks like. - -As someone who grew up hanging out at the local record store, chatting with clerks and watching bands play in-store performances will I miss the old record industry and its accruements? Yes, for a while, but it was always about the music, and the music will always continue.
\ No newline at end of file diff --git a/old/published/never published/tech-histories.txt b/old/published/never published/tech-histories.txt deleted file mode 100644 index 2da29dd..0000000 --- a/old/published/never published/tech-histories.txt +++ /dev/null @@ -1,35 +0,0 @@ -###IRC- (no idea what the first words were and definitely not funny) - -Internet Relay Chat (IRC), a multi-user chat system, where people talk on "channels" in groups, or privately, was born in the summer of 1988 When a Finnish engineering student by the name of Jarkko Oikarinen sat down to improve the BBS (Bulletin Board System) in use at the University of Oulu, Finland. - -IRC was intended to be a real time BBS, but in the end Oikarinen decided that there were too many features in the BBS, so he threw out that portion, leaving only the real-time chat that we have today. - -The results were spread to some of Oikarinen's friends and eventually the internet at large, but IRC remained largely in the academic realm (by 1998 there were some 40 servers worldwide) until history stepped in to give it a kick in the pants. - -Depending on who you ask it was either the attempted Soviet Coup of 1991 or the first Gulf war that brought IRC more mainstream attention. During both events IRC was used to circumvent media blackouts and stream up-to-the-minute news out of the region to the world at large. - - - -###ListServ (got the who, when and where, but again, no funny) - -Listserv was developed to allow bulk messages to be sent on the BITNET network. In the early days if you wanted to be added to a mailing list you sent a message to INFO@BITNIC. Contrary to automated Listserv of today, back then, INFO@BITNIC was a person who manually added your address to the mailing list in question. - -As the number of messages increased it often took weeks or even months to get your e-mail address added to a mailing list. - -Recognizing that this was sub-optimal, Eric Thomas decided to improve the software and in 1986 released Revised Listserv, which not only automated a number of process, it decentralized the the process in favor of a distributed model which shared the network load between several machines. - -Although it started as a personal project to speed up his own workflow, the impending doom of the IBM mainframe on which revised Listserv ran forced Thomas to found L-Soft to raise the money need to port ListServ over to Unix and other platforms. - -Eventually L-Soft released version of ListServ for nearly every mainstream OS. - -###IM (cluster fuck really, very hard to tell when it started or who created it) - - -IM in limited form dates from around 1965 when Tom Van Vleck and others wrote a program for the Multics shell, which included, among other features, a user interface that allowed users to send messages to other logged in users. - -By the 1970s the most popular messaging program was called "talk." To say talk was primitive would be something of an understatement -- in early versions, talk did not separate text from each user, meaning that if users typed simultaneously, characters from each user were intermingled in the display. - -When talk arrived on Unix, it was vastly improved and eventually partially supplanted by ytalk which allowed conversations between more than two users. - -Up until the advent of ICQ and AOL instant messenger in the mid 1990s, IM remained primarily a terminal-based experience. But ICQ, and then later AOL, sparked the GUI trend and the rest as they say, is history. - -Of course history in this case is still something of a jumbled mess, there are some 20 protocols for IM, nearly all are proprietary and most can't interact with each other. It's also worth noting that "instant messenger" is a trademark of AOL.
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