News for Non-Nerds, Usable Stuff

This piece tries to understand design requirements for bringing usable applications of RSS content syndication and aggregation to a less tech-savvy crowd, not as quick to adapt to a flurry flexible and powerful features.

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Originally uploaded by chrisholland.

TV Listings Launch!

TV Listings have launched, thanks to the blood and sweat tirelessly poured by some incredibly cool dudes and dudettes i know :) Congrats guys :)

It's possibly one of the best broadcast programing trackers out there. It's supposed to get better though. Give it a whirl, register for free, share your thoughts in comments. If that "register" link doesn't work, just go here.

PhoneGnome Developer Community Launches

David Beckemeyer's PhoneGnome, a neat little box that makes your home phone actually useful, and gives you a slew of features phone companies typically charge you up to $30/month for, is launching its User-Contributed Library. It will feature a collection of tools built by enthusiastic developers leveraging PhoneGnome's open API, to get the most out of their little box.

The first contributor to the library is Dr. Mark Petrovic, with a little handheld phone interface to the Phone Gnome. In David's words:

This little demo app is an application of real-world convergence in the here (hear?) and now. I can use my mobile to access and control my home phone, to make calls using my PhoneGnome Internet plans, and to do stuff like send a voice message (click a contact, my phone rings, and I record a message into the phone and PhoneGnome sends it to that contact as a WAV attachment in an email). that way I can send a long message, say even when driving,
without getting into an accident trying to enter it into the phone keyboard.

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See also:

Alec Saunders

Phoneoy

Mod_Expires: Apache httpd

Victor just pointed me to Mod_Expires (apache 2.0, apache 1.3).

This looks like a very simple and effective way to be very cache-friendly for certain resources.

I've really gotta spend some time catching-up on all the mods available:

apache 2.0 mods
apache 1.3 mods

Wacky Weather Weekend

CBS says "wacky weather" to hit the southland.

It's about 2am, and the wind is blowing very cold. It's getting nippy inside. Decent insulation would be useful just about ... now.

Where's Dennis Quaid when we need him!@

GMail Gone Mobile

Point your phone's web browser to http://m.gmail.com/

Going to this URL from your desktop computer's web browser will likely yield some weird results. That's because you're not supposed to access it from there. So don't. I know you want to. But don't.

It works on my Treo 650.

Rocket Boom Poised to Launch First Ads

Amanda and and Andrew are hard at work.

BarCamp Los Angeles Wrap-Up

Tags: barcamp - barcampla

Beyond getting my quick presentation out of the way, i got to meet a lot of cool people doing very interesting things, and missed a lot of good ones too.

Check out the BarCamp LA Wiki for what people presented, and hopefully they'll be updating the grid with links to their material.

Sean Bonner and Jillian Tate from Blogging.la have been thoroughly covering the event.

We were privy to some really cool demos of home-media-stuff that Yahoo is currently working on. Some sort of healthy, usable, alternative to Windows Media Center.

I got to chat with Travis from redswoosh.net. They were around way before dijjer, and are offering a very interesting framework for distributed content delivery, aka P2P CDN. Which is how i should have framed my dijjer review in the first place, versus pitting it straight against BitTorrent, which really fits different use cases. Travis mentioned they'll have a Linux and Mac OS X client available soon. Big name media companies are already leveraging them. They've built a business around turning the companies that used to sue them for billions, into rabid customers, by building a compelling framework that would cater to their needs, and to the needs of anybody who wishes to distribute content without footing high bandwidth bills.

Kent Nichols showed us all about AskANinja.com (AAN), and gave a very good presentation on various strategies to build podcasts with zero budget and focused ideas. AAN is insanely funny.

Matt Homann asked very pertinent questions on building effective conferences.

Chris Messina showed-off Flock. It's not a web browser. And that just may well be a very good thing. Its goal is to treat your online as an event stream, and Flock is meant to harness it, organize it.

Steve Myers showed-off a really cool Java-3D Peer-to-Peer application that leverages JXTA.

Debi Jones and Patrick Neeman led a very convivial discussion about myspace's popularity and some of its key drivers. One interesting thought i took away was that, for a certain younger demographic, being able to offer a highly personalized online representation of themselves matters more than just about anything else. No matter how unusable the page may be. See the report that sparked the discussion.

Eric, in his Things Left Incomplete presentation, showed us interesting work he's doing with RDF to model relationships from graphs, into an RDF store, managed and queried by custom-built perl tools, and presented thru XSLT transformations.

I caught some stuff on the Viral Marketing session, I need to go over the materials again, as soon as they put it online :)

I also caught a glimpse of Ilya's Web 2.0 without the web presentation. I really like his analysis, resonates spot-on by me. I'm also voting his presentation the coolest presentation format. I love it. Very effective.

Jason Calcanis wasn't there. With his really cool pooch. And he didn't call bullsh*t on a lot of companies and people out there doing bad stuff. None of this happened. In fact, i'm not even writing about this. ;)

Ian C. Rogers did a great presentation on physics of Media 2.0. I need to start reading-up on XIPF, XSPF.

I hope I can get my grubby paws on the material for most presentations I completely missed >:|

Additional shouts out to:

Nicole Simon, aus Deuthschland, for so-rightfuly pointing out that U.S. companies ought to be mindful of their international audiences when sponsoring podcasts, and brainstorming about some potentially nifty ways to help podcasters be in closer touch to their audience. Nicole didn't get to do her official presentation but has engaged many of her fellow geeks in thought-provoking discussions. Thanks Neezee :D

Jason Cosper, for showing me JabPhone, and showing a few lucky participants who hadn't gotten sucked into Jason Calcanis's rant (that didn't happen), how to get free sh*t for writing about stuff you like.

Ori Neidich for having attained UberGeekdom at Digital Domain, and for being The Curator of this guy's baby.

James Gross and the folks from Feedster.

Net Neutrality Bill Introduced by Sen. Wyden

IP & Democracy tells us about Sen. Ron Wyden's (D-OR) Net Neutrality Bill:

Broadband providers will not be allowed to interfere with, block, degrade, alter, modify or change traffic on the Internet;

Sounds good to me! :)

The telco lobby machine is probably going nuts ... just ... about ... now :)

via

Barcamp Los Angeles

i'll be presenting some random stuff at Bar Camp Los Angeles:March 4th-5, at the Little Radio Warehouse 1218 Long Beach Ave Los Angeles, CA 90021