Up my street. The Guardian has a good review of the UK site Upmystreet.com, which allows people to seek information/services within a neighborhood by entering a postal code. The site has gone a step further by connecting people in within that locale as well. The ability to mix information seeking and interpersonal interaction seems like… Continue reading Up my street

beSpacific. – “beSpacific focuses on the expanding resources in the public and private sector related to law and technology news. Daily postings provide updates on issues including copyright, privacy, censorship, e-commerce, e-government and freedom of information.” “The weblog was launched to the public January 4, 2003. The archives cover articles back to September 2002.” (via… Continue reading beSpacific

Whither Fusebox? – Someone reminded me today that I promised to write up my experiences with converting my website from “plain” PHP to Fusebox. Yes, yes, yes. I will get to it. I'm kind of snowed right now, trying to finish the new macromedia.com (along with many other folks) so cut me some slack. I… Continue reading An Architect's View

Clay Shirky: “Two years and hundreds of millions of dollars later, FedEx pulled the plug on ZapMail, allowing it to vanish without a trace. And the story of ZapMail's collapse holds a crucial lesson for the telephone companies today.” Excellent. Clay has hit the nail right on the head; everybody's looking for the huge business… Continue reading Clay Shirky

Old British Newsreels Find New Life Online. British Pathe has put more than 3,500 hours of its old newsreels online, allowing users to receive low-resolution clips at no charge. By Jeffrey Selingo. [New York Times: Technology]

Plug and Replay: Cardless Kit Turns a PC Into a TV Recorder. Personal video recorders like TiVo are continuing their march into the living rooms of the land, but for TV fans who have nice big hard drives on their computers, the PC can become a personal video recorder itself. An all-in-one kit from Pinnacle… Continue reading Plug and Replay: Cardless Kit Turns a PC Into a TV Recorder

eWeek on Contribute: It works for them, even though there are definitely changes they'd like to see in the 1.0 version. But what caught my eye is how they noted a cycle, where Dreamweaver started off very approachable, but as it added more abilities it scared more people off, and how simple tools can be… Continue reading eWeek on Contribute:

Why are Safari and Sherlock two different apps? Great discussion over at Jason Kottke's place about looking at stuff in a browser and doing things in an application. I printed it out, read it, and just before I posted my own reply saw that he had already collected citations from other bloggers, so I guess… Continue reading Why are Safari and Sherlock two different apps?

Crossing the bridge of weak ties. Once upon a time (1998-1999) I wrote a book about software that could revolutionize how we communicate. That software, I thought, was the fully-deployed but poorly-appreciated NNTP newsreader and its companion server. Netscape had radically modernized these ancient tools, and Microsoft did a great job of cloning them. I… Continue reading Crossing the bridge of weak ties

Bob Frankston: VoIP is a simple idea and simply works. In the Times article, the Verizon spokesperson said that the Public Switched Telephone Network has worked well for many decades. That's true by comparison to the alternatives — no phone system at all. Now that we have alternatives the PSTN comes up wanting. [Tomalak's Realm]