December 2006

And all this time I'd thought that the Silicon Valley Asshole's Society was just a list of people in my head, but as Marc Canter wrote in a recent blog entry, such a thing existed, and he was one of the co-founders along with Stewart Alsop and Dave Winer. Better still, in a move that only a supreme asshole would make, Jean-Louis Gassee came to the first meeting/party and proposed that they kick out Canter.

I imagine that the first meeting of a club of such bloodyminded personalities must've gone something like this:

A “Legion of Doom” meeting, as depicted by Seanbaby. Click to see the source.

Unlike the Legion of Doom, pictured above, I doubt that the Silicon Valley Asshole's Society had any women members. I think this is one of those cases where there wouldn't be much hue and cry over a lack of diversity.

Links:

• Marc Canter's blog entry on the Silicon Valley Asshole's Society
• SFGate story on the society

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I got a sense of deja vu when I saw that the first item in Read/Write Web’s Predictions for 2007 was “RSS will go mainstream in a big way. A quick look back to their predictions for 2006 told me why: they predicted roughly the same thing — albeit more catiously — that RSS would “inch towards the mainstream”.

That still didn’t explain that nagging feeling that I’d heard exuberant RSS predictions before. All it took was a little Googling to find that this is at least the fourth year in which pundits predicted “RSS is gonna explode in the coming year!” Case in point…

2004

• Gwen Harris: “RSS will go mainstream in 2004.”
• Steve Gillmor: Look Out, Outlook — RSS Ahead in 2004
• Jeremy Zawodny: In 2004, RSS is going to go mainstream–and it’s going to happen in a big way.

2005

• Law Practice Today: What’s BIG in 2005? RSS, Desktop Search, and Collaboration Tools
• Blogs and RSS feeds will become the leading vehicles for providing clients with the information they want.
• Robert Scoble: RSS will go mainstream. Why? Cause it’ll be part of the browsing experience.

2006

• Randy Charles Morin: And here’s the cake. RSS-based appliances will make there [sic] debut. Recipes on fridges, microwaves, ovens and through the roof from there.
• Press-feed.com: Now that major news sites such as USAToday.com and NYTimes.com are seeing double-digit monthly leaps in RSS-usership, RSS readership will be fully mainstream by 2006.
• Add Me.com: In 2005, marketers were told in no uncertain terms, if they are not using syndication and RSS, they will not survive. Well, they have one more chance to get it right. In 2006, marketers must use RSS as an alternative communication channel. It will no longer be cutting edge, it will be a must to survive.
• Jason Calacanis: Half of the indie RSS readers will shut down, go out of business, or just stagnate as the major portals take over this space. / No RSS readers will be bought in 2006 because every major buyer has already built one.
• USA Today: RSS will become the biggest thing since …

  The Web browser? Beanie Babies? Salt? Hard to say yet. But there is no shortage of effusiveness about Real Simple Syndication, or RSS — software code used to deliver news stories, blogs and other items via the Internet to your computer screen on readers such as My Yahoo or NewsGator. The prediction is that RSS will become the primary way everyone accesses stuff on the Web.

  “We believe 2006 is the year of RSS,” says Mark Carlson, CEO of RSS company SimpleFeed. Adds author and consultant Steve Waite, “RSS is likely to take off in 2006 and could well displace e-mail as the killer app on the Net.”

Perhaps I should start a betting pool on when the pundits will stop predicting that RSS will go mainstream next year. I’ll put money down on 2009. Any takers?

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Work these days has been keeping both me and George busy, but the Blogger's Credo (“No posting, no world domination!”) tugs at our souls, telling us to keep blogging. There'll be some of the usual editorializing and smart-ass commnetary later on today, but in the meantime, here are the news tidbits that have caught our interest:

• New York Times – Offline Involuntarily: It used to be that finding a hotel that offered high-speed internet connection in your hotel room was a rare treat. Nowadays, we want WiFi in our rooms. The tech may have changed, but the problem remains the same: how do we get a solid, consistent, reliable connection at our hotels, and what are they doing to make the experience better?
• Top 10 Apps for Laptop-Toting Mac Users: I do most of my work on my trusty 12″ 1.33GHz G4 PowerBook, just like the author of this piece who recommends: Sidetrack, Menufela, Stoplight, Letterbox, Virtue Desktops, QuickSilver, CornerClick, Sidenote, fKeys and Noise.
• Time Declares the PlayStation 3 a Bust: It's incredibly expensive, damned close to unavailable, has very few titles — all of which are “launch titles”, which are notorious for not being terribly representative to the machine's capabilities, and it's been beaten on the “fun” front by the Wii and the “hardcore gamer” front by the XBox 360. Gee, where do I sign up for one?
• Natali Del Conte's Departure from TechCrunch: Was it boorish comments from the boys' club that is high-tech or was she too thin-skinned to play in the blogosphere? Various blogs weign in: Deep Jive Interests, Shelley Powers, Down the Avenue and of course, Valleywag.
• Google's “Site Status” Tool: It's a quick little tool that lets you enter your site's URL: it tells you whether pages from your site are in Google's index and when Google last indexed your site. The results page also tells you that “you could find out more if you used Google Webmaster Tools…”
• Opera's Wii browser: A trial version for the Wii is expected to be available this Friday, and Opera's put out a comic to announce it.

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Okay, maybe the joke in the title is “phoned in”, but it's late and I'm tired.

The quick summary: without much fanfare, Google has deprecated its SOAP API for search. The API will still be available to current users, but they've stopped issuing API keys for the SOAP service, and updates to the SOAP API have stopped. They're encouraging developers to switch to their Ajax API, which isn't as flexible in both the technological or terms-of-use senses.

Developers looking for a search engine with a decent API should take a look at Yahoo!'s Search API, which is not only available for use, but also REST based (which is a great deal less painful to code for).

Link

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Scienceline answers the question “How do motion-sensing videogame controllers work?” In the case of the Wiimote, it's a combination of accelerometers…

…thinner than a penny, small enough to fit twelve on a postage stamp, and sell for under $6 a piece. They can accurately measure forces more than three times stronger than the pull of gravity in three directions – up and down, side to side, and forward and back. The chips also use gravity to determine the orientation of the controller, whether you’re holding it vertically like a golf club or horizontally like a gun.

…coupled with an infrared sensor placed by the television that determined where on the screen the Wiimote is being pointed.

The article points out that only small motions are necessary to use the Wiimote, but most people like to swing it as if it were a real weapon or sports gear:

Click to see the comic at full size on its original page.

Links:

• Scienceline: How Do Motion-Sensing Video Game Controllers Work?
• Penny Arcade comic on Wiimote playing styles

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Here's a LinuxWorld list of Web 2.0 APIs that “you can really use”. APIs that are “are simply formalized interfaces to a user-centric application” — such as the Flickr API — don't count in this list. APIs in this list are supposedly for “real programming problems, either in Web applications or in desktop or server software”.

Well, while this article isn't going to dispel the perception that Linux developers have the same love/hate relationship with their clientele that drug pushers do, the APIs listed are worth looking into. They are:

1. Google Maps API
2. Geonames.org
3. OpenID
4. Amazon S3
5. Amazon EC2
6. Atom API
7. OpenSearch
8. Open Media Profile
9. MediaWiki API
10. JS-Kit

Link

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