It seems that Blogger has finally added a much-needed feature as noted below. Perhaps if they had been more responsive sooner, I would still be over there blogging, but having experienced the other features that WordPress in combination with Flock provide, I'm afraid there is no turning back for me.
Dave Winer, an extremely creative but sometimes disruptive voice, over at Scripting News, has provided a fascinating look behind the scenes at Microsoft when he published two memos from the brass there, one from Bill Gates from October 30, 2005 and the other from Ray Ozzie, the Chief Technical Officer, from October 28, 2005, in which the two discuss the implications for their enormous company of a services-based and advertising-funded Internet economy.
Rising Concepts has made another tool, called Frapper, available for experimentation by the public. It provides the ability to visualize the location of people that belong to a community. Two of the communities to which I belong have already created such a map, and I have added myself to both of them. Both are in their early phases so the number of people who have added their location to the map is small right now, but both are growing quickly. One of the communities is made up of the people who use The Bat!, an email program, and the other is comprised of people who are experimenting with a new browser called Flock.
Update: Thanks to bd for straightening me out that this service is made available by Rising Concepts, not Google as I posted earlier. I guess I got caught up in the familiarity of the map and just «assumed» it was a Google service. It illustrates once again that «none of us is as smart as all of us.»
Last night as I sat here at the computer, engrossed as I often am in playing Freecell, I got a Skype IM from Tom Simpson, wishing me an early «Happy Birthday,» just so he didn't forget to do so tomorrow, which actually is the day. I mentioned to him that I had heard from James Prudente, the author of Mixcast Live, and that James was having some problems with the company that was hosting the media for his BigFeeder.com site. Those problems weren't insignificant, because the hosting company has gone belly up, but James is working feverishly to make new arrangements. Tom and I were both beta testers for Mixcast Live so he knew James.
In noting that November 2005 is the 15th anniversary of the very first web page, James Boyle in his Financial Times article, Web's never-to-be-repeated revolution says, «... there are three things that we need to understand about the web. First, it is more amazing than we think. Second, the conjunction of technologies that made the web successful was extremely unlikely. Third, we probably would not create it, or any technology like it, today. In fact, we would be more likely to cripple it, or declare it illegal.» Mr. Boyle is professor of law at Duke Law School, a co-founder of the Centre for the Study of the Public Domain and a board member of Creative Commons.
Not long ago, when I was still publishing my blog on Blogger, I had a visitor to my site by the name of Colm Smyth, an Irish software developer and blogger, who was randomly making the rounds of blogs by clicking on the «Next Blog» button on Blogger. Using that button is an excellent way to discover blogs that you'd never find otherwise. But Colm was doing it as a kind of self-imposed penance obligation (word changed based on Colm's feedback). His comment on one of my entries mentioned that «... because I've had the chance to experience the lack of any real response to my blog, I've made a pact with myself - I will read and leave comments on two new blogs for every time I post.» That personal commitment on his part impressed me, so I visited his blog to find out who he was and, because the blog was relatively new, I went back to the beginning of it and read forward to the most recent post as of that point. I was impressed! Impressed enough to bookmark his blog for exploration periodically.
On November 1st, Connor, my grandson, became six months old. His dad, Mike, is doing a good job of photographing him on the first day of each month, and Connor is in the running for one of the most photographed babies in history. A friend, Brian Parton, recently commented that «Connor seems to be really comfortable with being photographed.» It's not surprising.
Over the weekend, I spent a lot of time talking with Shannon Kamer by Skype. He lives only a couple of counties away from me here in Tennessee, but Skype provides a hands-free way for us to talk while we are exploring things on the Internet together. He was helping me set up WAMP5 on my system so that I could host a shadow version of my WordPress blog here on my own computer. As always, his help was invaluable in getting things to work properly. It was just the kind of hand-holding everyone can use when they are trying something new.
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