Blogcount asks:
How big is the blogosphere? What is its shape, color, true nature? Blogcount catalogs efforts to answer these questions. We collect and organize the best reports and analyses on this subject.
So how big is the blogsphere?
Blogcount says 2.4 to 2.9 million weblogs
Other fun facts:
The Berkman Center is redoing their home page (I think this may still be a prototype) so it's more blog-like.
They also have an RSS feed.
...via Scripting News
Phil Windley has an interesting post on Why IT doesn't Matter Anymore: Living in the Red Zone. The 'red zone' includes those projects that are both expensive and don't provide any competitive advantage. Things like support, reliability, security, local area networks:
The tough thing about living in the red zone is that its not sexy. Its hard to do and no one's going to come up to you and say "Hey, I noticed the computers didn't go down again! What to go!" Its thankless work and it difficult to convince people to spend much on it. The goal is achieve operational excellence and do it as efficiently (read cheaply) as possible. Focusing on it requires different priorities, a different culture and organizational changes. But "red zone" work is the foundation on which everything else is built and success in other areas of the business is unlikely to come if its ignored.
The New York Timestalks about the rise of the corporate blog:
For companies and executives, blogs provide a way to talk informally to customers, vendors and employees. But the so-called blogosphere can also be a minefield. Saying the wrong thing or revealing trade secrets could come back to haunt a company. And public companies need to worry about disclosure rules.
Via Dave Winer, the BBC now has 68 new RSS feeds covering all their News indexes.
According to Arab News, Saudi students can now receive their exam results via SMS.
The Technology Source at Michigan Virtual University has a good article on RSS - The Next Killer App For Education:
Imagine having the news that interests you automatically delivered to your desktop, or being alerted to updates on your favorite Web sites without visiting them first. Picture yourself as a news provider to specific people who share your interests or just appreciate your commentary. Most commonly used to support the publication of weblogs and Internet news sites, RSS is an important development that promises to have a substantial impact on the world of education.
CityCynic.com has an NYU Weblog Portal which lists present and past NYU students who have weblogs.
...via Scripting News
The Shifted Librarian quotes Andy Rhinehart of GoUpstate.com on use of their RSS feeds:
"From March 1-May 31, users accessing our RSS feeds accounted for 7.97 percent of our total traffic. This doesn't include people coming to the site from the various blogs who used the RSS items, but just the number of times our feeds were accessed.
Samsung has released a cell phone with a TV tuner:
- The phone receives TV broadcasts over public access channels. - Tiny, high-performance antenna provides clear pictures and sound. - Channels can be automatically selected and the screen can be viewed either horizontally or vertically. - Up to 50 frames of TV broadcast can be captured and downloaded for use as a screen background image.
Japan Media Review has started a Keitai Log:
an occasional Web diary by a group of Tokyo college students who are researching the changing role of cell phones -- keitai -- in Japanese society. Check in every week for new musings from our keitai team reporting in from the wireless capital of the world.
In Japan nearly everyone has a cell phone and there is evidence that young people particularly are more literate with cell phones than computers.
...via Gizmodo
Gizmodo, the gadgets weblog presents a glimpse of what it would have been like in 1983.
...via BoingBoing
I gave a presentation on weblogs, RSS, and news aggregation at the CYFAR (Children, Youth and Families at Risk) conference in Minneapolis, MN on May 14, 2003.
I created a weblog for the presentation that not only included information from my Powerpoint slides for the presentation but also additional information for attendees to reference later. This was also a hands-on session and I asked people to blog their impressions of weblogs or another presentation at the conference.
Schools are using eBay to sell surplus inventory:
Unloading everything from vacant buildings to old buses and even fire trucks, schools and other municipalities have found that the internet greatly increases the number of potential buyers who can bid on used equipment and%u2014in some cases%u2014is more cost-effective than holding a local charity auction.
David Pogue asks the important question:
Do Nokia executives actually use Nokia cellphones? If they did, they would soon realize that turning a cellphone's ringer off - every time they walk into a movie, seminar, meeting or bedroom - is an important and common function. Perversely, Nokia buries this function in a menu that requires four button presses on two different sides of the phone.And if that doesn't sound so bad, you've obviously never sat in church and had your pocket suddenly emit "Ride of the Valkyries" at 90 decibels.
Pogue asked cellular carriers to send him their simplest phones. None are all around winners (too many steps to turn off the ringer, small keys, etc.) but he rates the Kyocera 2325 as the simplest of the simple phones.
Danish scientists are adapting face-recognition software to create a weed-killing robot. Theoretically, the robot would target weeds and not crops, delivering herbicide or, eventually, pulling the weeds automatically.
The current state of face-recognition software, issues of terrain and weather, and adapting for different weed environments may make this a fairly long-term project.
The Milwaukee Journal Sentinal reports that the city of Milwaukee is establishing wireless access in two city parks:
City Hall is setting up high-speed wireless networks in Pere Marquette Park and Cathedral Square Park that will let anyone with a properly equipped computer or handheld device connect to the Internet. The networks should be up and running this summer, possibly this month.
The article also cites a security expert :
"It's a huge security risk. Whenever you use a wireless network, you are opening yourself up to the information you're sending being snatched out of the air by someone else," he said.Sherwood said buying items over the Internet or checking an online bank account using a wireless network would be a bad idea.
Cory Doctorow comments at BoingBoing:
Sherwood is just sowing FUD here. First of all, anyone with a cablemodem connection is in the same boat as a wireless user: your communications can be captured by anyone in your neighborhood and read. This is also true if you're using the DSL in your hotel room -- and the connection in your office is sniffable by your sysadmins.
The most glaring inaccuracy is the business about buying stuff and checking a bank-balance over a wireless link. The security of this activity is determined by the presence or absence of an SSL connection. If your bank uses SSL (and all of them do), then you're (relatively) secure. If your e-tailer uses SSL (and nearly all of them do), then you're (relatively) secure. And if they don't, you shouldn't be doing business with them in the first place: sending sensitive information in cleartext over the Internet is insecure regardless of your connection.
Jonathon Peterson at Corante talks about using blogs for project management:
While I'm sure there are companies that are running project dashboard systems that enable workflow, source control, polls and discussions, etc. but I'd be willing to bet that blogs RSS trackback pings Google would be significantly more powerful than whatever is currently in use in 95% of IT organizations.
The Chronicle reports on scholarly blogging:
In one form or another, that question inevitably arises in conversations with scholars who have taken up the habit of writing Web logs, or Some have started blogging in order to muse aloud about their research. Others want to polish their chops at opinion-writing for nonacademic audiences. Still others have more urgent and personal reasons. ("The black dogs of depression are snarling at my feet," reads the first entry of one scholar's blog.)
Scientific American describes self-repairing computers
Our group of research collaborators at Stanford University and the University of California at Berkeley has taken a new tack, by accepting that computer failure and human operator error are facts of life. Rather than trying to eliminate computer crashes--probably an impossible task--our team concentrates on designing systems that recover rapidly when mishaps do occur. We call our approach recovery-oriented computing (ROC).
They began by looking at why computers fail. They found: We were a bit surprised to find out that operator error was a leading cause of system problems. Traditional efforts to boost the dependability of software and hardware have for the most part overlooked the possibility of human mistakes, yet in many cases operators' miscues accounted for more downtime than any other cause
Given this, they are exploring ROC computer design with the principles of speedy recovery, better tools for pinpointing problems when they do occur, support for 'undo' functions for all programs, and the ability to inject test errors
