Saturday, August 14, 2004

Netflix is great. And a few months ago we had the intuition that there's something they could do with RSS. Today the idea is well formed, and there's no question, there's a lot they could do, and it doesn't stop with RSS. We are a community. Some of us belong to Netflix. What movies have we rented that we like. Who else watched Traffic in the last few weeks and what did you think of it? What's in your queue? What's in our aggregated queue? Just the beginning. BTW since Microsoft did a deal with Blockbuster, why hasn't Yahoo done a deal with Netflix?  

NY Times: Florida Digs Out as Mighty Storm Rips Northward. 

A picture I shot of Scoble last week, enhanced.  

Insight: Once you become a regular listener of an Internet radio program, like The Gillmor Gang, or Adam Curry, or even my own Morning Coffee Notes, and if you have an iPod or equivalent, you immediately want to be able to dock your iPod and subscribe to the channels, so you have to do absolutely nothing to have the latest installments of your shows pre-loaded on the iPod as soon as they're available. Adam has been saying this for a while, but until I became a subscriber myself, I didn't get fully get how important this is. The practices we have developed for reading weblogs and newspapers in our Web browsers apply equally to disconnected listening on the iPod.  

Rod Kratochwill recommends Acoustica MP3 Audio Mixer.  

File not found. "The requested URL / was not found on this server." 

Florida gets all the publicity, but Wisconsin is a swing state too. 

Rogers Cadenhead: "Welcome to St Augustine, Charley." 

Adam Curry has a new audio blogging channel. Listening to today's installment. Adam is looking for Mac software that allows him to mix various sources, music and voice. I want that for Windows. Then I would include snips of the song of the day. I know the RIAA will probably sue me, so then maybe I'll just move to Europe and we can set up the Belgium Internet Audio Studio. "Just boil it in a big pot of scum." Heh. It's great to hear Adam's show. It's like tabloid audio from the blogosphere. Nice. "Living in the future." 

Try searching for Adam Curry on Google, and look at all the things they think I might mean! Wow. How did they do that? Strage and coooool.  

As I watch the Atom people loop around and around on dates, how many should there be, which if any should be required, I keep wanting to stick my neck around the door, like Helen Hunt's mama in As Good As It Gets: "There is no answer, we wish there were, but there isn't." And with that said, suggest that they talk to a publisher or two and ask them the question. Just putting it in terms that make sense to a publisher may cause the answer to magically appear before their eyes.  

Ed Cone: "Start your own blog, link to me and tell me that I'm an idiot." 

Business Week interviews Howard Rheingold. 

Airport security and laptops 

Every time you go through security you take out all the crap from your pockets, take off your shoes (hope you're wearing clean socks), take off the coat, and take out the laptop. Then it all goes in those plastic buckets and then on the screener belt, and comes out the other end, bumping down a short incline and slamming into a steel wall at moderate speed. Now your shoes were built to take this kind of abuse, but what about the laptop?

The ThinkPad, which has a reputation for durability has developed some kind of fracture, where my left wrist rests as I write, right above the slots for PCMCIA cards which are almost obsolete now that USB has become the universal connecting standard. Perhaps this is a weak spot in the current design of laptops? Maybe laptop designers need to build more rugged machines now that the TSA has singled them out for special treatment? Anyway, it's just a matter of time before my laptop is totally broken, it seems. I wonder if anyone else who travels by air with a laptop (seemingly everyone who travels these days) shares this concern?