Nov 19, 2006 | blog
Ok, so I’m trying out this service/plugin called Snap Preview Anywhere. Snap is a search engine, but their unique twist is to generate live previews of the search results. So before you click on a given search result, yo can view the preview to decide if you want to visit the site, or move on to the next result.
The Snap Preview Anywhere plugin that I’ve enable here on my blog generates a preview of the site that a given link is for. Simply hover over the link and a preview will appear.
I have noticed that many times this takes a second or two – so my question to you is:
Does the delay in the Snap Preview bother you, how bad is the delay when you’re simply trying to browse?
Nov 14, 2006 | blog
I’ve blogged before about Avvenu, the on line storage provider. Well, if you’re a current customer, you should be getting an email from them about an upgraded service offering available to you. It is a pay-for service but upgrades your account to 5GB.
Avvenu is unique in that they allow you to access your home computer hard drive in addition to online storage. I’ve been using them for some time and enjoy the ability to get to files on my home computer.
However, I use another service for my on line storage. Currently I’m actually using AOL’s XDrive for my data. Personally, I’m not fond of paying large sums each month for a service – it has to be a really good service, or something that I can’t live without. I can live without access to my home computer, but not to my on line files.
If I can access my files on the ‘net for free, why would I pay $20 or $30 per month for the privilege? If I have to pay, Amazon’s S3 service is looking more and more appealing to me.
I’ll take a closer look at this new Avvenu service later, but at first blush it doesn’t appeal to me.
Log into your Avvenu account for more details.
Nov 9, 2006 | blog
Om Malik has a great piece today over on GigaOM. He points out that Microsoft has fallen to the Mafia tactics of the music industry and will pay $1 for every Zune device to Universal Music Group (UMG). At one point, he wonders if this would have happened at Microsoft’s height of dominance.
In this battle of the monopolists, Microsoft blinked and decided to pay up. (Would this have happened a few years ago, when Microsoft ruled the technology planet?) Remember how Jobs stood up to these music industry bullies. Today they are asking $1 a device; what is to stop them from asking for say $10 or $20 per device down the road. This shakedown should result in a serious investigation into the music industry cartel.
The music industry has really lost its marbles, they do believe that their customers are crooks, they do believe that they are being cheated by “fair use”, they do believe that they should get a payment every time one of their songs is heard by anyone anywhere from any media source.
The sad fact is that these once-powerful media companies are crying like children who dropped their candy, and it is obscuring their ability to logically think and plan out a relevant business model in the “new media” world.
Link to GigaOM » Microsoft, Zune & The Music Mafia
Technorati tags: Music Mafia, Microsoft Zune, Universal Music Group
Oct 29, 2006 | blog
It is and it isn’t. This weekend, I’ve gone back to several services that I had joined many months ago to check them out again. Namely ClipMarks, NewsVine and del.icio.us. The only one I had found useful at the time was ClipMarks, and it mainly for a storage place for things I found interesting on the Internet. One problem I had with these services was that I didn’t “get” them. They were interesting, but didn’t click for me at the time.
Now I think I get it. I’ve been posting items to all these services, and integrating the feeds and information back here into my blog. The interesting thing is I finally went from my “view” of the service to the front page again and found all the content from other users streaming in. That was the part I had been missing, these services (and others of course) are best consumed when you view all the incoming streams of information – not just our individual contributions.
There is the metaphor of my problem with technology. Ever since I’ve been interested in technology, I’ve worked hard to understand how things work, how the software works, how it interacts with other software/services/hardware. So much so that my career long ago had taken a turn to follow that – I’m a tech-geek to the core. What I failed to understand was how these services where intended to be used.
Well now that I’ve figured out the basics, I’m going to embrace them along with the rest of my Web 2.0 services that I use. Neat stuff, but I’ll keep working to understand how their used in new and better ways.
BTW, here are my pages at these sites:
Oct 28, 2006 | blog
So now I hear Pluck is shutting down their RSS Reader(s). While I gave up Pluck and other client-side news aggregators in early September, I had used Pluck for a long time.
The rich feature set, ability to share my feed list automatically between multiple computers and browsers was its biggest draw. Also, I really enjoyed the format, where it plugged into your favorite browser as a side-panel where you could scroll through the list of feeds and click away reading easily through each category.
Since I’ve moved to Google Reader, I won’t be moving back to a client-side aggregator. I’ve got my feeds in one spot that I can access from practically anywhere. The “River of news” views, either by category or by date, has won be over. The ability to quickly scan the most recent conversations is a huge productivity boost.
Still I will miss Pluck, and I have to apologize to everyone that I recommended it to as they will now need to move on to another reader. My latest recommendation on that? Google Reader of course!
Via Read/Write Web – Pluck RSS Reader Shuts Down: Consumer RSS Readers a Dead Market Now
