Links: MS Portal Beta / iTunes Podcast Review
June 30, 2005
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Latest interface to the MS Start.com beta portal
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Apple have released a set of extensions for RSS that affects how podcasts will show up in the iTunes Music Store. The specification can be downloaded as a PDF from Apple’s site. Here’s a quick review of the elements they’ve specified.
Folksonomy/Tagging and Music
June 28, 2005
:sun TagCloud is a clever beta site that takes RSS or OPML feeds, and extracts del.icio.us style tags from them. You can then insert a couple lines of code into your web pages and it will retreive your tag cloud based on the feeds you specified.
I’ve put this code into the right hand panel, and also implemented into my blog page (for blog only tags).
I think the whole tagging/folksonomy thing is very interesting, particularly the possibility of implementing something similar to music discovery and buying (and probably by extension video and games). If you’ve ripped your own, or bought any music online, you’ll know that genre based heirarchies are OK at best. The problem is that music categorisation is too subjective, and can make finding music a little difficult.
My idea is developing plugins for the popular media players (iTunes, winamp, Real, Window MP), that will make it easy for you to tag your music/artists/albums/videos with whatever tags you like. This information is simultaneously posted back to a del.icio.us-like site to enable the aggregation of tags. The interface could be embedded within the media player itself, but also browsable from the web.
Local tagging will make it easy to generate interesting playlists, while the online copy will help with music discovery. This service would come with all the expected xml feeds, including the ability to re-import your tags/meta-data if your local version gets corrupted.
Ultimately the online service could then provide links thought to your preferred legal download store. Affiliation could be a source of revenue for the site.
Very interesting… I bet 3-6 months before someone puts out beta.
Links: TagCloud / Google Earth
June 28, 2005
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TagCloud is an automated Folksonomy tool. Essentially, TagCloud searches any number of RSS feeds you specify, extracts keywords from the content and lists them according to prevalence within the RSS feeds. Clicking on the tag’s link will display a list
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Google Earth puts a planet’s worth of imagery and other geographic information right on your desktop. View exotic locales like Maui and Paris as well as points of interest such as local restaurants, hospitals, schools, and more.
Command Line Interface for Goolge
June 27, 2005
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Google Command Line is a command-line based interface to Google’s services. With it you have fast and easy access to many Google services, such as the default search, the image search, the maps, the language tools, etc. All in the best geek way.
DRM in Europe Analysis
June 25, 2005
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The INformed DIalogue about Consumer Acceptability of DRM Solutions in Europe. The overall goal of INDICARE is to raise the awareness about consumer and user issues of Digital Rights Management (DRM) solutions.
Links: Portable Web Server / del.icio.us UI
June 24, 2005
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Just plug in your USB stick in any Windows ® computer. A complete Apache webserver with PHP and MySQL starts. And you can enjoy the full power of WOS (Webserver on Stick).
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del.icio.us direc.tor is a prototype for an alternative web-based rich UI for del.icio.us. It leverages the XML and XSL services of modern browsers to deliver a responsive interface for managing user accounts with a large number of records.
Links: Feynman Lectures / Portable Solaris
June 23, 2005
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A set of four priceless archival recordings from the University of Auckland (New Zealand) of the outstanding Nobel prize-winning physicist Richard Feynman – arguably the greatest science lecturer ever.
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Lightweight OpenSolaris based OS LiveCD that can be mounted onto a USB drive to boot a PC
Legal Bittorrent Music Portal
June 21, 2005
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A community directory of freely available music distributted via bittorrent. Members can upload their own music for distribution.
Links: Chris Anderson Interview / Polaroid-o-nizer
June 20, 2005
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Dr. Moira Gunn interviews Chris Anderson, editor-in-chief of Wired Magazine about what’s the hot new thing! Chris joins Moira to review the latest technology coming up at NextFest 2005 in Chicago.
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Cool online tool that allows you to turn any picture into a polaroid type snap, along with a comment.
Portable USB Linux Howto
June 19, 2005
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Slax Linux forum guide on putting Slax onto a USB drive and make it bootable.
