DISQUS

I suppose you can't really say RSS feeds aren't important because they're what enables all of this Friendfeed stuff to happen.

But at any rate, to answer your questions, I'm still using individual RSS feeds. I don't use Friendfeed and I'm not sure I really see the need for it - I like everything (blogs, twitter, Flickr) to stay in their own separate boxes myself. And I'm not that concerned if I only read one aspect of someone's output and miss out on all of the others.

Sorry Scoble, I have to join the choir. (You can have loads of fun making fun of us if Palm succeeds.)

What, indeed, are you smoking?

The simple fact is that Palm hasn't had a good idea since the PalmPilot. (The Treo was Handspring's idea.)

This MIGHT be a great idea - I don't know yet - but to assume that Palm has the tech expertise, the management, or the distributors to pull off a real success here is ridiculous.

If this came out three years ago, it would have changed everything. Now Apple has the inertia and the fashion factor. Palm's best hope at this point is to be bought out by Motorola...

Kathy is right, or at least in an ideal world she should be - but smoothspan has a point. I've noticed the same thing in music-making magazines (Guitar Player, Electronic Musician, etc.) - there seems to be a very clear rift between the magazines about gear (which spend very little time helping you learn better technique) and the ones about playing (which spend very little time talking about gear.)

Kathy's point is proven by a select few magazines that straddle the line between gear and learning, like Keyboard magazine. These are definitely some of the best in the category. Unfortunately, I've watched many of them shrink over the years and they're clearly having trouble finding advertisers, while the "nothing but gear" magazines seem to be doing just fine.

I'm not sure what that says about advertising or the attitudes of the magazine-buying public, but it's not good news for content producers...

Robert, I think you're missing the big picture of JPG magazine here.

The real trouble has nothing to do with the economy. It all started a year or so ago when Derek Powazek and Heather Champ (the founders) left the company:

http://powazek.com/posts/534

At that moment JPG lost its authentic voice and lost my subscription. The quality of the editing went down IMHO after that. (And there WAS editing - that's what made it more interesting than a purely crowdsourced thing like Flickr). It could have survived after that but the new owners would have had to build a great reputation, a community, and relationships with advertisers from square one, and obviously they failed to do so.

If the Internet is killing trade shows - and it is! - it started years ago, long before anyone cared about blogs or online video.

I went to COMDEX every year until the Internet killed it. Even Apple used to show off products there - I remember seeing the Newton for the first time at COMDEX 92 or so.

Now Apple can hold a small press conference and get nationwide media coverage, and even smaller companies have lots of options for getting exposure. Even in the days before Youtube and blogs, a major publisher I worked with decided not to exhibit at COMDEX because the cost was too high for the return compared with online advertising.

Same with Apple - they dropped out of COMDEX a few years before it crashed and burned, and it wasn't because of blogs or online video or social networks. It was because of the Wall Street Journal and Wired magazine and the fact that people could load Apple's website any time they wanted news from Apple.

Just because Facebook and Qik are the cool things now doesn't mean they started this trend. It's been going on for probably 10 years, and new forms of online expression just speed it up.

Color me underwhelmed.

I think you'd call me passionate - I've submitted bugs for Firefox, I've written plug-ins for it, and my particular installation is quite customized. Heck, I've even written books about it. But I don't (yet) see a use for Ubiquity.

Why? Because it doesn't solve any problems I need solved.

For example, the first two examples they give in the instructions are searching Wikipedia and searching Google for a selection. The latter is already built into Firefox and requires nothing but a right click, and the former is easily solved with a search keyword. I've taken it a step further and have Quicksilver set up so I can click shift-control-W to pop up a Wikipedia search box, even if I'm not currently in a browser.

I'm sure there are people out there who use Activewords for exactly the same thing and wonder why they'd need a browser command line.

I realize it has potential far beyond that, but the thing about us passionate users is that we don't use something for its own sake. We use it because it makes our life better, or more efficient. Eventually I'll have a problem that Ubiquity is the perfect solution for, but for now it's just yet another unnecessary command line with a confusing muddle of beta-quality features attached.

Ubiquity looks a lot like a browser-specific version of Quicksilver, which is intriguing, but I'm hoping the real Quicksilver will continue to evolve so I don't need a tool like Ubiquity that is tied to a particular browser.

Wordabble is my favorite iPhone game right now! Thanks!

A couple of suggestions:

1. It would be great if I could view the high score list within the game rather than opening a web browser.

2. I'd like to be able to see the words I missed - especially the 8/7/6 letter ones. Maybe that could be added to the high score web page.

At any rate, thanks for a great game!

This is probably the obvious response, but i've been getting a lot out of "Blues You can Use" by John Ganapes.

It starts with the boxes, but goes on from there (and there are two sequel books) - what I like best is the example sheet music (and CD track) for each section, which is always something more than simple scales.

I know what you mean, but some instructional videos are better than others. The ones that are all done in extreme slow motion with lots of talk of "Now put your third finger on the fourth fret of the sixth string" never fail to confuse me.

On the other hand, I've been liking the ones from iVideoSongs - they do the song in short, manageable chunks, and they display the tab before they start showing you.

I try to play it with the tab, then watch the video to get the subtleties (timing, bends, muting, etc) and it works pretty well.

Those ones aren't free, of course. There are lots of free ones on Youtube and a few are good - but I do tend to learn with the tab and then watch the video to further my understanding...

Thanks for the SRV video. Very very nice.

Merry Christmas Robert!

No.

Thanks for that, it was quite entertaining. It's a testament to the expressiveness of the French accent that when you quoted "it's almost modern" it didn't sound much like an insult, but when he said it... Ouch indeed.

BUY YOUR BLOG? Are you telling me Amazon's going to charge a fee to subscribe to an RSS feed?

That seems crazy to me. Frankly I'm surprised I haven't seen an angry Scoble rant on the subject. Bloggers have been freely exchanging information with RSS for years and Amazon wants to profit from that?

I don't really use twitter, and I have not noticed any particular lack of posts in the 150-odd blogs I read as a result of twitter or anything else.

If some of the "noise" of blogging is moving to twitter, though, I'll gladly enjoy the less noisy blogs.

The fact that more people here are commenting on your media (a 24-minute long video in two parts) than on your message should tell you something very important.

I, too, don't have the time or the inclination to watch you spend 24 minutes getting to the point, but I'd love to read an essay, or even watch a tightly-edited 2-minute video.

Also, I don't use Facebook and you can't make me. :)

I had a "blog" in 1995.

At the time Compuserve was threatening to charge for licensing to use the GIF format. This was becoming a controversial issue, and I set up a website to link to the latest happenings on the issue.

The site had a reverse-chronological list on the front pages, with some titles linking to separate pages and others being direct links elsewhere. It was updated several times a day, and I got a bunch of calls from journalists - I was interviewed twice on the subject by British magazines.

Sadly, it wasn't called a "blog" or a "weblog" and was hand-edited HTML, and it didn't stay online for long, so I can't prove it ever existed. But it wasn't the first page of its kind anyway.

Bloggers too often think they invented the Web, but I've had sites online since 1994 (complete with reverse-chronological "what's new" pages) so I still think of blogs as a relatively recent phenomenon.

Frankly, if I were the first blogger, I wouldn't take credit for it either - there's a lot about what blogs have become that I wouldn't be proud of at all.

Congrats!

Somehow I picture the doctor saying "It's a blogger."

Slow news day... That must be why I saw a picture of your face on The Showbiz Show with David Spade last night. (He was doing some kind of rant about how Youtube and video blogging annoy him.)

Sounds great in theory, but ask any ad agency and they'll laugh at the idea. People don't click on ads during videos... period.

Think about it - if you click the link, the video stops playing. And your eyes aren't over there anyway.

Video ads in videos (before or after content) create a captive audience. Text ads can never compete with that.

I wouldn't use that badge or code in its current form, because I disagree with a few minor points, and because the "Civility Enforced" badge has an unpleasant vibe to me.

Also, this whole thing seems to me a solution in search of a problem. I think most weblogs and forums are perfectly able to establish their own codes of conduct, either formally or informally, badges or not.

Would the whole Kathy Sierra incident have been different if the site in question had an "Anything Goes" badge? I don't think so.

I'm posting this anonymously because I have worked with O'Reilly and probably will again, and I too feel pressure. How would taking away this anonymity help?

Laura and I will be in Austin Thursday through Thursday. We might have a car. Would love BBQ but a 35 mile drive might be a stretch.

Iron Works is very nice and walking distance from the convention center... It does get busy, though.

I realize nobody will read this far down, but I have to put in my two cents anyway.

I run a small gadget weblog with a staff of three writers. Am I surprised when Engadget doesn't link to me? No. I'll be surprised when (and if) they DO link to me. Thus it's hard to be sympathetic when an A-list blogger complains that they didn't link to him.

Heck, try to be noticed by Engadget as a Z-list blog. I even wrote a gadget article that was on the front page of Digg and was covered by CNET, several radio stations, and two major newspapers - no love from Engadget. But then it wasn't really the sort of thing they usually like, so I'm not surprised.

Engadget has the right to their own editorial decisions. I don't agree with most of them - that's why I don't read Engadget regularly, and why I turned down a chance to write for them - but if they don't link to me, or don't link to you, or don't link to Slashdot, it's their decision and I respect that.

One more thing... I'd personally rather see a press release about Intel's new process than watch a video tour and interview with the engineers. The reason? I can get the facts from the press release in 10 seconds and then move on to something more interesting. I'm very much into Gadgets, and I use tons of Intel's products, but I'm not really interested in seeing them being made any more than in seeing a video of the camshafts for my new Volkswagen being made. Just let me test drive the car...

P.S. A suggestion for next year - if there's any chance of having Bloghaus at one of the hotels closer to the show (Hilton, Venetian, Treasure Island, Mirage) it would help get more people there - we would have stopped by and used it much more if it hadn't required getting in the car and dealing with parking.

Thanks again for Bloghaus! We had fun there and I wish we'd had time to come by more. Also enjoyed seeing some of the same folks (and Robert) at the party at the Atomic Testing Museum.

We were all very impressed at how Bloghaus was set up, from the hotel staff's participation to the video games and fast Internet. Well done - better than CES's official press rooms, in fact...

Thanks for the hospitality and the great food at Bloghaus! We'll be back tomorrow to take advantage of the bandwidth.