Nasa via Konfabulator?

Massimo Morelli segnala una bellissima foto…

Bellissima foto.

Bellissima foto (beh, non è proprio una foto) della terra. Non la copio perché è troppo grossa. Andatevela a vedere. Via [Jinn of Quality and Risk]

[Massimo Morelli: Momoblog]

…che aveva già fatto capolino sul mio desktop qualche giorno fa dal modulo Earth Observatory di Konfabulator

Apple e fette di mercato

Come ci racconta Cristian Vidmar

A picture named mac22pie.gifIs blogging a mac-user-only thing? Certainly not, but it's funny to notice that 22% of my weblog's overall visitors are mac users (red slice in the pie) where IDC says that Apple has a 3.5% marketshare in the U.S. for year 2002, and below that worldwide. [CristianVidmar.com]

sembra che l'utilizzo del Mac su Internet sia molto più diffuso della sua effettiva fetta di mercato. Siamo alle solite: uso Winzozz perché è uno standard de facto ma vorrei usare Mac. Mah, fate come volete, io ho sempre usato direttamente Mac. 🙂

1 april Safari Fool

Safari to Drop Table Support.

The next release of Safari will be fully embracing Web standards by dropping all support for tables. From now on, any pages that use tables will cause Safari to play a very loud raspberry sound and refuse to display the page.

[Surfin' Safari]

E io che mi auguravo che fosse vero…

Daily time for blogging [en]

The problem of daily time devote to weblogging is finally exploded not only in my mind:

This way, effective blogging becomes impossible. Reading other weblogs, news feeds and websites takes time. Re-thinking about all those things, trying to elaborate something innovative, interesting, useful to the readers or at least worth of consideration takes time. Blogging needs those tasks, blogging needs time. In particular, reading becomes more and more time-consuming as I find new, interesting weblogs around. Wealth of information is often my problem.

[CristianVidmar.com]

It reminds me of a similar survey about how much time one spent on reading usenet newsgroups some years ago. I used to read regularly it.fan.starwars one year before Episode I release. I had to stop reading after release for excessive number of non useful posts (both hype and bash) and move to a private medium/low traffic mailing-list.

In the Blogosphere the problem is harder because usually one finds in a single blog more interesting posts containing more links an pointers to interesting readings than one may find on a bunch of newsgroup that usually sports many non-interesting posts to be easily mark read.

In other words: in newsgroups world there is a lower signal-to-noise ratio that can be managed with newsreading tools like killer lists and filters. In the Blogosphere there are much more smaller number of articles but each of it deserving a longer time to read, meditate and follow linked readings.

This is surely time-consuming but this is primarily brain-consuming: one cannot blog without concentrating while one can newsread by simply pressing delete or mark read keystroke. 🙂

Tightly related to the time/brain consume problem is the quality and quantity of content problem, as I mentioned in “Weblogs, power laws and content [en]”: weblogs that simply relaunch other site's news are not so interesting and lower the signal-to-noise ratio. Weblogs that carefully choose one or two subjects per day and post their thoughtful comments are a great resource, at least IMHO 🙂

Da Kaleidoscope a Konfabulator

Quei geniacci di Kaleidoscope ne hanno combinata un'altra: Konfabulator, un motore che combina Javascript e XML per creare applicazioncine (widget) che si siedono bellamente sul desktop di Mac OS X mostrandoci che tempo fa, i nostri impegni, le nostre fotografie o (in arrivo), le news dei vari blog.

Chiaramente si vuole ripetere il successo di Kaleidoscope inuducendo la produzione di espansioni da parte delle terze parti. Gli ingredienti ci sono tutti: facilità di programmazione e attrattiva del giochino. Vedremo se sapranno raccogliere anche il buon gusto grafico come è già successo per il team di Audion.

Nel frattempo sono riusciti a far parlare di loro anche su Wired.

Weblogs, power laws and content [en]

A long article by Clay Shirky about Power Laws, Weblogs, and Inequality has been creating a great buzz in BlogLand these days (see insteresting reactions by Dave Winer or Mark Pilgrim)

While I find interesting the observation about power laws on a wide range of community as BBSs, mail-list, newsgroup and websites compared to weblogs I notice that a real serach for causes of inequality is missing. Clay observes that for the sole reason that a first blogger is linked by a second blogger, a third blogger is inducted in linking the first one.

This of course can lead to a sort of “automatic fame” in a pyramidal way but it misses a point: the content of the majoriry of the bloggers' posts is news.

News are not in an infinite number every day (even though there are many) so when the well-known bloggers have posted the same news references the game is over, at least for newbies. Lazyness, shyness and other reasons prevent the less-known blogger to say something new, to search for a not-so-referenced news or to create something original, even only by commenting that news.

In other words, being a blogger means having something to say and it is not so easy when the blogger world is so largely populated and you are a newcomer. News aggregators are a great tools but often they could transform you in a mere news-firer, not an original content producer.

This is why I mean my blog as my personal notebook, for 3, 5 or 3500 readers, it doesn't matter 🙂

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