Alt + Ctrl + 0 I’m unclear if this is actually a NBC commercial (video) but if it is it’s a great example of understanding the medium and making a great commercial for it (I mean it’s funny).
Archive for September, 2006
I always get a little excited when google come out with a great product because it’s just nice not to need to remember to go to another website. There are only 2 websites I really care about, my email and my feed reader. Currently Bloglines and Gmail fill this roll.
Previously google came out with a feed reader at it seems like it was targeted more at armature feed readers. Technorati has a similar idea going.
I am not an armature. I have 300 feeds that I do a half decent job of keeping up with. Google has updated their feed reader to come in line with the most popular readers.
Some of the stand out features are that it does not count a post as read until you scroll past it in the reader and other small things like button to jump to the next story.
One thing that really surprises me is though they look very different there doesn’t seem to be a large difference between Bloglines and Google Reader.
So what is the difference? In my opinion the difference is the layout. Bloglines has it set up so it uses the entire window for selecting and reading feeds. While google demands to use some of the window for their navigation. Basically Bloglines gets out of my way completely.
Winner: Bloglines
Don’t click though to my website from alpha.bloglines.com and then think I will not notice. Come on Bloglines, how do I get invited to that magical land of pre-beta?
Big day for feed readers. Bloglines has updated their interface in the left panel to not refresh all 300 of my feeds at the same time. This refresh was literally bringing Firefox to a halt and is a welcome update. Bloglines is clearly fighting to keep me off of Google’s reader.
Google’s RSS Reader has just gotten a major update to function a lot more like a standard RSS reader. I have to say I’m highly impressed. They have a lot of work to do to convince me to move from Bloglines but I am very interested so far. I’ll hopefully give a more comprehensive review this weekend.
Philip Reeve has won the 2006 Guardian Children’s Fiction Prize for A Darkling Plain, the fourth and final volume of the Hungry City Chronicles. The Hungry City Chronicles remains to be the best set of books I’ve ever read.
I was very excited to see the first Winterview of Raina Telgemeier and Dave Roman. Especially after wandering around Northeastern yesterday and missing Scott McCloud’s talk.
Facebook kills libraries (how’s that for a headline?).
I need to start making a list of PS3 games I want to play so 4 years from now when the PS3 finally a price I’ll pay for it I’ll remember the good games. A White Knight Story (working title) looks awesome (quicktime).
People are starting to make noise about Web 2.0 winners and losers. The lists are all really weird in my opinion. Does anyone even know if the “losers” are actually going bankrupt or if the “winners” are making any money? People are doing a bad job of defining what success and failure actually is.
I have a soft spot for “end of the world” stories and one of my most recent favorites is When Sysadmins Ruled the Earth by the one and only Cory Doctorow. The podcast is excellent.
MIT has a great podacast up from a Scott McCloud talk promoting his book Making Comics. Coming in at a hefty 2h and 16mins (just my style) the presentation does loose a lot with out the slides but there is still plenty of info to gleam. I’m so sad I missed this presentation!
Round 2 of voting for SXSW panels. go get your vote on.
Kevin Airgid’s book Web Designers Success Guide is now a free PDF. Download this while you still can for some of the best practical advice on going freelance without falling on your face. Not an ebook fan? You can still buy the book from Lulu for only $25. I did and I was not sorry. cheers.