Weblogs Going Mainstream

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Like most techies, we sing the praises of new items and new ideas and loathe when those ideas become mainstream. They seem to lose that elite quality that made them special. The Internet itself is a prime example. When people would ask me "What's the Internet?" or "What's the Web?" I would revel in the chance to explain what it was and felt quite a sense of pride at my unique knowledge. We knew that it was on it's way to becoming mainstream. When that day finally arrived it was bittersweet.

Web logs are travelling down the same path, as well they should. Links in the Daypop Top 40 point to three articles from large circulation publications explaining weblogs. Wired - The Blogging Revolution, Business 2.0 - Blog Nation and MSNBC - Business pros flock to Weblogs.

I wasn't at the head of the weblog pack, but I did create my own from scratch and I feel a certain sense of elitisim when people ask "What's a weblog?". I know however, that I'm going to loathe the day when people will just view weblogs as a natural option for contributing to the web and say, "Since when have you had a weblog?". In the end it's just a form of publishing folks. So I need to get over myself.

Inventing the Future

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Via Evan Tim O'Reilly lists the current development and charts the future of the net. It's nice to see an emerging market that so far seems to have enough competition yet still be based on standards.

I'll be the first to admit that I jumped on the web log bandwagon (though I rolled my own) but until recent articles like Tim's I hadn't viewed my creations through SonicBoomerang as part of new emerging markets. There are business models out there, as SonicBoomerang is slowly proving but like any good viable business it takes time. The .com boom may be over, but the fun is just starting.

Rogers now carrying Treo

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Rogers is now carrying the Treo. Now I'm hard pressed between the Treo and the RIM. It has all the same features as a RIM, GSM/GPRS as well. But it's got some more features as well. 16MB of memory, runs Palm apps, has stylus in addition to keyboard (no graffiti input with keyboard though, as there's no room to write), handsfree, regular phone, and speaker phone. Probably a lot of little differences as well. The biggest shock though is the sticker price. $850. Ouch. I don't think I'll be buying either of them soon. Check out this review by Dan Bricklin. Rogers isn't listing the new Blackberry yet so I'm not sure exactly how much it will cost. Probably similar but slightly less than the Treo.
Update: The Treo will support GRPS with a software upgrade. Note to Treo: GPRS is here. Make it available already. I've used a Blackberry 5810 over GPRS in Toronto so perhaps Rogers is holding off on deploying them officially until it's fully tested and scalable.

Waterlogged Camera Turns Magic

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After playing with my grandfather's Nikon Coolpix is was interesting to read this article from Wired on a photographer that droped his Coolpix into a pond and was surprised to see the destructive results when the camera was finally dry. Personally I would have been a little more that upset at my Coolpix taking pictures like this but Farrell seems to have gained quite a bit of attention with the results.

AOL to switch to Mozilla engine

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NewsForge reports that AOL will use the Gecko rendering engine used in Mozilla. "A browser shift by AOL is going to leave an awful lot of companies that assume their Web sites only need to work with Explorer scrambling to rewrite their code so that they don't lose AOL's 30 million-plus subscribers, or about 30% of all U.S. Internet users." Time to bring some balance back into the force and hopefully get all the designers back to standards.

Linux on my laptop

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Now that my laptop information has been migrated to my desktop I decided to install Linux on it. RedHat 7.2 with Gnome and KDE. Not much drive space after that install. Both Gnome and KDE have their own merrits, so I'm going to flip flop until I decide which one I like better. Right now I'm leaning more to KDE. It appears a bit more cluttered but it seems to have more applications to graphically control the environment. I've toiled away long enough with server's via the command line and would prefer to control everything graphically. This is also a good indicator as to how long it may be until Linux is a real alternative on the desktop. Based on first impressions, it still has a way to go.