Web/Tech

startups / The Internets / Web/Tech — 5 Comments
15
Mar 06

Star Wars or Web 2.0?

This is great. Quick quiz on how much  you know about your SStar Wars Characters and Web 2.0 company names. Renkoo? Dooku? Frodo? Man, it’s sort of a ridiculous industry I’m in. Yes, I know that Frodo is neither a web2 company nor a Star Wars character. Quick! start a new company.

Personal stuff / Web/Tech — 2 Comments
31
Jan 06

spell with flickr

neato! here’s a fun little webapp that lets you spell things with images from flickr. sort of a new age ransom note style of writing. here’s sam’s name, in one rendering:

SAmLIce Ice BabyLawrence Photo "L"El "L"Y

Web/Tech — Comments Off
2
Nov 05

Blown away

So much is happening on the Internet today. I’m totally blown away & can’t keep up. A few things I’ve started playing around with:

  • Typepad
  • VideoEgg
  • Ecto
  • 1001 — cool desktop app that works with Flickr
  • Growl — fun way to extend notifications on the mac
  • Flickr — photosharing, but I haven’t started using it a lot yet
  • Adium — cool multi-IM client — lots of fun icons
  • iScrobbler — keeps track of the music I listen to, makes suggestions via last.fm
  • Apple Mail — they did some nice things with filtering & search this time around; still needs a lot of work
  • Apple FrontRow — I’d like a Mac Mini with FrontRow & a cablecard to be my next Tivo, I think. otherwise Windows Media Center
  • Skype — ambivalent about VOIP. still figuring out what I think.
  • Firefox extensions — lots of great ones. GreaseMonkey is great.

Lots of great, creative things happening. Lots of ways to waste time, of course, but also incredibly cool & varied ways to share lots of info with friends & family.

nerdTech / OSX / Web/Tech / Weblogs — 4 Comments
16
Sep 05

.mac or not?

Kathy & I have been using .mac for a while now — it’s been really amazingly easy for her to take a ton of pictures with her Digital Rebel, import them into iPhoto, select which ones to post, and automatically put them up on .mac to share with the family. (Here’s a great one of our nephew Andrew’s first soccer game. As you can see by the numbering in the URL, this is the 120th album that she’s posted in the past couple of years. 1 a week or so. She’s also used .mac as a place to get her e-mail forwarded to — with some grief (the interaction between .mac and mail.app went through some rough spots, in our experience).

The yearly renewal is coming up — it’s something like $99/year for 100MB of disk space.

And we’re thinking about it. Not sure what to do.

What’s happening on the net is interesting. With GMail supporting POP and giving me 2.6 GB of storage space, not to mention being a *great* & innovative mail client and awesome example of how good a web-based AJAX application can be, there’s no reason in my mind to use any other web-based mail application.

With flickr, slide, picasa, typepad & others, there are getting to be way more powerful ways to store & share pictures online, and cheaper to boot. Readers on this blog will notice that mostly for Sam we’re using typepad photo albums instead of .mac based photo albums (really enabled by someone who wrote an iPhoto plug-in that makes it easier to automatically export from iPhoto).

So it’s the same old story: the vertical integration of Apple/MacOS/iLife/.mac is amazingly good — easy to use, generally works great — but is more expensive (by a bunch, really — Typepad is $149/yr to store 1GB and support blogs; .mac is $99/year for 100MB and no blogs, but some other features like the above-mentioned e-mail that are marginal value to us). On the other hand, there’s a ton of innovative stuff on the web (www.slide.com) that’s evolving very quickly into more cool stuff, it’s cheaper (often free or minimal cost), but it just doesn’t integrate as well, especially with OS X, but generally with everything.

So. I don’t know. I’m betting we end up paying for .mac again this year in addition to our Typepad account. But I don’t think it’ll be very compelling by this time a year from now.

Web/Tech — Comments Off
6
Jun 05

Watching Baseball in Waco

While I’m writing this (taking a break from some job-related networking), I’ve got a window up behind Firefox that’s got streaming video of a Stanford baseball game that’s happening in Waco, TX right now (playoff game). I have to say that while the quality of the video isn’t quite what you’d get on television, it’s pretty darn good — and definitely definitely definitely better than not seeing it at all.

It’s just another example of how the economics & reach of "Long Tail" offerings are changing. Demand for watching a college baseball game, especially one that’s not in the College World Series and is between two relatively small private schools (Stanford & Baylor), and during a workday to boot, is never going to be high enough to justify a real TV broadcast with professional broadcasters — but it’s definitely high enough to have the university’s video students and radio broadcasters cover — and broadcasting like this, reaching a bigger audience than they could otherwise — should generate more donations for them, plus give them a way to put in more advertisements to generate even more revenue.

But mostly, I just like being able to see Stanford baseball, even when it’s happening such a long way away.

And, incidentally, we’re now in the 11th inning, with a Stanford sophomore (Reynolds) having pitched the whole game so far. Win or lose, pretty gutsy effort by Reynolds, who’s only started 5 games this season.

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