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Personalized media

Tim O’Reilly has an interesting article on Web 2.0. It was great reading even if most of it was over my head (that’s how ya learn, eh). Thanks to Chris Anderson at the Long Tail blog for the link

One section in Tim’s article really caught my eye:

In many ways, the combination of RSS and permalinks adds many of the features of NNTP, the Network News Protocol of the Usenet, onto HTTP, the web protocol. The “blogosphere” can be thought of as a new, peer-to-peer equivalent to Usenet and bulletin-boards, the conversational watering holes of the early internet. Not only can people subscribe to each others’ sites, and easily link to individual comments on a page, but also, via a mechanism known as trackbacks, they can see when anyone else links to their pages, and can respond, either with reciprocal links, or by adding comments.

I hadn’t made that connection quite that explicitly before. NNTP newsgroups taught me the little I know about computers and the internet. They also provided indispensible information about software tools. Later I added a few web-based bulletin boards as things moved off NNTP.

All those groups are/were a great place to pick brains and share what you could. Most of what I learned was kind of techie in nature, but this statement by Tim got me thinking: Blogs and RSS offer a way to find information and start conversations in a much wider way than NNTP or standard web-based bulletin boards.

With a few well chosen RSS feeds, I can keep up with current thinking about IT, journalism, left and right wing politics, science, and almost anything else I care to follow. And all that information arrives at my desktop automatically. I don’t have to hop all over the place to read it.

If I feel like exploring something further, all I have to do is take the link to a favorite site and check out the blogroll, or follow the in-text links for more information. There’s bound to be more links than I can handle on a subject from there.

Cool. Personalized media. Ahh, the concept is starting to gel for me.

Open source film production

Not sure if this is available for Windows, but it sounds neat. A free digital production suite from the open source folks

I’ll have to read some more about it. My nephew is just 15 and starting out in film. If it works on Windows, it might save him a bunch of money for future tuition….

Thanks Wil Wheaton for the link to Make.

Biogas fuels

Enviroblogs writes about a new train in Sweden that runs on biogas:

Biogas refers to methane produced by the anaerobic digestion of biomass waste. (Aerobic decomposition, or composting, requires large amounts of oxygen and produces heat.)

Biogas produced in anaerobic digesters consists of methane (50%-80%), carbon dioxide (20%-50%), and trace levels of other gases such as hydrogen, carbon monoxide, nitrogen, oxygen, and hydrogen sulfide.

Now, if we could only figure out what to do with the 20%-50% carbon dioxide, CO, and H2S, this could be a moving solution to some of the waste we create.

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Fun on the Coq

I found this sign on the connector section of the Coquihalla Hwy, between Merritt and Kelowna. I was on a business trip to Vernon back in May. I’d seen the sign before, so I was on the lookout for it.

Not clear if it hails an end of BC moving forward, or the end of a particular project. I suspect the latter, but it made me think a minute.

Being Bold Blog: 90-day Planning

This looks like a good idea. How often do you do this? I use to, but haven’t for some time. I think I’d better start again.

Link (is dead): Being Bold Blog: 90-day Planning.

90-day Planning With the start of a new Quarter, I have reviewed my performance for the first quarter and have done planning for the next 90 days. I find that a really useful way of doing this kind of personal planning is to work backwards. Ask yourself this question: At the end of this next quarter, what must have happened personally and professionally for me to feel good about my progress and commitments? If you can identify those key things, then you shape them into SMART goals, and work backwards. Plan out what needs to happen in order to get you to that point. Over the 3 months, but in particular this month, and this week. Often, personal planning takes a back seat to the urgency of today, but I find that planning done well actually reduces the urgency and increases personal effectiveness dramatically.

HBS Working Knowledge: What Do YOU Think?: Where is Consumer Generated Marketing Taking Us?

Interesting post from Harvard. I wonder.

Link (is dead): HBS Working Knowledge: What Do YOU Think?: Where is Consumer Generated Marketing Taking Us?.

There is a kind of “always on” communication system shaping up between the most outspoken and committed of the tech-minded users and those that supply them. We might term it “consumer generated marketing.” Is it time to ask ourselves whether these trends are always in our best interests as marketers and customers? Is it possible to be too well connected with one segment of customers? Is there a danger among marketers and more generally the media of paying too much attention to the Internet-savvy early adopters and activists and too little to other early adopters that tend to keep their behaviors and ideas to themselves? Might marketers be too sensitive to Internet prompts, responding too rapidly on the basis of noise as opposed to truly developing trends? What do you think?