March 31st 2007
Archive for March, 2007
March 31st 2007
The narrator
I saw this on Virb recently and love it! It is called The Narrator …
Do you use Virb? What do you think about it? We were chatting about it last night at the Blog Awards as the next MySpace. I tend to agree with that although I hope it doesn’t devolve into a MySpace clone …
Technorati Tags:
virb, content sharing, social networking, the narrator
March 31st 2007
SA motorists a bit like crack addicts?
So the petrol price is going up by 68c/l and this will bring the petrol price to around R6.67 in Gauteng and we are already being warned to expect more increases. My question is why are we still driving cars dependent on oil-based fuels? Sure we can’t just chop and change to a vehicle that uses a different fuel overnight but what is actually being done to convert mass transport and our cars across to some other fuel. Biodiesel and other renewable fuels are being developed and being used more widely, sure, but how much longer will we be driving these expensive, polluting clunkers?
And who is to blame for the slow move to a new type of vehicle/fuel? The motor vehicle manufacturers worried about investments in new technologies and wasting investments in old technologies? The oil industry because a widespread move to an alternative wipes out billions of dollars in profits and radically changes geopolitics? Or us because we just take it?
Technorati Tags:
petrol price, oil, alternative fuels, oil industry, motor vehicle industry, biodiesel
March 31st 2007
Emulating paper or moving towards a new paradigm?
Danie spoke at the recent 27 Dinner about moving away from traditional paradigms of interacting with our data on a computer and took us through virtual models that had very different ways of conceptualising the data itself. I came across this post by Stii with the following video of an alternative desktop:
I think the interface is fantastic and I’d love to see if it works throughout the operating system or if this interface is limited to the desktop. One thing I was thinking about while I watched this video is whether we want an interface that entrenches the old model of how we interface with our data or whether we should perhaps adopt a different paradigm, like the virtual, more conceptual model Danie introduced us to?
I was reading a post by Seth Godin about publishing ebooks and he linked to a lens he created on Squidoo and he briefly discussed the format of the ebook and said that it should basically be resized to fit a 800 x 640 screen and should contain hyperlinks. That is already a shift away from our usual size books that don’t have hyperlinks. To me that was a small indication how we need to change how we present our data when we do so on a computer and that is really just a small change.
Technorati Tags:
virtual desktop, 3d desktop, virtual worlds, paradigm, conceptualise data
March 31st 2007
links for 2007-03-31
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Great guide by Seth Godin to publishing an ebook.
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Great tool for Firefox or Flock which picks up various microformats and presents you with the appropriate options.
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A discussion about the value of rel-tag microformats that is a pretty good introduction to these microformats
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The next version of the Mac version of OpenOffice
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Very exciting news! I am looking forward to seeing the final featureset. There is also a mention of OS X 10.5 Leopard in this article. Looking forward to that too!
