techno.blog("Dion")

The iPod Video came… and everyone is talking about it.

At first I thought “yeah! I want one!”, but I am trying to work out the use case when I would use the 320×240 screen to watch video.

So, I automatically get video from er er my Tivo lets say… and can watch anything I want…. but would I?

Steve Jobs in action

Front row was very cool. It could be another kick for vidcasting, and when everyone is asking “what about the content” our vid bloggers are getting a new way to send us their content.

We subscribe, and there it is on on TV. TiVo really need to get into RSS reading.

TechCrunch loves Memeorandum, which:

“is changing my reading behavior, but it is also changing my writing behavior. It is much easier for me to find and read everything that is being written about a topic (Memeorandum also includes links to the real time search engines for additional material). I find that I am more educated on the topics I write about, and am writing more often about things the web feels are important at the time.”

It is a good tool for sure.

I have organically created a process for reading blogs these days.

My head has a weird counter in my head that contains levels of blogs. Level 1 blogs are checked every few hours, level 2 once a day, etc etc.

The blogs change level every now and then, and new ones are always entering.

It is due to this that the river of content doesn’t quite work for me.

I would love to be able to keep an accurate rating of blogs and topics, and have a reader view that takes this into account.

Last nite, I got to go to Vince Vaughn’s Wild West Comedy Show.

It was a truly great experience, and reminded me of old variety shows.

Vince would get on stage, introduce comedians, and then do sketches with people from his movies.

He was truly personable, and man there were lots of women up front trying to compete with Jen :/

I hope that we get back to some of the ‘variety’ of the past, and move past the current reality show that doesn’t explore any real talent.

Google now allows you to add tags to sites in your search history.

Hopefully they will:

• Let you do this tagging directly from search results
• Publish RSS feeds of your info
• Publish RSS feeds of tags
• Share your info
• Rate + Tag
• Search within my tagged data
• Search within my blogs

I would love to do one click on a search result to say “i dig it”, and have it popup a line where I can put tag names and a short desc.

Then they have access to rating such as: “the user clicked on this after the search of Foo”, “The user activelly said he dug it and tagged it”.

This should all happen inline via Ajax of cos ;)

Remember the hub-ub of “Java is slow” back in the 1.x days?

Remember the buzz when .NET had the stack vs. heap ’struct’ world?

Brian Goetz is here to discuss Urban performance legends, revisited.

Brian gets down and dirty, and will amaze you with quips like:

Pop quiz: Which language boasts faster raw allocation performance, the
Java language, or C/C++? The answer may surprise you — allocation in
modern JVMs is far faster than the best
performing malloc implementations. The common code path
for new Object() in HotSpot 1.4.2 and later is
approximately 10 machine instructions (data provided by Sun; see Resources), whereas the best performing
malloc implementations in C require on average between 60
and 100 instructions per call (Detlefs, et. al.; see Resources). And allocation performance is not a
trivial component of overall performance — benchmarks show that many
real-world C and C++ programs, such as Perl and Ghostscript, spend 20
to 30 percent of their total execution time in malloc and

free — far more than the allocation and garbage
collection overhead of a healthy Java application (Zorn; see
Resources).

Give it a read, and don’t say “Java is slow”. Well, what about embedded devices, can we still say that realtime java isn’t quite there?

Everyone is trying to nail down a definition for Web 2.0, and all it does it start arguments.

I wonder if we could all agree on a definition Web 1.0 even at this point?

We didn’t seem to even want to define the Web that much back in the day. It seemed obvious. “Oh you have a website? welcome to the web”.

We can keep arguing about Web 2.0 all month long. Who cares. Create great web-based platforms, services, and applications, and people will come. Think about the participation age. Think about usability. Have fun :)

I just saw a review by the RIFERs, on my Java In Action talk on Ajax.

The funny thing about it is that I didn’t give the talk! Unfortunately something came up that had me missing the event, and my collegue and friend, Justin Gehtland really stood up to the plate. He jumped in with short notice, took the Ajaxian material and ran with it (adding a lot of his own style and ideas too of course!).

Thanks a lot Justin. You can do my talks ANYTIME! :)

Tim O’Reilly said at the Web 2.0 conference:

If you have to advertise, it’s probably not Web 2.0

What is the business model?

Is it just get bought? :)

We are seeing more and more innovation in the ad space. A couple of interesting examples out there are:

AdBrite

AdBrite changes the game with connecting the buyer and seller of ad space. Instead of having to have a dedicated sales staff, a seller can signup with AdBrite and say “If someone offers me $x / wk/month/whatever to put an add HERE, take it”.

Buyers can then browser around and find deals. “Ah, I want to advertise on that site, and $x seems fair”. They broker the deal through AdBrite, ads get put on your site and you get paid. Everyone is a winner!

Google’s new targetting ability

The Google AdWords team is getting in on the mix too.

They are testing a new ability for a buyer to pick, and target the placement of their adds like this example where you can get placement on askthebuilder.com.

So now there will be even more control on the ad placement.

I just went to Brightcove, a new Web 2.0 company (of course), founded by Mr. Jeremy Allaire (good guy).

When you go to the home page, you have this weird feeling where it looks like a normal webpage, but something is wrong.

But, then you try to use it like a normal web page, and it breaks:

• RSS link: I can’t right click on the RSS feed icon and use my context menu to add it to my feed automatically
• Links: The links are weird. They don’t mouseover like normal, and again, I don’t have a normal context menu… but a crippled one.
• More links flipping my world: Also, a friend pointed out that if you go to the “Company” section, the current “link” is the one with the underline, and the true links have none! Absolutely the opposite to what you would expect.

My entire browser world is taken away from me. None of the numerous browser plugins that go cool things, and let me work the way I want too, are allowed to play nice.

The reason? This is a web page in disguise as a Flash file :)

This entire page is an <embed src=”brightcove.swf” …> wrapped in a table (with the usual object for those browsers).

Now, I have nothing against Flash. I think it is great technology, and you can’t argue with its reach. I even think that it plays into my Ajax world.

However, why would you break every users world to get this functionality? Sure there are some nice effects? Sure you may not have to worry about browser incompatibility, but really?

Isn’t Web 2.0 about participation? This Web 2.0 should let us participate again. Let me wield my mighty greasemonkey ;)

I like the idea of BrightCove… the more ways to get content out there the better! Come on internet TV!