After I kicked drew into doing the audio thing, he kicked me back into proper distribution, or at least some attempt at making things clearer. So here’s RasterWeb! Audio in 3 easy steps…
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Furl Gets Bought
Gosh, look at that: Looksmart Acquires Furl.net (See Also: Why del.icio.us is neat, and Bootstrapping out into open space.)
[Sometimes I hate being a smart hacker type with no business sense…]
One thing I found interesting in the article is this bit:
“Every person who furls a page is casting a vote for it,” said Krim. “We’ll be taking the masses’ votes instead of just the webmasters’ votes.”
They even mention Google’s PageRank, which is interesting, because I see it having one of the same problems, context. Is someone ‘furling’ a URL a vote for… how authoritative the page is? Maybe. I mean, I stick plenty of things into del.icio.us just because I want to read it later. It might be a link to something that totally sucks and is wrong in every way, but I won’t know that until later, when I read it. Just like Google’s PageRank, which is a measure of popularity, not quality.
Hmmm, perhaps we need to solve that problem!
Oh, and as for the whole ‘masses’ versus the ‘webmasters’ – well, I guess us weblog types are ‘webmasters’ eh? Shouldn’t all the masses become webmasters eventually?
Ok, back to testing…
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Browser Zeitgeist (in SVG)
Following up on Browser Zeitgeist, we present Browser Zeitgeist in SVG!
(Yes, you’ll need a browser/plugin capable of displaying SVG files… Shouldn’t this be built into browsers by now?)
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Han Solo and Firefox
Ben Goodger had the following to say:
Netscape had it by being first.
Microsoft has it by being everywhere.
Firefox will have it by being best.We’re coming.
But I think he left out the bit about Netscape blowing it by getting all uppity.
Remember when Han Solo said Great kid, don’t get cocky!
? Well, small victories are great, but they are not equivalent to crushing the Empire.
While Firefox may be great, or even the best, I am continually saddened by the fact that many people/companies/organizations do not want the best, they just want the “good enough” – Really? Sure…
Ask yourself this? Is Windows better than Mac OS X? Is a BMW better than a Dodge? Don’t underestimate the power of “being everywhere” cuz while the dark side is not stronger…. ok, I give up on the Star Wars analogies, you get my meaning…
As an aside, I’ve had Firefox version 1.0 Preview Release quit on me a number of times. I can usually tell when it will happen because there is crazy disk activity beforehand. That’s ok, I blame the plugin authors, why? It makes me feel better…
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Who Owns Your Data?
Recently we looked at the Waypoint License Agreement, which we didn’t really like. Well, we later found some folks that appear to be violating the agreement.
Jeff Boulter says in Geocaching blog complete! that he is scraping the data from Geocaching.com and redistributing it. Perhaps the license was different when he first did this, but he does mention saving the data in both places, which is what I thought would make sense, post the data somewhere that is not Geocaching.com before posting it to Geocaching.com, since I don’t see how they could claim the rights to that data then.
Jeff also created a GPS Coordinate Grabber, so now he’s really pushing it, since he’s providing tools for others to violate the license as well. Where will it stop!
Oh, it doesn’t stop, as Buxley’s Geocaching Waypoint also takes that data, and it seems that while in the past there was some sort of “arrangement” with Geocaching.com, that may not be the case anymore, since as of 2004-09-16 Buxley was being blocked (see Status, sorry no permalink.) If you want to follow the development of this, there’s a forum thread titled Buxley New Caches Not Being Updated? to read through…
Oh, and for a bit more background on Geocaching.com and the whole data issue, see The History of Geocaching at gpsgames.org and of course you can’t miss the slashdot crowd’s reactions to such…