Paolo's Weblog, July 2006

Lunedì, 24 luglio 2006

Hasta Siempre, Technorati

Congratulations also to Technorati for the cool new design. I particulary like the last icon at the bottom of the page.

Tags: Technorati

6:38:47 PM

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Socialtext goes open source

Congratulations to Ross, Peter & C. for the news.

Socialtext Open is released under a standard open source license, and contains all of Socialtext's enterprise grade code aside from enterprise management and enterprise integration tools. Socialtext also announced the availability of its Technical Professional Service, a new SOAP API and the Socialtext Open Roadmap for the next three months.

Download here.

Tags: Socialtext

6:08:44 PM

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Loving bad products

I grew tired of wasting many hours of my life getting lost in cities around the country and decided to buy a satellite navigator. Following the advice of a few enthusiastic friends I decided for a TomTom Go 910.

I have been using it for about a ten days on a few trips and I love it. Which is quite remarkable considering that from many points of view the thing sucks.

I mean: it looks well built, it has all kind of accessories, the software has a good UI, the maps are excellent, but there are still a lot of bugs. The bluetooth data connection with my cellphone usually doesn't work and I have to restart telephone and navigator a few times before the link kicks in (this might be challenging to do while driving).

When the connection finally works, there's no way to turn it off, which means that all my calls are routed trough the navigator. Even when the navigator is in my car and I'm not.

And then from time to time it crashes. For example when I unplug it from the USB cradle. The only way is hard resetting it. Which can only be done with a very thin thing to insert into a tiny hole. Now: guess how many paperclips do you have in your car?

But still: I love it! I love all the statistical data it gives me on my trip. I love finding out names of streets. I love not having to worry about how to get anywhere in Europe and Nothern America, Guam and Channel Islands included.

Tags: TomTom

11:45:55 AM

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Martedì, 18 luglio 2006

Gaurav on the Indian internet ban

Gaurav: It [is] an attempt to thwart terrorism. So it’s OK if we can’t get our dose of blogs for a few days. The terrorist attack itself didn’t evoke such a strong response in the blogosphere but we can’t access blogspot for a couple of days and suddenly it is the end of the world. Geez.

2:30:27 PM

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Domenica, 16 luglio 2006

Widgetization

More thoughts on the widgetization of the web from Niall Kennedy.

12:05:50 PM

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Sabato, 15 luglio 2006

Fly with Google Earth

I have just found out about Google Earth's "G-Force" navigation mode. Just hit Control+G (Command+G on a Mac) click and you can "fly" using your mouse as a joystick (first you must gain some speed by right-clicking for throttle control). Turn on terrain elevation, turn off all other layers and you'll have a great flying experience.

Command+T to go back to regular navigation mode (even if I don't see why you should ;-).

8:03:33 PM

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Martedì, 11 luglio 2006

Richard MacManus on PeopleAggregator

The real value IMO of open social networks is that they create an ecosystem for lots of vendors and web services to participate in. If you're Amazon for example, or indeed any e-commerce vendor, you can create widgets to use in a service like PeopleAggregator - or simply open up your data via APIs so that external developers can create widgets or web apps. [more...]

IMHO the web widgetization is one of the big new things. Everything you develop for the web today should be easy to detach from its environment and reuse somewhere else.

Tags: PeopleAggregator, Richard MacManus, widgetization

12:29:21 PM

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Lunedì, 10 luglio 2006

Italy's big party

I'm not a big football (soccer) fan but of course I'm happy about Italy winning the World Cup. The picture above was shot yesterday night from our office window in Gorizia. It's a good sign, and this country definitely needs something to be proud of, bringing everybody together to face the future.

10:25:47 AM

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Dave is on the mauntaintop

Dave went to the mountaintop and created a little piece of software that hopefully we will all enjoy soon.

It's a nice little folder on my desktop called Amazon S3. When I drag a file into the folder, it goes to the proper place in Amazon's cloud. When I create a sub-folder and put a file into it, it also goes to the right place. Open a picture in Graphic Converter or Photoshop, save it into the Amazon S3 folder, and it goes up to the cloud. Edit it, the changed version goes up.

This should sound familiar to all old Radio UserLand users, and it's one of the most powerful concepts of this early publishing tool: having some code running on the desktop interacting with a server. Quite simply there are things you can do on the desktop that you cannot do on a server, drag and drop publishing is one of these.

Tags: Dave Winer, Amazon S3

9:32:06 AM

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Martedì, 4 luglio 2006

Happy 4th of July!

It's our last day in the US, we have already packed and are ready to leave.

We have spent two great weeks.

Meeting for the first time the Broadband Mechanics team and launching PeopleAggregator has been very exciting. Thanks to this off site, working with Gaurav, Ashish, Phil, MarcS and Richard will be much easier from now on, it's a great team. Of course, thanks to Marc and Lisa and Maura for all this.

We went to two great unconferences, BloggerconIV and Gnomedex6.0. Both were great opportunities to meet and listen to very smart people, thanks to Dave and Chris and Ponzi and everyone involved for the great organization.

I had the opportunity to spend some time with Dave Winer. It was good to meet again after 5 years and talk about business, ideas, blogging, the future and TV Shows ;->

This trip was also an opportunity to meet for the first time people I have been in contact with for years, like Jon Husband, Rick Klau and Jake Savin.

At this point we can't wait to be back home, in our house, with our families and cats, but it has been a great trip, thanks again to everybody who made it possible.

9:00:36 PM

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