Tomorrow we'll drive to Vienna, to spend a beautiful week-end in Austria's capital and get ready to enjoy two days of BlogTalk Reloaded.

Tags: Blogtalk, Vienna

Interesting, somebody is thinking again about tags vs. categories.

Here's some old thinking.

Everybody can now join facebook, having been involved with social networking applications recently I was quite curious and immediately joined and... to me it doesn't make sense.

Joining a school or a work network makes sense because you are getting involved on-line in a community you already belong to. To open Facebook to everybody, instead of creating a big network with "the others", Facebook choose to create regional networks. Since every user can belong to only one regional network I joined the Italy network.

Too bad that this is not my network, actually most of the people I would like to network with are not in Italy.

Suddenly the capability of PeopleAggregator to create your own network makes much more sense.

Tags: PeopleAggregator, Facebook

Since I upgraded from an old CRT monitor to a cool panoramic LCD screen I'm compressing all my jpg images much less than I used to. Since the quality and the detail of this new screen is far superior I tend to notice jpg compression artifacts much more than I used to consequently the "medium" compression that I have been using forever has now been replaced by "high". :-)

My quick trip to London has been great. The main reason for the trip was spending some time with Marc to work on PeopleAggregator: I think we made some great steps forward which will significantly improve the next releases. Then it was great to meet Stowe, Matt, Lee, Riccardo, Anu, Lars, Adriana and Anina. I'm sorry I missed Euan and Mary.

Tags: London

In Apple's current iTunes there is a feature called "Podcasts" that allows users to download podcasts from the web and upload them on iPods. It's a feature Apple uses to sell iPods and computers.

Now, Apple has all rights to try to protect its names, but "podcasts" are created from other people and companies, not by Apple.

So, if apple remains the only company which can use the term "podcast", what will they distribute trough the podcast feature of iTunes?

Tags: podcast

• BT Openzone: £6/hr
• Tmobile: £5/hr
• ZiFi Zone - The Cloud: £4,55/hr, but you can also buy 30 minutes for £2.99

It's still horribly expensive, but considering that it didn't take much to compare the three services (all I did was selecting the different networks and check the default page), you get to woner who is paying BT.

I'm going to be in London from tomorrow to Sunday.

Tags: London

I have just read this interesting essay by Alain Briot: Of Cameras and Art [via Haiko Hebig]. It's about good quality and tools and how many people tend to identify the two without considering the ability necessary to use the tool.

Briot's complaint is very true, but it's also a sign of our times. We live in a curious era when activities which had been reserved to professionals for centuries can be performed by a much broader range of people because these activities have suddenly become much easier thanks to new generations of digital tools.

It's true that you must be a good photographer to take good pictures, but it's also true that today anybody can take pretty decent pictures with any modern digital camera, while just a few years ago this simply wasn't the case. Digital technology improves qulity.

The same is true with graphic design, video, music, cinema and many other crafts.

From this POV the fact that an average user thinks that better tools provide better quality is natural, because it is true that for him the current tools are providing a better quality than what he was getting with the previous generation of tools.

And then, of course, there is a marketing side of it: buying expensive professional tools seems an easy way to become a professional. I might not be a better photographer because I have a big Nikon or a better guitarist because I have a Gibson but hey... it feels good :-)

JY reports about a bomb dropped by the US Air Force in 1943 which is still creating some problems. The same happens in Italy as well, a few bombs are still found every year, 60 years later. It helps putting things in perspective when thinking about bombings in Afganistan, Iraq, etc.

Sounds like yesterday Apple announced what I (and many others) was ready to buy some time ago. It won't be available until 2007, which is not a big deal since movies won't be available internationally until 2007 as well.

I've been using Bare Bones Software's BBedit as my main text editor for many years, I simply cannot live without 'grep' style pattern-based search and replace and can perfectly live without an application trying to format text for me (I use Pages for fancy documents).

I just dowloaded the brand new version 8.5 and I was curious about the new "Code Folding" feature. It allows you to collapse pieces of code. In other words: it's an outliner. Well, kinda, it only works with programming languages. Anyway, I have always found outliners the best code editing tool, this new version of BBEdit looks very promising.

PS: after the first few minutes of use I notice I cannot select a line clicking on "fold point" nor move it. And so far I haven't found a way to collapse all items. The good news is that folding status is somehow saved with the document.

Tags: BBedit

Congratulations to everybody involved for the deal. I think that RSS aggregator will fit pretty well in Vox, and RSS after all is becoming mainstream.

It's true: we keep seeing RSS icons on more and more sites, but curiously the vast majority of people I meet have never heard about it. I guess that it will take Microsoft and a new browser to change things below the geeks surface.

Dave is still having problems with his Macs.

Of course big companies cannot afford to keep track of every single user bitching on the web about their products... but can they afford to ignore them?

Dave's problems are quite peculiar, in my experience Macs almost don't crash: I did see a couple of crashes on my Mac Book Pro in the last 3 months, but I think I saw 3 crashes in 3 years on my previous PowerBook G4 and my desktop G5 is almost as stable. Anyway, nothing like a blue screen per day.

What would happen if Apple would decide to invest 10% of the budget they are investing on "I'm a Mac, I'm a PC" commercials to pay their geniuses to track and solve problems of bloggers?

Tags: Apple, Dave Winer, Customer Care

Speaking of mobile devices, the first time I got a cell phone with a built-in camera I thought it was a totally useless feature. I got that phone because it had a bunch of other stuff I needed and it happened to come with a camera.

On my next cell phone the first feature I will check is definitely going to be the quality of the camera. This one from Nokia looks interesting.

Tags: Nokia, n93