Today I opened two OPML subscription lists, one generated by Bloglines and one by Google reader, with my copy of Radio UserLand. The last time I tried this it was a pain, both on-line applications were generating OPML code which was probably fine to transfer a list of RSS feeds but absolutely didn't work in the outliner.

This time both files worked flawlessy.

Tags: OPML

Hey, did you get the news about the brand new MacBooks Pro with Intel Core... dual?... double?... secondo?... due?...

I can never remember the name of these Intel processors: good ol' G3, G4 and G5 were slower processors with better names.

This is just a test search engine I created with Google Co-op.

         

It only includes stuff from this blog and from our company web sites.

As a side note, I think it's the first time google is including a picture and is publishing a user profile. It looks like the "last activity" field gets updated whatever I do on any of google's services as a registered user.

It's good to read that video conferencing is back, with companies like Microsoft, Cisco, Apple and others pushing the envelope.

It looks like this new generation of video conferencing applications are quite expensive and require much more bandwidth than the average home or office has.

Which is exactly where we were 10 years ago.

While there were several "high quality" expensive video conferencing applications, using bundles of ISDN lines and costing tens of thousands of dollars, some of you will probably remember playing with CU-SeeMe and little spherical black and white cameras. It was kinda working, but the quality was very poor. Back then we were all saying that "in the future", with more bandwidth, better compression and faster processors we would have reached video conferencing nirvana, for the rest of us.

Sounds like we're not there yet.

Tags: Video conferencing

Dave: while 1984 might not have been like 1984, 2006 surely is.

Yesterday I broke my TomTom Go navigator mount kit. Since it was not hanging from the windscreen anymore, I found out that I could simply put it behind the driving wheel. I loose some information from the dashboard (but the engine doesn't go above 4500RPM, I don't care at what speed I'm going if it's below 40Kmh and I can live without the on board computer info), but I have the sat nav information in the best place: right in front of me.

How long before cars will provide a specific place for custom devices like this?

Most modern cars offer built in satellite navigation nowadays, but the truth is that the built-in devices usually are pretty expensive and, compared for example to the software of my TomTom, they suck. And it's pretty obvious why: since I got it I already updated the software of the TomTom a couple of times connecting it to the internet, while built-in systems are almost never updated. The problem is that cars' technology evolves at a much slower pace: my car is 5 years old and it still works pretty well while consumer electronics have a much shorter lifespan, let alone software.

Steve Rubel (whom I greatly admire) is presenting an Edelman research on the French, German and Italian blogospheres. Their research is based on data from Technorati, which unfortunately is flawed (for example, some bloggers considered very influential are actually template builders who get a lot of links by users using their templates, maybe popular, but hardly influential).

There's plenty of prior art about this (for example this is a very fine list of Italian blogs built with some smart metrics and very long discussions within the Italian blogosphere).

I think that now the real challange is: will Edelman listen to these comments and adjust their results?

On Friday I will attend an Edelman & Technorati event in Milano, we'll see. :-)

Looks like Google has updated some of its satellite imagery and now Gorizia, my home town, it clearly visible. Including my car, sitting in our office parking :-)

Curiously (well... actually it's not that strange since we are both back from BlogTalk) Ton Zijlstra is thinking about the same thing I have been thinking in the last couple of days: a tool to make social networking management easier across existing networks. Ton says:

Hence my question. Would there be a way to create a search agent that takes the name of a person you've met? Ideally you would provide such a search agent with your own account data of all the environments you are part of that you want to have searched. And then it comes back with a number of likely search results that might contain any or all of the following for instance:

Possible blogs of that person
Possible Flickr Feed, or 23 feed
Possible Skypename
Possible IM names
Profile in OpenBc.com
Profile in LinkedIn.com
Profile at 43people.com
Possible Plazes account
Possible del.icio.us account

So that I could have a look if it indeed is the person I am looking for, and then connect or subscribe. Connecting and subscribing would be manual again. Only I can send out personal messages, only I decide what to add to the feedreader.

Developing a tool which able to search all these sites should be possible, many services are already offering open API and some scraping might help with the ones which don't, the real issue is going to be matching profiles: for example somebody would have to confirm that this profile on LinkedIn belongs to the same person who owns this set of links on Del.icio.us.

Waiting for some type of federated ID system, this can easily be achieved manually and thinking about a centralized and social service, once the connection has been done by the first user, the same connection could be offered by the next user who queries the system.

This type of service fits pretty well in the PeopleAggregator vision, there already is the possibility to sync accounts from Flickr and Facebook within PA. There is already a ton of features on our roadmap, but stay tuned, a solution might not be that far away :-)

Yesterday we got back from Vienna, for me BlogTalk Reloaded has been one of the best conferences of the season. Actually the conference itself was good but not super, but the people was great, we really had a lot of fun every night. Thanks to Ton, Elmine, Anne, Marc, Lee, Matt, Jan and most of all to Thomas, I hope to meet you all soon.

Maybe at Les Blog in December? Sounds like Loïc is planning something seriously big this time.

Tags: Blogtalkreloaded, LesBlog30