Mind the gap
Posted: Thursday, November 02, 2006 2:10 PM by Will Femia
Elephants and Evolution - How the Landscape is Changing for Google, Microsoft, Mozilla and Adobe - "The days of purely desktop-based applications are clearly numbered, but so are the days of exclusively web-based apps..." It seems like everywhere I look lately I see commentary on bridging the gap between desktop and Web.
More here about how Blake Ross, "the Firefox kid," is working something called Parakey. "Parakey is an application you download to your PC, which effectively becomes your personal operating system. It turns your computer in[to] a hybrid Web site-hard drive, where you can choose what to make public online and what to keep private."
That post is in response to this feature piece on Ross. (Commuter Click)
These are a little long, but if you don't want to be playing catch up later, you might as well pay attention now.
Yahoo is about to launch a big food section.
"Das Rad" (The Wheel) - It's an animated short from 2003, but since I don't do a very good job of keeping up on animated shorts it's new to me. Plot: Two stones watch the evolution of man. 8 minutes long. Outstanding.
Looking ahead to Christmas, (w)rapping paper.
Cool robot vehicle transports man around Tokyo - "You act as thought you've never seen Buzz Lightyear Tetrapodal robot out for a Sunday roll before!" The description of the guy not acknowledging anyone makes it sound like he accidentally arrived from the future.
Will it blend? A take-off on Letterman's Will It Float? it's one of a series of videos in which a guy puts things in a blender to see what happens. I'm pretty sure this is part of an ad campaign for this particular brand of blender. Is this the future of advertising? Works for me.
Speaking of the future of advertising, "Amazon ... ranks books based on their sales over the previous 24 hours. This means that it is possible, through coordinated action, to hack the system by getting a large number of people to buy the book at the same time." I didn't see the post until it was too late, but it's a clever idea for getting exposure.
Primary and early e-voting problems point to gathering storm - A nice round up of problems with electronic voting machines. Also makes mention that "BlackBoxVoting.org has released "push this, pull here" instructions for multiple voting on a Sequoia DRE, no hacking skills necessary." That's here.
Plus, 35,000 Questionable Registration Forms
Plus, Jefferson County Voters Continue To Raise Concerns About Voting Machines (more of that automatic party switching)
While we're on election links, "In the YouTube era, stupid stuff a candidate did on tape four years ago doesn't remain in the past. Instead, it becomes part of the campaign narrative, in this case showing how Mary Parker, Democrat nominee for the state Senate in Tennessee, was willing to abuse her power position as a lawyer to get out of a speeding ticket in ways that a normal person couldn't."
Speaking of campaign ads, with all the buzz and hype going on I totally forgot to check in periodically with FactCheck.org.
"Now we learn that one of the first female soldiers killed in Iraq died by her own hand after objecting to interrogation techniques used on prisoners."
Speaking of members of the military finding themselves in tough positions, this compelling account of a Marine Navy (he's tending Marines) medic in Iraq is drawing a lot of link attention.
Flickr's best photographers
The Kerry corner:
The 91st Carnival of Education - A regular round up of education bloggers.
Transforming Transformer Costume - It actually transforms, sort of. NOTE: This site may contain unsafe material if you look around enough.
If Aaron Sorkin wrote a show about baseball - This is a pretty good fake Sorkin script, but also it's interesting to read a blog by an award winning TV comedy writer.
Speaking of TV writing (and I cast no aspersions on Mr. Levine in making this segue), the Digg folks share a bootleg of a recent episode of the Simpsons. What made me note the link, however, was a comment that does a clear job explaining the decline of the Simpsons and the problem with most TV scripts.
