Sen No Sen

As the old year draws to a close, Ton Zylstra provides a thoughtful post on the evolutionary direction weblogs need to take in future.

His concept of Personal Presence Portals, along with Mac Canter’s Digital Lifestyle Aggregators, points to an increasing degree of integration of what are still separate tools and services that facilitate collaboration, sharing and exchange amongst ever growing numbers around the globe…. towards greater Collective Intelligence.

Heaven knows, that’s what the world needs.

Robin Good reports on the continuing decline of Internet Explorer’s share in the browser market…

The perfect icon for the occasion by courtesy of The Schockwellenreiter.

First Forbes, then Fortune, now the BBC confirms the power of blogs.

But the real question is, will the BBC follow the visionary example set by the French newspaper Le Monde : providing blogs to it’s readers under their own brand and mixing their journalists blogs and their readers blogs, showing them at the same level, based on blog readers recommendations?

If they don’t - others most certainly will.

Oh, and while we’re at it - Forbes’ latest article: Feed Me, hints at how RSS threatens to bypass those who refuse to see the light.

If one hasn’t used them yet, one could easily overlook the fundamental importance and enormous potential that is evolving in and around del.icio.us and Flickr.

In the coming year, I suspect, it will no longer be so easy to overlook.

Here’s an interesting study that may help to illustrate why: Bookmark, Classify and Share.

(via iCite Blog)

Heads-up!

On the last day of 21C3 a student from Bonn named Angelo Laub gave a presentation detailing several vulnerabilites in OSX.

• User rights escalation through System Preferences
• Bad Installers and wrong Permissions
• Clear Text Passwords in Swap File
• Personal Filesharing Denial of Service
• Mach Injection
• Disguised Executables

He apparently notified Apple in October about the System Prefs vulnerability, to which they responded inadequately and now ask him not to go public and to wait for the next update!

Not good.

Anyhow, here are slides of the presentation: Practical Mac OS X Insecurity (PDF).

(thanks to Industrial Technology & Witchcraft)

Robin Good keeps a regularly updated list of Best Blog Directory And RSS Submission Sites.

A recommended resource.

Amongst others I just found Postami there.

Scott Johnson provides a listing of the Feedster contest winners.

For example, in the following categories:

Oddest Use: Shimon Rura and the Memory Game, and
Feedster in a Web App: Feedster RSS Zeitgeist.

(via SearchEngineWatch Blog)

Seems like there’s been a service glitch preventing web based login to all accounts… and won’t be fixed untill the 4th of Janaury.

Luckely I found a tip in the forum that the XML-RPC interface is still up and working.

So, just downloaded ecto and voila! we’re good-to-go!

A good thing the service supports the MetaWeblog API!

Update: 03.01.05:
The login and the rest of the web based service was restored yesterday already (perhaps even the day before - so busy bloggin!).

Whilst I enjoyed taking ecto for a run - I’ve come to rely on the benefits and power of blogging right from the browser using Firefox and the fantasic Sage RSS-reader and JustBlogIt! extensions.

• Favorite weblogs
• Best Links

…see also Rex Sorgatz’s Best of list.

Good value!

The German Apple page also has a message of condolences with links to the following organizations collecting donations:

• The German Foreign Office
• The German Red Cross
• UNICEF
• Doctors Without Borders

Amazon, in turn, offers a one-click donation button - going to the American Red Cross Disaster Relief.

(via Scoble)

Neighbornode: the extensible neighborhood network.

Can you see this coming to your neighborhood?

Neighbornodes are group message boards on wireless nodes, placed in residential areas and open to the public. These nodes transmit signal for around 300 feet, so everyone within that range has access to the board and can read and post to it. This means that with a Neighbornode you can broadcast a message to roughly everyone whose apartment window is within 300 feet of yours (and has line of sight), and they can broadcast messages back to you. Boards are only accessible from computers that go through the local node.

Additionally, Neighbornodes are linked together, making up a node network to enable the passing of news and information on a street-by-street basis throughout the wider community.

With access to your local Neighbornode, you can post messages to your local group board, as well as forward messages to other nodes in your vicinity. These other nodes can in turn forward messages to your node, resulting in a network of neighborhood message boards.

It certainly makes sense to me, but German cities? I’ll hazard a guess: in 5 to 10 years time, maybe.

(via Full Circle Associates Online)

Durl: an RSS feed for del.icio.us URL queries.

Whoa! 185 other del.icio.us users had already snagged this one.

More information about Durl.

On my first test results page was a Furl link to a list of other social bookmarking services…

(via ResearchBuzz)

The RSS Weblog reports on the new Intensified RSS Handling Features of Opera Beta.

A clickable RSS icon will appear in the address bar on sites that offer RSS feeds so you don’t have to look around for the link. You can also add the newsfeeds to Opera’s e-mail client where you can store, sort, search, and find information with a click of the mouse.

While it’s not the only new/impoved feature in Opera, Firefox has certainly blazed the trail in this regard - with Safari following closely. The copy machines must be running hot in Redmond. Ha!

All other considerations aside, I must say though, the developers of the Opera Site have done an excellent job. A pleasure to visit.

Even before listening to it, I just know this going to be a gem.

A “story” called Open source audio by Jon Udell.

More! Please! Thanks!

In a series on “10 Tech Trends”, FORTUNE magazine gives us the reasons “Why There’s No Escaping the Blog.”

Freewheeling bloggers can boost your product - or destroy it. Either way, they’ve become a force business can’t afford to ignore.

You’d better believe it!

The only difficulty I have with such deep insights into the effectiveness of weblogs that are suddenly appearing all over, is the rabid obstinacy with which the very same was denied, put down and ridiculed not that long ago.

(via Scripting News) … now updated along with the HTML version in OPML

mmm…’ wonder what Dave has in mind with this new feature?