This story illustrates the birth process of the Apple Mac user interface from 1978 to 1982, as told by Andy Hertzfeld. Lots of Polaroids to document the progress. The whole Folklore site is full of early Apple inside stories, for instance on Steve Jobs’ “Reality Distortion Field”.
Luc Van Braekel has developed a service called Blogium.be, to find new emerging ‘hot’ links on the front pages of Belgian blogs. His start database is obviously a big list of URLs of Belgian bloggers. I think that a good additional function of Blogium could be to display a ranking of these, ordered by some kind of meta-calculation over things like: Google Pagerank, #incoming links for all search engines, posting recency/frequency (so deserted blogs disappear from the ranking in time), intra-belgium link traffic, …
Here we are, back at the scene of the crime. Yes, I know it’s been a while. And the task of the day is:
Have you ever wondered how difficult it is to beatmix 2 records? Does one actually have to have skills to be a top-notch DJ like Roger Sanchez or Fat Boy Slim?
Dave Winer seems to be very excited about something but he can’t say yet what it is:
I recently rediscovered Meshell Ndegeocello. I had been really disappointed by the concert I had seen of her last year on the Blue Note festival and hadn’t listened to any of her CDs for that time. Basically I was disappointed to see such a talent go to waste.
While he was still a sceptic in October 2004, Russell Beattie has taken the Pepsi Challenge and tried out listening to podcasts in the car:
I have an extensive collection DJ mixes on my hard disk, and a while ago I discovered in one of them a catchy tune. It starts as a laidback (112 BPM) love song, a crooner voice singing “Just a little lovin’, early in the morning, just a little lovin’, early in the day …“. It then turns into a groovy re-edit of the same song, with the voice nicely cut up to match the new tempo (124 BPM). There are some added vocals that are a bit silly (clearly a non-native English speaker), but the chorus is really addictive. For some reason it stayed glued to the back of my head, I caught myself whistling it several times a day. But what was it?
Podcasting is still in its infancy. A lot of podcasts programs are about podcasters podcasting, on how they do it and why it’s so great. This is rather normal, since it is still new, and on the producing side a lot of (technical) issues still need to be addressed. I also hear the occasional “It’s 9AM. It’s raining. I haven’t got a clue what to say next.” podcast. But shows like IT Conversations, BBC’s “In Our Time” and The Dawn and Drew Show where the possibilities lie. This is high value content. It is clear that at some point people will start making money with podcasting.
In this geeky world I’m in, there are few magazines as spot-on and influential as Wired Magazine. It’s one of the magazines I keep around for years after publication.
