A few weeks back I was thinking about getting a BlackJack. Well, I did, and I’ve been slowly getting up to speed on its features.
One immediate annoyance was the way Cingular/Samsung have configured the JBlend Java Virtual Machine on the phone. That had to go, or the phone was going back to the store.
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In “The ‘Dumbness of Crowds,'” Kathy Sierra points out that the notion of the Wisdom of Crowds has been poorly understood, especially as it concerns creative endeavors.
She draws a distinction between “Collective Intelligence” properly controlled and leverage and “The Dumbness of Crowds”:
Hey!Watch launched over the holidays.
Got an invitation code this weekend, just as I was getting up to speed on using my new Samsung Blackjack phone. Ah, the joy of synchronicity.
What Hey!Watch does is allow you to transcode video – translating it from one format to another.
In and of itself, that’s nothing to write home (or blog) about. But, they’ve added a number of features that I think are remarkable.
What’s really behind Microsoft’s patent applications related to RSS?
Initial reports that Microsoft was trying to “patent RSS” turn out to be at best over-simplified.
At issue isn’t RSS itself, or an RSS reader, or feed publisher. What’s at issue is the way that RSS is handled in Vista, and in the combination of IE7 and Vista.
There’s an Internet Explorer plug-in from the folks at Weezu. It’s an interesting idea – trying to bring “social” activity to what is otherwise typically a solitary activity – using the web. I think it’s ultimately unsuccessful, for a few reasons I discuss below, but it will be interesting to see what other approaches might arise to the same scenario.
Basically, you install the plug-in in your copy of IE, and sign in to the Weezu servers. Then, while you browse the web, Weezu “watches” what urls you are visiting, and informs you when other Weezu users are looking at the same pages.
In other words, you can see which other Weezu users (those who also installed the plug-in and created a Weezu account) are viewing the same page you are.