Scribd is a website with an interesting marketing angle: they want to be the YouTube of documents. For long time readers of mutednoise that statement is a bit of a puzzler – after all, the web itself was first conceived as a set of linked documents. A quick scan through the comments on a recent Om Malik inquiry about the company’s ‘hotness’ turned up a number of people who are also scratching their heads.
I worked for several years writing software for a document control company. What I gradually learned is that there is a large difference between a document and data. A document represents a fixed set of data at a particular moment in time. Having these fixed ’snapshots’ can be highly valuable: while data is ongoing and without a fixed state a document provides the moors so that comparison and analysis can happen.
On the web data is able to exist naturally. It is constantly being scraped, mutated, appended, rearranged, split up, and recombined. By freezing that data into a state (in this case a PDF document) an authoritative (but not necessarily correct) version of the data can be presented across multiple forums in the exact same identical way. In this way, too, Scribd is like YouTube: they make embedding an entire document on another website as easy as cutting an pasting code. The ’snapshot’ of data maintains its referential integrity.
Is that a subtle benefit? Hell yes. However, its one that seems to be getting lost in the poo-pooing of the service. Scribd is providing some real value. It’ll be worth watching to see just how long it takes the doubters to realize it.
Posted in tools, video at 8:59 am by Matthew Reinbold
As I’ve talked about recently I love the quirky, original shows that have been filling up the series of tubes we know and love. Now the makers of the Democracy video player have launched a new online resource called MakeInternetTV. Its a site dedicated to sharing knowledge on just how to get up and running.
As much as I’d love to do my own video show two things are holding me back: (1) there are already way too many ‘talking-head’ technology shows to warrant my own blather and (2) I just don’t have the time. I make sure to carve out at least an hour each day just for writing and that’s orders of magnitude simpler that prepping, shooting, editing, reshooting, and uploading a semi-professional video. I fear that until I am independently wealthy with my virtual lama scam multi-level marketing offer I just can’t do a vidcast.
How about you – if you were to do a show what would it be about? Are you already doing it? What’s the link?
Posted in business, tools at 10:24 am by Matthew Reinbold
Buried in last weeks technology news was Google’s release of a freely available 411 service. I didn’t want to post about it until I had a chance to try it out for myself. And while I don’t have much first hand experience with ‘traditional’ 411 service (because I’m cheap like that) I can completely see me using Google’s 411 service on a regular basis.
First off it is completely automated with some darn fine voice recognition software. Growing up in the Dakotas to decedents of German immigrants there are times when I sound like an extra from the cast of Fargo. However, Goog-411 didn’t have any trouble. And because its automated there’s no fear of asking a dumb question – there’s no human rolling their eyes or stifling a chuckle if you ask a really dumb question (like where you can find a 5-star hotel in central Wyoming). And its fast. When I’ve tried previous voice recognition products there was always that uncomfortable delay while the computer tries to figure out what you mean by ‘got the munchies’. Not so here.
But, probably my most favorite part and something pointed out on a recent episode of Diggnation, is the nature of the automated voice. Sure, the male generated speech is a bit cut up but its like Stephen Hawking is giving you directions for pizza. I couldn’t stop giggling because I expected the service to break out into a passage from A Brief History of Time.
On a side note Google, in one fell swoop, has completely squashed the $7 billion 411 industry. And how they’re going to build a business around this remains to be seen (preferential ranking on the list of results that businesses can bid on?). However, for right now its hard not to be excited at suddenly having such a wonderful service available for free. Between this, Twitter’s SMS capability, and Jott even my cheap phone that came free with the contract is suddenly a very capable little device.
Posted in tools, video at 9:58 am by Matthew Reinbold
GeekBrief TV is a well produced, bite sized look at the day’s technology news. In a very recent behind the scenes recording they show just how they put the Geek Brief together. While anyone with a webcam and a Stickam acocunt can theoretically put together a show there is a perceptible difference in quality (of course).
They do cover the common sense stuff like a computer for editing things together and a camera to capture images. But they also go over a lot of the stuff that may be forgotten because its not on camera – the teleprompter, lighting, etc. If you’re interested in running a ‘pro’ podcast, check it out!
In the past several weeks more and more details are coming to light about the next version of Firefox, the main browser competition to Microsoft’s Internet Explorer. Excitement is growing for two very seperate audiences:
First, development guru’s are jonzing about the possibilities of local client storage. While this is possible with runtime environments like the newly released Adobe Apollo, Firefox 3 promises to not require a seperate download and installation. How they decide to sandbox each application running in a browser window – that is, protect it from doing harm to the user’s file system, will be very interesting.
The thing that had made headlines yesterday, however, is a portion of the app called Coop. As Stan Schroeder describes it:
Users will be able to add friends directly in Firefox, and send them notes, images and web pages. The idea behind Coop is to move the popular practice of sending fun web pages via e-mail directly to the browser, but it’s obvious that Coop could become more than this…
Personally, I love little innovations like this – abstracting redundant functionality that’s normally implemented on a site-by-site basis and putting it into the browser. A prime example of this innovation already in Firefox 2.0 is their spell check. Why have every website try and implement their own version of this utility? It’s certainly not unique to a website. And by pulling it back into the browser level a user can now do much more useful things – like adding their own vocabulary that may not exist in a generic dictionary – and have it be available to any site they browse.
Coop promises to do this with social networks too. Why recreate the same social networks over and over again when what you really want to do is have them available at all times? Why build your posse in a closed system to talk about the wider web when you could just take them with you as you explore? Schroeder comes to the conclusion that Flock (the struggling social browser) may be in trouble with these developments. I would be looking more at sites like MySpace.com, Bebo.com, or even Twitter and ask myself how these siloed social networks will compete in an community environment that will become website agnostic.
Posted in tools, video at 7:12 am by Matthew Reinbold
Not directly related to code but the following is a fantastic video non-the-less. It amazes me that in the age of all kinds of whiz-bang special effects and easy-peasy digital editing doing something as simple as carefully choreographed backwards filming (like that is simple) can create such incredible results.
It didn’t make sense to me until I had linked to a few friends. Once I began seeing other active people’s daily lists of accomplishments and activities did I see the real value of Twitter – a personal motivator. Working by oneself can be extremely satisfying but it can be hard to be disciplined – the only one keeping you from knocking off early or sneaking in a few rounds of Pirates Online is oneself. By not only seeing what others are doing but reporting back what you’re up to it creates a kind of active community – a friendly competition of productivity. Its similar to when I used to jog in college. Getting up early in the morning and running a few miles is extremely hard when you are the only one doing it. However, toss in a few friends who agree to run together and you find yourself making an extra effort – nobody wants to be seen as the ‘lazy’ one of the group.
If you’d like to add me as a friend my Twitter user name is ‘libel_vox’. Has anyone else picked up Twitter yet? How are you using it?
There has been a tremendous amount of hype surrounding Twitter. Twitter is a site that allows people to submit quick quips as to what their doing in a variety of ways (via SMS message, IM, and web). The idea is to create an ongoing log of activity however amazing or mundane. As Liz Lawley states on Corante, these kind of minutia is useful (for some):
This isn’t about conveying complex theory—it’s about letting the people in your distributed network of family and friends have some sense of where you are and what you’re doing. And we crave this, I think. When I travel, the first thing I ask the kids on the phone when I call home is “what are you doing?� Not because I really care that much about the show on TV, or the homework they’re working on, but because I care about the rhythms and activities of their days. No, most people don’t care that I’m sitting in the airport at DCA, or watching a TV show with my husband. But the people who miss being able to share in day-to-day activity with me—family and close friends—do care.
I was hoping to use Twitter and an ultra flexible time tracking tool. Given the variety of options for pushing data to be archived I started detailing my day. For time reporting, however, Twitter falls short. There’s no way of summing time for like-events together. The times displayed are vague and only relate to now without showing duration (’you were grocery shopping about an hour ago’). While the family angle Liz mentions is plausible using Twitter as an organizational tool leaves me scratching my head.
That’s when I came across Toggl. Toggl (with no ‘e’) is a slick little app where you type a project name and hit a record button to track time. I’m still exploring the functionality – right now there seems to no separation between tasks and projects and it would be great to be able to have Twitter’s variety of inputs (text message a task name to start and SMS the words ’stop’ to stop time tracking, for example).
Has anyone else played with these online tools? What were your thoughts? And what do you use to track your time?
Posted in privacy, tools at 5:00 am by Matthew Reinbold
I will agree with anyone that is concerned with Google’s growing adeptness at gathering information. Privacy concerns are definitely an issue but the trade off are a number of free applications that make me a more productive person. However, to believe the following video, Google will have our entire genetic code on file… so that they can… um, what exactly?
And really, when given the choice between random ad bombardment and providing some information to have ads that pertain to me I’ll choose the latter.
Pipes is a new beta app from Yahoo that has been getting high praise among the digerati. It takes advantage of the RSS machine readable format and allows people to remix that data in a graphical interface – no coding is needed.
Planning a trip? It takes research and time. Or maybe you can do a single pipe which will give you all the answers you need in a second? Ladies and gentlemen, I present to you: the travel fanatic. Seemingly most complex of all the pipes here, it’s actually quite simple to make. It combines Flickr images, Yahoo Answers, and Yahoo News related to the location. (Various other feeds could be added, but I chose only these three for simplicity’s sake.) This results in a very comprehensive feed with a lot of information on the place you’re planning to visit.
How useful is it? Pretty damn useful, I would say. With a bit of tweaking this single feed replaces what would previously be an entire service.
While that sound promising – getting contextual information about a place that exists throughout the web – trying to change the default ‘London’ to anything else doesn’t seem to work. And building a pipe from scratch, despite involving ‘no code’, is still slightly confusing. For example, something as simple as providing a unified feed for several of my blogs seems overly complex and still doesn’t work as I expected it to (I can’t figure out how to have the individual posts appear in the order in which they were posted – right now it seems to grab all articles from one site and then another). And, as Stan mentions, the interface is buggy and lacks some certain key features.
So would you ever use something like Yahoo Pipes? Or is anything beyond an aggregator for RSS feeds overkill?