Year: 2006

  • Congratulations, Jerry McNerney and staff!

    Victory is sweet. While other Democratic politicians in the state of California were making nice to Schwarzenegger, abandoning Angelides and risking the rest of the state ticket, an army of grassroots supporters, many of them veterans of the Dean insurgency, backed McNerney early and worked their hearts out to get him elected, upsetting the complacent…

  • The right way to do a 10-foot interface

    Todd, our resident Windows guru, directed our intention to the Xbox Live Video HDTV and HD movie download platform written up at Engadget recently. Todd says, “See how simple it is? It doesn’t have a lot on the screen. There are muted colors in the background making it easy to identify the things that are…

  • Army recruiters tell students war in Iraq is over

    ABC News: Army Recruiters Accused of Misleading Students to Get Them to Enlist: But if they study hard they won’t get stuck in Iraq.

  • South by Southwest panel approved

    One of the two panels I proposed for SXSW next spring garnered sufficient votes to make the cut. It’s the one on identity, presence, attention, trust, privacy and so on, called “Every Breath You Take.” I’m excited about moderating this panel and I’m in the process of pulling together the other panelists, which I’ll announce…

  • 21st Century Lou

    Here’s a swank new version of Walk on the Wild Side, from Lou “Mr.” Reed, with updated lyrics for this modern world. Worth a listen….

  • Google release Gmail mobile client

    Gmail works pretty well on mobile devices already, but Google just announced a Java client application for mobile (Official Google Blog: Gmail mobile client is live) that runs on hundreds of devices. I visited the download page on my phone and it automatically detected that I was connecting via an HTC 2125 and supplied me…

  • Great article on McNerney’s race to unseat Pombo in CA-11 from the UK Independent

    The coverage in this article makes the McNerney-Pombo race seem like a bellwether. To me, this is the money quote: >He has put family members on his congressional payroll at salaries so high that two years ago they outstripped the entire campaign budget of his Democratic Party challenger. And now he is pushing to build…

  • What World of Warcraft can teach web developers

    I’ve often said that game interfaces tend to more forward-looking than those of productivity applications and that younger people are having their expectations set by the experiences they have playing games on their computers, on their TVs, on their playstations and mobile devices, and online in general. Usually I haven’t pushed this idea too much…

  • What’s wrong with John Kerry?

    It wasn’t enough that he lost the 2004 election for us; now he wants to lose the 2006 election, too? Why on Earth would he open his mouth and give the Republicans a piece of red meat like this? Kerry says sorry for “botched joke” Johnny: Much respect for all you’ve done for your country.…

  • What's a 'community advocate'?

    Last month I posted an entry about Platial and commented that “I think it’s kind of cool that so many of these new companies have community outreach people, even if it is still sometimes hard to tell them from publicists or PR professionals in general.” This prompted Tracy Rolling to write me a long interesting…

  • Google buys JotSpot

    Google is getting serious about its online groupware offerings, adding JotSpot to Writely (now part of their Docs and Spreadsheets offering). CNet has more as some analysis including a mention of Wetpaint the hosted wiki service that drives our client HTC’s user-community site.

  • Funny blog spam today

    It was actually trackback spam: Failure is not an option. It comes bundled with your Microsoft product.

  • That time again

    Last year I did National Novel Writing Month and managed to bang out 30,000 words of my novel For You, The Stars. I wrote nearly every day of the month and averaged slightly more than 1000 words a day, short of the 50,000 word target for NaNoWriMo participants but still a heckuva lot more fiction…

  • Berners-Lee: Evolve HTML incrementally

    Tim “Invented the Web” Berners-Lee on a way to evolve HTML without the abrupt disorienting changes characterized by the switch the XHTML: Reinventing HTML | Decentralized Information Group (DIG) Breadcrumbs

  • Grattan School evening lecture program (SF)

    Robert Birnbach, who shot the awesome author photo on the page-cover book-jacket flap of The Power of Many writes to tell me about an evening lecture suries he is helping start called The Grattan Speaker Series, “featuring locally and nationally renown authors, educators, activists and thinkers, and focused on themes that resonate with San Francisco…

  • East Bay Exhortation Sensation: Phone Banking for Moveon.Org

    This is an offical, authenticated exhortation to East Bay folks everywhere. Well, East Bay folks in the East Bay. Short version: The last two nights I went to the MoveOn office in Oakland. These folks have their act together. It’s fun, easy, and unintimidating. You can volunteer any day, any time o’ day between 9…

  • Raw notes from technology roundtable with former Presidential candidate Mark Warner in San Francisco on November 17, 2006

    When I have a moment, I’ll upload the lo-qual cellphone pictures I snapped and embed them here. Maybe I’ll even get around to cleaning up these raw notes into something coherent or even listing who all was there. For now, all I have time to do is dump the notes I t9’d into my “smartphone”…

  • For election junkies only

    Wondering if the Democrats are really about to take the House or if a dirty trick or surge of evangelical voters will deny them (ok, us) the majority? Keep an eye on the odds at Majority Watch. Think that people betting real money (ok, one dollar per share) have a better take on upcoming elections…

  • Glorum, a tagged forum about anything

    Mario Rizzuti pointed me to his vaguely Digg-looking discussion-forum project called glorum. I asked him to describe the purpose or “mission” of the site and he responded thusly: >It is an attempt at building a concept for online discussions alternative to the usenet model. > >The key ideas are > >1. using tags (no groups)…

  • Jacco Niewland releases swipr, a Visio plug-in for information architects

    According to Jacco Niewland, swipr is “a toolset for Visio that allows the integration of sitemaps/screenflows and wireframes into one fully interactive HTML deliverable.” Swipr is released under the GNU Open Source license, and is completely free. It “allows for one screenflow/sitemap document and multiple wireframe documents to be exported into one integrated HTML set,…

  • Yahoo's time capsule

    Austin Govella posted a link to the IA Institute mailing list the other day pointing to Yahoo Time Capsule, an intriguing project for gathering memories from users and making them browsable in interesting and innovative ways (that may break the browser in some use cases, but still… pretty cool).