Albert Tanutama

Jeffrey Veen wrote

It’s the applications that are interesting, not the infrastructure. And Orcut, Friendster, and Tribe.net are all just infrastructure. They’re big databases full of relationships, but very little else. On top of that, the standards are all in place. It’s as if these big repositories of data are being handed free APIs: FOAF, iCal, vCard, et al. The interesting thing is that the social network sites own the contract between you and your so-called-friends.

A number of nifty ideas for creating new applications.

Berkman’s Urs Gasser released a study of Apple’s iTunes. The Digital Media Project’s Green Paper, iTunes: How Copyright, Contract, and Technology Shape the Business of Digital Media, provides an in-depth look at this service from the perspective of comparative law. Members of the Digital Media Team examined different legal and regulatory regimes from a range of countries to deterimine how iTunes and services like it are likely to fare under different sets of norms.

Eric Meyer said
Weblogs are temporally broken; the question I have is whether or not they’re temporarily broken, or if we’re going to manage to fix them. In fact, our collective behavior when it comes to reading weblogs is a stunning example of an entire community adopting hugely counter-intuitive behaviors in order to conform to a received truth (that weblog entries should be ordered most to least recent). So either weblogs are broken and we’ve chosen to invent a whole new branch of technique rather than solve the problem for the Web, or else the Web is not the correct medium for logs/journals and we need to get them off the Web altogether.

Darryl Taft of eWeek interviews “What Is Bill Gates Thinking?” about his annual “Think Week”. There are a number of interesting technology highlighted, for example: ultra wideband and WiMax 802.16, IPSEC, as well as other issues such as their competitor, webservices, even recruitment fair. In term of security, JD highlighted his concern about microsoft’s new MOM product, which might also be vunerable.

According to Christian Ricci,
Personalization, properly implemented, brings focus to your message and delivers an experience that is visitor-oriented, quick to inform, and relevant. Personalization, poorly implemented, complicates the user experience and orphans content.

Gates encouraged developers to apply their existing skills to mobile development and pointed out that the mobile industry is at an inflection point, with rich software and technology meeting exciting hardware innovation and new market opportunities. (Read the transcript here). Do I think mobile application exciting? Perhaps. I’m interested to see address book with photo in my mobile, better voice recognition and commands, photoblogging, RSS…. Wow!

Another list of links for today (I definitely need to figure out how to re-categorize them): 10 Things They Never Taught Me in Design School article, a must read for designers.

On the design side, Daniel Rosenberg from Oracle on Seven Myths of Usability ROI, telling current ROI models are inadequate. While from information studies related article, there is a Report of the Archives Task Force which makes clear recommendations to Government to transform and revitalise the UK’s archives. Interesting summary on the high cost of not finding information. University of Washington - Keeping Found Things Found survey (and the result) as well as The State of the News Media 2004 survey which provide a comprehensive look each year at the state of American journalism.

On a ‘lighter’ side. Cornell’s Division of Rare and Manuscript Collections investigates the evolution of games since 1800. Finally, a handy MSDN article explaining all the basics of blogging.

Finished off with my room cleaning stuffs, read some news, and run my FeedDemon. Read Steve Gillmor’s open letter to Steve Ballmer on why microsoft should make priority of syndication. Cool new ideas. Noted Social Software Symposium, with their blogs and wiki. Found Eric Rudder’s blog (is not updated since May last year though) via interesting Scoble’s note. It is interesting how blogs ‘dissolve’ people status - allow us to focus on what they have in mind.

Lawrence Lessig’s Free Culture book is available under Creative Common. Interesting excerpt on his other book, The Future of Ideas, and Code: and other laws of cyberspace

Finally, the CSS layout works for both IE and FireFox. It’s really rough rides to design using CSS, than using usual tables. At the same time, I’ve set my restrictions to use existing MovableType CSS styles (Though finally I need to add 3 more classes: main, navigation, and link-header - my personal note)

Yet, once the layout is ready, it’s really exciting to play around with margin, pading, hover, etc. This time, I choose natural green as my theme. I found it very refreshing. Anyway, this is my next on need further reading on (draft) essay for BloggerCon by Jay Rosen’s Journalism and Nick Denton’s “power-law” session

Rebuilding the look and feel of “a wink and a smile”. Interesting post from my cousin about blogging. Everyone would have their own style and purpose of writing weblogs. For me? I found constant evolution on my writing style, as I’m trying to build character of this blog.

For example, I used to post interesting links and brief commentary, then I used file upload features to put some personal photos. I consider this blog as my personal library of things I read and found in the internet. At the same time, it is a convenient way to “communicate” with my family. Further, I do wish want to build up my presence on the internet, that is to find the community where I could actively participate and contribute. I think it would be a rewarding experience to meet and communicate with people of similar interest beyond daily social network.

For my first step, I’d customize this blog look and feel, so that it becomes “me” in this virtual world.

Off we go…