Shel and Neville at the For Immediate Release podcast interview Steve Rubel. Interesting stuff.
hyprtext
I’ve been beavering away on a new collaborative blogging project, which is called hyprtext. It’s going to be covering web and tech news, mainly. The feed is at http://feeds.feedburner.com/hyprtext.
I’ve already signed someone up to cover copyleft and drm issues and am looking for a couple more contributors. One I need specifically is someone who can cover the open source angle a lot better than I can. We’re looking at a few posts per week, I reckon, not a huge commitment. If anyone is interested, drop me a line.
There are still a few issues to iron out with the site layout. I’m trying to get an RSS feed to publish in a sidebar using the WordPress RSS widget (just the standard one that comes supplied with the sidebar widget plug-in); and I can’t seem to get my MyBlogLog thingy looking anything other than lame. I’ll get there though, I guess.
The All New Blogger
Google have finally got round to releasing the brand spanking new Blogger. They’ve been justifiably criticised over the lack of movement on the product since acquisition, and have since been easily overtaken by the likes of WordPress.com and TypePad. Even with this release, it’s fair to say that Blogger has some way to go to truly compete.
You can also now sign into your blogger account using your Google account ID, and Google has made editing the template and posts significantly more user friendly, such as by implementing what sounds like a widget style drag and drop approach.New features include the addition of tagging, which, this being Google, is called ‘labels’ and an option to make a blog private, viewable only by people that you specificy.
This is all hardly groundbreaking stuff, and the launch blog post seems to acknowledge this, stating that the work on Blogger is “far from done”. Are Google back in the blogging game? Possibly.
One feature I’d like to see Google implement is to integrate Blogger into their Google Apps service, which desperately needs some form of dynamic web content creation, rather than the static Page Creator that’s currently in place.
Has anyone tested the ‘new’ Blogger? We’d be interested in any comments you have.
[tags]blogger, google[/tags]
The shape of GoogleOS?
Read/WriteWeb have another of their articles trying to predict what a Google-produced operating system might be like. There’s no reason to suggest that Google are even developing such a thing, but that doesn’t stop the guessing game being fun.
Their conclusion is that it will be a stripped down Linux, which literally just boots the computer into FireFox to connect with Google’s many web services, rather than a Web based OS like YouOS, or a fully functional Linux distribution.
It’s a cute idea, and one which I think has some legs – even if Google themselves don’t do it. I do believe, for example, that the future of the web is mobile – maybe a Blackberry sized device that boots into Firefox via wireless connections and then hooks up with web services like those offered by Google and of course Zoho and others.
This approach would completely knock out the need for any kind of syncing between the mobile device and a desktop workstation, because the systems and interfaces you are using are exactly the same.
One of the problem with this approach is what you do with data. Will people be happy that every file they own is stored online, with Google’s ad bots running through them picking up on everything we do with our computers? It’s obvious that business will have a problem with this although whether that is true of the average home user, I don’t know.
Another fundamental issue is over the technology that is being used to produce so many of the web apps that are out there, and specifically Ajax. Bill Thompson puts it much better than I could:
There is a massive difference between rewriting Web pages on the fly with Javascript and reengineering the network to support message passing between distributed objects, a difference that too many Web 2.0 advocates seem willing to ignore. It may have been twenty years since Sun Microsystems trademarked the phrase ‘the network is the computer’ but we’re still a decade off delivering, and if we stick with Ajax there is a real danger that we will never get there.
It’s an interesting debate though, and one that hyprtext will be keeping a close eye on.
[tags]read/writeweb, google, googleos, bill thompson[/tags]