And here is my del.icio.us page. Both this and the Furl one have RSS feeds to subscribe to.
Furl
Furl is a bookmark manager, rather like del.icio.us, I think. I am going to give both of them a try and see which is most useful, if either. Here’s the link for my Furl page which as yet has only this blog’s index page in it – how sad!
Election 2005 Stuff
So, another Labour government, albeit with a much reduced majority. Probably the best result all round.
Here are some interesting snippets from The Guardian‘s coverage this morning.
- Tony Blair alone bears the blame – Polly Toynbee
- The Tories’ Michael Foot – Max Hastings
- Who won? What next? – Lewis Baston
- BNP doubles its vote as it builds on support in inner cities
The BBC also provides a rather funky Flash-based map with details of all the results, here.
DIY Declassification
This from John Naughton is priceless!
Ho, ho! The Pentagon released a heavily-censored PDF version of its report into the shooting, by US troops, of the Italian secret agent who was escorting a freed hostage to safety. But it turns out that you could make the blacked-out paragraphs in the classified document, containing top-secret details (such as the name of the soldier who fired the deadly rounds of ammunition) reappear by cutting and pasting them from the site into a Word document! More exquisite details from Corriere della Sera here.
Is Search the Future of Desktop Computing?
Interesting post on Microsoft Monitor about the future of Windows:
What Microsoft really needs to do is transcend the traditional user interface and fundamentally transform how people interact with the operating system. But not in some newfangled way that would require effort akin to learning a new foreign language. Apple is off to a good start, assuming the company really understands what it’s got.
I’m talking search as the user interface. Back in February I suggested that maybe the best future of operating system interfaces is a step back to the command line. Search as the user interface makes lots of sense, and it is familiar because of how people use the Web.
Over the weekend, I stopped into an Apple Store to ask questions about QuickTime 7 High-Definition support. An Apple employee said that he had a 1080i short of BBC clips on one of the Macs. Rather than go to the file folder where the clip was stored, he clicked on the Spotlight search icon in the upper right-hand corner, typed BBC, found the file in about one second and started playback in HD. I’ve spoken to a few Mac users that are going through a kind of transforming behavior, where Spotlight quickly is becoming the main way through which they interact with the operating system.
Right now, Windows is stuck in the past.
I see desktop applications like desktop publishing and spreadsheets as driving the first wave of PC purchases. The Internet spurred the second wave of sales. Digital content could drive a third wave of sales, if vendor focus shifted from processing power and other tired feature and performance metrics to real user benefits. Search is a potentially strong user benefit, because it can remove an obstacle–the tired file folder structure–to making more out of digital content. I wonder in a teacher’s survey of a third-grade classroom how many kids aspire to be a file clerk when they grow up? Probably none. So how many people really aspire to filing stuff on their computers and then actually trudging through the file folders looking for it?
Since installing Google Desktop Search and Picasa I now never use the traditional My Documents file browsing. I just bung in what I am after into Desktop Search and move from there. Likewise on the web, with Google as my homepage I simply don’t bother with bookmarks any more – does anyone? It’s far easier to just type what you want into the search engine.