WiredPen

Just before I left for Japan, Terry Heaton posted a short essay on TV news in the age of online news. He writes:

One, TV news people are reluctant to get involved on the Web side of their stations… there is a sense that newsroom employees view the Internet as a bastard stepchild… I don’t care what your current priorities are, you are contributing to the demise of your industry by not personally gaining the skills necessary to compete in a multimedia world… Denying the realities of the shift from broadcasting to the Internet only accelerates your own obsolescence. Why on earth would you do that?

Here’s my question: what skills are needed to compete in a multi-media world? Do all reporters need to learn HTML (or Dreamweaver)? Do they need to become experts with Flash, Quicktime and Photoshop? Or do they need to learn how to create an effective non-linear narrative?

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According to the IE BLog at MSDN, MSIE 7.0 will be tabbed, and MSN will add tabs to its MSIE toolbar later this year. Will wonders never cease? I remember when Navigator launched tabs — I was still at Boeing (and I left there in 1999). Back then, I didn’t see the value; today, I couldn’t live without them. I have naked MSIE installations on my machines, even though there are third party method$ to create a tabbed MSIE 6, because I so rarely use the browser. Nod to Dan Gillmor.

It’s mid-afternoon Sunday 15 May … and I’m sitting at a computer desk at Narita … connected wirelessly (and charging my iPod while I download a new book from Audible.com). The week has been a whirlwind — starting with the blogging workshop on Tuesday and ending with developer day on Saturday. In between, I learned about search and semantic web and microformats … and kept bumping into the same people (heh, and I thought my interests were eclectic). I’ve connected with folks in the UK who are also interested in social science — and will learn more about their eScience initiative (linking this to my Access Grid project). This conference remains a geek’s name-dropper heaven … yet the sense of community (and lack of pretension) is inspiring.

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FirstGov.gov has an RSS library … the categories: agriculture, consumers, cyber-security, data and stats, education, federal personnel, forest, health, international relations, military and science. Each category contains a list of feeds and general information about readers and RSS.

Eric Meyer and
Tantek Çelik  are running a  developer-day  session on
microformats at this year’s WWW 2005 conference. This is an effort to add semantic meaning to objects (such as images or hyperlinks, for example) … and includes discussion about social networks (xFN - xhtml Friends Network). Visit Rubhub and XHTML Friends (for xFN application) and Upcoming.org (application of
hCalendar for events). Rohit Khare spoke on
hReview (standard set of tags for reviews — books, movies, etc). An interesting and practical set of applications for the
semantic web. Rohit also pointed us to JotSpot — the wiki that works like you expect (mark-up-wise).

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I dropped into Molly Holzschlag’s tutorial at WWW2005 … to see her using a really really cool tool in Firefox that allowed her to show table structure on a live web page. Run to Chris’ site for the tool. Right now!

Lorrie Cranor’s keynote on usable privacy and security: Her emphasis is not on the technology, but its use/adoption. To be safe, “experts” suggest

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This is the second keynote at the WWW2005 conference in Chiba - NTT’s R&D on human-centered network. Interesting demonstration of how the human eye processes color in motion: moving goldfish in full cover … greyscale … as pink against grey … as green against grey.

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I’ll be recording various sessions during the WWW2005 conference this week in Japan. I have produced an RSS feed for these podcasts.

Updated 18 May
This is an experiment! Podcast RSS Feed. If this fails (heh), get the mp3 with a direct download. Details about the workshop are available on the conference site.

The following papers (and recordings) may be of interest:

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