Monthly Archives: May 2005

TV in the Age of the Web

Posted on by Kathy E. Gill

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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MSIE Tabbed

Posted on by Kathy E. Gill

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.

WWW2005: Winding Down

Posted on by Kathy E. Gill

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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MicroFormats

Posted on by Kathy E. Gill

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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