Swimming with the Razorfishes: 11/28/2004

POTD

Come to New York.

Come to New York in your tour busses. Eat at McDonalds. See "Ground Zero."

Why not go to Canal Street and get a fucking fake Movado to go along with your fake New York "experience?"

Jack Nicholson prank call.

I missed this when it broke: Donald Knuth's [if you know that name, you might be a geek] open letter to Condolezza Rice.

Speaking of headphones, I'm thinking of getting a HeadRoom headphone amp. Any thoughts?

I'm sitting here, listening to Billy Breathes through a pair of Sennheiser HD 590s. It is rather nice.

POTD

CBS Market Watch: International Business Machines has put its personal computer business up for sale and expects to get $1 billion to $2 billion for its desktops, laptops and notebooks, according to a media report Friday.

POTD

Talk amongst yourselves.

Topic: certain fashion decisions should be punishable by law.

Bonus Topic: dyeing one's dog's fur pink should result in a beating.

Quick impressions of Microsoft's new MSN Spaces. I set up my own space as a trial:

It is unfair to call MSN Spaces a 'blogging tool. They really seem to be going more for a community-building tool. Sharing photos, music, and "lists," as well as 'blogging
The list concept strikes me as a bit muddy. MSN Spaces seems to allow three kinds of lists currently: blogs, books, and custom. Making a list of type "blog" allows you to enter a name, description, and a URL. Lists just seem to be lists of links. No RSS / ATOM auto discovery. I'm not sure why I'd actually be motivated to make a list. I do enough of that at work.
The concept of a "friends list" or news aggregator seems to be entirely missing. This is odd. I would have thought that this kind of a think is a no-brainer.
The journal/'blog features allow trackbacks and comments, but the comments are single-level; you can't reply to a comment, or have a conversation. Again, threaded discussions seems like an obvious community building feature. Comments don't seem to have RSS feeds.
It is entirely possible that aggregation and threaded discussions are missing because MS wants you to go somewhere else within MSN to do this.
The photo album feature is reasonably cool, though right now I prefer the way Flickr does photo albums. MSN Spaces allows you to upload photos and organize then into albums. It also has a slide show feature. Note that photo uploading only seems to work on Windows PCs (done with ActiveX). Slide shows seem to be cross-platform.
While messing with MSN Spaces, I was having confusing problems with session state. I'd suddenly be logged out, options to create blog entries would be missing. Maybe this has something to do with using Safari on MacOS X. I tried to use some of these functions, but it was too slow. I'll try again later.
Kudos to Microsoft for writing most of MSN spaces to work with browsers other than IE on Windows, by the way. Some parts are IE-only: photo albums, for example.
Big, glaring problem (for me, at least): I don't see any support for editing the 'blog with external tools. One of the really nice things about the way blogging software has evolved is the editor APIs. I prefer to edit entries in a native tool on my desktop, the zap it to the server. This also makes cross-posting far easier. Microsoft should really consider supporting some kind of editing API (Blogger, ATOM).
Initial support for RSS in the 'blog is good; it would be cool to see support in the playlist, list, and photo album functions, too.
It would be cool to see what kind of clever ways MS could integrate MSN Spaces features with Hotmail.

So, all in all, a good start for Microsoft, particularly with the integrated photo hosting features. Even so, I can't imagine that LiveJournal, Blogger, or Flickr customers will be wooed away in large numbers.

Dave is looking for help rewriting the weblogs.com update-ping mechanism. Having update notification to sites like weblogs.com, technorati, and blo.gs is a big thing for the community. I hope he finds the right person / people.

Oooh. MSN Spaces. Microsoft crashes the 'blog party. Interesting.

PictureCode has release a new beta version of its Noise Ninja Photoshop plugin. Noise Ninja was previously a stand-alone application; the plugin is more convenient to work with.

In 1939, Berenice Abbott published Changing New York, in her words:

"...an accurate and faithful chronicle in photographs of the changing aspect of the world's greatest metropolis"

She crisscrossed the city from 1935 to 1938, large-format camera in tow, documenting the details of New York City at street level.

For the last six years, Douglas Levere has been re-shooting Abbott's photographs. Photographing the same scenes at the same time of day, even using the same 8 x 10 camera, Levere allows us to see what has and what has not changed in the ever-changing metropolis.

He is publishing his photos in New York Changing, and has put together a nice site to showcase the photographs.

POTD

This is something of a repeat post, but you'll have to deal with it. I just love this woman's look.

POTD

Tavis Smiley is leaving NPR at the end of December.

Damn. I liked his show.

He has been getting more and more press lately. If I had to guess, he got a better, more visible offer.

SubChat: NYCTA moves forward with photo ban

Damn. I thought we were done with this.

"In light recent [sic] national and international events that have underscored the need for heightened security measures throughout the transit system, a reinstatement of a prohibition that existed until the early 1990's against photography, filming, and video recording in transit facilities and on transit conveyances without prior authorization except for members of the press."
"Alternatives: Consideration was given to restricting photography, etc. of sensitive areas only. However, it was felt that a less restrictive approach would not yield the necessary security enhancements and given the nature of the activities in question enforcement of a rule which required law enforcement personnel to make a judgment of the precise subject matter being photographed would be highly problematic."