Filters, agents and aggregators

Posted on Saturday, November 5th, 2005 4:16 PM

I’m at the airport with *way* too much time to spare. I’m the guy that’s always late and cutting it close. Being at the gate 45 minutes before boarding gives me the heebeejeebies. Doesn’t seem to be a WiFi access point available here in SFO’s International Terminal (something says tmobile, but it won’t let me sign up/sign in) so I’m connected via my EDGE phone. Just as good, really. All I’m doing is email, blogging and IM…

Anyways, I was wondering if anyone has done a “mashup” of an RSS News Aggregator and a SpamAssassin like filtering algorithm yet? For two reasons. First would be for referrer links to filter out splogs so I only see “real” referrers from real blogs. As a person, you quickly get a pretty good idea of the domains that are real blogs, and which are another-splog-ad-trap-full-of-crap.blogspot.com, no? It’d be nice if my news aggregator (I’ve been using NetNewsWire lately…) would grey-out the junk for me.

On the flip side of this, it be great if I was accessing my RSS news via my mobile phone if only the stuff that is most likely interesting to me showed up. Or if I was using my desktop, the stuff that I thought was great (because I trained a filter with my clicks) would be highlighted or moved to the top of the list, so I read that stuff first. And conversely, the stuff that I rarely if ever click on would float down to the bottom of the order where I don’t have to worry about it unless I’m really bored. Since I interact with my aggregator quite a bit - choosing which subfolders to read in which order, clicking through to both articles and to links in those articles, etc. it seems like a no brainer to funnel that stuff through a proxy to train a filter, no?

Then that same filtering technology could be sent off to a server to serve as an agent for me to find *new* blogs that I haven’t read yet (and aren’t part of my aggregator yet) in order to alert me to content of interest. Imagine being able to upload a file of your filtered preferences to blo.gs or weblogs.com or whatever, and as those sites are pinged, your agent looks at the content for anything that may interest you, then sends those results to your aggregator so the next time you refresh, you see a section with interesting new articles and posts. Sort of stretches the idea of an aggregator, no?

Filters and agents have definitely been on my mind lately especially because of their impact on mobility… Think back to the General Magic days when you would have agents go off and do cool stuff and then bring the results back to your portable device for you. (What was that scripting language called?) Well, a decade has past and now we have machines that are the equivalent of original Pentiums in our pockets, on 100kbps+ Internet connections to boot. Now there’s a real opportunity to do some really neat things on the device and on the server side as well. Nowadays we’ve got scalable and relatively inexpensive server solutions that could take requests from a bazillion intermittently connected devices and go off and look out on the internet for answers… then aggregate them and return them to your mobile or other device for you to use when you need it. This stuff definitely seems much more reasonable now to think about, no?

So it’s a question - is there stuff like this out there? I’m suspicious of “magic” intelligent agents and all that baloney, but it seems there could be some basic tasks that could start to be done for you now with all this infrastructure and new formats like RSS that now exist out there, no? I’m thinking like this: It’s like Palm’s Graffiti. Everyone at the time was trying to get devices to understand normal handwriting, and they were horrible at it. In contrast, in order to use Graffiti, you had to learn to write in a very specific way, and then it’d work great. By making their users meet the problem half-way Palm simulated handwriting recognition much better than other technologies and their success in the late 90s showed it.

I wonder if there’s a parallel there for filters and agents? Instead of saying “go do this magic for me” and expect it to work flawlessly, instead we figure out a better way of addressing the question: “Which information is the most valuable to me right now?”

Thoughts? (I’ll be on a plane of course, so it’ll be a while for moderated comments..). See you on the other side of the world!

-Russ

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Efficient Travelling: My Trip to London

Posted on Friday, November 4th, 2005 11:31 AM

I’m leaving for London tomorrow. I’m only going for a week, but since I haven’t travelled a lot lately, I’m trying to think of the minimum I can bring without thinking, “Damn, I should have brought that.” I hate travelling heavy… as Rick Steves once said, no experienced traveller ever says, “Every year I bring more and more.”

I divide the travel space into two areas: My carry on backpack and my checked baggage. Yes, I know there are some people who do it all with just a carry on, but I hate that. Check your baggage and relax: International trips take forever, always filled with random delays and are stressful enough as it is, trying to save 20 minutes on each end by lugging your rollaway with you everywhere isn’t worth it, IMHO.

Anyways, the clothes, toiletries and extra stuff go in the suitcase below and the important things go with me. First thought for the backpack is of course, which of my bag of electronics to bring. I’ve got the travel kit for my PowerBook, so that’s all set. Though I can’t get it working right now, I’ll probably bring my iSight with me as well - that’ll go in the checked luggage probably… unless I really feel like impressing my fellow travellers in the airport with a last-minute WiFi-enabled iChat conversation, I’m sure they’ve seen it enough. No WiFi on my Virgin-Atlantic flight either, so no need there.

Now, I am forcing myself to bring just one portable gaming system. A PSP with an extra battery might get me through the 10 hour flight without problems, but my Gameboy Micro is much more compact and the games are more compelling, except for Lumines, which I can stay up late playing for hours. Not sure which. I could rip a movie today too and pop it on my Memory Stick just in case. Hmm. Decisions.

My phone is a Nokia 6680, which should work without problems in the UK. I may find myself buying another SIM so I can try out some 3G goodness… though it’ll be an interesting test to see how 3G roaming works. Will I get off the plane and be able to send MMS? Will I be able to check my email, etc. Using Cingular’s gateway settings and which-ever carrier in the U.K. snagged my phone first at Heathrow? I’m not sure. I’m going to leave the rest of the gadgets here I think. Books are dead weight, and I never seem to be able to read them when I’m in the air. It doesn’t ever stop me from bringing one, but I never end up even looking at it for the entire flight.

By the way, I’m flying Virgin Premium Economy which is why you’re not hearing me bitch and moan this time about uncomfortable seats, etc. I haven’t flown that way before, but the seats look pretty big in the picture on the website (though the woman is probably a 90-pound midget or something…) From the seat map, it looks like I’ll be in the upper deck? That’s pretty cool, I’ve never been in that section of a plane before. Also, the flight is only 10 hours with no connections. Compared to the marathon trips to Spain (16 hours mimimum with connections) the flight to the UK is going to zip. Anyways, being sure that I’m not going to be stuck way back in steerage next to the bathrooms slammed between a screaming baby and two drunk backpackers is making the anticipation of this flight much nicer. I just wish I hadn’t seen so many episodes of Lost recently…

Back to the clothes thing… It’s going to be London in November, and I’ve heard that it’s turned chilly already. My brain has turned to mush being in California about what exactly “chilly” means in real terms, so I’m going to bring my wool jacket just in case. And sweaters. I’m always freakin’ cold in the U.K. - I think it’s the humidity or something.

Anyways, with my new boss being HQed in London, I’m going to be doing this trip regularly it seems, so I want to try to get it down the first time, so the next time instead of thinking about this stuff 24 hours beforehand and blogging about it, it’ll be more like “Oh, hey, my flight to the UK is in a few hours, I better get ready.” :-)

Anyone got tips for the trip? Leaving from SF tomorrow afternoon, arriving at Heathrow terminal 3 at 11 a.m. on Sunday and I’m staying near Convent gardens. Thoughts?

-Russ

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New S60 Browser

Posted on Wednesday, November 2nd, 2005 6:39 PM

Wow, I just caught the Flash demo of the new Nokia S60 browser (the one based on Apple’s Webkit) and it looks pretty cool. It has quite a few features I hadn’t seen before, but what I didn’t know is that it has an integrated RSS reader as well. Very cool! It’s really pretty innovative IMHO. Perfect for snagging feeds to read while you’re in the metro or other non-connected place. It’s a great addition to the browser.

I’m not going to miss this chance to name drop…. I have to say, quite a bit has changed since I showed Jeff Bezos how Amazon.com looked on my Nokia 6620 running Opera back at FooCamp 2004. It was possible then, but pretty painful. I used the opportunity to encourage him to improve Amazon’s mobile offerings. But now the demos in the Flash video of the new Nokia browser show how you can quickly navigate a normal web page with the new browser using Amazon’s website as the example and it’s pretty astounding. That sort of browser on a QVGA screen combined with a 3G network and it’s possible to do a lot. Very interesting…

I can’t wait to try it for myself and do a reality test on it. How well does it handle forms, for example? Will it really be able to handle AJAXy websites? And how accepting is the RSS Reader? Lots of questions, but it looks like they’re really doing some cool stuff.

-Russ

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Sony PSP Media Manager: It’s not iTunes, but it works

Posted on Wednesday, November 2nd, 2005 5:34 PM

So I ponied up the $20 for the new Sony PSP Media Manager software so I could try out the Podcasting support and see if it was anything like the experience I get with iTunes. My Macs aren’t supported, so I pulled out my venerable Toshiba Celeron WinXP Lappy and my credit card and grabbed the download off of Sony’s site. I already own PSPWare, so I knew sort of what to expect from the software. When you plug in a PSP and set it on USB mode, it just turns into another drive, so all the software has to do is handle some basic file syncing to work. Nothing special - Sony should really be giving this away with each PSP purchase, not charging $20 for it… but I digress.

Let me just start by saying the software works as advertised. It’s definitely does the job of syncing photos, music and video, and works as a podcatcher pretty well too. I do wish I could change the default color scheme (IBM blue on black), but it installed without problems and does everything it’s advertised to do including ripping CDs, game backups, converting video, etc. This is good. I didn’t completely waste my money. Well, it’d be nice to have an integrated Podcast Catalog like iTunes, and the ability to buy content as well, but it’s not bad for a start. Seriously, though, I can’t imagine they’ll be charging for this app for long. It’s just dumb to try to do that, especially with iTunes out there.

Now, the thing I most wanted to do with the Media Manager was find out if I could play video encoded for the new iPod on the PSP - obviously not the DRMed stuff from the iTunes music store, but just any of the new iPod-formated Video Podcasts out there. I grabbed a few of the feeds I’ve already seen work on my iPod with video, and added them to the feed list. The Media Manager quickly downloaded the video, and then immediately started to reformat the video to work on my PSP. Very cool! Though it did take the better part of 40 minutes, and the resulting file was 250MB (1/2 of my 512MB Memory Stick) it works! And that to me is a pretty cool thing. Sadly there’s no DiVX support (it’s a Sony thing, not a technical thing I’m sure) but other than that it works really well.

While I had my Windows box out, I played with TVHarmony’s Autopilot which will automatically grab video from your TiVo and convert the huge MPEG-2 files automatically into content your iPod and PSP can view. It can be even set up to do so automatically by name - so you can have your favorite programs be sucked out of your TiVo each night and then synced with your iPod in the morning… it’s pretty cool. I have to say I love this stuff. What I can’t understand is why TiVo isn’t letting me do the opposite yet, and allow me to grab video podcasts off the net and store them on my TiVo to be played when I want to on my TV, where I view most of my personal video. I’m sure it’s got to be on a drawing board somewhere, now that the Netflix deal is over, those guys need to start getting really innovative like that soon!

Here’s my last thought: The freakin PSP has *WiFi! Why do I have to even bother with a PC to do all this stuff? Hopefully Sony realizes this too, and we can look forward to a firmware upgrade that includes some basic podcast support as well. Browsing to a site and saving media files is a time consuming process… it’d be so great to just leave it in the corner plugged in and have it go off and fill itself up with content for me without me having to do anything, and then when I picked it up it’d be ready to go full of content. That would *definitey* be an iPod killer, no? Podcasting with no syncing needed…. it would rock.

Cool stuff. Totally worth the price to play.

-Russ

Update: Here is a little 3GP video taken from my 6680 of the two devices playing the same video podcast. You can’t really tell, but it’s perfectly clear on both devices, but the PSP is definitely the hands-down winner when it comes to screen quality. (I tried to focus in, but it didn’t work… heh.). It’s a shame that Apple had to essentially create this new resource before Sony got around to tapping it, but now that they have hopefully they’ll make a real effort in the space.

The main problem I see is the conversion time… I can’t seem to find a video codec combination that will play on both devices without converting them. Am I missing something? -R

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Nokia N92 In Action

Posted on Wednesday, November 2nd, 2005 4:49 PM

Go check out I4U’s video of the new Nokia N92 Video/TV phone in action. Pretty freaking cool. Like iPod with video, only no syncing needed.

Matt has a good roundup of all the other announcements made today at Nokia’s Mobility Conference in Barcelona. Lots of cool new gadgets and open source stuff as well.

Cool beans.

-Russ

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Microsoft’s Live: Monopoly 4.0

Posted on Tuesday, November 1st, 2005 10:17 PM

So I actually get Microsoft’s new Live initiative. It makes perfect sense for Microsoft to really go after the online application space as not only are they the standard bearer for many of the desktop apps which online apps emulate, but technically, if I remember correctly, they’re the ones that added in the XML objects to the browser which even makes stuff like AJAX possible. They’re not just following the latest fads and trends here, they’ve been thinking of this stuff since “Hailstorm” years ago.

It seems that the difference between then and now is instead of tackling everything in a monolithic platform play which scared the bejeesus out of everyone from partners to privacy advocates, they’re going to go the grassroots route of GMail, Writely and other Web 2.0 style apps instead. Starting small and building services one by one - the Live.com portal is the first example of this. I can imagine subdomains like todo.live.com or calendar.live.com as Microsoft branded PIM apps, then more and more ambitious apps added as they start to flesh out their services. This time they’ll do online apps in a much more realistic piecemeal way, and use their new advertising network to help make it all profitable and worthwhile. (That was the other thing that was missing in 2000 - there was no real viable web app business plan).

This is all well and good, and if it stopped there I think many of us might be wondering what all the fuss was about. Ahh, but not so fast. The names that Microsoft chose to launch with show their true intentions and motives. Instead of creating a new “Live” service and concentrating on making that a new profitable business, they instead launched “Windows Live” and “Office Live” as extensions to their desktop monopolies. Live.com isn’t just for new online web apps (as it would appear at first glance) but are meant to be integrated consumer services just like Apple’s iTunes. Ray Ozzie actually gave that as an example today in explaining the power of tying all their different products and services together in one seamless package for consumers.

But that’s the key word here of course: Tying.

Though it doesn’t seem to make sense for Live to have the Windows or Office names right now - live.com is just another web dashboard at the moment - there are far more ambitious plans to come. The Windows and Office monikers are there because Microsoft will, of course, be up to it’s old tricks by heavily integrating Live services into the desktop sucking the air supply out of any online competitors. It doesn’t seem that they should be allowed to do this sort of thing, but the success of iTunes seems to have given them a new excuse to start tying products again. And hell, the DOJ agreement only lasts until 2007, no? I can easily see MS adding links throughout their OS and Office products as they have with Passport, Hotmail and MSN in an effort to push these new services.

And it doesn’t stop there. Microsoft has announced massive Live integration of Messenger buddy lists to make sure that not only are you using their online services, but that all your IM contacts do as well. (They talked of 8 billion “relationships” to take advantage of). As heavy-handed as this seems, it works. Microsoft has a dominating presence in IM outside the US and are well represented domestically as well. How many people do you know have a Passport account simply to make that damn bubble which appears constantly in new XP installs go away? I know many.

How do you compete against this onslaught? I’m not sure. Just today we saw a variety of established Web companies already being targeted: Salesforce, Plaxo, Google Search and Maps, AIM, My Yahoo! and more - and that’s just on day one. Imagine what the near future is going to bring? Microsoft most likely has more cash on hand than these companies have in total profits this year combined, so there’s really no discounting this new initiative. If Microsoft executes, it could definitely spell another monopoly in the making.

Yep, for Microsoft, Live isn’t about Web 2.0 at all, it’s all about Monopoly 4.0.

-Russ

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I Just Tried the XBox 360

Posted on Monday, October 31st, 2005 7:07 PM

Wow. I just went down to Best Buy around the corner and had some quality time with the new XBox 360 kiosk. It’s a really, really, nice system.

The demo for Call of Duty 2 was just soooo good, it made you really see the power of what’s coming. The graphics were so crisp and movement so fluid, I was really blown away. It reminded me of the quality you see in Half Life 2 - but on a console! Add to this the online play, the new control pad which are a bit smaller and feel a lot better than the old one, the 360 User Interface, the integration of things like downloadable casual games and integrated media player… Oof, it’s going to be hard to beat this system.

I will say the other two games on the demo disk weren’t nearly as good - King Kong and Kameo - I really wish they had a demo of PGR3 to play rather than just a video, but Call Of Duty’s graphics and gameplay was good enough for me to see the potential. Especially since I could wander over to the next kiosk and compare the graphics directly with XBox and PS2 games. Insanely cool.

I’ve said this before, but this really could be the gaming console of this generation. The XBox has only sold 22 million units vs. 90 million for the PS2, and there are already 170 games reportedly being developed for the PS3, so Sony does has an obvious advantage for those looking to upgrade their current systems. But everything I keep reading about the PS3 is pretty bad. Yes, it’ll be powerful, but it’s behind schedule, the independant developers are having a hard time with both the development SDK and taking advantage of the Cell processor’s power, then there are worries that it’s going to be a closed Sony system rather than more open like the XBox 360 (notice Microsoft’s constant demos with the iPod plugged into it). Also, there was some backlash against the Nintendo’s next console as well recently… Could it be that Microsoft’s offering is not only first, but best? (And it only took them two revs to get it right this time. Scary.)

I don’t know. It’s going to be hard to resist not standing in line on November 22nd and buying a new XBox (Best Buy isn’t pre-selling theirs, by the way, it’s first-come, first serve. So camp out over night and you can get your own box before Christmas…). Hmm. I’m going to get a next gen console… do I really want to wait until July of next year for it?

I really don’t want to give Microsoft any money, but I really might not be able to resist this launch…

-Russ

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500 Million Camera Phones in 2005

Posted on Monday, October 31st, 2005 1:16 PM

Time to thump the drum again.

There’s going to be over 800 million mobile phones sold this year, and over 500 million of them will have cameras, according to this article over at InternetWeek. The numbers are projected to climb to over 90% of the 1 billion phones sold a year in 2009.

Think about it. A half a billion network enabled multimedia handsets sold this year alone. Compare this to the roughly 800 million PC Internet users out there and you start to see what’s happening. Yes, many of these phones are only 2.5/2.75G with 40kbps - 100 kbps data speeds, the phones aren’t very powerful or use closed systems and their users are saddled with expensive cellular data plans. But that’s not going to last for long - in fact, it probably won’t last another 18 months. 3G networks are being rolled out world wide, consumers are changing their phones every 16 months on average and competition among carriers is driving down data prices. The mobile market you see today will look very little like it will by Christmas 2006.

Look at this article about Vodafone’s new aggressive 3G push in Australia. Not only is it in the carrier’s best interest to move their customers to third generation networks because they cost so much less to operate, but as a differentiator, data services are an attractive marketing tool. But Vodafone is also using price pressure as well to compete with other earlier entrants to the 3G game. This is going to be repeated around the world. We saw it last year when DoCoMo had to offer flat-rate data plans to compete with KDDI, and we’re going to see it again in every other market as well.

Camera phones is just the beginning. The other metric to watch is multimedia-enabled phones (read: Music). Whereas camera phones require data-enabled handsets but can work easily on 2.5G networks, music and video phones pretty much require 3G. Watching the growth in that market will show the next stage in mobile data services. Here at home, the fact that Sprint, Verizon and Cingular all now offer music-enabled mobile phones actually shows quite a bit about the maturity of the U.S. mobile market, which I stil hear people describe as “behind”. Not as much as it used to be.

Fun stuff…

-Russ

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The Worst Day of the Year

Posted on Sunday, October 30th, 2005 10:07 PM

I hate, hate, hate, hate, hate, hate, hate the time change. I cannot tell you how much I despise having to move the clock back an hour for no reason. The change is so drastic. Suddenly it’s 5 p.m. and it’s getting dark out. And it’s 8 p.m. and what was just a few months ago the time when you’d see beautiful sunsets, is now pitch black. They should just outlaw the practice once and for all.

There’s really no “Autumn” in my head, there’s just Dark and Light, Winter and Summer. And today was when it changed from one to the other. It doesn’t matter that I’ve moved to California so I’m still wearing shorts and sandals well into October, it’s the lack of light that sucks. And moving it an hour back sucks more. Actually, it was a little chilly today. Cold sucks too. Bleh.

I think I bitched about this last year… and probably the year before that. Even without the time change, I’m still *such* a miserable bastard in general during the Winter. I really need to get to a place in my life (read: money) where I can live in the Southern Hemisphere for the Winter. Just pack up the fam and spend November through March where the sun is shining a majority of the day. An Endless Summer… that would rock.

-Russ

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My Brother’s eBay Store

Posted on Sunday, October 30th, 2005 2:10 PM

My brother was talking to me over IM today about his Sunday Afternoon chores of updating his eBay store and I thought it’d be nice to throw some traffic his way. He’s been a “collector” all his life - comic books, figurines, etc. etc. - and now he’s got an eBay store up to trade some of the extras. I told him I’d throw an ad up onto my weblog to see if that drove any sales. (Nothing like a little nepotism between Bros, no? :-) )

I’m not sure how much crossover there is between the blogging/mobile/techy readers of this weblog and the collector crowd, but if you’re into it, go check out Dave’s eBay Store (only his family calls him David, by the way, everyone else calls him Tuck because he sorta looks like Friar Tuck…).

I’ve also added the image above under my other advertisements as well for the Searchers to find. We’ll see how much traffic that bumps up. I think he should buy some Text Ads as well and get “good” traffic instead, but we’ll see if this works. :-)

Enjoy!

-Russ

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