I’m going to take advantage of this story about Volkswagen’s recent recall of 800,000 cars to just tell people that yes, Volkswagens look great, but they are really really poorly built. UDPATE: And this is most likely why I’ll be a Toyota next time around 
It seems that everyone is starting to love on Al Gore again, especially since the his messsage and documentary came out and his massive touring to promote them. But could this have a negative effect on the democratic ticket in the next election? I am by no means knowledgeable in the dark arts of politics, but if there already 2 strong democratic candidates emerging for president (Obama, Clinton) having serious thoughts about Gore getting into the race late in the game would only draw voters away from one side and weaken the overall democratic ticket, no? It reminds me of what Ross Perot did to the republicans in 1992.
After seeing this video clip, a thought popped into my head. Will Apple’s iPhone be the first mass market multi touch device? Will this be one of the things most remembered about the device years later when look back?
We had about 60 plus people come out to Barcamp Miami last night at UM and I have to say I was really happy with the way everything turned out. We had a wide range of presentations and people come out, discussions ranged from building games with Python to privacy issues to development outsourcing headaches.
Some things I learned at Barcamp Miami
- Imfied is run by 2 guys, one located in Naples, Florida.
- You can develop games in Python using Pygame a Python game developing framework.
- Ourscene, a new musically oriented social network with some twists will go into beta soon.
- We have some smart people thinking and teaching about internet law
- Miami-Dade is working on providing low-cost wireless access to the county
I’d like to personally thank Kim, Alex, Brian and everyone involved with the event. It was nice to see that the labor was all worth it. See you guys next year.
Band of Horses is making some stops in Florida. Will make sincere attempt to catch these guys live, but it probably won’t happen the way things in my life are right now. Rock.
Increasingly I’m seeing alot of people that run personal blogs admit the fact that they are just too busy to write and maintain them anymore. They either slow down and stop writing entirely or post apologies about unfrequent updates and “try harder” to keep writing with more regularity.
“Life streaming” is increasingly gaining more popularity because we don’t want to necessarily stop posting because we enjoy the act of self-expression but we feel a little restricted with the whole format of blogging. Post title, excerpt, tags, etc. In other words, sometimes we just want something quicker and a little looser.
We’re busy in other places like Flickr, Del.icio.us and Youtube posting content, these can all be forms of self expression and we want a vehicle that will aggregate this content in a cohesive way. So this brings me to the question of just when someone is going to create a tool for this to happen? A tool like Blogger or WordPress to give us this new form of expression.
We’ve seen some attempts like Jaiku, Lifecapsules and even what Vox is doing, but there is yet to be a tool to gain large audience. This is a great opportunity for a company with the right mindset and resources and a great challenge for designers, to come up with designs that present content from all over the web in an effective and digestible way.
This is a reminder that Barcamp Miami is right around the corner, happening this coming Wednesday, February 21st at UM’s Wolfson Building from 6pm to 9pm. There should be some interesting discussions to be had. I’ll be pitching on a discussion regarding the Metalink format and they’ll be talks on The Gorb, Tastytag, Scrapblog, IMified, Python gaming and more. Hope to see you there.
In a last ditch attempt to stay relevant in a drastically different music market from when they were popular, Nine Inch Nail’s Trent Reznor has hired a marketing firm to build “viral sites from the future” to promote whatever it is they are doing now, maybe a new record, not sure. I’m really hoping this isn’t going to be the beginning of a trend or maybe it’s already happening with other bands? Regardless, it’s pretty lame. Waiting for the day music will once again speak for itself.
I’ve been playing with Google Reader lately and seeing if I would ever want to ditch Bloglines and use it as my primary feed reader. One feature that I’m really getting into is the “Next” button, which you can find under “settings/goodies” One of the downsides to using a feed reader in my opinion is the sterility of the experience. Lately I’ve been feeling like I’m just reading email when I browse my feeds, the whole experience is a little robotic. The “next” button actually takes you to the feed page of your next unread item. I tend to find this a little bit more organic, in the sense that you are brought to a page with actual design, typography and color, it’s also a little bit of a fun waiting to see what page will load up next in your browser.
Medi-Share is an interesting concept and shows you just how bad our healthcare system is in this country. People ban together and share in the expenses of each other’s medical expenses. It sounds like there could be a myriad of problems associated with this model, but they’ve been around since 1993 and currently have 60 thousand members so they’re doing something right.