The Saturday Globe has a beg story on the Mac mini, Jobs and Apple, Globetechnology: We’re in the era of Jobs II (Saturday, Jan. 15, 2005, by David Akin). In a companion peice online, that is a “Globe and Mail Update” titled, Apple jabbed by price point, Jack Kapica makes the point that the price point of $499 that Apple is hitting in the US doesn’t work for Canada when it becomes $630 Canadian. He also complains about the price for Apples, though that’s another story.
What no one noticed is that Mac mini is not that far from an iPod. Could Apple adapt the mini by adding a small LCD and battery to turn it into a Mac response to something like the OQO? At some point of miniaturization I won’t be synching my iPod with my computer, my iPod will be the computer that I dock when at the office and listen to on the way home.
podSites: Simple hypertexts for the iPod
Audrey pointed me to a very neat idea and site, podSites.com. The site describes how to develop simple hypertexts or podSites for the iPod Notes area. The trick is that the iPod supports HTML links in the text file notes to other notes and links to audio that can play. The podSites site has instructions on how to create a podSite and “podCasting” (blogging for iPods) and so on. The site can be viewed in six basic colours – cute!
Google Zeitgeist for 2004
The Google Zeitgeist which summarizes the most popular queries for the year is up now. There is also and Interactive Edition that uses Flash to show you the most popular queries and images by month.
More on Photo Mosaics
I got an e-mail from Joseph Francis drawing attention to a blog entry about pioneering work he did on Photo Mosaics. He was following up a post here on Photo Mosaics.
Digital Artform is the name of the blog, and it has a number of longer posts about digital art effects.
More on Mindmapping
In a previous blog I wrote about Mind Mapping and software that supports it. This came from a one day workshop. I just got the notes from the workshop and here are some of the mindmapping tools that were mentioned:
- VisualMind, Pricing: Basic $69.00usd, Business $149.00usd
- Freemind, Free software
- MindManager, Pricing: MindManager X5Pro $284.05usd, MindManager X5 $199.00usd (Prices increasing Jan 1st, 2005)
- NovaMind Price $103.00cad
- Map It, Price $78.00usd
- Mindgenius, MindGenius business $189 MindGenius education $97 MindGenius home $53 MindGenius brainbloom $53
- Visimap, Price $125.00usd
- Openmind, Price $249.00usd
Trip Report on Face of Text
Vika at Brown posted a series of trip reports on the conference we organized here, Trip report: The Face of Text. It is one of several posts and is the most thorough trip report I think I have ever read. For the conference site, see The Face of Text. This is courtesy of James Chartrand.
Google vs. Microsoft
What’s Next for Google is an indepth article by Charles H. Ferguson from the January 2005 issue of Technology Review (from MIT.) The article looks at Google and how it might respond if Microsoft seriously decides to dominate the search engine business.
Continue reading Google vs. Microsoft
PubSub web tracking
PubSub is a cool site that will track keywords. You subscribe to a set of words and then it tracks those for you and you can read your subscriptions in a news aggregator.
What is particularly impressive is the opening interface which lets you start using without getting an account or anything. As an example of how to get someone started with a service, it is one of the best I have seen. Pity you don’t actually get any results immediately.
How can we do this for humanities research?
How much information? 2003
How Much Information? 2003 is a new version of How Much Information? 2000. They both try to estimate how much information was produced and in what form (from magnetic media to film.) These reports are thorough and fascinating.
Continue reading How much information? 2003
Mac Web Mining
METAfy has a Mac OS X Web Mining tool called > Web Mining Automation Software for MacOS X” href=”http://www.metafy.com/index.html”>Anthracite which, from the screen shots, uses a visual programming paradigm. Looks neat.
I found this on a page on Data Mining Resources that is a Subject Tracer Information Blog. See Deep Web Research Subject Tracer.