Daily Links
Gmail Redesigned (by Globex Designs) | userstyles.org
I like the idea of a new UI for Gmail, but I can't switch to this yet because it doesn't support the Remember The Milk extensions I am slavishly addicted to.
The Digital Funes the Memorious - Bokardo
Joshua demonstrates his classical education by comparing Google ambitions to the unfortunate ability of a Borges' character, Funes, who remembered literally everything. "And thus the minute details of our world can be represented by a hash function."
The Big Idea [Trailfire]
"Trailfire rewires the web to your interests. It guides you as you browse, suggesting where you can find information related to any page you're on at anytime. It also lets you make your own connections on the web - to link pages that relate to a topic from your own point of view.
At its heart, Trailfire is a community of people helping each other cut through the clutter on the web. By empowering individuals to distill the web, drawing on their knowledge and adding their opinions, Trailfire creates a web of meaning.
The basic building block of Trailfire is the trail - a collection of web pages on a subject or concept, hand built and annotated by a trail creator (we call them "guides") on each page. Trails run the gamut from practical to evangelical to whimsical."
Nick Denton Spins Off Three Gawker Sites: The Blogging Times
Sells off Idolator (music), Gridskipper (travel), and Wonkette (politics). Focusing more on mudslinging?
WordPress.com Launching Search and Related Items This Week
'Matt Mullenweg announces two new features coming to WordPress.com (the company’s hosted blogging platform) this week: search and related items. While Mullenweg is sparse on details, he says of the new features (at approx. 32:10) “you have to analyze the text and find the most relevant things … across more than 4 million posts per month.“'
Borges and the Foreseeable Future - New York Times
A growing number of contemporary commentators have concluded that Jorge Luis Borges uniquely, bizarrely, prefigured the World Wide Web.
Very Expensive + Affordable = Still Very Expensive
Sridhar Vembu of Zoho doesn't buy the Google/Salesforce match-up, because Salesforce isn't an R&D-driven company. In the long run, the partnership won't survive, he argues.
BostonNOW to shut down immediately | BostonNOW
"This healthy, growing 119,000-circulation daily is suddenly compelled to halt operations due to rapidly deteriorating economic conditions in Iceland where interest rates reached 15.5% Thursday, the krona, their currency, has declined over 20% against the dollar since January, and inflation is now at 8.7%." It's a world economy, and Icelandic interest rates close a newspaper in Boston. (Not that newspapers have any real future, anyway.)
The end of Mowser - RussellBeattie.com
Russell is hanging up the efforts with Mowser: "I don't actually believe in the "Mobile Web" anymore, and therefore am less inclined to spend time and effort in a market I think is limited at best, and dying at worst. I'm talking specifically about sites that are geared 100% towards mobile phones and have little to no PC web presence. Two years ago I was convinced that the mobile web would continue to evolve in the West to mimic what was happening in countries like Japan and Korea, but it hasn't happened, and now I'm sure it isn't going to."
I don't believe the mobile web is dead, but seriously different approaches are needed to make it click with people.
Comments