Weblog Without Honor or Humanity

More info on Chandler.

Some more information on Chandler has just become available.

General Magic story.
I love stories like this.

Can’t wait.

When will this site go live?

Audioblogs.

The idea of audioblogs (i.e. putting spoken word instead of written word on the blog)
is being talked about from time to time. It won’t happen on any meaningful scale.
There are a few problems with it, some of them fixable, some of them not. A
current but fixable problem is that it’s too hard. Acquiring audio recordings
and posting them to the web is too hard. None of the current weblog tools
supports audio posting. In time those issues could be fixed (although I don’t
think it’s going to happen anytime soon). One of the unfixable problems is that
for most things written text is actually superior to audio. It’s much smaller so
faster to download. It can be scanned and skipped if not interesting. You can’t
scan audio. Not everyone is a good speaker. What you read here looks exactly the
same as if it was written by Pulitzer-prize winner journalist. I wouldn’t get a
job as a radio DJ. You can read faster than you can listen to and listening is
deceptively non-multi-tasking i.e. you might think that you can do something
else while you’re listening but when you do you’ll loose it.

An almost accurate quote.

“The man who reads nothing at all is better educated than the man who reads
nothing but blogs.”

http://www.quotationspage.com/quotes.php3?author=Thomas+Jefferson

Color Sidekick - how unfair.

Danger is making news, this time by announcing a color version of Sidekick which is supposed to be available in Europe first.
People are talking. A lot.

Yes! Yes! Yes!

At least once rotten american law system is put to good use: movie theather companies has been sued for showing commercials before the movies. Yes, I go to movies a lot. Yes, I hate commercials (aka. “pre-show entertainment” that doesn’t entertain at all). I’m paying up to $10 to see a movie and they have guts to keep me waiting for the movie showing useless crap that overfills TV programming anyway.

Proper linking for Amazon Associates.

This article explains how to properly link to Amazon in order not to loose associate fees.

Professional photography ain’t easy.

Or at least how it seems to me after reading
this post

“Though I’ve read and re-read John Shaw’s book, I sometimes think that things have changed in the short time since it was written.”

It is still very early for me to say, but I think that things have changed quite a bit in the nature photography industry (and the photography industry, generally), since Shaw’s book. Photo magazines are struggling because online photography sites provide the content free, with more interactivity, and with the archives at your fingertips. Meanwhile, the ranks of photographers are swelling, and driving the price of stock photography down while driving the competition up. Digital photography is taking market share away from the film market, and moving many photographers from the traditional darkroom to the digital darkroom. Photofinishers are being impacted by people’s ability to produce prints on their own inkjets, at home. Desktop publishing is reshaping the publishing industry.

For some reason my mind found it related to the (potential) influence of open-source on professional programmers. Of course today we’re nowhere near this situation and maybe we’ll never be. It’s all supply/demand thing: if there are enough people willing to write software for free (or just more people willing to write software than the demand for software) then the amount of money one can earn writing the software will be (on average) smaller. It’s as simple as that.

Photography anecdote.

For all you photography phans, here’s a photography anecdote for you:

In one of Galen Rowell’s books, he recounts an anecdote about his first photo assignment for National Geographic, to document the first free-climb of El Capitan, in Yosemite National Park. After the several day climb, he turned 70 rolls of exposed film over to National Geographic’s photo editor, who then remarked to him that nobody had every taken so few pictures on an assignment, before!

Curtesy of photo.net article.