Inside View

People Aggregator Opens

PEOPLE AGGREGATOR swung open its doors yesterday and I met myself several times as I logged into the system through different side doors. That's to be expected if your user name or access details vary between social networks such as Flickr and del.icio.us. I'm also using my proper name in peepAgg and I'm as easy to find inside its network as the people search is easy to use. People Aggregator isn’t only a social network. I see it as a way to easily move between social networks.

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You can join irishblogs if you opt into People Aggregator.
via Marc Canter (thanks for two invitations) and Damien Mulley (thanks for the pointer).

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The Greening of Robert Scoble

WRITING ON SUNDAY about ways to reduce energy usage, Robert Scoble engages feedback with more than 40 different people across the world. The lively response--on a weekend with only two obviously commercial comments--illustrates the fact that the jury is out on the scientific wisdom of Al Gore's foray into global warming. The familiar arguments bubble up about global warming, nuclear power, next-generation power consumption, the fallacy of hybrid engines, and office energy consumption. Here's something I didn't know--you can save energy by removing light switches:

MSN Tube

MSN PLANS to launch its own version of YouTube, says Mark Sweney in Cannes. No major media player has tapped the home-spun video market segment, although I have seen rumblings from Yahoo! that tie the Yahoo! Messenger into easily-published video clips. This strategic move into YouTube space by Microsoft will illustrate the low penetration of broadband in Ireland. It also recognises that videos with low production values captivate audiences.

Scoble and Train-Stopping

ROBERT SCOBLE read An Inconvenient Truth and raised a question for Al Gore, the author. It's similar to a question I had at 6:20 AM when I counted coal cars at the Santa Fe crossing in Flagstaff last month. Scoble wanted to know why Gore isn't proposing to get rid of the coal trains that wind their way from the northern tier of the US to the energy-hungry west coast. On the Pacific coast of the US sits some of the world's lowest-cost data centres. They run cheaply because they get inexpensive coal and plenty of hydroelectric power. Some of the coal passes through Flagstaff--hundreds of coal cars an hour.

NYT ART VLOGS

THE ARTS SECTION of the New York Times looks at videocasting. It's Virginia Herrnan's gig and she's into "everything from political propaganda videos to nip slips, ... web video, viral video, user-driven video, custom interactive video, embedded video ads, web-based VOD, broadband television, diavlogs, vcasts, vlogs, video podcasts, mobisodes, webisodes, mashups and more."

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Virginia Heffernan, formerly of Slate, Talk and Harpers.

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10 Questions on Sunday

FROM THE SUNDAY papers and beyond, I have 10 questions arising after my second cup of coffee on a humid Sunday in Ireland. It's mainstream Ireland, all around.

TBL says it is serious

TIM BERNERS-LEE: "When I invented the Web, I didn't have to ask anyone's permission. Now, hundreds of millions of people are using it freely. I am worried that that is going end in the USA." Once the idea becomes reality in America, expect Irish telco services to follow the same path to increased revenues.

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Tim Berners-Lee -- "This is serious" (also on Real Video)
Adam Curry rambles about it from 29:55 to 42:20 on DSC-410.
Bonus Link: Google ramping up to be an ISP"

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One Way to Scrub Your Blogging

JOI ITO, forced to reformat a corrupt hard disk, scrubbed a second MacBook Pro in six months. That means he scrubbed his archive. "Erasing the disk that possibly had the only copy of six months worth of data on it was an interesting thing. I knew that if I sent it to some service or used some tool that I might be able to recover some or all of the data. However, I imagined the time, stress and grief that it would cause me to engage in such an activity. I tried to take inventory of what I had done in the last six months and what items were unique and what I could recover from other people or from the Net. When I clicked "erase" on the Disk Utility, it was actually extremely liberating."

Open Note to Google

I THINK GOOGLE should remove potentially dangerous files from its index. Files such as EXE, REG, MSI, and COM can be spyware. You can find those files in Google search results. Google Mail already restricts you from attaching EXE files or ZIP archives that contain EXE files. That restriction seems like Google knows it's dangerous to shift or click on those files. I think it's time to purge them from the Google index as well. Search for "size of stack reserve" and you can see what I mean.

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Google Operating System -- "Some Google Results Are EXE Files"

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Not enough storage for new handycam

IT WILL TAKE more storage than I have available in my household if I give into my craving for a HD camcorder. It records in file sizes of gigabytes per hour. Robert Scoble thinks I am not alone. Scoble writes, "Google (and others are) buying up dark fiber ... not to distribute more email to you. That won't increase the load on the Internet. It's ALL about HDTV. Well, OK, those server indexes are pretty big ... but really, they will be dwarfed by HD files."

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Robert Scoble -- "Let's repeat: Everything is about HDTV"

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