Posted on June 24th, 2008 by Travis
Geeks across the land rejoice.
Why just the geeks? Well this release is expected to not have many visible changes. A lot of those were made with the 2.5 release, so it’s time to catch our breath.
Instead, a lot of changes “under the hood” are being made to improve the usability and experience. Here’s the list.
Caching of static files with Google Gears. Speeds up the backend for admins. It’s cool and complicated at the same time. In a nutshell, Google Gears is a little application you install on your computer. It will then fetch the static files and information from Wordpress that rarely (if ever) changes. That way your browser doesn’t have to download the item, object, or function every time, thus speeding up the performance. You may have noticed in WP2.5 that the “Link” and “Add Photo” buttons can take a little time to load. Well, after the first time it loads, each subsquent load will be instant because Gears will have saved the functionality to your local machine.
Drag-and-drop sortable galleries
Post Revisioning. Wordpress will now save all of your individual post revisions so that you can compare them side by side. Red highlighted text will indicate text that had been removed. Green highlighted text will show what was added. You can then restore any older or previous version of a post from within the system. Works great for group edited blogs. Read more »
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Posted on June 24th, 2008 by Travis
In an interesting side story of the PdF2008 conference, it turns out that the conference actually had to pay Jazz at Lincoln Center for the rights to record, tape, and distrubute the content of the conference. Jazz at Lincoln Center retains the copyright to all “performances” in their facility. So to get your hands on it, you have to cough up the money.
Very ironic for a conference about free, open distribution of information to the masses.
As a result, you have to show a hard press ID in order to record anything. And you better believe that the ushers are hardcore about enforcing the rules. They seem to love:
- Keeping you from jumping over the rows in front of you or behind you.
- Putting your feet on anything
- Bringing bottles of water in the room
- Blocking rows with computer bags or power cords
Funny but sad at the same time.
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Posted on June 23rd, 2008 by Travis
Well, the web is approaching another one of those tipping points, and it seems that “LIVE” is the next big thing.
Through sites such as qik.com and mogulus.com, users can stream video live to the world. They also capture this live video and turn it around into ondemand video content after the live event is over. So you can go back and watch the recording.
The real groundbreaker is the live video comes straight off your cellphone. A live streaming video gets pumped wirelessly up into the cloud and back down onto these sites.
So you could be sitting in your company board meeting, pull out your cell phone, and stream the meeting to your offices around the world in real time.
Click Start…do your song and dance…then click stop. It’s that easy.
It can take the concept of live blogging to a whole new level.
Right now, the streaming tech is available on certain Nokia phones and some other models. The good news is that Qik is releasing an iPhone version of their system very soon (if they haven’t already). I’d imagine it will be out with the AppStore.
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Posted on June 23rd, 2008 by Travis
The transactional cost of gathering a group of people together has gotten very low thanks to the Internet and mobile phones.
Thanks to technology, there’s virtually no cost involved with getting people together, to exchange information, and act in support or opposition of a particular common interest.
Increasingly, media is not just a source of information. It is a source of coordinating action. New media makes the process easier.
Clay Shirky’s Site
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Posted on June 23rd, 2008 by Travis
Wow. One of the coolest concepts in blog tracking I have seen in a while. If you are really a big time blog geek, you’ve probably seen “maps” of the blogosphere before. They usually look like big and small dots on a page connected by lines. The big ones look like hairballs.
Well, there’s a new (or just new to me) player in the space called Linkfluence.net. Their algorithms organise the data in even more interesting ways based on link popularity.
For example, the system can determine if you are a liberal or conservative blogger based on the types of sites that link to you, and the types of sites that you link out to. Then, that data is compiled into spheres of influces and networks.
You can then run simulations to see what kind of “splash” certain blogs make when they publish content. For example, the more influential bloggers have their content spread over the blogosphere like a virus within moments of publication.
Less influential sites make a very little splash, and it can all be visualized on the system.
Definitely worth checking out.
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