Rough Drafts

The old grade school puzzler goes like this: Which is heavier: A pound of bricks or a pound of feathers? If you’re eight years old and you’re not paying attention, you say “bricks.” JP Rangaswami, who writes the IT blog Confused of Calcutta, used a similar analogy in a discussion I had with him last

The videonet is here. Data point: People upload 50,000 videos to YouTube every day. In turn, the site delivers 50 million video views each day. That’s huge. One of the most useful panels at Supernova covered “the rise of the videonet.” One of the panelists, Mary Hodder of Napsterization, quoted some

It’s a stellar networking event. The presentations were way too long, and too many of them were packed with empty platitudes about collaboration, change, innovation, “user generated content,” the “long tail,” blah blah blah. I nearly fell asleep several times. There was a lot of wit and intelligence

Conversation at Supernova today: Big podcaster: We had over one million people listen to that podcast! Intel exec: Yeah, we got about 200,000 downloads from people you referred to us. So that was pretty good. Not, you know, millions, but pretty good. Me: Is there any way you can tell whether people

I’ll be at Supernova 2006 here in San Francisco, tomorrow and Friday. If you’re going to be there, drop me a line and let’s see if we can meet up: Email dylan_tweney at ziffdavis.com (or just post a comment here). PS I’m also going to try to spend some time at Bloggercon, although it looks […]

Now I can let you know what I’ve been beavering away at for the past month. PCMagCast’s first Security & Mobility Virtual Tradeshow will be happening August 23 and 24, with a full lineup of presentations and other goodies on computer security and mobility for businesses. We’re trying to replicate th

I loved my Leatherman and used it nearly every day, but after less than a year one of the clips that lock the tools into the “open” position broke off. It just wasn’t built that well. I took the thing back to REI a few months ago and exchanged it for a slightly more expensive […]

Stevie Wonder plays Sesame Street, 1972. Can’t help but thinking that kids’ music was way better in the 1970s! (via tuberaider)

1. It’s a complicated issue. A really complicated technical issue. The simplistic rhetoric of “demanding that ISPs treat all traffic equally” is a nonstarter, because ISPs have never done that. Peering arrangements, cacheing networks like Akamai, even the fact that you can get slow DSL for an averag

The free Democracy Player from the Participatory Culture Foundation is a slick tool for finding and downloading Internet videos. Unlike, say, YouTube, you don’t have to sit around and wait for a semi-crappy video to buffer before you watch it. Instead, you browse through single videos or channels th

I’m at risk of getting a reputation for pissing on Web 2.0, but here goes. The problem with “microformats,” which Technorati is pushing pretty hard, is that they seem to be no more than poorly implemented metadata standards. Take the rel=tag specification, for instance. This is a snippet of code you

Despite being a far inferior piece of hardware, the Nintendo DS continues to outsell the Sony PSP by a factor of 6. The PSP has a bigger, more beautiful screen. It’s got more sophisticated controls. It supports removable memory cards and works pretty decently as a video and audio player. And its gra