I’m currently investigating, by means of current theories of communication, how to locate Twitter between other forms of social and mass communication. There’re some specifics which evolve Twitter (or in general Microblogging, for that matter) into an interesting and unusual new breed of interpersonal and mass communication at once.
Microblogging hasn’t reached a tipping point yet. It’s still mostly an early adopters technology, but fairly recent Nielsen Media numbers (1) suggest that it’s growing rapidly. I’d guess that the ongoing releases of new twitter-based software tools (i.e. Twitterrank) in line with the steep growth of the community will soon burst in an online phenomenon not unlike blogging, but bigger.
Since I plan to build on these thoughts, I decided to present parts of my argumentation here, in order to force myself to critically and elaborately write all these things down which just exist in my head right now.
Thus in my next post, I’ll try to explain why I think that microblogging has more potential than blogging.
(1) Nielsen Media Alert: Fastest Growing Social Networks for September 2008.
November 15th, 2008 in Technology |
“The venerable line of PC notebooks rolled onto the scene in 1992. While the concept was spot on, there was turmoil at IBM as to what to call it. IBM’s pen-computing group wanted to keep it simple; they liked ThinkPad. But IBM’s corporate naming committee didn’t—it didn’t have a number, and every IBM product had to have a number”
Cio.com
It’s hard to expect any kind of innovation from a corporate culture this conservative. Luckily they managed to decide against bureaucracy.
“Dell’s plan to chip away at Apple’s iPod+iTunes iceberg have apparently melted. After purchasing media portal software in 2007 and announcing plans this year for a new player that would tie into it, Dell has reportedly scrapped the media gadget in favor of building the software into every machine it ships.”
(Ars Technica)
Apparently, the Rob Enderle guided Team created a red device with yellow buttons and four black volume Knobs (two on each side), not unlike Formula-1 tires.
Rumours are, that Michael Dell screamingly left the room, after the Team presented the new device.
November 5th, 2008 in Politics |
Last post relating to the U.S. elections and it’s actors:
“You can always count on Americans to do the right thing – after they’ve tried everything else.” – Winston Chirchill
Nuff said.
X specifies what the end results of a series of rendering requests must look like, but how the display looks while it’s in progress is not discussed. GTK+ and Qt works around this to some extent by using double buffering, but we still see lag between window decorations and window contents while resizing etc. The wayland tag line is “every frame is perfect”, by which I mean that applications will be able to control the rendering enough that we’ll never see tearing, lag, redrawing or flicker.”
A step in the right direction.
In the past years, Linux has considerably matured as a Desktop Operating System. Not only the innovation from Ubuntu, but also new technologies (i.e. Compiz) developed by Red Hat, SuSE, or others, helped Linux to gain awareness of Linux as desktop. One of the fundamental flaws, however, has always been the X-Server. It starts with the incredibly ugly mode-switches during the system boot (vga, text-mode, svga, text-mode, native solution) continues along the lines of dual monitor setup problems, and culminates in ugly redrawing/flicker problems with most window operations.
I do believe, that one of the key problems, holding Linux back from gaining a wider audience, lies (next to the casual users’ stumbling block of not being able to install standard Windows software) in the feeling of a buggy system determined by the visualy visible fragments of on-screen operations.
Think about it: People don’t see the modern 2.6.x Kernel with all of it’s glory, people aren’t able to see the power that is a new O1 scheduler (or whatever), they can’t see the brilliance of the filesystem and neither the flexibility of all those new KDE4 / Qt4 API / technology layers.
However, what they can see is a desktop that leaves ugly fragments and feels immature.
So, although the new Wayland kernel won’t suddenly bring Linux on par with Windows Vista or OS X it should tremendously help in achieving a higher state of satisfaction with the whole Desktop Experience. Often, it’s the little things, that can make a big difference.
I