Random thoughts on random days

The back cover of the last Whole Earth Catalog that Steve Jobs mentioned in his Stanford commencement speech. Here is the YouTube video of the speech. I’ve just recently come across the text of his speech and it has really hit a chord within me. I’ve been way too quiet for too long on this blog. Time to open up my mind again. Dust off the cobwebs. Stir the passions that have been smoldering for a while now.

This is so funny and so bad for Comcast
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TechCrunch: Stealth start-up PostApp announced at Thursday’s SuperNova Connected Innovators session the launch tomorrow of WidgetBox, its new beta marketplace for managed web based widgets, and $1.5 million in funding from Hummer Winblad.

If you like widgets, there’s about to be a whole lot more of them available for use in your blog or profile page. If you’d like to develop widgets and have some one else deal with the details, this could be for you.

Now this is something I thought would really make sense. Widgets are coming out in all sort of products and platforms. Yahoo, Apple, Tagworld and just recently Opera have widget platforms and it makes perfect sense for a clearinghouse to emerge. I wish I had thought it up! Maybe I can turn my hobby of widget building into a my own little cottage industry! Hmmmm…..

I’ve often thought it would be much smarter to create one’s web space with building blocks of information from sources of your own choosing and not being locked into a particular environment. Now I am a geek at heart so it’s easy for me to roll up my sleeves and make programming changes to my site but my wife wouldn’t have a clue where to start. She mainly lives and breathes in email and IM because everything else takes to much time to her to figure out. However when I installed Tiger on her Mac and she played with her first widget I saw her eyes light up a bit. Maybe with the coming explosion (hopefully) of new and more functional widgets someone like her might just get the itch to experiment.

When I first discovered Ning I had high hopes that maybe their “playground” would be the platform that would allow someone like my wife to participate but I think their interface is a little confusing for a novice. And to take true advantage of Ning you really do need to understand programming. Maybe combining some next generation widgets with the Ning platform will prove to be an interesting idea. Hmmm….

I always find it hard to start writing in my blog. I have all of this pent up energy and ideas that seem to get throttled by attempting to put it down in type.

My interests? Social networks. Cluetrain Manifesto. User interfaces. AJAX. Widgets. Macintosh. Communication. Good writing. (Probably not mine.) Emerging technologies of all kind. Dave Winer.