Author: fioritto

Keeping an eye on Google

Great post by Topix.net’s Rick Skrenta on the “Secret Source of Google’s Power. As he points out, the platform they developed has allowed them to introduce new features that while appear incremental, would be expensive for others to match. Their platform encompasses the tasks most online users perform daily – search, email, local search/yellow pages, shopping and social networking. Plus…

Halley’s “In Praise of Grey”

I should have posted this awhile back. This is one of the funniest things I have read in a long time. I’m not quite in this demographic yet, but pretty close. This line, “wrinkly-eyed tired older guys at the PTA meetings” resonates deeply. I have two kids in college and one in Jr. High so staying awake at those meetings…

Posting from Newsgator

I was unable to get Movable Poster to work from Newsgator (never could get it to be recognized as a plugin) so I have moved on to the plugin that is based on the Blogger API. I was sucessfully able to get it to post to my site, but for some reason Movable Type does not recognize the titles in…

From Doc Searls: Television’s future potato famine

I think this post from Doc is pretty interesting. As he mentions it puts the control of the a-la-carte experience into the viewers hands. I don’t follow his idea on the transmit side of the equation; I need to read the pointers he mentions below. We are about ready to disconnect DirecTV and sink the money into Netflix or something…

The New Americans

I watched the first episode of the documentary “The New Americans” last night on PBS. The film chronicles the lives of refugees and immigrants as they make their way from disparate places across the world to America. As I watched their stories last night, I was reminded of our Kurdish friends that made their way from Iraq a few years…

Emacs wiki

I am currently obsessed with getting Emacs-wiki to post to my new server location. I have been using it to keep track of some new product development and innovation research I have been doing, but it is currently configured to save to my local machine. I want to move it to my server to make it more accessible, but I’m…

Bringing Linux to the laptop via Knoppix

In a recent Suitwatch column, Doc Searls talks about the issues of running and living with Linux on a new IBM laptop. I have been wanting to run Linux for some time but have not had a spare machine to install it. I thought about a dual-boot install on my wife’s machine, but there would be hell to pay if…

More on the Chicago Blogger dinner

It was nice to finally connect some faces to words and meet some new folks. I have been reading Rick Klau, Jim McGee, AKMA and Jenny Levine’s blogs for almost three years since moving to Chicago, but had not met in person. There were several new faces at the table (at least to me) and it was a pleasure meeting…