Good selection of news, observations and comments on stuff that is happening around. There seems to be pretty good match between what Michael considers blogworthy and my areas of interest - as I found there lot of interesting pieces.
It is mostly news - but not only news. It is worth browsing through archive, just to discover small jewels - like this one:
If you had a top 7 tips list for managing the flood of digital information, what would it be?
Today's Blog of the Day is "The Reader".
Everything about ebooks and readers - all the stuff I like. See at http://wowio.wordpress.com/
Here I discovered that Sony is assumably preparing new version of reader - PRS 505. From the changes that should be included, none is IMHO really so important. The memory capacity of the reader with SD cards (which are reaching 8GB these days) is much bigger than you ever will need. If I should pick some enhancements hat would make a huge difference, it would be:
Today's BOTD (Blog of the Day) is "Good Math, Bad math".
What it is about is summarized in its subtitle:
Finding the fun in good math. Squashing the bad math and the fools who promote it. There is no need to add anything to this.
Only maybe an URL: http://scienceblogs.com/goodmath/
Today's Blog Of The Day is named Strange Maps, which strangely accurate name. If you have are into maps, or information visualization - or combination of both, do NOT visit this link, because you risk sticking there for few hours :-).
Some ideas presented are quite original and wonderful: for example the map of the USA, having instead of names of the states name of the countries with same GDP as the state. You will find out that Canada == Texas, France == California and Hungary == New Mexico. Or a transposition of the map of Europe and map of Middle Earth - this places Rohan to southern Germany (not a bad match), Isengard is Hamburg. The Mordor ended up in Transylvania with Mount Doom in Romania, Minas Morgul in Hungary and Minas Tirith approximately in Austria.
Joel Oleson is suffering if you do not blog ! Sounds strange ? Read the article Join the SharePoint Blogging Revolution!
at http://blogs.msdn.com/joelo/archive/2007/05/25/you-don-t-blog-i-m-suffering-because-you-don-t-blog.aspx
He makes several very good points - which have very little to do with Sharepoint - but I think the best one is helping the "organic indexing" of the Web space and helping the search engines out there better rank content. I wrote about this while ago.
It happened! After starting my preferred feed aggregator - Google Reader I have noticed the new feature that sounded so good that I almost could not believe it: offline reading. Using new plugin - Google Gears, the reader can cache 2000 items locally and allows you to go offline and read the news, blogs or whatever you have subscribed to absolutely anywhere.
The installation starts with this screen:
YOU should write blogs. Even if nobody reads them, you should write them. It's become pretty clear to me that blogging is a source of both innovation and clarity. I have many of my best ideas and insights while blogging. Struggling to express things that you're thinking or feeling helps you understand them better.
From http://steve.yegge.googlepages.com/you-should-write-blogs.
1) Bruce Schneier
Bruce is author of several excellent books on cryptography, from very easy, thriller like read to a classic work Applied Cryptograhy (highly recommended). The blog goes back to 2004 and is fascinating read.
2) Paul Thurrott
Paul is the Windows guy from Windows Weekly podcast (recommended) who also runs the Winsupersite . He is one of the few people who focus on Microsoft technology and still keep balanced, fair view of the affairs. Paul is certainly not a Microsoft fanboy - and obviously not a Microsoft hater. He seems to share the same balanced approach in case of Apple and OS-X - he appreciates his strengths without being an Apple zealot.
Time to clean up the link cache once again.
Obviously, most of the news on Techsites are Vista related. Web Worker's daily gives you 10 reasons why to upgrade to Vista and 10 reasons why not. MacHouse comments on complicated upgrade paths and Brian Briggs offers decision chart for the updgradees.
General spirit - compared to the launch of Windows 95 - is fairly cynical. The italian Mac bloggers sums it up: Niente di nuovo in Vista. So does this one. This site shows some real innovation :-). Despite it is Vista launch, Steve Jobs and OS-X seems to get almost as much publicity as Vista and as few bloggers commented - Microsoft does not take it easy - see Bill Gates TV appearance.
I had a discussion few days ago with a friend of mine on blogging. The topic was that as soon as something happens on the Net, thousands and sometimes even more people are writing, posting, discussing and blogging about the very same topic. A sort of information tidal wave that spreads across the cyberspace. Which was according to my friend huge waste of time and energy. Generally, he meant, from a whole community perspective, it makes no sense to write about something unless there is reasonable chance you will be saying something very unique that nobody else will likely say - otherwise it adds no value, just clutters the content by repeating and rephrasing the already said. At first it sounded reasonably sound ;-), but the longer I was thinking about it, the more I was convinced it may be quite the opposite.