Here’s a discussion on FriendFeed about a post from Colin Walker. Pretty lively and interesting stuff.

Now here’s a link to the same post, which cropped up in Steve Rubel’s stream.

Now if you were only following Steve’s stream, and started a discussion on his link, you’d never get involved in the other discussion - in fact, you might never even know about it.

This is one of the weaknesses of FriendFeed as it is at the moment. There’s plenty of potential for multiple discussions of the same post in different places around FriendFeed, which are not linked together in any way. While FriendFeed centralises and aggregates discussion, it does so in a way which invites fragmentation of discussion on the site itself - meaning that you end up back in the situation that FriendFeed is partially meant to avoid.

Nicholas Carr takes issue with some of the aspects of Clay Shirky’s “Here Comes Everybody” theory:

“What Shirky is doing here, in essence, is repackaging the liberation mythology that has long characterized the more utopian writings about the Web. That mythology draws a sharp distinction between our lives before the coming of the Web BW and our lives after the Web AW. In the dark BW years, we were passive couch potatoes who were, in Shirky’s words “forced into the channel of media the way it was because it was the only option.” We were driftwood, going with whatever flow “the media” imposed on us. We were all trapped in Shirky’s musty cellar.”

Nick isn’t the first person I’ve seen make that very point. In fact, in a comment I posted over at Broadstuff, I said pretty much the same thing:

“I think a lot of this is just a continuation of the millennial optimism about the Internet which was prevalent in the early 1990’s, and largely by the same type of people. When you really, truly, want to believe that change is in the air, then it’s very tempting to make straw men to attack. That’s the language of every revolutionary movement, no matter how mild.”

Moving to a more modern era, it’s also easy to forget that television spawns a vast amount of creative fan activity, a lot of which pre-dates the Internet. One thing that I think Clay (and many others) miss out on: TV was, in fact, a highly social media in the sense that everyone talks about it. Families watched it together, before the advent of a TV in every room. People talked about the previous night’s big shows at work the next day. Sure, the medium itself didn’t provide for that social element - it was, and is, one way - but fed a great deal of material into a broader social context.

Clay’s claim, essentially, is that online media are by definition participatory and thus less “brain rotting”. I’d take issue with the whole idea of TV programmes as something monolithic and deadening. “Cosmos“, deadening? “Life on Earth“? “Civilisation“? TV can be massively inspirational - how many people watched “Cosmos” as children and ended up doing science because of it?

Disqus has added video commenting via Seesmic - and I’ve enabled them on here. Feel free to leave a video comment!

• HP 2133 miniNote PC
  RM’s product manager for the HP 2133 gives a video walkthrough of this new ultra-mobile PC. Looks good!
  (tags: HP miniNote UMPC)

Microsoft to limit the capabilities of cheap laptops:

“Microsoft is launching a program to promote the use of its Windows OS in ultra low-cost PCs, one effect of which will be to limit the hardware capabilities of this type of device, IDG News Service has learned.

Microsoft plans to offer PC makers steep discounts on Windows XP Home Edition to encourage them to use that OS instead of Linux on ultra low-cost PCs (ULPCs). To be eligible, however, the PC vendors that make ULPCs must limit screen sizes to 10.2 inches and hard drives to 80G bytes, and they cannot offer touch-screen PCs.”

Or, as an alternative, use a fully-fledged operating system which will work on pretty much any device you like: Linux.

John Gruber has posted a really interesting and insightful piece on BlackBerry vs. iPhone, and why he thinks that RIM is, fundamentally, in a very very bad place indeed.

However, there’s one point that I have to disagree with John on:

“In broad terms, BlackBerrys are optimized first for email; the iPhone for the web. What’s more important, an email client or a web browser? For most people, and perhaps even most current BlackBerry users, the answer is clearly the web.”

For the majority of business users, I think John has got this completely wrong. For them, the ability to send and receive emails, and view the attachments which come with them, is far more important than web browsing. Witness the number of users who spend their time in meetings thumbing their BlackBerry.

That’s not to say that John is necessarily wrong in his overall point that iPhone is going to eat RIM’s lunch. But in optimising for email, as John acknowledges, RIM are actually delivering something that’s far more desirable for business than a device that’s optimised for web.

Betsy Schiffman at Wired writes a story about Mike Arrington’s deal with the Washington Post, and mentions that ” it seems crazy-crazy to us that the Washington Post, a paper known for the sort of reporting that can take down U.S. presidents, is publishing content written by a dude who invests in the companies he writes about.”

This, of course, sends the TechCrunch macho-dickwads into a froth, and they come back with this:

Nice characters, eh? I’m sure their mothers - who they probably still live with - are very proud.

I’m really enjoying using Brightkite at the moment (I’m ianbetteridge if you want to friend me), and I’m pleased to see that the iPhone web application has now been released in alpha form.

But I was even more pleased to see this comment from one of the developers on the Brightkite blog:

“The native iPhone application with core location (cell triangulation, GPS) is in the works. Checking in will become much easier. We will be releasing it in June through Apple. There are no plans to release a jail broken version as of right now.”

With Jaiku effectively stalled, Brightkite looks a nice solution for location awareness. Plus, it integrates with Fire Eagle, which is great.

marketing: OpenOffice.org 3.0 Beta Features:

“With Version 3.0, OpenOffice.org is now able to run on Mac OS X without the need for X11. Thus, OpenOffice.org behaves like any other Aqua application. The cool thing is, while the market leading office suite vendor dropped VBA support and the Solver feature, OpenOffice.org recently introduced limited VBA support and includes a powerful Solver component. In addition, OpenOffice.org integrates well with the Mac OS X accessibility APIs, and thus offers better accessibility support than many other Mac OS X applications. Finally, people like OpenOffice.org 3.0 for Mac OS X because of its very good stability and performance. Reportedly, some Mac users have switched to OpenOffice.org just because of its extremely good stability.”

There’s quite a few more goodies, but for Mac users this is the big one. Download from here.

So now that Google Reader has the notes feature, allowing me to make little comments on everything I share, and the ability to share anything I browse to, I want to be able to use it to replace del.icio.us in my blog workflow.

At the moment, I use del.icio.us to create those “links for…” posts. Del.icio.us does this automatically - and what I want is for Google Reader to do the same job. Does anyone know how or even if this can be done?