dcinput daily for Thu 8th Feb, 2007
The Fake Steve Jobs: “I’m a middleman. That’s it. I’m like the guy who runs the record store down the block from you. If the record labels want to ship their records in cement blocks dipped in smallpox, what do I care? As long as the kids want to buy them”. The more things disintermediate, the more they re-intermediate, it would seem.
Ze Frank on procrastination.
Ali McClymont makes awesome London Snowman.
Yahoo Pipes…
I’ve been trying to play around with Yahoo Pipes. This web application that runs in your browser allows you to pull in RSS feeds from around the web and mash them up together in interesting ways. Techcrunch description here.
The GUI looks very nice. What I found interesting is how it seems to be based around similar node and flow metaphors used in many vfx 2D apps like Shake, Fusion and some 3D apps like Houdini. The aim is to allow non-programmers to be able to harness the power of the web.
Whether this will work or not, only time will tell. The apps mentioned above have certainly allowed many non-progrmmers into the world of vfx but this medium is inherantly visual, and since most people have a pair of eyes, there’s an inate understanding. My instinct is that mashing up RSS feeds full of different sorts of non-visual data is going to be way more cerebral and less immediately fun.
The other problem is that since it’s all web based, the Yahoo servers have to take the workload and so far they seem to be going down all the time. In principle though I like the idea. Lets see what happens.