The series is now in its third season and looks like it is still fantastic. Over the last month I caught three episodes:
Makhail Baryshnikov and Alice Waters — I can’t believe that I have lived in San Francisco for a year now and still not made it to Chez Panisse. (I had a reservation for last November, but my son got a cold so we never made it.)
Wynton Marsalis and John Besh –As a long time fan of Marsalis Family and New Orleans food & life in general this was great to see.
If you are ever in need of inspiration, you can’t do much better than Iconoclasts. If you don’t get the Sundance Channel, I did see that Season 2 is available on iTunes.
Further, if you are a Jazz lover, I highly recommend checking out Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra’s Congo Square; which was featured on the Wynton Marsalis’s Iconoclasts episode. The Congo Square performance from the 2007 Montreal Jazz Festival will be released on DVD next month. The album is available now on iTunes by searching for “Congo Square.” And if you have young kids, there isn’t a much better introduction to Jazz than Wynton’s Jazz ABZ: An A to Z Collection of Jazz Portraits picture & rhyme book. Great stuff.
I posted last week that MacSpeech was reporting that Dictate — their new voice recognition software for Mac — would be shipping yesterday. A new news release on their site says that they have started shipping, but only to “iListen Founding Customers” (whoever they are). They will next ship to iListen “crossgrade” customers. Finally, they will release to resellers within six weeks. So, the real ship date for the product around April 1, 2008.
MyBlogLog’s Reader Roll, the website & blog widget that shows recent visitors, has launched a major upgrade. In addition to a more stylish design (which is completely skinnable) the new Reader Roll gives a lot more information about who is visiting the site.
When you move your cursor over the face of someone in the Reader Roll, a new “flyout” appears. The flyout gives you information on the person — such as location, gender, a short about-me sentence, and sites authored — at a glance. Of course, you can still click on any of the information shown about a person to find out more.
This is much more than a better looking Reader Roll. It is a big step in helping authors and readers of sites to get to know each other better. And that is what MyBlogLog is all about after all.
You can see the new Reader Roll in action and join my MyBlogLog community at ToddSampson.com.
The MacSpeech website says that Dictate — the new native Mac speech recognition application built on Dragon NaturallySpeaking and winner of Macworld 2008’s Best of Show — will be released this Friday, February 15, 2008. I really hope they hit the ship date. I have so many ideas for this app… from speeding up the way I blog to automating transcription of audio memos & meeting notes from my phone & iPod w/ iTalk.
If you haven’t seen the demo, it is absolutely amazing…
I already posted about Ian Kennedy speaking at the Net Tuesday event in San Francisco this Tuesday, February 12, 2008. But, as Ian pointed out in the comments, there is another great event happening Tuesday night.
If you are closer to the South Bay, be sure to check-out Kent Brewser at the Search Sig event at 6:30pm. Kent will be talking about the Social Graph and showing off some of the magic he has done with the closed beta MyBlogLog API — including a new feature of the API that he will unveil.
With Beach setting up the Search Sig and Dave McClure moderating, it should be a can’t-miss. (Unless of course you are already booked to attend Ian’s thing or, as previously mentioned, you have a pregnant wife’s birthday to celebrate.)
The last several months we have seen the launch of OpenSocial, Data Portability, DiSo, Google’s Social Graph, and many related efforts. I have also noticed the MyBlogLog Reader Roll on nearly every site that I visit. (Even with the amazing MyBlogLog growth numbers of the last year, I thought it was probably just my mind targeting the MyBlogLog widget. But I have heard the same thing from three separate people over the last week alone.)
It’s time to party! The Social DNA of the large, closed social networks has started to weave its way into nearly every site on the Internet. The idea of distributed social networks, which MyBlogLog was founded on, has officially hit the tipping point.
MyBlogLog Product Manager and all-around great guy Ian Kennedy will be speaking at the upcoming Net Tuesday event. The event will cover building online communities for non-profit organizations with MyBlogLog, Yahoo! Groups and Upcoming. The festivities kick-off this coming Tuesday (February 12, 2008) at 6pm.
Note: I will not be able to attend due to the fact that it is my 22-week-pregnant-wife’s birthday and I do not wish to get killed. Please go anyway. And be sure to say “hi” to Ian.
Nearly everyone close to the tech industry has now heard of programming frameworks — thanks to the Rails part of Ruby on Rails. Every scripting language - PHP, Python, etc. - now has a framework; or fifty. This is a good, logical growing-up of the web. These languages needed the more structured Model-View-Controller (MVC) environment that their *established* compiled programming language brethren have had forever.
While I have extensively studied programming frameworks, especially around Ruby & PHP, I have somehow completely missed another set of frameworks being developed: CSS Frameworks. I hadn’t even heard of CSS frameworks until I stumbled across the following talk on An Event Apart’s presentation schedule:
If you are an interface wiz who has been keeping up with the CSS framework developments, please post additional links worth checking out in the comments. Thanks!
Man, it has been quite a while since I have seen new web hacks that have completely blown me away. Today I get two! No sooner had I posed about Niall Kennedy’s Browser Sniffer magic than Ian Kennedy (no relation) sends me another really slick hack.
Ian pointed me to the Intense Debate website. I first met the Intense Debate guys last Summer when Eric & I were mentors at TechStars. They are a great group of guys. Since I only recently re-launched my blog, I haven’t have much of a need for a comments service. As such, I hadn’t seen their site in quite some time. (I have since agreed to try out the Disqus comment system as soon as they integrate OpenID; but that is beside the point.)
When I first pulled up the site, I didn’t even notice the feature. Then it jumped out at me:
The site had auto-detected my blog. How cool is that!
So, how does it work? Like most great things, it is actually quite simple. Not only that, it uses MyBlogLog!!
When you first land on IntenseDebate.com, the site uses JavaScript to open MyBlogLog.com in an invisible Div.
The MyBlogLog website automatically redirects logged-in users to their MyBlogLog member page. (e.g. When I go to www.mybloglog.com I am redirected to http://www.mybloglog.com/buzz/members/toddsampson/)
The script looks at the URL of the site shown in the invisible Div. If the URL is www.mybloglog.com, the script does nothing. If the URL has changed, it means that the person is a MyBlogLog member. The script then grabs the member name from the URL. (e.g. In my example above, it would grab “toddsampson”.)
The member name is then passed to a PHP script. While I can’t see the PHP source code, the script must open the page for the selected user and determine which blog to push into the signup box.
Like I said — simple. Simple, but brilliant. Doing this kind of thing will become much easier and much more powerful once the MyBlogLog API comes out of Beta very soon. But, in the mean time, thanks for making my day guys.
I posted last week that MacSpeech was reporting that Dictate — their new voice recognition software for Mac — 
When you move your cursor over the face of someone in the Reader Roll, a new “flyout” appears. The flyout gives you information on the person — such as location, gender, a short about-me sentence, and sites authored — at a glance. Of course, you can still click on any of the information shown about a person to find out more.
