Brian Fitzgerald

It’s Steve Jobs' 51st Birthday.

What is meant by web 2.0? What was web 1.0? Read all about it here…

Apparently Flock has scrapped plans of making .6 a major beta release or they have decided that using numbers like .5.11 highlights the fact that these are betas. Either way, it has been a long time since a release of Flock was put out (outside of the hourly builds) and this new one is fantastic. Check out the new features here, then get it.

technorati tags: flock, browser

There may actually be a bit of a virus circulating for OS X masquarading as a screenshot from OS 10.5.

This would be pretty fantastic even if the DS weren’t already a great gaming device. Opera will be releasing their web browser for the Nintendo DS as a game cartridge. The DS runs about $250 has two screens (one of which is touch-sensitive), Wi-Fi, stereo sound, a microphone and stylus. If it renders web pages with any speed at all, this could become one of the most portable, cost-effective browsing options available.

It’s been in beta for nearly five years and yesterday it finally it version 1.0. It’s not my favorite browser but it’s a fantastic browsing alternative on the mac and I’m sure it has a lot of great things on the way.

Apple has released a new 1GB version of the Nano for only $149 and has made the 1GB version of the shuffle only $99 with the 512 now $69. It sure would be tough to pass up the extra features of the nano for only $50.

ZDNet has published odds on possible announcements at MacWorld.

Mozilla hasn’t announced it yet, but it’s out there. You can get the final 1.5 for macintosh here.

Apple has announced a media event for October 12th. CNet reports that Apple will use the event to release a new video iPod (I swear I read this but I can’t find it now). “MacRumors says they will not”:www.macrumors.com/pages/200… and instead release a larger-capacity iPod with some cosmetic changes.

Speaking of Sparkle. Here is a blast from someone to claims to be a PC user at Microsoft’s new photo manager (which is still in beta).

Microsoft has been rumored to have a “flash killer” in the works for a long time and it seems that the newly announced “sparkle” program may be it, but is it designed to go up against flash? It really seems when watching the available interview/presentation that it is not meant so much to be a low-bandwidth internet technology as a way to add a ton of vector-based eye candy at desktop applications. Of course, it becomes difficult to separate web from desktop when you are talking Internet Explorer, Visual Basic and Windows and I’m sure that this will impact the web in many ways.

Sun and Google announced that they will be partnering on different technologies. It’s interesting that Google (who is the big fish here) has nothing about this on their site while Sun, who really really needs this - and seems to think that they are the big player, has this as the biggest item on their site.

MIT has put together the specifications for a computer that should cost no more than $100 to build. The 12 inch laptop computer has wireless networking, six usb ports and a shoulder-strap that doubles as a power cord. The computer would be built primarily for third world countries looking to introduce computers into the classrooms of their students. Given this, the computer also features a small crank which can be used to provide juice to the computer in areas without handy electrical power. The computer may be produced commercially for developed nations and would likely run around $200 with some of the proceeds going to the effort to get these computers, again, into more povershed areas.

iTunes 4.9 was release sometime either last night or this morning and now features podcast subscriptions. It is so super easy, you can browse the store for podcasts in the same way that you browse for music. When you find something you like you simply hit "subscribe". You can customize how many shows you would like and best of all, you can tell iTunes how to clean up after itself so that old shows are removed as new shows are downloaded. Two great new podcasts are Adam Curry's new PodFinder where Adam plays snippits of other podcasts and Apple's New Music Tuesday podcast where new tunes and albums are introduced. Both take advantage of iTunes ability to display timecode triggered events that allow you to go straight to the podcast or album that you are listening to at that moment.

Whining Dave Winer posted a honest reason for his deciding to cancel his Audible service, which Audible CEO Don Katz blasted him for (I bet he doesn't blast people for posting about subscribing), and in typical form Winer opened both barrels back on him in his blog. Stupid stuff.

iPodder (the free, open-source podcast client) is really maturing nicely and the newest version, 2.1, is the first that would have me considering it has a primary means of managing subscriptions. The great effort may be coming to an end however as we await iTunes 4.9 with it's podcast support.

Will Richardson contemplates what Wikipedia means to research papers.