Goodbye Oink

Early Tuesday morning in a London flat, a young IT professional was arrested for running Oink, one of the most popular file sharing sites utilizing bit torrent technology. The site was focused primarily on music downloads and was known as a good place to find pre-release recordings. This is a sure fire way to piss off the sinking ship that is the music industry. Interestingly, the guy responsible for this site has been released on bail and no charges have been pressed as the investigation continues.

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Google's sustainability initiative

When it comes to sustainability, some companies could care less, while others, set the bar pretty high.

Google is setting the bar a few thousand feet in the air.

It's called Makani Power, and the big G is making a huge investment in making it work. Basically, its hundreds of kites with little turbines attached that permanently hang out in the jet stream where the air passes by at hundreds of miles per hour.

Yes, really.

It's an amazing technology that I had no idea existed until now. You can read more about it over at I, Cringley, but be warned: the author's a little long-winded.

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Leopard Tour

You can now tour all the nifty new features in Apple's new OS, Leopard here.

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Adobe moving to all-web software

This should make all you Web 2.0 fans stand up and cheer (I'm looking at you, Matt). Bruce Chizen, CEO of Adobe, announced at a recent Web 2.0 conference in San Francisco, that Adobe would begin making the move towards making all of their software web-based, rather than desktop-based.

This would be a pretty large addition to the Web 2.0 camp. Although, he does mention that it will probably take closer to a decade to make it happen.

Click over to Reuters for the scoop.

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Geniuses

Ever since Apple started referring to their retail employees as geniuses I've had a problem with it. I truly feel like it cheapens the meaning of the word genius. You sell a few iPhones and all of a sudden your sharing notoriety with Einstein and Mozart.

Several (about 800) Apple retail story employees have strengthened my case. When Apple launched the iPhone they gave one to every Apple employee. Even though they got the iPhone for free, they tried to take advantage of Apple's early adopter $100 iPhone credit. Apple caught onto this and fired approximately 800 offenders. Read more.

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RSS in the Corporate Context

A good friend of mine works at a web 2.0 startup (think music, social networking, 18-24 demographics yada yada yada). The email below was sent to his team describing the RSS infrastructure he created using Yahoo Pipes. He mentions using Feedburner to syndicate (publish, distribute) thsi content. We use Feedburner for this blog and will most likely use it for srg.com v3.

Names have been changed to protect the innocent. Read on. . . .


I’ve created a shared exec team RSS feed to enable us to share pertinent blogs, articles, news, etc from each of our own individual RSS feeds. In addition, I will be adding feeds from each of our bloggers once they’ve created a feedburner feed for their blog. This will enable each of us to share articles of interest and keep up with postings from the blog team. Please subscribe to the following RSS feed and read it frequently, as this is meant to replace our dependency on emailing links to articles for review.

Shared articles the team are being filtered into the above feed using Yahoo Pipes. If anyone else uses an RSS reader and wants to share articles of interest with the rest of the team please send me your shared feed. I’ve set a filter to prevent two or more users from posting the same article to the feed. Ideally, we would be able to combine this feed with wiki functionality enabling us to share and track comments on the information therein. I’ll keep exploring enhancement options, as this is clearly a work in progress.

Occasionally you will see an article with only a headline and no body, and or a “null” in the body. This occurs when the original source (i.e. digg) comes from a basic website URL as opposed to a specific XML feed.

If you’re set against using RSS feeds you can simply visit the link above on a regular basis to read the latest posts.

I hope this will streamline the timely flow of pertinent information from the internet to our team and enable us to stay ahead of the game.

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Findings From the Web Design Survey - A List Apart

Close to 33,000 web professionals answered the survey’s 37 questions, providing the first data ever collected on the business of web design and development as practiced in the U.S. and worldwide. Working with statisticians, we crunched raw data into meaningful findings.
View Survey Results

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