New High Water Mark

or is that low water mark?

This month: 1788

Google's Big Adventure

So Google has gone and done their S-1 filing with the SEC. This doesn't mean they will IPO but that they could. They may have been compelled to file due to SEC regulations that require companies to report financial results to the SEC once they have at least $10 million in assets and more than 500 shareholders of record.

Here are a few very worthy summaries of that S- Document : Tristan Louis's TNL.NET , John Battelle's Searchblog and TechDirt's take

A couple of interesting things to note :

• They are looking to offer shares via auction-based IPO. Which may or may not be a revise dutch auction. Very unusual in the USA, although more common in Europe. This will end run around the lock that the bankers (and their friends) have on getting first gone on the offering, and will also limit the first day bounce on the stock price (a good thing). It will also maximize the amount Googles raises via the offering


• They had revenue north of $900 million and earning of about $100 million in 2003. They had revenue ~ $300 m and earning of ~100 m in 2002. they would have had earning in line in 2002 save for share based compensation. (given that I exepect that they are planning to IPO) 95% of net revenues in 2003 are from advertisers


• The "Letter from the Founders" is inspired by Warren Buffett’s essays in his annual reports. Well worth a read, and is indeed readable. No doubt it gave the Lawyers and Bankers ulcers (reason enough!)


• They are going for a dual stock structure, to ensure they don't lose control

Jon Battelle's point summary would be more usefully if he edited it differently, like this :
1. We don't need to do this for the money;
2. We have no plans to run our business to satisfy Wall Street's need for smooth earnings predictability;
3. We plan to give no earnings guidance, not at least as it's understood on Wall St.;
4. Don't ask us to do so, we'll simply decline the request;
5. We'll do odd things that you won' t understand;
6. We will make big bets on things that may not work out;
7. We run the company as a triumvirate, so there will not be clear leadership from one person like most other companies;
8. We bridge the media and tech industries (interesting), which are in flux, so we've chosen a two-class stock structure similar to the NYT, WashPost, and NYT that helps us avoid being taken over by those forces;
9. We plan using an auction model, as it feels fairer and we understand auctions from AdWords;
10. Don't invest in us if this scares you at all, or the price feels too high;
11. Don't even think about asking us to cut expenses with regard to our employees;
12. We believe in the idea of Don't Be Evil;
13. It's evil to pay for placement or inclusion (a swipe at Yahoo);
14. We hope to bridge the digital divide through Gmail type free services and a foundation with at least 1% of profits and equity to help make the world a better place;
17. Betting on Google is a bet on Sergey and Larry (this was said multiple times, making me wonder if there wasn't some odd future blame being assigned here by the VCs or bankers);
18. This letter is our way of answering the questions we can't answer in the coming months due to the IPO quiet period.


Update: Tirstan done some figuring about How many Google machines : ~50,000 CPU's for around 20 teraflops of processing

and Dan Gillmor reports on GoogleMania: Using Clout, So Far the Right Way , as decent and balanced piece on the impending IPO

For the record here's a PDF of Google S-1 Filing:
google.pdf

Sanko in Toronto's Queen West

Last weekend. after dim sum, we cruised down to Queen West and poped into Sanko's (Sanko & Jackielne Int. 730 Queen Street West, Toronto, Ontario. M6J 1E8) where we stocked up on on lots of good stuff - Unagi, Nori, Fish cakes, Green Tea Ice Cream, and a bunch of other stuff (no Wasabi Peas this time) - and noticed that it was their 36th Anniversary, plus they are having a Discount Sale on May 1st only - maybe yummy discount Unagi?


http://toronto-sanko.com/en/

Herding Racehorses, Racing Sheep

PragDave

Taiwan Cam

Found Via MetaFilter comes Taiwan Cam, a Scenic Spot Search System, using a Flash based drill down map or drop down menu to find various web cams around Taiwan. The biggest problem being the ~12 hour time difference between Toronto (Eastern Standard Time and Taiwan).

New reality shows slated for the fall season:

The Candidate. George W. Bush and John Kerry spend a whole month together in a mansion filled with lobbyists. Who will get in bed with whom? Don't miss the sizzling behind the scenes deal-making. Each episode concludes with both candidates handing out long-stemmed roses to their favorite special interest groups.

The Apprentice of The Dark Side. The evil Emperor must choose among several aspiring Sith Lords, all vying for the coveted job of "Darth Executive," in charge of overseeing construction of the Deathstar. Each round eliminates a contestant with the famous tagline "You're fired," and is then zapped with lightning and thrown off a ledge to his infernal doom.

Aramaic Idol. The nation wide search for the next messiah. Come put your healing powers to the test and go head to head with other saviours and miracle workers for the kingdom, and the power, and the glory, forever and ever amen. Produced by Mel Gibson.

 

CNN Cribs: News Anchor Edition. Paula Zahn gives a sneak peek of her kickin' pad in the O.C., all West Coast flava y'all cuz the bitch is mad bangin' wit the bling bling, know what I'm saying? Holla!

Via SinFest, notes from THE R E S I S T A N C E

Sadly these ideas seem better than 99% of whats actually on air.

becks ad

Via Adam Curry's Weblog

UnFair and unBalanced

New York Times : When a Canadian Insults Fox News, Them's [Expletive] Fighting Words!

Following up on Cory's earlier post (http://www.boingboing.net/2004/04/22/bill_oreilly_mistake.html ) The New York Time has noticed Fox News' Bill O'Reilly public brouhaha with the Globe and Mail's John Doyle.

Fox News (and their defenders) come off as foaming at the mouth crazies, who don't understand why everyone don't love them.

Karen, Lady of Leisure

Just discovered the site of Karen Cheng a Asian Australian living in Perth, Western Australia and Graphic Designer, her Life, her husband (Andrew) and bady (Callum). Cute. Nicely designed site, great photo's and slice of life postings.

Could it be......

Frazz...the John and Thomas show?

You too can belong to the William Shatner School of acting....

Khaaan!!

B.D.'s Helmet

Garry Trudeau done a fairly radical thing in the April 21 (2004) strip of Doonesbury

The first thing was so shocking (a helmet's been there for 30 odd year's, I'm not sure if Boopsie has seen him without it) that I didn't notice the second thing, even after going back to it 3 times. It wasn't until someone else commented on it that I final figured out what was bugging me.

As a statement it is a gusty move. As a piece of writing / cartooning - the miss direct and subtleness - it is a masterful stroke.

Setting up ssh-agent on Windows XP

Ovidiu Predescu's Weblog
As you probably know already, ssh-agent is an easy way to enter the passwords for your private SSH keys only once per session. On Linux and Unix systems, when using X-Windows, it is very easy to setup ssh-agent as the parent process of your window manager. In fact most of the Linux distributions start-up the window manager this way.

The way ssh-agent works is by setting up two environment variables, SSH_AUTH_SOCK and SSH_AGENT_PID. The first is used to communicate the location of the Unix socket domain on which ssh-agent is listening for requests. The second is used to identify the Unix process id of ssh-agent, so it can be killed by ssh-add -k.

These environment variables have to communicated to every process that wants to use ssh later on, so ssh can connect to the ssh-agent process and fetch the decrypted private keys. In the Unix parent-child process model, this works just fine. The ssh-agent does the work of creating the Unix socket domain and then forks a child process. In this process it first exports the two environment variables above, then exec the process - the window manager for X-Windows. This way all the processes that inherit from it will have these environment variables available.

On Windows this is not possible, since there is no way to interpose some other process before the window manager. This of course, assumes the same parent-child relationship of processes as in Unix. The alternative is to always start ssh-agent on some well-known socket. Below, I assume you use Cygwin, an excellent free-software Unix emulator for Windows.

There are few things you need to do. First in your Windows home directory (usually c:\Document and Settings\yourusername, make sure you have a .bash_profile that reads:

. ~/.bashrc

Then create a .bashrc file in your home directory, and add to it the following:

export SSH_AUTH_SOCK=/tmp/.ssh-socket

ssh-add -l 2>&1 >/dev/null
if [ $? = 2 ]; then
# Exit status 2 means couldn't connect to ssh-agent; start one now
ssh-agent -a $SSH_AUTH_SOCK >/tmp/.ssh-script
. /tmp/.ssh-script
echo $SSH_AGENT_PID >/tmp/.ssh-agent-pid
fi

function kill-agent {
pid=`cat /tmp/.ssh-agent-pid`
kill $pid
}

Next, go to the Start menu, "Control Panel" -> "System" -> "Advanced" -> "Environment Variables" and add a new variable SSH_AUTH_SOCK, whose value should be /tmp/.ssh-socket. Hit OK to make the change persistent.

What happens next? The first time you open a bash terminal, an ssh-agent process is going to be automatically created. This process will listen on the Unix socket domain /tmp/.ssh-socket. Run ssh-add at the prompt to enter the password for your private key(s).

Now when you open another terminal, that will share the same ssh-agent process because of the SSH_AUTH_SOCK definition. Running ssh or any other command that uses ssh underneath will work without having to enter the password for your keys.

It will also work if you run a cygwin-ified version of XEmacs. Tramp, CVS or any other Emacs package that uses ssh will work just fine now.

The only requirement is for these programs to be cygwin-ified, otherwise the sharing described above doesn't work.

Machinima : Spielbergs with a joystick

Video games are manipulated to create short films with Satire, irony the hallmarks of machinima.

The incredibility long url of the Toronto Star introduces (to me, anyway) Red Vs. Blue, a series of short films created using Microsoft X-Box Halo.

Another example of Machinima, is "In My Trip To Liberty City" by Jim Munroe, a Toronto-based author and machinima dabbler, adopting the genteel perspective of a Canadian tourist while meandering the seamy, violent streets of the game Grand Theft Auto.

I submitted the story to SlashDork (Like in the Morning! @09:24AM, but noooo. Rejected!) but they accepted someone else's submission. Life is curel, fame is fleeting.

Category: Machinima

Mobile Myopia

Russ comments on the dim bulbs at Mobilopia.com and their lack of creativity.

Ka's lesser evil twin

Update : Looks like the site (http://www.mplayer74.com/) is down and out.

ka1.mpg (~1 Mb)
almost as evil as Ka's evil twin : Astonishingly fucked-up car commercial:

link - o- rama

• I'm starting to see billboard advertising for RedTO. It looks like a Toronto focused Directory Listings and search engine will a Dead tree based Business Catalog Book, coming out in June 2004. Or is it a Toronto based Business Catalog Book with a Website? The people behind it are called Red Media Corporation at http://www.theredpages.com/, so a guess the have ambitions beyond Toronto. Are there any Colors left?


• As reported in the Globe and Mail > On-line sales in Canada surged 40 per cent last year, fuelled by the increasing prevalence of high-speed Internet access, Statistics Canada said Friday.


• IBM developer has a article on Object-relation mapping without the container, Develop a transactional persistence layer using Hibernate and Spring
  exploring 2 hot framework tools that let you do strong db intergrate without ugly EJB's.


• Via Boing Boing comes HowToons, comics and video how-to projects for kids, with a good mix of mischief, smartassery, and science. I'm thinking of building the marshmellow gun for my summer get together with my brothers kids!


• Google is going after local Ads now: : Via TechDirt it seems Google AdSense is allowing businesses to specify that they only want the ads to show up for people in a certain location. Previously, businesses could specify only what country they wish to target, making the program prohibitively expensive for smaller merchants. The article talks about issues in display the results.
  
  This is in addition to the Local searching that Google is (quietly) testing here http://local.google.com/lochp (USA only right now)



• Came across a Blog of a guy (fairly) new to Japan called Japan Window, sub titled " life in Japan and my ongoing attempt to figure out what is going on here.." nice mix of text and images. The white text on Black back ground is very hard to read.
  
  

PostgreSQL vs. MySQL vs. Commercial Databases: It's All About What You Need

PostgreSQL vs. MySQL vs. Commercial Databases: It's All About What You Need looks like a useful summary of History, Licensing, Feature Sets, Training and Support, a very brief list of who uses them. Worth passing on to your friendly neighborhood CTO or CIO.

MIT's OpenCourseWare populated

Via Brian McCallister : "Brian's Waste of Time", MIT's OpenCourseWare is now nicely populated. Problem sets, exams, readings, Lecture Notes. 700 courses, materials from 33 academic disciplines and all five of MIT's schools. Look's like it's time to do some brain expanding.....

In one case a course has been translated into Spanish and Portuguese.

I wonder when the first story reference to OpenCourseWare going to appear? Maybe Cory or Charlie or Bill have already? Cory's "Down and Out includes a post-university / educational society that implies a OCW ( OpenCourseWare) like curriculum.

Also, given what has happen to books published under the CreativeCommons license, like Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom or Free Culture, what are the possibilities for OCW material?

Real world Knowledge management

The Globe and Mail : Knowledge management crucial tool for law firms is a nice example / case study of how a large law firm is using Knowledge management (really mostly Document Management ). selective quotes :

"When you're a small group, you know, it's the water-cooler thing,"

Part of McMillan Binch's knowledge management program is to discuss major projects when they conclude and record key lessons learned..The information is put into a project summary

"It's about improving client service"

software usually accounts for about 20 per cent of the total knowledge management costs. Planning and consulting accounts for about another 40 per cent, he says, and the balance goes in internal personnel time, training and maintenance.

To make knowledge management work, a law firm must adapt its structure. Mr. Pery recommends organizing the firm into practice areas, within which most knowledge sharing will take place. For each area, Mr. Pery advises, a major firm should take a qualified lawyer away from billable practice to spend his or her full time as "in a sense, the librarian" for that practice area, overseeing collection and organization of knowledge.

Practising lawyers sit down with members of the knowledge management team at the end of each major project to discuss what information to retain, Mr. Fireman says. This takes 25 to 50 hours of the average lawyer's time a year, he says.

At McCarthy, there was "a period of about 18 months that I would sort of call the period of faith," Mr. Peters says. During that time, adding documents and other information to the firm's new knowledge management system took up lawyers' time, but the knowledge base was not yet large enough to give them much in return. "That's probably the most difficult period."

Now, lawyers are seeing how knowledge management can help them serve clients better. "It's going to be the distinguishing factor between firms," he predicts.

Feed the Models

Since the Ka2 is proving SO popular, here some more from Chiseen | where cultural traditions and urban insanity collide

Feed the Models (cause if you don't feed them, they would feed them selves...

and Wok Boarding An ancient sport once favored by chinese chefs lost over time is rediscovered by Team Chiseen.

but Late 4 Work is the best

Category:Humour

Other uses for the Google Operating System, or the Google Space

Via kottke.org: GooOS, the Google Operating System has a commentary on topix.net : The Secret Source of Google's Power

from Kottke:

He argues that Google is building a huge computer with a custom operating system that everyone on earth can have an account on. His last few paragraphs are so much more perceptive than anything that's been written about Google by anyone; Skrenta nails the company exactly: Google is a company that has built a single very large, custom computer....

and Topix.net

Google is a company that has built a single very large, custom computer. It's running their own cluster operating system. They make their big computer even bigger and faster each month, while lowering the cost of CPU cycles. It's looking more like a general purpose platform than a cluster optimized for a single application

So how would I like to use the coming Google Space Operating System and take advantage of that secret sauce :

A Google IM (instant Messaging ), would seems to be a simple extension of Gmail.

A secure Google Id. something beyond a user name and password for my precious data. and make transmitting that password very secure. Maybe Public Key Infrastructure (PKI) based?

A Google file system, I want to see my Google space as a drive mapping on my Win, Mac, Linux, or Palm computing box. like how USB dries just show up. The mapping should be secure as well. maybe make the whole thing a zero install vpn (virtual private network) ?

Killer applications (services) for this kind of infrastructure are :

A Google backup for my data files, always in sync or dependent on the current bandwidth. Even better : mark which directories are to be kept incremental in sync with my Google space file system.

A Google web photo album, with restricted sharing, so I can share some albums (sub directories) with Family only, some with Friends. (allow the option of using Google's IM to tell me when something changes)

Put a intranet.com like interface on it and you have corporate Google space for company or project sharing of documents and calendar events (plus blogs or wikki's ?)

Offer the infrastrutcture for free (or almost) and change for the services (on a yearly/monthly scale)

All of these blur the boundary between my physical present OS (the one in front of me) and the Virtual Google OS. At minimum it would act as an extension of the local OS. Although (as Kottke argues), once the Google space is in place it would make that local OS less important (one of Microsoft biggest fears in it's battle against Netscape and Java). Access to the Google Space would be dependent on available bandwidth, storage, and local situation. (more of a issue on wireless and smart phone or PDA like devices)

If I have lower bandwidth it would make sense to locally cashe my directory listings and my most fequently (or last) used files; How many get locally cashed would depend on storage as well as bandwidth (full cimputer vs hand held vs broadband vs wireless); At work or at an Inernet cafe I what only a secure web interface with no local copies)

all of these does not even touch on Ftrain's : August 2009: How Google beat Amazon and Ebay to the Semantic Web which I have noted on Monday, February 02, 2004 and Tuesday, July 22, 2003

Toronto's High Park Ski Club's FITS (Fun in the Sun) Night is April 22 (2004)

HPSC's Annual Fun in the Summer ("FITS") Night, is being held on Thursday, April 22, 2004, at the Lithuanian Hall, 1573 Bloor St. West (2 blocks east of Keele St.; between Keele and Dundas Street West subway stations. Doors open at 7:00 pm and close at approximately 11:00 pm.

During those hours you will be exposed to a wide variety of summer activity clubs, associations and retailers in the Greater Toronto area. These organizations have been invited to exhibit and promote their summer activities and services to you and your friends. Last year this event was sold out with over 25 exhibitors.


http://www.highparkskiclub.on.ca

Robert Scoble is in in Kunal's World now, (Now I know why we called them K-Logs) or How to build push button blogging.

Robert Scoble (Microsoft blogger at Large) discovers a new piece of the puzzle :

You know, Kunal's OutlookMT feature is, for me, a killer feature. One of those that'll change -- dramatically -- my life forever.

The Outlook team and Sharepoint team should hire Kunal to implement this feature ASAP. It is THAT IMPORTANT.

What does it do?

It adds a new folder to Outlook. OK, let's say Bill Gates emailed me right now. Let's say I wanted to post that email out to the world? In the old world I'd need to open up Radio UserLand, copy the email, clean up the HTML, then click post.

New "Kunal's" world? Copy the email over to the folder. It's posted. Done. No more work.

Do you have any idea how this is going to change knowledge management? You just watch!

Now, keep in mind, this isn't commercial quality. Lots of work to do. But he's responsive. I bet that by the end of the week he has it working well enough for almost everyone. The quality difference between yesterday and today is huge.

[Via Scobleizer: Microsoft Geek Blogger]

More info here http://www.kunal.org/

Hmm... I wonder how hard it would be to add the sort of drag to folder to publish functionality to a Lotus Notes mail template or a Notes RSS news reader?

After thinking about this some more It occurs to me it would be trivial (SMoP, "simplify a matter of programming") to writer a Lotus Mail to Domino Blog add-on : a Shared action button "Blog this " (appearing on the Mail form and various views ) , a profile form to capture which domino blog I'm using (need to know the Form name, and some default behaviour , and the path to it), and a small amount of LotusScript. The drag to publish functionality could then be added if desired. All this could also be added to any Lotus Notes RSS news reader in 3 shakes of a lambs tail.

As an additional comment : The are 2 reasons that Mr Scoble is raving about this (I think , and maybe he should be clearer about) :

1. He is using a outlook based RSS news reader, so such a tool makes it much easier to turn a Feed item or a mail item into a blog item, without going all cut and paste.


2. in a corporate intranet blog (intra-blog.. i-blog ? hmmm), escalating a person to person (or small group) email into a corporate Knowledge log item, preserved for all time, has high value

Okay he's made explicate about how he see it being used here http://radio.weblogs.com/0001011/2004/04/04.html#a7159

Third, the real innovation here isn't for public blogs. It's for corporate knowledge management. When I left NEC I took one gig of email with me -- none of that is available to any of my former coworkers. All that knowledge is simply GONE. After 11 months at Microsoft I have hundreds of megabytes of stuff in my "resources" folder. This is a folder where I store anything interesting to me as a Microsoft employee. For instance, the internal link to get the latest Longhorn builds from. Now, if you're a new Microsoft employee, finding stuff like that is hard. It took me 11 months to build up a store of useful stuff. Why shouldn't I share that with my coworkers?
...
This is such an important feature to corporate knowledge management sharing that I can't sit still tonight. I'm serious. This feature has me tingling. It's what I've wanted for so long.

Kikkoman, from the planet Soy

I kid you not!

Kikkoman (Flash)

I've seen this before but that was pre-blog. This is a real company, with a real and very good product. The flash is based on a real (HILARIOUS) Japanese commercial.

and if you think that was weird, then you haven't see nothing yet : Miki Miko Nurse : There is no Escape, give us your brains! dear god.....

Complication in Daylight Saving Time

Via Nelson's Weblog, Daylight savings complications:

Twice a year as I set my clocks for daylight savings I wonder 'isn't it the future yet? Can't computers do this for me?' Then I remember the complexity that is the unix timezone database. 444k of datafiles (260k without comments) containing facts like 'Louisville, KY didn't observe daylight savings time in 1974.'
This spring, daylight savings time changes at 45 different times around the world. No wonder it's so hard to know what time it is. "

I've blogged and struggled with this beast before.


Oh and it's " Daylight Saving Time", no "s" as in " "Daylight Savings Time"

Nelson points to a couple of new to me useful Links :

• the unix timezone database, public-domain time zone database contains code and data that represent the history of local time for many representative locations around the globe and has links to other resources.
• The Time and Date , with various bits for clock and calendar information

also be very care Monday Morning as per: Springing ahead has its drawbacks:

In 1996 Prof. Coren did a study that was published in the New England Journal of Medicine that looked at car-crash data from Statistics Canada. He found there is about a 7 per cent increase in accidents the day after most of the country moves to daylight time.

Which also mentions another complication I hadn't really thought about :

The official changeover happens at different times across the country: midnight in Newfoundland and New Brunswick, 3 a.m. in Manitoba and 2 a.m. everywhere else.

and Wired has Technology Resets the Clock with this gem at the end :

Ignoring daylight-saving time brings its own complications, though. In Indiana, 77 of the state's 92 counties are in the Eastern time zone but do not change to daylight-saving time in April, except for two Indiana counties located near Cincinnati, Ohio and Louisville, Kentucky, which observe it.

Counties in the northwest corner of Indiana (near Chicago) and the southwestern section (near Evansville) are in the Central time zone and also will be springing forward this Sunday with the rest of the nation.

"It's kind of crazy. I work in one county and live in another so I spring forward and fall back on an almost daily basis," said Jeff Cunner, a software programmer who lives near Indianapolis.

"My watch and cell phone reset themselves automatically, thankfully. Otherwise, I'd never know what time it is."

and you think you have problems!

Category:algorithms

Joey has added on The Farm more Date and Time Calculation info inculding this J R Stockton's Date and Time Index and Links

Ka's evil twin : Astonishingly fucked-up car commercial: grab it while you can.

From Die Puny Humans
OH.... My..... God !!

Ka's evil twin, the Ford Sportka. I can't believe they did this!

I'll post it here because it's going to get pulled. KA2.mpg (~944 K)


Update : Looks like the site (http://www.mplayer74.com/movies/KA2.mpg) is down (due to trafic ?).

New : I've now upload the first KA commercial kas lesser evil twin
More : Ford does not approve (what do you expect them to say?)

See also :
Need directions?
Inside Jack and Totally Gridbag
Feed the Models or Late 4 work or Wok boarding
Kikkoman
or Jaws in 30 seconds or Alien in 30 seconds or The Shining, The Exorcist, The Titanic or
SpiderMan in LegoLand
or Just go hunting for more stuff on the Right using Previous or the Archives

or more Humour links

Update on Gmail

Yes it's real, although a lot of people weren't sure.

Erik Thauvin has a screen shot. (Update : according to Kevin Fox Erik's are faked, but his are real via Boing Boing

Someone commented (can't remember who, sorry) that given Google impending IPO, the SEC might frown on such a joke.

and the real Goolge gag was the job posting for a position at Google's Copernicus Center. (I applied just in case) was because the subject of todays User Friendly (and now I know where all that 419 money is going).

Top 100 April Fool's Day Hoaxes Of All Time

Top 100 April Fool's Day Hoaxes Of All Time. Enjoy

Found Words : little broadband; big broadband

little broadband : high speed internet connections above dial up modems, up to single digit megabits per second speed i.e. < 10 Mbps. This is current cable or dsl modem connections.

big broadband: high speed internet connections above 10 Megabits per second, up to a gigabit plus (a trillion bits per second).

both spoted in David Ticoll's Globe and Mail article (April 1, 2004) : Jumping on Alberta's bandwagon

category:words

RSS holds promise for on-line news delivery

Via Globe and Mail Jack Kapica reports. Mr Kapica compares RSS to 1995's heavily hyped PointCast push product / technology and shosw how RSS feeds and RSS Readers are different and address the potential benefits of the earlier hype.

To summarize story so far : RSS stands for Really Simple Syndication or Rich Site Summary or RDF Site Summary , depending on whom you talk to. Its based on XML RSS readers don't take over your computer like PointCast did. RSS reader are pull not push. Unlike PointCast, RSS feeds and Readers are based on open standards not proprietary technology. It's don't require a signed contracts to add a feed to a blog or news web site. this allow a much larger number of sources. And there is a large choice of RSS feed Readers available that work on different OS's , some of which integrate with outlook email or are standalone, or you can write your own (Like me).