Alex Dunne

Just saw this interview of Sara Palin by Katie Couric.  She makes Bush look like Einstein. Please America, consider the future.

For Cindee and Vicki’s benefit. Let me know if you guys like any of the transitions between photos.

Stacy, my boss, just told me about Animoto. You can upload photos, select a soundtrack, and it generates a nice slideshow that’s sync’d to the music. Here’s an example using Interop Las Vegas pics:

We just finished another fun week at the Lair. It was so nice to unwind, see our friends, let the kids run amok, and hang out in the mountains. Here are some pics, and click thru for a special vid…

Continue Reading »

The thought that ISPs may start charging users based on the bandwidth they consume each month really pisses me off. Comcast, Time Warner Cable, and AT&T are rolling out trials of systems that would allow web users a certain amount of data that they could consume each month. If users exceed it, they pay more.  The caps vary.  It’s certainly going to cause people (including me) to think twice about what I download, and will crimp efforts to distribute video and music online.  Apple TV, Netflix, Hulu, YouTube — they and others like them are all in serious jeopardy of having their traffic cut substantially.  And what about rich media ads that will count against your bandwidth cap?  Those will be really welcomed when metering begins.  Just when the web was getting competitive with TV and terrestrial radio. Grrrrr….

I just discovered an interesting new application for Facebook called Nexus, which analyzes your Facebook relationships and then graphs them out. It also sees what you have in common with your friends, and then tells you who is most similar to you, based on those commonalities. But the interactive graph is just really beautiful, and cool. If you have a Facebook account, check it out.

I was working over at the Web 2.0 Expo yesterday, and one of the guys I work with at Techweb, Fritz Nelson, came into the show office with an awesome balloon logo for the event. He said that the guy who does balloon animals for kids over at the Chevy’s restaurant on 3rd & Howard was bugging him to make an animal (not sure why, he was with a group of adults), and after initially blowing him off, Fritz thought better of it and commissioned the guy to make this:

Pretty cool. Fritz said he’s going to use it somehow in his video coverage of Web 2.0 Expo on Techweb.com.

I just discovered a great new (still in beta) search engine, Searchme, that uses a coverflow-like results page. If someone had described this to me, I probably would have rolled my eyes. It sounds a little gimmicky, but it works really well. You can flip through web pages really rapidly, see the context for the search term within the page, and hone in on what you’re looking for quickly. One gripe is that the results themselves aren’t as accurate as good ol’ Google.

Update: Hmmm, each page I flip through in the coverflow is added to Firefox’s web history. A single seach should add one page to the browser history, not umpteen-thousand.

I am sick of Facebook applications. I don’t want any part of annoying apps like zombie wars, movie trivia challenges, friends for sale, porno screen names, etc. They were fun at first, but not anymore.

I’m not the only one who feels this way. The Facebook backlash is coming.

Instant messaging has come a long way in the 10 years or so I’ve been using it. At first you were locked into a single messaging network, like AOL or Yahoo. Then IM clients like Trillian came along that bridged those networks, letting you message between networks. But there’s always been a lag between when a new messaging network comes out, and when the messaging clients would implement support. For instance, Trillian still doesn’t support Google Talk, which a couple of people at my company use (notably my CIO, and it’s important to be available to him). About a month ago I discovered Digsby, which is a new IM client which not only supports Yahoo, AIM, MSN, and Google Talk (big plus right there), it also integrates with Facebook and even a POP email account. If you use Facebook and have friends/colleagues on multiple IM systems, I highly recommend it.