del.icio.us My bookmarks are going to del.icio.us STAT¹. They are going to the-land-of-how-file-systems-should-work. If you want a preview of the future, read this post, and join the chosen before the rush crushes their (his?) service. In a very short time it is almost guaranteed that whomever owns del.icio.us will be very, very well off.

You did read the whole post linked to above before continuing, now didn’t you? I thought so.

Can you imagine combining this functionality (a term which belies the power of this new paradigm) with something like Flickr?

Add the notion of “group” and some file permissioning, and you have the future of file systems². Game, set and match.

Calling Google’s, Yahoo!’s and Microsoft’s corporate development departments (I didn’t have enough minutes on my plan to waste calling Time-Warner-not-AOL-anymore)… I’ve done your homework. Now get to work.

—————

¹ I will say that for the majority of my bookmarks, I really don’t care that everyone can browse them. Whatever. Bookmarks that I use to access really personal websites, I’ll just keep local, and not load them into del.icio.us.

² With del.icio.us (i.e., bookmarks), it rocks to have no real file permissioning. It facilitates the free sharing of preference. Like peer-to-peer where everyone shares their files as well as downloads files. All are consumers and contributors.

It looks like Yahoo! and Google are gaining market share worldwide, while MSN and AOL are the losers. In addition, Yahoo! is gaining ground on Google in the US. All this in the New York Times business section today in an article entitled, Search Sites Play a Game of Constant Catch-Up. Worldwide search market share for the “biggies” is listed as:

In the US, Yahoo! is gaining ground…

In the United States, Yahoo is gaining on Google. Yahoo’s share rose to 35 percent of searches in November from 29 percent a year earlier, according to ComScore. During the same period, Google rose to 38 percent from 37 percent.

Danny Sullivan, editor of the Search Engine Watch, is heavily quoted throughout the article, and speaks very favorably of Yahoo!, while being fairly negative about Google. Mr. Sullivan implies that Google has not been adding features as quickly as Yahoo! which he thinks is a result of Google’s IPO in 2004.

Last year Yahoo! acquired MusicMatch, Kelkoo and Oddpost. Perhaps in 2005, Yahoo! will become a verb?

It’s Monday. That means the New York Times business section runs metrics in their Most Wanted column. One of today’s metrics is on digital camera sales. Here’s what they listed with the source quoted as NPD Group/NPD Techworld:

I’ve seen similar data to these in previous issues of the NYT. It’s interesting that Kodak is the leader in this study. Perhaps these data are for US sales only… however, no information is given on the geography of the sales?? (I tried to find a link to this section in the NYT, but couldn’t find it using their online search).

This article is more in line with what I’ve read about world-wide market share (I had to link to the Google-cashed version, since the original link no longer works). The source for this article is InfoTrends/CAP Ventures.

The top five worldwide market leaders in digital camera sales in 2004 are, in rank order, Canon Inc., Sony Corp., Olympus Corp., Eastman Kodak Co. and Fuji Photo Film Co., the firm said.

Getting back to how the NYT came up with their sales data, this article breaks down US sales of digital cameras.

The research firm’s survey of third-quarter U.S. camera sales, released on Friday, found that Sony sold 1 million units to command 20 percent of the market. Kodak shifted only 10,000 fewer, to grab 19.8 percent of the market.

Canon was third, moving 800,000 units for a 16 percent market share, followed by Olympus, with sales of 600,000 and market share of 12 percent.

The moral of the story is that a lot of publications quote data on sales and other figures without giving you enough information. In fact, they give you just enough information to be misinformed. In this case, the NYT was sloppy in their reporting, since they did not qualify their data as being geographically specific.

I finally have had enough with my cramped, little desk that I have been doing my computing from. Unfortunately, if you are really into computing, the off-the-self options are pretty lame or nonexistent. A good desk has got to have room for a big monitor or two, speakers, a lamp, printer, scanner, CDs, pens and pencils, paper, etc. That is, you’ve got to have big desk.

As a bootstrap option, I decided to put together a quick solution. I figured that a good, solid door (the desktop), and a couple of modified wire restaurant-style racks would do the trick. Doors come in few standard sizes (24” or 30” wide by 6’8” or 8’ tall). I opted for a 30” × 6’8” solid-core oak-veneered door, which cost me about $90. To modify the racks, I had to hacksaw the four support poles down to desktop height.

The final result does not look very pro, but it is pragmatic. In the future, I’ll probably “upgrade” to an 8’ door (which they have to special order), and make it look a lot better with some cable grommets and organizers.

Here’s a picture of the new setup.

I’ve really been messing around with Firefox lately. I’ve been loading bunches of new extensions to try them out, unloading the ones I don’t like, using a CPU-optimized version of Firefox, modifying the configuration files, etc. In all of this, Firefox has remained very stable. That just blows me away. Any other application that you did so much customizing to would end up imploding… forcing me to uninstall it and start all over again. I do get crashes (very rarely), but the frequency of these crashes has remand constant even as I have been tweaking it. Firefox farking rocks.