In a recent post on Jon Udell’s blog, Jon introduced a new browser-based navigation application that he calls the Infoworld Metadata Explorer.

Jon has been thinking and writing a lot on information discovery via navigation with posts/projects like his Flickr advanced tag search Greasemonkey script, so if this kind of stuff interests you keep an eye on his blog.

Navigational discovery has some important advantages over the more common search paradigm. Navigation can easily revel relationships between data, enables quick filtering of datasets and is, well, visual. Since humans are very visual creatures (hence our color vision and relatively lousy sense of smell) navigational discovery can highlight information patterns that could never be discovered using search. The Metadata Explorer is proof of that. The kewl Flickr Related Tag Browser is another.

I’ve been using del.icio.us to categorize my posts on Zoinger under the ZoingerPosts user name, but I have been tardy in updating it recently, since I don’t get a lot of value from it. However, if I could easily create an application like Metadata Explorer for Zoinger, I’d be way more prone to keep ZoingerPosts up to date since it would make tags much more useful.

Search is great but it sure feels like navigational discovery is where search was in the mid ’90s.

Zoinger says, opportunity knocks.

The WSJ reported on 2006/01/05 that the Nokia 770 is a “hit” in an article entitled Nokia to Churn Out 770 WiFi Device, A Clear Hit. The article does not get quantitative, but says there is a two-week wait for the $359 dollar device. It’s got WiFi, a 4.1”, 800×480 screen, Bluetooth, some sort of tablet OS and no phone.

I’d like to try one, especially to see how the browser handles different sites. The browser on my Dell Axim (Windows Mobile 2003 OS) pretty much sucks. Great for text sites or sites like Bloglines that have a special mobile version, but no Flash support, DHTML is a no go, lots of sites crash the browser, etc. etc.

Anyway, I think there is a big market for all sorts of internet devices… not just laptops, desktops and phones. Some are going to be general browsing devices, like the 770, or application specific, like some of the stuff I’ve been reading about internet-aware universal remotes.

Zoinger says, bring ‘em on!

P.S. I wrote this a while ago, but forgot to publish it. Doh!

Anyway, here’s a good article over at InfoWorld on the 770. The article makes the point that although the 770 is not really a great consumer product, it’s a great way for Nokia to use open-source software to obtain a first-mover advantage and free product marketing (eg, having the open-source community guide product development through the projects they are working on).

P.S.S. Just the other day I discovered that my PDA’s browser has the option to display in “one column”. This improves the rendering of most sites and gets seems to get rid of the horizontal scrolling to view content on wide sites. Horizontal scrolling is painful if you have to do it on every sentence.

In yet another illustration of how screwed up the wireless industry is, it is very common, if not universal, for wireless carriers to “lock” the phones they sell. On GSM phones, the locking mechanism works by checking the brand of the SIM card against the phone’s internal carrier brand. If the SIM card brand does not match the phone’s carrier brand, the phone will not operate. I’m not really sure want the logic is behind locking phones (besides just annoying their customers), since even though carriers subsidize phones these subsidies usually require the customer to sign up for a long-term contract. That is, the carrier “earns back” the subsidy over the life of the contract.

As I wrote about here, I recently purchased a used Nokia 8390 that was advertised as a “Cingular phone”. Before the Nokia arrived in the mail, I realized that my SIM card was an AT&T card. Realizing that my soon-to-arrive phone was a Cingular phone, I knew that my AT&T SIM card would not work (never mind the logic that Cingular and AT&T are now one in the same). In order to prepare for the Nokia’s arrival, I ran down to the Cingular store and had my AT&T SIM card swapped for a Cingular SIM.

Of course, this took more than an hour since I had to wait in line forfrigginever at the Cingular store. Wanna know why your wireless bill is so high? Just watch the action at any wireless retailer… it’s like the DMV in slow motion.

Needless to say I was not pleasantly surprised when the Nokia arrived in its original AT&T Wireless packaging. Friggin’ classic.

Fortunately, it turns out that Nokia phones are pretty easy to hack. Hacking removes the carrier’s lock allowing it to work on any network (assuming the phone operates on the correct frequency). A quick search on the net brought me to this article over on the O’Reilly site. Some of the links in this article are a little out of date, but the one that counts leads to the appropriately named Unlockme site in the UK.

From the Unlockme site, I downloaded a copy of DCT4 Code Calculator 5.4 , inputed the required information and entered the calculated unlocking code into the Nokia. It worked like a charm! Now my new Cingular SIM would work with the Nokia.

One word of caution: You only get a few chances to enter in the correct code, so read through all of the instructions before trying to unlock your phone. Although the instructions aren’t very clear, carefully reading both the O’Reilly article and the information on the Unlockme site will probably get you safely to unlocked phone nirvana.

If you’re looking for some interesting podcasts, you might try Stanford on iTunes. I’ve been using it for a couple of months now and they’ve steadily been adding more and more content.

Using iTunes as a distribution platform is a great way to get content out onto the internet in a way that a lot of users are familiar with. However, there is one huge problem — it’s proprietary. Why is this a problem? Well, as Jon Udell notes, you can’t link directly to a file in the Stanford iTunes store (I tried, as suggested at the bottom of Jon’s post, to Right-Click -> Copy iTunes Music Store URL, but that command doesn’t seem to capture anything). And what’s even worse for people that don’t own an iPod, the Stanford audio files are encoded using Apple’s non-DRM .M4A file format. If you want to listen to these files away from your desktop, you’ve got to have a iPod or convert them to .MP3 (which is painful, but doable).

But even with the proprietary problems, there’s some great, free content available at Stanford on iTunes, so check it out.

Like a lot of people, I’m a freak about digital cameras. There’s just something really cool about digital’s instant gratification, no film hassles and shooting a bazillion shots/only keep the best. One of the features of most point-and-shoot digital cameras that is highly underrated is their ability to shoot video. With a modern camera you can capture video at 640×480 and 30 frames per second — video that looks darn good even on a large-screen TV.

One of the latest improvements to the usability of video is the use of MP4 codecs. It is amazing how efficient MP4 codecs are. My current point-and-shoot camera is a Canon Powershot SD300 which captures video using a motion JPEG codec. The SD300 is about a generation old, but still a great camera.

A friend of mine has a current-generation Casio Exilim EXZ750 which captures video in MP4.

To illustrate how efficient the MP4 is here’s a table showing the video capacity of the two cameras at 640×480/30-ish FPS:

As I mentioned above, MP4 codecs just makes video way more usable. Even in the era of cheap mass storage it’s just impractical to keep a lot of huge video files. To see how much more efficient the SD300 would be if it shot in MP4 instead of motion JPEG, I broke out a copy Vdub (a kick-ass video transcoding program) and transcoded a short 45 second video to DivX. Here’s the results:

The motion JPEG file is a huge file. It wouldn’t take many of these to fill even a 300 GB drive. However, the DivX file, while still kind of large, is very practical. In my experience, 5 MB is about the size of a high-quality encoded digital song — pretty reasonable. So next time you’re looking for a new point-and-shoot, make sure it videos in MP4.

Zoinger says, Canon… are you listening???