I’ve mentioned this before – Verizon is aggressively rolling out Fiber To The Premises (fttp) – this is true asynchronous broadband to our homes folks, imagine connectivity several orders of magnitude faster than that so-called ‘speedy’ cable modem on your desk now, but for the same price. Anyway I’m mentioning it today because verizon has announced that they’re expanding their rollout to six more states, including mine (NY). My bet is I am still at least a couple of years away from seeing this available to me, but it’s progress. I’m excited about this in the same way I anxiously anticipated cable modems 8-10 years ago- it’s going to enable another round of innovation just as the cable modems did.

(and it has the fringe benefit of kicking time warner in the ass – longtime readers know how angry I’ve been about the limited upstream capacity of their network. If the cable company can’t figure out this isn’t a broadcast medium, fine. We’ll let the telcos make the point. It can’t happen soon enough for me).

I’ve talked about and linked to folks talking about how to route around the existing tv networks. It’s already happening right now of course, just take a look at suprnova.org a few hours after your favorite tv show has aired and you’ll find it there for the downloading, usually edited such that the commercials and filler material are gone. The problem is it needs to be automatic – this needs to happen as seamlessly as your existing tivo setup works for this to really take off. I love peering into the crannies of the software development community to see what kinds of things the developers are cooking up. Here’s today’s excellent example – Buttress. There are a number of apps attempting to do the relatively simple thing buttress is doing – subscribe to an RSS feed, whenever that feed links to a torrent file, Buttress grabs it and ques it up in your Bit torrent client. You come home and find your favorite content ready and waiting for you.

Cool, cool stuff. A little rough around the edges, but some digging on your part and you’ve got yourself the perfect personalized tv network. Give these concepts another 6 months to a year to evolve and we will start to hear the networks squealing and the congress legislating to stop this.

This is Java-based so it should run on any platform with the appropriate JVM installed. I leave it to you all to find the appropriate RSS feeds 😉

Think of a discussion board, then cross it with that corkboard in the hall outside the administrative offices in your high school, and imagine what a programmer might do with it. Then check out webnote. Does it look anything like what you were imagining? Be sure to try the filtering feature. This is cool cool stuff. I’m going to try and get this up and running on my server once the code has evolved a bit, it’s still under very active development. Note that you can jump to the root address (www.aypwip.org/webnote) to make your own ‘corkboard’ and read about the codebase and the developer’s plans for it.

This requires a modern browser, Firefox, IE 6 or Safari, just fyi.

I’ve touched on this subject before, but I want to bring it up again today – google has just stealth launched their new Google Print service. No doubt you’ve been to amazon.com and noticed how they publish exerpts of many books on the book’s product page. This is an extension of that notion – Google’s intent is to make the full text of books searchable. I know this is going to sound like hyperbole, but if Google manages to succeed in convincing publishers that this is a good thing, it’s medium term effect on our civilization will be as profound as Gutenberg’s invention of the printing press. It’s all about the knowledge transmission folks, doing it in the most expeditious way possible, and this is a major step in the right direction.

Once again, my plea – make your government representatives aware that these kinds of advances are good things, that locking away content behind copyright is a bad thing – it’s impeding progress in the evolution of the information age.

Meanwhile, go read the text of the talk Brewster Kahle gave at the recent Web 2.0 conference and if that doesn’t convince you…..I give up 😉

Many folks probably remember the proliferation of free online file storage services during the dot com boom – places similar to the still running xdrive. Most of them died off as the funding evaporated, and the ones that didn’t have mostly transitioned to paid services. Some clever folks have figured out how to use your gmail account as free online file storage. This can be extremely handy if you don’t have a thumb drive or some other way to carry files you always need from machine to machine. You’ll need to install the client software to get this running. Note that it’s windows and IE (Ugh!) only.

I have a large thumb drive to deal with this problem but for those of you who don’t this is well worth a look. No doubt some enterprising mac hacker will build a mac analog to this (or already has, if so post in the comments and I’ll link over to it).