Oliver Thylmann’s Thoughts

There we have it. Actually, no, this is not a penpost only. What this is
is the introduction to the idea. I just got the Nokia Digital Pen and the
Nokia 6600 Mobile Phone is in the mail. The two together, with the help
of MFOP2, allow me to post things written with the Pen, live, from anywhere
where the phone works via eMail. I can write, draw, sketch, … whatever
works with a Pen on paper.

I’ll see what comes out of it. So here is the first image so you can beware of
what to expect

I just read a very good article in the german weekly Die Zeit, about why the US Dollar will fall further. In short, the US currently needs something like 50 Billion USD of fresh money from foreign investors per month because the country is spending more than it makes internally. Foreign investors have now started to remove their money from the stock exchange in the US with only Japan and China keeping the Dollar up where it currently is to make sure that their own export goods are still cheap. This cannot go on forever. It seems that the US is overspending their internal production by 5%, which is said to be a number far higher than any well established country ever had.

Die Zeit 52 / 2003 - Heusinger : Amerika bangt um Kredit (Try Babelfish for a translation)

Phillip M. Torrone has now put up all the pictures from his experiment on his art site. Here you can see all the pictures he took of himself every 30 minutes, 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, for 3 weeks. Either he doesn’t need any sleep or he stopped at night from time to time though.
Update: He really doesn’t seem to sleep a lot, as of Joi Ito’s post about the endavor.

Several people have been posting their thoughts on 2004, and it all started with Jeremy Zawodny’s thoughts on 2004. Jeremy says that Google’s PageRank is dead, and I can see his point, even though I do believe that there might be some other solutions. The problem with PageRank is that spammers can get their pages high up in rank by putting valid links on lots of pages, which they could even own. This does not mean that PageRank is dead, but simply means that they need some kind of system to find out real links and artificial links (meaning put there not for content or value but for pagerank). This will be very hard, but probably not a lot harder than some other methods. Search is hotting up though.

The biggest thing that will happen is something where I agree with John Battelle. In his predictions he says that the Internet will become a Platform and while this has been said often, same as John, I believe that this is now finally the time for this to happen. With all the APIs that are already out there and with RSS (which is where content syndication will be easier as Jeremy noted) and the general coming off age of XML, we are moving into a world where things can interact and you can build new things by linking old things.

Check out John’s post for other interesting predictions.

Now this is a cool feature!!! You can now create eMail Subscriptions at Bloglines. What this means is, that you get a special bloglines eMail address and use that to subscribe to a newsletter or something else that doesn’t offer RSS. eMails sent there will then appear just like any RSS Subscription inside your My Blogs page. If you want to subscribe to some weird newsletter, you can do that and simply cancel the subscription and the eMail will become invalid and unsubscribed your are! You could also put one of these on your homepage as a contact form if you wanted and whenever it gets picked up by bots, you kill it.

Bloglines, I thank you. Very nice.