The NY Times ...

The NY Times has two great articles about the technology absurdity that is BMW's iDrive. Dazed by a Technical Knockout and Menus Behaving Badly. Read them both.

Scott Teare: "So to be anti-Microsoft is almost to be anti-innovation." I find this to be a silly statement. The reason RealNames failed is because they decided to completely rely on Microsoft for their technology integration. RealNames bet the farm; Microsoft decided they didn't like farms; RealNames lost. For all those companies out there dreaming up revenue streams to take advantage of Microsoft's monopoly in the Web browser market, it'd be a good idea to pay close attention to the RealNames story. Oh yeah, don't be surprised in a few months when Microsoft announces something called ".NET Keywords" or something along that line.

The next NYC CHI meeting is this Wednesday:

NYC CHI's NEXT MEETING: 15 May, 6-8PM
The State of IA in NYC
Date and Time: Wednesday, May 15, 6-8pm (program starts at 6:30 sharp)
Location: TechSpace, 41 East 11th Street between University Place and Broadway
-FREE- (RSVP Required: nycchi@usableproducts.com)

The imminent release of Mozilla 1.0 is getting closer and closer. There's a 1.0 Release Party being planned for June 12 in San Francisco. There are also satellite parties happening simultaneously around the world.

Jeff Jarvis is proposing a Weblog Foundation. What Jeff doesn't know is that I pitched a similar concept to a private weblog-centric mailing list last Fall. Here's the text of my email.

I'm a little bothered by all the media attention that weblogs are getting, but I'm still a believer the concept of weblogs as niche-market portals that are edited/written by community and industry experts.