Matthew Gifford

My copy of Tiger shipped out last night. It feels like Christmas.

John Gruber continues to dress down Adobe:

Rather than expand into untapped creative markets, Adobe seems hell-bent on expanding into the jerks-wearing-suits market, a market that’s completely at odds with the creative market they’ve dominated for nearly two decades.

Jason Calacanis announced that the RSS feeds for some Weblogs, Inc. blogs contain AdSense ads (via Scripting News). So do LonghornBlogs‘ feeds. Robert McLaws explains that some sites are participating in a pilot program.

I think it’s inevitable that people are going to put ads in RSS. For sites that only provide one-way content, doing this is understandable. If they put all their content in their feeds and don’t advertise there, they’re going to miss out on ad revenue.

However, sites that offer more, such as good discussion, don’t really need to do it. For their users, the RSS feed is simply a starting point. Think of the feed itself as being the advertising for the site.

A song from the upcoming Sufjan Stevens album is in the wild (via Marusin). It is absolutely amazing. Part II (the last 2:45) is bliss-inducing for me. Do we really have to wait until July 5th to hear the rest?

The talk given by Jeff Tweedy and Lawrence Lessig on April 7th is now available as a Windows Media stream and an mp3 (via Kottke).

Here’s a little follow-up news on doing backups in OS X: Carbon Copy Cloner is not working in Tiger (via TUAW). By the way, I actually ended up choosing Synk as my backup application.

iTerm 0.8.1, released earlier this month, fixed the bold text problem I was having with version 0.8.0. Awesome. Thanks to Paul for telling me about the new version.

Since Gnomedex is in Seattle this year, I was really hoping to go. Alas, once I added the cost of the hotel, parking, and taxi rides, I just couldn’t justify going. It would be different if I had some cool new application to tell people about. But I don’t. I just don’t have any good ideas right now.

Of course, going to Gnomedex might help my creativity. But what if it didn’t? That would be a lot of wasted money. There’s a lot of interesting stuff available for free on the web. I really should be able to find inspiration without having to spend hundereds of dollars.

Speaking of PR, Paul Graham’s latest essay discusses the need that PR fills and why blogging is a threat to it.

John Gruber has translated portions of Adobe’s merger FAQ from PR-speak to English. I wish users of Adobe and Macromedia software luck in the upcoming software renaissance Adobe is working on.