Video calling, long anticipated by science fiction, is filtering into everyday use. And two demographic groups not particularly known for being high-tech are among the earliest adopters.

In a way that even e-mailed photos never could, the Web cam promises to transcend both distance and the inability of toddlers to hold up their end of a phone conversation.

Even two years ago, I was challenged chatting across platforms. But I’ve used Skype and SightSpeed to good effect since, and iSight and iChat have only become more widespread.

Technology has its limits, but I’m thankful for this incarnation.

Google News finally answers some of publishers’ questions, and promises more information in the future. Wow…I spent a fair bit of time trying to deconstruct this for News.com 3-4 years ago.

Academic PDF, which I have not yet read, but plan to: “The User Experience of Software-as-a-Service Applications” (link is to HTML abstract)

Jon Udell goes LazyWeb with “Parsing human-written date and time information, and the commenters come through, especially with DateJS.com. Not the only solution, though. I’d never heard of GATE, but looks useful. I’ve used solid implementations of this type of parsing at I Want Sandy, 30boxes.com and a few other places. Wonder how many rolled their own, or started with DateJS, GATE or similar utilities, and built from there?

Ken Norton makes his Scoble video debut in Google Announces Offline Docs. Ken, good job, but the laptop in hand was a bit tough. And now we know where this tweet came from.

During the last year or so I was at CNET, I pinged the legal team a few times about a corporate policy on blogging by employees. Didn’t happen while I was there. I realize it’s not so simple when you’re a media company — but it didn’t have to be that hard, either. So I noted the BBC’s Guidance -
Personal use of Social Networking and other third party websites, including the section on blogging. Good for them: more media organizations should follow this lead.

Speaking of British media companies, the Guardian impressed me in two ways last week. First, by creating the position of head of the Guardian’s development network with the goal of “offer[ing] data and tools for external developers.” Second, by hiring
Matt McAlister to inaugurate the role. Good luck and have fun.

Brief notes on Charlene Li’s 2008 SXSW presentation, “Social Strategies For Revolutionaries.”

Stefanie Olsen talks with John Battelle a couple of weeks ago. For when you can’t keep up with his blog, a distillation of some of the topics he covers and thinks about for FM.

I know storage isn’t free, and photos add up, but still surprised to get an email from BrightRoom telling me it’s the last chance to order some race pictures. I’ve bought a few before… wouldn’t you at least keep shots of customers, even if you dump all the other finish line photos? Of course, the email is remarkably promotional, and short on details: “Your Run Wild 5k/10k photos are going into retirement: SALE details below!” Will the photos disappear, or will you simply charge me more in the future to “retrieve” them? If you’re keeping them at all, then retrieval is almost without cost, so this feels like forced urgency. And I’m not interested or impressed.

I’ve set up my FriendFeed, but not using it yet. Definitely finding Twitter more and more interesting, and I’m now including my tweets on clock, on the home page.

Watched only one of Barry Pilling’s videos so far, but worth a link and a look.

2005 article someone (Ken?) recently reminded me about: “Wheels and Deals in Silicon Valley” I did my first racing in January, at the Early Bird, and I’m putting in some miles now in preparation for a mid-May century. Been mostly solo, though…guess I’m missing out on the deals! Any San Francisco-based riders reading?

More about the Loose Marbles in The New Yorker from May 2007.

Skimming it over the weekend, via satellite broadband, the video vignettes embedded in the piece wouldn’t play…the player told me I was a second-class citizen (not enough bandwidth). Oh well. Couldn’t watch Dennis Yang of TechDirt, either, until this morning on DSL. Even then, I had to wait for the entire video to stream in before it would play more than the 3 second WSJ intro. (Brightcove, you learned a lot from YouTube in usability terms… finish the job?)

Last night, I caught up with the print edition. Dick’s contribution was accompanied by a photograph there, too (not just online, which sometimes happens).

I have to ask… you made the Journal, but you got a photograph? Where’s the dot portrait?

Seriously, being thrown into the mix with Tom Wolfe, Christopher Cox, Newt Gingrich (!?), and Mia Farrow as a cultural commentator… not bad. But the dot portrait awaits.

Each one is two seconds long. It was hard to keep their attention this long. Remember, 24 frames/second. What did help was turning on voice activation, so I could say (and say again) “capture one” rather than reaching back to the computer to take each frame. It wasn’t foolproof, but a timesaver all the same.

To my annoyance, YouTube actually clipped the last frame of the “Race car” video, probably to put their Share / Watch Again frame on there. Frustrating, since the final frame had the kids entering the picture (deliberately).