know | Future

It is a milestone of sorts for the blogosphere when Google sets up an RSS aggregator. It is just out today and is uncharacteristically devoid of AdWords, but that will change I am sure. Some casual playing with it has left me unimpressed with the feed reader but the blog only search is sweet, as was to be expected. You can check it out here…

Adweek/IQ reports today that HGTV plans to premiere it’s new show My First Place online on their website a full five days before it airs on the cable network. Before that the WB Network had shown the first episode of Supernatural on Yahoo a full seven days before it aired and you can still cath the first episode of Everybody Hates Chris on Google video. More and more shows are using the web to drive viewers to their content and combining the media and online buys to make a much more attractive package for advertisers. The online version of My First Place will also have additional web exclusive content including additional content and a sweepstakes on-line game. Think of it as the DVD extras version of the show.

As broadband penetration becomes more ubiquitous than it is already, and it will; fast; we shall see more and more video content expanding into and eventually falling off traditional broadcast/cable outlets and onto the web. In this future IP delivered entertainment soup, video content will also come from small independent outlets like the trailblazing Atom Films and from regular schmucks like you and me. If you want to be very, very afraid, go check out Google’s latest version of their video search and click on one of the random videos - I just got a shiver up and down my spine…

Are you sick of the continual problems in having to support Exchange, Outlook and Entourage in a mixed platform environment? Well, you owe it to yourself to at least test this. Ok, so it’s still in beta stage and only runs on Red Hat Enterprise or Fedora, but it is very promising. Zimbra is a new startup with some clever ideas about how an e-mail system should behave. The system is entirely server-based, provide email, contact/address book, group calendaring features, has a zero client footprint and matches exchange almost feature for feature. Through the use of a new web development technique called AJAX the system provides a very interactive session without full page reloads. Amongst the many clever features and innovations is the use of tags instead of folders so any message can live in multiple folders, clever hovers that show contact info, calendar info and other data as you hover over names dates and codes. For the administrators it has a completely web based interface, the ability to easily restore individual mailboxes, online archiving and even comes with an Exchange migration tool. It is open source and distributed under a derivative of the Mozilla Public License. What are you waiting for? go and download it already…