Xagronaut

Dylan Tweney talks about why he uses an application that doesn’t quite measure up to his own custom solution. He doesn’t want to try so hard to keep up with the latest changes in XYZ technology. It’s just not important to him. I know how that feels. I just change my mind every other day.

Case Is Stepping Down at AOL (TechNews.com). Steve Case, the embattled, visionary founder of America Online, resigned under pressure as chairman of AOL Time Warner Inc. last night, saying he would “love” to remain in the job but that his presence atop the world’s biggest media company had become a damaging “distraction.” [Daypop Top News Stories]

It always seems sad to me when the founder of a company becomes a liability to that company.  Well, it might make sense that failed businesses often have their leaders as a liability.  But companies like AOL are on the list of success stories in terms of growth and lasting prosperity.  (Don’t ask me how they’re doing on Wall Street.  I don’t follow that stuff too closely.)

I remember the feeling I had watching Spiderman (I know, cheezy, right?) when Mr. Osborne of OsCorp was told to pack up his things and go by the board of directors.  My reaction was similar to Osborne’s–what??  I built this company!!

So, farewell to another founder.  Enjoy your retirement.  You deserve it.

“Bee Gees Singer Maurice Gibb Dies “ [Daypop Top 40]

Here’s my take on what would make a good bookmarklet.  How about a tool that helps you build a standardized bibliography entry (MLA, etc.) for the webpage (people do cite webpages these days) based on elements in the header, meta data, or user selections?  The URL is most definitely important.  The day viewed is also important from what I hear.

So, given a webpage, a user could spawn a new window that disects standard parts of the web page for assembly into the standard parts of a webpage bibliography entry.  Here’s your standard parsed stuff–now, the user gets to assign chunks to the proper bibliography pieces.

The challenge is that the pieces of information will not necessarily follow a pattern you might hope for.  But with a little effort, it could save you the work on all of the formatting.  Heck, you might even expand the service to build a collection that could be managed by the user.

Take that all you info-organizing-hacking-tweaking-slice-and-dice-data-pundits.  There’s my two cents (with more cents offered daily).   This should make that Shifted Librarian proud (or not).