I like Jorn's idea of an alternative to streaming video on the web, but when he first mentionned it on alt.hypertext, I had a little different idea of how it might work. Instead of having an article with one picture, and a link to a video clip (a la CNN, Reuters web sites), why not integrate the two, i.e. have higher resolution key frames from a video clip running down the right side of the text narrative. These "key frames" could either be a pseudo-animation (showing motion over 1 second), or they could be photos illustrating salient points in the article.
IIRC, Scott McCloud's Understanding Comics covers some different ways of illustrating sequential movement. The visual narrative could be a linear sequence, or a non-linear set of photos.
Also, I figure the photos should be slightly-larger-than-thumbnails, so they would have more clarity than a RealVideo clip (not too hard :>), but a higher-resolution version would always be a click away.
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More on the Amazon Honor System:
The Amazon Honor System does not charge registration fees, set-up fees, or fixed participation fees. We do, however, charge transaction fees based on the amount of money you receive. The fee schedule is very simple. For each payment you receive, we will charge $0.15 plus 15% of the total transaction amount. The person making a payment is not charged any fees at all.15% is a lot, but I guess it's low enough to not be totally unreasonable. Makes me worry that thanks to the .com slump, real micropayments are a ways off. And that people trying to send each other small amounts of money will be exploited for a while yet. Amazon is obviously in a position to leverage their installed base in this way.
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In the past few weeks or so, I've started to realize how uneducated I was about Mozilla. This article provides a few key facts/claims:
Because of this DOM, XML, and Cascading Style Sheet (CSS) support, programmers can now use the elements they need from Mozilla to build their own unique applications.
"Now," Collins said, "Mozilla is more cross-platform than Java."
I wonder how many people have criticized Mozilla in public, and know even less than I do. I'd venture that there are quite a few. Seems like the fact that information is so readily available and distributable on the net makes it hard for people to do research before declaring their opinions loudly. That, or there's so much misleading opinion out there that no one ever gets to the basic facts. Not that this is a new problem, just that it's less excusable now.
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