I was working on organizing a party for Etech - when Dave Weinberger pointed me to this article by Andrew Orlowski (yes - HIM again!)  David was directly attacked several times and more or less blamed for Dean's losses.

Pretty harsh.

In some ways I actually agree with many of Jerome Armstrong's views (the guy Orlowski quoted in the article) on how the technology 'pundits' associated with the Dean campaign "could be made to look" like blowhards, eggheads and far from representing anybody's beliefs - especially the everyman.

I agree that Technology shouldn't be seen as a panacea, solve all our problems, it's more important than people.  That's how Orlowski made Weinberger seem like. 

But we all - that's NOT what David Weinberger is all about.  In fact I've heard him plea for human passionate, logical, everyman-based 'sechel' (Yiddish for 'common sense) many timesin public and private - so I know Orlowski is just twisting words and pushing the limits of honesty to make a name for himself.

But something tells me that this Guy Armstrong is all about POINTING fingers and laying blame on bloggers, MeetUp and the Dean on-line efforts - for what went wrong with the vote results.  orlowski simply repeated what this Armstrong guy said - and it sure seems to me, that he "had it out' for david.  That's also pretty obvious.

But what's funniest to me - is how typical political, word twisting, slimey, back-room shenanigans has come to our world.  Because of the logical extension and out reach of the Web, politics were SURE to get involved.

And now we're experisincing teh ULTIMATE spin doctoring, stretch the truth to suit our own ends, kind of back stabboing that politis is all about.  And scapegoating is a crucial technique in a battle back - for some lagard candidate.

Now that they've brought in an old school, smoke filled room, inside the beltway kind of guy -you wonder why the nerds are getting scapegoated?

SAME OLD STORY.

Call it chads, a scene from Citizen Kane, Watergate or dead Chicagoans voting for 15 years after their death - politics has ALWAYS been about dirty pool and now the Internet got involved.  The ONLY thing that matters in the world of politics - are the vote results.

the ONLY THING.

It's the same bottom line, make a profit, do your IPO focused vision that drives business.  But politics is not business - so making money ain't the goal.  It's this other sort of 'chit' system - a system called democracy.

And in Amerika - it's winner take all - no seconds or runners up.  The Republicans figured that out in the 60's. That's why they had Nixon.  Now they have Bush.

Here's the letter I wrote David - to try and cheer him up. I'm actually really proud of what David, Zack and the whole Emergent Democracy/MeetUp/Drupal/DeanLink thing have done up til now. If nothing else happens... they can be proud of their accomplishments.

=======

Dear David,

So what is the answer that traditional politicians would give - to counter where you're coming from?

Focus groups in malls with lots of 3 x 5 cards asking 5 versions of the same question? As usual this Orlowski piece spent all it's time criticizing and did not list ONE alternative approach to what the Dean campaign has been doing up until now.

Orlowski's writing reminds me of Ken Aueletta or Roy Cohen. Vicious mean spirited pandering to reptilian hatred, designed to reach into the bigot inside us all. It's almost propaganda.

What is this 'bellhead', inside the beltway guy gonna do differently that Joe Trippi didn't do? How does that effect Dean's policies? What actions will be taken that counter-act what's been up until now?  What's more important ot Dean - getting elected, or........

The Dean campaign seemed to be playing by different rules - and I'm surprised that no one realized that silly things like media coverage and voter turnout would NOT go along with ANY sort of progressive approach to ANYTHING.

Even Democrats get reactionary and vicious when confronted with something that says: "the way you’re doing it now (politics) is wrong - here's the right way..." Who's gonna admit they're wrong?

So it shouldn't surprise us if the media are in cahoots with the fascists and Dean was targeted with being made to look a fool and lose elections. It's all about media image.

Wag the Dog.

If they can make planes fly into buildings on cue - or seem to get all the wrong intelligence info - right when they need it the most (to start a war), they can steal an election campaign. Ever hear of Tricky Dick Nixon?  How 'bout those Kennedy boys back in the 60's? 

Watch them do a similar thing to Kerry.  He's Catholic.

This is why I used to read "Good Morning Silicon Valley" every day - until I switched to RSS Readers.

Now that they've got an RSS feed - I can enjoy headlines like this.

Pixar to Disney: M-I-C, see ya around sucker; K-E-Y; Why? Because you blew it.. Pixar dumps Disney; Gateway posts first quarter rival acquisition; Increase the size of your URL the all-natural way; Google cash cow not quite ready for milking, redux; Intel to engage in cut-throat competition with itself; Stolen SCO Code in Linux cannot be displayed, GoogObits and more.

(By John Paczkowski,01/30/2004 09:37 AM PST) [Good Morning Silicon Valley]

lago at errant dot org said something interesting today.....

lago at errant dot org 

You don't build networks; you play the network game.

The people who take it seriously and the people who realize its a game dont see eye-to-eye (cf. Marc Canter mocking danah boyd ), but the fact is that they're both playing exactly the same game, for different reasons.

(Link created 1 hour 1 minute ago)(Cosmos)
[Technorati Link Cosmos for Marc's Voice]

---

So I want to clarify something.......

.....danah is a researcher, I am a software developer.  danah can make the following statements:

What the hell is up with the elitist approach to invitation?

Are trustworthy, cool, and sexy the only ways that i might classify my friends?

CONTEXT CONTEXT CONTEXT. Cool as a techy? Cool as a party kid? Trustworthy along what fucking axes?

danah cares about different things then I care about.  These two approaches are not mutually exclusive, we can live hand-in-hand.  If I choose to use (for literary purposes) one person's particular views or stance, it's for the purpose of communciating some particular point or more likely axis - or side - of an argument.

In this case, I was talking about 'gaming a system' and I've heard danah rant on this before.  But in fact, I think you could say that a LOT of people take social networks seriously - so much so, that now that they can't remove their name or get out of jail - that really pisses them off.

Gaming a system actually enables me to analyze it's performance, features and implementation.  danah looks athe usage of the software, I look at how it's constructed.  Each social network vendor gets to make decisions, whether consciously or because he hasn't finished the software.

I suspecrt many of the issues of Orkut have nothing to do with it being in alpha.  danah and Xeni are right - there's some fucked up things about Orkut.  It's not as bad as Friendster, but worse than Tribe or Ecademy.

Me - I care about business models, strategy, implementation, deployment, scalability, open standards, interchange, testing, rate of uptake, learning curve, FAQs and support.  But that doens't mean I don't care about and see things form how end-users use the software.

It's just that my expertise and living is derived from being to invent and build this shit.  danah focuses and researches on the ramifications OF this shit.

Social networking is really like multimedia 15 years ago.  It's the hot new field - and I'm digging on it.  But what's most fascinating is watching how it enhances and changes ALL fields of software.

Afterall - what software ISN'T about people?

this account is in jail

Your account has been temporarily suspended due to unusual activities. We will verify your account status on orkut.com and remove your block. Please send an email to help+blocked@orkut.com with your username and name if you think we made an error.

---

TiVo, the digital hub, powered by Strangeberry?.

TiVo is finally getting its digital hub act together. The purchase of Strangeberry is yet another proof that it is going to be competing with the likes of Microsoft in the digital hub sweepstakes. While most of its conjecture, some nuggets gathered during course of reporting tell me that this is the direction TiVo might be headed in.

ANALYSIS: For past few days the PVR universe has been hubbub about TiVo’s acquisition of a little known company called Strangeberry. I have refrained from posting anything about this for a couple of days because first, I was busy with work, and secondly I had to go through my old emails to dig-up some juicy nuggets about the company.

Strangeberry had caught my attention, thanks to a tip off from a venture capitalist who at the time was in the know about Marimba, a software company known more for their chief executive than their products. Nevertheless for JavaHeads this was big news. I did some follow-up reporting but nothing came off it, and since at that time Red Herring was going through some shaky times, it fell through and was forgotten. Anyway since then nothing much has been reported on this company, and TiVo’s SEC filing does not say much either.

On January 12, 2004 we acquired Strangeberry Inc., a small Palo Alto based technology company specializing in using home network and broadband technologies to create new entertainment experiences on television. Strangeberry has created technology, based on industry standards and including a collection of protocols and tools, designed to enable the development of new broadband-based content delivery services. In exchange for all of the issued and outstanding capital stock of Strangeberry, we issued shares of TiVo common stock to the stockholders of Strangeberry in a private placement. We have agreed to file a registration statement on Form S-3 to cover the resale of these shares by the Strangeberry stockholders.

So what are they really building? My best guess is that Strangeberry crew, all former Sun folks, developed a piece of software that actually makes finding devices on the home networks as easy as turning on the power switch. And it is using some variant of Apple’s Rendezvous technology. I remember these guys had released some variation of Rendezvous for Java in the early days of their operation. Rendezvous is a technology which can and does work with all sort of networks - Wi-Fi, Ethernet or powerline networks.

Now, at the 2003 edition of the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, a colleague of mine saw them talking to folks from companies like Philips and Sony. Add the two together, to me its seems that Strangeberry folks were developing an application for home networks—something that can detect all of the devices on the network and interact between  them, maybe something that would let you control your Internet home gateway, PC, TV, stereo, etc. from one remote control device. Of course since more and more companies are supporting the high speed Wi-Fi networks and some are even contemplating streaming video wirelessly using the super speeds offered by 802.11g implementations, it does not seem that far fetched that Strangeberry came up with this killer app.

I am still trying to get more details on this, but if this is the case then TiVo could easily become a big player in the digital hub business. First of all it does not have the heavy footprint of Windows Media Player. This distinguishes the company from many PVR clones out there, and also provider higher value to its partners such as Sony, Toshiba and Phillips. I think this would be a killer and unique selling point for TiVo which has seen its innovation of PVR get commoditized.

More proof at the bottom of the San Jose Business Journal article?

Two weeks ago at CES, TiVo announced new development partnerships with digital photo and music companies XM Satellite Radio, Adobe, MoodLogic and Picasa that it said will expand the features and capabilities of the TiVo service.

In a press release, TiVo CEO said:

“DVR was just the beginning for TiVo… we’re committed to extending the TiVo experience to a host of new and exciting, yet very easy to use, services for our subscribers. Strangeberry shares this vision and can help us accelerate innovation for the TiVo service through our own engineering initiatives, and through our expanding third party developer program, to build new products and services for the TiVo platform,” said Michael Ramsay, CEO of TiVo.

TiVo at present can save video and playback video easily. It can easily take music stream from your computer and play-it back through your music system. (I personally would buy TiVo over some standalone MP3 streaming device - it is a great two for price of one deal, which somehow does not get enough attention.) And now if Strangeberry can provide easy control and management through TiVo, you are talking big dollars.

[Om Malik on Broadband]

Marc's additional info:

Strangeberry was started by Rob Currie and Arthur Van Hoff - two former Marimba folks.  Kim Polese introduced me to them.  They had a killer home networking OS which built on top of a Java implementation of Rendevouz.

The system enabled humans to point their remote control at a TV - and selct any PC on teh HJome LAN.  The human coudl then selct any movie, song or photo and have it play./display on teh TV set.  All totallyc lean, smart, no stupid installs, blah blah blah.

Strangeberry only did the software - the hardware was a reference design.  Now that they're TiVO - watch out world - here we go!

Well Joi's started ranting,
'bout jumping out of airplanes now,
and danah's got some listners,
'cause she's got pink hair - and that ain't Kung Pow,
but my baby's started crying - 'cause her Daddy's out of Orkut jail now

I can go back to my posting, and clicking on faces now,
it's really kind of fun now,
in a sick and lurking way,
but as opposed to following Dean babe,
I really gotta tell yah - I'm a hollering loud - wow!

Yes - I'm from the South Side of Chicago,
where we sing these blues - without a bow
it's built into our psyches
like Rorshcach test without a row (rhymes with bow, cow, bow)
as opposed to Helsinki or Chiba
we got our own way of crying - like a sow

'cause if you get thrown into Orkut jail babe,
then you'll feel the hurt - just like a cow.
It's really kind of fun. now you ask me why I do it now?
in a clean and fashionable way,
you can think of it as a hobbie - yup - right now

It's like selling hair brushes the Amway way now babe,

and strum on my gitar - gow.

danah's rant on Orkut.

danah has finally posted her long awaited rant on Orkut. Orkut, in case you don't know, is the social networking site developed by a guy at Google. Orkut also means "orgasm" in Finnish. I've been through so many of these now that I'm playing around. When it's running, it's fast so I'm adding everyone I recognize, (I guess danah would call this "misbehaving") and trying to beat Marc Canter in my local game of "king of the mountain." Lucky for me, he's been thrown in jail. As danah says, I do not yet know what I'm going to do when I get there, but I'm sure they'll be another toy to play with by then. ;-)

Joking aside, it's a nice interface and seems to aggregate a lot of features from other similar services, but I agree with danah's points.

[Joi Ito's Web]

So I apparently broke some rules on Orkut and have been banned. that is - my account is in 'jail'.

Does anybody have a 'get out of jail' card?

:-)

I geuss it didn't like the idea of me establishing over 300 friends in less than a week.  What an unfirendly gesture.

OK - it's the end of a long day, it's 3 AM and it's time to talk about Orkut again.

Here's Scoble's reply to my rant from yesterday.

Social Software still not impressing me.

Marc Canter talks about the superficialities of social software. I agree. I've been trying them all (I spent a lot of time in Google's Orkut over the weekend) but I just don't get it. I don't see a business model (other than dating services, and Yahoo and "Hot or Not" already have good ones in those spaces).

As a business person, my blog is far far far more useful than filling out a form of made up BS. Why? Because you can't fake a blog for a long time if you use it for business purposes. If you lack integrity. If you are a jerk. If you are dishonest. It'll be found out here.

What's really interesting is that now that I have a blog and already have an identity online, I get tons of friends everytime one of these social software services opens up.

Translation: doing a blog is far more important than joining one of these social software networks.

[The Scobleizer -- Geek Aggregator]

 

My weblog featured on French TV Channel France 2 !.

Thanks to all the comments I had from French bloggers on a post I made about my meeting in Davos with a French TV journalist, Jean-Paul Chapel talked about weblogs and showed my blog in his morning high audience broadcast, France 2's Telematin.

Here are good quotes: "somebody blogged me in Davos and announced that journalists will disappear"

"No, we will not disappear" ;=)

Jay says there is no demand for messages and there is no mass. Well mass media still have nice days ahead of them but careful, the consumers become producers !



Thanks NiKo for mpeging the TV broadcast.
[Loïc Le Meur's WebLog]

Very few people know Loic or his plans for uBlog - his French blog tool.  But let's just say it's not a coincidence that Loic is on TV.  He'll be in San Diego at Etech - so ask him what he's up to!

:-)

Startup Candid.

Pitching in today at a hot startup; the scenario is classic, check the picture: wires draped over the walls, O’Reilly books on the tables, Doc Searls in the back room.

That space heater hanging from the ceiling isn’t there for decoration, the place was damn cold in the morning. Mind you, sitting right under it with your laptop isn’t recommended, you can cook your computer that way.

This, right here, is what the creative edge of the Internet business looks like. You can’t buy the feeling, and the real heat is coming from the people not that box up there. [ongoing]

Dave Winer says it's Technorati - I say it's some super secret project that Tim would have to kill us all - if we divulged.  Something to do with FOAF and RSS - that's for sure.

If Kevin marks was in the picture - then I'd say it was Technorati.

And I don't see no soul-food either.

 

 

 

 

You asked for it - here it is - every social network there is.

How Many Social Nets Are Too Many?.

How Many Social Nets Are Too Many?

Posted Jan 28, 2004, 8:33 PM ET by Judith Meskill

Today in Wired News, Leander Kahney has a story — Social Nets Not Making Friends — in which she talks about: an SNS backlash brewing; Jason Kottke’s parody job listing on craiglist.org; and the fact that the social networking service field has “ballooned to include about 20 different services.”

Well Leander, by my count, there are more than 100 social networking services that I have been observing — cruising past my virtual radar gun — in the past few months. I have been tracking this burgeoning growth of services aspiring to help discover and connect my friends, potential partners, business cohorts, and various levels of acquaintances — and I have this scary feeling that I am only carving shavings off of the tip of an iceberg with this list.

Here is a copy of my accounting — replete with links — of this daunting deluge of SNSs:

Affinity Engines, Amigos.com, AsiaFriendFinder, Backwash, Backwash for Pets, BuddyBridge, BuddyZoo, Chia Friend, Classmates.com, Community Zero, Company of Friends, The Conneck, Contact Network, Corporate Alumni, CraigsList, Delphi Forums, Dude Check This Out!, easeek, ecademy, eFriendsnet, 8minuteDating, Eliyon, enCentra, Eurekster!, everyonesconnected, Evite, First Tuesday, FriendFinder, Friendity, Friend Surfer, Friends Reunited, Friendster, Friendzy, GermanFriendFinder, Globe Alive, GoingProfessional, gradFinder, Growth Company, HeiYou, HelloWorld, hipster, Huminity, IndianFriendFinder, InterAction, ItsNotWhatYouKnow, KnowMates, LianQu, LinkedIn, Living Directory, Love.com, The Lunch Club NYC, Match.com, matcheroo, Mediabistro, MeetUp, Monster Networking, mrNeighborhood, MyEMatch, NetMiner, Netmodular Community, Netparty, Netplaya Burning Man Community, Networking For Professionals, Nerve, Online Business Networking Resource, The Opinion Exchange, orkut, PalJunction, Passion.com, peeps nation, PowerMingle, qpengyou, RateOrDate, RealContacts, ReferNet, RepCheck, Ringo, Ryze, Salesforce.com, SeniorFriendFinder, Shortcut, Silicon Valley Pipeline, Small World Project, Social Circles, Social Grid, SocialTree, Sona, The Spark, Spoke Software, StumbleUpon, Sullivan Executive Networking Community, Talk City, There, Tickle by Emode, Tribe.net, uDate.com, UUFriends, Visible Path, Wallop, WisdomBuilder, WorldShine, YeeYoo, YOYO, Zdarmanet, and Zerodegrees.

Cynthia Typaldos has an excellent post (from September 14, 2003) and database — that she started but has turned over to all interested parties to maintain — on Social Networking Sites and Software with perceived focus.

[The Social Software Weblog]

NYTimes covers last week's partycar event on SF BART. A piece in today's NY Times on last week's partycar event aboard a BART train in San Francisco, blogged here on BoingBoing and organized through Tribe.net -- and a stack of 1000 black-and-white flyers. FWIW, Marc *is* both a chef and a hacker, and I dare say he's damn fine at both.

When the reporter approached Marc, the party's nonleader who was described by others on the car as both a chef and hacker, Marc asked to see proof of employment. He looked disdainfully when handed a New York Times business card, refusing to take it. Marc then declined to speak further.

After about half an hour, the party took a general turn for the worse when two transit police officers boarded the last car in Berkeley.

It was there, with everyone required to assemble on the platform, that Romance the clown joined the reporter on the party's island of misfits. The police were threatening her with a citation for boisterous behavior. More than a few commuters simply wanted to read a book after a long week at work, the officers explained, suggesting that she just shut up. But Romance did not, for the longest of times. Most of the geeks scattered as she endeavored to remain in character, even when her rubber chicken slipped from her belt and an officer ordered, "Don't drop your chicken, ma'am."

Link: "Last Car. Geek Party. Spread the Word." [Boing Boing Blog]

To Do List.

1. Watch Return of the King

2. Watch Fellowship of the Rings

3. Join orkut

4. Watch The Two Towers

Well, at least I'm making progress. Its not quite as cramped in here as I thought.

[Random Bytes]

These are the sort of articulate posts that grew me to love Joi.  I wish he did more.  Understanding a multi-cultural world, and how technology can bring us together - is key.

Understanding culture through motion pictures.

I had the opportunity to be invited to a dinner with Steven Spielberg last night. We talked about Memoirs of a Geisha which Steven's studio, Dreamworks, will be producing. I imagined the difficulty of getting it right. It appeared that Steven and his team are going to work hard on this. The book has been criticized by some in Japan as either revealing too much, or emphasizing one aspect that doesn't reflect the geisha today. Other people love the book. I think they have a challenge and am eagerly looking forward to how it comes out.

My sister is teaching a class on how cultures are portrayed in movies and we talked yesterday about how many American movies are about Americans going to foreign cultures and "conquering" them. Even Kill Bill, which was one of my favorite movies this year, might have been more fun if it focused on the American obsession with oriental things, rather than setting it in Japan where the American triumph over the Japanese ended up being more highlighted. I'm generally a sucker for a good laugh so I loved Bill Murray in Lost in Translation, but my sister asks in the comments of our Chanpon blog

I found myself wondering what the film would have been like given a Japanese-American protagonist? Or what if they were not pampered ruling class hipster Americans staying at the most expensive hotel in Tokyo, but visitors of the more pedestrian tourist type? I also find myself thinking of visitors like Justin who resolutely refuse to take difference for granted and wander reckelessly through the most unpaved backstreets of Tokyo, confronting surprised Japanese in charmingly broken Japanese. What would a view of this kind of "othered" Tokyo subjectivity look like?

In Davos, I heard that soldiers going to Iraq watched The Battle of Algiers, which is a movie about how the French foreign legion tortures and mistreats the population, eventually turning their allies into enemies. My discussion with Shekhar Kapur about his decision to direct Long Walk to Freedom was also extremely thought provoking. I also remembered today, the opening of "Pearl Harbor" in Tokyo Dome. I got a weird chill when the over 30,000 Japanese in the audience cheered during the scene at the end where they bomb Tokyo.

Cultural understanding is one of the biggest problems facing us today and movies have a huge impact on how we understand culture. Movie makers, more than ever, have an opportunity and responsibility to help us understand each other.

By Joichi Ito joi_nospam_@nospam_ito.com. [Joi Ito's Web]

LinkedIn use up? (Clay Shirky). Is it just me, or has LinkedIn use risen dramatically? Up to last week, I’d gotten 3 requests for forwarding ever, and I’ve been listed on the system since roughly Day 1, but in the last 72 hours, I’ve gotten... [Many-to-Many]

Yup - I concur. I've gotten 12 LinkedIn requests this morning alone.

Orkut definitely appears to have stirred the pot.

Dina Mehta and Lilia Efimova on weblogs as/vs SNSs (Clay Shirky). Terrific pair of posts, one by Dina Mehta on blogs and social network services My blog is my social software.  It is also my social network.   It has my profile and much more - it has my identity fleshed out, through my... [Many-to-Many]

It's great to see heavy thinkers - Dina Mehta and Lilia Effimova get Clay's attention.

And Dina - you can be my friend in Carolina - anytime.  Feel free to ping me about nerdy things like FOAF, as the need arises.

Adding Audio to Blogs. Don't know how I missed this, but it's been around for a month: SoundBlox is "an MP3 audio playing Internet application that can be embedded into a personal blog template or Web page, and displayed in any modern Web browser." It's for non-commercial use, which excludes me on this blog, but I still intend to play with it on another blog I use for experimentation. Nice. [Dan Gillmor's eJournal]

 

Coolio! Now what do we have to do to get Dan to add one to his blog?

He could include his favorite speeches, the rants people have left for him on his answering machines, even know lies that 'new journalists' have revealed.  It could take new kinds of journalism into new realms!

Banter Schmanter - a blog run by someone named Charlie (who just so happens to own a fried clam joint named Charlie Too) has added the daily double - BOTH BlogBox and SoundBlox!

Congrats dude.

I see you like all sorts of weird stuff.  What do you think of MY weird stuff?

Coolio!

How did he know I totally LOVE fried clams?

Brian Dear pointed me to this.....

Seattle, WA /DenounceNewswire/ -- 27 January 2004 -- Amazon.com announced today the launch its own "social network", called Pricekut, allowing its customers to meet old friends and make new ones while shopping for products on the site. The catch? A customer can only enter the social network by first making a purchase on the site, or by having a friend buy an item on his or her wish list. Like its name suggests, Pricekut members may buy items for less than non-members: typically they'll save 10 to 25 percent on top of any existing discounts.

"This is by far the coolest feature we've ever released," said Jeff Bezos, Amazon CEO. "We wanted to make shopping at Amazon more fun and even more social than it is already, and I think our millions of customers are going to be amazed how much fun and addictive this new feature is."

...more....

I'm up to 193 friends - and counting.

I've decided that whenever I make a mistake in one of my posts, the abused person gets honorary status - as 'Person of teh day" - for that day.

Today that person is Foe Romeo (otherwise known as Fiona) who I misquoted or mis-understood yesterday.  It turns out Fiona DOES support centralized repositories of FOAF files - to make it usable by meer humans.

What I read was a post from Jan. 3rd - while Cory's original post - was based upon a post Fiona made on Jan. 26th.  Oooops - my bad.  Apparently I clicked on the wrong link.  I hate it when that happens.

I never click on BoingBoing's 'Link' button - so I'm often sent to the wrong place.

Ain't blogging fun?

So apologies to Fiona - see yah in San Diego!

Geekbox: Tribe tips. Interesting observations at Geekbox on ridiculously easy group-forming and the advantages of transparent membership and free-for-all taxonomies. (see also this previous post about Tribe.)

[Seb's Open Research]

These folks totally groks it..... (their names are Grant and Cyndie Berg.)

back and forth over the social portal play. Zawodny on the point missed: Stokes misses it not just once, but twice.

Om nearly follows him off the "they just want my rolodex and why should I give it to them" cliff, but veers at the last instant and manages to strike a glancing blow at a worthy target by alluding to social networking services embedded in client applications -- and spawns some interesting comments. Marc Canter's beating the FOAF drum again. I'm looking forward to peopleaggregator's next rev. Sifry's apparently working on FOAFing up Technorati, too. It isn't an accident that Sifry's tagline is web services for bloggers.

Anyway... back on topic...

Look, Friendster didn't get $10m solely on the basis of its current business model. It sure as shit didn't get it on the basis of its software / infrastructure [and I hope they're spending some of that money on some engineers].

They got it because, as Jon Udell and others have pointed out (can't find link -- may be misattributing), user-contributed data is a valid currency for the next generation of online [web] service[s] businesses. And anyone who can succeed at being a primary conduit for user contributed data which has bearing on purchase decisions and product / technology adoption/popularity has a great opportunity.

What Stokes seemed to miss, which Jeremy alluded to initially and Marc re-iterates from another vector:


"The place to make the money is by adding value added, functionality, tools, services - what have - AROUND these most basic of all instinctful notions. Not by charging for the right to do them - in the first place!

So a PeopleFinder or FriendRanking or Introduction manager or Private email or IM enabler kind of platform - would be augmented with value added tools - to become a new business model. This what I mean by 'new kinds of tools."


... is that web services technologies are going to enable a Friendster, an Amazon, and a Google to operate in a unified manner delivering synergistic services to groups of connected (define it any way you want) people with shared interests.

This is what people are hopping up and down about, and I think there's some solid cause [lineofsight - code + words + pictures]

I'm feeling all warm and fuzzy.  2004 is looking to be pretty interesting.

Cory on a rant.  See my response below....

Towards a non-evil social networking service. Within an hour of the launch of Orkut, Google's new YASNS (Yet Another Social Networking Service), I had written a mail filter that silently discarded invitations to join (it's the same filter that tosses out mail from Ryze, Friendster and all those other services, which drive me completely bonkers, since I already know who my friends are, am not actively trying to get laid, and don't need the "service" of having to risk offending near-strangers who want me to confirm some notional "friendship" between us a dozen times a day and I certainly can't think of a good reason to entrust some commercial outfit with my personal relationship data).

Do these things have to suck? Damnifiknow. I know that there's a bunch of stuff I'd like from a social network analysis of my own inbox, voicecalls, and so forth. Today, I have an iTunes playlist ("Old friends") that just plays highly rated songs that haven't been played in the past 30 days. Why not a smart to-do list that reminds me to email old friends that I haven't called or written in the last season (credit: Alice)? Hell, how about something that gives me a distinctive ringtone for calls from out-of-touch old pals and the option to define attention-grabbing behavior (a chime, a prioritization, coloring) when they email?

Foe Romeo talks about how Google could have launched a YASNS that actually provided a useful service that end-users could still control but that Google could add a lot of value to: a FOAF explorer:

Google would not create its own closed social network, Orkut, but would instead make FOAF one of its quick searches, so that FOAF:Fiona Romeo would return my FOAF file as the primary search result, with friend and location filtering options. (Content about Fiona Romeo would also be returned but would be differentiated.)

Perhaps Google could add value by introducing a sense of authentication to FOAF, by indicating reciprocal links between FOAF files. I know that this result for Fiona Romeo is the correct one because her friends link to it. Oh, and I know that Matt Jones is really a friend of Fiona Romeo, because he says so too. (Plink, a FOAF search tool, gets this bit right.)

Link [Boing Boing Blog]

Congrats to Thomas Madsen-Mygdal on the birth of his son last Monday.  3900 grams.

Mikel Maron (who used to work at MyYahoo) gives his insider perspective as to the new RSS enabled MyYahoo.

For me, this is all key - as now our PeopleAggregator can have a personality - that's a MyYahoo account.  That personality can then sit next to similar 'external' personalities - importing not only traditiobnal FOAF people-social net info, but also web links, classified ads, blog posts, email, RSS feeds, and even internal messages.

Having MyYahoo work in this universe is the first step to a world of inter-connected distributed presence on teh web.

some thoughts on My Yahoo RSS Headlines Beta. some thoughts on My Yahoo RSS Headlines Beta

Congrats to everyone at My Yahoo -- this means big things for Yahoo and the Web. I have a scattering of accolades, criticisms, tips, and next step suggestions.

The module is very useable, particularly with the great faq's and surprisingly good (still with room for improvement) RSS feed search. Technically, the back end must be solid for this to go beta -- we'll see how it scales. Nice touches with OPML import (though no play friendly OPML export), and update API.

One thing that current RSS users will immediately jump on is the 25 feed limit -- however the real limit is 150, as I'll show, which should satisfy most human beings. You can add the module to any page at http://my.yahoo.com/preview/ycontent.html. Each page has its own list of feeds and you can add up to 6 pages to My Yahoo. Users will quickly want a single page to manage all their feeds.

This is the presentation that inspired myRadio. More presentation options are needed in the module, particularly order by date and hiding read articles. However, both of these features would increase the computation load significantly.

When Yahoo Clubs merged with Yahoo Groups, My Yahoo lost a great module. Though, RSS Headlines provides a stop gap -- just add the RSS feed for your Yahoo Groups subscriptions. One problem is that Yahoo Groups produces RSS is reverse order, so you'll see the oldest messages first. Maybe with this new architecture in place for RSS, it will be easy to resurrect the Groups module.

Companion is calling out for integration. It could display a Subscribe To icon when it autodiscovers RSS feeds during browsing.

Wonder why this rdf feed doesn't work for the module? Wonder if they'll support Atom, and blogger? Would that require a name change for the module?

Many users are moving from a browser-centered world. Will My Yahoo grab this next opportunity with more haste? My Yahoo has lots of great content - quotes, weather, sports, movie listings, ski reports, tv - that would make great RSS feeds. There is a business model, as part of a Premium Package or in feed advertisements.

But whatever I ramble, it's a great great thing to see RSS in My! [Brain Off]

Harold Gilchrist is getting specific about his ideas.  I wonderif he'll plop a SoundBlox in his gutter now?

The benefits and the reasons why we need SAM!.

As I was writing and updating the draft of the SAM spec today, I started to draft a section in the SAM spec titled "The benefits and the reasons why we need SAM!".

The section needs more work.  Below is what I have written so far:

The benefits and the reasons why we need SAM!

• Present audio message data published and embedded in html on the Web today is incomplete, inconsistant and complicated to parse out.
• Present publishers of Web and Interenet audio messages need a structured XML file format to publish easily discoverable data on the Web about the pre-recorded audio messages they upload to the Internet.
• Publishers of audio message links, need a format that supports clear original audio message credit and proper media rights data.
• Consumer audio applications need a efficient format to discover recently uploaded pre-recorded audio messages to the Internet.
• To create a potential for a new class of audio message consumer applications.
• To allow publishers a way to advertise the existance of their audio messages in a near realtime time efficient manner.
• The new XML feed namespace will allow consumer applications of audio messages the ability to read and analize the audio message data before deciding to interact with the audio message.
• There is a need to create a consistant audio message specification compatible across all audio formats.
• To support multiple language audio message publication and detection.

[Audio/Mobile Blogging News]

The absolute best thing about Orkut - is that it was one of those memes that starts off on a Friday morning in your Inbox and by TGIF time - the whole blogsphere is talking about it.

When things starting heating up Friday night/Saturday morning - I could feel the repercussions echoing off the bank accounts and business plans of all those 'venture backed' social networking plays.  "Was this the end of Friendster?" - was all anybody wanted ot talk about.

I created a couple of Communities in Orkut and immediately had over 100 members in each, but nobody seemed to have any time to post anything on ANY boards.  They were too busy signing up friends, in a mad dash toward social networking heaven.

So then why join a 'Community' in the first place?  Folks were CREATING Communities without even posting anything! I mean "Come on?"  Why would you want to start an on-line Community and then not do anything with it? It's seems ludicrous.

Unles of course the Icon or image of that community, sitting in your Community List actually meant something.  All those people joining up to be in YOUR Community - somehow meant something.

This is the exact same behavior I noticed on the Tribe as well. People would start up or join Tribes (which is what they call Communities or Groups or Networks..... on Tribe) for some sort of prestige, glamor or bragging rights.)

And that's what happened when we formed the Social Software Alliance last spring.  150 people showed for a BoF at Etech - less than 12-15 participated on the mail list and within two months it was forgotten about.

Talk about short lengthed fuses.  These Internet memes are getting stronger and more intense nowadays. 

So when word came (thanks Bopus) of Orkut's shut-down, a smile came to my eye.  It lasted till Sunday - not bad, I thought.

And as to all of you speculating on what Orkut's business model is - please stop. There is no business model. It is not for making money.  Social networking is now a feature. It is not a market.  Remember multimedia?

Why Orkut Doesn't Work (Ross Mayfield).

January 25, 2004

Here's what I just posted as a comment on Many-to-Many...

Orkut is down - 'for a few days'.

Here's the Alexa report on it's traffic. The past few days have been full-time grokking Orkut and making sure that we ALL learn from this.  Maybe they'll get FOAF in before they relaunch it.

I had 25 friends in a network fo 1,200 Friday morning.  By Saturday morning I had 80 friends in a network of 4,500.  By teh time i went to Justin's party - I was up to over 125 friends in a network of 8,300.  I then stayed up all night watching people join it around teh world and as teh sun came up here in california...... I was exhausted and Orkut was starting to wobble.

Server calls we're being rejected.  The # of friends I knew I had was different then what was being displayed.  You could literally see it fall apart in front of our eyes.  Someone was bragging about how Orkut was gonna make Microsoft and .Net look really good. 

It's true. In the beginning Orkut had amazing performance. I was jumping between people and logging friends faster than a....

Now we get to see what 'a few days' is.....

I know Eric Sigler is happy.  Now he gets to say "look, even Google took down their social net!"  Eric's system - called the PeopleAggregator.com is back up and running, with limited functionality - for now.  Hopefully some other folks who have offered their help can pitch in and help Eric out.  the world needs an open source social network based upon FOAF.

Um - now let's see, isn't there a Microsoft super private social network event coming up soon?

Microsoft hosts social computing confab.

Wow, Microsoft Research is running a Social Computing Symposium on March 29 and 30 (up at the Columbia Winery here in Redmond, WA). This one is gonna be harder to get tickets to than the SuperBowl. Supposedly this will be broadcast for free on the Web. I'll let you know more as I learn more from Shelly Farnham, researcher in Microsoft Research who is putting this together.

Hey, Joi, are we gonna have one of those famous "Joi parties" up here at the same time?

The purpose of the symposium is to really stimuilate an active discussion, and potentially inspire collaboration, between people building and deploying social technologies and researchers. We'll have about 20 speakers, will invite a total of about 70 people (including about 20 MSFT people). Below is the list of speakers:

Panel on Social Computing trends & key questions:

Joi Ito: founder of Neoteny (www.neoteny.com), venture capital firm focused on personal communications and enabling technologies. Blogger and moblogger (mobile) in Japan http://joi.ito.com
Clay Shirky: Writes extensively about the internet & economics. Previously an editor at Ziff Davis, and teaches at NYU Blog: http://www.corante.com/many/
Steven Johnson: author Interface Culture, Emergence Mind Wide Open http://www.stevenberlinjohnson.com/
Tim O'Reilly: O'Reilly conferences, books, and web sites on open source, mac, emerging technologies http://tim.oreilly.com

Panel on E-Democracy & Civic Action:

David Weinberger: author Cluetrain Manifesto, Small Pieces Loosely Joined, NPR Commentator (All Things Considerred) http://www.hyperorg.com/blogger/
Bob Putnum: Harvard University professor in public policy, author Bowling Alone http://www.bowlingalone.com/
Zack Exley: Organizing director of http://www.moveon.org
Scott Heiferman: Founder http://www.moveon.org

Moderators and short talks:

Linda Stone Our own ex-Microsoft VP/director of the Virtual Worlds Group in MS Research is organizing and will moderate the 2 panels above Elizabeth Churchill: Social Computing Research, group manager FX Palo Alto Lab
Wendy Kellogg: Social Computing Research, group manage IBM TJ Watson Research Center
Danah Boyd: Ph.D student at UC Berkely, known for thesis on Identity and blogs: http://www.zephoria.org/ & http://www.misbehaving.net/
Judith Donath: runs Socialble Media Group at MIT Media Lab, talking about work on online dating
Mizuko Ito: Researcher at USC, known for reseach on mobile phones use in Japan, and impact of Japanese media (yugioh, etc.) http://www.itofisher.com/mito/
Ward Cunningham: Inventor of the WIKI, pattern languages, now a Microsoft employee!
Tom Erickson: researcher in the Social Computing Group, IBM TJ Watson Research Center, ex-Apple Human Interface Group
Jenny Preece: professor, university of Maryland, Baltimore County (online communities research)
Susan Herring: professor of Information Science, Indiana University, editor of Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication
Warren Sack: assistant professor, Social Technologies Group (SIMS), UC Berkeley
Steve Whittaker: Inforamtion Studies Department, Sheffield University (UI and collaboration systems)
Paul Resnick: Associate professor University of Michigan, School of Information (blogs, socio technical capital, reputation systems)
Shelly Farnham: Researcher Social Computing Group, Microsoft
- Sean Kelly: Research Developer, Wallop, rss Microsoft.
Rael Dornfest (unconfirmed): With O'Reilly.org, emerging Media Conference, http://www.mobilewhack.com/
Paul Dourish (unconfirmed): Associate professor Interactive and Collaborative Technologies, Dept of Informatics, UC Irvine

[The Scobleizer -- Geek Aggregator]

I awoke this morning to an explosion of invitatons to a new social network called Orkut.

Lots of things to say about it - first and foremost that it's a really clean, functional and exciting site!

Second - when I tried to join Orkut - I clicked on the 'Join Orkut' button and it told me - "Sorry you have to be invited into Orkut."

"Oh" I said.  "Then why is there a button saying "Join Orkut?"

That's pretty strange.

Now - the next thing is that Orkut is (apparently) created by Orkut Buyukkokten, who works at Google and just happens to be the guy who created the oriignal social network for Stanford - which is now part of Affinity Engines (who have a new CEO - BTW.)

Orkut has a pretty conspicuos message at the bottom saying "In affiliation with Google" - so if I was a betting man, I'd say Google decided NOT to buy Friendster - 'cause they got their employee Orkut - to roll their own internal system - which (just happens) to be called Orkut.

That said - let's just hope that Orkut will support FOAF - so we all can live happily together.

Orkut has Communities in it - so I created a few myself.

Here we go!

 

 

Today was my daughter's first day at 'school' (which is really just daycare, but who's counting?)

Streaming media patent provokes pain.

I got excited when I saw Marc Canter's post about how to add a SoundBlox to your site, as I think it might be cool to add one to my Ear Reverends music site. Then, I saw this article on streamingmedia.com, Patently Absurd? Streaming Users face Acacia Patent Fight. Ouch!

Still excited, but ouch!!!! (Coincidentally, this morning, I started reading The Future of Ideas, by Lawrence Lessig, which I know discusses these kinds of patent = ouch!! situations.)

[the iCite net development blog]

Eurekster, social networking search engine, now out of beta. eurekster, "the only search engine with personalized results," launched today after several months of beta testing. The site promises to "show you What's Hot with your friends... results get better as you invite more friends." Is there a word for that post-Friendster/Tribe/LinkedIn/SixDegrees oh-god-not-again feeling I'm getting as I read the launch announcement? Like, HTML rug burn? I mean, really -- I haven't played around with eurekster yet, and I mean no disrespect to whoever built the project. But if one more website asks me to "invite all of my friends," I swear I'm gonna fucking throw up. Invite your own damn friends, you website.

Anyway, link to Eurekster, link to a slew of news articles, and today's launch release (which explains that Eurekster's revenue model includes paid listings from Overture in the search results). (thanks, Marc) [Boing Boing Blog]

I just joined - now we get to see what this does that's better or different than just.....

The Home Server.

The Home Server

Martin Geddes of Telecopalypse (gotta love that name) saw yesterday's item about home servers and was move to comment.

The key word he adds to the discussion is database. Home PCs will become personal database servers.

This makes sense from an Always-On perspective. After all, what are medical, personal inventory, and security applications doing other than building databases, often huge databases?

But this brings up a key impediment (today) to Always-On, which is the price of software.

As hardware is mass-produced its price declines with Moore's Law. That's not true with software. In fact, complexity (or the ability to handle complexity) increases the price of software.

Look at the price of a Windows server license, for instance, next to the price of a Windows client license. Or look at the price of an Oracle license against that of any client program.

Martin notes in his piece that he's putting his databases onto a Linux PC, and that's a key point.

I've been noodling over the question of whether Windows or Linux will drive Always-On applications for some months. (Windows does have some advantages.) It's the question of price that is determinative. It's not so much that Linux is free as that the cost of Linux solutions move toward free, without the corporate overhead of Windows applications.

What are software companies delivering, after all, once you get the software? They are delivering support. Linux separates the cost of support from the cost of the software, so the initial cost can drive toward zero (especially in volume). That's a key Clue.

An ISP, or telco (is there any difference), or some other company, can earn itself monthly maintenance fees from the Always-On software in your home server, which they can maintain remotely.

I think that's the model for the future. And you won't get it through Windows.

Dana Blankenhorn

[Corante: Moore's Lore]

Marc's comment.....

If I was a betting man - that Linux home server will be running java with struts and Itabis or Turbine, with some coolio basicPortal frameworks - all wrapped inside a social software and personal publishing embrella.  All open source.

All designed for talking XML and serving up one's digital lifestyle.

OK - so I was off by 10 years.  Maybe building the MediaBar back in 95-96 was too early.  maybe spending all my money on research was EXACTLY the right thing to do.

I guess we get to find out now.

PeopleAggregator is back on it's feet and it's sister - WebOutliner - now has accounts.  Various pieces of the puzzle - from the Laszlo rich media front-ends, to JahShaka high-end editing tools, to pre-built jukeboxes and photo albums Portal software or knowledge management utilities - are all falling into place.  Open standards - like ATOM and FOAF - are taking off.  This train is leaving the station.

Rover's stunning image of lander. Nasa's Mars Rover Spirit has delivered its first data on the minerals present in the soil of the Red Planet. [BBC News | News Front Page | UK Edition]

Ross raps it out!

Westinghouse, Ford and RSS.

Dave Winer: "...ultimately we'll need help from the browser to make the act of subscribing simple. That doesn't mean the future of RSS is in the browser."

I guess this is true if one believes that there is a future for syndication in the browser in the first place. I certainly don't believe that.

We need better and different client tools, better information delivery and consumption mechanisms - and we'll get them. Making the act of subscribing simple means getting help from the likes of Westinghouse and Ford and other client developers (like Adriaan and Dmitry and Brent and...), not Microsoft or Opera.

The browser is but one type of client. Its great at HTML. It doesn't need to be great at RSS in order for RSS to be successful.

[Random Bytes]

More and more folks are starting to notice the coolio MP3 player that laszlo is offering - called the SoundBlox.  All you have to do is:

- store some MP3s on a server somewhere and get their URLs

- add those uRLs to an XML file and store that on your server - too.

- go to Lyndon Wong's SoundBlox page - and get you some Javascript!

- put that Javascript in your gutter - pointing at your XML file

- kabing, kaboom - you're rocking!

First PassThinking (RichKarpinski.blogs.com)

Laszlo BlogBox

I was one of the first reporters to write about Laszlo; I was quite impressed by the company and their top execs.

Now, Laszlo is apparently delivering some free Flash/XML widgets to add sidebar functionality to blogs. Check out Blogbox and Soundblox.

Found c/o Marc Canter's weblog, where he is running both widgets. [First Pass thinking]

XML and software (Ken Novak's blog)

So come on all your bloggers, better get ready for some musical tunes. Playing their hearts out, right there in your saloon.  A dirty old place, it's your virtual gutter.  And now, heaven forbid you can hear it utter.

 

We moved!. About two years ago we learned that we were supposed to leave the apartment we were living in. Back then we decided to find some land and build our home.

They started building it last year, in March.

After endless struggling with real estate agents, banks, builders, plumbers, electricians, painters, carpenters and a whole list of other people, last week-end we finally moved to our new home, during the two most rainy, windy and muddy days in San Martino del Carso history.

Waking up yesterday morning with a bright sun (sigh) shining on our bedroom window has been beautiful.

For the first time in years we are taking stuff out of cardboard boxes instead of putting it in. This also means that now I will have again time and mind to fully concentrate on daily work and writing on my weblog.

[Paolo Valdemarin: Paolo's Weblog]

I can't wait to go and try out the guest room. Only problem is (I mean challenge) is that I have an entourage of 4 now....

LiveJournal studying itself (Seb Paquet). LiveJournal studying itself

In the course of my ongoing foray into LiveJournal (making friends and all :-), I keep discovering journals I really should have known about for a while. This hadn’t happened mainly due to the fact that I have so far very rarely come across links into (or backlinks out of) LiveJournal (look up Ross’s informal survey from last year on this phenomenon).

But it turns out there are social software tinkerers and thinkers in there as well. Exhibit 1 is the recently founded LiveJournal research community, and exhibit 2 is the Sociology of Online Journals community, both of which aggregate posts from a number of individual journal authors and seem to be host to fairly active conversations. I haven’t dug deep into them yet, but wanted to highlight the finds.[Many-to-Many]

Anytime Seb says there's something interesting - I read it.

New Technorati Infrastructure beta test!.

Folks,

After 2 months of painstaking effort, I'm proud to announce the new Technorati infrastructure is up and ready for use.

Please have a look, and tell us what you think:

http://beta.technorati.com/

We focused 100% of our time on completely refurbishing our underlying event engine - essentially taking a volkswagen engine out and putting a Ferrari engine in. This new engine sports:

1) Much faster indexing - the median amount of time it takes from when someone posts something on their weblog to when it is captured and searchable via our live database is 7 minutes.

2) Much faster querying - our goal is to have every search query take less than a second, even as the database is being continuously updated. We added a query timer at the top of every results page so you can judge for yourself.

3) Much more scalable - We built this distributed database system to scale. As we track more events, we add more machines to scale. As our user traffic increases, we add more machines to scale. This should continue to work for quite some time, so we're eager to test under load.

4) Much better internationalization support - The database is entirely in UTF-8, a character set that encompasses a significant number (well, all) of non-english languages, including Japanese, Farsi, Hebrew, and many others. You can see results in multiple languages all on the same page. Localization should be significantly easier.

5) A new, smarter spider/crawler, which understands weblog posts and blogrolls much better than our old spider. You'll note that on our results pages, many results offer a "Read Full Post" capability, which take you directly to the entire microcontent post that created the link.

6) A redone results page, which should load faster, and is designed for non-browser usage as well. Lots has been moved to CSS, and we've added a nifty pager widget at the top and bottom of each page of results.

Please go and use the site - and send us feedback.

Some known issues: There are a few areas where we're still filling out content, fixing bugs and layout, like in the top 100 page, breaking news, current events, and other pages. We're looking to find showstopper bugs or problems before we move this beta infrastructure over to the production site. So, don't fret if a page you like is currently missing or if the top 100 is messed up, we're fixing that. You may also see a change in your inbound blogs/links numbers, but that is primarily due to the fact that we're still bringing the new database up to speed, so we know that some of the numbers are different.

Thanks again for your time and patience, and on behalf of the entire Technorati team, we thank you for all of your support. We're really looking forward to your feedback.

[Sifry's Alerts]

Esther Dyson, queen of comedy.

I know I know - it is like poking a rattle snake with your foot. But I am feeling feisty this morning. Now that Esther Dyson doesn’t really have anything to say about anything (smart guy in her company is doing his own thing), she has decided that comedy is the next big thing.

Dyson got the biggest laugh by suggesting a business model for Sunnyvale-based Friendster, the popular social networking service and a company that has yet to collect any revenue from its users. Populated by lonely singles looking to line up dates, Friendster should start a personal gift registry, Dyson said. The bottom line would be: “If you want to date me, this is what you’ve got to buy me.” (San Jose Mercury News)

Yup, that’s a new business model, so new that every generation has been doing the same since Adam and …

[Om Malik on Broadband]

Leigh Dodds tried to share his OPML via FOAF.. Oooops - he's not allowed to do that!

Here's the story....

Share Your OPML (maybe)

I've had half an eye on the Share Your OPML as another possible source of FOAF data. I've been having scraping and converting various data sources to help faciliate interesting applications where possible. For instance this week I published some converted Freshmeat data, and in the past I've done various OPML conversions, e.g. for BloggerCon.

Making as much data available as possible also helps resolve specification issues, as we can then explore the pros and cons of various ways of modelling the data, especially in the light of implementation experience.

For example there's an open issue on the Wiki concerning subscriptions and related to this there's been some interesting work happening on community aggregations using FOAF group data. Planet RDF uses FOAF as it's data source, and while I'm not sure about Planets Apache and Gnome they're certainly publishing the data in this format.

So with this in mind I took at look at the Share Your OPML SDK. Unfortunately I can't convert it to any other format as the documentation notes that you must not:

...convert the data into a format other than OPML, for redistribution, it's likely we'll say yes, but you must ask first. We want the data to be useful to you, but we also want to create an installed base of compatible data to encourage others to follow. We've learned that it's necessary to say basically that you can't use this data to thwart the purpose of our project. We wish it weren't this way, but it is, so we have to say it.

Strikes me as a bit overly restrictive but I wouldn't want to be accused of not playing nicely, so I've asked. Perhaps there should be a preference which says "I'd like to share my data, no matter what the end format is"?

Lets see what happens...

Update: what happened what I'm not allowed to convert the file to FOAF. As Edd notes in the comments, my request is deleted. I'm updating this posting to record that fact. I've little more to say on the matter other than note that the best way you can share you data, whatever the format it's in, is to simply publish it on the web: there's no need for a central service as people can
discover your data in a number of different ways.

It also seems to me that if I use a service under the impression that I'm doing so under a Creative Commons share-alike licence, then I expect that service to offer the same terms, after all the licence notes that: If you alter, transform, or build upon this work, you may distribute the resulting work only under a license identical to this one. So any site that publishes this data, e.g. aggregating it with that of others should make the data freely available, and also that it's legal to transform that data, so long as the transformed version is provided under the same licence.

More January babies!

It's my Birthday!.

Hey! It's finally here! Or is it... hmm. I was born around 9 a.m. EST, so that means I'm still 3 hours early... urgh! Damn timezones. Well, it's close enough for me. Welcome to my birthday! Please, help yourself to the candies and enjoy the music.

I think this may be the first birthday ever when I wanted to put on the brakes... I've always been excited about birthdays, I mean, you're one year older! That means you're one year closer to all those cool things that'll happen off in the future. But that stuff has all happened to me now. Seeing the world, marriage, having a child, etc. Oh-oh. Now what? Middle age, getting fatter, greyer, balder, etc. etc. Arrgh! Hold up! I want to go back to my 20s for a bit! I mean, damn, doesn't this ride stop along the way for breaks? And is it my imagination or did someone speed up the dial? Christ, I've blogged just about every day of this past year and it *still* seemed quick. Urgh. I may need a drink...

I've always wondered why some people hated their birthdays. They were just clued in a little earlier than me, I guess.

On that bright note... :-)

-Russ

 

[Russell Beattie Notebook]

Congrats to Dave Sifry, Kevin Marks and the rest of the Technorati team!

[FoT] New Technorati Beta officially launched!

We're getting ready to do some kickass calendaring features - so thanks goes to Leonard for this list. keep um coming!

 

Calendaring... the final frontier. Not really, but probably my next next project. Seeing how far I can push iCal for pubsub, calendar sharing.

• Jon Udell: The calendar fiasco
• Ray Ozzie asks on iCal in XML - see xCal (abandoned), RDF-iCal, Jabber/iCal, SyncML
• iCal Redux 2003
• Once more into the Breach: Calendars, Events, and RSS
• iCal Web Parity without .Mac - Kellan proposes a 3-file hack, I'll talk about my variations
• Design Notebook: pub/sub and iSync
• PHP Webdav Client Class 0.1.1 (fm
• PHP WebDAV Server Class
• iCal / WebDAV / PHP iCalendar - french, here's the systrans

Structure: 'entry' calendar which will talk to PHP webdav server connected to phpMyCal. This will then generate a 'combined' calendar which will be subscribed to. Now here's the neat card trick. The combined calendar is what we really want, but it's read only (thanks a lot iCal). So... run a script (AppleScript or shell script, either through cron or if possible, triggered by update) to move the output calendar and overwrite the input calendar (also, just leave it unchecked so you don't ever get double display). Since we're using a PHP webdav, we can do smart diffing supa-easily on the server-side. That and authorization, etc will all be handled courtesy of the phpMyCal (input and output will be via PHP). Events are tracked by UID. Does this work?

Seems to be a 99% solution. That is, at the end of the day, you get completely synchronized, fully editable calendar. It's about a 95% solution for group calendaring. You can set editing restrictions on the server side, but it won't be enforcable on the client side, however, you can either make it visually locked (make a note, or put it in the title), or just send those to a second subscribe only calendar. Different privacy/control levels can be handled on a by calendar basis w/ a web config, or w/ keywords...

[random($foo)]

I'm not a fan of OPML, I think it's a truly awful (and unnecessary) format - other people have found it problematic too - but I did think Dave Winer's Share Your OPML! site looked interesting, especially when there was a little SDK available. But then yesterday I read Eric's post pointing to the floater Dave had left in the pool :
If you wish to use the data for a different kind of application, or convert the data into a format other than OPML, for redistribution, it's likely we'll say yes, but you must ask first.

Anyone that's had dealings with Dave in the past will know what this means. Leigh asked (in comments) but had his request deleted. Basically Dave wants control, and he believes the formats will give him that control (remember the RSS patent application?).

I'm all for republishing, but not with strings attached. I don't want material under my copyright abused in this way. So I politely asked Dave to remove references to sites I maintain from his data. Anyhow, Dave's response was:
Do you want to make a legal case out of this?

Personally I thought that was pretty sad, but that might in part be cultural bias - being English I tend to think of etiquette before litigation. Whatever, unfortunately for Dave, and fortunately for the rest of us, formats aren't such a lever any more because the web will either ignore or work around attempts at lock-in.

I think the most sensible thing is to simply ignore Dave's site, but for purposes of demonstration, here's a workaround. The key obstacle is that Dave insists that you can't republish his data unless it's in OPML format. If it is OPML, you don't even have to ask. Ok, here is another version of the index file that points to all the others at "Share Your OPML!". This is still OPML format. Please do with it what you like. Incidentally, this new file is also valid RDF/XML.

Given that OPML is as thinly specified as it gets, and RDF/XML is designed to make it easy to make XML formats RDF compatible, it wasn't particularly difficult. Here's what RDF-compatible OPML looks like:

<opml opml:version="2.0"
      xmlns="http://opml.scripting.com"
      xmlns:opml="http://opml.scripting.com"
      xmlns:rdf="http://www.w3.org/1999/02/22-rdf-syntax-ns#">
<head/>
<body rdf:parseType="Resource">
    <outline opml:text="John Blog" opml:ctUpdates="8" opml:type="link" opml:url="http://example.org" opml:whenLastUpdate="Wed, 14 Jan 2004 03:28:00 GMT" />
</body>
</opml>


I first had to add some attributes to the <opml> element to give the XML namespace support. That top element becomes a resource in the (stripey) RDF interpretation, with head and body as properties, their contents being other resources. To keep things simple I just ignored the contents of the <head> element, so that gets interpreted as a triple with an empty object (I must check on the semantics of that). The element itself is mandatory in OPML, so that has to stay.
The <body> in effect contains a set of resources of type outline, which is easy to express by adding the rdf:parseType="Resource" attribute on the parent. The attributes of the <outline> elements all slip neatly into being RDF properties with literal values.

Couple of points that probably need explanation - since the spec update there's been no need to include a root <rdf:RDF> element. If the consumer knows it's RDF, that's good enough (the W3C's validator has check box: "RDF is NOT enclosed in <RDF>...</RDF> tags"). Also the use of unqualified attributes has been deprecated, so it should be opml:text="..." rather than just text="...". This makes the code look a bit uglier, but if you're using a lot of namespaces it does make mistakes much less likely.

I made the changes using search and replace, but this could easily be automated using XSLT. But if you are planning on using Userland format data from anywhere else, it's probably a better bet to use something a little less generic than the approach above (stylesheets for OPML to OCS and Userland RSS to RSS 1.0 are linked in the comments here).[Raw]

K-Collector @ Wonder Widgets, Inc..

We have recently launched a new K-Collector demo site. This is intended to show prospective customers how K-Collector might look (& be used) in their company. The W4 portal is interesting but too eclectic to really get an idea of how K-Collector is intended to work.

The site in question is for our imaginary company Wonder Widgets, Inc. who are purveyors of fine Java and .NET components. We had a bit of fun making up lots of posts ...it's how I imagine soap opera are written... we've already had one person leave the company!

So, if you've wondered what K-Collector is really all about, please drop me a line and I will organise a short (10-20 mins) demo for you. I'm happy to do this as I need the practice :-)

[Curiouser and curiouser!]

It's my birthday, I'm outta here for the weekend.

It's my birthday tomorrow (I'm 39) and we're heading up to Vancouver to celebrate. See ya tomorrow!

[The Scobleizer -- Geek Aggregator]

Here's my Scoble collage from PDC.  There's NOTHING this guy won't do - to get something done!

One of my favorite peeps.

#1 - Newsflash: the World Does Not Revolve Around Gigabytes!.

To all the fools out there who think the iPod mini is a bad deal, would you care to explain why people buy 40GB iPods for $500 when they can get a Nomad Zen with 60GB for $400? Shit with IDE drives at $1GB why doesn't Apple just make a 3 pound $300, 200GB mp3 player? You'd just eat that up, right?

Personally I expect Apple to sell a whole load of the minis. Typical scenario, person walks into the store looking for an ipod. They can get a tiny colorful one that holds 50cds worth of music for $250 more. Or they can pay extra for something nearly twice as big, twice as heavy and it doesn't come in colors. Battery doesn't even last longer. All they get in return is... some exta gigasomethings. And for most people in the world, believe it or not, the world does not revolve around how big their hard drive is. For real. Hang tight and watch these players fly off the shelves.

[Abstract Dynamics]

#2 - Visualizing Information

Carnegie Mellon: Journal of Social Structure: Visualizing Social Networks has absurd amount of information that I can't process at the moment. Tempted to hold it for a cold snowy day, except that would be now... Beautiful pictures though.

[via socialfiction.org]

#3 - 3 New Sites.

thickeye is still in the process of getting designed, but its already opened up new information flows in the art, tech, media space. Watch out for this one.

Jessica Miller is being hosted your's truly. Not sure what she has planned. Her her professional photographs can be found by following this link. But I'm hoping the blog equals loads more "unprofessional" photographs.

Napsterization.org is devoted to covering the stories of P2P's transforming our cultural and legal world. Run by Mary Hodder who is also the driving force behind the excellent bIPlog which is guaranteed to keep you more then on top in the latest news from the intellectual property battlefront.

 

All of these posts point to an intelligent, articulate, feeling human being - fighting the fight for art, technology and media.

 

My kind of people.

There are all sorts of amazing, real-tiem video processing, creation and manipulation programs out there nowadays.

One of them is called VDMXX.

Onward!. The Onward! conference at OOPSLA 2004 in Vancouver "welcomes papers describing new paradigms or metaphors in computing, new thinking about objects, new framings of computational problems or systems, and new technologies."

The chair is Geoff Cohen, whose Coherence Engine weblog I noted has a puzzling link cosmos (150 out of 192 inbound links from virtually invisible weblogs); Richard Gabriel is on the organizing committee.

(via boingboing)
[Seb's Open Research]

 

HHHHhhhhmmmm - maybe I should send in an application for 'The New Paradigm of Tools".  I'll certainly have plenty of examples by then - to show and talk about.  And I LOVE Vancouver - so much!

m3u generator bookmarklet. Alf Eaton has come up with a m3u generator bookmarklet which will harvest the links to mp3s on a page  you're viewing in the browser and give you a playlist. Drag that last link to your links bar, and try it on this page of songs from Les Ogres de Barback or this page of songs from the klezmer band Sirba (found thanks to Lucas).

[Seb's Open Research]

 

Coolio - once again Alf is leading the way!  I could have used that util over the past few weeks - building all the jukeboxes I've been up to.

Now Alf can take those MP3s he's grabbing and put them into a Laszlo SoundBlox - just like the one I got in my gutter (and Barlow has in his - too!)

Open Source Person. I thought it might be entertaining to give a blow-by-blow account of my job hunt here, naming names, trading off pluses and minuses, telling all. Then it dawned on me how incredibly clueless and lame-brained that would be. But I do have some vignettes—one notably optimistic for our profession—and a couple of pictures, and also an explanation of the essay’s title, which doesn’t mean what you think it does. [Update: Found! Jonas the G.J.S.L.w.n.e.]... [ongoing]

I'm sorry I missed the Geek dinner. I definaitely wanted to meet Tim Bray and get him involved -0 or least his mea culpa blessing - on what we're doing.  It's entirely in XML and I dream in schemas nowadays.

the only issue I debate is:

- Triples

vs

- doubles

 

Top 10 Open Source Tools For E-Activism.

Good article today listing the "Top 10 Open Source Tools for eActivism". Some of these I hadn't even heard of before (like ActionApps, completely new to me).

Open source tools are a natural fit for e-activism, since they are born of the same bootstrap, grassroots mentality as a good e-activist campaign. Plus, they're free :-) Or at least cheap -- and often far better in quality than their commercial counterparts. [Seen on Many-to-Many]

[Ant's Eye View]

Top 10 Open Source Tools for eActivism

Dan Bashaw and Mike Gifford have put together a terrific list of Open Source tools that can be used by activists to spread the message and promote interaction by enewsletters, forums, blogs, wikis and epetitions. They wrote an article for Steven Clift's excellent Democracies Online Newswire.

1. ActionApps (On-line Magazine/Content Sharing) http://www.apc.org/actionapps/
2. PostNuke (Slash Forums/Portals) http://www.postnuke.com/
3. Drupal (Blogs) http://drupal.org/
4. Active (News Posting) http://www.active.org.au/doc/
5. phpList (eNewsletters) http://www.phplist.com/
6. phpBB (Forums) http://www.phpBB.com/
7. WebCards (eCards/email2friends) http://webcards.sourceforge.net/
8. TWiki (Wiki/Group Documentation) http://www.twiki.org/
9. Back-End (eActions/ePetitions) http://www.back-end.org/
10. FPDF (eLeaflets/ePosters) (Dynamic PDF/Graphic Generation) http://www.fpdf.org/

[Designing for a Civil Society]

Web ad sales to hit $6.9 billion [CNET News.com - The Net]

I sat in a meeting today discussing new kinds of ad sales.  There are people out there who will pay real money (apparently as much as $6.9B this year) to put pixels in front of your face that have hot zones to click on.  These pixels, usually form the pattern of text or images that represent products, services or brands.

So how can we take all the pent up energy, potential and creativity of teh past 15 years - and do somethign creative with this potential - besides swinging Spiderman interstitials?

:-)

What I'm doing is incredibly fun!  I can't believe i get paid for doing what I love to do more than anything else (except make babies!)  But I AM making a baby - a new kind of.....

OOOoppps.  Sorry I can't tell you or else I'd have to kill you.  Needless to say what we're doing includes new kinds of 'Web Ads'.

"craig vs Hollywood" case partial victory.

"craig vs Hollywood" case partial victory

Hey, the case is over, and we've had a partial victory.

The entertainment lawyers agreed not to sue us, which we hear is the first time
this has ever happened in a copyright case. Our lawyers tell me this is a big deal.

I'm disappointed that the court didn't establish consumer rights.. but there will be
a next time.

More is available at the EFF site and in industry news.

I really appreciate your support, thanks! [craigblog]

Thank you Craig!  We need people liek you standing up to our rights!

 

 

China's online games sales double.

China's online games sales double

NetEase targets teenagers The number of people playing online games in China in 2003 rose by 63.8% and sales nearly doubled, according to an industry report. Sales of online games were worth 1.3bn yuan ($157m; £86m) in 2003, the China Games Publishers Association (CGPA) survey found. It said 14 million people regularly played online games in China, the official Xinhua news agency reported. This represents an increase of 45.5% on 2002, the report said.

[BBC News | Technology | UK Edition]

There's only ONE WAY to combat piracy, illegal downloading and BigCo software entities.

It's keep everything on-line. LiveJournal, Blogger and Typepad know this.   The on-line gaming world is learning that too - as we speak.

OPML or bust.

OPML or bust.

Right. So, recently Dave Winer has been working on a service to allow people to publish their OPML files into a collective group aggregation. Spiffy enough. He's made the data public, he's made an SDK, the data is even under a Creative Commons "Share Alike" license. All is well with the world.

Until you read "How you may use the data" from the SDK:

Our intention in sharing this data is to make it possible for developers to create applications that help people discover new sources of information in RSS and other syndication formats. A second goal is to help foster the use of OPML as a format for sharing such information. If you want to use the information for this purpose, and don't redistribute it in a format other than OPML, as provided on this site, you may use the information without asking for permission. It is licensed for such use under the Creative Commons for-attribution, share-alike license.

If you wish to use the data for a different kind of application, or convert the data into a format other than OPML, for redistribution, it's likely we'll say yes, but you must ask first. We want the data to be useful to you, but we also want to create an installed base of compatible data to encourage others to follow. We've learned that it's necessary to say basically that you can't use this data to thwart the purpose of our project. We wish it weren't this way, but it is, so we have to say it.

Winer attempted to create a "dual license" for his data, so that one type of usage (in OPML format) is covered under CC's by-sa license, and the other kinds of usage (anything else) is a "mother may I" sort of thing. It seems all well and good. But there's a problem. The CC's by-sa license allows anyone to make a derivative work of the data, and in any format they choose.

Relevant bits:

...License Grant. Subject to the terms and conditions of this License, Licensor hereby grants You a worldwide, royalty-free, non-exclusive, perpetual (for the duration of the applicable copyright) license to exercise the rights in the Work as stated below...

...to create and reproduce Derivative Works;...

...The above rights may be exercised in all media and formats whether now known or hereafter devised...

"So", you say, "he can just say that using the by-sa license, people have to keep their work in OPML". But the terms of the license don't allow him to make stipulations as to how the data is used beyond what is in the license. Others have found this out the hard way.

Relevant bit:

...You may distribute, publicly display, publicly perform, or publicly digitally perform a Derivative Work only under the terms of this License...

So, to recap:

1. Dave Winer dual licenses his data under CC's by-sa license and "mother may I" (for lack of a better term).
2. The CC license he chose allows for derivative works.
3. The CC license he chose allows derivative works to be in any format.
4. The CC license he chose does not allow him to restrict the format.

So...

• The CC license he chose allows anyone to transform the data from OPML into anything they want, as long as the resulting work is under the same license.

I don't even know that I have the right interpretation of this. But since the SDK says it's "draft", now is probably the time to address these issues.

(Hell, one quick way out is to just pull the CC license. As I understand it the content served while the license was granted is still under the old terms, but anything served after that wouldn't be.)[esigler.2nw.net/blog]

I should note that we (Broadband Mechanics) have everything to gain by having OPML promoted.  We have an on-line outliner - called the WebOutliner - that saves off and imports OPML.

Theoretically all of these CC OPML files can be used by the WebOutliner to.....

Maybe this is something Joi should look into.

O'Reilly's Emerging Technology Conference....

O’Reilly’s Emerging Technology Conference…

Posted Jan 15, 2004, 6:54 PM ET by Judith Meskill

O’Reilly’s Emerging Technology Conference — taking place at the Westin Horton Plaza, San Diego, CA, Feb. 9-12, 2004 — will have a Social Software track. This promises to be an excellent event with a broad spectrum of notable speakers that includes (but is certainly not limited to): Helen Greiner - iRobot Corp., Cory Doctorow - EFF, Lili Cheng - Microsoft Research, Gilman Louie - In-Q-Tel, David Sifry - Technorati, Joichi Ito - Neoteny, Elizabeth Lawley - Rochester Institute of Technology, and, of course, Tim O’Reilly - O’Reilly & Associates. [The Social Software Weblog]

This is the key event of the year.  We're gonna party like is USED to be 1999.

I'll be there - sponsored by Laszlo Systems and I'll be giving a :05 minute talk on FOAF and the PeopleAggregator.

But clearly the most exciting event will be the field trip to TJ and the House of Mole.  Something not to be missed.

Open-source gurus win software awards

Awards were given to Julian Seward and the Valgrind project for creating an x86-based Linux systems debugger; the Pango project for creating a way to lay out and render international text; the VideoLAN project for enabling all video types to stream on a TCP/IP network; and Paul Davis and the JACK (Jack Audio Connection Kit) project for developing a low-latency audio server to create and edit high-quality audio on open-source operating systems. [CNET News.com - Front Door]

The Broadband Home of the Future. With almost 23 million households sporting high-speed, always-on Internet connections, the broadband home of the future makes every room the center of the networked world. By Chris Anderson from Wired magazine. [Wired News]

It's my 40th Birthday Today!.

It's my 40th Birthday Today!

Bob asked for more metadata on my earlier post. Hopefully the <title> of this post is explicit enough. I've not got around to sorting out the machine-readable version yet - I think I'll try Semaview's calendar tool for that part of the data. Morten has done some nice work tidying up my Amazon Wishlist Web Service XSLT and has writted a script to combine all pages. I still need to clean out the bad URIs from my FOAF profile (sorry scutters!).

But in the meantime, here's the human-readable version of my wishlist, hint hint ;-)[Raw]

Scoble answers my question about .Text.

Questions to ask blog novices.

Marc Canter is asking what is so cool about .TEXT?

I'm getting that question a lot lately. But asked in a different way "what tool should I use to blog?"

That's a difficult problem, cause there is no "best tool" out there for everyone. Sometimes I answer "Blogger." Sometimes I answer ".TEXT." Sometimes I answer "Radio UserLand." Sometimes I answer "Moveable Type." Sometimes I answer "write your own." Sometimes I answer "TypePad." Sometimes I answer "LiveJournal." Sometimes I answer "Das Blog."

But, usually it takes me a few questions to get to the answer. The questions are key, so I wrote down what I usually ask. Are there other questions I should care about?

1) Do you want to host it yourself, or do you want someone else to do the hosting?

2) Are you willing to pay to blog (even a small fee like $40 a year)?

3) Do you care about what platform the software will run on?

4) Do you care about syndication? (If yes, do you care about formats?)

5) Do you care about quality of HTML and "coolness" among other webloggers?

6) Can you handle a little bit of HTML and/or configuration or do you want something that is super easy?

7) Is there a group of bloggers that you'd like to fit in with? (Sorta the same question as #5, but more from a social point of view than a technical one).

8) Do you care about advanced features like trackbacks or comments?

[The Scobleizer -- Geek Aggregator]

Every year I wait till my brithday to make wishes and predictions.  Here we go.

1. That the PeopleAggregator get back up and running - so everyone can enjoy what Eric Sigler has been up to.  FOAF is definitely the format for interchange of digital IDs and beating on FOAF, pushing the rdf folks to do the right thing and bringing FOAF into the mainstream - is one of my goals for 2004!  So GO ERIC GO!

2.  The great work that Joi, Weinberger, Doc, the Dean Campaign and all the Emergent Democracy folks have been doing - to help move this world forward.  I burned out on politics early - as my father is a politician.  Don't get me started!  My grandfather was a famous American Communist.  So I leave it to you folks to change the world.  me - I'm just a micro-content, new kind of tools, open standards, make up for my last company (which has locked people into propreitary standard) kind of guy.

3. That folks would grok and adopt Matt Mower and Paolo Valdemarin's k-collector and W4 technology.  Turn knowledge management into a good thing (from it's nebulous current state!)  Everything should have a topic attached to it!  See - I didn't even use the terms ontology, semantic web or meta-data!

4.  Marc Barrot's WebOutliner rocks and I hope that this is the year it gets out there as well.  Everyone should have their own on-line outliner baked into their app and/or service.  Long live OPML!  And thanks to Danny Goodman, Doug Baron and Paolo for helping!

5.  It looks like 2004 is the year that I'll get to show the world what I mean by 'new kinds of tools'. Let's just leave it at that - for now.  Needless to say I'm excited!

6. OpenReviews - this is something that is gonna happen this year - as well.  No longer will our opnions be locked up into Data Silos.  Folks - if you think blogging is big - wait till you see how big OpenReviews will be!  Notice how I don't have a page to link to for this idea. I've been leaving the leadership mantle open on this one - as I've got just too much work to do. I tried to get Seb Paquest to lead it.  Before that Noah Glass.  Maybe this year - someone will step up to the plate and take off - building up the alliances, technology and marketing poop needed to launch YET ANOTHER open standard.  Wait! I know - maybe Clay Shirky should do it!

7.  There will be a number of examples of how to take social networking to the next stage this year.  Hopefully Tony Perkin's AlwaysOn-Network will be one of the first. I helped.

8. I can feel it in my bones that this is teh year that digital lifestyle aggregators will make their debut. No - it won't be from Apple or Microsoft - though they're the ultimate competitors.

9. This is also the year for Laszlo and rich media platforms. I can't wait for them to kick ass and stomp all over my former company.  From the moment I heard about and saw HTML, I knew we had to move beyond that.  Go bless multimedia. God bless object-oriented client side systems that bring us forward.  Hopefully you folks will all have SoundBlox, PhotoBlox or ReviewBlox modules in your blog gutters by this time next year.

10.  And let's not forget ThreadsML, Open Calendar events, Recipes and Resumes. There are so many open standards to develop - hopefully ATOM will get us closed to doing that, while bending over backwards and simplfying everything - to fit into the RSS 2.0 envelope - as well.

And to you all - a good night.

Today has been a hell of a day.  Now it is tomorrow and my birthday.  Two birthdays in a row - the rest of my life.

OK - I admit it.

Today is my brithday.

I was hoping that Lisa (my wife) could hold out for 5 more hours - so Lucy would have the same b-day as me. But I just she deserves her own b-day.  It's just that Aryeh - my eldest son - is born on Lisa's b-day, July 31st - so if Lucy had been born on MY b-day - then we'd have a symetrical balance of dual birthdays.

Well anyway - here's the proof - my name came up on the Joi Ito birthday server service.

Here's a screen grab - which I refreshed many times - till it came up with my face on the faceroll. 

And by coincidence - that faceroll had Lisa Rein in it.  Lisa and I have something new in common - we're both in the Laszlo SoundBlox Jukebox - now on Barlow's blog.

SoundBlox is spreading.

Another faceroll face is of Kevin Werbach - who just had a baby girl - as well.

So many faces, so many stories.

I got to know Boris Anthony (bopuc) in the past few weeks, and he's a really nice guy.  He helped get the jukebox into Barlow's blog.

And the folks at the super secret project I'm working on - are great too!  You know who you are!

 

 

 

 

 

EFF's ReplayTV suit ends. About a year and a half ago, the EFF along with five plantiffs (including Craig from Craigslist.org) brought about a suit against Hollywood studios in order to defend their rights to continue using ReplayTV, after the same companies sued ReplayTV... [PVRblog]

Start-up DreamFactory conjures up new tools. The upstart introduces its first commercial product for building graphical user interfaces based on XML and Web services standards. [CNET News.com - Front Door]

Hey!  Congrats to Bill Appleton for getting some press!  We used Bill's 'Dreamfactory' tool to build our prototype 'MyMagicCarpetRide' - two years ago.  now Bill has deals with Salesforce.com and Grand Central Communications.

One thing Martin Lamonica - the writer of the article forgot - is that Laszlo Systems also creates "software for building so-called rich clients, or graphically rich desktop software that relies on XML and Web services."

We (Broadband Mechanics) - spent several years trying to build a 'rich-media platform'.  We finally just ran out of money.  But Laszlo got it right.  Oh - and Bill Appleton's Dreamfactory - also got it right - too.  :-)

Sisters meet for first time.

Lucy is my fifth child.  Kevin Werbach is enjoying his second (see below.)  Thomas Madsen-Mygdal also just had (or is about to have) a child as well.

The joy of parenthood, v. 2.0. Ah yes, now I rember what sleep deprivation is like!
[Werblog]

Christopher Allen on Social Network Services....

Christopher Allen on Social Network Services…

Posted Jan 11, 2004, 11:11 PM ET by Judith Meskill

Christopher Allen, founder of Alacrity Ventures, an angel capital investment firm, writes a two part series in his weblog — Evaluating Social Network Services and Followup to “Evaluating Social Network Services”……… — on the accounts he has created with Ryze, Tribe.Net, LinkedIn, and Friendster. Chris reflects, on what works and what doesn’t work for him with each of these services. He concludes his first post with a description of what he feels would be “The Perfect Social Networking Service”:

My ideal service would have the the multiple professional affiliation features of LinkedIn, but also allow me to show non-professional affilations. It would allow me to form intentional communities like Tribes.Net, but would also let me do a Wiki in addition to a message board. It would have meeting/party invite services like eVite, and blogging features like LiveJournal. It would have an endorsement system like LinkedIn integrated not only with professional endorsements, but personal endorsements as well, and you could even endorse intentional communities. It would let me better map and control my network, giving different friends different privileges. It would handle the release of my personal information like Ryse, but less clunky.

What would your “Perfect Social Networking Service” look like?

 [The Social Software Weblog]

Cards for 500 of my closest friends....

Hugh aka gapingvoid, one of my favorite online cartoonists, let me pick a cartoon and sent me 500 business cards with my contact info on once side, and this image on the other. After getting a stack of 500 cards that say, "You are the most important person in my Life" I realized the irony and realized that maybe I chose the wrong phrase. ;-p

I do think his idea of cartoons on business cards is a cool idea.

So what I need is a bunch of different cards ranging from "You are the most important person in my Life" to "Talk to the hand." Then I can choose which cards to give to people. This would be the intentional physical version of what Cory doesn't like about social software.

Of course, I would only give "Talk to the hand" to someone as a joke... really.

[Joi Ito's Web]

You Haven't Lived Until... (a.k.a. 666).

You've dumped 6 full ounces of meticulously gathered breast milk onto the kitchen floor—and considered for more than a fleeting moment soaking it up with a clean sponge and squeezing it back into the bottle.

You've watched your 6 week old retrieve his wayward pacifier and reinsert it. (Cue theme from 2001: A Space Odyssey.)

Your baby gives you his first smile. And 5 more for good measure.

[Bag and Baggage]

Will participate at E-Tech in San Diego Feb 9 to 12, let's meet there.. Just signed up to O'Reilly's Emerging Technology Conference in San Diego, Feb 9-12.

I know many of you will be there, let me know if you have some time so that we can meet during the conference.

Hope to see many #Joiito participants at Jeannie and Jibot. [Loïc Le Meur's WebLog]

Hey - at least ONE person will be paying full fair to Etech.

Well maybe not, I'm sure Loïc will get some sort of VIP treatment and comped.  Afterall - he IS a famous French entreprenuer - right?

Don Hopkins: "I'm designing an RSS 2.0 module for describing The Sims objects, which will make it easier to advertise and distribute Sims objects online, and enable the development of automated tools for assisting in this process." [Scripting News]

from Scoble:

[Ted Ritzer: BizBlog]

Laszlo preview release.

Laszlo preview release

A preview release of Laszlo Presentation Server version 2.0 is now available. Woo hoo!

• New Component Framework: All the components you expect in a web app plus a few more. This framework is fully laszlo-rrific -- with the details you know and love from an OS GUI with all the cinematic user experience you've come to expect from a Laszlo app. The components support simple declaration, data binding, full scripting APIs, and keyboard navigation -- whew!
  
• KRANK Optimizer: Every web engineer worries about performance. Here's something for the Laszlo bag o' tricks. This new "instant-on" technology allows developers to optimize an application so that it will start immediately once downloaded.
  
• Live examples in the Documentation: I use this feature all the time. With a single click you can modify and recompile examples.
  
• Better and cooler data binding: if you liked data binding and replication from v1, you're gonna love the new $path expression.
  

The components were my main gig on this release, jamming with Bret Simister, Peter Andrea, and the gang. I think this may be the first component set created entirely in declarative XML. The complete source code for the components is included with the developer edition. You can check out a component example which you change the style to see the components in different colors. The components use a new "Ultra Pixel" font created especially for Laszlo by Truth in Design.

Download LPS 2.0 Developer Edition and try it yourself. [Sarah Allen's Weblog]

Laszlo Systems continues to rock and roll.

Not only have they shown real world, major, scalable deployed apps (Behr Paint, Earthlink, Yahoo, etc.) but they're about to show something for Kodak and are working on...... (ooops can't tell  you!)

Anyway this 2.0 rocks and - gee - that copycat stuff from Macromedia ain't even in beta yet.  Smart developers will put their money on Laszlo.

The Internet Archive released a preliminary version of their new Web crawler software, Heritrix..  [Hack the Planet]

Heritrix is the Internet Archive's open-source, extensible, web-scale, archival-quality web crawler project.

Heritrix (sometimes spelled heretrix , or misspelled or missaid as heratrix / heritix / heretix / heratix ) is an archaic word for inheritess . Since our crawler seeks to collect the digital artifacts of our culture for the benefit of future researchers and generations, this name seemed apt.

THIS IS MAJOR, COOLIO TECHNOLOGY FOLKS!  Congrats to Gordon Mohr and the team at the Internet Archive!

JeannieAndJibot session at ETech.

If you hang out on #joiito or are interested in learning more and plan to be at ETech, please vote for, sign up for and contribute ideas to the session we are planning. We're going to try to play with RFID's and the Jeannie's cafe idea and we need a head-count so please sign up early if you're interested. Hopefully Hecklebot will be there as well.

[Joi Ito's Web]

I'll be there - assuming I can find the remaining 60% I need to pay.  You see :05 speakers only get 40% off of the list price, while rich VCs like Joi don't have to pay.

:-)