December 30, 2002
Holiday Catch-up
Things have been very busy during the holiday season, what with some relatives coming into town, some nasty winter storms, and a whole bunch of work responsibilities resting on my shoulders. As usual, my wife helped me get out of panic mode and get organized. She hit me with the potent piece of common sense: "Why don't you just make a to-do list, on paper, and then prioritize?"
So I did.
And now I've got things in a much more manageable state, and we're not even at new year's yet. Of course, there's always big deadlines approaching, but at least I don't have that nasty feeling of having everything hanging over my head.
December 10, 2002
Voice Blogging?
What about voice blogging? using something like Tellme's development kit, couln't someone create simple voice-based logging tools?
David Isenberg
David Isenberg, author of Rise of the Stupid Network, gave a talk about end-to-end networks. Pretty interesting stuff. Korea and Japan have serious broadband rollouts, including 8 and 12MBps DSL rollouts, and 100MBps FTTH (fiber to the home) rollouts, all for about $15-$80/month. Oh yeah baby, that's wide pipe.
The thing that I don't get with David's model of end-to-end is the issue of core network routers acting in "your best interests", including automated core caching, content-based routing, header rewriting, bandwidth limiting and throttling, and other breakages of the end-to-end model. I don't like those models, but because the network provider is between me and my destination, he has control of that, and because of the oligopoly of network providers, there's no real choice in who to use.
The thing is, does this center-of-the-network intelligence provide the average user with a lower cost? Because the ISP is auto-throttling Napster traffic, does that mean that the overall bandwidth cost to the provider (and therefore to me) is less? Hmmm.
Google accepting XML-RPC pings?
Ooh, Sergei Brin is getting feedback on something that will turn out to be VERY cool. He's offering to create an XML-RPC ping aggregator at Google, which will launch the Google robot to immediately reindex the site. If they can do this, it will finally bring Google's power to the blogging world, where freshness is a huge issue. This would be very easy to do, because most of the blog tools out there already have this capability. Wow!
Technorati bug fixed
I got some email for people who complained that they were having a problem with Technorati's link cosmos - they were seeing links from their own sites on their cosmos. Whoops! I think I got it fixed, please go and try it out. Just some minor hacking from the Supernova floor. Thanks, Kevin, for WiFi and enough power adapters!
Rohit Khare
Bumped into Rohit Khare here at the conference. Gosh, I don't know where was the first time we had met, but it was a long time since I'd seen him. We were ale to hang out some last night at dinner where he was his usual instigator self. He also pointed me to the FoRK Archive , his Friends of Rohit Khare archive. He also announced that his new company , KnowNow has release a subscribe/publish module for Apache - open source code.
Dave Winer says that we should all have a signal to show that we're reading his blog while he's on stage - I say we all do the finger-swipe across the nose, a la "The Sting"...
Photoblogs
Ooh, here's something I stumbled on because of a misheard comment at Supernova: Photoblogs.org, a site aggregating photo weblogs.
Weblog Panel
Dave Winer is on the panel, as well as Meg Hourihan (who I've tried to meet, but haven't had a chance yet) and Nick Denton, and Dave is blogging his own panel. Guess he can't blog while he's talking, though.
Damn that Doc, he just keeps on typing. Unbelievable how much that guy gets done.
Marathon Man
Ah, cool, got the link to the Marathon Man, which leads me to its host provider, called Hiptop Nation, an experiment in Moblogging, very cool stuff. That's what the marathoner was using for his blog. Thanks to Mike Masnick for the link (he's at the conference too)
The problem with web services
I'm waiting to make a comment on web services, but the moderator is avoiding me for now, so I'll just blog it.
The fundamental question around web services is around BUSINESS MODEL. If you want an always-up utility-like service like Google, they need to have a business model that lets them stay in business and even make money. Certainly for internal uses within a company, internal ROI means that using web services means you can have different systems talking to each other and reducing cost or increasing productivity, etc.
Dave Winer has a different business model arond web services - he uses web services to make his software easy to use, and he makes money by charging for his software, that's another model, and of course, Amazon can clearly show nw sales that occur because of click-throughs, frontends, and price comparisons that occur via the XML interfaces that they provide.
Dick is extolling the needs of identity for a business model to work - and he's right - I just don't think that people need to have a big federated (or centralized) identity system out there in order for web services to work.
Dave Winer and dinner
Had a great dinner last night at Jing Jing's in Palo Alto - must have been about 50 people who showed up, mostly from Supernova, but a smattering of people who had read about it on Dave Winer's great weblog Scripting News. Afterwards, I went out to coffee with Dave, Doc, Scoble, and a very nice person whose name I unfortunately forget) and got to talking about his dad, aging, Atkins, OPML, outliners (something that I've had long discussions with Tom Davey about, and it was very interesting and fruitful - leading to a post in Dave's weblog today. More later - now they're talking about web services, something I'm interested in. Suffice it to say that I'm really psyched to get to know Dave f2f and to have hit it off so well with him.
I mentioned the marathoner who was blogging the event from his 2-wy pager while he was running the marathon, only now I can't find the link... If anyone has it, email me
Dan Talks about MoBlogging
"The next time that there's a major news event in Tokyo like an earthquake, there'll be 500 people with weblogs and photographs up before the news agencies have their professional photographers mobilized"
Dan Gillmore
Day 2 of SuperNova
Dan Gilmore is talking about the future of Journalism "we media" adding context to journalism - starting in the Y2K elections and on to 9/11, including the new distributed news sources, like blogs.
Old form: Lecture - new form is a conversation (or maybe a seminar)
"We can fact-check your ass" -- Ken Layne
Dan is happy because he accepts the premise that his readers are smarter than he is (he's being humble - only in aggregate).
December 09, 2002
Howard Rheingold is sitting right in front of me, cool!
This is nice for a macrovision free DVD+VCR combo. Amazon wishlist, anyone?!?
60-90-120 hour hard drives are sitting in the living room - talking to advertisers about what they can do using the TiVo as a platform.
Now Morgan Guenther of TiVo is up. Rock on! I love my TiVo.
Here's a link to the paper itself
Cory's talking about the Dark Net
Doc is blogging using Radio and I'm using my little jabber-to-blog converter - looks almost the same
Sitting here with Doc Searls and meeting some really interesting people,. Cory Doctorow is now talking on a panel on Broadband media distribution (and doing a fantastic, coherent, unscripted job). Great conference.
Chris Locke is totally insane. And I love him. Rock on Chris!
November 27, 2002
Technorati
Ah, my weekend project is done. I started this two weeks ago as a weekend project to blow off steam from all the Sputnik work that I've been doing lately, and it has proceeded to eat up both last weekend and this one. I'm going to post a longer link on Sifry's Alerts discussing my motivations, but for now, it is just good to be finished. Definitely a fun weekend project.
November 20, 2002
November 16, 2002
Rock on, west Marin peaceniks!
Ah, every once in a while I get reminded that it is cool to live in the San Francisco Bay Area. We have the best kooks.