Friday, April 09, 2004

Session: Personal TV Networks. 

Question: Is moblogging a new market? 

We've got enough money for the evening reception, and probably some refreshments during the day. We could use more money for breakfast and more refreshments. We've got almost four hundred people registered! 

Barry Campbell writes to say if you lookup Sammy's with this spelling: Sammy's Roumanian, there are lots of hits. He's right. Thanks! 

BBC: "By the year 2010, file-sharers could be swapping news rather than music, eliminating censorship of any kind." 

Seth Godin: You Are Your References. 

New header graphic: Wisteria in Bloom. 

A thought I'll expand on later. The only economic factor you ever hear about are taxes. But the debt and the deficit matter too, maybe much more. The hype is that we should be ashamed of ourselves for passing on the problem to later generations, but that understates the problem. Our creditors could say, at any time, no more credit. Then, at current rates, we're going to be short $1 trillion per year. That's more than $3000 for every American, and that's just the shortfall. You'll still have to pay taxes.  

A couple of disclosures 

I need to make a couple of disclosures, but I want to be as sensitive as I can. I don't want to be part of supposedly open processes that only include a small number of people. They aren't open, you could say say they're "as open as possible," to be generous; or "exclusive," to be really accurate.

Anyway, I've had several email exchanges and one conference call about formalizing the specification for RSS with a standards organization. My position in these private communications is exactly stated in the Roadmap section of the RSS 2.0 spec. I'm basically explaining how it would apply to a formalization process, which I would support. I would not agree to be the chair of a working group, probably even wouldn't make sense for me to be a member of the group. That's all that's happened so far.

Second, I've been helping the evangelists at Microsoft, Lenn Pryor, Jeff Sandquist, Robert Scoble, in formulating a new approach to working with developers. I plan to be open about this too, because my goal here is to help bootstrap a two-party system, and when that's working, a three-party system, and so on. I think Microsoft can exist very well in that kind of environment, but it's going to be a tough thing to pull off, because they're so large, and they're basically a gravity well, largely influenced by their own internal conversation, that it's hard for an average MS person to understand why people outside MS even bother to exist.

And now with so many of them having weblogs, it's going to be hard to keep MS people frrom interfering. But that was the problem with Apple, and Netscape and now Google; and it will be a problem in the tech industry until it's solved. How can an organization be clued in, and still work with outsiders. This could be something David Weinberger looks into at the session he's leading at BloggerCon.