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Steve Gillmor: The Attention Operating System. Mike Arrington: "Don't use my own facts against me." I talked with Jeff Barr at Amazon last night, and he said the bit I posted about supporting XML-RPC on S3 got through and they're looking at it. I'm sitting next to John Furrier at Gnomedex and he says he heard from Bob Wyman last night that PubSub has shut down and their engineers have found jobs at other companies. Scott Karp: "Navigating Google ads feels like Yahoo circa 1997." Today and tomorrow are officially RSS Days in Washington. I'm in the conference center, and haven't been able to get online through the wifi, but luckily my EVDO modem works. People around me are getting on, maybe it has something to do with the fact that I'm using a Mac? If you're in the room and have an idea, please send mail. Tom Forenski: "I've been working with the PR industry to figure out a better way to create press/news releases that are more useful to reporters and others, in this multi-media channel world we live in." Looks like I have more to do at Gnomedex than the 15 minutes on Saturday. This morning during Chris's opening remarks, I'll read a document signed by a Washington political leader. And then during lunch I'm doing a live hour-long podcast with the temporarily unemployed Robert Scoble. The server is slow again The other day I reported that I thought the server that's running the OPML Community was running smoothly, but now it's clear that it isn't. I can't do anything about it during the conference, but I'm getting another server provisioned, and will try to figure out how to split the load between two servers. It may not be too hard. Realistically I won't get to that until the middle of next week. I'm really sorry for the poor performance, but I'm going to do what I can to make it better.
Frank Barnako: Why is John Edwards at Gnomedex? Melodeo looks good, but isn't its name too close to Odeo? Good afternoon from the Seattle waterfront where the nerds and geeks of the tech blogging world have gathered for Gnomedex 6.0. The opening party is tonight, 7PM-10:30PM. Me, I don't have anything that I have to do, other than talk on Saturday morning for a mere 15 minutes at 9:45AM.
In Gundotra, Google is hiring someone who believes in RSS. Betsy Devine on people who "support our troops." It's come to my attention that some people didn't learn The Golden Rule when they were young. Perhaps that's why discourse on the Internet can be so unpleasant. Identity and trust
First, we could all benefit from a common identity system for the Internet. Think about all the times and places you enter your social security number, date and place of birth, mother's maiden name, credit card number, the secret number on the back of the credit card. If you had all that information about someone else, and their bank account numbers, you could probably have all their money. And every day we hear stories of companies we trust with this information, losing it. Note the big word in there is trust. Trust a company? Hah. Now which companies do you trust? Are companies trust-worthy? Yesterday I got my credit card bill. There was a charge of $1017 for a hotel stay that was supposed to be picked up by a company. I actually only stayed one night, the rate was $400 a night, so not only were they were mistaken in charging me instead of the company, they overcharged us. How much you want to bet that I end up paying the $1017? In this case there were two companies not worthy of trust. (When told of the problem the first company should have let me know immediately that they would cover the expense, but they didn't. Ooops, there goes the trust.) Microsoft asked for our trust with Hailstorm. But they were behaving very badly. They claimed their bad behavior was legal (it wasn't, it turns out) but that wasn't even the point. If we sense that a company is bad, the first thing they lose is our trust. It turns out the concern was totally justified, many times over. As they were screwing Netscape, they were screwing us, their users, even harder, sitting on the browser, not making any improvements, as malware of all types rendered our computers more and more useless. Now Microsoft is paying for their sins. (They never even apologized for all our wasted time.) Now we turn to Google. I remember when my idea of Google soured, it was an instant flip, one day I thought these are good people who love the web, when they grow it's good for me. Really, we used to think of Google that way. But then they started acting like Microsoft, stupidly doing things that undermine the rare priviledge they had won. It was hard to argue that losing the trust hurt them or their shareholders, until today, when their intention to be the identity czar of the Internet became apparent. It won't work for the same reason it didn't work for Microsoft, they screwed with our trust too many times. It's sad that we can't launch companies in the tech industry that deserve our trust, it's sad because it holds back progress and innovation. But you can't trust who you don't trust, and I don't trust Google. Ponzi and Jory
Today was Scoble's last day at Microsoft. Scott Rosenberg: "The absence of ads is one of the key factors behind Craigslist's phenomenal success." Martin Green: "Haystack is designed to provide a very scalable, reliable and cost effective platform for object storage and delivery to the Internet." According to Joi Ito there are four bloggers at Brainstorm in Aspen. If the coolness of a conference is measured by how many bloggers there are, I guess Gnomedex is 50 or 60 times as cool. Sorry.
Jason Calacanis is wondering, out loud what I've been wondering in private emails to Om Malik, Mike Arrington and Staci Kramer, this morning. What's going on in Content Blogging Land? I've asked for meetings with Om and Mike at Gnomedex. These guys must be using each other as comps in their plans, so what do they know about each other that the rest of us don't? The list of people coming to Gnomedex, which starts tomorrow in Seattle. If you're going to be there, I'll be staying at the Marriott on Alaska Way. Let's party!
Freedback: "A folksonomic Bat-light..." This table lists the most frequently read HTTP resources by applications running on the opml.org server. I needed this to debug the server yesterday, and as long as I had it around, I figured what the heck, I should share the data. No guarantee that I'll keep maintaining it though. Deadwood is the new Sopranos I'm caught up on Season 3 of Deadwood. And I gotta say, it's the new high water mark in serial drama. Big Love hit some snags in the middle of its first season, ended on a high note, but Deadwood is rising to a crescendo, and changing the way I think about everything in business. They redefine evil, what I used to think was the height of depravity now looks rather innocent. If you've been following the show, you know what I mean. Highly recommended. PS: One of the downsides of being a Deadwood devotee is that I now think of everyone as a cocksucker. Hallelujah?
For users of the OPML Editor, the software Doc was using at BloggerCon to take live notes. Debugging Frontier-based servers
It took a nano-second to know where the focus would be. Tools for debugging performance issues. Right now if you ask the OPML blogging community what their number one priority is, it's getting the performance problems worked out on blogs.opml.org. Same if you ask me. I'm struggling to figure out what script is causing the flatlining behavior on the server. This has been the problem in Frontier for years. I've got very limited tools to figure this out, but with a little cooperation from the kernel, it could almost certainly dump the information I need, pointing me to the table that's getting too large, or the script that's looping infinitely. That we've been stuck here for so long is an indication of poor communication in the community, and a lack of incentives. The technology is very simple. I'd like the kernel to maintain a log, in a text file, on the local hard disk, of exceptional events. I get to define, to some extent, what is exceptional. I'd like it to dump the addresses of tables containing more than 10,000 elements, when the table is initially brought into memory. thread.getStats is nice for stack dumps, but not much else. I really want to know how many cumulative CPU cycles each thread has used. If I dump this table every minute on a server that has performance problems, it would tell me which thread to look at for an idea of why the server is getting hung up. The key to debugging these servers is to reduce the number of places I have to look.
David Berlind asks if RSS is the new Intranet protocol. Rex Hammock picture from BloggerCon II. People are still downloading the famous Dvorak movie. Rex Hammock's multi-part post-BloggerCon essay. Platform politics Scanning Greg Reinacker's latest roadmap for NewsGator, they support SOAP and REST, which I know from lots of experience means I have to work real hard just to try their stuff out. Too hard. Amazon's S3 service took this approach and their uptake is too slow, there's no visible momentum (I know I'll get lots of links for saying that). Go to a developer event, no one is talking about S3. That's terrible because it's a good idea and it deserves attention. I wonder why they are so cheap with the interfaces. Get over your religion Greg, and support XML-RPC, I bet it makes a difference. I won't dig into your stuff unless you do. Too much work for me, and I don't think you're going to get the uptake. That said, my first post-BloggerCon development project will involve S3. We have working code, even though it was a lot harder than it had to be to get there.
Let's see, I bet there's a law here, or a life lesson. Either you're going to be a platform vendor or not. If you choose to push a platform, don't go half way. Platforms that are picky usually don't gain traction. If you got a platform you must be open to all comers, enthusiastically, without reservation. I think this is what we were saying to Stewart Butterfield last week about Flickr's APIs. Late afternoon coffee notes
Human beings are amazing at filling in the blanks. And the people who show up for an event like BloggerCon are the most generous, optimistic, and rewarding people to work for. In the end, it works. After it's over you're tired. So there's lot of sleep and lounging around and letting the head empty out. Yawning, watching TV, mending, healing, and then waking up. My to-do list has a different sort of task on it now. Do the laundry. Pay bills. Renew my car registration. Hardly any phone calls to return. I noted that my email link has been broken for some time. If you sent me mail in the last month or so by clicking on the mail icon in the upper right corner of this page, you might try again. I didn't get the mail. A table overflowed somewhere in a mail server. I went looking for it today and gave up. I pointed it to another server, and went on with life. The mail is being delivered once again.
Were you at BloggerCon IV? (Either physically or tuned in over the webcast and IRC.) If so, please add yourself to the Frappr map, and let's see where we all are from. The MP3 collection of audio from the conference is complete. Amazing turnaround from the CNET folks.
10/19/94: "Once the users take control, they never give it back."
The room during the Core Values discussion. A video of the hands of Doc, blogging the Video blogging discussion at BloggerCon.
The speaker's wiki. "A listing of speakers, their websites and affiliation, contact information, past speaking engagements and other important information to help conference organizers choose speakers to talk on important topics."
Phil Jones: "Good software creation, like any other creative activity, requires a deep knowledge of the nature and constraints of the medium." Wired: BloggerCon Boosts the Blog Boom. Nick Bradbury: "What I'd like to see at a future BloggerCon (or Gnomedex) is an open, respectful discussion between users and developers. Even though public speaking terrifies me, I'd still be willing to moderate a session between users and developers if it would make the discussion less adversarial." Notes from Day 1
All the DLs and monitors were awesome. The right people showed up, the right people stayed home. Phil Torrone was every bit as good as I imagined he would be, esp given that this was his first BloggerCon, Jay Rosen who now is officially the only person aside from me who has been to all of the Cons, was of course, a monster super star. Chris Pirillo and Niall Kennedy had the hardest sessions, which didn't go the way I hoped they would, but then I've learned that my expecations aren't what's important. That's a basic life lesson. Niall was a hardass with people who tried to cross the no-commercial line, and was a hardass with me, and I apologized for not respecting him well enough. The smoothest session was also the riskiest, Lisa Williams kept the Emotional Life session going along. And I got to play technographer while Doc led a discussion asking people to ask how we're changing the world. Special hat tip to the BlogHer people who added so much to Day One. And of course, thanks for the incredible support from CNET, esp Marianne and Jason, who did a great job of producing the show, kept the mikes working, the music playing, and kept us on time.
How to tune into BloggerCon. I'm linking to the MP3s as they become available (about 20 minutes after each session, thanks to CNET). Kevin Marks' video webcast feed. The song: The Hokey Pokey. Another famous Marc Canter sleeping photo. Movie of the room during Phil Torrone's session. Dan Farber is blogging the conference. Phil's photos for the Tools discussion. We're live at CNET, we got the tunes playing, people are starting to arrive, life is good. Just got a report that the webcast has been tested and works. SF weather: "Highs in the 60s to lower 70s." Cooool! I switched to Colloquy, which is a much nicer IRC client. Chris Pirillo: Users vs Developers. Scott Karp: Digg vs the NY Times. Mike Arrington: "No one crafts a sentence like you, Steve." Two years ago today: "This time the pros beat the crap out of the blogs in a story about blogs. Something to think about. This time they fact-checked your ass. " New header graphic, the Rockies west of Denver shot on a flight from New York to San Francisco. How to tune into BloggerCon Whether you're remote or local, you can participate in BloggerCon in many ways. 1. Tune into the IRC at irc.freenode.net/bloggercon. 2. Or the webcast. (Murphy-willing.) 3. Doc Searls is the technographer. If you're in the conference room, you'll see his outline projected on either side of the room. If you're coming in over IRC and/or the webcast, you can view the outlines in a web browser through the table of contents. They are also available in OPML, so they are viewable in any environment that works with OPML. One interesting idea to try out is to follow a discussion using the Instant Outliner in the OPML Editor. 4. Listen to some funky music and get yo rear end in motion! 5. Listen to the MP3s as they become available. 6. Kevin Marks's video webcast feed. Jake Ludington
Jake is producing the BloggerCon webcast. Rex Hammock, Terry Heaton, Paolo Valdemarin
With Robert Cox in the background. Post partum before startup coffee notes It's 4:20AM, I'm awake, drinking coffee, and running over in my head, one more time, the checklist of things we still have to do, which of course are largely the things we won't do. And then there are the things we didn't do at previous BloggerCons that I must remember to do at this one. And the things I'm worrying about, because I know theny went wrong before and I'm wondering what will go wrong this time. 1. What if no one shows up? 2. What if the air conditioning doesn't work? 3. We didn't get signage, will people think that's tacky? 4. What if no one shows up? 5. What if the wrong people show up and the wrong people don't show up? 6. What if we can't think of a song? 7. And on and on over and over. Face it, I'm a worrier. Someone who doesn't worry can't ship software. But that isn't why I feel unsettled. I actually know why. There's a little bit of a story to it. About two weeks before BloggerCon I, in September 2003, I returned a call from to brother, he was boarding a plane in Chicago (I think) and he said I'll call you back when I get to my seat. That's when I knew something bad had happened. In the two minutes my mind raced. Was it my mother, my father, was someone sick, had someone died? It turned out it was my uncle. He was young, just 58, and had died suddeny in Jamaica. I decided not to go to Jamaica to participate in the settling of his affairs, I stayed in Cambridge to make sure BloggerCon came off. It was one of the most hyper-real couple of weeks, every minute of it in shock, depressed, but also participating in what would turn out to be a great event. Now I don't remember the unsettled feeling, trying to sleep at night in the last days before the first conference, or should I say I don't usually remember; but last night at the party, someone unexpected was there, Mark Stahlman, who I had last seen in Negril with my uncle, and he had stories to tell, and didn't know that Ken had died. It stirred up everything, and that's why this morning, there are unresolved feelings to feel, and it's totally appropriate to process them in the hours before the fourth BloggerCon.
BloggerCon party: 6:45PM tonight, Jillian's, 4th & Howard. Don't forget to sign up for a Friday night dinner. Doc Searls movie. It was a looooong hot day, setting up and getting ready for technography and webcasting at BloggerCon. This morning's webcast was great, and got a good WMA file. Music courtesy of the Carnival Cast. BloggerCon monitors. "There are two monitors for each session, each of them 'owns' a wireless mike, and moves around the room partially at the direction of the discussion leader, and partially in response to requests from others in the room." BART is free today. Almost all public transit in the Bay Area is free too. Ken Sands, the online publisher of the Spokane Spokesman Review, on citizen journalism. He'll be part of the citizen journalism discussion, tomorrow morning, at BloggerCon IV. Bill Gates: "This social-networking thing takes you to crazy places." All the whitewash that's fit to print David Pogue: "Some people remain cynical about the timing of Mr Gates's exit." Pogue gushes "when you step back far enough, Mr Gates's entire life arc suddenly looks like a 35-year game of Robin Hood, a gigantic wealth-redistribution system on a global scale." Look, I'm willing to give Gates his due. As long as I've been listening to him, he's always been clear that he would at some point give away his fortune. But in creating his fortune, he wasted the creativity of a generation. This isn't something that should be washed out of the history books. Also, it shouldn't be missed that Gates claimed to see what had eluded his predecessors, the founders of DEC and the other mini computer makers, and the management of IBM when he was dealing with them in the 80s. In fact, he fell into the same inevitable trap all big technology companies do. They get big, the leader's assumptions are rooted in the past, and they spend their capital trying to keep the world from changing, instead of embracing change, and staying out the way of the inevitable evolution of technology. Gates did some really nasty shit that cost us all a lot. He could have, instead of saving his generosity for his fifties, practiced it in his late 30s and 40s, and then I wouldn't be so cynical about his motives. You can find my public pleading with him to ease up on the destruction in the archive of this blog and DaveNet. Further, I think it's buying into a lot of PR hype to call Gates a scientist as Pogue does. We've already devalued "innovation" to please Gates, now will we do the same to science? No panels at BloggerCon
Sign-up page for Friday night Food for Thought dinners. What if your number is greater than 150? Technography and OPML at BloggerCon IV. Peter Merholz on tech conferences. "Same old people singing the same old song." Kevin Marks has set up an IRC channel for BloggerCon. It's the same one we've used at previous shows. I've listed it on the Webcast page if you need to find it later. I am using Ircle on the Mac, and was stumbling around for an hour, frustrated with the user interface, until I found this howto, and now I'm on the BloggerCon channel. Whew. Jared Benedict: "It is my position that hyperlinking to publicly accessible MP3's is perfectly legal." Awesome Frontline last night on the face-off between Vice-President Cheney and former CIA Director Tenet, and then complicity in the deception that led to war in Iraq. Doug Kaye: Interviews via Skype. Heat wave! I promised it would be chilly, but I was wrong!
We're having a heat wave. It was 93 in Berkeley today. Not much cooler in SF. On Saturday the Bay Area's natural air conditioning kicks in, with a more reasonable high. But we'll sweat tomorrow and Friday. Live MCN
At 9:30AM Pacific, we'll do a live Morning Coffee Notes, via webcast. I can't Skype people in, but I can respond to things people say via IRC. We'll do it for 1/2 hour. Then I'll upload a WMV archive, and if someone can figure out how to convert it to an MP3, I'll redistribute that, or if not, I'll work on it later. How does that sound? PS: The archive didn't happen.
BloggerCon party: Thurs at 6:45PM, Jillian's, 4th & Howard. BloggerCon update. Thursday night party. Lunches. Parking. Giants. A's. Gay Pride. Dr John. What's the song?? BloggerCon webcast page.
Slate rates Apple ads: "If you're a PC user, these ads are more likely to irritate you than convert you." Foo Camp 2006 wiki. You're (probably) not invited. Tim O'Reilly: "If you didn't get invited, it doesn't mean you're not a 'Friend of O'Reilly.'" In my case, I think it does. Steve Rubel notes that CNN has an OPML of its podcast feeds. Jakob Nielsen in the WSJ on blogs, RSS, feeds. Engadget: USB teddy bear holds data, scares children. Jon Udell received a takedown notice from PRI (which is related to National Public Radio, here in the US, a subtle distinction). Google is having serious amnesia problems tonight. New header graphic, New York's Broadway, looking south from Houston St. Why did Bill Gates step down?
When the top executive of a major company steps down, even gradually, we are too easily distracted by the emotional arguments, and Microsoft plays this sleight of hand better than almost anyone, but come on, do you think Bill would be stepping aside if the graph were inverted? Why do they need two guys to take Bill's place? Even he admits the "software architect" thing was bogus. The only new architecture to take hold at Microsoft during Gates's tenure was RSS, and we all know where that architecture came from. How effective has Microsoft's capital expenditures on software R&D been over the last decade? Doesn't all the revenue still come from R&D that was done in the early 90s? How can Microsoft justify employing all those programmers? What exactly are they doing? And will Brad Silverberg be vindicated now that Firefox is forcing Microsoft to make their sites work with another browser? How do they like dancing to someone else's tune? After they bet the company on Bill Gates's aggressive vision for the net, and then let the investment rot in a mess of malware, now where is the company? Why doesn't Gates leave now, so that the new management can start fresh and make the adjustments that are needed to reverse the slide? And who's going to take Ballmer's place when they realize they need more than a sales guy who can lead a pep rally to run the company? Ballmer understands the software business in the same way that Gil Amelio did, in a very last generation way. He lacks the confidence in himself, rightly so, to make agile bets on behalf of Microsoft's share holders. Microsoft has been expending huge resources for over a decade in an effort to remain in place. Clearly now the giant must change some of its basic philosophy about who it is and what it does, and stop trying to stay in place, a place that barely exists now, and won't exist at all in a few more years. I guess the question is why is Gates taking so long to get out of the way?
Scion billboard in NY: "So wrong for so many." Jay Rosen: "All sites become equidistant from the reader." Johnny Carson via Doc Searls: "Don't bother getting married, just find someone you hate and buy them a house." Jon Udell picks "user generated content" as the most offensive buzzword. Jeff Veen: "The mob mentality of the blogosphere turned it's wrath on Tim O'Reilly for taking a vacation..." Just drop the B A few years back I wrote that the P in P2P is people. It got widely quoted, by O'Reilly even. Now we need to hack and mash again, to put the focus back where it belongs because it has wandered, again. Web 2.0 is wrong because it's about technology, and the importance of the tools are that they empower people. Luckily, it's easy to fix, just drop the B and it makes sense again. Morning BloggerCon Notes
Dreams
Feeds Of Evil I decided it's time to unsub from feeds that have those annoying little web bug graphics in each item, masquerading as "useful" stuff -- they're really there to send messages back to the publisher that the item was displayed in my browser. This means that every time I read the newest stuff, my machine sends hundreds of stupid messages to ComputerWorld, Fast Company, WNYC, USA Today and the Christian Science Monitor and other sites with these bugs. Enough. I'm on a campaign to eradicate these Feeds Of Evil from my subscription list. PS: Ze Frank's feed, whose show I love, has these stupid bugs in it too, so goodbye my dear friend, I'll have to get my knowledge by hand. Maybe I have to think for myself now. PPS: I got an email from Erik Gavriluk and from Ze Frank himself. They showed me how to work around the problems with the web bugs, and gave me a pointer to a feed with enclosures (the one I was reading didn't have them) so now I'm happy! My podcatcher is busily downloading the episodes I missed, and will automatically copy them to my video iPod so I can watch them on the subway. Awesome. Karl Rove's big fat backside NY Times: "Representative John Murtha, the Pennsylvania Democrat and Vietnam War veteran, on Sunday mocked Karl Rove, the president's senior adviser, for championing the war while 'sitting in his air-conditioned office on his big, fat backside.'"
Movie of my plane landing at SFO today. Uneventful. Rene Blodgett notes that the air smells different on the two US coasts. I have to say I noticed this too, on this trip. And I like the smells of both coasts. I esp like that at 8:45PM here in Berkeley, the temp is 57 degrees, and when I go out in a few minutes I'm going to have to wear a jacket.
Scott Rosenberg says the results you get often depend on how you ask a question. For example, you could ask if people want to aggregate RSS feeds, or if they would like to try automated web surfing. Scott says asking it the first way would be like asking if you want to access web pages with HTTP. I'm back in California, watched a really good movie on the way back, a thriller with lots of twists and turns, great acting. It seems I can't not like any movie with Nicole Kidman. Ze Frank in the NY Times. Great picture of Lisa Williams who's leading the Emotional Life discussion at BloggerCon later this week. Interesting issue to discuss at the 2008 Election session. It's the users, part II
There's actually a neater solution, especially if you've put a piece of software on the user's desktop to facilitate uploading and editing of the data -- keep a copy of all the data on the user's desktop, and just mirror it in your web app. There goes the problem (or is it an excuse) that your competitor would be using your CPU cycles to grab a copy of the user's data (with the user's permission, I should add, you need a username and password to get access, so the argument that they're protecting against scrapers and abusers doesn't hold water). With a local copy, the user can point any service at the data, and it can suck up a copy, and the competitor's app would run on the user's desktop too, using their (abundant) CPU cycles. The vendor's server (in this case Flickr) wouldn't even know that a copy of the data has been made, and since it's the user's data, that's exactly as it should be. Yet another reason to use rich clients. I use Flickr Uploadr, always. It's just a bit easier to work with than the browser-based method of uploading, and that bit of easiness has proven to be worth it. Then of course the competitor has to offer a desktop tool as well. We do it with the OPML Editor. The server components, the directory browser, blog renderer, work with a copy of the data, the originals reside on the user's machine. It also protects against a system failure, or a company failure.
Niall Kennedy: Standards for Users.
I had lunch today with Andrew Baron of Rocketboom, it's the second consecutive Saturday I've had a meal with Andrew, last week it was in San Francisco at Vloggercon. We will continue the discussion next weekend back in San Francisco, because Andrew will be coming west to be part of BloggerCon. Must be something karmic about it. After the lunch we walked over to the Apple store on Prince St, and walking back to my car on Houston, I passed these soulful singers, and of course had to shoot a movie. It's the users, dummy!
This will be on-topic in two back-to-back sessions at BloggerCon next week, Users In Charge, led by Chris Pirillo; and Standards for Users led by Niall Kennedy. My goal is to help raise awareness that standards are for the users. They are not just a marketing checklist item, there are real, important reasons why users benefit when vendors don't hold the users' work hostage. It's why Web 2.0 with its focus on vendors controlling "User Generated Content" creates problems for users. This comment from Flickr creator Stewart Butterfield shows clearly why we need a user's conference to resolve these issues, because, like all other tech vendors, he's only focusing on his competitor, Zooomr and ignoring the interests of his customers. Yes, I know Flickr has an export function, but by making it harder than it has to be, you're holding on to something you have no right to hold on to. When users wisen up, and that day is inevitable, you will have lost the battle, it'll be too late then to give them their entitlement. If Zooomr isn't reciprocating that's their problem (or more accurately their users' problem) and they'll pay for it. My job, as the guy who started BloggerCon, is to help you get recognition for giving all the power of choice to your users. The only criteria for winning that should be tolerated, by anyone, are features, performance and price. Lock-in is not an honorable or sustainable way to win. Another observation. Every time there's a competitive market like this, the vendors learn something that seems counter-intuitive. Users who are attracted to Zoooomr will not stop using Flickr. The core users will use all the tools, even competitive tools that seem to be clones of each other, because some are strong in one area and others are strong in others. In the Mac graphic tools market, for example, people who used PageMaker got Quark, but they never stopped using PageMaker. And they also used Canvas and Illustrator and even MacDraw and MacPaint, because they all did things the others didn't. What made this possible was file format compatibility. So Stewart, let your users try Zooomr, make it easy for them! We won't stop using Flickr, unless you stop moving it forward, and you know because you have integrity, that if you stop moving it, you have no right to hold on to the users. Dunkin Donuts iced coffee is great on a hot summer day Sometimes I feel like putting the picture of a commercial product on my blog because I'm enjoying a seasonal beverage, for example, in its place of origin. This morning, the beginning of what promises to be a sweltering hot day in NYC, I am enjoying a tall Dunkin Donuts iced coffee. Yummy! It's a tradition I started when I lived in the Boston area a few years ago, where there is a Dunkin Donuts on virtually every street corner. In Boston they're staffed by young Brazillian emigres, they work fast and efficiently, and the line in the morning is often long, filled with teachers, cops, students, moms, sales people, postal clerks, working class Boston people. The line may be long, but it moves fast. The point of this little screed is that every commercial site should have easy to crib clip art of their most famous products, to make it easy to give them a free plug on my blog. Earthlink sucks, don't buy any
Nowadays at the beginning of each show Steve inserts a 3-minute rambling advertorial for Earthlink. After listening to it twice (the first time it was actually entertaining) I learned to skip over it, but then Steve implemented a workaround, he went to six minutes (I made the mistake of telling him I was skipping over the 3 minute version). Then, after a short break, he splices in the recorded banter between himself, Mike Arrington, Doc, and whoever else happens to be on the Gang that week, you know, the entertaining stuff, the stuff I came for. It's mind-numbingly stupid, but it's funny and stupid. A perfect companion while eating Vietnamese noodle soup in downtown Berkeley. So then I had a brainstorm, why not force Doc and Mike to listen to Steve's bullshit about Earthlink, and let them tease him, on-air, while he reads the ad. Doc loved the idea. Then we flipped it around, and decided that we're not doing Earthlink any favors, because this advertising thing is just making us hate them even more than we already did. I said to Doc, it would be better for Earthlink if we got some users to talk to them in the podcast, explaining how they could make Earthlink better. After all, their ads say how much they love us and how they're just like our camp counselor or kindergarten teacher, or our moms, and they really care what we think. So let's tell them what we think. Earthlink sucks, and we don't appreciate you wasting our time before we get to listen to the Gillmor Gang. I rest my case.
Paul McCartney turns 64 on Sunday (which also is my father's 77th). It's interesting because he wrote a famous (and great) song about being 64, back when he was in his 20s. "When I get older, losing my hair, many years from now." Had a real interesting all-day meeting today with Jeff Pulver. John Edwards is keynoting Gnomedex. Heard in NY: "My own private IPO." Rex Hammock, who's coming to BloggerCon from Nashville, blogs on the Dallas Mavericks and their blogging owner, Mark Cuban. Lisa Williams will lead the Emotional Life discussion at BloggerCon, the last session of the first day, one week from today. Jeff Cheney tells an "Emotional Life" story on his blog today. Jeff will be at BloggerCon.
The BloggerCon unconference format BloggerCon is an unusual conference. We don't have speakers, panels or an audience. We do have discussions and sessions, and each session has a discussion leader. The discussion leader
The discussion leader is also the editor, so if he or she feels that a point has been made they must move on to the next point quickly. No droning, no filibusters, no repeating an idea over and over. The discussion leader can also call on people, so stay awake, you might be the next person to speak! Think of it as a weblog Think of the conference as if it were a weblog. At the beginning of each session, the leader talks between five and fifteen minutes to introduce the idea and some of the people in the room. Then she'll point to someone else. She may ask a couple of questions to get them going, then she'll point to someone else, then someone else, then make a comment, ask a question, etc. Each person talks for two to three minutes. Long enough to make a point. About the time someone would take if they called into a radio talk show. We have a limited amount of time, and a group of participants whose time is valuable. The leader's job is to make sure the show stays interesting, even captivating. If it gets boring people will go out in the hall and schmooze, or focus their attention on the IRC channel, or read their email, or whatever. So the leader's job is to keep it moving. Sometimes this means cutting people off. How to prepare Since every person in a session is considered an equal participant, everyone should prepare at least a little. Think about the subject, read the comments on the BloggerCon site. Follow weblogs from other people who are paticipating. Think about what you want to get out of the session, and what questions you wish to raise, and what information or points of view you'd like to get from the session. Everyone is a journalist BloggerCon is an unusual conference in that almost everyone participating writes publicly. So we assume that everyone present is a journalist. Every badge is a press badge. On the record All conversations, whether to the entire room or one-to-one, unless otherwise stated, clearly and up front, are on the record and for attribution. You do not need to ask permission to quote something you hear at BloggerCon. Of course you may ask for permission to quote, and you may choose not to quote things you hear. It's a user's conference Where I come from, the technology world, most conferences are centered around the vendors. This is not like those conferences. Here, vendors are welcome, and we hope they will help by sponsoring a party, dinner or brunch, but they participate mainly by listening.
Further, if they say the technology is too complicated for a user to understand, ask them why, and if they could simplify it so we can understand. And if not, why should we use it? Perhaps a new user-centered philosophy will emerge. Things we assume Sometimes conferences bog down in meta-discussions, discussions about what it's okay to discuss. I want to try to head some of that off in advance by stating some assumptions, and asking people who want to discuss these things to either discuss them here on the Web beforehand, or to find another venue to discuss them. 1. Weblogs are journalism. Not all weblogs, and not all the time. People have said weblogs aren't journalism, and that seems foolish, as strange as saying telephones aren't journalism. It's kind of a moot question. Weblogs can be used for journalism, or not. When people say they're not journalism, I think they haven't thought it through well enough. 2. What is a weblog is an interesting question. At the Jupiter conference when the question of what a weblog is came up some people would say it's not a good question. At BloggerCon if you have an idea that requires you to say or ask what a weblog is, please go ahead. It's totally on-topic. I would consider the conference a success if that's the only thing we figured out. (Chances are we won't, btw.) Groundrule: No commercials
There are good reasons for this, if one person talks about his or her product, then their competitors will feel they are entitled to, and pretty soon the user's needs are drowned out by the needs of the vendors. The point of this conference is to focus on users. WiFi, webcast, IRC Wireless Internet access will be available. With luck, each session will be webast, audio only. You are welcome to bring your own recording equipment, cameras are allowed, basically the rules allow Grateful Dead/Phish style recording. Bring your microphone or camera and recording device, and record it and broadcast it any way you like. Be innovative. Have fun. Share. Be cool. Still diggin. Etc. (But please don't interfere with the sessions.) There will be one IRC channel for the conference. Other people may start channels for topics. If so please send a pointer to a page describing how to get on. Earlier posts Gizmodo: "Something so simple that we wish we'd have thought of it." Me too! Check out beta.netscape.com. Instead of buying Digg for $50 million, Jason Calacanis convinced AOL management to let him turn Netscape into a Digg-alike, with a small editorial staff that does unique reporting on the stories readers vote most interesting. I sat next to Jason at the dinner on Friday in SF and heard the story, among many others.
BloggerCon IV: Preliminary Schedule. Notes on the upcoming conference, a place to comment. Elisa Camahort: Building Bridges. Chris Pirillo and Jake Luddington have received a cease-and-desist demand to take down the Vista BitTorrent tracker, and of course they have complied. Tom Yager: Why Apple snubs its open source geeks.
Paolo Valdemarin, who will be traveling from Italy to be at the conference, offers a first impression of the Flock browser. Marc Barrot is coming from London and Richard MacManus from New Zealand. Lots of people coming from Canada and other parts of the US. James Vornov is trying an experiment I've been thinking of trying myself, he's put both a Windows and Mac verison of the OPML Editor on an iPod Nano that goes with him everywhere. The software needs some tweaking to make that work really elegantly, but I bet it's not very much. Another Sims user is experiencing intense bubbles, this time coming from the butt of one of his characters. I feel your pain, but I never did find a workaround. The character lost the bubbles when she became an elder. Marc Barrot: "ActiveRolls are just like regular blogrolls, with a twist, active outline wedges uncover underlying levels of information." Amyloo's car roll viewed through Marc Barrot's tool. Bob Wyman on the not-bright future of PubSub. Mike Arrington: "What a waste." It only matters if you come from the last century Scott Karp says that Google is killing the economics of content, which is sensationalist, and only important if you care about "content," not so important if you care | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Today Google announced the innocuously named "Google Checkout" but it's so much more than that, and if we've learned anything about identity and trust, it won't work for Google, as it didn't work for Microsoft. 
Knock wood, Praise Murphy, I am not a lawyer and my mother loves me. With all those disclaimers out of the way, I am willing to proclaim that I think I may have found the nasty table that was overflowing on the OPML Community server that was causing the performance problems. The server has been performing very well for 24 hours, so with any luck at all it should perform well in the next 24 hours and so on. In the meantime another fire has started which I am now trying to put out. Welcome to life on the server side. 
I met so many interesting people at BloggerCon this week, it's impossible to tell the story of every one of them. Further, there were combinations of people who would not likely have met otherwise, who I saw talking and thought "Wow that's power." Anyway, at dinner on Friday night I sat near a couple of guys from a company in Bellingham, WA, who do all their work in Frontier. A 40-person company. I didn't know such a thing existed. I suggested that we might fund some work on the Frontier kernel to make our servers run more smoothly, and they were immediately receptive. This led me to start thinking of projects I would commission. 
Doing a conference like BloggerCon is exhausting work. First, you work around the clock the week leading up to the show, spend a lot of time waiting for stuff to happen, for people to call back, etc. You make lots of lists, do things on the list, scratch things off, move undone tasks from one list to another, and in the end, there's plenty of stuff you never got to do, but somehow it all works anyway.
On Friday, Jay Rosen asked for a show of hands of people who had been to all four BloggerCons. Only two hands went up, Jay's and my own, so I made an 
The next conference on the Summer of Love Tour of West Coast Blogging conferences is hosted by Chris Pirillo, seen (making faces) in this 
A question for Windows podcast pros. We've got 
There's been a lot of 
Continuing the theme for this year's BloggerCon, empowering the users, Jay Rosen has written the 
Think of the discussion leader as a reporter who is creating a story with quotes from the people in the room. So, instead of having a panel with an audience we just have people. We feel this more accurately reflects what's going on. It's not uncommon for the audience at a conference to have more expertise than the people who are speaking. 
Most of the people who are talking are users. In my opinion, these are the revolutionaries. Vendors make a living by creating tools that these people use to change the world. So much attention is focused on technology, too much imho. At this conference we turn it around and focus on what people are doing with the technology. So if you hear someone say it's about the technology, expect me to challenge if I'm present. If not, stand up and say "That's not correct."
This is a user's conference, it's non-commercial, you may not promote products. If a discussion naturally turns to products, it's okay to talk about them, but it's probably not okay to talk about your product, unless the discussion leader asks you to. No matter what you must ask for permission, and don't be surprised if the answer is no. 
The webcast has always been the hardest part of BloggerCon, it's an expensive proposition to do right, we thought we had it covered this time, but I found out late this afternoon that we don't. We need some organization to provide the webcast transmission for us (we will provide the production and engineering), or find $8000 to pay a vendor to do it for us. We're only doing audio, not video. If you want to make a contribution, you can use the 
I begged and pleaded with 
things for us at this con. 1. He will lead the end-of-day discussion on Friday, summing up the day's events and getting ideas from people while they're still fresh in our minds, and 2. He will be the official note-taker for the conference, in outline form, projected in real-time for everyone to see. His notes will be rendered in HTML and OPML and uploaded to the web, also in real-time. (I will provide a specification of where the OPML files will be, if people with OPML tools want to show off their wares.) 
