Announcing the formation of the New York State Lottery CamWorld Lotto Group. If you'd like to be part of my 26-week lottery subscription group, get in touch with me and I will tell you how to participate. This is really more of an experiment in online community and communication than anything else.
Andy Oram compares the CBDTPA to purse-snatching:
Let's say there was a rash of thieves riding by women on bicycles or scooters and snatching purses. So the federal government passes a law saying that no transportation device may be manufactured or sold unless it incorporates protection against purse snatching.
Excellent. Some amateur Internet sleuthing has exposed Herbalife as the company behind most of those tacky "Work From Home" signs that plaster telephone poles across the country.
Why would you paint your floor purple? Kevin Fox thinks it's all Microsoft FUD.
NYC Metafilter Get-together: Massive weblogger and Metafilter get-together here in New York City on April 25 at the Pioneer Bar (Bowery between Prince and Spring) at 8:00 PM.
New Windows "filesystem" a threat to Open Source. I'm not sure how I feel about this:
"Microsoft is replacing the plumbing of its Windows operating system with technology borrowed from its SQL Server database software. Currently, documents, Web pages, e-mail files, spreadsheets and other information are stored in separate, mostly incompatible software. The new technology will unify storage in a single database built into Windows that's more easily searchable, more reliable, and accessible across corporate networks and the Internet." So Microsoft wants to get rid of application files (such as MS Word doc files) and store everything in a database. The ramifications of this are staggering.
I'm getting emails from Mozilla's Bugzilla tracker about minor cosmetic bugs I was tracking two years ago. The fact that some of these bugs are now being closed tells me that Mozilla 1.0 is getting closer and closer. There will probably be 2-3 Release Candidates before they officially release a 1.0 version.
Database of Web Robots. Nice!
My condolences go out to the British people, in their time of loss.
John Salinas from Ideawire pointed out a nice feature at php.net regarding URL search strings. If you type http://php.net/search_for_this into the location field of your browser and hit return, it will automatically do a search for "search_for_this" instead of resulting in a 404-Page Not Found error. He also points out that it would be very cool if Google and other popular sites implemented a feature like this, further increasing the speed of accessing information.
As Easter approaches the geeks get excited about Peeps, those sugary sweet marshmallow candies. Every year more and more bizarre and funny Peep web pages and experiments pop up. This year, it's Peep Surgery.
Camgirls and Webcams: Doc is talking about his [lack of] interest in webcams in response to the stupid NY Times article from the other day about how the Web is boring. This reminded me of a conversation I had with a "camgirl" at the SXSW conference earlier this month. I was at one of the opening parties and this "camgirl" walks up to me, dressed in a very revealing mini-skirt and a crazy stuffed animal of some sort. She's flaunting something but I'm not exactly sure what it is. She looks at my nametag and her eyes light up "Oh, CamWorld! I have a webcam. My cam site is [herfirstname]cam.com." She goes on for a few minutes talking about something, possibly herself. At this point I realize that she's asked me what my name is and is wanting a response. I look straight at her and say "My name is Cam. From CamWorld." A moment of realization crosses her face and she says "Oh," looks at her shoes, and walks away.
Sigh...Yahoo! apparently is resetting everyone's "marketing preference" in preparation for selling user data to spammers and marketers. If you have a Yahoo account you should go change it back (unless you like spam). I would not be surprised to also see Microsoft pull this stunt with Hotmail, which I've stopped using out of disprespect for Passport.
Chris Hamilton: "Someone on the WWWAC e-mail distribution list noted that We Have the Way Out, the anti-UNIX (UNIX-like) campaign launched by Microsoft and Unisys, is powered by FreeBSD and Apache."
I say I say, the Web is not boring. Here's a guy who created a giant bear out of ketchup packets and then shot at it and burnt it.
Interesting site called Untold History. The first story is The History of Flash, as told by Jonatha Gay the buy behind FutureSplash (what Flash was called before Macromedia bought it). The LEGO angle is fascinating.
Oh, this is rich. Florida governor Jeb Bush's re-election campaign people got a hold of an email list of his competition's supporters, and then spammed them. I love it when the politicians show exactly how little respect for campaign etiquette they have.
Funny. This site is mentioned in the back (on the humor page) of the latest PC Magazine.
This NY Times article is ridiculous. I guess the author of this article about the Web not being fun anymore hasn't been looking very hard. I love the Web as much today as I always have. It never ceases to amaze me. Sure, I admit that I've burnt out on some things, but I would never dream of not having it as part of my life and career. Comment.
The site developers at Sharp-USA have it all wrong. When you visit www.sharp-usa.com with the latest version of Mozilla, you are redirected to a browser upgrade page that says "To fully experience the Sharp USA site, you need to have Version 4 or above of Internet Explorer or Netscape Navigator Version 4.x." Idiots. Someone needs to tweak their browser-detection script. What's even more ironic is there is a 2-year old bug in Mozilla's Bugzilla database that addresses problems with sharp-usa.com.
Jock Gill: Overthrowing the telecom monopoly: The best medicine for democratic development both at home and abroad
Dan Gillmor: Journalistic Pivot Point. Rebecca counters.
I tried Reese's new Fast Break candy bar today. I really like it, except for the name. What kind of name is "Fast Break" for a candy bar. It should be called Peanut Butter Yummy Goodness. The candy bar has a URL on the wrapper: www.reesesfastbreak.com
Taking the PC case to the next level. [via Larkfarm]
The Economist: A lemon law for software? This would probably bankrupt Microsoft. Actually, I wouldn't mind some of their money...
Did I mention that any donation over $8.00 to the CamWorld Tip Jar will earn you a free CamWorld t-shirt. I have a new shipment of t-shirts in, with more colors (white, gray or light blue) for the women to choose from. If you leave a tip and would like a shirt mailed to you, be sure to contact me with your postal address and preferred gender and shirt size.
Usability News: Developing Schemas for the Location of Common Web Objects
Call For Discussion: Are you interested in the community aspects of weblogs? Do you like organizing events with your friends and fellow webheads. Are you a good problem solver or good at group coordination? If this intrigues you, contact me and I'll let you know about something (not publicly announced yet) I'm working on that you might be able to participate in.
You can now run Microsoft Office apps on Linux using something called Crossover Office.
Michael Fraase: When Elephants Dance
Grady Booch from Rational, often labeled as the father of object-oriented programming, compares Java and Microsoft's .NET. I'm not a big fan of the Rational Unified Process (RUP) as applied to software engineering, but Booch has some interesting things to say.
Usability Infocentre: Text-only is not accessible. Well sure, "text-only" is not a synonym for "accessible". Text-only enhances accessibility of a Web site, rather than automatically solving your accessibility problems. It's rather humorous that this usability site suffers from the tiny-font issue in Netscape 4. Such an easy fix, yet they overlook it. Unfortunately font-size: x-small isn't always your friend in Netscape 4.x.
James Robertson: Losing sight of the content in a content management system
Wow, has it really been five years since the Heaven's Gate cult killed themselves? I'm starting to feel old. Here's an mirror of their famous Web site.
This doesn't surprise me at all. It's typical Microsoft behavior and illustrates exactly why there are Web standards and why Microsoft should be required to follow them before releasing free software (like Internet Explorer) on to the world. Actually, that should be a requirement for any free software. If you release it for free, it must conform to an industry standard, and not just a proprietary standard that your biased developers came up with on a whim (ahem, Microsoft, cough cough Userland).
Ximian announces Connector, which allows people using Evolution to connect to Microsoft Exchange servers. The only problem with this is that you have to pay for Connector and there's nothing stopping Microsoft from releasing a patch ("oops, we didn't mean to break your Connector software") that will require existing Connector users to upgrade.
Very interesting. A company here in New York called Longbow is selling services around something called WebMorph, a "Microsoft-to-Linux Web Conversion Service." They explain that WebMorph is "For those clients who are concerned with the never ending security flaws inherent to Microsoft web technologies."
Victor Lombardi, an information architect at Razorfish in New York has written up an analysis of how the three big online bookseller's home pages have evolved over time. Interesting read, especially since I was very involved in the design of the Borders.com site from 1998-2000.
So, you've got a cat. Said cat likes to bring home live critters and let them loose in the house. So, what do you do? Why, you hook a webcam up to an imaging program which is fed into a computer which analyzes whether your cat is carrying anything in its mouth. If it is, the computer does not allow the cat door to open. In fact, it's what any geek would do: use technology to solve a problem. [via cardhouse]
Can you spot the hidden bird? [via 120 Degrees]
Car & Driver: It's a truck that's hard to miss. Plus, you can frighten small children and suburban livestock with it.
Watching TechTV shows is like watching cable access television but with really good sets and better equipment. Damien says the guy on Screen Savers right now lives up the street from us. "I fixed his iMac," he says. Apparently he has a bizarre off-Broadway show called "21 Dog Years: Doing Time @ Amazon.com" which is getting decent reviews.
Somehow I missed the formation of Blogzilla, a weblog about Mozilla. It's definitely on my regular reading list now.
I realized recently that I would probably play the Lottery more often if it were more convenient to acquire tickets. So I thought about a service that would buy tickets for you on a regular basis, with a nice Web front-end that would let you change your picked numbers, the number of tickets you want and a convenient hook into an online billing service. I even have a name for it. I'd call it AutoLotto. Does anything like this exist?
Excellent article about the business case for Java on the mobile phone.
Amazing! Drag this bookmarklet [Google Translate!] to your Web browser toolbar and whenever you hit a Web page in a foreign language all it takes is one click and it's automatically translated into English for you, via the magic of Google's translation engine. It doesn't do Japanese or Chinese (yet). [via Microcontent News]
SXSW 2002 Photos: I finally got my SXSW photo gallery up.
CamWorld TipJar: Did you know it costs money to run CamWorld? If you enjoy it, please drop a tip in the Tipjar. The first batch of CamWorld t-shirts are almost sold out. Another batch has been ordered, with more colors and sizes for the women to choose from. An order page with pictures will up soon. To those readers who have generously contributed, a big thank you. Your donations go a long way in helping offset the monthly hosting costs.
A reader forwarded me this link to baiting.org, which is a site that chronicles the "baiting" of people in AOL chat rooms.
Maxify Design: Concerns on Flash MX Positioning
Wednesday night I went to the opera. We saw Porgy and Bess, a Gershwin opera that is written in English. The nosebleeds seats were cheap but I just didn't enjoy this opera as much as I have enjoyed those that are in Italian. There's something not right about singing an opera in English. It's like it doesn't flow as smoothly or something. I can't quite describe it. I think the Sportin' Life character is pure genius.
Junk Mail: I never thought about it but this is a great idea, regarding fighting junk mail: "I've started taking out all the postage-paid reply envelopes from all my junk mail, sealing them up empty and sending them back. Make the junk mailers pay for postage twice." - Judy Kiel on WebDesign-L.
Mark Howells replies:
No, there's a much better way of dealing with them. Either send them each other's junk mail in their own envelopes, or finely shred an old newspaper and send that (making sure it's over the paid weight so they have to fork out twice).
Random images from my /misc directory:
Apparently, Network Solutions (owned by Verisign) has lost so many customers through their own gross negligance they're now resorting to tricky direct mail marketing sent to competing registrar's customers in order to trick people into renewing their domains with them. NetSol isn't the only registrar doing this. I regularly receive direct mail from two-bit registrars telling me I need to renew a domain I've registered through another more-trusted registrar. [via Script Digital]
I'll say it again. The Japanese mobile device market is years ahead of the U.S. It's frustrating that gadget geeks in the U.S. can't get or use this stuff.
From Keitai-L:
The problem I have with PocketPC is the "PC" bit. The whole point of a keitai-anything is that it's not a PC. [Ed. The word "keitai" in Japanese means "mobile device".]
Here's a good article from The Economist about the state of the mobile phone technology in the U.S.
Sun is going to start offering a commercial version of StarOffice, but will continue to offer OpenOffice as a free download.
Scary. I guess the only thing to do in this instance is to insist that you have your ID checked by hand or to patronize a different bar. The increase in "national security" and the crazy places (my doctor's office, for instance) that you have to have your ID checked just to get into a building is getting out of hand. It almost makes me want to acquire a fake ID to use just so I'm not spammed and marketed to death by companies who abuse this private information. For a historical perspective, read "Databanks in a Free Society: Computers, Record Keeping and Privacy" by Alan F. Westin.
Ordinal Spam: Do you need help becoming a priest? Do you want to start your own church? Oh my...
Knight-Ridder's RealCities hub is a good idea, but I'm doubting they will succeed. The transition from the old individual newspaper sites to RealCities has been rough. Someone did not plan this very well, obviously.
Jason Fried of Spinfree (and 37Signals) has released Singlefile, a Web service that allows you to keep track of your book collection. Jason is one of the best user interface designers I know. In a year or two when I start my own company, I'm going to recruit Jason (and a few other people I admire). I've been discussing this Singlefile idea with Jason for about three years ever since we got in touch with each other after I asked him about creating a Web front-end to his Filemaker run-time application called BookBin which does the same thing. I also floated this idea when I was working at Borders.com but the management [typically] ignored me. Back in 1999 I was playing around with the idea of developing a startup around this concept and got so far as developing some preliminary HTML mockups. I stopped development on the idea and Jason forged ahead. Singlefile is the end result. Awesome.
Interesting. The Church of Scientology is using the DCMA to get Google to remove links to sites that allegedly infringe upon their intellectual property.
If you don't think the Church of Scientology isn't a whacked-out cult, check out this paragraph from the story linked above. Yeah, these people are sane. I'll bet their spaceship is hiding behind a comet, too, waiting to transport them to the next plane of existance.
Hubbard's secret scriptures teach that 75 million years ago, an evil galactic overlord named Xenu solved the galaxy's overpopulation problem by freezing excess people and transporting the bodies to Teegeeack, now called Earth. After the hapless travelers were defrosted, they were chained to volcanoes that were blown up by hydrogen bombs -- and their disembodied spirits continue to haunt mankind today.
Meg Hourihan has a nice piece about Attendee-Centered Conference Design up at O'ReillyNet. She nails it ona c ouple of issues, mostly about how poorly organized and thouth out some conferences can be. Attendees don't want to spend a lot of money only to go to a crappy conference with lousy speakers and no group dynamics/interaction. It gives a new meaning to peer-to-peer interaction.
Pretty frequently I get unsolicted AOL IM requests from teenagers (and adults?) scouting for people to hook up with. Sometimes I like to mess with their heads. A reader sent along this link to Amber Forever, some guys chat logs of pretending to be a 14-year old girl named Amber and stringing people along on chat to see how far he can get them to go. Ha ha. (Warning, a bit crude and sexual.)
SuperModels Are Lonelier Than You Think! is a new weblog that covers news and tidbits from the supermodel industry. Cool!
Brian Carnell: "The only thing Winer's announcement [re: NY Times syndication] means is that the NYT is still clueless (and reaffirms a lot of suspicions people had about working with Winer on things like RSS 0.92)."
Hmmm, what does Apple have in itsss pocketsss? Is it precioussss? My precioussss....
Oops. Looks like someone didn't patch their servers. Heh-heh.
I've recently started using Mozilla 0.9.9 more. A full week's use has seen it crash only once. I'm in the middle of doing a bunch of QA tessting on some web applications we're building so I'm using Mozilla as my main test browser. I'm growing to like it. I've also started to tech-edit the forthcoming Creating Applications With Mozilla book for O'Reilly. No solid publication date for this book but I expect it to be on the shelves by the mid-Summer (or sooner). Just in time for Mozilla 1.0.
Spiders on drugs. Hmmm.... [via BoingBoing]
PFIR: Overcoming ICANN: Forging Better Paths for the Internet
John Udell talks about writing in Mozilla. This reminds me of the old Alphanumerica project we called the Mozilla ScriptEditor which was an attempt to create a BBEdit-like text editor that would sit on top of the Mozilla Application Framework. It's similar in concept to how the BareBones guys are starting to tightly integrate BBedit for OS X into the command-line interface of Mac OS X.
Grrl.com: My Date With Cape Boy
How I Gave Jon Stewart Customized Jockey Shorts. Hmmm, gives me some ideas...
Heh, the iBong. Funny.
CorporateMofo: Deconstructing NYC subway ads. You kinda have to ride the NYC subways regularly to understand this.
How Young Scientologists Spend Their Mornings: Last week in Austin, Texas I was part of several conversations about the prevalent Scientology community there. I didn't experience this first-hand until the last day I was in Austin, shopping for some souvenirs on 4th Street. On the corner were about 6-10 young, well-dressed men and women attempting to pass out small flyers. Living in new York, I've become accustomed to ignoring the people who try to thrust things into your hand as you walk past. These kids were different. They walk right up to you, look you straight in the eye and ask you something like "Would you like a free gift?" or "Would you like a free personality test?" I answer "No thanks" to which one of the young men responded "You're missing out, man" as I walked away. This whole incident was in direct contrast to their cohort, a well-dressed guy on the street corner shouting (not yelling) as loud as he could the virtues of being a Scientologist. I didn't pay attention to what he was shouting but it was pretty typical stuff. Blah blah blah.
Justin Hall, who was first known to the world for his groundbreaking Web site Justin's Links From the Underground (circa 1995-1996) has posted a great slideshow he presented last week at SXSW about Japanese mobile phone culture. Looking over his pictures, I'm disappointed that I did not attend his session. I'll know better next year.
To give you an idea of how corrupt and screwed up ICANN is, the Director who was elected to his post is being forced to sue the ICANN management to get access to the corporate records. Something stinks in ICANNville.
Spammers are morons. The subject line of an email I just got is: "Subject: C:\Documents and Settings\Administrator\Desktop\progies\superserver\Mailings\subjects\subjects\stock2.txt OTFHZT". They can't even use their spamming software properly. Doh!
Ego-Googling: The other day Tom Negrino was the 178th most important Tom on Google. Today he is #201. OK, Tom. Here's a link. And another. Maybe that'll help.
If I didn't already think AOL IM was dominated by teenagers, this IM I just got confirms it:
Irish0099: DitzyChicka21: U have been hit with the make-out chain! You have ten minutes to send this to 12 people. If you send it to 12 people in ten minutes, you will make out with your crush within twenty four hours. If you dont send it to 12 people in 10 minutes, you will have bad luck with kissing for the rest of your life. Good Luck
I will be attending the Meet-the-Makers conference/peer meeting in NYC on April 23. If you are coming I'll see you there.
A company called Siruis is trying to kill WiFi (802.11 networking) because it could potentially interfere with their lame and unproven technology that uses the 2.4 Ghz spectrum. I guess no one told Sirius that they needed to shit or get off the pot.
My long-time readers know that I've ranted and raved about how innovative the writing of Jim Munroe is. His two books Angry Young Spaceman and Flyboy Action Figure Comes With Gasmask are some of the most inventive, funny and fresh science fiction to have hit the bookshelves in quite some time. So, last week at SXSW I was having lunch with Cory Doctorow and mentioned that he ought to read Jim's work. Turns out that Cory and Jim are old pals from way back (both are from Toronto). I forgot about this conversation until Cory pointed to something Jim put on his Web site the other day. Hee hee, reminds me of Paul Rosa's Idiot Letters, which is one of the better bathroom reading books I have.
I kind of knew Google News was coming. A completely logical move. [via Research Buzz]
The New York Times News Tracker. Get email headlines via email based on a matching search query.
I thought I was going to be stuck in Houston last night. The American Airlines flight I was on had some mechanical problems that took about three hours to fix. On the flight back I sorted my SXSW pics, cropped them, and cleaned them up. I should have a gallery up in a day or two.
I got an email from the people who are working to get Koyaanisqatsi released on DVD (I contributed money towards this cause):
I am pleased to let you know that in late January IRE and MGM reached an amicable accommodation that will allow the re-release of KOYAANISQATSI and POWAQQATSI on DVD to occur as early as the Fall of 2002.
FlashMX: While everyone was sleeping, Macromedia released FlashMX, their new player that is being billed as a "replacement" for HTML and traditional Web technologies. This is exactly the wrong way to sell this product. During Kevin Lynch's keynote earlier this week at SXSW he failed to address this issue despite Jeff Veen's insistance that Flash needs to be thought of as a component of Web design/development, not the be-all, end-all solution that some Macromedia die-hards are billing it as. So, I don't really have any concern over FlashMX. It's a very cool technology, but I am worried that people will misinterpret it as a web application platform and abandon HTML and other tried-and-true technologies. What this boils down to is that suddenly we're going to find ourselves (again) developing multiple versions of the same site. One in HTML and one in Flash. Unfortunately out clients will not be willing to pay for this and will be forced to choose between Flash and HTML. Sigh...
Perl.com: Stopping Spam with SpamAssassin. Everyone I know is using SpamAssassin. I need to try it out soon since my existing filters are becoming less effective.
One of the best things about SXSW was it was a like a giant 5-day long peer group meeting. And one of the coolest things about that was that you got to see each each other's computing environments. Nine out of ten Powerbooks I saw were running Mac OS X. It felt weird for me to still be running Mac OS 9.2 on my TiBook (I run OS X on my dektop machine at home). I guess I'm going to cave into peer pressure and upgrade soon. Several people who watched me blog the conference called me "old school" for still using BBEdit and Anarchie to write CamWorld and not some CMS or publishing system like MoveableType.
Let me tell ya, there's nothing sillier (or cuter) than Alison Headley drunk at 3:00 AM at the Omni Hotel atrium bar. Alison, we love ya.
Lisa Rein just walked up to me and handed me a Starbucks iced mocha. She rocks.
I must have been on crack the day I made my SXSW hotel reservations. Two years ago I stayed at the La Qunita Capitol hotel and it sucked. Why I decided to stay there again, I don't know. Sadly, it still sucks. If I come to SXSW next year, I'm staying at the Omni.
Blogging the Weblog Panel (Live): The panelists are Meg Hourihan, Rusty Foster, Doc Searls and Cameron Marlow.
12:34 PM: Meg is speaking, doing the introductions. Wants the panel to be interactive, not just a presentation. Does everyone know what a weblog is? Does anyone not? Audience laughs.
12:36 PM: Meg says weblogs bring together a breadth of knowledge that is unmateched in traditional journalism. We are "domain experts" and provide a more accurate story. Wants to explore the collective of this group. How does this balance against the media conglomerates?
12: 38 PM: Rusty introduces himself. The Internet is fundamentially a two-way medium. It is different from all the other mass media we have. K5 is not about journalism. But the site and the ideas behind it are about journalism. The collaborative model behind K5 is about bringing people together.
12:40 PM: Doc introduces himself. "I am in fact a media whore." Asks how many of the audience are webloggers. 90% of the audience raises their hands.
12:42 PM: Cameron is speaking. He is focused on the research aspect behind weblogs. There are a huge number of weblogs, but they are connected. It is a personal connection. They are conencted socially in and informationally. Talks about Blogdex and how it displays the network/connection behind weblogs.
12:44 PM: Meg asks "What is a journalist?" What is the difference between a professional and an amateur? Doc says being a professional is being paid to write. "I use my blog to drive traffic to Linux Journal."
12:48 PM: Cameron says that being professional means providing the responsibility for being factual and reporting the facts.
12:49 PM: An audience member talks about a woman in Houston who is in jail for refusing to give up her sources. She was not protected as a normal professional journalist is.
12:50 PM: Audience member, from IndyMedia, talks about how their reporters are seen as part of a protest instead of as real/professional journalists or part of the professional media.
12:53 PM: Doc says that companies require proof that you are a professional journalist before issuing a press pass.
12:55 PM: Companies have a limited amount of resources, so they naturally want the best coverage. Doc says "Bloggers are going to give great coverage, so companies will soon recognize that."
12:57 PM: Meg asks "If a weblogger writes something that isn't true, how does that all work itself out?" How does the good stuff filter up and out? Cameron says "The stuff that populates is the stuff that most people think is interesting/"
1:00 PM: Doc says "One of us is going to get sued at some point. This is America, we sue each otehre here."
1:01 PM: Anil Dash (in the audience) mentions that he was threatened with a lawsuit threat by Walter Mossberg. "There is a resentment towards improving the credibility of weblogs."
1:03 PM: Rusty is talking about how weblogs are inherently personal. You can get the credibility you need, but it takes time.
1:04 PM: Rusty, "If you want pundity, go to weblogs. You'll get it."
1:05 PM: Jason Kottke (in the audience), "Hard news is expensive. In general, it takes time, research and money."
1:08 PM: A member of the K5 team in the audience talks about people reporting events live as they happen from the field, via their weblogs. His example is the earthquake in Seattle last year.
1:10 PM: Anil Dash says "We would all do better if we thought of our weblogs as journalism."
1:11 PM: Jesse James Garrett (in the audience) says "If amateur journalists are going to be afforded the same rights as professional journalists, then they need to have the same responsibilities."
1:14 PM: Rusty says "People I know who get most of their news from the Internet do not trust the news thst is on television."
1:16 PM: Doc points out that the top story on Blogdex is the news that AOL is going to use the Gecko rendering engine in their next AOL client. An audience member disputes, and Doc tells him to blog his opinion. The audience claps.
1:18 PM: Cameron says that in the wake of September 11 the people on Metafilter were doing a better job of reporting the news than the mainstream media sources.
1:20 PM: Meg says that businesses are starting to recognize the importance of weblogs and we are on the verge of being corrupted by free movie passes, books, CDs, etc. in exchange for favorable reviews. An audience member says that this is what happened to zines, and it destroyed them.
1:23 PM: Audience member asks "Have you ever been to a fake blog that was manufactured by a company to promote a product?" The audience laughs and agrees they've seen this. Manipulative?
1:31 PM: Doc says that he likes weblogs because they are not like the flame-y nature of Usenet.
1:34 PM: Rusty says "I don't think you can hijack the popular voice."
1:38 PM: The weblogger community will route around hate speech and bigotry online.
1:43 PM: Doc says that television initially did a great job of reporting the Sptember 11 events, but shortly afterward defaulted to crap headlines and stories like "American Under Attack" and "Attack on America." How is that different from weblogs?
1:45 PM: What we have with weblogs is a group of people who are absessive about specific things. They are the experts on x and y. You will get an informed opinion and not manufactured sensationalistic news.
1:46 PM: Wes Felter (in the audience) says that webloggers are domain experts. Anil Dash says that it's a question about finding that one weblog that caters to your specific news need.
1:47 PM: The panel is wrapping up. It's getting too hot in the room and peole are antsy. And hungry.
1:50 PM: Doc says "I have only a 24-hour attention span and I don't scale. I'm astonished at how much I miss."
1:52 PM: Doc asks the audience how many have political opinions that are left of center. Most of the audience raises their hands. He then asks how many people are afraid to talk about it on their weblogs. He mentions that he got a lot of scary email from fundamentalists. He no longer talks about his family on his weblog, out of fear.
1:57 PM: Meg says that this fear is silencing a lot of people. Doc says that we have to be careful. Cameron says that we're not writing for an audience, we're writing for our friends.
Woke up late and barely made it to the Politics of Open Source panel, where my old boss Brian Behlendorf is a no-show. What's up with that Brian?
Two nights in a row, after the various parties at SXSW have wound down, we've all ended up in the atrium lobby bar of the Omni Hotel. It's a nice change after the loud music and activities, and allows for great conversation. Last night I spoke with Kevin Lynch of Macromedia for an hour about my love/hate relationship with Macromedia and their products. The cool thing is that Kevin was very receptive to my concerns and actually echoed some of them, which tells me that Macromedia is very aware of how their products, especially the Flash Player, are perceived among both the end user and the developer crowds. I forgot to ask him about Macromedia's plans (if they exist) for integrating SVG capabilities into the Flash Player. This may be the solution they need to improve the client-server interaction that is currently weak in Flash. He even admitted that Macromedia Generator is a dead project and no longer under development.
Sitting across from me is Mike Kuniavsky, who has a book coming out soon from O'Reilly called User Experience Research Techniques. It's interesting how SXSW is such a social conference. A few years ago I met both Mike K. and Jeff Veen when they were still at Wired. At the time I was living in Ann Arbor, Michigan and I learned that Mike K. is from Ann Arbor and Jeff went to college in Grand Rapids, Michigan. And, of course, the well-known information architecture firm Argus and Associates founded by Louis Rosenfeld was in Ann Arbor.
Doc Searls yesterday made the comment about how many Titanium Powerbooks there were at this conference. It's easily a ratio of 4-to-1 against Windows laptops. SXSW is definitely a creative-technical conference and naturally the attendees are accustomed to using the best hardware for both their creative and technical needs. Almost every single Mac I've seen in use has been running Mac OS X. I guess it's finally time for me to take the leap and start running it on my Titanium. In contrast, I popped into the "Advergames" session and all five panelists had Windows laptops open. I listened to some guy talk about running a Web server behind an online video game that builds a custom Web page as you play. Sounded intriguing but *yawn*.
The SXSW Web Awards last night were fun. Most of it was typical blah-blah I'd-like-to-thank-the-Academy speeches, but there were some high points. One of which was Mena's (fromDollarshort) speech for winning the award for Best Weblog.
Several people have said the CamWorld t-shirts are the best swag at SXSW. You can order one for $10 and I'll ship it out later this week.
Lane Becker's session is the best of SXSW so far. Doc, Wes, Dori and lots of other webloggers are posting from the show.
As I expected I woke up this morning feeling sick. It's not going to stop me from going to as many parties as I can, though.
Cory Doctorow led the grassroots campaign to set up wireless access at SXSW and succeeded. It allows us to report/blog live from the sessions as they happen.
CamWorld T-shirts! If you are attending SXSW this weekend and next week and would like a free CamWorld t-shirt, tomorrow is your last chance to email me and request one. I am only bringing enough to pass out to those who have requested one. If you've already requested one, you don't need to email me again.
If you'd like to place an order for a shirt, to be fulfilled whan I return from SXSW, you may do so now. Simply send me $10 via PayPal (don't forget to send me your U.S. mailing address) and I'll mail them out in about a week. I will post some pictures of people wearing CamWorld t-shirts from SXSW. For you ladies, I even have a limited number of women's ribbed fitted tees, very similar to this shirt in both white and ash grey. All the Men's tees are in white with the CamWorld box logo near the breast pocket area.
Though, at times, Cringely's Pulpit essays are over-the-top and sensationalistic, he does present some very intriguing ideas and often puts a spin or perspective on news that is unlike the typical mainstream press. That alone makes his stuff worth reading. Like this week's essay.
Regarding bar-code scanning in retail stores, Bryan Skelton writes:
I think this is a great idea, plus many retailers already have the infrastructure set up for it, it is called wedding registries. You and your partner choose products you are interested in around the store, set up a profile in one of their kiosks, and then your friends/family around the world can view your list to see what to get you as a wedding present. At Target, they give you a bar code scanner gun that you walk around the store with and just zap all the stuff you want to add to your list, hand them back the gun and they download it into their system and it shows up in your registry on their site. Easy. As you pointed out, you should be able to do the same thing for yourself, in any store.
There are already specialized Palm Pilots that are being used to scan inventory. It wouldn't be hard at all to devleop a custom Palm application that you can allow your Palm-owning customers to use to keep a copy of their portabe "digital library" with them and update any time they walk into a store. And well, if you must, there is also the same technology available for PocketPC.
37Signals Whitepaper: Contingency Design: Maximizing Online Profitability By Helping People When Things Go Wrong
I think this may constitute a different kind of "crashing". And to think, people are going to pay a premium for this.
An good article on the future of using Intel chips in handheld devices:
Deep down Intel knows the mobile experience is truly horrible, and it wants to fix it. We want one inch thick laptops which last all day, but the technology doesn't get us there. Intel can't, like Apple, simply define some standards in a quick half-hour meeting, and email them to the hardware division for implementation. It needs to coerce and finesse its OEMs to arrive at the same destination. (Apple's power management is terrific, but then it doesn't have to play by the ACPI rules).
Research in Motion has a new Blackberry device out that includes built-in cell phone capabilities.
Joe Crawford has a good essay about Lindows.com that anaylzes the sales and product pitch by founder Michael Robertson.
Bruce Sterling: Information Wants to Be Worthless. Fantastic screed.
Steve Burns, the guy in the striped green shirt who hosted Nickelodeon's Blues Clues is now developing an album of songs for adults. It includes singing quirrels, songs for dust mites, and other wacky stuff.
Hmmm, would it be useful to be able to use your cell phone to scan bar-codes? I think so. A few years back when I was working at Borders.com we were pushing hard for the management to accept the idea of letting customers in the stores use portable bar-code scanners to build a "digital library" (by walking around the store and scanning books, movies and music) that they could then upload to their Borders.com user profile at one of the Internet-enabled kiosks that were being installed into the stores. Needless to say the management looked at us like we were insane but it's still a good idea and as technology like this becomes more an more integrated into everything we do, we'll probably start to see more retail stores adapt technology like this to provide cool differentiating services or their customers.
