Category: Uncategorized

…who’s reading. Which is why I keep certain things off my blog, like most people, I think. I don’t know if anyone at work knows about my personal blog (very few know about my work blog), but I am careful to write nothing that I could not live with seeing on my boss’s monitor (or his boss’s monitor). Same goes for family. I have one, and they are here, but only in outline/shadow most of the time… deliberately.

I was thinking about what I write a bit more as time gets more precious. I like living up to daily posting, although I sometimes find myself making this “work” not pleasure. I need the discipline, and I like seeing every day in the calendar linked. Simple stuff, but there it is. What I have not done here is focus. The jambalaya (a dish I’ve never tried) of information I present is less than I want it to be, both in original thinking and organization. But this is one area where I don’t want to let the perfect be the enemy of the good, so I’ll keep posting “lite” going while I get my bearings again as part of a family of four instead of three.

This HR blog from the Boston Globe seems a bit odd, but Scoble points out the germane question: “are you freaked out about webloggers?”

Too bad we all can’t sleep for 90 minutes every day after lunch. But we did today.

Get home from work, play games with Ben, go for a walk with him to pick up dinner, he goes off to bed with a smile on his face.

After eating my cheesesteak, I take Paton. 90 minutes later, she’s still crying. Argh.

Glow is an open-source GUI calendar effort. I can’t really tell without looking around more whether it’s going after the Exchange calendaring server stuff, but honestly, that’s the part of Outlook that I appreciate most: scheduling meetings. The email part is nothing special. I dislike the archive format immensely, and the constant connection to the Exchange server to be useful is the most aggravating thing imagineable when you are working remotely, especially via dial-up (which is, of course, excruciating under any circumstances once you’ve become accustomed to broadband). Still, seems like a quixotic project to me.

Read Cameron’s report on Bill of Rights for Web Services, Panel, with Tim O’Reilly, O’Reilly & Associates, Inc., Jeff Barr, Amazon.com (didn’t know he had left his consulting gig to go to work for Amazon full-time), and Jeffrey McManus, eBay. I’ll have to look around for other news from the OSCON conference.

Convert an image into HTML or ASCII text. Fun stuff. Of course, I don’t have a logo or other iconic images to translate, but I’ll find something.

Small Initiatives perked my interest in Word HTML Cleaner. I’ll have to try it sometime, since it’s sometimes useful to write in Word, but the HTML is godawful ugly.

CNN story “Geniuses, criminals do best work in their 30s” forces me to ask… does this count double for criminal geniuses?

Sorry, had to go there. 😉

Unlike Tim Bray, I’m not surprised that default placement in (some) news aggregators is for sale. I was amused to see that Adam Curry blew $10,000 about 18 months ago for default placement in Userland’s aggregators. It’s the land grab mentality, and it’s been around forever. In some businesses, it even works. I don’t believe that the RSS/content syndication game is one of those businesses.

Read Tim O’Reilly’s comments in this Infoworld interview. [found via Emergic.com]

…But there’s not much difference between Barnesandnoble.comæand Amazon.com in the software they have. What are different are the customers they have, and the amount of customer contribution to their data. With eBay it’s even clearer. The fact is, it’s the critical mass of marketplace buyers and sellers and all the information that people have put in that marketplace as a repository. So I think we’re going to find more and more places where that happens, where somebody gets a critical mass of customers and data and that becomes their source of value.

The one with the most customers, and the customer data, wins. While demographic data is important (explicit information), the real winning formula is usage data, which cannot be replicated or copied. Of course, just collecting the data isn’t enough. All websites gather data (like barnacles, even). Some businesses use their website intelligently and incorporate feedback loops, both directed and undirected, which build upon the usage data to change the nature of the application. It’s not about the software, but the combination of functionality + data. O’Reilly calls out Amazon and eBay as platforms, a ringing endorsement of their competitive advantage coming from a technical publisher, who deeply understands the power of a platform in the software world.

So… will ‘Sooners’ be rewarded in the RSS world? Naaahhhh… too easy to get turned on to smart, intelligent voices through the general spreading of information on the web. And how many sites can recoup any payments? (How did Curry make his money back? Ads on his site? I don’t read him regularly.)

You stuck with me this long… if you don’t recognize the term ‘Sooner,’ read on:

WHAT IS A “SOONER?”
The following text was taken from “Talkin’ Dust Bowl Blues,” A Study of Oklahoma’s Cultural Identity During the Great Depression, by W. Richard Fossey: “Originally the word “Sooner” meant a person who had illegally crossed the border of Oklahoma’s Unassigned Lands before they were officially opened for white settlement on April 22, 1889. The Sooners who arrived early had the best choice of land and only had to lie low until they could safely emerge and file a claim. They were naturally disliked by the immigrants who entered Oklahoma legally, and in the early days to call someone a Sooner was to attack his character.” (quoted from the State of Oklahoma website)