Category: Uncategorized

It’s either a business or it’s not. F*** the model. Either you provide a service or product that you get paid for (in one form or another) or you don’t. Enough ranting… I do care about this area. I want to learn lessons from other businesses that I can apply to the business where I work. I just don’t want to pretend it’s academic. I’m trying to watch a presentation Vin Crosbie made a few weeks ago at Berkeley on paying for content, but the QuickTime is timing out. Maybe another time.

Anil Dash’s vision of the personal panopticon strikes a chord with me. I care little for his fascination with capturing the audio of our lives, although I do think I need to get a few snippets of Benjamin’s funny comments now and again. But I find myself believing that events are not real, or easily memorable, unless I record something in digital form. Part of jotting down these notes (public, but not much of an audience) is to pin down specific thoughts in time. My memory is faulty and poorly trained. I’m very visually oriented (another way of saying I don’t listen very well). By opening up this conversation with myself, and eventually with others, I can note my passage through time by a metric other than my slower running times.

Back to the digital doppelganger… I always hoped that David Gelernter’s LifeStreams software would take root, because I love the concept of timestamping your life (sad?).

Thinking in video — which I rarely do — consider The Transparent Society David Brin brings to mind. He sees Big Brother, and advocates… go with the flow, and overwhelm the system, turning it to the advantage of individuals rather than just corporations and governments. I’m vastly oversimplifying, and perhaps misstating, since I’m relying on my memory of hearing him speak in early 2000. I have not read his book, nor his website, beyond grabbing this quote: “For the cameras are on their way, along with data networks that will send a myriad images flashing back and forth, faster than thought.” Seeing all the video cameras protesters carried during the recent anti-war protests here in San Francisco made it clear that Brin’s thinking is almost common knowledge/practice. All lots of video makes me think is… where are the editors?? (I want someone to save my time, and find the good stuff.)

My writing is too full of on the one hand, on the other hand type comments. I re-read this post from last night and was overwhelmed by parenthetical statements. To cleanse the slate, I should really rewrite it. But, I won’t. That post should really have been a short essay, where I resolved the contradictions and covered all the bases in logical order. Instead, I squeezed every thought into too few sentences. Practice makes perfect?!

“So a good fast Internet connection is not, after all, a cure-all for life’s problems. But it’s awfully nice to have.” from Tim Bray’s ongoing, at the conclusion of an essay about a weekend lost to regaining connectivity

That feeling that you didn’t get enough done this weekend, and tomorrow you jump back into the fray, and all those little tasks you had in mind will wait until next weekend. Not so bad tonight, but I can rattle off several projects I’d like to bring to completion. But if you let this ‘syndrome’ disrupt your sleep going into the week, it’s a bigger problem. Good night!

Barry Parr brings together a few useful threads to say that site registration is a marketing error. I think he’s right in the long run, in that advertising against demographics rather than context seems both difficult to do (meaning, execute on) and less effective for the marketer. But I think he’s wrong in the short to medium term (1-5 years) because the market (and marketers) don’t move that quickly. Often enough, marketers are choosing between print and online (or buying both at the same time), and through history and comfort, the print statistics (subscribers, etc.) are the metrics. Online publishers have been unable to change the game without turning to Overture/Google tactics (effective, but often coming out of different marketing budgets). So, if you cannot change the game, and your competition (print) has metrics (i.e., demographics) and you don’t, you (the online site) are a riskier buy. In today’s economy, you don’t want to be the riskier buy.

Tim Bray is, as he speculates, forever to be known as the XML guy. (There are worse things to be known for, and he is known.) Whatever kudos accumulate from well-formed markup, I’m finding that I’m more appreciative of his regular essays and posts in ongoing (his blog). His clarity on topics as important — but often glossed over — as Unicode speaks volumes for the work he puts into his writing. It takes time to be clear and concise. I know I rarely take the extra time! I also find that ongoing looks good, visually. The combination of crisp text and reinforcing, unique design is not common. I know my design skills are… lacking… so I was happy to steal a visual theme from the ‘library’ of those already available.

Anyway, here’s a quick quote from the aforementioned Unicode article, in the section “What’s a “Character” Anyhow?”:

All human languages are written using characters; and while philologists can enjoy decades-long arguments about what characters are, as far as Unicode (and computers) care, a character can usefully be defined as the smallest atomic unit of text with semantic value.

Computers usually store characters as small numbers; back in the days of A-to-Z ASCII, you could fit a character into an eight-bit byte, but those days are long gone.

Historically, there have been hundreds of different systems for assigning characters to numbers and then stuffing those numbers into bytes of computer storage. Given that every computer manufacturer in the world tended to cook up their own scheme for every language in the world, this was clearly an interoperability disaster in the making, and led to the ISO and Unicode work.

I wonder why he was exploring this topic at this time… gestating a while, or solving a problem for Antarctica, his software company?

We just got back from seeing Guster at the Warfield. This is the third or fourth time we’ve seen them, and each time, it’s in a bigger venue. Good sign for them. We had seats in the balcony, and I was pleased to have a seat, honestly. Fun performance, as always, but not really music to dance to, with few exceptions. The balcony crowd was indecisive about whether to stand up or sit… but was mostly sitting. The opening band was Maroon5, which I had never heard of, but one of their songs was a recognizable single (Harder to Breathe). Not sure when we’ll get out again for a concert again next… Joe Jackson and Elvis Costello won’t be in the Bay Area anytime soon, and I’m hard-pressed to think who else is worth the effort. You can tell I’m not that on top of the music scene.

I occasionally join some friends as a substitute player in a floor hockey league. The fast twitch muscles are not really up to snuff anymore (if they ever were). I like to start, and keep moving at a reasonable clip. Stopping and starting and stopping and starting and so on… not exactly what a 3 mile run twice a week prepares you for. Lots of interesting stuff to read and (maybe) comment on, but not tonight. Need to get in bed about… now.

Bloomberg.com was redesigned recently. Someone on the online-news mailing list threw it out there today, asking for comment. I took a five minute look around, and was surprised to see such clean, colorful design. US markets were closed, of course, so maybe I’m not seeing the site at its busiest, but I expected more data density. I have never used a Bloomberg terminal, nor the Windows application which is replacing the terminals in some (many?) instances, but the Bloomberg service is famous for the richnes and complexity of its data, and applauded for the contortions through which you can twist said information. Is it all a ruse? I doubt it. Bloomberg has little interest in competing with themselves with their public website, and little incentive. The site is decidedly more consumer-friendly than the reputation.

But if you don’t stay true to the Bloomberg identity (dare I say, brand?), isn’t this a bit shortsighted? I’m kibitzing from the outside, but I manage a news website, so… we’ll see. It will take a couple of years to see whether I’m right or wrong here.