Category: Uncategorized

AOL has blocked e-mail from my domain, which is frustrating to both me and my wife. Why? Someone in the same IP range at Verio probably sent something dodgy to AOL… or so AOL says. I hope it’s truly only temporary, no more than the 24 hours cited.

Yahoo Groups has been more consistently annoying. I keep being told that my main e-mail address is bouncing, with a hard bounce. When I go through the process to “unbounce” my account, I always get the error message in the image you see here. Catch 22… even if the error message tells me this is error code -1132. Yahoo is usually quite good about hiding/preventing these cryptic error messages, so it’s especially astonishing that this has continued over more than a month.
Trying again in a few minutes — or even a day or two later — does nothing. This is the second time I’ve run into this brick wall. Last time, I connected with Yahoo Support and was told to connect with my ISP. Thanks so much. I wonder if switching from Verio to TextDrive will alleviate these problems? It’s on my to do list at some point, though I hate the DNS disruption to email, etc.

I’ve been quiet about Newsburst for a while now, but there are a few more changes out there to enjoy.

• Category-level stream and dashboard pages: lots of readers asked for these, and I know I wanted them, too. Stream view lets you see everything at once, but it’s nice to filter it down to a category at a time. Click on a category name to view.
• Cleaner “Manage” page: improved Javascript and easier UI. Just more polished all around for managing your sources, whether renaming, moving, exporting, deleting, etc.
• Simplification: the Dashboard and Stream tabs were replaced by a Home tab. Dashboard and Stream are still available, and you can change your preference — but first-time users were puzzled by the choices. Also, Today Online is a bit smoother.
• Performance: shouldn’t be the last thing I mention, but the performance is much improved. Even a page with 100 items from various sources now screams.

More to come, and more to do, but this is progress.

A run, pancakes with the kids, a bike ride, some time at Crissy Field, lunch, a nap (yes!), playing in the backyard, and dinner out shortly. Happy birthday to me (and others).

Oh, and this marks 732 days of public posting, with this post as #725. I started clock two years ago. One year ago, my cryptic reference leaves me searching my memory without success. Guess if you’re going to use the blog as public brain, you have to put more in it!

In his essay How to Start a Startup, Paul Graham throws in the following observation:

People who don’t want to get dragged into some kind of work often develop a protective incompetence at it. Paul Erdos was particularly good at this. By seeming unable even to cut a grapefruit in half (let alone go to the store and buy one), he forced other people to do such things for him, leaving all his time free for math. Erdos was an extreme case, but most husbands use the same trick to some degree.

I know Graham is smart, but must he expose domestic secrets while he’s handing out lessons about startup life?

A few weeks ago, Om Malik published Flickr, Yahoo Deal Rumored. Today, Jerry Yang announced that Yahoo bought Flickr while on stage at PC Forum and the Flickr blog appears to be the official announcement, at least for now. Flickr-hoo! is Om’s note calling attention to the fact that he was proven right.

Well done.

In his initial Flickr-hoo! post, Om took a general swipe at “news.com” for mis-crediting bloggers — not in regard to this story; generally. I posted a comment asking why, and Om answered. In continuing the dialog, I found myself typing more than envisioned in a small comments window, so I moved my response over here.

Om wrote:

not an axe to grind – but every single time you guys get credits mixed up and never mention the bloggers who break the stories. and no its not me i am talking about there – it has happened so many times before that i get irked by it.

My response: “every single time” is quite a charge, and I see you’ve edited the main post to remove the initial swipe (thank you). In the future, I would urge you to speak up with specifics. You might also call or email the editorial team at CNET News.com about specifics — none of them are hard to reach.

More broadly… what is breaking a story? Is it mentioning the possibility first or the event itself?

You were the first (as far as I know) to say that Yahoo would buy Flickr. You were proved right. But your original post stated very clearly that this was an as-yet-unconfirmed rumor. Even the headline said “rumored.”

Quote: “Rumors are flying thick and fast in Silicon Valley: Yahoo is all set to buy Ludicorp, the company behind the hot photo blogging web service Flickr, for an undisclosed amount of money. Its not the first time rumors of these talks have made the rounds.”

Today, should you have cited whomever floated those earlier rumors? Did that person or people really earn the scoop? You went on: “At this point, it could all just be that–chatter.”

If you publish a rumor, without substantiation (even if you have proof, but decide you can’t share it), and then the rumor is true… that’s a scoop? What if the rumor is incorrect? What is it then?

Note: it may be tough to tell, but I am truly asking a question, and not just of Om. All readers and reporters (I make no distinction whether a person is reporting personally or professionally) need to find an answer (or answers?) to these questions. It might be easier for everyone if a rough consensus emerges. From all I can tell, Om broke this story, whatever that means. I’m asking here… what does it mean?

For example, there has been repeated chatter and public speculation and musing and even unsolicited advice surrounding Yahoo and Six Apart. (All results from first page of this search.) If Yahoo does buy Six Apart in the future, however unlikely it seems with 360 set to appear shortly, who got “the story”?

If gossip is public, does that make it any more true?

As usual, I missed The Incredibles in the theaters. The DVD was released earlier this week, and the local grocery story already has it for rent. Perfect Friday night flick. Underpinned by a real story (nothing deep, but universal), The Incredibles just roars along visually. In this movie, unlike Shrek 2, the references (visual and audible) to other films are gently done. Of course, the evil villain on a remote island feels like every Bond film ever made, but especially Dr. No. In one chase scene, we get both a nod towards the forest chase in Return of the Jedi and the race in Phantom Menace… listen. Only tip I’d give, beyond making sure you enjoy the movie, is that the special features disc doesn’t have anything particularly special on it except for the short film (4 min.) Boundin’. I’m guessing this short opened for The Incredibles in theaters, as Pixar does (bless them).

ETech and SXSW and IASummit all explored classification in many ways, according to various reports. Folksonomy, taxonomy, tags, etc. So, here’s a few links sparked by those events, and related posts.

• Cory Doctorow’s ETech notes on folksonomy are brief but lively.
• Community Engine on how IBM’s intranet will layer folksonomy on top of an impressive, exhaustive formal taxonomy… and there is a read-only PowerPoint of IBM’s presentation.
• Jeff Veen posted links to his SXSW panelists’ presentations… I believe the panel was How to Leverage Solipsism.
• Matt McAlister is playing with del.icio.us on The Industry Standard as a way to cluster links.

Haven’t read all of them all the way through, but enough to know I might want to refer to these later.

Watching a few minutes of basketball with the boy this evening, and he asked me to pause the TV so he could put something away. At age 4+, TV is something that you can pause anytime, and it always has been.

In the same department, both kids expect to be able to see any photograph immediately after it’s taken… and I’m not talking about waving a drying Polariod print, either.

I grew up with rotary phones, but I don’t feel terribly old until I hear these words out of the mouths of babes. I can almost feel the snow piling up in the stories I’ll have to tell about walking to school uphill, both ways! Actually, back in the day, the school bus worked quite well, or dad dropped us off on his way to work. So much for the myth…

More seriously, I hope I can remain fresh to new ideas as long as possible. And, now and again, I’d like to imagine a sliver of the future clearly enough to help build it.

Eleven years ago, I enjoyed a bit of (green?) beer at a St. Patrick’s Day party. The rest is history. I’m hardly Irish, but the occasion jogs fond memories all the same.

Susan Mernit interviewed me back in early February about RSS, for an article published in the Digital Edge. A publication of the Newspaper Association of America (NAA), The Digital Edge is for the New Media Federation, a group of folks from the newspaper biz focused on their digital businesses. (Sidenote: how much longer will we persist in separating information by its delivery method?) Anyway “RSS Providers Analyze Newspapers’ Opportunities” includes some of my words, which Susan was kind enough to include with the links intact — an ancillary benefit of an e-mail interview. You can read the article at the link just above, but I appreciated the line “One possible blueprint for online news’ future usage of RSS is visible at CNET News.com, a property of CNET Networks.” Of course, possibilities are a dime a dozen in this space right about now.

Two notes for those who actually care about details in this space. First, I traded emails with Susan for this article prior to the preview release of Newsburst making the rounds, so that part of the “possible blueprint” wasn’t mentioned. Second, with the exception of the CNET Mobile Feed Reader (BREW application), the RSS work across CNET Networks (many different smart people) has been done internally to date, contrary to the impression created by the article.

I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention the brief companion interview with Simon Waldman.

My overall feeling – as I’ve banged on about repeatedly, is that we are seeing the start of a series of moves that will take us from a world of online publishing that is really printing without paper, to a media environment unlike any other we have previously operated in. And, exactly who will make money out of it, how they’ll make it, and how much they’ll make is still unclear.

Amen.