Blog

We’ve just a weekend to remember. I’m glad I wasn’t in front of the computer until now, after sunset.

Scoble on “Why RSS is more productive than Web” includes several good ideas. None of them are new to me, but perhaps useful to reinforce some points I’m trying to make. I was struck, however, by this item:

3) No looking for “what’s new.” When you visit a site like CNET you need to do a lot of mental work to see what was different from yesterday when you read the site. In NewsGator new things are bold. I don’t need to do any work and I don’t need to pay any attention to old things.

All websites which used vlink (visited link) colors — which is well over 99.9% of them, since it’s the default and it’s smart — have some ability to help you distinguish what you’ve read before… if you click through. Should a website take it one step further, and mark something ‘read’ even if you just see a headline and (maybe) a brief? Avoiding for a minute the difficulties of knowing just what a person ‘saw’ on a webpage that extends more than one screen, and the problem of consistent identification/recognition of a reader… what’s enough of a change to call something old or new? No answers on a Sunday night, but interesting questions.

Steve Gillmor: “automating micro-content routing tends to reinforce the ubiquity of small consumable, searchable XHTML fragments.”

Makes sense to me. But I’ll bet it doesn’t make sense to many (most?). Using that language will never help extend the message beyond geeks. Of course, he’s writing for the geek audience in a geek trade pub, so maybe he doesn’t need to.

Ray Ozzie, CEO of Groove Networks, rarely posts to his blog these days. When he does, I’m sure lots of people pay attention, as I do — one more reason RSS as a mechanism for distributed attention is helpful. After all, who has time to check a site that changes erratically? Most of us can barely keep up with sites that change regularly/constantly. Anyway, most of Ozzie’s posts nowadays seem to tie to corporate events, while making a larger point. Fair enough. I care very little about Groove, having (a) never tried it seriously and (b) not wanting to commit to a single platform tool which is, itself, somewhat of a platform. But Ozzie has a track record of being ahead of the curve, and so I read for nuggets of interest.

Today, in conjunction with the imminent release of Groove 3.0, he writes about extreme mobility and its effect on the workplace. He looks at the confluence of recent technologies (laptops, broadband, WiFi, etc.) and points out that the flow of work continues to decentralize.

I’ve been thinking about a subset of that changing flow… information. RSS is accelerating the explosion of information into its constituent parts (ideas! facts! not necessarily mixed well…). Combined with mobility, things are changing. To me, mobility is more about multiple devices in a few fixed locations, than myriad locations. If I can move seamlessly between home and office without disrupting the flow of work and without needing to carry my laptop with me to do it, that’s a game-changer. I’ve commented once or twice before about the complexities of working with just two machines at home. Anything beyond a single repository invites complexity, which is a hurdle. And a lazy world hates hurdles. RSS has its adoption hurdles, too, but they are of a different (lower) level of magnitude. To come full circle, I always wonder if Groove benefits the individual along this axis (simplicity) without requiring full-bore commitment. Not really a driving concern for me to investigate right now, but maybe something to return to. There are also a few links which look interesting in Ozzie’s post, including one to a PowerPoint (I hate downloading stuff like this).

Doc Searls comments on Chad Dickerson’s post about the increased requests for an Infoworld RSS file. Dickerson notes that these requests now top the home page pageviews and says “Feels like a tipping point to me.” He acknowledges the obvious, that aggregator traffic is more like spiders/robots than real people, but still seeing a rise.

Having looked at this type of data closely, I think it’s an interesting data point, but the processes can overwhelm the humans every time. They have in various areas I’ve looked at for some time. So I’m a bit less enthusiastic about the stats as a signal.

Don’t get me wrong: I fundamentally believe that RSS is enabling and accelerating a dramatic shift in the way people consume information. And I thoroughly admire the fact that Infoworld has their CTO blogging — Chad has many interesting things to say, on various topics. But I think all of us in the echo chamber are a bit too eager to declare a tipping point when it happens, which is why so many people picked up on Chad’s post. (My Yahoo adding RSS support was another contender.) Can you really see a tipping point when it happens, or is it only in hindsight? I haven’t looked at this historically, so maybe I’m too pessimistic, and perceptive folks do judge correctly as history is being made. To me, the RSS space is in the midst of a Cambrian explosion, which is dynamic and even fun. But what’s left at the end of the explosion?

I’m not one to think visually, but, like many (most?) people, I appreciate a good picture all the same. Here’s Steven Van Dyke’s take on How News Travels on the Internet. Nice picture. I’m not sure I’d call what travels on the internet ‘news’ every time, but there is an amazing meme-spread going on.

Yesterday afternoon, I met with someone I worked with back in the go-go days yesterday afternoon. He and his colleagues have started a new company, and they launched their so-called pre-alpha site a couple of weeks ago, and then sent 20 people an email. He was amazed how quickly I — and others — found out about the new site, especially when measured against how long it took their previous business to propagate back in 1998-1999. PR and marketing still matter, somewhat, but as Andrew Anker wrote two days ago “brand follows user experience.” Amen. Guess this means I’m really due for a clean-up around here…

Yes, I should have done this long, long ago.

Om Malik takes a look at the Alexa graph for the domain com.com, and comes to the mistaken assumption that News.com is having a slow year. He then posits that the decline is due to the rise of blogs.

I’m all for the rise of blogs, but the reality is that CNET News.com traffic is quite steady, and has been for quite some time (longer than the period shown in Om’s graph). The Alexa graph isn’t wrong… it’s just misleading to assume that com.com is only representing News.com. That short domain has been used for many sites at CNET Networks. Over the last few quarters, though, a few sites — most notably Download.com, the largest independent software site on the internet, I believe — have moved back to their original domain. So com.com takes a hit, but download.com goes shooting back up.

The Alexa page with the misleading graph even breaks down the com.com domain a bit more, illuminating some of the sites included. Om, you have interesting things to write, but dive a bit deeper next time. (Alexa also is only one view into the traffic world… but I agree it’s interesting, since it’s one of the few public comparisons we can all make.)

Saturday night, I enjoyed a fine filet mignon from Bern’s Steak House, in Tampa, Florida. I’m not sure I can do it justice, but this place takes selection — at least with steaks and wines/spirits — to an extreme. You may review the menu [15 page PDF, 200K] if you dare. Page 9 begins the excursion into the steaks section of the menu, where you are given lengthy descriptions of the different cuts and cooking styles, and then asked to choose size and thickness of your piece of meat from a busy grid. That is only the beginning, but I’m too tired even thinking about the experience to write it all down.

I will advise you to make reservations, should you be visiting Tampa. The restaurant is worth one meal in your lifetime, certainly.

Tonight, Gene “the stereo guy” visited us for the third time. While I like Gene, and he does a good job, I hope to never need his services again. (But let me know if you want his number, for San Franscisco-area repairs/installations.)

It wasn’t about the stereo, per se, but just a general frustration with an inability to make all the machinery do what we want it to do. We’ve been in this state for a while now, since the big power outage, when (I think) one of the outputs on the receiver got blown. That caused a problem… which I worked around, but caused another problem… which problem I was unable to work around despite 45 minutes of futzing (the technical term, I believe). So we called Gene once again. Money well spent.

My product-focused colleagues at CNET are moving into what is called Digital Living. I’m living some of that life, but I’ve already reached the point where I want to “dispose” of some of the more sophisticated devices in favor of an easy-to-use single device that handles DVDs, CDs, radio, TV connection, VCR connection (just for legacy purposes), and TiVo functionality and/or great TiVo connection. And it has to be easy-to-use. And I want a TV/display that doesn’t need 7 hookups to connect to this device, and doesn’t have all the connections behind the *#$!*^ heavy CRT. (Did I mention easy-to-use?)

All this, and we have a built-in cabinet which — even were I willing to spend money on a new display that is light/big — won’t readily handle the new rectangular displays of the future. I guess when HDTV is common, instead of possible, we’ll just have to move, since a new TV won’t work in our current configuration.

I joking. I think.