Blog

Steven Johnson notes on his blog a a bit of extra information about his article for the NYTimes Magazine, Offloading your memories (hope this link doesn’t expire in seven days). In the comments, Anil Dash points to his April 1, 2003 (coincidence!??!) post on “the personal panopticon.” I had my own thoughts on that post a few days later. All this data I want to keep (for whom?) and I still don’t do a regular backup. The road to hell, and all that…

It happens occasionally, but not often enough that I’ll let the occasion pass without saving a link. Here’s the full story, on CNET News.com, written by John Borland: Canada deems P2P downloading legal.

A map that’s more art than function, at least from San Francisco. But nifty all the same.

Griffin Technology gets accessories for the Mac right. So I’m taking a chance, and pre-ordering RadioShark, which will let me time-shift radio the same way I time-shift TV with TiVo. Yes, I sound like a damn advertisement, but I’m curious/excited. There are shows like This American Life which I would really enjoy listening to, but never able to make time for. We’ll see (a) when they actually start selling this thing and (b) whether I have time for more media, even if time-shifted.

A bit over a week ago, I finished a short book with one long title: How Would You Move Mount Fuji?: Microsoft’s Cult of the Puzzle — How the World’s Smartest Companies Select the Most Creative Thinkers. Aside from the examples of various puzzles and brain teasers (and their answers!), I felt William Poundstone’s book would have been a great magazine article. It was, at times, a stretch to make it book-length. That said, it was a quick read, and everyone in tech likes to learn more about Microsoft. The Redmond company is not the only topic in the book, but Poundstone certainly used that hook well… it’s one of the main reasons I bought the book. Robert Scoble read it, but his notes on the interview process at Microsoft are more to the point and more interesting on a human scale. Chris Sells, another Microsoft employee, has a full page of anecdotes and stories about Microsoft job interviews, including his own. Here’s the full tale of Matt Goyer’s interviews with Amazon and Microsoft. I’ll bet these are highly read within these two companies as well as outside.

The most interesting part for me was the divergence on whether to share information about candidates or not during the interview day. Microsoft does, Amazon does not. I’ve tried it both ways. Certainly, if you share the information, the hiring company can do a good job of saving later interviewers’ time if a candidate isn’t worth it. To me, this just reinforces how important the pre-interview process is because while in-person interviews won’t be a match most of the time, you and your colleagues shouldn’t have to spend a lot of time interviewing unqualified folks. I know one person at Microsoft, and another who was there for five or six years before leaving to do his own thing. Next time I run into them, I’ll have to ask about their experiences. We haven’t been doing much hiring recently, although things are looking better in the future, so maybe I’ll get a chance to try both the Amazon and Microsoft techniques, since there is no corporate mandate or agreed-upon ritual on methods, so far.

Steve Outing reminisces about 10 years of online news. He doesn’t seem so enthused about what newspapers have done online to date. I would say it’s still early, although no newspaper has made itself a critical part of my online life to date.

I wasn’t at Internet World in 1993, but I was at the Consumer Online Services conference in the fall of 1994 here in San Francisco. That was the first time I ever visited the city, and my colleague Lowell and I also went down to Cupertino to get some instructions about eWorld, the Apple clone of the AOL service. I had helped bring The Atlantic Monthly online on AOL the previous fall (so I guess this marks my 10 year anniversary in online news, too), and our eWorld dabbling ended up going nowhere. We did enjoy the two PowerBooks we were loaned (indefinitely) as part of the arrangement, though!

I don’t remember much about the conference, other than that it was relatively small (the Parc55 hotel near 5th and Market), and Delphi was still a viable competitor in the online services space. That wouldn’t last long… how many people even recognize that Delphi was an online service? I certainly remember dial-up speeds, though… and I don’t miss them. Broadband = progress.

The day before Thanksgiving, I finished Neal Stephenson’s Quicksilver, the first volume of his Baroque Cycle trilogy.

Stephenson takes the ancestors of the protagonists in Crytonomicon (his most recent book) and sprinkles them through 17th century Europe, in key roles, especially among the nascent scientific community coming together (in England) as the Royal Society. I studied history and literature of France and England in the ‘modern era,’ meaning from 1750 to the present, so I hope I have an excuse for knowing so little about European history prior to 1750. I enjoyed this historical fiction, with its quite modern references to cryptology mixed with the period obsession with religious leanings as they apply to politics. (We have our own current obsessions with religion, of course). Also, the various characters Stephenson creates and follows throughout Europe are always close observers/participants with the real historical personalities… kings and would-be kings alike.

I’m pleased to see that the next two books are coming in 2004, not too far in the future. The Confusion arrives in April 2004, and The System of the World arrives in September 2004. With books this long, you wouldn’t necessarily expect each one to be ready so quickly. That said, maybe Stephenson wrote them like on the same schedule as The Lord of the Rings trilogy was filmed: all at the same time.

The words that really put me onto Stephenson as an author are found in his article Mother Earth Mother Board for Wired magazine (December 1996 issue). This 56-page opus chronicles how, physically, the internet gets wired, specifically across continents and under seas. Certainly, much of what Stephenson learned while researching and writing this article became part of Cryptonomicon, which I found to be one of the best stories I’ve read in years (better than this first volume of the Baroque Cycle).

There is a nifty experiment started with the MetaWeb, where Stephenson offers his book as a catalyst for putting deeper explanations out onto the web. As he states in the site introduction.

[We] are hoping that the annotations of the book on this site will seed a body of knowledge called the Metaweb, which will eventually be something more generally useful than a list of FAQs about one and only one novel. The idea of the Metaweb was originated by Danny Hillis.

I’m always impressed to see a person who makes his living by writing find an appropriate outlet for contributing “free” writing to the web without derailing their career. No blog that I know of for Stephenson, and I think he’s explicitly said that he needs to focus. Focus away! Keep writing.

Just added the Technorati link to the footer of my blog home page. Yes, I’m a lemming. We’ll see if BlogShares ever makes it back, too, so the broken image will resolve once more.

I’ve been reading Vin Crosbie’s posts for about a decade on the online-news mailing list, and his blog for several months. He knows publishing in a digital world. Still, he just made a very big public promise to deliver the business plan for the future of publishing.

There is a lucrative business plan for online publishing in this New Medium. I now know what it is, which is something I couldn’t have stated earlier this year. After the New Year, I plan to publish everything that I know about it. There is a official forum I’ve chosen, which has a mid-January deadline and a publication date of Spring 2004. I’m meanwhile going to cease making conference speeches and cogent public comments about online publishing.

He offers this teaser as explanation for why he and his blog will be quiet for the next several weeks. I’ll be listening, but I guess he’s never heard of underpromise and overdeliver. Should we believe the hype? Vin, don’t disappoint us now!

Just picked up that term from the comments of Jeremy Zawodny’s blog post on 2004 predictions. I certainly keep bookmarks in Safari only as long as it takes me to post them here… which can be several weeks, admittedly. I’ll have to try one of those bookmarklets (Radio Express?) to see if I can make blogging a link as easy as saving it in Safari.