EllementK

16 Jan 2006

The return of the Warp Records catalogue to Yahoo! Music Unlimited

by eleanor @ 11:32 pm in Life-Culture-Play   ++

I dogfood good and plenty, but only where stuff can be made to integrate with my world. My world, as it happens, tends to include asynchronous whirrs and chips — often supplied by Warp Records, of Autechre, Aphex Twin, Boards of Canada and Plaid fame.

One day they disappeared from the Yahoo! Music Unlimited catalogue - a rather abrupt reminder of all that’s entailed in a subscription music service. “A friend in the music business” said there was an issue of some sort. Meanwhile, despite owning more Warp tracks than is good for me, I had gotten hooked on sipping the newer releases from Boards of Canada and Autechre from YME, access to which was provided through my unlimited subscription. But man, once they pulled Warp, it was a little dismal for us connoisseurs of IDM, ambient, and electro.

Now they’re back. Yay!

So it’s time for me to support both Warp and YME and make my first purchase :-) - Campfire Headphase from Boards of Canada, though the review from Y! Music is a little off the mark. Who knew Yahoo! had music reviewers? Sign me up.

updated 16 Jan 2006 11:32 pm

Hello world: Return from the silent majority

by eleanor @ 7:09 pm in Geek | Life-Culture-Play   ++

OK, all the signs are pointing to me needing to spend more time with WordPress. Among PhotoMatt’s 22nd, the fanfare around the launch of WordPress 2.0, and the fact that my VP is leaving to go work with Matt - all conjoining with a long weekend, time had clearly come to upgrade and finally port my whole bloggy world over to a vibe more manageable from my Yahoo! busyness.

So I’m down to 73 feeds, with a few more hanging on the edge of (in|ex)clusion. I’m proud - I used to find 200 almost indispensible daily reading.

Hello world, many happy returns, etc.

updated 16 Jan 2006 7:09 pm

23 Jun 2005

Last day of ciccadas, hummingbirds, and fighting with blue jays

by eleanor @ 3:32 pm in Geek   ++

So since March I’ve been working from home and scoping out new projects. Working every day, slaving away with 30 tabs open in Firefox, pondering all the new stuff out on the net, who’s got it and who doesn’t, and what in the world I wanted to do next. Though always interesting, it’s been hard to always make sense of what’s going on, and that’s been a lot of what I’ve been writing about.

But now I have a job, and starting Monday, the hummingbirds, ciccadas and nasty blue jays will just be a if-I’m-lucky weekend diversion. I’ll be ok. I’m actually wickedly allergic to the jasmine that the hummingbirds love so and my herbs will just have to take care of themselves. I will however miss the ciccadas.

I’m just kidding really - it’s a great job, with a real team, and I’m terribly excited.

So that’s what’s been up the last couple weeks as I get everything settled for that. This week is “vacation geek-out week”, full of conferences. I have a bunch of stuff to write up about Supernova and then there’s Gnomedex tomorrow, which should be interesting. As long as I’m not locked in the back room reserved for the paraiah that procrastinated on registration. Ah, the rewards of social engineering.

updated 23 Jun 2005 3:36 pm

Finally, the Amazon Darknet review

by eleanor @ 3:04 pm in Geek | Life-Culture-Play   ++

While at Supernova, my (disclosure) buddy JD Lasica and I did a video talking about JD’s book, Darknet, on the conflicts between remix culture, Hollywood and Washington. My first citizen journalism experience - what a dilletante.

I thought JD’s book was great, a really solid treatment of the subject. He used one of my favorite approaches to understand a space — a combination of a big picture survey with deep dives to profile specific instances. In this case, it was profiling people and how they were using technology (almost all of the illegal under the DMCA, poor folks) to do new things with media.

And that spurred me to finally do the Amazon review that JD asked me to do weeks ago (only after I said it was a good book!) - so I’ll post it here. Perhaps I should reread the T&C of the Amazon page to see what I signed away, but microcontent is microcontent (is microformats) and it’s all mine. And thus I will repost for you to remix.

In what is essentially a PR war of hysteria (on both sides), JD presents the middle ground, shifting the focus off the corporations and file-sharing teenagers. We learn about real people who, having become accustomed to technology in their lives, adopt it to create a richer media experience. These hobbyists have the tools and ambition to express themselves, except now the law has intervened. Before, fair use was an acceptable compromise because it was hard to make a perfect copy. Now with perfect duplicates, all fair use is suspect, since the tools used to digitally record a few seconds of a song or movie for a remix piece are the same that pirates would use to steal music or, worse, to profitably bootleg. Those tools illegally circumvent copy protection and the act is a crime no matter the intent.

This is the tension JD describes is his book - a world where an absolute law applies to a range of activities, many of which seem perfect resonable and socially beneficial.

JD presents no real answers because as a society we haven’t come up with them yet. Darknet triggers important questions: is fair-use an intrinsic “right”? should it be? what can people repurpose for their own use in a non-commerical setting? how can that be defined/controlled? where are the mechanisms to license use of this content?

JD points us to the root of the conflict: otherwise normal people become criminals in pursuit of creating their own art and entertainment - works as “trivial” as they are culturally important.

updated 23 Jun 2005 3:05 pm

12 Jun 2005

Viral marketing movie preview for bloggers tonight “Yes”

by eleanor @ 3:38 pm in Life-Culture-Play   ++

So, I’m pre-posting on this so in case there’s anyone out there that’s interested and doesn’t already know.

Mark Pincus, Marc Canter and Tom Luddy are trying their hands at viralizing an independent movie with Joan Allen (what an interesting forehead she has!) and Sam Neill called Yes in SF by SBC park at 6pm tonight.

An interesting marketing challenge, since the film’s name, Yes, is such an ubiquitous part of speech. That makes it a hard word to viralize, not quite as easy to pickup on as, say, Sideways is when it’s being debated at the next table. Let’s hope that the text based aggregation of getting bloggers and other cool kids to write about it will help.

I am signed up, but am probably not headed back up to SF since we were there all day yesterday for the KRON blogger meet up. I’ve got a bunch of posts to get up, and have the hankering to play with my WordPress install.

So if you’re in SF tonight, jot your name down on the evite, join the crew, watch the film, drink the kool-aid and then faithfully blog.

It’s curious to note that despite signing up and somewhat committing to attend, it’s only now, while searching for a link for you faithful readers, that I bother to get more info about the plot of the movie. Mark’s posts and the Evite just mention Joan and Sally Potter, no Sam Neill: I wonder who the customers of this project are ultimately? Are reputation effects of Sally and Joan enough to carry the film with no further info, or do bloggers just like a party and special sneak preview treatment?

It’s probably a great opportunity: I missed seeing Primer at both Gnomedex and Defcon last year, and haven’t caught up with it since. And that’s been my loss.
Tags - “Yes” film

updated 12 Jun 2005 3:50 pm

8 Jun 2005

Mac moves to Intel as the Windows tax grows heavier

by eleanor @ 7:28 pm in Open Source   ++

This is terrible to write, since I’ve mocked friends who’ve moved to Mac as shiny-object-with-a-price-premium-loving poseurs, but I’m starting to consider it.

In the last two weeks I’ve moved to Open Office which is barely adequate, had spam-virii invasive enough in Thunderbird to trigger Norton alarms continually (but ineffectually), and, as the kicker, just now updated Norton which changed my firewall settings sufficiently to knock me off our home wifi.

Since I had to reclone to get back to native WinXP SP2 Bluetooth support, the trial clock on Norton was reset; they will inevitably ask for money to support the Windows tax, and I will refuse and go to Grisoft. So even this rant is about a temporary problem, but it still rankles.

Where, oh where, is my Linux desktop alternative? That dream of running a highly configurable system on commodity hardware?

The newly converted and devout preach alike of the benefits of the BSD infrastructure underlying OSX, but even with Apple’s announcement of a move to the Intel chipset, industry bets seem to be that Apple will keep the system closed. Where does that really get us?

That’s always what’s consoled me about staying on Windows - at least you have a wide range of kit on which to run your bloated, insecure OS. I can go super light with Japanese notebooks, or I could go beefy with a casemodded gaming machine. Just about every peripheral works. Yeah, it’s worse with Linux, but that’s where the world was headed before all the alpha hackers moved to Mac.

With Apple kit, choice is simulated with a coat of paint and dismissed as not being nearly as cool as thinking different (yet so monolithically). Think different, yes, oh yes - different from commodity pricing pressure of the rest of the industry (but not too different). Best a kind of vertical different that accepts the requirement of a matching set of Mac-dedicated components. I admire it as a marketer, but revile it as a consumer; they free as much as they control.

I’ll post this and reboot (as was requested by Norton), hoping that my wifi settings will be restored automagically. I hardly expect success if I have to play with the settings in their tool. Of course I could always disable it and go for the Windows Firewall.

updated 8 Jun 2005 7:28 pm

5 Jun 2005

Fun with the thinking man’s drinkers

by eleanor @ 4:08 pm in Life-Culture-Play   ++

So last night Mike and I had a rocking soirée with 60 or so folks who I can only describe as the thinking man’s drinkers. Geeks and nongeeks, boys and girls - all very cool people.

Despite my best efforts to astonish with tasty snacks, the highlight of the evening was absinthe brought by Robert Rich and his wife Dixie. Side note, Robert injured his right hand horrifically a couple months ago and is blogging about the recovery process. Last week, Dave McClure blogged about heroism the other day, and this is my nomination for heroism in our time.

Many thanks to all who came - we might have something else next weekend, we have a TON of leftover beer. I thought this picture of the 23 different kinds of beer we have left would speak volumes. Yeah, I was playing with my camera a couple weeks ago and left it with the datestamp setting on. Oh well.

I didn’t blog about this because I wanted to make sure I knew the people who showed up. And we do, after all, just have an apartment. If you missed the evite, email me and I’ll make sure to add you to my contacts for next time. :-)

So thank you to everyone who came - we had a ton of fun and you were great guests. Our kitchen still is a bit of a mess, but the rest of the place is almost as clean as it was when started.

updated 5 Jun 2005 4:13 pm

1 Jun 2005

Notes from Stanford US-Asia lecture with Prahalad and Barker

by eleanor @ 10:40 am in Events & Happenings | Strategy-Marketing   ++

Here are my Treo-tized notes from yesterday’s lecture in the US-Asia Tech Mgmt. Series at Stanford, which closed out the Spring series. Note that the presentations will be available online here - keep checking.

---

Jonathan Barker spoke and focused on China:

• Huge demographic and economic changes: Private property growing, primarily as lease holding from government
  Changing middleclass consumption patterns will have tremendous impact. Adoption of credit and cashless payment systems is coming: there were 200 million bank cards in 2000, in 2004 there are 468 million.
• Chinese consumption is predicted to increase 18% annually for the next X years (versus a static 2% in the US)
• Consumer electronics consumption (not just manufacturing) was $49.6 billion in 2004 (#2 behind the US right now). IDC predicts that will double to $100 billion by 2008. Covers all areas – mobiles, tvs, audio devices.
• Need infrastructure for autos: (missed how many they have now) but in 2020 China’s expected to have 140 million cars on the road – huge impact for cities (urban planning, congestion, pollution), the countryside (highways, gas stations, etc etc) and the nation in general.
• Factors even extend into the non-glamorous: take milk consumption – he showed a chart where per capita consumption went from about 2 (liters?) to 40-50 (liters?) per year. (non-sequitur thought of mine: I had read that many Asians have difficulty tolerating lactose. Is that true? If so would milk consumption be a habit, a sort of acquired taste that would signal affluence?).
• Then he discussed a most interesting bit: China has a metric called the Gini coefficient, which is a ratio of inequality ranging from 0-1, indicating roughly the gulf between the richest and poorest (very interesting – something I recall neither from Political Economy or recent discussions of class in America like in the recent series from The NY Times). China’s is now .46, disturbing when it was just .33 in 1980 (for comparison’s sake it’s .41 now in US).

---

Then we had C.K . Prahalad speak on India.

Central thesis: His work is now focused on the 10 countries in the developing world (see one of his slides for the full list, but it’s the usual guys). These countries represent $16 trillion in market potential. To get there we need to adopt the point of view of bottom of pyramid, abandon our own preconceptions and ways of doing business.

The question is what do with the 80% of humanity that’s stayed under the radar of the big global and local companies. hey’re simply unserved and that creates lots of opportunities for tremendous innovation and profit.

He wanted to give specific examples of why and how things work, because it’s very different. Everything about serving this market challenges conventional thinking and assumptions. The price-performance ratio needs to be completely rethought while maintaining world class quality. You need to plan for saleability, selling profitably at $1, not $100. Right now, the NGOs don’t pay attention to scale, everything is done on a regional/national project basis. Industry must step in and build this out.

So back to the question of how to convert 5 billion poor people to consumers. He uses a pyramid to show his 3 themes: global restructuring, conventional strategies and tactics, and the bottom of pyramid (this is probably made much more clear in his book).

This matters because in age of saturated markets, where we are chasing the same 1 billion people with endless product variations, the other 5 billion needs everything, making for essentially limitless opportunity. And it’s not a question of being “backwards”, it’s not about adopting best practices, it’s about finding next practices to leapfrog from being behind to adopting next generation tools. As just one example, India (or some region in India) held a fully electronic poll for their elections in 2004; of course the necessary equipment was transported by elephant, but their elections were successfully held using technology we can’t even get right (or trust, but that’s another story in famously corrupt India). Prof. Prahalad maintains it’s just a project management challenge, and encourages the Stanford Engineering students to bite in and take it up.

The theme of “Next practice, not best practice” would come up again and again in his presentation, that emerging markets are huge, demographics (youth) & growth rates appealing, especially versus the aging and stagnating demographics of the US and Europe.

So back to the question at hand, how to marry low cost, good quality, profitability, and sustainability (I might have missed one) at same time, fuse them into each product. He went through a couple examples (but had many more, I’m sure they’re all this fascinating).

• Hospitality in India. Indians love to travel – visiting relatives, religious pilgrimages, whatever – each day 10-20 million Indians use the national railway system. Where do they sleep? Sometimes even on the street (Gershenfeld’s Fab talked about the huge increase in prices of Bangalore hotels because of the influx of foreigners in to spend time at the tech haven – prices like $250+ a night). Prof. Prahalad wanted to do it for 10% of that kind of cost. So what do you do? You figure out what it will look like. They had a team of 6 people (students? At UMichigan or somewhere else? Is probably in the book.) They limited the scope, to redefine the market as being not luxury, not budget. They created a new market, but plotting the four most critical elements on the sides of a cube: space, modernity, price-performance, saleability. These were the self-imposed constraints (I think of them more as imperatives) that could not be relaxed. He didn’t say, but it has to be the case that everything else was up for grabs.

  So the example here is IndiOne, a venture backed by Tata Industries that’s the result of these efforts.

  

  They offer rooms for $20 US and it looks like a modern hostel meets a less expensive European chain hotel. The rooms are appealing, simple and modern. They have showers, LCD tvs, cable, and broadband connectivity. Hotel lobbies have stripped down restaurants. How did they do it? They rethought everything: new training practices, maintenance plans, human resources (hiring, staffing – they do this with far fewer people), and intelligent application of IT at the backend. Delivering more features, at a lower price. And they specifically thought about scale: they chose iconographic elements so they would be portable (and recognizable) globally. This is what 6 people did in 18 months. Ten more are due to be built next year. Their goal was to destroy the status quo price-performance curve, delivering a new kind of value unseen before. Watch out Marriott.

• The second project he described was to increase adult literacy. They chose to focus not on the educational basics of the “3Rs” (reading, writing, arithmetic) but on the 1R of reading. Goal was to quickly get people to read, so they went with immersion type video, not alphabets and piecemeal word construction. [I can say that while using that Rosetta Stone sw to learn Japanese, the immersion was very effective, especially for the kanji; though I did memorize the kana]. Prof. Prahalad said that half of all Indian women are illiterate. Interestingly, from the video he showed, learning to read via computer was greeted with an enthusiasm that was missing from Gershenfeld’s discussion of tech adoption in India in Fab. It might be the difference between just plunking down hardware and in establishing a program and software to do something immediately useful for the population? This venture was put together by TCS, Tata Consultancy Services as a non-profit, non-commercial project. He said something about the software being open source.

---

So that concluded the presentation part, the presentations will be online @ asia.stanford.edu/events/Spring05/ee402t/
Then followed some Q&A from the audience. I just captured snippets of the responses of the professors.

• ….Because our standard of living is so high, we miss out on serving everybody. We need to get back to the old ethos of Ford Motor Company, where the goal was to build products that everyone could afford. There needs to be a new industrial revolution.
• Discussing wage inequalities around the world: Information asymmetries lie at root of wage disparities; they will be brought in line once the information is available to all.
• Closing question - highlights of the best opportunities for the budding young entrepreneurs in the room:
  • Barker: In China, there are still lots of dirt roads, very basic opportunities are everywhere. To be successful, you need to learn to finesse the opportunity, to adapt to the local conditions and to not overlook huge potential even though many opportunities are not sexy by Western standards.
  • Prahalad: Invest time in languages and intercultural awareness. Focus on becoming part of global citizenry. In exchange for the opportunity to participate everywhere/anywhere in the world you have the obligation to do something productive, which will improve the world. Develop a personal mission, a desire to leave personal legacy.

updated 1 Jun 2005 10:41 am

31 May 2005

OpenOffice 1.1.4: motivation for switching and review

by eleanor @ 4:23 pm in Open Source   ++

I got a spiffy new Vaio back in March, which came with a trial edition for Microsoft Office 2003, which I eventually activated and used. I’ve used this sw for years, and probably use more of the power features than 95% the norm, but it’s a classic problem of an over-engineered product. And what is the cost barrier they need to overcome with me? The sub-$100 employee discount version. I’ve installed OpenOffice and we’ll see how it goes. Maybe I’ll need the upgrade, and maybe not.

One thing’s for sure though: the dinosaur campaign is a sure-fire dissuader. I haven’t commented on it previously but it’s been going on for months, and is — bafflingly — still in progress (some choice Flash platitude filled marketing here).

Microsoft exec’s need to revisit The Innovator’s Dilemma to get their thinking back in line with the reality of their market position. If your product has been goldplated to the point where customers no longer see value in the cost and disruption involved in an upgrade, you sure as hell don’t mock them for being… For being what exactly? For being customers who find your past products useful enough to keep wanting to use them?

I am no one’s advertising maven but this is where you’re supposed to tell them why it’s in their absolute money-making interest to upgrade right now. You can’t berate people into product adoption, certainly not in the current climate of business IT investment. The mere fact that this campaign exists is admission that there is no value proposition for customers: they’re seeking to play on emotions of being “behind the times” to sell their upgrade. What’s in it for customers? Features that will probably be never used, and the satisfaction of having “evolved” (to far more memory intensive applications). What’s in it for Microsoft? More money upfront of course, but the more subtle benefit is that every copy will need to be validated (as was not the case previously). From the Microsoft website:

Product activation is a technology created to help protect consumers and software manufacturers by reducing software piracy; it helps verify that you have a genuine, high-quality, virus-free copy of Office XP that has not been used on more personal computers than is permitted by the software license.

And sure, I’m antipiracy, but that’s not a feature that’s valuable to me as a user. Microsoft’s policy of bundling OS with each new pc, yet not allowing license transferability (I think I bought about 4 Windows 2000, and so far 2 Windows XP licenses) doesn’t bode well for user experience during the inevitable sytem restores, reclones, and hardware upgrades.

And upgrading is such a hassle with Microsoft products! I’ve never sat in front of one single install — even reclones — where Outlook has ever behaved and looked exactly the same. It can be argued that’s due to the vicissitudes of Exchange and various service packs and whatever, but it’s just bogus. The amount of customization it takes to make Office usable out of the box is insane - from turning things off (clippy, all that clipboard eyecandy, the pseudo-useful menu hiding) to pointing at defaut directories to configuring my toolbars with additional buttons.

You know, it’s only during upgrades and reinstalls that I really ever feel like a loser for using Microsoft products. That I ever feel like I’m flailing with a large, sensory obstructing dinosaur head on.

Note: in cleaning out my drafts 12-Jun I realized that I both needed to post this item and to write up a real review of the current state of Open Office after having put it through its paces, so I’ve backdated this.

updated 12 Jun 2005 4:24 pm

26 May 2005

Prahalad at Stanford: “Changing Lifestyles in Asian Countries: Opportunities for Entrepreneurs”

by eleanor @ 10:46 am in Events & Happenings | Strategy-Marketing   ++

So much of our work here is about geekery targeted to “people like us”. Unashamedly alpha geek though I am, I’d be a fool to ignore the huge emerging markets of the “rest of the world”. I do though, often enough.

Fortunately around here you can get a dose of fresh opportunity. The equation global development -> rising standards of living -> profit works even for those uninterested in changing world.

Stanford’s US-ASIA Technology Management Center (home of lots of interesting free seminars) is having in esteemed strategist and professor CK Prahalad (U of Michigan & required bskool reading) and Jonathan Barker, Managing Principal, Longbridge Capital (behold, the zero info website!) in to talk about what we should be thinking about.

I primarily associate Prof Prahalad with things like “Resource Based View” and moving-pawns-around-the-board type Strategy, but his new book, The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid: Eradicating Poverty Through Profits (not read) addresses these issues.

We should heed the call of the wider world.

Next Tuesday, 31 May from 4:15-5:30pm at Skilling Engineering Auditorium at Stanford.

updated 26 May 2005 10:47 am

24 May 2005

The importance of a peer group

by eleanor @ 11:51 am in Life-Culture-Play   ++

Mike and I saw the new Star Wars movie last night. While not as bad as the first two, the whole prequel series drives home a powerful lesson:

No matter how smart, gifted, driven, visionary, or well-financed you are, you will not think of everything and involving a group of people as spectacular as you are will make your thing better.

Everyone has blind spots, personal biases, and momentary lapses that keep them from achieving perfection. Peer review — even a simple chat among friends — exposes the weak spots, the obvious inconsistencies, the non-sequiturs, and the critical flaws in your venture. Reality checks can save your business.

As our operations/lives/business/jobs/industries become more complex and entwined, maintaining close connections and involvement with a group of your peers becomes even more important. And that’s part of the beauty and value of the blogosphere. It’s a huge distributed peer review system, as well as a tool for filtering news and attention. You can get a lot more of everything (news, analysis, criticism) that you want, but the insights can be tremendous.

But for some people virtual, distributed “mentoring” doesn’t work. And indeed, we all need real life relationships. A colleague, Blair Koch, with who I worked on a Product Management peer group happened to call this morning and tell me about how she was getting involved in The Alternative Board. Check it out - if you’re struggling on your own with these issues maybe you can find a valuable safety net, a trusty community of peers in this group.

It’s true it takes work. The smarter you are, the rarer you are. But that’s not an excuse. Keep looking and you will find them. Find mentors: good mentors collect people like you and can help you assemble peer groups.

It’s even harder here in the Bay area, surrounded by this culture of innovation where we lionize the coder or entrepreneur working independently. Of course we can do it “on our own”. Reading Darknet last night, I hit chapter 12, Architects of Darknet, where JD Lasica writes about Shawn Fanning (Napster), Bram Cohen (BitTorrent), Justin Frankel (WinAmp, later Gnutella) and Ian Clarke (Freenet) as lone warriors (notice these guys are… all guys - PubSub’s Bob Wyman told me women need get out and start more companies; which is undoubtedly true). These are guys waging an epic struggle, pursuing their vision, all on their own. But it’s “just” code. Important code, but scaffolding.

Vision is good. All strategy books say you need vision. But there’s a difference between a collective vision and a personal vision — especially when it comes to crossing from revolutionary to greatness. If you’re a guy with a revolutionary tool - if you’re brilliant and hardworking enough, you can do it. That same mindset doesn’t apply to building a company (or great films).

updated 24 May 2005 1:25 pm

23 May 2005

Quit - the day before your big devcon?

by eleanor @ 2:13 pm in Mobility   ++

Mike just IM’ed me a link to a piece that said PalmSource’s CEO David Nagel quit yesterday. Starting today and the rest of this week is the big PalmSource developer conference. What incredibly bad timing for such a disruptive announcement.

Supposedly it’s amicable enough that Nagel’s staying around for a few months as a consultant, but this is a ridiculous time for a CEO to quit. If this was in the cards - that is, known and planned for ahead of time - the timing couldn’t have possibly been worse.

We had Ewan Spence of All About Symbian and the newly launched All About Palm over last night along with some other mobility people, and Ewan talked about how Nagel was highly visible for his strong support to community efforts and seemed really appreciate his leadership within Palm. Think of all the developers who made their way out here only to be met with an announcement that surely puts the future of the company (and developer’s continued investment) in question.

If only we were checking our newsreaders instead of kiboshing and rearchitecting poor Russ’ homebrew java blog software!

What a message to send to your developer community and partners! Now, of course Ewan’s partner Rafe working away back in the UK posts this am wondering aloud if it’s a strategy mismatch. Everyone else seems to be just looking at it like a normal result of the company’s internal struggles, even the usually conspiracy-theorist Register.

You’ve got people like Russ who, even before he knew the news, took a shot at Palm for being “doomed” and even Mike saying how inconsistent their treatment of developers has been (I’m sure he’ll post on this later - check Bitsplitter for his thoughts). I’m not a developer, but the world of Garnet, Cobalt, OS changes, dev kit support and such permeates even the user experience. I should be able to find a tabbed browser for the Treo 650, but only one browser exists - in part due to how lethagic the developer community has become.

And it’s such a shame because the Treo 650 is a great device. Now I’m a huge fan of Palm going way back, but they’ve really earned it for me — this time with the hardware more than the software. And the split of the company into hw-sw means that when I say I love my Treo, the part I really talk about is the hardware. But how do you separate the hw of a device from the sw that runs on that device only? Companies can go thru mitosis, and Wall Street loves it, but sometimes it makes more sense than others. Like I love how I listen to music with my headphones, and when a call comes in, the display shows who it is, and lets me answer it with just a button. Who controls the magic there that makes the experience? Probably in that case PalmSource. This doesn’t bode well for me ever getting a tabbed Treo browser.

Hmmmm - speaking of Industry Standard - down the left side of the page, there are a lot of orphaned tech pundit blogs. A failed experiment?

updated 23 May 2005 2:15 pm

The forgotten cost of Firefox: cookie mgmt

by eleanor @ 12:01 pm in Geek   ++

I’ve been a Mozilla devotée since 1999, and was slow to come over to Firefox. I like Firefox, but this Silicon Beat piece on the “problem” of users rejecting cookies today just jogged my mind. I’m not longer prompted to accept cookies. I recloned a couple weeks ago to fix a bluetooth problem, and realized I hadn’t customized that part of the browser. Today I rediscover that Firefox is much more limited in how you can control cookies (something that surprises me each time I learn it). What a pain, and so hard to understand. Is it a “feature” or is it just part of Firefox’s original misssion of being a stripped down, fast version of Mozilla?

As a user of what’s now the flagship product of the Mozilla family, all I know is I just deleted a quantity of cookies that makes me feel positively unclean. And it’s very clumsy to maintain that state. I deleted by accident a cookie for Bloglines (with “don’t allow sites that set removed cookies to set future cookies” checked) and was unable to log back in. I had to go to “manage cookies” and delete Bloglines from the list of Exceptions (it was marked as “Block”). Phew! What else will I have to do that for just to get rid of the Zedo, Hitbox and all that other junk?

The full Mozilla suite has a much richer set of tools to manage cookies. I miss the “ask me before accepting all cookies” option, almost enough to go back to the full suite.

As it is with Firefox, it’s almost easier to track what sites I’ve viewed via my cookies than in my damn history - given all this residue! I’ve been to many of these sites just once, and there they site in my cookies! Horrible.

Where is the value for me? I’ll accept cookies if they are linked to login info, or customization that I explicitly create. But otherwise they’re just bugs. I’m willing to explicitly subscribe to feeds and make that data public, but site-based cookies that simply report repeat visitor trends drive no value for me. I know site stats are important to owners, and that this is data they crave, but the no-tangible-value-for-me of this chafes.

Back to the question of Mozilla Suite vs Firefox+Thunderbird, I remain curious: are Firefox+Thunderbird more memory efficient than the full Moz suite? Are they optimized for standalone use, or meant to be used together?

Updated: Hit publish too soon.
Updated: I also have this piece open in another tab on web analytics, journalism and pr from earlier this year. One of the my feeds linked to it (when I have my Firefox tracker, I’ll know who it was). This shows another piece of the puzzle, the back end mining that goes on behind the scenes. I don’t mean to be naive and say that there shouldn’t be advertising on the web, but rather to push for a technological solution that creates value for me as user. And no, I’m sorry, receiving more pertinent (targeted) advertising is not a value I experience, except when I am in shopping mode.

Maybe there should be a browser button to click to denote when I am open to deals being offered?

updated 23 May 2005 12:40 pm

Hip pre-fab homes… with built-in networks I hope

by eleanor @ 11:51 am in Emergent   ++

How weird is it that people who attended the Sunset Celebration Weekend stood in line for +2 hours just to file, Lenin-mausoleum style, though a pre-fab home, the Sunset Breezehouse? They did it last year, I heard, and certainly did this year. The queue was enormous, though I didn’t think take a picture. So you’ll just have to believe me. You can see photos of the display here (via Flickr). Mike and I cruised by, but did not wait in line.

Is it the “green” vibe? An acknowledgement that it’s the land that’s most important out here, or what?

It seems a Silicon Valley extension of a pre-fab fascination that we saw in a Business 2.0 write up on prefab London penthouses - created by lifting units onto rooftops. Interesting business model in light of the increasing chatter about how now it’s not just a question of getting Fiber to the Home, it’s about the bandwidth that will necessary within the home. I daresay prefab could help out.

But you’d need some serious manufacturing chops here. I told my little old dad about this, and he, a retired GM chief draftsman, said he always wondered why GM never got in the business of pre-fab buildings, considering their supply chain and competencies. If we are looking at cars as platforms (in all senses of the word), it’s true that houses follow along nicely.

updated 23 May 2005 11:54 am

Blogging vs journalism: stacacotto viewpoints vs. synthesis

by eleanor @ 11:16 am in Emergent   ++

Back when I was doing tech research for NEC, I spent more of my day among the “trash tech pubs” than blogs. By that I mean the EWeeks, ComputerWorld’s and the like. The trash isn’t perjorative, but rather reflects how the free-sub mass-mail dead-tree copies just tend to pile up before being trashed.

Lately I’ve de-emphasized them in favor of blogs, and have ruminated on the contrasts.

I don’t hate these pubs, but they are what they are: vendor-push, press release and advertising driven. That means they were something I used in the same sort of way that the guys in the movie Men In Black used the supermarket tabloid: there’s truth in there somewhere, if only we can sort it out. As critical thinkers, we have to take everything with a grain of salt, but as with all boosterism, I view these guys as hype creators. [My jaded view is that as individual bloggers gain a monetary stake in the equation, they join this bunch. But that’s not bad: more data that’s readily parseable and digestible helps clarify markets.]

Let’s take one example around Digital Identity. A couple weeks back Mike posted on Marc Canter’s talk at Mobile Monday, with Marc pre-pimping his work for Microsoft around the Digital Identity World conference (you can get some of his take here). Lots of people talked about the conf, but I never pulled out anything substantive (could be my error).

However, in going through my feeds, I see that EWeek has come through with more information about Microsoft’s plans here.

And I wonder if that’s part of the difference between blogging and journalism: that blogging is self-motivated, only about things that interest a person, whereas “covering a beat” brings a charter, mission and measurable criteria (completeness). Conversations are great for developing things, but for the many themes that we just need to be aware of, it’s helpful to have gain a snapshot 360 view brought by the “distanced observers” that journalists have traditionally striven to be.

updated 23 May 2005 11:16 am

20 May 2005

Music fun

by eleanor @ 9:16 am in Life-Culture-Play   ++

So I’m in a good mood apparently and not overly professional feeling. My feed reorg seems to be working: I caught a tag music game going on (I should set up searches on my name, but honestly I’m chicken). Jonas tagged me and I will participate.

Last cd’s bought: Winterkälte’s Disturbance and Casino Vs Japan early stuff. A bit epicurian for even my tastes, but CvJ’s Whole Numbers Play the Basics is one of my top 10 albums ever. The CvJ site gives a great sample of their sound. Soothing.

Disc volume: Server says 15.6 files in the main jukebox, but I’ve not burned everything and there are cds of mp3s offline too.

Current song: None. Last song played: (before I started this exercise - FoxyTunes displayed it in browser all day): Psychedelic Furs - Sister Europe.

My list is songs that have been stuck in my head over the last few days:

1. Converter’s “Dron(ritual)” off the very good Exit Ritual (note that “very good” in the category of power noise is a relative thing)
2. Death in June’s “Fall Apart” - neo-folk from Serbia. I have a couple versions, but Something is Coming is a good mix of acoustic and studio work. Warning, he occassionally uses Nazi imagery, but I think I would too if I was in Serbia thru the wars. Jonas?
3. Coil’s “Slur-Babylero-Ostia” (different parts of all three songs) off Horse Rotorvator
4. The Cure’s “A Strange Day” off the dark Pornography
5. Radiohead’s “Sit Down, Stand Up” from Hail to the Thief - this and Paranoid Android are about as mainstream as I get
6. Lastly, and quite enduringly, the “So Long and Thanks for All the Fish” song from HHGTG

I really can’t recommend most of that. I do have singular taste - love music with chirps instead lyrics, strange distinct beats and distortion. I find it tremendously focusing. But I do recommend:

1. Haujobb Vertical Theory - the kind of Industrial I favor besides noise.
2. Balligomingo Beneath the Surface - folks from Nettwerk back in the day (Delerium, FLA). Should I find it weird that Avril Lavigne is on Nettwerk now?
3. Autechre’s Amber or EP7 - excellent working music.
4. Anything Robyn Hitchcock - he’s an amazing songwriter and bard (even has a song with Eleanor in it!). If you can find his cover of The Furs’ “Ghost In You”, do it.
5. And on the rare, odd side - Coil/Elph’s Time Machines project - it all sounds like ciccadas. Here’s a review and I use the disc in the same way as the reviewer. It’s epic hot summer afternoon music!

Since I hate chain letters, but generally follow norms, I’ll tag Niall, MJ, Mike, and Russ. Ignore as you may.

And I’ll confess - between reading Darknet and meditating on all the file sharing I don’t do, I’m thinking of Yahoo’s music service. $5 is just about right. I even might be Russ’s sucker, but only if his Zen isn’t some girly color :-). A nice lime green is preferred.

updated 20 May 2005 9:16 am

19 May 2005

Everything iCal resource

by eleanor @ 3:09 pm in Geek   ++

Niall sent me this today - Ohtogo’s iCal Resources. I’ve heard about python folks have used, but this is the first real package I’ve found (and I did actually sniff around the MozCalendar mailing list, pretty scary. Shoulda just searched). I’m not coder enough to write my own, far better to munge other stuff.

The iCal WordPress plugin sounds good, but I want it in the other direction. I want my calendar (only certain categories) to drive my ical, to drive my blog - pour in all the new data into new post drafts? I’m not really sure how realistic that is, but I sure want it to be less work.

That reminds me, I was gonna install that but then got distracted. But a good distracted: you’ll never guess what by! Backing up and cleaning up my server! Oh, I’ll be a good little girl geek some day.

I’ll be very interested to see what code it generates from the WP iCal plugin. It may very well be liveable to just use that, instead of cracking into the problems off stripping out categories and checking to see what’s already been added.

I’ve also been dying to know what the “h” meant in Tantek/Technorati’s “hcal”, “hcard”, etc, hstandards. It’s just for HTML.

updated 19 May 2005 3:54 pm

Funny of the day

by eleanor @ 2:44 pm in Geek   ++

This précis made me laugh - top to bottom. But then again, I just saw Hitchhiker’s Guide last night so my sense of the ridiculous is freshly honed (it was super good and we could have just walked into a 12:30am screening of Sith but we didn’t).

This immediately brought to mind a piece I read Tuesday, as I was catching up on an older Economist. Apparently the celebrity trash newsies market is booming on both sides of the Atlantic, and we have new entrants. (Econ is sub required - a lot more than a couple $17 martinis, but, as some will say about the Times, worth it — or you can read about it in USA Today, perhaps the most appropriate source for analysis on this kind of news). From the Economist piece:

Young women want every bit of information they can glean about their role models and are willing to buy several titles each week…..Advertisers may sniff at low-down gossip, but America’s female readers seem happy to take their celebrity news any way they can get it—true, false, worshipful or unkind.

Of course, you have to 1,$s/women|female/bloggers/g (ie. sub “blogger” for “chick” over the whole article). But the point remains that old media and new media are getting closer every day. Where are the celebrity blogger gossip blogs?

Disclaimer: I have a bulging backpack and a martini-based price comparison works for me; at least he didn’t “put it in perspective” against 10 Starbucks visits or products from Apple. I wonder if that would have secured less derision? Ya gotta know your market.

updated 19 May 2005 2:45 pm

Gnomedex

by eleanor @ 10:57 am in Geek | Events & Happenings   ++

Ah, so I’m calendaring because I haven’t lately. And people keep mentioning Gnomedex. Which I went to last year. But hadn’t checked out for this year, let alone even registered for.

It’s in Seattle (good I think, but I personally hunger to visit Portland as those things go), the weekend of 23-25 June. We went last year, when it was only $99 and in Tahoe (I like conferences in places I’m already looking for an excuse to adventure to). I think Mike and I will be going - that is we’ll try and hope to see you all there.

Even if you’re not a conference-goer and more like just a normal person, this is a good place to start. This conference grew up in the midwest and last time, there were midwest moms helping out. So it’s a very laid back, friendly sort of place. You’ll meet some people you’ve heard of or read, but others completely new. Sometimes it’s easy to focus on the high profile stuff and people, but that’s not where life really happens. I’d especially like to see more girls there this year, as there was a shocking dearth of them (but all the boys were very nice).

Register here.

updated 19 May 2005 11:01 am

Webzine 2005 is back

by eleanor @ 10:42 am in Events & Happenings | Life-Culture-Play   ++

Well, not that I was at the first ones, but I heard they rocked. Scott Beale of Laughing Squid and crew are putting on another Webzine. It’s a conf, party, subversive get together, geek-out and art thing all at once. In September. And we don’t even have to head out to the playa.

Yes, the rumours are true! After FOUR long years, Webzine will return later this year to San Francisco. We don’t know how we could have gone so long with a Webzine event either. What is Webzine you ask? Webzine is your momma’s cookies, a cup of warm tea, a masturbating monkey, Carl Sagan in the shower, orgasmic, educational, a party, a couple days at the beach, living chinchilla earmuffs, a Habitrail, a snort, 10 hours of sleep, a magical sword, a French kiss, a conference, an expo and celebration of independent publishing on the Internet. It’s an excuse to bring some of the most amazingly brilliant online content creators together under one roof, exposing their secrets so YOU, dear reader, are inspired to create your own. That’s what this is all about. Creativity, ideas and the tools to take you there. Listen, learn and leave inspired.

Webzine’s in SF the weekend of 23-24 September. And it’s going to be cheap as hell.

I’m definitely going and volunteering to help out in any way I can. Check it out.

I like conference sites that are run on blog software. Anyone else noticing that blogs are just a cheap, quick and easy way to get stuff in a web-based database?

updated 19 May 2005 10:42 am

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