Archive for February, 2005

Calendaring needs

by eleanor on 25 Feb 2005 @ 2:01 pm in Geek   ++

Mike pinged me with the Google’s gonna do calendar thing on Tues am. We were just talking this weekend about the calendar issue, so I was interested. That first piece was a nice bit of speculation, but that was it, so I just turned inward to pick up the pieces of moving to iCal. Then Brendon pinged me with other bits of discussion, so now I’ll put this out.

I calendar almost everything. It helps me remember what I was doing, thinking, living then. My work calendar is completely mapped out, part of making the work of research more transparent for Tokyo (who might well question “What does she do all day?”). That was the original impetus, but I’ve adopted it as a sort of modified Personal Software Process. I simply find I accomplish what I set out to do within my original estimates as long as I keep to the schedule, since I can focus on incredibly diverse things as long as I plan for deep dives separated by periods of general work or phonecalls.

As a Windows user, I have been using categories in Outlook to manage my tasks; unfortunately the only way to get a visual indicator of task (i.e., displayed by color) was to use the proprietary (and buggy) “label” indicator. If you’re an Outlook user, this ends up being a nice feature (right click and select “label”, you can customize labels and colors). You can see it below.

When I prepared my Outlook calendar for export, I used my category-based organization to copy entries by category into new blank calendars I created. The process was rather involved (and I document the full thing here - will be uploaded when done).

I wanted to use the Moz calendar project for this first. I’ve used Moz since 1999 and last tried the calendar about two years ago. It’s come a long way since then, but still has problems. Moreover, it seems to be a huge memory hog. That’s ok, I’ll just have to get more RAM. Be prepared to deal with error messages notifying you a script will take a long time to run. Just hit “cancel” and it will continue cooking.

My 13 categories (which seems high) translated into 13 calendar files under ics. In MozCalendar (currently named Sunbird), I can toggle each one so they are viewable or not, and assign each layer a color to achieve the same effect.
Below you can see a view of my new calendar in MozCal. Horrid colors I know, but the app seems to need a restart before displaying a color change. I won’t bother with being aesthetic now.

Since I have WebDAV capabilities via my web host, Dreamhost, I can make these files available for viewing by others, and theoretically make slices available for public downloads. From this, you would just need a reader that can parse the .ics and add an event to a client calendar.

Since I haven’t really played with this before, let me try with JWZ’s ics for the DNA Lounge (actually, it’s more likely from a guy named John Adams). That will get a nice black or blood red font (I hit DNA for their fringe events). <CRASH!> Well, we’ll have to see MozSuite crashed (perhaps it is not so bad that I’ve been using Firefox as my browser while I test this out). <BANG!> A restart failed as well. Hmmm. Perhaps it is good that I got my screencaptures in while I could, folks.

But what goes on in my pc is only so interesting. The topic has gained traction out in the wild.

Jeremy Zawodny posted about this yesterday, which Brendon Wilson AIM’ed me about. Jeremy asked what features folks would want in additon to his good-start list. I added my thoughts in comments to Jeremy’s post, which I’ll reprint here (bc I’ll forget where I wrote them):

I’ve been near obsessed with this issue in the last two weeks with moving from outlook to ical and have found no easy solutions. Sorry for the long comment - repressed blog post.

Here are the client apps I’ve found in the win(dows) world: MozCal is most stable on MozSuite (I find it very slow and unstable on Firefox and Tbird). PHPical, like EventSherpa, is also gone. WebCalendar (which I’ve found cumbersome for other apps) will be my next bet.

My must-have feature requests:

• layered calendars. That’s the reason I’m moving to iCal is for the ability to layer on and off new calendars. That will fix some of the sharing-of-personal data isssue, as it addresses the rss/rdf thing by making context much more apparent (if users chose to group it in this way).
• for RSS type apps, a “click” to add to your calendar plugin for an individual event (in addition to offering the full ics)
• intelligent, mobile syncing with my treo650

As a personal solution to event tracking that uses RSS, I’m modifying a Wordpress install to publish an event feed (not live yet). I’m tangled in the code right now, but should be able to get smarter eyes on it this weekend and have it up next week.

As for demand, this is totally a scratch-my-itch thing that’s perfect for smaller groups to tackle. We don’t really need Google, but if they do it and it’s exactly what I want, that’s great (how likely is that?). However, this is about as critical as microcontent can get, and the trust barrier is very high. Local copies are still key, so it will take someone flexible enough to work across the various client apps (which really do suck).

And before we get all wound up about how complicated our technogeek lives are, we don’t have any exposure to the level of normal-land user need this is for this product. Can you imagine keeping a handle on family activities? That’s a huge pool of unmet needs. It might be free, it might be $29.95, it’s doable.

So where are we? Nothing really works. We’ve got a ton of dead projects (like what about Outport - code not updated in forever). New rants pushing people off from working on this (understandable though they are). Will Google save us? I don’t think so.

Also in the comments Technorati’s Tantek pointed to hCalendar, but I’m not sure what it means. Right now we’ve got standards around iCal, but limited implementation (except in the Apple world, and don’t think that didn’t cause me to reconsider my Treo650 vs. a nice phone-and-iPod-and-MacMini - but hell three gadgets just can’t compete). It seems like we need new implementations. And hCalendar might be an important source of both momentum and guidance.

One thing is for sure, what we’re really talking about here is search plus social networking plus synchronicity. The question we’re trying to address is how can I make the most effective use of my time? How do I find interesting ways to spend my time, with new friends, close friends, and old friends? How can I control my interests and my scheduling? How can I understand what my family is doing easily? How could I centralize and mobilize?

Let’s see what we can put together.

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My new killer app for Dragon

by eleanor on @ 10:58 am in Geek   ++

Here’s just a quick post to say that, after 25 minutes of their training programs, ScanSoft’s Dragon Naturally Speaking 8 (even the cheap version) works fabulously, and it scratches an itch I’ve had for years. I only wish the idea came to me sooner!

For some time, I’ve been taking notes from books I read - tagging interesting passages as I go long. Then, I return and laboriously key them in. It’s almost embarrassing to recount such a waste of time, but the end product is valuable. It’s taxing for my wrists, in addition to being a boring chore, so the scheme usually only works when I get books out of the library and can assume I’ll never see them again. A suboptimal solution all around.

The problem was more acute with this week’s offering, The Innovator’s Solution (which, yes, I should have read long ago). My copy, sitting here now, is just filled with little page markers - a daunting notetaking prospect (and I’m on the 3rd last chapter, with more to add). It’s, of course, a remarkable book, as good as you’ve heard and worth reading, filled with insights and tips that are worth capturing. It’s true we know, viscerally, a lot of this stuff, having learned through experience, but often I find I can lose perspective and need to be reminded. There are probably a hundred things Christensen writes that are worth careful study. Who has time for that?

A few years ago, when I started this system of capturing notes, I looked to pen scanners to snatch lines of text, but their performance was just not up to this application. I considered a few other schemes, including that Logitech IO pen and others too lame for me to recall. (ThinkGeek doesn’t even feature those single line scanners anymore - what a failure!)

Techno-flail followed techno flail, until at last, it hit me yesterday afternoon that Dragon would be perfect for the dictation that comes from reading printed material. It’s not creation - there are no pauses while I think, extra movements as I amplify and idea or move text around. This is just pure dictation. It’s a wonderful feeling to successfully think my way out of the problems I set myself.

And how did it do? Beautifully. 25 minutes of going through the tutorials and I was off. Even the control settings and such are easy to use (though I’ve learned I can be sloppy in my pronunciation of “asterisk”). As before, I’m capturing the text in a text editor, using characters as a break so that I can later swap them out in VIM (I’ve become a regex fiend out of pure laziness). When typing by hand, I used the | character. Using Dragon, I needed something easier, and so selected asterisk as my field-break marker. I need to create a macro for<i>, although speaking “open angle brackets - slash - i - close angle brackets” works and I’m able to achieve some fluency. “Open angle bracket - p - close angle bracket” is harder (”P” is a difficult sound to clearly isolate). Of course I can take a different approach with marking and just swap it out later. We must remain ever vigilant against losing our pragmatic approach!

This is excellent news for the world at large, because that means I will be able to convert the handwritten (can you believe it?) notes I have sitting on notecards from all my business school articles. This was before I was into PHP at all guys, so just settle down.

So keep an eye out probably Monday when I roll out the release of my oft-rescheduled repository of business, strategy, economics and other really interesting quotes and ideas. They’ll be direct quotes from books, but in fragmentary form, so they fall squarely within fair use. They’ll be useful for me, since I struggle to recall the specifics of anecdotes I’ve read in books. And perhaps we could do strategy quote of the day, just to share some of the wealth.

And you know, I think I might well be able to build most of this system myself. :-)

Taking this a step further, with Dragon performing this well, I half wonder if it could be an effective way to transcribe other things. I could imagine listening to a conference with headphones and speaking out the content. It’s not reasonable for everything, but it should reduce the effort involved.

There’s one final attribute to note approvingly: The Dragon packaging even gives evidence of a powerful lesson in serving customer needs. Headphones are included. I had just settled in to install the cd and planned on asking (nicely) for Mike to go fetch his Skype headphones. But I didn’t have to - my nice $80 software even came with headphones…. things I had been meaning to buy anyway but hadn’t yet. Way to deliver the full solution and get people started with a positive experience right out of the box.

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Satellite satellite - where are you?

by eleanor on 24 Feb 2005 @ 12:41 pm in Emergent | Life-Culture-Play   ++

Mass customization has given way to extreme personalization as content streams are now sliced thin enough to allow individual subscriptions. Blogging, podcasting, Tivo, OnDemand, iPodding, mobile entertainment and satellite radio all gyrate around the commercial opportunity that is giving people the content they want when they want it.

In the last few weeks, I’ve heard Orb and MobiTV (Idetic), spoke with the folks who make Sling Media and Slim Devices, makers of the SqueezeBox. The message is like a drumbeat: consumer-content-consumer-content.

Put on top of that the increased feed-reading capacity brought by my new Treo650+GPRS. I see that Doc’s shopping for a new car radio and Fred Wilson has a business take on the Tivo problem, riffing off Om’s do-an-Apple post which kicked off so much chatter that I sipped at in my other feeds. Further evidence of the march can be seen on if you hit Fred’s Tivo post directly - I bet your adsense will be as appropriate as mine was: I see an adsense serve for DirectTVvia RapidSatellite and his house ad for an HDRadio.

The same theme is everywhere - not surprising with 3GSM and Demo just having taken place. I like Jonathan’s take on 3GSM and SAPVenture’s Jeff Nolan’s take on Demo (along with the Blogging Demo blog).

I’m still reading though the Fast Company piece on Sirius v. XM that was pointed out by at least one of my feeds. It’s so hard to keep track of what’s interesting when perusing via mobile. Blazer and Bloglines are great together - but I wish the Bloglines interface as seen by mobiles had a checkbox to save posts rather than a per-post link so that you could submit several at a time. I also should see if there is a way to make Blazer have tabs so I could open other pages.

That’s (the hype and flutter, I mean) normally just par for the course, and not a big deal, but it’s funnier when I turn to today’s Wall St. Journal ($reg req’d) and see that some of this impact has begun to chew through to the profits of the big boys:

Viacom executives predicted that this year will be one of transition as the company reworks its mix of assets. It “will be remembered as the year of the reinvention of Viacom,” Mr. Redstone told Wall Street analysts on a conference call.

That reinvention includes shedding assets, including at least 40 under-performing radio stations and its Canadian movie-theater chain Famous Players. The company is also considering selling its theme parks.

Viacom now owns 185 stations. It plans to sell stations outside smaller markets so it can concentrate on its outlets in big cities. In the quarter, radio absorbed a $10.9 billion noncash impairment charge, leading to an operating loss of $10.7 billion, compared with operating income of $252 million a year earlier. Even without the charge, the radio unit’s operating income fell 9% to $231 million in the quarter. Radio revenue for the quarter was $550 million, compared with $551 million.

Game, match, and set. This is what happens when 20 minutes out of 60 are commercials and all the programs are pre-recorded. How can anyone be surprised?

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A challenge to a practical mind - the Bay Area buy-vs-rent dilemma

by eleanor on @ 9:52 am in Datapoints   ++

There was a fascinating discussion yesterday on a “chick list” I’m on, the SF Women of the Web, about housing prices in the bay area and bubble-or-not. Someone posted a link to this massively interesting rant on buy-vs-rent by Patrick Killelea. I’m right in Menlo, just over the ped bridge from PA, and I get to watch how quickly homes get sold — often only to be put back on the market within a year.

Patrick is right on when it comes to renting, which Russ’ househunting this past week proved. Happily, Russ is moving to our hood. His househunting (as he called it) gave me cause to explain to someone that yes - of course, househunting means rental when it’s proclaimed so cheerfully. Otherwise it’s just trauma, right? When Russ IM’ed me his Craigslist of candidate houses this weekend, the low prices surprised me — I hadn’t looked at house prices in more than 3 years. I know the price for our appartment (very nice, hanging off the edge of the San Francisquito and a park) kept going down, but wasn’t inclinded to scope out an upgrade.

What a strange world when renting keeps getting more cost effective (and ever more practical, with Mike working in SF and me with a to-be-determined commute as I scope for a new position). As I’m not a happy driver, it’d be terrible to be fully committed to living in Menlo if there was a juicy company in Pleasanton or Emeryville or San Rafael. That’s one cost that Patrick doesn’t even consider - the decreased flexibility that comes with owning a home or flat.

People continue to wonder how people “afford” houses around here. The answer is you build a great company and manage to so that you can have a few such houses. Or you scrimp and save and hope to profit by selling your house to someone flush with market success. Rinse and repeat.

But with time comes growth. I’m much more accepting of the market here now. Previously I expected to take the money and run to some island bunker. $700K takes you further just about anywhere, why not pick somewhere more convivial. I haven’t blogged about this (as I avoid political and newsish stuff), but the tsunami really made me reconsider the idea of tropical paradise. It’s an odd reflection to have, but since I’ve been mulling the life of an expat integrated into an adopted community, I’ve been troubled by new aspects of this experience that I could see in the aftermath of the tsunami. My somewhat glibly independent and adventurer instincts have been tamed by a sort of morbid practicality. Unspoiled is unspoiled and you can build your own infrastructure, but if something goes wrong, there’s little public infrastructure — the sort of safety net we take for granted here. In the event of some huge devastation like we saw this winter, it’s just impossible to recover. We’d rebuild together, if that was even feasible, but the timeline and cost are much different than recovering from a NorCal earthquake. Brewing up gourmet yuppie rum wouldn’t dig us out of that one (but the BVI’s aren’t so remote as Phuket).

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EFF Gadgets, Hackers and Freedom - EFF event at Minna tonight

by eleanor on 22 Feb 2005 @ 11:32 am in Geek | Events & Happenings   ++

Tonight the EFF is having a little soireé up in SF at Minna on Gadgets. Good preread for the event will be their piece on Endangered Gizmos. If you’re interested, RSVP to the folks at EFF.

I have definitely been planning on getting one of the unhobbled tuner cards, though the last time I looked seriously it was a year or so ago when it was posted on Slashdot (but who wants to shell out just for posterity when you have >1yr in which to procrastinate?) A quick check on /. showed they’re discussing the broadcast flag issue today anyway - sameold-sameold.

My interest was rekindled on Sunday when Wendy Selzer of EFF demo’ed a full system with MythTV at the Berkeley CyberSalon. She showed a pc running Linux and MythTV picking up HDTV signals from SF’s KQED and (at the other end of the spectrum) UPN.

However, MythTV isn’t productized at all; it remains a piece of software. It’s ironic that the EFF has found a really good application here in their effort to promote non-infringing uses, yet it remains a homebrew project. It’d be really nice to just click a button and add the full system to a shopping cart. While I can find time to order a tuner card, I’m not sure that I’ll find time to assemble the pieces myself. Too bad, bc it would be fun to play with.

This seems like an excellent solution for me. I can safely say that 70% of my tv viewing (such as it is lately) is PBS (the other bit is split between Discovery Science, Nat’lGeo, History, Military History and that cluster of geek channels). I consider “Monarch of the Glen” a guilty pleasure program - pretty queer, and pretty fringe. MythTV, a dvr, and GreenCine (Mike and I share a login - user “boygirl”) would take care of my viewing needs comfortably. Mike would miss Adult Swim, but he’d probably get smarter with less ATHF.

I’ll have to see if anyone tonight knows of someone who’s doing some SI work on this MythTV thing, even if it’s custom. Then again living room boxes are still pretty loud. I’ve been tracking changes in chassis design that should reduce noise, and I know this was implemented in a few boxes from Gateway, but it seems that it’s about a year out, further out than I’d hope. I haven’t been motivated to seek out the Gateway model to see exactly how much quieter they end up being.

I still think this is a key innovation needed to move the livingroom-media-center model forward. I know I get irritated if there’s a laptop running on the coffee table, but it might be less obtrusive if it’s across the room (or insulated in a cupboard, but then what of remote control?).

Anyhow, it’s just the endless permutations and roadblocks that get in the way of early adopters, and represent an economic opportunity for someone out there…..

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CyberSalon tonight

by eleanor on 20 Feb 2005 @ 2:28 pm in Geek | Events & Happenings   ++

Taking a bit of a break from Blogger Fort Weekend I, I’ll be heading up to the Berkeley Cybersalon with Elisa Camahort and her boyfriend, Chris. It’ll be good to get a view of “InternetTV”, since I’m not familiar with that area.

And this post will also serve as a test of the Technorati Tag a plugin by Keith McDuffy, that was, honestly, almost impossible to wget. It kept saving the full html page, not just the code (gosh, I guess I was feeling pretty harried, I didn’t use a bad word per-se, it was just ugly to read). Could be user-error, but I tend to do things the simple way…. thanks for the plugin (let’s see if it works). Just for reference, and if others have problems, there are a few more plugins on the WordPress support site.

Testing, testing, 1, 2, 3 - and it’s a spectacular failure. I’ll post this, then figure out why later….

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Of WordPress templates and the Plaza barman’s cure

by eleanor on @ 9:55 am in Toys, Tips, & Tricks   ++

So I’m still playing with templates - it’s not really been hours and hours, but it is on the “not fun” side of things. I’m trying to decide if I liked calendar display enough to bring it back. It served some function to help me recall the date and the world at large, but was very hard to alter design-wise. Devoted readers might recall the calendar remained a pale blue on the old install - I never took the time to hack it apart. We’ll have to see how badly I munge things together. I’m still hacking away off a site design done for me by my good friend Erich Schmidt of Pixelbrew (not Google) - where he did a mostly table-free CSS design with a three column layout. The defaults only have 2 columns, and that just seems like wasted space (elegance schmelegance).

Back in the fort, Mike looks worse and worse. I’ve no idea how he feels because he’s sleeping most of the time. But he’s got the death under his eyes and big black splotches. So far I’ve had no symptoms.

I’ve been plying him with a modified never-fail Plaza Hotel Barman’s Cure, which I had at the Plaza in NY while at some bubble era Internet conference. I was getting a travel-cold and went there for soup (we were staying at the Palace for gods sake, poor .com fools, so the Plaza would surely be top of mind for these guys). I had a nice bisque and a glass of wine, but it wasn’t really doing the trick. So chatting with the bartender I mentioned I was fighting a cold and he said “I know what you need!”, and started bustling. He made this tea concoction which, I swear, went straight to my toes. It hasn’t done that since, but that could be because I’m not a Plaza barman. Or maybe it was because actor Jeremy Irons was in the bar (looking average-Joe, but still with a cool voice).

Anyhow here’s the recipe:

Plaza Barman Cure
Earl Grey teabags + Honey + Lemon + Jack Daniels + Cinnamon
Brew the tea, add the lemon and honey to taste (lots of it). In this case, the modifications have been no whiskey and adding cinnamon sticks and dried orange peel to the teapot.

Enjoy!

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Wordpress upgrade proceeding swimmingly

by eleanor on 19 Feb 2005 @ 4:06 pm in Geek   ++

As you might have noticed, I’ve been up and down today - doing my much-procrastinated WP upgrade. Perhaps, Matt & co. would have shown me tips if I had made it to the WP Upgrade party last Tues, but alas, art trumped science (as we’ll see if BloggerFort Weekend achieves its objectives and I post on the Future Salon art thing).

Now for the “hard” (and tedious) part - mashing my old index.php and faux-art-sensibility.css into the new structure. Good job on the default install look-and-feel, WordPress guys. It makes light and simple quite appealing. :-)

Hopefull I’ll get everything hacked together shortly.

Gosh, apparently WP is now a CMS/page manager….. interesting.

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Blogger Fort Weekend I

by eleanor on @ 12:51 pm in Geek   ++

When you were little, did you built forts? I was a tomboy and spent most of the summer in our woods, building forts. In the wintertime, the media was either snow (upstate NY - land of mega snowforts) or textiles. Winter weekends when going outside wasn’t fun, my brother and I would make couch cushions into a little nest or else turn my bed into a tent by pinning a quilt to the wall. Then once inside, I’d read or play or just hang out, doing - as I’d say now - “important girl stuff”.

It’s in that spirit that I declare a Blogger Fort Weekend to go back and do blogging stuff while nested in my back room. I find that I’m accumulating post drafts far faster than is good, and have a lot to catch up on. I’m not going to process the new, just clear away the cobwebs of drafts, snippets, and even full posts that just never got published.

I haven’t blogged this week because I’ve been thoroughly enraptured with my new toy (Treo650) and caught up in evening distractions, including Valentine’s and various geek events. I’ve got stuff to post on that, including the ongoing saga of hacking Cingular’s Bluetooth Dial Up Networking (the holy grail of Treoville for me) and my various efforts to make (yes, make) Treo cases. It’s shameless fetishism, but I can’t seem to find what I want out in the wild. Currently, I have case projects underway in yarn, latex, and leather.

I also have some admin and general geekery to get out of the way. I need to upgrade to Wordpress 1.5 “Strayhorn”. Also waiting are a proper email filtering setup to handle mobile email productively, and back-tagging posts. More fun will be exploring ideas that Niall Kennedy, Brendon Wilson and I discussed on Wednesday night about calendars and event tracking. I’ll probably roll out a calendar blog for events while I’m noodling through the issue. Oh, and I have to finish importing my Outlook stuff to Moz’s calendar project, Sunfire, and get that up as iCal streams via WebDav.

I’ll update this post with links to the new stuff when I’m done. Mike has plague (thanks, Russ), so I’m gonna tent it out in the back room with some incense buring to propitiate the gods of health and vigor. Hopefully the powerful antibiotics (Augmentin, my favorites) I’m taking for my sinuses will let me glide on through…

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Jeff Clavier to speak at BMA ProdMktng/Mgmt Bkfst tomorrow, Tues 15 Feb

by eleanor on 14 Feb 2005 @ 4:12 pm in Events & Happenings | Venture & Startup   ++

This month’s NorCalBMA Product Marketing/Management Roundtable (we so need an acronym) will feature Jeff Clavier of SoftTechVC - a very clued-in and generally good guy. The topic will be “From Idea to Product to Company”, and Jeff will talk about his experiences on both the funding side and now in helping young companies grow. Check out his blog for more permanent info about the breakfast event and- add his blog to your feed while you’re at it.

I’ll give you a quick story about Jeff to let you know what you’re in for. In a deft coup de gras for his clients Buzznet, Jeff ably stepped in to replace reps from competitor Flickr at last week’s Media Center conference in Palo Alto. I thought it was just Jeff stepping up when it became apparent that Flickr was absent (not being critical here, but that’s what did happen at the IBDN Under the Radar Event, where Flickr just didn’t show) - but apparently it was known about 12 hours in advance. You’ll have to come and ask Jeff for the Full Scoop.

Incidentally, in writing this, I realized that I have a number of very interesting things held up in my drafts. Among them is a post with my notes from that IBDN event in Nov. Take a look - I back posted it to back in Nov, because that’s when it took place, don’t be picky.

Did I mention this event is a breakfast event?

It’s held at Scott’s in Palo Alto from 7:30am - 9am. If you’re a member of BMA, it’s free; if not, it’s $10. Their breakfasts are good, if a touch pricey - ranging from full omlettes to toast and other bargain options.

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Big news: free agent

by eleanor on 11 Feb 2005 @ 1:36 pm in Geek   ++

Gosh it’s taken forever for me to get to this post!

After a few weeks of uncertainty, I learned yesterday that my job search can safely become public and official. Times is tough all over, and Tokyo no longer has money to fund my position researching tech for HQ - so my time as itinerant researcher is up somewhere in the next month.

I’ve really enjoyed the work, despite challenged by the breadth of my domain. The best part about it is that it effectively scratched my research itch - I was fantasizing about an econ PhD from Stanford (on the theory “how can you live so close to a school like that and *not* get a degree?”). Talk about self-indulgent - who’s got 4 years to burn? I’m glad I found a productive way to get over it.

It’s been fascinating to bridge the gap between startup and enterprise, noodling the challenges of innovation addressed comprehensively (in theory) by folks like Clay Christensen (who is very tall - something I notice more post-Gladwell) in his book The Innovator’s Dilemma (read it or watch Clay speak via ITConversations, recorded at the 2004 O’Reilly Open Source Business Conference). Note that I still haven’t had time to read his latest book, The Innovator’s Solution, but it’s on my coffeetable.

Still, having been a sort of “coolhunter” who evangelized new markets, I find I’m reflecting on the high-brow b-school concept of agency issues. Dammit, why is it so hard to find a link to define agency conflict (I had to ask another MBA, which always gets us into trouble, see here and here) . In my case, these agency issues weren’t anything unseemly; it was just a case of a spy having more in common with the targets than her handlers.

My role was almost entirely outward facing, where I deliberately was directed to know less about NEC than about the world at large. That’s fine, but where is my colleague-base? Who do I get to bounce ideas off? My research topics pushed me closer to the innovators locally (not in my company) because they had the content, while my formal team in Tokyo was not only far away, but they were expecting cogent reports, not brainstorming. None of this is criminal, just suboptimal - I merely find it interesting to reflect on the dynamics created by this sort of experimental position.

Companies want to harness innovation to they can stay on top of new businesses, but the model for doing that is not easy. I was immersed in future tech that was too bleeding-edge to be effectively assimilated by the mainstream product teams in Tokyo. My value probably came most from being a sort of embedded journalist rather than in helping create concrete product offerings.

We’ll have to see where I end up . I’ll admit that I’m somewhat torn between jumping into the innovation I’ve been tracking (startups) or staying in that ‘make it happen in a large environment’ with a big corp. The difference between is not so large as it might appear, because of the very large ecosystem of companies here in the Bay Area (and around the world). It’s interesting to consider the degree to which there’s the same big pond of people working on similar projects that is often given for justifying corporations (back to agency theory again). Apparently, in a lively entrepreneurial market, people can self-organize to grow the pie, as well as their slice; it’d be nice to participate while it lasts.

So, in answer to the inevitable question - no, I never did get to go over to Tokyo, though I’ve been working at learning the language. Rosetta Stone language sw rules.

/p>

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Explaining co-authoring shenanigans

by eleanor on @ 1:11 pm in Emergent   ++

This post is an attempt to offer some perspective on perhaps the world’s first almost-realtime collaborative blog post. Gosh, feed readers, you can’t say I don’t deliver; but I won’t insist on invention rights.

As I blogged about Jybe the other day, Jybe brings some interesting possibilities. Brian and I were chatting via his tool (you can chat while you browse together, which has the advantage, for you folks still trying to appear fully diligent at work, of not looking like a normal chatwindow) on what sorts of stuff you can do.

Today I’m interested in its potential to allow collaborative editing, a sort of cheap and dirty SubEthaEdit or MoonEdit. I thought I’d log us into my blog running on WordPress, which from his end meant that he had to log in too. So I created a new user for this kind of play, jybe, and off we went.

Our first post is already (unfortunately - haha) public. We had some confusion over who owned the db entry which just had to be solved - wham - by a publish-to-the-wild.

Brian (who doesn’t have a blog, so perhaps consider his mic-check a real throatclearing) is now in the Jybe account adding some more content and context to our first shared post. Which, in the spirit of things, I will probably go back and do something to as well.

Jybe allows super-cheap conferencing and shared browsing, which is great for brainstorming and threshing through ideas. I’d like to hook it into shared capture of some sort.

Brian is going to think more on the db end, and I’m going to get him set up with his own Wordpress install so he can understand the workings, but I’m really not sure what will be the result of this. In some ways Jybe is a more inherently wiki-friendly application — any time you can have multiple people editing, you should have versioning. Hmmmmm…….

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Coauthoring posts with jybe

by jybe on @ 12:44 pm in Geek   ++

This is an experiment in simultaneous (sort of) editing using the Jybe plugin for Firefox.
So here I am typing (says Eleanor).
this is cool (says Brian).
test - test - test - test - test - test (all from Brian)

But in sharing the account we got out of synch - while Brian creatively added his mic-testing, Eleanor’s version looked like this (even though it got clobbered by Brian’s version in the database):

eleanor: So here I am typing…. (refresh)
brian: this is cool… (refresh)
eleanor: where did my text go?…. (refresh)

So this is a test post to see which person of a shared account really owns the database (wrote Eleanor, when she published this, to the confusion of feed-readers)

Brian remarks: Actually, we are sharing the account, you have to hit refresh after me because we are not pushing that command - but we can.

Then Eleanor says:

Hey Brian, did you know I am actually Feedster’s Feed of the Day? Nice day to screw around with this…

Bringing this back to something that’s useful for readers, Brian helpfully adds:

This exchange above was between Eleanor and myself as we attempted to collaboratively write a posting in real time, right from the native Wordpress blogging interface. Needless to say, we encountered a few technical problems but overall, we were able to have an interesting proof of concept in collaborative blogging. In doing further testing, we figured out the pattern to make this work: NOTE: we must both login to the same blogging account and then use Jybe to share the HTML view of the blogging page.

• Step 1: Person A, type in information and then save to the DB
• Step 2: Person B, hit the refresh button on the browser - this will get the latest post from the DB
• Step 3: Person B, type and then save
• Step 4: Person A: refresh

This approach needs lots of refinement needs to be tested in other blogging environments. But, collaborative blogging could prove to have great potential. Imagine having multiple people all working on a blog post together in real time? It would require some coordination of participants, but doesn’t all collaboration? Give your comments on if you see this as a valuable addition to your blogging environment.

Pretty interesting…..

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Jybe plugin - cobrowsing/collaboration

by eleanor on 9 Feb 2005 @ 3:00 pm in Emergent   ++

Secrecy is such a pain in the ass; it requires a longer attention span that I typically have the luxury of supporting. A couple weeks ago, I was invited into a private beta of a cool product, at which time I really wanted to blog about it but couldn’t. Since it’s been public, it’s been an entry on my to-do list that keeps getting trumped by bigger, longer issues. But this is easy, so I’ll just do it now.

This new thing is called Jybe - which is a co-browsing plugin for Firefox and IE. It’s distributed by a Houston startup with tech that came out of Rice University Advanced Reality. I met Brian Hoogendam, its CEO, at Gartner’s big, expensive fall love in, Symposium/Xpo in Sun’s Java session (giving full credit for his scrappyness, he said he actually snuck in - wish I did that, I’d still have travel budget left!). He asked some really provocative questions about how they, as a venture-backed startup, could leverage the viral nature of open source while still being true to the profit motive implicit in their receipt of investment (that’s a hell of a paraphrasing), which piqued my interest. They’ve developed a real-time collaboration technology that was aimed at the Microsoft Office apps, but which didn’t seem to have much exit besides acquisition by Microsoft, so they were wisely looking at other options. So these guys had some cool tech with a limited market in their inital area, and they were looking to recalibrate - this is just the sort of story I like.

And I’m really impressed with what they came up with. It’s very cool, letting you easily collaborate with someone by looking at the same thing at the same time, with a parallel chat window. It’s also set up to enable free web conferencing, just upload your presentation to the net (they have space if you don’t have a server out there), and take them through it.

Before you click away, thinking it might not work under your platform, know that it does work under Win, Mac and Linux (even if the requirements section is still confusingly worded).

I use it with Moz and there are some issues with tabbed browsing (which they’re working on). If they get this so that it stays on one tab, I would start a session and keep it open, and share it with my friends. It would be very fun to have a shifting window of links, so that when I cruised by I would see a page that my friends suggest.

This is getting back to the idea of serendipity that Steve Gillmor was discussing at our EBIG SIG last week (blogged here). This is the kind of serendipitythat would appeal to me - incorporate some of the push element back into the mostly pull model of the net. I probably should want to click on more of the links that are presented to me, shared over IM or email or in a blogpost (without context), for if my friends suggest it, it’s probably worthwhile. But often I don’t, simply because there is no context. That’s the model where I’d like to just serendipitously happen upon it open in my browser.

I think there are a lot of places this could be used - especially in the world of shared workspaces like wikis. I have a friend who was working on a wiki startup and they were trying to code in simultaneous collaborative editing (instant WYSIWYG) and that was hard; including this tool in your wiki tool, or just encouraging users to download it, would solve that problem in a cheap and dirty way.

There were other ideas I had, but that’s probably what kept me from posting this - so I’ll just stop. Try the tool yourselves, and let me know what the applications are. Email or aim/jabber me with your session and let’s check it out. I could imagine this being a base for a shared (though somewhat protected) serendipity engine.

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Thomas Dolby, ringtone god?

by eleanor on @ 12:24 pm in Mobility   ++

This piece in the WSJ (paidreg req’d/paygated after 17-Feb-05 or sneak a peek here) was diverting in that way that only the WSJ can be. Their pop-culture stuff is among the quirkiest bits of trivia I acquire.

Thomas Dolby is apparently a ringtone wizard.

Although ringtones are typically just 30 seconds long, compared with three minutes for the average pop song, Mr. Dolby says there are similarities between composing pop songs and ringtones. “It’s helpful if it’s catchy,” he says of the ringtones. And, he concludes, whether one is writing a pop song or a ringtone, “A hook is a hook is a hook.” He says he wishes he had more time to make “real music,” but adds that with the ringtone phenomenon’s potentially limited shelf life, “It’s a case of make hay while the sun shines.”

I very much like his work (am listening to “One of Our Submarines” now) and was sad to miss his show in SF a couple years ago. It always interests me to see how people adapt their work to suit changing times. I can’t wait to play with the ringtone thing when I get my Treo650 (just a week or so!).

The article mentions a few other corp players - Retro RingTones and BlingTones (I marvel at $2.2B businesses that harbor such whimsically named players).

Retro RingTones, based in Half Moon Bay, Calif., with offices in Los Angeles and London, typically charges the phone carrier $500 to produce the ringtone and $2,000 more if it’s actually used in a phone. If a company wants to use the ringtone melody in a commercial, other fees apply — and if it becomes a jingle, a company may be charged $200,000 or more.

BlingTones, meanwhile, touts itself as “the world’s first wireless record label.” Just like a record label, BlingTones has “artists and repertoire,” or A&R representatives, who act as talent scouts, signing deals with artists — mostly rap artists and producers. BlingTones also commissions songs and distributes them for sale.

“Essentially, a record company is A&R, marketing, promotion and distribution,” says Jonathan Dworkin, a former manager of hip-hop artists who is now BlingTones’ vice president for A&R. “We provide those same services.”

Gosh I can’t tell you how I feel about ringtone companies having A&R guys…. Why are we supposed to pay for that overhead? When will they learn?

This all gets into the same sort of problem Ted Shelton of Orb mentioned during his MoMo presentation that content companies (and carriers too in this case, dammit) want to charge you anew for each format you consume - cd, walled garden download (AAC, ATRAC, WMA, SWMA, whatever others), streamed download (Rhapsody), and ringtone. While I don’t dispute the value of the implementation of the ringtone, the skill required to get it to sound right in that form factor and given the platform (specific phone), that’s paying the craftsman - the converter. That’s not paying for the copyright, which strikes me as off here, even though it’s clear legally (insofar as not being a lawyer I can logic my way through this stuff and am entitled to have an opinion). But I can see that if ads have to pay to use a jingle, perhpas consumers should pay to have the right to associate themselves with a song; it’s certainly grounded economically. But the creative communist in me howls wanting to know where that diverges from whistling and questions whether it’s not all just more marketing for the artist. Isn’t the artist can be said to be served by the consumer in this case, as it’s just more promotion?

Still, the best ringtone I’ve ever heard was this minor-key version of “Sweet Dreams” — more Manson than Eurhythmics — that Mike had on his Ericsson T68, which he typed in from a recipe he found online. That was the best thing about that phone.

(this is an old post that got caught in my drafts)

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Kids aren’t writing?

by eleanor on 8 Feb 2005 @ 2:07 pm in Life-Culture-Play   ++

Now, for something lighter, we have a piece in today’s The Wall St. Journal (paid content - reg/$ reqd) today talks about parents fighting against some schools with tough pre-graduation requirements, chiefly around lengthy papers. The first case profiled is of a high school senior who was almost denied graduation because he didn’t complete an 8 page paper.

High-achieving students complain these projects eat up time that could be better spent applying to colleges. Many average seniors, bound straight for the workplace after graduation, can’t understand the need for such added rigor. Meanwhile, just the mention of a research paper can send out shock waves these days. Even three-page papers have become a rarity in English classes and 75% of all seniors say they get no writing assignments at all in history or social studies, according to a 2003 national commission on student writing.

I blush to admit the good student I was, but I probably had to do about 5 ten page papers by the end of high school. I marvel at how this could be true now - especially with how important writing is as a form of communication.

This quote especially sounded awful, for these are just the critical thinking skills that most kids aren’t going to get even in most colleges:

Because Cedarcrest students had little experience writing long, annotated papers that defended a point of view, failure on first drafts was common, even among honors students.

Now, if this really is true, this may be the solution to our blogging info overload. Or maybe they’ll find it’s worth the time and effort to try their hand blogging….

But it’s prob far more likely that they will become podcasters or videobloggers. :-)

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On the coming mobileVideo revolution

by eleanor on @ 11:03 am in Mobility | Life-Culture-Play   ++

Mobile Monday was a huge success last night - with more people in the room than we can handle. Check out the audio recording of the evening, recorded and prepared by Niall Kennedy’s site for a link to the audio of the evening’s discussions. (updated: 11-Feb with link to audio)

Two of the presenters - Ted Shelton who just joined Orb as EVP/Operations and Alan Moskowitz, the Product Marketing honcho for Idetic (MobiTV) . Both these products stream video to your phone, so it was very good to have them present together.

After taking it all in, I was particularly struck that Orb’s model - streaming content that one legitimately owns - is slightly hampering to the network as your content is effectively beamed to you. That feels sort of kludgey as a permanent solution, especially when I’m especially tracking the emergence of device independent data access that’s predicated on your data being resident up in the clouds. MobiTV aligns itself with the content owners and streams content down to you as its service offering, so it fits my model of “do you really want to take your data with you?”.

I can see Orb’s point: one beaming, one viewing, with very limited (if any) caching is what’ll be demanded by the content mafia types (aka RIAA and MPAA and whoever else I fund the EFF to fight). So they have bandwidth hits for the upload and the download, as well as the mesh processing network that uses peer-to-peer to process the images. Will capacity become a huge issue if everyone is beaming personal content over the net? Probably. We’ve got all that dark fiber, that extra capacity left over from the buildout. That’s slowly being used as broadband adoption is coming along, but - and this has been what caught my eye in all the fuss over telecom mergers - the name of the game there is pure convergence, but it will also come with some bloody consolidation.

Before convergence became associated with the tech nirvana of delivering multiple services (i.e., “more”) it was usually associated with the traditional model of mergers and consolidation (i.e., all too often “less”). The things I read on The Wall Street Journal tend to focus more on this consolidation aspect - and I just wonder if the timing of these new consumer technologies is off. The networks have sat and prices have fallen. The companies have fallen too on hard times and the backhaul is just not as profitable as the good old days of rich long distance tariffs.

Down in the trenches, we see the carriers (who I have little sympathy for) getting squeezed as for one, the ambitions of folks like Comcast to deliver a premium cable broadband solution aren’t proving viable - even as broadband adoption is gaining (have to look for the link).

So what if, after many years, customers have gone in for broadband? Do those carriers really want applications that drive heavy usage of that resource? Ted looked like he was thirsting for the fight, and commented a couple times about shattering business models. I can’t help but think that the model of data in the sky would be so much more simpler. But the content mafia goes nuts over that. So Orb’s got a hell of an idea, but is set to dance a fine line. MobiTV is going with the proven model of walled garden, and it’ll work - bored people are happy to watch just about anything (think JetBlue) - as long as you can get news, sports and things like Discovery, many people will be very happy with this less personalized mode.

Some discussion followed afterwards (at the bar naturally). During a conversation on videoblogging, I thought of user generated content - the sort of stuff that the guys at Our Media are working on. If content is licensed under some friendly model (Creative Commons) it could go a long way to providing content for mobile users. These grassroots types typically look for exposure more than anything else. We could expect them not to be as eager at the content mafia to get in the way and demand a payment right then or impose other limitations. What might be even cooler is that this grassroots content will tend toward the shorter, more bite-sized experience, which was there really interesting request that the guy from MobiTV made. They’ve datamined their network to come up with all sorts of interesting slices on the user experience as their customers are roaming the world. They’ve found that content of under 6 minutes - with a discrete start and finish - seems to be most appealing to their audience. They’re doing professional, broadcast-style programming, so for them it takes the form of music video type stuff or comedy sketches.

Now this is an area where grassroots can compete and provide extreme value. Think of all those homebrew MoveOn commercials or Bush in 30 seconds. Think of that EPIC video. If someone can distill their homebrew message into something short enough to divert me while I’m waiting in the doctor’s office then I’ll be happy to consume. The viral memes that send these around the web thru IM or email or blogs can also send these to us precisely when we have time and want to be amused. How cool would it be to have a channel - like a RSS feed of microcontent like this? I would consume video like I consume MegaTokyo - because it is easy to just pull it up and look at it when I have a stray moment.

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Toward an intelligent, personalized InfoRouter

by eleanor on 2 Feb 2005 @ 12:45 pm in Events & Happenings | Emergent   ++

We had a very good session with Steve Gillmor at last night’s EBIG Blogging SIG. Eric Rice recorded it and you can grab it… later - probably at ITConversations when Doug’s had his way with it.

I’ve done a lot of thinking around this area, and this session helped coalesce it into something that’s really turned into a product proposal. I’m not certain of its feasibility, but it has the advantage of a pointing towards supporting a for-pay business model. Let me know what you think.

Finding information is a specialist’s task now. Those who have time, dedication, and interest are responsible for most of the content out there; they pick up topics and point the collective mind toward the issues and debates. But it is essentially duplicating the model of the newspapers, where a group of tenured people with vested interests in the content and issues. The vested interests come both from their position as power brokers - which they necessarily seek to maintain - and from their relationship with their advertisers.

I propose there’s room for a Google News for blogs. The purpose of this would be two fold. Like an community, we need a mirror of ourselves. The whole has gotten far too large to parse, but if we can recognize the valuable content in our own interest domains, it is a small step to wonder how we could reduce the cost (economic cost here - currently it’s time) of sipping from the broader spectrum of blogs.

For lack of a better model, I’ll key off of Google News. I see an interface where we would group topics in several possible ways - by topic, by source, by type. We need to pull content out of the individual blogs and put the conversations back together. By grouping a theme or meme, with its threaded discussion featured below, we can get a quick sense of who is making contributions along the lines of discussion. This will allow easy access to the threads of the conversation, and bring back some of the beneficial aspects of a mailing list (while still ensuring that individual owners maintain control of their microcontent).

I see there as being several steps involved as both a reader and contributor. As readers and passive participants, we seek stay current with group thinking (otherwise you drown in info, and just have to give up and pick it up later). As contributors and shapers, we seek to inject our thoughts on the world, some in a free-frame context and some in a directly conversational way in response to current discussions. To enable these two critical functions, we need to speed access to information. The quicker we can disseminate good content, the quicker that content can be built upon to move the world along. We need to get past the echo chamber effect to shift from a manual idea transmission system to something more automated.

I see four use-cases that would solve some of my problems with all this information. I’ll set them out as four strawmen applications that I think can and would be best delivered by one provider; there could be competing providers that would deliver the same sort of service, optimized along different lines to serve different markets. These applications could easily serve as a bedrock of an actual business model for the providers who would step up to create them.

Interface and Presentment: 4 use-cases

These cases are essentially different slices or queries of the data set that companies like Technorati, Feedster, PubSub and even Google are already mining. This would be an application that provides the interface to mine and present this data to users in a to-some-degree customizable way. If I could code, I would envision this as a portal style site, with each use-case having a tab or section. Most of the screen would be devoted to displaying results along each query. The use-cases I see are below:

1. What’s abuzz?
2. What are my trusted sources and friends saying?
3. What’s new on my interests?
4. What do I want to learn more about today, this moment?

Leveraging the Hive Mind

“What’s abuzz” would be like Google News. It would be like a weather report for the blogosphere to show what’s going on now. Ideally, like Google News, it would be updated about every 15 minutes. I would love to see this incorporating some of the concepts of 10×10 while stripping out the repetition. We’d be presented with a meme — ideally in the original source post, for context’s sake — then with the names of the blogs who have carried on the thread. These could be ordered according to pagerank or Technorati metrics. These comments will serve to show how amplified the meme has become. The Scoble comment would be like the New York Times article in Google News, and might satisfy the “what do I need to know about this” need. Listing several (10 or more, just list them right as names with commas in a line) would allow people to get a sense of who’s participating and if they need to dive in deeper. As the meme expanded a topic might move to the top of the list, and the commentators names would change, just as we see in Google News.

The biggest benefit of this would be to get an “at a glance” view of the blogosphere. I’m not the least interested in politics, but might want to know the raging debate. With all the talk of citizen journalism, I’d like to see some examples of grassroots news coverage, though I’d never seek it out as a real feed. I’m sure there are other areas where there’s lively stuff going on that I don’t know about. For me, this would be a serendipity engine. A window into the world of the constant blog bake-off.

This could also be (as a sign up service) pushed out in something like an email, or as a feed with each new entry (though you’d prob have to click thru to get the current view of commentators?).

FOAF-Screening the Blogosphere

“What are my trusted sources and friends saying?” gets at using our network to do filtering for us. Most of us consume feeds via aggregators, where we subscribe based on a personal criteria. Most of the feeds we have came because we know the person, have come to respect their work, were recommended by a friend, or run across frequent mentions of the source. Right now it’s a manual process of checking each feed.

And our feeds are pretty personal. Most of us track a wide range of topics, and each of us assigns different importance to each info source. There’s Technorati cosmos ranking, but not all of the classic Gladwellian Influencers are tracked that way, and definitely not all of our friends. Some might want to have a Technorati filtered view of the world, and that should be allowable. But this would be simply something like an enhanced aggregator view. Your feeds now, made more useful.

Filtering for Interests

“What’s new on my interests?” centers our focus on specific topics we are tracking. Right now, we must scroll down through content in our aggregators. Posts have varying levels of interest. Some feeds we’ll want to read all the posts, others all the headlines, and still others, only when the headlines match our interests. This third use-case is a different slice on the aggregator view, mashing some aspects of subscribed searches with FOAF-Screen filtering, and possibly with personal interest/attention sensing. This is where I’m vaguest, both as to the technical feasibility and as to exactly how much of a standalone case it is versus #2.

I would like the ability to view blogs according to my interests - a sort of categorizing feeds as one would categorize posts. Without getting too much into specification, this would potentially leverage both post categories and Technorati tags to deliver results. For example, I would like to view posts grouped by topic - do some reading on mobility or search or Linux. This would in some ways have the attributes of subscribed searches like PubSub, where you currently must subscribe and personally accumulate data to later mine. I want access to everyone else’s stored PubSub type searches, or if at all possible, I would like to do new ones - create searches that can be run each day anew, either during off peak times or preferably, at will (I equivocate because I understand there are processing issues - this stuff could easily be the basis for pay services — +poof+ a business model is born!).

The FOAF-Screen would come into play in presenting the information to the user - where the entries could be ordered by points, taking (optionally) both their FOAF-Screen (their OPML list or some other device) and the larger Technorati cosmos ranking of the source. I’d really like to see the ability to dial these up or down - to favor my people or the commons’ view. Do you want to see what your friends think on this or do you want to see what the ‘accepted wisdom’ is on a topic.

Searching: the Fresh vs. the Best

“What do I want to learn more about today, this moment?” takes into account that we’re always catching up on something; there’s always a new meme out there. This is even more of a problem as we start to look beyond serving the blogging community, and shift our focus to the needs of the early mainstream markets. This calls for a panel for freeform search, akin to the PubSub searches, but allowable in real time. I think that for a first pass to see quick results, it would be perfectly acceptable to repurpose the queries that are used to deliver the “interest” results to people in use-case 3. The model of farming and harvesting makes me comfortable with the idea that most of the ad hoc searches would be comprised already by people tracking them: memes are usually in development long before they reach the awareness of the median user. For queries that don’t have an exact match already stored in the system, alternatives could be presented. A custom search could be offered to be run immediately, perhaps at a small cost or else for free during an off-peak time.

In this searching function, I would also like the flexibility to adjust between freshness and highest authority. The purpose of searching is to maximize reach; there are cases where searching should extend all the way to the end of the long tail instead of getting caught up in the hump of acknowledged authority.

What’s the goal of all this?

The goal of all this is to transform the current state of information farming into a more mechanized process. Metaphorically, we need plows. Machines are good at that. They can count words, links, and even with the right taxonomy behind them, help to chart mental maps and meme flows. This is not about computer-determined interest. This is using computers to reflect what the hump of the long tail is interested in (#1), what people I’ve voted for are interested in (#2), what I’ve said (or exhibited) an interest in (#3), and what I’d like to learn about. This is automating the hard work of trawling by hand, which, in my philosophical bent, is prejudiced towards those how have and can spend the time doing this. We need the ideas of the casual observer. We cannot build up this information glut so that only full-timer, specialists, experts, journalists, and job seekers can participate. Even though I am to some-degree one of those people now, I can’t keep up with my wide range of interests. What access do we allow the hobbyist, who’s interested but can’t spend (what is it now, Scoble, 4 hours a night??) the time keeping up.

We can’t forget that we want to keep up with all this, to help ourselves, our companies, our projects, or sometimes make the world a better place. We take the time to do this because we know that there are great contributions out there, ideas and tweaks that will make a big difference. Places we can make a ton of money or transform an industry or a workplace. We have to make getting those ideas out as easy as possible.

And this isn’t all altruism. If finding takes less time and effort, we can read and absorb more. Once we absorb more, we can think on it more effectively. We might have more time and impetus to respond and participate - to inject back into the community. I can’t tell you how many posts go unfinished or unstarted because I don’t have enough time. If getting good info moves away from subsistence - a daily activity that takes up most of one’s allocated time - to transformation, it’s like we’ve powered a new Renaissance. It’s like the difference between starting with a live chicken and sitting down to chicken parmesan. The raw material is converted into something that’s immediately digestible (sorry vegetarians - just think soup). All this time is saved, and we can spend that time like Michelangelo did.

We eat our dinner, and then go off to our studies to think, then we write. We are more productive at doing what humans do best; and we harness computing power to do what it does best. With the enhanced perspective brought by a fuller picture of the blogosphere, we have a wider base for ideas. When we do write, we can be more thoughtful and complete. Our additions are snapped up and fed back through the system. The cycle is sped up, and churn is reduced. Concepts can be more thoroughly polished and we can “get somewhere” faster.

I just wish I could really code…. :-)

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