Archive for April, 2005

Time to close that browser again….

by eleanor on 19 Apr 2005 @ 1:07 pm in Geek | Mobility   ++

This isn’t a Moz dev update blog, but since I just posted on Moz upgrades on Friday, I’ll note that Firefox has a new vulnerability fix release. Upgrade today to 1.0.3.

Now I just have to go through all my open tabs so I can shut the browser down and run the install.

Tabbed browsing is a great thing, until I get to my Treo - and what is otherwise a good browser experience sucks because I never have only one tab open at a time. Hmmm too bad this article on a tabbed browser from PalmSource seems to be lying…. it’s awfully old to have not been released and findable by now.

Grump.

Participate: 1 Comment | Trackback

Weaselese

by eleanor on 18 Apr 2005 @ 5:24 pm in Strategy-Marketing   ++

Yesterday’s Dilbert tear off calendar is just too good and must be shared.

PHB talking “…and the most critical part of your objective is… mumble mumble mumble”.

Dilbert goes to get an interpreter, someone who speaks (giggle) Mumble.

More mumbling between them and Allen reports “I’m a bit rusty with the Pointy-Haired Dialect but I think he wants you to line dance in a gazebo”.

People keep asking how my job search is going…… This captures it precisely: I’m trying to figure out how not to end up Dilbert, Allen, or PHB.

Yeah, it breaks my pretty page structure, but it’s worth it. I especially like the way the PHB leans into it in his second volley of mumbling. Too true.

Update - I’ve now decided that enough is enough and the page breakage is annoying. If you can’t read it, click on it to see a bigger view.

Participate: 0 Comments | Trackback

Adobe+Macromedia: common cause in graphics & mobile, but where’s the blog platform

by eleanor on @ 12:01 pm in Strategy-Marketing | Mobility   ++

Adobe buys Macromedia. My response is “weren’t they the same company really anyway?”. Tomato tomato.

More substantively, this signals the quantitative impact of personal publishing platforms making the web accessible for a whole range of users (who might have previously turned to Dreamweaver or GoLive). The web has changed and these two giants must cope.

For Adobe, it’s also a natural step after Creative Studio, the megabundle they launched 18 months back. Back then, I expected them to experiment in the other direction — to go after the infrequent user market with on demand, not give a price break to their best customers. These are the tools of the trade for creatives, a cost of doing business; if Adobe was not able to maintain the perceived value of their tools among those guys, compared to, say, the Apple upgrade treadmill, what was next?

Today’s union makes plain the saturated, commoditized content creation marketplace. In pricing theory, bundling is a response to saturation. A user’s willingness to pay for each package on its own merits decreases as the functionality becomes more mainstreamed (despite the best attempts of vendors to feature pad); so you use the bundle to push more product, getting a little bit more from users who wouldn’t otherwise cough up. Adobe’s extracted as much growth as possible out of this bundle, and now has turned to snap up Macromedia, where it’ll bundlize and kill off products by the playbook. All business as usual.

We all publish and consume, but we’re doing it on these blogging platforms. Hard-coded, hard-copy marcom is marginalized. And what Adobe doesn’t have is a blogging platform to address this increasingly important element of content. Even worse, content management functionality is already evident in tools like WordPress. I’d look for blogging to be the next natural step here - either as an organic, as yet unannounced thing or that this behemoth will be the eventual acquirer of SixApart.

Mike pointed out the mobile angle, which I had forgotten. Ah yes, that whole rich internet application and rich client space that Tokyo used to be so interested in. Even though we’ve neatly averted a public adoption battle between SVG and Flash (I bet we’ll see Flash endure — it’s got Laszlo extending its appeal, and holds a bridgehead between the desktop and mobile worlds), there’s a new rub: the adoption of AJAX for some of the more powerful (and attention grabbing) apps like Google maps. Taking a step back, this provides an interesting contrast between organic and strategic: we see two corp sponsored initiatives merge because they are owned and directed (and thus can be merged and killed off), while the AJAX methodology just continues to gain steam.

This is all very interesting, but I still wonder how real this is for the mobile space, at least in the US. It certainly remains far out. At last Wednesday’s 106miles, Mike and Russ slalomed questions from both Tantek Çelik (Technorati) and Dave McClure (SimplyHired) seeking to understand what the now of cell phone dev is. The answer for right now and the next 12 mos (given Russ’s “complete handset turnover every 18 mos” postulation and a camera phone penetration ramp up starting Nov 2004) is SMS is the lowest common denominator capability. But now we’re 1/3 of the way into a turnover cycle with camera phones, which give users the impetus to try out data functions, as well as have the larger screensize and resolution to enable meaningful gui interaction. If I were running a company with a mobile app, there’s no way I’d aim for the now in development; I’d aim for 6-12 mos out. Would someone want to receive job notifications via SMS from SimplyHired? Sure. Would I? No, unless their filtering system only sent me spectacular items; I’d rather browse via email.

More to the heart of the matter of rich clients on mobile - with cost, speed, screensize and network reliability still at issue, the last thing I’m concerned about is the immersiveness of the application. I’m sure we’ll get there, and bet that Adobe/Macromedia will play a part, I’d just be watching to see what happens in their core markets while they wait for the device market to catch up. And keeping an eye out for that blogging platform too.

Participate: 0 Comments | Trackback

BMA Prod Mgmt/Mktng Breakfast Roundtable on PMM in an Always-On World

by eleanor on 15 Apr 2005 @ 12:49 pm in Events & Happenings | Strategy-Marketing   ++

Heh - I really should have done this earlier, but it’s been “get my elderly dad’s finances and taxes in order” week.

This month’s roundtable is — just that — a real roundtable. We’re going to come together to discuss the good-bad-ugly of product work in this age of constant connectivity. We’ll talk about marketing, customer support, requirements gathering, and pr - all issues that swirl together when you’re a company that’s fielding products today.

We’ll talk about blogs - not in a how to blog for your company sense, but in a how to mine all this chatter to capture what’s going on in your segment and in the minds of your customers. We’ll discuss a bit about how to tap into what’s being said via tools, but I’d like the emphasis to be on integrating the power of the blogosphere into how we do our work as product folks.

We’ll look past simply tracking what’s said about your company’s products to discuss how we can participate to shape the market and dig into the conversations themselves to gain product and marketing ideas. In many areas, we’re seeing collaborative product development, as users are proposing important enhancements directly or - more subtly - posting their thoughts on what they want to see from some enterprising provider. This is the true value of the blogosphere for product development - a low cost way to run betas, test out ideas, solicit/discover feedback, reach out to early adopters, and — lastly — create buzz.

Tumble out of bed and come wake up with us. The coffee is on the table, and the decaf is strangely tastier than the regular.

• Date: Tuesday 19 April
• Time: 7:30-9 AM
• Place: Scott’s in Palo Alto
• RSVP: Not necessary, but email me if you’d like eleanor AT ellementK . com.
• Cost: Free for members of BMA, all others $10 + the cost of your breakfast.

Update - Well, hitting “publish” was touch premature, but no major changes, just added a link to Scott’s directions. Time to be done with this anyway!

Participate: 1 Comment | Trackback

A word to Tbird early adopters - upgrade to 1.2

by eleanor on @ 12:31 pm in Geek   ++

I spent all day helping my dad with taxes and life-transiton paperwork. His move was back in Dec but he’s somehow still stuck in that process.

When I came back last night, I had this angry pop up (from my lame ass daily-”renew-me-now”-even-with-1-full-month-remaining Norton Anti-Virus SW, but that’s another blog post) saying I had cooties! Viruses in my inbox!

Viruses in Thunderbird?? What gives? I’ve got a new Sony Vaio back in March (thus trial Norton subscription, hello Grisoft), where I’ve deliberately not set up mail in Outlook because of viruses.

It’s remarkable to see them in Tbird. I can’t I find confirmation online but this is the first time I’ve ever seen a virus come thru Tbird (or Moz mail for that matter) and trip scan engines, let alone ones that could not be fixed. Odd. Further proof that everything breaks down during tax season.

The best bet is to download the latest. They’re on 1.2 now.

Comparatively, I’d say that Thunderbird has proven highly stable. At this early point, it seems to me that even Mozilla suite was still doing that gradual degradation thing, where I found a fresh install every 2-3 months helped.

And on that note - it’s probably good to remind all the Firefox adopters too that 1.0.2 is out as well.

Participate: 1 Comment | Trackback

Making services more useful 2 - an idea for LinkedIn

by eleanor on 13 Apr 2005 @ 3:09 pm in Geek | Strategy-Marketing   ++

Ah, now here is the idea that got me started on this thread………

A chick on a chick mailing list I’m on is posting on her interviewing experiences. Great stories. They’d make a great shared blog, some sort of healthier twist on fuckedcompany from back in the day. In writing her a note, I thought - this would be a natural for LinkedIn.

If you look at their services today - you see they capture the now and past of people, and are expanding into their future with job postings. Why not capture their travels as they manage their careers and move to new positions by capturing their feedback of what it’s like to evaluate a company via interviews?

Now there are issues with this - the dangers of rants on interviews gone wrong and the natural reluctance of some to lay themselves bare. But there’s interesting data here, which can help show the character and personality of the poster, the company and its people. Now it could be looked at as a potential public relations nightmare for the companies, or it could be looked as a powerful tool to get at the impressions they leave with potential employees. It will give them insight into how the great ones get away, what they do that’s unique and impressive, and what they need to change.

This is valuable intel that would make the LinkedIn pool of data more valuable for new members, and that would strengthen the links between hiring companies, their postings, and the community. It’s also fabulous information that I (with my research and strategy bent) find extraordinarily juicy.

Now, this may be a bit out there, as far as LinkedIn’s business goes, but if it’s fertile ground for a blog, it’s gonna happen. This is a chance for LinkedIn to tie this into their portfolio of career management services. Right now, LinkedIn let’s you get that info about who is there and who was there, not about those who were almost there.

It’s a fact that the costs of poor employee fit are very high. LinkedIn, as I understand it, is mostly about making connections and outing skeletons. Augmenting that by making it easier to share information about company culture, which most people — fish in water style - don’t notice, will help yield successful hires. Everyone knows it’s not always about the smartest, or most experienced, or best connected - it’s about the person who’s best for a particular corner of your company.

Participate: 0 Comments | Trackback

Making services more useful 1- events & calendars

by eleanor on @ 2:38 pm in Geek   ++

This is great - in the midst of a rant about how various services just aren’t providing the openness and extensibility I require, Niall IM’ed that MeetUp wants to start charging. Via con dios, baby.

In lieu of blogging I’ve been geeking. I’ve been at more dumb calendar stuff over the last weeks. This feels like untangling a huge ball of tangled yarn, coming home to find the cat stretched it all over the house and around the furniture.

This weekend, my adventures in REST to port my non-standard (and unvalidatable) structured blogging experimental event cal to Upcoming.org hit a wall. Sure, upcoming’s got an api, but, as Mike finally deciphered, they have a hard-coded venue system, which makes mass uploading (think pushing from ical) almost impossible without some kind of preprocessing. Unless of course I jettison their structure entirely and post everything under the non-useful “bay area” venue.

So MeetUp’s news hits me when just as I’ve been mulling their flaws, as they use the same venue paradigm as Upcoming’s — a model I thought just as lame back when Mike was trying to do blogging meet ups years ago. What a pain. Not only did you have to log in to see anything, but you had to pay to add a new venue and some of the venues listed weren’t happy about being on the list, as it led to unexpected swarms. Blah blah.

It’s the same debate we see in tagging: do we use hardcoded structure or let one emerge? In many ways hardcoding is mooted by how much more effective search has become. Who cares whether I say SF or San Francisco? The Westin St. Francis or the St. Francis? This is where GPS would help — that’s the only hardcoding I can accept as adding value.

I love the idea of a published calendar, but really think that a simple ical is the easiest. No social networking, no searching, no appearance in a central way - but it’s a hell of a lot easier for me. Hcal might work, yes, but it is right now a standard sans implementation.

People say what about evdb? Sure, they say they’re gonna support everything, but right now don’t have an api. Fundamentally, it’s like all these other nascent projects: it’s impossible to know what will be done when, what promise fulfilled and what positioning staked out.

And what a problem to have! It’s remarkable - I could have a blog just of the interesting new project du jour. In calendars, there are Mosuki and Whizspark, which add more of the social networking aspect. Whizspark is more clearly an Evite chaser, with its notification lists and ability to accept payments. And if there’s another company that annoys me, it’s Evite - so I’ll be happy to try this out. Evite *really* needs to send basic info as text in the body of the email; anyone sending out just a link with no context suffers a high likelihood of going unread.

It’s clear we’re deep in the remix culture, a “let 100 (thousand) flowers bloom” period of mismash api ferment. I could spend all my time in a state of kitty-like distraction tracking all these small, single guy web-based projects — of which the stellar Paul Rademacher GMaps-Craigslist mashup app, Scuttle (a personal del.ico.us), and Trendmapper are just a few. No wonder I’ve been scattered.

What in the heck does it all mean? Have projects, apps and companies themselves gone long tail? If these things are so cheap to get up and running, will we always have 50 alternatives? What about critical mass? What about people who don’t want to keep up with this bake-off?

The amazing thing about all these tools - and innovation itself right now - is that it’s become so personal. It’s become a question of whether it works for me, despite the fact that I can see there are great ideas here and we’re breaking new ground. I rant here about how Evite and MeetUp don’t meet my needs, ignoring the wider innovations they’ve brought. Why do we have such public outflow of criticisms and feature requests for what remain essentially lab projects? Arguably that’s what’s driving the world of tech blogging. What is it that’s made it so tantalizingly close to what we want that we will take projects to task for the few ways in which they don’t match up? This is a pretty big change, and one that just hit me last night when Mary Hodder reminded me of her NetNewsWire controversy from a million years ago. We feel ownership of these projects — to attack, defend, enhance, and “own”.

Part of it might be because it’s all so hard to “get”. Understanding the pros-cons of each project is difficult because they are subtle and there are usually a dozen flavors. Throw in the fact that we’re used to being marketed to as consumers, expecting to be told who this stuff is right for and the setting is ripe for religion.

These aren’t really companies that market themselves and field products; they’re itches being publicly scratched. So we look to blogs, where people like me discuss nits (because it’s about the nits), but what I hate may work well for your needs. Fortunately for those who can code, much of this is remixable into personal flavors. But not everyone. Even though I know it’s good for me, I find myself stretched too thin by exploring AJAX, icky javascript, and the viccissitudes of XML over HTTP.

Participate: 1 Comment | Trackback

www.blogher.org goes live, conference ‘05 logistics announced

by eleanor on @ 10:43 am in Events & Happenings | Life-Culture-Play   ++

So the blogher project is up with the detail on the conference announced…. not the full agenda, but the most critical details:

• Dates: Saturday 30 July - all day, with pre-dinner Friday night
• Location: Techmart, Santa Clara, CA. Note on Gmaps that the little J should be across the street. It’s a good venue (a tad sterile, but we’ll girl it up somehow) in the heart of Silicon Valley. To give folks the flavor I tried A9’s neighborhood maps, since it came off so well at last night’s great BayCHI search session. But there was no data here for this ‘hood. Too bad. (Incidentally do see Mike’s notes on last night’s session.)
• Cost: $99, with scholarships available for those who commit to live blog. Nearby hotels and a girl network for more communistic, sleep-over style accomodations.

Blogher.org will be the core community site, so keep an eye there for the group blogs and other community building resources as they roll out.

The final agenda for the conf should be out 1 May.

Participate: 0 Comments | Trackback

Ah, connectivity….

by eleanor on 5 Apr 2005 @ 10:33 am in Life-Culture-Play   ++

We got back yesterday from New Orleans (vacation + Mike’s cousin’s wedding) to find total connectivity loss - phones dead, dsl down. What a pain. SBC crept in while we were at MoMo and fixed voice though it took the usual modem rebooting dance to get online this am. Things continue to flicker, something about Sunday’s downpour and a cut wire.

New Orleans was great - my first time there. I could live there - it’s nice to have US city I could say that about again. The vibe was excellent, decaying south meets the industrial north. And, yes, as someone asked - humidity is ok with me, I’m a native New Yorker (upstate).

Multimedia moblogging was not in line with the escape I needed, but I did take lots of pictures with my Treo. Flickr’s email interface made me laugh - I can’t believe so many people use it and love it if that’s what you have to do!! These devices are fun, but it’s so hard to get them to play well together. Even this am, my Treo was in infinite loop reboot after a synch when the stupid settings moved back the old photos I deleted off the Treo (which I didn’t have enough memory for which is why they got deleted). I will have to explore to see if I can set up an asynchronous synch for media to just push Treo pictures to the desktop. A devastating hard reboot only adds to my morning’s misery as I must redo all my customization again. But at least you get N’Awlins pictures.

We ate, we drank, but the town itself was the best part. I found myself proto-househunting in the French Quarter. Dumaine Street had particular charms, as you can see one entryway below.

Outside of the immediate tourist areas, the people were varied and interesting, like the architecture. It compared well to San Francisco - there was no begging, and, yet like SF, I got the sense that it was a city people lived in.

On the industrial side - there was such great decreptitude everywhere. I find that somehow inspiring. Where I live, in Menlo Park, is simply gorgeous - polished and rustic in the charming wooded cottage way. Here you had the sense of real life - like Oakland with ferns taking root in the cracks in the wall. I'm not sure which I liked best - the French Quarter, the Warehouse District (below), or the decrepit once-grand houses off the beaten track in the Garden District.

The city was at its best during our “adult night” - on our own during the rehersal dinner we hit some great places. First we hit Rasputin’s, a vodka bar - where they had a great ambience, good Canadian vodka (Pearl was our favorite), and spectacularly gourmet zakuskas (the small bites Russians have as chasers with their vodka, but this was caviar and not simple cut veggies) — though they didn’t have the wonderful herbal vodka, Tverskaya, from the Russian town in which I lived ten odd years ago. Next we hit the boutique hotel International House (think of an alternative W), which was playing a favorite Boards of Canada tune (Happy Cycling) when we walked in, and continued to play great alternative dub style music. It’s my choice for our stay next time, even more since our bartender’s recommendation for dinner turned out so well. We went out to Frenchman’s St - the local’s Bourbon St - to Marisol, which was fabulous and emminently reasonable. I pine for their chilled cucumber and buttermilk soup - and the chef’s amuse-bouche charcuterie and final samplers of homemade candies made it epicurian like few meals I’ve had. Yum. And definitely check out the jazz clubs on Frenchman’s.

So fun was had by all, and as long as connectivity persists (issues remain), I’ll be here back to work. And the headclearing vacation worked - I’m ready to do real work now and land my next thing(s). And that will in the area of information exchange - tools, services, and products to help move our stuff (tags, posts, photos, calendars, data, music, etc) so that it’s available at the point of need. Things to collect and repurpose information - mining and extracting in some cases, and in others simply provisioning - so that we can make all these fun and useful applications work better across our insane, info-overloaded, mobile lives.

Participate: 0 Comments | Trackback