Archive for May, 2005

OpenOffice 1.1.4: motivation for switching and review

by eleanor on 31 May 2005 @ 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.

Participate: 1 Comment | Trackback

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

by eleanor on 26 May 2005 @ 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.

Participate: 0 Comments | Trackback

The importance of a peer group

by eleanor on 24 May 2005 @ 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).

Participate: 2 Comments | Trackback

Quit - the day before your big devcon?

by eleanor on 23 May 2005 @ 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?

Participate: 8 Comments | Trackback

The forgotten cost of Firefox: cookie mgmt

by eleanor on @ 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?

Participate: 0 Comments | Trackback

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

by eleanor on @ 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.

Participate: 4 Comments | Trackback

Blogging vs journalism: stacacotto viewpoints vs. synthesis

by eleanor on @ 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.

Participate: 0 Comments | Trackback

Music fun

by eleanor on 20 May 2005 @ 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.

Participate: 4 Comments | Trackback

Everything iCal resource

by eleanor on 19 May 2005 @ 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.

Participate: 0 Comments | Trackback

Funny of the day

by eleanor on @ 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.

Participate: 0 Comments | Trackback

Gnomedex

by eleanor on @ 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.

Participate: 1 Comment | Trackback

Webzine 2005 is back

by eleanor on @ 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?

Participate: 5 Comments | Trackback

Darknet - the “now” in book format

by eleanor on 18 May 2005 @ 2:01 pm in Life-Culture-Play   ++

Perhaps it’s that I’m used to holding out to read books a bit after the hype has died down, but JD Lasica’s Darknet is downright freaky in how current events it still feels. I’m only about halfway through now, but it’s been very good. And weird. It’s like not having to zip around and hunt and read blogposts to get the back story. JD said he finished it last summer, but it was clearly edited to include events up to late 2004 (and I can’t find it now, but I thought I even saw a 2005 date).

But it’s so current it’s freaky. Like in yesterday’s massive news trawling I ran across this bit about Macrovision and what you can and can’t do and why. And TiVo’s email newsletter is promoting Record, Burn, Go, a $400 combo DVDR-PVR device.

We’re so much in the midst of this now, I wonder how it will standup once we get further out - or if it will be like Smart Mobs, which I read quite a bit after it came out (it think it described the Euro-Asian mobile zeitgeist much more successfully than here in the US).

I’ll write more later, but wanted to throw out how relevant the book is immediately. The stories about people (a bunch of whom I know) are much crisper than either Howard Rheingold or Neil Gershenfeld manage - somehow the interviewees speak more for themselves without extraneous description. Usually I take personal stories as just color and dialogue, but JD does a good job here weaving them into the larger narrative. This is just an off-the-cuff observation, but I’ll have to ask JD how he managed all this info. There were some direct quotes in here from a long time ago.

Things like quotes and sources are an odd thing for me to pick up on in a book (other than as bibliographic inputs to further research!). Jayson Blair was just ridiculous, but the story of Michelle Delio hits a lot closer to home since I can recall reading (and like Techdirt, scratching my head at) some of her pieces.

Participate: 2 Comments | Trackback

Design is important, but remind me how important?

by eleanor on @ 1:25 pm in Events & Happenings   ++

Two design things in my bin, so I’ll post them (having only one would seem off-topic!).

Yesterday I ran across a mention (if I had my firefox tracker, I’d know where I found it, but alas) of a design conference that sounded somewhat interesting, the Design Research for Product and Brand Innovation held in SF in October. It sounds somewhat like what I do, but I can tell they’re talking to folks with a different general skillset. It’s like listening to Québequoise radio.

I’ll admit my ignorance and say I can’t tell if it’s info design, or user interface, or - most cynically - just up-market web development. I keep attending BayCHI events and other usability things because I’m trying to understand what this role adds. I still need an answer to the question: if I have a sw startup with limited dollars, at what point do I need to have a person with these skills? What do I look for and what value should I expect them to add? I may be skeptical, but at least I continue to be curious, sensing there’s value in there somewhere.

My intial impression from how hazy things are is that the practicioners themselves don’t yet know. Perhaps because of its newness, I have a feeling that this discipline is not monolithic at all, with high variation in level and mix of skills. Like worse than when you talk about Java programmers and try to figure out who’s good or not.

The second design thing is more traditional stuff, mentioned on the Future Salon Blog - a session tomorrow at PARC with David Kelley of IDEO. Now maybe it’s a product of my confusion that I think design-pretty should also be design-useful, but there you have it. Looking at the Stanford Design School’s website I have to wonder. Is this a thinktank? Maybe it’s new-new and all will be revealed later, but I tried to sign up for the “more info ” and got an error from Topica. If I get enough done early in the day tomorrow, I’ll wander by.

Participate: 0 Comments | Trackback

Jeff Hawkins at ETL today

by eleanor on @ 11:07 am in Geek | Events & Happenings   ++

Niall and I have become Stanford groupies. He says it’s pseudo b-skool for him, and - even though I did that already - I might agree. In my case it’s revisiting the themes from the entrepreneurial side. I was a strategy and econ wonk in b-skool, and thought it’d be impossible to teach entrepreneurialism. While it may be, I now find that having designated times to discuss the issues, tradeoffs and best practices is very useful.

The speaker at today’s ETL session needs no geeky introduction, as it’s Jeff Hawkins of Palm fame. We’re gonna get our Treos signed! Niall’s got the pen and I’m getting the fixative. See you today at Terman at 4:30.

This is the second time I’ve fetishized my handheld - my old cute orange Clié has a little kitty hair (under the piece of tape) from my now-long dead familiar kitty.

I’m willing to guess that Jeff won’t burst into song, but it’s impossible to tell.

I’ll post pictures of our trophies and the process after our adventure.

UPDATE: Ah, ok so here we are, with the quintessential geek photo from Niall. Jeff was a good sport about signing, but he seemed keenest to sign on the inside. I have to apply fixative to mine today to make sure it doesn’t scratch off. (it’s reduced here the poor-man’s way, head up to flickr for the original in all Niall’s fooery). Nice composition!

Note also for the entrepreurial engineers out there, that 106miles is tonight. They say it’s full, but you might want to see if you qualify for the invites to the next one.

And dammit speaking of cats - why isn’t kittenwar back up yet???

Edit: .org, .com - tomato tomato - Thx to JeffC for the link correction.

Participate: 1 Comment | Trackback

Capturing the full view from microcontent

by eleanor on @ 10:55 am in Geek   ++

After a long and torturous session, my subscriptions are finally back in order. In a dramatic instance proving subject-based taxonomies don’t always work, I’ve smushed my subs into a few broad groups. The grouping’s based on a mix of knowing people, interest in content, posting frequency, and - perhaps strangely - ratio of “new” to rehash.

I’ve got a lot of feeds, but wasn’t trawling them effectively - but when I do, I’m struck by the ‘yada-yada’ effect of many blogs. And that’s my posting style - if I can get to something news-ish immediately (what Jeff noted here) I’ll post on it, but as it decays, I care less. It comes down to the fact that for me there’s a short window where you can legitimately repost facts, say an acquisiton or rumor, without providing analysis. After that I expect to be told something new. Which isn’t really fair, since the order in which I cruise a blog has nothing to do with when it was written.

At long last I powered through all my feeds yesterday, and have such a sense of Greek chorus. We’re all singing the same song - which would imply I need fewer feeds. But that’s not really true.

This gets back to the end-all-and-be-all that I wish someone would come up with - a conversation tracker. I’ve talked with the guys at Technorati about this, and the complexity is insurmountable they say. I bet that there are folks out there with a more pragmatic, just get it working ethos that can do it. This isn’t a criticism, Technorati works on a theory of precisely mapping the known and countable. This project would be a “good enough” tool, and might therefore be a good candidate for a Google beta (though it would be very dangerous for Technorati since it would be the idea pretex for encroachment on their market).

You’d need to collect all the feeds from all the blogs out there and do processing and mapping to very imprecisely map out the conversation. Me, I’d like to see it by date, and watch the flow of the conversation as the snowballs move up and down the hill. Others might want to watch it by authority. Whatever works for you - it should just be a sort on the data. When we talk about AttentionXML - the problem that solves for me is to help surface what I don’t already know or have access to. In all of these discussions, adding a time-based linking trail would help map out discussions, simulataneously tracking their linear progresssion as well as the collective mind map to capture how ideas morph and change, merging on later with other themes.

And this is the same kind of text processing and intelligence that Paul Kedrosky was expecting from PatentMojo. And when it comes to search, getting beyond keywords to context requires much more heavy lifting.

What I wonder based on this, and talking with the Technorati guys over the months is the degree to which user bitching in the “you can’t find my important post” works to really constrain the innovation that a company is comfortable with. Google’s clearly ok with alienating whole tranches of society in their experiements-cum-product-offerings, but they run their business to be isolated from this. The degree to which Technorati or Six Apart, as members of the blogging community, seem to have their moves questioned and second-guessed by the ecosystem is a striking counterweight to their ability to make the kind of leaps necessary to innovation.

Participate: 5 Comments | Trackback

Being bookish: events tonight

by eleanor on 11 May 2005 @ 5:22 pm in Geek | Events & Happenings | Life-Culture-Play   ++

Tonight there are two book events for more scholarly pursuits (not everything is food & drink):

• Steve Johnson has a book signing for Everything Bad is Good for You at Books Inc. in Mountain View at 7:30PM.
• Scott Berkun takes time out from talking to big corps with a chill meet up during his book tour of the Bay area. He’s out promoting his new project management book, The Art of Project Management. This one is, yes you knew it was coming, at Faultline Brewing Co., a bar in Sunnyvale starting around 7.

Niall and I (currently listening to Tim Draper of DFJ at Stanford) are headed to the 2nd event, though I am still eager to read Johnson’s book too.

Update: the ETL event yesterday at Stanford was not to be missed. Tim broke into song, which Niall captured here.

Participate: 0 Comments | Trackback

Correction, Citizen Journalism gathering updated info

by eleanor on @ 4:36 pm in Events & Happenings   ++

Two quick things: the place for Fri’s party has changed and (maybe this isn’t correction so much as perspective) it’s also not all about JD - Mary Hodder’s got the scoop that it’s also to noodle around what Dan Gillmor is doing with his new project.

New location: Varnish Fine Art - 77 Natoma (alley running between 1st & 2nd), near Howard.

I still stand behind the Onion party as well.

Participate: 0 Comments | Trackback

Coastal

by eleanor on 9 May 2005 @ 9:15 am in Life-Culture-Play   ++

And now I’m off down the coast with my dad! See ya tomorrow night.

Participate: 0 Comments | Trackback

…but on the web, they just swat at each other

by eleanor on @ 12:55 am in Geek   ++

It’s with the success of yesterday’s outing (and many of the rest of the last week, where there were many great women) in mind that I approach this latest girls vs boys piffle. I heard from Niall yesterday about the Technorati/AO 100, the headline for which I had seen go by on SharpReader when Dave posted it on Friday. I didn’t think it a big deal at the time or even truly pay attention when Niall mentioned it, but when I get back I see Susan Mernit’s post. And realize that of course there’s a chick angle.

Some of this stuff is getting a little worn. Yeah, there both are no chick speakers and there are lots of chick speakers. My problem with the speakers of both sexes is that too often those that put themselves forth, especially in the vanguard, like to speak more than they are worth listening too. Hell, isn’t this all less about the “speakers” than the “writers”, or better yet “the participants”?

That’s what I find most fascinating about blogs. Gives voice to those too remote to attend or keynote these rarefied events, too shy to put themselves forward, and giving the mic to everyone concurrently. The trouble with any event where you have a speaker or a list or any anything is that it’s hierarchical and ranked. Despite our best efforts, in real life only one person gets to talk at a time.

Link ranking is interesting up to a point - it helps break through and order the simultaneous cacophony of asynchronous online chatter. And thus for me link ranking it works best at the topic level. But fame doesn’t make me believe someone’s opinion more. It only seems to impact the info they sometimes receive or the depth of their perspective (influenced by whispered offline conversations), both of which I benefit from.

In reading through all this, I am processing in a different direction. I have no reaction to this contest in a feminist context. Always On has a lot of chick activity, and in my view, it’s chick participation on the senior side with a lot of sensible things being said. But does that come into this? Women who contribute there are largely lost to the wider world. And no, I’m not sure what I think about that, which is why I’ve never posted. Captive audience vs. owning my microcontent. You tell me.

But still this controversy rages, as if people forget that lists of any sort remain a self-aggrandizing thing. And why not, it’s freakin’ business. These ain’t just bloggers, these are media guys looking to make a buck.

Tony Perkins — one must never forget — ran hype machine Red Herring even as he wrote a book on its demise, The Internet Bubble: Inside the Overvalued World of High-Tech Stocks . Don’t roll your eyes - that’s what the man did. Maybe I’m just biased because I happened to be receiving Business 2.0 at the same time, when in 1999 B2.0 expanded to bi-monthly based on the volume of advertising and Red Herring was just as bulging. Now, he’s now trying to make the AO Blogozine hunt, among other elements of the AO business. I have the first issue, being an AO member, and the cover says “Happy days are here again!”. That definitely goes in my trophy box, along with my Digiscents schwag.

And Dave, well Dave is the frontman for an enterprise which is still looking for a business model, and thus motivated to do PR things like this. Dave needs the a-listers, pioneers, influencers and up-and-comers more than anyone else - they’re the backbone of Technorati’s model: their very picky and somewhat fickle user community/content library. Unlike Tony, Dave’s “customers” don’t pay for the interaction, but rather view Technorati (ed. note - corrected clumsy wording) as a public utility (even as they monetize the free content given them).

So this makes far more sense to me from Tony’s view than from Dave’s, except to show that all this chick kerfluffle and questioning of linking-as-merit-meter has started to chip away at the certainty that Technorati’s paradigm of ranking by link is the end-all. And it’s not - it’s just a model, just one observation of how people use the web.

This is business, and being a businessman, Dave’s responding to “market need” and playing with moving from the generated Technorati 100 to some new 100 with a cattle-call vote experiment . This is progress folks.

I’m incredibly frustrated and saddened to hear all these “won’t somebody please just think about the children” cries about women’s inclusion at seemingly every occassion. I agree with the Founding Fathers bit here, and yes, Dave changed it quickly, and great - but that’s a lame ass Google-type error that shouldn’t have been made in the first place. So that part rounds out to a solid eye-roll from me. But there the chick debate should end.

Any merit-based ranking now, whether by influence or readership, will include almost all men if it runs from now back. I don’t think that if we look over the start of blogging til now we can credibly expand too far beyond Liz’s chicks. And those are great strong women. But this 100 should be a nice obvious hall of fame, not a political statement. It’s ridiculous to cry that it needs to change to reflect some normative goals and I’m totally opposed to ballot box stuffing by chick swarming to have our voices be heard.

Far more constructive from my view would be a list of up-and-comers, separate from this list which is honoring the past and immortalizing the right-now state. Can you imagine it? This would give world-changers metrics, rather than the shifting results of the Technorati 100. Data one could measure with to gauge progress.

So far, I found Shelly Power/Burningbird’s post most in synch with my thinking (when we jive we jive). And she wrote all that before this mess started. It’s an interesting sidenote that, contrary to what she says, I find myself moving toward creating a blogroll that is more dynamic and linked with what I’m reading (as yet unimplemented). I am finally becoming fascinated by blogs as a tool for knitting together networks, not just as a personal mouthpiece.

But so my take is that the fight for any top 100 spots is about personal aggrandizement, but it’s also supposed to be about truth. I take Dooce’s scat-blog a smidgen more seriously when I’m told it’s consistently in the top 10, but that’s goes in the same category as other things that are inexplicably popular. As a marketer, I’d certainly value the data, and I suppose it’s only human to jockey for position since there is renumeration tied to this. And that’s what this is about - but there shouldn’t be crying about it: “there’s no crying in baseball.” People at the top make money. They deserve that money not because they deserve it as humans, but as compensation for entertaining, appeasing, and appealing to a wide audience moneyholders want to reach. You don’t get the money until you do that.

Participate: 0 Comments | Trackback