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| Tuesday, December 18, 2001 |
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Getting small 
| | Ehud (Udi) Shapiro is and old acquaintance who was one of the creators of chat and instant messaging a few years back. His company was Ubique. It was bought by AOL, but later Udi and his partners bought it back and sold it to Lotus, where the technology now powers SameTime. |
| | Anyway, he was a scientist in the first plce and went back to the Weizmannn Institute in Israel to work on biological computing, last I heard. |
| | Now comes a piece in the New York Times talking about how Udi and his associates have built a DNA nanocomputer. Interesting stuff. |
Best friends
| | While I'm really grateful for the votes people are giving me, and I'm having fun following the whole thing, I have to disclose my misgivings along with my appreciations. The best blogs are the most personal, it seems to me, even when the blogs are about technical specialites. It's a bit strange to give people awards for doing well at being themselves. |
| | I've always chafed a bit when people tell me I'm a Big Time Blogger, because I'm not sure any of this is even close to Big Time, or ever will be. Or ever should be. It's too avocational. Too much of a side thing for each of us. Also too much about us rather than me. A blog without links isn't a blog. What we do here is the opposite of sticky. We want interest, not traffic. We want our authority to grow by accreting other people's knowledge and opinions, and to give and receive more of the same. And we want the respect that's a natural result of participating in the whole thing. |
| | Blogging is more of a social thing than a media thing. It's effects are social too. Google does a sensitive job of measuring that effect — perhaps too sensitive. Should this blog show up as the #2 Doc on the Web, behind the Department of Commerce and ahead of Doc the Dwarf, Doc Holliday, Doc Watson and every Microsoft Word .document exposed on the Web? And even ahead of what I've done with Linux Journal and Cluetrain? Only if blogs are unusually important in the world. |
| | And maybe they are — to the World Wide Web. But should the Web care only about itself? Should it be one vast Hotel California? |
| | A couple years ago I was talking to Brian Behlendorf, who brought us Apache and co-founded CollabNet, about coming up with a way to reward open source contributors to Jabber. I suggested that we look to the peer review process for some kind of guidance, and to best reward those contributors most respected by their peers. "You mean like high school?" Brian said. |
| | I grew up before geeks were programmers. In my day geeks were into electronics. So I was a ham radio operator. The code I learned was Morse. I liked the ham radio culture (which is back there in the modern geek culture evolutionary tree, even though ham radio is hardly extinct). It was a place I could go that was absolutely unlike school, which I hated from the first day of kindergarten until my junior year in college. In the ham world, everybody was curious about you, and eager to let you know something about themselves. Everybody was smart, and assumed you were too. It was a gift culture: Everybody liked helping everybody else, and to do good work in real world emergencies too. The field had its graybeards, but nobody was exceptionally important, other than novices. Bringing people into the community mattered perhaps more than anything other than having fun and doing good work. There was no social caste system. Sound familiar? |
| | Anyway, what I like about the Scripting News awards is that they're Dave's and Userland's. They're accessories to his boundless interest in a field he has fun trying to understand (and help the rest of us understand), even while he's in the midst of enlarging it. There's no academy, no committee .org-anized around a shared sense of rectitude and a need to judge. It's all in good fun. |
| | The great teacher John Taylor Gatto said this about how he learned to truly teach: |
| | I dropped the idea that I was an expert, whose job it was to fill the little heads with my expertise, and began to explore how I could remove those obstacles that prevented the inherent genius of children from gathering itself. |
| | That's what Dave does with Frontier, Manila and Radio Userland. It's what Ev does with Blogger. It's what we all do by using their software, or whatever else does the job. If I win anything, I'm giving those guys the game ball. |
Only 5 days 'till Christmas
| | Relatives and friends are converging here two days early and then departing, so we've moved Christmas up to Sunday the 23rd. Made sure Santa could make an early trip. |
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