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Thursday, November 8, 2001
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 Thursday, November 8, 2001
started 11/8/2001; 1:04:52 AM - last post 11/9/2001; 11:17:06 AM
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Doc Searls - Thursday, November 8, 2001 
11/8/2001; 5:04:52 AM (reads: 4430, responses: 12)
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Eventual messaging 
| | I'm trying to make AIM work, but I keep getting a message saying "Chat services are not available right now. Please try again in a few minutes (no chat nav)." Well thank you! Meanwhile it also ties up the machine for :30 seconds (that feels like 5 minutes). I just quit the program and it hung. Now it's force-quit for good. Oy. |
| | On to the next question: what else is there that runs on Macs? The last few times I used ICQ it crashed everything. Right now I'm trying to get to JabberCentral to download a Mac Jabber client, but that gets nowhere (they have a better excuse, being small and new and hacky and all). I'm told Yahoo has one, but I can't find it (ah, there it is). MSN is Windows only. For my purposes IRC won't do. IM/Chat is what I want. |
| | Anyway, we'll see how it goes. |
As I was say—
| | Later... David wrote back with the rest of the quote: "They've drawn a circle around the people who have an immediate interest in their source code, and said we're going to allow these people to participate in this," Mr. Searls said. |
Culture 1, Carly 0
| | I spoke to an old friend yesterday who worked many years at HP, and still considers the company "family." She told me that Carly Fiorina's deal to buy Compaq was something neither company namesake would have done. Nor would they have hired Carly in the first place. The Family has never taken well to outsiders coming in to run the company. Better to appoint somebody who came up through the ranks, has the respect of fellow family members, and knows the culture. |
| | Carly staked her career on the deal, the Mercury-News said. Stick a fork in her: she's done. A real shame, too. I liked her from the start, and still do. |
| | Next time, bet on the family. |
Ground Infinity
| | I've imagined doing software backwards—and it almost works. Backwards 1.0 has a ton of great features. With each release it has fewer features, until, one day, it¹s down to its core, the bare few features that make it a killer app. |
Pray for the company that can play tic-tac-toe with itself
| | That said, recommendations for other hosting candidates are welcome. All I need is to park the domain and its mail server where about 200Mb of space isn't too expensive. |
How instantaneous are you?
Whither target=``_blank''?
| | I sense a shift in common linking practice. Where the default used to be straight links, more and more of us are using the target tag to open up a new page. Some readers, like Charles Roth (who did the hackage on BuzzPhraser and whose opinion I regard very highly), think it's a good idea. Others, like Jakob Nielsen, whose opinion a great many (including me) regard highly, don't. |
| | I've generally been against it because a) there's more to go wrong when typing up the tag — a mistake I make daily — and b) it clutters the reader's page while giving them something they didn't expect. I hate hitting the Back command and going nowhere because the page I'm on happens to be new. But maybe that expectation is changing for a lot of people. |
| | Curious what the rest of ya'll think. |
Apple cider
| | Apple has tried to be an Enterprise Vendor on several previous occasions and failed because they don't understand what is expected of an Enterprise Vendor. Technology's nice, but that's not what makes a successful Enterprise Vendor. Service, support, and customer relationships are what count. I've seen no indication that Apple has changed its attitude about any of that. |
| | She adds this provocative question, which I think is a really good idea: |
| | Maybe they could find a partner to be their Enterprise Supplier Partner? |
| | Amy was responding to this post by Barry Cohen in response to this post by Dori Smith (both also very good). I just posted a long response. Let's see if more than 1 in 10 of you go there. (Yes, this is a test. I'm curious to see what happens. Later....So far it looks like more of you have gone there than here, meaning linkage is heading in from elsewhere. Interesting.) |
| | Another question. First, look at what Mike Sanders is saying today at Keep Trying, and follow its links. Now: what is it I'm doing here with Amy and the rest of you? Monologue? Dialogue? Blogalogue? Or something else again? |
Uncommon places, they are
| | Tom writes about the blog thing with his customary eloquence and insight. A sample: |
| | Here's the thing for me. I've kept books of things I like since I was a kid, before knowing they were called commonplace books. Sharing such things was a natural outgrowth of enthusiasm. Bothering with whether anybody gave a damn seemed extraneous. |
| | I love the "natural outgrowth of enthusiasm" line. |
Put it on UB and it'll be cancelled in thirteen weeks
Me, starring Billy Ray Cyrus
| | Seems there's a TV show called "Doc." |
| | This comes up as "news" when you search for "Doc" on Google. Meanwhile this blog is the #2 result out of 20,000,000. |
The dike is breached and the kid is raising his finger to the sky
| | Blog o' the day: Punkey.com, the Log de Plume of Frank en Helie. It's mostly in Dutch, but his tagline is vintage Weinberger, being a meme authored by the good doctor that served as Thesis #7 of The Cluetrain Manifesto as well as one of the book's chapters. Dig the pile of links on the right side of Punkey's page. They're a hoot. (Didn't know Google had a Dutch twin, did you? Neither did I.) Anyway, Punkey came to my attention as part of RageBoy's memewrangling efforts of late, which appear to be exceeding. Which is the idea. |
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Dean Landsman - Re: Thursday, November 8, 2001
11/8/2001; 8:02:47 PM (reads: 587, responses: 2)
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The survey is too limited (this from a guy who designed surveys for years!). As far as this IM business goes: I have it available, but find it horribly intrusive. The ability for other users to observe that one is online should not enable them to immediately engage (or attempt to do so) this person in an IM event.
In my own case, this forces me to either "appear offline" to all, or to block out any number of users. Both of these feel all too disingenuous, and this makes me uncomfortable. So I have disabled all the IM programs.
There's another way to look at this: the Blackberry/RIM e-mail pager, which enables two-way text paging. I love this wireless tool. It enables e-mail, forwarding, unobtrusive interaction, and enhances communication without being intimidating or just plain rude.
Opening a separate window in links is a good thing IMHO. It maintains the original, referring page, and offers the linked page as an alternative view. Some may see it as a waste of resources, but in this day of more powerful processors, that shouldn't be too much of a concern. Also, if one wants to click the link and then view it later, after finishing or further investigating the original page, it enables the process. A good way to solve the should-I-or-shouldn't-I dilemma is to offer a yes/no radio button for the readers: open link as new page? This puts the decision in *their* court.
Maybe one of those really capable people who help those of us who rely on the Manilla Newbies board for a lifeline will post the html for putting that on our blogs. Hmmm, maybe I'll send this URL to all the smart people on that list (HINT, HINT).
What to call the dialogue, interaction, and sharing in this world? It might be blogversation. Or typetalk. Interblogation. Keyboardialogue.
Or modern day communications.
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Doc Searls - Re: Thursday, November 8, 2001
11/8/2001; 9:01:42 PM (reads: 549, responses: 0)
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I got going with it again for one reason: to know if my wife is home. In our house I can't tell: our offices are too far apart (mostly mine is a cave: I have no idea what's happening outside the walls).
If she is home, it's handy to pass messges back and forth while each other is on the phone or whatever. Neither of us is highly exposed otherwise. We're set up that way.
My theory: lots of IM is actually rather limited and private. Kind of like an intercom.
As for the survey, yeah. I'm just starting to figure it out, actually.
But it's new. We'll see.
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A.M. Kuchling - Re: Commonplace books
11/8/2001; 10:19:31 PM (reads: 461, responses: 0)
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Good reference on commonplace books; I now have to get Earle Havens's book as described in the Yale link. Collecting quotations is dangerously addictive; I'm hopelessly in thrall to it, starting with
my own commonplace book (at http://www.amk.ca/quotations/quotations/).
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rusty - IM and target=_blank
11/9/2001; 4:55:52 AM (reads: 528, responses: 6)
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About instant messaging:
I used to use AIM all the time, but it got annoying, mostly because you can't ignore it gracefully. I'm IRC all the way now, because if you don't feel like talking, you just don't have to, but you can still take private messages from some people without anyone knowing you're actually around.
About target=_blank:
Hate. Hate hate hate hate. The only thing I hate more is when they use javascript to accomplish the same thing, because that just disables even more of your normal controls. I usually just close javascript popups right off, without even reading them, out of sheer annoyance. Tha is, when I don't have Konqueror set to ignore all window.open events anyway.
The weird part is, I hardly ever click a link straight through in the same window anyway. I virtually always use the middle mouse button to open a new wondow with the linked page. But I say when I want to do that and when I don't, and it drives me nuts when some design-weenie decides what I want to do for me.
------
By the way, I still utterly hate the comment system here, too. Hard to read, hard to follow threads, hard to post, unclear what's going to happen at any given click. For example, should I be using HTML in this comment? I have no idea. Can I preview? Dunno-- the only button I have is "Post Response". Will I be able to edit? I guess I just have to leap and hope...
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rusty - ???
11/9/2001; 4:57:11 AM (reads: 534, responses: 1)
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And why do I have a blank comment box, to respond to my own comment now? How do I get back to the top? Why wasn't this system designed for humans!?
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Bubba - Re: Thursday, November 8, 2001
11/9/2001; 5:10:57 AM (reads: 571, responses: 0)
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Doc Searls - Re: IM and target=_blank
11/9/2001; 6:31:14 AM (reads: 590, responses: 3)
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I'm not crazy about target=_blank either. It's policy at Linux Journal now (maybe was all along, I dunno). I seem to also notice a trend, but maybe that's just me.
As for this discussion thing (comment system, whatever), I still don't understand it very well, but regard it as a work in progress.
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rusty - Yipes
11/9/2001; 8:20:35 AM (reads: 658, responses: 1)
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Don't worry, Doc. I blame the software, not you. :-)
By the way, the comment page just changed completely. Was that supposed to happen? And why does the Discuss link on the front page migrate around from time to time?
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Dave Polaschek - Hosting
11/9/2001; 3:17:06 PM (reads: 477, responses: 0)
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That said, recommendations for other hosting candidates are welcome. All I need is to park the domain and its mail server where about 200Mb of space isn't too expensive.
pair.com is pretty darned good. Cheap for the amount of space you get, and
But rather than storage space, knowing how much bandwidth you're expecting is probably the more important issue. With big hard drives so cheap, a lot of places are changing from charging by storage space to charging by bandwidth used.
But $20/month would give you the storage you want, plus 6Gb of traffic/month. You could probably find a cheaper deal if you poke around in their pages, but that's the package that has everything you said you wanted.
-DaveP
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Dave Polaschek - Re: ???
11/9/2001; 3:20:55 PM (reads: 582, responses: 0)
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Why wasn't this system designed for humans!?
It was designed by and for Dave Winer. :/
More seriously, to get to the top, you can click the link after the Topic: at the top of the page. I'm pretty sure everything you're looking for is in Manila, it's just not quite where you're looking to find it.
-DaveP
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Doc Searls - Re: Yipes
11/9/2001; 6:26:27 PM (reads: 718, responses: 0)
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I, um, don't know.
But I do suspect I fucked something up on the other side of the page yesterday when I tried to edit the list there. No time to figure out what, though.
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Dwight - Re: IM and target=_blank
11/10/2001; 5:42:42 AM (reads: 697, responses: 0)
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In regards to the target="_blank" topic, I used to do that religiously on my site for the longest time and really fought with myself when I created my blog. This was, I think, primarily to keep people at my site, as I felt I was losing too many people to outside links I provided, and few ever returned. I still see more people leaving then come from other links, but I decided without realizing it, that it took more time then it was worth to change each link to it's own window and I stopped. I know there are ways around this, like a single target site wide, like the "_blank" above, but it still does not seem to be worth the trouble. I see the reason for a professional site dependant on advertising or page views to keep a lock on the viewer, but I have come to accept that if you publish a site, or writing, well enough, people will return or stay on their own no matter what form of linking you do.
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