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Monday, November 19, 2001
Just make sure you lift the seat 
| | Mike calls blogs The digital equivalent of a public restroom stall with no door. He also compares them to logs thrown into a fire. I've used that metaphor myself a few times, starting way back here (when Cluetrain was still a site but not yet a book). Interesting what's come to pass since. |
A burka for your whole country
| | What a concept. The companies involved oughta be shunned. |
| | By the way, that link comes from Buzz of Activewords, who always finds good ones. Since I'm the pied piper of blogs today, I've got to publicly express my long-standing wish that Buzz would blog too. |
Peripheral interests
| | I'm looking for a color scanner that connects by firewire or USB for Mac and/or Linux. One that will scan old color slides would be a nice plus. |
| | Also for a 3-button USB mouse to do Unix stuff in a command line on a Mac running OS X. Recommendations for both are welcome. |
Making Interstructure
| | Take away all the usual arguments, including the politics and the personalities, and open source has a single problem: its first concern isn't business. The itches most open source hackers tend to scratch are their own, or those of their community. Not a customer's. I don't believe, however, that this needs to be a problem. Just an invitation to play a role that supports, and is supported by, other roles played by people who work mostly for customers. I could easily get going on this subject, but I'd rather turn the floor over to Andre Durand, who has posted some interesting thoughts in Commercially OPEN For Business, an essay on his blog. |
| | Some context. Andre's company, Jabber Inc., is strugging with very real issues here. It's a commercial company selling products and services around Jabber, which its open source creators call both "the coolest IM (instant messaging) system on the planet" and "a powerful platform for XML messaging and presence." |
| | At the very least, Jabber has the potential to become, or at least provide, som e very helpful Internet infrastructure. There is no Internet spec, de facto or otherwise, for either IM or presence. The instant messaging most of us know (AIM, ICQ, Yahoo, MSNM) may use the Internet, but they offer the Internet nothing infrastructural it can build on. They're 100% private. They are no closer to real Internet-based IM than online services like Compuserve, Prodigy and the original AOL were to the the Internet we know today. |
| | It's clear Microsoft and AOL aren't going to take the lead here. I don't think the traditional open source and free software communities are either — beyond what they're doing already with Jabber (which is a lot, but not yet enough). They can't do it alone. They're going to have to work with the independent developer community, which still needs to define itself. |
| | I think that definition is simple. Independent developers aren't interested in controlling any destiny other than their own. They have healthy perspective on what's best kept public, and what's best kept private — on how to make money on what you sell, and how to make ubiquity with what you develop in cahoots with others, give away, or both. |
| | The software industry is still young, still new, still learning. Its leaders are neither government nor corporate giants, but inspired programmers. Some are interested in business. Others are not. Both have goods they can bring to the bazaar we call The Marketplace. Companies like Jabber Inc. and guys like Andre are trying to figure out how to do that, and thinking out loud about it along the way (on blogs, naturally). We should try to help them. |
| | Disclaimer: I'm on Jabber, Inc.'s open board. So are Eric S. Raymond and Tim O'Reilly. Craig Burton is on the company's Technical Advisory Board. We've all been involved in this thing. But the network is much bigger than that. Dave has been contributing as well, starting last August at Jabbercon. |
| | So the context is bigger than it looks. In fact, it's as big as The Net itself. |
| | He's right, of course. That paragraph belongs at the disclaiming end of a press release. Not at the front of a Web site.] |
Gonzo Marcom
| | Interesting reading Judith's Generating Strategies for Technology, which is both a standalone document as well as last Wednesday's blog. At first glance it might look like yet another corporate communications how-to. But it's deeper than that. I watched Judith and Craig do exactly this stuff at Novell, and that's why Novell is still a name we can't forget. Also why Novell gave Microsoft real competition while Microsoft barely threatened Novell's core businesses. In fact, Novell gave Microsoft fits. |
| | One item that stands out for me is the last one in Judith's list of ten key elements of planning: authority to proceed. If you asked me in 1986 to list the number of companies where the head of corporate communications (or marketing communications, or marketing — whoever was in charge of the place where the marketing wheel hits the market's road) — had real power, and I could name exactly two: a company called CXI, and Novell (not just a coincidence: Novell later acquired CXI). Judith's work at Novell was so good it was scary. And a big part of that was Judith's authority to proceed. As a rule the person in her position at most companies doesn't have it. Only the CEO does. Maybe whoever runs sales. But not the marketing person, and least of all marketing communications. Most companies see that stuff as cosmetics. Paint-job stuff. Not what the company is fundamentally about, being acted out, live, in the marketplace. (For a few minutes during the dot-com madness there were all these Chief Marketing Officers, but those guys were often products of the Form Follows Fundingn principle. The VCs earmarked huge sums for brute force branding, and somebody had to be in charge of that.) |
| | One of the most amazing tactical moves I ever saw was Novell's real-world response to a 3Com ad that showed 3Com winning some kind of shoot-out against Novell. Within moments Novell put out another ad challenging 3Com to a real-world shoot out, to see which was "the fastest gun in the West." It was a gauntlet that 3Com had almost no choice about picking up. The publicity was huge, and Novell was completely in command of the entire affair. What stands out in my memory of it, however, is how gonzo it was. There was nothing detached about it. All this stuff was being played out, live, in the marketplace, which was as dusty and rowdy as any in the Old West. |
| | Somehow Judith and Novell managed to be both highly strategic and fully engaged at the same time. "Life is what happens when you're busy making plans," John Lennon said. But there is no business more formidable than one that's planned to the Nth yet engaged to an equal degree — and eager to embrace every opportunity that comes along. |
| | I submit, by the way, that this is a largley uncredited reason for Microsoft's success as well. |
Moldy oldie
| | Before blogrolling, before there were even blogs, we had to flatter each other by hand-coding HTML. It wasn't pretty. |
| | I made this discovery by way of the Wayback Machine at the Archive.org. |
Uh oh
| | I kind of expected civil liberties to get stampeded as the country rushed off to war. But I wasn't aware that torture had become a serious subject of debate until I read what Deborah wrote about it this morning. It's hard to believe we're coming to this point so quickly. Good God. |
| | I don't care how inconvenient due process may be, it's always better to have one. Or, as Ben Franklin said, "If we give up our essential rights for some security, we are in danger of losing both." |
Third step: getting the Net to the hut.
| | Over the weekend I went into the back forty with a bow saw and removed the understory of palm fronds that had made the area impenetrable. When I was done, about a hundred huge fronds (some 25 feet long) from 15 palms of various sizes were laying on the ground and my hands and legs were perforated by the knifelike leaves each frond features near its base. But I felt like a man, rather than the desk potato I've been for the last few decades. |
| | Next step: building a grass hut. I'm not kidding. Pointers would be welcome. I've certainly got enough material. |
| | [Later... I called one of my new friends —'; one of those guys who seems to know everything because he's boundlessly curious and seems to have done everything — and asked him if he knew anybody who knew anything about building grass huts. "I do," he said. "Used to build them all the time in Fiji when I lived there. It's easy." So he's coming over early next week and we'll make a project of it.] |
See what happens when somebody makes you CEO of something?
And why wasn't I invited, hm?
Purgatory, cont'd
| | Used to be you could get some nice MP3s from any of your 60 million friends on Napster. Now you can get a t-shirt. |
And blogs need Clay
Blogs do that to you
| | I was a philosophy major in college, somewhere back in the Middle Ages. Somewhat more recently, Dr. Weinberger actually taught the stuff. Like, in college. And now he's back at it, in his blog, writing about Continental Philosophy and the horizontality of hyperlinks: |
| | So, does the Web world have an horizon? Since it's not a physical world, it well might not have a structure analogous to the horizon. But I think it does: hyperlinks. Hyperlinks point to a page beyond itself. They are a quite explicit gesture - far more explicit than the real world horizon in suggesting what lies beyond. |
| | It's gets deeper than that. Dig it. |
Just five shopping days left
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