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Thursday, June 1, 2000
Mo fo Why is it that every time I "flip" this page (making all extant content yesterday or older), I get a long phone call? The result is an equally long time with nothing under today's date banner, where I'm writing now. In radio we call it "dead air." Here we can't call it "dead space," since there's almost no space between today and yesterday. How about "dead fo?" Fo would be short for inform. Some context. A few weeks ago, when I was talking with Tim O'Reilly about the patent mess, we deconstructed the noun information. Clearly it derives from the verb inform, which derives from the verb form. So in conversation, we observed, we don't just "deliver information" back and forth. We form each other. When I learn something new from you, and what I learn is meaningful -- that is, I can't forget it -- you have literally formed me. In other words, we are authors of each other. What's more, we are in the market to be formed. We demand it. Otherwise we wouldn't learn a damn thing. That's why it's misleading to conceive information as a substance that we "deliver" to other human beings. When we do that, we insult the verb at its heart. Maybe we can recover some awareness of that verb by abbreviating it as fo. Actually, I think "clicky" (as the opposite of sticky) has a better chance. Time will fo.
I was overheard to have said... Every once in a while ON24 lends me a soap box to stand on and stream about something. Sometimes I stream as a talking blur (see left), and sometimes as just as blurred talk. In any case, I like them and they seem to like me, and that means distracted investors with fat pipes get to hear me talk about Linux, Cluetrain or whatever. Such was the case this morning. The interview should be up shortly, probably somewhere under the "Linux Low Point" headline at the top of the front page. I don't remember what I said, but it was something like the below: Linus has left the building There was other bad news. Today TurboLinux laid off some people. And Linux stocks, the flavor of the month last Chrismas, are now bulemia bait. What can we say? Well, whatever we said, it went on for 23 minutes, some fraction of which will run at ON24 today. Here's some of what I remember:
Like I'm a real stock market analyst. Scary thought. Knowledge In, Fun Out Take the domain name "feces.com." Or don't, because it's already gone (apparently to a Canadian pornographer). According to Register.com, all these "additional names" are still available: aboutfeces.com To which we might add some Linux permutations: freshfeces.org And some business ones Register.com missed: b2bfeces.com Anyway, on James Parry's About page, under the headline This page has a philosophy. That makes it better than yours, he says this: Web browsers are fragile assemblies of bugs, held together with Hello Kitty stickers. They tend to have problems with complicated pages, especially if they're long. Some of my pages are pretty long, and I want them to work with any Web browser on any computer, and so I've been very careful not to do anything unkosher, daring, or cool. And thus condenses all of Jakob Nielsen's advice to one quotable paragraph.
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The call that provoked the above came from Ian Brown of 
