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What's Wordsworth? A lot. I got a nice email from Sanj Kharbanda at Wordsworth. They're right in the middle of this fire I started, and they're handling it in an admirably direct and honest way. For evidence, look at the what they wrote to Joel Spolsky. It was interesting news to me that they were online two years before Amazon. Wow. To answer the obvious question, Sanj writes, "The only reason I can come up with it the same reason Wordsworth books has never tried to "chain" itself...we are an independent store that tries to keep the "community store" ethic and we were afraid we would loose that." And ya know what? We all would have lost it. Thanks for saving the store, guys. Same thing happened out here with Peets Coffee & Tea. As I understand it, the Starbucks founders came out of Peets, which has always set the high java mark for coffee house quality, at least here in the Bay Area. Today Peets is still the best, by far, and they have just a handful of stores. I've been at several, and they're all just as good as the first one in Berkeley, which I discovered when I came to California in 1985. By then it had been around almost 20 years. Great coffee. My current fave: the Garuda blend. With two people you just get an argument. With a mob you get democracy. Scott Reents and Mike Weiksner of The Democracy Project, who were extremely helpful to me a couple weeks back when I needed some background for a speech I was giving, wrote to announce the launch of Quorum.org, their new online town hall. It's kinda The People's Weblog. It's up and it's working. They use some kind of collaborative filtering. After filling out a mercifully brief questionaire, I find that I'm classed as a "pro-business progressive." Well, I'm also pro-sex and pro-crastination. Which is probably why I never get around to crastinating. Anyway, it looks like a good site. At least it's publicity One prevailing wrong idea about open source software is that you can't get paid for writing it. For most of the last year, CoSource and SourceXchange have been creating markets where buyers and sellers of open source programming can find each other and do business. Back in May I interviewed the two companies' respective progenitors, Brian Behlendorf and Bernie Thompson, plus Wayne Caccamo of Hewlett-Packard, who came up with the idea for SourceXchange and brought it to Brian and others at O'Reilly. That interview is at the Linux Journal site. I bring it up now because Thomas E. Weber took notice of the same phenomenon, and wrote about it today in his e-World column, which runs on the front page of the Marketplace section of The Wall Street Journal (for subscribers, here's the link). It's not a rave, but it's fair. Radio Redux Dave has a nice piece on Vin Scelsa, a veteran New York disc jockey who I remember from when he was on WFMU/91.1 — "Free Form Radio" — out of Upsala College in Orange, New Jersey, in the late '60s. 'FMU had an awful signal (in one direction — mine — its signal slammed straight into a water tank only a few feet from the transmitting antenna) and a completely wild attitude, but it was the first and best of its type, which was basically a bunch of folks you liked playing music you liked. And Vin was the best of that breed. He went from there to WPLJ in New York, as I recall, and has kicked around New York FM ever since. Hearing he's still active gives me hope. Also makes me realize that weblogs are a lot like free form radio. It doesn't give you that revolutionary rush that comes from occupying the neglected student station at a clueless college (which was what made WFMU possible), but the feeling of being On The Air is pretty much the same. The rest of my work is the records I play. I come here to talk between songs. Eat your vendor Don Marti just pointed me to this extremely funny piece at SFBG.com, the Web site of the San Franciso Bay Guardian. That site is a lot funnier, seems to me, than the paper. Or maybe it's just seeing "free market cannibalism" in a headline. Anyway, the piece is about bad customer service at The Gap. All it lacks is a link to Gapsucks.org Watch this hack IBM has embedded Linux in a wristwatch, Reuters says. They talk about an IBM statement, but the "journalist" link at the IBM site goes to a 404. Bummer. Swim in Sync This morning Jesse Berst suggests that the next Microsoft-grade (i.e. ubiquitous) platform will be built on synchronization. He goes on to credit two companies with paving the way. Those companies are FusionOne and Roku. [Disclaimer: I have no less than two close relatives working for FusionOne.] Here's the meat:
Meanwhile, the Web continues to feature a huge lack of directory infrastructure. We have domain names. That's it. Everything to the right of the next / is a haystack. No email app, cell phone or other hand-hyeld device is built to share directory info with anything but their own kind. It's a huge mess. When serious infrastructure comes along, it will express and embody the virtues that uncredited programmers (not companies that want to "own" ubiquity) built into the Net in the first place:
Microsoft's .Net strategy looks like a move in this direction, but it smells uncomfortable with virtue #1 (and it doesn't have to be — those virtues are themselves what qualifies the Net as a ubiquitous platform). What FusionOne does will be terrific, once it supports enough OSes, apps and devices. What Roku does... I have no idea. By the way, I tried to post a talkback &:151; my first — to Jesse Berst's page, but went straight to the broken link page. Markets are Technography
Bernie, who created the concept of Technography, and (I believe I have this right) co-conspired with Dave Winer to create the presentation category (which left Microsoft unencumbered by patents) by giving us all the concept of turning outlines into bullet charts, has been steadily improving CoWorking.com. If Bernie had been technographing my conversation with Dave a day or two earlier, it would have made starting today's fires even easier. I probably would have also had an article or two out of it. Technography has always been an extremely useful concept. It should be making Bernie rich. Instead, it's just made him fun. Plus influential and stuff like that. Anyway, he's an ace and a True Original. So hire his ass. To make that easier, read Of Magic and Meetings, which I am humbly pleased to see was informed by the very conversation I just mentioned. Then contrast this...
ÒThe game would move so quickly that every fake, cut and pass would be surprising, and yet nothing could surprise me. Even before the other team brought the ball in bounds, I could feel it so keenly that I'd want to shout to my teammates, "It's coming there!" -- except that I knew everything would change if it did. My premonitions would be consistently correct, and I always felt then that I not only knew all the Celtics by heart but also all the opposing players, and they knew me. There have been many times in my career when I felt moved or joyful, but these were the moments when I had chills pulsing up and down my spine.Ó (Bill Russell, Second Wind: The Memoirs of an Opinionated Man, Random House, 1979) ... which Bernie posits as an ideal for business meetings, with this...
"Thank you," I told Spain. "I appreciate that. they seemed really receptive." "'You'll never hear from them again,'"he said. ... from Michael Wolff's Burn Rate. Which would you rather have? That's why you need Bernie. There are responses to this message:
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So far, FusionOne supports the most popular OS (not OSes) and apps, but it won't qualify as a "platform" until it provides something more than piecemeal support for non-Microsoft OSes and apps. But hey, it's still early. I've signed up, and I'm waiting to hear when they're ready with Mac and Linux support. To their credit, I get emails with progress reports. This is encouraging.
Roku's site reads like it was written by 
Last week I talked with 
