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Thursday, April 17, 2003
Blog Sax 
| | Nice playing blog pong with fellow blogger Vince Outlaw, on whose New Jazz Thing show I will be a guest tonight. The station is KSDS, on 88.3fm in San Diego, and everywhere else within the sound of its packets, via live webcast (it turns out they still allow that). |
| | Vince explains the new streaming stysem (sounds cool) and promises to support more than just Windows Media Player soon. I'm listening right now on an OS X box (you can download a free player) and it sounds terrific. |
| | The show runs from 6-8pm. I'll be on at 6:05pm, PDST. See ya there. |
Moving onward
| | Head Lemur: The Next Big Thing. It's about GlobeAlive, a project by my son that's the subject of the long post below. I'll be immodest here for a minute. I don't often run across stuff that makes me want to say "I couldn't have said it better myself." This post does that. It also moves me. A long excerpt: |
| | What makes this significant is that the web has opened the floodgates of knowledge, information and opinions. From personal websites, to elaborate commercial enterprises specifically designed to separate you from your money in traditional and shabby methods that the web is making extinct as you read this. The web with email and chat, has created a vast system of personal communication that is part library, part fantasy, part salesmanship, part hucksterism, part ego, and with a bit of common sense, entertaining far beyond previous social systems. |
| | Blogs and blogging software opened up the ability of a large number of folks to communicate ideas and information without knowing any of the underlying tags, protocols, and nuts and bolts of traditional website creation. I have spent 6 years building websites for a living and it is not an easy road to follow. This is their true power. |
| | The conversations around blogs as journalism are semantic exercises of small import, promulgated by folks whose day jobs are under increasing pressure by folks who can do their own reporting on events and offer opinions unfiltered by marketing, editorial, or sales departments. The true crime here is that the anti-blogger journalism folks point out errors and fallacies, but offer no guidance on how reporting is done, nor share effective writing techniques. They still believe the emperor's new clothes are stunning. |
| | Information without education is the old way of communication. Blind faith in the acceptance of news by organizations whose principles are being bent by ratings, marketshare, and advertising, are being examined and pointed out with increasing regularity by simple folks whose eyes are being opened to the potential of communication and discourse in near real time. |
| | Doc's announcement of Allen's new enterprise, Globe Alive , points to the next stage in this revolution in communication. Globe Alive is the next big thing. |
| | Real time communication with folks who have information to share, expertise to offer, and are willing to do so on a one to one basis is going to revolutionize the way folks can use information to improve their lives, their business, and their society. Globe Alive is the next big thing. |
Crimson Ink
| | Nice long piece, with a boffo pic of Uncle Dave right up top. |
Other items that have nothing to do with sex and stuff
The 'ize have it
| | Well, the long-standing semi-rumors are reavealed true: The Scobleizer has been Microsized. That doesn't sound right. He prefers Microsofted. Doesn't sound much better, coming on top of the posts below. Whatever, he works for Microsoft now. Technical Evangelist, US-.NET Platform Strategy. Or something like that. |
| | He says he "swallowed the red pill." Which is interesting, because I would have thought it was the blue one. Shit, man, I'm getting confused. Doesn't Microsoft run the Matrix any more? Who does? |
| | Jokes aside, this is real good news, for both Microsoft and Scoble. They'll be a better company and he'll do a great job. |
It's getting hot around here
| | She includes a bonus link that goes back to a great tax day photo. (That's a happy laptop there, doncha think?) |
| | Semi-related (but sex-free) counterblog: Dean Landsman's Oil Trumps Science. ...the predominant IQ we seem to have in the Oval office, fixated on Iraq, is a low one. |
What a bunch of dicks
HyperActiveWords
Yes, there are more of us
| | I'm  a lot more careful than I may seem, at least when it comes to other family members. So I've been slow to blog about the good work my older son, Allen (who is, like, 24 years older than the younger one), has quietly been doing on a project he only told me about a month ago, long after it was well underway. |
| | The project is GlobeAlive, the slogan of which is The World Live Web. It's basically a 'live' search engine: one that finds human beings who might be available to answer questions in real time. There's a lot of synergy with what Britt is doing with Xpertweb, and what Mitch has been saying about the Strip Mall Infomediary, both of which also, like GlobeAlive, could stand to benefit from the kind of identity infrastructure I wrote about in Making Mydentity, and expect to see coming out of SourceID and similar efforts. There are also natural synergies with smart mobbery, social software, moblogging, and most of the stuff in Marc's blogrolling column. Even ActiveWords, to name another potentially interested party. And, of course, instant messaging with presence detection, which is why Allen and friends are currently developing a new Jabber-based client. |
| | What prompts me to start talking about Allen's work with GlobeAlive is Britt Blaser's post yesterday, What's That In Your Genes? Britt does a nice (and flattering) job of explaining the fertile ground where the Xpertweb and GlobeAlive circles overlap. |
| | Some interesting context: Allen isn't your typical Web entrepreneur. He isn't even a techie. He's a writer and a philosopher whose research tends to want answers he found Google and other Web search engines didn't quite provide. What he wanted were the kind of answers you can only get from live human beings — real experts on, say, relativity theory or Ludwig Wittgenstein (two subjects he mentioned in recent conversations). Not finding what he wanted with Web search engines, he decided to invent an engine that searched for live and available people. Here's how he explained it to me on the phone a few minutes ago: |
| | GlobeAlive is for when you want a person and not a site. If you want a site, Google's your engine. If you want a person, GlobeAlive is there for the job. Or will be. We're still in beta, although we have a very devoted group of people involved already. |
| | Is it for when you're looking for experts? |
| | It can be for any form of interaction; not just an expert answer, even though that's the most common use at this early stage. But I don't want this to be thought of as just another expert site. It's not just that. It's a live search engine. Later we may want to make a distinction between an expert, a conversationalist, or a somebody with something to sell. But for now the primary use will be to find experts, and get expert answers to questions. |
| | Where does it stand technically? |
| | We've been working and reworking it for going on two years now, but basically it's still in beta. Right now we're working with GlobeAlive desktop, which is a crappy instant messenger. That's why we're working on a Jabber client right now. What we're want next is to scale up on both the supply and the demand side. More experts, more participants, and more users doing searches. Right now it's like Google with a handful of Web sites to search. But we've been at this long enough to know that the idea does work, and it does scale. And it will grow organically, and in value. The bigger it gets, the better it gets. |
| | How does an expert keep from getting bothered by the wrong questions? |
| | You only come up in searches when you want to be found. Your keywords and nothing else. (It's a bit more complicated than that, I think; but that's what I wrote down.) |
| | What about your business model? |
| | Revenues come from paid placements. We've played with the word "chatvertising." In any case, appropriate advertising. Positive-value stuff. Nothing insulting or intrusive. And we want to put in financial incentives for participants in the form of tiered revenue sharing. |
| | I'm intrigued by the idea that the Web, or the Net, is missing a live element, in spite of all the efforts going on with VoIP, instant messaging and other stuff. And I'm impressed that Allen has already taken this thing as far as he has, entirely on its own bootstaps. He's funded it himself, out of his own pockets, and with the help of many friends who believe in the idea. (Which was, he tells me, partly inspired by The Cluetrain Manifesto.) |
| | He's also started a blog. That's in beta too, but coming along nicely for a rookie effort. |
| | So check it out. Sign up, if it intrigues you. Since Allen's now out here in the blog world as well, I'm sure he'd be interested in all kinds of connections and constructive feedback. |
| | I really do think this is an interesting idea. So far I've already been asked one real (& tough) question. I guess I will get both sides when I try using it as a user. |
| | Euan Semple calls GlobeAlive a bit like Google with meatware at the end of the queries. |
| | Mike McBride: ...seems like a very interesting idea, one that I intend to at least keep an eye on. |
Blog of Unusual Rodent
| | Ken Coar (among whose handles are Rodent of Unusual Size) has a blog: The Rodent's Burrow. (Hey, Ken!) |
| | Among other things, Ken has found anoles at his home in North Carolina. Anoles are the little green/brown (depending) lizards that a pet shop in New Jersey sold as "chameleons" when I was a kid. They'd also sell "chameleon food," which consisted of a cup full of white larvae. You'd tweeze one wiggler, put it in front of the anole and watch it gulp the thing down. I kept a pair of them as pets for awhile, until they died of boredom, or larvae poisoning, or something. |
| | Much later I lived in North Carolina for the better part of twenty years, but never saw one. Were they around then? I have no idea. |
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