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Saturday, April 19, 2003
If we make Mydentity real we won't have a paradox. 
| | Are you willing to restrict the capabilities of something like Google to protect your privacy? (ie, are you willing to begin to limit the inherent nature of the internet to protect your privacy) |
It's more convoluted than it appears
| | The Happy Tutor: Bound, Beaten & Branded. You ever get the sense that THT is kind of a Hannibal Lecter who went good instead of bad? Like, that he knows a lot more than you do, and that his convolutions are dancing all over your convolutions? I do. But then I'm into thought bondage, so what can I say? |
| | Some of us today believe that most of what we are fed by popular news and culture is a fiction, created by Knaves for Fools, and that these false seemings work because most readers are good-hearted, ignorant, and gullible. Hence, we Teachers adopt the stratagems of indirection, creating elaborate and absurd canards and defending them with all the energy of Ari Fleischer. If you can read us well, and see through us, you are prepared to read the daily papers. |
The scourge of dyscontentia blogosis
| | The "Independent Jason Calacanis" story is over, for now. Any predictions about Jason are always dangerous, but this time his ever morphing, ever alive Silicon Alley train has been hoisted: his company Rising Tide Studios (RTS), and the database and website Venture Reporter (which came in after Silicon Alley Reporter magazine closed down mid-2001) has been bought out by Wicks Business Information, a B2B media company covering the investing and private equity market (perhaps best know for its VentureOne website and database), PaidContent.org has learned. Venture Reporter magazine, which was launched as a bi-monthly in January 2002, only had five issues before it was closed down. |
| | The bottom line is that we created something of true value with Venture Reporter and some thing that made people want to pay for content. We sold hundreds of research reports for hundreds of thousands of dollars in the last six months. We also sold hundreds of $1,000 database passes. In fact we reached profitability with the exception the MCG loan. |
| | Frankly, the only reason anyone was interested in what we were doing was because we shifted from a business that was 95% advertising, sponsorship and event based to a business that was 95% based on paid content. |
| | Also, it didn't hurt that we basically leveled the second biggest brand in the space, VentureWire , in under a year. Venture Reporter was a database and Venture Wire was a blog. There is nothing wrong with blogs, but let's be honest here a blog is not a business . It might be a profitable hobby in some cases but I don't think a blog is going to make anyone rich any time soon. We went to market and said "we'll give you the same newswire (aka blog) features of Venture Wire but we will also let you search for deals by date, amount, location, industry, venture capital firm, amount invested, etc." That value proposition lead to the same result each time: people signed up for us and let go of their VentureWire subscription. |
| | That is the big lesson I think.. blog + database + research reports = big business, blog plus nothing = a hobby. |
| | In my mind blogs have killed the newsletter business. You can't be just a newsletter any more because some talented and ambitious fellow who has been laid off will spend $99 to host a blog to kill his former boss. The only protection you have is to build something bigger and better then a blog. Blogs are killing the weak publishers. |
| | ..to be honest working with no resources in the worst publishing market in three decades (and the worst advertising market in the history of advertising) has not been a party... |
First Church of Christ, Comedian
| | Jesus must have had a sense of humor. I mean, here's this oddball Jewish guy with a lot of friends who stands up and draws crowds. He uses metaphor and irony, tells deep stories and pisses off the authorities. What are the chances he didn't open with a few one-liners? |
| | I'd say yes. But then I'm not, technically, a Quaker. I went to a Quaker college and attended Friends' meetings for a few years in the third quarter of the last century. But these days I go to Catholic mass; although I'm not, technically, Catholic. I'm catholic in a literal sense, I guess. Like, with a small c. If it helps, the masses I go to are about as close to Quaker meetings as the Catholic liturgy allows. And I like funny priests, too. Irreverends, I call 'em. We need more of those. |
Peace In
| | Christopher Lydon: Serbs All. It's a brilliant piece. I had written a whole bunch of stuff about it a few minutes ago, but then something blew up and I lost it all. Now I hafta go. So just read it. |
The SIMPLE case for XMPP
| | As both Cathleen and Eric point out, SIMPLE is a big developer (IBM and Microsoft) project, while Jabber is an independent developer (Jabber, Inc.) and open source community (Jabber Foundation) project that has attracted the involvement of some big companies on the demand side of the market (Hitachi, France Telecom, Sony, Hewlett-Packard). Last I heard, IBM and Apple were also making use of the Jabber protocol. (Here's a case where IBM is using Jabber to help build a wireless emergency network in Washington, D.C.) |
| | XMPP and Jabber are taking off because they are (truly) simple infrastructural building materials that are highly compliant with the NEA nature of the Net. SIMPLE is being pushed by IBM and Microsoft for a variety of reasons; but that very variety may be the core of a problem. Here's Cathleen Moore: |
| | Moreover, because the SIMPLE protocol is still incomplete, IBM's and Microsoft's implementations have required the addition of proprietary extensions to make their offerings work. Admitting that its forthcoming Microsoft Real-Time Communications Server 2003 contains propriety extensions to fill out the SIMPLE protocol, Microsoft steadfastly maintains its commitment to the SIMPLE standard as it matures. "We are absolutely committed to being SIMPLE compliant," said Ed Simnett , l ead product manager of RTC Server at Redmond, Wash.-based Microsoft. |
| | "SIMPLE is not a mature protocol at this point, so we've taken a snapshot and implemented against that," Simnett said. "As we make subsequent releases, we will be looking to make sure we are absolutely compliant to the standard." In fact, Microsoft views SIMPLE as a superior technology choice because of its extensibility into other media types such as audio, video, file transfer, and whiteboarding, according to Simnett. |
| | "One of the reasons we picked SIP and SIMPLE is because it allows more than presence and IM. We think that one of the most exciting long-term vision areas here is making sure IM and presence become base building blocks in the broader real-time communications arena," Simnett said. "Other protocols focused too much just on instant messaging and not enough on the other media types we think will be important." |
| | Having just shipped a SIP gateway for its Sametime IM platform in November, IBM Lotus also maintains its commitment to SIMPLE. The standard is young and vendors are implementing it differently, but interoperability is the goal, according to Kevin McLellan , marketing manager of workplace collaboration products at IBM Lotus in Cambridge ,Mass. "The fact that the largest industry players, [IBM] and Microsoft, are supporting SIP and SIMPLE suggests we will work to make sure that the standard evolves to achieve interoperability. That is the goal. We are also working hard to make sure it evolves in the right way." IBM intends to add native SIMPLE support to Sametime in a subsequent release, McLellan added. |
| | Meanwhile, IBM's SameTime and Microsoft's MSN Messenger barely interoperate. Both companies have done little in the past to demonstrate a willingness to meet market demand for interoperable IM. Last month Microsoft announced a product that will bridge SameTime and MSN Messenger, but just for corporate intranets. |
| | Meanwhile, any company, any customer, can develop its own Jabber-based IM system. Countless numbers have done exactly that, including IBM. |
| | SIMPLE may be a fine protocol when it's done; but it's not. And from the sound of what Microsoft says above, it risks violating POGE: the Principle of Good Enough. Without POGE we would have no TCP/IP, no HTTP, no HTML, no SMTP. In other words, no Net, no Web, no Net-based email. POGE also accounts for the success of XML and Linux. It's why XML-RPC moved faster than SOAP. |
| | There are two questions you need to ask about protocol efforts like SIMPLE and XMPP: Who's pushing it? and Why? Then you look for pudding proof. So far I don't see it for SIMPLE. I see lots of it for XMPP. |
| | Disclaimer: I'm on the Jabber, Inc. advisory board. One of the reasons I'm on that board, however, is because I want a world with wide-open and ownerless IM protocols. |
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