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| Author: |
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Doc Searls |
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| Posted: |
6/26/2001; 4:04:13 AM |
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| Msg #: |
805 (top msg in thread) |
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804/806 |
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3105 |
Blast from the past 
| | Amazing. Somebody has the rare OMNI from 1979 in which I wrote about how budget cutbacks forced NASA to confine its space explorations to the third planet from the Sun. Haven't seen that thing in 20 years. |
Still searching for answers
| | Now google finds 15,200 of Doc+Searls, but still only 494 "Doc Searls". Earlier today and last night they were the same. |
| | And I see Dave is now up to a whopping 375. This matter seems to be unfucking very slowly. |
| | [Later, back home... Now Doc+Searls gets 7540 while "Doc Searls" gets 6820. Interesting. Meanwhile Dave is down to 439.] |
The Whatever Effect
| | Reading Scott Rosenberg's excellent Assimilating the Web piece in Salon (which I learned about simultaneously from Cam and Dave), I realized that Microsoft and AOL will together crush the Web only if the real Web culture (people sharing shit with other people, like they have since Mosaic) together reacts with a great "Whatever." Its what Marketing Mentality wants and depends on. Of course, Microsoft and AOL are outstanding marketing companies: exemplars of the best and worst that Marketing Mentality brings — and does to — the world. They have different agendas — Microsoft wants to intermediate between your wallet and the marketplace, while AOL wants you plug your whole mediated self into the Marketing Matrix behind its many media brands — but both want to do something we've heard and argued about before. |
| | Remember Push? That's what we're dealing with here. Only now it isn't a bunch of marketing and technolgy rookies aspiring to the Big Time. It's the two biggest, most plugged-in, most aggressive companies on the planet. |
| | So let's revisit the nightmare in its most pernicious expression: the famous PUSH! cover piece that ran in the March 1997 issue of Wired. I responded with two pieces of my own at the time. Those are here and here. The second is the nastier of the two (coming after the Wired piece). I'll try to go back and fix the links when I get a break this afternoon. |
| | [By the way, I still feel a bit bad about slamming the piece as hard as I did, because I really like Kevin Kelly. I thought his New Rules were pretty darn good at the time, and still apply (especially #8: The Law of Allegiance). He and Wired — which I've always liked as a magazine — just got caught up in something very wrong with this Push thing.] |
Something is still amis with Google (and I'm not sure it's just a Userland thing)
| | Now I'm at work and I can't find more than a tiny subset of what I've written in my blogs, and to which I know there is plenty of hyperpointage in the Webbed World. Here's the score for my name as an exact phrase: |
| | The situation for Dave is even worse. Does his name really appear on only 294 Web documents? |
Towards a more hackable Mac
| | Interesting to juxtapose the Jordan Hubbard hiring with Adam Engst's TidBITS report from MacHack. Especially this: |
| | For the most part, I didn't detect significant enthusiasm for Mac OS X among the MacHack developer community. Few people were using it on their primary work machine, and only about 10 percent of the hacks submitted to the hack contest required Mac OS X. The people who were the most excited about Mac OS X were, unsurprisingly, those who like and use both the Mac and Unix, and even then it was Unix that made the difference, not the Macintosh aspects of Mac OS X. Woz and the members of the original Mac team concurred with this basic attitude - they too liked Mac OS X's Unix underpinnings but made negative comments about the Aqua interface. Woz was particularly blunt, saying that he felt Mac OS X "wasn't ready for prime time." |
| | As a friend put it, right now Mac OS X feels like an art project, not an operating system with innovative human interface design and rigorous usability testing. If the MacHack demonstration and discussion of Microsoft's forthcoming Windows XP from some ex-Macintosh programmers is indicative, Microsoft has embraced some of the design attitudes that made the Macintosh great. And if that's true, Apple will need to set its sights ever higher or risk being beaten at its own game. |
| | By the way, I'm writing about this for a brief Linux Journal piece. The question I want to answer: What difference will Jordan Hubbard make at Apple? Input is welcome. |
Embrace & Employ
| | Here's Slashdot's take on the matter. |
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