Author: Kent

Reader, writer, arithmeticer. Proprietor of Newsome.Org, a tech, music and life blog.

The Importance of Being Happy

I have lost interest in the continuing saga of Steve Gillmor’s seemingly self-ignited internet implosion. To anyone who isn’t a close friend or opportunistic groupie, Steve’s recent posts, taunts and fight picking have demonstrated that something is out of kilter over there. I suspect there may be more to it than meets the eye and, above all else, I don’t want to pile on.

So I have quit reading about it and tried to quit writing about it.

But Rogers Cadenhead’s post today about Steve ‘s latest antics contained a line that I find irresistibly funny and completely accurate:

“I was upset to see InfoRouter shuttered, because I’ve come to appreciate Gillmor’s bizarre takes on Web 2.0, which read like tech magazine hype filtered through Dennis Hopper.”

Maybe Dennis Hopper in another David Lynch film. Blue Velvet sequels into Angry Sandpaper.

What I know is this: no one who is as smart as Steve and makes their living writing writes as incoherently as Steve does unless they are trying to. It’s Naked Lunch, internet -style. Some think it’s clever. Some are confused by it. And some find it to be a pointless waste of energy. I see it as a method of disassociation. Like a cyber-tattoo.

And I just don’t understand why it has to be this way.

I remember the first time I heard a Gillmor Gang podcast. I was amazed at the wit and intellect. Like Alias, however, I was late to the party and got into it right before it started the downward spiral into oblivion. And I remember hearing Steve talk at that Berkley CyberSalon. I was blown away by his logic and tenacity. I miss those days.

I don’t even care about this ridiculous gesture business any more.

I just hope Steve finds some outlet for his intellect and energy that will make him happy.

It’s hard to overstate the importance of being happy. And it’s hard to be happy when you’re mad at everybody.

Peace to you Steve Gillmor. No more harsh words from this corner. You’ll never read this, of course, but maybe the positive karma will find its way to you somehow.

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Doc on Doc and Where Did that Cheese Go

I think it might be my growing appreciation for Live Writer that has resulted in an explosion of posts on this last night of my vacation.

Anyway, Doc Searls has a post that quotes Dr. Laura bashing blogs. I used to listen to Dr. Laura on the radio once in a while just to reassure myself that I wasn’t the craziest person on the planet. Sometimes I was between her caller and her, but I was never crazier than both. In an article behind the Santa Barbara News-Press‘s paywall, Dr. Laura proves that blogs are definitely among the many things she knows very little about.

First of all, her blog bashing seems to originate from some negative blog posts one of her flunkies must have shown her:

“Blog-happy? It has only been a couple of weeks that I’ve had this column and I’ve already been attacked by some blogosphere inhabitants of Santa Barbara. Bloggers are folks with their own personal Web sites, which they can use for whatever end they please with impunity. Some of these sites have had a big impact on politics, technology and journalism.”

Can we take from this that if she had been shown blogs praising her, blogs would be the inspired voice of the new media?

And then there’s this nugget, which I about half agree with and about half get irritated at:

“It used to be that folks wrote autobiographies to detail some significant journey or challenge survived, with the desire to share life lessons learned and wisdom gained. No more — now it is as though every errant thought should be embraced by the outside world as having greater significance than the burp it really is.”

Some of the blogs I enjoy the most are about every day events. Good writers can write about a trip to the market and make it compelling. Just like good storytellers can talk about anything and keep you highly entertained. But, if I’m going to be honest, I do come across the occasional exercises in anthropomorphism, generally involving small dogs with sweaters on or cats, naked or clothed, that annoy the dickens out of me. But the reality is that blogs are not, first and foremost, about the subject matter- they are about two things:

(a) the writing, be it great, average or bad; and

(b) a new, faster manner of information distribution and retrieval.

Note that I have recently added a blog search button beside the web search button on The Home Place, my internet portal. Blogs are becoming the medium for the creation of the real life Great Big Book of Everything.

Think about it this way: how much would you pay to be able to read blogs written by your parents, grandparents, etc. One of the benefits of blogs that no one ever talks about is that our kids and grandkids will know us much better thanks to these records we are creating.

It’s one thing for my real world friends to be confused about blogs (the fact that I made a lot of money developing web sites during Bubble 1.0 is about the only thing that keeps them from teasing me mercilessly about my little internet diary), but it’s another thing altogether for someone who has somehow become a part of old media to be so cavalier in her research about and understanding of new media.

Doc’s other point, which is a good one, is that the News-Press is getting left far behind thanks to its insistence on maintaining the paywall that many papers tried and most have abandoned. Google can’t index their stories so people can’t google, er search, for them. The cheese isn’t going to reappear, so it’s time to stop hoping it will and start looking for some new cheese.

Doc offers to meet with the powers that be and explain to them the way the distribution of media, both old and new, works in 2006. They should take him up on it, as he may be the only guy smart and likeable enough to save a paper that pays Dr. freaking Laura to write articles behind a paywall.

Thank goodness my hometown paper has embraced RSS and blogging.

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Dave Poo Poos on Live Writer

livewriterDave Winer more or less lays one on the head of today’s internet darling, Microsoft’s Live Writer.  Granted, he starts out saying its great that Microsoft made it, but the tone is more rain than sunshine.

He says it should be part of the browser.  Maybe, but let’s not forget that something in the nature of .00001% of the people who use browsers blog.  It would be feature overload for most- similar to the way I felt when I tried Opera.  There is a marginal utility to adding features to software.

Just because you can add something doesn’t mean you should.

Back in the day, I used the free version of Microsoft’s Front Page HTML editor to create some early web pages.  So there was a wysiwyg editor back then for the task at hand- nobody knew a blog from a grasshopper back then.  Later, as I learned html, I used the excellent, but long forgotten HotMetal Pro.  Even today there is one wysiwyg HTML editor that I like- Namo Web Editor.  It’s not the wysiwyg editor part that makes Live Writer so interesting- it’s its simplicity and the way it works across many platforms.

Dave is a scientist.  He creates very cool stuff for geeks.  Microsoft is a merchant.  It creates stuff for the masses.  The reason there is a market for what Microsoft makes is because there are a lot of people who are not smart enough to use what Dave makes.

Well there’s that and all the money Microsoft has to promote its products.

But the bottom line is that Microsoft has made something that can be used by non-geeks and non-programmers to fill a need.  That’s why I think it will take off while some perhaps cooler, but harder, products didn’t.

Sometimes Dave-light is good enough.

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Don't Google Google Says Google

In what Steve Rubel correctly calls “one of the worst PR moves in history,” Google has apparently sent letters to certain media asking them not to use the word google as a verb.

This is another example of the troublesome crossroads between marketing and intellectual property law. I’m sure these letters are Google’s reaction to the recent inclusion of the word google as a verb in recently released dictionary editions.  It’s all about protecting the trademark.  Whether or not Google cares about the use of google as a verb, if it wants to maintain control of the trademark, someone is advising Google that it needs to write these letters as a token of diligence.

Coca-cola has undoubtedly faced this problem in the past, as to many people coke is a synonym for a carbonated beverage.

From a marketing perspective, however, it’s hard to understand why Google would be anything less than giddy to hear someone say “I googled it on Yahoo and here’s what I found out?”  I expect Yahoo would gladly consent to the substitution of yahoo as the new search verb- but only because yahoo isn’t that verb.  If it were, Yahoo would probably feel compelled to toss out a similar letter in the name of trademark protection.

I don’t know beans about intellectual property law, but speaking here as a layperson, if I were Google I’d try to craft some sort of a public license for the use of google as a verb.  Being the verb for the space you’re in is a mightly powerful thing.

In other words, I’d try very hard to have my cake and eat it too.

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Windows Live Writer

livewriterDwight Silverman raves about the public beta of Microsoft’s new blog editor, Windows Live Writer.  Ed Bott does too.

Ed points out that the guy behind Live Writer is J. J. Allaire, founder of Allaire Corp., which developed web site editors ColdFusion and HomeSite.  Those were good programs, so that bodes well for Live Writer.

I’m writing this post with Live Writer and although the proof is in how it will look once I publish it- so far it looks really nifty.

I need to test an image insert, so here’s another photo from our recent trip to the Frio River.

And I need to test the maps, so here’s a map of Concan, Texas.  You can see the Frio River running north to south.

 

Two Features I Really, Really Want

Here are two features I want (paging J.J.)- a way to upload an image to allyoucanupload.com and insert it into a blog post with one click.  Now that would be righteous.  Also a plug-in for making Technorati tags is a must.

As many of you know, I host my own blog and related content, but use blogger to create and publish posts.  While I have long wanted to move to WordPress, only to be stopped in my tracks by URL handling problems, Blogger is not a bad platform at all- at least when you use it the way I do.

One thing that I don’t like about Blogger, however, is its 18th century looking spell checker.  A more robust spell checker alone might be enough to get me to adopt Live Writer (why do I think Day Tripper every time I type that?).

UPDATE: After I temporarily disabled Zone Alarm so the program could communicate with my server in order to upload photos, it works really well.  Give me the two features described above and I’m sold.

Windows Update Problems

Ed Bott, writing at ZDNet, posts about problems he has been having with Windows Update.

Me too.

It’s bad enough that you can’t use Windows Update manually via Firefox. And it’s bad enough that both Zone Alarm and Norton Antivirus (last year’s model for the reasons stated here, which is soon to be uninstalled forever as I move to the stupidly named but generally well received Windows Live OneCare) can trip up the Windows installer program and make it hard to install updates.

But now it seems the Windows Update servers are having problems of their own. I have had a constant yellow updates available icon in my system tray for the past week- and updates often either don’t work or seem to work, only to be followed by the immediate reappearance of the yellow update icon.

This problem, while a mild annoyance for desktops that are always connected to the internet, is a royal pain for laptops that are updated periodically. I haven’t been able to successfully install any updates on my Thinkpad in over a week.

I hope this causes Microsoft to rethink its decision to semi-push installs of Internet Explorer 7. My hunch is that Microsoft will still want to get IE 7 out there to stem the flow to the superior Firefox.

One of the many ways Firefox is eating IE 7’s lunch is in update ease. It’s simple as pie in Firefox.

Not so for IE 7- at least not at the moment.

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RanchoCast – August 11, 2006 Edition

I did a new podcast tonight. It started out without a particular theme, but quickly turned into the River Edition, as I played songs inspired by our recent trip to the Frio River.

I’m hoarse from too much fun at the river, but managed to introduce some great songs by the Hangdogs, Jesse Dayton, Johnny Cash, Mother Hips, Julie Miller and others.

Delicious: Good Traffic, But Show Me the Money

delicious

Hitwise reports that the reports of Delicious‘s death at the hands of an apparently apathetic Yahoo were at least somewhat exaggerated. It seems that Delicious’s traffic has doubled since it was assimilated by Yahoo in December 2005.

That’s pretty impressive since it appeared from the outside like Yahoo forgot all about Delicious after it swallowed it. I am a moderate Delicious user, and I think it is by far the best bookmarking site out there- mostly because it doesn’t try to overwhelm you with unnecessary features. It follows my business rule no. 1 by doing one thing better then anyone else. Too many companies these days try to do everything and become average in the process.

While the traffic numbers are impressive, as Steve Rubel points out, Delicious, like almost all of Web 2.0, is still mostly populated by geeks. But the income demographics that trend towards the high end show that Delicious has valuable eyeballs.

But I have to ask the same question I always ask in this case- how does Delicious intend to turn these eyeballs into cash?

And I also wonder if the traffic numbers would be even better if Yahoo actually marketed Delicious.

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