Having gone from dial-up to DSL, bought a house and moved, and gone back to dial-up until my new DSL connection got established, how much difference do I feel DSL makes vs. dial-up?

All the difference in the world.

10:51:51 PM     comment []   Google It!  

So even though I'm on dialup because <http://www.speakeasy.net>, <http://www.covad.com>, and <http://www.verizon.com> can't seem to get their collective acts together to save their lives, I want to comment on having attended Live From the Blogosphere.

First of all, I have to say that I'm happy that such an event even took place in Los Angeles, a sentiment that one of the event's prime movers, Susannah Breslin of The Reverse Cowgirl's Blog, commented on. You'd think that a media town like Los Angeles would be far more interested than seems to be the case, although when you consider that this is the same town that is home to the RIAA and MPAA perhaps it becomes more clear why there may be a disconnect.

I'm a tech guy, not a creative guy, and the panel discussion was really about blogs as a medium despite the presence of Evan Williams of Pyra Labs. Evan talked a bit about Blogger and Pyra and came across as quite humble. He also did a demo of a voice-via-cel-phone-to-audio-blog tool that drew applause. I dunno. My take on most voice technology is that it's a solution looking for a problem, and this didn't seem like an exception to me.

People probably expect Susannah to be striking, and she is—for one thing, she's very nearly as tall as I am. More importantly, I got the sense that she's got a good head on her shoulders. She had interesting things to say about her writing process, particularly when the question of dealing with unkind comments came up. For a while she apparently went proseless, posting only images. I thought this was clever because it then forces the visitor to come up with their own interpretation of the image and to grapple with their own feelings about it—not that prose can't also do this, but rather that I think the subjective nature of interpreting images is more obvious, accepted, and understood.

Mark Frauenfelder talked a bit about the evolution of BoingBoing from being a print zine to a blog. I don't really have a lot of thoughts about this because I wasn't familiar with the print zine, but I think that BoingBoing as a "directory of wonderful things" is incredible, just because it really does manage to catalog things that I don't find anywhere else, and so many of them are wonderful in the literal sense of the term. It's kind of a post-modern "Ripley's Believe It Or Not." I like that.

Heather Havrilesky turned out, upon reflection, to be the panelist I most wish I could've spoken with afterwards: she had a number of observations to make regarding her online cartoon-character persona, and how that persona is perceived differently than she is now that she's open with her identity. As I'm keenly interested in issues surrounding identity online and off—more about that in a moment—to have had the opportunity to learn more about how Heather thought/felt about this would be welcome.

Tony Pierce came across as the most ordinary guy of the lot. By his own admission neither a writer nor a tech guy, his anecdotes had a fun just-fooling-around feel to them: frankly wanting more traffic and posting alleged nudes of Anna Kournikova, which led to three million hits over three days. There's something appealing about the straightforwardness of that, and there's something important about the fact that now an ordinary guy can not only put his thoughts/feeings online, but have a sense as to how many people are paying attention. Nielsen can't do that.

Finally, Doc Searls was the reason I was there: I've been wanting to meet Doc ever since his move to Santa Barbara and this seemed like a perfect opportunity. Unfortunately I had to leave with my friends before the afterparty, so it will have to wait for another time. But Doc has written eloquently about the issues online that are most important to me: identity, reputation, relationship—the humanity of it, but with an insistence that this will also be the underpinnings of any successful implementation of business and contract and all of that online as well. I was surprised that Doc didn't even mention <http://www.pingid.com> when a few questions surrounding identity did come up.

The back-and-forth among such a disparate group of people was great fun. Questions of self-censorship were popular; the importance of traffic, questions about how to make money (unfortunately, I thought there was a real lack of imagination shown here—as I commented to my friends afterwards, it would be quite odd if blogs turned out to be the first literary form in history that couldn't make money); Clay Shirky's essay Power Laws, Weblogs, and Inequality got what I thought was some self-servingly dismissive treatment. The issue of exhibitionism and/or self-exploitation got perhaps the best treatment. Heather floated a funny idea about offering a fuzzy picture of her posterior that gets progressively clearer as the tip jar fills up; Tony kindly pointed out that Heather is quite a lot prettier than half the "cam girls" that make (in?)decent money for similar antics. Is it exploitation if you do it to yourself? What is your motivation for blogging anyway? Susannah: "I do it because it gets me off." Interesting to note that the most overtly sexual blogging, both among the panelists and the audience, seems to be being done by women. But maybe that's just me.

That's about it from me on the subject, but I'd be remiss if I didn't observe that I attended the event with old friends Darin Adler and Diane Patterson. You can read Diane's transcription of our somewhat-cynical post-event conversation on her blog.

Finally, perhaps I should speak with Xeni about setting up a different event, one specifically about identity, trust, and transaction. I'd love to have panelists who can discuss Friedrich Hayek's definition of "capital" and how "reputation capital" might reflect it; or how Clay Shirky's observation about Power Laws might relate to the Granovetter Diagram and whether that's a good, bad, or indifferent thing; or how blog "supernodes" might fill the role of "trust hubs" in the sense of Hernando De Soto's "The Mystery of Capital." Let's invite Doc to that one, too.

Meanwhile, I look forward to reading the blogs from the panelists with their take on the evening's events.

8:41:16 PM     comment []   Google It!  

This is just a test of NetNewsWire, neé NetNewsWire Pro. Let's see if this actually shows up!

10:52:08 AM     comment []   Google It!  

While I don't have to like (and don't) the entire question of the anti-trust trial against Microsoft, I do have to push back against the notion that "one platform for everyone" is beneficial to consumers. Greater competition and pressure to innovate is beneficial to consumers. My principal complaint about Microsoft is that they almost single-handedly turned personal computing from a revolution that was focused on the individual to a mere extension of corporate computing: we have PC's, not so that we can extend our own intellectual capability, but so that we can compatibly take our work home with us, thereby making the longest working hours of any developed nation even longer.

To have gone from the IMSAI and its brethren in the mid 1970's to the level of stagnation that we have circa 2000 is at least tragic, if not criminal. It's easy to understand why some people feel that something has to be done. I harbor those feelings at times, but I feel the need to temper them by considering the possibility that perhaps, given Moore's Law, this was inevitable: the increase in personal computing power far outstripped any increase in our collective imagination as to how to take advantage of that power that might have resulted in a more competitive personal computing market. I do most definitely feel strongly that the mismatch between Moore's Law and any similar increase in quality of our development tools has impeded competition: it's far more difficult than it should be to write software that fully leverages the massive amounts of power that the hardware now affords us unless you have accumulated the resources that Microsoft has.

So while I'm sympathetic to the concern that many people share about Microsoft's role in the industry, it's not clear to me as a technologist that having the government define what is an "application," what is "middleware," and what is an "operating system" is at all desirable for reasons that should be crystal clear to any technologist, but also frankly because I'm largely persuaded that Microsoft were aided and abetted by natural causes.

Hmm. Part of me also feels, however, that once you are, in fact, convicted of a crime, you should be punished accordingly. So on the same principle that disgusted me when the impeached Bill Clinton was not removed from office, seeing the illegal monopolist Microsoft walk away with a slap on the wrist rankles.

Finally, Megan, you keep talking about the Macintosh and Unix as if Apple weren't the largest commercial Unix vendor in the world, and as if you couldn't get one of these UNIX systems for $800. Apple has given the industry IEEE 802.11 wireless networking and IEEE 1394 high-speed serial connectivity, both of which have enjoyed wide-spread adoption by other vendors. Apple also gave us QuickTime but has largely squandered their early lead in that market. More recently, Apple has included ZeroConf networking in their operating system—and open-sourced their implementation, sans GUI, for others to benefit from. I mention all of this not so much to praise Apple per se as to give concrete examples of what the actions of a genuinely innovative, customer-focused computer company can look like. I could easily have done the same for Be if they had survived.

Bottom line (for me) is that it's vitally important that Microsoft have competition, and I have concrete examples as to why. It's an open question as to how best to ensure that they do.

5:53:33 AM     comment []   Google It!  

There's a great movie called Shadowlands starring Anthony Hopkins and Debra Winger. Hopkins plays a know-it-all philosopher professor, who teaches about courtship and romance and writes kids books. He thinks he's got it covered until Winger comes along. "I like a good fight," says the professor. "That's great," says Winger. "But when's the last time you lost?" Later in the movie he talks about how inquisitive he is, in a boastful way, and she sets him straight. "When was the last time you asked a question you didn't know the answer to?" Learning never stops. People who know all the answers, or pretend to, have simply forgotten to ask questions they don't know the answers to. BTW, it's a beautiful sweet movie, and even though we pity the Hopkins character, in the end he has great courage, and does the right thing. [Scripting News]

It might not be obvious from the movie itself, but "Shadowlands" is at least loosely based on the real life writing, marriage, and widowerhood of C.S. Lewis, one of Christendom's best-known modern writers—very few Christian teen-agers have not read The Chronicles of Narnia or The Screwtape Letters, while many Christian adults will at least be familiar with Mere Christianity. It's also worth noting that C.S. Lewis was agnostic for most of his adult life, but was persuaded of the truth of Christianity largely through conversations with his good friend and fellow writer of epic fantasy, J.R.R. Tolkien.

I note also with some pleasure that The Screwtape Letters audiocasette is read by Joss Ackland, who also portrayed Lewis in a BBC production of Shadowlands.

It's true that Shadowlands is a great story—all the more so because it's true.

12:44:11 PM     comment []   Google It!