Wednesday, June 4, 2003

More examples of micro-content iComic. For the record, iComic rocks extremely hard indeed.... [Ben Hammersley.com] I wonder if Anil Dash had comics in mind - when he expostulated on the future of micro-content. But comics are indeed - yet another kind of micro-content. I still wanna be able to flow micro-content through distribution systems like blogrolling.com! Reviews are coming, so are conversations. And in the future - everyone will have digital lifestyle aggregators - which will feature ALL of their favorite and personal micro-content - right at theior fingertips. [Marc's Voice] Gosh, I was just thinking this myself. These comic readers (there are 3 on Mac OS X) are aggregators of a specific kind of content. So, can a more general aggregator be built to include both weblogs and comic strips? How does that generalize into all kinds of micro-content? Or are we really just describing an RSS feed for the various comic strips websites? 8:19:34 PM

City-by-city spending San Franciscans drink too much, Bostonians smoke too much, Chicagoans heat their homes too much and Washingtonians enjoy themselves too much: The two-year study of spending habits, released by the Bureau of Labor Statistics, found that New Yorkers spend the most on clothes, Bostonians spend the most on tobacco, Chicagoans spend the most on utilities and Washingtonians spend the most on entertainment -- not counting admission to sessions of Congress, which is free. The average San Franciscan, however, spent $744 on booze and $266 on books, out of an annual income of $70,237. The average resident of Los Angeles, by comparison, spent only $412 and $148 for the same items, out of an annual income of $53,514. LinkDiscuss [Boing Boing] It's gotta be the cost of wine versus the cost of wine coolers. :-) 8:12:43 PM

The Slippery Slope of Statistics In a recent pitch, an entrepreneur told us that his software client was being downloaded by 10,000 new users a week. The number was an interesting one but it led to many more questions that the entrepreneur was unable to answer at that moment (e.g., how many users become paying customers?, what's the attrition rate?, etc.). To his credit, the entrepreneur had tracked all that data and gave us access to it at a later date, but at that time it left a number of unanswered questions about adoption, sales, market, etc., as well as the rigor of that entrepreneur's analysis. Statistics can be incredibly powerful and venture capitalists love them. We often invest in emerging markets or technologies. As a result, we can only predict the speed of adoption of a new technology or the ways in which a new market will develop. While we certainly can look to historical trends and past patterns of adoption in related markets, the most powerful tool we use in predicting the future of a particular product or technology is its past performance. If it took a company a year to attract its first thousand customers, six months to attract its second, and three months to attract its third, the trend is an interesting one, even if it doesn't assure that the next thousand customers will sign up in a month and a half. And that trend alone may be sufficient information to convince a venture investor that your opportunity is an interesting one. But have no doubt that statistical analysis is a slippery slope. For every statistic there are a hundred interpretations and a thousand more statistics that may be helpful to sort out which interpretation is the correct one. And each venture capitalist with whom you meet will likely focus on a slightly different aspect of that statistical analysis. So the best thing you can do is track every statistic that you believe is crucial to the understanding of your business, know those statistics cold, and be prepared to explain why it is you believe that those are the key metrics for tracking your progress. The better you understand those statistics, how they impact your business model, and how they've changed over time, the more persuasive you will be when pitching your company. [VentureBlog] I'm finishing Stats I now, and this is prescient advice. 8:10:49 PM

Adapting Blog Technologies to Corporate e-Newsletters reviews blogging as a disruptive technology an Adapting Blog Technologies to Corporate e-Newsletters reviews blogging as a disruptive technology and how to take advantage of it for corporate e-newsletters.... [Blogging News] Bingo! 8:08:26 PM

On the Bursty Evolution of Blogspace... On the Bursty Evolution of Blogspace (registration required) - interesting. I'm going to have to pay more attention to what the research community discovers through statistical analysis of blog usage. [Ray Ozzie's Weblog] Lordy I want to get at that information! Being able to quantitatively define the growth rate of weblogs would go a long way to validating my business model! 8:07:32 PM

Macromedia and RSS You may have noticed that over the past year we have really begun to leverage RSS through weblogs, content on the DevNet Resource Kits and the Macromedia XML News Aggregator (MXNA). This string of resources and projects utilizing and focusing on RSS has not been a coincidence, but rather the product of the realization of the power of RSS. This realization began over a year ago when we began publishing weblogs. Initially, we saw weblogs primarily as a way to... [mesh on mx] The question is, does Macromedia see RSS as the disruptive technology that it is? In other words, do they see that "browsing" has reached its peak, and that "aggregating" is the next phase? Creating server-side aggregators is all fine and good (and I nice example, since its so simple), but do they see that desktop tools for leveraging RSS are where the market will zig next? 8:05:11 PM

Walking the Virtual Halls I can't say that I agree with Don Park on this one. In every organization in which I've been a manager, hierarchy becomes unavoidable because of course it's essential to utilize organizational network forms to cope with complexity. But hierarchy by its very nature causes filtering and interpretation, and in order to truly keep a continuous "feel" for what's going on in the organization and in the market, I strive for more sophisticated network forms that inject more than a bit of the "edge" into my thinking. Don says that "the CEO is not likely to know about, let alone subscribe to, a lowly QA engineer's blog." Perhaps. But I seek out and truly relish interaction with people at the edge of my organization. When I find a hairy bug (e.g. a deadlock, or a comms or memory issue in the product), I love having the developer come in and debug it face-to-face. It gives me a chance not only to understand more about the product's internals, but also you have NO idea what I learn while chit-chatting while waiting for debug files to copy, etc. Design & implementation issues, stuff that people have been building off to the side, things about the organization, rumors, etc. And of course they also milk me for what's going on in my travels, in my official role as Overhead at the organization. I love listening to an individual sales rep or SE when we're on a sales call, because I get a better feel for what's actually going on with customers or prospects. I try to pattern-match across reps so that I can see what might be improved in the sales process, rather than just listening to my VP of Sales. I love interacting with designers and developers when doing my Thursday detailed feature design reviews. I suppose this is just classic "walking the halls", etc., but I feel as though without this kind of direct nonhierarchical contact I would lose touch with my organization, and people throughout would know I was disconnected and would lose respect for me. With regard to blogs, I do agree that we need to figure out some kind of structure, but I don't think it should be strictly hierarchical. I've got nearly 150 feeds that I monitor in one way or another - some employee, some not - and of course it's way too much to consume everything. I've asked myself "if you could only read 10, which would you read?" But I've found that this is the wrong question. Reading those 10 would be like only having meetings with my direct reports. I look to blogs for serendipity, and I won't truly understand what's going on "out there" unless I mix it up a bit. So rather than hierarchical blogs, maybe the answer is a mix of some close (recurring) and some far (random)? Maybe I should constantly read my 10 favorite feeds, and have the reader spit a bunch of randomness at me from the remaining 140? All I know is that I need to mix some "practice" with the "process", to force some chaos into the system rather than just treating it as merely complex and manageable - which it most certainly is not. [Ray Ozzie's Weblog] So, organizational blogs allows you to walk the virtual halls regularly, thus increasing your orgs information exchange rate. 8:02:00 PM

Why does NewsDesk integrate with NewsIsFree? Earlier this year, while NewsDesk was still in beta release, many of you told me that I simply had to make it easier for new users to get started. The two most popular requests were for (1) preloaded channels and (2) an easy way to add more. I considered the alternatives, and decided that the best solution was to partner with one of the leading RSS directories. After evaluating several of the most popular directories, I concluded that NewsIsFree offered the best service at a reasonable price. If the "Free" in NewsIsFree seems out of place, consider that it was free at one time, but demand grew so fast that NewsIsFree later added fees to cover operating costs. Their basic service is still free -- you can get headlines for most of their channels, though they limit free users to five headlines per channel and do not include headline descriptions. I contacted Mike Krus at NewsIsFree, who agreed to collaborate with me to bring preloaded channels and seamless integration to NewsDesk users. So what do you get for your $20 NewsIsFree subscription? Use the Add Channels wizard to effortlessly search the 5,700+ popular channels they provide, and add NewsIsFree channels to NewsDesk with just a few mouse clicks. You get headlines updated every hour, with headline descriptions for most channels. If you're looking for headlines from reputable sources around the world, NewsIsFree is a wonderful way to get them. NewsDesk is the only RSS headline reader to make it this easy. [NewsDesk Updates] Excellent idea! 7:59:22 PM

Synderilla I posted a new drop of Synderilla that's based on Dimtry's May 9 release, and adds support for gzip/deflate compression, xhtml:body based items and multiple plugins (both IBlogThis and IBlogExtension). [Simon Fell] Well, here's the beauty of open source projects. Someone can start it, get tired or whatever, and someone else just takes over. Kudos to Simon for taking the reigns, but maybe Dmitry was right to put it aside... with all the RSS aggregators out there, what will Synderilla offer above and beyond the field? 7:58:29 PM

Are you an isoblogger? Blogging thoughts and philosophies is a neat rant that proposes a taxonomy of bloggers according to their linking behaviors. (via Stuart) [Seb's Open Research] ug. 7:55:33 PM

Friday night Something I wrote late one night last week... It's an unusual friday night here at the donsavage/cooly compound. I'm in the office, working on sorting out the mess, and Paulette is next door watching "White Teeth". Jackson is breezing thru another full night of sleep, and I can only count myself lucky on that front. In fact, it's looking pretty good on all fronts, now that I reflect on it. I wish I could say I was as comfortable here. You see, I'm still not sure what to make of myself, what voice to broadcast, what expression I desire... Oh how I can wordsmith a paragraph into minced meat, to work in stead of play the keyboard. And fatigue so easily when I've barely just begun. At least the minced meat tastes good :-) 7:54:27 PM

ENT as a RSS2.0 extension Let's get ready, now. One of the things we talked about at dinner last night was the stupidity of forking RSS among the little guys. In the future we're going to look back at that as the most bone-headed thing since Marc Andreessen called Windows a bunch of device drivers. Here's how Microsoft is going to fuck all of us. Their blogging tool will support RSS 2.0. Basic stuff like title, link, description, and maybe to be nice, a few extras like guid, category, and generator. Then they're going to define a namespace with poorly documented stuff the rest of us don't understand. Some of us will support Microsoft's extensions, others won't. Either way it won't matter. They'll be able to say they're supporting the standard and we won't be able to say they're not. And they'll add and subtract features unpredictably until users get the idea that it's safer just to stay with MS, and they'll own yet another market. Now get this -- it doesn't have to be that way. We could establish a profile of RSS 2.0 and implement strict compliance with that profile in the major blogging tools. We could give that profile a name, and jointly market it to users. Then when MS comes in, the users would know what to insist on. It would make history, it would be the first time a market anticipated Microsoft tactics, and took effective, preventive measures against it. Re-inventing RSS was a bad thing to do. I forgive you. Now fix it, quickly and let's get ready to survive the onslaught. [Scripting News] OK - so Paolo and Matt have extended RSS 2.0 - staying within the structure of the namespaces feature. So what's wrong with that? Is that what Dave calls "strict complaince within the profile"? If not - how would it be different? How would he embed topics into an RSS feed? [Marc's Voice] I think Dave has a point: who cares about the standards, as long as the user experience is good. And taking that a step further, who says it has to be MS that wins that war? 7:52:53 PM

Blogging Internally A few folks have asked me whether Macromedia uses blogs internally. I haven't seen too many in operation but the subject came up again this morning so I set up Movable Type on my team's server and created a team... [An Architect's View] I hope we'll hear more about his experiences, particularly in terms of tools for maintaining the weblog by all of its contributors (pun not intended...?). 7:50:24 PM

Sherlock vs Watson vs Macromedia Central Sherlock vs Watson: Matt Deatherage has a story in MacWorld comparing the growth of Apple's Sherlock and Karelia's Watson. Both are pluggable web-savvy shells, and overlap with Macromedia Central in some ways. It's good history, but I'm not sure I... [JD on MX] The comparisons of Macromedia Central to Sherlock/Watson come from all over, and I'm glad I'm not the only one who sees it. Konfabulator is another product that looks similar. I just don't see the market, frankly. 7:49:11 PM

Uncle Sam's Huge IT Budget There was an article in the Business Section of Sunday's San Francisco Chronicle entitled "Selling to Uncle Sam." The basic gist of the article is that while startups used to be reluctant to sell to the United States Government, as the government has increased its technology spending it has become an attractive customer for all infotech companies, big and small alike. According to the Chronicle, the Department of Defense will spend $364 Billion on technology products and services in 2003 (going to $380 Billion in 2004) and the Department of Homeland Security will spend $28 Billion in 2003 (going to $36 Billion in 2004). That's a whole lot of technology products and services. My experiences over the last year or so definitely reinforce what the article suggests. Particularly in the wake of 9/11 and the "war on terrorism," the Federal Government is working hard to integrate information gathering, sharing and analysis across and among each of the departments. That is a huge project. Add on top of that the security you need to protect that massive store of data, and you've got a whole lot of technology dollars being spent. I would say one thing, however. It remains infinitely easier to sell to the Federal Government as a subcontractor to one of their trusted suppliers than to try to sell direct. But for those startups that have managed to find the right channel into the US Government, the payoff is significant. [VentureBlog] With all the news I read about various state and local governments diving into RSS, I can see that weblog software could do very well here. 7:46:06 PM

We Missed it But Hallmark Wants to Wish Guys a Special Day I've held off on blogging this for so long now... :-) [via Viralmeister] [Adrants] 7:44:15 PM

Digital Storytelling Festival returns Eight years ago I attended the first Digital Storytelling Festival in Crested Butte, Colo., at which a group of three dozen or so invited guests assembled to talk about the collision of narrative art and digital technology. It remains one of the high moments of my conference-going career -- and not only because Crested Butte is about 9000 feet above sea level. In the three successive years that I attended, the conference grew in size, and it acquired a more specific focus on how individuals -- professional artists and everyday people alike -- can use digital tools to tell their own stories and break through the logjam of "old" media. Yet that first event set a pattern of intelligence and camaraderie that held up through the years. I was unable to go to conference number five, in fall 1999, and since then the event has been on hiatus -- its founder and guiding spirit, Dana Atchley, passed away in Dec. 2000. But Dana's wife Denise -- working with Joe Lambert and Nina Mullen of the Center for Digital Storytelling, and with the core of people that have formed the Digital Storytellers Association -- has revived and revitalized the festival this year. It happens June 12-15, and I'm going to be talking there, along with a bunch of great people (including, as of now, Brenda Laurel, Harry Marks, Jonathan Delacour, Derek Powazek, Kit Laybourne, and many others). One big thing that's changed is the location: The festival has moved to Sedona, Arizona. Arizona in June may sound like a recipe for frying, but Sedona's up high (though not as high as Crested Butte) -- I've been there in June, and it's delightful. There's lots more info here. [Scott Rosenberg's Links & Comment] I met Dana exactly once, in the hallway between the two sides of Moscone Center. I asked him if he'd like to see PuppetTime, and he gave me his contact info. Next thing I know, just a few months later, I hear he passed away... Joe and Nina are good people, too! I met them at their lab @ UC Berkeley. Good to hear they're firing up DStory again! 7:42:42 PM