Coyote Gulch

Monday, August 25, 2003

Phil Windley - Weblogs as Loosely Coupled Conversation
A few weeks ago the Denver Post published my advice to John Hickenlooper upon his becoming Mayor. Here's the Coyote Gulch link to that post. In the post I describe weblogs as a new type of conversation.
Today Phil Windley pointed to one of his articles about loosely coupled conversations. I wish I'd thought of the term.
Says Windley, "People feel remarkably empowered by their ability to control the editorial policy and speak in their own voice. Weblogs are an excellent example of one of the words that I think describes an exciting trend in computing: decentralization."
9:27:35 PM

2003 Denver Mayoral Transition
Mayor Hickenlooper has decided to keep current Police Chief, Gerry Whitman, reports the Rocky Mountain News. From e-mail, "Denver Mayor John Hickenlooper announced this afternoon he is keeping Gerry Whitman as the city's police chief."
6:34:54 PM

Dave Winer - XML Standards
Nice essay from Dave Winer about standards around XML. Says Winer, "I yearn for just one market with low barriers to entry, so that products are differentiated by features, performance and price; not compatibility. Compatibility should be expressed in terms of formats, not products. We're dangerously heading down the latter path. The next thing is feed developers work around bugs in a particular aggregator, and then all aggregators have to emulate the bugs, if they can figure out how. That's a big if. Just ask developers who tried to compete with Excel, dBASE or Word."
Remember the words of Patricia Sueltz, "Cooperate on standards, compete on implementation."
6:27:22 AM

November 2003 Ballot
Here's a story from the Rocky Mountain News [August 25, 2003, "Water pact suggested"] about Referendum A. From the article, "Western Slope legislators and two committees of Club 20, the region's lobbying and promotional organization, are strongly opposed to the measure. It doesn't protect the river basins from which water might be taken, they say. They want more provision for mitigation and compensation."
Representative Scott McInnis has an editorial in today's Rocky Mountain News [August 25, 2003, "Speakout: A fair, unifying water compromise"] about Referendum A. He would like to see a special session of the Colorado Legislature called to deal with two issues around the referendum. First, he is asking that the legislature add a protection clause so that any water moved out of a basin would be offset with compensatory storage in that basin in the model of Green Mountain and Ruedi Resevoirs. Second, he wants assurances that the monies set aside by the referendum will not be use to buy water rights. Says McInnis, "I think that most would agree that this water storage referendum should be about 'bricks and mortar,' about expanding physical storage capacity and promoting conservation through greater storage efficiency, not about underwriting legal fees and acquisition of agricultural water rights. Accordingly, the legislature should construct a firewall that prevents the expenditure of bonded monies for these nonstorage purposes."
6:12:54 AM

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