Monday, March 18, 2002

Communication is the application: I agree with Burningbird about people who try to make up terminology — "There is no such thing as a 'full peer.'  Any machine that must be on 24x7 to serve a community of clients is called a 'server.'"  But UserLand continued its tradition of real blockbusters half-buried amidst wildly mixed marketing messages today by shipping Radio Community Server at a price of $0 for Radio and Frontier licensees.  This is way cool, and makes me think of what I think could be an answer to the mystery of reaching critical mass for public and journalistic attention about which John Robb and I crossed swords last night. Mixed messages?  John talks about Web Services with a capital W, capital S, arguing that UserLand is virtuous and right where Microsoft and IBM are pernicious and wrong in the race to — what?  To attempt a definition or stake a claim to a catch phrase that's going to be as meaningless, as much a vague, fuzzy buzzword and ultimately a customer turn-off, as "application service provider" or "artificial intelligence" or "full peer" or any of the other fizzled flops of our industry's jargon addiction. And Dave Winer can't help talking about outlining as the holy grail and ultimate app, which for him it is, his heart's belonged to outlining since the days of ThinkTank and More (sorry, this Weblog does not type MORE any more than it types Corel DRAW!; the WordPerfect/PowerPoint copy editing rule permits software product names a maximum of two capital letters — Ed.).  There's nothing wrong with having a fave-rave software category; I have two, right-sized word processors like Yeah Write and fast free-form data retrievers like Info Select.  But you can't count on people to share your enthusiasm, to get excited when you cry, "It's an outliner!"  For lots of us, outlining has long since been subsumed into word processing. But what's an application analogy that's red-hot nowadays, and that even shallow consumers or lazy journalists can grab onto?  Instant messaging, the poster-child example of a technology that got the kind of gradual buildup to business-press explosion that John craves — at first an underground phenomenon, then lots of stories about "Here's the craze that's booming among today's hip teens," then even more stories about "You thought it was just for chatting teens, but surprise, more and more businesses are finding IM a valuable tool." Position it as "Weblogs are to yesterday's HTML-expertise-required home pages as Radio Community Server is to yesterday's mostly-for-big-companies intranets and extranets, and the result is like instant messaging but with unlimited, real business data instead of just short text notes."  Get a clear, unified message out, avoiding no-one-knows-what-it-means phrases like "Web Services" and restricting RSS, XML-RPC, SOAP, etc. to the fine print.  Stand back. 8:32:20 PM    commentplace ()

Ah, Bartleby!  Ah, humanity!:  I gotta go to work, but I should note that John Robb has edited his "Where's the beef?" post cited below, graciously removing the libel about how journalists and research firms are all whores for BigCo dollars (though I've got a news aggregator screen capture if anybody thinks I hallucinated the original).  I don't know whether my fiery response was a factor, or indeed if anybody's read it — this morning, the Radio comments server seems to be down.  It's a conspiracy!  That's it!  A plot! And today, though it has nothing to do with advertising pressures, I'll have an awkward meeting with my boss, who wants me to take on the maintenance of a fourth site and half again as much work as I'm doing now, and tell him, "I would prefer not to": my company is justifiably proud that it's kept its doors and almost all of its 160-odd Web sites open during the tech/dot-com bloodbath, but this additional site would be not only a ton more work for me but a topic I'm uninterested in, out of sync with, and unable to adequately serve its loyal readers (who justifiably miss the days it was a bustling place with a dedicated staff of four or five). So will my company show me the door, leaving Patricia and me both looking for work and wondering if, as much as we like our house, we should move someplace with saner living costs than grotesquely expensive Greenwich?  We've been eyeing the Sarasota area in Florida, but it'd be too cruel to move out of visiting range of Mom in New Hampshire now.  Anybody hiring in Portland, Me., or Northampton, Mass., or anywhere?  Shall I go into teaching or get an M.B.A. and give my services to a single company?  Is there a Wal-Mart that needs a greeter? 8:09:59 AM    commentplace ()