Thursday, June 1, 2000
Mo fo Why is it that every time I "flip" this page (making all extant content yesterday or older), I get a long phone call? The result is an equally long time with nothing under today's date banner, where I'm writing now. In radio we call it "dead air." Here we can't call it "dead space," since there's almost no space between today and yesterday. How about "dead fo?" Fo would be short for inform.
Some context. A few weeks ago, when I was talking with Tim O'Reilly about the patent mess, we deconstructed the noun information. Clearly it derives from the verb inform, which derives from the verb form.
So in conversation, we observed, we don't just "deliver information" back and forth. We form each other. When I learn something new from you, and what I learn is meaningful -- that is, I can't forget it -- you have literally formed me. In other words, we are authors of each other. What's more, we are in the market to be formed. We demand it. Otherwise we wouldn't learn a damn thing.
That's why it's misleading to conceive information as a substance that we "deliver" to other human beings. When we do that, we insult the verb at its heart.
Maybe we can recover some awareness of that verb by abbreviating it as fo.
Actually, I think "clicky" (as the opposite of sticky) has a better chance. Time will fo.
I was overheard to have said... 
The call that provoked the above came from Ian Brown of ON24.com, a Web broadcaster to the financial market (notice that I don't say "audience," since ON24 is a very conversational company).
Every once in a while ON24 lends me a soap box to stand on and stream about something. Sometimes I stream as a talking blur (see left), and sometimes as just as blurred talk.
In any case, I like them and they seem to like me, and that means distracted investors with fat pipes get to hear me talk about Linux, Cluetrain or whatever.
Such was the case this morning. The interview should be up shortly, probably somewhere under the "Linux Low Point" headline at the top of the front page. I don't remember what I said, but it was something like the below:
Linus has left the building The Elvis days of Linux are past says the latest CNET Linux story headline. The story is mostly about Red Hat, whose CFO promises profitability by mid-2001. He also says "some Linux companies (are) overvalued relative to their business plan." In the last quarter (Feb 00) Red Hat had revenues of $13.1 million. Its market cap is $2.7 billion. Last November its market cap peaked at $22.5 billion, when the company finished a quarter with $5.4 million in revenue. Losing paper money may build character, but not always perspective.
There was other bad news. Today TurboLinux laid off some people. And Linux stocks, the flavor of the month last Chrismas, are now bulemia bait.
What can we say? Well, whatever we said, it went on for 23 minutes, some fraction of which will run at ON24 today. Here's some of what I remember:
- One year ago, there were no Linux stocks. The total Linux market cap was exactly $0. The crapper on which the Linux market now squats is worth $7.16 billion. This isn't bad. Unless, of course, you loaded up on Linux stocks in January when we were all stoned and the category was worth $50 billion.
- Five years from now, Linux stocks will be a subspecies of internet stocks, which will include pretty much all stocks, since the Internet will be a ubiquitious infrastructure that just happened to change everything when it showed up a few years earlier.
- Linux is a building material and Open Source is a building method. That's all they are. But both will turn the software industry into the construction industry, which is run by its architects and builders -- not by its suppliers. So, in time, the software industry will be mature, robust, and "owned" by nobody.
- If an established company -- like, say, IBM -- officially adopts Linux as a strategy, they are cluefully admitting that their own technology people adopted Linux and made it a fact of life inside the company -- and that this has meaning for the company's own markets. This means they are a good value play.
- When the stock market turns into a gymnasium, everything is a play. There are no more "investments."
Like I'm a real stock market analyst. Scary thought.
Knowledge In, Fun Out Speaking of Elvis' peristence in many buildings, George Hammond has a theory: "Elvis impersonators are genetically identical to Elvis because your genes determine your hairstyle and jumpsuit." I learned this from James Parry, who says he is to the Internet "what Charles Nelson Reilly was to Match Game '77." I learned about Parry from Kibo, his massive, insightful and very funny Web site. I learned about Kibo while searching for untaken domain names at Register.com, which I love because it combines domain name candidates with all kinds of cliche prefixes and suffixes to yield a table of purchasable derivatives. I found out about Kibo from The Hacker's Dictionary, which says it's an acronym for Knowlege In, Bullshit Out. Which brings us to those domain name derivatives.
Take the domain name "feces.com." Or don't, because it's already gone (apparently to a Canadian pornographer). According to Register.com, all these "additional names" are still available:
aboutfeces.com
allaboutfeces.com
buyfeces.com
cyberfeces.com
easyfeces.com
efeces.com
ezfeces.com
fecesauction.com
fecesbiz.com
fecesbusiness.com
fecesdot.com
fecesfirm.com
fecesoffice.com
fecesonline.com
fecessearch.com
fecessite.com
fecesstore.com
findfeces.com
globalfeces.com
interactivefeces.com
internationalfeces.com
internetfeces.com
myfeces.com
quickfeces.com
sellfeces.com
webfeces.com
To which we might add some Linux permutations:
freshfeces.org
fecesmeat.com
fecesforge.com
openfeces.com
fecessource.com
freefeces.org
And some business ones Register.com missed:
b2bfeces.com
fecesboard.com
feces247.com
fecesedge.com
broadfeces.com
profeces.com
Anyway, on James Parry's About page, under the headline This page has a philosophy. That makes it better than yours, he says this:
Web browsers are fragile assemblies of bugs, held together with Hello Kitty stickers. They tend to have problems with complicated pages, especially if they're long. Some of my pages are pretty long, and I want them to work with any Web browser on any computer, and so I've been very careful not to do anything unkosher, daring, or cool.
And thus condenses all of Jakob Nielsen's advice to one quotable paragraph.