Friday, February 14, 2003

Get your war off to a blog start

IraqWar.info is what its subhead says: coverage of the coming Iraq war. The look & feel is slashblog. Brand new.

Thieme's theme

Richare Thieme doesn't blog, but he does commit essays to pixels. A House Divided is his latest.

MoBlogoPromo

Coming down to 24 hours before Live from the Blogosphere in Chinatown, L.A., USA, Earth, etc. A friend just wrote to say he expected me to be "trenchant and hysterical." I had to look it up.

It'll be interesting to meet and hang with people I already sort-of know, many of whom I know only from the b'sphere, rather than from Earth.

In radio we used to talk about people with high "voice/face differentials." Robert Reich (whom Alan Greenspan calls a "Bolshevik dwarf") comes to mind. Radio prepared me for the shock of discovering that maybe one in ten people look like they sound.

Imagine a police lineup where the witness is asked "which one did he sound like?" You get my point. Think people will look like they blog? It's an L.A. kinda question. I'm getting ready.

While we're not on the subject of Valentines, Moxie's is a good place to start, since her guest blogger, the Right Wing Texan, spreads his love around rather manfully. The Mox is still (amazingly, considering) looking for a Good Man, too. Maybe, if she shows up, tomorrow night will turn her luck.

Speaking of love, Technorati's Link Cosmos, which is what you get from Technorati Anywhere, abbreviates to TLC, which meant Tender Loving Care before The Learning Channel came along. This invention was responsible, sort of, for the Cosmic Links on the left.

Anyway, I'm hoping Moxie, Matt, Charles, Brian, Mickey, Martin, Ken Eugene, Emmanuelle, Ann, and other locals not featured on the marquee (over there on the left) will show up.

There's certainly no shortage of L.A. bloggers. Look forward to seeing a bunch of ya'll tomorrow night.

Wider fi

We need to do this in Santa Barbara.

MoJoho

Dr. Weinberger's Latest JOHO is out, and a fine tome it is. A valentine to the lot of us. I'm especially fond of his opening piece, The Internet is Not a Thing. Puts a lot of stuff in perspective. His three class sessions for MIT also rock, for the same reason. Dig in.

Moredentity

Andre Durand does some extensive explaining about various kinds of identity, where PingID and SourceID fit in the world, relationships and lack of same with Liberty Alliance, and a bunch of other stuff that's been discussed with great heat in private and semi-private conversations.

In it he addresses some of the same concerns that Dave Winer brings up in his response to Dave Stutz' parting message to Microsoft. While Dave Stutz urges Microsoft to embrace open source, and Dave urges Microsoft (and the open source community as well) to grow past "world domination" mentalities and embrace independent development in all its forms — commercial and non-commercial — Andre talks about the challenges of doing exactly that, with both Jabber and PingID, each of which consist of .com companies and .org open source communities. (Disclosure: I advise both companies):

I have a saying, the Pendulum Swings Fastest in the Middle. I use it in connection with the concept that HYBRID open source/commercial strategies (neither CopyLEFT or CopyRIGHT) are like gene-splicing the best of both into one coherent strategy. I did that with Jabber, Inc. and I'm doing it again, albeit a bit more aggressively in Ping.

When I founded the commercial company Jabber, Inc. in 2000, there was a lot of concern and a lot of confusion around our business model. No-one quite understood that we were a commercial company, funding an open source project that built a product that competed with our own commercial Jabber server. They didn't understand that we were serving two different markets, that every success of the open source project added a feather to the success cap of Jabber, Inc., and that every new Jabber, Inc. customer (Disney was the first) added to the pride of the Jabber community at large. The notion of 'MUTUALISM' didn't exist -- both parties benefit from each other.

I remember standing in front of my competitors at the early Pulver instant messaging shows and explaining EXACTLY what we were doing, just to see if anyone really understood it. Three years later, most of those companies no longer exist -- clearly they didn't.

He goes on to explain, with graphics and strong language, how his vision of identity works. If you care about this stuff (and you should), it's Important Stuff.

While we're on the Identity Thing, Eric Norlin adds this.

By the way, my own global view on all this is that we're at about the same stage in the development of the post-Net world that the Earth was about 4.5 billion years ago, when (current evidence suggests) another planet about the size of Mars smooshed into it, and cast off the ring of matter that gathered itself into the Moon. The Net, free software, open source and independent development are all elements of the same Big Thing that's still busy clobbering The World We Knew.