Tuesday, March 23, 2004
Paying cheaper (and better) attention
Digging the PC Forum Eventspace, a wiki that's an excellent accessory to the event.
What I said yesterday is under Great Weird Ideas. Ross posted it, with a bad link (my fault, in the "rules" I set up wrong for my blog yesterday, I just found out). And I just fixed it (plus the other thing). I love being able to edit truly public documents like this one.
Identity for people: Identity federation is the roundtable I'll be on with Eric and Andre this afternoon. Feedfront welcome.
This just im
This instant from Britt in New York: Would you spread the word about the Open Republic project? We need some industry volunteers to vet and promote the role of great tools in opening politics to people who think beyond politics. See "Misty Smith goes to Washington" Ethan's involved. So are other friends.
Done.
Make that *Inter*nation.
Om wonders, Can lone coders reverse the outsourcing trend? Background: Cult of the Lone Coders.
Bonus Link: Daniel Pink's Free Agent Nation. Too bad Daniel isn't still blogging.
Quit solving problems
Why are we asking: what can social networking tools solve? Why aren't we asking: what problem do we have that social networks give us insight to? I remember when i first got involved in technology creation, there was always a technology-first, problem-second approach. A technology was created and then everyone was rushing around trying to put it to use. I find it very entertaining that social networks (which weren't invented, but modeled) are being put to the same process.
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So Keith Teare (of VidiTel) to my right here, is working away in OS X on his Toshiba TabletPC. How? He's on his office OS X box via RealVNC, an "open-source cross-platform remote control solution." Tranlation: you work in a full-screen terminal window. You can also scale between different screen resolutions. Works on Linux, OS X, Windows and a raft of other platforms.
Pretty neat. Should have some use in the context of my current challenge.
Wrong. It was a "How many people are paying attention?" question.
From the panel on stage, Scott Kernit (from Goodmail) just asked how many people in the audience don't want unsolicited email. A few hands went up. He said "about fifteen percent," and felt encouraged.
He also just talked about "the average consumer." And said his company, in the long run, will "fix spam." I predict he will fail.
Think what it would cost on the open market
Matt (Black Belt) Jones has provided Technorati with a very thorough critique of its new design.
Is there a SexApart? Just wondering.
Loïc just did a deal with SixApart. I'm sitting here reading about this while IMing with Loïc, with Elliot looking over my shoulder. He's in the biz too.
Meanwhile, Shel, who told me last night that he could top my The Longer Now idea with The Longest Now, just passed me a note I can't blog. Trust me, it's funny.
Why so few of us have been blogging from here, so far
One more piece of advice for providers of networks at conferences. Don't make them so private and secure. Don't require logins and passwords or put users through some kind of gauntlet that requires a playground for Murphy at your end. Just open the damn thing up and leave it open. The freeloader risk is low and its potential impact rounds to zero. And the chance that something will go wrong with the gauntlet system is high. In my experience, anyway.