Category: Life online

I don’t blog enough; or, Going naked

Thomas Hawk - Cat

I don’t blog enough. Fast enough.

Whimsynogrammarspellcheckmewhoareyouanywwayblog.

I have 9 drafts in WordPress, 19 saved locally. Countless strewn about other folders on my laptop.

WTF. No, it’s not 400,000,000, but what happened to leaner, meaner blogging?

I hate saying “I have a post queued about that…” “I was going to write about that.”

I hate posting 4 days after the topic’s gone cold. I hate self-censoring.

Y’know what? Ugh, impulsive. I need to get rid of the design of this site. It’s wonderful, really Heilemann, but it’s suffocating. I can’t compete with what you’ve created. I just need to blurt out stupid stuff. Your design makes it look all official and true. Dude, nothing I say is true — it’s just conjecture and opinion, rolled together in spices and dough.

I’ve never really completed a theme before. I’ve never really gone so naked in public. But hell, maybe it’ll inspire some kind of necessary creativity. We’ll see. Maybe I’ll break the whole site. Oh well. It’s just words anyway. And code. And blah.

. . .

Ok. Done. There, that’s better. Sigh.

Incurring the wrath: tags vs labels

Tags vs LabelsSo now that the Google Toolbar has added support for “labels” (and not tags) it seems like there should be some consensus built about the heck we should call these little jellybeans in Flock.

Vera has repeatedly told me that “tagging” is a hard word to use in documentation because it has multiple purposes… whereas “labeling” is a bit more clear and more singular in its utility. Let’s face it, when you label something, it’s pretty clear what the before and after states are. When you tag it, not so much.

The other thing we have to consider is this: since Google is obviously throwing its hefty weight behind labels and not tags (consider Gmail, Picasa, your search history, the toolbar and elsewhere), we might do well to realize that the de facto “word” for this behavior will not be “tag”, but will instead over time become “label”.

Sure sure, we need consider what Redmond will standardize on, but from what I’ve seen of IE7, etc., they’re playing a game of catch up and will do whatever the consumer market standardizes on first. (Imagine that… what happened to that whole bit about needing a monopoly to innovate? Guess that didn’t work out after all, eh guys?)

Anyway, Flickr has tags, delicious has tags, ‘rati has tags and most other Web Two projects seem to support tags… so when Google goes the other way and pushes labels, seems we ought to pay attention.

Mind you I’m not advocating one or the other or suggesting that we all change course now (especially within Flock), but instead proposing that we think seriously about this now before the rift between the two starts to hit teh long tail and we have massive confusion between one term and another.

Curse of a thousand blocked ports

PHX Wifi AgreementI landed in Phoenix two hours ago en route to Dallas for Bar Camp and missed my connection because another plane was in our gate… So instead of arriving at 1:40pm, I’ll be getting in around 4. Yuck.

So why am I bothering to broadcast this on my blog? (I realize this sounds like a big whiny complaint, but there’s a reason…)

Because Port 80 is my sole vehicle for outgoing web communications at the moment.

My email is blocked (another vote for moving entirely to Gmail), IRC is blocked, IM is blocked, Skype IM is blocked… I can’t even send smoke signals via FTP. On top of that, my SMS is totally backed up and I haven’t been getting texts for days.

WTF?

Now I know that more capable geeks would tell me to just tunnel into some other unblocked system, but c’mon, I’m a simpleton, remember? I expect (and need!) this stuff to just work. If this kind of service variability is the future of the networked environment, man, add that to DRM and we truly are EFFed. If we can’t even rely on publicly-accessible (though privately sponsored) wifi for these basic communication channels, we’ve gotta think about who should really be in charge of these networks… Who cares about my robot breathren taking over when we’re already turning our computers against us.

Seriously. WTF.

Hacking Photo Booth

Update: Tristan O’Tierney discovered this lazyweb requested and created a PhotoBooth add-on called FlickrBooth! It’s free and works like a charm! Check it out!

Photobooth @ Apple Store Palo StoreI suck at coding, so I’m just going to seed this idea and hope someone does the hardwork for me and releases the results.

I stopped by the Palo Alto Apple Store today on my way back from lunch and had my first Photo Booth experience. Wow. What a cool piece of software…!

Talkin’ to Matt, I had an idea: create an Applescript to upload the shots it takes to either a WordPress blog or to the Flickr group tagged with “” automagically. This should be fairly easy, since each photo is stored in /~Pictures/Photo Booth/Photo [#].jpg. You could simply hook up the Flickr Uploadr or 1001 as the upload tool… and maybe toss in a little Automator action to make it all happen in the background. Then you could aggregate the results (hmm, with Suprglu or Drupal?) and presto! A literally global Photo Booth!

Of course, the real hack here is getting this script on to iMac G5s at Apple Stores around the world… hook it up to Riya and boom, now you can search for your friends getting kissy-kissy @ Apple Stores!

Tom Raftery catches me in the AM

Factory RockstarThat spikey Irish-bloke Tom Raftery (who I met at Les Blogs) interviewed me the other morning.

A little poppy, but y’know, might be worth a listen if you’re into sadomasochism and listening to a web geek waxing intelligent floats your ship.

Anyway, a podcast that smells like bacon must be good and Tom does well grilling me on Flock, Web Two Dot Oh, and software that I’d marry (are you listening, Jitkoff?). I also go off the deep end about DRM and robot take-overs and say something in French that someone else told me to say. I mean, it was like 8:00am, gimme a break.

Going where no mashup has gone before

dodgiemonk logo

Idea.

So Michael Arrington posted about BillMonk, a hella cool service that lets you keep track of outstanding debts between you and your friends… part of something they refer to as “Social Money“.

Now the first thing me and Tara thought of (before really taking a look) was — hey cool, but wouldn’t it be better if you could be at restaurant or something and SMS your debt to the service… which, duh, it does (okay, we’ll read more closely before jumping to feature ideas next time)!

But the second idea we came up with really has some legs… and will probably make the Attention Trust folks go all squishy in the knees: perhaps the next frontier in mashable services will be the nexus between your cell phone/SMS/remote devices and the range of services previously-reffered-to-as-Web-Two-Dot-Oh that you access through http-type connections (yeah, like the one that your browser made to this blog).

What huh?

Ok, in English 1.0: Behind the scenes, all these services which currently provide some utility separately really start to become incrementally indispensible when you can mash them together to form aggregate services of your own design. But now add in a Firefox-extensions-like model as personal in-betweener web service… kind of like Suprglu meets 43* meets .Mac meets Ning (conceptually). Ok ok, that still doesn’t make it much clearer.

I mean, here’s how it works now: I check in with some friends on Dodgeball somewhere… who cares where, but for example’s sake, let’s say Tantek‘s Lair (aka Crepes on Cole). At some point in the evening, we determine who’s paying for what… split the bill, etc., and if there’s any discrepancy (oops, Chris is out of cash again!) we ping BillMonk with the amount that I owe to so-and-so. Simple, but Dodgeball and BillMonk don’t know jack about each other. So while I’ve just created a checkin and an IOU, I can’t go back in my history of Dodgeball checkins and see where I incurred said IOU. Similarly, I can’t go to BillMonk and see where the IOU originated from. Sure, I can add a description to the IOU, but should I really have to when Dodgeball already knows where I am? See what I’m getting at here?

So let’s see how that fabled Web-Two-Oh open-API-goodness that we’ve all become accustomed with could make both services more valuable… Hell, let’s throw a little Plazes cell-phone action in there too for fun… And let’s see what kind of cake we can bake with the following: 

  • a service to notify friends where you are (Dodgeball)
  • a way to record IOUs (BillMonk)
  • a location-service for identifying and recording where you’ve been (Plazes)

Now, let’s say we merge in some kind of attention stream aggreagator and — presto! — we’ve got a view of where you’ve been, who you’ve told about your whereabouts, and where, with whom and when you incurred (or became the benefactor of a friend’s) debt.

And that’s of course, only the beginning. Toss in some mapping APIs (which Plazes and Dodgeball already support) and you can see watch your debt-accrue as you travel the globe! In fact, you could map your friends’ whereabouts to the same map and play your own mini debt arms race. Fun while watching all your friends go bankrupt! 

Yeh, anyway.

While this is all good and smaht, etc., you’re likely to start throbbing with, “ooo, yay, convergence!”

Okay, eff convergence.

I don’t want one service to collect all this data. I’m not a privacy maven, but even if it were possible to do the one-stop-shop thing, don’t do it, don’t try it, don’t even think about it coz I won’t use it. Nope, I don’t wanna be boxed in and so-help-me-Ford, I won’t let you. You and your proprietary megaservice can kiss my RSS.

BUT, I do however, want an external agnostic service aggregator (which I control and plug stuff into of my own choosing) to help me make sense of all this data… one API/feed at a time. Avoiding convergence allows me choice of services, allows each provider to innovate in their particular domain, and also gives me the freedom to experiment with different combinations of services as they are released and/or improved. Maybe I want to switch from TextPayMe to BillMonk without losing my history of transactions. This proposed third-party service aggregator would allow me to do this smoothly and seemlessly coz the data would be out there and tracked, yet neither BillMonk or TextPayMe would need to know about my prior service history. That’s data for my eyes and my eyes alone.

Sucks to be a service provider with open APIs you say? Puts them at the mercy of the whims of fickle “consumers”?

No, I don’t think so. Indeed, if you don’t open up, the open source community (or your competitors) will build something that does the same thing as your service and then they’ll open it up and give it away for free. So hey, I’d pay a couple cents per hundred transactions if you’re innovating and providing a really nice user experience… that also spits out data that I can plug in elsewhere, invisible to you (what do you care anyway?). Put your customers in the driver’s seat and I can pretty much guarentee you’ll not only get long term investment from them in what you’re doing, but heck, you might even get new Plazes, Dodgeball and BillMonk buddies with lots of friends who haven’t yet found out about you… and are eager to use whatever it is their friends are using.

Mashing up social networks: oh yeah, now there’s the next killer app. Gimme a way to cross-polinate, cross-aggregate, mix up, re-use, recombine or reinterpret and reshare and you’ve done something interesting.
Something I’ll use, and yes, probably tell my friends about. This is where mashups are going. And I can hardly wait…!

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Wanting a permanent coworking space

So I got a report from Niall last night that Ritro, my favorite cafe in town, has cut off power on the weekends… like, to the degree that they’re covering the outlets with labels reading “No Power”. Yikes!

This comes a few weeks after they blocked a bunch of ports useful for things like IRC, IM, Bonjour networking and SSH (etc).

Obviously they need to protect their business and it’s true that more often than not, more and more even casual vagabond hackers are spending time in cafes without buying a damn thing, not surprisingly pissing off the proprietors.

So while I’m totally sympathic with Eileen et al at Ritro (she needs to make money to keep her business around, after all, right?), this issue, in my view, further underscores the need for a more permanent coworking venue in San Francisco… one that feels like a cafe (and probably has coffee and tea and whatnot on hand) but encourages the productivity of a collaborative workspace.

It dawned on me that our ailing library system could actually be used for this purpose, except they seem to have this hang up with silence. If they got over that, I could see that being a resource, at least temporarily, for this idea.

Additionally, I’ve been talking with a bunch of folks about establishing a loft-like venue for this kind of environment… just imagine: free, stable wifi, juicy power, tasty coffee, desks, projectors… and lots of smart people doing hella cool stuff, having Mash Pits every other day. How would we afford this? Well, we could do what Brad’s already doing: charge a weekly/monthly/daily subscription fee for the use of a desk. No company would ever be able to have more than a certain percentage of desks bought out at any given time in the interest of diversity and inclusivity… and of course we’d keep it open to independent consultants and other interested folks just wanting to chill out for the day.

And what the heck, we’d have a backchannel going, some Bonjour networking… and of course an open SVN repository to dump all the good stuff that happens to emerge that wants to be open source.

So I don’t know when or even if this will happen, but it’s on my agenda for this year: an accessible, permanent space in San Francisco for geek innovation, neue thinking, GSD and making the kind of connections that can only happen in the real. Any takers?

The war on consumers keeps on rollin’

People don’t kill people. Robots kill people.As if insurgent consumers weren’t already under the gun, Microsoft is apparently developing technology to make it easier for The Advertiser’s Army to target human beings:

The AdCenter Incubation Lab, or AdLab, has opened in Beijing and is responsible for developing technologies that would provide advertisers with better tools for targeting online consumers…

Yeah, I’m making a semantic joke, but hey, Robots Kill People and apparently advertisers want to too.

And hell, I’m really sick of being “targeted” all the time. If all you want from me is my money, fine, here, take it. Here’s a big EFF you too. I’ll throw that in for free, y’know, since it’s quite clear that you give a shyte about me.

But that’s all right too, no hard feelings. When it all comes down to it, we won’t need dollars where we’re going. Hey hey, chew on that one for a minute and see if your head doesn’t explode.