Category: Things I think about

The Bubble Cometh (now streaming!)

Richard MacManus = Illuminati

There’s been a lot of talk about whether there is another tech or Internet bubble on the inflate. Yes, there have a been a bunch of launch parties as of late. Yes, more companies are getting funded. It’s giving the blogosphere much to ponder,. But one only has to look at the latest issue of Wired magazine to find the answer. It’s fat again! Yes, it’s a heavy ass slab this month. Compare it to say 2 or 3 years ago, during Wired’s anorexic years. I can’t remember it being this obese in years.

Of course, this is fantastic news for the budding young media empire known as Geek Entertainment Televison. There’s endless material to draw from, and draw from is what we must do. The greater the exhuberance, the more irrational we must be. Bring on the bubble! Give us the fuel we need to snark this thing. We’re up to 7 episodes now, with new ones every couple of days. Take a gander if you haven’t yet, and then subscribe to the GETV feed so you don’t have to remember to keep checking back.

jibber jabber: the eddie underworld » As the Bubble Fattens Up

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Gems from Sean Coon

Tara pointed me to a great post on the power of tagging and the creation of grassroots, semantic content creation on Connecting*the*dots. A couple excerpts:

So what’s the connection between geo-political events and blogging and the tactical fervor of Web 2.0? (social bookmarking, tagging, open source, open content, etc.) In a nutshell: everything.

He calls tagging:

a tactical [strategy] in the battle of the information age. … The effort, I believe, is based on the desire of individual voices to be heard amidst the shelling of the mainstream media.

…

The legitimization of the individual (creative and political) perspective is being sustained in the 21st century by the conviction of the blogosphere, …The concept of social dialog and the elemental foundation of Capitalism are beginning to shift in exciting ways.

…

Blogs are beginning to bridge the social and communication gaps between nations. My peers are thinking differently when developing this medium, even in traditional business development circumstances. The tactical approach to producing, managing, sharing, finding and using information objects — defined from the bottom up — is finally getting it’s due.

connecting*the*dots: Tag! We’re It! Part II

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Laughing Squid 10th Anniversary Party

Laughing Squid 10 Year Anniversary

Tonight my good friend Scott Beale is celebrating 10 years of Laughing Squid.

I’m psyched about Scott’s outside-the-bubble success and feel privileged to call him a friend — he’s been instrumental in bringing our little BANC community together and making sure there’s always fabulous photos from our events. Without Scott, the glue that keeps us Bay Area folks so closely bound up wouldn’t be nearly as strong.

After all, on the web, without photographic evidence, you don’t really exist now do you?

Is open source immune to bubble economics?

© 1999 CRC Press LLC, © 1999-2005 Wolfram Research, Inc.

Open source business models are booming in the software industry, a rapid rise that has some experts wondering if it’s a bubble that will burst.

Is open source a bubble ready to burst? – ZDNet UK Insight

Knowing full well that I’m adding to a meme that needs no help in spreading, I’d like toss out a theory inspired by what appears to be growing speculation about the Second Coming of the Bubble (y’know, since the first one (referred to as the “Dot-com Boom” back in the day) and its subsequent bursting sucked so hard).

My theory is based on absolutely no math and certainly no experience with economics. My background is in design fer crissake. But that doesn’t mean that I can’t make obversations and conclusions about the state of things from where I sit. Pffthb.

So here’s the deal. Bubble or not, it doesn’t really make much difference. Well, not in my corner of the world. In fact, I would be delighted if we are going through some kind of dot-org bubble — in which case, it would be certainly less like the first go round, when all these brilliant ideas got sucked up behind barriers of proprietary software licenses. No, a dot-org bubble would be more like the way things were back when no one knew or cared about the intarweb except for a few dorky blokes in sweaters and tight chinos pushing packets around and having one helluva good time.

But back to the previous bust. In spite of all the money that got pushed around, one of the few good things seems to have been Firefox‘s Athena-like explosion from the head of AOL. Which also incidentally seemed to be the tipping point that brought the entire house of cards crumbling down… but I digress.

See, the question on most people’s minds seems to be “Can something like that happen again?!” or “Oh my god! It’s happening again! …Isn’t it?”

Well, maybe the right way to ask that question is, “Shouldn’t it keep happening until we get it right?”

I mean, what if these bubbles are part of some grand Darwinianly organic weeding out process that will lead to all the source code in the world being released under open licenses! Wouldn’t that be great?! …Ah yes, but then there’s that tricky thing we call reality.

Foiled again.

So back to my theory. What’s really happening here is that the focus has been exclusively on the fact that some people are trying to make some make money using open source tools and methodologies and have pulled in some VC to support their efforts. Yet the real story is that open source has reached critical mass and is gaining widespread adoption — so much so that people with dollars are willing to make some serious bets on its future. Let’s get down to the brass tacks of the matter: you invest in something either to see it grow or because you’d like to reap some benefit from your willingness to take a risk. What’s being communicated is that open source is now a less risky business proposition and it’s cost-competitive too:

Ron Rose, the chief information officer of Priceline.com, said that the company has become “predisposed” to buying open source products because of the “economic benefits”. A vibrant community behind a product also ensures a long-term road map, he added.

So all this hubbub over an impending open source bubble is silly. Open source doesn’t work that way. Companies will make money building open source tools or fail trying, not simply because they’re part of the open source ecosystem, but because of the quality of their ideas, execution or people. So even if all this “neue bubble” money dries up, open source will continue remain as vibrant as it’s ever been. It survived the first dot com boom and bust. It will survive the next.

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IamCaltrain.com launches on new Yahoo Maps API

Flickr Photo Download: IamCaltrain Launches on new Yahoo Maps APICal and I teamed up on IamCaltrain, the easiest way to plot your daily Caltrain trip and figure out when the next train is coming. I’m really pysched about this little app and hope to continue to improve it over the next couple weeks (and at the upcoming SHDH).

Mashing up the APIs

Of course this is only yet another example of what is becoming the de facto standard behavior towards remixable web apps. Just check out Yahoo’s Maps API Application Gallery. Even the New York Times are picking up on this trend, writing about a recent Pew study that claims that 57 percent of all teenagers between 12 and 17 who are active online – about 12 million – create digital content, from building Web pages to sharing original artwork, photos and stories to remixing content found elsewhere on the Web. (emphasis mine)

In discussing Yahoo’s new pretty maps, Robert Scoble brings up another idea that I think is worth mentioning… mashing up the design of other APIs. While he cites a number of reasons Google’s maps are going to win the coming advertising war (think Minority Report on the web), there’s a far more interesting aspect to this story that I also hope to explore at this Saturday’s SHDH:  that of reusing the design of popular APIs to push the adoption and use of open source tools.

While some might argue that this is commonplace in open source already (for a pertinent example, AGPL’d CiviCRM has both an API for Drupal and Mambo/Joomla and makes use of the Google Maps API), I’m suggesting that there are new opportunities to build publishing apps that use existing, working APIs to publish to open source content management backends. The primary example I have in mind would use the Flickr API to publish media (primarily photos) to Drupal or WordPress using existing tools.

While the goal is not to necessarily achieve the same socially rich experience that Flickr offers, it would be quite useful to jumpstart the wider behavior of publishing photos to open systems — bypassing Flickr when you have more mundane or private image hosting needs.

So what I want is Gallery, the Drupal Image module (walkah, you listening?), or a WordPress plugin to reimplement the Flickr API and allow me to use 1001 to upload my photos to any of the sites that I participate in. This would be a boon for sites like DeviantArt or even print shops Zazzle, but also my humble little blog. Rasmus went and wrapped the API in PHP, but what I want is something that actually allows me to publish to any site — not just Flickr’s. Any takers?

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Licensing the Uncreative Uncommons

Uncreative Uncommons LogoMy good buddies over at the supr.c.ilio.us blog have invented a license that just makes sense. Dubbing it the Uncreative Uncommons Humor-LinkBack-Don’tRepeat license, they’ve single-licensedly made it safe to publish humorous content on the web without the fear that someone else might get away with retelling one of their jokes who actually doesn’t get it.

Makes sense to me. Full disclosure: I designed the logo and icons, borrowing massive inspiration from the original commons of the creatives.

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Helping nonprofits and NGOs join the digital revolution

All this past week, TechSoup, a technology provider for nonprofits, has been running an online gathering to degeek current technologies that encourage openness, collaboration and sharing. Over the course of a week, they’ve covered topics like:

On top of that, they’ve very wisely started a resource on NetSquared for cataloging successes that nonprofits have found putting technology to use:

Has your organization solved a problem, reached new heights, or re-energized its base — thanks to a digital trick or two? Have you seen another organization use technology to help accomplish its goals? We want to hear these stories, and we want you to share them with other non-profit leaders.

Participate | NetSquared

TechSoup will also hosting an event called Net Tuesday Tuesday, November 8, 2005 in San Francisco to continue the dialog about how nonprofits can leverage technology in their respective missions.

On top of events and microconferences like Aspiration Tech‘s annual Open Source Usability Sprint, CompuMentor’s Nonprofit Technology Roundtable Series and the Craigslist Foundation Bootcamp, it seems like it’s a very good time to be a nonprofit looking to get started with open technology!

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Flock on the BBC

Flickr Photo

Here is why Flock is interesting: over the past two years, the way we use the internet has started to change.

BBC NEWS | Programmes | Newsnight | Internet Part II: Return of the geeks?

There you have it. The BBC’s Paul Mason sums up the reasons why Flock makes sense.

Of course, it’s really not that simple. Firefox does and will continue to be the best browser around for most people. But for those who want a little more – who want to use the browser to directly engage with the people and ideas they encounter on the web – maybe Flock can help make that process a little easier and a bit more exciting.

Anh, we’ll see.