Tuesday, January 18, 2000

Dan Bricklin: How long does it take to make a website?

Who owns Love.Com? Ask Jeeves?

Be: "Thanks to innovative new technology from Be, you will be able to download BeOS 5 via a Web browser and store it as a file within Windows. No repartitioning will be necessary, and launching BeOS 5 will be as simple as double-clicking an icon on your desktop." Very nice!

Linux Newbies: Reading Other Disks. "Now, onto the Linux Way: everything is a file. Even processes occurring in memory could theoretically be accessed as a file could, by changing to the proper directory, performing a directory listing on the contents of that directory, and finally manipulating the files with which you want to work."

Another hint. We love newbies here. It would be great to have a site, parallel to Zope Newbies, Davos Newbies, Manila Newbies, Linux Newbies and Qube Quorner, that covered the BeOS for newbies.

I wonder if people see what we're doing? Here's how I see it. We're building a broader and more adult SlashDot.Org. Everyone has their own space. If anyone gets rude, people stop visiting. No need for complex filtering systems. Everyone is being respectful. It's the nature of the web, and EditThisPage.Com takes advantage of that.

Yesterday I met with Kevin Werbach at Release 1.0. In March they're having their annual conference, PC Forum, and this year I will be going, and will be presenting and leading a track on web applications, including Manila. But that's not all. We'll do a weblog for the conference to give the outside world access to news that happens at the show.

Any Scripting News readers going to PC Forum? If so, send me a private email. Thanks!

Dan Bricklin will be there. Excellent!

My friend Lance Knobel takes my hint to heart, but shows that most online booksellers have long and possibly fragile URLs. From this look it seems that Amazon hardly needs a patent to protect itself in the ecommerce space.

Yesterday my attorney, board member and 20-year friend Jack Russo came over for a demo of Pike. Jack and I bonded in the early 80s over outlining software, which we were developing, and attorneys and other thinkers were using. Jack called me from his cellphone after the meeting, somewhat breathless, saying that the killer app for Pike, which is a net-enabled outliner, is chat, of all things. He envisions a chat system running in an outliner to organize the work people do in chat. (He says it's become a preferred tool among attorneys to get clients focused during phone conferences.) I see it as a UI challenge, but the first step is to link the outliner to an existing chat system. And that frames a question. Which protocol should we use for experimentation? Are there any chat systems that have easy open APIs?

More party pictures from my 14-year friend Marquis Decanter. He kicks it off with my favorite room in his house, the server room. I have serious server envy. Those Netfinity's are reallly beautiful. But not as beautiful as the women who come to Marc's parties.

Who owns Weblogs.Com?

NY Times: Online Music Gets a Lift in AOL Deal With Warner. "In combination we think we can help to set the agenda for the industry," said Ted Leonsis, president of the AOL Interactive Properties Group.