Saturday, February 12, 2000

Jason Snell: The One Person Web is Dead. "If you're someone who just got used to the idea of making Web pages, saving them to your hard drive, and then uploading them to a Web server, I have begun to sound like I'm from Mars. But that's the whole point -- the whole process of creating Web sites is evolving into something really big. Been planning on mourning the day when the Web transforms from being a medium where regular joes can get their message out to the world to a medium totally dominated by big media companies with lots of expensive staff and technical experts? Break out the black frock, because the time is now." Hmmmm.

Here's the really weird thing. Jason works for Mac Publishing which does its content management with Frontier, including Manila. The individual web writer can have all the database and XML power he talks about, without tying up a staff of HTML coders, system programmers and designers. Jason, in case you read this, here's a link to Manila. Create a free site on EditThisPage.Com.

(Wouldn't it be cool if MacWorld offered free Manila sites to their members?)

BTW, Lance talks about the "Davos Man". If there were a "Seybold Man", Jason's essay would be what he would say. They really believe that what the publishing industry does is special. "Denial is not just a river in Egypt."

Another BTW, I recently added MacInTouch to the rotation at Weblogs.Com. It's a totally cool site, I think it's now run by two people, but until last year it was just one. I think it's at least as good as MacWorld, and I don't think they use any content management at all.

Yet one more, check out AppleSurf which provided me the link to the Snell piece in the first place.

Conclusion, like all nested points of view, the Seybold Man only looks in one direction, for justification of his beliefs, even if the road leads right to the front door of the glue factory. Sorry!

Reminder, we still have to get Steve Zellers to upload the MacBird project to the source control system at SourceForge. Let's get our feet wet in Open Source.

New flavors being added all the time!

Photo. Everyone should have one of these. Issued at birth.

More. It's just February 12, but there are already crabapple blossoms. They smell faintly like bubble-gum. Probably still a few days from being really ripe. In a week or two the tulip tree will be in bloom.

If it weren't for PC Forum I'd definitely be going to SXSW.

Dan Mitchell is running a weblog at DeAnza College in Cupertino. Right down the street!

Washington Post: Down and Out in Silicon Valley. "On a rainy Monday in mid-January, he calls his existence tortuous. Libraries were closed for Martin Luther King Jr. Day, which denied him access to his prime job-seeking tool, the Internet. 'I'm a total cyber-cripple in here,' he said."

Standard: The Experience of Suddenly Being Rich. "A flood of economic power can be really destabilizing to your sense of personal balance," says Mark Levy, a Mill Valley, Calif., psychiatrist and assistant clinical professor of psychiatry at the University of California at San Francisco. "People handle it differently, depending on how rich they are, how old they are and how psychologically sound they were to begin with."

I've never been homeless, but I've been pretty poor. I've also experienced the "flood of economic power" and for me, it was more destabilizing than being broke. I grew up with a sense of being powerless and worthless. When the money truck hit, there's evidence to the contrary and that's where the destabilization came from. It's a contradiction -- proof that you are neither powerless or worthless. Some people work hard to get rid of the money, every bit as hard as they did to make it. Almost everyone gets paranoid about losing it. Very few are as happy having the money as they thought they would be when they were poor. On the other hand, I remember when I got my first big check, I had to sit down my knees got wobbly. It was a happy moment.

A new serviceList XML file for My.UserLand. This is the fourth version. New fields include timeLastChange, submitter and error. Each of the older versions are maintained, updated after each hourly scan of the aggregator. I'm working with Andre on moving My.UserLand entirely off the XML-RPC interface, having it run off affiliate2.root, the more low-tech way to do an affiliate.

Linux Newbies: Linux Text Editors.

News.Com: Vignette Venture Capital Plan. Interesting.

Boy I'm still jetlagged, I've just been sleeping and sleeping. My body stores a sleep deficit. All those late nights and early mornings at Davos caught up with me. But I'm still in a great mood. I'm thinking about how we can get a quick meeting of many Manila users in the western US. I want to talk about the future with a bunch of people in one room.

At the same time I'm thinking about a ski trip to Utah. My favorite ski area is Deer Valley which is adjacent to Park City. It's the first ski area to be designed after the big boom in skiing in the 70s. All the runs are carved vertically, no funny angles, and they designed the mountain so grooming would be easy. It's like skiing on a cake. The conditions are always great, it's never too crowded, and they mastered the art of ski-on-ski-off. No schlepping from car to slope. It's expensive, but in my experience worth it.

Another favorite ski area -- Vail, if you can stand the showy richness of the town, it's like skiing at Stanford Shopping Center, Vail offers the best combination of a snow and a huge variety of places to ski, including the best back bowl I've ever tried.

BTW, next week there's certain to be great snow in the Rockies. How do I know? Because we're getting deluged in the Bay Area. In North America the storms move west to east, on a fairly predictable track. Tomorrow there will be a blizzard in the Rockies. For sure.

Scanning the Weblogs, both on and off UserLand servers, I see divisions, groups and cults, exclusivity, bitterness and even sarcasm (never sure about that). I wonder why? My feeling is that the Web is an inclusive thing, that it empowers people. Why then are empowered people so unhappy? I think we need a Psychology Thinker's weblog. We already have Ptypes, but I think there's a flaw in the idea that all people can be so easily classified. (The classifications tell you more about the people doing the classifying, imho.)