Saturday, March 04, 2000

April 6 in SF: mozilla.party.

Links for W3C and IETF people: "I promised to put together a page of links of background information on what we're doing at UserLand to build the Two-Way-Web, for people in W3C and IETF who are getting to know us."

Sun's Michael Condry will host a B2BXML BOF at IETF in Adelaide. 5 acronyms!

LWProtocols.org is a "clearinghouse for information about distributed computing architectures that are more structured than telnet command protocols or CGIs but less complex or heavy than CORBA or DCOM."

Dan Gillmor: President gives online privacy some perspective.

Wow. I'm totally glad that former Suck guy Greg Knauss has an EditThisPage.Com site. Sarcastic!

The Suck parody of DaveNet from January 1996.

Eric Soroos: Amazon's Net Patents: "Amazon.com has lots of minority shareholders, and their stock has been falling. In today's legal climate, there's a significant possibly that they will have to defend against minority shareholder lawsuits."

Slashdot discusses last night's O'Reilly post.

Two other angles on the Amazon patent situation. First, a common theme, since Amazon loses money on every sale, boycotting them helps them. (Somehow I think that's too linear for today's economy.) A second angle. If you think standardized Web user interfaces are coming, as I do, Amazon may be digging themselves into a hole. Notice that the other booksellers are reverting to the shopping basket metaphor. Unless the market wholly coalesces around Amazon, they may end up switching to shopping baskets themselves at some point, if the Web is like computers, and if UI standardization catches on as it did with the Mac in the early-mid 80s.

The benefit of UI standardization was that users could use more than one app, a concept that, when translated to the Web, means a user can use more than one Web site. Today's Web has more in common with Hypercard stacks than it does with desktop apps, but the idea of Web applications is still pretty new.

Pictures from XTech on Thursday. Peter Murray-Rust, Simon St Laurent, Tim Bray. Familiar names to people who follow the xml-dev list, xml.com and xmlhack.com. As usual, meeting the people face to face makes all the difference. Peter is very cheerful fellow. Simon is young! (Who knew?) And Tim is pulling back from W3C, encouraging us to work with Apache.Org (no problem) and getting ready to launch his new web application, which of course uses XML, and will do something interesting with weblogs. Excellent!

Blogger pulling ahead of the pack on the Weblogs hotlist.

Out for a walk yesterday, it was so bright, when I saw this puddle I asked "Can the camera can see the sky in it?" Yes it can. Live oaks have gnarly limbs. Soon they will all have leaves. The structure is visible, for now. You like green? We got green.

News.Com: "AMD will try to trump Intel by releasing a 1-GHz Athlon processor on Monday, sources said today, although it's a good bet that Intel will try to move up the release of their one-gig chip to the beginning of the week as well."

NY Times: The Idled Workaholic. "His plan to get rich had never included a plan to be rich. He held a title at Yahoo, but it was mostly just a title, not like the jobs he had before. At the age of 41, he faced the question, What would he do?"

Thanks to Marc Canter for helping Dave Jacobs get his Manila site going.