Thursday, March 16, 2000

First MacWorld, now Jim Roepcke, have dug out quotes from old DaveNets about Apple. Now let me return the favor. Here's what Steve Jobs said in Fortune in 1996. "If I were running Apple, I would milk the Macintosh for all it's worth--and get busy on the next great thing. The PC wars are over. Done. Microsoft won a long time ago."

WSJ: Success of King’s e-book sparks old-line vs. online controversy. "Simon & Schuster said it didn’t include Fatbrain on the list of vendors for Mr. King’s book because Fatbrain’s encryption systems, which allow readers to download the material twice, wasn’t suitable."

NY Times: IBM Makes Breakthrough in Memory for Computers.

Susan Kitchens started a roll call page on the March 25 site.

Linux Newbies: More On Installing Software.

Grateful Dead: Touch Of Grey.

8/21/95 Time: Jerry Garcia dies at 53. "The flags were at half staff in San Francisco, and on one, a riot of colors replaced the traditional red, white and blue. It was the first tie-dyed flag to fly in front of city hall."

4/21/97: Can Apple Survive?

Minnesota Public Radio interviews Jesse James Garrett on weblogs. RealAudio.

News.Com: "The way Jini has been handled is a classic example of the product-marketing cycles that drive much of today's high-tech industry. To satisfy the relentless demands of competition and Wall Street, companies often hype their products far before a market for them has been created--and sometimes with little knowledge about how their technology will ultimately be used, if at all."

Dan Gillmor: "For the first time in years, the installation of a new operating system went without a hitch. With Windows 2000, Microsoft put a lot of effort into this part of the product, and it shows."

Steve Yost would like to apply collaborative filtering technology to My.UserLand and Weblogs.Com.

What is Everything?

Synchronicity. A few minutes ago I sent a follow-up email to John Patrick of IBM, saying that I saw how Sash, their JavaScript UI widgets, could fit into our Two-Way-Web vision, and at the same time, Andrew Wooldridge, editor of the Web Apps site, was pointing to Sash, saying "This is truly interesting."

To Manila designers -- I'm sure there's a temptation to regard my call for templates as a greedy request by a huge corporation to get its users to work for free. I've even seen this POV on the web. Or you could view it as a way of giving future Manila users the benefit of your experience, knowing that this will mean they will have more fun, and will get to know you as the design inspiration for their site. We're going to open a new hosting service in the next few days. Right now all we have is the plain It Worked template that's getting kind of stale. We could offer money for the winning design. If we did, would that get you off your butts and coming up with new starter designs?

Tim Bray: Patent your DTDs. "It's interesting to note that the DTD is ambiguous and hence technically not XML - I'm sure the USPTO will detect this."

Dan Bricklin has some great pictures from Esther's, including me, smiling.

One of my best lines ever. At the Web Apps panel on Tuesday, we're talking about building on each others' tools, Evan Williams volunteers that they've already prototyped an XML-RPC connection between Blogger and Manila. "Excuse me while I fall off my chair." It was that kind of session. Good humor, lots of laughs, awe at some of the demos (particularly ThinkFree), and hunger for success.

NetDyslexia: Euroblogs.

Conversant is a Frontier-based web app. I created a Conversant site late last week, but only had a few minutes to play with it. I'm interested in starting a discussion on how Conversant and Manila might be integrated, along the lines of the discussion we had in Phoenix (which I haven't written up yet!) about connecting various content servers with editorial tools. Perhaps someone with a Manila site can create a Conversant site for exploring the possible connections between the products.

Also this is a milestone for the Frontier development community. This product is at least as competitive with Manila as Blogger is. (As if competitiveness could be measured on a scale of 1 to 10.) Finding a method for co-existence is going to be a bit of a challenge. The two lead developers of Conversant, Seth Dillingham and Brian Andresen, are highly regarded in the community as experts in getting Frontier to do amazing feats and working around its flaws. I bet Conversant works really well. They've been working on the service for many months. Their work deserves a careful review by people who use Manila and Frontier.

XML-RPC mail list: "I am working on a business to business portal, which allows members to put up Items to buy/sell on the exchange."

Chris Nolan: Why I'm still scribbling for a living. "Silicon Valley is now well on its way to becoming an affluent, fast-paced urban environment, stretching from San Francisco to San Jose. It is sophisticated, it is cutthroat and it is one of the most amazing places on Earth right now."

Reuters: Life imitates art in Web confession sites. "This year's South by Southwest Interactive Festival featured an impressive array of Webcam and Weblog site proprietors who are committed to making people see that the Internet as a medium can be more than just an online mall."

Tim O'Reilly talks with Richard Stallman on patents. "If only the nontrivial new ideas are off limits for 20 years, that will be enough to keep us 20 years behind the times."