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Heard on the 7 train returning from the last game of the Subway Series. An older man (not me) to a young Mets fan. "Son, if you're going to be a Mets fan your heart is going broken, a lot." It's true! We know about losing. The Mets began as a team famous for losing in flamboyant, unpredictable and interesting ways. Let's never forget that. Losing is part of what the Mets are about. Other teams and their fans don't understand that. It's OK. NY Times article on the Yankees' victory. Weblogs.Com is down this evening, getting a hardware upgrade. Mail starting 10/19/00 includes comments from Sean Parker on Napster and P2P, and Russ Lipton on Groove. Parker asked me not to say what his relationship to Napster is, but a Google search reveals some interesting articles. Ken Dow is offering an "intensive, hands-on two day course on designing and managing Manila Web sites." I've been going for daily walks through Manhattan and am struck by all the Inside.Com ads mocking the dotcommers. One guy says "If we don't get this site on the air in three minutes we're toast." The other guy is thinking "At least toast has a business model." So the backlash isn't just a San Francisco thing. Now I wonder what comes next? Somehow I missed that Napster/Mac is now available. I spent a couple of days brainstorming with Adam Curry about the future of Radio UserLand and Manila. It's been very useful. He has dug in deeper than I thought he had. On his weblog he promises to write up the things we talked about. He was at the Scripting News dinner last night and scratched the surface of the things we talked about. My European programming friends are going to be happy to hear that Adam is working on the programmer's commune, in Belgium, and has figured out a way to pay for it. He's savvy and ambitious and asks tough questions, which is very useful. News.Com: The P2P Myth. The shortest-lived hype balloon? Several Manila-related updates went out to Frontier users last night. Washington Post: Clutch-hitting Piazza is a Fall Classic. Had an interesting-but-brief talk with Dan Bricklin at the Groove rollout. Dan is CTO of Trellix. He told me about a picture-editing program they're developing to work with their browser-based CMS. A Manila user asked him to make it work with Manila. I said "That would be great!" Dan said "But we have to figure out how to make money." I said "Dan your company just raised $35 million, why are you worried about that?" I guess I was teasing. Sorry. But the answer is obvious. Make money the old fashioned way. Charge for the software. I would encourage people to pay for it if it's good. Why not? Fortune: 50 Lessons. "The best way to monetize your customers is to sell them a product or service for a healthy profit." Exactly. One of the things I've noticed, not just with Dan's company, is that when the VCs get involved, they tend to lose the open-interface choice-first philosophy of the Internet. If you don't let your users choose which CMS back-end they hook into, imho, you force competition to develop. Better to have open interfaces from the start. Another form of openness that's going to matter as people start putting real content in their free websites, is giving them access to the databases behind the websites. The users won't stay dumb forever. 
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© Copyright 1997-2005 Dave Winer. The picture at the top of the page may change from time to time. Previous graphics are archived. Previous/Next |
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