Saturday, November 22, 2003

Two years ago: "How many Californians does it take to screw in a light bulb?" 

Good morning early morning coffee drinkers. Hope you're enjoying your early morning coffee.  

Today should be made a national holiday. John F Kennedy Day. He was the man who said "Ask not what your country can do for you, ask what you can do for your country." What a stunningly beautiful and simple nation-building idea. As they would say these days, He Got It. 

Speaking of coffee, Outlook Express is toast, which goes well with coffee. I spent two hours this morning trying to get it to stop telling me it can't open a reply window because it was out of memory. I don't have MSBlast, I checked, running tools from Symantec and Network Associates. I even went so far as to re-install the browser and the mail client. Along the way I installed Firebird and reactivated my Yahoo Mail account and configured it to check my mail accounts. I had to use Firebird to upgrade MSIE because it would keep crashing on Microsoft.Com. Talk about irony. Anyway goodbye Outlook Express, at least for now. And Firebird does look as nice as everyone says it does. I'm going to use it for a while.  

One of the things I'm going to do while I'm traveling is rearrange my blogroll, expand it, and group things. I've already begun. Now that I have an infinite amount of space and the potential for infinite structure, I'm able to think much bigger. So far I like it. Feels expansive. 

I have no idea what Steve Gillmor is arguing with John Dvorak about. He (Dvorak) obviously hasn't checked his facts. Whatever. It's great to see Steve at his new gig at eWeek. Hey Steve, let's have a cup of coffee next week when I'm in the Bay Area. I gotta show you how all this category stuff works. Like Lisa said yesterday, we chop the meat up into little bits so you can eat it with chopsticks.  

The plan for the new software, whose codename is Channel Z, is for me to burn in the editing tool for the next week while visiting the Bay Area, and if all goes well to start a very small beta group on Monday or Tuesday of the following week (December 1) and then offer it to all who come to the Thursday meeting (the 4th). Eventually it will be released broadly and we'll work with others to make authoring tools in other environments (such as OmniOutliner, Joe, Flash, WebOutliner) and back-ends (lots of places). On the back-end if you have code that processes RSS (with categories) and OPML, you're basically ready to go. We're gearing up to cover a big story and to be ready to cover one that may come along any day. The idea is to broaden the pipe, make writing for the Web more powerful and make the structures we build richer, have more lasting value, and integrate with each other in interesting ways.  

Some have suggested that I go to the meeting of educational bloggers happening in SF today and tomorrow (I'm traveling today, but I'll be in Bay Area tomorrow). After giving it serious consideration, I've decided not to go. Here's why. UserLand has a new management team, five new people, with all kinds of experience operating technology companies, selling and marketing, product development. They're in rapid learning mode, talking to as many people as possible. I'm going to spend a lot of time with them next week transferring as much as possible of what I know about the product, the users, the potential. A few of them are going to the meeting tomorrow, including Jake. If I go, people may get the wrong idea. I want to help the new team, I don't want to steal their thunder. I want you all to learn how to work with each other, and the best way for me to do that is to step back and let it happen. So I send these very excellent people to you with much love. Go forth and make big things happen. Some of the best people in BloggerLand will be there today and tomorrow. So exciting.