Saturday, September 17, 2005

Greetings from SBC Park, Club Level, Section 213, Row I, Seats 7 & 8., where the wifi is free and fast.  

Here's a movie of the action from the park. 

Rogers owns 804 shares of Hurricane Philippe. 

George Ou: Is the Firefox honeymoon over? 

BusinessWeek chose Scripting News as one of their favorite work weblogs. Thanks! 

Exclusive ways 

I can blog about Google's unbloggable community conference because I wasn't invited. Great community building Google. Exclusive events suck. I guess News.com wasn't invited either. I probably wouldn't have gone anyway. I don't think bloggers should go to public events they can't blog about. What's going to be discussed there? You and I won't find out, and that's the way Google wants it. But what's puzzling is that their competitors are invited. So they don't want to keep the information from them, it's just the public they want kept in the dark. Geez Louise, isn't stuff like that illegal?

While I'm at it, the "summit" next Wednesday, at Google, is still a bad idea. It should be open to anyone who wants to participate, and it should be bloggable, and it shouldn't be called a summit. How arrogant of Technorati to think they can decide who goes to a summit. Feh. And it shouldn't be at Google. It would be so easy to get a classroom, or a conference room at a library (they're free in Berkeley, probably in Mountain View too) or even at a local branch of the Bank of America. Doing it at Google will stifle the conversation, and help reinforce the very bad idea that the tech world revolves around them, one that I'm sure they don't mind pushing, but why should we support it?

Also a little advance planning would have made it possible for me to participate, but I have an all-afternoon meeting in the South Bay on Wednesday, so unless things can be rescheduled I'll probably keep my appointment, and skip the summit. I have a feeling I'll be able to read about it on the blogs even if it's not bloggable.

Now that the PDC is over, I also gotta say it was disappointing to not have had a place there, after seeing so many people were invited, and to have my work featured so prominently. I even asked for an invite.

It seems the tech industry cares more about not being criticized than in building something that works. That certainly describes Google, and I was surprised to find out it also describes today's Microsoft. I would have been happy to work the hallways at PDC, maybe even speak. Maybe someone on their Team RSS can explain. Was it an oversight? Did anyone ask if I should be part of the RSS conversation at PDC? It left a really bad feeling, and not much of a basis for working together in the future. I'm behind the curve now, I don't know what they're doing with RSS, I find myself in the awkward position of having to tell reporters who ask what I think that they know more about what MS is doing in RSS than I do. I wonder if anyone in Redmond thought about that. Scoble had the presence to pick up the phone and call on Tuesday, but that was the extent of communication from Microsoft about the PDC.

I've been back in the Bay Area for about a month now, I left because this is a company town, and the penalty for not being onboard is exclusion. It still is that way, only more so. I'm hoping I can exist here, outside of the context of this bad blood, enjoy the weather, and be picky about who I spend time with, and only work with people who aren't scared of a strong idea or two, or in knowing what someone really thinks. A bunch of scared people run this place, and you can't make love out of fear.