Wednesday, September 28, 2005

Cliff Gerish says Web 2.0 is all about user interfaces. 

What if Web 2.0 is actually about sex? What if you could choose -- a bubble in which some VCs get rich, or a bubble in which we all get laid? Come on, seriously now. Given a choice would you rather hang around a party listening to some idiot talk about target markets and business models or have wild sex with the partner(s) of your dreams?  

We solved this problem in Radio, four years ago. Here's what we did. We didn't export subscriptions that required passwords in the OPML. Our feeling was that the existence of these feeds shouldn't even be advertised, and certainly not the "credentials." Never had a single user complain about this solution. The power of prior art.  

John Furrier, in the comments on Om Malik's site, says something wise and fair: "Come on this is so simple.. Web 2.0 is the next version of the Web 1.0 -- it’s simply a better version than the previous version." That cuts through the hype, and opens the door wide and inclusive. It works for me, sign me up, I'm on board for improving the web. I'm not so chauvinistic about it to think it couldn't be improved. I guess what I object to is the clubby-ness of it. If you're not cool enough to be invited into the club you can't be part of the new web. That's totally unweblike, imho. 

Om Malik's take on the existential question of our day. Great rewards await the guru who discovers the deep beauty of two-point-oh. 

Major progress on the OPMLization of DaveNet.  

Screen shot of the OPML Editor viewing the DaveNet outline. 

They're talking about a food museum for New Orleans. Now that's a kickass idea. I bet that would be a huge tourist attraction. Reminds me of an idea I heard at breakfast last Thursday. A guy sitting next to me said he was dating through a site called marriage.com. I thought to myself, now there's a place you could get some dates. Turns out I imagined that's what he said, it was some other site.  

I missed this week's West Wing, so I fired up my BitTorrent client and downloaded the latest episode, and 25 minutes later I was watching it, without commercials. While I love the West Wing, and didn't want to wait for the rerun (to be aired months later) it's not right to get the show without commercials. So, why don't they offer a legal version of the show, for BitTorrent download, including commercials, maybe even special commercials for people who watch the stuff on their computers. Reading this article in BusinessWeek about the new company founded around BitTorrent, it seems like an obvious collaboration. BTW, I'd like to talk with the VCs who passed on this one, thinking that podcasting somehow obviates the need for BitTorrent. The two are very complementary, even essential to each other. The BT guys get that and are adopting RSS, but I gather that the VC-backed podcasting startups are missing this one. 

Eirikso: How Bob the Millionaire became a pirate. 

Here's something wierd and kind of depressing. Doc Searls quotes me, at length, but my name isn't there, and he links to some site named Joape which apparently is repurposing my writing. I'm sure Doc doesn't know this is my work, and I usually don't object to people republishing my stuff, but man, I really like to get proper credit for my writing and a proper link back to it. (My site is included in a list of "Associates" in the right margin, but the association is in their mind only, no one asked if I wanted to be associated with them.) 

BTW, Joape is almost certainly a spam blog. Look at all the links for gas and electricity pricing in the "Associates" column. They all go to the same place. This is becoming more common, using RSS-derived content to game search engines as they try to detect fake sites. Any defense against this kind of spam is going to have to keep a database of content in RSS and know which is the original and which is a game.  

Okay so Commander In Chief isn't the West Wing, but give it a chance. It's gotta be pretty good, with Geena and Donald as the stars. It's just getting started. A woman president. Of course. She kicks butt.