Monday, November 07, 2005

Here's the scoop on HyperCamp. We don't have a venue, date or topic yet, but we're working on it.  

I was looking up movies on Google for a new test file for the OPML Validator, and noted that they now have showtimes and reviews. Nicely done. I heard Bill Gates quoted as saying that their search results will eventually catch up with Google's. But that's not the game. I'm sure he remembers Ken Olson, who (probably) said that eventually their desktop computers would be faster than Apple's. I'm sure they were. Didn't matter. Everyone was using Macs. (For a while at least.) Now I imagine Bill thinks he's going to do to Google what he did to Apple, but I don't think so. We're developing usage patterns that will be hard to break. When MS comes up with a service that I lust for that I can't get on Google, then we might have something. But tail-light-chasing won't cut it here. I got my habits, and Google keeps giving me more. There are things on Yahoo I can't find on Google. Until today one of them was an excellent aggregation of movie reviews and showtimes. But Google just made it easier for me to use theirs. I don't like that Google is sweeping up so well. I want Microsoft to bet the company like they did in 1996. But they seem to lack the will to do it. 

I stumbled across an archive all this stuff from the 90s that I thought I had lost. Here's a collage I did when the motto of Scripting News was "It's even worse than it appears." 

Another improvement to the OPML validator. 

TechCrunch: "I've been tracking a number of sites that offer Flickr-like services for video." 

Welcome to the camp 

Later today (Monday) I'm going to outline a new idea for conferences that's been hatching not just in my head, but among BarCampers, TagCampers and MindCampers.

It's not a BloggerCon, not an unconference, but it's not your normal panel-speaker-audience thing either.

It's over quickly, in twelve hours starting at 10AM and ending with a 10PM cocktail party, and maybe dancing.

It's organized, not free-form, there is a schedule, a grid, but instead of people going into the hallway to converse it's all in one big room with the conversation at the center, and lots (I mean lots) of Internet connections.

In a way it's like a big press room, but it's different too. I call it HyperCamp, it's coming to San Francisco, soon; I'll explain the concept here on Monday morning.