Thursday, January 26, 2006

Essay: Yahoo game-changers for 2006.  

Reforming the VC industry is in the air? First I read this piece by Rick Segal, who I know from many years ago when he was at Microsoft and is now a VC. Apparently he and Doc Searls have become friends. I gave up on VC a few years ago, after repeated tries, I realized we just don't speak the same language. Maybe it's worth another visit. If there's going to be game-changing in technology investment, I'd like to be part of the discussion. 

Anne 2.0 writes great stuff, and today gets to some core questions about reading lists and OPML. A reading list is more than a compendium, I think it's got to be curated the way an art director chooses paintings for an art exhibit (as if I knew how they do that). As a reader, I want the effect to be subtle. All of a sudden I'm getting much better info about gadgets, even pointing to stuff from those sources. But I'd never have thought to subscribe to the feeds. Luckily I know an expert in gadgets and he did a reading list for people like me, people who dabble, who enjoy gadgetry, but haven't committed much time to the subject. So while it's great that you have an OPML of women in technology (it would make a fantastic directory) it probably isn't a great reading list. But what do I know. This is all so new. Keep on writing and I'll keep reading (and commenting). 

Dan MacTough asks a few questions. First, I develop in this environment because I designed this environment as the place where I wanted to all my development. That's way I thought of it in the 80s and 90s, when the kernel was in active development -- do it right so you don't have to do it again. It's got most of what I want. I wish there were a Linux version. I wish the back-end was continually being analyzed for performance improvements and bug fixes. I wish there were work going on to remove display glitches in the outliner. I wish there were a version in development that ran on the new Intel Macs in native mode. So it's not perfect, but there's nothing else like it, and at this point, it's the only current development environment I know how to develop in, and at my age, I'm not wanting to learn another. I put at least 20 years into this one, it works the way I want it to. That said, everything we're doing is with open protocols, and the code is all open source (GPL) so what I'm really doing is bootstrapping another defacto standard, like RSS or XML-RPC, and the apps that build on them (podcasting, MetaWeblog API). It could be that most people will eventually use software different from what I use. Programmers like to re-invent. But at least our work will be compatible, if we can avoid some of the mistakes we've made in the past. Hope this helps, Dan. I appreciate the spirit of your questions. 

Dan, we have to pick a better medium for this discussion. There really isn't anything for a two-person-only public discussion. If we did it in a blog post with comments there would be all kinds of extra noise from people in the (put on your Mick Jagger accent now) critics section. First updating FeedDemon is Nick Bradbury's job not mine. I needed a platform for improvements to aggregators, the only way I can get people to go where I want to go is by doing it first and making it popular. Reading lists are the big shift. And, yes we do need some major improvements in the blogging platform most people use. It's been totally stagnant for almost four years. It's all so stuck. Now if Matt Mullenweg would do everything I asked (as if he didn't already have a full plate) there would be no need for me to do any work here. But that's not the way it works. And about improvements below the system.compiler table, that's exactly where I don't want to go. I worked under there for many many years, but the C development environment I worked in is dead now (THINK C) and the replacements (imho) suck. So what remains to be done there must be done by younger people. I'm fully capable of fixing stuff above that level, and I've been doing so quietly for months. Every time I tell you to update opml.root you're getting one or more of those fixes. Keep digging Dan, I like your style, and let's continue this discussion when we get some better tools for two-person public discourse. 

BTW, the last time I ran that pic of Esther Dyson (adjacent to the post above) she sent an email asking (very nicely) what it meant. I said it's just a decoration, I liked the picture, and I like to put interesting pictures in long posts to stir the imagination, as a kind of art. A few days ago a picture of briefcase or file folder with that picture on it either appeared in a dream or in my FlickrRivr stream (I honestly don't remember) and ever since I've been looking for a way to get it into my Scripting News stream. So anticipating Esther's curiousity, that's why it's there today. Hope you're having a great time representing the Tech Nation at Davos!  

An all-in-one car MP3 player gadget? 

Apple has a syndication mail list. 

Wes Felter is an outliner-style blogger who doesn't use an outliner.  

Thanks to Betsy Devine for spotting this one. Business 2.0 chose the dumbest ideas of 2005, and the smartest (look at the bottom of the page). RSS is one of the smart ones. They also picked Skype and Jeremy Allaire.