Friday, March 24, 2006

Steve Gillmor: The Allchin Tax Cut. 

tvRSS just got a major upgrade. BitTorrent, RSS and TV. This is a really big deal. It's time for all aggregators to learn how to do BT. 

Marc Canter says Bill Gates learned to say microformats just in time for his Mix 06 talk. Imagine if he had learned to say BitTorrent. Amazon is leading the way, busting through as the first major Internet company to embrace BitTorrent. It's time for them all to follow suit, there are lots of non-infringing applications, like podcasting, for example. BitTorrent is rational technology, it's long past time for the technology industry to stop bending over for the entertainment industry. Bravo Amazon! 

Lifehacker: How to get happy. 

Odeo says podcasting pays. "People want to listen to good stuff! And they'll even pay for it!"  

The power went out today so I snuck out to the movies and saw Inside Man, which was super-good. I especially liked Jodie Foster as the borderline-evil arranger. 

The top stories on Memeorandum this week have been the delay in Windows Vista and the reorg in OS development at Microsoft. Their web conference in Las Vegas didn't make much of an impression in the blogosphere. My guess is that they just went with safe bloggers, and if you go for safety you might as well not do it at all. Now, if they had come to us and said, what could you do with the resources we're going to put behind this conference, could we have created some lasting value? Without a doubt. How many millions of dollars did they spend on Mix 06? I'd have gone looking for a college classroom building we could use during spring break, and put participants up in Motel 6, Best Western and Hampton Inn (and pay their airfare and incidentals). One space for podcasting. One for blogging. One for APIs. And so on. Add 1/3 Microsoft people so they can absorb the culture. And do a hack-a-thon, something that's definitely part of MS culture (they were doing them as far back as the 80s). But today they have strict rules about who controls what is said. And as a result, their bad news dominates. So much for control. What a waste. A conversation? No way.  

According to David Richards, an unbelievable 60 percent of the Windows Vista code is going to be rewritten before it ships. It's unbelievable because if it's true, there's no way it's shipping in 2007. If true it's not just a setback, it's a multi-billion-dollar debacle on the scale of Apple's Copland (which, if you recall, resulted in regime change). Basically until someone from Microsoft confirms this, I'd give it zero credence.  

I've said before that I believe RSS is going to embrace and extend Microsoft, not vice versa. I'm sure Microsoft doesn't accept this. But the longer they delay, the more it will cost them in leadership.  

Who are the three men and what are they smiling about? 

Salon: A portrait of the blogger as a young plagiarist.