Monday, November 20, 2006

Doc Searls: "As a photographer, I have a relationship with Flickr. Not with Yahoo." 

Ethan Zuckerman, a former colleague at Berkman, on a yesterday's outline of a "Bronx Science for Adults." Maybe this should be a Berkman spinoff. Not kidding about that. A deliberate attempt to congregate creative people in a collaborative fashion is something worth revisiting, now that we have an Internet.  

Mike Arrington: "Great late-night conversation with intelligent people is a lot more interesting that the hallway chatter at the latest conference." Amen. 

I like Sunday Brunch conversations with intelligent people more than late-night conversations, morning person that I am.  

BTW, over the last month I've watched all the previous episodes of Entourage and am now in the middle of season 3 of The Wire, two fantastic and reality-altering HBO series. I find the world of inner-city Baltimore so captivating, but I'm glad to be watching it from this side of the LCD.  

A question you can't easily ask the Internet today. "Where can I buy firewood as a function of price and distance from where I am now?" I invested in Confabb because it's that kind of no-nonsense obviously useful idea that the tech industry so often overlooks. Another one that I'd invest in, in an instant: An easy accounting system for small business or home users. I want to be able to pay bills (already can do this at my bank), and categorize the expenses, and have the same data available through the web, to my accountant. Same with income. When I describe this, people say "Quicken." But geez come on, it's not web based and it's not easy. I want to be able to enter an expense no matter where I am. That's the secret for detail-averse people like myself, make it painless.  

Another example of the relative information poverty we live in now. There's no easy way for me to get a list of all the local shopping malls and the stores within. You have to ask friends for that information. We're still living in the word of mouth era. Yeah it's a lot better than it was ten or twenty years ago, but we still have a long way to go. 

Too bad they don't still make the Cobalt Qube. I could really use one now. Maybe the Mac Mini is as close as you get these days. The cool thing about the Qube was that you really didn't need a keyboard, mouse or screen to make it work. Here's a picture of the back of the machine. The little LCD readout was used for one thing only, to set the IP address of the box. They could have even done it without that, by booting up with a DHCP-determined address, and then letting you enter the IP address in a web form (probably causing the server to reboot). That one little accomodation to user input was all it needed. Here's a picture of a man holding the Qube, to give you an idea of how small it was.  

Valleywag: "Netscape visitors, most of whom only stuck with the neglected portal out of habit, were the worst subjects possible for Jason's radical experiment." 

Another reason why college papers are worth reading -- they aren't owned by media companies.