Tuesday, September 27, 2005

Kevin Burton considers a pending ping crisis. There is a solution to ping spam, but he's right, it will require more resources than are currently available to services running on a Labor Of Love basis. It's surprising that they're just tuning into the crisis, it's existed for quite some time. Today, for example, I spent three hours shutting down idiot ping spammers on audio.weblogs.com. The sites had no hope of making it through to the output queue, they didn't have enclosures at all, but someone must have realized "Hey there's another site that takes pings, let's flood them!" The solution is to use collaborative filtering techniques to figure out what a pinger's site is about. If it's about nothing, then segregate the ping, don't ever not include it, but provide higher quality output feeds that only include sites known not to be about nothing, if you get my drift. Anyway, I'm happy to report that we're making progress on a deal to implement this, and hopefully will have something to announce fairly soon. 

Jeff Jarvis: Seeing the forest for the flood. 

Rex Hammock observes a milestone in the evolution of podcasting. 

Marc Canter's cell phone is sleeping with the fishes. 

Dummies.com: "Both Dave Winer and Howard Dean are known for being, well, intense characters." 

My blog has been nominated for a BOB award. If I win then I can say Scripting News is an award-winning weblog. That would be nice. 

Elmer Masters is live-blogging the Duke podcasting conference, in OPML. Outliners are especially good for meeting notes.  

iPodderX for Windows is out. 

Wired: Podcasting Goldrush Is On. 

Scoble: "Don't like our aggregator? Take your OPML somewhere else!" 

7 years ago today: "By this time tomorrow New Orleans may be under water as Hurricane Georges creeps toward the Gulf Coast." 

Statesman-like technology company 

7/7/99: "Having witnessed the Internet turned into a battlefield, and assessing that at least half of the blame for that belongs to Microsoft, I am in no mood for another contentious, irrelevant do-or-die battle. This time around either Microsoft grows up and learns to be the statesman of the industry that it could be, or we'll do a Linus, and keep doing the work we love.."

Starting many many years ago, I urged Microsoft and other technology companies, to adopt a different poise with respect to the community of developers and users. Microsoft had outgrown its self-image of "scrappy upstart." In the mid-nineties, Microsoft was anything but that. Some phrases that might have made more sense: Lumbering Giant, Awkward Adolescent. Adjectives: self-absorbed, unfocused, off-topic, dangerous. Dangerous to it itself, and dangerous to everyone else.

Then, humbled by the antitrust trial and conviction, Microsoft sulked. At no point did it ever occur to Microsoft to do the one positive thing left to upstarts that become monopolies -- LEAD. Now, perhaps, there are signs that Microsoft may be becoming a leader. They can lead not through technical innovation, that's the province of scrappy upstarts. Their job is to identify the positive trends that lead to growth in their markets, they don't even have to be early in recognizing these, and then just support them, and by all means, don't get in the way. As I said, there are signs that they are beginning to accept this role.

I called this "statesman-like." A George Soroos of the software world. A Jimmy Carter, Henry Kissinger, a Ford Motor Company, or General Electric. Bill Gates helping technology the same way he's helping health care.

In the comments of yesterday's post about my Yahoo visit, I noted that "Yahoo is rapidly becoming the statesman-like technology company I've been hoping would emerge. Too many tech companies throw their weight around, and try to act like scrappy upstarts, when taking the long-term big-picture view would serve themselves and the community much better."

I observed that I should say something about this on Scripting News, to commend them for starting to lead our industry, and to hopefully help create room for more inspired leadership from Microsoft, Apple, and maybe someday, Google. Steve Gillmor notes today that Eric Schmidt did an interview with News.Com. Good good good. There was no point trying to freeze them out. A mature statesman-like company can accept that not everyone agrees with everything they do, without lashing out like a spoiled powerless child, which often describes Google's posture, but certainly does not describe the company, with its $7 billion in cash, and a juggernaut of relevant products. Now we hope Google can approach the blogosphere with the same equanimity, and wouldn't it be wonderful if Apple found a way of working with us, instead of in spite of us. In other words, once one technology giant becomes a statesman, it's likely that they all will have to.

Web 2.0 is Really Simple 

Tim O'Reilly posted a "meme map" that was developed at Foo Camp for the thing he calls Web 2.0.

Mike Arrington says it's not simple, he feels what's needed is simplicity.

I think we need honesty. Just as we need Microsoft, Yahoo, Google and Apple to recognize their truth, we must deal with our own. We have abused the economic system and channeled money away from the technology we say we love, and into the hands of hucksters and carpetbaggers who promote complicated self-serving memes.

That the memes are complicated is no big surprise. It's hard work to make things really simple.

Note that the thing that's really going, the juggernaut that's powering the growth of the new applications of the web, isn't on the O'Reilly map.

Web 2.0 is really simple, it's RSS 2.0.