Monday, November 13, 2006

Engadget: "Our experience with the first version of the Zune software this afternoon is much like that of many version 1 software experiences. It sucks." 

Nick Douglas leaves Valleywag, you heard it here first.  

Sheila Lennon wonders what version of the web will they use on the Starship Enterprise. Beam me up! 

Nick Bradbury: "The Semantic Web may happen, but if it does, it's going to be a helluva lot messier than the architects would like." 

Google Blogoscoped: "I asked several bloggers about their most popular, or one of their most popular, blog posts." 

Confabb 

TechCrunch on Confabb. "A new service launching today that offers a centralized place to find information about all kinds of conferences."

First, an important disclaimer -- I am an investor in Confabb. I believe in the product, it's a simple but incredibly useful tool for conference managers, speakers, participants. I put together something much more limited than Confabb for the four conferences I have done, my tool was hard to use, and it was missing important features, but it worked. Next time I do a conference, I'll use Confabb to organize it. You can find out who's going to what sessions, see what other conferences people participated in, publish your own conference itinerary and look at those of your friends. It's a metadata-rich application, kind of a no-brainer, you have to wonder why no one has done this before. When I saw it, I immediately recognized the power.

Examples: Le Web, TechCrunch party in NY, Web 2.0.

Scoble's interview with Salim, recorded here in Berkeley yesterday, he explains just how awesome the product is.

Technorati linkage about Confabb.

The Confabb weblog.

Dueling Markoffs 

Imagine John Markoff on the banjo, playing with Tim O'Reilly also on the banjo, except Markoff calls his instrument Banjo 3.0, and you get some idea how surreal tech publishing has become. Markoff, theoretically the top technology journalist in the world, and O'Reilly who many believe publishes the best howto and reference books (I'm among them) seem to think somehow this BS matters! I know why O'Reilly wants to perpetuate the myth that anyone understands wtf Web 2.0 is, but why would Markoff and his NY Times bosses want to get into this fray? If you have a clue, please post a comment.

What a day! 

Yesterday was a super-interesting and sweet day here at The House that RSS Bought. First, NakedJen came over from Santa Cruz, and we went for a walk up and down and up the hill, then we took some (warning, not work-safe!) pictures here and Scoble and Patrick came over. Patrick and I went into the den to watch Ice Age 2, while his dad interviewed Jeff Ubois. Salim Ismail came over, he also did an interview with Scoble, and a demo (more on that later).

Jen showed me how to use my food processor (never been used) and then went back to Santa Cruz. The remaining partiers went down the hill for Chinese. I came back up, made some delicious carrot soup, easy with the food processor, then Sylvia called and I walked up the hill to her house to hang out with Richard Stallman and Henri Poole. I had never met Stallman, and contrary to his rep on the net, he's a warm, considerate person, definitely with a very specific focus (free software) but very different from the way people portray him. A very interesting and stimulating Sunday in Berkeley!