I wasn't going to write about this, because it hurts too much. Even from afar. Even though I don't know these people. But somehow I have to. I have a towel in my lap and my hands are shaking and I hope the girls don't hear a strange noise from Daddy's study and come to investigate.

The other day, during my daily reading, I came across this post on Doc Searls' page. I read it and it broke my heart. But I soldiered up and tried to stuff the story and the feelings away somewhere.

But then tonight I went back. It wasn't a choice- it was a human mandate. One human being to another. One parent to another. I read every word. Sobbing, shaking. With my towel.

I didn't cry this hard when my dad died. Or when my mom died. But none of that matters. All that matters is that I am so sorry.

Those words seem hollow. Like a greeting or a nod.

But this time they are more than that. Much, much more than that.

I'm done for tonight. I'm going to find my children and hug them, tell them how much I love them and just be with them.

If they ask why Daddy is crying, I'll just tell them because I am a Daddy. And because I love them.

No tags, no links.

Just sorrow.

I don't want to be a hater. I always tell people not to be haters. Just last night while I was watching a basketball game on TV, my wife came in and asked me to feed the dog. I looked at her and said gently "don't be a hater."

But every time I think I have my hatred of the MPAA and its other brother the RIAA under control, something like this happens.

A-Hole Number 1

Determined to take away all of our digital media rights, the MPAA now wants to force, via Congressional mandate, manufacturers of devices that can convert analog signals to digital ones (like camcorders, some handheld devices and computers) to include some sort of proprietary watermarking technology called VEIL (someone accidently switched the V and the E, so I will refer to it by its correct name). As best we can tell, the way it would work is that the recording device would seek out the EVIL watermark and respect any do not record instructions contained in the EVIL watermark.

A-Hole Number 2

A Princeton professor called the company that makes EVIL for the MPAA and asked if they would show him how EVIL works. Get a load of the response (as quoted in the Boing Boing story linked above):

[O]nly if he pays them $10,000 and signs a non-disclosure agreement. And they'll only tell him how the decoder works -- there's no price you can pay to find out how [EV]IL encoding works.

As Cory and the Professor point out, that should end the discussion right there. But you can be sure the MPAA will continue lobbing bombs at media rights until someone makes them stop.

You Want a Bill, Here's a Bill

How about a Congressional bill outlawing any attempt to restrict the fair use doctrine? Huh? How about a bill like that?

A-Hole Number 3

In the birds of a feather work together category, check out Cory Doctorow's encounter with Brad Hunt, the guy leading the charge for the MPAA, as quoted by Thomas Hawk:

This Hunt's an interesting character. I once was at a meeting with him where we had no Internet access, so I went and got the conference center to turn on an Ethernet jack. Before I could get hooked up to it and turn on a WiFi service for the room, Hunt grabbed it and hogged it for the rest of the afternoon, refusing to turn on connection sharing so that a room full of TV, electronics, and film people could get online too.

This little encounter says a lot about the MPAA's views on both cooperation and the rights of other parties.

If we aren't careful, the MPAA and the RIAA are going to completely destroy the fair use doctrine and take away all of our media rights.

I really don't like those people.

Now I have to go meditate.

Don't...be...a...hater...

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Richard MacManus posts today about the various personal portals that have recently come online and the effect of the same of the traditional portals like My Yahoo.

I have been thinking and writing about the both the new and old portals as well.

The New Spin

Along with social bookmarking and the 50,000 or so online calendars, one of the new Web 2.0 lines is the reinvented personal portal. Many of these applications are Ajax-based, which makes them easier to customize, on both the developer and user ends. Richard says, and I heartily agree, that:

[T]hey all use Ajax in the UI. For that reason there's something uniquely "Web 2.0" about personalized start pages. But in other ways, they harken back to the dot com era when portals were all the rage (Excite, AltaVista, Lycos, etc). For example, the main aim of the game is still getting traffic.

Like a lot of Web 2.0 stuff, these portals are improvements on existing things, not the revolutionary new creations that some people like to believe (or more accurately, like to try to make us believe).

The New Players

That's not to say these new players in the personal portal game aren't worthy. In fact many of them are. I have already written about some of them already:

Pageflakes and Eskobo
Favoor

and several others are future contestants in my Web 2.0 Wars series.

Others that Richard mentions are Netvibes and Protopage. He also posted an Ajax homepages market review at ZDNet and mentioned LinkedFeed, ItsAStart, Zoozio and Wrickr.

Are Portals Still Relevant?

I absolutely believe they are. I have defended them here and here.

In a nutshell, I believe portals are still highly useful as newspaper alternative, to aggregate the sort of content that I find doesn't really fit into typical RSS readers. Rather, these pages take content, often from RSS feeds, and display it in an organized, newspaper-like manner. This allows me to skim newspaper-type content in an online, but newspaper-like, manner.

I read blogs via a feed reader, but I still get my news, weather, sports, stock prices and similar content via a portal.

What About the Old School Portals?

While not as Ajaxy as some of the new players, I still find My Yahoo to be, by far, the best of the personal portals. Recent back-end changes have made it very easy to add RSS content to your My Yahoo page.

Richard makes a good point when he wonders when Yahoo will enable Yahoo Widgets content in My Yahoo. I agree that this is a good idea and I expect it will happen before too long.

Google and Microsoft are also involved in the portal game, via Google Homepages and Windows Live. While those applications are closer in look and feel to the new Ajax-based applications and backed by companies with huge mindshare and pocketbooks, I don't like them nearly as much as My Yahoo, Ajax or not.

Conclusions

I view blogs, Ajax and all the other Web 2.0 stuff as complimentary to a good, old fashioned personal portal. And while Yahoo needs to be aware of the new players in the game and work to keep up feature wise, I still think My Yahoo is the best personal portal solution available today.

Some of these new players may pass Yahoo in the personal portal game, but I wouldn't bet on it.

My money's still on Yahoo to win.

Eric Scalf has a great read on the transition from journaling to blogging.

I find his discussion of finding your target audience especially compelling. For me, the central difference between writing a journal (using the traditional definition) and a blog is the audience. A journal seems more like the online version of a diary (more on that below). Granted, the fact that it's online indicates that the writer wants someone to read it. But the structure and the initial thought process is the same as the diary under the mattress: to chronicle your experiences for future reflection. In other words, it's writing from the outside in.

Journaling is a powerful thing. Many years ago, I read two journals every day, written by people I don't know. The first, The Semi-Existence of Byron, was written by a guy from Denton, Texas. I really got into his stories and the characters he wrote about. It was a really sad day for me when he quit writing. The link is still in my bookmarks, many years later.

The other was by a woman named (at least on the net) Tracy Lee. She was a photographer, wife and mother. I followed her story until she stopped writing it, around the time her husband graduated from law school.

Those were the two that I read consistently for the longest period of time, but I read others as well.

For a while I read the journal of a lady who was fighting cancer. Ultimately, she lost. Bob Clay and I were so touched by her story that we wrote a song about it.

Later I came across and followed another person's struggle with cancer. I was sad when her son posted that she had lost her battle.

Heck, I even wrote a five day journal about the last time I saw my mother alive.

So I'm all about journals and the beauty of the personal word. Because they are written from the outside in, journals are generally more powerful on a personal level than blogs.

When blogging, you are writing not from the outside in, but from the inside out. You are adding your voice to a series of conversations about the topics that interest you. It is, by definition and by design, a communal experience.

In other words, while it's possible for one person, with no interaction with others, to write a journal, I don't think you can say the same about a blog. Blogs require the interaction that comes from links, comments and cross-blog dialog.

Which mean, simply, that blogs require at least some readers.

And that is why defining your audience is so important. To attract readers more effectively, we need to figure out who were are writing to. Maybe it's just your friends and family, maybe it's people who share your hobbies and other interests. Maybe it's both.

The group can be narrow or fairly broad, but once we define who we're writing for, we can begin to test our ideas for stories and topics against what we know about our target audience. Because blogs are no different that any other product or service, the more you please your customers, the more customers you will have.

Rodolfo Segleau, a former Houstonian now living in Costa Rica, takes a look at my Five Steps to Good Blogging and how they relate to his blog.

I am profoundly underwhelmed by all the buzz Ask is getting lately.

So they canned Jeeves. Good, that whole shtick was silly from the get go.

Gary Price, Ask's Director of Online Information Resources (which may one day join Plaxo Privacy Officer in the job name hall of fame), has a good summary of why Ask thinks it can become relevant. Gary admits that Ask is a work in progress, but sets forth some things that he believes will give Ask an advantage in the search engine sweepstakes.

Granted, some of that stuff, like the answer engine concept, is interesting. But Henry Blodget nailed it again today when he set forth his version of one of my core themes:

My theory about the search business, moreover, is not that "users will immediately switch to the best search engine," but that users will use whatever search engine they are used to using--unless the gulf between that search service and the leading search service becomes so great that it cannot possibly be ignored.

Chris Sherman has nice things to say about the new look, feel and performance, but the fact remains that Ask has a small market share in a pretty mature space.

I'll give Ask a try, but from where I sit, I don't see the revolutionary advance it would take to get significant user migration.

I haven't written in a while about my beloved and soon to be obsolete TIVOs. Recall that TIVO was number one in my Top 50 Gadgets list, but that I believe DirecTV for all intents and purposes killed TIVO when it abandoned TIVO in favor of its own digital recorder line.

Since then, TIVO has been floundering around trying to hook up with the old enemy, the cable companies, while making a deal a day or so in the hopes that one of those deals will be the lifeline it so badly needs.

Today I read another story indicating that TIVO may give its boxes away in order to gain subscribers (I sure am glad I paid a grand a piece for our three HDTV TIVOs so I can use them to prop open our doors).

TIVO's plan is to give the boxes away in exchange for either a higher monthly fee (in which case, they really aren't giving them away- they're merely entering the rent-to-own business) and/or a longer contract.

Here's the great, big obvious problem with that: how does the customer know that the box it gets will be compatible with the television service for the duration of this longer contract?

Rewind a year or so. If I'd know when I chunked down three large for my HDTV TIVOs that a few months later (a) DirecTV would dump TIVO and (b) DirecTV would move to MPEG-4, making my boxes little more that expensive door stops, I probably wouldn't have bought them. Having experienced that little slice of gadget bliss, why in the world would I sign anything resembling a long term contract that might require me to pay for service that no longer works with my television provider?

What's to keep the cable companies from doing what DirecTV did and dumping TIVO in favor of their own boxes? And even if they love TIVO, what happens when someone they don't love or view as a competitor buys TIVO?

I would love to figure out a way to keep using TIVOs forever, but under the current state of affairs, I don't see a safe and cost efficient way to do that.

It a shame, because TIVO brought life changing techology into lots of homes.

I tried hard not to write about the latest rumor craze in the blogosphere, I really did. But I failed.

I failed because it's starting to dawn on me that, notwithstanding the dazed and confused manner in which Office Live was ramped up and released, Microsoft may actually have a marketing plan. Well, at least Scoble and the boys better hope they do. Because Microsoft is talking the talk about Origami. And after all this, if it turns out to be much ado about nothing, Microsoft might be about to set off one gigantic bozo implosion.

Everywhere you look today, someone is writing about what Origami is or is not. Scoble, who presumably knows, hints that it's something Tablet PC-like.

The Buzz

The official Origami web page, in a goofy 2001: A Space Odyssey way, implies some sort of portable, hub-like, device.

John Markoff of The New York Times says there's a video out there indicating that Origami is a hand-held, wireless touch-screen computer.

Some folks have suggested that it might be a media player aimed at the iPod market. Personally, I would love it, as long as it wasn't hostage to DRM and other RIAA foolishness.

My Wish List

What I would really love to see is a device smaller than a Tablet PC and larger than a smart phone or iPod, that would allow you to play music files, access the net, take pictures, take notes (assuming they can actually get handwriting technology to work like it's supposed to), synchronize all of that data with your desktop, and serve as a wireless modem for your laptop. Roll that out with some sort of national wireless broadband service and you'd get instant traction.

But There's Risk

So here's the thing Microsoft, you've built the buzz. You've got people interested.

You're talking the talk.

Just make sure that when you finally pull up the curtain that whatever's behind it can walk the walk.

Otherwise cover your ears, because the explosion, both bozo and blogo, will be loud.

Steve's Social Media Tour, which I talked about the other day, has been set. Here's the schedule.

What a great way to knock down some gates. Candidly, I don't understand why this isn't getting more run in the blogosphere. People complain because A-Listers allegedly won't give links, and here's one giving interviews (and links, mind you) for 12 straight hours on a first come, first served basis.

If a few other A-Listers did stuff like this, all of the gates would fall.

Here's the Technorati link numbers for the people who get tour stops:

53
182
109
4
6
1
34
1
60
112
73
9
14

Lots of people, including me, have had lots to say about all the gatekeeper business. Now it's time to give credit where credit is due.

I'll be covering this earth flattening event, and am looking forward to reading and hearing what Steve has to say, and ask.

I'm going to do what I can to help Steve open the gates a little, and I hope others will think about what they can do as well.

Improbulus, one of my favorite bloggers, is trying to map out the Technorati genome and cure the indexing problems that she and others, including me, have experienced at one time or another.

Reading her post got me thinking about Technorati and the challenges facing it as it becomes the backbone of the blogosphere. Nothing in this post is in any way a criticism of Improbulus- she is only addressing her version of the issues I have already faced and wrestled with. These are just my current conclusions based on my experiences and what I have read about those of Improbulus and others.

I'm certain someone at Technorati will get her indexing problems worked out, because they always do. Granted, their email support is not going to win any awards, but the problems generally get fixed and Dave Sifry takes an active role in identifying and responding to problems.

Dave and Craig Newmark are carrying the banner as far as hip and proactive CEOs go. If I were some young guy just getting started, this blog would be devoted to convincing one of those guys to hire me. Proactive and involved CEOs set the tone for the entire company (I'll write more on this another time).

Though I'm not on the payroll, I am still the self-appointed customer evangelist for Technorati. As such, I have to believe a couple of things where Technorati is concerned:

1) The engineers behind their hardware and software have had to deal with scale, both rate and amount, in a big, big way. That simply cannot be completely planned for and there's simply no way to do it without hiccups and interruptions along the way. I remember the deluge of scaling problems we had when we first went live with ACCBoards.Com and our scale then was a drop in the ocean compared to what Technorati is facing.

2) Given the foregoing, they are doing one hell of a job keeping things running, improving reliability and adding new features.

3) Technorati continues to be, by far, the most accurate at finding tagged content, inbound links and other information bloggers and blog readers want and need. I use Google Blog Search and Technorati to search for content and to monitor my inbound links and mentions. Technorati does a better job, hands down. It shows more content faster than Google or any other search engine or database I've tried.

So while I have blogged here many times about the problems I've had getting indexed and while those problems are very frustrating at times, Technorati is doing about as much as can be expected given the enormous task it has undertaken.

Technorati is still a baby company. There's lots to be done, but on the whole I'm pretty impressed with what they've accomplished so far.

And Dave, while you're here, how about hiring that new spokesman I recommended?

Frank Ahrens of The Washington Post takes his turn today at the latest old media one question meme: has the blog movement peaked?

This is one of those questions where the goal is not to find the exact answer, because the exact answer cannot be found. It's more about expressing your opinion about the status of the blogging movement and wondering aloud where it's headed.

Blogging and the Bubble

I think too many people get blogging confused with other troubling memories of days gone by, such as Bubble 1.0 and all the non-companies that made the lesser fools wildly rich and the greater fools more poor back in the nineties. Yes, I think we have a lot of people huffing and puffing beneath Bubble 2.0 in the hopes that a new investing frenzy will permit a second generation of lesser fools to get rich, but that has very little to do with blogging.

For every lesser fool blogging about how the next social bookmarking service is going to change the world, there are two others blogging about how it won't. Blogging doesn't discriminate between the absurd and the realistic. And blogging is no more a cause for bubble growth than the pen or keyboard.

So is the Party Over?

I don't think the blogging movement has peaked and I certainly don't think it has entered its twilight. I think it's simply maturing a little. This is about math, not rejection.

When anything new is invented, manufactured and first sold to the public, there's always a ramp up as the pool of existing customers buy it. Whether it's a car or a DVD player, millions of people who already travel or watch videos, are out there ready to replace their inferior tools (wagons and VCRs) with the better technology. The result is a ramping up of market penetration on the front end, which tapers off as the market is saturated. It certainly doesn't mean the technology is losing its relevance or mindshare.

It simply means that most of the current customers have already bought it. Millions of new people (younger people; people in other parts of the world, etc.) are still moving into the customer pool all the time. Frank points out this possibility:

And it could be that the people who wanted to start a blog already have. Like settlers joining the land rush to Oklahoma, bloggers charged into the 'sphere, chunked down their URLs and set up shop. Everyone else stayed back East.

All those people back East may one day get on the wagon train and become a citizen of the new media state. And if they don't, many of their children will.

Blogging is Not New, Just Easier

Blogging is not a new and different activity. It's merely an easier way to publish and manage internet content. Sure, it makes it easy enough that someone who wouldn't otherwise have tried to create an internet presence might do so now. But unless and until people lose the desire to put content on the internet, blogging is not going to lose its relevance any more than video cameras or word processors will. It's a tool that helps satisfy a need that was there years before anyone combined the web and a log into the Reese's Cup we know and (sometimes) love.

Growth Potential is Obvious

Oddly enough, the one thing that is clear to me is that there is tremendous growth potential for blogging. That's not the same as saying it will grow, but it certainly makes it harder to say it's in its decline.

The fact that we have empirical data demonstrating that so few people currently read blogs is proof positive that market saturation is not complete. It sounds more like the web back in the mid-nineties. I was on it then, and many of you were too. But to almost everyone else, it was a novelty. Today, even those who have never read on word on a blog use the web daily. For news, email, etc.

If you believe, as I do, that old media will move away from current distribution models towards distribution via RSS feeds, then you have to believe that RSS feeds will become more mainstream in the coming years. Once people know how to use RSS feeds (whether they know they're RSS feeds or not) then blogs will become just another selection on the information menu.

I think blogging, along with reading RSS feeds, will take its place beside email in the mainstream. It will take a while.

But it will happen.

Cassidy's basketball team, the Liberty, had their last game today. Afterwards they had a snack and got trophies and a DVD we made of one of their games.

It was a fun season, and even though Cassidy is a year younger than the rest of the girls, she played hard and had fun.

The other coaches and I had a great time and we're all looking forward to next season.

It's time for Round 8 in Newsome.Org's Web 2.0 Wars. The contestants and rules are here.

Prior Rounds: 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7

Here are the contestants for Round 8:

Memeorandum
CalendarHub
Superglu
Pando
Zigtag
Findory
Backfence
Clipmarks
Wayfaring
gOffice
Fleck

Memeorandum is the King of the Meme Trackers. I use it every day.

CalendarHub is yet another web based calendar application. It looks nice, but what is it with a million online calendars.

Superglu is an application that aggregates your information from other services like Delicious, blogger, etc. It gathers your content from popular web services and publishes them in one convenient place.

Pando is an online application that lets you email any size file or folder to anyone, free. It's not yet live, so I can't say much more than that.

Zigtag is not yet live. They aren't saying much about it on the web site.

Findory is a personalized newspaper that evolves, quickly, as you click and read. It creates personalized content as you read. Sounds like a web version of TIVO suggestions. Cool idea.

Backfence is a group of community based citizen media sites. It has sites now for cities in Virginia and Maryland. Where's Bellare, Texas? Interesting idea in its early stages.

Clipmarks is a people-powered search engine where users rate web content, talk about it and connect with other people who share similar interests. There is a Firefox extension you install that lets you capture pages or parts of pages to Clipmarks.

Wayfaring needs a new logo. It looks like Wayfanng. This site lets you build maps, annotate and share them. You could use this to show all 10 Starbucks within 50 yards of you house, or something. It's actually a neat application with lots of potential uses.

gOffice is a free online office suite, with word processing, desktop publishing, a presentation maker and a spreadsheet. Alas, no calendar.

Fleck describes itself as a "patent pending, world changing, paradigm shifting and user experience enhancing technology." I think that's a joke, since the same description saya "every Web 2.0 hype is covered." It's not live yet, so I can't say much more about it.

Before Today I'd Heard of:

1 out of 11

And the Winner of Round 8 is:

Memeorandum in a landslide. Even with a scoring discount since I already use it, it still wins going away. Findory finishes second.

Technorati Tags:
newsome.org web wars, web 2.0

Dave Winer posts a copy of an email he sent to the other side. As I've said before, I don't know who's right or wrong here, but this seems like a pretty reasoned letter.

Scott Karp has a good read on the sweetspot between old media and new media, which correctly says:

Old Media has the audiences, but doesn't know what to do with them. New Media knows what to do, but doesn't have the audiences.

Thomas Hawk demonstrates why he's my favorite photographer. I absolutely love looking at one of his photos while reflecting on the name he gave it. You have to experience it to understand it, but the way he names his photos makes experiencing them like a little mini-movie. I love the way he names his photos.

Please join me in voting for JK's excellent blog in the IT Community Choice Awards. JKOnTheRun in on the list as "OnTheRun," so look in the O's, not the J's.

This is the another installment in my series of favorite records. The list so far is here.

I've loved Emmylou Harris since the first time I heard her 1977 masterpiece Luxury Liner. And there are any number of her records that are worthy of my Top 50 list. But there's one of them that's just a notch above the rest.

That record is her 1992 live album, is At the Ryman.

I remember going to the Ryman to see the Grand Ole Opry when I was a kid, and I sure wish I'd been at the Ryman when Emmylou made this live tour de force. She joined up with the Nash Ramblers, one of the best backing bands in the history of recorded sound, led by Sam Bush and Roy Huskey Jr., and simply made one of the best live records ever. One of the best. Ever

From the opening chords of Steve Earle's Guitar Town until the last chord of Smoke Along the Track, there's not a song on this record that I'd rate less than a 9.5 on a 10 scale. The two best songs are covers of Bill Monroe's Walls of Time and Get Up John (I can't listen to a second of either one without feeling that beautiful tug of spiritual emotion). I expect Sam Bush's fingers were in shreds at the end of Walls of Time. What a beautiful song.

This is a great album.

Technorati Tags:
top 50 albums, record reviews

For those who don't know this great spokesman.

Today comes word that the MPAA has filed a new round of lawsuits in a continuing effort to stuff the cat bag into the bag.

I have a few questions.

Do the MPAA and its even more aggressive cousin the RIAA really think they can curb file sharing by suing a bunch of random people once in a while? Do they also think it's possible to make water naturally flow up hill?

I don't think anyone at the RIAA or the MPAA really believes they can curb file sharing. It's too late and they have to know that. So what is the real goal here? Are they trying to slow down the growth of file sharing while they come up with some technological solution?

Do they understand that the only people they are hurting by mandating DRM-infested product are themselves and the remainder of their once loyal customer base? Surely they know hacker technology will trump copy protection every time.

Is the plan, or part of it, to force us to buy the same thing over and over? Is that how they think they can save their dying business model?

If it's OK to sue a search engine that allows someone to search for pirated material, where's the line? Is it OK to sue the companies who make the computers that allow someone to access the search engine that allows someone to search for pirated material?

I want someone of importance at one of these organizations to tell me what the real goal is here? Not the scorched earth campaign to spread fear of litigation, but the realistic one that they must have talked about.

So tell me, exactly, what is the end game in this futile effort to stuff the cat back into the bag.

I really want to know.

That's the only question that needs to be asked to Yahoo following the statement by Yahoo Music chief Dave Goldberg that record labels should sell music without copy protection.

Everyone knows that the DRM-infestation that has ruined online music and put the screws to consumers to buy multiple copies of the same thing is horse manure (to put it mildly).

But until one big company who has both skin in the game and enough mindshare to kick-start a movement calls foul and stops pushing this crap on consumers, this is just a soundbite. There's no need to "prompt industry-wide discussion." It's being discussed now, but since the record label cartel has all the bargaining power, we're not getting anywhere.

The prospect of getting booted off of Yahoo's music service would create enough bargaining power to at least bring the record labels to the negotiating table.

Yahoo, tell the record label cartel no. Make your music store DRM-free. Don't toss out some unwanted, non-binding advice.

Take a stand. Make it happen.

I think Rex Hammock nailed it the other day when he said:

When you set up a weblog, don't think of it as launching a "publication" or any other "mass media" and don't measure success in terms of "size of audience." Think of it simply as having a place on the web to easily post messages, photos and other digital files. Think of it as having something like email, but you don't send it out -- however, your friends or associates can "subscribe" to it, if they want to. Don't make this too complicated.

Many of us, myself included, are inclined to think about blogs as being more revolutionary than they really are. Yes, I write about how a blog is really just an online diary, etc. And most of the time I remember that. But then my erector-set personality fools my brain into thinking that all this blogging stuff is some new creation that is rapidly shifting all of our paradigms.

The fact is that blogs are changing things, primarily by making it easier to do what we've been trying to do all along. We wanted to have distributed, archivable conversations with people all over the world back in the nineties. The problem was that we didn't have today's blogging platforms to help publish and manage our content.

Blogs are really just a technological advance in the personal web page. They make it easier for us oldtimers to manage our content and they lower the technological barrier to entry, which gives more people a place at the table. Good, yes. World changing, not really.

Look at what Newsome.Org looked like back in 1999 (ignore the date near the top, that's some code that continues to do its job). See the "Latest News" in the middle column? That's a primitive Perl based predecessor to a blogging platform. I didn't call it blogging back then, but that's what I and countless others were doing. We just didn't know it.

Note the empty box in the right hand column where the Chat Room used to be? 2006 so far is the year of the blog-based chat room. But we had them back in 1999.

See the classified ads link in the left hand column. Again, primitive and Perl-based, but we had them way back then.

Scott Karp gets it too:

So what is a blog? It's a content management and publishing platform. All online publishers use a content management and publishing platform. The difference with blogging software is that it doesn't come with the huge price tag.

Blogs are just a better and easier way to do what we were doing back then.

And we didn't even know it.

Steve Rubel is doing a really neat thing.

He is going to devote an entire day (12 hours, less lunch breaks, etc.) to doing as many podcast and blog interviews as he can fit in. He's taking all comers (as time allows- but 12 hours is a long time).

Not only that, he's going to turn the tables a little and ask questions to the people who interview him.

Talk about knocking down the gates. This is like Second Opinion on steroids!

I am very excited about watching, reading and listening to this, and I will cover as much of it as I can here.

This is part eighteen of my A-Z review of Scoble's feeds. The rules and criteria are here.

I've already done A, B, C, D, E, F, G, H, I, J, K, L M N O and P.

There were no Q's chosen.

There are tons of R's, and here are the best ones:

Ratcliffe Blog (RSS Feed)

Raw (RSS Feed)

Rexblog (RSS Feed)

I am utterly uninterested in politics, but I find Ratcliffe Blog extremely interesting, even though (and perhaps because) I don't agree with everything Mitch Ratcliffe writes. But he writes well and makes me think.

Raw is Danny Ayers' blog about various internet and tech stuff. Good mix of topics and good writing.

Rexblog is Rex Hammock's blog. Good range of topics, with some local Nashville coverage. As an ex-Nashville resident, I enjoy both the marketing, tech, music and local stuff.

Honorable Mention:

None

This is part seventeen of my A-Z review of Scoble's feeds. The rules and criteria are here.

I've already done A, B, C, D, E, F, G, H, I, J, K, L M N O and P.

There are very few Q's and I didn't find one that knocked my socks off. So no Q.

There are lots of good R's so I'll post that installment right now.

Maybe Dave read my post yesterday, because he seems to be looking for some middle ground.

Rogers Cadenhead responds, in Dave's comments and on his blog.

Maybe these guys can get this worked out and then move on to the real issue: protecting RSS from the predators.

Stephen Bryant posts 5 reasons why Web 2.0 and big business don't mix. I think he's right and I think his post is a must-read for any Web 2.0 developer who is aiming for the corporate market.

One of my themes, of course, is that big business doesn't care about Web 2.0.

Let's take a closer look at one of Stephen's reasons.

Enterprise software needs to be personalized for each company, and enterprises have also invested heavily in legacy software.

This may be the truest thing I've read yet on this issue. You could found a religion based on that statement. Most big companies are using old versions of old software, with a bunch of customized stuff (or stuff they think is customized) layered on top.

All this extra stuff makes it a royal pain to push new operation systems and new versions of applications. The party line is that some of the allegedly custom stuff (much of which is bloatware, but they don't know it) won't work with a new operating system or a new version of an application. The real reason is that (a) it's hard to push new stuff out to thousands of computers and (b) corporate risk aversion. Regardless, the effect is that big companies fall way behind the new application curve.

And of course some new applications don't play well with older operating systems, so you get caught in a cycle of obsolescence.

Which results in slow and old computers running slow and old applications.

Which means that big business is a long way from caring about the lastest and greatest Web 2.0 application.

Somehow I managed to lose my cell phone in Galveston the other weekend. It was on our bed when we left for a wedding. Cassidy remembers seeing it on there while we were gone. But when we packed up the next morning, it was nowhere to be found.

So I did what any right-thinking guy would do: I went out and bought a better one. My firm uses a Blackberry server to push email while we're out of the office, so I had to beat back my Treo lust and get another Blackberry.

I got a Blackberry 7130e.

I was with T-Mobile, but when my firm's T-Mobile representative decided not to follow up on my two calls, I decided to move to Verizon. Unlike the first time I moved my mobile number to another carrier, which was a huge hassle, this time it took about 45 seconds. I had service with my number before I walked out of the store. Nice.

The other reason I decided to go with Verizon is its national wireless broadband network. While many people buy the computer card to get this service, the 7130e can provide the same network coverage as the computer card via a USB cable that connects the phone to your laptop, and the cost is only $15 a month extra (as opposed to $59 a month for the computer card).

When I got home, I tried out the wireless broadband connection and it was fast and reasonably reliable. I'll know more once I get back from some upcoming speaking engagements, but this seems like a really good deal to me. The one drawback is that you can't use the phone while it's being used as a wireless modem, but that's not that big a deal when you consider the cost savings.

I'm sort of sorry I lost my cell phone, but as is the case with any gadget upgrade, I'll get over it.

A few things in no particular order.

Disqualification

After seeing this indescribably juvenile ad, I regret and retract all the nice things I had to say about Tagworld.


If that's the sort of brain-dead, lowest common denominator advertising they are doing, I want no part of it. So what if they are targeting young people. What kind of message is this sending them?

Tagworld won Round 4 of the Web 2.0 wars, but it's just been DQ'ed for stupidity. Runner-up Tailrank will take its place in the playoffs.

Blogging Round-Up

Susan Getgood has a great roundup of recent posts talking about the evolving nature of blogs. She also says some nice words about a couple of my posts, for which I am deeply grateful.

Susan is doing a Blogging for Business Workshop at the University of Wisconsin on March 17.

The Argument for Partial Feeds

Amy Gahran explains why she streams partial RSS feeds. I'm on the other side of this debate, but if anyone in the world could talk me into using partial feeds, it would be Amy.