OK, I know I'm not going out on a limb with this topic, but I can't believe how atrocious radio has become. I usually have an iPod in my car and really haven't listened to anything on the radio but Howard Stern in years. But my car has been in the shop for the last week (some idiot rear-ended me while I was stopped at a red light) and I've been driving our Suburban which doesn't work with the cassette interface the iPod requires. Meanwhile, Howard's gone satellite and I'm stuck listening to the regular radio. To paraphrase one of my co-workers, it fucking sucks.
I tried listening to my old standby, KFOG, but in two 15 minute sessions (one on the drive into work, one on the drive home) I heard the same terrible Train song. Check out their just played page and I guarantee you'll see what I mean. As I write this now, the last ten songs include Jerry Garcia, Peter Gabriel, The Beatles and Steve Miller Band. I mean, I love the 60's and 70's too but do we still need to hear "Long and Winding Road" and "Swingtown"?
Live 105 was a Howard Stern rerun during my morning drive; at night they featured songs that make Stone Temple Pilots sound cutting edge. The Bone (107.7) is usually my refuge when all else fails but they kept going deep into the one catalog of music (heavy metal) where you tend not to want to go too deep.
So I spun through the dial in a desperate search for something better. Since I don't speak Spanish and I'm not religious, my options were highly limited. The lesser of all evils turned out to be Fresh Air, but only because they were doing a profile of Gene Wilder. Normally, NPR reminds me of hanging out in a Berkeley cafe. Which, needless to say, I just don't make a habit of.
I just found out my car won't be back for probably two more weeks. Shoot me now.
I'm sitting in the back of the room (as is my normal conference habit) at Les Blogs 2.0, a Six Apart organized conference about blogging. It took us awhile to find the place which was nice since I didn't otherwise get a morning hike. Walking through Paris is a good alternative to the back woods of California.
Up on the screen is an IRC back channel, a current conference habit that I have to say, I don't quite understand. Let's all fly to Paris so we can sit in a conference center and chat onscreen while the people we actually came to see fight for our attention. I know it's a great way to bring a larger audience into the conference, after all not everyone can justify flying to Paris for a conference. But I'm not sure of the value of putting it onscreen.
Of course, everyone here in the conference center who isn't on IM is blogging the conference in real-time (like me). Maybe that's no different, but at least that's why we're all here.
I just cancelled a dinner reservation for tomorrow night and the guy I spoke with couldn't have been more thankful for my calling to tell him I couldn't make it. In fact, he was the same person who took my reservation in the first place and while he was certainly nice then, he was far more effusive during my cancelling of the reservation than during the original making of the reservation.
This is not the first time that's happened to me in the last few years. Obviously one possibility is that they really didn't want me at their restaurant in the first place and were genuinely happy I wasn't coming. If only. Assuming that's not the case, are there really that many people who make reservations at restaurants but then never show up? Did they change the rules and no one told me?
There's been a lot of back and forth on the "What is Web 2.0" question. And criticism. And parody. Wikipedia has one of the most backhanded entries I've seen, starting off by saying it's just a meaningless term manufactured by promoters, but then going on to describe it in great detail.
I recently put together a deck for a speech I'm now not giving. In one part, I tried to articulate what to me is interesting about operating in the web business world of today, as compared to ten years ago in the web 1.0 days. Think of it as my contribution to the web 2.0 question. As an added bonus, it gave me a chance to utilize one of the classic lazy conference speech devices: "the three c's."
The original three c's of the online world were popularized by Steve Case in the early 90's. The idea was that America Online would represent the place where good content would provide context to help build community.[1] And bigger communities would enable more people to create more content, establishing a virtuous circle of growth. The portal wars of the 90's were essentially a fight for the center of this vortex. Success looked like an integrated stack of services that attempted to lock users (stickiness) into staying on that portal only. Why go anywhere else when you can get email, stock prices, message boards, news headlines and search in one place?
In this speech I was going to propose a new three c's for today's web 2.0 world -- create, consume and connect. But as Michael Sippey told me when he saw my presentation, he said it first exactly ten years ago. Regardless, I'm going to jump out in front of this meme train and call it a parade. Or something.
In this model, the virtuous circle drives company creation and market growth instead of sucking more people into the stickiness of one company's offering. Once the initial circle had started, a second wave of more specific content creation tools, like Flickr and Delicious, were developed to specialize on some of the most popular social media behaviors. As more RSS was being created, consumption became harder and Feedburner sprung into action slicing, dicing and splicing things together as needed. And so on. Think of each of these waves as point releases, we're probably up to web 2.1 or 2.2 by now.
The overriding point, of course, is that all of us in the social media world are building pieces of this vortex (that's two mixed metaphors in one blog post!) with the user owning the center. Even Yahoo, the winner of the web 1.0 war, is starting to migrate towards (and buy up) a collection of more loosely coupled web services. This time, there's no war to be won, just a continuous battle to be best of breed in whatever you can. Most importantly, there's always room for a new player since standards (RSS, Atom, OPML) allow the easy migration of user data to the newest shiny object.
And that's what web 2.0 means to me.
--
[1] Actually, it was originally five c's, including commerce and connectivity, but they weren't as popular on the conference circuit. And during AOL's downfall, cost became the sixth c.[2]
[2] I promised myself I would never stoop to footnotes in blog posts, as we all know where that leads. But that digression got too big for parentheses. It won't happen again.
Dagmar passed this link along to me, it's a fun feature on South Park's website I hadn't seen before. Build your own South Park character (it's towards the bottom of the page).
This is me on my morning hike.
Well, it had to happen some time. We have been hoping for as late a start to the rainy season as possible so our construction team could make significant progress on the foundation before stopping for the winter. If they can get far enough along, there's even a chance they won't have to stop.
Hopefully this is one of those early rains that isn't a sign of things to come. We got almost a fifth of an inch in the first hour, not particularly torrential but a lot more than a normal "heavy fog" kind of situation. The weather sites suggest that it's not raining in San Francisco, so maybe this is one of those quick mountain storms that come and go with the morning fog.
Earlier this week on our regular morning hike, Renée and I noticed a pretty bad smell along one particular segment of the trail. I thought it might be an overflowing septic field from some distant neighbor. Pretty rancid and we walked on quickly. A couple of days later, Shadow found what we were smelling and brought us home this deer leg to prove it.
Mountain lions eat as much as they can after killing deer (heart, liver and lungs first), but hide the rest for later. We're not exactly sure where Shadow found the leg but it was in the same vicinity as the bad smell and it's the same general area where we've suspected lion activity. Good to know that the lion is having no problems finding deer to eat.
I bought a trail camera with a motion detector probably a year ago and I guess it's time to finally get around to setting it up.
The other treat from the Web 2.0 conference was Outcast Communications' caricaturist, Rhoda. I think in caricaturist-land, I must rate highly... she was very excited when she first caught a glimpse of me (her exact words were "that nose!"). She made me turn to the side during my sitting, just to get the full benefit of my profile.
I guess it could have been worse. She didn't paint rainbow stripes on my nose or anything.
I had a great dinner tonight at this conference I'm going to. To my right was this nice guy who also makes blog software. I'll have to check it out. On my far left were these other guys, who were having a spirited conversation with Mena about the joys of working in sprawling 5 person company. And in the middle was a wide-eyed guy from middle America and me.
No one stayed for the dessert.
Dear Andrew
Despite a strong finish, your San Francisco Giants were unable to overtake the Padres and are no longer in contention for the Post-Season. The September surge made for some exciting baseball and we thank you for purchasing your Post-Season tickets.
We have not shipped your tickets and subsequently, you will be refunded your full purchase price including handling fees. We will be sending your 2006 renewal invoice in about six weeks so you may wish to have your Post-Season payment credited to your 2006 Season Ticket account.
[snipped out joke about getting a refund]
Thanks for your continued support. We look forward to many Post-Season appearances in the future!
Sincerely,
The San Francisco Giants
