Happy New Years!
Happy New Years! I hope 2008 brings you all joy and happiness. See you in the new year!
From the Britannica
While visiting my parents for the holidays, I pulled down a random volume from their copy of the Encylpædia Britannica. My parents bought the complete set in 1992, and for the next several years The Britannica filled our minds with knowledge of far off places and historical people.
Today, the concept of a printed and bound encyclopedia seems so quaint with the likes of Google and Wikipedia filling our desire for learning. I can consult them everywhere from my computer at home to my iPhone while on the go. However, despite The Britannica’s size and lack of portability, it’s still generally relevant. It’s not like the life and times of King Henry VIII has changed all that much in the past 15 years. But what The Britannica gets wrong, it gets really wrong.
Science, medicine, and technology are areas where the printed Britannica fails completely — their carefully written articles are utterly worthless starting the moment the books are printed. To combat this decay, Britannica sends out an update book of sorts called The Science and Future Yearbook. Our copy arrived at the end of 1992, but even this update rapidly degenerated to garbage in a short period of time.
Consider their article on technology and telecommunications (pages 323-326 in the 1992 edition). The article begins by contemplating the future of fiber optics, and even predicts the difficulties of bringing fiber to the home. What the article calls the “fiber to the curb” problem we would call the “last mile” problem. However it all goes downhill from there when the article decides that fiber to the home really isn’t all that important anyway:
The question arose as to why fiber should be used for local service. After all, if a fiber — theoretically capable of transmitting hundreds of thousands of conversations — was to be used for only a singe conversation, or even two or three conversations, it might not be worth the effort to install it.
The article spends more time worrying about who will pay the utility bills for powering the equipment to convert fiber to copper on a neighborhood level, and then concludes that the only value of running fiber to homes is for television access. Even this, it concludes, may not offer an improvement over traditional coax cable. At no point does the word “Internet” appear.
Of course, the odd thing is that a true futurist would have seen some aspect of the rise of the Internet in 1992. The World Wide Web had been invented three years earlier in 1989 while dial-up services like Prodigy had been around since the mid 1980s. To completely miss the benefit of fiber optics was inexcusable for 1992, and without a doubt this failure demonstrates the fundamental problem with any kind of encyclopedia: Someone, somewhere, knows better than you.
This single truth shows the true value of Wikipedia, despite how many (including Britannica’s editors) claim otherwise. Self proclaimed experts just aren’t good enough, and there are very few fields, especially in science and technology, where a single expert can capture the broadest understanding of both current and future research. Quite honestly, The Britannica screwed up in 1992. Had Wikipedia existed, this article would have been shaped differently.
Let me conclude with another excerpt from later in the article where The Britannica sums up the predictions about cell phone networks:
The next generation of mobile systems was named the personal-communications network. In the PCN, the cells would likely be smaller, the sets smaller and less expensive, and the requirements for handoffs greater because of that diminished cell size. The exact role such a network would play had not yet to be determined. Skeptics doubted that it would have any significant effect on the world of telecommunications. Proponents suggested that sometime after the turn of the century a person would be assigned a telephone number at birth and that the number would remain with the assignee for life — wherever he or she might live.
It’s not a bad prediction in some ways, but like before it completely misses the rise of the mobile Internet or mobile digital media. The rest of the article is no better.
#106
last minute shopping
tosses me to the mad crowds
laziness reward
More Old Photos
Here’s another round of photos that were lost in the great website crash of 2007. This is probably the last round of things I’m bringing back from the dead. The next upload will be all new.
These are from a bunch of different places including New York City, Cornell, Colorado, and the Bay Area. The guy in the sphere is David Blaine in Lincoln Center.
Ad Review - Beyoncé does Amex
American Express has long run some pretty interesting ads, but their theme lately has focused on celebrities and their American Express credit cards. A good example is this ad with film director Wes Anderson.
A few weeks ago, a new ad appeared featuring singer Beyoncé Knowles. At first glance, the ad appears similar to the other ads: a celebrity lives life and extols the virtues of her credit card by example. However this one is a little different.
The problem with most of the Amex ads seen so far is one of celebrity scale. Wes Anderson uses his credit card to rent a helicopter for $15,000. M. Night Shyamalan somehow uses his card to see ghosts and expensive special effects. Shaun White goes on a round-the-world vacation looking for snow. None of these people are using their cards for anything…normal!
The Beyoncé ad is refreshingly different for a number of different reasons, but the biggest is how it portrays the day-to-day routine of Ms. Knowles. Quite simply, she’s busy. She runs a major performance act, travels constantly, has to make frequent decisions, deals with constant adversity, all while trying to stay a good role model for her family. In short, the ad features Beyoncé the busy executive rather than Beyoncé the celebrity.
These days, American Express appeals to a number of market segments, but without a doubt they’re associated with affluence. No other brand carries quite the same cachet, even to the point that Amex has to dream up bigger and better offerings for their most wealthy users. With affluence also comes an association with busy business leaders, and that’s why this particular ad works so well. The people most likely to identify with this ad are not the typical music fans but rather the overworked business travelers who never have time to see Madrid while trying to keep up.
For these people, just like Beyoncé in this ad, American Express does not somehow redefine their professional experience. Instead, the card is a tool that solves problems in a way that other cards just can’t quite match. The impression is simple and powerful: no self-respecting business leader should leave home without their American Express card (catchy slogan…) because it saves time, adds peace of mind, and makes it easier to focus on whatever it is they really do. A+
Thoughts from the Airport
I’m sitting in SAT right now, and now is the perfect time to make random observations about airports:
- Southwest airlines has started lining up people by letter and number. Organizing customers by more than just groups makes sense in their ruthless drive for efficiency. Loading customers onto the airplane is very much a delicate science, but many of the approaches are quite fascinating.
- SAT now features dozens of power stations spread throughout the airport. You can sit down, plug in your laptop and recharge right away.
- My work issued Blackberry does Bluetooth dial-up networking. That means that all I need to do is have it somewhere near my laptop, and I can dial up an Internet connection. I actually think the Blackberry is a rather middling cell phone (the iPhone leaves it in the dust in almost every way but messaging), but this feature is killer.
- Is there a great conspiracy that only a certain variety of restaurants are allowed in airports? It’s an American truth: McDonald’s, Blimpies, Sbarro, and maybe some little local place. Are these the only restaurants operationally capable of sustaining an airport business?
And now my late flight has arrived and is disgorging its passengers. Time to go find my place among the numbered pillars.
Movable Type Now Free - Now What for Six Apart?
As many have reported today and yesterday, Six Apart has open sourced Movable Type, their flagship blogging tool. Adding to this was the news from last week that they sold their LiveJournal property to SUP, a Russian software company. Six Apart purchased LiveJournal just two years ago in 2005 and grew it to be one of the largest blogging platforms on the Internet. Individually, these moves might simply be interesting, but together they seem to indicate rough times ahead for Six Apart.
Without a doubt, Six Apart is strengthening their product portfolio, and in this case their portfolio is TypePad and Vox. Both products, along with LiveJournal, are part of the hosted blogging market where a company (like Six Apart) manages the blog systems in a transparent fashion for customers. In the case of TypePad, customers pay a monthy fee for their blog, while LiveJournal and Vox are free. Hosted blogs are popular because customers who lack technical sophistication (most of the market) can get online quickly and without a steep learning curve.
Movable Type, on the other hand, is unhosted. Customers purchase the software from Six Apart and then download and install it on their own servers. By open sourcing Movable Type, Six Apart has decided to give away the software for free. Ironically, by not taking this step in 2004, Six Apart lost the broader unhosted blogging market to WordPress and other open source tools while simultaneously making it harder for them to be taken seriously in the hosted market as well.
To understand what happened, we have to go back in time a bit to when invading Iraq was still the hip thing all the cool countries did and John Kerry was someone people took seriously — a time called early 2004. Movable Type was the unhosted blogging platform and its control over the market was nearly absolute. Movable Type was not the first blogging platform, but it was arguably the best. Of course “best” wasn’t all that great as this Kuro5hin post so effectively pointed out, but Movable Type’s legions of loyal followers were rabidly excited about blogging as the next great form of online media.
This all came tumbling down when Six Apart made the decision to no longer offer Movable Type for free when they released version 3.0. Suddenly thousands of bloggers were forced to pay for the platform they had been using to pontificate on the web — a place where nobody in their right mind pays for anything. Some ponied up, but the true mind share for Movable Type vanished overnight. And what upstart open source blogging tool was standing by, ready to accept these lost weary bloggers? Why WordPress, of course.
WordPress now has an enormous ecosystem of users and developers (many of them disgruntled former Movable Type users), and no question exists that it is one of the most sophisticated blogging platforms available. Movable Type is still popular in the enterprise space, but in truth there is only one serious Movable Type customer in the world: Six Apart. The largest Movable Type blog in the world is TypePad, and TypePad is the key to both Movable Type and LiveJournal.
With any technology company in Silicon Valley that’s both successful and still private, all one has to do is follow the money — the VC money. All VCs want a return on their investments, and that means their portfolio companies must “exit” by being bought or IPOd. Six Apart is no exception with investors like August Capital, Intel Capital, and Focus Ventures. Between their Series B round in 2004 and their Series C round in 2006, Six Apart has raised at least $22 million.
VCs always want their money back, and activity like this suggests that Six Apart is prepping for an eventual sale. TypePad is likely profitable given that it has large numbers of paying customers, and because Six Apart built Vox from the ground up it’s likely making money as well. LiveJournal, on the other hand, was supposed to receive a new advertising platform a year ago, but it probably didn’t make a dime and was likely an under performing asset. The capital from selling LiveJournal will almost certainly fund much more profitable projects for Six Apart and TypePad.
That leaves Movable Type. Six Apart must certainly be feeling the pressure from WordPress and other free competition. Not only is WordPress a strong unhosted product, the people behind it founded their own company called Automattic to provide hosted WordPress blogs at wordpress.com. Right now, they have almost 2 million blogs, all using WordPress as a platform. Automattic just took a $50 million funding round and apparently turned down a $200 million buyout offer not long ago.
To keep the TypePad ecosystem strong, Six Apart must start replicating the kind of success Automattic is having with WordPress. That means cultivating a strong ecosystem of developers to create innovative and useful plugins and other tools for Movable Type — software that can be used to strengthen TypePad as a platform. This won’t be easy because a happy WordPress user is not likely to switch platforms (most bloggers started writing after 2004 and have known no other platform besides Wordpress).
However, Six Apart practically invented the idea of blogging software ecosystems, and Movable Type had a thriving community of plugin developers long before WordPress became popular. For Six Apart, the key must now be to reclaim some of that lost community interest and regain their footing. This time it won’t be so easy.
And We’re Back!
Hello everyone! Welcome back to my fancy new and improved website. After far too much downtime, I have rebuilt and recovered. This is my new home on the web. Quite a bit has changed both online and offline, so let’s take it all one at a time.
New Site
First of all, I hope you like the new look and feel of the site. I would claim credit for all of it, but sadly I can’t. The theme you see in front of you is a highly edited version of Envy by WPDesigner. I have long enjoyed their themes and it’s a great site for some seriously nice Wordpress design. Let me add, editing a theme, especially one with lots of images (all those curvy things you see are images) takes a long time. But it was worth it, and I think this now reflects my preferences.
As I mentioned above, I am now on Wordpress. After many years of using Textpattern, I have decided to make the transition. Wordpress has matured as a platform, and while many of my objections about it remain, there’s no denying that it has claimed the mind share of more developers and users on the Internet than just about any other blogging platform. I would continue to use Textpattern, but it just doesn’t quite match up with my needs anymore.
The old web content is still around, however I have only reimported the haikus. My guess is that this is the only part anyone truly missed (if you missed anything to being with). This brings me to my next new feature: a poll! Wordpress has a plugin for doing online polls, so I can now ask:
Should I reimport my other old posts?
- Yes, I miss your rants. (67%, 2 Votes)
- No, please move on. (33%, 1 Votes)
Total Voters: 3
Loading …Other new features include new photo gallery support. You can see an example of that in this post here. What this means, however, is that I’ve dropped using the Gallery photo management program. I never liked having a separate tool to archive my photos to begin with, so I’m hoping I will enjoy keeping them all one one page. Less clicking.
Sadly, the great data loss of 2007 resulted in me losing my photo galleries. That’s not a problem because I have backups of all my photos, but I need to bring them back piece by piece. I’ll be doing that over time in a series of photo posts bringing back some of my favorites. If there’s one you would like, please let me know.
From a comments point of view, writing and then editing your comments after the fact should now be a lot easier. You should now be able to preview your comments instantly, and then correct them if you’ve made a mistake. Additionally, I’ve added OpenID support. That means that if you use an OpenID system (like LiveJournal), you can authenticate and post your comments directly. No waiting for my approval (although if it becomes spammy, I’ll have to turn that off). For LiveJournal people, authentication is as simple as putting your LJ URL in the web address blank. If you’re johndoe on LiveJournal, just put johndoe.livejournal.com in the blank and then give LiveJournal your username and password when asked. Of course, if you don’t have an OpenID, that’s no problem. Just post like normal.
There are all kinds of other things hidden here at and about. The Contact page now lets you IM me from the web while each post now has some additional tools that allow you to either bookmark things you like or find related content on other blogs (that’s the Sphere link you’ll periodically see). Also, if you quote me elsewhere, you can now use a trackback link (and I can trackback to others as well).
Offline
So where am I in life since August? Well, I have now moved to San Antonio where I am product managing at a fantastic company called Rackspace. They are an absolutely outstanding Internet hosting company that specializes in premium customer service. As a result, they have tremendously loyal customers and a great reputation. Product Management is excellent fun and exactly what I wanted to do after getting my MBA. Getting to do that at a company that is strategically strong (kicking ass), full of great people (about 1,800 employees), and an industry leader is a real treat. To say the least, I’m enjoying my work.
Misc FAQ
So I’m sure you have lots of questions, so here’s an abbreviated FAQ of questions that have not yet been frequently asked:
Wait, where are the haikus?
Look here.
Are you writing more haikus?
Yes. When I feel like it.
And the photos?
More to be coming shortly. Leave a comment if you want something in particular.
I have another email address for you than the one listed on your Contact page. Should I change?
I actively check the address listed on the Contact page as well as my Gmail address, my Cornell alumni address, and my Rice alumni address. If you have another address, please update.
How do I get a link on your “Friends” list on the right? or I’m not your “Friend.” Take me down!
Just leave a comment.
Nothing works in my browser!
If you’re using IE6, I’m truly sorry but I just don’t care. Please do what Windows has undoubtedly been telling you to do for the past nine months and upgrade to IE7. It still sucks, but it at least sucks in a less ridiculous way. Or, just download Firefox and be happy. To be honest, this website looks the best in Firefox and Safari and OK in IE7. (Why IE7 insists on rendering 1 pixel high divs as something like 3 or 4 pixels, I have no idea.)
If you’re not using IE6, leave a comment or email me.
What’s Sphere?
Sphere is a nifty tool that helps you find related content on the Internet. Clicking it will open a little box that will show you other blogs with similar content. I have no idea how useful that is, so please let me know what you think.
What happened to your old site?
My hosting company (not Rackspace) had a disk meltdown that somehow affected both my server and the backups. I’m at a loss as to how that could have happened, but it did. My data was salvaged only because I had a reasonably recent copy of my blog database stashed elsewhere. The other things, like my photo gallery and the images I used on my site, were lost.
Who hosted you?
Email me (or use the cool IM thingy here) and I’ll tell you.
Old Photos, Pt. 1
Here are some of my favorite photos from my old site. More will come as I get around to posting them. These are mostly from the Bay Area (Monterey, San Francisco, and Big Sur). The fall color photo with the steps and both snow pictures were taken in Ithaca.
