Monday, May 17, 2004
I know most people think I'm some weirdo has-been - hasn't done shit in 15 years - kind of loudmouth.
So you can just imagine how hard it is for me - to stay optimistic, forward looking and open.
So it's REAL NICE to have something tangible out there which I can proudly point to and say "there's a there there now".
Here's Ross Rader's perspective......
Marc has been a busy boy as well...
"What was I doing at E3? What does digital lifestyle aggregation have to do with videogames - you ask? Where's the money for blogging and social networking? And my favorite question: "what's a DLA (digital lifestyle aggregator)?"
Well sports fans - we can now say "there's a there there." Well not completely there, and not necessarily running and up all the time, but that's life. We got 1M hits on Weds alone - and our poor servers are still sniffling.
We're doing lots of new stuff with 1UP.com - which I'll be highlighting and talking about over the next few months."
This is starting to look really hot and more importantly, its starting to flesh out some of those whacky charts and diagrams that Marc loves so much. Its so much easier to get it when you can touch it.
[Random Bytes]Coming soon to a T-shirt near you: trailers for "I, Robot," starring Will Smith. In the never-ending search to capture the attention of consumers bombarded by commercials, billboards and a massive array of other advertisements, 20th Century Fox debuted an innovative new guerilla marketing tactic at E3 last week -- T-shirts embedded with video screens that played "I, Robot" trailers.
The two women who wore the video T-shirts as they walked around E3 drew crowds and TV news crews on hand to cover the gaming conference at the Los Angeles Convention Center. 20th Century Fox is the first studio -- or business of any kind -- to use the video T-shirt marketing tactic developed by San Francisco-based Brand Marketers.
Link (Thanks, Jeff; photo by Kurt Rogers of the SF Chronicle, Link to SF Chron story) [Boing Boing]
This totally reminds me of Tele-Tubies.
I watch Tele-Tubbies almost every day (Mimi calls them LaLa - after one of the characters.) Oh and Elmo too!
Marc Canter regrets that the company he founded, Macromedia, left the service business. [Scripting News]
In the early days of MacroMind - my partner Stuart Sharpe and I came up with a way to stay alive. We started creating these animated marketing disks (on floppy in those days) which would loop in computer stores. The retailers loved them and soon enough Microsoft, Lotus, Ashton-Tate, Novell - everyone had to have one.
It was one of the things that made the Mac look better than PCs. And we could produce them fairly cheaply - something like $30k-$50k per.
Well needless to say when "professional" management and investors came along the FIRST thing they said was "get out of that business, you're competing with your customers."
Man oh man - do I regret that decision. We could have become a $200M company by 1990, never needing to merge in Paracomp or Authorware and I wouldn't have then been kicked out by those same VCs.
Since all they care about is money - they wanted and needed an IPO - but we didn't have enough cash flow yet. So they merged in these related comapnies, which turned out to add ZERO cash flow, and just diluted me down to almost nothing.
God bless the VCs. May they turn Friendster into - nothing.
Just while my plane was taking off from the Trieste airport I did notice some stormy clouds approaching, but only when I landed at Stansted airport I learned that a thunderbolt had struck our office. We lost:
- adsl router
- ethernet hub
- ethernet cable (!)
- the motherboard of a Mac Cube
This created more than a little disruption, and it took quite some time and efforts to my partners Monica, Simone and Fabrizio to bring the company back on-line while I was partying in London. Everything is working again now. Great work.
[Paolo Valdemarin: Paolo's Weblog]
Whew! Thanks god it wasn't our Radio servers that got fried!
Paolo is the person who hosts my Radio blog tool. That why my address ends with an .it
I can't wait to get over to Italy and see Paolo and Monica's new house.
Wow - UserLand plans open-source release of Frontier kernel. The kernel includes things like the UserTalk script interpreter, all the UserTalk builtin functions, the Frontier ODB and the Frontier web server.
I don't expect that it will gather as many developers as the big open source scripting languages, but it would be a worthy addition to the community. It used to be cutting-edge, and the system still has a bunch of great ideas, despite having been surpassed in various areas (speed, reliability, debuggability, popularity) by other competitors. Enough to be worth saving, for sure.
Just off the top of my head, I can think of some interesting projects to do with the Frontier source:
- remove the dependency on the GUI, so it could be run as a Windows service on NT/2K/XP (as modern server software does).
- once that's done, a UNIX port might not be so hard. Presumably it's fairly portable already, as right now it runs on two different versions of Mac OS as well as Windows.
- perhaps after those two, or perhaps first, someone could rip out UserTalk and make a standalone interpreter, so you can use it the way you might use Perl or Python at the moment.
- this is a bit of a long shot, but if you could make the UserTalk interpreter support the Python module API or something similar, a whole bunch of open source libraries (DB access, etc) would suddenly be within reach.
Anyway, that's all for now. Announcements of open-source releases usually precede the actual releases by quite a while, so don't hold your breath. When this release actually happens, though, it will be a lot of fun :-)
OK - I'll say it.
Dave Winer and Frontier were my main introductions to the web, CMS, webapps, personal publishing and open standards. Without Dave - I wouldn't be sitting here today.
I can remember Dave telling me about this guy Eric Raymond - and his Cathedral white paper. It really pissed off Dave. He had made his Frontier tool available - for free - in the early 90's and had had direct experience in dealing with people expecting a whole lot for free. Yet Dave knew that by having a strong developer community behind him - that's all that mattered.
So Dave spent a few years trying to figure this all out. He then made the decision that he HAD to charge for Frontier - or else he'd never get corporate uptake. This is just as Linux and all the open source stuff was starting.
So now jump to years later. Frontier is finally open source - but it's too late. Php and python came along, Zope, Drupal - all sorts of stuff that does exactly what Frontier and..... well let me correct myself - not EXACTLY what Frontier does - as it STILL is a revolutionary IDE - as the integrated outliner makes o-o programming actually culpable.
But there are still problems with Frontier - memory leaks aside. And it sure seems like it's five years too late. That doesn't mean folks should'nt use it. My buddy Paolo uses it for his eVectors knowledge management stuff. Radio is built on top of Friontier and gives unprecedented extensibility that I'm sure many a MT user wishes they had.
I spent years pitching Frontier as the backend solution to our front-end needs. Most people would look at me and say Huh? But I'm proud of Dave and Frontier and I hope that LOTS of college kids give it a try!
| Why I'm weepy |
This issue has had me on the verge of tears for days. And sometimes I've gone over the verge. Why?
The feeling is immediate. I don't have to think myself into it by imaginging that I'd been prevented from marrying my wife for 25 years. The feeling isn't connected to any particular friends who are getting married. Yet it's got a direct line to my heart.
The best I can figure, it's about hope. Here is something I never thought would happen in my lifetime. And it isn't just an issue like legalizing marijuana. This is about a deep cultural prejudice (IMO) against one of the forms love takes. With the bang of a gavel, it's done. A set of people have been embraced by the law and will, I believe, be embraced by our neighborhoods as well.
All that I hope for is finding expression in this one moment of liberation. If gays can marry, who knows what else is possible? What other freedoms might we grant? What other ways might we find to accept love?
I think that's why today I'm crying at the weddings of strangers.
[Joho the Blog]Marc's reply
I spent the 90's learning how to chill. I used to be one of those type-A types who'd make his secretary cry and would yell his way out of every situation.
But I knew the stress was killing me, so I don't act like that anymore.
I remember starting to get pissed off at everything that Jonathan Abrams was, what he stood for, who he was, what he was doing to the Fakesters. But you know what?
I just got up and walked away. "He has every right to be an asshole - but I'm not gonna let it stress me out."
So it gives me warm fuzzies everytime truth and right wins one. What's the sort of person who would try and stop people from getting married to each other? Why would you NOT let us smoke marijuana - which is basically is a weed and what does a lot LESS damage than legalized tobacco and alcohol?
Well - today is an important day in the fight for right and truth. Congradulations everyone on your marriage!
While in London. 
While in London also I met Loïc and Andrew. It was the first time we met: it has been a good meeting.
At the moment there's no business going on between SixApart Europe and Evectors, still we are all working in the blogosphere, we are talking to the same people, often trying to sell products and services to the same customers and we mostly believe in the same things. This is why it makes sense to meet, to exchange ideas, to try as hard as we can to find common grounds and to build something together.
This is an entirely new business, it's worth trying to establish some new rules.
[Paolo Valdemarin: Paolo's Weblog]
Here here.
I think Loic and Paolo should definitely do business together.
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