Thursday, May 27, 2004This just in from Dennis Crowley...
Hey all -
Just a quick update on what's going on at dodgeball.com...
++ dodgeball now up and running in 10 U.S. cities!
Brand new this week: Austin, Chicago, Portland, Seattle and Washington DC! So two weeks ago: New York, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Boston and Philadelphia. Make sure to tell your friends that live in those far away lands to get on board!
++ Turning in for the night?
Hey, sometimes we want to go to bed early too. We've added the ability to stop receiving messages for the evening. Just send the word "off" to us and we'll close you out for the night. Don't worry though, you'll be back in action the next day.
++ "Help, I've cloned my friends!"
We got a bunch of emails from people who somehow ended up with 4 copies of their friends. Weird, but we think we've got it figured out. If this sounds familiar, log in and check out our new "delete friends" tool.
++ What happened to dodgeball last week?
Some of you might have noticed that we were experiencing some problems last week. We're sorry if we weren't there when you needed us most. The good news is we're back better than ever and should be running smoothly from now on.
++ Fresh press!
If you get a chance, check us out in the June issue of Wired and this week's issue of Time magazine. And The New York Times? Who knew?!
http://dodgeball.com/social/wired.php http://dodgeball.com/social/time.php http://dodgeball.com/social/nytimes.php++ See you tonight?
If you're out tonight, take dodgeball with you. Just send a text message to [your city here]@dodgeball.com with the name of the venue you're at (e.g. @Local 138) and we'll ping your friends with your whereabouts and let you know what's going on nearby.
Thanks to everyone for sticking with us and spreading the word. We love you guys.
- The Management
(aka Dens & Alex)
| Five years of Cluetrain |
Giles Turnbull writes in The Guardian on how that Cluetrain stuff worked out now that it's been five years since the site went up. Good article.
I'm always a bit awkward talking about Cluetrain. I think it was basically right about the value of the Net at a time when the media and most businesses were (IMO) insistently wrong. But, for example, the other day at a conference someone very sweetly thanked me, crediting Cluetrain as the inspiration for the company he'd founded. That's great to hear, but it also invokes my Flight or Polite instinct. Cluetrain tried to articulate ideas that were just below the surface (and occasionally above the surface) in the Web community, but now the co-authors sometimes get credit for the ideas.
Also, I don't like reading what I write. That explains why at the end of The Guardian article I'm quoted as saying that I don't remember what was in the book. Of course I don't! Do you think authors sit around rereading their books? My books terrify me because I know they contain wrong ideas and passages that read like sandpaper, yet they're still out there for anyone to read. (And then I read someone like Steve Johnson and think I should just give up entirely. Sigh.)
[Joho the Blog]Humble is as humble does.
Everytime I meet David Weinberger - usually in some hotel of conference center I like him more and more.
If At First..... 
WebSideStory, which first filed four years ago right before the bubble burst, has filed again. The web analytics company just hit profitability after losing money the past few years. It's a great field, but to be honest, this feels a bit rushed to me.[John Battelle's Searchblog]
HHmmmmm - I wonder how these folks compare to Technorati?
Broadcatch. Now wasn't that Fen Labalme idea?
Lucas Gonze has an interesting post on broadcatching with video playlists (On the topic of broadcatching). He points to the Webjay video playlists of Brett Singer: Playlists by webjaybs. According to Lucas:
Since I don't have a television in Montreal, I watched the news last night via his [Brett's] compilation of BBC and NY1 clips. It was embryonic and crude, but also mind blowing.
Mind blowing, indeed ... and the future. [unmediated]
Fantasia Barrino voted 'American Idol' [Salon.com]
They said that over 60M people voted. I wonder how many via SMS?
I know there's not much time - but I deplore the conference advisors and sponsors to NOT make this just like every other day-long symposium you've ever attended. Make it something special, something different, for the children - if for no other reason - to leave them a legacy of innovation.
And mention FOAF! Hopefully by then the FOAFnet will be interopping away.
Social Tools for Enterprises Symposium.
Once upon a time, in a land far, far away…
Actually on 11 May 2004, Matt Mower ‘IM’ed me that he and Paolo Valdemarin (both of evectors and k-collector fame) had been talking about arranging a “Social Networking for Enterprises” event in London.
They were inspired by the fact that both Stowe Boyd and I are going to be in Nice, France to present at the iDate conference on 15-16 July 2004. Stowe and I had both, separately, expressed our individual interests in getting together with our EU cohort for some type of event.
Subsequently, on 18 May 2004, there was an IRC chat with a number of folks—including Matt Mower, Marc Canter, Martin Roell, Ross Mayfield (host of the Social Tools for Enterprises Symposium Socialtext space), Paolo Valdemarin, Lilia Efimova, Lee Bryant, Suw Charman, a number of others, and myself. Since that day—many emails and IM chats later—this event has really begun to take shape. Largely thanks to the un-flagging efforts of Matt Mower. Go Matt!
In London, on 12 July 2004, there will be an “event aimed to be a practical get go for CxO’s in Enterprises as to how social tools & methods can help them with problems like insufficient collaboration, low innovation and unmanaged risk” according to some early thoughts from Matt Mower’s weblog…
Stowe posts a link to the venue information for this London Symposium, scheduled to take place at the Bloomsbury Square Training Centre and which is now being organized by KM Cluster.
More as the date continues to draw nearer… (-:=
Clear Channel Finds Another Way to Abuse Artists: Patents. The company recently bought a patent for recording a CD of a concert immediately after the show. A profitable, artist-empowering industry currently uses the technology, but Clear Channel plans to enforce its patents across and beyond its 130 U.S. venues. [EFF: Mini Links]
OK - so this is a clear opportunity for someone (EFF?) to bus these dam patents.
This one - claiming that you can't record a show and burn a CD - most probably has plenty of prior art/usage on it. You telling me that NO ONE recorded a show and burned it - before this patent was applied for?
I bet not.
I bet there are folks back at the JVC labs in Kamakura who were recording shows and burning CDs as far back as 1984-5. I was in an impromtu show at the JVC labs in 1987 that was then turned into a CD, and they told me they had been doing for a while. When was this patent applied for?
Hey, I got a little sister now!
Doc makes it very clear. I just liked this story so much - I ran it anyway - but alas - it's true - it was fake....
Panning for gold in the bitstream 
| Brian Dear says Michael Moore's "Fahrenheit 9/11," which won the Palme D'Or at Cannes, will be distributed via BitTorrent: |
| In a stunning move, controversial documentary filmmaker Michael Moore announced today that his latest film, "Fahrenheit 9/11", will be released by BitTorrent, the popular peer-to-peer file-sharing network. |
| From Brian's Denounce.com. |
| [Later...] Once again, we need to point out that Denounce is a satire site. Hence the name. Here's the disclaimer, from top right on the index page: |
| Recognized around the world as the best source for completely fictional news and information. |
| When you're not looking for a reliable, accurate site for industry news, there's only one place to go: Denounce. |
| All fake. All the time. |
| Founded in 1980. Eight years before The Onion. Deal with it. |
Do:
Check out the new (v. 2.0) Creative Commons licenses.
Issue a Blogger Pass to your conference (which Tony Perkins is doing again).
Rethink the HTML — whether it works just isn't an issue if it's kept on the Web and out of the mail. (Yeah, yeah, my predilections and biases are showing again. Ideally everyone should have the choice.)
Don't:
Abandon your old Blog*Spot domain!
It will be great to see Denise Howell this summer. I wonder if she'll bring the family?
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