rwandering.net
The blogged wandering of Robert W. Anderson
Archive for Web 2.0
February 10, 2006 at 8:48 am · Filed under Web 2.0
Last night, Dave Winer held the Berkeley Bloggers Dinner #2.
I had a good time and as usual met several new people. At one point, Dave got up and talked a little about his past, his current plans, and asked the group what they wanted to do with these dinners. Meet and eat? Maybe work on a project? I heard later that he hadn’t wanted to get up and talk, but I know that several of us appreciated hearing him give some perspective on why he is arranging these dinners and what he is up to.
In terms of logistics, I think it worked a little better than the last dinner. People were able to move around which is a good thing. The downtown location is good (barring the Cal / Stanford basketball game which affect traffic). The large round tables were a little strange and the karaoke music was a bit loud at times. I dropped enough hints about singing at the karaoke bar, the clearly no one was up for that. 😉
Unfortunately, the attendance was low. Dave had planned in advance with the hotel for a certain number of people to cover a buffet. When people don’t show, someone gets stiffed. We all pitched in more money (at least I hope we all did), but I suspect that Dave got stuck with the balance.
Thanks to Dave for arranging the dinner — I know this is a real value to many people. I hope that the experience with the hotel doesn’t put him off to do more of these. I do think that this dinner was better than last.
Thanks to Tom Conrad for the beer. It is a little known fact that we members of the CTOs of Oakland Startups Club have this understanding about buying the round — I’ll get the next one.
I enjoyed chatting with Enric. Let me know if you want to try out the Digipede Network.
I met Shannon Whitley again. Since meeting him several months ago, he has started blogging. He took exception to some arguments that were made last night regarding technology and change. He may have misunderstood where I was coming from — enterprises cannot throw their investments in the lake; many businesses are five+ years behind the technology curve and that is actually OK.
I enjoyed some banter with Steve Gillmor over Windows, IE, and the Beatles of all things. He is a challenging adversary on the latter topic — he trumps my trivia knowledge considering he actually saw them perform.
And now I’m 3 for 3 in meeting someone who uses FreeBSD at one of these events.
Tags: Blogger_dinner, FreeBSD, Web2.0
February 7, 2006 at 8:02 am · Filed under Web 2.0
Much has already been written on coComment — clearly there is a great pent-up demand for this kind of service.
I decided to try it out. My past approach has been to rely on TalkDigger to go back and look for comments I have posted, though URL search is not as good as an exact list of my conversations.
The way you track your comments with coComment is through a bookmarklet. They have specific ones for the four main browsers. The bookmarklet is supposed to allow you to both track your newly added comments and also add your old comments.
I tried it out in both Firefox and IE7 (and Maxthon, too, which runs on whatever version of IE is installed).
A couple things I noticed so far:
- The bookmarklet doesn’t appear to work properly in IE7 due to a script error. The same may be true of IE6, but I will have to restore my VMs before I can try that out.
- It works fine in Firefox when adding new comments (in both blogger and WordPress); however, I am unable to add my old comments. The FAQ suggests that a dialog box will appear, but it does not. Nothing happens.
It is a cool idea and I will keep evaluating it. I agree with Mike Arrington that including trackbacks would pretty much solve the entire problem of tracking one’s comments (and the responses to those comments); however, this is a great start.
February 4, 2006 at 2:43 pm · Filed under .NET, Web 2.0
I have been working on the Attention recorder for IE 6/7 for the AttentionTrust in my “spare” time. I’m using C++/ATL for this.
I am enjoying working in C++ again (most of my development these days is in C#), but it has brought out to me my personal likes / dislikes about the two languages. I know this post is about 3 or 4 years late, but I wasn’t blogging back when I started with C#.
Things I miss in C++
- Const pointers: The ability to declare that the data referenced by a pointer will be accessed read-only is quite useful. I never liked that this isn’t supported by .NET; though, I understand why it was.
- Macros: This one still gets me. The macro support in C# is nearly non-existent. Why would you want macros? Doesn’t this violate the strong-typedness of the language? Yes, but stringizing and token-pasting is very useful to build maintainable code. I really wish C# supported this.
- copy constructors: Having a default implementation of the copy constructor is quite useful.
What I don’t miss in C++
- Header files: When I used to work in C++ I remember enjoying the distinction between the declaration and the implementation of classes and methods; however, now I just feel like it is an annoyance. The C# approach of leaving this up to the tools is much easier.
- NULL: Back when true and false were added to C++ as language elements, I wished that null had been added too.
- global scope: At first I didn’t like that C# has no global scope (outside of classes), but now I look at C++ and don’t like that I have to put methods that are clearly associated with a class implementation, but static, outside of the definition of the class. Certainly this can be handled with namespaces, but that doesn’t quite do it.
Of course, I much prefer the richness of the .NET Framework to the hodge-podge of class libraries required in C++ to do anything modern: ATL / MFC or WTL / MSXML, etc, . . . I also prefer the overall environment of garbage collection and pointer-safety delivered by a managed environment.
Tags: .NET, Attention, c#, IE, Web2.0
February 2, 2006 at 8:00 am · Filed under .NET, Web 2.0
Yesterday, Dan and I heard a talk from John deVadoss, Director Architecture Strategy at Microsoft. He delivered the Wednesday Software Architecture Summit keynote titled SA Summit Keynote: Software Architecture on the Edge: Moving Beyond SOA.
John presented the fundamentals of SOA and of Web 2.0 as the basic architectural styles of the enterprise and the consumer space, respectively. He called both of these “edge” architectures. The purpose of his talk was to show some nascent work from Microsoft on how to connect these two different architectural styles.
One of the points he made is that SOA has tended to shift away from the user-centric approaches of previous rounds of enterprise architectures. Of course, Web 2.0 has shifted more towards user-centric approaches than even previous Web architectural styles. Fundamentally, he argues, moving away from the user is a bad thing and the ideas of Web 2.0 can be used to bring SOA back to the users. I certainly agree with him on this point.
So, how do these two come together? John showed an interesting mapping between the fundamentals of these two architectural styles. Interesting, yes, but practical? Right now, no. But that is OK. Clearly this talk was intended to present these ideas to stimulate conversation and dialogue with the community.
It is great to see Microsoft working harder to engage with the developer and software architect communities.
I plan to closely watch how John and his group proceed on this topic — I am very interested in how Microsoft approaches Web 2.0 on every front.
Update: fixed capitalization of deVadoss — interesting business card, name and title are all lowercase.
January 27, 2006 at 9:16 am · Filed under Web 2.0
And a thanks to Dave Winer for organizing the event. Sorry to say, I still haven’t met the man. Had a good time at the dinner last night — met many interesting people:
- Scott Mace: working on the swamp of calendar formats so we can actually have shared calendars that work.
- Scott Rosenberg: look for his coming book (in November) on the Chandler product.
- Sylvia Paull: talked about what to blog and what not to blog; what to look forward to as a parent; and about nerdliness.
- Jay Cross: talked about all sorts of things . . . he pointed out that Vista is going to be a bonanza for training companies.
- Steve Hill: has a cool idea for geographically distributed events.
- Edward Piou: cool to talk to a FreeBSD user for a change. FreeBSD rocks!
And a shout out to the enigmatic Dr. Chadblog (aka Chad Williams) — didn’t get a chance to talk this time.
Tags: Blogger_dinner, FreeBSD, Vista, Web2.0
January 18, 2006 at 1:48 pm · Filed under Miscellaneous, Web 2.0
In a picture here, you can see a part of AT&Ts new ad campaign.
Reading through the comments, some bloggers seem to like it. Others don’t. Robert Scoble humorously suggests that blogging has jumped the shark. Tara Hunt says to AT&T, kiss my RSS.
Outside of my office is a “Close friends delivered” billboard. Aren’t they just saying that they provide connectivity?
The way I see it, if this is the “Year of RSS” it must also be the year of blogging which implies more silly ads by the big companies.
At least now your grandmother might ask you what a blog is.
P.S.: It seems there is no consensus that this is the year of RSS. Maybe it was last year and the year of the blog was the year before that, I don’t know. Anyway, it sure is hitting mainstream now. Heck, I’m even doing it 😉
December 17, 2005 at 9:05 pm · Filed under Miscellaneous, Web 2.0
I have posted several times about the Microsoft / Google debate, making the point that the trust / faith people give to Google is beginning to wane. The news in the NYT about the AOL / Google agreement brings me back to this same point.
Like many, I am surprised at the deal Google struck with Time Warner for AOL. It isn’t the $1 Billion for 5% of AOL. That seems like a lot, but hey, they print money at the “plex”, don’t they?
But, preferential placement for AOL content throughout the Google services?
What?
One of the things that got people to trust Google in the first place was their stance on preferential treatment. So Google search users will get directed to AOL content instead of more-relevant content? John Batelle reports that (essentially) sponsored AOL links won’t be marked as such. (For those who don’t subscribe to the NYT, Nicholas Carr excerpts some of the article).
Google taught us that sponsored links should be marked; and so, have trained us to trust them. With AOL, they will violate this trust — go against what they have trained us to believe.
So, can we trust Google search if the AOL deal is consummated?
Can we trust it now?
Tags: aol, Google, Web2.0
December 1, 2005 at 7:39 am · Filed under .NET, Web 2.0
In his post, Off to go to Dublin, Disconnects between Blogosphere and Real World, Robert Scoble asks if there are disconnects between blogs and the real world.
He cites as an example the outpouring of enthusiasm for the Visual Studio / SQL Server / Biztalk launches and the lack of blogging about these products. I know I did it (VS drink menu, anyone?).
But Robert, there are easily hundreds of bloggers that have hyped up these launch events and blog about these products every single day.
Maybe these don’t appear on the general blogger “radar” because the vast majority of these Microsoft-focused bloggers are not tagging nor are they really interacting with the Web 2.0 blogosphere.
If I am right, Robert could do a great service to Microsoft and its Web 2.0 push by helping to better integrate the vast Microsoft blogging community with the rest of the blogosphere. For example, there are several siloed Microsoft-enthusiast blogger communities. Wouldn’t it be cool if those sites made it easy (or automatic) for their users to tag their blogs with Technorati tags? Couldn’t this increase the awareness of the general blogosphere about Microsoft and all their cool development tools?
Robert, what you think?
Tags: .NET, blog, Microsoft, Web2.0
November 23, 2005 at 10:55 pm · Filed under Miscellaneous, Web 2.0
Steve Gillmor posts provocatively about attention, standards, timing, and Office, in Time is on our side.
I posted before that the work that the AttentionTrust is doing is very interesting with powerful connotations.
One valuable, pragmatic, insightful (and inciteful) thing they’ve done is to put together a way to track attention without standards bodies. Sure, those can come along, but nothing revolutionary happens through standards bodies. First you show it is interesting by doing real work (e.g., the AttentionTrust Extension, ATX; or ROOT Markets). Then let the interested (and threatened) get involved. Even in this case, the first format for attention data will soon be superceded by OPML.
I do want to point out, though, that I wasn’t slamming Steve for saying office is dead, exactly. It was I who brought up Office at the TechCrunch party. I was trying to poke fun at Steve about Office “already being dead”. This came from our earlier argument at the Berkeley Geek Dinner. He has been arguing this and Robert Scoble refutes it. I think what it comes down to is that Steve is saying that Office is dead (see Office Dead) meaning that the writing is on the wall for Office. I don’t think he isn’t saying people won’t upgrade to Office 12 (though he probably doubts that the numbers are significant); however, I see plenty of sales and opportunities for Office for both Microsoft and ISVs regardless of the Office Live strategy. In the mid+ enterprise.
Anyway, I think that Steve’s post supports that he views time differently then many. For example:
. . .when someone tells you how long something is going to take to make a difference, divide by 10. 10 years, 1 year. 5 years, 6 months. A year, a month and a half.
Most of us think in opposite terms: we tend to under-estimate how long something will take to make an impact. And I think the difference is, again, that Steve is talking about the implication of the “something” versus the practical, mass adoption of that “something” (or irrelevance of the alternative). I’ll leave that to him to refute, agree, or ignore.
And, I wish I hadn’t brought up Office, because we were having a much more interesting discussion about attention . . .
Tags: Attention, office, office12, Web2.0
November 20, 2005 at 8:46 am · Filed under .NET, Web 2.0
One thing striking at Web 2.0 events is the absence of people using Microsoft software development tools. Of course, that isn’t news. Many of these startup companies go for the free tools and steer away from Microsoft. When we were starting out, we signed up for the Microsoft Empower program for startups. It is essentially free and provides all the Microsoft development tools. I suspect Microsoft needs to promote this program more. Free Express versions help, but it is too early to tell what the impact will be.
At the TechCrunch / Riya party, I did hear only one thing that made me bridle:
On the way to the ePlatform demo, we walked into the end of a Podcast of John Furrier of Podtech.net interviewing a fellow podcaster. She was pushing her site (I won’t mention it here). She said something like:
We are all buzz-word compliant. (list of terms), anti-Microsoft, (more terms) etc.
So “anti-Microsoft” is now a buzz word? It isn’t enough to be Java or Ruby on Rails or PHP or pro-Google or Sun, etc? Not liking Microsoft is one thing, but encapsulating that dislike into a buzz word is too simplistic for me. It is just another way people put blinders on isolating themselves and narrowing their view.
It isn’t about the hardware, software, OS, development tools . . . it is about what you create with them.
IMHO.
Update: I think I’m still not being clear on this: I would also bridle at “anti-Google” or “anti-Java” as attaining buzz-word status. It is just to cliqueish for me — am I alone on this?
Tags: .NET, Microsoft, Web2.0
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