Eliot Blogs!

Finally - Eliot has a blog! Dr. Macro's XML Rants

I worked with Eliot several years ago (at DataChannel) and enjoyed every minute of it.

More SOAP apologetics

In "Don Box on Pragmatism and Web Services", Dare quotes Don being pragmatic about when and where to SOAP

Some of the decisions [...] are simple business decisions that are determined by who your target audience is.
1. If you want a great experience for .NET/Java devs, you’ll typically publish schemas (through wsdl) and support SOAP.

Hmm, "business", "audience" and then "developer" just don't flow for me. The market for true Web applications are users, not developers. Developers using early binding procedural languages will be a shrinking market - not a growing market. Those who build for themselves are the new 'developers'.

Listings from the edge

This article by Rob Hof about Edgeio is interesting - the vision of decentralized listings is a strong one, and very exciting.

Although Teare's demo was on blogs, that doesn't appear to be the only target. He says this will work for single items on blogs all the way to millions of items from Web stores like Amazon. He contends that RSS feeds reduce the usefulness of centralized repositories of information--most big Web sites today, in other words. "EBays and Craigslists become unnecessary and the tolls they charge become unreasonable," he says.

Well, it looks like Edgeio is a centralized system, but built from de-centralized data that is also directly available. Sort of like syndicated listings.

100songs

I've started another blog - not much related to Amazon or Web technology - called
100songs. Since I have a mini ipod and buying music online is easy (and getting easier month by month) and I had a $100 gift certificate from Christmas, I thought I'd buy one song a week and write about it. Feel free to drop by and make suggestions.

Windows Live beta agreement - cost of shipping?

I'm checking out the Windows Live email beta, and their license agreement is of course scary, but this really was intriguing:

3. COST OF TESTING. There is no charge to Recipient for testing of the Product. Microsoft shall bear all direct freight expenses relating to the shipment of the Product to Recipient’s place of business and Recipient will pay any return freight expenses.

They unfortunately don't specify how I can initiate the shipping of Hotmail to my place of business - and I'm not sure Amazon would appreciate it even if they did.

France July 2005

France July 2005 324
Originally uploaded by dierken.

Last year we traveled to Europe and spent a week in the South of France. July was hot, dry and we loved it there. This is a photo just outside the apartment we were staying in. It's on the edge of the village of Le Garde Freinet.

A link is not a widget - part II

From Kevin Burton's blog:

Take Microsoft's Live.com for example. At the Syndicate conference I was nice and pointed out a few bugs to the Microsoft team. They fixed them by making them worse and just plain inaccessible.

They're not links. They're fake ajax 'on click' handlers which trap both the left and right mouse buttons. The Live.com team tricks the user and makes them look like links when in fact they're not.

As I've said before "a link is not a widget".

Great quote:

Live.com is one of those products you won't use but it's still annoying to know that it exists.

Fuck Christmas

Oh, this is good... very good...

From Fuck Christmas:

Can we back up just a couple steps here? At what point did a basic understanding of the separation of church and state become a fucking war on religion? And how did we get to the point where you can call an organization set up to defend our civil liberties Terrorists on national television and no one fires your ass? Enough. Fuck all of you lying little shitheads who wish the world was out to get you so you could play the poor oppressed victims. Wake up assholes, you're the cowboys, not the fucking Indians.

UDDI - say bye bye

Huh, this took longer than I thought.
IBM UDDI Business Registry: Shutdown FAQ

Leveraging the Web: Caching

From Mark Nottingham - a nice success story about building on the Web, rather than along-side of it.
mnot?s Web log: Leveraging the Web: Caching

ahah - So that's how it's done

The microformats.org wiki has a discussion about AHAH (Asychronous HTML and HTTP) that describes an interesting approach to building dynamic pages - but I can't help wondering why the browser developers (like the WHAT-WG) just don't implement client-side includes? Something simple like <div src="latest.html" /> This avoids the need for client side script and ensures the browser can correctly manage connections, caching, authentication, etc.

Pricing Rules

How very interesting. I hadn't thought about price in this light before.

From Joel on Software

The answer is that pricing sends a signal. People have come to believe that “you get what you pay for.” If you lowered the price of a movie, people would immediately infer from the low price that it's a crappy movie and they wouldn't go see it. If you had different prices for movies, the $4 movies would have a lot less customers than they get anyway. The entertainment industry has to maintain a straight face and tell you that Gigli or Battlefield Earth are every bit as valuable as Wedding Crashers or Star Wars or nobody will go see them.

Now, the reason the music recording industry wants different prices has nothing to do with making a premium on the best songs. What they really want is a system they can manipulate to send signals about what songs are worth, and thus what songs you should buy. I assure you that when really bad songs come out, as long as they're new and the recording industry wants to promote those songs, they'll charge the full $2.49 or whatever it is to send a fake signal that the songs are better than they really are. It's the same reason we've had to put up with crappy radio for the last few decades: the music industry promotes what they want to promote, whether it's good or bad, and the main reason they want to promote something is because that's a bargaining chip they can use in their negotiations with artists.

And Apple? Apple wants the signaling to come from what they promote on the front page of the iTunes Music Store. In the battle between Apple and the recording industry over who gets to manipulate what songs you buy, Apple (like movie theaters) is going to be in favor of fixed prices, while the recording industry is going to want variable prices.

A link is not a widget

Oh, this is so wrong...
Ruby on Rails makes it easy to "do a link via post" : see
Ajaxian: Ruby on Rails uses Ajax to simulate POST links.

This hack is purely to make a button in the user interface not look like a button. The problem is that most of the operations this is intended to be used with are 'remove' or 'delete' type of operations - actions that a user really really should know about ahead of time. More than once I've seen a link for "delete this picture" - just clicking causes the data to go away (Flickr is guilty of this). While I sympathize with a page designer trying for a spartan look and feel, it is important to realize that a link is not a widget. This breaks the explore-ability of Web applications and exposes destructive operations to utilities and tools that pre-fetch data - links should cause no harm.

To really get the job done, Web designers should do the work to define the CSS necessary for a form to fit within their design. Keep links safe - just say no to 'links via post'.

Amazon Mechanical Turk - Recognizing US Government in Seattle

The Amazon Mechanical Turk is a cool system (a friend works on it). So I went through to see what it looks like.
One customer is A9 - they have visual Yellow Pages and need the community to vote on the best image among several for business storefronts.

I was suprised that my third HIT was a request to pick the best picture for "US Government Seattle". My choices were either a collosal two layer cement highway section, surrounded by rubble or a tree. I chose the tree.
US Government in Seattle, according to A9

The Boy Who Heard Music

So, Pete Townshend is writing science fiction - a dystopian saga with disturbing scenes and juxtapositions. The Boy Who Heard Music

South Park über Alles

I just found the South Park Studio - create SouthPark avatars of yourself and cow-orkers. Just perfect...

Steve Gillmor, Microsoft and Attention

Historically, I've assumed Steve Gillmor is just doing poorly at self-medicating himself, but recently I dredged up the coherent flotsam and jetsam out of his stream of consciousness labeled as 'articles'. His recent post about the Attention Bunny provided a succint summary of what he believes the coming Attention Economy is all about:

The key to this reboot is the understanding that page rank, and the fundamental search methodology of people looking for information, is about to be flipped on its head to a new model where the information is provided gestures of intention that allow it to target the user.

In my words - "You don't find the information, the information finds you". The difference between 'subscription' and 'attention' is the difference between boolean logic and fuzzy logic - one is a discrete 'subscribed or not subscribed' the other is a summarization over many events that signify interest in a subject or topic. Basically, pub/sub on acid. (You heard it here first...)


This is also interesting, in an 'opportunity' sense (emphasis added):

Gestures that span multiple engines and transports (AIM, GTalk, Skype IM, and Yahoo; Bloglines, Rojo, MyYahoo, Google Reader, Vista; the coming round of calendar gadgets; etc.) will inherently become more trustworthy as signals of interest than gamed links, walled garden cross and up-sells, and attempts at supplying authoritative information from incumbent publishers who can't or won't intermingle content from their competitors.

Google Base == Amazon Simple Queue Service++ ?

Hmm, this is interesting.

Dare Obasanjo aka Carnage4Life - Google Base == Amazon Simple Queue Service++ ?:

I'm still unclear as to why this is an interesting idea although I'm sure some clever geek will find some way to build something cool with it. I also wonder if this will spur Amazon into doing more interesting things with their service as well.

Well, one 'suggestion' from Google sounds suspiciously like Craigslist - "Listing of your used car for sale". As for spuring Amazon into doing more interesting things... hmm.

Information is no longer a scarce resource - attention is.

This is a pretty interesting piece from NYT - not ground breaking, we all know that we are more interrupt driven every day, but seeing it put into context is eye opening.

And of course, the obligatory quote:
Meet the Life Hackers - New York Times:

Information is no longer a scarce resource - attention is.

Intermind Communicator - Back to the Future

And I thought 1998 was a good year - this is an article from Oct 1996 issue of Tidbits about the now defunct
Intermind Communicator product (which really opened my eyes to the possibilities of the Web):

Intermind Communicator relies on the Web for transport and display, but builds in the active part of email, changing the dynamic of the communication process. Let me give an example of how this will work with TidBITS, since TidBITS is also being published via Intermind Communicator, using what Intermind calls a 'hyperconnector,' a small file that contains information about the item being published, including publication name, description, polling frequency, and so on.

First off, you install Intermind Communicator, which runs on your computer and uses a Web browser as its interface. If you want to receive TidBITS via Intermind Communicator, you subscribe to our hyperconnector, which is a matter of following a Web link to download the hyperconnector file and automatically add it to your Intermind Communicator database. Once that's done, Intermind Communicator reads the contents of the TidBITS hyperconnector and checks our Web server for updates once each day.
[...]
At its base, it's a database combined with a Web server that only works for a Web browser on the same machine.

The cool thing about Intermind Communicator - which sunk many years ago - is that it was an HTTP server on the desktop. Just like Google Desktop Search is today. And UPnP in Windows. And so on...

(But they don't have the cool 90's icon of Intermind...)