BizSpeak for the geek
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Back in the go-go â90s, business meetings were awhirl with arcane buzzwords clearly inspired by last-minute visits to Dack.comâs Web Economy B.S. Generator. IT workers were often left to raise a brow and wonder just how much commitment was required to feel fulfilled in a virtual partnership.
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You&#39;d better hope your computer doesn&#39;t break down today. There&#39;s a good bet nobody will be around to fix it. That&#39;s because every self-respecting geek with $10 and a pulse will be queuing
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Eleven days ago I wrote a blog post describing a call-in service that I'd like to use to create a podcast with my friend and fellow blogger Robert Scoble. A new service (or one that I just became aware of) comes achingly close to doing what I want. Maybe it goes all the way there, but I've not seen how to do it. First, here's how it works. 1. Call 646-495-9201 x 49763. 2. Talk. 3. Hangup. There will be a new recording here.  http://drop.io/tradesecrets  Looks good!  But there are two problems. 1. The RSS feed doesn't have an enclosure, and even if you were willing to scrape the HTML there's no pointer to an MP3 file. 2. There's no pointer to an MP3 file on the landing page, although there appears to be one if you don't look at the HTML source. Tricky. It was enough to get Mike Arrington at Techcrunch to think it was there. I have a call into Mike to discuss. A caveat, I am also in touch with the folks at BlogTalkRadio. I want this service, and we're close to having it now. drop.io doesn't go quite far enough, they clearly want to drive traffic to their site, and appear unwilling to let the MP3 out into the wild. Interesting stuff!!  Update: I did a podcast with Robert and Patrick Scoble using drop.io. I was able to download the MP3, although it pretty well hidden, and upload it to my S3 account.
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The Web 2.0 conference is under way in San Francisco, so the B.S. will be flying. Thanks to the innovators in Wired's Gadget Lab, you can contribute to the dung heap by using our Web 2.0 Summit startup and press kit to tout your own flim-flam company.
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IAC/InterActive spins off the online travel service. Also: PCs sprout second brain.... Nielson ratings show broadband users surpassing dialup.... and more.
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The TC40 conference, which (important caveat) I did not attend, had a big impact on the space I occupy. Sometimes I think we put too much emphasis on Techmeme, but it is important, and for the two days of TC40, most of the top articles had something to do with the conference. Yet most of the people in the TechMeme loop were not there. This makes me wonder if we can do better with these conferences that become the cursor for a few days. And the answer is of course we can. But it may mean reconfiguring the conference to take the emphasis off the people in the room and put it on the people on the net. As Jim Forbes points out, if you wait for hotels to change, you're going to wait a long time. They're not really in the conference business, they're in the bedroom business. So anything that keeps people out of the hotel is likely to stay out of the conference -- like really terrific networking. So that suggests a different approach, one that does not rely on hotels.  I've done four conferences, three of them at universities, and one at CNET in San Francisco. At two of them, we hosted as many people as they did at TC40, because we had multiple tracks, and a very large facility. And the last three were all very much present on the net. The first, not so much. If I do another conference, we'd try to push the envelope on the net side of things, and probably not try to host as many people in person. Instead of 500 to 1000 people, I'd try for 50 to 100 people. Kind of a middle-ground between the experts at the TC40 conf, and the audience. More like a TV studio than a conference. Everyone would be either a blogger or reporter. All would be encouraged to participate. And everyone would lead a chat room, or a blog comment section, or a video track. We could have much more diverse video nowadays, because of services like justin.tv and ustream.tv, and I'm sure many others, who provide outbound bandwidth. All we'd need at the facility is enough bandwidth to connect to these services, and if you're not at a hotel, that's not at all hard these days. You could do it at Stanford or Cal, or even the Hillside Club. If you're not deep inside a building with thick walls, EVDO can serve as a backup. If you can't get on through the LAN, try a WAN instead.  I'd also like to see less of a focus on the interests and success stories of venture capital. Something has really changed, even the VCs seem to know it. Money is undifferentiated, so why pay so much attention to what the money people say. Let's get people with big ideas to contribute them, and to disagree with other people with big ideas. That's not to say I'd exclude the money people. But I would insist that they be people who are participating in the networked conversation, not just at the show, but 24 by 7, on blogs, on Twitter, on whatever. I had this discussion with Loic last week. I didn't think and still don't think that it was a good idea for him to have French politicians speak at LeWeb last year. I didn't think it was a good idea for Chris to invite John Edwards to speak at Gnomedex in 2006. Why? Because these people don't have blogs, they don't understand the net. They want to use it, for sure, to get money and votes, but they don't have a vision for it, beyond that, so what they have to say is uninteresting. "Give me money. Vote for me." That's all they say. If they want to come, great, let them listen and ask questions. And look for politicos (as with the VCs) who are making a difference on the net. People like Fred Wilson or Paul Kedrosky, for example. I'm sure there are many more. And I'd work to develop more ways for the back-channel to participate, to come to the front. That's the key to the future of conferences, how to extend them into the net, so the communication path is every way imaginable, not just from the venue out to the world. I want to feel like I'm in a nerve center, whether I'm at the venue or sitting in my living room in Berkeley. I had that feeling, btw, or an inkling of it, watching the AlwaysOn conference eariler this year, which had excellent presence on the net, real-time. The TC40 conference promoters, amazingly, actively thwarted the back channel. I don't know what their thinking was, but I think it was wrong.  Maybe someday these conferences could host real-time development, where media hackers put together new communication systems and deploy them before the conference is over. The moon mission approach to development, if you want to get something done quickly, make sure you know where you're going and are excited about it. Sometimes it's amazing how quickly these things can bootstrap. I'd also like to see a mix of interviews and debates, and open discussion. Dinners in every major city that wants to have them. The truly great tech conferences of the future will be world wide events, as the web itself is world wide, and will be inclusive, not exclusive, and cost very little to participate in, if not $0. Mundeemo: "Don't forget a row of suicide booths.."
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Some tips for figuring out what all the startup messages flying by your screen actually mean.
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Welcome to a new on-line column here at LinuxJournal.com, "Linux Products Insider".  I'm James Gray, Products Editor at Linux Journal.  After the spam has been deencrusted and hucksters repelled, I'll use this space to update you on the latest and greatest products and services that I find using my secret channels.  This week, I had the chance to take part in a press conference with Mark Shuttleworth, Founder of Ubuntu.  Read on to learn why Shuttleworth's is so fired up about the new Ubuntu 7.10 "Gutsy Gibbon" (available this week), as well as why he thinks Ubuntu is so darned successful.  read more
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Gabe: We did a really awesome project (can I say it"s awesome, is that okay?) for Wired magazine. You can either go pick up the most recent issue and read it there or check it out on their site. They asked us to do a piece for them handicapping all three of the next generation systems. We tried to be as fair as we could and hopefully you"ll get a kick out of it.
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In this issue, my colleague Chad Dickerson unveils his "Top 20 IT Mistakes" based on some unhappy lessons he and others have learned. This list is so much fun that I couldn't resist adding my own: five common mistakes that business people make when dealing with IT. Each of these derives from bitter experience. And in three of the cases, I was personally responsible for the bad judgment (please don't ask which three!).
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Tim Hanson casts some light on eBay, Harley-Davidson, Under Armour, and Whole Foods.
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Tech types, send your folks to MAKEzine to find something you can improve on this Christmas. From cool toys with a high hackability quotient to endless electronic projects, this gift list for the nerds in the family is a winner. In Gear Factor.
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Some last minute advice about the hot tech toys
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Here's a problem that some investment dollars help solve. Apparently, the TechCrunch 40 conference isn't streaming to the outside world because the Palace Hotel has incredibly lame networking, and they won't allow conference promoters to bring in more wires? This is what I hear, although it's not confirmed. Emails to the conference promoters yesterday were not responded to.  I've also received emails from a number of companies announcing products at the show who want coverage on Scripting News, so my interest is not entirely idle.  So what does it take to establish one hotel in SF as the default tech conference hotel? Networking! Geez, you'd think it's obvious by now. We do things that require networks. Look in any conference room around the world for a clue. And supposedly San Francisco is the central node in the network of technology bringing all this great stuff to the rest of the world. So where is the hotel that gives us the very most basic technology to wire up conferences so that the whole world can participate?  Do we need to move the tech industry to another city? Someone please ask the Mayor or Google or someone in charge when they're going to fix this problem. It should have been solved in 1997, and it's already 2007.  BTW, here's a clue: there are some great business opportunities, beyond conferences, for the first physical location in downtown SF to solve this problem. Just ask Loic.
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I have an observation I'd like to disclose about the Open Source community: we tend to leap into all kinds of things before we have all the facts and/or information necessary to make intelligent decisions. We criticize other communities, laugh at things like directory services from the two major NOS players, talk about all our great applications, etc. we hang on to old notions about a what makes Linux tick. Sorry, but that model Eric doesn't fit any more. The community natter appears to come mostly from people who lack deep technical skills and knowledge of enterprises.
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By Bruno Dieter Chan  THIS week I have some interesting software for you. We'll start off with the useful and work our way down to the could-be-useful.
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PC maker plans to talk consumer electronics this week, and the conversation could turn to a "Pocket DJ."