Smalltalk Tidbits, Industry Rants

Update: Stephen Pair gives a parse tree example in the comments.

Don Box has another post up showing how to create lambdas in C#. The syntax for all that looks pretty baroque to me. In any event, Don asked in the comments to my last post on this for the Smalltalk equivalent. I'm not going to generate a list and compile that, as he does with Scheme and C# - in Smalltalk, we'd have a string, and just evaluate that at runtime. Same idea, just not the same machinery. So the way I'd approach his problem in Smalltalk:

" Creates the function that adds one to the input value "
func1 := [:a | a + 1].

" String for the same function "
func2String := '[:a | a + 1]'.

" Print that to the Transcript window "
Transcript show: func2String.

"This will raise a MessageNotUnderstood: #value "
func2String value: 4

" Have the compiler evaluate the string, which gives us the function "
func2 := Compiler evaluate: func2String.

"Now execute that, which gives us the desired answer of 5 "
func2 value: 4

If you were really hung up on creating a List, you could do that with MessageSend objects, and then hack the compiler a bit to get it to deal with lists instead of strings. That's not how Smalltalk works though (it's kind of cool that you could make it work that way - I've had University students tell me about projects to implement that in Smalltalk). The Compiler is just another object that you can subclass and/or extend - the IDL compiler for CORBA and the DLLCC parser for our foreign language interface are both implemented that way. In general, you can tell any class which compiler to use (allowing you to easily create domain specific languages).

The bottom line is, creating code whose execution is deferred until later is easy in Smalltalk - and is still easy if you want to create that code on the fly by generating the code and then compiling it at runtime.

Wired has a column that wistfully looks back at the days of powerful unions, and dreams of a unionized Microsoft. Towards the end of the column, there's this:

So, will we ever see a unionized Microsoft? With his own union working on the Redmond behemoth, Courtney certainly won't rule it out.

"WashTech has been actively trying to build the union at the company. (It's been) recently reported how wages at the company have been stagnant while profits are soaring, and that the review process has become an unfair management tool. These are core issues that a union can address."

Microsoft needs to become more agile, not less. Right now, they suffer from the same kind of rigidity that cost IBM so much money back in the mid to late 80's. What if the work force there joined a union? Well, they would see work rules and process - just like now - only from the employee side, rather than from the management side. I fail to see how that would help the company in the long run. It might help a few people in the short term, but I rather expect that it would drive the company toward an Eastern Airlines sort of ending.

What MS needs is more people like Scoble, who are willing to shake the rafters and try to create positive change. Unions, like management, are conservative forces that fight change. That's not what MS needs.

In the same vein as the last post, I thought it might be valuable to go over the way Smalltalkers normally construct new execution at runtime. One way, as I covered in my last post, is to compile code from a string. All by itself, that gives you a fair bit of power - you can compile anything, including new classes. You can add new instance variables to existing classes, and have all the subclasses get recompiled for you - at runtime. When I do live updates of this server, I'm often doing just that.

So a few examples - say I wanted to add a new instance variable to an existing class. I could do that a couple of ways. I could recompile the class definition. Here's my class in the browser before that step:

Now, I execute the code below:

 
 

Compiler evaluate: 'Smalltalk defineClass: #Foo
	superclass: #{Core.Object}
	indexedType: #none
	private: false
	instanceVariableNames: ''var1 var2 ''
	classInstanceVariableNames: ''''
	imports: ''''
	category: ''test''' 

The double quotes are to tell the compiler that the things wrapped that way are strings, not the end of the string being defined. Executing that yields:

You can also tell the class to add an instance variable, rather than recompiling the class:

 
 

Foo addInstVarName: 'var2'.

In Smalltalk, all your objects - including the classes - are live at runtime. They aren't dead text lying in the version control system, and they can all be manipulated. You can insert new methods into a class in much the same way:

 
 

Foo compile: 'initialize
var1 := 1.
var2 := 2'.

Which adds the #initialize method to class Foo. You can inject new code into a class at runtime this way - so if you have a code generator for some reason (database interfacing, whatever) - you could have the code dynamically generated and added all at once.

You can also dynamically create message sends that didn't exist at deployment time via #perform. Say you have a variety of API methods, all similarly named, but their use depends on a base selection (in the post tool I'm using, that's how code fires, based on whether the tool is set for my API, the MetaWebLog API, the MT API, or the Blogger API.

So how does that happen? Here's an example. I have the following message send:

 

^self performForAPI: 'GetAllItems'

And that code looks like:

 

performForAPI: messageString
	^self performForAPI: messageString with: #()


performForAPI: messageString with: arguments
	| prefix msg |
	prefix := self perform: self apiToUse.
	msg := (prefix, messageString) asSymbol.
	^msg isKeyword
	       ifTrue: [self perform: msg withArguments: arguments]
	       ifFalse: [self perform: msg]

The message is created by appending strings, turning that into a symbol, and then firing it. This is not a completely great idea in all circumstances (it makes it hard to trace senders, for instance) - and I wouldn't write the post tool that way were I to do it now. It's a nice capability, and very valuable when you need it - but you really need to be sure you need it.

In any case, that shows some of the more dynamic features of Smalltalk.IMHO, they are far less baroque than what C# is adding, because Smalltalk was created with this kind of thing in mind. C# wasn't, and it shows.

James Governor likes the usage numbers being reported for Sun's app server software:

Go buy some stock? The evidence is coming together in some interesting ways.... and if Sun's Java Enterprise System app server has momentum, anything can happen.

In the accompanying data, Sun's market share has jumped up to almost 20%, which does look good. However, that may not mean much revenue:

Download a complete enterprise-class solution -- Solaris 10, Java Enterprise System, development tools, desktop infrastructure and N1 management software -- at no cost, no kidding.

You only pay if you want support. There was an article on the uptake of support licenses for JBoss awhile back, and it wasn't encouraging:

Problem is, most people just take the free stuff and run. Only 3% to 5% of JBoss customers buy support contracts.

Which is one of the reasons that JBoss ended up selling out to RedHat - the ongoing development costs simply weren't being met by those paltry incomes. So let's look at the app server and OS for Sun, shall we? Schwartz has made Solaris free and open source, and championed it running on x86. So even if I decide to run Solaris instead of Linux, I still don't need to pay Sun a nickel. The same goes for the app server. This is the ideology of free masquearding as a business plan, and I doubt that it will end up happier for Sun than it did for JBoss.

If you give it all away for free, you can't make it up in volume.

Brad Wilson on starting the day:

I don't know about you, but I sure don't read the newspaper any more. It's a stale version of information compared to what I can get 24 hours a day from the web. And, letting someone else pick my comics? Never!

I start my morning with a bowl of cereal and my comics. On the web, of course!

heh. I go the extra step here - I created scrapers for the various comics I like that don't show easily via RSS, and create local (i.e., on my HD) RSS feeds for them. I have a BottomFeeder plugin that periodically runs the scripts, and each day I have all the comics I want, right there in my aggregator.

It's often the case that management - and in particular, VC management - spend way too much time focused on irrelevant details. For instance, Thomas Gagne writes:

Too many potential investors spent too much time looking at the technology. The answer was always the same: lots of scalability, too little system documentation. The technical due diligence reports would often comment about the Smalltalk in the "risks" section something like, "Using Smalltalk may make it difficult to find programmers, but by using it they won't need many anyway."

Why is the worry about technology use irrelevant? Either the startup being funded has a good product or they don't. If they engage in a long effort to rewrite it in an "approved" language, they'll almost certainly miss whatever market window they are going after. The phrase Thomas used next is very telling:

Many of those VCs don't exist anymore.

I rather expect that a lot of them "managed" their startups into oblivion by asking them to do stupid things. To follow the story:

When we finally found some real investors I was surprised they didn't seem too interested in the technology. They wanted to know it worked. They wanted to know it balanced. They wanted to know the president had confidence in it and me. After they understood the business plan and what the company was preparing to do I really don't think it mattered much to them what the code was written in. They weren't buying into language marketing or hype, they were buying into a commercial finance revolution. The system could have been written in 16-bit Fortran-IV and they wouldn't have cared as long as it was supportable, scalable and correct.

Couldn't have said it better myself. This reminds me of something that came up many years ago, back before Java was around. I was teaching a Smalltalk class with Russ Pencin, who is one of the two best instructors I've ever met. We had a C programmer in the class who really, really wanted to know how strings were implemented at the VM level. Russ' answer was brilliant:

Why do you care?

Why indeed? If the system performs well, what difference does it make? The same goes for funding, really - training developers in a language they don't know already isn't that hard. If it was, C++, Java, and C# never would have succeeded. Sure, the syntax is similar - but they don't really work like C. If it was that hard to train developers, we would all still be using Cobol and Fortran, for that matter.

Thomas also quotes Paul Graham - and this is one of the smartest things I've ever read:

"In a big company, you can do what all the other big companies are doing. But a startup can't do what all the other startups do. I don't think a lot of people realize this, even in startups."

If all you strive for is mediocrity, then sure - hire cheap developers and use what everyone else is using. If you want the chance to do better, you have to be different.

One of the things a lot of people get wrong is user spikes. Whether it's spike in downloads of a product, or a spike in traffic, a lot of people will tout the sudden increase as if it matters. In reality, as this post makes clear, it usually doesn't:

Josh Kopelman has a perfect post up today called 53,651. This is the number of RSS subscribers to Michael Arrington’s great TechCruch blog, and is exactly at the core of the “first 25,000 user” issue. Since there are 53,651 RSS subscribers of TechCrunch (at least as of 5/12/06) , if something gets reviewed there, it’s likely to get 5,000 to 10,000 users in the next 24 hours “just to try it out.” As so many traffic graphs of these “TechCrunched” products show, there is a huge spike in use for a day or two, and then it goes right back down to where things were before they were TechCrunched.

There's a nice chart that goes with that; follow the first link to see it. As most of you know, a post I made last week hit Digg, Reddit, and Slashdot - and gave me a sudden flood of traffic. That flood didn't last - it's not as if every reader of those sites suddenly became fascinated by Smalltalk :) I know plenty of marketing people who would make sure to include that spike in a report on traffic averages thoug, in order to make themselves look better. It's no more real than the initial spike in users described above.

If you're trying to build a new business, those mentions help, but they won't put you into "lie on the couch and wait for the orders" mode...

It's starting to look like a board game renaissance. Can Smalltalk be far behind :)

Well, the level of BottomFeeder downloads hasn't dropped after the slashdotting - they hung steady at a rate of 170 per day. The details:

Platform	BottomFeeder Downloads
Windows	455
Update	153
Linux x86	145
Mac X	121
CE ARM	82
Mac 8/9	58
HPUX	48
Solaris	34
AIX	34
Linux Sparc	20
Sources	16
Windows98/ME	11
Linux PPC	6
SGI	4
ADUX	2
CE x86	1

The real story will be in the HTML pages accesses - that will have dropped off since last week. The details on that:

Tool	Percentage of Accesses
Mozilla	66.4%
Internet Explorer	24.7%
Other	4.2%
MSN Bot	2.7%
Opera	1%
Megite	1%

The number of unique readers is still up for the week, so I guess some of them stuck around. On to the RSS:

Tool	Percentage of Accesses
Mozilla	26.5%
BottomFeeder	14.9%
Net News Wire	9.1%
Other	8%
BlogLines	8.5%
Internet Explorer	6.1%
Safari RSS	4.6%
Google Feed Fetcher	3.5%
BlogSearch	2.4%
NewsGator	2.4%
RSS Bandit	1.7%
SharpReader	1.6%
Planet Smalltalk	1.5%
JetBrains	1.2%
Liferea	1%
News Fire	1%
MSN Bot	1%
Java	1%
Attensa	1%
Everest/Vulcan	1%
Lilina	1%
Feed Reader	1%

The subscriber count jumped up as well, so it definitely looks like I got some new readers. Welcome!

Almost seems to count for a lot with "Duke Nukem Forever" as well. Here's piece of a Game Daily interview:

Miller: We've put about $7.5 million into that and we've been working on it since late 1998. So it really hasn't been that much of an investment. And once it comes out, if it's as successful as we think it'll be, we'll make that money back in the first day or two of sales.

THR: 1998? You've been working on it for eight years?

Miller: I know, I know. It's embarrassing.

THR: Maybe you can explain to readers who don't know the games industry why it should take that long to make a game.

Miller: It shouldn't. And I'm dumbfounded myself. A huge part of the problem is that it's really hard hiring good developers to come to Dallas. This place used to be a hotbed of game development. But, nowadays, people seem to want to go to Austin instead.

Hmm. Sounds odd to me. Aren't most game developers young and more easily relocatable? In any event, that game is the industry version of Waiting for Godot.

"A Peace to End All Peace", by David Fromkin, is a book about a forgotten theater of WWI - the Middle East. It's primarily focused on the efforts of the British government, and that was a huge muddle. The Egyptian Office, the Home Office, and the India Office all worked at cross purposes, with the "Arabists" of Lord Kitchener mostly coming out on top. If we weren't still living with the legacy of what they did, this book would be comical - the misinformation they basd their policy decisions on is just sad. I'd recommend this book to anyone who wants some background on how the modern middle east came to be.

That old song may end up having more poignancy than anyone would have guessed. New Scientist reports that we may have out-clevered ourselves:

Virtually all bananas traded internationally are of a single variety, the Cavendish, the genetic roots of which lie in India. Three years ago, New Scientist revealed that the world Cavendish crop was threatened by pandemics of diseases such as that caused by the black sigatoka fungus. The main hope for survival of the Cavendish lies in developing new hybrids resistant to the fungus, but this is a difficult and time-consuming task because the seedless modern fruit does not reproduce sexually and has to be bred from cuttings.

For all the talk about monocultures in software (i.e., Windows), this looks like it might be the real deal.

Now here's the definitive site for LOTR language geeks - a complete compendium of the languages of Arda.

Scoble from Middle America:

So, I've been thinking about what it'll take to get these folks to try something new. Hey, the iPod still hasn't gotten here, so don't even ask about podcasting, RSS, or tagging. Interestingly enough, blogging has been heard about here. One older lady who visited my mom saw that I was blogging and she said "oh, blogs are the things that's keeping the media honest."

Heh. The things that get heard here in a small town in middle America.

Two things come to mind reading that. First, the condescension for "fly over" country. I don't think it's even a conscious thing for Scoble, but there it is. I rather expect that if he headed on over to the local high school, he'd find a more tech savvy audience.

Second, he could come and ask the parents of my daughter's girl scout troop about tagging, podcasting, RSS (et. al.). We live 30 miles from Washington DC, in the heart of "bi-coastal" America. And believe me, none of them would have any more awareness of that stuff than the people out there in Montana.

The funny thing is, the "keeping the media honest" thing is more relevant than any of the other stuff Scoble mentioned. It has more of an impact on day to day life for most people. There's a huge bubble all right - and way too many people on the two coasts live smack in the middle of it.

BusinessWeek lets itself be a front for another round of "the internet is falling":

Every day, it seems, a new service pops up offering to send you video over the Internet. "Desperate Housewives," Stephen Colbert heckling the president, clips of bad dancers at wedding parties: It's all there.

You may be up for it, but is the Internet?

The answer from the major Internet service providers, the telephone and cable companies, is "no." Small clips are fine, but TV-quality and especially high-definition programming could make the Internet choke.

Over the last 10 years, I can't remember how many things have been about to make the internet choke. At one point, I think the mere existence of broadband on a large scale was going to do it.

Chicken Little, meet your local ISP. Just make sure to hold on to your wallet.

In a small bit from The Register about the new book "Prefactoring", Smalltalk (and Cincom Smalltalk in particular) gets a mention.

The slashdot crowd will have a meltdown, but the WSJ's Mark Golden is right: Linux on the desktop just isn't ready for most people. Heck, I've come to the conclusion that most people can't safely run Windows on the desktop, due to the constant need to play sys-admin. The answer isn't Linux though; it's Apple. The problem is the level of effort required:

What I found was that for some people, Linux systems may do just fine. But they still are largely more appealing to computer hobbyists who would like to see Microsoft face more competition. Specifically, while the installation and simple functions worked well enough, the systems couldn't handle all the multimedia applications I needed. And getting some of the systems to work required more time and effort than I was willing to exert.

The last sentence is the kicker. It's not that you can't get various things working on Linux as they do on Windows - it's that it takes more effort (and expertise) than most people are willing (or able) to expend. The sad truth is that the same thing is true of Windows, but not in the same way. Everything "just works" out of the box, but things aren't safe. I've yet to encounter a non-technical person running Windows whose machine wasn't infected - often with multiple things.

You can run Windows or Linux quite well if you're a technical user, and willing to play sysadmin. If you aren't, then a Mac is almost certainly your best bet. The premium you pay up front will be more than made up for by the lack of "wtf??" moments you'll end up having.

Dave Winer on Web 2.0:

Now, will there be a bubble? Yes, of course, read the VC blogs, they're basically telling you they're running out of deals they're willing to fund. And who doesn't think the growth of Google is going to slow at some point? Don't we all know that web advertising is a scam? A friend who writes for a very big news site said the other day that he had never clicked on an advertising link. Even people whose salaries are paid by the advertising industry think it's a scam. And scam is just another word for bubble.

I agree that there's a bubble, but it doesn't seem to be as big (or as silly) as the initial one. The advertising thing is slightly different though, I think. Advertisers and content producers have been lying to each other about the efficacy of the eyeball (or eardrum) model of advertising since the golden age of radio. The issue has always been one of imperfect personalization - advertisers know that they are wasting money, but have not been able to figure out how to effectively narrow the audience down - to be able to deliver a message to the person who wants it.

That should be possible with the web, but it will require a lot more tracking of behavior than some people will like. Not to mention that - like supermarket affinity programs - the tracking will really only be used to go after the high end consumer. The advertisers really want to find the 20% of their intended audience who spend 80% of the money, and deliver a message that has real interest to them. That's no easy task.

In a thread in comp.lang.smalltalk, Eliot answers why Store was developed:

While Jim Robertson's financial info on ENVY and VisualWorks is fine that's not the reason that Glenn Krasner as VP of engineering and I as technical lead had for ditching ENVY.

First,. ENVY essentially dictated the architecture of the development environment, including things like what constituted a valid package. Once a new version of VW would come out we would have to wait about 6 months for the corresponding ENVY to come out. That gave VAST a 6 month time-to-market advantage and meant that whatever ParcPlace engineering did to enhance the programming experience was essentially irrelevant because it would be overlaid by whatever ENVY deemed appropriate.

When we came to do VisualWorks 3.0, which introduced Parcels, this was intolerable. First parcels had features ENVY couldn't model:

Parcels do "partial loading". One can maintain a large logical component in a single parcel and load it in a system that is missing some prerequisites. Any code that can't be loaded is held back until subsequent code loads make it installable.

For example let's imagine you build a distributed programming system that allows helper methods on classes to control distribution semantics for different kinds of objects. Let's say you have several loadable applications such as a multi-user drawing editor and a dungeons and dragons game which you make distributed with the system. With parcels you can put all distribution code, including helper methods, in a single file. If you try and load it into a base system that is missing the drawing editor and the d-n-d game the parcel will still load. The extension methods and subclasses get squirreled- away for a subsequent load. When you load the drawing editor the distribution methods and subclasses get added.

In ENVY and other code loading systems in Smalltalk and other languages you must subdivide the distribution package into a code set of facilities and separate fragments.

This is a real advantage when you try and break up a system into components. Partial loading means you don't have to visit all other components splitting them up whenever you extract some base functionality into a component.

Essentially it avoids a polynomial explosion in the number of components in a componentised system.

Parcels support overrides, the ability to redefine classes and/or methods on load. So a parcel can override an existing base method, which is essential if you want to add or modify kernel behaviour on load. The overridden code is remembered so that if you unload a parcel the system reverts to its previous state, allowing one to unload code, which allows one more freedom in trying components out.

We needed the facilities to make 3.0 a componentised system within the limited resources we have and these features have proved their usefulness over the years, but ENVY could not support them and we would have had to wait for years for it to do so. So we provided Store as a team programming tool that supported the new parcel concepts and facilities.

Second, we wanted to bring programmers a rich VisualWorks programming experience immediately, and not wait for ENVY to get around to doing the work. We believed (and still believe) we can do a better job than ENVY in the context of VisualWorks. By moving away from Store we have gained control of the programming environment and you can see the improvements made in recent years. Vassili would have had his hands tightly tied had we not moved out from under ENVY.

Third, Parcels allow one to add single methods, including methods defining types or external calls in external interfaces. ENVY requires an entire ExternalInterface class to be in a single package.

Fourth, and quite importantly, ENVY's model is that one is always attached to the repository. Store allows one to detach, developing in ones' own image, reconnecting to the repository when appropriate. great for plane trips.

Fifth, ENVY's versioning scheme is old-fashioned, based on ascending version numbers. Store separates the version tree from code quality. There is no implication in Store that a later version is more correct. In Store one has "blessing levels" which declare whether a given version is production quality, development quality, blue sky, etc, etc. So components can go through natural cycles of development, productization, experimentation, development and productization for version 2, etc.

So we had very strong compelling technical reasons that were the real driving factor. We had to risk pissing-off customers who were wedded to ENVY and even risk losing some of our most important accounts. But in then end VisualWorks is much better because of it.

Add in the business reasons mentioned here, and it all makes a lot of sense - and doesn't involve politics.

Tim Bray on JavaOne talk:

After saying some nice things about Rich, Jonathan proposed that they do a Q&A, with Jonathan asking the questions, saying a “I’ll simulate a developer”. His first question was “So Rich, are you going to open-source Java?” Rich started with “Well, why not?”

Here's a "why not" for Sun to ponder: If you OSS Java (and never mind the compatibility issues Tim mentions later in the post), then the license revenue Java does bring in dries up. Sun already destroyed the value of Solaris by open sourcing that - by open sourcing Java, the (admittedly paltry) revenues from that will dry up and blow away.

At that point, someone is going to have to go into the exec offices and ask exactly what the value of Java is to Sun. It speeded the commoditization of Solaris and SPARC - once money makers for Sun. The guy who takes over Sun after Schwartz drives it into the ground is going to have very little of value left to sell - either to customers or parties interested in acquiring the remnants. As Forbes says:

What pieces could Sun sell? The three most valuable assets are the Sparc chip line, the Solaris software and the hardware that uses both. The three would be hard to sell independently because they're designed to be tightly integrated. But the chips, once the clear choice for high-performance computing, are no longer on the cutting edge. And Sun cut the value of Solaris steeply by turning it into an open-source operating system. StorageTek, a tape-drive maker Sun acquired last year for $3 billion net of cash, could be sold, but there isn't exactly a line going out the door of people who want to buy tape-drive companies. Sun's Java software language generates lots of goodwill among programmers but not much revenue. Kariithi estimates it brings in only $10 million a year.

Somewhere, the folks at IBM who actually do make money on Java are laughing, a lot.

I'm on my way to Syndicate in NY, which is why I'm posting at this insane hour - I have to catch the earliest Amtrak run up to NY. Maybe I'll be awake when I arrive...

Jonathan Schwartz is certainly good at poor analogies. He likens Sun making money from Java to electricity:

When Thomas Edison first introduced the lightbulb, he held patents he tried to wield against potential competitors - he wanted to own the client (the bulb) and the server (the dynamo). He failed. Standards emerged around voltage and plugs, and GE Energy (formerly, Edison General Electric), to this day, remains one of the most profitable and interesting businesses around. How big would the power business be today if you could only buy bulbs and appliances from one company? A far sight smaller, I'd imagine. Standards grew markets and value.

And railroads:

Then there was the civil war era in the US, when locomotive companies all had their own railroad widths and shapes - designed only to work with their rail cars and steam engines. How'd they fare? They failed, standards emerged that unified railways and rail lines, and that era created massive wealth, connecting economies within economies. Standards grew markets and value.

Here's the thing. For electricity, someone made money selling the power that ran the lightbulbs. Never mind that Edison's mistake had more to do a fixation on DC over AC - the point is, there was money for the power company in selling the power. The same goes for the rail system - there was money for the rail companies in selling access to the rails - for moving people and goods. Why are these poor analogies for Sun? Simple - they don't own the delivery system for the network, and they've come out strongly against making money off any of the enabling technologies.

Let's look at the Java business - Sun doesn't make money from development tools, from deployment by others of Java based systems, or from the application servers - they give all those things away. Is this a razor and blades thing? Hardly - Java, being cross platform, destroys any rationale a company might have for buying Sun hardware. Why buy an expensive SPARC box when you can buy a much cheaper x86? Heck, now that Sun is giving away Solaris, you could run that instead of Linux and still not owe Sun a dime. The fact that Microsoft is steadily selling more servers is not a sign that this strategy is working out for Sun.

Schwartz' confusion is deeper though. Consider:

So if you want to know how I feel about Java, my view is it's changing the world - standardizing the plugs and rail gauges and containers used by global internet players. Its momentum, in my view, is unstoppable. What's that worth to Sun? Give it your best shot. When I do, I say most of our revenue is derived from Java. Just like most of Verizon's revenue comes from handsets. Even though the economics of the handset look baffling (but I dare you to recommend to Verizon that they stop selling them). Those that believe free software or service yields lower revenue don't understand the economics or dynamics of the software industry. Think Google or Yahoo!, not Maytag.

When I get a mobile phone, I have to sign a two year license with the vendor (Verizon, in this case) - and commit to paying them some kind of usage fee for those two years. If I cancel, there's a penalty. It's likely that I'll renew as well - inertia will see to that. Verizon lets someone else make the phones, even subsidizes the cost of buying one - in exchange for a 2 year lock-in. Now consider Sun and Java. Where do they get any revenue? It's clear where the mobile vendor cashes in - the subscriber license. Even if Java's momentum is what it was in 1998 (and it's not), it doesn't matter - at no point in the value chain do any of the users of Java owe Sun so much as a cent. If Schwartz thinks that Java actually drives revenue for Sun, then let's see if he can convince any of the mobile providers to mimic his *cough* plan *cough* - see if they'll make all calls free, and ask subscribers to pay for support, if they feel like it.

Yeah - there's a plan. Good luck pitching that one. It does become clear why Schwartz calls the economics of this baffling though - the mobile provider is making money, and that's simply baffling to Schwartz. It's not as if he knows how to do that.

Tim Bray is looking to add comments to his blog, and posted a set of ideas he's ruminating on. Sam Ruby responded with some himself, and I have to say, I'd echo what he's said about comment spam prevention:

• Use an IP Throttle
• Use a simple filter

The filter I added to our Wiki the other day is working out really well. For some reason, spam comes in waves - I get a ton of the same stuff for awhile, and then it quiets down - only to roar up again later. The IP throttle and filter stopped that stuff pretty well. For this blog, I use an additional technique: I toss any comment that has "too many" hrefs, on the assumption that most commenters are not adding tons of such references. That stops the massive porn/poker/pharma link spam that floats in.

Like Sam, I've decided against moderation - it sounds too much like work, and I really don't want the blog to become that kind of chore. Thus far, the only thing I've had to turn off is trackbacks, and I intend to push the filter code from the Wiki codebase over to the blog so I can turn those back on.

I just got here, and I missed the first few minutes of Jeff Jarvis' presentation. It took me a few minutes to really settle into what he (and the audience) was talking about, partly because I walked here from Penn Station. One thing that became clear from a few comments Jeff solicited from the audience - marketers still don't know what to make of all this. One guy mentioned that his marketing department was worried about RSS, because they couldn't capture email addresses (etc, etc). Another guy complained that his content is being stolen by others (as if this is a new problem on the web).

Heh. And here's a guy who wants to limit what he puts in his RSS feed, so that people will come to his site and view the ads. I understand that problem, but it's walking straight into a buzz-saw. There's a parallel with the newspaper business here - headlines are an attempt to attract people further into the paper. RSS can, and probably should, be used the same way for content that needs to pay for itself. The reason that model is in trouble is that so many people are pushing out content just to be heard. I'm glad this problem isn't mine, because I have no idea how to deal with it :)

Ahh, the general desire for more (and better) metadata. The problem is simple - people don't tend to categorize on their own. For example: right now, in my BottomFeeder cache, I have 18,116 items. Nearly 12,000 of those have no category set. If the highly motivated people won't tag, who will? Unless there's serious automation support, it isn't going to happen. The audience is focused on the wrong problem. Tag spam, missed tags - that's so not the problem. The sheer unwillingness of people to bother is the problem.

Never mind though - the audience is obsessively focused on the real or perceived problems of Technorati. I maintain that the base problem can't be solved by Technorati, because they rely on users providing metadata. Meanwhile, people just love to blame Technorati and Dave Sifry - we have someone actually trying to show Sifry code. Forest, Trees, and all that :)

Having said that, I like the way Jeff ran the conversation.

This session was supposed to be Robert Scoble interviewing Richard Edelman, but - as many of you probably already know, Robert is in Montana dealing with a family crisis. Which leads to the first question, which Robert sent in: given that he's in Montana with family, why are various PR firms still pitching him for this show?

Richard recognizes that this is bad behavior, and likely indicates the stock "spray the field" approach (also common to sales) without regard to whether the audience is prepared to hear the message.

Second question: If you want to pitch a blogger, how do you (or should you) go about it? Richard advises email, referencing back to something that the blogger has actually written about - so as to link the pitch to something that is of interest to the blogger in question. Following on from that, Richard thinks it's appalling that so few corporations in the Fortune 500 are in the blogosphere. He says it's because they are still in full on "control the conversation" mode (See: WKPA). That should change.

Another question: If your product doesn't suck, why are corporations so afraid to get out there? Richard says it's because they are used to being able to get a certain kind of attention from a certain kind of communication. Blogging deconstructs that, and blows the whole impression model away. Like any change, it's slow to happen. Companies that do change will get positive results. Spin is fading in its effectiveness, and many agencies (see above!) are slow to figure that out.

Richard says that many ad agencies are in a near panic over all this - the old model is expiring, and that generates fear. It's more or less a generational change.

Good question: why is anyone issuing press releases anymore? This resonates with me - I push things out for Suzanne all the time. Press releases are simply low credibility "news" spam. So what replaces the Press release then? Less spin, more actual information.

How do PR agencies deal with the fact that a lone blogger can break news as fast - or faster - than, say, the New York Times? Stories can start anywhere, so agencies have to watch the new channels ([ed] - search feeds). Things can start outside the media and move in, so you have to pay attention - globally. Richard also thinks that bloggers can help create better products via early access to products - properly harnessed, it can be a "free" beta campaign.

What about paid bloggers (Walmart issue?) - Richard says it's not that way - the idea was to get in touch with people who were already blogging positively about Walmart, and get them information. It's a touchy situation - without transparency, it can look like astro-turfing. As Jeff Jarvis chimed in though, the media asks for a level of transparency from bloggers that they themselves don't hold to. Reporters rarely identify where information came from (which itself could easily be called astro-turfing in many cases). The media is not generally in a position to criticize here. The even stupider part of that is that the New York Times reported on that, but their stuff died behind their pay wall.

Richard points out that flak is going to come in - PR needs to adapt to answer it, instead of the all too common reactions: attempts to shut it down, or to ignore it. PR needs to move out of spin and into truth and transparency. Companies need to move beyond fear of the commentary.

Why is Richard blogging? He got feedback (and believes) that you can't be an evangelist without getting your hands dirty. How will Richard know if the outreach is working? Based on feedback from bloggers themselves. Related to that, they'll track the progress of stories, and see if the outreach is helping.

WKPA comes up in a question - how bad was their reaction? Well, Richard goes back to the notion that you need to just roll with the punches and respond. Attempting to bully bloggers is going to be counterproductive.

Another question: Is engaging with the blogosphere making PR smarter? In other words, is it moving PR beyond push only, and into actual conversations? Richard hopes and thinks so. Some PR firms are still in denial, while Richard's firm is at the other end of the spectrum. It's early days here.

Should executives blog? Possibly, but employees probably have greater trust with the community than execs do. Get them the information and let them run with it.

Troy points out the limits of search engines:

Here's where google and current search technology starts to break down. Sure, there's a post on my blog where I used the phrase " Spandex Butts ", but I'm talking about neon colored rock and bridge climbers. When I check out the search link that led someone into my blog, uhm, let's just say that my post wasn't typical of the other search hits.

Ditto for " Latex Fetish ", which is the title of a recent post about my enjoying the LaTeX system.

I see some of the same stuff in my referers - the oddest things pop up from time to time. This is definitely a field where more work needs to be done.

I wandered into the middle of this session - I had the pleasure of meeting Steve Gillmor in person (and finding out that I don't disagree with him nearly as much as I thought). Which falls into this talk, since Gillmor has been podcasting for awhile. The question I walked in on was about production values, and how important they are. The panel here thinks it matters, and I have to agree. Just grabbing a microphone will work for the occasional (i.e., not regularly scheduled) outburst (like, say, the screencasts I do). if you want to attract an audience though, you have to aspire to the production qualities of Talk Radio. My example of a great podcast - anything Lileks has done :)

A good question from the audience - how long do you aim for? The panel seems to agree on the 25-30 minute timespan (which would slot into a typical commute, I think). Sounds like they all agree that it takes real discipline to hold to that, and that interviews/exchanges have to move quickly.

After lunch, and onto breakout sessions. I've headed upstairs to the "emerging tech" track - we have David Weinberger and Paul Gillin talking about tagging taxonomies. This is a smaller session (I expect that most of the crowd at this show is in one of the PR oriented tracks). David is writing a book - "Everything is Miscellaneous" (due out in 2007).

The premise of the book is that everything is going online, and we then have an opportunity to create folksonomies via tagging. In particular, he wants to compare and contrast with the pre-existing, traditional management of knowledge. The traditional method is a lot like sorting laundry - if you have a book, it goes in one section of the bookstore (etc). This is a limitation on how things can/should be categorized. So what do more wide ranging taxonimies give us? That's what the book is about.

So to start: "What is a tag?" - tags are, of course, metadata attributes in ordinary (user defined) vocabulary. The important usage is not author defined, but reader defined tags.

Paul: We've had metatags in HTML for a long time now - what's changed? Applications that make use of them are starting to appear, and support user defined tagging. In other words, communities that care can create their own taxonomies. Things like del.icio.us and flickr are examples. Where it helps is letting us escape from the folder system when confronted with tons of data (eg: digital photos). What about trying to tag tons of data - David agrees that we need automated support from our tools (all the way out to the camera - for instance, combine GPS with a camera, and you can get good automated support). Add in things like facial recognition. The bottom line is, you need automation support.

Another form of automation: post photos from a social event like this conference, and invite people to tag them (distributes the task across time and space).

What about the ambiguity of tags? Generally speaking, we aren't looking for completeness. It doesn't work for people (eg, lawyers looking up case law) who need complete results, but it does work for most of us. For instance, searching for pictures of "London" just to get an idea as to what to visit - if you miss some because they were tagged "Picadilly", it doesn't matter that much.

Paul: Do you see bleed over back to the physical world? Already happening (RFID, newspapers, package bar code lookup, etc). We are already seeing the editorial control function moving to the web - Digg, Reddit, etc. - users are determining which stories matter to the reader community. What about getting more ability to read what other people are reading (OPML reading lists came up here).

Interesting point from David - we need metadata for the tags themselves: where and when they happened, public/private, language used, etc, etc. That part should be automatable. A question about search vs. tags: Troy blogged about that this morning :)

Very interesting point brought up by Paul - your public image is not (and has not been for awhile) under your control. Other people can tag you any way they want. Along those lines - what about suggested tags? For instance, tags to use for a conference, for posts about a natural disaster/event (etc, etc). Sure, it's not bottom up, but it could provide useful guidance.

That sound is Sun purposely throwing away potential future software revenues. I'm sure they'll make it up in volume though...

This panel is about RSS usage within an enterprise in order to solve real world business problems. Some background: the number of pages on the web has grown astronomically since 1994 (the chart makes that obvious) - and that's just talking about public data. Internal data (behind the firewall) tends to be even more siloed. Don't I know it - I got a call from sales this morning asking where on our corporate net to find data she needed :/

Enterprise RSS is all about syndicating internal data (CRM, etc). This data needs to be properly routed based on your internal needs. You might have security needs as well. Use cases:

• Market intelligence (what people are saying about your product)
• Corporate communications (internal/external)
• Material event notification (relevant information as it happens from internal systems)

This is a vendor pitch - KnowNow sells tools around this stuff. To give that end of things, he has some customers - John Delatte of Rentals.com. They provide database driven websites to multi-family properties. They've got a CRM system that focuses on lead management for this domain. So how did they push that to their clients, given:

• Non-technically oriented end users
• Varying (possibly antiquated) hardware/software
• Limited/No IT resources available

Typically, CRM systems for this are fat clients. Given the above, not really possible. They do this via RSS that is routed based on the capabilities of the client's infrastructure. The consolidation of lead notification eliminates excuses and allows tracking.

Cliff Bell - VIO at Phoenix Technologies. They are the BIOS people, and they are getting into the security business. They are looking to make information rollout easier across the global firm. Interesting IT perspective (a breath of fresh air) - IT's job is to make access to information easy on users. As opposed to most IT orgs, where the goal is to make it easy on IT). They push RSS events out to users across a set of approved devices. They ensure than a VPN connection is set up (via script). Information is delivered w/o regard to VPN state at time of event.

Heh. There's a demo, and the slowness of the net connection has brought the demon of demos to the room :)

Now we're on to a money conversation - Greg Reinacker and three VC guys - Seth Levine and Richard Fishman, and Dan Flatley (sp?) to talk about where the money might go in the syndication space. Greg is moderating the panel. Two of them are backing Newsgator, which is amusing. Richard's company is called "RSS Investors", which was certainly forward marketing into the space. They received over 600 business plans in short order, and only something like 2% had a revenue model. They've invested in Attensa and Edgeio. They are looking in to two more RSS oriented plays in the next little while.

Seth Levine is another investor in Newsgator, from Mobius. They also have money in Technorati, Feedburner, and a few others. Dan Flatley's firm is also a Newsgator investor, and in digital media in general. RSS is one of the things they follow.

So starting with a question from Greg: Where do the VC's here think the syndication space is going, and how does the entry of big firms like MS and Yahoo affect it? Dan thinks that the field is validated, and that big firms and government organizations will be moving into it. Seth agrees. He's looking beyond blogs (etc), and sees syndication technology moving across many notification domains. RSS will be an enabling technology. We have consensus - Richard agrees as well. He also sees RSS moving into new domains as a connecting technology.

Heh - Seth says that many of the business plans out there seem to involve getting sold to (insert big company here). Question along those lines to Richard - what common themes (if any) amongst the "losers". He immediately rejects any plans that involve "revenue will come later".

I asked about something Avi mentioned in discussing bootstrapping DabbleDB - he counselled avoiding VC money. The panel here said sure, on the technology side, you can do that a lot more easily than you ever could before. Depending on your target market though, it may be very important. If you are going after the enterprise, for instance, you'll need those expensive sales/marketing folks - and thus, will need cash.

I was zoned out for the first keynote of the morning - not enough coffee to pay attention :) I'm coming around now that Gillmor is up (looks like he's moving his blog here soon). Heh - he's riffed the political slogan "It's the economy, stupid" into "It's the Gestures, stupid". Sounds like a key point of his talk is to get a simple point across: The user community is in charge and can no longer be effectively "talked at". There was a lot of talk about that yesterday, as well.

This goes back to attention.xml (something I've been ignoring, truth be told), which is a technology format that can be used to track what it is that you are paying attention to. Maybe I should look at it - I've had people ask for that kind of personal (not necessarily shared) information gathering in BottomFeeder, as a way of helping filter what they actually read as opposed to what they subscribe to.

Seems that some of the talk at last night's VC discussion, about business models that the VC's (here) don't believe in, has been the subject of some banter on the Gillmor Gang podcasts. I haven't been paying attention to those either, so I can't really express much of an opinion on that. I can say that I've been skeptical about Steve's gesture ideas though - see here, for instance. I spoke to Steve yesterday, and it sounds to me like he's thinking in public, and engaged in throwing ideas at the wall in public - so a lot of what he's writing about is forward looking cogitation. I'm still skeptical, but then again, so is he.

One thing he's got right is that there is a huge information glut. There are tons of sources for information, and current search engines return results based on a rough measure of relevance - pagerank/link results. Confusion over how that works was how WKPA got itself in trouble with their recent blog problem, for instance. Heck, whenever I need to link to that, I hit Google and take the second result - which is the Maine blogger they wrestled with. In a small way, I'm helping push the relevance of that result up.

"We are in a post search world" - the quality of what comes back from search results is questionable, from Steve's viewpoint. We are in the process of creating communities (Mike Arrington being an example of a self created publishing "somebody"). What Steve is looking for is this: RSS has transformed publishing, allowing people to subscribe to what they want, when they want it - but what's next, as a way of managing that? How do you "gesture" to the cloud and ask it to give you what you want? Gmail is a small scale version of that cloud (but in an email specific silo). What Steve wants is a mechanism better than current search that will find what you want and subscribe to it. Feed Discovery, if you will, but not limited to the page you happen to be looking at.

He's asking for smart use of history tracking in your browser. Google is doing this on a large scale, according to Steve. What he wants is a personal implementation that is aware of what you look at, and can then make sense of your future requests for "more like that" - sounds a lot like Amazon's "people who bought the book you are looking at also bought these other ones - would you like them too?" Google has something like that, in "find similar pages" - I don't think I've ever used that option though, so I have no idea how useful it is.

Question - are Techmeme (Digg, Reddit, etc) examples of this? Steve claims that techmeme isn't, as it's specifically what the site owner thinks is worthy of attention. Digg (and the others like it) are community based though. Heh - Steve doesn't pull punches either. He called the guy on the panel yesterday (Davidson) who was against full text feeds a pinhead who didn't realize that the truck was already half over him. Steve thinks that ad supported full text feeds are inevitable. There's a combination possible here - mass customization, offering relevant ads to people based on what their actual interests are.

Steve thinks that we'll get into a real lead generation economy. Hmm - sounds like personally selected middle men. No idea how that would work, but there's certainly no infrastructure for that now. He's pointing to GestureBank, which is building up that data. I'd be very curious to see what the response would be to a Google sponsored effort of this sort. Would people freak out over privacy concerns? That would be interesting to see. Steve thinks the revenue model should involve payment back to the people sharing gestures - and I think that's the part that breaks down right now. There's simply no convenient micropayment system around yet.

Steven Schwartz from Reuters is up, discussing the changing nature of news, syndication, and publishing. Schwartz is from the Direct to Consumer portion of Reuters. One of the main things they are dealing with is the emergence of citizen journalists, who can be immediately on the spot when something happens.

Where this hits Reuters is right in the ad model - as alternative journalism rises, that revenue stream gets threatened. Internet advertising is growing, as is consumer spending online. The average consumer spent $100 online last year - and that's given that only 12% of the (US) population is confortable spending money online. Meaning, it's only going to get bigger.

What Reuters is really after is the influentials in the blogosphere. Now here's the interesting part to me - he's talking about how they are leading in RSS distribution. However, I dropped all my Reuters feeds recently. Why? Because they were all partial feeds, requiring me to click through to the site. I've dropped most of the bloggers who do that too. Now, I'm an edge case, since I use an aggregator. Will people who read RSS only via "My Yahoo" (etc) care? If the headline is in the browser, following the link may not seem like much. We'll see - but I dislike link blogs too. I really think that mass customization of ads (i.e., ads that we actually want to see) combined with full text (video, etc) feeds are the answer.

"Consumers as partners" and "everyone is a journalist". Hmm. He says that the issue with citizen journalism is that facts may be lacking. Interesting then that the mainstream media is bleeding subscribers. He's right that people want authority, but wrong in thinking that the MSM has it.

Huh - during Q&A, I ran across this via Dana VanDen Heuvel - from a Pheedo report:

As the RSS publishing and advertising marketplace evolves, it is important to monitor the indicators such as click-through rates, which are normalizing; RSS ad performance, which remains strong; and most importantly, how RSS consumers are interacting with feed content.

Advertisers and publishers need to engage the RSS consumer at the aggregator or feed reader level. That's where the relationship is -- not at the website. Hoping for a click-through by publishing summary feed content is not a viable content monetization strategy in an RSS-enabled publishing model. This is good news for publishers who are evaluating opportunities for RSS feed advertising, and good news for advertisers seeking to reach information consumers in this growing channel.

Full-Text Feeds and Summary Feeds Garner Similar Click-Through Rates (CTR)

Summary feeds (full content not shown in the feed item) average at 12% CTR while full-text feeds average 10% CTR. The report states that the median CTR for full-text feeds remains at 10% while summary feeds drop to 8% CTR due to extremely high CTR rates in certain categories and individual feeds.

If that data holds up, then the entire justification for summary feeds just falls flat. There are charts and more data over on Dana's site. Very interesting stuff. If summary feeds don't generate significantly more (or even less!) click throughs, it really calls the concept into question.

I decided to attend this talk even though there are two more obviously technically oriented talks going on - I'm curious as to how the legal people see this field. So from their standpoint - the good news is, the subscription model gives people the content they want, when they want it. It's driven new business models, etc.

The bad news? heh - he says Lawyers (he is one). All of the traditional risks of copyright are still around, and fair use really hasn't been hashed out in this area. For that matter, free expression and libel hasn't been hashed out either. The existing rules - those hashed out in the past - still apply (trademark, copyright, libel, etc.).

Copyrights - Good quote - "The law is always struggling to catch up to the technology" - and the problem is not new. Old law is being applied to new situations all the time. Copyright is any original work that is fixed in tangible form. Generally speaking, copyrighted works cannot be used in whole or in part (copied, etc) without permission. This causes problems with the standard rip and paste culture we live in.

Things fall into the public domain after life + 70 years (95 years for an entity). Way back when, copyright was 14 years + a renewable 14 years. It's gone up and up steadily since then. Discovering whether a given work is or is not in the public domain is not always easy to determine. For instance - the book "The Wizard of Oz" is public, but the film by MGM is not. Things get more complex when you cross borders - which law applies? Which treaty obligations? In the US, there's the 1909 act, and then there's the newer regime.

Works of the Federal Government are in the public domain as well, so any publications from there are public (moon photos, for instance). There may be other issues beyond copyright though. There's also data publication that has been contracted out to a private entity, which may make it copyrighted. Take postal stamps - some of them are licensed by the PO, and the PO itself is in a quasi-public state anyway.

Fair Use - the bottom line is, it's complex and the right answer is often no better than "it depends" :/ It's a risky doctrine to rely on if you are trying to make use of copyrighted material. A lot can depend on the potential market value of the copyrighted work. So quoting a book (newspaper, magazine, etc) is fair use - the hard question is where you have taken too much to fall under fair use (quantitative and qualitative). All of this impacts bloggers - not via linking, but when we quote people, the same rules apply to us as apply to any other form of writing. A comment here from Julie Fenster (on the panel) - media players are most interested in whether the use impacts the economic value for the copyright owner.

Don't rely on how big players do it either - the "Perfect Ten" decision hit Google, for instance.

A question from the audience - if you offer full text feeds, are you offering implied consent to republish (BlogLines, etc)? The panel says yes - your control over re-publishing is diminished based on your actions. It does not, however, diminish your copyright protections. Sounds to me like the debate a lot of the attendees need to have on this is based on what Dana VanDen Heuvel wrote this morning. What the panel thinks is going to happen is DRM applied to RSS feeds . Heh - that will go over well.

Another set of questions arise here - given the "implied consent" theory, RSS makes it easier to repurpose content (for instance, scraping a family cartoon and pushing it to a website that the copyright holder wouldn't want it on). To my mind, this is a technical non-issue - you can scrape HTML nearly as easily as you can scrape RSS. The copyright holder still has ownership either way. As the panel points out, given the smallness of many of the violators (or foreign location), it may not matter anyway. To my mind, if you want to derive value for your site, you need to give me a reason to visit it.

Risk Management - the core business you are in matters, and your size matters. For instance, media orgs and large orgs probably already have policies in place (insurance). For small organizations? Insurance companies move much more slowly than technology, and they are not excited about jumping into this kind of thing quickly (an example: protections given early on for P2P plays, before there was law in the area). Right now, you'll end up in the specialty insurance business if you are looking for coverage here.

Question - how does a blogger protect himself (comes to mind based on that WKPA stuff). Not easy to do, given the paucity of loss data on this (i.e., there haven't been many cases). So a great question - what liability is being assumed by anyone republishing content that could be slanderous (Google, BlogLines, etc) - the panel says "none", as they are seen to be in the same position as a book seller (as opposed to the publisher and writer). A manager who acts in an editorial fashion may well run into a problem (techmeme, et. al. ?). That's very gray at present. On the other hand, sites like Slashdot have been around a long time now.

It's after lunch, and time for a breakout session on attention - Craig Barnes and Seth Goldstein are running this one. I had some less than charitable words for Goldstein's ideas here. Barnes is with Attensa - no moderator, so it looks like the two of them will give their views. Craig is speaking first.

What does Attensa do? It observes behavior (RSS), prioritizes, and attempts to give you mor of what you want - all the while mitigating overload. This is all based on what they call predictive ranking. They rank things for you based on observing your behavior while you read RSS - more than just links. They give you a manual ranking stream as well, letting you push things up or down (which itself modifies the automated rankings). They are in the process of adding things "from the cloud "(or behind the firewall for intranets).

So what is attention? Most people are talking about browser clickstream behavior. They aren't doing that in the browser - they are following behavior with RSS. That can include group behavior. Heh - they've been talking to Steve Gillmor for quite awhile, and don't really like the attention.xml path to get there. They think it's too heavyweight. Like Steve, they believe that "the user is in charge", but they've come to different conclusions based on that. They don't view this as being for the targeting of ads (they are mostly going after the enterprise). So what do they target?

• Blog Posts, News Headlines
• Alerts for BI (Business Intelligence) - what I use search feeds for
• Business Blogs, Wikis, Podcasts
• RSS Enabled Enterprise apps - they are seeing more of these all the time

The bottom, bottom line - RSS overload will dwarf email overload (don't I know it :) ). So this all goes to what they call Attention Streams - where people are spending attention (in the Enterprise). So:

• Business RSS for now
• Email Implications - nothing done yet, nor do they have firm plans. But they think that attention as it applies to RSS applies to email as well.
• Other stuff - PDF, docs, etc.
• Structured Blog Templates (microformats?)

Sounds to me like they are trying to create tools that people will use for prioritizing their attention in the enterprise. Ahh - Attensa is another Outlook plugin thing. That explains why Greg Reinacker walked into the room :)

Seth Goldstein has the title "Selling Attention" on his slides. To start with, Seth thinks Attensa is doing good work for the Enterprise, but says this: we are all touching different parts of the elephant, but it's still one elephant. Seth is involved in attentiontrust.org with Gillmor, et. al.

His evolution in this area - from Josh Schachter/del.icio.us: "Tags are crystallized attention". hadn't thought of it that way, but it makes sense. Attentiontrust.org with Gillmor. He calls attentiontrust a consumer advocacy group, interested in making sure that you have access to the attention that you are giving things. With all that data being electronic, recording it is easier, and that you as an individual should, at the very least, be able to keep track of that.

So what is this all about? He's trying to create a marketplace for clickstreams. The idea would be to reverse the selling situation - allow people to market themselves to companies. He thinks it could become a new kind of credit bureau. Hmm. Color me skeptical. The idea is that you toggle some settings in a browser, and then let their servers gather your clickstream data for potential sharing. The reporting is interesting - it gives back details on what I've visited. You can share this data with other users of their system.

One thing just became clear to me - the potential for extreme embarrassment is huge. Sure, you can turn the tracking off, but imagine that you forgot and visited an, umm, "not safe for work" site. Here's the end question I have - what's the business model? How do these folks intend to monetize this? Ah - he says that there will be opportunities down the road via leads. Hmm. I think the VC guys were skeptical of that kind of thing :)

Up front question after intros for the panel (which I missed) - have PR people picked up on the change in the media relations model? Do they get the idea that "the users are in charge?" yet? The panel thinks that clients of PR firms are picking up on this faster, and that west coast firms are further along than east coast firms. I'm not sure about the latter, but I buy the former. The push model of marketing messages is pretty much dead.

Interesting - there aren't many PR people here in the room (or at the show, for that matter). Hmm - is that evidence that PR firms still haven't picked up on this stuff? The old agency model is still in place, and the "up and coming" generation of people haven't made an impact yet. The agencies don't think that they have time to get involved ([ed] - they need to make time).

Good observation from the panel here - the agencies are still in early days in understanding this (and the ones that aren't paying attention yet are falling behind). The ones that aren't paying attention will be utterly oblivious to nascent negative PR events - and with that obliviousness comes an inability to respond early.

These guys are very interested in the activity surrounding Digg, Techmeme (et. al.). These sites allow you to follow an ongoing conversation - and, depending on the conversation, it may well be of interest to a client. This is more useful to PR than tagging. A lot of this is just basic fubdamentals: Can you write well, can you listen. The difference now is, there's more to listen to.

Heh - good comment: "There are a lot of tools out there that will tell you you're on fire, but not many that will tell you how to put it out". You need tools to learn that you're on fire, but you need PR skills to put it out.

Pitching a reporter vs. pitching a blogger. Before blogs, you would read previous writings and know the ground rules. With bloggers, getting those interests/sphere of influence is every bit as important, but the rules of engagement (i.e. - what will get published) are different. Another take: don't pitch them, ping them (link to them, comment on their blog, be part of their community).

The rest of Doc Searl's title is "Reading some writing on the web's wall". Here's a side observation, while we wait for the ending keynote - there are a lot of Mac's here, a truly disproportionate share. An awful lot of "thought leaders" are - and have been - moving to them. There's something Microsoft should pay attention to.

The title reflects something Doc's been writing about for awhile on his blog. By showing a Google search for "syndicate", he says that search isn't dead, it just isn't live. However - a search for "syndicateNY" turns up a lot better results... ). There are live searches on Yahoo and Google, but they aren't primary (and Doc calls them hidden). Hey, my blog shows up near the top on that Yahoo search :)

So Technorati is the "live" web as far as Doc is concerned - their default search results are the live stuff. I don't know - the main problem with the example, to my mind, is the term "syndicate" - it's way to general, so the results are likely to suck. The point is good, but it's a bad example. Anyway, back to Doc - he's stating that Google and Yahoo search the whole haystack, as opposed to just syndicated feeds ([ed] although - those two are converging, and that convergence will only grow).

"On the Live Web, the demand side is supplying itself". He's relating this to the growth of Linux (Torvalds and open sourcers supplying the demand and the supply). Umm, no, not so much. The real growth started when IBM and a few other old line firms started tossing real money at it. It's a blind spot that fools a lot of people. Including the Sun executive team, but I repeat myself.

Back to the presentation. "The best blogging is provisional, not finished. It's about rolling snowballs downhill". You can watch that rollout on sites like techmeme. You can be be an "alpha blogger" by being quotable. I like this - there's no "new economy" - it's the same one, but networked. The power isn't redistributed, it's re-originated. The most connected will be those taking advantage of the Live Web.

"The value chain is being replaced by the value constellation". The wide open space around the constellations is freedom. Heh - with apologies to Gillmor, he says that we it's more about intention than attention. The intention? It's about customers who are ready to buy. To Doc's mind, a lot of marketers, PR people (etc, etc) are back in the original web bubble - trying to get eyeballs and attention to sell to. His notion is that people are now coming with intention - ready to buy - and they need to find a willing seller. So he wants vendors to come to the customers, not vice-versa.

An example - renting a car without shopping around.

The Live Web exposes many of advertising's flaws. Zapped by mute and fast forward, inattention to the message, etc. etc. Top-down advertising is just noise, and it's very inefficient. AdSense is a start at fixing the problem, but it's not done. Doc thinks money will be spent fast in the intention economy, because it matches willing buyers and sellers quickly. He also thinks that the stuff that Gillmor is talking about plays into this, as a way of getting that matching built up.

Large vendors are going to have to adapt, and resist the urge to build silos. Consumers are coming in educated about what they want to buy already. So some more stuff:

A free market is not "your choice of silo" - a great example being the various carriers that want to ditch net neutrality and let the ISP's build out their own silos. Another: "no one wants an experience". People want to make, find, understand, or buy stuff. They don't want crap. Another: "The Consumer" is a relic of the industrial economy. We need to gag when we say "consumer" rather than "customer" - or "listener" or "viewer". More: The net is not a place where "consumers" "access" "content". For instance, I'm producing right now...

"Branding is for cattle, not for products or people". Playing into this, everything and everyone is being unbundled. This is impacting local TV already. The current distribution mechanisms are outdated - we need a la carte, but as we design it, not as "they" design it. TV as we think we know it is already dead. One in three teens cannot identify the top four networks. Meanwhile, the FCC is busy mandating HDTV and moving the existing channels off the air.

"Clear Channel killed Radio. Listeners are resurrecting it". The same thing happened to newspapers, as they standardized and stopped being local. Doc says that Podcasting is bringing back local radio. Hi-Def TV will be cheap and available by the end of the year. Neither cable nor satellite can carry (much) of it. Neither can ISPs, who have left the last mile for delivery only. However, you can buy cheap production tools for it (cameras, etc). [ed] - I don't see a small timer putting together something like "Battlestar Galactica" anytime soon though.

"Email marketing is creepy. So is SEO" - I heartily agree with that.

The "livest" part of the web is on mobile phones (etc). Everyone is now an influencer, or can be.

"Closed Formats are Doomed" - Heh - he thinks that the majority of desktops and Laptops will run Linux in 5 years. he's very wrong about that, for reasons I've blogged about before. Hand a Linux box to any nearby non-technical person, and watch them try to get audio and video (or printing) working. I don't see any of that being fixed, either - none of the outfits promoting Linux are interested in that stuff at all, and - to be blunt - uncompensated developers don't do that kind of "finishing" work. None of which has anything to do with stability or safety, btw.

"The net should be as fast as your hard drive" - and he says someday it will be, although the carriers will fight it. People want real bandwidth, and will fight for it. The funny thing is, Verizon is laying fiber in my neighborhood, and they charge $45 for the 15mbits connection - and $145 for the 30 mbit one. Which means, they'll sell very little of the latter, and will have to drop that price. Who knows - this one, the market will sort out. What will likely happen - anyone who can convince their company to pay for the upper end connection will get it, and anyone who can't, won't.

Question: What social changes do you see? The end of the couch potato (not sure of that one). Education will change, as it's now on an old style industrial model. I hope he's right about that, but there are a lot of people standing in the way of real change (regardless of how you define real change) in that field.

And that's it - end of the show.

Open Source advocates are stunned, just stunned, that large users of OSS contribute very little back into the pool:

Chase Phillips used to spend up to 100 hours a week writing code for the Firefox browser. Bruce Momjian, a former teacher, manages the E-mail list for contributors to the PostgreSQL database. Brian McCallister spends evenings and weekends working on projects for the Apache Software Foundation. Swedish engineer Peter Lundblad labors over Subversion, a change management system for distributed development, at night "when the children are sleeping and my wife watches TV."

This spirit of volunteerism is alive and well in the world of open source software. Thousands of people donate their time and expertise to the benefit of all. But not everyone is giving as much as they're getting. Large companies, those with the greatest wherewithal to help, are surprisingly minor players in the roll-up-your-sleeves work of open source development.

Big companies are "great consumers of open source. They're very good at pushing the limits of what open source code can do," says Carl Drisko, leader of the data center consulting practice at Novell, which distributes SUSE Linux. But when it comes to pounding out code, Drisko says, "they don't have a lot of people contributing back."

I think a big round of "Duhhh" is in order here. Corporate software development is about solving business problems, not about writing extra code. Sure, there are plenty of shops that have gotten into death marches, where tons of useless code got written - but even there, the code was allegedly useful to the business. Releasing code back out to OSS projects runs into two big hurdles:

• The "who owns it?" dilemma. Most companies operate under the assumption that code written at work belongs to the company. That means that releasing code out to the public requires signoff from legal (and likely, management). Most people shake their heads and think - "not going there"
• IT developers are trying hard to get their projects done. Doing extra work to make code accessible (and available) to external projects isn't in the budget or timeline

This isn't specific to Open Source. Most IT shops don't do blue sky work for any set of tools they use, open source or proprietary. There's always a small community of interested parties willing to commit code back to a vendor or project - but it's a small community. There are reasons for that, which I'll illustrate with another quote:

But contributions from businesses are small, partly because of a cultural divide between the open source crowd and corporate software developers, says Brian Behlendorf, co-founder of the Apache Web Server project and CTO at software company CollabNet. In contrast to the bottom line business world, Behlendorf says, open source developers exhibit a "willingness to challenge authority, the passion to work on an interesting problem well past the end of the workday, and the time and space to be able to build the right solution to a problem rather than just the most expedient."

It has very little to do with the "bottom line business world" in terms of extra work. Stuff done on the job - sure, there are hurdles, which I outlined above. After work? Most developers have these things called "lives". Maybe Behlendorf should look into that before he comes up with silly explanations. Most people who work in software are not into software to the exclusion of all else. Contrary to the TV stereotypes, most of them have other interests and activities that fill their non-working hours.

The bottom line is, don't expect more than a relative handful of people to contribute non-paid hours to projects, open source or otherwise.

The RIAA wants to make technological progress illegal:

US satellite radio firm XM is being sued by record labels over a gadget that lets listeners record songs.

The recording industry said XM's Inno device, which stores music and divides it into tracks, infringes copyright.

The lawsuit seeks $150,000 (£79,537) in damages for every song copied by XM customers to an Inno gadget.

This is TiVO for radio, but with fewer features. With a DVR, I can not only record TV shows - and divide them into "tracks" (i.e., individual programs) - but I can also drop them to videotape. The Inno device doesn't allow that kind of copying - it's not unlike an iPod. Once the music is there, it can't move further.

Never mind all that though - the RIAA wants to forbid any possible use that doesn't involve them getting paid (never mind the artists though). I have a visual of the morons back at RIAA HQ; deep in the bowels of the building, they are trying to build a weapon that will make anything but vinyl LP's stop working. The image: Doc Brown from "Back to the Future", but without the brains.

McGovern on why enterprisey types aren't at conferences:

Other attendees at conferences such as practitioners of Ruby would feel intimidated being in our presence.

This comes in the context of him answering this question he posed: "Why aren't more enterprise architects speaking at industry conferences?" I can't imagine anyone being intimidated by being in McGovern's presence. Plenty of other reactions come to mind though...

While coming home on the train yesterday, I finished off something I'd been letting hang - an interoperability demonstration between two Cincom products - Mantis and Cincom Smalltalk. There's a Mantis server running inside of our firewall for just this sort of demonstration, and it's got a Web Services interface available. So with a lot of help from our lead WS* developer, Tamara Kogan - and useful pointers from our lead Mantis guy, Tim Flick, I've got a screencast. Enjoy!

In the spirit of Bob Newhart's old phone routines, here's Emperor Palpatine taking a call from Darth Vader - after the Death Star has been destroyed.

The arguments in favor of net neutrality sound seductive - the idea is to allow a "level playing field" where no service stands above any other. However, stand back from that a minute, and ask yourself about the proposed solution: regulation of the network providers. Hmm. It's rarely the case that a regulated system provides optimum behavior. In fact, it usually provides LCD behavior, and stifles forward progress.

Which leads me to something an awful lot of smart people will consider to be heresy: to hell with net neutrality. Leave the market be, and let the network evolve. The world didn't come to an end when we got fast and slow lanes for parcel delivery - heck, we have "net neutrality" for standard postal service. Is anyone prepared to argue that we have the best possible mail delivery service as a result?

I think I'd rather leave the market alone and let it deliver than rely on the cognitive powers of the FCC.

Vincent Foley-Bourgon asks about doing remote management of a Smalltalk application:

For instance, you’re at a friend’s home on a Saturday night when you cell rings, it’s work, there’s a pretty big bug in the software and they need it fixed ASAP. With a language that uses text source files, you could use your friend’s computer with Notepad.exe or what have you, make the fix, upload it back and go back to your Bailey’s.

I don't think the whole "works with text files" thing helps a lot. If a system runs into trouble, I seriously doubt that you'll want to try applying a fix by hacking some code in Notepad, and then uploading it. For one thing, how would you compile that for a mainstream application? Bottom line - you need access to your development tools - whatever they are - if you are going to fix a production app. As well, you need access to your test environment.

So, if you get that call Vince speaks of, you're heading back to the office (home or otherwise). Smalltalk images just don't enter into it. I've gone through my scheme for patching this server in place before - it involves coming up with a fix by working with the test server, and then uploading the changes to the server (in the form of a file-in). I then kick the server through a remote admin interface, and tell it to load the code. I also push new versions of the parcels up to the server, so that the next time I start the server, it loads the latest code from the get go.

I suppose I could hack a file-out by hand in notepad, but that's no more realistic than the Java guy doing it. In either case, you simply aren't going to try and apply a production fix that way.

The NYC STUG talks to Ruby:

I thought it would be an interesting idea to have a presentation where we compared Smalltalk to one of our dynamic language cousins. Of these next kin it seemed to me that from the most popular languages that Ruby was the closest. So I approached the NYC Ruby chairperson, Patrick May. We met at the cafe at the New Yorker Hotel , right around from Suite LLC where we hold our meetings and for a couple hours we chatted but mostly went through the VisualWorks IDE. I brought a copy of VW 7.4 NC which I let him have. Patrick apparently has been a fan of Smalltalk but did not know quite where to start.

Check Charles' blog for details; dynamic languages go better together :)

Rogers points to James E. Robinson III, who explains why specs matter:

I used to think there was a virtue in less precise, more readable specs because they are much less intimidating to new implementers of a format. The success of XML-RPC has been driven in part by how easy the spec is to understand at first read.

But making software interoperate well is a hard job that becomes significantly harder when a spec lacks precision. An incredible amount of time can be burned on arguments over interpretation, especially when a programmer is told that his code doesn't meet a spec.

I came around to that point of view as well - interop is actively harmed by loose specs - regardless of the prominence of people who think otherwise.

I've updated the information page for the summer release.

This is the sort of thing that happens when you treat support as a cost center, and focus only on minimizing those costs:

"Hello. MCI. What is the trouble you are having?"

"There's a number in the UK that MCI won't connect to."

"And what is the trouble with that?"

"Well, I want to talk to this number in the UK and..." Then there was a click as the phone went dead at their end.

I'm glad I just left MCI. I'm happy I'm not an investor in MCI. I wonder if they hung up on me, or if they just aren't very good at this whole making telephone calls thing.

Many companies haven't really picked up on the sea change in word of mouth PR. A decade ago, you grumbled to your friends and acquaintances. If you knew someone influential, you might get some action - if not, you just got ignored. Now? The poor service provided by your support people gets publicized everywhere.

Support can be a cost center all right - just not in the same way most management seems to think.

As if Microsoft didn't have enough problems of its own with getting Vista out - now Symantec is looking for an injunction:

Symantec has asked a U.S. court to order a halt to the development of Windows Vista, claiming that its rival is wrongfully incorporating Veritas storage technology into its next-generation OS.

Symantec sued Microsoft yesterday, seeking unspecified damages and also asking the court to remove Symantec's storage technology from a variety of Microsoft products, including Windows XP, Windows Server 2003, and the upcoming Vista and "Longhorn" Windows Server products.

This sort of thing makes the far fetched scenario here sound possible :/