It’s birthday season
BigDave Jacobs - May 4th
the other BigDave Winer - May 2nd
Paolo Valdemarin - April 29th
Kjetil Larsen - May 4th
P-Air Wolff - April 30th
Kjetil Larsen - May 4th
Jamie Faye Fenton - April 25th
What a day! Recalling times gone past, and time to be lived and the powers of creativity
Queen’s Day 2006 - I drank a cup of beer. Lasted til 8 PM.
Man oh man - its morning time in Amsterdam and I’ll be back. This is a special day - where the entire inner city is blocked off and turns into a Mardi Gras flea market yard sale party. And it’s birthday season.
We went out on a boat and got stuck in a gridlock.
Its on these calm mornings, after a night of partying - that life is best clarified. Old people beget young people, parents and children, mentors and students. I spent the day with a young programmer named Andy Smith who enfused in me again with the spirit of why we’re all here.
To create.
As a young man I wandered the streets of Amsterdam - trying to figure it all out. I was using the ‘cover’ of being an opera student at the Conservatory of Music in Amsterdam. But what I was really doing was experiencing freedom for the first time. It was 1975.
The same year Jobs went to India and Gates started….. well just go check the history books.
I’d sit with my journal and write, draw and figure out how man can cope with machines.
My conclusion was to write software to control these machines. I was doing ‘analog’ programming’ with a Moog synthetzer. So I knew digital programming was going to be the predominant paradigm. All those ‘loose’ analog pots were too dam loose to get anything to reprpoduce itself effectively.
But I also knew that no creative person was going to be able to be a programmer. We needed ‘easier to use’ ways of letting humans control machines.
I also knew that we’d need humans to define and controls these digital bits. So they needed tools that we exact and detailed, not too sloppy or loose. So compromises had to be made. We only had 128k on our original Macintoshes, but we got the timeline working anyway.
On one side you have cold hearted machines who nothing about morality, ethics or what is right. They dont; care if you run out of RAM or hard drive space or if your net connection is slow or fast. They just take the code and execute it. And that’s where the humans come in.
Machines simply interpret instructions - very efficiently.
Humans on the other hand - bring - well they bring the humaness to things. As Neo discovered in ‘the Matrix’ - we have choice.
So its the battle between man and machine - or shall I say - the conspiracy to work together. Cause we need each other.
And this struggle that we’re immersed in right now - is really an extension of the same issue: “the battle between Man and Machine“. The amazing potential and opportunity that faces us - versus the task(s) of actually getting it all to work.
Together.
James Joyce in Dublin
I forget to tell you that I quoted Joyce in Dublin. It ws my sort of “seed planting” (piss on the side of the wall) marker I wanted to leave behind.
“He was alone and still, gazing out to sea. She seemed like on whom magic had changed into the likeness of a strange and beauitful seabird.”
Don Hopkins is in Amsterdam
Getting ready for the Queen’s Day weekend celebration. Don is a legendary hacker - I’ve known for 17+ years and worked with on several occasions.
Me too!
Dublin Blogger dinner
Here we all are at some Tapas Bar in Dublin, Temple Bar.
I recited James Joyce and told stories of yars gona past.
AOL wins Emmy for Live8 promo
Look what I found in the paper yesterday.
Congrats to Jim Bankoff and the team at AOL!
Eine deutsche Version für unsere deutschen Freunde
German version of StructuredBlogging.org. Thanks Raju!
It’s the Context
Here is the big post I’ve been meaning to write - on convergence, the players and the wire into the home.
For 15 years now we have watched a war rage over who can get the data to flow into and out of conusmer’s homes. That wire - whether it be the cable TV or telephone wire - was surely going to be the gold mine that would enable folks to monetize and exploit the digital revolution.
With 15 years of precedence and history behind us - it is safe to say that no one wire will dominate the landscape - and that we are destined to live in a world of myriad lanscpaes and technology platforms. That doesn’t mean that the Interactive TV world will give up or that everything will be IPTV.
What it means is that IPTV will not surplant cable TV or terrestial broadcast - it’ll simply add to it. As TiVO, DirectTV and all the other new ‘forms of TV’ have done. Orb recent successes and deployment has also contributed to shaking up a few entrenched souls. Its amazing what these fangled ‘programmable devices’ can do.
Cisco assembling a critical portfolio of related companies (Linksys, Scientific-Atlantic) is also contributing ot upsetting the status quo. But I’m not here to promounce some new ‘era of TV’. What I wanna say is that there’s plenty of room for everyone - and that its all about context.
In fact, I can venture out onto a ledge and say ”Context is ALL that matters”.
I’m participating in the Sprint Ambassador program - where they gave me (and others) a free phone and free service for six months. That means I can download as many songs, search for data, cruise the web - with a phone all setup andworking - and really enjoy a mobile on-line digital lifestyle (as opposed to my Lifeblog Nokia phone - which I still can’t get to browse the web or answer email and I have to pay for its usage.)
Getting free downloads is pretty coolio. It effectively turns my phone into an integrated MP3 player, similar to iTunes. However the songs cost $2.50 (instead of iTunes ubiquitous $1 a song charges.) Why do I think Sprint will get away with charging over twice as much - for the same thing?
Cause of the context.
At that very moment that you wanna hear that song and be able to play it back - the difference between $1 and $2.50 ain’t that much. I’d gladly pay for something - that I need - at the right moment and context.
And when your DSL line goes down in the middle of the night, oh how you wish for the cable modem account. And when you wonder why your TiVO doesn’t connect in with other PVRs, or which Home Media Center system to go with - I say - go with the open one.
So prepare yourself for expensive PCs and hard drives in cars, all sorts of elaborate Home LAN boxes, PVRs, net based CD players and portable gizmos - all based upon the principle of IPTV, content and services on-demand - and good old fashioned ‘on-line communities’.
Cause I really think that’s the one thing that the hardware guys are missing. How these online services and communities wil be an overwhelming sucess with cyber-savvy teen agers - and how they’ll fail miserably with folks over 60. And vice versa.
Is there anybody out there who doesn’t intrisicly understand this intuitively? Why do we even have to explain this to Telcos, so-called portals or cable TV companies?
Culturally relevant content, ethnically oriented content, sexually or religously oriented content - all have their place - in today’s content marketplace. When static content morphs into interactive services - WATCH OUT for the oft promised explosion of people’s marketplaces, Long Tail marketing and guerilla viral uptakes.
But yah gotta get the context right.
When mainstream media can cleanly mix with web services - the juice will be there to drive an entirely new world of distruibuted meshed together brands. New kinds of ’syndicates’ and ‘cartels’ will emerge. Maybe they’ll be owned by the same mothership - maybe they’ll just be partners with one another. But the only way we’ll be able to equal Microsoft, Google, Yahoo, Fox, IAC or AOL - is via our own sort of home-grown consortiums.
In other words - maybe the MySpace kids LIKE an inefficient, poorly designed site? Maybe they will continue to go against all the logic that says: “if its shitty, they will leave.” The kids keep going back to MySace and that’s clearly cause of the relationships they’ve got there and the bands they love to listen to and track.
The context for MySpace is perfect for them right now. The issue is “what happens over time?” Will MySpace stay hot or turn into the MTV of social networks (which is about as un-hot, un-cool as you can get.)
Only time will tell.
But one thing we do know, if you get the context right - you’ll have a pretty good chance of surviving.
It’s Monday and I’m link blogging - again
Dare is pissed that nobody understands Microsoft’s org chart changes. Can you imagine this ex-Ask guy demanding power and division level budget? What Dare is MOST excited about is: the press release, [which declares that] this organizational structure will increase Microsoft’s agility in delivering innovation to customers.
Michael Arrington has some suggestions to Ziki - what he calls “Suprglu with social networking added on.”
No Russ! Tell me it isn’t true. Others agree.
Esther is schmoozing with Mike Jones.
More details on Plum. Kaboodle? StyleHive? StyleHive looks like a new kind of community shopping site. I was under the impression Plum was more like a new kind of aggregator. I just sure hope that ALL of these sites have open APIs and support ONE of the major open ID systems. Then we can work with them.
Congrats to Ted for his team being in the playoffs.
The migration continues from the Beeb to Yahoo.
Viacom buys XFire - Stewart Alsop is happy.
Dave has some interesting things to say about bittorrent.
Inflated, inefficient MySpace page views. Ah HAH! I knew there was something fishy going on!
ajaxTunes - a web based audio player
I love these relationship maps Valeywag puts up.
Ted Shelton has a new company. Congrats Ted.
Half of everything is not here
Om Malik has a nice bit on the NYT article on MySpace.
Its the realization that there are a LOT of people who are not in the US or speak English.
I believe that International issues will creep up and supercede US based issues - within 4-5 years from now. Chinese and Indian companies will have as much influence and power as US based companies do now. And God forbid the Italians, Germans or Spanish get their act together.
Russia alone could transform the known world - and when all of these factors, cultures and technology bases interact and mix together - they’ll easily equal, if not overcome Hollywood and Silicon Valley.
All this is very clear if you spent anytime OUTSIDE of the US lately and met and talked to some of these technologists. That’s why we’re starting BBM India and getting our footholds in China and Korea (and back in Japan - after being away for 10 years.)
BTW I get to meet Jamie Kantrowitz from MySpace Europe - as we’re both speaking at the eTribes mashup - May 2nd - at the Commonwealth Club.
