Chris adeptly rips a new asshole into the ignorance of our tech community to not focus in on the real issues which Unite highlights and which are staring at our collective souls. To summarize:
1. Its not enough to billow and rage about ‘user’s controlling their own data! That is so, so, so, so….. 2007ish! Nowadays we must focus on the BENEFITS to openness, why owning your data is BETTER and EASIER and (IMHO) why we need to prove these benefits to other vendors so that THEY can benefit as well. If we don’t have an ecosystem where ALL benefit - it ain’t gonna happen.
Take COMCAST for example. Here’s a schizophrenic company that on one side is metering bandwidth and about to define what destroying net neutrality is all about, while at the same time running cutey videogame-like TV commercials of an integrated DLA-like environment and sponsoring Joseph Smarr and John McCrea to help us build our open stack and change the world. COMCAST desperately needs to be shown the BENEFITS of working with others, not locking users data in and they need to keep on the trail of making up for Plaxo’s PAST transgressions.
Joseph and John have been doing a great job at that repentant task, but we all know that at any time the bosses can come in, lock up that Plaxo data and help Haliburton and SAIC send us back to the stone age. So until its painfully obvious that open systems, cooperative cross-vendor efforts and an on-going open web are the ONLY courses to take - we have more work to do!
2. Microsoft Live Mesh, bit torrent, Dave Winer’s Frontier platform and all sorts of ‘client side’ servers have shown that distributed architectures are a piece of our future. So having one baked into Opera seems coolio.
But as Chris points out “why do we care about Opera, if its not even open source?” We might as well use Live Mesh!
IMHO Unite should be a plug-in for all browsers. But then that wouldn’t help Opera’s installed base - right?
3. I won’t even go into the other issues that Chris brings up; but owning the namespace, lack of OpnID support, filtering and proxying and the other requirements that Opera demands to use Unite - make it a non-starter.
The real issue is: ‘where’s Michael Arrington or Eric Schonfeld on these issues?” “What’s up with GigaOm?” Whatever happened to blogger intelligence and insights - in regards to this product launch?
4. Hearing that Unite supports Activity Streams say a bunch of things to me:
- there are good things in all dark clouds
- Activity streams is the buzzword du jour
- Unite may have some sort of future in our distribted world
Anyway - back to building cities in Northern Ohio.
Just found out that Craig Newmark, Paul Buchheit and Don Knuth are all alumni of CWRU - where I’ll be teaching.
Date: Wednesday, June 17th, 2009 | Time: 6:51 am Tags: 2 comments
Did I tell yah how much I love it when Quicktime comes along - demands an update - yet I cannot click the button and it simply locks up my entire computer? Even Microsoft doesn’t do shit like that! Its happened twice now.
This is the presentation I’ll be giving in Northern Ohio over the next few weeks. It’s about a new company I’m forming called Digital City Mechanics, which will be incubated at the Youngstown Business Incubator.
I’ve met some amazing people in Northern Ohio recently (George Nemeth, Ed Morrison, Jim Cossler, Lev Gonick, Anthony Houston, Paul Podnar, Kent Smith, Curtis Thompson) - enough so that I’m moving my family there and digging into this new project.
We’re going to build a Open Digital City regional alliance, with Akron, Lorain, Youngstown, Oberlin and Cleveland as the founding members. We’ll produce a dashboard with live video help baked in and make sure that a series of ’shared servers’ will get produced which will house; a timeline of historical moments, a green jobs knowledge, local web celebs, local foods productions tutorials, webcams and location pages and the typical kind of hyper-local stuff like jobs, events and business directory.
These shared servers and a Digital City ID system (SAML based) will connect a wide range of vendors, institutions, people and businesses together. our goal is to innovate workforce development.
Governmenta nd Foudnation money purs billions into workforce development every year. The status quo is our competition.
We’re focusing on using tech skills for health and local foods jobs, as well as producing multimedia on-line content and services - as our business model. If we can improve the quality of jobs and compfort level of older workers using computers even 10% - we’ve saying billions and educating 100,000s.
I’ll be recruting - ALL OF YOU - shortly - so be prepared to ‘come to Cleveland’.
My two books are on Blurb about this effort:
- “How to build the Open Mesh” - which is the the theory behind using dashboards as a great equalizer for our distributed architecture
I’ve found a bug in Wordpress that just appeared. Whenever I go into the media gallery it crashes in Firefox. But it doesn’t crash in IE. Wordpress is also taking my smiley faces and blowing them up to 500 pixels large. I wonder if I’ve been ‘hacked’?
and if anyone knows the CEO Blurb, please introduce me to her. I need to explain to her that locking in my data inside of their editor tool and not allowing me to output it as a pdf - is not going to be tolerated much longer.
I’m still finalizing the deals, but it looks like I’ll be teaching the class at CWRU, Lorain County Community College, Univ of Akron and Oberlin (and hopefully CSU.)
I’d also like to announce that I’m incubating a new company - called Digital City Mechanics - at the Youngstown Business Incubator. I’ll be moving my family to Cleveland in the summer. Shoutout to my homeboys George, Paul, Kent, Ed, Lev and Jim! And Frank, Curtis, Jon, Patty, Mark, Cara, Susie, Susan, John and Hunter.
This Digital City project has me putting all my theory into practice. For the past few years I’ve had to go hat-in-hand to customers trying to convince them what to do with my platform. Now I’m going to go and do what I want to do with my platform.
And that’s build an Open Digital City. Where workforce development, content production and local foods meet in the valley of health care, medical digitizing and the history polymers. Add to that some Seniors interviews, green jobs knowledge bases and authorized venues, community services and common constructs - and you have our project! Oh yah - and a business directory of……
Stay tuned - it should be fun. Something I can take to the White House and Katie Stanton. A distributed architecture based on dashboards and open standards.
I’ve lived in California for 21 years. We brought the first software company to the SOMA area in 1987. Now I’m taking a whole new attitude to Northern Ohio. So:
- 2 books, a class and a new project
Date: Saturday, June 6th, 2009 | Time: 3:34 am Tags: 1 comment
This is the speech I gave in Montreal at Webcom-Montreal ‘09 on “How to build the Open Mesh” (’09 edition.) This speech was the first time I pitched our virtuous circle we’re building in Cleveland. The circle starts at about 25:00 minutes in……
Date: Friday, May 29th, 2009 | Time: 7:47 am Tags: 2 comments
This new improved edition includes details on our Digital City project in Northern Ohio and an expansion of my proposal for dashboard outlines as a shared table for distributed - everything. I also have updated just about every page and I’ve pretty much closed up the content of the book.
This will become the ‘insider’s original guide’ and I’ll now start a new book entitled “How to build a Digital City” which I’ll use as a textbook for a class (of the same name) I’ll be teaching in Northern Ohio.
Enjoy!
Date: Wednesday, May 27th, 2009 | Time: 2:03 pm Tags: Add a comment
How does the news of today (Memorial Day) connect together?
Years ago I developed several ideas for connecting the open web to broadcast television. It’s great to see that Twitter will be used for these kind of ideas. I’m hoping that scavenger hunts get real, sort of like a hybrid Great Race-Trivia quiz between meatspace and cyberspace. I worked on an early hybrid TV-web portal system for NOW.com in 1999.
