/etc/crontab

The Microblogger's Dilemma

2011-11-14T12:31:00.001-08:00

Will every site soon have a "status update" field? How can I possibly update all of them?! This has passed trend and is headed straight toward pandemic. I suppose because it's so easy to implement, there is a proliferation of "what are you doing now?" kinds of status update opportunities. Twitter. Facebook. LinkedIn. Google Plus. And that's just the biggest, most popular ones, and doesn't

Open Letter to Web Site Developers

2011-11-11T14:40:00.001-08:00

Dear Web Site Developer (or misguided management): Please don't do any of these things on your web sites: Ask me to enter my email address twice. Tell me what characters I can and can't use in my password. Time out my sessions for my own protection. Make me change my password every so often. Make every field in your form *required. Make it impossible for me to change my email address. Insist

Expert Culture vs. Ease of Use

2011-07-12T16:55:00.000-07:00

There is a phenomenon I call an "expert culture" where things that are hard to understand and use become popular precisely because they are hard to use. Once you figure out how to use something complicated, you become an "expert", and it feels good to be an expert. You help other people because it makes you feel smart, and then they learn, and then they are an expert too.Conversely, products that

JIT vs Buffering

2011-07-03T08:30:00.000-07:00

I've been studying Just-In-Time techniques for business and manufacturing and process (or JIT, or the Toyota Production System). There are fascinating parallels between computer science, where JIT is also used to some extent, and manufacturing. I have some thoughts to add to this discussion, and no place to add them, so I'm blogging about it.JIT has two things at its core: predictive forecasting,

Why Podcasting Never Really Happened

2011-06-05T09:21:00.000-07:00

Back in the day, I predicted that podcasting was not really "a thing" and would go nowhere. Nobody really agreed with me, but I believe that now it is safe to declare podcasting officially dead. (Blogging is almost dead, too, so this posting is perhaps paradoxical).Here is why podcasting (as an authoring paradigm) never happened: audio is the same as video. Except not as good.Video and audio are

The Truth about Multitasking

2011-04-12T13:08:00.001-07:00

I've been reading recently about scientists studying multitasking and declaring that we're no good at it. I have something to say about that.First, some background. Multitasking is a word borrowed from computer science and reapplied to life, which doesn't happen that often. In a computer's operating system, at the very heart of it, is a switching mechanism for doing a little bit of work on a lot

Cost cutting: rolls of toilet paper? Really?

2011-02-18T15:01:00.000-08:00

It was bad enough when suddenly Cheerios boxes were thinner by 20% than they used to be. Same price, less content. There was a rash of that when the economic downturn really hit. I saw that it was probably necessary, but found it discouraging.Today, I discovered that the same brand of toilet paper that I've been buying forever (Scott) has made their rolls 3/8" narrower than they used to be. That

Inventor Labs blog

2010-06-16T16:31:00.000-07:00

We started a product design-oriented blog over at Inventor Labs. I will continue to blog here (sporadically, as always) but may put more technical or product-related posts over there.

Design Renaissance conference

2010-04-18T20:26:00.000-07:00

I spent much of today at a conference in Santa Cruz, CA, on an incredibly beautiful day. I was inside much more than a sane person would have been. Santa Cruz is a special place: people care more about more things, per square centimeter, than almost anywhere else except maybe Berkeley.This was a good conference, though it had less to do with Design or Sustainability than I would have expected.

Customer Service in the "facebook era"

2010-04-14T15:23:00.001-07:00

I have some feedback for facebook that I think would be valuable to their product managers and software people. I have no way to get it to them. Their "customer service" is almost impenetrable. It is clearly designed for idiot prevention, and I can sort of understand that, with 100's of millions of customers who use the site for free.However, I think that this doesn't serve them well. Because

Why iPad will kill Kindle

2010-04-14T12:07:00.001-07:00

I have a new iPad. I'm not usually an early adopter, partly because I've worked in the technology industry a long time and I wait a revision or two with most things. But I bought an iPad, partly because they're [relatively] cheap.But this blog post is about reading. I have not done much reading in the past 20 years. I'm not sure why. I read sometimes on airplanes and on vacations, when I

iPad dock and keyboard

2010-04-12T15:04:00.000-07:00

I just took delivery of my iPad dock and real keyboard. It's great to be able to actually type on this thing!However, it's clear that the iPhone OS was not designed with keyboards in mind. There are dozens of missed opportunities for things that could "just work" that don't.The biggest shortcoming is that you can't navigate between apps from the keyboard. At least I've not discovered how, if

Password Security

2010-03-16T16:21:00.000-07:00

I have a new web hosting service on one of my web sites that insists that I use a password that they call STRONG. They forced me to change my existing password, and won't accept my ideas for a new password without passing their meter for STRONG passwords.It irritates me that they think they know better than I, a 25-year computer industry veteran, what makes a good password. They are, in fact,

10 Years Ago...

2010-01-24T08:02:00.000-08:00

A friend of mine sent a question to his network on New Year's Eve. He is 38, and I happen to be 48, and his question was this: "I wish I could ask my 48-year-old self for advice, so I know what might be coming in the next decade". So, being wiser than many of his peers, he tried to reach out to people who had just gone through that decade, to see if there was something to learn. I admire the

Maintenance

2009-04-24T09:14:00.000-07:00

I have a growing, or perhaps surging sense that the single word we need to revive from the past, and embrace, is maintenance.It seems like a boring word, and to some extent, that's the point. It is a concept that has all but disappeared from our society: to keep things working, to fix things that are broken, to battle entropy.The word that seems to drive us today instead is growth. You hear it

VistaPrint.com - horrible experience

2009-04-02T11:08:00.000-07:00

I have done digital prepress and graphic design software since the beginning of desktop publishing, so I know a thing or two about what it takes to print business cards.I used VistaPrint.com because I needed cards in a hurry, and it seemed to be a well-designed site, and they could get them done in a hurry. I'm *very* unhappy, however.First of all, they charge some ridiculously low price like

Twitter: just say no

2009-01-05T20:06:00.001-08:00

It's really just that I don't like Twitter, but given the recent breaches of security, it seems ill-advised to use the service. Just delete the tweet.

User Experience

2009-01-04T16:54:00.001-08:00

I just ran across this article in PC world. It's a great summary of how to design software -- succinct and on the mark. Good reading for all. Kudos to Mike Elgan.

iPhone: photo copying via Bluetooth, please

2008-12-22T20:28:00.000-08:00

The iPhone seems to insist that you use iPhoto to get your photos out of it. Often that's a fine thing. But on somebody else's computer, or on various occasions, I want the photos out but I don't want to deal with my desktop computer directly and "pull" them out. I should be able to just push a button on my iPhone and have them bluetooth'ed or 3G'd or even emailed back to my mothership. The

Quoted in Wall Street Journal

2008-12-21T09:54:00.000-08:00

I was quoted (not entirely accurately) a couple of days ago in the Wall Street Journal in a story about Apple. I got a surprising amount of email about this. Apparently a lot of people read lengthy articles in the WSJ; that's a good sign, methinks.

Gas Prices

2008-11-09T17:40:00.000-08:00

These stations are right across the street from each other, yet their prices per gallon are $.50 different. There haven't been any cars in the Shell parking lot when I've driven by in the last week.

Magnetism

2008-10-16T20:37:00.001-07:00

I have been thinking about magnetism a lot recently. It makes no sense. It is called one of the "Fundamental Forces" which usually is the kind of term scientists use for stuff that nobody really understands.I set up an experiment in the lab this week. Two magnets opposing each other, holding some weight up in the air. Levitation, if you will. Teeny little magnets holding some metal up in the

Power Wagon Woodie

2008-10-07T13:24:00.000-07:00

What a beautiful truck George Wellman has, in his 1950 Dodge Power Wagon, the only existing Campbell-body Woodie PW. Here is a link to some pictures I took during my recent visit to Traverse City, MI. George and Jill were extremely generous hosts, and I thank them.

Recently Spotted

2008-10-07T13:17:00.001-07:00

Two sides of the same sign, on a church in Traverse City, MI.

2008-10-01T18:00:00.001-07:00

I'm sitting in a place called "The Catch" in Traverse City, Michigan. This is a pretty cool town. Tomorrow I pay a visit to George Wellman, owner of the venerable (and only known remaining) wood-bodied Dodge Power Wagon "Woodie". I can't wait to see it, and meet George...Posted with LifeCast

2008-08-29T08:55:00.001-07:00

Sittin' in Starbucks waiting for the bank to open, and I thought I'd try a blogging app on my phone. A good way to use a lot of time, trying to type with my thumbs!Geolocate this postPosted with LifeCast

Driving big trucks

2008-07-30T08:31:00.000-07:00

I recently bought an antique Mack tractor trailer, and in order to be able to drive it, I went to truck driving school. I now have a California Class A commercial license, and can drive just about anything except hazardous materials and tankers. One of the main things about driving a tractor-trailer is knowing where your trailer is, and making turns so it doesn't crunch the stop sign and

Nuts-and-Bolting

2008-07-24T12:06:00.000-07:00

A friend in Australia used the phrase "nuts-and-bolting" to describe what I'm doing now, and I love it: . There are a surprising number of nuts and bolts in the real world, and I've been using wrenches a lot. In fact, a wrench slipped in my hand and I hit myself in the face the other day, and it made a perfectly semi-circular cut on my cheek bone.Compared to the software world I've been

Issues with iPhone

2008-07-23T21:40:00.000-07:00

I bought an iPhone 3G yesterday. Mostly because I may be doing consulting for a VC firm that likes mobile technologies and I wanted to know more about it. But despite having blogged before about how I don't need one, I do recognize the excellent technology in the phone.There are a few things that totally bug me about it, though.1. [This is a major flaw in Apple Mail.app too] when setting up a

iTunes missing features

2008-07-20T11:56:00.000-07:00

iTunes has evolved for about 8 years now since it was acquired from Casady & Greene. For some reason, it has almost no new features for enjoying music. I can't imagine why this is the case. I'm sure the authors have seen the movie High Fidelity, which came out in 2000. Classifying and sorting music is a primary part of the experience.I still can't sort my music by artist's last name in iTunes,

Engineering Process

2008-06-18T09:09:00.001-07:00

[I found this document in my archives from a little while back and thought it would be useful to somebody out there, so I'm posting it.]Introduction and PhilosophyYou have a small team of people who are highly motivated and work well together. The right process for this group will be one that allows and encourages the organic development process while preserving clarity of purpose and minimizing

new iPhone - my rumor mongering

2008-06-07T07:46:00.000-07:00

I don't like to participate in the Apple rumor mill, and given more than 5 years since I worked there, my contacts have gone cold, but given the high level of secrecy, something big must be up.I'm thinking video conferencing.

National Inventor's Day

2008-02-11T13:30:00.001-08:00

Today is the anniversary of National Inventor's Day (in the U.S. at least). It is also Thomas Alva Edison's birthday. This holiday was created in 1983 by Ronald Reagan, though if you read the proclamation carefully, it was just that day in 1983, not in fact a recurring holiday. I choose to think of it as Edison's Birthday and therefore recurring."Almost two hundred years ago, President George

Unfinished Projects

2007-12-05T15:31:00.000-08:00

I recently have been tackling a long backlog of unfinished projects (and starting a few new ones, of course). I've noticed a pattern in how I do projects that I suspect others have as well. You identify what you need (1-1/2" pvc pipe, a u-joint, two couplers, two elbows, and some pvc glue), measure a few things, and go to the hardware store. You come home and set the bag of parts down in the

Recency Illusion

2007-11-28T08:43:00.000-08:00

I subscribe to a bunch of magazines; one I especially like is New Scientist. There was an article in there that I read a couple of days ago describing what I have noticed but never named: the recency illusion.When something that you have discovered recently you assume is new to everyone is an illusion. In the software world I used to call a variant of this the "most-recently-discovered bug

Copy Protection punishes honest people

2007-10-26T20:54:00.000-07:00

I worked at Adobe Systems first in 1985, before PageMaker 1.0 was available. In those days software was copy protected through various means, all of which were nefarious. Aldus used to drill holes in the floppy disks and the installer would look for the bad disk sector to correspond to it.Copy II Mac was a free utility that defeated copy protection easily. If you wanted a free copy of

GMail security (or lack thereof)

2007-10-24T15:51:00.000-07:00

I have a GMail account. I don't use it. I don't like Google's policies about keeping/filtering email. But I have a GMail account. Maybe one day I'll use it. They sort of force you to have one to do a lot of things, such as blogging on Blogger, which this blog is. Sigh.Anyway, today I logged in to my GMail account, out of curiosity to see if I had any mail. I have a WHOLE LOT of spam, which

Sky divers die in plane crash

2007-10-09T20:30:00.000-07:00

It strikes me as extremely ironic that the plane crash today was 10 members of a skydiving company, all of whom apparently were in the plane when it hit the ground. You'd think they'd jump out, with parachutes, wouldn't you?

iMovie 08 doesn't cut it

2007-09-30T22:37:00.000-07:00

I'm the guy who created the version version of Apple's iMovie back in 1998 so my thoughts about the new iMovie might be biased. On the other hand, I know a lot about software and movie editing.Apple tossed out iMovie this year and rewrote it from scratch. They got it wrong. The new iMovie... well, it sucks. I still have friends on the iMovie team (for a little while longer, at least), but I

Tesla Motors spotting

2007-09-24T21:03:00.000-07:00

Today I spotted a prototype Tesla car up on Skyline Blvd. I had rushed over to talk to whoever it was, but it was clear that an interview was in progress so I didn't interrupt. The car looks very cool when you're next to it; a little smaller than I had imagined, but cool.The best part was when the truck/trailer that was hauling the car up to Skyline stopped to refuel. Something very ironic

Brilliant Civics

2007-07-26T08:23:00.000-07:00

Saw this sign last night in Redwood City. It's more jarring to look at than the average yard sale sign, so I'm not sure they're making forward progress here."Redwood City Sign Ordinance 3.114 (This sign is exempt)"

iPhone schmyPhone

2007-07-17T14:04:00.000-07:00

Everybody seems to think that since I worked at Apple I'm a big fan of every product they've ever made. Wrong. Though I can see why one would think that, since a lot of Apple customers are in fact zealots.For the record, I'm a big fan of the XServe and almost everything that Bertrand Serlet and his team come up with. The OS is fantastic.But I don't like the iPhone. I shouldn't say that. I

California Light Bulb Legislation

2007-02-03T11:15:00.000-08:00

A legislator named Lloyd Levine wants to outlaw incandescent bulbs in California. I am very much opposed to this. Not because I'm against energy efficiency, but because I'm Pro Choice. I want to be able to choose any light bulb I want. This is America, not a totalitarian regime.I'm against this also because I don't like fluorescent light. It's from the "cold" end of the spectrum, and I like "warm

eBay: gone to the dogs?

2007-01-23T19:36:00.000-08:00

I'm a big eBay fan. I've bought some large items (cars, trucks) and lots of small stuff on eBay. I've sold things on eBay. I love it.Yet I think it's going to the dogs. It's dog slow, the interface hasn't changed in years, and the feedback mechanism, which was once innovative and world-changing, is many years old and has been gamed so badly as to be almost counter-useful. You can't rely on

Apple's own Paparazzi

2007-01-10T20:59:00.000-08:00

I have long been mildly disgusted by the "rumor sites" that feed on Apple's product launch plans. At times I have been on both sides of it—an engineering manager for iPhoto and iMovie, and as a Mac owner and consumer.The tone that sites like ThinkSecret take is kind of a smug pride in getting illicit information from snitches at the company or its suppliers, and "predicting" the product plans.

Scrabble from MacGameStore.com

2006-12-29T13:30:00.000-08:00

I recently bought Scrabble for OS X on the MacGameStore.com site. I have to say that I disrecommend both the Scrabble game itself and the MacGameStore company that sold it to me. The game crashes randomly and frequently and there's no Save so you lose the whole game. I'm posting this here in the hopes it will help somebody before a purchase, as you won't see this on their review site (see below)

Back to Blogger

2006-12-11T23:10:00.000-08:00

I've moved my blog back to Blogger from Bubbler. Sigh.Not there are any of you readers left, but I have mapped the URL "blog.glennreid.com" here and that will let me move the blog again some day without a huge disruption. So depending on how you got here, click that link and then bookmark it (or RSS it, or delete it, or whatever).

Thanks for all the fish

2006-07-21T23:09:00.000-07:00

I'm starting a consulting business. The web site isn't there yet, but email me at glennreid dot com for more information.So long, and thanks for all the fish.

Apple iWeb - initial impressions

2006-02-13T23:08:00.000-08:00

I was prepared to be "intimidated" by Apple's iWeb, since after all I left the iApps group at Apple to build network software, including web publishing and blogging, and this is right smack in my new territory.I bought a copy of iLife '06, mostly to get the new versions of iMovie and iPhoto, but also to check out iWeb....My biggest initial reactions: + the templates are visually stunning, as

TurboTax rocks

2006-02-12T23:07:00.000-08:00

I'm doing taxes tonight, and I have to rave about TurboTax. It is a great, great program, and it really doesn't have to be. People would use it even if it was marginal, because it's so much better to use a computer than pencil and paper to do taxes.But Intuit, year after year, keeps making TurboTax dramatically better. It keeps getting easier to use, faster, and simpler. That's no small feat.

"white list" vs. "black list"

2006-02-11T23:06:00.000-08:00

There are two basic approaches to filtering or moderating content. They are called "white list" and "black list". Each is, in a sense, the opposite of the other. A "black list" is a list of things (bad words, IP addresses, photos, etc) that you want to filter out. A "white list" is a list of things (people, IP addresses, etc) that you define ahead of time, and only things on that list can get

No Escape from Spam

2006-02-10T23:07:00.000-08:00

I'm irritated at Microsoft. I try to be neutral on platform issues, despite preferring a Macintosh myself, but I'm totally irritated with Microsoft. Here's why...It used to be that if you were careful with your email address, you wouldn't get any spam. If you didn't put your email address on a web page, or didn't fill out forms on questionable web sites, you could go years without getting any

Fear of "bad content"

2006-02-10T23:06:00.000-08:00

Almost every customer we talk to has a similar fear of "bad content" appearing on their site, if users are allowed to participate and upload things.There is no inherently easy answer to this paradox. If you want, and allow, user participation, there's no guarantee that it won't be abused in some way. One can imagine all sorts of things that "might happen".The answer boils down to two things, in

The addictive quality of Browsing

2006-02-10T23:05:00.000-08:00

Browsing can be addictive, let's face it. Whether it's shopping (online or brick-and-mortar), "surfing the web" from the old days, or traversing a social network site, the temptation of clicking just once more to see what might be there can be almost irresistible.This is a good thing.Addiction, in a lesser, slightly diluted form, is simply motivation. If someone is motivated to traverse a site

Should I Stay?

2006-02-10T23:04:00.000-08:00

A key ingredient in forming a community is to provide a reason to stick around, or a reason to come back. This is true of a backyard barbecue as well as a web-based community site.If the premise of a site is clear, and the benefits can be seen or even just imagined, it might be enough to create a sense of wanting to stick around.Sheer activity is another way to accomplish this: if people are

Searching and Browsing

2006-01-25T23:05:00.000-08:00

The word browsing has a popular meaning that for most Westerners brings to mind the idea of going through a book store, or a retail store, looking around, interested, but not exactly shopping for anything in particular. You're looking, but you're not feeling goal-oriented.Searching, on the other hand, is goal-oriented. You have something in mind, and you're looking for it as specifically as you

Community Building

2006-01-25T23:04:00.000-08:00

This is a post devoted to the nuances of community building on the world wide web, which is a loosely defined category including social networking, affinity groups, fan bases, and interest groups.The phenomena of Friendster and MySpace and Facebook have shown amazing growth and have garnered great interest. But what are they? What is a social network anyway?A community is built around a premise.

Servers are the new Apps

2005-12-27T23:02:00.000-08:00

My career has, until recently, been devoted to building applications. What this used to mean is programs that you ran on your computer do get stuff done. Photoshop. Microsoft Word. TurboTax. Excel. Most applications have been document-centric--you open and save documents, usually on your local hard drive.All that has changed. Even Microsoft is starting to build the venerable Microsoft Office

Programming Languages

2005-12-26T23:02:00.000-08:00

I've learned a lot of programming languages over my career. I started with BASIC, I think, back in the 1970's. There was Action! (a cartridge for the Atari 800), Pascal, DIBOL, C, sh, csh, and it's not even 1982 yet. In the 80's I learned PostScript, Lisp, and Objective C. In the 90's there was Java, C++, Perl, Python, Objective Pascal (!), and way too many conversions back and forth between C

Razor Blades

2005-12-17T23:01:00.000-08:00

In the computer industry, a common topic of conversation in discussions on "how to make money" is the old razor blade analogy. The idea is that you give away the printer, and make money selling ink cartridges. I think we've all been on the receiving end of that, when you realize how expensive the ink cartridges are, and how quickly you need them. "But I only paid $49 for the printer!" That's

That's Palo Alto for ya...

2005-11-11T23:01:00.000-08:00

I had a quick dinner in downtown Palo Alto tonight after soccer practice, with my wife and two kids and one of my daughter's friends. We went to the California Pizza Kitchen.To my amazement, within a 20-foot radius, also having a quick dinner with their families, was Ross Mayfield, the CEO of SocialText, a popular wiki provider; David Hornik, noted VC and major investor in Six Apart; and Jeff

Little Things for the customer

2005-11-09T23:00:00.000-08:00

We've made a few little changes that you might not notice unless you were one of the folks who wrote to our Support team asking for it.One thing is that the viewer for photographs just got better. Super-large photos are now resized automatically so they display at a good size for computer screens, and there's a navigation link to click through all the photos on a page without closing and opening

2005-10-13T23:00:00.000-07:00

If you go to our bubbler.net site and look around, you'll see that our web platform supports custom domain mapping.It has been dawning on me, by reading some blogs (cybersonic ) and from talking to customers, that the way we do this is really far superior to the Virtual Host mechanism in Apache. So let me geek out for a second and talk about this, because it's cool.DNS servers are one of those

Web 2.0: the energy is building

2005-10-08T22:59:00.000-07:00

I am excited about a lot of the news coming out of the Web 2.0 show. Our server engine to power many of these kinds of services and we're getting a ton of interest in it.We're going to roll out a developer API relatively soon and we're looking for key developers to partner with to build innovative front-end applications on our platform. If you're interested, drop me an email.We're about to

Software Design: Ease of Use vs. Discoverability

2005-09-20T22:59:00.000-07:00

Almost every product you pick up, whether it's a hot glue gun or a $1000 impossibly complex piece of software, says this on it somewhere: "Easy to Use!"But many products aren't so easy to use, as we all know. So this term has almost lost its meaning, like "intuitive" or "all natural". So what do you say about your product if it truly is easy to use? And what does that mean, anyway?I want to make

AppleMatters vs. iMovie

2005-09-19T22:58:00.000-07:00

If you read this posting on the "AppleMatters" web site: http://www.applematters.com/index.php/section/comments/540/You would think that iMovie was just a modest adaptation of existing movie editing software. As the original author of iMovie, I wrote a comment on that site, which required me to register.I received some spam as a result of registering, but my comment was never posted. This

Barb Mitchell for Palo Alto School Board!

2005-09-16T22:57:00.000-07:00

Barb Mitchell is running for the School Board in Palo Alto, where we're based. Her web site, barbmitchell.com, is hosted on Bubbler.If you live in Palo Alto, please vote for Barb![I guess now I'm a political blogger too].

Serving our own Food

2005-08-31T22:57:00.000-07:00

Have you heard the phrase "eat your own dog food" as applied to the technology business? If you expect your dog to eat it, you should eat it too. Which means, use your own software, if you expect other people to use it!We do this, at Five Across, and our business is practically run on the collaboration and file sharing that is provided by our Bubbler Instant Messenger application.But yesterday

Performance

2005-08-31T22:56:00.000-07:00

Underneath the hood of our "fastest blogging engine in the world" is in fact an engine. We built our own web server from scratch, and it is massively parallel and breathes fire. We weren't sure exactly how fast it was, but we knew it was pretty fast...One of our OEM's, about to be announced, happens to be expert in web servers, and routinely deploy several different ones--Apache, of course, but

Livewire

2005-08-01T22:56:00.000-07:00

Last week our new OEM partner launched a great new community site called Livewire, powered entirely by the Five Across Server and our publishing and messaging client applications.I am especially proud of our web server, which serves their entire site and is wickedly fast, handling large amounts of traffic as well as driving the blog/site hosting. We are benchmarking much, much faster than Apache

I Don't Like Dashboard or Spotlight

2005-07-07T22:55:00.000-07:00

I've upgraded to Apple's "Tiger" OS and I'm trying to like it, but really I don't.I don't need or want Dashboard widgets, but there's NO WAY to turn them off, or opt out. The closest thing is to "Remove from the Dock" but all the widget processes are still running.I also don't want Spotlight indexing everything on my computer, and there is no opt out for that either! I turned off all the

Open Source

2005-07-04T22:55:00.000-07:00

Thanks to Alan Kleymeyer for this pointer to an open-source "smackdown" posting on Forbes.com. Very interesting.I have some opinions about open source. My old company, RightBrain Software, released several products as open source for NeXT computers in 1992, long before the current craze. It didn't work that well as an endeavor, mostly because people don't really want to see or touch the source

SuperNova conference

2005-07-03T22:54:00.000-07:00

David Weinberger did some great video interviews for c|net at the SuperNova show. Here's the link to the whole page with lots of interesting folks.There's an interview of me talking about how blogging is a symptom of a bigger problem, that it's still way too hard to get a web presence.

WEB: Tangle, Weave

2005-06-28T22:54:00.000-07:00

I'm old enough to have seen a few things go by in the technology world, some good, some bad. What fascinates me is when younger people accidentally re-invent something that has been done before. This happens a lot more than you might think.A historical case in point....A couple of decades ago or so, the grandfather of Computer Science, Donald Knuth, chairman of the CS department at Stanford for

Ease of Use

2005-06-16T22:53:00.000-07:00

I have probably blogged about this before, but "easy to use" has become a meaningless phrase in today's technology world. I ran a test through Google for the literal phrase (with quotes) "ease of use" and it told me that there are about 10,100,000 pages that match that. "user friendly" is even more: 15,000,000 results.I see that IBM is the first entry in the results for "ease of use". I don't

Drag and Drop Web Publishing

2005-05-28T22:53:00.000-07:00

During our public beta period we learned a lot, mostly from our customers. Overwhelmingly they told us: you are a site-building tool, and blogging is just a small part of it.This is fascinating to me, because we launched the beta as a blogging tool. I now believe that a lot of the people who are investigating the blogging phenomenon don't really want blogs, they want web sites, but they want them

Fixing problems

2005-05-24T22:52:00.000-07:00

We are a real-time company. If you have problems with our software, tell us about it. We are responsive and will help you quickly and even fix problems as quickly as we can.In the traditional software world, you had to wait six months for a bug fix or a new release of your favorite productivity tool. We've learned to "live with" bugs in software because the hopes of getting them fixed seem very

Life's Persistent Questions

2005-05-16T22:52:00.000-07:00

I'm staying at the Marriott Marquis hotel on Times Square on the 26th floor for the Syndicate conference that starts tomorrow.I was talking to my almost-9-year-old daughter at home on the phone, telling her about the hotel, and she came out with this perfect radio voice..."On the 26th floor of the Acme building, one man is still trying to find the answers to life's persistent questions--Guy Noir,

Launching 1.0 in New York...

2005-05-13T22:51:00.000-07:00

We're heading to Syndicate to officially take the wraps off our 1.0 product, and we'll have even more great business templates that can make some amazing sites with just a few clicks. I'm excited by this technology, and I'm not an easy guy to get excited about technology!

Sled dogs

2005-05-03T22:50:00.000-07:00

A metaphor took shape for me today as I was composing email to an old friend...First, a caveat: this isn't a reference to anybody I work with today, who are awesome -- just an overall reflection over almost 20 years of working in various places with different sets of people, often watching from the sidelines as things didn't get done, sometimes being one of the various kinds of sled dogs myself..

Cheerios

2005-04-26T22:50:00.000-07:00

The thing I love about Cheerios is that they have not changed at all. Not during my lifetime, anyway. They have a good thing, they know it, and they don't mess with it. Cheerios have been around for 64 years. Here was the first box, back when it was called Cheeri Oats:

RSS feeds: the perfect marketing channel?

2005-04-26T22:49:00.000-07:00

I'm sitting in a presentation by Bill Flitter, the Chief Marketing Officer of Pheedo , a company who specializes in serving advertising through RSS feeds.I know the guys at SimpleFeed who are turning RSS into a targeted marketing channel.Theoretically this is a pure channel because users "opt in" -- nobody has to read an RSS feed. It remains to be seen exactly how the ads are spliced into the

Countdown to 1.0

2005-04-23T22:48:00.000-07:00

We're about to release the 1.0 version of Bubbler, on May 16 at the Syndicate conference in New York.We have some work to do to finish it up but it's coming along great and we've gotten some amazing feedback during our Beta program.For those of you who have been using it already, be sure to check out our special deal before we go live.

Software Engines

2005-04-09T22:48:00.000-07:00

Please read the next two paragraphs of "marketing hyperbole":We have developed an engine that delivers blogging, web site hosting, instant messaging, file sharing, revision control, email distribution, and many interesting combinations of all those things (uploading files to your web site with built-in revision control, posting notes to your blog with automatic email notifications, etc).Our

More on Blog Conversations

2005-03-13T22:47:00.000-08:00

I just found Richi Jennings' href="http://richi.co.uk/blog/2005/02/blogs-as-conversations-yeah-right.html">post about blogs as conversations in a Technorati search, and he's got me thinking about this again. He writes: Twaddle. What we have right now, is a messy prototype. Comments are too prone to comment spam, most people find it hard to understand the concept of trackbacks, and the whole

The case against XML

2005-03-01T22:46:00.000-08:00

If any of you happened to see the article in the Tech Monday section of the San Jose Mercury News about Bubbler, you may have seen me quoted as saying that XML is one of the most over-rated phenomena. I've gotten quite a few questions about that :)Here's why I think XML is overrated.XML is not really a technology. It's a syntax for tagging bits of data. It's not all that advanced in its evolution

Unicode support for Bubbler

2005-02-27T22:45:00.000-08:00

We are in the final testing stages of rolling out proper Unicode support for Bubbler so you can post in whatever language you like (I think; we've tried some German and French but we're not too good at typing in Chinese or Turkish or Greek).I have to say that Unicode support on Windows is quite bizarrely implemented, with #ifdef _UNICODE and having to distinguish between "wide" characters and

Blogging for people who have nothing to say

2005-02-23T22:44:00.000-08:00

This phrase was going to be our tagline at one point. It seems that a lot of people sort of want to start a blog, because they think they're missing out on something, but they just don't have anything to say! Or at least they think they don't, which amounts to the same thing.We've been thinking about this because the line is blurring between blogging, which is more of a social phenomenon than a

Our live demo at the DEMO conference

2005-02-15T22:43:00.000-08:00

We demo'ed the first public beta of Bubbler today onstage at the DEMO conference, which gives you a 6-minute slot to show off new products.We took live photos of the audience and presenters, captured some live audio on an iPod ("podcasting"), and entered live text, and brought up a full multi-media blog in 58 seconds.We then stepped back, showed off the page a little, played the audio clip,

Our live demo at the DEMO conference

2005-02-15T22:41:00.000-08:00

We launched Bubbler yesterday at http://www.demo.com/demo2 in Arizona. I'm just now starting my new blog with our own software.

My new Bubbler blog

2005-02-15T21:26:00.000-08:00

Check out my new Bubbler blog over on bubbler.net/glenn.

Bubbler!

2005-02-14T13:15:00.000-08:00

We launched our new Bubbler technology and blog hosting service today. I'm at the DEMO conference in Scottsdale where we're doing the launch. It's a busy day!

Wild about Wikis

2005-02-10T01:04:00.000-08:00

A while back I said to a Red Herring reporter that I thought that wikis were "a fad - nothing more, nothing less." Tonight I met Ross Mayfield and he mentioned it, or perhaps called me on it. Okay, so I was caught up in the rush of actually having a Red Herring reporter ask for my opinion so I was a bit brash. What Ross and Socialtext are up to is very compelling and cool and bringing into a

Re: Threaded Blog Conversations

2005-01-27T21:03:00.000-08:00

JC said (in comments attached to my posting from yesterday):To my eyes your proposal has 2 important limitations:by referencing a single thread ID for all contribution sto a conversation you can't render the threaded nature of a conversation branching out and expanding along different branches over time. You can only represent a linear succession of posts. If a blogger decides to remove a post

They All Died in Vain...

2005-01-27T20:17:00.000-08:00

I try not to get into political discussions, particularly in my blog, but this article is an especially clear, riveting piece of journalism, from the Magic City News of Millinockett, Maine, a small mill town. If only we bloggers were so eloquent. I exhort you to read it, no matter what your political bent.

Threaded Blog Conversations

2005-01-26T16:41:00.000-08:00

I have an idea for how to make this work. It's simple, but it requires Technorati or somebody like them to make it work. Let's say you (Blogger A)are composing a new entry for your blog. You decide whether or not you want to start a conversation or just say something interesting. The blogging software you use will ask a centralized service (Technorati) to issue a thread ID that's unique and

Blogging: Conversation or Soliloquy?

2005-01-25T22:23:00.000-08:00

Blogging should be a conversation, not a long-winded speech with scattered applause.... But it's not. Yet. Reminds me of an old family joke I share with my family, when trying to coordinate: If you get there first, make a blue chalk mark on the door. If I get there first, I'll rub it out.Bloggers all reference each other, but other than the weak comment mechanism, it's hard to create anything

Lossless JPEG compression of 25%-30% !

2005-01-22T08:55:00.000-08:00

I met Kevin Hughes yesterday and was checking out his excellent Kev's News, now in my blogroll. Kevin is one of only 6 people in the WWW hall of fame, created the idea of image maps among other things, and is an amazing guy. I saw this article in Kev's News which backs up Allume's claim that they can losslessly compress JPEG files by up to 30%. This is amazing, dramatic, and has far-reaching

Casey at the Bat: It's All About Time

2005-01-17T22:31:00.000-08:00

We've all read the classic poem Casey at the Bat, but do you remember it? Casey was a slugger, or so they said--a slugger with the hubris to let some pitches go by.There was ease in Casey's manner as he stepped into his place, there was pride in Casey's bearing and a smile lit Casey's face. And when, responding to the cheers, he lightly doffed his hat, no stranger in the crowd could doubt

What's the Deal with Podcasting?

2005-01-16T20:15:00.000-08:00

Okay, so I have to admit I'm baffled about podcasting. I've listened to a couple of podcasts and it's not bad, as internet radio goes. But audio is so unbelievably low-tech and low-bandwidth. The amount of information in a one-hour block of audio can be assimilated in a very few minutes if it is read as text. Text can be accessed in any order; you can skip to the end, or rapidly scan it. You