Fantasy Football

And so last night another season began. I think I have been playing fantasy football pretty consistently since 1998. Each year it has ramped up a bit more in terms of my engagement. Two years ago I went beyond the normal fantasy league and joined a keeper league. This has been by far the best experience so far as it requires me to always have some kind of background thoughts that are engaged with football all year round.

Last night was a draft for a Dynasty league, which is a league where you keep almost all of the players for good. It will be interesting to see how this pans out. I was dicey on keeper and have really enjoyed it. Dynasty will place a big premium on focusing on new incoming players out of college.

The tools that are used for fantasy football have continued to improve as well. The news services, the draft tools and the various communication tools are just amazing. I believe that our choice to use AIM for our draft was directly responsible for 6 new people in their 30s to start using instant messenger. Last year I believe that there were 3 of us using IM. Now it is 12. I wrote back in April of this year, this post, that talks about how the NFL drives technology adoption. I think Sprint is doing some smart things with their various NFL Tie ins.

I frequently cite fantasy football as an example of user created content that is a big driver of consumer entertainment. Although the primary content is the actual sport/game itself, we fantasy football nuts spend a massive chunk of time looking at stats, arguing over rules, making trades with other players, paying for services, and buying every channel that Directv will offer us for pro, college and any other kind of football. As more of us non Gen Y folks take control of our entertainment experience, whether it is through things like fantasy sports or other things, we will continue to see and understand that media is undergoing an unparalleled paradigm shift where the users are in charge.

My.MP3 launch video

Sander sent me this link to a page where the video of the My.MP3 launch is memorialized. Shawn has a couple of appearances in the video.

The Anti-Telemarketing Script

Lifehacker linked to this script to use when telemarketers call you. This is one of the funniest things I have seen in a while.

Regarding Operating Systems

I spend some percentage of my time trying new things in technology. For example right now I am spending some time with the Cingular 8125 Windows Mobile Device. It is always hard to overcome the bias you get from being wedded to a way of doing things. I really like how Symbian works and have to figure out how to not let that bias color my impression of Windows mobile.

Although most of my experimentation has been around mobile devices and related web based technologies, my recent purchase of a Mac Mini for home has given me a recent renewed interest in operating systems. As a bought in Windows user for the last 10+ years, it never occurred to me to spend any time looking at operating systems as new versions rolled out.

My previous experiment with operating systems goes back to around 1994. I had an earlier computer phase back in high school and early college and then took a long break from computers until around 94. In 1994 I decided that I was going to build a computer and try out some different operating systems such as Slackware. My initial impression of Slackware was that it was interesting but I hit some pretty nasty problems trying to configure PPP so I ultimately punted on the experiment.

This time around, the breathtaking look and usability of OS X piqued my interest to see what else is out there. I had installed Windows Vista on my old broken down laptop and it has performed well. It really is a nice improvement from XP but it feels more incremental than an overhaul. I am guessing that when you use it day to day that it might feel a little different but right now it is hard to say.

On my Mac Mini I installed Parallels to run Windows XP in a virtual machine and I have to say that I have only fired it up a couple of times. I have found that most of the things that I do are net related and haven't required invoking my windowness to get things done.

With all the niceness and coolness coming from my Mac, I asked around the office about how far Linux has come. Ben showed me the Linux GUI XGL which, simply put, is insane. Seriously insane. I tried to make a run at using it on my old home computer (1999 Gateway Pentium 3) to no avail. I then tried a plain vanilla install of Ubuntu and also Open SUSE using a wireless network card. Wireless isn't all it's cracked up to be on Linux.

Today I finally gave up and dragged the old beast over to an Ethernet connection. Once there I got Ubuntu up and running and plan on giving it the rounds here and there in the coming weeks. Stay tuned for more.

Ancestry.com

Two weeks ago I read a newspaper article about people using the Internet to search for their family tree. In the article they gave much praise to Ancestry.com. I hadn't spent much time looking at my family tree in the past as there were a number of gaps that I hadn't desired or been able to walk through.

My father and my mother divorced when I was two years old. Although they were divorced he was stationed almost always on the west coast which meant he was around a lot. My father's sister had tracked back the Oien family to Norway back to the early 1700s which I thought was really impressive. As of the last time I checked they hadn't done that on his mother's side. Their family name was Venn. I need to give her a call and get some details.

On my mother's side there were two branches, one of which I knew and one which I didn't. The one I knew went back to Mexico fairly quickly and then presumably went to Spain. My great grandmother, who I spent a large amount of time with growing up had the maiden name of Castillo. Other family names were Figueroa and Valdespino. My mother's father was estranged from our side of the family by my mother's choice if I recall.

So I sat down with a trial account of Ancestry and a couple of family names going back. I won't bore you with any more details about my family but I will say that the tools that are available are amazing. ESPECIALLY the census data. I was checking census records back to the 1860s which blew me away.

When I sat down I thought that my family was all Norwegian on one side, and then a mix of Spanish, German, Irish and English on the others. In reality I ended up realizing that I am 1/2 Norwegian, 1/4 Irish, and 1/8th Spanish and 1/8 Swedish. Not what I expected. I managed to track back every side out of the country, with most branches going in the 1880s and one branch going back to the 1850s (Irish potato famine refugee I assume). I did this in 2 hours. I don't plan on going beyond that our getting all the details together but when I do decide to do that I know that there are some amazing tools online today.

Facebook APIs

Marc Canter reports that Facebook has opened up APIs for developers. Woot! You can find the developer information here. Looks like there is some work to be done. As Marc says, expect others like Myspace to open up as well. I am not sure that this will happen quickly given their market position but it will certainly act as a point of differentiation if they don't.

Rabble Integration Manager Revamp - Flickr and Spaces

Last weekend we pushed out significant changes to our integration manager on Rabble. What is the integration manager? Our not so well named integration manager allows Rabble users to publish content between the mobile and web environment in either or both directions. Our first cut, while functional was a bit clunky. The new changes make the process of setting up your accounts a lot more easy than it used to be and it also sets us up for the changes we will be making when we roll out version 2.0 of Rabble mobile and web in the near future.

A really cool part of this rollout for me was the addition of Flickr and MSN/Live Spaces. Flickr had taken us a long time to get permission and now that we have it I can use the 1400+ photos I have on Flickr with Rabble. Here is a screenshot of setup screens.

With these rollouts we currently support - Blogger, Live Journal, Movable Type, Typepad, Webshots, Flickr, Zoto, Eventful, Upcoming.org, Travelpod and MSN/Live Spaces. More to come soon.

Roomba

I have robots on the brain right now. I blame Tate. This weekend we were at Circuit City and I glanced over that the robot section with Tate. Right next to the Robosapien were two different models of the Roomba.

I had heard people talk about the Roomba but had never seen one in person until I was at SXSW at the Lifehacker party. When we walked into the bar where they were having the party I glanced over at the pool table and on top of it were two modified Roombas dueling. It was quite a strange sight, not unlike two giant roaches in a courtship dance. It smacked just a bit of Survival Research Labs.

At any rate I bought the Red Roomba to see how it worked. So far so good.

Robots

I am working on another post about my current fascination with operating systems and old computers that is borne out of my switch to the Mac and my re-provisioning two old computers to run Windows Vista and Ubuntu.

In the process of spending a little time at night tinkering with these things I was inspired to dig out the copy of Make magazine that I received at Gnomedex. What a great magazine! I subscribed.

In the issue I have (#6) there is a good section on robots. I think that the BEAM robot materials are just fascinating and if I can learn to use a soldering iron I may build some to play with my son. While looking around briefly and trying to understand the lay of the land I came across the new Lego Mindstorms NXT system of robotics. Wow. Super cool. I want one of these. I think I need to go get one...

The Zamboni Machine Driver

This morning when I was driving me son Tate to pre-school he called out to me in the front seat.

"Dad"

"Yeah" I said.

"When I grow up, I want to go to an ice skating rink and I want to drive a Zamboni."

"Yeah? That's pretty cool."

"Yeah, when I grow up I want to be a Power Ranger and I want to drive a Zamboni machine"

"Well Tate when you grow up, you can be whatever you want. If you want to drive a Zamboni, I think that's cool."

San Diego MoMeMo

I spaced out the inaugural MoMeMo event in San Diego last month but plan on being at the next one which is on August 21 at 6:30 PM at Estancia. If you are in San Diego and are into mobile come and check it out.

TurnHere

Geekd in our office sent an email out about the site TurnHere that has short films about various neighborhoods and communities for people to watch. I love this idea and it reminds me a bit of what the guys at Videonary are doing. My community of Cardiff is featured here.

The AOL Data Leak and Attention

The Attention Trust Blog reports some of the details of the AOL user data leak in this post here. Imagine if everything you ever searched for on Google, Yahoo, MSN or AOL became available to people. Looking up old friends? Searching for some ahem something you shouldn't be? Are you trying to lose weight? (I am). Etc. etc.

What I have discovered since installing the Attention Recorder on my browser is that there are times when I stop myself and hit the pause button before I continue on to the next site. This awareness becomes even more important when you think not only of the personal things you do but also the competitive or business related things you do. I have a badge on the right hand side of this blog that shows a list of the top sites I clicked on and the gainers and losers. VCs? Competitors? Business Partners? It's easy to get a sense of what one is doing with click data. Installing the recorder has allowed me to become more cognizant of the power of that information. It has also made me even more cognizant of all the data the various portals have on my combined surfing history going back a long time. I think at some point a lot of people are going to wake up to this and start becoming more vocal in word and deed about how information about them is collected and how they can take control of that information.

I Went Apple / Mac

I can't believe that I am writing this. If you had told me a year ago that I would buy a Mac I would have told you that you were insane. I frequently referred to Mac's as computers for people who don't like computers. But Saturday morning there I was walking into the Apple store to buy a Mac Mini. What sort of strange series of things had occurred to make this surreal event happen?

There were a number of things over the last year that happened that made me make the commitment involved in learning a new OS and all the things associated with it. To recap, the following things occurred:

1. Video Conferencing - My father in law has been pinging me for many years now about setting up web cams for him to talk to our son Tate. I have constantly been telling him that the quality just isn't there. Earlier this year, we installed a Mac Mini in our office to video conference in our Seattle and Montana based employees. When I was told that we were going to conference people in via video, I thought it would be a big waste of time. What it has been though is simply amazing. At any given time I can stroll over to the Mac mini in our office and plop down and start a conversation with one of our remote employees. And it is REALLY REALLY good.

2. Intel Core - Our home computer has been a real workhorse and I am embarrassed to say that Jessica bought the top of the line home PC in early 1999 and we are still using it today. I mean, as of yesterday. When I spoke with our Systems guy, who is a Mac fan, he walked me through how I can use both the Mac OS and Windows XP on the Mac Mini. I have been charged with getting a new home computer but one of the key requirements was that Jessica wouldn't have to learn a new OS. No computer had really gotten me excited until now. With the new machine I set up last night, we can easily switch between the Mac and Windows world.

3. iTunes Buy In - I took the leap and digitized all my CD collection over the last six months as I have been using the Shuffle when I run.

4. Geek Buy In - All the geeks in my office are big fans of the Mac as it supports UNIX. If they can be into the Mac then I know my time to look at it is here.

So it's still early for me, but I can tell you that I m really excited and look forward to the new computing experience in the months ahead. I am sure there will be some god stories as I settle in.

MP3.com liquidation photos

It's funny that people just resurrected the photos from the MP3.com liquidation sale that can be found here. His editorial reflects a lack of understanding of the context of the business but I think it's hilarious.

Michael Goldhaber Presentation

Earlier today I spent a little time walking through the presentation that Michael Goldhaber gave at a recent conference that you can find linked to from his most recent post here. I continue to find his materials compelling and certainly a different perspective on what we have been thinking for a while in the development of our company. If you have any interest in the Attention Economy this is a must read.

VMix in USA Today

Local pals and former MP3.com alums Vmix were mentioned in this piece here in the USA Today.

PSP 2.8 Upgrade

Last night I noticed that PSP firmware 2.8 became available. There are a number of minor features but the biggest one is adding RSS support for video. I was unable to get Rocketboom or Ze Frank working but figure it must be user error.

The Mo List - Mobilista.net

Shawn and I share an office. It's kind of small and we have this really junkie table piled high with junk and mail on it where we set our laptops and do work when we aren't traveling. The other day Shawn remarked how there isn't anything in the mobile industry like the Pho list. We talked about it for a while and agreed that a Pho list in mobile would be something that would be fun to participate in.

The Pho list, for those of you who don't know was/is a digital music mailing list that was ground zero for digital music discussion during the late 90s through today. I still subscribe although I haven't posted in probably a year. When something ground breaking or controversial was happening in digital music, the discussion happened on Pho. It wasn't always pretty, and there certainly were a variety of characters who either participated or lurked. I recall posting something once and then getting an email from a label executive who told me I should be careful about what I posted because everyone reads the Pho list. I thought that was hilarious but it really spoke to what Jim Griffin and John Parres did in gathering the various tribes that make up digital music.

When we started Intercasting in 2004 the only thing that resembled Pho was the Unwired list that John Parres and Hal Bingham set up. The Unwired list, and I believe the Pho list currently, is a closed list. Although having to read the random postings of everybody and their brother on the Pho list was occasionally annoying, it really created a meeting place for everyone. The Rabble if you will. If you didn't like it you could leave. I personally have been reading the Pho list for I believe 7 years now. Annoying or not. To me it doesn't have the value it once had, but it still has a lot of the people I find interesting and the topics are important to a variety of media types and digital music heads.

I am not sure why but for whatever reason the Unwired list isn't anything like Pho. I suppose that one could argue that the conversations have migrated out to the various mobile blogs and other gathering places but the problem with that is that there isn't a place for a community conversation per se where everyone can speak up etc.

So with great nods to John, Jim and Hal we bought a domain and set up a list server at lists.mobilista.net. You can go to that URL and sign up and get yourself added to the mailing list. Alternatively you can send an email to mo-subscribe@mobilista.net .

It is our hope that we can get some of the various characters, players and geniuses of the mobile world to get together and have some open conversations. And maybe there will be some good heated discussions. And maybe we can get Russell Beattie to sign up so he may occasionally opine on all things mobile since he isn't blogging anymore. At any rate, come on in and check it out. You can always unsubscribe.

US Cyworld is live

I didn't see or hear anything about it until a friend mentioned it today. Sign up at us.cyworld.com.

I haven't spent anytime with it yet so I don't have any feedback.

12th Anniversary

Yesterday my wife Jessica and I celebrated our 12th anniversary. I owe my success to her love and support especially over the last two plus years while we have been getting the company off the ground and juggling the things in life that come when you unexpectedly end up with triplets.

Message from a Rabbler...

While taking a peek at some posts on Rabble earlier today, I ran into the following post that had me laughing really hard. Kind of.

this is a test transmission from the year 3018AD, it is intended to be a warning transmission, due to the intricacies of electronic space time travel, this is a reproduction of 1 trillion messages, and it is hoped that a member of the human population is now reading this,you may see this message elsewhere and in another time, infer only the aforementioned in this case. this message is intended for the whole of the human population, for it is the whole of the human populations existence that is in jeopardy, this messages point of origin is extraterrestrial in nature, we have detected the self inflicted nuclear destruction of your planet, physical laws of the universe bar the possibility of ever being able to transfer mass through time, and as such we will be unable to save you from destruction. it is sincerely hoped that you will receive this transmission, and be able to avert what ever accident has lead to your destruction, with that hope, we look forward to greeting you in the future.

Helio Review

I read a pretty good Helio review in the Washington Post today that you can see here. On whole it appeared pretty balanced but I think he missed the UI of the handset which I think is a big plus.

Quien es mas macho? SMS.ac or Microsoft

Over the weekend when I was reading my del.icio.us clips, I saw a link to this Business Week article that you can read here. While scanning the article I came upon this quote from Greg Wilfahrt (Our former PR guy at MP3.com until after the Vivendi acquisition):

"Besides, these social networks, typically catering to 18- to 35-year-olds, could make additional money off the ringtones, games, and music downloads this demographic favors. "We could be bigger than Microsoft," contends Greg Wilfahrt, co-founder of SMS.ac. Clearly, that's a bit of an overstatement, even if SMS.ac's sales have been growing 50% a quarter for the past two years."

I am betting that Microsoft isn't too concerned about SMS.ac just yet. :-)

NCAA 2007 - OMG

This is the most amazing thing I have ever seen on my PSP. I haven't played with it much but I got some time on the plane. My gaming interests are pretty specific. FPS, football and occasionally some other sports games, and strategy. I haven't had anything yet that blew me away on the PSP. NCAA 2007 does that. I am not sure if Madden 2006 was a bad port of the PS2 to the PSP but it was not a good experience in general. It had lagginess and had that notorious bug that wrecked all your presets. Occasionally I had Japanese characters pop up. How cool. Not.

NCAA 2007 is a stand alone kick ass football game. Hands down. If you haven't had the reason to get a PSP yet, and you have any interest whatsoever in sports gaming, you now have a reason. As a side note, that game registration site still isn't letting me in. Frown.

Google WiFi

Been traveling and have been meaning to post but have been too busy. One quick thing though. I was in SF for a couple of days this week and stayed at a hotel overlooking Union Square. Before I fork over my $14 to Starwood for Ethernet, I like to browse the local wi-fi networks. Once in a while you get lucky. This time what to my surprise on the top but Google Wifi. Nice. It had a great signal but for some reason I couldn't connect and Starwood took my money anyways. It got me thinking a lot about how different things will be when there is broad based availability of free wifi to everyone. Lots of implications and opportunities.

EA - A Little Help With QA on NCAA 2007 Please!

I love EA. I think they are the best publisher of games in the world. Larry Probst was on our board at Mp3.com and I thought he was a great board member. I know a couple of other people there who are super high quality people. Demanding. Winners.

I am so addicted to their football franchise that I went out tonight and grabbed the inaugural version of NCAA 2007 Football for the PSP. I must add that the NCAA Football franchise is without question the BEST football gaming platform ever. Madden may be more well known but NCAA takes the cake hands down.

The packaging for the PSP was great and while flipping through the document I came to the registration page on the back where I was prompted to register and get cheat codes and other stuff. Tired, but eager to make sure that I maximize my game playing experience, I go to the website and run into the screen above. At step 1, I can't register my game. Done. End of story. The game not listed here link is of no help and basically tells me that I might have made a mistake on platform or game name. Or your QA staff or website production staff didn't make the necessary updates. So please fix that, I need some cheats, fast.

I can't wait to see how this year's version plays out!

The Hub - Walmart's Myspace Alike Site

Walmart rolled out The Hub recently, which is a Myspace alike site. Given all the uproar over public safety and profanity, Walmart is uniquely positioned to create a kinder safer Myspace alike given their reach into the pockets of so many Americans. The question is, will the cool kids hang out there?

Sidekick III - Review

Actually review is probably the wrong title for this post. It's really more impressions and thoughts.

So my new Sidekick...

Let me start by saying that I think the Sidekick/Hiptop is one of the ultimate devices. I carry around 7 devices in my bag at all times and there are two that I use all day long, the P910 and the Sidekick. The p910 is my primary communication device as well as email. The Sidekick is my mobile web browser and IM client. It may be unique, but that's how I am configured. I say this to illustrate that I am not a typical Sidekick owner and that there are a number of features on the Sidekick III that don't hit my radar. With that in mind let me give the following good/bad and summary.

The Good.

-1.3 Megapixel camera.

-The overall general industrial design is clean and has some wow gadget feel. The previous version looked a bit Fisher Price (Although I admit that I liked it personally).

-Integrated Instant Messaging. All of the Instant Messaging platforms supported are accessed through one place on the device.

-Edge. I have noticed quicker speeds but I have also been having some intermittent connecivity issues that are probably network related.

-Migration. I moved the SIM from one device to the next and everything was there. Email etc. This was very impressive. I have never had a smoother move.

The Bad.

-The keyboard. I have big sausage sized fingers that worked really well with the old device. I haven't had too many problems with the new keyboard but it certainly is not my preference between the two.

-Swivel action. My old device seemed to have a slightly smoother open action. The new device seems like I am going to break something with the "clack"noise it makes when it opens now.

Summary.

In general the move from the II to the III felt like an incremental upgrade for me. Keep in mind that I am not using it as a phone so Blue Tooth doesn't help me. I am not playing music on it and haven't tried that out yet.

If you are new to the Sidekick I think you are going to dig it. If you are upgrading I think that in general you will be pleased but you will probably have some nits depending on what you do with the device. After waiting a long time for this device I can only say that still it is one of my most favorite devices and I can't wait to see what Danger comes up with next.

Windows Vista Beta 2

At Gnomedex, attendees were given a copy of Windows Vista Beta 2. I generally stay away from Beta versions of Microsoft software but having an old laptop lying around (That has really sound technical specs) I decided to give it a go.

The laptop in question had a bunch of old family stuff on it including pics, music, and most importantly several years worth of emails. The laptop had a power issue that caused the computer to die if you hit the power cord. It didn't happen often, but enough to put some pretty good hurt on the OS. After some massive slowdowns and some OS not found errors (That eventually recovered) I decided to move onto my current laptop.

I did all the usual backup things and somewhere on a hard drive I have pretty much all of the stuff that was there in the past. With that in mind I felt it was safe to proceed. Note I didn't have everything but let's just say 90%.

I started on the upgrade path for Vista. I will spare you the details but will give some highlights:

-Lots of drivers don't work (This wasn't a surprise)

-The UI is beautiful and it seems like in general the OS is more responsive than XP

-I lost everything (As I said before I had it backed up but I would occasionally pull the beast out to find an old email address. That won't be happening ever again)

-The OS diagnoses problems and in fact claims that there is a bunch wrong with my current installation that includes both driver issues as well as OS issues. That's kind of funny, sort of like Windows telling on itself. I like that concept.

As I did with XP, I won't install Vista on any device that doesn't come pre-installed. I will probably upgrade devices sometime within 6 months after Vista goes live though. It looks like there are a lot of cool new features especially around collaboration that I look forward to using. I am trying to get my head around the Windows Live stuff but have to admit that I am a bit put off by the credit card requirement no matter what version you are using. I may break down and give them one this week but in general find that a more intimate relationship than I would care to have with a software vendor.

PSP Software Upgrade 2.71

I just noticed that PSP software Upgrade 2.71 became available. The two main features are Game Demo downloads and improved video display on Location Free. NCAA 2007 is coming out for the PSP in 5 days. I can't wait! Football season must be on the way.

Twttr launches, wither Odeo?

A couple of days ago Twttr launched. I have been playing with it a bunch. There are some similar services out there but this one is pretty cool because of their use of shortcodes and there is a public area where you can see the overall flow of posts through SMS that is broadcast out to others. People who are your friends essentially subscribe to your messages and whenever you update them, all your friends get the update. It's very bloglike in my opinion in that it is subscription based pull messaging. I like how they have put the pieces together but wonder how you avoid it becoming spammy.

The bigger question to me is how this fits in with Odeo. It appears that a number of the Odeo team are working on this which makes one wonder what's going on with Odeo?

Media, Users and Attention

As I have mentioned or hinted at in previous posts over the last week or two, I walked away from the Gnomedex conference with one idea that has stuck in my head since I encountered it. That idea is centered around what Steve Gilmor unveiled as the Attention Trust or what can more broadly be described as the Attention Economy. This idea was certainly not new as I believe that Michael Goldhaber has been writing about it for a number of years and the topic has been given new prominence recently by Tim O'reilly and others. The presentation that Steve laid out was brief and it had the taste of an academic topic but I wanted to share some of my thoughts as it relates to my personal journey around media and user created content and why I think this is an extremely big and powerful idea. Hopefully I can do that in a way that is accessible. I find myself grappling with how to portray this to people I discuss the topic with without sounding confused.

By way of background, my time prior to MP3.com's acquisition by Vivendi and during my tenure as President of their Internet Music Group, we spent a lot of effort trying to find meaning in the data that was generated by our detailed user tracking. The main byproduct of that was described in this blog post here where we identified up and coming bands and held out the theory that a quantitative approach can be applied to identify likely content producers that would be of interest to major record labels. In retrospect we were harvesting the attention of our users to identify trends in content consumption or consumer taste with respect to music.

For me, I walked way with the intention to focus my professional efforts on opportunities that platformed what I would describe as edge of the network media. Some of the background that builds on the previous post can be found in this post from earlier this year. My general theory was that there are a number of trends that are creating a fundamental shift in what we think of as media. In this presentation I gave to some SDSU students back in early 2004, pages 16-18 highlight what I thought were the important pieces/trends that related to this shift in media.

One of the important trends on that slide was the decrease in cost for people to create content. This is seen in many areas such as blogging, podcasting, fantasy sports, and mobile devices. Some of this thinking contributed to what we have done so far with Rabble. One of the key ideas that was present at both MP3.com and with Rabble was the use of stats for users. Stats to us are a proxy for fame or in the language of Goldhaber attention. People wanting to capture other people's attention.

My personal belief based on my experiences over the last 7 years or so with media produced outside the center of the network has been that there is a fundamental shift away from centralized media and a passive entertainment experience to an interactive content creator model that is embraced by the youth culture in specific, but also is broadly beginning to disseminate out to a broader audience. This idea is described in a large number of places including most famously by Chris Anderson in The Long Tail.

So what was the big deal for me in hearing Steve Gilmor talk about Attention Trust? A couple of things. The idea that your attention is something that you can control, although on some level an obvious statement, isn't that powerful if you can't actually document what you are paying attention to. I can see what people are paying attention to on this blog by looking at my Sitemeter reports or by looking at my reports on Urchin. What I see in that case is maybe a navigation flow, or a referral track from a search engine. In general though I don't have much insight into who the person is viewing my pages, or why they are here or what they are hoping to gain.

The use of the Attention Recorder plugin or Firefox allows us to keep track of all the places we go to the Internet. This combined with the various devices like the Root vault allows us to create a record of our activity and share it with others. So who cares where I surf on the web? Well Google and Yahoo certainly do. They use this data to determine what sort of ads to serve us. What if based on what I am paying attention to there was someone or some company out there that has a product that I am looking for? Would I mind being told that there are a number of books that I am waiting to buy that I just haven't gotten around to ordering at a great discount? Certainly.

In general I am still trying to get myself up to speed with the concepts. The piece I am currently digesting that you can find here is from Michael Godhaber in the First Monday journal. It is really good stuff.

There are two specific things that are of interest to me that I am still trying to crystallize in my mind. The first one is that this sort of infrastructure or platform can really drive expressive behavior down to a really low level that makes sharing your thoughts/ideas/activities very easy. If you don't want to blog or create a podcast, how about sharing with others the clikstream of the sites you are visiting. Certainly there are a lot of my friends whose clicktream I would find fascinating. It would be a way to keep up with what they are doing when I don't have the time or ability to reach out. Knowing what they are surfing would give me some insight into what they are up to.

The second one is the one I touched on previously, which is the marketplace idea that Root and some others like Meople are working on. Mathcing your attention with the creators of products or services you are looking for.

There are certainly challenges for the widespread adoption of these ideas and principles but the ideas are extremely powerful when one considers the shift from passive consumer of content/media to an engaged creator or arbitrator of our own attention. The implications are profound. I am sure that I will be spending some of my free waking hours noodling on this for a long time.

Rabble Launches on Verizon Puerto Rico and Cricket

While I was on the road we added a couple of new carriers. Rabble launched several weeks ago on Verizon Puerto Rico. Last week Rabble rolled out on Cricket as well.

Gnomedex Revisited - Themes

I want to distill some of my general observations about Gnomedex down to a couple of themes that upon reflection were the main takeaways for me.

Geek Social Networking - The attendees at Gnomedex were very high on the geek quotient. By geek I mean less Dungeons and Dragons than I mean really smart people. Although certainly there was a D&D feel without the chain mail. The first night party felt like there was a club of power geeks and some other tribes in attendance although they felt smaller. There were certainly a handful of media tribe types, most of whom I know from previous functions and interactions.

Although I felt that the first night was going to be a pre-cursor to an us and them conference dominated by the geeks, it was very open and cool and ultimately I think that anybody present was having a good time and enjoyed the interactions. I know I did. The only thing that I would add is that I think more diversity is better. There was a mortgage business person who made some comments on the last day that showed a big disconnect between the super brains in the conference and real/normal/smart people who aren't developers. I think bringing those two groups to the table would be a good thing.

What I find when I hear some of the great ideas presented, and when I see the products that rollout (Share Your OPML, People Aggregator) is that the ideas are extremely powerful but that the products aren't broadly adoptable by normal people. At least in my opinion. It's like that Myspace thing. What an ugly site that 10s of millions of people use. :-)

Open Everything and Users in Control - This was a big theme across many areas. Canter talked about the ability to move your data between social networking and other community sites. Making it easy for users to move things around as a benefit and not some artificial lock in. I though that his comments to Jeremy Zawodny were spot on as I have said in previous posts here.

Steve Gilmor talked about the Attention trust and taking control of our click data and using that to our own benefit. I think this was the most powerful idea presented although some people made some snarky comments about the discussion. I hope to do a long post about this shortly.

Kaliya/Identity Woman did a session on Open Spaces which as a discussion made sense but I didn't understand or was familiar with the overall meme. The idea of empowering non-corporate users with social tools is a good idea and it's good to see people focused on mainstream users.

Orthodoxy - There was an overall feeling that there had to be orthodoxy around certain ideas or points of view. It is probably because the audience was homogeneous in general. Examples to me were that it was assumed that nobody has a contrary position on network neutrality. Certainly there were no wireless carriers or telco people in the room, or at least none that spoke up.

It was generally assumed that everyone was on the progressive side of the political spectrum. In chats at the table there was some Republican grumbling regarding the Edwards non-political appearance and it has to be said that I think that it is very rare that you will find a politician who in a public setting would conduct themselves as anything other than a politician. I don't think that is necessarily bad, but it is the way they are wired in my opinion.

There was a heated exchange between Winer and Blake Ross that was resolved later offline but I was struck by one particular comment that Dave made that really embodied the orthodoxy and made me think of this as a big item. Dave commented that back in March he had blogged about his concerns about how Firefox would avoid becoming evil. There was an exchange in the session and Dave said that Blake should have commented on his post or sent him an email. There is an underlying assumption that Blake does/should read Dave's blog. This may or may not be the case, but the assumption that anyone should have to respond to something other than a direct conversation with that person was very surprising to me and felt like something that normal people would find fascinating.

Media - I won't say much about this but media was certainly a big and recurring theme as evidence by the session by Dave Dederer and Ethan Kaplan. Both very good sessions that covered territory that us media whores know well. The only comment that I will make though is that I find it really funny who people demonize the large content companies for exercising their rights with respect to copyright would be enraged if people took their blogs and other related IP and did what they wanted with it. There, I said it yet again. The good news is that as people learn more I think the anger has gone down from a boil to a simmer.

Good times - The balance of sessions and breaks combined with evening functions made this an excellent experience. On the one hand I would encourage any of the non-geeks I know to make the trip next year as I think it would be very rewarding, although on the other hand, I would be worried that a conference of this type has to by it's nature remain as small as possible. I am certainly going again next year provided it doesn't occur over a holiday weekend.

Gnomedex Revisited - Applications

There were a number of applications/products that were announced or demo'd at Gnomedex. The most noteworthy ones to me were the following:

Mindjet Mindmanager - This was a tool used to document the sessions. I really liked being able to go back to their blog which you can find here to look at the outline of the session and discussion. It would be great if tools like this were used at all conferences. It really was a nice way to review what was said.

Farecast - When should I book one of my many flights? Farecast allows you to do predictive modeling for airfare rates between cities to determine the right time to buy the best priced ticket. Only in Boston and Seattle but coming to you soon.

People Aggregator - Marc Canter unveiled his new meta social networking platform. I played around with it a bit but don't have much real feedback. Conceptually I totally get it and would argue that we embrace the same vision but ultimately it comes down to execution. Is this it? It's not obvious to me right now but it definitely warrants some more time.

What Day Is It? What City Am I In?

The last week has been a blur. I spent a bunch of time in Seattle for business and then Gnomedex. I did the holiday thing at home and hand a really nice time with the whole family. Somewhere along the way I forgot what day it was and then before I knew it, I was on a plane to NYC where I am now. I have a backlog of posts that I am going to rip through today in between meetings.

Chris Pirillo - Strike a Pose

Chris Pirillo - Strike a Pose,
originally uploaded by JoshB.

The host of Gnomedex, while trying to strike a Michael Jackson pose, was unaware of the headline projected onto the back of the auditorium that was for the next presentation. It really was a perfect storm that Chris will be living for many years to come. There were calls for Tshirts. I am sure that they will be coming out quickly.

Sidekick III In My Office

My new Sidekick arrived in the office yesterday. The bad news is I am in Seattle...until tonight. I can't wait to get my hands on it. A detailed review will certainly follow.

Rabble In PC Magazine

Josh just pointed out that Rabble was mentioned in a PC Magazine article here about Mobile Social Networking sites.

Rabble Mentioned In Reuters Article

Reuters wrote about social networks and mobile devices in this article here. One of our activity community members, Amazonian was quoted towards the end of the story.

Gnomedex Day 1 Wrap

The afternoon sessions were really good for me and several things were of particular interest.

Steve Rubel lead a session on marketing and PR that was definitely enjoyable. The highlight to me was a discussion on blogging about toilet paper which Steve made light of but the audience came back at him on the topic including Werner Vogels who said there are tons of reviews on Amazon of products. Ok. Toilet paper? I think the point was good though.

Marc Canter talked about open source and our right to take our data where we want when we go from one site to the next. We totally buy into that as we have extended our support of a ton of different APIs. We need to get our API out there for anyone to develop against...

Marc is a nut. It's been fun seeing him in action.

Susan Mernit, whose blog I enjoy, led a session around sex and real life blogging. Although the topic is certainly worth a good discussion, I would venture that the audience lacked the diversity to really do the topic justice. As some other people posted elsewhere, it just felt out of place. Nevertheless, Susan did a great job with a difficult topic.

I skipped the Bloglines commercial piece although I am a devoted Bloglines user. That one wasn't working for me.

Steve Gilmor was amazing. His discussion of Attention Trust was profound. I want to post something about that later today hopefully.

The dinner and party were nice with lots of socializing opportunities but ultimately the long day had me back at the hotel kind of early. I am looking forward to several things today but may try to get home a little earlier than planned.

Gnomedex and Network Neutrality

Werner Vogels led a session about Network Neutrality. It's clearly an important topic but I have to say that at a conference with an audience like this, it would be like having a discussion on whether or not we are all in favor of computers. Maybe it's just me.

Also as an aside at lunch it was pretty obvious that there were a chunck of people clearly not happy about a stump speech for Edwards. I thought that when you have a politician speak at a conference it was a forgone conclusion that it would be a stump speech.

Gnomedex Day 1 - Morning Session

Mike Arrington from Tech Crunch led a lively session that I don't recall what I was supposed to take away. It was pretty heated at points and funny.

Dave Dederer, one of the founding members of The Presidents Of The United States of America led a good session on intellectual property of creative content and pondering what the impact is as we move to an increasingly digital world.

John Edwards did a keynote conversation with the crowd. Good response from the crowd and Edwards. He is clearly trying to court the technology intelligentsia. I donÂ’t think there is any doubt he is running for President.

At Gnomedex

I was in Seattle for business Wed/Thursday so I was in town early for Gnomedex. I hit the pre-conference reception last night and got to hang with Brian Dear, Pete Mauro, Corey Denis, Eric Rice, and a bunch of others.

I woke up a little early this morning because I forgot to close the shades on the hotel window.

I went out for a quick jog in the crisp morning air. Seattle has been down right gorgeous. The days are warm and sunny and the mornings are nice and slightly cool but certainly not chilly.

On the shuffle for the jog:

Taking Back Sunday - Liar
A Perfect Circle - Judith
Peal Jam - Given to Fly (Had to have some Pearl Jam, Right?)
Black Sabbath - Fairies Wear Boots
REM - Man on the Moon
The Mars Volta - Miranda That Ghost Just Isn't Holy Anymore
System of a Down - Shimmy

I am looking forward to a day of interesting discussions and geek socializing.

Rabble RSS

A day or two ago we rolled out RSS feeds for all Rabble Channels. If you are a Rabbler who also uses an RSS reader point it at www.rabble.com/rss/Channel-Name. All updates will publish there to see in a reader. An example would be the Intercasting channel here.

Kent State Hates Facebook

Kent State is banning student athletes from using Facebook. Details here. Sounds like a free speech issue to me.

Moviso Launches

Shawn and I sit in the same crowded office and earlier today he looks up and says, Moviso just launched. I shrugged and went back to what I was doing. Then at lunch I went, duh! Shawn writes about it here. The Moviso and Mobizzo saga is certainly interesting.

Rabble Wap

Earlier today we rolled out a beta version or our Rabble Wap site that you can see at wap.rabble.com . Point your phone browser there and see behind the scenes into the Rabble community This is a first step and doesn't have near the feature set of our client application but it is a taste of some upcoming things we are working on.

Softness in Social Networking Advertising?

The Deal reports here that Viacom is very bearish on the prospects for advertising on social networking sites. That may or may not be true but it would be interesting to hear advertiser feedback on advertising performance. (I have some opinion based on some limited campaigns thus far) Clearly Viacom is going a different direction with Xfire but given the amount of media that Viacom buys this could be the start of a bad trend.

173 You Tube Clones

CNN Money reports that there are currently 173 You Tube like services in this article. Look for a shakeout.

Sidekick III is coming!!!

I can't wait. Rather, I will have to wait until June 28th which is when I can pick up my new one. See the details here.

The Sound of Silence

Back at the end of May, one of the guys who works at Digital Chocolate wrote this piece about the dilema's of corporate blogging. In it he cited me as one of the people at a company who blogs about the industry and I assume he also meant that I manage to keep some balance between trade secrets etc.

While to some extent that is true there are certainly a lot of things that I would like to write about that I can't. In fact increasingly that is the case. Although I have a broad range of interests that hopefully is interesting for people to read periodically, the most interesting, insightful things that I can discuss or say are things I can't really talk about. The biggest problem with that is that I would like at least remember times like I am having now. There are lots of interesting things going on that I would like to memorialize that I wont be able to do. That's too bad.

I think that as more of the corporate bloggers like Scoble and others go into startups or innovative technology, that they will find that what they can talk about constantly decreases.

Ah to be a pundit without a company to run. That is something I will aspire to in between this and the next company. Although I don't suspect that this will occur anytime soon.

Fathers Day

I had a great Father's day. My gift was a Giant Le Creuset oven for slow cooking large slabs of inexpensive meats. I spent the better part of the weekend making my first Beef Bourguignon. It was a lot of work but the results were definitely worth the effort. Jessica made the whole weekend very nice and relaxing. Tate gave me an especially touching card he made at school.

Summer Conferences

I don't go to a lot of conferences. We go to the wireless ones. Like CTIA twice a year. I like to go to certain ones that I am interested in like Bloggercon. Unfortunately not this year. Dave scheduled it after a bunch of other conferences were set up and I can't afford too much time away from the home office. I am bummed to miss Bloggercon as I found the last one very rewarding. Most important to me Gnomedex. I have watched over the last several years how everyone gushes about going to Gnomedex so this year I registered immediately sometime back in January. I am very pumped to go and ran into some people yesterday who were talking about it and asked me if I was going. So the answer is yes. I am looking very forward to it. So if you are some of the few people who aren't my friends or family who read this blog and you happen to be going to Gnomedex, drop me an email and lets grab a beer.

Radio Interview Regarding Rabble

A couple of weeks back I did a radio interview with a guy named Craig Peterson who does a show called Tech Talk in the Northeast. Here is a link to the show.

Linkedin, Zero Degrees & Plaxo

I hadn't had my coffee the other day and I received an email from Linkedin saying they had a new Outlook 2.0 plugin available. Possessed by something I can't explain I took a flyer and downloaded the plugin. I hit the install button and panicked, realizing that I may have just unleashed some spam monster to the 1500+ people in my contact list ala Zero Degrees. By the way what happened to them? I digress...

The plugin is actually pretty cool. I don't intend to do a review but I realized that Linkedin was taking a decidedly different approach than Plaxo, which is an application I am not fond of. Where Plaxo takes the approach of periodically pinging your contacts with a request for them to stop what they are doing and update their information, Linkedin has the opportunity to essentially create an RSS style subscription where those who happen to subscribe to my Linkedin account get an update when I change it. An added bonus is that I can see other users who may not be in my Linkedin network who also use Linkedin. Its a much softer approach than Plaxo which I think has done a great deal of damage to their reputation with those of us who resent the interruption in a mechanical way.

Pitbull and Rabble Promotion

A couple of weeks ago we rolled out our promotion with Pitbull that you can see here. Fans are sending in pictures that others can see on Rabble and also on our bands wap site at bands.rabble.com . Make sure you check it out on a WAP browser.

Location Free and The World Cup

I have to confess. I am not a soccer fan. (Football is something the NFL plays. Sorry, I am an ugly American on that point). I do enjoy it once in a while and I am pretty sure that living in southern California there is a high probability that more than one of my children will probably really get into soccer. Because of that and all the crazy fans I saw in Vegas I decided to try to pay at least some attention to the World Cup.

To that end I broke out the PSP and hooked up my Location Free. Yesterday streaming away on my desk in the background was the defeat of the blessed American soccer team at the hands of the Czech Republic. That alone would not warrant a post but later in the day we cruised over to Whole Foods during lunch and on a hunch I assumed they had free wi-fi. Good guess. I whipped out the PSP and fired up the Italy game. Shawn looked at me and shook his head.

Catching My Breath

Last week I had a board meeting in Boston and then Jessica and I took our first vacation without kids since our triplets were born. It was a couple of days in Vegas but it felt like a long time. I came back to work this week refreshed and under a pile of emails. I have some random tech observations and Rabble updates later today before I head up to SF and Silicon Valley for a quick trip.

Something Up With Snocap

I don't know what is going to happen, but Sean pointed me to this link that seems to indicate something is going to happen with Snocap in 9 days. I will post more when I know. My first guess when asked was that Mashboxx or something else is going to launch.

Vox launches

Six Apart rolled out Vox over the last day or two. As I am traveling I haven't been able to check it out in detail. It looks a lot cooler than some of the other personal pages that have rolled out recently. Let me know if you want an invite.

Webshots and Rabble

I am out of pocket this week for a break. There was one thing we rolled out earlier this week that I wanted to share which is integration between Rabble and Webshots. Our users can bring their Webshots pictures into Rabble to make posts and they can also use Rabble to send pictures to their Webshots account. Thanks to Webshots for letting us be one of their API users. More to come.

CA-50 Election

For the first time in my life I am living in a congressional district that has a highly charged campaign. As you may recall, my former Congressman, Randy Duke Cunningham, is now serving an 8 year term in jail for taking over $2 million in bribes. Nice.

As a result there is an election today to replace him for the next several months before the November election. The disgusting and misleading commercials by both sides is an extremely ugly commentary on the state of politics. I think there are commercials from both sides running during every commercial break. I am not sure who is going to win today as the safe Republican district is in serious play resulting from Cunningham's disgrace. The voters on the other hand are certainly the losers on all counts.

Heading to Boston

I am off to Boston for a board meeting this week so I don't anticipate much posting. I did get the new Helio software for my PC and will write that up later. I do have to say that the speakers on the Hero are extremely impressive for a phone.

Intercasting Presentation at BREW

Shawn gave an hour long talk on User-Generated Content at BREW 2006 yesterday. There is a link to the presentation he gave on our blog you can find here.

Rabble In Business Week Article

There is an article in Business Week this week regarding the move of social networking sites to mobile devices that you can find here where we received a mention.

Mobile Monday San Diego Tonight

I spaced and forgot to post that Mobile Monday is tonight (Wednesday) to coincide with the Brew conference. It's a great lineup of LBS related companies. Debi has the information here.

Orkut Spam

Has anyone else been getting a lot of Orkut messaging lately? I have been getting a resurgence of activity from people in Brazil. As I have never been to Brazil, but really want to go there soon, I chalk it up to spam. Spam for sure but fascinating Spam. I have been ignoring it until tonight. I think everyone I can persuade should become a friend of $16;MonsterMan. The Punisher. I want to party with him. I am now his friend. Sorry I haven't used Orkut in a while. He is my best friend.

DRM Pain

Been going through old to-do emails. I have been playing a little bit with the Sprint Music store on the demo phone they sent me that is powered by Groove Mobile. On the phone it's kind of cool in that I use it as my new transistor radio when I am out with the triplets. They really dig Tears For Fears - Change. I hadn't played with the PC part until tonight. I was going to download the songs I had "bought" from the store. I tried to do the download but I had to do a Windows Media Player upgrade. Not a big deal.

I download the upgrade of the DRM. I start the install and the first thing it tells me to do is to backup my hard drive. Pass.

Is this still the current state of things? I don't mind upgrading your DRM for my players but the .99 or $2.99 dollar songs is worth a whole lot less than my data. I will keep the data. I am behind on backups anyways and will do the backup but I am not installing software that can wreck my stuff. I am less worried about the backup than I am the 3 days I would lose reinstalling stuff. Pass.

I Want Media

A couple of months back I subscribed to the I Want Media newsletter and I have to say that day in and day out this is my new favorite surpassing Moconews, Venture Wire and some others. It's a shame they don't provide RSS feeds but I would definitely recommend checking it out if you are interested in the intersection of media and technology and want to stay up to date.

Quien es mas macho? Max Headroom or Tony Snow

I was walking past a television the other day and noticed that CNN had a smiling picture of Tony Snow talking and I was struck by how similar he looked to Max Headroom. It must have been the goofy smile and the big head. I must say that having a affable press secretary was a stroke of genius for the people who are running the country. For my money though, I have the say that Max Headroom is the better man.

Blogger Comment Filter Improvement

Over the weekend Blogger rolled out word verification for comments. I don't get many comments but I really enjoy getting the ones that I do. Unfortunately I have been getting about 50 Spam comments a day for all kinds of crazy stuff. I turned the filter on this weekend and away the Spam went.

Tivo And Direct TV Confusion

Some days you feel like you are complaining a lot. After the drug store ordeal below and being seriously burned out from the sailing trip, I wanted to sit down and watch a movie with Tate. We pulled up Pay Per View on our DVR and tried to buy a show. We ended up getting a weird customer service error where we had to call some number. Lameness. Why would I want to call someone? Why would the company I am paying want me to talk to someone? That costs money. I call the number and do some weird menu navigation kung fu that ultimately gets me to an apparent human being. Fascinating. You don't find many humans these days and I actually think this guy was located somewhere in the United States.

We spend a longer than I would care time on the phone and early on he tells me that my machine hasn't called back since March. I corrected him and said that no in fact it had called back the previous Thursday at 1:01 AM as I have had this problem before and I went through all the information screens in advance to get the information in advance of this call. He said that it needs to send something back on a special call and it hasn't done that since March. Now mind you, this is the second time I have had this problem and the last time it resulted in me shipping my box back to them and them sending me a new box. I am thinking this is about to happen again.

I don't spend much time with him editorializing as it doesn't really do much to help me but I would point out a couple of things...

My machine does call back every couple of days.

Some kind of data gets sent back to the home base.

When I order a show some kind of authorization process occurs which leads me to believe that they should have some record on their servers independent of my box.

The movie studios want to get paid.

If my box is broken again and I haven't paid for any of the 10 plus movies we bought in the last two months how do the studios get paid?

If Direct TV authorizes the shows in advance from their home servers they should have a record of it.

If they have a record of it then my machine calling them shouldn't matter.

If the above fact pattern is true then they should let me buy whatever I want, whenever I want instead of making me sit on the phone for 20 minutes where they lose money and I lose patience.

If the above is false then I am going to get a bunch of movies for free when they make me ship this box back to their home office.

Maybe I am missing something. Maybe not.

Give Me Liberty Or Add Me To Your Database

Tonight I was pretty wiped out. The previous night one of the triplets, Brit, had a respiratory thing going on. We didn't get much sleep. We had a day planned to go sailing which we did and had a really awesome time. Pics will be posted shortly. Tonight I needed to head to the drug store to get a ration of Motrin, Pediacare, and some Vaporizer stuff. With 18 month old triplets and a soon to be 4 year old, we go through lots of medication.

Apparently the nationwide epidemic of methamphetamine use has resulted in some restrictions around your ability to purchase large quantities of medication that could be used to make speed from the comfort of your home. Mind you with all the chemicals involved and the number of kids in my house, I don't have any plans to set up a meth lab anytime soon. I can picture a biker in a bandana loading up a shopping cart full of sudafed as being suspicious but several bottles of the above mentioned drugs shouldn't freak anyone out.

When I stepped up to the counter the clerk told me she had to see my drivers license. I pulled out my wallet. She said she needed me to take my license out of my wallet. Huh? I am tired, sure. I took it out and handed it to her. Yes, I am turning 40 this year and the curly headed kid with me is in fact mine and the small quantity of medication on the table is because I have triplets and they generally take 3 times as much medicine as a single child. It's a math thing.

The clerk proceeded to take my license and swipe it on some magnetic card reader. YOU HAVE GOT TO BE KIDDING ME! I have been added to the database of speed freaks and meth cookers. I asked her what the hell that was. She murmured something about some methamphetamine act and pulled up some government publication in her other hand. Tired and not fully realizing how seriously angry this was going to make me, I blurted out vocally, "Hey nothing like a little invasion of my privacy in the land of liberty." The elder gentleman in line behind me blurted out a vocal "Amen".

I am thinking I need to do some research on this law and see if any civil liberties people have any issue with this kind of stuff. If I wasn't tired and if I had any inkling that I was going to be scanned to buy some medication for my kids I would have told her thanks but no thanks. What is going on with my country?

Rabble and Upcoming.org Integration

This week we rolled out integration with Upcoming.org . Rabble users can adjust their settings and then when they add events to their Upcoming account the event automatically gets published to Rabble. Also when our users create an event in Rabble they can choose to publish it out to Upcoming.org. For example I just added the San Diego date of the Warped Tour to my Upcoming calendar and it is now in Rabble as well.

On the Road / Chicago and LA

Atlanta was hot. I don't do humidity very well. I did ride the MARTA to the airport which was cool although the back story reason I rode the MARTA was kind of fascinating but I won't go into that.

Chicago was perfect. The time of year that the Midwest has great weather. Chicago is a great city that just looks so regal. I think that most of the time I have been there when I was at Vivendi was the middle of winter, which isn't as nice.

The trip was good. Mostly business although I was happy to grab breakfast with Patrick DeMoustier who worked with me at Vivendi. He is currently at EA in Chicago as the COO of their studio there. It was nice getting to catch up.

Leaving Chicago was a nightmare. Apparently some weird tornado stuff came up that delayed our flight like 3 hours before they boarded us and made us sit on the tarmac for another 2-3 hours. Lots of fun. We got home at 2 AM and then ran up to LA for a day of meetings. No rest for the wicked. Currently I am on the train with the EVDO on catching up on stuff hoping to get back in my bed before midnight.

Two big technology things from this trip.

1. I downloaded my first TV show. I know, I know, I am a lame avoider of P2P networks but having lots of friends in the content businesses I just don't download stuff for free. I caught the first half of 24 for $1.99. That was so worth it. I was really excited about being able to not have to wait to go home and see it on the TIVO, although sometime late tonight I will catch the other half of the finale. I am really tired or I would have some commentary on how music is not throw away but television is for me and how I actually want to own a CD but could care less about the DVD of a TV show season but I can't do it now. There is something profound there. Not tonight though.

2. More TV on my phone. During those 2-3 hours on the tarmac, in a small seat, in a plane that was hot, with no food or beer, I found that pulling up live feeds of the Weather Channel on my Sprint phone and looking at the weather radar made me realize that when the airlines push you out onto the tarmac with no intention of letting you fly, it isn't really a magic fairy storm that spontaneously comes into existence. They actually know it is coming because they have satellites and other technology that lets them know full well what they are doing. Wow, stupid me. So with that fact in hand it begs the question of why it is better for me to sit confined to the seat of a plane for hours than to sit comfortably or semi comfortably back in the airport. I can't imagine I would like the answer so I am going to continue to pretend it's the weather fairy and gremlins that make my traveling miserable.

On The Road From Atlanta

I am out traveling a bit this week. I got to Atlanta last night and will be here for the day for meetings before I head to Chicago tonight for more and then on to Los Angeles. A couple of observations from the road. First, I forgot my noise reducing headphones that I received as a gift earlier this year. I can't tell you how much I miss them. Bad mistake. Those things have changed my travel quality of life. Second, the EVDO phone I am using is awesome as a modem. As we checked into the hotel last night I saw the sign for $16 for unlimited connectivity. Whatever that means. It's kind of funny how we have gotten to the point where almost all of the hotels are now wired for connectivity but we are now starting to use high speed phones instead of their wi-fi. Third, the podcasts that are available for download are amazing these days. I listened to Nightline, Jim Lehrer and All Things Considered on my PSP. In some respects travel has certainly gotten easier. More later.

Movable Type / Typepad on Rabble

Last week we rolled out integration with Rabble and Movable Type and Typepad. We publish the Intercasting Blog using Movable Type so this afternoon I set up a channel Intercasting on Rabble and brought over all the posts we have made in the last year. We can now update the corporate Blog from Rabble while on the road as well.

Virb

One of the sites that took the mantle of indie and up and coming music when the first incarnation of MP3.com went dark was PureVolume. I have admired what they have done from afar over the last several years and in my opinion they have really captured the pulse and lifeline of indie music today. Where you go from there in a world of changing tastes with kids is hard to say but an indication of where they are going can be found at the soon to be launched Virb. It appears to be their take on social networking and given the smarts that they have it will be interesting to see what their take is when they go live.

New Yahoo Homepage

I just hit a new, updated and stylish Yahoo homepage. My cohorts can't seem to get it to appear. I like it a lot. Wonder when it really rolls.

All Beta'd Out

This has been a tough week for trying new stuff in my ample free time. The things this week that drove me insane:

Helio. I should have waited for a little while. I don't think that you can do an evaluation of the service right now. The software to connect to the PC isn't available yet and I don't think they intend to lock the handset down as much as it currently is locked down. Please let me put Opera Mini on the phone. Cool? Again, love the phone, love the UI. Not much else to say at this point.

Aimpages. I heard they went beta earlier this week and signed up. I tried to edit my template but it was really screwed up. Painfully screwed up. I tried it on Firefox, IE, Safari and Camino. Each time I couldn't get it to work. I sat down with one of our developers and watched him go through the process and realized that when I had signed up my base template had been improperly initialized and there was no framework to add the Ajax widgets. Grrr. I deleted my page and started over and it was working. Well sort of. But its a start. Pretty wacky. Here is a start for my page.

YouTube Mobile Video Upload. I deserve what I get on this one. Video off the phone, over the air to a web service is a leap of faith. Is my file to big? Will the MMS gateway on my side barf? Will their handler work on the other end? Will the specific flavor of encoding on my phone work? I knew better going into this. I tried to send a big file from my P910 through the MMSC for Tmobile. Nope. Too Big. I sent it over the Internet Gateway. No Problem. YouTube barfed on it. I sent a smaller file over MMSC. No Dice. Smaller file over Internet. YouTube barfed. I sent a smaller file over MMS from Helio. No error message and no video. I can't even figure out what happened to that one. I am going to try some other carrier gateways like Verizon or Sprint MMS which I believe will actually work. User Created Video is going to be big. But there is a long way to go before it is a good consumer experience.

All in all it was a bit of a frustrating week but on the plus side, the amount of innovation that is happening everywhere right now is breathtaking. I expect the three above mentioned services will all get their kinks out and I suspect that each of them will be successful in the long run. I am going to take a break from trying new things out next week. One thing that occurred to me though is that it would be really cool to see a side by side comparison of Helio and Ampd. Of Myspace, Aimpages, and Pages.google.com. Of all the video hosting sites and how they handle mobile video upload. Someone? I am off next week.

COPA? How about DOPA?

Cnet reports that Congress is considering passing legislation called Deleting Online Predator Act or DOPA. This legislation would basically shut down access by minors to websites at all schools and libraries for social networking and blogging sites. This Myspace as scapegoat inspired legislation would be broad enough to nail all the sites kids use like Myspace, Facebook, Live Journal, Xanga etc. as well as sites like Blogger.

I expect that there will be a concerted effort by the fledgling industry that 10s of millions of kids are using to temper this a bit or at least make it reasonable. It smells a bit like election year over-reaching to me.

2 Years of Blogging

Today marks my "blogging birthday". Two years and 657 posts later I am still enjoying it immensely.

Narchive Music Wiki

I must have missed the rollout of Narchive. Or N-archive as in Napster archive. Think Wikipedia meets Allmusic. It looks pretty cool. I of course went to look at Tool because they are my soundtrack of choice this week. Me and 500,000 others last week. There isn't much there yet except what I think is a big chunk of Muse bio information. I will have to check out some of the other more popular bands to see what is there. Has anyone else tried the Wiki music approach yet? I think this is a first.

OPML Madness

This is my week for OPML. The Social Software Weblog (which I need to re-add to my blogroll) had an article about Grazr here. Earlier this week I decided to start hacking my blog up to clean things up and to try some new stuff. I started by creating an OPML file of my newly condensed reads to try out Winer's new Share Your OPML, which I have to say has been fascinating. Mostly to see what other people read stuff like you. There are a number of views into the information that I have been stewing on and interestingly found someone I know at Warner Bros. who was near the top of my list and I was also near the top of his.

Today I installed the Grazr Javascript on the side and I have to say that it is a super cool little add on that makes updating the blogroll a snap. It also lets people quickly and easily read the same stuff I am reading instantly.

YouTube Rolls Out Mobile Video Upload

Cnet reports that YouTube has rolled out a new feature that allows users to upload videos to their site from their mobile devices. Nifty. I imagine that most users will have to send videos through their carriers MMS gateway which will have a size limitation. My account allows me to bypass MMS and go direct to email. I just sent a fairly sizable video that hasn't gone live yet. I will post a link when it does.

Share Your OPML Site Down?

I can't get in. Anyone else? I get a Wordpress database error.

Share Your OPML

I had been putting off trying to grok OPML for over a year. There are the obvious things but after spending time with the opml.org outliner. (Painful and non-intuitive) I managed to get together an OPML file of what I am really reading right now. I went down to 24 feeds. I will begrudingly add more as the days pass. I am thinking of quitting using bloglines and start with a new newsreader as well to make sure I don't go and red the several hundred I have in Bloglines and Sharp Reader.

I pointed a link from Share Your OPML to my file and voila! There are some cool things about this site that is a different slice from the other services like Bloglines and Feedburner.

I am really interested in the shared updating of outlines ala Basecamp (no OPML isn't Basecamp but the shared space thing) and I think I got a glimmer of the power of synchronized information in a format like OPML.

Helio First Impressions

I wanted to clarify something that I hadn't said before. Our company is an application developer and it's our goal to get the widest distribution possible. From that perspective, all carriers are good. I am not writing about Helio as it relates to that at all. I am writing about Helio because I think I am in their target demographic. Ok, maybe at the high end of the target demographic in terms of age, but nonetheless, when I heard the original Helio announcement, I thought, "Here is an MVNO for me, high end phones, 3G networks, etc." This should be my carrier.

So whether or not that assumption was flawed, I have proceeded to get a phone and have gone through some of the processes that I described earlier that I will describe as opening week jitters. That sort of stuff happens and it was neither my intent or desire to say, "hey I keep having problems." I will say that there was one other thing that popped up that I wont go into but I want to say that their VP of Operations called me to give me a hand with some of the issues I had been experiencing. I was impressed with the outreach.

My requirements for a carrier are pretty straightforward. I want a lot of minutes for talking. I average 2000-3000 a month. I have a 5000 minute plan with T-Mobile to cover that. I want to have a feature rich phone or at least flexibility to bring my own phone if I don't see anything that excites me. My current phone is the Sony Ericsson P910. I love it and have gushed about it frequently. It is a slight bit big and slightly underpowered in the media department and lack of hi-speed network capability. I also want to be able to use my phone to read my email, surf the web and act as a modem for my laptop in a pinch. This means unlimited data or cheap data. At it's core I want a cool phone without a lot of restrictions.

The Hero phone is amazing. All of the specs are great. The sound is great. The gameplay is stunning. The UI is out of this world, truly a big improvement over most phones. As an FYI, my phone UI bias is Sony Ericsson and Samsung. I am not a Nokia convert. I think that the Hero UI is close to what I am used to.

The EVDO network is solid. Actually, let me say, that I expect it to be solid as the Sprint Ambassador Samsung A920 phone that just kicks ass in terms of speed. I haven't really been able to properly put the phone through it's steps to see how it performs under some serious load, but the Samsung has been a champ and I expect that when I get the chance to work the Hero, it will be similar.

I plan to spend more time with the phone later but there were several things that made me pause or scratch my head. First off, the HOT or Helio On Top application. It is a nifty feature that sends alerts to the screen of my phone. Like Yahoo News, Yahoo Sports, Yahoo etc. It also has Myspace news and IGN news. Great. Let me go in and customize this for the stuff that I use or the blogs that I read. Not so much. Or at least not now. I imagine they will change that but for now my ability to customize or personalize the experience is fairly constrained. I guess Bloglines on my Sidekick II is staying for a bit longer. The HOT application also made my phone occasionally non-responsive. Again, I am sure this will get fixed.

The next issue, that to me is currently the biggest issue is the open/walled garden setup of the phone browser. This certainly has to be an oversight. The ability to go to the WAP sites of choice or even to view non WAP sites is pretty limited. I think this is probably a network configuration issue. I am not sure if it is intentional or not. After realizing that the installed browser is not HTML friendly, or doesn't come installed with a real browser like Opera was on my Sony. I cruise through the Opera site and get to the download and then get a permissions error from the phone. Sorry bucko, no can do. Ok, this has got to be wrong. I haven't had the chance to install any software yet and maybe that is by design. I am loading the software for my PC in the next day or two when my actual phone gets here and will see how the PC integrates with the phone and see if I can do some software installs that way.

The other big glaring thing for me, and it's not something I would expect to be there, but the Sprint Ambassador phone has actually gotten me fascinated more than I expected, was the lack of a music store to load tracks onto my sweet new phone. The only music available are music videos. Huh? This might be a user error issue but I am not sure.

Anyway, like I said these are first impressions. I certainly hope the phone/network are a bit more open than I see at first glance. If that is the case I would say I am heading down the path to really liking where they are taking this. If it's more locked down then it's probably not for me.

I am not going to comment on the Myspace integration for obvious reasons but will say that I have used it a lot and would like to see someone else review that functionality soon.

My Helio Saga Part 3

An hour after my last call, I called back because it still wasn't working. We did a 20-30 minute phone call. We walked through lots of phone geek stuff. At the conclusion they said wait for an hour and it will work. I waited an hour. It didn't work. I called back. I did another 30-40 minute call. Actually I am still on the call. They said that the device is defective. I guess that's possible but it seems strange. Sigh. I get a new one tomorrow. Stay tuned. Grumble grumble. Early Adopter.

Dodgeball Newsletter

I just saw a Dodgeball newsletter in my SPAM catcher. It looks like they are providing stats to users as it relates to check ins etc. I love stats and think that's pretty cool. None of my friends use Dodgeball so I haven't been using it. Some of the people I know in SF are into it, I guess I need to add them as friends, I just don't who is. I certainly missed out on the Dodgeball connections at SXSW.

My Helio Saga Part 2

The title of this post shouldn't be saga but unfortunately it is the right description. As readers may recall I uncovered a broken javascript piece in the shopping process that prevented me from completing a purchase of my new Helio phone. After calling them and alerting them to the problem, the fixed it. Opening day bugs, not a problem. It's to be expected. As an early adopter of things, this doesn't come as a surprise.

Yesterday my phone, a Hero, arrived. I was extremely impressed by all the packaging and presentation. Very Apple if you ask me but cooler in my opinion. A great start. I had also seen the phones before and wasn't very impressed. It reminded me of so many other sliders I have used. I think it was mostly because I wasn't really trying to focus on the phone. Last night I have to admit that I thought the phone was extremely nice and the UI, which I had been impressed with before is extremely beautiful and gives such a great first impression.

I charged the phone overnight and rushed downstairs to activate it so I could start putting it through some drills on the morning coffee run. No dice. I went through the activation process and the phone doesn't work. I called back and it baffled the tech guy. All the settings were right and it should be fine but it wont call out, accept calls, or do anything with data. Huge bummer. The tech support guy said he had to escalate this or send me a new phone. I am waiting for a call back now.

Ok, so this is a saga right? I hope it gets sorted out today. If I weren't a phone geek, I wouldn't have bothered with the website problem and this activation problem, assuming I had gotten past the previous problem, would probably be the deal killer. But not me, nope I am an early adopter. Maybe they should send me some test phones. That would be a good idea. :-)

Google Translate Take 2

John came in this morning chuckling at me. He asked if I had ever noticed the translate this page next to results if you search for something like Munchen. Well actually, I hadn't but I do now. Needless to say I am not always as quick on some things as I am on others.

Google Translate

I was looking through our server logs and saw a referral from translate.google.com . I didn't recall hearing or seeing this but a quick technorati search shows some activity around this URL. The reason that this is important to me is that it spells the death of my use of Altavista. Actually that isn't entirely correct, it spells the death of my navigation to Altavista to get to that Babelfish link whenever I need to translate a website or an email. Does anyone use Altavista anymore? I am done. I am curious why the translate stuff isn't obvious anywhere on the Google directories, or at least not where I could find it.

Helio Shopping Cart Fixed

I called them to fix the shopping cart. They did so hopefully tomorrow I should have a new phone.

I can't Buy a Helio Phone

I decided this morning to get a Helio phone to check it out. I went through the sign up process on Firefox and right after I was upsold a Flash card, the website is broke. I thought it was just Firefox but I had the same experience with IE and it broke at the same point. That isn't good. Fix your website! I guess I have to call them on the phone. Did anyone else get through to buy one?

Rabble on TV

A local TV network in North Carolina RTPTV did an interview with Amanda Krantz who was working with us in North Carolina earlier this year. Here is a link to the video. If you have ever wondered what Rabble looks like, there are some good live screen shots in the interview.

Helio Launched - Korean Retail Angle

I try not to post about things that are broad news where I don't really have anything to add. Yesterday Helio launched. I am interested to see what their Myspace integration is like. As of this morning I haven't seen any reviews. I guess in the next day or two things might start to appear. I was dying to get my hands on a phone yesterday and since they are actually going to do some retail distribution I went to their site to find a store near me. Although my expectations were that in fact there are no stores, I was surprised to see a number near me. They happened to be in an area that is very Korean in terms of businesses and residents. There were three stores. I called them all. None of the people answered the phone in English. They did in fact speak English when prompted and after a couple of questions I realized that they didn't have the phones yet but should have them in the next several weeks. More important to my quest though was that these phones that they would be carrying would be with a Korean language version so no dice for me.

I think the biggest issue that I saw with their launch was the price point. When I originally heard about Helio I expected that they were targeting a more affluent post college kind of crowd which would be able to handle a relatively expensive price plan and handset purchase cost. I think their rollout suggests that this is still the case. With that in mind it seems sort of counter intuitive to me that they are marketing to the Myspace crowd which strikes me as a younger more price sensitive group. I am certain that similar to the other recently launched MVNOs there will be several course corrections over time. All in all though I am really excited about what they are trying to do in the MVNO space and I hope they gets traction quickly.

Radiate / Flipt Series A and Staff Addition

Yesterday in Venture Wire and Moconews it was reported that LBS start up Radiate / Flipt raised $5 million from Sequioa and NEA. As Shawn pointed out here although they are a "stealth" company some details are emerging through some astute blogospheric observations. Yesterday when I saw the names of the founders I tried to find some more news. I wasn't that successful but then thought that any good Silicon Valley backed startup probably uses Linked In. As a result I found the CEO Sam Altman and a link to Radiate on his resume that revealed Mark Jacobstein, The President and COO of Digital Chocolate is their EVP of Corporate Development and Marketing. Interesting that neither his departure from Digital Chocolate or his role at Flipt had been reported previously.