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.