With the appearance of My AOL, Microsoft's Start

With the appearance of My AOL, Microsoft's Start.com and Google's RSS home page it seems that My Yahoo! has some company in the "RSS Home Page" space. These competitors are right to jump in as according to FeedBurner, Yahoo! is currently enjoying nearly 60% of the aggregator market. Though it's nice to see that mainstream portals are jumping onto the RSS bandwagon (lead by my employer), the problem is that all of these services generally suck.
Why? Because they all break a very simple rule: You should only see an RSS item once. If I go to a page and see the weather for the day, that's it. I don't need to see the weather again until it changes drastically or tomorrow. After I've seen it once, it's noise. If I see a news story headline, that's it, I don't need to see it again unless there is something new. It's very simple. There's too much information out there in the world to constantly have to search for updates on my own customized news page. New information should stand out, and old information should go away.
The way all these "Box Aggregators" are set up, you have all these boxes on the page with different feeds in them. At a glance you have no idea what is new and what is old, nor do you have any idea when things were updated relative to each other. I don't necessarily subscribe to the "River of News" method, but honestly, I'd rather have that sort of basic interface than a bunch of boxes which contain 90% old news and don't scale beyond a few dozen feeds.
Of course my beloved Bloglines seems to hit the sweet spot, though the interface could definitely do with another refresh and some more accurate functionality. I love the fact that I'm able to click on a category and get all the new items for that category in one long list - which could be 200 or more stories - there's no latency in scrolling. I love that once I've done that, those stories go away. I've seen them, I don't need to see them again! Though if I want to, I can view items from a set time period in the past and they reappear. I wish this worked better (sometimes the dates seem to be wrong or I get ENTIRE feeds from some blogs) and I wished Bloglines had a better concept of sessions - even if I had to log in more - so I could just say, "show that last click to me again, I changed devices and missed the updates."
Read marks and session management is the key to aggegators IMHO. As a person who scans almost 400 feeds daily, I can tell you this is the only way realistically keep up. Even aggregators made for the general populace, who may only keep track of a dozen or so news sources, not providing this functionality is just wasting their time. Though actually, I think that many people start out with a small list of feeds and just keep adding to them. Why not give them a scalable solution right away?
While I'm on the topic, I have to say how AMAZING Bloglines Mobile is yet again - this time on my PSP. The PSP is a perfect Internet tablet - it turns on instantly, connects in seconds and really makes browsing enjoyable, not just possible. Though sites with a lot of JavaScript and frames and tables either don't work or are just cramped, Bloglines Mobile just looks and works amazingly - again, scrolling has no latency so it's so comfortable to sit back on the couch and keep up with my feeds reading them on a great big portable screen. Last year at Camp Foo (which I didn't get re-invited to, waaah), I told Mark how great Bloglines Mobile was and I'm still impressed with it. Now that the PSP is out, they need to add back in the "enclosures" link (which is missing from the mobile version) as the PSP is a great Podcast listening device as well.
Hopefully these are all first generation services and we'll see a quick progressing to more useful versions. Seriously, all this stuff looks just like Netscape's original use of RSS on its home page back in 1999, no? RSS is so much more than that now.

My sense of personal computer history

My sense of personal computer history isn't really that long. I got my first PC in 1990 and started really paying attention to the PC industry a few years later after a temp job at IBM lead me into programming, so I missed out on quite a huge chunk of the PC history which occurred in the 80s. But being an über-geek that I am, I've read most of the required reading (like Startup) and seen Triumph of the Nerds at least a dozen times, so I've got a good handle on what was going one before I came into the industry. I was there for the dying days of the original big names. I remember Windows 3.0 and OS/2 were big when I first started with PCs. And I remember there were the suite wars between Microsoft Office, Lotus SmartSuite and Borland Office... which included WordPerfect. As we all know, Borland, Wordperfect and Lotus fell off the map while Microsoft went on to become the $40 billion borg.
But though their companies may have faded from view, the guys who ran them are still around kicking up dust. For example Mitch Kapor - the co-founder of Lotus - has been in the news lately for his work on Chandra and for standing up against Groove's involvement in the U.S. government's dirty business. And it dawned on me just yesterday that there's another Old Schooler who we're probably going to see a lot more about again soon: Philippe Kahn, the founder of Borland.
Philippe's been a hero of mine for the past few years, ever since I read this Wired article about him in 2000. My worship of him didn't have much to do with him or his technology - though both are very cool - but more because he made his millions in technology and is now kicking back enjoying life with his family on the beaches of Hawaii and Santa Cruz, CA. The Wired article, if I remember correctly, talked about his high-bandwidth bungalo on the sand. Yeah. Baby. Where do I sign up for THAT life?
However, as fate would have it, there's a bit more about what Philippe is doing that I now realize has a lot more to do with me than just my desire to live in high-tech heaven on some tropical island. You see, after Philippe got ousted from the board of Borland in 1994, he went on to do some other cool things, which are now just becoming Very Important. First, he went on to start a company called Starfish Software which was eventually sold to Motorola in 1997. Starfish's main product Sidekick went away, but their sychronization technology called TrueSync - and related patents - have been a qualified success. In fact, Starfish worked with big names like Ericsson, IBM, Lotus, Matsushita, Motorola, Nokia, Palm, and Psion in 2000 to create SyncML. There's one.
The other thing that Philippe has been working on for the past five years is a startup called LightSurf. And this company is the reason you're reading this right now. LightSurf makes software for managing digital images sent from mobile devices, i.e. MMS. Nokia is one of their customers. So now you're probably starting to see the picture (pun intended). SyncML and MMS - two very important technologies in the oncoming mobile revolution that's just starting and ones that I am currenlty obsessing over daily (including writing blog entries about it at 5 a.m. when I should be sleeping).
Yesterday, LightSurf announced version 5 of their Multimedia Messaging software for MMS which is what prompted my memory of all this. I remember when I first read about LightSurf and their software for compressing, sending and managing digital photos, I thought it was the dumbest thing I had heard of. Yep, that's me. Russell Beattie: Visionary. Well, in my defense this guy developed Pascal the year before I was born, so I shouldn't feel bad that he's way ahead of me on these things... But still, I'm just trying to figure out how to use these SyncML and MMS right now, and this guy has had a hand in creating/improving both. It's quite eye opening.
And just from a business perspective, if you compare Borland, which is slowly fading into oblivion with random name changes and various IDEs (that aren't as good as the open source Eclipse), to LightSurf you realize where the 'revenge' part of my subject line comes in. Philippe's set to get a tiny cut of all those billions of MMS messages sent in the next few years from licensing and the patents he has on multimedia messaging... Nice. There's a company I'd like to have stock in. ;-)
Actually, LightSurf looks like it needs engineers to work in its Santa Cruz offices, in case you're interested. I don't think my resume would get me a job right this sec, but in case my grand business plans for Mobile World Domination don't come to fruition, some of that work might look good enough on a resume to get me an interview, so that might be another "exit plan" to seriously consider. ;-)
Anyways, I wonder if Philippe is going to start becoming more visible in the news lately now that his company is becoming more and more relevant to many people's daily lives? From what I understand he was quite blustery back in the day, so it should be quite interesting to watch to see if he re-emerges from obscurity like some technical John Ritter...
Okay. Not tonight (this morning) but another business plan is coming up. This one - coincidentally - with an MMS focus.

"We were not aware at all that these photos

Posted on Saturday, April 24th, 2004 2:13 PM What a bunch of complete morons. This story about the ban on pictures of coffins coming from Afghanistan and more importantly, Iraq makes me so angry. The media today is an embarassment and a dissappointment to us all.
Look at this quote:
"We were not aware at all that these photos were being taken," Bill Keller, executive editor of the New York Times, was quoted as saying in the paper today. I have All the President's Men sitting on my table. I took it out the other day to explain to my Spanish wife who Bob Woodward was and why he was being interviewed and why his new book is both important and holds a bit of weight. 30 years later and that type of dedication to the story is long gone, yet now is when we need it the most.
How could the American media go this long without those photos? HOW? It makes me so mad to think we trust these guys to balance out the government's power. We have more media outlets than ever, yet none are doing their damn job! How can CNN, MSNBC, FOX, CNBC, a million local news organizations, Time Magazine, NewsWeek, The New York Times, the LA Times, the Washington Post and every other media organzation out there *not* get this story? Why did some website I've never heard of (and I know a lot of websites) have to ferret these photos out? It's an embarrassment! The 4th estate? Obviously not any more.
Thankfully they are no longer going to control what information we see and don't see. Thankfully the Internet is going to help distribute information when the established organizations fall down. But you know, websites are full of crap, inuendo, opinion, etc. and if I had my preference, it'd be that "real" news organizations instead be in charge of reporting, verifying and vetting news. But they're obviously not doing their job now, and are beholden to their corporate owners, all of them. Taking on the government may impact earnings, so these media companies look the other way and no longer can be trusted with their duties.
It's going to be up to us now, and that's just a sad state of affairs. Bloggers are not reporters. I don't trust what I read on a weblog or some random news site. I don't *want* to have to trust them. I should be able to trust that the fucking New York Times is doing its job to monitor the government's activities and be a fighter for freedom of information. Instead we're going to start having to look to random websites to balance out government spin and censorship.
How sad is that?

This was done in various spots around the U.S.

Posted on Thursday, November 10th, 2005 3:07 AM When I was going to college for journalism in the early 90s, the desktop publishing revolution was just reaching its peak, and the Internet was just coming into use, which meant there was a new opportunity to combine the two to create something that is rarely done, a new Daily Newspaper. This was done in various spots around the U.S. and I happened to work at one called The Conway Daily Sun during the summers so this is how I know. These were free tabloid-sized dailies for small communities which featured a few reporters writing up local news like school board meetings and the daily police log combined with lots and lots of AP news filler. The syndicated services like news and comics and photos weren't cheap I'm sure, and neither was running the huge printing presses, but these could easily be offset by insane "column-inches" charges for advertising and classifieds, the real money maker.
My boss at the time Mark - who with his partner had started the daily I was working at only a few years earlier on the backs of a couple Macs and an ISDN connection to AP - told me once while I was working there something like, "Starting a successful new businesss in the U.S. is something special. Most businesses don't survive. But to start a new newspaper? That's something really special." And he was right. (Though I ended up not pursuing a career in Journalism, I learned a lot from those guys I use every day.)
Skip forward a decade or so, and now we are in the midst of a new publishing boom - but this time squarely centered on the Web. The Desktop Publishing revolution has been replaced with the Personal Website Publishing revolution, and now individuals like myself can have a "circulation", i.e. daily readers, equal to that of the entire paper I used to work at. So why isn't my weblog worth what a daily newspaper with a similar circulation is worth then? Well, besides the fact that I'm just one guy writing in my spare time, I'm basically what a newspaper would call a "columnist" right? I write my opinions daily, and sometimes do a bit of research, but I'm hardly doing any of the hard work that many journalists do on a daily basis. The representative values of this blog vs. a real newspaper reflects this. There's a lot of drudgery in running a daily paper, but with that drudgery comes real value. You haven't lived until you've been on the local "sewers and refuse commitee beat" or something like that. It's not sexy, but it's valuable work nevertheless.
Anyways, it's thus no surprise to read about Newsvine's pending launch, which is supposedly going to combine AP news wire reports with specialists "citizen journalists" covering specific topics. Sounds neat - as Mike says in the post, "Newsvine is a news company, not a Web 2.0 company." I hope he really means it, actually, as there's a lot more to be done besides just a blog-news mashup. I don't know what they're doing exactly, but the "community news source" is a proven business model and an uptapped need in the current web. There's lots and lots of towns, neighborhoods and cities out there that have a need for someone to keep track of the local school boards, and high-school sports scores and all that stuff, and write up daily reports. Forget all this "social news" crap where lazy people read a bunch of news sources, add a bit of uninteresting, usually uniformed opinion or analysis and throw it out there as a story. There's a real need for professional journalism, but published with a blog-like versatility, accessibility and accountability. We don't need more columnists - we need more journalists, willilng to get their hands dirty, keep their opinions to themselves as best as possible and help inform the rest of us of what's going on in the places we live.
If Mike and co. don't fill that need, I'm sure someone else will.

Nokia and SonyEricsson are going to work together

This isn't a link site - I don't want to just throw out a bunch of news that I've read tonight, but there is SOOOO much stuff coming out of 3GSM it's overwhelming. I can hardly blog and read at the same time. Anyways, here's the Symbian news that I thought were very interesting.
First, Nokia and SonyEricsson are going to work together to make it easier to develop applications for both Series60 and the UIQ (the P800 user interface). This is cool because there was a subtle divergence happening in the Symbian world between the two platforms (3650/7650 and P800). I'm not really sure what they can do to fix this since the UIs are very different as are the versions of the OS (6.1 vs 7.0) and other factors, but the fact is that the core of Symbian is the same. So if you're developing an app - the majority of your code should be portable.
This sudden announcement of amnesty points to an interesting article over at the Register about how Symbian is taking charge of their platform again. It looked for a while like Nokia was leading the way with all the Series60 licensees they've gathered. However, since the P800 is such a hit, Symbian has started realizing the potential for their UI and have announced UIQ version 2.1. Rafe has a great analysis of this over at All About Symbian:
During 2002 UIQ looked like it might fade away as Symbian concentrated on the OS rather than the UI (basically precipitated by Series 60, but also other factors). However at cannes Symbian appears to be playing up UIQ again, and it no has its own website (which is very nice). Furthermore an update has been announced taking UI to version 2.1 (you can see a nice history of the UI from its first 1.4 VGA implementation through to the current fat and thin UIQ on the new website).
The update to 2.1 'introduces new functionality and customization possibilities. It also includes, for the first time, an integrated telephony application'. Other updates inlcude support for MIDP version 2.0 and enhance graphics and sound for gaming. The customisation upgrade aminly sounds to be in form of themes (like the T68i?) - 'a series of background wallpapers, color schemes and sounds, which can be used for branding as well as personalization of the phone by the end-user'.
Looks like it all good stuff, and the fine tuning of an already excellent interface. When we'll see this new UIQ is unclear, but it isn't beyond reason to think that it could be seen in a future P800 firmware upgrade. Certainly it will be seen in BeneQ 3Q UIQ device.
It seems likely that there may be more UIQ devices in the pipeline, and this is an important step for Symbian as it gives it another area besides Series 60 and shows it can be a sucessful mutliple area company. Accusations thta it was becoming a Nokia puppet are certainly weakened by this announcement (along with all the other 3GSM news). Who knew UIQ devices might come from is very difficult to say although the Register suggests handspring (half jokingly perhaps) in this article about the announcement.
Whatever happens it seems UIQ has a bright future. I for one am very glad, because it seems to be this interface is the closest yet to smartphone / converged device perfection. So you can see that Symbian is starting to get its act in gear, realizing the potential of its own UI and getting its licensees to play nice. This is all good, but that's only one side of the story. The other side is Symbian's financial future. Samsung just bought a 5% stake, but as a profitable company Symbian has a lot more ground to cover:
Symbian Chases Distant Profits
Mobile phone operating system company Symbian has admitted that it could be years away from profitability, even with financial backing from the main mobile handset players.
At this week's 3GSM World Congress in Cannes, Symbian revealed that two million phones equipped with its operating system were shipped during 2002.
But when asked by vnunet.com when the the company expected to make a profit, the company's chief financial officer Thomas Chambers admitted that it would take the shipping of 18 million Symbian-powered handsets per year.
"We make about $5 (�3.10) from each unit licence and about 80 per cent of that is gross profit after costs," Thomas said.
"It may be unusual for a chief financial officer not to be able to tell you when his company will make a profit, but I cannot predict handset sales." Hmm. So Nokia is predicting 10 million Series 60 phones, yet Symbians CFO doesn't want to commit to being profitable at 18 million... weird.
Anyways, this is all interesting stuff. Trying to follow it all is crazy, but it looks like I'm starting at a good time. This is when it's all happening. It has to have been torture following Symbian up until now with such potential and so few products in the pipeline. Now there's announcements like crazy, more than half a dozen phones out there or coming soon, etc. I'm glad to come late to this party, now that all the actions started

HOURS reading news

Posted on Tuesday, June 24th, 2003 3:34 PM Last night I spent at least 6 or 7 HOURS reading news. I didn't even notice... but I realized that as soon as Ana got home around 7 p.m., I started opening up links in different Moz tabs and just kept on going. Exclusively reading news. At the end, when I had read just about everything that could possibly have been said in the past week about mobile technology, I was casting about for more - opening up random Slashdot threads, doing searches on Google news, refreshing my aggregator cache every 5 minutes or so, and more.
At like 2 a.m. it dawned on me how long I had been reading news. Hours. If it wasn't for pure exhaustion, I'd have kept on going. This isn't the first time I've done this. Being obsessed with (but not actually doing much about) productivity, this of course lowered the boom of guilt on top of my head. I live by guilt. My life is one long string of happenings where I'm doing one thing when I should be doing another.
What should I be doing? Well, lots. Blogging is one. I've got lots of things I haven't written about lately that I want to get out. Working on my "big project" which has stalled in the past couple weeks as I fought with my computer then swapped it out for a new one. Answering emails is another. And I've got a long To Do list filled with both Real World issues like getting our paperwork done for Ana's Visa and an even longer to-do list for virtual activities like getting regular backups set up for my web server.
Of course this morning, instead of getting right to it, I opened up another 10 or 15 tabs and started reading again. I didn't think I was the obsessive compulsive type of person, but I'm starting to wonder.
Are you a news junkie? I mean, literally where you are spending so much time going through your aggregator and browsing news that it negatively affects other things in your life? I'm like a fucking pigeon looking for that New News Buzz over and over again... I keep hammering on that red button over and over again hoping a seed pops out of the machine. I wonder what that sensory thing is that I'm trying to duplicate is? Is it learning? Am I addicted to learning? Is that a bad thing (Yes. Any time you use the word addicted it's a bad thing). Or is it the sheer novelness - I can't wait to discover something "new"?
I'm going to be going cold turkey in about 2 minutes (after I get through these last tabs... just one more hit). I know *enough* about what I'm working on for now. There is no reason to *learn* about more news today, tomorrow or next week. I can learn how to do what I'm doing better, but no more news, do you hear me? None.
Ooh. Erik's updated...

The problem is that the news media

Is there a weblog out there that's sort of an Engadget for "real" news? I'm talking about summaries of the days events as they happen, but without the crap of the mainstream media, which includes rehashing stories, celebrity crap, or general fluff.
is in the business of filling space, rather than actually generating actual new information. If you're a newspaper, the size of the day's paper depends not on the amount of news in the world, but about how many ads were sold for that day - or as the old joke goes, "All the news that fits" (a take-off of the New York Times motto). If you're a television station - either a local, national or 24 hour news, you have a certain amount of time to fill, and you fill that time up as best as possible, but not with the most important news, but the news that mixes the basics with entertainment, sports, weather, etc.
The result is a constant stream of non-news or re-hashed news which buries everything else. I thought of this this morning as Diego IMed me with the latest Bear Stearns news, and when I went to CNN.com to find out more the lead story was McCartney divorce. I had to scan for a couple of minutes before finding any news articles that actually summarized the news in a useful way.
I heard a great comment on NPR today from a listener who was complaining that the news media (including NPR) in general is making the sub-prime debacle worse by daily stories repeating the same news, but with a different "angle" or "spin". And it's true, but complaining about it is silly as that's what news media is paid to do - fill that space up. Every day.
But it's not necessarily a bad thing. Eventually that constant focus on topics or stories pay huge dividends, right? Watergate would never have broken if there wasn't an editor sending a reporter down to the DC court house every day to cover the normal crap that happens at a court house every day. So unlike that guy complaining to NPR, I don't want to change that system, because that's how it works. But the problem is that unlike in 1971, we now have *access* to all that stuff... that daily churn of news over and over again is impossible to consume.
And what's worse, real news is now mixed in thoroughly with complete garbage.
All of media eventually devolves to the most generic fare possible. Look at the gradual decrease in quality of dedicated cable channels in the U.S. - The History channel used to have actual history, now it has crime shows. Bravo used to be dedicated to the fine arts, now it's all poker and reality TV. The Biography channel used to have shows about presidents and scientists, now it's just all celebrities. The Discovery Channel should be renamed The Disaster Channel, as all it seems to show lately is ways in which the Earth will be destroyed - meteors, environment, wars, plagues, etc. And the Science Channel is good for science, only as long as they're blowing shit up.
This goes for news as well. We all know how bad the 24 hour news channels have become, but no matter how focused even the New York Times is on news, they're going to spend just as much time on fluff topics because their readership has a bell curve just like everything else in life. George Carlin says something like: "Think about how dumb the average guy is, and then think about the fact that half the people are dumber than that." And if these media companies are to stay in business, they need to cater to the average guy, it's just the way it is.
So, to my main point... There's now blogs for everything - TMZ covers all the horrid, voyeuristic shit you could possibly want, Engadget covers all the gadgets, The Huffington Post has all the Op/Ed you'd need for a lifetime, ESPN has sports covered and then some. What about the actual *news*? Is there a site just dedicated to that? You can't subscribe to Yahoo! News, because it has just as many stories about Britney as it does Bush. In fact you can't subscribe to any MSM news source really - or worse AP or Reuters - because they'll spew the same shit at you daily, eight different ways to Sunday.
What's really needed is a focused blog by someone who really gets the idea that the same information given slightly differently every day is not "news", and unless Heather Mills develops the cure for at least one form of cancer, that we never - ever - want to see her name again.
Anything like that out there?