Leave a comment on Penner Ash Willamette Pinot 2009
Penner Ash Willamette Pinot 2009
Month: May 2012
New Feeds For Searchblog
Pardon the site-specific interruption, but as part of my ongoing quest to keep my content here on my own site, I’ve begun posting pictures of stuff here that I’d otherwise put on Instagram, Twitter or other services. Given that many of you read Searchblog for my trenchant commentary as opposed to my preferences in pinots, I promised you that I’d create new RSS feeds. Well, here they are!
You’ve got a lot of choices – Everything (all photos and posts), Everything But Photos, Headlines Only, and Photos Only.
Read MoreGet to Know Ross Levinsohn
The remarkable news today that, among other important board moves, Ross Levinsohn will take over as interim CEO at Yahoo may well mark the end of an era – should his tenure stick, perhaps we can stop talking about the web pioneer in past or conditional tenses. If you’d like to get to know him a bit better, here’s an interview I did with him at Web 2 last Fall.
The Audacity of Diaspora
Last Friday Businessweek ran a story on Diaspora, a social platform built from what might be called Facebook anti-matter. It’s a great read that chronicles the project’s extraordinary highs and lows, from Pebble-like Kickstarter success to the loss of a founder to suicide. Given the overwhelming hype around Facebook’s IPO this week, it’s worth remembering such a thing exists – and even though it’s in private beta, Diaspora is one of the largest open source projects going right now, and boasts around 600,000 beta testers.
I’ve watched Diaspora from the sidelines, but anyone who reads this site regularly will know that I’m rooting for it. I was surprised – and pleased – to find out that Diaspora is executing something of a “pivot” – retaining its core philosophy of being a federated platform where “you own your own data” while at the same time adding new Tumblr and Pinterest-like content management features, as well as integration with – gasp! – Facebook. And this summer, the core team behind the service is joining Y Combinator in the Valley – a move that is sure to accelerate its service from private beta to public platform.
I like Diaspora because it’s audacious, it’s driven by passion, and it’s very, very hard to do. After all, who in their right mind would set as a goal taking on Facebook? That’s sort of like deciding to build a better search engine – very expensive, with a high likelihood of failure. But what’s really audacious is the vision that drives Diaspora – that everyone owns their own data, and everyone has the right to do with it what they want. The vision is supported by a federated technology platform – and once you federate, you lose central control as a business. Then, business models get very, very hard. So you’re not only competing against Facebook, you’re also competing against the reality of the marketplace – centralized domains are winning right now (as I pointed out here).
Read MoreOh, MacROSTIE!
A very happy Friday night with my wife, mother in law, and kids (and tomatoes, kale, wild rice, et al), made round by this MacRostie Pinot, 2007. Yippee, it’s the weekend!
Curtain Raiser: The CM Summit in NYC Next Week
As New York City gears up for its annual Internet Week, the team at FMP has been diligently working away on creating another stellar program for our 7th annual CM Summit, held this coming Monday and Tuesday in SoHo.
Last year we eliminated panels from our program, the move was met with great success – attendees love our fast-paced approach, which features short, high-value presentations from leaders in digital marketing and technology platforms, interspersed with conversations with CMOs from Fortune 500 brands and entrepreneurs driving change in digital.
Read MoreTwo More Wines of the Week
Larry Lessig on Facebook, Apple, and the Future of “Code”
Larry Lessig is an accomplished author, lawyer, and professor, and until recently, was one of the leading active public intellectuals in the Internet space. But as I wrote in my review of his last book (Is Our Republic Lost?), in the past few years Lessig has changed his focus from Internet law to reforming our federal government.
But that doesn’t mean Lessig has stopped thinking about our industry, as the dialog below will attest. Our conversation came about last month after I finished reading Code and Other Laws of Cyberspace, Version 2. The original book, written in 1999, is still considered an authoritative text on how the code of computing platforms interacts with our legal and social codes. In 2006, Lessig “crowdsourced” an update to his book, and released it as “Version 2.0.” I’d never read the updated work (and honestly didn’t remember the details of the first book), so finally, six years later, I dove in again.
It’s a worthy dive, but not an easy one. Lessig is a lawyer by nature, and his argument is laid out like proofs in a case. Narrative is sparse, and structure sometimes trumps writing style. But his essential point – that the Internet is not some open “wild west” destined to always be free of regulation, is soundly made. In fact, Lessig argues, the Internet is quite possibly the most regulable technology ever invented, and if we don’t realize that fact, and protect ourselves from it, we’re in for some serious pain down the road. And for Lessig, the government isn’t the only potential regulator. Instead, Lessig argues, commercial interests may become the most pervasive regulators on the Internet.
Read MoreJaron Lanier: Something Doesn’t Smell Right
Jaron Lanier’s You Are Not A Gadget has been on my reading list for nearly two years, and if nothing else comes of this damn book I’m trying to write, it’ll be satisfying to say that I’ve made my way through any number of important works that for one reason or another, I failed to read up till now.
I met Jaron in the Wired days (that’d be 20 years ago) but I don’t know him well – as with Sherry Turkle and many others, I encountered him through my role as an editor, then followed his career with interest as he veered from fame as a virtual reality pioneer into his current role as chief critic of all things “Web 2.0.” Given my role in that “movement” – I co-founded the Web 2 conferences with Tim O’Reilly in 2004 – it’d be safe to assume that I disagree with most of what Lanier has to say.
I don’t. Not entirely, anyway. In fact, I came away, as I did with Turkle’s work, feeling a strange kinship with Lanier. But more on that in a moment.
Read MoreChampionships, Milestones, and Alzheimers
As readers are realizing, I’m posting photos here first, then using this as the basis for exports to other services like Twitter or Pinterest. It will be a few days before I have a “non photos” RSS feed for you to follow, forgive the interruption with non-work related stuff. But, it was a big weekend.
It started with my daughter winning the county championships in the 1oom dash for the third year in a row. Wow!
