Cafe Bucky

Worth pointing at: Caterina’s post on “It’s a bad time to start a company”. I can’t say I completely agree. Doesn’t mean I’m going to start one - I’m happy where I am on that score. It’s a good time for some to start a company that does something Original. It’s a terrible time to do anything “me too”. It’s a good time to keep developing skills, and to keep branching out. Think this will last forever? Silly Rabbit. Stay relevant, or there will be no carrots for you. Pay frikken attention :-)

The most tenuous of segues is this: It’s a great time to find some balance. I’ve decided to start living in SF part-time. More life, less commute. Eventually I’ll be back in NYC for a while. For a year or so, the West Coast version will be a great rhythm to get into.

Coming up on March 28th is my 3 year anniversary of writing this blog. I raise a Guinness in the direction of those who developed WordPress.

I’d love to cull some favorite posts, and do an Alcapulco Cliff Dive into the comforting warm waters of the Nostalgia Sea. But that’s not on the menu. Ok, I’ll think of one: “Revenge of the Overhead Bin”

Course adjustment. Taking a fork in the road. Blog stops for a bit. Work is great. Creating photos and music is great. Health is great. I just want to take a little break from writing here. cheers.

Yes, it’s a real place. Not something out of a Charlton Heston movie. Actually, it’s what you see on New Year’s morning after drinking too much at the Hyatt Regency party.

So, quick story. Walking through downtown. Argentinian looks at me and says “it’s about the people man! Not the architecture!”. I know he’s Argentinian because he says “wait a sec”, dips into his car, and whips out an Argentinian hat. Damn insists that I snap his photo. So I do. It’s not worth posting, so you’ll have to just nod along. So, anyfrikkenway, I generally don’t do the urban stroller photography thing - I give them the privacy. Oh, wait.. wait. No, I lied there. Here’s one of a Harmonica Guy:

One of the more extreme examples from yesterday … Name that place in SF.

“At The Center Of It All” - Union Square, March 2006

I coerced myself into getting to the City today to do some photos, as in the Urban Zoom Blur thing. It’s been a while. This one lept out at me. The zoom leads to what’s really important in life (no, not tequila), so that hit me the right way. I’ll have others on Flickr or FlexiPhoto as soon as I go through them.

It’s days after ETech, and I really should write a summary. On the other hand, Snapper helped my mixology skills by showing me the infamous White Russian. Ah .. Kahlua.

So much for my participation in the Attention Economy.

I’ll comment on San Diego though. It was an interesting trip that threatened to be fun. The day I got there, I decided I better get my laptop a charging. Little wisps of smoke issued from the skimpy wire off of the power supply.

Not good. Oh, this won’t do. Fuck. I only brought one. I have, like, access to 3 or 4 power supplies at home. Hmm, 3 days of conference ahead, and no way to charge. Double frick frack fuck.

But I’m an explorer, and have some twisted sense of accomplishment in being able to look at a trolley route map in a strange city and Just Get There. (I am guessing that one day, Tokyo will make me shut up on this one). For reasons best known to Apple, the nearest Apple store to downtown SD is nowhere near downtown SD. This would involve a transfer.

So anyway, I get to some place called Fashion Valley, aka Lack Of Character Forgettable SoCal Mall. I can poke fun at it, because I grew up in SoCal amongst all sorts of Interchangeable Retail. It took me about 150 seconds to walk in the Apple Store, get the power adapter, pay, and get out. I actually had more fun checking out the crowd on the Light Rail than I did in the mall.

On the way back, the thought occurred to me that I could just keep riding all the way to Tijuana. The next thought took the first thought out to parking lot and shook some sense into it. I was frikken alone, and it was getting dark, and nobody knew my location. I think I’d head to Vancouver B.C. at the drop of the hat to go have dinner. Tijuana’s a bit different.

So SD is not really a walking city. It’s scaled for cars. I stayed across from the Cruise Ship Terminal. I enjoyed watching them pull out with their horns at full song. It was a mile or so to the hotel where the conference took place, so I got into the pattern of walking along the waterfront … again and again and again. That was a good thing though, as I dropped some weight in the process. The thing I noticed about Downtown is that there is a familiar laid back SoCal vibe, but there’s also an Undercurrent of “keep alert” that I felt. Although I did walk around a bit at night, I’d have to say that I felt a little less wary in Manhattan than SD. It could be because there are so few peds. The buildings are ok. The architecture of the Santa Fe rail depot is really cool. The fact that the USS Midway was berthed along my walk was inspiring. Big, Intimidating Aircraft Carrier, that. I did a double take when I noticed a MiG up on the flight deck!

My impression of San Diego is that I should go back sometime when I have a reason, but it doesn’t seem like a destination for its own sake. It’s no San Francisco, or Portland, or Seattle. On the other hand, the next time I’m there, I’ll take a car and explore. It’s the only major California city that I don’t know.

Off to San Diego tomorrow. Off on a plane. Up, up, and away. Here’s a bit of musing, as I struggle to explain the “Widening Web Gap” from another angle …

I’m stoked to be going to Emerging Tech once again. It turns out that I hadn’t been to one since 2003, but had made it to OSCon for 2003 and 2005. The years blur.

Every O’Reilly confab turns into a Drinking From A Firehose week. There’s so much to take in. OSCon tends to be programming focused. ETech is more about how people interact with sites and each other over the net. Both are about building.

If someone were to ask me what my focus will be over the next week, one possible answer would be “I’m wondering about all of the people in the middle.”

What do I mean by that? I mean the huge group of net users that are in the Long Tail, but not near the end. I don’t mean the Alpha Geeks and Web 2.0 pioneers with accounts spread over 25 sites, and I don’t mean the luddites on dialup who grudgingly learn basic email so that they can stay in touch with their family. There’s a huge group in the middle: somewhat net-savvy, somewhat interested in what’s going on online, and completely frikken overwhelmed with the Krakatoa Explosion of Choice.

Who could expect the middle group to make sense of some of the sessions next week? Sessions with titles such as:

• “The Internet of Things”
• “Applications for the New Attention Economy”
• “Hunch Engine”
• “Building a Participation Platform: Yahoo! Web Services Past, Present, and Future”
• “Ambient Findability”
• “The State of the Mashup: An Interactive Dialog About Advances in Free Mapping APIs”
• “Shut Up! No, *You* Shut Up: A Pattern Language for Moderation Strategies”
• “Feeds as a Platform: More Data, Less Work”
• “Everybody’s It: Tagging with Identity”
• “An Open Microformat for Syndicating Mashups, Web Content and Ajax Applications”

Sure, the conference-goers get most of these, but Mabel J. Clickstream out there will glaze over in nanosecond. (and I left out some of the tough ones) The Middle Group is primed for revolt! They’re going to get burnt out on the Web 2.0 stuff. Burnt, as in Toasted Attention Span.

So that’s some set up. I’ve been circling around an idea that’s been spread out over a few posts, and I’m still not sure how to express it. Of course, that won’t stop me from adding a nugget whenever I think of one … so here it is:

• Conferences such as Emerging Tech, or SXSW the week after, are firsthand, real-world gatherings where we lose ourselves for a week in an alternate net.reality that’s way out on the leading edge.
• The trick is to figure out how to channel some of the energy and ideas back into the real net.reality, as seen by users, customers, and so on.
• On an interface level, the job is getting easier. In between AJAX and Flash, a lot of the old browser constraints are vanishing. Web sites feel more like desktop apps. The looming roadblock is going to be bandwidth (wait till Web 3D gets started … )
• On a conceptual level, the job is getting harder. There’s too much to pay attention to. Here’s an example: bookmarks. It used to be that it would be nice to store personal bookmarks on a web site somewhere. Can I get to them? Yes? Good. Done. Now we’re tagging and searching them. Now we’re overlapping them with those of our friends. Now we’re seeing them come in through RSS feeds. Now we have 20 different Social Bookmarking Sites (yo! you guys can stop now! we get it already!). Which one do I join? Will my bookmarks be available to some other personal portal that I want to join? Will the site that’s storing my bookmarks be around tomorrow? See what I mean? What used to be simple, static bookmarking has now evolved into a living, breathing, time-sucking monster.

So like I said, conferences are DemoVille, and make us think about what’s down the road. An interesting notion is that many users are happy to park on the side, and they’re not into any more traveling (and that’s fine, for the moment, as the web works on many levels). They think a mashup is something you order in a Southern Restaurant. I think one of the real challenges over the next year will be to do web sites with varying levels of complexity. Think of a Personal Portal as an example:

• Grumpy Old Man Mode (get those dang heewhaw flashy things off of my screen, and just let me see a picture of my granddaughter and some sports scores … yeah, I know my zip code, what’s it to ya?)
• Hip Mode (If I can do it in 3-5 minutes, I’ll arrange a few extra things on my personal portal - but give me an easy list to choose from)
• Cuisinart Mode (Give me all of the data feeds I want, and I’ll arrange them myself, and come up with some personal skins … and give me an API or some GUI thing so that I can make up my own new widgets)

More over the next week!