Cafe Bucky

I am staying offline tomorrow, Saturday August 30th.

Why?

To switch gears a bit. Think of the last 20 years, and all of the change that has snuck up on us:

• cell phones
• blogs / facebook / myspace / linked in
• web
• twitter
• IMs
• email

It’s amazing when you think back to the 80’s.  In terms of communication, and the sense of being ‘always on’, they seem almost tranquil by compare…  It will be good to stop for a moment and reflect a bit.

So I will do my best to play hooky from the online world tomorrow.  One of the best parts is that I wont be checking online to see if anyone joins me.  It is a switch off day.  I’ll apologize on Sunday :)

I want to write about the speed of running Second Life on my PowerBook, but I’m also thinking I should be writing a review of the Red Hot Chili Peppers “Stadium Arcadium”. Short one: Good Double Album, better if they had clipped it down to One.

Segue: my computer needs a Red Hot Chili Pepper. Anything to speed it up. It’s not gonna happen though. It’s an old G4 with 1gb RAM. And SL just frikken kills it :-) It’s ok if I crank down the detail … I included a snap of my avatar. Yeah, it’s dorky. I figure it’ll evolve. I’m digging SL though - it’s giving me a bit of the “new” rush I felt when I started using the Web in ‘93.

So, to take the steps from the web world to the more immersive stuff, I’m going to cast my net for cheap fast hardware. I think this is going to mean a Mac Mini …

My vivacious new friend M (hey!) was IM’ing to me this week about second life. She meant the general idea of being online, being in chatting mode, and feeling detached from the real world. Face to Face as First Life, online as Second. I had asked her if she had heard of “Second Life”, as in Second Life from Linden Labs

I’ve wrapped up with Friendster, and am about to start a contract doing stuff with Second Life. In other words, my First Life (at least, the work bit) is changing, and I’ll be surrounded by Second Life, the work, and Second Life, the virtual world. Got that?

I’m looking forward to it. Check out the BusinessWeek cover story “My Virtual Life” which gives a good sense of what it’s like to wander in off the web, and into a much more immersive environment. The whole idea of how we ping pong between modes is changing quickly. At this point, many are happy to get the web on their mobile phone, but because of the way that feels, it’s not really convincing “being somewhere else” stuff. What happens in, say, five years when you get realtime photorealistic rendering on an ultra portable wireless device (less than a pound, 8″ screen, insert favorite specs here)? (btw, I am expressing a desire, and don’t know of anyone that’s doing anything that advanced) In other words, will First and Second lives start to blur a bit? Maybe they already have.

It’s going to be fun.

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!

Ah, how remiss of me to go so long without posting …

Early rising commute bus work get home at dark blur.

My other excuse is the Olympics.

The post that’s been percolating in the noggin for a while is about the Widening Web Gap. It’s not quite brewed, but the gist of it is:

• When I started looking at the web around 1993, it was a very simple place. We didn’t even have frames or tables, and AJAX was merely a cleanser. The gap between the simplest web page and the most complex wasn’t that wide. User expectations were low. We were all just flat out fascinated to see pages from far flung places.
• The types of sites, and those using them, has absolutely exploded, and will continue to do so.
• The gap between those who barely use and understand the net, and those who are pushing the boundaries every day, is widening by the second. The 20th Century Web crowd are happy with bare minimum functionality — they’ll be damned if they have to learn a new concept, such as making use of an RSS feed, or rearranging options on a default start page. The Fast Forward Button crowd can never get enough. Pity the designers in between who try to appeal to both.
• I think we’ll see an increasingly tiered web. Some sites will consciously punt on the entry level users. Some will keep things so stripped down and basic that they’ll make AOL look like rocket science. Some will try to appeal to everyone and have the toughest job of all.
• I’ll be paying special attention to ETech next week, and am hoping to get the time to lay this out in a coherent way. There’s a lot of experimentation going on out there (check out any 10 sites from Kottke’s “The secret to Web 2.0″ post.) I am thinking we’ll hit a sort of saturation point soon, and that the next major bit will be “Web 3D”. More to come on all of this …

Sure is cold. Wish we’d have a freak snowstorm. I just want to know ahead of time, so I can get out of the way of the falling freaks.

I remember exactly where I was 25 years ago, when I heard that Lennon had been shot. I was in a college bookstore with my friend Stephanie. We didn’t want to believe the radio.

Since then, I’ve been up and down 72nd street plenty of times, and stopped in Strawberrry Fields from time to time to think for a moment. There’s a great cafe (La Fortuna) on 71st that John & Yoko used to go. It’s still there.

I miss John, and wonder what he’d have to say about the political idiocy swirling about these days. I think I saw him once in the 70’s, when he was in his L.A. period. It was in the Tower Records on Sunset Boulevard. Sure looked like him.

There are tons of Beatles/John songs that I could say are my fave, depending on the day and mood. I’ll leave off thinking about the lyrics to “In My Life”. [I had posted them earlier, but I am not real clear on what constitutes "fair use", so I'm going to remove them for the time being]