Cafe Bucky

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]

I’ve always regarded Daylight Savings Time as an anachronism. Turns out that Benjamin Franklin is credited with coming up with it. I say that the man is entitled to have one stinker of an idea, but I wish we’d stop following it.

“Leave Time Alone!” says I. I don’t like all this mucking about with clocks.

It’s calendars I want to mess with, and the work week in particular. Yes, I want longer weekends, and you do too. We’re going to figure out how to rearrange the calendar … This is part April Foolishness, part thought experiment.

We get 52 weeks a year (364 days), where many of us work 5 days a week (260 work days). The seven day week is basically 5 on / 2 off. Let’s change it! Since many take off two weeks vacation, let’s call it 50 work weeks, times 5 days = 250 work days.

The one constant you can’t play around with is the length of the year. Our little thought experiment doesn’t involve changing the orbit aroud the sun. The 365/366 thing is the Law.

What if we had a 10 day week? 36 weeks per year (360 days), plus 5 or 6 days at the end that are a sort of “holiday week”. In the 10 day week, we’d work 6 days on, and have 4 off. This is great for getting a lot done on the 4 day “weekend”, but it only adds up to 216 work days. Ah, but bump it to 7 days on / 3 off, for 36 weeks, and you get 252 work days, and every “weekend” is 3 days. Hmmm.

The calendar people will love this. They’ve been trying to think of a way to increase sales for the last 500 years … this ought to do it … They get to come up with the names of two or three new weekdays, and this one detail gets tied up in “standards committees” for a good 15 years.

A variant is to think of a 9 day week. 40 weeks a year of 9 days gets you 360 (and then there’s the wild 5 or 6 day party at the end of each year, especially at the calendar companies, which suddenly seem to have unlimited budgets). What if we had 6 on / 3 off? Well, 6 * 40 gets us 240 work days. That’s pretty good, except some Scrooges out there will drag their staff back in during the 5 or 6 day “end of year” party, in order to get closer to the old-fashioned 250 day “ideal”.

The other thought in this is that there would be a lot of overlapping schedules (i.e. “my weekend is not always your weekend”). A plus in this is that traffic gets spread out a bit, and work facilities are used every day. A big minus is that everyone runs around consulting time scheduling programs, trying to figure out the ever-increasing “when is everybody free to get together?” problem. Those that put on weekend-oriented events are pissed off, because 60% of their usual attendees might be working on any given day.

On paper, the math all works out. In real life, I don’t see how society would cope – “7 days” is what we all know, right? It would work pretty well for a subset of jobs (and some do this now: more than 5 days on, more than 2 off). In any case, it all makes more sense to me than the Daylight Savings Time jazz!

Golden Gate Bridge pouring rain, dark night, 2 cramped lanes above, and half a million crustaceans & mollusks below, gnawing away at the International Orange Paint on the towers. Howling wind outside. Pixies “Debaser” playing inside. Just want to get home

Oh, wait, s’not a travelogue posting. I was coming back from a Wordpress get-together in the Mission District. Even though I was just there for an hour or so (weeknight, long drive), it tied together a number of threads that have been bouncing around in the noggin :

• It’s really cool that Matt Mullenweg and cohorts have come up with a great blogging package. It’s always fun and inspiring to meet one of the lead authors, and congratulate them in person. I’m glad I made the switch from MT. It reminds me to get my butt back to FlexiPhoto.. devote a few hours here and there, and feel like I am making progress.
• Why didn’t I go to SXSW??
• … or Etech?! .. I blogged this one in 2003. Missing the conference scene.
• I want to get together with someone to do something in GarageBand.
• Gotta get out and take more photos (I haven’t done Zoom Blurs of the GG Bridge, or indeed of San Francisco, yet I pass by it very often)

The gist is that I’ve been sort of a hermit lately in Petaluma (or hermetically sealed into a 2 block radius in the Mission, zipping my commute to and fro). Reached the point where it hit me all at once: make some new contacts, and get some creative output going. Time to wake up from a long winter’s nap :-)

I said “it’s not quite spring yet”, but then the house said “ya think you can put it off any longer?”, and I said “but I can still see the floor in some places…”. The house chuckled merrily, and slapped me upside the head with some random wainscotting.. “don’t argue with a 110 year old!”.

So while I am off filling my lungs with dust and shredded credit card invites, go see The 30 least hot things you can say to a naked woman.