everwas

a blog by Ian Kennedy

Month: June 2005

  • Les Claypool

    On a whim, I went to see Les Claypool last night. His bass playing style is a hard-hitting funk that I haven’t seen since I saw Keziah Jones several years back in Tokyo. His finger-slapping style throws out over the crowd like thick waves of jello – as soon as he starts playing, the whole room can’t help but start jumping.

    I’ve never seen him play live before so I asked the others there what to expect. Everyone shrugged their shoulders, he likes to mix it up so much you never know what he’ll bring out.

    Les took the stage with a sitar player named Gabby La La who wore a bright blue wig with ponytails and looked like an off-duty Japanese Anime character. The percussionist, Mike Dillon, was also amazing. Most of the time he played vibraphone but several times in the show his enthusiasm for the timbales got the best of him and he hauled his set out from the corner over to center stage and laid down a groove with the drummer that near blew the roof off the concert hall. During the entire 2 1/2 hour set he wore a rubber devil’s mask which only added to the pitch of his fever.

    All 450 tickets to this Sunday night show at The Independent (the old Kennel Club) were sold out. I was lucky to get a spot right up front. I felt sorry for the bouncer who, good natured as he was, had to have his back to all the weirdness up on stage the whole night. At one point the sounds were so strange that curiosity got the best of him. You could see the question marks come out of his head when he looked up to see Les, donning a full-headed monkey mask, hunched over a one-stringed homemade base, banging on it with the back of a bow and bending the pitch with a springed lever. It just kept getting stranger.

  • A Drinking Club with a Sailing Problem

    Today Mie & Dav came over to Alameda with their bikes and we rode to several yacht clubs on the Island that opened their doors to visitors interested in becoming members. It was kind of like a pub crawl because each clubhouse has a bar and they all had food laid out for potential members. I had another meeting so joined them after they had already visited the posh Encinal Yacht Club and Oakland Yacht Club.

    We met in front of the Alameda Yacht Club and immediately fell in love with it. The atmosphere was real casual and the people real friendly. Dav called it the, “working man’s yacht club” and the bartender (who we all think was sampling the inventory) went on about how they have lots of parties at this club and also give me the line that’s the title of this post. Membership is reasonable and they have an active group that goes out regularly and are always looking for extra crew. If I were to join a sailing club, this would be it.

    We then went over the the Aeolian Yacht Club which I’ve been riding by each morning on my way to the ferry each morning. AYC was founded in 1905 and is the oldest club on the Island. There’s a functional clubhouse and they have a drydock and fully outfitted workshop for its members. The walls are lined with wonderful old black and white photos of old boats on that used to sail on the bay. I spotted one photo of a beautiful old catboat under full sail with the half-completed Bay Bridge in the background. Every Thursday evening, club members gather at 6:30 to row a large whaling dingy out into the bay to drink wine to the setting sun and sing sea shanties.

    As Dav says, it’s good fun getting to know a new subculture.

    Thanks again to Mie for the photo of the Alameda Marina. I miss my DSC-T1!

  • Morgan Aero 8

    Morgan Aero 8

    My father used to go on and on about how a Morgan would be the perfect car for me. Because of their over-sized, smog-producing, hand built British engines, the old Morgan’s from the 50’s were eventually banned from the US and I never saw one. Morgan, one of Britain’s oldest independent sports car maker has now updated itself and is going to begin selling it’s new Morgan Aero 8 in the US this year. The look has been updated but it’s classic styling remains. I think I understand what my father was getting at. Now if I only had $100k to spend on a car. . .

  • Email is broken (part II)

    Further expanding on a point raised last year, today I received an email the had the following disclaimer in the .sig.

    Note: Because of the high volume of spam we receive, legitimate e-mail is sometimes mistakenly filtered. If you send a message and don’t receive a reply, please try the telephone.

    The IT press has been writing about the problems with email for some time now but this notice really brought it home to me. What this is saying is that if you can’t reach this person or do not receive a response, hail me on a technology that was invented 100 years ago.

    This gives me a chance to segue into some email anecdotes that we’ve been using around the office just to illustrate the current frustrations with email as a business communications tool.

    1. Anyone under 30 has only known broken email. Most of the folks hitting the workplace these days have grown up using IM, Skype, and blogs to communicate. Email is viewed as an outmoded technology to get receipts from Amazon and stuff.

    2. 10 – 20% of your email volume may be better suited for a blog. For those of you that think you’ll never have enough time to blog, take a look at your Sent Messages box someday and count the number of messages you send in a day. I guarantee that a good percentage of them would have been better suited for either an intranet company blog or external work or personal blog. Responses to your posts will be there for others to see and learn from and the posts will be indexed and archived for quick future reference. Anytime you write an email where you wouldn’t mind adding “cc: the world” – then you should be thinking about a blog post.

    3. If you address and email to ten people. . . there are 2 that got it that didn’t want it, 2 more that got it, threw it away, than later regretted it, and 2 more that didn’t get it but wished they did. This is Anil’s favorite anecdote and I use it quite often. The mere act of addressing an email asks you to define a circle of trust (to borrow a phrase from Robert DeNiro’s character the movie, Meet the Focker’s). This sets up barriers to communication and we all know it’s uncool to cc:all on something. Email is great for the point-to-point exchange of information but it really breaks down when used for group collaboration.

  • Father of Web 2.0 planning on move to SF. Bringing wife and kids too.

    Richard MacManus, widely hailed as the Father of Web 2.0 is pulling up stakes in New Zealand and coming to San Francisco. First to attend the conference named after him (wink to John Battelle), then to look for work that will allow him to live here year ’round and participate firsthand in all this wonderful Web as a platform discussion that, to a large extent, seems to be bubbling up on a regular basis in the San Francisco area. Just goes to show you that despite the promise of the internet to enable tribes to gather regardless of space & time, nothing beats the quality and throughput of a face-to-face interaction.

    Richard is tired at looking at things from a distance and is jumping in with both feet (just as I did, almost a year ago). His inspiration was Steve Job’s recent commencement speech at Stanford.

  • Yahoo hoovers the dark web

    Big news. Yahoo has quietly launched a beta service which allows you to use the Yahoo engine to search content that normally sits disaggregated behind proprietary subscription walls. Some of you may recall the old Northern Light service which attempted to do the same but never was able to convince the larger aggregators to play. KeepMedia tried the same model and hoped to use the clout of the Borders Books brand to bring the magazine publishers directly to the table but has since faded from view. When I last talked to representatives from KeepMedia, they were more interested in the potential of their service as a place to sell targeted ad inventory.

    This time it seems that the attractiveness of Yahoo’s collective query traffic was just too good to resist and they currently offer a unified search box for the FT, WSJ Online, Forrester, and more. Yahoo Search Blog says that the big aggregators Factiva, Gale, and Lexis-Nexis are on the way in the coming weeks as well. The Factiva and Gale collections have been open to non-subscriber queries for some time now via the Microsoft Office 2003 Marketplace but because it was hidden away in a little Research Pane off of Office 2003, it never had a chance to test the Free Search > Become a Subscriber to Read the Article, model at scale. Yahoo will now test that model in spades.

    Don’t misunderstand me. Yahoo Subscriptions will never replace the power and benefit of the specialized search interfaces that aggregators such as Factiva have built for their core customers. But Yahoo will introduce a whole new class of customers to the value of searchable, archived publications that have, to date, been mostly limited to the Information Professional.

    Gary Price brings up a good point and asks what will happen when a unified search of premium content and free web content presents the stark economic contrast of the $2.95/article vs. free on the web side by side in the same search results. Look for intense downward pressure between all three main aggregators as they fight to offer the most compelling package to attract these new subscribers. The New York Times already fired the first shot with their TimesSelect plan. The one vendor that can offer both the NY Times and WSJ as well as the rest of their collection for the best price will lock in the lion’s share of the revenue from the Yahoo channel. This price war will be great for the consumer but rip shreds from the margins of the aggregators as they try and come up with the most attractive pricing.

    You can be sure that Google will follow in Yahoo’s footsteps soon enough (while huming "anything you can do, I can do better") and maybe even MSN and Ask will play the game once the model has been established. All this activity is going to expose the aggregators to the full force of the wild and fickle world of internet consumer business models in which they have little experience.

    Right now it’s a dead heat between Factiva, LexisNexis, or Gale to win the race to be the primary benefactor of Yahoo’s consumer search engine traffic. My guess is that the winner will be the vendor that can offer the most comprehensive collection of content (unfortunately, meta-data is irrelevant for the keyword searches coming from the typical Yahoo searcher) with a subscription model that is both economically attractive and easy to purchase.

    Some things that will quickly put one of these vendors in the lead are:

    – integration with all major credit cards and PayPal. Bonus if you can tap into Yahoo’s Small Business billing system.
    – persistent URLs that allow bloggers to point to specific articles deep within the database. 
    – a sense of community. Build in screens to entice subscribers login and see things such as the most popular (linked and viewed) articles and other exclusive features.
    – strong relationships with content providers that allow flexibility with pricing. It will take some time to settle on a model that works for the consumer and is sustainable for both the aggregator and publisher.

    The race is on. May the vendor with the longest tail win!

    Additional commentary by:
    John Battelle
    Paid Content
    Steve Goldstein, CEO of Alacra
    John Blossom

  • Zuppa, good for the soul

    Zuppa (564 4th St, San Francisco, 415.777.5900), an Italian restaurant around the corner from the Six Apart office, opened its doors today. Ginevra has been following their progress closely as they transformed the grey, bunker-like structure into an airy SOMA enoteca. After chatting up the head chef (which she confessed that she had thought was the general contractor), she scored invites for the Six Aparters to come to their opening to sample their food. We were the first in the door and were encouraged to try all their dishes so we could give the kitchen a dry run.

    Wine was poured liberally and we availed ourselves of their menu which ran from smoked hams and salami to olives and mozerella. Everyone enjoyed the mussels in wild garlic, Jason’s wild beans & homemade pasta looked wonderful and I enjoyed a hearty meal of roast pork and beets.

    But the nicest thing about the evening was the time to chat away from the office with all my work mates. It was great to catch up on what everyone is up to and sit around a big long table like one big happy family. We really don’t do that enough and as the office gets bigger, it gets harder and harder to organize such gatherings. Thank you Ginevra for organizing and thank you Zuppa for hosting us and stuffing our bellies with such delicious food!

    Thanks to sis for the picture above. More photos of the evening over at Kokochi.

  • Class of ’84 Update

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    Dear Middlesex Class of 1984,

    It’s that time of year again – the lazy days of Summer are upon us. What better time than to take stock of your lives and share your accomplishments with your classmates.

    Comments are due back to Fundraising Headquarters by July 31st so if you can click on “Comments” below and leave your piece by July 15th, I’d be most grateful. Looking forward to hearing from all of you!

  • Skiddaddling Alarm Clock

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    Ever had one of those mornings where you hit the snooze bar one too many times and end up having to rush out the door with a bagel in your mouth because you’re late? Gauri Nanda, a researcher at the MIT Media Lab has a device that will solve that for you.

    When the alarm clock goes off and the snooze button is pressed, Clocky will roll off the bedside table and wheel away, bumping mindlessly into objects on the floor until it eventually finds a spot to rest. Minutes later, when the alarm sounds again, the sleeper must get up out of bed and search for Clocky. This ensures that the person is fully awake before turning it off. Small wheels that are concealed by Clocky’s shag enable it to move and reposition itself, and an internal processor helps it find a new hiding spot every day.

    Problem solved until you’re one of those people with a pistol in your bedside drawer.