a blog by Ian Kennedy
The internet is a wonderful catalyst for busting apart black boxes that mediate experience, knowledge, or commerce. My co-worker Sippey, points to Zopa, a UK exchange network which hooks up lenders to borrowers and, because there’s no middleman, takes only 1% as a fee. Their approach is fresh and they’ve got a few ideas on how to spread the risk of the lenders that fund the network.
My Japanese grandfather passed away last night. Oji-chan was of the generation that lived through the war and helped rebuild Japan. No matter how tough things got, this generation always managed to dig a little deeper and work a little harder. Employed by a concrete factory as an onsite mechanic, he was great with his hands and could fashion just about anything. A graceful metal swan scupture broke at my parent’s house and he fixed it with a big ol’ blob of solder. It wasn’t pretty but he fixed it. He loved his work and was called out of retirement three times because he was the only one that could figure out how to fix some of their aging machines.
My grandfather also taught me to put personal pain into perspective. I remember one time when one of my relatives, a cousin I think, fell down the steep wooden stairs at my grandparent’s house in Yokohama. My cousin was six or seven at the time so he was wailing in pain would but also in a way to garner some sympathy. Oji-chan started laughing at him because, well, it was kind of funny, and no one was really hurt, and, well, you need to laugh at yourself sometimes. At first I thought it was cruel of him to laugh at someone’s misfortune but then I realized he was trying to teach my cousin a lesson.
He would laugh at many things. Especially when telling stories of extreme hardship. The time the Imperial Army sent him into basic training towards the end of the war when they started conscripting the kids. They were out of all but the largest-sized boots and they sent him out on exercises in these huge boots and gave him a pointed bamboo stick for his weapon. He laughed at how ridiculous it was.
And then there was the time he went to play pachinko and, because it was so loud, he stuck pachinko balls in each ear to block out the racket. The pea-sized metal balls fit perfectly and completely blocked out all sound. He later discovered that he couldn’t pluck them out and had to come home to my grandmother, who is nearly deaf, and try and explain what happened and what he needed her to do. The image of the two of them yelling at each other and neither of them able to hear what the other one was saying still makes me smile.
He was old school. Didn’t say much, just surveyed the situation as the household fluttered around him. Didn’t want to cause any fuss, all things work themselves out eventually. When he did weigh in, he would cut to the chase and quickly put things in their place, no questions, no debate. He was alert up to the end and passed away while taking a bath – he would have wanted it that way.
I hope he’s smiling down at us. I am smiling up at him.
Wow. This news took me totally by surprise. Groove is peer-to-peer collaboration software developed by the creator of Lotus Notes. What does this mean for the future of Microsoft Sharepoint?
“Peer-to-peer collaboration solutions through Groove’s Virtual Office, which let any Windows-based PC user instantly create. ad-hoc, virtual work spaces that securely and easily span organizational, geographic and network boundaries, and allow information workers to be productive whether they’re online or temporarily disconnected from the network.”
This doesn’t sound like the Microsoft I know. Cool!
It was only a matter of time. Ken McCloskey over at Pixelabra has developed a plug-in to allow you to search Yahoo! using their new API from within Movable Type.
A common objection to blogs is that because the medium is so easy to update and the cost so low, too much unedited drivel makes it online to make the material useful as a source of business information. I have to say I don’t mind people speaking their mind in an unedited stream. I describe it as viewing the raw feed from a network news show, the satellite uplink where you get to see the anchorman get his nose powdered during the commercial break.
To me, the rough edges, where you see the process behind the production is an important part of the context. To those that view these edges as irrelevant and something that should be edited out of sight, I say that any skillfully-crafted search statement should be able to cut right by these distractions.
The internet is messy. It’s not about finished pieces – it’s about works in progress. When Usenet was my the source of information, my kill file was my friend, it helped me filter out irrelevance. Navigating through a site map or other navigational aid is becoming a paradigm of the past. Now it’s all about using search engines used as scalpels to get right to the point. This is why search engine marketing has become such a hot business.
I read magazines, I browse newspapers. I search the internet, I scan the results. I really don’t browse the internet anymore. If there’s a lengthy piece I want to read, I print it.
Which leads me to my last point. I saw the piece about blogging on ABC Nightline last night and the one good point they made is that as links are propagated to the second and third degree, they drift further from the original point and the linking process twists original context much like a phrase gets misinterpreted in a game of telephone.
How do we keep necessary context while also allowing people to drill down past it?
The folks at SFist write about their dinner with Yahoo where they get an insight into some of the economic shifts that are a result of the changes in the media landscape.
Greg pointed out that in the past, papers could depend on classified ads accounting for up to 35% of their revenue. Now they’re lucky if it represents 15%. And Susan’s friend Bob, who was nice enough to give us a ride back up 101, noted that 93% of businesses in San Francisco have fifty or fewer employees, and that as print publications increase their ad rates to account for revenue shortfalls, small, local businesses are being shut out of much needed publicity, which opens the door for chains and franchises who can subsidize the increased media costs.
A sign of the times perhaps. Nando Times, one of the first online media organizations is being re-branded by it’s parent as McClatchy interactive. Nando, launched in 1994, was shorthand for The News & Observer and was, in the early days, the first place to go for quality news online.
I’m pleased to announce another Movable Type Hosting Partner. 2MHost offers an Movable Type integrated into an MT-Ready hosting package. A full list of all Movable Type Hosting Partners can be found on the Six Apart website.
Bud Gibson, who teaches at the University of Michigan’s Ross School of Business, writes about using TypePad in the classroom. On the three reasons why blogging is not just another technology in the classroom fad Bud writes,
By design, blogging allows individuals
to raise topics of interest and create threads of conversation without
having to ask anyone’s permission. That was an explicit design
consideration for this course; I wanted to know what was going on with
students. Bulletin boards tend to be top-down and are owned by one
person. Wikis force you to go through a social filter. Others can edit
your pages or even delete them.Second, because blogging also produces XML-based feeds, it is very
easy to aggregate all of the individual contributions in one place
while still maintaining individual attribution.Third, the XML-based feeds in blogs allow me to join people and
resources to my group vs. having to get them to join me. Note, I did
ask permission of everyone whose feed I aggregated into our site, but
they did not have to go through a sign-on process and explicitly
produce content for the site. By localizing content creation, blogs
make it possible to ask permission and get a coherent stream of content.