Category Archives: personal

Naked Conversations with Robert, Jeremy and Matt

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Robert Scoble and Shel Israel's book Naked Conversations probably should have kept it's working title "Blog or Die", but it's an excellent read nonetheless.   The point they hammer home with many good examples is that corporations better jump on the blogging bandwagon or suffer the consequences of missing what many would say may become the biggest communication bandwagon of all time.

As if to emphasize the power of blogs and the freewheeling nature of the new corporation two of my favorite online guys – Matt Cutts of Google and Jeremy Zawodny or Yahoo have traded blogs as what has got to be the top April Fools online event so far today.

Given that these two represent two of the top public faces of their respective companies, it's obvious that the NEW corporate landscape – blogging and otherwise – ain't nothing like the old one.  

I like that.

The Google Story

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I read two books up at the lake. David Vises "The Google Story" was an entertaining and informative history of Google from humble beginnings as Larry Page and Sergey Brin's Stanford PhD project to the earth shaking internet giant Google.com. I didn't feel I was getting any really "deep" information however. I kept feeling as I often do when talking to people at Google that they are simply too loyal and too enamored with Google to share insights that might reflect poorly on the company. I'm actually in the picture of Matt Cutts taken at SES San Jose last year. The very favorable tone seemed odd because Vise is a distinguished reporter. I'm wildly guessing that he (perhaps even subconsciously) sacrificed some critical observations in exchange for better access and candor about the basic story.

This "guarded" nature of comments about Google dovetails with points made in Scoble and Israel's "Naked Conversations", the second book I read up at Odell Lake which I'll review next.

Overall though I remain convinced that Google is

1) Special, especially with regard to the incredible intelligence, innovation, and involvement of the founders. The rapid ascent of Google may allow more of this "founders energy" to have a positive impact than where a company grew more slowly.

2) Sincere. This is a slippery slope but I think they remain fairly steady and non-compromising about doing great stuff for the right reasons.

3) Overpriced. I simply don't understand the stock price, which seems to assume Yahoo and MSN have no interests or abilities relating to grabbing a bigger share of the online advertising pie.

3 days in the wilderness…

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Well, not exactly wilderness.   Lake Odell Resort in Oregon is one of my very favorite places.   We rented a nice cabin and hung out for 3 days in the snowy forest land near Crater Lake National Park.  The kids (and parents a few times)  could sled right out the door of our cabin down a small hill, down the path between the cabins, past the lodge, and down to the lake's edge.    The dog had a ball except for his plunge into the icy lake, which freaked me out as much as Chico.  

No internet, phone, or TV for 72 hours.    I guess I could live without them for longer, but glad to be back in the zone. 

Yahoo! It’s .community!

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Jeremy is always asking the right questions.  He notes in his blog today:

Yahoo Groups can serve as the collaborative (not just communications) platform for bringing people together in interesting ways…

Yes it can, though it needs to take some lessons from Myspace, which I'd argue is by far the world's BEST crappy-looking website and BEST example of a site that understands the simple and often unexpected needs and desires of a .com community.   The remarkable rise of Myspace should demonstrate that people are FAR more important than the application.  Also that MOST people will express themselves in what most savvy web folks would consider to be very unprofessional, sloppy, offensive, obnoxious, rule breaking and bandwidth breaking ways.  

Yahoo wouldn't have to have such a messy environment to succeed, I'd think all they'd need is better integration with the inspired but largely unused Yahoo 360, easier signups, and perhaps most importantly ways for people to import data into their profiles at other services to avoid the tedious chores of uploading pix and rewriting bios.

Yahoo – "If you build it, they will come … if they can get in very easily"

 

The DeviceOsphere – coming soon to a world near you.

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At the MIX06 conference the most provocative and exciting idea I heard was from Tim O’Reilly who also posted about this today on his blog. Tim suggests that we are on the verge of the evolution of a sort of *deviceOsphere* (I think this is my term not Tim’s), where the staggering amount of device data gets collectively shared in new mashup style applications.

Think of a traffic map where thousands of drivers are sharing in real time their personal observations and auto measurements (e.g. ONSTAR and GIS system data) about weather, road conditions, CRIME events, alternate routes, pictures, suggestions for restaurants. A moveable data feast where the conversation never stops and includes thousands of observers/reviewers.
Flickr has shown that people really want to share photos with the world. This notion gets really exciting when you broaden the idea of “content available to mashup” to include ALL the digital content that often simply swirls around in it’s own little world. Transportation road cams, navigation data from individual cars, camcorder and cell phone feeds and crime reports are only a few things that generally just swirl around in a limited space and are discarded or relegated to obscurity.

O’Reilly’s suggesting that this data store, combined with the collective intelligence of the burdgeoning online community, could generate masterpiece applications. And the best thing is that it’s not going to require a Leonardo Da Vinci to do it.

Y2K preparation …. saves Oregon Family!

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I live just a town away from the Stivers family who recently spent 17 days in an RV stuck up in the mountains about an hour from here.   This area is easy to traverse in the summer but has often caused people problems this time of year.

The Stivers family survived just fine thanks to … Y2K rations!

Hey, who am I to say all that Y2K hype and prep was a big waste?

Local Story

Thanks, Delta, for being late!

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Most people complain about flight delays but I was very happy to be delayed in Salt Lake City yesterday, giving me a chance to catch up a bit with Rick, one of my oldest and dearest pals. We had breakfast together and drove up one of the spectacular canyons that run perpendicular to the Wasatch Range that rises very majestically above Salt Lake and the surrounding territory. Delta even allowed me to change flights to give me more time in Salt Lake, which I thought was … cool of them. Now that there’s a direct flight from Medford to Salt Lake I home I can see my good friend more than once per blue moon.

McCarran ROCKS with free WIFI

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It’s SO frustrating to pay 9.95 for an hour or two of access when you are travelling through an airport that I think most don’t do it.  Here in McCarran Las Vegas it’s free and I love them for it.

Airports like Salt Lake, that CHARGE for internet, should reconsider their strategy and either offer this as a great perk or use some ad supported model.   I’m happy to say I helped establigh free WIFI at my local airport Medford Oregon (MFR).   Portland’s PDX also’s got it and my email complimenting them was well recieved.   Tech people should try to send positive notes to airport administration about free WIFI – this helps them keep it going.