wake up!

Started off Saturday morning with Kick ‘08.

Namedropping: Talked to George Kelly, Erin Malone, Anil Dash, Jessamyn West (yay!), Simon Willison, Owen Thomas, Hugh Forrest, Micah Alpern (briefly, passing on the escalator), Janna Hicks DeVylder so far….

The blog world, along with my slice of the twitter world, is abuzz with attempts to understand, analyze, deconstruct, laud, and excoriate Google’s new OpenSocial initiative.

One key question seems to be: is this true openness or simply using the (increasingly at risk of dilution) “open” mean as a handy cudgel to ward off Google’s current nemesis, Facebook, with it’s extremely popular but closed application development platform, active and growing userbase, and impending social ad network play?

Another key question I’m hearing people ask is whether this is a hand-off attempt by Google to hew to its roots of faciliating access to information and monetizing the traffic and data that passes through its metaphorical ands or is it an attempt to do judo and place itself at the hub of the social web as it matures?

My meta question might be to ask whether each pair of possibilities is truly mutually exclusive.

But I don’t feel like I really can comment on this right now.

If I were still an independent writer or even just a user experience consultant at an agency with a blog, I’d be much more comfortable jumping into the geek-punditry fray, but I’m not.

I work for a company that view Google and Facebook as competition, a company full of people who use both Google and Facebook, a company in the midst of announcing and operationalizing its new strategy, a company that has just made a commitment to openness and has its own ideas about what that mean, and it’s really just too hard to figure out what has been announced and what hasn’t and I really don’t want to talk out of school, so I’ll just adopt a wait and see attitude and for the time being keep my opinions to myself.

If Apple can sell electronic downloads of songs with no packaging for 99c a pop why can’t Amazon sell short little chapbooks electronically, download only, for 49c? The answer is they can, of course.

A writer on a mailing list I’m on recently alerted me to this feature (no idea how long Amazon has been at it), mentioning his eleven-page piece called Letters from Resistant Editors. In his own words, “Like almost all writers, I’m well acquainted with rejection and I learned long ago to keep faring forward when I get a rejection slip or letter. But one such letter started my mind tinkering with letters that some editors might write. Here is the result: letters of rejection that might have been written to some well-known authors. If you are a writer of children’s stories, or a reader of them, how would you like to get letters like these?

“It looks interesting and for less than half a buck, why not take a look? Amazon describes its Shorts this way:

About Amazon Shorts:

• Amazon Shorts are available exclusively at Amazon.com; you will not find them anywhere else.
• Amazon Shorts are delivered electronically; there are no printed editions.
• Amazon Shorts are yours forever – after purchase, you can read them anytime at Amazon.com. (They’ll be stored forever in Your Media Library in PDF, HTML, and text e-mail formats.)
• You are free to print Amazon Shorts to read in hard copy form at your convenience.

For me, this is déjà vu all over again. Back around 1988 I was packaging short “e-books” for a startup called Mightywords that had spun off from Fatbrain. They had detected this exact market: items shorter than a book but still worth publishing. Something like free-floating magazine articles. They were pricing them too high (typically $5 or more) and they were targetting technical subjects, and mainly they were burning through a bunch of VC cash (which I did my best to spread around to the various starving writers I knew). It was too early, the business model was wrong, and so on, but that idea really wasn’t a bad one.

I’ll be watching this Amazon experiment to see how it pans out.

Yahoo! Mash (né Mosh) is open to non-Yahoos on an invitation-only basis.

If you want to try it out, and you know me (or at least have some connection to me that you can tell me about), leave a comment and I’ll send you an invitation.

Oh, my profile there, for people already in Mash is at mash.yahoo.com/xian21370.

Looks like Technorati has reconfigured itself to be less blog-centric and to take a more multimedia look at what they call over there the Live Web (Technorati Weblog: Come check out the refreshed www.technorati.com!):

First, we’ve eliminated search silos on Technorati. In the past, you had to know the difference between keyword search, tag search and blog directory search in order to make use of the full power of our site. No more. Starting today, we now provide you a simplified experience. Simply indicate what’s of interest to you and we’ll assemble the freshest, hottest, most current social media from across the Live Web - Blogs, posts, photos, videos, podcasts, events, and more.

We’ve also worked really hard at making our user interface simpler, and more intuitive. We’ve been spending months doing user testing, and listening to you, our users, collecting and prioritizing what you wanted, what you liked, and what you hated about Technorati. We haven’t gotten it 100% right yet, and we’re going to keep working hard to improve, but I think we’ve made a big step forward with this launch.

…

With this launch, we also provide you with more context around more stuff like videos, music, and blogs. Over time, these pages will become richer and more comprehensive as we add more information about the thing itself, like where it was published, who links to it, what other things are similarly tagged, and more.

If you’re an experienced blogger in the Bay Area and would like to work for a cool startup recently acquired by Yahoo!, in Berkeley, then you may want to apply for this new community manager role: The MyBlogLog Blog: Seeking: MyBlogLog uber-user for long-term relationship

They seem to grok the Craig Newmark idea that customer service is a key part of growing their business.

Unsurprisingly, Ze Frank is going all Hollywood in the near future.

Last year at SXSW (at least I think it was last year, and not 2005), I ended up going out to dinner with my Austin guru, some folks from WorldChanging, and I think David Pescovitz or maybe I just chatted with him at some party later on, and a very tall witty guy who I felt like I should know but didn’t, who was talking about the work he was doing mainly giving talks on creativity.

It was much later (that night) that I realized this was Ze Frank, the Ze Frank. Probably because he is so much taller than I, the angle on his face was different from his usual bug-eyed unblinking full frontal in his videos and more recently on The Show.

I’m kind of glad I didn’t recognize him and go all fanboy. Instead I probably acted aloof, and that’s cool, right? After all, did he really want another person saying, “Hey, I got your How to Dance animated gif forwarded to me back in the day. I’ve been a big fan for yea long!”

Meanwhile, he is a creative force of nature who should make me feel envious and insecure but who instead inspires me not to get hooked on brain crack and I’m not surprised he is about to cross over to the mainstream and I’m sure he’ll knock him dead in Hollywood town.

Back in 1994, Richard Frankel and I (along with Briggs Nisbet and Martha Conway), launched a hypertext webzine called Enterzone. At first it ran on a server under Rich’s desk at Berkeley and its address (now obsolete), was enterzone.berkeley.edu. Eventually we got the ezone.org domain and moved it there.

One of the features of that site was a collection of interesting links. At first we just linked to other e-zines, or other e-zines we liked, or other interesting creative sites, but along the way we added another set of links called “unclassifieds.”

Then one day Rich sent me a link to a site at akebono.stanford.edu/~yahoo which already had a big headstart on us in gathering and organizing interesting links. We agreed that the guys doing that site (David Filo and Jerry Yang), had the link-collecting thing under control so we decided to abandon our half-assed attempt to index the Internet by hand.

Yahoo apparently stood for “Yet Another Hierarchical Officious Organized Oracle”, although it clearly harked back to the “rude, unsophisticated, uncouth” characters in Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels.

That first website of ours launched both Rich and me into new careers. He was a sysadmin at the time studying archaeology and creative writing. I was an author of computer primers, former editor, and part-time painter.

For a while we ran a little consulting firm together, helping small silicon valley firms get on the Internet, setting up their email servers and their first web sites. Rich made the leap first, from that partnership to a startup in the web advertising world called NetGravity. By now, websites like Yahoo were buying and selling ads in huge quantities and companies that provided ad infrastructure and tracking tools were in high demand.

Rich started out doing tech support at NetGravity but quickly rose to a position of responsibility, and then NetGravity was swallowed up by DoubleClick and Rich took on a new position there. Ultimately he moved on to Yahoo itself, where he is a senior director of product marketing now.

I kept writing, became a literary agent for a while, kept making websites, started writing an online journal, helped an e-book startup acquire authors, saw all my art-y friends from the early days of the web explosion take jobs in the field, and then finally joined a web consulting startup with big ideas called Groundswell in 2000.

I rode that baby down through the whole dotcom crash, through seven official waves of layoffs down to an asset sale featured me, ten or so other good folks, some computers, ongoing engagements with Sprint and Visa, and some Aeron chairs. At Groundswell I was a content strategist but at the successor firm, Enterpulse, I was rechristened an information architect.

Times were still tough and I was finally laid off myself in spring of ‘02. That hurt, even though it was a decision I’d have made myself if the roles had been reversed. We just didn’t have enough IA work to keep me around. I was working on the first of a series of Dreamweaver books then, so fortunately I had something to do. I also got heavily into blogging, which online journaling had kind of evolved into, launching the now fairly moribund Radio Free Blogistan and continuing to migrate the personal blog to new platforms and domain, ending up here.

I consulted with some startups, did some freelance IA work, got involved in politics, wrote The Power of Many, and then rejoined the world of the employed in June of ‘05 as a senior information architect at Extractable, a dynamic interactive agency in San Mateo.

About a year ago I became the director of strategy there, ultimately consulting with such interesting firms as FedEx, Kodak, Charles Schwab, Safeway, Sun, SanDisk and HTC, among others. I spoke at SXSW several times and presented a poster at the IA Summit. I joined BayCHI and was elected to the board of directors of the Information Architecture Institute. Extractable has been growing at an exhilarating pace.

Now, nearly thirteen years after Rich sent me that url, I am also drinking the Yahoo kool-aid. I start my new job there today. I’ll be working for Erin Malone, one of the founder of the IA Institute and one of the founders and first editor of Boxes and Arrows. I’ll be joining her Platform Design group in the Platform Products group. Specifically, I’ll be “curating” the pattern library, and contributing to related initiatives.

Wish me luck. More on this as I get my bearings.

What a surprise! Just a few weeks after launching the first update to Internet Explorer in years, Microsoft has announced that it has purchased Firefox from the Mozilla foundation. Bill Gates says that this is part of Microsoft’s plan to open source all of their software and move towards an MS Linux 2007 platform.

:-)

Yahoo has pulled it’s trip planner out of beta. This site is a really interesting mashup of internal Yahoo products. It uses Maps, Flickr, Travel Content and 360 for blogging. Too bad they didn’t use the cool FLEX interface for maps.

Today I added links to some of the IA, UX, and design sites I read regularly, many of which I’ve gleaned links and content from in the past. They are listed in the blog’s sidebar under the heading “Blogroll” and contain many blogs, and a few web magazine and link aggregators.

When arriving at work today I saw a large crane removing the Siebel sign from atop our neighbor’s building. Unfortunately I remembered to take a picture just after the sign was hidden from view behind the truck.

Siebel was officially integrated into Oracle on June 1, 2006