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So what am I doing at the moment? you ask, gripping the edge of your seat.
Well, for those of you who remember as far back as my first application for permanent residence, I’m now at the point where I can write for U.S. companies, which I’m doing with my closest personal approximation to abandon. I’m writing a little bit of stuff for the O’Reilly people, and I’ve just filed a story for Wired News. I’m feeling my way a little here, working out what stories work best for each publication, trying to not mix up everybody’s house styles. Or fuck up. Very important not to fuck up.
What I’m trying for is a bit more of a spectrum between my usual Proper Media work (where I carefully and as non-scarily as possible explain the edge of technological culture to new audiences. Or at least, that’s the idea.) and the free-wheeling, private-jokey, LOOK AT ME I’M SLAMMING MY FACE AGAINST THE WALL OF IGNORANCE. LOOK! I DID IT AGAIN! words that we make NTK out of.
Weirdly, the best medium for that middle-ground so far has been Linux User and Developer, the magazine that went bust, and now lives again. I continue to write their back page. The deceased previous company owes me money, but the new lot seem to be paying up okay. It’s one of my favourite jobs right now.
In other anti-news, no, I still haven’t updated the Life Hacks site. Maybe the next deadline will jerk me into activity – Merlin “43 Folders” Mann and I will be speaking at the MacOS X conference on Thursday October 28th, 2004. This session will primarily consist of Merlin leaping around high-kicking Macs on stage and typing in QuickSilver command sequences with his knees, while I stand behind him describing the geeky sociological and API basis of these tricks in a steady reassuring monotone. It’ll be like the KLF meets Anthony Robbins.
I quit a bunch of UK net.politics. I was thinking about doing this last year when partner-in-crime Stef Magdalinski took nine months off from the same projects. He came back looking so refreshed that instantly I regretted not taking the time myself. Apart from anything else, it had got to the point where I’d say yes to anything, whether I had the time or ability to do it or not. And standing around saying “ooh I’d love to help but…” doesn’t help anyone. So I helped myself to the unsubscribe notice.
TheyWorkForYou seems to have survived perfectly well without someone to write overly jocular body text for them. If you want to see the internal workings of how something like this gets done, they’ve just opened up their original dev wiki. (login: theyworkforyou, password: novemb3r ).
If I was still involved, my job would have have been to make impassioned speeches about why we didn’t really need to password-protect the wiki to fight off spammers, thus winning a decision which would bite us all on the arse six months down the line.
Oh, and if you want to have a go at a project like this, but worry that you’re not glitteringly professional enough, check out Stef and Tom’s first sketches.
The fame piece got a big reaction, and has been looking increasingly fascinating topic for me. Like Life Hacks, I’ve got this strong sense that this is rich new topic that may be too big for me to explore on my own. I’m doing my best.
At the moment I’m just trying to listen to people as much as I can. There was all kinds of layers of irony when I tried to do this at Foo Camp this year. The year before, having a slot there to talk about life hacks (which was then called “Secret Software”) worked very well, as nobody knew what the hell it was about. So only a handful of people turned up, and we quickly brainstormed a lot of ideas. This year, the fame talk gathered a big crowd, which meant I had to quickly scale up the presentation. That worked well in some respects, not in others.
One of the problems was that I really want to talk to people about their experiences being micro-famous. But it’s a bit like talking about your salary – one-on-one it’s fine, but in a big audience, you risk sounding like you’re boasting or archly disingenuous.
What I really need is something concrete to hook the whole question on. With Life Hacks, that was sending a questionnaire about, but I suspect the Fame question needs something a little harder. I’ve thought about doing some stat analysis of how many names appear in, say, the New York Times over time. That doesn’t seem quite right yet, but may point in some good directions.
2004-09-09»
putting the lazy into lazyweb»So a lot of people (including myself, late at night, staring at my ceiling) ask me – when are you going to finish off the Life Hacks site? After all, most of them don’t say, isn’t it a bit ironic that the guy who lectured people about how to be organised can’t even get around to putting up his notes?
My line here is what I’ve always said: Life Hacks was about the techniques of super-organised geeks, by someone who is spectacularly not one of them. But, you know, that’s not as helpful as a bunch of Perl scripts to tidy your bedroom, is it? So it’s really nice to be now point people to Merlin Mann’s new site, 43 Folders, which is clearly written by somebody is one of those geeks, and is really accomplished at describing and illustrating how he drives his life. It’s a bit of a relief to discover that it runs along the same lines as the Life Hacks talk indicated – text files, little scripts, Getting Things Done, index cards, all that jazz. And a bit humbling too, given that he’s uncovering stuff I never found out, even when I tortured people with hot tongs to find out their secrets.
So, hopefully I’ll be able to copy and paste enough cool tricks to get the fuller notes to Lifehacks up soon. In my continuing chasing of my own tail, I’ve now developed an unhealthy interest in the other side of the geek organisation equation: What motivates geeks? And given that, how can you trick yourself into doing stuff that you’d otherwise run screaming from, like paying bills on time and going to bed at a sane hour?
(Looks at clock.)
A-ha.
2004-08-30»
error in mid-atlantic»[ Ada and I come in from a walk. ]
Q: What’s that?
Me: It’s a horse chestnut. There’s a chestnut tree in the park. We could play conkers!
Q: [ Narrowing eyes ] Is this more of your weird monkey language?
Me: In the Autumn, you take one of these horse chestnuts, drill a hole in it, put a piece of string through the hole, and play conkers. You flick the chestnut at the other persons’ chestnut. The chestnut that doesn’t break into pieces wins, and goes on to battle other chestnuts. Conkers! You want to play conkers, Ada?
Q: So, here’s the thing, Danny. We have Nintendo here. Nintendo and automatic weapons.
2004-08-16»
flickr is getting really good these days»When they launched with that funky Flash chat thing, I admit I didn’t really get Flickr. I instinctively kept my big fat ignorant gob shut, though, because they were obviously fixing things and adding other, cleverer things almost every day. In other words, they were doing a beta like a beta oughta be.
I’ve stumbled back to them in the last couple of weeks, initially because I got really into browsing their tag system. I now have an RSS feed of cute in my Bloglines feed, which has been a non-stop kawaii mix of puppies, babies and hamsters). Then I got dragged into using their picture uploading bookmarklet, which rocked. And now I’ve just found their flickr-<blog interface, which is similarly goodly.
I’m still a bit edgy about handing over all my photos to someone else’s server, but as far as being a scheme to easily make the photos I want public, it’s shaping up really well.
2004-08-11»
life imitates sterling»From this week’s Popbitch
Tatu are no more but their infamous svengali Ivan Shapovalov hasn’t abandoned his devotion to underage girls.
Ivan’s new act is called Nato (nATo – like tATu) – a 16 year old Albanian singer who looks no more than 12. And instead of a schoolgirl outfit Nato dresses in a burkha – all you can see on her super-cool promo posters are eyes and microphone.
Leggy Starlitz lives!
2004-08-07»
how famous do you want to be?»So, I’m writing a piece on how technology helps independent musicians. I went to a house concert this evening, which is a small gig hosted in someone’s home for a couple of dozen people, to see and support a well-loved act. I had a very good time. Unfortunately I stumbled into the gravity well of one of the Two Questions, the questions that plague me and prompt me to be very boring, online and off. Your turn to be bored.
Here are the Two Questions. The first is: “How deep a culture is geek culture?”, but that’s not the one keeping me up tonight. The second is: is “How many people do you need to be famous for?”.
I know: they’re not really up there with “What is dark matter?”, are they? Don’t blame me, I didn’t pick them. They’re the questions that, whether I’ve wanted to or not, I’ve been asking myself for years now.
The fame question appeared in 1997. We were futzing around doing an NTK Live in Soho, and Stew Lee turned up to watch. He was very impressed with all the cabling and the recording equipment and the laptops we were using, and asked how many people were listening to the show online. Standing next to the streaming server, I could answer him instantly: maybe twenty or so (there were probably about seventy people watching the show at the venue). He looked very disappointed, and probably a bit defensively, I found myself asking him The First Question. How many people do you need to be famous forn
I’ve been trying to work out the answer ever since: both personally, and, more generally, as question whose answer may be affected by the technologies we are creating.
There was a time, I think, in the industries where fame is important, that you had was famous, and not. You had big stars, and you had a thin line of people who had work, and you had failures, or people who felt like failures.
But now the drop-off on that curve seems to be less precipitous. It feels, stuck here, so close to the machinery of the Net, that there’s a growing middle-class of fame – a whole world of people who aren’t really famous, but could spend their days only talking to people who think they’re fucking fantastic (or horrifyingly notorious).
The old “famous for fifteen people” joke isn’t quite right. I imagine the majority of people have always been famous (or at least known fairly well liked) by that number. But there are plenty more people who are what Carl Steadman first identified as microcelebrities: famous for fifteen hundred people, say.
And fifteen hundred very thinly distributed people too. One person in every town in Britain likes your dumb online comic. That’s enough to keep you in beers (or T-shirt sales) all year.
But is it enough? Is fame relative? The upper reaches of fame have disappeared beyond human ken – so does that mean that we’re all humiliated by not being as popular as Madonna? Or is it a fixed constant? If you’re liked by about-a-paleolithic-tribesworth, is that enough to keep the average person with a smile on their face?
Or has nothing changed at all? Do I spot more people in this middle-rank, just because as time goes on, the middle-rank becomes more obvious, as your tastes settle, and you slide out of the thrashing, heavily-marketted, teenage years – that Age of Heroes?
There was a time when the only people I knew were obscure nobodies (like me) and the famous people I saw on the television. But that’s because I was young, and only knew other young people, very few of which has a chance at becoming well-known. Now I know a bunch of people, of all ages, some of whom are well-known in their fields. Is that what’s filling in the middlespace to me? Am I just blending this with the usual “level playing field” Internet hype, and detecting an effect that isn’t there?
You can tell I don’t have any answers here. It’s not even a very clear question. Am I talking about my own requirements? The range of particularly fame-driven people? The overall spread in a society?
I’ve spent less time chewing on this question recently, because I’ve mostly answered it for myself (short version: if you’re reading this far, that’s fame enough for me). But going to this house concert brought it all back.
Groovelily, the band I went to see, are in many ways, poster children for the middle of that fame curve. They’re not a super-famous act, but they are deeply loved, with a “street team” of 300 volunteers who flyer and promote them in their towns, and a range of fans and casual supporters who’ll let them play gigs of over two thousand in some venues, or twenty or so in my friend’s house. Surrounded by an audience of their fans, they’re happy and hardworking, and as far as I could see doing just fine financially.
A lot of their songs, though, speak of the hardness of that road: the envy of the success of peers. The self-doubt that eats at you when you don’t get that break: that leap up the spike to the top of the curve. The emotional core of their songs described the state of that life as one of perserverance until you reach a glorious goal; the most self-referential of the musical archetypal song plots.
I’m mostly writing for this piece how the technology helps them, and other independent musicians, prosper at this level. Talking to them and others, it seems clear that the Net, and computers, and even more compact and flexible musical instruments have made that middle-rank a lot easier.
But talking to the band, I realised that the greatest stress on that life is the contrast between that middle-rank and the extreme nature of the ambitious dream that drives people in this industry.
Valerie, the band’s lead singer, and I talked about what success meant, and in the end, I asked her whether a slow, even progression was enough – if Groovelily’s audience and earnings continued going up, say 10% in real terms every year. Would that be alright? Or is success still the big break, the discontinuous act of God that turns you into a big name?
In the end, neither of us were sure that that was success, although it seemed more appealing the more we talked about it. But then we were both getting tired, and I was talking too much, just like now.
But it’s such an infuriating hanging question!
2004-08-01»
ancient history»The secret origins of AOL, Pixar, LucasArts Games and MMORPGs in general. This stuff already sounds like people reminiscing about the golden age of silent movies, even though it was just 1985. To add to the ambience, here’s Andre and Wally B, the SIGGRAPH short that alledgedly cost George Lucas $500,000, and prompted him to sell-off almost all of the computery bits of Lucasfilm (including Pixar and DroidWorks). It just reeks of those odd, flickery, and honestly rather dreadful forays in the early days of cinema.
“Even though it was just 1985”. 1985 is almost twenty years ago now. I was born in 1969; as far as I can work out, modern television hit its stride in the early 50s (let’s say 1954). So TV was 25 years ago when I was born. When I was growing up, TV seemed to be something that had existed forever – or, at the very least, it was a medium that had finished growing up. But now I’ve seen it for over half its life. Twenty years ago seems about right for the start of computer animation; I can imagine that stabilising out in five or so years time. How long does television last? Could it outlive me? I can imagine “100 Years of Television” – I might live to see that. Will I live to see 100 Years of Computer Animation? What will they play “Andre and Wally B” on then?
2004-07-30»
notes on: splitting books open: thoughts on the digital future of technical documentation»Okay, now I joined Andy Oram talking about Splitting Books Open: Thoughts on the Digital Future of Technical Documentation.
He’s talking about the difficulties of “community documentation”. Describes his struggles to find out how Trackback works. How hard it was — there’s an ecology of self-education on the Net, but it’s hard to drill down to the right place. So traditional documentation has some place in the modern technical world.
What are the advantages of a good book? Can this be replicated in community education?
Firstly: Pace. Revealing the answers in the right order. There’s an idea of audience – technical reviews, focus groups and so forth. Background: books can gather together relevant and enlivened background. Structure: like pace, but on a larger scale. “Life in general is getting less structured. Even the military is much more flexible than it used to be.” – so we can tolerant less structured documentation.
Questions answered by good books: What’s the range of problems that this tech solves? How do different parts interact and alter each other’s behaviour? What are the strengths and weaknesses of different solutions”? What am I responsible for once I adopt the technology?
A step toward the solution: Safari. (Just sketching this out, not talking about Safari) – subscription service, profitable, there’s a competitor called SourceBeat which looks interestd.
Stuff that’s wrong with Safari (fun seeing this from an O’Reilly guy). Material is essentially identical to print books. There’s a nice Eclipse plugin, ORA should open source it. Lots of work to do, lots of potential. Other publishers should join Safari, or start their own service to push us to do more from it.
Comments: people saying the thing they really want is Safari offline. Everybody agrees it’s tough because of warez. Andy Oram: “Yeah, but people rip us off all the time! Will it make it worse?”.
Potential future roles for publishers: Authors may contract out to publishers for particular tasks: editing, layout,, art, indexing, tech review. Publishers might help with publicity, getting book reviews.
Improving user education: I am trying to apply what I know about good documentation to USENET, mailing lists, Linux Doc project, etc.
1. Urge active community participants to become formal contributors. O’Reilly often finds people on mailing lists, and pluck them out. Project folk should do this more – find out what motivates them, offer rewards, Wiki concept is intriguing but too new to judge effectiveness. (Comments from audience: Wikipedia good indication they will do well. Wikis tend to sprawl to cover everything. Yeah, but some pages become hotspots. Plone guy: We’re moving away from wiki for documentation, because the amount of refactoring increases exponential, so we’re moving to a more structured HOWTO system, with named authors, ownership etc. Andy Oram: Wiki is a good place to collect information, then someone goes through and pull out the info. Audience seems to agree.
2. Incorporate professionals into community documentation: problem is these professionals cost. Whittle down what is needed to the point where authors can afford professional help — just tiny discrete tasks. Or what about sponsorship? Companies must love decent documentation, right? Audience: companies don’t even give money to their own documentation. Perl’s good documentation was written while the authors were writing O’Reilly books, so there’s a weird kind of sponsorship here.
3. Nurture new users; don’t repel them. Community has to take responsibility for each member’s learning. Dump “RTFM” from your ammunition bag. These may be people you need to hire in six months.
4. Point people to documents: many useful explanations are buried. Create flexible pathways through documentation. Make use of professional developed documentation. Large volumes of documents will be overwhelming.
Plone guy: we have an embarassment of documentation. So we’re structuring, and it might be useful for other projects.
Enhancing rating systems. Let readers rank documents. There are problems, but then there are problems with reputation in the real world. Willingness to tolerate bad advice varies with the subject matter. Documentation in Plone “ages” (the ratings go toward the mean over time).
Ancillary failings of user educations: it favours English-speakers. There are translations, but it’s hard to keep things in sync. Cultural differences aren’t respected: we expect people to ask questions, or stand being flamed. You shouldn’t have to give up your cultural background to learn information. Different learning styles not respected. There are gaps, and haphazard coverage.
notes on: open source renaissance- what novell is doing to make open source a mainstream reality on thedesktop and server»
Welcome to another day on a bus tour of OSCON, seated at the back uncomfortably close to the voices in my head. I’m currently in the Rumsey keynote, and I’m not writing notes about it, because you really have to sit and watch these maps and see what David Rumsey has done with it. Kidnap someone with a fast broadband connection, go to the David Rumsey Collection and click around like a mad thing. Note to self: we have to drag this speaker to the next NotCon. It’s the most inspiring thing I’ve seen in some time.
Okay, now it’s David Patrick who is CP at Novell.
Not going to talk much about Novell (boo!), but what’s going on in Open Source from the POV of business. (I’m pretty sure this is Patrick’s standard speech to businesses, which is usually a very bad sign, but it’s actually quite a good insight into what businesses are worried about with open source). David Patrick was CEO of XImian, working with Miguel. They put it together commercially five years ago. They went out to CEOs and IT people at Fortune 500 companies and pestered them with questions. Five years ago, very few people knew about open source. Now they do.
If you’re over 35, you probably know something about Novell. They’ve been around a long time. Novell bought Ximian, S.U.S.E.; we went from a proprietary company to an open source company. We’ve also started marketing. We’re not known for marketing. (“Freedom to choose Linux or any other software you damn well please” is the ad he has up on the screen.
Novell was a Windows shop. On March 31st of this year, they cancelled our Windows licenses. They’re no longer an active licensee. They say they’re their own case study. The steps are: moving to OpenOffice, then they’re moving to a Linux desktop. Two thousand out of six thousand have already moved. When Novell Desktop ships, the rest will be moved. They’ll be documenting all of this on the Web
The concern from companies is that there’s no money to be made out of open source. What you see is the evolution of new business models: MySQL good example. Licensing, maintenance, support, training is the usual business model. In open source, less emphasis on licensing, more emphasis on the other three. It’s a good fit with how the industry is changing. We’re becoming a more mature industry — less about finding new customers, more about looking after your existing clients.
We need to educate everyone – customers, businesses, and each other about the nature of free licenses. That’s very critical, he says.
What are the myths that we deal with when we talk to enterprise customers about open source.
Myth 1: Open source will destroy the software industry. Open source doesn’t spell the end of proprietary software.
Myth 2: “Open source isw a have for purple-mohawked hackers who write sub-standard code” – quote from CTO. Really, sixty percent are software professionals with >6 years of experience. And he says that I don’t care what colour hair they have. The code quality is really high.
Myth 3: Open source is a fad. Yeah, right.
Myth 4: Open source is “The Right Way” to develop software. It’s a great way, but it’s not the silver bullet. “Buddha wasn’t meditating on open source software”
Myth 5: There’s no money in open source. We’ve invested $260 million in Open Source. (Rather notably, didn’t actually explain how to make money. Just talked about how much has been invested in it. But you know…)
Myth 6: Open Source is free. Sure, downloading is free, but it’s not free to the enterprise.
How do you succeed? You need very precise focus. You need to understand complements and substitutes. Does open source complement what I’m doing? Substitute what I’m doing? Is there something out there that’s already doing what I need?
Now he’s talking about licenses. You can tell this is really his talk that he gives to businesses, but that’s not as bad as it might be. He’s saying how funny it was that the Ximian coders knew more about the subtleties of licensing than their corporate attorneys, and that knowledge needs to be spread.
Something that’s really helped is more universal computer literacy. Nice anecdote about his fifteen-year old daughter and how she hassled him every day over the problems she had with her Windows machine, so in the end he moved her to SUSE, and now she looks at him like he’s an idiot when he asks if its working okay.
The Internet was vital to open source. Most of the early Ximian engineers were hired off of IRC.
What else drove open source? Needs not being met by proprietary software. Especially the “one size fits all” idea – you have to change your company to fit our software. CEOs say they’re tired of being held hostage by the vendor.
Ton of money being invested in Linux – billions by IBM, Novell, RedHat.
Linux is a substitute to Windows. We have to make decisions constantly about whether we’re going to implement something like JBoss, or just use our engineers to improve JBoss.
We’re a cooler company since we adopted open source; we’re not ashamed any more. My kids aren’t embarassed to wear the t-shirts.
We think the desktop is very close to on par with Windows. We believe in the next generation will be on par, and we can beat Windows at a $50 price point.
How do companies move over? Look at complements or substitutes — do you add open source stuff, or replace proprietary stuff. What relationship do they want with vendors? Do you need 24/7 support? Or are you pretty self-contained? Tying oneself to open source solutions isn’t something he believes will happen. It’s going to be a long time before a customer can switch entirely to open source. Seeing it creep up the stack – low level, up to desktop, CRM. He doesn’t see anyone using a free software tax product evarrr.