Windows Live Writer: Just Stupid?

Alright.. isn't the point of web 2.0 to be on the WEB? Isn't the concept of a downloable application like this just announced Windows Live Writer from Microsoft against everything Windows Lives is supposed to be? (LIVE.. like.. right there... on the web. AJAX, WebApps, yadayada.... you know Web 2.0...).

Introducing Windows Live Writer

Welcome to the Windows Live Writer team blog! We are excited to announce that the Beta version of Windows Live Writer is available for download today.

Windows Live Writer is a desktop application that makes it easier to compose compelling blog posts using Windows Live Spaces or your current blog service.

Blogging has turned the web into a two-way communications medium. Our goal in creating Writer is to help make blogging more powerful, intuitive, and fun for everyone.

Am I missing something or is this as it appears: just stupid?

I'm actively deleting my stand alone applications from my computer. I use google spreadsheet for 80% of the spreadsheet stuff I do now (simple ones at least). I use writely as my wordprocessor. We use ActiveCollab for ClickCasters project tracking. We use fogbugz for our feature and bug tracking. We use email, IRC and, sometimes (rarely) the phone for communications.

The only application I'm still stuck with is Powerpoint and I've seen some reasonable potentials in the works for that on the web of late as well.

I thought Microsoft might have started to 'get it' with their LIVE initiative, and had this come from, say, the Office group, no biggie, but it's FROM the LIVE group. That can only mean that the people in charge don't, after all, get it.

I'll be selling the last of my Microsoft stock on Monday.

Cars: Stepping down while stepping up

I just traded in my Mini Cooper for a 2007 Yaris. It's weird, As I get older, I'm finding I like simpler, and friendlier to the world I live in.

At 40MPG, this little beastie puts even the Mini Coopers high 20's low 30's to shame.

I paid about $12,500 for it. (actually, I traded the Mini and got a nice big check back).

I've owned Porche's, Lexus and Audi's. I've spent twice the average American's annual income on a single car several times. I've come to the conclusion it's just dumb. That 12 MPG Landcruiser cost as much as 5 of these cars. Did I ever take it off road? Did it save my ass in a pileup? Was there really any reason to buy it other than it was big, it was impressive and it was expensive?

No.

I suppose some of it is just: I don't care what others think of what I'm driving anymore. Yea, I used to. I admit it. I just don't anymore. And, having lived in startup company land the last year or two, I've really grown to love the 'less is more' approach to life and business.

We're just now closing a round of financing from a group of really great people and, damn it, I'm going to do everything (personal and professional) to use that money they trusted me with as if it were my own. So, how do I spend my discretionary income on cars? Do I blow it on an Audi Twin Turbo TT for $50K? Or do I get the Yaris liftback at $12.5K?

Simple. Yaris! And if I do it there, I'll do it in the business too. "Just enough" is really the best approach to life in my book.

And, I also have to admit that my sense of the environment is greater now than ever before. All the news on global warming has me slightly freaked. I think some of it is overblown, but I also think some of it is dead on accurate.

If we can each make a small dent by using less resources as individuals, it makes the world a slightly better place for all of us. And if we can achieve the same goals (like: getting from point A to point B in a car) doing that: all the better.

Simplistic stuff, but it's the simple stuff that adds up to overall big change, in our personal life, in our businesses and in the world in general.

Does Apple believe in OpenSource? Really?

Apple is trying the OpenSource approach, again.

By ScuttleMonkey on on-the-road-again Today Apple announced a few expanded open source efforts. First, beginning with Mac OS X 10.4.7, the Darwin/Mac OS X kernel, known as "xnu", is again available as buildable source for the Intel platform, including EFI utilities. Second, iCal Server, Bonjour, and launchd are moving to Apache 2.0 licensing. And finally, Mac OS Forge has been launched, as the successor to OpenDarwin as a conduit for hosting projects such as WebKit that were formerly hosted by the OpenDarwin project's servers, such as WebKit. Mac OS Forge is sponsored by Apple. DarwinPorts has already moved to its own servers. Update: 08/08 01:43 GMT by J : The official Apple announcement is now out. Other fun news: Leopard will ship with Ruby on Rails.

http://apple.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=06/08/07/2359256&from=rss

Something tells me this isn't going to work. They originally tried this with Darwin and formed OpenDarwin. Just last month, that community of developers shut down the project. The reason? Apple didn't play well with others. From: http://www.opendarwin.org/

OpenDarwin Shutting Down

OpenDarwin was originally created with the goal of providing a development environment for building and developing Mac OS X sources as well as developing a standalone Darwin OS derivative. OpenDarwin was meant to be a development community and a proving ground for fixes and features for Mac OS X and Darwin, which could be picked up by Apple for inclusion in the canonical sources. OpenDarwin has failed to achieve its goals in 4 years of operation, and moves further from achieving these goals as time goes on. For this reason, OpenDarwin will be shutting down.

Over the past few years, OpenDarwin has become a mere hosting facility for Mac OS X related projects. The original notions of developing the Mac OS X and Darwin sources has not panned out. Availability of sources, interaction with Apple representatives, difficulty building and tracking sources, and a lack of interest from the community have all contributed to this. Administering a system to host other people's projects is not what the remaining OpenDarwin contributors had signed up for and have been doing this thankless task far longer than they expected. It is time for OpenDarwin to go dark.

Project admins for all active projects have been notified, and we will be working with them to provide as seamless a transition to their new homes as possible. We don't want to boot anyone off, we will be operating the machines as usual for several months, until everyone has had a chance to move elsewhere.

We will continue to provide email and dns redirection after the machines go dark. We'll be looking at what other redirection services are needed and can be provided after hosting has ceased.

The OpenDarwin team would like to thank everyone who did contribute to the project, and our apologies to active, loyal projects that have to move.

Thanks,
- OpenDarwin Core Team and Administrators

So I've got to wonder if this most recent attempt by Apple isn't something along the same lines. What's different here? By what I can see, not much. Same people at Apple. The likely result: Same indifference. Apple is, by nature, a closed ecosystem. Look at the Mac. Even more so.. look at the iPod/iTunes juggernaut. If there's one thing that goes against all things Apple, it's the concept of OpenSource (unless, of course, it benefits Apple in a way that lets them take, but not give back).

If I were an OpenSource developer, I'd take a long hard and cynical look at this before I spent my time and energy on another Apple 'OpenSource' project.

Media Meltdown? Nope.. it's the aggregation of old and new media

Chris Anderson, of "The Long Tail" fame has some interesting figures on traditional media.

Mainstream Media Meltdown III

A couple times a year, I take a statistical look at mainstream en

tertainment and media in decline. All figures are year-on-year comparisons unless otherwise noted. (The last version of this, from November, is here).

Down:

• TV: netwo rk TV had its lowest ratings week ever in July.
• Music: weekly album sales set a 10-year low in July. For the year, CD album sales are down 4.2%; although digital single downloads (still less than 10% of the business) are up 77% and are nearly making up the difference in revenue terms.
• Radio: the music radio listening audience is down 8.5% this year alone, continuing a multi-decade decline.
• DVDs: shipments are down 4% so far this year, more than 30 million units behind the same period last year.
• Newspapers: circulation, which peaked in 1987, is declining faster than ever and is down another 2.6% so far this year.

Mixed:

• Magazines: ad revenues are up 3.7% although the total number of ad pages is flat (they're charging more per page). Newsstand sales are at an all-time low, while total circulation was down 0.3% last year.
• Books: up slightly so far this year (but still lagging behind overall retail growth).

Up:

• Box Office: is up by 5.8% so far this year (but still down 4.2% from 2004).
• Videogames: The long slump caused by the next-gen hardware transition (Xbox-to-Xbox 360 and PS2-to-forthcoming-PS3) seems to have finally ended. June sales were up 25%.
• Internet advertising: is on pace to grow by 21% this year. Google's revenues grew by 77% in the most recent quarter.

Posted by Ch

ris Anderson in Media Meltdown | Permalink

What does this mean? It doesn't mean the end of the old media world. It means that the trend that was first spotted back in the 70's by Tofler (Remember 'The Third Wave'?) is continuing. Media is becoming more dispersed. The methods of distribution are becoming more varied and the audience is becoming more segmented.

The opportunity lies in embracing the splintering segmentation and getting ahead of the technology, just enough, to aggregate what makes sense and ignore the rest. A good example of this is Feedburner (www.feedburner.com).

The recently announced that they will be creating aggregations of feeds targeted at specific audiences. They'll, in effect, take RSS content, put a managing editor in charge of the 'collection' and make it available with a headline (like: VC blogs, or Indie Podcasts).

Sound like a new take on that venerable old media institution the Newspaper or Magazine? Yea, does to me too. It's editorial perspective from a trusted source (i.e. the managing editor persona.. usually someone well known, respected and trusted in a specific community of interest).

Pretty clever on Feedburners part. They're collecting feeds from 100's of thousands of places (and getting paid for the service), then, they segment and create editorial perspective around collections of the feeds. This drives marketing dollars (i.e. advertising) to their feeds which puts more money into people's pockets that host their RSS feed with feedburner, and creates additional value for the aggregated collection of 'trusted' feeds around specific interests.

I take it back, not pretty clever, frakkin brilliant. Not only do they not disintermediate the hand that feeds them (traditional media and new media alike) they make it more valuable individually, and collectively. All the while, potentially, creating entirely new classes of 'super' managing editors.. like Brad Feld, who's doing the VC collection of feeds... and I predict, will be one of the main 'go to guys', globally, for anything VC, media and blog related 12-18 months from now.

He's who the editor of the New York Times will call first on matters of VC importance. The question that comes to mind for me is: who's likely to be more listened to by the people that matter in that particular area of interest in late 2007? The NYT's or Brad and other RSS feed managing editors? I love it.

But.. that's just my opinion. I could be wrong (betcha I'm not though).

Indian Scott?

What if I'd been born in India and not the US?

THIS is what. heh. Check it out

http://www.dcs.st-and.ac.uk/~morph/Transformer/

Web Video and the Cambrian Period

Hmmm..... read that second sentence

USA Today
Web Video Madness!

USA Today columnist Kevin Maney says the Web video craze has gone off the deep end. How long will consumers be content to watch videos of people slathering butter on their heads to combat graying hair? Or teenyboppers bouncing around lip syncing to pop music? "Web video sites are proliferating like bunnies that broke into a vat of Viagra," he says. Noted tech blogger Om Malik simply calls it "the madness." There are now more than 240 online video sites. Venture Capital firms invested upward of $156 million in online video in the first half of 2006. Most of these sites will fail, Maney says, just like all the Web-retailing sites of the mid-to-late Nineties. Remember eToys and pet'scom? Well, now we have Eefoof, Bix, Guba, Stickam, and Frozen Hippo, each wanting to become the next YouTube. "This is classic American capitalistic thinking," Maney says, "believing that if there's one prize in the box, there must be another--even though such thinking is usually proved wrong." He says business is still looking for the next Google, eBay, and Netscape. And he reminds us of the dark side of video sites: "For all its usage, YouTube isn't making any money yet. These other guys are copycats at best, offering very little to differentiate themselves from the leader." -

Honestly? ME! If slathering butter on my hair gets rid of grey.. well hell.. I'll try that! ;-)

All you have to do is go to standard broadcast outlet (you know, that TV thing in the basement) and tune into a 'reality television' show.

Watch one of these. Take out the highlights (and pull all the fake 'tension' of 15 minutes of crap before they make the hot blonde eat a live African tree spider)... hey.. it's YouTube!

There is an (apparently) insatiable appetite for this stuff. Average people doing (sometimes) extraordinary things. Or, just average people doing average things... even that seems to catch folks fancy.

Plug in the Long Tail equation that the internet provides and you've got an almost infinite audience for almost all content, no matter how bad.

I do agree there will be a shakeout (there always is) but it makes sense. We're in the Cambrian period of internet video. Remember reading about that in school? It was the period in Earths history where 99% of all living things that ever existed on the planet lived.... only 1% remains. You've got to have that Cambrian explosion to decide what designs work right, throw out the silly creatures with 5 legs and 3 heads and settle on that 'best' 1%.

And, of course, the ride is always fun. Enjoy it while it lasts.

Boulder: Revisited

OK, gotta be fair here.

That last post was down on Boulder. I guess it comes from all the bad weirdness (vs. the good weirdness Boulder is famous for) that I've seen over the years. Things like the crossroads mall sitting nearly empty for a decade while tax revenue drained out of town to Superior and Broomfield because the city council couldn’t make up it’s mind. The requirement that any new house (or addition) to a house in boulder has to have a study done to make sure the shadow of the house doesn't impinge on the neighbors property (like, their tomato garden, I kid you not). The amazingly homogeneous population (I once brought a girlfriend to Boulder who was Japanese, she said she'd never seen anything as lilywhite in her life).

But, like any place that you've spent alot of time in, and gone deep with, you tend to, over time, see the faults and forget the good. And Boulder has LOTS of good.

The natural beauty is breathtaking. Literally breathtaking. When I'm gone for long periods and come back, I can't get over how it looks like some artists rendition of a perfect town in a perfect setting. And by god, it is.

It's full of passionate people. Some are passionate about things most of the US would consider offbeat, some downright weird, but man, they care. Some school back east (Harvard maybe?) did a study that had the number of 'activists' (people who have position and aren't afraid to say so, and act on it) in Boulder was 'the highest per capita in the US'. How the heck they determined that I don't know (number of people arrested protesting Rocky Flats maybe?). It says one thing though: We care about what we care about. "The 60's" started in San Francisco, Berkeley and Boulder. I personally know some of the ‘activitists’ from the period (now upstanding business owners, lawyers and professionals in town – which is damned ironic) These guys took over the bulldozers the police tried to use to force them off the highway into Boulder in the late 60’s and set them on fire. Some of that spirit, deep in the heart of these now ‘establishment’ activists still lives on in Boulder.

For 5 years Boulder was one of the few cities in the US with it's own underground pirate radio station (most last for a couple of months, get a visit by the FCC and shut down, pansies). Only 2 other cities (Berkeley and Santa Cruz) had longer running pirate stations. Why's this matter? It shows people are paying attention to the media, didn't like what they saw, and did something about it. They become the media.

The range of people you can meet on the aforementioned Pearl Street Mall (an amazing place as well: a multi block walking mall packed to the gills as soon as the temperature gets about 60 degrees) is incredible. Street performers, college students, families, punks, homeless people, beautiful people, music venues, world class restaurants with just about any type of food you can imagine, 5 star hotels, scammers, millionaires, blues musicians hanging on the corner, you name it. There's about 100 blocks of culture from the average town packed into that little 6 or so block area.

Ride bikes? This is the place to live. In Boulder, you have as much right to the road (at least in theory) as the cars, and the city has one of the most extensive bike path systems in the country. It's actually a lot easier to get around town on a bike than in a car. It's certainly faster.

And the open space. It's (one) of the big reasons housing pricing are so high, but it's also why the town feels like, well, a town. Not a suburb. Large parcels of land around Boulder are owned by the city. Purchased over the years to create a greenbelt around the city. Come into Boulder on US36 and as you reach the crest of the hill that leads down into Boulder Valley, you can't help but think: wow... what an incredible place.

We can't leave out the University. It has it's problems (the athletic department could use some retooling) but parts of it are world class and with time, attention and care, it could become one of the best universities around. And, of course, if you like party schools, well, not so much anymore, but it's still got the rep.

I could go on. There's so much here it would be impossible to list it a single post, or even several.

I miss some of the weirdness of Boulder (Penny Lanes coffee shop, hangout for some of the most interesting characters in town, around for 20 plus years, recently was replaced by yet another bike shop) but hey.. the Tridents still there. One of the original coffee shops (I remember sitting in there while in College getting completely wired on Quad Americano's and studying with friends).

I guess I won’t move to Longmont after all. I guess, naaa.. I know.. I’m already home.