Posts from January 2005

Martin Tobias has a good post on tags, what he finds useful, and for what purposes.

Here’s his mix:  PubSub, Technorati, Google, and del.icio.us. 

Very interesting.

I agree with Martin that we need a layer on top of all this to make life easier.

Interesting post by OM Malik claiming that eBay’s earnings miss shows that Metcalfe’s law has its limits.

For those who haven’t heard of Metcalfe’s law, it states that a network’s value scales with the square of the number of users.

So what happens when the number of users stops growing?  Does the value of the network keep growing, stop growing, or does it decline?

Now I am going back to college calculus. A dangerous thing to do in public. But I think this means flat user growth is bad news for a network’s value.

Interesting stuff to ponder, particularly if you own eBay, Google, Yahoo!, or any of these "network plays".

It’s good to hear that Air America is going to make it.

Here’s a WSJ story on Air America courtesy of Jeff Jarvis.

This is a small piece of what’s needed to build a strong opposition to Republicanism/Bushism.  But it’s an important piece and I’m happy to see it succeeding.

Of all the albums recorded in the 60s, this is the one that feels the most like it could have been made yesterday.

Sure the great Dylan, Beatles, and Stones ablums still get rotation on my ears from time to time, but The Velvet Underground and Nico gets more.

Starting with the cool xylophone sounds on Sunday Morning and ending with the Wilco-esque noise of European Son, this album never fails to provide thrills and chills.

I particularly love the three Nico songs, Femme Fatale, All Tomorrow’s Parties, and I’ll Be Your Mirror.  Nico is what makes this album my favorite VU album. Her voice is so cool and german. And that’s Andy Warhol’s major contribution to this album.

I also think these are Lou Reed’s best songs (with the possible exception of New York).

People say the album’s too druggy and it sure is.  This record takes you right up to 125th to wait for the man or to Union Square with Margarita Passion.  And Heroin is certainly the most gripping and realistic drug song of all time.  A masterpiece in my opinion.  I never tire of hearing that song.

So there it is.  The Velvet Underground and Nico joins my Top 50.

It would be nice to say that I wish Bush well in his second term.  But I don’t. 

I don’t like or trust the man and the people who work with him.  It’s that simple.

When Bush makes an appeal for "unity" so that the country can move forward, I cringe because Bush and his team are never interested in compromise

And compromise is what’s required for unity.

They don’t want unity, they want capitulation.

For example, he just re-nominated ten nominees to the federal court who had already been deemed unfit to serve by the last Senate. That’s not compromise.

That’s an insult, a slap in the face, a taunt.

That’s the way these guys work.

And so I on the day after his inaugural, I find myself hoping he fails to achieve his grand plans.

And I find myself resolved to do my part to help the opposition find the people, the money, and the message to fight back.

UPDATE:  It looks like half the country agrees with me that Bush is no "uniter".

With the Jets out of the playoffs, the Knicks looking like they are headed for another losing year, and baseball season months away, where am I getting my sports fix these days?

Right here in Greenwich Village (and throughout the independent school’s of NYC).

Our kids go to a great school in Greenwich Village called LREI (Little Red Elizabeth Irwin).  Although its not known for being a jock school, things are changing.

In particular, the 8th Grade Girls Basketball team that Jessica plays on is making a tremendous run through its season.  They are 7-2 right now and playing some incredible games.  All of the girls are playing great, led by Gloria who is a terror on the boards, KK who owns the paint, Vio who plays tenacious defense and has the touch from outside, and Jess who runs the plays.  They are aided by a group  girls who come in and contribute at key times.

I don’t get to see all of these games but I manage to make at least one game a week.

I missed yesterday’s game at UNIS (the United Nations International School).

And it was another thriller.  The LREI girls were down 8 (21-13) with one quarter to go and posted a furious rally (I got this from The Gotham Gal who was there).  KK fouled out but Gloria and Vio just shut UNIS down.  They rallied to tie the game with 13 seconds to go. 

Jess rebounded a missed free throw by Gloria with 13 seconds to go and got fouled and went to the line. 

She missed the first but made the second and the girls in red won again.

Kid’s sports are so great.  My girls play in a weekend basketball league called GVYC that I’ve blogged about before and Josh plays soccer, basketball, and baseball. A lot of people think living in the city means you don’t have great sports for the kids, but my experience is the exact opposite.

I am a big fan of Picasa.

The Gotham Gal and I use Picasa on our PCs to manage our photo libraries.

We also use iPhoto on our kitchen Powerbook and the kids use iPhoto on their iMacs.

What we need is a server in our basement that all of these programs talk to as the central repository, but that’s the topic of another post.

Picasa just released a new version, Picasa2.

You can get it here.

Picasa2 is a big improvement. The initial version of Picasa was nice, but not great.  I liked the UI and the similarity with iPhoto and the price (free).

Picasa2 brings a major improvement in photo editing tools.  From the simple Are You Feeling Lucky button which always seems to do the right enhancement, to the Fine Tuning and Effects tabs which let you tinker away to your hearts delight.

My HP Photosmart 5.1 Megapixel camera is nice but I find that I often end up with pictures that are too dark, particularly pictures taken inside at a distance, like Jessica’s play or the kid’s basketball games.

The original version of Picasa really couldn’t fix these pictures, but Picasa2 does a much nicer job.

Picasa2 offers a windows screensaver which I really like (its possible that the initial version had this feature but I never could find it).  And there’s a cleaner and more functional interface.

All in all, I really like Picasa2 and recommend it highly to anyone looking for a good windows-based digital photo library.  For the Mac users, stick with iPhoto, there’s nothing better than that! 

In fact, in his interview with John Batelle, the CEO of Picasa, Lars Perkins, acknowledges that iPhoto is great and says that Picasa is not doing a Mac version as a result.

But the thing that bothers me about Picasa, and is certainly related to Google’s ownership of Picasa, is the lack of an online integration plan.  Today you can share photos in Picasa with friends using Picasa’s proprietary Hello system which is like an IM client with real time photo sharing.  No thanks.

Or Picasa allows its users to upload photos to Google’s Blogger service.  Great if you use Blogger.  It sucks if you don’t.

What I want is integration with Flickr and TypePad.  What I’d like to see Picasa do is integrate with everyone.  If Google was really thinking right, that’s what they’d do.  Open systems are best for everyone, Google included.

I said in my inaugural work-related post of 2005 that the next big thing is the "architecture of participation."  That is creating an architecture that allows all of us to participate in building the technology infrastructure that we use to live our lives. It includes open source, but is so much more than that.

Take tags for example. We’d all like the web, and all digital media for that matter, to be described in some way that’s more than a URL and an index of the words/text associated with that media. But that’s all we have now. There is no rich categorization scheme for digital media because it would be too expensive to create it and frankly almost impossible to maintain it.

Unless we were able to use the "architecture of participation" to do this for us.

And so, with that in mind, I have been spending some time with technorati’s tags, del.icio.us, and flickr to better understand how community based tagging will impact the world of digital media.

All three services are related and in fact, Technorati has partnered with del.icio.us, flickr, and furl to supply them with many of their tags. They also allow bloggers to include tags in their posts.

I find the tagging approach of del.icio.us the most interesting because its a true community based tagging system. I haven’t tried Furl yet, so it may well be that Furl does the same thing.

Letting bloggers tag their posts is fine, but letting everyone tag everything seems to me to be the most interesting and scalable approach.

Here is a great post on del.icio.us, how to use it, and why its so great. The comments are almost as good as the post itself.

Jeff Jarvis also has a good post on tagging and why its important.

But my favorite post on tags comes from Brian Dear who wants someone to build Taggle. I think its a great vision for where all of this can go if user generated tagging takes off the way I think it might.

As I am still in the early stages of using and understanding this stuff, any comments and thoughts would be greatly appreciated.