Posts from September 2005

Last month I posted about the new premium content store that Alacra launched called the Alacra store.

Well it seems the team at Alacra has web 2.0 religion because this week they launched another great web resource called the Alacra Wiki.

Alacra operates in the professional business information market and they have aggregated well over 100 premium business information sources into a huge web-based data warehouse.

They know pretty much every company operating in the premium business information market and so they’ve put all that knowledge together into a wiki.

What I like so much about what they’ve built is they didn’t just build a directory, they built a real wiki.

I thought Rafat Ali’s Paid Content ought to be on the front page of the wiki, so I put it there this morning.  That’s a wiki.  Peer production at work.

Steve Goldstein, CEO of Alacra, blogged about the Alacra Wiki on the Alacra Blog (another great web 2.0 resource).

Go check out what he has to say about it.

Great work guys.

If you are new to blogs and blogging and want to figure out how to do it well, you can learn from one of the masters, Seth Godin, and you don’t even have to pay for his advice.

Just go here and check it out.

You gotta love that Seth would put this up for free instead of publishing it as a how to book and making a bunch of money.

Last year at this time, we had Franz Ferdinand’s debut record in heavy rotation.

As we headed out the lincoln tunnel last fall to see a Jets game, Josh put the record on our car stereo for Jackson and D.  After a song or two, Jackson said that Franz sounded a lot like Gang of Four.  I went back after the game and pulled out Entertainment and there sure was a lot of similarity, particularly in the song Not Great Men.  The Gang of Four sound is back in vogue, and not only with Franz.  Bloc Party spent some time listenting to that record too.

So there’s a new Franz record coming soon, called You Could Have It So Much Better.  I was fortunate to get my hands on an advance copy and I like it.

But this record shows that Franz hasn’t just listened to Gang of Four.  Apparently the other band they spent a lot of time listening to is the Kinks.  Ray Davies’s influence is all over this record.

My favorite track on the new Franz record sounds so much like a Kinks song that I googled it to make sure it wasn’t a cover.

It’s called Eleanor Put Your Boots On and its my MP3 of the Week.

Our new weekly podcast is up.

We did this one while watching the Jets beat the Fish (Dolphins) in our family room.  We had the game on mute, but you can hear a few shouts of excitement from the Jets fans.  We also reviewed three movies (Just Like Heaven, Proof, and Corpse Bride) and talked a bunch about the Rolling Stones concert from last thursday night.

We also did two "double shots" on this podcast from the Rolling Stones (predictably) and M. Ward.

Here’s the song list:

Emily’s Song – Ruby Tuesday – Rolling Stones
Fred’s Song – Outta My Head – M. Ward
Jessica’s Song – Concrete Bed – Nada Surf (as promised during last week’s show)
Joanne’s Song – Let’s Dance – M. Ward (David Bowie cover)
Josh’s Song – Brown Sugar – Rolling Stones

Listen Live Here.

To listen in iTunes or on your iPod, get iTunes version 5, then select Advanced, Subscribe to Podcast, and then enter this into the box:

http://feeds.feedburner.com/Positively10thStreet

Last month, I suggested that my readers pay attention to Tom Evslin as he was about to launch a blog version of a book.

Well its out and its called Hackoff.com and I’d encourage everyone to go take a look and read the first chapter which is up.  Here’s the intro:

"New York, NY — April 1, 2003 – (BUSINESS WIRE) hackoff.com
(NASDAQ:HOFC) announced today that the company’s Chairman and CEO,
Larry Lazard, was found dead in his corporate office of an apparently
self-inflicted gunshot wound. The Board of Directors has selected the
company’s CFO, Donna Langhorne, as his successor. Controller Lew
Marigold will serve as acting CFO replacing Ms. Langhorne."

Tom calls it a blook, a book published via the blog paradigm.

I’ve seen something like this before.  About a year ago, Jason Chervokas, attempted to write a book online via the blog paradigm  It was called Electricity and it was fun to watch Jason develop the book online. I don’t believe Jason finished that project and it is not available online anymore.

And we’ve seen Seth Godin and John Battelle deliver whole or partial portions of their books online with excellent results.

But Tom is up to something different.  He’s making the blog an essential part of the experience of reading the blook.  Since the blook is a murder mystery, the comments, the links, the discussions, will be an essential part of the blook reading experience.

Tom’s clearly thought a lot about leveraging the power of the audience to impact the overall experience.  He’s got two versions of the "about the book" page, his and a wiki so the community can develop their own.

He’s got subscriptions via email and RSS so you can get the new chapters delivered to you when they come out.

He’s got a bunch of linkrolls (aka blogrolls); one for people who maintain a persistent link, one for people who mention Hackoff.com, one for people who review Hackoff.com, one for posts about blooks, and one for links to other blooks.

But let’s leave aside how interactive this is for a second.  Go read the first chapter.  It’s a great story too.  And I cant’ wait to watch it and read it as it unfolds.

If you like the story, make sure to subscribe via RSS or email and get the new chapters delivered to you as the story unfolds.

From the NY Times today:

In a statement handed out to reporters at City Hall yesterday, Mr.
Bloomberg complimented Judge Roberts’s legal knowledge and integrity
but said that he was opposed to the nomination because he did not
accept "the landmark Roe v. Wade ruling as settled law."

"What I
was waiting for, as were many Americans, was a clear affirmation that
the life-altering decision as to whether or not to have a child must be
a woman’s decision," Mr. Bloomberg said in his statement.
"Unfortunately, Judge Roberts’s response did not indicate a commitment
to protect a woman’s right to choose."

During his confirmation
hearings, Judge Roberts has declined to state his position on Roe v.
Wade explicitly, saying, "I should stay away from discussions of
particular issues that are likely to come before the court again."

At
the White House, a senior aide said that the news was not received
warmly and that the administration’s annoyance with Mr. Bloomberg was
promptly shared with his campaign team.

Good for Mike.

People will say he is playing politics because Ferrer is trying to link Bloomberg and Bush.

I don’t care.  Mike is calling it like it is and I agree with him.  He’s had my vote since he threw his hat in the ring four years ago and he’s still got it.  Bigtime.

We were doing the loop of Manhattan on our bikes this morning when we came upon this scene.

This guy had been walking on this narrow ledge fishing for clams with a pole and a net and he slipped and fell into the East River.

The police came and one of them put on a wet suit and went down a ladder to get the guy.

I am sure the guy was happy to see the policeman.

Apparently he had hurt his shoulder and wrist in the fall.

Here’s a Flickr slideshow of all the photos I took of this scene this morning.

Conventional wisdom says tech companies rise and fall with the waves of innovation that lash the shores of the technology business. There are so many examples of this that I won’t bother to repeat them.

But there is one cat out there that has so far avoided that fate.  His name is Bill Gates and his company, Microsoft, is being talked about quite a bit in the blog world and the business rags this week.

Let’s go back and look at the three lives that Microsoft has had so far.

PC 1.0 – Bill invented PC 1.0 when he got IBM to adopt his OS (not even sure it was his OS, but we’ll leave that one alone) as the standard for the PC platform.

PC 2.0 – Apple created PC 2.0, threatening Microsoft’s dominance.  Bill retooled Microsoft to respond to the threat. The result was Windows and Office, the two franchises that even today power most of the Company’s revenue and profits.

Web 1.0 – Netscape made the browser mainstream threatening Microsoft’s dominance of the desktop.  Now the browser was the place people lived on a computer. Bill went after Netscape with a vengeance, bundled Internet Explorer into the Windows OS, and put Netscape out of business and got himself in trouble with the Feds.

So far, this cat has had three lives.

So now we’ve got Web 2.0.

Is this cat going to get a fourth life?  That’s what inquiring minds want to know.  It’s a $280bn question.

Web 2.0 – Google invents the ultimate disruptive free web service with search and shows how it can be monetized like hell with paid search.  Every entrepreneur worth their salt takes the LAMP stack and builds a lighweight web service to try their hand at the same trick.  This isn’t cool for Microsoft at all.

So the question is whether Microsoft’s response, coming next year in the form of Vista (fka Longhorn) and supplemented with .net, Avalon, Ajax, and a host of other interesting web service oriented technologies, will bring them back to the leadership position they believe belongs to them.

My friend Brad Feld spent a day at PDC and came away saying that 2006 will be the year of Microsoft.  Read his post, because it got me thinking, and it might get you thinking.

Earlier yesterday I had lunch with a friend who predicted that Vista will put a lot of these lightweight web services out of business the way that the Windows/Office juggernaut put a lot of PC software companies out of business in the early 90s and pissed the VCs off mightily.

So some smart people are clearly thinking that this cat has at least four lives.

But I am not so sure.  I didn’t go to PDC, I didn’t work at Microsoft, I am not "technical", but my gut says that we are in a different place now and its going to be much harder for Bill to put this genie back in the bottle.

People ask me why all these smart developers are leaving Microsoft.  I don’t think its the "rats leaving the simking ship" phenomenon because Microsoft is not a sinking ship and even if it doesn’t have nine lives will live a long time on its Windows/Office franchise.

I think its because software is becoming "organic". I believe Google started this movement. They released a free web service that people responded to in an emotional way. That created a phenomenon that drew developers and users to the Google franchise. Google opened up their APIs so people could build businesses on top of them. Now they have a whole ecosystem.  This has happened with other software platforms too – Craigslist, Flickr, Skype, etc.

Microsoft may want to be part of this "organic" software world, but its not in their DNA.  And I think many of their leading technology minds get this new way of being and want to be part of it.  So they leave, some to Google, many to do startups.

Consumers get this too.  They don’t want to be locked in any more.  Microsoft is the master of lock in.  They want open software, open source, open potential.  You don’t have to look any farther than Firefox’ market share to see this happening in the consumer market.

CIOs might not get this yet.  I think Microsoft’s franchise is the CIO going forward because they are risk adverse and are the least likely to move to this new developing organic software model.  But consumers will lead the companies they work for into this world whether they like it or not.  And eventually people will be using wikis and web based email and calendaring apps in their offices and Office will slowly matter less and less.

That’s my view.

So does this cat have nine lives?  It depends on the quality of life he’s looking for.

I can see an IBM-like scenario for Microsoft in its fourth and possibly fifth life.  But I can’t see them at the top of the technology hill planting their flag again for the fourth time next year.  It’s just not going to happen that way this time.

It’s that time of the week where I pull out a relatively unknown record out of our collection and riff on it for a couple paragraphs.

I’ve got the Stones on my brain this morning after seeing them last night at Giants Stadium.

But I honestly don’t think I can call any Stones record a Nugget (with the possible exception of Between the Buttons – I gotta consider that).

So I am going to pull out a record that was written as either a homage or a rebuttal or possibly both to the Stones’ greatest record, Exile on Main Street.

In 1993, an unknown young woman singer named Liz Phair released a record that was raw, angry, powerful, and unabashedly patterned after Exile.  She called it Exile in Guyville.

That record was in heavy rotation in our apartmnet and house for pretty much an entire year. 

We still pull it out and play it every now and then.

Exile in Guyville for a time was a candidate for my Top 50, but it ultimately didn’t make the cut.  It came damn close.

So its a Nugget instead.

Give it a listen.

Exile in Guyville on Rhapsody.

Exile in Guyville on iTunes

Buy Exile in Guyville on Amazon