News You Can Bruise for 2002 August 12

Mon Aug 12 2002 09:08: That velvet painting is getting more and more crowded; Kevin tells me that it has to have Bob Marley in it too.

Mon Aug 12 2002 12:31: A one-sided market:

Doc Searls: Where they need something in the infrastructure space, they'll roll their own if they have to, as they did with FireWire. But in other cases, like with BSD and with USB and Apache, they'll cherry-pick what they need. So it's a matter of carefully adopting and driving ubiquitous standards.
It's also finally happening with Web services. Craig says they are finally starting to emerge now as a result of infrastructure anarchy. And what's smart is when companies cause anarchy in a market, like you're doing right now. I was sitting there in the audience at lunch thinking I was looking at what we used to call a corporate sex change. It's huge. It's total. You're saying some of the same things I was hearing from (from Linux vendors) several years ago, but from a much different perspective, because you have commercial success that most other companies have never enjoyed. And you're involved with this community internally. I know this from the emails I get from people involved in your company saying they're doing really cool stuff.
Rob Glaser: Yup.
Doc Searls: You haven't been able to talk about this stuff for a long time, but now you've created a structure where you can.
Rob Glaser: Yup.
...

Doc Searls: ... And this is how these two conceptual frameworks fit together here. This is where it's really critical. You have commercial where it's proprietary and closed, and you have infrastructure where it's open and public domain. And the smart companies know how to work both sides of this. In your case there's been this tectonic shift, and bang: this (the company's infrastructural stuff) is all exposed.
Rob Glaser: Yup.
Doc Searls: We can understand: "Oh: you're selling this (commercial stuff) and you're working with everybody else on either giving this (infrastructure stuff) away or co-developing it. And suddenly it all starts to make sense.
Rob Glaser: Yup.

Mon Aug 12 2002 13:20: Harmless joke: A guy is transported to the near future and his guide is showing him around. He sees a sign on the side of a road: MAXIMUM SPEED 110.

"Wow," he says to his guide, "you guys really raised the speed limit."

"No," says the guide. "We just switched to metric."

Mon Aug 12 2002 13:58: At my command, Joe analyzes the lackadasiacal attitude of the man in the outback towards GPS.

Mon Aug 12 2002 15:29: NewsBruiser RSS in action! I'm still not sure what use this RSS thing is, but it looks nice. It probably just needs a killer app.

Mon Aug 12 2002 17:04: While driving home I saw a car that looked just like mine in the lane next to me, and I thought: What if that car and mine crashed? How would it be described? "An accident on southbound 280: two gold 2000 Saturns collided." People would think that the fabric of reality had momentarily become undone and split one car into two and the cars had crashed. This caused me to consider the same possibility I was having other people consider; what if that car was somehow my car from an alternate dimension? Then I thought: wait a minute... techno is the same cultural phenomenon as disco! We look upon the 70s and sadly shake our heads and think How could they not see?, but all the time we're blind to the fact that it's replaying as farce before our very eyes. Why don't they look?

Mon Aug 12 2002 20:16: People come up to me on the street and ask me "Leonard, what's the most useless dialog box in the world? It would have to be one of those 'tip of the day' boxes, right?" And I say "Yes, strange person coming up to me on the street for no real reason, you are correct." And then I point them to the world's most useless dialog box, which I found while trying to get a KDE RSS reader to work.