Lorem ipsum is the new alpha. Thanks to three year beta programs by large companies such as Google I think we all place little value in the term “beta.” Why should alpha be any different? The solution? Keep some lorem ipsum on your page so your visitors know this site is not yet ready for a general audience. It’s like leaving the top corner of a house unpainted to let everyone know it’s not yet ready for the realtor. Tags: loremipsum, alpha…
Category Archives: Thoughts
Gnomedex was very different
I’ve been reflecting on Gnomedex for most of this week. It was a very different conference than I have ever been to before. The entire place was full of content producers. Text bloggers, audio bloggers, video bloggers, cartoonists, rockers, photographers, journalists, publicists, marketers, and venture capitalists all mixed into the same room. Everyone I met at Gnomedex created new things and publicly made available their own view of the world. We had so much to share even two T1 lines could not hold our stream of thoughts. “I read your blog” was a line of introduction. “I like you, I…
What’s your happy dance?
When something really good happens I feel inspired to get up from my chair and do a little dance in celebration. It might be a press mention, a new business partner, or some code finally behaving the way it should.
Legal tidbits on blogging while an employee
I have written some form of a weblog since 1994. A lot has changed in my life over the last 11 years, but I always have claimed my personal Web space as my own, free of paycheck influence.
Corporate blogging policies
Should employers adopt blogging policies?
Fighting the white ninja
When I was eight years-old I had a recurring dream in which I was chased by a ninja but had no voice to scream for help. It baffled me that no one else could see a ninja in white chasing me and occasionally throwing his ninja stars by my ear. The dreams continued for about two weeks, until I realized no one was going to stop this ninja except for me. I turned, I fought and won, and the world took notice. As I think about resolutions for things I would like to change about myself and my life in…
Creative Commons question
My weblog is currently licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike license. I allow comments for every post, subject to my approval. Other persons are therefore able to add their own content to an individual entry page. The work is the individual entry on my weblog. By adding a comment a person is essentially creating a derivative of the work, an annotation to an entry. Are comments considered part of the work and therefore subject to the Creative Commons license? If so, I should probably remind posters that their submission is subject to the license. Any thoughts? Sidenote: Movable Type does…
Share your feed unsubscribes idea
I add and delete RSS and Atom feeds from my news aggregators every week. I publish my OPML file on occasion and services such as Dave Winer’s Share Your OPML index the file. Anyone could run a diff of the OPML and modified date and track my subscribes and unsubscribes. What’s lost in the data is why I unsubscribed. I think this unsubscribe data would be valuable to publishers, especially as syndication becomes more corporate. Maybe someone unsubscribes to my feed because they do not like my posts about soccer. I could create a feed that includes or excludes certain…
So you’d like to…grab an expert OPML file
Amazon has the “So you’d like to…” guides to share product lists spanning a unique category. iTunes Music Store has iMix. What are the data structures for the online publishing world’s self published guide lists? Users of news aggregators in search of new feeds might browse a directory such as Syndic8. While viewing a channel, they see a few guides containing this feed. So you would like to… be a Web standards guru, learn photography, keep up on world news, etc. Guides could be published using OPML. It is Share Your OPML, at a very targeted level. The user would…
Mobile thoughts
TigerDirect is selling my Compaq TC1000 for $999. I have been questioning how much the Tablet’s handwriting recognition abilities matter to me and whether I should sell my Tablet on eBay and buy a Sony VAIO or an IBM ThinkPad instead. Intel has done a really crappy job marketing their Centrino brand. Most people have no clue that Centrino is a bundle and not a chip. The clock speeds are notably lower than the mobile P4 processor, and the AMD and Apple have already struggled with educating consumers about clock cycles. Wireless Internet is the driving force for notebook sales…