Thursday, April 04, 2002

[John Robb's Radio Weblog] This is cool.  A KaZaA client clone called KaZaA lite.  No spamware, ads, or pop-ups.  Otherwise, it works exactly the same as the actual KaZaA client. 10:11:30 PM

[Scripting News] Oddpost. How do they do that? Wow!    It's a browser based mail reader -- pretty slick.  Maybe it's flash?  No apparently, it's all DHTML. 9:58:52 PM

Here it is:   Plans are useless; planning is priceless.   I paraphrased this from something I read in Good to Great.  It struck me as the heart of the issue -- why so many people resisted planning (including me at some points):  You don't do it for the artifacts it produces.   You do it for the activity, for the attention to detail if forces.    Actually, the most valuable thing about a plan is *not* that it tells everyone what they should be doing on a given day.  It's that it gives a metric for measuring yourself and your teams planning ability -- what were the big surprises that we didn't even consider in our plan. The people who produce 6 feet of Gantt chart for a two month project and insist that everyone follow it domatically are just as bad as the people who refuse to discuss the activities and dependencies -- at that point, you've lost sight of what matters about the activity. 8:29:11 AM

[diveintomark] Choosing an open source license. Zooko: Quick Reference For Choosing a Free Software License. Also see the FSF's list of GPL-compatible and other licenses. I had the opportunity today to choose an open source license for my day job. (Side note: if you can't ever imagine yourself saying that, are you sure you're in the right job?) I chose the new-style BSD license (without the obnoxious advertising clause). Exactly what we are open-sourcing is still a secret, but when it goes public, I promise to advertise the hell out of it. 8:07:15 AM

[John Robb's Radio Weblog] New Scientist.  Early puberty in girls linked to shampoos. >>>...says Chandra Tiwary, former chief of paediatric endocrinology at Brooke Army Medical Center in Texas. "I believe that the frequency of sexual precocity can be reduced simply if children do not use those hair products," he says.<<< 7:35:39 AM

[John Robb's Radio Weblog] Dave Reed's presentation on creating communities of value (an overview of Reed's Law).  In simplified form.  The value of a network can be calculated via these equations (where N is the number of participants or nodes):  Sarnoff's broadcast model = N   Metcalfe network = N (squared)  Reed community = 2 (to the Nth power)   A system moves from Metcalfe network (ex. e-mail) to a Reed community (ex. eBay or in a limited way Napster) when it provides context, collaboration, content, and commerce.  The growing weblogging world would be classified as a Reed community.  Weblogs.com, the blogger API, and Daypop are examples of technology that leverages multiple weblogging communities to create a greater whole. 7:29:05 AM

[Daypop Top 40] "The Random Masturbation Synonym Generator"  It's raunchy and juvenile... but funny. 7:21:26 AM

[John Robb's Radio Weblog] Here's my thinking on why Instant Outlining (I/O) and weblogs provide value beyond what's provided by e-mail and instant messaging.  Both IM and e-mail are great tools for conversations between consenting individuals.  Beyond that, e-mail and IM break down, and weblogs and I/O take over.  Here are three reasons why: Scalability and information overload.  Everyone is facing information overload.  There is too much information that the average person needs to know to function effectively.  So how should you get this information?  Right now, most people get it through e-mail.  However, for those of us on the leading edge of online workflow, the volume of informational e-mails has exceeded our ability to parse it.  Why?  E-mail is a terrible one-to-many publishing tool.  Not because the technology can't do it, it can, but because the volume of information published by an increasing number of publishers crowds out its basic functionality:  conversations.  Finding a valid conversation in the stack of inbox spam from friends, co-workers, and nameless hawkers of "penis enlargers" is frustrating and increasingly futile.  In contrast, weblogs and I/O provide publishers a place to put relevant information where it can be found by interested parties.  It rationalizes the flow and allows it to scale.  It is a parallel processing environment for the mind.  Passive vs. active.  E-mail and IM demand my attention and my time (a dwindling resource) when I am least able to provide it.  The tools force me to read something I am not prepared to read (granted, e-mail is more passive than phone calls).  In contrast, Weblogs and I/O leverage my time.  They put me in control.  I can batch process my interactions with individuals and groups.  I can expand my circle of personal interactions and collaboration with little fear of being overwhelmed by the resulting interactions.  For me, the ability to time-shift in a passive collaborative environment makes me infinitely more productive.  Thinking in a massively active and interruption driven environment is like wearing a thought inhibiter. Quality and complexity.  Weblogs and I/O allow me to construct and publish complex thinking.  Further, it archives that thinking so it isn't lost.  The conversational nature of e-mail and IM make sharing complex thoughts difficult and more time consuming.  It's hard, if not impossible to build a body of work that conveys a complex idea or plan.  Additionally, I can't easily leverage previous thinking or the thinking of others to create a more complex work.  The ephemeral nature of e-mail and IM is like thinking in quicksand. 7:16:28 AM