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  • 1 min read

A new term: Blobjects

A very thought provoking speech by Bruce Sterling at SigGraph 2004. Recommended.

"When you shop for Amazon, you're already adding value to everything you look at on an Amazon screen. You don't get paid for it, but your shopping is unpaid work for them. Imagine this blown to huge proportions and attached to all your physical possessions. Whenever you use a spime, you're rubbing up against everybody else who has that same kind of spime. A spime is a users group first, and a physical object second."

  • 2 min read

BlogBridge Starz!

Finally. Ever since we started working on BlogBridge, I've been talking about helping a user slice and dice and sort through a ton of blogs and other channels, finding the good from the bad, the interesting from the boring.

Remember the catch phrase "… the ability to follow hundreds of blogs without loosing your mind " which is sprinkled all over our web site. In our next beta you will see the initial instantiation of this idea.

Channels (Blogs and other feeds) in BlogBridge are rated with from one to five stars(unique, isn't it?) These stars will tell you how interesting these Channels are to you.

stars_1_20.gif

The secret sauce is in how a certain Blog is rated with one or two or three or four or five starz. This aint AI folks! It's actually pretty simple and flexible.

For each Blog, BlogBridge figures out4 different metrics:

  • Importance. Using Technorati's API, we figure out how many inbound links there are, and use that as a proxy for importance.

  • Rating. There's a Thumbs Up/Thumbs down widget where the user can, Tivo-like, indicate subjectively how much they like the Blog

  • Keyword Hits. The user can, optionally, supply a global list of keywords that are important to them (for me, "Pito", "Salas", "BlogBridge", "eRoom", "Lotus"). This metric is simply counts the hits.

  • Activity. Using another web based service, we'll try to figure out how actively this Blog is updated.

Given these four metrics (so far, but more can easily be added) we come up with a number of stars to rate the blog. Of course the more advanced user can tweak the mix to get the Starz to reflect their own priorities, using this cool interface.


Click here to enlarge.

Given the Starz Rating on each Channel, there are lots of other interesting things we can do for the user. That 's for another time.

  • 1 min read

eBay to assist in setting BlogBridge Price

So, some day we will consider BlogBridge complete enough to actually be worth a few bucks. But the question is, how much? I've said many times, that even if every single cool idea I have is perfectly realized that the most one could expect is maybe $20 or $30 per copy. But even that is a lot.

So, here's a thought. Let the market decide.

What we plan to do is to offer a limited number(say 10) of perpetual BlogBridge licenses on eBay with an opening bid of $1 and no reserve. And see what happens. Depending on how it goes we could offer twice that number of licenses an opening bid equal to the average price the first batch went for. And so on.

Cool idea , eh?

By the way, David Coursey's recent Blog entry is titled: "Marketplace to gets to set MS Prices" When I saw that I thought David had to be writing about this idea , but upon more reflection anyone would realize that this is something that MS would never do!

In fact this idea is inspired by what Sun did recently, which was to use eBay to determine the right price for their hardware/software developer package, which I thought was a pretty cool idea. Credit where credit is due.

  • 2 min read

XP SP2 Makes a Hash Of It

As you know, I am quite impressed with Microsoft's ability to build and ship and deploy and sell and support software at an absolutely mass scale.

Yet, on my second XP SP2 installation, it totally destroyed and hosed my computer. It took a superhuman effort (with Google and MSDN help) to recover it.

Briefly, here's what happened:

The computer being upgraded (a 4 year old Dell running XP with .5 Gig of Memory and 40 G of Disk) lost connectivity to the server that had the upgrade pack on it (due to a wire being unplugged - duh.) This aborted the upgrade, and which caused the upgrade to try to unwind itself.

Up to a point when one of those famous "about to install unsigned software, do you want to proceed " messages that I love so much came up, quite unexpectedly. Being suspicious of what might be going on, I said "no." Everything seemed fine.

Later on, when I tried to reboot, it failed, hard.

Over and over again, blue screen of death! Booting from floppies didn't work. Booting from CDs didn't work. Booting to DOS worked, but when I tried to look at the C: drive it said that it wasn't there.

Anyway, long story short , after a bit of searching I found that I was not the only one. And Microsoft, God Bless em, had a technote that took me through a tortured process of cutting 8 floppies, booting of of them into the "Recovery Console", lighting some incese, and following a bunch of steps. And yes, I am back up again,without SP2 installed.

So I guess this is the exception that proves the rule.

  • 1 min read

XP SP2 Shows Why Microsoft Is A Great Company

I've said (and believe) that there's no other company on earth that has the capability to develop, debug, beta test, deliver software on a massive scale like Microsoft.

The number of configurations (both legal and illegal) of hardware, system sofyware, application software, languages, etc that XP has to be tested against totally boggles the mind.

I truly believe that not IBM, Apple, BEA, Oracle or any of them have the capability to do this at the scale Microsoft does it.

This at some level is a key competitive advantage and provides them the monopoly lock-in that they enjoy. So when that capability ceases to be a competitve advantage is when their monopoly will start eroding.

So let your imagination run free : if all software becomes centralized on servvers, if massive scale software like XP becomes obsolete, when all hardware becomes so cheap that you just throw it out instead of upgrading it, maybe then Microsoft might loose their lock-in.

Not before.

  • 1 min read

BlogBridge Beta 3

We just put up BlogBridge Beta 3. Check it out. It's got many neat new features, most particularly the BlogBridge Service which I wrote about recently.

Here are the key links of interest :

BlogBridge has reached the functionality now that it is my main Blog Reader. It's more buggy than I would like , but that's the nature of a beta, I guess.

Finally the foundation is there for us to build some of the neat new ideas we've been talking about, like " Show only good articles". Hmmmm. Clever trick!

And let me know what you think!

  • 2 min read

BlogBridge open source license

I've done a little research about what the Open Source really means, legally, when it comes to BlogBridge. I wrote about this question a few months ago, and now, having consulted with people who know, here's an update.

First of all, start with the goals.

  • BlogBridge should be available, in source code form and executable form to everyone who wants to look at it and use it. It should be a bona fida open source project.
    Reasoning : We will be able to recruit others to help us build it; It is a significant differentiator among the other blog readers out there; And we can legitimately use services such as Source Forge to manage the project and its source code.
  • If a commercial entity wants to use the code to build a commercial business, we would like them to have to come to us for permission.
    Reasoning : Obviously, we aren't making any money on this; if someone else wants to, it would be nice if we were involved.

As it turns out, this is not an unusual set of objectives, and it is pretty straightforward to achieve.

As of BlogBridge 0.5.4, the product will be licensed under the GPL (rather than the LGPL which is what we had before.)

The effect of this is that the first objective above is fully achieved implicitly. The second objective is achieved, indirectly:

Because the GPL is quite strict in its requirements of releasing any modifications, enhancements, etc also under the GPL, it makes the source code as it stands unsuitable for a commercial purpose. The obligations attached to modifying the source would really discourage anyone from building a business around it.

(You might wonder, once you've released something as Open Source, can you decide to change the license? Isn't that prohibited? It turns out that it's perfectly alright.)

The code as it stands therefore is incompatible with a commercial project. If we decide that we want to embark on, or give someone else the ability to embark on a commercial project, what do we do?

We release a copy of the source code under a different, commerical license. This copy forms the basis of the commerical project. It's called "dual licensing " and it's a well understood and accepted model.

  • 1 min read

Can you change the license of an Open Source product?

This puzzled me. Once we released the BlogBridge source code under the LGPL, it was out in the open, and published to the world. Had we forfeited the right to change the license? The answer depends on who owns and holds the Copyright to the code.

As it is, all the code was either personally written by me (90%) or written by others who have agreed to transfer ownership to me. In other words,I hold a clear copyright to all the code, and that is the key. This makes it legitimate and legal to reissue the same source code under a new license.

What existed before (i.e. everything up to 0.5.3) under LGPL will not cease to exist or be available under the LGPL, but, all continuing work, enhancements and so on will be governed by the GPL and that's what counts.

So the key requirement is that, no matter what the open source license is, do you have clear ownership and if you do, you can re-release it under a different license. Makes perfect sense once you hear it.