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Feeling like a Red Sox

Feeling like a Red Sox Fan. Kerry seems to have won the Democratic nomination, and convincingly. I'm rooting for him in the Big Show in November, right along many others, but, why do I feel like a Red Sox Fan?

Google Coolness. Well those wacky

Google Coolness. Well those wacky guys and gals at Google keep on coming out with neat new stuff. Check out http://www.google.com/help/features.html for a whole bunch of neat new searches. Among them you'll find Vehcile ID Numbers (e.g. "AAAAA999A9AA99999") and Patents (e.g. "Patent 5317686") Follow the link above to see all the other cool encantations.

Is this the return of the command line? After all these years distancing ourselves from the infamous command line (remember 4GLs?) how are we supposed to remember all these weird encantations. GUI anyone?

Smiley Queries. Ok, here are

Smiley Queries. Ok, here are two for you to ponder: How do you put a smiley inside parentheses? (And by the way, I am (not) trying to be funny 🙂 And while we are on the topic, does the smiley have a nose , or not, or is it a different kind of smile?

🙂

Comparing this years Demo to

Comparing this years Demo to previous years (Demo 2004 Series - 7A) As I've been writing these little Demo reports from my notes, I realized that as I have been going to Demo for years (in fact I think I've been to almost all of them) I had perhaps an interesting perspective, and this little thoughtlet bubbled in my brain:

In the last few years, the burst bubble seemed to impact Demo by showing down to earth, obvious ROI products and services. This year there seems to be a few more out-there product and service ideas. I thought that was a positive development and perhaps a sign that we are recovering somewhat from the shock of the last 3 years.

Email is not dead (Demo

Email is not dead (Demo 2004 Series - 7) I continue to be an avid follower of what's going on in the email space. Why? Here are some things to think about:

From my eRoom and Collaboration days, I've been very aware of the challenges to achieving adoption. My view is that the challenge exists whenever the adoption of a new application or system requires some degree of coordination between a set of users. Email is by far the greatest example of an application of computers which has very successfully overcome that barrier. I want to learn from that.

Second reason: I've observed that the tools we use to work with email (the general striucture email applications, email protocols, email use models) basically were laid down in the 1970's. And yet, in the past 30 years (!) email's role in society has totally changed, the volume of email has totally changed, the numbers of users have totally changed, the purposes of use have totally changed. It feels like we are due for a major re-think of the model.

Would it be the merging of Instant Messaging with Email? Might it be the merging of collaboration tools with Email. Might it be some fundamental move away from the Inbox/Outbox/Folders/Compose/Forward/Reply model to something perhaps more appropriate to the new world of email?

Anyway, back to Demo 2004. There were some interesting email "related" applications launched at Demo.

Bloomba Email Client : Bloomba 2.0 is, believe it or not, an Outlook replacement that is worth a look. They are literally and knowingly going head to head with Microsoft. They have a heavy emphasis on searching within the email, which as you know, I think is super important and overlooked. They've done a very nice job with the application, and as I say, worth a look.

MailBlocks Web Based Email client: This is a very interesting integration of email, calendar and contact information. I believe that there is also fancy spam filtering technology. But the neatest (and useful to me) feature is the automatic parsing of emails to locate contact info changes and meeting information and proposing them to you as calendar and address book updates. While there are multiple web based mail clients, this one has a neat angle. Very nice. If you are interested in this web based mail client, you should also check out OddPost, which is interesting because it's a tour-de-force DHTML application that actually creates a real GUI Outlook Express like experience, all with just a browser, and no downloads.

BlogBridge latest

Just a quick note about what's up with BlogBridge. My time has been severely drained by a new consulting project, so progress has slowed down more than I would like. The last while I was knee-deep in installation, deployment, upgrade facilities. I looked at a bunch of possible ways of distributing,installing and then upgrading the application, evaluating 3 of them in detail. What a mess!

In the end I settled on Java Web Start. I used to think of this as a bit of a kludge, but it seems to be well suited to deployment and installation of Java apps, and with each release Sun seems to make it a little nicer. So that's what I am going with.

I've learned far more than I ever wanted to know about the CLASSPATH, Jars, JNLP, and yada-yada-yada. Interesting though, but definitely heavy duty geekosity.

BlogBridge is still in what I would generously call a pre-alpha state. Not really usable. (FeedDemon is much better.) If a few people would like to try out the Java Web Start deployment, send me an email and we can talk.

Forced to use Atom. Well,

Forced to use Atom. Well, it's happening… My friend Paul English has been using Blogger for the longest time for his personal blog. I often complained to him that I used a Blog Reader (FeedDemon is my current favorite, until BlogBridge comes out 🙂 and wouldn't be able to follow his blog until he had a feed…

Well as you may know, Blogger now has a feed, and it's uses the Atom format. In the ' tempest in a teapot' department, you might have followed the Atom/RSS battle, which took an interesting turn when Blogger (=Google) decided to support only Atom as their format. Clever strategic move or small minded vindictiveness?

So, Paul's blog is the first time that I have been forced to use Atom. Luckily the latest Beta of FeedDemon does support Atom and so I can read Paul's blog right along all my other favorites.

This is just another in the continuing format, API, or protocol conflicts which arise constantly in the our business. It's a good kind of conflict because it raises important issues and allows things to evolve to a better place.

Remember VIM and MAPI? That battle shook the very foundations of the software industry at the time. (VIM stood for "Vendor Independent Messaging" but the running joke was that it really stood for "Vendors Ignoring Microsoft", led by Lotus. Remember Lotus 😉 And more recently, how about SHTTP vs. HTTPS? HTTPS eventually became SSL which of course is all anyone remembers.

My point is that as our products and visions and customers and platforms move forward, there is a constant tension between evolution and compatibility. It's clear that this is a good thing in the end, although a whole lot of glass is broken along the way. The one thing I know for sure is that it's way too early to stop the evolution right now.

Adobe Enterprise document control technology

Adobe Enterprise document control technology (Demo 2004 Series - 5) They have come up with a policy server to control and log access to pdf documents. I don't think it has a name yet.

It is very similar but much more limited than Liquid Machine’s product (and Authentica.)

They are all somewhat exposed to Microsoft’s recent DRM features in Office 2003. I don’t really know the details of Microsoft’s product but one likely fact is that it works only on Office documents which is a big limitation. P

eople sometimes don't recognize that this is a severe limitation - after all, the whole world uses Office, doesn't it. Well yes, but there are some key other formats out there which are every bit as sensitive as Word and Excel. Graphics (Photoshop, Illustrator) and Cad (Autodesk and SolidWorks) come to mind.

New in the world of

New in the world of Digital Photography (Demo 2004 Series - 4) The beat goes on in the world of Digital Photography. Two very nice (and one less nice) Photo Sharing products were launched at Demo this year. Quick notes on three of those.

PhotoSite from Homestead. This is a very nice simple online photo album. It’s customizable and has very attractive album pages. There is an annual charge, but it’s probably worth it.

Share-a-lot. This is a different approach. It’s a very easy, peer to peer sharing of photos with specific other people. This is a free service, so the question does arise how they make money. Visually it is less attractive then Photosite. Also you have to specifically indicate with who you would like to share.

Our Pictures is a custom client which delivers pictures peer to peer to your friends and family. The interesting thing about the team building it is that they were the people who developed AOL's "You Have Pictures" service. It shows: the user Interface is very nice. There’s also a tie-in with the photo retailer to order prints. I think they got it mostly right. They are providing a different transport to send pictures because for various reasons email isn't ideal. That's good. However I think they threw the baby out with the bathwater, because they don't even use email for notification - they have a separate application and notification method.

By the way, here's an article I came across that goes into more objective detail.