Letter home

It’s been almost a week since Smashley grabbed her backpack and headed home, but I still have her beer in my fridge and her cigarettes in my purse. I’d have the memories, but those tend to get a little fuzzy when she’s around. To paraphrase Adam Sandler’s The Hannukah Song, “instead of one night of parties, we have eight craaaaaazy nights.� Thanks for livening up the place, Smash.

I’m going to have to figure out how to keep this up now that I’m working. For a paycheck! My mom’s pretty excited. I’m happy to be doing something constructive, getting out of the house, and meeting new people, but it’s really just for extra pre-holiday cash, not a career move. Friday was pretty brutal since I didn’t alter my usual 3 am bedtime but needed to be up at 6 am to make it to work, and then let the good times roll until the wee hours again. Those pictures are all the evidence I need that the good times are taking a physical toll, as if I couldn’t tell. But hey, it’s good prep for the holiday party season.

Stop the presses!

When did Cafepress start offering black shirts?.

And on closer inspection, why are they $5 more than the white ones? For that price I could get a better shirt and my own damn transfers. C’mon, guys. I want to love you, but you make it so hard.

Hello, WordPress

Welcome to my new home. I’m still in the process of sprucing the place up a bit, but go ahead and make yourselves right at home. Can I get you anything?

Trolling for charity

Matt Haughey on what may be the finest fundraising idea ever conceived: paying to shut people up. Personally I have nothing against either of these guys, we gravitate towards different topics so I rarely see the sparks fly. But I think it’s a fun and original idea and I’m all for it, as is most of the community.

Webtastic!

I am missing Web 2.0 this week, which doesn’t bother me like it should. Partly because its purpose seems to be clueing in the corporate world as to how they can take advantage of up-and-coming technologies, as opposed to an event like Webzine which is geared towards individuals. Partly too because my schmoozing muscles are atrophied after months of disuse, and I’ve always been more of a team player than a self promoter. And as Ted Rheingold points out, real innovation happens in bedrooms and garages, not $$$ conferences. But most of all, because at any large event all the good stuff happens on the fringes. Last night I unfortunately missed Merlin’s undoubtedly great Web 1.0 Summit, which is what I get for taking a break from my obsessive reading of local blogs. Tonight I am inviting myself to the Colors Of Web 2.0 party, and tomorrow is Web 2.1. 10% better at 10% of the cost, so there you are. If you know of any other related events I’d be interested in, or have access to the Web 2.0 wiki you would like to share, please let me know. Otherwise my next web-related event will the Digital City panel on Monday.

The final, actual, Webzine roundup

The thing about perfectionism is that it can really get in your way when not operating under a deadline. Also, finding inspiration tends to get me out of the house and not farting around on the internet all day. Luckily for me bloggers will blog, which means that by waiting a few days weeks I find most of my Webzine-roundup already done for me. As Willam Henry, Duke of Gloucester once said, “Scribble, scribble, scribble, eh Mr. Gibbon?”

The offical website once again is here, and it looks like the podcasts have been added now if you’re interested. The schedule is here, and all the photos you could want (and then some) are here. Talks and workshops I actually made it to, in order were: 1. Jacob Appelbaum’s talk, 2. Rich Media Tools Workshop, 3. Intro to Digital Photography and Photoblogging, 4. Blog Warez Dance Off, 5. Hacking Gadgets And Electronics, 6. The Saturday Afterparty, 7. Video Blogging Panel, 8. You Are The Media: Videoblogging 101, 9. Around The Corner: Neighborhood Blogging, 10. Jonas Luster’s talk, and 11. Selling Out: Making Money Doing What You Love. Whew!

General thoughts from Sean Bonner.

Justin Watt liveblogged the whole thing, hitting many of the same workshops I did. It’s a great overview, as is Tara Hunt’s. Tara and I spent some time hanging out together at Saturday’s afterparty, and I’d like to nominate her for Coolest Canuck. As I suspected, the afterparty was really where it was at. I met more people in the four hours at that party than the whole rest of the weekend put together. I even posed with Ms. Webzine and got hit by the kissing bandit.

Brian Shields on Jacob Appelbaum, which was the first talk I caught Saturday. It was very interesting and a good way to kick off the weekend with its focus on creating alternative media, but also very sad and touching. Brian also blogged about the rich media workshop, and both these write ups are unusually thorough. I attended all the rich media talks and workshops I could after being inspired by this workshop that I really just stumbled onto, so it really set the tone of the weekend for me. I felt that fireANT, the video aggregator and Our Media, the Internet Archive front-end, were the stars of the show.

Jay Allen from sixapart, Matt Mullenweg of WordPress, and Jason Goldman from Blogger showed off their stuff at the Blog Warez Dance Off, which was interesting but too short and crammed into a tiny space. I sat on the floor behind the presenters, so I apologize to any of them if they felt their ass was being scrutinized (and I have nothing but good things to say about the asses in question). I use Blogger now but I managed to score a WordPress.com account too, which I’ll be playing with (thanks Matt!).

The gadget hacking presentation by Phillip Torrone was too short to do much more than skim over some of cool stuff in Make, but fun nevertheless. Plus he brought a bunch of free copies, so I can flip through them at my leisure.

On Sunday I was pretty tired after the party, but the videoblogging panel was interesting if only to see how the technology is being used in practice. Markus Sandy’s workshop on actually making a videoblog likewise helped a great deal in putting the pieces into place. If you’d like to do this at home, check out Freevlog for a great tutorial.

I never expected the Selling Out panel to be as great as it was, but it was actually really interesting. The founders of LiveJournal, Hot or Not, CafePress, StickerNation and Fucked Company all talked about how they started their companies and what it took to make a living off them. To sum up, not much. Every single one of them found that the money came as a result of the idea, and almost by accident. Even the most capitalistic of the sites, CafePress, was started more as a curiosity than a business. As Maheesh Jain explained, he and his partner saw the mugs, mouse pads and t-shirts that were offered at photo processing places and decided to see if there was demand for that on the web. They put up a very basic site with no idea how to actually make any of the stuff or access to any equipment. Within a week the orders were coming in and he actually headed to the mall to ask the guys at the photo processors how they did it, bought identical equipment and stuck it in his partner’s garage. In a month it was popular enough they had to rent office space. There were similar stories all across the panel, and all the panelists warned everyone away from throwing money at your site (your own or VC) in an attempt to grow fast and get rich quick. All these sites grew along with their user base, and all on the basis of a single good idea.

So if anyone comes up with that One Good Idea, let me know.

Early reports

I’m still trying to process everything I saw at Webzine 2005 this weekend. I’m groggily combing through notes and trying to match names and faces to blogs and software so please bear with me, I will talk about everything in far more detail than you could possibly want very soon. For now suffice it to say that I had a great time and learned more than I expected to. Even better, I found the inspiration I was looking for. Let’s just hope I can hang onto it long enough to get things moving.

In completely unrelated news, I couldn’t help but read this post over on the best city planning blog ever (yes, I really am nerdy enough to have a favorite). I haven’t been blogging much about my Google Maps obsession recently, mostly because others have been doing a better job of keeping up with the constant stream of new cool stuff. But one maphack you might have heard of is Seattle’s Bus Monster, which shows current locations off all busses on a route and their ETA. It’s a tough call deciding which is better, Bus Monster or SF’s real time traffic and NextBus systems. I’ll have to give the edge to Seattle for now due to the seamless integration of bus and traffic data, but when those shelter signs show up in my neighborhood I think SF will take the crown.

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This weekend

It’s looking like I may have to eat crow and go to Webzine this weekend after all. Against all expectations, their schedule looks really interesting. The workshops in particular have caught my eye.

Unfortunately that means missing the How Berkeley Can You Be parade, as well as the famous Folsom Street Fair, the RESFEST digital film fest (which I did catch part of last year), and the Fallfest food & wine show.

Have I mentioned recently how much I love this city?

Shiny new things

The recent announcements of first Google Talk and now the iPod nano have prompted me to say something. Despite the joking about my curmudgeonliness, I’m actually just as prone to excitement about shiny newness as anyone. My first reaction today in seeing the nano was “It comes in black! It’s tiny! It has color!”. But that lasted about 20 seconds.

Here’s a little secret about me: I’m not really a Californian. I’ve lived here since I was two, but I was born a Yankee and in many ways I’m still one. That word implies certain qualities like thriftiness, a taste for minimalism, and a propensity to speak your mind but hold your emotions in check. I’ve tempered the thriftiness a bit, though I still can’t understand why anyone would throw away their plastic grocery bags and then buy brand-new trash bags, or not just re-label a file folder, or people who don’t know how to darn a hole or fix a hem or use one teabag to make two cups of tea. The point is, the old Yankee adage “use it up, wear it out, make it do or do without” is well ingrained in my subconscious. If I’m going to spend money (or time) I expect to receive value in return. And value is most definitely not defined as “more stuff” (minimalism, remember?), it is defined as “something I will get a lot of use out of”.

Which often puts me at odds with consumer culture in general, and the tech world in particular. I have tough standards. I don’t automatically install upgrades or new beta releases because generally it’s a waste of my time, hard drive space and/or money. That goes double for beta products that require hours of combing forums for hints before they might start working as intended (hint: working products not yet entirely fleshed out or with minor glitches are in beta, getting users to find the bugs in your basic code is called alpha). Both Apple and Google are usually very good at producing high-value lean, useful and durable products and for that reason both rank high on my list of favorite companies, right up there with Trader Joe’s and Honda.

Not these releases though. I have yet to find anything I’d want Google Talk to do that iChat doesn’t already, so for those of you who have sent me invitations thanks but no thanks. When they have an application that functions as both an IM and IRC client seamlessly, so that you can be having an IM chat with one person and invite a third to participate in that same window, then I will pay attention. When I have the ability to be logged in under multiple usernames simultaneously and to have my friend see responses as coming from my firstnamemiddleinitiallastname account and some random five dollar n00b see responses as coming from my anonymoususername account at the same time, then I’ll consider switching. My 3rd generation iPod (purchased used) is still functioning just fine thankyouverymuch, and unless it dies I won’t be replacing it anytime soon. What the majority of Apple’s existing customers actually want is more storage (80GB or more) and videocast support. The nano is not a bad product, but it should be called Shuffle Deluxe. It targets the same market, though I suppose you could add in those who have bought the Shuffle but are frustrated by its limitations.

I find it admirable that Google and Apple (especially Google) both let their developers run with their imaginations a bit. It’s certainly better than the focus group inspired mediocrity that’s seen so often in other industries. But guess what? While they were busy working on these projects, people are mumbling their frustrations with Google, and buying extra hard drives to stash their growing music & video collections. Focus, people. F-o-c-u-s.