Author: gulley

The early promise of web-based application service providers seems to be coming to fruition. Not only that, many of the most useful applications (like Gmail) are free. Evan Williams, creator of Blogger (and now at startup Odeo.com), talks here about running your company on web apps. As he says, “One interesting thing about starting a company today versus a few years ago: Lots of cool web apps are now available that you can more or less run you company on.” He rattles off a short list of online software they use and then continues, “The improved efficiency of having these apps available, and not having to install and maintain servers for them is huge.” Williams is certainly an early adopter in an immature field, but there’s no question which way the wind is blowing. Salesforce.com is damaging PeopleSoft (er… I mean Oracle), because you can just hire sales people and not worry about hiring IT staff. Fewer IT staff means fewer ferrets in the bag when you’re trying to move quickly. Companies in the future will come and go like foam on the waves, because everything, aside from the actual innovative force driving the enterprise, will be virtualized and outsourced. Barriers are dropping and boundaries are blurring.

I have been sold on the value of books on tape for a long time now. But sadly my old standby BooksOnTape.com stopped renting and then, as an added insult, decimated their collection down to bestsellers. No sign of a long tail here. They seem to have some deal with Audible.com, so I took my business there to give it a try.

Actually, even the phrase “books on tape” has become something of an anachronism these days. Now I download books to my iPod in seconds via Audible. It’s a pretty good service, but Audible’s site is maddening. The design makes browsing for titles painful and slow, and the implementation is so JavaScript-heavy that you can’t pop open multiple tabs. The site logs you out after what seems like 30 seconds of inactivity, forcing you to restart your session if you aren’t a Type-A hard-driving online shopper. And if you pay for a subscription that entitles you to one book a month (as I do) your book credit is use-it-or-lose it: if you forget to download your February book in February, they get your money, and you get Jack Diddley Wiener. Overall the service is good enough to keep using, but I sure wish it were better.

At this point, people who are not too lazy to visit public libraries sometimes observe that I need not be spending lots of money for my audible fix. As I understand it, piles of entertaining books can be had at these “libraries” for free. But I have not yet personally verified the veracity of this outrageous claim. Now where did I leave that Visa card…?

I find myself completely agreeing with Clay Shirky’s assertion that ontology is overrated based on a speech he gave at a recent O’Reilly Emerging Technology Conference. I didn’t go to the conference, but I did hear the speech, courtesy of ITConversations. The gist of it is that we have inherited a world view of the taxonomy and classification of information based on the fact that when a book sits on one shelf, it cannot sit on another. This is the librarian’s physical reality: is “Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance” to be classified under philosophy or fiction? Make up your mind once, and then declare it to be so forever. But this physical reality casts a long shadow across our intellectual tradition in that it lets ontologists define the world that the rest of us live in. As Shirky goes on to say, the bookshelf is gone, and its departure makes way for new and, to the ontological old guard, disturbing ways of categorizing information. Google, del.icio.us, and others let socially aggregated post hoc views of reality define the world. At one point Shirky says: “It comes down to a question of philosophy: does the world make sense or do we make sense of the world?” If the world makes sense, then any conflict you and I have must be resolved against some larger semantic framework of reality. This was the object of Leibniz’s universal philosophical calculus, which sought to resolve all arguments with pure logic, beginning with the words “Let us calculate.” But if we make sense of the world, then context cannot be banished, and we must resolve all arguments with the words “Let’s talk.”

Let’s talk.

Happy tax day! As I was wading through TurboTax, I came across a “Frequently Asked Question” that seemed entertaining enough to pass along. The topic was income received in the form of awards (not that I received any…). Here’s the screenshot.

I can see how this comes up a lot. Gangs of angry and confused Nobel Prize winners must have been hassling the TurboTax tech support staff again this year. I understand the Pulitzer Prize winners are even worse. I wouldn’t share a limo with those guys if you paid me.

I recently started reading Roland Piquepaille’s site again; it’s got some darn good stuff on it. This item caught me eye: Seagliders Break Endurance Records. A seaglider is an underwater airplane, or rather an underwater glider. Take a look at the size of the “wings” and you’ll get an idea of the difference between flying through water and flying through air. A much smaller wing will do the job in water. You get the same picture when you think about a sailboat as an airplane with one wing (the keel) in the water, and the other wing (the sail) in the air. The forces nearly balance despite the vast difference in wing area. The beauty of a seaglider is that it can glide incredibly cheaply by changing its buoyancy. I wrote about this last fall, but the technology seems to have taken a real leap forward in the meantime. These robot porpoises are swimming across the Pacific, reporting by satellite to their masters. There must be lots of people jumping at this idea.

My Dad is a faithful reader of this blog (he’s married to the other one), so allow me to wish him a very happy birthday and thank him for getting me started.

Take a look at this Annotated New York Times. It pulls down the most recent version of the Times and then weaves in blog commentary about each article. The cost of prominently displaying bad writing is going up every day. There’s an old quote that you shouldn’t pick a fight with someone who buys their ink by the gallon. That’s true enough when words ride on the backs of inkpots. But these days just about anybody can afford all the electrons they need.