onfocus

I'm just sick that I'm missing the Emerging Technology Conference because I'm sick. I'm feeling better though, and I think I'm finally past the contagious stage. I'll be there tomorrow. Meanwhile I've been living vicariously through Wes and Cory's live updates. Is anyone else blogging from the conference?

This makes me think conferences should set up a simple Web Service that bloggers could ping to let the conference know they've written something related. In fact, a method for sending/receiving weblog posts would make this simple; and publishing tools could build it into their interface. You'd just enter the URLs of the services you want to notify, and choose from a list as you post—if what you're saying relates to the subject of the service. Then attendees (or absentees like me) could get a list of the distributed conversations happening about a conference at the conference site itself. This would be handy for aggregating topic-specific discussions as well. You'd just set up a server and say, "ping this URL whenever you talk about [your favorite subject]." Let's call this a Distributed Conversation Server. I'll get right to work on that.

Update: They have pointers to some weblog coverage.

being sick on a beautiful weekend like this is frustrating. And just to drive the frustration home, one of my favorite bands, Ozomatli, is giving a free concert at Sonoma State University today.

Other corporations could learn a lot from Macromedia. When their actions were (kindly) criticized by a few weblogs, they had an immediate platform to respond. Because they have weblogs themselves, they are involved in the community, and Mike Chambers responded to my comments with clarifying information right here. Most corporations who want to respond to criticism would still be discussing what kind of press release they're going to write, if they were even tuned in at all.

Stephen Johnson mentioned the Weblog Bookwatch in an article at Salon: Use the blog, Luke: He calls it "An interesting corrective to ordinary bestseller lists, in that it measures which books get talked about, rather than which ones get bought." I couldn't agree more. You may remember him as the author of such books as Emergence (currently on the Weblog Bookwatch Top 10) and Interface Culture. He'll be speaking at eTech next Wednesday.

Macromedia Vice President to employees: blog or you're fired. It'll be interesting to see how "the blog strategy" works out for them. Can someone sustain an interesting weblog if they're compelled to do it as part of their company's developer relations strategy?

And it seems the strategy has a few problems. Meg points out: "Passing off a 'work' site as a truly personal site when it's obviously not...can be misleading to its readers." Transparency and honesty are key pieces of personal opinion weblogs like these. Also, Matt notes that they're on the right track, but the content restrictions show they "...don't trust their employees to be human in a corporate setting."

You learn some interesting things in spam. Evite.com is wholly owned by Ticketmaster. TMCS also owns Citysearch.com and Match.com. (It cost me an extra $12 just to mention them in this post.)

"There is no such thing as writer's block. There is only failure to make a decision." - Michael Bremer quoting one of his writing professors in UnTechnical Writing. I can't decide if I agree. Maybe that's the first decision I need to make.

If you administer Windows 2000 servers, you might want to check out their new Baseline Security Analyzer. It will scan for missing hotfixes and known vulnerabilities and return XML reports about the machine. (Conveniently translated to HTML for easy reading.) It also checks out the security status of SQL Server 7.0+.

I'm guilty of using javascript: in my hrefs. Scott's rant has changed my ways.

Meg has some great advice for working with clients in her latest O'Reilly article. Having a review process can take the personal politics out of project decisions. And it's another reason why persona-based design decisions are better than the results of an internal battle-of-wills.

Went for another spectacular hike this weekend. Mt. Hood in Sugarloaf State Park near Santa Rosa is a tough hike, but the views all the way up are worth it. It was very hot, but we found a cool spot next to a waterfall for lunch.


a great lunch spot

We all agreed that if we could teleport to a location for lunch every day, that would be the spot. Very relaxing.


view from gunsight rock

We didn't know this at the time, but there's a geocache at the top. Those geocachers are everywhere.

Finally, finally, finally I'm free from the incompetent boobery of Network Solutions/Verisign. This domain has been transferred to another registrar. (I use register.com.) I've been wanting to do it for a long time, but I'd heard horror stories about the registrar transfer process. Luckily, transferring was a breeze.

Based on Verisign's stock, it looks like the title of Internet Capital is being taken away from Virginia. That story from 1999 shows they've always been clueless: "'Virginia is the home of the Internet, and we are the leaders of this historic business revolution,' said Mike Daniels, chairman of domain registrar Network Solutions..."

This link describes an instance of domain hijacking/re-selling thanks to the incompetence of Verisign. This sort of thing should be illegal if it isn't already, but I guess you can get away with it when you live in the Internet Capital. Security is all about trust, and instilling trust doesn't seem to be their core competency.