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Tim O'Reilly and I at Ubuntu Live: Be different

PORTLAND, Ore.--Tim O'Reilly is giving a keynote speech at the Ubuntu Live conference, even as I type. I spoke just before him, and he's now throwing out much of what I said. :-) (I argued that we need to be more religious about open source, not less, by which I meant "filled with passion," not "filled with fury toward unbelievers," which is not a religion that I've seen much of here.)

O'Reilly is talking about the rising tide of Ubuntu, using book data, search data and other things (see right) that lead him to believe that Ubuntu is clearly growing in popularity. Tim warns, however, that we need to not get infatuated with open source qua licensing but rather need to think about how it (and, in this case, Ubuntu) fits into the larger technology conversation.

For instance, what would happen if Ubuntu succeeded in becoming the dominant "L" in the LAMP (Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP/Python/Perl) stack?… Read more

Minisodes: For those who find 30-minute sitcoms too deep and drawn out

The average half hour sitcom runs about 22 minutes, but for some people that's simply too long. Most successful web videos average between 2 and 5 minutes, and the folks at Sony Pictures Television have found a new way to deliver classic television to this shortened-attention-span set. As highlighted in a recent story by CNN, The The Minisode Network is presented on Myspace and offers a swath of retro television episodes that have been carefully edited down to five minutes in an effort to update the old shows for the post millennium web format.

The network offers a variety of programming from Dilbert to Diff'rent Strokes, but is something lost in translation as the video editors slice and dice everything from the original that is considered not essential? Are these mostly ancient sitcoms even worth watching today in either form? While I can't be certain whether it's a result of the hack jobs or the dated material, most of the mini-episodes I watched felt incomplete and not really worth watching. The editing was clean and seamless, but the stories lacked any real development (something that's already a problem with the sitcom genre). The jokes were still there and the punchlines were also kept intact, but the timing was wrong and the humor was all but lost on me.

… Read more

YouTube users take on the Democratic presidential candidates

The questions in presidential debates have traditionally been determined by whatever media outlet happened to be running the show. CNN and YouTube are looking to change that tonight. As you may know, YouTube is working with CNN to hold a presidential debate where all of the questions will asked through YouTube videos that have been submitted since early June.

Even though users can submit their own questions, CNN is ultimately in charge of picking the questions that are going to be asked. Still, this is a promising development. According to an article on CNN.com, there is a small committee … Read more

Power Downloader makes a capture

Recently Power Downloader was working on a top-secret project, which required him to grab screenshots of Internet criminals off the Web. Some pages had individual shots of the criminal in question, while other sites showed multiple photos on a page. As he slogged through the Web pages, Power quickly began to realize that the method of pressing the Print Screen key to capture what's on the screen was pretty inefficient. Once you have the screenshot in the clipboard, you still have to paste it into another program, and then name it and save it. Power realized that, when you have a lot of images to deal with, using the Print Screen process can be downright frustrating.… Read more

Growth that sales and marketing money can't buy

I was thinking through the open source diffusion model over the last few days, and put together this slide. It's not groundbreaking by any stretch (Larry Augustin and John Roberts are much more articulate on this point than I am), but it reflects the way open source spreads.

On the open source side, you start with users and then convert them into customers. On the proprietary side, you start with marketing and sales to create customers. No users until they pay.

The key point here is in the difference in focus.… Read more

Searchles: Searching goes Web 2.0

As everyone knows, you only get one shot at making a first impression, and my first impression upon visiting Searchles was one of bewilderment. I received a couple e-mails from an employee at Searchles and decided to check out what the site was about. I was greeted with a search box along the top of the screen, and a feed of recent posts running down the left. A listing of groups and tags filled up the rest of the real estate.

Not sure where to begin, I typed Iraq into the search box and returned a query of 3,188 results. The top result was culled from October of last year and the top 10 posts seemed to be all over the map including videos from the Iran-Iraq war. So perhaps the site isn't geared toward current events, but each subsequent search I performed yielded an equally diverse set of posts. The group functionality seemed a bit more utilitarian, but it took some time before I stumbled onto the part of the site where Searchles really does excel.… Read more

Publishing your photos

Taking digital pictures is simple; transforming them into a constructive project is a whole 'nother story. Web services like Flickr, Picasa, Shutterfly, Webshots, Snapfish, and countless others let you create photo galleries that are hosted on their servers, but what if you want to create a gallery for your own Web site?

Personally, I'm the sort of guy who wants to start with my raw images and my trusty NoteTab Light text editor, but I seem to have lost my patience for HTML and CSS (not to mention JavaScript and XML) over the last five years.… Read more

Mom's brain as the family's Web 2.0

Among two-parent, Mom and Dad families, most women feel that the "Mom" role means that her brain becomes not only the family's collective memory store, but its search engine as well. Even Google can't answer questions such as:

"Mom, where's Princess Leia's shoe?" (At the bottom of the blue box in the playroom.)

"Honey, are we out of toilet paper?" (Look in the kids' bathroom.)

When are our property taxes due....when is my next dental check-up...what day is the dog's birthday?… Read more

Sneak Peaks: Nokia's Phone Widgets, FreeWebs' New page builder

At the WidgetCon conference in New York today, Nokia marketing executive Craig Cumberland privately showed us some not-yet-released widgets for Series 60 mobile phones.

Nokia announced in April that this phone was "widget-ready," and this fall the company plans to release fully functional widgets that will reside directly on the phone. With a little work, you can get widgets for your phone today, but you need the for-pay version of the Opera browser. You can also get some applications that are lighter versions of widgets, without all the functionality, at Widsets.

The widgets that Nokia promises are true … Read more