I just attended a keynote from this this guy Ben McConnell. His Powerpoint was killer! It was exactly what PPT should be. The slides were emotional or visual reinforcements of what he was talking about. Every 2nd or 3rd slide had text, but rarely did a slide exceed 5-7 words of text and the most text I saw was about 11 words. Very impactful. I had to split out early because Roy, who is sitting outside of sessions hurriedly finishing off the product we’re launching tomorrow, notified me he was sitting across from Craig Newmark. So, I rushed out to get a photo with Craig and thank him for his product and not sellng/cashing out. True to form, Craig was responding to support requests from Craigslist users, but was willing to pause for a moment and take a photo with Roy and I:

I’m pissed I didn’t think to have us face the light. Damnit, bad photo! Anyway, Craig is more handsome in person! At first I wasn’t sure it was him. LOL. Newmark kicks ass.

Here a some shots of the hotel. The arcitecture is stunning and designed to reflect the mountains. I wish Tara and Ashby were here sitting by the pool.

I’m at the Community 2.0 conference today. It’s the conference’s inaugural event and it’s being held at the Red Rock Hotel and Casino in Las Vegas. This is the first conference I’ve been to that started with Champagne being served at 8:30 AM during the keynote. Last night I discovered the event’s blog and this morning an IRC channel. What do you know, Chris Heuer and Nate Ritter were in IRC. I didn’t know either were here. Nate is local to me in San Diego and Chris I just met (virtually) a few weeks back.

I would be remiss if I didn’t mention I got into Vegas last night. I mention this because when I got here I went to a restaurant in the casino for a beer and something to eat. I had a $2.99 cheesburger and a free beer. This burger was better than $15 burgers I’ve had! Standing in line to register a gentleman named Charlie pointed out he had a cold $30 burger delivered to his room. Take a look at this burger:

I guess it’s the little things. What’s really annoying is the hotel is charging anywhere from $9.99 for 2 hours of wifi access to $12.99 for 24 hours. Ridiculous. At least at OSCON the event planners made certain the hotel gave attendees free wifi access. Every conf should demand free access for their attendees or else take the conf somewhere else. There is free access at the conference around the conf ballrooms, but no where else. Free beer, $3 burger, but no free wifi. Lame. I suppose they want me gambling rather than surfing. I’m using my Blackberry to connect. I’ll be posting more about the conference. MindTouch is sponsoring. We’re exhibiting and I’m on a panel. Should be a great event.

Tara pointed out I’ve been short on family posts for a couple weeks. Last Sunday we went to Pacific Beach for the first time. We split a killer hamburger at some New Zealand hamburger joint. PB is cool. I could live there.

>

I hadn’t realized Pacific Beach was the birthplace of Wikipedia. I thought it was San Diego. I recently met Ted O’Connor (his site says Ed, but he goes by Ted) at the MindTouch office warming party. He’s a great guy. Turns out he was the first, or one of the first, paid employees at Wikipedia. He actually preceded Sanger. Update: read the comments for how I misquoted Ted. What can I say? MaxM mixes a mean white Russian So, I asked him: is Wales the corrupt and borderline sleazy individual I’ve come to believe him to be? Keep in mind this was right in the midst of the Essjay thing. Also, I’ve been really turned off by some other peculiar goings-on at Wikipedia and some odd things Angela Beesley said back in 2005. Ted explained that it was quite to the contrary and shared some stories about Jimmy Wales. It made me re-evaluate the guy. Maybe I’ve been wrong? I don’t know. I had hoped to meet him at the upcoming Community 2.0 conference. However, for some reason Wales is no longer listed as a speaker. With how poorly organized as this event has been it makes me wonder if he was ever actually coming…

Back to journal stuff. Tara, Ashby and I walked over to the Gaslamp today. It was a typical 70 degree day in San Diego. A tad windy though. We hadn’t been to the Gaslamp but once since moving here just over a month ago. Having been there today made us both glad we live in Little Italy. We had looked at some condos on that side of town. Little Italy is definitely more family friendly.

In the day time Dick’s Last Resort is a surprisingly good place for children. The place is a dump. Ashby couldn’t possibly make a mess the staff would notice. Also, it’s loud and there is a lot of stuff going on to interest a child. I asked our server for some napkins and she brought out an entire sleeve of napkins that she proceeded to throw into the air above our heads. Ashby liked it A LOT. Tara and I both were concerned about the trees that were destroyed and the pollutants that were generated while producing these paper products. Ignorance is bliss… Oh, if you noticed the writing on the hat Ashby is wearing, don’t worry Ashby doesn’t _really_ like Tequila. She preferred the Guinness 😉

San Diego Business Journal Online

“(Ajax) provides very pleasant online experiences that people can have an emotional connection with,” said Fulkerson. “It’s not just the geeks, but my mom or dad who can use it.”

Keep in mind this is a mis-quote. I said with AJAX one can create highly usable web applications that provide a desktop application look and feel, which means AJAX enables online applications to be sufficiently usable that my mom or dad could use them. I surely wasn’t implying my mom or dad would be using AJAX in their web programming. My mom and dad are all about Flash applications (just kidding).

Fulkerson, however, sees problems ahead for making money on the [Ajax13/WebTop] concept.

“(Ajax13) is a ‘WebTop.’ All of your applications (are) on the Web instead of a desktop and there’s a lot of companies doing that,” said Fulkerson. “In WebTops, I’m kind of skeptical … Google’s revenue is ad-driven, but it’s difficult to be successful when your success is incumbent on someone else’s property.

“If it’s a subscription model, Google isn’t going to charge (for its service),” he added. “Charge based on storage? Storage is cheap. So that’s a tough one. How are they going to make money?”

I do see problems with Webtops. Least of which is the one cited above regarding revenue model. By the way, in this interview I also said Ajax13 is a good thing because these guys are pushing the edges on the web. This is wonderful and will absolutely lead to innovations. Howver, the bigger issue I see with Webtops like Ajax13, Zoho, and countless others is that for decades computer scientists have sought to distribute applications across computers/devices. Now we’re going back to the future. Remember how we used to have time sharing mainframes? Remember how all the processing was done on a server somewhere while we tapped it on a dummy terminal that did no processing locally. Well, this is the equivalent of webtops. We have enormous pools of processing power locally on our desktops, laptops, and handhelds. This processing power is still increasing in accordance with Moore’s law. Are we to just throw this processing away? Who cares! Put it all on the server! With webtops the only processing performed locally is done in javascript. This is not optimal. What’s interesting and where we will be within five years is distributed applications. Applications that exist in the network across multiple devices and platforms that federate to provide an optimal computing and user experience. This is more than just data mashups. This is also about having behavioral mashups in which the application exists both on the client, the server, and perhaps many other servers and devices. Some may say I’m a DREAMer, but I’m not the only one.

TechCrunch

Ben Brown, co-founder of CNET-owned Consumating, just announced that they will be releasing “every single line of code” for Consumating within the next month.

Consumating is a dating and social networking website for “geeks” that CNET acquired back in December 2005.

SteveB just called my attention to this. I guess this post is more of a reminder to myself more than anything else. Here’s why:

1. I should talk to these guys and review this software.
2. I need to get some stuff posted about Open Web and distributed social networks. I just noticed Canter started talking about this recently and it’s driving me crazy I haven’t posted anything on this topic yet. Maybe I’ll get something posted while traveling to Community 2.0.

Ethan finally resurfaced. Above is his nifty new Nagios tshirt.

MindTouch is helping to organize, what I’m told is, the first San Diego Bar Camp. We’re calling it SanDBar and I encourage you to read more about it and register to participate.

MindTouch’s office warming party was Friday, March 2. It was great fun meeting folks from around San Diego. We entertained at our office for about an hour and then headed out to the Princess Pub for pints. We finished the evening with dinner at Vincenzo. MaxM made some wicked White Russians at the office. I heard Damien say that he would unconscious after six of them. I think it would take considerably less than this. I want to thank everyone who came out and introduced themselves. It was great meeting members of the local tech community. I especially enjoyed meeting and chatting with Chris and Ted who both work at Eventful.

I recently blogged about the modified MPL attribution licenses, Alfresco’s excellent choice to become open source, and companies like Socialtext that have been claiming to be open source even though it took them almost four years of selling their software to release their source code under a non-OSI approved license. I’ve suggested that OSI should have a wall of shame and a formal censure process. A couple days after my previous post I spoke with Michael Tiemann, the President of OSI and I shared my opinions with him. Michael is thoughtful, intelligent, funny and just plain cool.

I hope I get this right because it’s been several days since we spoke. Michael feels OSI should be a positive force rather than a negative one. He believes the open source community, mostly, does a good job of policing itself. Also, he thinks there is a  trend among the companies using modified MPL attribution licenses toward a return to the fold of open source, as is evidenced by Alfresco and others. I understood his point and I shared with him that it’s probably a good thing he’s more reflective and not as reactive as I am. Michael blogs on these topics on the new OSI website (he calls it the OSI 3.0 website) that hasn’t yet officially launched. Allegedly the board will be blogging regularly here. I hope so. 

In our conversation Michael I concurred on several items not least of which was: 

One particularly insideous subversion of the movement is the meme that “open source is about creating a commercially successful software project, so any licensing change believed to be more commercially defensible is, ipso facto, more open source.” Commercial success is a predicted side effect of open source, but open source is not defined by the commercial intentions of a software project.

My biggest concern  is the proclivity for the many newly VC backed “open source” companies to create their own licenses. In fact, I just read the lengthy piece Berlind wrote regarding this topic way back in November. I suppose it was right after our email exchange and my first post in which I accused him (perhaps inappropriately) of being too scared to take a stand on the topic. I want to highlight:

The reason for my neutrality is not that I don’t believe I could make arguments for one side or the other. In fact, if I were in the position to use or host SugarCRM (and I am, but that’s a different story), I’d have no objection to the attribution requirements. My problem is that focusing on the attribution argument right now is a distraction from what in my estimation are the more pressing issues for ZDNet’s open source-using readers (and developers) and the open source community as a whole.

Berlind goes on to assert that if this trend continues “the total number of unblessed licenses will at some point out-number the number of blessed ones.” Thereby rendering OSI and open source meaningless. David, I’m with you 100% on this. I suppose I may have been a tad harsh with you and I should provide you with kudos on, at least, two points: 1). you’re talking about this very important issue 2). and you’re addressing the real problem. I know this is a little late, but hey, I don’t spend all my time reading/writing in the blog-o-sphere. By the way, I too don’t particularly care either way about attribution. Well, that’s partially true. I do think attribution licenses are silly. However, the more important issue here is that if the spawning of non-OSI approved licenses continues unchecked it creates confusion and demeans open source. 

Finally, I’m still more than a little confused as to why Mayfield and Socialtext is being heralded as a good and noble comprimising champion of open source as Berlind, among others, have asserted when the fact remains, and I know I’m being repetitive here, this company claimed they were open source for years of selling their software without releasing so much as a stitch of code. Has everyone overlooked this because there are perceived greater evils?  

In addition to our photos being stored on our NAS (network attached storage device) and most of them being uploaded to Flickr Tara likes to print them off and make photo albums. She used Target.com for a while, which charged like $0.15/photo for 4×6 prints. Now she’s discovered York Photo, which charges $0.08/photo for 4×6 prints. Wow, who would have ever thought that 308 prints would cost you just $24.64. Killer.