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It seems every time Adobe updates something, it hoses my Mac. The other day, after installing the Flash Player 9 update, Flash ceased to work in any browser. I did uninstalls, re-installs, and all for naught.

Then I remembered what happened after the *last* major Flash update. I loaded up Mac OS X’s disk utility, and sure enough–the disk had become corrupted.

I’m not saying it’s Adobe’s (or the former Macromedia’s) fault that every time I get a Flash update, my hard drive needs to be repaired. I’m just saying it’s a hell of a coincidence.

First, Dave Winer coded NY Times River (and BBC River) to give Blackberry and Treo users a better way to get headlines. (I wish I could check them out from my mobile, but it’s a WAP phone, and the sites don’t display. What can I say–I’m a poor journalist.) And now, Dave has create a blogging tool for the Blackberry.

Nuts. I’m stuck with “moblogging” through Flickr with my webcam. And that doesn’t do very well with papercasting. I guess I gotta find a way to shake down some cash from the Internet tree and get me a Crackberry.

You can tell things are tough when all it takes is a Highway 101 billboard to elevate people’s adrenaline levels. And that, apparently, is what an Ubuntu Linux billboard has done.

From SJVN’s Linux-Watch:

The above billboard, and another just like it, were spotted by our roving reporter has he drove between Palo Alto and San Francisco on the 101 freeway earlier this week. We can’t help wondering: is it something in the water supply here in Silicon Valley? Or, is it the upcoming LinuxWorld conference that sets up shop in San Francisco next week?

Or, is it an indication that immense amounts of marketing crack are being done somewhere? Sure, Ubuntu is “increasingly popular” — for people who use Linux as a desktop. But that’s like saying that death is increasingly popular with the living — it’s a force of inevitability, given how awful most desktop Linux distros are, and how little most Linux players care about the desktop market.

Google has lately been trying to find new ways to make money off its technology. The AdWords API will soon be metered. Some speculate that the Maps API will follow.

Well, Google’s gotta do something, because right now it’s pissing in its own pool with AdWords and AdSense. Someday soon, the results for many high-value keyword searches will consist mostly of highly search-engine optimized crap carrying AdSense payloads, and the whole value of Google search will be destroyed.

Google’s PageRank is its strength and its Achilles heel. The original idea of weighting search results toward things that people have linked to with matching keywords was a smart hack, and did a good job of leveraging the informational democracy of the Web. But it also left Google wide open for other people’s smart hacks, like Google-bombing. By using PageRank algorithms to determine relevance, Larry Page and Sergey Brin dodged the bullet of having to actually do the heavy lifting of categorization and entity extraction from content to figure out what it’s about. But they also made it possible to game the system.

So, for example, if I wanted to create a perfect Google sandtrap of a site, I would build a technology that watched the Google AdWord auctions, detected the highest value keywords, and then automatically created AdSense (and other context-sensitive advertising) enabled pages optimized for that keyword. At the same time, I’d syndicate links to that site with the keyword to other domains so that they could be picked up by Google, raising the new site’s page rank. Just a little content to make the site legitimate, and a little care about the use of cross-linking, and all of a sudden I’ve created revenue for myself by lowering the value of Google’s searches.

Already, the amount of irrelavent content and spam being yielded by general search engines is being seen as an opportunity for “vertical” search companies, who are seeking to provide search tools that provide high-quality results for very specific topic sets. Call it vertical search, categorized search, community search–these are all about getting better results for searches based on some sort of inherent filtering of result domains.

Google is in a tough spot long-term with click-based advertising. They have to be careful about radically altering the ecosystem they’ve created with their search engine, but they also have to figure out how to filter out the inbound links from automated “spamblogs” and other robo-sites that exist merely to game the PageRank system. Otherwise, their revenue is going to start declining, and will eventually crash because of overgrazing by search-engine marketers.

I just recovered this server from a really hideous .htaccess failure. Since I’m hosting multiple domains on this one virtual server, I had constructed a whole bunch of .htaccess Rewrites to redirect requests to the proper subdirectories. During maintenance yesterday, the .htaccess file got corrupted, and my multidomain housr of cards fell flat–just before I had to leave the office to go visit my wife and son at sleep-away camp (a long story for a different blog).

I couldn’t figure out why the file had gone bad. On inspection, it looked intact; to be sure, I renamed the old file and saved a backup copy to the server in its place. No joy, the site was still sending everything to the root page. Fsk.

Tech support for my host, Powweb, was no help either. “We don’t support .htaccess,” they said. I said that the config had been working for literally years before the failure, and I thought that maybe there was a glitch in the server configuration or there was something wrong with the file system. They “elevated” the call — a fancy way of saying that they would eventually look at it.

So, rather than wait for them, I went back and beat on the server some more in an attempt to evict whatever demon had infested .htaccess. It took about 10 deletions and renames and reloads before I finally got a backup .htaccess file to take properly (or maybe someone rolled back a change they made in server configuration at my hosting company…I’ll never know). So at midnight tonight, I finally had everything where it should be. Sort of.

If you ever doubted that personalities shape the path of technology, all you have to do is look at the checkered history of RSS. Even its acronym is the source of rancor: is it Rich Site Summary? RDF Site Summary? Really Simple Syndication? Any answer is bound to piss someone off.

When Steve Bryant pointed me at Rogers Cadenhead’s blog today, I suspected I was in for another RSS-related rumble. And I wasn’t dissapointed. Cadenhead got a letter from Winer’s attorney last week, threatening legal action over a variety of claims, such as infringement of copyright and a dispute over “third-party information”–other people’s publicly-shared OPML feeds.

Here’s Dave Winer’s side of the story.

Update: Here’s Burningbird’s summation of the whole timeline of this mess.

At its most basic, this is the story of a verbal agreement that went bad. But at another level, this is a fight over the future evolution (or not) of RSS, and something much subtler –if someone makes an API “public”, how public is it? And how open is a standard if someone can come along and slap you with a legal threat when you don’t use it in a way that they like? And just how far can you go using information provided openly by an agreement between two other parties–like an OPML feed, or phone directory listings?

The future of RSS is of more than passing personal interest to me. As the newly-minted director of IT strategy for Ziff’s enterprise group, I have to figure out how to make stuff work together, and right now RSS figures pretty heavily in that. But Atom could just as easily fill that role for my integration purposes, and if the whole RSS process is going to drop dead because of personality issues, I’m going to get as far away from it as I can as quickly as I can.

It doesn’t help any that the entire blogosphere is gathered around Winer and Cadenhead chanting, “Fight, fight, fight!” But then, we’ve seen this happen to people who’ve gotten on the wrong side of Dave before. And inevitably, it makes the higher questions involved subordinate to the battle of personalities. Which means the movement toward fixes in the holes in RSS is going to cease while Dave postures.

Before I go into full rant mode here, it’s time for full disclosure. I once worked with Dave Winer tangenially, as he was a columnist for XML Magazine, of which I was editorial director. I have spoken with Rogers Cadenhead all of twice or three times, more if you include comment threads on blogs and email exchanges (but not much). None of the above qualifies me to be much of anything other than an informed passing observer of either of these guys at the moment. But I do know that Rogers is one of the nicest guys in tech that I’ve ever interacted with, and Dave is…well, Dave.

If you take everything at face value here, the center of the dispute is OPML content. OPML is an outliner format, widely used as a format for exchanging sets of RSS feed subscriptions. We use it on Ziff to package our feeds for easy uploading onto RSS readers, and it’s used by a variety of blogrolling and RSS-based services for similar tasks.

The OPML Factory site that is the main point of this dispute is a port to the LAMP platform of the functionality that Winer had originally run at feeds.opml.org. The site didn’t scale well, so Winer turned to Cadenhead to port it to LAMP. Cadenhead had stepped in to save the bacon for Weblogs.com users who found their Manila blogs dropped when Winer could no longer support them, and had also helped Winer port the Weblogs.com “ping” service to LAMP before Winer sold the service to Verisign.

The two never arrived at a formal contract for the OPML project — the verbal agreement included parntership, says Cadenhead, and the written contracts offered none of that, making his contribution purely work-for-hire. So he refused to sign them, and now Dave wants to take his ball back (plus the $5,000 he paid Cadenhead up front for the work he’s done so far) and go home.

Cadenhead says the third-party data is “open” by agreement–it’s subscribers’ OPML files, which they voluntarily posted to Dave’s defunct OPML service in 2004. But Dave says that the data is not “open” — that people trusted him with the data, and he’s claiming copyright on it.

The dispute is not over OPML itself. OPML is claimed on opml.org as “a trademark of Scripting News Inc.”. The specification for OPML, however, states: “No claim of ownership is made by UserLand to the format it describes. Any party may, for commercial or non-commercial purposes, implement this protocol without royalty or license fee to UserLand. The limited permissions granted herein are perpetual and will not be revoked by UserLand or its successors or assigns.”

The OPML data from subscribers is another matter. Winer’s interest in it is probably fuelled by the indications it provides of what subscribers’ “attention” is trained upon. My former colleague Steve Gillmor, and my boss Mike Vizard, are both big fans of the potential of the “attention economy,” and I’m sure that Winer sees some potential “monetization” of information about what RSS feeds people are subscribing to. And I can see Winer being reluctant to dilute his interest in that cash flow by sharing it with someone who merely stepped up on more than one occasion to save his ass with generosity and programming skill.

But the dispute does have other root causes. In a post I made about RSS advertising recently, I noted that Dave and Rogers were having something of a disagreement about the future of RSS. Rogers wants it to keep evolving, as he thought Dave had intended when he set up the RSS Advisory Board and licensed RSS under Creative Commons, donating the standard to Harvard’s Berkman Center. Dave doesn’t want anybody touching the damned spec, because he says it’s done.

There is no other single person I can point to in the world of web technology who has shaped the development of web standards so much with his or her personal enmity as Dave Winer. If you’re involved in blog or syndication technology, odds are you’ve at least virtually bumped into Winer in some way, and you’ve formed very strong opinions about him. The Atom spec came about mostly because Dave claimed RSS as his intellectual property, and a large set of web developers just couldn’t bring themselves to work with him. Some, like Rogers ,who intially had mostly good things to say about Dave’s knowledge and contributions, have been driven off later by his orneriness.

Scoble weighs in on the competing lynch mobs, or at least on the group that’s been gathering around Rogers’ blog. Mike Arrington, Winer’s former lawyer who is now better known for TechCrunch, takes a driveby potshot at Rogers without any sort of explanation. Rogers responds to Arrington’s comment here.

It’s almost impossible to have a civil conversation over any topic through duelling weblogs. In the end, nobody’s mind is going to be changed about Winer one way or the other. All this argument will do is cast a bigger shadow over further development of the RSS standard for new applications, and we’ll be stuck with whatever proprietary extensions of RSS get hoisted on us by Apple, Microsoft, Yahoo, et al.

And so, I’ll be left with having to deal with a different framework for every point-solution integration point for my syndicated content, podcasts, etc.. All because of a clash of personalities.

I haven’t blogged much lately for a very specific reason–I’m now building blogs at work. The first of my efforts is here.

It’s less a pure blog and more of a mash-up of blog and aggregation portal. I’m using XSL transformations and RSS feeds to create a topical site that combines a regular blogger with all of the “traditional” editorial coverage we do on a topic. And, much to my chagrin, it’s all based on .NET.

One down, nine to go. This month.

Last night, I went to an open house at MICA run by the graphic and digital design group of their Continuing Studies program. I went mostly because Sean Carton was speaking, and he had invited me to come by.

Carton has started writing a weekly column for my day job. Considering he’s now Dean of Philadelphia U.’s School of Design and Media, it was kind of strange on the surface that MICA would ask him to come speak–it almost seemed like GM having Lee Iacocca come speak at a Chevy product launch.
But I was also there to network, and to find out about MICA’s graphic/digital design programs. Plus, it gave me a chance to check out the new Brown Center at MICA, the concrete and glass monster on Mount Royal that’s most famous here in Baltimore for catching a bullet shortly after it opened. And besides, I wanted to steal some ideas from Carton.
And here’s the idea I’m stealing today — to succeed with a product, in bits or atoms, you need to delight.

Here’s the context. After a whirlwind tour through the last 20 years of digital convergence and its impact on culture — and on the amount of available attention people have — Carton talked about how important design has become to the success of a product. Products (be they physical or information-based) succeed because of the total experience people have with them, and much of that experience is a result of design.

The Delight factor is what seperates the iPods, BMWs, Mini Coopers, Muvicos, Googles and such from the rest. People overlook the specs if something engages them in a way that goes beyond just the function of the product.

It’s a dangerous word, “delight.” When I hear managers talk about “delighting the customer”, it usually comes two seconds before they spew out the most idiotic drivel I’ve heard in that particular fiscal quarter. The word itself has lost most of its meaning in daily usage; people just don’t say, “Whoa, dude, this thing delights me.” Typically, it’s used in a sycophantic greeting (”Delighted to meet you!”) or ironically (”I’d be delighted to take that back to the kitchen for you, sir”).

I have a hard time working up to delight. Sure, I covet some of the things that hit the “delight” button hard, like the Mini Cooper, the latest PowerBooks, and so on. But creating a lasting sense of wonder about anything is pretty fucking hard to do. The butterfly on this blog’s header landed next to me on a broken asphalt parking lot…that delighted me, in that moment. Doing stuff with my kids delights me. It’s a real stretch to say that any brand of anything can come close to that level of emotional connection.

And really, that’s the challenge people trying to hack our emotional responses for a buck face these days. Everything has become experiential–everybody is trying to find some way to connect in a scripted, contrived way with the product-consuming public that you really have to do a good job of faking originality to get anyone interested anymore. Everything is derivative of derivative things. To “delight”, you basically have to:

• be original
• be “authentic”
• be inclusive
• not suck

Baltimore has plenty of places that pull that off for me. The fine folks at Atomic Books know how to pull off the experience for their market niche (Yo, Benn and Rachel! And congrats on the Emily Flake book making the Must List in Entertainment Weekly, by the by). The Karzai family has experience nailed at B and Tapas Teatro. WTMD has somehow managed to steal my iPod playlist and make it their programming.

The other key piece of what Sean Carton said is that eventually, the technology or medium used to deliver whatever connection you’re trying to make with people is irrelavant. It’s about making people feel like they belong within the world that the product/website/experience reflects. A cool, makes-you-want-to-come-back web site isn’t just about the graphics, the beveling, the font choices, or demonstrating mad CSS skillz–it’s dependent upon creating a connection with the audience. The content needs to speak to people at a whole level beyond just passing along information.

I look at the stuff my company does. Does it “delight”? I don’t think so. How do you “delight” IT people, corporate executives, etc. with a tech website? It’s hard enough to just suck less, let alone not suck.

Last night, I went to an open house at MICA run by the graphic and digital design group of their Continuing Studies program. I went mostly because Sean Carton was speaking, and he had invited me to come by.

Carton has started writing a weekly column for my day job. Considering he’s now Dean of Philadelphia U.’s School of Design and Media, it was kind of strange on the surface that MICA would ask him to come speak–it almost seemed like GM having Lee Iacocca come speak at a Chevy product launch.
But I was also there to network, and to find out about MICA’s graphic/digital design programs. Plus, it gave me a chance to check out the new Brown Center at MICA, the concrete and glass monster on Mount Royal that’s most famous here in Baltimore for catching a bullet shortly after it opened. And besides, I wanted to steal some ideas from Carton.

After a whirlwind tour through the last 20 years of digital convergence and its impact on culture — and on the amount of available attention people have — Carton talked about how important design has become to the success of a product. Products (be they physical or information-based) succeed because of the total experience people have with them, and much of that experience is a result of design. The “that’s cool” factor, what Carton bullet-pointed as Delight, is what seperates the iPods, BMWs, Mini Coopers, Muvicos, Googles and such from the rest; people overlook the specs if something engages them in a way that goes beyond just the function of the product.

Delight with a web site isn’t just about the graphics, the beveling, the font choices, or demonstrating mad CSS skillz–it’s dependent upon creating a connection with the audience. The content needs to speak to people at a whole level beyond just passing along information. Eventually, the technology is irrelavent–it’s about making people feel like they belong within the world that the site reflects.

I look at the stuff my company does. Does it “delight”? I don’t think so. How do you “delight” IT people, corporate executives, etc. with a tech website? Or with a weblog, where it’s hard enough to just suck less?

The answer, I suspect, isn’t one that media companies are going to like.

That papercasting thing I started has turned into a freakin’ monster. Stephen Shankland of News.com (a competitor of my employer, I should note) linked to it two days ago, probably because of this little item: