Archive of UserLand's first discussion group, started October 5, 1998.

scriptingNews outline for 3/26/00

Author:Dave Winer
Posted:3/26/2000; 6:56:44 AM
Topic:scriptingNews outline for 3/26/00
Msg #:15712
Prev/Next:15711 / 15713

To ManilaPalooza People: You're Totally Awesome. Thanks!

David Weinberger, one of the Cluetrain authors, is looking for examples of people who use weblogs in business. "I'm trying to illustrate the point that the Web is changing the old rules about the presumption of secrecy."

Dan Gillmor: Cobalt Networks is emblematic of valley evolution.

This was a week of outage and escalation. One very big one, lots of aftershocks. Now I've gotten used to the Ten Minute Outage. One happened in Cupertino, just before my demo. Luckily the line stayed up through ManilaPalooza. And now, we've bonded with the Conxion people, and this week I learned more about escalation, watching Steve Martin waste huge amounts of time looping. PacBell is not taking responsibility. In the ISP world, when that happens, you escalate. But Conxion can only go so high up the hierarchy at PacBell. I said "It's a shame they're not really part of our industry, because I can usually find a way to get through to the CEOs of high-tech companies." Then I realized that I could escalate to the PacBell CEO through Davos. So this is a public note to Lance Knobel at WEF. Lance, how would we go about contacting PacBell? They have a serious issue, and could take leadership in a very important area for world economic growth. How can we network to the right person at PacBell?

BTW, DavosNewbies is served on our Seattle LAN, so it did not go out when PacBell started heaving our packets. In a way (a small one!) it's unfortunate that this site was not served through PacBell, because then the CEO would instantly care if he looks bad. Imagine a Davos site behind all that michegas in the PacBell cloud!

Lots of great feedback yesterday. We will deploy static rendering for EditThisPage sites, probably next week. We'll also host media objects like movies and wavs. We'll create a SlashDot-mode for Manila weblogs, individually editable objects by mutliple editors on a home page. We will convene a design workshop, where we meet to design features. Everyone is invited to post their thoughts on the March 25 site.

To Wes Felter's question -- we're not there yet with all the features you asked for. What more can I say? Our focus in 1999 was on ease of use and writing tools. We've delivered, now we're in refinement mode on those things, and lookin for the next holes to dig. We're going to hire more engineers soon. And partnerships are a distinct possibility. No company can do everything, right??

BTW, to Wes, we sent a Frontier T-shirt to Austin for you with Craig Jensen. And thanks to Robert Occhialini for the wonderful shirts! And we gave out Frontier 1.0 manuals. There's still a palette of those in my garage, so I don't think they'll become collector's items any time sooon.

Ideas for Manila plug-ins: Presentation bullet charts, Blue Mountain Arts.

And we met Fredrik Lundh, I'm sorry I didn't get a chance to introduce him. Fredrik was instrumental in the adoption of xml-rpc, after we released the Frontier implementation, he made it work in Python. He says: "Writing the first version of Python's xmlrpclib took me about 20 minutes." Looking back, with the benefit of hindsight, this was one of the most powerful 20 minutes in history. Lundh's implementation bonded us to the Python community, and it precipitated all the other xml-rpc implementations.

Danny O'Brien from NTK was there too. I explained what "It's even worse than it appears" means in the context of ETP. I realized immediately that I had stepped in it.

Other regrets, I gave a hint to the cluelessness of VA Linux. We offered to make them kings of our world, but they'd rather be whores to the corporate bosses. Not great profit margins there. We're not hucksters folks, we just want to help you make the products we want. Thanks for listening.

Keynote Systems: Free Performance Appraisal of Your Web Site. "Are you losing customers or revenue because your web site is too slow or slower than your competitors?"

Psssst.



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