Venture Geek

3 years ago I was pointed to EveryDNS.net, and I have been a big fan ever since. EveryDNS is a free service for domain holders to use to host their DNS entries (if that doesn’t mean anything to you, and you care, read about it here, but basically it’s a necessary part of having an Internet domain that, absent something like EveryDNS is either going to cost you money at a domain registrar or will require that you have access to your own DNS server). Not only is EveryDNS damn useful, it really captures the spirit of the Internet (or, at least, the spirit of the Internet I remember from the early-mid 90s).

Well, the founder of EveryDNS, David Ulevitch, is at it again. This time with a new company called OpenDNS. The service is currently in a closed beta, and David asked that we not spill the beans just yet, but you can sign up to be notified when they launch. If you’ve ever messed with the DNS settings on your computer you probably can see where he’s going…

By the way, David Ulevitch and David Weekly (who is no fan of blogs but does run a great service called PBwiki) started the California Community Colocation Project, a free colocation hosting service for non-profits that Nicenet, the small non-profit that I started, has been using for a few years, so I have lots to be thankful for.

The world doesn’t need yet another blogger supporting Net Neutrality, so I won’t explain why I think it’s critically important — instead, I’ll just point to people like Tim Berners-Lee (inventor of the World Wide Web) who can speak to the topic with infinitely more authority than I. Now, that said, it’s not yet clear to me that the regulations being proposed will have the intended effect. The bottom line for me is that the end-to-end principle of “dumb” networks is one worth fighting for.

(via Lessig, where the discussion on the comments is perhaps more interesting than the original blog posts [as usual])

I am writing this post from a very cool piece of software called Journler created by Phil Dow. Not only is Journler a highly functional journaling/blogging tool, it is a great example of why people love Macintosh software — great integration with iLife and various other OS X features and a beautiful, intuitive, efficient interface. As if that weren’t enough, it’s FREE. Assuming this blog post goes well, I’ll be making my donation today.

Hat tip to FreeMacWare for the pointer to Journler.

[UPDATE: although I still think Journler is a very nice application, the blogging features have left much to be desired. Of course, as freeware, there’s not much use in desiring new features — I had a nice interaction over email with the author of the software, but he doesn’t seem terribly interested in expanding out the blogging features of the program. The most obvious issue is that a “blog entry” is really totally separate from the journal entry — if you edit one, the other does not change. The “blog” feature is really just a convenience to post a journal entry to a blog once after it’s all ready to go (no editing of blog entries, for instance). Also, I like to write my blog entries in plain text and insert my own HTML when needed — you can do this in the “blog entry” screen of Journler but not in the main journal entry screen.]

I have spent a fair amount of time in the last year or so hanging out on YouTube, IFILM, Google Video and the host of other video sharing sites that have also recently emerged. I have also done some amateur video of my own with iMovie (a very fun thing to do — and something I used to think I would never have interest in). So, it’s safe to say I’m a fan of the new wave of amateur video — and let me be honest here: I’m a TV junkie. I manage to limit the amount of time I spend actually watching TV/online video, but I could, left to my own devices, flip channels (or whatever the online equivalent of channels are — more on that some other time, perhaps) all day long.

But, I don’t find video a particularly good format for non-entertainment information. In other words, unless it’s something that is making me laugh or cry or some other explicitly leisurely emotion I don’t generally find myself making the time to watch. The latest example was a video of Kara Nortman talking about, of all things, the online video space. Now, this is a topic that I’m very interested in, and hearing from an experienced venture investor on the space is definitely right up my alley. But, sitting through a video of her talking about it is ever so tedious. First of all, you need to be in a place where having sound on is OK — in many work places that’s often not acceptable (or, in my case, catching up on various blogs and such while my wife is watching TV next to me). Sure, I could wear headphones, but when I’m doing that I generally have music on (and I’d have to stop the music to watch the video). More importantly, you can’t really skim video — I read far too many blogs to actually read every word of every article. Skimming is a must to gain cursory knowledge of lots of things and decide which few things are worth taking the time to digest fully. It might even help if there were any easy way to just plain play the video faster — people talking is a laborious way to pass along information, and only works when the speaker is very engaging in my experience (and this from someone who loves a good lecture over reading for picking something up — but, the in-person aspect of that also matters). There’s also the problem that videos like the one above tend to be very disparate — in other words, although it’s technically possible to have, for instance, an RSS feed of videos, few people serving up video of this nature are using feeds — instead they want you to click into the site (partially for the ad impressions and partially out of technical limits/vision).

I don’t have the same opinion of audio. For instance, I’m a huge fan of Doug Kaye’s fantastic service IT Conversations, but I listen to that in the car on my iPod (watching video while driving is still a no-no — but, for how long?).

Anyone found video to be a good way to get non-entertainment information? If so, where are you finding it and when are you watching it?

Over the last 8 years of living in San Francisco I lived in three different neighborhoods with three different kinds of weather (for those not familiar with San Francisco, I literally mean different neighborhoods in the same town have different, sometimes drastically different, weather). In general, I love the weather in San Francisco — rarely very hot and often just a bit chilly and foggy. When I made my recent move to San Jose, I knew the weather would be warmer, on average, than San Francisco. But, today was downright sweltering. It must have broken 100 degrees, and the forecast shows the highs hovering in that neighborhood for the next several days. Brutal.

So, we broke down this afternoon and decided we really needed to buy an air conditioner right away. So, we hopped in the car (which, of course, has air conditioning, so the trip itself was going to be worthwhile) and headed out to the local Best Buy, since they had such an extensive array of air conditioners on their web site. Of course, given the weather, Best Buy was sold out of air conditioners. And the guy who gave us this news had no sympathy. Tragic. So, off to Bed, Bath, and Beyond up the road. They only have those free-standing air conditioners that cost much too much. A quick poke of the head in the Circuit City next to the Bed, Bath, and Beyond made it clear very quickly that they would not deign to carry mundane home appliances.

I was feeling very disappointed, not just because I was going home to my sauna of a house with no relief in site, but also because I thought one of the points of moving to the ‘burbs was to have ready access to well-stocked big box retail (and their ample parking) without hassles. I mean, isn’t that one of the main reasons to move out of the city and into the world of strip-malls? But, I digress.

So, we’re driving home when I see Sears. I literally didn’t even know they were still in business — I thought for some reason they had gone the way of K-Mart, but thankfully no. So, figuring that of all places surely Sears would have a stock of air conditioners, we pulled into our third shopping complex of the day (and its ample parking — something I do appreciate about suburban land). Sears proved to be one of the nicest retail experiences I have had in a long time. We walked in and immediately were asked if we needed help. We were pointed right to the wall of air conditioning units where we encountered another person willing to help — and get this: the person who offered to help us actually knew something about air conditioners. Not an expert, perhaps, but I have become used to “sales people” in retail stores like that asking you if you have questions, and when you ask the question they add no value to your shopping experience. My favorite flavor of such interactions is when you ask something about a specific product that you are standing in front of and the person offering to assist you starts reading what’s on the box in order to try answer your question. Oy.

Anyway, Sears has plenty of choices and plenty of stock. Granted, most of the choices are their store brand, Kenmore, but at this point just having choices was a nice thing. So, we pick out the two we’re going to buy (a big one for the living room and a small one for the bedroom) and pay for them right there next to where are. We pull the car around to the pick up window, where I scan in my receipt to get on a queue. I wait literally less than a minute and out comes a woman with my A/C units on a push cart. She wheels them out to the curb and puts them in our car, and off we go. The whole Sears experience could not have taken more than 15 minutes in its entirety. Compare that to the nearly 30 minutes I waited last week at Ikea AFTER making my purchase, which was made with no help on the sales floor and after navigating their maze of cross-selling opportunities. Don’t get me wrong here, I think Ikea is one of the finest merchandisers around, but that’s what made the Sears experience that much more remarkable.

The epilogue of this story, unfortunately, is that I’m going to bed tonight without either unit installed. The big one is going to be a non-trivial project (one that caused me to go out and buy my first power drill) that I just couldn’t get into so late in the evening. The small one is too small for our bedroom window (who knew that having a window 39″ across is so unusual?), so it may have to go back — and then I’ll get to see just how good the user experience at Sears really is.

I was lurking on Joi Ito’s IRC channel for a while this morning, when Kevin Marks posted a link to We Feel Fine.

In addition to satisfying anyone’s inner voyeur, the site provides an interesting user experience, showing a dataset in various visualization/interactivity models. What’s more, it has it’s own API (does that automatically make it “Web 2.0″? [smirk]).

A little story on ZDNet’s Between the Lines caught my eye because as someone starting a new blog I can’t help but think a bit how what I write here will in many cases be the first (and perhaps only) impression of me that readers have (perhaps it’s just delusions of grandeur that anyone I don’t know will actually read this blog, but that’s a topic for a different time). As usual, when a topic of this nature is covered in blog/press format the interesting details and nuances are lost, but you can always dive into the publications on Judith’s (the woman the post is about) page.

Robert Young’s piece about the evolution of advertising on MySpace and other social networks made me cringe. Judging by the comments on the post many others had a similar reaction, though the tone seems to be more about the business feasibility than the social implications. In short, Young suggests that MySpace could act as a “talent agency” to identify users who are brand-friendly, and then use those folks as, in essence, spokesmodels for micro-demographics of their friends.

In the same session I read the thread on Slashdot about Craigslist, where the varied reasons a company might “turn down” huge profits was discussed. The common theme here is when business models and what the people using a service want come into some kind of tension.

In general, advertising models always exhibit this tension, of course. Even in an age of context-sensitive advertising, where the relevance is certainly much better than the broadcast-style interruption model, the ads are still the thing used to pay the bills, (I’m reminded of Comedy Central’s web site, where the annoying Flash ads are literally wrapped in a box that says “Payin’ The Bills” as if it’s “us” (you and Comedy Central) vs. the advertisers.

But, back to Young’s suggestion of having kids vie to be noticed by an advertising executive on-high in order to become a shill to their buddies. On the face of it, I tend to agree with those who think that leaving aside the cultural critique, the business model just isn’t sound, since the whole point of building of the model is to build “trust” between advertisers and audiences (the origin of Young’s idea is that advertisers are scared to have their ads placed on parts of the site, like profiles, that can’t be controlled for content that they would find objectionable to be associated with). Knowing that your friend was trying to get noticed and is now trying to entice you to buy something in order to be rewarded is hardly a way to build trust. I certainly hope that most people would just plain not subscribe to such blatant commercial exploitation of their friends, but I suppose that history has shown people will do strange things for their 15 minutes (or 15 clicks, if you will). I can’t claim to any longer have a finger on the pulse of the youth, but from I’ve seen on the amateur video sites and other centers of peer publishing, they would find some way to appropriate such crass commercialism to their own ends.

Raph Koster has a nice little piece on the cyclical nature of audience behaviors in MMORPGs.

I’ll add yet another voice to the blog world linking to Don’t Cross the Debt Bitch.

Remember once upon a time, when people debated the relative merits of and predicted the future prevalence of thin vs. fat clients? I remember when I first used the “fat” client of Federal Express — at the time I thought such clients would become increasingly popular. My thinking was that the complexity of developing web-based applications was increasing (this was years before Jesse gave us “AJAX” as a moniker — though, of course, not years before all the technologies behind AJAX were being used) quickly enough that the cost of building a truly interesting web interface was starting to approach that of “regular” software. At the same time, bandwidth was increasing, so downloading and installing actual software didn’t seem that onerous anymore. Sitting here today I can’t say I was necessarily right, though certainly the iTunes Music Store or any client-based news reader are prime examples of what we would have then called a “fat” client in action.

I recently downloaded Pyro, an application that provides an interface for Campfire (the chat application from the good folks at 37signals). But, Pyro isn’t really what would have been called a “fat” client — sure, sure, it’s a full-blown, separate download that goes into my /Applications folder (for those who don’t use Macs, that’s basically the equivalent of your “c:\Program Files” directory — and please don’t leave comments explaining that I don’t need to be installing my applications in either of those folders), but Pyro is really just a web browser. A web browser specifically tailored to be used for one application only. Now, as something of a web purist myself, this might have offended my sensibilities, but I think it just might be genius. You see, for an application that you use frequently, especially one like chat where you will care that you are notified about incoming messages and such, it’s nice to have a separate item you can “Alt-Tab” to, see bouncing in your Dock (like the Taskbar, for you Windows-only folks), and generally separate visually and conceptually from your normal web browsing (as I said yesterday, I tend to have way too many windows/tabs open in my main browser to have any one of those tabs be useful as an always-on application). The Pyro approach is extremely lightweight, using Apple’s WebKit with a thin wrapper of Campfire specific preferences/features. So, I think of it as a “big-boned” client more than a “fat” client. This is a very different approach than the Widget I use to access another 37signals product, Backpack, where I keep all of my TODO lists. In that case, the Widget is using the Backpack API on a custom web interface (though, of course, the OS X Dashboard Widgets are built using XHTML/CSS/Javascript anyway, so it’s sort of the same concept — not a full-blown custom application).

What I’d love to have is an application that lets me spawn these custom applications — a “meta application” if you will. It would basically let me configure a few things about what kinds of information needs to be stored for authentication, let’s me tweak the UI and choose various menu/toolbar options, and then creates a stand-alone application that would be specialized to a specific web-based application. For someone versed in the ways of Objective-C and XCode, building something like Pyro would be a breeze, but even for someone like me, with some reasonable experience hacking at web scripting and databases, grocking all of that is too high a learning curve to make a productive contribution (and, more importantly, it would likely have lots of bugs that would be time consuming for someone new to the platform to work on) without really getting into it (and my heads-down days of coding, especially in new environments, are pretty much behind me). The geek in me is rolling his eyes at the person who just wrote that line, though…

I had the pleasure of visiting Onomy Labs today, as part of a small group of folks from the Berkeley Digital Media and Entertainment Club (of which I am an alumnus). Thanks to Seth Familian for hooking it up.

Onomy was born out of Xerox PARC — when they were downsizing a group of researchers looking at interaction design left to start their own thing, and Onomy Labs is the result. Chief Technical Onomist, Scott Minneman showed us three demos of the kind of work Onomy does. The first was the Tilty Table, which provides a unique tactile user interface experience. They shine an image onto a table top, and you can then pan and zoom on that image (in the demo we saw they were all birds-eye images of cities) by tilting and twisting the table. A+ on the wow factor here, though the real-world usability was questionable for any application that isn’t built around showing off that wow factor. But, we talked about how you could layer on other UI metaphors, like some kind of touch screen to make the whole thing more versatile (and it would definitely provide an awesome experience for the right kind of games). The next thing we looked at was The Interactive Digital Wall. The example they have in their office is one used at TED in 2003. Picture a wall, with, in this case, the various days of a conference and the names of the speakers on those days. Now, picture a large monitor (in this case a plasma TV turned to be in portrait perspective) that rolls on rails along the length of the wall. As you move the monitor along the wall, the content you see on the screen reflects what’s on the wall behind it (here’s a picture of what I’m talking about). Last time I was at The Tech Museum (about a year ago) they had one of Onomy’s walls that had two dimensions of movement of the monitor. The last demo was a rig that could “read” text out loud using cameras, OCR, and speech synthesis, but it was all put into a character of a dog — the idea was to help kids learn reading, I think. The point was that it was the total design of the system, made to appeal to a particular audience rather than just the raw underlying technology, which is often boring at best and intimidating at worst for most non-geeks. In short, Onomy’s core strength is imagining and building unique interaction pieces for museums, businesses, and, well, anyone else with such interests. Pretty cool stuff.

Onomy is a small shop, and they seem to like it that way. Their average project sounds like it’s in the mid-five-figures range, and they are only 7 people on staff. But, with high-profile appearances at places like TED and the upcoming Foo Camp, I would look for Onomy to continue to build a strong reputation with lots of influential people, and hopefully that should bring them much success.

For all the various banter about the Attention Economy, this was one of the first pieces I’ve seen that really digs into some fundamental insights about the human brain and connects those with the ethos of openness as “good” for more than just political reasons:

http://firstmonday.org/issues/issue11_6/goldhaber/.

At the end of last month I moved to the South Bay to be closer to my wife’s work (a professor at SJSU). Moving, needless to say, is a bitch — and very time consuming. As a result, I hadn’t read the couple dozen or so blogs I try to follow for a couple weeks, and now that I’m trying to catch up, I realize just how time-consuming it can be to follow the discussion that is the blogosphere, let alone try to engage in that discussion.

Once upon a time I didn’t even use RSS — I just had a list of bookmarks of blogs I visited regularly. I tried a few different RSS readers over the last few years, but these days I just use the built-in RSS support in Safari. At first, I wasn’t into it, but when I worked at Apple last summer I forced myself to try using it for a couple weeks, and now I’m hooked. In fact, I’m so hooked that it has become the primary reason I continue to use Safari as my primary browser, despite the fact that it continually lets me down by being either a) not compatible with the latest Ajaxy goodness (more on why that’s a damn shame in a future post), or b) damn slow. Now, don’t get me wrong. I think Safari is quite a good browser (especially when you add in Saft), but I tend to have lots of windows/tabs open, and after a while it just plain bogs down (to be fair, I have found that Firefox and its derivatives aren’t much better on that front). I am hopeful that Flock, with it’s fairly decent built-in RSS reader will be my salvation, but it lacks some basic features in the latest beta (like having folders in the shortcut bar that contain various RSS feeds, or even having sub-folders at all in bookmark collections).

Anyway, the point of this post was that there are too many good bloggers. And, to make matters worse, good bloggers tend to link to other good bloggers, so during a session of catching up on a long list of blogs, I inevitably find several new blogs worth reading (thus, the large number of windows and tabs open at once), making my list of blogs to follow even longer. In the last 3 years I have had to go through a total reset on my blog feed list twice — once the list becomes too long I found it was better to just start from scratch, and the blogs really worthwhile to me come back to the list eventually. I stopped reading political blogs entirely, as they were taking up too much time and only served to agitate me (regardless of the political affiliation). I also jettisoned the notion that I would follow blogs on topics only tangentially interesting to me (though, I do continue to read a few blogs about ColdFusion, even though I rarely write code these days). Most of the blogs I read fall into one of three categories — first are friends. Despite the incredible, perpetual time-crunch of my current lifestyle, I always find time to read the blog posts of my friends, most of which are truly personal blogs, about things like kids, travels, and random life experiences. These are the kinds of blogs that people mock when they write about blogs — “who cares about picture’s of this dude’s cat?”; Answer: I do. For all the wonders of blogs I read by interesting business executives, academics, lawyers, venture capitalists, entrepreneursl, and other professional types, it’s the blogs of my friends, many of whom live far away, that really give me faith in the staying power of the personal publishing revolution. The other blogs I read tend to be either VCs or someone involved in some way with the dizzying array of interesting things happening in the world of Internet-based applications.

Anyway, given that there are too many great bloggers out there, I’ll leave it to you, the reader, to decide why this rambling post has managed to take up your time thus far….

Keeping up with a blog is tough. If you don’t write almost every day, people start to lose interest. That’s particularly true for a blog that hasn’t even really started yet.

So, you can imagine how upsetting it was when my second post on this blog was lost in the ether by Flock, that fancy browser based on Firefox. One of the nice features of Flock, in theory, is the integated blogging interface, allowing one to create a blog post any time by clicking a button on the toolbar. Sounds great.

Somehow, Flock managed to post only the title of my post, losing the body entirely. It just didn’t make it. And, of course, Flock closes the window after you post, making it impossible to retrieve. But, wait, Flock is apparently able to save posts locally. Well, somehow the folder Flock created to do just that is empty.

The short of it is, instead of reading what was surely brilliant insights into the nature of the universe, you are reading this. And how is a rant about beta software a valuable use of your time? Well, it’s a warning to stay away from the Flock beta if you are in it for the blogging tools….

This is the first post on this blog, though for me it feels simply like a continuation of my past blogging effort. That blog has been dead since I started business school, and it suffered from not staying “on topic” — mostly because it was never clear what exactly the topic was in the first place. My plan is to keep this one a bit more focused, but we’ll see. Given that very few people will even know this blog exists for the foreseeable future, a word on why I bother…

I remember when I first found the Internet. It was 1994. Sure, I had been sending email and doing research through telnet for over a year by then, but it was in (and here I will date myself) late 1994 that I decided, along with my classmate, Ben Archibald, to do an independent project about the Internet during the “January term” of 1995. At the time we came to the Internet from a social science perspective. We were interested in the cultural phenomenon of a new medium. The Internet was a new paradigm in media that we wanted to write about, as good social scientists do. But, we quickly learned that writing about the Internet would be missing the point.

Put yourself back in January 1995. The very notion that you could sell things on the web was quite a new idea — in fact, it was still controversial with a non-trivial percentage of people that constituted the “Internet community” — a term that barely has meaning today. The mainstream media was certainly abuzz about the Internet, but plenty of the stories were about whether or not it was here to stay.

Back then, Internet culture meant things like John Perry Barlow’s A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace — lofty stuff, to be sure, but I was fully bought in. Really, I still am. So, for me, blogging is not really a new phenomenon at all — merely a formalized set of conventions for what the Internet was supposed to be all about all along. For that matter, most of the Web 2.0 hype fits that same mold — bottom-up, distributed, open, peer-production — these are all concepts that made the Internet great even before HTTP.

So, whether anyone but a handful of my friends reads this blog isn’t terribly important as long as someone is getting something out of it. That’s the beauty of living way out here on the long tail.

As an aside, I was struck after I wrote this how similar it is to how I started my last blog nearly two years ago.