Yahoo's MyWeb 2.0 beta and del.icio.us

Yahoo launched My Web 2.0 in beta today and while I don't have time right now to pontificate on the larger meanings (take a look at John Markoff's piece in today's NYT for that), my first thought was, "cool! but gosh, I've put all this effort into tagging and sharing stuff in del.icio.us already. . . . "

It didn't take long for me to realize that since you can import RSS feeds into My Web 2.0 (very nice, Yahoo folks), and del.icio.us generates an RSS feed of my stuff, then I could just import my del.icio.us RSS feed into My Web 2.0 to get a head start. Not only did this approach work, all my del.icio.us tags were carried over in the transition. I like the way Yahoo makes new technologies simple for regular folks, but also takes care of the geeks who walk among us.

IT solutions for outdoor grilling

Since we're approaching the pinnacle of grilling season with the 4th of July holiday, it only seems appropriate to take a short break from enterprise IT and point to my friend and neighbor Andrew Leonard's piece in Salon's "Object Lust" series. This week, Andrew writes lovingly about the Maverick Remote-Check Thermometer that I gave him a while back (or, as he says of the Remote-Check, it was "provided to me by a high priest of the digital age." That is a real compliment from a man who works the grill like LeBron James plays hoops.)

For serious multi-tasking grillers, the Remote-Check offers remote administration at its best. Of all the IT solutions I have recommended and implemented over the course of my career, this one ranks very highly on the pride list. At the very least, giving one of these to your neighbors is a nice way to distract them and make them forget they were about to ask you about their latest spyware infection or Wi-Fi issue.

Those low-down-can't-post-my-podcast to iTunes blues

Sigh. I spent part of my evening manually typing up an RSS feed for my CTO Connection podcasts (#1, #2) containing all the extended RSS stuff in the Apple iTunes podcast spec, and this is my reward:

I guess I'll try again in the morning.

Update: 8:30am PT: Still having "technical difficulties." I tried at 6am also.
Update: 7:15pm PT: Finally got it through! (after failing all day) We'll see if/when it shows up in the directory.

Asterisk, open source telephony, and the Clash

My InfoWorld column this week ("Open source calling") focuses on Asterisk, the open source PBX solution that we reviewed in InfoWorld earlier this year (very positively). Thank goodness IT and telco folks now have an open source solution that can do battle with the big boys -- we've all been suffering from big vendor lock-in for a long time now when it comes to phone systems.

By the way, the headline and "dek" (what we call the subheadline in the biz) is an incredibly strained reference to the Clash's London Calling:

Headline: Open source calling
Dek: The clash between open source and proprietary telephony solutions has arrived

That's just one small attempt to redeem myself for referencing Motley Crue's "Too Fast for Love" in a column a while back.

Podcasts from Syndicate conference last month

I'll admit -- I have fallen significantly behind on producing the third of my CTO Connection podcasts. You can listen to Jon Williams, CTO of Kaplan Test Prep and Admissions, or Mike Dunn, VP of Hearst Interactive Media if you haven't listened to the old ones. I do have a raw interview already in the can with Dave Simon, IT Director for the Sierra Club -- expect that one reasonably soon.

In the meantime, I could at least point you to some other audio, right?

Mark Chernesky (Web Development Director at CNN.com and one of my former colleagues) forwarded me links to a couple of the Syndicate sessions he recorded with his iRiver. Mark says of his recording technique:

One thing to note on the audio quality on all the podcasts from the conference, they were recorded nearly as low tech as you can get. An iRiver iFP-899 sitting on the table in the middle of a large conference room using the internal mic. No external mic, no headphones to check audio quality, no changing settings. Simply turn power on, hit record.

Here are the sessions Mark grabbed (and thanks to the IDG World Expo folks for encouraging this!):

• Beyond Words: Media RSS and Podcasting featuring David Berlind (ZDNET), Mike Dunn (Hearst Interactive Media), Bradley Horowitz (Yahoo!), and David Payne (CNN.com) (I moderated -- some notes here)
• Doc Searls' Closing Remarks

Microsoft, Longhorn, and RSS: I'm having IE4 flashbacks!

Steve Rubel's recent post ("What default feeds will IE7 and Longhorn carry?") made me think about my experience back in 1997 at CNN.com and CNNSI.com when IE4 was released with the Active Desktop driven by CDF, a syndication format now in the dustbin of history (along with ICE). CDF wasn't RSS, but it also wasn't that different conceptually. It's a bad analogy from a technical purity standpoint, but if you don't remember Active Desktop, think of it as Pointcast built into the OS and driven by RSS-like feeds in the background. Both CNN.com and CNNSI.com (that's CNN and Sports Illustrated) were default "channels" -- which is why Steve's post got me thinking about the technical implications of Microsoft's RSS announcement. Working on the tech side for a major site providing default channels (which were really just text feeds), I was on the front lines back in '97 on Microsoft's IE4/Active Desktop rollout and it was UGLY. I'll get to the details in a moment, but for some reason, this is feeling a little like deja vu (although it is certainly different).

So, if you're caught up in RSS fever (and who isn't at this point?), you might be thinking, "Where did this talk of Active Desktop come from? What does that have to do with anything?" I'll point you to this Microsoft Knowledge Base article, "How to Configure the Active Desktop," particularly this bit:

You can use the Active Desktop to make your desktop act like your own personal Web page. You can display pieces of your favorite Web sites directly on your desktop and keep them up-to-date automatically. You can easily customize the Active Desktop at any time.

Sound familiar? My preferred aggregator (Bloglines) says this when I load up my home page: Create a personal Bloglines page loaded with the freshest news about the things you love. Hmmm. . . automatic updating, easy customization, displaying the latest news on your desktop, big Microsoft initiatives. . .

Now to the technical part, which I voiced in March 2004 in the context of my Active Desktop experience back in '97 (except I was writing about RSS scaling issues):

Another interesting technical aside -- as our RSS requests have grown quickly, we have noticed increased server loads at the top of the hour as aggregators "wake up" to pull feeds. Not a huge problem for us right now, but the surge has roughly the same characteristics as a distributed DoS attack and could eventually present trouble for really huge web sites unless aggregators become a bit smarter. I was working at CNN.com when IE4 and its Active Desktop with various CDF "channels" was released, and boy was it active. CNN.com and CNNSI.com were default channels in the new browser. All the newly-downloaded IE4 clients absolutely pounded our servers with requests for CDF files. It was a big pain, and I wish I could remember how we dealt with it.

Actually, I do remember how we dealt with it -- we assumed the fetal position and prayed for the barrage to stop. OK, I'm kidding (sort of). Our operations staff at CNN was beyond incredible and included people like Sam Gassel, who probably knows as much about scaling as anyone in the world. I recall a visiting vendor comparing the CNN ops team to Israeli tank commandos -- these guys were the best, and I still feel honored to this day for having worked with them. When we had problems, those problems were very real and very big -- and this Active Desktop problem was a doozy.

We were being absolutely slammed as more people downloaded the IE4 browser (I believe Active Desktop was enabled by default), so we set up a test machine with IE4 installed and monitored its outbound HTTP requests. Although no user was actually sitting at the machine, we discovered that it was making thousands of requests to fetch content that it had (supposedly) already cached, and it was pre-fetching entire web pages to feed the hungry
Active Desktop (hmmmm, Google Web Accelerator, anyone?) As I recall, Microsoft was very slow to respond to our pleas for help to the point of being almost disdainful when we finally had a conference call with a team over there to air our concerns. I can't remember exactly how the situation was resolved, but I didn't leave with a good taste for Microsoft.

That was eight years ago, of course, so I'm glad to see that Longhorn Team RSS has a blog with open comments. Even if there were problems like we experienced back then, I think it would be impossible for Microsoft to hide from them anyway (not in a Scoble world anyway). Also, scaling to handle RSS traffic seems to be better understood now -- look here to see how we dealt with some minor scaling issues here at InfoWorld last year (as described by our IT manager Kevin Railsback).

I'm guessing that the Longhorn RSS reader will be a lot gentler than the old Active Desktop driven by CDF -- but if it ends up roughing up a few sites along the way, don't think that something like that hasn't happened before.

Long Tail for comedic effect

It's been a pretty busy few days (two back-to-back days of all-day meetings on the east coast, the kind where the meeting is preceded by a group breakfast, briefly interrupted for a group lunch, followed by a group dinner, then the inevitable after-dinner drinks), but one thing is absolutely clear judging from the content of the meetings I attended: the Long Tail has absolutely entered the popular business consciousness. I can't tell you how many times I heard the term used in many different contexts. Of course, Chris Anderson has already noted the misuse of the Long Tail meme he created and offered some words of caution in his recent post "What the Long Tail Isn't." (It's always worthwhile to re-read his original exposition of the Long Tail, too.)

In any case, now that the Long Tail meme has been (correctly or incorrectly) firmly implanted in the business consciousness, it can now be used as fodder for a cheap laugh when you're doing business presentations. At my meetings earlier this week, I delivered a line that went something like this, "My blog is part of the Long Tail. (comedic pause) Which is just another way of saying no one reads it. [rim shot here]." It killed, I tell you.

I flew all the way from Boston to San Francisco last night (comedic pause). . . .and boy are my arms tired. [rim shot here]

OK, I'll stop now.

Experiments in the RSS economy: the sequel

Two years ago tomorrow, InfoWorld began experimenting with RSS advertising. Our experimentation has continued since then and we have tweaked the feeds in lots of different ways, but our basic approach has been consistent. Today we upped the ante considerably in our experiments.

Our VP/GM of Online Matt McAlister announced this morning that we've rolled out full-text RSS feeds for our content, incorporating 336x280 ads from DoubleClick into the feed to help pay the bills, along with related links driven by our del.icio.us experiments. I'm biased because I work here, but I'll put a stake in the ground and say that mixing advertising in a full-text feed with content produced from a staff of writers and copy editors seems reasonable. Matt asks two key business questions that until now, everyone has hypothesized about, but not really tested:

1) What impact does the additional exposure of content in our feeds have on our site traffic? Will people visit the web site less?
2) We have a lot of revenue drivers on every page of the site. So, will the advertising revenue from the feeds make up the difference in lost traffic value?

Arriving at the answers to these questions is going to be really interesting.

Matt is on a roll these days -- if you didn't read his post What is the future for Web sites in a world of RSS? a couple of weeks ago, then you missed a thoughtful and honest essay on what it means to work inside a traditional media company in the new world of aggregation (a post that got nice pointage from places like BusinessWeek and Micro Persuasion).

Geek dinner next Tuesday 6/14

My fellow CTO and friend Mike Dunn and I are organizing a geek dinner for next Tuesday in SF at Henry's Hunan -- details on Mike's blog. Please RSVP via comments on Mike's blog or e-mail to Mike or me so we can warn the restaurant if the numbers become substantial. Mike is keeping a running list of attendees on his blog.

My reaction to Apple / Intel announcement

Yawn.

Wait, that yawn wasn't deep enough. . . yawn. Ahhh, better.

Without a doubt, it's an interesting "inside baseball" story within the technology industry, but from an end-user perspective, it's as if Coca-Cola changed its sugar supplier as far as I'm concerned. The main thing I'm wondering is whether or not an Intel-powered PowerBook would burn my legs like my current G4 PowerBook (and based on some reporting from our own Ephraim Schwartz about a year ago, I could be looking forward to cooler legs).

The message to developers is a bit strange, though. On the Apple Developer Connection page, I see Xcode 2.1 being heralded as the platform for creating Universal Binaries, which is well and good, but if you read the release notes for Xcode 2.1, you'll see this new release described in a decidely ho-hum way -- Xcode 2.1 is a minor release that extends Xcode 2.0 -- and absolutely zero mention of Intel when I searched those same release notes (as of this writing, at least).

Reading the Universal Binary Programming Guidelines sheds some light, particularly on whether or not Apple plans to simply have Intel produce PowerPC chips, as some have suggested. The term x86 is used all over that document, and is defined as such (under "Conventions" on page 10 of the PDF):

The term x86 is a generic term used throughout this book to refer to the class of microprocessors manufactured by Intel. This book uses the term x86 as a synonym for IA-32 (Intel Architecture 32-bit).

Dan Gillmor has a nice roundup of the news, but from where I sit, this falls into the "hmm, interesting" camp of news, but otherwise is a real snoozer.

Podcasting and Murphy

Thank you, o' great Murphy, for bringing road construction crews with jackhammers to tear up the street outside my office (2nd and Bryant in SF) just as I am beginning to record podcasts in my office. Sigh.

Normally, I don't blog "woe is me" complaints like this one, but when I looked up Murphy's Law on Wikipedia, I decided to post my whining just so I could have a pretext for pointing you to the Wikipedia entry. It's an interesting story, and like podcasting itself, there is a little controversy about who should ultimately be credited.