One startup's trajectory
posted Saturday, March 31, 2007 at 7:43 pm MSTIn his "Breakups are hard to do" (see his What Do I Know"), Todd Dominey gives us a nice peek behind the scenes:
"the road to launch started a year and a half ago. Myself and a handful of other talented people spent months creating presentations and financial projections, developing wireframes, pitching the concept to focus groups, designing mockups, acquiring staff, and of course developing the brand; all with the end goal of acquiring the 'green light' from Turner. You see, Super Deluxe wasn't a directive from above, but rather a concept that had to be sold to the company before it could be started.
We reached that goal early Fall 2006, and immediately followed through with three intense months of development. The site was publicly launched mid-January 2007.
Today, two months later, Super Deluxe is seeing incredible traffic with very little marketing or advertising."
Nice story ... thanks.
Hey, BTW: I took my "The Cool Discipline of Freedom" (a dormant blog) for a walk through blogspot.com's "Template Update" process and settled on "Scribe", a design by Todd's Dominey Design. Nice thing about properly formed XML? It took me about 18.2 seconds to shift the sidebar from left (which I think really sux) to right (which I think is only right and proper. (Now, here's a quibble: how long do you bet it'll take me to get the google-geek's lame-ass Profile "widget" to STOP SHOUTING MY NAME AND ADDRESS. *buncha dummies*)
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When I point to how we're still wrastlin' with email clients' functionality though it's 2007 (as evidence that yuppies and their kidz know how to cash out 80% of the profit for providing 20% of the functionality ... nasty aulde dawg that I am) my interlocutor looks at me like I've sprouted a second head. Which, in these times, passes for compelling counter-argument.
Today I came across this:
"due to the fact that i'm using a web mail client, and my system is extremely unstable, i kept receiving an error message from the mail server, immediately followed by the crashing and auto-closing of whatever browser i was attempting to use... apparently, the error messages on the mail server were false alerts, and, consequently, the post ended up being posted multiple times."
If you're not using elite gear, you're going to get stabbed in the eye. But not just techno-peasants, not by a long shot! What has W3C's HTMLWorkingGroup been wrangling? Whether it's dead obvious that mailing list software should be configured the to include a "Reply-To: <list address>" header in messages, or whether that's just dead wrong. 2007 ... that's been a perennial problem /forevuh/, and was fully documented in 2000 ... to absolutely no avail: the two camps remain at logger-heads.
see marc.merlins.org/netrants/listreplyto.html ("List Reply-To considered harmful"; a compilation) of unicom.com/pw/reply-to-harmful.html ("''Reply-To'' Munging Considered Harmful") and metasystema.net/essays/reply-to.mhtml ("Reply-To Munging Considered Useful")
Is it because of my 2nd head that I have been so rebuffed in arguing that we have for long been in need of a dialectical discourse system? What else could it be ... opportunistic careerism and tunnel-vision? Naawww, not us!
heh
"Chaos is a name for any order that produces confusion in our minds." -- George Santayana
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Thanks to a item by Doc Searls:
Temporally Relevant - The Meaning Economy: "All relationships between these networks are always fully transparent and openly published. Networks exchange knowledge between them, each adding new meaning to the information, each of them responsible for the reputations of their participants and peers. This is the very foundation of a Meaning Economy."
New writing by yours truly, for your consideration, the first of a set I wrote this week.
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Findings / Gleanings
posted Friday, March 30, 2007 at 9:32 pm MSTSoftware: Laszlo Webtop | LaszloSystems: IA Desktop in a Browser - "Designed to support the delivery of integrated suites of OpenLaszlo RIAs, Laszlo Webtop offers a consistent user experience that is accessible from any web-enabled computer. The wide-ranging appeal of Laszlo Webtop makes it ideal for internal or consumer-facing corporate deployments, varying from financial dashboards to consumer communications consoles to enriched enterprise portals."
Joel Spolsky on "How Microsoft Lost the API War" - "largely unnoticed: Microsoft's crown strategic jewel, the Windows API, is lost. The cornerstone of Microsoft's monopoly power and incredibly profitable Windows and Office franchises, which account for virtually all of Microsoft's income and covers up a huge array of unprofitable or marginally profitable product lines, the Windows API is no longer of much interest to developers. The goose that lays the golden eggs is not quite dead, but it does have a terminal disease, one that nobody noticed yet."
Canvas Paint ... M$ Paint in a browser window, with AJAX and the new <canvas> tag. How amazing is that?!
ThumbStacks (the devblog) and Empressr (also the blog), 2 sweet little web apps for producing presentations.
ZoHo Creator ... just plain impressive.
Mindomo and Kayuda ... two, count em two web-based concept-mapping systems!
I discovered this slick documentation system earlier. Then I was really wowwed by this example of ''complex layout'', really. And then Jack Slocum's blog, an absolute garden of delights ... but dig this blog entry ... click the little glyphies in the left edge/toolslide. Amazing, nae?!
Raymond Chen's blog, out of M$, recommended by Joel. And OnStartups.com, a dandy blog on entrepreneurship.
Think pieces:
"Yale University Press has graciously agreed to release an online version of my 1998 book, Cultural Software: A Theory of Ideology, under a Noncommercial Sharealike Creative Commons license."
Decentralized Information Group, TimBL's ''Linked Data - Design Issue'', SweoIG / LinkingOpenData wiki at W3C
"About Chief Blogging Officer huh huh ... RageBoy by another name! *grin*
*gawwwwwwwwwwww what a day!*
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What's the point of life if you don't have a code? *snort*
posted Wednesday, March 28, 2007 at 8:59 pm MSTDon't know about "geek code"? Then "blogger code" won't mean a whole lot to you.
Know about "geek code"? heh ... I'll show you mine; you show me yours? *le smurque*
Geek code from ?what? 9 years ago:
G_C v2.1: GTW/P/>CS$ !n !e e e+ e* !n -d+$ H+ !n Y++ a+ po->-+ h>* !n s-:- g+ p3+ !au>--- w->+++ v->--- C++ P+>++++ E---->--- W UB>++++ M- N++ K- t++ R G'>? tv++>-- B-- u* f- y++++ r r--- !n
Blogger code from ?what? 9 minutes ago:
B9 d t+ k++ s u- f+ i+ o+ x+ e l- c--
heh ... sometimes it's nice to leave "discourse ethics" and "participatory deliberation in the context of post-modernist historiography" aside for a moment or 3. *snort*
I blame Hixie for this. You can blame Hixie too, if you want. Or blame someone else. Even me. Whatevuh. heh
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Beginning again = a new beginning
posted Monday, March 26, 2007 at 3:42 pm MSTConversation Base: Introduction Of Bloggers and Blacksmiths :
"'It began with conversations. Then we got into broadcast media. Now we are going back to conversations. It's a full circle.'
--Terry Catchpole, The Catchpole Corporation"
VibeWise | Taking Simple Things Seriously ... Beginning with foundations
What does it come down to? You know … “it“.
As individuals we are story tellers. (If what you are doesn’t matter to you then you should adjust your tin-foil helmet and until you do just find a quiet place and try not to cause trouble.) That means our “internal narrative” is what runs society. (Like the little voice in your head right now that’s telling you this is hippie bullshit … or wondering what I’m going on about.)
“History” is the story that historians agree on. Made up of facts, most of the time but not always, and strung together in a way that makes some sort of sense to most people most of the time. Usually in a way that’s useful to those with the sort of clout that lets them have historians hired and fired.
Many2Many ... Nuts and Bolts VS Turnpikes and Beltways:
Thinking about how the processes of publication and broadcasting relate to the dynamics of inter-personal exchange (The over-lap is so fractal it’s like stepping into a time/space discontinuity!) I realize that the mandate I imagine for Many2Many is quite distinct from, well, from what drives my “Participatory Deliberation” project. So much so that I started a seperate blog for the latter: VibeWise: Taking Simple Things Seriously
Also of interest, google hacks:
In Dojo's blog, "Planet Dojo" (see their "Summer of Code / Data Projects") I came across Daniela Florescu's "Managing Semi-Structured Data" ... a new one for me.
And reading up on Leo Sauermann's thinking about "Gnowsis" I found Dynamic Data Web Page, by Frederick Giasson.
Also, from Alex of Dojo: "Continuing Intermittent Incoherence". And from Brendan Eich, "OpenWeb and its Adversaries"
Elsewise, Conversation With X/HTML 5 Team" (by Ian Hickson) and "Cool URIs for the Semantic Web" (by Leo Sauermann, Richard Cyganiak and Max Völkel).
