My blogging software is homebrew, and I haven't bothered to put functionality in it to hold back things from publishing. Once I post, it's public. So I have to finish my thoughts in one fell swoop, and have time to do so, or I end up with something that looks pretty goofy. I've used various tactics (Google Notebook, adhoc pages in my wiki, paper!) to help me store "in-process" posts...none of them with much success. I just can't quite get them into the workflow. But I'm liking my baby here, so I think this will actually be a useful place. Feel free to look around...I don't mind people seeing stuff in progress, as long as it's clear that it IS in progress.

Here come the plumbers! Plumbing isn't glamorous, but it's a critical piece of modern infrastructure. Regardless of the design of the house, the landscaping, or the location...it needs plumbing under the covers, and reliable plumbing to boot. And the analogy holds in other realms; I often consider sysadmins and DBAs (my tribe!) the plumbers of the IT world, keeping things working behind the scenes. This scales even to large-scale infrastructure as well, and on multiple levels.

In one sense, you can consider (of course) the backbone IP providers and such the true plumbing of the Internet. That's valid, but limiting. If we pop up the stack a bit, you can see that "cloud computing" providers like Amazon, Google, etc. will be the plumbing providers of raw "service" (storage, db, etc.) to developers. It's a great step in simplification...but we can go further.

Another level up, and things start to get really interesting. Many web sites and services have been about providing a real-world service (everything from Amazon and book sales, to Backpack and project management, to muxtape and playlists)...but more and more interesting services are popping up that are, for lack of a better term, plumbing. Everything from open protocols (like OAuth for authentication, OpenID for identity, and microformats for data) to full-fledged services that you can wire into your app. Twitter was (and is...it ain't dead yet!) both a microblogging app and something more; a prototype messaging bus for the web. Tweets have been remixed and consumed in ways that no one could have imagined at the start. And that's a good thing; as painful as the Fail Whale can be, Twitter certainly has been driving innovative ideas.

And now, a new crop of plumbers appears, learning from the old. Gnip is here to try and re-architect the message bus into a scalable and manageable model, Identi.ca makes microblogging open, federated, and Free (Software), and FriendFeed is truly the next level of meta-conversational tool. The fact that plumbing is hot right now makes me very happy. Good tools enable great ideas to be born. I think we're getting ready to see some great stuff. Vive la plumbing!!

Post thoughts about FF and it's relationship to Brad Templeton's "bring the app to the data" paradigm. Meta-apps like FF are a baby step, in the sense that I can change out services (delicious for magnolia, for example). Also, services like FireEagle will be important; it manages location data, but not as central repository (it maintains only most recent point), and it is touched only via OAuth style APIs, so again, you can pull in and out services as they change in relevance, safety, etc. It provides an import service as a highly available and visible touchpoint on the Internet, but you can manage the full archive yourself. Baby steps, but we might get closer to Brad's idea than I thought we would. This model is SO much better than the Facebook/MySpace/AOL(yet again) silo model. Or even the Google silo model, for that matter.

Relevance of Ferguson's comments. So far...Obama is liked by young people, and they suck, and they're not important. Que? "MaCain is just below the average relative age of a President". Why on Earth do I care that McCain is apparently "old enough" to be President. This matters? Sad. I can promise you that though I'm happy to mock a 200-year old man as President, I care not that McCain is older than the nation, and I certainly DON'T care that Obama is "young". Whatever.

Reasons for McCain: Congress and President together Democrat would give us most liberal government since early Clinton years. (Wow. Really?) Bad, for Republicans. McCain can win independent voters (Ferg.), so is best Republican for 2008 election.

So far, no reasons for why McCain should win other than McCain is the Republican nominee. I guess for such a partisan presentation (Ferg. is a McCain advisor). I guess that makes sense, but it's not really what I thought I would be listening to. I mean, this is preaching to the choir...telling Hoover Institution people why they should vote for...um...the Republican candidate. Well, the point is that he was the only Republican that could win...ok, that's valid. But see...he's already won the Republican nomination.

Democrats plan to make economy worse...Obama at heart a New Deal regulator. (Roosevelt) Obama itching to "tax and spend" (pot...kettle). He actually is apparently more concerned about the taxing than the spending. He thinks that recessions aren't dealt with by gov't expenditures...reduce taxes, he says. This is what GWB did, and actually worked. (???) Worries about deficit aren't relevant. Trending downward (35% -> 23% over next 10 years). McCain is "serious" about cutting expenditures.

Compares anti-globalization with protectionism of the 1930s. Cherry-picking...likes to point out places where it's relevant to him that things have changed, but likes to make comparisions to OLD economic situations where...well, it works out for him. Be consistent!

OK, he's trying to make people who are luke-warm supporters of McCain into enthusiastic supporters. OK, gotcha.

Amazon article here = comment

Ashley Alexandra Dupre: to me, worth $24.31. Tell my story.

OpenID and OAuth (and Cardspace) -- much of text on Nokia; copy from there

Review of Farthing...why it's so good. Story similar to lots in that "country mystery" style, but the important concept is the counterfactual history perspective. That's the strength of SF.

Less Twitter, more conversation.

One...Meellion...Flowers... http://kenzoid.com/blog/archive/765/

Review these sorts of sites:

If the content is not at a domain that you control, or the domain expires, you lose any way of having a non-archival canonical location. So...do you run a service to maintain domains for dead people (you can actually get pretty long-running domain registrations; this is possible). But what about content at blogger.com, wordpress.com, lj, or any other place where they never DID control the domain? Obviously, (and Jon has thought this through already), there needs to be a primary location that these other platforms reference, or pull from. That way, you can move over time, if need be.

Should you be a for-profit, a non-profit, or what? Nifty problem.

danah

KenzoidsExoCortex: BlogPostsInProcess (last edited 2009-03-25 02:22:54 by localhost)