Global Nerdy

Over at the blog of my role model Guy Kawasaki is an entertaining entry titled The Venture Capital Aptitude Test, or VCAT for short. Guy makes it quite clear that:

Venture capital is something to do at the end of your career, not the beginning. It should be your last job, not your first.

The test is really more of a mental exercise rather than those silly web tests whose results bloggers love to post (“Which Three's Company Landlord Are You?”). The gist of the article is that you shouldn't become a VC until after “you’ve had the shiitake kicked out of you.”

(Come to think of it, George and I know a couple of VCs that we'd love to kick the shiitake out of…)

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Perhaps it's a little more “Local Nerdy” than “Global Nerdy”, but perhaps you might find it interesting. I attended a Toronto Board of Trade “Technology Innovators Breakfast” session this morning, where I heard presentations by Alizabeth Calder of Brainhunter and Dan Fortin of IBM Canada on how to make Toronto a world-leading center for information and communications technologies. I took notes and posted them on my personal blog, The Adventures of Accordion Guy in the 21st Century.

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Who knew that recommendation engines could be funny? This made me laugh out loud.

Go to the Philips Norelco BG2020 Men's Bodygroom page at Amazon.com and take a look at the “Customers who bought this item also bought” section:

Click the image to see a larger version.

(Thanks to Miss Fipi Lele for the link.)

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Busy Airport by 'superlocal'. Click the image to see the original on Flickr.

There are a couple of articles that those of us who travel often (I fly about once every 6 weeks, and I assume that George flies as often, if not more) might find interesting:

First: The Socket Seekers is a New York Times article that looks at the half of the airport computing equation that isn't wifi: electrical outlets. I was surprised to read that some airports are actually adding outlets to meet the demand of travellers with laptops, mobile phones, iPods and other devices that need charging; I was always under the impression that they went out of their way to discourage the use of their electrical outlets.

The article offers some advice that's already well-known to regular fliers that casual fliers might not know: when looking for power, think like the custodial staff. They've got to plug in their vacuum cleaners and floor polishers somewhere. To this, I also add: look for things that rely on wall current, such as vending machines and internet kiosks. I don't recommend unplugging those machines to juice your laptop, but sockets often come in sets of two, and one just might be available. I also travel with an extension cord that lets three people share an outlet and pack a spare PowerBook battery.

Also: Why Isn't Internet Access Free for Travellers? Frank Gruber asks the question on his blog, and the comments seem to be split between “I wish internet access was free in hotels and airports too” and “It's called capitalism, Frank.” I think 'net access works better as a free amenity to attract customers rather than as a profit center.

Okay, I'm tooting my own horn here, but a number of people have found it useful enough that I thought it was worthy of mention in this blog.

Duke of URL is a little application that I put together that spits out up to 100 available domain names based on a word or phrase that you provide. The Duke spits out .com domain names by default, but you can also have him give you .net, .org, .info and .biz domains if you prefer.

The Duke is written in PHP (PHP 5, but it's compatible with PHP 4) and makes use of Tucows' OpenSRS API for provisioning and managing domain names. I wrote it to showcase the NAME SUGGEST API call that was recently added to OpenSRS and to demonstrate one possible use. Over the next few weeks, I plan to post the code along with explanatory notes as well as upgrade the Duke to some other possible applications, including mash-ups.

As I mentioned earlier, the Duke generates domain names that are also available. I was under the impression that most of the word-combination domains were taken, but so far the Duke has always been able to provide 100 domain suggestions for every word or phrase I've tried. As usual, there's a lot of junk in the results, but there have also been gems that would have me reaching for my credit card if I were more of a domain speculator. (Maybe I should do that.)

Give it a try!

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It's always great when the author of one of the blogs you read daily writes back in the comments. In this case, it was Kathy Sierra, author of the excellent blog Creating Passionate Users, who responded to yesterday's article titled “Web 2.0” and the Great Grunge Hoax, which in turn was a response to her article, Why Web 2.0 is more than a buzzword.

I'd like to thank Kathy for taking the article (and especially my parody of the excellent graphs that are her stock in trade) in the spirit in which it was intended. It's always tricky using smart-assery in one's writing style while not becoming a techno-vulgarian. I'm also glad she noticed that I can disagree with her without “losing faith in humanity” like Dare Obasanjo did.

In her comment, Kathy writes:

But I disagree (obviously and strongly) with your comparison between the grunge hoax and my post. People have all sorts of notions about why Tim talks about Web 2.0… but the worst characterizations always seems to be from people who don't actually *know* Tim as a personal friend.

I wonder how many people would feel the same way if they knew and trusted Tim as a human being. That doesn't preclude some of his friends from saying to him, “d00d…the concept is sound, but teh whole version number thing was lame.”

I do understand Kathy's concerns about animosity towards Tim. The recent kerfuffle over the Web 2.0 service mark has been the source of friction between Tim and a number of geeks. There's the strange observation in Paul Graham's piece on Web 2.0:

Even Tim O'Reilly was wearing a suit, a sight so alien I couldn't parse it at first. I saw him walk by and said to one of the O'Reilly people “that guy looks just like Tim.”

“Oh, that's Tim. He bought a suit.”

Coming from the DemoCamp brain trust, a bunch of nerds who are also snappy dressers often seen in blazers and dress shirts, Graham's aside about Tim's suits feels like a desperate grab in order to add to a list of his faults. “Look! He's well dressed! NOT…ONE…OF…US!”

I bear no ill will towards Tim. It's been a while since we “swung on the flippity flop”, but we do get along:

I met him at a Peer-to-Peer software meeting at Microsoft in early 2001, and he invited me to play accordion at the closing keynote of the first O'Reilly Peer-to-Peer conference, the con that eventually morphed into ETCon and then ETech.

Simply put: we cool, we cool.

My beef with “Web 2.0” is that on the buzzword-jargon spectrum, it falls closer to the buzzword side. As George wrote in his comment:

Web 2.0 is carries so much water for so many terms, it's basically meaningless. It's the opposite of what jargon should be. Perhaps it most closely resembles the stuff that crosses over from being jargon and turns into poorly-understood mainstream language that newly-minted MBAs use (think “risk management” or “value add”).

And that's the point I was trying to make: not that the term “Web 2.0” was a hoax being pulled on us by Tim and company, but that it's got a slight whiff of fakeness to it. Just as the made-up “harsh realm” found a real use, “Web 2.0” is promotional term that got clumsily repurposed into a technical one.

The Great Grunge Hoax

George and I were DJs at campus pubs and writers at the campus
humor/satire/libel paper at our beloved alma mater during the heyday
of grunge, so we remember the media prank that later got dubbed
“The Great Grunge Hoax”.

The hoax was the creation of Sub Pop Records publicist Megan
Jasper, in response to a call from a New York Times
reporter, who asked for a list of “grunge terms”. You must
remember that this was 1992, around the time when Generation X
was both a buzzword and a bestseller, movies for “twentynothings”
like Slacker, Singles and Reality
Bites were all the rage and grunge was the scene's soundtrack.

(We really lived the grunge thing — we were even in a grunge band
named “Volume”. I like to think we weren't half bad.)

Megan knew an opportunity when she saw one, so she simply made up
a list of terms that while completely made up, sounded plausible to
the reporter on the phone. The list was dutifully reproduced in the
New York Times, which led to it being dutifully copied
by many other publications eager to get a Gen X story.

Here's what the Times version looked like:

“Harsh Realm”

The list had a few obvious clunkers that anyone under 30 would've
been able to instantly spot as fake: wack slacks for old ripped jeans,
cob nobbler and lamestain for “loser”, and my favorite,
swinging on the flippity flop for “hanging out”. That last one seemed
to be a challenge by Megan; it's almost as if she was daring the Times
reporter to figure out that it was a hoax.

The list had to be plausible-sounding, so some of Jasper's coinages
could've been actual slang of the time. Fuzz for “sweater”, plats for
“platform shoes” and kickers for heavy Doc marten-style boots were
three of her creations that should have been adopted.

My favourite one of these accidentally good creations
was harsh realm — a term that was supposed to be synonymous
with “bummer”. The term was good enough to be appropriated by a comic book creators
James D. Hudnall and Andrew Paquette, who used it as a title for their comic about
a virtual reality simulation gone awry. X-Files creator Chris Carter
thought that the title and concept were so good that he lifted both for his ill-fated
Harsh Realm TV series.

Your Point Being…?

I think of the term “Web 2.0” as being like Megan Jasper's better
coinages such as “harsh : it may have been originally made-up nonsense, but it
turned out to be good enough to find some real use.

According to Paul Graham's Web 2.0 essay, the term was coined
during a brainstorming session between O'Reilly and Medialive International,
a company in the tradeshow/conference racket. He wrote:

O'Reilly wanted to organize a conference about the web, and they were wondering
what to call it.

I don't think there was any deliberate plan to suggest there was a new version of
the web. They just wanted to make the point that the web mattered again. It was a
kind of semantic deficit spending: they knew new things were coming, and the “2.0”
referred to whatever those might turn out to be.

Simply put, “Web 2.0” is the new “Harsh Realm”.

2006 is the New 1992

It pained me to read the latest entry in Kathy Sierra's otherwise excellent blog,
Creating Passionate Users. In it, she states that “Web 2.0” is
more than just a buzzword, it's jargon, and there's a difference. I think
that Dare Obasanjo hit the nail on the head when he called her on that statement:

On the one hand Kathy argues that jargon allows us to communicate more efficiently
then in the same breath points out that “Web 2.0” wraps many different and ill-defined
concepts together. That seems pretty contradictory to me. How is it communicating more
efficiently if I say “Web 2.0” to Bob and he thinks AJAX and widgets while Jane thinks
I'm talking about social networking and tagging while I actually meant RSS and open APIs?
We may be communicating with less words but since we are guaranteed to have a
miscommunication, this efficiency in words exchanged is small compared to the amount
of time we waste talking past each other.

I've made my peace with the idea that “Web 2.0” is here to stay and that it
is such a wide umbrella term that it is effectively meaningless other than a catch
all to describe Web trends have become popular over the past two years. However
that doesn't make it worthy of being elevated to “professional jargon” unless your
profession is slinging bullshit to VCs or trying to wade through which bullshit
knockoffs of YouTube and del.icio.us you want to be investing in.

By retrofitting some legitimacy onto the term, Kathy has effectively made
herself the New York Times to Tim O'Reilly's Megan Jasper in this
modern version of the Great Grunge Hoax. Let's hope that we techies and tech businesspeople —
as the Chris Carters in this scenario — have projects that fare better than
Harsh Realm.

Of course, I cannot resist closing this article without my parody of Kathy's graph technique:

With sincerest apologies to Kathy Sierra, with whom I normally agree.

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