Global Nerdy

Robert Scoble writes that although the Zune has an advantage in software extensibility — it's easier to update Zune software and there's a chance an update could give it some PDA and GameBoy-esque functionality…

But, for now, I’d stick with an iPod. Microsoft hasn’t given us a
killer feature yet that is easily demonstratable for why we should buy
a Zune instead of an iPod.

I agree with Scoble's assessment: Zune's WiFi-based song-sharing and XBox integration just don't have enough “oomph” to be considered killer features, it lacks a distinctive conversation-maker like iPod's white earbuds, nor does it have those little UI features for which Apple is famous.

There's also an issue that doesn't show up on features list comparisons: the iPod is just plain cool. While Microsoft's “consumer” offerings make you feel as if you're eating the table scraps of the people they love most, their “enterprise” customers, Apple products are like “Vince” from the HBO television series Entourage — the cool friend, who by letting you in his posse, makes you cool by association.

Here's an observation from the recent Ajax Experience conference. Although the conference organizers could've chosen to go with a more “cost-effective” MP3 player to include in the swag bag given to every attendee, they went with the iPod Shuffle. They held a number of raffles throughout the conference and a big trivia game at the end, and although they could've saved some money and handed out cheaper players, the prizes were iPod Nanos and iPod Videos. The vendors in the exhibit hall did the same: their prizes were also Nanos and Videos. There wasn't a non-Apple MP3 or video player offered as a prize, because it wouldn't have fit in with the high-end feel that they were going for with this conference.

That's why the iPod is still the Wonder Glove Monkey.

At last, we have proof that Jason Calacanis is using some kind of mind-reading technology capable of penetrating the protective-but-jaunty tinfoil chapeaus that George and I wear: he's stolen yet another one of our ideas and given it away as his own — for free — at his Blog Business Summit keynote.

Since he's already made off with our super-seekrit plan for becoming big-time blogosphere stars, we might as well give them away ourselves — or better yet, steal Tris Hussey's coverage on Calacanis' session at the Tucows Blog. Here it is — our five-step program for becoming an A-lister, as stolen from our brains by Jason “That Dirty Plagiarist” Calacanis:

1. Go to Techmeme.
2. Blog something intelligent about the top story of the day.
3. Link to and mention all the people who have said something intelligent.
4. Repeat for 30 days.
5. Go to a couple of conferences a month.

Calacanis, whom we're thinking of referring to as “Plagiarismo”, also stole our favorite thing to say to those people at blogging conferences who whine about their inability to break into the A-list or even the B-list. Here it is, courtesy of the blog Pro PR

Blogging is the biggest meritocracy in the world. It’s not broken. You don’t rank? It’s because you suck.

…

How well you do is up to you. It really is obnoxious to look at the space and say it’s broken because you’re not doing well. If you want to succeed, do a better job.

Here are some choice places to see coverage of Calacanis' keynote, which apparently features ideas that he didn't steal from us. Mind you, he might've stolen them from other people…

• Anecdotes from Jason Calacanis on Weblogs Inc. and blogging (Tucows Blog)
• Jason Calacanis: From Weblogs to Netscape (Blog Business Summit)
• Why I Disagree with Jason Calacanis about Blogger Junkets and Pay Per Post (Blog Business Summit)
• BBS: Jason Calacanis (Pro PR)
• Jason Calacanis Keynote at Blog Business Summit (ConversionRater.com)

Wouldn't it have been nice if you could've participated in the blogging hype about Snakes on a Plane while actually on a plane? Should another opportunity like that arise, you'll be able to jump on the bandwagon thanks to The Definitive Guide to Airline and WiFi and Internet Access, which lists the airlines and flights on which you can get online (for varying values of “online”).

The list isn't as useful as one might hope. There are only two brands of online access offered by airlines: Connexion By Boeing, which will be discontinued at the end of 2006 and OnAir, which currently offers a limited subset of services and typically works through the seat-back video screen rather than your own laptop.

In this article, I continue with my look at the dot-com-bubble-esque swag and prizes being given away by the organizers and vendors at the Ajax Experience conference. If you haven't seen part 1 in this series, it's here.

Helmi

Helmi, who bill themselves as “the only open source Ajax-based RIA development platform” were giving away the fanciest pens at the conference. The Helmi pens house a green LED, which gives off an eerie glow through their transparent barrels.

Google

Also present in the exhibit hall were Google, whose booth was
essentially a recruiting booth. Instead of literature about their APIs
or developer-centric events like the Summer of Code, they had half a
dozen different pamphlets about job opportunities for Java back-end
coders, UI and rich internet application developers and
researchers.

Swag-wise, these were their offerings:

• Google gum: Haven't tried it yet.
• Google pen: This one was pretty popular.
• Google key fob: Optimizes searches for your house keys.
• Google post-it notes: Handy for reminders, comes with subtle recruiting ad.
• Google notepad: With lenticular cover that shows a different image depending on your viewing angle.

I asked if they were giving away the heated toilet seats for which their offices are now famous. They would've come handy in the Boston Westin Waterfront's aggressively air-conditioned conference rooms.

Apparently, if you asked really nicely, the folks at the Google booth had some of their coveted long- and short-sleeved t-shirts to give away as well.

[Cross-posted to the Tucows Blog.]

Back during the days of the dot-com bubble, the quality and quantity of swag available at conferences was nothing short of amazing; I'd often have to buy a cheap duffel bag in order to haul the promotional booty, which I then gave as gifts to my co-workers. Here at the Ajax Experience, I'm feeling deja vu — while the “exhibit hall” outside the sessions is occupied by only a handful of vendors, the swag and prizes available from both them and the conference organizers is impressive.

One big surprise is AOL's table. Ever since The September That Never Ended, AOL has had a pretty bad rep among the developer set. In the meantime, other “portal” players — Google, MSN and Yahoo! as well as portal-like entities such as Amazon and eBay — have been boosting both traffic and developer love by becoming programmable by providing APIs, through which specialized sites and mash-ups can be built. What, you might ask, is AOL doing here?

It turns out that they're here to woo the developer community and promote their developer site, dev.aol.com and their APIs and encouraging developers to use AOL services for their mash-ups. They've been surprising a lot of developers (myself included) by opening their pitch with “Did you know that MapQuest is an AOL property?”

They realize that they're late to the party, so they've gone to some trouble to make sure that their swag is good. They've created a series of “mash-up” t-shirts, like the “Geek” one I'm showing in the photo below:

There are 6 shirts in the set. They're called “mash-up” shirts because you and your friends can wear different ones and rearrange yourselves — that's the “mash-up” — to form cute nerdy catchphrases. They've been very popular; people have been lining up for them here. Here's the set:

Some of these shirts may seem weird out of context: “Garden” will make people think you're into horticulture, and wearing the “unwalled”  may convince people that you're either homeless or have poor impulse control.

Also on their table: USB cable extension cords, developer-friendly stickers (I found the Unix-hacker-friendly chmod 777 aol sticker amusing), quick reference sheets and a postcard announcing a contest for the best mash-up using AOL APIs. They've also included an AOL-branded sprial-bound notebook in the knapsack given to every attendee (I'll cover the knapsack's contents in a later entry).

AOL's going to have a long, tough climb towards respectability, but they seem to be working hard at it.

[Cross-posted to the Tucows Blog.]

George and I are both quite busy, with him in Cambridge for a meeting and me in Boston at the Ajax Experience conference (and yes, we did catch up with each other last night). Stay tuned; I'm going to have more reports from the Ajax Experience including one on the state of promotional giveaways called “Swagging Like It's 1999.” Here's a sample: a “Geek” shirt from the new developer-friendly AOL…

Maybe I'm getting old, but trying to catch all the interesting stuff at the Ajax Experience conference feels like running a marathon. The conference is packed with sessions and other activities; days 1 and 2 each have 12 or more hours in their schedule. Here's my first report, covering the opening keynote.

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After a nice breakfast — kudos to the organizers for going above and beyond the standard “continental” and throwing in some eggs, sausages, bacon and home fries — the conference began in earnest with a quick “welcome” keynote by the Ajaxians, Ben Galbraith and Dion Almaer.

I imagine that for the organizers of a conference, doing a keynote has got to be physically trying. They usually have had very little sleep the night before, what with the last-minute preparations and things that always arise before the start of a conference. As a result, opening speeches by conference organizers are fairly lackluster — but this one wasn't! Instead, we got a lively, funny, well-rehearsed start to the conference.

In addition to the typical bits of information about the conference, Ben and Dion gave an Ajax “state of the union address”, in which they shared their thoughts about the current state of Ajax.

They posed this question: What the conference would be called if Jesse James Garrett hadn't coined the acronym “Ajax”? They listed a number of possibilities, including “The JavaScript Experience” and “The DHTML Experience”, but then explained that although at least correct to one degree or another in a technical sense, these names would fail to capture the true meaning of what we're doing, and that's building better user experience for web applications.

It's for this reason that they say it's “Ajax” and not “AJAX”: Asynchronous JavaScript and XML describes only a portion of the technical underpinnings and fail to capture the real revolution in how web apps are being written today.

“Everything old is new again,” they said. It's true — the technical prerequisites for Ajax have been around since Microsoft introduced XHR (that's the popular shorthand for XMLHttpRequest, the browser technology that makes Ajax possible) into Internet Explorer in 1997. Being a browser-specific feature, it wasn't used by many developers. Even when XHR was finally implemented in Mozilla-based browsers in 2002, it wasn't one of the features that was touted inthe press release. We'll have to assign bonus cool points to Brent Ashley, who figured out that there might be some very interesting uses for XHR before the wave of applications like GMail, Google Maps and Oddpost led Jesse James Garrett to coin the buzzword after which this conference is named.

Many user interface specialists have eschewed web development in favour of building so-called “fat clients” because of the severe constraints imposed by working within the browser. These constraints had a silver lining; Ben and Dion pointed to a quote by Marissa Mayer (Google's VP of Search Products and User Experience) in BusinessWeek:

Creativity is often misunderstood. People often think of it in terms of artistic work — unbridled, unguided effort that leads to beautiful effect. If you look deeper, however, you'll find that some of the most inspiring art forms — haikus, sonatas, religious paintings — are fraught with constraints. They're beautiful because creativity triumphed over the rules. Constraints shape and focus problems, and provide clear challenges to overcome as well as inspiration. Creativity, in fact, thrives best when constrained.

They talked about how far Web 2.0 can go with the current set of constraints. We've got web applications that are coming close to providing a user experience similar to desktop apps. We've got interesting approaches like Comet,where the server continually pushes or streams data to the web client rather than the web client doing the polling. We're only seeing the first appearance of JavaScript frameworks, which are emerging with different philosophies, from MochiKit's “JavaScript sucks” point-of-view (Mochikit's slogan is “Making JavaScript Suck Less”) to Dojo's “JavaScript is T3H SEXY”.

As for whether our current constraints will be loosened, Ben and Dion don't think that will happen any time soon. Although IE7 fixes some problems, it runs only on Windows XP and later versions of Windows; Ben and Dion said that “IE6 will always be with us”. There are some interesting developments with SVG and Canvas, but these have only been implemented in Firefox and Safari. As for things like Flash or Microsoft's “Flash-killer”, WPF/E, time will tell.

Stressing that the Ajax Experience is about the User Experience, Ben and Dion talked about the introduction of a design track to the conference and also encouraged people to attend the accessibility presentations.

It was a well-done opening keynote, and it set the stage for a very busy, very informative day 1 at the Ajax Experience. Well done, guys.

[Cross-posted to the Tucows Blog.]