Steve’s Tech Journal

Jeff Pulver’s Save the Internet creative content contest is wrapping up, with final submissions due by next Tuesday.   If you haven’t yet thought about this, I encourage you to take the time and participate.

 The internet can be and is becoming one of the the greatest egalitarian communication tools mankind has ever witnessed.   Or, it could become just another large-media-controlled channel of information and products “pushed” to passive consumers, otherwise known as “eyeballs with wallets”.  Large media and telco forces are trying to turn the internet into the latter — we need to make it the former.

 Read Jeff’s plea here.   Think of something, do something, if only to send an email saying why you care about the internet, why you care about your ability to have a voice and reach your personal audience, and that you want the equal access of the internet preserved!

I’m a huge user of Skype, as my friends and colleagues know. I’ve helped shift the management of several companies over to Skype as a productivity tool. One of the main reasons I use to promote Skype is the value of the seamless pyramid of communication: presence -> IM -> Voice. However, some factors are interfering with this value, and I think there’s a paradox in the direction Skype is taking.

To recap, here’s what’s good about the model:

• presence — I can see if someone is at their computer, or not. If they’re at their computer, it means there’s a good chance I can reach them if I need to communicate with them
• I can then IM them for simple matters, or to ask if they have time for a call. This is a much lower profile interruption than a ringing telephone, and therefore I feel freer to do it, and correspondingly do not mind it when people ping me
• If we want to talk, it’s just a push of the big green button

But, increasingly people are starting to access Skype from a mobile device that doesn’t have presence and IM capability. For example, this Netgear Skype phone which I have on order from Amazon (and which as Andy points out has some flaws as an out-of-the-home device).

For months I was trying to reach a friend in Italy via Skype IM. When I was over there recently, he said, “Oh, the server is up in the attic and I never look at the screen, but if you call it, it rings on my phone downstairs”. It turns out he permanently set his status to “online” and walked away. This breaks the model — presence no longer has meaning, and IM doesn’t work. You need to go straight to pressing the big Green “call” button. This is a huge step backwards from the virtuous pyramid I talked about above.

Yet, Skype seems to be accelerating this direction. Witness the recent move to offer free calling in North America (great link collection on this topic here). Witness the variety of Skype-enabled hardware coming. Combined with free urban wifi, these trends point to Skype being a free cellphone, not a Presence/IM/Voice platform.

I fear that you can’t be both. Both directions are interesting, both are worthwhile. But by trying to be both you degrade the value of the IM/presence network, and thus rob one group of users from the productivity gain they currently enjoy. It’s a bit of a conundrum, and I certainly don’t have the answer, but just watch if the value of your Skype presence indications doesn’t start to drop over the next year.

We’ve had 10 inches of rain in the last 48 hours here in Carlisle, MA. Roads are covered and blocked off, bridges are out. There’s a state of emergency in Massachusetts, New Hampshire, and Maine, especially in Middlesex county, where we live.
Our basement is flooded, which temporarily put Ampersand and Steve’s Tech Journal out of business while I put furniture up on blocks. We’re back in operation today, but they are expecting more rain so we’ll have to watch the situation carefully.
We took a walk yesterday into Great Brook State Park and snapped a couple pictures at the entrance. You can click through into my flickr photostream for a few more.

UPDATE: sorry to rss subscribers that I had to go edit this.  I had been using a larger image size for one photo, which turns out to mess up the html formatting under IE (but not firefox).   I finally tracked it down and fixed it, and also used the proper flickr html ref code so that you can click through on the pictures.   Since you’re here reading this, I’ll also tell you that the basement is dried out and everything is fine, but we are going to invest in a perimter drain and sump pump system — ka ching

In the daily evidence mounting for a total disruption of broadcasting, bloglines displays flash including YouTube’s flash video.

You can now sub to RSS feeds of interesting new video, content that you care about, etc. How long do you think until the content owners (and I include us the public in this group) start queuing up nicely tagged video clips. You watch what you want when you want, I watch what I want when I want, and likely never the twain shall meet.

The world is de-homogenizing rapidly (written like a true Engineering School grad)

Tonight I went to OneWebDay’s Boston meeting, where founder Susan Crawford, board member David Isenberg, and others talked about OneWebDay and helped the group brainstorm about things we might do in Boston. It’s late, so all I’ll say is stay tuned, I’ll be helping with and writing more about OneWebDay in the future. But, go ahead and pencil in Sep 22 — OK?

One of the fun things was the great people in the audience and the fun dialog with them. I sat with Ben Sheldon of the Digital Bicycle Project, an effort to provide distribution tools for community media. Fascinating topic, and another example of the disruption coming to broadcast. Luis Villa formerly of Ximian was there, he was one of the original Evolution team (my current Linux email client). Novell doesn’t seem to have the budget to invest lots more. Too bad, because there’s a lot of things I like about Evolution. We talked about where email clients are going, server side (gmail) sure seems to have a lot of advantages. Sigh, another personal tool migration is looming.

I also talked with Dean and Daniel who are associated with Berkman and the Beyond Broadcast conference which is coming up this Fri / Sat. I had not planned to attend but found out that Berkman will simulcast it through Second Life. So, Dash Flintoff (that’s me), will be going for at least part of it. I gather it’s being held on the Berkman Island.

All and all this was a lot of fun, and was a good reminder that I shouldn’t get so busy with work that I don’t go to this sort of stuff. The meeting even made BoingBoing.

Rainbow from Hotel Raphael

I’ve been on hiatus for the last couple weeks, on a brief holiday back to Rome. We had a wonderful time seeing some friends, going to Italian cinema (Chiamano and La Notte Prima degli Esami), dining at our favorite restaurants, and of course shopping for some Italian fashion.

The photo is from the rooftop terrace of our hotel, looking across the space of Piazza Navona.

But now it’s back to work and back to blogging. I’ve got some queued up posts that I want to write, and I plan to do so over the next few days.