I have a late afternoon meeting in the City today so I am thinking about stopping by at Technorati Developer's Salon afterward for pizza, beer, conversation, and adventure (I never been to that part of the town — Do I need to bring my urban jungle knife, David?).  Maybe I'll see you there.

Update:

I did make it to the meeting and here some pictures to prove it.

Marc is getting really good at this

It's was a rather large garage…for a caboose, I think

Ah, there is David.  Many people showed up,
some VCs, even Mitch Kapor.

Loic brought his french gang to which JY here belongs to.
Hi, JY!  You look like someone just grabbed your butt.
Not me and I have the Victory sign to prove it.

What?  Technorati is working on an IE toolbar?;-p

For every startup, there comes a time when you stop looking around and start pushing, the long haul.  Your goals are clear so you pour all your resources into filling and expanding the rank and start beating the marching drum.  At the executive level, focus shifts from faces and dreams to numbers and dollars.  It's a time of metamorphosis that turns a group of people into an engine of profit.

If all the pushing goes well, swell.  If not, there is no point in keep pushing in the same direction.  But all to often, startups I worked with over the years continued to pump away until the money ran out.  The smart thing to do would have been to 'turn' your product line toward a direction that will give more easily just as a wrestler might.  Some VCs see 'turning' as compromising of the original business plan, a great poopoo.  Hogwash.

If the landscape changes, the map must change as well.

I think I may be losing it.  I wrote two posts today but trashed them both because I didn't want to bother with the backlash.  Fear is something I have a good handle on, but not the lazyness.  In one of the two posts, I pissed liberally on good people like Dave, Joi, Tim O'Reilly and companies like Microsoft, Google, Six Apart, and O'Reilly.  The other post was about why I may be a racist.  Saucy topics indeed, but my lazyness got the better of me.  I hope I get better soon.

Six Apart's new gravy-train license for MT lasted only a day.  With new changes, it's looking a lot more bearable to MT users.  While I respect their fast response to criticisms, I think the worst of the damages, loss of trust and sense of betrayal, are not reversable unfortunately.

I also question the wisdom of emphasizing misunderstandings and miscommunications when the former places the blame squarely on the MT users and the later undermines Six Apart's competence.  Whether true or not, I don't think excuses are very effective in situations like the one they are in.

If I was running Six Apart, I would have just pleaded temporary idiocy and begged for forgiveness instead of serving a string of weak excuses which just end up as fodder for suspicion.

Speaking of Google, Evan blogged from the SBC Park last tuesday and took this picture.

I think it's neat that WiFi is available at the park and geeks tend to posse with other geeks, but the picture made me shake my head.  Four laptops in a row, including the one Evan probably had in front of him while he took the picture, at a baseball park?

Hmm.  Maybe this was sort of a work thing.  A WiFi-enabled stadium is a perfect place for flash P2P grid computing after all.  Who needs expensive office spaces when your team can work at round-the-clock movie theathers and holding meetings at the lobby?  When WiFi access at campsites become widely available, maybe we'll see startups working out of tents and RVs.

Just now I found out that users commenters to get a Google Blogger account before they can post comments to blogs hosted by Google Blogger.

This makes no sense.  I wouldn't mind if they just required the commenter to register themselves and made creation of a blog optional.  Yes, one could just create one and ignore it but it's irritating to be forced into creating and abandoning something like a blog just so I can post comments.

The right way to grow membership is by increasing the quality of service for members (i.e. convenience), not by telling blog readers to either join or go away.  Maybe Evan or Jason can explain why.

Update:

It turns out that this was caused by a preference setting.  Now it makes sense although I sure hope this was not the default setting.  Evan and Jason, nevermind.

I used to think that privacy concerns in America was strong enough to thwart ideas like single-signin and Gmail from being realized.  My study of the social networking phenomenon have gradually changed my opinion to a point where I now think the power of privacy concerns can be dispelled with the right strategy.  Obviously, this can't be done by just anyone and serious commitments must be made in terms of time and resources, but I now believe it can be done.

I have come to realize that concerns are temporal in nature and requires constant reinforcements to maintain them.  A primary source of that reinforcement is social pressures.  If people around you are concerned, you become concerned.  If they seem unconcerned, level of your concern diminishes.  People who do not conform to the group's level of concerns are pushed to the fringe and eventually casted out, either by the group or by their own choice.

Remember the opening scene of StarWars movie that made you feel like a little bug under the belly of a huge beast?

When I was a child, I would take ordinary things around the house and examine them closely, not as one would look at it with a microscope, but looking at it like an ant or a fly might see while crawling or flying across it's surface.  What I enjoyed was the different perspective and its effect on me.  Mere dented pots and pans suddenly transformed into spaceships or spacestations, and those ugly dents on the outer hull had a lot of stories to tell.  Aside from my parents worrying about me spending hours alone with a frying pan in hand, it was magical times for me.

I wish I could do the same with products sold at e-tail websites or auction sites.  Unfortunately, not even quality static pictures of products are readily available.  Innovative e-tailers like Zappos are improving shopper experience but it's still far from my vision of satisfying shopping experience.

Is this a moneymaker?  I think it is for expensive products like Gucci bags.  If you see those bags very closely with lights glinting off each bumps in the leather texture, they look far more substantial than they really are.  3D model and texture database of products is also valuable IP.

Can it be done?  Definitely.  You will need even more high resolution textures than yet to be released Doom 3, but next version of DirectX will break open most of the limitations that made it difficult.

It won't be long before shoppers will be flying around the things they are interested in buying.  Hmm.  If you are a guy, wouldn't you want to hover across the surface of Planet Halle Berry?  Captain!  I am experiencing stronger than usual turbulence between her cleavages.

Yeah, yeah.  I know I am weird and I like it that way.

All right, I have been neglecting my LinkedIn account because their survival was questionable before and LinkedIn UI was irksome, but I think it's time I started nurturing it.

If I know you and you have a LinkedIn account, send your link requests.  You can find me under, surprise, 'Don Park'.  If you don't know me but I know you (?), you can still invite me.  For example, if you are Bill Gates, you are welcome to invite me.  🙂

As to my LinkedIn profile, I'll get to it someday.  Thanks to Niall Kennedy for the reminder.

Timothy Appnel reports on the release of Six Apart's Movable Type (MT) 3.0 Developer Edition and the MT community's reaction to changes in terms and licensing cost.  He closes with this comment:

This outcry raises a bigger more important point which is the reason for my post. As a developer and one who makes a living writing code, this reaction to Six Apart's new licensing is really disheartening and on a certain level frustrating to see. I am a firm believer and backer of open source. I've personally released quite a bit of open source code myself and will continue to do so. However this apparent expectation of the vocal part of community that it is their right to have all great works of software at no cost is bothersome. If users don't have the funds or won't pay on principle for my time, effort or talent – how do I eat?

While I was thinking about the question, I couldn't help but notice how similar the situation is with carnal relations.  Six Apart and other open source companies have opened their legs in return for love.  And now they risk losing the love if they start playing hard to get.  No easy solutions there.

Maybe Doctor Ruth can help.

Update:

Dave's long rant on the subject reminded me of the 60's free sex meme.  I think that's what we have here except this destructive meme is not likely to go away any time soon.  What a trip.

Update 2:

Perspective from the other side, the shocked lover who now feels betrayed, is also interesting and understandable.  This comment from teledyn posted to James Robertson's blog is a good example:

What gets me is the breach of trust, their about-face that leaves me stranded with no warning. When you invest your time creating content for a publishing system, you don't expect to have your priviledges to proceed with that software held for ransom.

In my faith in their company, I have recommended and deployed their free software over about a dozen sites…

[…]

It's not the money per-se, it's that about face that has frightened me away; if they'd turn against their core community for a buck now when the company is in the pink, they'll do it again later when the chips are down.

Dependence on SixApart is now a risk and I'm also concerned that, having squandered all the community good-will they'd only valued at $0.25, the future doesn't look so rosy for TypePad. Two days ago a colleague asked me if he should host his company site on TypePad or host it in-house, and I recommended TypePad, "They'll be around for long long time" I assured him.

I sent him a message today, reversing my assessment.