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Playing with my new iPhone

Gotta admit it, I'm a hopeless fan girl for Apple products (no surprise to my friends). No, they're not open source (sorry, Darwin project...but really). Still they are leading the tech world in user design and I'm addicted to that elegance....as we used to say when I worked for Apple..."If you cut me I still bleed six colors". And I'm not alone. My pal Mark Shuttleworth has a Mac at home (wants to "study the competition")...but he's also under the spell of the elegance. How could you not be? Actually, Brian Behlendorf is pretty clear about not using Apple products because of the DRM issues (and the proprietary nature of the beast). He did buy one once as a present, however.

So today was the first day you could buy an iPhone. I had to have one. I've had to have one for like months...since January. But I had a 24-hour flu. Bad flu. Achey, chilly, not a good idea to be further away from the Porcelain God than a quick streak across the livingroom.

What to do, what to do? Luckily, my wonderful son Adi agreed to wait in line for me and just brought the new baby home. And...of course I love it. No way to set it up for my Corporate Account (although I have 30 days to deactivate the Personal Account I just set up). Of course it arrives in a very elegant packaging. Of course everybody in the house oohed and ahhed as I was unwrapping and using iTunes to set up an account. And, of course the user experience is *totally* slick. Soooo much fun.

Okay, just thought I'd share. Did I mention that my old "SuperPhone" has been dying for weeks? Sure hope I can get my Intel number copied over...

Attention Panel @ FOO

Kathy Sierra said she was inspired by Linda Stone's talk on Continuous Partial Attention, but that she was surprised by the reaction she got to an unfavorable blog she posted about Twitter, so the topic is clearly polarizing.

Linda gave a 10,000 foot summary of her talk. She said recently she's been working with researchers at the NIH looking at what happens in the body when you timeslice. MRIs show some effects in the brain, but more interesting are breathing patterns. People timeslicing tend to stop breathing, and their CO2 levels soar. The folks at Twitter and say there are two clear user patterns emerging 1) Grandstanders who want to tell you everything they are doing and 2) Engaging in Continuous Partial Friendship (as coined by Dave Weinberger).

Dan Russell alked about his research into how attention works. High jitter (frequent interrupts) can be smoothed over in User Design by normalizing the timeslice...we can handle frequent interruptions so long as the interval is consistent (so in IRC for instance, you may be timeslicing conversations, but the rate of new messages is fairly consistent). But, stacking interruptions (you're in the middle of a task and a completely different task interrupts) cause chaos. Popping the stack is again as simple as breathing. Meditators may be on to something.

Kathy spoke about "clicker training" for pets and how our email queue is an intermittent variable reward and is clicker training us to keep checking back for more "treats" (emails). On her Twitter post: What she actually said was that Twitter was causing so many interrupts that she doesn't know how anyone is getting things done. High-order experts have a genetic predisposition to hyper focus, not to timeslice.

Linda said the gaming industry is starting to shift to design games from Continuous Partial Attention "shooter" games to logic games that give birth to deeper thinking.

Audience discussion: Our generation has grown up with a high level of signal-to-noise, and kids today are perhaps even more able to handle these tendencies (is this just Evolution?). Cory Doctorow said that his writing style has evolved to only a daily 20 minutes of dedicated writing. Is this an age thing? We had a Twitter employee Blaine Cook is in the audience, who said that demographically the users are actually "old" (other than him anyway...he's 27). Inductive vs. deductive thinking came up...do inductive thinkers love interrupt because it allows a background process to cook? Linda pointed out that dedication to a task (intention) is antithetical to accepting interrupt (so Cory's 20 minutes are very very focused). Linda pointed out that rock climbing is a very intentional task.

Open Data @ FOO

There are no less than four sessions about the concept of "Open Data" at this year's FOO (last year there was one). 

Open Data is something I've been interested in for a couple of years now as a natural extension of Open Source (not unlike Open Standards).  The idea is that your online data should be available for your use freely.  There are still many large datastores that treat data you submit (or that is gathered about you) as a "proprietary resource".  So for instance, how easy is it to manage your photos online?  If you get tired of one photo aggregation system, how easy is it to transfer your assets to another system?  Do you "own" those photos?  You certainly own the copyright, but do you own them from a practical point of view if you can't manage them? 

I'll make more comments after I've attended the sessions.  I'm especially interested in the session led by Mark Hedlund.  Also, Julian Cash is here and will no doubt be talking about Move My Data.org.

Stalking Tantek Çelik

I must here take a pause to admit a private vice.  I am stalking Tantek Çelik.

Every day my cellphone beeps new SMS's that tell me Tantek's whereabouts.  Its gotten to the point that my husband is suspicious of my interest in Tantek.  I mean afterall, he's one of the Top Ten Male Hotties Of The Web.  But that's not how I came to be his stalker.  I run into Tantek at conferences, but he's nearly always surrounded by people.  I wanted a more singular conversation.

So, last year when Dodgeball started to get popular in San Francisco (before the Google acquisition that seems to have gone awry)...I signed up and asked Tantek to be my contact because I was hoping to figure out a less congested place to meet up with him.  I'm big on tea dates at Samovar.

What I wasn't counting on was the sheer enthusiasm with with Tantek broadcasts his daily movements.  It's not uncommon for me to get 10 messages about Tantek in a 24 hour period.  I don't know that much about the whereabouts of my kid.

And I've gotten to where I worry a bit about Tantek (as a Mom...heck, I'm nearly old enough to be his Mom).  So for instance, I'm happy when I see that he's at Mission Cliffs or munching brown rice sushi at Whole Foods.  But I think he drinks too much coffee.  And I worry when he's on the occasional pub crawl...will he make it home in one piece?  On the other hand, I've learned about a few places from him, and I've found that we go to some of the same places.

The really funny thing is, I've still never met with him.  Tantek, if you're reading this...can we just make an appointment?

Tools of Change Conference 2007 - Day One Morning

I really wanted to check out this newest O'Reilly Conference, Tools of Change.  Its themed around the move away from traditional printing on paper (as well as a move away from all traditional printing entails including friction in the form of cost of production, distribution costs, obsolesence).   Of course people like the aspects of books that make them easy to carry around and actually read. I used to say I'd never read a novel online (before Cory Doctorow's Down and Out In the Magic Kingdom of which I was a huge fan).   These days I mostly "read" books in the form of audiobooks and I've been working off and on for the last year on a wiki-based book for O'Reilly called Art of Community, so I'm a prime candidate for Tools of Change.

Through O'Reilly I've met online publishing pioneers like comic book author Scott McCloud, and Philip Greenspun.  Wikipedia guided by Jimmy Wales has been a O'Reilly favorite project for a long time as much for its vision as for working out the first practical method for moderating publicly contributed content.  This conference is a first stab at discussing these trends and generally starting conversations in the traditional publishing world.

So, sitting in the morning keynotes.  First keynote (after intro remarks by TimO and conference co-chair Sarah Milstein, including this funny video Introducing The Book)...is Brian Murray, a muck-muck from Harper Collins Publishers who told the story about their path to digitizing content (very marketeerish but full of information if you were willing to parse it).  Most interesting was that they had to look hard for a vendor to support their transition to "Digital Warehousing", and their plan to build what they needed, including rolling in some of their existing digital assets in the form of their pre-existing workflow and electronic text management systems.  And of course they are reaping benefits in the form of less dupilcation of effort and wider distribution...however they are still holding a lot of the cards to try to drive all traffic to their own site.  Their content browser for instance is distributed as a widget that drives eyeballs back to their site rather than running native on the site you were originally browsing.  I'm wondering if and whether that kind of proprietary hold on things will hurt them in the long run?

Next up was Wired Magazine Editor In Chief, Chris Anderson (also Long Tail author, who apparently has a new book in the works called "Free" about the economics of giving things away).  He says that in the 20th Century radio and TV changed the game via the economics of broadcast, which was the first widespread example of frictionless distribution and made advertsing a viable financial support model.  Today this broadcast model is so pervasive that physical magazines such as Wired essentially sell eyeballs, and charge only because it converts free readers into advertising assets.  Anyway...this man is writing a book, which will come out in 2 years time as a physical book (because he thinks physical books will not be obsolete any time soon because, well heck, they are comforting to have, hold and read).  He thinks Free is the business model of the 21st Century, and so his book about the topic will explore as many aspects of free as he can arrange...so for instance, the audio book version will be free (because he is buying the rights).  The unlocked e-book may be supported by ads (which he defends from his position as a glossy ad-driven magazine editor, but I'm not sure I relish).  The physical book he's thinking of making a "sponsored book", or possibly a "loss leader" book for advertising purposes as he did with Long Tail (of which he gave 800 copies away to anyone who would blog a review).  He may also offer a rebate on purchase if he can work one out.

Chris Anderson's reasons to give a book away:
1) Free Advertising
2) Digital books are still considered inferior, and some fraction of those people will convert to a physical book
3) Maximizes access to the "new influentials"

Why more books aren't given away:
1) Charter conflict....authors want to increase their personal fame and influence, but publishers want to make money (and don't yet understand that free can be an asset)
2) Channel conflict...bookstores don't want their product undercut
3) Fear

Have to take a moment to applaud Chris' willingness to work without Powerpoint Slides.  His talk was wonderful and IMHO more interesting to listen to without visuals.

Last before the break,  Tim O'Reilly talked about Web2.0, (again...but this time with a special publishing bent).  He pointed out that while user generated content is really an important sea change, at the same time its not that new (since nearly all authors start as readers, witness J.K. Rowling).  Like the Harper Collins guy, he talked about O'Reilly Media's entries into online publishing, Safari.  Search changes the reading experience.  Online readers only read 20% of a given title, but older content demand is satisfied.  Search drives readership of out of print content.  40% of the content read on Safari accounts for only 9% of physical book sales.  O'Reilly is still working out what implications this trend implies for the future of their business, and they are engaging in various experiments.  On the subject of piracy, Tim thinks its progressive taxation...you get more out of additional exposure than it costs in lost sales.  Tim ended with a call to be fearless and look to the future to re-discover publishing.

There was a Q&A, but as I asked a question, I didn't capture it.  It was short (3 questions).  Mine was about why the Harper Collins widget doesn't show up on Amazon, although I also commented in support of the notion that digital format books may actually be MORE compelling than print over time, since novels can include a soundtrack or rich image files.

My conceptual artist friend Catt Avery, who is sitting here with me at the keynotes, wonders how many folks in the audience today have YouTube accounts?   There are lots of trad publishers here, so I'm guessing not many.

Linux Foundation Collaboration Summit (day one- afternoon)

After the usual yummy Google Cafeteria lunch...on to the afternoon panels.

Can I first offer a couple of hopefully helpful (if unsolicited) public comments to the organizers of this event?  Chris DiBona recently blogged his frustration with participating on panels, and I have to say I agree with him.  People like us are asked a hundred times a year to be on panels, and there are definitely better and worse ones.  Moderator-driven panels are not nearly as interesting as audience driven panels, but conference organizers keep forgetting this.  The energy-level in this room goes up when the audience is allowed to ask the questions and down when the panelists act like "talking heads".  Also, cutting general mingle time down in favor of more panel time is a mistake.  The interesting thing is the mingling, not the lecture.  One reason I love O'Reilly conferences is that they have comprehended these facts.  So, in future please allow more mingle time in the schedule (night-time "fun" events are not mingle time...nobody wants to talk about work at them).

The first afternoon panel was about getting more applications onto Linux.  Lots of Industry folks (see schedule).  There were comments about the usefulness of the Linux Standard Base (they all liked it...but afterall they are on an invited panel ;-) ).  There were snipes about still having to "pick a target" when app vendors choose which versions of Linux to validate and support.  Lots of questions about how to make money.  Quote of the panel was Mike Milinkovich Executive Director of Eclipse.org saying..."If you're a small ISV and your only platform is Linux, it SUCKS being you"...(he did have the good grace to say that he was hoping to get out of the room alive after the comment).

Next panel was the obligatory legal one...this one about GPLv3 and its effect on the Linux ecosystem.  Interests (in to GPLv3) included patents, standardization, fragmentation and aggregation such as Linux Foundation.  IMHO, there was more than a little pandering to secular interests (adverts for initiatives championed by their employers).  I personally asked a question about Open Standards and the need for a definition there, which Andy Updegrove agreed with (no surprise, but it was nice).

At 3:00pm, I had to take a call (it's a miracle my cellphone didn't call me away before now)....

Linux Foundation Collaboration Summit (day one- morning)

Sitting in the audience for Day One of the June 2007 Linux Foundation Collaboration Summit (they should number these things). The room is full of Linux developers, open source luminaries and corporate interests trying to have conversations about what would make Linux "better". (Here is a pointer to the published schedule, for quick reference).

Jim Zemlin started off with a few choice "adverts" about Linux that showed how the overall FOSS community is seen by the outside world, including: this one and this one.

Next was a panel with Kernel Developers. Within that panel, there were questions about provisioning device drivers (in which Intel's PowerTOP was applauded and Intel was generally given high marks for delivering drivers to Linux (yeah!)). Also discussed were the topics of accessibility, non-english participation, and Linux for mobile devices. Despite Jim Zemlin's pleas not to "make sausage" in today's sessions (I wish he would stop saying that)...there was a bit of heckling (just showing again the friendly and informal nature of the overall FOSS community we love so much).

Second panel was representatives of Industry interest in Linux. Dan Frye said that IBM is really interested in Real Time Linux and that they like to think of themselves as members of the Linux Community. Christy Wyatt from Motorola said that although Moto is a somewhat fusty company [my words, although implied by her], they are working on Linux for Mobile Devices, especially in the area of tooling through Eclipse Foundation (which she invoked more than once). My friend Chris DiBona said that Google is dependent on Linux and tries to give back through projects like Summer of Code and hosting events like the one at which we are met. Lengthy discussion ensued about how good things are at IBM, Motorola and Google. Christy Wyatt especially had a lot to say about the importance of "owning your own ecosystem" (although she tried later to respin those words as "enabling"...oops ;-) )...shows that she wasn't lying when she said Moto has a lot to learn.

I predict that Dan Frye is going to get quoted a LOT (and the FSF should make a tee-shirt ) about his great comment when asked for the top two things the community can do for Linux..."When the GPLv3 is final...just CHILL !!!"

Last before lunch was the always sublime Mark Shuttleworth. Much of the content of his talk has been exposed in detail in his series of blogs about the big challenges in the FOSS Community. He talked about the importance of "Collaboration", including aspects such as managing "poisonous people" who monopolize conversation and effective working between projects. In general, he said he thinks that Federation and increasing Decentralization are the answer and called for new tools to be designed with these memes in mind. In terms of things that need to change, he said that translations and bugs and patches aren't "moving upstream" (I think I'd call this "flowing" because the prevalent "upstream" image implies a hierarchy and there's already so much of that). He called for better conduits that can broadcast completed work around the whole ecosystem. He also mentioned issues of authentication, and asked how we can remove other barriers to collaboration. Since he is a fan of "Federation" he pointed out that Standardization probably isn't the answer (is LaunchPad broken by design?), but he believes that better Project Management will be essential in future. Projects that are doing a good job? Mark thinks that GNOME is very well self-organized and does a good job of communiciating with other projects. For the Ubuntu project, Mark also took Mozilla as a design center. He pointed out that Microsoft's internal systems allow their internal developers to find and have conversations with peers very easily, and that similar inter-project equal participation is lacking from the FOSS world. As always, he pointed out lastly that we should all strive to focus on that on which we agree.

Okay, okay...now time for lunch (more afterwards)

Back in the saddle (again)

Okay, okay...so it's been a long long time since I blogged. Some of you know that the little health issue I blogged about last time (wow, last November) ended up being a few months of required rest. So I was basically under a doctor's orders NOT to blog (or go to meetings, or take calls, or travel at all...you get the idea)...

But the good news is that I'm (mostly) back in the saddle now. Allowed to work again (finally). And this is very good news because, as anyone who knows me will tell you, I love to work. I'm going to try not to work so much that it hurts me in future, however. But I will return to blogging. Those of you who know that I helped Sun start blogs.sun.com , and I believe in the value of blogging (SPAM comments notwithstanding).

I want to thank my family, my very good friends, my health consultants and Intel for being very patient with me as I've been in recovery. I couldn't have asked for more support. Curiously, a number of prominent Open Source advocates have contacted me for advice lately because they are showing greater or lesser signs of burnout, so I'm not feeling like the only one. I'm thankful that I got this wakeup call at a time when I could listen and I'm hopeful that others will learn from my experience.

I've learned that it can really hurt a body to travel the way I was traveling (and maybe to live the way I was living...It's been said before, but 24x7 access to the community may be a problem. I've learned that I'm not 20 years old anymore and that I need to pace myself for the long haul instead of working like there's no tomorrow.

If you're curious, I'm happy to type more about what my symptoms were and what therapies I pursued (am pursuing, because some of them are "lifestyle changes")...but I'll wait to read comments before I launch into all of that. Better to type about the inaugural Linux Foundation Collaboration Summit, where I am hanging out with Allison Randall, Zaheda Bhorat and a couple hundred of my "closest friends" today (see next post).

BTW, Have to take a moment to add to the many congrats to Sun and especially to the OpenJDK Team for finally pushing Java (the language) out under GPLv2. I was at JavaONE, but as it was a month ago I wasn't supposed to be there working and certainly not blogging. Still, I'm really pleased to see another Open Source Java joining GNU Classpath/Kaffee and Apache Harmony. Its about time!