ABC Streams HD: Apple better hurry up and add HD video to the iTunes Store.

Warner Brothers Records rockin’ it with Drupal! | drupal.org: Drupal.org has a fantastic writeup about the new Warner Bros. Records homepage, which is one of 15 sites we now have done on Drupal.

Let me just say: I love music. I love technology and I’m focusing on our job of building a solid business between the two. I’m a geek and a music fan. Drupal has helped me marry being a geek and a music fan. Some point of history: before I started at WBR, I had ethankaplan.com on Drupal, and had toyed with Drupal in my graduate work at UC Santa Barbara. I’ve been using it since version 2.0 I think, or maybe 1.0? Not sure.

Anyhow, Drupal is a big part of our 07 initiatives and Shaun, myself, some consultants, WorkHabit, aka Firebright (Earnest, Jonathan and Dale especially), Bryght, Alex King, Josh Pigford, Prod4Ever, David Hull (13Jupiters) and tons of others have been working our asses off to make it a solid platform (or Platform) for our artists.

The beauty of open source, and I think open-engagement with the community is that it provides some transparency to our internal workings, which in the end has yielded better code, modules and consulting from all parties involved. Everything from code to process is under continual revision, but that revision is collaborative and open (thank you Basecamp and MediaWiki!) and a hell of a lot of fun. It makes me very happy to have WBR credited on open source modules on drupal.org.

Anyhow, I’m going to pause, catch my breath and then get back to Drupal work. More coming soon!

PS: because we can, we put in a blog on the site that a bunch of us update continually. Its a very loose look at what happens at 3300 Warner Blvd.

This is the funniest picture I’ve ever seen, or at least in a bit. Sysadmins waiting to get into 365 Main

My last movement didn’t seem to work all that well, sadly. Sites like ArsTechnica still don’t provide full feeds (why, by the way?). However, I need to start another movement:

Take Back the Semantic Web!!!!!!

This is an anti-widget movement, an anti-Javascript include movement and an anti-”why not?” movement.

Here are the steps to joining the movement:

1) Strip your blog down to just the raw HTML, semantically describing the content: that means, remove all your widgets, all your “my friends company!” applications, Sphere links, Snap links, flash widgets, Twitter status things, LastFM widgets and all that shit.

2) Go and check your page weight, feel cleansed and whole again.

3) There is no step three. At this point, you should feel good and I will visit your site more.

Blogs are about content. They are about the removal of barrier between the voice of the blogger and the cognition of the user. Because of various technological standards, we have portability of this content, and portability of the context of cognition.

Web 2.0 should not have been about companies who’s intention was brining value-adds to this content within specific contexts. Its counter to the very nature of what blogging is supposed to be! Dave Winer knows this, Fred Wilson does not (it seems). All of these Javascript includes, these widgets and tools, cement a context to something that is supposed to be devoid of context.

A caveat here, some value-add services (like FeedFlare, etc) are context-agnostic, and thus don’t count. Advertising too works in such a way.

So my movement, I’m calling for people to strip their blogs down to the context-less content, semantically marked up, devoid of any tools which explicitly tie themselves to any experiential model.

No widgets
No javascript onHover events
No 5 different search methods (TechCrunch, looking at you here).

Just content.

AideRSS Means Quicker Feed Reading : AideRSS is interesting, but I see inherent flaws in tools which don’t render the data complex enough. PostRank isn’t nearly as complex as PageRank, in that its a nomralized algorithm from single-metric data. Its also extremely gameable by the very nature of the data that populates it. Easy syndication means easy duplicatability, which equates to the fact that Technorati data for instance, is dubious at best. I’d be interested to see how using a self organization algorithm would effect the results.

I’m sorry, but this needs to be said.

Has anyone really visited TechCrunch lately through their browser? Lets run it down. The total requests made for the page is 56, and the total download size of all assets is half a megabyte. Of that, 43k is Javascript.

Techcrunch seems to have every “wow!” Javascript utility known to man included on their site. SnapShots on links, Sphere It, etc. Not to mention all the code for different ad networks, widgets, etc. I’m all for the use of cross-site scripting and handy tools, but its getting kind of ridiculous.

In the beginning stages of this “web 2.0″ shit, it used to be about a clear definition of what a site was, with the fludity of the data from that site to transgress the boundaries. It never was the aggregation of this fluditiy on any given site, but the ability for people to make their own tools which could mash these things up into wholly new things.

I don’t think the intention was to use the fluidity of data as window dressing on content for the sake of saying you could. I don’t think it meant laying tool over tool over tool for the sake of aesthetics and “just because.” Minimalism dictates one using the minimum amount of aesthetics to get a singular job done.

A blog such as TechCrunch is for the purveyance of information, not for the aggregation of randomness for the same of randomness. It seems that sites have lost this, and we’ve entered the arms race in terms of data heterogeneity. An arms race littered with Javascript, browser freezes, 6 second load times on an OC-3 and more cross-domain scripting than a script-kiddie vbulletin party.

Here is my proposal:

Stop.
Refocus
Think purpose outward.

Please.

This means: take your blog/homepage/etc. Remove anything that is referencing extra-domain Javascript, third party utilities or random cruft. Strip your blog down to its content and then sit back and go through these steps:

1) Given the context of the site, what do people need from it?

a) Meta-information about the author?
b) Meta-information about the subject?
c) Meta-information about the site?

Make a decision on that, and act.

2) Given the context of a post, what do people need from it?

a) A way to share it?
b) Inline contextual information?

Make a decision and act accordingly.

3) Given the context of the author, what do people need to know?

a) Status updates?
b) Meta-information about their physical context (location, photos, music?)
c) Biographic information?

4) Given the context of monetization, what is the least obtrusive means, and most congruent with the aim of the site?

I think if we all did this, our sites would get much better. I did it already to some extent, removing the Twitter flash thing. I stopped using Twitter, so it was rather stale. I’m also doing this on other sites I own and we’re applying these methods to Warner Bros. Records sites.

So my call for this week:

Strip your site down
Refocus
Reimplement.

Could Facebook Become The Next Microsoft?: an otherwise astute analysis killed by the predilection of technology journalists to want to cement their arguments with stupid analogies. Can’t we just judge things in situ instead of having to contextualize things against each other? Or is that asking too much? Is Facebook the next M$? No, Facebook is Facebook and is actually using what the Internet was designed to be, oh, 26 years ago.

To Wit:

” As strategic and tactical computer communication networks are
developed and deployed, it is essential to provide means of
interconnecting them and to provide standard interprocess
communication protocols which can support a broad range of
applications. ”

” As noted above, the primary purpose of the TCP is to provide reliable,
securable logical circuit or connection service between pairs of
processes. To provide this service on top of a less reliable internet
communication system requires facilities in the following areas:

Basic Data Transfer
Reliability
Flow Control
Multiplexing
Connections
Precedence and Security”

I of course am referencing RFC793, TCP
or how about this?

” The internet protocol is specifically limited in scope to provide the
functions necessary to deliver a package of bits (an internet
datagram) from a source to a destination over an interconnected system
of networks.”

” The internet protocol treats each internet datagram as an independent
entity unrelated to any other internet datagram. There are no
connections or logical circuits (virtual or otherwise).”

This is of course, RFC791, Internet Protocol

If you want to know the true value of Facebook, it is a company which hasn’t forgotten the purpose and implication of the past in looking toward the future.