I’m posting this during a power outage. Since I re-rigged my telecom setup with the Ooma box, I put all my telecom and internet boxes on a UPS. I’d been itching for a power outage to test it out. Temperatures are close to 100F today here, and with all the AC units working, I got my wish. It’s somehow good to know that nothing about a DSL line depends on local power working.

Test successful.

If you don’t have your cable/DSL modem an router on a UPS, maybe now is time to consider it? -m

Reminder: Thursday evening at Yahoo! Sunnyvale headquarters is the launch party for the developer-facing side of SearchMonkey. In case you haven’t been paying attention, SearchMonkey is a new platform that lets developers craft their own awesomized search results. If you’re interested in SEO or general lowercase semantic web tools, you’ll love it. Meet me there. Upcoming link. Party starts at 5:30. -m

Update: The developer tool is live. Rasmus has a nice walkthrough.

Cory Doctorow’s Little Brother is now shipping from Amazon and other stores. I reviewed a pre-release copy of it and liked it. But the best part is–like Cory’s other books–it’s downloadable right now, for free, under an open content license. I can attest that this is an effective strategy for getting your name and your work out into the wild. If you really like it, then please purchase it in a convenient portable package, also known as a printed book. :-) -m

In the new-to-me department, here’s a library and description of useful XQuery functions from my friend Priscilla Walmsley. XSLT 2, also. -m

P.S. Mark my words, more news is coming…

When making hash browns xkcd style, there are at least 14 ways it could go badly.

1. That’s not a potato, it’s a misshapen rock.
2. Unexpectedly flammable tennis racket.
3. Sparks landing on gas can.
4. Food poisoning via undercooked hash browns due to limited flame contact time.
5. Broken plate fragments.
6. Dripping, flaming gasoline.
7. Swing and a miss; balance lost.
8. Flaming potato fragments in the eye socket.
9. Diving catch ends badly.
10. Spontaneous combustion.
11. Tennis elbow.
12. Repetitive stress injury.
13. Fork misfire.
14. Heat death of the universe.

(17 if that fork is a dangerous crossbreed) -m

Wholly new forms of encyclopedias will appear, ready made with a mesh of associative trails running through them…

The prescient Vannevar Bush, who foresaw (among other things) the importance of hyperlinks. -m

The Minority Report and Other Classic Stories by Philip K. Dick. This volume has all of Dick’s earliest short and medium-length fiction. It’s PKD so you know it’s good, but this one really gives insight into how he developed some of the themes that came to dominate his later work.

Even these early stories are filled with mind-blowing premises, which are only just the beginning before things get really weird. Highly recommended. -m

Up on Flickr. Anita and I had a blast. We spent about 8 hours and saw maybe half of everything. -m

New gear, an Ooma VOIP box. I plan to post more technical details soon, but the short story is that you get a sleek little box that goes between your dsl or cable modem and your router, and you get unlimited local and long distance calling. For free. For life (or 3 years, according to the TOS). Check out the Flickr set of the unboxing experience.

WIth this, I plan to turn off my landline, to the tune of about $35 a month, and by not using our mobile phones for so much long distance, reduce the calling plan for another $40 a month. The one-time cost for the box set me back about $231, so I will be even in just over 3 months. (Only recently, these things were retailing for $599.)

How do these guys stay in business? I’ll write more about this too, but the short story is that bandwidth is really, really cheap, monopolistic efforts of telecom companies notwithstanding.

So far I’m really happy with it. The online Ooma Lounge isn’t as good as Vonage’s system–for one thing, you can only see voicemails, not any kind of call logs. But the features that are there Just Work. The documentation is short and simple but thorough. Setup was a breeze.

Have you tried Ooma? Comment below. -m

If you have webdev skillz, you might be interested in the SearchMonkey launch party on May 15. Good food, good drink, good coding. Space is limited, but I have a few invites to share. Comment here or contact me offline if interested. -m

Today happens to mark the 6th anniversary of my blog. To celebrate going into year seven I’m refocusing it, including a new name: Micahpedia.

Blogging is an important skill, a subset of the overall skill of managing your online persona, so it’s worth devoting some attention to. The ego-burst doesn’t hurt either. My concrete goal is to get in the top 10 search results for the query [Micah], though I face some stiff competition including the prophet.

From an SEO perspective, “Push Button Paradise” wasn’t the greatest choice of name. It suffers from the common SEO mistake of being excessively clever and/or cute reflection of what I happened to be working on at the moment, namely XForms. If you see the old name standalone, or in a blogroll, or in an RSS reader, you still don’t have much of an idea what it’s about or who’s behind it. True I get pretty good ranking on the exact phrase, but nobody searches for that…

I will continue SEO tweaks on this site as time goes on and welcome any advice from any of my 7 readers.

In short, Micahpedia is about what I’m reading, writing, thinking about, and working on. I have plenty to say about these things. :-) The best is yet to come. -m

“Rails is a lot of fun, and lets me do cool new things - but it’s hard to eat it.”

Simon St. Laurent

-m

Tips from Leo Reilly in How to Outnegotiate Anyone (Even a Car Dealer!).

• Be patient. If you insist on having something today, know what you want and be prepared to pay for it.
• Never disclose your deadline.
• Cultivate a positive relationship with the other party.
• Don’t make the other side look stupid (for a prolonged period of time).
• The best negotiators talk only 40% of the time.
• The most intimidating thing you can do to someone trying to intimidate you is to not be intimidated.
• Never be the one to make the first offer.

The most critical aspect of negotiation is the opening offer. Four opening gambits are possible:

1. Lowballing. Offering substantially less to create psychological downward pressure on the price.
2. “Up against the wall.” Forcing the other side to make more concessions than you do.
3. Anchoring. Having both sides make equal concessions.
4. “The Kiss.” Like anchoring, except allowing the other side to take one final (often minor) concession.

If you want to find out what Leo says about how to buy a car, in 5 minutes, below dealer cost, you’ll have to pick up the book though. :-) -m

I haven’t mentioned it yet, but SearchMonkey (now an official name, not just a project name) is in external limited beta. Keep an eye on ysearchblog, lots more technical content is on the way. -m

Roughly speaking, the innovator’s dilemma happens when a product progressively gets more and more advanced features, to the point that it misses out (by listening to customers) on an entire new opportunity. At that point, a simpler, competing product can come into play and make large gains.

But what happens when a company is generally aware of the Innovator’s Dilemma and tries to compensate? It seems like second order effects might come into their own. A product widely known for being (and remaining) minimalist is exposed to attacks from deliberate enhancements and related complexificaiton of competitive products. As the market gets more mature, the steadfastly-simple market leader gets left behind. In a sense, it’s a role reversal from what Clayton Christensen describes. But can it work out the same in the end? Please comment. -m

I’m not involved in the the corporate wrangling about Microsoft and Yahoo! talks. Which leaves me relatively free to comment on it. [Disclosure: I am, not too surprisingly, a Yahoo! shareholder.]

Lots of things have been happening lately. A deadline of, well, today. Talks of Google adsense trials. And all kinds of merger speculation involving Rupert Murdoch in some fashion, or else AOL.

But I haven’t seen anyone point out this connection: Google owns 5% of AOL, having invested a billion bucks and taken over search there a couple of years ago. So if Yahoo! and AOL merged, there would already be a Google advertising connection in place. Running pre-trials now is just due dilligence on something that might happen anyway.

Having both an in-house advertising network and an outsourced one has some advantages too, namely in the form of “knobs” that can be adjusted to tune margins as conditions warrant. And maintaining the in-house system keeps Google honest and makes sure that relatively good deals can be negotiated in the future.

Lots of pundits talk about regulatory scrutiny, but honestly, it’s been years since any antitrust machinery in this country has been effective. And the recent spectrum auctions showcased Google’s skill at turning regulatory tables in their favor. If it came down to it, the smart people on both sides of the table shouldn’t have a problem crafting an agreement in a way that meets muster, even in the stricter EU.

Summary: based solely on public reports, it seems like the AOL connection might be a credible threat to Microsoft’s appetite. The ball is firmly in Steve’s court now. We’ll see what he does.

Harry Potter author J.K. Rowling, herself rowling in gazillions of dollars, is along with her publisher suing Steven Vander Ark, a poor librarian who produced a lexicon of the Harry Potter universe.

Rowling says it’s not about the money, it’s about control. Poppycock. If that was the case, she would have objected to the web site. Instead, Rowling is quoted as saying:

This is such a great site that I have been known to sneak into an Internet cafe while out writing and check a fact rather than go into a bookshop and buy a copy of Harry Potter (which is embarrassing).

A lexicon is a collection of existing (fictional) facts, not something that is going to wrest creative control of the franchise away from the author. This work makes the Harry Potter universe more valuable, not less. Even if legally this is a gray area, it’s a boneheaded move to sue one of your greatest fans for providing a valuable and useful reference.

What troubles the bean counters so much is that the printed lexicon costs, well, actual money, $24.95 to be exact. As an author it troubles me to see how out of touch copyright law is, and how badly the scent of a few dollars can make an otherwise reasonable person behave. -m

Some books you forget immediately, but some stick with you. Some affect you so profoundly that years later you still think about them. They get under your skin and shape your future. Here’s my list:

1. How to Win Friends and Influence People This got me through years of W3C work, and still affects every human interaction I have.
2. Gödel, Escher, Bach This book is impossible to describe in one line, but it will make you think. And re-read it. This book directly inspired my Hyperlink Offering article riffing on XLink and my fondness for predicates.
3. Three Men in a Boat The funniest book I have read. Ever. But I actually read Connie Willis’s To Say Nothing of the Dog first…
4. Kicking the Sacred Cow Sometimes you need to think about the impermissible. Or understand why others do. This book inspired my XML Annoyances column.
5. On Writing Stephen King’s “CV” (aka life history), writing tips, and harrowing description of his real-life near-death experience. This book influenced my choice of house to by–get one with an office…
6. Calculus Made Easy I was originally given this book by my mentor, Virgil Matheson, when I was probably in the 6th grade. “What one fool can do, so can another,” the author opines. An utterly remarkable book that deflates the aura of complexity normally around higher maths.

OK, I guess that’s 6. Also, I would have to mention another that caused significant changes: XForms Essentials ;)

What’s on your list? -m

P.S. These links are Amazon affiliate links. If you buy some of them you will be helping support my terrible Amazon habit, now at around 50 pages a day.

Thanks to chromatic for the link. Largely hidden,  largest app clusters of this particular platform can:

Control over a million computers and can deliver over a hundred billion advertisements per day.

However, “don’t be evil” is not a part of this particular platform’s strategy… -m

Never let anyone say that forms are easy. What seems like a boring, tedious topic on the surface is surprisingly deep and challenging. As evidence, the multi-billion-dollar plan to modernize the US census in 2010 has fallen back to paper technology. Sadly their plans didn’t involve XForms.

Highly-critical applications, like say voting, are even more difficult to get right. Possibly the government will get it in shape be 2020 or 2030. -m

(sick again…at least I get to catch up on my reading)

Something has always puzzled me: I’ve never solidly connected with a Cory Doctorow story. It’s baffling; we’re practically brothers-in-geekdom. Most every nonfiction thing I read from Cory leaves me nodding in agreement. If we met, we’d have no trouble talking for hours about metacrap, free content licenses, and crypto. But for some reason, Cory’s fiction–short story or freely-downloadable-novel–hasn’t clicked with my peculiar mind.

Until now, that is. I emailed Cory asking him for a prerelease copy of Little Brother, in return for an honest review here. He was happy to oblige. The story pulled me in fast and hard, and by the time it was over, I wished there was more to the tale. I’d call that “solidly connecting”. :-)

The story is aimed at high-school-aged kids, and naturally features a cast of high-school-aged protagonists. This means that I’m quite outside the target audience, so your opinions might vary. Too many reviews fall into plot synopsis mode here, so I’ll try to avoid it. Suffice it to say that the story revolves around a close group of teens who get accused of involvement in a bigger-than-911 plot, and quietly fight back against the resulting oppression.

The tale has a lot of (and AFAIK this is a freshly minted word) techsposition. Like any exposition, it is a risky thing to do as a writer, since it halts the forward momentum of your story. It’s doubly hard to stop to explain technical details. Blocks of techsposition were heavy enough to throw me out of the story a few times. There were cases where the plot wouldn’t have suffered by glossing over some details. On the other hand, these not-quite-asides are about real-world (as opposed to fictional) technology, so definitely have some benefit for readers.

The story has a strong message, but it gets spread a little thick toward the middle. All the clever things the kids think to do happen fairly early in the story, but the plot keeps rolling along. There’s also a few too many instances of the really-smart teen who has outwitted or escaped from the clutches of The Man, just in time to appear in the action.

There’s a number of characters in the story, with complex interactions among them.  The main characters are solid, believable, and fully-realized. In fact, I’d point to the characterization as the main that kept me up late reading.

Little Brother comes out the end of April, both in print and freely downloadable. If you’re allowed to choose your own reading material, you might decide it’s worth a look. -m

Evernote looks like a cool application, and for at least a few more hours, you can get it for free via the Giveaway of the Day site. At first glance, this seems like the closest software I’ve seen to the original “Brain Attic” concept I’ve held for years.

My most pressing questions are (big surprise) around data storage. It seems that in the version 3 beta all the data is kept on a remote server, which makes me a little uneasy. In what format is the data kept? Is it some format that will be readable in 50 years? If the Evernote corporation goes offline or out of business, do I lose everything?

I’ll keep reporting back here with my discoveries and experiences. -m

I have here a pre-release copy of Cory Doctorow’s novel Little Brother.

With permission.

In plain text.

Being read with the UNIX command less.

On an XO laptop.

And so far it’s awesome. -m

So today Yahoo! announced a major facet of what I’ve been working on lately: making the web more meaningful. Lots of fantastic coverage, including TechCrunch and ReadWriteWeb (and others, please link in the comments), and supportive responses and blog posts across the board. It’s been a while since I’ve felt this good about being a Yahoo.

So what exactly is it?

A few months ago I went through the pages on this very blog and added hAtom markup. As a result of this change…well, nothing happened. I had a good experience learning about exactly what is involved in retrofitting an existing site with microformats, but I didn’t get any tangible benefit. With the “SearchMonkey” platform, any site using microformats, or RDFa or eRDF, is exposed to developers who can enhance search results. An enhanced result won’t directly make my my site rank higher in search, it it most certainly make it prone to more clicks, and ultimately more readership, more inlinks, and better organic ranking.

How about some questions and answers:

Q: Is this Tim Berners-Lee’s vision of the Semantic Web finally getting fulfilled?

A: No.

Q: Does this presuppose everybody rushing to change their sites to include microformats, RDF, etc?

A: No. After all, there is a developer platform. Naturally, developers will have an easier time with sites that use official and community standards for structuring data, but there is no obligation for any site to make changes in order to participate and benefit.

Q: Why would a site want to expose all its precious data in an easily-extractable way?

A: Because within a healthy ecosystem it results in a measurable increase in traffic and customer satisfaction. Data on the public web is already extractable, given enough eyeballs. An openness strategy pays off (of which SearchMonkey is an existence proof).

Q: What about metacrap? We can never trust sites to provide honest metadata.

A: The system does have significant spam deterrents built in, of which I won’t say more. But perhaps more importantly, the plugin nature of the platform uses the power of the community to shape itself. A spammy plugin won’t get installed by users. A site that mixes in fraudulent RDFa metadata with real content will get exposed as fraudulent, and users will abandon ship.

Q: Didn’t ask.com prove that having a better user interface doesn’t help gain search market share?

A: Perhaps. But this isn’t about user interface–it’s about data (which enables a much better interface.)

Q: Won’t (Google|Microsoft|some startup) just immediately clone this idea and take advantage of all the new metadata out there?

A: I’m sure these guys will have some kind of response, and it’s true that a rising tide lifts all boats. But I don’t see anyone else cloning this exactly. The way it’s implemented has a distinctly Yahoo! appeal to it. Nobody has cloned Yahoo! Answers yet, either. In some ways, this is a return to roots, since Yahoo! started off as a human-guided directory. SearchMonkey is similar, except a much broader group of people can now participate. And there are some specific human, technical and financial reasons why as well, but I suggest inviting me out for beers if you want specifics. :-)

Disclaimer: as always, I’m not speaking for my employer. See the standard disclaimer. -m

Update: more Q and A

Q: How is SearchMonkey related to the recently announced Yahoo! Microsearch?

A: In brief, Microsearch is a research project (and a very cool one) with far-reaching goals, while SearchMonkey is targeted as imminently shipping software. I frequently talk to and compare notes with Peter Mika, the lead researcher for Microsearch.

You are awesome. Just sayin’. -m

Some time ago, Doug Crockford’s excellent blog pointed me to this page on “excessive DTD traffic” at the W3C. Go ahead and follow that link, I’ll wait…

All the standard templates that show how to construct a basic XHTML page include a public identifier of http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-strict.dtd and often a namespace name of http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml. As the blog points out, these are not actually hyperlinks, they only play them on TV. Huge quantities of software are requesting these URLs 24×7, putting a load on their servers. Often times this results from unfortunate defaults in off-the-shelf XML components such as parsers.

But what did you expect?

This is the web equivalent of having a front-desk receptionist hand out a stacks of self-addressed, stamped postcards, then complaining about how much mail the company gets from all around the world.

HTTP URLs are great for identifiers on a technical basis: they are based on DNS names and have the important qualities of uniqueness and persistence. But as far as human factors go, they are a terrible choice (though with a great deal of inertia at this point). -m

Somehow I missed this posting and the underlying news that a Y Research project has a nice public demo of semantic search, driven by RDF, RDFa, and microformats. Still a rough sketch of a full solution, with multiple-second access times. But I particularly like the query for renaissance faire. -m

The WebPath bug reports continue to roll in. For one, queries against *.wikipedia.* don’t seem to work. You get something back, but it has no resemblance to the page you were looking for. The problem comes from the W3C tidy service that I use, specifically that the (understandably overworked and understaffed) admins at the Wikimedia Foundation seem to have blocked it. It seems like more than a simple IP or user-agent-based block. I’ve emailed them about it but haven’t heard back yet.

So, this highlights the limitation of having a single-source converter in the Platonic Web module of WebPath. So I turn to my readers: do you know of any other tidy servers? Or converters of a non-tidy origin? For any of these to work, they need to return clean XML corresponding to the original page (as opposed to, say, returning something with big headers/footers or ampersand-encoded). This seems like an outstanding need for the open source community.

Please comment below with ideas. Thanks! -m

UPDATE: heard back from the Wikipedia admins, and although professional and helpful-as-can-be-expected, they won’t be changing anything on their end. Still looking for more open source options.

As spotted on TechCrunch, full article. This is a game-changer folks. Check out the comments attached to the article. -m

Amazon hosted a networking event tonight. They had me at free beer and a chance to look at a Kindle. Now that I’ve actually played with one, I can comment on some of its features for better or worse.

It’s heavier and more solid than it looks. With the little padded cover, it could pass for a physical book in most situations, and it would probably survive a drop to the floor just fine.

The screen does look great, even in the sub-optimal lighting conditions of a bar. I had to compare with the XO when I got home, and with the backlight off, I think the resoloutions are very nearly similar. However, the XO (without backlight) is fairly hard to read at indoor lighting levels, though in full sunshine it’s great. I don’t know how easy it would be to read the Kindle in full sunlight…

Page turning is annoyingly slow, and annoyingly easy to do by accident. The annoying part is that after pressing the button, nothing seems to happen for a second, then the page blacks out, waits another second, then displays the new content. I understand the technical limitations of the black flash (and the corresponding benefits–essentially zero power consumption to hold an image). But it feels like if it started working as soon as the button was pressed, it could cut the overall page change time in half. Keyboard entry felt slow and lagged as well.

Overall, the device didn’t feel usable to me. I somehow stumbled my way into Wikipedia and got to see the browser in action. I would love to see a touch-screen version.

Did seeing one change my mind about buying one? Nope. Still waiting. I’d buy this one at half it’s current price, an updated model for maybe more. -m