Technorati Sidebar Released
I've just put up a
new addition to the
Technorati site - a sidebar for
Mozilla/Netscape and IE. When you find an interesting site or blog,
simply cut-and-paste the URL into the Technorati sidebar, and get an
up-to-date list of blogs that link to that URL. It's like getting
instant reviews and commentary on what's going on on the web.
I like going to my favorite news sources, like the
New York Times,
The Washington Post,
Slashdot, etc., and when I find an interesting link, I paste it into the sidebar so that I can see what interesting conversations are going on about the article. Depending on the article, I get a glimpse into different communities of thought - Articles in the Times about
missile defense bring up warbloggers, articles about
technology bring out the geeks. It adds a metalayer to browsing.
It would be cool to have the sidebar automatically load the watchlist for any URL that I'm browsing on, automatically. Any Javascript or XUL programmers out there ready to take on that challenge?
Supernova Wrapup
Lunch break, so I can do a little bit of blogging before getting back to work. I'm back in San Francisco at work after spending the last day and a half at the
Supernova conference. It was great, one of the best conferences I've been to in years. First of all, it was small.
Kevin Werbach, who has a very interesting
pedigree, put the conference together and got some very interesting speakers and attendees. The total number of people at the conference was about 100, so we all sat in the same sessions, listened to the same speakers, and for the most part, had lunches and dinners together. That was a big idea, because over half of what makes a conference interesting is the schmoozing, networking, and f2f meetups that occur. The early
LinuxWorlds had great networking, but there were too many people there, and I would always get pulled away for press interviews, analyst meetings, and partner/customer discussions to really have the chance to hang out and meet and make new friends, which is really what is most exciting, serendipitous, and fun.
Even though I had to work during the first day of conference sessions, I got there in time for the
blogger's dinner that
Dave Winer had scheduled with the enormous effort of 2
posts on his
weblog, and it was a great time. Immediately I saw old friends like
Doc Searls, and people I've known through email or blogs like
Cory Doctorow,
Glenn Fleishman,
Rohit Khare,
David Weinberger,
David Isenberg,
Howard Rheingold,
Dan Gillmor,
Joi Ito,
Marc Canter, and of course,
Dave Winer.
Dave is a really neat guy, and I've been looking forward to meeting him for a while. He lets it all hang out on his weblog, and
writes essays too, not to mention the
software business he doesn't quite run anymore. Dave is sort of the blogfather of the blogger mafia (not that we really exist, shhh!) We really got to know each other better at coffee after dinner on Monday. He
wrote about it on his weblog, and I must say, Dave was being too kind. BTW, we're from
Lawn Guyland. It's always fun meeting transplanted New Yorkers because after talking for a while, you always come away thinking there's a bit of a tristate cabal going out here. I mean, I wouldn't be able to make it in the dog-eat-dog world of NYC, but out here among the laid-back California culture, I feel a bit like a wolf in sheep's clothing. It's a little shared secret we all keep, and there's a delightful pleasure in sharing it with another expat. Dave and I also spent some good time talking about
Outliners and
OPML (which is fertile ground, IMHO) and I think that having a really good outliner for Linux would be killer, even if it was proprietary; there's just nothing half-decent available on Linux for keeping notes and quickly building weblogs like
Radio's Outliner. At coffee, I also met
Robert Scoble, who had worked for
UserLand for a while, and had coincidentally, written about
Technorati a few days before. I also bumped into
Meg Hourihan and
Lisa Rein, who were having coffee with Cory. I had wanted to meet and get to know Meg at the conference (she was one of the founders of
Blogger), but other than a brief introduction, never got the time to get acquainted. Oh well, maybe next time.
There were also a whole bunch of new friends I made at the conference, and some very interesting folks they are:
Mitch Ratcliffe, who used to be the Y2K columnist for ZDNet amongst other things,
Euan Semple, a manager at the BBC,
Peter Kaminsky, Myles Weissleder from
Meetup, Dick Hardt from
ActiveState (who also knows
Rasmus),
Bob Frankston (co-author of VisiCalc), and a whole bunch of other people that I'm sure I'm leaving out.
Tuesday morning I got up bright and early and headed over to the conference. I met up with
Glenn Fleishman, the best journalist covering the
WiFi industry, and we hung out during the conference, which culminated with
Glenn's panel on wireless infrastructure, on which I was a speaker. I've got some pictures of the panel, but more on that later. Howard Rheingold sat at my table, and I got him to sign my copy of
Smart Mobs. He's great, and he lives in the bay area, too.
Dan Gillmor (whose writing I love) did a great job on short notice talking about blogging and Journalism , called
Journalism 3.01b2, which I blogged about
earlier.
Sergei Brin from
Google did a great Q&A with the crowd, and the best part (for me, at least) was his offer to look into setting up an
XML-RPC aggregator at Google, which would then fire off the GoogleBot to reindex recently changed weblogs that pinged it. Minus the technobabble, it means that blogs would get reindexed on Google more quickly, making Google's index fresher. Sergei, how about having me over to
the offices again - we'll have lunch provided by your great chef, and I'll happily explain all the details.
The afternoon wireless panel went well, even when I put my foot in it (so to speak) during one of the Q&A's. All in good fun. What was awesome about it was that some of the real innovators in the wireless space were there, like
Tim Pozar and
DeWayne Hendricks, who I got to meet for the first time. They should have put in two more chairs on the stage for those two. DeWayne talked about the need for people to submit their comments to the
FCC Spectrum Policy Task Force, which is beginning to decide some things that have serious impact on the unlicensed wireless industry - innovative proposals like easements to licensed spectrum holders for ultra-low power technologies like
ultrawideband are being actively opposed in Washington by the
oligopolists, so all the rest of us need to make our voices heard.
Afterwards, a bunch of us drove back into SF for the
EFF open house of their new digs down in the Mission district. Fortunately we got there before the party got too crowded, and I got a chance to meet
Clay Shirky, who was supposed to be at Supernova, but had had his flight cancelled. He was quite charming and interesting, and I plan on staying in touch with him. I shook hands with
John Perry Barlow and
Brad Templeton, and was able to thank
Seth David Schoen and Cory Doctorow personally for all the hard work they've been doing to
stop the HDTV Broadcast Flag. They wrote a
great reply brief to the FCC last week, and deserve to be commended for their cohesive, cogent arguments. I saw Lile Elam, founder of
GeekMaids, and I also bumped into
Brewster Kahle, and got to see one of his
Bookmobile-printed public-domain books. That was an awesome idea in action, when he drove his bookmobile across the country, making books for people on the spot at schools and libraries, culminated by his arrival in DC on the day of the Eldred arguments before the supreme court.
I bumped into Zach Brown, and we hung out for a while. Zach's the writer of
Kernel Traffic, and editor of
Kernel Cousins, and it's great to see that he's doing well and having fun.
After the EFF reception, Doc, Euan,
Marc Canter and I went to a little Tapas place in the Mission for dinner. It was AWESOME. Marc is a true epicurean. I've got to make a mental note to invite him out again and just remember to have him do the ordering, he was naming all of these wonderful sauces and spices and ordered up some great dishes that went with the really interesting conversation. It turns out that we also have a lot in common, like his youth membership in
Habonim - I was in
Hashomer. Marc's another San Francisco personality, a true gem. His new company sounds really neat as well.
Hmmm, I'm thinking that I can't allow all of these interesting personalities drift off - perhaps I should set up a dinner or something, sort of like what
Jeff Ubois does (did?) with his dinners with interesting people.
Anyway, I'm still basking in the afterglow of all that concentrated stimulation and fun. It is so great to put faces to names and email addresses, and have real human interaction - reminds me that even with these wonderful communication tools like email and weblogs, there is simply no substitute for physical interaction with all of its multimodal communication streams, chance meetings, and introductions by friends.
I'm looking forward to next year's Supernova which is planned for Washington DC, and Dave is talking about
putting together a weblogger's conference for next summer as well. Can't wait.
Back to work...