Work(ing Title)

The smoldering embers of the Flickr/Zooomr API fire almost got a another burst of fuel this weekend when Thomas Hawk showed up at Bloggercon. Niall just about kept him from opening his mouth at all, though that didn’t stop Marc Canter from taking the ball and running–something that I simply can’t do justice to in text (mp3 44:08-44:48). The thing about it is what Marc and I briefly traded on across the aisles; a problem I’ve decided to call kickball and lemonade.

The fantastic thing about the Web is the collaboration it fosters, and all the ideas born on the Web have the sense of sharing in their DNA. Companies are formed out of a common desire for a particular tool or service, which has a similar set of motivations as playing kickball.

The other side of the coin is that these ideas, in this most popular case Flickr and Zooomr, are ultimately businesses created for aquiring wealth either for profit or to cover the cost of existence. These motivators are just like those behind running a lemonade stand.

While it’s well and good to get together and just play, most people will get thirsty and start looking around for something cool to drink. The problem reaches a breaking point when more and more people move into the neighborhood and start doing the same thing. It’s kosher as Christmas so long as it’s all about having fun, but sooner or later the two cats who were playing kickball together are selling lemonade across the street from each other.

If electricity and bandwidth were free then ‘fair APIs’ would just happen and I wouldn’t be writing this. So far however there are still bills to pay and spending money to help your competitors is pretty low on the list of places to invest that preverbial phat cash.

While Monzel graciously drove me back to my hotel after dinner last night, we started to rehash Bloggercon. Dave had asked Niall to use half of his time to teach us how easy it is to read an RSS file.

What we quickly came to was the issue we had with spending our time simply talking about what we wanted. In this case the room seemed to want an answer to archiving and securing online data.

In the time it took getting from PT’s apartment to the Triton we came to the conclusion that a simple upgrade in syndication specs should allow for easy archiving. A lot of time was spent talking about the sort of things we wanted from software during Pirillo’s Users in Charge session (mp3) and that theme really should’ve been carried over into Dave’s idea.

The desire to stay tightly on-topic prevented real change from happening. We had the one of the architects of the RSS standard sitting in the room, and we sat around talking about what we wanted rather than changing things in real time. Monzel and I agreed that the value of yesterday’s time could’ve been grown significantly if the room had rallied around making change instead of asking for it.

Niall’s session at Bloggercon yesterday was focused on standards for users. He wanted to talk about how standards for users are designed and what we all want from standards. That could have been a really interesting talk, but Dave had his own ideas. According to the docNography:

Dave: let’s give 5 minutes to learning how RSS works.

At this point the notes go cold, which is unfortunate because the next 20-30 minutes were the most heated and exciting that day. Niall graciously threw his energies into walking everyone through Doc’s RSS file, explaining each line of code in plain English.

Dave interjected at different points to address some hacks in the file, which signaled a downward spiral. Ponzi took a moment from running the mic around the room and pointed out that for as legible as Dave proported RSS to be, there were still a handful of lines that required extra explanation.

Soon after that I felt the urge to try and convince Dave of my feeling that his exercise didn’t really hold a lot of value for people (a fool’s errand in hindsight) so long as the code did its job. The conversation lost any appearance of usefulness at that point, but Niall brilliantly got us all back on track and wrapped up his abridged talk. All in all he did a yeoman’s job dealing with the least comfortable hour of the day.

Check out the Standards for Users mp3 for all the hot talk.

While Dave constantly reminds people to wait for microphones, Doc interrupts demanding clarification for enhancing the talk notes, and PT moderates with his usual hilarious commentary, Bloggercon marches on.

The room exploded into heated discussion within minutes around the tools that people use to manage their information, whether public, private, or both. Naturally there are three-to five limitations for every solution, but that didn’t keep anyone from loving how they do their thing.

The OPML file Doc is generating could be the most data-laden document I’ve ever seen created in near-realtime. It’s amazing to watch a treasure of useful information get created, let alone be a part of it.

I’ve gone back to Cali tonight, and the 75F breeze that hit me upon stepping outside was the best welcome I’ve ever got from my home state. I’ll be at BarCamp this weekend throwing out on10 shirts and Channel 9 guys, as well as BloggerCon at 08:00 this morning (why Dave why?!)

More importantly though this weekend is [Gay] Pride–something Eric almost forgot about. While it holds greater significance for San Francisco’s more obvious male population, Pride means one thing to those of us who like girls…KGAY!!!

This is the only time of year I actually seek out traditional radio broadcast. Listen and be entertained, so it is written…