(Henry Story of Beatnik and Michael Hauser of BetterBadNews dot com)
What does a geek do on Saturday? Why, load up the iPhone with interviews of Dave Winer and Max Levchin by Cringely! Yes, fresh air is great, especially on a sunny day in the Swamp with one of the last shuttle launches just down the road a piece...but, I must admit, Henry Story's blog screwed my healthy day up by tempting me to dilute it with more addictive wired stuff. Bruce Eckel lists Cringely among his reading list, and it's easy to see why. The NerdTV lineup is a who's who in the geek world. I tried to downlad it using Limewire, which I am experimenting with as a torrent client, but it couldn't find the torrent file for the Winer interview. So, we're going for the conventional 80 MB MP3 download and will import it into the iTunes for iPhone viewing.
Why this random walk? I met Henry Story at JavaOne after his fascinating talk on Beatnik, the semantic web address book reader browser (rolls off the tongue). Just a few minutes ago, I read about the upcoming ParisJUG meeting on Spring. Well, did you know that Henry Story helped create BabelFish, an online translation program just acquired by Yahoo? Last time I tried to order fish using French in Dakar, I wound up with a plate of mashed potatoes.
Which reminds me, I‘ve been meaning to mention this thinking inside out thing that keeps happening to me. Web2.0 and all. I surfed to Slide.com and checked out just what all the talk is about Max Levchin's (founder of PayPal) latest effort, written mainly in Python. I mentioned to Jim White, the Wings Guy, that I didn't see what the deal was with Slide. He said, well...it's giving you a better way to see all the media. Taking the media from all different sources, like hosted on Flickr, YouTube, wherever, and giving you a different view of it. That's what I mean by inside out. Web2.0 or call it what you want...taking data from the source and transforming it. Fascinating!
(Later) Levchin says the startup winners are the ones who can execute what the users want the fastest and stay ahead of the copiers...
Up next: Winer…
