jr conlin's ink stained banana

i kinda love how folks are getting so upset about that whole "Long Tail is bogus" story. Then again, i love it when folks completely miss the point.

In a nutshell, nobody should be surprised that big blockbusters and perennial favorites do exceptionally well. They're blockbusters and perennial favorites for a reason. They cater to a demand, otherwise they wouldn't be blockbusters and… ok, you get the point. By the very definition of the word, people like things that are popular, and you can do quite well continually catering only to that.

The point of the Long Tail thing is that you can also do fairly well by providing a good bit of less popular stuff to smaller audiences. Dollars are, in fact, dollars, and while i probably won't give you $20 for the latest Metallica crap, i'll happily turn over that amount for a digital version of Looking for Jack. Are there going to be more folks looking for out of print Australian jazz-pop albums than Mega-Metal fans? No, i can safely say there aren't. Still, if you collect up me, and probably a few hundred other folks interested in other types of music, you'll do just fine thankyouverymuch.

What the long tail specifies is not "Toss out that golden goose for thirty for regular geese, two chicken and a handful of army ants", but more "Your audience also wants a diverse product".

Heh, i even like the comment at the end of the article about how the vast majority of bloggers aren't read. Of course not. Anyone expecting fame, fortune and riches from blogging about their cat is delusional.

Doesn't mean they don't get indexed and added to search results, though, and sometimes those obscure folks actually do have something interesting to say.

Ok, no, not really, but it might happen one day.

i feel like i need to apologize to future generations.

The Digital Tipping Point is a project with the stated goal that they're studying and documenting how Free Open Source Software is changing culture. They're using Open Software for everything from running the site, to editing the content to eventually delivering the final product. Everything is being put under Creative Commons and will be available via the Internet Archive. They've interviewed myraids of luminaries like Richard Stalman (sans ninjas), Dan Gilmore, Caitlin Hill who speak both with great knowledge and insight about the wonders of Open Source.

And then there's me.

For about four hours i was taped at the KIPP San Francisco Academy (a damn spiffy program that seriously needs your old servers) where i think i will serve as comedy relief or possibly that guy. (You know That Guy. The one that got cornered into the Daily Show interview who is way out of his league and completely and unerringly wrong.)

Don't get me wrong, it's not like i hate Open Source. i loves me some FOSS. It's just that i'm a pragmatist and realize that while it's going to get there, it's not going to happen soon. It's a bit like how i wonder about the entire concept of a "Tipping Point" where OSS overcomes commercial. i'm not sure there ever will be. OSS is a different option than commercial. There may be real, valid reasons to continue to choose a commercial, non-open option for something where OSS may simply never make sense because you can't get enough folks interested in supporting some obscure option or function you may need. You may have to literally pay someone to build it. Likewise, there are going to be times when a commercial app will out-perform an OSS solution because there's a different incentive model. People have iPods. How many run RockBox on them? It's not so much a tipping point as a period of slow evolution.

Still, i'm thankful that someone felt my opinions were worth preserving in some form. i'm also going to try to help out the KIPP folks and see if i can wrangle up some gear they can use (Considering the kind of gear that gets hauled off to the recyclers, i can think of a far better use for it.)

i fully expect that even though it will all be transcribed and digitally stored, my remarks will not make the final edit. If i'm lucky, someone will turn my penchant for rambling use of pronouns into a dance remix and i'll become the next NumaNuma guy.

Allow me to continue to point out the blindingly obvious. Whoever creates the simplest interface wins.

This is a point that kind of struck home with me sometime this morning. i was going over the Open Auth specification, and the older Open Auth Specification where i discovered that you simply pass the Consumer Key in a crypted, signed manner back to the authenticating site before you can access the data. Where do you get the Consumer Key? Well, first you need to get an access token, which is preceeded by a authorization request, which begins with an unauthorized request. Granted, the initial request is made to a given server which will contain a redirect to the XRDS server information which is a documented and reflective set of instructions in XML which describe where to get the additional elements you'll need to construct where to ask for that unauthorized request. Of course, once one goes through that multiple hand off process, involving several redirects, a presumed level of caching and one can only hope several sacrificial chicken offerings performed by hastily constructed LEGO kits, you discover something rather key.

Even though you've now gotten the individual to log in, you still don't know anything about them.

That part, as noted in the specification, is left as an exercise for the implementor.

Now, while i appreciate the level of effort that has gone into this design and construct, and i certainly do want to know that there's near universal agreement that having something that's both open and secure isn't easy, i just want a way to have folks log in and not have to retype a dozen points of data.

This is one of the big reasons that things like YUI, Gears and Python generally wins as far as geeks are concerned. They work like cars. i don't have to know the proper combustion ratio and timing required to drive a piston nor do i have to understand the effective torque levels required in order to rotate a series of gears about a common axle if i want to go get a gallon of milk. i just get in the car, perform a few simple initialization functions and i'm off. i don't have to think about what all is going on.

It's one of the reasons i always chuckle whenever i hear the old saw about how Linux is like a chair, they give you the raw materials to make the most comfortable chair you've ever sat in, provided you do the work of assembly. i don't want to learn carpentry, metallurgy and upholstery, i just want to sit and get some work done.

Yes, i've looked at using the various libraries for the various languages. They each suck in their own special ways, and it's not really the fault of the author, since they just spent a good portion of their lives trying to weed their way through arcane theoretical constructs and LEGO filled chicken entrails.

As it is, i've kinda blown a day messing on something that should have been a quick bit of work. Ah well, i guess i'll just use another time honored computer science technique and just abstract out that part. Perhaps, when i need to actually implement it, someone else will have created a simpler wrapper.

Otherwise, i get the stinking suspicion that person will be me.

First off OMG! A non-employment related post!!!!1!1one!!oh-en-ee!!!
right? where was i?

Ah, yes, so regular readers of this blog may note, i have strong feelings toward Apple. Said strong feelings are not what you'd normally call "positive". Kind of like saying how being dragged through salt encrusted broken glass before being thrown into a pit of lava may be a tad "uncomfy".

That sort of feeling.

So, needless to say, i wasn't exactly thrilled to read that Helio (my current provider) is headed the way of the Newton. This means that should the contract die and i'm stuck with something less appealing, i could very well be shopping for a new phone and contract.

Which leads me to a rather annoying possibility.

If i were to get a new phone, it'd be a smart phone. Ideally not something the size of a small table. That means deciding between a blackberry or a (sigh) apple iphone. Granted, a blackberry has wifi (for both of the times that, you know, you can find an open access point), already has an SDK out (for quite some time), works on nearly any network, has a killer battery life and frankly, who cares if it can play music? It also features a less than adequate browser (well, until one loads Opera on it, i suppose) and is the size of a small table. (Ok, the Bold is only slightly "tablely", but still, none of these aren't "slip in the pocket and go" type devices.) It also features a standard USB miniB connector and not some hell-spawned proprietary evil and some models can take mini sd(hc) cards and have replaceable batteries.

Vs. the iPhone, which is the current geek wet dream of a device which, will eventually have an SDK, may actually let you load programs to it, has an ok battery life, pretty darn good browser, proprietary hellspawn connector, thinks mini sd Cards don't fit with Steve's View, and have replaceable batteries, provided you replace the attached phone as well.

So, pragmatic logic vs. sheepish cultural following?

decisions… decisions… mixed with cursing. Lots of that.

Ah well, who knows. Perhaps the impending demise of my current carrier isn't quite the looming iceberg off the port bow i believe it to be, and, a year from now, there will be a plethora of time travel enabled devices to select from. (or not).

Looks like more cursing.

i have to wonder at what point marriages will fail because the husband forgot to friend the wife?

Web 2.4 seems to be increasingly minutia based. Consider that folks use Twitter to tell folks of various activities, thoughts, and bowel movements they may be having at any particular moment, which can be bad enough. Then we get to the various aggregation sites like MyBlogLog and FriendFeed that collect up what tracks you've listened to, comments you've posted, and well, everything else you've done online short of the number of times you clicked on the iPhone ad hoping that the price has dropped again this week (and the only reason that's not included is because nobody made a feed of that yet).

One wonders about the level of digital noise we're creating. i'm just as culpable as anyone else is. i mean, sure, i might be interested in photos you've recently posted up to Flickr, passingly interested in the stuff you've added to delicious, and not really interested in the fact that you have Afternoon Delight on endless loop at last.fm.

i know that there's some effort being made to filter the noise and produce a more clean level of… mindless personal minutia that can be combined together with other elements of social trivia to further emphasize how my a person's life is, but in an era where there are guidelines in reducing the amount of interpersonal communication, one has to wonder at what point this all fits in.

i suppose that in the general maturation of the web we've passed the three-year-old "So-and- so-and- so-and then the monkey? he grew real big? and then he- then he- then he jumped up and down REALLY fast and - and - and that's how i think of major political parties and the major technical companies backing them? and then - and then…" to the point where we're all 13 year old girls with iPhones who like totally have got to tell Suzy and Bobbi and Jamie and Steve the fact that they so totally love that new SproutCore thing that they heard Billie and Julie and Mikey were totally into.

Me? i like to think that i'm living ahead of the curb in the later stages of the Interweb 36.9. The one where i stand out front of my website and scream at you kids to stay off my LAN.