America the scared

Lovely piece by Jonathan Raban in the Guardian about the current mood in the US. Last para reads:

“This is an extraordinary moment in American history. Half the country – including all the people I know best – believes it is trembling on the very lip of outright tyranny, while the other half believes that only the Bush administration stands between it and national collapse into atheism, socialism, black helicopters, and gay marriage. November 2 looms as a date of dreadful consequence. A bumper sticker, popular among the sort of people I hang out with, reads: Bush-Cheney ’04 – The Last Vote You’ll Ever Have To Cast. That’s funny, but it belongs to the genre of humour in which the laugh is likely to die in your throat – and none of the people who sport the sticker on their cars are smiling. They are too busy airing conspiracy theories, which may or may not turn out to be theories.”

Advice to Bill Gates, newbie Blogger

There’s a story that Billg is thinking about publishing a Blog. Jay Rosen has some good advice for him:

June 28, 2004

Dear Mr. Gates:

Welcome to weblog writing. Since you are the person who least needs my advice, I am perhaps the best person to give you advice on the matter of what your weblog should be about, and how to do it reasonably well.

Instead of, “I need a blog myself,” start at: I need a self to blog with. You are less likely to go awry that way. Jeff Jarvis of Buzzmachine says: know my blog, know me. This condenses into five words his experience of meeting people who said: man, you’re exactly like your weblog. Jarvis thinks there is something common to successful weblogs in that experience, and I agree.

Dave Winer, who’s been doing this a while, calls it, “the voice of a person.” (A group weblog: the sound of six people.) Joi Ito says: my blog is like my house. People hang out there because they like the atmosphere. Of course, the author has to be comfortable in the house first.

It’s the person that comes through. That’s what these authors are saying. Self filtered through world.

This is good advice. I know lots of people who have started Blogs and then run into trouble because they cannot find an authentic ‘voice’. That’s probably why many Blogs by teenagers don’t work — because they’re still forming as people, they don’t know who they are, and that uncertainty makes them unable to communicate. Thinks… Gates is unlikely to have that difficulty though.

Why is Internet Explorer so retarded?

I don’t use Internet Explorer if I can help it, but when I do my first thought is how kludgy and old-fashioned it now seems compared to Mozilla, Safari, Firefox and Opera. This leads to a second thought: why did Microsoft apparently stop developing IE? After all, it’s a flagship product and Billg is always ranting on about how Microsoft innovates.

Now comes an interesting piece in the Guardian by Ben Hammersley which addresses that very question. His answer, in a nutshell, is that Microsoft stopped developing IE because the company could see it metamorphosing into a threat to Windows and Office. After all, if browsers and web applications become so sophisticated that one can do serious work inside your browser, why worry about operating systems and Office suites?

Hammersley also points out that Google’s upcoming email service may offer the first sign that this is happening. Some recent testers report that Gmail is much, much slicker and faster than any previous webmail service — and in some cases preferable even to using a specialised email client program. Supposing this is the thin end of a wedge — that Google has other web applications (word-processing with unlimited storage?) in mind for its huge Linux cluster? What then?

We’re moving towards a world in which people want applications that do what they want, and are agnostic about how precisely those applications are delivered. I often make that point in lectures by asking the audience to indicate if they use Microsoft software. Most hands go up. How many people use Macs? A few hands. How many use Linux? Usually no hands go up. Final question: how many use Google? All hands go up. “Congratulations”, I say, “you’re all Linux users then”. It’s a dirty trick to play on businessmen, I know, but it doesn’t half make the point. And in the interests of full disclosure, I should point out that I got the idea from Tim O’Reilly, Whom God Preserve.