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 Saturday, February 16, 2002  
 
Radio UserLand 8.0.5 is available for download. 

Dann Sheridan is working on a real-time data displayer for Radio/MSIE users. (Screen shot.) 

Ken Bereskin is collecting dock collections. 

Steve Gillmor: "Dave Winer wraps the thrill and agony of Frontier's creativity and complexity behind Radio's placid browser interface." 

NY Times: "An Internet start-up goes public. It is not profitable, in fact, it has lost hundreds of millions of dollars to date, and faces competition from old-economy stalwarts. Yet on the first day of trading, investors go wild, pushing the company's stock up 60 percent. Sounds like 1999? It happened today." 

Hello Google 

A few weeks ago I asked for help at Google to be able to experiment with their XML interface. (Demo.)

What a runaround. Google appears to have a core of people who love the Internet. Their PR people have always been helpful and enthusiastic. But try to find someone at Google who can talk developer stuff, and you're in for quite a trip. I post this here as a possible way of cutting through the maze.

I'd like to prototype a distributed tool for writers that uses Google in an interesting new way made possible by the distributed writing tool we already have deployed on thousands of desktops. It's a money-making opportunity for sure, if it works, we'd be happy to share the profits.

So if you work at Google, please let us play with your XML service and see what happens.

Radio-Design mail list 

As promised, we're ready to open the Radio-Design list, for designers working in Radio, and for vendors who produce tools that are useful to designers, so they can give us advice and we can help them be successful, and vice versa. Radio is not just a platform for geeks, it's also a venue for designers to innovate, teach and explore new techniques in easy content management. That's the charter of this list.

Real-Time Enterprise mail list 

Last week, our friend Dann Sheridan, an enterprise guy from Accenture, and a Radio 8 developer, started a mail list to work on real-time technologies for the Enterprise. I subscribed to this list, it's an interesting topic, I want to learn more.

Morning coffee notes 

Good morning fellow coffee drinkers. Got a big white mug of steamin coffee. It's yummy. (I hate the word yummy, that was an experiment. I survived. I also hate cat pictures, yesterday I ran one. I think the CSS zealots are out to lunch, but yesterday we shipped a CSS theme for Manila. I see a trend.)

Anyway things are really weird in Silicon Valley. The Good Earth in Palo Alto, one of the icons of our culture, shut down. That's where I had dinner with Doug Engelbart, and lots of other cool people who call this place home. Up and down University Ave, the main commercial street of Palo Alto and Stanford University, are For Lease signs. Niehaus-Ryan, one of the highest flying PR firms of the Dotcom Boom, shut down last week. I read Nick Denton's essay on what a stinky place this is, and while I share some of his snobbish attitude (I'm from NY) I look forward to the day when the carpetbaggers who came here seeking unearned fortune, go home. They fucked this place bigtime. Even as they leave they fuck us. Poor manners. I can't afford to be so cavalier, because I am invested, with a company that's based here, and I own a house and some land.

In 2002 being a small company is a huge struggle. We're still here, but some months are more difficult than others. There's a "collection" mentality among the survivors. Everyone has to collect. No one can pay. My little company never participated in the DotCom mania, so I figured we were immune from the collapse. It's not actually so simple. In an economy that's tubing, it's hard to stay on the surface, in a little boat, and not get sucked into the Big Flush. We are managing, inch by inch, staying afloat, and have a great time with the software and the community. But the business environment, which hasn't been normal here for over a decade, shows no signs of smoothing out anytime soon.

Two years ago today News.Com was kvelling about Eazel.


 
 
        
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