Category: News

I think I figured out the following from listening to Steve Gillmor. Thanks to Google (Search and/or Alerts), there isn’t much point to hyperlinking references in your text. Clueful people know how to grab terms and search for them in Google Search. Interested people run a Google Alert on their name or their blog’s name.

You can kind of count on clueful and interested people to notice if you mention their name in a post. So, to Robert Scoble I should reply, “you’re certainly welcome.” I still was pleasantly surprised to get a shout back.

Will Parker asked on his blog, Channeling Design, whether Scoble or I needed more irony in our diets. If he thinks digg top stories are low quality and I was actually criticizing Scoble’s links, I wasn’t. Or maybe Tim O’Reilly’s post was meant to be sarcastic. I totally didn’t get that. Finally, if he’s trying to get my attention because he’d like to interview at Clear Ink…I can make that happen.

Dave Winer noted that today is the 10th anniversary of his blog. Despite his recent rhetoric about joining a mob, I will risk joining in an sending congratulations his way. 😉

Was 1997 a crazy good year? As I mentioned last week, I was married ten years ago. A week after that (yes, immediately after my honeymoon), I started working at Clear Ink. When I started, everyone who did HTML had the title “Programmer”, but I was the only one with a Computer Science degree (Steve Nelson has one, but he was a founder and didn’t have that title). I worked my way into being the Chief Technologist.

Joel Spolsky took Steve Gillmor’s latest post on GestureLab and “decoded” it. (I noticed this because I’ve got Dana Gardner in my aggregator). I must be one of the strangest people in the world because I don’t feel like I need to spend much time decoding what Steve says. I tend to appreciate that he doesn’t stop very often to explain something that I already know. I figure that anyone listening or reading would care enough to google a reference he made that they didn’t catch.

I did find it amusing that Joel uses “Rashi” and “Tosefot” without explaining their significance. I’m not a regular Joel on Software reader, so maybe I’m missing context. (It’s a reference to Jewish scholarism. Google it.)

Having listened to the Gillmor Gang for the entire run, I got to where I understood the principles behind what Steve says. I started paying attention to the things he pays attention to. And thus I tend to follow his thinking as well as anyone else’s. I often would find myself frustrated with the other members of the gang when they couldn’t get some point that I’d already reached.

Anyway, I miss listening to the gang each week, but I figure I’ve been taking more out of the Net than putting into it for the past few years. Maybe I’ll finally arrange for my own podcast.