Sin City was an absolutely mind-blowing movie. I'm sure you've read about how the movie was shot (entirely green-screen); how it was manipulated (high-contrast b&w splotched in certain frames with a single brilliant color — white, yellow or red); how it was co-directed (against the dictates of the DGA by Robert Rodriguez and Frank Miller). I don't need to rehearse all of that.
I just need to say, "Go see this movie." Slate's review was really spot on: "I loved every gorgeous sick disgusting ravishing overbaked blood-spurting artificial frame of it." And Salon says that the film offers "an admission that there are some things decent, God-fearing folk just aren't fit to see, and an assurance that Sin City is going to catalog them dutifully and in exacting detail." See also Rolling Stone and The Onion. It was brilliant.
Oh yeah, and there's a beautiful, half-asian, teenaged prostitute with a freaking ninja sword.
IBM's alphaWorks has release a new tool that will allow you to visualize the history of a Wiki document. This is really cool. It's written in Java, and it appears to be available for license, though I'm not sure under what terms. There is a plug-in for MoinMoin and MediaWiki.
I'm not sure if this is useful in a business context, or only to satisfy academic curiosity. But it might be. I think I'd have to live with it a while to know for sure. But it's clear to me that Wiki vendors need to provide very good tools for understanding the histories of documents, for evaluating changes, and for comparing and managing versions. Those will be crucial for any site with a more than a few authors.
Link via if:Book.
Mac OS X Tiger has gone gold. (Build 8A428, in case you need to know.) Start your engines, everyone.
While I stuck in Dallas on my way home from Birmingham last weekend, I was able to pick up a copy of the April Atlantic Monthly, which has an article from the inimitable David Foster Wallace. The article had been linked around the net about a week before, but it was behind a subscription-only content wall at the Atlantic website, so I hadn't been able to read it.
Normally, in such situations, I just forget all about the article and move on with my life, but Wallace is someone who I would go very much out of my way to read. So I bought the dead-tree version, and the article was typically brilliant. Wallace is one of the funniest authors I know.
As I was just saying….
Tim Bray comes through with a nice rant today blasting Apple's lack of transparency.
My big gripe with Apple, of course, is their cult of hermetic secrecy. We at Sun and our esteemed competitors up in Redmond are engaged in a grand experiment: what happens when you dramatically increase a company’s transparency? Initial results are pretty good for both of us. Apple’s approach is of course, exactly the opposite. They control the message, nothing that’s not part of the message can be said, nobody is allowed to say anything except for Steve, and they’ll sue your ass if you step out of bounds.
See? Customers notice when you treat them badly. They get mad. If they get mad enough, they'll go somewhere else. Having insanely great products is only one item weighed on the scale of customer satisfaction. Trust, respect, community, and access to information are all there too, weighing on one side or the other.
Last week Fred Wilson and Om Malik argued over the whether there are "we companies" and "they companies." Fred says that Apple used to be a we company, but they've become arrogant and lost their way. They're attacking their fans and the predatorily taking advantage of their users. Om, on the other hand, says this is business, damnit, and companies only look out for their own profits. They're out to "make as much money as [they] can get away with."
First of all, calling Apple a "we" company betrays a certain lack of perspective on Apple's history. But that's not really the point.
Om is exactly right when he says "all companies are they companies." Companies are designed to behave only in their own self-interest. And, in fact, they people in charge are legally obligated to do so.
But there is an insight here that Om misses. It underlies Fred's argument, though he fails to fully articulate it.
Had a lovely weekend at home: saw friends, spent time with my family, went to church. The weather in Birmingham, for once, was idyllic.
And by way of warning, my email server has been out of commission for the last twenty-four hours (roughly). It's fixed now. But if you mailed me anything of terrific importance, you might want to send it again.
I'm leaving tomorrow to head home for Easter. I'll only be there through Monday. But if you're in Birmingham for the holidays, give me a ring.
It's another god-awful, early flight — 6:30am. I'm off to pack. Cheers.
Well, don't I feel ill-informed. It turns out that JotSpot actually did do something interesting at PCForum yesterday. They released the JotBox! (Cute name.) I found the announcement through this eWeek story. How despressingly old-school.
Jot is no doubt responding to the same pressures that SocialText is feeling from enterprise customers. Oh, wait. I suppose that might have been apparent from the press release subtitle, "Company Responds to Enterprise Customer Demands with "JotBox" Appliance." I should really read the entire press release before I start to spout off.
SocialText announced at PCForum today that they have relaunched their product line to address three distinct markets: Enterprise, their enterprise appliance. .Net, their hosted product for SoHo and consumers. And .Org, which appears to be the same as SocialText.net, but offers discounted pricing for academics, non-profits (and perhaps open-source projects, though that's not said explicitly). You can read more about the SocialText relaunch on Ross Mayfield's blog.
Despite the rhetoric in the press release, this doesn't appear to be a substantive change. SocialText has had the same basic divisions for the last several months, at least. Instead, I think they're using this announcement to focus attention on their enterprise appliance, which has been pretty well hidden prior to today.
My guess is that they've finally heard enough feedback to convince them that a hosted solution is a problem for a lot of potential customers. For example, externally hosted data is a total non-starter in my company. So talking about SocialText enterprise helps them in the door with those kinds of companies. On the other hand, I think appliances are a questionable idea in general. I'd much rather have a installable software. But I suppose that this is better than not having an inside-the-firewall product at all.
Jonathan Nolen 