As promised, my JotSpot beta account was created today. I'll play around with it tonight and let you know what I think.
I realize I'm a couple days late putting together my thoughts on the whole Wiki-wars dust-up between SocialText and JotSpot, but here goes.
First, Matt Marshall's original article was really substandard: pure sensationalism. I've enjoyed reading his blog, but the Merc news article is trying to invent a controversy where there is none. Honestly, can you believe that they wasted column inches on the fact that company A lost one customer to company B?
JotSpot has written to tell me that my entry into the Beta program has been postponed until January 24th. I'm still eager to see what they have to offer. Though it contains nothing particularly newsworthy, the full letter is reproduced after the jump, in case anyone is interested.
I've been using SmartyPants to HTML-prettify my typography. Unfortunately, I just realized that it breaks TrackBacks. In the last post, I had a curly-apostrophe in the first word: "I'm". All the trackbacks I sent out stopped their excerpt right after "I". Not very interesting reading, eh? See the problem in action here. I guess I'm going to have stop using SmartyPants. It's a shame — it was a cool feature.
I’m sure that everyone and his snake has read about Google’s (and Yahoo’s and Typepad’s) new nofollow initiative by now. I'm sure this will be discussed to death over the next few days, but I wanted to weigh in briefly:
First, as John Battelle says, I’m willing to bet that they haven’t fully examined the consequences of this idea. We’re talking about changing a fairly fundamental piece of our “shared reality.”*
Second, this implementation carves a deeper chasm between the haves and the have-nots. It is now just a bit harder for an unknown voice to be heard. And I don’t think that’s something we want to codify in the code/law of the net.
Andy Wismar argues, and I agree, that this solution is drastic overkill in his post: The Spammers have Won.
On the other hand, I am elated by the way these companies were able to cooperate so quickly. Compare this to the bureaucracies of the IETF or ICANN. It reminds me a little of the way things felt in the mid-’90s. We really do live in a shared ecosystem. Good for these folks for recognizing and trying to make life better for everyone. I just wish they had found a different solution.
* Ed’s note: I can’t find the post in which I found the “shared reality” idea. I know I read it today, but now it’s gone. Apologies for not giving credit.
TiVo seems in a precarious position these days. The bad news just keeps coming: They lose their contract with DirectTV. They announce that they’re going to start selling ad-space in their UI. They finally release the long overdue TiVo2Go — but it’s DRM crippled and not even ready for the Mac. They pitch their brilliant new strategy to try to sell people extra content off the net. They announce that they are “promoting” their CEO, Mike Ramsay, architect of said strategy. And today, the NYT breaks a story that says TiVo walked away from a deal with Comcast.
I’ve been wondering for years why TiVo couldn’t manage to ink a deal with any of the cable companies. Now I’m sure those negotiations were fraught with difficulty — but this failure will, I think, ultimately doom the company. Honestly, the parallels to the early days of the Mac are just too plain:
So Mike builds an interesting metaphor here. He posits that Wikis could be the “third place” of corporate communication. I’m not going to summarize the entire argument here — go read his post. But I am going to play the Devil’s advocate a bit.
I like Mike’s core explanation: wikis are better than Word docs because they enable collaboration and they’re better than email because the information doesn’t get lost. So I think the metaphor holds, but I don’t know how effective it is.
JotSpot, the company I mentioned here, has started a company blog. It’s just gotten started and there’s not much of interest yet, but we’ll see what they come up with.
I found the link by way of Scott McMullan, who appears to be a new JotSpot employee. He also points to some other interesting info about JotSpot:
One, two, three of Scott’s posts on JotSpot.
An article about JotSpot beta launch in InfoWorld.
The JotSpot co-founders’ blogs: Joe Kraus and Graham Spencer.
An interview with same.
Another interview with Joe Kraus.
A demo of JotSpot recorded by John Udell at Web2.0.
As soon as I have time to read all of this, then I’ll post further thoughts. Also, as I mentioned in my last post about JotSpot, I had signed up for a beta account. But I got email from the company asking me to “wait for the next upgrade” before starting the beta. Everything is supposed to be ready next week. I’m anxious to check it out.
I read Nicholas Basbanes’s A Splendor of Letters: The Permanence of Books in an Impermanent World over the break. I know, it's a decidedly non-techy subject. But in the immediate aftermath of the Google Library Initiative it provoked some interesting thoughts.
A book has three distinct aspects: the physical artifact, the content it contains and (recalling what I said here,) the accretion of commentary and criticism that collects around around the other two parts. We need to find a way to preserve and make simultaneously accessible all three aspects of the book.
Jonathan Nolen 