Garrick van Buren

I just picked up a new pair of glasses from George over at Look + See Eyecare in Minneapolis.

Until I found Look + See, I was weary of eyewear places. It was a classic case of the paradox of choice. Lots of potential options and difficulty discerning differences without trying on every pair in the store.

George and I actively ignored the vast majority of the frames in the store. We may have gone through 5 frames – out of the hundreds on the walls. Five. Cause, really, how many times do you want to say ‘No’?

Plus, picking 1 from the 5 George recommended was easy.

While part of my final bill was for frames and lenses, part is also for George’s expert curation and recommendations. I don’t want discount that. Remember, the fire hose is free….

If memory serves, the internet was originally developed as a national defense mechanism. A way to keep communications – in a distributed manner – flowing after a nuclear attack.

Each node a client and a server, a receiver and producer.

Today, not only are the vast majority of Americans online (receivers), but a good chunk – 10% – are actively engaged in making online a better place (producers).

While our communications and communities are distributed, our energy is still centralized.

Broadcast if you will.

From where you’re sitting, can you see the power plant generating the electricity you’re using to read this?

Probably not.

So, we don’t see energy being generated, it’s far away, feedback takes a billing cycle, and our only way to reduce costs is to reduce demand.

And we’re surprised selling energy efficiency to the American public is an uphill battle?

But what if?

What if, just 10% of us were also putting energy back onto the grid.

1 household per block (another take on the block-by-blog idea) sucking down solar, wind, or geothermal. Covering their energy needs and putting the surplus on the grid.

Reducing demand by increasing the number of suppliers – even if they’re only nano-suppliers, cover a few households.

This may even minimize the outages from minor disasters.

The economics are tough from a private citizen doing this on their own, so I wonder – what if this was part of being a energy customer. The energy company finances and maintains the solar panels on your suburban roof. Like sitting in the exit row on an airplane. But for your neighborhood’s electricity.

Hmmmmm.

(citations forthcoming)

• Amara’s law — “We tend to overestimate the effect of a technology in the short run and underestimate the effect in the long run”.
• Brooks’ law: “Adding manpower to a late software project makes it later.”
• Conway’s Law : “Any piece of software reflects the organizational structure that produced it.”
• Edwards’ law: “You cannot apply a technological solution to a sociological problem.”
• Goodhart’s law: “When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure.”
• Hanlon’s razor: “Never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by stupidity.”
• Heisenberg’s Uncertainty principle: “States that one cannot measure values (with arbitrary precision) of certain conjugate quantities, which are pairs of observables of a single elementary particle. The most familiar of these pairs is the position and momentum.”
• Keynes’ Law: “Demand creates its own supply.” (The economists’ version of Gibson’s ‘the street has it’s own use for things’)
• Parkinson’s law: “Work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion.”
• Sturgeon’s revelation: “90 percent of everything is crap.”
• Winer’s rule of alternatives: “One way to do something, no matter how flawed that way is, is better than two, no matter how much better the second way is.”Two is more than twice as bad (Note: Thanks Dave!I need to find a proper citation for this. Google wasn’t helpful)

Update 11 Aug 2008
I’m interested in the relationship between Sturgeon’s Relevation and the Pareto Principle (i.e the 80-20 rule).

While listening to John Gruber & Dan Benjamin’s – The Talk Show #24, I was reminded about one of my pet peeves with all the free software – it completely kills the innovation¹.

John and Dan were talking about email.

I feel the same way about email clients as I do about feed readers – they’re water.

And by water, I mean money.

By money, I mean: my wallet is open for something better than Mail.app.

Elsewhere:

“Email is built on a set of standards, and is implemented by a number of different servers, clients, etc. All this makes innovation in the email space move at a glacial pace.” – Jason @ Babelnote

1. I’m calling web browsers the exception that proves the rule. For some reason, there are plenty of desktop options for web browsers, each fairly distinct and interesting from the other. Throughout the day, I regularly alternate between Safari and Camino while usually touching Internet Explorer and Firefox every other day.

“the more time I spend w/ FriendFeed, the less I like it. I’d rather read y’all through my own blog.”

If services like Friendfeed, Twitter, etc, have an innovation, it’s in present reading and publishing in the save view. This single view – often described as ‘presence’ or ‘social-ness’ – makes it easy to write a comment or publish a new idea quickly.

The 2…3…4? blogs I maintain is where I feel the most comfortable exploring and archiving ideas¹. Yet the one (apparently killer) feature the popular weblog tools lack is this combined view. I’m thinking of the ability to easily initiate a reply on one weblog/service that can be read in its entirety on another weblog/service – without a click.

Separate places distracts and dilutes.

“By keeping me posting small thoughts all day long, I have less urgency to capture those thoughts in longer, more fleshed out blog posts. It eats away at my time, the continual partial attention it requires saps cycles from my brain’s CPU and in the end what do I have?” – Dave Slusher

Now, imagine loading up feeds into a WordPress install and reading them the same way you read things within FriendFeed or Twitter or WhatHaveYou2.0. The writing process would remain the same, and when a post is published – it’s sent to all the other sites/services that are subscribed to the feed.

Weblogs today aren’t far off. The difference is immediacy and a read/write combined presentation. There’s nothing requiring a weblog post to; be larger or smaller than some arbitrary number of characters, have comments, categorization, or any number of other things that separate it from ‘microblogging’ tools.

Perhaps you feel more comfortable publishing through Twitter or YouTube or Utterz than a weblog proper. This difference should be as meaningless as our respective carriers when we’re chatting on the phone.

1. This post originally started as a comment on FriendFeed, but the lack of paragraphing and a few other annoyances sent me here.

via Twitter, I was asked the above question.

It’s a good question, cutting to the core of my ambivalence over the religious wars between RSS, Atom, etc.

The flavor of XML a feed is published in shouldn’t matter.

Neither to the publisher nor the receiver.

Any parser able to handle multiple flavors should be able to parse all flavors equally fast. Some parsing engines are built for one flavor of XML or another – rather than abstracted to parse XML in general. Then again, it’s trivial to spit out one XML format as another, so, maybe format is a conversation between the user agent and the server.

Eh. (Get a smarter parser, jeeez.)

From my studying of both RSS and Atom, comparing them is like comparing the UIs of Windows and Macintosh. They do feel different. One puts window buttons over here, one puts them over there. One is this color, one is that color. One prefers the Control key, the other prefers the Command key. Some people prefer this one, others prefer that one. One says ‘potahtoe’. One, ‘potaytoe’.

From my I understanding, Atom was developed due to perceived deficiencies and ambiguity in the RSS 2.0 spec. Perhaps RSS 2.0 is guilty of being open to interpretation. I don’t know. I’ve found it to have logical places for everything I want to publish. Same for Atom.

Last I checked, Cullect was parsing somewhere north of 8100 feeds. Cullect doesn’t and shouldn’t care if a feed is Atom or RSS or RDF or filled with crazy namespaces. Cullect has 2 jobs when it comes to feeds; parse XML tags in a smart way, publish out useful feeds in whatever flavor the user agent requests.

The biggest issue I’ve found in parsing thousands of XML feeds is badly published XML. Feeds using the tags in bizarre ways. Feeds just not conforming to any spec. Feeds published in a way that just makes parsing hard.

Both RSS and Atom publishers are equally guilty. My Wacky-Feeds-That-Won’t-Parse list of contains just as many RSS feeds as Atom feeds.

A year ago, I wrote up my thoughts on publishing RSS 2.0 for easy publishing.