Waxy on "Infocom's Unreleased Sequel to Hitchhiker's" (playable samples included!)

Andy Baio strikes again:

From an anonymous source close to the company, I've found myself in possession of the "Infocom Drive" — a complete backup of Infocom's shared network drive from 1989. This is one of the most amazing archives I've ever seen, a treasure chest documenting the rise and fall of the legendary interactive fiction game company. Among the assets included: design documents, private emails, employee phone numbers, sales figures, internal meeting notes, corporate newsletters, and the source code and game files for every released and unreleased game Infocom made. For obvious reasons, I can't share the whole Infocom Drive. But I have to share some of the best parts. It's just too good. So let's start with the most notorious — Milliways: The Restaurant at the End of the Universe, the unreleased sequel to Infocom's The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. For the first time, here's the full story: with never-before-seen design documents, internal emails, and two playable prototypes.

Man. Disclosure: I know and like Andy a lot, and I've already linked to him once this week. But come on. This is awesome.

What I like most about what he's doing with the Waxy.org site is that he's creating an interesting kind of online journalism. In an earlier entry this week he headlined a scoop "Exclusive:" and I told him I liked that -- it signaled that he wasn't just echoing things found on other blogs (what I'm doing now). He continues to find things that are new and interesting to the world in which he's writing, so unlike the echo chamber that so many others do -- which, he says, is just what he is trying to do. That's fantastic, and I'm really happy to see him, and support him, pursuing that goal.

Everybody gets the iPhone interface

I noticed two new web applications doing something interesting: serving their iPhone interface to everyone. Muxtape uses an iPhone-style interface for its playlists, which works great on an iPhone but for the fact that the MP3s don't play (at least, for me -- doesn't the iPod app load MP3s from MobileSafari? I guess not). Instapaper takes this further, and makes a web interface that you wouldn't know works great on an iPhone unless you happened to try it. (Their FAQ even addresses the question since it's not that obvious.)

The result is that everyone who tries these apps gets a simple, clean UI. Talk about limitations producing great effects.

Multiuser Backpack

Congrats to my friends at 37signals for their launch of multiuser Backpack, a great upgrade to a product I love. Their new features, which let you share calendars, notes, to-do lists, and reminders with other people in a group, look perfect for the "household schedule" I've been wanting.

I continue to be very impressed with how the 37s do product development. They've always advocated for launching with "Less" in the product and leaving out features until the demand for them is overwhelming. It's great to see that they've heard and watched how people use Backpack and have made it a ton more useful -- essentially adding communication to what was a single-user product -- while keeping all the benefits for individual users that they had.

Go ahead and call me a fanboy in the comments. I am.

Artistic License 2.0 and ... REM?!

Very cool! REM have released 11 HD music videos in MP4 format from their new album, and they've done so using the Artistic License 2.0 and asking for remixes. Radar's very own Allison Randal spent years working on that license for The Perl Foundation. I'm not sure she had rock videos in mind when she was crafting the clauses, but that's a pretty good thing to put on your resume! As commenters to the ReadWriteWeb thread say, REM probably should have used Creative Commons rather than a license written with software in mind, but I suspect the name "Artistic License" proved too seductive .... (thanks Perlbuzz)

evhead: "Will it Fly?"

Evan Williams put up a great post today on evaluating business ideas, "Will it fly? How to Evaluate a New Product Idea." Required reading for entrepreneurs.

I think his last criterion, "Personally Compelling," is the most important for whether an idea will succeed or fail at all. The other criteria speak to how big that success can be. I find it very easy to work on Wesabe seven days a week, and I never get tired of it. That won't make us the next Google on its own, but it does help us keep moving ahead (especially since there are others at the company who apparently feel the same way). After you have that or don't, then the rest of Evan's list will help determine what that energy leads to.

Great read -- thanks Ev.

Dopplr Launches

Earlier this year, I posted about Dopplr, saying it was "the coolest app I saw at ETech, by far." This morning at LeWeb in Paris, Dopplr launched, so anyone can sign up for it now. Check it out.

I continue to think Dopplr is an amazing product and, having had ten or more Dopplr-facilitated lunches or coffees while on the road this year, I feel like it helps me get more out of travel. Exactly what I want from web apps: here, I'll give you some information, light it up for me, would you? They do, and it's a great model and an inspiration to me for my own work.

Congrats, Dopplr folks, on launching such an amazing product.

Tribute to honor Jim Gray on May 31st, 2008 at UC Berkeley

A tribute to honor Jim Gray will be held on May 31st, 2008 at UC Berkeley. The general session is open to all, followed by a technical session reviewing a small fraction of Jim's lasting contributions. Registration is required to attend the technical session.

General Session Program 9:00am - 10:30am, Zellerbach Hall

• Opening Remarks - Joe Hellerstein
• A Tribute, Not a Memorial: Understanding Ambiguous Loss - Pauline Boss
• The Search Effort - Mike Olson
• Jim's Impact on Berkeley - Mike Harrison
• Jim as a Mentor: Colleagues - Pat Helland
• Jim as a Mentor: Faculty and Students - Ed Lazowska
• Why Jim Got the Turing Award - Mike Stonebraker
• Jim's Contributions to Industry I - David Vaskevitch
• Jim's Contributions to Industry II - Rick Rashid

Technical Session Program 11:00am - 5:30pm, Wheeler Hall (Registration is required)

• IBM/Transaction Processing - Bruce Lindsay
• Tandem/Fault Tolerance -
• Development & Effect of TPC/A Benchmark - David DeWitt
• DEC, Architecture, Memex and More - Gordon Bell
• Writing the Transaction Processing book: "Is There Life After Transaction Processing?" - Andreas Reuter
• The Adventure in Russia and the Terra Server - Tom Barclay
• The Sloan Digital Sky Survey - Alex Szalay
• World Wide Telescope Project - Curtis Wong
• Undersea Data Collection & Sharing - Jim Bellingham

Rick Dalzell's retirement tribute from Jeff Bezos

Rick Dalzell is retiring today after 10 years as Amazon's CIO. Rick is an exceptional leader, mentor, and friend to me and hundreds of other people privileged to know and work with him.

Jeff Bezos has given Rick a public tribute on the Amazon.com website as an "easter egg". It can be found by going to the Amazon Sporting Goods Page, scrolling down to the bottom, and looking for the small transparent image at the center.

Thank You, Rick Dalzell

Ten years ago, when interviewing Rick, I inadvertently tried many techniques to scare him away. First among those: I poured coffee on his shirt within ten minutes of our first meeting. Next, I showed him our fulfillment center. He wasn't impressed. It's a great testament to his vision and down-to-earth temperament that he came here anyway. Over the last decade, Rick has been the glue that has held together our engineering organization and driven us to success. He has constantly taken on new roles and brought people along to fill old ones. He has been a coach and mentor to many of us. There's no replacing Rick -- we'll instead have to figure out how to do it a completely different way.

Rick, we are all super grateful for your many amazing and lasting contributions. Thank you!

Jeff Bezos
November 2007

Congratulations Rick, and thank you!

Technorati Tags: amazon, cio, leadership, rickdalzell

Goodreads

My friend Rosaclaire was patient zero in getting a bunch of our mutual friends, and me, to join Goodreads today. So now I'm getting book reviews from my friends via RSS. Useful.

I'm totally in love with the LibraryThing blog but haven't fallen for the product yet. I'm not sure why Goodreads drew me in; LibraryThing seems more my style. Maybe it's Rosaclaire -- by which I mean, maybe it's the fact that a set of my friends have joined. I'm not a good patient zero in this case.

Travelers Tales wins Lowell Thomas Awards Again

Most people don't know about my "other" publishing company, which I started in 1994 with my brother James and his writing partner Larry Habegger, Travelers Tales. Our first book, Travelers Tales Thailand, won the Society of American Travel Writers prestigious Lowell Thomas Award for best travel book of the year. We've won it numerous times since. James just sent me a note to let me know we've done it again:

We won both Gold and Bronze for best travel book this year.

Gold: 100 Places Every Woman Should Go
Bronze: Best Travel Writing 2007

The Travelers Tales series is based on the insight that the best way to prepare for a trip isn't to pore over laundry lists of places to go and things to see, but to read stories by people who've been there. The books are anthologies of true travelers tales about places, or about themes (womens' travel, food, adventure, spirituality.)

A couple of my own travel stories have appeared in Travelers Tales (and are available online): Walking the Kerry Way, and Illumined in St. Chappelle.

To make this story remotely relevant to the normal themes of this blog, let me point out how much of traditional publishing is in fact based on "user generated content." Publishers don't create content so much as they search out, curate, and promote it. Travelers Tales has been in the business for years of assembling the best stories on a place or a topic, searching through both published and unpublished material. Bringing Web 2.0 to publishing means finding new methods of curation, but it doesn't mean that curation and editorial selection go away as key competencies.

Here's to the Crazy Ones

I love this remix of Apple's "Here's to the Crazy Ones" ad over a scrolling display of third-party iPhone apps:

(Found here, which also has the original ad.)

Apple has previously hinted that they went after Hymn and similar iTunes-hacking projects not because they cared themselves, but because they were contractually obliged to by the studios providing them with music. I could imagine, charitably, that there is a similar dynamic at work here, where AT&T is "forcing" Apple to take action about iPhoneSIMFree and the like. But then, not so charitably, Apple has a long history of rocky developer relations, and this seems like another chapter in that history.

Whether this was intended or not, the effect of bricked iPhones will likely be that a far smaller audience will be willing to install 3rd-party iPhone hacks from now on. Most of us don't have $400 to blow on bricks. That will have to lead to fewer iPhone apps -- at least until Apple decides to release a supported API. The open question is what happens then. Of course, in all likelihood everyone will cry, "Our long nightmare is over," and get right back to work developing. But I wonder if the video above speaks to any lasting damage.

The amount of interest and excitement around iPhone hacks is unbelievable, and would be unbelievably positive for Apple (and AT&T) if they'd let it. It is everything Apple says it stands for, as the "Crazy Ones" mix points out. I hope all of that survives this bleak period.

WebRunner 0.7 rocks

Mark Finkle has been pushing out builds of WebRunner, a Mozilla-based tool for running a standalone application with a single web site in it (a.k.a, a "Site-Specific Browser"), for some time now, but WebRunner 0.7, released today for Windows, Mac, and Linux, is ready for its close-up.

I use WebRunner for Google Reader. I double-click a .webapp file which launches a standalone process containing just Reader, with no menus, toolbars, or other noise. WebRunner has its own cookies, so my .webapp is always logged into Google, but my main browser is not, which I like for privacy reasons[1]. When I click a link in Reader, it opens in my main browser. Also, RSS readers are hugely distracting, so being able to minimize Google Reader while still having Firefox in the foreground is a good pattern.

WebRunner 0.7 adds desktop icons, so that .webapp launchers look exactly like native applications, and also adds scripting capabilities, so that the GMail .webapp can provide new-mail notification popups. It's great to see Mozilla used as a foundation for projects like these. Congrats to Mark for building such a simple and useful tool, and thanks.

[1] There is some privacy benefit to not being logged into Google all the time -- namely, that your searches are not associated with the cookie that maintains your login -- but it's a weak benefit. Google apparently also associates searches with IP addresses, and if your IP is fixed, as mine is, there's still a good likelihood that searches are discoverable. Blocking cookies only really helps if your IP address is a bad identifier (if your IP address changes, such as work vs. home or dynamic IP, or if your browsing is from the same IP as others', for instance behind NAT), but don't kid yourself about the anonymity this provides. That said, having a "cookie sandbox," which is effectively what WebRunner provides, is better than ignoring the problem; true privacy is usually gained by taking lots of small steps, not one big one.

And don't make me tell you again

Jason Kottke seems to have decided this week to empty a full clip of silver bullets into the just-stilled heart of the New York Times' ill-conceived TimesSelect subscription service. He's been digging through the now-free archives of the Times, finding treasures and blogging the hell out of them.

Earlier this week, he celebrated the first day of free archive access with Gems from the archive of the New York Times, including articles on Lincoln's assassination, Custer's last stand, and the 1906 San Francisco earthquake, through to the first mention of the web. Next, he threw in a link to Paul Krugman's new blog, Krugman being one of the main voices muffled by TimesSelect's paywall. Finally, today, he found what seems to be the first restaurant review in the Times, from January 1st, 1859. This last is completely wonderful to read -- history, foodism, and love for New York, all in one.

I take it that the point of this progression is to show what the web, and the Times, have been missing by locking away TimesSelect. Hear, hear. Jason is producing a beautifully illuminated manuscript, glorifying the new openness and implicitly scolding the failure to get there sooner. I hope everyone in a position to make the same sort of mistake the Times made with this program will find Jason's posts and see in them the canonical example of why not to bet against the Internet. Don't make us tell you again (*ahem*, Economist! That last link is a trackback to "irony").

Google's Authentic Voice Problem

Google had an interesting blogging problem last week. A post to the Google Health Advertising blog by Lauren Turner stirred up a lot of backlash when it claimed Michael Moore's new movie Sicko "portrays the industry as money and marketing driven, and fails to show healthcare’s interest in patient well-being and care"--and then went on to solicit Google ads to help healthcare companies improve their image. She very quickly posted a stilted retraction.

Google has had a very good track record when it comes to corporate blogging. Their product blogs have been clearly identified as product blogs. They haven't smacked down bloggers like Steve Yegge who very definitely don't post in the Corporate Boring voice that MBAs are apparently taught. This, I believe, is due to people like Chris DiBona who get authentic voice, understand how to balance engagement with legal obligations, and how to appeal to the common sense that Google obviously feels engineers have. (I shudder to think how he'd deal with my authentic voice, which I like to think of as "Tim with Tourette's")

However, it's not so clear that marketers have common sense. I feel sorry for Ms Turner, whose post has a painful logic to its existence. Blogs let you communicate directly with your audience. Of course, we're too busy building product to communicate with our audience so let's hire a marketer to do it for us. And when inexperienced marketers get a blog, they all blog the same way. Their voice is as authentic as a Twinkie is organic.

The time-honored marketing blog post formula is simple:

1. Find something topical. In Ms Turner's case, it was the release of Michael Moore's new film.
2. Identify the shiznit you wish to pimp. In Ms Turner's case, it was Google's Health Advertising services.
3. Find a line (however tenuous) between the two and the post just writes itself!

These posts are easy to write, and so everyone does them. Hell, even I've been guilty of it at times. The posts are unsatisfying for the same reason they're easy to write: they have no actual insight or useful information, just the staggeringly unobvious "Michael Moore's new movie is anti-HMO" and "you can advertise on Google."

If your authentic voice is that of a carnie barker, get your ass off the keyboard and stop wasting our time. People who make such posts are the tech equivalent of those assholes who leapt on TV during the Virginia Tech shooting to promote/condemn gun control, or the self-righteous spanktanks who leapt on TV after 9/11 to blame it all on "the gays."

But, ultimately, Ms Turner was just doing what almost all in the Technorati Top 100 tech blogs do when they want to pimp something. It's hard to blame her for that, which is why I felt sorry when BoingBoing, TechCrunch, and others piled on. Their ire should have been directed at whoever gave the keys to the blog to someone whose authentic voice reads like a Newsweek health supplement advertorial.

What followed, though, washed the sour taste of a beating out with the sweet taste of irony. Google, confronted with a media shitstorm because they hired a marketer to write a blog, made her post a retraction that said, in effect, "oh, those nasty words about that movie--that was all me, not Google." They blamed it on authentic voice!

So, to recap, the recipe for a disaster is easy: hire marketers with no authentic voice, ask them to pimp offal, and when they're busted for it make them force out an apology in which they blame it on their authentic voice. You too can make the front page of TechMeme for two days running with three easy steps, though you might get wet sleeves fishing your career prospects out of the toilet when you're done. You're welcome!

They're Beautiful: virtual flowers from Jackson Fish Market

Jackson Fish Market, which I've mentioned on Radar before, has just launched They're Beautiful, a virtual flower delivery service where the flowers slowly die if you don't water them. Here's their write-up about the new project.

I've thought that virtual, degrading objects are interesting for a while now. While I was working on starwars.com, it was always frustrating to me that the communal experience of seeing Star Wars in a movie theater was so absent from the web site. I wrote an article at the time called "A well-worn staircase" about how the virtual world was missing some of the signals the real world gives us about how many people have been somewhere or used something before us: stairs that have been worn down by years of use, books with dog-eared pages and coffee stains, that sort of thing. The only way a newcomer to the Star Wars site would know someone else had been there was if the site was slow.

My friend Ben Olander later used a similar idea on the Pleasantville movie site -- like the movie, the Pleasantville site switched from black and white to color images the more you used it.

I never launched any of the ideas we had for degrading virtual goods on starwars.com because our ideas felt contrived to me -- forced degradation, like asking the janitor to run sandpaper over the stairs each night. That said, Facebook's "limited" gifts (some of which are limited to run of 10,000,000), for instance, seem to show that with the right social setup, people will respond to programmed limitations.

Jackson Fish's setup seems like it could work -- you can send flowers to anyone, and embed flowers you've received in a blog or other site. If you do embed them, you probably won't let them die -- a clear indicator that you're not tending to your blog! Maybe embedding would work as the online version of "Let me put those in some water..." I'm skeptical, but I'm interested to see if that works.

I love that Jackson Fish's home page banner is filling in with the "shops" they're building -- a neighborhood block with a fish monger and now, a flower market. Makes me want to visit. Congrats to Hillel and crew, and give us some sign of the people buying flowers from your shop!

Satisfaction on the Digg Revolt

I've really been liking the blog over at Satisfaction, the as-yet-unlaunched new company from Adaptive Path veteran Lane Becker and others. I liked what they had to say today about the Digg Revolt:

Beware of business decisions that masquerade as legal issues. You’ll be tempted to defer to your lawyer’s advice. And it’s a good bet your lawyer’s instincts will be wrong when it comes to fostering open, two-way dialog with your customers. It’s more likely they’ll enmesh you in a battle of wills with the very people you depend on to grow your business.

Whatever the “right” decision was for Digg regarding whether or not to delete the offending post, Digg knows it is nothing without its passionate and participating members. The enlightened path should have been obvious to them: be completely transparent with users from the beginning.

I've subscribed -- and am looking forward to seeing what they've built to help companies with these questions.

Matt Haughey launches 'fortuitous'

Matt Haughey of Metafilter fame has just launched fortuitous, a site about everything he's learned setting up and running a business around his blogging empire. I'm biased in favor of Matt since he's a friend and a great guy, but he's also incredibly thoughtful and forthright -- his 2003 essay Blogging for Dollars, for instance, was so good it became part of the Google AdSense sales material for quite a while (maybe it still is). I think he's a great source of advice for people looking to support themselves with an online business, particularly those who use systems like AdSense to do it. Here's his description of the new site:

Eight years later almost to the day, I called up my boss at work and gave notice that I was leaving my job because I no longer needed it. I had freelanced before but it was a stressful binge-or-starve existence. This time was different; I surpassed my revenue goals on my sites and I was ready to make the jump for good, building my own sites and answering to no one else. To "live the dream" as everyone called it. Thus began my new career in professionally screwing around on the web....

I'm going to be sharing the things I've picked up along the way here, with a new essay posted every Monday about some aspect of doing business online. If you're a freelancer hoping to someday ditch your clients, just starting out with a web business, or already have an established blogging empire, I hope you'll subscribe to the feed and enjoy the ride.

Congrats, Matt, and I look forward to seeing more from the site.

Ask the Wizard

FeedBurner CEO Dick Costolo's new blog, Ask the Wizard, is turning into a fantastic resource for entrepreneurs. If you're an entrepreneur or thinking about becoming one, go read the whole thing and subscribe.

Nice work, Dick!

'sfearthquakes' on Twitter

Apropos of NOTHING AT ALL, you can now get Bay Area earthquake information through Twitter by following sfearthquakes. Nice, Coda! (Coda's had a busy week -- he also backed up a righteous beat-down with code to fix it. I like working with people who are hilarious and right at the same time.)

One of my favorite business model suggestions for entrepreneurs is, find an old UNIX command that hasn't yet been implemented on the web, and fix that. talk and finger became ICQ, LISTSERV became Yahoo! Groups, ls became (the original) Yahoo!, find and grep became Google, rn became Bloglines, pine became Gmail, mount is becoming S3, and bash is becoming Yahoo! Pipes. I didn't get until tonight that Twitter is wall for the web. I love that.

[Update: added ls and mount, plus find at Nat's suggestion. Having fun with this. The comments are good, too.]

Mark Fletcher's "Startupping" launches

Mark Fletcher, founder of Bloglines (now owned by Ask) and OneList (now owned by Yahoo, as Yahoo Groups) has just launched Startupping, a community site for entrepreneurs. The site has blog posts, forums, and a wiki for entrepreneurs to share information about starting a company and what to do next.

To kick the site off, Mark has asked a bunch of entrepreneurs, including John Battelle, Paul Graham, Dick Costolo, Chris Pirillo, and Ross Mayfield, to describe the best and worst decisions they've made in their startups. Great stuff.

(Disclosure: Mark is a friend, and I owe him a best-and-worst email...)