this is sippey.typepad.com

dump the bags

A hearty +1 to Dale Dougherty's post Bag the Schwag.  In Austin this week all I wanted from the bag was the tiny conference guide that I could fold up and stick in my pocket or inside my badge; the rest of it was just wasted promotional material.  And when I told the bag people this, they were literally shocked.  "You mean you don't want all these magazines?  Look at all these great magazines!"  And then after I convinced them that No, I didn't want the magazines, they told me I had to take at least the full-size program (along with the micro-sized one) because, and I kid you not, "people sell them for thirty bucks on eBay."  The program went back in the bag.

Other highlights of Austin:  Henry Jenkins; catching up with "easterners" Bryan Boyer, Molly Steenson and the Hesketh crew; our panel on After Bust 2.0 ("How many of you are here because you're afraid of losing your jobs?"); general twitter mania; having the mobile web panel I was on scheduled opposite of Will Wright's Spore demo (gah!); contributing to continuous partial attention by phoning Jason Shellen while Heather Gold was interviewing him about the same; meeting a bunch of great MT, TypePad, Vox and LJ bloggers; and the lightning show on Sunday night.  Wow...a real thunderstorm!  We don't get those out here very often.

And In case you're curious, as of this afternoon there are exactly zero conference programs for sale on eBay.

at sxsw

For the first time ever I'll be attending SXSW.  (If you have vague memories of drinking margaritas with me in Texas at some point during Bubble 1.0, you're probably remembering Miller Freeman's Web Austin show in October 1999, back when Andrew Beebe was still doing Internet stuff (covering Google with solar panels doesn't really count), Eric Lunt wasn't burning feeds, Molly Steenson was "on fire" about Scient, and I was working for competitor Viant.  Ahhh...good times.)

At any rate, I'll be there Sunday afternoon through Tuesday afternoon.  I'm on two panels on Tuesday.  At 11:30 am it'll be After Bust 2.0: Ten Years Later Where Will We Be with host Lane Becker; and at 2:00 pm it will be There's No Such Thing as the Mobile Web (or is there) with host Bob Morgan from Shozu. Should be fun.  Thankfully, I'm not as stressed about what to pack as fellow Bust 2.0 panelist David Hornik was about packing for TED.

At any rate, if you'll be there and want to catch up, drop me a line.

kids these days

Back in the olden days I worked at this great little software company, and we had our offices in this great little building South of Market.  Now, this was back before Web 1.0, back before Wired came to the neighborhood, back before Cafe Centro and the ball park and the mixed use condo / office building that stands where the motor home park used to.  Anyway, this building we were in had no air conditioning to speak of, had very few windows, and when someone rolled their chair over the coax network cable someone in development would eventually shout "Hey!" but only eventually because there wasn't much networking to do back then. 

Where was I?  Oh, yeah -- no air conditioning.  When it got really hot in the summer one of us would hit up the CEO for a $20, head down to the bodega on 3rd and Bryant and buy them out of popsicles, ice cream sandwiches and anything else that was frozen.  We'd hurry the delicious treats back to the office and hand them out before they melted all over our XTs.

Kids these days not only get air conditioning and networking that actually works, they also get natural, locally-sourced, trans-fat free custom made IT'S ITs wrapped in the corporate logo.

your pal

I know I must stop this nostalgicizing (I'm absolutely sure that's a word, dagummit), but many thanks to Sir Owen Thomas for the pointer to suckcom, the syndicated account on LJ that's retreading suck.com, nine years later.  If suckcom were your pal friend, you'd be having serendipitous moments like this one:  seeing that nine years ago Stewart Brand was the netmogul card, and then reading that The Well's up for sale!

what's ten years, tin?

Holy moly, it's August.  Which means it's been ten years of irregular online publishing.

button economics

It's retrofun day on Kottke.org!  Jason's linking to Mahir, the hampster dance, the Internet's last page, the cookie recipe and, of course, the really big button that doesn't do anything, which has a treasure-trove of user generated content, including this gem from "Esther Dyson."

The really big button that doesn’t do anything poses interesting challenges both for owners/creators/sellers and for users of the button. Because the button allows for essentially endless pressing, it dramatically changes the traditional economics of "buttons." In this new world, competing with the old one, the button is easy to press, but hard to understand. The button allows creativity to proliferate, but button quality will be scarce and hard to recognize. Button creators will have to fight to attract attention, and to get paid. Logistics alone used to add value to buttons; it does so no longer.

Ah, good times.

a trip down powerbook memory lane

Jason Levine posts a great little photoset of the otherwise deadly boring act of migrating files off an old computer...except this time the old computer is a PowerBook Duo 230.  Has to be one of my all time favorite machines; I used one for a couple of years -- well after its prime -- and wrote my most (um, only? --ed.) productive two years of Obvious pieces on it...  I recognize the ridiculousness of professing love for a hunk of plastic, metal and glass...but I loved that machine.

(Oh, and I wanted to leave the nostalgia category alone with its sole black holes post, but I just couldn't file this one anywhere else, now could I.)

black holes

Speaking of black holes, I'm coming up on ten years of Stating the Obvious (dead, dying, nearly buried -- don't even bother clicking, there's nothing there to see; instead, do me a favor and just imagine Jeremy Piven (yes, that's his name) in Grosse Pointe Blank yelling "Ten years!  Ten years, man!").  No need to celebrate; the thing should have been buried back in about 1999, after I gave up the thrice-weekly schedule for the thrice-quarterly schedule, which slipped into the thrice-yearly schedule.

Anyway, where was I.  Black holes.  Right.  Well, since it's been ten years for theobvious, that means it was about nine years ago that I wrote a few pieces for the oft-missed Suck, under the editorial guidance of former and current microstars.  And believe it or not, one of those pieces, An Astral Theory of Rock, actually had something to do with black holes!  And rock stars.  And rock stars that turned into black holes.  Here's a brief excerpt:

If the [rock] star is sufficiently massive, it will collapse into a Black Hole.  The rocket scientists among us will  immediately recognize the KISS revival tour as the largest black hole the industry has ever seen. In the center of the black hole lies the singularity (Gene Simmons's  tongue), where matter is crushed to infinite density, and the curvature of spacetime is extreme. Which explains why millions of people keep  expecting to hear "Beth" on the  radio, and to be reunited with their  7th-grade car pools.

There's more after that...and plenty before it as well.  (Remember, it was the mid-nineties, back when writing on the web actually meant stringing multiple paragraphs together -- good times.)  But hey, if the analogy fits, right?  And since my fine friend Jason seems to think that some of us have disappeared into a "blackhole for creative people," that must mean it's time to dust off the old standards, get the band back together, and kick off our Internet revival tour with a rousing rendition of "Those Were the Days."

And hey!  We don't need the big concert promoters -- we'll raise tour bus funds with Dropcash, plan the logistics with Basecamp, list the dates on Upcoming, distribute nightly direct-from-the-board ogg's as cc-licensed torrents, blog about it on TypePad, and afterwards sell the commemorative photo album through Lulu.  It'll be great!

Just after I figure out this whole quantum tunneling thing.