Peter Scheer of the California First Amendment Coalition wrote an opinion piece in this Sunday’s San Francisco Chronicle suggesting that the major print media (newspapers) should embargo their content for something like 24 hours before publishing it via online media sources. The thinking is that this would force people who wanted timely news to acquire it either via dead trees, or some sort of subscription service of the papers, which would bring them revenue and thus save the print establishment.
Big Step 1: Going Multi-Server
As products get successful, they grow. For client applications that run on someone’s computer, this doesn’t necessarily represent a huge challenge: just make more CDs. For network applications in general, and web products in specific, this presents a different challenge. There are two distinct points in the growth of a web application which represent step functions in the level of complexity. I call these points the Big Steps. Today, I’ll cover Big Step 1, going multi-server.
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AOLserver, ADP, and the Web
AOL spent the better part of the last 10 years doing their best to answer every question about the growing influence of the web with “yes, but” answers. We did acquisitions large (Netscape) and small (Navisoft), invested in technologies, and otherwise built a path which ran in parallel to the rest of the web.
Five Years Out
All forms of media — print, television, and internet — will likely dedicate coverage today in equal measures to reliving and rehashing the morning of September 11th, 2001. I will do no different, although there is always a temptation to let these somber anniversaries slip by unrecorded.
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China – Lijiang and Guilin
Following Tibet, we spent two days in Lijiang and two days in Guilin. While after Tibet, it seems like anything else might be a disappointment, these two places were both interesting in their own way.
China – Tibet
Part of the appeal of the particular trip I chose to join was that it included a trip to Tibet. Specifically, we flew to Lhasa, the capital of the Tibet Autonomous Region. It’s a very different place from Beijing or Chengdu, and not without some challenges.
UPDATE: Photos from Tibet!
China – First Few Days
I’m taking off the second half of July to take a vacation to China. The internet access situation here isn’t too bad, so I’m posting what I can, when I can. Here’s an update for my first few days, complete with photos.
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The End of Editors?
Guess who said this in a recent interview:
Technology is shifting power away from the editors, the publishers, the establishment, the media elite. Now it’s the people who are taking control.
Cool Web 2.0 Stuff on Netscape.com
Imagine a personalized portal, customized to your interests and needs. It could have content from major sources that were based upon what you liked and didn’t like. Okay, big deal, there are lots of these, the most popular of which seems to be My Yahoo. But, now imagine that instead of just pushing the same stories, links, and Yahoo content, it allowed anyone to put any RSS feed they like onto the page. Yup, Google and Yahoo allow that, sure. But imagine it’s at Netscape.com, and the year is 1999. You’ve got the original My Netscape, which brought us something no less innovative and essential to the Web 2.0 experience than RSS.
The many web servers of AOL – where are they now?
When I arrived at AOL in 2001, various groups in the company were developing no less than 3 (three!) different web server platforms. Why did we have so many, what ever happened to them, and what were they all about, anyway?