Since Internet slang coinages based on “phishing” are apparently in vogue, I decided to try my hand at it. Whishing: “Posting an indirect comment about some problem you’re having on IRC in the hope that someone will chime in and help you without you asking directly.”
Examples:
plasticmillion wonders why he’s getting strange linker errors when building Spidermonkey on the latest trunk
plasticmillion can’t remember where he put his car keys
plasticmillion could sure go for a pizza
etc.
If you are thinking about raising capital for the first time, The Funded has some excellent resources.
My friend and former colleague Frank Felix Debatin has posted an interview with me on Live On Air, the official blog of his company 1000 Mikes. The interview is in German (although I wrote the answers in English and asked Frank to translate them). We touched on a number of topics, including our upcoming plans for AllPeers and the basis of my new Just Browsing blog.
Tristan Nitot wrote up a good description of the open-source free-for-all that is FOSDEM. I’m still not a proper open source person (though I’m getting better at Unix shell scripting, which probably means I’m on the verge of shedding any lingering capitalist bent), and at the last two FOSDEMs I didn’t go to many (any?) of the general sessions. But this, after all, is the big European Mozilla bash, and that’s more than enough reason to make the trip. I’m sure that, like last year, some of my AllPeers colleagues will come along as well.
Uberpulse has posted a interview at CES with David Rosen, a developer at Opera Software. The interview is entitled “Opera Browser Coming To The iPhone”, but the first 99% of the video have nothing to do with the iPhone, proving yet again that like sex, the iPhone sells. David isn’t able to demo the Opera for Devices because of the lack of wifi (when will conferences finally get a grip on this?), but he gives a good overview of the new product’s features.
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I first met John Lilly in late 2005 when I stopped by the Mozilla offices in Mountain View for an informal “getting to know you” meeting. His title at the time was Vice President of Business Development. My next interaction with John was in February 2007, by which time he was Mozilla’s Chief Operating Officer. Yesterday, Mitchell Baker announced that she was officially handing him the keys to the corner office and giving him the CEO title. I think I can sense the way the wind is blowing, so let me be the first to say: John Lilly for President in 2008!
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When I started this blog in August 2004, I claimed that my main motivation was to learn about blogging as part of my broader investigation into the present and future of social software. I’ve certainly achieved that and a whole lot more over the past three years. I’ve met a lot of well-informed, articulate and opinionated people, I’ve developed my views on a broad range of topics and, more than anything perhaps, I’ve effectively taken a crash course in grassroots marketing. Budding marketers take note: you’ll find out more by starting a blog and trying to get noticed than any school could teach you.
But I’m the kind of person who gets bored if he doesn’t feel like he’s moving forward (insert shark cliché here), and lately I’ve been thinking about how to take my blogging activities to the next level. Peer Pressure is all over the map, serving as it does as the official AllPeers blog, a receptacle for my Mozilla-related posts and a vehicle for my (and Cedric’s) random musings on everything from online identity to paid content. What I want to do, I think, is to get more focused on a specific topic.
The posts that seem to attract the most attention (judging from the number of comments) concern web browsers and browser technology. Luckily that’s also the topic that interests me the most right now. So I’ve set up a new blog specifically on that topic: Just Browsing. Peer Pressure will live on, of course, but with a tighter focus on AllPeers-related posts.
Please take a minute to check out my description of what Just Browsing is all about and my first post. If you have a blog, I’d really appreciate a quick link if you think the content might be of interest to your readers. The hardest thing with a new blog is rising above the noise. Garnering some incoming link love is the best way to do so.
I can’t resist this one. I was already shaking my head in disbelief when prominent Wall Street idiot Henry Blodget pipped the blogging world at the post by publishing what is doubtless the worst idea of 2007 on December 29th. Does anyone still believe the laughable notion that a failed, tired brand has some great intrinsic value? If so, perhaps they should consider for a moment the purchase of the Napster brand by Roxio in 2002 for $5 million. Brands have momentum, and if someone had snapped up the Napster name in its heyday to launch a legal music service, it would doubtless have been worth much, much more. As it transpires, Napster was dead and gone in letter and spirit by the time Roxio bought it, and as of May 2006 the service had lost them a further $175 million. But hey, the Netscape brand has done so much for AOL, right? It takes some serious balls to make this proposal in the face of (nay, as a consequence of) direct proof that it has already resulted in one dismal failure.
His previous bout of Mozilla blathering having presumably resulted in a satisfying bump in traffic, Blodget is back with an even stupider idea: a Mozilla IPO. My issue with the post isn’t that an IPO would be counter to the open source ethos or that it would alienate the all-important Firefox community, although there are strong cases to be made for both of these. I’ve argued in the past that Mozilla would benefit from stronger capitalist motivations. Nor do I dispute his assessment of Mozilla’s value. If anything, $4 billion seems conservative for a company with its assets.
No, the real issue is his total lack of understanding of the Mozilla community ethos. Again, this mind set often frustrates me, but the reality is that Mozilla management would never, ever contemplate an IPO, anymore than they would plaster ads on the Firefox start page to generate more revenue (another of Blodget’s priceless suggestions). It’s more than a bit like suggesting that the Dalai Lama could make a mint by setting up an international “Dalai’s Lama Hut” franchise chain (”buy two tender Bodhisattva Burgers and get a Spiritual Strawberry Shake absolutely free of charge!”). Ain’t gonna happen. Sorry.
Even more to the point: isn’t this totally, utterly illegal? Can a non-profit launch a multibillion dollar IPO? Wouldn’t that amount to tax evasion on a stupendously massive scale? Maybe I’m wrong, but I would have thought that Blodget, supposedly a financial expert, would have at least addressed this.
But then let’s remember why he’s famous in the first place: for jumping on the dot.com hype bandwagon in front of the curve and looking like a genius for a total of, what, two odd years, until it all crashed back to earth around him? Why should we care that he turned out to be completely off target, or that he was then booted off Wall Street for securities-related improprieties? I guess it’s oddly appropriate that in the modern media environment, you can become famous and influential simply for being wrong on a sufficiently heroic scale.
I’ve already received some encouraging feedback to my latest Mozpad post (I’ll be posting a followup soon). Further positive news is that I’ve made good, in a small way at least, on my pledge to devote some time to the Mozpad documentation project.
Having labored to get Prism to build using the Mozilla build system, I was struck by the lack of documentation on this topic for XULRunner developers in general. There’s a blog post by Songbird’s Ben Turner and there’s Dave Townsend’s McCoy project, which is a great practical example of how to do it. But nothing comprehensive on the documentation site.
So I decided to turn my original “Creating Custom Firefox Extensions with the Mozilla Build System” article into a franchise with “Creating XULRunner Apps with the Mozilla Build System”. The article has yet to be reviewed, and to quote Douglas Adams, “it has many omissions and contains much that is apocryphal, or at least wildly inaccurate.” (Unfortunately I didn’t think to adorn it with a prominent “Don’t Panic” label, although this would certainly have been apt.)
Stay tuned for new additions to the series, including “Traditional Chinese Calligraphy with the Mozilla Build System”, “Mastering the Mental Game of Golf with the Mozilla Build System” and the much-anticipated “12 Days to a Flatter Stomach with the Mozilla Build System”.
