Alan Shimel has a good post on a recent release of a formerly “open source” product called Nessus.  With the version 3.0 release, the authors abandoned the GPL license and effectively made it closed source.  While one can debate the rationale of the parties all day long, the fundamental issue surrounding the migration of “successful” open source projects to “closed source” as part of a commercialization phase is one that I think both vendors and customers be thrashing around with for a while. 

Recently, I’ve been exploring some thoughts with my former doctoral advisor Eric von Hippel on the broader issues surrounding Free / Open Source software.  There’s been a flurry of academic research in this arena that is covered nicely in Perspectives on Free and Open Source Software (co-edited by Karim Lakhani, one of Eric’s current students.)  My simpleminded conclusion is that there is an enormous amount of complexity around this issue, especially when you incorporate our completely busted software patent system into the mix.  While it’s easy to blow this off as something that will sort itself out, I don’t think it will and we’ll be living with the dynamics of the F/OSS ecosystem for a long time.

In the category of “duh – that’s been there for a while”, I got a nice tip from TheOfficeWeblog about Outlook’s ability to automatically generate a map from an address.  As a member of the “endlessly directionally impaired” category of humans, I’m lost without either a GPS or driving directions.  Stupidly, my VW Touareg doesn’t have a GPS in it and even though Garmin could make my life easier, I’ve been irrationally stubborn about buying a GPS from them.  While maps.yahoo.com and maps.google.com are spiffy and nice, it’s always annoyed me that I had to enter the address manually from my address book.  Voila – go to Outlook, bring up the contact in question, and click on the little yellow arrow on the standard toolbar.  This is a simple, but nice, demonstration of integrating Office with a webapp.

On the heals of TypePad’s 18 hour outage this week, there’s been (and will be) a lot of continued discussion about how to build scalable and reliable online / web-based applications.  This is not a new problem (I not so fondly remember major and systemic outages in large services such as eBay and Amazon in the late 1990’s) but it’s gotten new attention as some of the emerging applications have scaled up the point as to have an interesting numbers of regular users (e.g. – it sucks if their service goes down for more than 15 minutes).  For example, as far as I can tell, del.icio.us has been down for the last four hours (“del.icio.us is down for emergency maintenance. we’ll be back as soon possible.”) and on 12/15/05 Bloglines acknowledged that “Bloglines performance has sucked eggs lately.”

Tim Wolters – an extremely capable CTO – has an introduction to how he is approaching this at Collective Intellect.  He’s taking a page from Google’s playbook and developing a web service based on a “shared nothing architecture.”  On Friday, I had two different discussions about scalable architectures (e.g. “we’re going to scale up between 10x and 100x on a meaningful base in 2006 – here’s what we are planning”) and both included elements of what Tim is describing.

I expect we’ll hear a lot more about this in 2006 as a small percentage of the flood of web apps created in 2005 become popular enough to have real scale issues. 

I’ve received a variety of entertaining (and thoughtful) presents for my 40th birthday.  Earlier this week, Dave Jilk gave me another one – my own Wikipedia entry.  I suppose every kid wants an entry about him in the dictionary – my ego is highly entertained.  Thanks Dave.

I monitor around 400 blogs and try to stay on top of them daily (I use FeedDemon and NewsGator Online and have developed an awesome personal algorithm for getting through all the items quickly.) I also use a handful of services such as Tech Memeorandum to follow what people are talking about. I’m a fast reader and excellent skimmer so that helps.

I had a very busy day yesterday that started early so I didn’t read anything from Thursday evening through Saturday morning.  I just finished going through everything and was stunned by the amount of discussion about the Yahoo / del.icio.us deal.  I’m very excited and happy for everyone involved, but as I read through post after post after post saying “Yahoo bought del.ciou.us” I started to feel something was wrong.  I checked on Technorati – “delicious” is the number one search this hour (and Yahoo is four; Delicious Yahoo is six).  I checked NewsGator’s Latest Buzz – the first is Joshua’s post and the second is Jeremy Zawodny / Yahoo’s post.

Forget about the TAR stuff (trust / attention / relevance) for a second – there is a huge content imbalance when everyone is writing about the same thing.  There was a very large and interesting deal done on Monday last week that arguably has much greater importance to the structure of the tech / media business than Yahoo / del.icio.us and it had extremely little coverage by the tech bloggers.  Can you name that deal?

Liberty Media acquired Provide Commerce for $477 million (PRVD was public – $33.30 / share – 50% valuation increase in the past 60 days).  Now, maybe I’m more sensitized to PRVD and L since they are both Colorado related company (L is headquartered here, PRVD is headquarter in San Diego, but the founder and good friend Jared Polis is based in Boulder.)  This is Jared’s second monster win – his first was the sale of BlueMountainArts.com to Excite in 1999 for around $800 million.  Oh – and he had other successes like the sale of AIS to Exodus in 1995.

But – no one is talking about this.  More specifically, very few people are speculating on what Liberty Media is up to.  John Malone and Liberty are clearly interested in making yet another round of moves, this time with focus on Internet related properties.  Greg Maffei joined Liberty Media as CEO a few weeks ago and – while Fortune had a decent introductory article setting up the landscape – there’s been very little chatter about what might become another key entrant in GAAMEY (Google / Amazon / AOL / Microsoft / eBay / Yahoo).  Oh – and where is the discussion about InterActiveCorp (IACI) – same drill  – $9 billion market cap company with key online assets and a chairman (Barry Diller) who happily and regularly makes big strategic moves.  Should GAAMEY become GAAMEYIL (or maybe AGILEAMY in honor of my wife.)

I’m perplexed.  Fortunately I have a two hour run today to ponder this more.

Lyle Lovett’s “It Ought To Be Easier” was the 195th song on Amy’s iPod Shuffle playlist that I manually recreated for her this morning. 

Someone at Apple on the iPod user experience crew needs to go to the Apple Store in Palo Alto, buy two shuffles, three iPods of different flavors, and a G5.  Then, they need to go to Fry’s and pick up two desktop PCs, a server, two laptops, and a wireless router (I assume all the machines have wireless cards in them.)  Now – set it all up, rip all your music, store it on the PC server (or Mac server, I don’t care), point all your iTunes clients at the right directory on your server, and make a bunch of playlists.  Yeah – that was fun, wasn’t it. 

Now, for shits and giggles, synchronize your server music file on one of your laptops (c’mon, it’s not that hard to figure out how to do it, but you will need new and exciting software.)  Make a playlist on that laptop (using iTunes of course), associate a Shuffle with it, and copy the playlist to your Shuffle.  Now, give your laptop to someone else (e.g. your IT guy because you got a new laptop – just pretend).  Try – just try – to get the Shuffle to automatically associate with another computer without wiping out the playlist.

Now, stare at your orphaned Shuffle for a while.  Your wife – who you love very much – just wants to make a few changes to it.  Try to explain to her why it’s not that easy (since nothing recognizes what’s on the Shuffle).  Watch as she looks at you as though you are a total freak of nature.  Continue to watch as she starts to scream and then cry.  Seriously.

You – like me – will become determined to figure out how to get this damn playlist off the orphaned Shuffle and into a copy of iTunes so your wife can be in music change happy land.  Anapod looked like it would work, but after spending $30 on it, it turns out that it doesn’t handle playlists (and recreating them in iTunes) with Shuffle’s very well (it works very nicely with the other iPod versions.)  Thankfully, Anapod can figure out what’s on the Shuffle and gives you a nice list of it.  Try to figure out how to print this list.  You’ll eventually give up and resort to opening a Word document, hitting Shift-PrtSc, and Ctrl-V into the Word doc, followed by PgDn in Anapod, Shift-PrtSc, … until you’ve got a nice document of your screen shots (5 pages to get the full 250 or so songs in the play list).  Then – print (to your network printer of course).

Hold your breath.  Plug the Shuffle back into your wife’s desktop computer (I’m not going to make that laptop mistake again – this is her computer).  Fire up iTunes.  Song by song, recreate her playlist.  After 30 minutes of this, walk outside and scream at the top of your lungs (or – if you have neighbors – go in your garage and scream). 

Fucking stupid.  There’s got to be a better way.  Apple has mastered the user experience.  These are not the droids you want.  Oh – and don’t bother trying to explain this to your wife – just smile and show her how to update her playlist on her desktop computer.

I had lunch with Stan James on Friday at Pasquini’s Pizzeria.  Stan is the creator of Outfoxed and was introduced to me by Seth Goldstein who is one of the guys behind AttentionTrust.org and has recently launched Root Markets (Seth has a long essay up about Root Markets: Media Futures: From Theory to Practice that is very interesting (and complex) if you are into this stuff.))

Stan’s moving to Boulder to be in the middle of the Internet software development universe (ok – he’s moving back here because it’s a much better place to live than Silicon Valley, but don’t tell anyone).  We spent a bunch of time getting to know each other, we talked about the research he’d been doing for his masters these in Cognitive Science at the University of Osnabrueck, and how this led to Outfoxed.  Oh – and we ate a huge delicious pizza.

I’d been playing with Outfoxed for a few days on my computer at home (I have a computer at home that I’ll install anything on) and was sort of getting it.  An hour with Stan helped a lot.  When I combine what Outfoxed is figuring out for me with the data I’m getting from Root’s Vault (my clickstream / attention data) I can see how this could be really useful to me in a few weeks once I’ve got enough data built up. More in a few weeks.

We then started talking about something I’ve been thinking about for a while.  My first business was a software consulting business that built database application software.  As a result, the construct of a relational database was central to everything I did for a number of years.  In the mid 1990’s when I started doing web stuff, I was amazed at how little most people working on web and Internet software really understood about relationship databases.  This has obviously changed (and improved) while evolving rapidly as a result of the semantic web, XML, and other data exchange approaches.  But – this shit got too complicated for me. Then Google entered the collective consciousness and put a very simple UI in front of all of this for search, eliminating the need for most of humanity to learn how to use a SELECT statement (ok – others – like the World Wide Web Wanderer by Matthew Gray (net.Genesis) and Yahoo did it first – but Google was the tipping point.)

I started noticing something about a year ago – the web was becoming massively denormalized.  If you know anything about relationship databases, you know that sometimes you have denormalized data to improve performance (usually because of a constraint of your underlying DBMS) but usually you want to try to keep you database normalized.  If you don’t know about databases, just think denormalization=bad.  As a result of the proliferation of user-generated content (and the ease at which is was created), services where appearing all of the place to capture that same data (reviews: books, movies, restaurants), people, jobs, stuff for sale.  “Smart” people were putting the data in multiple places (systems) – really smart people were writing software to automate this process. 

Voila – the web is now a massively denormalized database.  I’m not sure if that’s good or bad (in the case of the web, denormalization does not necessarily equal bad).  However, I think it’s a construct that is worth pondering as the amount of denormalized data appears to me to be increasing geometrically right now. 

Stan and I talked about this for a while and he taught me a few things.  Stan is going to be a huge net-add to the Boulder software community – I’m looking forward to spending more time with him.

I woke up this morning thinking about User Agents (ok – I was also thinking about Naomi Watts and Sean Penn who were amazing in 21 Grams.)  A commenter on my Personalize Feed post pointed out that most of the big online aggregators include subscriber counts in their user-agent headers when the aggregator polls the RSS feed.

While I agree that using the User Agent to report the number of subscribers to a feed is a good approach, I’ve noticed a bizarre pattern lately.  Since I use FeedBurner to manage my feed, I’ve got great visibility into which aggregators are providing their subscriber numbers.  I’ve got enough subscribers at this point (> 4500) that the law of large numbers are working for me – while I won’t claim to have perfect “aggregator market share data”, I’ve got a pretty good feel for it (which is really useful given my investment in NewsGator.) As I wrote in my Blog Analytics post, I love numbers and have long invested in, benefited from, and paid attention to web analytics.  So – the number of subscribers to my feed (among other feed and blog related data) are near and dear to my heart.

However, it turns out that a number of aggregators don’t report subscriber count.  I’ve got 128 distinct aggregators polling my feed on a daily basis according to FeedBurner.  76 of them have one subscriber which most likely means they don’t report the number of subscribers via User Agent (yeah – some of them probably only have one subscriber, but not all of them.)  The top 10 aggregators polling my feed (in order) are Bloglines, NewsGator Online, FeedDemon, NetNewsWire, Firefox Live Bookmarks, Rojo, Google Desktop, SharpReader, NewsGator Enterprise, and Thunderbird. 

Ok – that’s sort of interesting – but more interesting is the number of aggregators that don’t report number of subscribers.  Google Reader doesn’t.  Microsoft is noticeably missing (and has a User Agent is lodged down in the subscriber = 1 category).  And – the grand daddy of them all (My Yahoo) – after reporting a number that landed them regularly in my top four, recently stopped reporting number of subscribers and now shows one.  Others in the subscriber = 1 list that stand out include OddPost (Yahoo again), Pluck Firefox and Web Edition (ironically the Pluck Internet Explorer Edition reports, just not in the top 10, although that might be because it’s not an online reader), Pubsub, and SearchFox.

Since a web-based aggregator only needs to request the feed once and then uses that cached version for all its users, putting the subscriber count in the User Agent is a good citizen move to simply help the publisher of the feed (e.g. me – I want to know the number of subscribers I have.)  I’ve got to believe that it’s useful to the aggregator to report the number of subscribers since it helps the publisher understand how popular the aggregator is and publishers will try to promote the services where they have a lot of subscribers.  Plus – as a publisher – while I don’t know the demographics of my subscribers, at least I’d like to know how many I have.  Given how trivial it is for the aggregator to report this, it baffles me why some of the aggregators, including Google, Microsoft, and Yahoo, don’t do this.

Of course, there are issues with the simply reporting the aggregator count. While I get an aggregate subscriber count, I don’t get any real information about the number of subscribers that are actively reading my blog via an aggregator.  Also, people don’t tend to delete their user-ids at online aggregators if they don’t use the service anymore (e.g. I know I have a Kinja account – remember Kinja – they don’t report subscribers either – with feeds in it that I imagine happily pools stuff daily for me).  Finally, some services subscribe a bunch of feeds automatically skewing the number of subscribers for that aggregator. 

That said, the User Agent approach is a good one that I figured was worth decomposing more based on the comment I got suggesting most of the big online aggregators support subscription counts.  While a lot of aggregators are playing nice (at least 33% of the ones that poll my feed), a bunch aren’t, including Microsoft, Google, and Yahoo. What’s up with that guys?

I was in an Oxlo board meeting recently and Todd Vernon (Raindance CTO who is on the Oxlo board) said “I’ve subscribed to your del.icio.us tag feed – I like it more than your blog because it tells me what you are thinking about.  I was mulling this over when a few days later I saw Jason Calacanis’ Wired & Tired post where he called out “subscribing to Fred’s blog” as Tired but “subscribing to Fred’s del.icio.us feed” as Wired.  Jason used almost the same phrase as Todd – “I prefer to read what Fred is *considering* blogging about.”

It dawned on me that my del.icio.us tag is akin to the first derivative of what I’m thinking about.  For a while, I struggled with tagging stuff as I didn’t get the benefit.  Now, I tag everything I read on line that I find interesting and am finding myself referencing my del.icio.us tags regularly to find stuff that I’d tagged a few days earlier (rather than going to Google and doing a new search – hmmm.) 

I went ahead and FeedBurnered my del.icio.us tag feed so it’d be easy to subscribe to.  FeedBurner’s BuzzBoost feature made it easy for me to put the most recent tags up on my blog (on the left hand column – I chose to list the last 10).  del.icio.us’s new Tagroll let me quickly put a nifty tag cloud up on my blog also (on the right hand column).