Disqus - Latest Comments for Tom Morris

Re: TechCrunch20 and Hammer: Can’t touch this

Tom Morris — Fri, 11 May 2007 18:20:37 -0000

Well, I'd say that it's finally honesty in advertising. Half the Web 2.0 stuff is marketing/advertising/advertorial or whatever under the guise of technology. Before we had all the Web 2.0 stuff, a typical business plan would be "we're going to build the best [database/word processor/'foo' server etc.] in the world and we're going to sell it to people". If the TechCrunch crowd were doing that, MC Hammer would be totally irrelevant. But they're not.

When we're talking about YouTube - the technological component of which consists in FLV files and a server farm the size of a small town - it seems far more appropriate to have media people than tech people. I mean, what the crap do we know about advertising and music promotion or indie video? We write code and geek out with computers. A group of fourteen year-olds could club together and build their own YouTube clone in less than a month these days (and evidence suggests quite a number of them have - and then subsequently went on to found companies).

In an age of tech startups being basically media companies in disguise, MC Hammer is a far more appropriate choice for the conference board than a techie.

Re: Lying with Statistics

Tom Morris — Sun, 04 Jun 2006 19:45:18 -0000

Most of mine are either ripped from CD or are legal downloads from independent artist websites.

Re: 2007/07/25/firefox-security/

Tom Morris — Thu, 26 Jul 2007 04:47:28 -0000

1Passwd is quite neat (and it's currently $10 off at maczot.com), but what made me most satisfied was FireGPG, which allows you to use Firefox as a GPG client. It also integrates with Gmail, so you can sign, verify, encrypt and decrypt email within Gmail. Mind-blowingly great.

Re: Tom Morris Rocks

Tom Morris — Sat, 16 Dec 2006 17:10:56 -0000

Why, thank you. I've been to four unconferences this year - two BarCamps (London and Ireland), PodCamp (the one in Boston) and OPML Camp (also in Boston). Once you've been unconferenced, going back to normal conferences shows you how utterly dull they are.

Re: How MySpace is Broken

Tom Morris — Mon, 05 Feb 2007 06:15:36 -0000

Hmm. The "all in one place" shouldn't matter. That's what web services are for. In an ideal world, where your photos get posted or who is on your friends list could be managed by services that talk to one another.

I've finally managed to expunge MySpace from my life by writing a script to pull all the comments from each profile I want to follow and deliver them as RSS.

Re: Dave Winer working on new RSS aggregator?

Tom Morris — Thu, 29 Dec 2005 18:07:34 -0000

Peter: that is exactly what Dave is trying to break free from, and I think he'll do it (he has a knack of taking good ideas from the past and breathing new life in to them). Most of the aggregators I've seen in recent months suck - and none more so than the many box-on-a-page "Web 2.0" aggregators that don't scale beyond about 5 feeds. None of them do what I want them to do. I use Bloglines because it annoys me the least. I've tried Radio UserLand, and I like the aggregator but don't want to use it for my blog. Having an aggregator built in to the OPML Editor will actually be exceptionally useful because I spend an enormous amount of time using it.

Re: Dave Winer working on new RSS aggregator?

Tom Morris — Thu, 29 Dec 2005 18:32:39 -0000

It's not a solution looking for a problem. It's an alternative to the current solutions.

Re: Dave Winer working on new RSS aggregator?

Tom Morris — Thu, 29 Dec 2005 19:52:58 -0000

NewsFire isn't pure River of News. It's two panel. From what I've read of Dave's planned RSS reader, it's going to be one-panel in much the same style as the Radio UserLand aggregator.

Re: I’ve shared my OPML, will you?

Tom Morris — Mon, 08 May 2006 06:53:23 -0000

User 19 speaking here. If you want to filter some feeds out of your OPML before you upload it, you might want to use the script I've written: http://blogs.opml.org/tommorris/2006/05/08#shar...

Re: How to find good podcasts

Tom Morris — Mon, 24 Jul 2006 21:06:01 -0000

jean: people need podcasts like they need videogames, music and movies - they're not a necessity but they are nice to have.

Re: Scoble is Mini?

Tom Morris — Wed, 02 Aug 2006 16:32:15 -0000

When this popped up in my aggregator, I thought that it was Mini-Scobleizer not Mini-Microsoft.

"Hmm, Scoble *is* Mini-Scoble? That's an elaborate and snazzy marketing trick... But I'm sure I saw pictures of Patrick in Dave Winer's Flickr stream - that's gotta be hard to fake..."

Re: Will Apple sue PodTech.net? (My employer)

Tom Morris — Sat, 23 Sep 2006 19:27:52 -0000

One word: "feedcast".

And a downvote for "vlog". Too Russian for our mixed Germanic and Romantic language. It sounds horrible and has about the same feeling inside one's mouth as a urine-soaked cockroach.

Re: The “pissed as newts” tour

Tom Morris — Tue, 28 Nov 2006 09:20:16 -0000

For those who don't know where the Eros Statue is, here's how you get there. Go to Picadilly Circus on the tube or bus. Then look for this thing:
http://www.milesfaster.co.uk/gallery/leicester-...

Can't miss it. I certainly won't be.

Re: A positive view of Le Web

Tom Morris — Thu, 14 Dec 2006 08:41:13 -0000

Paul: "Yet to read the blogs you would think the Geneva Convention had been violated."

I know it seems like an over-reaction - but there was a lot of resentment in the room. As one of the ring-leaders among the dissenters, I chose to start posting because I was pissed off that our side of the story wouldn't be heard. Me, Nicole Simon and Adam Tinworth were blogging away with a dissenting voice because if we didn't, then I don't think anyone would have paid any attention to the Sarkozy thing.

And I'm certainly not going to stop until Loic Le Meur says something. This is a conversational media, yet the organisers of Le Web have had only one reaction - calling Sam Sethi an asshole. We want a conversation about this because we believe in the power of the technology which we are using and/or building.

Lame conferences where political buddy games are played do not help to promote blogging and conversational media - they are stifled and dull. Europe - and France in particular - deserves better than Le Web. Did we overreact? Yes. But it was necessary so that someone might pay some attention to it. I don't regret anything I've said. All I want to happen is for Loic to talk to us as a human being. Press desks, panels filled with sponsors (sorry, but how does Orange have anything to do with Web 2.0?), ministers shipped in to give stump speeches - none of that is in any way connected to having a conversation.

Re: How to respond to criticism?

Tom Morris — Sat, 16 Dec 2006 17:31:20 -0000

The irony of the situation is multiplied an infinite amount when you consider the fact that Loïc Le Meur is an executive at Six Apart. Sorry, but this only proves that Loïc and friends don't eat their own dogfood. They're perfectly happy to sell conversational media to other companies in the form of blogging software like Movable Type, but aren't willing to take part in the conversation they are selling to their customers.

Re: I finally get “semantic” Web

Tom Morris — Thu, 05 Apr 2007 13:14:57 -0000

Congratulations, Scoble! There is a grokking point, where it all makes sense. Like with RSS, it's difficult to explain why it's cool until you see the reality for yourself.

What really excites me is GRDDL, which basically allows one to provide a bridge between straight HTML and the Semantic Web.

Re: I finally get “semantic” Web

Tom Morris — Thu, 05 Apr 2007 14:53:06 -0000

cdavies: Good luck with that. I'm looking forward to the robot where I can poo in it's mouth, it goes away and processes it and then hands me back little nuggets of gold. Drop me an email when you've built it, okay. Until that point, I think I'll stick with the Semantic Web idea.

And, believe me, there are lots of fun engineering challenges one can have building the SemWeb - making massively scalable triple stores (something that Nova's company is apparently working on), efficient scutters, finding the optimum distribution of granularity vs. centrality and much more.

If Google can achieve this much with a set of source documents that are not particularly well marked up semantically, then imagine how cool the next evolution of Google could be...

Re: I finally get “semantic” Web

Tom Morris — Thu, 05 Apr 2007 16:22:58 -0000

Barry Kelly: the same way they are in real life. If someone puts their phone number on their website, and you phone it and get someone else, what do you do? If you buy a city guide that tells you that there is a certain museum on one street and it's on another, what do you do? If you go to a shopping site and there isn't a phone number, what do you do?

Well, whatever your answer is - it's basically the same with the SemWeb. There's a whole group of cool and interesting technology - SSL, GPG, OpenID, FOAF - that can be used in combination with good old-fashioned human judgment and human rule-making. If someone advertises something on their website and it doesn't work, they may be breaking - say - a law or contract. If they advertise something in a Semantic document (say, a series of RDF triples) and it isn't true, then you can use the same sort of legal instruments.

The W3C/TimBL vision of the Semantic Web is not holy. Trust is a question higher up on the layer cake. Adding small amounts of semantics at this stage does a lot of good - which is why things like microformats, eRDF and GRDDL are important.

Re: What happened to ICQ?

Tom Morris — Fri, 13 Jul 2007 20:31:41 -0000

This post reminded me to add my ICQ account to my Adium. I now have Jabber (aka. Google Talk), MSN, AIM, Yahoo and LiveJournal. I'm waiting for Jabber and OpenID to merge with FOAF and microformats and then we can have the complete open identity stack...

Re: Twittering Shelley

Tom Morris — Thu, 15 Nov 2007 18:28:24 -0000

I think Shelley has it about right actually. Twitter is not the problem though.

There is a problem with giddy business types hyping every thing "2.0". Things that come to mind:

- wikis as business content management solution (as if: if people don't communicate within a business, software won't magically solve it)

- the 'social graph' - a clumsy expression that's become something that everybody is now 'leveraging'. What that actually means in practical terms is almost impossible to find out

- pointless vendor sports. Sorry, but I don't care about the latest strategic move in the multi-dimensional Yahoo, Google, Microsoft, AOL, Facebook game. It's not just not interesting, it's mind-numbing to the shoot your brains out with a shotgun degree.

A thinking exercise. Why is it that if you Google for web 2.0 site:techcrunch.com you get over 17,600 results while if you search for web 2.0 site:tbray.org you get 156 results - mostly in quotation marks or with an ironic trademark symbol afer them. Similarly, you get 167 results from Simon Willison's blog. You get 310 results on Sam Ruby's blog. It's the same for other developers. Most of the developers I read don't have time for Web 2.0 - it's the name of an overpriced conference, and that is about it.

Why is it that developers don't use the term Web 2.0? I mean, Tim Bray is one of the people who bootstraped Web 2.0 with his work on XML. Perhaps because it is all a clumsy bit of fudge that makes actual technological change and advance like grid computing, decent search algorithms and advances in Semantic Web/microformats etc. and lumps it together with, oh, being able to post comments on newspaper articles.

I think a fair degree of cynicism is required to be a good software developer.

I used to read TechCrunch and TechMeme and all the other similar places - ReadWriteWeb, Mashable and a lot of tech pundit blogs. I haven't bothered for a long time, because it's gotten seriously dull and has no relevance to what I sit down and do in my text editor every day. It's just people squabbling over phrases like "social graph" and "Web 2.0" which seem to have less and less meaning by the day.

Anyway, just my opinion. YMMV.

Re: Twittering Shelley

Tom Morris — Thu, 15 Nov 2007 19:46:30 -0000

I don't think it's unfair, Robert. I'm just putting my experience out there - not attacking anyone. (Well, maybe TechCrunch a little bit, but hey). And I don't think Shelley is attacking you either.

We're all friends here.

Re: Dear Jeff Bezos (one-week Kindle review)

Tom Morris — Sun, 25 Nov 2007 18:14:21 -0000

Thanks for saving me $300. No way I'm going to buy this when it comes out in the UK. What a pile of crap. The only books I read on screen are technical books for reference. Often publishers will provide PDFs for the books if you've bought the paper version - and I'll put those on my laptop. Similarly, the eBook reader in my Palm Pilot is mostly filled with converted specifications from the W3C.

For anything other than W3C specifications and technical manuals, I use Good Old Paper. Not because it's special or magic or sacred, but just because ebook technology and/or design sucks.

Re: The first Twitter/Facebook/Seesmic/Kyte business card?

Tom Morris — Sat, 15 Dec 2007 00:29:12 -0000

Tantek Çelik had his Twitter on his moo card when he gave it to me in London a month or so back.

Re: Exclusive - Yahoo Using Dirty Tactics to Switch Google & Firefox Users?

Tom Morris — Fri, 12 Jan 2007 15:47:40 -0000

I'd be more worried about Yahoo and other large internet companies and how they've been collaborating with the Chinese government and handing over details of dissidents and political opponents. This is nothing in comparison.