Scripting News for 12/21/2006

The BBC, in a deal with Azureus, will share high-def programming using BitTorrent.  

The Queen of England has a podcast feed. Here’s her 80th birthday speech. Via the Telegraph. 

We’re making progress on next week’s meetup in NYC. We still need to pick a date, I can’t do the 27th, when I’m going to a Knicks game with Steve Rubel. But I can do the 28th. We need a place to have it. Ideally, a conference room (or classroom) that can seat about 25-30 people, we can meet at 5:30 or 6PM, talk for a couple of hours, and then go to dinner. Anyone have a room they can volunteer? And Greg Cannon points out that it’s so far an all-male affair. It would be great to get some women there. We’re not looking for dates, Greg points out, but how about a little variety? That would be nice! :-) 

What makes things work 

First, thanks for a great discussion yesterday. The best part was there was only a little ad hominem bashing, much less than we used to have whenever we have a sprited discussion of technology. I remember when I couldn’t say anything without getting surrounded by a bunch of really nasty personal stuff. Didn’t happen yesterday. Almost from the beginning I started learning, and that’s always appreciated. So thanks! Good work.

I might have felt a bit differently right off the top, about JSON if I hadn’t read this bit of anti-XML propoganda on site that appears to be a JSON advocacy site. If I didn’t know to question such things, given the domain name, json.org, it appears to be the advocacy site. Even if it isn’t JSON-central, clearly there is some reinvention going on here.

Back in the mid-90s, my first reaction to XML was to retch in horror at the inevitable politics that such a beast would certainly evoke. Back then I was very happy to be working on the web, I thought of it as the platform with no platform vendor, and I saw XML as a way of inviting all the would-be and former platform vendors back in to rule our lives, and prevent us from having any fun or making any money. Eventually I was won over, for one main reason — interop is important. If I make software that has an open and easy to understand protocol for communicating with other instances of itself, then other people can write plug-compatible software, and users can choose between products based on features, performance and price, not compatibility. I had already seen the world melt down several times as the technology industry fought to form lock-in through various schemes to delude people into thinking they were open to being replaced, when they were anything but.

Fast-forward to 2006, after a lot of time was put in by a lot of people to get a teeny little bit of interop here and there, and predictably, it’s being erased, of course, by the tech industry. I don’t think there’s any doubt about it. This just happens to be the week I took a look. I don’t know why. Maybe I was bored. Maybe it was meant to be.

Les Orchard, who I admire, and have worked with several times, says I shredded his product. I didn’t mean to. However I did mean to shred the idea that everything can be redone at any time. Sure there are always lots of arguments in favor of starting over, but the one argument against it, imho, is the strongest, interop is sacred, and anything that throws out interop is highly suspect. One way to do things, no matter how flawed, is better than two, no matter how much better the new way is. The Perl community has a different motto, god bless em, but in the space where all languages interop, the less-is-more and worse-is-better approach is what makes things work.

So JSON isn’t evil. It’s just the internal object serialization format for JavaScript. No problem. But using it as a basis for interop, when there were already good ways to achieve interop is evil, imho. I don’t think that’s what del.icio.us did, but I do see some people advocating that, and I think they’re wrong. Am I going to do anything more about it? No fucking way. There’s a nasty war in Iraq, a national election next year, I just bought a house, I may want to write a book, and I’m fighting other battles that demand more of my attention. But I’m glad we could have this discussion, and please continue, I enjoy learning new stuff.

A tale of corporate atrocity 

I had lunch with Marc Canter yesterday, and he told me about a conversation he had with Tim O’Reilly and Cory Doctorow, where they told him they knew I had nothing to do with RSS. I asked how they said they knew. They had apparently asked some people at Netscape and they said they didn’t work with me. As if that was how RSS came to be the powerhouse it is today. It isn’t. Eventually Tim came around, and gave me credit for making RSS happen. Thanks.

The process whereby RSS came to be so powerful was one of building out both ends of the technology, supply and demand, and putting some currency on the network, and hoping it boots up. In the case of RSS as a transport for blog posts and news articles, it did, and the two pieces were Radio UserLand’s blogging tool, Radio UserLand’s aggregator, and a few early blogs, including Scripting News (the currency). It also worked in a similar manner, eventually, for podcasting.

Today I received a link to a patent granted to Microsoft, where they claim to have invented all this stuff. Presumably they’re eventually going to charge us to use it. This should be denounced by everyone who has contributed anything to the success of RSS.

Scripting News for 12/20/2006

Earthquake rattles my cage 

7:15PM Pacific — Was there just an earthquake in Berkeley??

Answer — Yes, at 7:12PM, a 3.7 quake. It was very close-by, just above the Claremont Hotel in the Berkeley Hills.

Rattled the staircase in the house.

God bless the re-inventers 

Gotta love em, because there’s no way they’re going to stop breaking what works, and fixing what don’t need no fixing.

I’ve been hearing, off in the distance, about something called JSON, that proposes to solve a problem that was neatly solved by XML-RPC in 1998, the encoding of arrays and structs in a format that could easily be processed by all programming languages. The advantage being that you could easily support the protocol in any language that supported XML and HTTP, which, at the time, was quickly becoming all languages.

Then came SOAP, a re-invention of XML-RPC, that I saw as the inevitable fussing that BigTechCo’s feel they have to do to give their software lock-in, make it impossible for another developer to reverse-engineer the profile they used, and make the documentation so broad and incomprehensible that it’s impossible to ever completely implement it. Competition-free open protocols. Microsoft and IBM succeeded at that, with help from Sun, leading to a backlash, some of it well-intentioned, and some of it hypocritically promoted by the very same people who made SOAP so difficult to program! Such chutzpah, but already the users were so confused they thought it was just geeks being difficult.

I said it then, you’d still need to come up with an object serialization format for REST apps, otherwise every app has to start from scratch, they could have used the one SOAP used (we defined a profile called the Busy Developer’s Guide to make that possible), or god forbid, use the original one in XML-RPC, but maybe the new devs at various big Silicon Valley companies never heard about these proto-standards, or chose to re-invent anyway. They came up with this thing called JSON, that I kept saying to myself, “You don’t even want to look.”

Today I looked. I read on Niall Kennedy that del.icio.us has come up with an API that returns a JSON structure, and I figured, sheez it can’t be that hard to parse, so let’s see what it looks like, and damn, IT’S NOT EVEN XML!

As Dr Phil asks — What were they thinking?

No doubt I can write a routine to parse this, but look at how deep they went to re-invent, XML itself wasn’t good enough for them, for some reason (I’d love to hear the reason). Who did this travesty? Let’s find a tree and string them up. Now.

Ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls, this is why I’m fed up with Mountain View, Cupertino, Redwood Shores and Redmond. Give me Berkeley and New York any day. Silicon Valley is made up of little boys pulling their puds, constantly making love to each other, pretending the world revolves around them.

End of rant.

Discuss here. Note — it’s an incredible thread, proof that there’s still a bunch of minds in the loop here. I’ll probably write up a summary of what we learned tomorrow. Thanks.

Time to stand up? 

Assuming you agree, would you be willing to stand up with other Americans, and march together to stop the war in Iraq?

Would you march in your hometown, or go to Washington to help save the lives of young Americans in Iraq?

Will you hold a sign, a candle, say a prayer, sing a song, stand up and be counted?

Perhaps Christmas Day is a day to take to the streets?

Scripting News for 12/19/2006

Shall we have a bloggers meetup in NYC next week? 

Note, the password on the wiki is hotpasta. 

The San Francisco Chronicle tries to write about the Silicon Valley Asshole Society, a late-80s early-90s phenomenon. Its name was chosen so as to make it impossible for press people to write about it. I think Marc Canter was kicked out because we knew it would piss him off. And everyone said they were the founder of the society. That was the nature of the group. BTW, I was the actual founder, along with Stewart Alsop and Guy Kawaksaki. :-) 

Mary Hodder recommends a conference on DRM in March in Berkeley. Reviewing the schedule, it seems there’s plenty of discussion and advocacy of DRM but not much dissent. Imho there’s no DRM in our future. It’s like discussing OpenDoc and OLE in the years the web was gaining traction. Podcasting and RSS point the way for media in the age of the Internet. BTW, I’m pretty sure Mary would agree. 

The President wants to send more troops to Iraq. Almost no one else thinks this makes sense. Will civil disobedience follow? 

Five things you didn’t know about me 

I’ve finally been tagged, by Maryam Scoble, who I saw on Sunday at the lasagna dinner. So here they are, five things that you didn’t know about me.

1. The women in my family are beautiful and powerful. My mother has a PhD and she doesn’t take any shit. Her mission is to get all the buses in NYC to turn off their engines when idling, and she’s winning. She played a role in integrating the schools in the neighborhood I grew up in. Her picture was once on the front page of the NY Times walking my little brother to school in Corona, which is a black neighborhood adjacent to Jackson Heights, the neighborhood we lived in. One of her cousins was the famous 40s box office bombshell and geek, Hedy Lamarr.

2. My brother lives in Los Altos and has three kids, and is married to the VP-marketing of Filmloop.

3. My iPod has every song recorded by Stevie Wonder, Elvis Costello and the Beatles.

4. Some people think that one of the reasons I kept this blog going is because I am in a fight with Mike Arrington, but this is not true. I like Mike, he’s helped me many times, he’s intensely loyal, under a lot of stress, and I absolutely do not hold anything like a grudge with him. I never want to fight with Mike, but I don’t always agree with him.

5. I might write a book. I have to learn how to write an outline and a proposal, and then after that comes the task of writing the book itself. I already have an agent, and there are publishers that are excited about it.

Now I have to tag five other people.

Amyloo, Doc Searls, John Palfrey, Keith Teare, Mike Arrington.

Two notes about TV shows 

My parents were here for the lasagna dinner on Sunday and for breakfast on Monday. My dad, as usual, is full of stories. Apparently he’s been watching Dr. Phil, because he quotes him all the time. “What were you thinking?” is the punchline of many of his tales. It’s often a good question.

For no special reason, I want to say that Deal or No Deal has become my favorite TV show. Ever since Howie Mandel made an appearance on Studio 60, I’ve been tuning in whenever I can. It’s a very nice show. A little math and a lot of spunk.

The last post on the Google API 

We were excited when the Google API came online, we waited for them to come up with a licensing plan that would allow developers to build Internet-scale applications using the API. Today, the wait is over, and it’s not good news.

Google is deprecating the API, which means, for now, they will continue to implement their side of it, but they won’t be issuing new keys, and presumably we should not wait for a business plan. This leaves the door open to others — my recommendation would be to support the API as-is so that developers who have built on it can just change the name of the server and their software works. Google blinked in search. Who would have thought such an opportunity would present itself. Seems a perfect opening for Amazon or Yahoo.

Postscript: The discussion here has taken an interesting turn.

Scripting News for 12/18/2006

The Library of Congress supports RSS. 

The lasagna was so-so 

We had a lasagna party at the house in Berkeley last night.

Lots of Berkeleyites, people from the Hillside Club, and Jen and David from Santa Cruz, Robert and Maryam from Half Moon Bay, my parents from New York City. A full table and lots of food, humor, politics, candles, fun!

So many people not from the US. Let’s see if I can list all the places. Holland, Germany, Iran, Rumania, Czechoslavakia, England, Tibet. That wasn’t even part of the plan.

Anyway, the lasagna that held such promise was in the oven too long, and while I was tending to this and than, it burned. Luckily there’s a potluck on Friday night, I’ll do it again, based on the theory that you need to get back on the horse right after you fall off. The dish was good all the way up to the end. And everyone was very gracious, and said it was good, but I wasn’t satisfied, myself.

Get your P.O.V. out of M.S.M. 

Dan Gillmor nails it, but doesn’t go quite far enough, imho. He says that Time’s wording betrays a royal point of view, a separation they cling to, that no longer exists. But I’d go further, and say that the person of the year is not you or us, but me. The correct picture is a camera shot over the mirror looking at Homer Simpson’s face looking into the mirror, with pride. The theme song would be the Beatles singing I, Me, Mine. It puts the honor right where it belongs, and the responsibility too. But good on you Dan, for getting your p.o.v. out of m.s.m. and joining the rest of us!

It’s not the aggregation of all the voices that matter so much (although they do matter, as in Netflix recommendations) — it matters more that my mother blogs, or my programmers, or friends. When Silicon Valley types talk about The Long Tail, crowd-sourcing or user-generated content, they’re playing the same game that Time is, separating themselves where there is no separation. Each of us has a voice. Sure some of us serve as aggregators, and that used to give them more power. But not so much anymore. That’s a key point.

Stowe Boyd: “Everything worth doing is difficult to do well.”

Scripting News for 12/17/2006

Lasagna in the oven, soon to feed hungry eaters. 

Getting ready to bake the lasagna. 

Glad to have gladiolas. :-) 

Oops, you might not be the person of the year, after all.  

Om, thanks for the kind thoughts. Maybe Ev, Ben, Mena, Matt and myself should throw a party remembering how the software of the blogosphere came to be.  

Amyloo on the latest back and forth in the love-hate-fest between Amanda and Andrew. I can’t stand watching this meltdown. I may see Andrew next week in NYC, I was planning to before all this crap started flying, but I know that when Andrew is in Amanda-obsessed mode, he can’t talk about anything else, and to me it’s both frustrating and monotonous. He’s got it bad. I don’t know where Amanda is at, but if I had Andrew nipping at my heels that way, I’d be wondering how the hell I could put this behind me and get on with my life. I’ve had situations like this, where people are irrationally obsessed with me, when it isn’t clear what they want, other than to keep me right where I am. I consider both Amanda and Andrew friends. I’ve spent much more time with Andrew than Amanda, countless times I’ve told him to just let it go. I say the same thing to Amanda, because I think she’s holding on too. Of course it’s easier to see this when you’re on the outside. But that is where I am, thankfully.  

Watching the Sunday morning news shows, I can’t believe they’re seriously talking about sending more U.S. troops to Iraq. Uhhh that’s incorrect. We need to get our troops out of there. I think there’s been a misunderstanding.  

Here’s a better idea: Send Bush and his daughters to Iraq to help pacify the country. Laura can run one of the checkpoints. Hope they don’t get blown up.  

One thing that’s become clear — the press no longer supports the war. They did, for a long time, and should take their share of the responsibility. But they won’t let this war go on much longer, and they have the power. They can show us the human side of the war, here at home. Profiles of dead soldiers and their families. They know how to pull the mass heart strings. It’s hard to imagine what will make them flip back to carrying water for Bush. 

Scripting News for 12/17/2006

Watching the Sunday morning news shows, I can’t believe they’re seriously talking about sending more U.S. troops to Iraq. Send Bush and his daughters there to help pacify the country. Laura can run one of the checkpoints. Hope they don’t get blown up.  

Scripting News for 12/16/2006

Time named its person of the year, and it’s you! 

I got a nice mention in one of the cover stories.  

YouTube: Hand Farting the Star Spangled Banner. 

Hot fire keeps you warm. New header graphic. 

Today meat sauce, tomorrow lasagna. :-) 

Goodbye to the embargo 

I read on Frank Shaw’s blog that Nick Denton thinks that embargoes will soon be a thing of the past. I think this is a good thing, even though I fully understand why big companies like Microsoft (Shaw’s client) have attempted to orchestrate product rollouts in the past. It made more sense before there were blogs, when the number of news outlets was finite, and when most people were dependent on intermediaries to find out about new products. That hasn’t been true for quite some time, and it will be less true in the future.

The embargo system led to an inbred information flow, and created opportunities for competitors that didn’t have the ear of the big pubs, like the NY Times, Fortune, Business Week or the Wall Street Journal. How many of the ideas that made a difference in the last few years were rolled out in the orchestrate and embargo system? When you see a rollout that’s been orchestrated does that make you more or less interested? For me, if 18 big publications got the story before me, I’m not interested at all. If Om and Mike got it before me, ditto. And in a world where everyone is a publication, you just can’t play favorites, you have to find a way to spread the news on your own, without help from middlemen.

Luckily it’s easy to do. No reason you can’t cover your own rollout. It requires that you undestand your product, have an idea how people will see it. It means maybe you haven’t been that secretive about it while you were creating it. Chris Anderson’s list of transparency features, which we’ve been writing about here for years, apply to businesses too. So what if your competitors know where you’re going. Stop worrying about them so much, think more about the users.

The embargo system is a throwback to the ivory tower development system. But I’m sure of this — in the future, the users are the designers, so you can’t hide your ideas from them, they already know them, if you’re barking up the right tree, if your ideas are any good. So goodbye to embargoes, and good riddance.

Scripting News for 12/15/2006

Happy Birthday Betsy the Babe!! :-) 

Interesting comments on What is Victory, below. 

I’m watching Scoble’s interview with Mark Lucovsky at Google. I have to admit there was a point where my chin hit the floor. Guess where that is. Beyond that point, well, I don’t really support the idea of a search engine where you can only find one brand of hotel. I believe in modeless software, search should always be search, nothing more nothing less. Perhaps the day of the “professional” developer is over. 

Scoble explains why no hard questions for Bill Gates.  

Remember the press room thing I wanted to do, why don’t we organize one for big tech companies and the same kinds of bloggers that went to Microsoft’s thing, except the bloggers pay their own way and the companies pay us to get 1/2 hour to present and then a few of their people can mingle throughout the day. We buy food, wifi, a big hotel suite (or small ballroom), level the playing field and let the ideas flow without worrying so much about social behavior. I figure we could do a first class job for about $25K for a day. 

Wired reviews MP3 tag editors for Windows, Mac & Linux. 

What is victory? 

On the lunch walk with Lance on Wednesday, we talked about the level of reality the MSM is willing to report, and how it lags behind discernable reality by a matter of weeks or months.

For example, it wasn’t until after the election that they were willing to call the fighting in Iraq a civil war. Now the discussion has moved beyond that, and they’re almost willing to say we’re losing the war in Iraq, and that the President somehow wants a strategy to win the war. (They quote the incoming SecDef, heroically, for admitting that we’re “not winning,” which isn’t exactly the same as losing.)

Going all the way back to the beginning of the war, the MSM didn’t ask the obvious question — given that there’s no evidence that Iraq had anything to do with 9/11, why are we invading them now? Wouldn’t it be more prudent to focus all our energy at rooting out and destroying the people who organized the attack? It seems we should have been talking about that, not just in hindsight, it seemed that way at the time, too.

But now, in late 2006, we seem to still be at least one step behind where we should be. When talking about winning and losing, how could we know, when we haven’t got a way to measure success or failure? Simple, obvious point — but, again, we’re not looking at what’s necessary and obvious, at our peril, really. It could get a lot worse. I don’t think people are factoring that in. Or so it seems.

In World War II, victory in Europe was clear when Hitler was dead and the Allies occupied Berlin. The Pacific war was over and won when the Japanese surrendered and we occupied Tokyo. Even the Cold War had a clear outcome, amazingly. I suspect most people wouldn’t have thought it would ever end, but it did. We won that war too.

I suppose we could spell out some formula for victory in Iraq, but until the President tells us what his definition is, there’s no point. Whatever the goal, I certainly wouldn’t support sacrificing any more American lives even to turn Iraq into a peaceful country. And from everything I’ve read, it seems this would take 10 or 20 years, if it could happen at all. But I think there’s reason to believe that Iraq can’t get on with finding peace until we leave, as long as the country is occupied, that will be the issue everyone talks about and fights over.

So maybe the MSM could help us by starting to make this the question of the day: What is victory, Mr President, while we’re waiting for you to tell us how you’re going to win?

Sincerely,

The People of the World

Scripting News for 12/14/2006

Valleywag’s nine best business moves of 2006. Heh. 

Om Malik eulogizes Al Shugart. Amen brother! 

Classic rambly rant from Monsieur Marquis de Canter.  

Scoble: “Google is delivering the Web goods and is taking over more and more of my life.” 

Bruce Schneier: “Passwords are getting better.” 

Doc Searls: “Henrietta’s is for politics and media what Bucks Woodside is for venture capital.” 

Aaron Swartz: “Google hires programmers straight out of college and tempts them with all the benefits of college life.” 

An apology sent to all This I Believe essayists. Good move. I think it may have been Romenesko getting in the loop that caused them to take this more seriously.  

Dale O’Gorman asks the power question: “Why can’t we be both the vendor and the customer?” Exactly. Master this concept and you’ve mastered commerce for the 21st century.  

Geek News: “No hard questions for Bill Gates?” My guess is that Bill Gates still likes hard questions, but the rest of Microsoft doesn’t.  

Paolo, who was at Le Web 3, says it was a mixed experience, neither wholly positive or negative.  

Coming out ahead 

I woke up this morning with a desire to heal all the wounds of the world, to settle the war in Iraq, help the Republicans and Democrats get along, and help Mike Arrington make peace with Jeff, Rafat and Sam Sethi.

But first, on healing the wounds of the world.

I had lunch yesterday with Lance Knobel, a longtime friend, blogger, and by a very lucky coincidence, fellow Berkeleyite. Things like that happen in Berkeley, friends who used to live on another continent show up here. Berkeley, therefore, borrows cultural elements from all over the world because it’s so international, and yet, it’s a very small place, where everyone seems to know everyone else (or getting that way for me, since I am a new arrival myself).

Before Lance came over, Sylvia showed up with a NY Times article she wanted me to read, and her accomplished friend Joan Blades, co-founder of MoveOn.org. Joan is busy but she still wants to decorate my house. Passionately. One of the reasons I love my house so much is that passionate and intelligent women want to decorate it. Me, I like colors and scenery, that’s how my mind works. And wires. I really like wires. No joke, that.

Anyway, Joan is thinking about the same things I am thinking about, in her own context. Get this — she’s co-hosting a conference on mothering issues, in Charleston, SC, women from the Christian Coalition! Wow. That’s so cool. I’ll get you some pointers in a bit.

Now back to Arrington. I can’t help it, I love the guy. I see recent events as an awkward statement on his part that he needs friends, and needs help. I would never turn down something like that, because long before he became an Internet superstar, he was very supportive and helpful and encouraging, so I know he has it in him, and I want to help that part of who he is come back to the surface.

I wrote a bunch more about this in response to a post he made yesterday, one that I’m ashamed to say a friend of mine wrote. Let’s just say he was having a Bad Hair Day, and move on from there. (Of course there’s the matter of a guy who got fired, he can’t move on quite so easily, and I’d like to see that have a happy ending too.)

I don’t think Dave Jacobs will mind me saying that, when he was terribly sick two years ago, waiting for a kidney transplant (the word “waiting” itself a cruel joke on the process) there was a time or two his anger got directed to places it didn’t belong. I remember saying that I don’t care how mean you are, I’m still your friend, nothing is going to change that. I understand how frustrating life can be sometimes, and know that if I stand with someone and offer my strength in a moment of weakness, there’s a chance they’ll survive and we’ll get to an even better place. We recently celebrated the two year anniversary of Dave’s new life, and I gotta say it was easily worth any small pain I had to endure. Easily, easily.

So it’s easy to move on from where we’re at. Arrington is a good guy going through some tough times. Shit happens. My guess is that Jarvis feels the same, and maybe the three of us should get together for a dinner sometime soon, we’re long overdue for an Old Farts Genius Network meeting.

Scripting News for 12/13/2006

Tim Johnson, the 59-year-old US Senator from South Dakota, may have suffered a stroke. If he can’t serve, a replacement will be appointed by South Dakota’s governor, a Republican. Johnson is a Democrat, whose 51-49 majority in the new Senate would turn into a 50-50 tie. 

NY Times: “Congdon — a droll, blond Rosalind Russell for the digital generation — has at last landed at ABCNews.com.” 

Rosalind Russell starred with Cary Grant in His Girl Friday.  

Jeff Jarvis on a puzzling flare-up in comments in response to a recent Techcrunch post about the NY Times. I agree with Arrington that the Times isn’t doing well in competition with the web, but I don’t go as far as he does. When I think they’re wrong I say it. But I also think the Times is important, in the same way that Techcrunch is important. Even if they’re sloppy, self-serving, and nasty, the fact that something was said in the Times, at least for now, is itself important.  

News.com: “GPS devices might not help you get rescued if you’re lost, but they can help you avoid getting stuck in the first place.” 

I got an email from Dan Gediman, president of This I Believe, Inc, apologizing for the fund-raising email I received yesterday. Accepted, with these suggestions. 1. When I gave you my email address, I assumed it was only for communication regarding my article. Now I wonder how else you’re going to use the information. 2. If you’re going to continue sending email solicitations, it should be made clear, up front, that there is no connection between the solicitation and the submission. 3. Apply the golden rule, respect the integrity of your authors as you would insist on having your own integrity respected. 4. I don’t think the editorial side should be sharing contact information with the publishing side. And while I do appreciate the apology (btw, I found it more than “bothersome”), this affair has lowered my opinion of your organization, the program, and of NPR.  

CrunchStorm 

I was talking with Scoble this afternoon about today’s events in ArringtonLand.

I wondered out loud if Mike should have created a network of sites, or if it would have worked better if he had stayed the sole author of TechCrunch. Who knows what that path would have led to. He might have emulated Ben Rosen, the author of the Rosen Electronic Letter in the late 70s and early 80s, which was something like TechCrunch, though it ran less frequently and was printed on paper. Rosen got to know all the players in the nascent PC industry, and when he was reasonably sure how the industry would develop, he quit the newsletter (turning it over to Esther Dyson) and started two companies: Compaq and Lotus, and became even more influential in very short order (and hugely rich, btw).

It would be hard for Mike to do that, with all the management hassles that come with a growing network of publications. But, it might still be possible. He still has unique access to the product plans of the industry, and people would probably kill to have him involved in their companies.