Jonathan Boutelle's home on the net: April 2005 Archives

The trouble with tagging

Posted by jon at 11:32 AM

In my last post, I provided links to a lot of well-written criticism of the “tag cloud” / folksonomy approach to organizing content. Yet it’s pretty clear that tag-based folksonomies make it easier to find certain types of information.

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New Digs!

Posted by jon at 09:26 PM

Uzanto has completed moving to a new office. We're now on Castro St. in Mountain View. It's a block from the train station, the best bookstore in town, and dozens (ok, maybe just a dozen) great bars and restaurants. Sweet!

This is the building we're in (photo src is A9).

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Swagger in their step: Macromedia before the acquisition

Posted by jon at 08:59 AM

Amit Ranjan (the head of Uzanto's India operations) has a great post describing the Macromedia MAX conference in Delhi (a conference I went to last year).

The conference happened mere weeks before the announced merger with Adobe. His report gives insight into the spirit of Macromedia immediately pre-merger, describing a marketing/technical team with "a swagger in their walk", feeling they have the potential to be the "Microsoft of the web". Pride goes before the fall, boys!

zero people want to do this

Posted by jon at 09:44 AM

"Write a complete Web 2.0 app on my own" (via 43things.com)

And can you blame them? Much better to have a team on that kind of job.

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recent innovations in search redux

Posted by jon at 09:29 AM

Yahoo! Search blog has a nice writeup of the "recent innovations in search" panel that Rashmi organized last fortnight.

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Tagging jumps the shark

Posted by jon at 01:07 PM

Tagging (a la del.icio.us / flickr / technorati) is a clever newish technique for empowering users to organize digital content. But alas, in the world of blogging, and in the world of the west-coast tech elite, nothing is ever just a useful, good innovation. It’s always the “new new thing”, the game-changing paradigm that will eliminate all that comes before it.

Tagging jumped the shark with Clay Shirkeys overheated “ontologies are overrated” speech at ETech 2005, and since then a host of articles challenging the idea of tags as information nirvana have emerged like mushrooms after a rainstorm. Below are some choice excerpts from the backlash.

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Trip report from Geoffrey Moore Talk at TIE

Posted by jon at 03:04 PM

The crowd, as it always is at TIE events, was a mix. The usual Indian serial entrepreneurs, who have been in the game longer than you’ve been alive, hard-core fat-fingered desi supercapitalists who start a new company every year and could eat you for breakfast, were in attendance. White dudes from Sand Hill Road cruise the heavy hitters, looking for a fast, mutually beneficial transaction. Caught in the middle of this mating dance, herds of newbies trying to start their first company (or just trying to network their way into a better job) circle nervously, clutching their drinks and trying to make small-talk. Everyone has an agenda, something they want to sell or buy, a rumor they want to spread, something. Did I mention there was free booze and good Thai food? My kind of party.

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ewey goowy

Posted by jon at 01:07 PM

A new web email client (with the unfortunate name of goowy) has just hit public beta. Regular readers of jonathanboutelle.com will know that this kind of thing is right up my alley. The movement of desktop applications to the web is one of the big trends in rich internet applications right now, and email clients are leading the way (think gmail, earthlink, and oddpost).

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Adobe to buy macromedia

Posted by jon at 10:58 AM

I am dumbfounded!

Adobe has a dry press release, Mike Chambers provides some thoughtful commentary, and Mark Cantor spews some bile on the proceedings. Om Malik and Genuine VC cover the business angle. Slashdotters and Metafites have various opinions, as usual. Ross Mayfield also has a nice summary.

Update (4/22/05): hilarious translation of the dry Adobe press release.

I have nothing useful to say about this, except that I've worked at companies going through complex buy-outs, acquisitions, mergers, etc: it's ALWAYS a distraction, it always slows things down.

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Xamlon: a .NET->SWF compiler!

Posted by jon at 01:14 PM

Xamlon has released to beta a new developer product (Xamlon Flash Edition) that will compile a .Net program down to a SWF runtime. Like most good ideas, it seems obvious only in retrospect. News stories , many blog postings, and even tutorials all seem pretty postitive so far. Most criticisms seem focussed on SWF as a deployment technology rather than Xamlon per se. The dubious buzzword AFLAX (AJAX with flash) is used to describe what is really a standard Flash application.

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A talk by Geoffrey Moore

Posted by jon at 02:41 PM

Geoffrey Moore, the author of "Crossing the Chasm" (the "unofficial bible of silicon valley") will be giving a talk entitled "What Kind of Software Company are You Trying to Build" in Santa Clara next Tuesday. The event is hosted by the software SIG of TIE Silicon Valley.

I've written about Moore's model and it's implications for usability before. As the owner of a tiny little software company myself, I expect to learn a lot from this event about how to position our software in the marketplace. Notes on a talk he gave a few weeks ago should give a sense of what to expect.

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Trip report from Recent Innovations in Search BayCHI event

Posted by jon at 10:52 PM

The BayCHI panel on Search innovation was a huge success. I’ve never seen the main auditorium at PARC so full…the aisles were full of people sitting on the floor (don’t tell the fire marshal) and 30 or so people had to watch remotely from a television in the lobby.

I’ll start by summarizing the key themes that came out in the panel discussion / questions and answer session. I’ll follow up with a blow-by-blow that captures some of the specifics of the show-and-tell that each company was allowed to do.

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Whitepaper on RIA technologies

Posted by jon at 07:07 PM

A nice little white paper comparing the different RIA technologies has just been published. It's a good 30,000 ft overview of the different technologies available (including java and xaml and other non-swf, non-AJAX solutions). Among other things, it's a great collection of links to articles and documentation on Flash, Laszlo/Flex, AJAX, etc.

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Games, flow and RIA design

Posted by jon at 09:37 AM

I have never been much of a game player. Apart from the occasional game of Solitaire during college (and a seriously disturbing brush with Grand Theft Auto last year), I managed not to get addicted even while hanging out with game obsessed geeks, and building Tetris for a computer science course. I would look at people addicted to computer games, and congratulate myself on knowing better.

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Laszlo Unchained

Posted by jon at 11:39 PM

The newest release of the Laszlo Presentation server (version 3.0b2) allows developers to use Laszlo technology (LZX) to develop swf-based applications, without requiring IT department to run the resulting applications using the Laszlo presentation server.

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