I missed blogging for two whole days this week, which I consider unconscionable. I'm sure my blog shares are plummeting through the basement right now. I'm concerned that my reputation as a digeratus has been seriously impinged on. Maj, Jani and I have been in Southern California this week to work on some new ideas, which has meant a lot of writing and meetings and spreadsheets and such. So a) my time cruising the Internet has been limited, and b) the time I've been on the computer has been under crushing levels of pressure.
We hit a slow period in our business discussions yesterday, though, so we've got some time to enjoy ourselves. We had a big presentation on Tuesday morning, some further discussions on Tuesday afternoon and Wednesday, and now a pause for everyone to digest. Jani's going back to Singapore late tonight (I think he'll be able to find his way around better now...), and Maj, Amita June and I are heading up to Santa Barbara to visit Maj's childhood friend Nelly Hill, her boatmate John Payne, and their brand new baby Charlie Dylan Payne, which is a great place to chill out.
Nelly and John live on a sailboat in the harbor, which has got to be one of the nicest lifestyles I can imagine. We usually spend a day or two with them every year, and getting up in the morning and looking up at the mountains and out to the ocean makes me feel pretty much as relaxiated as I get. There are dolphins jumping in the surf, for crying out loud.
It's not perfect -- buying groceries and other necessities is something of a chore when you have to bring it in on a Zodiac or across ½-mile of floating docks. But there's sun and sand and it's just a nice place.
I'm looking forward to Amita meeting Charlie. She hasn't spent a lot of time with babies younger than her -- Tessa is a notable exception -- and it'll be neat to see how they get along.
tag: work stress blogs santa barbara nelly hill john payne babies amitajune
Man down
Our home server is unreachable right now, meaning that neither Maj nor I are getting any email at our regular accounts. That's probably all right; who needs email, anyways? I can't tell if it's a routing problem with our otherwise stellar network provider Cybernaute, or some problem with the server itself.
We depend on our home server probably more than is healthy. Among other things, it gets all our email, hosts a couple of mailing lists, and does DNS service for 5 or so domains. We even have a hosted server at hosting service, and I still put too much pressure on this poor machine.
It's done a lot of time for me, too. I left it running in San Francisco? in 2001 when I left the town, and it sat in Elise's kitchen for a couple of years. It was the first server that Wikitravel ran on (I kind of boggle at this point sometimes...), and it's got lots of little Web sites running. Weirdly, it's had two major hard-drive crashes, with minimal recovery of data, and yet it's still chugging along. I can't say why.
I hope it's just a network problem... I'd hate to see that server die.
Update: Cybernaute says there's no problem in our network, so it seems like our modem and/or router at home is down; probably due to a power outage. I left a message for Sam to restart it. Hope that works.
Yahoo Rocks
I've mentioned before the Google Anti-Semantic Conspiracy Theory: that Google actively opposes semantic Web technologies to keep people dependent on their full-text search technologies.
I'm not sure if it's true, but I think that Yahoo's recent embracing of microformats for Yahoo Local invites the question of how SW technologies can keep the Web open. (See "We now support microformats!".)
I think that more often than not in the last 12 months Yahoo has been falling on the side of the angels w/r/t open standards on the Web. Google has done some nice things supporting Open Source software, but it's not clear that they support Open Standards for Web content. I think with Google's incredibly humongo media empire, there are some serious questions that need to be asked about their influence on the Web's content, shape, and formats.
I posited this question to a friend who works for the Big G, and he gave me the standard line: that metadata can be gamed with by people who want to trick Web software. I find this hard to defend; I think the Black Hat SEO world has moved far beyond the good old days of keyword stuffing. (Not to mention that metadata has moved far from meta keywords!)
Any Web content can be, and is, used to trick Web software; discounting the format used for that trickery wholesale would mean throwing out the entire Web. GoogleBot and other Web spiders and indexers have extremely sophisticated means to determine the trustworthiness of Web data; there's no reason those same metrics couldn't be applied to metadata, too.
It's time we start dealing with the fact that the lack of metadata on the Web makes things difficult for small players trying to get into the Web indexing and searching space.
Anyways: kudos, Yahoo! Local team, for putting some more data in the hands of users.
tags: yahoo microformats semantic web google metadata yahoo local kudos