cheesebikini?

Jane McGonigal excels at such a deep and broad variety of things that I really should be jealous of her. And I try. But she’s so thoughtful and innovative and fun to be around that I just can’t keep the envy alive.

A year ago I invited her to a party at my house. She couldn’t make it because she was out of town. She apologized profusely, and to make it up she arranged for a cadre of performer friends to come over and carry out a full-on rock opera involving simulated Internet chat rooms and blue topless singing aliens.

You’ll be sorry if you miss Jane’s “Graveyard Games” this Saturday in Colma, the home of San Francisco’s dead. Details here. (You’re not allowed to bury people in San Francisco. Colma is a bizarre suburb south of the city that’s made up largely of cemeteries housing countless deceased San Franciscans.)

Amidst all the buzz about the launch of Ning.com (Marc Andreesen’s “24 Hour Laundry” project), Jen King points out that this all sounds like the startup she worked for back in 1999, Devtop. Apparently they were all Web 2.14 back when the rest of the world was still on Web 1.145. Give or take a few digits.

SAN FRANCISCO–(BUSINESS WIRE)– June 26, 2000 — Desktop.com (www.desktop.com), the first integrated and personalized Internet desktop platform, today introduced Devtop (www.devtop.com), the first open, integrated platform for building, deploying, and distributing Web-based applications. Devtop reduces development time, minimizes cost, enables enriched functionality, and offers broader distribution for Web application providers everywhere.

Devtop provides the infrastructure, content, technology, and other resources needed to build Web-based applications. The service includes an Application Programming Interface (API) and corresponding documentation to access databases and servers, 25MB free storage, and content such as news headlines, sports scores, and stock quotes. Devtop’s free hosting, 24×7 monitoring site management, and reporting minimize the time, money and technical expertise required to deploy an application.

Full press release

Dav Yaginuma (formerly Coleman) has been writing about this concept as well, calling it the “blank white server.”

It’s official: Yahoo! will open a new research lab in partnership with UC Berkeley, just off campus.

Congratulations to Marc Davis, the Berkeley SIMS professor who will head up the lab, and to the other sharp SIMS folks who will work there. I can’t wait to see the goodies that will emerge from this.

I dreamt that I was sneaking through Bill Gates’ house with a friend.

We hadn’t been invited, but we hadn’t broken in and we hadn’t planned this adventure. (Looking back, I’m not sure how that could be. Perhaps we found a door that had been left open?)

As we slinked around this dark expensive house, Bill strode in and flicked on the lights. He didn’t seem surprised to see us. He offered us each a drink and showed us around the place a bit.

He said a few small-talk things. He glanced at me, offered me an opening to speak. I froze and couldn’t say anything. That’s what always happens when I’m face to face with a celebrity or a legend: I freeze up. Later I always kick myself because I didn’t say things that I should have.

As I pondered this Bill said:

“If you freeze up in front of a famous person
and you know that later you’ll remember 100 things
that you should have said,
you should say:

‘I freeze up in front of famous people.
Later I’ll think of 100 things that I should say now.

But I can’t say them now.’

That will break the roadblock.”

At “roadblock” I awakened with hot sunlight in my face.

I closed the blinds. I tried to go back to sleep and speak to Bill Gates but I couldn’t.

I’m not Bill’s biggest fan, but I’ll try those words next time I meet Jeff Bezos or Satan or Jesus.

The latest from the Embarrassing Florida News Department: Police arrested a man in St. Petersburg, Florida for briefly using an open wi-fi access point in a public place.

The clueless cops charged Benjamin Smith III with “unauthorized access to a computer network, a third-degree felony,” according to the St. Petersburg Times.

Every day thousands of people do what this poor guy did. And they have no idea they’re felons. I’ll wager that most wi-fi users think that if a hotspot in a public place is open (i.e., if it announces its presence to the world via SSID broadcast and it’s not WEP encrypted or password protected), using it to access the Internet is legal and ethical. Such use is common practice.

The St. Petersburg Times article about this arrest belongs in the National Enquirer. It refers to Smith’s off-the-shelf wi-fi use as “hacking” into a computer network. (Of course the writer makes The Obligatory Greenhorn Tech-Reporter Mistake: use of the term “hacking” to mean “maliciously breaking into a computer network.” But that’s not the real problem.)

Imagine this: You’re at home. Your window’s closed. Your neighbor’s window is open. She plays a catchy tune on her stereo. You open your window to hear the song more clearly.

Now cops arrest you for opening your window.
Read the rest of this entry »

Damon, Jon and I will present Project PlaceSite and discuss wi-fi cafe fun in San Francisco next week at Where 2.0, O’Reilly’s new conference about location-aware tech.

If you’re there, come say hi.

A bizarre media storm has gathered around wireless Internet cafes. Project PlaceSite and I have benefited. But this all deserves a closer look.

Tomorrow’s New York Times quotes me in an article by Glenn Fleishman. My words appeared in a Seattle Post-Intelligencer piece last week. On May 30 a Financial Times article about wi-fi in cafes mentioned “zombie effect” [definition here], a term we invented to explain some of the reasoning behind PlaceSite. All this mainstream coverage followed Web buzz about an entry by Glenn on his Wi-Fi Networking News weblog. The entry announced that a Seattle cafe had tried turning off wi-fi on the weekends.

I’m thankful for the PlaceSite publicity but for the record: each of my partners, Damon McCormick and Jon Snydal, contributed to this project at least as much as I did. Professor Marti Hearst served a critical role as our project advisor.

A problem with the coverage: The Financial Times article strongly implies a trend in cafes across the country that involves reduction or removal of wi-fi access. But the opposite is true, at least in Seattle and San Francisco: wi-fi is becoming more ubiquitous in cafes. The article cites just three cafes — one in Seattle and two in San Francisco — that have limited their wi-fi access. But hundreds of cafes in these cities offer wi-fi service, and more cafes add wi-fi every month.

I see no evidence of a new trend: both of the San Francisco cafes in question have been experimenting with limited access for more than a year.

The other articles, particularly the New York Times piece, were more balanced and better informed about this. But I sense a media snowball effect that might trigger an avalanche of inaccurate coverage.

A warning to reporters: consider the numbers here, so you don’t mistake aberrant behavior for what’s clearly the norm.

With a single keystroke in OSX, you can invert your laptop’s screen and turn it black-and-white. That improves the legibility of things that are hard to see in brightly-lit environments. Repeat the keystroke and you’re back to normal.

Here’s the key combination:
CTRL-ALT/OPTION-[Apple-key]-8

Bonus: now you can freak out your Mac-using friends who haven’t heard of this feature, but who let you near their keyboards.

There’s a new opera about flash mobs on the BBC. Please someone, send me a rip of this.

Unless this is one of Chicken John’s pranks, the Odeon is closing.

What a blow to San Francisco. If I learned the Golden Gate Bridge will be dismantled at the end of the month, that news wouldn’t strike me any harder.

No joke. Many, many of the people and things I love most about San Francisco are somehow associated with this place.

Thanks Chicken John, for this fantastic creativity-magnet called the Odeon. It was too good to last. I can’t wait to witness your next project.