A belated congratulations to the team behind Chandler, for getting to 1.0! It’s been a long, windy road to get to this milestone, and I’m really happy for Katie, Sheila, Mimi, and the whole team for getting here.
[disclosure: I'm on the board of directors of the non-profit Open Source Applications Foundation]
In a weird blast-from-the-past moment, TechCrunch reported yesterday that hot mail startup Xobni has licensed the IP from Zaplet (nee Firedrop, and most recently bought by MetricStream), a company we started from Reactivity nearly 10 years ago. TC has bits and pieces of the story, and gets most of the basics of the history right. Seems like both yesterday and an eternity ago when Mike Hanson and Brian Roddy and I were brainstorming about live HTML in e-mail and when Mike mocked up the first one — as we were searching for names, we started with Zimlet or Zaplet or Zammogram, among many other very bad names. Then Brian Axe took it and started to build a business case, recruited Dave Roberts, got some mad Firedrop namage & logo help from Gentry, and was away to the races. (And IIRC, the Reactivity Austin team of Lynn and Dave and others built the screenshots showing up on TC now.)
Anyway, it’s neat to see that another piece of Reactivity technology is still breathing — and hopefully will be put to good use at Xobni.
I needed to look up something about EU membership today, and went to the Wikipedia artile on it. — and I’m reminded yet again what a wondrous thing it is. I could spend hours looking at pages like this — learning things I’d forgotten, and many I’d never known. Even the disclaimers at the top of the page are wonderful — indicating contested parts of the content, that there could be/is bias in the article, etc. Just a magnificent evolution of shared knowledge, I think, for all its faults. For me, it’s ground zero for human beings to learn again how to really read. How to read in an age of ubiquitous and cheap creation tools — how to read in an age where understanding point of view of authors is paramount.
But this article is just a beautiful example of what’s possible. In the middle of a busy work day for me, I am undone.
about time for the new york times to open up. welcome to the web. now i can go back to reading some of the stuff i cared about before this dumb times select experiment.
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Some followup thoughts on my SOPA post
Feb 3, 23:21 › Travis: Man, SOPA and PIPA just drive me crazy. I am shocked Jan 11, 17:22 › John Stack: Have you considered #OPEN? Personally, it is as far Jan 11, 16:51 › Brad Feld: Fantastic John. I couldn't have said it better myself Jan 10, 15:34 › Robert Kaiser: "What I think we really need to figure out is how