Fascinating…The Guardian – Bees take the sting out of explosives

RealNames. Lots of press about Realnames going out of business – for instance at Scripting News. Most of it very anti-Microsoft. I think The Register has it right tho. Actually maybe the tide is turning – Joel has it right too.

Realnames is dying because a) it has very little utility for most end users. Search engines and autocomplete in the browser make it pretty easy to find things. b) it has little utility and lots of cost for site developers. It doesn’t make it that much easier to find my site (see a) and it costs me money. c) it has little utility for advertisers. They already have to put URLs and AOL keywords in their ads. Neither of these are going away. Why put in a 3rd that has less coverage than either of the prior two?

It is easy to point a finger at Microsoft and say they are to blame. But Microsoft did a deal with Realnames at a time when other large players did not – where was AOL? A merger of AOL keywords and Realnames might have made sense, by providing a common name across the internet and the AOL service.

Had the service been incredibly compelling I am sure lots of deals would have occured. But the bottom line is the service didn’t solve that many problems. I just did a quick check on google. Searching for “Ignition” – first several hits were relevant. Searching for “Ignition Venture” or “Ignition Seattle” – first hit was dead on our home page. When we set up our homepage I considered getting a Realname – but given the experience above, I couldn’t ever justify the cost. I think most people did the same math.

Design the Box. Good thought exercise for every startup – what exactly will the box for this product look like, what will it say? Joel on Software - Product Vision. Equally interesting – what does the press release announcing this product say? What will the user experience in the first 30 minutes?

Tolerance. Nice pointer from Liz to Tolerance.org. I’m disappointed to find I have some biases to work on…

Your Tax Dollars at Work. The Ohio State Legislature, after 200 years of statehood, is finally rectifying an obvious oversight – choosing a state amphibian. Thank goodness. It can join now the state beverage – tomato juice – and the state fossil – trilobite – and the many other fine symbols of Ohio.

Here in Washington we are waaaay behind – we have a state insect, fish, fossil, tree, but no amphibian. Are slugs amphibians? They’d get my vote.

Ugh. LawMeme: Legal Bricolage for a Technological Age - Top Ten New Copyright Crimes

Jamie Kellner, chairman and CEO of Turner Broadcasting (an AOL Time Warner company), was recently interviewed by [INSIDE] on the future of television (Content’s King). In the interview, Mr. Kellner said some very interesting things, including characterizing those who skip television commercials as thieves: [Ad skips are] theft. Your contract with the network when you get the show is you’re going to watch the spots. Otherwise you couldn’t get the show on an ad-supported basis. Any time you skip a commercial or watch the button you’re actually stealing the programming.

Netgear. As a break I installed the Netgear FS 105 100mbit switch, upgrading one of my minihubs. Wow was this painless. The autodetection of uplink port and cable type made this soooooo simple. Love it.

These guys totally get the “First 30 Minutes” principle. If the first 30 minutes of a product are great, you will have an enthusiastic and committed customer. If the first 30 minutes are rocky, well that is trouble.

Blogger alternatives. I love blogger. I love the fact that so many people are doing useful things with it.

But it is clearly a tech-weenie experience. Stability is poor. There is often disagreement between blogger and me about what has been really published. I often have to whack blogger upside the head to get it to correctly publish my content. I have recommended blogger to many people but my non-tech-weenie friends find it daunting.

So I am on a mission to find alternatives. Looked at Movable Type – but don’t really want to install server software, I am very wary of installing even scripts on my server that come from sources I don’t know. I played with Radio some more. It shares some of the stability and tech-weenie nature of blogger.

Next up is citydesk from Fog Creek Software. OK I have citydesk from fogcreek installed. The article management UI is nice. Including pictures is easier than blogger. Stability seems fine so far. I will have to do some initial setup for my buds so that they don’t have to learn {$x.barf$} syntax. A possibility…

Windows Update. A friendly reminder – if you are running a win98 or better system and aren’t checking windows update periodically, you should be. the number of critical security fixes flowing thru win update is high and some of these are pretty important. you can ignore all the optional components but the critical security fixes seem like goodness.

Wildseed. Wow they are making great progress. I received a real sample of one of their skins last week – first manufacturing run. Very very cool. I am very proud to be associated with these guys. Check out coverage at USA Today and Forbes.

Boating. The great weather makes me want to get out on a boat. And we live in a great area for it. Thankfully there is no reason to actually own a boat. There is a great market of charter options. We’ve used Ledger Marine here in Seattle and had great luck. Other options I’ve noticed are Penmar, CNI Charters, Bellingham Yacht Sales, ABC, Starellit, and Anacortes Yacht Charters. A huge range of pricing, amenities, crew options, etc. Waaaay cheaper than actually owning a boat.

Someday I’d like to do a charter in other parts of the world. From some of these sites you can see the market for charters in other areas, and clearly the mediterranean and caribean are active markets. I have a dream of doing Australia by boat someday…

Mt Rainer. Man it looks good today. A day like today reminds me why we live in Seattle. Time to hit the trails…

Small Camera. Here’s a cool small camera.

Makes me wonder about the limit to size of a camera. As moore’s law drives down the size of necessary circuitry, I guess the limits to size are a) batteries, b) lens structure, and c) control surfaces. I would have in the past said storage media was a driver of size but no more, not with solid state media. Lens structure is a feature decision – how much optical zoom, size do you want. I bet batteries can get very small as designers go to low power circuits. These cameras are going to get very very small….

Tech segment news. A variety of newsletters I read to get news on particular tech segments. Consumer Electronics – TWICE. Nano – Small Times. Wireless – w o w - c o m and WirelessWeek. Storage – searchStorage.