Your father’s already home, I said with some surprise as I pulled into the driveway at 5:20 p.m. this evening. 

He’s rarely home before 6:30 p.m. these days; disbelieving, the kids look over his car parked in the driveway to ascertain the truth of this oddity.

As we opened the hatch to unload the groceries, my nine-year old daughter said flippantly, Bet he’s lost his job…as she grabbed a sack and shut the door on her side of the car.

…Or he felt like leaving early, she finished as she walked towards the garage.

Damn, I thought.  Better hope for Option B, child, as I grabbed my groceries and headed for the door.

---

Lucky us, it was Option B today.  He only had to come home early to have a tire repaired before the shop closed at 5:00 pm.

Wonder what tomorrow will bring?

8:07:11 PM    comment []

I managed to catch the webcast of the last session at BloggerCon yesterday afternoon (aptly titled, by the way).  Dave Winer took pro/con feedback during this session from the remaining conference attendees in order to build a better BloggerCon even next year.  One attendee (whose name I either didn’t catch or wasn’t shared) noted that BloggerCon focused not on developers but on users.  This seems to be an issue for this person who is a developer by profession.

Can’t they have a day that’s dedicated to developers?  he asked.

Winer feels that BloggerCon (or at least some blogging conference) should to refocus on users and their needs.

To which I say, HUZZAH!!!

As I’ve said before, blogging isn’t just a market of and for so-called A-list bloggers who are either highly proficient techie writers or have techies on staff.  The overwhelming potential for blogging as a product is as a commonly used communication tool.  Common, meaning every Dick and Jane Six-pack who wants to blog can do so with the least amount of hassle.

Blogging providers need to focus on all parts of delivery, or be candid and upfront about the limitations of its offering(s).  Radio Userland, for instance – is it a software?  Or is it a hosted blogging system?  If it’s software, support it.  If it’s a hosted system, damnit all, then provide 7x24x365 service.  Users will flee in droves if they aren’t getting what they paid for or misunderstanding the product offered, fell they’ve been misled.

The excessive techie-ness of most blogging tools also cuts into the ability to build a market beyond the A-list techie writers.  As I recently suggested to someone in the industry, we should be able to describe and explain blogging to our mothers and grandmothers.  If you can’t, something is just not right about it; I should know:

I’m all of the above: non-novice writer AND a mom.  The single advantage I have over the non-novice writer and moms is that I have some background in IT and know a little HTML.

To sell to the average non-novice writer AND everyday moms and grandmoms will require two things: provide examples of the cool things that can be done with a blog – in plain, non-technical language – and require NO understanding of HTML.

The earliest word processors I employed used command tags to format text; if a blog software insists that users must know HTML, they should revisit those earliest softwares and read the manuals.  They were very easy for the average typist to learn; any manual for HTML in blogging should be equally simple.

NO HTML coding knowledge required would be a far better claim for a software to make.  Even AOL Journals, in spite of being brain-dead easy, still require users to have an understanding that characters are being generated that count against a 2500-character limit per post, even though the user can’t see the characters being embedded in HTML out of their editor window.

How do we achieve this without having conferences that are user-centric versus developer-centric?  Shouldn’t developers be looking forward to conversations with the people for whom they develop, instead of looking for opportunities to navel-gaze?

Could be I’m in bit of a pique right now over the Salon blog server crash this weekend; it’s as if we bloggers as customers were completely forgotten.

Could be that the Cluetrain Manifesto, to which Dave Winer is a signatory, seems to be forgotten even in an environment as open to dialogue as the blogosphere.

12:28:03 PM    comment []

Written for a blog-friend who’s suffered a breakup recently:

…There's more effort required to unwind emotionally than physically, the winding being invisible makes it a more difficult task. I sometimes wonder if it's physics at work instead of emotion, if it's merely proof of Bohm's theory of implicate order -- the power of once-intertwined objects to influence each other at a distance -- which dogs us as we are separated from former loves. How does one break the intertwining between particles, organisms, which were once separate, joined as a whole and then broken apart?

Perhaps finding stronger bonds elsewhere, whether with a person, group, object or event, will weaken what's left of the previous bond. It may never be entirely broken or purged (it's an illusion that we are all separate, anyhow); occasionally I wonder years and decades later about bonds that failed yet still pull weakly. But new, strong and active bonds suppress their pull; I don't hear the whisper of an ex-lover's voice in the middle of the night, only the slow, measured breathing of my children as they sleep.

I would have it no other way.

Best of luck on finding new bonds.

What worked for you after the loss of a love?  What helped you purge obsessive “what-ifs” and dull that throbbing heartache?  Did you get right back up on the horse after your fall or did you wait and grieve?  How did you move on?

Or did you?

10:10:52 AM    comment []