At our bloggers lunch, Dan Bricklin gave us a scoop on his announcement of a new metadata scheme, SMBmeta.

Dan realized that periodically (perpetually?) people come up with the idea of building a mega-directory of businesses. That would be handy for anyone trying to locate a business, but it’s too centralized to succeed on the wildly decentralized Web. Instead, Dan’s proposing that businesses fill in a form with relevant data (name, address, goods/services offered, languages spoken, etc.) that then gets saved as XML data in a file at the top level of their site. Anyone who wants to aggregate that data to provide a directory service is free to do so; initially, Dan will set up an aggregation site but — and here’s where he’s so damn smart — he doesn’t want to own this data. If you want to aggregate it, go ahead. Maybe someone already spidering the Web will decide to collect SMBmeta data as well.

SMBmeta is nothing more than a set of XML tags. That’s its beauty. If enough businesses use them, then it will be a howling success. If not, then, well, nothing’s lost, except a whole bunch of Dan’s time.

BTW, the spec is extensible. It enables name spaces so you can add your own fields without worrying about mucking up someone else’s extensions.

If you want more information, go to the new TrellixTech web site. There you’ll find a blog, the spec, and a highly readable paper on the topic.

Any suggestions for a name that’s user-friendlier than “SMBmeta”? “BusiTag”? “WorkPlacer”? How about calling it your “shingle”?

Ok, besides the “shingles” jokes, shingles.com isn’t available. But the BusiTag.com and WorkPlacer.com are.

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Excellent Lunch with Bloggers, on the occasion of Halley‘s one year blogiversary. Dan Bricklin has posted a gallery of photos and Halley has linked to the attendees.

Topics of conversation included: what’s wrong with broadband, Vonage phonage, Dave Winer’s ascension, Blogger.com vs. Movable Type vs. Radio, whether technology is actually interesting (= why men get hot for gadgets) and Dan Bricklin’s new venture (see the blog entry after this one). Also: what to order for lunch.

We’ll be doing this again soon, I hope.

Halley and Steve OnePot Himmer

Halley John Radio Robb, Steve and Steve BlurCircle Yost

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Here’s a photo I took this afternoon on my way back from the bloggers’ blunch:

Hess gas station, Allston, Massachusetts

[Click here to see a larger version of the photo.]

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Safari is the new Web browser for Mac. It looks great. Doc likes it. I want it for Windows.

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Here’s a message I loved upbraiding me for being too timid in the first session of my MIT mini-course. It’s from Richard Volpato. Richard thinks he’s rehashing what I say in Small Pieces Loosely Joined, but this is so forcefully, originally and well-put that we have to count it as Richard’s own:

I checked out your weblog today to see the comments about the MIT experience. Maybe your audience are a bit smug or your were a bit tired —- BUT: where is the triumphal aspects of Small Pieces…, for god’s sake!

Just had to get that off my chest!

Yeah! That’s what I meant! : )

Great stuff, Richard. Thanks.

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I got my scanner working this morning. It took many hours and a couple of dozen reboots. Which raises the question: Just how badly does Windows suck? I mean this as a real question.

The scanner — an Epson Perfection 1240U — had worked fine under Windows 2000. It worked fine when I upgraded to Windows XP. And then it stopped working in a blaze of random weirdness: the scanner control panel would start up when I pressed the Start button on the scanner, but then the system would claim that it couldn’t find the scanner. Or, the XP dialogue asking how to deal with a data file it’s found would list the scanner twice but neither would work.

So, I did the usual Windows things. I downloaded the new TWAIN driver and app software from Epson. (Note to Epson: Your explanation of which files to download definitely sucks.) I installed them. I uninstalled everything. I started from scratch. I changed the order in which I installed the various scanner-related apps. I uninstalled and plugged the scanner in to enable Windows to find it and prompt me to do the installs. At every turn I ran the upgrade/patch software, rebooting between every encounter.

This morning I edited the registry, taking out every reference to Epson I could find. Then I went through the reboot-install-reboot-patch-reboot sequence. And the scanner works! At least for now.

With XP, there’s less of this time-stealing crap than ever. Remember how hard it was to install a scanner in the old days? But it still happens, and I’m not sure who to be pissed at. After all, Windows is dealing with an extremely complex environment. Assuming we want the maximum openness to peripherals and apps, is XP under-performing, performing, or over-performing? I know the Epson apps are not very robust — their preferred way of handling errors is to put up a dinging error message once a second until you reboot your machine — so perhaps the blame goes to Epson. And although the Registry is more fragile than any of us would like, the fact that a foolhardy user like me can hand edit it I count as a plus. But perhaps I shouldn’t.

I know we all enjoy being pissed at Microsoft, but let’s be honest. The last time I was a serious Unix user, installing apps took a systems administrator, and the OS was far from crash free. And I’ve watched Linux hackers tear their hair out trying to install a peripheral. Granted, they have the comfort of knowing that there’s a community that can make it better, but Linux isn’t free of experiences like my Epson battle. Is the Mac? OS X? Are these the inevitable difficulties of dealing with systems perpetually at the limit of their ability to manage complexity, and/or does Windows just plain suck?

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Dan Gillmor has launched the meme he’s been gestating:

Journalism is evolving away from its lecture mode — here’s the news, and you buy it or you don’t — to include a conversation. ..

it boils down to something simple: our readers collectively know more than we do, and they don’t have to settle for half-baked coverage when they can come into the kitchen themselves. This is not a threat. It is an opportunity. And the evolution of We Media will oblige us all to adapt.

Of course, Dan being Dan and the Web being the Web, he’s been gestating it in public. Nevertheless, the appearance of “We Media” in the prestigious Columbia Journalism Review is a marker worth celebrating.

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Wow! What a great opportunity. And what an honor.

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If you’re going to join the lunch on Friday the 10th celebrating the first anniversary of Halley’s blog – also, an excuse for Boston bloggers to get together – please note that the location has changed. We’ are now meeting at Yenching Chinese Restaurant in Harvard Square at noon. See you there! (Map)

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Here is Kevin Werbach’s reply (in email) to the speculation that I repeated here, that the FCC’s reversal on providing competitive access to telephone networks might have something to do with national security. Says Kevin, a former FCC wonk:

I’m pretty confident, based on my personal knowledge of the FCC and Michael Powell, that this isn’t what’s going on. I’m not a defender of what the FCC is doing. But they are removing one mechanism for competitors to use Bell company networks, which has only been in existence for three years or so, not eliminating the right of competitors to interconnect and buy unbundled elements from the Bells (which is mandated by the 1996 Telecom Act).

Whatever Poindexter and his cronies may be cooking up, I don’t believe the FCC is deliberately trying to limit the number of carriers. The closest thing one could claim is that the FCC thinks some of the competitors exist only because of un-economic artificial subsidies.

There was a lively debate post-9/11 about whether what happened in Lower Manhattan proved that we need to strengthen the monopoly local carriers (Verizon’s argument) or just the opposite, because diversity of networks allowed for greater resiliency and faster disaster recovery (the CLEC argument). It’s important to continue fighting this battle. But the arguments will get much less credence if they are couched in terms of the TIA bogeyman.

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