PlexNex

Welcome Jason & Friends!

Won't you join me in welcoming Jason Connell to PlexNex! Jason's first contribution runs just below and I hope it is the first of many where Jason feels free to develop his inner-Yeats.

We are going to flesh it out a bit here on the Plex, get some new voices and grow the conversation. Although you will agree with me that ODF and Microsoft trash-talk are compelling fields, they are nothing like plastics...nor babe magnets, per se. So, Jason will add some flavor while exploring software patents, baseball, life in Philadelphia and other cultural must-haves.

Speaking of babes, we will have one or two women on -- including our very own Mrs. Robinson, kind friend Solveig Haugland -- to make the atmosphere real. I hope Solveig too will feel the Plex her second home while dishing about food, technology, travel, relationships, oxygen and all the nuances of Auto-correct, Spell-Check & Word-Count.

There's also Ben Horst we will be honoring soon with huzzahs. Ben is another well-read fellow traveler from the alternative office suite universe whose voice will add dimension to the conversation about technology culture and other compelling areas.

I admit that it is hard to give up a platform of pure, unadulterated self-involvement, but also look forward to the challenge of being nice most some of the time.

Welcome, good friends to our new adventure. Enjoy!

Is Seth Okay?

It's a rather dark compliment from Hugh. (Click the image.)

Nothing on Google indicates anything has happened to Seth. Once remarkable, always so... even if he's home writing another inspiring book about information & marketing.

PlexNex is Reaching New Audiences

Recent stats analyses here at PlexNex indicates that traffic is up significantly. The Plex has been averaging over 100 unique visits per day for a few weeks. You'll say that's not much, but I think it is significant for a blog with such a narrow niche and such a self-involved editorial mojo. PlexNex is way too technical and smart-ass for a large audience; I stopped caring about that almost immediately after launching last Christmas.

My technorati rank is in the 200,000nds now after hovering in the 160,000 range while ODF gained ascent from Massachusetts business this year. The drop I attribute to the fact that IBM's Bob Sutor stopped linking here in September at the time our (OpenDocument Foundation's) negotiations with IBM on the ODF Plugin for MS Office scuttled. Bob, for whom I have a lot of personal & professional respect, gets a lot of hits on his blog(s) because he's good and because he's regular and because IBM is a big company (with lots of people for whom Bob's valuable synthesis of the standards world is relevant). Bob's links boosted my rank because that's how the technoarti ranking system works: a link is valued by its weight, as it should be. I'm thankful to Bob for the attention while it lasted and I'm thankful also to IBM's Rob Weir, who is still looking in. Rob's own contributions to the ODF debate are significant on his An Antic Disposition blog.

So, viewing my stats I can triangulate a few guesses about what's reaching people. But first, here are some novel take-aways...

Most Popular Post

"The Masturbation Post"

What do you know? Sex sells, and 'masturbation' could be one of the most searched for terms in the English language, by my analysis of link sources -- 100% coming from Google (from many different countries).

This post was originally intended as a post April-Fools bust on Nick Carr (his blog, Rough Type, I admire), whose comment still makes me laugh out loud...

My Personal Favorite Post

"Open & Closed"

This, during the early days of the Massachussets ITD ODF Pilot Project after Peter Quinn resigned, was a comparison of Peter Quinn & his boss The Governor, Mitt Romney, to Jackie Robinson & Branch Rickie of the Brooklyn Dodgers. There is some poetry in there, if not an overweening comparison. But it was Deval Patrick's victory in the Massachusetts Gubernatorial race last week which put this post back in my thoughts.

Perhaps it originally missed -- perhaps due to timing (traffic low), or perhaps the point is too far-fetched -- but I personally believe there is a close thread between the gradual and grudging acceptance of ODF and the grudging acceptance in the United States of the 1940's & 50's of racial integration. Please read it and let me know what you think. Even if you are not American -- perhaps especially if you are not American. It's my social extension of Rogers | Moore | Christensen theories of the adoption of innovation.

Recent Post Getting the Most Attention

"Pretending Interoperability (PG version)"

This post I did not think that much of while I was writing it. Perhaps because the thinking behind it issues from our long series of conversations at the OpenDocument Foundation and I owe much of the logic to my close & valued colleagues there. However, in the timely context of the Novell-Microsoft deal (the PG verson of the post -- running Nov 11th -- was an exact but cleaned-up version of the original, which ran on Oct 31st and preceded the SCOvell deal by a few days) the post seems to have shed new light for many people on what Microsoft is trying to achieve through its file format work at ECMA and through its particular approach to its new format, MOOX.

It also sheds light on the irony of Sun and Novell each doing a deal with Microsoft that provides critical help in getting Microsoft's ECMA file format approved at ISO next year, which will obliterate their own office suite's (OpenOffice.org's) chances in the market-place. Novell joins Sun here in a few strokes of extremely self-defeating behavior.

This post was picked up in a comment to Joe Wilcox's piece, "Interoperability: Is Microsoft All Talk?" on Microsoft-Watch and hits continue to escalate.

The New Gestault of the Plex

Several factors may explain the new traffic patterns on the Plex...

(1) My talk profile at XML 2006 went up a few weeks ago. This conference is a big deal and I'll be speaking about the Foundation's ODF Plugin for MS Office, about which many people are curious;

(2) Perhaps ODF has reached a new phase of relevance to people outside the immediate standards world;

(3) The Microsoft-Novell deal has put a panic on the ODF community, and people are looking for clues with renewed vigor; or

(4) I added Hugh's gapingvoid.com cartoons to the Nav last weekend.

Or it could be the foul language and the liberal view of sex, but it's probably nothing personal.

The Anxiety of Blogger Influence

Veteran readers of PlexNex ("we" launched less than a year ago ;-) will note the new-look nav. My headshot is getting old. It deserves a demotion and I thought I'd reach out to blogger Hugh McLeod and liven up the Plex with some rotating, shape-shifting visuals.

One thing about the blogosphere, such as it is, is that you can follow tracks in posts and on the blogrolls of people you like to read. I was missing Doc Searls and his blog for a long time, my head buried in my own concerns (Massachusetts, PlexNex & ODF, naturally), so I did some catching up on Doc and bumped into Steve Gillmor's new Gesture Lab, which bristles & sizzles with reverse anti-TechUtopianism (it's simply very Web 3.0)! Sometimes it's better to read for a while.

Nick Carr is another regular read for me. Why? It's because Nick is arrogant enough to be interesting; he's thought-provoking; his writing is transparent (does not draw attention to itself), it is sharp & musical; he composes his posts without squelching the life out of them; and Nick has managed to attract a sharp & pugnacious audience unafraid to mix it up. His The Great Unread improved my understanding of blogging (a 'fudal fealty' system) -- the comments were even richer than the strong original post -- and made me think hard about why I blog. If Rough Type was a physical place, it would be McSorley's Ale House off The Bowery where a bar fight or two is admixed with rugby songs sung from the diaphragm: an intellectual hothouse with a hair-trigger, fresh beer and few women.       

Hugh McLeod's "The Porous Membrane"

I really like Hugh McLeod's gapingvoid because a blog just isn't a good blog without pictures. And Hugh business card illustrations are -- different. And wonderful.

Hugh's gift is contrast; his drawings mix sense & sensibility, cold logic with gutsy (what's the opposite of milque-toast?) spirituality, fear, vulnerability, sex, sexism, irony & Long Tail brand analysis with strange pizzazz and voice. So I'm an admirer. And I'm consciuosly borrowing Hugh's chi (his qi) by association, by even mentioning his name. But I wouldn't have added Hugh's widget to PlexNex if I didn't think it would add a much needed dimension of humanity, of comic relief, to this site -- which can be overserious and a little self-indulgent, not to mention narrow in its niche.

I'm as stimulated by the quality of Hugh's thinking as much as by Doc's. They remind me of each other a bit (they may be Internet Branding's Science-Fiction Twins) but this could be because the above picture illustrates a post Hugh made over a year ago called, The Porous Membrane: Why Corporate Blogging Works, which riffs on Docs great book, The Cluetrain Manifesto. Among other quality ideas, Membrane talks about how Scoble's blogging at Microsoft affected internal conversations that never would have occurred otherwise.

Here's another Searls-esque McLeod gem: "The Hughtrain".

Cluetrain is among a few stimulating books that influenced me as a security analyst to move toward IT and some of these confirmed the decision once I had left.

• Negroponte's Being Digital
• Gilder's Microcosm
• Raymond's The Cathedral & the Bazaar
• Brooks' The Mythical Man Month
• Stephenson's ...in the beginning was the command line

And it is a few good bloggers who from time to time remind me that blogging's internal monologues & external conversations can add value and open pathways that simply wouldn't otherwise exist.

Tagged by Solveig

Today -- which was St. Patrick's Day, a fake holiday -- I was blessed to be taken out of my daily head and brought down memory lane by being tagged by my gracious friend, OOo comrade & that Scandinavian-American goddess, Solveig Haugland.

Four Jobs I've Had

1.    pickett fence nailer - GM Fence (Parsippany, NJ)
2.    Head of the Rifle Range - Camp Dudley, YMCA, Inc. (Westport NY)
3.    Equity Analyst, Value Line (The Daily News Building)
4.    7th Grade English Teacher, NYC Teaching Fellows (The Bronx)

Four Movies I Could Watch Over & Over

1.    Blowup (1966)
(David Hemmings, Sarah Miles & Vanessa Redgrave in 1966 London with cameo appearance by The Yardbirds including Jimmy Page, Jeff Beck AND Eric Clapton; Directed by Michelangelo Antonioni)

2.    Where Eagles Dare (1968)
(Impossible mission like in The Guns of Navarrone: Burton & Eastwood pull the old triple-agent gag & foil the Nazis at Schloss Adler; from the novel by Alistair McLean; Produced by Eliot Kastner; Favorite quote: "Broadsword, calling Danny Boy. OVER.")

3.    Bambi (1942)
(Why? Because I have watched it several hundred times when Bean was 2 years old; Bambi demonstrates Walt Disney's unabashed use of Christian & Shakespearian mythological imagery.)

4.    Butley (1974)
(English & Poetry Professor Ben Butley has a bad day: A BBC TV production of Simon Gray's stage play; directed by Harold Pinter; starring Alan Bates and featuring Jessica Tandy as Edna Shaft.)

5.    Gosford Park (2001)
(Robert Altman's dryly acerbic set-piece mystery of an English upper-crust shooting party weekend has a) the complete cast of all movie-dome, including my personal favorite guy-actor (after Ralph Feinnes), Clive Owen, as well as Micheal Gambon -- The Gambon -- as well as Maggie Smith doing her immortal thing let's hope not as well as it will ever be done again, but probably; b) Bob Balaban as the ridiculous American movie producer; c) an authentically English script by Julian Fellowes (story by Altman & Balaban); and d) a tableau shot in amber hue of the maids sitting on the stairs listening rapt to Ivor Novello's parlor singing echoing through the house...a still-life that makes Rembrandt, Vermeer AND Velasquez wish they were Englishmen or wish they could come back and make films.)

6.    The Third Man (1949)
(Orson Welles' adaptation of the Graham Green novel pretty much defines the Noir genre.)

Four Places I Have Lived

1.    London, England (Chelsea & South Ken.)
2.    Ridgewood, New Jersey
3.    Durham, North Carolina
4.    New York, New York (West 72nd Street & West 88th Street)

Four TV Shows I Love to Watch

1.    House (Sherlock Holmes in the OR with a painful migraine)
2.    Fox Soccer Channel (any Premier League match)
3.    Fox Football Friday (Nick & Steve)
4.    Fox Sports News (daily dose of pich events & football gossip)

Four Places I Have Been on Holiday

1.    Kenya & Tanzania
2.    Ambleside, Cumbria, ENGLAND (The Lake District)
3.    Big Sur, California
4.    Banff, Alberta, CANADA

Four Websites I Visit Daily

1.    Google (mail, feeds, IM, search)
2.    Six Apart (my blog)
3.    Guardian Unlimited (football news)
4.    flickr (unreal browse of photos and connections)

Four of My Favorite Foods

1.    toast & coffee
2.    Tetley's Ale
3.    A heaping turkey or roast beef sandwich with mustard or horseradish, fresh lettuce & tomato (on farmhouse bread with salt & pepper)
4.    Roast Beef & Yorkshire Pudding
5.    Laphroiagh 18

Four Places I Would Rather Be Right Now

1.    Old Trafford photographing Chelsea v. Manchester United
2.    Iceland, taking pictures half as good as Helga's
3.    downstairs with Bean, who just got home from school
4.    upstairs, napping snug with Lucy the Great Dane

Four Bloggers I am Tagging

1.    Ben Hammersley
who redefines the cognitive limits of what a blog can do, pictorially, textually & erotically. Nice taste in books and country of domicile, too.

2.    Bob Sutor
who's sang froid, patience & empathy in his writing make him a "Beacon" (IBM developerWorks / Sutor).

3.    Helga Kvam
who's landscape photos of Iceland on flickr and her poetic blog are an inspiration and credit to the Internet.

4.   Danah Boyd
who's asking the right questions about blogging and social interaction through her stimulating work at UC Berkeley and on her passionate blog.

Hammersley is Dangerous

...seriously dangerous. Even aside from his serious pictureTaking talent, Hammersley's new site gives a new meaning to the concept blog. It is the best-integrated visual/textual experience in that thing called the Blogoshere that I have seen. Given the starved visual/textual interplay of this venue, such an endorsement might take for faint praise. But that's as may be.

Apparently Hammersley has also been cooking up some page designs for one of the seriously dangerous news organs, Guardian Unlimited. Now in this time when the revolution du blog is under attack while being praised with equal vehemence -- like the Beatles in 1964 -- [and I will tell you, as an experienced blogger that most blogs utterly suck], often within the same organ, the Guardian's print edition and website together are my yin & yang of truth & football reportage...each medium providing a lighter shade of pale on this dog-eat-dog world.

As for blogging, it will not go away but, likewise, it will probably not kill any journalists soon. That is, any journalists who are any good. And the old-school bricks&mortar, paper&ink venues that treat their online media more like a conversation -- visual, textual, whatever -- are going to reap rewards.

And I'm glad Hammersley is here to show the way.