Temporary blogdrought continueth, I'm afraid. Normal service will be resumed, etc.

Meanwhile, three quick links of note:

1. Utterly wonderful to see my mate Albert Lai smiling out at me from the cover of the latest Canadian Business magazine.


They interviewed Albert for the front end feature piece in a special section on "What's Next". The piece isn't online yet, alas, but I think they post things eventually.

Albert's still one of the nicest, smartest, and hardest-working people in the North American tech scene. Great to see him getting this kind of attention.

2. Heard about this site on Leo Laporte's excellent TWiT show: TheEndIsTheBeginning.

Llamas, origami, a link to an article about the RIAA crackdowns on student downloading, and the message "You are being manipulated". Hmmm...

It's a teaser for something, certainly - something launching on July 4th, 2007. But for what?

Leo thought it might be a viral thingy for some new movie. I wonder - the combination of llamas and the RIAA makes me think of WinAmp.

WinAmp is a really powerful cross-platform media player from developers Nullsoft. Really useful product - great for moving audio and video files you own back and forth between different formats and devices.

The founders seem to have something of a llama fixation going on. They describe themselves as: "One part genius. Three parts llama. And a sprinkling of corporate AOL." Plus, there are llama jokes and images spread throughout the site and even embedded as easter eggs in their downloadable product.

What have they got up their sleeves, I wonder...?

3. Equally puzzling and intriguing are the videos launched on behalf of US Senator and presidential candidate Mike Gravel. Here's one of them:



Hard to know quite what to make of this. It's a really interesting approach though, and I can't help admiring the guy for his creative courage. When's the last time you saw a Presidential candidate with the confidence to use such oblique metaphors?

Plenty of discussion of this elsewhere, including an MSNBC interview in which the Senator attempts to explain the videos to a particularly obtuse host.

The wonderful, eclectic literary journal and cross-format publishing house, McSweeney's, is in dire trouble.

Hit by $130,000 in bad debt from the bankruptcy of their former distributor, McSweeney's itself is now hurting, big time.

I love McSweeney's. From the first time I encountered founder Dave Eggers' (in his book "A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius"), I've enthusiastically followed everything he's been involved in. I've been too stingy to spring for the cost of a subscription to McSweeney's "Believer" magazine, but my friend Josh kindly drops off his old copies in our mailbox while he's out walking the dog. (Hey Josh, btw - when you going to wake up that dusty ol' blog of yours again?). It's terrific stuff.

From Nick Hornby's collected columns to the beautiful way the McSweeney's people breathe new life into old and nearly forgotten classics, I just love the way their adoration of the written word and the tactile beauty of well-produced books shines through in everything they do. It would be simply rotten and miserable to see McSweeney's die.

To help keep them afloat, they're running an auction of some amazing art, music, and literary artifacts at their online store.

They've got original art from Chris Ware, Marcel Dzama, David Byrne, and drawings of Ray Bradbury, Eminem and others from (Drinky Crow-creator) Tony Millionaire. Plus there's a limited-edition CD of some of Nick Hornby's favourite tunes, and loads more.

Centrepiece of the whole auction just might be Dave Eggers' haunting, unpleasant cover painting from Issue 14 of McSweeney's, featuring George Bush as a double-amputee. Not sure I'd care to have that around the house - it's a bit too creepy.

There's plenty of other great stuff at the store, though. Treat yourself, and help keep McSweeney's alive.

A big day in the clan today.

Happy birthday, first of all, to our wonderful, beautiful, growing-up-oh-so-fast baby girl, Lily Aine. Eight years old today. Crikey. Where the heck did eight years go so fast?


You're a special, delightful, cheeky little joy, Lily, and we love you very much.

An extra special birthday surprise this morning too, with the news of our brand new baby cousin - Louiza Marie - born at 11am Brussels time this morning to Leona's lovely sister Wendy and wonderful husband Mouloud. 6lbs, safe and well.

Congratulations! Nice to have twice the reasons to celebrate every year.

Happy Birthday Lily and welcome to the world Louiza.

I’ve only met Tom Williams twice, in passing; both times at the Mesh Conferences. He's an extraordinary man, with a storied career, who was famously hired by Apple to work in Product Marketing at the age of 14.

Still, brief though our encounters have been, in today's world of "ambient intimacy" or "continuous partial friendship", our overlapping areas of attention and interest constitute enough of a relationship for Tom and I to have become connected as "friends" on Facebook.

I'm grateful for this connection, however superficial it might be. Without it, I might not have come across Tom's latest blog post in which he briefly discusses his ideas for "Web 3.0".

It's not that it's a hugely important post, per se, but it does include one particular nugget that serves to pull together a number of the thoughts that have been floating around my head over the last few weeks – threads that started to knit together into some semblance of semi-coherence at Mesh.

Tom says: "Web 3.0 will be technology-driven and about creating reputation and order for UGC." (User-Generated Content)

The bright spot in this comment, for me, is the fact that Tom chooses reputation as one of the anchors for his ideas about the next wave of Web innovation.

I hear resonances of Cory Doctorow's idea of "whuffie" here, and overlaps with the work Doc Searls and others are doing around "VRM" (Vendor Relationship Management - the reciprocal of CRM).

Tom's words help illuminate one of the things that has been bothering me about the gaps between all the various Web 2.0/social software spaces I inhabit. Colin McKay just wrote something that helped draw another of the thought threads into alignment: "Okay, people. I've got a job. I've got a family. I sometimes watch network television. Who is going to invent a Trillian-like app for all these damn social networks? Really."

That's part of the problem. Like Colin, I've been something of a serial joiner when it comes to social networking services – I was into (and rapidly out of) Friendster fairly early on, and have mucked around in spaces such as Sixdegrees, Orkut, Ryze, Flickr, LinkedIn, Xing, eCademy, MySpace, Facebook, MyRagan, and several other services with similar sets of features.

I'm too easily attracted to the cheesy, chintzy cheeriness (to borrow from Betjeman) of these spaces; too often disappointed, disillusioned, or just weirded out once I spend more than a few days inside the latest ersatz schmooze room.

There's a diminishing returns thing going on with social networking products. The investment one is required to make in setting up a decent profile and then adding all the same friends and re-forging all the same connections over and over again is often too onerous to be worth bothering with.

I'm sure I'm not alone in this thought. There are entire nomadic herds of loosely-connected friends, steadily migrating from site to site as we over-graze one service, tire of it, and then move on to the next shiny YASNS that springs up full of the promise of new hotness.

We need, as Colin intimates, some kind of universal personal profiling and info aggregation tool to minimize the repetitive maintenance involved. But beyond the simple repetitive data-entry issue, there's another problem inherent in the treatment of the reputation capital we invest and grow through our use of these social spaces.

In the huge and multi-faceted social software macrocosm of blogs, RSS, Twitter, Facebook, Second Life, and all the services I’ve mentioned above, this is the one consistent, bothersome issue. All the reputation systems that underpin these sites exist in silos.

When you "friend" me on one service, you're giving me a vote of reputation – saying, in effect, "this is one of the people I count among the good guys". Trouble is, there's no way to port your votes, your whuffie (or often anything else) from one service to another.

For example, I have fairly detailed profiles on LinkedIn, Facebook, MySpace, and a bunch of other places - none of these silos talk to each other without some kind of interim ETL step.

Plus there's that even more valuable reputation/relationship network represented by my blogroll, my email and IM address books, and the many, many interactions I've had through more than six years of blogging.

Every comment I've ever received or left on another's blog, every trackback or link pointer given or received, every blogroll "add" – it's all reputation capital, one way or another. There are tens of thousands of connections in there, hundreds of relationships, and a sizeable handful of explicit or implicit recommendations and testimonials.

This concern was touched on by Jordan Banks of eBay Canada in response to a question during his panel session at Mesh last week. On eBay, the problem is particularly apparent.

One of the most successful community-driven protection mechanisms they have is the feedback forum, where buyers and sellers provide feedback on their experiences with fellow registered users. Every time a sale is completed, the buyer and seller are invited to provide feedback on each other and the buying or selling experience they encountered. In this way, each user builds up his or her own personal reputation that can be viewed by anyone visiting the site.

This is a unique advantage of an online service – it's the clear analog of word of mouth recommendation, the difference being that any registered user can access any other community member's "record of service" at any time. It's a key factor in fostering the spirit of trust we need to make online businesses work.

But the problem, again, is that the reputation record an individual builds up through being a "good citizen" on eBay sits in a silo, in their silo. It's your reputation, but you don't even own it. If you ever chose to leave eBay, you can't take it with you.

James Russell Lowell said: "Reputation is only a candle, of wavering and uncertain flame, and easily blown out, but it is the light by which the world looks for and finds merit."

... and in some circumstances, it's all we have. Where social networking spaces are used to grow and foster connections between far-flung individuals, reputation is perhaps the most important currency of the community. We may all be separated by a mere six degrees, but if I don't really know you, there's no way I'm introducing you to my friend the billionaire angel investor unless I'm able to assess your reputation some way. It's Cory's whuffie idea in action.

I'm still not quite sure where I'm going with this, but I feel the need for some secure, personal repository that would hold all of my connections and "whuffie" together. I want to keep my whuffie in my wallet - but not in a Microsoft Passport/Hailstorm kind of way. Ack, no.

It should include most elements of OpenID, a lot of FOAF, and maybe some of the stuff being worked on by the Attention Trust people.

I want it in XML, of course, and I want it to be incredibly easy to implement and use, as secure as it possibly can be, and extensible without being completely unmanageable.

Naturally, I’d want everyone to adopt it – from eBay to Amazon, Facebook to Flickr, Google to Microsoft to Yahoo.

Critically: no vendor (or government) can own it.

My reputation and relationships are mine. They're the sum of the gifts of friendship and respect people grant to one another over the years; the currency we earn through our life and work. And like the other, folding kind of currency, I should be able to carry my stock of links, linkages and laurels with me from one Web experience to the next.

Perhaps something like this already exists. I need to go dig deeper into emerging whuffie-like solutions such as The Bitchun Society and Yap.

For now, though, time for bed. Two proposals under my belt today and another long day tomorrow. Must rest the old carpal tunnels...

Spent a fruitless 10 minutes before getting the kids to school this morning, searching high and low for one of Ruairi's camouflage-patterned Crocs.

Couldn't find it because, as Ruairi and Lily gleefully pointed out: "Daddy, it's camouflaged."

Right. After a weekend of recharging, cycling out on the Leslie Street Spit with the kids, and noodling on the mass of interwoven themes and threads from two and a half days of Mesh Conference fun - it's about time I posted some thoughts on the whole shebang.

It was, first of all, an immensely enjoyable conference in many, many ways. The Gang of Five organizers – Stuart, Mark, Mathew, Mike and Rob - did an outstanding job. Great speakers, practically flawless organization, terrific buzz. I had, and still have, some quiet reservations - but more on that in a moment.

I took a lot of notes, but it would take too long to sort through and transcribe them into some kind of coherent post. My conference note-taking is often a kind of displacement activity anyway, if that's the right expression. By taking notes, I find I recall things better – but I don't actually have to go back and read the notes in order to remember stuff. It's the simple act of writing something down that helps commit it to memory.

No - in lieu of my personal notes, if you want a good idea of what the conference is like you could do worse than to check out the masses of posts, photos, and videos already tagged 'mesh07' out there.

Some of the session highlights for me were:

- Mike Arrington's keynote conversation – funny, snarky, and entertainingly direct;
- Richard Edelman – smart, candid, level-headed, charming;
- Jim Buckmaster – deliciously dry, insightful, and almost criminally relaxed (even in the face of endless repetitious questions from the audience on "what's the business model" and "where do you see Craigslist in 5 years time". There were so many variants of that last one, in fact, I was sorely tempted to ask: "where do you think Craigslist will be in 3 years, 4 months, 2 days and 17 minutes from now". Sheesh. Instead I asked a cheeky tabloid question about the freakiest thing Jim's ever seen posted to the site.)

Outside of the sessions, it was fun getting to hang out with Dell's "Chief Blogger" Lionel Menchaca – a terrific bloke in every way. And getting to drink with Loren Feldman, who is just naturally, effortlessly hilarious, plus stacks of other fine folk: Mary Hodder, Alexa Clark, Sandy Ward, Raymond Ludwin, Cynthia Brumfield, Rachel Clarke, and of course lots of old friends – the list could go on and on...

Beyond the keynotes and panels, though, the real joy of Mesh – this year as much as last – was to be found in the white space on the schedule; the mixing, mingling, muttering and...um...meshing in the open spaces and hallways around and alongside the main events. The conferring going on all around this conference had the feel of a love-in. Like a big group of friends swapping stories and URLs in a warm, open, collegial atmosphere.

Yet in the heart of that thought is one of the things that I've been worrying over for the last few days. It was great, and I really did enjoy it all, but I had this troubling sensation in the run up to the event and all through the two main days of the conference that I wasn't really gaining anything new from it all.

OK, so I did come away with a decent handful of new business leads, at least one of which is really solid. But beyond the genuinely enjoyable huggyfest of the social media jeunesse dorée at play, what did we actually gain from attending Mesh?

When you fill a selection of rooms with a crowd of people who have already achieved social media consensus, who all agree on The Five Precepts of bloggisyana, the potential for real creative tension is kind of limited. And you need that tension for the really juicy stuff to happen – from conflict comes real insight.

One of the people I bumped into at Mesh, Alexa Clark from the CheapEats restaurant guides summed it up in email: "It's got to be hard running a conference where the audience is often packed with experts with as much hands on experience as the speakers." Indeed.

That's the kind of thing that was nagging at me all throughout Mesh. Much as I enjoy gatherings of the blogosphere clan, I've been fretting that all this jolly consensus isn't really getting us anywhere.

We meet, we chew over the same thoughts of authenticity, transparency, clarity; we agree on where the business models are, feel confident that we're changing the world, generally concur that there's AND logic happening here (i.e. we're not necessarily killing or replacing old media - AND as opposed to OR, or NOT). Then we go back to our day jobs until the next social schmooze.

And yet – even though I was vaguely disappointed that I came away without any hard-edged slices of tangibly new knowledge – I still left the conference feeling energized, stimulated, my head buzzing with ideas. How did that happen?

It's at this point that David Weinberger comes to the rescue, as he so often does. David wasn't actually at Mesh, but his ideas and that of his Cluetrain Manifesto co-authors were an ambient, omnipresent undercurrent informing almost every session and hallway conversation.

It was entirely appropriate that my reading matter for the streetcar commute to the two days of Mesh was the last few pages of David's latest book, Everything Is Miscellaneous. It's a wonderful, deeply thoughtful, finely wrought book – one that deserves a post of its own (at the very, very least), which I'll get to in due course.

In the closing sections of the book, David addresses the "echo chamber" gripe that so often surfaces in bloggy contexts. When I read these thoughts of his, the penny dropped for me with a an almost audible clang. I read the passage twice, closed the book, and sat back with a comfortable smile on my face.

Now I know what it is that we're doing at Mesh, and why it's worth doing. Here's the relevant excerpt:

Web conversations have looked to many like echo chambers because of the nature of conversation itself. Conversation always occurs on a ground of agreement. If we don’t first tacitly agree that sugar is an edible substance, we can’t then talk about whether eating sugar makes kids crazy. From that basis of agreement, we then iterate on differences. Where the ground of agreement is more controversial – “Howard Dean should be president” at the Dean site or “Aromatherapy works!” at a New Age healing site – outsiders may think that a bunch of people who agree have gotten together to reinforce one another. But that mistakes the ground of conversation for the conversation itself. By discussing differences while standing on a shared ground, we work toward understanding.

Understanding, not knowledge, is what we’re aiming at in most conversations … In a conversation’s shared ground there are things we know – or assume we know – but they’re precisely what’s not interesting to talk about. In conversation we think out loud together, trying to understand.

And that's the heart of it, right there.

What the Mesh organizers have done is to foster the ideal environment for a crowd of interesting people to gather and "think out loud together, trying to understand". That's why it works so well, and why I'll do all I can to get back there for the third year running at Mesh '08.