Amazon hosted a networking event tonight. They had me at free beer and a chance to look at a Kindle. Now that I’ve actually played with one, I can comment on some of its features for better or worse.

It’s heavier and more solid than it looks. With the little padded cover, it could pass for a physical book in most situations, and it would probably survive a drop to the floor just fine.

The screen does look great, even in the sub-optimal lighting conditions of a bar. I had to compare with the XO when I got home, and with the backlight off, I think the resoloutions are very nearly similar. However, the XO (without backlight) is fairly hard to read at indoor lighting levels, though in full sunshine it’s great. I don’t know how easy it would be to read the Kindle in full sunlight…

Page turning is annoyingly slow, and annoyingly easy to do by accident. The annoying part is that after pressing the button, nothing seems to happen for a second, then the page blacks out, waits another second, then displays the new content. I understand the technical limitations of the black flash (and the corresponding benefits–essentially zero power consumption to hold an image). But it feels like if it started working as soon as the button was pressed, it could cut the overall page change time in half. Keyboard entry felt slow and lagged as well.

Overall, the device didn’t feel usable to me. I somehow stumbled my way into Wikipedia and got to see the browser in action. I would love to see a touch-screen version.

Did seeing one change my mind about buying one? Nope. Still waiting. I’d buy this one at half it’s current price, an updated model for maybe more. -m

It’s been an exhausting past couple of weeks, but life goes on. WebPath made front page at next.yahoo. I’m starting to get feedback from developers who are actually using it, filing bugs, suggesting features, and it’s gratifying. The community is still building up. Won’t you join too? -m

WebPath, my experimental XPath 2.0 engine in Python is now an open source project with a liberal BSD license. I originally developed this during a Yahoo! Hack Day, and now I get to announce it during another Hack Day. Seems appropriate.

The focus of WebPath was rapid development and providing an experimental platform. There remains tons of potential work left to do on it…watch this space for continued discussion. I’d like to call out special thanks to the Yahoo! management for supporting me on this, and to Douglas Crockford for turning me on to Top Down Operator Precedence parsers. Have a look at the code. You might be pleasantly surprised at how small and simple a basic XPath 2 engine can be. So, who’s up for some XPath hacking?

Code download. (Coming to SourceForge with CVS, etc., in however many days it takes them to approve a new project) I hope this inspires more developers to work on similar projects, or better yet, on this one! -m

Take a look at this URL, and the page behind it. This is a list of all the Flickr photos with the tag “xmlns:dc=http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/“. Although these have been around for a while, I hadn’t been aware of this kind of tagging until recently.

Why “xml” in the namespace declaration? This doesn’t have much to do with XML. How many tags are there in the world that start with “dc:” and are not referring to Dublin Core? At least the tag declaring the namespace provides a good hook for finding things with machine tags. It’s only a small step up to RDFa from here, which is good! -m

Does the MacBook Air make a good ebook reader? -m

Admittedly, their marketing folks wouldn’t describe it that way, but essentially that’s what was announced today. (documentation in PDF format, closely related to what-used-to-be Konfabulator tech; here’s the interesting part in HTML) The press release talks about reaching “billions” of mobile consumers; even if you don’t put too much emphasis on press releases (you shouldn’t) it’s still talking about serious use of and commitment to XForms technology.

Shameless plug: Isn’t it time to refresh your memory, or even find out for the first time about XForms? There is this excellent book available in printed format from Amazon, as well as online for free under an open content license. If you guys express enough interest, good things might even happen, like a refresh to the content. Let’s make it happen.

From a consumer standpoint, this feels like a welcome play against Android, too. Yahoo! looks like it’s placing a bet on working with more devices while making development easier at the same time. I’ll bet an Android port will be available, at least in beta, before the end of the year.

Disclaimer: I have been out of Yahoo! mobile for several months now, and can’t claim any credit for or inside knowledge of these developments. -m

P. S. Don’t forget the book.

I discovered this by accident, but my life has been measurably better since.

You probably already know that you can switch apps quickly with Cmd+tab. But if you reach your pinky up a bit more and hit Cmd+~ you can rotate through the windows of the current app. This turns out to be most useful when, say, your email compose window gets behind the main email client window.

What is the equivalent keystroke on Linux? -m

Thanks to all the folks who showed interest in this little XPath puzzler published here a few weeks ago. Some asked to see the dataset, but I’m not able to release it at this time (but ask me again in 3 months).

Turns out it was a combination of two bugs, one mine, one somebody else’s. Careful observers noted that I wasn’t using any namespace prefixes in the XPath, and since I did specify that it was XPath 1.0, that technically rules out XHTML as the source language. Like nearly all XML I work with these days, the first thing I do is strip off the namespaces to make it easier to work with. Bug #1 was that in a few cases, the namespaces didn’t get stripped.

Bug #2 was in the XPath engine itself. Which one? Uh, whatever one ships with the “XPath” plugin for JEdit. It’s hard to tell directly, but I think it might be an older version of Xalan-J. In the case of the expression //meta, it properly located only those elements part of no namespace. But in the case of //meta/@property, it was including all the nodes that would have been selected by //*[local-name(.)='meta']/@property. Hence, a larger number of returned nodes.

Confusing? You bet!  -m

P.S. WebPath would not have this problem, since in the default mode it matches local-names only to begin with.

The new ticker symbol is SCOXQ.PK, as in “pink sheet”. From the soaring heights of the $20s, it’s now under a dime per share, as bankruptcy proceedings move forward and their attempt to charge fees for all Linux users continues to crumble. Serves ‘em right. -m

I visited the Amazon home page today to find this:

Thanks, Amazon! Now sit back down, you’re scaring me. -m

I’m taking some time off from work to relax a bit. And just in time for that, my OLPC arrived. Check out the photoset on Flickr. It’s an impressive little machine, and I’m very happy to have got this instead of a Kindle. :)

-m

OK, the majority of the buzz came from my talk, where I strongly encouraged folks to take a look at Hadoop. This article seems to be saying much the same things. If you’re curious about the future of distributed computation and storage, it’s worth a look. -m

Or, why the Kindle cost $399 at launch.

What is Amazon’s most valuable IP?

How about a list of registered users who are guaranteed as willing to pay a premium price for a nifty gadget (I mean “service”) along with the exclusive privilege of buying more things from Amazon? Somewhere in Amazon’s database land, alongside all the details and purchasing history they already have for each customer, there’s a single bit called something like owns_kindle. Those bearing this mark are the ur-early-adopters, the loyalists, the customers with a vary large net future value. The marketers dream. Opt-in isn’t even an issue–what Kindle owner won’t be interested in special offers and exclusive deals for their special device? Where else are they going to go?

That one bit alone is probably worth another $400, making it the most valuable IP in terms of dollars-per-byte that Amazon holds. Even if they do a drastic price cut soon (and such price cuts will at some point be inevitable to sustain the market), even if they refund half of the difference to the early adopters, they will come away with super-sized smiles. -m

P.S. s/Kindle/iPhone/ and s/Amazon/Apple/ and this entire post still holds.

P.P.S. There is a pretty good play Apple could make here around an ebook reader. Tie it to the same wireless service plan that the iPhone uses, make books available through the iTunes store (including tons of Gutenberg/public domain content/creative commons for free), and put it on a very slick designed piece of hardware. But even in this case, it will initially sell for a premium price for the reasons above. Game on!

Where’s Project Gutenberg? One difficulty in launching an ebook platform is the lack of available titles. I keep hearing about 80,000+ titles, but expressed as a percentage of Amazon’s book catalog, it’s minuscule. There should be all kind of public domain titles ready to go on day one. And where’s the Creative Commons books?
There’s some public domain books to be found, but none are free. Take, for example, A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court, a book (in paper form) sitting just out of arm’s reach as I write this, waiting to be read. If I had it on a device, particularly one with a good screen, I’d be more inclined to keep it, and dozens others, on hand in my backback and be ready to read at a moment’s notice. But no.

The problem is the the “we take care of the wireless delivery” part, called Whispernet(tm). It’s not really free, nor bundled in the service price. It’s bundled in to the cost of every media access. Is it fair to pay $9.99 for a New York Times bestseller? Sure. But it sucks to pay $1 for an A-list blog that’s free everywhere else, or to get literally nickeled and dimed for the privelege of “converting” and delivering your own content to your own device.

By the way, who gets the money paid for accessing, say, a CreativeCommons non-commercial licensed blog via the Kindle? Somebody should look into that.

I applaud Amazon for pushing to innovate in a space that badly needs it, but the financial model behind the wireless access encourages the wrong kind of things. Exceptions, like unlimited Wikipedia access (be still my heart!) still need to be hand approved by the gatekeeper. Information wants to be free, it doesn’t want to be a service, though that’s hard to see when the dollar signs get in your eyes.

Many folks are comparing this to the original iPod launch–remember, the huge klunky one with a tiny capacity, black and white screen, and a mechanical click-wheel? There’s some strong points of similarity, but stronger differences. For one, anyone with an iPod can easily rip their existing CDs, not to mention obtain MP3s from other methods (so I hear). There’s nothing like that yet for books.
Where’s the documentation for the new, proprietary ebook format? I don’t care about the DRM crap. I care about being able to create new content, or repackage existing content for which I have the rights, and for that, I’m having trouble coming up with a rationale for an entire new format. I would love to do some cool things with this platform. Perhaps I will some day, though my enthusiasm is somewhat lessened by the difficulties I would face getting anything cool onto the devices. -m

I see from the system requirements that Leopard requires an “866″ Mhz processor. Is this a hard limit, or just an advisory? My first Mac–the one I wrote the book on–is a lowly 800 Mhz. box. Is it worth trying to upgrade it? -m

…should write more opinion columns. :-) -m

I didn’t get to do much for Yahoo Hack Day, but I did get to help a coworker a teeny bit with an implementation of Y! Search for social web sites, including Facebook. There could be some interesting repercussions from that, so I won’t say more now. But what did surprise me is how many Yahoos are active on Facebook.

Myself–I’m still a Facebook curmudgeon. But mostly I simply haven’t had the time to check it out, or figure out the value proposition of accepting an invitation. -m

As widely reported by now, the final schedule for XML 2007 this December in Boston is up. All I have to add is the suggestion of careful attention to the Tuesday program at 4:00. :) If you can’t wait, some technical details are forthcoming in this space. That is all. -m

A strange note at the top of the web site that appeared in the last couple of days:

Yahoo! apologizes deeply, but we will be closing down the Podcasts site on Oct. 31, 2007

It’s underlined to look like a link, but in fact is just styled that way. Some further observations and questions:

• The writing style is out of sync with the rest of the site, clearly done by someone else, likely not a marketing person nor designer
• View-source shows the markup was jammed in there without regard to the CSS/structure on the rest of the site (look for style=”color:#fff;text-decoration:underline;padding:6px;margin:4px;”)
• Is this a case of the original folks who wrote the site having moved on, and the new owners find it easier to shut down?
• Is this a part of “finding focus in hollywood”? (linked earlier)
• Is it a good idea for Yahoo! Podcasts to exist? If there’s even a Y! site for Wii, why not podcasts?
• Is this a case of not being able to automate things down enough?
• Why doesn’t Yahoo! produce any podcasts?

-m

(Note: I wasn’t involved in Y! Podcasts nor in the apparent decision to shut it down)

Today is my 2nd anniversary at Yahoo!. Looking back, it’s been a great time. Since I don’t know how long ago, I’ve fantasized about being involved in research. Check. Since sitting across from the mobile guys for 5 years in W3C meetings, I’ve fantasized about working in mobile. Check. And since I wrote Web search, without the web (demo), I’ve fantasized about working on web-scale search.

Check.

What will the next two years bring? I don’t know, but I’m certain they will be even better than the previous two. -m

Here. -m

If a free energy device (like this one) were really possible, simple economics would dictate that (as soon as patents expired, etc.) one or several would be found in every cell phone, iPod, notebook computer, desktop computer, appliance, automobile, airplane, house, building, and factory. That’s a lot of waste heat that would get dumped onto the planet’s surface, maybe even worse than burning-stuff-to-produce-greenhouse-gasses.

But if you have unlimited energy, it would be straightforward engineering to produce a large scale air cooling unit that would (beam|radiate|dissipate) heat into space. In effect, a planetary-scale air conditioner.

Remember when you were younger and you left a window open with the A/C on, and somebody said ‘what are you trying to do, cool off the whole outdoors?’ Finally an answer to that question. :)
November, National Novel Writing Month, is coming up. Could this be the kernel of a story? What other practical considerations would there be around free energy? Comment below.

-m

No iPhone for me. No waiting in insane lines. No paying $600 to beta test first-gen hardware. And definitely no signing up for two years under the AT&T regime. Now when does the 2nd gen iPhone come out…? -m

I fell asleep one night while reading Ray Kurzweil, and had this crazy dream where the internet called me up (over VOIP, naturally) to complain that none of my web pages made sense. Par for the course, I thought at first. But then I told the internet a few things, to let me worry about my own domain of concern; he/she/it grappled with a response when a loud noise awoke me–my chirping alarm clock. I reached over to pound the Snooze button, but I stopped when my eyes focused on the display, which read in segmented LED letters: I rtFm. -m

Still more mobile news. Yahoo! Go is shipping. No alpha, beta, gamma, etc.–the real deal. Give it a whirl. If your phone, like mine, can’t handle the awesomeness, you can visit the slick web-only version at m.yahoo.com. -m

Have a look at these new Samsung phones, especially on page 2. Still limited to Asian territories, but this sort of thing has to be coming to the US and Europe as well… -m

The big buzz today is news that Terry Semel has stepped down as CEO of Yahoo, and Jerry Yang has stepped up. Believe it or not, Y is the first place I’ve worked at that’s large enough that I’m not on a first name basis with the CEO, so this kind of thing is much less personal. I can’t remember even shaking his hand.

In reflection, Terry’s management style seems to be based largely on the Dale Carnegie How-to-win-friends-and-influence-people style that’s been influential in my life and career. I have more respect for him than for most of the armchair CEO’s out there. I never understood some of the venom hurled at Semel, but then again I’m happy to see the change–I think Yahoo needs a little less Hollywood right now.
In short, there’s lots of change happening at Yahoo, both at the management level and in my personal role to play. But each change so far has been good, and the changes are adding up to something even bigger. After some recent personal tough times, I’m glad I decided to stay with Yahoo. What’s even better, there will probably be no more Tom Cruise visits. :-) -m

The approximately seven readers of this blog have probably already heard this, but just in case: I have a new role at Yahoo!–working on next generation search.

Lots of details are still falling into place. For now I describe it: “Imagining, specifying, prototyping, developing, and evangelizing next-generation web search experiences leveraging the full and unique capabilities available within Yahoo!”

In many ways, this is a logical stepping stone after oneSearch, and I’ll be dealing with lowercase semantic web issues more now. Expect the focus of this blog to shift accordingly (though I’m still interested in mobile and will make note of important happenings.)

Search On! -m

I thought this article was interesting in overall tone and a specific quote:

Modifying the software for each phone’s display is a matter of brute-force labor. There’s no intellectual way around it. Yahoo! is one of the few companies that’s been able to pull this off, but only because they have an army of Ph.D. hackers working for them.

Thanks! The primary design for the content adaptor was done by one non-Ph.D.–me–with plenty of help from the resident “phone whisperer” and a talented team of fellow non-Ph.Ds. It’s not a matter of “brute force” at all. The only way to solve the problem with finite resources is to understand developers, understand the problem space, and be smart about drawing a line between the two (and being flexible enough to handle the inevitable unknown).

One thing is certain: the industry is changing fast. A mobile app working great today will look dodgy in a year, and be obsolete in two years. It’s not clear if this will stabilize at some point, or keep shifting..

But I’m curious about what the rest of you think. Is mobile the next big thing, or a huge sand trap? Comment below. -m

Here’s a NYT article on Yahoo! Mobile, including a picture of the “warroom” where I spend a few hours on a typical day. The sign on the back wall says “platform team”, and on top of that “Maru” in Kanji and roman characters. -m