While outside it's been a warm inviting Spring, inside we've been driven by single focus, aimed at our product launch in June. Others sometimes call this the "death march" period, which personally I think is disrespectful of those forced to take real deach marches. Besides, death marches are usually considered unhealthy and ultimately counter-productive. Instead, I prefer to call our development endgame, the period of sustained focus before a release, a toboggan run. For those that haven't experienced a real toboggan run, it's starts high up on a snowy hill with five or six people looking down the slope at...

In the second paragraph of Weaving the Web, Tim Berners-Lee writes of the Web as something that "leaves the entirety of our previous ways of working as just one tool among many." I'm sure most people keep right on reading without a second thought about that sentence, as the line resembles much of the overwrought journalistic hyperbole aimed at the Web. When I read it today though, the line stopped me cold. He means exactly what he wrote, and he can back it up. Outstanding. With the WWW2004 show coming next week, I've been trying to gather my thoughts after...

My wife plays Solitaire incessantly. She's got a PhD and a professor's schedule, but nearly every time I look over at her laptop, she's reflexively sorting cards into piles, playing Freecell or some variation. She tells me it relaxes her, which seems reasonable enough, even if my idea of relaxing involves a dark room and a soft pillow. She's not alone. Solitaire is easily the most popular computer program of all time. More popular than email or web browsing, Solitaire is often the first program people use. I used it to teach my mom how to use a mouse. It's...

It's been a while since I talked about "Grannies and Gurus", so before getting into the meat of what we're doing, it'll help to first define the audience we're aiming at. Non-technical users are those that regularly put URLs in the Google search bar instead of the location bar. They're people who've never used a text editor in their life, only Word and email. Non-technical people rarely use menu bars. They're people who have yet to create a new folder in their email program, or even their file system. Non-technical people are the vast majority of computer users. When I...

An hour away from the start of www2004, I'm in my hotel room at the Sheraton, listening to the coffee brew and my wife Paula prepare for her bus trip back to Pennsylvania. We've been here three days, starting with an Ani Difranco concert in Carnegie Hall on Saturday, then roaming round Greenwich Village, South Street Seaport, and lower Manhattan on Sunday, then sleep and work on Monday, topped off with Times Square and Super Size Me, a film that cured me of fast food forever. Now Paula's leaving, which is making me sad. I wish she were staying the...

Just got back from two meals at the Zen Palace, first with semweb photo folks such as Jennifer Golbeck, Ben Shneiderman, Nick Gibbins, and Stephen Harris, then as we were leaving, I ran into Libby Miller, Dave Beckett, Dave Reynolds, etc, so stayed for their meal. Five hours of dinner talk. Storymill.net will have to wait. :)...

A line that stood out for me at yesterday's Tim Berners-Lee talk was "Start off with islands and stitch them together." He said this in answer to a question regarding ontology standardization. Later as I talked to people about it, I was surprised at how controversial an opinion it was. Many thought (or knew people who thought) that modeling efforts should be less haphazard, that we should we aim at a kind of "imperial ontology" and instill a sense of responsible conformity in those around us. One guy even said, when confronted with some "fringe attributes" that people may consider,...

Here's a photo of me and Jon "finishing up" Tidepool in the "Cyber Cafe" this afternoon, while across the hall the conference was officially closing. Eight hours later we're still at it, mostly struggling with issues that weren't originally scheduled for this release, such as uploading the w3photo stuff to storymill. We've been very close to good enough for hours now, but we still can't upload and publish photos and RDF from Tidepool. The rest of the program works fine. Ah well, time for sleep. If I seem half asleep on Developer Day, you'll know why. I had a long...

Waking after what seemed like mere minutes of sleep, I dressed in a daze and wandered down to the photo annotation session of Developer's Day. Greg Elin, Libby Miller, and Mor Naaman gave talks while I played a bit with Tidepool, trying to get it behave. After I made a point regarding privacy at the show, mentioning that we were working on a photo annotation program, Greg asked if I'd like to show it. "Sure", I said without much thought as I wandered up to plug in my Powerbook into the overhead projector. I said a few things about it,...

Last night I ate dinner at the Carnegie Deli with Nick Gibbins, Stephen Harris, Dave Becket, Libby Miller, Jim Hendler, and several others I know only by IRC nickname. We then chatted till 11pm in the hotel bar about a great many semweb things. I'm exhausted! This morning I packed up and checked out with plenty of time to make my bus, then talked for an hour in the lobby with Mor Naaman from Stanford, causing me to miss my bus by 8 minutes. My penance was sitting two hours on the floor in Port Authority, which is its own...

After yet another 4am grudge match with both Tidepool and Storymill.net, we're (mostly) ready for the world to see what we've done so far. You can download the Tidepool preview by visiting: http://storymill.net Details on Tidepool and Storymill can also be found at the site. There's also a Flash demo if you don't have time to install the actual program. We had hoped to get Tidepool uploading its w3photo goodness to Storymill, but we're still inches away, so it will have to wait until the next release. You can still output the RDF locally and upload to w3photo. Storymill currently...