Simon Says

I want to write about Simon Bolivar. Well, not really. I mean, I don't want to write about the liberator of South America, the George Washington of South America. I'm actually trying to write about a friend of mine, but given his general paranoia about being blogged on, I'll hold off. I mean, I could have used his first name, but it's just unusual enough in the world he's popular in that most people might well guess who it is.

And that's partly what I want to talk about. I was in San Jose recently, or more properly, Mountain View. This is Silicon Valley. Google was about 3 miles from my hotel. Probably within 20 miles is Cupertino, which is where Apple is headquartered. Microsoft has an office in the area. Stanford University is another few miles away.

Why did I pick the name Simon? Ah, that's obscurity for you. So, my paranoid friend used to post under a pseudonym, and Simon Bolivar was it. I think he thought it was just amusing enough that few people would have any idea who this person was, sort of like going to Spain and claiming you're George Washington. While that name would draw stares in the U.S., it might warrant less than a glance in Spain.

I would have taken a picture, but he frets at the idea of his picture being put up on the net. It's not that he's a troll or anything. If anything, he's a reasonably handsome guy, though certainly not for all tastes (arguably, this is true of anyone, even Brad Pitt or Lindsay Lohan). In fact, his picture has been Flickr'd a bunch, well, 70 or 80 times. He appears to have his own blond stalker too.

Who is Simon? Simon's created a website that has some notoriety among the blogoscenti. It's not so much a blog as a blog aggregator. He runs a one man show. The site is entirely his own. No employees, other than himself. And frankly, no money, either, though he's had chances to make money. The problem is the conditions under which this money comes. How many companies will simply give you money and have nothing in exchange? They're not lotteries after all.

He spends prodigious amounts of hours working on the website, hacking away at code. For those who've known him (that would be about ten years or so, since I've met him), writing scripts had always been a passion. We'd call them Simon-lets named after applets, which would be a little funnier if I had used his real name. He had a script that kept track of who owed whom how much money. OK, that wasn't particularly sophisticated, but he wrote it.

He wrote a game where you could click the mouse, and a bunch of soldiers would generally aim in that direction. Some games have already thought of that, but he had thought of it too.

Simon goes to these various panels and parties and meet others who could call themselves members of the blogoscenti. Those who live in this world sometimes don't realize how prevalent they are not. I started to think about this during ETECH and shortly afterwards.

I've heard terms like RSS, feed aggregators, AJAX, REST, Ruby on Rails, Hibernate, Spring. ETECH introduced me to more terms like Web 2.0. Actually, I first heard of Web 2.0 about 6 months ago. In a nutshell, it basically means that the web, through technologies like AJAX are producing web pages that are more like desktop applications. We're so used to clicking on links on a webpage and expecting to go to another web page, instead of having the page update (e.g., when you press a button, it slides open some content).

These words are on the cutting edge (oh, is that ever an obsolete term, so much so, that people feel the need to push that term and call it the bleeding edge) of web apps, and yet, there are so many programmers out there that have heard nothing of this, and frankly, won't for some period of time.

To give an analogy, most of us work, right? Think of the wealthiest Americans. Their wealth allows them to do things like host fancy parties and partake in activities that most of us don't know about or care about. Maybe something trendy like having horses on ice skates do curling gets popular among the wealthy. The rest of the public, who is also working, doesn't care. They go on doing what they do.

I mean, people can still write simple web pages, using HTML that they learned in high school, and never have to think about Javascript or the DOM or Rails or Ajax. They don't have to hear about companies like Flickr or 37 Signals or know who Joel Spolsky or Paul Graham or a bunch of other bloggers are.

They can lead contented live administering databases, making sure accounts are handed out, or whatever, and never have to know this part of the technical universe. And, yet, I find myself keeping track of this stuff, and to be frank, I'm not even doing that good a job at it.

I attend ETECH as much to figure out what is going on. I can think of no other industry that examines itself under a microscope so often, trying to tap into the next new thing. Sometimes I think, people like Tim O'Reilly, who is head of O'Reilly publishing figures "I don't have to program, I don't have to code, I just have to spot trends, and give new words to it!".

And I suspect, he, and others, think this is a profound thing. You guys code. I conceive of ideas. O'Reilly, I believe, came up with Web 2.0, which is either appropriate or mocking or both. It resembles a term that was popular in the 80s, namely, Japan Inc, where Americans tended to think of Japan as this monolithic entity. They weren't simply Sony, Mitsubishi, Honda, Nintendo. They were some mishmash of them all, in collaboration with the Japanese government that favored an industrial policy, i.e., investing money into various industries (such as the semiconductor indusrty) to encourage growth, while protecting them from foreign competition.

This term was big in business, and held some currency for a few years. Web 2.0 might last all of two years before it becomes a forgotten term or something quaint, much like the software that people name with numbers are soon replaced by other numbers. People begin to attach 2.0 often without a whole lot of meaning (e.g., Learning 2.0).

Yet, there's discussion of this term, even if people poo-poo it, and to that extent, it's OK if they hate you, as long as they talk about you. Other terms that came up: mash-ups and alpha geeks.

I could, indeed, summarize ETECH 06 by the terms thrown around. Let me do that now. AJAX, Alpha-geeks, Ruby on Rails, Mash-ups, The Attention Economy, Web 2.0, RSS feeds, tagging, blogging. There was still some residual mention of "the long tail", the idea that companies like Amazon or Netflix can succeed because both have huge libraries that people can tap into. Even though the most obscure titles have few readers, all those obscure titles, put together, lead to sales. You don't have to be the Crown Books of the world, providing bestsellers, but making it tough to find early Orson Scott Card books.

Simon's in the middle of this. If, for no other reason, he doesn't operate his website in a vacuum. He wants to know how it's doing. If he attends panels, he doesn't want to say "What's AJAX?". He wants to use it in his website. Remember when Madonna used to wear that do-rag thing early, early in her career, and young teenage girls would dress like her?

I've basically blogged about this too. Why do I feel I need to keep up with all of this? My parents can basically lead lives they lead nearly ten years ago. The technologies that impacted them? The microwave, the VCR, the desktop computer, dial-in modems. They don't use the web that much. They like watching TV programs on the satellite televisions that show Chinese programs. But they've been doing that for years. They don't care much about this trend or that trend, and seem relatively content.

Even those who make it their business to do computers don't necessarily keep up.

How many people live and die by their RSS aggregator? And of those who don't, how many don't even bother reading online newspapers? Do they want new interfaces for getting information? Clearly, some people do. Clearly, many others don't.

The impression I got, eating sushi with Simon, was that he was consumed by this. I'm sure he would say he wasn't, and yet, he was. He had been working on this for over a year, with little rest. He should take a bit of a break, but he knows, more than academia, that the tech industry moves on, plugs on, and to keep up, he has to keep moving, know what everyone is doing, and try to one-up them.

Recently, there were a few posts criticizing his site, and he didn't particularly care for that, though, as usual, he blamed them for misunderstanding what his site was all about. But how did he know this? Surely, some friends pointed it out to him. Read what so-and-so said about you.

And the funny thing, I suppose, is that, like celebrities, he wants a share of fame, and a bit of anonymity at the same time. Thus, he doesn't like pix that trail where he goes (I just go to Flickr to get some sense of where he goes).

Your life, baby, is on the Internet. You're a movie star in cyberspace. And like most places, your fame is fleeting unless you keep one step ahead.