matt.griffith

Make Meaning

Sun, 20 Mar 2005 17:16:06 GMT

There really is only one question you should ask yourself before starting any new venture:

Do I want to make meaning?

Meaning is not about money, power, or prestige. It's not even about creating a fun place to work. Among the meanings of "meaning" are to

Make the world a better place.

Increase the quality of life.

Right a terrible wrong.

Prevent the end of something good.

Goals such as these are a tremendous advantage as you travel down the difficult path ahead. If you answer this question in the negative, you may still be successful, but it will be harder to become so because making meaning is the most powerful motivator there is.

It's taken me twenty yeas to come to this understanding. [Guy Kawasaki - The Art of the Start]

For six months I've tried to answer that question. I've thought about the times I was happiest in my life. I realize that I am happiest when I am teaching and inspiring people to do something they consider impossible. That is my purpose in life.

What should I teach? I've thought about teaching technology, but that bores me to tears. One of the few good teachers I've had was my high school chemistry/physics teacher Mr. Seela. He won Iowa Teacher of the Year for 2004 and he deserved it. Mr. Seela was one of the few people who never gave up on me in high school. No matter what I did, he kept trying to reach me. I've thought about following in his footsteps and teaching high school science. But the pay sucks. And the system sucks. Mr. Seela deserves to make 10 times what he makes but most of my other teachers should not be allowed within 100 yards of the nearest classroom.

When I was younger I dreamed of being a software developer, a Navy SEAL, or a Navy fighter pilot. At one point I planned to become all three - a real life MacGyver if you will. Eventually I realized one of my dreams. I became a software developer. I should be happy right?

Last year I realized that writing code to make someone else more profitable, by making banks more profitable, isn't that fulfilling. That's when I decided to go into business for myself. I thought that if I chose the products I worked on, I could make meaning with the products I created. But the idea of writing code in my spare time doesn't appeal to me anymore. I want new challenges. More importantly, I want to spend more time working with people than I do working with machines.

Then I remembered one of the other passions from my youth - flying. I've thought about becoming a flight instructor in the past, but like many teaching professions, the pay sucks. But I see ways to change that. And I want to change it. I want to change the way the flight training industry works. I want to find a way to make flight instructor the premium position in the aviation industry. I also want to find a way to reach kids that are like I was in school. I know that Mr. Seela could've reached me by teaching me to fly. That would have been the motivation I needed to live up to my potential in school. I know that there are kids out there like me, who need something to focus their attention. I know that through flight instruction, I can change the world. And who doesn't want to change the world?

So thanks David Seela. Thanks Guy Kawasaki. Thanks Robert Scoble. Thanks Steve Pavlina. Thanks Dave Winer. Thanks Adam Curry. Thanks Eric Sink. Thanks Jon Udell. Thanks Seth Godin. Thanks Jack Canfield. Thanks Harvey Mckay. Thanks Duane "Dog" Chapman. You have all inspired me to change the world.

NewsGator Online Services

Wed, 07 Jan 2004 22:33:57 GMT

I don't use NewsGator now but I can't wait to try NewsGator Online Services. There is a ton of potential for this type of service. Greg Reinacker and the rest of the NewsGator team seem poised to deliver a lot of the tools I want but am too busy to build myself. I can't wait to see what they come up with next.

Subscription API

Wed, 02 Jul 2003 05:59:10 GMT

Dave Winer is thinking out loud about developing a tool to harmonize subscriptions. Sounds awesome. While you're developing a protocol to do this, why not include the actual RSS feeds in the equation? There currently is no way (short of password protection) for a feed publisher to know how many unique subscribers it has to a feed. So why not ping the publisher at the same time you ping the feed harmonizer? [Derek Scruggs]

Subscription API: Group Subscriptions

Wed, 02 Jul 2003 02:16:04 GMT

Good idea. That would be even more interesting to us if we could use it to synch a bunch of subscriptions among several users. [Olivier Travers]

Something similar has been done with Groove and this is something a well specified API should accommodate. It'd be an easy to make sure that everyone is on the same page.

Subscription API

Wed, 02 Jul 2003 02:02:13 GMT

When you have a laptop, a desktop, and a computer at work that all have a different (well, same program) aggragator running, getting them all synchronized together is a pain. However, I don't feel Dave Winer's approach is really all that great. For instance, it doesn't allow for synchronization of the actual articles that have been read/unread in a given feed. It is also based on XML-RPC, which while UserLand invented that technology, seems to add a lot of unnecessary overhead to the whole communication layer. [ Ryan Gregg]

Subscription API

Wed, 02 Jul 2003 01:48:37 GMT

HA! I've actually already implemented this in Ruby. And it keeps track of which items you've read. Of course it has no admin interface to speak of. So adding new subscriptions is a pain. [Justin Rudd]

Yeah but what we really need is a well specified extensible API. I hope the community is patient and thinks this through before everyone jumps on a band wagon that paints us in to another corner.

FYI: NewsMonster users got a not-very-interoperable version of this feature with NewsMonster RC1 about a week ago.

Titles Matter

Sat, 31 May 2003 16:49:03 GMT

Basic functions of HTML doctitles:
Search engine results display

Search engine results weighting

Bookmark display
[Jon Udell] >

The very first change I made to BlogX was to fix the titles on the permalink page. I'm still waiting for the solution to many other BlogX problems though.

Patrick Steele Moved

Wed, 28 May 2003 16:22:19 GMT

Patrick Steele has a new home at .NETWeblogs. Welcome back Patrick.

OCS in RSS Bandit

Mon, 26 May 2003 00:00:33 GMT

Dare is adding OCS support to RSS Bandit.

ETag Support

Thu, 22 May 2003 07:40:50 GMT

I have a new RSS feed that supports ETag. The old feed is still active so if you don't care about wasting bandwidth feel free to continue using it. I won't move it again I promise ;-)

Note: The new feed doesn't support Last-Modified yet because I wasn't in the mood to fight RFC 822 dates.

Open Content Syndication

Thu, 22 May 2003 02:47:18 GMT

Bill Kearney says aggregators should use Open Content Syndication (OCS) to store their subscriptions. I was aware of OCS because that is NewzCrawler's default format and I had to deal with it when I migrated from NewzCrawler a few months ago.

Why didn't I mention OCS? Partly because it seems tailored more for content producers than content consumers, but mostly because it makes heavy use of the http://www.w3.org/1999/02/22-rdf-syntax-ns# namespace. Yes I know that isn't a good reason to ignore it but there you go. I doubt I'm the only one that looked at <rdf:RDF> and thought "no thanks I've got better things to do with my time".

I'm not dismissing OCS mind you. I'm just trying to understand how the cost of RDF complexity is justified for OCS.

RSSConnect

Thu, 22 May 2003 01:51:27 GMT

PerfectXML.com now has a page where you can read RSS feeds/blogs - a simple Web-based interface to read RSS feeds. Team PerfectXML will be adding some features (such as adding blog entries to favorites, searching, and other customizations), till then enjoy the RSSConnect at http://www.PerfectXML.com/RSSConnect [sellsbrothers.com]

It looks great. I'd love to be able to use something like that for reading my news remotely. Of course I'd still want to use Luke Hutteman's excellent SharpReader when I'm at my primary machine(s). If they both supported a common subscription format and a common API for managing the subscriptions I'd be able to do that.

I wonder if RSSConnect uses a caching proxy or if it downloads the RSS every time someone requests a feed.

P.S. I'm in the process of updating my RSS feed so it supports ETag and Last-Modified properly. It doesn't look like it is possible to do it from an ASMX but I may be missing something simple.