Alex Hopmann’s Blog

Today I moved the site to WordPress. There are still some aspects of the styling that I want to clean up, but this should be good for now and should make it easier for me to post more. The DNS switch-over might take a day or two to work consistently- I’m hoping it will settle faster than it did for the Launch21 switch-over.

I’m also switching the RSS feed over to feedburner. Again, I’m hoping it all goes smoothly- ideally the old URL should redirect to the feedburner URL shortly, but I’m not positive how well that will work with all readers.

I’m planning on moving this blog to WordPress soon. I’ve been using my own hand-rolled software for years and so far its worked out ok. On the plus side it keeps me in deep with various of the latest blog technologies, having to hand-roll them myself. As I wrote on a post over on the new Launch21 blog, the lack of good tools to post make it harder for me to update things frequently and it is just not worth it.

Launch21.com is running on WordPress now, but it will probably take a bit longer to move this site there since I’ll want to preserve pretty much all of the old URLs for search engines. Hopefully not too long.

Matt from Judy’s book finally started writing a blog and is off to a quick start with a flurry of interesting posts. I’m always a fan of interesting discussions about how to balance innovation, execution, etc. There was an interesting talk at the Northwest Entrepreneurs Forum by Shaun Wolfe, CEO of MessageGate. He called execution “system” and talked about a classic triangle balancing time, system, and innovation. One of his key messages was that its really key for a startup to understand when is the right time to invest in system (process, infrastructure, global scaling, reducing costs, more predictability), given the inevitable impact that has on innovation and rapid development.

On another random topic, Eric asked about what would be a good video card to drive his new Plasma TV nicely and I pointed him to this AnandTech article on HDMI/HDCP capable
video cards. For a “TV” you want to find something that supports an HDMI connector at 1080P to get the best results, and ideally that supports the crappy HDCP copy protection stuff so you can play high-def video content.

Dave asks
“Is the Semantic Web (Web 3.0) Dead on Arrival?” over on his blog. This reminds me a bit of some of the stuff I was trying to get at when I wrote about the history of RSS, although as usual my writing approach was the boring one and Dave did a great job coming out with an attention grabbing headline.

Some of the general concepts of the Semantic web are great, but the presentations I’d seen never included compelling user scenarios that made me really want to get it. In terms of the Vista marketing, there was no “wow” moment. Furthermore the technical approach was very dry, complicated and impractical.

Microformats and some of the other current trends on the web are a much more reasonable way to go about this kind of thing. Strip down complexity, make it work with the existing infrastucture and let people wire it together. The W3C vision around RDF and whatnot requried people to adjust how they expressed all their data, build new query engines, new outputs of their data from their apps. Ironically for a thing called the Semantic web, it required you to strip the semantics out of your data. From an architectural point of view there are good arguments for this seperation of data and semantics, but it rarely fit in well with any web-sites business strategy.

In other news the new Bloc Party album, A Weekend in the City is out and its available on eMusic immediately. This is a huge score for eMusic and it seems like they would be crazy to not sponsor (or otherwise have a presence at) the Bloc Party tour this spring. I see that they do have a big animated add for the album on their homepage, so it is clear that they get what a big deal this is for them. Of course Bloc Party’s own web-site advertises downloading it from iTunes complete with evil DRM that Steve Jobs, despite his letter yesterday, hasn’t removed. Given that Bloc Party obviously allows non-DRM protected distribution of thier stuff, this would be a good “put up or shut up” for Mr. Jobs.

Many blogs have referenced Steve Job’s Thoughts on Music post today. While it is absolutely true that this is a propaganda statement in his battle with EU regulators, and that Steve’s business is benefiting greatly from DRM right now, it doesn’t matter. The fact that he came out and said this so clearly in public hopefully will help turn the tide away from DRM. Bill Gates in effect said something similar a few weeks ago when chatting with some bloggers but not in as public a way and certainly not as clearly.

For now I’m going to continue to support eMusic as much as possible as a great place to get DRM-free music. Some quick research shows that I can find over 30 of the bands playing at Coachella there so I’m well on my way downloading an album or two from each to decide what I want to go see. I’ve heard that other services are experimenting with DRM free music and if they do I’ll be eager to support them too.