Category: TechBiz

I’ve been messing around with Perl in-between conferences at SxSW. What’s delighted me is how little I have to code because of CPAN, an archive of Perl Modules.

In order to write a simple RSS aggregator all I had to do was:
1) Create a class for fetching and saving the RSS.
2) Use a Perl module with web client functionality. (LWP::Simple)
3) Use a Perl module that can parse RSS. (XML::RSS::Parser)

my $lostdogs = Fetcher->new();
$lostdogs->feed("http://sfbay.craigslist.org/search/ccc/nby?query=lost%20dog&fo
rmat=rss");
$lostdogs->getfeed();
$lostdogs->savefeed('lostdogs.rss');

Now what if there was something like CPAN for JavaScript? Wouldn’t it make building all those AJAX apps easier? You wouldn’t have to be committed to either Dojo or YUI or Prototype.

Jakob Heuser introduced me to Tantek and Matthew Levine. My conversation went something like this:

Me: How’s it going with hiring PHP guys?
Tantek: We’re always hiring great talent.
Me: Really?
Tantek: Do you know about microformats?
Me: No.

At this point Tantek turned away from me and our conversation ended.

But Matthew Levine jumped in to help out by asking, “Do you have a website?”

Me: Yes
Matthew: Let’s add a microformat to it right now.

In less than half an hour we geeked out the right sort of microformat for my website and put it up on my contacts page.

It’s because of helpful folks like Matthew that SxSW is so enjoyable.

If you don’t know about microformats, I will not turn my back to you, and will no doubt help you out in the same way that Matthew did.

I’m wary every time I hear something new. I’m a bit wary of the idea that there’s progress in history. Instead, I like to think like Foucault, and what he said about ruptures in history.

Here’s a Wall Street Journal article on the Moguls of the New Media.

The essential idea is that the little guy can be a big player in the media world. But really there is nothing new in this. The success stories in the Wall Street Journal read like a Horatio Alger dime novel.

It’s great working in the tech industry and being part of this, and seeing outsiders storm in and take the buzz away from older, established forms of media, but we should really be weary, especially those of us who were here in the 90s.

The old rules, or the rules still apply. Money is still the power du jour, and remember AOL Time Warner? It’s now called just Time Warner.

What’s actually happening is the same thing that fueled the personal computer “revolution” of the 80s. Cheaper computers went hand in hand with greater demand. Cheaper means of communication qua new media means greater demand in that means of communication, too.

When I used to consult, I could work for a few websites, and barely get by. Maybe I didn’t charge enough, or maybe how I worked for these sites didn’t allow me to invest in the site.

What do I mean? If you work for just a few clients, you run the risk of one project backing your work up. This is true of any professional service company. A great example of this is ICon, a company that works to keep the IRS off other companies’ backs. Because the IRS fails to leverage the advantages of networked computing, ICon cannot work as efficiently, and therefore doesn’t make us much money as it could.

Many web consultants shy away from hosting responsibilities because it isn’t what they do, or because they’re afraid of the potential financial risks of hosting, but anyone who wants to make serious cash should seriously consider hosting. It’s one of the few areas, where increased charges to clients are easily justified, once a client’s site starts becoming a hit.

Do web firms that takeover hosting responsibilities make more money than web firms that don’t?

Share your thoughts.