Accept no substitutes

Author: Paul (Page 146 of 147)

What the Book Market Tells Us

Tim is setting up to talk to some energetic yet drowsy people about learning from the book market.
In the meantime, I check out Microsoft’s Channel 9 where you can listen in to engineers as you could listen in to pilots in the old days. Also of course the blogs of MSDN.

Tim is talkng about how BookScan (sorta like SoundScan) tells fairly accurately the sales of their top sellers by surveying top book sellers (amazon and borders are 16% of market each in US). Tim also uses some open source software that looks a lot like smartmoney’s map of the market to map various categories. He also crawls Amazon in smoe way that I missed but we’ll see that live in a few minutes,
computer book sales are off 15% so far this year from 2003 and the seasonal track looks nearly identical. why? no new tech solutions hit the market (no significant ones that required significant new books).

Why doesn’t Google do more with Zietgeiss (sp)? asks Tim. Stock prices of tech match nearly book sales trends on those topics. Java books tell about Sun stock for example. Not a leading indicator but a matching indicator.

This stage says Tim is the period of cleaning up on an ongoing basis the ontologies. the ontologies need to be clean and repositioned constantly (?) now.

Note that Java sales are dropping while C# is gaining and PHP is climbing sharper yet. Python is more or less flat after a little bleep up. PERL is flat despite no new developments in PERL in a long while (this is actually good for PERL. This is when looking at the language dimension.

msql and sqlserver are cleaning Oracle’s clock. postgress well very small.

applications servers chart is so small and with so few books that even one book changes the chart. basically not a good trend measure.

java vs .net .net rose above java in 4th Q of 2003 and remains higher. Note that intro books sells better as the market matures. Much discussion on this chart with lots of Java appologists

Market shift from reference to tips and tricks and intros. why? references are better done on the net.

microsoft leads open source despite OS upturn. apple spikes are each new release (as you might expect). who are these buyers? CS students, professionals, whatever. Note the number of CS majors worldwide are shrinking could this be a contributing cause?

Shapes of the curves for $$$ of sales looks a lot like Lotka’s curves.Photoshop books make money! Mac OS X or windows XP does about half. Java and C/C++ have identical curves! C# mostly sells only 4 or 5 profitable books.

but programming language sales show an 70 – 30 split between propriety — if java is considered open source. without java on either side they are equal.

In ad words on Google, Java rules based on charges.

See also Tim’s Treemap

What other sources of data might be used? Want ads? Blog entries? Free docs online? rural vs urban? price sensitivity. idiots are cheaper then dummies.

Morning of FOO

Up at 6ish PST. Walk down to the showers with Andy Oram,O’Reilly editor from Boston. There is an in-building shower, but Andy and I found the outside camping feeling showers. Three shower stalls smaller than many coffins. The sorta porta-johns of showers. The water works for about 1 minute then quits til you shove it again. All fiberglass and not all that warm. Perfect for the camping experience. Andy complained a little about the size of his shower. Tall people and wide people will appreciate them less than I did.

Coffee. Works better when all the parts are in the airpot.

Sleeping on the floor when you are very very tired is not so bad even once you have reached a certain age.

Geeks are up early and doing email and blogs. Reading their spam to each other as if it were unique. I too am guilty. (pictures later I promise maybe).

Tim kicks off the morning with a session on “What the Book market tells us” at 10 PDT so we have a couple of hours to show off our limited social skills and casual approaches to hygene.

Evening of FOO

Before I start in let me point to Seamus Heaney’s wonderful appreciation of Czeslaw Milosz in the Guardian, called “In Gratitude for All the Gifts”

Next, Yes I can stay awake for 24 hours straight. I did it. not meaning too. but nonetheless. FOO Camp is full of folks to talk with including several from across the years.

Dale Dougherty who I met as the Web was beginning when he was starting GNN for O’Reilly and who is now starting a mook/bagazine (not my terms) called Make, a kind of how-to do things techie rag. Basically a high quality quarterly paperback to be sold as book as the old American Heritage series or more locally to NC as the Red Clay Readers.

Dan Woods who I knew at Nando.net and who is now an O’Reilly author.

Wendy Seltzer who is an EFF lawyer (an seems too ambigious a word for Wendy).

Kathy Sierra
and her husband Bert Bates who I met on my first trip (I think) to Boulder’s Conference on World Affairs and who are now doing the HeadFirst series of books for O’Reilly.

Danyel Fisher who works with Marc Smith on Social Software and the like at Microsoft Development.

Chris DiBona once of VA now of Google.

Sam Ruby of IBM Emerging Technologies who lives right in Raleigh and who I met earlier this week at Doc’s talk.

Paula Le Dieu of BBC New Media who is looking at ways to make all of the BBC archives available on the net.

Brad Templeton who founded Clarinet and who is now with EFF. Ten years about almost to this day, I had a long email dispute wth Brad about how to do radio on the net — specifically WXYC which became the first 7/25 simulcast station (despite Brad’s misplaced fears). Brad remembers that he was right at the time considering the state of the Net. He wasn’t.

A good talk/session on Gmail led by Chris Uhlik (with help from Chris DiBona) started last night at 11 PDT and was interesting enough to keep me up much too late in the EDT sense. What would you like Gmail to be? What API should be provided?

During this talk a person (whom shall remain nameless and whose employer shall also remain nameless) was posting a critique (internal or external?). I didn’t mean to peek but I from what I saw it was a bit unfair. Like a Demo blogging the Repubs or the reverse. Offhand remarks seemed to be taken as ways to show how unsmart the Goolists are. Or maybe to reenforce the smartness of those who are less open. Any how the “not everyone is a programmer so why consider APIs a solution?” at the center of the critique. I’m of the “APIs are better than what was get from some companies” school.

FOO Camp arrival

We’re in warm and dry Sebastopol after a slow drive up 101 from SFO. Very slow and not intentionally so. We did stop for a lunch at 3:30 EDT for lunch near Union Square at Sears Fine Food (pictures to come).

Sebastopol is a small but very California town. Old drive in burger places but also Whole Foods and Bikram Yoga and Starbucks as well as a Crystal Shop that is not selling the kind of wedding presents you’d buy in Graham, NC. I will have pictures up later from the Camp which is growing even now.

I think the FOO Bar is getting ready to open and the afternoon is underway. So far the swag is lovely even if the campers are as lovely as you could expect.
One surprise is that Pamela Jones of Groklaw was scheduled to be here. Neither Fred nor I have even seen Pamela. But the new news is that she’s still in NYC. Flash: she emailed Fred a couple of hours ago.
More soon.

FOO Camp and beyond

We just had our monster meeting of all 400 folks who report to the Vice Chancellor for Information Technology to hear the new reorganization plan. There are still many things to be settled but the place is on its way to being more fully integrated and more fully functional.
That observed, Fred and I are off to FOO Camp in Sebastopol for a week end of sleeping on the floor and talking tech. Interesting and very smart people will be there, but I will be there too. I’m hoping that some of their brain cells will rub off on me.
This is an excellent example of social networking (class pay attention) of the type that Peter Coclanis was discussing only yesterday. Note that the O’Reilly folks have used a wiki so that we might all contribute to the discussions and social life in advance. Also many of the attendees have blogs and use them as one might use a business card to introduce themselves.

Enterpreneurs, economists, networks

At noon today I went to a talk by historian Peter Coclanis about the history of entrepreneurship as part of a program on Carolina Entrepreneurial Initiative . Odd to be there since I have been a kind of ward of the state for the past 25 years, but the topic turned to social networks and social capital. The trend in entrepreneural discussion seems to be about the importance of networks drawing on an argument between Granovetter and Ronald Burt. Burt would be useful for our class especially with his work on “Structural Holes” which sound a lot like some of what we heard in Doc’s talk. Burt and Nan Lin have collaborated in the past (nota bene seminar members).
Peter also made the case for commuities of creators (not his word) who were more “loyal to the craft than to the companies” and how this made an area endure and grow — citing silicon valley and RTP as examples.
One point made over and over was that creative enterpreneurs don’t really do anything new but they recombine and/or reuse existing ideas — Ford taking interchangable parts from Whitney via Colt and adding the assembly line taken from the slaughter houses.
I, who hold that all art is recombination — and so copyright should be weak to allow more art to be created –, have to pause when the entire of the myth of orginality goes out the window.

Later in the afternoon, I ran into Koleman Strumpf and his co-author F. Oberholzer who wrote “The Effect of File Sharing on Record Sales: An Empirical Analysis”, the paper that showed that P2P music trading has no economic effect.

Book recommended by Coclanis: How Breakthroughs Happen The Surprising Truth About How Companies Innovate by Andrew Hargadon

Doc’s talk

We had a very nice crowd for Doc’s talk today despite the rain which is approaching monsoon level as the remains of Francis approach the area. We should have video on the web and Doc should be posting his slides in the next day or so.
The talk was more marketing than blogging, an update on ClueTrain with some nods to Howard Dean (very much in passing) and to Linux and Linux culture (more than passing. this included a narrative by Doc’s youngest son told with plastic penguins — I hope he has these slides online soon).

Doc’s visit to my class

The nice thing about guest to a class like ours is that the guest can range around quite a bit and we’re small enough to absorb and even revel in that ranging. I sent Doc down memory lane by bringing up the fact that when he lived here in the early 70s that he was part of an intentional community, Oxbow. Doc is still interested in community and not completely accidential ones that build around physical proximity. So off we go.

Unlike the talk for this afternoon, Doc was allowed to tell his story with digressions and questions along the way. We were helped out by questions from some of the folks who work with me at ibiblio.org as well as Cori Dauber and Richard Vernon. (Richard was once Doc’s editor at Linux Journal).

I am still not sure if blogging and bloggers even when aggregated by Technorati constitute something called a “community.” I am becoming more convinced than before that blogging can become a part of ‘everyday life’ (thanks Barry Wellman) and can facilitate the creation, growth, and maintenance of communities. Perhaps blogs are one of the better examples of the ‘strength of weak ties.’

What it was was Football

Thanks to my position as consort to the Council Member, I was invited up to the Chancellor’s Box for the UNC vs William and Mary game on Saturday. My having gone to NCSU means that I can enjoy the game when UNC is really looking dumb. My having worked at UNC for over 25 years allows me to enjoy the game when UNC is really doing well. Luckily I had opportunity for both on Saturday. Although my technical knowledge of football all comes from Andy Grifiths’s “What it was was football” and my spiritual knowledge of the game comes from James Wright’s poem “Autumn begins in Martin’s Ferry, Ohio”, I had a grand time. With UNC behind by 3 in the fourth quarter, we had to leave. By the time we got to our car UNC had scored again (up by 4). By the time, we got out of the car at the store, UNC had scored yet again winning a pretty sloppy game 49 -38.

John Hood suggested links

http://www.johnlocke.org/lockerroom/ of which John says:

As you can see, it ranges widely; politics, history, economics,
pop culture, whatever. It is written by staff, affiliated fellows and
scholars, and a number of other folks we have “invited in”
and armed with appropriate passwords. It does not accept comments at this
time, as I’ll be happy to discuss.

Our “Raising the Issue” feature is a regularly scheduled debate between JLF
and the NC Justice Center on issues of mutual interest. It happens in
real time within our blog (another is scheduled for Thursday, that is
tomorrow — yikes) and will soon happen on theirs, too, when they
get one up.

Here’s the link:

http://www.johnlocke.org/raisingtheissue/

And here’s the announcement about it:

http://www.johnlocke.org/press_releases/2004052464.html

Notes from our second class

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