The Gillmor Gang

Ray Ozzie is the guest on the latest edition of The Gillmor Gang. The lead developer of Notes and the founder of Groove Networks joins The Gang to look at big-picture issues. Innovation no longer flows from IT out, but from the consumer world to IT, and most innovation and growth is at the edge of the network. iPods are caches for iTunes on the desktops, which are in turn caches for the iTunes store. What does the future hold for VoIP and Skype, and what do the recent Longhorn announcements mean for ISVs? CRN's Michael Vizard returns as a Gang member.

Along with guest Michael Vizard, and with a week to think about it, The Gang considers the ramifications of Microsoft's Longhorn announcement: the stock market's non-reaction; implications for the channel and storage vendors; alternative user interfaces vs. Avalon/XAML.

The Gillmor Gang analyzes today's hot news: Microsoft will ship Longhorn in 2006 as originally announced, but without some important components. Is this good news or bad? Consider that they made the announcement late on a Friday. The Gang considers what this means for Microsoft, IT customers, open source and competitors.

Dave Sifry, founder and CEO of Technorati, and Mary Jo Foley, author of Ziff Davis' Microsoft-Watch.com, join The Gang. Ross Mayfield, CEO of Socialtext, is our special guest this week.

Steve Gillmor and Technorati's David L. Sifry have been working on something called Attention.xml for nearly a year, and this week they discuss the concept with the rest of The Gang. What is it? It's a specification for tracking, prioritizing and sharing what people are reading, looking at or listenting to in RSS and elsewhere.

Fresh from a great presentation at the O'Reilly Open Source Convention, R0ml Lefkowitz joins The Gillmor Gang including guest Gang member, Michael Vizard, to discuss the corporate IT world. Will Windows XP SP2 allow Microsoft to claim its products are more secure? Why can't large organizations move away from IE? (Why should they care?) Why aren't more vertical applications available in open source? And why do vendors open-source their proprietary code such as Sun's plan to release Solaris 10?

The Gillmor Gang, August 8, 2004. Some of the Gang members report from Linux World. (Doc says it's too much about what the vendors are doing. [clip].) Our guests from RealNetworks discuss their plans to open source components of their Helix line of products. They're using two licenses: GPL for open source and a commercial license for manufacturers who can't be bound by the GPL. Jon Udell continues to explain the need for random-access players and supporting URLs [clip] and standards and why he thinks players will ultimately become authoring tools. Dana Gardner weighs in on why multimedia has yet to catch on in the corporate world.

Dave Winer has had a huge impact on the Internet as we know it. Blogging and RSS? They might not exist if it weren't for Dave. Live from the Democratic National Convention, Dave joined The Gillmor Gang to discuss ConventionBloggers.com and the reaction it has received from the traditional press who have no idea what's under the covers. Dave says the DNC is "truly visionary" and have accepted this "technology transplant" but they probably don't realize what they've done. This could be the the turning point for RSS--when it becomes just another part of the infrastructure.

Where will blogging and RSS go? Deeper into local politics? Are RSS and the web as powereful as talk radio on a 50,000-watt AM station? Dave and The Gang also debate the importance and future of audio blogging and the need to link to or excerpt multimedia content. It's one thing to download a one-hour show to an iPod, but when you can blog a sound bite as easily as you can a text byte, then look for a boom. You'll hear this and much more in another great edition of The Gillmor Gang.

Our special guest, Dave Sifry, founder and CEO of Technorati, will be providing real-time analysis of the political blogosphere for CNN at next week's Democratic National Convention. Dave discusses this announcement and gives us his social and technical insights into Technorati: "tracking patterns of influence and authority in real time." 140+ servers give Technorati a huge grid-computing system, and Dave explains how their technology is different from traditional search engines. On open-source software, "We wouldn't exist without it." He even goes deep into the Postgres/MySQL debate.

Is this the start of Browser War II? Can Mozilla-based browsers corner 6% of the market by year end? And if they do, will they be targeted by the same crackers who go after IE flaws? Does the potential for "tag soup" sound like what Microsoft did to the browser market in 1996? This week's special guest is Brendan Eich, chief architect, Mozilla Foundation.

Special guest: Jonathan Schwartz (Sun) and guest Gang member, Michael Vizard (CRN Magazine). Solaris goes open source. Is Sun the low-cost provider because their oeprating system cost-of-goods sold are essentially zero? Will IBM buy Novell to acquire SUSE Linux?. Will Schwartz succeed in prioritizing its sales (and compensating its staff) according to the NPV of products and services? Will Wall Street let him do it? The Gang assesses the futures of Sun and its new president.