I’ve been sick for the past week and have spent most of the week nursing a cold and curled up with a book. It is has been a good fall for reading. Here’s what is on my list:

The Nine by Jeffrey Toobin.
This book on the last 20 years on the Supreme Court is a fascinating behind the scenes look at the Court and believe it or not — a page turner.

Then we came to the end by Joshua Ferris
This first novel has been nominated for a National Book Award. It’s a comic look at a failing advertising agency.

Tree of Smoke by Denis Johnson
Favored to win the National Book Award in Fiction. This is a big, absorbing novel about renegade CIA agents in Vietnam. It gets my vote as the best novel of the year.

Loving Frank
Fiction but based on the love affair between Frank Lloyd Wright and Mama Cheney. A good summerish read.

Laura Joh Rowland mysteries.
I’ve read three now. They are all set in 17th century Japan and feature a Samarai detective. Really fun and well written.

Brother, I’m Dying, by Edwidge Danticat.
This is a beautiful memoir based on the lives of her father and uncle. Edwidge was left in Haiti for 8 years after her parents moved to America. During this time she developed an extremely close relationship with her uncle. It is a vivid, beautiful, and tragic story of the life of Haitian immigrants.

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I installed Leopard on Friday and have been exploring it over the weekend. There are a few very nice improvements over Tiger and I think it is worth the $90 investment. (I bought a family pack with five licenses for $190.) Here is my take on it:

Leopard User Interface
The main change in Leopard is how you access and manage information. Apple has taken some of the innovation in UI from the iPhone and iTunes and incorporated these things into the UI for the Mac.

The Finder now incorporates Cover Flow from iTunes so you can scroll through documents within the major areas: deskop, home, documents, music, photos, etc. I don’t use the cover flow in iTunes so I’m not sure how much this is going to buy me in terms of document management. But it is pretty.

The Finder also saves all of your computer searches and organizes them as Today, Yesterday, and This Week. This is a quick way to get at things you have been working on.

There is quite a difference of opinion about the aesthetic quality of the new dock. It has a mirrored bar underneath the icons. The aesthetics are fine for me. But the big change is in the way the dock handles stacks. When you drag a folder to the dock, it opens up like a fan so that you can see all of its contents (which can be sorted along a number of parameters.) I can see this as a useful way to manage multiple project files.

The Finder now aggregates all of your images, movies, and documents into groups that can be scanned through cover flow. This is a nice way to quickly review what you’ve got.

Leopard also gives you a new Dock, which is a nice aesthetic improvement. I like the Stacks feature of the dock which allows you to drop folders onto the dock. When you click on these folders, they open like a fan and you can quickly find things inside. This is another shortcut to getting to things on your computer. And there is a new downloads folder that stores all of the downloads from mail and firefox (if you set the preferences to drop things there). This is another nice organizational improvement.

The Rest
Leopard includes improvements in Mail, iCal, and .mac integration. I now use gcalendar and gmail so I won’t be taking advantage of much these things. Mail now has nicely integrated to-do lists and notes, as well as RSS feeds in the Mail finder.

Spotlight has been improved and is much faster. It also has an integrated dictionary that gives you results in wikipedia, thesaurus, and the Apple database. This is actually really nice and handy.

iChat has a whole bunch of improvements. You can send text messages from iChat windows. You can also record video and audio chats. This is very useful for doing podcast interviews (with people on macs). And there is a chat theater presentation system, which I am interested in exploring.

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Flock just launched its new browser with facebook integration and I have to say that it is fantastic. The left hand column contains the status updates from my friend’s network. I know this would have been critically important to me in college and now it is just a nice, tacit way to stay in touch with my pals. It is just kind of nice to know what people are doing.

Flock also has a very nice integration with flickr and facebook media. I can open a tool bar that shows all my friend’s recently added photos. This morning I looked at Pito’s shots of his recent trip to Hawaii and some wonderful family photos from Tim Halle.

Flock has good integration with del.ici.ous and a built in blog editor. Techcruch complained about posting images from the blog editor. I’ll stick with Ecto for that purpose but I plan to use Flock as my “social media browser.”

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I have been following the fire on CNN but if you want an extraordinary view of images from many perspectives, check out the term “San Diego Fire” on Flickr.

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I have been a Linked In user for a couple of years now. This month I decided to upgrade myself to a paying account in order to take advantage of inmail (Linked In’s service that allows you to email others with whom you have no direct connection) and to canvas my network about an introduction to the South By Southwest conference in Texas.

My current account level allows me three in-mail introductions per month and membership in the Open Link network. Based on my experience in the past week since I upgraded, I really feel like the benefits are well worth the costs.

I started by canvassing my network about an introduction to someone at the SXSW conference. Within 15 minutes, I got a direct link to the guy I was looking to meet. I also reconnected with a number of folks in my network who were curious about my request.

Then I used In-Mail to contact two people with whom I am trying to develop a business partnership. Both are extremely busy CXOs. Both responded within a couple of days of my request.

We are just beginning development on our Swift platform for conferences. (We expect to be ready to demo in early December.) V1 will have Facebook integration so that you can network around conferences using the Swift application for Facebook. Linked In is busy working on opening up its API for applications like Swift. We hope that Linked In opens up quickly because I can imagine deriving even more value from networking via Linked In around conferences I am attending. Being able to contact people who are also attending conferences with similar interests or people whom I would like to meet would certainly be a driver for upgrading my Linked In membership further.

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This is a good video presentation on where Facebook is headed. Here are my notes on it:

Facebook doesn’t have access to our real social network. Our phone has this information. But we have to hack around in the social networking services.

Facebook growing 1 percent per day
Applications growing 2 percent per day
87 percent of the usage goes to 2 percent of the apps
Top 50 apps looks like the long tail
Graph with 5000 is almost flat

O’Reilly print book market has the long tail characteristics on facebook.

On facebook are the top apps are taking off like wildfire and the rest are languishing.

Apps at the top are peaking out. The longer the apps are out, the growth is slowing.

Tim defines web 2.0: Systems that harness networks effects that get better the more people use it.

Dan Bricklin: Cornucopia of the commons.
Three ways to build a collective database: 1) you pay people (Yahoo). 2) Volunteers do this (Wikipedia) 3) Peer to Peer file sharing (it happens naturally).

Architecting systems so that they get smarter automatically is a key breakthrough in web 2.0.

Harnessing Collective Intelligence: every true web 2.0 company is building a database whose value grows in proportion to the number of participants. Accelerating returns to the winners.

Right now Facebook has that characteristic. But it could be better.

Google automatically extracts meaning from linking activity - use that to deliver user facing services - google automates
finding out how to make participation authonomic. It just happens.

Facebook has some automation there. One of the problems is that I don’t have much control over it. Facebook now requires too much manual work. Like authenticating friend requests.

Social networking has a long way to go until it becomes the web 2.0 address book.

Facebook is working from the outside in because the phone company which has all the data should be doing it.

Mining email and showing the top contacts and automatically extracting address book data from it. Click to call, email statistics.

Web 2.0 is about the future of the internet operating system. Subsystem is not about devices; higher level data subsystems.

Even though facebook is describing itself as a platform it is a subsystem platform. Not the whole thing.

Who is going to own these subsystems into the larger Internet operating system.

Two types of platforms: one ring to rule them all (Microsoft). small pieces loosely joined. (the web). The future social of networking is going to include small pieces loosely joined.

Facebook and others will work together to build together to build a small pieces loosely joined of the social graph.

Questions you need to ask yourselves: are you doing everything you can to build applications that learn from your users?

Facebook applications take this approach: learn from your users and take that and turn it into an application that serves the users.

Does my application get better with more users? Turn more into less. Once I have a certain number of friends, how do I do more smart filtering on that? What data do you own?

Data is the intel inside - source of competitive advantage - unique data resources that are growing through user activity.

Is the platform you are using? Does it give you and users control or take it away?

One of the challenges for facebook is you have to create more value than you capture.

What I want from the social graph?

I want social networking to reflect my real social network.

I want my social network to help me manage my connections.

Two classes of people: people we already know; friends of the company; then there are cool people who are doing interesting things. Who are the emerging superstars in fields I don’t know? I want to be able to manage this information. It is all on the premise that these people are your friends.

I want to be able to put people into groups: here is a field I am following and I want to manage that independent of whether I know them or not.

I want fined grained control over what I see and what I ignore. Take data in the minifeed and have control over it. I don’t want to see the tweets but I do want to see their blog posts. Because I want to discover interesting people.

Purpose built social networks: geni.com. Genealogy sites.

How do we build special purpose social network? Now we have that data. When somebody shows up in facebook, we can check Swift for what conferences we are going to? And who is speaking?

Facebook doesn’t give me any choice between friends and other.

Interesting ideas at 3base for any kind of data. Data graph of relationships.

Crowdvine. Social network for people to at one of our events. Tagging. People tag their company.

Jaiku.

Think ahead of the curve. All of the social networks work together to share data and get increasingly intelligent.

Spend as much time as you can thinking far out along that curve. Thinking about smart presence on the phone.

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This week’s New Yorker has a very good article by Alex Ross on why the Internet has been great for classical music.

Ross starts with a rundown of the hundreds of music blogs that have emerged over the past few years.

Now I find myself part of a jabbering community of several hundred blogs, operated by critics, composers, conductors, pianists, double-bassists, oboists (I count five), artistic administrators, and noted mezzo-sopranos (Joyce DiDonato writes under the moniker Yankee Diva). After a first night at the Met, opera bloggers chime in with opinions both expert and eccentric, recalling the days when critics from a dozen dailies, whether Communist or Republican or Greek, lined up to extoll Caruso. Beyond the blogs are the Internet radio stations; streaming broadcasts from opera houses, orchestras, new-music ensembles; and Web sites of individual artists. There is a new awareness of what is happening musically in every part of the world. A listener in Tucson or Tokyo can virtually attend opening night at the Bayreuth Festival and listen the following day to a première by a young British composer at the BBC Proms.

Then he points to a new web service from the San Francisco Symphony called Keeping Score.

Perhaps the most constructive digitization of classical music is taking place on a Web site called Keeping Score, which is hosted by the San Francisco Symphony. Michael Tilson Thomas, the San Francisco’s music director, has set a new standard for educational programming with a series of behind-the-music radio and television broadcasts. To accompany the TV shows, which delve into canonical works such as Beethoven’s “Eroica” Symphony and Stravinsky’s “Rite of Spring,” Tilson Thomas and the orchestra have set up high-tech pages where listeners can follow the score bar by bar, stop to listen to the conductor’s explanations of the particulars, and see musicians demonstrate how Stravinsky reinvented their instruments.

The “Explore the Score” web service, which links the music of the piece to the orchestral score, is one of the best implementations of learning for the web I have seen so far. This is something that could only be done on the web. It is beautifully produced.

Ross goes on to describe how the classical music recording house, Naxos, has now made its catalog available online for $19.95 per month. Music is streamed and played with a flash player inside the browser. The catalog is extensive and includes jazz and folk as well as classical music.

And classical music is even finding its way to You Tube.

The Grand Valley State University New Music Ensemble, from the farmlands of Allendale, Michigan, provides a case study in how new technology is playing to classical music’s benefit. Last year, part of the group travelled to New York to attend Steve Reich’s seventieth-birthday festival at Carnegie Hall and participate in a workshop. The Grand Valley’s director, Bill Ryan, wrote a firsthand account of the visit for the Web site NewMusicBox, introducing his ensemble to a wider audience. In June, they performed Reich’s “Music for 18 Musicians” at Bang on a Can’s annual marathon concert in downtown New York; their time slot was five in the morning, but, for reasons that no one could quite understand, some four hundred listeners showed up to hear them play. The ensemble’s recording of “Music for 18” is being released this week on the Innova label, its arrival heralded by a striking video “trailer” on YouTube, which ingeniously contrasts Reich’s hyper-urban music with shots of rolling cornfields. The Michigan musicians play with glistening precision, yet they also bring out the variously jubilant and wistful emotions beneath the surface of Reich’s score. The result is a vibrant recording that deserves to leap from the new-music ghetto onto the mainstream charts.

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This morning my pal Pito gave me a tour of the about-to-be-released Blogbridge 6.0. Blogbridge remains my favorite aggregator. It runs on the desktop but can be easily synchronized from computer to computer. When the firmware update fried the logic board of my Macbook Pro last week, I downloaded Blogbridge to Harry’s Macbook (my emergency back up machine) and sychronized with my stored bookmarks and was good to go.

Blogbridge 6.0 has some great new features. The two main improvements are:

What’s Hot and Statistics.

What’s Hot canvases all of the feeds in your aggregator and then gives you a nice summary of what is being actively linked to. This morning when I fired up Blogbridge 6.0 and scanned the what’s hot menu, I found a pointer to Bit Torrent’s new content delivery service. It just popped up, no scanning through lots of feeds on my end. This is definitely how I’m going to start my day with Blogbrige.

The statistic’s feature tracks how you use Blogbridge and lets you know where you are spending your time. This is also a nice way to monitor my own usage.

There were also significant performance improvements in this version of Blogbridge. It loaded very quickly.

At this point, I could not live without an RSS aggregator. And while I’ve tried them all, I keep coming back to Blogbridge. It just works really well for me.

And I just signed up for the highest level service plan, which allows me to publish directly from Blogbridge to my blog. Very nice integration with wordpress.

Pito says Blogbridge 6.0 should be released shortly. You can download 5.1 here. (It is free.) And track the rss feed for the blogbridge blog to find out when 6.0 is officially released.

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Check out this post from MacSlash:

Apple has set a date for those who are willing to risk updating to a .0 version of a new OS. Leopard will be available on October 26 according to Apple’s website, which is also taking pre-orders for the OS. It’s safe to assume that MacOS X 10.5 Leopard Server will be available at that point or shortly afterwards, as well

(from: Leopard Available October 26)

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Tim O’Reilly has been writing about his requirements for a social network operating system that is both portable and interoperable.

Every explicit social networking site, which is trying to reconstruct my social network by asking me to invite people and approve their invitations, is crying out for access to my true social network, which (to the extent it exists online) is locked up in applications that don’t think of themselves as social networking applications at all.

I believe the biggest question facing developers of online communities is how they deal with the emergence of Facebook as “the” social network operating system. There is a movement afoot to have one, open source place where your social graph resides. Social graph is defined as the global mapping of everybody in your network and how they are related. The problem is having to register on multiple social networks and “declare your friends and contacts.”

I have written about this before in terms of having a home for your profile. Here’s what I said in January:

What I need is a place for my profile that can be plugged into any web service I join. And by plugged in I mean can dynamically draw text, bookmarks, images, and videos from all of these services and build them into a dynamic view of what’s going on now.

After thinking about this for some months in the context of Swift, our new service for conference organizers, I have come to believe that my blog is the home for my public profile and Facebook (and eventually Linked In when the api opens up and is comparable to the facebook api) is my social network operating system. I am doubtful about the success of the open social graph. I think Facebook just has too much momentum and will serve as the defacto operating system for now. As long as it keeps innovating, it will probably remain so.

That means that online communities will not be able to compete for attention and participation unless they integrate with Facebook. From now on online communities will be defined by individuals and their needs and preferences. I live on Facebook and on my blog and I’m not going to relocate. But I will participate as long as participation is seamlessly integrated with where I already live online.

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