( This is a reply to osunderdog's Telecommuting, who wins? as a seperate blog post since commenting seems to be disabled )

Keyword:Flexibility

Telecommuting can allow you to employ and retain staff who become home-bound due to accident, sickness or pregnancy of themselves or their dependents.

Telecommuting can allow you to quickly set up off site workplaces in case of disaster or demand for temporary expansion.

Telecommuting can allow staff critical to continued business operation to take extended holidays and remain accessible in an emergency.

For many years I have heard coworkers ask about telecommuting. "When
will we be able to work from home" they would ask. Usually they would
ask this during the open questions section of a company update
meeting. I could just barely make out the slight eye roll of the
manager that would eventually answer the question.

I'm putting up my public notes on Steve Jobs keynote here, with special thanks to Steve Gillmor, who's providing the connectivity. In a long-standing Apple practice, there's no Internet access here.

No big news yet. A nice FM radio for the iPod. Big sales for iPods and the retail stores. 40% of new cars in the U.S. will have iPod integration. Big silo.

New tool for photographers: Aperature. "A quantum leap" says one of the photogs feeatured in the video. Album layout on screen. Handles RAW, fast, he says.

New widgets, with OS X 10.4.4, out today.

I've been developing software professionally for about 13 years now.
The first 12 years of my career were spent at a Semiconductor company
in Idaho. It's probably not hard to figure out which one I'm talking
about as there is only one left. But that's another story.

Recently I was recruited to Savannah, GA to work for a friend at a
startup he was forming. I was lured by the opportunity to work in a
new manufacturing environment where things were just starting. An
opportunity to make quite a few of those initial IS decisions.
Hopefully I could make them right the first time. The title, CIO,

On the Front Lines in Las Vegas is my latest SuitWatch at Linux Journal.

The background for the piece, I just realized upon re-reading it, is Larry Lessig's 2002 Free Culture speech, where he challenged technologists — makers of the future — to fight those who were opposing it with increasing success.

A year later Larry was calling this fight a civil war between Northern and Southern California: between Silicon Valley and Hollwood.

What I fear we are now learning, from Intel and Apple and Microsoft, is that the real division is between those who favor freedom and those who favor control. And that there are no big companies on the freedom side — not even in Silicon Valley.

Are there? Show me one who is willing to stand behind what Larry Lessig has been saying, for years, about the fight for free markets and free culture.

The technology community that matters is comprised of ronin. Free agents. Independent operators. These are the people standing together on one side of this fight.

And now, I fear, the fight will be with the companies we hoped would fight for us. In some cases our own employers.

So, naturally, I look for help. Today began with a visit to Terry Heaton, a broadcasting veteran who consults the commercial television business. Terry is the best thinker about What's Actually Happening in and around that business. This morning, fortuitously, he treats us to some important wisdom in 2006: The Unbundled Awakening. Here are the core paragraphs:

How I Blog

Hmmm, OK, so Frank... you want to know how I blog. Right? I take that to mean the nuts and bolts stuff. If that's not what you meant, then tough, because that's what I'm gonna write about here. And the first thing I'll tell you is that I'm in a crappy mood. Well, a little crappy. I guess I've seen worse. I guess I've seen a whole hell of a lot worse, so I should cheer up and get on with it, I suppose. But a little bit grumpy, anyway. So watch it.

In keeping with my theme of the day...

DNS is a useful abstraction of IP address, because servers and services shouldn't be tied to a specific network location.

I'll be having an on-stage conversation with Jonathan Schwartz of Sun Microsystems at Syndicate tomorrow morning. So I'm looking for some help with questions. Especially as they relate to the theme of the show, which is syndication.

Blogging chief executives are a rare breed, and Jonathan is among the best of them. He's also a very bright guy with original takes on a lot of subjects.

For a sample, here's an excellent podcast of an interview of Jonathan several months back, by Quentin Hardy of Forbes. And here's Jonathan's blog post about it. And here's a nice piece by Jim Grisanzio about one point Jonathan makes in it.

The Syndicate conference starts at 8am here in San Francisco. I'm giving the opening remarks. In the spirit of syndication itself, I decided I'd rather blog what I'm going to say, rather than prepare slides about it.

After the opening wisecracks — which will probably include something about what it really means to be the conference "chair" (Please move your ass off my lap. Thank you.) — I'll tell the story of how Dave Winer got me started blogging more than six years ago, and how without his help I might just be another tech writer making money on the side telling clueless companies how to market stuff.

I'll talk about Dave's original vision of the writeable Web, and how there never has been a more empowering concept than his original "Edit This Page".

Except, of course, syndication. Dave drove that too. He was the guy who turned RSS from "Rich Site Summary" to "Really Simple Syndication".

Blogging and syndication are on one side of a split in the Web, as it grows outward and upward like a tree, that is revealed by the difference between "site summary" and "simple syndication".

On one side is the Static Web of sites that we architect and build and construct, at locations with addresses. On the other is the Live Web of pages that we write or author and publish and syndicate, and which can be browsed or subscribed to.

Tim Berners-Lee conceived the Web in the first place as a set of documents, linked to each other. But for a half-decade or more after the browser became popular, we thought of the Web primarily in real estate terms, as a set of sites. Because that's what the tools supported, and that's how we thought about what we did on the Web.

That's also what search engines supported as well. Everything in a URL east of the domain name is a haystack. It has no directory and barely any structure, besides a series of slashes between words. Each slash is a file folder. The static Web is essentially a vast mess of files inside file folders inside file folders. The miracles we call Google and Yahoo are how we find needles in the Web's haystack.

The live Web, however, has a kind of organization. As a living thing, written by human beings in the dimension of time, it goes domain/year/day/date/post. That's how it's organized, even if each URL doesn't exactly conform to that layout.

It also has categories, called tags. This is a new thing we'll be talking about over the next couple days. What matters is that, like blogging and RSS, it's driven by individuals and independent developers. Not by the big guys.

Here's the biggest fact about the live Web: individuals are in charge. The group we used to call consumers are now producers. The demand side is supplying itself. Dealing with that fact, and taking advantage of it, is the biggest challenge and opportunity for everybody who wants to succeed in the live Web.

Think about photography for a minute. Used to be we consumed film and processing and showed prints to a few friends and family members before they went in drawers or albums on shelves in our homes. Now we produce our own photography, publish it on Flickr or BuzzNet, tag it and share it with thousands or millions of people, in a form where it is interesting and useful and completely drives the whole photography business, far more, in the long run, than any brand, even Kodak, ever did.

So there is a new balance of power in the world, that we're seeing first in the live Web. Now individuals are in charge of their own lives, their own livings, and the things they do in the world, many of which involve production of goods like we've never seen before.

That's the new context.