wow

FORTUNE Magazine: Warren Buffett gives away his fortune - Jun. 25, 2006

Thirty-seven billion dollars. That's the biggest charitable contribution -- ever.

Successories

This photo (taken by Michelle on our half dome trip a couple weekends ago) is just begging to be turned into one of those "Successories" motivational posters. I can see the title now:

EXHAUSTION
Think it's bad now? Guess what buddy, you've still got to get your ass off this mountain before sundown.

when brains, biology, and copyright meet

At tonight's NetSquared event in San Francisco, I listened to Creative Commons CTO Mike Linksvayer tell the story of how a group of environmentalists is working to subvert Monsanto's claim that it owns the copyright to the DNA of its genetically modified crops.

According to Mike, this group is working on cultivating related crops nearby whose DNA is licensed more openly, under the "free" Gnu Public License (GPL) scheme.

This is interesting because, according to the terms of the GPL, any work that is based on (derived from) another GPL-licensed work must also be released under a GPL license. So, if the Monsanto crops and the GPL-licensed crops were to cross-polinate and yield a hybrid crop, that would -- theoretically -- mean the hybrid was freely available.

Regardless of where you stand on Monsanto's policies or politics, or whether this would hold up in a court of law, you have to admit that this is an incredibly clever tactic.

half dome, 8am

Six hours later, we were standing at the top of it.

call me old fashioned

So it seems like everyone -- er, everyone in San Francisco -- okay, everyone in San Francisco tech circles -- ah, okay, fine, just a handful of very smart people -- is talking about Web 2.0 technologies these days. And while I do think the tools in this category have the potential to be used to accomplish a lot of great things, I'm a little frightened at what seems like an overbearing willingness to overlook the need to gradually integrate the new tools with the old, tried-and-true ones that we're all comfortable with.

Case in point: I recently said "aw, what the heck" and set up a wiki so that a group of friends could collaboratively plan a camping trip we're taking soon. While the wiki -- basically a shared whiteboard -- worked suprisingly well in that it reduced the number of emails and phone calls that we all had to send back and forth to plan the trip, I found it a bit of a pain to have to remember to check the wiki every evening to find out whether anyone had added anything new to the page.

So, I figured I'd just subscribe to the wiki and automatically get emailed each time someone updates the page. Not so easy. Wikispaces, the wiki provider that we're using, only lets you get notified of updates via an RSS feed -- another Web 2.0 technology.

The thing is: I don't always keep my RSS feed reader open and running. Plus, I like to check my email from multiple computers and multiple programs depending on where I am. So why can't I just get a simple email notification? What up, Wikispaces? Is email too old-fashioned to be cool?

come see me

I'm going to be giving a real brief talk at the Creative Commons Salon next Wednesday about how Creative Commons licensing is helping nonprofits get information about technology.

There will be other speakers, too, giving much more interesting talks and demos. Plus, it's at a bar (Shine) and there'll be "drinks and discussion." So if you'll be in San Francisco on Wed, June 14, from 6-9pm, drop on by and say hello.