automated utilitarian hermeneutics party

The Google-Blogger party was interesting - a bugger of a drive up to SF, but a great venue, and I got to meet more people I only knew online. Odd to go into a room and not recognise anyone, then realise that you actually do know several of them...

Tim Oren and I took on Marc Canter on his 'video is special, and needs special treatment by routers' argument. I must write up this stuff soon, as it needs explaining.
Chris and Gretchen produced some bottles of Raging Cow. I can confirm that it tastes like off milk with high fructose corn syrup added, but as someone passing said, if you're drinking corn syrup, make sure it is high fructose. Raj found some silly hats.
Alex Cohen introduced me to Simon Perry, who was very taken with the mediAgora ideas.

Denise told me about the FareChase case, which could set a precedent making Google illegal - effectively, American Airlines has a court ruling that gives them control over which browsers can display their webpages, and whether further information can be derived from them. She also got me chatting to Chris Locke, using her very borg-like bluetooth phone earpiece.

I talked to various Blogger and Google people about ideas. Simple ones first:

Add a permalink link to each post in the lower pane of the Blogger editor. that way when I write a post, or find an old one there, I don't need to open the blog and find it again to mail the link to someone, or refer to it in another post.

Make damn sure the new Blogger supports a usable RPC posting API so that people can write non-browser based editors well. NetNewsWirePro is great, but it gets lots of errors back from the Blogger server, and it can't post Titles. It works much better with MT,

I also talked a lot about the 'voting links' proposal, and have been inundated by emails about it today. I'll blog a straw man proposal in the next entry. What I learned from Google people was that Google looks in the text of pages for signifiers to use as evidence, then analyses their actual utility in discriminating good links from bad, so think of it as automated utilitarian hermeneutics.