Le Sigh.

Writing is hard. Writing well is harder. Lately I've been working on trying to write some essays about the interface between business and the open source movement. Sort of my own take on Business 2.0. I've written some stuff (which I'll officially publish in a week or so, all going well), but I'm far from happy at the quality. Even so, so far its been like pulling nails.

Then, I see an essay like this which says what I want to say, and says it so much more clearly and concisely than I've managed. It makes it difficult to keep up the enthusiasm for what I am doing.

Credence.

Today on slashdot they were talking about Credence, a system for using collaboritve filtering in a reputation system. Its what peer-to-peer networks have needed for ages. I don't know how well this one has been implemented. The fact that its been put on top of the Gnutella network, which has scaling problems, doesn't (in my mind) bode well for its future use.

On the other hand, I'm very glad to see a first attempt at this. To think that _sps_ and I designed a better peer-to-peer file sharing system in 2000, and its only now that some of the parts are being created. The net seems to be about 2/3 of the way along in creating the components needed to do it right.

When am I going to have the money to do something like this, rather than waiting for others to do it?

Startups and Investors.

Heh. I just followed a link from one of the previous essays I pointed to, and found this page advertising an angel investor service. They certainly got my attention, what with calling themselves 'Y Combinator' (a term from operator theory) and saying that what they prefer to do is take an idea and help folks build a company around it.

I wonder if they deal with folks outside the US?