Ben and Mena come to London...

Grok Headline matches for Ben and Mena come to London...

Ben and Mena come to London

Ben and Mena come to London 07/10/2004 04:58 AM
weather presenter .. Tom Coates .. more

plasticbag.org/archives/2004/07/ben_and_mena_come_to_london.sht ml
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Open maps of London event: April 14,
London

Open maps of London event: April 14,
London 04/04/2005 06:24 AM
Cory Doctorow: The Open Knowledge Forums are a series of lectures and panel discussions about the ways that "open knowledge" can benefit the public interest. The next one is a week away, in London, and it's about a plan to produce a set of public domain maps of London (London's maps were produced at tax-payer expense, but can't be freely used; rather, you have to pay the ordinance survey thousands of pounds for the privilege; by contrast, US government maps are free and plentiful, and form the basis for thousands and thousand of competing mapping efforts, from Michelin guides to Google Maps).

There are a number of interesting proposals for this, including deploying an army of GPS-wielding geohackers, and buying up Russian satellite photos of London. Check out this squib from last January's NTK:

London's geowanking fraternity have come up with an intriguing proposition. With a grand's worth of Russian 1-meter resolution satellite pics, they believe they can stitch together an entirely free, redistributable vector database of the capital, freed from the shackles of the Ordnance Survey's restrictive copyrights, and thus open to all manner of GPL-style repurposing.

Here are the details:

* When: Thurs April 14th 2005, 7-9pm

* Where: Stanhope Centre, Marble Arch, London. [WWW]Directions

* Who can attend: public. Registration is optional but useful so please notify us if you can via okforums-info@okfn.org.

* Speakers: Steve Coast of openstreetmap.org; Roger Longhorn (geodata policy expert); Giles Lane of urbantapestries.net; Jo Walsh of mappinghacks.com

Link

Ben and Mena, I take it all back!

Ben and Mena, I take it all back! 12/23/2003 12:23 AM
Ben and Mena Trott have made up in a big way for their earlier silence on future plans for MovableType. In a series of postings on Six Apart and MovableType, they have announced release of a security update to MT, support for Atom 0.3, and a feature list and time frame for MovableType 3.0.. It all sounds great, and to my surprise it seems that they intend to keep the current pricing structure, e.g. free for non-commercial use. I hereby volunteer to be a Beta tester. I and some others have complained publically and privately to about the lack of news regarding MovableType. I received some kind private email from Mena, but this kind of an announcement demonstrates better than anything that the Trotts listen to user feedback, and that they have not forgotten their first users. It makes me feel a little sheepish about my earlier criticism -- I hope that it was useful, in the way it was intended to be. Certainly the least I can do now is volunteer as a Beta tester and send some of my Christmas pin money their way, to help pay for all the engineering and usability work. To Ben and Mena and the rest of the team at MT/SA, thanks for all the news, and thanks for the hard work that it represents....

"Mena による久し振りの長文
Entry"

"Mena による久し振りの長文
Entry" 07/14/2004 10:18 PM

some clarification from Mena at Six
Apart

some clarification from Mena at Six
Apart 05/15/2004 07:05 PM
addressed some of these concerns today .. The Movable Type 3.0 FAQ .. posted a clarification .. this link to an update .. Mena and the changes .. explanation .. firestorm .. go over

sixapart.com/log/2004/05/movable_type_30.shtml
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IT Conversations: Ben and Mena Trott -
Six Apart

IT Conversations: Ben and Mena Trott -
Six Apart 05/16/2004 03:15 PM
Ben and Mena gave a great interview here .. Ben und Mena Trott interviewt

itconversations.com/shows/detail121.html
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nice interview with ben and mena

nice interview with ben and mena 05/15/2004 07:09 AM
i like the part at 12:00 where mena gets genuinely choked up talking about how kind our users are

help ben and mena get on Yahoo! Most
Emailed

help ben and mena get on Yahoo! Most
Emailed 02/18/2004 09:35 PM
if our blogging tool was called "pair of boobs and a kitten" we'd already be number one

mena holds a gun to my head

mena holds a gun to my head 08/04/2004 03:21 PM
this is how we motivate workers at six apart

Ben and Mena make the Fast 50

Ben and Mena make the Fast 50 02/16/2004 01:17 PM
i am always amused by lists that treat the Trott as a single entity

mena on salon's six apart article

mena on salon's six apart article 08/09/2004 04:40 PM
it's always nice to have an outside perspective

Dear Ben and Mena, Thanks for lunch!
[Flickr]

Dear Ben and Mena, Thanks for lunch!
[Flickr] 02/05/2005 10:08 PM

Mena Trott steps down as SixApart CEO

Mena Trott steps down as SixApart CEO 07/14/2004 03:38 PM
Mena Trott has stepped down as CEO of SixApart, makers of Movable Type and TypePad, in favour of Barak Berkowitz, one of their Series A investors. Mena's written a heartfelt appreciation of Barak that is an instant classic -- a unique example of a company founder's sincere desire to see her efforts bear fruit, even if she's not's in charge any longer (though she's staying on as President).

At our office, we had phone cables running up and down walls and doorframes and across the floor. This mess was around for months until one day Barak came to work with a T-shirt, some tool-belt type thing and some device to do phone wiring. During the course of the afternoon, Barak installed our phone lines and cleaned up the office.

Incidentally, while he was doing this, Maile, our administrative assistant came in for her first interview with us and saw Barak. A week or two later when we called her in for a second interview I asked that she speak with Barak so that he could interview her as well. After we hired Maile and explained who Barak was she laughed and said "Oh, I thought he was the handyman and that this company really liked to get everyone involved!"

Link (via Kottke)

"Mena on comment spam and the new
version of MT"

"Mena on comment spam and the new
version of MT" 12/24/2004 01:00 PM

Ben and Mena Trott: You forgot to dance
with who brung ya

Ben and Mena Trott: You forgot to dance
with who brung ya 05/14/2004 03:25 AM
After I wrote the post this morning, Ben and Mena Trott sucker punch the weblogging community, I had second thoughts about it, especially the title, which has a moralistic and judgmental tone that isn't appropriate. If it wasn't for my belief that it is almost always dishonest to rewrite something that you have already published (and that others have linked to), I would take the post down. Instead, I'm writing a new version of it: As I said earlier, Six Apart has the right to charge whatever the market will bear for their labor. So why are people so outraged, and why is it a questionable business decision? Is it just because Movable Type users are a bunch of whiners who want something for nothing, as some believe? I don't think so. Six Apart is reneging on a very public promise, and is treating the people who helped make Movable Type a success very poorly. A little history from a long-time user: Movable Type owes its success first of all to Ben and Mena having done a great job designing, implementing and updating a product with an excellent user interface and superb documentation, and secondly to having it ready at just the right time to catch the blogging wave. But the third factor in Movable Type's success was the army of evangelists and contributors who sold the products to their friends, businesses and community organizations, and who contributed bug reports, bug fixes, responses on the bulletin boards, and great plug-ins. In many ways, Movable Type was treated by the community like a Free Software project, which it wasn't. But the ethos of the MT 2.x license, if you make money off this software you have to pay, if you don't you don't, was very similar to that of MySQL and other open source companies, so people, in spite of warnings, ignored the significant differences between it and free open source. From a business point of view, Movable Type Personal was the seed product, or the loss- leader, that sold Movable Type Commercial. The other part of the history is that when Six Apart got VC funding and shortly thereafter started work on TypePad, it stopped work on its already announced 3.0 product, but didn't say anything publically about it for many months. Meanwhile, the Movable Type comment spam problem started and quickly threatened to grow to unmanageable proportions. As resentment...

mena on tightly knit bonds in bl0gging

mena on tightly knit bonds in bl0gging 07/09/2004 12:06 PM
the real weblog revolution and a defense of personal weblogs

MENA Mobile Subscriptions 60% below
Market Potential

MENA Mobile Subscriptions 60% below
Market Potential 09/13/2004 03:17 AM
The Middle East & North Africa region has only 45m current subscribers from an addressable mobile market of 115m. This large spread emphasizes the tremendous pent up demand and the profitability potential awaiting the mobile operators best suited to tackle this regions needs. [PRWEB Sep 13, 2004]

"Meg, Ev, Paul Bausch, Ben, and Mena are
PC Magazine's People of the Year"

"Meg, Ev, Paul Bausch, Ben, and Mena are
PC Magazine's People of the Year" 12/25/2004 05:03 PM

Ben and Mena Trott sucker punch the
webl0gging community

Ben and Mena Trott sucker punch the
webl0gging community 05/13/2004 02:02 PM
Of course Six Apart has the right to charge whatever they want for MovableType, but having repeatedly said that they would provide a free version of MovableType 3.0 for personal use then announcing this crippleware that is MT 3.0 personal is stupid at best, dishonest at worst. Enraging your first customers and your developer community is a strange path to business success. Hopefully they will reconsider after being enveloped in the perfect storm that is brewing....

Mena Trott answers 6A's critics and
Geodog signs off on criticism

Mena Trott answers 6A's critics and
Geodog signs off on criticism 09/16/2004 03:40 AM
I wasn't planning on ever writing anything about SixApart and MovableType again, but today Kris Krug sent me mail alerting me to a lengthy interview he did with Mena Trott, where she responds to some of the recent criticism of Six Apart and the MT 3.0, and 3.1 releases: MT: One of the biggest things that I want to get through (and that I probably don't a good enough job of getting through) is that it's completely untrue that we're this big corporate company and that we don't care about the users-that it's all about just Ben and Mena and the venture capitalists. It's not so; there are so many smart people here who love what they're doing and love blogging. It dismisses their value when people say the company is just a big corporation that doesn't care about its users. People should understand that when you're insulting the company, you're insulting a lot of people. We're all good people and I wish everyone would take some time to see that. There are so many other targets to focus on; our little company from San Mateo is the least among them. The interview is worth reading in its entirety, if you are interested in the whole MovableType saga and some of the issues around the recent releases. To round out the view, or if you want a different perspective, check out long time MT user Ben Hammersley's opinion, Ben Trott's response, and 6A supporter and plug-in writer Timothy Appnel's comments. I myself have said more than enough about MovableType and SixApart, and gained some unwanted notoriety through a poor choice of weblog post titles. I've also have had my criticisms misrepresented, and Anil Dash has fairly called upon me to examine my criticisms. As a result I reread Anil's post about criticism, and reread for about the 10th time Phil Ringnalda's classic post on the same subject, there is no they, and I've decided not to spend any more time offering what Anil called "unsolicited criticism." We all have more important things to do. I will just note that I as I have said elsewhere thought MovableType was a was a brilliant product when I first encountered it. The documentation, user interface, features and support were superb. I enjoyed the time learning how to hack the templates and add plugins. I appreciated the ethos of the old MT license --...

Congratulations Mena G. Trott and Ben
Trott

Congratulations Mena G. Trott and Ben
Trott 12/24/2004 12:46 PM

Mena G. Trott and Ben Trott of SixApart have been named People of the Year by PC Magazine. Congrats to both and that is one of the bigger Geek Awards one can win. [PC Magazine]

Raya Contact Centre is the certified B2B
contact centre for Intel in the MENA
region

Raya Contact Centre is the certified B2B
contact centre for Intel in the MENA
region 03/24/2005 04:18 AM
AME Info Mar 24 2005 8:36AM GMT

In the London Eye

In the London Eye 04/21/2004 01:05 PM
Several weeks ago I posted a poll asking where you wanted to see me. "In the London Eye" received... (86 words)

Off to London

Off to London 02/01/2005 09:26 PM

I'm leaving for London in a couple of hours. I'll probably be posting a bit while I'm there as time and connectivity permit...hopefully some photos as well.

Packing this morning, I came up with a list of the extra stuff that I need to do before going to the airport now that everyone's a terrorist until proven innocent** and the major airlines are all about to go out of business:

• Clip my fingernails. With nail clippers verboten on planes, you need to do it before you leave.
• Silence my electric toothbrush. Last time I traveled, my toothbrush turned on in my luggage and the battery was long dead when I got home. Luckily I can plug the power cord into the brush to prevent it from turning on, lest some anxious baggage screener thinks it's a buzzing bomb and/or illegal sexual device.
• Leave ridiculously early. I am a single male traveling alone on an American Airlines flight to Heathrow on a ticket purchased not so long ago...I'm pretty sure that I'm going to get pulled aside for a "random" screening. My only hope: my summer tan has faded and I'm white as can be (Non-Terrorist White is the hottest color for pants at J. Crew this season)...come on, wave whitey through!
• Wardrobe change. Gotta wear pants that don't require a belt and shoes that can be slipped on and off with ease.
• Eat. You may get food on the plane, you may not. With random screenings come random feedings and I don't like my odds in either case.

** The Jan/Feb 2005 Atlantic Monthly has a couple of great articles on terrorism...here's a relevant snippet from Success Without Victory (subscribers only) by James Fallows:

Screening lines at airports are perhaps the most familiar reminder of post-9/11 security. They also exemplify what's wrong with the current approach.

Many of the routines and demands are silly, eroding rather than building confidence in the security regime of which they are part. "You can't go through an airport line without thinking 'This is dumb,'" says Graham Allison, the author of the recent Nuclear Terrorism: The Ultimate Preventable Catastrophe, and the director of the Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs, at Harvard, which conducts many projects on anti-terrorism and security. "You have two people whose job it is to see if the name on your driver's license is the same as the name on your ticket -- as if any self-respecting terrorist would fail to think of that. You have a guy whose job is to shout out a reminder for you to take off your jacket and get your computer out of your bag. You've got one-year-olds taking off their shoes. It is hard to think of a way you could caricature it to make it look sillier." At the same time, the ritual manages to be intimidating, as a standing reminder of how much Americans have to fear.

Getting around London

Getting around London 02/01/2005 09:58 PM
The Transport for London Journey Planner shows you how to get from anywhere in London to anywhere else by public transport, on foot or by bike. Fancy a stroll from Trafalgar Square to Big Ben? Help yourself to a custom-built PDF route map. If you're travelling by road, you can use webca ms to see exactly what the traffic's like. (But the best downloadable London maps are still on the BBC web site)

The Museum of London

The Museum of London 12/07/2003 08:14 AM
The Museum of London.

UXnet Comes to London

UXnet Comes to London 12/19/2004 03:55 PM
You’re invited to the first monthly social meeting in London for the User Experience Design community.

Oh, sweet London

Oh, sweet London 12/30/2003 01:24 AM
This city is most certainly a place where it's impossible to get bored. Yesterday, after an early arrival, we went to see the Lord of the Rings exhibition at Science Museum, which was very well worth the rather steep 12£ admission: some of the miniatures are simply amazing, Sauron and the ringwraiths can scare you witless even if seen from a distance, but the best part are some of the paintings and sketches: I felt like any weak-minded creature in front of the Ring as I let my eyes rest upon the artwork of Sauron overseeing his troops at the plains of Gorgoroth... This must be mine - my precioussss...

Afterwards, we were - completely accidentally - treated to the artwork of Yann Arthus-Bertrand, who had an outdoor exhibition of 3x2 meter photographs outside the Natural History Museum. Go see the stuff this guy shoots - some of it is quite simply breathtaking. Especially in large size.

Anyhow, the tournament looks like it's going to be a good one: plenty of nice people all around, good location, relaxed schedule... Well, I might still lose all of my games :)

Unfortunately, I am not able to get GPRS roaming work, so it looks like no moblogging. I even forgot all of my USB leads home, so I can't even upload any pictures. Oh well.

Get a job (Boston), get a job (London)

Get a job (Boston), get a job (London) 12/22/2004 01:29 AM
Web jobs, baby.

London: Next City of the Sky?

London: Next City of the Sky? 06/29/2004 08:41 PM
London architects and developers are pushing to remake the city's profile, much to the chagrin of conservation groups and locals.

The London Screensaver (B&W) 1.0

The London Screensaver (B&W) 1.0 07/07/2004 10:42 PM
10 high-resolution photos of London, England in black and white

Wi-Fi from London Streets

Wi-Fi from London Streets 12/20/2003 08:35 PM
StreetNet Islington, London

Poverty in London

Poverty in London 06/22/2004 05:04 PM
Charles Booth Online Archive. Charles Booth's survey of life and labour in London at the end of the Victorian era, with the famous poverty maps.

London Calling

London Calling 11/11/2003 03:21 PM
A nice sit down and a cup of tea are among many events (pdf) planned for GWB's impending visit to the UK. Police are estimating 100,000 plus demonstrators for his visit, and London's Mayor says of American requests for an exclusion zone to protect him, 'I don't think that's got a chance at all'. How does this level of grass-roots dissent compare to his reception when out and about in the US?

Back from London

Back from London 02/05/2005 10:18 PM

Back from London and up at the ungodly hour of 7:00 AM ET after getting to bed at 1:30 AM ET, which was the minute I got home from the airport. Still, six hours of sleep is better than none hours. I'm going to use the time to get some stuff done...lots of exciting and dread-inspiring things to do in the next couple of weeks. Trip pictures are forthcoming; luckily my camera battery lasted the whole time despite the charger being thousands of miles away and I took lots of photos.

But quickly, I learned a few additional travel tips on this trip (to add to the list):

• Never purchase a US to UK power outlet converter at a Canadian/Australian ex-pat shop. It will fail to work after a day or so. I practically had to splash water on it to get a good connection.
• When going through security at the airport, don't wear a shirt that depicts a little girl blowing her head off with a gun, even though her splattered brains turn into butterflies.
• You know that bottle of unopened soda in the bag bouncing on your hip for the last 1/2 hour? Yeah, that's going to spray everywhere when you open it, dummy. When I got home, my coat was so sticky that I just kinda pressed it to the wall to hang it up, no hook needed.

Oh, and I ate kangaroo! Not half bad, but I probably wouldn't go out of my way to order it again.

More on London Booted

More on London Booted 04/25/2004 11:07 AM
Following up on this BoingBoing post about the bootleg Clash remix project "London Booted," Will says:

We featured a preview of London Booted in issue-zero of our bootleg newsletter, which you can find here if you're interested (it's down the bottom in the "Coming Soon" section). We're also planning a follow up for issue-two (out 29th April) where we'll be talking to the remixers involved and also they guy who organised the project (only subscribers to the mailing list will get this issue).

Link

WTF-2 in London this Saturday

WTF-2 in London this Saturday 05/24/2004 04:44 AM
The next WTFCon is in London this Saturday: it's a one-day convention devoted to hackery subjects.

* An open space gathering and conference of various groups, projects, people, and organisations active and interested in creating a better world.

* Action and not just talk. Too many social forums and gatherings result with little or no outcome. Come and propose and gain support for actions during Soho Summit, ESF, G8, GDR etc.

* An assembly of gifts and needs: tell everyone what your projects are all about, what they have to offer, and what they need. Together we have everything. Let's self-organise and share!

* About working together, many of us have shared principles despite our diverse goals. No more either or!

Link (Thanks, Tav!)

Faces of London

Faces of London 02/05/2005 10:18 PM

Without intending to, I ended up taking photos of a bunch of faces while I was in London. Here are some of them:

It's been awhile since I've seriously picked up a camera (not that I was ever that serious about it) and I'm a little rusty. I'm hoping to get in lots more practice in the coming months, so the quality should hopefully improve.

3D London Tube

3D London Tube 11/15/2003 03:29 PM
These 3D rendered London Tube maps are pretty mind-blowing. Link (via Blackbelt Jones)

Grok Description matches for Ben and Mena come to London...
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Ben and Mena come to London...

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