About

I live in an apartment full of dogs, computers and musical instruments in the Venice Beach area of Los Angeles, in Southern California.

I am a director and former product manager at Yahoo! Music, where I landed after it bought my playlist-sharing site Webjay. In the past I have worked on Unix office automation software, e-commerce sites, web servers, peer to peer applications, and web services. During the bubble I ran a web shop that morphed into a peer-to-peer startup that morphed into a dot-bomb. After that I made a living as a consultant, notably on web communities.

I have spent my career in the world of free and open source software developers, where I focus on projects related to music libre in general and playlists in particular. My work on music includes Webjay, the XSPF playlist format, and a survey of playlist formats. I helped craft the formats for Creative Commons licenses in MP3, OGG, and SMIL. I co-created CC Mixter. Projects I have made driveby contributions to include CDR, JDOM, Mozilla, the Java FAQ, Freemarker, Mckoi, PoolMan, ANN, and MusicBrainz. I have also written unix utilities such as m3udo and stats.

Other things I have created:

  • A Protocol for HTTP Notifications. An event notification protocol
    built on HTTP and adhering to the REST architectural style.
  • The [Decentralization] mailing list, which I founded. The [Decentralization] list was arguably responsible for the spread of the term “decentralization” to describe P2P, so I take pride when I hear senators and journalists repeat it.

Contact

  • Send an authenticated message through MyLID.net (without revealing your e-mail address).
  • Leave a voice message in the comfort of your browser, without picking up the phone or using VoIP. (Courtesy of Odeo).

Digital identities

Twitter
http://twitter.com/lucas_gonze
Webjay
http://webjay.org/by/lucas_gonze
Internet Archive / archive.org
http://www.archive.org/search.php?query=creator:%22Lucas%20Gonze%22
Myspace
http://myspace.com/lucas_gonze
OpenID URL, LID URL, and Yadis URL
http://gonze.com/about
FOAF
http://gonze.com/foaf.rdf
Yahoo! 360
http://360.yahoo.com/lucas_gonze
Weblog
http://gonze.com/weblog
hCard

photo
Lucas Gonze

Venice,
CA

Send email (BUT NOT WEBJAY HELP REQUESTS) to lucas@gonze.com.

10 Responses to “About”

  1. yokum said:
    May 24, 2007 at 5:39 am

    Hi Lucas,

    Found your blog after reading about the end of WebJay. Hope all is well.

  2. Marc’s Voice » Blog Archive » Open Standards for Social Networking said:
    July 5, 2007 at 5:20 pm

    [...] We have a standard for routing blog posts to where you have your personal blog, your work blog, or group blogs that you’re a member of, or any of your social network blogs. We invented that routing standard with a chap named Lucas Gonze. [...]

  3. bugmenot said:
    July 6, 2007 at 12:15 am

    How does it feel to work for the company that just killed your baby ?
    Just curious, as I have encountered that same experience a couple of times too.

  4. lucasgonze said:
    July 6, 2007 at 12:46 am

    I would rather be able to blame somebody else for that, but I can’t.

    If all goes as planned I will ship a new and better generation of software. Hopefully then I’ll feel ok about what happened to the baby.

  5. bugmenot said:
    July 7, 2007 at 12:52 am

    Good luck and thanks for what you made.

  6. oatmealfun said:
    August 24, 2007 at 3:16 pm

    Today I went to listen to my webjay page, excited to potentially explore others’ pages through comment links. Instead, I got a page that reads, “Yahoo! Failure. The requested operation has failed or is not allowed.” So sad. So abrupt.

    Yahoo didn’t give notice that it was shutting down Webjay completely — the Help page still tells you to check out your user page URL. Thanks for the goodtimes while they lasted, Mr. G. Webjay opened up a whole new world of indie hiphop and top40s tunes for me.

  7. Stas said:
    September 10, 2007 at 6:52 am

    Hello Lucas!

    Sent you e-mail where asked for your advice. Please let me know if you get my mail or not.
    Thank you.

  8. keimform.de » Dezentralisierung wird Mainstream said:
    November 4, 2007 at 11:38 am

    [...] Jahre, nachdem mein einstiger Chef Lucas Gonze die [Decentralization]-Mailingliste gegründet hat, in der Phänomene wie der damalige [...]

  9. SteveR said:
    April 15, 2008 at 5:23 pm

    Am I blind or do you not have an rss feed?

  10. lucasgonze said:
    April 15, 2008 at 6:03 pm

    That’s a UI error in my blog skin, which doesn’t expose the feed with a visible control. If you’re in FF you’ll see the rss icon in the URL entry field light up because it found this inside the HTML:

    http://blog.gonze.com/feed/

    Prepare to be dazzled with my erudition and raw mastery of the keyboard.

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