There's a feature in all my rivers that makes it possible to RT a post, directly from the browser to your linkblogging tool.

Here's an example of one of the rivers.

It works with Radio2, and probably nothing else. But any other linkblogger could support it by accepting three parameters. They are: link, title, description.

They came straight from the RSS item.

The first time the user clicks a RT, a dialog asks for the domain name of their linkblogger. It stores it in a cookie, so the user never has to enter it again.

If you have a blogging tool you can support this, probably in a few minutes (and you might already support it if you have a bookmarklet, in which case please let me know).

 2/3/2012; 6:49:54 PM.   .

John Battelle is right.

Google defined the web that we like, and the web we like defined Google.

Having Google break the contract is not just bad for Google, it's bad for the web.

Two take-aways from this:

1. We should be more careful about who we get in bed with next time.

2. We probably should help Google survive, but only to the extent that they support the open web that we love.

Another comment.

On Twitter, Om Malik says that he's following me by using a search engine I wrote about here. And while I did write about it, I don't use it. And I won't unless we can work something out with them that guarantees that they will not take us down the same path Google did. I don't see the point of endorsing a successor to Google, if it just takes us down the same path again.

I use Bing on my iPad, and still use Google search on my desktop. Google for some reason decided that I need a special mobile version of their search engine on the iPad. That's crazy. It's got a full size screen. All they did was add a lot of whitespace. It's like building a car for the tropics with an industrial strength heating system and no air conditioning. Hello. If anything you'd want to reduce the whitespace on a smaller screen. But the brilliance of the iPad that software designers generally refuse to recognize, is that it has a no-compromise web browser (except for the still-irritating omission of Flash). Find other problems to solve. This one doesn't need solving.

So Bing, while it comes from a company even more evil than Google (although their evil is older and they are more humbled), is a better iPad search engine, so it's a no-brainer for me to use it over Google, there.

I've yet to find something that works well enough to replace Google on the desktop.

 2/3/2012; 10:23:17 AM.   .

As you may know, I resigned from Facebook a few months ago. I don't miss it one bit. And while I get a good dose of tech news from Twitter, it isn't enough. So I'm an at-least-every-hour TechMeme reader, even though I admit that it isn't really tech news. It's an addiction. So hat's off to Gabe Rivera for creating something I can't live without. But I want more! More! More!!

Then the other day I was looking at the TechMeme leaderboard, and saw that it lists the RSS feeds for most of the top sites. So I pulled them info into an OPML file, and created a river out of it using my River2 software, and let it run overnight to see what it would look like after some stories had come in.

No surprise -- it's pretty fantastic.

I know you all love tech news, so I wanted to share.

http://tech.newsriver.org/

PS: I sent Gabe an email yesterday with a pointer yesterday asking if it would be possible to jointly provide this as a service on techmeme.com. He's probably busy creating new "meme" sites -- but the offer remains open. I'd love to see this as river.techmeme.com or something like that. I think everyone who wants to be blasted with tech news should know about it.

PPS: John Battelle posted an excellent item yesterday asking what our vision is for the future of the web. I wanted to point out that all of these sites are totally on the web. So it ain't dead yet. And they all have feeds too. Just thought I'd mention that.

 2/3/2012; 9:24:46 AM.   .

I just read a piece on Reuters with advice for new Facebook millionaires, that is for the most part, totally right on.

I have some of my own advice, based on experience.

1. First and foremost, remember who you were before the money truck hit you. You're still that person. The money didn't change you -- even if it did change your circumstances.

2. The most important difference in your circumstances is that you now own yourself. It's the most important thing you can own, in fact it's the only luxury that's really worth it. You can only sleep in one bed every night, drive one car, eat one dinner, etc. There's a limit to how much happiness consumption can buy you. After a while your posessions start owning you. A cliche, yes -- but also true.

3. Practically speaking, the lockup period probably won't prevent you from selling stock. A lot of reporters don't seem to understand the purpose of the lockup period is to enable the managers of the IPO to control the flow of stock to the market. That's important if there's limited demand for the stock, which often happens with smaller companies that aren't so famous. It almost certainly will not apply to Facebook. The underwriters can release you from the lockup if they have a buyer for the stock and they don't think it'll screw up the price for the other shareholders. They want to help you sell your stock because during the lockup they get all the commissions. After the lockup ends you can sell any way you want, and that can mean no commission for them.

3a. One of my investors said all the money he ever made was due to lockups. What he meant is that he would have sold all his stock on the IPO if he had been able to. Because of the lockup he didn't, and the stock appreciated significantly in the first six months. I guess his underwriters didn't like him or there wasn't much demand for the stock in the first six months? Doesn't make a lot of sense to me that all of a sudden, once the locked-up shareholders were free that demand would go up. Seems it would go down. (I think he was giving me a peptalk to not worry too much about being locked up. But I had completely divested before the lockup was over.)

4. Brokerage commissions are negotiable. That goes for buying and selling.

5. Have you ever seen The Graduate where the old guy tells Dustin Hoffman to go into plastics. I'm going to say something like that now, so listen up. Diversify. It makes no sense to have your entire net worth in Facebook stock. Look at it this way, if you had $10 million in cash, would you put it all into Facebook? Of course not, no matter how good the company is, it's too risky. The same goes if you got lucky and got all this Facebook stock just for coming into work for a few years. Sell that Facebook stock and get other stocks and bonds, and in this economy, keep quite a bit in US dollars.

6. A good approach to selling is to sell a certain percentage of your stock every quarter no matter whether the price is up or down. That takes the stress out of it, and gets you the average of the price over time. On the other hand, if the broker calls you up some day and says he can get you a hundred million for all of your stock, and you feel like taking it -- take it! There's nothing like trading a risky high tech stock for good old American dollars. They may have downgraded our debt but it's still the safest form of money out there. (And remember the importance of #2. If you can get transcendental about your money, it doesn't matter whether you have $100 million or $10 million. You'll still be able to buy anything you could want, as if being able to buy luxuries was what life was about, it's not.)

7. I remember learning that a friend, before I had my first windfall, was actually a rich guy who had sold a bunch of patents and was worth tens of millions. Yet he lived in a middle class home in a middle class neighborhood. He drove a modest car. He didn't act like a rich guy. That made a huge impression on me. Not enough to save me from the excesses of being a nouveau riche myself. I bought the 750IL and a mini-estate in Woodside. Later I learned to scale down my lifestyle, and I was happier! I was raised a middle-class guy and have middle-class values. Living like a rich guy is not so good, at least for me.

8. One of the things you don't anticipate when you choose to live rich is that you're going to end up spending a lot of your time with people who work for you. My friend from #7 had it right. Much better to spend time with friends. People who like you because of who you are not for what you have.

9. What is money good for? Distance. It buys you distance from everyone else. But normal human beings like to be near other human beings. We are a social species. So not only can't money buy you happiness, it can buy you a lot of isolation and that's not happy. You'll likely be happier living in the middle of the noisy messy world than all alone at the end of a long driveway in the middle of nowhere.

I agree with the theme of the Reuters piece. Don't expect the money to change you. To the extent that it does, you will probably have to unwind those changes later, so it's better overall not to make them in the first place.

 2/2/2012; 5:00:22 PM.   .

Is there an archive of campaign commercials used in the Republican primary this year?

 2/1/2012; 9:46:54 AM.   .

Following up on Ideas for Movie Moguls, 1/25/12.

Robert Goldman writes about a nearby cinema that has reserved seats. And has eliminated the non-preview commercials. This is the big idea. Treat your customers like you care about them, and they'll be happier to pay money. The idea of paying $15 to see a movie and then having to sit thru commercials for soft drinks and real estate is really humiliating. Whoever had that idea should be sent off to the glue factory.

Another one. I discovered that somehow I'm not subscribed to HBO at home. That's news to me, since I get HBO on my cable box. So I went to the Time-Warner site to check it out, and if I wasn't paying for it, to pay for it. They want me to call them. Well, I'm not going to do that. You can have my money, but not my time and pride. When they get you on the phone get ready for the hard upsell. Someone calculated that if you don't mind wasting the customer's time, you can get an extra 10 percent revenue from them, as some will pay you to shut up. I don't happen to be one of those people. In any case I'm paying $119 a month, so I'm pretty sure that's covering HBO in addition to the standard cable package. You know that seems like an awful lot of money just to watch Boardwalk Empire and Homeland. Hmmm.

One more idea, one that I was bouncing around with my friend Chris Dixon last year. If one of us had the time to implement it we would. Maybe you'd like to? Here's the idea. Set up a trust for the movie industry. A bank account that we can deposit money into but only movie-makers can withdraw from. When you download a movie via BitTorrent that you watch all the way to the end, deposit $5 into the account for the movie. When the owners decide to accept BitTorrent as a legitimate distribution system, which someday they are sure to, they can have the money. The amount of money in the account is always public info. So it becomes an important statistic, part of the "box office" for a movie. Then you'd probably find a funny thing happening -- independent movie producers who can't get distribution any other way will start promoting this site as a legitimate way to pay for movies. It wouldn't take long before the MPAA realized that there are a huge number of people who want the convenience of watching movies at home on their own timetable, instead of having to deal with the inhumane system the movie industry created for them.

Maybe then they will apologize for being such dicks. (But I wouldn't hold out for that.)

 1/31/2012; 10:21:29 AM.   .

This is too funny not to say something.

A few days ago I installed a widget that makes it easy to follow me on Twitter. When I looked at it in Firebug I was surprised at how they did it. They basically framed the whole page, just to get a tiny little thing in there. What are they doing? I have no clue. I don't like it. It looks nefarious. I like technology that, when I lift the hood, looks simple and understandable.

But what the fuck. Everyone else is doing it. I'll let it be for a while.

Then this morning I saw this where it's supposed to show the number of Twitter followers.

I clicked, and sure enough I could type some text.

Hello. How did that happen?

And how is that even possible?

As I said, I'm laughing about this because it's funny. We've been to this place so many times. Conflicting plug-ins. It's a sign of an architecture that people are pushing farther than it was capable of going.

Maybe it's because they don't like my browser? I have no idea.

But maybe it's time to get rid of all the hitchers, and just stick plain old HTML.

 1/30/2012; 2:09:07 PM.   .

I don't often use this space to condemn a person or company. I try to be understanding, see an issue from all sides. Or accept that it's just in the nature of big tech companies to be monopolistic and arrogant and closed-minded, and know that things will run their course, and eventually whatever they try to control will end up obsoleting them.

But this bit about Google being sued for age discrimination, with some horrific quotes from Google people, goes too far.

"Some observers say much of this language is just code for age discrimination. They point to the case of Brian Reid, a 52-year-old manager who was fired by Google in 2004 -- nine days before the company announced plans to go public -- after his supervisors, including the company's vice president for engineering operations, allegedly called him a poor 'cultural fit,' an 'old guy' and a 'fuddy-duddy' with ideas 'too old to matter."

Google doesn't deny or retract these statements. If you were to change those words from age to race, or gender, they would be ashamed. And they would apologize. But because it's age, the one ism that's socially OK, they don't even admit that they were wrong.

Even an open-minded person has to say this is over the top. Not only is there something wrong with the people who say these things, but there's something deeply wrong with a corporate culture that tolerates it.

If one were to try to understand it, the story might go something like this. Big companies hire people who occupy seats, and their job is, as they see it, to keep the company from doing anything that might endanger their seat. They will use any irrelevant excuse to disqualify an idea they find threatening. Instead of finding the future exciting, these people, whatever age they may be (and they often are very young) try to hold back the future.

The people who should be fired are not the people they are talking about, but the people who did the talking.

PS: One thing's for sure, when I meet a person from Google now, I'm going to have a fairly good idea what they're thinking about me as I speak.

 1/30/2012; 1:47:15 PM.   .

You hear this a lot -- I don't seek out the news, I assume that if something is important it will find its way to me.

The other day I heard a famous VC say he gets most of his tech news from TechMeme. Add in a smattering of news from Twitter, and that's it.

The problem with this approach, as I'm sure you know, is that you've given gatekeeper-like power to others. And they have their biases, conflicts, goals and business interests that keep some stories from getting to you.

And you've allowed them to define what "tech" means. Like most conferences these days there isn't a lot of actual technology on TechMeme. Again, not their fault. If you want a real tech river, we can create one. But TechMeme is what it is, and it's not technology-heavy.

I don't blame anyone for being a gatekeeper, just as I don't blame Twitter for bending to the will of governments that want to censor ideas that reach their people. So who or what is to blame? No one really. It's just that if you want to be informed, it involves more work than just accepting what the most powerful gatekeepers are willing to give you.

Another example to consider is Facebook. No one outside Facebook understands how their algorithm works. How do they decide which stories you'll see and which aren't important enough for you? I suspect it has something to do with what will make them money, both short-term and long-term. How they decide is completely opaque.

Here I practice what I preach. Of course, like everyone else, I delegate my reading to gatekeepers. But I have over 400 of them! When any of them pushes a story it shows up in my river. I'm sure you've seen this, because I point to it all the time, as a way of enticing you to create your own river, and share it with others.

http://daveriver.com/

If you want to get one set up, you can do it for free for a year on Amazon EC2. Just follow the EC2 For Poets tutorial, and then install River2 on the server it creates. The whole thing takes about twenty minutes. And it's a unique experience, not like anything you've likely done before.

I'd love to see tech pubs create rivers that include not only their stories but the stories of their competitors and individual bloggers. Remember the old adage, People come back to places that send them away. It's still true, and it works!

 1/30/2012; 9:45:50 AM.   .

100,000 years from now historians will debate the purpose of this street sign, discovered on the south corner of Central Park South and Columbus Circle.

Was Earth occupied by a race of poets?

 1/29/2012; 2:58:51 PM.   .

There was a time when you went to a tech conference and many if not most of the speakers knew how computers work. Some of them even knew how to program, and some of them were actually programming on a daily basis. I know it sounds outlandish, but think about it this way. How many medical conferences have no doctors on stage? How many architecture conferences have no architects? Yet it's considered normal to for tech conferences to have no technology.

I was lucky to be invited to speak at a flash conference about Wikileaks in December 2010 in NY. I asked for a show of hands, how many people in the room are programmers? A lot of hands went up. So we're getting at least some techies in the audience. Why are there none on stage?

I believe this is responsible for a very dangerous situation we find ourselves in now. We're quite vulnerable to a few very large companies who control most of the flow for most people on the Internet. Most of the messages flow through their servers. It's possible to argue that this isn't the Internet at all. Because one of the best features of the Internet was its decentralized nature, its resistance to censorship. When everything flows through a few company's servers, Google, Apple, Facebook, Twitter, Microsoft, Amazon, and a few others -- it's much easier to shut things down. And it's also possible to shut things down without anyone knowing. And it's possible to shut things down with no possible recourse. This is an unacceptably dangerous situation.

So I propose three changes for tech conferences, akin to the changes brought about by women noticing that almost none of the speakers at tech conferences were women.

1. There ought to be at least one active programmer speaking at every tech conference.

2. If there are tutorials at the tech conference, there ought to be a tutorial that shows people how to operate their own server with a few apps running on it. Blogging software perhaps. Or their own news aggregator. Or their own Facebook or Twitter clone (those might come later with an installed base of users who know how to run servers).

3. If a conference is promoting APIs, it should in addition to promoting proprietary APIs, give equal time to open APIs that are not owned by any single corporation.

Anticipating the objection that programmers are not suitable speakers because they are not good communicators, that's simply not true. It reflects people's fear more than reality. There are plenty of programmers who are great storytellers, and who are passionate about their work and able to tell you about other people's work, and what it means to people. There are far more programmers that I would like to listen to than venture capitalists or corporate CEOs. Programmers can get you excited about networks. CEOs tell you how great they are and how they're going to kill their competition. VCs tell you how much they love their CEOs. All this leaving users feeling like they're forgotten, which they truly are.

About tutorials, we achieved great results at the Bloggercon conferences teaching people how to edit their own websites, at a time when it was considered just as weird to want to do that as it is today to want to run your own server. I promise you it's no more difficult to run a server, and it's just as satisfying, and opens your mind to a lot of new possibilities. And it weakens the grip of the big companies on their users if people aren't mystified about what it takes to run a server. The mystique is the problem. The fact that you think you can't run a server is the problem.

All the money that's been made on the Internet owes a tremendous amount to the open APIs that made it all possible. It's also fair to ask the big companies to give back to replace the open-ness that they're taking out of the Internet. I like to ask VCs and company execs if they tip waiters at restaurants. Of course they all do -- but they don't have to. We do it because -- well -- why do we do it? Probably because we appreciate good service. So we should all be giving back to the Internet. And one good way to do that is to demystify and promote the technology that made it all possible. In the hope that perhaps we'll get more.

Looking at it another way, the Internet was one of the most successful development projects of all time. Why don't we continue the project instead of assuming that everything good will come from corporate developers.

 1/29/2012; 10:39:14 AM.   .

Over the last few days the worldoutline got its basic macro facility. This is at least the seventh time I've implemented this, but it's the first time that CSS and JavaScript played a role in it. We've had support for CSS in the past, but this time we're depending on CSS as part of the runtime environment. Still feeling my way around and going slow, because the decisions made at this stage have to be lived-with for a long time to come.

I was also able to build off Andre Radke's excellent work for Manila macros that run code. So we start off with very powerful and safe macros that can call each other and even have logic and certain kinds of arithmetic. As usual for Andre's work it's done with precision and completeness and it's stood up over time.

Here's a page with links to all the worknotes for this little project.

And here's the leading edge, being able to include expandable outlines within any kind of object. The cool thing about macros, if they're designed with care, it's like swinging a huge ball at the end of a long chain, just by flicking your finger. I'll see if I can find an image that conveys the feeling.

There's a macro that allows includes a Glyphicon from a page.

The cool thing about this project is that it was not hard work, it was not a stretch. Part of that is because this the seventh time I've done a macro system that renders in a web page. AutoWeb, Clay Basket, NewsPage Suite, WSF, Manila, Radio8 all came before. You think I'm in a loop? Obviously... Hopefully this is the last one.

 1/28/2012; 8:05:38 PM.   .

On Twitter, with its 140-character limit, there's little focus to the discussion about the new filitering they just announced. Here are some of my comments, in bullet form, hopefully to add some more substance to the discussion..

1. We don't know very much about what they're doing, and it's not clear that we ever will.

2. The examples they cite, laws in France and Germany that prohibit pro-Nazi speech, are somewhat reasonable. But I suspect this will be used in the future to prevent leaks of information they don't want leaked. If Twitter-like tech is the new world stage, and I think it is, they want to control who has what access to it.

By "they" I mean the unspecified governments and companies that can tell Twitter to make something inaccessible somewhere.

3. The Internet is not a law-free zone.

4. I am not passing judgment on Twitter. I will gladly concede they have no choice.

5. What we're deciding, by our actions, is whether the Internet will be like TV, a medium where individuals can perhaps comment on what's being broadcast (that would be the innovation, the interactivity) but without the ability to organize ourselves outside of the control of huge corporations and governments.

6. Yes, the governments can shut down anything they want.

7. But, as I've pleaded previously, if we force them to shut down the Internet to control the flow of information, everyone will know. If there is an ability to shut off communities selectively, that would be hard to detect.

8. Clarity on whether the Internet is up or down is something we should value and protect.

9. It's possible today to be on a decentralized network and still participate in Twitter. If large numbers of us do it, Twitter won't be able to quietly turn this feature off, or limit it, without lots of real users feeling it.

10. We should have tutorial sessions at every Internet policy conference that show people how easy it is to operate your own infrastructure. It's really there now, ready to teach users how to do it. But you have to make a commitment to standing up for the Internet. It will never be as easy as Twitter. However, if Twitter shuts you off, it won't effect your presence. That's worth a little more complexity. (And the complexity is all in setup, not in posting. Once set up, it's faster than in Twitter itself.)

11. If you work or study at a university in compsci or journalism, learn how to run a server, and then teach others how to do it. If you want to make a real contribution to the Internet, that's how to do it. Signing petitions or forcing minor movement in Washington really isn't that effective.

12. Ask not what the Internet can do for you, ask what you can do for the Internet.

Anyway, that's it for now.

 1/27/2012; 12:06:19 PM.   .

Three years ago, I wrote a tutorial called EC2 for Poets that made it relatively easy for a technically proficient user to set up a Windows server in Amazon EC2. A few hundred people tried it, and were able to get servers running. They could install apps, and run web apps that they then could access from home or on the road. Having your own server "up there" can be pretty cool, makes a lot of things possible that otherwise would be hard.

For example you can run a personal river of news. That's what I do on one of my EC2 instances. Not only for myself but for a few friends at universities and publications. I'm now working on one for a friend who teaches at Harvard. And there's a biologist at Columbia who's using Radio2 to keep a linkblog running. This stuff really works, and is not so hard to set up. And once it's set up, it pretty much runs itself.

Running a server may sound hard. But in practice it's as easy as running a laptop. In some ways it's even easier.

And Amazon and Microsoft just made it possible to run an EC2 server for a year for free!

That's a pretty big deal if you were thinking it might be too expensive just to play around.

So in summary:

1. EC2 for Poets.

2. River2.

3. Amazon EC2 pricing page.

Just to be sure everything is working, I set up a River2 installation on a micro EC2 instance, and it really went smoothly.

 1/25/2012; 7:08:12 PM.   .

I know the Repubs like to demonize Nancy Pelosi, but I really like her.

Check out this exchange with John King at CNN.

Fascinating. What does she know?

Some possibilities...

1. Newt is secretly a Democrat.

2. Newt is secretly a woman.

3. Newt secretly slept with Nancy P.

4. Newt is secretly Osama bin Laden's long lost brother.

5. New paid no taxes until he was 45 years old.

6. Instead of fighting in Vietnam, he signed up for the Khmer Rouge. He's Prince Sihanouk's long lost brother.

7. He was part of the Bay of Pigs invasion. In fact the bay was named after him. He's Fidel Castro's long lost brother. (Hence his hatred of Fidel.)

8. ???

 1/25/2012; 9:59:37 AM.   .

President Obama asks that we suggest ways for the movie industry to control the Internet that we might not find so objectionable.

Nat Torkington tells an old joke in a new context. It's a good one. God already gave the movie industry the Internet and it's been shown you can make many billions of dollars selling things there. So why not sell movies too?

I think the President asks the wrong question.

What can the movie industry do to freshen up their product in the age of technology to make it more fun and interesting for their customers. Rather than try to destroy the new playground, how about coming out to play!

So here are some ideas.

1. The best suggestion I've heard is to make it impossible to use a cell phone or send or receive text messages in movie theaters. Just block the incoming signal. True, some people might stay home because they always want to be online, but I bet a lot more people would come back.

2. Work with Apple and others to emit a special "no alarms allowed" signal to be broadcast in the movie theater. That way the user doesn't have to do anything to turn off the alarms. The owner of the venue could do it.

3. I find it's hard to hear dialog sometimes in movies. Maybe it's because my hearing isn't so good. I like the sound systems they have. But I could use my mobile device and headphones to tune into an audio track that's broadcast locally to those in the theater. Sure hackers could use this to get a great recording of the sound of the movie. So what. It would make the experience better for the people who pay. Those people are your customers.

4. Open the theaters to amateurs. Have contests for local creative movie people in your neighborhood. Have Saturday showing for the kids in your area. Get involved with your community. They could be a source of ideas. And we could find out where the great movies are coming from, geographically.

5. Why aren't there cafes in the lobby of at least some theaters. Aren't we always looking for a place for a snack or coffee after the movie? A place to talk about what we just saw with people we came with? Or a place to talk about the movies with people we saw it with. Instead they just move people in and out. Missed opportunity, imho.

6. Make the theaters more attractive and comfortable! Upgrade the experience. You're competing against my home theater which isn't really that great compared to the theater. But it is much more convenient.

7. Stretch the genres. So many of the movies are stupid rehashes of stories that weren't that great in the first place. Movies like The Artist show that there are still a lot of ideas that are not fullly explored. Challenge the movie-makers to be more creative. I think that's a big part of the problem.

8. Start a dating site based on people's like and dislike of movies.

Anyway, just some ideas. Feel free to share your ideas in the comments.

 1/25/2012; 9:35:52 AM.   .

In yesterday's piece about wanting an exit from Google, I mentioned that I might use DuckDuckGo, but had reservations because it's "another Fred Wilson company." Fred, who is a very cheerful dude (no sarcasm) responded with evangelism, which is what I like about Fred. Of course he can handle criticism, even when it's as vaguely defined as the bit in my blog post. Come right back with a great product pitch. I wouldn't expect any less.

Even though I know Fred personally, he has a bigger presence in the tech world. Like it or not he now is the leading tech VC. He occupies a slot that John Doerr used to. Who came before? Not sure -- Don Valentine? Arthur Rock? Eugene Kleiner? I've heard about them. But they're not of my generation. I'm a little younger than Doerr, and a little older than Wilson. And I know JD as well. He bought a company of mine, I served on a board with him, and he lived on the same street in the 90s (not bragging, I lived a little beyond my means, and Doerr is more modest than his).

Both Doerr and Wilson are genial, charming, politically active, and I think for the most part share the same values I do. However, where we part is on the role of users in tech. I have chosen to identify with them. And while Fred does as good a job as he can, given what he does, of understanding the user's perspective (I'd say this is the reason he rose to be #1 in his field) he really is sitting on the other side of the table, business-wise, from the users. I doubt if he views it this way, but I do.

The way to align our interests is to own a common stock. Back in 1998, it turns out, it would have been a good idea to not switch to Google unless we as users could buy it. I think the Google guys sort of intuited this, because when they finally went public in 2004, they cut out the investment bankers, and went with a very web-like approach to stock called the Dutch Auction IPO, invented by Bill Hambrecht. What a pioneering idea, it paved the way for Kickstarter, which is growing like a weed, and changing the way we think about funding startups (Kickstarter is Fred Wilson company, btw, and Google is a John Doerr company).

So Google started out on the right path, but eventually they went wild and desperate, and did all the things with their product that users probably thought they would never do. So now I'm shopping for a search engine to invest in. DuckDuckGo could be that, except for this one problem. Imho, it's inexorably on the same path that Google was on. That means they're going to spend years of our time pretending that they are still on our side, until one day it'll be blatantly obvious that we just wasted years waiting for them to give take us somewhere we'd want to go . They are using us as pawns, as big techco's always do.

In other words, I want to use a search engine that I, along with you, and everyone else on the web, own.

In the same sense that we own the web. Can we operate our own search engine? Can the developers who lead us there get unreasonably rich even if they don't control our future? These are all questions that I believe we can address. I think we can all win. And I think that until we do this, and do it right, we'll be stuck in the same infinite loop we've circling as long as I've been in tech.

This isn't intended to generate an action item on anyone's todo list (to use tech management terminology) rather to raise the question, once again, how we can build a future with technology that is allied with the interests of users. That's where I want to invest my most precious resource -- time.

 1/24/2012; 10:08:03 AM.   .

Google's feature-creep is creeping me out.

I did an image search the other day and it made me stand up and pace. They were showing me posts on Google Plus with pictures from people they know I know because I email with them in Gmail. I don't want to go there. I want search to be search and just that. I want the same search everyone else gets unless I specifically ask it to search images from people I know who are using Google-Plus. There are times I don't want to be marketed to. Like when I'm using image search. That's almost always part of creative work. I will do the driving Google. Thanks.

Maybe it's time to use DuckDuckGo, but honestly that's another Fred Wilson company, and even though he returns my calls and answers my emails, I don't want to be so dependent on him. I already us Twitter, Tumblr and Disqus. That's enough.

One thing is for sure, the Internet experience which has been pretty steady for the last five years or so is about to upheave. I'm planning on doing some of the heaving myself.

 1/23/2012; 11:15:42 AM.   .

I've got three main projects and lots of little utilities that tie them together.

They are River2, Radio2 and World Outline.

River2 and Radio2 are at 1.0 level. Totally functional, polished UIs, but they're still being worked on. There will be new major versions.

World Outline is rock and roll. But it's coming out soooo nice. I love this product like I loved outliners in the 80s and blogging tools in the 90s and 00s.

As you might imagine, outlines play a big role in the World Outline. And when you can make an outline behave and look like an outline, well that's strictly good. In December I finally invested in making outline objects work just like outlines. That meant rolling up my sleeves and making no apologies for my Javascript coding. And it came out nice. Then I rested on that front for a while, let it burn in and dug some new holes over the holidays. Now on my todo list is to roll up the outline rendering tool so it's used to render other forms of outlines. And in my world, scripts are outlines. So what the hell, let's make it so that script code renders as an outline. There are good reasons to do this. For one it makes the code more readable. And I have lots of code. And I want to send pointers to code to Frontier newbies who are coming up now (yay!) and I didn't want to send them pointers to flat text. That would seem to miss the point. Yes? Yes!

So here's an example of what a code object looks like now. As you might imagine, to expand something click the blue wedge.

Text in italics are comments. One of the cool things about programming in an outliner is that the comments collapse up to a single line. So there's no penalty for explaining what's going on. As a result, some of the scripts in our world are really blogs! Here's an example, tcp.httpClient. It started out in 1998 as a utility to replace code that was being replicated all over the place. Over time we realized that this was a pretty central piece of code, and invested in it. And from time to time it needed a new feature or a new optional parameter. Naturally we documented the changes in comments at the top of the script.

And because we love CSS you can control the look of code objects by editing the template. Here's the default template for code objects in the world outline. But I imagine that these templates will be traded like themes in Manila or templates in Tumblr. I love investing in template languages because it's where geeks and designers meet. Power meets power. (The template is an outline, so you should open it in an outliner that understands OPML.)

And all this has Bootstrap baked in, and it surfaces at the top level. When this is done, I think it'll be the easiest and most powerful Bootstrap prototyping and design environment in addition to all the other stuff it does.

Just wanted to mark this milestone here....

 1/23/2012; 11:00:01 AM.   .

Good evening everybody. It's time to watch football. And inbetween plays a place to write some notes. Not necessarily about the game.

I had a thought about Apple's hype that their products "just work" and how it causes pain for the support system for their products. The users hear how easy everything is, but when they go to their spouse or child or parent or S.O. to get help they make it sound so complicated. Hand-waving and exasperation. This disconnect causes infinite angst in family relationships. I guess it's part of life. But it would help if Apple told users that their friends who try hard to help really are trying to help. (Assuming they are.) Or they could do more to realize the "just works" promise.

Last night Newt Gingrich gave a disgusting victory speech, which is why we tune into Newt. To see how low he can go! And he can go pretty damn low. He helped me see how Republicans use ideas that no one understands and make them sound evil the way they use the terms. The Republican fans tune in. Oh Sharia Law. That's great I mean awful! Can you just imagine the Supreme Court taken over by Sharia lawyers. What will the liberal elites think of next! Answer: Saul Alinsky. A Jewish communist who worked against "racism." What could be better for a Southern racist than getting to hate a Jew who loves blacks. Oh Newt! You know just what to say to get us excited. The silver lining? Republicans outside the South aren't quite as low as Newt. And some of them are even Jewish, African-American or Muslim.

Yes, I hate the Republicans. Delete the party and start over. That business with driving the country to the brink of default after running up the deficit for so many years, that was a line they shouldn't have crossed. That kind of arrogant anti-Americanism deserves the death penalty. As Newt says it's as close to despicable as anything I can imagine!

 1/22/2012; 4:21:50 PM.   .

Central Park was absolutely lovely, with kids sledding and everyone out to experience the snowy landscape and really cold air. Wonderful.

 1/21/2012; 7:36:20 PM.   .

Truth is this -- users are caught between tech and media. Neither of them is looking out for our interest. Each of them own politicians each owns tech. The tech industry is better at tech (no surprise) and the media industry is better at a lot of other things, including getting Congress to do their bidding.

I've been warning the news publishers to be careful about viewing Twitter and Facebook as if they were equivalent to the web. This would be like Kodak trusting Apple to handle its digital photography strategy. We know now how that turned out.

Twitter and Facebook are rich and getting richer. Either of them could easily buy a struggling but independent news organization. Then where would you be if you were dependent on them to distribute news? It would be like the Times depending on Murdoch to print their daily paper. Instead the Times invested in their own printing plant, presumably so they could have better control of the product, both from a creative and tactical standpoint. If Murdoch owned the presses and the trucks, who do you think would deliver the most timely news? They have to think about Twitter that way. At some point they will come to see themselves as a media company, if they don't already.

Caught in the middle is the original idea of the Internet and the web, that people could be media instead of just consuming it. For that to continue, enough people have to see their future as publishing independently, and enough people have to read indpenedently of corporate media, neither originating from Silicon Valley or Hollywood, to keep the flame alive.

I still hope that there's a remnant of the idealism of tech. That there was value in the personal-ness of PCs. The net is the same way. We need to make it always-easier for people to own and run their own infrastructure. People think it's hard, but it doesn't have to be! Each of us can have the equiv of a printing plant, that's the magic of tech. No harder to keep running than a laptop. To those people in tech who still hold to the ideal of free communication unrestricted by government or corporations, please use some of your profits to help guarantee the future of an independent Internet.

Otherwise, I think we can all see this clearly now, the net will be a single amorphous disneyfied mess, not too far down the road.

 1/21/2012; 11:29:46 AM.   .

I remember reading an article in the NYT magazine that had a picture of a young woman who had been horribly disfigured in a fire when she was a kid. They showed her the picture. She didn't know she looked like that. They asked what she saw when she looked in the mirror. She said there was a way of tilting her head and looking only at certain features that made her appear attractive. That's how she hid the truth from herself. This made an impression, obviously, since I read that piece many years ago, but the story stays with me.

Yesterday, I tried to configure an iPad with my mother, for my mother, and we failed. And in the process I saw clearly how awful the process still is, even though you no longer need to tether the iPad to a computer to set it up.

I understand it can be a hard problem, but I also see evidence of different teams working on different parts of the setup and not talking to each other. What else could explain why you have to enter your email address twice in the process?

And why exactly do they need to know her email address? And why does it need to be verified? We paid good money for this device. It's ours, isn't it? How does Apple justify getting in the way of our using it whatever way we'd like to? (Yes, I know that shows how naive I am and what a throwback I am to the days when computers were really ours, when they were personal computers.)

They didn't like the password she chose. It was a good password given that she just wants to play a game with it. But it required 8 characters, at least one had to be uppercase and one had to be a number. The chance of her remembering the password we created? Pretty slim. (And what good is a password that the user can't remember?)

They use so much techinical jargon in the setup process that a normal person couldn't possibly be expected to understand. I didn't write it all down. I knew what to do because I have almost 40 years experience using computers and a couple of degrees in computer science. But if they commissioned a study at Apple to evaluate the setup process, by someone who didn't have a stake in "it just works" as applied to Apple, they would have their eyes opened. This thing is not easy to set up or use. (It is easy to buy, however. That process they have invested in streamlining.)

All I wanted to do was give my mom a way to play Words With Friends with her friends. She's a lifelong Scrabble player, and I think she would enjoy it. But we didn't have a way to access her email from the Starbucks where we did this work, so she left without the iPad. And she's not good at following instructions over the phone. I had reservations about giving her something that would further complicate her computer life. Now I can see what a bad idea this was.

But what if Apple lived up to their claims? What if the iPad really were easy to set up and use? What if they streamlined it so that all unnecessary steps were taken out of the way of a user who just wants to have fun?

I read a quote from Steve Jobs where he said he didn't want to compete with Dell and have the computers delivered by UPS or Fedex because he wanted to experience the joy of an impulse purchase. He wanted to get the credit with his family for bringing home something fun, powerful and easy. I agree. But today's Apple doesn't deliver on that.

My mom says that all her friends who have iPads had to go to the Apple store to get them set up. I'm not surprised. I can't imagine how it could be otherwise.

 1/21/2012; 9:50:51 AM.   .

I've known this was coming, Matt told me about their RSS aggregator when he told me they were supporting rssCloud.

So theoretically, I should see this update over there immediately because I'm subscribed, and of course scripting.com supports rssCloud.

A couple of problems off the bat.

1. I tried subscribing to my linkblog feed, which is valid RSS, but got an error saying it couldn't find a valid feed.

2. I don't see any way to import or export an OPML subscription list. Not saying they don't have it, I just didn't find it.

And of course it's good news that Wordpress is embracing RSS fully, as a way to connect reading and writing. It's what I wish Twitter and Facebook had done from the beginning. They said it wasn't possible. It's good to see that Matt & Co didn't fall for that.

Also interesting to see that they subscribed me to some stuff before I had ever been there. They are blogs I'm interested in. How did they know?

Update: Apparently you can only subscribe to a blog, not to a feed. I have quite a few feeds that don't have blogs. No reason to. Here are a couple of examples: NYT firehose, Hacker News firehose. Thee are two of my most-used feeds.

Update: I tricked it into subscribing to Hacker News by creating a pseudo-blog "wrapper" for it and asking Wordpress to subscribe to it. However, it did not like the wrapper for my linkblog. Weird and frustrating.

 1/19/2012; 10:32:32 PM.   .

Matt Waite, a professor at University of Nebraska, has written a very timely post about the dearth of student developers to work in newsrooms and j-schools. I wrote a comment, but my browser crashed as it was submitting it. Then I posted another comment, but I put it under the wrong post. Serves me right. I should have made my rather longish comment a blog post, as I so often recommend to others. So here goes.

First read Mr. Waite's post. If you're a regular here, you will find it on-topic, in many ways.

Now, my observations.

Lots to say on this subject, but most to the point -- I have lots of working code that's relevant to journalism, and lots more ideas. Also have a track record at getting ideas adopted. Not only am I available to work with academics who want to get stuff done, I have experience at it. Just finished a two-year fellowship at NYU J-school, and also worked as a fellow at Harvard Law School to get blogging adopted across the campus.

However -- it's been over 30 years since I was a student.

There are plenty of 50-somethings like me, with lots of relevant experience who are looking for ways to contribute.

Based on my experience at NYU, I think what the young folk are mostly distracted by are the VCs, who believe the way to riches in software is through people in their early 20s. It's hard to keep them interested in school, or anyhting other than being "the next Zuck."

One more thing I wrote a piece last year about educating the journo-programmer. To summarize, I think the one skill we should be teaching all journalists is how to manage their own infrastructure. And we should help compsci students learn how to make that easier and more powerful for the journos. And the ones who have talent at the intersection will be fairly obvious.

 1/19/2012; 12:09:24 PM.   .