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Register: "AOL gets it! Steve Case gets it!" beamed Dave Winer today, after brokering a deal that sees two hundred of the most popular weblogs become part of the AOL-Time Warner publishing empire. Yeah! I don't know how I missed this special distribution of Linux for Christians. It came out in 1999. "The distribution that will not lead you into temptation." Nice. Russell Gum is connecting Radio with SVG. Scott Johnson wrote an essay about trying to learn Radio as an outliner. "Anyone downloading software, particularly cheap software (Radio is $39.95), has the attention span of a rabid gnat. They tend to give up immediately when they hit a problem since their investment in the process is minimal at best." What he says is true, and if you use Radio for its main purpose, you get to the pleasure button quickly without too many distractions. But if you wander into the outliner (deliberately hard to do) you need to pay attention. Someday we may have a product that is just an outliner. For now we have to put the outliner on the side, and make it relatively hard to find, so it doesn't trip up casual users. Jonathon Delacour goes where few men have gone before, and I support him. Gender politics so far has been a mostly one-sided conversation. It's great to see men not being silent. Like everyone else I get too much spam. Maybe more than most people. At least 50 spam messages just now. Like everyone else I heard about Yahoo's change in policy about opting-out for marketing messages, but until now I didn't know where I had to go to do that. Thanks to Eugene Leitl for posting the pointer. Very clear. I'm turning them all off. And thanks to Yahoo, no sarcasm, for letting me do that. They're in a tough spot, for sure -- with a big burn rate, low sales, and no place to turn to get more free money. Those of us who use Yahoo's mail list service for community and standards work really don't have a choice but to continue to use it. We're all in a tough spot.
Happy birthday to Matthew McDevitt Donellan! 0. Happy birthday to Evan Williams! 30. Ingo Rammer spotted another .NET developer who started a weblog. Something's going on here. Wired: "Sen. Patrick Leahy says a controversial proposal to embed copy protection in electronics gear will not become law this year. Since Leahy is the powerful chairman of the Senate Judiciary committee, his opposition instantly boosts the difficulty Hollywood studios will encounter in their attempts to enact sweeping copyright legislation." Michael Bernstein reports on suicide bombings in Israel in real-time. It's so funny that Paolo made an OPML Easter egg. I've come to see it as an egg. How did he know? Protocol7 has an OPML => SVG viewer app. Thanks to the NY Times for the pointer to Daypop's aggregation of the top Amazon wish-list items by webloggers. Interesting stuff. Very futuristic application of weblogs. Oy I don't like the word transclusion, but it looks like it's sticking. The reason I don't like it is that it sounds icky, which is a word I like even less than yummy, but sometimes no other word will do. The word I like is inclusion. It's even in the dictionary. And it's got such positive meanings. Everyone is included. And it's like #include which is a key directive in C, and should be part of HTML. Postscript: David Davies says inclusion. Two other people I appreciate. Sam Ruby and DizzyD. Dizzy is one of the leads on Jabber. Sam spotted a comment by Dizzy about instant outlining. Sam got it exactly right. We're in total bootstrap mode. This is the third implementation of I/O in the last few months at UserLand. In October I built one that ran on XML-RPC and depended on the software that became Radio Community Server. We have behind-firewall users at UserLand and people who travel with laptops, so the software got complex, it works, but I didn't want to support it. The next revision, which I did over the new year holidays, used the publish-subscribe model described in OPML 1.1 (sorry no spec, just an advisory that it was coming) The third revision, the one people are using now, began with the most primitive HTTP-based polling. It just looks at the header and if the content length changed, it boldens the user and pre-caches the outline. It is so simple, yet reasonably efficient, and probably does scale pretty well. The problem with this approach is latency. It can take up to 30 seconds to learn of a change. In most circumstances that makes no difference, but when you're also talking on the phone with the person you're working with you feel the latency and it's bad. That's where Jabber comes into it. It's just lack of human bandwidth that's keeping us from doing it right now. Think of Radio 8 as a user interface for Jabber, that's where we're going. Instant outlining is also a killer app for instant messaging. We want to run on your network, we have no interest in duplicating what Jabber already does. BTW, I've seen it said that cloning RCS is not a good idea since we're already offering it for $0. This is wrong. Cloning it will get a package of capabilities integrated into the Jabber server, probably first, and perhaps AOL's and Microsoft's instant messaging servers. It's a blueprint for services that desktop users need, and we've provided the chickens, so if your egg is compatible, you don't have to wait. Apps drive markets. Without users, the programmers have nothing to do but jerk off. (And that's why there's so much jerking off, we forgot how to seduce users.) Andre Durand still believes the hype about open source. The loop has closed on this, they were just theories, that if you said "create this for me for free" that thousands of programmers would show up and magically work together in some kind of utopian way. In fact giving the code away caused programmers to get less user-centered, not more. Why should they pay attention to what you want? It's hard work to make stuff for users. Why should they work so hard when you aren't paying them? Hello Andre. Here's where I think openness fits into the equation, and it has very little to do with whether or not you let other people use your source any way they want to. And while it may seem obvious that giving away code removes the economic incentive, some people insist that a kind of communist magic happens that changes something that hasn't changed. You still need money to pay rent and buy food and put the kids through college. There was a bubble that caused people to believe this kind of babble. The bubble is gone. Some people haven't got the message yet. Two people I appreciate. 1. Jon Udell. What a mind. Our paths have intersected quite a few times on the journey through our individual explorations of the Internet as groupware. If you've been reading Scripting News you know Jon. It means so much to me that he's part of the loop on Radio 8. In a way I don't need any more success than to have someone of Jon's intelligence and drive to talk about this stuff with. The second guy is someone who I've only written about once, in a DaveNet last year. We fell out of each others' loop as I was beginning to work on Frontier in the late 80s. Last week I got an email from him, and I was shocked and surprised, but most important very pleased to get back in touch. I don't think he knows about Scripting News or weblogs, so if I write about him, this might be a way to get him to take a look, and when he does, this guy's going to get it like no one else ever has. I love Adam's mind the same way I love Jon's. Adam became the leading dBASE guru in the 80s, we talked endlessly about the politics, economics and design of software. dBASE was a good testbed for all the pits and foibles, all the marketing idiots who thought they ran the show. They endlessly frustrated Adam, who believed in the software, and in people, but we were both disappointed by human nature when we were younger. Now we're not so young anymore. (He's about the same age as I am.) Adam didn't make the switch to the Mac as I did, that's how we lost touch. I walked away from the PC, so thoroughly. There was a day in 1986 when we did a deal with Apple to replace every PC in the company with Macs, one for every employee and board member. At that point we talked over a chasm that was too deep. Adam wrote the manual for Ready, the least famous of my three 80s outliners, but still a very nice product, made much better by his contribution. Adam sent me an email because he had discovered SOAP and was tripping out over its subversion. Luckily my name hasn't been completely erased from the record by the Bigs and their friends in the press, so he knew that his old friend played a major role in making it happen. That's good. One of the reasons I like to be credited for my accomplishments is so that loops like this can close, when the time is right. Now here's the trippy part that proves what a small world it is. Adam was the CTO at Andover, the company that acquired Slashdot, then took it public, then merged with VA Linux. At one point Adam was worth $20 million, on paper, of course. He did manage to cash out, a good-sized sum, and now is independent, but that's a silly thought -- because Adam is and always was and always will be an independent thinker. Now I have to figure out how to entice him to try Instant Outlining. His mind will explode when that happens, and that will be something to behold. Postscript: Bing! Now, at the same time that I'm writing so much about outlining, it's so exciting to me to see these ideas begin to take hold, I'm also aware that many people using Radio may wonder what the heck I'm talking about. Reading this piece by Ernie the Attorney brings it home. "I see a lot of us are still struggling to define what 'blogging is, and also what it has the power to be. I guess I am struggling too." I so admire Ernie, I kid you not, and I also think I know that outlining will be the logical next step after weblogs. I think in many ways they're the same thing. But please don't feel you have to understand what we're doing now. Scripting News is about the leading edge, and the road at the edge is pretty rough. It will probably be a few months or even years before this stuff is fully baked. But we sold a lot of outlining software to attorneys in the 80s, and I believe I know how deep the connection is, so eventually I think it will be relevant to them. As we explored instant outlining at UserLand starting in November we learned that some people are good at it, and some people are very good. I can't judge my own work, because so much of the art is in the use of other people's outlines. For some people this will be their first experience on the other side of the fence, most people just use computers, very few people create things for other people to use. That changes with Instant Outlining. I've already written a bunch about how to create usable outlines, not published yet. Talking with Jon yesterday the question came up about who does it best. And hands-down that would be Brent Simmons, who is no longer at UserLand. Brent's outline was always the model of clarity. As his manager I knew exactly where my input was needed, what he was planning to do, and what he had done. That's what managers want, imho. Clarity, and a sense that the person knows what he's doing and is in synch with the rest of the team. Now, if the past is a guide, there will be naysayers -- people who say Instant Outlining isn't for everyone. The last time we had this discussion, in the 80s, I didn't have a weblog, so I couldn't explain the subtle point, that it's OK if it's not for everyone. Organizations will form where good outlining skills are a requirement. UserLand is already such a place. We can't employ people who don't narrate their work in outline form and collaborate with others. In many organizations, where people jealously guard the information they accumulate, group outlining will be seen as a threat. But my belief is that organizations that try to compete with ones that use this tool will lose that competition. Teams that communicate with care, and focus on helping each other will win every time. So it's OK if it's not for everyone.
DaveNet: In Rebuttal to Glenn Davis. A new macro for your blogging pleasure. Now here's an interesting story. Jon Udell just told me that he's written what he thinks has a chance to be the definitive piece on Instant Outlining. He rushed to get it out for Monday. At first I didn't get the magic of Monday, but then I realized that I had told people who were subscribing to my instant outline that I planned to publish my definitive piece on Monday, the 5th anniversary of Scripting News, and fourteenth for Frontier. Blah blah blah. So Jon wants to beat me. That is so cool. But he's hamstrung by an editorial process that gets grouchy when he says he has a scoop. Oy I've been there myself. At Wired I had a big story, ran it through DaveNet, but wanted to get it on the Hotwired home page. They said I had to wait until my turn came around. In the meantime another pub read my story and took the scoop and put it on page 1, where it belonged. Jon says he's tempted to upstream his story to his Radio blog. I said do it, I want to read his take. I don't care if he gets out there first. I'm satisfied that I got there first with the software. Another epiphany is coming. In a few days, Murphy-willing, a print journalist will write a truly insightful piece about blogging. It won't be superficial. It will be based on an aha. It won't be demeaning or diminutive. It won't change the mind of many professional journalists, but it will connect bloggers to print readers in a new way. Fascinating NY Times postmortem on the WTC. BigCo's do web services blah blah lies and BS. Nice lookin template on the site. Of course my bemused remark about Flash MX Crack just made matters worse. Now Scripting News itself is authoritative on this subject, not just the referer log. I wonder what people are searching for. Whatever it is, Google thinks they can find it at Scripting News. Wes: "My guess is that they just downloaded a warezed copy of Flash MX and are looking for a crack so that it won't ask them for a serial number." Register: Intel launches 2.4GHz P4. Yummy! Today's song goes like this. "Oh give me a home where the buffalo roam where the deer and the antelope play. Where seldom is heard a discouraging word and the sky is not cloudy all day." Ingo Rammer: "All the aggregator posts for which I don't have the time to read them (at the instant I see them) get posted to a 'must read' category that's not upstreamed." Ingo points to another Microsoft Radio blogger. This is great. Everyone at Microsoft should have a Radio weblog. We'll give them a good deal. BTW, to Microsoft's developer relations people -- this is Windows software. Works great on your newest OS. A totally new application. Let's spread the word. Win-win. 88 percent say that fax machines are covered under the Hollings bill. I wonder how that will work. The fax machine will have to go to the FBI or CIA or GAO or whatever and send it a scan of the document being faxed. It will have to do some OCR and then look it up in some massive database that doesn't exist, and then send a message back to the fax machine saying yay or nay. Who will pay for that government database? We know Eisner has at least $700 million (unless he spent it all) -- so maybe he should pay for the database and all the new services the government is going to have to provide. Also something else to consider. The Supreme Court might think this is a First Amendment issue. I am not a lawyer, but due process and privacy might enter into it too. Do you want the government to read all your faxes? Hmmm. Luckily I don't have a fax machine, I hate the things, so it's not really a problem for me. But it wouldn't surprise me if Hollings has a fax and uses it. BTW, in case it isn't clear -- a legal system where fax machines must call the government to get approval to send a document is a very bad idea. It reeks of the Soviet Union or the repression that people in China have to deal with. It's not only bad technology (it'll never scale) it's also bad period. The framers of the US Constitition envisioned something like this and gave the people the power to overthrow the government. I hope we will not go quietly into this future. It should be noted, in all the hooplah about Dan Gillmor's epiphany about real-time blogging, which does matter, despite what some nattering nabobs of negativism say, that Alan Reiter single-handedly introduced the people at the wireless conference in Orlando, earlier this month, to the idea of wireless conference-based blogging. Alan is the most thoughtful of evangelists. It can be hard to see someone else get all the air for an earlier epiphany one wanted to share. And lest I not share all the credit, let's be clear that this is an instantiation of something called Meeting Technology that was "invented" at Living Videotext in the 80s. I put that in quotes because it's virtually certain that Doug Engelbart did it too, in the 60s. Regardless we're now in bootstrap mode on a new Internet. That the epiphanies are swirling and whirling is pretty good evidence of that. OK, I have to get back to my Instant Outline. Seeya soooon. I got an email from John Gapper, the editor of the op-ed page of the Financial Times in response to one of my many observations about the Eisner essay. I said "We fully understand that [Eisner is] lying about protecting the interests of creative people. That the FT let him do this in their esteemed journal says something (not sure what)." Gapper explains. "I think all it says is that we think the debate about Internet copyright is a vital one, and we like well-written and pithy pieces on the subject that excite comment and interest, which this one clearly did. We have also carried a couple of other articles by Lawrence Lessig and we hope to keep following the topic." Accepted. If I the Eisner essay had landed on my desk I would have run it too. Glenn Fleishman says pfui to the NY Times theory that the Web has become boring. I concur. Here's how the essay for my Long Bet begins. "As with personal computing, the early days of Web publishing belonged to the hobbyists, reveling that it worked at all. But the Web is maturing, the tools are getting easy, as the understanding of the technology has become widespread." Pfui is what Nero Wolfe says when he doesn't believe something. Wolfe is a famous fictional detective. Detectives hear a lot of lies. Pfui is pronounced Puh-foo-eee. I read lots of Nero Wolfe books when I was a kid. They were great. A&E is now running a Nero Wolfe series, but I won't watch it. Their Nero Wolfe is skinny! The real one was very fat and lazy. He never left his house. He had an ace operative named Archie Goodwin who did all his legwork. He raised orchids and ate a lot of food. Correction. A&E's Nero Wolfe is fat. Ooops. I found a link to this article on MetaFilter yesterday, written by a woman, on a site called iFeminist.Com. I've quoted the last two paragraphs. "Eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Europe had a custom called charivari in which an abused husband was dressed as a woman and forced to ride through the village, sitting backwards on a donkey. Twenty-first century America displays a similar attitude. We snicker and laugh at abused men -- all the while telling them never to hit a woman, even in self-defense. At the same time, we bring up girls to believe it is acceptable to strike a man: 'If he gets fresh, just slap his face.' "Battered men pay taxes to support hotlines and shelters from which they are excluded because of their sex. They are dismissed by police because of their sex. Crime and punishment in domestic violence seem to hinge on genitalia and -- legally speaking -- men have the wrong equipment. The only right abused men seem to have retained in full is the right to remain silent."
Survey: Are fax machines legal? Newsweek: "Another blogger in the room read Searls’s log, and copied the link to his own site, acidly commenting on the inappropriateness of Nacchio’s whining. Though it’s not clear how many in the room were reading the weblogs, apparently there were a lot. In any case, it seemed that the room palpably chilled toward the pugnacious executive. This is a dangerous trend for public speakers everywhere." Monday is the fifth anniversary of Scripting News, and the fourteenth of Frontier. It wouldn't surprise me if there are some Radio users who were born after the the code that's running their blog, not that that actually means anything. Tommy Williams: "I work for Microsoft. I have worked for the company since June 1999. But it gets harder every day." Mary Wehmeier wrote a letter to Senator Hollings. It's the first letter I've seen from a user explaining the consequences the senator's bill would have on the vendors' products she depends on. In other words, users can't afford to be silent on this bill. If you like our software and you want it to keep evolving and improving, you have a stake in the outcome. Dudley Moore, Uncle Miltie and Billy Wilder, RIP. Michael Bernstein found a directory of Israeli weblogs. The NY Times covers the big news of the day. Sarcasm. Reuters: "A Dutch appeals court on Thursday told an Internet software company it could distribute a software program that is designed to let users share music and films on the Internet." Wired: "A political brawl over mandatory copy protection is about to spread to the U.S. House of Representatives." Russ Lipton documents Radio's Status Center. Hey Rebecca, Dan did have a moment of epiphany. Integrating computer technology with face-to-face meetings has been a long time coming. And get this, it happened at a computer industry conference. Something new at an industry conference. That in itself is an epiphany. Scoble: "Conference directors don't weblog and don't get why this is important for them to do this." Scoble is right about that. He used to run Fawcette's conferences until he jumped ship and joined UserLand. We're not in the conference business (please, there's already too much on our plate) but our technology will eventually play a big role in conferences. I saw the same kind of edging-up to interactive conferences at Davos 2000. They had a big screen with pre-composed information displayed in The Brain. Very few people tuned into it. I watched and tried to engage people in discussion about it but audience members were hardly aware it was present. I believe this is because it was completely static and mostly off-topic. Look once or twice, don't see anything interesting, don't look again. There's so much other stuff to look at. Anyway, the trick is to have audience-entered material visible to the moderator. Members of the audience, perhaps only 3 or 4, can comment in realtime on what's happening. The moderator is in both conversations. The difference in perspective between an audience member and a person on stage is so big, sitting in the audience I often wonder why don't they ask the obvious question now. Standing in line waiting for my turn guarantees that my comment or question will not apply to the discussion when I finally get my turn to speak. That's the vein of gold that Dan struck. His off-the-cuff instant thoughts made it into the room, and his inner-geek loved it because of the Rube Goldbergish way it got there. Dan, did I get it right?? Jon Udell's first essay on Instant Outlining. As always, Jon cuts right to the core. "It's not about XML, or HTTP, or outlining. It's about people evolving to the point where they publish what they're doing, and subscribe to what other people are doing, in just the right proportions, so that there's maximum awareness of shared purpose but minimal demand on the scarce resource of attention." I would only disagree with the statement that it's not about outlining. I think it is. One of the reasons the time is ripe for Instant Outlining is that email has become so unusable due to spam. With I/O, you choose who to subscribe to. If they spam you, or you lose interest, unsubscribe. Adam Curry: "My I/O has already replaced my email conversations with 4 people in one day!" Julian Harris: "It starts with a cage containing five monkeys." Did you watch The West Wing last night? What a great show. I loved the part about LemonLymon.Com. It reminded me of a few sites I sometimes watch but mostly don't. On this day two years ago, Joel Spolsky, an ex-Microsoft guy, published an essay about legal encumberments and why software developers should never agree to them. What he says about employees applies equally to independent developers. Be careful what you agree to, the lawyers keep copies of everything you sign. Charles Miller is talking about doing a clone of Radio Community Server in Java. He posits that if he ported our code we'd sue him. Probably not, but please play fair. It's probably not possible anyway because Java doesn't have the high-level integration of an object database with the scripting language. Of course there's no reason he can't clone RCS in Java, and to that I say Gambatte. (Japanese for Go For It.) BTW, the core spec for RCS was available quite a few months ago, but few people were interested until we had a base of users and an application that built on it. Another comment. Because there are no patents on any of this stuff, it's likely that Radio Community Server will become a universal architecture for Internet-based groupware apps. HailStorm, Groove and Liberty Alliance don't stand a chance. Too encumbered by crazy intellectual property constraints. Matt Goyer: "Let's buy a senator!" $300K. Thanks to Sam Ruby for sending a pointer to the Microsoft shared source license. The patent disclaimer is at the top. "You may use any information in intangible form that you remember after accessing the Software. However, this right does not grant you a license to any of Microsoft's copyrights or patents for anything you might create using such information." It's a poison pill for sure. Very clear. On this day last year, the first draft of: A Busy Developer's Guide to SOAP 1.1. No patents. I hope some day the independent developers appreciate that because we've been developing in advance of Microsoft in this area, that their patents are going to be pretty hard to establish. UserLand does not patent any of its technology. This is a matter of ethics, core values and self-respect. We believe in the power to compete. We think our technology is so good that it can withstand competition. Microsoft clearly has jumped over to the dark side. It wasn't always so. At one point they were willing to bet on their engineering. Today they're betting on their lawyers. I say this in a challenging way, knowing that engineering still has some power at Microsoft, and that a lot of developers at Microsoft read this weblog. Guys and gals, this is over the line. Your company has a disconnect. You aren't producing 1.0 software if the bosses keep your competition out through the use of patents. Today, if you want to make real software that has a chance of getting to 2.0 and beyond, you must do it outside of Microsoft, or change Microsoft. Good morning. Just getting started. First stop Daypop. Good to see the Eisner piece is #3. If you know someone who thinks Disney is great, but also liked Napster, send them a pointer to this piece. Also let them know that Eisner made over $700 million in five years. And he wants more! Wow. Thanks to Sam Ruby for the pointer to this email from Miguel de Icaza about Microsoft's release of Rotor. Summary of what's happened so far. Earlier this week Microsoft released the source for the core technologies of .NET in source form under their "shared source" license. What's the catch? For that you just have to read Miguel's email. Patents. Has Microsoft disclosed the patents they've filed on this stuff? The license appears to be buried in the source release, so if you want to stay clean, is there a way to read the license? Not clear. We know there are patents somewhere because Craig Mundie and David Stutz said so in public, last summer at the O'Reilly Open Source Convention. (Postscript: Sam Ruby sent a pointer to the license.) Jenny the Shifted Librarian likes her Replay TV. "Even on my 60-hour unit, I usually only have about 5 hours clear at any given time because I'm recording everything I or my family might want to watch. Some of the stuff on there has been waiting months for me to watch it. Other stuff I just delete without watching when I need the room." My TiVO works the same way, except I don't have as much storage as Jenny. A note to Eisner and the other filthy bastards who think I'm a pirate, I pay $60 per month for this service. And I largely use it to watch stuff that's broadcast over the public airwaves for $0. Go figure. BTW, do you see a pattern here? Microsoft sends a friendly hippie to make the pitch. But Bill Gates made even more money than Eisner. Bill wants more money. And he's willing to look like a benevolent dictator to get you hooked. But the patents are there, it's like a field full of landmines. Go in, if you choose to, with your eyes open.
DaveNet: Eisner made over $700 million in 5 years. Michael Bernstein is blogging from Netanya, in Israel, where a suicide bomber struck today. David Stutz: An Architectural Tour of Rotor. Jeremiah Rogers' first essay on Instant Outlining. It's a good one. I'll be writing a few myself. BTW, here's the OPML version of my instant outline. It changes all the time. This is called Instant Outlining, or I/Oing for short. "It's fresh. It's buggy. And it's yummy." Just a small part of The World Outline, which makes a great acronym. Hehee. A candidate for best-named-blog for 2002. Hey Radio UserLand got a writeup on XML.Com. Thanks. A few minor corrections. The MP3 playlist stuff isn't present in Radio 8, nor is the chat functionality (both were in Radio 7). They renamed XML-RPC and didn't mention the support for OPML. Otherwise much appreciated, glad they mentioned that the Radio outliner is an easy XML editor. Rob Fahrni introduces a new Visioite Radio blogger. Speaking of new converts, a hearty welcome back to Dan Gillmor, proud owner of a new Radio blog. Brian Yoder: "I live next door to where Disney does most of its creative work and I know a lot of artists over there, and I can tell you that Eisner has no fans among the creative staff in any of his enterprises. Disney treats most of its creative people like garbage (why? because they can!) and they churn more talented people in and out of their doors than any large company I have ever seen." Truth is, Brian -- the tech industry treats its creative people with just as much disdain. The Eisner story has been an eye-opener for me because I've looked at the garbage that passes for thought in our industry and see how hard it is to be creative. It requires the consent of the press and analysts, none of whom care about the truth, they just follow the money, as if that's all that mattered. I'm fed up. I don't think the tech industry gets a free pass on this. Corruption is all over the place. Giles Bateman: "The problem is not with just one corrupt executive -- it is with industry standard operating procedure." Ryan Naraine at InternetNews thinks Google's News Search feature is a weblog. It's funny. It's a joke, right? An early April Fool? Register on Eisner: "We want some of whatever his speech writers are smoking." Disturbing interview with Anne Thomas-Manes on the evolution of Web Services. She says "We're way ahead of everybody else in the market because we've been doing it longer than just about anybody, with the exception of Microsoft." Wow. That the interviewer, who is familiar with our work, let her get away with this is appalling. Nick Denton describes a "defining moment" when bloggers got looped into the discussion at a wireless panel at Esther's. I pitched Stewart Alsop on this idea for Agenda, over ten years ago. It's a breakthrough for sure. No conference will ever be the same now that conference rooms are wired with 802.11b and bloggers are in the audience. Eric Soroos puts the Eisner debate into focus from an engineer's point of view. It's interesting, we are entitled to an opinion because Eisner would have us contribute our work to his business, without compensation. Yeah, that does sound like theft to me, by any reasonable definition of the word. Actually it's worse. It's slavery. I think this is how they've been screwing musicians. Heh. I had my own revelation about Eisner's argument. I think I can boil it down to its essence. It goes something like this. We remember the days, not long ago, when our users were stupid. They thought they were giving money to the artists. We want them to be stupid again. Tommy Williams: "Like most teams inside Microsoft, we have a SharePoint site set up to share information. Everyone in the team can post to the site. There are lists, calendars, and even discussion groups." There's a Cleveland Indians weblog, filed under Sports. Salon's Katharine Mieszkowski interviews Rusty Hodge, who runs a small Internet radio station, on the new economics imposed by the DMCA. "We just want to be treated as over-the-air broadcasters are treated." Jerome Camus: "If Eisner made 700 million over 6 years, he could have given 600 of them to 1200 new, unknown and worthy artists, made them ecstatically happy and launched them possibly into further artistic production endeavours. He would have still been filthy rich." More thoughts on Eisner. The most disgusting thing about his FT op-ed piece is that he's preaching morals. But he's so decadent. We fully understand that he's lying about protecting the interests of creative people. That the FT let him do this in their esteemed journal says something (not sure what). On this day in 1999: "Submission is inevitable, even for people who hate to submit." It's so funny. One of our worst kept secrets is on Daypop this morning. Giggle. Monday is the 5-year anniversary of this weblog.
Microcontent News: "Scientology critics again claim Google censorship, this time through Adwords program." Adam Vandenberg had an aha moment thinking about Radio in relation to Microsoft Sharepoint. He's right that everything we do is about presence. Our scaling strategy is Apache. (In other words static HTML and XML where ever possible, and using CPU cycles on the desktop.) Our model is publishing, even if it's behind a firewall inside a corporation. We can't fit our view of the world into Office apps. Neither can Microsoft, imho. Scott McNealy is a loser because he confronts Microsoft on the old battleground. There are so many ways to zig, why keep beating your head against the brick wall. I think MS and Sun must be in cahoots. (What a great word!) News.Com: "Mankind needs your help." Loser. Bull Mancuso: "I'm going to share my displeasure with McNealy in person. Looking forward to that." The Dot-Net Guy wants to kick James Gosling's butt. I just sent an I/O message to Bull. He says "Get in line." Thanks to Ryan Tate for digging up this interesting nugget. Guess who was in the opening film on the Oscars on Sunday night? When you're ready to be blown away, click here. "I guess not everyone in the Hollywood power structure hates file sharing," says Tate. Indeed. Wow. One of my favorite oldtime Manila sites is back! They don't deal with the weighty issues of the day, unless you consider what you had for lunch to be a weighty issue. For me today it was ravioli with tomato sauce. It was tasty. John Robb: "If we had copyright term reform, we could see a world where people carry around the Library of Congress -- legally -- on their laptop. " I don't know what this guy is doing but it sure sounds weird. Weird is good. JY: "I'm launching one stupid contest today." Michael Eisner wrote an op-ed piece in the Financial Times. A simple response. Where do I send the money? I want to buy music. I am not a pirate. I can afford to pay for what I use. But I won't buy it through the pre-Internet distribution system, or a hobbled Internet that's designed to behave like the old system. Also, once I've paid for the music, I want to use it on any device I want to. And if I like a song I want to play it for people I care about so they can learn about me, and also be inspired by the music. And since he raised the subject of slavery, I insist that some of the money flow to the creative people. Eisner is dangerously out on a limb. Napster wasn't a narrow thing. There were tens of millions of users. It was a cultural phenomenon, unlike anything Hollywood has ever manufactured. People know what nirvana looks like, we got a great demo, and that's what we want. Forbes reports that Eisner made over $700 million in five years as Disney's CEO. Where does it stop? He's 59 years old. How much money does he want? Music is important, not just for its monetary value. The philosophy of cynics is that there is no magic to music. Too bad for them, but music does have healing powers. If you think about it, it's like Don's Amazing Puzzle, so obvious, you have to work not to see it. Have you ever listened to a song from childhood and gotten goosebumps? Where does that music take you? Deep inside yourself, to places normal existence can't easily reach. The feelings, for me, are pleasure and relaxation. I feel it physically. The music I was getting from Napster is stuff that Eisner's distribution system doesn't carry dammit. Being able to walk through my past over the Internet, through music, is a kind of therapy I want to share with everyone. Music has unique power to heal. So what's in the way of this experience? A few people who are worth hundreds of millions of dollars and want more. Yuck. The irony of it is, if they would get behind this instead of fighting it, they'd probably be able to milk it for even more money than the old distribution system. I never liked buying music in a store. I really would like to buy music on the Internet. Really. How much money? How many ways are there to spend money that bring happiness? Not that many Michael. Nick Denton: "John Doerr, the venture capitalist, is probably the richest man in the room." There's a Boston Red Sox weblog called Bambino's Curse, filed under Sports. Today Adam Curry, who is a disk jockey in the Netherlands, shared his playlist. Adam and I have become good friends over the Internet, even though we live on different continents, and have only met face to face a handful of times. Today for the first time I found out that our tastes in music intersect, but there are a few bands and songs in his playlist that I do not have in mine. Now why can't I just click off some checkboxes on a web form and buy them? Would you like to see what music Adam listens to? You can. Want to see what music I like? Check this out. Here's a free pervasive computing idea. A pair of glasses that can "see" 802.11b hotspots. I got the idea from a post on Chris Gulker's weblog. Look at the picture and imagine that you could see what's hot. Boston Globe: "At present there's no good blog equivalent of Yahoo - a categorical search engine that lists Web sites devoted to specific topics." That's very true. I've been thinking a lot about this lately. There's starting to be a critical mass of weblogs that "cover" a certain subject. It may be time to start a categorized directory of weblogs. We have the tools here at UserLand to do that. And a great spot to do it. I started a directory of domain expert weblogs that I know of. We can build it with the suggest-a-link feature. Lawrence Lee and I will maintain the directory. Through inclusion we will be able to seamlessly incorporate other directories. The bootstrap will be more human than technological. Our directories are built out of OPML. Any outliner can be used to edit branches of any directory if it supports OPML and if the documents are stored on the Web. Radio is the ideal tool for working on such structures, but any combination of software that supports OPML and HTTP can play. I read the Flash Blog every time it updates. Something like Radio is happening over there. Radio uses bare-bones lowest-common-denominator HTML, with tweaks so it'll run in as many browsers as possible (even so, our biggest problem browser, MSIE/Mac remains inept at talking to a server on the same machine, on Mac Classic OS, which many people still use). But the Flash developers are onto something that seems as exciting as Radio. Intuitively, it seems the two pieces of software should be bonded. This could be one of our escape routes from Microsoft captivity (recall that they have a monopoly in HTML browsers). We have an another escape route in bootstrap mode. Soon you'll be able to browse cool stuff on the Internet without running any Microsoft software. You'll probably read about it on some of the blogs in the coming days, weeks and months. James Robertson: "Without content creators, there would be no need for a CMS. Yet surprisingly, this user group is often the worst served by a new content management system." That's true of the expensive CMS's but not with Radio. We've totally flipped it around. A personal content management system. Get started in five minutes. Build a portal around content that's easy to create. Web Services top to bottom. There's a mind bomb waiting to happen over in content-management-land. Never say never. Reuters: "Some 2,000 people were killed and more than 3,000 injured after a series of earthquakes flattened a district capital and villages in northern Afghanistan late on Monday night and Tuesday morning." Steve MacLaughlin has the scoop on a redesign at the WSJ. When I need to rekindle my intensity, I read this piece on the Radio site. It's the deep philosophy of the product, borrowed from Jobs and Woz. Tom Matrullo proclaims the death of Hollywood. Reminds me of a debate that Sumner Redstone of Viacom particpated in at Davos in 2000. He said that 90 percent of the world's creativity is within 100 miles of his office in Hollywood. I muttered to the person sitting next to me "Off to the glue factory!" Adam Curry: "Woohoo! Instant Outlining!" Happy Birthday to Brent Simmons. Many happy returns. Xml.Com is four years old today.
DaveNet: My Long Bet with the NY Times. "My bet with Martin Nisenholtz at the Times says that the tide has turned, and in five years, the publishing world will have changed so thoroughly that informed people will look to amateurs they trust for the information they want." AP: "A federal appeals court said Monday that Napster Inc. may not resume its free online file-swapping service." Today's mail page has a quote from Rob Enderle. I guess I'm becoming a BigPub? Pioneer Press reviews Radio. "When you give the masses a publishing tool this powerful, I don't think you can pretend to know what will happen." Coool! Tony Collen links to two more Pioneer Press articles about blogging. I just got an email from Julio Ojeda-Zapata, consumer-technology editor at the St. Paul Pioneer Press, with a pointer to their Radio weblog, which contains the full text of today's stories. It's much easier to read. The links are hot. And there are no ads. Very nice. Brent Simmons explains MySQL in terms that make sense to Frontier users. Mark Paschal adds: "In doing so, he also explains Frontier (as a database environment) to MySQL users." This Radio site is noteworthy because it's the first to flow through Phillip Pearson's Python clone of Radio Community Server. Best wishes to Josh Lucas on his last day in his 20s. Steve Zellers: "You can't have bugs in code that isn't there!" Daniel Berlinger: "If you can offer sacrifices to Murphy on my behalf, it would be much appreciated." Done. Russ Lipton: Speak In Your Own Voice. Exactly right. The weblogs that are most interesting are the ones that have something to say about the writer. Teach us what you know. Bring new people into blogging. Be viral. The Redwood City Public Library has a weblog. BBC: "Financier George Soros announced in February that he was giving a $3m grant to the Budapest Open Access Initiative to set up open-archiving systems." Since Scripting News is already so full today, I wrote a bit about Movable Type and Radio over on my Radio weblog. Bill Bumgarner: "Apple's policy is a reflection of the legal status of minors within the US." It took a minute for me to realize that this is a joke. NY Times: "Sun will roll out a new set of Web services standards intended as an alternative to Microsoft's .Net." News.Com: "Sun Microsystems, Oracle, IBM, and Hewlett-Packard are expected to announce new software or tools to improve or fill holes in their product family, and battle the perception that Microsoft is leading the way in Web services." Craig Burton: "The lack of clarity from both vendors makes it very difficult to understand what is happening." Screen shot of News.Com article about IBM with an IBM ad. The poetic explanation of "web services." Never mind that it's impossible for the BigCo's to actually do what was promised by web services, since the core idea is to turn the Internet into a scripting environment where no one knows what tools you use (and you can switch at will). The Bigs roll out their own standards to battle the perception that the other guy is leading. None of them are leading. If you read the stories with that in mind, you'll find the truth. It's all lies. Saturday: "There isn't really much fun in web services unless you're a programmer who likes to play in different environments, or likes to work with other programmers who work in different environments, or thinks the Internet is cool, even if he or she can't totally explain why. Web services are plumbing, and therefore to most non-programmers, off-topic." Am I the only one who thinks its weird that a search for Scientology on Monday yields roughly the same results as a search done last week? What about all the news stories and essays about Scientology that appeared since the issue was exposed? Another funny Google thing. Somehow something about Flash MX "crack" ended up in my referer log. Google indexed the log. Now when people search for Flash MX Crack, they get taken to my log. (It's the second hit.) Thereby perpetuating my log's authority on this subject. One for the girls, thanks to Masukomi. Bull Mancuso: "My favorite TV show is The Sopranos." Coming soon. Watch for an appearance of Lawyer Boyer. She's not actually a lawyer. That's her real name. Ernie the Attorney: "I remember being shocked when I left law school to go clerk for a federal trial judge here in New Orleans." The Death Clock says I'm due on Sunday, Feb 11, 2029. On this day in Y2K: ManilaPalooza! Remembered well in 2001. On this day in 1999, Salon wrote about the Dancing Hamsters.
Radio UserLand: Text-editing cheat sheet. David Weinberger: What the Web is For. "Small Pieces Loosely Joined tries to explain what I think is truly important about the Web. I wrote the book for grownups, but I think what it says is as true for kids as for their parents." If I worked at a BigCo they'd never let me show you this screen shot. It's a snapshot in the development process of my new Instant Outliner. I just got something working and wanted to mark the moment. If you study the screen shot carefully you'll figure out what I got working. I know I really have to stop teasing and just ship it already, right? Dori Smith is blogging the Oscars. Hey check this out. The mind bombs are spreading. DJ Adams figured out that our XML coffee mug could map onto any HTTP server running on 127.0.0.1, port 5335. He wired it up to Peerkat, and it worked. This is what bonds us, not whether or not we give our code away in a way that pleases Richard Stallman or Jeff Bezos (to pick two extremes) -- it's whether one can pick up on an eye-twinkle, and let your soul get excited by the possibilities. I love playing tennis with people who hit the ball back. There are so many sad sacks floating around, what a thrill to find someone whose mind is alive. East Broadway Ron keeps taking us to places that I worship. Today he stops at Junior's on East Flatbush in Brooklyn, who his friend from France fell in love with. It's one of the stops on the official Gustatory Tour of NY. The most heavenly cheesecake in the world. And they ship. Sending a Junior's cheescake is better than flowers. And don't fall for the different flavors, that's for the goyishas. Just ask for a slice of the plain cheesecake, a cup of coffee and take a deep breath and prepare for a trip to heaven on earth. Doc just demo'd Radio's outliner to Cory Doctorow, and Cory asks if he can use the outliner to post to Blogger, and of course the answer is yes. Screen shot. Seems like last year's mind bombs still have some life in them. Happy. Ingo Rammer: Using American dates with Radio on localized Windows. Karl Martino: "Bells and whistles are great - a UI that looks beautiful is great - but I like a system that moves as fast as I do." Moral of the story -- it doesn't matter how fast the software is, what matters is how fast it responds. We tweaked the performance of Radio so that it comes back right away after you post. It may take a few seconds for it to get onto the public server, but you're back to work in an instant. Fraase's Elephant Dance essay linked to yesterday is getting a lot of interesting comment. It's cool that Michael is collating the discussion. To Glenn, who liked my story about talent and Dan Gillmor, I've seen countless companies win or lose on the quality and commitment of the talent. Too many times the suits swoop in, resentful of the role talent plays, and screw the whole thing up. I was part of one of those disasters, Visicorp, as was Dan Bricklin, Bob Frankston and Mitch Kapor. Mitch had a great story to go with the mess. He said the corporate types treated the talent with as much respect as Nine-Lives treated Morris The Cat. Bring the pussy cat in to the meeting. Meow. Nice kitty. Now shut up. I went looking for a picture of Mitch Kapor and dug up this famous portrait of Bill Gates, Mitch and Fred Gibbons taken for the 1984 rollout of Apple's Macintosh. This poster was distributed to every developer, our names were on the poster too, so that guaranteed that we'd put it up in our front office. We were proud to be Mac developers. In those days Bill was talent. Fred was a total suit, but an imaginative one who understood users. Mitch was the perfect eclectic and brilliant software designer. Phillip Pearson is cloning Radio Community Server in Python. Heh. It's fun to watch. He just got comments working. Doc Searls will be our eyes and ears at Esther's this year. NY Times: "Over the last few years, Internet job sites, especially Monster, have eaten away at newspapers' help-wanted ads, which inch for inch have been their single most profitable product." Steve Zellers: "The big loser in Mac OS X is the file system fragility problem." Steve also asks where Bull Mancuso came from. Yeah. Good question, except Bull doesn't like intellectuals and would never use a word like etymology. He's from Elizabeth, NJ and drives a Cadillac SUV. He has a license for the gun he carries. He goes to board meetings and baseball games and has a house in Reno, and spends a lot of time flying betw the coasts. He uses a Sony Vaio with 802.11b and Radio 8.
DaveNet: Web Services are boring because.. NY Times: "Pick a stock topic, assign a producer, interview a few people, slap it on the air: that's 'in-depth' television journalism." Michael Fraase: When Elephants Dance. What is Bitzi? John Boynton: "The single best thing you can do with stylesheets is to add a little extra space between your lines of text." Russ Lipton: How to Create Navigation Links. DotNetCentric: "There's a new Microsoft blogger in town." Jeremy Bowers released a new version of Jabber.Root for Radio 8. "The only major new feature is reliability, but I'd say that's a biggie," says Jeremy. NY Times: "No product has been skinned quite as Winamp has." One year ago today, Glenn Fleishman nailed it. "There are a lot of plans floating around to control media, and none of them benefit the artists or consumers, and all of them impose ridiculous burdens on manufacturers." Even more true today. Glenn, today, on AOL's email meltdown: "You've Lost Mail!"
News.Com ran a light edit of last night's piece. Economist: "Everything seems wonderful, darling. And yet a shadow stalks Tinseltown. Beneath the bonhomie the industry's leaders are increasingly nervous that Hollywood is about to be Napsterised." A new feature on Weblogs.Com shows the top 100 pages pointed to by weblogs that pinged in the last three hours. It's rebuilt every night at midnight Pacific, Murphy-willing. Some problems calling Advogato's XML-RPC interface. Sean Gallagher: "I suspect that Dvorak doesn't know a web service from a hole in the ground." There's a Detroit Tigers weblog. Oh the humanity! I've been following Brig Eaton's battle with epilepsy on her weblog, wondering if it was OK to point. Today's installment is so riveting, I decided it was time. Take a deep breath. Tom Matrullo asks some interesting questions about our deal with the NY Times. I have written extensively about the difference between amateurs and pros. I use the terms the same way they apply to athletics. There's no implication of higher quality on either side, but if I had to make a choice, I'd prefer to read amateur stuff, it's more honest, less conflicted. Integration means having bloggers write for the Times and having Times reporters keep blogs. I've also written about that. Tom asks some other questions that I don't think, as the CEO of a private company, I have to or want to answer. BTW, unlike Tom, I was against Third Voice. If it had caught on, there would have been no difference between the Web and mail lists. I like mail lists for what they are. And I like the Web for what it is. And I thought the Times challenge of Amazon over use of the Times Best-Seller List was tacky, but then I don't think much of Amazon either. They could have been Google, they could have been on our side, and a stupid worthless patent was enough to turn them to the dark side. I think the Pew Internet (pointer?) writeup nailed it. Someone at NYTD thinks weblogs are important. But it's a big organization, a very venerable one, and there are two sides to that. I don't want to inherit any of the Times' conflicts, I am solidly a blogger, and an amateur, but I do want to help ease them into the new practice of journalism, and at the same time help bloggers take ourselves and each other more seriously. And maybe it's just a way of returning a kindness they did for me when they helped train my mind as a kid. 4/24/01: "At a party, editor-publisher Louis Rosetto introduced me to one of Wired's biggest advertisers, an American vice-president of a Japanese company, Fujitsu, Toshiba, or something like that. I listened to his pitch for a minute, and interrupted with a question. 'Don't you make a clone?' I asked. He gulped. I saw a light go on. He looked at Louis, and Louis at me. They walked away. I felt owned." Sometime last night Google reinstated Xenu.Net. That's very cool. No doubt there will be more challenges in the future. On Slashdot they noted that without exception the tech sites stood up for Google. That's something to be proud of. Russ Lipton: How to Download and Swap Themes. Macrobyte: "RCSearch is the super-easy-to-use search engine for UserLand's Radio Community Server." Whew. The Daypop Top 40 is back. Missing it felt like losing a thumb. Not that I've lost a thumb. Last year on this day, Vignette was worth $1.5 billion, Interwoven $1.3 billion, Allaire was $185 million and Marimba $81 million. "I see no rhyme or reason here." Today they are worth $830 million, $546 million, Allaire merged with Macromedia and Marimba is worth $74 million. BTW, I sold another piece to News.Com. $0.00.
DaveNet: Scientology and Google. Great links tonight on The Shifted Librarian. Wired: "The Consumer Broadband and Digital Television Promotion Act prohibits the sale or distribution of nearly any kind of electronic device -- unless that device includes copy-protection standards to be set by the federal government" South China Morning Post: "Ironically, the concept of blogs in the next few years may see its full expression not in the West, but in China, where community, relationships and reputation can sway a highly literate population." News.Com: Google pulls anti-Scientology links. Wired: "The Church of Scientology has managed to yank references to anti-Scientology websites from the Google search engine." John Robb: "Germany treats Scientology like a cult and they outlaw it under the same laws that prevent distribution of Neo-Nazi propoganda." Microcontent News has an RSS feed. Click here to subscribe to it in Radio 8. Advogato has an XML-RPC interface. Coool! 802.11b: "In a move that surprised me, at least, Apple offers up a Bluetooth technology preview, working with D-Link's USB-based Bluetooth adapter, which Apple will offer for $49 through its Apple Store starting in April coupled with some OS X 10.1.3 software." Welie.Com: Interaction Design Patterns. Very interesting. A concise taxonomy of Web UI techniques. Thanks to Manton Reece for the pointer. John Dvorak: "This Web-service stuff is purely wishful thinking. Nobody knows what the heck is really going on." Russ Lipton's Learning HTML cheat sheet. Web Pages That Suck is a Radio weblog. Yeah. News.Com: "Beginning April 24, Yahoo's Mail Forwarding service will cost $29.99 a year, according to a message posted on Yahoo's site." Here's something recursive and Googlish. I have one of the most authoritative links to Google according to Google. It makes my brain hurt to think what this means. Bull Mancuso: "Just got a call from Joey saying that I left my cigarette burning in the ashtray of his car last night, and the place stinks. He says if I do it again he's going to blow my head off." Washington Post: "We do still have Dick Nixon to kick around. Apparently, thanks to his tapes, forever and ever and ever." Bob Crosley: "I think the news aggregator is the key. It does a great deal of my surfing for me." I admit I have been procrastinating on the OPML Coffee Mug. Not to worry. Carlos Granier is pushing me along. He has an OPML Coffee Mug on his site. I click on it and I get a dialog. I had to look twice. How did he do that? Then I realized that I have been leaking, on DHRB. He just connected up to the code I've already written. Hehe. I love you guys. What a sweet reminder. Hey Miguel de Icaza has a weblog. Nice. Jennet's first Radio theme. Everyone wants to know -- what's become of Daypop? The Top-40 page has been empty for the last day. I miss it. Reading the blogs this morning I see questions about why we wanted to work with the NY Times to get their content flowing through Radio's news aggregator. I'm going to try to answer them, but understand this is an ongoing thread, there will be more to say about it as time goes by. First, take it as a given than I personally like to read the Times. Hopefully I've explained that. I think, but I don't know for sure, that we're getting links to stories that don't appear on the index pages on the Times' site. Second, they are a leader in their business, so it's likely to pry loose other XML-based feeds. We are already see evidence of that. Third, it's a first step down a road that will inevitably lead to, imho, an integration of amateur and professional journalism. The practices of each should be adopted by the other. My stake in the ground -- in a few years the home pages of the surviving professional sites will be weblogs. And in a few years, the art of writing for the Web will focus on domain expertise. Having NY Times stories on an equal footing with those written by bloggers will, imho, elevate the writing of the bloggers, it will tease out quality that today is possible, but give it the push that it needs to get to the next level. At the same time, some of the reporters at the Times may be inspired to check out a few of their new cousins to see what they're doing. Instead of a superficial dismissal, perhaps they'll see that there are some new tricks they can learn to liven up their writing and create bonds with their readers. Just as this process makes for better software, a two-way relationship based on respect between writers and readers improves the quality of writing. So it's a blending. And just a first step. And, as with all first steps, it's hard to see exactly where it's going. But it's certainly better to have the Times syndicating through XML, than not. Good morning Vietnam! (I always wanted to say that.) There isn't anything stunning or exciting happening right now. Yesterday Tori brought me a new coffee cup. It's very huge. In a few moments I will drink my first coffee from that cup. Like a Slashdot member saying First Post! I will say, out loud, First Coffee! Tori says she would like me to write more pieces about life and love, bodies and struggles. I told her that I had been reading old stuff I wrote a few years ago and finding that it was pretty good, better than what I'm writing now. I suggested that perhaps I had a talent that had slipped away. After all, my eyes had talents that have slipped away. They don't work so well anymore. So maybe my writing about deeper and more abstract things has fallen too? It's possible. Or another possibility. Maybe I learned what I wanted to teach myself. I still seek out younger people, and ask them questions, to try to explore my own past and maybe give them a boost in their path through life. I think it's hard to find shortcuts for others. But at least I listen to myself. That's cool. The other day, talking with Chris and Gretchen Pirillo and The Scoble Boys, I said something quotable that I'd like to share. Control is not possible, but power is. I asked Chris some broad questions, and he had answers. He's a very smart and talented guy, so that's not too surprising. I asked what he wanted to do with his life (he's in his 20's). He talked about leaving a legacy, making a difference, changing the world. Ahhh I recognize that. That's what I wanted when I was in my 20's. Today, in my mid-40's (I'll be 47 in a few weeks) -- these things matter almost not one whit. I never wake up and say I want to change the world. My inner voice isn't interested. Nope. What does it want? To feel good now. I suppose that makes sense, as you get older you want less. Smaller things make me happy. I'm easier to please. Chris asked what it's like being in my 40's and after I explained he said "Wow I guess I don't have much to look forward to." This puzzled me. I said that's not true. It's cool to not have the struggles. It's good to feel defined, to know who you are and why you are that way. It's good to know what you can and can't do. That I control nothing, to really believe that, makes relaxation possible. These are the things I say that make people uncomfortable. But there you go, I still can write, even though my eyes are weak and my feet hurt. Now I'm going to go trolling for trouble. Seeya in a bit.
Today's big news: The New York Times on Radio UserLand. News.Com: "Citigroup has agreed to use Microsoft's Web services technology, including password protection, online authentication and messaging services. The endorsement is significant for Microsoft, which has been struggling to define a business plan for its .Net My Services product." Paul Boutin: Bloggers vs Journalists. Doc Searls: Death by Content Management. Flangy: "If I was doing some for-pay web work, and it was going to be IE/Windows only, then there would certainly be some CSS going on." Jeff Barr is cooking something up at Syndic8. I bet it's pub-sub. He knows when feeds change. He can build a nice network based on notification. Anyway it's nice to be on the receiving end of a tease for a change. MacCentral reports on a wireless hotzone in downtown Palo Alto. Interesting. Gets me thinking. Downtown Palo Alto is in a depression. Lots of For Lease signs. Even the most famous landmark, The Good Earth, is shuttered. I thought it would be a good investment for renewal of the business district to have free WiFi for University Avenue, to attract people to local businesses. This is something the city should be doing. A special tax for stores on the avenue. Get the occupancy rates back to their former level. David Burrows gave me the ad of my dreams. Flash. A personal note on today's news. As I've probably said many times before, I grew up reading the NY Times. To me, they defined, as a young man, how an intelligent person with a curious mind approaches the world. We understand that everyone has a point of view, and style is part of news writing, but facts come first. When we started syndicating Web content in 1997, I set a goal to get the Times headlines flowing though our space. Today, amazingly, that goal is accomplished. To me it's a reminder that it's worth setting lofty goals, and I hope it's an inspiration to everyone in weblog-space. Writing with integrity has value no matter where it comes from. That the Times, such a venerable institution, was willing to trust us, fills my heart with pride. Screen shot showing NY Times headlines on Radio's News Aggregator page. Yesterday I said that today's news would be for people who love poetry, books, movies, art, education, food, fashion, health, travel and technology. I left something out. It's also for people who love The Mets. Times Square is named after the New York Times. 5/31/1889: "An appalling catastrophe is reported from Johnstown, Cambria County.." The Times covered Custer's Last Stand at Little Big Horn. A time capsule by the Times and the American Museum of Natural History.
Michael Fraase: "Personal computers infiltrated organizations through the back door. Someone brought one in to make his or her job easier and the notion spread, like a virus. RCS is going to infiltrate organizations the same way." 2/13/01: "Dell Computer started in Michael's dorm room." News.Com: HP declares victory in Compaq merger. Megnut: Attendee-Centered Conference Design. Newsweek: Silicon Valley Reboots. I've been trying in vain to drop hints about tomorrow's bomblet and keep drawing blanks. No one is expecting it. It's coming from left field. I have failed to tease! OK. It's connected to part of Radio that hasn't changed much. It's not the new outlining stuff. You'll think differently about UserLand after you know. It's not very technical. It will raise the bar in online journalism. It's for people who like poetry, books, movies, art, education, food, fashion, health, travel and technology. Never in a million years will anyone figure it out. This is so frustrating! Scottish Lass: "Dave, it's supposed to be us girlies that are the teases." Hehe. Radio Community Server is now #1 on Daypop. Mac Net Journal: Outliners for OS X. Macrobyte is adding security to UserLand's Web server. André Radke: "Version 1.0a10 of my PostgreSQL extension for Frontier and Radio is ready for download." Stephen Tallent: "The new version of the ODBC Extension has been released!" Russ Lipton: How to Place Pictures in your Weblog. Thomas Madsen-Mygdal: "It's a great bottom-up play that only people of a caliber as Dave and his team can pull off." Carlos Granier translated the RCS home page into Spanish. Ben Hammersley: Personal PubSub 1.0. Euro.Weblogs.Com is springing to life. In Europe of course. Last year on this day HailStorm was the buzz of the weblog world. What became of HailStorm? Did the buzz matter? NY Times: "'We're always willing to try something new and out of the box,' said Sue Fleming-Holland, vice president and marketing director for the adult trade division at Simon & Schuster in New York." James Gosling: "I don't know of anybody who's actually been deploying Web services at all." Ouch. Maybe Gosling will live up to his billing as a hero to programmers everywhere, and will roll up his sleeves and share in the fun. The strategy of Radio Community Server I'm sure there's some confusion about what Radio Community Server is, and why we released it for $0, and what the next steps are. I think that's because we did something new, and probably unexpected. First, for all the bored pseudo-hooplah about web services, Radio Community Server is fully web services, built on open specifications, all of which have been around for a while, in one easy to install package. The press are only looking for web services from the BigCo's so they probably won't cover it, but I want you all to know, this is a tour de force of web services. Some people have said it's clonable in open source, and that's true, and it would be okay with us if people did that. Some have said they can do it in a week, and that's of course not true. Sure they won't have to do some of the work we did, like design it and bootstrap it and create a community of users, but it's still a lot more work than it may appear to be, at first glance. But if you have a few months and want to do a cool piece of software, and can make it run faster or cheaper or in places we don't reach, go for it. Modulo glitches and bugs, which we will work out, we now have a server product that can be installed on private networks, so people can use Radio for workgroups. Weblogs and knowledge management. We've broken through where no other blogging software has. Any workgroup can have weblogs and aggregators, people narrate their work, gain efficiencies and make connections that weren't possible before. But it's more than private networks that we want to enable -- there's a deep feature in Radio Community Server that allows an ISP to fully brand the user experience with their own look and feel. We've been quietly upgrading the workstation software so that it doesn't care which community its tethered to. When Radio boots up for the first time it connects to the cloud, gets the templates and themes and initial aggregator channels, as designed by the service provider. It's kind of like the AOL client software, where you can be AOL if you want. As often is the case, Adam Curry is the guinea pig for this. He's launching his Blog News Network, as both a radio show and a Radio show. There are other deals in the pipe now, but first we have to do one more release of Radio, version 8.0.7, and this little bootstrap will be complete. Now, why $0? Have we lost our minds? I hope not. We still need to make money to make payroll. We gave this a lot of thought of course, it took years to arrive at RCS 1.0, and hundreds of thousands of dollars. But we figured that we'd do better financially if we let this out at no cost, so everyone who was interested could try it out, and since it drives Radio and Frontier sales, we'll make it up that way. Like a lot of other tech companies these days, UserLand needs cash. We want to work in a world where lots of people are running their own communities. So please accept our generosity, but if possible, return it. Buy a few copies of Radio for your workgroup or school. It's a bargain at $39.95. If you want a really powerful back-end, go for Frontier. We still have to make this work as a business so we can keep pushing the leading edge and bootstrapping the Two-Way-Web.
It is my honor to present: Radio Community Server 1.0. Important pages: Pricing, FAQ, Download. A newly minted community server. Tim Jarrett: "Free? I wasn't expecting this business move, Dave, but it's smart." Seth Dillingham is working on a search engine that plugs into the CS. This is a key feature for private workgroups whose weblogs can't be indexed by Google. Adam: "I'm rebooting my brain tonite." His Blog News Network is a Radio Community Server. Moazam Raja: "Dave is a crack dealer!" Heh. JY Stervinou translated the Radio Community Server home page to French. Merci! XML-RPC: How to test with the MetaWeblog API. Adrian Roselli: The Wrong Way to Use CSS in Page Layouts. El Norte: "Los 'web logs' que circulan por la Red son una alternativa de páginas personales y pueden ser desarrollados por cualquier usuario." Reminder: "On Wednesday, a new partnership, with the blessing of Murphy (and lawyers)." Russ Lipton: Bootstrapping or Beta? Reuters: "Nearly half a billion people around the world had access to the Internet from their homes by the end of last year, Nielsen/NetRatings said Thursday." Susan Kitchens: "All those ol' studies on coping with stress that emphasized the human tendency toward fight-or-flight were done on males." Mike Krus wrote a format driver for FARK's XML feed. Most of Brent's readers are Radio. Interesting. David Burrows: "Next steps - get Radio to render pages out in a nice Flash friendly format and start integrating some of the other elements of the Radio look. There's a nice MX calendar component that should could come in handy." It's so funny I had a dream last night about advertising and Flash. I was at Symantec, urging my boss, Gordon Eubanks, to let me use the $300K we had budgeted for advertising. I wanted to do some big Flash ads for Radio. A simple message. Software for people with minds. $39.95. Click here. Radio seems to attract developers. I'm quite happy about that. A few weeks ago some Cocoon guys were talking about crushing UserLand. Now there's a Cocoon weblog that uses Radio. 10/24/96: "How much happier we would be if instead of crippling each other with fear, we competed to empower each others' creativity." It's still the right way to go. It looks like we will ship Radio Community Server later today, as promised last Monday. Over the weekend I announced the pricing, privately, to our testers. I think they were pleased. Later today I'll say publicly what it will cost to set up a community server so Radio and its weblog software and news aggregator can support private communication within workgroups. I don't think Microsoft or Groove will be able to match it. We're going to be very aggressive. We want to build a decentralized network of thinkers, fact-gatherers, knowledge workers. Please check back later for more. At first outlining may not seem related to the Internet, but if you look again, you'll see lots of possibilities. First and foremost, the Internet is a communication enviornment. Email, instant messaging, the Web, each offer a different form of communication, allowing one person to speak to many people, publicly or in private; or allowing just two people to communicate, and most points inbetween. But outlining is also about communication. Used by engineers, managers, marketers, teachers, students, librarians, consultants, accountants, speech writers, scholars; people who think for a living use outliners not only to communicate with others, they use outliners to process ideas, to sort out complex problems and find the hidden simplicity. For computer-based brainstorming, organizing and presenting, no tool can beat an outliner. Now imagine an outliner that works on the Internet. In your bibliography, you cite a source. Link to it. When a reader double-clicks on the headline, the document expands, in place. Copy the citation into another outline, and you've got another link. Linking and outlining over the Internet. This is the start of something big.
Thanks to Alan Reiter for spreading the gospel of weblogs at the Wireless conference today. Major Bing! Dave Babbit wrote a format driver for Radio to read this feed from Macromedia. It has the basic elements of RSS, but it isn't RSS. I'm dropping everything to get his format driver working. Fantastic. Later. It works. Format drivers prove their value. Yehi. But wait there's more. Bill Humphries has a format driver for the XML version of his weblog. This was a bona fide good idea. Who knew! Rogers Cadenhead is working on a format driver for Amazon. I had to make a small fix in xml.rss.compileService to skip over its doctype element to find the catalog. Radio 8 support for the MetaWeblog API has been released. In this release I also wired up both the Blogger API and the MetaWeblog API to Radio's SOAP interface. It would be interesting to see a blogging tool in .Net or other environments that have strong SOAP support. Maybe this is what the SOAP world is waiting for -- something to work on that has clear benefits to users. All the consorting and sparring among the Big's has yielded little utility so far, mostly science projects. Let's see if a great blogging tool is possible in .Net. If not, we'll help you do it. Business 2.0: "Web services. The name alone is enough to induce fits of narcolepsy." Another all-BigCo piece. The 802.11b weblog is #1 on Google for 802.11b. Cooool. Hannes Wallnöfer has a proposal that combines the Blogger API and the MetaWeblog API. PostNuke: "We implemented support for the Blogger API." Jeremy Bowers: "Ask your local psychologist whether men and women are different." Protocol 7 is working on OPML to SVG. Last year on this day you could have bought Salon for $6.1 million. Today, you could buy them for $2 million. (Tony Bowden points out that they probably have $1.5 million in cash, and prepaid advertising, and other assets, so you actually need just a few thousand to buy them. He says "their share price implies that the markets expect them to just waste the rest of their cash.") Alas my googlewhack is not a whack anymore. All good things must pass. Side-effect of Yahoo Groups being down is that I have to remember to go to the recent hotspots on our discussion groups to see if there have been new comments. A fascinating discussion is developing between Daniel Berlinger and Sam Ruby about extensibility in APIs. How much is the right amount? You end up chasing your tail. If an API is perfectly extensible then it says nothing about interop. Something has to be nailed down. Always at the cost of extensibility. Imho, interop and extensibility are two opposing forces, like time and space. If you want your code to run faster, you can always burn memory. If you want your code to be smaller, it's very likely that it will run slower. So we look for the sweet spot. What are people ready to agree on now? That's why the Blogger API was so important when it came out last summer. It was something the server vendors and the tool makers could use. The proof is in the result. Lots of tools got made. The sacrifice was extensibility. No longer were all our options open. Not all eventualities were forseen. If you had asked me then if I knew this, I would have said yes. But I went for it anyway. Simon Fell said he prefers SOAP to XML-RPC and RSS 1.0 to RSS 0.92, because they provide more extensibility. Of course I don't agree. XML-RPC is a means of implementing interfaces. The only way to use it is to extend it, without extension it is nothing. But it's got a frozen transport. Yeah you can't change that. That's why we get more interop from XML-RPC than we get from SOAP. I think that's clearly demonstrable. Now to RSS. Almost immediately after RSS 0.91 came out, developers independently added elements that were not in the spec that they needed in their applications. Some of them made public statements, and some probably didn't. Key point, it didn't break any of the aggregators. So in any real sense, just because a spec says it's more extensible, doesn't mean that it is. Watching the developer's list for RSS 1.0 since it started, I see the same problems surfacing that were in the way of evolution for the supposedly non-extensible flavor of RSS. But as long as the processors ignore elements they don't understand, there's no real advantage to using the other flavor. They traded off complexity and interop to get no additional extensibility, imho. Not a good deal. Not a sweet spot. Even 0.92, which (to my knowledge) is only supported by Radio, dwarves the installed base of the older 1.0 format. (An irony of the breakage in the community, 0.92 is newer than 1.0). One more example, and then a conclusion. The developers of Conversant boast that they've gone so far towards extensibility that their interface is all structs, even the name of the procedure that's being called is encoded in a struct so presumably if the way of expressing the name of the procedure requires extension there will be no breakage. But have they actually done anything other than replicate XML-RPC? It appears to me that they've just pushed the stone one step up a staircase, and now have to deal with all the problems all over again. Now the conclusion. We have to agree on something, for better or worse, in order to move forward. You can't keep all the options open for all time. This means there will be corner-turns. So far the Weblog API world has been very collegial and has produced real results at a very low cost. I believe we will be able to move forward, and the protocols and formats will evolve in a market-driven way, and when the corners are turned we will look to the tool developers to insulate users from the bumps. As long as we work together, it will work. That's what matters. A frequent correspondent, a man, writes: "Do you really believe those myths about men and women being different?" Heh. Tricky question. Yes, I believe what I write. That's rule #2. A less twisty, and more respectful way to say what I think he was actually saying: "I don't believe men and women are different." Funny thing is, when discussions turn to gender, all reasonableness goes out the window. One of the differences between men and women is that women are right and men are wrong. And a lot of men believe it. A lot of women too. Last night I went to dinner with Scoble and Son, and Chris and Gretchen Pirillo. We talked a lot for a long time about a lot of things. Patrick, who is now 8 years old, left one of his toys at the first restaurant. Gretchen and Patrick went into the restaurant to look for it. It took a long time to find his toy. When they came out Patrick said "It was right in front of their eyes." I said often that's the last place people look. Obviously there are differences between the genders. What's going on when an otherwise intelligent person says it's a myth that there are differences? Now, I want to go further. In no case should an individual be limited by generalizations. That makes it safe to theorize and share points of view, and to learn and grow. Understand that there are exceptions. While many men are solitary and prefer to work alone, surely some women are like that too, and not all men are. And one day you may feel different, and we all have the right to change. 5/7/97: "Just when you think you know someone, they change." The door should be open for every person to be unique, because that's also obviously true. But most important, every person, no matter what their gender, should be given the same opportunity to speak. This is where women have been fucking up in a major way, and men have been acquiescing to it, because it's easier to say nothing, than to say hold on a minute, you're not listening to me. No doubt the women who are speaking have valid points to make, and experiences with sexism that are real. But that does not justify shutting out an entire gender from the discussion. It's totally unfair and it's not even pragmatic. If you won't listen to others, if you won't even include us in the conversation, you shouldn't expect much in the way of help.
The new architecture for the XML aggregator. "Now that light is shining in this space, the art of aggregation, while it may only appeal to a few gutsy developers, can develop in new ways." What does this mean for users? If it goes as we hope, new worlds of content flowing through the News Aggregator page in Radio. It's a geeky developer feature that can open new sources for news junkies, fact-gatherers, organizers, scholars; the curious. And a repeating theme. Developers working with thinkers. That's what makes our world go round. Business Week, of all places, has a clear-headed analysis of the dead-end that the music industry has driven itself into. But, David Golding writes, "CD sales are *not* plummeting, and movie box-office takes are *not* stagnant."Ooops. It would be cool if they got a like-minded reporter to look into the Microsoft-IBM-Sun cartel. They'd see these guys are spinning their wheels, while the next layer of the Internet is springing to life. It's about sharing ideas, it's two-way, and people-driven. The CIOs they sell to don't get it either. Meanwhile they're rearchitecting existing products, as if anyone cared, or planning more meaningless infrastructure, or lost in space. Reading Burning Bird's surprisingly mild denunciation of Jonathon Delacour, in defense of the concept of the BlogSisters (which Delacour apparently called "breathtaking hypocrisy" (sidenote: when I first read it I thought he was talking about me)), I thought I could resolve the matter -- but it's so dangerous to come between a woman lecturing a man on How It Is, but what the heck here goes. Women think men are just like them, but in power, which can be forgiven because no one gets that people who are different from them are really fundamentally different, as different as men and women are. Women are organizers. Everywhere you go there are organizations of women doing things, planning stuff, making the world work. Men aren't like that. There isn't a "Boy's Club" where we get together to plot our world domination. But women always talk about the Boy's Club as if it existed. Heh. (Of course if women owned the world (instead of just running it) there would be a club and they would really meet. What would they do or say? I have no idea.) Men just won't work with others, men or women. We're solitary beings. Yeah we like to get laid (or mothered), that's why we have anything at all to do with women, in our natural unevolved state (evolved men, like women see the value in all points of view). Now women, while they organize, are not win-win beasts, they compete with each other viciously. I didn't tune into this until I was in my thirties. Until then I thought women were strictly superior to men. Much to my surprise they are not. But they are different. End of rant. Boy will I get flamed for this. Coool. BTW, while I might wish for a BlogBrothers, it will never happen. And how can I object to BlogSisters? It's a perfect demo of women doing what they do so well. Life is good. The universe is as it should be. Murphy smiles. 1/24/00: "Listen listen listen. That's what love is all about." JY Stervinou has a Bull Mancuso-siting to report. BTW, Bull is not unlike the Serbian despot seeking revenge on the Fox TV hit 24. JY also tunes into a new buzzword you're going to be hearing a lot about on Scripting News in the coming weeks. Ernie: Blogging towards Knowledge Management. Russ Lipton: How to Enter Text into your Weblog. Sam Ruby: A Gentle Introduction to SOAP. There's a Cleveland Indians weblog. What's the point? Shane McChesney offers a third installment of Why Write a Weblog? Kevin Kelly writes about the future of music in the NY Times Magazine. Wired's Leander Kahney posits that the Mac was made from marijuana. "Maybe that's why Macs have been slower all these years," said David Bunnell, the founding editor of MacWorld Magazine. Apparently YahooGroups is down all weekend. Dann Sheridan visited their site around 9PM Pacific last night and saw this: Dear Yahoo! Groups Members, As noted on our web site earlier this week, the Yahoo! Groups service will be down for scheduled maintenance Friday March 15 9:00 PM PST (GMT-8) as we move our servers to a new facility. We expect the service to be restored the morning of Sunday March 17. During this time the web site will be unavailable and email will not be delivered. (Some users may experience email non-delivery notices, but all email should be delivered once service has resumed.) Please note: Once the service is back up, there will be email delays due to backlog. We expect these delays to last no longer than 1 day. Please do not to re-send email to your group as it will only add to delays. We apologize for any inconvenience this may cause. The Yahoo! Groups Team There's been a lot of revisionist history-writing in the world of RSS, but the archive of Scripting News shows what really happened. The first controversy wasn't over the XML format, it was over Netscape's content provider agreement, very much not in the spirit of Netscape or the Web. On this day in 1999, I noted a phone talk with Ekhart Walter at Netscape, and pointed to an essay I had written on the UserLand DG, explaining my position on the agreement. Today thousands of people are running UserLand's desktop aggregator, and today we will release an open architecture for the aggregator allowing drivers to plug in support for new formats. Netscape's aggregator is no longer in service. Our commitment to open syndication via XML has expanded over the years.
Flangy says Microsoft is back on the road to Cairo. Steve, if Sun is Rodney Dangerfield, what is UserLand? So many things coming next week. On Monday, Radio Community Server. By then we'll have to say what the price is. OK. Then on Wednesday, a new partnership, with the blessing of Murphy (and lawyers), and at the end of the week, the OPML Coffee Mug mystery is solved. Oh and tomorrow, I'm going to unveil a new open architecture for Radio's aggregator, driver-based, like upstreaming, making it possible to plug-in new XML formats. Last night I had dinner with the Seybold folks, we talked about doing a Web Services Day at Seybold SF in Sept. The emphasis will be on publishing, of course -- since that's what Seybold is about. We'll also put the focus on the support that Apple has built into Mac OS X for XML-RPC and SOAP. We have some time to get the program together. If you have products or ideas that you'd like to get in front of the Seybold community, and are focused on publishing, esp on the Mac platform, please let me know. Jake is looking for some fresh testers for Radio Community Server. We're still on track for shipping the first public release on Monday. Three changes this morning to the MetaWeblog API. Evan Williams, the author of the Blogger API, comments. This afternoon, another change, in the Radio 8 implementation of the MetaWeblog API. Jon Udell: "Until and unless critical mass is achieved, we are just angels dancing on the head of a pin." Amen. Tim Jarrett is bridging OmniOutliner and OPML. Tom Matrullo reviews David Weinberger's new book, Small Pieces Loosely Joined. Tim O'Reilly weighs in on the Eisner debate. Register: "AOL has - finally - shipped a beta of its software that uses Netscape technology rather than IE. This suggests, barring major breakages in the interim, that the company could contrive a defection from the Microsoft camp with the rollout of of AOL 8.0 software later this year." Happy fourth birthday to Kottke's weblog. On this day in 1999, Scripting News was the first site to implement RSS. Of course almost all the links on that page are broken, including Netscape's and ours. Oh well. Coffee coffee coffee I love coffee.
RFC: MetaWeblog API. "It's time to broaden the XML-RPC pipe that tools use to connect to Radio, and in doing so offer an evolution to the art of scripting weblog tools." BTW, in case you're not a geek and wonder what's happening here, we're gradually creating new layers of technology that allow developers of desktop tools to move the user interface for writing for the Web outside of the limited confines of the browser. As we show more power through the interfaces, the tools developers can add more features. Eventually this will yield a new kind of word processor, one that's custom-fitted to writing for the Web. An interesting discussion sprang from today's RFC. A specific question re the RFC: "Developers of tools, either side (server or client) please chime in. What do you think of this stuff? Is this just for UserLand or would you like to use this too?" Late Night Software: XML Tools 2.4. AppleScript. Reuters: "Google has distinguished itself from other search engines with a sophisticated system that considers the number of Web sites a given page links to, in judging that page's importance." Ooops, that's backwards. News.Com: "British Telecommunications suffered a blow Wednesday in its bid to charge royalties for hyperlinks when a New York judge hearing a case brought against Prodigy Communications issued a ruling on the first phase of the proceedings." Reuters: Microsoft working with DOJ to fight cyber-crime. I wrote a DaveNet that ran on News.Com in November 2001, talking about the Microsoft deal with the DOJ. Now some of the details are coming out. But I'm sure there's more going on than Microsoft helping to fight cyber-crime. In Israel, "The Finance Ministry has decided not to accept a donation of Microsoft software valued at $20 million." Thanks to Deborah Branscum for the pointer to this interview with NY Times columnist Stuart Elliot. "If people who are camera buffs keep finding that every article in Popular Photography is a fake and sponsored by advertisers and not indicated as such, they will go and read Modern Photography or American Photographer or they won’t read any damn magazine at all." To Nick, on your southern-route drive from SF to NY, stop at New Orleans, you won't be sorry. Great food and music, the weather will probably be great when you get there. Russ Lipton: "Just be sure to make at least one post into your weblog each month. That will keep your calendar purring along and help you keep your sanity intact." In a couple of days this will be a googlewhack, if no one else quotes it. Nice clean use of CSS in a Radio weblog. Easy to read. Fast. XMLcmNOW is a "CMS based on XML/XSLT technology." NY Times: Hollywood vs High Tech. Great piece! Linux Journal: Unix under the Desktop. By Doc and Brent.
David Burrows went to a Macromedia Flash MX seminar. David Brown: "Now I want to start putting OPML front ends on everything I do." That would make me happy. Chris Gulker asks "What's wrong with this picture?" Indeed. Dann Sheridan: "I am curious if anyone in the Frontier community has developed or implemented content versioning for Manila." BTW, another reason I blog is patents. My weblog is my "lab notebook." I keep track of my art here, lest someone someday take a patent out on an idea I came up with. I also try to point to other people's innovations so they get on the record too. Keeping a public weblog helps protect our power to innovate. Wasabii is "an attempt to create a flexible, yet simple, API, running via XML-RPC & SOAP, for various web applications running on heterogeneous platforms to communicate and interact." BBC: Google hit by link bombers. Tempest in a teapot. Much ado about not very much. The term "Google bombing" was an unfortunate choice of words. The serendipity between the simultaneous rise of Google and weblogs is not a coincidence, imho. The weblog world would never support or even tolerate orchestrated manipulation of Google, it's too valuable a resource to screw with. The BBC article exploits fear, too bad, I hope Google sticks to its guns. Jon Udell provides instant analysis of the features we released this week. Daniel Berlinger posted an RFC for an XML-RPC API that supports Titles and Links. Daniel is presumably interested in this because he makes a desktop editing tool, Archipelago, that supports Manila-RPC and the Blogger API. blogBuddy, a Delphi app for Windows that implements the Blogger API, shipped a new version on Monday. "New features include spell checking and post editing." Today Jon Udell remarks on the pace of innovation coming from UserLand. As I've been working on my next project, I can't imagine how stripped Jon's gears will be over the next one. This week's features were developed this week. The pace is impressive perhaps, except for two things. First, we have changes distribution down. There's been a lot of talk about software subscriptions, but we really do it here. We have a good system for getting new parts out to users. That contributes to the ease of development for us, and the fast pace. The second factor is that we do development in a very high level environment. Having an object database integrated intimately in the scripting environment means we have to write less code. The hard part is figuring out what to do, not usually how to do it. That said, I'm getting ready to release some software that early Radio users got a peek at, it's a very grand vision (even for me) of something I call The World Outline, that's parallel to the HTML web, a new way of webbing. I remember how excited the most intelligent Frontier users were when we gave them a glimpse of this concept, but then we turned to the Desktop Website idea, to the exclusion of work on The World Outline. When I roll it out, Murphy-willing, next week -- I'll deliberately show it in a diminutive way. I'll show you how to get started. It'll appear to be much less than it is. Then the smart people will ask if it can do this or that, and the answer will be yes. Then the bomb will explode in some people's heads, they'll try things out and find that they work. This bit of bombing will not be like the features this week. They will have been many years in the making. In some ways the software will be insufficient, but will point in a direction and invite competition. It will encourage people who make Web apps to put OPML interfaces on them. It's our job to deliver the users as an incentive to developers. We will do that. But the art of the next bomblet won't be in the bombing, it will be in the smooth ramp, the seduction that gets people to try it without being overwhelmed by its hugeness. It will appear to be an evolution on instant messaging. But in fact it will be much more. Sam Ruby has been blogging for almost three months, and wrote a rambling essay explaining why he blogs. Along the way he almost touches on the reason I blog. Back in a minute with first coffee of the day and an essaylet. First, even if I wasn't a software developer I would probably have a weblog. I just wouldn't have been among the first to do it, because when I started you needed technical skills that are not necessary today. But I am a software developer, and my weblog is all about that. Why do I need a weblog? Well, I want to get a true connection between people who use my software and myself. I want to talk directly with them. When I started writing publicly on the Internet in 1994 that was the epiphany. I can get my ideas in front of the people who matter in my industry, without the middlemen. (Ironically I also want the middlemen to write about my software, so I'm a flawed human being, what else is new.) And as a person who consumes information about software products, I was always frustrated that they wouldn't let the developer say in his or her own words what the purpose of the product is. So when a developer like Sam shows up in the blogging world, even if he didn't use my software, that's a victory for my profession. Another developer who decides to speak for himself. Since you can't lie to a compiler, eventually the truth pops off the stack, and I learn something, some new compatibility develops, I see someone else's point of view. When interop happens at a human level, interop at a software level can't be far behind. So weblogs cut out the middleman. It's a collaborative development environment. A way of doing open engineering using the Internet. There's more to do here, but it's also worth noting that there have been some accomplishments. BTW, the five year anniversary of Scripting News is a few weeks away. April 1. No joke. Sam touches on a point I've wanted to comment on but hadn't until now had a way to do. He says "As far as civil disobedience goes - does anybody else find it ironic that some self described aging hippie who pretty much is the establishment in this corner of the weblogging world mentions this?" I know some people feel that way, but I wish they would lose it. It's not a cooool idea. When Manila was new, in early Y2K, we went through this too. Fact is, some of you will get more flow than I get. It's in the numbers. The more blogs there are the more likely someone is going to hit the nerve and become the next MattyG, or Heroes and Villains, Joel Spolsky or Wes Felter. Even Evan Williams of Blogger was reading DaveNets before he left O'Reilly to start Pyra. Robot Wisdom and CamWorld started with my software too. So when success strikes, mazel tov, and I hope you remember old Uncle Dave, and send me some flow from time to time. In a way I'm a manufacturer, and you guys are (from my pov) distributors. It's okay for you to want a spiff, and look to me for approval, that's human nature I guess, but it's even better when you bring in fresh blood and point them my way with a few kind words. Tell them that I have good ideas, and that my software is popular. That's a meme I can support. Microsoft's latest new direction is very interesting. Not. BigCo web services blah blah blah. "For those people who did think that this was a flash in the pan, I think they can set that aside. But it's also not a silver bullet." OK. Yet another BigCo's hype the web services thing but there's some meat there piece, this one from Business Week. Puzzle. What's missing from this sequence. "SOAP 0.9, 1.0, 1.1, SCL, SDL, NASSL, WSDL 1.0, 1.1." Clue.
New feature: Automatically Generated Links. This is the feature Julian Bond has been patiently waiting for. New feature: Google-It! Macro for Item Templates. Something fun for people who use your weblog. Demo of the new features on my Handsome Radio Blog. "thinkUsaAlignRight"There's a bug in the idea that the govt could require the computer hacks that the entertainment industry wants. At some point the govt will realize that it would render its own computers unusable. Of course they could put exemptions on their computers. Then we could all get government jobs. We'll need them, because there won't be any computer industry jobs except to make computers for the government. Listening to Julie Andrews sing My Favorite Things. A lyric reminds me of Andre Radke. It just snuck up on me. "Doorbells and sleigh bells and schnitzel with noodles!" Craig Burton: "Preparing for some Radio Tutorials. Mine are the best." Gary Secondino takes me up on the OPML Coffee Mug puzzle. Pretty close, except it's simpler, but it can do all the things you say, and more. Captain Blowtorch: "The Committee for the Defense of The Fatherland has (though we cannot divulge our sources) reason to believe that the whole Radio 8 conspiracy is a thinly veiled attempt to undermine the Free Market System." Sun: "Four Times the Hyperbole, Half the Facts." Sean Gallagher on quote mills. "There are some analysts I will never quote, and some I will quote only with other sources for compare/contrast. These are the kinds of people who would still have a 'buy' rating on Enron if it were possible." Ray Whitmer: SOAP Scripts in Mozilla. Kevin Altis: "The latest release of PythonCard contains XML-RPC and SOAP samples and the radioclient sample app for Radio Userland 8 and other Blogger API services." I wonder when Dan Gillmor is going to turn his jets on his employers. Every time I read a blistering condemnation by Dan of a technology vendor, I wonder how he can ignore the utter failure of his own technology. Who can't Dan go after? Why is Connectix safe for Dan to trash? Jon Hiler: "If the link to my article was the virus, then the method of transmission was the humble weblog." Jon is discovering something we've known for a long time. There's a hierarchy of buzz in the weblog world. The business people and press who ignore this miss the opportunity and the story. Whole industries are built on buzz. Jon Udell: Oar Pullers and Sail Inventors. "What if one of those guys pulling on the oars figures out how to make a sail?" Raja: "Yeah, so Nautilus really sucks." Remind me: What is a Web Application? Wooohooo. Yesterday's new Radio feature is #5 and rising on Daypop! That's so cool. Gotta look for some more features like that one. Julian Bond: "It would be even better to see Radio provide an optional setting to auto-fill the Link tag with the Permalink of the item." Julian, thanks for being so patient. We will do this. I would have done it myself yesterday but I hit a snag. Pushback about aggregation being an Emergency Broadcast System. Burning Bird says she'll turn to Scripting News because I get so many great links. Thanks for the confidence, but that's a centralized strategy. If this node had been in NYC on Sept 11, you would not have gotten any info. Maybe the next terrorism attack will come in Silicon Valley. Could happen. Better to distribute the flow. Amy Wohl is one of the few people who can get away with calling me David. William Shatner: "I have to ad lib a lot in my life." Hmmm. Grateful Dead: "Let us put men and women together, see which one is smarter. Some say men, but I say no, women got the men like a puppet show." I asked my friend David Jacobs who wrote that song. "It wasn't Barlow," he said. "I remember seeing it sung on the Lucy show by Ricky Ricardo. I think it is called Man Smart, Women Smarter by Norman Span." I woke up early today, about 4AM, made some coffee went into the office checked the mail and the Web, didn't like what I saw and went back to bed. I guess I had my personal Groundhog Day. Feeling better now.
New Feature: Titles and Links in Radio-generated RSS. Bing! is the word of the day as word of Radio Community Server spreads through Corporate America and academia. Next little bomblet. OPML coffee mugs. It gets worse. Bryan Bell who does our graphics is in Europe, so if there are any good Photoshop hackers out there who can do better, please do. It's going to be an interesting bootstrap. The first feature in a long time that depends on Radio's built-in outliner. Joe Jennet did a very nice OPML coffee mug. But I'd like to use the exact image of the OPML logo. It's a brand and a trademark. Done. But wait, there's more. Gary Secondino did a steely one, with coffee in it. Yeah, that's the idea. John Robb says of the unreleased software behind the OPML coffee mug. "This is the first product I have ever used that decreased the flow to my e-mail inbox by over 100 items a day." We've been eating this dogfood at UserLand since November, and it totally revolutionized the company. We couldn't have shipped Radio 8 without it. Dan Cochran is an old friend from Apple in the good old days, in 1984 and the years after when the Mac community was small and everyone knew everyone. Dan has been working for Woz doing educational projects. He wrote me a few days ago, having discovered Radio, and said he was really excited about its possibilities in education. I told him there were a lot of people around here saying the same thing. Well, I insisted that he start his own weblog so he could experience the community from the inside before we start meeting with other old friends who are now venture capitalists, and Dan did the deed, for which I am very grateful. Simon St Laurent cuts Macromedia a new anal orifice over Flash MX. Hey Simon, why not have multiple Webs? The one that the W3C is leading that's owned by Microsoft isn't doing very much new for us. Why not have some excitement outside the confines of the cartel? Globe and Mail: "The site is one long broadsheet of single-paragraph teasers, each with a link to some off-site article." Russ Lipton explains why eyes glaze at the distinction between websites and desktop websites. Terrarium is a "game for software developers that provides a great introduction to software development on the .NET Framework." Amy Wohl on quote mills: "We love to talk to reporters on subjects in which we have expertise. We hope that they're going to quote as accurately and make us look intelligent. But we know we're playing the odds and all we can hope for is to win more times than we lose." BoingBoing: Asimov died of AIDS. From a blood transfusion. NewsForge: "The Gecko rendering engine at the heart of the Mozilla Web browser is scheduled to replace Microsoft's Internet Explorer as AOL's default browser -- the one in the millions of free AOL CDs distributed every year -- in the 8.0 version of AOL's client software." After spending much of yesterday thinking, not coding, we're going to push back the release of Radio Community Server by one week, to next Monday, March 18. The software is ready at one level, it can be installed and it will yield a community server, but one week will not make that much difference in the life of the product, but the extra knowledge we'll gain in that week from testers will make a big difference. Jonathon Miller: "Carpe diem and fuck you." Kenzoid: "Dave does a lot of the grunt work in this space." Definition: Navel-gazing of weblogs by weblogs. Observation: Weblogs are different things to different people. Experience has shown: If you take the low road, over time, all you attract are other low-roaders. Aggregation: Is goodness. Think of it as a way of upping the bandwidth of people whose minds are sponges and want to learn as much as possible. In time of crisis think of it as the Web's Emergency Broadcast System. Today is the six month anniversary of 9-11.
John Rhodes: "While I am waiting, I promise not to change the URL of this page." Steven Garrity makes a good point. With XML, search engines could glean better information from individual weblog posts. He proposes a new XML format just for weblogs. Robb Beal: "I read old DaveNets!" Cooooooool. How can you tell if you're using a Desktop Website? If the URL begins with 127.0.0.1 or localhost. It took me a while to figure out why people say they don't work well on laptops. They're missing a key piece of data. We use Desktop Websites to put a friendly weblike face on apps that run on your desktop. Disconnect from the Internet if you want, the desktop app still works. I think what they're saying is they don't want to run a public web server on their desktop. I get it and agree. I don't either. Yes. DizzyD has hooked up with Jeremy Bowers who's working on Jabber.root for Radio. Dizzy is one of the lead developers of Jabber, and a Radio user. Jeremy is a Radio developer who's made it his mission to get Jabber working in our environment. Please sprinkle magic pixie dust on this connection. Mark Woods: A Busy Writer's Guide to Radio Renderers. Dori: "Hey everyone--there's wireless bandwidth at the SXSW trade show food court. C'mon down!" Wes: "The sessions are boring, so Cam and Dori and I are blogging from the trade show floor." Doc: "Hey, Wes is blogging, two seats away." Cam: "Doc, Wes, Dori and lots of other webloggers are posting from the show." If given a lot of thought to Michael Fraase's discussion of RCS. He's a customer and a user of our software. He likes Manila. How can I argue with that? Manila is cool because you can plop it on a LAN behind your firewall and give everyone their own site. If they can access the LAN from their laptop when they're offsite, they can update their workgroup notepad very easily. With modern hardware a single $2K machine with $899 of software can easily support a few thousand writers. It's a bargain, just a little investment and boom you've got a great Intranet. Now, that said -- Radio is cool too. It pushes more of the work to the edges. We can build more powerful apps there. Look at how excited people are about that. The Frontier community is in revival mode. There's a good reason for that. Radio. Another trip, along the lines of Mr Natural (who Michael correctly identifies as one of my heroes). I don't just talk as a CEO or a marketing hack here on Scripting News, I also talk with other developers. When I tell them about desktop websites, and what a cool architecture it is, it may not be a prudent thing for the CEO of a commercial software company to do. Hey I'm inviting competition. But I think the idea is so juicy that I want other geekish people to know. That's why I like writing software, because if you trawl around enough there's an interesting idea just around the corner. Of course I'm not finished. Radio and Manila don't do the same things. Radio is more of a platform than Manila. Some people (myself included) think that Radio is just the thing for (here's a surprise) instant communication in workgroups, beyond weblogs. Manila, ensconced in its glass palace, doing its job so well, can't be a conduit for that kind of communication. I have an idea that takes instant messaging and makes it very powerful, in the same way the spreadsheet took the idea of a calculator and gave it dimension. For that I must have a platform to target that runs on the user's desktop. Must have. So RCS is a step on a journey that I hope to be able to see through to completion. In a sense I'm asking you guys to go along with me on a trip. It's totally not uncommon for people who love step N, to be puzzled and even to reject step N plus one. This is the story of my life. But my track record is not that bad. Yes, I've left some dead-ends on the trail behind, but I strongly believe RCS is not one of them. (BTW, the price is higher than $50.) Jim Roepcke explains desktop websites. Dizzy: "Cool. It would appear that referer stats and rankings are all working now." Patrick Logan: "What's happened with DotNet is a real disservice to developers everywhere, no matter what the motivation or best intentions of the organization behind the effort." One year ago on this day: "The hype has said, unchallenged so far, that the open source community created the Internet. It's not the whole story. Commercial developers created the Internet too." Ben Combee sends an email from SXSW. He did the Palm scheduling app for the show. Ben says if you try it out you might feel like you're there. I haven't got a Palm, if you do let me know if it works.
Michael Fraase says RCS is a "a swing and a miss." Hmm. Well, I sure hope not. It's funny, Michael calls me a sneaky bastard, but the way he does it, I like the way it feels. Sure makes for an interesting discussion over a few days among friends. I wanted to give it some thought before responding to Michael, but then I stumbled across this post on the Blogsisters site that makes an important point. Centralized services go down or get clogged and require a lot of supervision. The design of RCS is part of a bet I made in Y2K that desktop websites are the way of the future, because the users get full control of their data, and they don't have to share a CPU with lots of other users. CPUs are cheap. People cost a lot more. There's a lot of power on today's desktop machines that isn't well-utilized. Anyway, in a perfect world, we wouldn't even need RCS, but net bandwidth being what it is, and NATs and so forth, we need something lightweight that's centralized to glue groups of people together. That's the premise of Radio Community Server. As kind of a demo, here's what the Windows Performance Monitor looks like on a modern $2K machine running Radio 8. Look, it's actually doing some work. (Note: I have a huge www folder and upstreaming is turned on.) Adam Curry is bootstrapping euro.weblogs.com. Here's the public view of a virtually empty RCS. And here's the very helpful Help page. Daniel Salber has an RSS feed for VersionTracker. A very good idea. Done with Mark Paschal's Stapler tool for Radio. Hey Glenn has an RSS feed too. I'm subscribing right away. Russ Lipton explains the diff betw posts and stories. Julian Bond nails it. "From what can be seen of RCS at the moment, it could have been coded on many different platforms. The functionality could have been written in PHP, Python, PERL, as an Apache MOD in C++, Java, .NET and probably many others." That's correct. All formats and protocols implemented by RCS could be implemented in any environment that has support for XML, SOAP and XML-RPC; commercial or open source. Specs for every format and protocol on our websites. The basis for competition is performance, price and ease of use. Ours community server runs in Frontier and Radio, with the advantages that come from that. But there are lots of ways to slice it. Simon Fell: "I wonder if Dave is expecting any competition in the RCS space." 10/24/96: "The future's not ours to see." Chris Pirillo: "Hey retard! Why didn't you make a better product?" Archive of the RCS-DEV mail list for March 2002. This is the list we're using to test the software; when we go live this will be the support list for Radio Community Server. Here's some good news. Erin Clerico of Weblogger, the commercial Manila hosting service, has his Radio Community Server running. Evan Williams of Blogger states his professional goal for the next six months. "Make my company/Blogger not dependent on me." Amen to that. A friend shared an idea on this. You don't actually have a business until you can take a sustained break, and work (and revenue) continues. This is what every business owner wants, and it's elusive. It seems that the economics only work if you're constantly feeding the machine, personally. Sam Devore is taking notes on his Radio Community Server. "If there was a callback on the server when a new page came in I could call to the mainResponder search engine to index the page." There is such a callback. This is a docs-writing weekend here. Ernie the Attorney: "Who's to say what really happened?" Archive.Org has a copy of Jeff Bezo's open letter about patents, which I pointed to from Scripting News a couple of years ago. Ted Conway sent the original pointer, which now redirects to a page about Amazon's products. Moral of the story. The Web is fragile. Archive.Org is scotch tape that holds it together. Best wishes to all my friends who are at SXSW in Austin. I wish I could be there. Maybe next year. Send me pointers to stories from the show. I'm happy to be your remote blogger. 802.11b: Apple Base Station for Half Price. Adam: "Last night we premiered the BlogNewsNetwork radio show on dutch public broadcaster BNN." Yesterday, as part of the mop-up on Radio Community Server, I did a rewrite of the notification code on the server-side. Some people had asked what the Please Notify entries on their Events pages are about. Here's the scoop. Some RSS feeds have an element in their header called "cloud" that tells a reader how to subscribe to the channel. When you're subscribed to such a feed, Radio automatically requests notification. That's what Please Notify is about. Then when it changes, if everything goes well, the cloud sends a short message to Radio saying "Hey this resource changed." Then again, Murphy-willing, your Radio reads the feed and if there really are new items, it adds them to your News Aggregator page. Until yesterday, this feature of the community server was turned off, now it's back on, and appears to be working. Yesterday I had a great phone talk with Seth Dillingham about search engines, Jabber, and the Frontier community. He's a nice guy and I appreciate that. I like working with him. That's all I wanted to say.
DaveNet: Our Back-Door Sell. A milestone. This afternoon we released the first Radio Community Server software to testers. David Berry hit the sweet spot first. Here's a Radio weblog that upstreams through his cloud, not ours. He had a few glitches in the setup, there was a bit of confusion because he's using IIS to serve static pages. He narrates his experience on the Web, as has become the tradition in the almost-two-month history of the Rado 8 community. So how did it go? "Surprisingly smooth. Setting up RCS was as easy as setting up Radio itself." That was the goal. Chris Sprigman: "Disney's copyright on Mickey Mouse, who made his screen debut in the 1928 cartoon short Steamboat Willie, was due to expire in 2003, and Disney's rights to Pluto, Goofy and Donald Duck were to expire a few years later." Jon Udell: "We all want to achieve the effects that supernode inviduals do. But most of us aren't wired with the natural ability to be tuned in to many diverse groups, an ability that a lucky few are gifted with. Part of the future of RSS, as I see it, is to help the rest of us have some of the social power that those lucky few already possess." Jon, there's lots to say about that. There are all kinds of UI issues and choices. RSS was a first approximation of the XML format that could work for weblogs. I don't write in RSS, but by some kind of accident you can read my writing fairly coherently in a RSS aggregator. I never think about RSS when I'm writing Scripting News (unless I'm writing about RSS). I just write as it makes sense to me. I judge the result by how it looks in an HTML browser. Why? That's the way I've done it for the last few years. For some reason Alan Reiter's excellent wireless data weblog had fallen off my radar. I listened to Adam's debut on Radio Blog Netherlands. It's funny listening to a friend who speaks American English without an accent speak in Dutch, which sounds funny (and friendly) to my American ear. Kind of like the Swedish Chef. Breakage. The Web Bug Simulator app wasn't updating. Note that the URL changed. Jim Roepcke on Radio Community Server pricing. AP: "Sun Microsystems said today it is suing rival Microsoft for more than $1 billion because the software giant made the Windows XP operating system incompatible with Sun’s Java programming language." Scoble: "Java runs fine on my computer." KPIG: "Independent webcasters such as KPIG are facing a grave threat to our existence." Mike Donnelan nails it. "Stop buying music." Congrats to Rageboy for getting Slashdotted. Flow-wise this is quite significant. Radio Bump: "Hello from Austin!" Robert's at SXSW. ZDNet: Web services forge ahead, hack by hack. A screen shot showing what Weblogs.Com looked like two years ago on this day. Macrobyte: AttSearchEngine. "Indexes more than just text." Tease. It gets worse. Much.
I just tripped across Scott Andrew's XML-RPC client for JavaScript. This could come in handy. John Van Dyk: "I have licensed a soon-to-be-announced piece of technology from a well-known Frontier development powerhouse for inclusion in the next generation of the Metadata Plugin. Details will be available soon." After three weeks of corner-turning and mission-critical work with lots of breakage potential, I just did a little programming that absolutely no one is depending on or waiting for. There's a little story first. A long time ago when weblogs.com was starting, we had a little thing where people could choose their own Zeldman icons and when they updated the icon would appear on Scripting News (with a link of course). When we did the big weblogs.com corner-turn last fall, the icons came back (on the weblogs.com home page), but only some of the weblogs-with-icons made the transition. I've been tracking updates of the Zeldman-iconified weblogs since the corner-turn, and today I finally was in the right place in the right mood to write out an XML feed (every fifteen minutes) with the in-use icons. For each icon it says when the weblog last updated (in GMT), how many times it has updated since we started tracking, and links to the website. Maybe there's some interesting data to track here? I don't know. You tell me. Now for something serious and important. Sjoerd Visscher is tuning into the work that Jeremy Bowers is doing to get Jabber running in Radio and Frontier. We'll intersect with this, Murphy-willing a couple of weeks after we ship Radio Community Server (still on for Monday). Here's where it gets really interesting. The Jabber guys like Radio. Heh. So as a community I feel it's our job to make their protocol work in the environment and then say Let's Go with gusto. Inch by inch. Pricing. Radio Community Server will be under $1000 per server per year. Licensed in the standard UserLand way. $XXX gets you the software, plus one year of updates. If after a year you choose not to renew the subscription, you may continue to use the software but will not receive udates. At any time you can choose to renew, and get caught up with the latest features and fixes. It will run in either Radio 8 ($39.95) or Frontier/Manila 8 ($899). Wes on REST: "I think this is a case of touting a hypothetical benefit instead of an actual benefit." NY Times review of post-Napster for-pay music systems. Important fix for Radio 8 users. After yesterday's corner-turn, the link from the Cloud Links section of the desktop website home page no longer points to your referers page. Although a page would render, it would not contain any referers. Thanks to Greg Hanek for the very clear report. I had seen mention of this on other blogs, so it was pretty clear there was a problem, but Greg pointed me right to it, and I was able to fix it quickly. To get back in the referer loop, please Update Radio.root, and then refresh your desktop website home page. The Referers link should take you to the correct place, as shown in this screen shot. Postscript: This didn't fix people who are upstreaming via FTP. Thanks to Simon Fell for helping us get to the bottom of this. The update is released. 11:35AM. NY Times: "Today, Microsoft and the Justice Department, which had been fierce courtroom adversaries for years during the Clinton administration, spoke with virtually one voice on most issues." Two years ago today: "I just realized something about Microsoft. To most people, including people at Microsoft, you're either anti-Microsoft or pro-Microsoft. Then thinking about it some more, this isn't just true of Microsoft. It's also true of Apple. And it's also true of Linux. And Open Source. And it's not just about computers either. It's pretty much everywhere. And it's total bullshit." Steve Zellers: "I'm in an exciting meeting with my peers!" I had no coffee when I wrote this I just read on Adam Curry's weblog that his radio show called Blog News Network, starts tomorrow, March 8. It's a real radio show, not one of those Internet things. Of course Adam is integrating the Web into the show. The Dutch will probably not even notice the word Blog, because it sounds like a Dutch word. BTW, March 8 is the xxxth anniversary of the Thrilla in Manila, the big fight betw Joe Frazier and Mohammed Ali. How do I know? I remember a commercial. It went like this. "Joe Frazier you gonna be so messed up on March the Eighth, even Vitalis won't hep," said the heavyweight champ. Vitalis was a hair dressing for white men that was on its way out. Frazier and Ali were both black. That's way it goes. OK, so how many mistakes can we find in that paragraph. First the note wasn't on Adam's blog, it was in an enclosure he attached to his RSS channel. I got the info from him, but it didn't come from his blog. OK, mistake number two, the Thrilla in Manila was on 10/1/75. So it must have been some other fight. Back in a minute with more mistakes. I didn't imagine Vitalis (what a name) it was horrible stuff. My mother made me use it when I was in 1st grade, but I went natural soon after. It's still around, apparently, so I guess that's mistake #3. How many more can you find? Rob Heiser: "The fight was Ali vs Frazier (I), the first title fight between the two in Madison Square Garden on 3/8/71. Frazier won." So much for Vitalis not helping. While we're talking about mistakes Yesterday we did a big overhaul on the community server for Radio 8 users. It's for a good cause, now we'll be able to start lots of Radio 8 communities, even private ones, behind firewalls, for workgroups. And any improvements we make to the commercial server product will flow back into the Radio community that uses our community server. But there are bound to be glitches. If you see anything that's wrong, like empty referer lists, or links that don't work, please send me an email, with the url of the page that isn't working correctly. We want to get the problems swept up today, where they exist. Whenever you do a big job like the one we did yesterday there are bound to be problems.
Nat Hentoff: "The press ought to awaken the citizenry not only to the FBI's harvesting lists of what 'suspect' Americans read, but also to the judicial silencing of bookstores and libraries that are being compelled to betray the privacy and First Amendment rights of readers." WriteTheWeb interviews J-Robb on K-Logs. Google: "In a world where everything seems to be for sale, why can't advertisers buy better position in our search results?" O'Reilly: A Pressplay Test Drive. "There are too many stumbling blocks: not enough artists and songs to choose from, poor quality streaming, and too many restrictions on the music you've downloaded." Mitch Wagner: "I'm one of those journos who quotes Rob Enderle a lot, and I do it because I think he's a pretty smart guy on some issues. I've used him as a source on Microsoft antitrust issues, desktop operating systems and client access devices." InternetWeek: Mission Interoperable. Two more Radio/FrontPage tutorials from David Berry. Glenn: "Google has dropped the 135,000 or so listings from my site from their index on Feb 22, the day after Brian Livingston of Infoworld published part 1 of 2 articles about my site's indexing and commercial strategy." Russ: "Many vendors devote themselves to the future of their products but skate dangerously - and manipulatively - around the Internet's centrifugal whirlpool of challenge and confusion. They try to mold the Internet insanely to themselves. Userland, by contrast, adjusts its products to the demands and dynamics of that whirlpool." Thanks Russ. Seth Dillingham is doing a directory of Frontier resources, looking for pointers. In May 1996 I thought Java was saying something that it wasn't. "The Internet is the vendorless platform. It's a groupware system. Let's try again. We can work together! That's what Java is saying." -10. A thoughtful reader asks if Java wasn't saying Let's Work Together, then what was it actually saying? I suppose that's a matter of a point of view and time makes a big difference. I'll give this some more thought. 12:30PM: We just did the big corner-turn, the back-end of upstreaming, otherwise known as xmlStorageSystem, is now running through Radio Community Server. The old RPC handlers and thread that served us so well up till now are retired. We're 90 percent eating the dogfood now. What remains is mop-ups, looking for problems, and then getting ready for a release to the testers. Last night I did a corner-turn on Weblogs.Com, as noted. 1. The Ping Site Form is broken. Noted. It's the first thing on my list this morning to fix. Fixed. Survey: "If you use the Ping Site Form on Weblogs.Com, do you hit it manually or do you ping it from a script?" There will be more breakage today as more of the one-off bits are upgraded to the new commercial community server. It's all for a good cause, and is being done very carefully. But in all likelihood today will be a glitchy day. Hopefully just today. 2. The Rankings-By-Page-Reads report isn't updating. Now it's updating but the links to the site referers is wrong. Both fixed. 3. Spam-free mailto is broken. Fixed. 4. On the referers pages, if the url is long, it is improperly truncated, reported by Simon Fell. It was even worse than that, actually. Fixed. It's a rare night that I'm at the keyboard at midnight. Why not flip the home page and leave a note? No problemmo. I'm up so late because I'm so excited about the next steps in our software story. I can hardly wait to see how it comes out. Anyway, see y'all in the morning, probably not too early.
Weblogs.Com got a software upgrade this evening. It's no longer a one-off, it's running our commercial software, part of Radio Community Server. This is called eating the dogfood. More modules will be switched in the next few days. Yes I know the template is weird. But I have to keep moving. No breakage so far. You know I'm going to say Praise Murphy! I started the next switchover. If you're part of the Radio community hosted at UserLand, this is the temporary home for Rankings by Page-Reads. There's been an improvement, we now list weblogs not by the author's name but by the name of the weblog, if we have the data. If you update Radio.root, Radio can take care of that for you. We call this percolation. Meanwhile Jake is bootstrapping RCS into Radio. Next week when you're playing with this expect a mental explosion when you realize that a RCS can upstream to another RCS. It's some kind of weird network. Or it's exactly like something else. Maybe it's UseNet? Or the inverse of UseNet? Hmmm. Did you grow up in NY in the 60s and 70s? If so, you probably remember Crazy Eddie's TV ads. He would say things like "My prices are so low people think I'm insane!" When he said the word insane he's make his voice waver so he sounded insane. He'd wiggle his fingers in front of his face as he said it. It had a very memorable effect. I had a phone talk with Paul Boutin today. He told me about the revolutionary side of CB Radio. I didn't know (or forgot) that there was an element of civil disobedience to CB. They had a song. He sang it. Then I sang The Streak for him. Another theme song for blogging. You're probably too young to know about streaking. Believe it or not in the 70s people took off all their clothes and ran around in public. "Look at that look at that," sang Ray Stevens. Well, that's what bloggers do, they show more of themselves than most people would think prudent. Why this story right now? Because I just read what my lovely friend Doc Searls said about me on his interview page for SXSW. What a sweet man. I love you Doc! Peter Drayton: "Little known fact: Simon is 100% of the PocketSOAP toolkit development team - how come he's the first one to ship updates with all those other BigCo's and not-so-BigCo's working on the same stuff?!" It's simple. Simon kicks butt! An odd note perhaps. We're looking for workgroups to test our upcoming product. Here's the announcement for Frontier users and for Radio users. The new app runs in either UserLand environment, with a few small differences. With your help RCS will be a big success. Here we go! David Berry: Working with FrontPage and Radio. gRadio transcribed a MacWorld article on outliners from 1987. He says "I am making this article available as a tribute to the quality that once was common in the media coverage of the computing industry. It is here to remind us of a time when there were more choices in available software, and when the computer industry media often took a more critical POV when doing a comparative review of the software." Jenny the librarian: "Don't you feel like Microsoft, the RIAA, the MPAA, and the BigCos all think we're a bunch of idiots that will blindly believe whatever they say?" 5/13/98: "Do they think we're stupid?" How people read on the web. They want to get to the beef asap. Most people will only skim, and record the fact that the article is there, and then use Google to find it when and if they need it. So the most important thing is to quickly say what you're going to do in the piece and who should care. Quickness is a very important thing. Most people just dash in and out. At least this is my assumption. That's one of the reasons I give quick soundbites, and the sources. Paul Boutin: Waiting for Wi-Fi. "You won't be blogging from your phone anytime soon." Sean Gallagher: "I am blogging from my WAP phone now - by email." Brent Simmons: "DSFinder—short for DocServer Finder—is a small, free utility for Frontier and Radio UserLand scripters." Mac OS X. Sam Ruby wrote a tutorial explaining how to do a WSDL for Weblogs.Com's ping SOAP handler. 3/5/98: "XML stands for eXtensible Markup Language. It's a rigorization of HTML, which is a very loose language that a lot of people understand. XML is beautiful, but it's getting really complex, which is a turnoff for the kind of people who were attracted to HTML." YahooGroups has been down for most of the last 24 hours, bringing much of our work to a halt, of course, at the worst possible time. News.Com ran an article, but it doesn't offer much detail on the source of the outage or an ETA. They're merging YahooGroups with their chat communities. Seth Dillingham: "Shortly after you posted the blurb about Yahoo Groups, they brought it back online." OK, next time I won't wait so long. Paul Fletcher: "FYI, the Yahoo Groups outage was caused by the RAID on the main Oracle database blowing up. The hot standby has been offline because of a bad CPU, so the database had to be rebuilt. Which takes time with 40+ million users."
For XML geeks: How the Web Bug Simulator Works. I linked to the Web Bug Simulator readout in the left margin of this page. The third item. I called it HotX's because I couldn't think of a better name for the readout. I know it's a mess. I'm going to have to do a special site just for this service. They're XML. They're hot. You want to watch it. It's the place where weblogs meet the BigPub's and don't give an inch. Dave Liebreich reads the tea leaves on UserLand's strategy, and his thinking is quite reasonable, however it is not our strategy. The next move will happen next Monday, Murphy-willing. One more week before you see the full scope of the network we want to build. We're going for broke folks. You're going to be surprised. (But surprise is good, otherwise life would be flat and hohum.) Steve Jobs nails it. "We believe that over 80 percent of people are willing to pay," he says. "But there is no one offering you a choice." Amen. Kuro5hin: "With the switching of Morpheus to the Gnutella network, the size of the Gnutella network has grown tenfold, overnight. This has had the effect of making the network almost unusable for dial-up users." The story of Flash as told by its inventor, Jonathan Gay. A fantastic new Radio weblog from Katy and Bruce Loebrich. Clean and simple. Excellent use of categories. Stephen Tallent: "I can see several situations where it would be quite nice to retrieve info from an Oracle or MS SqlServer database at publish time." Amen. Brent Sleeper: "Trying to write productively in a web browser is like using a knife to turn a loose screw." Status-Q: "The number of hosts on the Gnutella network is booming." Kevin Altis lists WSDL analyzers and validators. Looks like Visio is becoming a development platform. Tim Jarrett: "Adobe gets SOAP religion." Adam Curry reviews the new XML feeds ranking system. "If you don't update, you start to feel blog-gravity," he says. He's right about the gravity thing. Overnight Scripting News fell to 13th place. Now that I've started updating, it should start rising slowly. The Register, a UK publication, is number one right now (7AM). They're nine hours ahead. Makes sense. Yes, the new ranking system is very interesting. I will write a technical description of exactly how it works, but it still may be better to just accept it as a number that somehow reflects how much new stuff is flowing from each source. And it's also got a tiny little coffee mug (thanks Bryan!) next to each feed that makes it easy (very) to try out the feeds in your aggregator. In other words, it's got a little virality to it. John Hiler: Google Time Bomb. A demo of a Google bomb. On Saturday I decided to try to become the authority on Rob Enderle. It worked. A mostly harmless experiment, I hope. I've been playing this game since I noticed that I had become authoritative on John Doerr (he's a board member at Google). At the Segway demo in December, I met Google founder Larry Page and wrote it up. I told him Google likes me. I became authoritative on Segway too (as did Dan Bricklin). In December the NY Times said that Paul Nakada's Segway weblog was authoritative, but I guess their link didn't count because Google can't get into the Times because of the cookie requirement. But Scripting News did, so if you search for it, you find my reference to the Times article. So I'm kind of a weblog proxy for the Times. Heh. What a funny small world. Later this month you'll find out why it's even worse than it appears. Tease. OK, it gets even wierder. Sight unseen, I'm going to point to Glenn pointing to the NY Times which is running two articles on WiFi. Glenn says "The New York Times Gets It." That's good enough for me. See how this shit works. Glenn is the authority on WiFi. If he says the NY Times is out to lunch, I believe him. If he says they have two articles that are insightful, I point sight unseen. This is how Google evolves to capture human intelligence. More and more I think we and Google are exploring two sides of the same mountain. What passes for a life these days A Friday night is the beginning of a quiet period on the Web known anachronistically as a "weekend." Those of us who live the Web lifestyle perhaps have some vague recollection that this used to be a period for relaxation, sports, parties, visiting with friends, etc. Nowadays it means that the traffic goes down on the net, everything's fast, and it's time to do corner-turns and bootstraps, because if hell breaks loose not so many people will see it. Friday night is not the best time to receive an award or to have a great review for your newest product appear. So with that in mind, please check out the following two links. Thank you and god bless. InfoWorld: Top ten technology innovators: Dave Winer. Jon Udell: Radio 8 is a Lab for Groupware. Benjamin Franklin: "If you would not be forgotten, as soon as you are dead and rotten, either write things worthy reading, or do things worth the writing." March 4 in Y2K was a Spicy Noodles kind of day.
Good morning Web Masters. New Radio 8 feature: Web Bug Simulator. Jon Udell comments on today's new feature calling it the "RSS Stock Exchange." In yesterday's rant about Orlowski's blogging piece I said "to get a balanced view there must be people who are watching it," so it's important to see how my ideas and implementation bounce off The Mind of Udell. Jenny the librarian: "I've come to believe that news aggregation based on RSS feeds of web sites (newspapers, blogs, magazines, etc.) is the future and that the Net Gens will grow up with this as their primary news source." Anyway now that I can see the initial results, I think we must tweak the readout (done). Seeing Weblogs.Com Changes in RSS at the top of the list, with Daypop In RSS in the #2 slot, says that counting the number of new items may not be as juicy as it seemed at first look. Just one person subscribed to either of those sources pushes it to the top of the list, esp the first source, which blows a hailstorm of new links through the aggregator page. It's surprising that anyone actually reads the Weblogs.Com changes list that way! To each his own. Lots of great stuff on John Robb's site today. We're out of the recession he says. Good news! Stroll on Brighton Beach with East Broadway Ron. Steven Levy: "No outlaw service can ever provide consumers with the deep libraries at guaranteed high quality that content owners can deliver." Pew Internet: "As Americans Gain Experience, They Use the Web More at Work, Write Emails with More Significant Content, Perform More Online Transactions, and Pursue More Serious Activities." Scoble snapped this pic of me speaking at the InfoWorld Web Services conf in January. Note the Radio screen in the background. That's called Marketing. Sneaky. We have to figure out what's going on here. We're so short-staffed. I wonder if someone who's expert in Frontier and up the curve with the Radio 8 runtime model could dig in and find out why for a few users on a fast CPU Radio consumes all the available CPU resources. We have not been able to reproduce this here. Last night at a party in Portola Valley I met a man who collects tanks and fire engines. He even has his own Scud missle and a mobile launcher. Nice. Tim Jarrett: "I would think that newspapers, above all, would understand the importance of syndication." On this day last year I thought SOAP was in a critical section. Today, interop in SOAP remains confusing. NY Times: "Many companies are establishing 'alumni networks' for laid-off employees through Web sites and special events in the hopes of rehiring them when the economy improves." In stealth mode, I've been working on a project called RCS, or Radio Community Server. It's basically at an alpha level now. The idea is to make installing the centralized side of a Radio community as easy as installing Radio on a workstation. It's a fascinating bootstrap, the software is ready, but I need users. How to entice them? Features, of course. So this morning I'm turning in a different direction, I'm working on the Web Bug Simulator for XML feeds. It's very interesting, along the lines of the articles by Udell and Gillmor. A lab for developing community services. OK, here's the idea. We can track hits and referers for HTML by putting a web bug in the page, and when the browser loads the page it asks for the bug, and with a little Javascript magic, we can tabulate and rank the sites, and count the referers. But how to do that for an XML feed which only goes through the browser after being digested by the aggregator? Not so hard to figure out when you phrase the question that way. But there's an opportunity for refinement because my client code is less crude than the meager power the HTML browser gives me. I'm tracking the number of new stories times the number of people who read it, so a site that doesn't update its XML feed falls off the chart, as it should, because it's not saying anything new even if a lot of people are subscribing. Anyway I hope to have some results to show for this shortly. Diggin. Some time in the last couple of years I stopped talking to the music business. When they shut off Napster I stopped caring. A few days before Morpheus shut down last month I downloaded the software and installed it. I had a specific mission in mind. My MP3 collection had almost no Elvis Costello, and, having heard an NPR interview with him, I was interested. So I booted up Morpheus and went looking and found lots of hits, mostly the songs I already had, and downloaded a couple I hadn't, and the quality was so low, I threw them in the trash. My time is worth money and of course I would have happily downloaded a curated and quality-assured package of Elvis songs, with written narrative (he's an interesting guy, very smart, a good story teller) for $39. Charge it to my credit card. I thought I'd mention that, because like others, I spend $0 on music now, and no that's not a story of Napster screwing things up, it's Eisner and Case that screwed it up. While I was using Napster I was a veritable pump of money into their coffers to make the point to myself and anyone else who cared that it wasn't about money, it was about love of music and wanting it to come to me easily, conveniently and with high quality. For the 18th time, we want to work with the music business. Why can't they hear that. Instead they're lobbying Congress to rape the computer industry so they can get all the money we would supposedly send to them after they did that. Oy. We'd burn their houses, figuratively of course. No money for losers.
OK, I have to get some programming work done today. Too much stimulation from all corners. Back to work Dave. Jakob Nielsen: Deep Linking is Good Linking. Slashdot says either deal with humongous ads, or pay for a subscription. Rick Ross, the Java Lobby guy, has a Radio weblog. Robb Beal is having a "Metadata Weekend." Tim Jarrett asks "So how was Morpheus going to capture any value? Somewhere, though, someone thought they were a good idea." News.Com, 10/01: "..Timberline Venture Partners, a venture capital firm associated with Draper Fisher Jurvetson, which funded MusicCity, also known as StreamCast Networks." Mark Pilgrim has a great demo of how much easier Mac OS X is for personal Web serving than Windows XP. Of course if you run Radio on XP, you just have to launch the Radio app. It's a Web server. It's pretty easy. I have a confession to make. Radio is also an outliner. I'm thinking more about that these days. Register: Back in the Bloghouse. Great story. I'm going to have a lot to say about this. Andrew almost gets it, but not quite. Breaking news is hard work only if you're not already immersed in the news that's breaking. For the person who lives it, who spent years working to make the news, it's hard work for sure to explain what's going on, and to get a balanced view there must be people who are watching it. The reporter who swoops into an area for two weeks, then writes a piece and moves on, never gets the story. How many times have you read a story in an area you know about and shake your head because the story was just plain wrong. It happens so often that I have no confidence when they cover areas I don't know about. Glenn gets breaking news on 802.11b every day because he cares about it, and makes it his business to know what's going on. This is not the end, we're not finished, we're just booting up. The pings you see now are a network that's bootstrapping. We all say hi. Some don't bother (we note that) -- Andrew's piece, even if it said nothing else, was great because it linked to all the people he talked about. Note that yesterday I got an award from Infoworld -- no link. The O'Reilly review of Radio 8 didn't link to the product, so how could people try it out? Andrew's doing his job. Letting us talk back. Letting a reader get all sides to a story. Let the reader of a review try the product being reviewed. BTW, the herd may move on, but I cover stories for years. It's all in the archives. Otherwise Andrew says things that need to be heard. It's not enough to kvell, you also have to do, if you want to see the promise realized. BTW, don't think blogs haven't covered breaking news. Look at the rollout of Radio 8. It took a month or more to get the whole story out, through lots of different perspectives. But the story got out. The print world hasn't caught it yet. The Times piece last Monday, supposedly a review of what's going on in the business of blogging, had an interview with our COO, but no mention of the product we shipped on Jan 11, and certainly did not take into account the new things it makes possible. Is that relevant to the reader of the Times piece? I have no doubt that it is. So a lot of it depends on what color your glasses are. If you think Radio 8 wasn't a big story, then the pros missed nothing and the bloggers didn't get the story. But if you wear my glasses it looks totally different. One year ago today I wrote a piece about Microsoft that was later quoted in a John Markoff piece in the NY Times. Here's what I said. "Every time I use the Web I am reminded why I hate Microsoft." It's still true today. I feel like they're the US in Vietnam. They have no business here, they don't understand it, they're an occupying force. What Markoff didn't understand, or at least didn't represent in his piece, is that this is only part of the Microsoft and Me story. I'm using Microsoft software now as I write this (it's in the background, I'm using my own outliner to write); and as a platform vendor they have an exemplary record of keeping my software running; and I have had many friends at Microsoft, even some personal friends, dating back to the mid-80s. I've also done some of my best cross-company collaboration with Microsoft. I don't know how he could have expressed all that in a 600-word piece, this is why I think pros like Markoff should also have weblogs, where they track the people and subjects they care about on a daily basis, so their readers, if they want to know more, have a way to get it. Behind every profile should be a professionally maintained dossier, so that readers with minds have a way to get and stay informed. Kevin Altis: "Shows like Nova and Frontline provide information and forums that supplement their programs." Boy, going back through the On This Day In links (to the right) is a real trip. On this day two years ago I wrote one of my big hits, The Two-Way-Web. Over the years there have been a handful of DaveNets that I link back to frequently. This is one of those pieces. And on this day four years ago, we went into stealth mode on our work with Microsoft on SOAP. I think this must have been the day after my trip to Redmond to plot out the work. Good morning. Got a couple of emails from Rob Enderle, unfortunately he doesn't want them on the Web. They were long. I would love to publish them. See how the mind of a quote mill works. 1300 quotes per year. I guess he counts. Anyway, he's not that interesting. I hope Cydney writes a piece about this. And I also hope she keeps developing sources who know what they're talking about and avoids assembly-line journalism. In Enderle's emails was a tinge of chivalry. Well hmm, she's a tough broad (to use an anachronistic term) and chivalry is dead, it went out with feminism. If women are to be respected, then their work must be subject to examination and criticism, without regard to gender. I support equality for women, therefore I would never let gender get in the way of collegial pushback, nor would I point to an article because it was written by a woman (or a man). Perhaps this is a subject for the BlogSisters to look at. BTW, Rob thinks I have an issue with him, that I was getting to him through Cydney. Oy what arrogance. I think he's as relevant as the financial analysts who led Wall Street astray during the dotcom mess. I don't think anyone's making investment decisions today based on what Meeker and Blodget say. Enderle and his ilk are old fashioned vestiges of a system that was really shitty, and got the ink-stained crowd in a deep hole. If you want to find a way out, start digging for real stories, real news, and for that you can't go to the quote mills.
InfoWorld names their top innovators for 2002. Check this out. I'm one 'em! Nice. What a day. Thanks! BTW, Frontier 8 shipped yesterday. A review of Radio 8 on O'Reilly. $0. By Jon Udell. Priceless. A personal note of thanks to Jon. We've been talking about this stuff for years. The Radio Community Server project he alludes to at the end of the article is coming along nicely. We're releasing bits for the current centralized community, factoring out specifics that make it centralized. Inch by inch, bootstrapping our way along. Masukomi has a new easier to read template, and is kicking butt with OPML. I have an unspoken bet with Edd Dumbill about OPML. I say it's the next big thing. Edd thinks I've lost my mind. Of course I'm right. And (drum roll please) so is he. Ba-ding. New Radio 8 feature released this afternoon. Screen shot. A new link in the Cloud Links section above the status center, links you to your community. Today, for all Radio users, that's Weblogs.Com. After our next corner-turn, it could be your intranet, or ISP or some other interesting place to gather a community of thinkers, writers and fact-gatherers. David Brown: "It's not as important to actually BE fast as it is to SEEM fast." So true. Adam Curry: "Trust is a funny word." Craig Saila states the case for CSS. Interesting article explains how the Church of Scientology manages its relationship with Google. An opposing view of Scientology. (Following Wes's lead.) A year ago today I asked how people visualize Radio's story flow. "One idea was to imagine a river, with lots of tributaries. Logs are floating down the river, and each of us have a little sawmill, where we carve the logs up and turn them into houseboats which then float down the river.." Rob Fahrni: "I'm hoping it will prove that a component Visio engine is necessary. That someone out there needs a service, or the means to create their own, based on Visio technology." I support this. It's interesting being on one side of a fence, knowing how the sausage factory really works (and doesn't), how creativity turns into shipping software; how servers stay up 24 hours a day, seven days a week; how kind Murphy has been to us for not making everything fall apart so there's actually time to create new stuff. Reading Shane McChesney's piece yesterday really hit home. When we opened our servers over two years ago to free hosting, we opened a Pandora's Box, not knowing how we would pay for it. We learned that it was through stress that we would pay the price; not through a DotCom success story; and that a transition would be slow, if we want to bring the most creative writers and thinkers with us. This is a long preamble to a simple thank you to Brent Simmons, for taking so much of the responsibility for keeping UserLand running. I met Brent online during the 24 Hours of Democracy project. He was fascinated with Web scripting, and became one of the best contributors in the Frontier community. Very easy to work with. So I offered him a job and he accepted. We've been working together for five years. Today is Brent's last day at UserLand. I couldn't let it pass without saying what a champion he is, and how envious I am of his new freedom. He created a lot of the software I use and it's wonderful stuff. He also kept his eyes on our servers, kept them running, did the cleanups, basically anything he was called on to do. So thanks Brent for all you've done for us, and best wishes and much success and happiness on your new path. Survey: "I wanted to find a way for Scripting News readers to thank Brent for making the software work so well and keeping the servers running. This is what I came up with.." Good morning fellow Netizens. Lots of great stories yesterday. More today? Sure, why not. The story that stands out from yesterday is Mike Godwin's account of what awaits us in the US Congress. A major technology overhaul to protect the assets of Disney, AOL, and a handful of smelly bean counters with lots of money. It's true they all smell bad. Anyway, I forgive them for that. I don't forgive them for holding all of us accountable, financially and artistically, for a system that was never very good at moving creativity around. The obvious answer imho is to calculate roughly how much money it would take to rewrite every operating system, every TCP stack, every application, so that it won't copy Eisner's TV shows and movies. Then present him with the bill. (And let him do the recruiting.) Also on the list of interesting posts from yesterday is Steve Zeller's comment about the Mac OS X Apple Event Manager breakage. This is an immature medium, so I have to say that I love Steve, I've worked with him many times, and am grateful for all that he's done to help us. That said, what a loopback. What a hoop to jump through. It's hard to imagine that changing our Apple Event code will generate any more sales. How are we supposed to pay for this work? Yeah, money is that tight in 2002. The quid pro quo on this would be for Apple to do something meaningful to tell people how cool Radio 8 and Frontier are, as Mac apps, so we get more sales, to provide the money it's going to cost to turn this corner with them. We'll probably do this one, our users will help (some have already offered), they're good people -- but geez, I want to focus on work that makes our software more valuable, and it's hard to see how this change does that. Second point, it's a loopback to the old days when every release of the Mac OS would break lots of apps. It worked in the 80s when Apple was the only game in GUIs. It's a hard sell now. What is Apple's commitment to keeping our code running? Serious question. We've been shipping code on Windows since 1998, already long enough to know how it works with MS as a platform vendor. In that time, with lots of new releases of Windows, no breakage. Apple has to match that, imho. Even though MS has never made a commitment about no breakage (as far as I know), their track record speaks for itself. Every subsequent release of Windows makes our software run better. That's what we want from Apple. BTW, read the paragraph above, and try to imagine that message floating through BigPubLand. What would get lost in the translation? The headline would read Apple Is Dead, No Developers; or something like that. The truth is Apple has developers. We're one of them. Now, how can we help each other to win? Steve Zellers states his point of view. Some things he says are perfectly valid, and others are shortcuts that don't address my problem as a developer for his platform. Daniel Berlinger, who develops using UserLand stuff and Apple's, says that No Breakage is an implicit commitment between a platform vendor and a developer. The temptation to optimize and fix bugs is real, but we don't always have that freedom, if we want to keep developer momentum. Three years ago today: "It's very difficult not to be in love this time of year, so let's not even try."
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