|
||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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. |
 
|
|||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
© Copyright 1997-2005 Dave Winer. The picture at the top of the page may change from time to time. Previous graphics are archived. Previous/Next |
||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
