Sunday, March 31, 2002

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.