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The NY Times tells the riveting story of the last hours of people who died in the World Trade Center.  Washington Post on Radio: "The program, its templates and other elements work smoothly, and you can go from downloading the program to publishing your thoughts on the Web during a coffee break." Thanks! Wired: "Some [ads] even crawl over content, forcing you to simply wait helplessly for the nightmare to end." Jeff Barr gathered statistics on the use of various elements in RSS feeds processed by his Syndic8 service. Inference  If Mr X says A, he must also mean B. This is an example of inference in conversation. But look closely at "must also mean" before you hold X responsible for B. If your own filters, your point of view, lead you to the inference, it's probably wrong. Never has this been more clear when the only form of communication is electronic. Likely facts: The two parties have different points of view. Mr Y, the observer, has a different set of experiences and expectations than Mr X. So if we want to get somewhere, avoid concluding that B follows from A. As Dan Gillmor says: "If your mom says she loves you, check it out." Software and standards work requires this discipline. "You can't lie to a compiler." The West Wing A dozen stories beautifully woven together. A stage play as the backdrop. Fantastic music. An ill-fated love affair. The characters ooze integrity. The president makes the right decision. The best line when the president meets his adversary. "I decided to kick your ass when you said.." We cheer for President Bartlett, as we would have for Bill Clinton, had he faced Dubya in the Y2K election. New characters enter left, and old ones exit right. We are in awe. Simply put, the season finale of The West Wing was the best single hour of television ever. Written without coffee! Good morning sports fans. Another local story. Went to the grocery store to get some coffee and food and wine. At the checkout counter the clerk says "Oh the tourists." I said "Tourists? I didn't know we got tourists here." It turns out we do. They stop in and ask if there's anything to see. She says "Oh yeah, there's highway 280, go check it out." I had the same experience on the other side when I came to Silicon Valley for the first time in the late 70s. I kept driving around looking for something to see. There's nothing to see. A lot of freeways, Denny's, and not a whole lot more. Stanford has a couple of museums. Winchester Mystery House. Lots of geeks. Ask Scoble, he was born here. My trip to Google on Friday was great. First I took the tour. Lots of geek toys. Lots of press clippings. A nice graph showing flow. Then we sat down and talked software. This is not Netscape. They're playing long-term, they've got real technology (Netscape's was all quick hacks). I pushed six things and gave them a heads-up on an seventh. Here they are. 1. Spell-checker web service. 2. Pings from CMSes for more currency. 3. Google On The Desktop. 4. An API to access page rank. 5. OPML and directories (instead of two or three directories, millions). 6. RSS feeds for their news flows. 7. Gnutella as a decentralized distribution method. |
 
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© 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 |
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