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Matt Croyden reviewed tonight's Cato Institute debate in Washington entitled Let Hollywood Hack.  The SF Chron asks how much we should blame journalists for the dotcom craze. Radio Free Blogistan: Reading blog books. Sjoerd Visscher started a mail list for support of RSS 2.0. I'm having lunch today with a bunch of ex-Apple people at the Computer History Museum at Moffet Field in Mountain View. This year is the 25th anniversary of the founding of Apple. Next year they're going to have a gala to celebrate. I'm encouraging them to include developers in the celebration. They want to use a weblog to coordinate the work. An opportunity for a win-win, and a chance to see some old friends. Early this evening, Murphy-willing, we'll release a new channel compiler for Radio and Frontier that is guid-aware, per the evangelism I posted on Monday. Before doing the release, it would be great if a few adventurous Radio users downloaded the part, installed it, and verified that the News Aggregator still works. The cool thing about the new version is that now the aggregator will only show truly new items. In the past it had to guess which items were new. Now it can tell for sure. (But only for 2.0 feeds that support guids.) Chilling Effects: "Do you know your online rights? Have you received a letter asking you to remove information from a Web site or to stop engaging in an activity? Are you concerned about liability for information that someone else posted to your online forum? If so, this site is for you." John Robb: "If you had complete control over a browser connected to Radio, what would you add to it that would improve the experience?" Brian Buck: "I wanted to start a weblog about my cancer treatment long before I had the guts to actually do it." Brian helped me see that I could use my weblog to get back in the world before my body was ready to. He's an innovator, which really isn't a surprise, I knew Brian before he got sick, and he was an innovator then too. Life doesn't end when you get sick, and for people who are healthy, hearing from people whose bodies are sick can be very fear-evoking. But when there's a screen and a net connection between us, that can create enough distance so that we can communicate. Information can save your life. Weblogs can help disseminate that information. And it's possible that just being in contact with the rest of the world can save lives too. Intuitively I believe that's true. These days when you get heart surgery, they have you take your first walk within 24 hours of the surgery. They want you out of bed asap. Weblogs, in a very real sense, get your mind out of bed, and back in the world. They can help alleviate the endless aloneness that's part of recovery.  A long time ago I offered to develop for a hot startup called General Magic. I was going to do the work for free. I wanted to explore a new platform. They turned me down, saying they already had enough developers. Yesterday they announced they are shutting down the company. Now no one knows if one developer's software would have made the difference, but it's been known for a long time that exclusive platforms die and inclusive ones have a chance. It's why the Mac worked and Lisa didn't. If you're lucky enough to get a gazillion dollars invested behind your ideas, never say no to a developer. They might have the next VisiCalc, Lotus 1-2-3, PageMaker or Mosaic. Eric Vitello: "I highly suggest that we start from scratch, and not worry about backwards compatability." This is exactly the kind of thinking I was writing about in my Discontinuities piece. He goes on to say that developers won't mind, which shows that he understands that there's an issue of the installed base. He's wrong about developers not minding. They do, generally, mind when they have to do work just to stay in place. We like to do work to delight our users and make our product work better. The trouble with Jeff Barr and Bill Kearney continues. |
 
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