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Harvard Crimson: Citizen Bloggers in NH? A slightly longer version of the Crimson piece, circulated to the DaveNet mail list. Brent Simmons: "Not all RSS feeds contain guids. My hope is that more and more they will since they’re so useful, since they make reading news so much better." Amen. 1/24/03: Guids are not just for geeks anymore. Eric Soroos has Frontier running on Linux. This is big. Manila on Linux. Very important stuff. News.Com: New dreams for Morpheus. Two garden pictures, one taken on April 4, and one today. What a difference 26 days makes. It's finally spring in Cambridge. In the 80s yesterday. Too hot. Today it's in the high 60s. Just perfect. A bug in Daypop shows what they filter out. Without filters, the top 10 reads like this. Blogger, UserLand, Blogger, UserLand, Apple, UserLand, Apple, Apple, Wolfelaar, Wired. Rogers Cadenhead is doing a book on Radio to be published this summer by Sams Publishing. Chapter 1 is on the Web for your review. Very cool! Thanks Rogers. Lots of travel in the coming week. To NY on Friday, Denver on Sunday, back to Boston on Tuesday and New Hampshire on Friday. Overheard at a Cambridge pizzeria yesterday. A cop talking to another cop, telling a story about his young son who was cursing him out. Then, the next day, he overheard him saying exactly the same words to a mirror. The cop says "When people say angry words to someone else they're really angry with themself." NY Times: "In the toughest move to date against unsolicited commercial e-mail, Virginia enacted a law Tuesday imposing harsh felony penalties for sending such messages to computer users through deceptive means." NY Times: "Until recently, the record industry has been reluctant to act against the several million people who copy music over the Internet from one another for fear of alienating its own customers. But with CD sales plummeting, the record labels have lately taken a more aggressive stance." And do they think that spamming their customers will make CD sales rise? These are not business people, they're thugs. Lower the prices, and work with users. Give them products that take advantage of the new medium, instead of trying to hold on to the obsolete one. We've been saying this for years. MacRumors confirms that iTunes is coming for Windows. I was going to explain that Windows users generally don't care about Apple software for Windows, it usually sucks bigtime, but then I decided to avoid the flames, I have a busy day so never mind.
Alternet: MSNBC's Banfield Slams War Coverage. "We got rid of a dictator, we got rid of a monster, but we didn't see what it took to do that." It's been a writing day, doing an op-ed for tomorrow's Crimson. A new experience. The unedited piece will run tomorrow as a DaveNet. A bit that got edited out: "Like cholesterol there are good lawyers and bad lawyers. I work with the good ones." Happy birthday to Python Community Server, a clone of the backend of the Radio UserLand community, written in Python of course. The cloneability of the backend is something that the Microsoft developers have yet to discover (or so I think) and when they do, boy are the bulbs going to light up. SOAP has a greater purpose than I imagine they imagine. News.Com: "Tapping into the chat functions built into software programs such as Kazaa and Grokster, the RIAA on Tuesday started sending automatic messages to people who are providing copyrighted songs online, warning them that they're breaking the law." Dan Bricklin has been emailing with people at Berkman about the Creative Commons licenses. I urged him to write about his concerns publicly and he has done so. Today at Berkman we got a presentation on PRX. Keola: "Let me start by saying that I love iMusic." Tristan Louis: "Whatever the extent of Apple's DRM, it must be firm enough to quell the record companies' fear of piracy." Megnut: "Whine whine whine. I want an iPod now." JY Stervinou debugs the XML interface for Apple's iTunes. Danny Goodman (via email): "It appears the pricing values are in mils. Looking ahead to micropayments perhaps?" Ed Cone is thinking of running for office. Yes! Micah Alpern on the News Hour blogging segment. Howard Kurtz: "It seems this morning that bloggers have taken over the world. Or at least the 2004 presidential campaign." Jon Udell: Blogs and InfoWorld. Dear Paolo, I can't buy music at Apple's store since I use a Sony laptop, not a Mac. Karlin Lillington on Apple's iMusic service. I support what she says and go further. Not only are CDs too expensive, but the distribution system often doesn't carry the music I want. And one more thing, it bothers me that the artists aren't getting any of the money. How do Apple users, many of whom are creative, feel about that? I still have to process my pics from WGBH on Sunday. In the studio all the computers are Windows PCs. In the offices, they're Macs. I got to wander around, since it was Sunday. I notice these things. Critt Jarvis is one of my political advisors for 2004. Two years ago: "There were people at Microsoft, notably Ben Slivka and Brad Silverberg, who would probably have endorsed my proposal that the browser be in a separate company, and not tied to Windows." Three years ago: "Excise the browser, embrace WINE." Two views of Groove on Jeroen Bekker's weblog today, one positive, one negative. PRX at Berkman Today at Berkman we got a presentation on PRX, which stands for Public Radio eXchange. It's a B2B marketplace connecting producers of public radio shows to radio stations, alongside NPR and PRI. It's not for you and me, an ordinary person can't access the content in the PRX database, unless we're one of their reviewers. There's a fatal flaw, imho -- the producers of the content don't insist on getting paid, and the users of the content don't want to pay. Yet their business depends on money flowing between the two. They say the alternative is an MP3.Com type arrangement, which of course isn't attractive because it was based on dotcom money from the public market and you can't get that kind of money anymore, and was ultimately taken out by an RIAA lawsuit. (I guess they're owned by Vivendi now.)
InfoWorld: Are you ready for RSS? This is the second publication that has recently given me (appropriate) co-invention credit for RSS. Thanks. BTW, I'm trying to accentuate the positive, hoping that the few holdouts who begrudge me credit for my creation with RSS would get a clue that they are looking worse and worse all the time. Eventually I will have to raise the issue publicly, and ask those who say I didn't co-author RSS to prove it. I'm sure I can prove that I did. It's important, esp now that I am in academia, where these issues mean a lot. Not that they don't mean a lot to commercial developers. Everyone should get credit for what they contribute, don't you agree? Of course some people will flame over the above paragraph. I have something to say about that, a bit of wisdom from Martin Nisenholtz at the NY Times. At one point in a phone conversation a couple of weeks ago, when trying out an idea for their archive, I responded by saying "People will flame about that," to which Martin said "That's not fair." I thought about it, and realized that of course he was right. PBS ran a segment on blogging on News Hour last night.
10/23/00: "New York, of course, is the capital of greasy food." I'm tempted to go to Doc's dinner in NY, but I can't. It would mean missing the Thursday evening weblog-writer meeting at Berkman. I can't do that. What's really frustrating is that I will be in NY on Friday, which is my birthday (you knew that, right?) and I want to spend this birthday with my parents. BTW, get this -- Dad is driving now. Here's what I want for my birthday. When he was unconscious and in Intensive Care at Flushing Hospital in November, and things weren't looking very good, one of the Physician's Assistants, a young guy named Danny, said he had patients in my father's condition recover and bring him cookies. That idea stuck with me all through the ordeal, I saw Danny a few weeks later when things didn't look any better and I shook his hand and thanked him for his courage, and told him I'd bring my Dad back with cookies. Well, that's what I want for my birthday -- I'd like to introduce him to Danny, and bring some nice home-baked cookies with us, of course. It's schmaltzy, but then I'm a schmaltzy guy. Someone actually wrote an open letter to me. Flattering. I don't plan to get rid of my blogroll. The world doesn't revolve around Google, even though sometimes it seems that way. Smug Canadian: "The reason Google is skewing web importance to 'A-List bloggers' right now is because many of these A-List bloggers have done a lot of work to get there." Apple: "The revolutionary iTunes Music Store puts 200,000 songs at your fingertips." Derek Slater: "My favorite part of the release is Steve Jobs saying, 'The iTunes Music Store offers the revolutionary rights to burn an unlimited number of CDs for personal use.' Funny, I don't find that revolutionary at all, given that I've burning copies of CDs for the last 5 years." TidBITS: iTunes Music Store Takes the Stage. News.Com: "The software will be able to read music files encoded with ACC, a format that Apple says 'compresses much more efficiently than older formats like MP3...while delivering quality rivaling that of uncompressed CD audio.'" Register: "You're out of luck if you live outside the US -- the only territory in which the service is available. It's Mac-only too." Jenny: "I'm here at MIT talking about blogging!" Brent Simmons: "ServerBeach sucks." Doing my part. Scoble says I'd whack him with a 2-by-4 if he screws up at Microsoft. Not exactly. I actually said I would kill him. On this day in 2000, a decision to split Microsoft in two, that would eventually get overturned. At Harvard I've met a couple of lawyers who were in the Clinton Justice Dept, prosecuting the case. I say the same thing to each of them. "You screwed up." They nod their heads in agreement. Microsoft got off the hook. But at least we don't have to argue with Microsoft people (like Scoble) about the competence of their competitors. If they were so incompetent, why bother to cut off their air supply? Ed Cone: "The News & Record's intro to weblogs gets posted. I'd give it a C+." Phillip Pearson released his OPML Directory Browser, in source, under the MIT license. This document explains how to implement an OPML Directory Browser.
The NY Times says that Apple will announce a new music service tomorrow. Bad omen -- Hilary Rosen of the RIAA plans to attend the announcement.
One more thing. This is the canonical picture of John Palfrey. Or at least a funny one. Common list of feature requests for Radio (Jake take note). Scoble changes his mind about Creative Commons after a phone call from yours truly. Philip Greenspun: "The theory is that it is tough for a manager to do a good job if he or she is paid only a straight cash salary of several million dollars; the manager also needs to get an additional $10-20 million per year in stock." John Palfrey notes that Kazaa did not win in court on Friday. Phil Rignalda, a digital magpie, quibbles about Trackback. News.Com: "The Webby Awards, the Internet community's biggest annual event, has become a non-event this year."
In progress: Trackback in the UserLand Environment. John Palfrey took me on a tour of the campus looking for places to hold BloggerCon. Along the way we visited possible sites for a party, and spotted the president of Harvard College, Harry Lewis, who has become famous for his letter about music sharing on campus. Philip Greenspun: Outlining and the Presidential Campaign. Jimmy Guterman: Management by Blog. The date for BloggerCon at Harvard Law: October 4. Yesterday John Palfrey and I went looking at possible auditoriums for the conference. I took pictures. On this day three years ago SOAP 1.1 was announced. Draft of a privacy policy for weblog sites hosted at blogs.law.harvard.edu, and users of those sites, written by Harvard Law student Eva Chan. Yesterday testing and tweaking of my outbound Trackback code. I tested against 14 servers, and as long as they have the RDF bits for auto-discovery (most do), my Trackbacks get through and are recorded. The next step is to write some docs for this implementation, because supporting this is going to require a clear understanding of what's happening, and then onto inbound Trackback. Please don't flame me but it appears another developer has some problems with CSS. "Wow, the default Moveable Type 2.63 CSS stylesheet is horrible," says Ryan Lowe. "Internet Explorer 6 is coughing up a lung." I'd love to see a Zeldman article about this. "Enough already," he says. "Ben and Mena are nice people, but I can't stand to see them trample on standards." Mark Pilgrim runs a parody of Ben and Mena and Uncle Joi and Aunt Anil. They take a trip to the Great Wall of China and throw out RSS and replace it with milk cartons with pictures of dead terrorists. Then the bad dream is over and we all resume fixing bugs and making new ones. More discussion of social software on the Blogrollers list.
Streamcast and Grokster win the day in court. Palfrey's appraisal. News.Com: "Stunning court victory." Chris Lydon: "800-886-9364."
Scott Rosenberg: "When you hear that Henry Norr has been fired because he falsified his time card, be assured that this is not the real issue. The Chronicle is getting him on a technicality because it wants to fire him for some other reason." Zeldman goes RSS. I'm subscribed. Abstract for my May 9 talk at Dartmouth. "thinkusaalignright"After posting the bit about blogs for voters in New Hampshire I've been pinged and pecked by people working for specific candidates telling me how cool their guy is because he Gets weblogs. That's not very interesting. More and more I wonder if people actually read what's written on the Web. I think they just scan for key words, and immediately open up their emailer or browser and start writing their schpiel about the key words, not what the writer was saying. I catch myself doing it too. I'm looking for literate discourse. Maybe we need some kind of Turing Test to filter out one-issue correspondents. Maybe this is the kind of thinking that led to the virtual tie between Bush and Gore in the last election. And forgive me, it's probably what led to the war in Iraq, which looks more and more insipidly stupid every day that we don't discover a huge stockpile of WoMD. Maybe we'll find them later, but our leaders told us they knew they had them. I think we know now, for sure, that was a lie. End of ramble. Gotta go to a meeting. News.Com: "A US district court on Thursday ruled for a second time that Verizon Communications must give up the identity of an anonymous Internet subscriber accused of swapping music files online." David Carter-Tod: Manila Express for News Items. Animated demo of David's tool, above. MacNN has upgraded to RSS 2.0. More testing of outbound trackback in Manila. If you have a MT site for me to test with please post a comment with a pointer to the site. Thanks. Adam Curry: "Geeks, nerds, programmers and developers often complain they feel misunderstood in corporate and other social circles. It flows both ways guys." The Register reports that the Chronicle has fired tech columnist Henry Norr. I've known Henry for 20 years. An exceptionally intelligent and honest analyst. What a loss for the Chronicle and the tech industry. Three hot topics Report from last night's session. We did the usual hour's worth of software demos and then switched over to three topics that are much on my mind:
2. Blogging and the New Hampshire primary. Citizen bloggers covering the candidates for US president, follow it where it goes. First step -- clearly -- go to NH myself and find some candidates. Luckily I'm speaking at Dartmouth on May 9. I'll go looking for presidential hopefuls. With my camera and some questions. I'll try to explain weblogs. And here's another way to proceed. Are there any people in NH reading this site who think weblogs could make a difference? We need a citizen's committee for evangelizing the concept. Everyone who hears it goes Hmm, that might work. 3. BloggerCon, otherwise known as Weblogs in Meatspace. In October a conference in Cambridge about weblogs as writer's medium, from a historic and technological perspective. Computer industry conferences have done a great job of the latter, at best a superficial job at the former. I want librarians, lawyers, historians, executives, musicians, producers, pundits, scholars, educators, personalities, politicians, and more. BTW, Philip Greenspun came to last night's meeting. I expect he will write about this discussion as well. In fact, during the discussion he made some notes on his blog using my keyboard and mouse. As always the discussion was informal, and the minds alive and interesting. This pig won't fly Social Software? I've been in the software biz for 2.5 decades, so I've seen this kind of hype over and over. Take something that exists, give it a fancy new name, and then blast at reporters and analysts about it. Every time around the loop it works less well. In the 80s it worked very well. In the early 21st Century, there aren't enough analysts with credibility to make such a pig fly. P2P was the last gasp. I remember getting breathless invitations to keynotes where this or that luminary was going to finally tell us what it is. In the end it wasn't the technology that made a difference, but ironically, the people. Apparently the promoters of Social Software were listening. It's wrong. We don't need this. Weblogs are about punching through the hype machine of idiot analysts and reporters who go for their BS. Social software has existed for years. What's the big news? A few people are looking for a pole to fly their flag on. Pfui! Charles Cooper: "You have to wonder about the wisdom of the over-the-top, we-just-reinvented-the-universe approach. It's easy to understand why so many vendors are eager to bang that drum as loudly as possible. But maybe if they just stopped talking in tongues, they'd get a better reception." Poopy little wiener boys On this day three years ago Dan Gillmor was being pecked at by poopy little wiener boys up past their bedtime. "Western civilization is in jeopardy," Dan said. "And it's all my fault."
Happy Day. We got the green light on BloggerCon this aft. In the fall, on the Law School campus. Style, scholarship, blogs, Harvard, Uncle Davey. Still diggin! Chris Double: "It seems that Radio Userland 8.0.8 now runs under Linux using Wine." Screen shot. Paul Boutin: "I have a recurring nightmare where the economy gets so bad I'm reduced to reporting the daily bugs found in Windows for a living." Critt Jarvis is lurking at Berkman. Sounds like a song! Halley: "Don't tell anybody!" Dave: "I'm writing about the canary." Russell Beattie on blogging. Jeremy Allaire reports from a broadband conference at Harvard Business School. BBC: EMI backs digital downloads. "Faced with sliding music sales, EMI has ditched efforts to stamp out online distribution altogether in favour of more liberal licencing arrangements." I am not a lawyer, and I'm not a doctor either, but I learned about infections and hospitals when my Dad was sick late last year. Hospitals are infected places. They often move patients from nursing homes to hospitals at the first sign of infection. So it's unusual for a hospital to close because of an infection. That tells us something about SARS. It's serious. Griffin: FM for iPod. Paolo concurs with my conclusion about aggregators that work like Usenet readers or mail apps. "This is why after trying other aggregators I came back to Radio: it's just like reading a very large weblog updated by several people every hour." Exactly so. And Scoble assures us that after May 12 Microsoft will test their RSS feeds with Radio. Thanks! Adam Curry on Google's invisible RSS strategy. Karlin Lillington reports that William Gibson is ending his weblog. I bought lots of new hardware yesterday. A flat-panel screen, an IBM keyboard, a new mouse. I now have two screens, one for writing, one for data (an aid in debugging). I love this setup. I'm back to work on Trackback. Last night was productive. Today I plan to install some new code on the Berkman server for a demo tonight. Trackback news and essays I've got 1/2 of Trackback working in Manila. Bing bing bing. Okay, now that I've implemented 1/2 of Trackback (and I will implement the other half) may I ask "What is it for?" I suppose I'll get flamed for that. But it's a serious question. Help me. I have to explain it in 73 minutes. Mena and Ben Trott: "TrackBack was designed to provide a method of notification between websites." What trackback means to Sam Ruby. Phil Ringnalda: Autodiscovery and the death of TrackBack.
Here's a milestone. Microsoft saying, on the record, that it is building on a UserLand spec. That's a far cry from deprived air supply. Bravo and thank you. BTW, how about testing with Radio UserLand. It's the top match on Google for aggregator, so it's not a big secret.
Sjoerd Visscher is a smart guy. I don't say that lightly. When other people flame, he reads, and thinks and a few days later adds light, not heat. Thanks man. Kendall Clark: "Even after five long years of XML development, the ideal and ubiquitous XML editor for humans seems more rumor than reality. Could it be that we have underestimated the difficulty of building a tool with which ordinary people can easily and simply create XML content?" That tool is impossible, because writers generally are not programmers, and don't think or write with metadata, even simple title-link-description two-level hierarchies like RSS. The closest thing to an XML editor that's widely deployed and popular are weblog editors like Radio, Blogger and Manila. Coming in second are outliners that support OPML. And most practical of all are apps that connect using XML invisibly, using SOAP or XML-RPC. Simon Carstensen is in love with Radio's outliner. Bryan is excited about doing a Manila training. That's very cool. "Every one seems to understand that you click the Edit this Page button to make changes to a page, and they seem to understand how to upload images to the server. But you should see the color leave their face when I tried to show them that you had to edit a 'simple' XML outline to make addition to the navigation. It was heart breaking." Went to lunch today with Chris Lydon. He asked if we were doing the usual Thursday evening thing at Berkman. Good question. Yes we are. Every Thursday night, rain or shine. Now I have to get back to coding so I can demo Trackback and Manila Plug-Ins. I love Thursdays. They're the best day of the week for me. Chris asked me to guess how old he is. I had actually been thinking about that, and was pretty sure I knew. I said 57, thinking he wouldn't like it. He grinned. "I'm 63," he said. Wow. We talked about people we should invite to BloggerCon at Harvard in the fall. (Not yet a sure thing, but getting close.) Chris knows everyone I could possibly want, having interviewed them on various NPR radio and TV shows, or as a reporter at the NY Times. I know who I want for the cocktail party: Click and Clack. He knows them well. Walter Cronkite and Jimmy Carter both wanted to meet them when Chris interviewed them at WBUR. They're good because everyone knows them, but they are still mysterious. Like the voices behind The Simpsons, few people know what the Car Talk brothers look like. Would they like weblogs? We'll find out. I wonder if Walter Cronkite would like them. I'm pretty sure Jimmy Carter would. Being at Harvard has huge advantages, like the doors it opens. Many of these people would take my call, even though they've never heard me. I imagine this is what it's like working at Microsoft. Or Google. First the news. Edgar Codd, a giant in the evolution of relational database technology, died at the age of 79. When I was a comp sci grad student in the 70s we studied Codd. Now a question. That was a NY Times article, syndicated by News.Com. Will that link rot after seven days? Anyone at CNET or the Times care to comment? Ray Ozzie: "Well, I'm back." He's also on News.Com today. Criticism of Tim O'Reilly and Clay Shirky from Andrew Orlowski at the Register and Tim's defense. I've noted what Andrew observes. These conferences tend to follow lines drawn by Clay. Disclaimer: that's my opinion, it's not journalism. Also, I wasn't invited into Clay's social software club either. To me it looks like an Everyone-But-Dave weblog software consortium. Kind of flattering. iPoding: "Want to read news on your iPod without installing and managing a new application? Now you can with RSS2iCal, a simple web script that allows you to subscribe to web news sources directly from Apple's iCal as if they were shared calendars." Lots of news today from (UserLand competitor) SixApart. Congrats to Ben, Mena, Joi and Anil. May the market keep growing. Disclaimer: I remain a large shareholder in UserLand and am an active user of its products and enthusiastic developer in the UserLand environment. I also have a Moveable Type weblog (mostly for testing). Dan Bricklin: "If students are being sued for sharing their record collections within their dorms, why isn't it a problem that they share textbooks while studying?" Forget the flamers Good afternoon. It was a truly miserable morning. Schlepping around Cambridge and Brookline between computer stores, all the time fighting Boston's illogical traffic system. I have a tiny little keyboard for my laptop. It sucks, so I went into the office where I have a full keyboard and screen. I've been getting flamed so much lately, surely I've offended someone who believes small keyboards are the future, or that all other traffic systems must be deprecated, or whatever. Some of the flames are competitive, people who must not like all the innovative new software that's emitting now. As Maude said, God'll get you for that Walter. Remember, April is traditionally when new ideas hatch. No shortage of those this April. The flames will be long forgotten, and so will the flamers. The ideas though, seem to have lasting value. Morning keyboard breakage Keyboar broken, spi11 1iqui too 1ate 1ast nite. Many keys broke. Oy. Praise Murvy! Quick fix -- I got a USB keyboard at the Micro Center in Cambridge. Not bad. The screen is a bit far away. BTW, the text above reads: "Keyboard broken, spill liquid too late last night (couldn't get enough of "coffee" to work so I said liquid). Many keys broke. Oy. Praise Murphy!" 2002: The battle for the Web continues. NY Times: Recording Industry Goes After Students Over Music Sharing. The suits, which seek billions of dollars in damages, accuse four college students of unauthorized copying of digital music.
Manila: Easy editing of Navigation Links. This is the release of the Wiki Blogroll Editor. Now available on all UserLand-hosted Manila sites and to current Manila subscribers. Screen shot. We're doing maintenence on the Berkman weblog server starting at 11PM Eastern tonight. It should last between one and three hours, Murphy-willing. Next set of features for Manila -- optional human-authored summaries for long weblog posts, along with the option, on a per-post basis to include the summary or the full text in the RSS feed. This is the solution for the conundrum that's been circulating in RSS-Land: should feeds include the full posts, or summaries? The answer is to let the author make the decision, and it's not a global, it's made on a per-post basis. The default is full text so people who do short posts never have to think about it. Along with this we'll have both sides of Trackback. We're testing with Moveable Type, but both sides will work without MT. It's not my #1 feature, but it's clear many users want it, so it's going in. Matt Neuburg reviews NoteTaker, the Mac OS X outliner from Aquaminds. These menus are the "creations of Charlie Ayers, former chef for the Grateful Dead and current head chef for Google, Inc." Don Box describes "a magic directory that acts like a transmit queue." That's upstreaming. A lot more to it than meets the eye, and it's exactly what should be baked into the OS (with open APIs for apps to hook in). Maybe this is the moment we can really collaborate on this stuff. Philip Greenspun: "Pick a college based on whether the town is a reasonable retirement destination." SJ Merc: "Two record labels filed suit Monday against Hummer Winblad Venture Partners, accusing the venture capital firm of contributing to widespread Internet music piracy through its financial support of Napster." Ryan Tate, 8/4/00: "Legal experts say there is a good chance the flush venture capital firm Hummer Winblad stands to lose more than its $13 million investment in Napster Inc. if the music-swapping firm is fined for music piracy." Karlin Lillington: "Just back from a lovely hour and 45 minutes with one of my favourite writers, William Gibson." Howard Coble defends the RAVE Act. BBC: "An Indian wedding party has been quarantined after the bride tested positive for the Sars virus." Ouch! Kamat: "Add the business of Periodicals (industry magazines, and journals) to the list of industries decaying with trouble."
Halley's Comment: "I have this idea. My idea is that we went horribly astray in the 80's and 90's mistaking business for sex." And in this century we mistake blogging for sex. Redhead: "My blog is better company than a lot of the boyfriends I've had." Deborah Branscum: "I don't understand what CNN officials would have lost by choosing to leave Baghdad." Princeton: "Yesterday, Death Penalty Awareness Week began with a lecture by Ray Krone, the hundredth innocent man exonerated from death row after a wrongful conviction."
Here's my Wiki Wiki Blogroll Editor. Have fun! Newsweek: "The newly named dean of Columbia's journalism school outlines his plans for the program." Photos from dinner tonight. Marvin and Gloria Minsky [1]. Book agent John Brockman and Harvard physicist Lisa Randall [2]. Minsky and I went to the same high school. Great to see Brockman in the new context. Mitch Kapor announces the release of Chandler 0.1. Check out all the Microsoft weblogs. To everyone at the O'Reilly conf, best wishes. See you at the next one, from your friend on the east coast. Coming later today for Manila -- spam-free mailto. And next after that is a neat browser-based blogroll editor. For fun I may let y'all edit the blogroll on my test site. Kind of like a Wiki-blogroll thing. Hehe. (Postscript: Ready for play.) Blogroll: "The section of a weblog that lists the sites that the blogger reads on a regular basis. This is usually located on the side of a blogger's frontpage, or on a separate page linked off of the frontpage." Doc Searls coined the term blogroll on 12/17/00. In looking for this we both realized Google was missing a feature. Find me the first use of a word on the Web. It seems they could do that. Free idea. No patents, please. Thank you. Roland Piquepaille: "Would you use a vertical keyboard?" Checking in with Syndic8. Today they announced they're tracking Creative Commons use in RSS. And the pie charts continue to show that support for RSS 2.0 is growing. Today is the Boston Marathon. I was here a few years ago during the marathon, staying in a hotel overlooking the finished line. Does the marathon go through Cambridge? Harvard Square? It doesn't. I can't imagine what it would be like driving around the area today. Dave Pollard: "A couple of weeks ago, I posted, and e-mailed to about fifty Salon bloggers, a six-question survey asking Salon/Radio users for their opinions on the product, and on the business of blogging in general. I received a dozen responses."
Wendy Seltzer explains why Madonna should be especially careful with her trademark. A new version of Blogger is on the way. Hey they have a changes.xml. 4566 items. Impressive. Go Blogger! New script for a Manila site, lists all the pages on the site, makes it easier for us to review a site, perhaps easier for others too. Source included. Imagine my shock when Slashdot banned my RSS reader. "I swear officer all I did was read once too often." Gregor Rothfuss wrote a "quick & dirty xslt" to convert an OPML file into an Apache forrest file. Not sure what that is, but it sounds interesting. Hossein Derskhahan: "Sina Motallebi, well-known blogger and journalist was arrested this morning." One year ago: Google Outline Browser. Other Google applications, including four G.O.B.s. On this day in 1998, Bob Atkinson, one of the designers of XML-RPC, reasoned that HTTP-POST "is completely and totally 100% isomorphic to a procedure call." That ought to get the REST folk agitated. In 1999, Jakob Nielsen said we would be stuck with old browsers till 2003. Back then that seemed like a long time away. Today it.. uhhh, wait a minute. J Randall Short is a student at Harvard Divinity School. Halley's walking on worm poop again. Jake Savin is here in Cambridge for a couple of weeks, while we incorporate into Manila lots of what I'm learning by working with newbies here. Jake says he has a list a yard long. But more important, we're working on a process that will better incorporate lessons learned from working with users face to face. One step at a time. Today I'm reviewing how membership works in Manila and will make some changes in my server, and make some recommendations for the base product. Interesting to watch Robert Scoble turn his jets on Microsoft, his new employer, as of May 12. Yes, it would be great to have Microsoft embrace OPML. But sell softly. And review the canons of conduct of the Linux Advocacy Mini-Howto. OPML is not a standard, it's format. On good days a popular one. By implementing OPML in OneNote they would gain compatibility with network applications that generate and consume OPML, and of course encourage more applications, for which we would be grateful.
Ev, if you're in Mountain View, try the sushi at the Japanese place on Dana just off Castro. Matt Grayson has an OPML Directory Browser for .NET. Damn I hate California this time of year. Caleb Crain: "It's a little unreal to think that someone I've known for years took these photographs in Iraq this morning, and I'm looking at them after lunch in the safe haven of Brooklyn." BBC: US airline pilots get guns. UserTalk source for site-list OPML script, below. Chris Lydon: "If Saddam ruled perchance Rome, we might just possibly have decided to go get him; but somebody would have said: oh, by the way, we have to save the Sistine Chapel!" Phillip Pearson has an OPML Directory Browser in C#. Interesting timing, I'm did an OPML project this morning. Here's the problem. Before our server was up and running I started a directory for Harvard weblogs, we got 35 submissions, all from sites running off the Harvard network. Then the server went live, and we are starting new sites at an increasing rate, over 100 so far. Of couse those people wanted to know why they aren't in the directory. Oy. Last night I figured out how to put both directories together, without having to manually add each site as it comes online. I wrote a script that generates an OPML document listing all the sites that have ten or more messages in the discussion group, indicating someone is posting stuff, either to the home page or as comments. Then I included that as a new sub-directory, and moved the off-site blogs into a sub-directory, and joined the two in the original location. Sounds complicated? It's not when you read the directory. Jake Savin: "A whole bunch of new stuff is in progress for Manila. I've got a list longer than my arm, and I'm working as fast as I can to get features, enhancements and bug-fixes into the software."
DaveNet: Preacher With a Projection Screen. Wendy Seltzer: "Even Harvard's dean misreads the DMCA." David Carter-Tod: RSS Plugin for Manila. Mark Nottingham has prepared a draft of a spec for RSS 2.0 suitable for submission to the IETF. Protestor in Baghdad: "Leave our country, we want peace." John B. Jaymes: "I've sworn not to go north of Orlando." Joshua Allen: "Scoble has been assimilated!" A reader writes to ask if there's any progress in the talks with the NY Times about their archive, and the answer is -- a little. Per the agreement, I'm not going to talk publicly about this until the talks reach a conclusion.
Harvard Gazette: "He's a preacher with a projection screen."
Philip Greenspun on the death of the MIT Media Lab. Jon Udell: "After I posted yesterday's note about RSS redirection, Dave Winer wrote to remind me that there is a mechanism known to work for both Radio UserLand and NetNewsWire." John Palfrey: "Perhaps the most famous living American historian, Bernard Bailyn, has weighed in on blogging -- sort of." BBC: Diet guru Atkins dies. "He had suffered a severe head injury on 8 April after falling on an icy pavement while walking to his office in New York." News.Com: Software rams great firewall of China. I'm fed up with CSS in News Item Templates. Sheila has pics from Las Vegas! An update via email from Hossein Derskhahan, who writes from Toronto, about blogging in Iran. Macintouch has an RSS feed. Nice. Chilly this morning. Highs today around 40. Brrr. Interview With a Lawyer
One of the good guys is Larry Lessig, who works at Stanford now. He used to work at Harvard, in the area I'm working. You can feel his presence everywhere. Look at Donna's pictures linked to yesterday. Yup there's Larry. There's a picture of Larry in Diane Cabell's office. I see his mannerisms in some of the young lawyers. His spirit is here, even if his body is not. Yesterday I was interviewed by Lessig on the phone for a new book he's writing, which at least somewhat is about weblogs and democracy. He asked a lot of great questions. Essay questions. Not easy ones. So I said I might answer some of them in essay form. Here's one. What will weblogs look like in 15 years? My first impulse is to say who could possibly know, but then on further thought, I looked back instead of forward to see what 15 years had done to graphic personal computers, which were about where weblogs are today. The first commercal GPC had come out in 1984. By 1998 the form was pretty well set. How different is Windows XP from the Macintosh of 1988? Not very. It's faster and bigger, but basically does the same thing, in much the same way. But on the other hand, the use of GPCs has grown enormously in 15 years. In 1988 you had to be a very special person to use a Mac. They were popular with people who did design and layout and people who think for a living. But now, people in all walks of life have a Windows or Mac PC (mostly Windows). Weblogs are just part of the evolution of personal computers. Over time our expectation for information has risen. The late 80s were the end of the age of information poverty. Today we can look back and laugh at how inaccessible information was way back then. I did an experiment one evening after dinner, probably in 1989 or 1990. I wanted to find out the score in the Mets baseball game. I called the local radio station in San Francisco, they didn't know. I called a New York radio station, they didn't know. I called the NY Times, no idea. I called a radio station in San Diego where the game was being played, they didn't know either. That was a little more than ten years ago. Today it would take you mere seconds to get the answer. But none of this was what Lessig was asking about, I presume, because he was asking about democracy, not technology. Having written this as background, I want to come back to that shortly. Two years ago: "All programmers want to tell you How It Works. In excruciating detail. As if you cared. Try to be patient."
Princeton has an excellent RSS 2.0 feed for its daily paper. They didn't go half-way. They support guid, category, and author. It's as good as any feed I've produced. Of course we subscribed to Princeton from the aggregator at Harvard. These are amazing times in university news. Stop the presses. The Dartmouth Review has an RSS feed. This is great! Who's next? Southern Illinois University at Carbondale has feeds for news, sports, editorials, entertainment. Papa Doc has an idea for a barn-raising for civilization. Philip Greenspun: Staying Alive in Small Airplanes. I started a directory for people going to OSCOM. Donna Wentworth's photos from iLaw in Rio. This one is my favorite. Both Donna and Charles are so striking, she looking like Young Meryl Streep in The Meryl Streep Movie, and he looking cool like any guy would, sitting next to a beautiful woman like Donna. Jeff Jarvis says that Donna actually looks like Laura Dern. Hmmm. I'm going to stick with Meryl Streep. Wired: Beyond Wi-Fi. "The 5 next big things." Chicago Tribune: "Some mainstream media organizations don't really know what to do about blogs." New sections of the directory browser howto on linkrot and latency of the inclusion cache. Chris is going to hate me for this, but his successor at The Connection, Dick Gordon, is doing a great job. Today he's doing a Boston-area talk show from Baghdad. He's been there before, he's not a newbie. At 10AM Eastern he's going on live. I've got the headphones on in my office at Berkman. I can't wait. This is the most exciting kind of radio. You can listen to the show live even if you're not in the Boston area. BBC article from 2000 on the re-opening of the Iraqi museum. A Google search reveals lots more. It's not the first time they've been looted. Jon Udell: The Semantic Blog. News.Com: "After being ordered to stop distributing his program that let iTunes users share music over a network, software developer James Speth takes another stab at it." iCommune is "an application that extends Apple's iTunes to share music over your network." Simon Fell did a clone of the OPML Directory Browser in ASP.NET. A new directory with implementations like Simon's.
Adam Curry: "I do a radio show every Friday evening on Dutch national radio." Jenny Levine says there are more library weblogs than ever. News.Com: Will patents pillage open source? According to Don Box, Microsoft is consciously trying to build a Chinese household. Interesting. There's a little problem though. We're all still locked in this trunk, you see.. Everyone wants to know: "Did Scoble gets Microsofted or did Microsoft get Scobleized?"
On this day two years ago, The XML-RPC Man made his debut. Arf! Arf!
Chris Lydon: "We will be broadcasting from WGBH in Boston at 6 p.m. EDT. 'Be ready,' as the Good Book says. And please leap into the get-ready starting immediately with your comments here." The FeedRoom is "the world's premiere broadband news network, gives high-speed Internet users the video news they want, from the sources they trust, anytime they want." Lots of RSS feeds. Dave Sifry has just come out with his first product at Sputnik, Inc. It's a cool 802.11 base station. I used a prototype of this product at Larry Lessig's Spectrum Conference at Stanford in February. Lots of users, and didn't skip a beat. I'm glad to see Dave ship, he's one of the few these days who has the guts to ship new technology products, and I'm sure it's great, and I wish him the best.
Why the Times chose to ally itself with CNN on this is a total bewilderment. Do they think he represents a cause that must have their support? This is not the first time a dirty press person has taken a bath on the Times' op-ed page. On a smaller scale, an editor at the Industry Standard, who now writes for Time, admitted huge ethical transgressions during the dotcom boom, with no comment from the Times. He still claims to be a journalist. What are we to believe? That the Times engages in such practices itself? It certainly seems to condone them. Today CNN got a much-deserved lecture from the Washington Post. But the Times is in trouble alongside CNN, until they cut them loose with a strongly worded disclaimer.
Boston Globe: "A plan to enact tough digital antipiracy legislation in Massachusetts has run into fierce opposition from technologists and civil libertarians who say the new law would violate civil rights and ban some common computer security techniques." Scott Rosenberg: "While US forces were unable to protect museums in Baghdad from looting crowds destroying millennia-old artifacts, it seemed to have plenty of troops available to protect the Iraqi oil ministry in Baghdad." OPML.Org: How To implement an OPML directory browser. Brent Simmons has an OPML directory browser running in some environment that runs on Mac OS X. I'll get more details later (I have a meeting at 10AM). But in the meantime, here's a screen shot courtesy of JY Stervinou. Bing! Hopefully we can have implementations in PHP, Python, Perl, Zope, .NET, you name it. A barn-raising. A community development project. It worked several times before, with RSS, XML-RPC, SOAP and OPML itself. Can we do a bootstrap in 2003? Let's find out. Let a thousand flowers bloom. "I looked at Andrew but said to the group, how well is it going now that there's one browser?" Simply stated, here's my rule. "Where you want competition, give away the technology. Where you want to be competitive, keep it to yourself." OSCOM OSCOM is an inexpensive conference, and there are lots of seats available. I've thought maybe I should invite all Scripting News readers to come. The two keynotes are two people you're familiar with -- Jon Udell, and me. I'm sure Jon won't disappoint. Hey if you're in the Boston area, or even NY, it'll probably be worth a trip if you're a content management sort of guy or gal. No wait for tools The really cool thing about this kind of directory isn't the format, OPML is designed to be unremarkable. When people look at the OPML files and criticize them I know they don't understand OPML, but I wish they did. They're looking at the roots of a tree, when the interesting stuff is happening in the canopy, in the tree-tops. Here's what's different. There's no need to wait for a tool to edit this format, because the tool existed before the format. This is flipped around from all other XML formats, where it may or may not be possible to create a tool. We know of several good outliners that support OPML. And outliners are a tool of choice for people who think, people who have information that we want in directories. It's a clever plan! Hey if you want to know about outliners, ask Larry Lessig. Lawyers love them. Soon so will librarians.
A quote that makes me smile. "[RSS] grew out of a good idea in 1997 from the software company Userland that got picked up and melded with one of Netscape's similar ideas." After hearing over and over that Netscape invented RSS on its own, it's refreshing to get credit for my contribution. Harvard Law professor Jonathan Zittrain on what he calls The Google Death Penalty. There's a lot more to Google and the DMCA than I thought. Philip Greenspun: "A university will spend hundreds of $millions on dormitories, i.e., places for students to drink beer and sleep together. Why is there is no budget for cubicle farms where students in the same major could do their homework together, asking for help from the person at the next desk and, if necessary, raising their hands for help from roving teaching assistants?" Andrew Grumet found that ThinkTank runs on Windows XP. Unfortunately it doesn't support OPML. (It was written in the early 80s, way before XML.) You could see this coming. British foreign secretary Jack Straw insists that Syria is not 'next on list.' Heh. Famous last words? On this day three years ago, the NASDAQ tanked, dropping over 300 points, almost ten percent, in one day. In retrospect, there is no doubt, that was the bubble, bursting. Also on that day Megnut said: "Web people can tell you the first site they ever saw, they can tell you the moment they knew: This, This Is It, I Will Do This. And they pour themselves into the web, with stories, with designs, with pictures. They create things worth looking at, worth reading, worth coveting, worth envying, worth loving. They create Beautiful Things. We need more of those." Interestingly, the profiteers are gone, but the people who do the Web for love, they're still here.
Ed Cone: "I think most Americans know at some level what's going on, and many of them approve of it." John Robb: "Do you think we will go to war with Syria in the next year?" Vikas Kamat says there are 204 libraries at Harvard. We're having spring weather today here in Cambridge. It's already in the 50s this morning. Predicted high around 70. In the next few days it should reach 80. That's what it should be like this time of year. Whew! Jon Udell has posted the topic for his keynote talk at OSCOM. Perhaps I'll talk about OPML and directories. I want to zero in on something we can all do together to move Content Management forward. I want to see OPML directory renderers in all environments, not just UserLand's. What better place to spread the gospel than OSCOM? Maybe we can come out of the conference with a revolution in our pockets? That would make me happy. Gregor at OSCOM: "Where do we go from here?" Excellent question. I'm going to go for a walk, and then write up a plan, in public of course. OPML and directories One year ago I wrote a technological ramble about Google, directories and OPML. It's still the way of the future, imho. There's no single root of the Web, so why should directories (like Yahoo, DMOZ, Looksmart) have single roots? And therein lies the problem with directories, and why we're not effectively cataloging the knowledge of our species on the Internet. A case in point. Last week I pointed to a great directory of RSS aggregators. So why not also have it available in a format that allows it to be included in other directories? I should be able to include it in the directory I keep for RSS developers. Why should I have to reinvent the wheel? Would he want me to? And maybe it fits into a directory of tools that are useful for librarians, alongside book inventory software; or in a directory for lawyers, alongside legal databases. See the point? There is no single address for a directory, every directory is a sub-directory of something, yet all the directories we build on the Internet try to put everything in exactly one place, which leads to some really ludicrous placements. My Windows software is categorized under Mac software because we were only available on Mac when it was first categorized. This one-category-for-all-information approach is a vestige of paper catalogs, not a limit of computer-managed catalogs. I'm burning to get this idea broadly implemented. When we do, the Web will grow by another order of magnitude. The challenge: Put all that we know on the Internet and give people the tools to present it in a myriad of ways. Let a thousand flowers bloom. No one owns the keys to knowledge. That's Jeffersonian software. The Web, of course, was modeled after the printed page, with all its limits. This new Web is modeled after the mind of man. By the way, one of the reasons I'm networking with librarians at Harvard is that I am driven to build this new knowledge base. There are a lot of libraries at Harvard. It's a big source of pride for the university. See, there is a method to my madness.
New feature: Creative Commons, RSS and Manila. Pics from brunch today at Philip Greenspun's. I suggested that Philip could play the role of a younger Steve Jobs in The Steve Jobs Movie. He looks so much like him, and he's brash like Jobs, and smart. He's about ten years younger than Jobs. A good time was had by all. And today the weather was nice too. Tomorrow they promise it will be even better. Today's post from Philip is about Idi Amin. Doc Searls has a Manila site, so he can play with the new Creative Commons feature. Lessig: "While for most of our history, there were a thousand ways to move creative material into the public domain, most lawyers today are puzzled about whether there is any way to move work into the public domain." Chris Lydon is learning about pictures.
Bryan Bell lists his Manila themes for 2003. Derek Slater: "Good to know that some universities are willing to stick up for their students." A new report on the Berkman site, shows site updates in reverse-chronologic order. It's merely a listing of the contents of config.manila.updatedHomePages. One of Doc's friends asks a question we hadn't thought of. Will New Iraq be allowed to hate Israel as Iraq Classic did?
Speaking of bad dreams, David Green at NTK had a doozy of a bad dream about fellow sarcastic Brit Andrew Orlowski. Someone ought to tell those guys that self-deprecating humor is funnier, although his piece about Orlowski had me howling and rolling on the floor.
Greenspun: "Now that we New Englanders seem finally to escaped the clutches of Winter it may be worth reflecting that it could have been much worse." If you want me to like you, buy my stock. Bruce Loebrich wrote to say that no one can make me happy by buying my shares because none were available. So I created 5000 additional shares, and thus dropped the per-share price dramatically, but it's slowly coming back up and now anyone who wants to can buy these very affordable shares that are sure to increase in value. One year ago today a nice engineer joke. Or is it a transgender joke?
BBC: Baghdad descends into chaos. Alireza Doostdar is blogging the Iranian weblogs, in English. I met Ali at yesterday's ABCD meeting, he's a master's student at Harvard's school of education. Russell Beattie: "Wow. What have I done? It's a good thing I'm on vacation this week."
Eason Jordan was interviewed today on NPR's All Things Considered. Earlier I got an email from Xeni Jardin suggesting that Sites' experience is retribution for Jordan's piece. Karlin Lillington: "Here is the folly of Rumsfeld's bargain-basement approach to waging war." DaveNet: Shaking our faith in Google. After mentioning the meetings I'm having with Chris Lydon and his team, I got a bunch of mail from readers in the Netherlands who work with Adam Curry saying his Blog News Network is going great and we should work with them. I've already emailed intros to Adam to the team here, and he's coming to Cambridge at the end of May. In other words, we're on it. BBC: "Apple Computer is in discussions to buy Universal Music, one of the world's leading record companies, according to press reports." Wow. Jarrett House: "What the heck is Jobs thinking." Harvard Crimson: "Students caught sharing copyrighted songs and movies online more than once will lose their network access for one year, according to a message released by Dean of the College Harry Lewis this week." John Palfrey, law school professor and Berkman director, comments on the College's rules about file sharing. Easy News Topics is a module for RSS 2.0. As noted below, the NY Times reversed their archive policy again after my last DaveNet on the subject. As noted here on Tuesday, I am working with the Times people on this issue. I agreed not to write publicly about it until we're finished talking. I've talked with a few people who I trust, on the same terms, to try to make this come out right for the Times and for the Web. I have another talk, as noted below, later today. Last year on this day Google released the Google API.
News.Com: "Children using Google's SafeSearch feature, designed to filter out links to Web sites with adult content, may be shielded from far more than their parents ever intended." Lance Knobel: "The most loyal Concorde passengers are the Duchess of York, Joan Collins, Sir David Frost and Sir Elton John. Shudder." Morning notes It was demo-day, two live sessions, one at a very beautiful conference room at a library in Havahd Yahd; and the other the regular Thursday evening thing at Berkman. My first demo was one of those disasters caused by a bug in the software. I couldn't create a new post, show the rankings page, or anything other than the home page of the site I was explaining. The fix turned out to be simple, but it didn't come in time to save my presentation. The latter demo was the third Thursday meeting and as always it's a lot of fun for me, and I hope for the people who come. We went deep this time, but still left quite a few things to talk about next week. These sessions are great. Today will be busy too, but in a different way. I'm starting to get involved in Chris Lydon's radio production group, talking about connecting weblogs and radio; and am talking with Martin Nisenholtz at NY Times Digital about archives and other topics.
Here's a scoop from Ben Edelman at Berkman. "Testing indicates that SafeSearch blocks at least tens of thousands of Web pages without any sexually-explicit content."
Reminder: Every Thursday we have meetings for weblog-writers at 7PM at Berkman Center, 1587 Mass Ave. If you are a reader of Scripting News, or a member of the Harvard community, you are welcome at these meetings. We want to bring weblogs into Berkman, and vice versa. An editorial on this moment in time. Gavin Sheridan posts gruesome pictures of war death. Doc Searls comments and links on the war. BBC: "French President Jacques Chirac welcomed the crumbling of Iraqi President Saddam Hussein's government." Motley Fool: Google in the Crosshairs. "When you're so good at what you do that your brand becomes a verb, the competition starts to notice, big time." A personal note. It's been 300 days since I smoked. I still want one from time to time. But I don't do it. BBC: Concorde grounded for good. Thanks to Jenny Levine for the pointer to Haiko Hebig's directory of RSS aggregators. On this day last year we announced our syndication deal with the NY Times. This morning warmth and sunshine in Cambridge. Happy! News.Com: "The ACLU on Wednesday lost its first attempt to challenge a controversial 1998 copyright law." Editorial Like people who favor the death penalty, the war proponents must have a sense of closure, except not so nice because so many more people have died, including our brothers and sisters, sons and daugthers. MSNBC proclaims Bush a visionary, makes me wonder how this war is changing my country. What vision does it require to start a war? Have we lost our minds? Eventually discussion will come back to what this war is about. As Rumsfeld says -- it's not over; and we haven't been told what the war was about, because it surely wasn't about Weapons of Mass Destruction (where are they?), and we don't believe our government cares about freedom for Iraqis, because if they did, we'd be at war with China, among many other countries. Our track record for follow-through is abysmal, ask Afghanistan or Pakistan. Our troops will be withdrawn quickly, and what's left behind may be worse than Iraq under Saddam much as the artificial nation of Yugoslavia fell apart when Tito died. Chirac is a politician, so he must back-pedal now. The French made it personal, I heard an interview with a French official who sneered that Americans didn't understand the world. I hated that. That breeds a dangerous feeling inside the US, where we have to worry what comes next. The only way forward is to keep our heads on straight and think, not resort to emotional arguments. I've gotten emails requesting an explanation of my thinking in the early days of the war, but I believe it requires no further explanation. Like all weblog posts they belong in the context of the time they were created. Further, don't be sure you know how it turns out. All we saw yesterday was a TV show. It's hard not to be influenced by it, I know. But I'm reading and listening for facts, and that's what I will form my opinion about as we go forward.
Scott Rosenberg: "The reason we went to war in the first place remains strangely elusive." The NY Times reports that in the Arab world there was "utter disbelief at the absence of any Iraqi resistance in Baghdad, when just weeks ago the tiny port Um Qasr down south held out for days against a coalition onslaught." AP: "The advance of US troops into Baghdad is proof that early criticism of the war's plans was misguided, Vice President Dick Cheney said Wednesday." Ben Longman welcomes us to Baghdad. Christian Crumlish will do the weblog tutorial at Seybold later this year. John Palfrey's RSS feed has a Creative Commons license. We're working on making this an option for all Manila sites. Lee Felsenstein: Make a revolution in 3 easy steps. David Carraher: Weblogs in Education. Jon Udell: Blogs, scopes, and human routers. My new friend Philip Greenspun from MIT has a Harvard weblog. His first post is a doozie. Maybe they'll write a Register article about it. Presstime: Syndication Made Simple. A sign that I really have moved. Today I pledged $120 to WBUR, the NPR station in Boston. Karlin Lillington: "A lot of newspapers, magazines, radio and television stations also routinely publish items that are basically just rewritten, unquestioned press releases and government statements." New Manila feature: "Whenever a new discussion group message or comment is posted, Manila now records the IP address along with the discussion group message."
Tomorrow is Wes Felter's 25th birthday. That's the birthday when your car insurance gets cheap. I knew Wes when he was 16. Man. He's getting old. Interesting article about Silicon Valley in the NY Times. Is Moore's Law bad for us? Hey if there's no new software then what's the point of faster CPUs, bigger disks, and cheaper RAM. Will Kim Polese lead a new generation of software entrepreneurs or has the milk of growth gone sour? Trackback continues No feedback on the post yesterday about Trackback. However, on my own, I found a weblog that supports the RDF-based discovery feature for Trackback. Do a view-source on Jeremy Zawodny's weblog. The RDF snippets are there. Now if I could convince Jeremy to post an item for me to test against. I can't load up his weblog with test pings. Hold your horses, stop the presses. My MT weblog has the RDF snippets. How did I miss that. Anyway, I can set up a test post for myself. Never mind.
My notes for this afternoon's presentation at JFK. Rogers Cadenhead: "Many journalists have an exaggerated sense of self-importance that dovetails nicely with the perils of war. Case in point: Embedded journalist Ron Martz thanking God for putting two U.S. soldiers at his side in Iraq so they could be shot instead of him!" Jim Moore: "How do we strengthen the Second Superpower?" Jonathan Schwartz: Open source vs open standards. My comments on the Schwartz piece.
New howto for Berkman/Harvard weblog users shows how to add a basic comment window for weblog posts. Halley's story, starting the day before her father died, one year ago today. Great story. Makes me wonder if I should publish my writing on the same subject, but my father survived, miraculously.
Damn the snow, don't forget today's seminar at the Kennedy School. An hour and a half about weblogs and speech. One year ago: Shortcuts in Radio. And in California, the wisteria are in bloom. Ouch.
DaveNet: NY Times archive is back, The view from the BBC. Wired: "Like any number of webloggers trying to make their mark with commentary on the war in Iraq, Sean-Paul Kelley knew geography and career experience didn't favor him." About press releases on Google News, there's been a bunch of comment on this recently. I've been asked to comment. Press releases are okay if they are clearly labeled as such. It's predictable that professional reporters would object to this practice, but they have a conflict of interest, which they don't disclose. The maker-of-news has a valuable perspective. That's the thesis of weblogs. Most press releases aren't worth reading. But they don't have to be. They could be more enlightening and accurate than the supposedly disinterested reports by pros. A list of NY Times articles cited by Scripting News going back to April 1997. 1003 links, most work for me, some don't. So far none redirect to the for-pay archive. It's pretty clear that something changed in the Times' archive policy in the last 48 hours. So it seems we can point to the NY Times once again. Life is good. You can quote me on that. Neven Bartel says that the German television station Tageschau maintains a public archive of their broadcasts, since 1999, in RealVideo. I heard Chris Pirillo and Lisa Rein on BBC this morning. They are both really good at radio. Wow.
Peking Duck on Chinese TV coverage of the war in Iraq. Werbach: "I dream of Centrino." I saw Phone Booth this evening. A very well-done movie, actually flawless, with a strong message and really good acting. Great cast. Wendy Koslow: "I admit freely that I am a dork too." On Friday I asked if it snows in Cambridge in May. Yesterday about 20 people told me it does. It's even snows here in June. Amazingly they're forecasting snow tomorrow and Tuesday. Two to four inches tomorrow. Hellp. New howto for Berkman/Harvard weblog users shows how to add XML icons to your weblog template. To Manila developers, I'm planning an overhaul of all the themes we're using at Berkman, so I put together a checklist. I wonder if I'm missing anything. We've never done a complete review of all the themes, and it may be years before it's done again. So if you know of any theme-based upgrades that should be done across the board, now's a good time to speak up. Of course I'm going to share all the work I do here. Please post comments on the discussion group. Thanks. 2002: Google's SOAP interface.
Philip posted some thoughts about last night's dinner. I wish he had a weblog. At the dinner he must have had a dozen ideas that would rise to the top of Blogdex or Daypop, and he expresses them so well. On the other hand, completing a product that's easy to use takes a lot more time than he allows for. Manila took three years, Radio another two. I could write a spreadsheet in two days. And then it would take another two years to make it work so users would experience the suspension of disbelief that a complete piece of software creates.
DaveNet: The paper-of-record. Rod Kratochwill notes that the St Petersburg Times maintains a calendar-based archive so you can see what was in the paper on a specific day. Very nice. Caleb Cain reviews Top Gun from an interesting angle. John Palfrey: "Professor Lessig is right in the pessimism of his last book and recent speeches." A firey anthem from the professor. There's hope he says. Please explain how this happened. A Microsoft person applauds a piece of software for "Great OPML support."
Steve Wozniak via email: "In my opinion the guiding principle, for all copyrighted material, should be that if any material is presented to your senses (sight, sound, etc.), free or paid for, then you should have the right to memorialize it, to record it and to get it later." Wired: "Hawash, a US citizen, was arrested last month by the FBI's Joint Terrorism Task Force." NY Times: "An armored force of 50 American tanks and other vehicles wheeled suddenly into the center of Baghdad today, taking the city's defenders by surprise and triggering a rolling firefight along boulevards lined with some people waving and others shooting." AP: "US Army soldiers Saturday captured the headquarters of the Republican Guard's Medina Division in this town about 35 miles southeast of Baghdad." BBC: US Forces Enter Baghdad. Manila love Jake released a new feature for Manila yesterday, it's worth noting because it's evidence of movement, and evidence of an important new feature in Manila -- its news aggregator. First, about the new aggregator. Like Radio UserLand, the underlying engine for Manila has always had a news aggregator. Now you can access that aggregator through the Manila user interface. There's a Prefs page where you edit your subscriptions (screen shot), and another page where you view the results of the latest aggregator run (example). It's a new idea, a workgroup news aggregator. I asked for this feature because I wanted my colleagues at Berkman to have the aggregator experience without having to install software on their machines. That would be too intrusive, at first. Once they get a taste for the functionality, they may want to install their own. Second, about the new feature. The Manila-hosted aggregator now supports a basic feature that all aggregators support, mySubscriptions.opml. You can access the subscription list for any Manila installation through a predictable url. Lots of applications have been built on this format. Now the Manila aggregator can participate. Thanks to Micah Alpern for this feature idea.
A weather forecast in one picture. A fantastic weblog, with a video, from Iran. BBC: "The world of patents and intellectual property is shifting more and more towards intangibles and ideas and away from concrete products, and current structures may not be able to cope, according to Federal Reserve chief Alan Greenspan." 7/24/00: "Imagine if you couldn't write a story because Dean Koontz had already written it. What if the idea were as basic as Boy Meets Girl? That's what's going on in another creative space, software." Does it snow in Cambridge in May? Watch out -- here's another Berkman blogger. Diane Cabell. I thought she'd be a tougher sell. Bing! Kevin Werbach notes something that I noticed too. Now both Harvard and Stanford Law Schools have women deans. A year ago I wouldn't have found that interesting. An unconfirmed report on NPR just aired that the US has found "thousands of boxes" of an anthrax-like white powder near Baghdad. Speaking of weapons of mass destruction, one of our sites is getting pounded by porn sites, in an unusual way. They hit the site just enough so that their site shows up in the top sites list in the referers report. It's spam, with a very small audience. It's also easy to defend against. All we have to do is program our server to filter out the offending sites. Done. A small bugfix in the RSS 2.0 spec. The interesting thing about Maxwell-Dworkin, a Computer Science building, is that it is zero-based. That is, the street level is Floor Zero. It's a joke, one that a programmer would get. Hey they even have a page for the room we met in today. Heh. I'm now reading third-generation spin on Andrew Orlowski's spin of Jim Moore's spin of the 2nd Superpower meme. I had never heard the term Andrew used until today, but it won't appear on Scripting News until someone else uses it. I think Andrew is trying to slip one by. This is a definition of a slow news day. We're all burned out on the Battle of Baghdad? Karlin: "Why do fanatical devotees of computer operating systems always miss the point?" Happy birthday XML-RPC Thanks to Archive.Org, the "Early April Coming-Together" document, which had been missing, is back. Published five years ago today, it's the first public evidence of the protocol we designed with Microsoft that was eventually named XML-RPC. Thanks to Don Box, Bob Atkinson and Mohsen Al-Ghosein. What a great collaboration that was. "All this is laying a foundation for a new namespace that Brent and others will build that will connect Frontier's object database to the new RPC mechanism, for Java and other environments, and all kinds of things we have just begun to think about." Wow they have more stuff that was lost. Want to know what Betty is? It's running right now, on every Radio user's desktop, and behind every Manila site. From today's perspective, Betty is one of the layers of the lizard brain of UserLand's CMS. But we didn't see it that way in 1998. Then, it was the leading edge, so modern it made my head hurt (in a nice way). BTW, Jon Udell got the soundbite on XML-RPC. Unfortunately it's gone. Fortunately Archive.Org has it in their database. Yaaay. I wonder if they were archiving the NY Times? Postscript: Jon has a copy of the feature about XML-RPC too. The Times will be missed NY Times piece on Harvard Law's new dean. I'm thinking maybe I should write a script that erases all NY Times links at the end of the day. I hate this. I depended on the Times. Orlowski's rant Kevin Marks rebuts Andrew Orlowski's rant, yesterday. In the rush of events yesterday (there was other stuff going on, like the NY Times taking their archive off-line, a really significant event for the Web), I didn't get to comment on the piece in the Register until now. First, let me say that Moore has what it takes to be an A-team blogger. I could see that immediately as I watched him work on his new weblog on Monday. We share an office at Berkman. Second, Google is a piece of software. Perhaps Andrew places too much faith in it. There's an obvious moral to Andrew's story. In matters of the intellect or good taste, don't delegate to machines. (There will be more data on this next week.)
But Orlowski did succeed at getting us to point to him, and that led to pointers on all kinds of weblogs, including Slashdot, and all kinds of flow, and new pagerank for Moore's piece, so if he's really true to his cause, he just hurt it enormously. Last night's meeting We had the second in our series of weblog-writer meetings last night at Berkman. I had a great time, and I think most other people did too. There was a little romance, lots of demos, discussion, ideas. Jim Moore sat next to me. We're rapidly becoming good friends. When I showed features he liked he giggled. I really appreciate having Chris Lydon there as our fearless newbie. Last night I showed him how to avoid losing his writing when writing in a browser, and how to do a hyperlink. It's so cool to see the sense of empowerment he got when the light goes on -- "I can do this too," he seemeed to be saying. I explained RSS, and showed how aggregators work, and showed them that each of them has an aggregator in their weblog. Example. A journalism student at Harvard, Tiscar Lara, had a question that was simpler than I thought. These meetings are a great turn-on for me. We'll do it again next Thursday at 7PM. I'll post a reminder here. BTW, today I'm going to a lunch for webmasters in a building named for the mothers of Bill Gates and Steve Ballmer.
DaveNet: NY Times Pulls Back. I'm giving a talk about weblogs at the monthly ABCD meeting next Thurs, April 10, at 3:30PM in the Lamont Library Forum Room. Here's a brief bookmark list for people attending.
New York: "'Mom, I wanna be a blogger' may not have much elan. But it's where we're going. At least moms will rest easier." OJR: "Are Weblogs one more tool in the arsenal used by online journalists to report the news? Or does a blog's typically individualistic voice and unfiltered attitude place it outside the journalist's palette?" I'm working on a piece that answers that question. The BBC provides a clue. We have a new dean at Harvard Law School. Houston Chronicle: "Blogs are weird." Orlowski: "Moore is an overnight A-list blogging superstar." August Capital, a Sand Hill Road venture capitalist, has a new weblog. I know Andrew Anker, an August partner, from his pre-VC days, when he was the publisher of Hotwired and I was a contributing editor, in the early-mid nineties. NY Times: "The rapid spread of a deadly respiratory disease that originated in southern China is cutting into an already battered airline industry, as carriers around the world cancel empty flights, lay off workers, screen passengers for symptoms and deal with crews that refuse to fly to some Asian cities." Survey: "Is Iraq president Saddam Hussein alive or dead?" Obvious idea for spam avoidance Why didn't I didn't think of this sooner? I started a mailbox called Friends. I create rules for everyone I know to move their mail to this box. It's the inverse of what I used to do -- route known spam addresses to the Deleted Items mailbox. Emailers could support this by having a rule that's easy to invoke. If I've ever sent an email to an address, move incoming mail from that address to the Friends mailbox. Easy to understand. Makes it less likely I'll miss something important.
DaveNet: Microsoft Supports RSS. I'm keynoting, in May, in Cambridge, OSCOM. Cisco Systems has 12 new RSS feeds. Latest News Releases, Content Networking, Partner, Routing, Security, Software, Standards, Storage Networking, Switching, Voice, Wireless, Features. Matt Carter at Fawcette sends a pointer to their new RSS feed. He says it contains "all of our magazine articles, online stuff, code, interviews etc, updated twice a day." The subject of the message is Bandwagon Jumping. The bandwagon here is Microsoft. A remarkable movement, and a remarkable move by MS. They didn't reinvent RSS as they jumped in. This is a new idea for a BigCo. Of course there's still plenty of time for them to reinvent it. Praise Murphy!
Pictures from today's meeting with Jean Paoli of Microsoft. Except mine actually works. Fast Company has an RSS feed too. Bing! Danny Sullivan of Search Engine Watch explains how to make an RSS feed. He walks through all the version confusions, but it's much simpler than that for most people, since many weblog tools these days automatically generate RSS feeds. Jim Moore: "Charlie's idea is to run a candidate for President of the United States who is supported by the worldwide community of web-enabled activists. Essentially this person would be a second superpower candidate for the key power role in the first superpower." Apple has four new RSS feeds. Thanks to Steven Garrity for the pointer. We appear to have the glitches worked out, and now we're getting pings from the Persian weblogs on Weblogs.Com. I'm not sure why but Iran is a hot place for weblogs. A list of legal weblogs, from LexisOne. Once again, we will have a meeting tomorrow, Thursday April 3, at 7PM at Berkman Center, 1587 Mass Ave, Cambridge. Jim Moore explains why China will win the war in Iraq. Lance Knobel: "I'm trying to find more reasons to send letters so I can use my do-it-yourself fruit and veg stamps." Lawrence Lee explains how spam filters work. Little-known feature of Weblogs.Com, a ping circuit for RSS feeds.
BBC: Nude volleyball angers game makers. Tim Ewald: "MSDN finally has official RSS feeds!" Excellent. April fool snow. The joke's on me! Nice joke Rick, but I plan to buy Google. Hey since you guys know Cambridge so well, are there any good Chinese restaurants that deliver? I've got my head down programming tonight and I like to reward myself with Chinese food when I'm doing that. Here's how my Start Menu-based news gator looks. Hey there's an InfoWorld conference in Boston today. Paolo Valdemarin, my friend from north Italy, drew a birthday cake for Scripting News, on the Web of course. Yummy! Don Park: "XML is great because it draws people to look up at the sky and cause a great big pain in the neck." Speaking of yummy
I also want to get this working on Mac. Is there an equivalent of this document for Mac OS X? (BTW, I didn't used to like the word yummy but thanks to cute little Cassandra Goth in The Sims, I do now.) How Macs do URL files Thanks to Brent Simmons for sending the info. File type: ilht, creator: MACS. The file suffix is .webloc. It's an old-fashioned resource file. It has a 'url ' resource with an id of 256. That resource is just text, the URL to open. Where to put the files? Brent understood exactly what I meant. file.getSpecialFolderPath ("", "Desktop Folder", false) Jim Moore Talking with Jim Moore yesterday, he said that more people see themselves as citizens of the world not of any specific country. It certainly is easier to do that now, and that's the argument for globalization, or the observation of globalization. Of course we're all citizens of the solar system, galaxy and universe. Carl Sagan and all that. (Douglas Adams.) Anniversaries On this day six years ago I started Scripting News. Welcome to year seven of my humble weblog, and praise Murphy. "It's even worse than it appears."
"Ask not what the Internet can do for you, ask what you can do for the Internet." April has always been a productive month for me. It's the month of breakthroughs and new beginnings. Who knows what's going to happen this April. Not me. One of the coolest searches on Google. Everyone has fun with a birthday cake, esp kids.
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