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Streamcast and Grokster win the day in court.  Palfrey's appraisal. News.Com: "Stunning court victory." Chris Lydon: "800-886-9364."  At dinner last night after the Thursday blogger's meeting, someone deliberately mispronounced the name of Brookline as Baruch-Line. That's funny because so many Jews live in Brookline. And it's especially funny for me because my paternal grandfather was named Baruch. I laughed. I'm laughing now.  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.  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:  1. How to integrate blogging with radio (not Radio). We talked about this at length. As other people talked I realized it is not about technology. There is no magic formula that will make the two worlds connect. Chris says let's hear what they think, and I say let's see. Two different senses, one visual and cerebral, and the other auditory and soulful. The answer, as it often is, is people. A roundtable of intelligent bloggers, like Washington Week in Review, or The Capital Gang, but staffed by writers who work in blogspace, and done on the radio, once a week. Chris is our anchor. I want to do this at BloggerCon, and every week, starting asap.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." |
 
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