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Pictures from last night's party in SF. Bob Stepno demos rich editing with Firebird/Mac in Radio. My Chris Lydon interview gets a recommendation from the Command Post weblog. Mail-to-weblog for Manila beta.
Reminder: Dinner, 5:30PM, Henry's Hunan, 924 Sansome. Today's song: "I'd be safe and warm if I was in L.A." The Apple Computer History Weblog. East coast blackout as seen from space? I bought a Creative Labs MuVo player, 128MB, for $129 at CompUSA, so I could listen to the Chris Lydon interviews on my daily walks. Trivially simple to use, just plug it into the USB port, copy the MP3 files across. David Weinberger wonders about plural nouns for bloggers. I like bevy myself. Funny reading east coast bloggers in the morning from the west coast. Everyone here is still asleep, except me. Even Starbucks isn't open yet. I forgot how beautiful it is Last night, walking around Pacific Heights after dinner, I was struck by all the For Rent signs on all kinds of beautiful homes in dramatically beautiful places. It was chilly and foggy, I wore a sweater and a jacket, in August. What a difference from the hot muggy weather in Boston. The prices are much more reasonable than I remember. Later, coming back, I realized that the hotel I'm in, a luxurious Union Square hotel, is virtually empty. Then I read this NY Times article about how cheap travel to SF is, and then it hit me. This place has become a bargain. I was talking on the walk last night about how nice it would be to live in one of those Pacific Heights apartments for a year, until I realized "There's no Harvard here." It would be a relaxing year, reading books, driving to the wine country. A year of retirement, perhaps. Or with the cheap air fare, a pied a terre, a few thousand miles from home?
Essay: Tips for Candidates re Weblogs. Jake specs the comment notification feature for Manila. Slashdot reports that AOL is blocking all links from LiveJournal sites. If you live in the US, you have about 24 hours left to register in the National Do Not Call database. I just did. Mary Jo Foley says the number of Microsoft bloggers is growing exponentially.
AP: "Through the years, the presumptive front-runners have discovered that Labor Day is either the beginning of the glide path to the nomination and the White House or the time they acquire a giant bull's-eye on their back."
Chris Lydon interviews Robert Fisk from Beirut. "We went to war based on lies." The Guardian reports that Tony Blair has an email address. Don Park: "Unless I am mistaken, RDF fragments are being inserted automatically by Radio Trackback script. Yikes." Michael Feldman: "Putting a huge dick shot on the front of my Blog where my mother could see it, even if it is growing out of an arm, is over the line."
Steve Outing: With Email Dying, RSS Offers Alternative. JY Stervinou translated the RSS 2.0 spec to French. Burningbird: "I never thought I would get to the point of welcoming emails offering to enlarge either my penis or breasts." Andrew Grumet debugs Instapundit's RSS feed. First the good news. My hotel has high speed Internet, and email works. The bad news? Over 1300 messages.
Today's song: "California, here I come." Mail meltdown, again. Don Park's weblog is one year old today. Here's his hello world post. Thanks Don, it's been a very interesting year. Congrats to Halley on the her clarity of vision. 12/24/97: "My hearing feels sharper too." On this day in 1999, I stated my vision for RSS, and asked others to express theirs. Paolo notes a problem with Yahoo's feeds, announced last night. They flow a huge amount of stuff, even if you just subscribe to one feed, there might be dozens of new stories each hour. Maybe this is just something to get used to. I remember the NY Times felt strange that way too at the beginning, now it's very normal to get several dozen stories in one update. There's another concern, linkrot. Links into Yahoo News rot relatively quickly, as compared to News.Com, for example, which is near perfect. So, until I hear something has changed, I'm going to use Yahoo to read news but try hard not to point to stories on Yahoo from my weblog. Wired: "Come September, Silicon Valley commuters will be able to log on from the train. The first wireless Internet access from a rail line in the United States was bound to happen here where most commuters tote laptops." Mail meltdown, again 600 messages waiting this morning. My DSL line hasn't been doing well the last 24 hours, and that means mail gets even more unreliable, and overnight it overloaded again, even though I have Eudora checking every five minutes. So if you sent me an email overnight, there's a pretty good chance I won't see it. Same for the rest of today. Not sure what I can do, but it sure makes planning a trip to Calif pretty hard without reliable email. About 9AM, I'm giving up on email for now. If you need to reach me before I leave, I'm on AIM, screen name scriptingnews. Please use it sparingly. If you can't reach me there, try scriptingnews2.
Yahoo News in RSS. Major bing! Tiny Yahoo Coffee Mugs make it easy to subscribe to the new feeds in Radio UserLand. John Palfrey, who is a lawyer, analyzes Yahoo's unusual terms of use for their feeds. Jeremy Zawodny: "RSS is alive at well at Yahoo. Watch for more in the future." I just got an email asking me what "bing" means. Dinner on Saturday will be at 5:30PM Pacific at Henry's Hunan on Sansome near Broadway, in beautiful sunny SF. This will make sure that Scoble and I and anyone else who's invited have time to eat, and make it over to the Pirillo's for their house cooling party.
Graeme Foster reports that PopHeadlines, an aggregator, supports enclosures. Added it to the appropriate lists. The move to Harvard scrambled the rankings for RSS on Google. I guess they don't follow redirects? Hmmm. BlogHerald says Yahoo is shopping for a blogging tools company. BBC: "A court rules that an injunction against posting online code for copying DVDs does not violate freedom of speech." MetaWeblog API: "It is now safe to deploy applications based on this spec." What a beautiful remembrance of Doc's mother. "And now, as she so often said, it's time to get back to work." Wired: "Global geeks getting an MIT education." Jake Savin: "I'm writing in my browser, and loving it all over again. Writing this post feels a lot like writing in Manila for the first time, and that feels really good."
News.Com: AOL launches blogging service. Susan Mernit: "According to an insider, AOL Journals already has about 7000 users."
A new feature on the Harvard weblog server. When someone posts a comment on your weblog, your notification list receives an email containing information about the comment. Previously this feature was only available for discussion group posts, not comments. Does the BBC plan to release their old programs or just the new stuff? I wonder if NPR in the US will follow? PBS? I'd double my annual contribution. Think of the new software we could write once there was a sizable flow of content that could be channeled. Next question. Is there yet a good MP3 player that connects through USB and is relatively easy to operate and relatively inexpensive? Michael Feldman stumbled across the original Manila logo. I have no idea who the guy with the gray beard is. Greenspun: "Best of all, the menu at McDonald's won't tempt you into excess. The sandwiches aren't all that delicious." News.Com: "By digitizing its huge archive of programs and making some shows available free on the Net, the BBC hopes to help usher in a second, public-minded phase of the digital revolution." News.Com: "Imagine the negative fallout if RIAA ends up suing a family member of Rep Lamar Smith, who chairs a crucial copyright subcommittee -- or a music industry executive who secretly hangs out on Grokster every evening." Paolo: "I have tried importing quite a few PowerPoint presentations to Keynote, it doesn't only work, they usually improve."
How long before the candidates collect Cluetrainers. I'd love to see Gephardt or Kucinich invite Rageboy to travel with them, or even just have a power lunch in Boulder. All aboard. Next stop the White House!
Postel's Law has two parts. Andrew Thomas: "Welcome to MIT. When you move into your new rooms and set up your computers, make sure your lawyer is on speed dial." David Weinberger is blogging the Dean campaign, from the press bus. Six posts so far. 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6. Important: He has endorsed Dean. BBC: "Greg Dyke, director general of the BBC, has announced plans to give the public full access to all the corporation's programme archives." Cory Doctorow Boston Globe op-ed on Net politics. Tuesday morning I'm going to take the Do Not Deploy caveat off the MetaWeblog API spec. If there are any deal-stoppers, please let me know about them in the next couple of days. Sun has a tutorial on RSS, including software that parses RSS files from Java.
NYT Magazine profile of Harvard president Larry Summers. Two years ago today we opened a Manila site that made it possible for developers to test their implementation of the Blogger API against UserLand's. People are still posting to it, two years later. That's a thorough test! Three years ago: "If you think your shit doesn't stink, I recommend getting a second opinion."
Scoble will be in California next weeked so he can have dinner on August 30 in San Francisco. Can you join us? According to Michael Feldman, tomorrow is Goth's Day at Disneyland in Anaheim. Consultation for the Independent Review of BBC Online. They have excellent support for RSS, now would be a good time to tell the UK government how much we appreciate that. BBC article on the review process. It looks like Eudora is sufficiently better at dealing with overload than Outlook Express. Now I have to figure out how to configure it to send mail, not just read it, and figure out how the filters work beyond filtering on who a message is from, who it is to, or what its subject is (sometimes I have to filter on CC alone). Chris Heilman's revised California governor's list. Wired: "At 2:30 PM., Hypponen said 19 of the 20 servers that would have been used to launch the attack had been blocked." BTW, the SoBig virus sounds like the tricks Coble and Berman were trying to make legal for the music industry last year. Imagine if the law had passed.
Microdoc: "The way we have developed the Internet is creating the biggest economic, social and cultural time-bomb of the century." Jake: "The WYSIWYG editor for Mozilla has been released for both Radio and Manila." Stateline.Org: Bloggers Train Sites On State Governments. Halley Suitt: "I've just published a piece on blogging in Harvard Business Review." Congrats! Steve Gillmor: "What I'm really looking for is a private Google, where I can find random notes without exposing them publicly." 2/3/02: "An easy to install HTTP server that communicates with the mother ship via XML and can search the local area network as effectively as the whole Internet." Michael Feldman: "I almost came out and told you about the little voice inside my head whispering insistently that, finally, this was the year." 11/24/01: "Red Sox fans must know, by now, that it ain't gonna happen." Reuters: "Computer security experts raced to beat the clock Friday as the super-potent Sobig.F e-mail virus threatened to unleash a crippling barrage of data across the Internet." Register: "The prolific mass-mailing Sobig-F email worm, which has flooded computer users this week, could attempt to download a Trojan horse tonight, anti-virus companies are warning."
Chris Lydon has three audio excerpts from the Howard Dean presentation on Wednesday night in Manchester. I've included each of the audio excerpts below as enclosures, in today's Scripting News RSS feed. Enclosure-aware aggregators will automatically download them so you don't have to wait for them to download. 1. Dean's 24-minute talk, in its entirety. 3. Chris's "open ended sampling" of the crowd. I've started a list of aggregators that understand RSS enclosures. Right now I only know of two, but I hope that changes soon. Enclosures are, imho, a really big part of where RSS will go. Phil Wolff's "plant requirements" for BloggerCon, in response to Bob Doyle's message that the Pound Hall rooms don't have WiFi. They will, one way or another. I hope Wendy and Robyn can see this, because (per the post below) my email is totally broken. Email is still broken. I'm trying Eudora, it seems to work a little better than Outlook Express, but of course it's totally strange and all my filters are gone. It doesn't work better enough to use it instead of Outlook. The solution may be switching to Fastmail. In the meantime I'm missing boatloads of email. Thanks for all the great tips in the comments on last night's message. If you're trying to dig out of the quagmire, you may find some good advice here. Adam Curry: "This is where we get to sneak RSS into the email jet-wash." The only people I can communicate with are people who send and receive over RSS. Adam will probably see my comment on his post in about 40 minutes or so in his aggregator. Adam reports that the spam-free test worked. Bing. We communicated without seeing a single spam or virus-generated email. Just like the good old days, before email melted and evaporated.
The email situation has gotten so bad I'm actually starting to get an idea on how to route around it. It's pretty radical. JY Stervinou suggests using TMDA on the server. Lawrence, what do you think? Dwight Shih recommends Fastmail. Michael Feldman: Copyright Questions from a Blogger. PoliticsNH.Com is excellent. Added to the list of NH newspapers. They have a calendar for all candidate appearances in NH. Now all I wish for is an RSS feed. Ten years ago, she was one of three M.I.T. graduates in their 20's who were profiled in The New York Times as women who might change the face of the computer industry. Zawodny: "After spending most of the day on the problem of 'how to find the RSS feed (if there is one) given a URL' I've come to the conclusion that it's a pain in the ass." An XML guru wants to outlaw markup in RSS descriptions. Chuq Von Rospach: "We're going to end up with two protocols that do the same thing." Four years ago today I got my outliner saving directly to a discussion group message, via XML-RPC. Over 2000 messages are waiting. Perhaps its time to give up on the mail client software I've been using. Adam Curry: "Just don't email me at all." BBC: "Sobig F had been written by a spammer looking for ways to get past spam filters."
We saw Edwards and Dean today, I'll have pictures in the morning. In the meantime, over 800 messages accumulated in my mailbox, and my mailer is incapable of dealing with it. So if you sent me mail, I probably won't get it until tomorrow afternoon. Sorry. A new Manila theme from Bryan Bell.
Chris Heilman: Faces of the California Candidates. Wash Post: Bush Campaign Reaching Out to Bloggers. Blog Graham is the weblog of Presidential hopeful Bob Graham. It's fairly awful.
Kevin Werbach: "Either email is broken, Microsoft's email software is broken, or those two statements are the same." Scott Rosenberg: "Where do you want to go today? Anywhere but Outlook!" Jesse Ross in the Berkman Geekroom explains how the SoBig virus works. Question of the day: Is email broken? Dave Hyatt responds to the problem with Safari and Chris Lydon's site. BBC: "E-mail inboxes are being clogged by a new version of the Sobig Windows virus." Garth Kidd says poptool, a Python app, helps get rid of spammy messages. Scott Johnson is working with Chris Pirillo on a tutorial about aggregators. Happy wedding anniversary to Andre and Andrea. And many spicy noodles! This morning 650 messages accumulated overnight, and my email program, Outlook Express, one which millions of people use, can't download them without crapping out. On the other end is an uspecified mail server, and inbetween is Verizon DSL. They must all be getting hammered by this week's virus. Until yesterday this setup could handle the email I'm getting. Today it took one hour to coax 650 messages out of the server, tons of duplicates, and most of them contain viruses. I'm looking for one or two vital messages in this group of 650, and there are always some people trying to contact me through email. The only logical thing to do is to give up on email. Nothing is going to make this better. In a bind.
Pito Salas: "Can your mother use RSS?" Schedule for candidates in NH. Tomorrow it's Edwards and Dean with Chris Lydon and possibly Halley. Jim Moore is thinking about BloggerCon.
The world as a blog. "Weblogs.com + Geocoding + RSS." New pictures of rooms for the Sunday Birds-Of-Feather meetings, to inspire you to think of great sessions we can have on October 5. I'm at the office downloading my email, getting tons of virus-carrying emails. Back from New Hampshire at 12:30PM. Catching up. Mail server is hobbling along. Oy. When I have more than 2000 messages to download, my emailer-server combo can't cope. I have to download them in 10-20 message groups. When the reader fails, I have to download the messages again, so I have huge numbers of duplicates. Whether the problem is in the server, the client, or somewhere between is a mystery to me. I've spent almost three hours at it, and still have over 1700 messages to go. If you have any ideas, comment here -- don't send email. I give up. I'm going into the office and try to download my mail using the fast Harvard net connection. It's worked before. Wish me luck! Chris Lydon: "Why aren't we holding American media responsible for 'sexed up' intelligence on Saddam's WMDs?" Wired: "Presidential hopeful Howard Dean may be receiving kudos for his use of the Internet as a fundraising tool, but he's getting raised eyebrows for a pair of junk e-mails allegedly sent by his campaign staff last week." Ptypes: "Dave is a very smart guy and a responsible leader of the weblog community. What better way to gain respect for blogging vis-a-vis professional journalism than to have Dave Winer covering the candidates." Wow that's nice. Thanks.
The key point, the one not to miss, is that anyone can do this. Today's Rotary session was open to the public. We paid $10 each so we could eat, but if we didn't want to eat the cost would have been $0. The candidates want to talk to you. If you can get yourself to New Hampshire or Iowa you can participate in the political process as any local voter does.
WSJ: "Is Google slipping?" My questions for Presidential candidates. NHPR has a series on the Presidential primary. Gnome-Girl: "Doesn't anyone else think monthly 4 day weekends would boost our morale for work?" Comments here on Wired's article on news aggregators. Text of email sent to BloggerCon subscribers. Good morning. Up early, excited about my first trip to see a presidential candidate in NH, Bob Graham. The talk is in Manchester, New Hampshire's largest city. Approx one hour drive from my front door. Dean Landsman says Yes to an Outlines and the Web BOF at BloggerCon. Michael Feldman, who's been to a couple of Thursdays at Berkman, has a great weblog. Hard to classify. I'm a regular reader. Keep going! Two years ago: "If you ever get the blues, try getting your car washed." Three years ago, nodetypes were rolled out. They explain how the type attribute on an OPML outline element works, triggering a callback mechanism in the outliner, which allows it to route to the proper code to process an expand operation. That allows an outliner to be used to browse resources that aren't in memory, that can be located anywhere on the Internet. We got it working for RSS, and it was beautiful. It still works today. Maybe soon it will be time for this innovation to be used by users. Wired on Aggregators Wired News: "At heart, RSS is simply a specification that a site uses to produce a page of XML code. The code breaks up each entry or story on a website by title, description and direct link. An aggregator then determines how to display that output in a reader." Comments. I love how Wired side-stepped the issues around all the angst among techies about whether it's RDF or not. I suspect that the RDF people might not be very happy. But it really hurts forward motion to have the reporters try to cover the pie fight. So on that, thanks Wired, you said there was trouble, but kept going anyway. That's what I did too. That's the right way to go. Now, I'm not happy that neither this article or Dan Gillmor's piece yesterday, mentioned Radio UserLand. It's a very fine aggregator, and if it wasn't the first, it certainly predated all the ones they did mention. It's in very wide use. I think it's still the best one out there. So I feel sad when an article appears about the category Radio pioneered, over a lot of naysayer's objections, and it isn't even mentioned. There are two schools of thought about aggregators. One says that they should work like a mail reader, the other that it should work like a weblog. The former shows you each feed as a separate thing, the latter shows all articles in reverse-chronologic order, grouping them by time. Imho we already have enough mail readers, wire up RSS to email and you're done. Who needs another piece of software to do what an already-existing category does so well. But the latter, which is the approach I used in Radio's aggregator, works incredibly well. People who are just using mail-reader style aggregators are really missing something. Articles that only write about mail reader aggregators are also missing something. Reporters, here's a new category of software, scoop your competitors, get the real story, not the easy one.
Why I'm going to see the candidates in New Hampshire.
Dan Gillmor: RSS Hitting Critical Mass. Steve Kirks: "Send Steve to BloggerCon!" Yeah! Phil Ringnalda on BlogStreet and BlogLines. Should I do a 1.5 hour session on October 5 on Outlining and the Web? Pito Salas: "There are a few good blog readers out there but there's lots of room for innovation." Today's song: "When you walk in a dream but you know you're not dreaming, signore." Dan Grigsby: "I've put together a service to send out alerts via AIM whenever someone reads a blog entry."
NY Times: Ohio Lines Failed Before Blackout. David Hoggard: "Is this a wonderful country or what?" Last year on this day, Instant Messaging in Frontier/Radio. Three years ago in the Atlantic Monthly: "Rampant music piracy may hurt musicians less than they fear. The real threat -- to listeners and, conceivably, democracy itself -- is the music industry's reaction to it." A picture of Doc's mom, in 1943 (approx) after catching two big fish in Alaska. Hey she's a cutie. Of course, I knew that. She looks like Doc. Duh. Lydon, CSS, Safari Michael Dalling writes: "I think I know why the links aren't clickable in Safari." He ran Chris's site through the HTML validator and found the problem in an anchor element, before line 361, and that it's fixed by HTML Tidy, but he hasn't been able to find it. Neither have I. Matthew Morse writes: "It looks the same in Safari and in Mozilla, but the links don't work. That can be fixed by removing the float:left; line from #content in the style declaration. It doesn't appear to impact the layout." Bob Stepno: Communal Debugging. Kool Aid, Scoble, Gillmor
What is Dan is saying? That Microsoft is like Jonestown? That Scoble has stopped thinking for himself? That Scoble is forced to say something dishonorable or unethical on his weblog to keep his job? Gillmor doesn't substantiate it. My opinion, Scoble tells us more about Microsoft than Dan has told us about his employer. We supposedly have a blogger inside one of the biggest media companies in the world, yet we are no better informed about media companies. I think Scoble does a good job of balancing his employer's interests against the interests of his readers. According to Google Answers, they didn't actually drink Kool Aid at Jonestown.
Thanks to Paul Boutin for a pointer to this MSNBC article with advice from citizens of Baghdad on blackouts. "Maybe there are followers of Saddam Hussein who are sabotaging their power stations." Dan Gillmor says he might vote for Schwarzenegger. Dann Sheridan: "Bye, bye VCR." Something about Chris Lydon's weblog doesn't look right in Safari on Mac OS X. It clearly has something to do with the CSS. Any suggestions are welcome, I can't test it in that configuration. Thanks!
Harold Gilchrist suggests an Audioblogging BOF on October 5. I think it's a good idea. I bet Chris Lydon and Bob Doyle would participate. Let me know if you'd come to Cambridge for a 1.5 hour discussion of audioblogging (and of course whatever else is discussed on the 5th). Tim Aiello: "I'm attempting to map the timeline of the power outage." BBC: "Former Ugandan dictator Idi Amin has died of multiple organ failure in hospital in Saudi Arabia." Thanks to Don Park for the pointer to Flame Warriors, a fantastic taxonomy of various roles people play on mail lists, with excellent illustrations. CamWorld: The Great Blackout of 2003.
Chris Heilman: "This is a sorted and annotated list of all 135 candidates in California's special recall election." Weblogger, a commercial Manila hosting service, got a great review in PC Mag. I run a Manila hosting service too. BTW, Jake has mail-to-weblog coded for Manila. PC Mag likes the feature. It'll be there soon.
Where the candidates are the week of August 18. Today's song: "The blue bulldog howls 'Boo-la, boo-la, boo!'" I put together a grid to visualize Day 2 at BloggerCon. Think of groups you'd like to get together in a Pound Hall classroom. They're large rooms, with comfortable seating. Also on Monday I'm going to New Hampshire to find some presidential candidates. I'll stay overnight somewhere in NH and return to Tuesday afternoon for a local host committee dinner in Cambridge. It'll be my first time covering the presidential campaign on location. Jim Moore says he may come along. I think Halley from Halley's Comment is coming too. If you're in Massachusetts, Vermont, Maine, or New Hampshire, next week is the week to converge on NH with our laptops and digital cameras to capture the scene. There's lots of stuff happening in Iowa next week too. It's time to stop talking, time to start doing. Rolling Stone: RSS 2.0. Surf the Net with Kids has a new RSS 0.91 feed. It's a "guide to the hidden educational gems of the Web, written for kids, parents and teachers." More here. 416 new feeds from PRWeb. Subscribed to the main feed, with the "top" press releases. RSS 0.91. Martin Schwimmer: "Pampers don't need electricity." Julie Powell: "I wonder how Julia passed the time during the blackout of 77?" NY Times: "Frantically calling across town and around the country to find out the scope of the power failure, they were trapped in a news event they were trying to cover."
Henry Wong: "Meatless political Web blogs don't spell the end of the Internet, just as Hillary Clinton's meatless memoir doesn't spell the end of books." BBC: Power failures hit US and Canada. NYC, Detroit, Toronto, Ottawa, Cleveland, Toledo, NJ, Connecticut. No evidence of terrorism says NY mayor Bloomberg. Overload on power grid? Hot in Boston. We have power. CNN: "Much of Midtown Manhattan and Wall Street was shut down. All area airports and the Long Island Railroad were also affected." Microsoft: What you should know about the Blaster worm. Another game of 20 Questions, Weblog Style! Seth Dillingham got the correct answer. BBC: "Scientist Sir Isaac Newton has triumphed in a poll searching for the greatest Briton." Halley is looking for a new "Printer-Copier-Fax-Scanner-Nutcracker." Sam Ruby has an interesting thread on quantifying the RDF Tax. I just posted a lengthy comment. BusinessWeek interviews Jim Clark on Silicon Valley's funk. Rogers Cadenhead posted a new chapter from his upcoming Sam's book on Radio UserLand. He says the book is getting the attention of his publisher because of the number of pre-orders it has received. Jenny Levine: How to Add Navigator Links in Radio. What's up with a comprehensive list of aggregators that doesn't include Radio or Manila? (Postscript: They're there now. Thanks.) Thanks to John Robb for the pointer to a Linksys product that displays pictures, movies and music from a desktop computer on a TV using 802.11. Perfecto. News.Com: "Since applets and plug-ins are also a key feature of other Web browsers, the Eolas decision could affect Microsoft's competitors in the browser market." Another reason weblogs are important in education, in today's NY Times. They help kids become better writers. On this day last year weblogs.com's high water mark passed 1000. Today it's over 4000.
DaveNet: Nutch, an open source search engine. Paul Nakada, via email: "It appears that the coding muscle for Nutch is Doug Cutting, the author of Lucene, an Apache Project open source search engine. We use it here at salesforce and have a huge amount of respect for Doug's coding." NY Times: "Can Johnny Blog?" John Palfrey: "I'm not sure there's ever been a conference at the Berkman Center that has received so much attention as BloggerCon has two months before it's actually happening." Chris Lydon interviews the Real Live Preacher. "He's a Baptist minister in South Texas who started a blog as a sort of personal refuge from his church -- a confessional place where he could voice some of the doubt and confusion in his life, or so he thought." Side-note, we're using a new CSS-based theme on Chris's site, should be easier to read. Remember my father who was so sick late last year and early this year? He and my mom just got back from a hiking trip in Switzerland. The Miracle Man. Simon St Laurent did a Plain Old XML rendition of a FOAF file, which is usually coded in RDF. I admit, I tried the same thing, with similar (good) results. I bet almost anyone who had done a little HTML, the low-tech stuff, could understand what's up here. As everyone who cares knows, I find the extra RDF bits to be noisy and fluffy (not funky). Microdoc News remains one of my favorite sites. Dan Gillmor links to four Microsoft job openings with the word blog in the description. Der Schockwellenreiter: Was ist RSS? GROKLAW is following SCO.
I was telling Chris yesterday that 99 out of 100 Times articles about blogs go like this. 1. Do blogs mean the end of journalism as we know it? 2. No. Dowd has a new angle. 1. Do candidate blogs mean the end of blogging as we know it? This time the answer appears to be yes? Heh. Daniel Bright: RSS 2.0 using XmlTextWriter. Adam Curry: To Collect and Serve. Two years ago today we celebrated the Blogger API. Scoble is hosting a blogger's dinner in Seattle tonight. Paul Boutin: "If wireless Internet access is such a hot technology, why is it such a dud business?" No fleecing Andrew Orlowski reports on the pricing of BloggerCon. As I explained, publicly, I'm not being paid to do BloggerCon. His story says that I am going to "fleece" people who come, which means "To defraud of money or property; swindle." This is a really ugly accusation, and factually incorrect. Doesn't Andrew say that professional reporters are good at getting the facts right? What happened to his extensive fact-checking network? Last June Andrew asked me to correct a story I ran about the Register. He was earnest and insistent -- my article could do real damage to his publication, he said. I gave it some thought and ran a retraction and apology. I didn't want to be responsible for the Register going under. That's how you do it, Andrew argued, when you get the facts wrong. I only had his word that I had the facts wrong, I had two sources who said I had it right. I decided to trust Andrew.
Tim O'Reilly, via email, re this post: "Actually, Nutch has no ambitions to dethrone Google. It's just trying to provide an open source reference implementation of search to help keep Google and other search engines honest, by letting people compare the results of an engine whose algorithms and methodologies are transparent and accessible. It also aims to give a platform for people outside of the search heavyweights to research new search algorithms." Geoff Heard has been marshalling MORE 3.1 docs. He has PDFs of the full manual. This is pretty incredible. Released in 1991, MORE works on today's Macs. You can download the software for free on outliners.com. News.Com: "McDonald's said it plans to sell Internet access inside 100 locations in the Chicago and Milwaukee areas." Charles Cooper: Here we go again. DeanSpace: Why Use DeanSpace? Thanks to Ole Eichorn for finding a bug in my RSS feed. The guid needed to be adjusted by three hours in order to be a permalink. It was a good guid (say that five times fast) but it was not pointing to anything on Scripting News. The bug was introduced when I moved from California to Boston in March. At first I thought Ole was being anal retentive, and told him so (not in those words of course) but he was right. It takes great courage to persist, and Ole clearly has great courage. Thank you. Now my permalinks should work. Praise Murphy! Speaking of Ole, here's one of my favorite Ole and Lena jokes. Howto: Generate an RSS 2.0 feed for Typepad. EFF: "You could spend up to five years in prison, pay a $250,000 fine and lose your right to vote for trading a single copyrighted song if the Author, Consumer and Computer Owner Protection and Security Act is passed by Congress."
News.Com: Is ZIP coming undone? Sadly, this year I will not write about the Bees. Google now has a built-in calculator. Coool. How about a built-in dishwasher? The XML-RPC site is getting a lot more traffic lately. Nothing's changing, just lots more hits. And the referers don't reveal anything. Not sure what's happening there. Google names eight enterprise customers of their search appliance: Pfizer, the US Army, the city of San Diego, Xerox, Hitachi Data Systems, Nextel Communications, Procter & Gamble and Discovery Communications.
Seth Finkelstein solved the puzzle on 20 Questions. A person who is both animal and vegetable. Read the comments to find out who it is. Godin: "What is it about ubiquity that breeds contempt?" Ted Leung writes about jury duty. It's like watching a courtroom drama on TV, but the camera is in a weird place. I wrote about my experience with jury duty in 1996.
Great piece by Tim Bray that explains how designers should use XML. He describes the Worse Is Better school of XML format design. The names we use for elements are the worst-possible names, but they allow our software to interoperate. Namespaces create elements with names with colons in them. I bet Tim agrees that funky feeds, even if they're valid RSS, hurt interop. So much of this is obvious, yet we spend years arguing about it.
DaveNet: The 2004 Election. 20 Questions -- Weblog Style! If I understood Dutch I could tell you what this page says. Marcus Mauller translates. NY Times: "A federal judge in Boston said yesterday that there was mounting evidence innocent people were being executed. But he declined to rule the death penalty unconstitutional." ComputerWorld: "A federal judge ruled on Friday that two universities do not have to comply with subpoenas requesting that they hand over the identities of students who could be illegally sharing music online." Greenspun: "Think about all the poor people currently being housed in cities, occupying housing that could be sold to rich yuppies who would pay huge property tax." Greensboro has a candidate with a candidate weblog, written by the candidate. RSS feed? Yup. My new list of candidate schedules. Howard Dean's campaign schedule. Very nicely done! ABC News's The Note is tantalizingly complete, but almost useless because it shows you where the candidates will be today only. That's great if a a candidate is going to be in Boston and I can shuffle around my day. We need the same depth of coverage for a week going forward. Gary Price summarizes a Business 2.0 article about an open source search engine that aims to dethrone Google. Brian Buck: "Can't wait for that first day in September when the sky turns from gray haze to clean dry air." Amen. Jake's got a wizzy editor working in Radio and Manila in Mozilla on Mac. What a relief. Now when people ask where's the wizzy editor for the Mac there will be an answer. Jevon MacDonald designed a namespace for comments included in an RSS feed. He also provides an example feed. I linked his page into the sub-directory on the RSS 2.0 site. One of the concerns Mark Pilgrim expressed about Daniel Berlinger's RSD spec is that he was hosting it on his own server. It's simple to remove the objection. I asked Daniel if he would let me mirror a copy of his spec, and he said yes. NY Times: "Is there any advantage in having been ahead of the crowd now that just about every telecommunications company is rushing into the Wi-Fi wireless world?" MSDN: Creating an RSS News Aggregator with ASP.NET.
Sponsorship at BloggerCon
Second, I got an email on Thursday from Glenn Fleishman saying he couldn't attend, the cost was just too high. On Friday I got an excited email from Glenn, he had found a personal sponsor who wanted someone to be at BloggerCon on their behalf. I don't know who our benefactor is, yet, but thank you! It's a win-win for sure. Having Glenn at our weblog conference is a big deal. I also sent an email to the list to be sure everyone who was interested could benefit from the idea. We are looking for the usual sponsorships, bronze, silver, gold, platinum, etc (contact John Palfrey) but this raises the issue of micro-sponsorships, where we match a corporation who wants to be in the loop on weblogs with an experienced blogger who can make a real contribution to the first academic conference on weblogs. Frida
Who pulls the strings in the Atom community? Yesterday I pointed to Mark Pilgrim's slam of RSD, a format that's been widely adopted on both sides of the blogging APIs. Pilgrim made it personal, by attacking the person who authored the spec, Daniel Berlinger, as if you could reduce a popular format to a person, and then defeat the format by enflaming the author of the spec. It's the usual trick, use the person's name in a flame enough times, and the casual reader thinks it's the person you're writing about who's flaming. Now that they're not coming after me, it's pretty clear what's going on. And I'm reading the archive carefully enough to notice who's saying what, and I'm not falling for the trick. Then Sam Ruby stepped in, contradicted Pilgrim, and tried to take the attention off the back-channel, the not-visible conversations. It became totally clear, as RSD was thrown out, that decisions were being made in places no one could see except for Sam's friends. Sam explains how that works: "What's important is that no final decisions are made 'offline'." The key word is "final." Later he will be able to claim that he never said it was an open process. The correct statement, if the process were to have some kind of balance, for all kinds of developers, not just ones that can afford full-time developers flying around the world to meetings, would be "No decisions are made offline." Sam must agree to that before anyone should accept that his process is open, fair, or even has a chance of working. Now, I admit I haven't been following the Wiki, but I have been reading Sam's weblog, and the Formerly Echo weblog run by Danny Ayers, and following the mail list, and I have not seen a single contribution from the Blogger or Movable Type people. Are they not participating? Or is their participation entirely back-channel? Who else is is not visibly participating? I want to know who's pulling the strings. If it's open, I should have all the information that Sam has, or some reasonable portion of it. Sam says you can't have it all, it would be impractial. Of course. But he's not providing any information. There's a big difference. Extra: Read the first comment in response to this Rich Salz piece about the "grass roots" API. The fascinating angle on all this reinvention is that none of these people create weblog CMSes, aggregators or editors. Where are all the people who do that? Why are none of them participating in the public discussions?
This NY Times report makes it sound like politics in Calif is melting down. Blogging the bloggers blogging the 2004 election. AOL hired a pied piper for their weblogs. Smart. Gary Price reports on IBM's "Google on steroids." How power is wielded in the Atom developer community. DeanSpace is an "open development community providing powerful web-tools, quality support, and expert advice to Howard Dean's grassroots supporters." Subscribed.
1/5/97: "We talked about HyperCard, which was then the most powerful scripting software for the Macintosh. I said (of course) that our software would be much more sophisticated than HyperCard, more for geeks, but simpler, deeper, faster, more useful. Jean-Louis encouraged me to tell him more. I did. I like talking to JLG because he likes geek talk. So then he asked me a question that I still think about. He asked, 'Would it be all right with you, if in the meantime, we continued to sell HyperCard?' I laughed! I'm laughing now. It's a funny question!" Nikon has an 802.11 camera. Exactly right. Thanks to Jason DeFilippo for the pointer. Dennis Kucinich will be at the opening of his NH campaign headquarters, in Manchester, on Monday morning, 9AM-10:30AM. He spoke in SF at 401 Van Ness, at 7:30AM Pacific, Austin, TX tonight. Senator Bob Graham is touring Iowa by car this month.
Anand: "Does anyone know about any implementation based on the cloud sub-element in RSS 2.0?" Jake reports a fix in Radio's implementation of Trackback. Mark Pilgrim's bug report. Just a bug, not a conspiracy. Lockergnome's RSS resource. Subscribed. Edd Dumbill explains why he likes RDF, still. Jon Udell: "There is an ongoing controversy in the XML world about the use of a feature called namespaces." Two years ago: "People always ask 'Where were you when Kennedy was shot?' This is where I was."
BBC: "United States President George W Bush has added to the drama of California's recall election by saying movie star Arnold Schwarzenegger would make a good governor."
Steve Gillmor: "Clay Shirky is the Adlai Stevenson of Team RSS." Dan Gillmor on Microsoft's blogging software. "This strikes me as no threat to the current and upcoming end-user tools from the vendors we use today." Andrew Grumet has a philosophy of aggregators that matches mine. The three-pane "feed reader" is a disaster, it's merely recreating a mess I want to run away from. I like having a new queue every few hours. Adam Curry on a Dutch ISP using RSS for trouble tickets. Jon Udell: "Let's stop punishing RSS syndication for its success by asking it to carry the whole burden of XML usage in the semantic Web." Amen. Happy Birthday to InstaPundit and many happy returns! It turns out the Blogger API is two years old today too! All Things Considered: '"Theoretically, pages on the Web are governed by standards -- rules about how they are built, how computers read their instructions and display them." Dann Sheridan: "Since installing a new firewall on the home network last night, I haven't been able to publish to my site because my firewall thinks it is being attacked by Radio." Cone: "Limbaugh’s show prep no doubt includes weblogs." Oh geez, Notepad popups. Amit Dubey, via email: "After the Liberal Party Convention this November, Paul Martin will likely become Canada's next Prime Minister (some pollsters report he has the support of about 80% of the delegates). He also is a blogger." Zawodny: "Ever wanted to talk directly to the Yahoo! Search team in an open forum? Well, now you can." Four years ago today, a milestone piece on standards in instant messaging, in News.Com. How dorky is an application used by three people that hits one of my sites 10K times a day? Sometimes I wish the kids would just grow up. Or if that's not possible, at least leave home. Or if that's not possible, die.
Welcome to another Thursday night at Berkman. The BloggerCon site has a delightful new look. Scoble signs Hillary Clinton. The deal of the century. Another celebrity pol for Scoble to sign. Ptypes says "Howard Dean is a body-double of Lee Harvey Oswald." Michael Feldman is a Harvard blogger. "Every day I try to post one thing that makes me laugh and one thing that makes me think," says Michael. Tonight's song: "In the town where I was born, lived a man who sailed the sea. And he told us of his life, in the land of submarines." Julie Powell: "I like the idea that eating well is a universal right, and that you can do it in the midst of the daily Hell that most of us live, especially when you live in an outer borough of New York City."
Greenspun: "'Welcome to the West Coast,' said the friendly woman at Travis Air Force Base Approach before handing me off to the Napa airport tower." Lessig, a lawyer, asks: "Is it impossible to imagine the lawyers ever on the side of innovation?" Thanks to Mat Wrigley for the pointer to the full Dogma 2000 website. I replaced the link in the blogroll on Scripting News so that search engines will have a better chance of finding it. Don Park: "I hope many people get nosebleed from this and the previous post." Halley Suitt is a member of the local host committee for BloggerCon. In the invite I referred to her as author Halley Suitt. Her first post today is a reminder why that is such an accurate description. She should write a book, she's so good. August 2001: Exploring the Blues. NY Times: "Some colleges now let freshmen pick their own roommates in an online roommate-selection system that works on the same principles as computer dating." BBC: "Microsoft has announced that new versions of its mouse will be fitted with wheels that tilt as well as roll." Kottke took a look at all the flavors of RSS and figured out what's been going on. This stuff isn't that hard. Andrew Orlowski is having another acid flashback, this time about Apple and Sun. Based on his previous track record give it a 10 percent chance of having any substance at all. But it's still an interesting idea, isn't it? IdiotDev: "Hey what would a game look like that used RSS as its engine?" Google News Alerts "are sent by email when news articles appear online that match the topics you specify."
John Palfrey says Tim Bray missed his point. Jeremy Zawodny says Google's PageRank is broken. Last year on this day: "I still dream of smoking, but even in my dreams I have become an ex-smoker."
BBC: "Arnold Schwarzenegger has announced that he will run as a Republican candidate for governor of California." Hossein Derakhshan, an Iranian, says that RSS can be used to route around government censorship. Viswanath Gondi: Google for Privacy Conscious Users. NY Times: "The AOL 9 upgrade is the least cocky, most customer-focused overhaul in a long time." PC World: "Meet your next Web-based time-saver: customized news feeds that give news junkies their fix quickly and easily, without their having to scour the Web for all the latest bulletins. Called RSS, this standard could radically change the way you gather and manage information online."
Essay: "RSS is a billion-dollar format. If you objectively look at all the content that flows through it you'll see that, like Apple in 1983, it can't be stopped. It doesn't matter who wants to stop it." Phil Wolff interviews Steve Rose, the author of RSSJobs. Bryan and Paolo reveal Radio's biggest secret. Heh. BTW, I use Radio to edit my Manila sites, including the templates and content, as Bryan does. I can't imagine editing the components of a website any other way. Ben Adida, an MIT grad student with a Harvard weblog. Tracy Adams: "I wrote this entry without typing." Nutch is a "nascent effort to implement an open-source web search engine." Jon Udell: "I'm not saying that I want to put RDF into RSS." In his second piece of the day, Jon Udell asks RDF advocates what's wrong with Plain Old Metadata. NY Times: "Over the last 20 years the nation's housing market has been cleaved in two, and the break has helped create two very different economies in one country." The picture above is art. What does it mean? Click on the pic. Do you know any more? Who is wKen? Who is speaking? What does your mind say? That's the art. Did you click on the Gnome-Girl link? If so, at what point did you decide not to get involved? Or did you? (Big juicy kiss to GG, love you baby.) Now what do I see? I see weblog art. The button represents the Come As You Are philosophy of Dogma 2000. Web Energy forever. Yeha, he mis-spelled Governor. And I mis-spelled yeah. Let's hope it was an accident. Rageboy: "A month or so ago, maybe it was last year... No. It was June."
Ed Cone: "Senator John Edwards has responded to some questions submitted to his office by EdCone.com. Here’s what he has to say in a weblog-exclusive email interview." Jonathan Zittrain: The Copyright Cage. "Bars can't have TVs bigger than 55 inches. Teddy bears can't include tape decks. Girl Scouts who sing Puff, the Magic Dragon owe royalties." Jon Udell on relative links in RSS feeds with comments from Brent Simmons and Sam Ruby. Wes Felter: "One thing you can do with a news aggregator is watch things propagate through the blogosphere." Tom Daschle: "My driving tour began with a visit to the Community Health Center in Rapid City." Daschle talks about health care and insurance. This is much on my mind these days. I just signed up for Harvard's health plan yesterday. It's much cheaper than the COBRA plan I was on (it expires next month). Also, I've gotten lots of email after yesterday's News.Com piece, all of it sympathetic. Thanks. I guess most people didn't know how vicious the bashing had gotten. It's pretty bad and it's been going on for years. Yesterday the bad stuff was exposed in a way that lots of good people could see. Dan Gillmor: "I'm spending several days at the Vermont headquarters of the Howard Dean presidential campaign, studying a breakthrough in American politics."
Still thinking about Art Interludes at BloggerCon. Looking for the intersection between art, weblogs and a face-to-face conference. How can we bring art into BC? Glenn Fleishman: "The future has finally arrived with Hydra from The Coding Monkeys in Germany." Howl is Rendezvous for Windows and Linux. Paolo: "What I would like next? A renderer for Radio which replicates the easy to use 'wiki punctuation' that many wiki apps use." Doc Searls: "Dean is totally upstaging all the other Democrats by picking fund-raising fights with the Bush campaign. And the press is eating it up." NY Times: "Lieberman warned that nominating Howard Dean as the Democrat to face President Bush in 2004 would be 'a ticket to nowhere.'" Essay: Pointers are cheap.
Register: Novell buys Ximian. Wow. Oracle has three new RSS 2.0 feeds and a Radio weblog. Jake reports that Trackback for Radio is now released. Evhead: "Google is not a famousness-ranking-by-first-name engine. It's a search engine." Bummer. An article in News.Com, while extremely incendiary, may be seen as the last gasp in the Great RSS War of 2003. John Palfrey: "The substance that seems to matter most is some combination of the following: openness on the Net; interoperability; true consumer and technologist choice; and effectiveness and stability of the technology."
NY Times: "To lie effectively, one has to have a notion that other people have minds and can be deceived." A letter to Palfrey, Ruby, Bray, Pilgrim, cc'd Festa. A heads up. Tim Bray says the News.Com reporter left out something important. I said "Hey Tim, you have a weblog, what are you waiting for?" He said he'll write it up. I don't want to steal his thunder, it's quite along the lines of the letter I sent, linked to above. Look forward to linking to it tomorrow. Charles Cooper, also in News.Com: "Whether that ends the feuding with folks who have very different ideas about how to advance the spec is anyone's guess. But it strikes me as laudable. Instead of opting for a proprietary land grab, a company that was an RSS tools builder freely gave up its guardianship to a nonprofit trust." Diego Doval comments on the move to Harvard, today's News.Com article, and working on Pie-Echo-Whatever. Paolo: "Hydra is cool." My Radio weblog now has Trackback. Three years ago: "The Republicans nominated a presidential candidate that some say knows as much about the world as an 'average TWA pilot.'" NY Times: "The online edition of The New York Post, which is owned by the News Corporation, ran an article last month about a murder in which the victim's body parts were packed in a suitcase, and Google served up an ad for a luggage dealer." NY Times: "On Saturday, a flash mob collected near the American Embassy in Berlin, and far from deriding Iraqi policies or some other momentous topic, they wore silly hats, waved flags and popped Champagne." Scoble: "So, how do you get people back to work? Easy: provide incentives for rich people to invest their money in new companies." If someone asked if they should invest in RSS, which so many developers seem to have creative ideas about now, what would you say? What incentives would make it worth the risk? RSSJobs allows you to "create and save searches for Monster, Dice, HotJobs,and more in one location, then delivers the results to your favorite RSS Reader." Scott Reynen: "This utility will take a monster.com or hotjobs.com job search URL and produce an RSS feed of the results."
Don Park: "It is a great feeling just being here." NY Times: In DSpace, Ideas Are Forever. Dan Gillmor: "In the past month, I've done my part to undermine a monopoly. How? By making phone calls." Chris Pirillo: "E-mail is a polluted medium." Chris Heilman: Summer in Southern California. Error-handling in MetaWeblog API I added a new note in the comments section of the MetaWeblog API spec explaining that errors are handled through the fault-reporting procedure described in the XML-RPC spec. Comment on the mail list, or in the comment section of this weblog post. Technography at Berkman I've been gently introducing technography to the Thursday evening weblog writers group. A scenario. I put up an outline and ask "How would we know if we were successful in New Hampshire." People start blurting out ideas. I note them in a projected outline that everyone can see. The conversation stalls after the list fills up (this always seems to happen, people get evaluative too quickly). I add a dozen blank lines in the middle of the list, after sorting it by the size of the idea (big ones go at the bottom, little ones at the top). Then the ideas start flowing again. Two XMLs, sliced and diced I've been discussing two different ways of approaching XML. At XML Devcon, talking with Peter Drayton and Brian Jepson, I postulated that there are people who love XML for its technical intricacy, and people who use XML because it is a convenient way to move info between apps. Brian pointed out that the latter is the Worse-Is-Better philosophy or POGE, the Principle Of Good Enough. Last night I realized there may be another way of describing the dichotomy, people who think of XML as a programming space, and people who think of it as a literary space. I am generally in the latter group. It's why I shudder when I see namespaces in an otherwise understandable-as-literature XML doc. There is no equivalent of namespaces in prose or poetry. Let's say you could step back in time and rename the Dublin Core, what could you call it so that it would read well in any XML document? Nothing. A colon has a completely different meaning in writing. Nothing you name it could make it read well. Being important Bloggers who never flame anyone and don't have blogrolls (or don't make a big deal about them) may take a long time to become "important" -- but if they stand out because of the quality of their ideas, and the ideas they insipire, they can attain a kind of longevity that has value, like the giants whose shoulders Sir Isaac Newton stood on. Think orgasmically Did you know that you can be intellectually sensual in your interactions with other people? It's virtually impossible to find anyone who wants to play this way, but a good university offers the possibility that other people came there who want to collaborate, truly. The sexual metaphors make some people uncomfortable, maybe most people -- but I kind of believe that God gave birds orgasms when they migrate in the spring and fall; and that's why I feel so good when I have an idea that mixes well with the world. I wrote this thinking about Betsy Devine. I have no doubt she fully understands what I'm talking about. Very few people do, and I think most of them (seem to be) are women.
Sir Alec Issigonis: "A camel is a horse designed by committee."
Mark Twain: "In the first place, God made idiots. That was for practice. Then he made school boards."
Rob Fahrni: "If Blogger would implement the MetaWeblog API I could get titles to show up in my posts without editing my entries from their web UI." William Grosso: "I like RSS, but I have reservations." STkoutline imports and exports OPML files. Two years ago a couple of jokes, suitable for the whole family. How to name a product 1. Make a list of adjectives that apply to the product, things you want to convey in the name. If you don't have such a list you'll never know how to judge the potential names you come up with. 2. Using a thesaurus look up some of the adjectives. Let your mind wander. It's important to play at this stage. Think of people who exemplify the traits listed in step 1. Think of places. Historical periods. Don't be linear. Call a friend and read off the list in step 1 and ask them to blurt out any words they think of. Make up words that convey the adjectives. 3. Now go into evaluative mode on the list from step 2. Cross off words that are descriptive. Those won't pass muster as trademarks. Keep proper names. Made-up words are especially good. At any point you can jump back to step 1 or 2, and add to your lists. (In fact if you don't I suspect your process isn't working very well.) 4. Look up the words from step 3 on a search engine. Cross off names that are products, formats, standards, or in any way are associated with your industry, no matter how remote. Save yourself grief later. 5. Pass the list from step 4 over to a trademark attorney to check them in the USPTO database.
Chris Lydon takes us on the road, to blogging from Belfast, Northern Ireland. iRATE radio is a "collaborative filtering client/server mp3 player/downloader." Ed Cone: "Trudeau is less than pleased with the redaction." The first BloggerCon invites go out next week. Be sure you get one by signing up here. Tom Daschle: "Welcome to my travel web log." Hey it sounds like JPalfrey is having a great time at Oxford. The sky just opened up. An east coast summer thunderstorm. Wow. Haven't seen one of those in decades.
Arrgh. DirecTV called at 5PM saying they wouldn't be here to install my dish and TiVO betw 1PM and 5PM as scheduled. They want to reschedule for a week from tomorrow. Grrr. I'm inclined to say no. If Amazon were giving out developer awards, onfocus should get one. Tim O'Reilly on Moneyball: "I'm not a big baseball fan, but this book is a revelation. Anyone in business should read it. It describes the superior results that come when you throw away what you think you know, the accepted wisdom of an industry, and rebuild your efforts around a deeper understanding of what matters in your success." Thanks to Ben Matasar for the pointer to Tim's interview. Dann Sheridan is looking for weblogs that specialize in storage issues. Storage is "one of the deepest, darkest geek sanctuaries in technology," says Dann. Two years ago: "Twenty years ago, in August 1981, the first IBM PC rolled off the assembly line and said Hello World." Young Steve Jobs in 1984. Quicktime. Economist: "Mr Mundie is unambiguously the secretary of state of the United States of Windows." AP: "Harvard Law School is planning to put more than a million documents from the Nuremberg trials on the Internet, allowing ready access to records of hearings into the war crimes of Adolf Hitler's Third Reich." Jesse Ross: Cloning a computer with free software.
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