Don Park: "Reading Dave Winer's blog these days is like watching a house being built from the inside." Heh. 

Round-trip air fare is $399 from SFO to BOS with enough time to do Day 2. At prices like this, can you afford to miss the show? Dave Sifry, Don Park, Jeremy Zawodny, you won't be sorry. Coming from Seattle? It's even cheaper! Brent Simmons and Robert Scoble, we'd just love to see your smiling faces on Day 2. You know you gotta do it.  

Chris Lydon: Another Way to Think About Wesley Clark. Must-read piece. I admit to being not impressed by Clark on Friday, I just heard a lot of easy answers to softball questions. Chris's filters kick in, he says he thinks there's something there, and a few hours later, a picture emerges. I described it to a friend like applying a PhotoShop filter to a poorly lit picture. All of a sudden you can see things that were there all along, but the contrast was all wrong. Bravo Chris, this may be the first really thoughtful piece on Clark.  

Some time in the next 24 hours I expect we'll have yet another BloggerCon announcement. This show has turned into a venue. Lovin it.  

Interesting question, a Web question. I'm hearing from my uncle's friends. There was a party for him in Negril on Thursday. There will be pictures, for sure. My mother, his sister, just wrote a story of her trip to Negril with my brother. Sounds like there's going to be a party in Crescent Beach at Ken's old house (it's still there, it turns out) on Oct 11. In other words, there's a flow of news about him, the story isn't over yet. He has a Manila site. I don't think I want to change the home page. I think I want to leave it as he left it. It's a little part of his body that's still alive. If we change it, I reason, it won't be his any more. Maybe that's silly. Should I create a weblog on his site, but keep the home page undisturbed? Hmm. A bit of a puzzle. Give it some thought, don't send email, just think, I'll ask again in a few days, maybe we'll figure this one out. There's certainly plenty of time to decide. 

I've started to work on the draft press release announcing the program for BloggerCon. I was looking for the verb. What do bloggers do when they convene? I decided the correct term is flock. The bloggers will flock. It's a nice blog-like word. Flock flock flock flock flock. I like it. 

I added the three-part interview with Cluetrain author David Weinberger to the special Lydon RSS feed. He takes us back to the foundation of the Web, the link; it's the idea and the philosophy that all our work builds on.  

Here's what it looks like when an enthusiastic supporter of a presidential candidate withdraws. It's not a pretty sight. 

RSS News Ticker looks interesting. Windows. 

Michael Feldman, the designated teacher of BloggerCon, tackles the What Is A Weblog question. 

5/23/03: "At Berkman we're studying weblogs, how they're used, and what they are. Rather than saying 'I know it when I see it' I wanted to list all the known features of weblog software, but more important, get to the heart of what a weblog is, and how a weblog is different from a Wiki, or a news site managed with software like Vignette or Interwoven." 

Saturday, September 27, 2003

A daring essay: Why they hate me. 

BloggerCon essay: It's not really piracy. 

Don Park says I'm full of shit, of course I am, but not about this, as I explain in a comment on his post. 

BloggerCon blogroll ready to roll. If you're coming on Day 2 (the free day) please register on this page to be sure to be included in the blogroll. And if you know people who are coming (who might not read this weblog) spread the word. We want to create a lasting community from this conference so having people sign up is important. 

Greenspun: "The things that I hate about Microsoft.." 

I received a glossy annual-report-style brochure from Steve Elman at WBUR, Boston's news-oriented public radio station. There isn't much financial information, but there is some. Income was approx $21 million, 50% came from listeners, 36% from corporate support, 14% from grants. Expenses were also $21 million, of which 45% was spent on news and programming, 16% on fundraising, 9% on engineering, 8% on administration, 8% on new media, 5% on corporate support, 5% for overhead, 4% for listener services. 

Irony galore. The unofficial Edwards weblog is better than the official one. The official guys turned us down. Should we invite the unofficial guys? The first question I'd ask is "Why did the official guys turn us down?" 

Dowbrigade: "Tomorrow, Sunday, from 1 to 5PM, all of the Harvard museums are open free of charge." 

Frank Paynter: "I'm bringing a toy-box to BloggerCon." 

Pictures from the Clark campaign in Henniker, NH. 

Clark: "I don't know all the answers, but I will." 

Dowbrigade has the guts to ask What if every state had an action hero governator? 

Bennington Banner: "Web sites that attack one candidate while subtly or overtly supporting another are popping up more frequently in cyberspace, tracking the sudden rise in the Internet's importance to presidential politics." 

Doug Kaye has an RSS 2.0 feed with enclosures of his interviews with Tim O'Reilly, John Hagel, Paul Bausch, Anne Thomas Manes, Cory Doctorow and others. 

Added Real Live Preacher to the Lydon RSS feed today. It also has enclosures, of course. Hey we're starting to get a (very small) installed base of interesting feeds that use the enclosures. To use these feeds you need an enclosure-aware aggregator. Talk to the developer of your favorite aggregator, if it doesn't support enclosures. It's an easy feature to add and a new source of interesting ideas for users. (BTW, there appear to be bugs in Radio's implementation of enclosures. I'll try to take a look at this before BloggerCon.) 

I interviewed a reporter yesterday, a nice turn of events, and asked him what he thought of weblogs. He said they're mostly commenting on stories in newpapers like his own. I asked what he bases this on, did he do a study, how many weblogs did he look at. When I pressed him, he said that it was Instapundit that works this way. I told him that's not what I do on Scripting News. Not only do we dig into new stuff pretty regularly, but we also create new formats and protocols, far beyond anything done by the IT people at his newspaper, and we deploy them, and evangelize them, and then move on to the next thing. I don't think he was actually very impressed.  

Paul Krugman webcast at UC Berkeley School of Journalism. 

Friday, September 26, 2003

New BloggerCon speakers confirmed: Eric Folley, Democratic National Committee; James Taranto, Wall Street Journal; Len Apcar, New York Times; Jeff Jarvis, Advance Publications, Dan Gillmor, San Jose Mercury News. Folley is the director of Internet operations for the DNC, and is responsible for Kicking Ass, their weblog, reviewed below. Taranto edits the Opinion Journal best-of-the-web. Apcar is the editor in chief of NYTimes.Com. Jarvis manages the online presence of Advance Publications, which includes Condé Naste and several newspapers. Gillmor, who needs no introduction to readers of Scripting News, is a technology columnist, and was one of the first users of Manila in 1999. Taranto and Apcar will discuss the value of editing, a hot topic in the blogging world. Folley will particpate in the Day 1 presidential politics panel, and Jarvis will lead the Day 2 discussion about presidential politics along with Dan Gillmor, Ed Cone and several others we've invited who have not yet confirmed.  

Jon Udell: "Folks who consume news by way of blogs are likelier to be exposed to primary sources than folks who rely on conventional news sources." 

Don Park: "If I get run over by a herd of pigs in my dream, I am going to buy some lottery tickets as my way of saying I got the damn message!" 

Megnut is at the MIT Emerging Technology conference. What a contrast between their website and the BloggerCon site. I like ours better, of course.  

Oy. I wanted to send a message of compliment to the bloggers at Democrat.Org and ask them if they wanted to be part of BloggerCon. So I used their web form. First problem, they ask for my mailing address. Uhhh. Why? Second, I get a confirming email that accuses me of being a Democrat and asks me to be part of some network of Democrats who want to elect Democrats to every office there is. I'm not a Democrat. There's some real serious cluelessness over there. On the other hand, the person who's doing their blog posts is a star. Jesse Berney? I love the fact that they took us behind the scenes into the spin room at last night's debate. That's what bloggers are supposed to do. Give us a sense of what it's like to be there. Observe and report. Skip all the bullshit that you get on network TV and NPR.  

BloggerCon will be webcast.  

Rogers Cadenhead reports on an analyst who apparently was fired for criticizing Microsoft. 

Andrew: "The BloggerCon infrastructure session is starting to come together." 

Wendy asks if BloggerCon badges should show the URL of your weblog or the name of your weblog? 

Description of the last session on Day 2. Remember, Day 2 is free. Spread the word.  

Lunch suggestions for Day 2 people. 

NY Times reports that Dell is going into consumer electronics, with a portable music player, online music service and flat panel TVs. 

Ever get a song into your head that just won't leave no matter how nicely you ask? Such a song: "He’s a one boy cuddly toy, my up, my down, my pride and joy." 

Uncle update. The autopsy results are in. He died of a heart attack. A massive one. Killed his heart, then everything else died. I wonder if such a heart attack leaves you conscious. Do you know you won't come back? Is the pain excruciating. Then I read that rock star Robert Palmer, only 54, died yesterday of a heart attack. And on this day in 2002, a famous programmer, Bob Wallace, died suddenly. Two quotes come to mind. One from Woody Allen. "It's not that I'm afraid to die, I just don't want to be there when it happens." An argument for good drugs. Laughing so hard, I forgot the other quote. Sorry. 

Woody Allen: "How can I believe in God when just last week I got my tongue caught in the roller of an electric typewriter?" 

I have to write a BloggerCon essay about the term "piracy." It'll go something like this. As long as the music industry labels all use of music on the Internet as piracy, and as long as pubs like the NY Times go along with this, the "problem" will never be solved. The music industry is insisting on a moral principle that they don't hold themselves to, that musicians should be paid for their work. They need to clean their house first, and that's going to mean disclaiming ownership of some of their supposed property, and deciding what they want to be paid for, and then asking for (and maybe receiving) help from the online community, in much the same way the US presidential candidates are. The music industry is going over our heads (by going to Washington), and under (by suing users), but the solution is here. First, give up trying to control the old music. We understand that there was no money in this anyway. Don't give up the copyrights, so if the music is used for commercial purposes, like in ad jingles or public radio pledge drives, you can charge your license fees. Then let the Internet have them to distribute and listen to for free, without fear of a lawsuit. Watch carefully to see what happens. We might not need to go to war anymore. Music is that powerful. Specifically exclude the new stuff, the stuff you're making money on, and provide proof that the artists are getting a share of the profits. Having done this, you may get some leaders on the Internet to agree to calling ripoffs of that stuff piracy. More in a bit, after some coffee. 

Thursday, September 25, 2003

Happiness is a new Chris Lydon interview, with Cornel West. Chris and I are going to see Wesley Clark tomorrow in Henniker, NH. And it appears that Clark has a blogmaster, and it's someone we know. I hate to tease, but then, well, I love to tease.  

Reminder to aggregator developers working with enclosures, here's the test feed.  

Daniel Drezner is "offering a scholarly paper, during the draft process, for public comment, on the political impact of blogs, with a fellow named Henry Farrell," said Ryan Overbey. "It's very exciting stuff," he continued. 

Quotes from tonight's debate from the Democratic weblog. 

100 days of Dowbrigade. Natural Born Blogger. 

Checking in on the Wesley Clark campaign, it's been a week since he entered the race, and we don't have an official blogger. According to Daily Kos, the Clark campaign is trying to disband the grass roots blogs. Seems like a mistake to me, that was the most exciting thing about Clark. I was interviewed yesterday by one of the major TV networks, Newsweek is sending a senior political analyst. The NY Times is sending two people, one a reporter covering the event. We've got the venue for the presidential bloggers. Clark, if you can figure out who's doing your weblog, he or she would be totally welcome. Same with Bush, Kucinich, and any of the candidates who currently don't have blogs. We have confirmations from Dean and Graham. Turndowns from Kerry and Edwards (the door's still open). And if anyone is up for a road trip to see Clark tomorrow (see below) let me know. 

NHPolitics.Com: Wesley Clark is doing a Town Hall Meeting at Simon Hall, New England College, Henniker, 6:30PM tomorrow. 

Ed Cone: "Journalists were banned from today's annual meeting of Cone Mills." 

Four years ago today: Dave's History of SOAP. 

Derek Willis disputes some of what I've said about public radio, agrees with some.  

Scoble is definitely full of shit today. I don't see evil, and my disk is full (of shit), so it seems like it's time to start cleaning out the temp files. And geez Louise, how would an ordinary user know these files even exist. So many Microsoft people take even the appearance of criticism as condemnation. Get a sense of perspective. My software has bugs too. Sheez. 

Replay Radio is an "incredibly easy way to record radio broadcasts. It's like a VCR for the radio." Sounds perfect. 

Essay: When someone close dies. 

Today's song: "Some say my uncle, that he's a zero." 

BBC: Net guru peers into web's future. 

National Public Radio is not very public 

They like to say "you own the station," it's one of the big marketing pitches, but it's not true. There's very little to distinguish a public radio station from commercial one. The major difference is the business model. NPR stations sell subscriptions and commercial stations don't. But the distinction is fading because public radio stations are running more commercial-like spots all the time. See the bit about conference sponsorships earlier this week. The NPR stations don't disclaim or disclose much, so it's reasonable to assume that they sell speaking spots too, stuff that sounds like editorial but is really commercial.

Streaming is a form of copy protection 

There's very little talk-radio type stuff, BBC, or NPR programming, that's available in MP3 format. Yet there's this incredible growing installed base of players that can play MP3s. Time-shifting of audio, news and comment, click and clack, should be flowing out this way, and were it not for the fears of the broadcasters, it would. See item #1 for a clue why NPR stations aren't taking advantage of this. The BBC, if I correctly understand their model, should distribute through MP3 and the Internet, and RSS enclosures. I bet there are some good connections between Harvard and the BBC. I'll explore that after BloggerCon, unless someone from the BBC would care to participate in the conference? Anyway, Chris Lydon's stuff is far and away the best content flowing in MP3 that I found yesterday when I asked for pointers. He's more of a pioneer than I realized.

Nothing temporary about temporary files 

While I was writing this the operating system informed me that I had run out of space on Drive C, my system drive. That was surprising because I had gone through a cleanup routine just a few days ago. I had no more obvious places to go to get back space, so it was time to run my Find Large Files script. This time it didn't find much that I could delete, but I watched as it ran, it showed me the names of thousands and thousands of files I couldn't find browsing around the file system. Then I realized -- they must be hidden files. In a deeply nested sub-folder of Documents and Settings called Temp. I flipped the bit and sure enough there they were. The thousands of one-pixel gif web bugs, and all the Shockwaves, gigabytes of them, that I had looked at since I bought this computer many months ago. In other words Windows just consumes disk space. I wonder if Microsoft bought some stock in one of the disk drive makers. This is just appalling. How is a regular user supposed to find these files? Why should they have to? As we use MP3 more and more, do we need to write some utilities for people that make their systems perform better? (BTW, I'm sure Scoble will say "That's fixed in Longhorn.")

Wednesday, September 24, 2003

New Manila feature: Mail-to-Weblog. 

MedicineNet.Com unveils over 1000 new fabulous totally not-funky RSS 2.0 feeds. Very nice. Thanks! Via LibraryStuff. 

Harold Bloom: "The decision to give the National Book Foundation's annual award for distinguished contribution to Stephen King is extraordinary, another low in the shocking process of dumbing down our cultural life." 

Bloom is in the Lydon archive in three parts. Great stuff.  

Scott Rosenberg: "Scanning the blogs this morning I came across an interesting dustup between Glenn Reynolds and Josh Marshall. Since I'm sharing a panel with them at BloggerCon next week this naturally caught my eye." 

Mike Lockwood tells the story of his last day at Apple working on the Dylan project. And there's a list of Apple history stories told by Apple insiders. A gold mine of now-it-can-be-tolds.  

Here's a serious question. Is anyone else doing Lydon-style interviews? I'd settle for the BBC World News available in MP3 form. I'm all caught up on the Lydon interviews and I want to go for a walk. I'm looking for news shows that are distributed over the Internet in MP3 format. Any clues? 

Eugene Volokh is the latest confirmed presenter. He will lead a Day 2 discussion on weblogs and law. Chris interviewed Volokh, who is now a visiting professor at Harvard Law School. 

Three years ago today, OPML 1.0. 

Cornell Daily Sun: "Between 50 and 100 Cornell students gathered on Ho Plaza for the University's first-ever flash mob." 

Glenn Reynolds is now part of the special Lydon RSS feed. 

Screen shot of Radio's enclosure prefs page. 

Disclaimer: My friend and Harvard associate Chris Lydon is a former WBUR star.  

I'm listening to the WBUR pledge drive this morning. I paid them $120 in April, a generous amount according to the station. So I listen to the pledge drive guilt-free. They say we get both sides of the story on WBUR, but then I just realized, we don't, they don't explain how they spend our money. This morning Jane Christo, the general manager of the station, is pitching us. How do I call in and ask questions on the air? How much salary does Ms Christo draw? How many execs are there at WBUR and what are their salaries? And how about the talent, how much of my money do they get? I suspect that public radio in the US is like most other industries, execs control the money, and get most of it, and don't do very much for it.  

A search for "Christo" on wbur.org returns no matches. The navigation system on the website appears to have no information about the management of the station or its finances. I admit to being a neophyte here. What reporting responsibilities do public radio stations have? How open do they have to be?  

I'm trying to reach Ms Christo by phone right now. I explained the purpose of my call to the receptionist. I've paid up. I'm listening to Christo pitch us, saying in general terms how much it costs to provide the news, and I'd like to know how much she costs us. I asked to be transferred to the studio so I could ask her myself. The phone has been ringing, but there's no answer. I think I got transferred into the bit bucket. I called back, and she said "They didn't pick up at the studio." Okay I knew that. So she transferred me to the assistant general manager. He said he has to go on the air in four minutes and asked for my number, which I gave him. I suggested we could talk about this on the air, and he laughed. I said I was serious about it. Personally, I think all WBUR subscribers would find the answer to the questions about station finances very interesting. It also seems the management doesn't want to discuss this.  

I then called the official pledge line, 800-909-9287, and talked with one of the volunteers. I asked for an accounting of how my money is spent, she said she didn't know if it was available. I asked if she'd be interested in seeing it, and she said yes. That's one of the cool things about putting volunteers on the phone, since they aren't getting paid, they're not scared of the truth. You can call too, but I'd recommend only doing so if you've already contributed to WBUR, or are seriously considering it. You can also call your local NPR station and ask the same questions.  

Enclosure Extractor allows you "to easily extract and download enclosures from newsfeeds." 

BBC: "MSN is closing all its chatrooms in Europe, the Middle East, Latin America and most of Asia from 14 October, and changing the way others are operated globally." 

Tuesday, September 23, 2003

Chris Lydon has been doing a series of audio interviews on his weblog at Harvard. There are already over 25 interviews, representing 40 separate MP3 files. The archive is nearly 300MB. It's a perfect application for RSS enclosures. 

BloggerCon essay: Groundrules for BloggerCon. 

BloggerCon essay: Questions for Presidential Candidates. 

Day 2 session: Medicine and Weblogs. 

Mark Glaser: "Should news sites edit their blogs?" 

Bob Doyle will record BloggerCon on video and audio. 

A cheat sheet explains how to kill your Sims. 

News.Com: "A federal jury has convicted a Florida man of violating the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, in the first jury-trial conviction under the controversial law." 

AP: "Democrat Wesley Clark, in the presidential race for less than a week, is tied with President Bush in a head-to-head matchup." 

Tim Bray explains the economics of conferences, books, TV, etc. As we tried to sell sponsorships in BloggerCon, I learned the same thing. People expect to get something very specific in return for their money. We tried saying that we'll find an appropriate (unspecified) way to thank the sponsors for their contribution, but that wasn't good enough, they wanted speaking slots, and I said no way. This is a conference about weblogs -- largely a non-commercial medium where the authenticity of the voice is what matters. No shills. So we're making due with a less-fancy lunch, and I'm going to pay for the Friday night party out of my personal savings (along with Adam Curry). We'll have a great conference and no one will have to worry which talks are ads and which are the real talks, they're all real.  

BTW, I included the Diet Pepsi picture to blow your mind. They didn't pay me to put it there. I added it because I like the product. Nothing more than that. 

I'm trawling for BloggerCon essays. I've already written four and am outlining more. If there's an issue you want to be part of the discussion at the conference, whether or not you will be there in person, now's a good time to start thinking, and in the next few days, writing. Let's add your passion to the agenda at next month's conference. 

According to The Command Post, Wesley Clark would have been a Republican if Karl Rove had returned his calls. 

Scott Rosenberg: "How dare they? What do they think this is, a democracy?" 

Glenn Reynolds: "If you want to know, in a nutshell, why Old Media is in trouble, this is it." 

Can you believe it -- there are weblogs that turn away traffic based on referrer. This is bad practice. These people seriously need to take a refresher course in what the Web is about and how important links are and stop screwing around with them. I won't read sites that do this, and I certainly won't point to them. You should let the authors of the sites know that you won't either. If they don't want to be linked to, just take the site off the Web. 

Monday, September 22, 2003

BloggerCon essay: Paul Krugman and Lies. 

Rogers Cadenhead: "XML-RPC does everything I'd use RMI for, without the hassle over stubs, skeletons, registries, and binding." 

Wendy Koslow on BloggerCon dress code and parking. 

Political Wire: Clark and Kerry beat Bush in new poll. 

The Democratic National Committee has a kickass weblog. 

Fredrick Marckini: The Coming Search Engine War. 

E&P: Newspapers Try 'Really Simple Syndication'. 

The Berkman server is getting Slashdotted. Usually it's not a problem, but the combination of Monday, the Greenspun name, and him calling Java the SUV of programming tools was too much for our humble server. Caching helped a lot. 

Sunday, September 21, 2003

BloggerCon essay: The Spirit of the Web. 

The Internet Archive has video of Chris Lydon's interview on Friday with Paul Krugman. I listened to it today, it's great stuff. Makes me proud to know Chris. I found out about it through the RSS feed that the Internet Archive provides. 

NY Times review of Aretha at Radio City. 

News.Com: ICANN asks VeriSign to pull redirect service. 

People are buzzing about calendars and RSS. Adam Curry and Marcus Mauller were the pioneers here. Use the search engines guys. RSS isn't that new. Most of the ideas being talked about now have ample prior art, with docs, and implementations. Just ask. Lots of solved problems.  

BTW, I can't wait till Chris meets Adam on Oct 4. Sparks are going to fly between those two minds. Hoo boy. Stand back. Look out.  

Listening to Ed Cone and Chris Lydon talking about Howard Dean and Wesley Clark. Chris asks: Ed is this the beginning of a fight or a courtship? Ed: Don't know how long you've been out of the dating market Chris. Chuckles.  

Mike Clough: Hurtles ahead for Dean. 

Press release: "Oliver Willis announced his candidacy for the presidency today." 

In honor of my uncle, I killed all the characters in my current Sims house. I built a tiny little room, told them all to go into it, and sealed it off. No door, no windows, no food, no place to sleep, nothing. After a few days they died. The house is still there, seems to be fine without them. I'm going to let it run for a while and see what happens. I'll let you know. 

It's strange that I ordered three bittersweet movies from Netflix before I knew there would be a death in the family. On Golden Pond, Driving Miss Daisy, and today's Glengarry Glen Ross, which is a lot better than I remembered. All-star cast. All three are sad tales, real heart-grabbers. The previous three movies were different: The Matrix, Lord of the Rings and Amadeus. 

Greg Reinacker: RSS and MIME types. 

Steve Gillmor is full of shit; as is Derek Powazek (And if history is a guide Powazek will be complaining about this link well into the next milennium.) Also, Scoble is full of shit, and if I know Scoble he'll be bragging about it for decades.  

The shit parade continues with John Robb, who thinks blogs don't matter in RSS space. He must not be paying attention to US presidential politics.  

A reader's guide to shit-fullness. I wouldn't say someone was full of shit if I didn't think there was some value to their bullshit. Remember the rule I have about links. "A link on Scripting News means that I thought that the story was interesting, and felt that an informed person would want to consider the point of view expressed in the piece."  

The Obsolete Computer Museum uses RSS 2.0. 

The Trademark Blog reports that the owners of the Dewey Decimal System are suing a NYC hotel for trademark infringement. A must-read.  

Not sure if Verizon has solved the problem or not. This morning the net is unbelievably slow. Maybe it's not just me. Meanwhile, reality is sinking in, in a new way. Probating an estate in Jamaica, that's going to be some kind of treat. Not. After all the outages, and with BloggerCon coming up, it's cool that I have a brother to deal with the first couple of weeks. After BloggerCon I'm pretty free. In the meantime, if you know a good lawyer in Jamaica, let me know.  

I still have more work to do on the schedule of BloggerCon, and we still have to get leaflets for Day 2 posted all over Harvard and MIT, but now my attention is going to turn to writing. Chris Lydon says he thinks it's kind of like a constitutional convention. Maybe so. Is there a chance to do some writing that gets on the record in a new way? Perhaps. 

Saturday, September 20, 2003

Chris Lydon interviews NY Times columnist Paul Krugman. 

Earlier this year, Terry Fisher, the director of Berkman Center, outlined a proposal that would flow money to the recording industry by taxing Internet usage and devices used to record and play back music. While I think the proposal is brilliant, I also think it's unworkable because it's unfair.  

Brian Buck: "People use the word friend too casually, but the counterpoint to that is that is that people use the term family too strictly."  

Press release: "The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and the New York City Department of Education today announced a $51.2 million effort that will support the creation of 67 new small, challenging high schools." 

A new more complete rendition of the BloggerCon blogroll. 

Essay: What is friendship? 

More -- what happens when friends are full of shit? 

Speaking of people who could be friends who are full of shit -- today Joi Ito sings a well-sung but false song about Microsoft screwing with nascent standards. Joi, in RSS-land, MS is playing fair and square, so far (and so are AOL and Yahoo, btw). The people who are pissing in the soup are people you don't have the guts to criticize. You're in their blogroll, they're in yours. Dig deeper dear Joi, really disassemble the lunacy of our little world, and do what you can to unravel it. Then, when and if Microsoft screws with us, you'll have some credibility. Right now you haven't got a leg to stand on.  

Three years ago today: What is P2P? 

Last year on this day Morning Coffee Notes re-appear. 

Jon Udell: "Doing more with less is the theme of Michael Lewis’ terrific new book, Moneyball." 

Verizon economics 

BTW, the 1.5 week outage, it turns out, was Verizon's fault. It took four multi-hour phone conversations to convince them that the problem was on their end. In each of the first three conversations they said the issue was closed. One time they thought it was a problem with my Linksys router, another time, a problem with my email service provider.

All the while there was a short on their wire, and a quick test they can run to prove it. According to their economics, the time of an employee and a customer is much less valuable than the time of a diagnostic device. I can understand (somewhat) they're throwing out my time, but what about the people they're paying to support customers? Even if they worked in Bangalore (they don't, I asked) it would still be diseconomic, it seems.

A throwback to the time of punch cards and mainframes when computer time was more expensive than human time, but I thought we crossed over that line a long time ago.

Friday, September 19, 2003

Bad news in the family. My uncle died yesterday in Negril, Jamaica. We don't know the cause. It was very sudden, unexpected, totally sad. Some thoughts here. 

Marc Canter: "I'll be lighting one up for him tonight." 

Betsy Devine welcomes BloggerConners to Cambridge. 

NY Times: "He has missed the summer trifecta of local Democratic politics: visiting the butter cow at the Iowa State Fair, marching in the Labor Day Parade in Des Moines and appearing at Senator Tom Harkin's annual steak fry in a balloon field." 

Matt Gross appears on JOHO tonight. 

Andrew Grumet: "Free your mind, and your weblog will follow." 

Thanks to Martin Schwimmer for the link to We Like The Moon. 

Verizon finally came out and the problem was a short between the house and the station, so they gave me a new line and said everything should be fine now. If you can read this at least it's fine now. Fingers crossed, praise Murphy, and still diggin. 

Ahoy mateys. Piracy is legal today. Arrr. 

Dr Vaughan: "I'm not doing this to save money. I'm doing this because the music industry doesn't give me what I want." 

They're talking about RSS in Latvia. 

Philip Greenspun compares the budget of Hamas, an effective Middle East terrorist organization, with compensation package for William Grasso, former chief of the NYSE. 

Thursday, September 18, 2003

Nico MacDonald: The Future of Weblogging. 

Photo of Hurricane Isabel from the space station. 

Day 1: Weblogs in Journalism. 

Day 1: Weblogs in Presidential Politics. 

Notes from tonight's weblog writers meeting at Berkman. 

Highly recommended: Political Wire weblog. 

Elizabeth Spiers: "New York Mag made me an offer and a few details have to be worked out, but it looks like I'm going to take it." She will still headline at BloggerCon. 

Jenny Levine: "Is there a moblog set up for BloggerCon?" 

Best of luck to people in the path of Hurricane Isabel.  

Roderick Nordell: "Pollsters keep asking people to split hairs on how interested they are -- very, somewhat, not, or don't know -- in inescapable matters like the economy and healthcare. Perhaps we'd have more confidence if you and I defined the questions and multiple choices." 

Roger Simon: "Clark came off as a civilized and well-spoken fellow." 

News.Com profile of Doug Engelbart. 

Wired: "VeriSign's controversial 'typo-squatting' Site Finder service is about to be bypassed by an emergency software patch to many of the Internet's backbone computers." 

Chris Lydon interviews Joe Conason, Doc Searls, Ed Cone and Josh Marshall on the candidacy of Wesley Clark. 

NY Times: "The problem you have getting in this late is you have no field troops, you have no ground operation," said Bill Dal Col, who ran Steve Forbes's campaign for the Republican nomination in 1996 and 2000. "Without the troops, it doesn't matter how good your logistics and planning are." 

News.Com interviews RIAA president Cary Sherman. 

Wednesday, September 17, 2003

Sign up here for the blogroll for BloggerCon. 

Unnamed source: "Bush's campaign manager announced in a private meeting this afternoon that the campaign will have an official blog to be launched next week." 

The question came up if we would welcome a Republican blogger-in-chief at BloggerCon, and the answer is an enthusiastic Yes! Of course. BloggerCon is non-partisan and will not endorse a candidate or a party. Our only interest is in the use of weblogs in all aspects of politics, business, education, science, basically everything. This year the use of blogs in politics is front and center. We can all learn from each other as the candidates compete for votes. Voters can have blogs too. The more the merrier. 

I'm almost caught up on the Lydon interviews. Today was Joi Ito Day. The only bit of controversy in his talk, as far as I'm concerned, is his belief that the great coders of the blogging world are in their teens and twenties. Pfui. Ito is 37. Wishful thinking? Now that I'm pushing 50, I've learned something all over again, a guideline of my teens and twenties, with a minor caveat, from a new point of view. Never trust anyone over 30 (and under 40).  

Josh Allen's list of Microsoft bloggers, in OPML. 

Jason Levine is searching for NY bagels in Brookline. 

Elaine of Kalilily on Art Interludes at BloggerCon, an idea we're kind of running out of time on. I'm still game if artists want to use our environment to innovate. 

BBC: Clark enters White House race. 

Nick Denton: "Google text ads will give blogs a business model; but they'll also warp the format." 

Four OPML files generated from the blogroll app: People attending Day 1, Day 2, both days and either day. 

Something not to worry about: Entering your information more than once. That's cool. You're allowed to make changes.  

A test version of the blogroll in a web page. It should update approximately once an hour. Still needs some work.  

Ben Adida: "Today, we have the technology to cheaply deliver any piece of music ever recorded to your car, stereo, or portable music player within seconds. Why isn't it happening?" 

Zeldman asks the question no one dared ask, did Microsoft want to lose the browser patent case? Postscript: Vincent Flanders dared to ask. 

The Democratic National Committee has a weblog, and it supports RSS. 

Apparently I'm one of the 25 most innovative this year.  

Jacob Reider posted a description for the Medicine and Research Day 2 session. 

Word pirates. "Marketers, politicians and other short-sighted, self-interested, sticky-fingered people have been stealing our words. Not only do they take them for commercial purposes, but they misuse them entirely." 

Wesley Clark has an official campaign website. 

Apparently the official Clark weblog is the one we pointed to yesterday.  

Brigham Young University has an RSS news feed. 

USA Today: Edwards upstaged on his big day. 

Joshua Allen: "My Boss Has a Blog!" 

Wired: "Clark apparently decided to run following an elaborate Internet-based draft movement that grew on its own, without much help from the candidate himself." 

Lots of new stuff on the NH political calendar. 

Comment notification in Manila.  

Creative Computing review of ThinkTank from 1983.  

Two years ago today the stock market re-opened. 

This morning my home DSL is fast. And tempting. But I didn't go for it. I drove to the office, got a couple of cups of coffee on the way, got a parking spot right in front of Berkman on Mass Ave, and I'm getting ready to do some long-delayed programming work. We need an easy registration page for Day 2 of BloggerCon so we can see who's coming. I'm on it boss! 

9/17/97: "I forgive you now, and always, unconditionally." 

Tuesday, September 16, 2003

Tom Tomorrow: Clear-eyed Conservative Realists. 

Blog Graham says it's not enough to be a general. "When Perot ran for president he was eaten alive by the press." 

6PM: Knock on wood, my home DSL is working, very well. It's super fast. It feels like a strong wind is at my back. Pray for my DSL. And Praise Murphy! 

Comment notification for Radio is released. 

Orlowski asks if Google is the only archive we'll ever need. 

Microdoc News: "Type in the word blogs into any search engine and what would you expect the first site to appear in the resulting listing?" The author says that Google tampers with search results. I wouldn't go that far. I do think there are bugs in their algorithm. For example, I'd love to know why the first hit in a search for weblog is the Google Weblog. That search looks like a human tampered with it. 

Steve Kirks suggests a new Elements of Style for weblogs. 

Tom Bradford likes XML-RPC 

Beautiful satellite picture of Hurricane Isabel. 

Betsy Devine calls for "poster sessions" at BloggerCon. 

Here's an Edwards weblog that is not part of the official campaign, but looks pretty damn good.  

CNN: Clark to enter presidential race. "He's made his decision and will announce it tomorrow in Little Rock," said Mark Fabiani, a spokesman for Clark. 

When Clark announces, we will immediately want to know where his weblog is, and who's running it so we can invite them to participate in the presidential campaign weblogs session on Day 1 of BloggerCon. Here's a hint. 

Zawodny: Verisign is Pure Evil. 

If you have an idea for BloggerCon, and many people do, please -- instead of sending me an email, post it on the BloggerCon site. Too many things are waiting for me, and there's often no need for that. Here's a how to that explains how to post something on the site. From there anyone can point to it (including me). Let's use the Web whenever possible. My email isn't working very well. See below. 

Next programming project -- a new RSS feed with enclosures for the Lydon interviews. One every couple of days for the next few weeks, and then updated whenever Chris posts a new interview. This should be the chicken that lays the egg that finally bootstraps enclosures in RSS aggregators. So far (as far as I know) only Radio supports enclosures, and it doesn't do it very well. Chris's interviews are the perfect application for enclosures. All of a sudden Chris is interested, thanks to a post by Adam Curry. How can we increase the utility of these fantastic interviews? I'm on a mission. 

10:40AM -- here's the feed. The first two interviews are Joi Ito and Matt Gross. Now to do the writeup. 

9:40AM. Oy I had another Internet outage. It was looking really good for about an hour this morning but then it just went out, so I'm at the office, still trying to start my week. Thanks for bearing with me on this. Phew. 

I'm still catching up on the Lydon interviews. Yesterday I listened to David Sifry's interview. It seems to me Dave bends over backwards to offend no one, so much so that he says ridiculous things. He argues with passion, over Lydon's objections, that the professional editorial process does things that the blogosphere can't. I don't think he's right about that. Having been edited myself, for a brief period, I can tell you for sure that some writers do better without editors, like yours truly. If you're saying something precise, and you mean it, there's nothing worse than an editor who knows bupkis correcting you so the readers will understand, and along the way changing what you said so that it no longer reflects what you think. I prefer a few spelling errors and awkward sentences. But Sifry says blogs at best are commentary, not news. I think Dave should do some of the fact-checking the blogosphere is so famous for. We do indeed report facts on weblogs, as much as they do in the professional press, where I regularly read fiction posing as fact. For example, yesterday in the venerable NY Times I learned that Clay Shirky is a software developer. Huh? He's a commentator. Now I wonder if Clay told them he was a developer and they didn't check it out, or if it was a misunderstanding and they didn't bother to ask Clay if he was a developer. Either way, as we know well, such an error wouldn't last very long on a well-read weblog. 

Michael Feldman requests feedback on his outline for the Weblog For Beginners sessions on Day 2 at BloggerCon. I asked him to grab the ball not just because he's a newbie, but also because he's a teacher, and he groks blogs, and is passionate about it. And he's also a really nice guy and I could imagine liking learning from him, so it's easy for me to imagine that others would too. 

Scott Rosenberg: "If u cn rd ths msg u r jst lke vryne lse!" 

Monday, September 15, 2003

Boston Herald: Blogs offer peeks inside small firms. 

Due Diligence: Intraspect Software is sold. 

Paolo: "Are free weblogs good for the Internet?" 

Jon Udell: Email's special power. 

NY Times: "Some musicians say they are beginning to wonder if the actions being taken in their name are a little extreme." 

Michael Feldman: Approaching Critical Mass. 

JY Stervinou sends a pointer to Archive.Org's excellent not-funky RSS feed of recent additions to the archive. Nice use of the Creative Commons module. Subscribed.  

Good morning sports fans. News from the home DSL front. Now Verizon acknowledges that there's a problem. I consider that progress. The line is totally not working, no Internet at home. Found a great parking spot right on the Commons. My to-do list is overflowing. My cold has returned. BloggerCon starts in about three weeks. Hehe. Let's have fun. 

Sunday, September 14, 2003

Six years ago today: Fractional Horsepower HTTP Servers. 

John Palfrey is using weblogs in his Harvard Law School class this semester. 

Lots of discussion on mail lists, weblogs and wikis about making RSS work. That's good. I want to see the second half of Postel's Law apply, there should be less variability in the RSS people produce, making it easier for aggregator developers, and allowing them to spend more effort on improving the user experience rather than debating the merits of many different ways of doing the same thing. Also Google has adjusted to the move of the RSS 2.0 spec to Berkman, it's once again at the top of the results page for RSS. It has the URL wrong, but that's not a big problem since we redirect from the URL they have to the correct one. We changed the title of the page so it stands out better in the Google searches. All part of making things work better without ripping up the pavement. 

Saturday, September 13, 2003

Interesting to see Brent work on how to handle permalinks vs links in RSS feeds in NetNewsWire. Radio's aggregator always displays the content of the link if it's present. The permalink, if it's present is displayed linked to a purple pound sign in the right margin, below the POST button. A screen shot illustrates. The theory is that if there are two links in the feed, two links should be displayed. Works perfectly.  

The Dalai Lama is in town. Michael Feldman says he's a Natural Born Blogger.  

Here you go -- the next Halley Suitt series.  

Chris Lydon interview with Matt Gross, Howard Dean's Blogger-In-Chief. 

Until we get the home DSL problems solved there are going to be limited updates on Scripting News, and it'll be hard to reach me on email. Sorry. It's been a long time since I had such poor connectivity. Verizon is totally no help at all. 

Friday, September 12, 2003

Ray Ozzie believes he has non-patented prior art for Eolas. 

Jeremy Zawodny has some good ideas on advancing discovery in RSS using OPML. This is something the aggregator developers should get together on. We need to agree on how to add hierarchy to the OPML we generate and consume.  

Scott Rosenberg's Seybold report. 

The patent meltdown we've been warning about is coming home to Web designers. It's virtually impossible to work with patent-holders like Eolas who don't market products and don't have customers, but we can hit other patent abusers in the pocket-book, and not let up until they use their power in Washington to change the law about software and business process patents. In other words, we are not powerless. 

7/24/00: "The Internet which you and I use was built out of an open sharing of ideas. By erecting barriers, as Amazon has, and being aggressive about it, they are milking a cash cow they didn't create." 

Ethan Zuckerman: "I find I'm being drawn kicking and screaming into the world of blogging." 

Diego Doval: Simplicity applied. 

PDC Bloggers is "a community of developers blogging their thoughts and experiences of the Microsoft Professional Developers Conference." For me, the amazing thing is how much of my technology they're using. If you had showed me this site two years ago I never would have believed it. However I gotta say there's quite a bit of funk in some of those feeds. This is what I worry about, a lot -- Microsoft reinventing the formats we use and then turning them to dust. To be clear, I also worry about IBM, Google and SixApart, although it's less fashionable to do so. 

An Instapundit-friendly version of xml.rss.compileService, for Radio and Frontier, for adventurous souls only. It fixes Radio's aggregator so it works with the funk you'll find in my friend Glenn's feed.  

Andrew Grumet has an "even non-funkier RSS 2 template for Movable Type." 

Chris Locke: "Mama don't let your babies grow up to be bloggers." 

My DSL at home is on the fritz (it doesn't work) so I went into the office this morning at 7AM where the connectivity is excellent. I thought, okay, here's a new routine, when I go home I won't be able to get online. Maybe that won't be so bad. Then I thought, maybe I should just move into the office. Then I remembered that Richard Stallman used to live at Berkman. I had just read a bit I wrote about Stallman three years ago. Small universe. 

I was thinking about The Romantic Web last year on this day, not The Semantic Web. Big difference.  

Lisa Williams: "I just downloaded all the files, via my cable-modem connection to the Internet and it took about as long as it takes for me to take a shower and eat a cheese sandwich." 

Three years ago: "Everything is always changing." 

Heads up -- we're going to publish the attendee list for BloggerCon. If you have signed up for Day 1 and don't want to be listed, please send me an email. We're going to list name, affiliation (company, school, etc) and a link to your weblog. We will not publish email addresses. Think of it as a blogroll for the conference. We're also going to have a way for people to optionally register for Day 2, so others can know in advance that you're going to be there. 

Lots of new campaign appearances on PoliticsNH.com. 

Former Apple marketing exec, 1987-97: "We told ourselves that our core competency was designing user interfaces, but actually we were better at designing T-shirts and org charts." 

Betsy Devine: Baffling blogware wars. 

Johnny Cash and John Ritter die. 71 and 54. 

Second OJR web pioneer roundtable. 

Thursday, September 11, 2003

Joe Jones from Blog Graham will join Matt Gross (Dean For America) on the US presidential campaign weblogs Day 1 session. Had another talk with the Edwards people, left the door wide open. Still trying to contact Kerry and Kucinich. Any others with blogs? Contacted today by Clark supporters.  

8/18/03: Pictures from Bob Graham talk in Manchester. 

Andrew Grumet is recruiting for the Day 2 infrastructure session. 

Lessig: The BBC's Lessons for America. 

Interesting discussion on Ed Cone's blog about the Edwards campaign and BloggerCon.  

The Thursday night meeting at Berkman is on. 

In the evening of Day 1 we're having a reception at Norton's Woods at American Academy of Arts and Sciences. 

Heads-up, my RSS feed is not being updated today. I know. I'm working off-site today, and there's a configuration problem on my laptop. 

On this day two years ago, in an act of terrorism, two planes deliberately crashed into the World Trade Center in NYC, destroying it, and killing over 3000 people. Another plane crashed into the Pentagon. A fourth went down in rural Pennsylvania, an act of great heroism and self-sacrifice by the passengers on board. In no way minimizing the suffering and grief caused by the crashes, it was also a day of incredible growth for the weblog world, and emphasized the need to continue to develop decentralized communication systems that route effectively around outages. 

Highly recommended: Chris Lydon's interview with Elaine Scarry, for a perspective on the heroism of the citizens of 9-11. They were more effective than the Pentagon, on less notice, on a much tighter budget. It'll give you an idea of the kind of defense we're buying with all those trillions of dollars.  

Good morning. A second US presidential campaign has accepted our offer to participate on Day 1. The announcement and writeup will come later today. 

Also, the Day 1 education panel is complete. Jenny Levine, The Shifted Librarian, will participate. Excellent. I still have to get writeups for all the Day 1 panels. But things are starting to finalize. Is it soup yet? Almost!  

Wednesday, September 10, 2003

Chris Lydon interviews Joi Ito. 

NY Times: "Reva Renee Renz, a Republican candidate in the California recall race, keeps a running account of her campaign in a weblog." 

An informal place to announce BOFs for the One Big BOF on Day 2 at 9AM in Pound 201. 

One thing's for sure, once you've blogged a candidate appearance, even just one, you start listening more carefully to news reports about the election. Things are interesting that weren't interesting before. Rule #182: Blogging breeds involvement. Now, of course I have an idea that may force us to add another day to BloggerCon -- a field trip to New Hampshire to see one or two candidates speak. A demo. An accelerated form of Pied Piperism. Maybe Oct 6. 

Dowbrigade: Can Truth Trump the Big Lie? 

Steve Outing: Blog Hard News on Your Site. 

News.Com reports that Blogger Pro will be offered by Google for $0. 

First draft of description for the opening Technology session on Day 2. Instead of putting vendors on stage, with predictable results, I wanted to give the power at BloggerCon to users to drive the agenda, if they choose to. I've asked Susan Mernit to take ideas from everyone, before, during and after the conference, and publish the results. Please come on Day 2, users and vendors, and let's plot a course that makes sense for everyone. 

Another Day 2 session -- One big BOF for all tools, in a big room, with a corner for each tool that has people that want to meet about it. For sure there will be Movable Type, Blogger and Manila corners, the three most widely used tools in and around Harvard and MIT. We'll have a sign up sheet at the registration desk, so people can start new corners, or meet outside if the weather is nice. 

Phil Wolff will lead a Day 2 discussion: Weblogs Behind the Firewall. And Joi Ito will lead Managing a Community. 

Chris Heilman: Mars with the moon behind a tree. 

Happy birthday Willem Dakota Neuefeind Lessig. 

Newsweek: "Matt Gross, the head blogger, drove all the way from Utah without the promise of a job, or even calling ahead to say he was coming. He was hired on the spot and created Dean’s Call to Action site, now the 3,000th most-visited Web site, making it more popular than Madonna’s. By comparison, Massachusetts Sen John Kerry’s site is 159,000th in the rankings." 

Adam Curry: BloggerCon or Bust. From Amsterdam. 

Paolo: "Every day a new good reason to go there." 

BTW, the Edwards campaign turned us down, saying they are too busy to send their chief blogger to Harvard. However, I don't accept that answer. We can improve the Senator's weblog, and I'll guarantee it. If the Edwards campaign sends their chief blogger to BloggerCon, and feels, for any reason, that it wasn't worth the time, I will personally work for the Edwards campaign for the double the amount of time they feel they wasted. I am that sure we can improve their blog. 

Wired: Schoolgirl Settles With RIAA. 

Scott Rosenberg: "I won't support the pie rats!" 

All over New England this morning people are wondering Should I turn the heat on? A few weeks ago the thought of being cold would have sounded deliciously luxurious. This morning it just feels cold. Crisp and sunny, yes, but brrrrr. 

Last year on this day, Jon Udell wrote: "While bitterly arguing about which end of the egg to crack, everyone is busily cracking eggs and making omelettes." 

Two years ago: "Mazel tov to the members of the Syndication community." 

Five years ago: "It was exciting, in a Hallmark sort of way." 

Joi Ito at Berkman, Tuesday evening. 

Chris Lydon: "On the stump in New Hampshire last night, the millionaire trial lawyer and first-term Senator from North Carolina reminded me of the old Downeast joke about the Maine fella spinning his wheels in the spring mud." 

NY Times: "Edward Teller, who was present at the creation of the first nuclear weapons and who grew even more famous for defending them, died yesterday at his home on the Stanford University campus in Palo Alto, Calif." 

Watkins: "I like my Wolfowitz well grilled, rather than half baked." 

Bill Joy: Why the future doesn't need us. 

Deathwish piano movers, Brookline, MA. 

Tuesday, September 09, 2003

Announce: Dean's "chief blogger" to present at BloggerCon. 

The flip-side -- Matt's announcement on the Dean weblog. 

Notes from tonight's local host committee meeting. Joi Ito just came in with Halley Suitt and John Palfrey. 

Halley: "Why are bloggers so excited about this election?" 

NHPrimary.Com covers last night's Edwards talk.  

All current Chris Lydon interviews in one big download. 

NewsCenter 5's Gail Huff reported that "Ashcroft is expected to arrive at Boston's Faneuil Hall at 9AM Tuesday." 

MIT-Stanford Venture Lab: "The explosive uptake of blogging, RSS feeds, and self-maintained collaborative web platforms such as wikis are already having powerful revolutionary effects on news and content delivery." 

Guess who's coming to dinner? 

Betsy Devine: "The squeaky blogger gets the discharge?" 

Salam Pax: "As the war came closer, my blog started getting mentioned more and more." 

NY Times: "During cocktails in the back yard, one group heard former President Bill Clinton say that the national Democratic Party had 'two stars': his wife, the junior senator from New York, and a retired general, Wesley Clark, who is said to be considering a run for the presidential nomination." 

Later today we'll have an announcement about BloggerCon that includes one of the Democratic presidential campaigns. We hope that before the show happens, on October 4th and 5th, we will have announcements with all the candidates that have weblogs. BloggerCon is neutral on the candidates. It's important that their point of views be represented on the subject of weblogs as used in political campaigns. We will strive to be totally neutral, and if you believe you see us taking a partisan position, please speak up. It's important. 

Two years ago: "Ole and Sven went fishing on the lake on a hot summer day." 

Three years ago: The P in P2P. 

Monday, September 08, 2003

Big BloggerCon announce tomorrow. 

Pictures from the Edwards campaign in Merrimack, NH. 

Tonight was the first time I met a person, Marc Nozell, who reads my weblog, at a presidential campaign appearance. I have pictures of him (he's taking a picture of Edwards), and his wife and daughter.  

Senator John Edwards will "hold a town hall meeting in Merrimack, at the Merrimack Community Bandstand at Abbie Griffin Park. The meeting is free and open to the public, part of Senator Edwards’ plan to hold over 100 New Hampshire town hall meetings before the primary on January 27th." 

Michael Watkins: "We are committed in Iraq because the costs of failure are too high." 

8/16/01: "He is the best harvester of love I've ever seen." 

BloggerCon in a nutshell, in progress. Comment here. 

Description of Halley's Day 2 session. 

S'More is an outliner that supports OPML.  

NY Times review of my ThinkTank outliner, May 1983. It did not support OPML. 

I started a list of presidential candidate weblogs. If you know of others please let me know. Thanks. 

Two new signups for BloggerCon: 1. Chris Locke. Author of Gonzo Marketing and co-author of the Cluetrain Manifesto. 2. Scott Heiferman, founder of Meetup and Fotolog. A summary of recent additions to the BloggerCon lineup. 

I've been emailing with an ex-Yahoo engineer about their directory. It's weird how little those outside Yahoo (like me) know about them. First, they're maintained by people called "surfers" who have god-like status inside Yahoo. They were the first Yang-Filo hires, and of course it's how Yahoo started, as a hierarchic Web directory. Many of the original surfers were librarians.  

You've heard of Alpha Males. Check out Alpha Nails.  

Three years ago today: "The best advice I can offer the music industry based on my experience in tech is to give the users what they want. Don't try to negotiate. Just give it to them." 

Four years ago today -- Carmen's Headline Viewer, one of the earliest aggregators, and as far as I know the first desktop aggregator. Funny story. It was supposed to have been written by a woman named Carmen. It was actually written by her husband Jeff, who was moonlighting from his day job at Microsoft. Jeff now works for Amazon. 

Sunday, September 07, 2003

Today I listened to Chris Lydon's interviews with Real Live Preacher and Elaine Scarry. I recommend these without reservation. The first will change your view of the blogosphere, and the second will open your eyes about 9-11 and US defense, or lack of it. 

MicroDoc News is authoritative, and easily as objective as other sources, even those that have editors. That Google News doesn't recognize the value of MDN speaks volumes. Why did they buy Blogger if they don't see the value in what MDN does. We started blogging because the journals they trust are not trustworthy. Someday a professional reporter is going to tell us that Google invented weblogs. 

Donna Wentworth: "I didn't ask Cory why he is so awesome." 

If you must know, this is why I moved back east. 

Lakeland Ledger: "And on the 2,893,402,568th day, man created blogs." 

Lake Powell at 35,000 feet. 

The Boston Globe profiles Matt Gross, the "first chief blogger in presidential politics." 

X1 is "free PC software that uses an advanced indexing process that lets you find any word in any email or file on your computer, in under a second." 

Halley Suitt: "Yes, I'll be in a pale lemon cocktail dress with green surgical gloves on, isn't that what everyone cool is wearing to BloggerCon?" 

Jim Moore recommends ethicalEsq. 

Saturday, September 06, 2003

How to post a new story on the BloggerCon site. 

Roundtrip airfare, SF to Boston, as low as $288 on Orbitz. 

Roundtrip airfare, from London, as low as $454 on Expedia. 

Brian Dear has been blogging his experiences with Netflix. 

Scoble: "Of any company with more than 10,000 employees I can only name one that has more than a handful of webloggers: Microsoft." 

A.K.M. Adam will lead a discussion on the spiritual context of weblogs, on Day 2 at BloggerCon.  

Chicago Tribune article on blogging in the workplace. 

NY Times: "The recording industry, struggling to curb music piracy, is shining the spotlight on another demon lurking on the Internet: pornography." 

I went for coffee with Jim Moore at Starbucks in Watertown, to talk about BloggerCon and other things. I asked what's most confusing to him about weblogs, and he said the infrastructure, things like Blogdex, Daypop, Technorati, search engines, etc. We talked some more, and I realized we should have a Day 2 session on this, so I just spec'd it out. The goal is to demystify the concepts that tie weblogs together into communities, and make it easier to edit the blogs, search them, find things that point to other things, etc. There's room for visionaries in this session. Where should we be going? Comments are welcome.  

News.Com: "Microsoft announced late Friday that it will pay more than $23 million to settle an antitrust suit filed by onetime operating system rival Be." 

Wired: "The music industry plans to offer what it calls a general amnesty to file traders who step forth and promise not to do it again, but experts say few will take the bait." 

Last year on this day: The road to RSS 2.0. 

The grid for Day 2 is shaping up. Lots of room. Day 2 is free. 

Susan Mernit's Day 2 ideas. 

Russell Beattie compares three aggregators. 

Two interesting items from the World Of Joi Ito. First, he's hanging out somewhere in Europe with my fellow Berkmanite Ethan Zuckerman. They're telling the GLTs about weblogs. Second, Ben and Mena are having a meetup in Madison Square Park in NYC next Sat. Maybe I'll fly down for the day. I use their product, and like it very much. We're looking forward to entertaining Joi when he visits Boston next week. He's coming to the BloggerCon local host committee meeting on the 9th. That extends the concept of "local" a bit, because Joi isn't from Cambridge, or even Arlington or Waltham. He's from Tokyo, but he's very local in the world of weblogs. Joi is coming to BloggerCon in early October and Halley is our newest presenter. I signed her up yesterday. We still have to write up the talk, it's going to be a dandy. I hear she's going to wear surgical gloves.  

Friday, September 05, 2003

A white on orange icon on MSDN. Very cool. 

BTW, since we moved the RSS 2.0 spec to Harvard, there's been some confusion about where it is. The search engines are still catching up with the change.  

Donna Wentworth: "My name is still Donna Wentworth." 

This is how Red Sox fans spell torture. 

Rogers Cadenhead on ESPN's hiring of Rush Limbaugh. 

Rayne Today: "My bad, I’ve been messing around all morning with the silly piece of fluff that AOL thinks is blog software." 

Keola: "Hey Dave, this guy sounds like a prime candidate for a weblog!" 

Greenspun: "People will pay for music but they won't pay $18 for one song that they really want to hear that otherwise could be nicely stored in less than 1 cent of hard drive space." 

Michael Watkins: "That time is rapidly approaching for Bush to ritually sacrifice Rumsfeld to save his presidency." 

Random idea of the day. A friend at a famous company you've all heard of is planning to announce something new and exciting in the next few weeks. I suggested announcing it at BloggerCon on Day 2. Lots of cool people with weblogs will be there. If they say yes it'll be a first: an announcement where bloggers are not only present, but are front and center. I hope they choose to accept the invite. And if you are announcing soon, and would like to use BloggerCon as the venue, please let me know asap. 

NY Times: "More and more PC owners are discovering software lurking on their computers that they had no idea was there." 

On the BloggerDev list, an interesting proposal from Chris Snyder that, if we're going to have Yet Another Blogging API, why not base it on something that's been frozen for 18 years. Heh. It's a funny idea, but it's a lot better than ripping up the pavement and starting over just for the heck of it. 

BBC: "Music industry officials in the US are considering offering an amnesty deal to people who admit illegally sharing music on the Internet." 

Jon Udell will lead the Day 2 discussion of aggregators. 

A debate among librarians about aggregators: Con and Pro. 

Mikel Maron discusses My.Yahoo's support for RSS. 

On this day last year I floated a trial balloon about namespaces in what was then called RSS 0.94 (it became 2.0). The proposal was that RSS could be extended at will by anyone, to include "elements not defined in the spec, and leave it at that. They can be in namespaces or not, at your pleasure." In the end, the spec was a bit more conservative, requiring extensions to be in namespaces.  

BTW, I've seen various recent articles say that the history of RSS is unclear. I don't think it actually is. It would take a half a day at most to piece together the sequence of events from records on the Web. There's a timeline on the RSS 0.91 spec. At least this explains the trail from UserLand's point of view. And the Syndication mail list has an archive, which documents the RDF discussion starting in August 2000. There is a good trail to follow. It would be nice, if someday soon, someone put the time into writing a definitive history, and tries not to spin it one way or the another.  

JY Stervinou wrote an RSS History Haiku. 

Another place to do research -- in the archive of Scripting News. I documented all my work with RSS here, in public.  

I decided to have a look and see if I could find the beginning of the XML work on Scripting News. Seems to be in December 1997. My first essay was called Real World XML describing an idea that is still relevant, still hasn't been widely implemented and is long overdue. Dave Sifry even brought it up at a dinner a couple of months ago. Wouldn't it be cool if a CMS could tell a search engine definitively, only these pages have changed since the last time you visited? I've tried to get various search engines to support it at various times, with no luck.  

Tim Oren: "Now software is smallish section at Office Depot or Best Buy, a pale shadow of the old channel. Today, the music business may have taken its first overt step down that same path." 

Thursday, September 04, 2003

Greenspun: "What would an engineer do with $100 billion?" 

News.Com: "Lycos customers have been without e-mail access for most of this week, after what was supposed to be a routine server software upgrade went awry." 

Chris Lydon interviews Harold Bloom. 

Hey thanks, Monday's DaveNet is #4 on BlogDex.  

Lawrence is doing a great job of keeping the UserLand product news feed updated.  

Dowbrigade: Cats Sacrificed in Bizarre Experiment. 

I'm too sick to do the Thursday meeting. We'll reconvene next Thurs, Sept 11. Ooooh. That's the scary day.  

A new session for Day 2 at BloggerCon, on news readers and aggregators at 11AM in Pound 200. As with all Day 2 sessions, it's free for all who are interested.  

David Galbraith: "There is a possibility that the weblog space will Balkanize." 

NY Times: Universal to Cut Prices of Its CD's. 

Jake: "We've got a new set of features for testing: RSS feeds for Manila discussion groups, and for news item departments. This beta also includes a new department list page." 

Gary Price reports that a portion of the Internet Archive is now searchable, and that Google has received a new patent.  

Jenny finds my search-the-aggregator script interesting. 

I'm sniffling, coughing and sneezing. This cold has been creeping up on me. Gotta do the Thursday evening meeting. May not do dinner. Ahhh choo! 

On this day in 2001, I had a strange technical dream.  

Hey I'm in a Netflix subscriber now. The first movie I watched is The Witches of Eastwick, a movie I've not been able to find in the video stores. It's the real Alpha Male story, not the one that women make up.  

Ed Cone: "The John Edwards campaign weblog is about to launch." 

Library Stuff reports that My.Yahoo now does RSS. 

Bob Stepno reports that the Times ran a correction on Saturday to the piece I cited yesterday, re the "house blogger" who was traveling with the Dean campaign. It only gets more confusing, however.  

Wednesday, September 03, 2003

OJR interviews on the 10th anniversary of the Web. 

Christian Science Monitor: "With the battle for the Democratic presidential nomination now in the decisive fall campaign season, the growing dominance of former Vermont Gov. Howard Dean is changing the dynamics of the race." 

Daily Kos says it's too late for Wesley Clark. I feel like I know the guy now that I've listened to his Lydon interview. He thinks like a blogger for sure, but he doesn't trust the medium enough. Of course it's not too late for Clark, because it's not all about money this time. I bet we'll have a good laugh about his prediction come November next year.  

Phil Wolff: The Blogger's Platform. 

And then there was the NY Times article about Dean last week that quoted a blogger traveling on the Dean press bus. I think we know she was with the campaign, yet the Times article didn't say so. Assuming the blogger and the campaign didn't tell the reporter, who screwed up, or did anyone? 

Neat search script for the Radio aggregator, made the post above work, even though the Times article it points to is more than a week old. Read the comment at the head of the script to learn how it works. For geeks only.  

Dana Blankenhorn says Dean will shortly be the Democratic Party, and will need to create his own software to win. That's one point of view, and that's cool but imho it's too early to give the nomination to Dean. And Dana didn't explain the features they need that the competitive market doesn't provide.  

JFK: "A rising tide lifts all boats."  

Dean is not the rising tide. He is a boat. We'll look back in 20 years and see, perhaps, that he was the first candidate to win on the Web, much as JFK was the first candidate to win through TV. Dean owning the software is analogous to JFK starting a TV network. Had he approached it that way, would he have won? Would TV eventually have achieved its destiny anyway? As big as Kennedy was and is, isn't TV bigger? 

Will Richardson: Manila Procedures Manual. 

Phillip Pearson gets a Python script to talk to the service Microsoft put up yesterday. I thought perhaps I'd get Radio talking to it via SOAP, but it seems that Microsoft's SOAP is very different from UserLand's. I could be wrong about that. 

New BloggerCon'ers: Kaye Trammell, Brian Weatherson. 

Michael Watkins: "There is very little talk these days about preemption, much less American empire." 

Andrew Grumet is looking for help adding external authentication to Manila. I am pretty sure it can be done, but I'm not sure how.  

Four years ago today, a manifesto for decentralized syndication, arguing in favor of RSS over the heavyweight approach being sold by the big publishing companies. Today it may seem unnecessary, but back then most people assumed Vignette would define the standard. It didn't turn out.  

Two years ago today we were planning a session for Seybold on Sept 26 about The Next Technology Revolution. It was cancelled because we had our revolution, on Sept 11.  

I'm asking people with weblogs to point to yesterday's DaveNet piece. I'd like to see it rise on Daypop, Blogdex and Technorati, so it has a chance to influence campaigns, not just the presidential campaign, but local ones too. I spoke last night with Matt Gross, who blogs for the Dean campaign. Nice guy. I recommended he read the piece.  

DaveNet referrer stats page. 

Adam Curry is blushing because he's Halley's blogger of the day. I wonder if Halley knows that today is Adam's birthday. He's 39 years old. Just a baby. 

Dean meetups across New Hampshire tonight. 

Marc Nozell, a NH resident, spoke with an Edwards campaign worker yesterday, asking him to come to an campaign event in his hometown, Merrimack. Nozell asked if the event was on the Edwards website. Not yet. Does Edwards have a blog? No, but they're thinking of starting one in NH.  

Tuesday, September 02, 2003

DaveNet: Tips for Candidates re Weblogs. 

After the recent email meltdown, I didn't send today's DaveNet out via email.  

Tomorrow's NH political event: 2:45PM, Kerry announcement rally, Kerry HQ, 195 S McGregor St, Manchester. 

Tim Jarrett, who works at Microsoft, comments on their Web Services release. I read about it earlier on Mark Pilgrim's site, but couldn't make heads or tails of what it is. Still confused. What did Microsoft release? BTW, I know Pilgrim redirects that link. Not sure why.  

TechDirt reports on more nasty patents for Amazon. 

News.Com runs an Amazon press release on the patents. 

Ray Ozzie mourns the death of a colleague. 

RageBoy: The difference between decoration and art. 

Bay Area Writing Project. 

Craig's List parking in Boston. 

Megnut is frustrated with OPML. 

Personally, I'd love to address the questions Meg raises, but when I try I get flamed. I had long talks about this with both Gillmor brothers when I met with them separately last week in Calif. It's been a constant theme. The problem isn't the technology. What incentive is there for me to walk into a flamewar? Don Park explained it when I saw him on Saturday. The spokes complain when the hub moves, said Don. Okay, that's probably right. The problem is easily solved -- when people other than me say no to the personal attacks when they come, it's easier to weather the storm. I get blamed for the messes, but honestly I want to clean them up. There are just a few "standard" attributes for OPML. Programmers don't like to be told to conform. But the rest of us have to encourage them to get over it.  

Three years ago, an essay asking what to do about RSS.  

Wired: "The biggest reunion to date of ex-Apple employees will converge on Silicon Valley next month." 

Monday, September 01, 2003

Independent: "Is Microsoft to blame?" 

John Leyden reports that virus writers are rarely caught.  

Netscape DevEdge, its developer site, has an RSS 2.0 feed.  

Looking for a parking spot in Cambridge. 

Robert Crook is a Salon blogger who likes John Kerry. 

New features for managing membership of Manila sites. 

Chris Heilman on California's "Doomsday Question." 

Pito Salas explains what he means by "blog bridge." 

News.Com: "The European Parliament has delayed voting on a controversial software-patents directive, following protests and criticism by computer scientists and economists." 

Nice thing about plane travel is that it often leaves me reading a good book. Yesterday's flight was actually two. The first, from SF to Dallas, was empty enough so I had my own row to stretch out in. It was clear daylight and the scenery was gorgeous, over canyon country, southern Utah, northern New Mexico. The second leg, from Dallas to Boston, was dark and rainy, the flight was full. I was crammed in and kept thinking of my pyloric valve slamming shut. The book I'm reading is much like Confederacy of Dunces, although the movie was nothing like it. One supposedly crazy person, a person who acts crazy, but who's actually saner than any person you've ever met.  

Gee it's good to be back home. 

Looks like today is Gephardt day in New Hampshire. 

FeedMe is a new aggregator, reviewed by Library Stuff. 

Later today we'll randomly choose 25 people to get free passes for Day One of BloggerCon. That's Oct 4. Day Two, Oct 5, is free for everyone.