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Scripting News via email should be working again, at least the sending part. Sorry for the outage. I've been doing a complete rewrite my content system, this is one of the last parts to come back online. If you're getting 80,000 copies of this message, remember, Murphy runs this show, not me. Rockbox is "more intuitive" firmware for Archos boxes, which are famous for their awful user interface, or so I'm hearing. How bad could it be, he wonders. Out loud. Foolishly.
Philip Miseldine explores Googlism. Don Park wrote a great tutorial on BitTorrent. "A shocking ISP bill won't wipe the slashdotted smile off your face at the end of the month."
There may be another law here. It goes something like this. When you meet in private with someone else to talk about something other people are interested in, we all lose. So, for example, if Pete should go to a private meeting where something relevant to Paul is discussed, and Paul doesn't know about it, Paul's knowledge can't be applied to the process. He may be off doing something that assumes it's not being done, and he may be wasting huge amounts of time, or may end up competing in an area he'd prefer to partner in. Now there's nothing that says you can't tell me something in confidence, I have to be able to accept that, but it's at the point of intersection, where we make Thing A work with Thing B, that open-ness is so important. That way a guy out in left field can break through. You don't have to know The Right People in order to be empowered to do something important. And left field is where The Good Stuff always comes from. I'm gradually restarting my Channel Z development work. It's slow after a one week break. Today's project is to do category-level RSS feeds. For example, here's the feed for Mottos. Basically you throw a dot-xml at the end of the URL to get the RSS rendering. Don't subscribe yet, still diggin, breakage ahead, praise Murphy, IANAL, my mother loves me, etc. I downloaded and installed BitTorrent, but I'm mystified. Where is it? How do I invoke it? I want to get a copy of a Beatles song (that I've already purchased on vinyl and CD, btw). How would I go about doing that? And if all else should fail, how the heck do I uninstall the thing? Tim Bray did an investigation of BitTorrent. I started a BitTorrent category. According to Jason Shellen at Google, their new API will ship in about two weeks. "There is a light at the end of the tunnel." Redhead: "Good grief, tomorrow is December." Greg Ritter sends a pointer to the Archos Jukebox FM Recorder MP3 player. 20GB hard drive, records off the radio, speech. About $250. Looks like a great deal, better than the 256MB Creative Rhomba I wrote up yesterday. BBC: "A Chinese student arrested for criticising the Communist Party on the internet has been released from prison." Xiao Qiang told us about this weblog at the dinner in Berkeley on Tuesday. 10 million daily visitors.
Chris Phoenix: "Imagine a horror story about baseball, in which the batter keeps hitting the ball hard enough to kill the fans. The story might be entertaining, but it's obviously unrealistic." Don Park: "If your head gets too big, go stand in line at the nearest DMV for an hour."
On this day four years ago, Manila shipped. NY Times review of CBS movie on the Reagans. "Anyone eagerly anticipating or dreading a hatchet job on the 40th president is bound to feel confounded." Paul Boutin wrote the most concise FAQ on The Broadcast Flag so far. Thanks!
This is the product I was looking for earlier this year. Ultra-portable MP3 player, radio, voice recorder, that can record radio. Under $200 for 256MB. USB port interface. On the other hand, I'd like it better if the same features were available in a 20GB hard drive-based unit.
I just got an alert from the National Weather Services's RSS feed for Massachusetts. "A band of snow showers across interior Massachusetts and southern New Hampshire." Where did the snow come from? Partially from "plumes of lake-effect-snow from western New York climbing over the Berkshires." It's not snowing in Boston yet, but it feels like it'll start any minute. I just got the chill walking outside. This is the beginning of winter. Still sick this morning, but better. Pumping Vitamin C and Echinacea. Alka-Seltzer Cold Remedy, tastes terrible, but works wonders. Reading the latest Michael Crichton novel. I'm sure technically it's nonsense, but it's a good story. A good clue that it's nonsense is that he completely botches his explanation of recursion (a procedure that calls itself). Why don't they have technical reviewers of these books, before publication, so at least he could get the basics right and people could learn a little while reading a fun story.
Back in Boston safely. Wet and warm here. Easy flight. Just checked. The Bush weblog has been updated with news of the President's trip to Baghdad. Good morning. Today is a travel day, heading out from SFO to BOS. Got a bad cold, coughing sneezing, sniffling. Luckily there's no one sitting next to me, according to Orbitz. Travel is never going to be the same. I stayed in a deluxe hotel on the peninsula, in a plush room that has to rent for $300 a night. But I paid $65 a night. This is because I used a computer network to do my bidding. In the past I'd have to call eight hotels to get their rates, and none of them would know that I was talking to any others, so I'd just get their average price. Or call a travel agent, and get directed to the hotel that gives them the best commission, not necessarily the best located hotel, or the one with the best deal for me. Now I can get multiple bids on the same hotel, even, and consider hundreds of options before making my decision. When people say the Internet wasn't revolutionary, they must not be paying attention. It gave us the power, where the industry used to have it. The power of better information, and that can translate into nicer accomodations for much less money. Not much going on today. Thought I'd mention that the Bush weblog still doesn't have anything about Bush's trip to Baghdad. Not that I thought it was much of a blog before, now it's clear.
BBC: Bush makes secret visit to Iraq. An International Herald-Tribune report provides details of the stunning trip. The Bush weblog has no info about the trip.
My favorite piece of the year, it got me so much sweet email. And of course while the title says it's about beauty in women, it's really about beauty in general. We have so much in common. We all feel unappreciated, and left out. No one likes being talked-down-to by others, but it's especially humilating when a member of the opposite sex does it. Women have so much more power today than they did in the past, but do they use it wisely? We're getting close to the end of a year, which means we're getting close to a new year. When we flip the page, let's try to create more win-wins and not be so picky about who we get help from. If someone offers a hand in friendship, try to take it, even if it isn't exactly the person you wanted it from, or on exactly the terms you wanted it. Don Park has a unique idea about selling laptops at retail. Betsy Devine is cooking Thanksgiving dinner, a complex affair, back in Cambridge. I'm sure her dinner will be very cool. Mark Cuban: "If we can't compete with some guy sneaking a camera into the theater, or a blurry, encoded, postage stamp-sized file, then please -- just shoot us."
Spent the afternoon with Dave Sifry and Kevin Marks talking about Technorati and Channel Z. I think it's going to be a very interesting collaboration. Steve Gillmor popped over to join the discussion for about an hour. Paolo surveys the different blogging taxonomies popping up. Here's how my blogging taxonomy works. I use the RSS 2.0 category element to specify the category, and a popup hierarchic menu to select categories, and an outliner to edit my taxonomy. Paul Boutin, at last night's dinner asked me to write it up whitepaper-style, and I wll do that very soon, probably next week. Fortune: Can Google Grow Up? It's looking like this is going to be the first Thanksgiving since I started writing on the Web that I won't write a Thanksgiving piece. I am very thankful for many things, I'm just very very busy driving all over the Bay Area, visiting, schmoozing, etc. The place is so beautiful, the air so clear, the temperature so comfortable. I knew it was a nice place when I lived here, but I lacked the perspective to see in what way it was so nice. This morning, driving to a breakfast in Palo Alto at Il Fornaio, I had a flash that this is like San Luis Obispo. A college town, but very compact, clean, and rich. Cambridge isn't like that, Harvard very different from Stanford. There are campuses all over Boston. Stanford is all in one place. Palo Alto has so many fine places to eat, and htere's parking everywhere. Couldn't be more different. Larry Lessig is too kind; but we did have fun at Stanford on Monday. At the end of the talk Larry came up with a big grin, I guess his trademark pessimism is fading a little now that he's a new dad, and told me that Stanford is going to be hosting blogs for incoming law students starting next year. This is great news of course. We're going to connect our weblog networks in some really interesting ways, I hope. Along with another big university who's blogging program is just about ready to reveal. At dinner last night I sat next to Xiao Qiang, a fellow at UC-Berkeley's school of journalism, and suggested we do the same with their student weblogs. I would make the same offer to Jay Rosen at NYU. Let's link up our networks of bloggers. I told Xiao this is beginning to sound like the way the Internet itself started. Is a new network booting up, one built on ideas as much as technology? One where users are the architects. It could be that the university environment, with these new bright-eyed leaders, is the perfect petrie dish for new Internet culture. Derek Slater, our young hero who took on the high tech company hiding behind the DMCA, who was let off the hook by Harvard, has now, apparently, been completely vindicated, as Diebold has withdrawn its complaint. A hearty bravo to Derek and all who stood with him. It's nice to win one, once in a while. Bryan Bell's report on the EdBlogger conference.
Mary Hodder: "One librarian is simply stating regularly when there are no warrants, so that when there is no statement of anything, people will know there is a warrant that has been served." Tonight's dinner, King Tsin, Berkeley, 7PM. News.Com: "Eugene Kleiner, a pioneer of venture capital in Silicon Valley and co-founder of Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, has died at the age of 80." I was interviewed for Austrian radio about Google.
John Palfrey: "Copyright is not meant to be used as a weapon to stifle free speech." Wired: Congress Expands FBI Spying Power. Yesterday's talk at Stanford went very well. Larry Lessig was in the front row, there was a good mix of Stanford students, faculty, and Scripting News people. I talked for about twenty minutes, and then we had a discussion. They asked tough questions, one of which I declined to answer, but on reflection, I could have. I had said that lack-of-reciprocation is common in the weblog world, but rarely talked about. Person A delivers flow to Person B, but B doesn't point to A. I was asked for an example, but declined. I didn't want to take any specific person to task on this, my point would have been lost. But I could have talked about a class of websites that receive lots of pointers and rarely point back -- newspaper sites. Anyway, thanks to Larry and Lauren Gelman for inviting me to speak, and to Stuart Rosenberg for arranging. I had a great time. I think the door is open now for some new collaboration between our respective schools, and that would be great. And after a couple of years of emailing back and forth with Larry Lessig, and reading his weblog, and coming to have great respect for him, it was good to exchange ideas face-to-face. I've spent a bunch of time with Scoble in the last couple of days. We went computer shopping on Sunday, and then he came to Stanford Law School yesterday. He has a story to tell about computer retailing and why Best Buy couldn't take the money out of my pocket and give me a shiny new laptop. He was listening, in a way that the salesperson at BB wasn't. And he knows what I want, an Ikea like experience. Make sure I find what I came for. That's hard to do, but that's what it takes.
Palfrey blogs Volokh's talk on Crime-Facilitating-Speech. Powazek says the Globe got his quotes wrong too. It's a new world ladies and gentlemen. In the old days, the BigPubs would put words in your mouth, and what could you do? Today each of us have a platform to tell our own story, so when they screw it up, we can run a correction, immediately. k-collector is an "enterprise news aggregator that leverages the power of shared topics to present new ways of finding and combining the real knowledge in your organisation."
Michael Jackson's newsroom, with a list of stories in reverse-chronologic order. He's starting a weblog so that his story can get out directly from the source. John Palfrey on the Federal anti-spam law that just passed the House. Jim Moore is looking for Iowa weblogs.
Much ado about Google Oy I was afraid when I spoke with Hiawatha Bray that he'd get it wrong. The direct quotes are accurate, I did say what he quotes me as saying. But when he paraphrases he puts words in my mouth that I don't agree with. I'm not scared Google is going to "crush" UserLand. What an ugly word. I think their approach is more likely to hurt Google itself than anyone else. Bottom-line, I said Google screwed up by putting Blogger on the toolbar, a few weeks after promising they wouldn't do anything to favor Blogger. It made it impossible to trust them, and their business is built on trust. Google could have helped the whole blogging community, and it's not clear why they didn't -- it's not as if they make any money off Blogger, it's a freebie. They did the small, selfish thing. That's why I think they don't have what it takes to be a leader. About Hiawatha Bray, the Boston Globe and professional journalists in general, this piece is a perfect demo why I hold them in such low regard. He's really writing a column, he thinks they pull "stunts" and "crush" small competitors, but instead of having the guts to say it himself, he puts the words in my mouth. He should become a columnist, write opinion pieces, or become a software industry leader, and test his ideas in the market. Two Jewish Guys Joke First a disclaimer, I am Jewish. Two Jewish guys were walking down the street and passed a Catholic church. A sign out front says "Convert to Catholicism today and we'll pay you $100." One guy says "That's it, I'm converting now." The other guy says: "What do you mean, you'd throw out your faith, your people, just for money?" He says: "It's a lot of money." So he goes in the church. His friend can't believe it so he waits outside. When he comes out he says "Is it true, did they give you the money?" He says: "Is that all you people ever think about?"
NY Times: "Some have said that Republicans were violating a presidential promise not to use the campaign against terrorism for political gain." Adam Curry: "It's interesting to examine a culture that mounts cameras on smart bombs to view the kill on the 6 o'clock news, but freaks out if a nipple of a [female] breast is flashed on TV." PocketRSS is a "Today Screen plugin and stand-alone application which allows a quick and easy method of displaying various types of RSS/OPML compliant data on your Today Screen." Rest of trip notes Tomorrow I'm speaking at Larry Lessig's class at Stanford Law School about weblogs, the election of 2004, outliners, Hollywood vs Silicon Valley, what we're doing at Berkman, and anything else Larry wants to talk about. We've been having great productive email exchanges for about a year now, it'll be great to have a conversation in person, in front of a group of students. It's free and open to the public. 12:30PM. As people to help you find the Moot Court Room. Scripting News readers are welcome to participate. Tuesday evening in Berkeley Sylvia Paull is hosting a dinner in my honor, this will be the first Scripting News dinner in the East Bay. King Tsin, 7PM. Again, this is open, but please send me an email if you're coming so I can forward it to Sylvia so she can reserve a place for you. I imagine that we can accomodate people who don't. I didn't buy a new laptop today. The selection at Best Buy was abysmal. I didn't want to buy one at Fry's because there is no Fry's in Boston, if I need service. I did get to hang out with Scoble and Son, we went to Ikea, and had Swedish Meatballs. I ran into a Bloggerconner in the lobby of Ikea. That's the funny thing about BloggerCon, I keep running into people you met there. Morning notes Goooood morning from California! This computer is almost completely hosed. I may have to go to Fry's today and pay retail on a new one. Oy. The dysfunction is funny -- text doesn't display in places you know it should. But then it's amazing that the most iffy bit of technology, Channel Z, is working just fine, praise Murphy. It's been that kind of trip. The flight cross country was supposed to be jammed full but it was only 2/3 full, and the middle seat in my row was empty. They had a nice movie, which I didn't watch because I was reading an even better book. The guy next to me was a Silicon Valley entrepreneur from Taiwan whose company makes thin clients. Interesting stories. But when I got to SFO the car rental company, Thrifty, said I was a no-show and they had given my car to someone else. And they were sold out. So tired. I just stood there at the counter and said I wasn't leaving until they gave me a car. They gave me one. Drove down the peninsula and my hotel room is great. So it's been a yin-yang trip. If it holds up, the next one should be a goodie. Anyway it'll be a light day here for sure.
Two years ago: "How many Californians does it take to screw in a light bulb?" Good morning early morning coffee drinkers. Hope you're enjoying your early morning coffee. Today should be made a national holiday. John F Kennedy Day. He was the man who said "Ask not what your country can do for you, ask what you can do for your country." What a stunningly beautiful and simple nation-building idea. As they would say these days, He Got It. Speaking of coffee, Outlook Express is toast, which goes well with coffee. I spent two hours this morning trying to get it to stop telling me it can't open a reply window because it was out of memory. I don't have MSBlast, I checked, running tools from Symantec and Network Associates. I even went so far as to re-install the browser and the mail client. Along the way I installed Firebird and reactivated my Yahoo Mail account and configured it to check my mail accounts. I had to use Firebird to upgrade MSIE because it would keep crashing on Microsoft.Com. Talk about irony. Anyway goodbye Outlook Express, at least for now. And Firebird does look as nice as everyone says it does. I'm going to use it for a while. One of the things I'm going to do while I'm traveling is rearrange my blogroll, expand it, and group things. I've already begun. Now that I have an infinite amount of space and the potential for infinite structure, I'm able to think much bigger. So far I like it. Feels expansive. I have no idea what Steve Gillmor is arguing with John Dvorak about. He (Dvorak) obviously hasn't checked his facts. Whatever. It's great to see Steve at his new gig at eWeek. Hey Steve, let's have a cup of coffee next week when I'm in the Bay Area. I gotta show you how all this category stuff works. Like Lisa said yesterday, we chop the meat up into little bits so you can eat it with chopsticks. The plan for the new software, whose codename is Channel Z, is for me to burn in the editing tool for the next week while visiting the Bay Area, and if all goes well to start a very small beta group on Monday or Tuesday of the following week (December 1) and then offer it to all who come to the Thursday meeting (the 4th). Eventually it will be released broadly and we'll work with others to make authoring tools in other environments (such as OmniOutliner, Joe, Flash, WebOutliner) and back-ends (lots of places). On the back-end if you have code that processes RSS (with categories) and OPML, you're basically ready to go. We're gearing up to cover a big story and to be ready to cover one that may come along any day. The idea is to broaden the pipe, make writing for the Web more powerful and make the structures we build richer, have more lasting value, and integrate with each other in interesting ways. Some have suggested that I go to the meeting of educational bloggers happening in SF today and tomorrow (I'm traveling today, but I'll be in Bay Area tomorrow). After giving it serious consideration, I've decided not to go. Here's why. UserLand has a new management team, five new people, with all kinds of experience operating technology companies, selling and marketing, product development. They're in rapid learning mode, talking to as many people as possible. I'm going to spend a lot of time with them next week transferring as much as possible of what I know about the product, the users, the potential. A few of them are going to the meeting tomorrow, including Jake. If I go, people may get the wrong idea. I want to help the new team, I don't want to steal their thunder. I want you all to learn how to work with each other, and the best way for me to do that is to step back and let it happen. So I send these very excellent people to you with much love. Go forth and make big things happen. Some of the best people in BloggerLand will be there today and tomorrow. So exciting.
New feature: Previous/Next links through archive. Lisa Williams talks about the software I demoed last night.
National Weather Service alerts are available in RSS 2.0. Bing! I subscribed to the feed for Massachusetts. "There are no active watches, warnings or advisories." I just did a total brain transplant on my CMS. Let's see if this shows up. It did. Now I'll route this to a category, Fun/Neat Net Tricks. And this post showed up. Amazing. I can't believe it. Now let's see if I can edit the cats. Yup. Now the directory shell. Try adding a movie. That worked too. Let's see if pictures work. Yes ma'am. Here's Joe Trippi's Diet Pepsi. Now I'm going to have to disappear for a bit to add code that does static rendering of the the HTML and RSS versions. This stuff isn't on www.scripting.com yet. Now it is. Have to hook up the static RSS feed. Testing. 1-2-3. All is good. David Galbraith: "Things that aren't really search engines, like Amazon and Ebay, or the classification of species for that matter, would be useless without some kind of ontology." Actually I agree with Galbraith on this one, now that I've read the rebuttals to Shirky's piece. I agree with Shirky about how shrill and offensive the priests of the Semantic Web are, but I believe in taxonomy, which I guess is the same thing as ontology. And I know it works for a different reason than Galbraith -- I wrote outliners in the 80s and 90s and am building on them now, and they are nothing more than personal ontology editors. So there. They key is to take the rigidness out of it, and to throw out the people who think everything anyone else invents is junk. Hierarchies are good, if you don't expect too much of them. Scott Rosenberg: "What 'some are now attacking the president for,' of course, is not for 'attacking the terrorists' but for his foolhardy and foundering invasion of Iraq." I was trawling various referrer logs, and came across Richard Stallman's personal site, where he points to something I wrote. We've certainly gotten into a few heated discussions, but when it comes to keeping the Internet free of ownership by media companies, we're on the same side. I like. Simply Live Anywhere: "You need the power of a heavy jetliner to get an idea off the ground." It took me a while to figure out who Moose is. It's Jessica the Librarian, a Thursday night regular. Moose? Press release: "Weblog software leader Six Apart and NIFTY, one of Japan's leading ISPs, have announced a licensing agreement to provide Six Apart's popular TypePad weblogging service to over five million NIFTY subscribers in Japan."
Andrew's looking for a new laptop too. Friendster user on Friendster: "...the fantasy that we are all rock stars, that everyone's ass looks great in leather, that everyone is sexy." Today's song: "I want the world to change for me!" A Seattle reporter who covers Microsoft has an alternate view of ApacheCon, including Chris Pirillo's keynote. On the other hand, Doc Searls says it reminded him of BloggerCon.
Packed house tonight. This is going to be something, a beta group for a new software product at a university that meets once a week. Even in the old days, in the 80s, I never had so much contact with users. Off to a great start. BTW, I'd love to read other people's accounts of tonight's meeting. My talk at Stanford Law School is at 12:30PM on Monday. Open to the public. Depending on how it goes tonight, I may demo the new authoring system I'm working on. Bill Joy: "Open source doesn't assist the initial creative act." My demo list for this evening's meeting. Chris Sells explains how Longhorn SDK annotations work. Dave Pollard: "I'm just trying to save the world. Someone else will have to save the blogosphere." Jon Udell: Working with Bayesian Categorizers. Fascinating map shows where each of the candidates' money comes from.
BTW, I know I'm really rude when it comes to talking about entertainment industry execs. No, I wouldn't like it if people talked about me that way in public. When I read someone saying Dave Winer has the barest hint of a clue, I think, yeah sure, what makes him so smart. Okay, I need to express my inner-arrogance. Many apologies to Jack Valenti, who surely is a fine human being, for using him as my foil. No kidding. Now, on the other hand, Jack dreams of modifying our operating systems, hard drives, networks, routers, servers, you name it -- so that he can tell us which bits we can copy. This rewrite makes the Y2K corner-turn look tiny in comparison. The cost is incomprehensible. Does that make him an asshole? You bet. Five years ago today: "How much thinking goes on on the Internet?" Michael Feldman's tutorial is a great resource for people learning how to use Manila. It's really great to see O'Reilly embrace RSS 2.0. The power of two growing platforms, Microsoft's Longhorn and Really Simple Syndication. Tim Bray: "Jean Paoli called last week to tip me off about the release of the MS Office XML schema-ware." I just noticed that Al Gore looks a lot like Robert Scoble. Yesterday I met someone who had not read Kurt Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse Five. I expressed envy. I wish I had not read it so I could read it again for the first time. A delicious book. Then it occurred to me that some of you might not have read it either. You have no excuse now.
ScottR isn't sure BillG is telling the truth about Google. Every new piece of software I write begins with a document written by Bull Mancuso.
Paolo: "Now: do we want to give all this power to a company?" intraVnews is a "state of the art news aggregator that turns Microsoft Outlook into a news reader."
Jeremy Zawodny: Is Google The Next DNS?
NY Times: "Getting a job in the Valley is easy, if you're perfect." SJ Merc: "Tech insider Dave Winer, an inveterate blogger and fellow at Harvard Law School, said he was surprised that Polese stayed at Marimba as long as she did." Dan Gillmor reports that Good Morning Silicion Valley now has an RSS feed. Guardian: "Music blogs are free from the business plans and targeted readerships that determine the content of commercial publications." Gotta play with this some more: GoogleRace.Com. Jay Rosen: "Ed Cone explains exactly why Howard Dean's 'open style' of politics is a big deal--and a big story--whether he or not he wins. "
It's a beautiful morning!
Just got a call from a reporter with news that Kim Polese will step down as chairman of Marimba. I am going to demo my new content system at the Thursday meeting, day after tomorrow. If you're in the area and want to see what's up, please be there at 7PM. I'll probably demo it Monday at Stanford Law School at noon. Boths sessions are free and open to the public. Weblogs, outlining, knowledge trees, RSS, OPML, XML-RPC.
Muscle-boy's fix for California's money woes -- get a loan. Don Park: "Ebichu is a cute housekeeping hamster who is fiercely loyal to her undeserving master." Daily Kos: Bloggers at DNC convention. "Handing out press passes to bloggers is a no-brainer, and something we could easily get from the DNC. However, we want to go one better, in effect putting together a convention-within-a-convention for left-leaning bloggers." Good thing the convention is in the summer or else you might have to suffer through Kerry playing hockey. (Enclosed in the RSS feed.) Andrew has questions about Apache and Windows. Wired: "Microsoft plans to introduce a song-downloading service next year that will compete with similar offerings from Apple Computer, Roxio's Napster and others." Ed Cone: The Marketing of a President. 3 News: "I stepped out of the serene lake of Sufi Shire and, a few days later, found myself in the deal room of a $100 million corporate acquisition. Talk about whiplash." Idly.Org: Porn Sites Hiding Behind Blogs. Another summit you weren't invited to. Two years ago: "Of course if you don't even try to make software that other people use, it can't be very shitty." Three years ago: "Dimpled chads." Also on that day: "Dogma 2000 isn't worth to think about it -- it's just a behavior of well stuffed guys." That was quite a day. Al Gore looks snippy and Dubya looks dorky wearing a presidential cowboy hat. Weblogs.Com was hatched on this day in 1999.
Jon Udell: "Every major software system has, at its core, what Dave Winer likes to call a lizard brain." Scoble says that MyWallop, Microsoft Research's foray into blogging and social networking, will support RSS 2.0. Another Scoble post that you shouldn't miss if you work at Microsoft. He's right. Microsoft should support RSS across all its websites, asap. It would be a communication revolution for the company, with key customers, developers, the press. The strange thing about it is that I know the day will come when they do this. When you know something, it's frustrating to have to wait.
BTW, to see the results of the categorization, click here. Brief Morning Coffee Notes Good morning spores fans. Pretty nice day. Drinkin coffee. Thinking about the day ahead.
Jay Rosen: "At most five percent of Americans actually mattered to the operatives who ran the campaign. And what do the lucky five percent get? Ads!" 2/22/00: How to Win the Presidency on the Internet. I had a mockup of an ad for McCain. Bill Gates: "We've never been in any talks with Google about any acquisition thing in any way, shape or form." John Robb: "Google's KPCB hype machine must just be clearing its throat for the IPO."
Doerr: "Believe it or not, the Internet is actually underhyped." Nick Denton: "I don't want to see some VC's invest idiot money in idiot people at idiot companies." Wired: Social Nets Find Friends in VCs. Statistics on the growth of the blogosphere from Technorati. Newsbot: Will it support RSS? Adam Curry: "We produce the show entirely in Radio's outliner." Calpundit explains how to point to NY Times articles without linkrot. "It's a bit klunky, but since we bloggers link to the Times frequently I thought I'd pass it along."
Des Moines Register on candidate weblogs.
Screen shots of a three-pane aggregator, RSS Bandit. Serious problems with the transfer of power from west to east last night, so we flipped the switch back, and will try again in a couple of days after some more testing.
BlogTalk 2.0 will be held in Vienna, Austria, July 5-6. Tomalak's Realm is five years old today. Thanks Lawrence! Everyone's testing their sites on SurfControl today. Scripting is considered "Computing & Internet." Today's song: "Gonna put up my antennae." Mitch Kapor's weblog goes on hiatus.
NY Times: "During an election season increasingly defined by grass-roots organizing, Iowa is the hottest place to be for ambitious young campaign workers." Jennifer Howard: "A year ago, I barely knew what blogs were. Within a few months, they'd become a staple of my daily media diet." Dowbrigade comments. Flip-switch day Lots of changes today, but ones with (Murphy-willing) very small impact on the user interface. In fact, unless they don't work, you shouldn't see any difference at all. Since this is Scripting News, and not Knitting News, we'll go ahead and say which switches got flipped. First, www.scripting.com now resides on the east coast instead of the west. The new Monster servers, the 3GHz meat-eaters that climb skyscrapers, are now both managing the content and doing the serving for everything on scripting.com.
Second, a big change in the way the outliner works. We used to have to tell it how to format a day of weblog posts using Rules, a great feature if you want a lot of control over how things look, but a pain in the butt if every day looks exactly like every other day, as is always true in my weblog. Third, this is going to be a product, not one that I plan to sell (although I may give it to UserLand and they might sell it). It's a new kind of outliner-based Web CMS, that does weblogs and all the other stuff you see popping up here on Scripting. I spent much of the day exploring ideas for how to package, test and then ship this. Should it be a Manila plug-in? Or something that's linked to Manila on a sort of peer basis? Or should it be completely independent of Manila? I want to deliberate on this decision, because I expect to live with it for a long time.
Diego Doval: "RSS is not anti-web, RSS is the web at its best." Hey it's a lot of work to move just part of seven years of my Web content from Santa Clara to Cambridge. We've now transferred all the static content on www.scripting.com to Monster2. It was about 300MB compressed. The Search facility is back up too. Here's an idea of what working-together looks like. The Dean and Clark campaigns are competing now, but in a few months they're going to be on the same team. There's a win for both here. I read on Salon today (premium stuff) that the latest Republican talking points are that Democrats are shrill and nasty, overly critical of a President who's doing the best he can. Eye-opener. Okay do we know for a fact that Longhorn has an RSS aggregator built-in? What do we know about it? (Paolo Marcucci who was at the Microsoft developer's conference, sheds some light.) Thanks to the good professor Lessig for casting gris gris on the cause of collaboration in blogland. Seems to me that users have an interest in developers working together. Now you can subscribe to custom feeds that find new stuff for sale on eBay. Morning coffee notes: Orlowski, Dowbrigade tennis, tools. I'm still an idealist, and would like to be able to vote for one for president of the US. (Routed to Dave/Homilies/Mottos.) Adam Curry: "Yesterday Dave added a 35MB QuickTime video to his RSS feed that automagically popped up ready to play on my machine this morning. I will pay anyone who is willing to set up a similar RSS feed with daily enclosures of Letterman and/or Leno's TV show for my private viewing pleasure." There was a frost last night. There's a white cover of ice on everything outside. The car, the grass, you name it. Of course in a month it will be unusual if there isn't a cover of ice on something that's outside. (Routed to Boston/Weather.)
On this day three years ago Clay Shirky wrote a guest DaveNet. And around this time in 1999, Doc Searls started blogging,
On This Day In is back. It's generated from a dynamic OPML file. That's the theme of the new version of Scripting News. Everything snaps together through OPML. No exceptions. (Poke around, lots of other stuff works. I'll start writing about the broad strokes in the next few days.) You can see how the category routing has been paying off (or not). For example, here's the Microsoft category. Not too much, but not too little. It's working. There will be an RSS feed. No doubt there's a ready market for this, people inside Microsoft who may find Scoble's fire hose a bit much, and might want an outsider's point of view. . Nice the way Joe Lieberman's pic is on the Dean category. Looking up at the hooker. Does he approve? Does he want a date? Screen shot: My hotsy totsy weblog editor has buttons that make rebuilding the RSS and editing categories single-button-clicks. A weblog item is routed to a category by 1. Right-click, and 2. Choose a category from a hierarchic popup menu. Brent Simmons on fighting comment spam. Here's a really nice development. Non-vendor-specific work by developers. Good work. Manila and Radio people should pitch in. I spent four hours in a dentist chair this afternoon having root canal, and a bunch of other stuff. I survived, barely. My mouth hurts. I feel so abused. Ouch. Scoble: "I guess Diego missed the fact that we had an RSS news aggregator built into Longhorn already." I missed that too. Tell me more! Following Dean, Kerry opts out of the public finance system for his primary run. He's going to self-finance by taking out personal loans. BBC: Microsoft rivals take the stand. The second monster, a static server running Apache, is now hooked into the content flow. I know this doesn't look like much, but it's a step on the path. Joi Ito: "I'm not (yet) asking to be allowed to participate in the US elections." Interesting thought. But Joi is already participating, more than most US citizens (being on the Internet advisory board of the Democratic front-runner is not a bad place to start). How can less-well-connected people can have a say in the US democracy. How can a brilliant, poor voice from left field inspire us? Deborah Branscum: "Here I sit in Stockholm, planning a Thanksgiving dinner for in-laws who have never had one. I miss my family and friends, my old house and my old neighborhood. When people ask me if I'm going to become a Swedish citizen, I start laughing because it's such an odd idea." Werbach: "This is just too cool." BBC: US babies get global brand names. Andrew Orlowski is trying a new career as a comedian. Wired: "Fleshbot, the new blogging-for-bucks pornography venture of media entrepreneur Nick Denton." Steve MacLaughlin: "Fleshbot's dirty secret recipe for promotion was to use a 'popular blogger' to report on something happening in bloggerville." Faisal Jawdat sends pointers to Muxway and Delicious, two of a new Breed Of Blog that's minimalist and programmable.
I started serious work on the first of the two new servers and thought to do something that I had never thought to do before. Instead of scattering my changes in various tables in Frontier.root, I'm creating a Tool, and doing all my customizations there. If I had done this when I started the Harvard server I'd be able to start with a much better hosting setup today. The reason this works is that Tools can hook into almost every nook and cranny of the Frontier runtime environment, and where they can't, I'll install code that comes from the custom Tool. Voila. Instantly clonable installations. Hey the logo changed, but I still bleed cactus juice. It's at times like this that I love to hate Jeff Jarvis for hating Glenn Reynolds. And why do I hate Jeff? Because it's snowing in NYC. I told the guys at the Thursday Berkman meeting that it was going to snow in Cambridge tomorrow. Mark my words. The smell is in the air. And I say "the guys" with some confidence. Until Jessica showed up, it was an all-male Thursday meeting. I said "I knew there was a reason I felt so relaxed." Ba da boom. We talked about penis enlargers, of course. Michael Feldman had never heard an Ole and Lena joke. And next week I promised to take them on a tour of the object database for their Manila sites. I can't believe I've never done that. Scoble: "Dave Winer has done more to get me to move away from the Web than a huge international corporation that's supposedly focused on killing the Web." Cool! Congrats to Paul Boutin who's back at Wired for the next year. Greenspun: "I'd like to find software that is good for preparing a photo collage." Paolo: Categories to Topics. I've got Frontier installed on one of the new servers. Wesley Clark has a professional camera crew following him around. As an experiment I've linked to a Quicktime video of the candidate in NYC, riding the subway, appearing on a TV show, and eating a bagel, from my RSS feed, as an enclosure. If you're subscribed with an enclosure-aware aggregator it will download the 35MB video tonight, for instant viewing tomorrow. Whew. Spent the morning fighting for a clean code design and think I got it. The problem: this is an exceptional page, it doesn't fit into the hierarchy. For the last three years I've been building hierarchies and linking them into Scripting, and haven't gotten anyone to care about them. This hierarchy has to contain Scripting, but of course it's at the top level of a domain. How do you get that to work? It took some baling wire to make it fit in. I fought for just one piece of baling wire, not 100. So far so good. Next time I work on the hierarchy I will be able to use the outliner, which was the whole point. Another bit of philosophy. Weblogs have gotten so jammed full of crap like rolls of blogs, rolls of things I'm subscribed to, old software products, old friends, even dead people, you name it, lots of old stuff. So I decided to see what it would be like if I could have even more old crap, but not put it on my weblog. Make sense? It should be easy to get to, but why should it slow down every page load, and who really cares about all that junk anyway? I want to be able to find it, and I want you to be able to find it too, but it doesn't have to be on the page everyone's reloading all the time. Another bit. Are you the kind of person who reloads Scripting 18 times a day? If so, why do you have to reload last Tuesday's news too? In the new design you don't. Just today, in reverse-chronology. But if you want to see a whole bunch at once, if you're an every-other-day reader, click on November at the top of the page to see all that's been published this month. This will only fail to work at the beginning and end of the month. At the beginning you might only get a day or two. At the end you might get 30 or 31 days which is a lot of junk you don't need to see. As always, trade-offs. On average this model performs better.
In the continuing comment thread, a man named Patrick asks what was wrong with the cactus, anyway, to which I said, nothing, and that's the problem. You gotta break a few eggs to make an omelette. You can't stir the pot in an peaceful, easy way. We're going to build a new city, around the Presidential race of 2004. And you're going to help me do it. You just don't know it yet. Goddard: "O'Reilly For President?" Matthew Thomas: Security Snake Oil. Feedster Builder lets you create an RSS feed for sites that don't have them. It pings weblogs.com too. Michael Feldman's ten things you don't know about Google. Reminder, here are the categories of the last week's posts. When I was coming up to speed on heart medicine last year, I asked my cardiologist how they knew that statins, the kind of drug Lipitor is, worked. He said they were doing a big study, but early results had been so promising, even stunning, that they kind of knew it was a effective drug. Yesterday the Times had the report, now it's fully known, it basically halts heart disease. I've been taking it for over a year. The power of networking. I'm terrible with names too, but the president of the student body at Simmons College came to one Thursday meeting at Berkman. Really bright.
Bryan Bell's ode to the cactus. Tomorrow morning Andrew is going to install the new servers at the co-location facility, and then I will move the Scripting News archive onto one of those servers, and pick up the work from there. A NY Times report on a study that shows that Lipitor, a drug which I take, is very effective in preventing atherosclerosis. Halley cleaned out her address book. I know what she's talking about. Every time I dial someone in my phone book on my cell phone I trip across my uncle's name. I keep meaning to delete it, but I just can't seem to do it. Too fucking sad.
Paolo: "Stay tuned." Ack. Today's song: "We all want to change the world." Bob Stepno has a great Art Carney story. Great pics in the comments on this post. Sean Gallagher is working on new designs, too. There's now a totally dysfunctional cookie crumb trail at the top of the page. Now I have to figure out how to get it working for real. Now if you're looking for the grand vision, this is the beginning. When you click on World, at some point, you will actually get the world. BBC: "TV and film star Art Carney, an Oscar winner for his part in the 1974 film Harry and Tonto, has died aged 85." Jon Udell wondered yesterday if Microsoft really means to push the Web into a corner, pour gasoline on it, and light a match. This happens over and over. People can't believe it but Microsoft really didn't want the Web.
BTW, Esther came to BloggerCon. I saw that as a gesture of support and it was much appreciated.
Scott Rosenberg nails it. Three-pane aggregators save you zero time, unless the issue is that your net connection is too slow to display HTML pages live. Otherwise you might as well read the news in your browser. He's correct that server-side aggregators have certain advantages (we offer one to our users at Harvard), but reverse chronologic updates are a huge efficiency. Otherwise you have to do the hunting for new bits. Let the computer do it for you, I say.
Next thing on my to-do list -- unbreak the main RSS feed. Done.
The last cactus snapshot. No doubt, everything is broken. The blogroll is missing. But some stuff appears to work. I can update. The flow is much simpler. And my editorial system is faster and easier (so it can get slower and more complex). What did we used to say? Still diggin. BTW, I spoke with Jon Udell this evening to review the plan. He and I have been talking about this stuff for years. I'll be turning on more features tomorrow and Thursday and of course write much more. It's been a long day, and all kidding aside, everything seems to work better than I could have hoped for given how much has changed. Where are we heading? The tree of knowledge. What's our technique? Bootstrapping. Are we building The Semantic Web? No. But we are building tools for people to share and preserve what they know. As Engelbart says, augmenting human intelligence. Washington Post: "George Soros, one of the world's richest men, has given away nearly $5 billion to promote democracy in the former Soviet bloc, Africa and Asia. Now he has a new project: defeating President Bush." Ready or not, it's time to start flipping switches in the transition of Scripting News from weblog to directory for the World Wide Web. Some changes will be visible to the public, others will only be visible to me. By this time tomorrow the cactus will be gone. Everything will change, except one thing will remain constant. It's all still the unedited voice of a person. But it will be modular, and it will be possible for my voice to be mixed with others, in new ways. Feeling mellow today, I picked up the phone and called Mark Pilgrim, and said we should work together. There's a story that's been circulating, it first appeared in a paper given by Matthew Rothenberg, a NYU professor, about standards evolution in the weblog world, and was picked up by Clay Shirky (who's also teaching at NYU these days). Mark and I both figure heavily in the story. One of the many lessons of the Rothenberg piece is that people want us to work together. I think it's a good idea. Mark is a smart man, and we have done some great collaboration in the past. When we both get on the same page, mountains move. Announcing a Scripting News dinner, on Tuesday November 25, at the King Tsin restaurant in Berkeley, 7PM. Thanks to Sylvia Paull, doyenne of Bay Area geeks, for coordinating. This will be the first Scripting News event in the East Bay.
A people hire A people, B people hire C people. Always strive for the most excellence. Never be scared to work with people who are smarter than you. Never be scared to let others be smarter than you. (Filed under Dave/Homilies/Mottos.) This week is shaping up to be huge in NH, with Kerry, Dean and Clark touring at the same time. Greenspun in Mexico City. StateDemocracy.Com looks interesting. The Church Sign Generator has great potential.
Tomorrow you will think I am a total idiot. Wired: Clark Campaign to Debut Big Blog. Quotes Cam, Doc and myself. "A voter with a weblog is ten times more powerful than a voter without a weblog."
Crimson: "Slater received a cease-and-desist letter from Harvard on Oct. 31 after posting thousands of internal documents about an electronic voting machine manufacturer on his Harvard-hosted website." Derek: "I will be filing a letter defending my actions and will go before a hearing if necessary. I will also use this opportunity, as best I can, to urge the University to reconsider its role in these matters and its DMCA policies in general."
Glenn Reynolds demos what a Presidential campaign video should look like. In it he tells everyone to read weblogs. Perfect. So when do you think Glenn is going to officially declare his candidacy? I swear he's going to run. I'm so sure I started a category for his campaign. I hope he does. I also think Philip Greenspun should run. Paolo compares RSS categories and ENT. Good job. I totally see my taxonomy as personal. Not trying to get anyone else to adopt it, at this time. Not even sure I'm going to stick to it. I have to start somewhere. I designed a bit of flexibility into the category element, but not too much. Getting people to agree on a taxonomy is a huge problem, that and user interface are the two looming beasts that keep this stuff from taking off. So instead of putting the cart before the horse, I decided to start pulling the cart myself. Today's song: "They may be stupid but they sure are fun." Nelson Minar: "Each of the individual applications using RDF I know of could have been done more easily with plain XML." RVW is "intended to allow machine-readable reviews to be integrated into an RSS feed, thus allowing reviews to be automatically compiled from distributed sources." Chris Lydon interviews Cameron Barrett from the Clark campaign. Special RSS feed updated. It's gratifying that Cam didn't fall into the hype about open source politics. That shows integrity. Open source is a term that means something with software, but it is meaningless in politics, unless somehow I can take over Wesley Clark's body, but I don't think anyone is seriously considering that, at least I hope not. Wendy: "I'm in my new office, by the way, on the 2nd floor!" Congrats. That's a big deal. Changes the flow of Berkman. Major Feng Shui implications there. For people wanting to follow the development of the new aggregator, here's a table containing all the categorized items from Scripting News in the last three days. Screen shot.
Fleshbot, the "pornographic sister website of Gizmodo and Gawker." A fascinating discussion started on this day in 1999 on evolution of RSS 0.91, including comments from Evan Williams, Dan Libby, Edd Dumbill. Cordial and professional, even statesman-like. Touched on many of the ideas that were later implemented in 0.92 and 2.0. This hyothetical conversation between Bill Gates and Satan in 1998 explains why our world still doesn't run in Java.
Joi Ito is becoming a cranky old man. Welcome!
Marc Nozell blogs Joe Lieberman campaigning in NH. Wired: "Linus Torvalds wants me to believe he's too boring." I find this report really interesting. It shows where the readers of the Scripting News archive are coming from. The top two are domains at Harvard, I assume they're crawlers of some kind. Then crawlers from Teoma, Google, then users and more crawlers. It's been a while since I've had a clients readout. SecurityFocus has two new RSS feeds. SmartMoney magazine has 12 feeds. Lessig: "It is ok to bend the truth, but only in one way."
Sunday night forecast: "Clear and cold. Lows 18 to 23." Reminder to self: Watch for Paolo's comments on changes to Scripting News RSS.
Stirring Cory Doctorow piece on the evil Broadcast Flag.
NY Times: "Howard Dean became the first Democrat to opt out of the presidential public financing system in 30 years." Changes to Scripting News RSS. Today's song: "Let's all get up and dance to a song that was a hit before your mother was born, though she was born a long long time ago." Clark campaign: "We'll probably soft-launch the tools on Monday and label it a 'Public Beta.'" Howard Greenstein's pictures of the lunar eclipse. My copy of Cadenhead's Radio book came yesterday. I've read two or three chapters, and it's excellent. We've been very lucky in this community to first have Matt Neuburg's book, published by O'Reilly in 1998, and now an up-to-date book on the 2003 environment published by Sams. If you've been wondering about the programming and content management environment behind the blogging tool and aggregator; the object database, verb set, outliner, debugger, website framework, get this book, it's great. I'm really excited about this. We should see another boost of growth in the community. The timing is also good because the new management team is booting up, and instead of asking Lawrence and Jake lots of questions, they can RTFM. AP: "In a historic move, Democratic presidential hopeful Howard Dean will skip public financing and the spending limits that come with it." Berkman fellow Jim Moore is at Dean headquarters in Burlington today. Wired: "Wallop is Microsoft's venture into the red-hot social-networking arena." "Everyone now has got their guns locked and loaded at Howard Dean," said Rachel Gorlin, a Democratic strategist.
Another dynamic OPML element in the Scripting News archive redesign. Each item links to a page where you can see the full content for a given month. Example. The new archive now has a primitive Referers page. Halley would like you to buy a copy of Penthouse. No kidding.
Next trip to California is booked. Nov 22 through the 29th. Speaking at Stanford on the 24th. Visiting friends and family, doing light work, staying in Mountain View. Excellent NY Times article about Web sites with information about ski trips. Library Planet gathers comments on Shirky's latest. Changes to Scripting News RSS Several changes today in the RSS feed for this weblog. 1. The beginning of category support. I now have a basic user interface in the outliner that allows me to route each post through a hierarchic set of categories of things that I am interested in. This maps directly on to the RSS 2.0 category sub-element of item. I'll post a screen shot of the user interface when it looks a little prettier. 2. Stopped generating the <skipHours> element. It was supposed to be a bandwidth-saver, but it confuses people who are emulating Scripting News, and I think Radio is the only aggregator that respects it. 3. Stopped generating the <ttl> element. The P2P network I was working on with Morpheus didn't deploy because I got sick last summer. When and if it ever comes back, I can uncomment the code that generates it. 4. Stopped generating the channel-level <category> element for Syndic8. This was intended as an olive branch, but they didn't reciprocate. If someone else is working on a taxonomy of feeds, let me know. Rule of Win-Win. 5. Changed <webMaster> and <managingEditor> to my Harvard email address. 6. In the <docs> element, point to the spec at Harvard, not at UserLand. 7. Add a channel-level <pubDate> element. The shape of weblog software
DNC: 2004 Primary Calendar. Weather forecast: "Lows in the upper 20s." Brrr. I got a demo and a new account on Clark's weblog space (in beta). It's quite rough in its implementation but solid in its philosophy. Some of the ideas outlined in this piece are implemented. It's good because it will up the ante for Dean, Edwards, Bush, et al. Remember the Browser Wars when Netscape and Microsoft were competing to give us the best access to the Web. Now we have competition among the candidates to give us the best access to each others' minds. How much progress that is! They used to think of us as eyeballs and couch potatoes. One reason I like Jim Moore is that he helps me do what I want to do. Of course I don't mind sharing, but I like it even more if there's something in it for me. All Headline News is a new service that generates RSS feeds for publications that don't have them. I've been working with Jeff Brown for the last few days, getting his RSS in shape, and it's looking pretty good now. It has an important feature, explained here, that allows you to set up search-based RSS feeds. Very powerful stuff.
Werblog: "Google reportedly rejected a $10 billion buyout offer from Microsoft, and is now launching a product that puts Google directly onto the Windows desktop." Essay: We can't win in Iraq so let's get out, now. Doc Searls: "Cam Barrett showed me some of the community network stuff he's planning for the Clark Campaign yesterday, and I'm impressed." Lots of great ideas at last night's Berkman-Blogs meeting. We spent a lot of time talking about how to get more weblogs started at Harvard. Bob Stepno turned it around, and asked how we could track news sites that Harvard already maintains without weblog technology. I love it when somone reaches inside the balloon and pulls it out by the inside and the problem gets simpler. Now the problem is to find all the sites that change every day with news generated from Harvard, and aggregate them on one easy to read weblog-style page. In other words, instead of telling everyone they need to start weblogs, decide that they already have. Our plans for hosting fell through. We have two great servers that should be ready to deploy this weekend or early next week, and nowhere to put them. We're looking for two U's of rack space in an easy drive from where we are. Cambridge, Somerville, Arlington, Watertown, Newton, Lexington, Waltham. We can afford reasonable monthly bandwidth costs. These boxes will serve weblogs and special-purpose aggregators, and over time new stuff Andrew and I (and others) develop. If you have suggestions, please send an email. Thanks. Two years ago today: "Use these motherfuckers with care." Three years ago, the beginning of the crazy post-election mess of Y2K. Bush won't concede Florida, the headline read. Little did we know what was coming next.
Press release: "NPR will benefit from a bequest of more than $200 million from the estate of philanthropist Joan Kroc." The Clark campaign is hiring various kinds of Web devs. Jeff Jarvis report from Always On breakfast in NYC. Yesterday's big insight was that it takes years for people to get to know you through your weblog. Today's (thanks to Ed Cone, below) is that weblogs are just part of the new political process. Ed Cone: "So it's months before the NC primary, and a year before the election, and Dean has this network of well-equipped local volunteers working away on coordinated projects. The cost of this locally-run operation to the campaign is the cost of materials and shipping." Feedable creates "the feeds that someone forgot." Wired: "If you are an inventor, you had better team up with someone who is cunning and vicious." David Pollard commends Business 2.0 for an insightful choice of social network software as the technology of the year, but (correctly) points out that personal content managment technology (weblogs, RSS) is a necessary companion. I got an invite yesterday to do an academic-style talk at Microsoft Research, about weblogs. I said yes of course. It'll be in a big auditorium, with an open invite to everyone at MS. Curtis Wong is the host. I've known him for years, and he was also a keynoter at the PEI media conference last month. Ted Ritzer set up a tree of knowledge on his Salon weblog. Two years ago: "No matter where you live, in what time period, no matter who you work for, you can think for yourself." Tim Berners-Lee: What's new in 92. For people curious about the origins of weblogs, this site looks like it might have been the first.
Howard Dean: "If we accept federal matching funds, our spending will be capped at $45 million -- and the greatest grassroots movement in the history of presidential politics will be stopped from raising money almost immediately and will reach the spending limit well before the end of the primaries. We will not have any funding until the Democratic convention at the end of July."
Roger Simon asks the question they should have asked last night. "Which candidate would you most like to have smoked dope with?" He gets the correct answer. When people ask why you read Scripting News, now you can tell them. The new servers arrived. Murphy-willing they'll be deployed and online in a few days. Chris Lydon: The Blogging of the President 2004. Chris gave a presentation at the NextMedia conference in Prince Edward Island. I took pictures. I was playing with the settings on my digital camera with an interesting result. Jay Rosen: "How dumb should an ombudsman assume Americans to be? NPR's Jeffrey Dvorkin forces us to ask that. His answer: very dumb indeed." Essay: "Candidates should use weblogs instead of becoming one." BBC reports that MTV is preparing an online music system I took the political compass test. I'm a leftist libertarian. Check out how the Presidential candidates rated. Greenspun: Should universities permit free speech? PRSA: Pitching Blogs. Andrew Grumet's new Weblog Outliner for Movable Type.
It comes and goes. Yesterday I had a badly infected tooth pulled, one that had been causing a lot of discomfort that I just lived with, and then started hurting, then the pain became unbearable. Remove the tooth. I feel great! All these horizons open up. It's all relative. Moods swing. Tah dah.
Sebastien Paquet: Structured Blogging. Free Movable Type hosting. GCN: "Long popular with Internet surfers, weblogs are getting a review by Defense Department users for project management." Postscript on dentist visit. I was concerned that it was an impacted wisdom tooth. In fact it was a huge cavity in a wisdom tooth. They pulled it. My mouth, though bloody, feels marvelous. Three cheers for dentists! And I found one that does nitrous oxide. Nice effect. Wouldn't mind doing it again. AP: "CBS announced Tuesday it was pulling 'The Reagans' miniseries off the air." Jon Udell gave a talk about blogging to execs of "dynamic mid-size companies." Adam Curry wonders if today's late start is because I'm developing software. Actually I have a bad tooth ache that I'm going to see a dentist about at 4PM in Lexington and I have a late lunch meeting before that in Cambridge. So it'll be a light day, not like that other light day last year, I hope.
Al Franken guest posts on Kicking Ass. Here's what a whole month of Scripting News looks like.
Another: "Real men are not so perfect." One more: "Some wise person said that our parents teach us so much, and the last thing they teach us is -- and there I have to leave it blank. I don't yet know what the last thing my father will teach me is." Example of an RSS feed from the new Scripting archive. Werbach: "Why not subsidize bloggers who create popular posts? Or creators of popular shareware? Or great CSS templates? Let's all get on the gravy train!" Thanks Doc for looking into the Dean campaign's use of the term open source to describe their campaign. We seem to agree that it's not an accurate use of the term, that what they really mean is "open," which of course, is very very cool. Now maybe the next step is, in an open way, to throw this over the fence to Dean's Internet advisory board, which is staffed by many of our friends in BlogLand.
Berkman Center, where I work, recently received funding from the MacArthur Foundation to study alternative compensation schemes for media on the Internet. John Palfrey, executive director at Berkman, explains how the project will work. Note, I am not working on this project myself, I'm not even sure I agree with its goals. But that's the cool thing about working at a place like Berkman, we're still friends even if we don't agree on everything.
NY Times: "MIT announced that it would temporarily shut down its groundbreaking Library Access to Music System until the licensing rights can be worked out." Ole Eichorn returns from Microsoft's devcon with questions about performance and reliability of the new OS code.
Diego Doval's tutorial on syndication.
Bless John Kerry, he bought some ads on weblogs. Doc comments on the term open source applied to politics. Very stimulating conversation with Jay Rosen yesterday. Two follow-up pointers, one a tutorial for professional reporters getting started with weblogs, and the other a long-running philosophical disagreement between myself and his NYU colleague, Clay Shirky. I'm sure Jay won't mind my making the pointers public. BTW, we had lunch at the 2nd Avenue Deli. I had matzoh ball soup, chopped liver, a kosher hot dog, and bobka. After, I stopped at a Starbuck's at 9th and 2nd for a large coffee. My mother told me that it was at the location of my grandfather's favorite old-country restaurant, the Kiev (or was it the Odessa?), where he would have perogies. Now it's just another Starbucks. Oy vey. PS: Rosen is going to Davos next year (lucky guy!). Mazel tov to Full Professor Akma, sir. Fox News (paraphrased): "Seek out stories that cater to angry, middle-aged white men who listen to talk radio and yell at their televisions." BBC: Thirteen US soldiers die in helicopter attack in Iraq. Unknown developer: "We don't solve problems, we just talk about them." I went to a party in Prince Edward Island with several hundred people, lobster, mussels, beer, great conversation, and one guy wearing a kilt. I drank a bit of beer, so at one point I had to go to the bathroom, and who would be in there, taking a leak, but the guy with a kilt. It was too much for me. Woody Allen: "I don't want to achieve immortality through my work. I want to achieve it through not dying. "
Dean campaign response to "tag team attacks." AP: "A comment by Howard Dean about Confederate flags and pickup trucks has embroiled the leading Democrats in Iowa's presidential caucuses in a name-calling donnybrook." Edwards campaign weblog: "Outrageous." I had lunch today with NYU journalism prof Jay Rosen and spoke at length with Chris Lydon about various ideas around academia, journalism, politics and weblogs. Noted that the term "open source" is being used to describe journalism and politics these days and wonder what exactly that means. In open source politics, a term which Joe Trippi uses to describe the Dean campaign, could I take a snapshot of their codebase (borrow the candidate) and fork the project? (Have him run for city council or dog catcher.) Or could I hijack the campaign, and take his place on stage, and introduce myself saying "Hello I am Howard Dean." I'm all in favor of open politics, I think it's a must. But open is not the same as open source. BTW, I heard about a secret, invitation-only "summit" to discuss open source politics. Really. No kidding. Diego Doval's introduction to weblogs. Excellent. Deanspace demo. Campaign as software developer. From Burningman via Dowbrigade a fascinating simulation of 3D with animated GIFs. As the primary powers up, one of my favorite sources is NHPrimary.Com. They have an RSS feed too. There wasn't much response to my call for a dinner in NY, so we'll do it another time, with more advance planning. Doc Searls blogs baseball philosophy. The Cubs have good philosophy. Not as good as the Mets of course, but pretty good. And now that the Red Sox are throwing it away, we're looking for a worthy opponent for the Mets to beat in the World Series. Driving in to NYC last night, a delicious train of thought. Saw a sign for the Cross Bronx Expressway, which made me think of the Major Deegan, which made me think of Yankee Stadium, which made me think of how the the Florida Marlins kicked their butts in the World Series this year. Embarassed to say that, due to operator error, I can only send mail, I can't receive it. So if you sent me an email after mid-day yesterday, I won't read it until I get back to Boston. On this day last year, I made a set of proposals to developers who use RSS. I link to them today in hope that they will get a fresh look. I accept that some people think RSS should be replaced. That's a fixture of this community. In the meantime, the market is growing, new users are coming online every day, we have work to do. Three years ago: "Defensive indifference."
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Thanks to Vitamin C, 
DaveNet: 
An aside. BloggerCon was not a summit. It never occurred to any of us to call it a summit. Conference promoters who use the term are telling you the opposite; they're leaving some important people out, and they hope you won't notice. A perfect case in point is the upcoming 
Dean campaign manager Joe Trippi is on 
