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This year's song: "He was playing real good for free."
Paul Boutin: 101 Ways to Save the Internet. A story about stories inspired by Big Fish. Four years ago: "That's it for this millennium!" One of the cool things about New Years is we get a new year in the On This Day In list. Okay, it's not really that cool.
Pet peeve: Print pubs that mis-spell Dan Gillmor's name. Every time I see it, and it happens a lot, I wonder what happened to all the editing that supposedly is backing up every print article. Are you your stories? Warning -- if you're the type of person who doesn't watch movie trailers and you haven't seen Big Fish, skip this section. On the other hand, I promise not to reveal anything about the movie that isn't in the trailer. Tim Burton, the director and producer of Big Fish, is a master story-teller. Is there anything more to Tim Burton than his stories? Suppose I met him at a party and asked "Who are you really, I mean without the stories?" Could he give a meaningful answer? I suspect Burton is telling us, in Big Fish, no. Speaking through one of his characters he says "I can be who ever you want me to be." My uncle, who died a few months ago, was a big story-teller. We used to joke when he'd start to tell a story that we'd heard dozens of times -- oh that's story number 278,291. In his stories, as with all our stories, he's the hero, he overcomes great odds to prevail, in a funny, lesson-learning way. Today my uncle is dead and guess what, there's nothing more to him now than his stories, and our stories about him. Do any of them have anything to do with who the true man was? See, that's really hard to say. We seem to think there's more to a person, that you can sort of lift up the floorboard, and underneath the stories, find the soul, the essence of the person. But I'm beginning to wonder. Could it be that our purpose is to tell a story, and that the better lived a life is, the better the story that survives after you're gone? The story behind this movie really gets you thinking. And that kind of story, for me, is the very best kind.
BBC: "The inventor of the world wide web, Tim Berners-Lee, has been awarded a knighthood for his pioneering work." Jay Rosen: "Ordinarily we make New Year's Resolutions for ourselves, not for other people." Brent Simmons: "I except 2004 to be fun."
BBC: "More people looked for information about the file-swapping program Kazaa than anything else on the net in 2003." Wired: "Gibson's maverick CEO wants to shove Ethernet up your ax and rock the music world." InfoWorld: "Phil Goldman, the founder and chief executive officer of Mailblocks and one of the founders of WebTV Networks has died at age 39, according to a statement released by the company on Sunday." SF Chronicle: "A fitness nut, Mr Goldman seemed in excellent health, said those who knew him. After a long night of programming, Mr Goldman often headed over to Gold's Gym to lift weights, Perlman recalled. He was also notoriously careful about his diet." Kay Trammel picks up on the Universal Story ID idea.
Harvard Magazine profiles our humble little community. Today's movie -- Big Fish. One word review: Wonderful. Mike Walsh: "I wish there were a Universal Story ID Number in the blogosphere." Andrew Grumet: "The first Getting Started with Weblogs class will be held a week from tomorrow at MIT Sloan, building E52." Edwards received the endorsement of Hootie & the Blowfish. Over the Christmas holiday I started a new moderated mail list for people who use RSS. It's off to a great start. No flames of course, and lots of good ideas, and a discussion about feeds with excerpts. Taegan Goddard: "If you have ever wondered why a campaign can spend $1,000,000 or more on television advertising and still be in the single-digits in the polls, you need to read this." USA Today: "This will be the year downloadable music goes legitimate," says Dave Fester, general manager of Microsoft's digital media division. Betsy Devine: "On December 13, President George W. Bush signed a big chunk of Patriot II into law -- but the 'major media' were focused on Saddam's spider hole." Betsy, something to think about -- did any of the Democratic Presidential candidates alert us? "thinkUsaAlignRight"BTW, Wired News had an article about it in late November, I pointed to it and Jason Lefkowitz got angry and went into motion. I've heard Republican spin masters say that we need a positive optimistic vision for the future, not people who are angry about the past. Remember, when you hear that bullshit, they're not wanting you to think about the Fourth and First Amendments which are being dismantled. Do you think Uncle Sam was angry about Pearl Harbor or the Nazis? Yeah I'm angry. And that's the correct way to be. The Scotsman: "Every political animal -- from George W Bush downwards -- began to notice the potential for communicating directly with voters without irritating media types getting in the way. The political weblog was born." A rambling essay on friendship, the Dean campaign, ping-spam. With any luck, glossary elements are now expanded as the RSS feed is being generated. If so, this should show up as a smiley when you read it in your aggregator.
Scoble: "Why didn't Silicon Valley happen in Kansas?" mobileRSS is a "Web-based client for reading RSS feeds." For 10 points, write a caption for this picture of a moose kissing a kitten. The Wikipedia, an incredible resource, needs $20K to stay afloat. The Unofficial Kerry for President Blog. Karl Rove's unofficial blog.
Also on that day: "In the end the only teams that matter are the Cubs, Red Sox and of course the Mets." Elvis Mitchell's ten best movies of 2003. Kaye Trammel: "You don't have to try be gendered on your blog -- chances are that it just happens naturally. After all, that is what being gendered is all about." Sarah Leonard, spokeswoman for the Dean campaign: "What you're seeing is a career politician desperate to save his political career." Here's a question. When the campaigning politician talks to the press they do it separately from their pep rallies for voters. Why? I'd like to hear what they say to the reporters. Wouldn't a grass roots campaign like Dean do that? Jim Moore, I wonder what you think about this. Is that true to the Second Superpower concept, which you developed?
The audio from my talk at Stanford is available. At a restaurant in Queens today an Asian woman lugging a suitcase goes from table to table offering DVDs for $5. Movies that are currently in the theaters. I had never seen this before. I found it disheartening. Calling this piracy is totally fair, imho. Jim Moore, the "newly appointed Director of Internet and Information Services for the Dean campaign" responds to my Wednesday editorial. Note that Jim and I are both fellows at Berkman Center. The Unisphere in Flushing Meadow Park, in Queens. Six years ago today: "A new Scripting News feature. Soooon, you'll be able to hook up to the news flow thru XML." Boston Globe: "McGovern, now 81, places himself, and Dean, 'right in the mainstream of the Democratic Party' on all issues besides the wars each have opposed." Paul Krugman: "I don't know why some journalists seem so concerned about politicians' clothes as opposed to, say, their policy proposals. But unless you're a fashion reporter, obsessing about clothes is an insult to your readers' intelligence." Bing!
Microsoft has announced a unique approach to stopping spam. "For any piece of e-mail I send, it will take a small amount computing power of about 10 to 20 seconds. When you see that proof, you treat that message with more priority." Normal email senders won't notice the delay and filters on your mail client will be able to tell high priority mail from low priority spam. Very clever. I was briefed on it a few months ago, and as long as they are making the technique freely available I support it. If it's another patent gateway I'm afraid we're just trading the evil of spam for another evil. Which is lesser is a good question. The RSS-User mail list is a miracle. It's the first time, to my knowledge, that there's been a discussion of RSS that wasn't dominated by developers. All I'm doing so far is approving messages, I just posted a couple at the start. I won't let through messages that are developer issues or ad hominems. Should have done this a long time ago. BTW, on some blogs they're saying my stint at Berkman is about to run out. Although I've asked them to run corrections, they haven't. So I'll correct it here. My fellowship goes through the end of next semester, and we're working on plans that go beyond that. Nothing in life is certain of course, but I hope to be employed by Harvard for quite some time, Murphy-willing of course. BBC: "The prospects for the Beagle 2 lander on Mars look increasingly gloomy after a radio sweep of the planet failed to detect any sign of the UK-built probe." Steve Pomeroy: "Another fun (though scary) computer-generated Xmas song is this MBrola test file." Dare Obasanjo: "My day job involves reading or writing specs all day. Most of the specs I read either were produced by the W3C or by folks within Microsoft. Every one of them contains contradictions, ambiguities and lack crucial information for determining in edge cases. Some are better than others but they all are never well-defined enough. Every spec has errata." Today's song: "Oh the weather outside is frightful.." Computer rendition of Let It Snow. Demo of the Creative Rhomba for my parents. Here's me singing Let It Snow (it's not snowing in NY today). Happy holidays boys and girls!
My next challenge -- figure out how to get my Sony DSC-P9 camera to connect to my IBM laptop over USB. In the past, when I used a Sony laptop I could just pop the memory stick out of the camera and plop it into the laptop. The IBM, as far as I know, doesn't have a memory stick slot. So when I plug the USB cable in, nothing shows up on the desktop. I assume this means I have to install some software on the laptop. (Postscript: I just had to turn the camera on. D'oh!)
BBC: No Mars signal from Beagle probe. Philadelphia Inquirer: "Air France canceled six flights between Paris and Los Angeles yesterday after U.S. intelligence reports indicated that al-Qaeda might be planning to hijack aircraft for a Sept 11-style suicide attack, US officials said." Channel Z status -- I'm using it every day, in fact I'm using it to write this post. At some point I plan to put in another month or so of intense work, not sure exactly when. Now I'm gaining experience as a user. And my experience as a developer with thousands of users of new Web authoring software has taught me to go slow at this stage. Once deployed, the demands of users get overwhelming quickly. B52s: "I am living on Channel Z." Me too! Followup on yesterday's editorial There's been a bunch of comment on my editorial yesterday, most of it missing the point, widely. Candidates have to earn my vote, and they won't if they say one thing and do another. They don't stand a chance competing with commercial software developers, yet that's exactly what two leading candidates are doing. Further, the software market in America is depressed, and I think that's partly caused by people expecting to get software for free. A candidate who wanted to help software jobs come back to NH, a high-tech state, could do something right now to help. No need to wait till they're elected. And I don't agree with people who say the candidate's job is to get elected. Sure, that's probably the way the candidate views it. But I'm not a candidate, I'm a member of the electorate and a taxpayer. I've yet to vote in a presidential election that means something. I'd like to, someday. I honestly don't think this is the year, but I'm doing my part to shift the focus to the voters and away from 60-second TV commercials. What are you doing? BTW, Dean is a very average candidate. His handlers ought to tell him to answer questions frankly. He got a question about the airplane they were using and tax dodges. He was asked if the story was true and he said No, and didn't comment further. He said some really nasty personal things about George Bush and John Kerry, kind of schoolyard stuff. Not something you'd expect from a Presidential candidate. That people are rallying around this guy gives you an idea how desperate we are for leadership. I think we can do better, much better. About open source being un-American --> wrong. It's almost totally American. Think about all the big open source titles, projects all led by Americans (or Fins living in America). Sometimes I wonder if these people even bother to read the things they critique. Some critics have pointed out that I've done plenty of software for free. True. In fact, since 1988 I've only done software for free. Did it make me happy? No. I yearn to be paid for software again. I've learned, the hard way, that people don't appreciate stuff they get for nothing. Jay McCarthy: "The point should not be to get elected to office. The point should be to be the person who the people want to be in office. Don't convince them, be their voice."
Antoin O Lachtnain: "I gave up smoking quite a while back, and I have been meaning to take it up again now for some years. MyWireService "delivers the headlines and summaries to you in an easy to scan page." Went to a Broadway matinee, it was great, a musical, lots of fun! The RSS-User mail list is off to a great start with 81 members. It works because it's moderated. All the posts have been about feeds and howtos, no politics, no personal attacks. Bush officials tell holiday stories, including Karl Rove reading Santa's New Reindeer. Requres Real (video). NY Times: "Gephardt's aides say he has to win Iowa to have any hope of gaining the Democratic nomination." Editorial Wired: "If we're still in the race in a few months, I think you'll see a tremendous amount of development." Wouldn't it be great if Dean and Clark went after Viacom, ClearChannel and Time-Warner, instead of the tiny companies that make blogging and social networking tools. I find myself hoping they get their asses kicked, hard. I don't expect much of Bush, but I doubt seriously that he would undermine the mostly American software industry by competing with it with free software. Makes the Dems' pitch about exporting American high-tech jobs to India fairly hollow (NH is a high-tech state, so it has been an issue). One of the reasons American programmers aren't competing here (in America) is that users expect to get software for free, and in that environment little new stuff gets created, and we have to keep creating to justify the greater amount of money we make (over Indians). But if all we make are commodities, then Indians working for low pay beat Americans working for free. (People who work for free have no incentive to please users, or even create usable software.) How sad to see two leading Democrats fall for, even feed the lie that they can create user-oriented software for free. Shame on both Dean and Clark. They went after the little guy. Who wants a president who does that. Not me. Still looking for someone worth supporting.
NY Times: "The federal government said this evening that the first suspected case of so-called mad cow disease had been discovered in the United States." A new Manila macro, available only on Harvard's server (for now) is a clone of the Radio macro that displays recent blog posts. Amazingly, my test site has become an authority on Gretchen Pirillo. Still have the number one slot for John Doerr. And the number one Dave. Lessig: "Enough already!" Highly recommend Mort Sahl on NPR's Fresh Air today. Scott Rosenberg: "Today's open-minded kids are tomorrow's democratic majority." Bryan Bell's viral marketing scheme for the Central California Falcon Club. Update at 6:30PM. It's over. Whew. All the services are turned back on. Update at 4:30PM. First the good news. Shanti Braford responded to my emails. It's not a denial-of-service attack, it's just a buggy bot. The bad news -- the flood continues unabated. About five requests per second. A huge waste of bandwidth and money. I was about to begin a day away from the computer, and decided to check my server log, and saw tens of thousands of accesses by a bot at 69.10.144.111 of a single file. It's reading a fairly large file about 100K times per hour. I entered the IP address in my browser. This usually doesn't get you anything but this time it got me an empty Movable Type weblog for "Shanti Braford." I looked up this person on Google, and found that he is the author of Popdex. So this probably isn't a denial of service attack, rather a script with a bug -- a bug that's costing me a boatload of money. If you're friends with Mr Braford please call him up and ask him to kill the script. In the meantime I've temporarily removed the file (sorry) to help minimize the damage.
Dowbrigade: "Dean has reached the Pact-with-the-Devil stage of his political ascension, and how he handles it will go a long way toward determining the ultimate impact of his campaign, if not its objective success."
NY Times profile of Elizabeth Spiers. As an experiment, I put Google AdSense ads on the weblogs.com home page. Immediately it makes me laugh. "Handmade Leather Journals." The perfect gift for the blogger who has everything. I started a moderated mail list for people who use RSS, either as a publisher or reading feeds in an aggregator. The list is moderated to keep it on topic and away from personal issues. It's just about using RSS, not debating its merits or other formats that may be like RSS. I wanted to have this list to get ready for the session I'm doing at RSS Winterfest, below, and of course if it's an active resource it'll be around for a long time after that. Scott Rosenberg: "Our office tower just started swaying. Stopped now. Seems like there was just a medium-size quake in the Bay Area." AP: "An earthquake estimated at magnitude 6.5 rocked California from Los Angeles to San Francisco on Monday, collapsing downtown buildings in one town near the epicenter, causing several unspecified injuries in the region and a widespread blackout." Reuters: "Ralph Nader said he wants to make another White House bid in 2004 and will announce a decision next month." You can tell Ralph to run, or not, in this Web form. In Salon, Scott Rosenberg explains how Microsoft is using weblogs to spawn a culture around the Longhorn version of Windows, in development. You have to get a free day pass or buy a subscription to read Scott's column.
Lessig's on a roll. Lots of interesting posts today. Go get em. Taegan Goddard reports on a poll showing Dean leading narrowly in a crowded field in South Carolina. "Dean leads with 16 percent and is followed by Wesley Clark at 12 percent, Al Sharpton at 12 percent, and John Edwards at 11 percent. " Jon Udell: "XML documents, flowing through XML plumbing, can now deliver very real and tangible benefits." The Clarkbot is a "Perl script written by Rick Heller. It searches the Feedster RSS search engine for references to "Wesley Clark" To be picked up by the Clarkbot, a blog must generate an RSS Feed, and that feed must be listed with Feedster."
Ed Cone: "North Carolina should be a great proving ground for Internet campaigning at a state level." Two years ago today Brent Simmons said: "I'm 200, you're 200." It's cool because you have to know HTTP to get it. The Guardian's A-Team blogger list. Phillip Pearson: "I wrote a Python script that downloads a web page, then examines all linked pages to try to find their RSS feeds." Back from New Hampshire with pics of Dean and Lieberman. Jessica Baumgart's notes on yesterday's trip to NH.
Off to see Dean (6:30PM) and Lieberman (7:45PM). Al Gore's son is arrested for pot posession. It would be really cool if one of the Democratic candidates could explain why marijuana is illegal. Jon Postel: "Be liberal in what you accept, and conservative in what you send." Chronicle: "A massive San Francisco power outage on one of the busiest shopping days of the year turned the normal chaos of the Saturday before Christmas into surreal confusion -- disrupting traffic, shutting down two transit stations and disorienting thousands of suburbanites who visit the city only a few times a year." Marshall McLuhan: "The medium is the message." John F Kennedy: "Ask not what your country can do for you, ask what you can do for your country." Unknown philosopher: "Only steal from the best." Today is the first day of winter and the shortest day of the year. Bloggable campaign events today in NH. Dean, Lieberman, Clark. Frank Rich: "The political establishment has been blindsided by the Internet's growing sophistication as a political tool -- and therefore blindsided by the Dean campaign -- much as the music industry establishment was by file sharing and the major movie studios were by The Blair Witch Project, the amateurish under-$100,000 movie that turned viral marketing on the Web into a financial mother lode." Karlin Lillington reviews Radio UserLand. New version of mainResponder.respond for Frontier users, adds ETag support and optimizes all pages served by mainResponder.
Pictures taken at Clark and Gephardt talks today.
Off to see Clark (1PM) and Gephardt (3PM) in NH today. The eyes of Joi Ito oversee weblogs.com.
Erika Stutzman: "The University of North Carolina's School of Journalism and Mass Communication is hosting a Weblogs in Journalism seminar in January, yet another sign that the online journals and forums are starting to mature." The Blogosphere and the Holidays
One of the things I like about this time of year is that so many people seem to have a time to do interesting and fun things. It's like everyone gets a mini-sabbatical. It's time to go to a game, to the movies, a museum, out to a long lunch or visit with a few bloggers you haven't stayed in touch with. Next week I'm going to be in NYC. Maybe there will be an opportunity to do some or all of that. Randy Charles Morin sent a question about this. Does the blogosphere pick up or go on holiday during the holidays? Here's what I said. 1. I don't have any data, but I do have subjectives. 2. The actual flow goes down, around the 25th way down. 3. But the volume of real work goes up, because people have time for projects that require attention or thinking, which they have more of in the coming two-three weeks. I've done some of my best work in this period in years past. My first two XML projects, siteChanges.xml and scriptingNews format (which became half of RSS 0.91) were hatched in December 1997. Last year in this time period I helped my parents get through a tough time. I was telling my brother yesterday that I have fond memories of this, it gave me a strong sense of purpose, and a sense that I made a difference. That also happened during the holidays last year. So mostly the holidays are good. I especially like it when stress isn't a big part of it.
David Davies: "Let's see those video moblogs!"
Chris Lydon interviews Larry Lessig. Just listened to it, great stuff. Reminder -- there's a special RSS feed for Lydon interviews, with enclosures, that can automatically be downloaded overnight by enclosure-aware aggregators and feed readers. RealAudio archive for last night's webcast. In MP3 format. Fantastic story by Zeldman of the beautiful website for a Semantic Web conference. Is it semantic? No, but it is beautiful.
This is a test post. There was an error when I tried to demo routing to weblogs.com last night and the error recovery was inadequate (it left around an invalid structure). So I fixed it so it cleans up after itself, and tried again, and this time it worked. Next time there's an error it'll recover better, and also will leave around a message for me so I can tell what went wrong. It wasn't broken, it just wasn't prepared for something to go wrong. News.Com: "What is the impact for peer-to-peer fans of a court decision that knocks back the recording industry's legal strategy for tracking down and suing alleged file swappers?"
Ryan: "So here's a kiss, for Joey and for Wendy. You've just shown me another beautiful side of the Internet." John Palfrey comments on the Verizon decision. Donna Wentworth has a roundup of articles on the news. BBC: "There was more bad news for the record labels, this time from the Dutch Supreme Court." The Dean weblogs ping changes.xml for RSS feeds. Here's howto have your RSS feed included in the flow, even if it's not a Dean blog. NY Times: "The broad presidential powers invoked by the Bush administration after the Sept 11 attacks to detain suspected terrorists are now being challenged by the courts."
Announcing: Dean Community News.
News.Com: "RealNetworks sued Microsoft on antitrust charges." Cook Report: "The unusually strong approval numbers among his fellow Republicans builds Bush a very high floor, but the equally strong degree of opposition among Democrats constructs an unusually low ceiling." Kaye Trammell: Why the Fox Searchlight Pictures Blog Sucks. NY Times: "Google, the Internet search engine, has begun an experiment with book publishers in which the contents of the first chapters of books, reviews or other bibliographic information is indexed and made available to Web surfers."
PS: Please don't construe this as an endorsement by Berkman Center, Harvard Law School, or myself for any particular candidate. Sorry if this is a bummer, but that's very very important. Rebecca Blood on weblogs. John Palfrey on ICANN. Doc Searls on presentations. Clay Shirky on the RIAA. Jay Rosen on journalism I've got a total kickass demo for tonight's Berkman meeting, which is on, and Murphy-willing will be webcast. Boston Globe: "IDG World Expo, the Framingham company that is moving its flagship MacWorld Expo convention from New York to Boston, said yesterday that it is doing the same with another of its technology industry trade shows in 2005." La Fing interviews Chris Pirillo and JY Stervinou about RSS. Wired: "Voter advocate Bev Harris alleged Tuesday that managers of a subsidiary of Diebold, one of the country's largest voting equipment vendors, included a cocaine trafficker, a man who conducted fraudulent stock transactions and a programmer jailed for falsifying computer records." On this day last year Daniel Berlinger's Really Simple Discoverability format went 1.0. Two years ago: "As your body ages you learn in many ways that your shit does stink. It's a constant reminder. If you didn't have a sense of humor before, aging gives you one." Fastbuzz is a new centralized RSS aggregator. NY Times: "Better coffee a millionaire's money can't buy."
Changes.xml for RSS feeds. "It seems that aggregators and feed readers can make good use of the flow of changes, to discover new feeds that may interest readers; and to optimize polling." Today's song: "It was a night like this forty million years ago." I dialed into one of my servers to be greeted by an error window that made me wonder "How does it know?" BBC: "Film fans who have just seen the final installment of The Lord of the Rings trilogy have been heaping praise on the much-anticipated movie." Brent Simmons: "The MetaWeblog API does exactly what I need." If you hate the Yankees, as I do, please click on this link, but before you do so, swallow your coffee. Here's how I'm handling apps that request changes.xml too often. The rule is that you may access changes.xml three times an hour. After that you'll get a 503 Service Unavailable response. I also included a Retry-After response header. FreshMeat has a new XML-RPC interface.
Source code for user.html.renderers.top10, the script that renders yesterday's 10 reasons RSS rules. If you know about outline renderers in Frontier or Radio, you can do the same thing. Reminder, here's the feed of New Hampshire candidate appearances thanks to PoliticsNH.Com. The primary is about a month away (42 days to be exact). If anyone asks if there are any applications of RSS that are temporary, tell them about this one. Randy Charles Morin
On the Atom-Syntax list, RCM said: "In the next month, I'll present a framework based on Atom API called PaSSAPI that will implement both the Atom syntax and RSS over the Atom API. Then you can choose to do whatever pleases yourself." Choosing whatever pleases yourself sounds good on paper, but in practice it's bad. The #2 cool thing about RSS is that you can implement it in an afternoon. An API based on doing Whatever Pleases Yourself is something only a large company can pretend to implement, because no one can fully implement such an API. No one will believe that a sole practitioner or even a smallish team could cover all the variability in a platform like OpenDoc or SOAP, or what Atom is shaping up to be. If you want it to really fly, simplify. Use the guideline if it can't be implemented in an afternoon, it isn't going to fly. The Blogger API and the MetaWeblog API both could be implemented that quickly. Imho, the smartest thing would be to require XML-RPC, and then forget about SOAP and REST. We've already heard from people who flip it around, force every tool to support SOAP and REST and make XML-RPC optional, but none of them have anything invested in the installed base, so of course they want to change everything. Anyone who had already implemented the Blogger API or the MetaWeblog API would want to keep their investment. Even when a big established platform vendor does something like this, it usually fails. I've seen Apple, Microsoft even IBM try. Only in very unusual circumstances do you get enough support from developers to make an incompatible corner-turn, a discontinuity. Even Mac OS X had to run unaltered Mac apps. Learn from them, Luke; don't repeat the mistakes. And to Randy thanks for the good juju you've been spreading around.
Top 10 reasons why RSS rules. Just got news that I've been nominated for another Wired award, for my work with RSS. I love getting nominated. I just love it. I really do. Meet the new team at UserLand. Scott Young is CEO. Scott Rosenberg at Salon welcomes the new team, as does Scoble. New category: Technology/UserLand/Management. Eric Raymond: "A textual protocol tends to future-proof your system." This just in. Saddam was turning into Santa. "Watch out Easter bunny, you're next," says President Bush.
New weblogs.com feature shows cumulative high water, starting today. BTW, I now have a feed you can subscribe to with all the news about weblogs.com. FCC Commissioner Michael Copps: "Anyone could access the Internet, with any kind of computer, for any type of application, and read or say pretty much what they wanted. This Internet may be dying." CNET reviews my new laptop. How did they know? Ars Technica reviews it too, calling it an "object of geek desire." A fresh start for Weblogs.Com. "Quietly, over the last few days, with help from Lawrence Lee at UserLand, I took weblogs.com for a ride across the country, from UserLand's hosting service in California to my personal colo'd server in the Boston area." Re changes.xml, any application that reads more often than once an hour should be using shortChanges.xml (it contains the last five minutes of changes only).
Steve Gillmor: "Hi ho hi ho disruptively we go."
How to deal with slashes that appear in category names in RSS feeds? I had the problem myself, when I named a category Homilies/Mottos. Tim Bray agrees that slashes should be encoded. Lance Knobel comments on the Dean foreign policy team. Jason Lefkowitz is fighting back against Patriot Act expansion. Desktop Dean is a "free Dean for America mini-RSS aggregator." Suggestion: Include my Dean feed in the default subs. NY Times: "Baghdad is a place that feeds on rumors." Redhead: "I'm hoping my voice will reach South Carolina." Ed Cone: "If you don't need to fight a war, but you fight it anyway and win it and thus remove a really bad guy from power, have you done the right thing?"
Boston Globe: "A wonderful mix of rain, snow, sleet, rain." NY Times: "When this project is successful," he said. "people will say, 'A bicycle with Internet access -- so what?'"
I added ETag and If-None-Match support to mainResponder.respond on Monster2. Is that enough jargon? Do you care? Well, it makes Scripting load faster, and it will lower my bandwidth bill, and I'm giving it to UserLand so they can give it to Frontier users (after a thorough burn-in). But basically it brings my server into the Modern Age of HTTP 1.1 in an important way.
Jeff Jarvis says the latest news is breaking Lieberman's way. I agree. Dean shouldn't have taken the Gore endorsement. Big mistake. I bought another electronic toy today, a Sony thing that plugs into the cassette player in my car, on one end, and plugs into the headphone jack on my Rhomba on the other. So on a drive earlier today I was able to listen to a report on NPR and record it at the same time. And of course now my MP3 music collection is available on my car stereo. I call this feeling Living In The Future -- in the sense that I've always known that in the future I'd be listening to the same music in my car as on my desktop. I could have done this a while ago, but now I'm actually doing it. I also bought a Microsoft notebook mouse. It's very very sweet. A tiny little thing. Dan Gillmor: "China is adopting open-source software in a big way." Mike Clough: "The Gore endorsement may spur the party's ardent centrists to rally more openly behind Wesley Clark, the candidate who most closely matches the centrists' profile of an electable candidate: a strong-on-defense, progressive Southerner. This is especially likely if, as many observers believe, Clark is the preferred choice of the party's chief centrist, former President Bill Clinton." Weather update: The snow just started, and the heat is back on. Getting ready to dig out when the storm is over, in about 24 hours or so. BBC images document the capture of Saddam. Comments: "If you could decide his fate, would you put him in jail for life like Noriega, or put him to death, or create a special punishment for him, one that fits his crimes?" BBC: "Ousted Iraqi President Saddam Hussein has been captured by US forces in Iraq, the coalition says."
CNN: "The arrest came with little or no resistance, a U.S. military official in Washington said Sunday. He was with a small group of aides who also were taken into custody, the official said." Bremer: "Ladies and gentlemen, we got him." A spider hole is a disguised entrance to a tunnel used by the Vietcong. I recorded the press conference. A couple of caveats before you download the 4MB file. I began the recording about fifteen minutes into the event. Second, it's a WAV file. Haven't figured out yet how to convert to MP3. JY Stervinou sends a pointer to SOX, an open source Swiss Army Knife for sound files. A special category for news about the capture of Saddam Hussein. Plea for sympathy. The heater went out last night, the coldest night so far. I'm shivering waiting for the stores to open to go buy a couple of space heaters. It's above freezing in the house, barely. :-( DiscountWatcher "constantly searches the Internet for the latest discounted items, organizes them by category and by store, then lists them in reverse chronological order. The site is fully RSS enabled - you can subscribe to any category, store or search."
La Fing: RSS: une alternative au Web? Finally something worth pointing to on Frank Paynter's site. You won't be disappointed. Before you click make sure your mouth is empty. We're doing lots of domain remappings tonight on the ping handler and static server for weblogs.com. If your site doesn't show up in the changes list, it's probably because the ping went one place and the static page was written to another. It should all resolve itself over the next few hours, Murphy-willing of course. BTW, weblogs.com is now on Eastern time.
What's more pathetic, planning a smear campaign or telling everyone that one is coming? Hard to say. How about inspiring us with some ideas. We knew the Internet was great before Dean came along. The Republicans got it wrong when they say Dean is McGovern. A more apt analogy is Netscape vs Microsoft. The Dean guys are making the same mistakes Netscape made. Yeah you got there before the Republicans. Now build some alliances, spread the love, before the hoarde invades. I can be convinced. I keep telling you how. Let's go already dammit. I don't want to see Dubya get a second term. Man. Harper's Magazine has an interesting taxonomy. (Scroll down.) Ward Cunningham, the designer of the original Wiki, has taken a job at Microsoft. If you have advice for him, leave it here, on a Wiki of course. BBC: 'Iran's policy of blocking access to certain websites has been defended by the country's authorities at the UN digital summit." NY Times profile of Dean campaign manager, Joe Trippi. Canadian regulators said it's legal to download music, illegal to upload; and imposed a tax on playback devices to be distributed among artists. "MP3 players with up to 10GB of memory will have an added levy of $15 added to their price, while larger players will see $25 added on top of the wholesale price. MP3 players with less than 1GB of memory will have only a $2 surcharge added to their cost." Ask the users Google's Jason Shellen proposes a change in the functionality of the white-on-orange XML icon. He says most users find it confusing, but I wonder about that. How many people click on things they aren't interested in? I don't. Too busy. I might, if I knew nothing about XML, click once, after seeing them pop up in lots of familiar places, seeing something I don't get, click on the Back button and remember not to go there again. I agree that most Web users today won't understand what they see when they click. However, I don't think they'll understand something that looks different from, but contains the same information as the page they just came from. Why is this here twice? the uninformed user might ask. To which Shellen says, it's explained on the page itself. But I don't read, responds the user, I just skim. But it would be good to verify some of the assumptions by actually asking some users what they think. And we know that the white-on-orange buttons are good for something, and they will be less useful if they aren't used consistently. Markup in titles in RSS? The RSS 2.0 spec and its predecessors may not say clearly enough if you can or can't include markup in titles. But I don't think you should include markup in titles. Titles are like file names (not exactly of course). They are a happy medium between software and people. Both must be able to read them and make sense of them, in all contexts, and do so easily. While it seems reasonable that a description may contain markup, it also seems reasonable that a title should not. So, if I were writing a validator for RSS, and encountered markup in a title, I'd warn the author that many processors would not be happy about this and it would be safer to strip the markup from the title. Disclaimer: Scripting News is a weblog, not a spec. If you interpret it as a spec you will be making a mistake. I think I've said this quite a few times, but a few people still treat it as if I were writing a spec here. Not so. And not fair. A postscript. I went back to see what the spec actually says, and it turns out it's not really a problem with the spec, rather with my recollection of what the spec says. Scroll to elements of item. It says descriptions may contain entity-encoded HTML. It doesn't say that a title may. So if that's the biggest problem people can find with the spec (which many were flaming about when I wrote it, it's not like they offered any help, btw) then it's a pretty damned good spec if you ask me.
Ben Adida: "I just returned from two days at the National Institute of Standards and Technology where we discussed eVoting." Leslie Walker: Early Days Of a Data-Sharing Revolution. As I read this headline on the Dean weblog: What Can You Buy with $61 million? I thought this was the amount that Dean had raised, or expected to raise, and they were about to tell us they were going to do something imaginative, instead of giving it to smelly media companies so they can run television ads. No such luck. What would you do if you had $61 million and wanted to make America a better place? Could $61 million make a difference? Rolling Stone interviews Steve Jobs. Another storm coming in on Sunday. Just as the snow from the last storm has been reduced to slush and huge piles in corners. A chance to take some more pics? It isn't even officially winter yet. Let's help Rogers promote his excellent Radio UserLand book. An MP3 of yesterday's Berkman meeting, thanks to Jake Savin. Okay I can tell I'm going to watch this about 100,000 times. Telegraph: "Rolling Stone Mick Jagger has been knighted for his services to pop music at Buckingham Palace." Wired: "AT&T's move was the latest in a flurry that promises to bring VoIP into the mainstream." Music at Berkman
People drop in when the tunes are going. Ben Edelman stopped in and we compared devices. Mine has more features. But his cost $0 and was three years old. Mine has more storage capacity and his has less but physically is bigger. Mine cost $200 and was brand new and has a radio and can record voice. At first I thought we wouldn't pull it off, but Jay McCarthy came early and got the webcast going. I was still disorganized as the session started, and didn't get my demo properly set up, but I think it was a wonderful session. Webcasting gives the Thursday mood a new zing. We'll keep doing it for sure. There was also an active IRC channel. I didn't get much chance to see what was going on there, but it seemed to be pretty active. The tent gets bigger? At last night's meeting I said something that Ed Cone and I figured out at almost exactly the same time. It takes two years to get to know a blogger. Then I snickered. Some people, less.
A new security exploit? Don Park: "It's like discovering that everything you designed was built on a gigantic turtle that just woke up." As Don recommends, I did a View Source. This is what the URL looks like. With a quick glance it looks like it's from Microsoft, but you're actually viewing a page at zapthedingbat.com. This isn't entirely new. I'm not sure what the %01 is about. I guess it's a problem if it's the action attribute of a form element, where you can't see the URL. Takeaway: look in the Address part of the browser window when you're typing into a form and if it's the wrong place, hit the Back button and resume your life.
It's looking like we will be able to webcast tonight's meeting, Murphy-willing. We have the server runing and recording, now we're trying to figure out the URL for the webcast. If you have an idea what it might be, please send me an email. My next mini-project will be to get IRC installed on my laptop. We got music now, playing Channel Z right now, just played Start Me Up. The webcast is working and the IRC is running. (Postscript: The 40MB RealAudio archive of tonight's meeting is here.) Taegan Goddard: "Don't expect a landslide." Washington Post: "The Acacia case highlights why a growing chorus of corporate and government officials is warning that the US patent system is broken, threatening to stunt technological innovation." Lance Knobel: "Much of the commentariat has passively accepted the conservative's characterisation of Dean, without examining the evidence." BBC: "Reports that Google's cache -- which keep copies of websites for records and can be used to bypass government restrictions - was no longer available to some web surfers in Iran first surfaced at the end of last week." The discussion from Tuesday's RSS rant got to an interesting place. As always, when I'm using Scripting as a guinea pig, you see posts like this: "Testing. Please ignore." Good that worked. Now to see if it updates properly. It did. Gloryoski. The update should happen faster now. And it surely did. Now I have to give this item a title. 1.2.3
Larry Lessig comments on one of my many posts about Dean. An article about news aggregators from a lawyer's perspective. Some things are starting to fit into place.
Readers, aggregators, linkblogs and another approach Some things are starting to fit into place. From the article above, it's clear now that the difference between readers and aggregators isn't new, it goes back to the difference between My.Netscape and My.UserLand. In the former, each feed was considered its own independent thing; My.UserLand flowed all feeds into one flow. (My.UserLand migrated to become the aggregator in Radio.) To me (and I've said this before) the My.UserLand approach is more leveraged for the human, because the former approach still makes you go somewhere to find the new stuff. True, the "somewhere" is all in one app, but it's still work you have to do, instead of the computer. Then another dichotomy is exposed. Quite a few Movable Type bloggers start things called linkblogs, or remaindered links, whatever you call them, they're working around the model of longish posts with lots of visual overhead (a model also implemented by Blogger, Manila and Radio, so this isn't a dig on MT). What if you just want to link to something, should that require a whole post with all its attributes? It's a matter of user interface in the end. If MT made it easy to post and update a news item that was link-blog-like, people wouldn't need to invent a way around it. But that would break the relationship between the feed and posts. Oy what a mess. Now look at this page carefully. See how posts of all sizes mix? It seems to work. The only thing missing is titles for posts (you'll see why I need them, in some cases, later today). But a right-click menu makes it possible to give a post a title. Musical interlude This morning I'm listening to Start Me Up by the Rolling Stones. What an excellent song. Man. It's so weird that Microsoft chose this as the theme song for Windows 95. Wow. I think they chose it because they wanted us to think about the Start Menu. But ohhh you make a grown man cry. If you rough it up startitup startitup don't make a grown man cry. She's my fave-fave-favorite shape. Never never never stop. I take you places you never never seen. Never never never stop. Start me up never stop. Start me up never stop. You make a grown man cry. You make a dead man come.
The Telegraph in the UK has a very nice set of RSS 2.0 feeds. They make you tick off a box saying you've read the terms and conditions, which seem more to apply to incorporating their headlines in a website than reading them in an aggregator. Oh well, I guess they have lawyers in the UK too. In any case, very nice job, lots of data. Excellent. Wired: "The Content Reference Forum aims to publish standards to allow consumers to easily play music or other digital content encoded in one format on any device and in any country, while also obeying contractual obligations, such as paying licensing fees and enforcing copyright protections." What happens when you combine a weblog tool with an aggregator? Haha. I should have it working in time for tomorrow night's weblog writer's meeting. I'm such a tease. (Postscript: It works. As a by-product of the changes, you will, from time to time, see items in the Scripting News RSS feed, that have titles. Another example of the exhaust of one site hooking up to the intake of another. I call this feature the Ghost-Writer-Router. Or is it Router-Writer? Steve Gillmor is going to like this. I'll explain first thing tomorrow morning.)
Boing Boing has a theoretical pic of the NY Times front page on the day after Election Day in 2004.
Don't forget python.scripting.com. Hasn't been updated in a while. I could see this being a group effort to keep up with all the developments in PythonLand. It would be a natural next step for scripting.com. I'd subscribe for sure. I could even see putting ads on that site. Jim Waldo: "The dominance of C as a programming language was an example of better is better, not worse is better."
Steve Kirks: "I propose that you create a Scripting fellowship." Dave Sifry's Thanksgiving piece. Thanks for the thanks Dave. I went to see a great movie the other day directed by Clint Eastwood, who must be in his 70s by now. It was a masterpiece. Could he have made such a movie in his 20s or 30s? I think it would be impossible. He knew what worked and what didn't. He knew who to cast, he knew how to edit, he knew what I would think at every step in the process. At the end, I came out of the theater thinking "Man that was a great fucking movie." Howard Dean: "If you guys are upset that Al Gore is endorsing me, attack me, don't attack Al Gore." Same thing. Dean made a really huge mistake. When offered a chance to get on board with the same old idiots, Dean grabbed. Should've said "Thanks Al, but no thanks." Now it's kind of obvious that the next step is a (Bill) Clinton endorsement of Clark.
BBC: "At an event to mark the opening of the UN technology summit in Geneva, Tim Berners-Lee was reunited with the machine he used to invent the web."
USA Today: "The former vice president's endorsement is another sign of how a compressed campaign increases the influence of party insiders at the expense of voters." Jake Savin recorded last Thursday's weblog writer's meeting at Berkman, and how has them available in MP3 for easy downloading. We're going to webcast tomorrow night's meeting too, Murphy-willing, and I'll bring my Rhomba and will try recording it that way too.
The Philadelphia Inquirer announces RSS support. Brian Jepson pointed to this great letter written by Jerry Rubin in 1969. Who was Jerry Rubin? Read it and find out. Sounds like a letter I was just writing to Jay Rosen. Yoz Graham is working on the centralized comment problem Paolo described this morning. Doing another scripting.com corner-turn this evening. You may be seeing some broken links and images. Sorry for the ugly stuff. Dig we must. Debbie Weil: Top 20 Definitions of Blogging.
Klaus Schwab: "Mr President, to conclude our session, you have in front of you the 1,000 most influential business leaders. What would be your single, most important wish towards them, at this moment?" CNN: "I'm very proud and honored to endorse Howard Dean to be the next president of the United States of America," Gore said. BBC: "The endorsement of such a mainstream figure is a major boost for Mr Dean." Signs of life at the Clark weblog, asking people to spam an MSNBC survey. Whether you think that's nice or not, at least they're using the weblog to fight for their guy. BTW, the Gore endorsement means bupkis to me. I thought the guy was a weenie in 2000. Imagine losing to George Bush who's an even bigger weenie. I know everyone thinks this validates Dean, pushes him over the tipping point. But I don't care about candidates at this stage, I care about a discussion of the issues, a meaningful vote, an election, not a TV show. And that's looking pretty grim now. Andrew has been TiVo-hacking. Interesting stuff. It's been a tradition, every year on this day I check in with Google to see how my John Doerr investment is doing. It's been a good year. I own the Number Two link on Google when you search for John Doerr. And get this, I have the Number One link for his partner, Will Hearst. I wonder if there's some way to monetize that? Interesting little rant by Zawodny about Trackback and corporate secrets. Hands-down the most useful coverage of US politics is Taegan Goddard's Political Wire. I'm sure Gore's support will turn out to be worth something less than $100 million, but it's still a good quote. Paolo: "I would like comments I write on other weblogs to be saved on my own weblog." Early morning RSS rants RSS clearly is about to go through another growth spurt. And as with each other time its eclipsed its former self there are people who seem to want to take control, redefine it in some bizarre and undignified way. If people would first study the history of RSS and see how much it has suffered from this kind of greed, perhaps they'd back off and just be grateful that there's new technology that makes the Internet much more useful, and leave it at that. (They usually say their ignorance is their strength, btw.) The name RSS is every bit as good as any other name you can come up with, and it has the advantage that it's already the name everyone uses. Read a marketing text book. Trying to make a new name stick will only make the whole thing weaker. For example, imagine falling in love with someone. "You're the perfect person for me," you say. "But your name doesn't communicate who you are. Let's have a contest to come up with a new name for you." Now, how clueless would that be? One more thing. There's a myth going around that there is a way to do publish-subscribe without polling. Not true. At some level, every apparently non-polling technology is built on, you guessed it, polling. It's all just an illusion. Computers don't really do interrupts. At some level it's polling. Now, should an aggregator be polling every 30 minutes? The convention early on was no more than once an hour. But newer aggregators either never heard of the convention or chose to ignore it. Some aggregators let the users scan whenever they want. Please don't do that. Once an hour is enough. Otherwise bandwidth bills won't scale. Further, there are good ways to optimize this stuff, but that would require cooperation among members of the community. And this community is well-known for not cooperating with each other. We let a small number of people fillibuster the mail lists, people who don't produce software on either end of the RSS equation, and thereby progress happens in very small steps if it ever happens at all. Net-net, it's good that users are taking an interest in RSS. But it's bad that they're behaving just as the geeks did, selfishly, in a controlling way, fighting over things that were decided a long time ago. Human nature comes along for the ride with us on our journey to more effective communication tools. Can people see the big picture and let good stuff like RSS rise to the top without pulling it down? I've become a pessimist over the years, I think they can't help themselves. So it's a miracle something new happened. Enjoy it while you can. Comment here.
Dowbrigade: "Wednesday, China's new premier, Wen Jiabao, will be speaking at the Harvard Business School, and my Chinese student Simon will be there to give us a first-hand report."
No word about the Gore endorsement on the Dean weblog. For that matter no mention of it on the Clark or Bush blogs either. Postscript: Lieberman had something to say. Joshua Marshall: "It's difficult to write anything about Howard Dean without Dean's fans thinking you're bashing him -- except, of course, if you're adoring him or cheering him on." I noticed too. On this day last year, my Dad talked. This was a big deal, and the family was optimistic -- but he wasn't out of the woods yet, as it would turn out. Today, he and my Mom are hiking in the desert east of San Diego. Hiking. We call him The Miracle Man. Later this month, Murphy-willing, the folks will celebrate their 50th wedding anniversary. Betsy Devine: "In her doggy mind, I'm the one who made all this snow. And I did it for her, just because it would make her happy." Zawodny: "RSS may not be perfect, but it's good enough." Paul Boutin's 10 technologies that have changed the way we live. Jim Moore: "Woke up this morning to a world of dazzling sunlight on waves of undisturbed sugar crystal snow." 2/18/95: "If millions of people understand and use the expressive power of the web they would be easier to organize against paranoic attacks on our civil liberties." Ed Cone: "The Dean campaign has created its own parallel media universe." I email on and off with the CTO of the Kerry campaign, he was at BloggerCon, trying to drop not-too-subtle hints that Dean could be one-upped, or maybe two-upped. So he asks how and I tell him, and he says they have to go slowly. And you wonder why Kerry, according to some, is getting ready to write off New Hampshire. BTW, I don't support Kerry, or Dean. I do believe in using the Internet to revolutionize democracy. You can see that in my writings going back to 1994. People said I was a dreamer, that I should stick to technology, but I insisted that politics and technology were inseparable. Hey it's nice to be right. But Dean doesn't go nearly far enough, not enough to make it real democracy, and not enough to beat Bush. So far Dean only reports to and about people who are already Dean supporters. BTW, Dean breaks the number one rule of the Internet, he takes from the Internet, but doesn't give back. Where is he on the Broadcast Flag and earlier Democrat-sponsored efforts to turn control of the Internet over to the entertainment industry? Has he stood up for free speech on the Internet? What was his position on the Communication Decency Act? Read the last section of my recommendations for Presidential candidates. Imho, it's not enough just to use the Internet to schedule meetings and raise money. The ideal of democracy involves diverse points of view, an informed citizenry, and freedom of speech. I've yet to hear a Dean speech that grabs me this way, but such a speech is not only possible, it's mandatory. Get up in front and tell us why the Internet is great. Dean is in front but sadly he doesn't really know why the Internet is great. The real revolution is still waiting to happen. One more thing, Dean has picked safe people to advise him on the Internet. They're nice. They say nice things. But they're not fighters. Another way to say "let's lose this election but we'll be really nice about it." NY Times: "At least a third of all spam circulating on the Internet is now sent from or relayed by personal home computers that have been taken over." Slow start today -- lots of good stuff on yesterday's Scripting.
Chris Nolan: "Why can’t Big Media write about Howard Dean’s campaign without sounding like a bunch of clueless but well-meaning 19th century explorers debating the source of the Nile all the while breathlessly reporting back on the wonders of Africa?"
Adam Bosworth admits he doesn't get REST. I like that. It takes courage. The REST advocates promote by intimidation. A clear sign they don't want you looking too closely. Now Bosworth is going to do exactly that. Bravo. Went for a long walk in the snow. Still light flurries. Very beautiful. Quiet. All the houses lit up. Smell of fires in the fireplaces. Like a Currier & Ives print. No sleighs, but every other schmaltzy New England winter visual. Some stats on the new server we deployed yesterday. On a Sunday it's doing about 10,000 hits per hour and keeping up very nicely. Most of the traffic are things like the white-on-orange XML button, various graphics for Radio users, the DTD for RSS 0.91. I'm going to write some scripts that tally up how much of the bandwidth is subsidizing the community. Who should I send the bill to?? Yippee. The weather forecast for tomorrow is Mostly Sunny. That would make me Mostly Happy. Okay, I've got a new laptop, a new MP3 player, next on the list of goofy gadgets is a hand-held GPS. I found myself at Best Buy last week with techno-lust, but I didn't know which one to buy. Stay tuned.
Snowy New England street. Jewish mother jokes. Lessig: "Declan is a brilliant writer, and excellent pundit. But he is more a bomb thrower than a careful reader." Newsweek: "Now that Dean has put 30 points between himself and onetime front runner John Kerry, his candidacy is coming under intense scrutiny -- from the media, the GOP and his Democratic rivals." An article in today's NY Times Magazine, about Howard Dean says "A team of Internet theorists -- David Weinberger, Doc Searls, Howard Rheingold -- consults for the campaign." According to Doc this isn't true. So where did this bit come from? Did the reporter invent it? Did the campaign put Doc on some list? BTW, I have buckets for the Dean campaign and for Doc's punditry in my taxonomy. Cheaters have infested the WizBang awards. In case you're not in the northeast, here's what almost two feet of snow looks like. I'm going for a walk myself in a few minutes after some coffee. Enough cabin fever. It's not snowing very hard now, and I've got sweaters, ski clothes, a hat, mittens, and warm boots. I'm bringing the camera too. BTW, I have a Boston Weather category.
NY Times: "The finale of a powerful two-day storm roared across the New York metropolitan area and played out over the Northeast today, burying parts of the region in a foot of snow that set records, slowed travel, challenged Christmas shoppers and transformed the landscape into vistas as uncluttered as early maps of America."
Hey, I looked up the session on the WEF website -- check out the title. "Will Mainstream Media Co-opt Blogs and the Internet?" Giggle. They asked the question backwards. "Have blogs and the Internet already replaced Mainstream Media?" For many, the answer is yes. Seems like the WEF is trying to tell their membership (large corps) what they want to hear. It's up to you to not co-opt those cute little blogs. Heheh. Yowsa. The Redhead is in Toronto.
Terry Heaton wants his Greymatter weblog to emit RSS. Steve Gillmor's latest ode to RSS. He gives credit to Radio UserLand for pulling it all together. Radio 8, in early 2002, was the milestone, it has both sides of the equation covered, publishing and aggregation. It turned RSS from a promising idea into something for users. I'm grateful to Steve, even though he uses another RSS reader, for the acknowledgement. Jay Allen has the full lyrics to They All Asked for You. The part that I wanted the most is [inaudible]. Something like "Boiled villas. And tomato paste." Eh labas.
Thanks to lots of help from my friends, I have gotten my IBM laptop to work, so that's good. And it's snowed a lot over night, and I guess that's good too. My cold is back in a big way, and I'm having trouble finding the goodness in that, but I'm sure it's there, somewhere. Cough. Sniffle. Sneeze. Oy.
Just after 10PM Eastern, the snow has started. Scary! Jim Moore took a picture of his son in the woods by his house outside Boston today. A big blizzard coming in tonight from the south. The scene is going to look quite different when the boy wakes up tomorrow morning.
There's a snow storm headed our way. "Driving and walking would be dangerous and that people should remain indoors unless travel was 'absolutely necessary.'" Hey there's a new award site and Scripting News is nominated for Best Overall Blog. Thank you thank you. Now y'all can vote for my humble weblog, and for that I would be most grateful, because as much as I like being nominated, I like winning much much more. John Foster sends a pointer to an abbreviated rendtion of They All Asked For You. Mike Donellan sent the most complete lyrics. I'm still looking for one that includes the names of all the New Orleans food they talk about, like red beans and rice and crawfish etouffe. There's some that I can't figure out wtf they're talking about. And while I was writing that, my new laptop arrived. Yehi. Andrew Grumet: "BitTorrent will probably be the killer app for dealing with RSS enclosures when they catch on." Talking with my brother last night we hummed a few bars of an old New Orleans favorite. "I went on down to the Audubon Zoo and they all aksd for you. The monkeys aksed. The tigers aksed and the elephants aksed me too." It's a silly little song, that's why it's so much fun. I told my bro we could get the lyrics on the Web, but I just looked, and they still ain't there. Come on Internet. Let's get this show on the road. Gotta love this. Here's a developer who created a tool that claims to support the full RSS 2.0 spec. Even Radio doesn't do that (but it comes close). Jeffrey Henning: "Some commentators have taken our idea of nanoaudiences as a sign of the failure of blogs." After much thought and mind-changing I bought a Creative Rhomba. Deciding factor was ease of use and reliability. Reviews of the Archos box were not great. Downside is that the voice recorder in the Rhomba produces WAV files so if I want to generate MP3s, I'll have to run a converter of some kind. It's time for a new banner for Scripting News. This one comes from a series of pictures I took on 5/28/00, on a boat on a canal in Venice, on a trip to Trieste, with my gracious host, Paolo Valdemarin.
Thanks to Hal Roberts and Jesse Ross at Berkman, tonight's meeting is being webcast via RealAudio. You can tune in right now, starting at 6:12PM Eastern. You'll hear me typing. I'm the only one in the conference room right now. I'm going to try to set something up on IRC so people who are remote can participate. Okay, I think I am now on the #bloggerCon channel on irc.freenode.net. If you can find me there, please stop in and say hello. It looks like Kevin Marks is there, but it might not be the human being named Kevin Marks, it might just be his chat client. And of course I have no idea how to use IRC, so I probably got something horribly wrong. Peter Rukavina from Prince Edward Island sent a picture of winter rolling in, in three hour period yesterday. All this is due to the magic of webcasting and IRC. Steve Outing, a user, wishes Dan Gillmor's RSS feed had guids. Now, he didn't all of a sudden wake up one day transformed into a geek, he wants the feature that guids enable -- no more repeated posts when an author makes minor edits. Kevin Marks: "Tim -- you're in VC. You should know the difference between a demo and a product." Salon's Scott Rosenberg writes an ode to RSS, likening it to HTML in 1994. It's pretty cool to have had a hand in creating something that's become so powerful. BTW, the Salon piece requires you read an ad. The Seattle Post-Intelligencer supports RSS. Scoble: "I want to see more software companies, not fewer." Good news -- Jorn Barger is okay. Diego Doval's essay on the recent Atom discussion at Scoble's.
Deanspace is released. Now I can make my announcement. When Channel Z is released I'm going to announce I'm running for President. Now here's the clue that I'm just kidding:
Getting Started with Weblogs at MIT in January. Tim Oren: "Kevin, if you want your Old Fart credentials, you've gotta get your history straight."
I didn't know this, the motto on Jackie Gleason's tombstone is "and away we go." Hehe. I already know what's going to be on mine. "He's not diggin anymore." Bryan Bell: "I can't say enough good things about the CSS 2.0 text-shadowing support in Safari for Mac OS X 10.3." Don Park: "Most of them are not even taking the proposal seriously. One even called it trolling." Don is talking about his proposal to use RSS 2.0 as a starting point for Atom. If you share Don's preference, there is a place to register that. It'll be interesting to see how many people agree, and if the people in charge gives it any weight. Sebastien Paquet wonders if combining RSS feeds into new steams is in the air. Yes. We tried it in 2002, with Radio, with a tool that does just that. Any aggregator could do it too. But it didn't take root then. Now, with a highly category-based content system, which I call Channel Z, I'm going to try again, and this time I think it'll stick. Many of the first steps are in place. For example, every category is also a feed. Here's the Fun/Songs category in HTML, and in RSS. In the aggregator, I only subscribe to my own feeds, but there's already a mechanism for others to ping a category with the URL of a feed.. Not publicizing that yet. And thanks to Seb for pointing me to Jason Kottke's redesign. I read his Remaindered Links in my aggregator so I missed the changes. Now that I see where he's going, it's deja vu all over again. He's where Scripting News has been for seven years, a mix of links and paragraphs. I bet Jason would like editing his blog in an outliner. Nice and warm inside. Thirteen degrees farenheit outside.
Wired: "Prosecutors, on behalf of major U.S. film studios, will try to prove that 20-year-old Jon Johansen broke Norwegian law when he developed and distributed a computer program that enables consumers to make personal copies of their DVDs." According to News.Com, IBM will announce a new "lockbox" for home networks on Thursday at Berkman. "The software will let media companies protect their intellectual property and be simple enough for consumers to use, according to IBM." I believe the conference they're talking about is actually on Friday, December 5. I'll get the details. I am reluctant to attend because I don't agree with the premise. I think we should find ways to move on, without the music industry, and let a new commercial medium develop around the strengths of the Internet, rather than tax the Internet to hold back the clock for an industry that's unwilling to change.
PC World: "As digital music site MP3.com prepares to go silent under new ownership, mobile media group Primetones.com warned this week that over a million tracks from independent artists could be lost in the shuffle." Ralph Nader has an exploratory committee website. Weather for Cambridge: Clear, low of 17, chance of flurries. There's no doubt about it this time, winter has arrived. Eric Wagoner: "Jorn Barger, editor of Robot Wisdom, is missing." Jorn Barger can be found in the archive of Scripting News, at least references to him can be found. Another innovation in the right edge. The search form is replaced with a popup menu that takes you to a bunch of places in my world. I missed some things from the blogroll too much, but I didn't want an endless column of links, just the essentials, and neatly tucked away in a popup. As they say in Italia, prrrronto. (BTW, I know I have to get rid of the Go button, and can do it with Javascript. But first I have to eat dinner.) Lots of good stuff today on OPML-DEV. We found out how Amphetadesk, NetNewsWire and Bloglines use attributes in subscriptions files, for reading and writing. Stan Krute is collating the new data, in an outline, of course.
According to the DNC weblog, the White House told a big lie about the President's encounter with a British Airways jet on his way to Baghdad on Thanksgiving. Rogers Cadenhead is interviewed about Radio UserLand. Robert Scoble asks important questions about Atom. JY: "I love when Dave creates new things." Thanks! I moved the Recent Categories list onto a separate page. Too much screen real estate. Added to the directory. Thanks for the email. Great ideas. Good to know there's so much interest in this humble weblog. Maybe Doc is ready for Payloads for RSS. The state of Arkansas has an RSS feed. Via Ray Matthews. Pito Salas understands what I'm doing. You gotta break a few eggs to make an omelette. Greenspun: "Why bother pretending to care about another person's troubles?"
Dwight Shih has standalone Trackback for Radio. A new feature in the right margin of Scripting News links to categories that have new posts in the last seven days, sorted by number of posts in the seven days. This gives you a rough idea of what's topics are hot over the last week, and a way to get more background going back further in time (click on a link). Now that I've been categorizing stuff for a few weeks, the payoff may be here now. Let me know what you think. Command Post: Edwards Launches Spanish-Language Blog. Rogers Cadenhead on the OPML 1.1 spec. Note, we're reactivating the OPML-DEV mail list, with a clear heads-up re the charter, and what's on-topic and off-topic. My hope is that users will be able to participate in the discussions if they're sufficiently interested, esp librarians and information architects. We're not talking about format design, or why OPML as a format is or is not good. Not a debating list. We are talking about applications and cleaning up loose ends. For those who are interested, here's why OPML is a cool format. William Grosso: "Someone dropped a meme in the water supply again." ThinkTank packaging circa 1983, thanks to Dwight Harm. Greenspun: "Thus did students who are within months of graduating with their $160,000 computer science degrees learn how modern information systems are actually built." NY Times: Eisner's 19 Years at Disney. AP: Man Changes Name to Bubba Bubba Bubba.
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I went to 
First, if this time of year makes you cheerful, have a happy. I'm pretty ambivalent. There are some things I like and some things I don't. I see the pressure to buy for what it is. Pressure, which I don't like, and commercialism, which I also don't like. I love buying nice things, but almost no one knows how to do that for me like I do. I suspect that's true of everyone. 
I was joking with a friend about doing a new format, MCS, an acronym for More Complex Syndication. Here's how you'd cook it. When Atom starts settling down, make a list of features it has that aren't present in RSS 2.0. Then copy the RSS 2.0 spec, creating a new document. Do a search and replace, changing the string RSS to MCS. Replace the Roadmap section with a single acronym, 
More about tonight's demo. I'll explain how the Dean campaign is using the Internet in ways you didn't know about, and that I didn't know about until last night. My eyes popped when I saw what they were doing. Jay Rosen, whose nephew Zack is the Dean developer, got a sneak preview. "Very exciting Dave. Mega cool. Did Zack help with this?" To which I said: "Yes he did, but due to the power of standards, he didn't know he did. ;->" That's the way it's supposed to work. Open level playing field. Anyone who wants to can innovate. Small pieces, loosely joined. Tune in to tonight's webcast. The app I'm demoing is a Web app so you'll be able to follow along from home. 7PM Eastern. 
