Wednesday, December 03, 2003

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:  

The next new feature is ready for you to try out. If you want to receive the contents of this weblog every night at 11PM Eastern, visit the page and enter your email address. You'll receive a confirming email. Click on the link in the email to confirm. The page is also linked into the popup menu in the right edge, under Nightly Email. If you were subscribed before the switchover there's no need to resubscribe, I transferred the addresses from the old system into the new one. At this time there's no way to unsubscribe. That's the next thing on my list. BTW, all Channel Z sites will have this feature. 

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 just moved www.opml.org from a UserLand server to one of my own servers here in Boston. In the transition, I hooked up my OPML category here to a box on the home page of the new OPML site. Hello Dolly. It just worked. Man I love this stuff. Hook the exhaust of one site up to the gas tank of another and (as Ralph Cramden used to say) away we go! 

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. 

Two years ago today, I asked what if we cut out the middlemen and elected the stars of our favorite TV shows as our political leaders. Martin Sheen for President. Move the capital to Hollywood. Four years ago today I had a phone talk with Joel Klein, then the Department of Justice official in charge of the Microsoft antitrust case. I blew it. I said they should leave Microsoft alone. This is before I read what they were saying about Netscape in emails inside Microsoft among the execs.  

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.