Wednesday, December 10, 2003

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.) 

Part of this round of corner-turns has been better real-time stats. For example, how much bandwidth does scripting.com use? About 100MB per hour. The top five files it serves? According to hits: 1. The Manila badge, 2. rss.xml for Scripting News, 3. the permalink marker, 4. the daily link icon, 5. the world famous and much maligned white-on-orange XML icon. Now, according to bytes served, it's a somewhat different story. 1. rss.xml, 2. the banner graphic for Scripting (probably a bug in the caching code in Frontier's web server, or an oppty for optimiziation), 3. an MP3 of a Grateful Dead song (this is new as of today, someone must be pointing to it), 4. Scripting News, 5. the Manila badge. Worthy of an honorable mention is #7, a rare picture of Elvis and Nixon together, proving that they were not the same person. #6 is the RSS 0.91 DTD.  

Boing Boing has a theoretical pic of the NY Times front page on the day after Election Day in 2004. 

I got a bunch of very nice requests today from people who want to put a site on scripting.com, but I spent the day messing around with Windows networks, so I haven't had a chance to do anything with them. I need to think about whether or not I want to do hosting, and on what terms. But I wanted to acknowledge the requests. Also, in my spare time this afternoon I helped Doc's friend Terry Heaton get his RSS feed on the air. I'm subscribed. Looks interesting. And thanks to Lawrence Lee, Andrew Grumet, Robert Scoble and the people he annoyed at Microsoft. I got my network working thanks to all their help. Yeah, we had to whack and flush things to get it going. Had these been Macs. Never mind.  

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." 

Just for fun I left the door open on the new scripting.com server so that anyone could create a Manila site. One of the good guys, Phillip Pearson, created a site, in disbelief. "This is so weird," he said. "Why is it so weird?" I ask. An empty Manila site is a few kilobytes on a hard drive. These days, a few megabytes is nothing. Phillip posted a note about this on his real website, and then the wiener boys swooped in, creating the childish stuff they like so much. I closed the door and sent Phillip an email, "If someone you trust asks if it's possible to get one, send me an email introduction vouching for their maturity." I won't host sites for little boys up past their bedtime (or little girls for that matter) but I'm interested in who would like to have a scripting.com website, and what they might do with it. It doesn't cost me much to find out. But I'm not interested in cleaning up the messes that children leave behind. 

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. 

If you're running for office this year, or plan to in the future, check this out. Robert Scoble, who works at Microsoft, points to an innovation from Sun. Why? "I want to be an authority on the operating system industry," says Scoble. I'm sure there are people at Microsoft who think this is stupid, but it's actually really smart. Create a new media context for yourself. A tent that's big enough to hold people who are interested in your competitors. If your products are superior what have you got to lose? MS people are always whining about the press. Scoble doing something about it. Bravo. BTW, this is Rule #1 in my seven point plan for candidate weblogs. The same plan probably works for technology companies too.  

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." 

A reasonable response from Clark (the campaign, not the man) about Gore's endorsement of Dean. People who say the campaign is over are assholes. Not a single vote has been cast yet. Dean is out of the running now, he's a slave of the Democratic Party. I'm sure it's even worse than it appears. Looks like Clark is the front-runner for making something sensible happen in this election cycle, although I wouldn't hold my breath. 

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 BBC's support for RSS isn't new, but it is newly explained on their site. For example, if you scroll to the bottom of the index page for UK news, in the lower right corner you'll see a menu item called "RSS version." Click to visit a page that explains what RSS is all about, and links to the feed for the page you came from. It requires a little digging to find all the goodies, but the payoff is huge because the BBC has so much you can subscribe to. Now there's a way to find it from the BBC site.