Monday, January 05, 2004

Boston Globe: "Because RSS-compatible products are based on open Internet standards, anybody can produce them. So there'll be no RSS media empire or RSS billionaires. That's just as well, as it eliminates the hype that exaggerated the merits of push technology, and helped to destroy it. Instead, we can see RSS for what it is -- simple, powerful, and helpful. It's an idea from the Internet's adolescence, reborn into a world that's grown up." 

Marketing Profs: "It’s not because TiVo is a bad company -- but, like the Matt Damon character in Good Will Hunting, it cannot seem to reach anything near its unlimited potential." 

Scott Rosenberg on Dean's supposed gaffes.  

Okay the feature is done. Start on the Top-100 page. To the right of each line is an asterisk. If you click on it, you get a page listing all the people who are subscribed to the feed. Each name is linked to the page listing the feeds that person is subscribed to. Click on one. You'll see the asterisks there too. Round 'n' round, dosey doe. Where she stop? No one know!  

At lunch today Betsy Devine, who works for Feedster, said that people would kill to know who is subscribed to their feeds. My eye twinkled. That's what I was working on this morning, but when I left for lunch there was a bug that was keeping it from working. So with a belly full of Bombay Club smorgasbord, the bug revealed itself, I fixed it, and now I can show Betsy who, among the members of my new site, are subscribed to her feed. Only people who have opted to make their subscription lists public are included. Here's who subscribes to Scripting News. And Boing Boing, Joi Ito, Scoble, Doc Searls, NY Times home page. In a few minutes every page that lists feeds will have an icon next to each feed linking to a page showing who's subscribed. Pretty cool.  

Greenspun: "I'm thinking of writing a tutorial on how to use the Windows XP file system as a photo database." 

People who support Bush apparently don't like the MoveOn.Org comparison of Bush to Hitler. I haven't seen the ad, but I don't find the idea offensive. It's about time people outside the blogging world started ringing the bells. Wake up. They're taking the Bill of Rights apart. Get your priorities straight. An ad with some imagery you find offensive is nothing compared to what the Republicans are doing. We live in amazing times. The professional press isn't covering the laws that are passing in Congress and being signed by the President.  

Category routing, RSS, OPML: "I predict a day when everyone who attends a Clark campaign event is so well informed by fellow citizens." 

Jim Fawcette: "Why would anyone with excellent computer skills want to work long hours to create code so that millionaire executives at IBM can use it to sell expensive mainframe computers and middleware with six-figure licenses? All for no compensation and little recognition." 

Kudos to Fawcette, one of the smartest people in the business. No I'm not attacking open source, and I participate in open source myself, more than most of the advocates. But I am also aware of the hypocrisy of venture capitalists and IBM execs, who take home millions of dollars a year in compensation, and expect programmers to work for love and no money. It pisses me off that they get away with such excessive greed, and that my fellow programmers sell out so cheap. Programmers have to have health insurance, send their kids to good schools, make mortgage payments, and retire someday. And these days they have to hire lawyers to defend themselves against the lawyers of the big companies. It's romantic to think of programmers working just for the approval of their peers. Sure it's nice to get approval. It's even nicer to get approval and get paid for your work.  

Question -- does this require a disclaimer? Does Google need to tell readers that it owns Blogger? It appears as if Blogger paid for this ad. Did they? I think they are required to disclaim if they want to maintain their integrity. Apply The Microsoft Test -- i.e. if Microsoft did this would we object? If so, it's not cool to have different standards for different 800-pound gorillas. Google dominates search the way Microsoft dominates operating systems. In 2004, it's hard to say which dominance has more potential to do damage to competition. Or apply The New York Times test. If the Times were promoting a service, or appearing to promote a service, that it owned, but it wasn't clear from its name that it was owned by the Times, would they include a note saying they owned it? Imho, without a doubt. Should we look for Times-like clarity from Google? 

Scotblog is "the weblog of BBC Scotland Interactive." 

If you've had trouble emailing Joi Ito, this might be why. 

Don Park: "Piracy undermines the soul of our young." 

Scoble: "When I've asked for guidance from the general manager who runs our group he says 'I'd rather not screw up a good thing.'" 

Jay McCarthy visited with Wesley Clark in Nashua, NH. This is what blogging is about. In the future, every candidate presentation, whether it is for President of the United States, or dog catcher of Podunk, will have one or more blogger in attendance, bearing witness for The Rest of Us, in the true spirit of America. Jay is a true pioneer. 

Triangulation: "Two bloggers can look at the same event and see two different things." 

Wired: "Consider it a 21st century Dewey Decimal System designed to fight information overload. But unlike libraries, Vivisimo doesn't use predefined categories. Its software determines them on the fly, depending on the search results." 

Elvis Costello: "She said drop dead, then left with another guy."