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Pew Internet: "44% of Internet users have created content for the online world through building or posting to Web sites, creating blogs, and sharing files." Yeah, you kill all the competition and then the talent pool dries up. People were choosing computer science as a career because they hoped to be the next Bill Gates, not because they wanted to work for Bill Gates. Howard Kurtz explains how internal politics helped bring down the Dean campaign, via Ed Cone. Howard Dean: "The quotes attributed to me by others in Howard Kurtz's gossipy rendition of the divisions in the Dean for America campaign are entirely false." Diego Doval raises some interesting questions about RSS validators. Doc Searls sums up the news of Clear Channel's cancellation of Howard Stern. According to Jeff Jarvis, Stern is moving to satellite radio. At first I thought I was looking at a horrible bug in my software, but it turns out the software was right and I was the one with the bug, Steve Outing: "A Times reporter wanting to write a personal blog on bee-keeping might be allowed to do it, but the paper's policy is that even such an innocuous blog must be approved by newsroom management." Slate: "Meet BitTorrent, the file-sharing network that makes trading movies a breeze."
James Robertson: "What tangible benefits does Sun get from Java?" Clemens Vasters: "If you want to put your skills to work and you need to support a family, your work and work results can’t be free." Scoble is hosting a dinner tonight at Jing Jing's in Palo Alto. Wish I could be there. Have some spicy noodles for me! Glenn Fleishman reviews the iPod mini. Dowbrigade tunes into OhMy News. Tim Bray: "It’s been years since I cranked up a first-person-shooter." NY Times: "For men, arousal almost always leads to desire." Joi Ito: "Marko may have been trying to get me back for feeding him snapping turtle in Kyoto."
AP: "RSS has been called the TiVo of the Web, the first 'killer app' of the anticipated automation of social and commercial transactions online using the Web's second-generation XML standard." Fredrik Lundh spies on the Swedish Donald Duck. "I read twenty newspapers on the Internet and subscribe to dozens of RSS-channels," says the famous duck. Phil Ringnalda on the synergy betw Google and Blogger. Michael Watkins: Death Knell for the Delicate Experiment at HBS. Crimson: "A junior faculty member at Harvard Business School is using his popular weblog to sound a warning that the school’s prestige is in jeopardy, but HBS faculty and staff vigorously dispute his claim." Watkins comments on the Crimson article. Oceana today announced "that Yahoo, one of the Internet’s leading search engines, has accepted two of its paid advertisements, one describing Oceana’s mission of saving the oceans and linking to its Web site, the other focusing on Oceana’s campaign to stop cruise pollution. The same ads created a major media stir last week when they were rejected by Google." Boston Globe: "Is a movement about its leader or the person who put it together? That question is fueling a behind-the-scenes struggle between Howard Dean and his former campaign manager, Joe Trippi." AP: "Hollywood is dog-eat-dog," said West Wing co-executive producer Llewellyn Wells. "And Washington is the complete reverse." Rod Kratochwill is going to figure out what No Child Left Behind is about. BBC: "The creators of internet search engine Google have joined the Forbes magazine list of world billionaires." Planet PDF has an RSS feed. Randy Charles Morin: "Dave Winer has passion." We had a fantastic Thursday meeting last night. Some new contributors and a fresh topic. Lots of humor and good ideas. Thanks everyone, looking forward to next week.
Jim Moore's vision for blogging software.
Dru Oja Jay: "Haiti is in crisis, and an entire society stands on the brink of economic and humanitarian disaster. This disaster is not the product of some unfortunate circumstance, but the direct result of policies carried out by our governments." Dowbrigade: Where are the Haitian blogs? How Jesse Ventura used the Internet. Howard Dean is speaking in New Haven tonight.
Re discussion moderators, I have a few confirmations, and still have to send out offers. In general they are people who were at the first BloggerCon, but did not present. I want to rotate the faces every time to emphasize that the people who are in front of the room are just facilitators. There is some small prestige in being one of them, but it's also hard work (but rewarding, I hope). We pack each room with experts and leaders, and the job of the moderator is to assemble a story by calling on the people at his or her disposal. They're like a reporter putting together a story, but you get to hear, first hand what the experts are saying, in their own voices. Think of Dan Gillmor's adage that the people who read his blog are much smarter than he is -- that's the philosophy of BloggerCon. Don't be distracted by the face in the front of the room (as you would be in most conferences), it's the people to your left and right who know the most. And if you want to talk with them later, we'll be sure you get a chance to do that too. To give you an idea of how this works, at the first BC, the moderators were great, for sure, but for me the two most memorable contributors were both in the "audience" -- Esther Dyson and Jay Rosen. I think there's something relaxing about not having to prepare, and in that relaxation, if you have a powerful and curious mind, can come brilliant ideas. That's what I want. That's why I love this conference, because brilliant people come to it, and share what they know. The first invitations will go out by email in a day or so. Remember the cost to attend is $0. If you want to make a contribution so we can have refreshments or help fund the party, or contribute labor, we will welcome that. We're doing this by the seat of our pants, which is cool, it seems to be The Weblog Way to do things. Onward! NY Times endorses John Kerry. Hotel choices for BloggerCon. Lisa Williams talks up a "chick blogs" discuss at the Con in April. Why no comments about the weather lately? Because it's been so great. Highs near 40. Over the weekend they say it might reach 50. And it's still February. What's going on? Don Park theorizes that Osama bin Laden will be killed or captured shortly before the US election in the fall. A list of 34 senators who will vote against a constitutional ban on gay marriage. Via Joshua Marshall.
We've got a date for BloggerCon II -- April 17. Same rooms as last year: Pound 200, 201, 202, 203, 204. Adam Curry will be there on the 17th, as will Jevon MacDonald and Lisa Williams. A visual tool from Langreiter that compares results from Google and Yahoo searches. For example, here's the comparison for Dave. Forbes: The Coming RSS Revolution. An incredible response to the call, yesterday, for visions of the future of blogging tools, from users of the tools. Howard Rheingold asks, provocatively, why all blog comment tools are brain dead. The answer is that they aren't. Adam Curry: Blog News Agency. Is Joe Trippi is trying to reboot the Dean community? Wired: The Complete Guide to Google. Telegraph: "[Kerry] won easy victories in Hawaii, Utah and Idaho, giving him 18 wins out the 20 contests in the race so far." Dino Morelli did a RELAX NG schema for RSS 2.0 Dowbrigade: "Ever get that feeling that something bad is about to happen?"
A vision for the next generation of blogging tools?
BTW, I would endorse a constitutional ban on Donald Trump. Elizabeth Drew: "This is no way to pick a possible president." Steve Gillmor: "Maybe I should accept one of those Orkut invitations before I run completely out of friends." Wired News interviews the author of the USA PATRIOT Act. It's time to dump Sprint for Verizon. What phone should I get? Rebecca MacKinnon: North Koreans cite John Kerry in positive light.
The Tubes have a feed. White punks on RSS. A Russian article called RSS For Dummies. Olav Junker Kjaer is building a table of Unicode support in XML-RPC libraries. Thanks for doing this. It's good that someone is bothering to get the data instead of just making speeches. A new feature on the Share Your OPML site, an Andrew-Dave collaboration, it lists people whose subscription lists are most like yours. Think of it as your personal echo chamber. It's an interesting way to discover new feeds you aren't subscribed to.
It's hard to imagine it getting much worse than this.
David Weinberger on echo chambers. Dan Farber on what's up with blogging.
Joshua Marshall says Bush campaign manager Marc Racicot lied on NPR this morning about whether Bush volunteered for Vietnam. I heard the interview too. Marshall asked who's going to call them on this. Answer: we are. Slate: Forget Nader. Draft Moore. "Moore refused to remove his famous monument to the Ten Commandments from his courtroom." Andrew Grumet: "If you use AOLserver, give it a hug today." Paolo likes Event Share Framework. What's wrong with April 17? Could we schedule BloggerCon for that date, to avoid being one day before Easter and in the middle of Passover? The quickest way to find out is to ask everyone to look at their calendars. (Mike Walsh says April 19 is the Boston Marathon, meaning hotel rooms will be hard to get that weekend.) Dare Obasanjo: "After we got back on the train from the winery tour the unexpected happened." An important Lessig post on certifying non-control. "For most of the history of copyright law in the US, there were a million ways to forfeit your copyright. Today, it’s not even clear that it is possible." Dowbrigade had dinner with Julio in Columbia in 1975. Mike Walsh: "The only drawback on this device is that it's so small and light I just know it will wind up in the washing machine one of these days." A measure of how ineffective the interop work in SOAP was. "We have 3 dozen beta testers testing a new set of SOAP-based APIs and exactly one has made a successful call after 5 weeks." That's failure.
DaveNet: Ralph Nader's candidacy. On Meet the Press today, Nader made nice sounds about John Edwards. I wish Russert had asked the obvious follow-up. "Will you still run if Edwards were the Democratic nominee?" ESF is an RSS 2.0 extension for sharing event information. Thanks to Greg Reinacker for the pointer. Britain joins Denmark and Germany in blessing RSS as a standard format. You can see the endorsement in Table 4 in this PDF document. I started a new category for the Nader campaign, and of course it has its own RSS feed. If someone wanted to start a group blog about the Nader candidacy, this would be a decent place to start. CSM: Will Google IPO bring back the bubble? Oy. There is no such thing as a good date for a conference. We've tentatively chosen April 10 for BloggerCon II, and why didn't anyone notice that the next day is Easter Sunday? And Passover is April 5th through the 13th. I'm not changing the date, but I am re-opening the discussion. "thinkusaalignright"Imho, Nader's run separates the people who "get" American democracy, and those who don't. If Nader is going to win the election for Dubya, then now's the time to fix the bug in the process. Kerry isn't nominated yet. Think. What's the problem that Nader exploits? What's so fixed about our political system that a minority independent candidate, who likely won't be able to register in many states, is going to spoil it for.. who exactly is he going to spoil it for? Think. Is this the America you imagined when you were a kid? Why can't we make it better? Why can't we have a dozen people running for President? By trying to hold back Nader (good luck) maybe you're preventing exactly the kind of transformation we need. I think Nader is a patriot. Give him a medal. And think instead of being part of the herd.
William Grosso: "The number one response to Nader's entry is not about his ideas and whether they're any good. It's about how his entry impacts the (mostly imaginary) horse race." Eric J: "It's that 'two party' mentality that keeps us locked into this 'two party' nonsense." Andrew moves forward with RSSTV.
CNN: "Ralph Nader, a consumer advocate and former Green Party presidential candidate, said Sunday he will run for president as an independent in the 2004 election." Dan Gillmor column on anonymity. NY Times: The Search Engine That Isn't a Verb, Yet. BBC: "The consumer advocate Ralph Nader has said he will announce on Sunday whether he will join the US presidential race." Nader is on Meet the Press this morning. Euroresidentes: "RSS es un formato para la sindicacion de contenidos de paginas web." Two years ago: "If I've inspired zealotry I've failed." Five years ago I was working on my browser-based weblog editor.
Telegraph: "Dr Dean told his aides that Sen Edwards would be 'the stronger candidate' to beat President Bush." Rick has a big story, but it's gone unnoticed by other blogs (not here) and he's been exchanging email with a reporter from the NY Times, so it's likely to break there. Let's make sure he gets credit. Jon Udell: "Steve Gillmor told me that he's feeling overwhelmed by thousands of unread items in NetNewsWire." The Wisconsin Legislative Reference Bureau is syndicating their publications; via LibraryStuff. Keeping the meme of editing your friends' pictures, Don Hopkins revised the Dutch Masters pic with a new gesture from me and Marc Canter. Rogers Cadenhead: "A good weblog is a conversation among friends that you can't tear yourself away from." NY Times: In Politics, the Web Is a Parallel World With Its Own Rules. Julie Leung: How I got a geek boyfriend. What's the scoop on microphones for PCs? Adam Gaffin rounds up reviews of the new Yahoo search. Dowbrigade yearns to blog the conventions. Me too. Should we have a session on blogging the conventions on April 10? I think so. I've asked Sanford Dickert from the Kerry campaign to come to the conference. He should be able to help, as should our new friends at Shorenstein. Mike Walsh's report on the KSG talk we attended on Thursday. In San Francisco, a judge has ruled that gay marriages may continue. Chris doesn't like the picture on Scripting I guess Chris Gulker is a great photo editor and I'm not. But Chris's criticism of the banner photo is based on some missing and incorrect data. 1. That was the only picture I have of that meeting. I have no idea how I got it, I just tripped across it in the archive and thought it was interesting and still do. 2. I don't think of those people as alpha males. Where did you get the idea that I do?? 3. It's the flaws that make it interesting. That's why I like to read weblogs. They're genuine. I don't look like an actor, I wasn't posed for the shot, that's me as I probably look 99 percent of the time. If you don't like it, then you probably don't like me. 4. Okay you may be a better photo editor than I am. So what? Does that mean I shouldn't play, explore, experiment, learn, have fun? Just because you're better than I am? That's 20th Century thinking. This is the century of amateur journalism, Garage Band, digital cameras, etc etc. 5. I also like it because it makes Bucks look like an Old Master painting, and makes it look like we're engaged in deep interesting thought. But if you knew what was being discussed and how it turned out, you might think it's a bit ironic. 6. It wasn't a "publicity picture" -- it was just a picture. Like this. See there's all that depth there that you didn't see. That's why it's art. You obviously felt a need to be critical, and that's okay. But given what you know now, what would you change about your critique? BTW, I'm also a writer in addition to the things you list.
Rex Hammock: "I just walked out of the Old Executive Office Building where four other 'real people' and I sat down for a 25-minute chat with the President of the United States." Washington Post: "The White House press corps yesterday scrambled to figure out why a hastily-arranged 'conversation' between President Bush and some regular Americans about the economy was suddenly closed to reporters -- and what went on behind those closed doors. Little did they know that behind those doors, one of the regular Americans whom Bush was meeting was a blogger." BBC: "The most compelling use of RSS is that it lets users read dozens of websites, all on the same page. The sites can be scanned in seconds rather than have to be laboriously loaded individually." Tentative announcement of BloggerCon on April 10. Please comment if there's a problem with the date. Experience has shown that people speak after it's set in stone when it's too late. If there's some reason we can't do it on April 10, please comment asap. MIT tech blog: "There are a couple of different ways the general public can sort through the 'raw' images returned by the rovers." There was a weather bomb in Nova Scotia and Prince Edward Island. Russell Beattie: "Atom needs the simplest solution that could possibly work and not all this headache." Did Yankees owner George Steinbrenner fund ads to dislodge Howard Dean as the Democratic front-runner?
I went to a seminar at the Kennedy School yesterday doing a postmortem on the Dean campaign. The discussion was led by a Chicago Sun-Times columnist and a political operative who ran a PAC that ran negative ads successfully against Dean in Iowa. He repeated that the only thing that mattered was winning. It didn't occur to me until this morning why that is wrong. Maybe it's true from the candidate's perspective, but it's not true from the voter's. What matters to the voter is getting representated. In the current political system that can't happen. Think about it this way. What if, in 2000, your main issue had been No Nation Building. Easy. Vote for Bush. What does he do his first week in office? Gets ready to do some nation-building. Did he know he would invade Iraq when he was running? You be the judge. In any case, as with most centralized businesses, the voters are a herd, not meant to be heard. At one point I leaned over to one of my colleagues and said "These guys are the enemy."
Paul Boutin: "Perhaps Kerry should make a special trip to Harvard to court the Berkman Center's A-list of bloggers for their support." Yes! We're booting up the Thursday evening meeting at Berkman. We didn't get the new microphone so the webcast is certain to suck. However the IRC channel is probably great. What is Exploit Boston? Chronicle: "Google has become the symbol of competition to the academic library." Kerry campaign: "We have finished experimenting with the RSS aggregator that was on this page and decided that it did not meet our needs." Jason Kottke calls Jakob Nielsen an ugly name on his way to making an important point, that the general press doesn't review tech products in a serious way. News.Com: "Manufacturers plan to start selling notebooks with integrated VoIP this year and plan later to offer notebooks with built-in cell phone capabilities." Atom use XML-RPC It's fascinating to read the comments on Russell Beattie's post about the Atom API. His concern is that he won't be able to build a client that talks to a weblog server through his Java toolkit because it doesn't allow the HTTP methods the API calls for. Further, he notes that the spec, which was openly developed, has a restrictive copyright. The best answer is obvious, imho, use XML-RPC because it already has been adapted to and debugged in all the environments where blogging APIs need to run. By cutting almost to the bottom of the stack you will have to redo everything that took years to do. I think it's going to take longer to redo because XML-RPC didn't need to get any Java toolkits to change, it treaded more softly than the Atom does. There's a practical side to protocol and format design that's missing in the Atom API. The goal is to make it easy for developers to hop on the bandwagon and get them committed to developing for the platform. Putting unnecessary hurdles in the way unnecessarily limits adoption, and virtually guarantees either stagnation or massive breakage. I can't imagine that either choice is what Google is looking for. XML-RPC was designed for what they want to do and it's stood the test of time. Learn to love the pragmatic, it's how you're going to win the wars with Yahoo, Microsoft and everyone else who wants to eat your lunch.
Dean quits: NY Times, Telegraph, BBC, MSNBC, Dean weblog, Edwards weblog, CNN, Fox, AP. Jon Margolis: "The experienced national political reporters wondered why Howard Dean blew it. Up here in Vermont, no one was surprised." News.Com: Yahoo dumps Google search technology. Search Engine Watch: "Yahoo is rolling out a brand new search engine today, with its own index and ranking mechanisms, casting aside its long-standing use of Google-powered search results." ResourceShelf: "We knew the switch was coming. However, we didn't know it was coming so soon."
Phil Ringnalda compares Google and Yahoo search. Mark Bernstein: "Imagine what the tech side of the blogosphere would be like today if, when Atom kicked off, the Atom folks had felt strongly that the new standard should minimize disruption and avoid hurt feelings -- even the feelings of people they might not want to invite to dinner." Russell Beattie: "Now Yahoo just needs a web API and it'll be perfect." Russell Beattie: "Why would the Sun J2ME developers just simply leave out support for two basic HTTP functions? Because they're not commonly used." An author writes to ask if its safe to only support RSS on his weblog, and I say absolutely yes it is safe. Look at it this way. Scripting News is a top-ranked feed. And I promise it will always be available in RSS as it is today, so as long as people want to read my site, the aggregators will have to support RSS 2.0. I can offer the same kind of safety that Lotus 1-2-3 offered developers on MS-DOS or Excel on Mac OS. If you did something the way they did, you were safe, because you could be sure the platform vendor would never break them. In this case what matters is if aggregators read the format. The day aggregators can't read Scripting News is the day your RSS feed will stop working. My job is to be sure that day never comes. "Though Dean is not going to formally drop out of the race, he is going to stop campaigning," a Dean aide told the LA Times. Joshua Whalen: Paybacks are a bitch. Wired: "A Democratic candidate buys $2,000 of advertising on a blog and gets $80,000 in campaign donations in two weeks. Was it a fluke, or the beginning of a new campaign cash cow?"
NY Times: Kermit and Miss Piggy Join Disney. On this day last year I sold my house in Woodside. In 1998 Berkman had a conference on the Internet & Society, with an amazing cast of speakers. Editorial about the weather. After a promising beginning this winter has been a major disappointment. One good snow storm in December. I thought "Gee this is fun but I bet I get tired of it by the end of the winter." Bzzzt. Not. Since then we've had flurries. Every week they predict a good storm, and every week it fails to materialize. I want my money back. Let's get it together. Snow now. Snow now. Snow now. Snow now! Gary Secondino respectfully disagrees.
Kerry squeaks by Edwards in Wisconsin. 39 to 37. Dean distant third. Betsy Devine wonders why she can't be more like Adam Curry. Hmm. At John Battelle's search-focused weblog, rumblings of a new search engine called Dipsie, and a search engine transplant at Yahoo. Could there be choice in search soon? That would be welcome. New header graphic commemorates the kind of meetings that are commonplace at Buck's Woodside. Pictured are Jamis MacNiven, Jimmi Johnson, myself and Marc Canter in 1999, talking about websites, or something like that. I was probably having a Chorizo Scramble. Jamis, who owns Buck's, picked up the tab. The food was good. The meeting ill-fated, like most of the meetings held at Buck's before the bust. According to NPR business is good again. News.Com: "The RIAA picked up the pace of its legal attack on Net music swappers Tuesday, filing copyright infringement suits against another 531 individuals." Howard Dean: "I still have some hope of being the nominee."
Paul Boutin: Inside Baseball vs Outside Baseball. Lots of new feeds from Apple. A poem in a picture at East Broadway Ron's. Adam Curry's latest report from Iraq. Pictures of Brent and Sheila taken last Wednesday from the back seat of their car while Sheila was driving.
Thanks for those who sent good wishes on the WIRED nomination. It's great to know that there are some high-roaders in this community. It can be hard to hear them over the din created by the negativists. Onward!
The Rave Award nominees for 2004 are up. I'm nominated in the Software Designer category, for RSS, along with the designers of Friendster, Skype, BitTorrent and iTunes.
Law Tech Guru follows up on yesterday's post on Atom vs RSS. The concept of friendship is much-discussed these days in the blogosphere. For a refresher, I turned to a couple of essays I wrote last September when my uncle died suddenly. We don't have many friends, true friends, people who will listen to anything we want to talk about. I was confused then, but not now. My uncle was a friend, and I still miss him, terribly. BBC: "According to a new survey, UK women are now spending more money online than men for the first ever time." AP: "Howard Dean revealed Monday that national campaign chairman Steve Grossman has departed." Roy Neel: "There have been a lot of rumors around today about Gov Dean's intentions after the Wisconsin primary."
I bought a new microphone for our Thursday evening meetings. The webcasts should be much better, Murphy-willing. Mike Walsh: "I decided to get a copy of my credit report." Adam has arrived in Iraq. Pictures from the trip. Washington Post: "Will Google get steamrolled like Netscape?" It's a bank holiday in the US. Happy birthday to Presidents Washington and Lincoln. It's an efficiency. We used to have two holidays, one for each. I think they collapsed them into one so we could have a January holiday for Martin Luther King. Good deal. George could not tell a lie, Abe freed the slaves, and MLK had a dream. Postscript: It's not true that President's Day is the result of merging the birthdays of Lincoln and Washington. Nixon said it is the "holiday set aside to honor all presidents, even myself." Heh. I don't think anyone's celebrating Tricky Dick. I'd love to see a picture of Dubya with Nixon. Now that would be cool, even if it were a fake. Caucuses and jury duty make you smarter. So do weblogs, if you use them the same way, to share ideas. Snopes exposes the fake Republican picture of Kerry and Jane Fonda. A rare unretouched photo of a young George W Bush visiting the Nixon White House around the same time John Kerry was appearing with Jane Fonda.
Tonight's presidential debate is at 6:30PM Eastern on MSNBC. AP: "Howard Dean is preparing to abandon his race for the Democratic presidential nomination if he loses Wisconsin's primary, several advisers said Sunday, despite the candidate's assertions to the contrary." Ferdig, Trammell: Content Delivery in the Blogosphere. Alexander Svensson writes: "The German Constitutional Court now syndicates its decisions and press releases using RSS 2.0." On Friday we noted that the Danish government is also standardizing on RSS. It seems that Mr Safe has made his decision. Jeff Beard: "Is Google crazy, or crazy like a fox?"
Phillip Pearson has a feed normalizer that converts Atom to RSS. Derek Scruggs: "There is no reason for Google to not support RSS." Tracy Adams: "Why exactly is Google investing in Atom?" Tracy Adams: "After 30 comments to my last post, no one even commented on why Google is interested in Atom." Phil Ringnalda: FUD 101. Dowbrigade: Big Tent Movement. Clay Shirky: "Trippi comes this close to blaming the voters." Question: What is being done to archive the Dean web presence? On this day in 1998, Fat Web Pages.
Adam is on his way to Iraq? Yow. DFA blogger and BloggerConner Matt Gross has a new weblog. Yup it happens to me too. One of life's
The headphones work very well with today's song. "You don’t need a weather man to know which way the wind blows." New feature -- the Scripting News home page now shows the last three days. Not a mind bomb but nice to have nonetheless. Wired: "These corporations have outlawed an art form." A historic perspective on Google and its leader, Eric Schmidt. Jeremy Bowers supports: "The most important thing is to keep the ball rolling." Amen brother. Anita Rowland: "Dave did remember what I told him about Jack and me getting together." Boston Globe: "Howard Dean's presidential campaign increasingly looks like it won't go on beyond Tuesday." Jessica Baumgart on the value of an encyclopedia on CD-ROM. Jay Rosen analyzes a Reuters story on Joe Trippi's talk. NY Times: "The latest conundrum hanging over Howard Dean and his campaign is how to give up a serious bid for the White House without devolving into some obscure trivia question." Phil Stanhope, in the comments on yesterday's post about Atom and UserLand: "Perhaps Mark will end up in the XML-equivalent of a $10 bill -- but my vote is for the more deeply thought out principles and approach of our modern-day Adams."
John Adams is one of the founders of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences, where we had the evening reception for BloggerCon. In the same thread, UserLand CEO Scott Young says: "We will continue to follow the development of the Atom spec to see how it maps with our product plans."
Microsoft developer network RSS feeds.
Crimson: "The Committee on College Life voted to approve a student-run magazine that will feature nude pictures of Harvard undergraduates and articles about sexual issues." Massachusetts for Dean starts up, interestingly. Scott Young, CEO at UserLand, asked what I thought they should be doing re Atom. Here's what I said. Marc Barrot: "Atom support is not going to be a piece of cake." Smalltalk: "Atom is nothing but a tax on aggregator developers." Bob Doyle writes to say that if you image-search Google for "Evan Williams Blogger" the first two matches are pictures of me. Heh. That's so strange. Wired: "Microsoft says incomplete portions of the source code for some versions of its Windows computer operating system were leaked over the Internet, but analysts caution it's too early to say how much damage the leak may cause."
Linus's Law (via Eric Raymond): "Given enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow." Another face-to-face first in Seattle, I met Baiss Magnusson, who I've known online for over a decade. He was part of the first group of Frontier developers in the early 90s, a smart guy, very easy to work with, a generous and nice guy. He introduced himself at the end of my .NET group talk, and said he's been looking for a job for a while. He looked sad, so I said "You look sad," and he told me the story of how life has been for over-50 programmers in the Seattle area. The jobs are going overseas. I hate to hear that. Baiss is a good guy. I vouch for him. Give the guy a chance. A Seattle love story. I met Anita Rowland and Jack Bell on Monday night at the pizza meeting at the .NET Developer's Association. To my surprise, it turns out that Anita met Jack on Scripting News. She had sent me an email saying she was looking for a geek boyfriend. I published it of course, on that day's mail page. Jack sent her email, they had coffee, and now they're married. How about that! Thanks for the kind thoughts Paolo. I like to think everyone deserves the benefit of the doubt, esp when you're reading their words on a screen, but even when you're meeting them in person. Paolo reminds me that the second time I met him, in California, I was afraid he and his wife thought I was being rude or grouchy, but in fact I was really sick. We're taught to be strong, that it's impolite to let a guest know that we're not feeling well, put a smiling face on it, do the best you can. So even when you have the benefit of real-world contact, it's nice to know that you may get the benefit of the doubt, and that the doubt is always there. Jessica Baumgart: "The Winter 2004 issue of News Library News with the feature article I wrote about RSS is now online."
The Age: "Online search engine leader Google has banned the ads of an environmental group protesting a major cruise line's sewage treatment methods, casting a spotlight on the policies -- and power -- of the popular Web site's lucrative marketing program." George Colony: Googlescape -- Are we headed for Bubble II? John Gotze writes to say the Danish government has included RSS 2.0 in its "government interoperability framework called the Reference Profile." NY Times: Microsoft gapples with source code leak.
Adrian Holvaty reviews the terms-of-service at a scraping service and finds it lacking. Two big stories yesterday: human cloning in Korea; and a brewing sex scandal around presumed Presidential nominee, John Kerry. Interesting newcomer at last night's weblog writer's meeting at Berkman: Rebecca MacKinnon, friend of many of our friends, Shorenstein Fellow at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government, bureau chief for CNN in Tokyo, and student of weblogs. She wants to know how they relate to professional journalism. Me too. Perils of publishing Charles Herrera sent an email yesterday saying that he has a whole new impression of blogging after watching the talk I gave at Microsoft on Monday. It was a gratifying email for another reason. He says: "To someone who has read Scripting News since the start, but who is not involved in scripting or blogging, it has seemed to me that on occasion you have been forced into a grumpy mode. Sometimes words on a screen don't always convey the sense of the person underneath. Of course, the 'grumpy' that I saw, or thought I saw, comes probably from the flames all around you." This is worth emphasizing. If you scan an email quickly and there's a bunch of nasty words with someone's name in the middle, the mind has a tendency to connect the words and the person. Unfortunately this is how people read on the Web. Charles noted that I'm a friendly person, in person. I like to think that's true. Sometimes it's hard to see that in the writing. I know.
PC World: "Microsoft is investigating rumors that the secret code underlying its Windows NT and Windows 2000 operating systems has leaked out and is available on the Internet, a company spokesperson confirms." Notes from tonight's Berkman meeting. Dinner tonight is at the Cambridge Commons, 8:45PM.
Steven Vore reports that Pepsi Blue has been cancelled. In a way that's bad news, but I liked the bottle more than the drink, and since this is the Web, the bottle is still here. Andrew Grumet: "I can't believe that Google is letting Mark Pilgrim do their talking for them." Don Hopkins pulls quotes from my talk at Microsoft on Monday.
Here's the picture that offended so many of the leading bloggers. Man these people are seriously uptight. Marc says he never pulled it. Right on. NY Times: "As long as Senator John Kerry faces even nominal competition, President Bush's advisers will have a harder time getting equal attention for their political message." Paul Boutin mourns the passing of WebMonkey. Guardian story about Chris Lydon and audible weblogs. My talk at Microsoft Research on Monday is now available on the Web.
News.Com ran a perfectly awful food fight about RSS, again. I wish they'd give a damn about users, and stop putting so much energy into Mark Pilgrim. What has he done for anyone lately? Anyway, here's the only question that matters. Dear wheel reinventers. Please explain exactly what your format does that RSS doesn't and why it matters to users? If the answer is nothing, then just support RSS and let's compete at delighting users.
Back in Boston. Let's have fun! Larry Lessig will speak at Radcliffe tomorrow afternoon. Ross Mayfield explains how Disney is using RSS enclosures. LA Times article about Dean quoting Berkmanites and others. At dinner last night I gave my usual schpiel about how DaveNet started, and since I was dining with Microsoft people I emphasized the early piece I wrote about Bill Gates, and his response. I quoted Bill saying that the Internet wouldn't mean less sales for Flight Simulator or Encarta, and I said he was right but that wasn't the point. One of my companions stopped me there and said wait a minute, the Internet did mean less sales for Encarta. I was shocked. That's correct, and Gates got it wrong, and I wasn't enough of a visionary to see it. I got it wrong too. Who needs an encyclopedia on a CD-ROM when you have the Web at your fingertips? Someday some kid is going to ask you What is Encarta? That might be where you end up going today. 1/25/04: "You can get anything you want at Alice's Restaurant."
In a comment on the Cadenhead site, a guy named Pete says: "Just a reminder, you don't have to use Google." Perfect. A good way to provide feedback to the Google people is to switch away from them. Let them make the connection that the day they started playing unfair is the day the users started moving away. Companies always respond to this kind of input. It's where users have the most power. Andrew Grumet: RSSTV, Syndication for your PVR. CNN: Kerry wins in Tennesse and Virginia. Clark quits. A review of the new headphones. I'm going to try them out tomorrow on the flight from Seattle to Boston. Most of the meetings at Microsoft yesterday and today were non-disclosed. Interesting stuff. Wish I could talk about what I saw and heard. However I can say this, as promised, I went to bat, repeatedly, for the open formats and protocols of the blogging world.
New toy. "Fantastic." New Chronicle of Higher Education article on RSS. Andrew posts a new teaser. This is going to be very cool. Calpundit is digging into the Bush military record. Dowbrigade: Why We Need Video Aggregators. Wired: "Talking largely about Dean's presidential quest in the past tense, Trippi blamed rival campaigns and an irresponsible, hopelessly conventional news media for knocking the one-time front-runner from his perch." Washington Post: "Did Trippi's aggressive ad strategy pose a conflict of interest?" Guess who has the number one hit on Google for howard dean rant. News.Com: "The Semantic Web is no longer a research project," W3C representative Janet Daly said. Joshua Allen and Korby Parnell blogged my talk at MS yesterday. Hey Hemos, thanks for the Slashdot.
Tim Jarrett blogged my talk today at Microsoft Research. Chris Lydon has a new show on MPR. James Joyce: Why C Is Not My Favourite Programming Language. Star-Telegram: "'The point is, it's my driveway and nobody should be able to tell me I have to get rid of something because they don't like it,' Parsons said of an ordinance passed last fall that banned recreational vehicles from residential driveways." Howard Beale: "I want you to go to the window, open it, stick your head out and yell: 'I'm as mad as hell, and I'm not going to take this anymore!'" Economist: "When your neighbour loses his job it’s a slowdown (or, if you dislike him, a correction); when you lose yours, it’s a recession; when an economic journalist loses his, that’s a depression." NY Times: "Despite impressive recent growth, social networking Web sites like Friendster face a challenge: how to make money." Ross's Stupid Little Feedster/Share Your OPML Thing. Don Hopkins thinks MSIE should have pie menus. Steve Gillmor: "Today Kan is dead, Joy is retired, Napster is a brand name, and Ozzie's biggest client is the Department of Defense."
Welcome to Seattle where it's warm and dark. Easy trip. Got about 1/2 way through page-turner thriller. Tried to watch a movie on my laptop DVD player, but the volume wasn't high enough to make out the dialog, not that the dialog is the key feature of this movie. There must be a way to amplify. Anyway, it feels good to be on the west coast for a change. Not nearly so cold here.
I'm also speaking at the .NET Developer's Association tomorrow night along with Scoble. Should be interesting. I might sneak in a little demo of my development environment, maybe show them SCNS, the object database, how I edit scripts (and my weblog), how the CMS works. Let's see how it goes. Maybe RSS will be enough. I'm also meeting with the other half of MS, but I can't talk about that one. You might figure it out. These guys are so much cooler than Silicon Valley companies. They're all full of who-does-he-think-he-is, and why-should-we-listen-to-him's. Microsoft culture, even though it's PFU, has always been open to other points of view. It's part of the genetic coding. You want to give us free ideas? Sure thing, says Billg's guys and gals. Seattle weather for the next few days, highs in the low 50s, lows in the high 30s. Partly cloudy, no rain. That's good weather from my pov.
New feature this morning allows you to cancel a scheduled validation.
BTW, I am told that tomorrow's talk will be available on the public Internet, if not as a webcast, afterwards. I'll be Seattle through Tuesday night. Don Park: "Engineers are like blacksmiths without a hobby." Dare Obasanjo: "This is the first step in fragmenting the interoperability on the Web gained by XML." UN weapons inspector Hans Blix's quote of the day. If you're on a witch hunt, he says, "every broom in every corner is evidence of witches." The Holy Bible is now available as an RSS feed. Dave Pollard: "O Google, why have you forsaken me?" NY Times: "Voters have wiped out several decades' worth of conventional wisdom about presidential primaries."
DaveNet: Howard Dean is not a soap bar. Washington Post: Kerry wins Washington, Michigan. Put down the cup of coffee and swallow before clicking on this link. Dean Peters asks how many syndication formats he should implement.
If you know anyone at Google, call em up and tell them this sucks. At the Thursday meeting Jim Moore, who apparently is friends with Eric Schmidt, couldn't believe he'd be nasty to the bloggers. I know Eric too, he is a nice guy. But here's the deal about nice guys. Sometimes they fuck you. And everyone says "But he's such a nice guy." The NY Times is advertising on weblogs.com. Mike Walsh previews the Bush appearance on Meet The Press tomorrow. "His handlers must be sleepless worrying that maybe he will say something unpresidential."
A new app for people who want to be sure their feeds are in good shape. You enter three bits of info, the URL of a feed, your email address and a subject for filtering. Periodically (at most every 24 hours) the app checks the feed and sends an email saying whether or not it validated. I have it set up to check the Scripting News RSS feed. This is mostly for technical people who are actively working on their feeds. Jeff Jarvis asks a question that was behind much of the discussion last night. If the Dean campaign winds down, what becomes of the Dean weblog? Should it become a movement? Will people keep giving money? If so, what should the money be used for? Greg Reinacker: "Our system is indeed standards-based -- except in those areas where there are no standards." First there was a Cup of Joe, then Joe-Mentum, and now the Joe-Bitchuary. One can only hope that this is where it ends. Jim Louderback: "This newsfeed service could turn RSS into a nasty walled garden." Goddard: Dean Loses Grip of Washington. Ryan Lizza: "I spent a couple of days at Dean headquarters to get a feel for how the campaign was dealing with this stunning turn of fortune." Don Hopkins: "I hope these ideas will inspire more tool developers to contribute their programming skills to the Sims community." Winter beauty They forecast sleet and freezing rain today. A few minutes ago I took a look and sure enough, that's what's going on. So I got my coffee, and continued work on my latest programming project, but then glimpsed out of the corner of my eye that the nasty weather had turned beautiful. Huge flakes of snow falling slowly, with almost no wind. The street just beginning to turn white. What a nice surprise. I had to get up and take a look. I wanted to tell someone about it. So I told you. My friend Betsy We had a fantastic meeting last night at Berkman. I'm sure a lot of people who were there will write up various parts of it. Here's one little bit. We were talking about the money that Dean raised yesterday, Betsy Devine volunteered that she had given money yesterday. She gave for two reasons. I don't remember the first, but I do remember the second. Dean said either he wins in Wisconsin or he retires from the race. Betsy, an early Dean supporter said it's important that he bow out if he loses. Makes sense to me. One last push, if it works, great, if not, that's the end of the fight. But this morning Dean is on the radio saying he didn't write the email, and while it was a great tactic to raise money, he's not personally pledged to get out of the race if he loses Wisconsin. While I'm not a lawyer, I think he either has to return the money or honor the pledge. It seems fraudulent not to. BTW, the cool thing about Presidential politics is that unlike politics in the tech business, there is an end to it.
Guardian: "To underline the point, Dean staffers abruptly halted campaigning in Michigan yesterday and relocated to Wisconsin."
Gene Smith: Six tips for better RSS feeds. Jim Moore reports that Dean has raised $438,000 so far today. What is OpensourceNovel.Net? "I want people to change it around." I must be crazy. I forgot that Lessig is a lawyer. Oy. Chad Dickerson touts the benefits of simple syndication. States I've visited are shown in red on this map.
Mark Pilgrim: "Userland took Netscape's RSS specification, removed Netscape's copyright statement, made several incompatible changes, added a Userland copyright statement, called it RSS 0.91 and claimed that it was compatible with Netscape's RSS 0.91." Note, if you want to visit that page, you'll have to copy the URL and paste it into a new browser window, Pilgrim's server is configured to bounce links from Scripting. Don Hopkins: "The Sims pie menus were something I whipped up one night and just checked into the code base, and then gradually evolved over time."
Last year on this day: "It's great to be a kid because they don't have to pretend they're not crazy, like adults do, if you know what I mean." Six years ago: "If we could have let her live, even considering the horror of what she did, it would have made us greater. I feel deep shame at being part of a country with such a shallow collective heart, with such a brutal response to brutality, with no sense of forgiveness." Boston Globe: "Howard Dean told his supporters today that he must win the Feb 17 Wisconsin primary or else he will drop out of the Democratic presidential race." NY Times: When a Search Engine Isn't Enough, Call a Librarian. Chris Heilman: "Kerry won in AZ, and just about everywhere else. He's like Bush with shaggy hair, so it's 4 more years no matter who wins. On NPR, EJ Dionne said the only difference would be the judicial nominations."
I started my third corporation last week. The new company is called Scripting News, Inc. It owns this site and a few others, and some software I'm working on. It's a Massachusetts corporation. So I guess I'm going to be here for a while. There's a Dean ad on www.weblogs.com. Surprising. j Baumgart: "I'm j Baumgart and I approved this message."
Political Wire: More Evidence of a Divided Nation. AP: Mass high court rules for gay marriage. Unfortunately this is going to be an issue in the 2004 presidential election. Kerry, the likely Democrat nominee, is from Massachusetts. Bush had strong language about this in his State of the Union speech. Even if you don't believe in gay couples' right to marry, certainly there are more pressing issues that should be discussed in this election cycle. What is Infoworld.Feedster.Com? CNN has a great table showing the returns from yesterday's primaries. Kerry won five, Clark and Edwards each won one. But that doesn't tell the whole story. Where Kerry won, he won with large margins. Clark's margin in Oklahoma was tiny, and while Edwards won by 15 points to Kerry in South Carolina, the rest of the field was left in the dust. NY Times: "Edwards and Dean still have small windows of opportunity" Ed Cone: "Is John Edwards the first North Carolinian to win a presidential primary?" My new RSS validator now recognizes Atom feeds and gives you a nice badge saying your feed validates. Some people felt that calling it an RSS feed was confusing. I'm pretty sure users will end up thinking of Atom as a flavor of RSS. The validator still recognizes RSS feeds, of course.
Political Wire exit polls. Edwards++. Bob Stepno has been following the NY Times election "weblog." I asked Randy Charles Morin what he would do if he was on the RSS Advisory Board, and, no surprise, I got a thoughtful and upbeat response. Rogers Cadenhead: Janet's Breast Throttled My Server. InternetNews: Is Ad-Supported RSS the Next Big Thing?
Last year on this day: "How about teaching us something about space and the universe. Seems like the perfect opportunity. They say we wouldn't understand, but I'm not sure they're right. I think maybe they're just lazy." NY Times: "They're dead, but they don't know it yet." Ross Karchner is doing a front-end for RSS validators. Scott Rosenberg: "If US intelligence is broken, it's clear that the Bush White House broke it." Three years ago: "How can the air be so soft and full of new fragrances while winter is in full swing in so many other places?" BBC: "John Kerry's supporters are hoping for a knock-out blow with a clean sweep of seven states picking a Democrat presidential nominee today.
Michael Watkins: On Not Getting Tenure. A new validator for RSS. I worked on this app with Andrew Grumet, it's based on the open source feed validator written in Python. ActiveRenderer 2.0 has lots of new features. Ted Goranson: Outliner User Interfaces.
Dan Gillmor: "A farting horse?" NY Times: "Did Mr. Kerry, class of 66, and Mr. Bush, class of 68, know each other at Yale?" David Weinberger: "I am finding Orkut to be all maintenance and no value." Andrew Grumet: "At BloggerCon this October several people noted an irony in the Dean campaign budget: they were rewarding the Internet, which had helped them raise unprecedented amounts of money in small contributions, by pouring the war chest right back into television." All the Super Bowl ads on one page. John Palfrey: "I couldn't figure out why it wasn't an issue ad." Michael Gartenberg: "Steve Ballmer doing a Dean Scream?" AP: "Downloading music online from rogue file-sharing networks got 14-year-old Annie Leith sued for thousands of dollars. Now it has landed her a leading spot on a national ad that will debut during the Super Bowl."
Back to politics. Taegan Goddard rounds up the latest polls that show that Kerry is gaining momentum. Not much of a surprise there. I'd like to see Dean hold on for a while because it's a guarantee of continued discourse. The other candidates haven't been so intelligent or straightforward, imho. Should Kerry wind it up on Tuesday, I'm concerned that's the end of the liveliest campaign in memory. The Patriots won. It was an excellent game. There's fireworks outside. Amazing. Lots more issue ads. Congrats to Patriots fans!
Okay the Fedex commercial wins so far. Yes, Jenkins is an alien. John Nichols: "What if we lived in a parallel universe where Howard Dean was actually treated fairly by the media?" MoveOn couldn't broadcast a commercial about the Bush deficit, but Bush himself got a freebie on CBS, followed by an H&R Block commercial that asks how much of Bush's tax cut you want. An issue ad? Hmmm. I guess it's okay because he didn't have to pay for it?? Discussion of excerpted RSS feeds on the RSS-User list. Chris Heilman: "The only two words I can think of scarier than President Kerry are President Cheney." Telegraph: Blair and Bush nominated for peace prize.
AP: "Dean spent more than $6.5 million on staff salaries and related expenses, and more than $2 million on consultants." 1/19/04: "Asked about last year's drug policy advertisement that linked drug sales to international terrorism, Mr. Franks said, 'Is it an absolutely perfect system? Absolutely not. On the other hand, the MoveOn.org ad wasn't even close. I didn't need to rewind that one in the VCR.'"
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Some announcements about BloggerCon II. We will have several sessions on journalism, politics and the campaign of 2004. We've scheduled the conference between the first part of the campaign, the primaries; and the next -- the conventions. The goal is to coalesce what we've learned in time to apply that knowledge in the second cycle. We will also have a session on weblogs and libraries, which is new. And if there's sufficient interest, we will repeat the sessions on medicine and law, and possibly add sessions for art, education, science and literature. Let me know. Based on the very strong response re visions for web writing tools, we will certainly have a session about that. We're also going to do a session on RSS. Technical people are welcome, but remember this is a user's conference. 
The opening act for Ralph Nader on Sunday's Meet the Press was California governor 
Four years ago today, an 
I'm having a great time with the program for BloggerCon. The second one is much easier. Man. Anyway one of the themes is going to be Nuking The Echo Chamber. I'm going to ask each of the moderators to find a way to work that into the discussions they lead. These conferences are stringing out into a series. This one follows the O'Reilly Emerging Technology conf, where the they identified this problem. How do we methodically and systematically overcome the tendency for echo chambers to form and self-perpetuate. There are some obvious ideas, once we know the problem is there, which we do now, thanks to the people who were at O'Reilly. Of course our conference will be totally wide open and webcast and IRC'd, blogged and wiki'd, we'll create a record, so subsequent meetings can work on the problems we uncover and hopefully build on the answers we discover. 
Several people sent a pointer to this 
After I 
Reviewing the schedule for the MS trip, I see I have an hour with the head of the MSIE team. I asked for the meeting. I want to talk about how the browser can be made more useful to people who use RSS and who write weblogs. I'm going to ask for features that work for all blogging software and all aggregators, foolish me, maybe I'm the only one who thinks we all do better if everyone has a chance to compete. Send me email if you have ideas how the browser could work better for what we do. 
I heard the NPR interview with Ralph Nader yesterday, after leaving a long interesting meeting with two ex-Dean operatives. Nader is 
For the record, I missed Janet Jackson's 
Halftime. Three commercials worth noting. One borderline issue ad about kids downloading music for free and getting caught and prosecuted. Maybe they avoid issueness by promoting Pepsi and Apple's iTunes. An anti-smoking ad from Phillip Morris was totally an issue ad. I guess everyone agrees smoking is bad, I sure do, but it's still an issue ad. Would they have allowed someone else to buy an ad saying cigarette smoking makes you more masculine or feminine or sexy or makes people like you better. It wasn't so long ago that people believed that, or said they did. Anyway, the most fun ad so far is the "romantic" Budweiser ad on the sleigh. It's a territorial thing. The Super Bowl is a guy thing. The women can watch if they want. Do they think it's funny? I kinda doubt it. Hehe. 
