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Bob Stepno on the World Editors Forum in Istanbul. "thinkusaalignright"Last night's 60 Minutes had a controversial segment, I watched it this morning on TiVO, a 10-minute scroll of pictures of American soldiers who died in Iraq. Some observations. When people say it's just Americans in Iraq they're missing something, America is so diverse, we have people of European, African, Asian, Latin descent. All those young people's lives gone, it's profoundly sad, and you feel it differently when you see all their faces scrolling by. In Andy Rooney's lead-up he got in a dig at men, saying most of the people working on new ways to kill people are men. He didn't mention that most of the soldiers who die in wars are men too. Next week I'd like to see CBS run a similar segment with all the Iraqis who have died in the war. Their deaths are no less tragic. I suspect you'd see a lot of small children, mothers and grandparents among their dead. It would take much longer than sixty minutes. New York: "Falsely accused of having an affair with John Kerry, the 'intern' sifts through the mud and the people who threw it." Wired: "Companies prefer authoritarianism to democracy."
Trial balloon: Solving the "silent data loss" problem in RSS 2.0. UC Berkeley professor George Lakoff tells how conservatives use language to dominate politics.
Adam Curry and his colleagues created a wireless LAN on their flight home from Las Vegas to Amsterdam. Netflix RSS feeds? Watching movies in the age of the Internet is way different. Now I can look something up after watching a movie, like for example, did you know how many future stars were in One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest? It's pretty amazing. Scatman Crothers, Danny DeVito, Christopher Lloyd.
It seems that Netflix would be just the kind of network service to give me an RSS feed I can subscribe to, where they would give me interesting articles about movies I just saw, or ones I'm about to see, or movies playing near my house that I would probably like, movies my friends liked, etc etc. They already do a bunch of stuff like that on their site, so why not do it in a feed? Also, did I write this just so I could include a picture of a youngish Jack Nicholson? I'm not telling.
Gnome Outliner, an "outline editor for Gnome." Russell Beattie's experience getting an Atom feed up and running. His experience mirrors the experience I had trying to write a driver to read Atom feeds. I asked some straight questions on the Syndication mail list but didn't get any answers. I think it's pretty clear that some very basic questions don't actually have answers. I'm listening to NPR in the background, then realize Hey that voice sounds wise and sensible and familiar, and then I realize it's Jay Rosen. "Daily life doesn't have press conferences." Amen. John Robb: "I noticed that Yahoo is now including an RSS 2.0 feed with every Yahoo Group. Nice. It even includes an orange XML icon." It's true. Here's a screen shot of the home page a group, and the feed.
Today's song: "I entertain by picking brains. Sell my soul by dropping names." Very useful feed from CNET, lists the most popular shareware downloads. If we were going to try to collectively gather data on which apps are the most treacherous spyware tools, this would be a good place to start, the ones on this list are doing the most damage. A fantastic rant from 2001 about memes and why I dislike them. Scoble is hosting a "geek lunch" today at Buck's in Woodside. I could probably get there in time. Heh. Hmmm. Strange idea. Nah. Next time. Fascinating thread on Scoble's, where Joshua Allen says things that totally needed to be said about advocacy in syndication. Read the comments. We're getting beyond ad hominems. Good work. The revolution of RSS is "what people are doing with it, what it enables, the way it works for people who use technology, the freedom it offers, and the way it makes timely information, that used to be expensive and for the select-few so inexpensive and broadly available. RSS is the next thing in Internet and knowledge management. It's big. A lot bigger than a format."
RSS is more than a format... Highly recommend the latest Frontline on how the music industry fell apart during the 80s and 90s. Why? Stopped loving the product. SF Chronicle: "Prince is back, and we can all breathe a sigh of relief." NY Times on the women of Six Feet Under. Scoble sat next to an exec from eBay on a flight from Seattle. The day after the day after tomorrow
BTW, one of the coolest things about the movie is that the Vice President is a Dick Cheney look-alike: he's stubborn, stupid and Republican. The President, who defers to the VP, is cheesy and stupid and wears a military bomber jacket in the Oval Office. Someone in Hollywood, a Democratic stronghold, had fun with that. They also found a neat solution to the war in Iraq (but I won't say what it is). The clean-up continues Installing Kazaa wasn't the only insane thing I did, I also enabled Windows Update, allowing it to install updates from Microsoft every night at 3AM. This was not a good idea for at least one reason -- it reboots my machine every time there's an update. I'd rather decide when my machine is rebooted. Now I'm trying to figure out how to turn it off. There used to be a Windows Update icon in the tray, but now it's gone. I guess once they have you hooked there's no need to configure it? I've pored over the site, to no avail. If you know how to turn it off, please let me know. Thanks! Shannon Rush writes: "Click on the properties on My Computer and go to the Automatic Updates tab. Hope this helps." It did help. Thanks!
Frontline interview with rock star David Crosby. Rory Kaplan: "I've been in the music industry for 30 years." Steve Gillmor: "Bill Gates chose carefully his first public comments on RSS and the tectonic shift it's rending across the technology landscape." Engadget: A $50 iPod from Microsoft? Michael Gartenberg: "There is no $50 iPod from Microsoft." Still cleaning up. The next thing is to figure out how to get rid of popups that are watching where I go, and popping up ads that are related. I've run Ad-aware several times, asked it to remove everything it finds, but somehow it's not catching this demon. Four years ago, twenty-two pictures from Venezia. Five years ago today, Scott Rosenberg, writing in Salon, wrote a milestone piece about the then-nascent world of weblogs. In response to Scott's essay: "Salon (justifiably) brags that they've matured to the point where they could send a reporter to Yugoslavia. But the web was already there. People on the ground all over the world. Some of them are great writers and have passion for the truth and aren't serving the same masters that the bigtimes at WSJ, NYT and CNN. And most of them don't have websites, yet, largely because it is too complicated and expensive to have one. When this bubble bursts we'll get a new burst of diversity in thought and vision on the web." BBC: "Californian senators have approved a bill that limits Google's plans to scan messages and include ads based on what it finds." Political Wire: "Kerry is expanding the use of biographical ads to introduce himself, while President Bush is running negative ads to try to define his opponent first."
Postscript: Several people wrote to say that the apparently-broken task manager can be fixed by double-clicking in the gray border of the window. Sure enough, it worked. Thanks!!
Salon: "It's the war, stupid." A
For ten points, what's the connection between this picture of Bruce Springsteen and The Sopranos? J-Walk: "Dave Winer should know better."
Serves me right I did something realllly stupid this morning, I installed a free program that offered me a choice: $29.95 with no ads or $0 with ads. Since I was just checking it out, I opted for the $0 version. I figured a few ads, no problemmo. If I like it I'll pay the bucks. Big big mistake. Popups all over the place. Tons of virusware installed. I expect to be digging out all day. To try to regain control of my system I installed the Google Toolbar for its ability to kill popup windows. It does seem to stop some of them, but a lot of them still get through. I'm running an Norton SystemWorks One Button Checkup now. It's impossibly slow. Hope it finds those nasty things that are popping up the windows. I bet they're also sending keystrokes back to the mother ship.
NY Times: "Al Gore demanded today the resignations of Defense Secretary Donald H Rumsfeld and five other members of the Bush administration."
Scott Rosenberg: "Admitting mistakes is the first step toward preventing their recurrence." Harvard Crimson: "A social studies office worker said she was fired this week after administrators discovered provocative posts in her online journal, including threats to fellow workers and superiors." Richard Gephardt says John McCain is "someone a lot of Democrats could get interested in." Be careful, that could backfire. What if the Republicans ran McCain instead of Bush. I bet a lot of Dems would be interested in him, over Kerry.
CBS Marketwatch RSS feeds. MSN: How to Speed-Read the Net. Ranchero: External Weblog Editor Interface. Mac. Gary Wolf: "Back at the dawn of time, Dave Winer and Louis Rossetto had a little debate about the future of Web publishing. It was 1994. Things got heated." Ask Phillip Pearson what it's like being a programmer in New Zealand. e-Church: The Unconference As An Example of the Participatory Church. Ed Foster: Dumb Patents. At a meeting on radio and the Web at Berkman. Not exactly sure where we're going. I'm sitting next to Roger Kennedy, former White House correspondent for NBC. Lots of really interesting people around the table. Bob Doyle is on my right, with a fantastic new Sony Vaio TR3A notebook. Bill Buzenberg from Minnesota Public Radio speaks. They want to do a national news show cross the country with the Web at the center of it. "It isn't just Talk of the Nation." Chris Lydon is speaking, then we got into a chaotic discussion, the best kind. John Palfrey is blogging this too. Jay McCarthy update on the big fire. Steven Cohen reports on new feeds from the Kansas City Public Library. John Kerry has a new campaign plane.
Wired: "Linus Torvalds, creator of the Linux open-source operating system, has proposed changes to the Linux kernel-development process which he and other developers hope will make it easier to answer any questions about the origin and ownership of Linux source code." Register: "More than two thirds of the 840m emails scanned by filtering firm MessageLabs last month was identified as spam." Scoble, who works at Microsoft, says that internal weblogs are boring. Now there's something I didn't know. We did group outlining at UserLand behind the firewall, and that worked great when we had a project that required a lot of collaboration, but I've never done a private weblog (or if I did I don't remember it). In comments on Scoble's site, Firas explains why so many programmers are troubled by the XML icon (and probably a lot of other things about RSS). "They hate being told to use it." I know how that feels, I felt the same way about the Macintosh user interface guidelines, but then gave in. That made users happy, because while programmers hate being told what to do, users love consistency among apps. If you don't believe me, ask a user. (These days apps are websites.) Adam did his first Live-From-Las-Vegas radio show. Since it was live, they had to do it between 9PM and midnight Pacific time, to catch the morning rush in Amsterdam.
Andrew needed to get something out of his system. Dare Obasanjo: "Scoble gets on my nerves sometimes." Hehe.
Looks like some new interop is booting on the Mac, led by Brent Simmons, author of NetNewsWire. I love to see developers working together to make software work better for users. Bravo! Jay McCarthy: "Having your house burn in front of you is a very strange experience." Amazing story. Jay is a Thursday night regular. Lisa Williams has started a PayPal account for donations to the McCarthy family.
CBS: "Forty-one percent approve of the job he is doing as president, while 52 percent disapprove -- the lowest overall job rating of his presidency." Jakob Nielsen: Thirty Years With Computers. Wired: "Once a year, Microsoft chairman Bill Gates lectures the nation's top CEOs on how much more productivity they'll get from adopting new technologies."
A friend of Michael Gartenberg's asked why there are so many debates about syndication, and Michael looks to the Talmud for the answer. I got my first stock alert from RSS Quotes. Interesting format. Don Park: "What if a DEMO conference could be held every month?" Transcript of last night's CBS interview with General Anthony Zinni.
Bernie Goldbach sends a pointer to a Sunday Times article about syndication. I can't read it because I don't have a subscription. Here's a quote that Bernie sends along. "The hot topic of today is Really Simple Syndication (RSS), the answer for anyone with news deprivation." Travelocity asks for feedback from customers. They don't ask the key question: "Why are you spending several hundred dollars a month with our competitors and not with us?" A perfect demo of a company in need of a trip on the Cluetrain. Philip Miseldine: "I'm not going to give credence to a new specification when the one we have already works perfectly fine."
Scoble: Why can't you all use the XML icon? I went to three meetings last week in NYC with publishers, two of whom are currently publishing RSS feeds. The ones who are public have heard from advocates of different formats, saying that they were taking sides in a religious war. Considering that they probably all hear that, it's pretty remarkable how broadly RSS is being supported. As far as I know RSS advocates don't use religious arguments. If you do, please stop.
I'm getting a sense that some of the newer aggregators have a funny way of handling time. Not sure exactly what's going on. I've gotten one complaint about the NY Times feeds which include the items in the order the NY Times provides them. It's never been a problem in Radio's aggregator, it knows if it has seen an item before and if it has, it doesn't present it to the user. I gather some reading software isn't keeping track of what they've already shown the user. This is not a bug in the feeds as some people believe, rather a missing feature in the aggregator. However, I haven't got enough data to be sure, I'm just guessing. We've talked about starting to track features in aggregators and blogging tools at the Berkman Thursday meetings. This is an affirmation of the need of an independent view of the various categories of software in the blogosphere. I went to the ballet yesterday, and saw a great movie.
WordPress 1.2 is released. I'm still in NYC where it's hot and muggy. Back home in Boston, it's collld. 49 degrees. Sounds great. I'll be back tomorrow. Brent Simmons continues to think out loud about prospects for the open source release of Frontier. This kind of open narration is very useful. I also got a lot out of Mark Pilgrim's piece about GPL vs BSD, linked to below. Rogers: Publishing MySQL Data in RSS 2.0. Andrew is getting ready for Iceland. Adam Curry: "In about 20 hours the crew and I will be in Las Vegas for a week of live shows and plenty of fun." RSSQuotes "allows you to create and save a list of stocks, then delivers the quotes to your favorite RSS Reader during market hours." Mark Pilgrim on open source licensing. "A GPL advocate is a BSD advocate who has had their code used against them."
eWeek: "The technology at the heart of one of the most popular Web-logging tools is about to go open source." Rogers Cadenhead: "...an integrated development environment, persistent object database, outliner, dynamic scripting language, Internet client and server, and Web services platform that supports TCP, HTTP, FTP, SMTP, POP3, XML, XML-RPC, SOAP, and RSS." Brent Simmons: "Before Frontier was Frontier, its name was Cancoon." XML.Com: "The majority of RDF editors available today continue to confuse the user with predicates, reification, ontology editors, 3-dimensional webs of orbiting triplets, and other low-level data and terms." ComputerWorld: "Wi-Fi wholesale network operator Cometa Networks Inc. has announced that it's suspending operations, citing a lack of money." BBC: "The official title of the record was Most Naked People on a Rollercoaster." Yahoo Maps shows WiFi hotspots now. Quite useful! BBC: "In a speech to an audience of chief executives, Mr Gates said the regularly updated journals, or blogs, could be a good way for firms to tell customers, staff and partners what they are doing." Shouldn't Google execs be explaining blogs like Gates is? Isn't that why they bought Blogger? Or did they just buy Blogger to break RSS? A story about big Silicon Valley companies In 1990 we were licensing the UserLand IAC Toolkit to other developers. Our first and only licensee was Claris, an Apple subsidiary run by Bill Campbell, Yogen Dalal and John Zeisler. Their products included MacWrite, MacPaint, Hypercard, maybe Filemaker? Not sure. They were a friendly company, nice guys. I'd meet with them from time to time to talk about how apps would work when they could be connected by a scripting system. I was working on such a system, the software that would become Frontier. (When it's open sourced you'll see that the toolkit is still in there.) Anyway, Apple decided to compete with our scripting system, and began by creating a clone of our interapplication communication toolkit. They were having a big sales meeting in Hawaii to demo the new stuff, but sadly it wasn't ready. So our friends at Claris demo'd our software, and told everyone it was Apple's.
Reminds me of a Michael O'Donoghue song that Doc Searls posted on his blog on 2/12/03 (sung to the tune of I'd Like to Buy the World a Coke). I'd like to give the world a hug Also reminds me of the HL Mencken quote. When someone says it's not about the money, it's about the money. So of course, when they say Don't Be Evil -- they're being evil.
Bill Gates pushes RSS to CEOs of the world's top companies. Transcript of the Gates speech. Reuters article. Guardian: "There are around 400 Microsoft employees blogging." Talking Moose: "Lots of people seem to think I'm Scoble." Jim Roepcke: "I am giddy with excitement..." Evan Williams: "We're certainly excited about RSS." Wes Felter: "What a great way to attack RSS and co-opt its publicity..." Tim Jarrett: "Sounds like a positioning statement to me."
Leadership Council on Civil Rights supports RSS. Don Park visited with a couple of old buds from the early Mac days -- Mike Boich and Robert Simon. We used to be younger. Hey they look good. Forgive them for becoming venture capitalists. Four years ago today, a pic of an Amsterdam canal in spring regalia. Two years ago today, the origin of the isPermaLink attribute of guid in RSS. The request came from Rich Salz. Wired: "Rumors that Google is offering users of its Gmail service an unprecedented 1 terabyte of storage space are untrue, the company said Wednesday, blaming a bug in the system for the confusion." Taegan Goddard reports on a "blog scandal" in DC.
John Fraser: "What doors will Frontier open?" BBC: Wi-fi may tempt train travellers. An unfair article about Linus Torvalds and his role in developing Linux. You can do a very quick barn raising in software, even of a substantial piece like a Unix clone. But Linux wasn't written by one person in a few months, it's been in development for a decade, by a group of developers. UserLand: Manila 9.0.1.
RSS-User: "LinkTV, a channel on DISH and DirecTV satellite networks, makes its show Mosaic available daily via RSS." NY Times: "Wi-Pics, from Dice America, is an external Wi-Fi transmitter and storage device about the size of a portable CD player." News.Com: "It's easy to make money giving away software -- just don't give away too much of it."
NY Times: "Google, the Web search engine, is preparing to introduce a powerful file and text software search tool for locating information stored on personal computers." 4/13/02: "When Google arrives on the desktop, it will have the same SOAP interface that the global Google has." Google takes a stand on spyware. It's news to me that ESPN has feeds. I added them to our directory. Rich Salz: "The next thing I remember is being on a hospital gurney being asked if I knew where I was." A possibly interesting twist on the Is It Journalism? perma-debate. Okay, let's not worry for a minute if blogging is journalism or not. How about keeping a list of pubs that claim to be journalism that run stories that are clearly not journalism. Factual errors that are never corrected. Conflicts of interest that are not disclosed. We've learned that the pros simply won't investigate themselves, which itself is a breach of journalistic ethics, as far as I'm concerned. So what's to stop us from doing it for them?
Ananova: "A German couple who went to a fertility clinic after eight years of marriage have found out why they are still childless -- they weren't having sex." I read somewhere that I spent $150 on a cab in Geneva (not true) and that I'm no longer a fellow at Harvard Law School (also not true, I'm here through June). Let's face it, the information you get on blogs is not 100 percent accurate. Time's new RSS feeds, each a beautiful demo of how incredibly simple syndication can be, includes a list of selected covers from the archive. Here's one that caught my eye, movie star Marilyn Monroe in 1956. A post on Scripting News led to virtual fork throwing at the Leung house. We'll pay, one way or the other
Another price is the tubing stock market, falling precipitously at a time when the economy is rebounding. That may be felt in a shallow recovery, lost jobs, higher deficits. Another price, one we hope to pay, is that the Yale-educated Good Old Boy, George W Bush, loses his bid for re-election and we have to apologize to the world for electing him in 2000. His presidency will haunt US foreign policy for generations to come. (I'd probably vote for John McCain, if the Republicans have the guts to tell Bush to step aside.) Today's higher gas prices are just the beginning of a reduced standard of living for the American people. We've had a great ride and we've become fat and child-like. Consider this a possible way of pre-empting all the crap that's waiting for us. They call it "reducing our dependence on foreign oil," something we desperately need to do. We're still an oil producing country, btw.
Time Magazine has RSS. We have Bing! Aaron Swartz: "Gmail now indicates that users have a full terabyte of disk space!" My Gmail account is saying the same thing.
Two years ago: Ideas for standards work. A window into W3C politics, as they discuss RSS & Atom. Not a word about: 1. users, 2. publishers, 3. bloggers, 4. developers. Mostly they're worried about: 1. Tim Berners-Lee, 2. BigCo's. 3. IETF, 4. Patents. Tim Jarrett: "RSS isn’t owned by a big company. To the extent that it has owners, they are all the content authors, aggregator developers, and readers who have invested time and energy in making it work for them." The RSS advisory board has "a very conservative mission, to answer questions about RSS, to help people use it, to promote its use." UPI: "The scandal continues to metastasize." The Atlantic: "If a window in a building is broken and is left unrepaired, all the rest of the windows will soon be broken." Citizen Action of New York: "In only 17 key 'battleground' states, voters will decide who wins the Presidency. What can the rest of us do?" Frank Zappa: "Yes indeed. Here we are." Vincent Flanders: "If I'm paying $700 for a software package, it better install like Photoshop and be as easy to use as Radio Userland or it has to kiss me where I can't. And send me flowers the next day." Hehee. One year ago: "The Times can't be a factor in Google searches for the simple reason that the Times archive is not accessible to Google." We're starting to get some pings in the audio weblogs commons. Not enough yet to do an HTML rendering. If you implement an audio weblog service, you can help bootstrap a community. Here's the howto. Every silver lining's got a touch of grey David Brown: "Imagine a language where persistence is assumed, and if you want something to be transient, you have to do something different." I find it amazing that so many people with Frontier experience are still on the Web, and then boom, yesterday's announcement, and they're chattin it up wonderng what it means. Me too. It's good to see all the old faces, and it's good to see that the years haven't dampened their enthusiasm. Yeah, we're a little worse for the wear, it's cool that the code ages more gracefully than we do. David Gewirtz says he can't wait to see how some of the features he's been using for years were implemented. That's the spirit I love. David I think you'll like it. There's an architecture in there.
BTW, people who say that it's too late can't know that. And the expectations are low. All I want it to see the technology preserved. If one young programmer in Podunk learns something from it, the way I learned from reading the Unix kernel in the late 70s, then I'm happy. If it exists on a hard drive somewhere in the year 2040, that'll exceed my expectations wildly. If a bug gets fixed or a new technique is learned from reading the code, that would be fantastic. We're not finished giving, yet.
David Weinberger covers last night's same-sex-marriage party in Cambridge. "We're giving them the street." Brent Simmons: "What I love about the kernel is the way it is written in C but is nevertheless object-oriented." The Nation: "Powell acknowledged that he and the Bush administration misled the nation about the WMD threat posed by Iraq before the war." FAQs about the Frontier open source release. Reuters: "A suicide car bomb killed the head of Iraq's Governing Council Monday, dealing a major blow to the US coalition battling a Shi'ite insurgency and a growing prisoner abuse scandal." A mathematical proof that girls are evil. Andy Kaufman: "Sorry about faking my death." My first blog was a plog. (Project log.) Yesterday's Meet The Press was pretty fantastic. US Secretary of State Colin Powell was answering Tim Russert's questions, when the camera moved off Powell. We could hear a conversation with a press aide. He eventually told her to get out of the way and answered Russert's question about his pre-war appearance before the United Nations. Lisa Rein has the video. Thanks to Boing Boing for the pointer. NY Times story. Colin Faulkingham thinks Frontier makes sense on the desktop, perhaps embedded in a Web browser. I think there are a lot of possibilities there. We did it the other way, embedding the MSIE browser control in Radio, but we never did much with it. I think there's a huge possibility. One feature I didn't mention in the piece below is Frontier's outliner. It's a great way to author content. Needs a few glitch-removals to really sing. Phillip Pearson: "A worthy addition to the community.." Duncan Smeed: "Today is an historic day..." Boston Globe: "Massachusetts became the first state in the nation to permit gays and lesbians to wed just after midnight today." NY Times article on the historic Brown decision that declared "separate but equal" unconstitutional. The decision was handed down fifty years ago today by the US Supreme Court. Marc Canter regrets that the company he founded, Macromedia, left the service business. As good a time as any
Anyway, I can see this is going to be a rambler, because Ted's piece is the fulcrum I'm going to use to announce something important, because I want you to think about this announcement in the context of his current piece, because it exactly reflects my thinking. As you may know, I have left UserLand. It's been almost two years, and while in some ways I wish I were there to drive the products and compete with the great companies in the blogging space, I know that I can't do it. I don't think a lot of people know that I left for health reasons, but I did.
We decided this quite some time ago, but waited for the right moment to start discussing it publicly. It seems now is the right time, or as good a time as any. Technorati cosmos for this post.
How to ping the Audio weblogs community.
I'll probably get some nasty mail about this, but iLaw should be renamed The Smart Babe Conference. The number of a drop-dead beautiful women was just amazing. And they're so smart! This is the conference I've been searching for all my life, the antidote to geek fests, which are fun too, in a completely non-babe way. Anyway, thanks for all the babes!
Adam Curry: "I've been tinkering today with RSS and BitTorrent." Daring Fireball: "Everyone loves bug fixes. Everyone loves performance improvements. But what people will pay for are features." Webmonkey, last year: "RSS gained traction among small developers years ago, because it's easy to code and simple to share. Today, RSS is gaining momentum with big commercial sites because the technology draws in a smart and growing audience." Reuters: "Same-sex couples will legally exchange vows on Monday when Massachusetts becomes the first U.S. state to allow gay marriage." John Robb: "I wish there was a mechanism in weblogging that allowed more collaborative editing."
New Yorker: "The roots of the Abu Ghraib prison scandal lie not in the criminal inclinations of a few Army reservists but in a decision, approved last year by Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, to expand a highly secret operation."
Which actors play which profs in iLaw, The Movie.
A Bloggerside Chat with Feedster’s Devine Feedmaster, Betsy Devine. Brad Choate on the new Movable Type pricing.
Wired: "Rather than modify the current, failing copyright system to save the entertainment industry, one legal scholar is proposing radical plans for a system that he claims will pay artists fairly and bring more digital media to the people who crave it." Scoble: "He tells how he developed Turbo Pascal for the Macintosh on a Sun Microsystems box. Among other historical trivia." I sent an email to the "Google blog team," and I got a response. MetaWeblog API: "Rather than invent a new vocabulary for the metadata of a weblog post, we use the vocabulary for an item in RSS 2.0. So you can refer to a post's title, link and description; or its author, comments, enclosure, guid, etc using the already-familiar names given to those elements in RSS 2.0." Google doesn't know about this? Hmmm. RSS has a publish-subscribe protocol.
Gazeta.pl: "Co to jest RSS?" Oliver Stor compiled a list of German news media with RSS support. Nozell on Moyers on Fresh Air on blogs. BBC: "Mirror editor Piers Morgan is sacked as the newspaper concedes photos of soldiers abusing an Iraqi were fake." Frederick Zimmerman: "Google recommends the AmphetaDesk feed reader but AmphetaDesk doesn't support Atom!" 7/17/03: "Is the advisory board a standards body?" No. AP: "A new Web browser from Opera Software this week is the first major browser to incorporate an emerging technology that automatically delivers new blog entries and news articles." Todd Cochrane: "I have been thinking over the past 24 hours what it must be like to be in Six Apart's office today. As I pondered that I thought back over the past 2 years." Dean Peters: "Movable Type is worth paying for; the question is, how much for which features?" Kottke: "The one thing I do think 6A got wrong is the pricing structure for personal users." Slashdot thread on Movable Type's pricing. Yesterday I heard about a user sending flowers to a developer asking that the developer do something good for the Internet. I don't want to say who sent, who received, and what it was about, because that would spoil the gesture.
Forecast for Cambridge, MA. Also available in RSS. Luke Hutteman: "Atom is not replacing RSS any time soon (if ever) so it’s just one more format to handle. This means that from an aggregator-writer perspective, Atom just adds extra work for fairly little benefit." The iLaw conference It's not really a conference, they're classes, taught mostly by people I know, who I've never seen teach. And they're good. It's the opposite of my ideal for a conference, a teacher is like a super-speaker, but they do it so well, it's a pleasure to participate. It's been 27 years since I was in a classroom as a student. I forgot how good it can be. Lessig, Zittrain, Fisher, Benkler. Great stuff. Glad I went. This morning it's Fisher and Nesson, then Lessig, Benkler and Nesson again. Palfrey says this is an essential Berkman experience. Hey, it's a side of Berkman I had yet to experience, and it's really coool. Playing real good for free? Yesterday at the iLaw conference,nice people, friendly group, a small community of smart, earnest, do-gooding people. I wish I could have gone to the reception but we had the regular Thursday meeting, which was quite good last night. Lots to talk about! Yesterday was probably the biggest news day for news about the blogging world. Let's recap what happened. 1. Google announced that they were doing mail lists in competition with Yahoo. I'm sure the service will be good, but it comes with a gotcha. No RSS, only Atom. So Google continues to try to force the issue. Everyone I've talked with can't figure it out, why do they care? And people are starting to get angry about it. I find my own anger receding. I'm starting to accept Atom on Google's terms. But I remember that it's a bad turn. It will lead to more fragmentation, not less, and it will be harder and harder for independent developers to play in the aggregator space. I've been pushing for coalescing, not splitting apart. The big companies, if they act like their arrogant selves, will push the other way. One wonders if for once, the users will see that their interests are aligned with the indies. 2. Six Apart announced new pricing for Movable Type and hell breaks loose. The users are acting as children, saying somehow they didn't know that eventually Six Apart would charge for their software. I knew they were going to charge, why didn't you? I can say this because I'm not a customer (I do use their software, but I didn't pay for it) and I'm not them. But I've been where they are and it sucks. No one's perfect. If you use their software, you owe them some money. If you don't like the price, don't use it. Amazingly they're not asking for money if you use the new software in a limited form, or continue to use the old software. Users who can't get behind that are people we don't need to work with. Everything costs money. When you drive to the gas station, try whining at the attendant, and see how much gas you get. Do it enough and they'll call the cops. 3. This isn't really big news but what the heck. I got a very nice greeting yesterday from Lessig, who, while speaking was surprised to see me in the last row typing away into my blog. He said Dave! Are you blogging this? I said of course I am. And then he proceded to fall down. I said Larry don't hurt yourself. It was memorable. Lessig is a good guy. I gotta talk with him about what's going on with Movable Type. How can we help reset users' expectations so they understand that if they want good software, it might cost money? I wonder if Larry agrees. 4. The W3C said they wanted Atom. On the way to lunch I said to one of my colleagues that might be good news. Then I looked over and said I'm being cynical. She knew. The W3C has been the roachtrap of standards. Ideas go in and don't come out. I turned over one of my creations to the W3C, and it died there, a long painful death, where it turned into a political football for dozens of tech companies. It might be better today because the tech world has shrunk, but hell, we don't need the tech companies, or the W3C. The former are bad actors, the latter is their consortium. The syndication world is growing fast, but not thriving. Our challenges are economic, not technologic. I'd be more impressed if MasterCard got excited about RSS than the W3C getting excited about Atom. Scoble nailed it. Like all other domains, the standards bodies compete with other standards bodies. The IETF is interested, so of course the W3C is. 5. Rogers leaked that he's on the newly configured RSS Advisory Board. I didn't want to announce this right away, but it kind of got lost in all the other stuff. Count my blessings. Anyway, the other new members are Andrew Grumet, Adam Curry, and of course myself. Yesterday, we made an offer to one other person who hasn't responded yet. Brent Simmons and Jon Udell are not on the new board, their choice, not mine. It was a pleasure working with them. We'll aim for getting the site updated by next week. So... The title of this section is the title of a great Joni Mitchell song. Software people are the "one man band by the quick lunch stand." Now Ben and Mena have lots of mouths to feed. This is good for users. It means they can can do more than two things at once. But it means they have to have money flow. A guy asked me yesterday what happened to Channel Z, which I used to talk about on Scripting News. I said it's just for me, I'm not going to give it away. Before people even saw it, or used it, they were complaining, calling me names. Then I remembered, it's no fun to be generous. Who would want to be a software developer in 2004. I'm much happier if I forget about pleasing users and just please myself, until they get their act together and start being responsible. Yesterday we saw people complain about spending $60 for a big useful piece of software like Movable Type. I paid $60 for a cab ride in Geneva. A good dinner is $100. A hotel room $150. You want the software, find a way to help companies like Six Apart instead of making them miserable. You've now got the tools to communicate. Use them well. Use them better.
Julie Leung: 13 reasons why Cluetrain made me cry. I didn't know that Google removed sites in response to DMCA requests. This came up in Jon Zittrain's talk this afternoon. I was surprised. Here's an example search. Scroll to the bottom of the page. "In response to a complaint we received under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, we have removed 1 result(s) from this page. If you wish, you may read the DMCA complaint for these removed results." Kathleen Otter: "I am looking into how to combine the new Imix publishing service on ITunes (which allows you to take a playlist in your ITunes and publish it in the ITunes music store) with RSS feeds." The W3C wants Atom. I'm linking to this because an informed person would want to be aware of this. I don't know what to make of it. Disclaimer: I am a former member of the W3C advisory board. Danny Ayers: "I wholeheartedly support Atom becoming a W3C-based specification." Mark Nottingham has reservations. Scoble: "How should Microsoft react to this?" Choice in software is what matters, not choice in formats. Clamhead: "To request a song for the Dr. Demento Show.." Tim Appnel: "Rumor around the MT community is that Six Apart was collecting less then 50 cents for each copy of MT downloaded. That is absurd for a piece of commercial software!" Forever Geek: "And now we have MT 3.0 and the new licensing scheme. There is one free version with one author and a cap of three weblogs." Micah Sifry: Thomas Friedman Bombs, Again.
Frank Field blogs the Lessig-Zittrain talk. Katie Hafner's do-it-yourself home theater. Guardian interview with Google's Evan Williams. Google can do mail lists now, in competition with Yahoo. I'm at the Internet Law conference in Ames Courtroom. Lots of familiar faces. Larry Lessig and Jon Zittrain are up first with a session on pornography. Jay McCarthy is blogging it. Prattboy is still waiting for his flood of spam. Project Gutenberg has an RSS feed. Rogers Cadenhead: "I never get a chance to scoop Scripting News, so I'm going to jump the gun with this announcement." Wired: Microsoft to Battle Spyware. Are there reports from yesterday's blogger dinner in London? Please send pointers. Bernhard Seefeld carefully explained (in Nov 2003) how Google could unilaterally end weblog comment spam. A similar technique would kill referer spam too. Does Rumsfeld read Scripting News? Yesterday: "Bush gets a one-way ticket to Falluja, so he can personally clean up the mess he created. He can take his great Defense Secretary with him. " Today: "Embattled US defence secretary Donald Rumsfeld has arrived in Baghdad on a surprise visit." "It's even worse than it appears."
News.Com: "Search engine giant Google plans for the first time to sell ads that include images, a surprise reversal for a company that has won regard for its pioneering use of text-only marketing pitches." The Internet Law conference starts tomorrow here in Cambridge. I'm going to Jeffrey Sachs an economist at Columbia University is the guest on NPR's On Point this evening. He says what I've been trying to say, it's time to cut our losses in Iraq. We made a mistake. I don't see any way that staying there can have a better outcome than leaving now. A conference tonight at Fenwick & West in Mtn View about blogging. "How will blogging change the way we do business?" Aaron Pratt wants to fill up his Gmail inbox with a gig of spam. Archive.Org has an RSS feed. BBC: New abuse photos are "even worse." Reuters: "The Americans killed hundreds in Falluja in retaliation for the mutilation of the four Americans and now those people are killing an American in retaliation for the torture of prisoners," said Arkan Mohammad, a cleric at Baghdad University. I basically agree with the title of this site. This is, probably, by the way, why I won't spend a major amount of time in Europe this summer. We've got an election here in the fall that's very important. I will probably relocate to one of the swing states, so my vote will matter. And my travelling this summer should be in the US, where I can help in any way I can to be sure that Bush gets a one-way ticket to Falluja, so he can personally clean up the mess he created. He can take his great Defense Secretary with him. NY Times: "President Bush and Senator John Kerry are pouring resources into more than 20 states in a struggle to master one of the most complex electoral playing fields in nearly 20 years." Mary Jo Foley: Trouble in TabletLand? Wired: "It's probably a bit much to say Jobs is saving the music industry, but he's showing them the way into the digital age. They have been stumbling around drunk in the dark." XML-RPC interface for Mail To The Future. Peter Ford: "It is great to see the revival of Mail to the Future." AP: "The number of adult smokers in New York City dropped by more than 100,000 in a year."
TPM: "Lady Liberty gets left with fifty bucks, a sneer, a black eye, and the room to herself for the couple hours left before check out." 5/12/97: "A friend asks if galaxies can love each other."
Reuters: "Al Qaeda's leader in Iraq beheaded an American civilian and vowed more killings in revenge for the 'Satanic degradation' of Iraqi prisoners, an Islamist Web site said Tuesday."
Kevin Werbach: "And frankly, the attendees are just as impressive." I'll probably never get invited to Supernova, but Kevin I wholly agree, so why not have a page that lists all the participants. We have such an app running, created for BloggerCon, if you want to use it, just say the word, it would take a couple of hours to set it up for your conference. This way people can salivate about all the super-smart people who will be there. Bloglines adds enclosure support. I've attached a small enclosure to this item. Does it copy the enclosure to their server, or point to the original? Matt McClellan reports: "Looks like Bloglines points to the original." The Connection: The Anti-Blog. "Bad prose out there." George Packer: The Revolution Will Not Be Blogged.
Gizmodo report on the Vaio Pocket, pictured above. Register: Sony unveils colour iPod killer. Hans Kullin has a list of Swedish sites with RSS feeds. Betsy Devine did an experiment to see if Gmail only looks at the first paragraph in an email to figure out what ads to display. It appears her theory is correct. She writes about flowers, and the ads are about flowers. At first I couldn't figure out what she was talking about. Halley's Comment, a Blogger site, now has comments. I just heard that Yahoo's aggregator doesn't have a way to export subscriptions as OPML. If true, they should fix this right away. Scott Rosenberg: "Bush and his men keep parroting the line about torture chambers even as the scandal of American-sponsored torture in Saddam's notorious old prison was grabbing headlines worldwide."
Nicholas Carr: "In public, industry CEOs may continue to exercise their Peter Pan complexes, pretending that the IT business will never grow up. But behind the scenes they're dismantling Neverland piece by piece." Phil Ringnalda: "It's time for the users of syndicated XML feeds to stand up and be heard." Audioblog.com is "the powerful and easy-to-use audio publishing service that puts your voice in your weblog or online journal." Docs for the XML-RPC interface for MailToTheFuture.Com, 2/99. Three years ago today, Frontier for Mac OS X shipped.
Jon Udell article about Mail To The Future, August 1999. I'm working on transitioning this app to the Scripting News servers. It's not part of UserLand's future, so I'm going to run it here. Getting pretty close to flipping the switch. Working on the XML-RPC interface now. "thinkusaalignright"Reuters: "The independent Army Times newspaper, read widely in the US military, on Monday suggested Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and other top Pentagon civilian and military leaders should be removed over the Iraq prisoner abuse scandal." Boston Globe report on bloggers at the Democratic Convention. A simple thing you can do to irritate Reps and reassure Dems. Blogenstein "uses OPML files to keep track of weblog popularity." John Robb weighs in on Google's missing support for RSS. I'd add what I said to David Krane, it's a strategic issue, not an engineering issue, which is the party line from Google. Finally a clue to what Google means when they say that omitting RSS support is an engineering issue. They told San Jose Mercury News editor Dan Gillmor that they couldn't afford the server resources to maintain two feeds for each user. Dan wonders if this is true, and so do I. BBC: "One of the leading names in blogging is overhauling its service in an attempt to catch up with the competition." Contact with Google I have been emailing with David Krane, a PR person at Google, who works alongside Cindy McCaffery. That's good. He had emailed me an invite to use Gmail in the first wave of invites, but my very crude spam system coughed it up, and then hurled his follow-up email. Once I knew it was there and got back from Europe I tried to use it, only to find out that the invite had expired. Over the weekend David very kindly set me up with a new one, and now I have an empty Gmail account, dave.winer. Obviously it's not going to be much use until it starts getting some email, so send me a message if you feel so inclined. As noted yesterday, it was disappointing that the new Blogger interface, which looks quite nice, doesn't support RSS 2.0. I'm far from the only one who's commenting. It would be so easy to do, so not evil, so grown-up, so much appreciated if they would just do it. Pretty soon RSS is going to be known as the format of the BigPubs, which is totally ironic because I'm one of the original bloggers. Come on guys, what if I say please? Please, I'm down on bended knees. Another note, I now have four different logins at Google: Orkut, AdSense, Blogger and Gmail. Each with a different username and password. Now here's an area where Google could be a leader, provide an alternative to Passport, something we really need, a Google-size problem.
Biz Stone: The Great Blogger Relaunch. Phil Ringnalda: "Wow. Blogger just got a serious, serious makeover." There is speculation that RSS is now an option for non-Pro users, but my non-Pro site doesn't offer it as an option. NY Times: Alan King, exemplar of Jewish comedy, Dies at 76. CSM: "If kid's diary is online, should mom peek?"
Mitch Kapor: "They picked the wrong person to do this to." Glenn Fleishman: "This post will be a top match for Soviet Union in a few days." This is Doc Searls' first Mother's Day without a mother. I was wondering if someone could write about that. Luckily I have a mother. Called her today to wish her a happy day. We talked about what we're going to do to get rid of the Republicans come November. Mike Rodriquez: "This is a different holiday now that both our moms are gone." Seth Dillingham: "Think about those mothers who have lost their children since the last Mother's Day." One of the things that came out of our meeting with Adam this month in Amsterdam is a brain-dead simple geekish aggregator that only does enclosures, and works without much of a user interface. Marcus Mauller is already working on the code, and I hope Andrew Grumet will get into the loop on it. The idea is to get a basic bootstrap going to figure out how the ideal enclosure aggregator should work. This is the seed that starts up the Personal TV Networks tree. Five years ago today: "RSS is an XML-based format that represents what we in the Frontier community call a 'weblog.'" Chris Heilman: "Rumsfeld is even less elected than is his boss." Jessica Baumgart: "While I was reflecting on my life for the last year as I've been blogging, I realized I've met a lot of really cool people through the activity and a related support group for bloggers."
NY Times profile of Marc Benioff, CEO of Salesforce.Com. Rebecca MacKinnon offers a user's perspective on Reuters' video RSS feeds. "It's already having an impact on how I follow news events." I'm doing a video chat with Adam Curry in Belgium. He's on a Mac using iChat, I'm on Windows XP using AIM. It's three-quarters working, but the last quarter is very vexing. Can you help with the remaining connection? Dan Gillmor: "We are risking the part of being American that is so attractive here and around the world: the sense that we paid attention to human rights and meant it." Joi Ito: "I think software patents are a bad American idea."
Yesterday's top item: Reuters RSS Feeds. Worth repeating. Via Elmer Masters via LawLibTech comes news that Westlaw now supports RSS. It's behind a user login, so we have to go by what they're saying (so far apparently no press release). An example of one of the feeds. They're using RSS 0.92, perfectly appropriate for the application. Bravo! Two big publishers come online in two days. Bing-bing! 'Help -- my iPod won't play! Sailboat at sunset, Lake Geneva, Lausanne, Switzerland. Statue of Beethoven with a pigeon on his head, Bonn, Germany.
Wall St Journal via Scott Rosenberg: "Mr Frist at one point said he'd like to sit down with Mr Bush and ask which two or three people in the administration could tell him what's really going on with Iraq, according to one person in the room. 'I don't think he knows who could do that,' replied Senate Foreign Relations Chairman Richard Lugar.'" Lance: "Maybe Dave should spend his summer in Poland?" !
An O'Reilly report on news standards says RSS is here to stay. Adam: "I don't feel bad that I bittorrented the sucker this morning." Sponsors, speakers, panels, audience Supernova and the recently announced Web 2.0 conference are throwbacks to the priorities of old conferences, of the eighties and nineties: sponsors, speakers, panels, audience. Execs from high tech companies pay sponsorship fees, not disclosed, and guarantee that the content is paid advertising and that nothing real is said on stage. If you don't pay the sponsorship fee, you don't get a speaking slot. If you offend a sponsor, you don't get invited back. These conferences are all spin, and empty bluster.
By the end of the day people are in the hallway or outside, talking to each other, and when that gets boring, talking on cell phones. Now that they have WiFi, at least there's an outlet for the audience's ideas, their blogs. But as we learned at BloggerCon II, it's totally possible to do a conference without sponsors, without speakers, panels, without an audience. In this model, the rooms are full to capacity and even though there's WiFi, there was hardly any time to post to blogs. You can steal the design for this conference. And if you do, sign me up, I want to be there. If you really want to get the most out of people's time, switch models. You don't need the money from the sponsors, and you don't need speakers, and you surely don't need an audience.
Awesome: Reuters RSS Feeds. Bing! Cam: Anthrax Scare Messes Up Cam's Day. With the stock and bond markets tubing and with Greenspan warning about the havoc Bush's deficits are having on the economy, it's a wonder Republicans would vote for him. He's President of Iraq. Forget about one-way air fare to Crawford, send the bum to Baghdad. In the midst of all the bad economic and war news comes notice of an invitation-only tech conference in October. $2390 for three days. Ay carumba. Must be for venture capitalists. Geez Louise.
NY Times: "The head of the Federal Reserve voiced a note of concern today about the effects of America's soaring national budget deficit on the country's long-term economic stability." Andrew: "I'm updating myWeblogOutliner today, adding metaWeblog API based category support." Raffi Krikorian hacked his Google ads so that they appear in his RSS feed. Unfortunately Google doesn't like this practice. TPM is covering the Iraq prisoner abuse scandal. Thanks to Boing Boing for the pointer to this profile of the "Good ol' girl" from West Virginia in many of the Iraq prisoner pictures. NY Times: "Probably no more than 500,000 people are using IRC worldwide at any time, and many of them are engaged in legitimate activities, network administrators say." FYI, we use IRC at Harvard to connect people who are remote who want to participate in our weekly conferences. We're transferring several domains to my Scripting servers in Mass, and in doing so, need to find a registration service that may or may not exist. Q+A: What MIME type to use for RSS files? BBC: "Wireless net access is quickly becoming the rule, not exception, in the Estonian capital." Two years ago: "If I ever said that the amateurs would certainly wipe out the professionals, let me now retract that statement." Six years ago: "That had nothing to do with Bill Gates." A little over a year ago Diego Doval did an excellent survey of blogging APIs. Although there's been a lot of flames under the bridge since, nothing really has changed in the last year. New look at UserLand's web site, and a description of RSS from a corporate user's point of view. NY Times: "The City University of New York is preparing to open a graduate school of journalism in the summer of 2005 with an emphasis on urban affairs."
This op-ed piece in the Christian Science Monitor sums up my concerns about US foreign policy and the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. I've started looking at the suggestions for vacation rentals in Europe. I'm pretty serious about spending July and August in Europe. I'd really like a place in the country. Sounds like Scandanavia is a good bet, because Internet access is important, and swimming and not being too hot is also important. Here's a site that Guan Yang from Copenhagen recommended for housing in Denmark. Looks very interesting. Other possibilities include Switzerland, and Germany.
Ed Cone: "Howard Coble has a new website." Jon Udell: "If we really want transparent data flow, let’s keep it simple." What is this?? NY Times: "What would happen if people across the country were really engaged and informed and had a chance to think about the issues?" Thanks to Der Shockwellenreiter for the pointer to this great Pigpen song from the Grateful Dead of the 1960s. "Hey little thing let me light your candle cause mama I'm so hard to handle." Andrew switched to T-Mobile, so he's already Europe-friendly. Wired: "A Cold War emergency bunker nestled in the side of a mountain will soon house one of the largest movie and music collections in the world."
Back in Boston, where it's totally spring, sunny, not too cold, not too hot, everything in bloom, birds chirping. A normal long flight, the plane was packed, the movie was good. Glad to be back in the good old U-S-of-A. The reverse jet lag (the easier kind, if I remember correctly) is setting in. To me it feels like midnight, but it's really 6PM. Webjay is "a tool that helps you listen to and publish web playlists." Interesting people will be at Supernova, June 24-25, Santa Clara, CA. Rogers Cadenhead: "I'm working on an RSS 2.0 template that I would like Six Apart to adopt in its software." Invisible Adjunct: "Six more weeks of teaching, and I head for the nearest exit." The soul Roughly seven years ago: "I think each of us has a kernel, under all the layers of experience and pain, that's ageless and perfect. Some people call this a heart, the organ that pumps blood thru our bodies. Others call it a spirit, the essence of the person. Whatever you call it, it's there, and you can easily find it." Many years ago at a workshop I asked the teacher if goose bumps are love or fear. He didn't answer. Now I think I know. I get goose bumps when my point is touched. Don't know what that means? Read the story. Dinner with Adam On my last night in Amsterdam for this trip, I had dinner with Adam Curry at a meat house that reminded me of a bar in Mazomanie, WI, many many years ago. We had meat and beer. So did everyone else. It's really interesting walking around Amsterdam with Adam, who is a very famous person here. People stare at him. Ask for his autograph. I get some of the reflected glory, who is that guy with the rock star? It's a pretty unusual thing for me. Anyway, we talked about next things to do. It was good to get some one-on-one time with Adam this trip. Now it's off the Schipol, the Amsterdam airport, to go back to Boston, and whatever adventures await me there.
Independent: "The BBC will launch a pilot project that could lead to all television programmes being made available on the internet." Lots of good places to vacation for 60-90 days this summer, in Europe, places suitable for thinking, writing, swimming, planning, programming News.Com: "The European Commission has warned organizations that collect royalties on behalf of musicians that they may be breaking competition rules by extending their national monopolies onto the Internet." A new feed with items about the Google IPO.
CNET has the Google prospectus in PDF format. Russell Beattie: "Google changed their contract to include a gag clause preventing anyone who uses Adsense to talk about it publicly." Now I get on a train to Cologne and then to Amsterdam. It's a bright sunny day here in Bonn, overlooking the Rhine River. Auf wiedersen y'all!
Harold Gilchrist says it's time for audio blogs to have their own weblogs.com. We can do it if there's enough interest -- weblogs.com has the ability to spawn new communities. So if there are enough audio blogs or tools to start one, let's do it. Probably the best way to find out is to create a post and ask people with audio blogs to comment.
BBC: Wall Street cool on Google plans. Andrew Grumet: "Why isn't there better support for syndicating mp3 playlists? Why don't we have better support for sharing category trees across blog systems?" When I woke up this morning I didn't feel a day older than 49. Where would be a good place to vacation for 60-90 days this summer, in Europe, a place suitable for thinking, writing, swimming, planning, programming. I've been thinking about where to spend this summer. A lot. A few days ago I realized I wanted to spend it at my grandmother's house at Rockaway Beach in NY. But she's been dead for 26 years. A weird thing happened. I'm in the part of Germany she came from. Checked into my hotel room in Bonn today. It smells like her house. Unmistakeable. Smells stay with you forever. I miss her. She was a devilish person. I'd like to spend a summer at her house. Can't do it. Moral of the story -- enjoy the people you love when you have the time.
Jay Rosen: "Of course Ted Koppel was making a political statement." Mitch Kapor: "Google wants to have its cake and eat it too." Tim Bray: "I love the smell of flaming in the morning." Britt Blaser: "Hooray! Hooray!" Germany on May Day On the train yesterday I had a lot of time to think about all kinds of things. It was May Day, so everywhere the train went, there were families having picnics and riding bikes and walking. From my vantage point it seemed these people sure know how to live. No air pollution, lots of green, all the trees in bloom. Inexplicably they have graffitti, just like we do in the states. Is Switzerland and southern Germany really heaven? From the train it, in May, on a national holiday, it sure looks like heaven.
NY Times: "I would boycott Google if I could," said Mr Cadenhead, of St Augustine, Fla, who said he spends hours a day on the site. "But I can't. It's like boycotting gas." Via Seb: "Crazy old men are essential to society." Andrew wants to buy a cell phone that works in the US and Europe. Vive la difference NY Times: "Unlike conventional advertising, to which vast creative effort is devoted, a search engine like Google already has access to users looking for something in particular." This NY Times article is a milestone; it describes the basic difference between the economy of publishing versus the economy of eyeballs. On the Internet, over time, the role of "audience" goes away, being replaced by a network of people with information that other people use, and products people want, that other people can buy. On the eBay of tomorrow, the vendor of the product you buy may never have even seen the product, maybe never have seen a prototype, all they knew as that a need wasn't being met, and they took a chance on the idea. Manufacturing will be done where it's most efficient. Things that used to require experts, like advertising, travel agencies, realtors, will decline. One of the cool things about the Google prospectus, which I've only read second-hand, is that they stick by the principles of the Web, which say you give up control and provide a service people want. But I wonder if they've grown so big that Sergey and Larry don't know what their company is doing. If that hasn't happened yet, it will happen soon, IPO or not. As good as Google is, as much as they are Of The Internet, as they grow, they aggregate functionality that's probably better off being distributed. It'll become tempting if it hasn't already to make money at the expense of the commons. Already Google is acting like big chunks of the commons are private property. Strange names are okay I got an email from a friend asking if "RSS" is really the best name for the activity of creating and reading XML-based news feeds. I think it is, because if there was only going to be one name for the activity, RSS would have to be it. I can prove it. Suppose you call it XYZ and convince some people to call it that. Then some people will call it RSS and other people will call it XYZ. Unless you can convince everyone to change, which is a very hard thing to do, you're going to have two names for one thing, which is more than twice as confusing as one name. An example. I use a GSM phone in Europe. I even met the people who designed it. I have absolutely no idea what it stands for and I don't need or want to know. Another example. In Germany the high speed trains are called ICE. When I got on my first train, the American than I am, I called it an ice-train. The conductor explained that it's an acronym. I-C-E. What does it stand for? Inter City Express. This in a country where the first and only language is German. An English acronym is the name of their high speed rail system, one that they are justifiably proud of. All around us are things which have incomprehensible names. Eventually that fades into the background and they become new words in our common vocabulary, familiar and happy. Like TV. What is that short for? Tele Vision. What the hell does that mean? One more. Read the title of this section. Okay. Now think about that for a minute. It's a fairly universal cross-language word for "got it." We all say okay all the time. It's an acronym, right? What is it an acronym for? I bet you'll be surprised. Going north, slowly I decided I don't have enough time to do justice to the south of France, so I'm going to slowly return to Amsterdam, via Cologne, where Andre and Andrea of Spicy Noodles fame reside. Andre used to work at UserLand and is one of my favorite people in the world. Very smart, great programmer, and he laughs at my chokes. Er jokes.
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Still working on the clean-up. Last night before the Berkman meeting I mentioned what happened to John Palfrey, he said he had a Kazaa computer, one he never boots. Come on it can't be that bad... Maybe it can. Here's a 
version of 
It's Thursday and I'm still thinking about Sunday's episode of The Sopranos, that's how good it was. I guess we know who's going to get killed next. Will Tony have any blood relatives when it's over? Then a delicious thought, a Sopranos spinoff, set in hell, with all the characters who have been killed over the years. Some of the best ones. The star would be 
Postscript: Many people recommend 
Bush would find ample 
Another former US general, 
Interesting email this morning from "TheoDP," cc'd to Dan Gillmor, Larry Lessig and others, about Amazon's patents. First bit shows that Amazon 
The first Shrek was, in 
Five years from now, or sooner, you'll be able to enter something like this in a publicly accessible profile. "I have three months free and $X burning a hole in my pocket. I'd like to have an inspiring experience, in a place I've never been before, but I'd also like to have meals provided (healthy please) and I require a high-speed Internet connection. I like to swim, hike, and have long discussions about the future of writing, journalism, politics, networks, humans. Massages a plus. 
Anyway, these days UserLand is largely a company that markets and develops Manila and Radio. My concern was when will UserLand get around to enhancing and improving the "kernel" -- the large base of C code that runs Manila and Radio -- the scripting language, object database, verb set, server, multi-threaded runtime, content management framework. It's been several years since there was a meaningful update of that code. 
Products that Manila and Radio compete with don't have their own kernels, they build off development environments created by others. For example, Movable Type is written in Perl. WordPress is PHP. Blogger is Java. UserLand's products are different because they build on a private platform. For a long time we saw this as an advantage, the UserLand runtime is very rich and powerful, and offered performance benefits. When a new layer came on, for example the CMS, when it got stable and mature, we'd "kernelize" it, so it would be super-fast. But experience in the market said that, to succeed, UserLand didn't need to own its kernel. In fact, that it was the only developer using this kernel may well have been a liability for UserLand. 
Here's another angle. In 1987 we sold Living Videotext to Symantec, and along with it, sold them our products, ThinkTank, Ready and MORE. I appreciate what Symantec did for us, I'm still living off the money I made in the public stock offering, but the products died inside Symantec. I'm not blaming them for that, because it's very likely they would have died inside Living Videotext had we not been acquired. But some good products disappeared. To this day people ask me what became of MORE, and tell me how advanced it was, and how nothing has replaced it. It's a sad story, and a shame, that the art of outlining took such a hit. I swore this would never happen again. There are a lot of good ideas in that base of software that you won't find elsewhere. If it disappeared it would be a loss like the MORE loss.
To fans of UserLand Software it must seem inevitable that the kernel will go this way, it sure did to me. But I am on the board of directors of the company, and I persuaded my fellow board members that it would be in the company's interest to let the kernel develop separately from the products that build on it. And that's what I want to announce today. At some point in the next few months, there will be an open source release of the Frontier kernel. Not sure what license it'll use. There won't be any grand expectations of what kind of community will develop. Even if no bugs get fixed, if no features get added, if no new OSes are supported, it will be worth it, because its future will be assured. That's the point Ted makes, and that's my reasoning behind this. 
NPR's Juan Williams 
The organization of the conferences, with speakers and panels, guarantees that the audience falls asleep or is frustrated, waiting to make their point until they get to ask questions at the end of the session. Questions. What a silly concept. Look in the room. It's pretty likely the people who know the most are in the "audience." 
