Wednesday, June 23, 2004

AP: "All is right again in blog land." Whew. 

Thanks to Wired and AP for their help getting the news out. The blogs carried rumors and panic, and when it was clear that the panic was wrong, didn't carry the correction. This time the pros beat the crap out of the blogs in a story about blogs. Something to think about. This time they fact-checked your ass. Am I angry about this? Yeah, you bet I am.  

Technology.Updates.Com looks interesting. Lots of RSS feeds.  

Reuters: "Jason Smathers of Harpers Ferry, West Virginia, has been charged with stealing a list of 92 million AOL customer screen names and selling them to Internet marketer Sean Dunaway of Las Vegas." 

ComputerWorld: "Jonathan Schwartz, Sun's president, has said he is concerned that Java might fork into incompatible versions if it were made open-source, undermining Java's 'write once, run anywhere' capability." 

Ralph Nader "...abhors high-tech, uses a manual typewriter..." 

Wired: "What was decried as the death of a blog universe when Dave Winer shut down free blog host Weblogs.com turned out to be little more than a four-day server outage surrounded by a heck of a flame war." 

News.Com: "Computer trade show Comdex, once the biggest event on the tech calendar, has been canceled this year," 

Tomorrow at 7PM, a bloggers dinner in Cambridge. It's kind of sad, this will be my last Thursday at Harvard, but what the heck, we had a dinner when I came to town, let's have one as I leave. It's at the Bombay Club in Harvard Square. Please post a note here if you're coming, we'll call the restaurant tomorrow afternoon to tell them how many to expect. We'll sing a song, make a toast, praise Murphy. 

BBC: "Dr Mockapetris came up with the DNS system 21 years ago while he was a scientist on the Arpanet project." 

Hacking Netflix: "I think most companies don’t get blogs yet." 

Don Park: Murder She Wrote. 

Mark Bernstein on comments and trackback. A thoughtful post but I don't agree, last week's events happened on blogs, not in comments or through trackback.  

One difference between what happened to SixApart and what happened to me, is that I came to their defense, and they joined the mob. I'll still come to their defense in the future, when I think the community needs moderation, but I won't forget what they did, trying to hustle new business with the people whose sites were stranded. That totally increased the pressure, because the users were the ones who weren't freaking. And how much was at stake? Hmmm. Project the revenue from a couple hundred people with free weblogs. Some kind of gold mine? An amazing lack of perspective. I saw other competitors do horrible things that week. Only Evan Williams did the right thing, he did what he could to put it in perspective. I won't ever forget that either. Thanks again. Mark, this is what we need more of. People with the courage to stand in front of the mob and tell them to stand down. You want to solve the problem? That's how. 

Another difference was they were talking to customers about money, and I was finished hosting free sites after four years of free service. Another diff: SixApart is a company and I'm a person.