Wednesday, July 21, 2004

The Wall Street Journal supports RSS. Bing! 

Some brief comments on the new WSJ feeds. 

Erskine Bowles is running for Senate in NC, has a new blog, mastered by Matt Gross, former blogmaster at Dean For America. 

Hey I was invited to the guest on The Gillmor Gang, next week, live from Fleet Center. This has been my lifetime ambition. Now I can retire.  

I want to run IIS and Frontier on the same machine. Lotsa luck! 

I'm going to be in crunch mode on a big project for the next few days. I flew back to NY one day early to get one more day of programming time before the DNC. We're going to do something special, new technology, that could involve some or all of the aggregator developers. I bought a new server just for the occasion. In the meantime, Amy Wohl said something I've been wanting to say, so perfectly, that I'll just let her speak for me. There's a real opportunity for the blogging community to pull together on this one. From the Berkmanites, who got practice by blogging candidate appearances in New Hampshire, to geeks who can help tweak up RSS feeds, to people who can assemble sequences of images, and audio, to designers who can do templates for new sites that spring up, to Deaniacs who get a chance to do it all again (and the second time is always better). This is a chance to do another barn-raising, and it's been a while, and it can be fun. I'm getting charged up by the project. Haven't felt like this in a while. And it's just getting started.  

BTW, I got a great email from Joe Trippi this afternoon. I'm going to run it tomorrow morning. I think we're going to be friends. At least we're going to get together in Boston to eat, drink and tell big lies great stories.  

I think it was Christian Crumlish (who is blogging the show) who said we're just going to blog this like we would any other conference. No difference, except it's about a billion times bigger and more expensive, and we (supposedly) get resources just like the bigtime journos. Imagine a PC Forum or SuperNova where you take over a major US city, and you get an idea of how overwhelming this is. It's just hitting me now. This calls for some new technology.  

In New Hampshire, politics is retail.  

Something is brewing at Technorati. Blogs all the way. We kick butt! 

Jay Rosen on the new journalism at the 1960 Dem Con. 

Anyone who's quitting smoking deserves support. Three weeks into it, the psychological addiction is so incredibly powerful. I felt like I was dancing with a seven-foot cigarette, saying Just Smoke Me, every waking moment, and sometimes in my dreams. Every time I wanted to solve a problem or think, I'd reach for the cigarette that wasn't there. There's no silver bullet, I've found. Over two years later, there are still moments of craving, sometimes insane, almost psychotic, craving. Instead of punching my hand through a wall (which hurts), I take five deep breaths, and say "I love you" to myself. It works. The craving passes, and often, but not always, is replaced with a sense of well-being. Also, no matter how much I crave, there's no chance I'll smoke, I cough almost uncontrollably sometimes just being around smoking. I think my body would totally reject the smoke. Anyway, best of luck, you can do it, and it's totally worth doing. 

John Dvorak: Why Microsoft won't change. "The stock dividend and buyback are the result of not being able to buy companies fast enough." 

On this day in 2001, the Talking Moose asked: "Let's assume I had $100 million to invest. Where would I put it?" 

One of Marlon Brando's least noted movies, but a real good one, imho, is Don Juan de Marcos. I wrote about him in this movie in Sept 2001. "My movie role models are men who think, who are crazy, and struggle to be great. They're not one-dimensional, they are rich and complex, like real people."  

Brando was a dynamic actor. I bet you didn't think he could play a fat Jewish psychiatrist from Lawn Guyland. He was so versatile, I bet he could have played Rush Limbaugh, and made him seem to be the sad loser that he is. "I coulda been somebody, I coulda been a contenda." No you couldn't.  

If I ever get another cat, and it's male, I'm going to name him Marlon Brando, in the same spirit that Brent & Sheila Simmons's cat is named Papa. I assume he's named after Ernest "Papa" Hemingway.