Monday, November 01, 2004

New header graphic. Vote your philosophy. 

I just got a note from Lenn Pryor, on behalf of the Channel 9 team at Microsoft, they're giving $1000 to feed the bloggers at BloggerCon. It's cool to get Microsoft on board, along with Adam Curry, Associated Press, Google, Bloglines and Bradbury Software as major benefactors to the greatest amateur journalism conference on the planet. Thanks ever-buddy, and now thanks Microsoft. We've gotten a bunch of individual donations since the last group thanks-to: Gene Ragan, Chris Nolan, Gabriel Rivera, Evan Williams, David Adams, JJ Allaire, 500 Hats, Erik Higgs, Steve Zellers, Rackshare LLC, Niall Kennedy, Patrick Morrison, Ed Cone. We've definitely got enough money for this conference. Thanks to everyone for their generosity.  

Today's Morning Coffee Notes podcast, wherein I ramble and sniffle and rasp (still getting over my cold) but explain how being a blogger could possibly make you rich in the next few years. Worth listening to? Depends if you want to make money on the Internet. This is the podcast Marc Canter might do in about four years, if he stays on the path he's on.  

Please sign up for Saturday night Food For Thought dinners at local Palo Alto restaurants. "First come first serve." 

There was a bit of news on Larry King Live this evening. Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist was asked if the President would need Senate approval to launch an attack on Iran or North Korea. He said he didn't. I couldn't believe what I was hearing. King asked former majority leader George Mitchell if he agreed, and he said firmly that he did not. Only the Senate has the power to declare war. Bob Woodward of the Washington Post was on the show, as was Rev Jesse Jackson. No one called Frist on his lack of understanding of the separation of powers.  

Macworld: iPod Voice Recorders. 

The missing Gillmor Gang from Steve Gillmor. Exclusive! 

Tomorrow I start my drive from Seattle to Palo Alto. I'm going to take driving breaks by stopping and taking pictures of voting in small towns in Washington, Oregon and northern California. I expect I'll see a lot of Bush country, rural areas tend to vote Republican. If I can find a net connection on Tuesday night I'll upload them. Maybe other people will take pictures of their voting places on Election Day 2004. It might make an interesting Day in the Life experience.  

My interview with Doug Kaye is online.  

Doug Kaye would like to do a webcast from BloggerCon, but he needs help from someone with a PC laptop. 

Visual Studio already supports RSS enclosures according to Josh Ledgard. I'm saying "according to" because there's a wide variety of stuff people do and call it enclosure support. I'm being a hardass about this. I want the aggregator developers to meet the users and give them what they want. Tired of having developers acting like parents. This is a feature users want, maybe not a lot of them, yet, but they're leading edge people, exactly the kind of people you want singing your praises. I like the approach the VS guys are taking, using an existing feature of RSS to solve a problem the designer of the feature (me!) didn't anticipate. That's the way it's supposed to work. 

How the fcuk does this thing work?? 

Here's how the fcuk they did it. Thanks to Thomas Creedon for the pointer. 

Adam uses an outliner to organize his podcast production work. 

Roger Benningfield wrote to say that his blogging software, JournUrl, supports enclosures. I took a look and yes it does. My debugger likes his feed. And then I got an email from a WordPress developer explaining that they had enclosure support too. There's still some confusion about that. We'll certainly figure it out on Saturday, Matt Mullenweg is going to be at BloggerCon. I'll ask him what's up.  

Mini-editorial. The syndication community used to be a very nice group of people, and now it is again. It's really very simple, we make software for users so they can have fun and do what they want. What the bits look like on the wire is nowhere near as important as the user experience. 

Can you or your organization help with webcasting BloggerCon this coming Saturday? If so, please send an email. We have onsite audio and wifi, 3 streams, and potentially 100s of remote people who want to tune in. 

Cory Doctorow finds another utility to work around Apple's user-sabotage. I gave this whole situation some thought on yesterday's walk and I have a few comments. 1. We already knew Apple treats its customers with high disregard. The only people they hold in more contempt are Mac developers. 2. I told you so. 3. So did Doc Searls. 4. You want to pay the music companies? It's good to pay for what you use. Go ahead and buy the songs from Apple, and then load up LimeWire and download the MP3 of the song you just paid for. Assuming they let you delete songs (I honestly don't know), delete the one you bought and replace it with the MP3. The quality may be lower, but you'll enjoy it more knowing that you can use it any way you like.