Thursday, November 11, 2004

Comments on the botched rollout of Microsoft's new search engine.  

Jay Rosen led the Academia discussion at BloggerCon III. 

Rebecca MacKinnon led the Newbies discussion at BloggerCon III. 

Julie Leung, the DL of the Emotional Life session, summarizes. 

Tim Bray suggests that Atom might nearly be finished. I read his comments carefully, and find the benefits of the possibly-final Atom to be vague, and the premise absolutely incorrect. Unlike SGML, RSS has been widely deployed, successfully, by users of all levels of technical expertise. There are many thousands of popular RSS feeds updating every day, from technology companies like Apple, Microsoft, Yahoo, Sun and Oracle, big publishing companies like Reuters, The Wall Street Journal, NY Times, Newsweek, Time, BBC, Guardian, etc, exactly the kinds of enterprises that his employer serves. It's also widely used by today's opinion leaders, the bloggers. Where SGML was beached and floundering, RSS is thriving and growing. So to conclude that RSS needs the same help that SGML did, is simply not supported by facts. 

Scoble: "Halo 2 uses RSS to share game stats." 

My culture clashed with that of Elizabeth Grigg.  

Kottke: "ICANN has a new policy about domain name transfers which will make hijacking domains much easier." Update from Kottke: "The Netcraft article I pointed to about the new ICANN policy was misleading and I didn't check into it close enough. I updated the post." 

So we're in a totally different place, on Capitol Hill, called Victrola. It's totally packed, totally wifi. Taking pictures listening to yesterday's Daily Source Code. Everyone here must think we're weird. Okay. Hope this makes it into Newsweek. Back in a minute with some pics I took of the pics being taken of me. The photographer wanted pictures of me blogging, that's what I'm doing. Service with a smile.  

I'm getting photographed for Newsweek in a few minutes. There's a tradition of not saying what the article is about, to protect them from their competition, because of lead times. I understand this is for a piece they'll run in next week's issue. That's another thing, you never know for sure if the piece will actually run. We're going to take the pic in a coffee shop, probably the one I brainstormed moblogging with Scoble in, the one that caused the moblogging guy to throw a hissy fit. They want me to blog during the shoot, so we'll have to do it somewhere there's a good net connect. That's not hard in downtown Seattle, in fact it's hard to find a place where the wifi networks don't interfere with each other so much that you can't get on. How about that for a problem to have.  

One of many people at BloggerCon whose hand I didn't get to shake, but would have liked to. I did get to shake Matt's hand, he has a strong presence for such a young man.  

Looks like I'm going to throw a party on Friday December 10 in Cambridge, somewhere on or near the Harvard campus. Bloggers, Red Sox fans, Tax-and-Spend Liberals, and other Massive-Two-Shitters. We could have had a dinner, but sheez, let's have a party with drinks and music, and seasons greetings. If you have an idea for a venue, let me know. Looking forward to chilling out back east. And it is chilly back there! Brrr. 

In February 2001 I applied for an ISSN, 1533-8185. Now I hear from Dane Carlson that they're thinking about whether or not they want to give numbers to weblogs. Clue: Scripting News is a weblog. 

Mary Hodder says searching for metadata in podcasts isn't enough. I think we'll be lucky to get even limited metadata, and transcripts are completely out of reach. I'm not going to spend the time or money to produce them for my podcasts. And even if I could easily and economically produce a transcript, I wouldn't. Adam tried to excerpt my last podcast and found it impossible. I wasn't surprised. It was a sequence of thoughts, each building on the previous. Try to pull one out of context and it doesn't work. If I had to respond to people who had skimmed my podcast (by reading the transcript) I would stop doing it. Finally we have a medium that, unlike the Web, can't be skimmed. Reading comprehension keeps going down, people skim for keywords, not for understanding. I know because I get so much email that is based on misreading what I wrote. What a waste of intellect. For now, it's hard to do that with podcasts. Mary, my advice is to pick someone to be your guide, and let them guide. Listen to all their podcasts, get in the groove, and then reflect. For some reason I think you'd especially like Dawn & Drew. 

This time it seems Yasser Arafat really is dead. They've got a coffin, and an honor guard and they're playing taps. Now all the TV guys are experts on mideast politics. Lots of blah blah. Relaxing. 

BBC covers Microsoft's new search engine. 

A place for public comments about the search engine. 

Onlypunjab.com: "The world's first tap dancing podcaster, Sondra Lowell, was also the first tap dancing podcaster to declare the presidential race for President Bush."