Tuesday, November 23, 2004

Microsoft's Dave Massy, who works on MSIE, lists some of his favorite DHTML sites.  

I did a bunch of email today with Nicco Mele, who I met at Dean HQ and at the DNC last year. Very smart guy and probably the most natural sales guy I've ever met. We walked around the Flint Center and I met some of his friends. They're interesting people because, while they supported the Democrats, they were, like me, just about ready to give up. Nicco and I are having lunch on Friday (he's also from Queens, home for the holiday), should be interesting. In the meantime he pointed out this paragraph in a piece I wrote about Joe Trippi, who he worked for and loves. "Here's an idea. We're as far as we ever get from an election right now, it's two years until the mid-terms, four years to the next Presidential election. Let's start raising money for a truly open blogging network, out of which candidates for local office can emerge, and new journalists, and empowered voters, money-givers, an army of citizens ready to listen, to learn, and feed back to all of us what they learned." It was a pretty good bit. Worth thinking about. Would I stop everything to work on this network if we got the $10 million it would take to do it right? Yeah, I probably would. It would be good for America, and not just America, for everybody.  

I still have to write a bit about Arianna Huffington. She sure was impressive. Full of energy and love. She and Trippi were the stars of my LA visit. 

My mom reads this weblog. On the way to breakfast this morning she asked if I wanted a correction. I said of course. In this bit, I said that Giuliani is a citizen, implying that Schwarzenegger is not. Of course both are citizens. What I meant to say is that Giuliani was born in the US, and therefore is eligable to serve as President of the US, without a Constitutional amendment. Of course, literally speaking, my statement was correct, in two ways. First, Giuliani is in fact a citizen. Second, Schwarzenegger is a naturalized citizen, so it's accurate to point out that Giuliani is a plain old citizen. My mom admitted she was standing up for Arnie because she also is a naturalized citizen. I of course am not, and could serve as President without an amendment. Of course I did inhale, so I'm probably out of the running just on that count, if not for all the others. 

According to AppleInsider, Apple is developing a "breakout box" to connect to its GarageBand software. "The external audio device attaches to a computer and offers audio inputs and outputs for attaching instruments or other audio sources." 

AP: "78 cents in savings, $44,000 in debts, $88.5 million in winnings." 

Dan Rather stepping down as CBS News anchor. 

Laptop update. When I booted it up in NY it found my dad's wifi network and worked like a champ. It could be that my apartment house in Seattle is a totally polluted wifi environment.  

Anyone looking for a podcasting use-case, need look no further. 

Welcome Jon Udell to the world of podcasting. As usual we get an excellent narrative of his experience with lots of tips and tricks.  

Reminder to people having trouble with their podcast feeds. Run your feed through the debugger periodically. It really finds problems.  

The subject of how a site gets into Google News came up at the ONA conference a couple of weeks ago. They claim it's totally algorithmic, but the choice of which sites to include is made by human beings, using a undisclosed set of criteria. John Battelle writes about a case where a publication, basically a weblog, indexed by Google News, went after Russ Beattie (they've gone after me too, and Adam) and he's pleading for Google to remove the site. This just shows how far out of whack things have gotten. It's time for Google to either withdraw Google News, or stop claiming it's algorithmic, or even better, make it algorithmic. They've figured out how authority works in the search engine, why can't they do it in news? Disclaimers: 1. Scripting News is not considered authoritative by Google News. 2. I think that's ridiculous. 

Paul Boutin's new podcasting piece in The New Republic. You have to give them your email address, but it's a good story. Cyberpunk/cyberpunk doesn't work. Arrrgh. 

Julie Leung: "Elisabeth's vocabulary is expanding. She learned to say 'BloggerCon' and 'Burger King' this month."