Thursday, February 03, 2005

Harvard Gazette report on the Credibility conference. 

News & Record: Dave Winer's coming! And you're invited! 

A place to discuss Sunday night's dinner in DC. 

Correction please. I don't mind if Accordion Guy asks you to vote for him. I won't ask you to vote for me, not because I'm so dignified, but rather because I wasn't nominated. To be clear you can't vote for me. My site was judged not worthwhile by the people who put on the Bloggies. My accomplishments too meager, my attitude not hip enough, my clothes too old-fashioned, my presence -- not required. But you can vote for Accordion Guy. And while I won't actually encourage you to do so, I will say, in my rather long-winded way, that he's one of very few nominees actually worth voting for. Who are the others? You, of course.  

Danny Sullivan on MSN's feeds & Bill Gates's memo on interop. 

Continuing from yesterday's post about media companies and professional reporters. The owners of the media companies can't be reported on because they own the reporters. So what you say. Well, they also control our political system. Think about it. They control who gets airtime during the primaries, and who gets favorable coverage and who gets his scream replayed 20000 times between Iowa and New Hampshire. And if that didn't convince you consider that the hundreds of millions of dollars that the candidates raise goes to -- think about it -- the guys who run the media companies! The candidates are just sales reps for the networks, newspapers, radio, etc. We're getting screwed, and none of the reporters can write about it. Pretty clever, eh? 

On this day in 2001, RSS 0.92 got a new element: category. 

I made my travel plan for the next week or so. Tomorrow I drive to Washington, spend four nights, and would like to do a Scripting News dinner on Sunday night, after the Super Bowl. Then I spend three nights in Greensboro, North Carolina, going to school on their citizen journalism project. On Wednesday the 9th I'm going to lead a discussion at the News and Record, with bloggers and pros, 7PM at 200 East Market St, Greensboro, open to all. On Friday head over to Chapel Hill for the North Carolina BloggerCon. After that I want to visit with Andy Rhinehart at the Spartanburg Herald-Journal, a South Carolina newspaper owned by the New York Times. Andy is doing some very innovative hush-hush stuff that I want to help with. From there, somewhere I can be a programmer-in-residence, where I can do some focused work on my new outliner.  

Starting with the basics, feeds.scripting.com has a "River of News" style aggregator, subscribed to all the sites that have ever been in the Top 100 most-subscribed-to feeds. Basically, instead of having to hunt for new stories by clicking on the titles of feeds (the standard way readers work) you just view the page of new stuff and scroll through it. It's like sitting on the bank of a river, watching the boats go by. If you miss one, no big deal. You can even make the river flow backward by moving the scollbar up.  

Pito Salas is playing with social networks and aggregators.  

One critique of the aggregator developer community is that they don't steal each others' (good) ideas, that's why most of them suck, and most users aren't getting much benefit from using RSS. Seriously. It's one of the paradoxes of our time. I know that Mitch Kapor used VisiCalc, for example. Steve Jobs visited Xerox PARC. Bill Gates used a Mac. 

Here's another top-xxx list that leaves out most of the people who should be on it. They're talking about key innovators in the last 15 years. Let's see, 15 years ago is 1990. Uhh, shouldn't someone from Microsoft should be on that list? Why is Dan Bricklin there? (I know, everyone likes him, but his innovations were in the late 70s, not after the early 90s.) What about TBL and his colleagues at CERN? Ben and Mena? Yes, they sure are cute, but they're copiers, not innovators. How about Jean-Louis Gassee and the people of Be? Otherwise the list is interesting, and surely helps the Demo conference promote, because their main participants are secret until the show. And it's absolutely great to see Stewart back in the emcee role after passing off to David Coursey so many years ago. (BTW, if you're premiering a product at Demo and want some advance publicity let me know. I love sneaking stuff.) 

What's the story with ties? It's one of the few (only?) pieces of clothing that appears to serve no functional purpose. Why do people wear ties? Do you wear one? Why? Do they hold something up, or together? I never wear ties, and I don't think I'm missing anything. Am I? 

Straight Dope: "The wearing of neck cloths dates back at least to the time of the Roman legions, when soldiers wore a neck band to catch the sweat or block the cold, depending on the season." 

New York pictures and movies 

Pictures taken in Times Square this afternoon.

Movie #1: Watching television at home.

More movies: Watching television in Times Square.

One more Times Square TV movie.

Lexington Avenue downtown local, pulling into Grand Central.