Wednesday, March 16, 2005

StumbleUpon is a "network of people and pages." 

Tyme White: "There are millions of female bloggers." 

I still need help with my disabled accounts at Yahoo Groups. It's really bad. The email address they disabled is the list owner for a few lists.  

Version 2.0 of iPodder/Lemon shipped today. Congrats to the team! The software sounds fantastic. 

Don Park suggests names for the new outliner. 

David Johnson suggests: OAPMEAL. "Google suggests oatmeal." 

Scoble has a new take on linking technologies. I haven't read it yet. 

Dare Obasanjo, who works on MSN Spaces at Microsoft, was "totally blown away" by Amazon's presentation about OpenSearch. 

They're discussing the name of my OPML editor on Danny Ayers' site. Some have suggested that naming the software after the format isn't a great idea. The thing is that in 2005, it's pretty hard to come up with a product name that someone else isn't already using. For example, Steve Kirks suggests that Opie might be a good name. I like it, although his suggestion of using images of Ron Howard as the logo wouldn't work. I'm sure someone owns that likeness. So I loook on Google for opie+software and find lots of hits. Any potential name has to pass that test.  

Actually I think Don Park is a while male, a member of a Jewish family that wandered too far east. 

According to AP, Yahoo's blogging tool will debut on March 29.  

Now, where is Google's aggregator? Their recent enhancements to Google News may point the way, but I still hope they do something richer, more like a River of News. 

Flickr is amazing. It deserves all the accolades it's been getting. I love two things, one specific, one general. First, I love the way they edit graphics. It's way beyond what I expected. Second, the attention to detail, across-the-board, is wonderful. The user interface constantly delights the user, with things they thought of; and you can use the software with confidence that they are thinking about users every step along the way. Very excellent work.  

Crimson: "In a sharp and unexpected rebuke of University President Lawrence H Summers, members of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences voted yesterday that they lack confidence in his leadership." 

Domini domini dominate? 

Bob Wyman, formerly of Microsoft, worries that Microsoft will dominate blogging "sooner than expected." That assumes a lot, personally I don't think Microsoft will dominate blogging. And so far Yahoo and Google have been been more menacing than Microsoft, which generally has been a good citizen, as Bob points out, using the standard formats invented by bloggers, not trying to reinvent things to push others out of the market (as Google has been doing). In fact, so far, Microsoft has been exemplary. Also I think Bob should have said up-front that he used to work at Microsoft.

BTW, Bob theorizes that Groove will become Microsoft's business-blogging platform, but I've heard another theory, that MS bought Groove for the programmers, and it's too close to Sharepoint to survive, and will be taken apart and used as "technology" which means we've seen the last of Groove, and the programmers will be shifted to various dev teams at MS. As the theory goes, there may be one more release of the software, but after that, on to other things like Longhorn.

Once upon a time, a very long time ago, Microsoft expressed an interest in buying a software product from me. One of the people evaluating it said that the software would be broken into bits and distributed among various product groups at MS. I told him that would never happen. He assured me it would. So far I've won that bet.

I like white meat, if you must know 

To those concerned, there are no plans to include sexual and racial designations of those whose work is included in this weblog. But for one day it seemed a worthwhile exercise or demonstration, and so it was.

As Tim Jarrett pointed out, there are so many other dimensions to a person, for example, I could tell his geographic story in a nutshell. Tim hails from the Boston area (Arlington I think) and therefore about now is fed up with cold and snow, and is ready for the trees to bloom and the first flowers of spring. You can expect some irrational exuberance sometime in the next few weeks at Chez Jarrett.

I might guess at his national heritage, but then in the US, that's fairly pointless. Some people with very anglo-sounding names had them changed at Ellis Island, or changed by a racially-conscious father or mother. His parental status might be interesting, whether he's married, divorced, widowed or single. How many siblings does he have, what genders, and was he first born, last, or somewhere inbetween? Does he like dark meat or white? If you tell him he has to ride a roller coaster will he make some kind of excuse, or rush to be in the first car, or something inbetween? What kind of car does he drive? Where did he go to school?

Every human being who's lived for any appreciable time has lots of stories. And if they have a good blog, the probability is (imho) that they also have a good heart, and are trying in some non-self-glorifying way to make the world a better place.

I was kidding when I said women should pull their weight, but I wasn't kidding when I asked them to stop complaining so much.

If you have something to say that's on-topic to Scripting News readers, and I know about it, I will include what you say, whether you're black or Latino, female, gay. I love the idea that technology can help bring us together by being a topic we discuss. But you have to help out by sending an email with a pointer to your piece, or get someone who I subscribe to to point to it. In other words, there's no magic to it, follow Ben Franklin's advice and write something worth remembering, and I will help the world beat a path to your home page. With pleasure.

Chris Nolan says I'm "stingy" 

Chris Nolan calls me "stingy" with the links. Of course, I don't think I am. Chris, here's some feedback on how you could make it easier for people to point to you. (This may prove useful for others.)

1. Make your RSS feed easier to subscribe to. You have the badges for Yahoo, Bloglines and MSN, but I use Radio. You could have put up a badge for Radio, that would be super-convenient, or just put up a white-on-orange XML button. I tried clicking on your Feedburner icon, but that didn't get me the URL, it offered to save it to my hard drive. And Feedburner is really gross, I don't like supporting them. But sheez, if need-be put the URL of your feed on the page itself. (PS: I was able to figure out where the feed is, and have subscribed.)

2. If you call people names and expect them to link to you, well, don't. Didn't your mother teach you that when you were a kid. Don't stare and don't call the other kids names.

3. You didn't even point to me when you called me a name. At least then I would have seen you in my referer log. And I'm like everyone else, I like flow and I like new readers. I have pointed to you Chris, many times. How many times have you pointed to me? You may be surprised that there are people who's sites I helped build by sending readers to them, who have never pointed back to me.

4. If you've written something you want to be read by Scripting News readers, send me an email with a link. That's what I do when I want to be read by the readers of someone else's blog. I'm polite about it, I don't come out and ask for the link, I say something like "Thought you'd find this interesting" or "FYI" and leave it at that. If I don't get the pointer, no big deal. And I try not to do it too often, so it's seen as a welcome source of a link to the person I send it to, rather than some kind of obligation.

5. I don't often point to political blogs, whether they're written by men or women, black or white, although I do subscribe to quite a few. So maybe what you experience as "stingy" is just a difference in focus.