Thursday, March 17, 2005

Phillip Torrone attended the Odeo presentation at Etech. 

Audio.weblogs.com now has two BlogAds. Very cool! And it's not chump change either, some real serious money. I hope it's worth it for the advertisers, Podast Expo and FeedDemon. I like the way this feels.  

Phil Yanov reports that John Edwards is about to become a podcaster.  

SiliconValleyWatcher has a summary of what Odeo is.  

Today the Christian Science Monitor ran an editorial that actually said they can learn from bloggers.  

Chris Abraham: "I want to be amused, entertained, excited, and scandalized." 

The San Jose Mercury News supports RSS 2.0. 

Brian Bailey: "It looks like the greatness of Gmail will soon be available to everyone, with or without an invitation!" 

It finally dawned on me what OpenSearch does. Basically you tell it about different search engines by showing it how to query something in each, and get back an RSS return. Then when you search for some term, say foo+bar, it performs the search in all the engines you have configured it for. So it's a way to group a bunch of search engines together and command them all to look for the same thing. It is clever. It is something that hasn't been done before, to my knowledge. That's the good news. The bad news is that Amazon is a leading patent abuser. So as good as this idea is, it's bad for all the rest of us, unless they tell us that they're granting us some kind of license to use the idea.  

I'm surprised (and pleased) by the amount of positive, non-flamey email I've gotten about my post about developers conferences run by developers for developers. People want to know how such a thing might work. I'm going to give this some thought. I am not volunteering to chair such an event, I already do my part with BloggerCon. One thing's for sure, it must be an unconference, and it must be open to all, and no panels, no speakers, no audience, like BC. 

Yesterday I picked up a funny graphic from Jonathon Delacour's site, with a picture of Alfred E Neuman, next to a slogan "White, male and damn proud of it!" I like to laugh at myself, so why not laugh at my gender too. Almost anything with the What Me Worry kid is funny. Let's have a good laugh, then settle down, and do some positive PR for our gender and our race. Sure, lots of terrible people were white and male, but so were a lot of great people, heroes, martyrs. People who cured diseases, and stood up to tyrants. Artists, teachers, comedians, people who served as role models for boys and men, even some sons of feminist women (like me, for example). I know some women are offended by this, I've heard from them, but this isn't about you, it's about us. So I'm going to start running an occasional positive image of white maleness on Scripting News, for no other reason that to help white men, like myself, feel like we have permission to do good things and serve as role models for young men, and for ourselves. 

I created a new Flickr set, pictures taken in on 9/18/04 in Seattle at Pike Street Market, with Robert Scoble, after seeing a Mariners game at SafeCo field. I went poking around and found that they can post to Manila weblogs! Wow. So I gave it a try, and it didn't work, the picture didn't show up. The HTML they generated for the picture was wrong. If anyone from Flickr is tuned in, I'll be happy to help debug this.  

An Apple store is opening in the neighborhood tomorrow. 

Scoble, a rare bird for a BigCo, opines that the WaSP seems more interested in PR than in helping the browser developers do a better job. For what it's worth, that's been my experience as well. They are pushing one agenda on the browser developers, but it's not the agenda of all developers. Me, I want to see a really great text editor inside the browser, I've wanted it for close to a decade now. I think the Web is a two-way medium and a browser that can't create pages as easily as it browses them is just half a browser. The WaSP guys aren't interested, because as designers, their livelihood depends on it being hard for users to create content. Kind of like a book publisher working to keep a format complicated so there will be demand for their book. Yeah, I've actually seen this happen. Talk about the tail wagging the dog.  

Still no luck with my user-crisis with Yahoo. Just tried calling their customer support line, 408-349-1572, but they're only open during normal business hours in California. If anyone who works at Yahoo can help, here's the problem, thanks. This of course raises an issue re Yahoo, if you're going to trust them with your blog (starting March 29) what do you do when there's a problem? Who do you send email to? Who answers the phone? Let's hope they charge money for it, so users can act like customers.  

Reading the reports from Etech, it reminds me of how Apple developer conferences used to work in the 80s. People from the platform vendor (today that's Microsoft, Yahoo and Google) are up on stage, explaining how they are solving problems independent developers solved years ago. The independent developers are in the audience, grousing about how they're reinventing stuff that already works, blowing them out of the water, and crushing their hopes for the future. Some of the people are even the same! Heh. What we needed then, and still do, is a conference run by developers for developers, where the choices of what's on stage are made based on what's new, and what presents real opportunities for working-together, this year, not five years ago.