Saturday, April 30, 2005

This evening's podcast is 17 minutes of a tropical thunderstorm over the Atlantic Ocean. The piece I referred to but didn't explain was Monoculture, it asked if it's a 20th century artifact. (I think it is.) And the Raymond Poort clip from the Daily Source Code is archived here.  

I booked a quick trip to NYC, leaving Monday morning, staying thru Tue night. Steve Rubel is planning a dinner at 6PM. Robert Scoble is in town Mon night too. Sounds like it's going to be a big dinner. Yahoo! 

While at Steve's site, I noticed a post about Yahoo search and RSS. First let me say, good job Yahoo! I love the way you guys are embracing RSS. Now, here's a way to provide an even more useful feed version of a search. Only return things that you found in the last xxx days. RSS is good at providing news, most aggregators do a poor job with "feeds" that don't contain news. This is why services like PubSub are so useful, they age their database, it only contains new stuff. That's a good fit for RSS. We have another format that's great for stuff that doesn't change often, timeless stuff. You'll be hearing more about that sooon. 

NY Times: "A blog rebellion among scientists and engineers at Los Alamos, the federal government's premier nuclear weapons laboratory, is threatening to end the tenure of its director." 

BBC: "In March, we registered 16.5 million click-throughs to reports from RSS feeds, and our target is 10% of our traffic driven by RSS by the end of this year." 

Jason Calcanis explains why he feels ads belong in RSS feeds.  

Mary Hodder: "Food is not scalable." 

I heard about the last launch of a Titan missle from Florida, about twelve hours too late. NASA needs a special RSS feed for residents of Florida. 

NY Times: "It is not possible, aside from things unimagined, to damage his reputation," said Mitchell Kertzman, a partner at Hummer Winblad Venture Partners in San Francisco. "Steve is on such a roll in both of his companies, he's earned the right to do whatever he wants." 

InfoCommerce: "Google's recent decision to introduce advertising options not tied to keywords is a watershed event for the company. In one fell swoop, it is moving beyond the formula that made it unique and exciting -- relevancy coupled with pay-for-performance pricing -- and crossing over into the traditional world of cost-per-thousand advertising." 

Morning coffee notes 

Brent Simmons describes the one-click subscribing mechanism in Safari. I agree it's a big step forward, but it doesn't go all the way, because there are three cases it doesn't cover. 1. What if your aggregator isn't on the desktop, what if you use My Yahoo or Bloglines? This mechanism doesn't cover that, unless of couse the centralized app provides some kind of proxy that runs on the desktop. 2. What if you use more than one aggregator? 3. What if you don't use a Mac?

I did something smart yesterday, recognizing the symptoms of this cold as being exactly the same as the one I had at the end of last year, and then had again early this year, I went to the doctor and got the same anitbiotic that wiped it out last time. The result is that I already feel the healing, instead of getting worse, I'm getting better. Just in time for the big 5-0 which is now less than two days away. If there's anything I wanted to get done in my 40s now's the time to get busy!

Speaking of which, a sad note, going back to my teens, I've always had a message from my uncle, The Great VaVaVoom, welcoming me to my new decade. He was 9.5 years older, so for a brief half-year every decade we'd both be in our teens, twenties, thirties and forties. It was a silly little thing, but it's the little things, esp the silly ones that seem to mean the most. This year on my 50th I'll have to pretend he's calling to welcome me, from the great dope-smoking beach in the sky.

I listened to the whole Ron Bloom-Adam Curry strategy-cast thing yesterday. I'm sure I'll have more thoughts, but the primary one was, who is Ron Bloom, and why should he be the arbiter of what's cool in podcasting? Basically, I don't take professional gigs because of people like Ron Bloom, people who don't practice the art, who only think about how to make money off it. I don't object to making money, hardly, but I do object to only being concerned about making money. It's the same way I feel about venture capitalists who set up shop in RSS-land thinking it's just like SMTP. Huh. No it's not, and the fact that you think so says that all you're going to contribute are business models that you're going to eventually go to Congress to get laws passed to protect. Ron Bloom is a media exec. Sure, they're coming. Ron says so. Run the other way, says Dave. That's what I did.

Friday, April 29, 2005

Better Bad News: Really Simple Suggestion Woos Syndorati 1000. 

You gotta be able to laugh at yourself.  

Staci Kramer: "I've been asked to lead the Journalism session at BlogNashville, a daunting task." 

Like many others I've been whiling away the hours trying to download the much-awaited Adam Curry and Ron Bloom StrategyCast 2.0 to find out what the strategy is. Postscript: I've downloaded and listened to the whole thing.  

I've got a really bad cold today, coughing, sniffling, sneezing, not enthusiastic about anything.  

Thursday, April 28, 2005

Today's big news is that we have full support for RSS in weblogs.com. Popular services like Technorati and Feedster build on its output. 

A Morning Coffee Notes podcast done on the Archos on the beach, while tanning. Only ten minutes, but packed with stuff about weblogs.com, ipodder.root, KYOU and podcasting for love.  

More news. I'm going to BlogNashville at the end of next week, where I'll lead a discussion on a topic near to my heart. How can we work together in the USA even when we disagree. Nashville's a good place for that, and I'm a southern boy these days, but still have my blue state values.  

Om Malik: "One of the main reasons people started turning away from network/broadcast television to niche cable networks is because of the homogenous, brain dead presentation and uniformity of content. I see exactly the same thing happen today." 

On Sunday as I was preparing to leave Seattle, Lake Washington was quiet, like glass, and no was stirring but some birds. So I got out the camera and made a movie.  

This evening, as the sun was setting behind the beach, the light was just perfect, the colors so vivid, the sounds so tropical. So I got out the camera and made a movie.  

David Pogue: "I have to admit that it's Safari's RSS feature that has changed my daily routine the most. It's turned me into a fan of RSS--something that, because of the hassle and overhead, I never stuck with before." 

Advertising in RSS is just starting now, for all practical purposes. If we wanted to, as an industry, reject the idea, we could. 

Niek Hockx unsubs from feeds with ads.  

Here's what Engadget's feed looks like in my aggregator today. The good news is that now the ads aren't garbled and incomprehensible as they were before. The bad news is that Engadget is kind of like a feed of ads for me, already. I know the products they write about aren't paying them for placement (right?) but as a scanner, which is how I read in my aggregator, with my finger on the scrollbar, moving up and down quickly, the ads are disrupting my flow. I'm pretty sure that's the idea, but as Niek points out, these feeds are optional for me, if one starts becoming a bother, I can quickly get rid of it. These days there's no shortage of feeds vying for my attention. I don't know how this is going to shake out, but I'd like to get a message through to advertisers who are paying for placements in RSS feeds, try coming up with your own feeds, and route around Google and Jason, what the heck, it's worth a try? The cost of serving your own feeds is infinitesmal. What's the barrier? 

The KYOU website goes up, which raises an interesting question -- what happens if a submitted podcast has a commercial in it? Another thought, I was trying to work something like this out for bloggers with a very big flow website last fall, but it didn't work out. Instead of looking for submissions, we'd go trawling for the good stuff and surprise people. Nothing like having 10 million fresh newbies show up at a blog that had 10,000 readers the day before, eh? Maybe we were just teeny bit ahead of the times. It was going to revolutionize news. It still could happen. Probably will. 

Ed Cone has become a regular on MSNBC. 

John Martin outlines the issues of outlining software.  

Wednesday, April 27, 2005

Interesting comment here on Doc Searls's weblog from Brian Field-Elliot. He says he's coming to like my abrasive clarity more and more. I'm glad because I want people to like me, but it's not my first priority. We're all born wanting to be liked. Consider the baby born with genes disposing itself to not be liked,. What are the chances that baby lives long enough to procreate? That's why we all aim to please. Paul Andrews noted that some people say they don't like me but he doesn't understand why, because in person I'm so likeable. Well I like myself, that's a start, and so does Paul, so that's two. But I think some people just don't want to hear what other people really think. Weren't we all raised in a century where perception was more important than reality? Well, I want to change that, and sure that's going to be abrasive, can't help it. And saying I have an abrasive clarity is possibly the nicest thing anyone has ever said about me, that's what I aspire to. Thanks! 

Wired: "The world's first all-podcast radio station will be launched on May 16 by Infinity Broadcasting, the radio division of Viacom." 

Shimon Rura wants an MIT World podcast. Me too! 

Jason Calcanis reports that there are Google ads in his RSS feed.  

Is it just me or is it kind of crass that the first way they acknowledge RSS is by putting ads in it. Six years and this is what they came up with? We used to like Google, actually we loved them, they were the good guys, the ones who made the Web better because they got the big picture. When they started to draw out of it, we said okay, they earned the right. Now, they didn't put anything into RSS before they started to take out. Negative points for Google as a don't-be-evil netizen. 

As usual, Rex Hammock reads my mind. 

In 1995, in a column in Hotwired, I wrote: "Apple have should run the JFK ad: 'Ask not what the Internet can do for you; ask what you can do for the Internet.' Here's an important point: Netscape should run that ad, too." They didn't.  

My credit card expires soon, so they sent a new one. A sticker on the front says I have to call an 800 number to activate it. No big deal, I dial the number, expecting it to be entirely automated. After entering some numbers, and a pause, I was surprised when a human came on, and asked for my name, verifying, among other things, that David is spelled D-A-V-I-D. I thought there must be some kind of problem, maybe they're doing a voice match or something, then a long pause, and the human said "we're waiting." Then after another long pause she asked if everything was spelled correctly on the card. I said it was, and asked if her computer was slow today. She responded with something that sounded computerish. Then after another pause she started trying to sell me something. I said no way. Waited some more and she started selling again. I began to wonder if this was a human at all. I asked if my card had been activated, she said she thought so. Thought so? Don't you work at the credit card company? No.  

Infinity Broadcasting has announced the creation of "KYOURADIO, the world's first podcasting radio station with content created exclusively by its listeners." 

Rex Hammock has an update on BlogNashville, coming up next week, in Nashville, of course.  

PDA users, there's a new PDA-friendly rendering of Scripting News.  

There's a new unauthorized Steve Jobs biography coming out called iCon, which has to be one of the cutest names ever. It's a double double entendre. Wow. Does it stand for icon, the cute little graphics that made the Mac so famous, or does it mean Jobs is a con artist, as in the reality distortion field which is almost as famous as the icons? Jobs must get a percentage of the book sales because he's hyping it by banning all books from the publisher in Apple stores. He makes a fantastic subject for story-telling, check out Randall Stross's bio of Jobs, The Next Big Thing, written in the early 90s, before his comeback. It's a great story of the culture of Silicon Valley. 

Note to the publisher of the new bio, I'd love to get a review copy.  

Paolo enjoyed the French blogging conference he participated in earlier this week. Lots of Americans made the trip to Paris. Hasta la vista baby. Oops. Wrong language!  

AVN Online: "If the prospect of hundreds of thousands of Catholics being redirected to your site is making you salivate, don’t fret." 

Kosso uncovers a Nokia 4GB MP3 phone. Now dat's gul. Funny thing is, mate, now that I've been tawkin so much wid me pal Kosso, I fynd meself theenkeeeng in Bweetish.  

Simon Waldman, an exec at The Guardian, calls Google the "rampant ad machine," and says "there is no way that traditional media organisations can compete at this pace." 

Yahoo has an API for their new My Web feature. I have a couple of comments and a question here. 

Tuesday, April 26, 2005

A new podcast on idea processing and how it's different from productivity software. Thinking behind the OPML editor I'm working on.  

Yahoo: "Today, we launched a 'My Web', a new personal search engine fully integrated with Yahoo! Search." 

Now that I have a PDA with builtin wifi, I had to have a PDA-friendly version of Scripting News. I'll be making improvements to it over time. It's built on the OPML version of Scripting News, so I'll be able to do the same for other sites that have OPML versions of their content. It'll be especially useful for a new kind of linkblog that I think (hope) will become more popular when my OPML editor comes out.  

You've heard of PR, now there's BR. Oy. 

News of Google ads in RSS comes from a seemingly unlikely place.  

Really Simple Syndication: "I don't care for ads in RSS, because..." 

Mary Hodder demos how, once you've been part of an unconference, there's no going back.  

In the northeast US it goes from winter to summer in the space of a month. It's still a bit chilly, now, in mid-late April, coming up on the one period of guaranteed comfortable weather, and it may last just two or three weeks before the first blast of heat, and it generally doesn't let up up until the leaves start turning in the fall. In northeast Florida, by contrast, the weather has been quite comfortable since I got here in late February, highs in the 70s, generally, you rarely need a sweater, maybe a jacket, but nothing very heavy. And it's still in the comfort zone, now, as we head into May. At some point it's going to get hot, for sure, and then of course come the hurricanes. They say you really can't call yourself a Floridian until you stick it out through a hurricane season. I haven't decided yet.  

Rogers is "eating Chunky Monkey directly out of the container." 

Monday, April 25, 2005

Scripting News in OPML, in the right margin. 

One year ago: "Why do \you tune into Radio Dave?" 

Newsgator raised $6 million in its third round of venture capital, most of it came from my old friend Rich Levandov at Masthead Ventures in Boston. Congrats to everyone involved. 

Boston Globe: "Are we ready for a Wi-Fi city?" 

Henry Copeland: "BusinessWeek predicts corporate takeover of blogs." 

OpenRAW is a "group of photographers and other interested people advocating the open documentation of digital camera RAW files." 

Flying with Uma 

I couldn't get enough of Kill Bill, so I bought DVDs of both movies and watched every bit on the flight home, including The Making of Kill Bill, an interview with Quentin T, and all the trailers. I'm all the more convinced that it should be a chick cult movie, like Thelma and Louise, and I wondered why it's not. It's a revenge movie, totally, and it's all about the women gettin even with the men. Or more accurately, The Man. Something inside me is very satisfied watching the blonde Uma Thurman, who it turns out really was pregnant in the central scene of the movie, work her way through all the women (and one man) fronting for Bill, and then get to Bill himself, with the help of, well, I don't want to spoil the plot in case you haven't seen it. Definitely one of the best movies ever made, imho, of course.

Dinner with Paul Andrews 

Did I mention I had dinner with Paul Andrews in Kirkland on Friday. I connected him with Rogers Cadenhead, who, whilst I was busy swirling around Seattle was on national television, due to a twist of fate, he had become an expert on the topic of the new Pope Benedict! Can't make this stuff up. Even weirder is the trail to his celebrity came through Scripting News, which informed NetCraft which informed the Washington Post which led to The Today Show and on and on. Matt Haughey says blogs are part of mainstream media, and I suppose, in a strange sense he's right. The stream, as it were, begins in places like Scripting News, where we scout for the big guys. And we take back our heroes, like Rogers, when the Mainstream gals and guys are finished with them. We're all one big interconnected Happy Family, we are.

Good morning everybody 

It's weird to wake up on the east coast. I mean right on the east coast. I'm looking out the window of my workspace (the dining room table) and looking at the eastern edge of the continenent, and the western edge of the Atlantic Ocean. Yesterday morning I woke up looking at Lake Washington, which through a series of locks and Puget Sound and the Strait of Juan de Fuca are waters of the Pacific. To get here by water from there you'd have to go around the horn of Africa. Or you could fly on Delta via Atlanta, as I did yesterday.

Sunday, April 24, 2005

Marc Canter points out that ourmedia.org has RSS feeds. But it's even better than that, it has podcast feeds. Only one thing is a little odd, they're version 0.92, not 2.0, which means they might not work with some podcast clients. They could change the version to 2.0 and then they would surely work with all clients. Anyway, after his skepticism about podcasting it's good to see Marc and his partners get into it.  

8:30PM Eastern: Arrived safely at the beach. 

Wow. I get to disagree with Scoble and say that Ballmer is right. Microsoft, as a corporation, should never take a stand on a political issue, as they have, and if it took pressure from a conservative preacher to get them to change their position, then so be it. I've had a chance to be on the other side of this, not being able to buy a product that I wanted to buy because (I thought incorrectly) that the company was supporting anti-abortion political groups. The company was Domino's Pizza, and in the midwest, it's the best pizza you can get, but I had to do without because the conventional wisdom was wrong. It was the owner of the company who was anti-abortion, which is his right, as it is Ballmer's right to support gay rights. But people should be able to use Microsoft products without having to support political causes they don't. It's especially important because Microsoft has monopolies, and has even been convicted of antitrust. In other words, people may not even have a realistic choice. They are about to close the doors on the airplane so I won't be able to edit this before I get home. Oh well, here goes! Saving... 

4:20PM Eastern: This is a first. I'm online on an airplane parked at gate A18 in Atlanta. The service is T-Mobile. Got my 40 minute hike in the airport, not the nicest place to walk, but it worked. 

7AM Pacific: Checking mail at Gate A14 at Sea-Tac. Excellent T-Mobile wifi. Drinking a Tully's ice coffee.  

Rogers Cadenhead: "I wasn't prepared to be famous for 24 hours, but now that my weblog traffic has subsided to normal levels, I can relate some of the experience." 

You think? 

Steve Gillmor: "I’m really suffering from Post Gillmor Gang Disorder."

Tell me something I didn't know.

Note to universe. Please get Steve and his pals back on the air. I'm suffering.

Travel day morning no-coffee notes 

Today's a travel day, starting now, at 4:45AM Pacific. My flight leaves Seattle in three hours, change planes in Atlanta, arrive in Jacksonville, then drive for 1.5 hours before arriving at the beach, assuming all goes well, knock wood, praise Murphy. Add three hours for time zones, and I should get home in time for Sixty Minutes. I'll get my daily walk in Atlanta.

I had a very stimulating visit with Microsoft, and decided to stay in the US for my 50th birthday, only eight days away. I'll go to England toward the end of the month. Reason --> I want to spend two or three weeks working on the outliner. It's overdue. It got the kernel changes it needed, thanks to Dave Luebbert. Of course it's still a bit rough, and it will be when the beta is made publicly available, but it works, it has the right window dressing, now the furniture needs to be brought in (not all of it) and then it's time to sweep the floors, before the occupants arrive and put dishes in the cabinets and pictures on the wall. I want to get back to working with users as a software developer. I miss it. A lot.

Dave Luebbert and I had a great visit too. He called last night to talk some about the outliner. He wanted to know if an item could be routed to more than one category. I said it could. He said he had listened to the podcast with my dad, and like everyone else who heard it, was charmed. IPSTIQ all the way. Kosso says that to me all the time. It turns out he's friends with Phil Toronne. Phil and Beth are really smart, really nice, charming, honest. But if you listened to yesterday's podcast you know that too.

Had dinner last night with Chris Pirillo and Ponzi. She's from North Carolina. That means she's from Cackalacky and a Tarheel. Forgot to say that to her. We talked about Julie Leung, and Gnomedex. I'm going to get a special deal for Scripting News readers. You gotta go, it's going to be a great show. I told Chris about the outliner. He did a little jumping up and down thing. It's good. I'm going to talk about the outliner here in June. And in England in May. And New York. Maybe elsewhere.

Okay now I have to shut this thing and get out of here, go to the airport and get on the plane.

Namaste y'all!

Saturday, April 23, 2005

Starbucks coffee notes podcast with Phil Torrone of Make Mag, and Beth Goza of Microsoft, in Kirkland, WA. 

Client and Server: "If belly-achin' were baseball, Seattle would be the Dominican Republic and the Yankees all in one." 

Don Park: "What is the point of wearing a skirt if you are going to wear underwear?" 

In defense of Vic's company 

Vic Gundotra: In defense of the company I love.

I just spent a half-week at Microsoft, jammed full of meetings and ideas and brilliance, more of my energy and intelligence was used in these 2.5 days than usually is used in a full month of my time. In my experience, this only happens at Microsoft. I don't know why. Harvard is not so intense, Silicon Valley pushed me very far away; when I used to visit IBM in the 80s they would put me in a hermetically sealed room in Boca Raton and people would fly from Texas and California to meet with me.

There's a lot of good at Microsoft. It shares ideas, takes risks, and while they second-guess themselves all the time like the huge company they are, there's still a shred of the balls-out seat-of-the-pants let's-get-it-done attitude in which the company was founded.

I've been visiting Microsoft since 1981. There is something consistent, even as they grew so remarkably and there's a lot to admire and respect in the people and culture of the company.

On the other hand, I still am very angry with Microsoft for its attack of the Web in the 90s. But their presence in technology is so huge, that's only one side of it. Without Microsoft, these days, there would be no balance to Google, no reason for Google to grow up and believe me, we're waiting for them to do just that, as we waited for Netscape.

I wish Microsoft hadn't screwed up SOAP, but at least they didn't screw with XML-RPC. And I absolutely adore the gentle and respectful way they've adopted RSS.

Friday, April 22, 2005

Believe it or not, the person on the left, wearking a skirt, is a man.  

Ethan Zuckerman: "A journalist emailed asking why the Christian Science Monitor has such disproportionate influence in the blogosphere." 

Apple, a longtime member of Team RSS, adds new support. 

Audible joins Team RSS. It's good to see them get on board. The feeds are kind of weird, the obfuscated kind, where the content is hidden. Once you do a view-source, there are some strange elements and redirects. But the content is interesting, like the New York Times best sellers list. I don't think the Times itself publishes it.  

BusinessWeek: "The innovation that sends blogs zinging into the mainstream is RSS." 

David Weinberger: "I quit." 

Scoble and his Microsoft and RSS Team badges. 

Podbat alpha devcast #4. 

Lake Washington movies: speedboat 1 and speedboat 2. 

BBC: "A copy of the original Electronics magazine in which Moore's Law was first published has turned up under the floorboards of a Surrey engineer." 

Thursday, April 21, 2005

Podscope is the first search engine that indexes the content of podcasts. It actually understands what's being said. This is leading edge stuff in 2005, and a great addition to the set of podcasting tools. 

Sam Whitmore: "Just when we grasped what blogging was all about, along came podcasting, which in some ways is even more disruptive and exciting as blogging." 

Lake Washington from the window of my east side hotel room.  

For what it's worth, and seriously, no joke -- I don't think Rogers should give benedictxvi.com to the Vatican. I think the domain should be used for an independently-authored weblog about the policies and actions of the new Pope by someone who is expert in the papacy and independent of the Catholic Church. Imho, it's not about heaven and hell, eternal damnation or Rogers's grandmother. The church is a hugely powerful political, social and economic force, its actions are controversial and deserve some visibility, and MSM isn't doing its job. And for the new Pope, it's a chance to participate in history. It's the kind of thing you might imagine his predecessor really going for, until of course it got a story he didn't want it to get.  

My second monitor is back in Florida, the one that connects into my laptop which is here with me in Florida. WinAmp thinks it's running on the second monitor. I tried rebooting (several times) and changed the screen properties to tell the OS there is no second monitor. Every otiher app I was running "over there" has figured it out. I know, Windows sucks, but what do I do? 

Paul Jones suggests Folkstreams, "These are documentaries on American folk practices including BB King and the Blues, visionary painter Minnie Evans , and others." 

John Robb: "I am OK folks. Thanks for the concern." 

Sean O'Rourke asks if there is "a 'politeness' revisit tag for RSS?" 

Pope Rogers Cadenhead I. 

The new Pope: "Popesquatters have to be multilingual too." 

Wednesday, April 20, 2005

I was hermetically sealed in Atlanta, not so in Seattle. I have a room on Lake Washington with a view of the mountains, it's a sunny warm day here (still, although it's 10:15PM in the east). Time for dinner! 

Lisa Williams: "Hey, TV Guide: it’s not a podcast unless it has RSS." 

I watched Kill Bill on the flight out, and realized it's not only a great movie, it's a great chick movie, and a super-violent one at that. Count the number of men who kill women (zero) vs the number of men killed by women (at least 100). Anyway, Quentin Taratino is a genius. I love his movies.  

Google: "My Search History lets you easily view and manage your search history from any computer." 

UserLand: "This is a public beta site for reviewing and discussing features and documentation to be released with Manila 9.5." 

Search Engine Watch: "Google has rolled out a seriously cool search history feature that automatically keeps track of all of your web searches and every page that you view from search results." 

Fortune says Bill Gates is riled and he's making a Google killer. Yeah Fortune always says stuff like that, but it's never been true. Bill Gates does get riled, or simulates getting riled, but what really happens is the other guys get scared and blink and then he wins by default. But that was when Gates was young and feisty and more convincing. And when he had Ben Slivka who wore shorts and ate red meat, not the people working on the search engine at MSN these days. Give me a break. Those guys freak out if you raise your voice. All Google has to do is say Boo and they'll spend a year getting over it. 

I can't believe Bill Gates is being considered by the Discovery Channel as the "greatest American." A long time ago he took over other people's ideas (this was before software patents), and then once he cleared the field of all competition, went on permanent vacation. Just shows how much we're about perceptions, if he wins the award what they really mean is he's the greatest impersonation of a great American.  

There's a Cleveland podcaster's meetup tonight.  

Noon Pacific: Arrived safely in Seattle.  

Wired: "If the newly elected pope wants his own website, he'll have to talk to Rogers Cadenhead first." Makes sense. 

Okay I'm really getting the hang of the Archos PMA430, but there's one thing I can't figure out. It only plays MPEG4 format videos. Where do you get those? I don't have any. I have a cross-country plane flight later today, and a good net connection now. Where do I go? 

We've had some kind of problem with changes.xml on weblogs.com. I've posted a note here, and will keep it updated as I find out more. Update: The change I made appears to have worked.  

It's 51 degrees in Redmond 

A must-read piece about Microsoft by Dare Obasanjo.

Mini-Microsoft: "[There was] a reason for talented folks leaving in droves during the Internet boom: money. As folks left for start-ups, Microsofties would give them a cheery goodbye and (if they were good) say (once they were out of earshot), 'They'll be back.'"

The weather in Redmond: 51 degrees and clear. I arrive mid-day.

From the We-All-Can-Be-Popes Department 

Since we believe any one of eight million people who have weblogs could break the biggest story of our generation, what could be wrong with each of us leading our own major religion? Exactly. So in that spirit, in espirito doityourselfus, I proclaim myself Pope Dave Winer I. At your service!

And by the power vested in me I hearby acknowledge your holiness, your eminence, your Popeness. It works for everyone, male or female, rich or poor, African, American, Asian, Australian and European. You want to be The Pope? You got it baby!

7/8/98: "The BusinessWeek article referred to me as President Winer."

Via Lance Knobel: "They've elected Larry Summers as Pope."

Tuesday, April 19, 2005

Eight years ago: Matt Neuburg's Frontier scripting tutorial. 

Hey I'm using my new Archos with wifi to browse Scripting News. If all goes well, I'll link a photo of it into this item. Okay the picture didn't come out so good. But trust me, it's coooool! 

Washington Post: "A spokesperson for the US Conference of Bishops declined to speculate on whether the Vatican would ask Cadenhead to transfer ownership of BenedictXVI.com and the other potential papal name addresses he controls. Messages left with the Vatican's embassy in Washington were not returned." 

Rogers even got a link from Boing Boing. I wonder if they know he's a friend of mine.  

My first audio recording from the Archos. I had the recording level set way too high. Sorry for the distortion. 

Rogers Cadenhead: "I'm not the only baptized Catholic who gets geeked about this process."  

Nashville gathering to focus on educating bloggers.  

John Robb hasn't posted in 14 days. Hope everything is okay. I posted a comment on Dann Sheridan's site asking if he knows what's up.  

Hello everybody. This is your midday report. Guess what there's a new pope. No one knows who it is or what his name will be, but we're monitoring the situation, and will break in to regular scheduled program with breaking news.  

More news -- the new pope is speaking. It's Rat-zinger. Pope Benedict. 

Rogers wins, he has http://www.benedictxvi.com/.  

Jeff Sandquist gets a promotion. Pope Jeff I? 

Podbat reports that Google Maps for the UK is online. Cool-e-o. Now I can go to the UK. Seriously it's looking like I may go for my birthday and the election. Where should I stay? Hmm. 

Niklaus Coukouma is a Live Journal developer who has been grappling with issues raised by users who don't want their writing re-published elsewhere, using their RSS feed as a source. 

Getting ready to go for my morning walk in downtown Atlanta. I'm hermetically sealed in a hotel, when I look out the window I see a huge courtyard, where it's 72 degrees every day of the year, winter or summer, rain or shine. So to find out what the weather is outside, I have to turn to the World Wide Web. Isn't the 21st century amazing! (That's an ironic joke, by the way, not really very funny I'm afraid.) Good thing I looked, it's 50 degrees outside. Brrr. Better wear a sweater and a jacket. 

John Stanforth wonders about my Archos, which I won't be taking on the walk. Instead I'm taking the crappy $49 flash player. I find the Archos intimidating.  

Lenn Pryor: "I recently accepted a new job and have resigned my post as Director, Platform Evangelism at Microsoft after almost 8 years with the company. I am joining Skype and the family and I will be moving to the UK. I have taken a position on the product and services team at Skype." As a Skype user it'll be good to know someone on the inside.  

I met Lenn in Palm Springs in January 1998. I wrote about the trip in this DaveNet piece. He's appeared on Scripting News quite a few times. 

Monday, April 18, 2005

Well, I waited and waited for the Archos, and finally at 5PM, I had to go to the airport, without the new toy. Wouldn't you know, as I was was pulling out of the driveway, there was the UPS truck! I ripped open the package, charged the battery while driving to the airport, and managed to copy some MP3s across on the flight to Atlanta. It plays the music fine. There are so many doo-dads and connectors that ship with it. I've only begun to scratch the surface. In an act that's only symbolic, I copied my Frontier environment to the system. Of course it can't run it.  

Scripting.Com in ASCII art. 

Ryan Tate observes that neither Adobe or Macromedia are involved in The Two-Way Web. It's true. They've had so much time to get on board, it's a wonder that they haven't.  

Sydney Morning Herald: Podcasts make waves for radio. 

10:30PM Eastern: Arrived safely in Atlanta. 

I'm off to Atlanta tonight, then to Seattle on Wednesday morning, return to Florida on Sunday. It's an exciting trip with lots of cool technology. Most of the meetings are confidential, so I probably won't be able to report much that's specific. I have lots of time on Friday and Saturday to catch up with Seattle friends. Maybe a group dinner? If so, we'll have to do it without Scoble, since he's in San Jose this weekend. 

Scott Granneman: "I don’t like it when large corporations make wide-ranging decisions for users that disadvantage those that the corporations choose not to favor." 

Rogers Cadenhead is domain name speculating on the name of the next pope. Personally, if by some weird twist of fate they name me the next pope, I will choose the name Pope Harry Truman II.  

MarketWatch: Adobe Systems to buy Macromedia. $3.4 billion. 

Off the top of my head, who cares? At one time both companies had some mojo, to borrow a term from Yahoo, but those days are long-gone. Remember all the hooplah over the Allaire-Macromedia acquisition, and all the synergies that were supposed to happen. Hmmm. Did any happen? BusinessWeek didn't think so. Will any happen here? Heh. Slightly more exciting than Microsoft's acquisition of Groove. 

Phillip Torone has a new podcast, at Make Mag. 

Four years ago: The Web is a Writing Environment. "Amazingly the print publishers are pulling back from the Web, as if to say 'Whew glad that's over.' Fundamental mistake." 

Om Malik: "The marketing blitz makes you wonder if this time Intel’s finally figured out how to make a communication chip!" 

I had lunch with a Republican yesterday, a thoughtful one, and came away with a fair amount more hope than I did going into it. 

3AM on the east coast is midnight on the west, 8AM in London. 

Sunday, April 17, 2005

From Dan Hale comes news that Brian Buck died on April 8. I wrote a condolence on the Buck family weblog: "Brian was a smart, generous and inspiring person, before he had cancer, he was a programming colleague, after, we followed his struggle, written so openly, so personally and realistically. I'm so sorry he's gone now, I was hoping we'd have his company, his inspiration, for many years to come." He was 33. 

Brian Buck: "It was never my intention to get cancer." And die. 

Rogers put together a remembrance of Brian Buck. 

Rupert Murdoch: "Some digital natives do even more than blog with text -- they are blogging with audio, specifically through the rise of podcasting -- and to remain fully competitive, some may want to consider providing a place for that as well." 

We don't get no respect from Google, we don't get no respect from the EFF, but we do get respect, tons of it, from Rupert Murdoch. Now who do you think gets it, the tech industry, or...? Heh. My bet is, I hope, clear. The techies have an inflated sense of self-importance. The information system of the WORLD is changing, Murdoch sees that, and sees himself as an immigrant (all of us who were reared in the centralized information system of the 20th century are), and because of that, understands that he has much to learn. The young minds of the tech industry aren't young enough to be rooted in the transition, or old enough to get that a transition is taking place, and that they are building on a foundation that's eroding. If they were aware, Google would be pushing RSS instead of resisting it, and the EFF would be protecting the integrity of our work, instead of helping Google undermine it. We have a chance for a revolution, it's just a chance, Murdoch gets this, so the barriers are probably going up, as we speak. We, the little people, need to work together, now, like we really mean it.  

Four years ago: "All programmers want to tell you How It Works. In excruciating detail. As if you cared. Try to be patient." 

Richard MacManus: RSS and the Big 3. 

Working on the OPML editor, I'm trying to figure out how to have the app come to the front on startup on Windows. Any clues would be much appreciated. Source listings are here. 

The delivery service says they'll not make it on Monday, so my new toy won't arrive till Tuesday, when I will be in Atlan-tay, on my way to See-at-tay. So no happiness till the week next. Sad Davey. 

BBC: "Photographs of North America's most significant landmarks and locations, including the Grand Canyon, Alcatraz and Mount Rushmore are being given a fresh perspective thanks to a tool by Google." 

Library Stuff reports that the Discovery Channel has 4 new RSS feeds.  

Saturday, April 16, 2005

Today's podcast is Part II of answers to Shel Israel's questions for the book he's working on with Robert Scoble. Also a bit of music from USA for Africa (1985). One of my neighbors is sitting outside my window, so I felt self-conscious. No matter, I speak my mind anyway.  

Happiness is WinAmp. Now that I'm switching to the Archos (it arrives on Monday), I can start phasing out iTunes. I've never figured out how it works, if you can believe that. So when I came across an "ogg" file and found that WinAmp could play it, I grabbed a copy. I forgot how nice it is!  

Bill Gross's new search engine is Snap.Com. 

Microsoft's Jim Allchin had dinner with some bloggers in SF last night. It was set up by Scoble. Now, while it's true that Microsoft has embraced blogging to a greater extent than any other big corporation that I'm aware of, it's totally unbloglike to make a dinner invite-only, and keep it a secret until after it's happened.  

Totally coincidentally, I mentioned Allchin in a comment on Don Park's blog, yesterday. Hey, Don should have been at that dinner. He could have talked about Korean food, music or theater, or Win32 APIs. Not surprisingly, Marc Canter thinks he should have been there too (even though he's in Korea now). See what I mean about invite-only blogger dinners? You wind up creating fewer friends, more nagging. (I won't say enemies, too much is made of that. You can't fight a war with fingers and eyeballs, or can you?) Okay this post is long enough now to host the rotated Abe Simpson du jour.  

Interesting comments on yesterday's beach pictures. 

Friday, April 15, 2005

Essay: Yahoo, Microsoft and Google in RSS. 

Google Blogoscoped: "While Google is often late in the game, it equally often then releases something infinitely better than what competitors are doing at that time." 

Introducing MyCommentSpamBuddy: "If you're running a weblog, comment spam may be one of the biggest irritants you have to deal with. Until now Manila and its underlying discussion group software hasn't had any automatic defenses against comment spam." 

Went for a drive on the beach today. Pictures. Movie. 

Engadget: How would you change the iPod? 

Ross Rader is hosting a Toronto Podcasting dinner, next Tues.  

Don Park: "He can throw large rocks very accurately." 

Actually I throw Gonzos, not rocks.  

I did a podcast over Skype a couple of nights ago with Kosso and we used SkypeOut to call Scoble, which worked really well. It's pretty long and rambly, and goofy and techy. It's podcast number two with Kosso, the pod-bad-man, with a new brand for every day of the month. The brand du jour is Trade Sushi. It's like Trade Secrets, but with Sushi.  

Two years ago today Microsoft got its "foot in the blogging door" by hiring Scoble.  

I've got a new NetGear router, and once again BitTorrent is running at a snail's pace. I had this problem in March, mapping the BT ports to my laptop cured the problem and made the downloads run hugely fast. I've done the same with the new router, and the downloads are intermittently fast, but mostly snail-like slow, about 6K per second, on a high speed line capable of over 400K per second. I've tried it on lots of downloads, so I don't think the problem is with the net. I'm running 4.0.1 on Windows. If you have an idea, add a comment here, please; and thanks! 

Russell Beattie: Linux for Human Beings. 

Jason Lefkowitz sends a pointer to the Phil Hendrie podcast, which he describes thus: "A nationally syndicated comedy talk show. It's really funny -- like a parody of the stupid talk shows." 

New header graphic. A wet green lane in Woodside.  

Getting credit without patents 

BTW, I'm offering my comment spam buddy under the Creative Commons Attribution-Sharealike license, with a special request. It may be that this is a new way to fight comment spam. If it is, I would like credit for discovering it. I consider this one final attempt to work openly without patenting every innovation. I've been asking for help with this for years. Now on the other hand, if it's not new, as Emily Litella said, "Never mind."

A great example is this Newcity Chicago article which, once again, gives Adam Curry credit for my work. He doesn't say anything to correct them, that's his problem. The reporter's problem is that he's passing on lies. It's endemic, that's why you have a virtual industry of credit-takers, leeches feeding off the creativity of others, and they get away with it because the reporters are complicit. So please, I have no patience for people who lecture us about the thorough research that the pros supposedly do, if they ever do it, it's a very rare thing.

Thursday, April 14, 2005

A Morning Coffee Notes podcast for the day before Tax Day in the USA. A virtual interview with Shel Israel, co-author of The Red Couch. 

Press release: "The BBC is to podcast up to 20 more radio shows – including sections of the Today programme and selected Radio 1 speech content - as it extends its download trial, it was announced today." 

Gizmodo: "I apologize for any times I might have implied that Apple wasn't run by total dorks." 

Punk News: "Addison's Marc Alghini discovered the band via a podcast from Ohio based indie-rock webzine Donewaiting.com." 

Canada.Com: Ottawa's premier podcasters. 

Marc Canter's tour of Korean food -- in Korea. 

I'm fed up with Gender Spam, too.  

Little-known fact, there's a debugger for podcast feeds; it tells you if a feed will work with audio.weblogs.com, and if not, why.  

I found a lovely radio program on the BBC, Sounds of the 70s, poifect for a guy about to turn 50. It's done by a grizzled old British guy, opinionated, no commercials, great songs. Wowo. The Internet is still cool.  

Tod Maffin: "The owner of two radio stations in Wyoming said it has sold the stations and is concentrating on podcasting." 

Upcoming travel, all tentative: Seattle, Atlanta, San Jose, New York, London. I want to be in Europe on May 2, for the Big Five-Oh.  

Brian Russell: "Open Space conferences have no keynote speakers, no pre-announced schedules of workshops, no panel discussions, no organizational booths. Instead, sitting in a large circle, participants learn in the first hour how they are going to create their own conference. Almost before they realize it, they become each other’s teachers and leaders." 

I've got my spam defense tool for Frontier/Manila documented, tested and ready to go, pending approval from a few people who are reviewing it. I have it running on two servers now, and the software it was created from has been running almost six months. But a little more burn-in can't hurt.  

The Nation: "DeLay always has the same pathetic excuse: liberals." 

Rogers Cadenhead: "The end result looks like the out-of-wedlock love child of LiveJournal and de.licio.us." 

Steve May, via email: "I've been attending conferences for 30-plus years and it always pissed me off that speakers and panelists either didn't speak on the promoted topic or used the opportunity to bore us with a shameless commercial for their product or service." 

Thanks to Chris Pirillo 

After running the bit about Mr Picky yesterday, I got several emails saying that there are others who say the same thing -- "If Dave's there, I won't be." So it seems likely that Chris Pirillo was under the same kind of pressure when he invited me to keynote Gnomedex, and that makes me all the more appreciative of his support. Thanks Chris!

And to everyone else, listen to what I do at Gnomedex, I'm sure it'll be recorded. People slime me and it's not fair. I work hard at conferences to make sure everyone gets good value. I work for the "audience," a term that needs updating in the age of the blog. There are always a few people who feel otherwise. As they say in France, c'est la vie!

What's up with Abe Simpson? 

For the last few days I've been rotating Abe Simpson through Scripting News. I've been asked what this means. Here's what it means. Nothing.

Is it a comment on the post it's next to? No. Is it related? Only in that it's next to it. Why do you do it? I like it.

I like to put the picture next to a big post with lots of text that needs a little visual relief. Since Abe is my favorite Simpson's character, and I want to see what he looks like from every angle, that's where I'm going for visual relief, these days, in April 2005. Next month it'll be something else.

The issue of who's my favorite Simpson was raised in a radio interview with Brad Bird, one of the producers, who said that Krusty the Clown is his favorite. Krusty's good, but no one is more soulfully pathetic than Grandpa Abe Simpson.

A true story about Joan Baez 

I lived in a nice house with a garden on three beautiful acres by a creek in Woodside, California, from 1992 to 2003. I sold it to one of my neighbors, who used my land to add to his, which, according to Woodside's zoning regulations, allowed him to build a bigger house, which he wanted to do.

My old house, built in 1929, with thick walls that kept the house cool in summer, a fantastic place to throw parties, and a place that could be pretty lonely, at the end of a long driveway, was deleted shortly after the deal was done.

Anyway, one day, a couple of years before I moved, the phone rings, I pick it up and a woman at the other end says "Hello this is Joan Baez." I knew she was a neighbor, but we had never spoken. I guess I was too nervous, star-struck. She's a famous folk-rock star, dated Bob Dylan, played at Woodstock, stuff like that. She said she was going to get baby sheep (or goats?) to live in her yard and they would make a lot of noise at first because they were separated from their mothers, but eventually they'd calm down, and she wanted to let all the neighbors know.

I said okay, no problemmo, but why are you getting sheep?

"I've always wanted them," she said.

Wednesday, April 13, 2005

New feature on audio.weblogs.com: Click-tracking. 

A singing podcast, my rendition of It's A Small World. As usual, appreciate the philosophy.  

Need help with audio.weblogs.com? 

News.Com: Blog censorship gains support. 

Google Video Upload "lets you submit videos electronically." 

By now a bunch of people have had a chance to review Google Video Upload. What do you think? What were you first experiences? 

Richard Bluestein: "These big media guys are going to become the art police." 

Kosso: "Spoilers ahoy!" 

McD Tracy: "Neat little hack, Dave. Keep 'em coming." Actually I do have another neat little hack to offer Frontier system managers, maybe even later today. It's a Tool that keeps your DGs free of comment spam. It really works. Not sure if they have anything like it in MovableType-Land. In any case, the existing comment spam defenses in Frontier and Manila aren't working, I seek to improve that situation.  

BlogHer is a conference about women & blogging, 7/30, Santa Clara. 

Syndisphere, a term first used by Steve Gillmor, has legs. On Sunday it had 0 Google hits, today it has 124.  

GoDaddy has a podcast feed.  

Oh for the days when political correctness didn't rule public discourse. Consider the Randy Newman song, Short People (1978). "They got little noses and tiny little teeth. They wear platform shoes on their nasty little feet."  

The NYC podcasting meetup is on April 20, 701 Seventh Ave. 

Cory Doctorow has a picture of unhappy people at Disneyland. He says it's eerie and that's true. I've never understood why people like Disneyland so much. I've always really disliked the place. What nailed it for me was getting stuck in the It's A Small World ride with all the puppets singing for hours, while they tried to figure out how to get us out. When they finally got the ride working, as compensation, they offered us more tickets. That was absolutely the last thing I wanted. Get me outa here.  

Doc Searls: "When it's over, you can't help repeating, for the rest of your life, a song that you hate." 

Mr Picky and Mr Coward 

A friend confirmed something that I kind-of suspected. There's at least one person who has told at least one conference organizer that he won't come if I'm also invited. The person has name, of course, but I don't think I should say who it is, at this time.

If the conference organizer goes for that, they've done me a favor, because I wouldn't want to support a conference that allowed people to exclude others in this way. Further, people who make such demands should be scared that they'll be outed. That they're not, says a lot about this stupid little thing we call an industry.

Another related item, there was an anonymous posting in the comments on one of my sites recently that called into question the integrity of someone other than myself, in a demeaning way. The person took the challenge seriously, asked for help finding out who the poster was, and we're pretty sure we know who it is. Like 99.9 percent sure. It's that tiny sliver of doubt that makes me not want to expose the person.

Observation -- it's pretty gutless to challenge someone's integrity and not put your name on it. And it's pretty stupid to do so and leave a trail back to your desktop that a moderately skilled programmer could follow.

Tuesday, April 12, 2005

Today's news, I'm a keynote discussion leader at Gnomedex in June. 

This is the PDA/music player I bought today. It does everything. 

New Yorker: "To paraphrase John Paul Getty: If you owe the bank a hundred dollars, you’ve got a problem. If you owe the bank three trillion dollars, the bank’s got a problem." 

The Association of Music Podcasting was "formed in January 2005 to unite podcasters who play legally available independent music." 

Minnesota Public Radio: "The city of Minneapolis is receiving proposals to develop city-wide, wireless Internet access." 

Meetup.Com now charges a fee of $19 per month per group. 

Buy.Com has RSS feeds.  

Joe, I can't help but think you're a blood-sucking maggot.  

CBS: "Blogger is hosting an estimated 8 million blogs." 

Here's another free code release for Frontier server systems. The viewPodcastBox macro shows a RSS 2.0 feed with enclosures in a box in a web page. I used this macro podcatch.com to show the fresh podcasts from audio.weblogs.com. It's very much like the more general viewRssBox macro, but tuned to the display of podcast feeds. 

April 25 in Paris, Loic LeMeur is hosting Internet 2.0 conference. Lots of Americans are heading over to France for this event.  

JD Lasica is on the Diane Rehm Show today, 10AM Eastern, talking about radio. I listened to it. My notes, taken in real-time, follow. Oy, old JD isn't doing a very good job of explaining it. First he says radio is dead, and doesn't know it. No fucking way that's true, it's an incredibly entrenched distribution mechanism. It's going to change, for sure, but that's not the same thing as going away! Now, the moderator questions why 100 stations isn't enough, how many stations can one person listen to. Exactly, but maybe I want to listen to a station that only a small number of people want to listen to. Broadcast radio, commercial or non-commercial, can't handle that. Narrowcasting is what podcasting is for. And btw, how are we going to get anywhere when it's all Adam Curry. He's the poster-child for the flow of the big media model to narrowcasting. Does not compute. I'm sure Adam actually knows this, btw, that he's sold out to the dark side. Eventually we'll have a good laugh about this, maybe at Gnomedex. 

BBC: "Eight US newspapers and the Associated Press agency have thrown their support behind three bloggers sued by Apple." 

See you at Gnomedex? 

I don't go to many industry conferences these days, but this year's Gnomedex, in Seattle, June 23-25, is shaping up as a gotta-be-there event. I could tell when the guys on the Starbucks Coffee Notes (March 31 in NYC) asked if I was going. Then Kosso, who lives in London (that's in Europe!) asked if I was going. By then I was already working with Chris, but I wanted to leave it a tease, so I said nothing. With  the help of Steve Gillmor, who was at BloggerCon III, we worked out a plan to include a taste of unconference at the beginning of Gnomedex, to help get the "audience" out of their seats, sharing their ideas. You know, just like blogs. And it's cool because I get to go back to Seattle, where I spent four happy months at the end of 2004. I'm totally looking forward to Gnomedex, and thanks to Chris and Ponzi for extending the very generous invitation to keynote! I can't wait.

Pictures taken on the Seattle waterfront, where the Gnomedex will be held in late June this year.

A place to comment, let's start the discussion now.

Monday, April 11, 2005

BBC article about RSS, with extensive quotes from Yours Truly. It's a good piece, imho. "Automated web surfing." It's so cool that they got a picture of the sushi belts. Here's a place to comment. 

A new demo script for Frontier geeks that shows how to manage a huge dataset in an all-Frontier application. 

Wow, someone at O'Reilly has the Really Simple religion. Right on.  

NY Times: "Mr Bush has had his Apple iPod since July, when he received it from his twin daughters as a birthday gift. He has some 250 songs on it, a paltry number compared to the 10,000 selections it can hold." 

Clue: Someone ought to give him a TiVO. 

A random observation. Today Google News found three articles that contained my name. Screen shot. One was the BBC article above, and the other two were on blogs. Their rules don't work, blogs get through. They're suckers for certain kinds of site names. It's Yahoo all over again, what a mess, so unweblike, back to gatekeepers. I know Google News is useful, I use it, but something is wrong about it. 

Podshows are the future? Heh. Maybe.  

Okay, I'm stumped. Every XML parser I throw this file at says it's not well-formed, but I can't see the problem. If you see it, please send me an email. For extra credit, skip the ad hominems. Postscript: Robert Sayre gets the prize, being first to find the problem; it immediately revealed the programming error in my code. Runner-up to Gardner von Holt. These guys either have very good eyes and minds, or very good tools, or both.  

Watch this space for an announcement, real soon now. 

Steve Rubel asks if the RSS wagon has stalled and quotes me from our Starbuckian podcast in NYC on March 31. I posted a comment stating a new theory: RSS is waiting for its killer app, one that will drive adoption by non-core geek types. I'm pretty sure I know some or all of the attributes of this app. No point describing it, people don't listen. Maybe I should raise the money to make it. Or maybe I've gotten too lazy?  

If you're shopping for an iPod alternative, the readers of Scripting News have some ideas for you. 

Scoble is right, this Tiger Woods ace shot would make a great Nike commercial. I've mirrored the WMV file on my unmetered server. 

NY Times: Blogs Incensed over Pulitzer Photo Award. Could you imagine the Times running an article about negative letters to the editor?, but today there's an article about bloggers who aren't pleased with a choice for the Pulitzer Prize and the way the Times reported it. It's a vivid demo of the progress we've all made, the Times included. Now the former audience is part of the news, as it should be, and not as numbers in polls, but as people with ideas. The reporters and editors always were in the story, but didn't acknowledge it, now at least they admit it's possible. This article is interesting from so many angles.  

Sunday, April 10, 2005

Podbat has a new blog. This one looks semi-permanent.  

Steve Gillmor: "Syndisphere." 

Me dumb. Me make mistake. Syndisphere is not a googlewhack. It is however, a term that Google doesn't have any hits for. And of course that will change. Steve Gillmor has the first use of this term which is certain to become part of the terminology of the Internet.  

Steve Rubel: "A couple of weeks ago I wrote an open letter to Oprah Winfrey encouraging her to invite bloggers on her show." 

Three years ago today, the NY Times and UserLand announced a deal that would lead to the Times' support of RSS. Here's the essay I wrote that day. This was clearly a milestone in the life of RSS and weblogs.  

Gizmodo: "Could it be that Archos is going to release some products that aren't ugly?" 

I've been playing with a French search engine called Exalead. 

Om Malik pulls links to several interesting stories about Technorati. 

Every year on this day I say happy birthday to Wes Felter, because (duh) April 10 is his birthday, #27 if I'm not mistaken.  

Scoble, maybe we should ask the Blog Herald, which is already in Google News, to let us write an occasional piece for them. I'm not going to change the format of Scripting News for Google, that's just wrong.  

New header graphic. "Coffee cup and friends." 

Saturday, April 09, 2005

Here's a BigPub article about podcasting that gives credit to Chris Lydon with an assist from me. That's closer to the truth that all the other articles. Chris did the interviews, with technical help from Bob Doyle, and I did the overall concept, the RSS and promotion. Those really were the first podcasts. I didn't write iPodder as they suggest, I wrote the aggregator in Radio, which iPodder is patterned after.  

NY Times: "Mr Finkelstein's personal life made headlines Saturday after he said he had married his longtime male partner in a civil ceremony in Massachusetts, a move that startled some of his associates, given his history with the Republican Party." Hmmm. 

A scene from my house in Woodside, on this day in Y2K. This might make a good header? 

There's a new "fresh podcasts" box on podcatch.com, showing the ten newest casts from audio.weblogs.com. Screen shot. 

Dave Wilson, a NYC VC, recommends FeedBurner for RSS ads. 

Practical Guide to Fair Use, written for non-lawyer consumption, by Christina Olson, a Harvard Law School student, via John Palfrey. 

John Stanforth on the West Wing of late. Warning, there are some spoilers in his writeup, which explains why the season finale was so satisfying. We're also grateful that the writers didn't hold the big decision till next year (that would have been awful) but did leave us a juicy tidbit to debate, which character is going to Federal prison for ten years.  

Friday, April 08, 2005

Steve Rubel: 65 Local TV Stations Now RSS Enabled. 

Yahoo has feeds for top-selling DVDs and new releases. 

A cold shower "of reality" from one Anne Onymous. Odeo has at least one friend, even though he or she doesn't have a name.  

RSS: When does it become a standard? 

David Berlind: "Have you given much thought to the formula you'll be using to add metadata into the ID3 tags that go along with your MP3 files?" 

Two years ago, a late-season snow storm in Cambridge. 

Google Sightseeing: "Why bother seeing the world for real?" 

Today's song: "Would you believe he had an eye infection?" 

Ironically, Camille Paglia speaks hastily in Salon, saying that blogs are not written with care for the individual word. Thanks to Ed Cone for calling her on that.  

Polly Toynbee: "Genuflecting before this corpse is scarcely different to parading past Lenin: they both put extreme ideology before human life and happiness, at unimaginable human cost." Via DavosNewbies. 

Chris Lydon did a fantastic audio interview with Polly Toynbee in August 2003, about the BBC, the war in Iraq. Quite timely with the British election coming up. 

Thursday, April 07, 2005

Feature/comparison chart for Odeo. "Now that we have an idea of what Odeo is, we can take a guess as to what the equivalent community tools are, and the open formats and protocols that are relevant." 

Tornado watch on the beach. It's even freakier than it looks. 

According to Scott Young, a new version of Manila is in the works. 

Reuters: "'People are watching all over the world to determine whether a city of 135 square miles can become one big hot spot,' Philadelphia Mayor John Street told reporters." 

World Wind: "Zoom from satellite altitude into any place on Earth." 

The Encyclopedia Britannica supports RSS. 

Another comic strip from the MS Mobile Phone Fan, including yours truly, wondering why Yahoo doesn't listen to me. It also features Jeremy Zawodny. And for what it's worth, I don't think Yahoo is evil, they're just a BigCo, hell-bent on world domination, or at least this part of it.  

David Berlind: What's a podcaster to do when his iPod breaks? 

I bought a cheap MP3 player at Target to hold me over. $50. 

A fun German strip tease game. Via Paolo. 

CBS: Microsoft claims 4.5 million bloggers. 

Kosso has a link to an OPML file of all the BBC feeds. 

Last night's West Wing, the season finale, was excellent, confirming my belief that they have two crews that alternate, one awful, and the other fantastic. I don't want to spoil it for anyone who hasn't yet watched it, but it's great, full of emotion and surprise. Maybe in the end not so much surprise, but still... 

MTV announces an Internet "channel." Now just link the new programs into an RSS 2.0 feed with enclosures and they're making history. 

Wired: "Lately, it seems like almost every time you tune into your favorite Blogger-hosted blog to catch up on the latest gossip, meme, political diatribe or cybersnark, you find that the site is frozen in time. Or, there are multiple posts with identical content." 

Om Malik: Paris Hilton Now Podcasting. 

I started a site for discussion of new stuff in the podcasting community, and it's off to a great start. Thanks for all the good energy everybody! 

Wednesday, April 06, 2005

Notes on where we're at in podcasting. Comments are welcome. 

Steven Erat, who works at Macromedia, explains his experience with podcasting. At times like this I used to say "bing!" These are exciting times, you can see lights going on in a lot of new places. Bing! 

iPodLounge interviews Evan Williams about Odeo. 

Telegraph: Cannabis may stop heart disease. 

Duncan Riley reviews Yahoo 360. 

Sam Whitmore asks for ideas for a Forbes article about podcasting. 

I got my Florida driver's license today. My old California license expires in a few weeks. The new one expires in 2011. Now there's a foreign concept. The eye test was interesting. You put your face against a pair of lenses. "Read line five," said the examiner. I breathed a sigh of relief, I could read it. Two groups of five letters each. I read them aloud. The examiner asked if I could read the third group. I couldn't see a third group. She asked if I had any sight in my left eye at all. I explained that I did, but there was a big blurry spot in the middle. She checked a box and said I could only drive cars with a left-side mirror. No problemmo. Whew.  

Scoble: "The digital photography space continues to heat up." 

Simone Bettini is in Rome, waiting in line to see PJPII. 

Steve Rubel: "Feeds may be Google's greatest enemy." 

Greenspun: "People pay $2 million for the privilege of living in an environment free of Republicans." 

SJ Merc reports that Feedburner raised $7 million.  

NY Times editorial: "The Republicans' campaign against the judiciary hit rock bottom on Monday when Senator John Cornyn stood up in the chamber and excused violence." 

Today's song: "Big hat, no cattle. Big boat, no paddle." 

Tuesday, April 05, 2005

Don Park on Google's satellite maps. I'm reminded of the article in the Guardian where they said Yahoo had captured Google's mojo. Heh.  

Okay, I'm embarassed to admit that I've never been able to figure out how to create a new user on Windows 2000 or Windows 2003.  

Good howto article on podcasting at O'Reilly. 

AP: "Hunter S Thompson's ashes will be blasted from a cannon mounted inside a 53-foot-high sculpture of the journalist's 'gonzo fist' emblem." 

It's time for a new MP3 player for Uncle Davey. 

Really weird, my Yahoo 360 photo was rejected. So I looked up the rules. It can't be more than 3MB, it has to be a JPEG and it can't be porn. Feh. I tried resubmitting and it was accepted.  

My endless infomercial bit has gotten a lot of pick-up, the latest being Howard Kurtz's column in the Washington Post. He even included the sarcastic swipe at pro-jos. "Now would be a great opportunity for some of the real reporting the pros are so famous for." Good work. 

Engadget reports what everyone who heard the Pew report knows -- they inflated the number of people listening to podcasts.  

Congratulations to the University of North Carolina basketball team, the Tarheels, who won the national championship last night. I didn't watch the game, college basketball isn't my thing, but I spent a fun week with the bloggas of the Piedmont in February. Yay Tarheels. Go team! 

Tarheel: "A native or resident of North Carolina." 

According to the BBC and others Google is starting a video-blogging service, where they store and serve the video (or so it seems) index it, or create transcripts. It's set to launch in the next few days. It would be great if they offered free storage and bandwidth for audio as well. 

Yesterday I offered to invite people who requested invites to Yahoo 360 until I ran out. Apparently you don't run out. There is a limit of 100 outstanding invites, but as soon as one accepts an invite you can invite another. My balance hasn't dipped below 50. So now the limiting factor is my ability to do the clerical work to process the requests for invites. I've already processed more than 100.  

Monday, April 04, 2005

Today is the seventh birthday of XML-RPC. 

Four years ago: "Keep your interfaces where we can see them." 

The Annotated New York Times tracks "blog postings that cite articles published by The New York Times." Via Steve Rubel. 

According to the Boston Globe, Microsoft paid $120 million for Groove.  

2WW: I applied to have Scripting News included in Google News, and got the rejection notice earlier today.  

I'm living in a new place as of yesterday, an apartment, the first time I've lived in one in a long time. It's on the first floor. Above me is a family with a kid. They seem to be moving furniture all the time. I have a hard time imagining how people could spend so much time moving furniture. Me, I never move furniture, except perhaps when I'm getting up from a desk or a dining table, when I push the chair back. But that's it. Otherwise I accept furniture location as-is. I'm not a control freak about furniture location, as my upstairs neighbors appear to be.  

The overnight emails haven't been going out for some time, not sure how long. Just a configuration problem oin the server. I'm going to have to keep my eye on this one. In the meantime, sorry that the people who read Scripting News via email have missed some of the new stuff.  

Jeremy Zawodny says he's out of invites for Yahoo 360, but I'm not. Post a comment here and I'll send out invites until I run out.  

Soxaholix: "Even in his final barely alive days, JP2 was more animated than the lifeless Red Sox last night." 

Gizmodo is hiring an editor. "...a person who knows gadgetry in specific and technology in general like the back of their hand, can write their way out of a paper bag, and is full of excitement about working for an editor who is increasingly fed up with the pointless tail-chasing and money-grubbing hypocrisy of the worldwide technology market." 

Don Park: "10 days since I quit smoking." 

Paolo Valdemarin: "Podcasting is not for me." 

Megnut: "I look for a phone card not to put in the phone but to press the numbers on the phone to use." 

Sunday, April 03, 2005

Pew Internet: "6 million American adults have listened to podcasts." 

Today's Morning Coffee Notes is an interview with Florida neighbor and author Jerry Vass, marketing guru, future blogger and podcaster.  

Rex Hammock: "There's art hanging in the Louvre and art hanging on my refrigerator. There's photography on the cover of Vogue and in my iPhoto library and films that win Oscars and videos of babies learning to crawl." 

I certainly make my share of enemies (that's one of my goals, after all) but I do have some fans too.  

Speaking of making enemies, is it just me or is anyone else suspicious of a supposedly independent analyst who refers to the CEO of Google as Eric. Any chance of some footsie going on here? 

Peterson's, the college guide company, has gotten into podcasting. 

Koan Bremner: "A good measure of a person's contribution to a debate is less the friends he keeps, and more the enemies he makes:" 

It's pretty funny, after all the attempts to trick Google into putting relevant ads on audio.weblogs.com, they decide it's about astronomy because the word "universe" appears in the page title. It may be time to give up.  

New header graphic. Mountains in British Columbia. 

The Accoridon Guy has a great pic of PJPII. 

Saturday, April 02, 2005

BBC: Pope John Paul II dead at 84. 

Scoble is a man of respect. "My co-author Shel Israel gave me heck for being too nice to my fellow bloggers." Right on. Too much footsie in the blogosphere. Enough. Just the facts please. Enough telling me about your friends. Make some new enemies for a change.  

Listening to the endless radio "coverage" of the Pope's death, it's remarkable how unbalanced it is. They have priests, saying we all know deep inside the Pope was right about everything. Hello. Earth to Catholics. The Pope was a good PR guy, but come on, he was against birth control. The Catholics actually burned condoms in AIDS-plagued Africa. Now would be a great opportunity for some of the real reporting the pros are so famous for. Instead they're running an endless infomercial for the Catholic Church. Hey the Catholics are the church of sin and hell, fire and brimstone. If ever there were an opportunity to be balanced this is it. No more footsie? Heh, yeah sure.  

Rex Hammock isn't playing footsie. "Do I really need all that crap portalized?" Tell it like it is bro. 

Rogers Cadenhead: "Every time commercial developers create an innovative new software category, as Netscape, UserLand Software and Pyra Labs did in weblogging and syndication, open source coders follow behind with software that makes it harder to earn a living in that niche." 

Why Darren Barefoot isn't smoking the podcasting dope.  

5PM Eastern: I've arrived safely back at the beach in Florida. Had a great time in NYC, look forward to going back soon.  

Kevin Fox on a Ben Hammersley article in the Guardian. "The trouble is that his datapoints are pretty selective, and in some cases are flat-out incorrect."  

Reviewing the Yahoo 360 launch, after the fact 

The launch of Yahoo 360 seems so long ago, but it was just six days. How did it go? This screed nails it. Invite-only, exclusive, two-tier marketing of beta services, a tradition started by Google (as far as anyone knows) don't work. It only worked for Gmail because there was great anticipation, the idea was new (the method of marketing, that is), and you could use Gmail to communicate with people who didn't use Gmail.

Everything about Yahoo 360 is for members only, and in the first few hours of its life in the blogosphere, most people couldn't get in. Now, after it's launched, there's no way to see anything other than a ghost town. Maybe that's all there is, maybe not. But for a service like this, the appearance of being a ghost town is just as bad as actually being one.

All this fuss for a service that most people thought was a poor cousin to Flickr that Yahoo bought just before rolling out 360. It's a disaster epic on the scale of The Towering Inferno or The Poseidon Adventure. They did everything wrong, and worked really hard at it.

Moral of the story, big companies don't have mojo, they can't, and it's not fair to make that the issue. They can, however, make the trains run on time, and at that Yahoo does quite well. But they should leave the innovation to small, nimble, motivated devteams with nothing to lose and no corporate hierarchy to please. Hire a business school prof to do a case study for you. It's never worked differently in Silicon Valley, yet this is a lesson Silicon Valley keeps relearning. The next revolution isn't on stage at Esther's or SXSW or even Etech -- those were the last revolutions.

Friday, April 01, 2005

Yet another New York coffee notes podcast, this one with Kosso, live from the bar in the Millenium UN Plaza Hotel. Tools for creating podcast feeds in Flash, and lots of other random stuff. Goofy and technical. 

An open letter to everyone about everything that matters. 

Google: "You mean we should cripple a perfectly useful feature just because of a little bad PR?" 

According to The Raw Story, Senator Frank Lautenberg (D-NJ) sent a letter to Tom DeLay saying his comments about judges in the Schiavo case may violate Federal criminal law. Not an April Fool joke. 

New York Newsday supports RSS. 

Scott Isaacs, an architect at Microsoft, explains the new weblogs.com listing for MSN Spaces. For me, it's fascinating to watch the idea percolate through the Spaces community. This kind of "anchor" page is an essential part of the bootstrap of a blogging community. 

Pictures from last night's dinner with Kosso at the 2nd Avenue Deli. He's the Flash podcasting guy from the BBC, who just happened to be in NY this week. While we were hanging out in front of the Starbucks on the corner of 2nd Ave and 9th St, a woman on a Segway pulled up to the red light, waited for it to change and then continued downtown. Makes kind of an interesting movie, I thought. 

Anniversaries 

Today is April Fool's Day, so look out for some laughs.

But in all seriousness, today is also the birthday of two of my creations, Scripting News and Frontier.

Frontier was started in April 1988, 17 years ago. If it were a human being, it would be well into puberty, capable of reproducing, driving a car, getting ready to leave home. It's appropriate that in its 17th year it gained its independence in a formal way, being licensed under the GPL, and is now ready for anything the universe wants to do with it.

On this day in 1997 I did my first weblog post at www.scripting.com. 8 years is a long run for a weblog. Scripting News was the inspiration for many of the mainstays of the blogging world, and they in turn inspired others, and on and on. This has been the template for growth, and it's a good one. Every new blog begets more new blogs. That mine was the root for so many is the accomplishment I'm most proud of.

So Year Nine begins. A little older, perhaps a little wiser? Let's have fun, still diggin, and namaste y'all!

Cory Doctorow responds 

I got an email from Cory Doctorow saying that my theoretical republishing of his book -- giving myself authorship credit, offering it for sale, and seeking distribution -- would be "fraudulent." So we know that Cory has a line. We're making progress. (Note I'm not going to publish his email, he can do that if he likes, and I'd like it if he would.)

Now, as I've said so many times (one more time won't hurt), I don't like it when a big heartless company takes my work and modifies it in a way that makes it hard to tell what they wrote and what I wrote. I'm concerned that if I let this company do it, then another company is going to, and another and pretty soon they're going to be competing on the basis of how "useful" they make my work, again without my permission, and with no compensation to me. I'm concerned that they may make changes I don't agree with, or even worse, change the meaning of what I wrote so as to confuse people about what I think. I quit working for a big publication because they were doing this, I went independent so my writing could have integrity, so it could truly represent what I think, to the best of my ability. Cory, Google crossed my line. To use your terminology, they're doing something fraudulent by passing off their derivative work as mine.

BTW, I say "I think," when stating an opinion. Cory and his colleagues (who mostly are not lawyers) state their legal opinion as fact. He also says "As you know" before saying something that I don't even agree with. That's just plain disrespectful, and makes discourse more difficult.