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.