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.