Monday, May 30, 2005

WGBH at 7PM Eastern -- the inaugural airing of Chris Lydon's Open Source. 89.7 FM. Guests are David Weinberger, Doc Searls and yours truly. If you're not in the Boston area, please tune in to the webcast.  

Kosso recorded tonight's show. Best line: "Revenge of the sources." 

A breakfast podcast with Betsy Devine in Cambridge, we sing, and she enjoys being Mr Jennifer Lopez.  

Betsy explains, in a movie. why people at Google, now that they're a huge company, do things that are not consistent with the values of early Google. Same is true at every other big tech company, maybe all big companies in every industry. 

A brief conversation with John Palfrey and Jim Moore who are starting an investment fund for RSS-related ventures.  

A movie taken out the window of a speeding cab of the Charles River from Memorial Drive. 

I wonder if Netflix has ever thought of partnering with Match.com to connect people who like the same kind of movies? I suppose Barnes & Noble could do something similar. Maybe therein lies a business model for podcasting.  

To Steve Gillmor, the constant evangelist for "attention" -- Netflix is in your corner, they actually publish attention data, today, not at some time in the future. If Match.com wanted to provide a service such as the one I described above, they wouldn't need to actually do a deal with Netflix, they already publish the data on a per-user basis, and they do it in XML (your favorite format by the way). So Match could provide a place for you to enter your Netflix user id, and they could go get the data and use it in their matching algorithm. How about that! BTW, so much for Dave Sifry's plan to invent a new format here.  

Four years ago: " I thought my father was a weird guy, but it turns out he was just European." 

I've been playing around with Blogger on and and off, and was surprised to find out after all this time that they don't have an easy way to edit a blogroll. They recommend by-hand editing of HTML lists.  

Two years ago: What makes a weblog a weblog? 

I was flipping channels last night and caught a profile of R&B star Lionel Richie, talking about what it's like to write a song. He says sometimes he's searching for the line that ties all the elements of a song together, he could be searching for weeks, and then it hits him like a thunderbolt -- boom -- mind bomb, that's it, and he can move on to the next project. Then I wondered if he actually wrote the songs, was he describing what it's like to have an idea, or what he thought it would be like if he ever actually had one. I have no idea if Richie is a creative guy or if he pays people to be creative, or if he rips people off and says their creativity is his without paying.