Wednesday, July 27, 2005

Scoble cites a report that confirms that Yahoo is getting ready to compete with Technorati.  

It's great that Jay Rosen is covering the BlogHer conference, looking forward to his reports. But let's hope they can avoid vacant homilies like the one in his last paragraph. Competition is a good thing. If it weren't for competition, Technorati would have no reason to improve their service.  

The ads are back in Political Wire. I'm really sick of being used as an experiment without permission.  

NPR: "NASA grounds the space shuttle fleet after analysis revealed that a piece of foam broke loose during the liftoff of Space Shuttle Discovery Tuesday." 

Skip to the end of this NY Times piece on podcasting for a good dose of disrespect for technology. "All of that is whimpering in the wind." But of course it's anything but. I'm not one of the wimps, I even agree with much of what he says, but geez, how can you argue with someone who says people who disagree are whimpering? When did the NY Time resort to Limbaugh-like logic. Who can you trust. Isn't this the paper that didn't challenge President Bush when he took us to war in Iraq? Don't they have any editorial standards worth preserving? Don't they owe all of us an apology for trying to pass this off as journalism? Wasn't it the NY Times that one year ago was dismissing bloggers at the DNC, when we were pioneering the technolgy they now think is so revolutionary (because Apple is doing it now). Isn't a bit ironic that they call music sharing piracy, perhaps because the people doing it don't advertise in the Times, yet huge scale piracy by Apple is kind of fun. What next? 

BTW, I had to stop in Massachusetts today to open a bank account for Scripting News, Inc, which is a Massachusetts corporation (I lived there when the company was founded). I was able to do it, but the amount of information they required, the sheer paranoia of it. The excuse offered was, surprisingly, the USA PATRIOT Act. This is the first time, that I know of, that my life has been impacted by this, but I strongly suspect it won't be the last. Who knows what this government might consider threatening to security. I just finished a book about the World War II seige on Stalingrad, which was an interesting look into the paranoia of a fascist dictatorship run to insanity. Am I more scared of the terrorists or of the US government? On some days it's not even close. 

Philip Greenspun: "After renting dozens of new cars in the last year it struck me as odd that the factory stereos can't do two simple things: (1) bring an aux input out to the front of the dashboard for plugging in an MP3 jukebox, and (2) read a CD containing MP3 files. These features would only add about $1 to the cost of the car and presumably would give MP3-crazed yupsters a reason to trade in their older vehicle."  

PC Mag reviews the beta of Windows Vista, which was released today. 

Okay, I wasn't at AlwaysOn, so I don't know what Marc Canter and Tony Perkins announced. I've been watching Marc's blog, where he explains how various people got the story wrong, but where is the bullet list that explains what it is. 

Danny Boyd: "When will browsers allow me to point to a local or remote OPML file for my bookmarks or favorites? This would be near the top of my list for new features in IE and Firefox." 

It's freaking hot here in NYC today. Ouch! 

Watch the new blogs as Europe goes to work and the east coast of North America wakes up. 

Last night I put up the first version of templates for the OPML Editor's blogging tool. No docs yet, I just wanted to see what people would do with it. Amy Bellinger showed that it basically works, you can make a very nice looking blog with this feature.  

RSS 2.0 is good enough for the US Army.  

Check out all the new podcasts at MSNBC. Yow! 

Isolani says upstreaming is limited to my server and the OPML Editor. The former is true, temporarily, but the latter is not true even today. Just drop a file in the www folder and it streams up to the server. I totally does not have to be created by the OPML Editor. You can even use another editor to write your blog (but it has to produce OPML, that's what the back-end understands). And the back-end will be GPL'd too, and the protocol (very very simple) documented. The convenience of upstreaming should be for everyone. Also, we're working on two-way synchronization. As you might imagine it's a little harder, but really not that bad.  

In a BusinessWeek interview, David Sifry of Technorati says: "We're built into every single publishing platform." Is that really true? 

Columnist Greg Lindsay trashes podcasting by the people.  

Brilliant piece by Britt that explains why columnists like Lindsay, whose job it is to get you to read ads, have a limited future.  

Rupert Murdoch: "As an industry, many of us have been remarkably, unaccountably complacent." 

BBC: "People who illegally share music files online are also big spenders on legal music downloads, research suggests." 

JD Lasica's pictures from the AlwaysOn conference.  

The next two conferences are BlogHer and the Open Source Convention, both on the west coast this weekend. I expect there will be some discussion of OPML at both, although I'll be in NYC, trying to stay cool (there's a heat wave going on now).  

Hey I went for a massage yesterday. It's been a while. What happened is what I was afraid would, my lower back really hurts. But before it was really tight. So it's a good ache, I'll do some more stretching and maybe go for another massage, esp when I'm in Calif around Aug 20. Maybe a side-trip to Esalen.