Wednesday, August 10, 2005

Steven Livingstone suggests that the AJAX stuff people are so excited about is actually a lot like XML-RPC, which has been around since 1999. The thought had occurred to me as well.  

Well blow me down, it looks like the opml-newbies have a theme song.  

I went looking for hiking trails in Bozeman today and hit the mother lode. They've got incredible trails right through the middle of the town. This is a green city, totally done right. It's like Palo Alto in the Rockies, where they designed the place before the housing boom, so there's tons of gorgeous green space still there. The smells, the green, the creeks and wild flowers. What a place. I could really see living here. It's weird that there don't appear to be any Scripting News readers here. I haven't gotten a single email, where I was getting correspondence from people in even the most remote parts of Ontario and the Upper Peninisula in Michigan. With so much wifi and so many rich hippies, you'd think this place would be crawling with Scripting News readers. Maybe that's a good thing? Housing prices are quite reasonable compared to Cambridge and California, and there is the beginnings of some of the congestion, but just the beginnings. You can get out of town into spectacular open country in about ten minutes. And a Rocky Mountain ski area is just 16 miles outside of town. Winters are great here too. Haven't found, yet, what the temperature range is. 

Just caught wind of this deal, sorry I missed it. Kleiner Perkins and Sequoia have backed Podshow. Apparently it was just announced today. John Doerr and Ray Lane on the board. Podcasting goes VC. No comment, for now at least. 

And then Odeo follows with investments from Charles River and a long list of high-tech angel investors.  

And Rex Hammock has turned this into a song.  

Frontier Kernel: Important bug fix for outline-saving. 

Phil Ringnalda: "If you like the sort of content Google News delivers, and especially if you enjoy making a political choice between RSS and Atom feeds, yay for you! Google News has feeds!" 

NY Times and the web 

I read this piece on the supposed revolution at the NY Times, and yawned. You'll know they're really jumping in when they let a blogger onto the op-ed page. I don't mean when they give a blog to one of their op-ed columnists, rather when they put someone who is rooted in the blogosphere in a position of power and authority in their midst, someone who can call the Times on their bullshit, in the Times. Until that happens they'll be cloistered, insulated, immune, clueless. I loved the quote from Sulzberger, btw, but it was bullshit.

I've now gotten three emails saying they recently let a blogger on their op-ed page, but that's very very different from having a blogger on their op-ed page. Give a blogger a guest slot, great, if you don't like the piece, you don't have to run it. But if you have a blogger there regularly, then you have to run what they wrote, and that would change the character of their editorial, it would make their regular writers think twice about taking the inexcusable shortcuts they take. Go back and look at the piece Pogue wrote about podcasting on the front page of their business section. They need some regular discipline, some checks and balances, and they aren't getting them. Another one, the ridiculous unanswered piece about software patents by Randall Stross. They've turned into Amateur Hour. Maybe they always were, and I didn't know enough to see it.

And of course let's not forget the big stuff -- they went to war with George Bush without calling him on his bullshit. They need some strong medicine, they've acknowledged it, but they refuse to take it. The stupidity of it is that it would sell newspapers, it would make them money, because they'd become much more interesting. They're just too scared to piss off their world famous reporters, who don't want to be challenged. They could make their paper interesting, but they don't want interesting, they want job security. That's their real problem, that's where they need to embrace the web, and that's what they haven't done.

Yeah I have fear too 

Anyway, when I write something like the above I'm sure everyone thinks I'm angry, but that's not it, I'm impatient.

I think it's obviously wrong to call people names, like they do, all the time, so I try not to do it. I didn't say Pogue is a jerk or an idiot, I don't know why he writes such idiotic stuff and passes it off as journalism, and why the Times runs it on the front page of their business section. And why a historian like Stross doesn't do any investigation before spouting off on software patents as if they were something new that Microsoft invented. Geez Louise. Does that make you angry? Not me. It makes me want to shake them and say -- get your fucking shit together. I want to give them a talking-to like George C. Scott gave to the cowardly soldier in the great movie, Patton. We don't have time for you to learn how technology gets invented, you don't have a goddam clue, so get back to your basics you so proudly claim to practice. Edit out the idiocy and stop seeking revenge, how about seeking the truth, you know, like All The News That's FIt, etc.

It so totally doesn't matter whether you publish the bits on paper or scatter them over the net, it's the information that matters guys and gals. And courage. Have some. And use the new tools -- minds.

From the mountains of Montana, your earnest correspondent,

Spencer F. Katt

Thanks Brian 

Brian Russell, a young man I admire, likes this kind of shit.

I bet Doc Searls likes it too.