Saturday, October 01, 2005

Tim O'Reilly joins the What is Web 2.0 discussion. Haven't had a chance to carefully read the piece, but did skim it. It's nice that finally O'Reilly allows me my role in creating RSS. Good to put that piece of acrimony behind us. However most of the ideas in his piece could be found in the back-issues of DaveNet, starting in late 1994. The Web he descirbes was evolved during the dot-com boom. XML-RPC started in 1998, and RSS in 1997, OPML in 2000. The people that go to his conference weren't thinking about the web as a platform for the people, but as it turns out, that's what it was (and is). The O'Reilly piece appears good, the only thing left is for them to drop the exclusivity of his conference, that's what makes his Web 2.0 totally not about the web. The web is anti-exclusive.  

Scoble wants to borrow Microsoft's checkbook. 

BetterBadNews wishes the EFF a happy 15th birthday. 

Here's a site that could really use RSS. 

Jason Calacanis is glad to see the "old guard" blogs "fall off" Technorati's list of popular blogs. I reaaaaally don't care about these lists, but of course I had to see if I was one of the blogs that had been booted. Gulp. It seems so. So, I wanted to see how bad it was, how unpopular had Scripting News become. I checked to see how many sites were linking to me in the new scheme, and found that there were 4778, which seems would place Scripting at #19, if I have any clue how their rankings work. I must be missing something. In any case you could get rid of the lsits altogether and I wouldn't mind, I don't compete with the top sites on that list. I want to be respected for what I do, and I'm definitely not trying to be the most mass of the mass market. Note there are no ads here. I understand why Jason cares, btw. And there's a strong argument to be made that the number one site (Jason's Engadget is number two) gamed the process. 

Johannes Ernst suggests that FOAF embrace RSS.  

I'm working on a new module for the OPML Community Server, and am revisiting a question we answered in Manila and before that in the website framework in Frontier. Should we rely entirely on the physical structure of the data for the URLs, or should we allow the designer to overlay a logical structure, basically rewriting URLs to separate what's presented to the reader and what the implementor sees. Of course there are tradeoffs. I found I used the feature in Manila but not in the WSF (I'm pretty sure the former is built on the latter). Anyway, I wonder what people who developed sites in Manila or the WSF would think about this. 

Om Malik: Google Confirms Free San Francisco WiFi Plans. 

Don Hopkins has an OPML directory feed for his Drupal blog. 

Last night I taped an episode of NerdTV with Robert X Cringeley here in Berkeley. It was great fun. The show will be available for download a week from Tuesday. Everyone get your BitTorrent clients ready. 

Had he lived, today would have been my uncle's 60th birthday. Happy Birthday to Vava on the great hippie dope smoking beach in the sky. Say hi to Lucy, Dot and Pumpkin for me. Hope you and Rudy made peace. How's Hymie Stutz? Ray Fox? Cousin Joey? We really miss you! :-( 

Make-believe stories 

Suppose you have a sharp pain in the lower-right abdomen. The pain is getting worse, so you visit a doctor, who explains what a mess most operating rooms are. He adds that he doesn't actually understand how they work, he blames the documentation. Did you know you can die in surgery, he asks. So what do you do? This might be appendicitis. I'd see another doctor, preferably one who isn't scared of operating rooms.

Another story. You're wrongly accused of murder, in jail, but unfortunately the circumstantial evindence is pretty bad. The bloody murder weapon was found in your house. You had a motive. You were the last person to see the victim alive. But you didn't do it. The lawyer they assign to your case comes to visit and volunteers that he doesn't really like court rooms, they're so drafty and there are all these criminals there. Judges are so unfair. It's not his fault he had to take the bar exam five times before he passed. So, do you believe this guy and take your chances, or do you ask for another lawyer?