Tuesday, October 25, 2005

CNET has an OPML feed for its top 100 blogs. I've linked it in to the box in the right margin. 

Last night's dinner in Berkeley was a ton of fun. I brought my Archos and recorded a one-hour podcast with lots of interesting people including Don Hopkins, Sylvia Paull, Steve Gillmor, Scott Rosenberg, Niall Kennedy, and lots of guests coming in and out, telling jokes, stories and clues.  

Yahoo is looking for an RSS product manager. 

Play an accordion, go to prison. That's the law!  

I had a really cool idea. I'm going to open a service called Elgoog that scrapes every page on Google and displays it without their ads. Of course to pay for the service I'm going to have to insert my own ads. Fair is fair. Google can opt out if they insist (how clueless can you get) but they have to send a lawyer over to my house and once a lawyer has been used to opt out for one page, that's it, if you want to opt out for another page, you need to send over another lawyer. And if Google complains, I'm going to make the lawyers come over naked, and I won't let Sergey and Larry come to FU Camp. Of course no lawyers are needed if they get with the program and let me have all their content for free and don't whine about it too much. 

Stanford Daily report on podcasting.  

Niall Kennedy took a closeup of my Archos while it was recording last night's Morning Coffee Notes. 

Kaboodle is "the easiest way to get all your web choices on one page!" 

Dare Obasanjo: "Google is multi-billion dollar, multinational corporation. However whenever its executives speak, they do an excellent job of portraying the company as if it is the altruistic side project of a bunch of geeky college kids." 

Sleight of hand 

Watch Alex Macgillivray's hands carefully in this quote from a Wired News piece today.

"The world would be a much worse place if the card catalog in a library only contained the books that the publisher had come by and put in," said Alex Macgillivray, an attorney at Google.

Of course, that makes sense, you nod your head, how true, but then you realize that the analogy doesn't work. If card catalogs were as good at selling books as Google claims Google Print will be, they'd batch-submit all their publications using the marvel of computer technology (they know how to write scripts in NY too, or in a pinch, they can hire a wizard from California). No one has to "come by" in the age of the Internet. How quaint. And misleading.

The likely reason they insist on opt-out instead of giving an inch and letting it be opt-in -- very few publishers would opt-in, and at least some would forget to opt-out.

(And, have they explained how opt-out works?)

Maybe the publishers want to operate their own search engine? After all, they did pay the authors advances on royalties, and marketed the books, they have a major investment in the books, and Google has no investment at all. (I was reminded of this perspective listening to Tim O'Reilly's NerdTV interview, where he explains why his books aren't freely available, as Richard Stallman insists they should be.)

Anyway, like any sleight of hand, the trick is to get you to focus on what's least relevant, and ignore what is most relevant.

Another perspective 

Can you imagine that Steve Jobs got the music companies to let him build the iTunes music store with the kind of legal strong-arm tactics that Google is using with the publishing industry?

Second question. If Google prevails, what's to stop them from doing the same with the music industry? I don't doubt for a moment that Google is on a path to compete with Apple in this area. How convenient it would be for them if they didn't have to listen to the music industry.

We live in interesting times, folks.