Monday, December 19, 2005

Have you been following the business in Washington? Bush was using the NSA to spy on Americans, in America, without court orders. I just listened to Meet the Press, and what a crock the way Secretary of State Rice dodged the issues. What utter disregard for the Constitution. We live in a police state, and all the mentions of 9-11 can't explain away what they did. Even the Republicans are pissed and scared. 

Financial Times: "Jimmy Wales, Wikipedia's founder, said a new 'stable' version of the reference would be added to the site and audited to ensure its accuracy." 

I took a quick look at the Google Talk API stuff, and realized quickly that it doesn't help me. They're trying to extend Jabber in some way, which is nice, but what I want is an endpoint that I can send XML-RPC messages to to have them be routed through the Google Talk network. I want them to hide all the complexity behind a super-simple interface so I can build applications that run on their network. I want to do Instant Outlining, and use their infrastructure to transport the packets. Wouldn't that be cool? Why not let me help you lock in your network? Oh well. I'll keep waiting. (Or maybe they want to hire someone to integrate this into the Frontier kernel? Seems the long way around.) 

There's a blogger's dinner on the 30th in Palo Alto, courtesy of Scoble. I'll be there for sure.  

Rogers Cadenhead: "Another person obsessively monitoring his own biography is Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales, who has edited it frequently, removing references to a credited 'co-founder' of the encyclopedia and obscuring the nature of a pornographic web site he once published." 

News.com: "A new online information service launching in early 2006 aims to build on the model of free online encyclopedia Wikipedia by inviting acknowledged experts in a range of subjects to review material contributed by the general public." 

Important news. Ross Rader of Blogware and Matt Mullenweg of WordPress are participating in the discussion about blogging tools interop. As Ross says, all it takes is two vendors to make it happen. I'm willing to be the glue, and I can also help by supporting interop in the OPML Editor. I've been writing about this for many years, it would be great to see the users finally get real choice. 

Great Santa picture, but warning -- not for people who are truly into the spirit of the holiday. I went to my first Christmas party last night. Someone asked if I was enjoying the holiday season so far. I said yes, I hadn't really noticed it this year. It's the same old thing, as you get older the time goes faster. So really this year's Christmas just melts in with last year's. Life is one big Christmas. Ho ho ho.  

I saw that Ron Bloom was interviewed on Business Week and, according to Heather Green, he commented on Adam Curry's editing of the Wikipedia entry on Podcasting. I'm going to avoid the angst and skip the podcast.  

More on the Wikipedia article on "unconference." 

Busted 

Excellent piece by Russell Shaw about Web 2.0.

He's exactly right, and what he says is kind of obvious.

Web 2.0 is a way for certain marketing people to claim they invented stuff that they didn't invent, without actually claiming they invented it. It's the kind of double-talk marketing guys love.

In a sense people are right when they say it's another bubble. It's dishonest like the bubble was. Yet the technologies they're hyping are honest.

Yeah, we're getting fleeced again. It sucks.