Tuesday, January 24, 2006

I sent an email to Matt Mullenweg the other day and then I realized I sent it to the wrong place. It should be posted publicly so anyone who knows how to work on WordPress and can write production-level code, high enough quality so it could be included in the main distribution, could see it. 

Do you care if the Washington Post has comments? 

Joel Spolsky shut down his forum after a community member posted a series of suicide notes there, which turned out to be real. 

At lunch yesterday Steve Gillmor tells a joke. A guy in NYC asks for directions. How do I get to 42nd Street or should I just go fuck myself? 

While I was in the movies Disney bought Pixar, raising the inevitable question, how long before Iger gets Amelio'd? 

Snuck out to a movie this afternoon, most excellent, a love story in 17th century Virginia. Beautifully spun story, gorgeous constumes, makeup, acting.  

Sean Lyndersay heard what I was saying about the origins of RSS. The techies have tried to muddy it up, pointing out all the competing ideas that came from all kinds of different directions, but the fact remains that the RSS we use today, the one that rose to the top, was the one that the publishing industry got behind. It's cool that Sean came out in public on this because he is from the most tech of tech companies, Microsoft. "The best thing that we in the tech industry can do is recognize and take to heart exactly why RSS is successful and do everything in our power to make sure that we don't mess with that." Now, I'd love to hear what Apple has to say in response.  

David Galbraith: Outline style blogging. "Non outline style blogging leads to the type of writing where you feel compelled to make every post a mini essay. This is bad for both writers and readers -- since most people don't want to read essays about everything and most bloggers don't really want to write essays about everything." Bing! 

New header graphic, outside the Belkin booth at MacWorld Expo in SF, earlier this month. 

Essay: "Dissing your competitor on a personal level makes you look like a loser." 

A command-line podcatcher written in Ruby. You give it a subscription list in OPML and it downloads the enclosures in the RSS files it points to. 

Tom Foremski: "Yes, the publishing industry is indeed, the new technology industry." 

An important point not to miss: weblogs are publications. Bloggers are therefore publishers. Any innovation that comes from blogs comes from publishing. The reason the distinction is important is that publishers have a fundamentally different view of the world than tech companies. I'm still working on trying to characterize it. One thing is for sure, the tech industry takes a dim view of this kind of thinking. Why? They look at publishing as "user generated content" and authors as "the long tail" (with them as the head of course). They see themselves as the makers of the money, and us as the laborers of love. That for sure is a flawed way of viewing the world, defintely a loop the tech industry is in, one that the publishing industry should not continue to support.  

The podcatcher of my dreams 

I've finally got the podcatcher I've always wanted. Every night while I'm sleeping it downloads all the enclosures from the previous days' feeds and presents them to me in a list that I can scroll through. Every line with an uparrow is an audio program I can listen to immediately, even if my laptop is disconnected from the Internet (for a ride on BART for example, or a commute by car) because it's already on my hard drive. No flashy graphics, and I don't miss them. I know, some people think podcasting is about the eye candy, but I'd much rather have an executive summary I can skim, and then go right to the audio. To me, it's like having my own personal morning news show. Amazing difference, it's like blogging for the ears, finally.