Thursday, February 16, 2006

Essay: What's rotten about tech conferences. 

Ernie the Attorney: Dave Matthews, Jimmy Buffet, Paul Simon, Keith Urban and Bob Dylan at the New Orleans Jazz Fest, April 28-30 and May 5-7. 

WSJ: Amazon Plans Music Service To Rival iPod. 

Firefox started misbehaving, so I thought -- let's go download a fresh install. Guess what's waiting for me: no choice but to install the Google Toolbar. Remember what they said about their hack, if you don't like it, don't install it. Well, there it is. Where's the choice now. Back then I couldn't get anyone to listen. Letting Google modify our content to add links to their sites was a very bad idea then, now maybe others get that too? Now that they're doing it for the Chinese censors. Why do you guys trust Google so much. They're a corporation; they'll do whatever they have to do to make money, do you think the integrity of your writing is even the smallest little issue for them? I don't. Now here I am and so are you. Someday you'll have to run the Google Toolbar. Today I don't have to, I can accept a misbehaving browser, or I can learn how to uninstall it after the fact (good luck, I still have some Google crap from the Desktop Search product that I can't uninstall), or switch to another browser, or back to Windows. At least Microsoft isn't fucking with my integrity (and yours) the way Google is. 

Follow-up, that was an adware site which I got to through Google. Actually makes it even worse. Google behaves more and more like a spammer. And trust has value too. Microsoft tried to get us to use Passport after they had been caught killing Netscape. No one would trust them after they became an outlaw company. So when you push the limits of the trust of your users, eventually it does cost your shareholders. Something for Google's board to think about.  

I've started to listen to WAMU, the NPR station in DC. I've gotten tired of WBUR, the same old people, same endless pledge drive. I also like WAMU because they have Diane Rehm. She's so good she could be a blogger.  

I'm starting to get a new release of the OPML Editor together, as part of the release I asked Andre Radke to prepare a download for the kernel source. The OPML Editor is an open source app, licensed under the GPL. There is a developer's mail list and a Sourceforge project, but I wanted to get a single place to download a snapshot of the source on the last release of the OPML Editor, and this is it.  

Ed Vielmetti helped me when I was first exploring the web in 1994 and 1995. When web hosting was a mystery to me, he gave me some space on his server so I could experiment with the beginnings of content management on my side. It's interesting to watch him explore the world of outline-based blogging. And it was just in this last week that the OPML equivalent of weblogs.com started reaching a critical mass, when you'd go there during the day and often see that 10 interesting blogs had updated. I told Amyloo in her chatroom hack that by the end of March there would be 100, and then 500 and so on. OPML has the feeling of something that has taken root and is growing on its own.  

Yesterday I wrote "The pros have gotten lazy, they only take the stories fed to them." I got a bit of pushback, via email, from pros who think that there might be exceptions to that rule. Yeah there might be, but they're rare, and too much is made of them. It's been a long time since a political leader has been brought down by an investigative reporter, and god knows there have been plenty worth bringing down. We routinely get stories in the blogosphere that we can't get the pros to run with. Why? Yeah, sometimes they generate their own stories, but when do they generate one that bucks conventional wisdom? When do they inform us about what's really going on? When don't they just chip at the edges? When do they have the guts to explain how things really work? The answer -- it never happens. And for every rare heroic act there is also the reporter who is on the payroll of his or her source. So, yeah, I stand by the statement. The pros are lazy, they aren't doing their job. Wish it weren't so. 

One year ago today: "There are business guys who think a good deal is one where they make all the money and you make none." 

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