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Startup School, April 29, Stanford University.
Dennis Forbes: Interesting Facts About Domain Names. Jason Calicanis says he's "ripping off" my style, which is totally okay, and I especially appreciate that he credits me. Perhaps he should use an outliner to write his blog? That could make him even more prolific. One of my many mottos of the past is "Only steal from the best." When you use someone else's idea that's the ultimate sign of respect. But it's important to say who you're stealing from, because they're the best, right?
Steve Gillmor is thankful for many things. BrainJams New Orleans: "On May 4th we are going to bring the best of Web 2.0 to the New Orleans small business community in what could be one of the biggest Unconferences of the year." Somehow I think he knew I'd link to this cartoon. Paul Boutin tries to figure out what Web 2.0 means, and comes to the conclusion it's just the Internet. Apparently BART crashed last night. (Not a train crash, a software crash.) They say all the good domains are taken, but in my experience none of them are.
News.com interview with Guy Kawasaki about Apple at 30. The second of Niall Kennedy's SF Tech Sessions is tonight at the St Francis Hotel, 7-9PM. Steve Gillmor: "This concludes the GestureBank Q&A." 3/29/05: "It's not the shape, it's how you shake it."
Steve Ballmer: "I've got my kids brainwashed: You don't use Google, and you don't use an iPod." Lifehacker: "FeedBlendr is a web based RSS feed aggregator that pulls all of your favorite RSS feeds into one aggregate feed." Podfeed does something similar, for podcasts. HotelChatter: Worst Wifi Hotels for 2006. My father has a very popular Flickr picture, it's been viewed over 7000 times. There was lots of pickup on the idea of an unconference on unconferences. I was surprised to find that the podcasting page on Wikipedia now more or less tells an accurate story of the development of the technology. What they mostly omit, however, is the development of the art, and the key roles of Steve Gillmor's, Doug Kaye's and my own early podcasts. But I'm glad to see Chris Lydon get the credt he deserves. He really was the first one to do a series of podcasts, with his 2003 blogger interviews.
Today's a travel day -- expect light posting. 11PM Eastern: Arrived safely in NY. Easy flight. Checking in from Terminal 3 at SFO. Excellent TMobile wifi. TechCrunch report on Evoca, a new podcasting web app that appears to have it all, and can record Skype calls. Jeremy Zawodny asks for ideas for evolving Yahoo Groups. Jared Russell says "no way" to the idea of Second Life as a new operating system. He's right, I have no idea what lies beneath the Second Life user interface, my main point was that the next platform is likely to look entirely different from the Mac/Windows user interface, and to think creatively about what comes next. Scoble says Second Life is an OS. He makes a convincing case. But will Microsoft port Windows to run inside it? That's not actually a joke. Hotel Chatter: Best Wifi Hotels for 2006. Here's a cheat sheet we came up with for BloggerCon III that explains how unconferences work. "We don't have speakers, panels or an audience. We do have discussions and sessions, and each session has a discussion leader." I'd like to do an unconference for people who do conferences. The topic? How to improve conferences, to make them more valuable to the people who participate, to actually enable problem solving, moving the discussion from the hallways into the conference room. A discussion about unconferences may be developing at Matthew Ingram's blog. One year ago, an interesting discussion about Feedburner. Not sure if the issues were resolved. Richard MacManus and Phillip Pearson started blogging around the same time, four years ago, as did Paolo Valdemarin.
The nine-year aniversary of Scripting News is coming up, a week from yesterday. It started on April Fools Day in 1997. Rex Hammock on recovery efforts in Pass Christian, MS. I visited the area in December and took pictures. Mini-Microsoft on last week's bad news and Microsoft's reliance on Scoble to communicate with bloggers, among other topics. It seems from reading Karl Martino and Jeff Jarvis, that yesterday's unconference in Philadelphia was a success. Fighting a cold this week, it kept coming and going until I started taking massive doses of Vitamin C. Knocked the cold down and brought on a nice feeling of health.
Thanks for four years of great blogging, Paolo. I know some people are going to give you shit for that post, but it always felt to me that your blog was written just for me. When talking about an unconference, I find it's helpful to consciously stop myself from using the term "attendee," replacing it with "participant." Love the way this Memeorandum bit came out with the reduced Second Life snippet in the margin. Over on Megite they associated the picture of Bob Hope hitting the road with the OS bit. Last night's movie was Confederate States of America. I didn't really like it that much, most of the jokes were spoiled by an NPR segment I heard a couple of weeks ago. Went with Sylvia, she really liked it, so don't go by what I say. CSA begins with a quote from George Bernard Shaw. "If you are going to tell people the truth, you'd better make them laugh. Otherwise they'll kill you."
Jeff Jarvis blogs from an unconference in Philadelphia on the future of news. Rafat Ali snaps a pic of Barry Diller at a cupcake shop. Amy's 17-year-old son is planning a "virility festival." When I'm feeling down I'll just remember that Scripting News is Amanda Congdon's favorite weblog. Wow. Lifehacker advice on hitch-hiking. I've done a fair amount in my younger days. Here's my number one tip. If possible, ask to be let off at a rest area. Then, if you have the chutzpah, walk up to people and ask if they could give you a ride. This gives you a chance to size them up and it's hard to say no to a person, where it's easy to drive by a guy on the side of the road. Also people feel better after a little rest, and are more likely to give you a chance. NY Times: "A 24-year-old blogger for The Washington Post, Ben Domenech, resigned yesterday after being confronted with evidence that he had plagiarized articles in other publications." Niall Kennedy: "I am in west Los Angeles today and dropped by theOffice, a community workspace serving the professional writing community of Santa Monica."
Steve Gillmor: The Allchin Tax Cut. tvRSS just got a major upgrade. BitTorrent, RSS and TV. This is a really big deal. It's time for all aggregators to learn how to do BT.
Lifehacker: How to get happy. Odeo says podcasting pays. "People want to listen to good stuff! And they'll even pay for it!" The power went out today so I snuck out to the movies and saw Inside Man, which was super-good. I especially liked Jodie Foster as the borderline-evil arranger.
According to David Richards, an unbelievable 60 percent of the Windows Vista code is going to be rewritten before it ships. It's unbelievable because if it's true, there's no way it's shipping in 2007. If true it's not just a setback, it's a multi-billion-dollar debacle on the scale of Apple's Copland (which, if you recall, resulted in regime change). Basically until someone from Microsoft confirms this, I'd give it zero credence. I've said before that I believe RSS is going to embrace and extend Microsoft, not vice versa. I'm sure Microsoft doesn't accept this. But the longer they delay, the more it will cost them in leadership. Who are the three men and what are they smiling about? Salon: A portrait of the blogger as a young plagiarist.
Dan Farber: Craig Newmark's modest anti-spam proposal. Bill says to Mike, you better sit down, I got some bad news. Some rational thoughts on A-list blogging. Like this. "Every A-Lister could stop blogging at once and the blogosphere will continue on." You bet it would. Wouldn't it be interesting if every certified A-lister, by convention, didn't blog during the third week of every month. What if that idea caught on? Heh. That might be a mind bomb, right there. MAKE Mag's OPML of their feeds. Viewed in our grazer. Le blog de Jean-Louis Gassee. Fred Wilson's favorite business model: "Give your service away for free, possibly ad supported but maybe not, acquire a lot of customers very efficiently through word of mouth, referral networks, organic search marketing, etc, then offer premium priced value added services or an enhanced version of your service to your customer base." Jacob Reider sends pointer to docs for a Wiki that has an XML-RPC interface. Britannica responds to Nature on Wikipedia. BBC: Apple attacks plan to open iTunes. Om Malik: Meet Ajax Write. TechCrunch: Jigsaw is a Really, Really Bad Idea. Don't forget to feed the meter
Can you come up with a creative caption for this picture? Wired: How France is saving civilization. Amen. Jon Udell explores Amazon's S3 network storage system. And Matt Croydon is backing up his Flickr pics to S3. People ask why. Because it's interop. It's a blade of grass popping through the ground, certain to be followed by many more. The next blades will be more useful. David Berlind expands on the possible connection between OPML and wikis. Phil Jones found an XML-RPC interface for a wiki, not the MetaWeblog API, though. Steve Rubel notes that the Kremlin supports RSS. Sometimes, rarely, Valleywag has me in stitches.
News.com: Who Microsoft invites to a "conversation" Three years ago today: "Microsoft doesn't really exist to give customers what they want, the harsh truth is that they exist to keep employing more Microsoft people." Thoughts from Sunday's CyberSalon I'm having lunch today with Sylvia to talk about Sunday's CyberSalon. Here are some of my notes. I sat in the front row, an unusual place for me to sit, but it allowed me to pass a note to John Markoff, technology reporter for the NY Times, who was one of the panelists. My note said "It doesn't have to be adversarial." He wrote a response, which wasn't public, so I won't include it here, but a productive discussion followed, and a handshake, and we're having lunch next week in San Francisco. If I had a chance to rewrite the note, I might have said -- It mustn't be adversarial, between us, because we already have a mutual adversary, the Executive Branch of the U.S. government, who would, if they could, completely disempower the press, and control the flow of information to the populace. Anyone who's paying attention in 2006 needs to be concerned about this. I think our concern has morphed to ambivalence, because we all feel so powerless to do anything about it. But what if we combined resources, saw ourselves as part of the same effort, with the same goal, to improve the flow of information to the citizens, to counter the negative efforts of the government. I have a sneaky feeling that money would start flowing again, while our attention was focused on our mission, and if we looked at each other, pro and amateur, less like adversaries, and more like allies.
We're not going to get anywhere by calling each other wrong, there's been finger-pointing both ways, and I've done it myself at times, and I've got to remind myself that it's not constructive. The pros have often erred by being dismissive of the bloggers, but maybe we're getting past that. They now tend to see the problem as economic -- that Craig's List is eating into their revenue. But there's a balancing opportunity. Some, perhaps not many, of the people reading Craig's List, share the passion for informaiton and democracy that a good idealistic reporter does, and will do it for love, not money. I believe the vast amount of editorial writing will be done for no money. This isn't really new, after all, the publications don't pay their sources -- and that's ultimately where the information comes from, right?
NY Times: "Microsoft's said that its new Windows operating system would not be ready for consumer personal computers for the holiday sales season." Mini-Microsoft: "Oy. Oy. Oy."
Bruno Pedro has a tool that converts an OPML file into wiki-formattted text. Donald Knuth, famous comp sci prof and book author at Stanford, doesn't have an email address, according to News.com. "You wake up, start answering email and the next thing you know it's noon." I know the feeling. He's also the #1 Don on Google. Phil, thanks for listening, no sarcasm. Scott Rosenberg: "Web 2.0 sometimes seems in imminent danger of collapsing in a heap of cutesiness, obscurity and alphabetical anarchy." OPML to Wiki? How long will it be before there's a wiki that supports the MetaWeblog API? A quick search on Google indicates that it might already have happened. Anyway, send me a pointer to such a wiki, and I'll try to get the OPML Editor working with it. If there are problems, I'll document them, and when they're fixed, I'll try again. There's absolutely no reason that you shouldn't be able to edit wiki-text using an outliner, and I bet it would be pretty useful. Phil Jones part 2 Another very interesting narrative about my software strategies by Phil Jones. 1. He's figured some of it out, and he's trying, and that I appreciate. 2. I'm not at war. I'm not trying to defeat the Semantic Web, and I like wikis. You're not going to figure me out with warfare analogies, because 3. I only fight when people try to turn the clock back, because that's the weakness of, the thing I hate most about the tech industry. 4. And he allows me enough pride so I can respond. Many of the people who comment about my work say I'm stupid, or a bad person, and I'm neither, and I won't encourage such discourse by honoring it with a response. As soon as it gets personal, that's when I walk out of the (virtual) room. I wrote a longer piece last night, but that's basically what it says. A Microsoft-run blogging conf?
I'm not at their blogging conference this week, but some honorable folk from the tech blogging community are. I wonder if they're having a session on Fact-checking Your Ass. Did you ever see the Sprint commercial with the guy sitting behind the desk in front of a top-floor skyscraper window, explaining how he's using his cell phone to Stick It To The Man. His assistant, a Smithers type, says, But you are The Man. He responds, "I know." So you're sticking it to yourself? Big pause. Maybe. In other words, there's something weird and funny about a Microsoft-run blogging conference. There's something not very blogging about it. Hmmm.
New features in the OPML Editor this morning. New commands in the right-click menu to add a feed (grazing), or, if experimental OPML 2.0 support is enabled, add an inclusion.
Scott Rosenberg on last night's CyberSalon. Save the Merc? Dan Gillmor suggests that Yahoo might be the white knight to save the San Jose Mercury News. I would support community involvement in saving the Mercury News, if the Mercury News would become a pioneer in community journalism. There are hundreds of thousands of potential journalists in the South Bay who could cover every school board, zoning commission, shareholder meeting. They could report on housing prices and gas prices, traffic patterns and other quality of life issues. How about helping us understand why mass transit doesn't better serve the area. Integrate the South Bay universities, which include some of the best in the world, with the communities. A newly configured Mercury News would include daily reports from sister publications in Bangalore and Shanghai. This is how news will work in the 21st Century. The South Bay would become one of the best-served metro areas in the US, after being one of the worst. I don't know very many people who feel fondness for the Mercury News. I lived in the their geography for 24 years, I never subscribed. I read the paper occasionally when I went out for breakfast, but I was raised on New York's newspapers, and in comparison the Merc is strictly second tier, if that. To get people excited enough to rally behind it, they're going to have to do something exciting. How to How to make money on the Internet v2.0: "If journalists won't write from a users' perspective, what's to stop the users from becoming journalists?"
Photos from the Berkeley CyberSalon. AutoLink in a nutshell One year ago today: "Danny O'Brien, writing on an O'Reilly site rants at and about me, and my position on Google's AutoLink. He quotes me saying things I'm quite sure I never said, and don't agree with, and then proceeds to make fun of me for saying these things that I didn't say, and he discredits the ideas behind the quotes, and not surprisingly he wins the argument -- that he's having with himself!" "The irony is that the debate is about Google changing what people say." Who is Phil Jones?
In the comments on Hugh MacLeod's blog post about me turning down god because I was too busy with RSS, he says: "Dave didn't invent RSS. Nor does he claim to. Go listen to the NerdTV interview he did with Robert Cringely where he explicitly says he realized that (to paraphrase) the second mover 'makes' the standard, and so he threw away his own syndication format to support Netscape's RSS." That's true -- and an important consideration that most people don't seem to understand. In the world of standards the second-mover is the decision-maker, the first-mover is at the second guy's mercy. In the case of simple syndication formats, Netscape was the second mover, they blew off my earlier work. So I decided that I could either sulk about it, or do the powerful thing. Of course I did the powerful thing. I added all the features of their format to mine, which they responded to (as I thought they would) by adding all the features of my format to theirs. At that point, I had what I wanted, I put a bullet in the head of my format, and made RSS my cause. Invention here is hardly the issue. What matters is adoption and forward motion. The smart people in this space do what smart people do everywhere, they listen, think, learn and adapt, like Jones is doing. The idiots rule the roost though, it's very hard to hear the intellect through all the honking and barking and ruckus that the idiots make. (Not talking about Hugh, his contribution is satire, and that's always welcome. If you can't laugh at yourself you break.) Shane I watched Shane last night, rented from Netflix. It's really dated, kind of hard to watch because the acting is so bad, and the mid-20th century actors look so out of place in 19th-century Wyoming. But it was worth watching to understand what Nick Carr was saying about the place the blogosphere might be at.
Shane, played by Alan Ladd, is a gunslinger for the farmers. The movie builds to a showdown with the hired gunslinger for the ranchers, played by a young Jack Palance. Ladd wins (of course, I'm giving nothing away) and the farmers take over, for now. But when you drive around in this part of the country today you don't see many farms, the land is too poor for farming and the summers too short. I think the ranchers eventually did win the argument, which kind of undermines the plot of Shane and the story that Nick Carr told. After writing this, I re-read Carr's piece, and it's funnier than ever. Carr is a great writer and thinker. I hope to meet him some day and shake his hand. State of the blogosphere The question of whether my retirement has any significance for the blogosphere is likely to come up tonight at the well-timed CyberSalon, with a variety of different panelists with a variety of views of the staying power and utility of the blogosphere. Me, I'm tired, and I don't enjoy being the the go-to guy for snarky folk who try to improve their page-rank by leading idiotic tirades about their supposed insights into my character. I want to enjoy the ability to plan and think before my would-be competitors have a chance to position themselves to grab the fruits of my labor. Too much transparency can be a hindrance, so I'm looking for less of that, and more fun, and more options. Me, I'm thinking fiction might be fun. I'm thinking about dialog, and how a novel is a continuum, and a bunch of short stories hanging off a tree, and a few diversions to keep the reader on his or her toes. I'm thinking about the craft of writing in ways I've never done before. I also see that much of what happens in the tech and publishing world happens "off-blog." This week I had a bunch of meetings, in San Diego, Berkeley and San Francisco, none of which were blogged, by myself or the people I was meeting with. Did they care about the looney tunes world that the tech blogosphere has become? Not one bit. At the two conferences I've participated in recently, Under the Radar and PC Forum, after a long absence from tech conferences (Gnomedex last summer was the previous one, and that was an exceptional event for me) that absence does make the heart grow fonder. So by taking a hike and working on my health and learning some new crafts, and working offstage more and more, I hope to evoke more fondness, smiles and hugs, and less lies, sneers and dishonesty. If we've learned anything about humanity, is that it's really good at closing ranks, filling gaps, and moving on. If a famous reporter were to retire, some young dude would come along and take his place, maybe three or four. In the competitive landscape that comes after a big tree falls, comes fresh thinking, as I hope to bring fresh perspectives to my next pursuits. And freshness is good. For me, writing here is becoming stale, I'm energized by the idea of new frontiers, new holes to dig and then fill in and dig again.
Reminder: CyberSalon, tomorrow, in Berkeley. Chris Pirillo: "Just as a Web browser interprets HTML, there will be a new range of products -- both Web-based and on your desktop -- that will support and parse this strange new OPML thingy for you." 0xDECAFBAD: "Why don't we have a Xanadu web run on Lisp serving up perfect, crystalline RDF?" Dowbrigade reports on a new Internet scam that involves cashing counterfeit checks.
Movie: Train pulling into BART station. Last year on this day: Surfers in a roiling Atlantic. Three years ago: "I've arrived in Cambridge. Rarin to go!" The Web Innovators Group of Boston will meet on Monday at the Hotel at MIT. Eirepreneur defines a "feed grazer" as an "OPML browser and an RSS reader in one." Just FYI, the directory browser that's built into the OPML Community Server has this feature. The next header graphic. I can't wait to use this pic cribbed from a picture of the beach in Florida, but I have to let the railroad crossing run for a few more days. Tom Morris: "I'm surprised that nobody has done anything Web 2.0-ish with the humble discussion forum." TechCrunch will have an awards party, mid-year, too big for Mike's house. Amen to that. How about Candlestick? Okay, seriously, there's a new Four Seasons in Palo Alto. Spicy Noodles for 10,000. Ben Barren may win the award for best list of possible (funny) TechCrunch awards. I am an animated inventor.
Phil Jones: "The entire history of computer science can be interpretted as one long war between pragmatic tool builders and idealistic format / process builders." Mike Arrington notes that the NY Times is linking to the discussion on Scripting News from Esther's op-ed piece. That's pretty coooool!
ComputerWorld: New Orleans' Wi-Fi network now a lifeline. Mary Hodder: 400 skydivers in tandem. I've been emailing with David Berlind who is in the hospital recovering from back surgery yesterday, apparently it was successful and he's getting better. Best wishes to David and his family. I missed this bit about a speech given by retired Supreme Court justice Sandra Day O'Connor, warning of "dictatorship" in the United States. It was mentioned at the end of the first hour of the Diane Rehm show this morning. Dan MacTough: "The buzz-o-meter on OPML browsers is off the charts right now." New header graphic. A railroad crossing in northwest Wisconsin, photographed on 8/29/04. Dave Johnson experiments with the Microsoft Feeds API, and finds they've made some unusual choices, which may not be good for interop. The solution of course is to parse the XML yourself, and it's definitely not too late for the community to provide the equivalent of the Microsoft toolkit, if perhaps the community can discuss such a thing without flaming out. Looking for Mr Goodmail
Daniel Dreymann, co-founder of Goodmail, checks in. "Most leading vendors have already signed up with Goodmail to make it a standard feature on their MTAs." I asked if they have filed for or received patents. Dreymann said: "We do have intellectual property here but we provide software libraries for implementing the sending side and libraries for the receiving side -- all free of charge to interested MTA implementers." Sounds like they do have patents. Okay, that's a reason it might not work. MTA is an acronym for Mail Transfer Agent.
Congrats to John Furrier who raised $5.5 million to fund his Podtech podcasting venture. This was a surprise, but a nice one. John is a member of the Web 2.0 Workgroup, as am I, he's got lots of friends in the community.
Sylvia: "Geniuses are not only supposed to be innovative thinkers -- the ones who come up with new memes, technologies, and art -- they're also supposed to be kind and loving to competitors, thieves, ex wives, and assholes." It took a couple of days for the brilliance of the continuity in the Sopranos to catch up with me. It's been two years since the last episode, and instead of picking up where they left off, the characters have gone on while the show wasn't being aired. So now Uncle Junior is completely demented, Tony has a newborn niece, and his marriage with Carmella is repaired. We have no clue how any of this happened, but there it is. While on the subject of the Sopranos, I noticed something about the picture on the website. Who's the guy in the middle? I thought I knew all the characters. And who's not in the picture! Without wanting to spoil it for those who haven't seen this season's opener, remember what it leaves unresolved. Are they using the website to give us a clue as to the resolution? It's like Kremlinology. And where was the picture taken? Does that look like a funeral home to you? It's been a while since I commented on ads in RSS feeds, but don't you think the signal-to-noise ratio is a little low in this Economist feed? Another low signal-to-noise ratio feed. This is why I think of Nick Bradbury as a stand-up guy. Sometimes to do the right thing you have to say something.
PaidContent reports that Netscape.Com is coming back as a Digg-like site, with Jason Calacanis at the head. OPML innovation I noted that the first item in the Grazr demo is the outline of past DaveNet essays. I wondered if people were aware that the archive of Scripting News is also available in OPML There are several ways to access it. First, you can browse it in HTML, or as OPML, or in any OPML-compatible app, like Grazr for example. Here's today's Scripting News, viewed in the OPML browser. Interesting, no? I hope other people will be able to use this in their demos. An aha waiting? Now you might see this blog in a new way. Scripting News is just an OPML browser. One of many ways to browse hierarchies. No parking meter They don't have parking meters in the mountains outside Salt Lake City, Utah; but they do have signs that advise you not to litter. Click on the pic to get the joke.
Unfortunately, there's another controversy with Rogers Cadenhead. He asked to handle this matter privately and using attorneys, both of which I agreed to. Then he apparently changed his mind, and published my attorney's letter to him. Grazr is a Javascript-based OPML browser that can be included dynamically in web pages. Marc Canter says "aggregate." People have pointed out that there's more than one level of irony in yesterday's post about Identity Woman. Retirement roundup Since I've been at a conference the last two days, I haven't had enough time to follow all the discussion about my decision to stop blogging. This morning I got up very early, ready to fly back to the Bay Area, and had some time to wade through the commentary and had some comments, since I am still blogging. Several essays stood out as thoughtful, interesting, original, and had elements of truth to them, imho, that were unique. Nick Carr: Once upon a time in the west. I've never seen Shane, but I will. I like the imagery. Even now some friends send me emails saying I should fight. I thought I said pretty clearly that I'm not fighting. You want a fight, you do it. I gave at the office. Some people have characterized my post as a suicide note, and that's correct, it is a suicide note. Let me explain. There's a virtual Dave and a real one. Here, you're reading the virtual one. Some people hate this guy, some people love him. Lots of people invent new features of this guy, that are so different from the real guy that if the real guy met the other people's version of the virtual guy, he would line up to punch him in the nose too. Over time, this duality has gotten further off track to the point where people come up to the real guy in restaurants and shake the virtual guy's hand. People threaten to hurt the virtual guy, and mistakenly hit the real guy. The real guy has serious health issues and has to take care of himself, and everyone who reads this blog knows this, yet they still create huge battles with the guy, and otherwise considerate people stand by and watch and do nothing. Eventually the real guy decided enough of this bullshit. I just want to be the real guy. When I started blogging it was all about creating a platform for people to be real. Well if I have to live up to your fantasies to be able to blog, I quit. Maybe there's still some life left in the real guy. This is not meant to make you feel sad, or guilty or miss me or anything else. This isn't about you. It never was about you. When you read other people's blogs, think about that. They're not writing about you, they're writing about them. The real Dave won't stop writing, btw. The virtual Dave is going to stop. Bye-bye. See y'all later. So Nick, I'll watch Shane, for sure, but another movie whose plot may be like this story is Heaven Can Wait. If you like reading the real Dave, be prepared to play the role Julie Christie played. If a stranger walks up to you and asks to buy you a cup of coffee, you might want to say yes.
Scoble: "I'm getting fat but I'm fat and happy." Identity Woman, whose alter-ego is sitting next to me at PC Forum, is hosting an identity conference in Mountain View, May 1-3. I just signed up for Amazon S3. Here are the docs. There doesn't appear to be a web app that allows you to upload a file to try it out? I really wish they had an XML-RPC interface, if they did, I could start programming it right away, since they don't have sample code for my environment. It seems that XML-RPC would get them support for all the environments, not just the ones they say are most popular. No matter what, I'm going to try programming against the SOAP interface.
9/12/99: "The purpose of XML-RPC is to end once and for all, the idea that there can or should be one operating system for all. No more über-operating systems, and no press releases claiming über-ness!" Colin Faulkingham: "Amazon S3 supports BitTorrent, it will create and seed your object (file)." Bing! That's one of this year's game-changers. Google bought Sketchup, 3-D software. Nicco Mele: "The bill is designed to (a) protect bloggers and online political activity and (b) open large loop-holes in campaign finance law." BBC: "Bullies are increasingly using the internet to terrorise teenagers outside of school, a survey suggests." Gabe Rivera's new memetracker, "Automatic Dirt Digger." No one guessed who the guy with the jacket on his head is. For 10 bonus points, why was the jacket on his head? Use the comments on the Flickr pic to post your ideas. TechCrunch: "Move over Google Drive, Amazon just stole your thunder (for now)."
Hugh MacLeod: "I remember when God asked me..." Scott Karp: "If Dave abandoned Scripting News and started a new blog with a new name, would it be fundamentally different from Scripting News, even if it was still Dave? I think the answer is yes." Kevin Burton announces a River of News view of the TailRank story flow. The 2006 weblog awards were presented in Austin today. Identity gurus hang out on the patio, catching some sun, talking politics. Guess who the guy with the coat draped over his head is. Kim Cameron from Microsoft said there isn't much chance that they'll disinvite Tim O'Reilly to Mix 06, but he might be able to talk Bill Gates into apologizing for inviting him, before Tim comes out on stage. I said I'd pay to see that! One of this afternoon's presenters is bitty.com. Sounds very interesting. News.com: "VeriSign announced Monday that it plans to acquire Kontiki for $62 million, in a move to enter the broadband content services market." This is an interesting and unexpected acquisition. Mike Graves from VeriSign is here in Carlsbad, I'll ask him what's up with this deal. Yahoo: "It's a spiffy-looking module you display on your website to show off your series rating on Yahoo! Podcasts and encourage your listeners to rate and review your show on Yahoo!" Reporting from the PC Forum conference.
One of the things that came up is Goodmail. They asked for a show of hands of those who like it and those who don't. No clear consensus. I said I like it. I don't get what the argument is against it. Seems like it would totally clear out the biggest abusers of spam. What's the problem? Pictures of Monday's opening session. Todd Cochrane at Geek News is a long-time Movable Type user. He isn't happy with how the product is evolving. The first comment is from Jay Allen, from Six Apart, the company that makes the product. Interesting back and forth between a customer and a vendor. It's great to have the Sopranos back. The season opener was surprising, even for a show that's often filled with surprises. Old folks boogie Last night's dinner was pretty fantastic. They've changed something at PC Forum, the first night used to be the speaker's dinner, but apparently not any more. The buffet was absolutely first class, I ate lamb, paella, a wonderful spinach dish, lots of great conversation, glad to see friends I hadn't seen in some cases in 15 or 20 years! We've all aged, quite visibly, but it's cool to reconnect after so long. Even the old rivalries have faded as the former powerhouses are either gone or faded (Lotus, Microsoft, Ashton-Tate, AOL, Sun, Oracle, etc). I spent a long time talking with Bret Fausett, who Mike Arrington describes as the "Dave Winer of ICANN." Brett is a longtime Scripting News reader, who I had never met face to face, but whose blog I read regularly, and whose circles have regularly intersected mine over the years. Not surprisingly we had a lot to talk about, and had both figured a lot of the same things out. Now if we could just get everyone else on the same page! Sat next to Jeremy Allaire from Brightcove, and confirmed that I do understand that they're seriously re-inventing television in the context of the Internet. And while I missed Esther's opening remarks, people say that there were a lot of ideas from the Unconferences manifesto in her talk. She's going to try to include the audience more in the discussion. It's good to see she's feeling the influence, but I think they could go farther, faster, by having a session or two that's done totally unconference-style, to give the community (she has one too, even though the talk here is of other communities) the experience. This would give everyone a data point to think about in the coming year, the minds could accomplish a lot, with the information and the time. It's been ten years since I was at a PC Forum, and while the onstage conversation is as ungrounded as ever, the place is humming, there's thriving going on, once again. I came back last, at the height of the dotcom mania, to find the river was flowing somewhere else. It was quiet here, not many people, not very much to talk about, and what was being talked about seemed to be covered better elsewhere. Today, more than ever it's the social events that are the pulse, and luckily we have a lot to talk about, and old friendships to renew. It's a sweet event, so far, and that's a surprise, a pleasant one. Why I will stop blogging I can do it, folks, I have already, in some sense, stopped one of my rivers, and soon, probably before the end of 2006, I will put this site in mothballs, in archive mode, and go on to other things, Murphy-willing of course. It's been a long time coming. When I started blogging, depending on how you look at it, either in 1994, 1996 or 1997, I had different goals, and happily the goals have been accomplished. Billions of Websites now no longer seems an outrageously ambitious goal. We're pretty close to a billion, I suspect. The goal was also to create tools that would make it easy for everyone to have a site, and then more specifically a chronological one. That's done. I wanted programming to turn upside down, to have the Internet be the platform instead of Microsoft and Apple. That worked too. APIs on web apps are now commonplace, and a basis for comparison between offerings. While user interfaces have gotten better, of course, there's been a steady flow of new ideas in how my work connects with yours, and vice versa, and we're doing it without a platform vendor controlling it. I wanted decentralized news. We can do for ourselves what the pros haven't been doing. And politics -- I don't doubt that the House of Representatives will be filled with bloggers, if not in 2006, then surely in 2008. There's no turning back on any of it. The 20th Century is fading and the new century is going strong. There really was a big shift as the calendar rolled over, and I'm totally glad to be a part of it. So there's the first part of my reason. Blogging doesn't need me anymore. It'll go on just as well, maybe even better, with some new space opened up for some new things. But more important to me, there will be new space for me. Blogging not only takes a lot of time (which I don't begrudge it, I love writing) but it also limits what I can do, because it's made me a public figure. I want some privacy, I want to matter less, so I can retool, and matter more, in different ways. What those ways are, however, are things I won't be talking about here. That's the point. That's the big reason why.
Randall Stross: "Wikipedia's reputation and internal editorial process would benefit by having a single authority vouch for the quality of a given article."
An ex-Googler wonders why anyone buys Google stock at the current price. It's not really a mystery. They do it because they hope to be able to sell it at a higher price, later. Mike Arrington: Flickr has some catching up to do. It was 1983 I had a dream last night. It was so vivid, so real, a little on the nightmarish side, with a premise from science fiction. Somehow I had been transported back to 1983. I was at an Apple event, and there was Young Steve Jobs, with a full head of hair, talking with reporters, but not in a huge auditorium, in a room that looked like a high school gymnasium, kind of a user's group meeting. He was defensive, talking about the Apple ][, and the reporters were on his tail, hassling him, looking for defensive quotes to fit into what were sure to be stories about the death of his company.
The dream didn't end there, it dragged on and on, my subconscious apparently was interested in how life would work if all I had in my wallet were about $100 in cash and credit cards with expiration dates like 2007 and 2008. It was pretty difficult to make a go of it, as a homeless person with almost no money. The place I live in, in Berkeley hadn't been built yet, nor had my car, my cellphone didn't work, and if I could find the younger version of myself in 1983, even if I could convince him that I was a relative of his, he was fairly broke then and wouldn't have been able to help me out much. And then all the different people and places got to be too much, and I drifted off into some other place, or woke up, or whatever.
Chicago Tribune: "It's easy to track America's covert operatives, all you need to know is how to navigate the Internet." Nik Cubrilovic reviews Dabble DB. One of the most significant demos at Under the Radar. FileMaker for 2006, running as an AJAX web app. What Office Live should have been. Marc Canter had BBQ in Austin and found a new anthem. I'm with him, I'm providing tools for people who eat BBQ, pay taxes, educate the next generation of kids, elect Congress and the President, and decide if the rest of us can live the way we want to. If we want to stay free we have to learn how to listen. March 2006 tech conference season If you see Hugh Forrest at SXSW tell him I say hi, and I'd love to meet him someday, and I offer my services for SXSW 2007, as I do every year. Maybe one of these years they'd be willing to let me talk with their community on stage, because it's the same community, Hugh. Why don't we cut the distance and go direct. Who's telling you I can't speak from the SXSW stage. I can't figure it out. I was talking with Mike Arrington yesterday about Microsoft's upcoming web conference, Mix 06. The same people who spoke at Etech are speaking there, as at SXSW, even though the Microsoft people told me straight out that it was going to be Microsoft people talking to developers (which made me think it was not a conference I wanted to go to). Then last week I found out that lots of people I know who don't work at Microsoft are speaking there, and to my surprise, that includes Mike. (He says he assumed I was part of the program.) I felt so wronged, why do they lie about these things, don't they know eventually they'll get caught in the lies, or don't they care. (BTW, that includes Scoble too, I asked why he didn't give me a heads up, and the answer was unsatisfying.) I did a lot of work for them for free. That's finished, not going to be doing any more of that. So embarassing. I heard it's happening at Esther's too, which this year is focused on the Attention Economy, and the guy who drove this idea to the point where Esther does a whole conference about it, Steve Gillmor, isn't speaking and doesn't even get a free pass, even though he works for the company that's putting on the conference. Now that's something. Now I see things a bit more clearly, it looks like Esther wants us to think these are her ideas, and how inconvenient it would be to have the person whose ideas they really are, there, in the flesh, explaining how the stuff really works as she and her friends scratch the surface. I'm paying the $5000 to go to this conference, so I'm a customer, and I feel cheated. The real guy was willing to come educate us, for free, and the conference promoter said no. Yow. Maybe this should be the first question that gets answered as the show opens tomorrow afternoon. Why? The way Esther does Steve, that's how O'Reilly conferences cover my work. They get someone who reads my blog to talk about what I do, without mentioning me, with cheap personal shots thrown in, ones that are safe from rebuttal because the guy they're criticizing isn't there. And now Microsoft is doing it too. What's in it for them, I can't figure out. What about Bill Gates, who's giving the keynote, being interviewed by the Man himself, Tim O'Reilly. I've never known Gates to be unkind at an intellectual level to the people whose ideas he steals. He doesn't pay them very much, if anything at all (they never offered to pay me for the work of mine they've used over the years). I don't mind that so much, because that's the way it's always worked. It's this new notion that you don't need to tell people where your ideas come from. That's not only bad business, it's dishonest. Why the richest guy in the world needs to be so dishonest, well he doesn't, so I don't believe he is. He might try asking Tim O'Reilly some questions about where he gets his ideas from, when he's on stage with him at Mix 06. I won't be there to ask the questions, nor will any of my friends.
River of Meme-O-Randum: "I just had one of those AHA moments, when something clicked into place, and the only question is how to share the idea, because this is one that's just begging to be shared." One year ago today it was 1000 days since I quit smoking. Steve Gillmor: "Oh really? No, O'Reilly." Snark! Okay I have the disk-image-maker working, and I've built a DMG for the OPML Editor. Admittedly, this is probably not the final look for the 1.0 package.
Jackie Mason and Raoul Felder: "Could you picture a Jew deciding that he has the right to kill but you have no right to draw an insulting picture?"
Narrative: Tech support with MindVision Software. Let's have a Scripting News dinner at La Costa on Sunday night to celebrate the return of the Sopranos, among other things. Jeff Jarvis on BloggerCon. "I've wished for every conference since to make its mission bringing out the wisdom of the room rather than treating the room as a mere crowd."
Amyloo on the organization of the OPML Editor user community. She's sorting things out. Essay: A rambler on flaming in the blogosphere.
Forbes Magazine list of billionaires. Bill Gates is #1 with $50 billion. Today is the last day in Knight-Ridder's auction, which will determine the selling price for the second largest chain of newspapers in the US. Google acquired Writely, a browser-based word processor. Scott Karp: "If search only represents 5% of online media time, it shouldn't have 40% of the dollars." Kevin Burton at TailRank has already implemented the meme-search function I was asking about on Tuesday.
I'm at Skobee headquarters at 604 Mission, in downtown San Francisco where I'm leading a discussion among engineering-oriented entrepreurs called 106 Miles. Squash: Poor Web 2.0 fools. "This VC is a complete and utter twit." A few simple ideas I call A Busy Developer's Guide to RSS 2.0. Comments and suggestions are welcome. Nick Bradbury's BDG for RSS. Apple is patenting our inventions, again. Oy. Jens Alfke, one of Apple's "inventors" stopped by to explain how there's no real generosity in the tech business. I can see where he might get that idea, working where he does. Mike Arrington has screen shots of Google's new calendar. Besty Devine: "I drove up to NH today to go digging around the Court Clerk's offices in Federal District Court, to see what lawyers for convicted phone-jamming conspirator James Tobin are up to in exchange for the $2.3 million they've been paid (so far) by the Republican National Committee." 3 babes
I've been looking for the perfect day to run this picture of the 3 hot babes of the California web, and I guess today is the perfect day. White fences Over the years I've learned that you can't lead by asking people to do things. It doesn't work that way. If I want you all to paint your fences white, I can't say "Wouldn't it be great if your fences were white?" I could go on and on explaining how nice white fences look, how they last longer, and how if all the fences were the same color your property values would go up. No one wants to go first. So you have to do it yourself, even if you don't have a fence, even if you don't have a house. Not too long ago I suggested that if you wanted to make RSS 2.0 better one could instead create what's called a profile of RSS. I was introduced to the term by Andrew Layman, in 2001, who was then one of Microsoft's chief XML architects. At the time we were trying to get a complicated protocol to interop, and I suggested that perhaps it would be easier if we looked at a small subset, instead of trying to get interop across what had become a far-reaching protocol. So we came out with what we called a Busy Developer's Guide, or BDG, and it proved to be quite popular. So if I want a BDG for RSS 2.0 -- it's the white fences again. I bet if I write my own profile of RSS 2.0, others will get inspired do their own. Who does he think he is doing a profile of RSS. We'll show him! Ours will be better. And I'll be chuckling to myself thinking that it worked, I got what I wanted.
New idea: Ray Ozzie's clipboard for the web. "Let's say you have two sites both of which understand calendar data. I want to move an appointment from one site to another." Danny Sullivan: "Having your page be described, sometimes inaccurately, by a third party, with no recourse, isn't acceptable." Look at this, grokking is happening. Lisa, I call it the World Outline, analog of The World Wide Web. del.icio.us is on the path to the World Outline, so is tagging. DMOZ and Yahoo are single instances of the technology that's about the burst forth, in an open way, around OPML 2.0. A nice spike in traffic on my WordPress essay blog in the last day or so. Most of the flow is the Unconferences piece which has been widely linked to. Another picture from a conventional conference. Look closely. See the empty seats? Where did all the people go? Here's a full room. An interesting discussion about DMOZ has started in the comments on yesterday's Scripting News. The March 19 CyberSalon in Berkeley is about elitism in the blogosphere. Should be quite interesting, as the elite of print publishing apply their standards to the brightest lights in the blogging world. Notes on icon bitmaps for nodetypes on the Mac. A delayed (positive) reaction to my post about mothers as the paragon of cluelessness. One year ago today I went to see the Mets play in spring training in Port St Lucie, FL.
Here's a free idea Want to make a million dollars? Implement a search engine that accumulates all the stories pointed to by the top meme-engines over time. That way if I think of something I saw on Tailrank or Memeorandum a year ago, I just go to the universal meme search engine, type in the phrase, and get back the hits.
Make it run off their RSS feeds. You'd have to build it quickly (get there first) and build it to scale, because it would be pretty popular and would grow fast. If Gabe or Kevin moves quickly maybe they could do it themselves. Postscript: Gabe Rivera of Memeorandum says an RSS search engine could do this for him, and Paul Montgomery says that Tailrank already has a search engine. About G-drive and box.net
My thought for them is Go Vertical. Find an app, preferably a new one, that works much better with integrated net storage. Really get creative. Pick something wild and wacky, something that a BigCo like Google would never shoot for. Look at how bland all their new products are. There's a reason for that. Once a company gets really big, they are always second-guessing themselves. Only very ordinary ideas survive that process. So Google isn't likely to copy you until it's way too late, only if your idea is truly unusual. I gave Young Aaron a few ideas, but ultimately it's going to depend on the quality of his thinking, if they're going to make it past the next few months. From now-on the Google cloud will be darkening the market they're in now. They're going to come to hate that cloud (unless Google or someone else buys them first). BTW, Mike Arrington has an excelent summary of what we know about G-Drive, and box.net has their own thoughts on their blog. Yeah Beating Google ain't gonna happen. Find that hill and set up camp.
Essay: What is an unconference? "If you swapped the people on stage with an equal number chosen at random from the audience, the new panelists would effectively be smarter, because they didn't have the time to get nervous, to prepare PowerPoint slides, to make lists of things they must remember to say, or have overly grandiose ideas about how much recognition they are getting." Mark Evans, a reporter in Toronto, suggests that we actually put four random people from the former audience on stage. That's not exactly an unconference, but it is an interesting idea. A picture that was taken at a non-unconference. Another. I got locked out of Gmail again. Oy. Just checking email, sending some email. I'll fill out the form again. Sigh. Rakesh Agrawal's report from BarCamp in New Dehli. Question: What icon to use for an "include" nodetype? AOL: "The Open AIM program enables companies, communities and developers to sell advertising and access, and to facilitate up to 250,000 log-ins per day or two million log-ins per month, without additional licensing requirements." Late last week I got an email from Ray Ozzie at Microsoft, and like the discussion we had about SSE late last year, this one promises to result in a new idea entering the web app space. New header graphic, the Mississippi River at Cass County, MN. Wired: "I just hope when they're done remodeling our living rooms, we'll still be able to use our legally purchased content the way we want to." N.Y.T.i.m.e.s article about R.S.S. A subtle change It was a subtle change at Google, but a profound one. It happened some time ago, without any fanfare, and at first confused me, so I haven't written about it until now. But it's major. Here's the deal. On some subjects, where there is a DMOZ editor, the editor's descriptions of each page, right or wrong, biased or not, are included with each entry. I'm not going to give examples, because if I do, people will focus on the examples, not the practice. DMOZ has a bad rep for having editors with conflicts of interest. And it's exclusive, unlike Wikipedia which at least has battles (never thought I'd say that) of people with conflicts, DMOZ doesn't even have dissent among conflicted people, only one point of view exists, because there's only one editor for each category.
Basically Google has become an About.com, but with much more power, and without the scrutiny. They know they're doing it, and so do people who are watching Google, like me. How do we have a discussion about this?
OPML Editor: Changes to prefs in Community menu.
I had lunch today with Aaron Levie of Box.Net. He was one of the presenters at the conference on Thursday. One of the things we talked about is their storage API. Let's look at how it might be used to connect users of the OPML Editor.
Isn't it odd that the post above made it onto the ladder at Memeorandum? It's Sunday, so nothing is happening and a snark back at some snark, what we used to call "watching them watch us watching them" before all the newbies arrived (and arrived and arrived and on and on), is all that's going on in the tech blogosphere. That could be good. I did post a comment to Nick Carr's award-winning post explaining that of course Jeff Jarvis does get it, despite the snark, and I hope that isn't over-looked in all the good-natured Sunday morning poking. DropDMG is the "easiest way to create Mac OS X disk images."
A new feature this morning for OPML weblogs. Bpedro is editing his blog with OmniOutliner. It's as easy as I thought it would be. Just save the file in OPML in the right folder and the rest is automatic. University of Wisconsin howto on podcasting. Anne Zelenka is a geek-mom who says we can find better ways to express "how intuitive and appealing software should be." The podsafe music movement gets a surprising boost from Tower Records. Nice!
For ten points whose mom is pictured in the margin above? Doc Searls: "The only blog I read every day is Dave Winer's." Wow. That's nice. It's funny, I keep missing Doc. This year I'm going to PC Forum for the first time in ten years. This is the first time he's missed a PC Forum. At least we visit virtually, I read every post on this blog. Today Doc snarks back at Ryan King's snark at David Berlind, which is right, although the camp concept has run its course, imho. I'd like to see Doc apply his desnarking logic everywhere, not just where and when it's convenient. Anyway, to Doc, here's the pointer you're looking for.
Amyloo is working on the download page for the new OPML Editor support site. Another project we should start soon is a directory of tools that understand OPML. It would be a perfect demo of OPML, don't you think? Chris Clark has the answer, and it ain't simple, to yesterday's query about images to make Macintosh DMG's pretty. With my 23-inch Cinema display I now fully understand why power Mac users are so into keyboard shortcuts. You spend so much time moving the mouse from one side of the screen to the other, from top to bottom. It makes you wonder why anyone thought a mouse was a time-saving innovation. Seriously, it's a huge PITA.
Miss Rogue shot a picture of me shooting pictures at yesterday's conference. Ryan King says Mashup Camp was a shark-jump. Two changes to the draft OPML 2.0 spec.
Scott Karp: "Bloggers are independent publishers, and the best bloggers are successful and effective because they do what the best Old Media publishers do -- consistently provide quality content that is interesting and useful to their readers." Mike Arrington: Newsvine is Perfect. Jeff Jarvis, in London, says that Reuters' CEO gets it. Seems like there are three stages: 1. media hackers (early stages), then 2. compete with big media (now) and finally, 3. become the media (always was inevitable). BBN: "Evil Genius says boring ads made his nuts fall off." Steve Rubel says the center of gravity is shifting. Ted Leonsis: "Whenever new media tries to replicate old media, it tends to fail. When it takes advantage of the unique social and personal behaviors of this new medium, it does pretty well." Essay: "Every conference emanating from Silicon Valley or its environs should have state of the art networking. For that to happen we have to define what that is, and the only way to define it is by doing it." The latest tech celebrity to manage the Wikipedia story about his work is Marc Canter. New York Times podcasts. Mercedes-Benz podcasts. I took notes during the day on my WordPress blog. Under the Radar was an excellent conference, but the wifi at the Microsoft campus in Mountain View was disabled by only allowing access on port 80, so I wasn't able to update Scripting News (my editing system uses a different port) and I wasn't able to use my aggregator (it does too). I'll write about the conference in the morning.
I'm spending the day at Under the Radar in Mountain View. Depending on the wifi that means not very much, or quite a lot happening here. I was trying to send an email as I was heading out the door, and got a message saying my session had expired and I needed to log on again. Okay, so I went to the top level of Gmail, preparing to enter my username and password, and got this sarcastic screen instead (Lockdown in sector 4, geez Louise), saying my mail would be inaccessibe for up to 24 hours. Serves me right for choosing Google for my main mail address. I can't be 24 hours without email. (PS: It's only the web interface that's turned off, I can get in through the POP account.) Doc Searls reviews the choices for Macintosh sound. Heather Green: "There isn't a huge amount of money to be made just on podcasts and that the disruptive nature of podcasts lie in the fact that most people will be doing them for themselves and their friends and families." Amen. Sound familiar? Private Lives, March 1955: "Joan Crawford's power -- her abuse of people who refuse to bow to her, her control of the casting, direction, and production of her pictures, is the disgrace of Hollywood." In case you think the blogosphere is mean-spirited, we still have a ways to go before we match Hollywood. I'm pretty sure we're going there anyway.
Announcement: "The public review of OPML 2.0 begins." OPML 2.0 is easy to understand if you're intelligent, have common sense and are patient. I explain, in this podcast, why the improvements in OPML 2.0 will help users. Here's what the CIO Insight interview with me looks like. Pretty funny! Do I really look like that? When Joan Crawford saw a picture of herself at age 69 or so, she said "If that's what I look like you'll never see me again." They told her that's what she looks like and she was never seen in public again. Nicholas Carr: "Edgeio enters a crowded market with a ton of pizzazz and a gram of strategy." This can't possibly be true, but if it is, I'm going to rename my podcast the Morning Coffee Notes Podcast Show, and find out whose lawyer is doing this. I love the way people are not buying Apple's horse crap this time. For crying out loud, it's a g-d stereo. I had one of those when I was 15 and that was 35 years ago!
Gabe rolls out a new esthetic for M-O-R. "A general reduction in rate of eye injury," he says. First impression: Nice! Sam Ruby responds to yesterday's post here. A bunch of people want to know what Marc Canter's picture is doing here on Scripting News. Easy. It's a cool picture. And when you click on it, a bigger story is revealed. More coolness! Still mysterious. That's what I like.
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I've been following the 
I had to book a quick trip to NY next week, and the choices on Expedia weren't good so I tried 
The top stories on 
I envision an 
Four years ago today UserLand 
People who doubt that thoughtful discourse is possible in the blogosphere, need only look at the 
BTW, to Jon Udell, who raised a 
It's always interesting to hear which of my podcasts people like the best. I have a hard time picking. I think the best one was May 12, 2005. It's also 
6PM Pacific: Arrived safely in 
I've been getting both public and private warnings that some people are going to try to do something nasty with OPML, maybe get a "war" going with me. I'd love to avoid having to protect my creative work this time. I think at this point, no one would argue that, for better or worse, I am the designer of OPML, and the author of its spec, and the developer of the app that defines the format (the last part probably some people would contest, but I believe most reasonable people would concede that). Yet, based on recent experience, there are people who think it can be "taken over." I don't know if it can or it can't. But why not wait until after the OPML Editor 1.0 release ships to try to hijack the format. After that I won't fight with you. I probably won't even fight very much now. The fight has pretty much gone out of me. I'm feeling the stress of all the fighting, and age, and I'm satisfied that I have enough money to retire on now. Why not let me go, quietly and peacefully, I'll stop writing my blog, I'll stop developing new stuff, you can be me if you want, I won't be in your way. How about it? If ever there was a peace offering, it seems like this one must be too good to be true. 
I sought out one of the Apple marketing whizzes, these guys were like gods back then. He was young, in his early 20s, with an arrogant smile. They weren't winning any battles with the reporters, but I was just some old schmuck, he didn't have to be nice to me, so he wasn't. Didn't matter to me, I was on a mission. I wanted to tell him that it would all be okay, I wanted him to get the message to Steve. As proof that I came from the future, I told him I knew they had a new computer in the works, it would be called the Macintosh (I couldn't remember if they had decided on the name at this time) and it would ship in January of the next year. He corrected me and said they would have some news in February, not January. 
I smiled. I told him some more things that would happen in 1984, knowing this would not help convince him that what I was saying was real, but if he'd remember them, he'd know then that what I said about 1997, and the iPod in 2002 would likely be true and I was really a visitor from the future. He walked away, and a minute later a snotty security guy with facial hair like the guard in the Wizard of Oz came to escort me out of the hall. Apparently the young marketing dude thought I was a lunatic.
At the 
Last night's 
I really liked many of the young entrepreneurs I met at Under the Radar last week, esp the two box.net guys, so very young and directed and smart. But Under the Radar is hardly what they are, how about caught in the cross-hairs, in the middle of the next big thing, and destined to be swamped in all the hype over Google's G-drive. Can they emerge with an intact business, or will they get washed up on shore? I'm pretty sure they're going to have to find a nice hill to camp out on, that the market they're in right now is too big for a company that's so small and two guys that are so young (even though they are really smart and high energy). 
Because Google accepts DMOZ as authoritative, it also accepts the conflicts of the editors as authoritative. Bzzzt, that's a bug. The opportunities for payoffs and bribery are incredible, so incredible it must be happening. No one supervises the editors. That Google is willing to give them editorial control over what Google says is surprising, to say the least. It's almost unforgiveable. 
The award for 
A couple of observations on Thursday's conference. 1. There was a time, not too long ago, when a conference about technology would be all about Bill Gates. He'd be the elephant in every room, in the middle of every presentation and every conversation. "What about Microsoft?" has been replaced by "What is your business model?" Either they were going to kill you or buy you. They were the menace that was everywhere. This conference was different, even though it was held in a Microsoft office, they weren't mentioned (except by me, with irony that they weren't being mentioned) once. 2. I'm so tired of people talking about how their mother wouldn't understand something. I've been hearing this for 20 years, and it's sexist and ageist, and wrong and unfair, and how about let's get rid of this offensive idea. I'd never say that about my mother, who has a PhD, and is pretty smart. I certainly wouldn't want to encourage her helplessness! At one point I leaned over to 
One of my ego-filters caught an 
One of the next things on my to-do list is to learn how to 
Meanwhile, the mini-crisis in RSS appears to be over, as the group that was proposing to be the authority on the evolution of RSS has turned, and is now producing a best practices document, which is totally consistent with the 
