Friday, July 07, 2006

Scoble's having a camp-out in Montana, starting August 6 near Chico Hot Springs.  

Steve Rubel reports on Huffington speculation on the new Rocketboom anchor.  

Wired article on Rocketboom. 

Don Park explains how Kim Jong Il thinks.  

Brent Simmons on a new Mac outliner that supports OPML. 

Todd Cochrane reports that Podshow has fixed the links to the RSS feeds, they now point to the correct places. Watch out when anyone hosts your feeds. There's no telling what they will add or remove, now or in the future.  

Scott Johnson, who has consulted for Podshow, takes up their cause. It's a bit much to believe that a bug caused them to hijack our feeds. More likely it's a business model. When Plan A failed, the one where we all sign over all our IP to them in return for nothing, they went with Plan B, let's just take the content and let them sue us.  

Rose Mary Woods demonstrates how Podshow programmers accidentially erased the link to the real podcast feeds, and instead linked to podshow.com versions with copyrights removed.  

Another question arises from the new directory at Podshow, what happened to the community directory? Here's an archive.org snapshot of the directory at the beginning of 2005. I think it would be worth restarting the effort, and I would make a contribution to hosting it. I've heard from a few of the maintainers of branches of the original OPML-based podcasting directory.  

BTW, an interesting comment thread developed here last night about the issues at Podshow.  

A story for Richard 

On the Web 2.0 Workgroup mail list, Richard MacManus asked: "Will someone please tell me why this Rocketboom soap opera is such a big story in the blogosphere?"

This gave me the perfect entree to tell a favorite story...

Richard, I once wrote a story about this, called Bee Season.

I wondered why Bees live and die.

It turned out that the Bees in my back yard died because I wanted a peaceful August afternoon.

I was pretty sure that the Bees didn't know that, but if they were creatures like us who wanted to know why everything was the way it was, they would be loathe to guess that a human being named Dave Winer was killing them. I doubt if they even understood what a human being is. And they were very very far away from knowing the why of it.

At the end of the piece a reporter calls to ask why Mac developers are switching to Windows.

Why! Why!

Oh man.

Dave

PS: Oy vey.

Self-deprecating humor is great