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NY Times: "Top House Republicans knew for months about e-mail between Representative Mark Foley and a former teenage page, but kept the matter secret." Newsweek has a lengthy excerpt from Bob Woodward's new book on the war in Iraq. I bought a copy at Amazon for delivery next week. Google News articles about Idiocracy. Closing line from the narrator in Magnolia: "We may be through with the past, but the past ain't through with us." The Beatles sing Ticket to Ride when it was new and they (and we) were young. This is why YouTube is great, even if they don't make a trillion dollars. What memories. And what value. Word is getting around about Idiocracy, a movie written and directed by Mike Judge (Beavis and Butthead, King of the Hill), that opened only in a few cities at the beginning of the month. I heard a review of it this morning on NPR, they said it was great. I totally want to see it.
According to this (anonymous) guy, people like me are "destroying discourse in this country." Or is it that I just know scripting and should stick to that? Or was yesterday's political writing the best in a long time? Michael Markman: "History asks, 'Where were the good Germans?' I don't want future history to ask, 'Where were the good Americans?'" People are using this post of mine to say I support things that I don't support. I was asking for an icon for validated OPML. An icon that would link to the validator. To link from HTML to an OPML version of the data behind the page, I generally use the white on orange XML icon, as I have for years, and I'm not going to change that. Hopefully that's pretty clear.
How Bush goes I seriously think my country has lost its mind. We're getting the best wakeup call possible with the torture bill. We're getting the warning, if we re-elect the Republican Congress, we deserve what we get.
I wonder if Bush will leave office at the end of his term. Someone should ask him that question and listen carefully to the answer. An unequivocal "yes" is the only acceptable answer. I don't think he's planning to leave. That's what all this maneuvering is about. The next step will be they'll find some American citizens who are terrorists, and Congress will vote that in time of war the President doesn't need to charge them with anything to imprison them until the war is over. They can already put non-citizens, legal or illegal, in prison, indefinitely without charging them. What's next? How far is "economic terrorism" from Islamofascists? Not really very far at all. When McCain runs for President the immigration issue will be front and center. Use your imagination if you want to understand what the final solution will be. And you should worry. I don't believe U.S. citizenship is any kind of protection. We may be in the last moments of free speech in this country, unless we do something about it. It seems we still have a vote. I will vote against the Republicans, take that as a given. But that isn't enough. We need people who voted Republican in past elections to stand with us, to vote them out, now, so we can begin the process of unwinding the mess we're in. I heard a talk by Joseph Biden earlier today. I think he's got some interesting ideas. Might want to take a look at that, for something positive and constructive we can focus on. And yes, once there's a new Congress, we can begin the impeachment process. That's how Bush goes. We can't wait for him to decide whether he wants to leave or not. It's time for him to go. An important life lesson I should probably do a Flickr illustration for this one. Four years ago today: "One of the lessons I've learned in 47.4 years: When someone accuses you of a deceit, there's a very good chance the accuser practices that form of deceit, and a reasonable chance that he or she is doing it as they point the finger." Yahoo opens its identity system Jeremy Zawodny links to Yahoo's diminutively named Browser Based Authentication (or BBAuth).
The Identity Gang folks are going to be talking about this for a long time to come. Now Google and Microsoft have to speak. I'm pretty sure they're not going to federate with Yahoo. Will they? Ryan Tate is "confused but interested." Wes Felter: "Google released the same thing a few months ago." Wikipedia as a tool for character assassination
I don't believe in War On Terror
Daniel Conover: "Shame on us."
Podshow raises another $15 million. Oy. JC: "What on earth Podshow is going to do with almost $25M in funding is anyone's guess, but it's not going to end well I can tell you that." In other earth-shaking economic news, I bought a couple of chairs today. And a table. New header graphic, taken in the living room at my old house in Woodside, CA. Interview with Ann Greenberg on the future of media. Now that Facebook is open, I have joined, and also started a group for Scripting News readers. Let's have fun!
Scoble: "Find me the best blogs from Demo." Ditto. Random idea -- A BitTorrent device that plugs into your router (or maybe it is a router) that senses when you're not using the net, and starts serving BT content. As soon as you start using the net, it goes offline. Steve Matthews: Top 10 Uses for RSS in Law Firms.
Another dumb question. I have a Windows machine that's misbehaving badly, but I think I can trick it into launching the Explorer, but I have to do it from the command prompt. But I'm stuck, cause I don't know how to type the name of a directory that has a space in it. In other words, I want to CD to a directory called "FOO BAR" without the quotes of course. Is there a way to tell command.com to change to that directory? (Postscript: Two things made all the diff. 1. I switched from command to cmd. 2. And instead of launching the Explorer, which seems to be damaged in some way, I just used MS-DOS to copy the files to a backup disk. It took a couple of hours, but it's done. Thanks for all the great advice!!) Martin Schwimmer says I'm right, the monkey is wrong. Liz Gannes reports on Day 1 at Demo. Duncan Mackenzie is thinking about tags vs categories in blog posts. On this day in 2003, Doug Kaye added an RSS 2.0 feed with enclosures for IT Conversations. I wrote: "Hey we're starting to get a (very small) installed base of interesting feeds that use the enclosures." That's how standards get created. Someone goes first, then someone goes second, compatibly. And so on. In this case, Doug was the "ratifier." When I see this dialog I think it's only talking about photos. But then I read it carefully and "albums" might refer to music. Is this the place where you lose all the music on the iPod if you click on Yes? I don't see how it could be. And damn if I know what they're talking about. I've never synced (is that a word) this iPod with a photo library or folder. I just use it for music. More on MacBook random shutdowns Via email from Tim Joransen...
"His daughter loves the Mac Book Pro even better (bigger screen), but my friend isn't too happy."
Jeremy Zawodny on Yahoo's Hack Day.
Eric Soroos had the same problem, after three weeks in service, his MacBook was fixed. He says at some level Apple is aware of the problem, if not at the retail level. Mike Kaltschnee has had two replacement Macs, still getting random restarts. He provides the range of defective serial numbers, my serial number is in the defective range. Guess it's time to take it in. Surprising that the people at the store don't know about this problem. Surprising that they're still selling defective computers? Jason Calacanis reports that there are now mobile versions of all the Weblogs, Inc sites. Good luck to my buddy Robert Scoble on the launch of his new show, aptly named The Scoble Show. Go get em dude!! Why it's been so quiet here the last couple of days -- I'm furniture shopping with another good buddy, the world-famous Ponzi, of Gnomedex fame. She flew down from Seattle just for the occasion. She's a really great person to do this with. We're having a lot of fun! That's why there's a picture of a chair below, we call it The Million Dollar Chair. It's really nice. A monkey is living in my old bedroom at my parents house. He's typing random letters into a typewriter. In 1986 he typed the letters I, P, O, and D next to each other. He says I can sue Apple for trademark infringement. I say no way.
Ray Ozzie named top Agenda Setter for 2006. Where the fcuk is Gastonia? I asked my friend from Gastonia. She says I answered the question with the question.
ConvergeSouth, Oct 13-14, Greensboro, NC. Russell Shaw digs into Apple's history with the USPTO on trademark applicaitons for iPod and (gulp) iPodcast. This may explain why they're being so aggressive. Check this out. Now Google is using my previous search results (and presumably choices) to find the results "most relevant to you." Good move. Next step: Let me tell you where my blog is, and you can use that data too. Stewart Brand reviews Roomba. "It is perfect for bachelors of either sex who put off vacuuming chores for months." More twists and turns in my iPod saga
So I decided to move the machine. It was time to do it anyway. So now the old desktop is in the new house, I downloaded the weekend's podcasts, some real good stuff, a few interviews with former President Bill Clinton, a Modern Love podcast from the NY Times, an all-star cast with Scoble, Malik and Arrington. Nice stuff for a walk on a Sunday afternoon. Only one problem. When I plug the iPod into the desktop, the original one, the one it used to like, it now acts like this is a foreign computer! Want to reformat the iPod, the Mac asks? No fucking way Jose. I like the iPod just the way it is, no thanks. But it insists. Sighhhh. Okay, so this may seem a little subtle for people who are blinded by Mac devotion, but listen up. 1. I'm using these podcasts with the permission of the publishers. 2. I'm breaking no law. 3. I paid for the Mac and the iPod (quite a bit of money, I might add).
My two cents on "podcast" Today is, in a sense, the three-year anniversary of podcasting. It wasn't called podcasting then, but all the essential elements of what would become podcasting were in place. A regular show with a theme (Chris Lydon inteviewing people he finds interesting), a feed that has those shows as enclosures. The enclosures are in MP3 format. And a small number of aggregators that could do something interesitng with all that. A step down the road that would lead to podcasting. When this became a juggernaut, almost exactly a year after the first Lydon feed, it desperately needed a name. Danny G came up with "podcast" and we liked it, so that was it, the decision was made, a "rough consensus" formed, and from then on we called what we were doing podcasting. Now there's no doubt that part of the reason that podcasting took off then and not in 2003 or 2002 or 2001 is that there was an iPod and it was a juggernaut. People were interested in portable media, and the iPod had everything to do with that. So it made sense to relate this new art to the iPod, even though what Leo says is totally true, our podcasts work on things other than iPods. In fact, I wonder why Apple or someone else hasn't invested in making a device that is GREAT for listening to podcasts on the go, but that's another subject altogether. Apple has a legitimate concern if you look at it from their point of view. Although I am not a lawyer, it seems to me that iPod is an excellent trademark, it's not descriptive, it's a made-up word, until Apple came up with it, it meant absolutely nothing. So, from the start, it was a defensible trademark. Then it went through the lifecycle that most runaway successes do, commercial interests try to take advantage of the popularity of the mark and name their products relative to Apple's, some leading to confusion, others not. I think podcasting may create some confusion for the podcasters but not for Apple. No one confuses a podcast with an iPod, any more than car wax is confused with a car. And it's totally explainable that a podcast works on other hardware, by saying that the computer industry makes stuff that works together. To think that today's iPod isn't the leader in the market is to be in denial. So all competitors are able to play content that works on Apple's market leader. Emphatically, this is a good thing, and I feel no pity for Apple at being forced to be open, which is what podcasting forces them to be, like it or not. I guess my take on it is this. I like the term podcasting because it causes people to find out where innovation really comes from. Apple has been coasting on other people's work, as well as contributing their own, but they're not very generous when it comes to sharing the credit. I'd be inclined to work with them on this, and other things, if they would be kind to us and our creations. Instead Apple sneers at the people who gave them this innovation, and sends demand letters to members of the community. Maybe change is something Apple should contemplate? Maybe there's a way of working with creative people outside their own company that creates a win-win, and a foundation for further innovation?
Paul Krugman on 9/21/04: "It's hard to identify any major urban areas outside Kurdistan where the U.S. and its allies exercise effective control. Insurgents operate freely, even in the heart of Baghdad, while coalition forces, however many battles they win, rule only whatever ground they happen to stand on." The math of anonymous discourse on the Internet. Wired: "Apple Computer has slapped Podcast Ready with a cease and desist letter, claiming that the terms Podcast Ready and myPodder infringe on Apple's trademarks." A question about iPod that's sure to get me flamed. Jason Lefkowitz: "I do not agree that Microsoft has the right to 'turn off' my computer remotely if I've paid them for their OS, just because they don't like a new piece of hardware I've slapped in." Keith Veleba: "Like most 'activation' schemes, it's a grave inconvenience to the honest folk, and no concern for the pirates, cause they've already broken it."
BusinessWeek: "Google and Yahoo at times passively profit from click fraud and, in theory, have an incentive to tolerate it." Salon: "If one good thing can come from our country's apparent decision to legalize torture, perhaps we can finally agree to kill off the 'Myth of the Independent Republican Senators.'" Today is OneWebDay. Yaaay web. Go team! No doubt the Apple zealots are going to flame me for this
Details. I hosed my Sansa by copying a 2GB folder on it. Now it just loops endlessly, refreshing the database, restarting, refreshing the database, restarting, until the battery runs down. I've been emailing with their tech support people, to no avail. The device won't respond to updating the firmware. I've tried all the magic incantations. Sansa == dead. So back to Plan B. Try to use the iPod. It's plugged into my MacBook, not my desktop which is a few miles away at the old place. No problem, I have it configured for manual updating. But here's the rub, when I drag an MP3 file onto the "Dave's iPod" icon, in iTunes or the Finder, nothing happens. No file gets copied. I tried everything I could think of, honestly, so go ahead and flame me for being dumb, because I can't make this easy to use software do what it was designed to do. Message to readers: Helllp! Where do you want to go today?
Straight talk John McCain wants to be President. The last thing he would do is cross the current President, because that might mean he doesn't get to be the next President. So when he "fought" the President and then made peace with the President, they were obviously just doing photo ops for TV ads they're going to run next month that explain how American democracy runs just great with Republicans running the Senate and House as well as the White House. They were also shooting commercials for McCain's primary campaign which I guess has already started. So John McCain is some different kind of Republican? Nahhh. El Diablo. Capitol Hill smells of sulfur.
Doc went to the Berkman Thursday meeting this evening. Steve Williams, Digg: "If we could look in the head of the page to find the corresponding mobile-friendly page, we'd be ecstatic." Dan Farber: "Mary Jo Foley has been a persistent thorn in Microsoft's side for more than 10 years." Mike Arrington says he knows who the anonymous blogger, Dead 2.0, is, but he hasn't told the rest of us. It could be a good thing for the tech blogosphere to put a name to this person, might make people think again before taking cheap shots if they could end up being responsible for what they say. MP3 of yesterday's NewsHour interview with General John Abizaid about the war in Iraq, from the NewsHour podcast feed. My inner-cynic has figured out what's going on with the "debate" about torture in the Sentate. It's so obvious, I don't know why I didn't see it before. The Republicans are about to lose Congress, at least partially because the electorate has come to realize how dangerous it is to have the executive and legislative branches both controlled by the same party. Solution -- show the President having an argument with three of his staunchest supporters. Fake controversy. Voila. Extra benefit -- it distracts the press and the public from the awful news from the Iraq. Challenge to the Dems, get the focus back on Iraq, asap.
Mary Jo Foley: "Blogging is the future of journalism." Okay, I got cable installed at the new house today and got the HD option. Watching a random baseball game, it's awesome.
Could someone please tell NPR that their podcast directory is empty. I'm getting errors on all their non-podcast feeds as well. I hope it's just a wire-trip. :-( NY Times: Some Hot Recorders for Those Cooool Podcasts. BBC: Chavez tells UN Bush is devil.
Monkey Bites: How Buggy is iTunes 7? Joseph Pisani at BusinessWeek needs a high resolution picture of me for an article he's writing. I don't have one, but people are always taking pictures at parties. Maybe someone has one. If so, send Joseph an email at bweekpic at gmail dot com. Wired lists Web 2.0 winners and losers. Winners: Flickr, Odeo, Writely, del.icio.us, NetVibes. According to Valleywag, TechCrunch will launch an enterprise weblog today, edited by Nik Cubrilovic. Two years ago today we took a walk on the Seattle waterfront. On last night's Countdown, a constitutional law expert asks if the reason that the redefining of the Geneva Convention is being debated in the Senate is that news is about to break that the President has been ordering US military personnel to torture prisoners. If that's what's coming, we must act to remove the President from office. He is acting in our name, and we will have to deal with the consequences long after he's out of office. We can't support this for another two years. If the Democrats won't stand up to Bush, we must form a new political structure in which we can, without the Democrats. Important note -- the dissenting Republicans are not opposing torture, they are proposing a different definition for torture. The Geneva Convention doesn't need redefining. Imagine of some other country were debating about this, how would we interpret it? BBC: Free anonymising browser debuts. Glenn Fleishman reports that in-flight wifi may not be dead after all. Transcript of NBC interview with Iranian president Ahmadinejad. From Jay Rosen comes news that Reuters has given $100K to his NewAssignment.net to "underwrite the costs of hiring our first editor, which is going to be a fun job."
Fulfillment by Amazon: "You send your new and used products to us, and we'll store them. As orders are placed, we'll pick, pack and ship them to your customers from our network of fulfillment centers."
Jason Kottke said something really nice about me today. Thanks man. Getting a MacArthur would be great. It would probably make my parents pretty happy too. Joel Spolsky: "The phone they sent me, an LG Fusic, is really quite awful, and the service, Power Vision, is tremendously misconceived and full of dumb features that don't work right and cost way too much." Four years ago: "Weblogs, in a very real sense, get your mind out of bed, and back in the world. They can help alleviate the endless aloneness that's part of recovery." Sparkplug 9: "Pope says Islam is violent. Islamics react with violence. Pope apologizes." Google has satellite pics of Baghdad. Movie: More chickens on stilts from Sunday's parade. YouTube offers "several RSS feeds for categorized groups of videos (such as recently uploaded, top viewed etc) as well as customized feeds for users and tags."
Amanda Congdon is back with a new show, a roadtrip across America. A bunch of feeds, a website and a wiki. I signed up to be a beta for MSN's Soapbox video community. I'll let you know when I get a chance to try it out. I don't feel bad, Mike Arrington doesn't have an account either. I guess Microsoft is learning the art of teasing? Or does it just look that way?
I went for a hike today with the parents in the hills. Muslims who demand an apology from the Pope for insulting Islam would have more credibility if they demanded Ahmadinejad apologize for saying the Holocaust never happened. Think that'll ever happen? Nahh. Niall Kennedy on private feeds. "I believe large publishers such as Salesforce.com or eBay would produce more feed content if they knew their customers' data was kept private and secure."
Dan Blank: "Much of the web needs to look deeper into making their mobile versions more user friendly." Steve Philip: "Somewhere in the heartland of America, a conservative's head has just exploded." Photos from today's How Berkeley Can You Be parade. Movie: Chickens on stilts open Berkeley parade. Movie: Mobile cupcakes. New header graphic. Volkswagen beetle art car.
The Citizendium Project will "begin life as a 'progressive fork' of Wikipedia." Mike Arrington: "The Wikipedia community has completely intimidated me to the point where making a change to that site is unthinkable." Jory Des Jardins: The Conflicted Bride.
Where we're at with mobile-friendly news. Matt Mullenweg and James Snell have made two different recommendations for linking a mobile-friendly rendering of stories into an RSS item. Imho either approach is workable. No spec text yet. The next question is what is a mobile-friendly rendering? And they say all the good domain names are taken.
Gotta love President Bush. He says the Geneva Convention is too vague. He says a lot of Americans are confused, because it's complicated. It's not actually that complicated. We take care of the other country's soldiers, our enemy, because we want them to take care of our soldiers. That's why two Republican soldiers, McCain and Powell say Bush is wrong, and the US must continue to support the Geneva Convention. To do otherwise would be grossly unkind to our own soldiers. So many Republicans are coming out against this, you gotta wonder if this isn't some kind of trap for Democrats, who are saying nothing. Didn't Bush check with the Senate before going on this campaign? Is he running against his own party now? Hard to believe.
To Daring Fireball, maybe he does but he ain't here yet. The last house was called The Internet Hut (among other names). The new house doesn't have a name yet. It's tall, so maybe The Internet Tower? Hmmm. Not sure yet. A book I'd like to read -- Deadwood, the Rest of the Story. Assume the character development of the HBO series. Take the screenplay for the season they didn't produce and add some narrative. It'd be a best-seller.
Chris Messina: "As a white boy who attended yesterday and today's Future of Web Apps summit, I feel compelled to speak up about a disturbing element of an otherwise well-produced event." SF Chron: "Technolgy guru Esther Dyson has quietly put out the word that the 2006 PC Forum, held in March in Carlsbad, California, would be the last." Doc is in PhoneCo hell, with Verizon. No doubt all the people he's talking to are in India or the Philippines. That's what the SBC guys were telling me. But get this, I got a business card for one of the installers. It's like gold. He speaks my language. Even better, it has an email address on it! Wow. Pretty cool. It's a good idea to plant a few spies inside these big companies. Kind of like putting a blogger on the op-ed page of the NY Times. Hasn't happened yet, but I'm sure someday it will.
Now that the DSL is in, it's time to stress over something else. Today I'll be over at the new house waiting for the DSL installer. Knock wood, praise Murphy, maybe I'll have Internet at the new place. In the meantime, if anything interesting comes up I'll post it on my mobile weblog. Gary Short: "It seems to me a namespace extension to RSS could be the way to go."
Evan Williams explains how Odeo screwed up. "Mr Gutman" on second-time entrepreneurs. Now if Podshow's CEO, Ron Bloom, Odeo's competitor, were as insightful and open as Evan Williams, he would say something like this. "I thought all the technology for podcasting had been invented, but boy was I wrong!" Rex Hammock in 2/05: "Opportunism should never be confused with passion." Engadget on Microsoft's new iPod-alike, Zune. Todd Bishop: "If Zune is to become the long-awaited iPod killer Microsoft so clearly wants it to be, it'll have to compete on a much more elusive battlefield: coolness." Michael Gartenberg: "I can share any song on the device to any other device in range. DRM content or plain MP3s but don't get too excited." I don't understand what Amazon is doing with Promotion via API and RSS for ECS, but it's intriguing. Are the feeds a demo, or is that real data? Mobile-friendly news
Let me try to state the problem concisely, so we'll know when we have a solution. First, consider the BBC and NY Times rivers. When I link to an article, I start with the URL to the "rich" HTML rendering, and apply an algorithm to turn the rich URL into a URL that points to a "plain jane" page, one which renders well on a mobile device. For example, here's an article on the BBC website, and here's the mobile-friendly version. See the difference? On a desktop or laptop, you'd probably prefer the rich version, but on a mobile device, like my Blackberry, the plain version works much better.
PS: Anticipating that people are going to suggest using Google's algorithmic method of generating mobile-friendly content, I'd rather not depend on Google, I'd rather the content people take care of this. Building too much on one large platform is a precarious way to build. We've already found, many times, that Google doesn't care what we think. So let's fix this ourselves, it'll work much better that way, imho. PPS: I linked this into a new Technical Issues section in the NewsRiver.org directory.
Feedburner: A Peek Inside TechCrunch's 100K Milestone. Lessons from AT&T/Yahoo In early August, I wrote a piece about where the intelligence is in the network of users and vendors, and how so much of it is with the users, and in the past that was so poorly utilized, and how the Internet is in the process of flipping it around, to the point that users become manufacturers, and that's the process Jason was trying to explain yesterday. We still need expertise, I don't know how to design a bridge, and my doctor can't design a web app, but we also need the expertise that users develop, that today's manufacturer's just throw away. The current product development process, that focuses on a few supposed geniuses and ignores the intelligence that's in the user's minds, same as with unconferences, is about to run its course much as the old style conference can't possibly compete with one that involves the brains of the people formerly known as the audience. Back to AT&T/Yahoo. I could tell them so much about their organization because I've had to deal with 20 different people in their organization the last couple of days. The information I have is stuff they don't, and I'm sharing it with other people on the web, and it's going to show up in the search results when people try to figure out whether or not they should go with AT&T/Yahoo (so far, I wouldn't, I'm on the verge of cancelling the order, but they're getting another chance, because Comcast is even worse). Ahem cough *tease* cough ahem
Ryan Sholin: "Does this mean a new NewsRiver online aggregator comes with a slice of strawberry cheesecake?"
I got burned again by the Firefox bug/feature where it implements permanent redirects without looping the server in, and this was really elaborately fcuked up. Okay, so I had a bug in some software and it was redirecting where it shouldn't, and because I was doing permanent redirects, once I fixed the bug there was nothing I could do to Firefox to tell it to forget about my mistake (or was there? is there some programmer's switch I can flip that tells it to forget about all the redirects it's remembering? that would solve the problem). Anyway, so I map a different domain to the app, as I did last month when I hit this wall, and I used that one instead. However, I forgot to change the domain for the cookie the app was returning. So I spent hours chasing down a bug in some ancient mainResponder code that I haven't looked at in this milennium, and therefore didn't trust, when the problem was somewhere very far away, in my work around for this new weird and programmer-unfriendly behavior of Firefox's. Now I know some idiot is saying it's my fault for having bugs, but that's ridiculous. If I have to write bug-free code to use Firefox as a development tool, well then I'd better find another browser. Unless there's some hidden nerd switch (see above). Pretty soon Scoble will be more popular than Jesus. MacWorld report on Apple's announcements.
Postscript on the DSL installation. I waited until noon and then called SBC/Yahoo to find out where the installer was. They said they weren't sending anyone out and I didn't need to be there. Except when I signed up they said I had to be there. Not an auspicious beginning. Four hours waiting for an installer that wasn't coming. 5/7/97: "A programmer is a rigorous scientist determined to coax the truth out of the ones and zeros."
An OPML directory of all the Digg rivers. It will automatically update when they add, remove or rename the feeds. Ted Leonsis: "As I entered the hotel where I am speaking today, the national anthem was being played, and we held a moment of silence in the lobby of the hotel." Wired News on how blogging blossomed on 9/11/01. Amyloo has a mobile visualization page. "Get a rough idea of how a website looks when viewed using a mobile device."
When I read this headline on GigaOm, I thought a Disney character had started a podcast, and wondered if perhaps the chipmunks had started one too.
Grace Davis: "I'm thinking that the anniversary of Katrina will be overshadowed by the five year anniversary of 9/11 and as much as I was horrified about 9/11, I think Katrina was worse, far worse."
Speaking of Technorati, I realized it's a River of Links, where Google is like a hierarchic news website (although wasn't originally hierarchic these days it's becoming more so). The analogy appears perfect. The first link on the first page in Technorati is not the most relevant, it's the most recent. The first link on the River of News is the most recent, but it could be a bit of sports news, while news of the stock market crash is two screens down. So, if you've been fumbling over the distinction, currency is what a river is all about. When you're reading Technorati, you keep going until you see something you've already seen. Same with the River of News. Jim Moore reports on the arrival of ex-Iranian president Khatami at Harvard, for a speech at the Kennedy School later today. "Numerous agents emerged from the cars and surrounded the front of the hotel, with guns drawn, sweeping back and forth over the crowd that quickly came to attention."
Yesterday I listened to a rather long but worthwhile podcast from the NY Times Magazine ethicist, Randy Cohen, that's part of a series called Times Talks. I'm a big fan of his column, and the segment he does on NPR every Sunday. The podcast is an hour-plus of rambling, he's not a good speech giver, but no matter, his point was very powerful. We've long assumed that ethical behavior is an indicator of character, but wait, that might not be what's going on. Social scientists do experiments that show that under different circumstances, a person might not call the fire department when the room they're in is on fire (if three other people go on doing what they're doing); or might call it in (if they're alone). Same person, same character, different circumstances. He shows a lot of other compelling examples. So I giggled and snickered because other people did? Maybe so. Maybe I waited to find out how other people reacted before deciding how I would react. Once I read the column in Wired and realized that other people were parsing it differently (ethically, empathetically) I felt free to let my ethics, my empathy, come to the front. So, I think there's a lot to Cohen's thesis, having just conducted the experiment, informally, with my own behavior.
NewsRiver.org: How mobile Rivers work. An open suggestion to the people working on the Digg rivers, it would be great to have an OPML file of all your rivers, then it could fit into the directory of rivers that I'm working on. Scoble: "Now I can get Digg while walking on the beach!" Proof that Scoble is a media hacker.
On Thursday, Niall Kennedy will lead a tour of the Letterman Digital Arts Center during the lunch break of the Future of Web Apps summit. I'm thinking of going, it's only $295 (wish they took Paypal) and it's local, primarily for the schmooze. Not sure. You think a lot of people are going? Hmmm. Flickr photos from Podcamp.
The NY Times launched a new mobile site today. Michael Gartenberg reviews the new Times mobile site. Michael Levin says the new Times site is a river, but it's a hierarchy, the opposite of a river. Rivers are reverse chronologies, like weblogs. Digg goes River, and Arrington reviews. They were inspired by our rivers, and give credit, which is appreciated. It's cool that Digg links to Scripting, and even better that they link from their mobile version to mine. What's coming next must be a web that works for mobile users, where we never click a link to a page designed to be rendered on a big-screen. Facebook does an about-face. Best wishes to everyone at Podcamp which kicks off this evening with a party at Harvard Law School (5:30-7:30PM tonight, Pound Hall, #213.). Wish I could be there, but there's lots going on here in California. Have a great time, and do lots of podcasts! (Duh.) Amyloo wonders if Steve Gillmor was invited to speak at Office 2.0. That would make a lot of sense. East Bay entrepreneurs Last night we had a dinner for people running East Bay startups. It was a first meetup, I got to see some people I hadn't seen in quite some time, which was really good; and some who like myself are East Bay newbies. We decided to do this as a regular thing, however I am not organizing it, I'm better at participating than organizing. For some reason there's less startup activity on the east side than on the other side of the bay. Not sure why, but I see this as a chance to bootstrap something more thoughtful and with more longevity. I hope it doesn't become super-heated and bubbly. And I also hope there's a streak of doing-good that isn't part of the Silicon Valley culture. Facebook 1-2-3 Okay Facebook did good. But Facebook also did bad. Good: Bring innovative new feature to users at no charge, and not in response to competitive pressure. Bad: The users had no control over the new feature. Let me explain. The feature they introduced tells users what's new with their friends. It makes people more efficient at browsing the network of Facebook users they're connected to. It's a feature I understand because, as Rex Hammock points out, it's very much like the River of News aggregators I've been developing since 1999.
Then the city changes the way traffic flows, you still put out the bowl of fruit and your gate is still open, but now instead of 20 people passing your property, 2000 people pass. And you only know 20 of them! Now your yard is filled with strangers, people with odd habits. The same rules apply, your gate is open, all passers-by are welcome, but the result is very different. Someone should have given you a heads-up letting you know this change was coming. Maybe you would have put a lock on the gate and given keys to your friends. Now, on a much larger scale, with Facebook's user base, the heads-up has to be done by word of mouth, and opt-in. Instead of forcing all the users to make sense of this all at once, bootstrap a new network on your old one, call it Facebook Plus, or Facebook Big City Life, of Facebook Now, put some futuristic imagery out there, and require users to sign up for an upgrade to their account, which would work thusly. Suppose I upgraded, and my friend Jane (in my network) also upgraded. Then Jane has a News page, and on that page all my changes show up, along with the changes of all members of her network that have also upgraded. I also have a News page and Jane's updates show up there, as do all the changes of members of my network who have upgraded. Now change comes gradually, and users drive the change. When I run into Joan at the bookstore and she tells me she broke up with her boyfriend, I realize I didn't see that on my News page and ask if she's upgraded. Now I, a user, her friend, explain how it works. She decides if she wants to participate or not. That's what users are complaining about, and rightly so. They need to control how their network sees them. They're entitled to. This was the implicit deal they had with you, and you broke it. You did good by moving the product forward in an innovative way. And you did bad by taking the users out of the loop. Later: Facebook does an about-face.
Guardian: "Dave Winer's 'river of news' finally looks like catching on." On this day in 2004, a drive from Kelowna to Seattle. Valleywag says John Doerr's departure from the Sun board signals a looming Sun sell-off. Jason Pontin reads Scripting News. Om Malik: "Treo has issues." Chris Heuer: "I was not saying anything about the O'Reilly situation in the hopes I might be able to one day talk to him about what's going on." Fred Wilson explains the change at Facebook that's sparking a revolt by users. "Social networks to date have been these big unmanageable messes. Facebook is addressing that by giving users a tool to consolidate the information they care about." The RSS "ttl" element and P2P networks There's been some recent discussion of the RSS 2.0 ttl element. There's a bit of history to it, and a grand plan that as far as I know, was never put into action. The initial discussion of the element was on 5/19/02, as part of document proposing three new elements: pubDate, guid and ttl. It was linked to from Scripting News on that day. In April and May of 2002, we were working with Streamcast Networks, the makers of the Morpheus P2P client on integrating RSS with Gnutella. The ttl element was the key that would allow the network, which consisted of many millions of nodes, to share RSS feeds that were hosted on servers that likely couldn't take the pounding such a network could deliver. At the time, Morpheus was trying to re-launch after being shut down by a court order. I learned a lot from their CTO, Darrell Smith, who I spoke with several times, at length, in the spring of 2002.
I'm not sure what happened at Morpheus, but this was just before I got knocked out in June, and I didn't return to UserLand after that, so the project with Streamcast was never completed. The ttl element, however, made it into the RSS 2.0 spec, later that year, and it's still there, presumably ready to be used should this problem ever appear. Of course, in practice, in 2006, there aren't many feeds that receive so many hits as to require this peer-to-peer treatment. The market went a different way, at least for now. Hope this helps. Roasted hot green peas
Super yummy!
My Craig Cline story: "There are very few people who will stand with you when you know you're right. Everyone who knew Craig knew someone like that, and that made us special too." Dale Dougherty: "Craig was big like a brown bear: slow and watchful, deliberate yet excitable." Michael Gartenberg tastes the tea-leaves on next week's Apple announcement by rating today's news of refreshes for the Mac mini and iMac lines. On this day, four years ago: The road to RSS 2.0. Mike Arrington: Six Apart Acquires Rojo. "The crowded and highly competitive feed reader space, dominated by Bloglines, Newsgator and others, was a tough playground to hang out in." Guardian on the rivers Guardian article about NYTimesRiver and BBCRiver. Thanks! "Dave Winer's 'river of news' finally looks like catching on -- at least on mobile phones and other portable devices. In fact, it was Winer getting a BlackBerry that kicked off the latest round of enthusiasm. On his blog, Winer noted that he 'reached nirvana' on the San Francisco light railway." I have definitely noticed the traffic on the rivers slowly going up. One interesting phenomenon is that the search engine crawlers pickup up story headlines every day or so when they scan, and for some reason they're highly relevant, so they often make it into the first page of links. Of course when people looking for information click the link, the story has long-since scrolled off the river. But these are probably the kind fo people who follow news, so they're gradually getting introduced to the idea, and word of mouth of course feeds it too. And thoughtful reviews like the one in the Guardian don't hurt either! Water service RSS
I'm seeing feeds everywhere. The other day I was looking at the website of UserLand's attorneys, and not only do they have a feed, prominently and proudly displayed on their home page, but one of the partners, Tim Hale, is even doing a podcast! I guess the future has caught up with us. All the stuff that we developed in the 90s has now become mainstream. I imagine that the utility companies don't know that their new customer helped them find new ways to communicate, I wonder if our old friends at Russo & Hale do? Haven't talked with them in a while, hope they're doing well. Postscript: According to Tim Harrison, they block port 80 on the DSL. My Craig Cline story I actually have two stories to tell, both have been told before, but I want to tell them again. Now that Craig has passed, I suppose there's more that can be told. Isn't it funny how that works. While someone is alive you don't know what's fair to write about and what's not, and it's often not a very comfortable thing to ask, so you err on the side of caution. But once they're gone, who's left to object? On 8/10/00, I wrote about spending an hour on the phone, riveted, listening to a friend tell a story of his heart attack. Starting with chest pain on the east coast, a plane trip home, a drive up the hill to his Woodside home, and then being evacuated by helicopter to Stanford Hospital, where he was lucky to be when the actual attack came. If it hadn't happened there he wouldn't have lived, my friend recounted. The friend was Craig. To keep my cool while listening to the story I had to massage my own chest and remind myself that I wasn't having a heart attack, although at the time I did actually have heart disease, and knew it, but I hadn't told anyone, not even Craig. Then two years later, I asked Craig over to my house, a few nights before I was going to a cardiologist. When I told him about my symptoms he urged me to go to Stanford Hospital, right down the street. He offered to drive me. I said no, I wanted to wait and do it the right way. Now I know how foolish that was. I guess part of you wants to be, if not free of the disease, free of the certain knowledge, as long as possible. When I finally went in for my checkup I didn't come back until my chest had been ripped open and four arteries from my leg had been grafted onto my heart, giving me at least four more years of life. (Knock wood.) Craig and I have a lot of bonds, our love of technology, an absolute sense of integrity (to the point of being boring, and making enemies for it, Craig made enemies too), and we both had bodies that paid the price for the way we lived. I still have my body, for now; he lost his on Saturday. (Do I go back and change the tense on the writing to the past tense? Where I say we have bonds must that change to had bonds? I'm going to keep it in the present tense, not ready yet to let go.) Like Jory, I confided my personal life to Craig, frustrations with lovers, one in particular, who Craig also called a friend. As with Jory, his advice was great, but did I pay attention? That's not the way these things work. The second story of Craig is one I've told a few times here on Scripting News, most recently on 8/30 of this year, less than a week ago. Craig was on my mind because I was thinking about a visit. I knew he was gravely ill, and that he couldn't speak. I imagined that I would do most of the talking, and what would I talk about? I would tell him a tale of his own heroism, a story I tell every young person I come to know, and will as long as I live, the one about Craig and the guy from Apple, how he looked him in the eye and told him in his Craig-like way, that whatever Dave wants to do is okay with him. I will tell the young woman or man how great it feels to be so trusted by one so wise, and that as long as they are true to their heart, they will have my support as I had Craig's on that day in 1997. It may seem a small thing, but in this world there is very little of that kind of friendship, there are very few people who will stand with you when you know you're right. Everyone who knew Craig knew someone like that, and that made us special too.
Google: "News archive search provides an easy way to search and explore historical archives." I spent a bit of time ego-searching, it's very interesting, too bad a lot of the good stuff is behind paywalls, esp the NY Times and MacWEEK. Time Mag has an open archive. NY Times: Silicon Valley to Receive Free Wi-Fi. "The project will cover 1,500 square miles in 38 cities in San Mateo, Santa Clara, Alameda and Santa Cruz Counties, an area of 2.4 million residents." ReadWriteWeb on Doug Engelbart's Hyperscope 1.0, a modern web app. Its native file format is OPML. Here's an example of a Hyperscope document. View source reveals that it is an OPML document with a stylesheet. Little-known fact: Scripting News is the top hit when you do an image search for Katherine Harris. In preparation for PodCamp, which starts on Friday (with a party at Berkman Center), they're getting together an archive of the first podcasts. I'm honored that the very first one is an interview Chris Lydon and I did at Berkman, on July 8, 2003. It's actually a pretty good one! Rocketboom asks where were you on Sept 11? WTC from the ESB webcam, 9/11/01. Raw Socket: "Standing in Shibuya Crossing, Howard Rheingold saw people looking at their phones instead of talking into them, and that blew his mind. That's the Shibuya epiphany." From Gayle Cline: "We are creating a memorial garden spot on the ranch, so if anyone wants to contribute potted plants, or memorabilia, they should have them sent here." Tim Bray: "Craig was a good man." According to the Wikipedia page on Craig Cline, Dale Dougherty of O'Reilly credits him with coining the term "Web 2.0." Meryl Evans: "The term came to life when Dale Dougherty of O'Reilly Media brainstormed with MediaLive's Craig Cline."
Jory's remembrance of Craig. She was with him when he died on Saturday. Don Hopkins demonstrates his new wireless remote control technology for "rock and roll." Raw Socket: "Mobility is being packaged differently so old-time webheads can digest it." Five years ago today I had a strange technical dream, in which the kernel of my scripting environment temporarily squared the speed of light (saving the old speed on the stack) to make the code run faster. Tom, I didn't get invited because I said I didn't want an invite. If I'd got one I'd decline to go. Been saying that publicly for 2 years. Hope that clears things up.
Craig Cline, former head of Seybold Publishing, died yesterday after a long illness. His wife Gayle and six children were at his bedside. We've started a site to accumulate stories of Craig's life, to provide information about the memorial service, and a mailbox for people to send messages to the family. A picture of Craig, leading the Mobile Blogging discussion at BloggerCon III, in November 2004. Mike Zornek: "Craig was a great guy. I really enjoyed working for him." Three Rivers by Bob Stepno. Hmmmm. Mac Bittorrent clients, via Om.
Bret Fausett: "I now travel only with Thinkpads. They are expensive, but extremely reliable." New header graphic. One of a few taken when my Mac was new. From time to time I hear that people miss the comment link in the right margin of Scripting News. (Actually I hear "It's too bad you don't allow comments.") So I moved it up, made it larger and bold face. Here's a screen shot that shows where it is, in case you don't see it.
Gandhi: "Where there is injustice, I always believed in fighting. The question is, do you fight to change things or do you fight to punish?"
Cringely: "Sometime in the next 30 days this column will morph overnight into a blog."
Confused of Calcutta: "There's been a lot of coverage on monetising blogs of late, partly catalysed by a Business 2.0 article titled Blogging for Dollars. So I thought I'd write about something else, something far removed from monetising. Things I have been able to do Because Of my blog, rather than With my blog." Ewan MacLeod: "I've been using Dave Winer's bbcriver.com for just over a week now on the Blackberry." Thanks to Amyloo for pages (NYT, BBC) that help desktop users visualize what the rivers look like on a Blackberry. Monkey Bites: Movie Downloads from Apple. Scoble had a good time at Google yesterday.
Michael Gartenberg may have figured it out. He begins: "I've been using mobile devices for years to consume all sorts of content. From email, to novels to newspapers. The experience for the most part doesn't work very well and you need to be motivated to go through the hoops to get something usable." Read the rest of it for a user's perspective on River of News on mobile devices. Fresh Mac and Windows builds for the OPML Editor. One sure sign of a bubble is the meta-ness of the excitement. How far removed from actual user experience is the euphoria? Is there any technology involved? To me, the peak of the dot-com bubble (as I've said many times) was the showdown between the pet food companies. And when people start getting excited about people getting excited, that's when it's time to think about putting the checkbook back in the pocket. I was surprised to learn, on Doc Searls's blog, that the TechCrunch party in August was a $50K money-maker. Muli Koppel illustrates the diff betw Web 1.0 and 2.0?
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Here's a perfect 
I took the MacBook down to the Apple Store in Emeryville. The "genius" (no sarcasm) took a quick look at the machine and said they know what the problem is (he wouldn't explain), and ordered a replacement part. I'll have to leave the computer at the store for 4-5 days in about a week. Why I had to drive down there I don't know. What would it be like to own a Mac where the Apple Store is a hundred miles away? 
Everyone's writing about the new 
But I swear I can't figure out how to copy some podcasts onto my iPod so I can listen to them on my daily walk.
Every day on the 
A few months ago I started noticing that, walking down the street, I'd have to veer to avoid walking into people. They weren't paying attention, if I didn't want to have a collision, I had to adjust my path. I couldn't figure out what was going on, did this just start happening, or did I just start noticing it, or what? I thought maybe it was the age difference, I'd always heard that when you get older you become more 
If the Democratic Party had a sense of presence, they would run national TV commercials commemorating the life of 
The wait is over, the DSL is working at the new house. Halla fucking loo yah! The techs at SBC were great. Once we got dial tone working, they swarmed on the house, and made it their mission to squeeze 6 megabits from the ancient copper running down my street. The result is an awesomely fast DSL connection. I also got 5 static IP addresses, so get ready for some fun new servers. 
The next step in the evolution of 
I was able to figure out a mapping for the Times and the BBC, but clearly that won't work in every case. Somehow each feed is going to have to tell us where the mobile-friendly version is. And that means, inevitably, using a namespace (creating a new one or using an existing one) to link from an item to its mobile-friendly rendering. Or so it seems to me. I could be wrong. Figure it out and let me know. I'll use whatever works and is supported by the community. (But the clock is ticking, I have an app almost ready to deploy that needs the solution.)
After all the hassling today with the phone company I still don't have a dial tone at the house. I came back to the apartment, ready to sign up with Comcast, but they won't sign me up unless I transfer my old service. But I don't want to transfer my service I want service at both places. Never mind, we can't even do that unless you come down to our office to prove that you're not the old owners who apparently owe them money. Okay, I give up. It's apparently impossible to get Internet service in Berkeley. 
I've become a regular user of 
I have to admit I giggled and then snickered when I read the story of the fake Craigslist posting from a "woman" seeking abusive sex from straight men, and how the guy who impersonated the woman published the responses, which included explicit pictures of the men, their email addresses and names (one works at Microsoft) and cell phone numbers. Having read this piece at 
Today was the day I got my new house. Nice feeling. Had a bunch of friends over, then we went to lunch. The place is absolutely empty, no furniture, and not quite 100 percent clean. So on Monday I'm having a cleaning crew come through, to clean the place top to bottom. Then I think I'm going to have the floors re-done, and then paint the walls. There's no furniture, no belongings to get in the way, and no one living there, yet, to get annoyed. 
Facebook is absolutely correct that no new information is available now that wasn't available before, but only in a theoretic sense. An example might help explain how the users feel. Suppose you lived in a small city of 5000 people, on a small street that 20 people walked by every day. Because of the way the streets are aranged, most of the 20 people are neighbors, people you know well, the kind of people you trust to watch your kids if you have to run some errands. You leave the gate to your yard open because there's a nice shade tree there, and you leave a bowl of fruit out because you want your neighbors to feel welcome as they walk by. Come sit a spell and visit, life is good. Maybe two or three of your neighbors come for a visit a day. They get to rest, and you get to catch up on the gossip of the day.
Here's how ttl was intended to work. Suppose you have a copy of Gnutella running on your machine, and I have one running on my machine. My machine wants a copy of a certain feed, so it asks your machine if it has it. Your copy of Gnutella looks in its cache, finds a copy of the feed, takes the lastBuildDate, adds its ttl value. If the resulting time is greater than the current time, it says yes, I can give you that, otherwise it says no. If your Gnutella strikes out, if everyone it asks says no, it reads the feed from the feed's server. 
I've been ordering all the services required for my new house, which I get the keys for on Friday. Pretty exciting! What's remarkable is that all the sites have RSS feeds. Of course the phone company, and the ISP have feeds. (I'm getting high speed DSL from Yahoo/AT&T with 5 static IP addresses, for $80 a month, an improvement over the T1 line I used to have, it's faster, and costs less than 1/10th the price). The water service, electric company and gas companies all have RSS feeds, prominently displayed on their home pages. That was a surprise. 
I've 
Lesson learned: Most people's take-away on the "rivers" are that they're stripped-down versions of sites. I assume this is because they looked at them on their desktop or laptop; when you do that, that's the most striking thing about them. However, the experience is different when you look at them on a PDA, they look readable and useful. It's a hard thing to sell, I've learned. Not giving up yet, still have to figure it out. 
