Today's links 

Randy Morin: SEOing Dave. Heh.

Steve Rubel: Twitter may face huge SMS bills.

Michael Gartenberg reviews and positions Apple TV.

Marc Canter nails it. As long as war is incredibly profitable, the US will continue to "solve" every problem with war.

Personal Democracy Forum 

I spoke with Micah Sifry this afternoon and we agreed that I would do a keynote at the Personal Democracy Forum in New York, on May 18 at Pace University.

The topic is the importance of open standards for all kinds of tools and devices. As with the Public Media conference last month, I'm going to write a series of essays here to prepare for the talk in New York.

300 

I played hooky today and went to see 300 at the IMAX theater in San Francisco. Not exactly my kind of movie. Pretty linear, the costumes were cool, and some of the monsters were so ugly they were funny.

Not sure why people think this movie is so great. But IMAX sure is impressive. If I were as rich as Mark Cuban I'd have one installed in my house.

McNulty from The Wire is in the movie. It was funny to see him speak with a British accent and pretend to be an ancient Greek.

I guess you can tell I didn't get sucked into the plot. I don't think you're supposed to come away thinking the movie is funny.

Top Dave 

Randy Morin notes that I've been gradually changing the way Scripting News works. It's true. I'm trying some experiments, to learn, but not to improve the rank of the site, rather to make it more useful to readers, and make it more likely that the things that I want to get attention, get attention.

For example, I noticed that I was always in the choir on TechMeme, but rarely did people discuss what I was interested in. Over time this got more pronounced. So I decided to opt-out of TechMeme, and rebuild, and see if I could reposition Scripting News as an originator of ideas, which it always has been. It seemed to me that Gabe's engine had drawn an incorrect conclusion about this site. I've noticed that Scoble can get an essay near the top of TM, even if no one is pointing to him, and if three excellent sites point to an essay here, it barely makes a blip on TM.

So I don't think his system is fair, or right. But unlike the B-list complainers, I'm not going to try to guilt Gabe into fixing it. I think a route-around is the web way of doing it. Make it all happen outside Gabe's world, and that will get his attention.

Now I may not be into SEO, but the changes are improving my rank, nonetheless. I've noticed that my articles now are showing up closer to the top of searches in the areas they cover. Of course I like this. Nothing wrong with a little respec!

BTW, I've been doing this with O'Reilly for a long time. I don't get invited to speak at their conferences, but they talk about what I want them to talk about anyway. Blogging, RSS, podcasting -- these are always big topics at ETech and the Web 2.0 conference. Same with SXSW. You think people don't know I'm behind these things? Heh. Of course they do.

You know the old Godfather rap, keep your friends close, but keep your enemies closer. Seems Tim and Hugh could learn a few tricks from Don Corleone.