Validating the validator 

Todd Cochrane noticed that feedvalidator.org is reporting problems with feeds it used to pass. I checked it out and verified the problems he reported. As far as I can see there's nothing wrong with Todd's feed, imho the validator should not be warning about the problems it's warning about. Please, would the maintainers of the validator check this out and make whatever corrections are necessary. Thanks!!

Thanks to Colin Faulkingham 

I added his expand/collapse code to the HTML rendering of Scripting News, per my recent request.

It seems to work nicely.

Does it work in Opera? Please let me know.

LobbyCon 2.0 predicts the Newsroom of the Future 

The lobby of the Palace Hotel was a hub of activity after lunch yesterday. The picture to the right hardly does it justice. A constant stream of friends, a wide variety of ages and backgrounds, flowed through.

It was unlike anything I had seen before, likely because this conference was held in downtown SF, and not San Diego or Phoenix, and a facet of what we'll have when the Newsroom of the Future is up and running. Every city will have one, but San Francisco will probably be first.

Here's a video I took last week at CUNY that gives another perspective. Lots of tables, video screens, a stage, radio and TV equipment. What you can't see is that the room was saturated with wifi, and while it didn't have a huge presence on the Internet, it could have.

Today's new toy 

Today's new (developer's) toy is an OPML 2.0 rendering of the NY Times keywords list. Have fun!

A mighty torrent of news! 

Doc: "A year from now every newspaper will have a newsriver."

I think so too because: 1. The idea is so compelling and 2. It's so easy to implement.

Thanks so much to Doc Searls for writing a great evangelical piece about the power of rivers. The stream is turning into a current, and soon really will be a river.

It’s so weird to see rivers show up in Facebook, and Twitter is just a big river of all the people you’re following.

The idea is actually a descendent of the teletype terminals that used to be in the movies (and for all I know in actual newsrooms). The news was printed on scrolls of paper, and when a new story came in it would push the older stories onto the floor. You could catch up on the news by scrolling back through the news. Cary Grant, Rosalind Russell, Katherine Hepburn did it. We’ll all be doing it soon enough. And it really helps to get other people singing the song, esp from within the hallowed halls of Harvard.

The more attention we get focused on it, the more other developers will tune in.

And what may not be so clear from the narrative is that this project got its start from a meeting I had with some technical people at the Times last week in NY. Like most organizations, it's not of one mind, there are people who are scared of what comes next but there are others who know that the Times has to change. By opening up their internal data to me, all kinds of interesting stuff can happen. We've been here before. The Times are the unsung heroes of RSS, without them it never would have solidified, with the publishing industry falling in behind the Times. It was this consensus that created critical mass for RSS 2.0 in 2002 and 2003.

I really hope some of this stuff feeds back into the Times support of RSS. And as you have seen, there are now lots of new opportunities in user interface for news. This is what I do, when I'm in my "flow" -- we're there now again, with a new toy to build and then play with, every day.

Betsy Devine: "Dave Winer has been improving the New York Times for as long as I’ve known him."

Phil Windley: "With more sources, who are themselves continuously updating, the keyword river could be as dynamic as you’d want it to be."

The Boston Red Sox 

If I were an American League fan there's little doubt that I would be a Red Sox fan. They have it all. Fenway Park. The Green Monster. The Curse of the Bambino. And an ancient legacy of sucking and when it looks like they're not sucking so bad, blowing it in the worst way possible at the last possible moment. The drama of the Red Sox, the agony of their fans. The only more hapless team in baseball is my beloved New York Mets. (And possibly the Chicago Cubs.)

Before last night's game they were down 3-1 in the ALCS, but they won, and now they're down 3-2. These are long odds, but with the Red Sox, you never know. (They were down 3-0 in 2004 and came back, amazingly, to beat the Yankees, a sweet wonderful humiliating defeat.)

For some reason, last night I thought of Aaron Copland's Appalachian Spring as an appropriate anthem for this moment in Red Sox time. The pioneers have their ups and downs, theres's still hope, but they've suffered greatly. I think of Dowbrigade, hunkered down, feeling sure his team will exceed his worst expectation of disaster.

With the Red Sox, as with Jerry Garcia and Scripting News, it's even worse than it appears!