Oh happy day!? 

A Twitter clone that's all-the-way open?

Did Christmas come early this year?

http://identi.ca/doc/faq

Marshall has a writeup.

I am dave over there. Follow me!

First thing --> looking for an API.

It supports the OpenMicroBlogging protocol, which I had not heard about until now.

evan appears to be the author of the software, or at least the authority on it.

From the FAQ, it will support the Twitter API, but doesn't yet. There is RSS here, but I haven't found it yet.

Here's the RSS. http://identi.ca/dave/all/rss Just add "/rss" after anything.

I've hooked it up to FriendFeed, but it looks (much) less than optimal (and I'm being kind). They really need to work on the RSS, it's the first really lame thing I've seen in identi.ca.

Social cameras, on the way 

Bijan got a preview of the iPhone 2.0 software, which adds location to the camera.

It's a piece of the social camera puzzle.

When you come back from vacation where there are lots of other people taking pictures, go to Flickr 4.0 and enter the location and the time, and voila, vacation pictures and you're in all of them. :-)

It's bad news for people cheating on their spouses. Now it'll be easier to follow your trail and who you were with. (I had a preview of this, when I was on a date, walking down the street the other way was Justin with his camera mounted on his hat and his broadcasting laptop in his knapsack. It was a long time ago, if you want to see who I was out with you're going to have to search through a lot of archives. Enjoy!)

A feature like this (which was obviously coming for years) will reshape what it means to take a picture. That's why people are confused, because we all come from the past, and this product exists only in the future (for everyone but Bijan, who I hate).

Just kidding of course. Heh.

PS: This originally appeared as a comment on Bijan's blog. An illustration of "chasing the news" earlier today.

How to stop chasing the news 

My Internet writing is so distributed these days, there are five main places I write, and a host of others where I write peripherally. Here are the five:

1. Scripting News (and its RSS feed).

2. The comments here (managed by Disqus).

3. Twitter (used to be a lot, now much less).

4. FriendFeed (links, comments).

5. The OPML Editor (for software dev work mostly).

My writing style differs in all the places, it depends on its newness, who's there, what the tools let me do, what I'm doing there.

None of them are what I want them to be, but I'm happy because I feel like things are shifting, and I'm almost ready to understand what I really want.

First, like a lot of people, I have either found or invented systems to connect the five places. When I write something here, I ping Twitter. FriendFeed has been programmed to automatically pick it up. My writing sometimes but rarely flows through the NewsJunk website and out to FriendFeed and Twitter because it's like a radio station, again, pushing links and content where we want it to go. We're all set up for new destinations. The NewsJunk software (which is a major undertaking, like Manila was in 1999) is all about moving ideas around.

But movement isn't really what we want.

For a moment think about TechCrunch. Okay let's say one of the editors writes something longish over on FriendFeed and then realizes that would make a good post on TC. So he switches over to WordPress (the editorial software they use) and pastes it in there, makes some corrections, adds a picture, some links, edits some more, adds a few thoughts, then publishes. A few minutes later an update, he spots a typo and fixes it. Now what happened to the FriendFeed article? It's still there, unchanged by all the improvements. But what should have happened?

It seems there should only be one copy of the story, and when it changes on TC, it should also change on FF. Further, when he adds some pictures, or links to a podcast, or embeds a video, that should happen in both places as well. And of course there shouldn't really be two places, there should be one, with two views. TechCrunch is a flow of articles grouped around a name, with the judgment we assume comes with it. But the idea originated somewhere else (it seems all of them do) and after it migrates it still exists there.

I go through a similar process with pieces that flow to the Huffington Post. First, I get the piece in perfect shape over here, and then copy it over there. Of course it never is perfect, and then I'm stuck making changes in both places.

Now should the comments in both places be the same comments? Ahhh, at that point I'm nto so sure. We'll have to try it out and see what happens. (In the Huffpost case, definitely not. I don't feel like a member of the community there, even though the comments I see are in response to my writing.)

If you want to get more ideas about this, revisit Web 2.0 Gas Prices, a piece that tells the story about how an idea sprouted in one place and then bloomed in another. Lots of data were integrated from pictures to maps to MP3s. Try to ignore the issue of wheher it's fair to McCain. That was the point in the discussion on FF, over here on SN, what's interesting are the editorial techniques and what kind of software will be needed to support them.

A few weeks ago for the first time a reader noticed the double-entendre in the name of this weblog. People always assumed it meant "News About Scripting." Sure to some extent that's what it means, but we all know, not so much these days. But it's main meaning was "The application of technology to news." Scripting is the verb, not the subject. You always have to be looking for that with me, I have a devious mind and sometimes (not often I hope) I lead you in one direction, when the action is in a different one.

PS: I've been working on a new "junk" site, this one for tech news. I'll have a writeup here soon.

PPS: What I've learned from the political NewsJunk, the MSM guys have figured out blogging, and generally do as good a job as the amateurs, though some of the pros are just running linkblogs and not much more. They typically don't like NJ, for some reason. Go figure.

PPPS: It seems postscripts should have lives of their own too. The next one should live here, and also live in the FriendFeed Feedback room.

PPPPS: The Reshare command in FF, it seems to me, shouldn't create a copy, rather should add the item to my flow, at the top of the list, and any comments that appear in either place would be seen in both. It's understandable that copies must be made when things move among silos, but within a silo why not deal in pointers? (Or give the choice to the user.)