Meetup in NYC, next Thurs 

When I have new tech to talk about I love to do what I call a "roadshow." I take the idea to some other city and have a meetup with anyone who's interested. Last time, when I lived in Florida, I did meetups in NYC, Toronto and Berkeley.

Now with rssCloud beginning a bootstrap, it's time for another roadshow, this one in NYC, at the same place as the 2005 meeting.

Next Thursday, July 30 at 6:30PM at the offices of Ritchie Capital, 747 Third Ave at 46th, 38th floor. We have a big conference room with a midtown view and a rooftop patio, the meetup should go for a couple of hours, then if people want to go out for a bite, let's go.

Already have confirmation that some of the most interesting people from NY tech will be there. If you know you'll be there, please post a comment below.

BTW, thanks to Thane Ritchie for allowing us the space. The investment world has been through some hard times, as has tech, and it's great to see them still out there. His latest interest, I hear, is urban farming.

rssCloud developments 

Yesterday I posted the Implementor's Guide. It walks a coder through the components of rssCloud -- the authoring tool, cloud, and aggregator.

I also released the source code for my implementation of the cloud. My aggregator, River2, was updated to support the cloud. I have not released my authoring tool yet.

I started a FriendFeed group to facilitate communication among implementors.

A feed that will help you test, if you're developing an aggregator. It updates every 15 minutes, notifies the cloud server, which in turn will notify any registered subscribers.

My personal "LifeLiner" feed is also available for testing. I wouldn't recommend subscribing in a feed reader like NetNewsWire or Google Reader. It's designed for the loosely coupled 140-character network. For which there aren't any readers. Yet! (Gotta start somewhere..)

Meetup in NYC next Thurs.

Anil Dash has written an excellent white paper on recent developments in the realtime or "pushbutton" web, including of course rssCloud.

rssCloud isn't "recent" --> it was defined in January 2001.

My two cents on Gates 

I just posted a tweet saying I don't view the Gates matter through a racial lens, I view it through a Harvard lens. I want to explain, and I'll try to do it briefly.

First, I've had my share of run-ins with cops. When I was young, I liked drugs and street politics, and that meant lots of confrontations with NY cops. Never got arrested because I was lucky and because I was fully submissive when stopped by cops. They scared the shit out of me. I knew they had lethal force, and they must teach them how to be terrifying, because they are. Very.

Later, as a college student, I'd occasionally get drunk (in New Orleans, everyone does it) and once even got picked up and put in jail for a night to sober up. No record, but I'll never forget it.

Hitch-hiking in Calif, I got stopped by police in Tracy, and was fined exactly the amount I had in my pocket. I paid it, and wondered where the money went, but I didn't make a stink. I just left and never went back.

I once had two cop cars come to my house in Woodside, and I had to prove that I lived there. I did. Kept my mouth shut except to say "Here" as I handed over my driver's license. I owned the place. Didn't matter. Until they left they owned my ass.

A couple of years ago driving from Calif to Denver, I got stopped in Winnemucca. I was speeding. Really speeding. Stupidly speeding. I accepted my ticket graciously. Drove slowly the rest of the way and got stopped in every major town in Nevada. Never expressed any irritation. Just begged for them to let me leave the state. Promised never to return.

I say all this to point out that I have some experience with cops, and I'm white, and I would never in a million years think of yelling at a cop. Never have, and if I ever do, I expect to be arrested.

Now Gates says he didn't yell at the cop. I don't believe him. Too many other people who were there say he did. I'm pretty sure when you're yelling at a cop who's doing his job he's supposed to arrest you for disorderly conduct. I think that's more or less what disorderly conduct is.

I also think yelling at a cop is stupid. He's got a gun. If it's so much worse being black with cops (and I believe it is) you'd think blacks would be 100 times more careful about it than a white guy.

Now, the second part of the story...

In addition to being hassled by cops, sometimes deservedly and other times not, I also spent 1.5 years at Harvard as a research fellow. I was not at the level of Gates, but I had an office in Harvard Yard and a very nice ID card that got me into all kinds of great places. Being in Harvard gives you an Ivy League feeling, you're one of the Special people. It's very nice.

Imho what we're seeing here is not black outrage, but Harvard outrage. As a piece in Salon pointed out today, if he were anyone else, white or black, no one would have cared, and he probably wouldn't have been so vocal in his rage. What he's saying over and over is "Hey I'm a tenured Harvard professor. I just got back from China where I was on a PBS show. I'm a big dude. You don't treat me this way."

But I'd like to say to the Harvard prof what the Salon guy said to him. Shut up Prof Gates. You're just like the rest of us. When a cop gives you an order, you do what he says. If you have a beef with it, that comes later. And let your lawyer speak for you, and be sure you're right.

Another way RSS works 

JY Stervinou had a great idea today.

He started by posing a question...

"If a decentralized microblog is represented by an RSS feed, how to represent the microblog avatar?"

Ahhhhh...

There is already a tag for this.

I added an <image> to both of my test feeds.

Great work JY!!