Home >  Archive >  2010 >  September >  2

Previous / Next

Christmas Tree
This site contributes to the scripting.com community river.
About the author

A picture named daveTiny.jpgDave Winer, 56, is a visiting scholar at NYU's Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute and editor of the Scripting News weblog. He pioneered the development of weblogs, syndication (RSS), podcasting, outlining, and web content management software; former contributing editor at Wired Magazine, research fellow at Harvard Law School, entrepreneur, and investor in web media companies. A native New Yorker, he received a Master's in Computer Science from the University of Wisconsin, a Bachelor's in Mathematics from Tulane University and currently lives in New York City.

"The protoblogger." - NY Times.

"The father of modern-day content distribution." - PC World.

"Dave was in a hurry. He had big ideas." -- Harvard.

"Dave Winer is one of the most important figures in the evolution of online media." -- Nieman Journalism Lab.

10 inventors of Internet technologies you may not have heard of. -- Royal Pingdom.

One of BusinessWeek's 25 Most Influential People on the Web.

"Helped popularize blogging, podcasting and RSS." - Time.

"The father of blogging and RSS." - BBC.

"RSS was born in 1997 out of the confluence of Dave Winer's 'Really Simple Syndication' technology, used to push out blog updates, and Netscape's 'Rich Site Summary', which allowed users to create custom Netscape home pages with regularly updated data flows." - Tim O'Reilly.

8/2/11: Who I Am.

Contact me

scriptingnews1mail at gmail dot com.

Facebook

Twitter

Friendfeed

My sites
Recent stories

Recent links

My 40 most-recent links, ranked by number of clicks.

My bike

People are always asking about my bike.

A picture named bikesmall.jpg

Here's a picture.

Calendar

September 2010
Sun
Mon
Tue
Wed
Thu
Fri
Sat
 
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
14
15
16
17
18
19
20
21
22
23
24
25
26
27
28
29
30
 

Aug   Oct

Warning!

A picture named warning.gif

FYI: You're soaking in it. :-)


A picture named xmlMini.gif
Dave Winer's weblog, started in April 1997, bootstrapped the blogging revolution.

They're dead now Permalink.

Yesterday I reported that the apps that I thought would drown in the Oauthpocalypse were still alive.

I don't usually like the death metaphor when it comes to software, but -- these guys are now really, officially, seriously and permanently dead.

Mid-day heat-wave ride Permalink.

You know it's not so bad riding mid-day in the middle of a heat wave.

For one thing, most people stay indoors, so the path isn't crowded.

The first half of the trip is great cause there's a powerful tail wind. I fly!

The return ride is a great workout cause there's a huge head wind. I crawl. My legs burn.

But always, the breeze actually keeps me cool. I think it would be worse if there was no motion in the air.

A picture named heatWaveRide.jpg

In any case, after a morning of dealing with stupid uncooperative servers, there's nothing like pounding the pavement with my bike, which I absolutely adore. Great ride.

The map. I hour three minutes. 11.86 miles.

scripting.com: It's even worse than it appears Permalink.

We lost two-plus hours this morning as I scrambled to rebuild the scripting.com server.

A mysterious outage. I tried to reboot the server over and over, and it wouldn't come back. So I created another instance, but kept making mistakes with AWS. Then after fretting and thinking of a million other ways to do it, I sat down with pen and paper and wrote down, step by step, what I thought would work. Then I did it. It worked. :-)

Moral of the story, there are no shortcuts possible. You must pay the piper. And as Jerry once sang, so wisely:

I know the rent is in arrears.

The dog has not been fed in years.

It's even worse than it appears!

See, Jerry was a musician, but he understood programming.

Namaste y'all!

Still diggin.

A picture of a slice of cheese cake.

Ping: It's even worse than it appeared Permalink.

A picture named bear.gifFurther examination of Apple's new social network reveals more problems.

To review from last night's post:

1. It's awkward, at least, that it runs in iTunes and not a web browser. There's no Back button, no way to copy the address of a page and share it outside of iTunes. Also if it were just a website we'd be able to access it from an iPad now, not some time in the future.

2. There's no way to Like the song you're listening to. In other words there doesn't seem to be any integration with the music-listening app, even though the social network is embedded in it.

3. It's a ghost town. Obviously they're recommending all the musicians they have, because they have nothing to do with my musical interests. Same with users.

Now, onto this morning's revelation.

Chuck Shotton writes: "It seems that the only way for mere mortals to post something to the timeline is to buy a song, review an album, or commit some other act of commerce on the iTunes Store, which I certainly have never done.

"It's unfortunate, because the capability is there to do much more. I followed Cold Play as an experiment and they can post pics, songs, status updates, and all the stuff you'd expect to do with a Facebook-like social media tool.

"I'm baffled why Apple has this locked down for normal users. Someone there has to have seen the potential for this to totally upset the social media balance. But if they cripple it at the outset, that critical mass of users will never happen, IMO."

So Ping is not a social network, by any realistic definition of the term.

Update #1: My guess as to why we can't post to the timeline is that Apple is afraid we might say something harsh about them or Ping.

Update #2: Doc Searls nailed it on Steve Jobs's art, in 1997.



© Copyright 1997-2011 Dave Winer. Last build: 12/12/2011; 1:40:07 PM. "It's even worse than it appears."

RSS feed for Scripting News


Previous / Next