This is both a test post and a celebratory post (if it works).

Yehi! It worked. What this means is that I now have scripting2.root as an installable tool, just like Radio2 and River2.

Here's a post with an admittedly ugly URL.

But it illustrates something that Werner Vogels will probably like, Jeff Barr too. Out of the box this tool likes to create blogs on S3.

Flip it around, what's becoming clear is that S3 makes storage easier, and that may be enough to make it worth another try for people hosting their own blogging software. We've done that with Radio2 which is a lightweight microblog editor, and now we have the same idea working for the heavy duty professional blogging solution, Scripting2 (the software I use to edit Scripting News, completely rewritten last year).

If you don't understand what any of this means, stay tuned. This is just a test post.

 3/16/2011; 3:29:59 PM.   .

What's that -- a new feature? But I thought RSS was frozen.

Yeah it's frozen, but a new feature is still always only a namespace away.

I wrote about the microblog namespace in Twitter Posts Don't Have Titles, a subject that could only interest someone who has been puzzling over how to do a Twitter-like streamer using RSS as the transport. The problem isn't whether or not RSS can do it, it can, the question is what to do about feed readers that don't understand. Answer: Let em figure it out!

In the meantime, I thought it was time to add some long-needed stuff to RSS, in a namespace of course.

For example, a lot of people wonder whatever became of their tweets. I have over 30,000 of them. Most of them are gone, poof -- into the ether. But some of them I have archived. I am determined that whatever we boot up now have archives provided for, in the base model.

So if you look at my linkblog feed you'll see an item called <microblog:archive>. Here's a screen grab.

With that info, you can loop over all the items I've pushed through this feed, going back to its inception. That's a built-in feature of Radio2. All Radio2 blogs have this feature.

So there's an advantage that microblogs outside-the-silo have over insiders.

 3/16/2011; 10:07:45 AM.   .

Amid revolutions and huge earthquakes and nuclear meltdowns, we're reminded that we might see a NY Times paywall any day now.

I've always said that the Times likes to talk about a paywall, and they've been doing that for a long time, but when it comes time to put it up they'll realize it cuts them off from the world, and they won't do it. It's like a baseball player refusing to get on a baseball field. Once you do that you stop being a baseball player.

But then corporations are capable of doing things you never thought they could possibly ever really do, when it came down to actually doing it.

1. Microsoft insisting that all netbooks had to run Windows 7. I figured they wouldn't mess with a good thing and would let the OS fade into the background. Here was a chance to create some new software because netbooks could be used in places no other computer could have been used before -- because of price, battery life and built-in communications. But they did manage to remove all the excitement out of the netbook product, just in time for one of the most exciting products ever, the iPad -- to swamp it.

2. Twitter and the coral reef. I think they really didn't see all the consequences as they drifted toward the model they now find themselves in. One where, in order to get revenue they had to shut down almost all the developers. The decision they announced on Friday was both impossible and inevitable. It was impossible to believe they could actuallly do it, and inevitable because they had no choice. I wonder if the founders of the company don't now wish they had gone a different way, one where Twitter could become an indispensible new layer to the Internet, instead of a bigger and bigger obstacle to that layer, to be routed around. I don't think in the end the founders will make much more money this way. The difference is that they bring along some very greedy people, who don't mind foreclosing on huge amounts of creativity to make a relatively small amount of money.

Meanwhile the Times app on the iPad is slow and crashy and incomprehensible. You can't get a quick sense of what's going on in the world. Using the news in this environment is a lot like it was in the 70s and 80s. Sit down at the kitchen table, spread out the newspaper, and spend an hour reading. As with the NewsCorp product, they seem to be saying "If we put a lot of effort into this we can convince people to use written news the way they used to." They could skip it, because things like that don't happen.

But they could do it anyway. If they really think people are going to pay a premium for a lugubrious daily news product, they're going to be as surprised as Microsoft and Twitter. There are too many choices. The Guardian is doing great work and there's no talk of a paywall there. They're not as broad as the Times, yet -- and they cover the world from a British perspective, and I look at things as an American. And there's Al Jazeera, which is aggressive and competent, and probably would move quickly to fill any void left by an entity the size of the Times.

I link to the Times in my feed probably more than any other publication. I might soon have to give that up. Oh well. I stopped using my netbook too.

 3/16/2011; 1:53:00 AM.   .