I've been working in Node.js for the last year or so, and am starting to share some of the results in the form of little focused server apps that do one thing well. I think of them as snacks, like the ones I released for in-browser JS in the summer. Nothing earth shaking, just useful tools.

The server snacks are also provided as open source, so they serve as good example code to help people get started with server-side JavaScript development. A lot of people want to learn to program these days, and imho server-side JavaScript is a good place to start. It's a very nerdy and deep place, but also soulful and well-connected to both the past and the future. And in its own way, welcoming. (It's a good way to find out if you really like programming.)

Noderunner

Before I start beating the drum about the first one, Noderunner, I want to ask some of the people who read this site who are experienced Node developers, to look it over. Perhaps install the software, give it a try.

https://github.com/scripting/noderunner

Looking for feedback that I haven't made any horrific errors or omissions.

I'm using Noderunner myself, so that's one thing that makes me think it's ready for others to try out.

PS: I started a mail list for server snacks support.

A shameful demonstration during the funeral of Rafael Ramos, one of the NYPD who were killed last week. Some comments follow..

1. If the police want to protest, when they are off-duty and out of uniform, I say go for it. This is America, where everyone is entitled to speak their minds.

2. However, when they are in uniform, and carrying a badge and a gun, they are not entitled to speak as individuals. They are members of the NYPD, and they must respect the chain of command, which includes the elected leader of the city, the mayor.

3. There are good reasons for this. When you depend on the police to keep the peace, you want to know that they will protect everyone equally, without regard for their political opinion. If I were to be arrested and I was wearing a button that said "God bless Mayor De Blasio" or "The police are assholes," both of which are protected speech, how confident could I be that the police would treat me the same as someone wearing buttons more sympathetic to their cause.

4. What about cops that are assigned to protect the mayor? Have they said if and when they will turn their backs on the mayor if someone tries to harm him?

5. If it were allowed to persist, then I would want my own police force to protect me from the ones who have political opinions different from my own. I believe it used to be this way before we decided it would be better to have one apolitical police force.

6. All this because the people we employ as police couldn't be professional in a time of great emotion. Maybe they did it impulsively. Maybe they'll come to their senses.

7. Not that it matters, but what exactly did the mayor do or say to so upset them? Perhaps he empathized with citizens who feared that NYPD wasn't up to the job, or worse, they simply murder citizens and expect impunity. The latter is what it looks like to me. The video of Eric Garner's death recorded a murder. His death was ruled a homicide by the coroner. This was worse than the murder of the two police officers, because it was done in the name of justice, and because there is no penalty for the murderers, so no disincentive to do it again. Garner was unarmed, and no threat to anyone.

8. There will be more marches in the city. There was a hiatus, possibly out of respect for the grieving police (the mayor did ask that there be no demonstrations) or perhaps it was the Christmas holiday. But especially since the police made such a clear political statement at the funeral of Ramos, and because they outrageously blame the demonstrators for the deaths of the officers there are certain to be marches to emphasize that police killing citizens without recourse is still unacceptable.

9. Who will police those marches? Will any of the police be cops who turned their back on the mayor? We're supposed to trust them? What if they decide to have a political demo of their own while the citizens are marching? What then? We live in a police state as long as the police feel they can try to control political expression. Perhaps we always have lived in a police state in NYC, but now it's become evident because we have better communication tools. Whatever it is, if the police thought through the consequences of their disrespect for the mayor, then they are playing a very ugly and dangerous game with our freedom and our lives.

This is the time of year when I choose someone to be my Blogger of the Year. It's never been easy, because while there are a lot of people who blog, only a few meet two important criteria:

1. They contribute themselves without a business model. People who blog because that's what they do. I call them Natural Born Bloggers and because I love acronyms, NBB's.

2. I read them.

Granted, there are many more people in the the first class than in the second. Who I pick depends a lot on what I'm doing the year before.

Podcasting

This seems to have been another breakout year for podcasting.

For me podcast listening is fairly seasonal. I don't drive, and in the summer I bike to get around and for exercise, and I don't listen to podcasts while riding. It's already dangerous to ride where I live, and I think that listening to a podcast while riding is over the top. I don't want to die in a horrible accident because I was listening the latest episode of Here's The Thing.

I hope that someday bike helmet makers will figure out that they could build-in Bluetooth speakers. I bet it would even sound good, and most important it would be designed to be ambient, not to dominate. I'd like to be able to hear the person yelling about the bus that's about to hit me.

Anyway, for me this is walking season, so I'm listening to a lot of podcasts.

My favorite is Planet Money. They ask interesting questions and tell stories in a natural and curiosity-evoking way. But they aren't bloggers, they're news people. I love what they do, and I thought for a moment this might be where I go with BOTY this year. But Planet Money doesn't fit criteria #1.

I know there are many people who podcast as they blog, I do that -- for example, but sporadically. I probably did no more than five podcasts this year. And the podcasts I listen to are all produced by professional news people. It just worked out that way.

Something unusual

Every choice for BOTY is unusual. Look at who I've chosen. Joel, Jay, Jen. Whoa a lot of J's there Dave. Then there was Philip and Seth. Each of these people have attitudes. Lots of white males, I know. I guess we read what we know. Jen is a hippie. These are all great people, and each is different. But this year I'm going to do something really different.

Ever notice how sometimes Time's Person of the Year isn't a person at all, rather a group of people? The Hungarian Freedom Fighter, The Inheritor, The Apollo 8 Astronauts, The Middle Americans, American Women, The Computer, The Endangered Earth, The Peacemakers, The Whistleblowers, The American Soldier, The Good Samaritans, The Protestor, and this year's Ebola Fighters.

So in that spirit, this year's Blogger of the Year is the first that is not a person, but a group of people.

People who blog on Facebook

For me this has been the Year of Facebook. Until now, like a lot of other people I respect, I've been a holdout. I've written a lot about that here on my blog, why I held out, why I gave up, and why I am so enthusiastic about the blogging that happens on Facebook.

There's a lot to like about it. Unlike Twitter, which because of its 140-character limit, reduces communication to what I call Grunts and Snorts, and people to caricatures. Twitter is for slogans, tribal communication, mis-directed anger. Twitter has a cultural problem, and because the people who run it aren't actual users, they aren't likely to find their way through it. It's going to get worse.

Facebook is different. There's room to express an idea. And a culture that's highly supportive. On both Twitter and Facebook I've gone from being master of my domain to a face in the crowd. But sometimes it's cool to be part of a group. I loved Twitter in the early years, but now most of that lives on Facebook. At least in 2014.

The best thing about Facebook are the new friends I've made over the last year. People who I knew well enough to want to friend them (which is a relatively low bar), who turned out to be gems hiding in plain sight. For example, I've become friends with Scott Knaster, after knowing him since 1984, when were were both part of the early Mac community (he worked at Apple, doing docs for developers, I was a developer). We bonded around this year's baseball playoffs. And btw, today's his birthday, something I only know because of Facebook.

There have been a dozen such new friendships that came from Facebook. Why? Because some people have the impulse to put themselves into their online expressions, and their humanity comes through in the form of vulnerability expressed with feeling. Because Facebook is so supportive, vulnerability comes more easily. I have a friend who went through serious surgery this year, and came out okay. Without Facebook, I might have heard about it through a friend, but I wouldn't have felt the story. I have another friend who lives for beauty, and it comes through in every expression.

So, in 2014, Facebook has picked up the ball for blogging. It's definitely not what I imagined, and I'm not comfortable with where it might be going. But for now, in 2014, the bloggers this year, that made a difference to me, came to me through Facebook.

PS: A hat-tip to Robert Scoble who insisted that I get on Facebook earlier this year.

After the Lakers, without Kobe Bryant, beat the Warriors last night, the team with the best record in the NBA, you have to wonder what happens when they next start Kobe and the Lakers go back to their losing ways.

Looks like a repeat of the 2012 conundrum the Knicks faced. Are we Melo's team, or are we winners? You can't be both.

This is why I love basketball. It often finds these very precise questions, and very often people make the (imho) wrong choice.

The right choice, btw -- is fuck Kobe, let's win.

Dries Buytaert is the community leader of Drupal, and is running a tech startup with an enormous endowment of $118 million. He wrote a piece that to me is 100 percent pure ageist dog whistle. He says attitude beats experience.

Now I have more experience than he does, but I think I would have said this even when I was relatively green. I guess I have a bad attitude.

Dries, it all depends on what you're trying to do.

If you want to make a consulting business with lots of corporate customers, when how people look and behave is most important, then I understand where you're coming from. You want people who make other people comfortable.

But if your goals are different, if you want to create something incredible that's new and different, and at the same time simple and usable, you're going to need people who, even though this isn't their goal, piss other people off.

Because compromise in development and design is the path to mediocrity. To APIs that take up bookshelves. To software with bad error messages that waste users time (like iTunes, for example). Most tech today is developed by people with good attitude and not much experience. Which is why you get such small steps forward, that are mostly derivative of what came before. If you want something great, simple, different, inspiring, you must choose different qualities in the people you work with. And worry less about fitting in and more about reaching for the stars.

I wrote on Friday, before the police murders yesterday, that NYPD and the city are inseparable. It's still true today, no matter what some people may think. We are the same thing. That's why it's so disturbing to see the police openly disrespect the mayor. We self-police in the United States. No matter how they feel, they really can't continue as police if they feel so strongly about the mayor.

We cannot have an independent police force in the city. This is the United States, with a Bill of Rights. We cannot impose constraints on the citizens of the city that would violate the Constitution. The police can protest when they're off-duty. They're Americans too. But when they're on duty they are part of the city as a whole. They have to protect opinions they don't support. They don't get a say in other people's speech. A police force that thinks otherwise is a very dangerous thing.

If they don't respect the mayor, how are they going to treat ordinary citizens?

We need leadership. We elected a leader, and the police must get behind him, as must everyone else in the city. There's really no other way it can work.

Mark Zuckerberg at 22: "Young people are just smarter."

My own experience: I did great work when I was in my 20s, 30s, 40s and 50s. The stuff I'm most famous for I did in my 40s. But the best software I've ever done was this week. I think that's pretty much been true all the way through. It all builds.

Some people stop growing. And some people never are that smart, at any age, even in their 20s. If you want to be creative, and you work at it, you don't stop growing.

It never gets easy. Which is one of the reasons I like what I do.

How to make it better

I don't expect the young people who have all the power in the tech industry to wake up one day and want to work with people who are the same age as their parents. That's not likely to happen.

But I do think it's possible to create new distribution systems for technology that don't have to flow through the channels they dominate. With different values that are appropriate to people who aren't trying to conquer the world, only make a modest contribution. That's something you come to appreciate with age. I don't think we'll have a lot of competition from younger technologists.

Alert: There are spoilers in this piece for two TV series, Battlestar Galactica and Homeland.

Battlestar Galactica takes place after the Cylons and the humans have been at war for some time. An earlier round of war involved computer viruses so as a result there is no net that connects the ships. When they have to turn the net on, in an emergency, they only have so much time before everything is destroyed by the viruses that are still in all their systems. Disconnect the network, no viruses. Re-connect: destruction.

I always thought this was brilliant of the writers of the series, because it's inevitable that we will do this too, if we avoid the total destruction that can come from interconnecting everything.

And that's a context for Sony's experience with The Interview. It'll get worse. We're going to globalize in ways we've never imagined. It won't just be our economic systems that merge (they pretty much already have), so will our legal and social systems. We can't, ultimately, have more freedom than the people of China, Iran or North Korea. Because our systems are networked, as we've seen, we exert control on each other.

Another example, what do you think Zuck is talking about when he meets with the leaders of the China? It has to be about how to impose limits on free speech. Facebook will have to have the same limits as locally-run networks, if the people who run China are to let it in. And once they've implemented those controls for one huge country, they are available to be deployed everywhere. I'm not saying Facebook is bad, it's just inevitable. If they won't do it someone else will.

And don't forget, the US is leading the way in state surveillance. We're already competing with China over who can control speech on the net more effectively.

That's why I laugh when I hear about The Internet of Things. No, if I ever get a pacemaker, I don't want it on the net. Another TV show, Homeland was very prescient in explaining this one. I probably don't want to ride in a car that can be hijacked by a North Korean hacker either.

One more thing, it's a problem that some countries are not fully on the net. That means they can attack without anyone having the ability to retaliate. As if we would even know who to retaliate against.

The big lesson here is that we probably should un-network in some meaningful ways. Before there's too much more havoc to deal with.

I had a phone conversation with a Facebook friend, Chris Saad, last week. In that conversation, I found out what Chris does. I also found out that he did not know what I do. Yet, I feel I know him, and I think to some extent he feels he knows me.

Yet all the tweeting and facebooking I've been doing about my various projects has gone for naught. When he found out what I do, and vice versa, we found that there was a lot we have in common! We should be collaborating, I felt.

So I wanted to leave you with this little thought. We may think we're being informed by these great social media tools, but more likely we're being fed. High fructose emotional rage medicine. Here's the next thing to be angry about. And the next and the next and so on. Facebook is a bit nicer. I can see Chris lives in a lovely apartment and has a sweet girlfriend (no sarcasm). Lots to admire there. But something is seriously missing.

I would really like to solve this problem. To use the great networking tools we have to their fullest potential. So we can really get to know the people we connect with, if that's what we want. And that is very much what I want.

Talking with a friend the other day I learned something I had not previously understood. The people of the NYPD want the support of the community the same way we support soldiers who are or were fighting in Afghanistan and Iraq. They want "Support Our Troops" to apply to them as it applies to soldiers fighting overseas.

The people of NYC are horrified to see what we are supposed to excuse in this support. The video of the murder of Eric Garner, and that's the only word for it, was totally incriminating. The thought that the perpetrators of that crime would go free is something we can't accept. Not when the evidence is so clear and overwhelming.

Two local papers, the Daily News and the Post communicate directly to the people of the NYPD and tell them they deserve total support of the community no matter what they do. And they apparently believe them.

This is a huge disconnect, and we let it happen. The problem isn't with the NYPD, the problem is with the blanket total support we give our military when it fights in Afghanistan and Iraq. The price of placing zero value on the lives of the people of these countries is that our lives in turn become worthless. What goes around comes around. You reap what you sow. There are dozens of adages and fables that explain this phenomenon. The lives of the people of the foreign countries are worth exactly as much as ours. We overlooked the behavior of American soldiers in these countries. Now the cops want to know why we treat them differently.

And they're right to ask. Why? If the army can arbitrarily kill thousands in Iraq, why can't they kill a few people in Staten Island, Missouri, or Ohio? You "support the troops" why don't you support us, they ask.

Fair question. There is an answer. We made a bad mistake. Now we understand. We have to unwind this. We have to tell the police that they are us and we are them. When they kill us they are killing themselves. Eric Garner was a real person, with a life, a family, he clearly had ideas, felt entitled as an American citizen to be left alone by the cops. So he was breaking a law. Yeah, it happens. There's no way what he did justified the penalty. The people who killed him must pay for what they did, so that everyone in a position of similar power understands that we do not tolerate murder, even if you have a badge. Our support of the police has limits.

We can support the troops by honoring their sacrifice. By caring for them when they come home. Or caring for their families if they don't. But don't expect to get a pass when you break the law. Police must be held to a higher standard, because of the power we give them. Certainly not a lower one.

Net-net: Let's stop singing God Bless America at our sporting events. Let's stop lying about what our military does (I see the recruiting commercials during basketball and football games, they are disgusting). We have to remove this culture of honoring the invasion of countries on the pretense of liberating them when we're actually protecting the economic interests of the rich and powerful. We allowed this to happen. Now if we want it to stop, we're going to have to be strong. It's going to involve a lot more than marching in the streets. We're going to have to remain seated when we're asked to stand and honor our imperialism which devalues the lives of ordinary people, like us. That way maybe the police will get the message that we won't tolerate them killing us.

Update: Who's going to bring NYC together?

Back in 2000 when Napster was raging, I kept writing blog posts asking this basic question. Isn't there some way the music industry can make billions of dollars off the new excitement in music?

Turns out there was. Ask all the streaming music services that have been born since the huge war that the music industry had with the Internet. Was it necessary? Would they have done better if they had embraced the inevitable change instead of trying to hold it back? The answer is always, yes, it seems.

Well, now it seems Sony is doing it again, on behalf of the movie industry. Going to war with the Internet. Only now in 2014, the Internet is no longer a novel plaything, it's the underpinning of our civilization, and that includes the entertainment industry. But all they see is the evil side of the net. They don't get the idea that all their customers are now on the net. Yeah there might be a few holdouts here and there, but not many.

What if instead of going to war, they tried to work with the good that's on the Internet? It has shown over and over it responds. People basically want a way to feel good about themselves. To do good. To make the world better. To not feel powerless. It's perverted perhaps to think that Hollywood which is so averse to change, could try to use this goodwill to make money, but I think they could, if they appealed to our imaginations instead of fear.

Note: This problem has been solved. Something about a tarball and the current node.js installation or distribution or. Something shifted in the plate tectonics and it broke my water pump. This is all voodoo, I tell you!

Upfront disclaimer

I have a cold. I'm trying to do some development work anyway. I have a project I'm itching to see run, and I'm bored. Because of the cold, my mind is a little foggy, and it's likely the problem I'm having with Heroku is something I'm doing wrong that's completely obvious. Hence this blog post.

The problem

1. I've been trying to create a new app on Heroku.

2. I create a new folder called pringles in a local folder on my local Mac disk.

3. In that folder I put two files. package.json and hello.js.

4. As you can see, the script is just a console.log call.

5. I do the commands on the Bare-bones Heroku page. Init a repo, add the two files, create the app (pringles3), build the master. Here's the log.

Things I've considered

At first I thought the problem might be that I'm using a new Mac and it's not initialized in some way. But I kept my original Mac around, completely unmodified, the one I did months of Heroku-based development work on, and repeated the steps with the same results. So it seems the problem isn't on my machine.

I also thought it might have to do with some package I was using, that's why I reduced it down to using no packages, and just being a simple console.log call.

What you can do

If you see the problem, please let me know.

If you're a Heroku user, can you think of something for me to check?

If you're a Heroku user, and feel like wasting some time, can you repeat the steps? Do you get a different result?

I'm basically stuck until I get this working, so I'm highly motivated.

Thanks!

1. Facebook should have a Dislike button, but it would work differently from Like.

2. Where likes are public, a dislike would just be between you and the algorithm. It's a way of signalling that "this is something I do not want to see more of."

3. It's very much like Checkbox News, an idea I proposed for cable news as it makes the transition to the net. Suppose I'm watching MSNBC, as I did in April 2007, and I have heard enough about the massacre at Virginia Tech. The reports are getting too meta. I get the sense that they're mostly just filling space until the next outrage breaks. So I want to say "No more news about Virginia Tech." Uncheck the box. Or in Facebook terminology -- dislike. Same idea.

4. It just came up the other day. I was sick of reading about people who don't know Ben Edelman saying he should be punished for being himself. I want to signal to Facebook, please I beg you, no more of this. Hence, dislike.

5. Even better, if the algorithm could learn about this genre of Internet writing, shaming people who have elite jobs, for being human, and allow me to dislike the whole genre. That would be fantastic. I hope the SEO geniuses at Facebook are working on this.

6. BTW, sometimes the Internet is used in clever ways to disable people like Ben who are acting in ways big companies dislike (there's that word again). I am sure they employ consultants who find ways to discredit their harshest most effective critics, people like Ben (ahh you didn't know that about him did you?). Their goal: get people to stop listening to him. I'd say they achieved that pretty well. (If you believe this is not possible, you haven't been paying attention.)

7. Two facts that might seem unrelated at first: A. For some reason I love to watch the Knicks. B. I quit smoking in 2002, already 12 years ago. I am not going to start again. Yet they run a certain number of absolutely disgusting anti-smoking ads on each Knicks game. I try to block the screen with my iPad so I don't have to see the poor disfigured human they're putting up as an example of what smoking can do to you. That's not enough, now they have people who have lost the ability to speak, lamenting how they didn't record their real voice for their grandchildren. I want to desperately say DISLIKE! Get this bullshit off my screen. I quit smoking. I am not going to start. Maybe they should have a FUCKOFF button to express more extreme displeasure than a mere dislike.

8. See also: 1-877-KARS-4-KIDS.

9. I read today that Maureen Dowd lets the people she writes about review her column before publication. I think the NYT, who she writes for, should click Dislike on behalf of all her readers, but until they do that, I want to ask for no more articles about her or by her. As far as I'm concerned Ms Dowd does not exist. Dislike!

10. I love that Facebook is basically a positive space. I think this is partially due to the positiveness of the Like button, but also due to the controls it gives users to silence people who abuse the power of Internet communication. So I click Like on Dislike.

A wish

I wish there were some way to tell Facebook that:

1. I know Ben Edelman.

2. He's a good guy.

3. No more "news" about him writing emails to restaurants in the Boston area.

Please!

That was an actual post

I posted that on Facebook, and there were a couple of replies that were interesting enough for me to want to turn this into a post on Scripting News.

Bill Heyman

"Unfortunately, some within the media love to throw out red meat to the famished, raging, and self-righteous mobs of social media to build up those page views. Add in some anti-elitism and other stereotypes to fuel the rage, boston.com has generated the perfect storm against a single human. Yes, what Ben did was tactless and asinine, but he doesn't deserve what's happening to him. The same goes with that GOP staffer who ill-advisedly criticized the president's kids on her personal Facebook page."

Michael Markman

"'All the news that's bait for clicks' would not have built the New York Times into the institution it, um, well, hasn't been for years now. The need for clicks to put bread on the table is a mighty corrupting influence, isn't it?

My own two cents

Yup this is the new SEO. At some point I expect the news "algorithms" will have to defend against this. It's so obvious what they're doing, and so potentially harmful. And after a while, sad and shameful, like a bad commercial that a station plays over and over.

One more thing. If you order takeout at Sichuan Garden in the future, and you think they screwed up the bill, just pay it. Not worth the grief.

Project Maelstrom sounds hot.

But it all depends on the execution. It has to be a very smooth reliable web browser.

And it'll need to have applications that can only work this way, in other words, a compelling reason for people to use it. It doesn't have to be a large number of people, just enough to draw interest.

Chris Saad is talking about what he wants from news. It's good stuff. Read it. He posted it on Facebook. I know what it's like. I wrote something today on Facebook today about my cold and what I'm reading, and whatever. It elicited some nice support from my Facebook posse, which was probably why I posted it. But along the way I put some ideas in there I'd like to have with all my other writing. Arrrgh.

Once again, I got snookered into putting my ideas somewhere where they will serve no use to me or anyone else in the future. Two weeks from now I'll try to remember where I wrote that, and will draw a blank.

THIS -- this is the problem I desperately want to solve. Technically it's no innovation. I could write in both places.

Then this great Kinks song came on! Another thread. All this mess. I want my ideas to live. Right now my ideas have nowhere to go to live and thrive.

For christ's sake have a cup of tea!

PS: Sorting out the tangled mess in my mind has been my life's obsession. These days I'm going in the wrong direction, I'm afraid. But I'm getting better results.

Interesting piece by King Kaufman at Bleacher Report, on the disconnect between Silicon Valley and the news industry. Read the whole piece, but there's a line at the end that really got me thinking.

"I can't tell you whether you should embrace a so-called Silicon Valley approach to journalism or stand and fight for old-school journalism."

There is no such thing

Silicon Valley does not have an approach to journalism. Silicon Valley makes tools that people can use to make journalism. A very important distinction.

As a software developer, I create tools that are useful in doing news. I use them to write myself, but when I do that, I've switched over to the other side of the fourth wall. I've become a user. The same way a TV show runner can also watch shows. A doctor becomes a patient. We wear different hats at different times. But especially in journalism, it's very important to at all times know which hat you're wearing.

We do best when we listen to our users, think about what they say about and do with our products, and strive to make them work better for users. This is the process of technology product development. It's iterative, it builds on its past.

Journalism is different. I'll leave it to journalists to define it.

The lines do cross

Yes, there are technology companies who are investing in content. That's also a fact, and they are here to stay.

For example YouTube and Facebook are now competing for share with video producers. Medium is gathering an impressive group of writers to help guide the development of their CMS. Or maybe the writing is their main business? I'm not sure they've decided yet.

It also goes the other way. All of the news organizations have more or less created their own CMSes, some from off-the-shelf technology, others built more or less from scratch.

But we do our best work, imho, when we know who we are, what role we're playing.

Product is an evolving idea, a moving target -- which is why it can be so confusing. Not just to people in news, but also to people in tech. If you want to understand, here's my story of how we got to today.

Shrink-wrap

Software used to come in shrink-wrapped boxes. Inside the box -- disks and a book. A registration card. The box sold to users for anywhere between $49 and $800.

There were print magazines. The magazines wrote about products, products ran ads. A full page ad cost up to $50K.

There were retailers, physical stores, where you could buy computers, and they also carried software. Eventually there would be software-only stores like Egghead. And there were primitive social networks called Compuserve, AOL, MCI Mail, AppleLink where people told stories about products they liked or didn't like. There weren't any ads on these networks.

There were software distributors, who the dealers bought software from, at a discount. Three big ones: Softsel, Ingram and Micro-D. Eventually the stores and distributors were replaced by mail order, and that, as far as I know, is where the shrink-wrap story ended.

Websites

Next came the web. Instead of products, we had websites. A whole new way to develop software. The software couldn't do much compared to what the desktop stuff did. Simple text editing, that was about it. Eventually the mainstays of the shrink-wrap world would show up as browser-based productivity apps like Google Docs. (I don't know how Office-type software sells these days? Do the users buy direct from the vendors?)

Snacks

Next transition -- apps and app stores. I think of these as snacks. All of them single-function little products, their entire UI must fit on a phone screen, not integrated with the others, creating little worlds (functionality-wise) with huge user bases, in the hundreds of millions in some cases. In the shrink-wrap days a successful product would have hundreds of thousands.

Productivity

Productivity "snacks" seem to be the next thing about to happen.

And probably after that, the users will want integration, where the data from one app can be used in another.

Which may lead to "snack suites."

Maybe that's why we're gravitating to larger-screen phones, to allow the software to get a little more complex. (That would be a good thing, imho, as a software developer.)

The unit of news

Briefly, it seems to me the unit used to be the edition -- an instance of the newspaper or news show for broadcast media, published once every 24 hours, that contained sections, and within sections stories.

Today the story stands alone, and is distributed as a unit by Twitter, Facebook, RSS and whatever else comes along.

Maybe a student of news could provide a rough timeline at how this evolved?

If you want to understand the disconnect between tech and journalism, stop everything, right now and read this thread by Jay Rosen.

The way he says tech thinks about product is how I think about it.

I grapple with it all the time. I work on the editorial tools, their rendering, and how the ideas written by other people can be made to interrelate with yours in ways that make sense and have value for readers. This is the frontier I've been working at for almost 40 years. I'm glad someone on the "other side" is making the effort to study the disconnect, with the intent of creating a dictionary that translates the terminology, so we can start communicating, and working together more effectively.

I need news people to use my tools. And I think you need my tools, and those made by my competitors. That's our basis for working together. (BTW, all I want is for you to use my tools, I don't want any ownership of what you write.)

PS: Maybe The New Republic editors were a little hasty? Maybe it was just a language disconnect. I think perhaps you guys just realized there is a world out there that doesn't think the way you do. Is that really so bad?? For all of our lunacy tech really has produced some good stuff, over the years.

There are protests, some spontaneous, some planned, all around the city tonight. Like many other people I wonder where they are. And the people of New York, collectively, know where they are.

How to put up an app that collects this data and displays it publicly in real-time? I put that question out to the readers of my blog, some of the nerdiest and most generous people around.

And if you feel like getting something running quickly please feel free to post a URL in a comment.

Update: Here's another way to see the protests, not exactly what I asked for. But even more interesting, imho.

I don't believe in the death penalty and I don't think cops should use deadly force unless their own lives or the lives of others are in danger. I also don't like to second-guess juries. But I also think they are predisposed to support the police. We need the police to be effective or else all hell will break loose, the theory goes. But what happens when the police are the hell that's breaking loose?

I grew up in NYC, and have never had a very good feeling about the police. But New York is an unusual place. Because there are so many people in such a small space, the rules about how we behave are different from the way people are in other places. The police have a tough job, I get that. But there are limits to what we, the people who live here, will tolerate from the police.

One thing is clear from the video. Mr Garner wasn't a threat. If they had left him alone, no one would have died, or even been hurt. So we're not finished with this. Something has to change in the policing of New York. What happened in Staten Island can't happen again. Someone in a position of responsibility needs to say that. The killers of Mr Garner must be punished, and the rules have to change to make it clear to police that they can't use deadly force unless there's real danger.

Two grand jury decisions in the last two weeks, and a lot of people are angry over the outcomes. Yet most people, when called for jury duty, want to get out of it. I did it too.

But then once, in 1996, I was called and decided not to resist. I was interviewed, passed the test, and was selected. We heard the case, deliberated, argued, were hung, told to go back, more deliberating, we reached a unanimous verdict.

When we started the deliberation, we were all naive about the process and our responsibility. By the end, there was lots of respect. I was confident that we had reached the correct answer. I can't speak for anyone else, but coming out of it, I had a lot more trust in our legal system.

I wrote a piece about it, back then.

It's like they say, if you don't vote, you can't really argue with the outcome. If you avoid serving on a jury, how can you be outraged when a decision is reached that you don't agree with? It's exactly the same kind of thing.

Being a juror changes you.

A little story. It's been a long time since I worked every day at the Unix command line. So, while the concepts are all familiar, they are not fresh. Mostly I work in graphic user interfaces. For a few years I used MS-DOS, which has its own command line. Same basic idea.

Anyway, I'm mostly back up to speed on Unix, but every once in a while I forget how to do something. This morning I needed to know how to create what I thought of as a "batch file." Google'd it. One of the first links explains the diff betw a batch file and a "shell script." Ahh that's right, they're not called batch files on Unix.

So I look up shell script -- see a few choices, go straight to the Wikipedia page where it tells me exactly what I needed to know in the first couple of paragraphs. Then I decided it was time to give them their annual $100.

Wikipedia is real

Without Wikipedia the web would be fully dominated by business models. There would be no way to get the simple single fact you need. If there weren't such a thing as Wikipedia, with all its flaws, we'd wish there was. Or in the future you would tell the younguns about this thing that was so wonderful that had just the facts you wanted and nothing more, and they'd roll their eyes.

I've noticed that Medium is now claiming to be a revitalization of the old web values. Oh that is so wrong. Wikipedia, however, which is very much the web, and very much alive. Yes we have lost many of the non-commercial ways of putting a simple web page up on the net. That doesn't mean we should give up. Not when we still have something as useful and relatively open as Wikipedia.

Give them a little money, today. It's the right thing to do, it's good for the net, it's "giving back" in a way that has very quick immediate impact.

I want to enable comments for a reader one hour after they read a piece.

The idea is that you'd have to remember what you had to say, and will have had an hour to let the ideas in the piece sink in.

You'd still have the same moderation tools you could delete spam, off-topic or abusive comments. But this would eliminate the drive-by slammers. And people who have a standard speech they want to give and don't care about your time.

The end of David Carr's current column in the NY Times is, I think, meant to outrage us. Reporters are being asked to deliver papers. I'm trying to think of what the analog would be in programming. We have to do a lot of menial tasks. Without a pulpit like Carr's on which to tell our tale of woe. But I agree. Having a professional reporter deliver papers is ridiculous.

I think we're really trying to have a negotiation with the big names of journalism. The NY Times and Columbia University are two of the most distinguished. I doubt if they can see the negotiation happening. Perhaps I can shed some light.

1. We, meaning everyone who doesn't write for the NYT, value their name. If an article appears in The Times it means more to us.

2. However, the value is diminishing over time. Fact. Impossible to dispute.

3. If news were working imho we'd be getting a lot more of it, covering a lot more turf. But too much of what we get in news is the same as all other sources of news.

4. This wasn't such a problem in the old distribution system, which was geographically limited. Example: when I was a college student in New Orleans in the 70s, I'd have to go downtown on Tuesday to pick up the Sunday edition of the Times. I would often do it, because it made me feel closer to home. Today, I live in NYC, and there's a news stand very near my apartment building. I bought the paper there exactly once, because I was going to eat at a nearby diner. I ended up not reading it, instead reading the news on my iPhone. Much faster, and my brain has adjusted to this way of getting informed. Shuffling papers feels like work (it didn't in the past).

5. I can read stories from the New Orleans paper in New York just as easily. And I do! But not for the same news that's covered by other papers. For ideas and events that are specific to New Orleans.

6. Also some of us have become decent writers, because the Internet makes us become good writers (or it used to before we were 140-char-limited).

7. I am interested in reading news written by other people who do what I do. Wouldn't it be cool if some of them, the really smart ones who don't pander too much could write for the Times? And there is the negotiation. The Times is like Don Corleone in the first Godfather movie. You have all the senators, but you refuse to share them. You have the name. I would still like to write for the Times. But there's no way for me to do that. Until you figure out how to flow the good stuff from the web through your name, the name is going to continue to diminish. Of course that's my opinion. Not one that you could read in the NY Times, of course.

8. Summary: You have to let more of the world in. Or eventually the world will invent what you have with a different name. That's always been the option. The Times should have fully made the transition to the web by now. The biggest part of that transition is allowing more voices to speak directly through your platform.