scratchpad.scripting

March 2012
  A rule for reporters
    Every reporter should have a way to contact them offline, without creating a public record of the contact.
    I don't mean a high security link, though that would be nice, I mean an email address on their About page.
    Obviously I have an idea for a reporter who I read regularly, who I think could benefit from a new perspective on things, that would give him a way to apply what he knows to a whole other industry.
    I'd rather not be his "source" for this idea, in other words I don't want to be quoted in whatever stories may come from this, nor do I even want to be mentioned in the stories. I am not the story, nor am I even part of it. And maybe he or she doesn't want to pick it up. But they are losing out if there's no way to send them a quick note, from someone they probably don't know (me).
    My hope is that the reporter I want to reach will post an item to this thread and I'll thereby get their email address and be able to get this idea out to them. :-)
  It's amazing anyone uses Google+
    Just read this piece that reminds me that not only does Google not allow posting from apps other than Google+, it also doesn't have feeds so there's no way to get your stuff out.
    I don't know what they're doing at Google, but they're going the wrong way with this stuff.
    My systems have feeds coming out and can be wired up to other systems to integrate their input.
    We still have more work to do but everything is aimed toward being open pipes on both end.
    Someday one of these companies will try to build a coral reef and will reap huge gains.
  Should journalists play roles in movies?
    Lately I've been noticing more journalists appearing in movies that are essentially fiction, or totally fiction.
    This feels like an ethical breech. A journalist is not an actor. Playing a fictional role, as yourself, with your name, your TV network, feels wrong.
    I'm having a hard time putting my finger on why this is.
    Perhaps it's that it makes one question when you're watching them do their real job if it's acting or if they're trying to be a real journalist. Or if they're just playing one (as they are in the movie).
    Do you have an opinion?
  Which Facebook billionaire will buy NYT?
    Billions are flowing to founders of tech companies, and the tech companies themselves. The companies will all need exclusive digital content. News stories. The kind of stuff produced by news organizations. Like the NYT.
    If Twitter, for example, offered exclusive access to NYT stories, if you had to go to twitter.com to read a NYT story, that would really screw with Facebook and Google. There aren't two NYT's to buy, just one. The first to realize the enormous value of the NYT flow will have a serious leg-up on the others.
    Further, do you think the Times could grow with a few billion cash injected, and a mission to screw profit and grow-grow-grow.
    I predict the existing news orgs will quickly be gobbled up by Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Google, even Groupon and Zynga, and their founders. They are hugely undervalued.
    Unfortunately for the news orgs, they are unable to grow into this opportunity because ownership and management have no sense of adventure, no excitement for the future of the most exciting craft in the future, news.
    A big transition is about to happen.
April 2012

  Great NBA Playoffs RSS feed?
  I'm looking for a great feed for news of the NBA playoffs. I want to know the scores as games complete. All the news before the games. Scheduling. Injuries. Nba.com's feed is fairly pathetic. I want a great one. Got a pointer?

    I'm looking for a great feed for news of the NBA playoffs. I want to know the scores as games complete. All the news before the games. Scheduling. Injuries. Nba.com's feed is fairly pathetic. I want a great one. Got a pointer?

  What's the dispute between Sun and Google?
  I haven't been paying attention to the court battle between Google and Sun. Just letting the headlines roll by. But this comment by Java lead implementor James Gosling made me wonder.

    I haven't been paying attention to the court battle between Google and Sun. Just letting the headlines roll by. But this comment by Java lead implementor James Gosling made me wonder.
    He said: "While I have differences with Oracle, in this case they are in the right. Google totally slimed Sun. We were all really disturbed."
    It appears the dispute is over licensing of the Java API. Google apparently believed they were required to get a license, but felt that Sun would try to control them, which if the past is a guide, is probably right. Is this another instance of the dispute that Microsoft had with Sun in the 1990s over Java?
  Trying out Google Drive
    I downloaded and installed Google Drive right away of course.
    I can share a folder publicly, which is useful.
    You can also link to an individual file in Drive.
    This link should take you to a picture of the White House if it's working. Only sort of. It tkes you to a page that includes the picture. I'd like to link to just the picture. Let's see if this link lasts. :-)
    The picture of Carlos Boozer to the right was being served from the Public folder of my Google Drive folder, but then the link broke. So you can't point directly to a file. The link isn't persistent. That's an advantage that Dropbox has. Here's the link to the small picture of Carlos Boozer on Dropbox. It won't break.
    Drive begins with the same two letters as Dropbox. So when you're typing the name of one into the browser's address bar you'll see the name of the other, if you've been to their website.
    Question -- will Google's search engine go into folders that are marked public. I don't see why it shouldn't. I think they want to go in there.
    Gotta wonder how long before Google-Plus features show up when you view a folder or a file.
  Free rent?
    Suppose a company said we'll give you an apartment for free, no rent.
    One condition -- they can monitor and record everything you do in the apartment. When you come and go. What products you use. Who sleeps over.
    Free Internet too, with the same condition.
    Would you do it?
  New EC2 for Poets
    I need some people to try out the new "EC2 for Poets".
    What's new is that it now gets you through the installation of River2, a river-of-news feed reader and podcatcher. It's updated for the latest changes in the AWS console.
    I've also groomed the installation process so there's nothing you need to set up in the "OPML Server" app. Once the server is running, you just install the River2 app (one-click) and you're up and running. At least that's the theory.
    It works for me. Does it work for you?
    If there are problems, please let me know what you expected it to do, what it actually did. Is the problem reproducible? Screen shots are often helpful.
  Question about URLs
    I want to put a link on every page that gets you the OPML version of the page. The back-end just looks for a format param whose value is opml. The question is what's the easiest way to specify that.
    I could provide the fully qualified URL -- http://threads.scripting.com/41912ByDw/questionAboutUrls
    Or I could leave out the host -- /41912ByDw/questionAboutUrls
    Or I could leave out the path -- questionAboutUrls
    But could I leave out everything?
    It seems to work in Firefox.
    Is it kosher?
    PS: I added the feature. Click the orange XML icon at the bottom of this page you get the OPML.
  Casual Games for XBOX?
    I just got an XBOX 360 without having any idea what I would "use" it for. :-)
    I like casual games -- The Sims, Angry Birds, stuff like that. I don't have the bandwidth to get into a massive gaming environment or whatever. I see the things people do with their consoles and it boggles me.
    I got the Kinect, but it's going to take a while to get used to it, and it may not work at all in my apartment because well it's a Manhattan apartment, that means it's smallll. Kinect seems to like more room than I have.
    What should I start with? I really liked the sports games on the Wii.
    This is just for fun, to let off a little steam, to distract my mind.
    Thanks in advance for ideas!
  Readability vs Instapaper
  Instability vs Readapaper
    I couldn't resist changing the headline. Of course that broke the link. Serves me right! :-)
    There's an active debate in the Mac blogosphere about the competition between these two products.
    Since everyone is making disclaimers:
      1. I know both Rich Ziade of Readability and Marco Arment of Instapaper.
        We're all in NYC. This is an example of NYC driving tech innovation. Something that gives me a sense of NYC pride. Like being a Knicks fan.
      2. I have used both products.
      3. I own no stock in either, have no formal relationship, not on advisory boards.
    Whether you like Instapaper or Readability is a lot like whether you like the Mets or the Yankees. Except neither Rich or Marco are paid like a baseball player. They both work really hard and care about their work. In fact that's what their products are made of, their caring for good usability of stuff you read on the web.
    I talked with Rich about his plan to ask for money from readers to distribute to writers. I told him it was naive and generous at the same time. He would regret doing it. There would be nothing but pain. Everyone would hate him for it. The more successful it was the more grief he would get. This is me, the 56-year-old technology dude speaking to the younger entrepreneur who has to learn these things for himself. I counseled that he should stick to what he does well, craft really gorgeous user interfaces and runtime environments, and let other people do the finance. I think I was proven correct.
    I've spoken with Rich about this recently and got in my I Told You So. But anyone who says he's a shnook trying to take advantage of people, is wrong, and ought to take a bit of time to get to know the guy personally before you make accusations like that.
    But the guy making the charges is from Philadelphia so what do you expect.
    I think this is all being blown out of proportion. If, after a few months, they don't unwind this ill-advised program, then I will join you in saying there's something nefarious going on. But for now, I'm pretty sure it's just an overly grandiose but well-intentioned guy not sticking to his knitting. :-)
May 2012
  Bitly's "bitmarks"
    Sound a bit like blorkmarks. Heh. Well not quite as cool. Anyway, it looks like they're creeping up on Twitter. Sharing bookmarks with your friends is a lot like what people use Twitter for, wouldn't you say? Maybe Twitter is finally getting some competition.
  My First Screencast
    A movie that shows, at a very basic level, how outliners work.
    I wish I had learned how to do this earlier. :-)
  Should Google have posting API?
    Blogging tools have had posting APIs since the beginning of the art, starting back in the mid--late-90s. Blogger, WordPress, Tumblr, they all have them. As does Twitter. It doesn't seem to have hurt them. Yet Google-Plus doesn't have a posting API. If it did, I would publish my stream there, and they would have some good sticky content that they don't now have. I think they should do it.
  Zipper merge
    You're in the left lane and see a Left Lane Closed Ahead sign. Do you 1. Immediately merge with the right lane or 2. Go all the way to the front, as far as you can go, and then merge. The latter approach is called a Zipper Merge, and the Minnesota DOT says it works better than the wait-your-turn method. But they don't explain why. Why?
  Will Twitter ever have competition?
    There was the beginning of a lively debate at my talk at Mesh earlier this week in Toronto. I say if Twitter ever gets competition, or thinks competition might be coming soon, they will buy a news organization, maybe several. But it hinges on this question. Can there be another Twitter? What if a service did everything Twitter did but had a 280-character limit. Just enough to be interesting, but not enough (maybe) to blow away the mode of use of Twitter. Would you try it? Do you think it would be useful?
  $50 for a year of the NYT?
    I keep getting emails from the NYT with offers for a digital subscription. They say I can get it really cheap for a certain number of weeks. Then what? Well, I thought, what if I made them an offer. I thought of Doc Searls. This is what he advocates. Let users make offers to vendors. So I gave it some thought and came up with $50 a year to be able to access as much of the Times site as I want, no paywall. $50 they're not getting now. Money on the table. Act now! Or make a counter, which I would consider. I don't want any limited-time offers. Give me an offer for a year, or don't make a counter at all.
  Dead is dead.
    Discuss.
  If I were Google
    I'd fight Facebook with RSS. Re-integrate RSS with Chrome. Make subscription something browsers support. Provide an open, clonable, simple web service that returns a subscription list for any user (with permission of course) so a million ideas for RSS aggregators can bloom. A browser button that says Subscribe To This. Surround Facebook with open innovation from small developers everywhere.
  What we're missing in search
    Example: I'm driving from NYC to Toronto today. Find me an Apple Store and a Target on this route. I think we still need human search engines to do this?
  Why amateur reviewers are better
    1. Amateurs don't have relationships with the vendors to protect.
    2. The reviews don't all come the week before the product is announced.
    3. They aren't rehashes of press releases.
    4. They reflect actual experience using the product, over a period of weeks instead of minutes, in the case of some professional reviews.
  Tech design can't move that fast
    Interesting piece that lists 15 current technologies that a child born today will never use.
    Some of the predictions are wrong. Mice will not be replaced by touchscreens unless people's arms are re-designed. People forget that human biology is part of the system.
    Cars have the same controls today they had when I was a kid. I was 57 earlier this month.
    If Microsoft really thinks they're getting rid of windows (with a lower-case W) they're going to learn the hard way the world does not care what they think. Same with Apple and Ubuntu. I'm guessing the companies are smarter than that. And thankfully we can fork Ubuntu if they make that mistake.
  What are threads for?
    They're bigger than tweets, not 140-char constrained, and express simple ideas that can be understood in a second or two. They inspire informational responses. The responses are stored elsewhere, and that's a problem, but the source is on my server.
  Chrome is better
    I've spend a couple of days working fulltime in Chrome, and it's improved my workflow.
    Firefox disappears sometimes, I sit there waiting for my computer to come back. Doesn't seem to happen with Chrome even though I accumulate a ton of tabs, as with Firefox.
    I've launched Firefox a few times to access Firebug. I haven't figured out how to get Chrome's builtin debugger to open in a separate window. Once I have that, I probably won't need to go to Firefox.
  JPM's $2 billion loss? I don't get it
    I've heard or read a half dozen reports on the $2 billion loss at JPMorgan, but don't understand why this is such a big deal. To a bank the size of JPM, $2 billion isn't very much money. If a company like GM or Microsoft lost $2 billion on a product, they'd shrug it off and go on. Probably happens all the time. Why is this so important?
  Interesting at Livefyre
    I was leaving a comment at Pando's site and noticed a funny <a href="http://127.0.0.1:8795/?id=27389511&displayNews=22010,25746,25747,34661,34662,34663,34664,35225,29688,24803,24802,24805,24804,33068,33069,33070,30092,30093,30094,30088,30089,30090,30091,22886,29568,30711,30710,30709,32076,36271,30719,30718,22857,30717,30716,30715,30714,30713,30712,35794,35795,35796,33726,33727,22354,22352,36169,22353,22351,22350,34252,27369,34251,27370,24003,22922,24004,24005,26115,29567,26118,22384,26116,26117,22383,22382,23970,32228,23971,23976,23977,21804,21801,21800,21803,21802,21797,21799,21798,26224,32750,32751,28380,32749,28379,32756,32755,28354,32754,32753,24626,32752,36153,36155,36154,25592,25593,25590,25591,25589,34945,23658,34944,23657,23656,24129,33881,26976,25074,25075,25076,36081,28441,27483,28836,26620,26621,26618,26619,24979,33403,34357,33406,33405,33404,35562,35561,23154,23152,23153,22616,22617,22618,22619,22620,22621,22622,22623,30727,30726,30725,30724,30723,30722,30721,30720,30733,30732,30731,30730,30729,30728,31455,25457,25456,24287,25454,25455,21619,25452,25453,31919,34027,34026,23772,31456,31457,31458,31459,22768,22767,23726,23727,24841,24206,34943,29221,29220,29223,29222,23287,29225,23286,29224,23285,23284,23283,23282,28146,28147,28144,28692,28145,28150,28690,28151,28691,28148,28149,25953">URL in the web interface pointing to 127.0.0.1:8795. They must have a desktop client that has a builtin HTTP server. Anyone know what's up?
  Question for HTML gurus
    Scratching my head over this page. Why is there a white gap at the top, above the menu? Looked at it in Firebug, but it seems it shouldn't be there. I know that's not right. Any ideas?
  Is computer science relevant?
    I've heard people say that it is irrelevant whether or not the CEO of Yahoo has a degree in CS. This gives me chills. Should the CEO of a pharm company have a degree in medicine? Why not? No wonder so many opportunities are missed in tech. Ugh.
  Using Disqus 2012
    I don't know all the features that are in the new version of Disqus, the commenting software we use here. I thought we'd dive right in and see. If you've used it elsewhere and know what's up with it, what we should look for, feel free to post a comment.
  I relive my life through Mad Men
    What a fucking great show. I loved how they had NYC play a role, every scene in the last half had city noises, either that or President Johnson in Vietnam.
    And Megan reminds me so much of an old girlfriend, makes my heart ache. How could I have been so stupid.
  Examples of great blog design?
    I'm looking for examples of beautiful yet simple and efficient (fast loading, easy to read) designs for blog stories.
    The basic information that must be conveyed: 1. Title. 2. Byline (author, when it was posted). 3. Prev/next. 4. Body. 5. Disqus comment block.
    There will be a menu at the top of the page, like the menu at the top of this page, but that's not part of the page design, it's more a component of the site.
    Clarity is key. The writing must come through, not the cleverness of the design.
    If you have designs that you think are worthy of mention, please post a link here. Thanks!
  Canon 320 Wifi setup
    I got the Canon 320 with wifi and of course immediately tried to set up the wifi access. The instructions in the manual are crap. They tell you to press buttons but they don't tell you where they are. And of course there's nothing like the buttons they describe on the camera or on any of the screens I was able to find. So far no luck.
  Missing Boostrap icons
    We're using Bootstrap 2.0 icons as the "leader" characters that tell you what you'll find when you click the link. It works fairly well, but we're missing some very important symbols.
    Here's an outline with examples.
    Some are great, the camera for a photo is perfect. And recycle icon for redirects. A bookmark for a link type is pretty good.
    But the icon for a feed is terrible. It should be the standard graphic for a feed.
    And we're using GIFs for the wedges that indicate whether something is expanded or collapsed. It would be nice if there were Bootstrap icons for those.
    Also If you look at the top of the page, you'll see a blue wedge that toggles the presence of the menu. I would love to see that be a flag, like the flags on mailboxes. Two icons, one up, and the other down. These symbols were used in early Mac desk accessories, and it felt great.
  I can see Clyde shaking his head
    I watched the first game of the Knicks playoff series with the Heat on TNT. I didn't know that MSG was also broadcasting them. That is of course where I watched Game 2, last night.
    I totally missed Walt Frazier's narration of the first game. Because he played the game himself, and was one of the coolest most zen-like competitors ever. When players get upset about a call, Clyde (what every calls Frazier) says this is not good. Teams that are focusing on the past, a bad call, aren't in the present game. They lose their fluidity. They're grunting and groaning. If the other guys are dishing and swishing, they win. Sometimes both teams lose the plot, that's pretty interesting too.
    There's a lot more to basketball than most announcers get to. But when you watch every Knicks game, you always want to know what Clyde has to say. And I'm sure he's not liking what he's seeing.
  Having fun with Bootstrap
    I just wrote a blogpost about what it's like to be the First User of a product.
    That's what I'm doing here. Using the product to solve a problem it was intended to solve. In this case, the purpose is one of a myriad of variants on the same theme. A web site with the usual components, but arranged in a specific way to accomplish a specific purpose.
    The posts here are shorter than a blogpost but longer than a tweet. And what comes back is the purpose of the message. How they are arranged isn't important.
  Organ donor podcast
    I am an organ donor, but when I heard this podcast, I came to understand that no one really knows when death occurs. Sometimes it's cut and dry, but other times, not so.
      "Dick Teresi wanted to write about how science determines the point between life and death. After a decade of research, Teresi says he still doesn't know what death is, but that the breadth of his ignorance has been widely expanded."
    Would you donate organs if you're alive and could be revived?
    On the other hand, organs that could have saved lives are buried because the dead person never got around to signing the form or the family didn't want to deal with it.
    I highly recommend listening to this podcast before making a decision.
    Zuck is promoting organ donorship via Facebook after a series of dinner conversations with his med school girlfriend.
June 2012
  Our Supreme Court
    I almost put a question mark at the end of that. Because so many people were so sure that it wasn't ours, rather it belonged to the part of the American political system that had lost its mind.
    After reading a few thousand words in the last 24 hours on the decision, and the history of such decisions, it's clear that the Chief Justice of the United States is thinking long-term, as I thought he would be. Or hoped he would.
    Whether the place he wants to lead us is where I would like to go is another matter. But at least he's got a sense of time that's got some maturity to it, a sense of history, and an appreciation for the responsibility that has been given to him.
    So maybe it is *our* court. It was supposed to be our government, but so many people don't see it that way. I'm stubborn, because I still do.
    BTW, the cable news coverage last night on CNN on Piers Morgan was really good. Maybe it's just that they need a meaty story that's actually new to create a news program that activates the mind?
  Questions re podcast suggestions
    I just posted a couple of suggestions for podcast clients. If you have comments or questions please post them here.
  Bi-partisan
    I've read a few thousand words today about the Supreme Court decision, but haven't heard anyone observe that it was bipartisan. That's why it's so powerful. We have two branches of government led by people who take their jobs and legacy seriously. That's a place to start. Maybe this will embolden the Chairman of the Federal Reserve to take more risks (he's also a Republican).
  Quick review: Chrome on iPad
    I'm a Chrome user on Mac and Windows, so of course I wanted to try it on the iPad, and I liked it immediately.
    But I don't think I can switch from Safari. One reason is the toolbar bookmarks don't work the same way they work in the desktop versions of Chrome and in Safari on the iPad. It's three steps to click on a bookmark, and in Safari it's just one. That's a huge difference, where there are a set of pages I visit regularly.
    Also Twitter for some reason gives me a mobile interface on Chrome and on Safari gives me the normal interface. Why sites keep treating iPads differently from desktops is a mystery to me. It's got a full-size screen. Don't be so fancy, "different" is not better.
    However, I'd like to be able to switch to Chrome to have everything all synched up across all my platforms. Maybe they can address the bookmarks question in an update, or maybe I'm missing something??
  NPR and Twitter
    How I'm following the SCOTUS decision: I'm watching Twitter and listening to WNYC-FM. How are you following it?
  Time to reboot podcasting?
    With Apple shipping a new podcasting product, maybe it's time to try out some new ideas. I've been thinking about a server-based app for subscriptions that hooks into Dropbox. All the shows you're subscribed to show up in a folder. And they have clients for all the mobile devices. A podcast service that doesn't have pictures of tape decks from the 20th century. How does this sound?
  Should Twitter have a Hate option?
    Re what sucks about Twitter, maybe you should be able to tag people with your angst, without it being perjorative. A single-click option, like "retweet" or "favorite". What would you call it? Heh.
  The story the tech press missed
    Q: When Google is the registrar of the .blog top-level domain will I be able to buy a .blog address for my site, even if it isn't running on their server. A: No.
  Quick review of The Newsroom
    Minor spoilers follow. I believe it's safe to read this even if you haven't seen the first episode of The Newsroom. Which I liked.
    I don't think it makes for great TV, btw. I was a big fan of The West Wing, even the early episodes of that show were much more fluid and fun, I seem to remember.
    But I loved the optimism for news, for the idea that it's possible to engage at a level of competence, not cynicism. I loved that the anchor made fun of people who said "our hearts go out to.. blah blah blah" where a real news anchor would instead nod their head and repeat the homily. I loved everything about it, even the soppy moment as the elevator door closed (no spoilers).
    The technology in the show, was dorky in the same way that The Social Network missed the point of tech startups. But who cares. It was inspiring and not cynical. That's pretty good. Sorry I'm a sucker for optimism.
  What does ICANN do?
    I was content to pretty much ignore ICANN. I have plenty of things to worry about. I know I should care. The gTLD changes really woke me up. Now I need to know what they actually do. How does the Internet depend on them? I know the registrars are one level below ICANN, and I understand what a registrar does, I think. What does ICANN do??
  New Orleans river update
    A couple of days ago I asked for links to New Orleans news sites, and got back enough to start a river.
    http://nola.newsriver.org/
    If you have other ideas for feeds that should be in the river, enter the URL of the feed here.
    It's been a long time since I lived in New Orleans (Tulane 1976), but I'm really getting the flavor of the city through the river, which I guess make sense since it's the river city!
  The choir in Angry Birds Piglantis?
    I admit to being an Angry Birds addict, in all its flavors. I've at times been very high ranked, even for a brief moment (shortly after release of one of the installments) I was #1 on the leaderboard. Anyway, I've been puzzling over the choir in the newest scenario in Angry Birds Seasons, called Piglantis, when the choir starts singing. WTF does it mean?
  New Orleans blogs?
    I'd like to start reading blogs that are specifically about New Orleans. I have a link to Uptown Messenger. Please, if you know of others, drop a note here. If there are enough I will start a river, along the lines of the one I did the East Village.
  Wallenda safety feature?
    I caught just a bit of Wallenda's daredevil walk across Niagara Falls last night.
    But there's something that confuses me.
    What's this cable connecting his body to the wire? Is it a safety feature?
    I must have missed the part where they explained what this is for.
  Netflix hamster commercial (2011)
    It's not new after all!
  Why did Dropbox kill the Public folder?
    First, I know they aren't eliminating the feature for current users, at least not at this time. And I know I can share any file in any folder. Of course this is deliberately misleading, because the sharing isn't the same. We're all smart, so I don't have to explain how. And sharing is the one feature that makes a difference if other people have it or don't have it.
    So why? I don't know. But I can take an educated guess. 1. A small number of people were using the feature to store graphics or audio or video files that were getting a ton of traffic. 2. They're getting a lot of takedown notices as people use the feature to share movies and music owned by the entertainment industry. Net-net, the feature is expensive both in terms of bandwidth and human cost.
    I'd bet their plan is to limit the damage by not giving the feature to new users, and then weed out the abusers, to try to contain the problem. If they can't, they'll just shut down the feature for everyone. They'll say they're sorry, but it can't be avoided, and you can use the new sharing feature, that doesn't have these problems (for them).
    It sucks, because it was a uniquely valuable feature for people who were just using it to store documents. It was especially useful for outlines containing feeds, templates, stylesheets, reading lists, data to be consumed by our apps. The user can specify a URL of a feed and we can read the feed. Updating the data, for the user, is as simple as opening the file and saving it. Now, they'll say we can use their API. But that's more work, and I probably won't do it, because that's the beginning of a long trail of changes, deprecations, and new limits, and strategy taxes. Your work is never done when building on corporate APIs. So I don't go that way.
    I put this in a thread so people could add new information if it's available, or ask questions.
  Getting started with Radio2
    A new screencast that shows you how to get started with Radio2. You need someone to give you an account on a server, or set up your own.
  Is Twitter using Open Graph tags?
    I wrote today that Twitter is not a level playing field. It's not, going all the way back to the Suggested Users List, which inflated the follower counts of friends of the founders of the company. But it may be that they're using a protocol established by Facebook for web pages to tell Facebook (and others) about the content on the page. Bill Seitz says he thinks that's what it is.
  New TLD apps
    Interesting set of names. I'm noticing things in the list and thought I'd take notes in comment here.
  Dave's NYC cycling meditation
    When cycling in NYC, count the number of times you say "asshole" under your breath. How many times out loud. And finally, yelling.
  Chrome and DDE
    Apparently Chrome on Windows lacks DDE support.
    This makes it fairly useless in a content management context.
  Central Park cyclists
    On weekends in the summer there's almost always (it seems) an early morning running or walking event in the park on Saturdays and Sundays. My ride seems to intersect with them at exactly the wrong moment. If I had arrived a half-hour earlier or later, I could have missed the big rush. This morning, I had to finish my ride on Broadway it was so bad in the park. But by the time I got back the runners were gone, and the ride would have been fine. The question -- is there a schedule posted of these events. If not, how can we get one together. It seems it would make everyone happier.
  The Unthinkable
    What happens if someday the Internet goes down for all of NYC. How lost will everyone be?
  What do you think of Twitter's new Display Guidelines?
    It begins: "Users must have a consistent experience wherever they interact with Tweets, whether on Twitter.com, a mobile client, website, or in an application developed with the Twitter API."
  Problems with Disqus/Ajax
    Update: I punted on this method of doing it, instead going with a non-Ajax approach. I realized I was putting too much effort into functionality that wasn't that important. Happens often with easily-distracted geekoids. :-)
    I'm trying to do something fancy with Disqus. Possibly too fancy. But the idea is very compelling. So I'm struggling to make it work.
    Here's the situation:
      I have a page with many items on it.
      Each item has a discussion icon floating on the right margin.
      When you mouseover the icon, three globals are set, including myId and myUrl.
      A Bootstrap 2 modal dialog pops up and in its bind callback we call DISQUS.reset, with this.page.identifier and this.page.url set from myId and myUrl.
      It works in a simple case with two threads.
      It works in a more complex case with a bunch.
      But now it fails to load unique threads on the new pages I start. Here's an example. It's just re-using the threads over and over. I'm fairly sure the IDs I'm sending are unique. I constructed the URLs without any idea to what they're supposed to do. The IDs seem like they should be enough. I don't want or need pages that display a discussion thread all on its own.
      The help page doesn't say very much. It says that you have to have a hash-bang url. I tried that, and it didn't appear to make a difference. As I said, I don't understand what role the URL is playing here.
    It's probably something I broke (I hope!) but I'm pulling out what's left of my hair trying to figure this out.
    Be a Javascript hero today, and help me figure this out. I will be eternally grateful! :-)
  Outliner screencast #2
    A new screencast for outliner users. And if you like to see the end before the beginning, here's the outline I created, on the web. Look in the right margin for the new feature. I think it's pretty hot! :-)
  How big is a tweet?
    If blog posts were motor vehicles, a tweet might be a motorized bike, and a WordPress blog post is like a RV. In between there are other sized bits of text that are blog-like. Tumblr, Posterous are famous. Disqus is for comments. But what other kinds and sizes of messages are good?
July 2012
  Hello r2.ly, our new URL shortener
    My tweets will now use a shorter domain -- r2.ly.
    I still love the name Blork, it was fun while this stuff was in development. Now we've got quite a few people running servers, and posting links that are fairly visible. It's better if the name corresponds to the product they're using. Radio2 and River2 --> r2.ly.
    And r2.ly is shorter than blork.ly.
    So goodbye my friend Blork -- for now! :-)
  Apple OS updates scare me
    All I want from an operating system is stability and performance. I want it to stay out of my way. I use today's Mac OS largely the same way I used previous versions and how I use Windows. Not looking for innovation in the OS. Pretty sure I'm like most users in this regard. Yet the tech industry seems to think that users want change in the OS.
    I used to get the new versions of the Mac OS whenever they came out, hoping they might have come up with something that I want, until they started changing the way things work. If they weren't adding features, stability or performance, why would I go out of my way or pay money to have them take things out?
    To me it doesn't matter if no one else uses a feature I depend on. When they take it out, I either have to do without or find some other way to do it. I don't find it interesting, amusing, entertaining, worthwhile or productive to install new software in order to take steps backwards. Doesn't make any sense that I would.
    The only times I get a new version of the Mac OS is when I have to. I didn't like Lion, but I did want the new MacBook Air that it came on. I would probably buy a new MacBook Air in a few months, if they came out with something enticing, but only if I were sure that it would do all the things my current MacBook Air does. Thing is, with the way they've been doing "upgrades" that's the one thing I'm sure will not happen. I will take major steps backwards if I install a new verson of Apple's operating system. So rather than buy something new, I'll just stick with what I have.
    I've been here before with Apple. They kept delaying in the transition to System 6. Year after year, it didn't ship. It got bigger and more confusing. At one point Apple told developers not to ship anything until System 6 came out. Then a year went by. And another. People got out of the habit of installing new versions of the OS. And developers got out of the habit of shipping new apps.
    Apple is playing an unnecessarilly dangerous game here. They have to deal with the same thing that Microsoft does, that there really aren't any new features people want from OSes. The best OS is one that fades into the background so you can forget it's even there. That can't happen as long as they're deliberately breaking users.
    I went from someone who had a habit of buying something new from Apple every few months, to someone who forgot how to do that because they became tedious and definitely not fun.
  Olympics on tape-delay? No please!
    Is there a way around the tape-delay of NBC's Olympics coverage? What if I want to watch the opening ceremony as it's happening?
    I hope they're not planning on delaying basketball.
    I thought we got beyond this bullshit. I remember watching the presidential debates in 2008 from California, three hours after I read the play by play on Twitter.
    I thought all these big media companies were so savvy to new media! Oy oy oy.
  Non-standard body formats
    Popular formats/protocols that were not created by standards bodies:
    BitTorrent, QuickTime, RSS, GIF, HTML, HTTP, PDF, SWF, FLV, JSON, RTF, PostScript, TrueType, WiFi, Ethernet, XMPP, OPML, XML-RPC, RSD, CSV.
    Others?
  Dear Fred: A more concise question
    What happens to your users' tweets, blogs, podcasts, check-ins, discussion threads, Scrabble games, photos when the companies go out of business?
    PS: This is a followup to an earlier thread.
  Rich people need to pay more taxes
    Richer people should pay higher takes to fund the next banking system bailout. Like Social Security for rich folk. Lower their taxes when we re-enstate Glass-Stiegel like safeguards. Till then we need a good escrow account. And it's really their responsibility.
    It's right to create a connection betw cause and effect. The reason we're in such shitty shape is speculation that created all that wealth.
  Beauty of the web?
    Who would be the authority on beauty and the web? In the same way that Lady Bird Johnson became the advocate for beautifying the nation's highways back in the 1960s.
  Dear Fred: Re your users' content
    VCs today seem to me much like product managers at big tech companies. I wrote about this last week, and it was echoed in a piece yesterday in the NYT.
    Today's VC/PMs are exploring a set of open formats and protocols known as Web 2.0. Various combinations and permutations on blogging software. That's how I see all the major services. Those that don't fit the mold are re-shaping themselves to fit it. Google-Plus is a good example of that.
    However this model doesn't do anything to safe-up the user's data long-term. When companies are acquired or go out of business, the users' data often goes with it. We saw this weekend a preview of this with Posterous going down. Someday Friendfeed will be taken offline by Facebook. Think about it, the two founders of Friendfeed aren't even at Facebook anymore. When there's a technical problem, or Facebook shifts priorities, who there will care about that archive?
    I'm not innocent here. I started weblogs.com many years ago, and when the management of UserLand gave me responsibility for all the sites, a couple of years after I had left the company, the server I had allocated couldn't handle the load, and poof there went the sites. UserLand was a small company, on its way to going out of business, and didn't even get acquired, so that isn't an excuse. The company just couldn't handle it. And I promise you the users did not understand, and took it personally. (Why? Blog-type content is personal. Users rightly see it as their web-body. If you delete it, no matter how it happens or what your motives, that's heavy.)
    I ask this question of Fred Wilson in a friendly way, because I know he likes discussions, and he especially likes discussions that challenge his business model. He's a leading VC, a blogger, and outspoken on the topic of free vs paid software.
    The question -- what about the archives of the users of the companies you back? What will happen to their tweets, blogs, podcasts, check-ins, discussion threads, Scrabble games, photos, etc in the years to come? How much have you thought about that? What are your plans?
    And if it turns out that this is something the VC community hasn't thought about or planned for, what are you prepared to do to safeguard users work against acquisition or failure of the companies?
    Note: The discussion software here is created and run by a Wilson-backed company, Disqus.
  Are you busy?
    Yesterday I wrote a piece explaining that I am not busy. It pointed to a NYT op-ed that, for me, did a pretty good job of definining the issue. I know some people thought it was elitist. Okay, I get that.
    But now the question is this -- Are you busy? Would you rather be less busy? Are you trying to do anything about it? Would life be better if there was more or less going on?
  Olympics blogs or feeds?
    I'm putting together a river for the Olympics. If you know of any blogs that are covering the Olympics, or news orgs with good feeds, please let me know.
  Why The Newsroom works where The Social Network didn't
    I think I know why news people hate The Newsroom. I think it's the same reason I hated The Social Network. Because he got it all wrong about how tech companies work. You can't make software and drink like a fool. Maybe you can be a musician that way, but software isn't like that. I don't think basketball players can be heavy drinkers the night before a game. I've never known a great programmer who was also a boozer.
    Anyway that wouldn't have mattered if Sorkin had written an idealistic story for The Social Network like the one he writes for The Newsroom. If he had them arguing about protecting the freedom or privacy of users. Or fighting the corruption of big tech companies, or telling VCs where to shove it, refusing to treat users like hamsters.
    But Sorkin doesn't use the Internet so he doesn't have any great vision for how it could be better. That's where The Newsroom is different. He is a news user, and he's pissed off at the simple easy things news people could do to fight for their users. He understands news, not from the inside but from the outside. And that's why the show works. Why it inspires and why it resonates with news users.
  I'm rooting for Yahoo
    Hiring Marissa Mayer is a good thing, imho -- because we all have a lot invested in Yahoo. If it were to fail it would leave a huge hole in the web. It's something we should be thinking about, but we're not ready for it. Anything that stabilizes Yahoo imho is a good thing. However, that might not be Mayer's plan.
  Berkman river?
        true
    I came across something I wrote on my Harvard blog in 2003, and there in the right margin was a link to a Berkman aggregator that is long-gone.
    Later I wondered what that river might look like now, if we had a good collection of Berkman blogs. So, I've started a river for Berkman faculty, fellows and alums.
    It'll take a few weeks to populate, let's see if it's interesting.
    Here's the list so far...
      Andrew McLaughlin's Blog Feed
      Andrew McLaughlin
      Copyrighteous
      Benjamin Mako Hill
      Berkman Center Newsfeed
      Radio Open Source with Christopher Lydon
      Creative Commons ª Commons News
      danah boyd | apophenia
      isen.blog
      David Isenberg
      Untitled
      David Weinberger
      Doc Searls Weblog
      Untitled
      Ethan Zuckerman
      Untitled
      Hal Roberts
      Jeffrey Schnapp
      Jillian C. York
      Untitled
      John Palfrey
      Joi Ito's Web
      Joi Ito
      The Future of the Internet -- And How to Stop It
      Jon Zittrain
      Juan Carlos De Martin blogs
      MediaBerkman
      ProjectVRM
      Radio Berkman
      Consent of the Networked
      Rebecca MacKinnon
      Susan Crawford blog
      Law and Information
      Urs Gasser
      Wendy's Blog: Legal Tags
      Wendy Seltzer
      Yochai Benkler's blog
      Yochai Benkler
      technosociology
      Zeynep Tufekci
    If you have suggestions for others, please post a link to their blog or feed below and I'll add them to the river. Or you can send it to me via email at dave dot winer at gmail dot com. Thanks! :-)
  How do adults learn computers?
    I have a friend who is smart. About my age, but didn't get a computer until fairly recently. He didn't learn how to use a computer in school, obviously -- we didn't have them when we were growing up. As I said, this is a smart person. Where can he go to get the basics of using a computer? Things we computer "natives" (I count myself among them) take for granted, aren't so obvious to a newbie. Are there any good adult education classes on basic computer usage? This person lives in New York City.
  Is Obama the first black president?
    When I saw the headline of this story -- Obama not first black president -- I drew the wrong conclusion. I thought when I clicked on it I'd find that one of our earlier presidents had an African-American grandfather or grandmother. Maybe Chester Alan Arthur? Or Woodrow Wilson? Richard Nixon! Heh. Funny. Anyway, it was flipped around. Freeman was saying that because Obama had a white mother and a black father, he's mixed-race, not black. Interesting. How black do you have to be for Morgan Freeman to consider you black? Seems there are fewer "pure" people in the US all the time. Maybe at some point we will feel it was strange that we bothered to make a distinction. Would that be a good thing?
  Macbook Air/Lion won't wake up
    This happens a lot. The machine sleeps. I try to wake it up. It won't come back. Try to reboot. No luck. In the old days you could pop the battery, but not on this computer. Basically, the solution is to put it away, and come back a few hours later and try again. It's been reported, but Apple hasn't said anything, apparently. People say you have to re-install everything, including the OS. Yeah sure, I have time to do that. (Not.)
  Nexus/S update woes
    A couple of days ago my Nexus/S updated itself. Nice. Except it says it's always charging now, even when it's not. And when it runs low on battery, instead of beeping once and running itself down, it beeps repeatedly, always in the middle of the night, until I wake up and plug it in. This is an improvement?
August 2012
  We *Really* Built It
    In all seriousness, the Republicans have made an extremely cool invitation to debate who built this country. Were it the capitalists like Mitt Romney, or were it the people who busted their balls to make something happen. Big or small. America is made up of millions of stories. We all have families we're proud of (to some extent at least) and we're not all like the little dude in Monopoly with the tux and top hat. We're dirty and crazy and we love this country. So fuck you Mitt if you think you made this. We made it. And we're not Republicans.
    If I were making signage for the Democrats I'd have lots of We Really Built It signs around the convention center. And huge chants with teachers and construction workers and teamsters and immigrants and women -- you name it -- all the people who aren't Republicans -- people who Built It.
    How about a boxing match between a teacher and an actor who looks like Paul Ryan. Obviously the teacher gets to kick "Paul Ryan's" butt. For extra fun have the teacher come from Janesville, WI. :-)
    One thing the Dems might not realize is how much pent-up frustration there is with the antics the Repubs have been pulling that have been screwing our country. It really would be nice to direct that hate of all things Republican in some productive direction.
  International news feeds
    I'm putting together a new tabs.mediahackers.org panel, a world news river.
    I'm starting with the "international" feeds from major news outlets such as the ABC from Australia, Ria Novosti from Russia, Al Jazeera, Ha'aretz, The Hindu, NYT international feed, etc.
    Here's the current list:
    I'm looking for other feeds. They should be English-language. Cover non-local news for their geography, but not be focused on the United States. We already have lots of American news in other tabs.
    If you have any suggestions, please post a comment here. Thanks!! :-)
  Write a blog post
    This is just common sense.
    If you want to start a discussion you can write a blog post. It's not as beautiful as some of the new systems. But you're not locking your ideas in a place where they can't be part of any of the systems we've developed on the net for ideas to flow around. And if you don't use those systems we can't make them work better.
    Start a blog on Tumblr or Wordpress.com, if you need to, or use the one you probably already have. Post a link to Twitter so we can see what you have to say. If people want to comment they can. It's the best system we have, until a better one comes along. And Branch is not it.
    All they have to do is support feeds to gain parity with the blogging tools. If they do, we can re-evaluate. (Actually they have to support some APIs too, and trackback.)
  Levity in Republican politics
    RNC chairman says Romney's birtherism is levity in politics. If it were levity it would be self-deprecating. For example Romney making jokes about how his underwear is itching in the heat. Or joking about what his other wives are going to say when he gets home. Forget about his birth certificate, let's see the marriage certificates. All of them.
    Romney, if you want to show you have a sense of humor, show a clip from Big Love at one of the campaign rallies.
    That would be some levity.
  Remember where you were when...?
    On my way out of Madison yesterday there was a show on the local NPR station with Tom McBride, a professor from Beloit College, reviewing the touchstone concepts of each of the generations. It was a fascinating show. People my age know what an "icebox" is, not because we've ever used one, rather because the previous generations did. Kids today talk about cc'ing someone, but they don't know where the term came from. And people my age don't really understand why DJs are considered musicians. And some of us know the tech stuff cold, despite what the kiddies think.
    One concept they talked about is what does The Day The Music Died mean to you. They talked about Buddy Holly and Elvis Presley and Kurt Cobain, none of which are meaningful to me (though I remember where I was when Elvis died, on East Johnson St in Madison). They left out the most meaningful music death of my generation -- John Lennon, and yes of course I remember where I was when I heard that.
    And today Neil Armstrong died. And yes, I remember where I was the day he landed on the moon. I was at the Newport Folk Festival in Newport, Rhode Island. Thousands of us were watching the landing from a small portable TV on top of a VW minibus. I couldn't really see what was happening, but I remember the moment, very emotional, a moment of pride and amazement at what we could do. It was one of those "pinch me" moments. I still feel the emotional charge now, 43 years later.
  Protocols don't mean much
    Three people have asked me to "weigh in" on a new protocol called tent.io. I looked over the site, and I don't understand what I'm supposed to weigh in on. Anyone can write a spec. What matters is what software is supporting the protocol, what content is available through it and how compelling is the content. RSS won not because of its great design, but because there was a significant amount of valuable content flowing through it. Formats and protocols by themselves are meaningless. That's what I say about specs. Show me content I can get at through the protocol, and I'll say something.
  Thurs on the patio by the lake
    If you're in Madison tomorrow with some time to kill, I'll be hanging out with Andrew Shell on the patio at the Union by Lake Mendota at 3PM, and would love to meet friends from the Scripting News community or people who read my feed on Twitter. We'll be drinking beer of course and telling stories. Hope to see you there! :-)
  Chrome RSS breakage, part II
    There's a huge thread on the post about the way Chrome has changed its behavior with RSS feeds.
    A recent comment by Navarr Barnier says that Chome only triggers the new behavior for files with type application/rss+xml, and not for files with type text/xml.
    He's got a point. Here's a file I uploaded to S3 with type text/xml. It didn't bring up the crazy dialog that tries to send me to the Chrome store. I got a stylization of an RSS feed. Not exactly what I'd like which is the feed looking like XML.
      s3.newobject ("/static.scripting.com/misc/chrometest1.xml", tcp.httpreadurl ("http://scripting.com/rss.xml", 5), type:"text/xml")
        "http://s3.amazonaws.com/static.scripting.com/misc/chrometest1.xml"
    Here's the same file uploaded with type application/rss+xml. And sure enough it brings up the dialog.
      s3.newobject ("/static.scripting.com/misc/chrometest2.xml", tcp.httpreadurl ("http://scripting.com/rss.xml", 5), type:"application/rss+xml")
        "http://s3.amazonaws.com/static.scripting.com/misc/chrometest2.xml"
    The moral of the story is if you can set it up so you serve your feeds with type text/xml, you can circumvent the breakage in Chrome. The question is, should we do this. I'm not convinced it isn't asking for more breakage from them.
  User-editable structure
    There's been a lot of action lately in new web-based content management systems, but imho, all the systems other than the worldoutline software I'm working on, are barking up an wrong, old tree. I had to go on a road trip to figure that out.
    Key idea -- there is the equivalent of source code in content. Behind the rendering of pages, of which there can be many kinds, there are words and structure. The words are like the furniture and equipment in an office building. And the structure are the beams, elevators, water pipes, electric lines, network infrastructure.
    Most content systems have very simple and fixed structures. Authors and designers can't do anything with the structure. In a way this is good because they don't have to do anything. But eventually this becomes too limiting. It's a limit I haven't had to deal with for a very long time, so sometimes I forget that almost everyone else is living with that limit.
    Anyone who has lived in an outliner totally understands the idea of user-editable structure.
  What's in a tabbed river?
    A very quick technical overview of what's in a tabbed river.
    First, a river is a list of items in reverse-chronologic order from a collection of feeds, also known as a subscription list.
    Feeds are RSS 2.0, 1.0, 0.9x or Atom 1.0.
    Subscription lists are in OPML 2.0. An example of a subscription list.
    The rivers are in a new JSON-based format. Example.
    I would like to see others build on the JSON format, providing new flows, and also providing new user interfaces.
    A tabbed river is a collection of rivers, presented in a tab format. I'm using the Bootstrap Toolkit for the tabs.
  NYT joins Tabbed River 2.0
    I love me some rivers! And here's a new one..
    http://tabs.mediahackers.org/?panel=nyt
    The tabbed-river concept is really working.
    Yesterday I had the idea that wouldn't it be cool if there was one really long tab just for NY Times stories. It's not that there are no stories from the Times in rivers, I follow the NYT firehose in my personal river. But there are a lot of other news sources in there, and only a limited number of items, so you don't get as many stories from any one source.
    The Mother Of All Rivers? Or is that the Grey Lady of All Rivers? :-)
    Ever want to find out quickly what you've been missing for the last 12 hours?
    Now we have your tab.
    It's the third one, after Apple -- which is the lead tab until the new products are announced -- and the very popular Tech tab.
    One thing I can see from the stats is that people are clicking around. That, I see as a sign that the rivers are proving useful.
  How much does a digital subscription to the NYT cost per year?
    At lunch today this question came up and no one knew the answer.
    One person asked how much a song on iTunes costs. 99 cents, everyone said.
    Seems we should know the answer to the question about the Times.
  Trying out Medium
    Evan Williams just announced a new blogging tool so I signed up. He just sent me an email saying I can post.
    After a bit of fiddling around, I can post. Screen shot.
    I have something I want to write about -- the new rivers I just shipped. Especially the Apple river, which replaces the Olympics as the lead river.
    Here's my first post.
    https://medium.com/p/1ded6abb9aec
    The editor is very nice. Very simple. I think I understand what it is.
    1. It's a blogging community.
    2. It does categorization, but does it upside-down. Instead of adding a category to a post, you add a post to a category. Maybe a little like Delicious, but with an editor. I never was a big user of Delicious so it's hard to say.
    3. It's very bare-bones. But like I said it's nice. :-)
    And I appreciate the chance to try it out.
    Here's a screen shot of the About dialog for the river. I thought I might use it for the picture in my Medium post, but it wasn't the right shape. Neither was the one I used. I think it's really designed for photos.
    I got an email when someone gave some kudos to my post. :-)
  An open Twitter-like ecoystem
    Please read this piece first. Thanks! :-)
    All of a sudden lots of people want to talk about this.
    And that's good!
    I've been wanting to do that for a long time.
    All I have to say is this -- go slowly, and set moderate expectations. Building ecosystems and coral reefs takes time, patience, love and understanding. And maturity. And friendliness. And code.
  Convert UTF-8 to HTML entities?
    I wish there was a simple C routine, possibly table-driven, that converts a string of characters from UTF-8 to HTML entities. Also these.
    This problem must have come up a million times. I bet it's out there. Do you know where it is?
  German in World Outlines
    I had an idea why text in German was getting garbled when it was moved from the OPML Editor to the World Outline software and rendered.
    So I took some time this afternoon to try to work it out, and I think I have it.. But first I want to check this out with any German-speaking users we may have here.
    Here's the experiment.
    I took a bit of text from the German Wikipedia page on basketball star LeBron James. The section about his high school experience.
    Then I pasted it into a test document in the OPML Editor, saved it and viewed it in a web page.
    The question is this. Are the two versions reasonably close?
  When I see Russell Westbrook
    I think of Bodie from The Wire.
  Madison 8/21 through 8/23
    I'm going to be in Madison, WI for three nights starting 8/21 and leaving on 8/24.
    I'll be giving a talk at the technology conference on 8/22. I'm driving from NYC, and bringing my bike. I want to ride around Lake Wingra. I used to that "back in the day." If you have any suggestions on things to do please post a comment here.
    Looking forward to eating some brats and drinking some Leinies. :-)
  Feeds for my Apple river?
        false
    When the Olympics are over, I'm going to give the first spot on my tabbed river to Apple, because 1. There are a lot of Apple fans, 2. There isn't yet a good river of Apple news, and 3. There's a big announcement coming, apparently in September. A good time to develop the flow of news about Apple.
    Here are the feeds I have so far.

      9to5Mac
      Apple Intelligence

      AppleInsider
      AppleInsider has been the leading source of insider news and rumors on Apple Computer since 1997.

      Ars Technica ¬ª Infinite Loop
      Ars Technica Infinite Loop
      CNET News - Apple
      Daring Fireball
      Gizmodo: Apple
      inessential.com

      MacRumors: Mac News and Rumors - All Stories
      the mac news you care about

      Marco.org
      NYT > Apple Incorporated
      Technology: Apple | guardian.co.uk
      The Verge - Apple Posts
      TUAW - The Unofficial Apple Weblog
    If you have others to suggest please post links to the feed in a comment below.
    PS: Thanks to Marco Arment for sharing his links via email.
  Arrgh Chrome broke RSS again
    Why do browser makers keep fucking with RSS?
    Now, when I click on a link to a feed, they present me with this set of choices.
    I happen to want something different. I'd like to see the contents of the feed in the display, and if they can't display it, I'd like my app to display it, and it isn't in the Chrome store, and no I don't want to submit it to the Chrome store.
    This used to work, as recently as a few days ago.
    Hopefully someone knows a workaround. Do you??
    PS: Why do they warn people about feeds "harming your computer." How exactly does a feed do that?
  Is the Twitter API an open standard?
    I don't think Twitter considers its API to be proprietary. There have been numerous clones and as far as I know they've never said anything about it.
    I am, of course, not a lawyer and am not seeking a legal answer. The question is, if one were to compete with Twitter and if the API is an important part of the competitive product, why wouldn't you seek total interop with Twitter? That way developers are not in any way locked in to either platform.
    I'm not telling anyone what to do, or making any moral judgements, just coffee-housing, kibitzing, pontificating, hopefully harmlessly. :-)
  Preview: Tabbed river
    I have four rivers that I follow pretty much all day while I'm working.
    Olympics, tech news, my own personal interests, and New Orleans. I want to be systematic about keeping up with each of these rivers, so I put into tabs on this page:
    http://tabs.mediahackers.org/
    The Olympics will be intensely interesting for another week or so. Tech news is something I'm always interested in. The tech tab here comes from the feeds in TechMeme's leaderboard. The 100 most frequently cited news sources for the previous 30 days.
    New Orleans is interesting because their newspaper, the Times-Picayune, announced that is curtailing printing. I wondered if some of the slack could be picked up by a river of news.
    If you have any questions about how this is done, please post a comment here.
        false
    Update -- added a feature that allows you to select the active tab from the URL. Useful if you're bookmarking the river and know which one is most important to you.
      http://tabs.mediahackers.org/?panel=nola
      http://tabs.mediahackers.org/?panel=olympics
      http://tabs.mediahackers.org/?panel=tech
      http://tabs.mediahackers.org/?panel=dave
    It also handles the case where you specify a panel that doesn't exist.
      http://tabs.mediahackers.org/?panel=doesnotexist
    Another update -- I added the Berkman river.
      http://tabs.mediahackers.org/?panel=berkman
  Tabbed rivers question
    I want to put multiple rivers on one page using a tabbed interface.
    Here's an example of the tabs. And here are three rivers. When I try to concatenate the rivers, the Javascript code gets (understandably) confused. I admit that as a JS programmer I am in way over my head. But as a user, I know exactly what I want.
    How to do it! (Any help is much appreciated.)
    Update: I have the answer, thanks to Kashif Khan's help. I'll post a demo shortly. :-)
  Trying Workflowy
    After reading Farhad Manjoo's writeup of Workflowy, I decided to give it a try.
    A disclaimer up front. I wrote my first outliner in the late 70s, and have been working in this area ever since. I built a huge amount of software around outlining -- a programming language, editor, debugger, database, menu editor, web content management system. I've been writing my blog, Scripting News, in the outliner since its inception, in 1997. All my DaveNet rants were written in the outliner too. I live in the outliner. I'm writing this in the outliner.
    Anyway, I have some advice to offer the developers of Workflowy: Simplify your model. I want to be able to see all levels while I'm editing. No need to do all that zooming. It looks nice in demos, but it's non-functional, and limits the fluidity of the tool, esp for reorganization.
    Another suggestion is to hook it up to OPML and offer that as a way of sharing. If you do that, it'll immediately hook into the worldoutline software I'm developing. I think there could be some nice synergies. Outliners should work together.
    And since my outliner only works in an offline mode, I can give Farhad what he wants there, and you can stick to the online outlining, which is a very good place to provide outlining.
    Also, Farhad is a really smart guy. I always stop and read his stuff when it comes out, and have only disagreed with him once. Smart people are the lifeblood of outlining. That's the best thing about making this kind of software is that you get to work with and for such smart people. They are a joy.
  What if Feedburner closes?
    A bunch of people sent me links to this piece that asks if Feedburner is about to be closed by Google. My guess is that Feedburner is probably not closing now. It sounds like they're shutting down some communication channels they weren't using, and pulling back from a business model that wasn't making money.
    But what if they are shutting down Feedburner? This is something you should think about. Google people give me grief when ever I mention that it might not be the best idea for people to centralize their feeds this way. And they're entitled to their point of view, but I'm pretty sure I'm right about this one. It wasn't a very good idea. The fact that Google is pulling back from the service, and that is unquestionable, is evidence of that.
    What can you do, and what can Google do to make a transition easier?
    1. Google can use the redirection facilities built into the web to send traffic to the Feedburner version of your feed back to its original location. That way people can keep publishing their feed contents and the subscribers will continue to receive updates. It's crucial that the connection between publishers and subscribers be preserved.
    2. You can use the facility that Google provides to map a CNAME to your feed, so that if Google shuts down Feedburner, you can point that name at your main server, and your feed could continue to be accessed even if Google does not provide a redirect.
    If you have any questions, post them here. If I can't answer them I'll try to find the answer.
  Digg archive gone?
    Worth noting, a SF Weekly article that says that the Digg archive is gone.
    If this is true, then the value of Digg as a way of preserving the history of its time is nil.
    I read the FAQ that explains they're providing users with their data.
    This connects back to the question I asked Fred Wilson last week.
  In Madison, August 22 and 23
    A heads up for people in Wisconsin who read Scripting News.
    I will be in Madison on August 22 and 23, participating in the Forward Technology conference, and getting another look at the town I went to school in in the late 70s.
    We're going to have a meetup at the Computer Science building on Dayton St across from Union South on the evening of the 23rd, 5PM to 8PM.
    Andrew Shell is orchestrating from the Madison side of things.
  Quick review of the new Digg
    I'm seeking news, it must be new.
    If I go to a news page and see the same stuff I saw last time, I'm less likely to come back.
    Pictures make nice wire-frames, but short headlines are easier to skim.
    The web is not a tabloid and vice versa. They function differently.
    Here's the link.
September 2012
  Ron Paul would probably like this
    I'm still on the mail list from the Berkeley neighborhood I used to live in. Today I got an email about a fire on the block. Here's the email, with the names and addresses changed.
      Hi,
      Last night a bit before 3AM, Shirley Hellman looked out her window saw flames shooting up from the vegetation in front of George and Helen's home @ 202 Filbert. She called 911 while Barney went across the street and put out the fire using George and Helen's garden hose. He prevented what could have been a devastating fire by his quick, intelligent and brave actions.
      By the time the fire department arrived with three vehicles plus a police car, the fire was no longer a danger. They completed extinguishing the fire and were gone by 3:20AM.
      My thanks again to Shirley and Barney for saving our block from disaster.
      Frank
  Twitter is a tragic tale
    I've known Chuck Shotton since 1995, early days of the Mac web community. I was doing Frontier, an editing and database environment that turned out to be an almost perfect match for web design and programming. Chuck was doing WebStar, the leading HTTP server for the Mac. Our products complemented each other well, and we've been friends ever since.
    I wrote a piece yesterday about Twitter needing a plan B for developers, and Chuck left a comment which I think is worth quoting in full:
      Since day 1, I have been unimpressed with Twitter's management team and their ability to grasp the potential of their own platform and capitalize on all the huge opportunities that could come from it. This is just more of the same from them. "Let's take what could be the single biggest transformational change in peer messaging on the Internet and dismantle its value, bit by bit, over the next 5 years and see if anyone notices before we're dead."
    What Chuck says is true.
    And we still need to create the layer that Twitter could have created.
    This has always been the disagreement between financial types and tech types. We want to make progress, that's why we got into this field in the first place. I want to be part of creating new layers of technology. So we can be ever more powerful. I like making money, and have made some -- but for me it's just one priority. And once I had enough money to own my own time, it dropped a lot as a priority. I love what I do, but the financial guys mock my love. I've seen them do it over and over, for decades. Jim Manzi, who was then CEO of a big software company, accused me of being Mother Teresa. He wasn't trying to be funny (or if he was, it didn't work).
    They think that the only reason to create something is to make money. The more money the better. They're not wrong. When I buy stock in a company, I want them to feel the same way. I say this to counter their belief that I'm stupid or naive. I understand why the VCs want to maximize profits. But I don't think they're doing that. Because they've made a trade-off. By reducing Twitter to sell it as an advertising channel, they are cutting off possibilities that might make money from a wide-open market. And some might make a lot more money than the platform. I don't doubt that will eventually be the lesson of Twitter.
    As an example, who made more money off the PC -- IBM or Microsoft?
    Would IBM be better off if they had been able to foreclose on the openness of the PC platform (they tried and failed), or if they had invested in Microsoft?
    There comes a time when a platform has a choice whether the innovation should take place inside their own walls or to let chaos reign in the open market. Having been around this loop a few times, I think the optimal approach is for, after getting to a certain point, the platform vendor to transition from being a programming shop to being a distributor and financier. The choice is between investing in employees or entrepreneurs. The latter is a better choice, always. You just have to look at the history of tech companies to see that.
    Instead, Twitter is going to invest in employees. They won't be able to find enough. There will be disappointment. And there will be competitors. And in a while there will be another shiny new thing. With any luck one of them will be open and the platform will take a back seat to the innovation. And then Twitter will look like a very small place.
    Update: There's a Hacker News thread for this piece.
  How Dave Develops
    "Don't Be Evil"
      Is Google's commandment.
      Mine isn't yet as concise.
      But here it is...
    Apps must...
      Give instant gratification and
      Convey a sense of purpose, yet
      Be deep.
    We serve
      Designers
      Programmers
      Writers
    Starter apps
      In 1984 the Mac could never have made it without MacWrite and MacPaint.
      Gave developers something to emulate.
      Helped form the coral reef.
    Where's the catch?
      My goal is to deliver an outline-based writing, design and coding platform, and have there be no catch.
      No hidden business model. Nothing I have to prove other than you can do all this at the same time.
      I may want to sell something, but you will always have choice to buy or not. Or buy from someone else.
  This is another test
    I just moved the r2.ly url shortener to a different server.
    If you came here through the r2.ly link, then everything is working a-ok.
    This has been a test. :-)
  Sites should have a "readable" button
    I'm finding myself using Readability to link to stories that for whatever reason are not imho readable. If I can't read it without using Readability (my eyes are not young anymore, and need a bit larger type, and I will not send out links to interstitial-limited sites) then I send out a Readability-processed link instead. It in turn points back to the original, if you want to see the ads, or squint at the tiny type. I'm calling on all site designers to spend 2013 working on making their sites work for readers. We're the reason you make your sites in the first place. Otherwise, why bother being in the writing business. It's not very profitable, I hear.
  Romney as human being
    I was shocked to hear the beginning of Romney's talk at the Clinton Global Initiative. Why?
      1. He cracked a joke.
      2. It was good.
      3. It was self-deprecating.
      4. It got the people on his side.
    You gotta wonder why he doesn't show this side of himself when he's not talking to world leaders and fellow rich folk. Like during a debate. Or on the campaign trail.
    But it makes his birther "joke" all the more certain to have not been innocent. Here's a guy who isn't tone-deaf to humor. He knows that a good joke has to be self-deprecating or relatively neutral or else it's flat. A good joke tells the truth in a roundabout or surprising way. Furthering an unfair racist insult against an opponent isn't funny. And it's not a sign of him being tone-deaf to humor -- it is however a sign of him having no moral compass. No place he won't go to win. He should have known that people aren't actually that stupid, we get it, even if we aren't in his social or economic class.
    I read in Politico that he has plans to do bi-partisan deals in his first 200 days to ease gridlock in Washington and gain the confidence of capital markets. A Republican president has that power, where a Democratic president does not. I'm sure he'd face a rebellion in his own party, but they'd have to get in line. So the question is, if this is his plan, why isn't he telling anyone?
    Maybe Romney, in a desperate last Hail Mary pass, could come clean, dump his own party, throw them under the bus, apologize, and tell the voters what he really plans to do. It's conceivable that might make the race competitive. Not likely, but not impossible. It would be good for the country, regardless.
    If Romney has a human side, doing something good for the country, even if it might not be good for his candidacy or his party, might not be completely unthinkable.
  Twitter may need a Plan B
    Sometimes the products of acquired companies fade away, but that's not happening with Instagram, bought by Facebook for $1 billion last summer. "Instagram has a greater pull than Twitter on mobile devices" says the latest Comscore report, according to Fast Company.
    Problem for Twitter, with their current developer program, they're shutting down Instagram's photo sharing competitors. Which means there will be little opportunity for a challenger to rise, giving Twitter something to acquire -- assuming their own photo sharing service fails to topple Instagram. Which clearly is not what's happening.
  Romney's 47 percent
    I've never seen a more powerful political ad.
    Also note it was not necessary to quote Romney out of context.
  The Angry Birds platform?
    I bought Angry Alex, and really tried to like it, but got bored and gave up. I ended up going through all the old Angry Birds scenarios dating back to the beginning, instead.
    Angry Birds is relaxing. I spend my days writing code and prose, communicating and creating. Playing Angry Birds is not about creating (obviously) it's about destroying. It's a perfect game.
    I'm sure that Rovio wants to grow, make more money, hire more people -- but maybe that wasn't meant to be. Maybe they should be happy with the success of Angry Birds, and try to do things to make their fans happy. No one would begrudge them some more money if they're helping make our downtime more relaxing.
    Anyway, I seriously think that Angry Birds could be a platform, and that's what they're trying to create with these other products -- including the new Bad Piggies, out today, which I admit I don't even want to try, because the idea seems like another Angry Alex, but this time with an element of the Angry Birds franchise.
    Instead, why not release the design tools they use to create Angry Birds scenarios, and open a store of their own. Let creativity rule. Even if the scenarios were just ripoffs of the ones done by Rovio designers, so what. Let's see what people come up with.
    An idea -- give the pigs and birds recognizable faces. Of movie stars, baseball players, LeBron James, Carmelo Anthony. Or Republicans and Democrats! There could have been a special scenario around the death of Neil Armstrong that had him and Buzz as birds fighting off lunar pigs (whatever they might look like).
    I think there's still room for a lot of creativity with Angry Birds. Stick with what works Rovio! :-)
  I want a Galaxy S3 but..
    I've been reading the reviews on Amazon for the Samsung Galaxy S3 and I want to buy one, but I don't know which one to get.
    Here's are the constraints.
    1. I don't want a plan or a contract, therefore it must be unlocked.
    2. It should work with T-Mobile in the US.
    3. Would be nice if I could use it internationally.
    I don't want to buy a phone only to find it doesn't work with T-Mobile. I know I should learn what all the different terms mean. Right now it's easier to write a post and ask you guys to tell me what to get. :-)
  I thought "stench" was real
    Now it turns out that Roger Simon's piece about Paul Ryan and the Stench was supposed to be a joke. A few observations.
    1. I read the piece, linked to it from my linkblog, even posted a link to a Google News search for the word "stench" because I thought it was historic. Like Sarah Palin going rogue in 2008.
    2. It doesn't say it's satire, and Simon is not a satirist.
    3. This is why it's wrong to run April Fools stories, as has become a tradition in the tech world. They're never funny, and you're rarely surprised, and if you are -- is that something a reporter really wants to do to someone who reads them? It would be like a programmer deliberately making software lose data. Not just appear to lose data, and not an accidental bug, but really throw the data away, as some kind of joke.
    4. We don't read Politico for this kind of fun. Had it been on The Daily Show or The Onion, we would have known to discount it. But they wouldn't have run it, because it's not funny.
    5. News should struggle to be plain and straight, so we get the information, so we don't have to hunt for it. It's amazing how many times you read a story and they leave out the one thing you would need to know if to act on it. For example, a preview of a football game that doesn't tell you what network it's broadcast on and at what time. Happens far too often.
    6. News itself should not be the story. What arrogance of Simon to think we care what he thinks is funny. If he wants to be a satirist become one.
  47% was not a gaffe
    There are silly mis-statements that should have no bearing on the outcome of the election. To call them out amounts to "neener neener" and Americans who are undecided or could change their vote are not influenced by them. Who cares if Romney says windows on planes should open? People who are voting for him will forgive it. People who aren't voting for him think it's significant. But no votes change.
    But the 47% line was not like that. It was an unusually clear statement of something very obvious about the Republican philosophy. Actually unprecedented. So important that it could not just bring down Romney, but it should also cause people who vote Republican to take another look at whether that's wise.
    I used to vote Republican, for the reason I think a lot of people still do. I want a strong country, one that doesn't waffle. I thought the Democrats were nominating people who, as Romney suggests about Obama, were asking for forgiveness. It started with Carter, again, as he says. I see his election as a response to Watergate and Vietnam. We had just spent a decade doing horrible things, and when the truth was out, we didn't trust ourselves. So we elected someone who would never commit the sins of Johnson and Nixon. It was the right choice for 1976. But then we forgot, and we elected a series of Presidents who in the end were much worse than either Johnson or Nixon. How much worse? Well the 47% idea really spells it out.
    What we need is to find a balance between the horrible governments of the Republicans and the anemic governments of the Democrats. That's why Clinton is so popular now. Even his Oval Office blowjobs look good. We don't want a saint. But we don't want Cheney or Romney either (don't kid yourself about who we elected in 2000 and 2004, it wasn't Bush, it was Cheney, Bush is a campaigner, a very good one, Cheney is governance).
    It would be nice if we Americans could talk to each other about this, instead of talking through the assholes we keep nominating. That said, Obama is not a terrible compromise, despite the atrocities Greenwald keeps reporting. That will change when we change. He's wrong to blame the government. As long as the Democrats have to run in the Republican environment, they're going to have to keep doing the shit they do to keep the bankers, oil industry, pharma, defense industry etc happy. If we ever decide to use our power, even for a moment, that might change.
  Why Obama didn't meet at UN
    I'm not a political reporter, or a partisan (really, I know Repubs think I am, but I'm not), so I can have opinions about these things, and express them, and you don't like it, that's okay.
    Anyway...
    This is why President Obama didn't meet with any heads-of-state at the United Nations meeting yesterday.
    1. If he met with any of them he would have had to meet with Netanyahu. He certainly couldn't have met with any other leader from the Middle East or North Aftrica without meeting with Netanyahu. The noise from Repubs and the press would have been deafening.
    2. He knows this, better than anyone else -- there is no light between Netanyahu and the neocon part of the Republican Party in the US. They coordinate. Share the same goals. It's as if the Republicans here were of the same government as Netanyahu, much more so than they are of the same government at Obama. The disloyalty to America is disgusting, but it's there nonetheless.
    3. If he met with Netanyahu, it would be scripted by Karl Rove, they would all know what to say. Netanyahu, masquerading as the head-of-state of a foreign government, as someone independent from the Republicans, would say something that could be spun by the Republicans as showing that Obama was weak. They would have worked this out before-hand. Karl Rove approved this message™. :-)
    4. Obama figured the cost of meeting with no one would be less than the cost of going through this charade. He's ahead in the polls. He wants basically nothing more than to run the clock on the election. Give the Repubs nothing to latch on to. A meeting with Netanyahu would give them the opportunity to push him into a corner.
    The press, I suppose, has to pretend that there's no coordination between the Republican neocons here and the Israeli neocons there, but Obama actually isn't weak, and certainly isn't stupid. There's no reason he should give them ammo. Stay the course. Whatever negative publicity comes from this will pass quickly, because he didn't give the neocons any soundbites or photo-ops to grab onto.
    PS: My link shortener chose this URL for this post. http://0bb.r2.ly/. I swear I didn't choose it.
  Problem posting to Twitter
    I moved this note to the worknotes site.
  Today's podcast
    When you've had a chance to listen to today's podcast,
      1. Please post a note here using the OPML Editor.
      2. Following the instructions on this page.
    When you come back here look for the green button.
    Refresh the page if necessary.
    You can do it! :-)
  Open fields for discourse
    Interesting post by Josh Miller on Medium about open discussions, in reply to a post by Fred Wilson. It's interesting because Josh is the lead developer of Branch, a discussion system -- and Fred is the backer, and public face for Disqus, the discussion software we use here.
    Fred argues that his blog is open to anyone to participate, but I've noticed what Josh has. While Fred, admirably responds to every comment on his system -- we're not getting much engagement beyond -- hey I'm here. To which you can reply and I'm here, and so am I, etc etc.
    These aren't really discussions, not in any sense that peoples' minds come open to being changed. People come to recite their beliefs, they skim the posts and comments for key words, and then choose from a set of schpiels they memorized, and type them in.
    Online discussions can be a lot like those on CNN or MSNBC, which to me seem like concerts. People are invited to sing their songs, in harmony with other songsters. The songs never vary. The volume does, and each has their own style, but there are rarely any new ideas.
    To me, a good discussion is where a new perspective or fact can surface, and everyone has the possibility come away from the discussion changed. Smarter, better informed, with a possibly shifted point of view. Oh that's what they mean when they say...
    Miller may be on to something. Branch allows discussion among a pre-set group of people. The moderator, the person who started the discussion can add new people. And new discussions can fork off from previous ones, exactly as it worked on my LBBS system in the early-mid 80s, only prettier (that was in the day of 300 baud modems, and scrolling "glass teletype" displays).
    I still like the idea behind the H20 system developed at Berkman Center about ten years ago. It also had the concept of invited participants. To start, each would post positions on a moderator-supplied topic, privately. Then at a previously announced time, all the positions are revealed. There's a commenting period where each participant can write a rebuttal, again in private. They're revealed all at once. And that's it. The goal is to cover all sides of a topic, intelligently and not personally. Not surprising this was developed at a law school, by lawyers. It's a very legal approach to discourse.
    What we really need are experimental platforms for non-programmers to invent new methods of discourse. We've relied too much on programmers, who have a definite style of arguing. But there are other professions that are fairly far ahead of us in understanding how humans communicate and share ideas. We are not that good at it, and so far most discussion systems have been limited by the imaginations of programmers.
    BTW, a final note -- in case it isn't obvious -- I am also working on discussion software. There is a place to comment in Disqus, that's open to anyone. There's another way to participate here, by installing the OPML Editor and clicking on the green button you will see when you reload the page with the software installed on your computer. Instructions are on this page.
  Why didn't Apple ease into maps?
        false
    When Apple switches basic technology it's almost always done in a gradual way, in stages.
      1. First, it's optional. Only for the most adventurous users, developers usually.
      2. Next, it's the default, but you can still run the old apps in a compatibility box.
      3. Then they require you to install special software to run the old style stuff.
      4. Then they introduce a version of the platform that only runs the new stuff.
    Apple technologies that have transitioned like that include the switchover from the 68K processor to the PowerPC. Then from the PowerPC to Intel. They brought in the NeXT OS that way. It took many years before they shipped a version of the OS that would not run Mac apps from before the transition to NeXT.
    People think they're doing that with app distribution on the Macintosh. And some people even think they're phasing out the Mac OS and that at some point they will say that Mac apps are "legacy" and eventually will ship a platform that only runs iOS apps. But that would have to be a long ways off, five or ten years, if ever.
    But this time Apple didn't do a gradual ease-in of their new maps platform. One day we had a maps platform by Google that mostly worked. It was replaced with Apple's maps technology which is most definitely not ready for end-users. And the Google maps platform is no longer available. It's a remarkably discontinuous change.
      Screen shot.
    It seems they could have shipped iOS 6 with the Google maps platform, and with a new app from Apple that implements their new maps technology. That would get it hundreds of thousands of users, immediately. The most change-averse users would stick with the existing maps app. And the power users, the insiders, those closest to Apple would help them fix the glitches and smooth things out so it would be ready in a year or two for the average iPhone or iPad users.
    They certainly haven't explained to users why they didn't also ship a Google maps platform. It's not as if the Google software won't run on the new version of the operating system. You can go to maps.google.com in Safari, and it works as before.
    User communities are layered. Think of concentric circles, like the layers of an onion. There's an inner core of users who are developers. They get the earliest releases of software, and know that what they're getting is both buggy and subject to change. They want that stuff, because they want to be ready when it ships with their own apps. After that there are enthusiasts. People who get glory from being early with the latest stuff. They also don't mind so much putting up with buggy or incomplete software. It validates their view of themselves as pioneers. And there are many more layers of expertise and tolerance for weird behavior, all the way out to the prototype end-end-user -- our mothers.
    It's surprising they would subject all levels of users to the quirkiest software, the stuff that usually only developers have to use, especially mapping software which is integral to using mobile devices. It's almost as if the NYC transit authority introduced new software for the subways, it's really that important these days to getting around. It's a very radical shift, with lots of problems, and they haven't provided an explanation of why it is this way. What other changes like this will they make? Why the change? What other Apple platforms are subject to this kind of change?
    See also: Apple's Feud With Google Is Now Felt on the iPhone.
    Update: Letter from Tim Cook to users re maps.
  As a renewed Knicks fan
    I was a Knicks fan in the late 60s and early 70s. Then I went away until early this year. Jeremy Lin is what brought me back.
    I know a lot about last year's roster. But I can only gather by listening to echoes of Knicks fan frustration that there were some horrible years before that. The names mean nothing to me. But one by one they come back, I read the stories, and they all say the same thing.
    This is a crazy team.
    And they reject luck. They have to be smarter than fate. And they make huge impulsive decisions that turn out badly. And keep doing them. Over and over.
    If I didn't know better I'd say the team is run by an idiot.
  Humanity doesn't scale
    Everywhere you look there's evidence.
    So many of the systems we've built work nice, for now, but when one component fails, how will all the others respond. How is Japan dealing with the Fukishima meltdown? This is a country that depends on nuclear heavily -- they have no oil of their own, and their economy isn't so strong, so what do they do now that they've had a taste of what nuclear-mageddon looks like.
    Great piece in today's NYT about data centers. Nice illusion there, but it's not sustainable. Yes that's where our bank balances and medical records are stored.
    What if something happened to corn? Or if we run out of antibiotics? Believe it or not the questions are related. Something that seems as as reliable as corn might not always be so.
    And philosophically and intellectually our minds can't grasp the complexity of the world we live in. That's why politicians who talk nonsense are so convincing. What they're really saying is Relax don't worry, things aren't really as complex as they seem. I can reduce it down to grunts and snorts.
    We have far more people doing far more with technology than our resources can support, than our intellect can comprehend. It's exhausting.
  Favorite movie reviews feeds?
        false
        130%
    I'm putting together movie reviews panel for Media Hackers.
    Here's the list of feeds so far.
    If you have any suggestions of movie review feeds, please post a link here as a comment. Thanks!
  Comments on Costolo talk
        false
        130%
    I didn't catch the whole of Dick Costolo's talk with Emily Bell at ONA, but I did get to hear the part about developers and APIs. I think this part also relates indirectly to journalists who use Twitter.
    1. Twitter will provide a way for users to download their history of posts to Twitter.
      I was amazed by this. And I don't believe it will ever happen, or if it does it will be in GIF format or PDF, some format that makes it virtually impossible to move the data somewhere else. It would be completely inconsistent for Twitter to offer freedom to its users when it's paying such a high price in goodwill to take away that freedom.
      I think Costolo was caught off-guard by a clever question asked by Ms. Bell, and did what a lot of tech execs do, promise a solution even when they have no idea how to do it, figuring later on they can excuse themselves with a shrug or a joke (as he did in several other instances in this talk, when asked about previous commitments).
      Another clue is that he immediately qualified it as being subject to engineering realities. You could almost see the gears turning in his head. :-)
    2. Think of 140 characters as a caption. This is consistent with what they're doing. People who argue that 140 characters is some kind of sacred limit are wrong. They should listen to what Costolo says.
      I think this the right move, not just for Twitter but for everyone.
      But it has implications that some journalists might not see. It means that there is no reason why Twitter couldn't host entire news articles. I am sure they will be doing that, probably fairly soon. I suspect this ability will not be open to everyone, and they will want favorable terms for those it permits to use this feature. Presumably there will be a revenue-share on ads placed on these articles.
      Also play what-if -- what if Twitter acquires a news organization. Just because they say they are not a news org today does not say anything about the future. Twitter made all kinds of promises to developers that were broken, in total, within a couple of years.
    3. Emily Bell did a great interview. The audience questions were also right on.
      I thought Emily Bell did a masterful job of raising these questions to Costolo, but in a disarmingly friendly way. To Costolo's credit he didn't always take the bait. He stuck with the idea that they are a tech company providing a platform, and are not going to cross into content. But he didn't exactly say that.
      If I were a betting man, I'd bet that before too long Twitter will be competing with its top content providers, the same way it's now competing with its top developers. Only they'll have to tread more carefully there, assuming the journalists and bloggers still have their own mechanisms to get news out. That's why this is such a dangerous situation. As we rely more and more on Twitter, our websites become less-used conduits for distribution of ideas and news.
      Obviously I believe Twitter is today a totally inadequate platform for independent journalists or bloggers and it's going in the wrong direction. They score points for not turning over tweets to governments, but they have an awful track record of tiliting the playing field to favor their partners and even personal friends. This is a very sloppily run platform for both development and journalism. People either don't know the history or are choosing to ignore it, presumably because building their own platforms seems difficult, expensive, or unlikely to succeed. However, the longer you wait the harder it will become, not easier.
      Monocultures don't work very well for news.
  A comment *and* a blog post
        false
    Now, any OPML Comment can be viewed as a blog post, with its own comments.
    The links below show how it works.
    Links
      An example of a comment on this page.
      Flip it over and here's the blogpost view.
      There's a feed of all the comments.
      You can browse the comments here.
      Of course that's available in OPML.
      There's a link to the comments in the Scripting News menubar.
  An open note to Doc
    My longtime friend Doc Searls and an outliner guy going back many years is now using the OPML Editor and has started to post items to the OPML Comments community.
    The community starts with the humble concept of a comment, and develops out from there, to create all the essential elements of an online community, but one built around replaceable parts.
      Small pieces loosely joined. It's the philosophy of Unix from the 70s, the PC world of the 80s, the Mac of the mid-late 80s and early 90s, the web and open source communities of the 90s, and the beginnings of Web 2.0 -- blogging, podcasting, RSS.
    It's a good moment, because Doc has wicked way of writing about this stuff. His stories are very different from mine. He goes deep on photography, radio, geography, airplanes. But when it comes to formats and protocols, we are on exactly the same page. He's on the odd-numbered side, and I'm on the even-numbered one. But it's the same idea, flip sides.
    It's a good time to write this story, because the very people that Twitter is pushing out the nest are the ones we want to work with. There will be competition for their hearts and minds. Evan and Biz are launching Medium. One of their colleagues is launching Branch. app.net is out there. There will be lots of new communities vying for the attention for the most creative and intelligent people on the web.
    By actively participating, I hope to nudge all the new bootstrappers to share data with each other. So the users can not only delight in the experiences each of our software can create, but also in the magic they can create by combining our tools to create new online communities that the software architects would never imagine.
    My belief is that if the right design, programming and writing tools are out there, and we foster easy movement of ideas, the amazing things we could only dream of in the past will come into existence. There are hundreds of millions of people in the world now whose minds share the space of the Internet. It can get a lot richer. They're ready for it.
    Anyway, this is an invitation to Doc to post a response below, in the outline that's attached to my post. I would like to read a Doc ramble on these topics. It would be good for my soul. Then I will show you another way of looking at what Doc wrote.
    Update: Doc posted a comment. And it appears on its own page, where you can comment on his comment.
  A new feature sneak
    Tomorrow I'm going to write up a new feature that's now "out in the wild."
    Very briefly, every OPML Comment now has a dual life.
      1. It's a comment (of course).
      2. It's a blog post.
    If you're subscribed to the feed of comments from scripting.com, you have already seen this, if you clicked on a link to a comment. If you look at the RSS source, you'll see the <guid> element for each item points to the post.
    More in the morning about what this means, and next directions.
  Maps, Tweetie and dBASE
        false
        bold
    Two examples of potentially disastrous "upgrades" --
      Maps on iOS
        In iOS 6 the maps functionality took a major step backwards. Just shipped yesterday so we're still figuring out how bad it is. Maps are critical functionality for mobile users. Why it happened, no one knows. Could be that Google pulled out on their own. They might not come back, hoping that maps will be a feature advantage for their Android phones. Remember these companies have been suing each other over patent issues.
      Tweetie
        I don't use Twitter clients, but I understand that their iPad app, acquired from Loren Brichter, was an exemplary iPad app. The new app apparently pales in comparison. Again, we don't know how this came to be. But it may be indicative of a similar kind of problem for Twitter.
      Ashton-Tate's dBASE
        Ashton-Tate is prior art for self-destructive upgrades. They had a theory that you could ship a new version of a product, in this case dBASE, without anyone in the company actually using it. It didn't work. They ended up selling out to a much smaller competitor after this upgrade ruined the company.
        So the stakes can be very high.
      Personal note
        I learned this one in 1984, when we shipped ThinkTank for the Mac.
        People thought we had removed features from ThinkTank, because they had used the Apple II or IBM PC versions. In fact this was a completely new codebase, and we shipped early because there was a lack of software on the Mac. So it didn't have a lot of the features of the earlier product. No matter, the users were outraged by this. They thought they had bought a better computer, and here was the product with less features. We totally didn't anticipate this, because from our point of view it was a major accomplishment to get something out at all.
        As the story goes, the customer is always right. We quickly came out with a new release that added all the features that were in the other versions.
  A day of construction
    You may notice some breakage in OPML comments today. I'm radically restructuring the code. In the end it should be totally transparent, except for things that break in the transition. Once they're fixed it'll be transparent again. :-)
  Un-Web 2.0
    You've heard of unconferences. They take the idea of a conference and flip it around. Instead of having speakers on stage, the speakers are in what used to be called the audience.
      The term has been hijacked to mean something much softer, that the planning of the conference is deferred to the day of the conference. But the speeches are still speeches. The audience asks questions. The experts are on stage. Zzzz.
      But the original concept, pioneered at BloggerCon and the term coined by Len Pryor, was deeply disruptive. And it mirrored what blogging was doing to journalism.
      Un-Web 2.0 is to Web 2.0 as BloggerCon was to RegularOldCon. And as blogging is to journalism. The source and the destination become one. :-)
        false
    So Web 2.0 was nice, as training wheels for the next steps in the future web. A two-way medium. The people who pioneered Web 2.0 are to be congratulated and thanked. But now it's time to Un it. :-)
    Because Web 2.0, while it started out as a freedom-inspiring thing, has been coalescing to being a dangerous form of locking-in the user's data so it can be applied to a corporate business model. We all know the dangers of this. It robs platforms of their openness. It makes moving data around impossible. And it makes creating hybrid systems impossible. It's not a very web-like direction for something that's inspired by the web.
    If the Web is Small Pieces Loosely Joined, Web 2.0 is Small Pieces Trapped In A Silo.
      Hat-tip to David Weinberger for the term.
    In Un-Web 2.0 you get full control of your data, and the services just get pointers to it, or copies of it. The originals live with you. Pointers are much preferable to copies because then you can keep updating the content after it has been incorporated in someone else's content tree.
    Food for thought. :-)
  MP3 of Romney's fund-raiser
    Yesterday I posted a question about the availability of MP3s via SoundCloud.
    I just wanted to listen to this on my walk yesterday. But I also think the MP3s of this should be available outside of SoundCloud's server so they have a chance of surviving over time. So I created an MP3 and uploaded it to my Dropbox account. It's mirrored in my S3 archive.
    Romney Fundraiser MP3
    BTW, I listened to the full recording as I prepared the MP3 and some of what he says is reasonable. But it doesn't seem consistent that one person would say all these things. For example he talks about what a blessing it is to be born in America. 95 percent of it is taken care of for you. Where did that come from? If you started life as an American you were better-off right from the start than most of the other babies born that day, elsewhere in the world.
      As a child of immigrants, I can tell you it's true. My parents emphasized the importance of education and my grandparents did very well financially and were able to create security for all of us. So I got an even better start in life. But clearly none of this would have happened had they not been able to come to the US during WWII.
    So how can you at the same time feel that America is great and think that 47 percent of us are losers. It doesn't make sense. At least part of what makes us great is that we have some greatness in our people. Or the system that we live in. It's not just a piece of paper, Mitt.
      We aren't voting for Obama because we are victims, or losers -- some of us are doing pretty well. I'm voting for Obama because I think Romney would be a terrible President. Maybe you should try to earn our vote instead of throwing it away. I thought you worked hard? I thought you were a success? Is this how you achieved so much?
    A note about SoundCloud. By now we should all see the danger of trapping our content on a Web 2.0 company's servers. People say that it was Mother Jones' decision to not allow this to be downlaoded, but there were limits on free accounts, so even if they wanted to let everyone download it, they couldn't as long as they used SC. There are other free services that don't have such limits. For example, Dropbox. We should all be working together to be sure that valuble historic documents like this are adequately preserved. It's not good enough to upload a recording to a commercial service that doesn't allow downloads.
  Question about SoundCloud
    Earlier this afternoon I was looking for an MP3 of the Romney video.
    I noted that Mother Jones had SoundCloud versions of the MP3 on the Mother Jones site. But I couldn't find an MP3 download, or a link to an RSS feed for their podcast.
    It's quite possible that I missed it. And that's the question. Is there a link on this page for either the MP3 or the RSS feed?
    I don't want to jump to any conclusions without clearly asking this question first.
  Dear Green Button People
    I want to show you something about where we're going.
    Here's a screen shot. That's how I edit the posts on this site.
    Does that look familiar to you? If you've already written a few comments, this is what your Comments Workspace looks like.
    Obviously it's a pretty straight line between taking what's in one window and treating it as if it were in the other window.
    "cheesecake"
    PS: Go here to learn about the green buttons.
  Jury duty, voting and Romney
    1. Jury duty is amazing. Especially if you go all the way to a verdict. You learn how the architecture of our democracy places its faith in the people. You might think, if you listened to some of our political leaders, that this would be a bad idea. Because most of us are takers not makers. But it works, because people are a lot smarter, honest and hard-working than we give ourselves credit for. And when you trust people, when you really make that point, and the legal process does that, over and over, everyone comes through. Some people accept trust faster than others, but in the end, all twelve jurors accept their responsibility. When we passed judgement I was sure we had arrived at the correct decision.
      As a juror this is impressive. Everyone stands when the jury comes in. But then everyone, including the jury, stands when the judge enters. Speech is formal, polite, even when they're saying horrible things. May it please the court. Your honor. Mr. Jones. It's all about respect.
      And the jurors must remain silent, for days on end. But the irony is that everyone in the room is waiting for us to speak. You are left with your thoughts and your senses. You look, you listen. Think. What does that mean. What are they really saying. Look at the body language. It's deliberative, almost a meditation. Because the question they're asking is serious. Did this person do something horrible. Something they must be punished for. In the US we don't take this lightly.
    2. Voting is the same idea. You have to look and look at the people who are asking for your vote. Sure they're lying. So was the defendent in the trial. Everyone lies, even if they took the oath saying they wouldn't. Dirty little secret is that if you're on trial, everyone understands that you can lie to defend yourself. And so do politicians. But if you really think about it, you know who they are and what they're really saying, behind the lies.
    3. So nothing was actually revealed about Mitt Romney in yesterday's tapes. If you had been watching this guy, like a juror watches every actor in the courtroom, you recognized the pattern. He might have been the guy who runs a company you once worked for. The principal of your school. Your friend's grandfather. To me, he was a Silicon Valley venture capitalist. He was the kind of guy who doesn't know what it means to speak the truth. His existence has nothing to do with the truth. He's a goal-oriented person. He's trying to get something from you. He doesn't care what he has to say to get it. Since he's running for President, a lot of the times that means he's out of his element and you can tell. He's not comfortable with teachers, with working people. But speaking to the rich donors in that dining room, that was his element. He was comfortable. The same way the defendent in our DUI case would have been comfortable in a bar slamming down a few whiskies before going for a drive. No juror would have been fooled by Mitt Romney before the tape, but what we saw confirmed what we already knew.
    I believe in the American system, and totally reject the idea that your vote doesn't matter. You think it doesn't matter because you haven't discovered what it means. If you had a little faith in it, if 25 percent more people had more faith, it would work a lot better than you have imagined. Because given enough time, no matter how much they lie, we figure it out. Change will come slowly but it will come. But don't tell me it can't change if you haven't even tried.
  I feel a little like a kid
    When I was a kid, my friends and I used to ride our bikes down to Shea Stadium and sneak in the back, through the bullpen and out on to the field. Only during the off-season. They didn't have much so security back then.
    We'd run around on the field, marvelling that we were running in the same place that the great players of the day were playing. Roberto Clemente, Willie Mays, Ron Swoboda, Ed Kranepool.
    Anyway, that's what I feel like now. Like someone left the gate open and I get to run around on the field and play whatever game I want. :-)
  River with JSON-encoded OPML
    This is a very bizarre animal.
    http://dropbox.scripting.com/dave/misc/riverWithJsonEncodedOPML.js
    It's a river.js file that has an item that contains the OPML source encoded as JSON.
    This means that a jQuery app that loaded this file would find the OPML structure already there in the DOM.
    We're a short step from having Media Hackers be able to do something much richer with content.
  OWS on its anniversary
    I've started a half-dozen posts about Occupy Wall Street on its anniversary. Here goes another.
    This close to a national election, I wish they were doing something to try to influence the outcome. What they're doing will just remind people about last year's occupations. I think most people who sympathize with or agree with the premises of OWS (I am one) were concerned with how it would end. Is this really a protest we want to associate with? Becoming homeless and going to jail to make headlines is not my idea of good craftsmanship of political message.
    I've felt in my gut that the right place for freedom-loving people to invest effort is to oppose the most heinous of the plots to control government to favor the rich -- voter suppression. If you're going to march somewhere, why not call attention to the places which are most dangerous to democracy?
    Also unlike most people who march I believe votes absolutely do matter. I believe in government of the people, by the people and for the people. True, we've given up most of our power. But what's the best way to get it back? By voting. I'm really serious about that. You can't take it back by getting arrested. You take it back by literally taking it back. And help other people whose votes are being obstructed to get around the obstructions.
      BTW, what taught me the value of the vote was doing jury duty about 15 years ago. The trial went all the way to verdict, so I had a chance to really think about how it worked and what it means. I had always glossed over this part of government. But here we were, 12 very random people, being trusted with a fellow citizen's liberty. We started out as raw cynics, but by the time we had to pass judgement we were true believers in the Constitution. It was an amazing transformation, in all of us, myself included.
    People died to undo the terrible methods of voter suppression in the past. Now we're sitting by and doing nothing while they put it all back in place. Something very wrong about that.
  Tech discussion of comments feed
    Today I released a new feature for OPML Comments, which is explained with links, on this Scripting News post.
    The core feature is of course the new RSS feed for comments.
    If you poke around the feeds, you may find some things that raise questions or possibilities.
    1. The JSON and JSONP versions.
    2. The microblog namespace, which is used by the feed.
    3. The roadmap post that shows where we're going.
    4. A screen shot of a permalink on comments, a necessary feature for the feed.
    5. My personal river, which subscribes to the feed, so it's an easy place to find the latest comments on the threads site (along with news from quite a few other sources).
    6. What's next? There's a full CMS behind the comments, with a templating system for designers. Lots of formats and protocols for developers. The only part that's visible is the writing tool. And that's as it should be, because the people we are doing this for are writers and readers.
    Please post comments here, either in OPML or Disqus.
  Newspapers and blogging
    Henry Blodget has a graph showing newspaper ad revenue over time.
    Jay Rosen observed that its fall started as the blogs rose.
    Proves that the right thing for the news industry to do back at the beginning of blogging was to fully embrace the change. Open the floodgates, and help the new amateurs create news for each other.
    I wrote about this over and over, urged them to offer blogging to their communities. But change doesn't come easily esp when you've climbed the ladder. You don't want to hear the ladder doesn't matter anymore.
  To OWS -- please use the web
    I wish I knew what OWS was doing now and why.
    If you don't have a website, here's a space to write.
    Please let me know. I don't understand. Thanks.
  Why Google is OK
    At a recent meeting we were talking about the reversal of fortunes for Twitter and Facebook and wondering why Google wasn't suffering as much.
    It isn't about money because Twitter is shrinking in order to make more money. But the stuff that was exciting about Twitter, the way it acted as a conduit for other software, it was sort of a message operating system on a global scale, the exciting stuff is exactly what they're taking out to get to profitability.
    Facebook is wilting because the thing that was lifting them up was their stock, and that's not working for them anymore. In fact it's working against them.
    True, Google has multiple revenue flows, but I theorized that that isn't why they have a strong future. It's because they're open where Twitter is not. Think about it. I don't have to be vetted by anyone to be part of their search engine. No one says yay or nay, and there are no funny rules about stuff flowing in or out, or using their code to display search results. Google is fairly laissez-faire. All you have to do to be in their index is to put it on the web, and we all know the web is the platform with no platform vendor. Anyone can put stuff there.
    I believe Twitter would have a much brighter future, Facebook too, if they trusted the web. If they let every bit of their service be replaced. That would force them to compete based on service, value and features. Now they get to be lazy and that's fine for a while. But the crazy chaos of the web will eventually do something exciting that you won't be able to match on Twitter. Had they been more trusting they would have guaranteed that whatever excitement comes along would automatically include them.
    Google, on the other hand, has a better chance. It would be good for them if they were more open-minded about accepting formats and protocols from people who don't work for Google, but even with that inefficiency, they still have a pretty strong basis for continued growth.
    And of course Amazon is the smartest of them all. They're automatically part of everything because they do everything to support and enhance the protocols of the Internet. They are very respectful of the web and choice. I can deploy my apps on Amazon if I want, but if Rackspace gives me a better deal, Amazon won't fight me. Same with Rackspace of course. This is the way we like it. :-)
    Who did Apple bet on in this field? Twitter. They'll never get networking right, imho. (I am a very happy Apple shareholder, btw.)
  Whole post to Scripting feed
    David Nichols on Twitter said: "Just realized 'Thread: whatever' posts don't contain the full text in Google Reader. I'm sure you have a reason, I don't get it!"
    He's right. The connection between threads and my Scripting News feed is a little temporary glue to connect the old world feed with the flow from the new world. When I did it, I did it quickly, because I was juggling a lot of stuff and didn't want anything to break.
    I gave it a little thought and realized I could easily broaden the pipe to allow full thread posts to go into the Scripting News feed.
    This post is a test, to see if that works. :-)
  Dear @diveintomark
    Just before Mark Pilgrim committed Internet suicide he posted a tasty little flame about me on Twitter.
    A spammer picked it up and every few days it shows up in my Replies tab on Twitter, a reminder of how much Mark loved me. Or whatever.
    Here's what it says.
      RT@diveintomark: Just a reminder @davewiner ran http://weblogs.com w/o a privacy policy for years & sold all your ping data #blork
    It's a wonderful slam, something a Republican would be proud of -- because some of it is true -- but it's ridiculous at the same time. And it's packed with intrigue and innuendo.
    1. I did run it without a privacy policy. No one ever asked for one. And it was still pretty early for privacy policies (it started in 1999 I think).
    2. A privacy policy would have read like this -- No privacy. The point of weblogs.com was to broadcast all the data to everyone that wanted it. It was a central ping server. For a while it was the only ping server for the entire blogosphere. If you wanted to let everyone know that you had updated all you had to do was send a message saying so to weblogs.com. We then would publish the ping as part of our XML feed.
    3. I did sell weblogs.com to Verisign, but just the domain. No software, no data. The data, to the extent that it ever existed is in a remote folder on one of my hard drives. An Old stuff folder inside another Old Stuff folder, etc etc. All the data was public. In the end it was almost all spam. Not worth anything, that's why they didn't want it.
    Anyway, I thought it was worth a rebuttal on a lazy Saturday afternoon, after seeing this message about a thousand times since Mark first posted it. It'll probably be echoing around Twitter's network from now until the end of time. Long after we're all dead people will be wondering who Dave WIner was and why he sold all your ping data and what was #blork and who cares anyway cause they're all long gone.
    Happy trails! :-)
  I don't think this is Kansas
    In the 1990s the very small web community, compared to today's web, had a lot of self-important ideas about the future of the medium. We were living in the future and prepared for it, or so we thought. In one way we believed that this would someday be the most important medium, or it already was, but on the other hand, not really. This was the kind of stuff you read about in science fiction, it didn't happen in real life. Well now it's happening. And it's freaky, and who knows where it leads.
    None of us are prepared for the world we find ourselves in. Not even the net natives.
    We don't know what comes after attacks on our embassies, all over the world now, but it's serious and unprecedented and couldn't happen without the net. Communication used to be controlled by governments. It would take days or weeks for stories of a war-like event in one part of the world to reach another part. I know this because it wasn't much better in the United States. When I was in college in New Orleans, I'd go downtown every Tuesday to get a copy of the Sunday NY Times. That, and the evening news, was my access to world wide news. It wasn't that long ago.
    Now Google has told the US government that it won't take down the video that's theoretically causing all the trouble. That's weird but it's right. Google is a multi-national company. Sure its founders are American. But it can't be anymore beholden to the United States than to any other country. If they did, they would disappear pretty quickly because someone has a good reason for every piece of content to be removed. Whether they obey an order from the US is another matter.
    Remember, this is all coming after WikiLeaks. And think of where Assange is now. It's only the respect the British govt has for the sovereignty of embassies that keeps him out of jail. And it's exactly that sovereignty that's under attack elsewhere.
    And meanwhile in Kansas some people aren't embarrassed to say the President's name should be taken off the ballot because he's a black man, and they're white and they can't handle it. I know they'll say it's not that, but they're lying.
    All this is happening at the same time.
  An idea for reporters conducting live interviews
    Just heard part of an interview between George Stephanopoulos and Mitt Romney.
    It went something like this.
    George: You going to take back what you said?
    Mitt: No, basically the White House agreed with what I said.
    George: They agreed that the President sympathizes with the people who attacked the embassy?
    Mitt: Basically the White House agreed with what I said (repeating his previous statement).
    George: You refuse to answer a direct question.
    Now, that's what I thought I heard Stephanopoulos say, but he actually went on from there.
    I propose that when you're interviewing someone who doesn't answer a question, that you say exactly those words. "You refuse to answer a direct question." It's like a receipt. Play back for them how you're interpreting. You still get to maintain your lack of a viewpoint. You're just saying what's obvious to everyone watching the interview. And it puts the burden on the person being interviewed. He could smile through it, and that would become the clip you use to summarize the interview. Or you might actually get a response to the question you asked.
  A question about class warfare
    Was just thinking about the Republican tactic of liberal use of the concept of class warfare.
    If you say taxes should be increased for the richest people, that's class warfare.
    If so, isn't it also class warfare when rich people want to cut health care and retirement benefits for middle class people? Why aren't both ideas equally off-limits?
    No tax increases for rich folk in return for no cuts in benefits for middle class people. Great. Now what? :-)
  YouTube in the developing world
    Pretty amazing that YouTube is playing such a central role in the battles in North Africa and the Middle East. And of course Twitter. A few notes on what's happening.
    1. The rioters in Egypt and Yemen say they're incensed by the video. I haven't seen it myself and I don't need or want to. Much of what's there is crap and highly insulting to someone. I'm sure some of the rioters are sincere. I'm equally sure some of the rioters are no more sincere that the American assholes who look for excuses to get "angry." They're not really angry. They're just using some pretense to try to violently and unfairly shore up their own power, in a highly undemocratic fashion.
    2. Clearly some of the people on the "Arab street" -- whatever that is -- are being manipulated. They need to understand that not only do we have free speech in the US, there's no guarantee that any video on YouTube actually came from the US. It could have come from the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt. If not this time, next time. Now that they see how powerful YouTube can be at stirring up mobs, it will be used again and again.
    3. The solution is not to censor YouTube, the solution is for the citizens of the new democracies in the Middle East to get clued-in, fast -- to how they're being used. Use your own free speech to expose the assholes. Your assholes, not ours.
    4. We should get rid of any premise in press reports that the rioters are upset about the film. The only thing we know is that they are attacking the US embassies. Are they really so stupid as to believe that the US produced the film? Shouldn't the press check that out before reporting the premise as fact. Could this possibly be some great drama whose purpose is to impose censorship on YouTube? It seems the press has a small conflict of interest here.
    5. This is what I mean about tech and politics being inseparable. That the political and tech blogospheres are divided makes the whole thing much weaker. There aren't any divisions any more.
    6. On a similar topic, Twitter decided to turn over the tweets of an OWS protestor. It's about time. Either tweets are public or they are not. Twitter needs to answer that question, very clearly. I thought they were public. Just like blog posts. If they're not, Twitter needs to clear this up right now. By not turning over the archive when asked for it, what pretense did they offer? I honestly don't know. Some sense of privacy? Tweets are the opposite of private.
  Blogging in transition
    A little over a week ago I wrote a piece called scripting.com in transition. I was getting ready to show people OPML Comments, and wanted to give you all a heads up. Now you've seen the next step. I've opened up a little window into the CMS running behind the threads site, called the worldoutline, to show you a bit of what it can do.
    Over the last couple of years I did a transition of my blog. First, I rewrote my CMS which had evolved in a disorderly research-driven fashion over several years. That was called Scripting2. Then I started a new CMS called the worldoutline, which was actually begun with the seeds of a way of organizing web content that goes back to Clay Basket in the mid-90s. But this time I achieved the goal I had been trying to reach the previous iterations.
    My goal was to create a way of writing, designing and programming for networks that was unified. Where a new domain is just a matter of putting a label on a node saying "Start something new here, and this is its name." Its analogous to a page-break in a word processor. On the net the equiv of a page-break is a domain-break.
    Things that used to represent large conceptual changes, like the difference between content and its rendering, are shrunken so you just have to save a document to effect large change on the web. Why not? We already have tools like this for printing and page layout. We're 15 years into the web now. We all create lots of sites, so many that they're hard to manage. We live at the edge of our capacity to manage it. But our tools, the file system and IDEs have only made incremental improvements in the last couple of generations. We're not using the great new capacity of our machines very well.
    So I don't think most people have an expectation for what comes next. That's why this is going to be so much fun. I think you will be surprised at what you will be able to do. :-)
  A message to Republicans: Enough
    The problem with what the Repubs did last night is that we hadn't even begun to process the events. It was six hours before we even knew a US ambassador had been killed. The Repubs are trying to take control of the story. We, the press and the informed electorate -- Republican, Democrat and independent, need to tell the Republican leadership, in unambiguous terms that their behavior, as Americans, is unacceptable.
    Yes, these events are inevitably political. But our first priority has to be the safety of Americans. Maybe our fiftieth priority is wanting to know what Mitt Romney thinks about it.
  Do you see a green button on this page?
    1. You have to be running the OPML Editor to see the button.
    2. We've had some reports of people using Chrome on Windows 7 who don't see the green button. If you're a geek, can you help us figure out why? I'm a Chrome user on the Mac, and I see it fine, and there haven't been reports of problems with other browsers. Help much appreciated.
    3. BTW, this is what the button is supposed to look like in case you can't see it.
    4. The button is generated by a page on a server on the user's machine.
    Update: Problem solved! :-)
  Witting with Greenwald
    This post came about from a brief twitter exchange with Glenn Greenwald.
    Glenn thanks for listening. Here are some simple ideas. (And if you just want the conclusion skip to the end.)
    1. Discourse on the net is much like discourse was during the print age. I can write about tech stuff, you can write about political stuff, neither of us gets access to the other's community if you should happen to have something to say to the tech world or I should have something to say political.
    2. This is working against us because today almost everything that is political is tech, and vice versa. We've got some smart people writing publicly who can put the pieces together, but we haven't yet actually put the pieces together.
    3. You talk about Arab Spring type demos. I say that won't work in the US and I don't think it worked in Egypt.
    4. What works here, and I know this sounds idealistic in a Mr Smith Goes to Washington way, is voter turnout.
    5. Kickstarter. Look what happened there. Why? Because people crave power. They may only be able to put down $10 or $100 but it magically mulitplies quickly to become $1 million.
    6. People are desperate to be involved. To be effective. To do something with their lives that's good. We are missing meaning.
    7. We are blessed with a democratic system that is actually a lot like Kickstarter. If we were to use it, that would change things right off. If voter turnout increased by just 10 percent it would be seen as a revolution in Washington. It would be felt.
    8. I believe it's possible to transform Obama, even just a little. I think he can be manipulated. If 10 percent more people turned out than were expected, it would shake him up.
    9. If somehow we could attach to that a message that the filibusters had to stop, that when we elect a majority to Congress we expect them to have the power to legislate, and that there will be a memory of any politician who threatened that. (Think about the power the Tea Party has had with a small minority in just a few states.)
    10. I want to do more than vote and give money. Right now, other than knock on doors, which I did in 2008 and when I was a teen, that's about all that I can do. But I desperatelly want to do more. I thinkn there are a lot of other people like that.
    11. I don't care what pundits think.
    12. I believe in demonstrations, but not meaningless ones. Showing up to vote is the best tool we have right now. I can't believe we're not doing more with it.
    Anyway, short term there isn't much we can do. I know that. The change that I want has to be something I create myself. I want to break down the walls that say only Josh Marshall, you and Ezra Klein (etc) can write about politics. And that the people who use the tech have the most important opinions, so I want to hear more vision about where this stuff should go from smart people like yourself. We're creating a new system for political discourse now. The tools are still early. We can make them much better. But first we have to create the expectation that they will get better, and the places we're looking for change are the places it can't and won't come from. The VCs will never give you the power that I will. The President will never bring about change on his own. But you and I and others like us can.
  Dead people on voting rolls
    I love how the Repubs are so alarmed that there are thousands of dead people on the voter rolls. OMG. We have to purge them. It's a sign of fraud! This is terrible. Well...
    There are also thousands of dead people on Facebook and thousands of dead people with driver's licenses. Every university has thousands of dead people in their alumni databases. Why? Because voters die. And so do Facebook users, and drivers, and alumni.
    My father died three years ago, and while I miss him still, even more today than I did right after he died, I still haven't called the State of New York to say "You need to take my father off the voter roll." For all I know if he showed up at the right voting place on November 7 they would let him vote. But I promise you he's not showing up anywhere. He's a former voter even though he may still be on the voter rolls.
    You have to check what the Repubs say very carefully, because while it may be true, what they say might also be designed to lead you to believe something else, something outrageous or fraudulent. That's not happening.
  A test of outline comments
    Welcome to a test of some new software I've been developing. This is a test you can participate in if you have the OPML Editor running on your Mac or Windows PC.
    Howto
      1. If necessary, download and install the OPML Editor application.
      2. Fully update it by choosing Update opml.root from the File menu.
      3. Choose the Your name command from the Misc menu and enter your name. This will be used to identify your notes in the comments box.
      4. Important: Reload this web page. You should now see a green OPML button near the bottom. Click the button.
      5. The OPML Editor comes to the front and a window opens with a place for you to enter some comments. Please do so. When you're ready, click the Save button.
      6. Come back to this page and reload. You should see your comments below. You can go back to the OPML Editor and change your comments and Save as many times as you like.
      It's a social experiment. Let's see what you all do with this. I have some ideas, of course, but let's see how it goes.
    Problems?
      If there are problems, you can use the Disqus comment box below to explain.
  To TechCrunch hackathoners
    I hear today is the TechCrunch hackathon!
    If you're looking for something to do, how about picking off one of the ideas on the roadmap for the open Twitter-like ecosystem.
    You could do a nice linkblogging tool. Or a beautiful rendering of river.js in the browser of your choice (or hopefully all of them).
    How about a nice way to manage susbscription lists in a way that can be shared with all applications. One place where users can subscribe or unsubscribe.
    Remember to give your users' data to other apps, to be part of an ecosystem. Closed silos are for the big guys. It's how we disrupt them, by working together. :-)
  app.net's impressive start
        false
    The Verge has an interesting story with an awful headline, so rather than point directly to it, I wanted to get a chance to frame it in a way that I think is fair to app.net.
    They say that only 250 users account for over half the messages posted on the new system. There are over 20K users, each of whom paid $50 to use the system.
    They say this means that app.net is off to a "slow start" but I wonder how that compares to Twitter. I have never seen any good numbers, but I think there are really several classes of Twitter users, I have a sense of how they break out in numbers.
    1. Celebrities, whose grunts and snorts are fascinating to their fans. They don't really provide information, just the tiniest glimpses into the reality of their lives, which are suprisingly like those of normal people.
    2. Link machines, like myself -- people who spend a lot of time online reading stuff, and share links with followers. We post a lot more than the people in category #1. We're not very famous and we don't share a lot of our lives. The product is a linkflow. Another way of looking at it, we use Twitter the way others use del.icio.us (perhaps why the YouTube guys bought it, to turn it into the interesting part of Twitter, imho).
    3. Active readers who use Twitter as if it were a river-of-news aggregator, which of course it is. Yesterday I posted a screen shot that illustrates that sometimes Twitter is providing almost exactly the same flow as the Media Hackers tabbed river.
    4. Darknet users. I have no idea who they are or what they do or if they are even real people. A huge portion of the numbers on Twitter. Who they are is totally unknown. Like the interior of Alaska or Siberia.
    Unless we know how things break down for Twitter how can we judge what's happening on app.net. For one, I am impressed. They have managed to get uptake, with a $50 pricetag, for an offering that is actually less functional than Twitter in many ways, from a technical standpoint. And it's a very small community relative to Twitter. Even so, they have managed to get a lot of people to part with a significant amount of money. And they're smart to go into a quiet period for a while to consolidate, and presumably get some new software ready, and perhaps some content deals.
  Breakdown of feed formats
    A question came yesterday up on the river-of-news list -- a list of developers who are creating tools and designs for rivers.
    Dody Gunawinata, is doing an aggregator and wanted to know if he should support RSS 1.0 format. I said that River2 does, but I didn't know the breakdown of different feed formats.
    So I wrote a script that recorded, when a feed updates, whether it's RSS or Atom, and if it's RSS, which version it is. Only feeds that updated in the 24 hour period would be counted, and each feed would only count once. The idea was to count feeds that were actually updating. Dormant feeds really don't matter for Dody's question.
    I ran the script overnight on the server that maintains my rivers. So this is a very unscientific test.
    The numbers: RSS 2.0 -- 338 feeds. Atom -- 36. RSS 1.0, 0.92 and 0.91 had 2 each.
  Life outside Twitter
        false
    I've made an investment over the last year, building up the rivers I use, both from a software and content standpoint. I've realized more and more that's how I was using Twitter. To be in the loops of writers, both professional and bloggers, in a systematic way. I wanted to see how rich I could make it.
    Turns out it's pretty good. I still use Twitter, and for now that's okay.
    A few minutes ago there were five posts on Twitter, in a row, that I would love to have outside of Twitter too. Expand this headline to see the screen shot.
    Except for Newyorkist announcing that he is making his bed, each of the tweets is from people I feel I know well through their online personnas, and each is pointing to something worth reading.
    Bora Zivkovic is a scientist blogger from North Carolina. Philip Greenspun is a genius entrepreneur, systems guy, developer, pilot, libertarian. Highly opinionated, great writer. Jay Rosen is of course always on-topic, a thinker and linker and media observer. Miguel de Icaza is a great community leader, programmer, and is politically outspoken (like me and Greenspun) and Chris Dixon is a NYC-based entrepreneur, VC and also a wise guy. :-)
    I would subscribe to any of these guys in my rivers, and in fact I do. Most of the content they're pointing to exists on the web, outside of Twitter, but I'm not subscribing to all of it. I want people like Chris and Miguel to have a linkblog, so that their links live outside Twitter as well as their writing.
    These are all super smart people and I think they will immediately understand why it's good to have feet on both the platform and the train, at the same time.
  About Twitter's changes
    There's nothing surprising in the changes Twitter announced today.
    They telegraphed clearly, a long time ago that they were phasing out their earlier developer program. Earlier this year Twitter CEO Dick Costolo said they wanted more content flowing into Twitter and less flowing out of it. So of course that meant that they would cut back on API access. If anyone had been building on these resources, they now face a setback, but it was one they could have seen coming.
    Twitter could have been something very different from what it's becoming. That's neither good nor bad. Every business has an opportunity to define itself, by what they do as well as by what they don't do. Twitter has had very strong positions like the 140-character limit and the decision to put links in the text that users type. These have become such fixtures that we hardly notice them. But different decisions could have been made, and a different environment would have resulted.
    When Twitter pulls back from features, they create room for new potentially valuable networked products and services that are radically different from Twitter, with different tradeoffs. I think we're at the point in the evolution of the net where there will be a lot of experimentation, in part fueled by the new space Twitter is opening up for competition. It's good for innovation. I think we may well be getting unstuck in some very big areas, very soon, as a result of the changing developer landscape.
    See Media Hackers for an idea of what can be done with news, entirely outside of Twitter, based on flows in RSS, Atom, XML and JSON, all of which are strong open formats with huge content flow from professional news organizations, bloggers, universities, schools of all sizes, scientific institutions, corporations, non-profits, media networks and government agencies.
    It's important to note that none of this is in any way subject to Twitter's terms. None of these feeds or JSON rivers will stop flowing because Twitter is placing limits on its own ecosystem.
    There are new projects from many developers that look promising. I believe there will be strong reasons the new projects will want to share user content more fluidly as a way to compete with the giant companies that are trying to carve out private areas of the Internet, as Twitter is.
    Working together is how new markets are always created. There's lots of new stuff in the pipe, much reason for optimism and excitement. :-)
  scripting.com in transition
    I'm doing more of my blogging over here on the threads site.
    This was always the plan. When people say that I turned off comments, that wasn't exactly true. I wanted to start a transition from a site where discourse was more controlled, and set off from the main blog content.
    There is more transition coming, some things I hope that many people will find exciting.
    I think there's a new kind of writing for the web coming. I want to be a major proponent of it, and participant, as I was in the early days of blogging and podcasting.
    Feel free to post a comment below (but keep it nice). :-)
  Why a second term for Obama?
    Economist: "A president who has had a patchy first term now needs to make a convincing case for a second one."
    Pretty simple. Romney repeats a promise that he'll "repeal ObamaCare."
    Obama will implement it. By the time his second term is over it will be a done deal.
    Even if Obama did nothing else, it would be worth it to re-elect him just for this.
    A little background
    Ten years ago I had life-saving surgery. It cost over $400K. And over the years since, my health care has been pretty expensive. I'm well-off. I can afford my health insurance. And I've had continuous coverage since I was in my 20s. So the insurance companies have to cover me.
    But I understand what it would mean to not have the money and not be insured. I would have died ten years ago. So this means something to me personally.
    I also have friends whose life requires maintenence from the health care industry to hold death at bay. If you look around you, and ask -- you'll find that there are many people who are in a similar circumstance. Not everyone likes to talk about it, but it's happening anyway.
    People who don't understand are imho:
    1. Young.
    2. Have never experienced the death or serious illness of someone they loved and/or depended on.
    3. Are not paying attention. Probably an alchoholic or drug abuser, because it's all around you. You have to work at not seeing it. Work hard.
    That we would play games with health care for our families is ridiculous. I guess Paul Ryan and Mitt Romney don't have any friends or family who might be at risk. But that can't be true for most Republicans. So I honestly don't understand. But I don't have to understand if we simply re-elect President Obama.
    Q.E.D.
  Ann Richards 1988 keynote
    One of the best speeches ever.
  Repubs lie and obstruct, but Obama does not lead
    The Repubs tell the truth about one thing, and it's the one thing that damns the president. He hasn't been leading. Campaigning for re-election is not leading.
    I'm going to vote for Obama no matter what. Not voting is not an option, and voting for Romney is most definitely not an option. If the Repubs were to control both the executive and legislative branches we're in for a whole other level of catastrophe. Last time they ran the country we almost lost everything, economically, militarily as well as our freedom. The whole thing.
    What has to happen is the Repubs have to be reined in. And the President has to lead us to that future. He can't just get re-elected. It has to be more than that.
  The real liars are the press
    Who can really blame the Repubs for lying if the reporters let them get away with it.
    I read a piece by Emily Bell about how media neutrality is fueling lies. It's pretty radical considering she teaches jouralism at Columbia.
    But the truth is much more radical. The Republicans are finally taking down the press. What will be left of journalism after this election will not resemble in any way what it was before. This is a moment of breaking with the past, a discontinuity, reformation.
    Finally it's obvious to everyone that the news is not being reported accurately. What we see and hear in the speeches in the cable news broadcasts is different from what they report. Could not be clearer. We see A, they report B.
    If the headline is wrong, then now is the time for the press to stop lying. I would love for that headline to be wrong, but right now, it's correct.
  Embedded registration form
    <iframe id="gottaregister" name="1_1" src="https://gottaregister.com/?brand=embed&source=http%3A%2F%2Fthreads2.scripting.com%2F" width="450" frameborder="" height="380" style="display: block; overflow: hidden; margin: auto; background-color: whitesmoke; padding: 20px; border:#c2dbe8 1px solid; moz-border-radius: 0; webkit-border-radius: 0; border-radius: 0; ">
    Note: I used the Obama campaign's embeddable form. You can too. It's easy.
  Odd pic of two Presidents
  Obama gets 1/2 of it
  Ron Paul would probably like this
    I'm still on the mail list from the Berkeley neighborhood I used to live in. Today I got an email about a fire on the block. Here's the email, with the names and addresses changed.
      Hi,
      Last night a bit before 3AM, Shirley Hellman looked out her window saw flames shooting up from the vegetation in front of George and Helen's home @ 202 Filbert. She called 911 while Barney went across the street and put out the fire using George and Helen's garden hose. He prevented what could have been a devastating fire by his quick, intelligent and brave actions.
      By the time the fire department arrived with three vehicles plus a police car, the fire was no longer a danger. They completed extinguishing the fire and were gone by 3:20AM.
      My thanks again to Shirley and Barney for saving our block from disaster.
      Frank
  Twitter is a tragic tale
    I've known Chuck Shotton since 1995, early days of the Mac web community. I was doing Frontier, an editing and database environment that turned out to be an almost perfect match for web design and programming. Chuck was doing WebStar, the leading HTTP server for the Mac. Our products complemented each other well, and we've been friends ever since.
    I wrote a piece yesterday about Twitter needing a plan B for developers, and Chuck left a comment which I think is worth quoting in full:
      Since day 1, I have been unimpressed with Twitter's management team and their ability to grasp the potential of their own platform and capitalize on all the huge opportunities that could come from it. This is just more of the same from them. "Let's take what could be the single biggest transformational change in peer messaging on the Internet and dismantle its value, bit by bit, over the next 5 years and see if anyone notices before we're dead."
    What Chuck says is true.
    And we still need to create the layer that Twitter could have created.
    This has always been the disagreement between financial types and tech types. We want to make progress, that's why we got into this field in the first place. I want to be part of creating new layers of technology. So we can be ever more powerful. I like making money, and have made some -- but for me it's just one priority. And once I had enough money to own my own time, it dropped a lot as a priority. I love what I do, but the financial guys mock my love. I've seen them do it over and over, for decades. Jim Manzi, who was then CEO of a big software company, accused me of being Mother Teresa. He wasn't trying to be funny (or if he was, it didn't work).
    They think that the only reason to create something is to make money. The more money the better. They're not wrong. When I buy stock in a company, I want them to feel the same way. I say this to counter their belief that I'm stupid or naive. I understand why the VCs want to maximize profits. But I don't think they're doing that. Because they've made a trade-off. By reducing Twitter to sell it as an advertising channel, they are cutting off possibilities that might make money from a wide-open market. And some might make a lot more money than the platform. I don't doubt that will eventually be the lesson of Twitter.
    As an example, who made more money off the PC -- IBM or Microsoft?
    Would IBM be better off if they had been able to foreclose on the openness of the PC platform (they tried and failed), or if they had invested in Microsoft?
    There comes a time when a platform has a choice whether the innovation should take place inside their own walls or to let chaos reign in the open market. Having been around this loop a few times, I think the optimal approach is for, after getting to a certain point, the platform vendor to transition from being a programming shop to being a distributor and financier. The choice is between investing in employees or entrepreneurs. The latter is a better choice, always. You just have to look at the history of tech companies to see that.
    Instead, Twitter is going to invest in employees. They won't be able to find enough. There will be disappointment. And there will be competitors. And in a while there will be another shiny new thing. With any luck one of them will be open and the platform will take a back seat to the innovation. And then Twitter will look like a very small place.
    Update: There's a Hacker News thread for this piece.
  How Dave Develops
    "Don't Be Evil"
      Is Google's commandment.
      Mine isn't yet as concise.
      But here it is...
    Apps must...
      Give instant gratification and
      Convey a sense of purpose, yet
      Be deep.
    We serve
      Designers
      Programmers
      Writers
    Starter apps
      In 1984 the Mac could never have made it without MacWrite and MacPaint.
      Gave developers something to emulate.
      Helped form the coral reef.
    Where's the catch?
      My goal is to deliver an outline-based writing, design and coding platform, and have there be no catch.
      No hidden business model. Nothing I have to prove other than you can do all this at the same time.
      I may want to sell something, but you will always have choice to buy or not. Or buy from someone else.
  This is another test
    I just moved the r2.ly url shortener to a different server.
    If you came here through the r2.ly link, then everything is working a-ok.
    This has been a test. :-)
  Sites should have a "readable" button
    I'm finding myself using Readability to link to stories that for whatever reason are not imho readable. If I can't read it without using Readability (my eyes are not young anymore, and need a bit larger type, and I will not send out links to interstitial-limited sites) then I send out a Readability-processed link instead. It in turn points back to the original, if you want to see the ads, or squint at the tiny type. I'm calling on all site designers to spend 2013 working on making their sites work for readers. We're the reason you make your sites in the first place. Otherwise, why bother being in the writing business. It's not very profitable, I hear.
  Romney as human being
    I was shocked to hear the beginning of Romney's talk at the Clinton Global Initiative. Why?
      1. He cracked a joke.
      2. It was good.
      3. It was self-deprecating.
      4. It got the people on his side.
    You gotta wonder why he doesn't show this side of himself when he's not talking to world leaders and fellow rich folk. Like during a debate. Or on the campaign trail.
    But it makes his birther "joke" all the more certain to have not been innocent. Here's a guy who isn't tone-deaf to humor. He knows that a good joke has to be self-deprecating or relatively neutral or else it's flat. A good joke tells the truth in a roundabout or surprising way. Furthering an unfair racist insult against an opponent isn't funny. And it's not a sign of him being tone-deaf to humor -- it is however a sign of him having no moral compass. No place he won't go to win. He should have known that people aren't actually that stupid, we get it, even if we aren't in his social or economic class.
    I read in Politico that he has plans to do bi-partisan deals in his first 200 days to ease gridlock in Washington and gain the confidence of capital markets. A Republican president has that power, where a Democratic president does not. I'm sure he'd face a rebellion in his own party, but they'd have to get in line. So the question is, if this is his plan, why isn't he telling anyone?
    Maybe Romney, in a desperate last Hail Mary pass, could come clean, dump his own party, throw them under the bus, apologize, and tell the voters what he really plans to do. It's conceivable that might make the race competitive. Not likely, but not impossible. It would be good for the country, regardless.
    If Romney has a human side, doing something good for the country, even if it might not be good for his candidacy or his party, might not be completely unthinkable.
  Twitter may need a Plan B
    Sometimes the products of acquired companies fade away, but that's not happening with Instagram, bought by Facebook for $1 billion last summer. "Instagram has a greater pull than Twitter on mobile devices" says the latest Comscore report, according to Fast Company.
    Problem for Twitter, with their current developer program, they're shutting down Instagram's photo sharing competitors. Which means there will be little opportunity for a challenger to rise, giving Twitter something to acquire -- assuming their own photo sharing service fails to topple Instagram. Which clearly is not what's happening.
  Romney's 47 percent
    I've never seen a more powerful political ad.
    Also note it was not necessary to quote Romney out of context.
  The Angry Birds platform?
    I bought Angry Alex, and really tried to like it, but got bored and gave up. I ended up going through all the old Angry Birds scenarios dating back to the beginning, instead.
    Angry Birds is relaxing. I spend my days writing code and prose, communicating and creating. Playing Angry Birds is not about creating (obviously) it's about destroying. It's a perfect game.
    I'm sure that Rovio wants to grow, make more money, hire more people -- but maybe that wasn't meant to be. Maybe they should be happy with the success of Angry Birds, and try to do things to make their fans happy. No one would begrudge them some more money if they're helping make our downtime more relaxing.
    Anyway, I seriously think that Angry Birds could be a platform, and that's what they're trying to create with these other products -- including the new Bad Piggies, out today, which I admit I don't even want to try, because the idea seems like another Angry Alex, but this time with an element of the Angry Birds franchise.
    Instead, why not release the design tools they use to create Angry Birds scenarios, and open a store of their own. Let creativity rule. Even if the scenarios were just ripoffs of the ones done by Rovio designers, so what. Let's see what people come up with.
    An idea -- give the pigs and birds recognizable faces. Of movie stars, baseball players, LeBron James, Carmelo Anthony. Or Republicans and Democrats! There could have been a special scenario around the death of Neil Armstrong that had him and Buzz as birds fighting off lunar pigs (whatever they might look like).
    I think there's still room for a lot of creativity with Angry Birds. Stick with what works Rovio! :-)
  I want a Galaxy S3 but..
    I've been reading the reviews on Amazon for the Samsung Galaxy S3 and I want to buy one, but I don't know which one to get.
    Here's are the constraints.
    1. I don't want a plan or a contract, therefore it must be unlocked.
    2. It should work with T-Mobile in the US.
    3. Would be nice if I could use it internationally.
    I don't want to buy a phone only to find it doesn't work with T-Mobile. I know I should learn what all the different terms mean. Right now it's easier to write a post and ask you guys to tell me what to get. :-)
  I thought "stench" was real
    Now it turns out that Roger Simon's piece about Paul Ryan and the Stench was supposed to be a joke. A few observations.
    1. I read the piece, linked to it from my linkblog, even posted a link to a Google News search for the word "stench" because I thought it was historic. Like Sarah Palin going rogue in 2008.
    2. It doesn't say it's satire, and Simon is not a satirist.
    3. This is why it's wrong to run April Fools stories, as has become a tradition in the tech world. They're never funny, and you're rarely surprised, and if you are -- is that something a reporter really wants to do to someone who reads them? It would be like a programmer deliberately making software lose data. Not just appear to lose data, and not an accidental bug, but really throw the data away, as some kind of joke.
    4. We don't read Politico for this kind of fun. Had it been on The Daily Show or The Onion, we would have known to discount it. But they wouldn't have run it, because it's not funny.
    5. News should struggle to be plain and straight, so we get the information, so we don't have to hunt for it. It's amazing how many times you read a story and they leave out the one thing you would need to know if to act on it. For example, a preview of a football game that doesn't tell you what network it's broadcast on and at what time. Happens far too often.
    6. News itself should not be the story. What arrogance of Simon to think we care what he thinks is funny. If he wants to be a satirist become one.
  47% was not a gaffe
    There are silly mis-statements that should have no bearing on the outcome of the election. To call them out amounts to "neener neener" and Americans who are undecided or could change their vote are not influenced by them. Who cares if Romney says windows on planes should open? People who are voting for him will forgive it. People who aren't voting for him think it's significant. But no votes change.
    But the 47% line was not like that. It was an unusually clear statement of something very obvious about the Republican philosophy. Actually unprecedented. So important that it could not just bring down Romney, but it should also cause people who vote Republican to take another look at whether that's wise.
    I used to vote Republican, for the reason I think a lot of people still do. I want a strong country, one that doesn't waffle. I thought the Democrats were nominating people who, as Romney suggests about Obama, were asking for forgiveness. It started with Carter, again, as he says. I see his election as a response to Watergate and Vietnam. We had just spent a decade doing horrible things, and when the truth was out, we didn't trust ourselves. So we elected someone who would never commit the sins of Johnson and Nixon. It was the right choice for 1976. But then we forgot, and we elected a series of Presidents who in the end were much worse than either Johnson or Nixon. How much worse? Well the 47% idea really spells it out.
    What we need is to find a balance between the horrible governments of the Republicans and the anemic governments of the Democrats. That's why Clinton is so popular now. Even his Oval Office blowjobs look good. We don't want a saint. But we don't want Cheney or Romney either (don't kid yourself about who we elected in 2000 and 2004, it wasn't Bush, it was Cheney, Bush is a campaigner, a very good one, Cheney is governance).
    It would be nice if we Americans could talk to each other about this, instead of talking through the assholes we keep nominating. That said, Obama is not a terrible compromise, despite the atrocities Greenwald keeps reporting. That will change when we change. He's wrong to blame the government. As long as the Democrats have to run in the Republican environment, they're going to have to keep doing the shit they do to keep the bankers, oil industry, pharma, defense industry etc happy. If we ever decide to use our power, even for a moment, that might change.
  Why Obama didn't meet at UN
    I'm not a political reporter, or a partisan (really, I know Repubs think I am, but I'm not), so I can have opinions about these things, and express them, and you don't like it, that's okay.
    Anyway...
    This is why President Obama didn't meet with any heads-of-state at the United Nations meeting yesterday.
    1. If he met with any of them he would have had to meet with Netanyahu. He certainly couldn't have met with any other leader from the Middle East or North Aftrica without meeting with Netanyahu. The noise from Repubs and the press would have been deafening.
    2. He knows this, better than anyone else -- there is no light between Netanyahu and the neocon part of the Republican Party in the US. They coordinate. Share the same goals. It's as if the Republicans here were of the same government as Netanyahu, much more so than they are of the same government at Obama. The disloyalty to America is disgusting, but it's there nonetheless.
    3. If he met with Netanyahu, it would be scripted by Karl Rove, they would all know what to say. Netanyahu, masquerading as the head-of-state of a foreign government, as someone independent from the Republicans, would say something that could be spun by the Republicans as showing that Obama was weak. They would have worked this out before-hand. Karl Rove approved this message™. :-)
    4. Obama figured the cost of meeting with no one would be less than the cost of going through this charade. He's ahead in the polls. He wants basically nothing more than to run the clock on the election. Give the Repubs nothing to latch on to. A meeting with Netanyahu would give them the opportunity to push him into a corner.
    The press, I suppose, has to pretend that there's no coordination between the Republican neocons here and the Israeli neocons there, but Obama actually isn't weak, and certainly isn't stupid. There's no reason he should give them ammo. Stay the course. Whatever negative publicity comes from this will pass quickly, because he didn't give the neocons any soundbites or photo-ops to grab onto.
    PS: My link shortener chose this URL for this post. http://0bb.r2.ly/. I swear I didn't choose it.
  Problem posting to Twitter
    I moved this note to the worknotes site.
  Today's podcast
    When you've had a chance to listen to today's podcast,
      1. Please post a note here using the OPML Editor.
      2. Following the instructions on this page.
    When you come back here look for the green button.
    Refresh the page if necessary.
    You can do it! :-)
  Open fields for discourse
    Interesting post by Josh Miller on Medium about open discussions, in reply to a post by Fred Wilson. It's interesting because Josh is the lead developer of Branch, a discussion system -- and Fred is the backer, and public face for Disqus, the discussion software we use here.
    Fred argues that his blog is open to anyone to participate, but I've noticed what Josh has. While Fred, admirably responds to every comment on his system -- we're not getting much engagement beyond -- hey I'm here. To which you can reply and I'm here, and so am I, etc etc.
    These aren't really discussions, not in any sense that peoples' minds come open to being changed. People come to recite their beliefs, they skim the posts and comments for key words, and then choose from a set of schpiels they memorized, and type them in.
    Online discussions can be a lot like those on CNN or MSNBC, which to me seem like concerts. People are invited to sing their songs, in harmony with other songsters. The songs never vary. The volume does, and each has their own style, but there are rarely any new ideas.
    To me, a good discussion is where a new perspective or fact can surface, and everyone has the possibility come away from the discussion changed. Smarter, better informed, with a possibly shifted point of view. Oh that's what they mean when they say...
    Miller may be on to something. Branch allows discussion among a pre-set group of people. The moderator, the person who started the discussion can add new people. And new discussions can fork off from previous ones, exactly as it worked on my LBBS system in the early-mid 80s, only prettier (that was in the day of 300 baud modems, and scrolling "glass teletype" displays).
    I still like the idea behind the H20 system developed at Berkman Center about ten years ago. It also had the concept of invited participants. To start, each would post positions on a moderator-supplied topic, privately. Then at a previously announced time, all the positions are revealed. There's a commenting period where each participant can write a rebuttal, again in private. They're revealed all at once. And that's it. The goal is to cover all sides of a topic, intelligently and not personally. Not surprising this was developed at a law school, by lawyers. It's a very legal approach to discourse.
    What we really need are experimental platforms for non-programmers to invent new methods of discourse. We've relied too much on programmers, who have a definite style of arguing. But there are other professions that are fairly far ahead of us in understanding how humans communicate and share ideas. We are not that good at it, and so far most discussion systems have been limited by the imaginations of programmers.
    BTW, a final note -- in case it isn't obvious -- I am also working on discussion software. There is a place to comment in Disqus, that's open to anyone. There's another way to participate here, by installing the OPML Editor and clicking on the green button you will see when you reload the page with the software installed on your computer. Instructions are on this page.
  Why didn't Apple ease into maps?
        false
    When Apple switches basic technology it's almost always done in a gradual way, in stages.
      1. First, it's optional. Only for the most adventurous users, developers usually.
      2. Next, it's the default, but you can still run the old apps in a compatibility box.
      3. Then they require you to install special software to run the old style stuff.
      4. Then they introduce a version of the platform that only runs the new stuff.
    Apple technologies that have transitioned like that include the switchover from the 68K processor to the PowerPC. Then from the PowerPC to Intel. They brought in the NeXT OS that way. It took many years before they shipped a version of the OS that would not run Mac apps from before the transition to NeXT.
    People think they're doing that with app distribution on the Macintosh. And some people even think they're phasing out the Mac OS and that at some point they will say that Mac apps are "legacy" and eventually will ship a platform that only runs iOS apps. But that would have to be a long ways off, five or ten years, if ever.
    But this time Apple didn't do a gradual ease-in of their new maps platform. One day we had a maps platform by Google that mostly worked. It was replaced with Apple's maps technology which is most definitely not ready for end-users. And the Google maps platform is no longer available. It's a remarkably discontinuous change.
      Screen shot.
    It seems they could have shipped iOS 6 with the Google maps platform, and with a new app from Apple that implements their new maps technology. That would get it hundreds of thousands of users, immediately. The most change-averse users would stick with the existing maps app. And the power users, the insiders, those closest to Apple would help them fix the glitches and smooth things out so it would be ready in a year or two for the average iPhone or iPad users.
    They certainly haven't explained to users why they didn't also ship a Google maps platform. It's not as if the Google software won't run on the new version of the operating system. You can go to maps.google.com in Safari, and it works as before.
    User communities are layered. Think of concentric circles, like the layers of an onion. There's an inner core of users who are developers. They get the earliest releases of software, and know that what they're getting is both buggy and subject to change. They want that stuff, because they want to be ready when it ships with their own apps. After that there are enthusiasts. People who get glory from being early with the latest stuff. They also don't mind so much putting up with buggy or incomplete software. It validates their view of themselves as pioneers. And there are many more layers of expertise and tolerance for weird behavior, all the way out to the prototype end-end-user -- our mothers.
    It's surprising they would subject all levels of users to the quirkiest software, the stuff that usually only developers have to use, especially mapping software which is integral to using mobile devices. It's almost as if the NYC transit authority introduced new software for the subways, it's really that important these days to getting around. It's a very radical shift, with lots of problems, and they haven't provided an explanation of why it is this way. What other changes like this will they make? Why the change? What other Apple platforms are subject to this kind of change?
    See also: Apple's Feud With Google Is Now Felt on the iPhone.
    Update: Letter from Tim Cook to users re maps.
  As a renewed Knicks fan
    I was a Knicks fan in the late 60s and early 70s. Then I went away until early this year. Jeremy Lin is what brought me back.
    I know a lot about last year's roster. But I can only gather by listening to echoes of Knicks fan frustration that there were some horrible years before that. The names mean nothing to me. But one by one they come back, I read the stories, and they all say the same thing.
    This is a crazy team.
    And they reject luck. They have to be smarter than fate. And they make huge impulsive decisions that turn out badly. And keep doing them. Over and over.
    If I didn't know better I'd say the team is run by an idiot.
  Humanity doesn't scale
    Everywhere you look there's evidence.
    So many of the systems we've built work nice, for now, but when one component fails, how will all the others respond. How is Japan dealing with the Fukishima meltdown? This is a country that depends on nuclear heavily -- they have no oil of their own, and their economy isn't so strong, so what do they do now that they've had a taste of what nuclear-mageddon looks like.
    Great piece in today's NYT about data centers. Nice illusion there, but it's not sustainable. Yes that's where our bank balances and medical records are stored.
    What if something happened to corn? Or if we run out of antibiotics? Believe it or not the questions are related. Something that seems as as reliable as corn might not always be so.
    And philosophically and intellectually our minds can't grasp the complexity of the world we live in. That's why politicians who talk nonsense are so convincing. What they're really saying is Relax don't worry, things aren't really as complex as they seem. I can reduce it down to grunts and snorts.
    We have far more people doing far more with technology than our resources can support, than our intellect can comprehend. It's exhausting.
  Favorite movie reviews feeds?
        false
        130%
    I'm putting together movie reviews panel for Media Hackers.
    Here's the list of feeds so far.
    If you have any suggestions of movie review feeds, please post a link here as a comment. Thanks!
  Comments on Costolo talk
        false
        130%
    I didn't catch the whole of Dick Costolo's talk with Emily Bell at ONA, but I did get to hear the part about developers and APIs. I think this part also relates indirectly to journalists who use Twitter.
    1. Twitter will provide a way for users to download their history of posts to Twitter.
      I was amazed by this. And I don't believe it will ever happen, or if it does it will be in GIF format or PDF, some format that makes it virtually impossible to move the data somewhere else. It would be completely inconsistent for Twitter to offer freedom to its users when it's paying such a high price in goodwill to take away that freedom.
      I think Costolo was caught off-guard by a clever question asked by Ms. Bell, and did what a lot of tech execs do, promise a solution even when they have no idea how to do it, figuring later on they can excuse themselves with a shrug or a joke (as he did in several other instances in this talk, when asked about previous commitments).
      Another clue is that he immediately qualified it as being subject to engineering realities. You could almost see the gears turning in his head. :-)
    2. Think of 140 characters as a caption. This is consistent with what they're doing. People who argue that 140 characters is some kind of sacred limit are wrong. They should listen to what Costolo says.
      I think this the right move, not just for Twitter but for everyone.
      But it has implications that some journalists might not see. It means that there is no reason why Twitter couldn't host entire news articles. I am sure they will be doing that, probably fairly soon. I suspect this ability will not be open to everyone, and they will want favorable terms for those it permits to use this feature. Presumably there will be a revenue-share on ads placed on these articles.
      Also play what-if -- what if Twitter acquires a news organization. Just because they say they are not a news org today does not say anything about the future. Twitter made all kinds of promises to developers that were broken, in total, within a couple of years.
    3. Emily Bell did a great interview. The audience questions were also right on.
      I thought Emily Bell did a masterful job of raising these questions to Costolo, but in a disarmingly friendly way. To Costolo's credit he didn't always take the bait. He stuck with the idea that they are a tech company providing a platform, and are not going to cross into content. But he didn't exactly say that.
      If I were a betting man, I'd bet that before too long Twitter will be competing with its top content providers, the same way it's now competing with its top developers. Only they'll have to tread more carefully there, assuming the journalists and bloggers still have their own mechanisms to get news out. That's why this is such a dangerous situation. As we rely more and more on Twitter, our websites become less-used conduits for distribution of ideas and news.
      Obviously I believe Twitter is today a totally inadequate platform for independent journalists or bloggers and it's going in the wrong direction. They score points for not turning over tweets to governments, but they have an awful track record of tiliting the playing field to favor their partners and even personal friends. This is a very sloppily run platform for both development and journalism. People either don't know the history or are choosing to ignore it, presumably because building their own platforms seems difficult, expensive, or unlikely to succeed. However, the longer you wait the harder it will become, not easier.
      Monocultures don't work very well for news.
  A comment *and* a blog post
        false
    Now, any OPML Comment can be viewed as a blog post, with its own comments.
    The links below show how it works.
    Links
      An example of a comment on this page.
      Flip it over and here's the blogpost view.
      There's a feed of all the comments.
      You can browse the comments here.
      Of course that's available in OPML.
      There's a link to the comments in the Scripting News menubar.
  An open note to Doc
    My longtime friend Doc Searls and an outliner guy going back many years is now using the OPML Editor and has started to post items to the OPML Comments community.
    The community starts with the humble concept of a comment, and develops out from there, to create all the essential elements of an online community, but one built around replaceable parts.
      Small pieces loosely joined. It's the philosophy of Unix from the 70s, the PC world of the 80s, the Mac of the mid-late 80s and early 90s, the web and open source communities of the 90s, and the beginnings of Web 2.0 -- blogging, podcasting, RSS.
    It's a good moment, because Doc has wicked way of writing about this stuff. His stories are very different from mine. He goes deep on photography, radio, geography, airplanes. But when it comes to formats and protocols, we are on exactly the same page. He's on the odd-numbered side, and I'm on the even-numbered one. But it's the same idea, flip sides.
    It's a good time to write this story, because the very people that Twitter is pushing out the nest are the ones we want to work with. There will be competition for their hearts and minds. Evan and Biz are launching Medium. One of their colleagues is launching Branch. app.net is out there. There will be lots of new communities vying for the attention for the most creative and intelligent people on the web.
    By actively participating, I hope to nudge all the new bootstrappers to share data with each other. So the users can not only delight in the experiences each of our software can create, but also in the magic they can create by combining our tools to create new online communities that the software architects would never imagine.
    My belief is that if the right design, programming and writing tools are out there, and we foster easy movement of ideas, the amazing things we could only dream of in the past will come into existence. There are hundreds of millions of people in the world now whose minds share the space of the Internet. It can get a lot richer. They're ready for it.
    Anyway, this is an invitation to Doc to post a response below, in the outline that's attached to my post. I would like to read a Doc ramble on these topics. It would be good for my soul. Then I will show you another way of looking at what Doc wrote.
    Update: Doc posted a comment. And it appears on its own page, where you can comment on his comment.
  A new feature sneak
    Tomorrow I'm going to write up a new feature that's now "out in the wild."
    Very briefly, every OPML Comment now has a dual life.
      1. It's a comment (of course).
      2. It's a blog post.
    If you're subscribed to the feed of comments from scripting.com, you have already seen this, if you clicked on a link to a comment. If you look at the RSS source, you'll see the <guid> element for each item points to the post.
    More in the morning about what this means, and next directions.
  Maps, Tweetie and dBASE
        false
        bold
    Two examples of potentially disastrous "upgrades" --
      Maps on iOS
        In iOS 6 the maps functionality took a major step backwards. Just shipped yesterday so we're still figuring out how bad it is. Maps are critical functionality for mobile users. Why it happened, no one knows. Could be that Google pulled out on their own. They might not come back, hoping that maps will be a feature advantage for their Android phones. Remember these companies have been suing each other over patent issues.
      Tweetie
        I don't use Twitter clients, but I understand that their iPad app, acquired from Loren Brichter, was an exemplary iPad app. The new app apparently pales in comparison. Again, we don't know how this came to be. But it may be indicative of a similar kind of problem for Twitter.
      Ashton-Tate's dBASE
        Ashton-Tate is prior art for self-destructive upgrades. They had a theory that you could ship a new version of a product, in this case dBASE, without anyone in the company actually using it. It didn't work. They ended up selling out to a much smaller competitor after this upgrade ruined the company.
        So the stakes can be very high.
      Personal note
        I learned this one in 1984, when we shipped ThinkTank for the Mac.
        People thought we had removed features from ThinkTank, because they had used the Apple II or IBM PC versions. In fact this was a completely new codebase, and we shipped early because there was a lack of software on the Mac. So it didn't have a lot of the features of the earlier product. No matter, the users were outraged by this. They thought they had bought a better computer, and here was the product with less features. We totally didn't anticipate this, because from our point of view it was a major accomplishment to get something out at all.
        As the story goes, the customer is always right. We quickly came out with a new release that added all the features that were in the other versions.
  A day of construction
    You may notice some breakage in OPML comments today. I'm radically restructuring the code. In the end it should be totally transparent, except for things that break in the transition. Once they're fixed it'll be transparent again. :-)
  Un-Web 2.0
    You've heard of unconferences. They take the idea of a conference and flip it around. Instead of having speakers on stage, the speakers are in what used to be called the audience.
      The term has been hijacked to mean something much softer, that the planning of the conference is deferred to the day of the conference. But the speeches are still speeches. The audience asks questions. The experts are on stage. Zzzz.
      But the original concept, pioneered at BloggerCon and the term coined by Len Pryor, was deeply disruptive. And it mirrored what blogging was doing to journalism.
      Un-Web 2.0 is to Web 2.0 as BloggerCon was to RegularOldCon. And as blogging is to journalism. The source and the destination become one. :-)
        false
    So Web 2.0 was nice, as training wheels for the next steps in the future web. A two-way medium. The people who pioneered Web 2.0 are to be congratulated and thanked. But now it's time to Un it. :-)
    Because Web 2.0, while it started out as a freedom-inspiring thing, has been coalescing to being a dangerous form of locking-in the user's data so it can be applied to a corporate business model. We all know the dangers of this. It robs platforms of their openness. It makes moving data around impossible. And it makes creating hybrid systems impossible. It's not a very web-like direction for something that's inspired by the web.
    If the Web is Small Pieces Loosely Joined, Web 2.0 is Small Pieces Trapped In A Silo.
      Hat-tip to David Weinberger for the term.
    In Un-Web 2.0 you get full control of your data, and the services just get pointers to it, or copies of it. The originals live with you. Pointers are much preferable to copies because then you can keep updating the content after it has been incorporated in someone else's content tree.
    Food for thought. :-)
  MP3 of Romney's fund-raiser
    Yesterday I posted a question about the availability of MP3s via SoundCloud.
    I just wanted to listen to this on my walk yesterday. But I also think the MP3s of this should be available outside of SoundCloud's server so they have a chance of surviving over time. So I created an MP3 and uploaded it to my Dropbox account. It's mirrored in my S3 archive.
    Romney Fundraiser MP3
    BTW, I listened to the full recording as I prepared the MP3 and some of what he says is reasonable. But it doesn't seem consistent that one person would say all these things. For example he talks about what a blessing it is to be born in America. 95 percent of it is taken care of for you. Where did that come from? If you started life as an American you were better-off right from the start than most of the other babies born that day, elsewhere in the world.
      As a child of immigrants, I can tell you it's true. My parents emphasized the importance of education and my grandparents did very well financially and were able to create security for all of us. So I got an even better start in life. But clearly none of this would have happened had they not been able to come to the US during WWII.
    So how can you at the same time feel that America is great and think that 47 percent of us are losers. It doesn't make sense. At least part of what makes us great is that we have some greatness in our people. Or the system that we live in. It's not just a piece of paper, Mitt.
      We aren't voting for Obama because we are victims, or losers -- some of us are doing pretty well. I'm voting for Obama because I think Romney would be a terrible President. Maybe you should try to earn our vote instead of throwing it away. I thought you worked hard? I thought you were a success? Is this how you achieved so much?
    A note about SoundCloud. By now we should all see the danger of trapping our content on a Web 2.0 company's servers. People say that it was Mother Jones' decision to not allow this to be downlaoded, but there were limits on free accounts, so even if they wanted to let everyone download it, they couldn't as long as they used SC. There are other free services that don't have such limits. For example, Dropbox. We should all be working together to be sure that valuble historic documents like this are adequately preserved. It's not good enough to upload a recording to a commercial service that doesn't allow downloads.
  Question about SoundCloud
    Earlier this afternoon I was looking for an MP3 of the Romney video.
    I noted that Mother Jones had SoundCloud versions of the MP3 on the Mother Jones site. But I couldn't find an MP3 download, or a link to an RSS feed for their podcast.
    It's quite possible that I missed it. And that's the question. Is there a link on this page for either the MP3 or the RSS feed?
    I don't want to jump to any conclusions without clearly asking this question first.
  Dear Green Button People
    I want to show you something about where we're going.
    Here's a screen shot. That's how I edit the posts on this site.
    Does that look familiar to you? If you've already written a few comments, this is what your Comments Workspace looks like.
    Obviously it's a pretty straight line between taking what's in one window and treating it as if it were in the other window.
    "cheesecake"
    PS: Go here to learn about the green buttons.
  Jury duty, voting and Romney
    1. Jury duty is amazing. Especially if you go all the way to a verdict. You learn how the architecture of our democracy places its faith in the people. You might think, if you listened to some of our political leaders, that this would be a bad idea. Because most of us are takers not makers. But it works, because people are a lot smarter, honest and hard-working than we give ourselves credit for. And when you trust people, when you really make that point, and the legal process does that, over and over, everyone comes through. Some people accept trust faster than others, but in the end, all twelve jurors accept their responsibility. When we passed judgement I was sure we had arrived at the correct decision.
      As a juror this is impressive. Everyone stands when the jury comes in. But then everyone, including the jury, stands when the judge enters. Speech is formal, polite, even when they're saying horrible things. May it please the court. Your honor. Mr. Jones. It's all about respect.
      And the jurors must remain silent, for days on end. But the irony is that everyone in the room is waiting for us to speak. You are left with your thoughts and your senses. You look, you listen. Think. What does that mean. What are they really saying. Look at the body language. It's deliberative, almost a meditation. Because the question they're asking is serious. Did this person do something horrible. Something they must be punished for. In the US we don't take this lightly.
    2. Voting is the same idea. You have to look and look at the people who are asking for your vote. Sure they're lying. So was the defendent in the trial. Everyone lies, even if they took the oath saying they wouldn't. Dirty little secret is that if you're on trial, everyone understands that you can lie to defend yourself. And so do politicians. But if you really think about it, you know who they are and what they're really saying, behind the lies.
    3. So nothing was actually revealed about Mitt Romney in yesterday's tapes. If you had been watching this guy, like a juror watches every actor in the courtroom, you recognized the pattern. He might have been the guy who runs a company you once worked for. The principal of your school. Your friend's grandfather. To me, he was a Silicon Valley venture capitalist. He was the kind of guy who doesn't know what it means to speak the truth. His existence has nothing to do with the truth. He's a goal-oriented person. He's trying to get something from you. He doesn't care what he has to say to get it. Since he's running for President, a lot of the times that means he's out of his element and you can tell. He's not comfortable with teachers, with working people. But speaking to the rich donors in that dining room, that was his element. He was comfortable. The same way the defendent in our DUI case would have been comfortable in a bar slamming down a few whiskies before going for a drive. No juror would have been fooled by Mitt Romney before the tape, but what we saw confirmed what we already knew.
    I believe in the American system, and totally reject the idea that your vote doesn't matter. You think it doesn't matter because you haven't discovered what it means. If you had a little faith in it, if 25 percent more people had more faith, it would work a lot better than you have imagined. Because given enough time, no matter how much they lie, we figure it out. Change will come slowly but it will come. But don't tell me it can't change if you haven't even tried.
  I feel a little like a kid
    When I was a kid, my friends and I used to ride our bikes down to Shea Stadium and sneak in the back, through the bullpen and out on to the field. Only during the off-season. They didn't have much so security back then.
    We'd run around on the field, marvelling that we were running in the same place that the great players of the day were playing. Roberto Clemente, Willie Mays, Ron Swoboda, Ed Kranepool.
    Anyway, that's what I feel like now. Like someone left the gate open and I get to run around on the field and play whatever game I want. :-)
  River with JSON-encoded OPML
    This is a very bizarre animal.
    http://dropbox.scripting.com/dave/misc/riverWithJsonEncodedOPML.js
    It's a river.js file that has an item that contains the OPML source encoded as JSON.
    This means that a jQuery app that loaded this file would find the OPML structure already there in the DOM.
    We're a short step from having Media Hackers be able to do something much richer with content.
  OWS on its anniversary
    I've started a half-dozen posts about Occupy Wall Street on its anniversary. Here goes another.
    This close to a national election, I wish they were doing something to try to influence the outcome. What they're doing will just remind people about last year's occupations. I think most people who sympathize with or agree with the premises of OWS (I am one) were concerned with how it would end. Is this really a protest we want to associate with? Becoming homeless and going to jail to make headlines is not my idea of good craftsmanship of political message.
    I've felt in my gut that the right place for freedom-loving people to invest effort is to oppose the most heinous of the plots to control government to favor the rich -- voter suppression. If you're going to march somewhere, why not call attention to the places which are most dangerous to democracy?
    Also unlike most people who march I believe votes absolutely do matter. I believe in government of the people, by the people and for the people. True, we've given up most of our power. But what's the best way to get it back? By voting. I'm really serious about that. You can't take it back by getting arrested. You take it back by literally taking it back. And help other people whose votes are being obstructed to get around the obstructions.
      BTW, what taught me the value of the vote was doing jury duty about 15 years ago. The trial went all the way to verdict, so I had a chance to really think about how it worked and what it means. I had always glossed over this part of government. But here we were, 12 very random people, being trusted with a fellow citizen's liberty. We started out as raw cynics, but by the time we had to pass judgement we were true believers in the Constitution. It was an amazing transformation, in all of us, myself included.
    People died to undo the terrible methods of voter suppression in the past. Now we're sitting by and doing nothing while they put it all back in place. Something very wrong about that.
  Tech discussion of comments feed
    Today I released a new feature for OPML Comments, which is explained with links, on this Scripting News post.
    The core feature is of course the new RSS feed for comments.
    If you poke around the feeds, you may find some things that raise questions or possibilities.
    1. The JSON and JSONP versions.
    2. The microblog namespace, which is used by the feed.
    3. The roadmap post that shows where we're going.
    4. A screen shot of a permalink on comments, a necessary feature for the feed.
    5. My personal river, which subscribes to the feed, so it's an easy place to find the latest comments on the threads site (along with news from quite a few other sources).
    6. What's next? There's a full CMS behind the comments, with a templating system for designers. Lots of formats and protocols for developers. The only part that's visible is the writing tool. And that's as it should be, because the people we are doing this for are writers and readers.
    Please post comments here, either in OPML or Disqus.
  Newspapers and blogging
    Henry Blodget has a graph showing newspaper ad revenue over time.
    Jay Rosen observed that its fall started as the blogs rose.
    Proves that the right thing for the news industry to do back at the beginning of blogging was to fully embrace the change. Open the floodgates, and help the new amateurs create news for each other.
    I wrote about this over and over, urged them to offer blogging to their communities. But change doesn't come easily esp when you've climbed the ladder. You don't want to hear the ladder doesn't matter anymore.
  To OWS -- please use the web
    I wish I knew what OWS was doing now and why.
    If you don't have a website, here's a space to write.
    Please let me know. I don't understand. Thanks.
  Why Google is OK
    At a recent meeting we were talking about the reversal of fortunes for Twitter and Facebook and wondering why Google wasn't suffering as much.
    It isn't about money because Twitter is shrinking in order to make more money. But the stuff that was exciting about Twitter, the way it acted as a conduit for other software, it was sort of a message operating system on a global scale, the exciting stuff is exactly what they're taking out to get to profitability.
    Facebook is wilting because the thing that was lifting them up was their stock, and that's not working for them anymore. In fact it's working against them.
    True, Google has multiple revenue flows, but I theorized that that isn't why they have a strong future. It's because they're open where Twitter is not. Think about it. I don't have to be vetted by anyone to be part of their search engine. No one says yay or nay, and there are no funny rules about stuff flowing in or out, or using their code to display search results. Google is fairly laissez-faire. All you have to do to be in their index is to put it on the web, and we all know the web is the platform with no platform vendor. Anyone can put stuff there.
    I believe Twitter would have a much brighter future, Facebook too, if they trusted the web. If they let every bit of their service be replaced. That would force them to compete based on service, value and features. Now they get to be lazy and that's fine for a while. But the crazy chaos of the web will eventually do something exciting that you won't be able to match on Twitter. Had they been more trusting they would have guaranteed that whatever excitement comes along would automatically include them.
    Google, on the other hand, has a better chance. It would be good for them if they were more open-minded about accepting formats and protocols from people who don't work for Google, but even with that inefficiency, they still have a pretty strong basis for continued growth.
    And of course Amazon is the smartest of them all. They're automatically part of everything because they do everything to support and enhance the protocols of the Internet. They are very respectful of the web and choice. I can deploy my apps on Amazon if I want, but if Rackspace gives me a better deal, Amazon won't fight me. Same with Rackspace of course. This is the way we like it. :-)
    Who did Apple bet on in this field? Twitter. They'll never get networking right, imho. (I am a very happy Apple shareholder, btw.)
  Whole post to Scripting feed
    David Nichols on Twitter said: "Just realized 'Thread: whatever' posts don't contain the full text in Google Reader. I'm sure you have a reason, I don't get it!"
    He's right. The connection between threads and my Scripting News feed is a little temporary glue to connect the old world feed with the flow from the new world. When I did it, I did it quickly, because I was juggling a lot of stuff and didn't want anything to break.
    I gave it a little thought and realized I could easily broaden the pipe to allow full thread posts to go into the Scripting News feed.
    This post is a test, to see if that works. :-)
  Dear @diveintomark
    Just before Mark Pilgrim committed Internet suicide he posted a tasty little flame about me on Twitter.
    A spammer picked it up and every few days it shows up in my Replies tab on Twitter, a reminder of how much Mark loved me. Or whatever.
    Here's what it says.
      RT@diveintomark: Just a reminder @davewiner ran http://weblogs.com w/o a privacy policy for years & sold all your ping data #blork
    It's a wonderful slam, something a Republican would be proud of -- because some of it is true -- but it's ridiculous at the same time. And it's packed with intrigue and innuendo.
    1. I did run it without a privacy policy. No one ever asked for one. And it was still pretty early for privacy policies (it started in 1999 I think).
    2. A privacy policy would have read like this -- No privacy. The point of weblogs.com was to broadcast all the data to everyone that wanted it. It was a central ping server. For a while it was the only ping server for the entire blogosphere. If you wanted to let everyone know that you had updated all you had to do was send a message saying so to weblogs.com. We then would publish the ping as part of our XML feed.
    3. I did sell weblogs.com to Verisign, but just the domain. No software, no data. The data, to the extent that it ever existed is in a remote folder on one of my hard drives. An Old stuff folder inside another Old Stuff folder, etc etc. All the data was public. In the end it was almost all spam. Not worth anything, that's why they didn't want it.
    Anyway, I thought it was worth a rebuttal on a lazy Saturday afternoon, after seeing this message about a thousand times since Mark first posted it. It'll probably be echoing around Twitter's network from now until the end of time. Long after we're all dead people will be wondering who Dave WIner was and why he sold all your ping data and what was #blork and who cares anyway cause they're all long gone.
    Happy trails! :-)
  I don't think this is Kansas
    In the 1990s the very small web community, compared to today's web, had a lot of self-important ideas about the future of the medium. We were living in the future and prepared for it, or so we thought. In one way we believed that this would someday be the most important medium, or it already was, but on the other hand, not really. This was the kind of stuff you read about in science fiction, it didn't happen in real life. Well now it's happening. And it's freaky, and who knows where it leads.
    None of us are prepared for the world we find ourselves in. Not even the net natives.
    We don't know what comes after attacks on our embassies, all over the world now, but it's serious and unprecedented and couldn't happen without the net. Communication used to be controlled by governments. It would take days or weeks for stories of a war-like event in one part of the world to reach another part. I know this because it wasn't much better in the United States. When I was in college in New Orleans, I'd go downtown every Tuesday to get a copy of the Sunday NY Times. That, and the evening news, was my access to world wide news. It wasn't that long ago.
    Now Google has told the US government that it won't take down the video that's theoretically causing all the trouble. That's weird but it's right. Google is a multi-national company. Sure its founders are American. But it can't be anymore beholden to the United States than to any other country. If they did, they would disappear pretty quickly because someone has a good reason for every piece of content to be removed. Whether they obey an order from the US is another matter.
    Remember, this is all coming after WikiLeaks. And think of where Assange is now. It's only the respect the British govt has for the sovereignty of embassies that keeps him out of jail. And it's exactly that sovereignty that's under attack elsewhere.
    And meanwhile in Kansas some people aren't embarrassed to say the President's name should be taken off the ballot because he's a black man, and they're white and they can't handle it. I know they'll say it's not that, but they're lying.
    All this is happening at the same time.
  An idea for reporters conducting live interviews
    Just heard part of an interview between George Stephanopoulos and Mitt Romney.
    It went something like this.
    George: You going to take back what you said?
    Mitt: No, basically the White House agreed with what I said.
    George: They agreed that the President sympathizes with the people who attacked the embassy?
    Mitt: Basically the White House agreed with what I said (repeating his previous statement).
    George: You refuse to answer a direct question.
    Now, that's what I thought I heard Stephanopoulos say, but he actually went on from there.
    I propose that when you're interviewing someone who doesn't answer a question, that you say exactly those words. "You refuse to answer a direct question." It's like a receipt. Play back for them how you're interpreting. You still get to maintain your lack of a viewpoint. You're just saying what's obvious to everyone watching the interview. And it puts the burden on the person being interviewed. He could smile through it, and that would become the clip you use to summarize the interview. Or you might actually get a response to the question you asked.
  A question about class warfare
    Was just thinking about the Republican tactic of liberal use of the concept of class warfare.
    If you say taxes should be increased for the richest people, that's class warfare.
    If so, isn't it also class warfare when rich people want to cut health care and retirement benefits for middle class people? Why aren't both ideas equally off-limits?
    No tax increases for rich folk in return for no cuts in benefits for middle class people. Great. Now what? :-)
  YouTube in the developing world
    Pretty amazing that YouTube is playing such a central role in the battles in North Africa and the Middle East. And of course Twitter. A few notes on what's happening.
    1. The rioters in Egypt and Yemen say they're incensed by the video. I haven't seen it myself and I don't need or want to. Much of what's there is crap and highly insulting to someone. I'm sure some of the rioters are sincere. I'm equally sure some of the rioters are no more sincere that the American assholes who look for excuses to get "angry." They're not really angry. They're just using some pretense to try to violently and unfairly shore up their own power, in a highly undemocratic fashion.
    2. Clearly some of the people on the "Arab street" -- whatever that is -- are being manipulated. They need to understand that not only do we have free speech in the US, there's no guarantee that any video on YouTube actually came from the US. It could have come from the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt. If not this time, next time. Now that they see how powerful YouTube can be at stirring up mobs, it will be used again and again.
    3. The solution is not to censor YouTube, the solution is for the citizens of the new democracies in the Middle East to get clued-in, fast -- to how they're being used. Use your own free speech to expose the assholes. Your assholes, not ours.
    4. We should get rid of any premise in press reports that the rioters are upset about the film. The only thing we know is that they are attacking the US embassies. Are they really so stupid as to believe that the US produced the film? Shouldn't the press check that out before reporting the premise as fact. Could this possibly be some great drama whose purpose is to impose censorship on YouTube? It seems the press has a small conflict of interest here.
    5. This is what I mean about tech and politics being inseparable. That the political and tech blogospheres are divided makes the whole thing much weaker. There aren't any divisions any more.
    6. On a similar topic, Twitter decided to turn over the tweets of an OWS protestor. It's about time. Either tweets are public or they are not. Twitter needs to answer that question, very clearly. I thought they were public. Just like blog posts. If they're not, Twitter needs to clear this up right now. By not turning over the archive when asked for it, what pretense did they offer? I honestly don't know. Some sense of privacy? Tweets are the opposite of private.
  Blogging in transition
    A little over a week ago I wrote a piece called scripting.com in transition. I was getting ready to show people OPML Comments, and wanted to give you all a heads up. Now you've seen the next step. I've opened up a little window into the CMS running behind the threads site, called the worldoutline, to show you a bit of what it can do.
    Over the last couple of years I did a transition of my blog. First, I rewrote my CMS which had evolved in a disorderly research-driven fashion over several years. That was called Scripting2. Then I started a new CMS called the worldoutline, which was actually begun with the seeds of a way of organizing web content that goes back to Clay Basket in the mid-90s. But this time I achieved the goal I had been trying to reach the previous iterations.
    My goal was to create a way of writing, designing and programming for networks that was unified. Where a new domain is just a matter of putting a label on a node saying "Start something new here, and this is its name." Its analogous to a page-break in a word processor. On the net the equiv of a page-break is a domain-break.
    Things that used to represent large conceptual changes, like the difference between content and its rendering, are shrunken so you just have to save a document to effect large change on the web. Why not? We already have tools like this for printing and page layout. We're 15 years into the web now. We all create lots of sites, so many that they're hard to manage. We live at the edge of our capacity to manage it. But our tools, the file system and IDEs have only made incremental improvements in the last couple of generations. We're not using the great new capacity of our machines very well.
    So I don't think most people have an expectation for what comes next. That's why this is going to be so much fun. I think you will be surprised at what you will be able to do. :-)
  A message to Republicans: Enough
    The problem with what the Repubs did last night is that we hadn't even begun to process the events. It was six hours before we even knew a US ambassador had been killed. The Repubs are trying to take control of the story. We, the press and the informed electorate -- Republican, Democrat and independent, need to tell the Republican leadership, in unambiguous terms that their behavior, as Americans, is unacceptable.
    Yes, these events are inevitably political. But our first priority has to be the safety of Americans. Maybe our fiftieth priority is wanting to know what Mitt Romney thinks about it.
  Do you see a green button on this page?
    1. You have to be running the OPML Editor to see the button.
    2. We've had some reports of people using Chrome on Windows 7 who don't see the green button. If you're a geek, can you help us figure out why? I'm a Chrome user on the Mac, and I see it fine, and there haven't been reports of problems with other browsers. Help much appreciated.
    3. BTW, this is what the button is supposed to look like in case you can't see it.
    4. The button is generated by a page on a server on the user's machine.
    Update: Problem solved! :-)
  Witting with Greenwald
    This post came about from a brief twitter exchange with Glenn Greenwald.
    Glenn thanks for listening. Here are some simple ideas. (And if you just want the conclusion skip to the end.)
    1. Discourse on the net is much like discourse was during the print age. I can write about tech stuff, you can write about political stuff, neither of us gets access to the other's community if you should happen to have something to say to the tech world or I should have something to say political.
    2. This is working against us because today almost everything that is political is tech, and vice versa. We've got some smart people writing publicly who can put the pieces together, but we haven't yet actually put the pieces together.
    3. You talk about Arab Spring type demos. I say that won't work in the US and I don't think it worked in Egypt.
    4. What works here, and I know this sounds idealistic in a Mr Smith Goes to Washington way, is voter turnout.
    5. Kickstarter. Look what happened there. Why? Because people crave power. They may only be able to put down $10 or $100 but it magically mulitplies quickly to become $1 million.
    6. People are desperate to be involved. To be effective. To do something with their lives that's good. We are missing meaning.
    7. We are blessed with a democratic system that is actually a lot like Kickstarter. If we were to use it, that would change things right off. If voter turnout increased by just 10 percent it would be seen as a revolution in Washington. It would be felt.
    8. I believe it's possible to transform Obama, even just a little. I think he can be manipulated. If 10 percent more people turned out than were expected, it would shake him up.
    9. If somehow we could attach to that a message that the filibusters had to stop, that when we elect a majority to Congress we expect them to have the power to legislate, and that there will be a memory of any politician who threatened that. (Think about the power the Tea Party has had with a small minority in just a few states.)
    10. I want to do more than vote and give money. Right now, other than knock on doors, which I did in 2008 and when I was a teen, that's about all that I can do. But I desperatelly want to do more. I thinkn there are a lot of other people like that.
    11. I don't care what pundits think.
    12. I believe in demonstrations, but not meaningless ones. Showing up to vote is the best tool we have right now. I can't believe we're not doing more with it.
    Anyway, short term there isn't much we can do. I know that. The change that I want has to be something I create myself. I want to break down the walls that say only Josh Marshall, you and Ezra Klein (etc) can write about politics. And that the people who use the tech have the most important opinions, so I want to hear more vision about where this stuff should go from smart people like yourself. We're creating a new system for political discourse now. The tools are still early. We can make them much better. But first we have to create the expectation that they will get better, and the places we're looking for change are the places it can't and won't come from. The VCs will never give you the power that I will. The President will never bring about change on his own. But you and I and others like us can.
  Dead people on voting rolls
    I love how the Repubs are so alarmed that there are thousands of dead people on the voter rolls. OMG. We have to purge them. It's a sign of fraud! This is terrible. Well...
    There are also thousands of dead people on Facebook and thousands of dead people with driver's licenses. Every university has thousands of dead people in their alumni databases. Why? Because voters die. And so do Facebook users, and drivers, and alumni.
    My father died three years ago, and while I miss him still, even more today than I did right after he died, I still haven't called the State of New York to say "You need to take my father off the voter roll." For all I know if he showed up at the right voting place on November 7 they would let him vote. But I promise you he's not showing up anywhere. He's a former voter even though he may still be on the voter rolls.
    You have to check what the Repubs say very carefully, because while it may be true, what they say might also be designed to lead you to believe something else, something outrageous or fraudulent. That's not happening.
  A test of outline comments
    Welcome to a test of some new software I've been developing. This is a test you can participate in if you have the OPML Editor running on your Mac or Windows PC.
    Howto
      1. If necessary, download and install the OPML Editor application.
      2. Fully update it by choosing Update opml.root from the File menu.
      3. Choose the Your name command from the Misc menu and enter your name. This will be used to identify your notes in the comments box.
      4. Important: Reload this web page. You should now see a green OPML button near the bottom. Click the button.
      5. The OPML Editor comes to the front and a window opens with a place for you to enter some comments. Please do so. When you're ready, click the Save button.
      6. Come back to this page and reload. You should see your comments below. You can go back to the OPML Editor and change your comments and Save as many times as you like.
      It's a social experiment. Let's see what you all do with this. I have some ideas, of course, but let's see how it goes.
    Problems?
      If there are problems, you can use the Disqus comment box below to explain.
  To TechCrunch hackathoners
    I hear today is the TechCrunch hackathon!
    If you're looking for something to do, how about picking off one of the ideas on the roadmap for the open Twitter-like ecosystem.
    You could do a nice linkblogging tool. Or a beautiful rendering of river.js in the browser of your choice (or hopefully all of them).
    How about a nice way to manage susbscription lists in a way that can be shared with all applications. One place where users can subscribe or unsubscribe.
    Remember to give your users' data to other apps, to be part of an ecosystem. Closed silos are for the big guys. It's how we disrupt them, by working together. :-)
  app.net's impressive start
        false
    The Verge has an interesting story with an awful headline, so rather than point directly to it, I wanted to get a chance to frame it in a way that I think is fair to app.net.
    They say that only 250 users account for over half the messages posted on the new system. There are over 20K users, each of whom paid $50 to use the system.
    They say this means that app.net is off to a "slow start" but I wonder how that compares to Twitter. I have never seen any good numbers, but I think there are really several classes of Twitter users, I have a sense of how they break out in numbers.
    1. Celebrities, whose grunts and snorts are fascinating to their fans. They don't really provide information, just the tiniest glimpses into the reality of their lives, which are suprisingly like those of normal people.
    2. Link machines, like myself -- people who spend a lot of time online reading stuff, and share links with followers. We post a lot more than the people in category #1. We're not very famous and we don't share a lot of our lives. The product is a linkflow. Another way of looking at it, we use Twitter the way others use del.icio.us (perhaps why the YouTube guys bought it, to turn it into the interesting part of Twitter, imho).
    3. Active readers who use Twitter as if it were a river-of-news aggregator, which of course it is. Yesterday I posted a screen shot that illustrates that sometimes Twitter is providing almost exactly the same flow as the Media Hackers tabbed river.
    4. Darknet users. I have no idea who they are or what they do or if they are even real people. A huge portion of the numbers on Twitter. Who they are is totally unknown. Like the interior of Alaska or Siberia.
    Unless we know how things break down for Twitter how can we judge what's happening on app.net. For one, I am impressed. They have managed to get uptake, with a $50 pricetag, for an offering that is actually less functional than Twitter in many ways, from a technical standpoint. And it's a very small community relative to Twitter. Even so, they have managed to get a lot of people to part with a significant amount of money. And they're smart to go into a quiet period for a while to consolidate, and presumably get some new software ready, and perhaps some content deals.
  Breakdown of feed formats
    A question came yesterday up on the river-of-news list -- a list of developers who are creating tools and designs for rivers.
    Dody Gunawinata, is doing an aggregator and wanted to know if he should support RSS 1.0 format. I said that River2 does, but I didn't know the breakdown of different feed formats.
    So I wrote a script that recorded, when a feed updates, whether it's RSS or Atom, and if it's RSS, which version it is. Only feeds that updated in the 24 hour period would be counted, and each feed would only count once. The idea was to count feeds that were actually updating. Dormant feeds really don't matter for Dody's question.
    I ran the script overnight on the server that maintains my rivers. So this is a very unscientific test.
    The numbers: RSS 2.0 -- 338 feeds. Atom -- 36. RSS 1.0, 0.92 and 0.91 had 2 each.
  Life outside Twitter
        false
    I've made an investment over the last year, building up the rivers I use, both from a software and content standpoint. I've realized more and more that's how I was using Twitter. To be in the loops of writers, both professional and bloggers, in a systematic way. I wanted to see how rich I could make it.
    Turns out it's pretty good. I still use Twitter, and for now that's okay.
    A few minutes ago there were five posts on Twitter, in a row, that I would love to have outside of Twitter too. Expand this headline to see the screen shot.
    Except for Newyorkist announcing that he is making his bed, each of the tweets is from people I feel I know well through their online personnas, and each is pointing to something worth reading.
    Bora Zivkovic is a scientist blogger from North Carolina. Philip Greenspun is a genius entrepreneur, systems guy, developer, pilot, libertarian. Highly opinionated, great writer. Jay Rosen is of course always on-topic, a thinker and linker and media observer. Miguel de Icaza is a great community leader, programmer, and is politically outspoken (like me and Greenspun) and Chris Dixon is a NYC-based entrepreneur, VC and also a wise guy. :-)
    I would subscribe to any of these guys in my rivers, and in fact I do. Most of the content they're pointing to exists on the web, outside of Twitter, but I'm not subscribing to all of it. I want people like Chris and Miguel to have a linkblog, so that their links live outside Twitter as well as their writing.
    These are all super smart people and I think they will immediately understand why it's good to have feet on both the platform and the train, at the same time.
  About Twitter's changes
    There's nothing surprising in the changes Twitter announced today.
    They telegraphed clearly, a long time ago that they were phasing out their earlier developer program. Earlier this year Twitter CEO Dick Costolo said they wanted more content flowing into Twitter and less flowing out of it. So of course that meant that they would cut back on API access. If anyone had been building on these resources, they now face a setback, but it was one they could have seen coming.
    Twitter could have been something very different from what it's becoming. That's neither good nor bad. Every business has an opportunity to define itself, by what they do as well as by what they don't do. Twitter has had very strong positions like the 140-character limit and the decision to put links in the text that users type. These have become such fixtures that we hardly notice them. But different decisions could have been made, and a different environment would have resulted.
    When Twitter pulls back from features, they create room for new potentially valuable networked products and services that are radically different from Twitter, with different tradeoffs. I think we're at the point in the evolution of the net where there will be a lot of experimentation, in part fueled by the new space Twitter is opening up for competition. It's good for innovation. I think we may well be getting unstuck in some very big areas, very soon, as a result of the changing developer landscape.
    See Media Hackers for an idea of what can be done with news, entirely outside of Twitter, based on flows in RSS, Atom, XML and JSON, all of which are strong open formats with huge content flow from professional news organizations, bloggers, universities, schools of all sizes, scientific institutions, corporations, non-profits, media networks and government agencies.
    It's important to note that none of this is in any way subject to Twitter's terms. None of these feeds or JSON rivers will stop flowing because Twitter is placing limits on its own ecosystem.
    There are new projects from many developers that look promising. I believe there will be strong reasons the new projects will want to share user content more fluidly as a way to compete with the giant companies that are trying to carve out private areas of the Internet, as Twitter is.
    Working together is how new markets are always created. There's lots of new stuff in the pipe, much reason for optimism and excitement. :-)
  scripting.com in transition
    I'm doing more of my blogging over here on the threads site.
    This was always the plan. When people say that I turned off comments, that wasn't exactly true. I wanted to start a transition from a site where discourse was more controlled, and set off from the main blog content.
    There is more transition coming, some things I hope that many people will find exciting.
    I think there's a new kind of writing for the web coming. I want to be a major proponent of it, and participant, as I was in the early days of blogging and podcasting.
    Feel free to post a comment below (but keep it nice). :-)
  Why a second term for Obama?
    Economist: "A president who has had a patchy first term now needs to make a convincing case for a second one."
    Pretty simple. Romney repeats a promise that he'll "repeal ObamaCare."
    Obama will implement it. By the time his second term is over it will be a done deal.
    Even if Obama did nothing else, it would be worth it to re-elect him just for this.
    A little background
    Ten years ago I had life-saving surgery. It cost over $400K. And over the years since, my health care has been pretty expensive. I'm well-off. I can afford my health insurance. And I've had continuous coverage since I was in my 20s. So the insurance companies have to cover me.
    But I understand what it would mean to not have the money and not be insured. I would have died ten years ago. So this means something to me personally.
    I also have friends whose life requires maintenence from the health care industry to hold death at bay. If you look around you, and ask -- you'll find that there are many people who are in a similar circumstance. Not everyone likes to talk about it, but it's happening anyway.
    People who don't understand are imho:
    1. Young.
    2. Have never experienced the death or serious illness of someone they loved and/or depended on.
    3. Are not paying attention. Probably an alchoholic or drug abuser, because it's all around you. You have to work at not seeing it. Work hard.
    That we would play games with health care for our families is ridiculous. I guess Paul Ryan and Mitt Romney don't have any friends or family who might be at risk. But that can't be true for most Republicans. So I honestly don't understand. But I don't have to understand if we simply re-elect President Obama.
    Q.E.D.
  Ann Richards 1988 keynote
    One of the best speeches ever.
  Repubs lie and obstruct, but Obama does not lead
    The Repubs tell the truth about one thing, and it's the one thing that damns the president. He hasn't been leading. Campaigning for re-election is not leading.
    I'm going to vote for Obama no matter what. Not voting is not an option, and voting for Romney is most definitely not an option. If the Repubs were to control both the executive and legislative branches we're in for a whole other level of catastrophe. Last time they ran the country we almost lost everything, economically, militarily as well as our freedom. The whole thing.
    What has to happen is the Repubs have to be reined in. And the President has to lead us to that future. He can't just get re-elected. It has to be more than that.
  The real liars are the press
    Who can really blame the Repubs for lying if the reporters let them get away with it.
    I read a piece by Emily Bell about how media neutrality is fueling lies. It's pretty radical considering she teaches jouralism at Columbia.
    But the truth is much more radical. The Republicans are finally taking down the press. What will be left of journalism after this election will not resemble in any way what it was before. This is a moment of breaking with the past, a discontinuity, reformation.
    Finally it's obvious to everyone that the news is not being reported accurately. What we see and hear in the speeches in the cable news broadcasts is different from what they report. Could not be clearer. We see A, they report B.
    If the headline is wrong, then now is the time for the press to stop lying. I would love for that headline to be wrong, but right now, it's correct.
  Embedded registration form
    <iframe id="gottaregister" name="1_1" src="https://gottaregister.com/?brand=embed&source=http%3A%2F%2Fthreads2.scripting.com%2F" width="450" frameborder="" height="380" style="display: block; overflow: hidden; margin: auto; background-color: whitesmoke; padding: 20px; border:#c2dbe8 1px solid; moz-border-radius: 0; webkit-border-radius: 0; border-radius: 0; ">
    Note: I used the Obama campaign's embeddable form. You can too. It's easy.
  Odd pic of two Presidents
    This picture will accompany an article in The New Yorker, to be published tomorrow.
    Is it just me or does it look like President Clinton is "submitting" to President Obama?
    I can't imagine they don't see this at the magazine.
  Obama gets 1/2 of it
    Political Wire: President Obama "has fundamentally shifted his view of modern presidential power" and "is now convinced the most essential part of his job, given politically divided Washington, is rallying public opinion to his side. As a result, if he wins a second term, Mr. Obama plans to remain in campaign mode." He's quoting a WSJ article, which unfortunately is behind a paywall.
    This is the most sigificant thing I've read about his presidency. He realizes now that he has to be in full-time campaign mode. That's the power of the presidency. You'll have no leverage with Congress unless they know you have the voters on your side. All he had to do to understand this is read a little history about the most effective presidents. They were the ones who had open channels of communication to the electorate, and used them well.
    This is, btw, the one valid part of the Republican campaign. When they said he wasn't showing leadership, I didn't know what they meant until Christie's speech at the RNC. "Real leaders don't follow polls. Real leaders change polls," he said. He was absolutely right. A president who doesn't get that is one who isn't using his power effectively. Then there's the question of what the president would use the power for, and that's where I can't go with the Repubs. They would try to take us back to some fantasy United States that never existed.
    Today is different. We're switching the way economics, communication and war work. The military that the Repubs wants to double-down on is, as always, designed to fight the wrong war. The next war will not involve terrorism or huge armies, you can attack the infrastructure of your enemy and cripple them with algorithms, code and passwords.
    Back to the bully pulpit of the president of the United States. The unique opportunity now is that communication doesn't have to be 1-way. This is where media hackers come in. I hope they open their doors and minds to us so we can get involved, not just as voters, but as innovators. This is why I was so disappointed when I saw the whitehouse website in January 2009. It told me everything I needed to know about what they didn't understand or want to put into practice.
    It's like everything. Just getting funded doesn't mean your business is successful. The hard part is yet to come. You can practice medicine after getting your degree, but whether you're a great doctor is still yet to be determined. Getting elected President is a huge accomplishment, but that's just where teh fun starts. And it's not just the Republicans you have to get to line up, you have to get members of your own party to do it too.
    This was all covered on the West Wing, btw. :-)
    One more thing. If you're good at communicating the Repubs know what to do then -- they'll impeach your ass. So be prepared for that too. OK?
    PS: Seeing the President on Reddit was a very positive sign, btw.
    PPS: Doc Searls could play the mature Teddy Roosevelt in the movies.
October 2012
  I'm tired too Abby
    BTW, the cute kid award for the 2008 election went to Ross Mayfield's son, talking about Obamaman. :-)
  Backups!
    I see lots of mentions of NY-based companies that didn't have adequate Plan B's.
    It's time to think about how you're creating redundancy in your communication systems.
    Also important as a service you can offer to users to differentiate your product from others. "We're good at keeping you online in times of emergency."
    Decentralize.
  Is Google Maps realtime?
    I just checked if Google Maps would give me driving directions through streets I know are closed because of the hurricane. It would and does.
    An example -- 57th St is closed between 6th Ave and 8th Ave due to the crane collapse. Yet if I ask for directions from 501 West 57th to 501 East 57th, it gives me a straight line.

      <iframe width="600" height="400" frameborder="0" scrolling="no" marginheight="0" marginwidth="0" src="https://maps.google.com/maps?f=d&source=s_d&saddr=501+W+57th+St,+New+York,+NY&daddr=501+E+57th+St,+New+York,+NY&hl=en&geocode=FV0XbgIdQwSX-ymhqAHfW1jCiTEKSc5KuwBcww%3BFT7obQIdlnOX-ykn9vpO51jCiTHYyADOhNEcWQ&aq=t&sll=40.697488,-73.979681&sspn=1.07033,1.08902&t=m&mra=ls&ie=UTF8&ll=40.763316,-73.97481&spn=0.026004,0.051413&z=14&output=embed">
      <a href="https://maps.google.com/maps?f=d&source=embed&saddr=501+W+57th+St,+New+York,+NY&daddr=501+E+57th+St,+New+York,+NY&hl=en&geocode=FV0XbgIdQwSX-ymhqAHfW1jCiTEKSc5KuwBcww%3BFT7obQIdlnOX-ykn9vpO51jCiTHYyADOhNEcWQ&aq=t&sll=40.697488,-73.979681&sspn=1.07033,1.08902&t=m&mra=ls&ie=UTF8&ll=40.763316,-73.97481&spn=0.026004,0.051413&z=14" style="color:#0000FF;text-align:left">View Larger Map

    It's at times like this when utilities like Google Maps can help the most. Wouldn't it be great if it were kept up to date on road closures and could take that into account in giving directions.
  The worst NY player
    Harvey Araton in the Times writes today that the worst deal in NY sports is Amare Stoudemire of the Knicks. Hard to disagree. Except maybe Carmelo Anthony.
    As a Mets fan since 1962, let me tell you -- it is not about winning. It's about love, and philosophy. The Knicks have two leading players that play from fear and have no philosophy. I think Carmelo could play on a team lead by someone with philosophy, as he showed in the Olympics this year, but even then, under pressure, he's the first to choke. I was watching the last great game in the Olympics against Spain, hoping that Anthony would rally, but instead he was benched -- and with the usual Baby Huey smile on his face, that seemed (to me at least) to spell relief.
    The core problem of the Knicks is they chose a Number Two to be their Number One.
    Neither Anthony or Stoudemire plays with heart. They are not competitors. Neither is a leader, or a winner. That's what's so fucked up about the Knicks.
    They had a great team for a few weeks last year, sparked by a coach and a point guard who played with love and great philosophy. Chandler was happy to play along. Novak, Fields, Schumpert -- all young and looking for a chance to play -- flourished. Sure, given a chance this combination might not have won, but as I said -- as a Mets fan, and I'm sure as die-hard Knicks fans can agree -- it's not really about winning. It's about having a spirit that we can get behind.
  Obama and Christie FTW
    1. If you haven't watched the Frontline 2-hour election special, the rest of this might not make much sense. It's really worth watching.
    2. I just caught up on the politics of the day. I didn't want to, but then two pieces came out at almost exactly the same time, a few hours ago, that shifted my perspective. One from Jonathan Chait at New York, and the other by Charles Pierce at Esquire. They both said in different but equally convincing ways that the response to Sandy is political and to view it any other way is wrong.
    3. The timing is amazing, obviously.
    4. It couldn't be more dramatic in the context of the election. Because the problem being given to Obama is one he's perfectly suited for. It's the one he wanted when he arrived in Washington in 2009 and thought he had been given, in the economic collapse. Unfortunately for all of us, the Republicans responded very negatively to Obama (understatement). This was made very clear in the Frontline report (see #1). I hadn't understood how the Republicans despised him. It wasn't just expedient. They actually hated him. I didn't get this because I didn't feel that way about Obama. But I certainly have felt that way about other politicians.
      They were right in some ways. Obama believed he was transformative. That was a mistake. He should have tried to make a difference in the context of what Washington was, not what he wished it to be. He was vulnerable and naive, and they took advantage of it.
    5. Enter Christie.
    6. Unlike the Republicans in Washinton in 2009, he wants to work with Obama. Really wants to, it's not fake.
    7. Why? Because he likes being governor of NJ, and here's his chance to do that in an incredible way, with all the money of the US govt available to him. All the planets lined up for Gov Christie. And Obama, seeing the opportunity (totally) says oh shit I'm getting the checkbook, and I'm going to spend the money and I got a Republican to play the game with me. "How much do you want?" he asks Christie. He gets to throw a Hail Mary pass, with almost no political cost, certainly none before the election. (I'd love to see Romney complain that Obama was spending too much on New Jersey, esp with the pictures on CNN likely to come in the days ahead. This isn't Benghazi or even Katrina. Our networks have lots of cameras and reporters in the NYC area. Even Republicans on Wall Street will want the money to be spent now. Look where the flooding happened.)
    8. This is what Obama is good at. Getting lots of governors, Republican and Democratic, to work with him. To let him lead and organize them. Use his intellect. Lead the team. (Give them money.) He did it at Harvard. And at Columbia and in high school. This is what he loves.
    9. Now here's the ridiculous part. It's probably something that Romney would be great at too. It's exactly the kind of job he seeks out. It's the way he sees himself. Disaster strikes, and Romney comes in and saves the day -- through management, competence, consensus. If this crisis, exactly this crisis, happened in February and Romney was President, he'd be Christie's buddy too, with the checkbook open ready to fill in whatever number Chris asks him to. But he won't get to do it, and he knows it, and it must absolutely drive him crazy!
    10. Christie will get to rebuild New Jersey with federal money. Before this his state was broke. Now it'll be rich. Jobs galore. He gets to be hero. And I bet he doesn't like Romney, on a personal level. And I bet he does like Obama.
    11. Watch the Frontline report. :-)
  Google Maps API overview?
    I've used little scraps of time during the hurricane to experiment with the Google Maps API.
      http://googlemapstest.blorkmark.com/
    I hope to simplify it so that people can set up a map in the OPML Editor outliner, by entering a list of names of places and have them appear as icons on the map. They also get to specify the icons, from the set of Glyphicons. And of course they can write a document for each, in the outliner. The outlines will be displayed more or less the same way as the About outline on Scripting News home page.
    The API is pretty strange to me, largely because I've never used a Javascript API before. The callback structure is totally bizarre. I'm accustomed to the enviroment managing threads for you. To me this is an odd way to program. Which makes learing a new API doubly-difficult.
    I'd rather not read a whole O'Reilly book on this API. I'd like to find a narrative to explain these topics:
      1. How to turn a name of a place into a lat-lng value. I see there's an entrypoint for this, geocoder.getLatLng.
      2. How to get a callback when the user clicks on an icon. It would also be nice to know where the mouse-click happened, on the screen, so the window can pop up close to it (I have no idea how to do this, but will have to figure it out).
    I see this as another way to do a presentation, or to organize information. I would like to have a single outline for a map, making it super-easy to edit, and also to have it in the most convenient form for someone browsing over the data.
    Any pointers are much appreciated.
        true
    Update #1
      Thanks to some pointers from Ted (see below), my test map now have markers that:
      1. Are specified not by latitude and longitude, rather by human-understandable strings like Roosevelt Island, New York, NY and 23rd St and Park Ave, New York, NY.
      2. When roll over the icon you see the human-understandable string.
      3. When you click on the icon and alert dialog pops up with the string.
      This is important because the string is what's going to be in the main headline for each chunk of outline text. In a sense it's the address both in physical space and in the outline. Being able to go from a mouse-click to that string is an essential step.
  Hurricane status report
    I'm getting tweets and emails from friends outside NY asking if everything is okay.
    1. Thanks! The concern is much appreciated.
    2. Everything is good. Power is on. No one hurt. Exhausted. Happy to be safe.
    3. Three trees fell on my mom's block in Flushing. She has lots of support nearby. They've lost some power. Luckily my brother was in town, he couldn't get out on Monday, so he's been there to help.
    4. I live in a high-rise in mid-town. The building swayed for hours, and it was exhausting and scary. One of the windows blew open, and it was a bitch to get it closed. But at 11PM or so the winds just stopped, and it's stayed quiet outside ever since. Got a great night's sleep. Power is on. Very fortunate.
    5. The streets in Manhattan are virtually empty. Some cabs, cars. Lots of emergency vehicles.
    6. My SandyCam site is up, but sad to say it's mostly getting pictures of raindrops on the windows.
    7. Posting links on my linkblog, of course (these also flow to Twitter).
    8. All is good.
  Climate change
    To partisans: The issue isn't whether Romney wanted to kill FEMA, it's that we're having an election without climate change as an issue.
    It should be the dominant issue.
    As usual, people want to blame the leaders, but we get as much bullshit as we demand from them. If we decided that climate change was the issue, it would be.
    Time for the American electorate to grow a pair and take responsibility
  NYT River repair work
    A few weeks ago the NY Times firehose feed broke.
    I emailed with a friend at the Times, and we were able to get it working again. But the new version of the firehose is a mere trickle compared to the former raging torrent.
    This put me in a bad place because I depend on a gush of NYT headlines in my river. I could subscribe to all the feeds I could find, but that means that I'd get duplicate stories because the Times, like other pubs, runs many stories in multiple feeds.
    I've always been thinking about doing a heuristic to fix this. I'd keep track of the titles that had already appeared in a river and skip duplicates. Last night during the Giants game I gave it a shot, and it worked.
    I wrote the change up in this worknote.
    I added a huge number of feeds to the NYT river. And it's starting to feel good again. I wanted to share this as a possible best-practice for other aggregator developers.
        bold
    Updates
      After running for a few hours -- success. The NYT river is back to its rich flow, at a time when there's lots going on -- the presidential election and a hurricane. And there aren't any duplicates. All is good. :-)
      It's been a while since I really looked at the NYT river. They write such good descriptions. You have a pretty good idea what the article is about even without clicking. Much more useful than getting full text. Because I get a breadth of the news, and the experience is created by editors who know what they're doing.
    Pointers
      Pointers: NYT river.
      NYT feeds page.
      The OPML reading list for the NYT river.
  A social network's soul
    How to tell if a social network has soul?
    How often do the founders' tweets get retweeted. How often do their names pop up in your stream, not as ads of course, but because someone thought they were worthy of a pass-along.
    In that spirit, I realized the other day that:
    1. I never see tweets from Ev or Biz, two of the three founders of Twitter.
      Of course today someone RT'd Ev.
      It always works that way!
      To show I'm a good sport, I RT'd the RT. :-)
    2. I do sometimes see tweets from Jack, the other founder, and they're often useful.
    I don't use Facebook or Google-Plus, but even if so, I would imagine from time to time I'd see things linked from Vic Gundotra or Zuck. And the other day I did see something from Vic. The only times I ever see something from Zuck is if there's a shitstorm over privacy and he has to write an open post to try to calm people down. But it should be a constant drumbeat. And not something synthetic. They should be NBBs. But no network yet has figured out that they need NBBs at the helm.
    This epiphany comes after an embarassingly large number of years using social networks.
    Back in the days of CB Radio on Compuserve, which was very much like Twitter believe it or not, the Compuservants (people who worked at the company) never used the service. In fact they referred to us as the Lonelyhearts Club (I knew this because I had a personal friend who worked there and heard about it over the phone, not on the network). Compuserve is long-gone.
    Whatever you may say or think about Scoble, he is retweeted. He works tirelessly to push new ideas out there. Any network should kill to get him on board. Pay him huge bucks. Wine and dine him. But they're so clueless they seem to resent him. Eventually this will flip around, and guys like Scoble will be seen as the equiv of NBA stars or American Idol winners. They are the reason people come to the service. If you're starting one of these networks you would do well to entice him.
    What made me think about this is that Hugh MacLeod, the famous Gaping Void artist-blogger, told me that Scoble had told him he should be using Instagram as his social network. I agree, up to a point. But Instagram never sought out Hugh. And Instagram doesn't have feeds, so I can't plug Hugh's content into my flows. So bzzzt, I veto Scoble on this one. But he was 80 percent right. Instagram is a good choice for what Hugh does, if they 1. gave a shit and 2. let the data flow.
    I think eventually the artists will rise and take all this over.
  Sandy's message
    It just occurred to me, reading an NBC article on how Hurricane Sandy might effect the election, that climate change will be an election issue after all.
    We may not want to discuss climate change, but our planet does.
  Lost Twitter connection
    I am unable to send links from my linkblogging tool to Twitter.
    This outage started at 5:45PM Eastern yesterday. The last four of my links didn't go through. The reply from Twitter is empty. There's no error message or error code.
    The first three links were about Hurricane Sandy. The fourth was about the election.
    I've tried re-authorizing the account with Twitter, but that didn't seem to make a difference. The response is still empty. Nothing is posted to my Twitter account.
    If you have any clues what else I might try, I'm happy to. It's possible something changed in the Twitter API that I am not aware of.
    It's also possible this is the end of the road, that for some reason they've decided that my contribution is no longer wanted.
    I'll save any editorializing until there's more info. :-)
    Updates
      I posted a note on the Twitter Dev discussion board.
      Got a pointer to this issue, which seems to have happened about the same time. Not clear whether it's related to this.
    While I'm stuck
      I don't think I'm being caught up in the same mess as the other guys, because I'm getting back an empty response. They're getting back a message saying that the content-length header is missing.
      Well, it turns out I was getting the message, it was just happening at such a low level that I wasn't seeing it.
      So to be clear, I was caught up in the same breakage as everyone else.
    Worknote
      See this worknote for details on the workaround, which I will now release.
  Our Soviet Union
    I just had a flash, and that's what blogs are for.
    The Soviet Union collapsed. And that changed the world.
    Could the United States collapse too?
    What if it already has?
    What if the change in the way the press works is the equivalent of a new political system, with a new division of power.
    Isn't that what happened in the Soviet Union?
  Listening is Hard
    The constant theme of my blog is the title of this post -- Listening is Hard.
    It is.
    The way people read on the Internet usually has nothing to do with listening. What people seem to do mostly is skim the article looking for their own name, the name of someone they hate, or if neither of those turn up, they look for a key word or phrase that's linked to one of their canned schpiels. There are some notorious commenters here, people who make me groan when I see their names. I know what I'm going to hear has nothing to do with the topic of the piece. In the worst cases they just pick up a rant almost verbatim from The Ed Show or O'Reilly, and repeat it word for word. Nothing could be more boring. I usually turn those people off when I'm flipping through channels. I totally don't want them here on my blog, by proxy.
    How you can tell if you're not listening? Here are some clues:
    1. The person you think you're listening to tells you that you're not. They might be wrong, but before you dismiss them out of hand, consider the possibility that they're right. And use the scientific method. Read the actual words they have written. Not the story you hear in your own head when you read those words. Read their words.
    2. If you find yourself hearing someone familiar talking through them, you're not listening. For example, if the thought forms in your head that "he is just like my brother" or mother or father, or former best friend -- someone you have issues with -- then you're not listening. There's absolutlely no doubt. Classic clue that you're projecting. Instead take a deep breath, look at your surroundings, then look back at the screen. It's just a screen. Not the family kitchen table when you were growing up. Your abusive parent isn't berating you. It's just some bits on a screen. :-)
    3. Try this puzzle. Most people don't get the right answer. I didn't. I was amazed. That's another proof that listening is hard. If you can't count the letters, what are the chances that you've actually heard what someone is saying by skimming their story on the net.
    4. Read this piece. See how bad inference can be. 99 times out of 100 it's not about you. So don't respond as if it were.
    5. A famous editor hated me for a long time, but then all of a sudden one day started being nice to me. This kept going on long enough that we've now had a discussion about why he hated me so much. It's the old inference thing. I was saying "Sources Go Direct." I wasn't saying that I wanted sources to go direct, or that editors deserved to be routed around (although as a matter of fact I did, and mostly do). But that wasn't what I was saying. I was saying that if you're in the publishing business, in any way, you have to realize that the lower cost of production and distribution has radically changed the way things work. You must factor that in. Hating me won't change anything. And if you actually listen to what I'm saying (there's the rub again) I say over and over that I want professional journalists to make the transition. But you can't make the transition by clinging to a system that has gone away.
    6. Another clue is that the topic is something that you find repulsive. Most people can't listen to topics that disgust them. For example, if I say that the OWS people missed huge opportunities because they didn't listen, if you support OWS, you're going to likely respond with a story that's orthogonal. I know this because it happens every time. But isn't it better to hear about the missed opportunity, esp when it's not too late, because then you don't have to miss it? To me, this is like a programmer who argues with a bug report. Why? If you listen, you can fix it. Good programmers do not argue with bug reports. And good revolutionaries are always looking for ways to be more effective at revolution. Dilbert-like revolutionaries insist on telling you why you don't get it. Don't be a Dilbert-like revolutionary. Nothing is more pathetic.
    Now let's see if anyone who comments has actually listened to what I said! :-)
  Why Obama Now
  Sharing and mobile sites
    Let's say I'm using my iPad and I come across a video, and click the link, watch it and decide to share it with my followers on Twitter.
    Something not-so-good happens. The mobile link goes to everyone. Whether they're using a mobile device or not.
    Mobile is about at the same place where we were with RSS when we realized that subscription wasn't just a matter of giving someone the URL to the RSS feed. We had to do more. Unfortunately we couldn't get everyone to swing in the same direction, so the problem was never adequately solved.
    The correct answer here is to have a link on the page that goes to a shareable version of the page. I might be on the mobile version, but this will take me to the "general" or default version of the page. Then if someone comes to the page on an iPad or some other supposedly limited device, they can show them the mobile version, if they must.
    This happens often enough to be something we need to fix, soon -- before it becomes an unsolvable problem.
  Olbermann don't sell out!
    If you know Keith Olbermann please send him a pointer to this. I've tried tweeting to him, but I never get a response. Tell him I'm for real, that I've done this myself with great success. (I have!) You can make a lot of money doing Internet broadcasting. And Olbermann, someone we know well, is the perfect guy to do it.
    Dear Keith Olbermann,
    Last time around the two people I read or listened to most were Frank Rich in his weekly column at the NY Times, and you.
    This time around neither of you are out there. Your voice has been missed.
    According to New York Magazine and other bits here and there, it seems you're looking for a job at a broadcast network. I think this would be a serious mistake. You have a popular Twitter feed. And lots of fans. You could very easily start something on the Internet and keep all the profits for yourself, and run your own show, and if you pissed someone off that would be good because it would get more people to watch and/or listen.
    I used to think creating an Internet-distributed radio show was hard, but it's not. You can do it with an iPod. A video show is a little more work. People don't care much about production value, esp for someone with as well-known a voice as yours. What we want is something no one else can provide -- you! Your insights, your ideas, your angst!
    Then, later -- once you've got a regular thing going on the net, you can get distribution from one of the networks, on your own terms. Don't stop distributing your stuff on the net, that's your fallback in case they start excercising control over your content.
    I'll help. No charge! I just want you to do it. Nothing more.
    What we, your fans want, is the pure unadulterated Olberman Experience™. We want to know we're hearing what you really have to say, not what some network executive will let you say. There's already so much of that. It's boring. Give us what we crave. Olbermann. Don't sell out!
  Buck-passing bullshit
    The Repubs are tempting fate, trying to allocate blame for Obama's loss in November. Obviously it's a little presumptuous.
    If Romney wins, it's not Obama's fault, it's not Bill Clinton's fault. It wasn't caused by the attack in Benghazi or the weak economy.
    It's time to lay the blame squarely where it would belong if we elect Mitt Romney president.
    It's the American people's fault.
    We have been disclaiming our power for far too long. It's become habitual. And it's wrong. In the United States, according to our much-revered Constitution, if you want to know who to blame for things being royally fucked up, just look in the mirror.
    When I suggested to the people in the Occupy movement, at least the ones who would listen, that after they finished with the occupations that we should move on to fight voter suppression, I was told, uniformly that our votes don't matter and there's no difference between Obama and Romney. I recognize that as pure bullshit.
    The reason we get bullshit candidates, to the extent that we do, is that we ask for bullshit. And they give us what we want. Bullshit. And lots of it.
    I said last month that we suffer greatly from a lack of imagination. We are not creative. If we increased voter turnout, we the people, not some campaign or political party, or paranoid focus group like Christians or the Tea Party, if ordinary Americans of all political persuasions got together and decided that voting matters -- then get this -- voting would matter. It might even inspire a candidate like Obama to trust us, a little, and start telling more truth about things like cyber-terrorism and climate change. Instead we're arming our military to fight World War II and we're building stupid pipelines and fracking our water, and basically continuing to screw everything up. For no good reason other than we don't want to deal with reality.
    So when President Obama said to Rolling Stone that young people recognize a bullshitter, and Romney certainly is the biggest bullshitter we've ever seen run for President, he's saying that he understands something that apparently very few Americans get. The buck doesn't really stop at the desk of the President. Ultimately, the buck stops with us.
  We need BYTE
    We used to have a pretty good technical journal for developers who worked on PCs. It was called BYTE Magazine. If you came up with something new that was relevent to a bunch of other developers, you could write an article, submit it, and they'd often run it. I wrote a few of them, about outliners and laptops if I remember correctly, when both were pretty new.
    TechMeme doesn't cover new technology. In all the stuff I've written in the last three or so years, they've only picked up a very few pieces I've written that were about investment. They are really a VC journal. They cover what the investor herd is following. So if you want to know all the nuance of the latest rumor about Apple or Facebook, you'll find it on TM. But if some developer comes up with a good idea we should all know about, that's not something they appear to be interested in.
    Obviously today it would be a blog, maybe even just a linkblog. But it would be moderated by people with a track record for creating innovative products. I would be willing to start something if others would join in moderating. Crowdsourcing is not what this is about. It must be peer-reviewed by people who create new products and have contributed to the general knowhow. And please no patents.
    What do you think?
  Walter O's revenge
    In 1958, when I was three years old, the Dodgers moved and with them took pro sports in Brooklyn.
    The owner of the team, Walter O'Malley, wanted to build a new stadium in Brooklyn to replace the aging Ebbets Field. According to his plan the new domed stadium, designed by Buckminster Fuller, would go at a transportation hub, where nine subway lines and the Long Island Railroad come together, in Brooklyn.
    He was opposed by the great highway builder and destroyer of urban ecosystems, Robert Moses, who wanted to build a new stadium at the confluence of three super-highways he was building, at Flushing Meadows, in Queens.
    O'Malley got his new stadium -- in Los Angeles. And Moses got his stadium and a new team, the Mets, to play in it. The Beatles famously performed there in 1965. They tore the stadium down in 2009, and built a more modern one, with restaurants and fancy skyboxes, in the parking lot of the old stadium.
      My Wikipedia bio incorrectly says I grew up in Brooklyn. I grew up in Queens, within walking distance of Shea Stadium. I come from a family of Dodgers fans, who instantly converted to the Mets in 1962. O'Malley was blamed for moving the Dodgers, but few at the time knew of the role Moses played in the story.
    Fast-forward to 2012, and a new sports arena has risen in Brooklyn, at the exact location favored by O'Malley. Fans won't drive to events at this stadium. Moses must be rolling over in his grave. Gradually the city is adjusting to the future it should always have had. And Brooklyn is on the rise again! All is good.
  AWS river
    Yesterday while I was waiting, along with hundreds of other server guys, for Amazon Web Services to restore service on one of their Virginia availability zones, I kept referring to their status page, where they have kind of an ad hoc method of accumulating information about the outages.
    I had nothing better to do than stare at this, and it gave me an idea. Why not systematize it? They have a feed for every service. And my aggregator produces a fairly usable readout, imho of course. :-)
    So I wrote a script to pull out all the feeds from the Amazon page, and loaded them into River2 running on one of my servers (hosted at Rackspace, so it won't go down when Amazon goes down), and started running. It looks pretty good. So here it is.
    http://tabs.mediahackers.org/?panel=aws
    You might want to bookmark it and have a look whenever you're wondering what's going on at Amazon.
  Our crunch?
    Interesting news that Mike Arrington and MG Siegler have returned to TechCrunch.
    I have an idea that a new bloglike pub would be one where everyone that these guys attack gets a platform from which to defend themselves. Strictly to set the record straight.
    Imho it would instantly outstrip all blogs in potential revenue and would probably put a little fear into the people at AOL. :-)
    I kind of like the idea. Should we start it?
    We could even run a conference, where the devs sit in the audience and the VCs boast about their talents on stage! We could even invent silly hoops for them to jump through. A personality contest. An award for best swimsuit.
  Crowley and Raddatz killed
    Stating what's obvious.
    Candy Crowley and Martha Raddatz were wonderful debate moderators.
    Schieffer and Lehrer were as awful as the other two were great.
    Next time I nominate Ezra Klein and Shepard Smith as the male moderators.
    Time for a new generation.
  He just makes this shit up
    In theater and movies there's an imaginary fourth wall at the front of the stage. When an actor talks directly to the audience this is known as breaking the fourth wall. It's a good technique in acting, and it would also be a good technique in political debate, if you want to establish a bond between yourself and the audience.
    In the three debates this year, neither candidate did it. I wished many times that Obama would have looked straignt into the camera as Romney was going on and on in fantasy-land and say "He just makes this shit up."
    Instead we say it among ourselves on Twitter.
    George Burns did it
    Breaking the fourth wall is not a new idea.
    George Burns did it well, and he even took it a step further. After breaking the fourth wall, he'd stroll over to his TV set and snoop on people as if he were on Homeland or The Wire and could tune in any person he wanted to as if they were a program. Usually he'd spy on his ditzy but wonderful wife, Gracie Allen.
    Here's an example.
    Bring the audience on stage
    I've also suggested that next time around the debaters would be allowed to bring a computer with them and hook into Twitter, or whatever is hot in four years, and participate in the discussion while his opponent drones on and on lying about this and that.
  Today's AWS outage
    Update: There was an outage on Amazon today. A segment of one of their server facilities, in Virgina, went out. This caused a large number of scripting.com sites to go offline. A couple of hours into the outage, I relocated my threads site to another server and started taking notes here. I was also posting tweets, some of which are included here.
    Heh. I realized that now that everything I have is in the worldoutline, it's remarkably easy for me to move a whole website from one server to another. It took two minutes to do the tech work, and it'll probably take as much as 20 minutes for the DNS change to propogate. But we're now back on the air, somewhat, and I can document the Amazon outage and its effects here, where I should have always have been able to.
    I also have to hook up the static home page. Done.
    One thing I'm going to have to do is export the roots list on each server to OPML so that I can automate the movement of the content on one server to another. Should be possible to make it even more automatic.
    At 8:40PM with the debate about to start, the outage has cleared.
  Why the press isn't tough on candidates
    1. Each of the two campaigns will raise approximately $1 billion this year.
    2. Much if not most of that money will be spent on advertising.
    3. The employers of the reporters get that money.
    The rest is left as an exercise for the reader.
  Two warm-up projects
    This morning I have to solve two problems.
    1. When I view the scripting.com home page on my Android phone, the text is all scrunched up in one column. Why? It doesn't happen on any other device I've tried, and it works well on desktops and laptops. Works great on my iPod and iPad. Here's a screen shot that illustrates.
    2. I needed to create another Windows server on Rackspace, but they're no longer offering Windows Server 2003 images. So I had to go with 2008. The user interface is fairly different, but I've been able to puzzle it out. One thing I haven't figured out is how to access the web server on the machine over the Internet. The IP address that Rackspace gave me appears not to work.
      Update: The problem turns out that I have IIS running on the machine. I should have figured this out for myself, but it took a Rackspace support engineer to find this for me. Now I have to figure out how to turn it off.
      I have turned off IIS, which required two tries (one to quit, it and one to disable it after it relaunched after a reboot).
      Now I am able to access the server on the local machine using its external IP address, but am not able to access it from my desktop using that address, orlando.scripting.com.
      Update #2: This time it was a firewall problem. You not only have to open port 80 for IIS (which was the default setting) it has to be opened for all other apps running on the server. It was blocked. Thanks to the excellent Rackspace support for their quick help. They should change their name to Rockspace. :-)
  I named my company UserLand
    Back in the 90s, before everyone was blogging, when I wanted to explain what we were doing, I would say this line and watch people's faces.
    "I named my company UserLand."
    It's actually a very powerful statement. It makes people think.
    I mention it today, because at lunch yesterday at Startup School, for a while I was talking with a small group of UX engineers, one of whom had read my piece about users, and wanted to know if it was really okay if he kept using the U-word, because after all it's the first letter of his job description. These people love users and love what they do, and they don't want to stop.
    Being the graybeard avuncular type, and being a UX guy myself, I gave them permission to continue to use the word as long as they kept loving the users. As soon as they didn't love them, they'd either have to quit and do something else, or stop using the term. If you use the word without love, it's a very harsh word, and unfair. But if you use it with love there's no higher honor than being called a user.
  Uber strikes out at JFK
    The CEO of Uber, Travis Kalanick, did a great presentation yesterday at Startup School. So great, that I decided I wanted to try the service, first chance I could when I got into JFK on my trip back to NY.
    So I set up a new account, entered my credit card info, installed the software on my iPad and my iPod Touch, and read a few docs that explained that it was not possible to arrange for a pickup in advance, that I would have to request the ride from the location where I was to be picked up.
    So here's what I did when I got to the front of Terminal 7 at JFK at about 4:30PM today.
    1. Opened the Uber app on my iPod, but it thought, for some reason that I was in the middle of Kansas. So that wasn't going to work.
    2. I got out the iPad, and it knew where I was (it has GPS, apparently the iPod doesn't).
    3. I got a confusing dialog that seemed to be asking me to choose which kind of ride I wanted. Either an SUV, or a Uber-x, or a regular ride. Too many choices.
    4. Then the moment of truth. A nice big button that you click to request a ride. The caption below it says the nearest car is 9 minutes away. I click the button. Expecting to be congratulated with a map that showed me where my car was so I could watch it come to me! But nooooo...
    5. A big error dialog comes up saying that before I can order I ride I have to have my phone number verified. Why didn't they have me do it at the hotel. I'm standing in front of a busy terminal, with people rushing around me, and I'm supposed to do what? So I get out my cell phone, and do what they tell me to do. Text the word "GO" to a number they specify.
    6. Now I'm juggling three different devices. And my luggage, and remember the nearest car is 9 minutes away. And there are cabs coming and going, any one of which would be happy to take me home.
    7. I try clicking the big button again, on the iPad, but again I get the error message. You have to text to this number blah blah.
    8. I look at the cell phone, and there's an error that says the number isn't registered with Uber. At this point I guess that my phone has identified itself by its T-mobile number, not the Google Voice number that I registered with Uber. I can never remember the T-mobile number (there's no need to, no one but Google Voice knows it). I figure maybe I'll go to the Uber site and register with that number instead of my real number.
    9. So I get the iPad out and go to the Uber site. But I don't remember my password (I used my Macbook Air last night to fill out all the forms).
    10. So I open up Gmail, and start to search for the password and at this point I realize I've given it my best shot, and close everything up and get in a cab, give him my address and he takes me home.
    And I was so excited to try the service! Oy.
    If anyone from Uber reads this -- validating the number is something I should have been asked to do when I was setting up the account, not when I'm standing on the street wanting to go home.
  Do VCs ever spot the new thing
    One topic that kept coming up yesterday is how do VCs spot the next big thing to invest in.
    If there are only going to be 15 big companies spawned in every generation, how does the VC spot them?
    I kept thinking of our experience trying to convince VCs in the late 90s that there would be a market for self-edited websites, the category that would eventually become blogging and lead to the market leaders of today.
    I would demo our software to VCs, showing them how they could update their own websites. They asked why would they want to do that? I thought it was self-evident. We were turned down. So I tried again with the idea being that their assistants, without any technical knowledge could edit their websites. Again, they didn't see the need. I came back with RSS, again -- why would anyone want that? The theory was that there would be three main websites, and they thought they would be Excite, Yahoo and maybe Google. Amazon and eBay in commerce. And that was about it.
    I think if the VCs look at what they actually do vs what they say they do, they'll see they're more like the movie industry. Funding a lot of ideas, without any clue which ones will be big hits. That suggests that the YCombinator approach is more viable. And I gotta say I argued for that in the 90s, and was told (again) that I was hallucinating. I should have taken that as a compliment. :-)
    And I'd look for more creative people making the decisions about what gets funded. Trying to get breakthrough ideas through the finanical guys who have been the gatekeepers, is a very inefficient process.
  Is Number One the only one
    Yesterday's Startup School provided much food for thought, and possibly a few blog posts.
    To start, Ben Horowitz, a principal at the VC firm Andreessen Horowitz, says there's only room for one product in any tech category. If you end up as number two, you'll end up going out of business.
    I wondered if that was true, and if so -- why is tech so special.
    He offered Sybase as an example. He said it was an excellent database, but it was number two and eventually Oracle came to dominate. Does anyone still use Sybase?
    But in many consumer categories there are plenty of number two's -- Avis to Hertz. Pepsi to Coke. The Rolling Stones to the Beatles. Ries and Trout in all their books, talk about there being three rungs on the ladder. One and two make most of the money, with one making far more than two. And three hangs on, barely.
    Then I thought about it some and realized there are quite a few examples in tech where no single product dominates.
    In web browsers there's Chrome, MSIE, Firefox, Opera.
    In mobile OSes there's iOS and Android.
    In desktop OSes, there's Macintosh, Windows and Linux.
    In browser-based email there's Gmail, Hotmail, Yahoo Mail.
    Search has Google, Yahoo and Bing.
  Microsoft keeps blowing it
    Windows 8 has a whole new user interface. Is there any demand for a Windows with a new user interface? Doubtful. Extremely doubtful.
    If they want to try out a whole new way of doing things, great -- go for it. But don't drag Windows along with it. Market it as a new product, so people who want it can buy it. If they don't believe anyone will buy it, or not enough people to create critical mass, then they really must know that they're not going to achieve critical mass by trying to force their current users, who may want new hardware, to switch to a new user interface. The fact that they wouldn't buy it if it were a separate product is a very strong clue.
    The sad thing is that they had a product that people reallly wanted, with Windows at its core, but they wouldn't let us have it. Netbooks. I know because I was one of those people.
    Netbooks were marvels. Little packages of a computer with a good-size hard drive, a fast-enough CPU to do the kinds of things people would eventually do with iPads. But Microsoft wouldn't let them make machines that had more than a certain size hard drive, or memory, and I assume screen resolution. Which meant that all the innovation and improvement had to take place in battery life. Which happened, until they reached a level where more battery life was irrelevant. The price was truly awesome, you could buy a lot of computer in a very small package, that had wifi built in, for less than $300. At the time this was more than amazing, it was a breakthrough.
    Microsoft, which was already facing the Apple juggernaut, had a unique product that people wanted, before the iPad, and they wouldn't let it evolve. Instead they wanted to force people to want a product they didn't -- more upscale Windows laptops that were heavier, had less battery life, and were serious investments at $1000. The netbooks were like popcorn. The were people's third computers, not even second. They should have subsidized those babies, created a huge installed base, encouraged software developers to target this platform, and let the manufacturers move where ever they wanted. And btw, they could have laid off half their engineers, because the OS just has to keep doing what it has been doing all along, nothing more. Faster, on new hardware. And that's all.
    These products would have still had to have dealt with the iPad, and who knows, they might still have been wiped out, but the way Microsoft forced them to be anemic and non-improving, they didn't stand a chance against Apple. They were sitting ducks.
    Now, they don't have too many options left, but they still have a cash cow. And if they insist on trying out whole new UIs, then do it, but let Windows become a quiet reliable and invisible platform, and do experimentation elsewhere.
    Another way to look at it, the people who wanted rock and roll left Windows a long time ago. The people who are left really don't want to think about Windows. Maybe they want to buy some new hardware. And along with that they get a whole new way of doing things. Bzzzt. Wrong move.
  Morning in America
    Reagan had a great ad in 1984 that was so good we remember it now, so many years later.
    But that was Obama's Morning in America ad, in 2012, that is in every way as moving as Reagan's. They should run this, a lot, in the next couple of weeks.
  Romnesia
    Look at all the women watching the President bring a new word into our vocabulary.
    BTW, Romnesia is a good response to the Romneys calling the President a child.
    Okay you call me a child, I'll say you're crazy.
    Watch the Romneys come back to say Obama is not respectful enough.
  I'm okay with Romney winning
    If Romney wins, I'm okay with it, because Obama has run a decent campaign, and a mostly honest one. And if people prefer Romney, then we deserve what we get. And I think it'll be really radical. There's a huge difference in direction for us based on who wins this election.
    I think we understand now that Romney doesn't stand for anything. He doesn't even understand the idea of having a political cause worth fighting for. He isn't pro-life or pro-choice. He doesn't want to do anything in particular.
    Once elected he will revert back to what he was in the primary. I think his choice of Ryan as VP cemented that. I think Ryan will run the Presidency as much as Cheney did. He's got the support in Congress. The only hope against that is if the Democrats keep the Senate, and if they refuse to deal with the Republicans with the same tenacity that the Republicans refused to work with Obama. But I wouldn't hold my breath for that. There are Democrats from red states in the Senate, who might not want to take the chance of crossing the Republicans, assuming they hold the White House and the House.
    I think you'll see the Ryan budget pass, pretty quickly -- if Romney wins.
    I read about this in a great piece by Jonathan Chait at New York Magazine.
    The flipside is also true. Even if Obama loses both houses of Congress, his veto power will be all he'll need to radically rewrite the budget in his own image, because of the wonderful "fiscal cliff" that's coming up.
    In order to raise taxes and drastically cut the military budget (and profits to the defense industry, a Repulbican patron), he has to do exactly nothing. Just kick back and watch the Republicans set their hair on fire. It'll be a thing to behold. Can Obama resist making a deal with them for a while, just for the fun of watching them get a dose of their own tactics?
    This cliff is nowhere near as dangerous as the one the Repubs pushed us to the brink of in August 2011. It's a good time to call their bluff. Especially after winning the election he wasn't supposed to win. :-)
    I'm not saying either scenario plays out, but I'm okay with either.
      1. We get what we deserve.
      2. The Repubs get what they deserve.
  Do you love Silicon Valley
    I'm writing this from Mountain View, in the heart of Silicon Valley.
    I first came here in 1979. I drove a beat-up old van from Madison. I went via Eugene, where I had a friend from school, and drove down the coastal route. The brakes on the van failed, on El Camino, near Castro St. That's how I ended up staying at a huge campus-like temporary apartment community before moving to the hills outside Los Gatos.
    I had mixed feelings about the Valley then. It was a burn-out, everyone worked all the time, or so it seemed. It wasn't like school where there was a mix of fun and work. And I ended up staying until 2003, almost 25 years. There were lots of ups and downs. It didn't take long to rise to the top, that was the good thing. But there wasn't much substance to the place. Sometimes I wonder if I wouldn't have done better climbing ladders in a comfortable east coast job. Might have left me more plugged-in at the age of 57, which is where I am now.
    I feel a lot of resentment from this place. I don't think they like me -- at all. I have what have become extreme ideas, but which in the beginning were the norm. That computers are tools of self-expression. That users are supremely important. When I came here I doubt if anyone had thought of running an ad on a computer screen as a way of supporting development. That didn't come until much later, after a few booms and busts.
    These days when a young tech person comes here, there's all kinds of structures that didn't exist when I arrived. There were angel investors and VCs, but nothing like the various incubators that take applications and have "classes" and graduates. I'm sure I would have liked those, but I wonder if they would have taken me in.
    I recently met a writer-in-residence at a famous university who said I should have no trouble landing a job in academia teaching young people how to do what I do. I encouraged her to give it a try at her school. Nothing happened. For whatever reason, I doubt if I would now be accepted in these programs. Yet, if I look back at my career, much of it right here in the Valley, it seems something would have been lost. Which is how I feel about my contributions now. Lots of missed opportunities. And maybe that's because the world isn't as open as it once was, and maybe that was the strength of Silicon Valley that has been lost. In 1979 there was a way for me to get involved.
    So I put this question out there, esp to young people who feel brilliant and driven to create real tools for personal expression, if there are any -- do you love this place? If not, where do you go? When I was young, this place was like Memphis or Nashville for country musicians, or Hollywood for actors or screen writers. Do you feel drawn to, and love for, Silicon Valley?
  Let's call them users
    Every decade or so this question comes up. Why do we use that awful U-word to describe our users. It's hard to even formulate the question without sounding stupid. And every time the discussion comes up, it lasts a while before everyone gives up because there really aren't any better words, and this is the word everyone uses so what are you going to do.
    Hey I called my second company UserLand Software, because I wanted to be clear who we were focused on. The idea was we would make a wonderful playground that we, as users, would love to er ahem -- use. And we'd make it easy enough to develop apps inside the land that developers and users would find they became the same people. Software made by users for users. This was a good idea, I felt.
    Words are like formats. You could try to come up with a better version of RSS, for example -- but the old one won't go away, so now you have two formats where once there was just one. That's why I say that two ways to do something is worse than one way, no matter how much better the second way is than the first. It's like taking features out of products -- you really can't do it. The users will eventually make you put it back (that is if you pay any attention to them at all).
    So rather than run away from the U-word (toward what exactly?) I decided to embrace it, fully -- and name the company UserLand. The idea caught on even if the company ultimately didn't make it.
    The answer is to love those users so much that they don't mind being called users. That's an art a lot of tech companies have yet to master.
  How to kick Twitter addiction
    Last night, a couple of hours before the debate, all of a sudden Twitter was radically transformed on my iPad. Previously it had appeared exactly as if I were accessing it on my desktop or laptop. This is as it should be, because the iPad has a full-size screen. And the compromises that designers make for "mobile" websites tend to fit much smaller screens, like an iPhone or Android smartphone.
    One might argue that this design is better than the full Twitter website, but that's unimportant, because no one asked me if I wanted a radical change, especially at a time like this -- just before a historic matchup that was going to be followed by all my friends on Twitter, in real-time, in a couple of hours.
    There was no way around it, and no time to get adjusted. I didn't know how to use this interface. I'd click on things and get unpredictable responses from the software. All of a sudden, software that I had mastered was foreign to me. I had become a newbie, in an instant, because of a bug, or some product committee at Twitter, or perhaps the CEO of the company. Someone decided that I would have to adjust, right now, with no warning, and no choice.
    This is an awful way to do this. And it's even worse than the way Twitter treats developers (I know, since I am a developer as well as a user).
    The bright side is that I realize that I am addicted to Twitter, and the feelings I have about this are the same feelings I had when I was forced to quit smoking a few years ago. My skin feels itchy. My mind can't focus. I keep thinking "Just one more tweet, one more, and I'll be fine."
    So I suppose I have to thank the folks at Twitter for helping me see how hopelessly addicted I am. And maybe, instead of making peace with this awful interface, I'll use it as a way to remind myself that this is not good. As if perhaps someone had replaced my Marlboro Lights with a menthol cigarette like Kool or Salem. Yuck. Tastes bad. Oh that's right this isn't good for me. Maybe it's time to quit?
    BTW, the debate was excellent. I thought the President was fantastic. He told Romney that his bullshit is bullshit. Which made Romney nervous and he said some things he probably wishes he hadn't said. Finally someone stood up to the bully. Had I been able to tweet effectively this is basically what I would have said.
  The new River tab on Scripting
    Today there is a new tab on the Scripting News home page. Screen shot.
    I've felt for a long time that every serious news organization and blog should have a river associated with their publication. The river would include the news sources that the publication "reads" -- to give their readers a sense of the community they both belong to and the community they define.
    For example, a blog about a town would include a river of all the bloggers who are active in that town. This is a vital resource for the editorial people who write for the pub, but it also gives access to everyone. The readers get to read all the news sources, and the news sources get to read each other. Very quickly, probably instantaneously, all these different boxes, sources, readers, reporters merge into one, because truthfully it's more like that every day. The imaginary line that separates a columnist from a voter from a mayor is more or less non-existent, in a day when mayors have blogs, and citizens become mayors.
    This is the world envisioned by at least some of the founders of the United States. That the people would form the government, and that the press would cover everything, without regard to status. The tendency of cliques and ladders to form would be counteracted by new entrants in all the fields, and lower barriers to entry. This is what democratization of media looks like. It's why I put my collection of rivers on a site called Media Hackers. Because that's what all this is doing, hacking media, and turning it into something new, given the new realities of the technology we now use to publish and to read.
    Rivers are revolutionary because they are flat. The ideal level playing field. I read NakedJen and Doc Searls along with the New York Times and whitehouse.gov. And Jon Chait, David Frum, Felix Salmon and Matt Taibbi. I love them all because they send me fresh ideas that get me thinking. And I love that I can share all that with you, the lovely people who read my humble blog.
    The river on Scripting News home page is a collection of feeds that I read to be inspired and to keep informed. They reflect my interests, which is appropriate because it is my blog. It helps you know who influences me, and I'm always open to adding more feeds to my river.
    My feeling is that if you read my blog you should also read my river.
    I think the more innovative sites should get on board right away. I have pitched FastCompany and Wired on doing this. Technology Review at MIT has written glowingly of the idea of rivers of news, how about putting one together for your community? BerkeleySide, why not put a river of Berkeley bloggers on your site?
    I am available to help any serious publication get started. We have the software, and the interest. And the community of users gathered around my site, ever-more-active, are zealots when it comes to spreading the gospel! :-)
    PS: Thanks to Dody Gunawinata, a developer in Cairo, for helping get the flash out of my rivers. I'm still very much a Javascript newbie, and need help getting stuff like this to work smoothly.
  California trip
    I can't remember my last trip to California.
    That's why it's time to spend a few days in Silicon Valley.
    My trip begins on Wednesday and I return on Sunday. I'll be staying in Palo Alto and have one event on my calendar, the YCombinator Startup School at Stanford on Saturday. I'm not speaking or anything, just going to sit in the audience and listen.
    Let's see how things have changed in the valley of tech. :-)
  Obama's easy sell
    For whatever reason, President Obama, has until now refused to sell.
    It may be a little late to teach him salesmanship, but maybe that's what they're doing in his debate prep before the second debate tomorrow at Hoftstra.
    The pitch is pretty easy:
      1. If you elect me to a second term, ObamaCare will be deployed and finally after a hugely long struggle, the United States will have the beginnings of health reform. It's not nearly everything we need to do, that will be something for a future president to tackle. For now, I promise to implement it. And that's a promise I can keep even with an obstructionist opposition party with a majority in the House.
      2. In my first term we wound down the war in Iraq, and we're winding down the war in Afghanistan. I get how weary we all are of war. My opponent, a nice man for sure, will imho get us into another war in the Middle East, with another crazy country, Iran -- and this one, like the other two, will be hard to get us out of. We're probably looking at another 10 or 20 years before all this war is over. Another war in the Middle East is not what we want. I think we can manage this one without sending Americans in to fight and without bombing Iran. I think we can work this politically and economically, with the cooperation of our allies and even our adversaries. No one outside of a few crazy countries wants to see Iran with nuclear weapons.
      3. Reproductive choices will remain with the people whose lives and bodies it concerns. None of us like abortion, but we have different views on what the correct moral choice is. As long as there is no consensus, and believe me there is not, we must stay with things as they are. You have to listen carefully to my opponent's words on this one. He says he won't pass legislation. But he also says he like Supreme Court judges like the ones who are prepared to overturn Roe v Wade. That means it's pretty likely if you elect him, that there will be a very serious changes to abortion rights.
    There you have three totally pragmatic reasons why you should re-elect the President. You may not like the way he looks, you may think (incorrectly) that he's a radical leftist. You may have heard (again incorrectly) that he was not born in the US. But if you think you might get sick, and if you're weary of war, and if you might ever have a family member with an unwanted pregnancy, you really have to vote for Obama.
    PS: I am an independent, I voted for Obama in 2008 and will vote for him this year. I've given his campaign $400 so far. However, I have still voted Republican more times than Democrat. So if you have a response to this post, I would appreciate if you took all this into account, and don't respond as if you're on Fox News and I'm one of the "liberals" they talk about. Thanks.
  Dark social web history
    I read Alexis Madrigal's piece about the Dark Web with a bit of sadness, in a way -- that so much time had passed with so much history being rewritten, and it's happening again. Not due to any malice, I'm sure. We all have the experiences we have.
    Madrigal was a teen during the huge initial growth of the web, and was an instant messenger, chatroom, ICQ and Usenet person. But in the blogging world, which was the precedent for Twitter and Facebook, we were constantly developing ways to surface the new and interesting content. Blogrolls, weblogs.com, RSS were all about that. And Live Journal had the social features of Facebook long before Facebook.
    Just saying I agree with Madrigal, but we're still waiting for a serious history of this stuff to be written so we're not all blind men looking at the elephant and discovering alternate theories about how it all came to be based on looking at this part or that.
  In 2016, a two-screen debate
    In four years, let's have a debate where the candidates may if they want have a computer and access to the Internet. This would allow the candidates to post pointers to things that viewers could read while listening to the debate.
    By then most of us will be two-screen TV watchers. Why not let the debate happen on the second screen as well.
    I know this will seem like a radical idea, but in 2008 they were still time-delaying debates so people on the west coast saw them three hours after the east coast. There were probably just a few thousand people commenting on the debates in real-time. Now, what a difference. We've covered a lot of distance in just four years.
  He called the President 'boy'
    Just tuned into a little of the Sunday morning news discussion on various networks. The big issue seems to be whether or not VP Biden was disrespectful of Congressman Ryan in the Wednesday debate.
    Yes he was. But I haven't forgotten what Mitt Romney said to President Obama. He said the President is like a boy who doesn't tell the truth.
    "Look, I've got five boys. I'm used to people saying something that's not always true, but just keep on repeating it and ultimately hoping I'll believe it."
    He called the President 'boy' -- to his face.
    With 70 million witnesses.
    There really isn't anything more offensive for a white man to say to a black man.
    Watch the video a few times. I think this was far more outrageous than anything he said at the 47 percent dinner in May.
    People complain about t-shirts at rallies worn by Romney fans. But please, this was said by the candidate himself. It didn't seem spontaneous or off-the-cuff.
    After the debate Ann Romney called the President a child too.
    This isn't an accident, these are strategies. Biden's condescension relative to Ryan was a response.
    You wanted acting in debates, you're getting it. But come on, there are two sets of actors here.
  AT&T will turn its customers in
    This in TorrentFreak about AT&T and other ISPs turning their customers over to the RIAA and MPAA for accessing certain sites while using their service.
    It's obvious to anyone with any appreciation of 20th century history that this is a first step which will have the ISPs cooperating with other multinational corporations to control what we do online.
    Oh it's just the Internet, not freedom. But these days how much freedom can you enjoy without Internet access?
    This question came up in my first year at Harvard, when the RIAA convinced the provost to suspend several students who they believed were sharing music with other students. They cut the students off from Internet access for a year. In 2003, this was considered too onerous, that it was equivalent to expelling them from school. We changed our mind, a good result. Now in 2012, those same students are fully adult, in the workforce, and suspending their Internet access is like expelling them from life itself.
    You think it will stop with music and film piracy? Heh.
    First they came for the communists, and I didn't speak out because I wasn't a communist.
    Ask not what the Internet can do for you, ask what you can do for the Internet.
    See also: Violate copyright? No Facebook for you!
  My blue iPod Touch is beautiful
    I didn't love any of my earlier iPods or iPhones -- but this one is lovely.
    It takes very nice pictures. Click on the thumbs below to view the full-size picture.
    It's thin and light. I can hold it in front of my eyes while lying down without any strain. So it's great for watching movies. I'm watching a Frontline special about the choice between Obama and Romney. It's in HD, and the iPod does a great job with HD video.
    The screen is large enough to read and write. My eyes aren't so great. So I haven't been able to use earlier iPhones for email or reading web sites. Maybe in an emergency. But I much prefer to use my iPad -- more screen real estate. But this one is different. I set up all my apps there, and used them -- and I think I will continue to do so.
    I know other people love to look at and hold their iDevices, but I've never felt that way -- until this one. It really is beautiful and light. The five years of work on this product really show. It feels like it's the size of one of the smaller iThings, but it has all the power of an iPhone, minus the phone (which I truly do not need).
    When I travel I will now have four computers with me:
      1. My iPad with LTE.
      2. My Macbook Air.
      3. My Nexus Whatever (I forget what model it is).
      4. My iPod Touch, blue.
    It was only $299 plus tax. I feel like it was a total bargain.
    I thought at first that the earbuds would work in my ears, but not when I'm walking. They still fall out every few steps. I think when my ears warm up they cause the buds to slip out. So far the only buds that work for me are the $8 Sony's. So the Apple buds go into my upper-right desk drawer along with all my other unused Apple stuffff.
    I also like that Apple got me to buy something that wasn't a replacement for something I already had. Some people like buying shoes. I used to like buying stereo equipment.
    Finally, click the thumb below to see a full-size pic of the iPod itself.
  My linkblog has an archive
    The RSS feed for my linkblog, which goes back to December 2010, has a feature that I think no other RSS feed has (or Atom for that matter). Not only does it have an archive, but the feed itself describes the archive. It contains enough information so you could easily write a script that downloads all the content of my linkblog, in RSS.
    1. If you look in the feed, look for the <microblog:archive> element. Here's a screen shot.
    2. I wrote a script that downloads the linkblog archive in full. Here's a text file containing the script. Here's the script as an OPML file, and as a .ftsc file. It's written in UserTalk, but could easily be converted to other scripting languages.
    2a. For fun, I pasted the script into the outline for this blog post. Let's see if it works! :-)
          Courier
          14px
          false
          115%
      on downloadLinkblogArchive (urlFeed, folder)
        Changes
          10/13/12; 12:38:32 PM by DW
            Download a linkblog that has an archive element at the top leve.
              http://threads2.scripting.com/2012/october/myLinkblogHasAnArchive
        local (xmltext = tcp.httpreadurl (urlfeed, 3, false))
        xml.compile (xmltext, @xstruct)
        scratchpad.xstruct = xstruct
        local (adrrss = xml.getaddress (@xstruct, "rss"))
        local (adrchannel = xml.getaddress (adrrss, "channel"))
        local (adrarchive = xml.getaddress (adrchannel, "archive"))
        local (urlarchive = xml.getvalue (adrarchive, "url"))
        local (fname = xml.getvalue (adrarchive, "filename"))
        on getdate (name)
          local (s = xml.getvalue (adrarchive, name))
          return (date.set (string.nthfield (s, "-", 3), string.nthfield (s, "-", 2), string.nthfield (s, "-", 1), 0, 0, 0))
        local (theday = getdate ("startDay"), endday = getdate ("endDay"))
        loop
          local (urlday = urlarchive + file.getdatepath ("/", theday) + fname)
          local (fday = folder + file.getdatepath (file.getpathchar (), theday, false) + ".xml")
          try
            local (xmltext = tcp.httpreadurl (urlday, 3, false))
            file.surefilepath (fday) //make sure all folders in path exist
            file.writewholefile (fday, xmltext)
            bundle //set mod and creation dates
              local (xstruct, adrrss, adrchannel)
              xml.compile (xmltext, @xstruct)
              adrrss = xml.getaddress (@xstruct, "rss")
              adrchannel = xml.getaddress (adrrss, "channel")
              file.setcreated (fday, date (xml.getvalue (adrchannel, "pubDate")))
              file.setmodified (fday, date (xml.getvalue (adrchannel, "lastBuildDate")))
            msg (fday)
          theday = date.tomorrow (theday)
          if theday > endday
            break
      bundle //test code
        downloadLinkblogArchive ("http://links.scripting.com/rss.xml", "Ohio:mylinkblog:")
    3. I ran the script, it created a folder. Here's a screen shot of the folder, and the folder itself as a zip archive.
    4. Here are the docs for the archive element.
    Hopefully that covers all the bases.
  Radio2 volunteers
    From time to time I get questions from people who want to set up Radio2 servers who are having trouble, are highly motivated, but it really isn't something they should do. I'm learning that running a server, like a lot of things, requires a temperment that most people don't have -- no matter how much they may want to do it. But it would be great if these people had Radio2 accounts somewhere. Then we could develop utilities to download their archives locally. This is a lovely little project I've been meaning to get to. If we had some users who needed it, it would actually make it easier to write.
    Anyway, all this is preamble to this question -- If you're already running a Radio2 server, would you be willing to let someone else virtually crash on your couch? Radio servers probably can host several hundred users, if not more. It's a pretty lightweight server app.
    Anyway, reply here with a comment if you already have a server and are willing to volunteer for this.
    I think it can be a good experience for everyone.
  New iPod Touch shipping?
    I find myself wanting to buy a new iPod Touch.
    The blue one of course.
    I wonder if it's showing up at retail yet?
  Catching up on OPML & RSS stuff
    Lots of things happening in the Land of OPML these days.
    1. At first I thought I wouldn't be able to provide full text descriptions and good titles to Google Reader people. But as often happens, after a night's sleep, and with the conversations with readers fresh in my mind, I figured out how to, step by step get there.
    2. Then last night, just before the debate, I had a bit of time, and wanted to see if I couldn't get a link to the OPML itself into the RSS feed. This is something I had working in the previous version of the feed.
    3. It proved a little difficult, so then I realized I could do something even better -- I could put the OPML itself right in the RSS feed. That way, if anyone wanted to provide a truly high fidelity view of the content of my blog, including the attributes that come with the OPML, and the full structure of the outlines, well, they wouldn't even have to read a file. So I did it. And it works.
      http://static.scripting.com/rss.xml
    4. Microliner was released. Quite a few people tried it. Everyone seems to like it so far. I find it fascinating. We can have a structured conversation that's something like the Instant Outliner and something like Twitter, but really not like anything I've seen yet. So I want to get a better feel for it, so today I'm going to add a community feature.
    5. There was a bit of drama on Wednesday night when it looked like Microliner had been shut off. But it turns out to have been a coincidence, that it was the same day that Twitter shut off some of the long-deprecated URLs in their REST interface. Quite a few other developers had to scramble to get their apps back online (we tend to forget about the code we wrote five years ago, esp if it continues to work without problems, as our Twitter code did).
    6. As the dust was settling on this, I wondered why there isn't a brain-dead simple machine image I could set up that does a subset of what Twitter's API does, reliably, fast, and with no terms and conditions. It could at least serve as a sandbox for testing apps before they go live. And it might turn into a coral reef. I sent an email to Dan MacTough, who has become fluent in node.js, to ask him to have a look. By writing this, I'm inviting all readers of this site to think about it, and maybe do it.
      It also occurred to me that Twitter might want to sponsor the work. They've been very active in open source, and it would be a great way to show that they love the wild innovation of the open Internet. It might be a smart way to zig to their own zag. :-)
      BTW, it's worth mentioning that the Bootstrap Toolkit, which came out of Twitter, and now is open source, came out early enough in the development process for the worldoutline software that we were able to get it in, at a very basic level. Every page rendered by the worldoutline, by default has the full toolkit available to it. That can lead to some pretty nice serendipity.
    7. If you can do it with tent.io, great.
    8. I'm still waiting for one of the alternate-Twitterverses to hook into my linkblog feed. The first one that does gets my full link flow, which is a nice little first step in what could be a wonderful bootstrap. It's my proposal to all developers for how I'd like to work with you. It's just RSS with a cloud element. You can even do it without using the cloud info (that's just for realtime-ness).
    Having a lot of fun. Finally we're getting some outliner users. That's a magic ingredient. Outliner people are smart and fair-minded, and love to think. Just the kind of users we like. :-)
    One more thing that's worth saying every so often, esp since President Kennedy came up in the debate last night. Ask not what the Internet can do for you, ask what you can do for the Internet. Really. It's good for you. :-)
  Mr President, grow a pair
    We all saw the debt-ceiling spectacle in the summer of 2011. The Republicans in Congress played an incredibly dangerous game of Chicken with the President. If either of them blinked at the wrong moment, the casualty would be American dominance of the world's financial system.
    Most Americans, and I would bet a lot of our representatitves, don't understand that it's not so much our military that gives us power around the world, rather it's the fact that our currency, the dollar, is the safe haven for all value, world-wide. If either the President or the Congress dropped the ball, that would have shattered, and we would stop being the exceptional country, and all kinds of bills would come due. Not for future generations -- right now.
    I was appalled when I saw the President take the 14th Amendment off the table early in the process. If you recall, the amendment contains a provision that says that the validity of the US debt will not be questioned. Clearly, there was no point debating whether we would honor our obligation. The Republicans can whine all they want. If they want to have an impeachment, the famously coool President would just look into the camera and say he was doing what the Constitution told him to do, and the Congress should get on board. They would still have to get the votes of 2/3 of the Senate, and it was controlled by Democrats, so they can jump up and down all they want, nothing was going to change.
    Instead, our dreamy-eyed President decided to negotiate with them! He chose brinksmanship when we should have had some ballsy leader ship.
    That's why his numbers dropped when he did the same damned thing in last week's debate. We were reminded why this President hasn't yet got the message. The Republicans are dicks. You can't deal with people like that as if they would respond to reason. Romney made that clear from the outset. This debate should have been seen by the President as an opportunity to get something straight.
    "I am the fucking President of the fucking United States, and if you don't like that, fuck you."
    Luckily there's still time for him to get a clue.
    This is not a negotiation with Congress or the Republicans, Mr. President. You are negotiating with your employers, the people of the United States of America. If this election were being held in August 2011, you would have lost. It's time for you to get the message, that we will not accept this kind of leadership in the future.
    You have my vote. And my money. But I'm glad that enough of my fellow Americans were willing to tell a pollster that you're too wimpy to be President. So maybe you'll get a clue and maybe in your second term we can get a bunch more stuff done. Or at least Washington will be a bit more quiet and let us get on with our lives, without having everything fall apart for no good reason.
  Unbreaking our Twitter
    We got hit by a wave of deprecation on Twitter yesterday.
    First thing that happened (or so it appeared) is that Microliner stopped working. Since yesterday was rollout day for Microliner, it seemed that this was a response from Twitter to the edgy-ness of the app. We do display people's tweets as lines in an outline. But, we figured that maybe they'd see how interesting this project is and let it keep running. We're not trying to steal anything from them. The tweets were in response to ones generated by Microliner. So it's not as if we're trying to replace Twitter. But that was worth a shrug -- okay -- they don't want us to do it, so be it.
    But later, Radio2 stopped working. That's much more serious because it's mission-critical. We use that software to keep an archive of everything we post to Twitter without having to depend on Twitter to provide one (they don't at this time). The only alternative would be to do all our tweeting inside Twitter. That would mean all my other uses for my linkblog would go away. Since that's a big part of the reason I do it, well -- there's no choice -- I would stop using Twitter.
    But it turns out that none of this actually happened. Instead it was an unlikely coincidence. The very day that Microliner was released was also the day they turned off some parts of the API. I admit I wasn't paying attention to their deprecations. Figuring I'd cross the bridge when I came to it. If they shut us off that way, I'd decide at that time if I wanted to do the work to get it all working again. I really disapprove of platform vendors doing this. I think there are so many more of us than them, that they should stay compatible. But I don't get a say in this. And unless you work at Twitter, Inc, you don't either.
    To Microliner users, many of whom are OPML newbies, to get the latest bits, choose Update opml.root from the File menu. That should get it working again for you.
    Update: Here's the worknote that outlines the details. I was able to get Radio2 and Microliner working again. Yehi! :-)
    Update #2: I almost thanked Twitter. But that would be too weird.
  Test post for Google Reader readers
    The first version of my app that re-links my CMS with full content feeds had a serious encoding bug.
    This post has a bunch of links to stuff. When you click the links, do they work?
    That is, when you see this post in Google Reader. (I know it works in the browser.)
    Here's a nice picture! Can you see it?
    And a little bold and italic text. Does it look bold and italic?
    If you want to help out, come to the threads site and drop in a comment.
  A reprieve for Google Reader readers
    I hate to hear the stories of readers who will muddle along and keep reading even though they wish there was a way to get the full text of the stories in their choice of RSS tools.
    To be clear, the ones who threaten me can go now -- this is a labor of love over here, there's no money involved. You can be bitter or angry with me for not pleasing you, but it only makes me wish you'd go away, not that there was some way I could serve you better.
    Anyway -- I figured out how I could patch up the feed after the fact, without unnecessarily intertwining software that I'm desperately trying to decouple. The saving grace was that each of my stories is also available in OPML. So I did what Google Reader could and never will do -- I get the OPML and converted it to HTML and replace the feed item description with that text. After creating a title from the description.
    Not a horrible klooge, and as I said it doesn't involve one piece of software knowing anything about the other, which was the goal. Cost -- 1/2 day -- so far. Let's see if it stays that small an investment. :-)
  Outline your Twitter conversations
    I just released a tool called Microliner that lets you outline your conversations on Twitter.
    I don't think anyone has ever had a tool like this, so I'd better explain how it works.
    1. Open up the Microliner Workspace window. Enter an idea. 140 characters or less, please. :-)
    2. Click the Tweet button. It goes out to all your followers on Twitter.
    3. Wait a minute or so. Click the Replies button. Microliner calls Twitter and gets the replies, and arranges them under the messages they are in response to.
    4. You can then reply to the replies, and so on. Once you get going, you can participate in a dozen conversations at once, and not lose track of where you are or who you're conversing with. It really works.
    The tool is available now: http://microliner.opml.org/.
    I thought I was done developing on Twitter as a platform, and then I get an idea like this, and I have to do it, whether or not its advisable. :-)
  To Google Reader readers
        135%
    As you may know, there's been a major redesign of the Scripting News home page. But, you may not be able to see that this is part of a much bigger change in the way I do content management, one which is being modernized to fit into the new realtime flow of links, pictures, podcasts, etc facilitated by Twitter, and what I hope will be a thriving ecosystem of feed-like apps that run outside of Twitter.
    Things are changing, not just here but everywhere. And I'm moving quickly, and as this happens things break.
    Yesterday I posted three items to my feed that were just titles. This was a bug, in some provisional software that patched the new system to the old system. I'm not going to fix the bug because there's going to be a new way to do the feed, and I'm just one person programming here, and I can't afford the time to maintain provisional code. I have to be working on the main line.
    And here we have a choice -- continue to compromise for people who use Google Reader, which is a very fussy piece of software that doesn't play by the rules of RSS 2.0, or break Google Reader, just for this feed -- and do things the way the Twitterverse works, which imho is also the right way to do things. Obviously, given the way I phrased that, I'm going the way I feel is right.
    The question is this -- must feed items have titles?
    The answer is clearly no. No, because the RSS 2.0 spec says so and no because Twitter has built a wonderful ecosystem of communication around the idea that posts can be short enough to be titles. How could you require a title to have a title? It would be ridiculous.
    I already have a great linkblogging tool called Radio2 that takes blogpost-like items and turns them into an RSS 2.0 feed of Twitter-able items. It seems perfectly reasonable that Google Reader could adapt to make sense out of these feeds. It's just one piece of software. But they don't move, and that gives others a tough choice. To move anyway, knowing people who use Google Reader will be left behind, or continue to provide content as if Google Reader was the only way people were consuming it, when that isn't even close to being true anymore.
    I hate it when users are caught in the middle like this. You guys did nothing wrong other than use a piece of software that works for you. And of course since you want to read my site, I think that's fantastic. Maybe there will be some compromise possible, a way to accomodate everyone without making me, just one person, do the work that a big company like Google should be doing to support you, people who use their software. But right now that just can't happen.
    You will continue to get links to my stories in your input stream, I hope. But the full text will not be there. You can click the link to read them on my site, or skip it, or unsubscribe. And I'm sorry to be parting in this way, but we have to move forward, and it looks to me very much like Google Reader is behind us now.
    Here's how my new system works.
      1. I created a new Radio2 category called Scripting News.
      2. When I want an item to appear in the Scripting News feed, I just check the box in the category list.
      3. I click Post. When I do that, a bunch of processes are set in motion, including a callback script running on my server that copies the category feed to the location on S3 of the Scripting News feed, and pings our cloud server to tell it that we updated. It in turn notifies all services that have requested updates, and they read the feed. All this happens in a couple of seconds, at most.
        An aside: One of the benefits of this switch is that all the effort that's been poured into feeds on Radio2 in the last couple of years now accrues to Scripting News. The feed not only has archives, but the archive is described in the feed itself, so apps can easily find it. Podcasting isn't an afterthought, it's fully supported, and not hacked in. And there's so much more.
      4. One of those agents cross-posts to Twitter. That's how you see the link on Twitter, and it's why my content, that lives outside Twitter, is archived separately. I'm not waiting for Twitter to give me access to my links, since I never gave it up to them.
    This is also consistent with the philosophy of distributing pointers to the content instead of the content itself. That way there is a single archive for it, one authoritative copy of each bit, even though it can be referenced in many places.
    I've never been a fan of full content in feeds. I know some people feel it's the only way to go, but I don't agree, and never have.
  New scripting.com features
    Two new features on Monday evening.
    1. There's a new Archive tab. It links to the monthly archive pages back to April 1997.
    2. Now each tab has its own URL. So if you're coming to the site for the links, you can bookmark that tab and go there directly. And there may be additional tabs in the future that you will want to bookmark.
    Sometimes clicking on a tab causes a flash. If you have an idea what might cause that please leave a comment. Thanks.
    Thanks again to Bootstrap for the great Javascript library.
  They taught outlining wrong
    In school they taught us to outline first, then write from the outline. It's an ideal no one achieves, because it's impossible to have the essay arrive in finished form in our mind before we start writing. It doesn't work that way.
    Instead we wrote the paper first, then the outline.
    And that was correct, because it was the only way that worked. But it didn't get us much more than a slide show presentation of our work. It's different when you have a structure editor, an outliner. Because you can revise both the text and its organization after the initial burst of writing.
    Here's how I do it today, in my outliner. I write from top to bottom. Then I review. If I find structure, I add it.
    Then I have a structure to work with, I add more ideas become apparent, more things I have to record, to tell the reader. The order might change. The process of each little project is to iterate both the work product and the narration until I feel I'm ready to move on to the next thing.
    Of course I might start two or more things at the same time. For example I have two worknotes open now, and this blog post.
    In a blog post I play with order more than structure. They are meant to be read from top to bottom, as a story.
    But worknotes offer different things to different people. I write them for today's users and hopefully tomorrow's too. But I also write them for developers, including myself, who will continue to work on the code behind the notes. I find it very useful to be able to open my notes from a previous project, while working on something related, and find it all neatly organized, so I can skip right to the part that's relevent to me.
    I thought it would be interesting to take a screen shot of my worknotes outline so you can see what projects in various states of completion look like. At the same time here's one of my blog outline. See how they're different?
    Outlining works on a computer, as long as you revise. It doesn't work on paper because revision, especially of structure, is too hard.
  I need grad students
    Please, this is just a blog post, not an ad. I'm just writing aspirationally. Thinking out loud. You're welcome to listen, but do not feel compelled to act. That would be wrong. However if you're sure you know of a school that could do this, or even another kind of organization, please don't be shy.
    A long time ago, a colleague of mine at Personal Software explained that I do software development as an academic researcher would.
    It's still true, but I don't do it in an academic context. And that context is rapidly disappearing in academia, where so many students are now studying computer science not as a way to further the art, but rather to start something entrepreneurial and get rich.
    And there's nothing wrong with that. In some sense, I did that too -- when I was younger. I thought making millions was the way to get validation for my work. My family and the society I grew up in raised me to see things that way. And I was successful, and as a result have been able to work on what I wanted to for my whole career. Pretty good.
    Now it's time to take what I've learned and pass it on. There's a huge base of software, most of it open source, that reflects what I've learned. Not just as ideas, but as working code. And programming practices that are, imho, pretty far in advance of what's being done elsewhere. The only problem is, I'm not attracting the students I need to help build something substantial and long-lasting out of it.
    I've outlined in the past what I hoped for in terms of an ideal environment, from the point of view of the institution. Now I realize that I don't need the institution as much as I need the students. And I can't work with beginning programmers. I'm looking for people who have spend at least a few years learning the basics, stumbling, falling and getting up again. What I have to offer is the equivalent of an actor's studio, for people with extreme talent and drive, to be creative making software. You might get rich from what you learn, but that shouldn't be the point.
    Again, as with the previous piece this is not an ad, rather than an aspirational piece. Not looking for advice or "solutions" -- but if you have a compatible goal, I'd welcome hearing from you. Not guaranteeing anything, but I will listen.
  Update on OPML Comments
    In early Sept we started working on a new role for the OPML Editor in web content -- as a comment creation and editing tool. It's a different way of doing it, and long-term I don't even think it'll be seen as comments.
    Now there's an official doc that explains in a small number of steps how to get going. It takes a couple of minutes. Almost at the threshold of a mass-relevant blogging tool. Getting there.
    There are more steps coming, hopefully pretty soon.
    And if you're a web architecture kind of person, here's a comment I wrote the other day in response to some questions of my longtime programming buddy, Chuck Shotton. There's some pretty big dreams about how content should flow that have been realized.
    When Twitter vanished as a possible platform about three years ago, I got busy building what I really wanted. I think in the end it'll seem that Twitter did us a favor by kicking us out of the nest, even though it didn't feel too good at the time.
    We're still diggin!
    Yes indeed. :-)
  A funny thing about outliners
    An idea that might be foreign to people who write in text editors.
    You can use an outliner to write multiple documents.
    Try creating a headline called My Diary.
    Then every day, add a subhead with the day's date.
    And under that write a paragraph about something you learned or did that day.
    Do it for a few days until the strangeness wears off.
    Does this make sense?
    Here's a screen shot of my "worknotes" diary, which is one level deeper.
    You can think of every major head under a day as a separate document.
    In fact the CMS sees it that way. So I have one document which in turn contains many documents. Actually thousands!
    For many people this will be a new way of thinking about writing.
  Romney cowardice
    When this election is over, we're going to ask the Republicans to apologize to every American for the disrespect they've shown to all of us by trying to make this election an appeal to race hate.
    They can make all the childish excuses they want, but as adults, we understand what they're doing. Even on the debate stage, when Romney talked to the President of the United States as if he was one of his children, and said it exactly that way.
    You know, of all the nasty shit Romney said in the 47 percent thing, the worst thing he said was this: "I'll never convince them that they should take personal responsibility and care for their lives."
    That's so self-important, even for a President, to think that somehow it's up to him to convince the rest of us to do anything, much less such personally offensive and outrageously condescending, patronizing, arrogant, irrelevent, egotistic ideas. Imagine if Obama had be caught saying something like that. The hooting would never stop.
    It's up to us, Mr. Romney, to convince you to slither back into the hole you crawled out of. You sorry excuse for an American. Get a real job. Create something. Do something real with your life. How can I convince you to take personal responsibilty for the nasty shit you say, Mr. Romney.
    BTW, now that he says it was totally wrong, let's find out exactly what was wrong with it -- line by line. Each statement in that rant.
  Compromising Obama
    I hated watching last night's debate. Not because "Obama Lost" but rather than being inspired, as some political discourse can leave you (e.g. Bill Clinton's speeches at the last three DNCs for example), it left me the opposite of inspired -- without hope. Hopeless.
    I imagine that the Republicans who had fought with the President behind closed doors know something about him that the rest of us don't. That when cornered, he turns into a bowl of jello. The hemming and hawing increase, and he starts saying idiotic things like "I suspect the Governor and I agree on this." While his mortal enemy is lying, he nods and smiles. Inside something bad is happening with the President, and it's visible on the outside.
    So they paint him as an apologist. At first we think it's just talk for the Repub base, but they know that come the debate they are going to be able to get the President to appear to apologize. All that being so agreeable, maybe it's Stockholm Syndrome. And the Republicans are going to keep pushing him. Romney is not inept like McCain, who Obama aced. Nor is he Hillary Clinton, with whom Obama managed pouty sort of dominance.
    Romney is going to bully the President, and it's up to the President to grow a pair and bully back. We learned something I didn't want to know last night. And we'll learn something else at the next debate, whether the President has friends who will kick his butt.
    And btw, maybe John Kerry wasn't the best person to use as a stand-in for Romney. I wish Coach Walsh was alive to help out here (though I suspect he was a Republican). Maybe Bill Clinton would be a good coach for Obama? Just throwing things out there.
  The drama of debate
    Tonight's debate will be where alternate realities meet up.
    Unlike the Repub debates which were all the same flavor of crazy, this one may have two people trying to live in our world, and a third who pretends the Republican reality actually exists.
  Scripting.com redesign
    I've been working up to this for a few months, now it's time to flip the switch and replace the old Scripting News home page with the new simplified and enriched version. Yes, it's got more features, but it's even cleaner than before.
      1. The menu is at the top of the page, unchanged, as promised. I said it would be a fixture through the transition, so if you found your way around the various sites that make up Scripting News, the links are still be there after the transition. This helps smooth out what I find to be a jarring about website redesign. You know how to find everything and then all of a sudden -- where did it go?
      2. There's a new About feature, very easy to find, in the upper-left corner, patterned after the approach taken in the Media Hackers site. And of course it's an outline, stored in my Dropbox folder, so it's reallly easy for me to edit.
      3. The banner is now down the left edge instead of across the top. But continuity is maintained. It's still the same typeface, but it's even bigger than the one before. I think ones' name should be bold and big.
      4. The biggest change is probably the most subtle. The text on the home page is rendered by the new outline renderer in op.render.viewOutline. This is the core rendering routine for the worldoutline software, but now it's so core it can be used in any application. So you see every bit of text exactly as it was meant to be rendered.
      5. Comments are back. They of course, never really went away. I moved my editorial act, gradually over to the threads site, where it remains now. You can read the articles on the scripting.com home page, or on the threads site. The star at the bottom of each piece links to the page with comments, and the one with paragraph-level permalinks. If you want to point to one of my pieces you should point to the page on the threads site. It's the permanent view. The home page only shows the 25 most recent stories.
      6. There is of course still an RSS feed, in exactly the same place. But there's also now a link in the head section of the HTML to a full outline of all the text in the new CMS, going back to March of this year when the threads site started. Nothing hard about this, because it's the outline where I do my writing. One big file for everything.
    Here's a snapshot of the Scripting News home page taken just before the transition.
    That's about it for now. Time for me to take a break, and when I come back, I'll fill in the links here and then flip the switch. Maybe tonight or early tomorrow.
  First October thought
    A simple first thought for the tech industry at the beginning of October.
    If your users are always looking for the catch -- waiting for the other shoe to drop, the 10-ton weight, or waiting for the trap door to open -- you've got a problem. If they don't understand your business, how can they understand your product. How can they understand you? And if they can't understand you -- how can they trust you?
    How naive. To think you might need to have the trust of users to build a company.
    It's not so naive. I think it's actually pretty naive to think that you can go on indefinitely without nailing that one down.
    Now, back up a few feet and realize that it's not a single company, but much of an industry that has this vagueness at its core. Even some of the most prosperous companies are built on a foundation of mistrust with the people they depend on for their existence.
    Feels like the kind of thing you look back on after a bubble-burst and say "Geez, of course that wouldn't work. How could we not have seen that."
November 2012
  Wireless laser printers that work?
    I got a Brother printer a few years back on the recommendation of a friend, and it's been a wonderful printer. Fast and trouble-free. As someone who doesn't print very often, it's important to have it be zero effort and the Brother is that.
    But it was advertised as having wifi, but when I tried to get it to work, I couldn't make heads or tails of the docs. And the consensus among users on Amazon is that it's unusable.
    Thinking about getting a new printer for mom for Christmas, she really needs one. I was just going to order her the same printer I have. But before actually doing it, I wanted to find out if anyone has gotten wifi and laser printers to work in an easy-to-set-up way.
    Thanks!
  Why Facebook sucks
    I was emailing with a friend and found myself explaining why Facebook is changing the economics for people like Mark Cuban. Here it is.
    Facebook has to do what they're doing because their stock is screwed and they're being run by Goldman Sachs now.
    I thought it deserved a blog post cause it was so concise.
  Nexus 4 arrives
    This picture was taken with my Nexus 4 which arrived today.
        bold
        true
    Micro-SIM issue
      The first task will be to visit a nearby T-Mobile store to see if I can swap my old big SIM for the smaller one that the Nexus 4 takes. It may be that it doesn't take a T-Mobile SIM at all. I still am fuzzy on all this SIM stuff.
      Here's the problem with the SIM illustrated in a picture. The SIM that I have is far too big for the adapter they provide.
      And here's the answer. It's a matter of converting a full-size SIM to a micro-SIM. CNET has a tutorial that explains all the options, including DIY.
      Update: The T-Mobile store on 8th Ave and 54th was able to fix it up in a few minutes. They were pretty impressed with my new phone. The guy said he was going to try to order one for himself later today. :-)
    Dispatching pictures
      The camera app seems to have a lot of features, but there doesn't appear to be a way to send a photo directly from the camera app to email or Twitter or whatever. I seem to remember that Android could do this. It's the first thing I look for.
      Several people recommend using the Gallery, but the best answer for me, so far, is to swipe from right to left. The camera viewfinder is replaced with a browser of past pictures. From there you can dispatch them where ever you want.
    Setting the wallpaper
      It's really frustrating to set the wallpaper. I have a full-size picture of the Mona Lisa, it makes a great background image for a cell phone. I use it on my iPad, my iPod and I want to use it on my Nexus 4.
      But the wall-paper setting function in the Settings only lets me select a very small portion of the picture. Can't figure out how to get it to zoom out. But when I display the picture in the Gallery app it works perfectly. And it works perfectly the first time on Apple's devices.
      Update: I gave up and just used Google's wallpaper-setter app. It's confusing, but I've had it explained to me, and sort of understand. Turns out the Mona Lisa still looks good if you're just looking at a corner of it. Amazing painting that way. :-)
    Video player
      A few days ago I wrote how I quit Netflix. Partly because Amazon appears to be offering the same service as part of Amazon Prime, and I'm already a member of that (and it costs less than Netflix and I get free shipping).
      Then I got the Nexus 4. And found out to my surprise that Amazon Instant Video isn't available for the Nexus 4. Too bad, because it's a very nice little computer for watching movies. I watched Gangnan Style last night a few times and loved the video quality.
      But I can play MP4 movies on the device. So it's possible for some of my entertainment to be viewed there.
  Time for voter suppression trials
    Now that some Republicans have confessed that the real purpose of Florida voter suppression was to disenfranchise voters in order to change the outcome of an election, it's time to arrest and prosecute some of the offenders.
      That's a bit too conservative. The purpose of voter suppression is to steal an election.
    Let's see how well their excuses hold up in court with a jury of their peers (the people whose votes they were trying to suppress).
    I've had it with the government looking the other way on political crimes. We have a free system that guarantees every citizen a vote. Screwing with the election is a serious crime.
    Update: Thanks to Betsy Devine for suggesting a petition. Please sign it! Now, before you forget. :-)
  Re: Our Twitter archives
    When we download our Twitter archives, which is supposed to be possible before the end of the year, what format will it be in?
    Update: At least one person seems to think this will enable people to switch to a different service. Not clear until you know what the format is. And what the terms are.
  Bandwidth poverty
    Yesterday I wrote a piece about information poverty from one point of view, but there's another -- bandwidth.
    In New York, the largest city in the US, the bandwidth available to most residents is pitiful for 2012. There is some FIOS, but very little, and mostly in the outer boroughs. In Manhattan we get Time-Warner asymetric junk.
    Google is of course experimenting with gigabit fiber in Kansas City, and now they've bought a wifi service company. Ooops, turns out that was a hoax! :-(
    The short term solution to New York's connectivity problem isn't digging up the streets and laying fiber, it's wifi hotspots blanketing the city. Every cell phone, laptop and desktop computer comes with wifi today, world wide. It's the standard for the future. And you can get some pretty great throughput with wifi. Much better than the crap that cable companies offer today. And much much cheaper.
    Google is probably going to price it at $0. :-)
    I've long argued that the NY Times should solve the city's bandwidth problem and charge us a reasonable price for it. The window of opportunity for that may be closing pretty quickly
  A time of information poverty
    It's Sunday night of a Thanksgiving weekend in NY and there are a bunch of movies playing I haven't seen. But in NY it's hard to know, for me at least, when theaters will be crowded. Is this a good time to go to the movies if you like a relatively empty theater and a short popcorn line?
      Sometimes the theaters in NY are packed when you'd least expect it.
    We live in a time of information poverty. Someday you'll tell your grandchildren there was a time when you couldn't zoom in on the local theater and see how many people had bought tickets for the show that starts in 25 minutes.
      It might help fill in the empty spots in theater's calendars.
      Related idea: I like to fly when the plane is pretty empty.
    Will we still have movie theaters then? Well, we don't really need them now, if it weren't for DRM and licensing we could watch them at home. But it is nice to go out to a movie. But maybe future generations will think that as quaint as the notion that it's nice to hold a paper book or printed news in your hands. Something about the smell of the ink or paper, I think.
    In 1990, I was at my brother's house in Palo Alto. It was about 9PM and we knew the Mets were playing the Dodgers in LA. We decided to try to find the score, using the means available in 1990. We called the stadium. And the newspapers in New York and Los Angeles. Someone somewhere knew the score, but we couldn't find them.
    A number of years before that, driving into San Francisco, I wondered how many people I knew there, and thought I probably knew quite a few. No way to find them in 1979. I figured someday I'd have all my contacts in a database and would be able to synch up with a global database with people's addresses. I'm not sure if Facebook can do that today, but they certainly have the data.
    Someday we'll have a lot more usable information, if things go as they should, or so it seems.
    It might be interesting to think of what we'll need to get there, that we don't currently have. If anything. :-)
  Bullet points on Ev's new startup
    I listened to a podcast interview between Evan Williams and Jeffrey Zeldman yesterday. It had a few bits about Medium, which is his new startup. I am interested in know what his thinking is on this -- as we've been exploring the same territory for a number of years, and his ideas are always worth a listen.
    Here's the executive summary -- he is exploring a niche that exists. Sometimes you wonder what a designer is thinking, that they're exploring something that no one wants, but not in this case. People will want what Medium does.
    Now to the bullet points.
    1. It's a hybrid, at the intersection of blogging systems and commenting systems.
    2. You don't have to create a blog. This can be a huge barrier for some people. People who have something to say but view creating a blog as making a commitment. Technically they're not right about this. Creating a new blog is no more complex than creating a new word processing document. But there's a psychic overhead that stops a lot of people. I know this because I've been evangelizing blogs for many years. A lot of people feel this commitment and it stops them from contributing.
    3. Like Twitter, this product is a simplification of what came before, a narrowing, and a focusing, but it's still wide open. Zeldman kind of got tripped up by this, but Williams was very clear. Users can create new buckets or collections and call them anything they want. A bucket is analogous to a blog post. Then other people can post to it. That's like a comment. But it doesn't look like a comment. It's got a place for a big image at the top. It looks much prettier than a comment, and much bigger. Looks are important here.
    4. There's no way for a user to control CSS or provide a template, or even choose a template from a library. This would make the product more complex. Not sure what their plans are here, but whether they offer these features will play a big role in defining the service.
    5. It's closest to Tumblr right now -- another product that occupies the space between full-blown blogging like WordPress, and ultra lightweight blogging in Twitter. Clearly Twitter is moving more towards Tumblr. If Medium adds templates and CSS they will be aimed squarely at Tumblr.
    6. Also not clear is how much portability users will have. At this point they offer beta users a way to download the contents of their site. This doesn't make it possible to use it as an editorial system for other environments, or the other way around, to use other tools to author content for Medium. There's no doubt Ev understands the opportunities here. Blogger had a pretty complete API as did Twitter. But in Twitter, everyone got burned by the API, including the company (though to a much lesser extent than developers) so my guess is that Ev's new company will be more conservative about interfaces than his previous ventures.
    7. The editor has some nice touches. The biggest one being that the rendering styles apply in when you're editing, so it delivers a level of WYSIWYG that previously I had not seen in browser-based editors. This will be a highly valued feature. This is the sizzle of Medium, along with the very easy to read template they use.
    8. The more I understand about Medium, the more trouble I have seeing how it co-exists with another Williams startup, Branch. It seems like they're both camped out in the same space betw blogging and Twitter. That as the two products evolve they will keep colliding with each other.
    9. They just hired a Director of Content, a former agent in the book publishing industry. Very curious. I guess that means famous authors will submit chapters from upcoming books and allow regular folk to attach our own writing to this stuff. Analogous to getting Oprah on Twitter? That could give Medium a very short honeymoon with the early adopters that make these kinds of services grow.
    10. This is yet another company that compensates its employees without compensating the content creators. Although clearly there is a class of creators who may receive compensation (see the previous point). Personal comment -- this makes me reluctant to participate. I appreciate getting early access, and I have posted a few items to the service to better understand how it works. But without a fair balance between the valuation of all of our contributions, I can't continue, or recommend that others contribute. I've always been on the outside of Ev's creations, putting creativity in while he and others take the dollars out. It's fun for a while, but then it gets old. The Internet and the web weren't designed this way, and I keep waiting for one of these services to build something that doesn't have this very tilted posture. That would be harder, but much more significant.
    11. Maybe the biggest point he makes in the podcast is his view that Medium should be seen as if it were YouTube for writing. We all understand what YouTube is. Is YouTube-for-Writing a niche? Not sure. Video obviously has special needs regarding bandwidth. And those issues don't exist for text. But aggregating them all in one spot has advantages. But it's possible to do that without capturing all of it one company's servers.
  Why I quit Netflix
    Last week I turned off my Netflix account.
    I have had it for at least a decade, paying between $9 and $21 a month.
    I turned it off because I stopped using it. The last thing I watched on Netflix was Ken Burns' series The West. But I found I could get that on Amazon's video service, for no extra money, since I was already an Amazon Prime member.
    But even before I was using Amazon, I was hardly ever using Netflix.
    Netflix was a great way for me to fill in a lot of the blanks in my movie-watching career. I missed a lot of great movies in the last couple of decades, while I was busy with other things. And there were all the movies made before I was born that I had of course missed. With Netflix, I pretty much could always find something I hadn't seen that was worth seeing. And I could systematically march through whole genres. It was like TCM on steroids.
    But then two things happened: 1. I caught up and 2. They closed the DVD side of the business, or if they didn't close it, they discouraged it. I forget how I came not to be a subscriber to the DVDs. But the on-demand service just wasn't worth it to me. There wasn't enough stuff to watch, or if it was there, I didn't know how to find it.
    I think Netflix missed the boat, bigtime. They could have been the place on the net to learn about and watch and share movie experiences. I think they could have started a match.com type service. If you're in a strange city and would like to go to the movies with someone with similar tastes, just click a few buttons. They were gathering all this information about people's movie preferences. But they were reluctant to build systems around it. And reluctant to open it up to app developers. I think we all missed out on something, because movies at least to some of us are such an important form of personal expression.
    These days there's hardly any time for catching up on old movies. My life is filled with all kinds of entertainment, I never have a chance to see it all. Netflix played a big role in the early days by giving us access to a huge base of old movies that are worth seeing. Now it's time for something new. Maybe someone else will try to fill the gap that Netflix never wanted to fill.
  Jeremy Lin and the small picture
    Of course I watched the Houston Rockets play the New York Knicks last night, and I felt the way I felt on Election Day, that if the result wasn't what I hoped it would be that I wouldn't be able to face life. Luckily, both events had favorable outcomes. Both Obama and the Rockets won, decisively.
    The Knicks protested that it was just another game and that they weren't even thinking of Jeremy Lin, the miracle that landed by accident in New York last year, the perfect player for the next decade of basketball. Esp in NYC where the Chinese-American community is rapidly growing. And in China, which loves basketball, they must be wondering why they moved Lin from New York to Houston. I believe we could have found an extra $50 million in an economy that has apartments that sell for $100 million (they are nice apartments).
      I grew up in Flushing, which then was a mostly Catholic, Irish and Italian neighborhood. Now it's largely Chinese. I went out to eat with my mom at a restaurant on Main Street a couple of years ago, and they asked if we were tourists (presumably because we were white). We laughed and said no, we're natives. :-)
    But the Knicks obviously were focused on Lin last night, at least at the beginning, and unfortunately for New York, Houston had three other players ready to go -- James Harden, Chandler Parsons and Omer Asik. All of them very young, and they kept their cool, while the veterans on the Knicks melted down. I expected it from Carmelo Anthony, but was surprised to see Tyson Chandler lose his cool (and they should have taken him out of the game after he elbowed Rocket Omer Asik in the throat, in anger).
    And there were some dazzling Linsane plays to remind us how good this young man is.
    The Houston team is made largely of reallly good young players who were on the benches of their former teams. They are the youngest team in the NBA. It's wonderful to see them playing with such enthusiasm, excellence and composure. In every way they remind one of the Knicks in the brief period of Linsanity. This is the team the Knicks could have had, now they're playing in Houston. I would swap the roster of the Rockets for the Knicks team any day.
    I don't think either team is going to win this year -- but I don't go for sports to see my team win. What I love is a group of highly talented people helping each other to create something bigger than any one of them. That's why I despise what the Knicks are, a team that wins or loses based on the performance of a single player.
    Watching the Rockets move the ball around the court, kind of daring the Knicks to figure out who was going to take the shot or the layup, was pure poetry. The kind of poetry that the Knicks were doing so well when Lin was our point guard.
    I think basketball has changed, and last night's game was a perfect demo. I don't expect many of the sports writers to cover it. I think their assignment was to "prove" that Linsanity either: 1. Didn't happen or 2. Was just a fluke. And 3. That basketball was always and will always be about superstars and individual performances.
    It's the same kind of thinking that leads you to believe that politics is about the bosses listening to the people to figure out what to say to get their votes. If that's how politics worked, marijuana and gay marriage would not have been legalized, and Mitt Romney would have won Ohio, if not the Presidency.
    We are riding a sea change in communication technology. It's been going on for 30 to 40 years. The people who grew up in the new world are maturing and taking power. It's not a centralized system any more. The owners and most of the players in the NBA want Linsanity to go away. Jeremy Lin and James Harden are symbols of what can happen if the individual says he or she is not buying into the system. I don't know about most of the fans, but this fan is fed up with the idea of a super-human superstar. I want teamwork and joy, and love enough for everyone. Humility and fun.
    In the past it was the big picture that mattered. Today, and more so in the future, it's what individuals choose or want, the small picture, that matters.
  The new Camp David accord
    Everything was in balance between Israel and Egypt until Mubarak was overthrown in a popular uprising early last year. The US continued to give aid to the Egyptian military, but weren't sure if the deal was still in place after the change in government.
    The deal, to be clear, was the US gives money to Egypt and the army supports peace with Israel and the people of Egypt are suppressed.
    The Israelis desperately wanted to verify that the old deal was still in place. They couldn't test it without some kind of conflict. So they created one. Now we need a cease fire. Secretary Clinton flies to Cairo. Drama. Does the old deal stand? she asks. Morsi asks to have the deal explained. She does. He says sounds good. She asks for proof. What would you like? Announce that you are taking extra-constitutional power. He asks if the money will keep flowing. She says yes. He says OK.
    That's what I think happened.
    PS: Why would Israel want to know now whether the peace deal with Egypt was still in place? Maybe they're getting ready to attack Iran and want to be sure they don't have to fight Egypt too.
  Two best movies of 2012
    The best movies of the year are slotted-in at the end, but sometimes movies that are released earlier in the year are also great, but sometimes slip under the radar, so a lot of people don't see them.
    My two favorite so far for 2012 are like that -- Paranorman and Savages. I knew to see them because both were born of movies that I adored in the past.
    Paranorman was created by the same animation studio that did Coraline.
    And Savages is classic Oliver Stone. One of my favorite movies of all time, Any Given Sunday, not a famous movie, is an Oliver Stone classic.
    I believe both Paranorman and Savages are available in DVD now. They are great movies, the best so far in 2012, according to this reviewer.
  How I ran ThinkTank/1987 in Chrome
    A really interesting combination of technologies, old and new...
    1. An app written in JavaScript running embedded in a web page, viewed in Chrome.
    2. Running on a Mac with 2GB of RAM and four terabytes of disk storage.
    3. That emulates an IBM PC running the original ROM BIOS.
    All this was put together by Jeff Par, whose blog is hashable.org.
    I heard about it from Dan Bricklin, who along with Bob Frankston, wrote Visicalc. I've known both these guys since 1979 believe it or not. Somehow they had gotten Visicalc to run in this emulator. I nearly shit my pants when I saw it.
    Of course I knew how to use Visicalc then and still do. I was able to put together a simple spreadsheet. It worked.
    Then of course I wondered if ThinkTank from that era would work. So I contacted Jeff, asked if he would be interested in trying it. I uploaded a Thinktank disk image to a folder on Amazon S3, then put together a list of files in the outliner I use in 2012, and saved it as a blog post on scripting.com.
    He took the files, did something magical with them, and now there's a menu item on his emulator page that offers to load an image of that disk into this virtual PC. So I fiddled with the commands a bit, got it to run. There was a little difficulty in getting the F10 function key to go to the browser, since some Apple system software was grabbing it. That was easily done in the keyboard section of the system settings app on the Mac.
    I have a ref card of the commands in ThinkTank, but I didn't need them, because I still remember how it worked. I slaved over this UI many years ago. It would be hard for me to forget how to do this.
    Dan asked if I would do a video showing how it works. I will (and will link it in here). I imagine that years from now people will watch the video even if the emulator doesn't still run. Maybe it will. Back then I kind of hoped it would be possible to run this sofware 25 years later. What a thrill that it turns out it does, and in such a widely accessible way.
    If you're studying the evolution of user interface, being able to look at this time capsule could be pretty useful. This software running on 1980s hardware, is interesting in the same way it would be interesting to drive a car from the early 20th century. You can see ideas that would later take hold and blossom once machines had more capacity and could be easily networked, and we better understood how people work with the new technology.
  Thanks!
  ThinkTank 2.41NP (1987)
    These are the files on the distribution disk for the 1987 version of ThinkTank for the IBM PC.
      AUTOEXEC.BAT
      OS2
        READ_ME.DB
        READ_ME.SAV
        TANK.EXE
      OS2INST.BAT
      OS2INST.CMD
      READ_ME.DB
      READ_ME.SAV
      TANK.EXE
      TANKCLIP.BRD
      TANKOPTS.DAT
      TMPLATES
        123FNCTN.TXT
        ADDRESS.TXT
        AREACODE.TXT
        BALANCE.TXT
        BNKRCNCL.TXT
        CALENDAR.TXT
        CORPARNG.TXT
        DEFENDNT.TXT
        EVNTQUAL.TXT
        INCALLOG.TXT
        JOBRVIEW.TXT
        JOBSPEC.TXT
        LITIGATE.TXT
        MKTINTRO.TXT
        MKTRSRCH.TXT
        NEWS.DB
        NEWS.SAV
        ORDRNTRY.TXT
        ORGCHART.TXT
        OUTCLLOG.TXT
        PERSONAL.TXT
        PLANTIFF.TXT
        PRELEASE.TXT
        PRNTRCOD.TXT
        PRODPLAN.TXT
        RESUME.TXT
        SALELEAD.TXT
        SALESCAL.TXT
        SRVCCALL.TXT
        STATABBR.TXT
        STATCNTR.TXT
        UPGRADE.TXT
        WTMEASUR.TXT
  Microsoft's bet-the-cash-cow move
    This piece has an extensive quote from Reed Hastings as a departing Microsoft board member about Microsoft's thinking behind the odd way Windows 8 is organized.
    They think there's a transition to touch taking place that's analogous to the transition to the mouse in the 80s and 90s. So they're putting the windows part of Windows into a compatibility box, the way they put DOS inside a window on Windows. You can still get to your Windows apps, but they're betting you will prefer to use the touch-based apps. That don't yet exist. But will soon. That's their bet.
    My opinion: Wow. Why bet the company's user base and cash cow on that when they could just switch to Mac, as I'm sure a lot of them already want to, and get a "traditional" desktop.
    Apple has been edging up to the same idea, in a much more conservative and rational way, imho. Testing the theory before betting what is not their biggest revenue source (Apple is now a devices company, iPad and iPhones make up most of their revenue). If Apple is being conservative, Ballmer thinks, I'll make the big bet. And hope I'm not wrong.
    Problem is this -- desktop computers as touch devices is not a new idea. HP's first PC, in 1983, was touch-based. It failed. Not because there was no software, there was. The reason is that it's really painful to hold up your arm and touch the screen as a way of controlling the computer when the screen is vertical, not horizontal. The keyboard won.
    Touch belongs in a tablet interface, for sure. But desktop computers need a pointing device like a mouse. I think Apple realizes that now, and isn't pushing the Mac in that direction. But this appears to be a bet-the-cash-cow move for Microsoft. Let's hope they have a Plan B ready to go!
    See also: Jakob Nielsen's report on Windows 8.
  Adjectives for Mitt Romney
    1. Sad.
    2. Lonely.
    3. Loser.
    4. White. Traditional.
    5. Beleaguered.
    6. Republican.
  Who's your BOTY?
    Do you have a favorite blogger?
    Someone who you tell other people -- You have to read this person they're so interesting/cool/funny/smart/etc?
    If you do, who is it?
    I want to make a list! :-)
    PS: BOTY == Blogger Of The Year.
    PPS: Could be a podcaster.
    PPPS: Not someone who writes for a conglomerblog like Huffpost and not a pro who writes for a travesty like TechCrunch.
  How to help the open web
    The last couple of blog posts were about the open web. Both have gotten some great responses.
      An aside, one reason the comments might be more lively is that I went to Fred Wilson's blog and noted that his Disqus threads were much longer and easier to read than mine. I went to the setup page for Disqus and found some prefs I didn't know were there, and found an ability to add styles to their CSS, and voila -- much nicer!
    In a comment on the first post, Kristopher Nelson, a PhD student and former software dev, said he didn't disagree with my points, but had trouble turning them into practical actions he can actually do, instead of relying on "installed leaders" to kick it of for him (paraphrasing).
    He's right! I said what the problems are, but I didn't offer ways to help. This is equally important. So here's a list of things you can do to help.
      1. Don't write mini-essays in Twitter. Instead fully express your idea on your blog and post a link to Twitter. That's the single most constructive thing people can do.
      2. If you absolutely can't respond in a post, then respond in a comment. 140 character posts are very often impossible to parse. And are hard to respond to if my answer requires more than 140. That's why I don't do support on Twitter. I think it's impossible. And tweets have limited utility after they scroll off. Comments create a somewhat better record. And instead of concentrating everything on one company's servers, we can spread them around a little.
        That said, don't see this rule as requiring you to be long-winded. You still want to get to the point quickly so people read what you're saying. People are very busy these days, so you want to say what you have to say as quickly as possible. And if you have a blogging tool that supports collapsable text like mine, use it to add detail in a way that's optional for the reader.
      3. For the installed leaders -- run a river of the blogs you read, and share it with your readers. Link to it prominently from your home page. Talk about it in posts. Get people to read more than just your blog.
        Someone asked for an example of a river. Here you go.
        A river is the next thing after a blogroll.
        A blogroll just has pointers to blogs. A river includes their stories.
        It's a way of defining a community. It's one of those wonderful things that empowers the river-owner and the people whose content flows through the river.
        Someday not only will every publication have a river, but they will be defined by their river.
        We need to get one editorial organization to do it and do it right.
        BTW, people note that my river is mostly mainstream pubs. That's because bloggers are publishing so little these days. I subscribe to lots of blogs. But they aren't updating. Let's fix that!
      4. Also do the thing that the "big boys" do so well -- reference each other. If I write something that you find interesting, write a blog post about it, and link to my post.
      5. Don't wait for a press release to write about something that's new. I find it amazing sometimes all the new stuff I've shipped on Scripting News, whci now is a fairly radical-looking blog with at least a few never-seen-before features, yet, as far as I know -- no one has written about them. Why? They say that news is just regurgitated press releases. This seems to confirm it.
      6. Fight conventional wisdom. One of the reasons blogs started in the first place was to fight the CW that there was no new Mac software. All the reporters knew this wasn't true, but they reported the CW that there wasn't. Reporters still do this. So let's route around that. The great Scoop Nisker said -- If you don't like the news, go out and make some of your own. A very wise man. :-)
      7. Share your ideas and observations. Start new threads that aren't responsive to anyone else. If you have an epiphany or see something you don't think anyone else has seen -- that's a blog post. Write it up!
      8. If you're a developer, hook your favorite tweet-like system up to RSS, both ways. I want to be able to hook my linkblog feed up to everything. This is how we bootstrap a network of compatible twitter-like systems. Use an existing standard that's good enough to hook everything up to everything. This way we can have competiing visions for how this stuff works, and still have content flow easily across systems.
    One more motto, a variant of something President Kennedy said. Ask not what the Internet can do for you, ask what you can do for the Internet. These days so many people look to the Internet to make them rich or famous or powerful. So much so that the poor Internet is exhausted from all those people taking from it. Think about what you can put back that may not help just you, that may help the Internet itself. It's important.
  I hope Mark Cuban reads this
    Hey Mark, I read your piece about Facebook, and think you're right about one thing and wrong about another.
    1. You're right to be appalled that Facebook does not show your updates to all your followers. They are breaking a trust. You promoted Facebook to your customers for free, and not only don't they reciprocate -- by finding you new followers -- they don't even fulfill their side of the deal, by showing your updates to the people who signed up for them.
      Yes, I know Facebook disclaims this. But we all thought that updates went to all followers, before discovering the hard way, that they didn't. Cuban is a smart guy. If he was surprised by this, imagine how surprised the less-savvy execs at other companies are going to be.
    2. However, your response, to diversify to other social networks is wrong. Why would you think they would do it any differently than Facebook? What have they agreed to do for you in return? If you're just using their normal TOS, they're agreeing to do nothing for you.
    Last night I was watching football on one of the big networks. It was a boring game so my mind drifted. I noticed that when they show the name of someone speaking on camera they also show their Twitter handle. I wondered if their lawyers had reviewed this decision. Had they read Twitter's user agreement? Had they advised their client on how one-sided it is? That made me wonder if Twitter does special deals with big media conglomerates? I wonder what they look like? I follow Twitter pretty closely and I have no idea.
    Back to Mark -- hope you're still reading.
    You're so smart about tech, why are you so dumb about this!
    We need to use the Internet itself as social media. Then you won't have to worry about Facebook putting their finger on the scale. Let's create the software you need to license. You can run it on your own servers, or let's start a company to run the service for media companies like the Dallas Mavericks and the NBA. Being at the mercy of tech startups like this is not smart. They are not your friends, or even good business partners.
    Update: Mark Cuban did read this, and responded.
  Our news predicament
    Back in the 90s I thought blogs would be the antidote to the bullshit of news, but it didn't turn out that way. Here's what happened.
      1. The early bloggers did deals with investors, so they needed revenue.
      2. Mostly they become marketing channels for the companies. For example, I like Om Malik, but the only stories GigaOm covers are ones from big companies and startups with VC money. Om is a nice guy and all the people who work for him are nice people. They also have jobs to do. If you look at his conferences they are marketing events for the people who speak. That leads to a certain type of discussion, and ignores a lot of other things that require thought and discourse. Same with O'Reilly, TechCrunch, etc etc. You can't blame a shark for being a meat-eater. But you shouldn't think they're anything other than that.
        How do I know how this works? Because as a company CEO I have participated in it, and if I'm ever a CEO again I will once again participate. So obviously I don't think it's bad. But let's not think we're getting our daily dose of tech news this way. What we're getting is marketing.
      2a. It's not just tech. TPM, Redstate, Politico, Buzzfeed, Huffington etc, don't stray off the accepted path, or the market won't know what to do with them. The product they sell? Campaigns, the ability to shift public opinion so more government money ends up in your bank account, or your taxes stay low, or you're allowed to warm the earth for free, sell arms to bad govts, keep the UN out of your country, etc. Again, I'm not going to question the value of what they do, only to say what we need to do is much bigger than what they do.
        And music journalism supports the music industry.
        Sports journalism supports the NBA, NFL, MLB, Olympics, NCAA, etc.
      3. Plan B was that user/bloggers would review the companies' products, and we'd at least get non-bullshit product news that way. That worked for a while, then people started using Twitter, and have been reduced to 140-character grunts and snorts. You can tell a little truth in 140-character chunks. Very little ones. Nothing factually interesting. For that you need a little elbow room. If that's really going to happen, more people have to write blog posts.
      4. There are a few product-oriented blogs out there. But not enough for critical mass. Some of them make money, some even a lot. But there isn't enough to read to cover most of what I'm interested in, and also the stuff I don't know I'm interested in. If we could do more networking on a more regular and systematic basis, that would create incentives for more people to do it, and would build flow independent of Twitter. But blogs work like everything else. Installed leaders don't generally help upstarts. Might impact the bottom-line. Go back to the sharks analogy. It takes some big thinking and betting to see that we're going to starve outside Twitter soon, and we'd all do better if we invest in each other and in opening doors for newcomers. We're playing out the prisoners dilemma, as we always do.
    I still think there's a way out of it. But it means that bloggers have to do more cooperating than they're likely to want to do. Believe me, I'm an expert in how hard it is to get bloggers to cooperate. I always have a bunch of propositions for them. Only a very few of them have even been seriously considered, much less adopted. Usually that happens when I give them my flow to get them to do something.
    I'm into level playing fields. There isn't one now. We're in really bad shape in terms of news distribution. And it's going to get worse.
    We're always in the predicament Benjamin Franklin described at the signing of the Declaration of Independence on July 4, 1776. "We must all hang together, or assuredly we shall all hang separately." If we could get past that we could start really reinventing news. Now.
  Where is maps.apple.com?
    Apparently there is no way to access an Apple map from a desktop computer.
    I'd love to try pointing to an Apple map from a blog post, so we could do a realistic A-B comparison with Google maps, which of course can be accessed from anywhere from a web browser.
    Pet peeve: Google Maps may have a serious problem with embedding. When I embed a bit of a map in a blog post it loses its position. For example, if you expand this headline you'll see a map of Bandley Drive in Cupertino. (If you scroll around you'll find it.)

      <iframe width="425" height="350" frameborder="0" scrolling="no" marginheight="0" marginwidth="0" src="https://maps.google.com/maps?q=Bandley+Drive,+Cupertino,+CA&ie=UTF8&hq=&hnear=Bandley+Dr,+Cupertino,+California+95014&gl=us&t=m&z=14&ll=37.327513,-122.034436&output=embed">
      View Larger Map

    That might seem like a small thing, but I'm kind of a perfectionist. I insist on having my maps actually show the place I'm trying to show you. :-)
    Anyway -- it would be great to be able to try Apple Maps on my Mac or even a Google phone!
    Update: Turns out that Apple maps redirect to Google on the desktop.
  The Apple of Steve's Eye
    Last week I wrote a one-week review of the iPad Mini. And said that I was thinking of selling my Apple stock. Update: I still have both the Mini and the stock.
    I got a lot of grief because of the piece. I've come to expect that. Seriously, Apple zealots might want to someday tone it down a little. This has been going on a long time. For such an elegant company, it sure attracts some inelegant fans.
    I said what I think, and since it's a blog post, no one will think it's a final judgment, allowing no disagreement. Maybe the judgers are the kinds of people who leave no room for other people's opinions. They must think I am like them. I am not. I thrive on different opinions, because I learn from them. I'm truly interested in knowing what other people think, as long as its respectful.
    For example, I love talking about movies with my friend NakedJen, because she so totally loves movies, but the ones she loves are different from the ones I love. We've seen a lot of movies together, and I don't recall us ever coming out of the theater both in love. She tends to like movies I that I find boring or trite. But I always look forward to talking with her, because I like viewing things through her eyes. In that way I like almost everyone -- if an idea is well-expressed, it doesn't matter whether I agree or disagree. I love human expression. I really don't care so much about whether they're right or wrong. And in the case of how one person feels about a product or a movie, they just can't be wrong. They can't miss the mark, as long as they try to say what they see and what they think. And don't pretend it's anything more than that. I sure don't think my opinion is more than that.
    I love products. I especially love products that hit the mark perfectly. Of course I've never seen one. But some products come pretty close! And I've even had a couple myself that hit the mark squarely, and of course not perfectly. When I make a new product, that's what I try to do.
      It's not just products I love, but strategies.
      In baseball, you can look at an individual pitch, and see how perfect it is, but then look at it as part of an at-bat, or an inning, a game, a season, career.
      Every act can be looked at in a lot of contexts.
      It's possible for the iPad Mini to be a perfect product for one person, or everyone -- at one time. But it also exists in a sequence of products.
      There are a lot of variables a strategist gets to tweak. And one of them is when to play the hand. You could keep accumulating cards for the perfect moment, and then wham lay them down. As Steve would say -- Boom.
      Sports, and theater, hardware and system software. It's all fun to put together and think about in a lot of different ways from all angles.
    When I saw my first Mac, it actually spoke to me. No kidding! It wasn't like I walked into a room and knew there would be a Mac there. I saw it in a random office from a hallway on Bandley Drive in 1983, while it was still a secret project. I saw it out of the corner of my eye, and instantly and viscerally I knew it was going to consume a big part of my life. I knew it was the machine I wanted to make software for. All in an instant. I'd say that was about as close to "hitting the mark" as any product I've ever seen. Even though it was a famously flawed product.
      View Larger Map
    So when Marco says I was far from the mark with my piece, that made me stop and think. He could be right, but we won't know for a while.

      Dave Winer is often right on the mark, but this is pretty far from it. gizmodo.com/5959770/is-theŠ
      — Marco Arment (@marcoarment) November 13, 2012

    Let's think about it this way, how might Apple have approached this, assuming what so many people think is true, that in a year or two, they won't be limited to the current low resolution screen. Let's assume for the sake of argument that there's an 80 percent probability that in 2015 we'd be able to ship the absolutely killer product, one that makes you scream it's so cool. Never mind what it means to the users, of course that's important to you and me, but that's not how the Apple of Steve's Eye made its decisions. Doc Searls wrote about this in 1997, and talk about hitting the mark. Dead bull's eye for Doc. You want to understand Steve's Apple -- read that piece.
    Remember when netbooks were the rage? I kept saying Apple should ship one. And Apple kept saying we'll ship one when we're ready. The ones everyone is selling aren't good enough for us to put Apple's name on it. I think Cook even said they were junk. I thought that was extreme, but I respected the drama of it. That's some kind of confidence. So we waited. And what came? The iPad. I still wish they had shipped something that worked like the netbooks of the day, but they didn't. Apple wouldn't compromise. It took guts and vision and certainty, patience, and an absolute desire to hit the ball out of the park in a historic way. It would have been a lot easier to just ship something like a netbook. Just as it's easier to ship a compromise like the current iPad Mini.
    I also mentioned a change in the way I was thinking about my Apple stock. I felt that's part of the deal of writing a blog, when I write about companies I own stock in. If I'm thinking about selling, I have to say that, unless there's a really good reason not to. I put it at the top, at the beginning, so it would stand out. Because when I tell my readers that I bought the stock, and then tell them that I hold it, if one day I tell them I sold it, I'd like to have told them inbetween that I was thinking of selling it. It seems to me the honest thing to do. After all I didn't buy an ad and say this to random people as some kind of great proclamation. I wrote a blog post, on my blog, to people who read my blog, and said "I'm thinking of selling my stock, and here's why."
    But the main point was to put a little stake in the ground, so a couple of years from now I could go back and see what I thought about this product when I first got it. My blog has lots of posts like that, and it helps me as a person who is into products and has changing tastes, and makes mistakes, and learns new stuff along the way.
    "cheesecake"
  Google Reader communities
    I had a phone conversation today with a reporter doing a story on Google Reader communities.
    Apparently there was an active social network built around Google Reader that disbanded when Google tried to switch everyone over to Google Plus. This is something I didn't know about, except peripherally, because I never used Google Reader. I would like to learn more. (But have no interest in using Google Reader or Google Plus.)
    Wondering if there are any opportunities for open development to help bring the communities back together, with the understanding that this time they will have to take responsibility for running the servers, and may have to pay for some of the software development.
    This is a story that repeats in technology. I'm interested in trying to build sustained communities that don't depend on the continued investment of a single company.
  How tech companies grow
    Two really interesting posts esp when juxtaposed.
    1. Marco Arment writes about Twitter's limits on developers. "Even though we don't currently have a Windows 8 client, we might have one in the future, so yours isn't allowed," he paraphrases on Twitter's behalf.
    2. Bijan Sabet, an early investor in Twitter, posts two pictures. One when the company had 15 employees and a wide-open API. That was just four years ago. And the picture from today, when the company has 1500 employees and doesn't allow developers to compete with them.
    Now I don't know for sure why Twitter changed their policies, but I can take a guess.
    Those 1500 employees have to do something. At least some of them are going to write the clients that the developers used to write.
    Which raises the next question. Why does the company need to hire all those people to work for money and stock when the developers are willing to do it for love? When you have the answer, you'll understand why Microsoft has shipped so many new versions of Windows over the last ten years, when the market was perfectly happy with the version they produced ten years ago.
    Spoiler: All those employees make decisions that tend to keep them employed. That's how small innovative companies become big incumbent ones.
  What is going on in Gaza?
    I saw the initial messages on Twitter from the IDF yesterday and a flutter of other messages from people apparently on the other side.
    News reports tell of the action, bombs and rockets, and what may come next.
    I read Jessica Roy's excellent piece saying social media companies had no idea what to do. A war is being fought on the networks. This was inevitable, but now it's actually happening.
    Maybe that's all there is to say. But it's very much a fog from my desk here in NYC.
    If you can shed any light without turning my site into a war zone, please do.
    Here are some links I'm finding.
      Jeff Gauvin: "Bibi launches a war on Gaza to win an election."
  Linkblog via email
    I learned how to use IFTTT today, thanks to a recommendation from Laughing Squid man, Scott Beale. It's quite nice.
      Reminds me of a project I did with Betaworks a couple of years ago, that turned into bit.ly. We were trying to create an end-user programming language for Internet apps. They pulled it off. Congrats.
    My test project was to create an email version of my linkblog feed. This is the feed that comes out of my linkblogging tool, Radio2. The links flow to Twitter, and to their own site.
      My goal is to have them flow everywhere, asap.
      I'm learning to be patient as the various environments prove they're not that into freedom for linkbloggers like me. :-)
    You can subscribe here.
    http://groups.google.com/group/daves-linkblog
    Enjoy! :-)
    PS: Here's a link to the recipe I used.
  Seamless + NYMag reviews
    When I'm looking for a restaurant in NY, I often turn to New York Magazine's reviews because they are concise and when they pick a restaurant it's usually pretty good, imho of course.
    But, when it's time to order a delivery, and having food delivered is a way of life in NYC, I'm stuck using the reviews at Seamless or Delivery. Let me just say that the tastes of their users and mine are not the same. I'd much rather eat food from NYMag-recommended restaurants.
    So could we please have a melding of good criticism and a great commerce website? Integration would be fantastic, not only with restaurants but with movie listings. I like to use movies.google.com. Unfortunately the reviewers they link to from each movie are, again, not my favorites. For that I go to the NY Times, mostly. I'm learning to use other sources now that I have a movies river, thanks to NakedJen's recommendations of movie review sites, and an evening I spent browsing around a month ago.
    Hey why not hook in Amazon's recommendation engine. That's what Chris Dixon and Caterina Fake were working on at Hunch. "Here are some nearby restaurants we bet you'd like." You gotta know the world is going that way.
    I guess the bottom line is there's still a lot of integration to do among the various data sources on the net.
    PS: Don't forget OpenTable. :-)
    PPS: One more thing -- can we get an RSS feed for Frank Rich's columns. It's a serious omission. Thanks. :-)
  Vivid dreams
    Something switched over for me recently, wish I knew what it was -- but I'm not spending as much time writing code. Instead I'm writing blog posts and hanging out, reading and doing a lot of sleeping. And because there's been so much sleep there's been a lot of dreams. And sometimes I remember little bits of dreams that at the time I thought were interesting or profound.
    It seems significant when the narrator in my dream is my father. I wonder later if this is just my version of him inside me, or if there's some method of communication between the subconscious and the dead.
    Sometimes it freaks me out that people in my dream see things about me that I don't myself see, in the dream. How could this be, I wonder -- because the other people are really me. It's as if my subconscious has written a play that my conscious self knows nothing about.
    And lately my dreams have had a long-gone lover in them, and we're re-living the agonizing last days of our relationship. I woke this morning with a real, sad, and unhappy question. What if this was the love of your life, and you didn't know it then.
    We say "no regrets" so casuallly, but is life anything but regrets?
    And then I had a mathematical dream, wondering if time travel would be so entertaining to us if we hadn't invented awkward language for time that suggests that it could possibly be a two-direction thing.
    Stories about time travel are fun, probably because we live with so much with regret. What if there were the possibility of going back and doing it again, knowing what you know now. When you're young you don't even know what that idea means. It's not like life imparts all that much wisdom, no -- it's what you know about yourself that matters. This was the big one Dave. We know that now. Be more loving, more caring -- spend the time to avoid misunderstanding. Don't give up so easy. Or give up easier. Try something else because what you did the first time around didn't work. If only. If only life were like programming, where you could do it three or four times, each time learning from what you did wrong and choosing not to do it again. Or if I could travel back in time and have a talk with those two young people and find out what's really in their hearts. Force them together in an embrace so they can talk love instead of hurt.
    It doesn't get any less confusing. But as you go forward things are done, they're finished. Books are closed and life goes on -- until it doesn't.
    I can still tell the stories about the people I miss, the loves of my life who are no more. The friends who are gone, the people who are just stories now, just actors in my dreams.
    Apparently I have more important work right now that writing new code. :-)
  Jeremy Lin belongs in Brooklyn
    For some reason it just feels right that Jeremy Lin should play for the Brooklyn Nets of the National Basketball Association.
    The Knicks were too good for him, I guess -- but the Nets -- Brooklyn? Fugheddaboudit. It's poifect. Like Canarsie and Flatbush. The L train and the Q train. The Lawn Guyland Railroad and Junior's cheesecake. Prospect Park and Jeremy Lin. It works.
    Now, I want to say I don't know bupkis about the Nets except like the Knicks they have a couple of stars, and I'm sure the players wouldn't want Lin, but it would be reallllly smart business for the Nets to bring him back to NY where he is admired, and the Knicks are hated for letting him go. They can keep Carmelo and the rest, we want Jeremy Lin on the Nets.
    It would be so cool. And you'd get all the folks from Flushing, and we'd come from Manhattan to see the Nets and when the Knicks play at Barclay we could yell in unison FUCK DA KNICKS and you wouldn't have to tell us to scream it louder.
    He's the new Jackie Robinson. He should be in Brooklyn. Please someone have the imagination to make this happen!!
  How did Cuban get caught?
    Facebook, as far as I know, has never showed all updates to all the people who follow you.
    There's always been an assumption that Twitter does show all your updates to all the people who follow you, but how could you know? It's really something only they know. My guess is that they don't either. It certainly would be consistent with all their past policies.
    We like to believe that our Internet services are like the Internet itself -- basically fair. But they are run by tech industry insiders, and they are not fair. Not even close.
    There was a time, not long ago, when Twitter dramatically inflated the follower counts of their personal friends, or press people they wanted good coverage from. Not by small amounts -- by hundreds of thousands of followers. Up till that point we sort of assumed they were trying to run a level playing field. It was at that point we learned they were not, in any way, trying to.
    Here's a nightmare scenario for our friends in the media business, and these days almost everyone is in the media business, including Mark Cuban, the owner of the Dallas Mavericks NBA team.
    1. More and more people depend on Twitter to show them the news. Other forms dry up. People stop going to home pages. Stop getting email alerts. Stop subscribing to RSS feeds.
    2. Big networks like CNN and NBC direct their viewers to follow them on Twitter. When NBC runs the Olympics, there's a Twitter icon on the screen a large percentage of the time. Twitter has become like a public thing, like the web.
    3. Twitter expands beyond the 140 character limit, for certain publications, at first they're liberal about who's included. And the first moves are small. Instead of a 140 character limit, there's now a 200 character limit. You can include a picture or a video, but not both. This is viewed without any ads on the Twitter site. More people don't bother going to the site to read the full story because they just wanted the synopsis anyway, or the picture.
    4. Now Twitter expands the limit beyond 200 characters. Full "long form" articles are now viewable directly on the Twitter site. They want to keep everyone on their site as much as possible. Now Mr or Ms Media Exec, what do you do? Do you go with them or not? But wait -- it gets better!
    5. Off-site content gets a big warning about viruses and other malware. Be careful clicking on this link.
    6. Twitter, Inc, now worth $85 billion, buys the Washington Post, NY Times and NBC News.
    7. You're not sure if they're showing your stories to your followers. You start to suspect that when the user clicks on your story they show them their version of the story.
    8. You threaten to pull all your content.
    9. Twitter says okay. Don't slam the door on your way out.
    I know this is just one scenario. It could turn out that Twitter is not a media company at all. They just look like one because I have a vivid imagination. You want to bet on that? Well, you are betting on that.
    I think the media industry is as clued in on its future as Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan were about their chances at becoming the next President and Vice-President. I don't think Twitter is especially clever, they're just acting like a tech company. They're gradually encircling all the media entities and it seems the media guys don't have any idea it's happening.
    That's why Cuban's exclamations about Facebook seem so naive. Did he not see this coming? Huh? He's supposed to be such a smart dude. How did he get caught in this trap? How did you?
    Other observations:
      Twitter is not in any way "democratic" media. They amplify some voices, a lot. Not saying they cut back others, but they could and we wouldn't know.
      FYI -- there are no equivs of Mother Jones, Esquire, NY Mag in the tech world. It's all press releases and people gossip.
      The political pundits are too occupied with mandates and sex to look around them and see how the media has changed.
  Spielberg's Lincoln
    I saw Lincoln this afternoon.
    Good acting, esp of course Daniel Day-Lewis.
    Famous TV actors from Mad Men, Breaking Bad, Law & Order. Surprising and fun to see them in 19th century costumes.
    Basically it's a shallow ho-hum Hollywood movie. No surprises. A plot that could be on any TV show, not even a very good one.
    There were a couple of decent jokes in there, esp one about George Washington.
    A movie that will be quickly forgotten, though it will probably win a few awards.
    Could have almost reviewed it in 140 characters, decided to write just a few more. :-)
    Worth seeing, but not with a whole lot of enthusiasm.
  Generals Have Sex!
    Executive summary: It's safe to ignore what's happening in the news on TV.
    I just tuned into MSNBC while I had lunch and caught the press conference with Jay Carney, White House spokesperson. The reporters want to know how the President feels about a general having sex. The logical, adult answer would be -- I don't really have an opinion about that. And that would be the end of it, because there's lots of sex going on all the time, and it isn't news.
    Right about now the press should be having the same soul-search the Repubs are having about why they were so surprised by the election. Why did they waste enormous hours "discussing" absolutely nothing in the time time leading up to the election. Instead, as if to prove they aren't doing anything, the big story is about a general's sex life.
    PS: At some point in this "story" I expect Gary Tuchman or John King to get in front of one of those dazzling computer displays with an illustration of a penis and a vagina. They would then proceed to explain how it works. Then Alex Costellanos and David Gurgen could give the Republican view of sex, and Paul Begala could explain the Democratic view. Wolf Blitzer would proclaim it "very interesting."
    PPS: Chuck Todd on MSNBC would show some numbers and Karl Rove on Fox would explain that Republicans don't have sex, so STFU.
  My iPad history
    I have bought four iPads.
    1. The first one was handed down to my mom, who loved it, so we bought her an iPad 3 with LTE. Then I gave the hand-me-down iPad to NakedJen in Salt Lake. I think she likes it too.

      @davewiner I really do love my iPad. Very, very, much! I wasn't convinced I even needed one, now I take it everywhere! e&
      — nakedjen f' (@nakedjen) November 12, 2012

    2. I bought the iPad 2, which I still have. It's light and holds a charge for a long time, but it doesn't have LTE or a retina display. I keep it charged in the living room, and sometimes use it as a TV iPad.
    3. I bought an iPad 3 with LTE, which is getting the lion's share of use. As has been pointed out by many, I didn't like it when I first got it. I still don't like it for the reasons I stated then. It's heavy, runs hot, and doesn't hold a charge very long and takes a long time to charge. Managing its battery is a problem. Yet it's the one I travel with, and the one I read in bed, and often is the living room iPad, because of the beautiful screen and because of the LTE. For me the quality of the screen is important because I have impaired vision. This is not a theoretical thing, not something to brush aside.
    4. I have an iPad Mini, which to me seems a lot like the Kindle Fire I bought when it came out. I use it as little as I use the Kindle. Maybe that will change. Maybe not. When I got the iPad Mini, I put the Kindle on the coffee table too, so I could, if I wanted to, pick it up sometimes. I pick up neither. But get this Apple freaks -- the Kindle has a nicer screen. It's heavier. And it's not an iPad so I don't really know how to use it.
    Disclaimers: YMMV. IMHO. AANW. (Apple assholes not welcome.)
  The new electorate
    It's fascinating to watch the Republican pundits hash it out post-election. I find many of them are saying things I wished they would have said before the election. Particularly this wonderful piece by Wick Allison at The American Conservative. Really nails it. Top to bottom.
    This Obama ad came out shortly after Romney's 47 percent video. Something Republicans should think about now. And this one too.
    Ryan Lizza in the New Yorker explains how the Republican Party is one state away from no longer being a national party. If they lose Texas, the Democrats will have a lock on the White House. No more "battleground" states.
    Jonathan Chait writes in New York that we just had a class war, and the middle class won. But now that the war is over, "what the people want is all fairly beside the point," he says. It's understandable, given what he does, that he feels that way, but he couldn't be more wrong.
    When everything settles down to the new normal, the pundits' view will probably be only slightly different from the old one. But the people, I think, are ready to move faster than the pundits are. I think part of the Democratic Party gets that, but I don't think they'll give up the power they would need to, in order for them to change at the pace the electorate is ready for.
    I knew we'd get here. Obama won by making his own excellent Facebook. But we need our own tools, so we can drive the political process even when there isn't a looming national election.
    The people have to drive their own policy.
    And it's happening -- legalization of marijuana was not a corporate-driven thing. Wasn't done by lobbyists. Same with gay marriage.
    So the pundits will stay in the new reality where they are comfortable. And for the first time in a generation, the people get to drive on into the future, and define where we're going next.
  Tech reporting is often nonsense
    The horserace school of election coverage has been debunked.
    But it's not the only kind of reporting that's based on the gut feel of people who don't know what they're talking about.
    Tech reporting is a great case in point.
    Look at this article at Business Insider that says because they shuffled the chairs at the top level of management at Apple they can predict that a similar kind of revolution is coming soon in their software. The reporter thinks that Apple's mobile OS is no longer innovative, so the whole thing will be redesigned, deployed, somehow, in as little time as it takes to move one exec out and the other in. Never mind that the new exec isn't even a software developer.
    "It's Time For Apple To Unleash A Major Software Overhaul," they say. Sigh.
    You don't have to be an engineer to be a reporter, but you do have to pay attention. Unless you want to sound like an idiot.
    When was the last time an OS got a total overhaul because an exec thought it needed one? Well, that was a trick question cause it happens all the time, of course. And how often are they disasters? Unfortunately for the companies, the execs and most importantly, the users -- that happens all the time too. So much so, that a smart company never undertakes such an overhaul without lots of process. Years of planning, and then it probably doesn't work. Look at how many times Microsoft tried it. Apple too, but in the last decade, they've been much more conservative. And that's a good thing.
    Now here's some more bluntness -- iOS is itself the major retooling.
    Reading the tea leaves you can see that they had the idea that gradually they would bring iOS features to the Mac OS. If you quickly traveled to 2015 or 2018 and booted up what they're selling as a desktop then, you'd be booting up iOS, with the old Mac OS in a compatibility box to run your legacy apps. I think this didn't work out as they hoped it would, that the cultures are so dramatically different, that they couldn't make the transition work. As a Mac user who also uses iOS -- I certainly hope so.
    Apple would be ill-advised at this point to rip up the UI of iOS and start over. Too many users. Too many braincells already aligned to the way it works. That's why progress happens so slowly in OSes. And in so many other everyday things that billions of people use.
    You could complain that iOS and Android are very much alike in UIs. And so are the UIs of Buicks and Toyotas. It has to be that way. It's good that it is that way. It means that our skills are transferable. It keeps lock-in to a minimum.
    I guess reporters have to have something to write about, and maybe there isn't enough. But don't expect a major overhaul of Apple's mobile OS. It would be better for everyone if they concentrated in the next few years on fixing bugs and smoothing things out.
  Horserace punditry is over
    Political reporting, as we've just seen in the cycle completed this week, is 99 percent horserace. But if you read and believed Nate Silver, as the race progressed, polling became more accurate, and it was fascinating to watch the pundits diverge from what the numbers were showing. Silver's model has been tested in two presidential runs, and both times it predicted the outcome in every state, almost perfectly. The 99 percent of political reporting that's about the horserace is over, obviated and unnecessary, now that we've got automated and near-perfect horserace data, thanks to Silver.
    Other elements of previously standard politics that were debunked:
    1. Negative advertising. Users pretty much figured it out when the ads were lies, and discounted them. Some of the lies even backfired, the candidates basically spending money to slime themselves.
    2. Voter suppression didn't work either. The voters tuned in, and just waited in lines that were supposed to make them go home. I don't think the Republicans will try such an open and obvious trick again.
    3. The idea that anything any candidate says is off the record. Kind of amazing that after the macaca disaster, that Romney allowed himself to bear such terrible witness against himself. Pretty much have to expect that won't happen again. Not that the candidate will guard better so his off the record statements are not caught on tape, rather it'll be seen as too dangerous to nominate someone who is so thoroughly narcissistic, arrogant and dishonest.
    The Obama campaign won basically by creating their own private Facebook, with unique features for political campaigns. You could argue that Obama's network is even more valuable than Zuck's. Maybe this is his Presidential library, or his version of the Carter Center or the Clinton Global Initiative. Only this time you might call it ObamaBook. The ultimate political machine.
    But I don't think ObamaBook is the last word. In this campaign the electorate was networked in ways that were not controlled by the media or the parties. That's only going to grow over the years. I hope that we'll eventually take over the political process, and the voters will start driving the discourse, not just during election season, but all the time.
  How to spot an outliner
    I went to a basketball game last night with Doc Searls, and after the game we went out for a bite to eat. And we had a long talk, as we always do.
    Conversations with Doc are like multi-dimensional tennis. He always hits the ball back over the net. But sometimes he hits two or three. And then I hit two or three. All of a sudden there are all these threads going on, and of course since conversation is mostly linear a lot of them drop on the floor. My mind picks them up later.
    One of the things I wanted to say to Doc, who is a long-term outliner guy, is that there's an easy way to spot an outliner. They start sentences like this. There are three reasons for doing this. First, blah blah and second, blah blah and third etc etc. (I heard him doing this several times last night and made note in my mind to come back to this later.)
    We tend to put bullet points on our conversations.
    I, of course, am an outliner dude myself.
    I'm happiest in rattling off lists of things that, together, make up a chain of thought.
    My mind just organizes things that way for me.
    It's as if it has a secretary that neatens everything up before delivering it to my mouth or fingers (for typing on the keyboard).
    If you don't believe me, read the previous piece. :-)
  This is not Steve's Apple
    First, I have been an Apple shareholder for about 10 years. I haven't sold my stock, yet -- but for the first time I'm thinking about it. I'm worried that I'll decide to sell after it's too late.
    Anyway -- here's the thing. I bought an iPad Mini. It was too cheap not to give in to curiosity, to see if it's more compelling or useful or whatever, than the high-end iPad that I already have. Executive summary: It is not.
    Here's the list of problems.
    1. I already had a great iPad. It's big and heavy, and hurts my arm to read in bed. It's my primary bed computer, and also the second screen when I'm watching TV. When I read in bed it leaves impressions on my arm where it rests. I can't imagine this is good for the circulation in my arm.
    2. I could use the iPad Mini, but I don't. People say they don't mind the grainier screen, but I do. If I have a choice, and I do, I always pick up the bigger iPad with the easy-to-read high resolution screen.
    3. What about as a traveling computer? Well, there too I go for the larger iPad, because it has LTE. It's very functional, in my knapsack, when I go out. I swtich it over from wifi to LTE when I go out. And I turn on Bluetooth, so that my iPod (blue, 32GB) has a way to get on the net. The iPad Mini could be a replacement for the iPod, I suppose. But it doesn't fit in the pocket as well. (However it does fit in my pocket, which is cool. Maybe I should try replacing the iPod with the Mini.)
    4. But here's the verdict, the reason why I think this product is making Apple's stock dive. Steve never would have shipped it. I know people have been saying that about all kinds of things ever since he died. Steve wouldn't have done this or that. I've stayed away from saying that -- even though the thought has popped into my head -- because I've never felt certain, and I don't think it's fair to say something like that unless you really feel it in your gut. But this one is kind of obvious. Technology has to keep getting better. Once you've shipped an iPad with a super high-resolution "retina" display, you can't ask people to buy a new one that doesn't have it. Steve wouldn't have done it.
    5. Some features are just features, like a camera, but the resolution of a display isn't a feature. It's integral to the product. It's like trying to sell a car with a fuzzy windshield. Everything you do with the Mini is a reminder that you could be using a nicer product. Always having the nicest thing is what Steve's Apple stood for.
    6. The new Apple is willing to compromise. And what are they compromising for? Well, it looks like they're doing it so they can "compete" with Google and Amazon. But again -- Steve's Apple never deigned to do something as crass as "competing." It was a foreign concept. Steve's Apple was so far in advance of everyone else, it was ridiculous to think of them as competition. But here is the new Apple inviting comparison to something else. But the comparison that's inevitable and damning, is the comparison between the Mini and its predecessor, the iPad 3. And in that comparison the newer product is a dust-catcher. Its battery is always fully charged. It never gets off the night table. It was an obsolete product the day it shipped, and the day before it shipped.
    BTW, this is why the orchestrated reviews of products are often worthless. I invite Mossberg, Pogue or Gruber to re-review their iPad Mini now, a week after their initial reviews, and let us know if they're actually using it. And if they still think it's a winner. I believe it's not only not a winner, but it signals a new Apple that's no longer beyond compare, no longer insisting on delighting its users to the point of orgasm. This Apple is content to be a competitor. Not my idea of what Apple is, and definitely not Steve's.
  My new blogging platform
    A few months ago, I'll have to look up the date, I switched to a new worldoutline-based blogging platform.
    I wanted something that would be halfway between a formal blogging tool, and Twitter.
    Here's why. Because I found myself with things to say that couldn't fit into 140 characters. I think by now this happens to everyone.
    So I wanted an environment that would feel as fluid and as casual as Twitter, but have no limits on length. I wanted to be able to edit as much as I want, and then quickly move on to the next piece.
    "Fluid" writing is the big thing. I didn't want to have to think about creating a blog post. I'd just start writing. If I didn't like the way it was coming out, I could just delete it and it would leave no trace behind. I'd never had a platform where the collection of all my posts was nothing more than a document. I've always wanted that, but until recently I hadn't gotten there.
    I just wrote two blog posts in about ten minutes.
    That's what I'm talking about.
    Blog posts that feel like a sequence of tweets.
    I've got that working -- and it feels great.
    One of the downsides is far more typos and spelling errors.
    But -- far more of my ideas make it out of my brain and onto the net.
    Whether it means anything to anyone but me remains to be seen. :-)
  The people are never a lame duck
    Most of the punditry in Washington isn't worth a bucket of warm spit.
    Take this op-ed in the Guardian that say that because of gridlock in Washington it will be impossible for the President do do anything in his second term that matches what he got done in the first. They don't know that, and they like to pretend they do -- but they're just being lazy.
    Less than two weeks ago New York City was being flooded by a hurricane of such strength with such a huge surge that it wasn't even considered possible before it happened. That triggered an immediate priority, what are we going to do to protect New York against future flooding? And more important, what are we going to do to protect the other coastal cities in the United States. A huge number of Americans live in danger of the kind of flooding we experienced in New York at the end of October.
    And that's just one thing.
    Who knows what kind of winter we're going to have in NY?
    And where the next drought will hit.
    For the Repubs -- where is the next Benghazi.
    You think any of those would disrupt the gridlock?
    The gridlock isn't some sacred thing. If we push hard, the gridlock will break. Congresspeople are sissies. They really don't have much spine when the people are on their ass.
    Life isn't that predictable. You don't know what's going to happen. We shouldn't waste our time thinking in such hum-drum terms. We could have a revolution, a legal revolution. I think it's going to happen one of these years.
    What do we have to revolt about? Well, voter suppression for one thing! It's outrageous. And surprise -- the people figured it out, and they were outraged. For once the books balanced. :-)
    Some of these diseased people should go to jail.
    When you call the President a lame duck you're necessarily saying the People are also a lame duck. And if you read the Constitution, and believe we could be motivated to push back a little more, the People are never a lame duck.
  Thanks President Clinton
    I haven't heard anyone talking about the contribution President Bill Clinton made to the re-election of President Obama. So I decided to do something about it...
    http://thankspresidentclinton.com/
    If you concur, please pass that URL along so everyone can take a moment and pay homage to The Big Dog, who played a big role in this year's victories.
  Why Romney Lost
    The meme du jour is Why Romney Lost.
    It's really not so hard to figure out.
      "There are 47 percent of the people who will vote for the president no matter what. All right, there are 47 percent who are with him, who are dependent upon government, who believe that they are victims, who believe the government has a responsibility to care for them, who believe that they are entitled to health care, to food, to housing, to you-name-it. That that's an entitlement. And the government should give it to them. And they will vote for this president no matter what.These are people who pay no income tax."
    You don't have to look any further. Basically this limited the field of possible Republican voters to people who were too stupid to get that he was talking about them.
      Aside from being insulting, it's clueless.
      I have a pre-existing condition, and if for some reason I lost my health insurance, I would not be able to replace it, no matter how much money I spent. I have never not had insurance. The system is terrible. I had to scramble to find insurance when I lost my job a few years back. Ironically, it was the health care law in Massachusetts that saved my ass.
      I'm willing to pay for the average cost for a person with my health, I think that's fair. But health care is already highly socialized. I get the same treatment as everyone else with the condition I have. We need to pool our resources.
      I don't feel entitled to health care. I am a very productive member of society, and I find it highly insulting that the Republicans think I depend on them to give me a sense of purpose with my life. That's just laughable it's so arrogant and ridiculous.
      So if you want an idea of why this approach didn't work, join the human race -- and you'll find out right away.
    As another famous Republican said: "You can fool some of the people all of the time, and all of the people some of the time, but you can not fool all of the people all of the time."
    In this case you could only fool 53 percent. And some of them were Democrats.
    As President Clinton says -- it's just arithmetic.
    PS: I wish President Obama had thanked President Clinton in his victory speech. It would have brought the house down. The Big Dog really earned it.
  "They don't know they're dead"
    I find it fascinating that Mitt Romney and his advisors went into election night thinking they were going to win. Reminds me of the famous "I see dead people" scene from The Sixth Sense with Haley Joel Osment and Bruce Willis.
  Boehner on ObamaCare
    Speaker Boehner says that ObamaCare is the law of the land.
    1. So there you have it -- a clear mandate from the election. Whether you knew it or not, when you voted for Obama, you were making health reform in the US a reality. But there were other mandates.
    2. You were also protecting Roe v Wade, and making a more liberal Supreme Court much more likely.
    3. Another sure thing is a tax increase for the wealthy. Taxes may go up for everyone else.
      The President has a lot more chips in the upcoming negotiation than the Republicans do, because they can only pass legislation or stop new legislation. The tax increase is already law. All the President has to do is this -- nothing.
      Read Chait's piece for the full story.
      Also Businessweek: "Obama and the Democrats can gain a huge source of new revenue by doing nothing at all."
  The world is socialist, part II
    I try to save big ideas for January 1, every year.
    Hard things to write, things that take a while to think about, both as ideas, and how I want to approach it in writing.
    On January 1, 2011, I wrote a piece called The world is socialist.
    It was intended as a rebuttal to the idea that was going around that our President is a socialist, somehow more radical than all his predecessors, and that was somehow a threat to people who live in the United States.
    It was said a lot during the campaign (I'm looking at you Peterffy) and now in the aftermath, they're still trotting it out. We're going off the cliff because the President is socialist. It's so sad to see people so adrift, for a couple of big reasons.
    1. The President is no more socialist than any other President.
    2. The world is socialist (as I said in the piece I wrote).
    Even the wild west, the supposed ideal of individuality, was highly socialist. The government gave people free land. The government moved the Native Americans out of the way when the Europeans wanted to harvest the buffalo or steal their land. Or is "liberty" something that only applies to white folk?
    Snowstorms are socialist as are hurricanes. When the city gets dumped on we have the roads cleared by the Department of Sanitation, government workers. You don't get a specific bill for this, it's covered under your taxes.
    And taxes. Rich folk pay more, because they get more. The companies they own use more roads, water, education, police. We have to pay for these services. If you don't want to contribute, then you shouldn't take the services. That is, you should move somewhere else. Because just by living you're using the protective services of the government, the police, the military, etc.
    And health care. Should your life be ruined because you get a curable disease? We've decided no. Is that socialist? Perhaps. But then disease, like snow and hurricanes, is socialist too.
    Well, read the piece. In the follow-up to the election this would be a nice one to get out of the way. We, who voted Democratic this year, are no more or less socialist than you are. If you think otherwise, then tell me how. Do you not drive on roads? Do need to breathe clean air? Do you go to public events that are kept peaceful by the police? Do you like to have clean water running into your house? Do you want your neigbors to flush their toilets into the street? Etc.
  Strange numbers
    I don't have a handle on this yet, because it's become virtually impossible to tell how traffic from Twitter arrives. But the hit counts on my short URLs are going way down. I used to get two or three thousand clicks on each one, as recently as a couple of months ago. Now I get two or three hundred clicks. I don't know what to attribute this to.
    I recently started supporting the Twitter Cards feature, so you get a 200-character synopsis of each piece on Twitter, without clicking through.
    I'm not sure this is such a good deal. :-)
    I'm very concerned that we're turning over all our flow to a small number of companies. And we can't tell whether they're passing our tweets along to everyone who follows us. I'm beginning to wonder about that too.
  What Republicans look like, to me
    Yesterday: "Romney did something with integrity by saying we need to get behind the President. If Romney had won, Obama's supporters, most of them, would have swallowed hard and gotten behind the new President and hoped for the best."
    I got a response from someone who I later blocked, who said that before we got behind the new President, we would riot and loot first.
    Then I read this piece by Tom Junod on Esquire where he said: "Though they will be back soon enough with their philosophy of limited government, they will heretofore practice their tried-and-true strategy of demonizing segments of the American population at their peril."
    I thought these two go together. I wanted to tell my correspondent that I am a middle-aged white, affluent, educated person, who would never in a million years riot or loot anyone or anything. I realize of course that there's no point in saying that, if his intentions were respectful, he would already know that.
    This is how a lot of us see Republicans. I thought people who think of themselves as Republicans who aren't like this should know that.
  As Repubs try to figure it out
    A few notes for Republicans trying to figure this election out, and for everyone actually -- because there was some new stuff.
    1. The late-breaking ad run by Romney that said Jeep was moving jobs to China blew back in his face. The people figured it out. And they had great communication tools to share the news with each other. The message: "Romney is a dick."
    2. When Akin said the awful stuff about women and rape, that presented an A-B choice to the Republican leadership. They seemed to understand that, because they called on Akin to step aside. When he didn't, they stuck with him. I assume Republican strategists figured that while maybe it would be an issue in Missouri, the rest of us would forget about it. We didn't. And then it happened again in Indiana. This time the Republican leadership didn't say anything. What if, instead, Romney had made a big deal about it, like the Obama race speech in 2008. Cut support for Akin, on principle. That would have changed the tone of the campaign. But this isn't the kind of thing a Romney does. And that's a big part of why he isn't President-elect Romney. He isn't willing to take a risk for a big reward. He's a numbers guy. Not a good guy to be Leader of the Free World. (Not that we haven't already had presidents like that, we have.)
      He said in his concession speech that he and Ryan had "left everyting on the field." Not true. He didn't take any personal risks other than telling ever-more-bold lies about himself. If he had taken a principled stand on something maybe a few more voters would have looked into his eyes and seen some of the conscience his friends says he has. But if he has it, it never showed up in the campaign. Quite the opposite -- his calculating "I'll say whatever I have to say to get your vote" attitude is what we saw 100 percent of the time.
      Akin and Mourdock teed up a perfect opportunity for him to stand for something. How much guts would it have taken to completely withdraw support from these guys? Sure it would have made enemies in the Republican Party. But it would have given him at least one anchor to the human race, for the rest of us to connect with. "At least he's willing to stand up for a woman who was raped." (It sounds terrible to say it that way, but that is what it comes down to.)
    3. Romney sealed it with his 47 percent comment at the Florida fundraiser. These were familiar ideas. It sounded authentic, like this is what Romney really thinks. No matter how competent you think a guy is, he has abstracted a huge number of American voters to be sub-human. If that's what it takes to hold his world together, I don't want to live in that world. I was already decided not to vote for him, and I didn't imagine there would have been anything he could say to change my mind, but when the debates came around...
    4. The mistake Obama appeared to make was to paint Romney as a cretin, incompetent, dumb, rich, inbred jerk. Well, you could see, in the debate, he wasn't that. He could think on his feet. Put a good sentence together. And he had the fire that Obama lacks. If I had been on the fence (again, I wasn't) that debate might have pushed me over. If he hadn't shared the 47 percent bit, that might have made a difference. There was a moment in the first debate when a thought popped into my head that he's the real president. It wasn't something I reasoned my way to, it was a flash of insight. I imagine this is the feeling, that other people had too, that made his poll numbers go up.
    5. I think he disqualified himself with the bullshit about Benghazi. People were dying, we didn't know how many. The situation was fluid, and there was Mitt sticking his two cents in. Really some people don't have good intuition for politics. Romney proved that day he was one of them.
    6. Don't make jokes about climate change or birth certificates.
    7. I think the biggest lesson of 2012 is that the people are much better connected now than they ever have been. That means that bold manipulative lies don't work, because they can be exposed, quickly, by networks of people that voters trust. In the past, politics was totally centralized. Like everything else, it is not centralized anymore. We have fact-checkers, we can listen to them, and now apparently enough people do that we can enforce a certain discipline on our candidates.
    8. Given the circumstances of the economy, Romney could have won. That's why Republicans should hear this loud and clear. If you run as the Party of Cretins you're going to keep losing. It might take a few years for the transition to be complete. If the Republicans want to reform, they should reform along the lines of empowered voters with good access to information. And show respect for everyone. Don't nominate patricians like Romney. Nominate people with decent political instincts, who would never say the kinds of trashy things Romney said, no matter how much depends on it.
  Election almanac e-book?
    It would be useful to have an e-book you could buy for say $10 put out by a reputable news organization, that gathers, in book form, all the information about the election we have, almanac-style.
    It would be updated as new information comes in. Eventually it would stop updating.
  Dear Repubs, we heard you
    Senate minority leader Mitch McConnell on the top Republican priority, two years ago. It wasn't jobs. Not deficit or ending wars. Not health care.
    The United States paid dearly for this.
    If you think we forgot, we didn't.
  It's a good day
    Lots of good stuff today.
    1. Obama won re-election.
    2. He gave a great speech.
    3. Romney gave a great concession speech.
    4. As of today, Romney becomes a punchline to bad jokes. Had he won, he still would have been the punchline to bad jokes, but they would have also been tragic jokes.
    5. Obama talked about climate change in his speech.
    6. He talked about self-government, implying possibly that he will help organize the people to do things that help our country regain some semblance of grounding. It's very true. In this country the people have all the power. But if you never work with us, if you treat us like mere voters, we can't work together. The President, of all the branches of government, must work with the people. Must like the people. And must lead the people. When the Repubs said the President wasn't leading, they were right. They could push us around because there was no connection betw the President and the people.
    7. By keeping things as they are, with the Senate and House, we told the government that they have to put the bullshit aside and start working for the good of the country. Some people will say this was a message to both parties, but that would be a mistaken interpretation. The message was to the Republicans. I don't know about you, but I heard them say they were being jackasses and holding the economy hostage to try to make Obama a one-term president. I assumed from that point on all the talk about principles was just smoke, covering for their remarkably honest admission. We all paid a huge price for the vanity of the Republican Party. No more of that or we will punish you with obliteration. And maybe we have a President now who knows how to organize the people.
    8. To Republicans, you may not like Obama, and I'm sorry you feel that way, but you have to man-up and deal with it. He not only is the President but he was just re-elected. Stop insulting the majority by saying we elected someone who is not legit. Don't be sore losers. Nothing is more un-American and honestly its disgusting to see grown men and women act like that. Romney did something with integrity by saying we need to get behind the President. If Romney had won, Obama's supporters, most of them, would have swallowed hard and gotten behind the new President and hoped for the best.
    9. I think our new President got the message about the Republicans. They will be bastards if they feel they can get away with it. So take Teddy Roosevelt's advice. Speak softly and carry a big stick.
    10. The fiscal cliff is no problem. Read Jonathan Chait's excellent piece on this subject. Opened my eyes.
    11. If the Repubs want to play a game of chicken on the debt ceiling, again, I have two words for you: 14th Amendment. Dare them to impeach you. Look into the camera and tell the American people that we don't negotiate with terrorists. And mean it. This is where your new cojones come into it. Last time around when you took the 14th Amendment off the table, that's when you sealed our defeat. See #9.
    12. ObamaCare FTW! When people see how much it helps they will love it. The law goes into effect in major ways next year, and with an executive branch that owns it, it has a much better chance. The Repubs will still try to starve its funding, but that's much better than having them try to dismantle it, as they would have under a President Romney.
    13. Even better, the Supreme Court will not be packed with Alito-Thomas-Scalia clones. More Kagans and Sotomayors, please. And Ginsburgs and Breyers and sheez even another John Roberts wouldn't be so bad.
    14. Maybe Netanyahu will stop trying to go behind President Obama's back.
    In general, the President Obama we're getting in 2013 is much improved over the one we got in 2009. This one has battle scars. The old one was remarkably naive about the Republicans. We all knew what he didn't seem to know -- they're bastards. They don't like you and they don't want to work with you. But they have to if you use the bully pulpit. You have all the power that Franklin Roosevelt had, if you choose to use it. He had radio. You have even better tools. Use them or become the red meat that the Republican jackals eat for lunch.
  Today we're the Decider-in-Chief
    Bush said he was the Decider-in-Chief.
    A couple of days ago Bill Clinton picked up the idea and gave it to the President.
    But today is a special day. The day when we're The Decider.
    We still haven't done enough with it. But one day maybe we will do more.
    If we declare our independence from the two parties, and run the next election ourselves, and it's possible -- we have the means to do it -- we can fight a revolution and win. And keep the attention of our leaders long before and after Election Day. And not just on superficial "values" issues, but issues of war and peace, how the economy works, and whether we're serious about saving the planet.
    But no matter what, don't pay attention to people who say your vote doesn't matter. They're wrong. It does. The act of voting is like exercise. When you run a mile, you end up at the same spot you started at, and you give up an hour of your life. But you have done something. You've preserved your power to do something tomorrow and the day after. Same with voting. Even if you vote for someone you hate, you've still voted. The act itself still matters. And someday it will have more meaning, I'm sure of it.
  My favorite movies
  If Obama wins
    My wish if Obama wins tomorrow is that he start building a cross-party coalition with his new buds Chris Christie and Bill Clinton. Go to a Jets game maybe. Ask Christie which Repubs are fun to party with. Bring them along too. Start a new informal Cabinet of advisers, people the President hangs with to talk sports or drink a beer or (privately) smoke some reefer. Then they plot out new ways to get the whole country working, not just the tri-state area. We have something much bigger than Sandy to recover from, that is if Obama wins.
    If Romney wins, god help us.
    Update: If Lindsey Graham keeps saying shit like this he can come to the football game too.
    Update: Wouldn't it be fun if Obama named Bill Clinton as Secretary of Getting People to Work Together? I heard Clinton give a speech at the end of his second term where he advised that we all "find a shared vision." This is every bit as much needed today as it was in 2000.
  Pando on corporate platforms
    A surprising piece by Kevin Kelleher in Pando about lock-in on corporate platforms. It's surprising because none of the California tech blogs have been looking at the possibility that the corporate platforms might not be a permanent fixture. And Pando has been one of the most conservative, imho. It's great to see them look in this direction.
    Eventually the lock-in will break. It would be smart for one of the platforms to decide that as a business strategy they'll try to create an open platform with replaceable components. Let people use different editors, browsers, let them hook in their own back-ends. Create a real ecosystem, with freedom, constructed the same way the web is, using formats and protocols that already exist, where ever possible. This really can work.
    They would be promising to compete on quality, performance, features and price, not lock-in. It's really the honest way to go, and lots of industries work this way. For example, I can buy a Ford, Toyota, BMW or Smart car -- and drive on the same roads and use the same fuel. Everything is interchangeable about them except the key that gets me in and starts the engine. It's a good model for how our communication systems should work, at all levels.
    Products like Twitter or Instagram are providing useful features, they really don't need to lock their users in. They will possibly survive this transition, if they're flexible when it happens. There's lots of examples of past transitions to study for possible strategies.
  How much does the NYT cost?
    Here's a story for a reporter at the NY Times.
    Find out how much I, a resident of the city of New York, a blogger, would have to pay per month for a digital subscription to the Times.
    Is it like a phone company contract? Do I have to sign up for one year? Two years? I'd much prefer to buy a month at a time like a no-contract cell phone. But sometimes it's hard to get rid of these things, like AOL. I had to talk to them several times, many years ago, to get them to stop billing me $20 a month. Given the deceptive way the NYT markets digital subscriptions, I strongly suspect they're like that when you want to say goodbye.
    I don't care how much it costs for the first 12 weeks. That's such an insult. As a reader of the NY Times, I expect you to lay out the information clear unambiguous terms. It's such a contradiction that the Times markets itself this way.
    I honestly don't know how much it costs. But if it's not too unreasonable I probably would have bought in a long time ago. To the Times, the way you're marketing this product is totally inconsistent with the values of the product you're trying to sell. I don't care if this gets more people to buy in, you're never going to get my business until you level with me, in a Times-like way.
  What are red state folks saying?
    If Romney wins, we won't have to worry about what the red states are saying -- we'll hear it every day in the form of legislation, tax policy, executive orders. But if Obama wins, we have a chance to try to grow the majority through the simple act of listening.
    On the surface the red state folks say things that we know are not true, and most of them probably do too. The president is American. He is no more a socialist than any Republican president ever was. It's all repetitive talking points given to them by their pundits. Same as the Democrat pundits on MSNBC give their people idiotic talking points. A lot of my friends think there's a difference. If anything the MSNBC dogma is richer than the Fox News bullshit. That kind of crap isn't worth listening to or arguing with. Time-wasters. The people who really believe that are hopeless. They are drugged into a coma.
    I also say we should not focus on policy issues, because they are mostly symbols, ways of expressing a more fundamental distrust, dislike, perhaps even in some cases hatred of east and west coast liberals. It's the fundamental things below that, what the symbols are expressing, that we should focus on, because they have validity.
    That may sound surprising, that the source of hate is valid, but it is -- and until we listen to it, and try to understand what causes it, we will not grow the majority. What if we can give them what they want? What if they feel the world is moving too fast and leaving them behind? Is that something we can relate to? We all feel that to a certain extent. My guess is that people in flyover territory generalize about people on the coasts, just like we generalize about them. We're all greedy, powerful, ignorant and rich.
    But people voting for Obama are not all alike. And middle class people have similar issues whether they live in the Bronx or Jacksonville, Florida.
    On the networks we hear from people in Louisiana saying that finally the people up north have a taste of what it's like to be them. That's sad, because that didn't just happen. It's been like that all along. People in Staten Island and Rockaway have always been forgotten. Just like people in Louisiana.
    The crazy thing is we all feel forgotten. Every one of us. Even the chairman of Chase or the mayor of New York or the governor of New Jersey feel unheard and unappreciated. I think that's the symbol we're all trying to manipulate, to light a huge flare, to send a message saying very simply -- hey I'm here, don't forget me.
    That's why the visual symbols of the people jumping off the WTC holding hands, or standing on roofs in New Orleans waiting for rescue, or lining up for gas in New Jersey, while differing in degree, are all expressing the same idea. I'm lost, we're all lost, we have no idea what we're doing, and what we're doing isn't working. This isn't a new idea with Obama. This has been our problem in America ever since the 60s, the last time we, as a country had a mission.
    The way things are, our leaders will never come up with the answer. We have to do that ourselves. It's a game of inches. It's two people communicating and helping each other across the red-blue divide. It's bi-partisanship not in Washington, it's bi-partisanship between us.
  Crowd-sourcing the election
    A note for next time, let's not let Shelly Adelson have all the fun. :-)
    One thing we've learned in the last few years is that if you have an idea that tickles the imagination of enough people, you can raise a lot of money online to develop the idea.
    So, when a video like this one comes along, that mixes a Republican crowd mocking climate change with scenes of the Sandy disaster, we could put $50 million behind running it where ever we like.
    The cool thing about this is that we could decide to run ads that our candidate would never run. We could run them in non-battleground states. Or we could run ads to make sure an issue gets discussed in debates that our favorite candidate is trying to side-step. We can make winning about making politics do for us what we want it to do, instead of settling for the compromises that come from letting individual fatcats do all the pushing. You and I may not have a billion dollars, but if we pool our resources, we can act like we do.
    Or we could run ads that shame the big spenders, reveal things about them they don't want revealed, give them an incentive to crawl back into their holes and stop pushing the rest of us around. I'm looking at you Thomas Peterffy.
    I believe that Citizens United actually opened a big door that we can all take advantage of, not just Republican dickheads.
    And yes, I know the title of this piece is funny. The founders of our country were the original crowd-sourcing guys, and voting is the ultimate form of crowd-sourcing. We've just gotten out of the practice of being proactive with our vote. We only vote on the things the rich guys let us vote on. Well, we have the tools to change that, imho.
  Help Annie help NYC
    Annie Feighery is working to get actual physical things to people who are hurting in the aftermath of Sandy. Here's what they need:
      Cleaning supplies (especially bleach-based cleansers).
      Diapers/wipes.
      Food that does not need to be cooked (ready-to-eat: PB&J, bagels, prepared meals pre-packaged, etc).
      Warm clothes and blankets (socks, long sleeve shirts, warm child PJs, etc).
    Details
    Please pre-sort your items as much as possible, as volunteers have to do it if you don't.
    Don't mix cleaning supplies with clothes in a bag.
    Try to separate adult clothes from kid clothes by bag.
    They're filling a moving van. :-)
    Where and when
    Bring supplies to 606 W 116th near Ollie's, 116th and Broadway, Sunday morning betw 8 and 10AM.

      <iframe width="600" height="500" frameborder="0" scrolling="no" marginheight="0" marginwidth="0" src="https://maps.google.com/maps?q=606+W+116th+St,+New+York,+NY&hl=en&sll=40.697488,-73.979681&sspn=1.072413,0.986023&oq=606+W+116th&t=m&hnear=606+W+116th+St,+New+York,+10027&ie=UTF8&hq=&ll=40.816537,-73.964424&spn=0.032479,0.051413&z=14&iwloc=A&output=embed">
      <a href="https://maps.google.com/maps?q=606+W+116th+St,+New+York,+NY&hl=en&sll=40.697488,-73.979681&sspn=1.072413,0.986023&oq=606+W+116th&t=m&hnear=606+W+116th+St,+New+York,+10027&ie=UTF8&hq=&ll=40.816537,-73.964424&spn=0.032479,0.051413&z=14&iwloc=A&source=embed" style="color:#0000FF;text-align:left">View Larger Map

    The 1-train has a stop at 116th and Broadway. And the 1-train is running! :-)
    Tweet her at @AnnieFeighery if you want to drop-off today instead.
  Crane on the move
    Remember the crane that blew over in the storm on Monday?
    Apparently it still works, and they're solving the problem by turning it, so that the dangling part is touching the building.
    Presumably from there, they can dismantle it safely, and cart away the broken bits down through the building itself.
    It's kind of brilliant. They might do some damage to the building, but the ground below remains safe, and the problem may be solved quickly.
    Update: Here's a close-up of the crane. Note the net under the crane bits.
    Update #2: Here's a Bloomberg article that explains the plan.
  Most brutal political ad, ever
  The 2001 Marathon
    In 2001, the New York Marathon took place 54 days after 9/11. The fires were mostly out by then.
    Having the marathon on Sunday is more like having it a few days after the hellacious snowstorm of 2010. You might have been able to clear the streets for the race, but what about the streets you weren't plowing. How much money would be lost by those people not being able to get to work? I think you're looking at a much higher cost than the revenue a sporting event brings into the city. Penny-wise, pound-foolish. It's probably more money to get the bodegas and delis open all over the city. And the barber shops and halal food vendors. And get some more trees off people's houses. Re-open Central Park for the people. So totally like the mayor to focus on opening it for the media and elite runners. The city needs the park. And what about people with no electricity. Give me a break.
    Another comparison. The Yankees returned home on 9/25/01 -- two weeks after 9/11. The baseball game involved a small part of the Bronx which was far from the disaster, and all transport systems to and from the Bronx were working at the time. Most of the infrastructure of the city was unaffected by 9/11. Not true in 2012.

      <iframe width="425" height="350" frameborder="0" scrolling="no" marginheight="0" marginwidth="0" src="https://maps.google.com/maps?f=d&source=s_d&saddr=world+trade+center,+new+york,+ny&daddr=yankee+stadium,+bronx,+ny&hl=en&geocode=FfM1bQIdVaSW-yHKYSw_KBEPTSlTGzgAGVrCiTHKYSw_KBEPTQ%3BFZgBbwIdnPiX-yEIHppV2cNASSlxaedaLPTCiTEIHppV2cNASQ&aq=&sll=40.697488,-73.979681&sspn=1.026601,0.986023&t=m&mra=ls&ie=UTF8&ll=40.774302,-73.969574&spn=0.181996,0.291824&z=11&output=embed">
      <a href="https://maps.google.com/maps?f=d&source=embed&saddr=world+trade+center,+new+york,+ny&daddr=yankee+stadium,+bronx,+ny&hl=en&geocode=FfM1bQIdVaSW-yHKYSw_KBEPTSlTGzgAGVrCiTHKYSw_KBEPTQ%3BFZgBbwIdnPiX-yEIHppV2cNASSlxaedaLPTCiTEIHppV2cNASQ&aq=&sll=40.697488,-73.979681&sspn=1.026601,0.986023&t=m&mra=ls&ie=UTF8&ll=40.774302,-73.969574&spn=0.181996,0.291824&z=11" style="color:#0000FF;text-align:left">View Larger Map

    More prior art. The Bay Area World Series resumed ten days after the Loma Prieta quake in 1989. As bad as that was, and it was really bad (I was there), this is a much bigger disaster. I don't think that's sunk in with a lot of people yet.
  Occupy Staten Island
    Just read this in the Times.
    Staten Island Hotel Owners Won't Kick Out Guests to Accommodate Runners. As anger percolates over the the decision to hold the New York City Marathon, at least two hotel owners on Staten Island, where the race starts, said they would not kick out those displaced by Hurricane Sandy to accommodate runners who have reserved a room.
    The rest of the piece is on the Times site, without a working permalink. But I'm sure you get the idea.
    The Mayor is a smart man, but he's made a very stupid decision, to have the marathon on Sunday. I can see the preparations happening right now in Central Park. It's a massive event that uses a lot of city resources at a time when all those resources should be used to restore power and transit and probably to some degree to save lives of New Yorkers. It's certainly possible that there's damage we don't even know about.
    Maybe next year we can have a marathon. But this doesn't look like an ordinary disaster, like a snowstorm, which the mayor kind of blew a couple of winters ago.
    It's important to do this rebuild right, and to include all the people of New York. Someone must get that. This is the premier American city not a monarchy. As long as there are New Yorkers suffering this way, we can't have a party.
    One person said this is like Mardi Gras after Katrina. Emphatically it is not. I went to New Orleans five weeks after Katrina. There's no way that city could have had any kind of party at that point. And we're a much larger city and this wound is fresh, the bleeding and dying hasn't stopped. New Orleans had its party, seven months after the hurricane. Maybe we'll be ready for a party at that point.
    People don't realize how much damage was done to our communities, and even more important to the infrastructure that connect us. It looks like these systems are really damaged. Months before they come online. it's time to sober up and get a clue, all of us. Especially our mayor.
  Nate is great!
    I think the public editor at the NYT is just right when she admonished Nate Silver for offering a bet with Joe Scarborough.
    Nate made a mistake. Here's my take.
    1. I am educated, with a math degree. I've spent decades writing software. To do what I do requires a precise kind of thinking, but there's also an art to it. So when I read Nate's analysis, I recognize and appreciate it. I think Nate is one of a small number of young folk who make me optimistic about the future. I appreciate that he uses statistical methods, and I understand what you can and cannot do with stats. It's possible that Romney will win when there's an 80 percent chance of Obama winning. But, according to Nate's model, four times out of five, Obama wins. He's not 100 percent sure of it. But he's sure enough to put his honor on the line. As a believer in Nate, and a supporter of Obama, I am relieved. But -- if Nate said it was the other way around, 80 percent likely that Romney would win, I wouldn't even think of trying to discredit Nate. Instead, I'd be depressed about the future of the world. A fundamentally different way of processing negative information. :-)
    2. Uneducated people probably don't understand the limits of statistical analysis. Probabilities don't come into it for them. I can't imagine that what Nate writes about makes much sense to them.
      BTW, self-educated people are just as educated as formally educated people. Not drawing a distinction between people with and without degrees.
    3. Making bets with such people accomplishes nothing.
    4. I have had to deal with gangs of Internet trolls for years. It happens to everyone who takes a leadership role. The more you accomplish, the more inundated with garbage you get. When I realize all the things I didn't do because I didn't have the stomach for dealing with these people it makes me really angry. If I had it to do over again I would not let them stop me. I've developed new procedures that keep them out of my way. They seem to work. Knock wood.
    5. Nate may think it's possible to teach Scarborough something. If he wanted to learn, he would buy Nate's book, or take a course in stats, or listen instead of rejecting strange ideas. But that's not who he is. No matter what you say to him, his mind is not going to change. You can't open the door for him. You can't show him how wonderful your world is. He's not looking for new delights. Sad, isn't it, but there are lots of people like that. They will never become Nate Silver fans. That's life!
    6. You have to be satisfied by informing people who understand the process you use, or whose minds are open to new ideas.
    7. The trolls will insult you for this. They will say you are not open to new ideas. Maybe they believe it. I don't know why they do it. But you'll never figure it out, no matter how hard you try, because they are truly different from you. So different that you can't communicate. So give up trying.
    8. I think the Times has had this problem for generations. Long before there was an Internet.
    9. Their isolation, their aloofness, could be functional, might be a response to this reality. I've often wondered why NYT people can be such assholes. Now I have an idea. They only let certain people into their discussion space. There are only certain people they listen to. Nate is to be commended for having a broader circle that influences him. But that doesn't make the Times wrong. They are probably just reacting to the reality that there have always been low-roaders like Scarborough. People who try to stop things they don't like or understand. Tune them out. But I think they go too far, and tune out things they should be listening to, that's not meant to harm them, or stop them. But too much time may have passed for the Times, organizationally, to be able to tell the difference between a troll and someone with strange wonderful ideas.
    That's why I agree with the public editor that the bet he offered to Scarborough (which he, predictably, slimed) was a bad idea. Not something to be repeated.
    On the other hand, the Times could find ways to open up a bit more and let some strange ideas in. They suffer for being too cloistered. And those of us in their community suffer too.
  No marathon
    There are many New Yorks right now. I am lucky -- I live in one that's coming back to life quickly. I have TV, electricity, Internet, heat. Most of the stores in my neighborhood are open. The only catastrophe that happened nearby is the crane that fell during the storm. But that seems to be taken care of, and its only a concern because it's caused traffic gridlock in my neighborhood. Very small problem.
    Last night I took a walk down to 4th St, went cross-town, and came back via Times Square. The contrasts were very heavy.
    I wondered how we could get the energy that's flowing through Times Square -- and everything is normal there -- to flow through the parts of the city I had just visited that are dark.
    Today for the first time we're getting a picture of what's happening in Staten Island.
    What will become apparent tomorrow? And do we really want to use our resources at this time for a huge optional event when citizens and taxpayers in parts of the same city are fighting for their lives? It's more ridiculous because the marathon is a citywide event.
    This the Heckuva job Brownie moment for the mayor. Only a billion times worse.
    No marathon. Bad business for NY.
  The paywall contradiction
    When I heard that the WSJ and NYT were turning off their paywalls for the duration of Hurricane Sandy, I felt sure there was something wrong with this, though I found it hard to put in words.
    I'm going to try now and see what happens.
    When I write something publicly it's because I want to put the ideas out there and get a response. I want the benefit of other minds interacting with the idea. To limit access is opposite the purpose of writing it publicly. So every person who can't read it subtracts some of the value. If that person had a pivotal insight, one that would make me change my mind -- then all the value of publishing it is gone if I never get to hear the response because of a paywall.
    One might argue that it's a matter of extent. If the paywall should come down because there's important potentially life-saving information on the site today, then it should come down tomorrow too, if the news organization is any good -- because that's always true. What difference does it make if they could save one life or one thousand? To the person whose life is saved, it makes none.
    In 1995, I called the attempted censorship of the Internet in the CDA a "crime against humanity." Some people questioned the use of that term. I offered two defenses:
      I have two answers. First, it's a felony to leave the scene of an accident, and it's a felony to blow up a Federal courthouse in Oklahoma City. Scale has nothing to do with it. If this isn't a crime against humanity, who is it a crime against? Do we hold our politicians accountable for their actions, especially if they're on a global scale? Are just US citizens offended by their attempt to shut down free speech on the Internet? No. The mail has been coming in from all over the planet. And rightly so. This act has global implications.
    Writers and publishers have different motivations and missions. A writer's job is to spread ideas far and wide and reap the benefit. That's his art. A publisher's mission is, well I don't understand that one -- because I am a writer. :-)
December 2012
  My tech new years resolution
    A friend who is a reporter sent an email saying they're looking for New Year resolutions from people in NY and in tech. Arrgh, I groaned out loud. I'll never come up with anything. So I put it out of my mind.
    Then trolling Twitter thinking about doing something fun with a couple of hours free time this morning, I came across a tweet from Paul Ford, a New York tech guy who also happens to be an excellent published writer. He also makes a living writing docs about XML and scripting, and other technical topics. He occupies a unique cell in my brain. A techie who is also literate.
    Every time his name pops up in my feed I think -- Man I wish there was a project I could do with this guy. Then I thought back to the question my reporter friend asked. And I had my opportunity.
    Thus, my resolution for the New Year is: I will do what I can to make tech writing more literate.
  What is Silicon Valley?
    Silicon Valley is an idea that represents an industry, analogous to Hollywood, Wall Street, MSM, academia.
    Sometimes these concepts are geographic, sometimes the geography is totally symbolic. For example, there are people who are definitely part of Silicon Valley who live and work in New York. And there are people in New York also who are part of Hollywood.
    Saying Silicon Valley thinks college is a waste is like saying Hollywood is fighting piracy. Or Wall Street supported Romney in 2012. Believe it or not I am part of Silicon Valley, and I sure don't agree with the idea that college is irrelevant, so it's not an absolute or unanimous thing.
    We say things like this all the time, often to explain what we don't agree with. It doesn't make sense to spend a few paragraphs stating exactly what all the people in tech think in all its variants. Even if Paul Graham hasn't heard that Silicon Valley thinks college is a waste, the students have. I went to his Startup School and talked with a few of them. I worked at NYU for a couple of years, and saw all the energy drawing students out of school and into startups. That pull totally came from tech. The students hear it even if Peter Thiel is saying something subtly different.
    So that's what I wanted to respond to. And I think I wrote a pretty good essay. It's certainly resonated with a few people (except in PG's backyard). I believe there's something there.
  Silicon Valley is wrong about college
    Lately I've been thinking a lot about startup culture, and am reminded of its nobility -- having started three companies in my career, and learned from each experience, and even occasionally made some money. I'm more positive on startups these days than I have been in a while.
    I have experience as an entrepreneur, but I also have an education. For me, it was a rough path. I dropped out, briefly, in high school. Got a chance to reboot my education, which was something I really needed to do. I had a professor in my freshman year of college who showed me that my mind could do math. And from there, I took charge. With mixed results. But at the end of the mess, I was educated. Not just in science and technology, but also in art, music, history, economics and literature. There were a few things I wish they had required I learn: accounting and psychology, foremost, so I wouldn't have been so scared of taxes and sex. But on the whole I think I got a pretty good deal.
    Nowadays Silicon Valley says that college education is a waste. This idea has spread to academia too. They're trying to make the experience more relevant to entrepreneurs and their investors. I've heard it said at Harvard that they want to participate in the success of the next Gates and Zuckerberg, both Harvard dropouts. I find this disturbing. I want them to educate better citizens, not richer business people. If they happen to be better citizens and rich, all the better. But first comes the person, not the bank account.
    I don't think Gates and Zuckerberg are good role models for young people. And not just because they dropped out. It's more subtle. Most kids who try to be the next billionaire entrepreneur will fail. There probably isn't even one such success in the class of 2013. So most will be disappointed. And if we push the kids toward that, we will lead them to believe, mistakenly, that it's enough to create a massive fortune. It is not enough. And if they fail to create the fortune, according to this standard, they will have failed in life. So, not only will we have set this generation up to fail, but we have just certified the mistake of past generations, that wealth itself has meaning. It has a lot less meaning, imho, than most people think.
    When you look at the problems our democracy has, probably the biggest one is the "low information voter." The ignorant electorate that says they want government out of our lives, but keep your hands off Medicare and Social Security, for example. We should strive not to create better billionaires, we should set our sights higher -- to create better voters. I'm not saying they should vote the way I want them to. I don't vote the same way I did 20 years ago. We should however vote with a purpose. Not for style or appearance. For what's good for ourselves and for the country.
    The education process could work better, so let's make it work better. But before you throw it out, think clearly and seriously about what we depend on it for.
    Update: There's a Hacker News thread on this piece.
  Two-minutes on Promised Land
    What could be bad about a movie starring Matt Damon and Frances McDormand, that was written by Damon and directed by Gus Van Sant? What could be bad? Just about everything. :-(
    There were two jokes in the movie. The first one they spoiled in the movie itself, and the second was in the trailer. The one Damon told had Damon's charm. Both appear in the first ten minutes of the movie.
    After that it was all downhill.
    The plot was taken out of the Handbook of Hollywood Scripts and then twisted so it made no sense. In other words they couldn't even get the standard plot right.
      The plot: Corporate asshole falls in love, finds he has a conscience, struggles, decides to do the right thing, gets the girl.
      The plot: Jerry Maguire, which I really loved, however with none of its charm, or coherence. Or Renee or Cuba. :-)
    However, this time the reviewers got it right.
    I don't understand how a movie can suck as much as this one did.
    They had a great idea -- let's expose fracking -- something that's very important. That, and $9 billion corporations suck the life out of people and communities. And if you want to show us how, great -- but they didn't.
    There were two people conversing loudly during the coming attractions, and I was thinking Oh this is going to suck. After the first half hour of the movie I thought they were more interesting than the movie.
    My eyes were rolling so often I just decided it would be simpler to leave them permanently rolled. They are rolled right now in fact.
    In case it isn't completely obvious: Skip this one.
    PS: It did have a great poster. Probably why I was suckered into seeing the movie.
  Amazon and static sites
    According to a post late last night by Werner Vogels, CTO at Amazon, and an email they sent to all AWS users just now, and a walkthrough on the AWS site, they appear to have finished the implementation of static websites on S3. I'm going to check that out right now and report back.
    The problem was in the past you could only map a CNAME to a bucket, not the domain itself. This is because of a limit in the DNS system. They appear to have implemented a non-standard (and appreciated!) alias feature in their Route 53 DNS service, which many of us use.
    What's not clear in the docs is if a request from mydomain.com is
      1. Redirected to www.mydomain.com or
      2. If the user of your site simply sees the content as residing at mydomain.com.
    To some this may seem picky, but I won't be using the feature if it's #1, because I think it's just plain wrong to waste four characters at the beginning of a web URL. I'm a member of the No-WWW movement. I would rather pay the extra money for a host than have readers of scripting.com be redirected to www.scripting.com. However if the distinction is tranparent to users, then I'll use it, but hope that next year they get rid of this limit.
    Cliff Notes version of the walkthrough
      Their walkthrough is very verbose. I'm going to do the Cliff Notes version here.
      1. Register a domain and set it up so it's managed by Route 53. For my demo, the domain is bloatware.org. It's a real domain, with a placeholder home page currently being served by other software. If this goes well it will be hosted in an S3 bucket.
      2. Create an S3 bucket for the domain. Screen shot.
      3. Upload the website. In this case, I just have an index.html file with an image on it. Screen shot.
      4. You have to add a "bucket policy." Follow the instructions in step 4 of this howto I did a couple of years ago.
      5. Next, configure your bucket for website hosting. Click on its name in the left panel, and then click on Properties at the top of the right panel, and then Static Website Hosting below that in the right panel. You should get a display that looks like this screen shot. Important, copy the endpoint because you'll probably need it in the next step. (We hope.)
        bloatware.org.s3-website-us-east-1.amazonaws.com
      6. Finally, go to Route 53, and set it up so it's hosting your domain. For that you can refer to the Amazon docs. But the key new feature is the ability to make the root name a CNAME that's an alias. I just guessed how to do it (the docs are too complex to follow) and it worked! Hey they did it right. Yehi. ;-)
    Postscript
      They did it the right way, #2 above. I can host scripting.com in a bucket and the user will not see www.scripting.com. You can redirect from www.scripting.com to scripting.com any way you wish, you don't have to use Amazon's method. That's why the docs are so confusing, they assume you need to use their software to do the redirect.
    One more thing
      Now that they have this wonderful feature, it would be nice if they increased the per-user limit on buckets from 100 to something more reasonable, perhaps 10000. :-)
      Or maybe no limit at all. It would be great to set up a hosting service based on this feature, and the arcane process of setting it up. It could be very useful, for example, to Dropbox users. But with a limit on the number of buckets, and buckets being the basic unit of this feature, it's impossible to set such a service up.
      Gives Werner something to ask for next year? :-)
  Blogger of the Year -- 2012
    This is something I do at the end of every year, at least for the last five years or so.
    I try to pick one person who exemplifies the blogging spirit, which is a multi-faceted thing. So each year there's been one face we take a look at. In the past we've looked at Joel Spolsky, NakedJen, Jay Rosen, Julian Assange and Seth Godin.
    These days I start thinking about BOTY in the summer. I know no one is waiting to hear who won, but it's an important process for me, because it helps me understand what blogging is and isn't. And this year's decision came down to two people, and in the decision is some truth about what blogging is, I hope.
    First, I thought it should be Nate Silver, who is most certainly a blogger, even though his writing now appears on nytimes.com. I thought it would be a good idea to say that blogging can take place even at a famous newspaper, even by someone who is paid to blog. Blogging isn't always an amateur thing, even though I strongly associate the word with the deed. Amateur means it's done for love, not money. Good blogging is amateur. But then so is good everything, pretty much. I don't really care how much money you made writing that book or movie script. I care about what it evoked for me, what you said, what it proved. On those grounds Nate Silver certainly belongs in the BOTY seat for this year. He proved that an individual with his brain and beliefs can conquer all the paid pundits the pros can muster. Politically and spiritually Nate is a carrier of The Cause. Believe your eyes and ears, and your mind, not conventional wisdom. But in the end, I believe his accomplishments in 2012 were not about his blogging. The blogging was a means to a different end. If there's an award for statistical modeler of the year, that award should go to Nate, without contest.
    My choice for BOTY is someone you might not have heard of, unless you were a techie in the early days of the web. If so, then you defintely know Philip Greenspun. He was a blogger before there were blogs, writing his own web CMS so he could tell the stories of his photography, flying, his beautiful dog, teaching at MIT, and his startup. It was when he wrote about the startup that he caught my attention. I remember reading the story of the people, his mistakes with investors, what he learned. Oh man, this guy is a blogger, for sure! But he wasn't writing on an official blog. Yet.
      At the time I said: "I think we're really onto something here. The people are doing their own press, and doing it damned well. Thanks to Philip Greenspun for showing us how it's done, and thanks for the courage to state your case so clearly. Amateur journalism at its best."
    That came later when we started a blogging server at Berkman Center in 2003. It was probably at one of his Sunday afternoon parties in his Cambridge apartment when I said he should get a blog on our server. He did, and it's still there, and he's still writing. And it's great stuff. When a Greenspun post appears in my river, I post it to my linkblog to be sure I read it. His politics and mine are almost 180 degrees opposed, but he's still a read, because you can see how a brilliant mind can take the same facts, and get to a totally different destination. And when it comes to aviation, or any of the practical subjects he writes about, there's always a lot of wisdom, and entertainment, in a Greenspun post.
    This is what I meant by the unedited voice of a person. That's what a blog is. That's all you have to do to be a blogger. But to be a great blogger, you must have something to say. That's Greenspun, for sure.
  Reporting weather news
    Someone should report weather news the way other news is reported.
    I said this in a variety of ways on Twitter yesterday, as a blizzard was working its way through the midwestern US, and got back pointers to regional feeds. I could follow the weather in the midwest. Yes, I knew that. I already follow the weather for NYC, and for a few other parts of the country, but I'm looking for something different.
    An example. The NYT has a feed for International News. One for Sports News. One for baseball and one for basketball. But they don't seem to have one for weather. The basketball feed has news about basketball where ever it happens. Not just for the NY-area teams. I would like to follow weather the same way. Yes, I have a particular interest in some areas. But I have a general interest in weather.
    There are probably other areas that we're not covering very well from a news standpoint, but right now weather seems to be the most glaring. Yes I know about wunderground.com. It's not what I'm talking about. It's reallly simple. News. About. Weather. No matter where it happens.
    It should be written like news, not like a meteorologist's report. I am not a meteorologist.
    You'd think weather.com would do this, but they don't.
  Heat-seeking missiles
    As someone who enjoys walking in New York, as many NYers do, I thought to take a walk relatively early yesterday. It was crisp, in the low 30s. Not windy. And it's Christmas Eve so I figured the sidewalks would be pretty empty. They were. However, that didn't mean that people talking on phones or reading/sending texts were paying any more attention than usual. If anything, they took license to occupy even more of the sidewalk.
    They can be pretty difficult to avoid. I think this is because we have an inner mechanism that draws us to other people. Or maybe it's my personal energy. I'm walking toward someone whose eyes are looking into their device. I move a little to the left, they move to their right. Okay, let's try it the other way. No luck, they match my move. I end up stopping a foot in front of them as they walk into me. I don't want anyone to say that I walked into them. They're usually not pissed. I guess they're accustomed to finding themselves in this position?
    I'm old fashioned. When I want to check for messages on one of my many devices (doesn't matter which, they're all synched), I generally pull off to the side and stop. In winter, I have to take off my gloves. And I'm just not fast or agile enough (fat fingers, fuzzy vision) to do this while walking. I'm also afraid that I'll end up walking into a city bus, which might have a rude effect on my future existence. :-)
    A story I've told many times. I lived in Florida for a few months in 2005. I wanted to try living on the beach, and I had family in the area, so this made sense as a place to try out. In this part of Florida, you can drive on the beach, which goes for miles, between inlets on the intercoastal waterway. This stretch of beach was about 10 miles long, and except for a town in the middle of it, mostly empty. One morning I decided to take my swim via car. I drove a couple of miles south, on a stretch of beach that was totally empty. I laid out the towel, read for a while, then went for my swim. When I came back, there was another car parked next to mine. The people were gone, so I couldn't ask them why they chose that spot, when there were so many other places to stop that were totally secluded.

      <iframe width="600" height="350" frameborder="0" scrolling="no" marginheight="0" marginwidth="0" src="https://maps.google.com/maps?q=crescent+beach,+fl&ie=UTF8&hq=&hnear=Crescent+Beach,+St+Johns,+Florida&gl=us&t=m&ll=29.768848,-81.25351&spn=0.104306,0.205994&z=12&iwloc=A&output=embed">
      View Larger Map

    Yes I am old fashioned. I still think it's hilarious to see a person walking down the street talking to no one. Hands waving wildly. I try to imagine my grandfather, who died long before this became a common sight, trying to figure it out. "David, vat ist dis?" he might have asked.
    When you get the idea that things will always be the way they are now, remember that not long ago people thought there was something special about printed magazines. Then go look at a magazine rack, if you can find one. Someday, not too many years from now, you'll mention the idea of a printed magazine, and a young person will have no idea what you're talking about.
  How to make a smiley
    I was talking with a friend who is a computer-using newbie who didn't know how to make a smiley.
    Don't laugh. :-)
    Here's how you do it.
    colon hyphen right-paren
    That's all there is to it.
    Unlike most things to do with computers, this one is easy. :-)
  Limits on HTML email?
    I was chatting with a friend the other day about using my outliner to write email, and later it struck me, why not?
    So I wrote a script that took an outline and rendered it as if it were on a web page and then emailed it to myself.
    When I opened it in GMail, not surprisingly, all the text was there, but the Javascript and most of the CSS had apparently been stripped.
    This led me to wonder if there's anything like a standard or best-practices document that says what email clients typically do with emails that have script and style?
    BTW, here's the text I actually sent, and a screen shot of the email. The wedges don't do anything when you click on them in the email.
    Update -- I received a few pointers on Twitter.
      campaignmonitor.com
      email-standards.org
      putsmail.com
  People don't listen when you say something bad will happen
    I went to college in New Orleans, so over the years I've paid attention when scientists said that it was certain at some point that a storm would cause the levees to fail. I also heard about what happened historically when the levees failed in other parts of Louisiana.
    All this information was available to anyone who lived in New Orleans. Yet, after Katrina, amazingly, people were angry that no one told them this was going to happen.
    Again, with global warming, on a much larger scale, the information about what's coming is available to anyone. But many people push it away. It's too heavy to really contemplate. We all have problems in our own lives, things to worry about on a much smaller scale, to really be able to incorporate the kinds of changes such disasters will bring about into our thinking.
    With that as background, I highly recommend reading this article in the NY Times about what's happening in the Antarctic.
  NBA All-star picks
    Pick#1: Omer Asik - Houston Rockets
    Pick#2: Kevin Durant - Oklahoma City Thunder
    Pick#3: Chandler Parsons - Houston Rockets
    Pick#4: James Harden - Houston Rockets
    Pick#5: Jeremy Lin - Houston Rockets
    Pick#6: Carmelo Anthony - New York Knicks
    Pick#7: LeBron James - Miami Heat
    Pick#8: Tyson Chandler - New York Knicks
    Pick#9: Deron Williams - Brooklyn Nets
    Pick#10: Raymond Felton - New York Knicks
    You can vote too. :-)
  The easy stuff should be easy
    Anyone who's trying to create a platform should keep this in their mind when making decisions about which way to go. The point of making a platform is to encapsulate something that you've finally figured out how to simplify. Then you put the complex stuff behind an interface, and it becomes easy.
    I like to visualize a very huge ball at the end of a very long chain. I have it between my index finger and thumb, and with the least effort possible I should be able to make the ball swing as fast as I want in exactly the direction I want it to go. That's my idea of power.
    There's a huge opportunity to simplify now that the web browser is being used as an application environment. We're pushing the envelope now further than we did in the age of desktop applications. But we've already simplified that once before, as the desktop platform matured. So I don't have any doubt that the simplification of the browser programming environment is coming. It will happen because it is happening. ;-)
    Things we need all the time are getting simplified, factored -- and standards are emerging. jQuery, for sure that's a standard. And more and more so is Bootstrap Toolkit. But it can get simplified further. What we're doing now is exactly what we did in the early-mid 80s as we went from character-based apps to graphic apps. We know how to simplify here. And Bootstrap is very much on the path.
    When I build in Bootstrap I have to worry much less about whether it will run in all browsers. And browser-makers should be sure they don't break Bootstrap apps or jQuery apps. The platform is being elevated. And the stuff that should be easy is becoming easy.
  My 3-minute review of Lion
    I got my new iMac on Monday, and immediately switched out the old one after doing the hot-copy upgrade, which is fantastic. Probably the nicest thing that Apple does. Of course it makes it easier for you to give them money too, but wtf.
    Okay, first the good stuff:
      It is really fast. This is important because I like to run a lot of bloatware, concurrently. More speed is goodness. It means I can keep more balls in the air.
      It's more beautiful. The screen is brighter, clearer, just qualitatively superior to the previous iMac.
    Now the glitches:
      They keep moving parts that shouldn't move.
      They keep changing the plugs in the back. So old devices stop working because there's no more Firewire on the thing, for example.
      The keyboard has the Control key in a different place. This meant that for the first few days I can't type quickly, everything has to slow. down. so. I. can. be. sure. my. fingers. are properly. positioned. over. the. right. keys. Try typing with a period after every word and you'll get a good idea what the re-learning experience is like. And what will it be like when I go back to the MacBook Air, which I still use when traveling? I'll let you know.
      A few pieces of software I depend on required upgrades to run on the new OS. One of them wasn't free, VMWare, which charged $45 for the upgrade. Not sure if I get any features I need for this, but it does work on the new OS.
    And the travesty:
      They fucking changed the way fucking scrollbars work. That would be a glitch. But the travesty is that there are things you can't do on the new scrollbars that you can do on the old ones.
      I am a serious professional computer user. This would be like Fender moving around the frets on a Telecaster. Or the knob that adjusts the pitch of one of the strings. Maybe I can adjust by composing my song in a different key, but tell me, what the fuck were you thinking when you did this, Apple??
      I'll forget eventually what bullshit this was. That's why I have to write this review now, to vent the sputum they added to what otherwise would have been a mostly-lovely experience, for which, btw, I paid $2500.
  Share your large Twitter archive?
    The archives
      Here are the archives, uploaded to static.scripting.com, a bucket on Amazon S3.
      @adactio -- the HTML view, and the zip archive.
      @ahynes1 -- the HTML view, and the zip archive.
      @alecperkins -- the HTML view, and the zip archive.
      @dino8352 -- the HTML view, and the zip archive.
      @gartenberg -- the HTML view, and the zip archive.
      @ijohnpederson -- the HTML view, and the zip archive.
      @knunez -- the HTML view, and the zip archive.
      @mathewi -- the HTML view, and the zip archive.
      @sarahbourne -- the HTML view, and the zip archive.
    The initial request
      1. Has Twitter enabled your ability to download your archive?
      2. Have you actually downloaded your archive?
      3. Have you been using Twitter for two or more years?
      4. Have you been steadily posting to Twitter?
      5. Do you have more than a few thousand tweets in your archive?
      6. Are you willing to make your archive publicly available?
      If we had one of these archives to play with we could start developing software tools right away.
      So, if the answer to all these questions is yes, especially #6, could you email your zip file to dave dot winer at gmail dot com. Important: I will upload your archive and link to it from Scripting News so any developer can experiment with it. It will become public. On the other hand, you might become famous. :-)
      Please help the developers get started now creating interesting stuff with this new flow.
  Madison snowstorm webcam
    Here's really great snowstorm webcam from the Memorial Union.
  Don't deliberately mislead
    Sometime early in the boot-up of the blogosphere, April Fools became an odd tradition. People would put up stories that were intended to fool readers into believe something that wasn't true. I did it once or twice myself, but came to believe it was a bad idea. Instead I celebrated the birth of my blog on that day. It gave me an excuse to not participate.
    Here's how I see it. One of two things happens:
      1. Your prank is obvious, no one is fooled. Or
      2. You pull it off. People are fooled into believing you.
    You lose in either case. In #1 obviously you look bad. And in #2, you convince people you most want to trust you, to not trust you. It's like deliberate failure, on your mission. Analogously, it would be like a bus driver deliberately taking you somewhere that isn't on his route. Or a street cleaner dumping garbage on the street. Or a teacher telling you something he or she knows is false. It's not just bad, it's very bad. It undermines what you do.
    This came up today when a blogger who I've followed on Twitter for a long time posted an item saying that Twitter had added the ability to edit a tweet. It looked like he was reporting a news event that's very significant. And since he covers Twitter itself, he's exactly the kind of guy I'd hope would break this big story.
    All kinds of thoughts ran through my head after I RTd it. Would the press credit him with the discovery? So often they don't recognize news until a big publication reports it. This guy is an individual blogger, but one who I respect. I hoped that he would get credit.
    A couple of hours later, when I had a moment I looked around to see if anyone else was reporting it. I looked for the command to edit a tweet. Didn't find it. I guessed that they hadn't turned the feature on for me yet. This makes new Twitter features particularly confusing to report. You often have to try to interpret other people's view of the feature, if you weren't randomly chosen as one of the first to get the feature.
    I then responded to his tweet, asking where the feature was. I saw that others had responded the same. We all took his tweet at face value. Wanted to know more about it. One person commented that Tweetbot would have to add the feature.
    I then checked my DMs. There was a message there from him saying it was a joke, and he was sorry for the misunderstanding.
    BTW, apparently he deleted the original message, so I can't point to it.
  Twitter enables new apps
    Something I haven't seen mentioned elsewhere.
    The way Twitter packaged up the archives that people are starting to download enables new kinds of apps to be developed. That's because the data files are distributed in a very software-readable format called JSON.
    It will be possible to make all kinds of interesting tweet-browsers without hitting any rate limits, because you won't have to access twitter.com to get at all your tweets.
    One thing they haven't said is how frequently they will allow people to download their archives. Once a week? Once a month? Or is it a one-time thing?
    But this is important. It will make a pretty substantial difference in the tech market, imho.
    If I had access to my own archive I would start playing with this right away.
  Some people like to eat out
    And some people like to cook for themselves.
    And sometimes people who cook for themselves like to eat out, and vice versa.
    So I use Flickr even though I could program my own photos site, and have. I find it convenient to use their front-end. But I don't have to. If I needed to cook my own meal, I would. I did.
    Everyone always thinks the last turn of the cycle in tech was the first and the last time around the loop. It might be the last but it sure isn't the first.
    For Marc Andreessen, who Felix Salmon quotes in this piece, the first wave of the web was his first tech experience. And it made him a billionaire and launched a fantastic career as an investor and tech iconoclast.
    For me, it was my third time around the loop (I'm a generation older than Andreessen), but I didn't make nearly as much money as he did, nor was I trying to. For me, the web was creative liberation. Seriously. I had given up on making software because everything was so jammed up and ugly in the tech world. The web freed up everything. We could create again, because I could set up my own net that no one owned but me. I didn't have to get anyone's approval to play with servers. I needed that to be creative.
    Imagine if Jackson Pollock had to convince a big company that his art was worth making. That's why when everything is controlled by companies, we get stagnation.
    Being creative with tech is not for everyone, but so what. It mattered to me that I could be free. Obviously freedom doesn't matter to everyone. And it was and is available to anyone who wants it and had the patience to keep it going.
      And freedom matters to me in some activities and not in others. I feel no need to be free in creating new kinds of car engines. Or creating new paintings or works of music. There, I prefer the AOL/Facebook type of experience. I like going to art museums and Broadway plays, and to drive a fine car made by a big company I trust. But for me, I will always, till the day I die, want to run my own servers. Because that's where I choose to be creative. And if I let other people do it, there would be unacceptable limits on my creativity.
      And I depend on the fact that people who create in other artisitic areas are free to do so. Who would want to see an endless stream of idiotic movies programmed for LCD intellect and emotional maturity. You see the problem, it is possible for us to die as a culture. It's happened before. But the human spirit is pretty strong. And there will be someone forcing the question of how to create, as long as there are new ideas to explore. It's never been an easy sell that this kind of creativity applies to tech, but it does.
    If you've only seen one turn of the wheel, it must be hard to extrapolate that because there were turns before yours that it's likely there will be more to come. I don't have any trouble imagining it because I've seen it, I've lived it.
    I don't say Andreessen is wrong, from his point of view the web never really was that wonderful. I accept his version of the truth, as his. But it's not mine. For me, the web was, and continues to be, liberating.
      We're all like the blind men and the elephant. Salmon sees the web as broken, as do the others he quotes. But I see it as liberating. We're all just reporting on the color of the lenses in our glasses. (And btw, all this discourse is happening on the web.)
  Instagram is for dummies
    That's what the change in terms says.
    If you're using Instagram and in any way care about your creative work, or what your word means, you're an idiot to keep using it.
    Now, there are a lot of idiots out there.
    Me, I always prefer to make tools for the smartest people.
    Schnooks are welcome to use my competitors' products. :-)
  Elites in movie-going
    Just a quick comment about all the discourse going on in the press about torture in the new movie Zero Dark Thirty. It's very angering because I haven't seen the movie. Yet the pundits are discussing it, with lots of spoilers, in places where I can't miss it.
    Okay, I live in NYC and it's opening here tomorrow. For three days, and then it goes away. When will it come back? They don't say. I have a funny feeling it's only opening so it can be up for the awards for 2012. And the pundits go on talking about it as if the movie is available to everyone.
    This system is going to end, hopefully soon. Let the movies open when they open, and everyone gets to see them at the same time. I don't think there's any special wisdom with the reviewers. They all liked a really shit movie, the latest Bond -- Skyfall. Why? It's so much better than the previous Bond film. Wow. That must have been one seriously awful movie. (I didn't see it.)
    It's even more aggravating given the totally aggressive way Bigelow, the director of the movie, went after piracy for her last Oscar winner, Hurt Locker. On the other hand this movie is supposed to be seriously great. I'm going to see it tomorrow, even if I have to stand in a long line at the theater.
  Could we make Flickr into Twitter?
    A thought just popped into my head when Peter Rojas friended me on Flickr.
    I wondered what if we used Flickr's API to implement a message system that worked like Twitter, with a timeline, and of course great picture support. Does the API have enough juice to do it?
    I think a lot of it would depend on how much of a moving target the API is. If it's not moving, at least for a couple of years, it might just work.
    I've said it many times in the last few days, but it bears repeating. The thing that makes Flickr so interesting is its broad and stable API.
  Why is Twitter letting us export?
    With all the crazyness about Instagram and how they own your pictures (not mine, I never used the service) it raises the question as to why Twitter is letting us export our tweets now? You don't see how they're connected? Read on...
    Instagram's answer for those people who don't like it is this -- opt-out. You can download all your content, close your account, and we won't own anything. They're banking on the assumption that most people aren't paying attention, don't understand, or don't care if they use their picture of their beloved Aunt Amy to advertise a brand of cookies that caused her demise. There are some truly bizarre possibilities.
    So maybe Twitter wants to use our pictures that way too -- esp since they now have access to all the pictures we post from other services, the ones who support the Twitter Cards API. Which of course until last week included (tah dahh) Instagram.
    The order in which things come public isn't necessarily the order they became known to the companies pulling the strings. It's quite possible Instagram gave Twitter a heads-up about the licensing change, and that Twitter told them to cut the cord, before dragging them into the mess. Or whatever. You just can't know what they're telling each other behind the scenes.
    So back to the question raised in the title.
    Maybe Twitter is letting us export because something bad is coming that they want to be able to offer an export-to-opt-out feature like the one Instagram is offering. A change in TOS that will be so unpalatable that if there was no way out, the FTC would stop the change (and rightly so).
    Maybe it's just Twitter being good guys. Wanting us to feel good about them, and maybe even wanting to enable new applications, which the JSON-based archive certainly does. Unless of course there are onerous licensing terms lurking in here somewhere. ;-)
    One more thing. To publishers who act as if Twitter, Facebook, etc are part of the open Internet, maybe now you're getting the idea that this is not true. These are corporations who think and act just like you do. They are very likely future competitors of yours. And if you don't think of them that way, at least as a possibility, you stand to lose, big.
  Make Newtown a showcase?
    According to this NYT piece, Newtown had a problem with guns before the tragedy. It would be interesting to see if they have any will to do anything about it, now that they have the first-hand experience of a nightmare of guns-gone-wild.
    Also there's a question whether the Sandy Hook school will re-open. Maybe it shouldn't. Maybe it should be turned into the National Gun Tragedy Museum. Re-create the horror scene, with dummies, fake blood, scattered body parts. Including the gunman. Everyone can come for a visit to see what guns do to the bodies of innocent school children, teachers, psychologists and school administrators.
    Did anyone else notice that all the victims were women and children. What does that say about the honor of this country? (I'm sure they must have talked about that on TV, I have been avoiding the news the last few days, for the most part.)
      Another thing I noticed that has nothing to do with this idea is that the school was named Sandy. What is going on here. Who is Sandy and why is he or she screwing around with the northeastern United States?
    Maybe the thing to do is to confront the problem we have, whatever it is (no one knows, imho) and look at it straight-on. Instead of sweeping our feelings aside until the next horror comes along.
    Now, it's not my town, so it's not for me to say. But I don't think new laws will stop the escalating tragedies. They are getting worse. I don't want to enumerate the ways, but they are growing more frequent and more horrible.
  Bloated Republicans and Democrats
    Last night I caught a bit of Meet the Press after the President spoke. I turned the sound off and watched for a few minutes.
    There was a bloated Republican dude talking aimlessly at a bloated Democrat. Neither of these guys held any offices. The Republican had been a secretary of something during the Reagan administration.
    I watched while I cleaned up after dinner. No sound. Just thought. All these guys do is opine for the cameras. Does anyone care what they think? I can't imagine why they would. But David Gregory asks them serious questions about which they have serious bullshit to say. I don't actually know what they say, because the sound is off. Maybe one them has something interesting to offer, but I'd be willing to give serious odds they don't.
  Sunday news is like opera
    A comment from Jay Rosen reminded me that Sunday news programs are so totally predictable.
    On each topic there are a fixed set of talking points. When a news event happens, the conductors -- Bob Schieffer, Chris Hayes, George Stephanopoulos, David Gregory, etc get out the script, and call in people to sing each role in the opera of the day.
    There's a male lead, a female lead, comic relief, someone to be murdered. All the usual characters. And they sing. If it's a big enough story, we just hear one opera per show. If it's a slow news week, we get a variety of songs.
    The only thing that's new from week to week is which operas are performed. Maybe a little stylistic variation. But always the same plot, and outcome.
  Let's explore Twitter downloads
    According to Next Web, the new Twitter feature to download your history is now active for some people.
    It's not active yet for my account, but I'd still like to learn more about the format. So if it's available for your account, please consider sharing your archive with us techies so we can have a look inside.
    If you have an archive, you can upload it somewhere or email it to dave dot winer at gmail dot com and I'll upload it so everyone can have a look. Thanks!
    Update: Thanks to Navjot Singh, we now have an archive to explore.
      Here's the readme.txt file from Navjot's archive.
      Here's the HTML view of the JSON archive.
      An example of a JSON file, representing one month of tweets.
      Here's the compressed archive.
  The Flickr API is a national treasure
    No joke, APIs are real, and are very important.
    And when a corporate vendor "deprecates" an API we've built on, it's really hard to shrug it off, esp since these changes usually modify the contract between developers and the platform. And it's very rare that the benefit accrues to the developers. Hey, very often when the API changes our apps are broken and gone, for good.
    Recently new life has been pumped into Flickr by Yahoo, something us long-time users are surely glad to see. But -- with the new life comes concerns that the API will break. Because that's what big tech companies do when they move.
    It's particularly important with Flickr because it has been unmoving for so long, which usuallly has a big downside, but it has one huge upside. It means that the API has been stable. Without breakage, we've been able to build some very good and useful systems on Flickr. Stuff Yahoo probably doesn't care about, but we do care about it.
    I was looking for a way to express that idea, and it hit me -- start a petition on whitehouse.gov to declare the Flickr API a National Historic Landmark. That's how neighborhoods in the physical world protect their character from corporate wrecking balls. If we didn't do this, the city where I live, New York, would have a freeway running down the middle of it. The East Village would only have NYU dorms. There would be no Central Park. And on and on.
    The founders of the city of New York were visionaries, and there's no reason we can't have vision for the future of the Internet. Let's make the revitalization of Flickr a complete win. Let's make sure Yahoo knows we want the API to remain stable, so we can continue to build on it as a platform. We think it's good business for them, but hey -- even if it isn't -- let's make sure our interests are represented here.
    Let's do something constructive to save some of the DNA of the net. It's worth it. Sign the petition, now! :-)
  New Twitter behavior
    I signed onto Twitter and saw a new message at the top of the page.
    When I clicked on the button it took me to a new page to compose a tweet welcoming Amar back to Twitter (whatever that means, they don't explain).
    Update: The first reminder was interesting. The second one is starting to feel like spam.
      I'm guessing the people at Twitter don't understand how casual a follow is. I follow people I don't know. Last thing I want to do is "welcome them back." I have no idea where they went. Twitter is not for friends. That's Facebook. We need a way to opt out of this.
  Medium is moderated
    I posted an item asking a question on Medium yesterday, but I received an email saying it was "not approved."
    I'm not complaining, just sharing a bit of a data. It's a moderated system. Neither good nore bad.
    Here's a screen shot of the email.
    PS: To be clear, the item is still there, it's just no longer part of the collection. I assume this means there's no way to navigate to the item through the user interface of the medium.com site.
  The next web will grow faster
    Ben Barren says something very smart on Twitter, that bears repeating and amplifying.
    The podcasting boot-up in 2004 happened much faster than the blogging bootstrap for one simple reason. We already had blogging to carry the message. "Hey there's this new thing you should try!"
    Remember that when thinking about how high a barrier to entry the existing social silos have. How can they stop the message of their successor from propogating? Maybe they can. Better start thinking about it Dick and Zuck. :-)
  The message of the web
    The message is simple and exciting. When the time is right, a very small number of people with a clear vision can build something with huge impact. I'm not talking about making huge numbers show up in their bank accounts.
  Access journalism is poison
    Felix Salmon is a smart guy, a very good writer, so I recommend reading this piece about what he calls "access journalism."
    He's responding to Margaret Sullivan's piece in the NYT about the Dealbook conference that was a huge demo of access journalism. I didn't go to the conference (wasn't invited) and neither did Salmon. But we've both been to conferences like it. And while Salmon is a journalist who believes in access, I am a source and subject of journalism who despises it.
      BTW, I'm friends with Lance Knobel, who managed the program for the conference, as is Salmon (I believe). That's how I know Salmon. We met first at the Davos conference in 2000 where Knobel was the program director. I know Lance well, and know he's a realist about how these things work. However I speak for myself only.
      If I were playing by the rules of access journalism I would temper what I said about this conference, for fear of losing Lance his job, or losing influence with Lance. I thought this disclaimer made a good enough demo to include in this piece, though imho it wasn't necessary.
    In an earlier life, as a Silicon Valley entrepreneur, I was good at the access game. I traded ideas and news with reporters, and in return they wrote nice things about me and my product. I'm sure many of them actually liked our products, but the reason they looked at them, or even heard of them, was this exchange of favors.
    When you don't do this, they pretty much ignore you, or worse. I've had a fair number of very negative jobs done on me by the press after I gave up the favor-doing. I had become a blogger, had decided to route around the mess instead of trying to deal with it. I had good reasons for giving up, because when I tried to do something that was so ambitious that it tweaked my platform vendor, Apple, the press turned on me. All of a sudden my product didn't exist, I didn't exist. Crushed by the Great Company who in reality had shipped a vastly inferior product. Didn't matter. So we had to invent a different way to market. It's harder to go direct, but it's honest, and more satisfying. The people who control access to users through the press play a dirty nasty game. And many of them have business cards that say they're journalists.
    I am glad that Sullivan has decided to challenge this corrupt mess, I felt it was very unlikely that she would. That's why I said she's the first public editor the Times has had. Becuase the previous public editors tried to dish up the mess in a recipe that's palatable to the journalists who are playing footsie with the people they cover.

      Margaret Sullivan is incredible. I just wanted to say that. A real public editor at the NYT, the first one imho.1vg.r2.ly
      — Dave Winer .& (@davewiner) December 13, 2012

    Now, there's absolutely nothing wrong with having conferences like the Dealbook conference. But there's also nothing wrong with saying the truth about it, that the system it exposes yields inbred journalism. People who are close friends with the people they cover aren't really covering them. If that's all there is, then we aren't getting news. And that leads to huge problems. Open technologies are ignored because there's no marketing budget for them. Housing markets are turned into gambling casinos by people who already have more money than they could ever spend. Ordinary middle class people are turned out of their own homes. There are real consequences to this system. And global problems going unaddressed because the reporter didn't want to piss off some guy they use as a source.
    We need dozens of people working at the Times doing what Margaret Sullivan does. I think Andrew Ross Sorkin needs to feel the heat, he needs to feel pressure to stab his friends in the back when they do something awful, and we need to get Felix Salmon to use his intellect to expose their mediocrity, not defend their parties.
    Sullivan's piece marked a beginning, perhaps. I hope.
    A couple of postscripts.
      1. My mother, a NYT daily reader for a long time, wrote on her blog that she might stop reading the Times because they weren't covering the Bradley Manning trial. She read about this in the Times itself in a Sullivan column. I said this is the reason to stay subscribed. That they now have the guts to criticize themselves so openly is a very positive thing for the Times, and a first. They are bending just a little to the advent of the blog. There's hope. In the past we wouldn't have known they were doing this. Now we do.
      2. I remember a column in PC Mag written in 1983 by Peter Norton, who was fast becoming the go-to guy for technical information about the IBM PC which was booming. I had used his book to guide my implementation of ThinkTank for the PC. And I read every word in every one of his columns. In the previous column he had said that the new version of IBM PC DOS was awful. It didn't work. Crashed. Lost data. He was right. It was awful. But he had gotten reprimanded by someone -- he didn't say who -- and he would never again question the wisdom of IBM. I thought it was remarkably honest of him to write this one last column. And true to his word, he never again challenged IBM. That was a very lonely moment. Up till then I felt like we were all in this together. Even IBM could benefit from honest criticism. That was the end of something important.
  The Internet as ecosystem
    There are huge parallels betw the Internet and our planet.
    Open formats and protocols are like the DNA of endangered species.
    The proliferation of corporate networks is like the spreading of corporate everything from coffee to big box stores to airports. Sameness, lack of diversity, individuality withers. What makes life interesting fades away, conformity reigns.
    But there still is art, even if most people don't live artisitc lives. And you can still use the open Internet even if most people don't.
    Google owning Reader is bad for open stuff the same way it was bad that GM owned the public transit system of Los Angeles. It's like the fox guarding the hen house. Read the story in Buzzfeed and see if the analogy holds.
    It was strange reading Gruber's account of the evolution of system scripting on the Mac, because all the diversity that was present as it was evolving is gone from his story. As if it never happened.
    So the thing that matters on the net is choice. If you choose something other than what everyone else is using, you're helping the net. You can still use the stuff everyone is using. But find a way to express yourself that's unique and that you know has value. And when you do that you're helping our intellectual and informational planet. And that probably can help the real planet too because if we're communicating and sharing ideas and information, we're better able to see problems, and perhaps find ways to solve them.
    Freaking out isn't going to help anything. Instead do the the opposite. Think, and act, and do something full of thought, for the Internet. Roll up your sleeves and do some good work.
  AppleScript was not alone
    John Gruber has a piece in MacWorld about AppleScript in which he says that Open Scripting Architecture was supported only by Apple. That's not correct.
      AppleScript was not originally intended to be the only OSA scripting language, but it was. The idea was that OSA was language-agnostic, and the plan was for there to be several of them eventually. AppleScript was the friendly language, derived from HyperCard's HyperTalk (therein another story entirely) and intended for use by non-programmers. The theory being that a programming language that looked like prose rather than code might enable a broad swath of 'non-programmers' to, well, program.
    UserLand's Frontier scripting environment supported OSA, both as a client and a server. The syntax of our language, known as UserTalk, is most like Python -- though it is a contemporary of Python, development started in 1988.
    The OSA compatibility and the struggle with Apple to allow us to co-exist with AppleScript is well documented in the archive of Scripting News.
      Working With AppleScript: Shows how to run AppleScript code inside the Frontier environment.
      UserTalk Everywhere: Frontier implements the Open Scripting Architecture, making it easy for scripting clients to hook up to the Frontier system.
      A Google search for "AppleScript" on scripting.com.
    Update: There's a JavaScript OSA component too.
  The API makes Flickr great
    Just read the review of the new Flickr mobile app from Nick Bilton at the NYT.
    I'm a Flickr user from the beginning, and I've stuck with it.
    I like Flickr for the API. It enables me to mirror everything I put up there on S3 which is really important to me.
    Hope they don't break the API. It's another of their big advantages, a huge base of compatible software. Lots of it hasn't been updated in a long time, all the more reason to leave it alone. (They've been talking about deprecating stuff for a long time, but my stuff still runs, which is good.)
    Installed it on my iPod Touch . That's where I take most of my pictures.
    It took me a few tries to remember the combination of username and password. Eventually got in.
    Was able to browse my photos. Took a new photo of a couple of soda cans on my desk. Used a filter to reduce the glare and give it an oldtime look. Not trying to demo the camera -- just want to see how the software works.
    I'm glad they updated Flickr. It works. If more people use Flickr I'm happy. It's a mature photo service with tons of users and lots of photos, and a full API that I've built on. If it has a more assured future, I'm happy.
    But don't break my apps. Please. :-)
  An idea for a product
    This is not a simple or obvious idea, so if you're skimming and expect to get it -- you probably won't. Just a caveat from someone who's accustomed to comments from people who aren't paying much attention. :-)
    Anyway, here's a little background for motivation.
    The last week I've been helping my very good friend NakedJen get started in the world of smartphones. Until now she had a Blackberry that could do SMS, but had email disabled. I don't really understand why, but it's not important to the story. She was hard to reach via email, and she couldn't use any of the apps we all like to use. She didn't have maps or any of the other cool stuff we're all playing with these days.
    Once I understood where she was, I gave her a phone I wasn't using, one of the first Google Nexus phones. It was a gift from Google. So it was totally appropriate that I pass it on to NakedJen.
    I think she stayed up all night playing with the phone. When I checked in with her, she had done all kinds of customizations. The next day she was installing apps. She was giggling with glee at every revelation. I think she saw that this mode of computer use is actually pretty simple. And she's taking it back with her to Salt Lake City, where her family there will be very happy I'm sure that Jen will be part of the 21st Century (something I like to kid her about).
    Next part of the story. This morning I got a Fedex from a longtime friend at Microsoft. In the package there were two new smartphones, a Nokia 920 and 810. Since I am a T-Mobile guy, I started with the 810. It's a lovely piece of tech. The performance and color are amazing. It's also very easy to guess where everything is. I had it set up to work over wifi with my GMail account in about five minutes. A few minutes later I was taking pictures and had installed the Twitter app. I sent a text message. Then we went out for a walk. I took my iPod Touch, iPad LTE and Nexus 4 with me, in addition to the 810, and of course NakedJen and her Android phone. It all worked just fine. Everything that didn't have its own service plan connected to the net via Bluetooth through the iPad.
    When we came back it was time for Jen to go home to Utah. She tried to get Glympse going but for some reason it didn't work, so I fell back to using text messages to follow her progress to La Guardia and her flight to Milwaukee.
    Now finally I'm able to explain the idea.
    When I tried to send text messages from my desktop Mac, all of a sudden I was dropped into a horribly complex maze of things that make no sense. I can't even figure out how to send an SMS without someone sending me one first. I tried reading all of Google's docs, installed all the software they told me to install, and in the end I went back to the Nexus 4 to communicate with Jen. Later I realized I could do what I needed to with the Voice website. But there were problems there too. I ended up having to enter the number manually, my contacts list was useless in that context.
    The idea is this -- Google or Microsoft or Apple -- create a new app that runs on the desktop that's designed with the parameters of a smartphone. Leverage the skills I already have. I was able to set up the Windows Phone in a few minutes, on an OS that I had never used. I am a relatively expert Mac user, but failed after a half hour. The lesson is pretty clear. At the very least the desktop has to do what the mobile device does, with the same care of design and simplicity. What I'm left with is a hodgepodge of stuff that wasn't designed to do this. Time for a fresh look.
  More than a tweet, less than a post
    There's a place for something between a tweet and a blog post.
    That's what I've been trying to explore here on the threads site.
    Quick little bits that wouldn't fit into 140 chars, and can benefit from having a place to comment with more than 140.
    Maybe we need a name for this. Pweet?
  There are a lot of assholes out there
    Re the Guardian profile of Julian Assange, which I wrote about earlier today.
    1. I'm sure the Guardian has profiled lots of assholes.
    2. I'm also sure they don't make most the articles about what assholes they are.
    3. How do they decide to make the story about what an asshole the person is?
    My theory is that they do it if and only if other publications do.
    And of course if Barack Obama were a huge asshole they wouldn't make the story about that. Or Mitch McConnell (who surely is as abrasive as any public figure ever profiled) because to do so would show bias. It would not be balanced.
    That's how school kids decide who to bully, for example. If everyone makes someone their bitch, then it's okay for you to. So the Times runs a magazine profile about Assange's socks and other minutia, so the Guardian can find other scabs to pick at. Even if their readers might feel more than a little empathy for the guy.
    I wonder if their profiles of the Royal Family include this kind of stuff?
    Would they interview the Queen the way they interview Assange?
    In British culture is that even considered a reasonable question?
    Assange isn't a founder of Google. Doesn't control a huge budget. Isn't a military commander. He's broke and lives in exile in a closet. He can't really do anything to you. He certainly can't pull his ads! :-)
    Kicking someone when they're down is considered poor style in the US. A sign of cowardice. How about in Britain?
  Twitter copying Instagram
    It's a shame that Twitter is copying the features of Instagram instead of giving us features only Twitter can. The web is crying. :-(
  Central Park hawk
    Came across this hawk perched in a tree in Central Park today.
  Twitter do something nice for users
    Give us a way to delete a tweet from someone else in our Replies tab.
    From time to time you get someone directing a speech at you, instead of to all their followers. They must have no idea how 20 messages from them look in someone else's Twitter equivalent of an inbox.
      It's lazy and inconsiderate.
        I went to the trouble to write my ideas in the form of a blog post. Where I could use full sentences, and not use cryptic abbreviations which are often impossible to decypher. I tried to link to my sources so you could see what I'm talking about if my prose was too dense.
      They're rants.
        The rants you get in tweets often are not only full of vitriol, it's also impossible to tell what they're so excited about!
          As if I wanted to know. :-)
    If it were email, you could just delete them, and that would be that. But in Twitter, they just stay there, until they scroll off. And that could take a long time.
    Even the most interesting person gets longwinded communicating in 140-character chunk after chunk. And most of these tweets come from people who are angry, exhausted, highly opinionated, and not very respectful (or else they would realize how much of your space they're taking up).
    It would be nice if we got one new simple user-oriented feature in Twitter in 2012.
  What is wrong with the Guardian?
    For some reason I started to read a long news piece on Julian Assange on The Guardian website, and it was interesting, until the reporter started trashing Assange. I've included a brief excerpt below.
      What about the fracture with close colleagues at WikiLeaks? "No!" he practically shouts. But Domscheit-Berg got so fed up with Assange that he quit, didn't he? "No, no, no, no, no. Domscheit-Berg had a minor role within WikiLeaks, and he was suspended by me on 25 August 2010. Suspended." Well, that's my point ­ here was somebody else with whom Assange fell out. "Be serious here! Seriously ­ my God. What we are talking about here in our work is the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people ­ hundreds of thousands ­ that we have exposed and documented. And your question is about, did we suspend someone back in 2010?" My point was that there is a theme of his relationships turning sour. "There is not!" he shouts.
    The piece continues in this mode, mocking him, as if they were children.
    Assange stuck his neck out for all of us, and whether you agree with him or not, it doesn't matter whether you like him.
    They need better editors at the Guardian, and more respect for their readers.
  Idea for a new democracy
    This idea isn't for today's United States, but if we were to ever try to boot up a new democracy, I'd suggest thinking about only offering the vote to citizens who had served on a jury that reached a verdict.
    Then at least we'd get voters who understand how the government works. And maybe we'd actually get a government that tackles the real problems.
    For example, we need a decision on climate change, and we needed to start implementing it 20 years ago, long before the effects could be felt by voters.
    Even now, when the entire NYC metropolitan area was shut down by Sandy, things are returning to normal, and we are deciding to postpone change for another year, until next year's miracle happens. Sandy, imho, is as ominous as the attacks of 9/11 were.
    Many things changed between 1776 and today. Instantaenous mass communication. Science appears to have conquered the elements. There's a sense that no matter what you see and hear and feel, that things can't really change that much.
    But things have changed hugely in the last couple of hundred years. And we, for the most, feel these changes were positive. But that's changing now too. We've run out of frontier. We've run out of space. And we're more efficient at creating and sustaining human life. But that may be about to change (probably is) -- and we can't react until -- when? Not clear.
    If jurors were making the decisions, we'd suck it in, figure it out and do what needed to be done. That's what jury duty teaches you to do.
  Twitter and Instagram break up
    Nick Bilton at the NYT reports that Instagram removed their Twitter cards metadata from their pages. This means that to view pictures taken by users in Instagram, you'll have to visit the Instagram site.
    Forgotten in the drama is: 1. Users and 2. the web.
    Having our pictures show up in Twitter isn't always the right thing. For example, when I link to a Flickr picture from a tweet, they take the picture from Flickr and show it directly in Twitter, without the reader having to visit the Flickr site. As a photographer, I would prefer this feature not be there, so people can comment on the pictures in Flickr, where there is no 140-character limit, and where the comments will have a relatively long period of visibilty. In Twitter they scroll off very quickly.
    I don't use Instagram, so I don't have an opinion about whether my (non-existent) Instagram pictures show up in Twitter.
    I also think it's good for the web if there's separation between these websites. Twitter is rapidly becoming something bigger than the web, sort of a mega-web. That's not cool. The thing I liked about Twitter re Facebook is that it was a way of pointing people to other sites. Over time, they've stopped doing that so much. That has meant that we've only got 140 characters to play with. Some ideas require more than that. Only very simple ideas can be expressed in such limited space.
      2005: "People come back to places that send them away."
    So it's not black and white. Not "Twitter Bad" or "Instagram Bad." Imho the only thing that's bad is the lack of diversity. These sites are growing too large, and we're growing too dependent on them. And as often happens in tech, the users and open standards become an afterthought to the warfare between large companies. But the good news is that this kind of fighting is a sign of an implosion coming soon, and a new period of expansion and innovation. When companies and the press become too focused on each other, and forget the users, the users seem to always break out, and invent a new layer.
    Hugh MacLeod: "Billionaires squabbling about who gets to own the commons."
    Rene Ritchie: "Twitter doesn¹t want eyeballs on third-party clients. Instagram doesn't want eyeballs on Twitter. No one cares what the eyeballs want."
  Why The Daily failed
    I don't even remember what the initial proposition was on The Daily, but I think it involved me giving them money to find out what it was. They told me it was great. They got lots of other people to say they were impressed. And that was the end of the pitch.
    Everyone on the net is busy. All the time. I was riding the LIRR the other day from Queens to Manhattan, and everyone around me was staring into the screen of their smartphone, tapping, typing, clicking. I watched the faces. They looked like the people sitting around in the system lab at the UW Comp Sci Dept in 1978. Same damn thing. Except now instead of a handful of misunderstood geeks, now it's everyone.
    BTW, they didn't look "engaged" or entertained, or even aware of what they're doing. Most of the time we spend pecking and nibbling at stuff on the net we sort of wish there was something more interesting to do. But there isn't, so we keep nibbling and pecking.
    And if you're the rare contributor on the net, you might tweet something once in a while. I would call that grunting and snorting.
    That's why I like to write blog posts, btw -- it keeps my writing muscles working, for the day when they might be needed again, which I hope I live to see. It would be justice though if it didn't happen. After spending a life selling this idea that people should live on the Internet, to find out that the life wasn't worth living! :-)
    Anyway, back to The Daily and why it failed. You might as well ask why the Charlotte Bobcats failed. Because they can't dribble, pass, shoot, block shots, get rebounds or avoid fouls. As in Charolotte, they didn't even field a team over there in MurdochLand.
    Anyway this is the topic du jour. I'll write the same piece again and again, as I have been for decades, in different contexts. We have the power to do much better, but it's not a requirement.
  What's like RSS?
    To be like RSS, it would have to be some open tech that is free to be used by anyone without royalty, with no individual, corporation or standards body that can make your development work obsolete. To me, as a developer, that's what open means.
    If Apple can deprecate and then remove an API, or not approve an app because it doesn't conform to a rule that didn't even exist when I wrote it -- that's very far from the ideal.
    Lots of APIs these days are like that. And since they have corporate sponsors, they're the ones they talk about at tech conferences. Because they can pay for sponsorships. That's how the conference promoters get paid.
    I have a reason for asking this question -- I'm wondering if there's enough open technology out there that's not corporate-owned that we could have an interesting meetup among interested parties and get some good cross-pollinating done.
    I think this is the core of what Stallman's free software idea is about. I really don't care that much about software, though I respect that he does. What matters to me is that I can ship something and have it keep working indefinitely, without worrying about someone outlawing my work. That kind of power always gets abused (I wonder why anyone would think it wouldn't).
    Anyway here's a list of some ideas, but please post comments or send me mail of any formats or protocols that you think should be on this list.
      JSON
      Markdown
      RSS (of course)
      OPML
      PNG
  Should feeds require HTTPS?
    I said no, feeds should not require using HTTPS, and got an email from a developer friend asking me to explain, which I am happy to do.
    If you think everyone who wants to read your feeds uses an aggregator that's being regularly updated then you won't lose any readers. But maybe you'll miss the one person who could help everyone understand your product.
    Engineers tend to think users are fungible. One user is as good as every other user. So if you lose 1 percent or 5 percent, no big deal. But it might be a big deal. And it might be more than 5 percent.
    However if your users are creating great stuff that a lot of people want to read, then it might not matter, because eventually everyone will get to read your feeds, no matter what they're using. Over time, all aggregators will support HTTPS if enough developers of feeds require it.
    If it should turn out that way, it'll be a pain in the butt to get my aggregator working with HTTPS, but if you make it compelling enough I'll do it. And I'll be pissed because it's time I'd rather spend doing something creative. Not make-work, because I can't see for the life of me why you need to push RSS over a secure connection. :-)
  Cloud Atlas mini-review
    The critics didn't like Cloud Atlas, so I almost didn't see it. That would have been a mistake, because I loved the movie. Much more than some other movies that got universally good reviews -- Lincoln, Flight and Argo, all of which I thought were yawners.
    I loved the way they wove all the stories together, and how they all reached the same places at the same time.
    Most important, it's very much a continuation of The Matrix series. Hugo Weaving even plays the Agent Smith role in a couple of the segments. And like Argo, it mixes slapstick comedy with heavy action, but unlike Argo, they make it work.
      I think the nurse in one of the segments was played by Weaving in drag?
        Update: Yes indeed!
    I like movies that make simple political points, and I like the message of The Matrix, and I like that they picked it up in Cloud Atlas.
      The simple message -- non-conformist -- be original, don't be a clone!
    Some of the reviewers said the story was confusing, but I wasn't even slightly confused. And I liked that it's also a love story, like The Matrix, but it's sweeter and grabs you at a more emotional level. Not to take anything away from The Matrix which is one of my all-time favorites.
    NakedJen arrives tomorrow for our annual film festival, and I'm going to recommend that she see Cloud Atlas after we see the three Matrix movies. And if you've seen and loved The Matrix, I highly recommend seeing Cloud Atlas. Unfortunately it's probably too late to see it in theaters around the country. It's still playing in NYC on 42nd St and in Kew Gardens.
    Moral of the story -- if critics universally pan a movie that don't mean they're right! :-)
  Sidewalker map app
    Here's an idea for a map-based app.
    The other day I was walking down Columbus Ave, on the west side of the street, and passed an Italian restaurant that looked like a place I'd like. Just a neighborhood restaurant with waiter service, but nothing fancy. They have a place like this in Lexington, Mass that I like to eat at. And one in Mountain View, Calif. There used to be one of these in every neighborhood in NYC, but nowadays mostly they have are upscale places, which are nice, when you feel upscale. But sometimes you just want a plate of spaghetti with a couple of meatballs and a nice mixed salad with Italian dressing, a big glass of ice tea, for about $10 to $12 plus tip.
    And there it was!
    I looked back and made a mental image of the place. I didn't write down the name or address. Now I want to find it. What I'll do is slog through Google Maps street view of the neighborhood. But it would be nice to be able to take a virtual walk down the street, a little faster than I walk IRL.
    Obviously this would have other applications. You get to play virtual tourist. Or do window shopping. Look for a nice nieghborhood to live in a town that's far away. Etc.
    Update: The solution to the puzzle is Francesco's Pizzeria. Didn't find it via Google Maps. Instead I went by foot to the location and scoped it out. Even took a picture this time. :-)
    Update: Had a nice plate of spaghetti and meatballs on the 7th with Ryan Tate, at Francesco's. Hit the spot perfectly.
  Just found Talkatone
    30 minutes ago I found Talkatone. I came across it because I'm wanting to make phone calls from my LTE-equipped iPad 3. Honestly, I thought when I got around to this, I'd just use the Google Voice app the same way I make calls from my GMail account on my desktop. Apparently it's much more complicated. On my Android phone it was just a matter of asking an automatic dialog that asked if I wanted to use Google Voice instead of T-Mobile for my calls. Of course being a totall Google Voice fan I said yes. Is this because Apple doesn't want GV to work on the iPad? Hmm.
    Anyway, Talkatone seems horribly complicated. But I'm sure it's the kind of thing where it makes more sense the second and third times you read the docs.
    PS: And then I came across this. :-)
  iTunes is an outliner
    Doc Searls posted an item yesterday explaining how journalism is an outline.
    Then also yesterday iTunes 11 came out, and it's the topic du jour. Pogue says it's great, overlooking the features they took out. He says if you complain about iTunes you're a bad person. This, in the Paper of Record. I'll remember that next time they pan a movie I like. (Seriously the Times tech reviews are pretty awful. They used to be great when Sandberg-Diment was doing them.)
      His actual words: "iTunes 11 is, on the whole, better than what came before it -- if only because it's faster, far less cluttered and laid out more sensibly. Yes, change always ruffles people's feathers -- you could argue that Apple's specialty is feather-ruffling -- but this time, at least, the overall direction is up."
      Bleh. This is typical Pogue. Nasty shit they should edit out, on the chance that their reviewer got it wrong.
    Anyway, luckily if you know what pref to turn on, you can get iTunes working again. The way it ships you can't use it to move content onto an iPad or iPod. Not exactly a minor function of iTunes.
    Farhad Manjoo says it's time to take iTunes out back and shoot it. It's bad software he says. I'd like to offer the perspective of someone who has made his share of bad software. Go watch the great documentary, The Fog of War. Most software is like that. A big Ouija board. In one rev you try to solve a problem, but in doing so, you lose the solution to the problem three versions back. So you fix that, and undo something else.
    It's like renting office space for a growing company. In the first office you were on the ground floor but had windows that didn't open, so the office was stifling in the summer. So the next office has windows that open. But you forgot how nice it was to be on the ground floor.
    The only way software really flows is if you focus relentlessly on a very small set of features, and write down what the rules are, and never break them, and take lots and lots of time to Get It Right.
    That's why it's important to study something like iTunes to figure out what it really is, and don't just tack on annexes and add-ons to suit the needs of the next "Stevenote" demo. When you step back and look, and think and think some more, you'll see that it's an outliner. You have devices to hook in, and apps on those devices, and songs and playlists. Every one of which is a hierarchy. And you're moving and copying things from one hierarchy to another. When I realized that everything in computers was like this, I decided to make a tool that was really excellent at editable hierarchies, so I wouldn't have to keep making shitty little outliners for every one-off problem. Because managing iPods is a lot like managing documents on a hard drive or ideas that make up a presentation or a business plan or a set of software reviews. Why have five miserable iTunes-like tools when one really great one will do? That way you keep the fog down to a minimum. (Remember to go see the movie if you haven't already.)
    I thought Apple would copy us and put an outliner in the Mac Toolbox. Should have happened in the late 80s. But for whatever reason they didn't do it. So they're still stuck in the fog of outliners shuffling stuff from one rev to the next. Until that major reconceive happens, it won't do any good to start over.
  Don't blame the Repubs
    Who can blame the Republicans for their lies if the press is willing to carry them, verbatim, as if there were some truth to what they're saying?
    It's like the SUL fiasco in the Twitter world a couple of years ago.
    Who can blame Twitter if pubs like TechCrunch, Mashable, GigaOm, ReadWriteWeb were willing to take bribes in the form of millions of followers, openly. If I were running Twitter and could get away with that, I'd seriously consider doing the same.
    Business people have an obligation to follow the law, as do Congress people. But their first obligations are to their shareholders and to get re-elected. If the press is willing to sacrifice its integrity and it helps your cause -- you might want to go for it. Twitter did, and the Repubs do.
    None of this will change until we change the way journalism works.
January 2013
  Developing developers
    I've had the privilege to work with a number of young devs over the years, and helped develop their skills. When it really clicks there's a lot of learning going on, all around. And the combination of a graybeard and young turk as a devteam has a lot of things going for it.
    It's probably a lot like Mike Woodson working with Carmelo or Ray Felton or JR Smith. Only the older programmer can still do it, if the mind is willing. It's like directing movies as well as basketball.
      I know NakedJen who loves both basketball and movies will understand this. :-)
      BTW, when NJ came to visit in December, I knew she loved movies, but I had no idea about basketball. How did that happen?
    In tech, however -- we set those young talented people out to conquer the world on their own. Their coaches, unlike basketball players, aren't developers. So they don't know what to tell them.
    No wonder we make so little progress from generation to generation.
    I'd really like to change this.
  NYT open newsroom to bloggers
    The NYT just announced that they're opening up their newsroom to a few tech startups. It's a fun idea, but also a safe one. If I were starting something I wouldn't want to put my office in the NYT. That's a gimmick. Running a startup is noisy and messy and sometimes involves firing people, and major disappointments, and you really want to hide the messy stuff from reporters. Even small companies, real ones, care about the press they get. Which leads me to conclude there aren't going to be many heavy duty companies in the group they pick.
    Then it hit me. The Times could do something not only courageous, but revolutionary for news. Give the space to bloggers. Qualify them the way you're qualifying the startups. Show us your blog. We'd like to read it. If we think it's interesting (and don't go for safety) and there's a reason it could benefit from locating both in midtown and/or the NYT offices, and we think the work you do would be stimulating for us, here's some space for six months.
    They will never do it, but if they did, with their hearts in it, the NYT and news in general, would change much faster than it is changing. In my opinion, for the better. They won't do it because it's competition and they're scared they'll end up doing what bloggers do. But the sooner they do more of what bloggers do the sooner they can get on with it. That means not worrying what their sources think of them, and report the news like real people instead of people in an ivory tower. Get out there and do it. And if you aren't doing it, then bring it in.
  A joke Rudy Kiesler might have told
    A rabbi, walking down the street in NY, sees a sign.
    Moishe Teitelbaum Chinese Laundry.
    Puzzled, he goes inside. An old Chinese man stands behind the counter.
    "Do you own this laundry?" the rabbi asks. Yes.
    "And your name is Moishe Teitelbaum?" Yes.
    "If you don't mind my asking, how did you come by such a name?"
    "When I came through Ellis Island, the man before me said his name was Moishe Teitelbaum.
    "When my turn came, the man asked my name and I said Sam Ting."
      Rudy Kiesler was my grandfather. He came from the Old Country.
      This joke first appeared on Scripting News in 2000.
  Javascript w/o curly braces
    Python doesn't have curly braces and semicolons because it considers the structure of the source code syntactically significant. We have something similar working with Javascript. Because I edit my code in an outliner, I have the curly braces and semicolons added as the text is generated from the outline. The result is a cleaner looking JS code, and less syntax to worry about.
    Here's a screen shot of what the code looks like w/o the CBASs. And the same code in a web page, after they have been generated. As you can see it's functional.
    This is possible because JS is consistent about its use of structural symbols. And the structure of the language maps well on outline structure. Not perfectly, but enough to make it worth using.
      The difficult construct is if-then-else. All other statements have a single summit but it has two.
    It's not ready for other people to use yet but it will be soon, Murphy-willing! :-)
    Update: This capability is now available in the worldoutline software, released today.
  Vine is interesting
    I was on the subway last night coming home from a Nets game in Brooklyn and I thought to take out my iPod and do a Vine video between two stops on the 1 train. It came out great! I couldn't wait to share it when I got out of the subway and had a net connection. But when I got out, it was gone. Whoa. That sucks. But it is a really interesting way to tell a story. Consider this a bug report. ;-)
  Beautiful software
    Jason Pontin of Tech Review asked a challenging question on Twitter today. What's the most beautiful software?
    I answered his challenge with a podcast. I felt the idea needed verbal explanation. I offered three examples. Two written by others, and one I wrote myself. In every case it's the reflection of the software from another person that makes the beauty evident. That, to me, is what art is. It is in the experiencing of it.
    If the Mona Lisa hung in a locked closet where no one could see it, it would not be art. Anything that evokes a response from an observer is art. And the beauty is a function of the experience. Beauty isn't intrinsic to the thing itself, as I illustrate in the story I tell.
    So here's the podcast.
    http://static.scripting.com/myReallySimple/2013/01/28/davecast2013jan28.m4a
    Dave
  The best commercial ever!
    I bet they play this one in Colorado and Washington State. :-)
    Yah man!!
  This is a test
    For the next sixty seconds this station will conduct a test of the emergency blogcast system.
    Here, have a nice bagel!
  What early software was influential?
    On Thursday I wrote a piece about MacWrite and MacPaint, two pieces of software that influenced much if not all the software that followed. There are many other examples of seminal software products. In most cases, the products are not the first of its kind, as MacWrite was not the first word processor, but for whatever reason, put enough of the pieces together to lead the way to the future. It's not always obvious in the moment, but with the benefit of hindsight we can see.
    They don't, for some reason, study these products in computer science. They fall between the cracks of "serious" study of algorithms and data structures, and user interface and user experience (which still is not much-studied, but at least is starting). This is more the history of software. Much like the history of film, or the history of rock and roll.
    In film, the movies of the 1930s were unusually influential. Probably because it was the first decade of sound.
    In popular music, the sixties and early seventies were seminal. The music of a very small number of artists and bands took music in a new direction.
    It seems to me that the 1980s were like that for software. Before that, serious people dismissed the idea that ordinary people would use computers. You know, the clip from the Steve Jobs movie where fictitious Woz says no one will ever use this stuff. People believed that (not Woz, he's always been a visionary and an inclusionist, the movie did him a disservice). To be a believer meant being lonely. That is, until we all read Ted Nelson's book! So, if we were to make a list of art that led to the popular use of computers, Nelson's work would surely be in there. As would Woz and Jobs, and Bill Atkinson, Randy Wiggington and Susan Kare, who pioneered a little thing like graphic icons. Made a huge difference, and influenced software design for all who came after.
    And Unix, sparse, bare-bones and character-based was also hugely influential. In the commercial software world it lay dormant during the 80s, mostly used in academia. But the seed was planted. If you got a compsci education in the late 70s or 80s you used Unix. And then, in the early 90s when networking boomed, it was Unix it boomed around. It became the server platform. The web basically is Unix with a somewhat friendly interface slapped on it (said with a bit of irony). I never thought users would tolerate http:// but it shows how wrong you can be (an idea always worth considering).
    Other obvious products of the 80s whose influence are still felt today (and remember this is my list, not anyone else's): Visicalc, Lotus 1-2-3 and Excel in spreadsheets. The popular word processors and databases of the day. PowerPoint. The Finder. Hypercard.
    I had to start a separate paragraph for two long-gone and much-missed products: Think C and Turbo Pascal. I used the former, for quite some time, to develop serious software. It did something no one thought was possible -- instant compiles of huge C programs. This was a barrier that was broken by Turbo Pascal a few years earlier. Proves one of the fundamental rules of good software design -- always revisit your assumptions as time goes by and Moore's Law continues to change the rules of hardware. What you couldn't do a few years ago might work perfectly well today.
    As I played around with this idea, I started thinking of people whose opinions I would value on this, and then realized this was turning into a software Hall of Fame, like the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. Something that the movie business doesn't do and should imho -- go back twenty or thirty years and recognize the films they missed when they were new, but turned out to be seminal. Honor people who you didn't know were great when they made their early contributions.
    I would ask people like Woz, Ray Ozzie, Dan Bricklin, Mitch Kapor, Joel Spolsky, Marc Canter, Michael Miller (former editor of PC and InfoWorld and a walking encyclopedia of software), Jon Udell, Chuck Shotton (people you might not have heard of but who have great depth of knowledge). Robert Carr and Greg Stikeleather. I'd love to ask Brendan Eich what languages influenced the design of Javascript. Or ask TBL what software he was using in the years leading up to the web. What software was Jimmy Wales studying before he figured out that we needed a global open encyclopedia? What led Adam Curry to come up with the idea for the "last yard" -- the idea that led to podcasting? Who else? Here's a chance for us graybeard programmer types to help put things in perspective.
    For my programmer friend who wanted to know about MacWrite and MacPaint, I suggested watching James Burke's great Connections series, which I've written about previously. Every "invention" is more of a synthesis of ideas that were floating around. This is the brilliance that makes change possible. If we had our priorities straight we wouldn't honor the lone inventor (an idea that I don't think even exists) rather we'd celebrate the synthesizer, the Rolling Stones, who loved the music of American blues musicians and figured out how to make it relevant to everyone, but never forgot their roots. Just one of a billion examples.
    Perhaps we're ready to give up the mythology of tech innovation, and start studying how forward motion really happens.
  MacWrite and MacPaint, a coral reef
    I was talking yesterday with a programmer friend who is 28. I wanted to use an example, but first wanted to be sure he knew about it. I asked if he knew what MacWrite and MacPaint was. He said no.
    Now this is very smart, well-educated guy. He has a computer science degree. Asking whether he knew about MacWrite and MacPaint, imho, is like asking a person with an English lit degree if he's heard of Shakespeare. In other words, we have to work on this. :-)
    Anyway, I figure a fair number of people who read this blog are like my friend. You might not know about these two seminal products, and you should.
    MacWrite and MacPaint were the only two apps that shipped on the original Mac when it was released on January 24, 1984.
    The Mac was a new platform. It didn't run Apple II software or IBM PC software, or even software from its cousin, the Lisa, which shipped from Apple a year earlier. The Mac platform was a completely clean slate. So if you bought a Mac in January or February, or even March or April -- all you could do with it was write with MacWrite and paint with MacPaint.
    They were not very powerful. Each could only open one document at a time. The menus were short. They were limited but they were also something of a miracle, because very few people had ever used a graphic app before. They had graphic menus, worked with a mouse, and they used a lot of pixels, for the day at least. It felt amazing to use these apps. Like driving a very sleek and fancy car. That is, compared to the tools that we were using before.
    More important, they served as example-ware for the developers of the day. If you were working on Mac apps, as we were at Living Videotext, if you wanted to see how to do something, you could always look at one of these two apps for an idea.
    Had the Mac shipped without MacWrite and MacPaint, it's kind of doubtful that there would be a Mac today. Or it might exist but there would be little consistency among the apps. The window I'm typing this blog post into now looks an awful lot like the window we typed into in MacWrite, 29 years ago.
    Software evolves like a coral reef. I've written about this many times. Something happens, a ship sinks, some fish live in the wreck. Their predators come there too, because there's food to eat. Then they die and their skeletons form a new structure for life to cling to. Eventually you have a thriving ecosystem. No one uses MacWrite or MacPaint today, but in a sense we all do, all the time.
    Someone who is planning on spending a career making software should know all they can about these two very important apps.
    PS: When I write these pieces I feel like Tom Hanks in the final scene of Cloud Atlas. No spoilers. :-)
  Quora is a blogging platform?
    I just heard that Quora is repositioning as a blogging platform. That's (might be) very cool.
    Hopefully that means that they're going to support the APIs that blogging platforms support. That would include the Blogger API and the MetaWeblog API. And of course we'll be looking for the RSS feeds as well.
      Update: They do have RSS feeds. Here's one.
      Update: I created my own blog on Quora. It was easy.
    I wonder who they're aiming at. Here are some of the choices.
      WordPress
      Tumblr
    Uhh that might be it. :-)
    If you have any more info please post a comment here.
    Thanks!
    PS: I suggested just this move in May 2012.
  Preserving the early blogosphere
    A story in a list.
    1. I love archive.org. It's essential. Without it, we would have absolutely no record of the early sites that are gone. Hooray for Brewster Kahle. No sarcasm. He should get a Turing Award. Researchers of the future will praise him, and rightfully so, for having the foresight and will to provide an archive of so much of the early web.
    2. If you want to see how necessary it is, spend a few minutes clicking on links from the archive of this blog from the 1990s. Most of the items I linked to are gone. The only way to see the content they once pointed to is to go to archive.org.
      I picked one random month, June 1998. Very depressing. All the links to DaveNet pieces in that month, for example, are broken. Oy. After a little investigation it's clear why. Umpteen migrations later, and in all that a dependency on .htaccess files. However S3 does not understand .htaccess files. Oh well. Not easily fixable in a few minutes. But the data is still there. You just have to know where to find it.
      Who's the best? It looks like the NY Times. All their links still work. They have some amazing future-thinking people there, and they mean business. Good work.
    3. However, sometimes that doesn't work, because the archive is imperfect. Sometimes the sites had bugs, and saw the archive.org crawler as a denial-of-service attack. A large number of UserLand-hosted sites are missing from archive.org for that reason. It was our fault, but in our defense, we were fighting fires with a very small staff and a company that was perpetually running out of money. Yet, we had as one of our goals to preserve the content we were hosting. Luckily most, but not all of our sites are still accessible at their original addresses. (See #6 below to learn why, it's not an accident.)
    4. As the blogging art progressed, we realized we should be creating static content. That would make it easier to archive. So we were able to find a home for the Radio UserLand community, with Matt Mullenweg. He has a similar problem for WordPress sites, and Matt is young, and likely to be around longer than I am, so it made sense to trust him with this content. It's not by any means an ideal solution, but it's good enough. And I do trust Matt. He has a good heart and sees a big picture. I think he values history as much as I do.
    5. We had a scare with the RSS 2.0 spec. It went offline in a server upgrade at Harvard a couple of years after I gave the spec to them, hoping it would survive longer there than on UserLand's servers. I learned a lot from the experience of trying to future-safe it. It's been at its current location for almost ten years. So I'm fairly optimistic that it will survive for a while longer. :-)
    6. I am hosting a large part of the archive from UserLand and scripting.com. Jake Savin, a former UserLand guy is hosting the other large part, out of the goodness of his heart, and respecting our early mission to produce a record. Both of us are looking for a way to make this stuff much more safe than it currently is.
    7. Not to be dramatic or anything, but no more than 40 days after I die, and probably much sooner, all of the content I'm hosting will disappear. That's just not acceptable. What was the point of trying to save it if that's the best we can do. (And after I'm gone it isn't my problem anymore.)
    8. I'm looking to create new art for long-lived websites. I see this as more of a financial and organizational problem than a technical one. From a technical standpoint, the best approach are static files served by any software capable of serving folders of static files. I like Apache. The domains should continue to work.
    9. More people would then create new content in this format, so that there will be no need to archive the sites. There should be the idea of content that's designed to survive as long as the web survives. This is especially important for sites that are trying to create a record. Government and news sites. Researchers who want their work to be built on in the future. Writers who think their ideas might be meaningful in a future context. Basically, anything that isn't completely ephemeral. We complain that the UGC companies aren't doing a good job of preserving their archives. But the awful truth is that no one is. The web is very very fragile. We can and should be making an investment in making it stronger and more resistent to damage.
    10. Right now the archive of the early blogosphere is in an unknown state. There were sites at Blogger, Movable Type, we hosted some at EditThisPage.com, and weblogs.com. I would like to see all of it safe and ready for future readers and researchers. Not as museum exhibits (this is what an ancient blog looked like) but as literature that's available to anyone at any time. There probably were some great writers back then, and there certainly is history that we have already lost that can be resurrected. But every day that gets harder. We should do something about this.
    I am mentioning this now because it's a long-term objective. I hope to be around for a while to work on this with others, hopefully younger people, who have a longer horizon than I do. I'm not looking for anything like a quick solution, because this is a problem that took many years to create. But I want to start making things better, one step at a time. I will go to conferences, if necessary -- but only conferences that are about preserving the early blogopshere. I am in favor of preserving everything, but one person can't take on everything. :-)
  Outage theater
    It appears Twitter is down.
    This is like using candles or hanging out at a camp fire?
    If you have anything to say, leave a comment here, or on Hacker News.
  Two post-season TV ads
    Football post-season ads are grand.
    Two ads during the NFC championship, one from Apple, the other from Google. Both are selling the same product. One wins, the other a loser.
    Apple has a protagonist playing ping pong with the Williams tennis sisters. They're very pretty. The ad is selling a feature of an iPhone that lets you tell it to STFU because you're sleeping. Aha. You're having a sexy dream with the Williams sisters. Do Not Disturb.
    A mom reading to her baby daughter on a couch. The little girl is having a fantasy, involving the tablet computer. Completely unnecessary. At the end of the ad you see that the mom is reading the story from a tablet. Nexus. What? Not Apple. Fuck.
    Apple is ceding the high ground to Google.
  Doc on life as a race
    Yesterday at Aaron's memorial in NYC, Doc Searls said:
      When you're young you think life is a sprint.
      When you're older you see it's a marathon.
      And when you're mature you see it's a relay race.
  We expect too much of geeks
    I've been a developer since I was 19 years old. That's already 38 years. I went to Silicon Valley when I was 25, and immediately met the most powerful people in the Valley. It was like that then, and still is -- if you're bright and young, male, strong, assertive, confident and optimistic, you can have access. Probably a lot like sport, basketball, baseball, etc. If you're young and think you're hot shit, and there's some reason to believe you are, you can go far, very quickly. This has been going on for as long as I've been in tech, and long before that.
    Computers are amazing things, they really are, in ways most non-technical people aren't even aware of. For example, when I learned about the process of bootstrapping compilers I was blown away. Still am actually. I tried explaining it to everyone I knew who wasn't a programmer. The only person who got it, sort of, was my uncle, a mechanical engineer. He could see using a hammer to make a hammer, so what's the big deal. How about using a specific hammer to make itself? How about that! His eyes glazed over. Yours probably are too. But ask someone who has made a real life compiler and see how mystical they get.
    So we programmers in a sense are a secret society. Until you learn the handshake you aren't one of us. And we can be pretty arrogant about it. Until the computer kicks our ass. Or the market. Or users. Then we learn really quickly that what we learned in school was just the beginning. That when we thought we understood everything that was just the arrogance of youth. It's functional. Because how else could you take on the world if you understood how huge and complex and fucked up the world actually is! :-)
    This is when depression sets in. All of a sudden you see that you are not all-powerful, you can't handle everything the world throws at you. But then what do you do if you've told everyone you can deal with it, that you'll come out on top? When I got to that point, which I remember very clearly, I felt I couldn't possibly face failure. I was locking up the office of Living Videotext one night, knowing the next day I would be firing half the company, and having no idea how we were going to bail it out. Yes, you can get lower than that. But between the two paths, one up and the other down, there wasn't much margin for error.
    When young people risk it all, it would be nice if there were people who understood what they're going through, who could offer some perspective. Even better, if there was an oldtimer around when the world is telling you you're a god and can do no wrong, to tell you that's bullshit, to kick you in the butt, in a friendly way, tell you you're a mortal human being, and you need to understand that life has its ups and downs, and you're going to be around for a long time, and this is just the beginning, part of the learning process, and while it looks like everything is great now, or falling apart, or whatever emotion is driving you at this moment, let's go for a walk, get a burger, see a movie and hang out for a bit, watch a game, and notice all the other stuff that's going on.
    Whew. That took a lot to write.
    The other thing we all can do, if we love the product of technical minds, is stop thinking it's magic. There is magic in computers, but the magic isn't in the programmer or the tech writer or the visionary -- it's in the whole thing. The miracle isn't any one person, rather it's that humanity can collaborate to create something much greater than any one of us. Then we can all have an accurate perspective on our role in it.
  Repubs and the Beetlejuice football players
    There's a group of football players in the wonderful Tim Burton movie Beetlejuice, one of whom delivers a great line, which goes as follows. "Hey coach, I don't think we survived that crash." I don't to spoil it any more than I have to, but it's funny in the context it's delivered in. :-)
    I was reminded of this line when I read about the House Republicans finally realizing that they are the minority party. It's as if Cantor said to Boehnoer "Hey boss, I don't think we survived the election."
    Now maybe we can resume having some semblance of government, the voters having spoken, and finally the Republicans having heard.
  Why I write
    I get a fair amount of grief for writing my blog and pushing links through my feed and to Twitter. It's been this way since before I started blogging. There are always people around who question your motives, and who project their own nasty theories about people on the easiest target to find. Often that's the most vocal and visible person, esp one without affiliation. There always seems to be one person who has a bone to pick with me, sometimes lots of people.
    There are many reasons I write, but probably the least of it is for fame or fortune. I don't make much money writing, I actually spend money to write. And if I wanted fame there are much more direct ways to go about it. In fact over the years, I've done things to limit my fame, because I don't like being famous.
    I write to express myself, and to learn. Writing is a form of processing my ideas. When I tell a story verbally a few times, I'm ready to write it. After writing it, I understand the subject even better.
    I send links to Twitter and to my linkblog feed because I want to share them, and because I want to remember them. By linking to them they get into my archive where I can search. This way instead of hunting around for an article, trying to remember where it was or how I got there, instead I just scroll through the archive. As a by-product, I share it. Some people like this. I assume the people who don't like it know how to unsub.
    I also write to create a record. In my programming work I've gotten a lot more disciplined about this. I have a rule that I can't make a change to my most mature products, the ones that are being used by others, without posting a worknote. It's a rule I don't have any trouble keeping, even though at the beginning, it was like a New Years resolution, it felt like a chore. Now it's a habit as ingrained as brushing my teeth or taking my meds or getting exercise every day. I don't feel right if I don't do it -- so I do.
    I write to keep up the connection with people I care about. That way when we meet, they have a clue what's going on with me. I really like it when people I care about blog too, so its reciprocal.
    I write to put a stake in the ground, so I can, over time, debug my prediction process, and hone my understanding of how things work. If you point to something I wrote ten years ago that turned out wrong, I don't feel ashamed. I take the opportunity to learn. By explaining my process then, I have a chance to debug it later. Why did I think desktop publishing was a bad idea? I don't know -- because I didn't write about it. But I do know why I thought the iPhone was a bad idea. This process helps me get smarter over time.
    I write to give people something to react to. So you think the iPhone was a winner from Day One. Great. Tell me why. Maybe I'll change my mind. It's happened more than once that a commenter here showed me another way of thinking about something and I eventually came around to their point of view. And even if I don't change my mind, it's helpful to understand how another person, given the same set of facts, can arrive at a different conclusion.
    Update: Another reason I write, which I remembered after publishing -- I develop writing tools. If I didn't write, I couldn't do that. I wouldn't be able to test them, refine them, and get new ideas for new tools. Writing and my software development process are integral. I couldn't do one without the other.
    And maybe I write because I'm narcissistic. It's possible. You know it's hard to tell, because the only experience we have is our own. I don't know what you think, unless you tell me, and then I have to decide if you're being honest about it, or being honest with yourself. And I try not to worry about that so much. Because whether you're honest or not is something for you to deal with, and if there is a god, for he or she to judge you on. It's not my problem, thankfully. Because there are now 7 billion people on the planet. If we were to make each person's honesty our business, we'd have no time to live! :-)
    So when someone gets on a soapbox and starts trying to rev up a crowd to hate me, and when they lie to do it, I have to learn not to give that any weight. What I do now is ask a friend to have a look and tell me what they see. Since the ranting isn't about them, they won't take it personally. If they say it's something I should pay attention to, I would -- but they never do. The most recent time it happened, a friend came back and said the person is a sadist. But my mind still circles around the abuse. I have a hard time not thinking about it. So what do I do? Write about it, of course. Now it's on the web, and hopefully out of my way.
    One more thing. I remember being at a conference, chatting with someone and I saw at the other end of the room someone who had been a friend but had started trashing me on the Internet. I excused myself and walked over to the guy and sat down next to him, and asked why he was doing it. He started repeating the nonsense he was saying online. But I didn't think he really believed it, so I pressed him and asked why he was really doing it. He said he had cancer, and was in chemo, and was in a lot of pain. I felt sick myself in that moment. I said you know that's terrible, but it's no reason to do and say things that hurt me, and make me feel bad. We all have our struggles. Me too. He agreed, and we're friends again, but now when I see him online, I can't forget how used I was, and why, and the pain comes back, his pain and mine. This really sucks.
    Anyway, I don't know why people do this. I don't think I will ever be immune to it. But I find that having good loyal friends helps make it a bit more tolerable.
  NBA All-star Results
        bold
    Eastern Conference
      Frontcourt
        LeBron James (Mia) 1,583,646
        Carmelo Anthony (NYK) 1,460,950
        Kevin Garnett (Bos) 553,222
        Chris Bosh (Mia) 528,014
        Tyson Chandler (NYK) 467,968
        Paul Pierce (Bos) 294,213
        Joakim Noah (Chi) 230,796
        Josh Smith (Atl) 187,174
        Shane Battier (Mia) 151,877
        Anderson Varejao (Cle) 149,246
        Amar'e Stoudemire (NYK) 147,720
        Luol Deng (Chi) 130,744
        Andrew Bynum (Phi) 111,902
        Brook Lopez (BKN) 108,978
        Jeff Green (Bos) 91,356
      Backcourt
        Dwyane Wade (Mia) 1,052,310
        Rajon Rondo (Bos) 924,180
        Deron Williams (BKN) 449,791
        Kyrie Irving (Cle) 445,730
        Ray Allen (Mia) 326,186
        Monta Ellis (Mil) 123,096
        Raymond Felton (NYK) 105,340
        Jrue Holiday (Phi) 103,146
        Jason Terry (Bos) 88,708
        Paul George (Ind) 80,060
    Western Conference
      Frontcourt
        Kevin Durant (OKC) 1,504,047
        Dwight Howard (LAL) 922,070
        Blake Griffin (LAC) 863,832
        Tim Duncan (SA) 492,373
        Pau Gasol (LAL) 310,845
        Kevin Love (Min) 283,458
        Omer Asik (Hou) 240,467
        Serge Ibaka (OKC) 197,063
        Rudy Gay (Mem) 182,523
        David Lee (GS) 165,875
        LaMarcus Aldridge (Por) 160,197
        Marc Gasol (Mem) 153,459
        Zach Randolph (Mem) 146,980
        Dirk Nowitzki (Dal) 145,776
        Chandler Parsons (Hou) 144,697
      Backcourt
        Kobe Bryant (LAL) 1,591,437
        Chris Paul (LAC) 929,155
        Jeremy Lin (Hou) 883,809
        James Harden (Hou) 485,986
        Russell Westbrook (OKC) 376,411
        Steve Nash (LAL) 270,741
        Tony Parker (SA) 176,168
        Stephen Curry (GS) 169,083
        Ricky Rubio (Min) 150,227
        Manu Ginobili (SA) 118,293
  My icons feed
    I've been having fun with icons on Twitter, mixing things up, same way I put images in the right margin of Scripting News.
    Peter Rojas of gdgt had an interesting idea. Why not start a feed of the icons. Indeed. :-)
    http://static.scripting.com/myReallySimple/myTwitterIcon.xml
    I can't add something to the feed without it going out to all my followers, so I'm not going to put the old icons in there. For that, here's a zip archive.
    And if I forget to put an icon in the flow, please don't be pissed, just remind me. :-)
  Pay your lawyer in cash
    I was talking with a friend the other day, and remembered I had learned this lesson a while back, but don't think I had ever blogged it.
    In Silicon Valley, when I was coming up, it was common practice to pay everyone you could with stock. They were go-go times, like now, but we weren't raising the kind of money people raise now. Vendors wanted to participate in the boom, so often you could work out deals for stock from people who printed your packaging, or did contract work. I'm still okay with that, however, not for lawyers.
    In a way it's counter-intuitive. Why wouldn't you want your lawyer to be incentivized for your success?
    The answer is, sure it's great -- when incentives are what it's about. But maybe the company won't be the shooting rocket everyone thinks? Maybe there are tough times ahead? Could happen. And then you'll have one shareholder with a huge advantage over everyone else. He or she will have set up the company. If there's any kind of shareholder action, the lawyer is going to have a big advantage over everyone else.
    So pay your lawyer in cash, not stock. Keep them on your side. Everyone will be happier.
  Gamify the NY Times
    The word gamify is kind of weird but nice.
    It means to take something that isn't a game and give it game-like features.
    Twitter is gamified because it shows you how many followers people have.
    It seems the NYT could benefit from a little of that.
    How might it work?
    1. Everyone starts out with 10 free article reads per month. As it works right now.
    2. When I tweet a link to a piece on the NYT site, I get my own code, so they can tell that a hit came from me. For every 100 clicks, I get another free read.
    3. That way we can put aside all that michegas about 99 cents for 8 weeks, which seems pretty crass, because I'm a veritable flow machine for the Times. Or at least I would be if they would gamify. :-)
    What do you think?
    PS: They can give us twice the reads for traffic generated for competitive articles, ones where they want to beat out the WaPo, BBC etc. And when the NYT gets their own Twitter-like system, which they will have to do someday if they want to stay independent, they can offer triple-points there, to encourage use of that system.
  We should retire Aaron's number
    When a great baseball or basketball player leaves the game they retire his or her number. That means the jersey hangs from the ceiling, or there's a plaque at the stadium, and no player on the team ever wears that number again.
    Babe Ruth's number, 3, is retired. Michael Jordan's too (23). Jackie Robinson's number, 42, is retired for all baseball teams.
    On the web, retiring a number would mean the website is permanently registered, and the content is preserved so it lasts as long as the web does. That means the contents of aaronsw.com will be there forever. It will never become a porn site, or a landing page, or whatever.
    Right now there is no way to do this. Isn't that strange. We could fix it if we want. The Internet is just software. It would be a small but worthwhile hack and could set a precedent for future memorials.
    Something to think about!
    Update: There's an active Hacker News thread on this topic.
  Aaron Swartz was curious
    Like everyone else in the part of the web that I exist in, I've been reading lots of stuff about Aaron Swartz over the last few days. The stuff written by professional reporters are mostly vain attempts to explain something they don't understand. Even the ones who have been covering tech for a long time miss what's important. Imho.
    I read one piece, written by Aaron himself and published in Fast Company yesterday, that really nailed it, about who he was. It was in the form of an email he had written to Ronald Lemos of Creative Commons Brazil, explaining, among other things, his involvement with RSS.
    He said he had been writing web apps, after visiting Philip Greenspun's web class at MIT, and trying to make reading news sites more automatic. Sounds about right. That's the frustration I was dealing with too, but I didn't know Aaron at the time. He says that then, when the RSS 1.0 effort became visible, he immediately wanted to be involved. That's when our paths crossed for the first time. You can read all about it in the archive of the RSS-DEV mail list on Yahoo Groups. Here's the first message Aaron posted. It was the second message of the group.
      To the extent that I participated, it was to express my dismay that this format was incompatible with what we were using. I didn't think they should call it RSS, because that would add confusion. Of course that's ancient history. But people have asked why they don't see my name on that spec. That's why.
    Aaron explains that what made him unique was that he was curious.
      "When I was a kid, I thought a lot about what made me different from the other kids. I don't think I was smarter than them and I certainly wasn't more talented. And I definitely can't claim I was a harder worker -- I've never worked particularly hard, I've always just tried doing things I find fun. Instead, what I concluded was that I was more curious -- but not because I had been born that way. If you watch little kids, they are intensely curious, always exploring and trying to figure out how things work. The problem is that school drives all that curiosity out. Instead of letting you explore things for yourself, it tells you that you have to read these particular books and answer these particular questions. And if you try to do something else instead, you'll get in trouble. Very few people's curiosity can survive that. But, due to some accident, mine did. I kept being curious and just followed my curiosity."
    After spending a lot of time in the last few days reading about his intellectual explorations, I'd agree. He nailed it. That is what made him unique. And that's of course a great thing. The world would be a better place if more people were driven by curiosity. Too many people accept things as they are. Aaron wanted to know why things worked the way they did, and wanted to see if there were other ways that might work better.
    Amen and right on Aaron, who now belongs to eternity. We'll try our best down here on earth to remain curious and keep following where it leads.
    Thanks! :-)
  Adoption, not invention
    Lots of stuff gets invented that never makes a difference.
    Invention isn't the important moment with any format or protocol.
    The moment that's important is adoption. If it got adopted then we call it "good enough" and go on.
    In RSS, the moment of adoption came when the NY Times published feeds in RSS 2.0 format in 2002. That got the users going, and gave other pubs something to shoot at. Blogging software already supported the format. We were off to the races.
    Also, a lot of the early users were reporters and editors, which drove the need for other pubs to get on board. If all the users had been in some other profession, the uptake might not have been so quick or large
    It wasn't an act of invention, or even design -- it was adoption and then uptake that make RSS as a format significant.
    Technologists and reporters should understand this is a process, not a moment.
    Hopefully that sheds some light on a subject that now seems to be interesting to people, which imho is a good thing.
    And obviously all this is just my own opinion. Like a guy whose been around a sport for a long time and thinks he understands what makes it tick. Not presented as anything other than that. :-)
  Online grieving
    When I went to my grandmother's funeral, in Rockaway, in 1977, I was surprised at how people were laughing and exchanging gossip. It was a family event. She died young, at 66, so the family was still pretty large. My grandfather was there, even though they were divorced. I knew her pretty well, and I don't think she would have approved all the laughter. But dead people are dead. A funeral can be the place where that fact sinks in for the first time, and people are entitled to express themselves however they want. As long as it doesn't interfere with others expressing themselves, in their own ways.
    When my uncle died, her son, many years later, I waited a day before writing about his passing. He had been a character on Scripting News, my blog. My uncle, along with Dan Gillmor and Jamis MacNiven, were the first people to use my Manila blogging software while it was in development in 1999. I often pointed to his site, and wrote about his adventures in Jamaica. But when he died, I didn't feel I was ready to write about it publicly for a bit of time. Probably because he was so close in age to me, just ten years older. A role model for me. And someone whose death hit me hard. I wanted to learn something from it before writing about it. At first I was just dazed. Stunned. Speechless.
    Then, when my father died, a number of years after that, I wrote about it the day it happened. It was one of the pieces I am most proud of. Short and simple, and deeply truthful. I don't read it very often but when I do, I am reminded of the sadness, of the letting-go, of feelings that had been long held inside, becoming part of the past. In an instant. No longer issues. My father loomed large in my life. But I was ready to write about it because his death was a long time coming. We got a chance to talk about it, me and him. It still haunts me. But I didn't need a lot of time to process it, before I could say what I had to say.
    In family, and online, I've come to respect the way people grieve is different for everyone, as it was for people at my grandmother's funeral, so many years ago. Everyone has a different process, and it could be different every time depending on who-knows-what. Death is something that I find impossible to understand. That's why it's so damned frightening. Maybe it's no more unpleasant than taking a trip. Maybe god is merciful and death is a pleasurable release full of spritual oxytocin. There are reasons to believe this might be so. Maybe death is something that's impossible to experience, much as we have no memory of existence from before conception? Death is a mystery, a horrifying one, if you love life. All the more horrifying if someone reaches a place where death is a choice they make. I find it especially hard to reach any conclusions about that.
    When I was young, the father of the kids across the street, one winter day, killed himself in the basement of the house, with a gun. His son discovered the body. I've had a whole lifetime to process that event, and you know what -- I still don't have any wisdom from it. I don't understand, and my guess is that I never will. And it's hard to find anything meaningful to say about something you have no appreciation for.
    I knew Aaron Swartz, not very well, but I did know him. I spent a fair amount of time yesterday reading his blog. Aaron was a voracious reader. And he really could write. And his ideas were good. I don't think enough people read his blog. Maybe more will do so now. And to repeat an oft-repeated theme here, maybe we can do something to make sure that his blog remains online as long as there is a web, which hopefully is quite a long time.
    What good can come from his death? I think we have to set more reasonable expectations for our brilliant young people. It's true that Aaron was smart, and had a great capacity to learn. But he was just 26. And for many of the years we knew him, he was much younger. He was very much his age, emotionally, even if he had knowledge beyond his years. To expect so much of such a young person probably puts too big a weight on shoulders that aren't prepared for it. I feel that there's a connection between Aaron's suicide and the suicide of Ilya Zhitomirskiy, one of the founders of Diaspora, and Gene Kan, who was one of the developers of Gnutella.
    I've had to deal with my share of death in my life, and one message I get from every one of them, approached from any direction, is that the dead are dead. Expressing love for their memory, support for the person, doesn't have much value, because they are not here to receive it. If you want to do something to honor a loved one's memory, be loving and kind to people who are still alive. That's the best thing you can do, always, every day.
    PS: The shortened URL for this post is http://2ea.r2.ly/. A message?
    PPS: I didn't put an image on this post because people have been very harsh about a smiley on a previous post that mentioned Aaron's death.
      This is part of what I mean about not judging people's way of expressing grief.
      In some cultures funerals are drunken celebrations with songs and sex. Life-affirming parties to honor a friendly soul who liked to have a little fun every once in a while.
      But the Internet that has gravitated around Aaron's soul is a very stern and gray one. Even puritan.
      No matter. If I feel a sentence needs a smiley, then I'm putting a fucking smiley on it and if you don't like it fuck you. :-)
  RSS history
    People are asking about the history of RSS today because of Aaron's passing.
    In April 2004 I put together a timeline of the various specs that led to RSS 2.0 being published on the Berkman Center website in 2003.
    http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/rss/rssVersionHistory.html
    Hopefully this adds some light! :-)
  The path to static nirvana
    If you're using the new static sites feature on S3 here's something to watch out for.
    I decided over the holidays to move scripting.com to a static site running on Amazon S3.
    It went pretty well, though uploading a folder with a huge number of files is something that we don't have good tools for with S3. But eventually I got it all up there, using a Firefox plug-in, called S3Fox Organizer. I had been using it for years, but forgot about it when I switched to Chrome last year. If you're managing large static S3 sites it's nice to have it around.
    Then at the end, I had as a loose-end to do the same for www.scripting.com. I wanted to have it simply redirect to scripting.com from an S3 bucket. I thought this would be a simple matter, but it turned out to be impossible, leaving me in a tough bind that I'm still in.
    The reason I can't do it:
      1. Amazon rightly requires that bucket names be unique.
      2. Someone has a bucket named www.scripting.com. Don't ask me why, I have no idea.
      3. Therefore I can't have a bucket named www.scripting.com, even though I registered the domain, a long long time ago. No one has ever had it but me.
    I haven't tried to figure out who it is, but I probably should, and ask them nicely if they could give it up.
    Right now I have a dynamic server running on EC2 doing the remap. But www.scripting.com gets a lot of traffic. It's the primary name the site went by until I became a fan of shorter names. :-)
  Spike Lee -- see Django -- please!
    I'm a movie fan, but I am a software guy. Spike Lee is a movie guy and a basketball fan. I know what he thinks about movies and basketball from Twitter, which happens to be the kind of software I make. So I make software that guys like Lee use, and I love movies that guys like Lee make. That's something we have in common.
    As a software guy I encourage people to use software. I'm never going to judge a piece of software without using it. There may be software I don't like but not software I don't like that I haven't used.
    That's why I wish Spike Lee would go watch Tarantino's movie, Django Unchained. Yes, they say "nigger" a lot. I find myself using the word in my inner conversation a lot after watching the movie (in my head it's Samuel L Jackson's Django character saying it). I don't dare say it out loud, cause I'm white, I guess. I think that kind of sucks, btw. Why can Patti Smith whose music I love sing a song with nigger in the title, but it's not cool for Tarantino or me to use the word? I don't get it.
    I honestly don't understand what the problem is. I'd like to understand. Maybe it's that Spike Lee would like to do a movie about slavery but can't get it funded? Surely he doesn't think no movies about slavery should be made? I can't get behind that idea. I think a lot of the BS in this country going on around the Tea Party and all the gun zealotry is all part of the legacy of slavery. We're still living in the country that was founded on slavery. Even right here in New York. (A lot of people don't know that the slave trade came through NYC.)
    You know Mississippi is still a shit state. Maybe if more people see the movie they'll understand why it's such shit. It's because their ancestors treated human beings as property. It wasn't that they used a disrespectful word. It was something much worse.
    Tarantino is an artist who communicates with audacity, but also with a wink. I saw Inglorious Basterds and laughed at the idea of a bunch of Jewish vigilantes in the American Army in World War II in Nazi Germany. I esp liked that Hitler liked Tarantino movies. And you know what -- I'm Jewish, and while I don't want to try to compare the pain my people feel around those events to the feelings of blacks have around slavery, there is something to be said for looking at these events with more of our senses, from different points of view, and thinking about them in ways different from the ways our ancestors taught us to think about them.
    I just don't support the idea of not listening to the artist because -- because what? I don't even understand what the issue is.
  A new wordpress.com reader?
    It's been about a year since wordpress.com released their RSS reader functionality.
    Here's a screen shot of the reader taken earlier today. And here's a link to the Matt Mullenweg post where he says a new version is shipping this week.
    If you have an account on wordpress.com, this link should take you to the reader.
    It'd be interesting to speculate on what might be in a new reader.
    1. I have subscribed to several feeds but only one appears to be updating today. That should change after I publish this post, since I am subscribed to this feed.
    2. Their UI says that you can subscribe to a blog, but that's confusing -- I have feeds that are not in any way associated with a blog. How can I subscribe to them? (I assume they will accept the URL of a feed, in addition to a blog.)
      Update: You can enter a feed URL.
    3. There's a ton of whitespace on the reader page. It's nice to have a little space between items, but it's also nice to get some news on the page too! (Sorry for the sarcasm.)
    4. Is there a way to import or export an OPML subscription list?
    5. I would, if I were them, strip the markup from descriptions. When I'm skimming, the markup is disruptive. The goal should be to have every post take exactly the same amount of vertical height, and not very much. They human brain is great at skimming, if you set things up the right way.
    6. This is what my ideal for a reader looks like.
    7. BTW, I like that they did a river of news, and not a mail-oriented reader. It's the right way to go, imho.
  AP challenges Twitter with feed ad
    I have a lot of thoughts about this development, but first -- to note it.
    AP is now running its own ads in its Twitter feed, to its 1.5 million followers.
    The first ads are for Samsung. They don't use Twitter's ad platform. Twitter is sure to object.
    A few questions follow from this.
    1. How did the AP get 1.5 million followers? Did Twitter promote their feed? If so, it seems Twitter has a legitimate right to the revenue flow from their ad feed. Do they have a contractual right to it?
    2. What happens if Twitter shuts them off as they did with developers? What might a shut-off look like when it comes to a content feed? For developers it meant that their API calls were not handled.
    3. What do other content companies plan to do here? Do you all think of Twitter as another channel for your content flow? Do you have plans to monetize it? Do you envision your paywall, if you have one, ever extending to your Twitter feed?
    4. Why is there a picture of a frog on the AP's Twitter page? :-)
    Now, my ready-made answers.
    1. Don't put ads in your feed, instead think of your feed as a flow of ads pointing to your content. Put ads on the pages you point to from your feed.
    2. Don't depend on Twitter to be a common carrier. They are a media company, like you. You're using a competitor to connect with your readers. This is not a healthy situation.
  I couldn't watch
    I made a point to sit down and try to watch a Sunday morning news show today, but I couldn't make it through five minutes. It's not that I was bored, it wasn't boring. They were just freaking me out. These people have lost their minds. I've never seen it this dysfunctional. It was like watching a very drunk person get behind the wheel and drive away, down Highway 1 north of San Francisco. A windy road 1000 feet up a sheer cliff. At the bottom of the cliff, rocks and sea. Make a wrong turn at the wrong moment and everything goes. Isn't there someone who can take the keys out of their hands? It's so weird.
  The TWC iPad app
    Is anyone else using the Time-Warner iPad app?
    It's surprisingly useful, because it turns your iPad into a remote for the cable box. The remote it comes with is the usual piece of junk. Mine is worse than usual because about half the keys don't work. So to get to channel 48, I have to enter 5 then a 0 and click the downarrow twice. I've learned how to find the most important channels this way, but I can't believe I'm actually willing to do this.
    Then I got the iPad app, and have set up my favorites, and I can just click on the name of the channel I want to go to and the iPad sends a message to TWC's mainframe in the cloud, which then sends a message to my set top box to switch to the channel I just clicked on. It all happens in an instant. Pretty cool.
    But last night it stopped working. I get a tune error message at the top of the screen when I try to switch to any channel. Here's a screen shot of the error on my iPod. Same app.
    Really sucks. I'm putting this out there in case anyone else is having problems or knows what box I have to kick to get this working. I have already recycled the power on everything in sight.
  Clyde makes Knicks games hum
    You know how I say there's room for something between a tweet and a blog post? Like this one. A simple idea worth a few words, but not too many.
    I like watching Knicks games on MSG because one of the guys calling the plays is an ex-NBA superstar, and a really smart guy, who takes his job very seriously -- Walt Frazier.
    His narrative, I realized watching the game last night, is what goes through the mind of a player on the court. And because he's so smart and cares so much, it's quite a narrative. He loves the sport, and he loves the players, and he loves great basketball. And while the nature of the job isn't to be overly critical, if you listen carefully you can hear what he doesn't like. In a word, lackadaisical play, a term he uses more than he should. :-)
      What Clyde doesn't like:
        1. Cross-court passing.
        2. If you don't play D.
        3. Lazy players.
    But it's all good. Thanks Clyde for making it real.
      "They're still paying homage to JR for his antics."
  Stop bullshitting
    This is the best piece you'll read all day, maybe all year.
    When people are near death they start telling the truth. I know this from experience. I got to hang out with my father for a full week when he was in hospice in the week before he died. He was never a big truth-teller. He used to say "Don't truth me and I won't truth you." But that week was different. He had a bunch of things he wanted to get off his chest. He didn't go so far as to forgive anyone, or say things that would make him vulnerable or embarassed. A lifetime of holding back on these things doesn't break in a week, no matter how close you are to death. And it wasn't his fault. He grew up into a world that told men that they had to be strong. And any emotion other than anger would scare the people around him. That such a person would grow a hard impenetrable shell is no surprise.
    I've had the near-death experience myself, twice -- once when I was very young, and once a little over ten years ago. I suppose it's a reason some people find me hard to accept. But it's also the reason, I think, that the people who love me, do. If I presented an image of who they want to see, or who I think they want to see, then it's the image they love, not the person. Now that does not mean you should tell people what you think all the time in every context. But you can change, and apologize and forgive, at any time, without asking anyone's permission, and without fear of offending. Even if you come in a package that most people don't associate with change, regret or forgiveness.
    Don't miss the opportunity to clean house and have a great rest of your life, even if you haven't narrowly escaped death.
  Dynamic forms into Javascript objects?
    I have a JavaScript question today.
    I have a form with lots of input elements whose names I can't hard-code into the JavaScript. I have to be prepared for anything that might be there.
    On a certain event I want to grab the values of all the input elements and put them into a JavaScript object, each as a property, with the name of the input becoming the name of the property.
    I can get a nodelist of all the input elements in the form, as follows:
      var inputs = document.getElementById ("myDialog").getElementsByTagName ("input");
    Now, I have a global called myValues that I want to get all the values from the inputs into.
    This is what I think the loop should look like (but it doesn't work).
      for (var i = 0; i < inputs.length; i++) {
        myValues [inputs [i].name] = inputs [i].value;
        }
    I've looked at various Stack Overflow pages, of course.
    Any help much appreciated!
    Update: It works. :-)
      Here's the actual test app.
      http://prefstest.blorkmark.com/
      I think the mistake I was making was initializing appPrefs to [] when it should have been {}.
      Still getting my wobbly JS sea legs to settle down. :-)
      Thanks for all the help!!
  Recreational marijuana in the US?
    It's now 2013 and I hear that marijuana is legal in two states.
    If you're in Colorado or Washington, what's it like?
    Do you see people smoking in public places?
    Have any stores opened?
    Any unforseen consequences?
    Really curious to know what legal marijuana is like...
    Do tell! :-)
  Discuss on Twitter? No.

    BTW, I try not to discuss stuff on Twitter. With its 140-char limit, hard to express anything complex or subtle.
    — Dave Winer .& (@davewiner) January 3, 2013

  Medicine is stuck in the 20th century
    At 57, I see doctors pretty regularly. They take blood, listen to this, look into that. I don't do nearly all they want me to do, but I would like to do more. I understand there's a connection between how I feel and look, and how long I'll live.
    I would do more of it, if it integrated with the rest of my life better. Having to wait for returned calls when ever I have to do something with my doctor's office -- so wasteful. Makes me avoid doing things with them. Why can't we use the new communication tools.
    While various professions and industries have changed the way they communicate, doctors and their staff have not. For example, there's an app for the iPad from my pharmacy. When it's time to re-order prescription drugs, I don't have to call anyone, or wade through a voicemail tree, I just click a few buttons on a couple of screens, and the meds are waiting at the pharmacy down the street.
    But if for some reason they have to talk to the doctor, it all reverts to faxes and phone tag. The contrast is stark. The doctors themselves probably don't have to deal with it, but they do have to pay for the human beings who implement all the steps manually, when they could do it with websites and email. And their patients have to deal with it too. BTW. :-)
    I'm sure there are doctors that use the new communication tools. Does yours?
  Making web archives safe
    This is an important subject.
    I just moved scripting.com, a site that goes back to 1995, from an Apache server to an S3 bucket. In the process we generated a zip file that contains everything. It seems to me that archive is a piece of history.
    What university is ready to receive such a gift?
    Background: I have a famous great uncle from Germany who was an author and translator. His work is studied in universities. My mother ended up with (paper) copies of all his books from his own collection. We went on a search for a university that would add them to their collection, and found one, and now we're fairly confident we did the right thing for Uncle Arno's legacy.
    But with digital stuff, who is going to make a big deal out of receiving a zip archive, when anyone's copy is exactly the same as all the others?
    In other words, how can I make this bit of history safe? I have no clue.
  What to do with archives?
    My mother's uncle, Arno Schmidt, was a published author in Germany. It's a long story how she ended up with a small collection of his books, but a couple of years ago she decided she wanted to donate them to a university. I've been interested in archives, so I volunteered to help.
    I wrote a blog post, got some interest, and in the end we donated the books to Portland State University. They had a scholar there who studied my uncle, so we felt we did a good job of finding a home for his writing.
  Seek the geek
    Yesterday, the first day of the new year, I walked through Times Square to see what aftermath of the big party. The square was more or less empty, except for a few bits of random glitter blown about by sanitation workers, not much was going on.
    So I had a chance to look more carefully at the incredible array of light shows in the square. One of them apparently had some image detection software, it tuned into me, and put my picture on the billboard for all to see. In a variety of ways! Wow.
    We're getting pretty close to Minority Report stuff. I shot a picture and showed it to some friends. Everyone found it confusing. Who took the picture, they wanted to know. Me, of course. See if you can figure it out. Then watch the video on Vimeo that explains.
  Moving scripting.com to S3
    With the new static sites feature in Amazon S3, it should now be possible to host scripting.com in an S3 bucket.
    This is my first project of the new year. We hope. Knock wood. :-)
    I have a script that will upload all the files from scripting.com, some dating back to 1994, to the bucket.
    I would like to, if possible, preserve the creation and mod dates on the files. Through all the transitions over all the years, I have managed to do that because my scripts have been careful to transfer this metadata along with the actual data.
    Now I'm trying to figure out if this is possible with S3. I see how you can associate metadata with a file as you upload it. However I don't see a way to transfer the modification and creation dates. If anyone has a clue, the help would be much appreciated.
    PS: I know scripting.com is down for most people now. Unfortunately this transition has not been without glitches. And there are broken images too! Still diggin.
  Happy New Year!
February 2013
  Don't slog away at the end of the day
    Here's one of the fundamental rules of programming.
    You're at the end of your day, you've gotten a lot of stuff done, and you have one more thing to get right before the feature is complete, and you're searching for the answer, trying all kinds of ideas, thoroughly confused, not wanting to get up until it's done, just slogging away and not getting it. Finally, you give up after a couple of hours of spinning your wheels, eat some dinner, watch a little basketball, have a glass of wine, read a little and crash for the night.
    Get up the next morning, make some coffee, read the news, roll up your sleeves and start over with the problem.
    Five minutes later it's done.
    Happens every damned time.
    The problem isn't intractable. It's just as difficult as all the other problems you solved the previous day. It just came after your mind shut down. So you might as well quit work a couple of hours earlier.
    Programming isn't like digging trenches. The amount of work you get done is not directly proportional to the amount of time you work. Also believe it or not your mind is solving problems while you sleep. That's why the answer is apparent first thing in the morning. Even after 30 years of programming, I'm still learning this lesson.
  Why you should learn to code
    I actually do think people should learn to code, at least a little -- just as you learn a little chemistry, biology and math in school. Learning how to program is imho easier than those things, but then I have a natural ability to program, so what do I know. :-)
    But I don't like the way people at code.org are pitching it. And I don't like who is doing the pitching, and who isn't. Out of the 83 people they quote, I doubt if many of them have written code recently, and most of them have never done it, and have no idea what they're talking about.
    If I were encouraging young people to learn to play basketball, at least I would have had the experience of playing a little myself when I was younger, and having watched a lot of it recently. I'm in awe of basketball players. How fast they charge at the basket with such reckless abandon for their own safety. They fall on hard wood at high speeed. That must hurt! But they get right up and play as if nothing happened. But there are plenty of basketball players to talk about basketball. So why aren't there very many programmers who can talk about coding? If I were a young person looking at this, I'd wonder what was up with that. They're telling me what a wonderful career it is. Where are the people who do it, and what do they have to say?
    Which brings me to the second problem I have with the way they pitch it.
    Suppose I said you should learn to play basketball because you can make a lot of money doing it. I wonder how Chris Bosh would feel about that. Or if I said you should learn to create music for the same reason? I bet will.i.am would have a problem with that. You don't learn an art to make money -- you learn it because it's fun and satisfying. Because it's what you were meant to do. You do it because you like it so much that it's what you want to do every day of your life. Because you want to get really good at it. To perfect your art, and achieve a greater goal. Imagine telling young people they should learn to do something because "To compete in a global market, our students need high quality STEM education including computer science skills such as coding." Okay. I'd run away from that as fast as I can.
      I like what Bill Gates said: "Learning to write programs stretches your mind, and helps you think better, creates a way of thinking about things that I think is helpful in all domains." It's very true, and a good argument for students in all disciplines learning at least a little programming.
    These people don't themselves know how to do what they want you to do. So what they say makes no sense. It won't make you rich, but it will make them rich. And if you do it, they won't listen to you. And even worse, if you do what they want you to do, you'll be tossed out on the street without any way to earn a living when you turn 35 or 40. Even though you're still a perfectly good programmer.
    It's a shitty system, and it needs to be fixed. And we have to get these spokespeople who don't know anytihng about what we do to stop speaking for us. To get out of the way. What we need to do, as programmers, is start helping young people become really good at what we do, so they can do it even if there are a lot of carpetbaggers trying to redefine it. (What's a carpetbagger? You should study a little history too!)
    To be clear, you should learn to code if:
    1. You love writing and debugging and refining and documenting and supporting code.
    2. You love to see the working result of your labors.
    3. It excites you to empower other people (your users and other developers).
    4. You have modest financial needs.
    5. Don't mind spending a lot of time working by yourself.
    6. Don't mind being misunderstood.
    Primarily you should do it because you love it, because it's fun -- because it's wonderful to create machines with your mind. Hugely empowering. Emotionally gratifying. Software is math-in-motion. It's a miracle of the mind. And if you can do it, really well, there's absolutely nothing like it.
    I wrote a piece about programmers in 1997. "Successful programmers know how to ask questions, and they know how to ask the right question. You can't go forward until that happens. A programmer is a rigorous scientist determined to coax the truth out of the ones and zeros. There's the beauty."
    BTW, I also think every student should learn to be a journalist and a lawyer and an accountant too. That way you'll be able to blog with authority. And will know when you're getting screwed. And keep your taxes down like rich people do. :-)
  Good software design is ageless
    A comment from Michael Markman: "I'm an older dog than Dave Winer -- by about a decade. And I've managed to learn this new trick: move one finger, the pointer moves. Use two fingers and the window scrolls."
    Necessary recital: I'm 57 and have been developing software since I was 18.
    He's wrong. I would have been just as upset about the feature-removal at 25 as I am today. It has nothing to do with age. And as a software designer, something that I've been doing for a long time and know quite well, I can tell you why it's bad to remove features. I learned it the hard way, by doing it.
    I once shipped a product for the Apple II and IBM PC. When we made the Mac version we started a new codebase, largely because of the new way of doing UI. We wanted to ship before we had all the features ported and debugged, so we did. The users saw this as taking features out of the product, even though technically that isn't what we did. They were angry about the removal. I bet a lot of them were my age at the time (28), that is, younger than Michael and myself. And they were right to be upset. We called both products ThinkTank. They expected when they opened the box (software shipped in boxes back then) they would get the same thing, but translated to the Macintosh. They didn't. So they concluded that we had removed features.
    Key lesson: Users don't see things from the same perspective as we do.
    And users build up processes that designers know nothing about. They work around the limits of our software by using other features to emulate the ones they wish were there. When we play with the mix of features, we break them. Why would you want to do that to someone who was smart enough to buy your product, and might buy an upgrade someday. Don't you want your users to be successful? Isn't that why you're making software. All these are reasons why anyone, not just Apple, should strive for continutity for users. I suppose there are times when you have to break users. But to break them for aesthetic reasons, when it's totally optional, that's a sign of bad things to come. A company that has decided willfully not to value their users.
    I'm reminded of this many times every day, as I work around the missing scroll-arrows feature. I remember it used to be there. A sin that's hard to forgive. And it's an important one to observe, because more and more the designers at big tech companies are, for some reason impossible for me to understand, sabotaging their own products by removing features that users depend on. It's becoming more commonplace. And it's a trend that will make users seek out stability as a desired feature.
    People do switch for stability, btw. I switched from Windows to Mac, at considerable expense, because at the time Windows was infected with malware and the platform vendor wasn't fixing the product. I could switch again, if the Mac becomes too unstable and another platform appears to be rocking less.
  The Sequester
    We're in constant Congress-induced crisis mode in the US.
    It's gotten so routine, I don't even pay attention anymore. I suspect a lot of other people do the same.
    I kind of hope the Republicans don't back down, and let the sequester happen, and then the voters may finally see the connection between what they do and what the Congress does. I think our Red State fellow citizens have been using their vote for entertainment purposes. To watch the assholes they elect stick it to the rich and sophisticated "elites" in the big east coast and west coast states. But when the cuts hit their communities just as hard as they hit ours, they may think again. I hope they do.
    We need to run this country a little more like a business. We have to think these things through. We want Medicare and Social Security, and we don't mind paying for them, but somehow we want them cut at the same time? Hello. That's no way to run an economy.
    Whatever. I'm beginning to think maybe the cynics are right and this is all just sleight-of-hand, to keep us distracted while the real action is somewhere else. Yeah, that's probably it.
  Watching Marco's Magazine
    I've been watching Marco Arment's publishing venture, called The Magazine, with interest and a little puzzlement. It looks like a high wall around writing, the kind of wall that was natural before publishing got cheap, first with laser printing and page layout software, then with the web and blogging.
    When I started blogging, with DaveNet, in 1994 -- people in the tech industry who read it thought for sure it was just a demo, and eventually I would charge a fee. Something like the $495 per year that Esther Dyson and Stewart Alsop charged for their tech industry newsletters. I told everyone that I would never do that, but they still seemed to believe I would eventually charge.
    But I didn't and I never would for this simple reason. I was having so much influence with the free and openly published email/web essays that it made no sense to limit the flow. I also never thought of my writing as my bread and butter, so in fairness, I could afford to give it away because it was a by-product of my real work, not the work itself, which was writing software.
    So maybe I wasn't so smart, just had my center in a different place. Whatever, I was sure I wouldn't charge, and in the 19 years since, I never have.
    Now Marco has changed his policy, and the articles appear on the web in addition to being in his iOS-based magazine app. It's a complex scheme that allows readers to point to articles to share them on the web. But you can only read one article for free per month. I don't see why this is a major difference from having an absolute and impenetrable paywall. One time, when I click on a link, I get to read the article. Every other time, I'll get an ad to buy a subscription, I guess. As a linker, I wouldn't like to send my readers to ads for a publication. I might read an article and think it essential for everyone to read, but wouldn't share it.
    I am the kind of person who, when I read an article, if I make it all the way to the end, I'm pretty likely to forward it to all my followers. I have this systematized, with software that makes it super-easy. I also will forward a link to articles that I want to remember to read. I figure if it's important enough for me to want to read later, then it's important enough for the people who follow me to get that link so they can read it too. My linkflow is a sort of memory system. I use it the way some people use Marco's Instapaper, or Readability, or the way they used to use del.icio.us, or any of a dozen other tools that remember links to look at later.
    But because sharing links is such a central part of my reading process, I almost never read articles that can't be shared. It means I've never read an article that's published in Marco's Magazine. It's not out of principle. Maybe he's right. If so, eventually I may have to give in. I don't subscribe to the WSJ or the NYT either, although I have at times been tempted to go for the NYT plan. If it were simpler and if I believed I could easily unsub I probably would.
    Anyway, I'm still watching. I suspect he will find equilibrium with full sharing on the web. The pull is just too great. I bet that most good writers want to influence with their writing more than they want to be paid for it. Everyone likes a small paycheck, but if it interferes with the purpose of writing, that creates a conundrum. I think that long-term the desire to influence will win-out.
  Young folk and greatness
    I was once a very young man with some talent, and luck and perhaps intuition that led me to a place where, at 25, I had arrived somewhere that few people did. Everywhere I went people reminded me what a miracle I was. But there were other people my own age who were even more miraculous, richer and more accomplished. This brewed a soup of emotions that were pretty intense -- pride, arrogance mixed with jealousy and anger.
    We were all difficult to be around, maybe I was more difficult than most. But because I could make "magic" happen with the computer, this was somewhat tolerated. It wasn't until I was in my mid-40s that things began to settle down. I realized that while my life might have been different from most people, more elevated in some ways -- I was actually a pretty ordinary person. I learned that the more I could make my actual life normal, the closer to happy I would become.
    I'm still able to work the stuff that people who don't know call magic, but I realize now as I did then, that it isn't magic at all. There's a process to creativity. All you have to go by when you're younger is intuition, and the feedback of others who say your talent is without precedent, unless you have coaches who help give you a sense of perspective, who give you a safe harbor to create within, and while giving you positive feedback when your work is excellent, keep reminding you to seek balance. Enjoy your youth, in a physical way. Enjoy the simple everyday pleasures of living. Do not believe the accolades. Strive to do better, and keep your eye on the long arc of life, not just the here-and-now.
    We, as a society, make a big mistake when we pump the egos of our young talented people. Love everyone, not just the rich. Don't believe that people are prodigies, they aren't. When people create something you like, tell them! But don't think they're gods.
  Era of the big man is over
    This is a basketball story, but not really.
    There was a time when bigger was better. If you worked at the biggest company you were smarter, more powerful, better looking, knew what was happening.
    You could see over our heads.
    But that was then. Now it's about being fast of feet and mind. Thinking not just where the puck is going but how to replace the puck with something better.
    That's why the Lakers are the past and the Rockets are the future.
    Think small picture, not big.
  Apple arguing with iTself on my iMac
    I just plugged my iPad into my iMac and launched iTunes.
    A dialog appeared saying there's a new version of iOS for the iPad. Would I like to download and iNstall it. Yes.
    A few seconds later a dialog appears saying there's a new version of iTunes. Same question. Yes.
    I think you can see where this is headed. :-)
    Some piece of software says that I can't install a new version of iTunes unless I quit iTunes. So I try to quit. Then I get a dialog wanting to confirm that I want to quit iTunes while my iPad is being updated with the new version of iOS. Either way, no or yes, gets me more dialogs. I can't get out of this loop any way other than to force quit all the software that's running that's orchestrating this Kafkaesque madness.
    Somewhere Steve Jobs is rolling over in his grave. (Or at least rolling his eyes.)
  Vanity Fair led me back to Pulp Fiction and to a great blog
    Warning: Spoilers ahead! :-)
    I spent the day in Cambridge yesterday. One of my stops was the Shorenstein Center, where I was interviewed as part of a project to understand the transition of journalism to the Internet. At one point I was asked who were some of my favorite bloggers. I said I don't like that kind of question, because I think it misses the point of blogging. I gave an example.
    1. On Tuesday I read an article in Vanity Fair about the making of Pulp Fiction.
    2. That caused me to watch the movie again. I hadn't seen it in a long time. I wasn't sure if I had even seen it more than once.
    3. Great movie.
    4. Near the end of the movie there's a scene with Wolf, Vincent and Jules at the junkyard. Wolf is going to breakfast with a delicious young babe who owns the junkyard where they had disposed of a car that was used in a crime. I wondered who the babe was.
    5. When the credits rolled I noted her name. Googled her. Found she has a blog.
    6. Spent the next hour reading it. She's a great writer. It's 20 years later. She's done a lot of living. And blogged about a lot of it. She reads books and watches movies and keeps a log of them.
    That story illustrates perfectly for me why blogs are so valuable. It's not that any single person has a blog, or is famous for it. It's that blogging is available to anyone who wants to blog. Not everyone does. But with Julia Sweeney I hit blogging paydirt. An attractive person who turns out to have something to say. Nice.
    PS: Kathy Griffin was in PF too.
  Do you use your own product?
    The "Lion" version of the Macintosh operating system removed what was, to me, a very important feature -- the arrows at either end of scrollbars. I found this out when I bought a new laptop, which I'm using now to write this piece, and discovered the omission. I wrote a blog post about it at the time, and was told by Mac advocates not to worry that I would discover better ways to do the same thing. That didn't happen, but since I don't use the laptop that often, I muddled along without the arrows.
    Then, late last year, I updated my Mac desktop to the latest model. It has a nicer screen, is a little slimmer, has a faster CPU, faster disk, etc. This time I couldn't side-step the missing scroll arrows. And since this is my main work machine, muddling along meant less productivity. More lost trains-of-thought as I have to locate the scroll thumb and delicately move it up or down small amounts to get the text to scroll by two or three lines. The scroll arrows are always in the same place, and you click once to move by one line. No care required.
    Finally, last week, I decided it was time to actually find the "better way" the people spoke of earlier. Only to discover it didn't exist. After hearing from lots of users in the comments, the best approach people have come up with is to use the arrow keys on the keyboard. But that's no answer. If I have to lift my hand of the mouse, find the keyboard, and find the arrow keys (does it even have arrow keys, I never use them).
    All this makes me wonder if the people at Apple actually use Macs, and if they do, do they hate themselves? Certainly someone there must have depended on the arrows as a way of fine-tuning the vertical position of text on the screen? As I do.
    So a few times every day I lose my train of thought because I use a new Mac instead of an old one. I can't figure out for the life of me why they would take features out of their products. I would say it might be to get us to leave their platform and use Windows, but they're playing even worse tricks on their users.
  Dinner in Cambridge on Wednesday?
    I'll be in Cambridge, MA on Wednesday, staying overnight and am free for dinner, so let's have a meetup!
    I posted an item on the Berkman-Thursday list (awkward because this is a Wednesday night event, but it's the people that matter, imho, not the day).
    Some possible items for discussion.
    Hey what do you guys think of Jeremy Lin? I love that he came from Harvard.
    I've been programming in JavaScript in the browser for the last few months. Would be happy to share observations.
    I'm coming to meet with some folks at Shorenstein and at MIT, and am working on a super-secret project which I might leak about if properly incentivized.
    Hey I don't want to make a big deal of this, but I remember fondly the discussions we used to have way-back-when in the Old Country with the Sad Beatles and all that.
    I hear they tore down our building. How can something like that happen.
    One more thing. I heard that Bombay Club is closed. That, and climate change, is enough to cause one to lose hope, I think. But the Red Sox have won the championship, so that's something. I can't imagine what their fans will do now without the curse to lament.
    Anyway, if there's enough interest we'll pick a restaurant, and post the details here before Wednesday night.
  Dear NYC Journo Brain Trust
    I sent this email to some friends yesterday and realized it should probably be a blog post.
    This idea came in a roundabout way...
    1. Google Reader has been sputtering lately.
    2. Causing some users to be nervous.
    3. They reach out to developers they know who care, including me. Asking if I can offer any help.
    4. The only help I can offer is my mind. My programming resources are going elsewhere, and this is not the kind of job a person or a small team can approach. Because while news looks easy and simple, there are millions of feeds, and all must be read every so often or else the system doesn't work. It means you need fairly real capital to make this happen.
    5. Either Google is or isn't going to continue to subsidize the news reading activity. Either way it's not good to be so dependent on them.
    6. So I approach some famous tech companies, get a hearing, and am told there might be money available for this, but no interest in doing it as a service. Makes sense. I don't want to do it either.
    7. It is suggested that perhaps a university or library might want to do this. To which I say -- not likely, for many reasons.
    8. Then, after sleeping on it -- I have one of those AHA moments.
    9. Why isn't this something a news org jumps on. It's their business. And for crying out loud -- do it with a revenue model. No paywall. Just charge the users for the service. Make this a market. Let's start building in a non-fragile way.
    I don't know what to do with this other than give the idea to people who might have some influence at the news orgs. Forward it where ever you like.
  Posterous archive received
    I was able to download my Posterous archive.
    http://static.scripting.com/dave/daveWinerPosterousArchive.zip
    I'm busy with other projects, but wanted to be sure I could find this if I find time to move it to another location.
    I took a brief look inside, and it looks fine. The posts are stored as RSS 2.0 items. Shouldn't be hard for any experienced blogging software developer to work with this.
  Tesla v NY Times
    A fascinating conflict is brewing between Elon Musk the founder of Tesla Motors and John Broder, a reporter for the NY Times who reviewed the Tesla Model S.
    Margaret Sullivan, the NY Times public editor has a good summary of the dispute, so far.
    Some obvious observations.
    1. The whole thing is good for Tesla. I hadn't seen the original review, but after seeing Musk's initial review-of-the-review, I became interested. Someday I might buy a Tesla as a result of the increased interest. It'll take a number of events like this to get me to buy, but a car is a big purchase, so it seems it should take a lot of work to close the deal.
    2. Before this, the most memorable thing I had heard about the Tesla was from Evan Williams who said it was the iPhone of cars. That made sense to me, and Williams saying it made a difference. I believe he understands what makes an iPhone nice. And cars are not designed like iPhones, but it might be nice if they were. :-)
    3. Had it been any publication other than the Times, they wouldn't have had Margaret Sullivan to rep the news side of it. This is possibly a big deal. I have been impressed with Ms Sullvivan's work so far, after being very irritated by her predecessors. They didn't seem to rep the public. Mostly they explained why the Times insiders were right all along and the public was wrong.
    4. Even though I'm a fan, I think public editors should be from the public, not journalism. And a publication of the stature of the Times should have many of them. The rule is they could put something on the Times website, adjacent to the articles they're commenting on, and they could say whatever they need to say to create balance. They wouldn't have indefinite terms, and it would be possible to fire them, but only if they breached ethical standards themselves.
      Some stories need lots of public editors, and maybe the public editors should be given anonymity. An example is the run-up to the war in Iraq when all the publications carried the same wrong story. Another, more recent example is the telling of the life story of Aaron Swartz. I knew Aaron, and I read many of the stories, shaking my head at the awful reporting. You can forgive Aaron's friends for distorting the truth, perhaps -- they were grieving. But what were the reporters' excuses? If they were emotionally tied to the story they should have been excused. The purpose of a news publication is to tell the truth, especially if it's unpopular. The Times has a public editor because it wasn't living up to this ideal, and they knew it, and presumably wanted to do something to fix it. But it's too big a job for just one person.
    5. All pubs should have someone like Ms Sullivan. Over the years, I've had a number of disputes that cut to the integrity of reporters at major publications, like the one Mr Musk has with the Times. None of them have had public editors, and none of them ever resolved the issue one way or the other. One even threatened to sue me for libel if I didn't stop saying they were doing something wrong (a British publication). Imagine if a software company threatened every user who reported a bug. I told them to go ahead. At least it would have raised the issue in a way they would have had to respond to.
    6. Just like all software has bugs, all publications have breaches of integrity. The question isn't whether or not you have them, you do. The question is what you do when someone raises an issue.
    7. I've long felt that each blogger who values his or her reputiation should have a panel of "rabbis" who will respond to public integrity challenges. If my rabbis say I have to address a certain issue, then I will. If they say it's not an issue, I can go about my business without responding. This would do a lot to increase confidence, and also protect us from troll-like accusations. I think it's possible the same system could work for publications too. Sort of a shared public editor function, for organizations that don't have the resources to hire one of their own.
    8. It's possible that Musk is a troll. It's also possible that Broder made it up. I don't expect Sullivan to say either of these things unless it's so obvious as to be indisputable. And it won't be. She will tell us what both sides say and will look at the data herself. She'll look at what others say, and will suggest that while Musk has a fine product he has probably engaged in a little self-promotion here. And that the Times can and should have some new policy for testing cars. We will get a decent list of sources to examine ourselves, and we will, as always, make up our own minds.
  Mac scrollbar woes
    It's been a few months since I got my new iMac and with it was forced to switch to Mountain Lion. I've more or less made my peace with everything except this -- the arrows on the scroll bars are gone. This means what was once an automatic operation that required almost no thought now requires me to swtich gears, locate the thumb and move it different amounts depending on how long the document is. When I first observed this, people said not to worry -- you'll get used to the new way of doing things. But the New Way so far has not revealed itself. So please, do tell, what's the recommended fast way to get the current window to scroll just a little in one direction or another, using the mouse? I have a Magic Mouse, of course. I've tried all combinations of gestures, and nothing seems to do it. Is there a howto somewhere?
  Why Rubio looked silly
    Last night Marco Rubio gave the rebuttal to the State of the Union in a studio. He looked silly and uncomfortable before the awkward moment when he reached for the bottle of Poland Spring. That just sealed it.
    He should have been at a podium, with a charged-up Republican-loving crowd ready to cheer every one of his cheap and misleading characterizations of the President. They should have a big APPLAUSE sign to give people a cue. Or pictures of hated Democrats offscreen behind his head to get the crowd going at the right moments.
    Certainly they can find an auditorium or airplane hangar somewhere in Washington and enough out-of-power partisans or out-of-work actors to fill the room. You gotta wonder who's planning these things.
  Central Park after the snow
    If you like, there are more pictures of the park after the storm on Flickr.
  Understanding the Dropbox API
    For the sake of argument suppose the developer of a document-based app written in JavaScript running in the browser wanted to open and save files from and to the user's Dropbox folder. What's the best way to do that, given the new APIs that Dropbox has been releasing?
    I see they have a Chooser. It looks like this can only be used to open files, not save them. Is that true?
    It seems where Google wants you to use Google Docs to access their Drive space, Dropbox could build around an independent developer community that's potentially larger and more diverse than Google's. Is this their intent? Or will they create apps to compete with Google's?
    What are developers doing? What's the best way of following new announcements in this area? If you are working on browser-based apps that integrate with Dropbox, please feel free to post a comment. I'd love to learn more.
  Page preview in a Bootstrap modal
    I'm trying to do a modal dialog that does a preview of a web page in a modal dialog in Bootstrap 2.0.
      And having the damndest time figuring out how to even get started! :-(
      Is it an iFrame? If so, how do I specifiy the size of the iFrame and the size of the modal.
      It's a complete mess.
      I'm going to narrate my work here.
      Looking for guidance...
    Here's an example..
      http://modalwithwebpage.blorkmark.com/
      I'm trying to present the contents of render.scripting.com inside a modal dialog.
      How do I set the height and width properties for each of the things to get get a reasonable display.
      This is obviously a very simplistic example. Ultimately I want to preview presentations in this format.
  The guy at the gas station
    There's a gas station at the corner of Sand Hill Road and Sharon Park Drive in Menlo Park. I used to live on Sharon Park, so I'd drive by the gas station pretty much every day. I was also a smoker then, Marlboro Lights, at least two packs a day, sometimes more. I had a thing where I'd never buy a carton, figuring that kept me conscious of how much I was smoking. It didn't really work. The gas station that sold the cigarettes was only a few blocks away. A two-minute drive, at most. "Two packs of Marlboro Lights, please" that was something I said at least once a day. Sometimes more than once.

      <iframe width="650" height="400" frameborder="0" scrolling="no" marginheight="0" marginwidth="0" src="https://maps.google.com/maps?q=sand+hill+road+and+sharon+park+drive&ie=UTF8&hq=&hnear=Sand+Hill+Rd+%26+Sharon+Park+Dr,+Menlo+Park,+San+Mateo,+California+94025&gl=us&t=m&source=embed&layer=c&cbll=37.424159,-122.195918&panoid=a-1RhIX067urQjyNC1t_sw&cbp=11,201.36,,0,-2.08&ll=37.39621,-122.19595&spn=0.027275,0.05579&z=14&output=svembed">
      <a href="https://maps.google.com/maps?q=sand+hill+road+and+sharon+park+drive&ie=UTF8&hq=&hnear=Sand+Hill+Rd+%26+Sharon+Park+Dr,+Menlo+Park,+San+Mateo,+California+94025&gl=us&t=m&source=embed&layer=c&cbll=37.424159,-122.195918&panoid=a-1RhIX067urQjyNC1t_sw&cbp=11,201.36,,0,-2.08&ll=37.39621,-122.19595&spn=0.027275,0.05579&z=14" style="color:#0000FF;text-align:left">View Larger Map

    One day I went into the gas station to buy some smokes, and the guy behind the counter couldn't seem to find them or hear me, or whatever. I must have said three different times "Two packs of Marlboro Lights, please." He was sweating. Really confused. At first I took it as a sign of disrespect, anger rose, but I tried to hide it. After what seemed an eternity of not getting what I wanted, something clicked for me. "This guy is having a hard time." That's very different from "He's giving me a hard time." I realized he wasn't my problem, and I wasn't his. He had problems, but they had nothing to do with me. So I stopped, took a big breath, smiled, and waited. He brought me what I asked for, I gave him the money. I smiled and said "Have a great day."
    He smiled back and said he was sorry. I said no worries man. (Or something like that.) I smiled again and turned to leave.
    I always think of that day when I get into a tight spot with someone, a friend sometimes, a person in a store or on the subway, in an airport. This is a person who is trying to do his or her best, given the circumstances, and for whatever reason, having nothing to do with me, is having trouble. I'm going to try to make it easier for them.
    The point of this story is -- nothing. I just thought it was time to write it. :-)
    Have a great day!
  Thanks to Jeff Atwood
    I tried to fit this into a tweet and I came close but couldn't quite squeeze it in.
    I was glad to see Discourse, released today. It's open source discussion software. Jeff Atwood, the developer, is one of the best programmers around, and he really knows discussion software. Too often people stop moving the ball forward when they achieve success. I don't know why. Do great directors hang it up after their first hit? Basketball players? Rock stars? Why should creative people in tech be any different.
    I think we're about to see a wave of technically excellent software in a lot of different categories. Feels that way to me. More software like Discourse that can be hooked into everything else, and we'll be looking at a lot of new opportunity for everyone.
    I think we're on the cusp of some exciting times.
    Thanks Jeff. :-)
  Kids are scientists
    A great episode of This American Life about children as scientists.
    A little girl on her first airplane ride, after takeoff asks an adult when will they get small? She had seen planes take off at the airport, and after they took off they all got small.
    Children are scientists. Even things you'd think were obvious, like gravity -- are mysteries to children. But they are born investigors and practitioners of the Scientific Method. That's something we all understand at birth, it seems.
    There's a wonderful story in there about a child discovering Jesus and Martin Luther King.
    When I was a kid I used to watch a daily kids show. The kids would have lunch, and before they ate they would say together "God is great, god is good and we thank him for this food." I came from a family where we didn't talk about god, so it was a strange concept. I figured God was one of the people who worked at the TV station and brought the food in.
    I tried to remember when I learned that God wasn't a stagehand, but I couldn't remember that part.
    Update: Just remembered another one, also about TV. I didn't get laugh-tracks. I kind of figured out that there are millions of people watching, and so many are laughing, that a very small portion of the laughs leak back through the TV network and come out on everyone's sets. It never occurred to me that there was either a studio audience laughing or (more likely) a tape that was played when the producers thought there should be laughter.
    I also thought everyone who was on TV immediately became a millionaire. People seemed so excited about being on TV, I figured they must be making a lot of money. :-)
  House of News
    I just got through watching the series House of Cards and believe it or not, it leads me to a set of observations about news, and where it should be now, and the changes called-for are long overdue.
    1. I'm a fan of modern TV series, as many people are. I love The Sopranos, Six Feet Under, The Wire, Deadwood, The West Wing, Battlestar Galactica, Breaking Bad, Homeland, Mad Men. There are so many, and they're great.
    2. I love watching them as I would read a book, at my own pace.
    3. This is a theme of modern media. It's why Napster was such a breakthrough. All of a sudden instead of being programmed, I could do the programming myself. Same thing with the travel industry, vacation rentals, retail, love -- everything. By now the pattern should be obvious to everyone. The users do the programming now. It creates new interest in, and demand for, creativity. THe fear of the entertainment industry was a fear of change. There was never a reason to be scared of irrelevance. Creativity is more in demand now that it ever was.
    4. It's as if the Netflix management had a come-to-jesus type off-site and the chairman said to his people -- what do our customers really want and let's see if we can give it to them. The result was House of Cards. Exactly on the terms that the users have been demanding since Napster. Entertain us, but we want to do the programming ourselves. We will do the programming ourselves, whether you like it or not. It's our time, our lives, our way of appreciating each other.
    5. Did it work? Yes. Was it as great as the others? It showed promise at the beginning of being as epic as The Wire or West Wing, but it trailed off into ridiculousness. That's okay. Homeland did that too. Will I pay for Season 2, if there is one? Yes I will, without a doubt.
    6. And get this, I didn't just pay for it, I signed up for $8 a month. I had been a longtime Netflix customer, but late last year, I unsubbed. But they got me back. And the deeper I got into House of Cards, the more they got me back. I'll give them another year, let's see what they come up with.
    7. Now what does this have to do with news?
    8. Everything. News needs to do the same recalc. Come-to-jesus and let's figure out what it is that the customers want, exactly, and give it to them, no compromises -- and see what happens. It's what you're doing anyway, as you pretend the pre-Internet news distribution system still exists.
    9. When you do that, you'll see very clearly that what the news industry needs is a cooperative venture that's external to all the news orgs, as Hulu was to the entertainment divisions of the networks, and boot up a new distribution system. Twitter and Facebook have shown you how to do it, although it wasn't necessary to wait this long -- you've now waited long enough. The new system will look like Twitter. You have to be present everywhere your news is in demand. The news industry should have a system tailored to the realities of news, the way Netflix has moved to become the HBO of the Internet age. We need news like that too.
    10. News orgs should also bring bloggers in-house, not to write for their pubs, but to co-locate intellectually. I wrote about this in an earlier piece, where I suggested the NYT do this. I did not mean to say that they should publish the bloggers in the paper or on its website. Just house them on premises. I'm thinking about serendipity. Overhearing elevator conversations. Eating lunch in the same cafeteria, waiting in the same line for the coffee cart. Inevitably the two cultures will influence each other and this would be good for both.
    11. Same thing with users and the flow of news. Use the same follower model that Twitter uses. Have USA Today compete with a random group of bloggers located nowhere in particular. We will develop new tools that let people combine news in a multitude of ways. The same way we want to program our entertainment, we must be able to program our news flows.
    12. Twitter is being very cooperative by closing off channels of innovation to developers. You can harness that energy immediately by zigging to their zag. Unlike movies, which are best viewed serially, news allows for much more varied types of flows. Some people believe this can happen to video too, but much more has been possible with news for the last decade.
    This thread will continue.
  House of Cards
    Back in November I signed off Netflix. I wasn't using the service, had probably watched two or three movies in all of 2012, and it bothered me that I was paying $8 a month for something I wasn't using. I put off resigning because I figured it would be a pain. I had to call them to do it, but it wasn't as difficult as it had been years ago to get off AOL or MSN.
    But then I started hearing about House of Cards. It was getting a huge rollout. On the web and in podcasts. It's exactly the kind of show I like, political drama, a series, and it all came out at once. I am definitely one of those people who likes to watch shows quickly, in a serial fashion. I watched the first few seasons of The Wire that way, and have worked my way through a bunch of other series since then, watching episodes the way I'd read a novel.
    They got me. I turned my Netflix account back on. They didn't toss any of my data. I'm not surprised, but I'm also not necessarily happy about that. I just watched Episode 7. Took a break to watch a David Fincher movie I hadn't seen in a long time -- The Game. Loved it even more this time than I did the first time. The story is very moving. If House of Cards is as emotionally grabbing as The Game it will be a huge winner.
    One thing that's missing from House of Cards, that you get from other serial dramas like Breaking Bad or Homeland, is the ability to discuss it with people online. It's tough because people are either a few episodes ahead or behind. I don't want spoilers, and I don't want to be a spoiler. We need to invent new communication systems, where only people who have made it through Episode X can discuss with others who have made it exactly that far.
    Update: Conclusions after watching all 13 episodes. No spoilers. :-)
  How am I doing?
    The death of Mayor Koch is not a surprise. At 88 he had become frail. Now come the memorials. Let's hope they don't lose their perspective. Ed Koch was no saint. He had a sharp tongue, and over his many years in public life he made many enemies. But he was also much loved in NY. Before Koch, the city was drifting in a post-Robert Moses funk. It was dirty and unsafe and in many ways just didn't work. Koch did much to turn the city around. And he didn't apologize for being a New Yorker. When he asked "How am I doing?" don't think it wasn't with much irony. What could possibly stop a New Yorker from telling you how you're doing. And it's not usually going to come with a hug or a pat on the back, although Koch was the exception, on the boardwalk in Coney Island or in the subway under Manhattan, people told him to keep up the good work. We appreciated what he was doing for the city. NY is and was and always will be a tough place, on a personal level. But it's a place of symbols. Koch was us, and the reflection wasn't so bad. We have a sense of humor, a sense of what-the-fuck. Somehow we'll get through this, and a feeling that it can be better if we work together, dammit. Koch embodied that for his generation.
March 2013
  Why don't programmers speak for programming?
    I've been watching for this for a few weeks. When public discourse turns to programming, the people who speak are people who don't program for a living. Sure some of them took computer science classes in college, or at one time were professional coders. But not people who today do it as their primary thing. In one particularly egregious case, they were quoting NBA players on why you should learn to code! That is so weird.
    So why is this? I think I finally figured it out, and it was the NBA connection that did it for me. Programmers don't generally speak in politically correct terms. And we don't have many, if any, spokes models who will talk in vague enough terms to be sure that they will never actually say anything meaningful. This disqualifies us from participating in public discussions. We simply can't be trusted to never say anything we mean.
    Maybe that's not it? But I don't like it. I'd like to see some developers be heard. I'd like to just once nod my head and say yeah that person knows what they're talking about when it comes to technology.
  The creepiest April 1 web page?
    The worst tradition of the net is the April Fools news article.
    I have something to announce. I'm quitting. No I'm not. Fooled you!
    My competitor is a jerk. Haha. You're a fool.
    None of it is funny, and while sometimes you are surprised, the surprise almost never feels good, or right.
    It's bad enough that the people who indulge in this idiocy hurt their own reps, but it also makes it hard to do any communication on April 1. North Korea is threatening nuclear war. Haha. April Fools. Cyprus is having a run on the banks. No they're not. But what if they are? What if there really is astounding news on April 1? Are you prepared to believe it?
    It would be good if we were all more circumspect about what we read.
    But journalists joking about inaccuracy in their reporting is like a surgeon leaving his or her lunch in your chest. Or a programmer deliberately putting a virus on your hard disk. Lies are the stuff we're supposed to be fighting against, not actively inviting in.
    If I come across something totally awful, I'll put a pointer here. Feel free to do the same in a comment.
    1. TechCrunch wins the award for the first inane April Idiocy post.
    2. Scott Radcliffe says he can't wait for Google's announcement tomorrow. So I ask him what they're going to announce and he says he was saying he hates 4/1 in a roundabout way. Oh. Ouch.
    3. Seth Godin's is noteworthy because he's the last person I'd expect to partake in the idiocy. Peer pressure? The idea of a $0 Kindle is interesting. Since when does Godin have leaks of product announcements, esp for one of his biggest customers (if not his biggest). It was misleading for a fraction of a second, and then made me want to throw up.
    Yours truly,
    Dave Winer, 3/31/13
  The soul of the new developer
    Just read this story in today's NY Times about the Stuyvesant High School teacher who wanted to make an elite school to teach computer science to young gifted New Yorkers.
    It was a Fred Wilson thing. Fred Wilson is to developers what Spike Lee is to the Knicks. The guy who shows up at every game and roots the team on, through thick and thin, no matter if they start a Brooklyn team (Lee is also a cultural icon of Brooklyn). He loves the orange and blue uniforms of the Knicks and Madison Square Garden. Only in this sport, the fan is confused for the great player by the opinion leaders and gatekeepers. As if all there were to being a champion is having a lot of money (you might argue the opposite is true, the most interesting players are the ones who don't have any money, but hunger for recognition).
    The Board of Ed liked the idea so much they stole it and usurped it, and now instead of creating great young talent to flow into Fred's NY startups, they'll create Certified Cisco maintenence guys. Or people who can keep Windows networks running as long as Microsoft is making them. Or Oracle databases.
    The fight is a familiar one. Should we create hackers for Wall Street or for the nascent high tech startup industry that's trying to get a foothold in NYC. Fred of course wants the flow for Foursquare and Stack Exchange and Etsy etc. And Bloomberg wants them for Chase, Citibank and the Department of Sanitation.
    There is a third possibility. Tell the captains of finance to back off, and let's create some developers who are capable of taking us in new directions. Not into Wilson's companies or Bloomberg's.
    Not much chance of that of course. ;-)
    So we'll still have Spike Lee coaching the team. Let's keep everything on a steady predictable course. As long as it makes me richer. (Paraphrasing.)
    New York has always been run for the benefit of the already-rich at the expense of the gifted artist. Maybe it's not true in every art, but it totally so in the art of creating great world-changing software. In a few years when these kids are ready to work there will be a new league, and no one is prepared today to teach them the skills they will need for that. So it doesn't matter much who controls the curriculum. The really smart ones will figure it out. And they will surprise us and teach us a lot. (And if there's any sanity we will get to teach them a thing or two as well.)
    PS: I went to Bronx Science, which is an elite public school, like Stuyvesant. Neither they nor I discovered, while I was a student there, that I had a talent for tech, and my media hacking was seen as a social behavior problem. So I don't have a lot of faith in the idea of elite NYC high schools. However, the students taught each other a lot, and we created our own fun. Which is kind of what I'm getting at in this piece.
    PPS: In addition to teaching kids how to be great commercial developers, I'd teach them how to create open systems without lock-in. That's the equivalent of the scientific method for software design. Schools have an obligation to teach the idealism of art, not only the craft.
  I'm on the web team
    Any company that takes content off the web and puts it in a private silo is playing on its own team. There are lots of companies doing this, so there are lots of teams. I'm on the team that puts all the content on the web. That means that every bit can have an address. That means it can all be plugged into other applications. So our work multiplies. The value of ideas deposited on the web is much greater than ideas that are trapped in a silo. There are lots of people, companies, universities, libraries, open source projects and governments in "web team" space. It may seem naive for any single company to throw its lot in with us, but when you see the full picture, you see it's actually the other way around. What we create together can be much much bigger than anything a single company can do.
    PS: Little Outliner is on the web team too. ;-)
  Ten-year Berkman Thursday reunion meetup on April 25
    It's been 10 years since the Berkman-Thursday group started, and with it, blogging at Harvard. It all happened at the same time Facebook was booting up on campus.
    It was an informal group that met at Berkman Center every Thursday evening. Our goal was to boot up a blogging community at the university and in the surrounding community. It was the first university at the time to offer blogging. We needed a way to create a pulse, a weekly event that was open to anyone where you could learn about blogging, and we could learn from each other.
    It evolved in a number of directions. New software came out of the group. We planned and succesfully ran the first blogging conferences in the US. We taught a lot of people how to blog. And the sessions themselves were a lot like blog posts. Someone comes in with an idea, talks about it, we ask questions and discuss it. We discussed the things we were writing on our blogs.
    The group continued running as a weekly seminar series until a couple of years ago.
    Now we're approaching the 10th anniversary and some of the members have expressed an interest in a reunion. I've asked for space at Berkman, and they got pretty excited about the idea, so we're having a Old Timers Day meetup on April 25 at Berkman Center at 7PM, 23 Everett Street.
    We'll talk about what we've been doing, what we learned, how life evolved in the last ten years, what we got right and what we got wrong, and what role the Thursday evening meetings played for us. I will also show off the software I've been developing, Little Outliner and other goodies. Some of them will already be shipping by the end of April. ;-)
    There should be room for 25-30 people. I've set up an Eventbrite page.
    http://berkmanthursday2013.eventbrite.com/
    Hope to see you in Cambridge on April 25.
    PS: Here's the archive of Scripting News for March 2003. You'll see a lot of the developments at Berkman recorded there.
  I'm not making blogging tools :-)
    First, I really appreciate Mathew Ingram's writeup in Gigaom about what we're doing at Small Picture. If you haven't read it, and you're a regular here, go read it now. Lots of good stuff. ;-)
    However.. (you knew that was coming)
    We are not making blogging tools.
    We are making software for creative people -- writers, designers and programmers. Inevitably that means it will connect to blogging systems, because blogs are fixtures in the world of 2013 and beyond. And it's certainly possible that one can create a blogging system using our backend (not released yet). But our business is not what his headline says it is.
    Mathew is totally entitled to his interpretation.
    And of course I'm entitled to comment on his interpretation. :-)
    Why this is important?
    1. Our product should not be evalutated based on its capability as a blogging tool.
    2. We see blogging products as complementary to ours, not competitive.
    3. I even made a proposition to vendors of blogging tools, and the offer is still open (and I will make it again, in new contexts as the software develops).
    I want to make great editing tools, for writers, designers and programmers.
    That's our mantra, at least one of them. ;-)
    And finally thanks to Mathew for such a thoughtful and otherwise accurate piece.
    PS: I can totally see why it's confusing, esp based on some of the things I've said. I will try to be more careful about that! :-)
  Make a Twitter out of RSS
    As developers rush to fill the Google Reader hole, it seems everyone is trying to reproduce Google Reader, almost verbatim. It's understandable. There are a huge number of fans of Google Reader who will be without Google Reader as of July 1. So when they tell you what they want, it's no surprise that what they come up with is basically, Google Reader.
    I think/hope they will be well-served.
    But there's an opportunity to do something different that might be equally interesting. Without asking users what they want, create a product based on a different hypothesis.
      A famous platform vendor once asked me if the users were asking for ThinkTank, my first product, before I created it. He had a point. There were no users before there was a product. So they couldn't ask. Because they didn't exist.
    The hypothesis: What if Twitter were, in every way, open.
    What would that look like?
    1. First, it would look like Twitter. There would be a box at the top of the page that asks What's Happening, and below that a sequence of new items from people you follow, in reverse-chronologic order.
    2. It would be easy to follow someone. When you're looking at their profile page, there would be a big easy to see button that says Follow. It would not say Follow in Product X or Follow in Product Y, etc. It would not open up a huge dialog with a list of products you could follow it in. It would say Follow. And when you click it you Follow that person. No questions asked.
    3. It's a web app. No synchronization among different clients. Supply an API if you like. But like Twitter it's always reverse-chronologic, and it doesn't remember what you haven't read. Yes, some users won't like that. They will use the other kind of RSS app, the ones that synch between clients. (See the first paragraph of this piece.)
    4. No lock-in. That's where it gets tricky. But it's a different kind of tricky than the people cloning Google Reader will encounter. Over there, you have to synchronize news items among lots of possible clients. Here you have to let the user tell you where she stores her subscriptions (and that will determine who gets the message when the user clicks on the Follow button). Beyond that, every developer could experiment with different scanning possibilities, and different presentations, and different whatevers.
    This is my dream system. I would happily make components for it. I'm just one user, for sure, and you might have to think a bit more to do this one vs the straight Google Reader clone. But there's also more opportunity to innovate. And it won't just be a repeat of the last 8 years.
  Me, in 1996
    A picture Tim Holmes dug up, taken at Apple in 1996, the night Steve Jobs returned from exile.
    I heard about the event by word of mouth and decided to drive down there to witness it. Walked right in, no security -- I even brought a date with me. ;-)
    No gray in my beard. ;-)
  An open note to tech press/bloggers
    We just did a great rollout, the product is fantastic. This is going to move tech in a new direction. It'll create new standards. I'm absolutely sure of it.
    Yet, even with my track record as one who leads change in technology, the release of this software has gotten almost no note from leading tech bloggers and reporters.
    That's okay, because it'll happen without them. Last time I pushed something through, it didn't get support from the press either. And the time before that. We can make it happen without their help.
    I think they're comfortable with big software ideas coming from big companies. But I can't make change happen within the context of a big corporation. Too much second-guessing, too many strategy taxes, too many phony business models. So I choose to do it as an independent.
    I think software is like other creative arts -- music, architecture, cooking, even design of everyday things like bikes and clothes. It takes a relentless focus on the act of using, and what kind of effect you want to create. Learning from others, and stealing from the best. Only. ;-)
    We can do it on our own but it would be easier if we got help from influencers and gatekeepers. So if you like anything that I helped bring about, blogging, RSS and podcasting and a few other things, please have a look at Little Outliner. It's a little product, yes -- but one with very big ambitions. ;-)
    These are early days, the product is very simple, and well-documented. We went to great lengths to make it easy to understand.
    Helping users understand new relevant technology is what you do, after all.
    PS: I did not include comments on this post because this is the kind of thing that attracts a lot of trolls.
    PPS: To users, this is why you haven't heard much about Little Outliner in the tech press. There's nothing wrong with the product.
  Thinking like an outliner
    I'm sure Bob Stepno won't mind if I use his question/suggestion as an example of how outliners are different from most other programs.
    On our Q&A page, he asked how do you select-all in an outline. He was disappointed that when you press Cmd-A it only selects the siblings at the same level as the bar cursor headline. He felt it should select all the text in the outline.
    My answer was that like almost every operation in an outliner, select-all is scoped. When you select a headline, you are implicitly selecting all the headlines that are subordinate to it. So if you want to select everything in an outline, move the cursor to one of the summits, and do the select-all there.
    This is fundamentally different from the way a word processor or spreadsheet works, but it's exactly the way the Finder or Windows Explorer works, which are also scoped. When you select-all in a folder, it doesn't select all the files on your computer -- it just selects the files in the folder you're working in.
    Why does it work this way? Well, an outline can logically contain many documents, not just one. For example, I'm writing this blog post in an outline that contains all my posts dating back to March of last year. If I did a select-all here, I'd want it to select all the text in this post, not all the text in all posts. However if I wanted to select everything, I could do that, by putting the cursor on the top level headline, as illustrated in this screen shot.
  HTML 5 local storage FAQ
    After a few thousand people looked at Little Outliner yesterday, it's clear that some users are uncomfortable with the idea of local storage. For many, apparently this is the first time they have encoutered this HTML 5 feature.
    I looked for a user-oriented FAQ on local storage but all I found were descriptions of the feature for developers. And for developers, there really isn't that much to know. I've put the details under this headline, you can expand it if you care.
      There's a new browser object called localStorage. It behaves like any other JavaScript object except it persists. That means the next time the user comes back to your site, the storage will still be there, exactly as it was last time they visited.
      In most browsers the object is attached to a single domain, so joe.userland.com and mary.userland.com will have different localStorage objects. Apparently Firefox is different, in that joe and mary share a localStorage object. There are reasons to do it either way. It would be nice if they all did it the same way. ;-)
    So here are some answers to frequently asked question.
    1. Where is local storage stored? It varies from browser to browser. Some users have explored in the system settings folders on various operating systems and found the files. They look like they're SQL databases.
    2. How much space does it use? The per-domain limit is 5MB.
    3. When you clear the cache does local storage get cleared too? I don't know.
    4. Isn't local storage like cookies? Yes, it's very much like cookies, except cookies are limited to 4K, and local storage can go up to 5MB. The difference in size reflects the difference in times. When cookies were invented, in the mid-90s, computers had a lot less memory. Today it's not uncommon for a new computer to have a terabyte of disk space. 5MB today is like what 4K was back then. It seems silly to live in a world limited by the machines of the past. But cookies couldn't change without risking breakage, of the web itself. So local storage was a good answer. Also local storage is simpler to program than cookies, but not so much simpler as to make a huge difference.
    5. Isn't this a potentially dangerous feature? We are very responsible about our software, we just want people to make outlines and be happy and want to use the new stuff we come out with. This is a business for us. So we would never use it in a harmful way. Not only would it be against our interest, but it would be professionally unthinkable. That said, localStorage is a potentially dangerous feature, in the hands of a malicious website. This is something the browser vendors will probably have to address sooner or later. Probably sooner. ;-)
    6. How can I get rid of what you stored on my computer? I can only answer for our product. If you delete all the text in your outline, that will get rid of most of what we store. There will still be an empty outline in local storage, and a count of the number of times you saved. That takes up about 140 characters, or coincidentally, the size of a tweet. If even this is too much to bear, we can add a way for you to delete that too. (I imagine someone will say that it is, so I'm already preparing to write the code.)
    If you have other questions, ask them below and we'll try to answer them, the best we can.
  The magic of HTML 5 and S3
    We just shipped a new product, promoted the hell out of it (with great results, thanks!), the site is getting huge traffic, but our server is as quiet as it was yesterday.
    Because this web app uses no server resources. ;-)
    That's the magic of HTML 5 local storage, and static pages on S3.
    Thanks to the W3C and to Werner Vogels (for persisting in getting the ability to access the root of a domain from an S3 bucket). As a result, we get unlimited scaling with zero investment. Consider this an endorsement for both innovations.
    Now, that said, in future incarnations, we will have a server component, and scaling will be an issue. But for right now we can bask in the glory. ;-)
  My new company, our first product
    Good morning!
    A quick note with some news.
    1. In December I started a new company, Small Picture, with Kyle Shank, a 28-year-old JavaScript developer.
    2. We've created a new product, Little Outliner. It runs in-browser. It's a continuation of the thread started by my desktop outliner products. It is in every way as easy, smooth and powerful as the earlier Mac and PC outliners. JavaScript plus HTML 5 is an amazing platform.
    3. Little Outliner is a new beginning. Our easy on-ramp. We want to re-introduce idea processing, and using outliners to create presentations, but this time the difference is networking. I think you'll be amazed at what we come up with in the coming months. I haven't been this excited about a product since we shipped MORE at Living Videotext in 1986. Not kidding.
    4. Working with a smart young dude like Kyle, who knows so much about the modern technologies, has been a real awakening for me. I've learned how to apply my craft in what is a very strange world. JavaScript is not like any language I've ever used. This product is very much the result of a creative partnership. As we grow we'll add other excellent developers. Like all my companies, Small Picture will create user-focused products, that offer choice, value, performance and interop with others. No lock-in here, other than what comes from happy users.
    Thanks for reading this far. Please let me know if you have any questions or comments. We'll try our best to answer them quickly.

    Dave Winer
    Small Picture, Inc.

  It's an outliner!
    On Monday of this week, somewhat quietly, we released the docs for the outliner we've been developing at Small Picture, Inc.
    http://smallpicture.com/outlinerHowto.html
    The docs are interesting, if you like outliners -- but also interesting because they illustrate something important about the outliner. It's very easy to include in a web page.
    There's a practice outliner right there on the docs page. Kind of subtle. ;-)
    It's written in JavaScript. Yet it's indistinguishable from the outliners we've been using, for many years, running native on Windows and Mac. This outliner runs in any HTML-5 compatible browser, on any OS.
    You install the software by reloading the page.
    Next Monday we'll show the next bit in our queue. And the Monday after that, the next one, etc.
    Our cup runneth over! (Finally.)
  Ignore the Bigco's
    We have a problem to solve.
    How to create stable systems out of the Internet we have now.
    What we've created is far too fragile.
    It's nice that the Bigco's have their business models. But that's not the point.
    I want to connect my writing with yours, and have it be readable by people no matter what device they use, where ever they are, no matter what kind of net connection they have, today and 20 years from today.
    Ignore the ups and downs of the giants. They come and go.
    Very dramatic, but also very predictable, and mostly off-topic.
    The question is this: How do we work together to create lasting value?
  Google is no good at being evil
    Google's motto is "Don't be evil."
    Paraphrasing HL Mencken's motto -- "When somebody says 'don't be evil'-- they're being evil."
      The literal quote: "When somebody says it's not about the money, it's about the money."
    Now, the thing to know about evil is there's good evil and bad evil.
    Unlike cholesterol, both are bad for you, but good evil is hard to pin on the purveyor. He makes it seem like someone else is the problem. Bad evil is the kind that comes with a bull's eye on your back that says "Hit me -- please." Google does the latter kind.
    It would have been so easy to ease the pain of Reader withdrawal by putting some effort into creating a scapegoat. Someone to blame for the trouble users are having. "At least Google did xxx," their supporters might say. But their withdrawal has all the care and sensitivity of DuPont refusing to clean up a chemical disaster site. Sure it happens all the time, quietly -- but the death of Google Reader is not and could not be quiet. All the reporters and bloggers use it! And there's no one to blame but Larry and Sergey. Who end up looking like Mr Burns on The Simpsons.
    The fact that they're so bad at evil is encouraging. Maybe deep down inside they aren't. Maybe they truly don't see that the 1 or 2 million people, or how ever many use GR, are actual people, like members of their family, who liked Google, but now will have a hard time doing that when they associate the name with the pain of withdrawal they feel, from the void of news flow.
  Twitterquette
    I've heard it said that it's impolite to talk about someone on Twitter without addressing your comment to them by using their handle, prefaced by an @. I disagree. If you're going to call someone an asshole, it's impolite to address it to them. If you're objectifying them, saying something you wouldn't say to their face -- then don't say it to their face dammit. :-)
    I know because I'm sometimes on the receiving end of this.
    Oh that @davewiner, he's such an idiot.
    I would much prefer if they left the @ off it. Otherwise I have to look at that idiotic thing over and over until it scrolls off. If you think it's going to get a reply, no way. And if you think I give a shit, I don't. It's just annoying to see a bit of stupidity staying there, like a turd in a toilet that someone refuses to flush. So I usually just block em. :-)
    Sometimes it makes sense to say something about someone you wouldn't want them to see.
    For example. The other day at lunch I was saying that Carmelo Anthony, the star of the Knicks, is never going to lead the team to a championship. I wouldn't want Anthony, a fine player, and a nice guy, to see that. I doubt if it would motivate him. And sheez it's not his fault he's in the same division as Lebron James (or for that matter occupying the same NBA as Lebron James). Even Kevin Durant, who is a great leader and player, and totally capable of being a champion, probably can't overcome the audacity and tenacity of the Miami Heat. At least not for the next few years.
    So I vote for leaving off the at-sign if you're saying trash about a celeb.
  A toast to the Chihuahuas!
    When I was a fellow at NYU, I moderated a panel on the topic of Sources Go Direct. My panelists didn't buy it. So we wandered in an unsatisfying way (to me at least) around various ideas of what media is about.
    One of the speakers was Nick Denton, founder, publisher and ego of Gawker. Nick says that media is about gate-keeping. Your power and value is in what you let through and what you don't. He said that at the beginning of the blogging era, I had that power (me, as in Dave). He recounted a visit he and his partner made to Palo Alto, probably around 2001 or 2002 or so. They were running a startup called Moreover, and according to Nick, they wanted me to write about it on Scripting News. I didn't know.
    And I sure didn't want to be a gatekeeper! To me it's a silly idea, and antithetical to what blogging is about. I want you to say what you have to say and if I'm interested or when I'm interested, I'll read it -- and not because I have to or because there's nothing else to read. We were going from the time of scarcity to overload, and that's what I wanted. Not gatekeeping. Because look who's doing the gatekeeping, some miserable person who will be dead in at most 70 years and probably a lot sooner.
    I once wrote about how we're all barking, farting Chihuahuas pretending our will means anything. I was thinking about the wonderful character in the Taco Bell commercials. I guess he didn't sell burritos and tacos and challupas or whatever, but I loved the dog, and now that I think of him, I miss him too. I wish they'd bring him back. I'd trade the dog for a million bankruptcy attorney ambulance-chasing mesothelioma profiteers.
      "The universe is so damned big. Billions and billions of galaxies. Every one of them filled with chihuahuas and captains of industry. None of them get out of it alive. What's it all about? Who knows? No one."
      I was thinking of Bill Gates.
    Nick is now a gatekeeper, I suppose -- and I guess he must have a soft spot for me, because anytime I want publicity from Gawker I seem to be able to get it. I wonder who he's turning down and why.
    And then I think of people I know who really are gatekeepers. And then I think of the great scene in The Godfather where all the bosses get together to tell Don Corleone to share his politicians with them. He says if you let my son come back to America you can have the politicians and judges. Now that I can get behind. An old man, in his final years, wants the comfort of his son, to drink wine with, and to tell stories to. What could be better than that! :-)
  Time for a Hulu-for-News?
    On February 5, I wrote a piece called House of News, in which I suggested that the news industry might do a recalc along the lines of the one Netflix did, in deciding to give its users all the episodes of House of Cards, at once -- instead of emulating the old TV serial distribution system, the one that existed before the net.
    They did something remarkable, Netflix did -- that most companies can't seem to do. They viewed the world through the eyes of their users. And decided simply to give them exactly what they wanted.
    I wrote that piece before we knew that Google Reader would be shutting down in July.
    What we don't know is why Google shut it down. But one possible reason is that they are trying to give the news industry what it wants, and in doing so, not only not giving the users what they want, but willfully throwing out the work of the users, in building their own distribution system for news.
    As hobbled as Google Reader was, it was largely a creation of its users. They did the programming for themselves. They chose what channels of news they wanted to listen to, assembling a highly customized news flow and sharing their discoveries.
    If I could say one thing to the the execs of the news industry, it would be this. Stop viewing today through the lens of the past. View it from the point of view of the future. Look back to today and imagine how you could get to the future we all know is coming. And when you do that, I think you'll see that it's time for something new and Netflix-like. A news system where the users have even more power to shape the news that they will receive from you.
    It's long-past time to trust the users and just do what they want you to do. You will probably be surprised at how profitable that turns out to be. Imho of course.
  Dear Mr Pierce
    Over the weekend Charles Pierce took a swipe at my earlier piece about sources going direct.
    He has summarized my thoughts: "Journalism is no longer an actual profession because everyone can do it because BLOGS!, that's why. Well, fine, that's an argument. But it's not a good one."
    Nor does it in any way resemble what I said.
      Or anything I have ever said or thought or even dreamed.
      And btw, how insulting to be called that superficial and that stupid.
      This is what I mean about reporters not listening to people outside their own profession.
      To Klein, he was condescending, but respectful, at least superficially. He didn't read Klein's piece either, or if he did, none of the meaning was reflected in his critique.
      My piece? Clearly he didn't even read it. And he didn't care how stupid it made him look, to be so dismissive and condescending without even bothering to find out what it was he was dismissing.
      Regardless, he's an entertaining and often insightful writer. But I'll always remember when reading him that I've seen some pretty sloppy thinking on his part, and it'll make me question the other stuff he says.
    To Mr Pierce: I love reading your stuff, and if your getting paid is what it takes for you to continue, I hope you continue to get paid for a long time to come. I hope that puts to rest any thought that I begrudge you your salary. :-)
  Even more on Medium
    A friend sent an email last week when I wrote yet another piece about Medium that I seem obsessed with it. Not really. I watch it. Not sure why.
    Why do I watch the Knicks? Certainly not because I hope they'll win. I'm just interested. Maybe I feel the same way about Medium. I'm invested in the Evan Williams story, having watched from almost the beginning, way before most other people in tech thought he was interesting.
    I remember once watching him talk on stage at a conference in Copenhagen. I had this instant visceral thought that he might be the Rupert Murdoch of this medium we were creating. I knew I wasn't that. I'm more of a creative guy, I eschew empire building. (But I do like an interesting word or phrase!)
    Anyway, I was just reading this piece in the New Yorker. It's short and to the point, and asks an interesting question. Why doesn't Mitt Romney finally let his hair down a little. It's of course well-written, it's in the New Yorker after all. I thought to myself -- "I bet this is the kind of writing they're looking for at Medium."
    I'm more casual a writer. I think of blogging as a written form of fresco. Made of plaster with a little coloring. It hardens fast, and you move on to something else. I used to say "we're just folks here." That's the kind of writing I aspire to.
  Email with Max Levchin
    A discussion began on Twitter about Google Reader between myself and Max Levchin, and at my request moved over to email. This is the discussion so far.
    Max wrote:
      RSS has a decentralized pub/sub model; the format has been open and stable for a long time; the addressing scheme has no reliance on a specific client. How does the death of one, particularly good even, client, carry with it a threat to the whole ecosystem?
    I responded:
      They weren't just "one client" -- they dominated, in the way that MSIE dominated the browser space. And they did what MSIE did, once they gained dominance they froze development (that might have happened through competition) and stopped moving. Everything that was broken in GR became a feature of RSS. And all the things that should have happened, to mature the market, couldn't happen.
      Now maybe that's about to change for the better. I hope so. But I'm not encouraged. This is a market where, in order for it to flourish, there HAS to be cooperation among vendors. That's what Twitter proved. Because they control the whole user experience they were able to solve problems that the RSS market couldn't. First, because the vendors wouldn't cooperate, and then because Google took the whole market. So we are now locked into a single vendor -- Twitter.
      So the way it looks to me is that there are three possible outcomes:
      1. GR's demise is also the end of RSS (which seems to me is Google's desired outcome, based on other things they did).
      2. A market develops, but we're unable to get the new features into it that simplify the subscription process, so it has a chance re Twitter.
      3. A new dominant reader comes about, and if they're good then maybe something good happens.
      I don't think there's the slightest possibility of #3. People in tech are just too insular, they don't study prior art, or even study their competition enough to know where the problems are, much less what the potential solutions are.
      I think more likely is a mix between #1 and #2. A continued decline for RSS as an activity and more and more reliance on big companies that don't give a fuck.
  Getting .mobi files into Kindle/iPad
    I tweeted that you couldn't do this, and got replies from a dozen or more people with ways to do it. And I'm happy to report at least one of them works.
    1. Use the email address that Amazon provides for your Kindle. It's on the Amazon site, poke around, you'll find it.
    2. The Kindle app shows up under Apps in iTunes. You can drag .mobi files into its Documents directory and they show up in the Kindle app.
    3. You can use Dropbox. It will report it can't open the files but if you look in the upper right corner of the screen there's a way to send them to a bunch of apps, for .mobi files this includes the Kindle app.
    There may be other methods, if you know of them, please add a comment below.
  One great thing about the demise of Google Reader
    For a long time I wouldn't create a feed that couldn't be read by Google Reader. That was after an awkward period, when Google Reader started up, that it couldn't do a good job of reading Scripting News's feed.
    Think about that for a minute. Scripting News was the first feed. The specs were all written in such a way that Scripting News worked. It would be impossible, unthinkable that somehow the first feed could not be read by a reader from Google. But that's the way it worked. From day one, Google came in with the attitude of The Boss Man. We run this show. I always thought well fuck that shit. What's the point of creating something new if a big asshole company can come along and break you. On day one. Not even a Hello World from a Humble Newbie. Nahh. We're Google. You're nothin.
    Eventually I caved, and got rid of the features that Google couldn't handle.
    So here's the good thing -- I can put things into my feeds that Google Reader doesn't like.
    Not that I haven't already been doing that for a couple of years. ;-)
  Waking up to the world around you
    It's always controversial to say that big tech companies make money by controlling the flows to and from users and charging others for access. But that is at least one of the businesses Silicon Valley is in. And it's definitely the business Google is in, so if you want to understand why they might do something to restrict or try to control the flow of RSS, that's probably part of the story, at least. (I'm bending over backwards to be conservative here.)
    The thing to fear is that Google intends to control the news people can subscribe to, the same way Apple controls what apps you can buy for the iPad. And the way Twitter decides what clients can have access to our tweets.
      They've got a pretty nice interface for it, btw -- the magical Google Now. It knows what information you're likely to want to see, and shows it to you. It's really good.
        An example of how good/creepy it is. My friend Jen was coming to visit from SLC. Google Now told me her plane was 24 minutes from arriving at the gate at JFK. I had never told them what flight she was on. I didn't know what flight she was on. But they did. Probably because she uses Gmail or their calendar, and somehow connected me to that trip (or did they just guess!) and thought I might be impressed if they told me about her flight. I was!
      But it's creepy, in two ways. One way most people see (it's snooping on what you do to figure out what you want to see). The second way: it's also deciding what you don't see.
      Centralizing this decision-making, for now, is the only way that works. But we're giving something up here.
      I love that the content of my river is not determined by any tech company. Do I think it will stay that way? It's possible that it might not. Even though I'm not running any Google software to manage it. (I run the aggregator on a Rackspace server, and the content is served from an Amazon S3 bucket.)
    We broke free for a bit there with unrestricted flow from blogs and news orgs via RSS. There are people who would like to put the genie back in the bottle. They're not going to run press releases saying that. This is one of those cases where the reporters have to investigate to get the news.
    News people -- if your plan for the future includes free flow of news from journalists to readers, now's the time to take a look.
  If you're doing a new RSS reader...
    Since I'm working on other kinds of software right now, and the RSS world is more fluid than it's been in a long time, it seems it might be a good time to share some things I learned in the first go-around.
    The main thing we learned is that subscription needs to be centralized to make the process as simple as possible for the user. That's one of the main reasons Twitter was such an effective competitor. The central server keeps an OPML file for each user. Each site with a feed links to that site with the URL of its feed as a parameter. When the user clicks a Subscribe link, a dialog appears confirming that you want to subscribe. If you say OK that's it, nothing more to do. The user never sees a URL. No browser has to cooperate (not that they would).
    OPML should be a file type you can subscribe to. That makes it possible for the user to connect their account on the central subscription server to your aggregator. Also, this feature opens the possibility of a sort of super-curator, someone who manages a collections of feeds that people can subscribe to in a unit.
    Also in the argument betw mailbox and river type readers, why not do both? The same data can be viewed either way. Some times you may just have a few minutes to quickly skim the news, and other times you may be able to read feeds individually at a slower pace. I did something like this in the LBBS software in the early 80s. There was a river, and a hierarchic view. You could switch instantly between the two views, and stay on the same item. The same approach would work well for RSS (though I've never seen it done, if I were doing a new reader, I'd definitely give it a try).
    Also a feed should have a way to tell readers "I'm done" -- no more updates, stop reading me. That would make it possible to do more things with RSS. I don't want to subscribe to a special feed about a specific event, knowing I'll have to remember to unsub. Better to let the feed tell the reader. This feature is documented in my microblog namespace and it's supported in my Radio2 linkblogging tool.
    There are lots of other ideas like this. I'll write them up as I remember them.
  Do you love outliners?
    I first started using an outliner in the late 1970s, on Unix. It was character-based, on a scrolling display. You'd type commands like 1,$p to show all the lines at the current level. You could view the subs of any headline, by typing the number next to it, and pressing Return. The basic operations were "dive" and "surface." Moving things around was a little more difficult, but it was the best you could do with the computers of the day.
    The tools advanced through the years. Influenced by Visicalc, then Lotus 1-2-3. That's when the outliner got a "bar cursor" which points to a structure, much like Visicalc's cursor points to a spreadsheet cell. You moved the cursor around with the arrow keys, and expanded by pressing < and collapsed by pressing >. These keys were chosen as mnemonics, they looked symbolically like the operations they were performing.
    Pretty soon after that we got the mouse, so you could double-click to expand and collapse and also drag things from one place to another. This made stuff flow better. That's a key idea -- outlines are about flow, they make text fluid (i.e. able to flow).
    Then came graphics, and with that bullet charts and tree charts. All of a sudden there was a production application for outliners, they could be made to do things more efficiently on a computer than could be done with ink, paper and scissors. The business exploded.
    All along, I have been writing code and prose with the outliner. These days I use it to narrate my work and to coordinate with the people I work with. It's an amazingly flexible swiss-army-knife-like super-adaptable tool.
    I've been doing a lot more with outliners in the last few months, in a project I've been working on with a new programming partner, Kyle Shank, at a new company we founded late last year, Small Picture. It has both a server side and a client side. Next week we will show the first bits of the client software. I think it will surprise people what it can do and how it does it. But this wouldn't be a good tease if I told you more about what it is. :-)
    In the meantime, if you have stories to tell about how you love outlining, please consider posting them. I love outliners, but I love outliner users even more. They're such bright people and so incredibly powerful and creative. Software that enables powerful people.
    So much more to say and I hope to say it all.
  Google Reader's demise, part 2
    Last night we said goodbye to Google Reader, and that got a lot of traffic and a fair amount of hate, from people who love Google Reader and probably don't like to hear from someone who uses RSS who won't miss it (i.e. me).
    I wanted to say that it's possible to use RSS without being dependent on Google Reader. And since GR is going away, that should probably be seen as good news, not bad.
    But it's not my problem. I'm not in the RSS Reader business any longer, and have no interest in returning to it.
    I don't doubt that people will be well-served by a newly revitalized market for RSS products, now that the dominant product, the 800-pound gorilla, is withdrawing.
  Goodbye Google Reader
    I won't miss it. Never used the damn thing. Didn't trust the idea of a big company like Google's interests being so aligned with mine that I could trust them to get all my news.
    And besides, I didn't think the mailbox approach to news was right. Who cares how many unread items there are. I like the river of news approach and I have a very fine set of rivers that keep me well supplied with news and podcasts. Have a look.
    http://tabs.mediahackers.org/?panel=dave
    July 1 isn't that far away, but there's time to get it together. Next time, please pay a fair price for the services you depend on. Those have a better chance of surviving the bubbles.
    PS: This message attracted comments some pretty sick comments, so I deleted the whole thread.
  Charles Pierce is wrong about Ezra Klein being wrong
    I'm a big fan of both Pierce and Klein. I love Pierce's irreverent writing style, and his political opinions match up pretty well with mine. I learn stuff by reading his columns in Esquire. Same with Klein. He's intelligent, and asks good questions, and backs up his thinking with information. It's sad that his way of working is so rare among political analysts these days.
    But guys like Pierce (who criticizes Klein in his recent piece, more about that in a minute) only read other news people. The chances of either of them reading what I write are pretty close to nil, so the chances of them passing along a good idea that I might have are therefore also nil. This is embarassing, because the epiphany of Klein's that Pierce mocks happens to be one that I have been writing about for almost 20 years, over and over. Think of all the time everyone could have saved if they deigned to pay attention to people who don't do what they do. It's tragic that it took a smart guy like Klein so long to understand such a basic structural truth about how news, his own profession, has been working for the last 15 years. Gives you some idea about the power of the blinders this community puts on.
      Upton Sinclair: "It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it."
    Now, in the past, any idea that didn't penetrate the haze of guys like Klein and Pierce would have very little chance of being heard by people like myself who might be interested. However, because we live in the times of the Internet and what Klein calls The Revenge of the Sources, I can go ahead and be heard without them listening. I call this Sources Go Direct, which means the same thing, but in a more positive less journalist-centered view. It's not revenge, it's more pragmatic. The old system didn't work. So we use the new one instead.
    If you look at the mechanics of how a news story is created and flows, there are sources, a reporter, an editor or two, a production and design group, a printing press or web site, a delivery system and finally readers. In the past I have been a source, and I still am, because reporters can and sometimes do quote my blog. I wish they would do it more. I am also an avid reader. I am not, and never have been, and don't want to be, a reporter or an editor or any of the other things. I do write publishing systems, and have created some of the software that these guys probably use.
    Pierce incorrectly thinks that every act of journalism is done by reporters. Look at the list of people in the paragraph above. There are lots of other roles. The sources aren't covering a fatal crash on Sunday night on Route 128 (his example). Instead they're writing, on their blogs, about the things they know about. Perhaps they were involved in the crash. Perhaps they witnessed it.
    In software, lots of stuff gets created that isn't on the radar of people like Pierce or Klein. They have very limited focus. They look to big rich companies with lots of employees for technology innovation. Makes sense, because they're employees of big rich companies. Of course that's what they understand. But if you look at the history of software (and very few people do) you'll notice that the big ideas almost never come from those places. If you understand the process of software, you'd understand why that's so.
    So while I admire both Klein and Pierce for their work as news people, boy would it be great if they looked outside their close-knit little community. Klein is a pioneer in his field for noticing Sources Go Direct first among his peers. But the idea was available to him long ago. And Pierce, a very flexible thinker when it comes to politics, has no flexibility in thinking about media, no ability to see things from other peoples' point of view, as demonstrated by his piece about Klein. And that's so important, and has been important for a very long time.
    I've met Pierce's attitude many times, from all kinds of ink-stained pros, some very accomplished. The arrogance is impressive, but they're still wrong. I don't care how many Pulitzers you have. The news process has been reorganizing for quite some time. You may not choose to see it, but that doesn't mean it isn't happening.
    PS: Do I think either of them will read this piece? Nah. :-)
  What comes after Facebook?
    It's pretty obvious what comes next, via extrapolation -- from past turns of the wheel in software.
    What comes next is an easy way for the generation of people who grew up on Facebook to create their own social networks, accessible only by the people they want to share it with.
    A somewhat easier to use version of what AWS is today will be the platform.
    And Harvard dropouts of the day will create AMIs their friends will configure cleverly.
    The art in this new way of doing things will be clever twists on "share."
  A business model for movie theaters
    I'd like to have a film festival for my friends.
    So I'll give you a list of 20 movies, Mr Movie Theater Owner, and one night every other week, you'll play one of them, and I'll guarantee a certain number of tickets sold. Above that, we'll split the revenue.
    That way we get to watch old movies in a theater setting, with popcorn and restrooms, and then we can all go out to dinner after and talk about the movies and why we like them so much. Maybe we could even get one of the actors or the director to join us.
    Movie theaters should be hubs for social activity. Watching a movie at home or on a laptop or a tablet isn't the same as watching it in a theater. And most of the great movies aren't showing in theaters now.
  Medium shows more
    I watched the Evan Williams interview with Jason Calacanis at the Launchfest conference in SF, and that gave me a better idea of what he's thinking about with his new company, Medium. The next day we learned that Evan Hansen is now working for Medium. Evan was the longtime editor of wired.com. Highly respected guy.
    What is Medium doing? My guess -- if you were to draw a line and at one end put blogging tools and at the other put BuzzFeed, SB Nation and Huffington, that Medium is on that line, and closer to the right than the left.
    Medium's strength appears to be the elegance and HTML 5-ness of its editorial tools. It feels nice using their editor. Like the content networks, being able to create content there is invite-only. But I'm assuming at some point it will be open to everyone, the way Tumblr or WordPress are.
    An advantage Medium is likely to have is a connection to Twitter, which doesn't have a blogging system, and has recently had success with Vine. Twitter giving Medium a boost is good business, for the owners of both companies. ;-)
    I'm very interested in where all this is going, keeping an ear out and listening.
  What I learned from jury duty
    I got called for jury duty this week, Wednesday and Thursday. In NYC, you go for two days, and sit and wait for a trial. Then they herd 75 citizens of New York County into a courtroom and winnow us until there are 14 left -- 12 jurors and two alternates, and the rest go back into the pool. If you make it through two days without being selected, you go home and resume your life. Otherwise you're a juror. But the education process begins the minute you sit down in the waiting room.
    This time I made it as far as a courtroom, but I wasn't chosen as one of the initial group of 24 to be interviewed, but I was required to stay, to wait for the selection to be final. I got to relax while watching my fellow citizens go through the process, where each of the sides, prosecution first, then defense, asks questions to see if you'd be a good juror.
    It was an eye-opener. The judge had explained a few of important points: 1. The defendent, accused of burglary, is innocent until proven guilty. 2. The standard of proof is high. You had to be certain the person had done what he was accused of, beyond a reasonable doubt. Otherwise -- innocent. 3. The burden of proof is on the state. The defendent can remain silent, and you can't use that fact in coming up with a decision.
    Some jurors didn't seem to understand any of this. They would agree with all ideas when the judge explained it, but when asked a question: "If you think there's a decent chance the person committed the crime, what would your verdict be?" Many of them said something like this: "Well, it would depend on the evidence." You could see the frustration with the lawyers in the room. It's as if you were teaching someone how to enter a command on a computer. "First you type some characters then you press the Return key." They would say they understand, but still not be able to enter a command.
    What would you think if the accused did not speak in his own defense, would that make you think he's guilty? Yes, some said.
    In the end they had to go with jurors who were pretty hazy on the decision-making process, what the rights of the accused are, and how jurors are supposed to think about the crime and the evidence and testimony. I was reminded that it was like this on the jury I served on. Some people just didn't get that there were rules to innocence and guilt. That it isn't like a family, where you live in a fog of who-did-what-to-whom-when, that in the end we will make a decision, and based on that, this person will go free, or go to jail.
    Jury duty is all about teaching us what it means to be a juror. There's a lot to learn, and the education system or television or our parents, or whatever, didn't do a very good job.
  HTML 5 localStorage demo
    One of the neatest features in HTML 5 is localStorage.
    It lets an app store as much as 5MB of data on the local machine.
    I wanted to understand how it works so I wrote a demo.
    http://scripting.com/misc/localStorageDemo.html
    View source if you want to see how it works.
    Hope you find it useful. :-)
  My first github repo
    I've been working almost exclusively in JavaScript for the last few months.
    It's been a very uplifting and interesting experience. HTML 5 running in the browser with JS is an incredible platform, with lots of unexplored potential, and very few limits. I haven't been this excited about a platform in a long time. And have been having a blast programming it.
    A lot of new stuff will be showing up in the coming months. Along the way you're probably going to think I'm teasing, and you'll be right, but there's no way to release as much stuff as we are going to, without doing it in stages, learning as we go, and letting that influence the next steps.
    Anyway, here's a beginning.
    https://github.com/scripting/utils.js
    It's a small number of date and string functions in JS patterned after Frontier verbs.
  Have you met your users?
    Last summer I went back to Madison, and part of the trip was a tour of the Computer Science building, where I had been a graduate student many years ago. The building had changed in many ways, and in others, not at all.
    1. The outside was exactly the same.
    2. The mainframes were gone, replaced by labs of personal computers.
    3. The basement was divided up in a totally different way than it was before. The two rooms I spent most of my time in were gone.
    4. And most important, the most exciting idea -- there's now a computer store in the front of the building.
    I was excited because I assumed that this meant that computer science students were actually meeting users, and learning how they think. But no, they staff the store with employees, just like any other store. My guide looked at me with what I imagined was puzzlement. Why would they want their students to work with users.
    Me, I'm always thinking about users, what I can and can't get them to do. What I can get away with, and how can I make them tell other people about my software, and even better, get them to get others to use it. ;-)
    There are frustrations, both ways. But if you see software development as a performing art, as I do, inevitably you're going to be judged by them. They will determine your success or failure.
    And over the years, I've found this is the hardest point to make to the developers I work with.
  Why Windows lost to Mac
    First, understand that this is a blog post, a highly prejudiced thing, completely determined by one self-important person's experiences.
    I'm a hypocrite too. :-)
    Anyway, I lived through this.
    I was a Windows user in 2005, when I had to get a Mac because I was supporting people who used my OPML Editor app on the Mac, as well as Windows. It didn't seem right that I couldn't see what the updates looked like on the Mac, even if it was open source software, and not generating any money for me. So I bought a $1000 white plastic laptop in the Apple store in Toronto. It was the first time I had been in an Apple store.
    It's a long story why I was so uninterested in using Apple products at the time. I had been an early Mac developer, shipping a product in 1984, and continuing to develop through the mid-90s. But when my product, Frontier, became available on Windows in 1998, I switched to Windows. Windows machines performed much better than the Macs of the day, and Apple had a new strategy every four months. I was very happy to get onto the safe ground that Windows offered.
    Back to 2005, the first thing I noticed about the white Mac laptop, that aside from being a really nice computer, there was no malware. In 2005, Windows was a horror. Once a virus got on your machine, that was pretty much it. And Microsoft wasn't doing much to stop the infestation. For a long time they didn't even see it as their problem. In retrospect, it was the computer equivalent of Three Mile Island or Chernobyl.
    Anyway, that's why when I read Gruber's and Arrington's discussion about why the Mac won, I was once again amazed about what a fog we all live in, and how little grasp there is of other people's experiences. I don't doubt that for these guys malware didn't make a big difference. Maybe I was the outlier, maybe not many other people thought it would be nice to take a vacation from fighting the viruses. And then the vaction became permanent. (As it did for me. I dabbled in PCs after getting the white laptop. But I bought basically every bit of hardware Apple has offered since then. And I made most of my friends do so too.)
    We don't do well at sharing experiences on the net about these subjects. The flamers pretty much control discourse, or have in the past. I think that's one reason our grasp of history is so hazy. A lot like the great movie, Fog of War. See it if you want to understand more about the tech industry.
April 2013
  Pando depends on its feed
    I subscribe to Pando, along with several hundred other feeds in my personal river.
    http://tabs.mediahackers.org/?panel=dave
    I click on one link in 100, and I post one or two a year to my linkblog.
    If they improved the quality of their posts, I'd push more of their links. I don't have the largest reader base on the Internet, but I am part of a chain that pushes lots of info and ideas around the net. If you drew a net of the people who follow me and who follow them, it would be pretty damn large.
    I use RSS because it means I can pay attention to more stuff. If for some reason Pando deleted their feed, I would almost never see a link to one of their stories. The other people I follow, and I follow a lot of people, don't seem to know they exist. It's a very small publication, relative to the size of others like The Verge, Mashable, Engadget, TechCrunch, etc.
    Last night Pando ran a piece where they suggested that we "retire" RSS when Google Reader shuts down in July. This was hopefully the last gasp of a malicious thread started by Mike Arrington and repeated by his fanboys, many times over the last couple of years. Their promotion of this idea was out of nowhere, had nothing to do with anything that was actually happening. If they were right, the passing of Google Reader would have happened without any protest. I suppose it's wishful thinking on Google's part that we depended on them to sustain RSS. When the dust settles, I think we'll see that they were stifling RSS. When competiton enters the picture, when lock-in is no longer an option (and that dies with Google on July 1), we will see the market pick up where it left off before Google entered.
    So to the extent that there was any thought behind Arrington's rants about RSS, it was incorrect thought. He misunderstood what was going on. And the people who echoed his mantra were equally clueless.
  A song I sing to users
    When users ask when a feature will be available, this is what I say.
    Software takes time. Good software takes even more time. We know that so we don't make promises about when software is coming. It'll be here when it's ready.
  What about Feedburner?
    It would, imho, be appropriate for users to ask Google what their plans are for Feedburner.
    It seems that shutting down that service is even more problematic than the shutdown of Google Reader.
    Why? Because it effects everyone who uses RSS, even people who don't use Google products.
    There's a real opportunity to do this transition more carefully than the diaspora from Reader.
  Google Glass is not a trivial product
    Watching this Chris Dixon interview this morning helped me appreciate that Google Glass has real-world non-trivial applications.
    Examples:
    1. A teacher giving a lecture while drawing a diagram on whiteboard.
    2. As a teleprompter for a person giving a speech.
    3. A doctor reviewing test results while examining a patient.
    4. An architect looking at designs on a site visit.
    5. Watching your heart rate while riding a bike.
    6. Sign-language interpreter for a real-time meeting.
    7. In general, as a heads-up display for jobs that require use of your hands and access to information, at the same time.
    Honestly, I had not thought of these applications until Dixon explained.
    And of course there are trivial applications, like watching Green Acres while pretending to pay attention to someone talking. ;-)
  Outliners and word processors
    I was writing a comment in response to a comment from Hanan Cohen, and decided to make it a post. It was getting so long, and said stuff that I wanted to say more prominently.
    Hanan said that Word had outlining in the late 80s, and they never took it out. So we should look out for users of that outliner as people who might like Fargo. But I don't look for any magic there, because their idea of outlining and ours are not the same thing.
      It's like the word unconference. It was a term we came up with for BloggerCon, and then was applied to a very different kind of conference and the result was confusion. That's what outlining in word processors was, from my point of view, confusion.
    What they called outlining was more like outline formatting. Putting Roman numerals on the top sections, capital letters on the first level. Numbers on the second and so on.
    Word is a word processor. Its primary function is writing-for-printing. The choices the designers made make it a relatively strong formatter and a weak organizer.
    Conversely, we can put formatting capabilities into an outliner, but it would behave like an outliner, not a word processor. We fully explored this with MORE, the users loved it, but they still needed to export to Word or Pagemaker if print formatting was important.
    Word is a production tool -- good for annual reports, formal papers, stories, books. Fargo is an organizing tool, good for lists, project plans, narrating your work, presentations, team communication. You could organize a conference with an outliner. The slides would naturally be composed wiht an outliner.
    An outliner is designed for editing structure more than it is for editing text. The text is sort of "along for the ride." Or you could see an outliner as text-on-rails. Outliner text is always ready to move, with a single mouse gesture or keystroke. You enter text into an outliner so you can move it around, like stick-up notes on a whiteboard.
    The reason a program has to be either a word processor or an outliner is this: There's only one keyboard, and one set of mouse gestures. The identity of a product is determined by choices made by the designer. Word processors are good at selecting words, sentences and paragraphs. Outliners select headlines and all their subs. Shift-click in the two apps do vastly different things, yet in both cases they are "extending the selection." Even the data structures used by the programs are different. Yet superficially they look similar.
    Some great software designers were fooled by this in the first go-around. Probably the guys who did Word thought at first that they were equalling our outliner, but I guess over time they realized what we learned too. That you need to know what your product is supposed to do before you make those choices. Otherwise it ends up as a confusing unusable mess. That's why Lotus 1-2-3 was a magical product, and Symphony, that confronted this problem head-on and didn't solve it (because it doesn't have a solution) never had 1-2-3's balance and sharp-edge feel. Symphony was mush, 1-2-3 was fine.
      Apple's iTunes is another good example. It's all over the map, doing a dozen different things, without a single idea tying it all together. You can tell that the designers are confused too, because in each rev the commands move around and are re-named. Things you depend on disappear, but if you know the magic formula you can make them reappear. One senses that it might be possible to do a beautiful music app that felt wonderful, but if Apple were to produce one, they'd have to start over.
    People who used an outliner were never satisfied with what the word processors called outlining. Ultimately that's how you tell what you got. When you sit a person down in front of the keyboard, does magic happen?
    BTW, this is great. When I was selling outliners in the 80s there were no blogs, so I couldn't comment on how the various categories of software were handled by reviewers. Now the conversation can be multi-dimensional and lots of learning can happen quickly. Hope! :-)
  The message of Boston
    This post was written quickly.
    It was an interesting week to be in Boston, as in the Chinese proverb about living in interesting times. But not for the reasons people think.
    I learned this last night, in a big way, at the Berkman Thursday meetup. We had about 15 people there, some original people from the old days, and some new people who totally fit in. Having new people there makes sense, because the Thursday group was like that. Every week we'd have a fair number of returning friends, and always a healthy number of newbies.
    One man, whose name I didn't catch, said something that I found surprising at first. He said that the press got the story of Boston wrong. The people weren't cowering in fear in their houses as was reported on TV and on Twitter. That was a lie. I admit I found it irrational. Boston is probably about the size of Queens, in geography and in population. If someone was holed up in Astoria, people in Flushing probably wouldn't be too worried. It wouldn't make sense. It would be like worrying that you'd get hit by a bus on any given day. There are a lot of days when no one gets hit by a bus. And even so, the chances of you being that person, well, it's not a smart thing to spend a lot of time worrying about. (Though please, look first before you step out into a street!)
    Everyone in the room who was from Boston immediately agreed, enthusiastically. They didn't like that they were being portrayed that way by the media. So we explored the actual story, what was really going on among the people of Boston. The answer was, they were working together to make their city safe. The city hadn't shut down on the Tuesday or Wednesday after the bombing. But on Thursday night, when the bombers were on the run, the police asked everyone to stay off the street. And the people did what they were asked to do, because that's what people do.
      One person explained it this way: The police wanted to take all the pieces off the board. So if the bomber started moving he would stand out.
    This goes back to one of the themes of my talk on Wednesday night at the Boston Globe. People feel a need to be part of the world they live in. Most of us feel like we're on the sidelines, spectators, consumers, eyeballs, credit card numbers, and that's not what we want. We want meaning. We want to make a contribution. We want do do good and have that good make a difference. If you look at what people actually do, not the stories you read in the paper or hear on CNN, this is obvious. The bombings not only worried people, for a short time when the scope of the danger was unknown, but people also saw the opportunity to get some of the precious stuff, meaning and relevance.
    Why was this a theme of my talk at the Globe? Because the news industry has the ability to offer people exactly what they want, but they won't do it. Their view of the world is that we're out there and they're inside. They talk, we listen. They are relevant, their lives have meaning. The meaning of our lives is not important to them. As long as they view it that way, people will continue to be frustrated by them, as long as they pay any attention. And more and more they're chosing to not pay attention.
    This week the people of Boston learned something about the press because they told a big lie not just about a handful of them, but all of them, collectively. This presents a unique opportunity for a whole city to wake up and take over. I suggested at dinner that the people of Boston buy the Boston Globe, and give it a new direction. You know a city the size of Boston could buy the Globe. And you know what, it's actually for sale. :-)
  Older techies and outliners
    I had a flash yesterday, after doing a series of demos of Fargo here in Boston on this trip and my last one in March. In several cases, the people were close to my own age, and were former users of MORE and ThinkTank. For these people I just needed to show how Fargo picked up on the ideas in those products and brought them into the technology world of 2013. But in a couple of cases, the people, smart and accomplished, had no idea what I was talking about, so I had to start from the beginning. Just like the old days, before outliners were a semi-major category. I don't mind doing this, I actually kind of like it -- but the engine is rusty. I haven't done this kind of selling in many years.
    The conclusion I reached, in an email, trying to explain it to a friend (who is 47) is that if you're under 50 you probably came into computing after the outlining category began to fade. If you're over 50 and a techie, you probably remember at least knowing someone who was a fanatical outliner, whose arms would wave as they tried to explain what they were so excited about. As they spoke, little bits of saliva would drip from the corners of their mouths. Non-inductees of the Club of Outliner Fanatics would stare, not knowing what to make of it. But at least they knew what they were, if only by the reaction they provoked with their acolytes.
    Now, there are companies, notably Omni and Eastgate, who have made a good living selling outliners, all along. I think that's because, while the category hasn't been growing as a percentage of computer use, it is growing in absolute terms, because so many more people use computers today than did in the late 80s and early 90s.
    I have my work cut out for me. I have to explain Fargo to a couple of new generations who don't feel so new, being in their 20s, 30s and 40s. This is going to be fun. ;-)
    BTW, my father, who would have been 84 this year, loved my outliners. So it's not just people in their 50s and 60s. Some of the people who could explain why this software is so great, are no longer with us. My dad would have absolutely flipped over Fargo. I think about that a lot. Wish I had done this work sooner so he could have seen it.
  How to create an "include" node
    My friend Anton Zuiker is our best tester. Anton is a really smart guy. And he's earnest. And doesn't give up. And he makes things break. Which is exactly what you look for in a tester. Because you want to find out about breakage as soon as you break something. Easier to fix then. And it helps make the software better sooner, which is what we're trying to do, all software developers.
    Anyway, Anton wrote me an email this morning asking how to include an outline in another outline. I'm including the full text of his email below. I don't think he'll mind.
      Dave, asking this off-list because I'm not sure you've announced this functionality yet.
      Something that I've never grasped is how to include an outline in another outline, or said another way, display Outline1 inside Outline2. I know you've referred to this, and some of the more experienced outliners on the list are mentioning it, but I'm not seeing includes mentioned in the HowTo or Fargo docs.
      Sorry for my confusion, but I'm finally at the point where I want to connect my outlines. Am I getting ahead of the feature rollout?
    I'm on a train and couldn't think of a better place to answer his question than in a blog post, so here goes.
    Headlines in outlines, sometimes called nodes, can have hidden attributes that tell software how to do special things with it. One of the things we can do is include an outline in another. Include is the right word.
    The way you do that is to add a type attribute to the node. The value of the type attribute should be "include" -- leave out the quotes. It should have another attribute called "url" and its value is the address of the outline that's to be included. That's all there is to it.
    Now, how to do that?
    In Fargo, we have a command that lets you edit the attributes of any headline. It's called, unimaginatively, Edit Attributes, and it's in the outliner menu. So if I wanted to add an include node here, pointing to my states outline, I would edit its attributes like this:
    The "created" attribute is automatically put there by Fargo, on every headline you create, so we can tell when it was created. It also gives each headline a unique identity, unless you manage to create two headlines in the same second (us programmer types are always thinking about things this way, they're called "edge" conditions, and every one of them eventually happens, it seems).
    BTW, I've created such an include node here, as a sub of the headline you're reading right now, so you can see how an include node works.
      My Much-Maligned States Outline
    I'm sure this is confusing at first. But if you try it out, ask questions, and do it again, eventually it'll make sense. You're learning a pretty cool computer science concept -- pointers. But it's really not that hard, once you understand it. ;-)
  A semi-luddite view of Google glasses
    This was written very quickly.
    At the beginning of my blogging career, in 1994, I expressed doubt that PDAs would become general-purpose computers.
    Randy Battat, then an exec at Motorola, rebutted that people used to say that about personal computers, and that I would come around. I never did, and I was more or less proven right. We're still struggling with mobile devices, trying to figure out what they're good at. One thing they are not, is being a general-purpose computer. The reason is simple. No keyboard. No way around that. Without a keyboard, they are good for reading and relatively short messages. They work well for text messaging and Twitter. I marvel at how some people can write full blog posts and emails with their tablets and phones. But I think that will continue to be something that only some people can do. I'm an excellent typist, but I have to use two index fingers on a virtual keyboard. There isn't room for both my hands.
      Other people opined about PDAs and I ran a roundup piece.
    Now to Google glasses. I want to put my stake in the ground. (And I know the product is called Google Glass, but I think they're glasses, so I'm inclined to describe the product my way, without using their brand name (and hence the lowercase G.))
    I think they will make an excellent display device for the obvious reason that they're mounted in front of your eyes, the organ we use for vision. The idea of moving your fingers to the side of your head, of winking to take a picture, well I don't like that so much. I admit I might be a luddite here, and am going to keep my eyes and ears open for indications that I'm wrong. It happens, quite a bit when it comes to brand-new tech.
    I think they could be a great part of a mobile computing platform. With more computing power and UI in my pocket, in the form of my smart phone, or in a big pocket, in the form of a tablet. They communicate over Bluetooth, and together form a more useful reading and communication device, but probably still not a very good writing tool. The idea that I would use glasses without tethering them to something more capable for finger-work, well that's what I thought was wrong with the PDA idea in 1994. It turns out, in 2013, for some people -- that the PDA of today can be used without tethering. But it doesn't have the same utility as the desktop computer I'm typing this blog post on. IMHO of course.
  Care to Share Your OPML?
    Interesting question last night on Twitter from Daman Bahner. He asked how about rebooting Share Your OPML now that there's renewed interest in RSS. That requires a little explaining for people who are not familiar with the original service with that name.
    First, OPML is used to exchange subscription lists between RSS aggregators. I'm the one who made this choice, because I thought it would be cool if people could edit their lists in our outliner (at UserLand) and OPML was the file format of the editor. All our competitors wanted to make it easy for our users to switch to their products, and Radio was the product that got all this RSS stuff going with users, so it became an instant standard. And even though few people use Radio today, the choice of OPML is still with us.
    If anyone writes a book about how standards really are developed, the way OPML became the standard for subscription lists would make an excellent counterpoint to the theory that all standards come from deliberative bodies of warring BigCo's.
    Share Your OPML took advantage of the standard. I asked the readers of my blog to upload their OPML files to a server I wrote at share.opml.org. It was later rewritten by Andrew Grumet and then Dan MacTough. That version is visible today through the Internet Archive.
    The reason it became popular? Because everyone who mattered in the RSS world of that day read Scripting News, and I beat the drum relentlessly and without shame for Share Your OPML, an idea I totally wanted to see happen. ;-)
    How it worked...
    When you uploaded your OPML, we added the info to a database.
    From that we produced a top 100 list of feeds.
    We ran an aggregator of the top 100, sort of an early version of TechMeme.
    We kept a list of the most prolific subscribers.
    You could find out who subscribes to a given feed (including your own).
    And most important, it would make recommendations, based on the feeds you're following, suggesting feeds that "people like you" also follow. It was very good at this. (Can't show you this page because archive.org wasn't a member, and this was a members-only feature.)
    We also had a blog, of course.
    You can get an idea of how it works by clicking around the archive. That was the best thing about it. You could lose a lot of time just clicking around and seeing what was related to what.
    We had to take it off the air because it was getting too popular and it was a labor of love, not a for-profit business, although it would have made an excellent for-profit business. I wanted to, but failed at finding a programmer to work with me on it. It wasn't the kind of project I wanted to take on by myself.
    Anyway -- today it would still be a good idea, but now I have a startup that's keeping me busy.
    Daman Bahner asked me about this on Twitter last night, and I asked him to put up a blog post explaining the idea. And that motivated me to write about it myself. Maybe we can fund this as a community thing. Might be a fun way to do it. Share your ideas, if you find this interesting.
    PS: I'm meeting with an old VC friend in Boston later this week. I'm going to suggest they kick in some money for labor-of-love tech projects. That's how a lot of the best ideas develop. What would they get in return? First right to invest in the projects. Seems like a no-brainer (a term VCs like to use a lot). :-)
    PPS: I've often wondered if any tech investors read my blog. If you are one, leave a comment, or send me an email. dave dot winer at gmail dot com. I'm interested in knowing if we have any money in our community.
  Verizon can't take your money
    The problem:
    1. I have an iPad LTE.
    2. When I was at the Knicks game on Sunday, I wanted to send some pictures to friends, but the iPad said I maxed out my data plan.
    3. I haven't used it once this month. How could that be.
    4. Then I remembered. My credit cards expire in May. Maybe that's it.
    5. When I got home I checked on the iPad, and sure enough, that was the problem.
    6. I enter the new credit card info, and re-entered my address, as it required me to do, even though the address was the same as last time.
    7. Invalid address.
    8. Every way I tried to enter the address it objected. I did this for about ten minutes. I thought I would take care of this during halftime of the Nets/Bulls game. We were already well into the third quarter.
    9. I decided to call the company and ask if they could just take the credit card info over the phone. After waiting on hold, I was told no, they couldn't do that.
    10. The very nice person said she understood why I was so frustrated (I didn't say I was), and called me by my first name even though I asked her not to.
    11. Enter it again, she said. This time it will work. Optimist!
    12. I entered it again. It did not work. It's worth mentioning that every time I try, I have to enter my email address and password, the iPad doesn't offer to remember these for me. A lot of hunting and pecking. We repeat this three times. No go. She has no advice to offer, but she is willing to escalate it.
    13. Her boss comes on the line, Frankie, who of course understands why I am so upset (this is a script they hired a psychiatrist consultant for) and said I should just enter the information again and this time it will work. I said I was unwilling to do this. He asked is there anything else he could help me with.
    So you want to know the answer?
    You have to type the address exactly as it appears in the credit card company account. No variance, not even whitespace. It's not case sensitive (lucky thing because the iPad determines the case and it doesn't agree with my bank's) but otherwise you have to type it literally exactly as they have it. Once I did that, after learning this on an Apple support discussion board, the request went through.
    Now tell me something -- why didn't the Verizon people know this? They should hire a systems person not a psychiatrist. Instead of trying to sooth understandably frustrated customers, they should make happy customers, or at least not insanely unhappy customers. Or they could teach their people how to use Google.
    Anytime you have to do business with one of these companies you're in for a lot of trouble, that's for sure.
    PS: Apple would like to get in on the Crazy Huge Company game. Look at this dialog that just popped up out of nowhere.
      I unplugged it and plugged it back in. All is well. Imagine if the user believed their stupid dialog.
  New Fargo intro dialog
    We've gotten a lot of feedback on the initial user experience for Fargo, and decided to take another look at it. The result is a new intro dialog. Screen shot below.
    The actual dialog is a little bigger, the full image is scaled to fit into the web page.
    Let me know what you think of it...
    Dave
    PS: This is deployed in Fargo 0.51.
    PPS: As I was writing this I was thinking of the Matrix. Clicking on the Dropbox button is like taking the red pill. Clicking on More Info is the blue pill. :-)
  Where's the app?
    In the early days of the web, I remember (vaguely) marveling at the idea that I could put software in a machine that had a persistent connection and have it be accessible anywhere. This was great until I created something that became moderately popular and learned the wonders of scaling. And then I learned about ISPs who don't react well to outages. After all that it didn't seem so magical.
    Today, almost 20 years later, we've pivoted to a new architecture and it's got me puzzled again, at times, looking one way then another trying to find the app, and not getting it right at first -- even though I wrote the app myself. Here's what's weird.
    1. Because JavaScript has become such a powerful language that performs so well, you can literally put the code for an app in a web page. To install the app just visit the page. To update the app, reload. Amazingly simple.
    2. But those apps have limited ability to store stuff. Little Outliner proved that even though there are limits, you can still create something useful that runs in the page, with absolutely nothing else. Every computer that runs a modern browser has decided that each virtual "site" can have a few megabytes of storage. That might not be a lot for movies or audio, but for outlines, it's plenty.
    3. Enter Dropbox, and presumably Microsoft SkyDrive, Box.net and Google Drive as well, with APIs that add another dimension to what a modern web app can do. Now instead of a few megs of storage that can only be accessed locally, and can't be moved between computers, these services offer gigabytes of storage, and infinite mobility. The data moves as fluidly as the web itself. This coupled with in-browser JavaScript is enough to make a full-blown computer. The UI is handled by HTML. Logic by JS, and storage by the Box-Drives.
    A user asked if Fargo could write to the local sub-folder of Dropbox even if he didn't have a net connection. I actually had to think for a moment. No, it can't. Think of the circuitous route the data goes through just to end up right back where it started. And think about all the efforts to sandbox web apps so they couldn't get at the local hard drive. That barrier is gone. Now we have to trust the Box-Drive folks to make sure the sandboxes they maintain are really solid. So far they seem to meet the challenge.
    But we are, once again, in a strange new world. Maybe there are ways it will get weary and will break. But if there are, we don't know what they are yet. And for now, it's just a mysterious kind of fun. The gee-whiz factor is high again. ;-)
  Wish for WordPress and Tumblr
    I love that WordPress and Tumblr have APIs.
    However, I wish their APIs were callable directly from JavaScript running in the browser.
    As it stands now, unless I'm missing something, if I want to connect to either service from an app running in the browser, I have to run a proxy server that does nothing more than act as a gateway between my browser-based app and their server.
    It would be incredibly helpful if they ran that endpoint. They already have to run a server since their apps are entirely server-based.
    We're trying to keep server load to a minimum in Fargo. It's one thing to deploy a server that provides some visible functionality for users, but this is just getting around a limit in the browser.
    Over time, more functionality can migrate to the "edge" computer. Smoothing out and optimizing the interface between the browser and the server will help move that process along.
    Update: It looks like Tumblr has what we're looking for!
  I'm a 57-year-old developer
    Fargo is announced and shipping. You can use it. You can see what I've been working on.
    Some people have expressed surprise that I'm still programming. Yes I am.
    I had an idea for what I wanted to do when I was 22, and I've pretty much stuck with it. I've had a few detours and setbacks. Some pretty big setbacks. But I kept going. I've always been straight about it. I guess a lot of people didn't believe me. I could tell. And it doesn't feel good, when people -- especially friends -- humor you. Sort of like "isn't it cute the old dude thinks he's a developer." One of the things that comes with age is patience, with stupidity. :-)
    I am 57 and I am a programmer, the same way Martin Scorcese is 70 and is a movie director. Or Ron Howard is 59, and Rob Reiner is 66. And that's just film. It's not unusual for people who decided in their teens or twenties that they were going to be creative in a certain field to stay with it through their lives. I heard an interview recently with Austrian actor Christoph Waltz (56), that he considered at a low point in his career possibly being creative in some other area -- painting, or music -- but realized he'd have to put in another 20 years to get started, and when you get going with a career, you know how important the head-start is.
      Jeff Bridges is 63.
    I didn't get into programming because I saw it as a way to get wealthy, although I have made enough money to be financially independent. But there's a catch. I was financially independent when I was broke too. If you've chosen a creative path, or more likely if you're compelled by it, or obsessed, or posessed even -- well, it's not about money. It's about expression. It's about bringing change to the world, it's about being the change. This is not a cliche for me because I've always made tools that were first and foremost designed to help me express.
    At 57, yes, probably most of my creative years are behind me. But the best ones are right here and now.
    Why am I so productive again? Because I've hooked up with an excellent programming partner. Every day I revel at how good this guy is. He's 28. Not better than I am, and I am not better than him. We are different, and part of the difference is age. Fargo is very much a product of two generations. This is hardly unprecedented, in most creative areas it's the most common thing. Hitchcock worked with young writers and actors, editors, designers. If you want to take a long-term view of an art, you have to have cross-generational sharing. Otherwise you never get anywhere. Yet of course the prevailing wisdom in tech says there's nothing there. That's part of the reason our ship is sailing in circles. :-)
    I did my work on blogging and RSS in my 40s. Before that I worked on outlining in my 20s and 30s. Programming languages and databases all throughout. But my real work has been myself. Developing a base of experience that can't come any other way other than by living a creative life.
    So if you think creativity in programming is only for the very young, you're thinking about it wrong. I suspect you're probably not yourself a programmer. Yes, some arts and sports do thrive off the youth of their participants, but there's Carmelo Anthony and there's Coach Woodson. Walt Frazier and Red Holtzman. Want to be inspired? Go see Any Given Sunday. That's what I'm talking about.
  Introducing Fargo!
    Good morning!
    When we started our new company, Small Picture, late last year, we set out to create the most powerful editing environment running entirely within a web browser.
    We believed that HTML 5 is actually a richer environment that the desktop, because of its ability to network. With JavaScript, we could do everything we formerly did on the desktop. And you can install this software simply by visiting a web page.
    But we didn't stop there. We hooked into Dropbox, the deeply transformative and open networked storage environment. Users don't have to export their data. No lock-in here. It's all sitting in a folder on their desktop (and tablet, smartphone, desktop, server, you name it).
    Today, we're ready to unveil the full vision. It runs in any HTML 5-compatible browser, including Safari, Chrome, Internet Explorer 10, or Firefox.
    The name of our new product is Fargo.
    http://fargo.io/
    And if you're still here, and reading, thank you. :-)
    Here are the bullet points:
    1. Fargo is a rich, networked text outliner.
    2. You can use it as a notepad, todo list, to organize projects, narrate your work, for presentations, brainstorming, design, programming, specs. Investors use Fargo to organize deals, lawyers for cases, educators for course outlines, project leaders to organize the work of team members.
    3. Fargo is deceptively simple. You edit documents within documents, nesting them and organizing to as many levels as you need. Reorganize structures with a single gesture. Expand to see the detail or zoom out to see the big picture.
    4. Dropbox is brilliant and transformative. Coupled with the deep power of Fargo, you get a profoundly powerful work environment that goes everywhere.
    5. You can share outlines with friends and co-workers, or publicly.
    There's lots more info on the site, but most important -- please try the software. It's right there in your browser.
    http://fargo.io/
    This is the beginning of a journey. We plan to hook Fargo into everything. And because it uses an open document format, OPML, other developers can hook into the idea flow of Fargo users. The possibilities are endless.
    If you've made it this far, thank you so much for your interest and please let me know if there are any questions, feature requests, etc.

    Dave Winer, co-founder
    Small Picture, Inc.

  Rollout postponed
    We had planned to introduce a new product yesterday, around the time of the tragic explosions in Boston. Of course we postponed the announcement. I'm sure marketers all over the country faced a similar decision, and today are evaluating what to do.
    The best approach to us seems to wait a couple of days and see where we're at.
    However, in the meantime, we have users waiting for the new stuff. So we decided to quietly give our closest users and friends a chance to preview the product, report on any problems, and in the meantime we can fix bugs and prepare for a formal announcement later this week.
    So, without fanfare: http://fargo.io/ is the new outliner from Small Picture.
    In the right margin of the app are links to docs and a press guide.
    If you have questions, you can post them here or on the Q&A page for the product, or on the support mail list.
    We'll be back with more news later in the week.
  "Assume you saw the news"
    When I got back to work at 3:46PM this afternoon, I got a message from Kyle after checking in: "Assume you saw the news."
    What.
    The change in body chemistry was palpable. I assume this is a moment I'm going to remember.
    I had not seen the news.
    I went to Twitter, but not before imagining what might have happened. I formed a theory. North Korea had destroyed a Japanese city. Or maybe an American city. We're on the verge of World War III.
    I found out quickly. Twitter is good for that.
    I went back and said: "Wow that was some strong medicine."
    The imagination is a powerful machine.
  Jeff is an idea processor
    Jeff Jarvis loves whiteboards.
    I never want to say an idea guy like Jeff is wrong.
    Rather -- there's a tool that could make that kind of work much easier, faster, and get better results. It's called an outliner. I happen to make one.
    http://littleoutliner.com/
    Perfect use-case.
    For an idea guy, an author, an outliner is like a spreadsheet for an accountant.
  A future Glass service
    Someday a VC is going to invest in a startup that:
    1. Employs a fleet of Glass-wearing unemployed 20-somethings in major cities.
    2. Like TaskRabbit, you can rent these people on an hourly basis.
    3. They will go where you tell them to, and look at what you want them to look at.
    4. Public places only. Places where no one has a reasonable expectation of privacy.
    5. You will be able to watch the world through their eyes.
    Lots of applications! The innocent-looking Glass-wearing hipster is spying for your wife or husband. Or your ex. Or your boss. The IRS. :-)
  Football and publishing
    I love football metaphors.
    Visualize this...
    The quarterback pulls back to pass, the defenders rush in, the offensive line holds them back.
    Receivers go long, when all of a sudden the defenders turn around and race back to the line of scrimmage.
    The quarterback stands there for a moment, shrugs his shoulders and lobs a bomb to one of the receivers, who catches it and trots into the end-zone.
    Fans are agape, chins drop, eyes widen. Huh? What? Is that football?
    I see the same thing happening in online news.
    The publishers have fallen in love with paywalls. That's like the defenders retreating back to the line of scrimmage. The quarterback is Twitter. Gradually supporting new media types, bringing in the talent that used to populate television and print with their imagery, songs, athletiticsm, drama, looks, humor, celebrity. The raw materials of media.
  Busting the fourth wall in TV
    Two lovable TV commercial campaigns.
    1. The GEICO pig.
    2. American Airlines hires Don Draper.
    They're both playing games with the fourth wall. They're including the viewer in on a joke that the humans don't get.
    The pig knows he's a pig, and of course so do we. But the humans, flight attendants, a girlfriend, a cop, don't seem to get it.
    Jon Hamm explains first class to us exactly the way Don Draper explained the Carousel to Kodak. It's amazing to be pitched a real airline by a fictitious character, and one as compelling as Draper. And it's an account the character wanted to close! A big airline. Oh the humanity.
      This is a great commercial, but the last two bits are not necessary. Where the narrator says -- eh, we can talk about it later, that's when the American Airlines logo should come up with the plane soaring through the sky. Fade out.
      The client probably insisted on having the last part. But this is an ad about you and me, not really about the airline. Yes, it's a little self-deprecating on our behalf, but we don't mind because it's Don Draper. He's our friend. And he's telling us something is new at American Airlines. We know he's lying. But we still like it, because it's sweet and funny.
    I love being involved in the commercialism. I love that kind of art. Great stuff.
  Workflowy and Little Outliner
    Little Outliner v0.42 is up.
    The main new feature in this release is the ability to import outlines from Workflowy, a popular browser-based outliner.
    It would be simpler if they supported OPML import and export, as our outliners do, but you take what you get. The users want to go back and forth, so let's make it as easy as possible.
    Here's how you do it.
    1. In Workflowy, get the section of the outline that you want to export on screen.
    2. Hover with the mouse just to the left of the main headline and nudge the mouse down to reveal the full menu, and click on the Export command. (Screen shot.)
    3. A dialog appears containing the exported text. Be sure to click on the Plain text option. (Screen shot.)
    4. Copy all the text, then go to Little Outliner. Position the cursor where you want the text to go, and Paste. (Screen shot.)
  Outlining a meeting
    We've been trying some experiments liveblogging with the outliner.
    For now, I think outlining doesn't add much to liveblogging. But there is an area where I am pretty sure outlining makes a big difference in a group setting, because we've done it -- in meetings.
    You can try it with one other person looking over your shoulder while you outline a project you're doing together. For example, imagine you're buying a house with your spouse. Start by listing all the things you want and don't want in a house. As you list your ideas, the other person will get some too, you add them to the outline.
    Pause for a moment and group them.
    Start listing neighborhoods.
    How much money you want to spend.
    How many bedrooms. A yard? A nice view? Schools? Close to public transit?
    Jump around. If your partner has an idea in one category when you're in the other, just do what they ask. It's about being fluid with your thinking.
    Pretty quickly you start using the outline to organize the problem. It becomes a shared space between the two of you, and it really doesn't matter who is at the keyboard, who controls the mouse. The ideas come from both of you.
    The same idea works in a larger context if you can project the outline on a screen.
    It can have magical results in organizing a project that has resisted organization.
    Don't make a big deal about using the outline at first. It's just being projected, maybe one or two people will start looking at it while you type. Then someone says "Move this item under the other category." They have trouble explaining so they get up and show you. Do what they ask you to do. Now they're controlling the outline by pointing to the projected image of it.
    Sometimes the power of technology is less important than the communication between two human beings.
    This process was possible 25 years ago. I know because we did it back then.
    Give it a try.
  A vision for River of News
    I had lunch a couple of weeks ago with Josh Marshall of Talking Points Memo. They're just three stops south of me on the A train. We should do this more often, political bloggers and tech bloggers getting together to share a meal and talk about what's possible.
    At one point in the conversation Josh asked me what new technology they should be looking at. I didn't hesitate -- I had an answer prepared. This is what I suggested.
    1. Let's ask your readers for their OPML subscription lists.
    2. Read the lists into a database and rank the feeds, figure out which are the most popular.
    3. Then let's start a river with those feeds. Let it run for a few days so all the feeds update a few times, and see what we've got. My bet is that we'll have a pretty fantastic and totally unique news service.
    4. Give it some space on TPM and let it live and breathe. We'll all read this river, and get ideas for more feeds to add to it. You'll learn about other, smaller, political blogs, and they'll get exposure to a wider audience. Win-win. (You'll also run links to stories from Politico and Buzzfeed, so oddly it'll be the place people come to find out what's new on your competitors' sites.)
    5. Make deals with them Josh. Ask them if they want to run some TPM ads. Share revenue.
    This is a way to build community in new directions. Encourage people to step out from the discussion boards and start their own pubs. It would instantly make TPM the technology leader in the political blogosphere.
    I promised I would write it up so that the idea could be presented to those people in their community who are RSS-savvy.
    This is something I talk about all the time with news people who will listen. You never should have let Google own the news distribution system. But now that they're evacuating, hurry up and fill the void, before another tech giant owns the space. News publishing is something news publishers should at least have a say in.
    Also see my pitch for River of News. We need some updated technology here. My River2 software can be a start, but we've figured out how to do it more efficiently since then, with JavaScript and JSON. I don't have the bandwidth now to do the development, at least not at this time, with Small Picture actively shipping new products. So there's an opportunity here for techies as well.
  Another pitch for River of News
    I know most of the developers working on replacing Google Reader are doing just that -- creating products and services that do more or less exactly what Google Reader does.
    But there is another kind of aggregator, river of news, and its needs are pretty simple, compared to the Google Reader approach which requires synchronization among different clients. If I had the time here's the software I would write.
    A feed scanner that accepts OPML subscription lists and generates river.js files.
    This is the core of a River of News aggregator. It doesn't say how to display it, but there's an excellent jQuery app that does this, written by a group of developers led by Nicolas Gallagher. And it also leaves subscription management to other tools.
    It would be great if this core feed engine could easily be deployed in an EC2 instance and very lean so it could scan lots of feeds for lots of users.
    It would be really nice to have this simple problem solved once and for all. And it's relatively simple compared to the problems of synching.
    For some reason this isn't being discussed. It should be. River of News may not be the only way to read RSS-based news, but it's a good way. And for some people such as myself, it's the only one we need.
  The next Small Picture outliner
    Good morning and welcome to your Daily Tease of what's coming soon from your friends at Small Picture (i.e. Kyle and myself).
    We've been working on Little Outliner's big bro. We're getting close.
    The big thing in this release, other than the ability to edit more than one outline at a time, is that your files reside in a folder in your Dropbox. This gives us the ubiquity we seek for our simple idea outliner, note-taker, todo list, project organizer.
    As we've gotten deeper into this project we've realized more and more that it's the right move. It makes all kinds of things possible. :-)
    I expect I'll talk a bit about this in the Thunderdome chat I'm doing later today, so I wanted the readers of my blog to hear it first.
  Comments on Arrington/Gawker
    1. I am a former friend of Mike Arrington. He was also my lawyer before he was a friend.
    2. I don't think what Gawker did was right.
    3. An anonymous commenter on TechCrunch said that on any day, any man could be torn apart the way Gawker was trying to tear apart Arrington. I believe that.
    4. My fear in speaking was not of reprisal by Arrington, as an Atlantic author assumes it is, I've been attacked by him at the height of his power, and am still here to tell the tale. The fear is if I stand up and say something I'll be the next one Gawker goes after.
    5. Mike has done things I don't support, that I don't agree with, that anger me, even at times enrage me, but what Gawker has accused him of is one of the worst things you can say about a man. You have to really know that someone is guilty before you make those kinds of charges. I think they know how weak their story is, and it's appalling that they went ahead with it anyway.
    6. Heather Harde's statement is the strongest possible endorsement he could get, as a woman who commands a lot of respect in Silicon Valley, her support says all that needs to be said. I encourage Mike to back down now, and let her statement be the end of it.
  Drew Houston and the role of MIT
    I read an interview with Dropbox founder Drew Houston that ran in MIT Tech Review in early 2012. Really interesting story, well worth a read, especially for this bit about where the idea for Dropbox came from.
    "For me, it goes all the way back to MIT, where there is a campus network called Athena. You can sit down at any of thousands of workstations and your whole environment follows you around: not just your files but where your icons were on your desktop. Then I left and discovered that no one had really built that for the rest of the world."
    I thought -- how interesting, the idea for a hugely important, transformative technology came from using the campus network as a student at MIT.
    Then I remembered where Zuck was when Facebook was being hatched. In case you're not familiar with the legend, it was down the street in Cambridge at Harvard. His co-founders were also Harvard undergrads.
    In my own case, the idea for outlining came in a hallway conversation with a fellow grad student at the University of Wisconsin. He told me about editors for Lisp systems that understood structure. From there it was a few steps to editable structures for non-programmers.
    Universities, for people who really use them, can be incredible places to make connections between people and ideas.
  Why podcasting matters
    Earlier I wrote about how podcasting got its name. I wrote it because there's a reporter who says he gave podcasting its name. He didn't. It pisses me off when people who know they didn't do something claim credit for it anyway. I don't need to explain why it's wrong, do I? ;-)
    Now, I want to say that even though I have never made a dime off podcasting, and I did a lot of work to make it happen, and I even spent money on it, it was still worth it.
    Because it's a form of literature that's valuable and it persists.
    To this day, when I go for a walk on a sunny day, or a frigid one, in NY or Seattle or Europe, I can listen to the people that I want to hear from, with no gatekeepers in the middle. I still listen to a lot of programming that is professionally produced, but I think it is better because it has to compete in a free market. One where the cost is pretty close to zero to distribute the programming.
    So even though it didn't make me money, it gave me something much better. Ideas! :-)
  Streisand's money
    An interesting chain of thought.
    1. I saw a tweet by Fred Benenson about the Streisand Effect which I had never heard of.
    2. So I looked it up.
    3. Decided to participate, so I tweeted a link to the page.
    4. Got a tweet from Sonal Chokshi saying that Streisand has a shopping mall with all her collections, in the basement of the house.
    5. I thought about being rich. I couldn't imagine that shopping mall really made Streisand feel good. But I imagined that a poor person could dream that it might. I tweeted to that effect.
    That led me to another train of thought that I didn't blog.
    I have opinions about what money does to people because I have been lucky enough to have money do it to me. Having money is nice, but not nearly as nice as poor people (which I have also been) imagine it is. But then I wondered how other people deal with money, and I wondered if they all reach this conclusion.
    Now, I'm sure I'm right that money doesn't buy happiness, but when you first get that message, what's your response? I think perhaps some people go into denial, and insist that it must.
    What led me to that was a piece I read last week about a guy who, like me, never stopped programming. He had a theory why people think that's unusual. Because being in charge of programmers has more status than being one. The more you are in charge of, the more status. It isn't the quality of the work that matters, it's the size of the subservience.
    It's funny because I never felt this way! And of course since I didn't feel this way, it didn't occur to me that others did.
    I always thought the greatest gift was to be able to do stuff yourself, without having to do it through others. It was the act of creating that was the priviledge. If you had a choice between being a player or a coach, wouldn't everyone choose to be a player? I guess not.
    Mitt Romney is a symbol of this for me. It didn't occur to him, I guess, that we wouldn't love him. If we don't love him, then what was the point of making all that money? I think a lot of rich people never put that to the test, and go through life assuming that they are loved for their money. This explains, imho, a lot of the behavior I see. Being rich seems to equate to "behaving badly."
    Another person who helped put this together for me is Frank Langella, in the Fresh Air interview that ran this week. He recounts what age does to you. And how actors deal with it, or don't. It was both rich and chilling. And a good perspective for anyone who gives money or fame too much credit for giving meaning or happiness to life.
    Time for a walk! :-)
  How podcasting got its name
    In September 2004, the activity we called audioblogging was starting to gain traction. There were a dozen or so regular programs. We had tools for creating audioblog feeds, and an aggregator that could pull them all together into a river of audio programming.
    I had my own show, Morning Coffee Notes. Adam Curry had Daily Source Code and together we did a short-lived audioblog called Trade Secrets. Adam was working on an open source tool that would bring Apple's iPod into the mix. In September he opened the iPodder-dev mail list, which I publicized on Scripting News.
    In the first days of the iPodder-dev mail list the term podcast was introduced and adopted as the name of the activity.
    Here's the sequence of events, with links.
    1. On September 13, Adam posts the inaugural message on the iPodder-Dev list. (You will get a warning from Yahoo when you click on the link because the mail list has since been overrun by spam for porn sites. Oh the humanity!)
    2. Lots of people introduce themselves, including Dannie Gregoire, a "reasonably competent Perl programmer" from Kentucky.
    3. On September 15, Gregoire posts a message where he uses the term "podcaster." I read this message, as did Adam.
    4. In a phone talk, Adam and I discussed this, and agreed we needed a name for the activity, and that Gregoire's suggested term was pretty good, so we agreed to use it. The conversation was recorded and distributed as one of the Trade Secrets shows. (Note: I'm not sure of the date of this podcast.)
    5. Gregoire recalls the sequence of events in a post to the list on September 20.
    6. On September 24, I wrote a definitive page explaining what a podcast is.
    7. On September 27, I decided to rename the audioblogging session for the upcoming BloggerCon, Podcasting. Adam was the discussion leader.
    8. On September 28, Doc Searls wrote a post entitled DIY Radio with Podcasting. I couldn't locate a subsequent post where he did a Google search and found zero hits for the term, predicting that there would be a lot more, as the idea caught on.
      On second thought, that post might have been written by Rex Hammock.
      Update: Apparently it wasn't Rex, but he has a quote from Doc's missing post.
    Finally, a Google Trends graph clearly indicates that the term was introduced in September 2004.
  Did something break in Chrome/Mac?
    Update: Thanks to elasticthreads, in a comment thread belog, for helping with a few workarounds, and the first one I tried worked. I have a fix I can release if other Frontier/OPML Editor users are seeing the same problem. Right now since I've not heard from anyone, I'm not going to do a release.
    I have a question to ask other people who do web development on a Mac using Chrome. I'm not trying to make news, this is just a question. I'm using my blog to ask it.
    1. Back in Netscape days the browser supported a set of interapplication messages called "Apple Events" that allowed other apps to make calls to the browser to get it to do things.
    2. The most useful one, imho, was the GURL message, which said "Here's a URL, please open it in the browser."
    3. This feature is deeply integrated in my CMS. I put my cursor on something, right-click and choose View in Browser. It figures out what its URL is and shoots a GURL message over to the browser, and within a second I'm viewing the page.
    4. This feature was copied by every browser from then on. You could shoot a GURL over to any of them and they'd open the page. This included Chrome. Until sometime in the last few days. Then it stopped working.
      Here's the Apple Event I'm sending:
      appleEvent ('rimZ', 'GURL', 'GURL', '----', string ("http://scripting.com/"), 'cwin', nil)
      No error is returned, the event eventually times out.
    5. I rebooted the system, relaunched the browser and my CMS, it still doesn't work.
    So my question is this -- if you do web development on Mac with Chrome, did this stop working for you too?
    PS: I started a Hacker News thread for this, in case you prefer to comment there.
    PPS: Losing this feels like losing the right rear-view-mirror on a car. Very jarring.
    PPPS: Gradually our development environment is being whittled away by Google and Apple. If I were paranoid I'd think they want to slow us all down, for some reason. That's the net effect.
  Pay For Your Sins
    Now that I've started a new business, my first business mentor speaks to me again, from childhood.
    My grandfather, Rudy Kiesler, was a businessman. He came to the US during the war, a Jew fleeing the Nazis, with a few diamonds sewn into my grandmother's coat, which was stolen on the way. So they arrived in the US, to their new home in Brooklyn, like many other imigrants, without a dime.
    He started a sewing shop, and grew it, and grew it, until when he retired after having a stroke in his 60s, he had a dozen factories in the South, and a nice bit of cash in the bank.
    When I was a kid he didn't seem like a wise person. He yelled a lot, loudly, and had hard opinions about everything. But there was an intellect in there. He was a good card player, and a good provider, and he did teach me one important thing about business, an idea that keeps coming up.
    "Pay for your sins," he would say. It's one of those ideas that means different things depending how you approach it. You're going to pay for them, one way or the other. So knowing that, think twice before you do it. And if you try not to pay for them you're only making it worse. There's a compound interest to sins.
    Compare this to the lame "Don't be evil" -- which has none of the subtlety. Why not be evil? My grandfather knew the answer.
  I do outliners for the thinking
    I love outliner people. They are so cool.
      I love how the new outliner is so lightweight and "transparent", yet powerful. It's a great mind mapping tool sans the cognitive load of layout and "making it pretty". I would love to see native experiences and sync to cloud (Evernote and the like are IMO becoming too heavyweight and start to get in the way of quickly taking notes or thinking)
    When I ship a new outliner that's where people are looking for them, and today that is on the web -- I get to meet a lot of outliner people. And that makes me feel great!!
    And that gets me thinking about why I do it. Because now the part about whether or not we attract users, which was speculative a couple of weeks ago, is no longer speculative. They are here, and more are coming.
    This is why...
    We need better tools for thinking. With those tools we might do more of it, and be more effective. I want the thinkers to be more powerful. That's it, that's why I work on outlining software. It's for the thinking.
    The rest of it, open formats, keeping choice in the software, valuing users, that's all so we do more thinking.
  We're not doing software right
    Nice writeup by James Fallows of Little Outliner, much appreciated.
    The story he tells is pretty typical of the software industry. He wrote about an online outliner a few years ago, but it's gone now. His favorite outliner, Grandview -- long-gone. My early outliners, gone too. A few products took their place, but nothing like the great start we got at the beginning of the PC software era.
    What changed is the way we finance software.
    And that seems to be a story reporters appreciate now, because one of their most-used products, Google Reader, is going away. Probably wouldn't happen if a smaller company made it, if they depended on revenue from the product to make payroll.
    The wave that's undermining journalism crashed over software many years ago. That's why when journalists want us to make their mission the center of our attention, it's a bit of narcissism on their part. Because what's happening to their profession happened to mine long ago.
    We human beings aren't that good at creating sustainable systems. The bees are dying. The globe is warming. And we lose great ideas in software, and it takes generations to reinvent them, only to lose them again.
    I'm bringing back a little of it now. Outliners are my thing. Now let's see if we can make this work as a business. :-)
  Outliner plug-ins
    As you may know, we shipped Little Outliner one week ago today.
    It's done pretty well. I've been watching our stats page regularly and there always seem to be at least a couple dozen people using it. Sometimes as many as a thousand people are outlining with our simple browser-based notepad.
    But all the users, and esp Kyle and myself, want the full-featured product. And we'll have something for you to try out, pretty soon. We did most of the development on the full product before releasing Little Outliner. We wanted to be sure the basic outlining code works, and we wanted to start off with the simple, no-brainer product.
    We will always have Little Outliner, because power-user products can get too complicated for beginners. Just like a ski mountain has a bunny slope, with a hot cup of cocoa close-by, we want to make sure there's a super-easy outliner so people can get comfortable with the idea.
    Okay, so we've built a rich product, it's coming soon -- but I want to also hook up tools to produce different ways of viewing text that was written and organized in the outliner. The prototypical example of this is a slide show. That's what MORE did so well, why it won all the awards, and caught the attention of the press and investors, Guy Kawasaki and Apple, and a whole boatload of users. So that's where we begin with the plug-in story today.
    We've created a little slide-show renderer, using the beautiful JavaScript presentations of reveal.js. Then we added an icon to the left side-bar of Little Outliner that takes the content of the bar cursor outline and shoots it over to the presenter. It in turn sends back the HTML which we then display in a preview window. All this is done with interfaces that are every bit as simple as they sound.
    All this is accomplished with OPML, which is an incredible way to package up a structure of text to ship between programs. It's almost a whole language unto itself for specifying the arrangement of text. And as you know, we have an easy editor for producing OPML (the world-famous Little Outliner you've heard so much about). And with all the experimentation that's been done in JavaScript tools for presenting stuff, the outliner is the missing element that makes this stuff truly user-friendly. If you don't believe me, have a look at the docs for reveal.js. Or bespoke.js. Or impress.js. All of them produce wonderfully animated presentations, but you have to be a real glutton for tech detail to even begin to create your own. But with an outliner it's dramatically easy.
    So now we're ready to show, dear developer, how plug-ins will work with our outliner. Right now you have to jump through a few hoops to enable the demo. This howto shows you what to do.
    http://worknotes.smallpicture.com/march2013/pluginDemo
    Hope you like! :-)
May 2013
  Dropbox is down
    We love that we don't have to run servers for most of what Fargo does, but that means we rely on Dropbox's and Amazon's servers.
    And Dropbox appears to be down now, and that means no Fargo.
    I feel the same sense of abandonment and confusion that other Fargo users feel.
    Nothing to be done about it until Dropbox comes back.
    Update at 11:30AM Eastern -- Dropbox is back up. :-)
    Dave
  My first ride on a CitiBike
    I just got back from a ride on a CitiBike, one of NYC's new bikeshare deals.
    Executive summary: It works. I felt like I was there on the first day the subway opened in NYC.
    However it was not without glitches.
    I am a founding member, having paid the $95 annual fee on the first day they were available. I am user number 1411. In theory as long as each trip is 45 minutes or less, I don't have to pay any more money to use bikes. As much as I want.
    But how does it work? I looked all over the website. They had instructions for people who were buying day passes or week passes, but no instructions for people who have annual memberships. I figured I'd find out when I got to the bike station.
    I went to the kiosk. No instructions for members. They did however suggest you get a membership if you're going to use it a lot. Okay I got one, so what do I do? No clue.
    I wasn't going to go home without trying it so I put my credit card in and started the process of buying a daily pass. There are some real usability problems with this system. First, it's very slow. Second, the display is at about belt level for me. Granted I'm tall, but not that tall. Some of the instructions refer to buttons that aren't there. You might guess wrong, as I did. Some user testing could have avoided this.
    It was so slow at responding to keystrokes, about midway through the process (I guess) after asking for my phone number and zip code, it just gave up and took me back to the main menu. By then a small crowd had gathered around to find out how it worked. A guy who had done it before showed me that I didn't need to do any of this. There's an unmarked slot where you can insert your keychain card. I did. It took a while for the light to turn from red to green. When it did, I was able to take the bike out of the rack, I adjusted the seat and off I went, south on Broadway toward Times Square.
    The bike looks like a klunker, but it rides pretty smooth!
    It has three gears, probably not enough, but pretty close to enough.
    It's comfortable, more comfortable than my regular ride.
    There are flashing red lights on the rear of the bike. (I know this because I saw them on another CitiBike.)
    There's no bell. That makes it an illegal bike in NYC, as I understand it. There were many times on my little excursion that I wish I had a bell. Pedestrians in NYC think bike lanes are useful for picnics, baby carriages (with babies in them), hand-holding at arms length. Waiting for red lights. You name it. The cars like to honk when they think you're in their way. It'd be nice to have something to fight back with, even though a bell sounds a little wimpy, it's less likely to get you killed than the typical NYers salute of Fuck You Asshole. :-)
      Update: Apparently it has a bell, I just didn't spot it.
    As soon as I entered Times Square proper, I took a right and headed over to Ninth Ave and rode all the way downtown to Bleecker St, where I made a left on 4th St, and dropped the bike off at the stand on 7th Ave. I got a couple of hot dogs at the Papaya Dog on 8th St, and rode the 1 train back uptown.
    It was on the subway that I realized that I had just used a new form of city transport, one that's perfectly suited for NY. I encountered a few other riders on my way. There's a Zero Day kind of feel to it. People seem excited. The bikes are nice. And there are enough bike lanes to get around.
    Bloomberg is a total 1 percenter, and a real dick about some things, but he got this one right. He will be remembered as a visionary mayor. I believe this is a keeper. Bikes and NY go together.
  New Flickr
    Users like changes in products that are responsive to their needs and wants.
    Bugs fixed. Performance improved. A key missing feature added.
    Users like a dialog with the product creators that show there's an understanding. That seems to work best if the people who decide about the product are also users of the product.
      Star Trek fans were horrified to find out that JJ Abrams was not a Star Trek fan.
      Couldn't they find a show runner who liked Star Trek-style science fiction?
    That's why we watch serial shows like Mad Men. We like to see the characters we've come to know in new situations. We nod our heads, that's right, that's what Don Draper would do. If all of a sudden Don Draper started acting like Instagram, we'd wonder if we had the wrong channel.
    I've been using Flickr since almost the beginning. When I started, a generous Scripting News reader gifted me with a Pro account, and I've been paying the $25 every year. Sometimes I ask myself if I reallly want to do it, but in the end I always pay the money.
    All the while, Flickr hardly changed at all. I wasn't sure if this was a good thing. It meant that the management at Yahoo wasn't paying attention, I figured. At least if they aren't paying attention there's little chance they'd screw with it. For many years they stayed away. But last week all that changed. All of it.
    The change in Flickr was radical. And the performance of the site, which recently has been pretty bad, got worse. I assume this is because the servers have to do a lot more work to figure out how to lay out the photos so they show up in a neat array, as if we were reading a magazine instead of browsing a website.
    Other people have analyzed the deal changes, I honestly don't care much if it's $25 or $50, and I don't come close to using a terabyte. Mostly what I value from Flickr is the longevity of it. It seemed like a safe place to leave my pictures. My father's pictures are there too. He died in 2009. Up till now I wasn't too worried.
    Couldn't Flickr have given us the option of not using the new features? What if we don't want them? Why force this on us.
    What if I don't like the idea of ads on my pictures, the ones I pay them to store for me, btw. I can pay to get rid of the ads for myself, but as I understand it (and my understanding might be wrong) the ads will still show up for people who view my pictures.
    I want my pictures to be the star on Flickr, not Flickr. I don't care if they're hip -- or if they appeal to people who like Instagram or Facebook or whatever. I kind of doubt whether the superficial changes they make will attract many new users. Their competition have been out there for quite some time. I don't think Flickr did anyting more than match them. And the changes are so superficial. It looks like a mask that says Instagram while lurking in the back is something old and ugly, as if they're embarassed about what Flickr was. The site I thought was good enough to pay $25 a year to use. Flickr which looked just fine without the mask, now looks like a New Yorker cartoon. A parody of something that was pretty good as it was, and is horribly tragically pathetic trying to be something it's not and probably never will be.
    I don't know what the answer is. Yahoo had a lot of money and offered some to the founders of Flickr. I don't blame them one bit for taking it. And how could the management at Yahoo understand what they bought if they weren't themselves users?
    There's a lot of irony in the fact that all this embarassing change was implemented on the same day they were promisng that they would never do to Tumblr what they were proudly and openly doing to Flickr. Didn't anyone at Yahoo speak up and say that maybe people might notice the disconnect?
  Fargo thread on Hacker News
    I didn't want to post Fargo to Hacker News because it would seem too much like an ad, but this evening someone else did, and it's generating a lot of new users, and people seem genuinely excited about it.
    https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5772623
    It's worth having a look at, and if you think it's interesting, please upvote! :-)
    Thanks!
  Kickstarter for VCs
    Listening to the latest Planet Money gave me an idea. They went to Kickstarter to give their fans a way to fund public radio in a fun way, by buying a t-shirt. They used this event as a way to program a few shows where they examined the economics of t-shirts, and since it's Planet Money it was hugely interesting. I love their show. And they raised an astounding amount of money. $590,807.
    I thought that the way they did it might work for raising money from tech investors and successful entrepreneurs to fund the development of new open formats and protocols.
    My work generates open formats and protocols, because unlike most other entrepreneurs, I have a philosophy of no lock-in for users. This makes me more vulnerable to predatory competition, and it usually it comes from VC-backed companies. It's hard for me to compete with them not only because they have more money (lots) but they also have the halo that comes from VC investment. There was a time when money from Kleiner Perkins was a huge lift for a startup and they're still a powerful ally, but now Union Square and Spark Capital are even more influential.
    I've talked with the principal guys at these funds about changing the way they invest. Let's add a premium to investments that add to the open ecosystem instead of just consuming, but so far none of them have been willing to go for it. So it falls to me to do it for them. I'm not aware of other companies that do this, if there are any please send me an email.
    I think it's a good idea for investors to put back, so that when this cycle winds down, as it inevitably will, there are some new open formats and protocols to build on. If you depend on me to do it, the results won't be as good as they should be.
    Now, we could go to Kickstarter and ask end-users to fund development of open formats and protocols, and it might work -- it did for the Diaspora guys. But I suspect they were more investing in their anti-Facebook message, or their youthfu optimism (some might say naivete). I won't make my work anti-anything (except lock-in which isn't a thing really, it's more of a practice) and as you know I lost my peach fuzz a long time ago. ;-)
    I think successful VCs and entrepreneurs should invest. I think they should kick back into the ecosystem that made them rich. I'll recuse myself from any investments such a Kickstarter might make, in fact I'll put money in along-side them. Let's give all new companies an incentive to give freedom of choice to their users, right from the start.
    Look at it this way -- when you get good service at a restaurant, you don't have to leave a tip. But you do anyway, because it's the right thing to do. Same thing here. Open formats make people rich. Those people should give back to create more open formats for themselves the next group of investors, entrepreneurs and users.
  If you love to make software...
    A 14-min podcast about programming as art and engineering, and why if that's what you do, you keep doing it.
  Mathew taught me something
    In late March when we shipped Little Outliner, Mathew Ingram wrote a very nice piece about our startup in GigaOm. But the title was problematic. It said: "Watch out, internet: Dave Winer is back in the business of making blogging tools." I groaned. We had just shipped an outliner, a small one, and there were no blogging tools anywhere in sight. But somehow, looking at my outliner, Mathew saw blogging. I should have listened more carefully. Instead I wrote a post that claimed, boldly: "I'm not making blogging tools." I put a smiley after it to show there were no hard feelings. I wanted to get on the record quickly and clearly. Don't think this is a blogging tool. It's an outliner.
    Then in April we shipped a much more ambitious product, Fargo -- whose name relative to Little Outliner was supposed to be kind of a pun. Little Outliner is little, but Fargo will Go Far(ther). How far it will go has not yet been revealed, but we're hard at work on a publishing platform that Fargo connects to. At the time I didn't think that the publishing side could or should be viewed as blogging. But now, as it's evolved, and I've met our first users (back in March we didn't know who they were), I can see that Mathew was right. We are in the business of making blogging tools. Did I know it at the time when I said we weren't? I didn't. Nothing changed except the product and the users. If they are changing, you have to go with them. You can't fight City Hall, and if your users say it's blogging, and a respected analyst says it's blogging -- it's blogging. ;-)
    Another thing happened while all our development was going on -- Tumblr, a product which I have deep respect for, sold to Yahoo. What I admire most about Tumblr, as a product designer, is its templating system. It's a descendent of the ones we developed at UserLand in Manila and Radio, which in turn were descended from the templates used by designers in the desktop publishing era using Quark and Pagemaker.
    Templating is at the core of blogging. The reach of a blogging system is determined by the richness and flexibility of its templating. And here's an interesting fact. If the content has structure, as outlines do, you can do a lot more for the user with templates. CSS is a nice beginning, but the outlines give you power flat text designers and authors can only dream of.
    We can, and are, doing more. Tumblr has now been around for a long time. Our earlier work has been around even longer. It's time for a fresh look at tools for designers, writers and programmers, centered around web content. If people want to think of that as blogging, who am I to argue with them.
    So I won't. :-)
    PS: A good content tool should also be a workgroup collaboration tool, as Fargo is.
  Investing in America on Memorial Day
    There's a false argument about the national debt that goes like this.
    We can't leave a huge debt for future generations to pay off.
    It's false for a couple of reasons:
      1. If you make good investments, they create growth and the growth pays off the investment. That's how business works. If you build an interstate highway system, that creates growth in cities that weren't served well by other forms of transport, they pay more taxes, and those taxes are used to pay back the bonds that were sold to create the highways.
        The time to worry is when we make investments that don't create value, like the invasion and occupation of Iraq and Afghanistan. No growth came as a result of that borrowing. We should think very carefully before starting unnecessary wars, aside from the moral reasons, the economics are really tough.
      2. We pay the debt back in a currency that we print. So if there isn't enough money coming in from #1, we pay back the bond holders with new dollars. You say that's inflationary, and I'm no economist, but I have a bit of common sense. If taxes aren't generating enough to pay back your good investments that's because the economy is depressed, and in those times a little inflation is a good thing, because it counteracts something even worse than inflation -- deflation.
    But even if you don't buy the math of it, consider the emotional argument. You're worried about future generations, but what about our debt to past generations that sacrificed for us so we could have good education, homes, health care, transport? Aren't we betraying them if we let the infrastructure they built for us crumble and disappear?
    When do we think about our ancestors and what we owe them?
    Of course that's what Memorial Day is for. To remember the people who came before, especially those who sacrificed so we could be propserous and healthy. We invest in our country because the only other option is to see the country crumble. And we invest because we hope for a better future for those who come next.
  The whitewashing method
    You know how they have all these methods of development, agile, etc.
    My method is whitewashing fences.
    I'm Tom Sawyer and I have a great fence and some paint.
    It's a beautiful day and I'm having the time of my life whitewashing this fence.
    My friends want to know if they can do it too.
    I don't know! I'm having so much fun...
    I'll have to get back to you.
  3 free ideas for Hacker News
    The other day I suggested perhaps adding blocking to HN, mostly as a way of starting a discussion. And it led to some interesting ideas that I think are worth considering.
    A lot of the personal attacks come from accounts created to post one message. The user has never commented before, or submitted a link to the site.
    So here are some ideas:
      1. Add a waiting period before new accounts can post. Like registering a gun.
      2. Charge for creating an account. Maybe $5 or so. Not very much money, but perhaps enough to make someone think again. If they want to be anonymous, use Bitcoin. That's what it's for.
      3. Automatically downvote posts from accounts created within the last hour. Make it clear to readers that this comment was made by a new account.
    What made me think of this idea was yet another one-off flame from a user named redmarx who created the account 13 hours ago, the exact same time his post was created. Now what do you think is going on there? A courageous whistle-blower, or a coward who doesn't want to own his or her own words? :-)
  Icon Chooser Dialog
    Our users love icons.
    I guess most users do, but people who write in outliners need a little more graphic relief because our work is totally text and structure. Adding a bit of graphics is like adding spice to a sauce. And they're fun!
    We're lucky because Font Awesome is such a great collection of icons. And it keeps getting better. If you're developing web apps, you're nuts if you aren't using Font Awesome. Seriously.
    Anyway, until Fargo 0.65 it was a lot of work to add an icon to an outline. What changed is that we created an icon chooser dialog that makes it easy and fun.
    If you're using Fargo, you can try it out with the Icon Chooser command in the Outliner menu.
    If you're not using Fargo, here's a little demo app you can try. It doesn't do much but allow you to browse the icons. When you click on one, an alert pops up saying which icon you chose.
    If you're a programmer, the code is free to use under the GPL. That means any improvements you make must also be licensed under the GPL. And it would be nice if you said where you got it. :-)
    https://github.com/scripting/Icon-Chooser
    Enjoy!
  Hacker News is depressing
    Yesterday someone at Hacker News thought to point to my piece about Marissa Mayer. It was a story I wrote in about 15 minutes. The point was at the end of the piece. As a preamble, I told a couple of stories from my personal experience. I figured it would get a few comments, maybe a couple of thousand reads, and that would be that. But the torrent of abuse on Hacker News was something that I haven't seen in a long time.
    One of the main reasons it doesn't work is that people don't ask questions to clarify. They jump to conclusions, some of which are very wrong. For example, they assumed I was the only person who was concerned about the BlogThis! button. Not true.
    They assumed that I was being "egotistical" for thinking that Google ever cared what I thought, and arrogant that I think they should care what I think now. It's a fact that at one point, early-on, Google did care. Their chief PR person was from Apple, Cindy McCaffrey, a class act in every way. She would routinely send emails to me and Doc Searls asking our opinions. Whether anyone else there cared, I don't know. But I was invited to a meeting with engineers to talk about blogging, RSS and XML-RPC at one point. I can't imagine why they would ask me to tell them what I think if they didn't care. I suppose it might have been a big conspiracy, like Mission Impossible. Hey I wouldn't put it past some of the trolls on Hacker News to argue that. :-)
    On the other hand, I don't take it personally that Google doesn't care what I think these days, partially because I don't think they care what anyone thinks. That's a long story all by itself.
    Now, we could have had an interesting discussion on HN if people would have asked questions for clarification instead of just piling on the abuse based on their impressions. That's taking them at face-value, assuming they really want an informative discussion. Probably the trolls in the thread, and their upvoters, wanted nothing like that.
    There were some other ludicrous statements. Did any of them know that I started a new company in December, and we shipped our first two products in March and April? They said I thought JavaScript was a bad language. How funny, because I'm writing almost all my code these days in JavaScript. They say I'm old and out of date. Funny. They're the ones who are out of date! :-)
    And if you say someone's old as a way of hurting them, the joke will eventually come back to hurt you. As one of the characters of Citizen Kane, Bernstein, said so eloquently, old age is the one disease you don't look forward to being cured of. It comes to everyone. I was young once. Now I'm middle-aged. Truth. And the sun rises in the east and sets in the west. I don't see what it has to do with the point of my blog post.
    Now I think there's a solution to letting the assholes control the conversation...
    As discourse has moved to Twitter, its big contribution has been to push aside the abuse that's common with discussion boards and mail lists. A very simple feature in Twitter, the block command, enforces decorum, by empowering the listener to turn you off if they find you offensive. People learn that if they say abusive things, they don't have to listen. The only people I listen to on Twitter are those who can make a point without getting personal. I learn from disagreement, but I can't stand people who use their freedom to speak as a way of hurting others.
    Then I wondered -- if it works so well for Twitter -- why can't sites block Hacker News if the abuse gets too heavy? After yesterday's experience I probably would do it. I like the flow they deliver, but I hate the abuse.
    So I have a suggestion for Paul Graham, the guy who runs Hacker News. Give sites the option of blocking links from Hacker News. I honestly don't care what the HN trolls, and the people who upvote them, supposedly "think" about me. None of it is based on anything real. A lot of it is anonymous. Sometimes people create accounts just for the purpose of dropping a big smelly turd in the middle of a discussion.
    Let's learn a trick from Twitter, and cut off the trolls at the source.
    PS: I subscribe to the Hacker News feed, which does not include comments. It's very useful stuff. So the links themselves are good.
  I tried Google Glass
    I went to dinner last night with the two Scobles, Robert and Patrick.
    Robert is famous for the picture of him wearing a Google Glass while in the shower.
    Last night, he was wearing the glasses most of the dinner, but took them off. He said I should try them. I did.
    What you get is a sequence of cards, with recent tweets, emails, Google Now type stuff. You scroll through them by swiping on the stem of the glasses. It doesn't take any time to get the hang of it.
    You can create tweets with voice. It happened so quickly I barely knew I had done it. I created a tweet on Scoble's account. It contained an expletive which they conveniently ***'ed out for me.
    It was nice. However I don't feel any lust for having one of my own. I carry an Android phone and an iPad with me most places. The UI of Google Glass, while interesting, doesn't seem to be an improvement over the phone interface.
    But it's early days. Maybe someone will figure this out. The Apple II wasn't much use before Visicalc, for example. The Mac came with a couple of demo apps, but didn't blossom until there were 20 or 30 useful pieces of software for it (it needed more of an ecosystem than an individual killer app).
  My one talk with Marissa Mayer
    It was 2003. Google had just bought Blogger. On the acquisition, they said they wouldn't do anything to tilt the table in favor of Blogger. There was concern in the wider blogging community that Google might use its power in search to give people an incentive to use Blogger over other publishing platforms. They said this would never happen.
    But a few weeks after the deal they broke the promise. They added a BlogThis! button to Google Toolbar. It only worked with Blogger. It would have been a simple matter to make it work with any blogging tool. But they didn't see why they should do that.
      It would have been okay if Blogger was the default. But give the users a preference to set the address of our blogging platform.
    Back then Google cared a little about what I thought, so the result was a conference call between me and an exec at Google, Marissa Mayer. I was driving cross-country from California to Boston, so I stopped in Utah, in the parking lot of a 7-11 just east of Salt Lake City, and we had the call.
    All I remember of it was there came a point in the conversation when Mayer had had enough. She just got up and left. I think the people remaining in the conference room were a little embarassed. Google didn't do anything to change the BlogThis! button.
    All this is to say that the promises execs make on acquisitions are meaningless. They own the thing, they will do what they want to with it. It doesn't matter how many nice sounds Mayer makes on the deal. At the core she cares not one bit what the users of Tumblr think. She's saying what she needs to say to make the deal happen. To avoid a PR crisis on Day One. To make the team at Tumblr feel like their work has value to the new owners. That somehow this acquisition isn't actually an acquisition.
    I have some intuition about this myself, because I sold a company. We were bought because we had a presence in the Mac market, which was highly coveted at the time. I negotiated for myself a role as the "Chief architect of Symantec's Mac strategy." A few weeks after the deal I made a presentation to the exec staff about what our Mac strategy would be. Only one person showed up, the president of the company, Gordon Eubanks. He watched a couple of slides and thanked me for the input. I asked What about my chief architect role? He told me that was something they told me to get me to do the deal.
    He left the room. What was I going to do? What could I do? Nothing, that's what. :-)
    Moral of the story: When you sell your company, no matter what promises were made, you sold it. It's theirs now. They will do what they want to with it. Promises don't matter.
  Yahoo buying Tumblr
    It looks like Yahoo is buying Tumblr.
    I feel some sense of pride here because Tumblr is a descendent of products I made, Manila and Radio, that laid the groundwork for products like theirs. David Karp and Marco Arment will get rich (or richer) and that's cool because they're smart people who worked hard and made something real happened. I am in awe of systems that handle as much content as Tumblr. Their users should be in awe as well, imho.
    Yet we still don't have a whole system for product development in this industry.
    The rewards for digging the first holes that become the foundations for great systems like Tumblr and WordPress are minimal, if they exist at all. When you try to talk with investors about kicking back a bit of their proceeds in ventures that in addition providing good ROI, also create open formats and protocols that industries can be built on, you get blank stares. As if they don't understand. Of course they do understand, it's just easier to pretend they don't.
    They profit from this work, but like the grasshopper in the famous fable, they aren't willing to participate in the investment that made the profit possible. Too bad, because if they did -- I think their companies would be stronger as a result. The better the foundation, the bigger the building you can make, and the more efficient it is to keep it running. Had we had a longer easier runway for Radio and Manila, Tumblr might have gone further on less investment.
    Anyway, that's a small point right now. Get out the champagne and celebrate, because some of the good guys won. (Or at least appear to have, we'll find out for sure tomorrow.)
  Users mail list for Dropbox
    I've been wondering lately why there has been so little useful stuff written about Fargo. It's an interesting product from a lot of angles.
    So I've been asking questions, and this is what I've figured out.
    1. There are great places to go for reviews of Mac products.
    2. If you want to know about software that's sold on Amazon, you'll find lots of reviews from users. I understand that well because I depend on reviews for almost everything I buy on Amazon.
    3. For IOS and Android apps there are the stores, which have reviews.
    But there is no place, that I know for Dropbox users to find out what the great apps are and what users are doing with them.
    Probably because Dropbox as a platform is so new?
    It's like a fog here, because we're all operating with so little information.
    So let's solove the problem. I started a mail list today for users of Dropbox who want to be in the loop on all kinds of new products. Obviously it's a chicken and egg thing. If enough users show up, the developers will follow, and vice versa.
    https://groups.google.com/forum/dropbox-users
    We'll probably need some rules of conduct at some point, or move to a blog or blogs, because mail lists always tend to flame out if there's no moderation, but for now, it's a good way for people to meet, if there's enough interest.
    As a vendor of a Dropbox-based product, I can tell you I am highly motivated to see this work. Most people who use Dropbox, some of whom would love a great outliner, don't know my product exists. I want desperately to fix that. :-)
  Google is the new MSM
    Last night watching the NBA on TNT, new commercials for the YouTube comedy fest. The production was distinctly not YouTube. It was professional in every way. Nothing amateur about it. Google is now MSM. All that talk about Burning Man is sleight of hand. That guy has as much in common with you and me as Rupert Murdoch does.
    It's not just Google, Twitter is also MSM. Facebook? Eh. Their presence on TV is mostly in URLs at the bottom of other peoples' ads. Their commercials are amateurish, awful imitations of other tech company commercials. Not to say they're the only ones with awful commercials, but theirs are awful in their amateurishness.
    A blog post on Forbes suggests that Google is going to bring RSS back in a MSM-type way. You'll be able to follow Blogger blogs in Google Plus. Maybe they'll make a deal with Automattic and Tumblr to make it possible to follow their blogs too. Me and you? Well we can be followed, but only if we use one of the silos. We have to be locked in someone's trunk to participate.
    The web is going to play the same role to all this crazy locked up stuff that it played to MSM in the 90s. We're going to be the oddballs. The ones with amateurish sites. We'll be the artisans, the local farmers of ideas. The ones that lack polish but speak from our experience. We'll do what Bulworth so famously did. I don't have access, and I don't want it. I'd much prefer to hear from other people who don't have access and don't want it.
    The web keeps moving. If your attention has shifted and you can't see that, that's not the same thing as the web being lost. Maybe you got lost? :-)
  Why Dave Wynn uses Fargo
    Over on our Community Feed for Fargo users, a conversation started about how people are loving writing code with Fargo. This really surprised me, because we haven't done much to encourage this. There's a simple feature in the app that allows you to run a single-line of JavaScript code. This means you can call any routine that's in Fargo, or in Bootstrap, jQuery or in the core JavaScript libraries.
    We have it in there because it's useful for one-liners, for debugging the app. It's not meant to make it a programming environment. But some people seem to love it. I wanted to know why, so I asked. And what came back from Dave Wynn, a user who I had not met until this exchange, was a simple and eloquent explanation of why Fargo is a great product (I happen to agree with him of course, but then it's partly my creation). Here's what he said, of course in an outline (Fargo is an outliner).
    It's as cross platform as it gets
      I use Windows at work and Linux at home, and making everything play nice (even with Dropbox) can be a HUGE pain
      Linux also doesn't get a lot of love with regard to clean, user-focused apps
    It's file backed
      I couldn't get into Workflowy because I couldn't trust that they wouldn't just disappear one day, leaving all of my thoughts unavailable in the ether
      I got into org-mode precisely because of this, but it took a lot of tweaking in order to work, and even then still missed some basic things like spell-check (which needed a diferent engine for each platform... see above)
    I can inspect it much more easily than other software
      Sure I know I can't see everything that's going on, but I can press the F12 key, and that makes little mods much more possible for a beginner like me
    Feedback is immediate
      CSS changes kick in right away, and there's no crazy compile step in order to get things right
  Working without servers
    One of our fetishes at Small Picture is getting cool stuff working with no servers.
    You can get a lot done. For example -- Little Outliner. There's only one function it relies on a server for, the importing of OPML. And if you think about it, it's ridiculous that that function has to be done through a server. The code is running in a browser, which is perfectly suited to get a file over the Internet.
    Many of the limits of the 2013 web are accidents of history. Someone at some time thought an operation was too powerful, that it could be abused, so they made it illegal. But they didn't close off the ability to call a server to do it for us, so we effectively can do anything we need to do.
    A great example of that is the way Dropbox allows Fargo to save to the local file system.
    This is something we're not supposed to be able to do. But we're doing it anyway. And nothing is breaking as far as I can tell. We're inside a very simple easy to understand sandbox, a sub-folder of the Dropbox folder.
    And in addition to being able to write to the local file system, we get cross-device synchronization for free. That's a great deal. (Understatement.)
    All this means things are shifting pretty radically. Who is the operating system vendor if my files are equally accessible on Windows, Mac, Android, Linux, IOS, etc? Dropbox is, that's who.
    A couple of years ago I asked the guys at Automattic to add a feature to their API that would allow me to store a small XML file along with a blog post. Had they done this, and if we had followed where it would logically have led, today they would have the equivalent of Dropbox, along with content management. You'd be able to publish just by saving a file.
    Today you have to figure Dropbox sees this opportunity. And that they will, eventually, navigate to roughly where WordPress is.
    The server is moving. A fair amount of what used to be "up there" is now in JavaScript, in the browser. The network services are doing what only they can do, provide global access to published information. And unfortunately due to history, they are also acting as pointless proxies for things a browser app should be able to do for itself.
  What's new (or broken) with the Twitter API?
    My linkblogging tool, Radio2, has a connection with Twitter. You can establish a link between your feed and Twitter so that every item in your feed is also posted to Twitter.
    Here's a screen shot. To create the connection you click on the blue bird. That starts an OAuth conversation where the user gives Radio2 permission to post to his or her Twitter account.
    I've been hearing, peripherally, that some part of the old Twitter API is about to be turned off, or maybe has already been turned off. I can't pay full attention because it's a small feature, used by just a few people, and I have my attention elsewhere.
    Late last night I tried clicking on the blue bird, and sure enough there appears to be some breakage. Twitter complains that there is "no request token for this page." Perhaps they changed something in their OAuth implementation?
    I should investigate.
    If you have any clues, please post a comment.
    Thanks! :-)
  We need a curator for the Apple river
    I did a house-cleaning on my river server on May 9. At that time some of the rivers stopped updating. Mostly the ones that no longer have tabs in the user interface because either I personally didn't have enough interest in the subject and not many other people were reading them. I didn't feel like paying for machine resources if only one or two people were reading the flow, or if there were only one or two new items a week.
    One of the rivers that I turned off is the Apple river. I use a Mac, several in fact. And I have an iPad and an iPod. I am a long-time Apple shareholder. I am an Apple user, but I am not a dedicated member of the Apple community like some people I respect are. For example, Brent Simmons, Marco Arment, John Gruber, Daniel Jalkut or Michael Gartenberg. I see a tremendous value in the river, if only someone rooted in the community would take an interest. It's also a potential money-maker, imho.
    It's really time for communities to spread out and become more inclusive. With a well-curated river, the Mac community can explore more niches, and grow in some interesting ways, perhaps.
    So I offer to keep running the river...
    1. If someone with a site with serious flow offers to display the river on their site, linked to from their home page.
    2. It can be rendered in their template.
    3. I will provide support on the technical process for getting the river to display well in another site. It involves using jQuery, something I'm not an expert in. But I got it to work here, so I presume we can get it working anywhere. If we need help I know where to ask for it. ;-)
    4. The curator has to have the ability to edit an OPML subscription list, and make it available at a public HTTP address. Fargo, my outliner, does this very nicely, in conjunction with Dropbox. But you can use any tool you like.
    5. The person doing the curating and the person doing the display can be different people, if you like.
    6. Curating here means choosing feeds, not stories. We're looking for good sources of Mac news and opinion. But it's up to those sources to decide what goes in the river. It's just an RSS aggregator on the back-end.
    7. All I want in return is a link from the page back to a page that shows people how to set up their own rivers, which I will write. It won't be hype-ish. I may ask for a little money for the software.
    I think the Apple river is a great place to start. Now I'm looking for one of the leaders in the Mac blogging world to step up and work with me on this. I may not be a Mac insider these days, but I go back to the beginning. I was onstage at the Mac rollout in 1984. I had an ad in the first issue of MacWorld. My product won the top Eddy in 1986. I used to go to WWDC back when it was in San Jose. I even spoke at WWDC one year. Ask Guy Kawasaki. ;-)
    Let's do this. I think it'll turn out to be an important step in the growth of the Mac blogosphere.
  Should the Community Feed be an RSS feed in addition to being an OPML feed?
    This question came up in the Community Feed, which you can read in Fargo, by choosing the Community Feed command from the Docs menu. Or you can read it in the Small Picture Reader if you don't use Fargo. I wrote my answer there, but thought it would be interesting to also post it here. No I didn't use the fancy Blogging 2.0 protocol I described in an earlier post. Soooon!
    Well of course it would be nice to have everything, if there were no cost.
    It would take time to write the code and keep it running. It would be worth doing if there would be a lot of people using it. But right now the Community Feed a new feature. We're still at the point where we're introducing ourselves. If that's all it does it will have been worth it.
    I'm an investor in software, and I have to make decisions as any investor would. I can't buy everything. And right now there are other projects that I think need more attention.
    Also, and this is a key point, this is not something you need Kyle or me to do. The OPML feed is public. If you want to write the code to convert it to an RSS feed, you can do it.
      Read it once every ten minutes. Use the eTag feature of HTTP to conserve bandwidth. Generate RSS 2.0. How will you synthesize a title for each item? I don't know, that's a hard problem. RSS 2.0 doesn't require titles, but Google Reader did. That made generating RSS feeds a difficult process for data that doesn't inherently have titles. But Google Reader is going away, so we're free to do as we please, you say. Not so fast. The replacements are clones. I bet they're just as picky as GR was. At least until the dust settles, and that isn't going to happen this year even, probably.
    But OPML feeds? Ahhh that's easy. Since I'm writing both ends I can make it work. And if I want to change things based on what I learn, I can do that too. That's why the early days on anything are important. And why you should go slowly enough so you can feed back what you learn into the protocol.
    Anyway you see these questions sound simple, but when you actually start writing the code, they can become complex.
    Bottom-line: My bet is that no one would use an RSS feed of this content. That makes it a bad investment. I've been wrong before, btw.
  Standards for Rivers
        Georgia
    Jay Rosen wrote me last week to say that the River of News concept had reached a tipping point. That led me to publish a brief email exchange with Brent Simmons about what a river is, from a design standpoint. But there's more to rivers than their form, there are a couple of other very important ways to look at them:
      1. Standardization.
        The Mac beat the IBM PC because there were user interface standards. If I learned how to use a couple of apps, I was actually learning how to use all of them. If your river and my river work and act differently, we have no advantage, and people are going to stay with Twitter, because there, the UI for all rivers is the same. True, it's limited to 140 characters, but the advantages of standardization make Twitter easy and familiar.
        It should also be possible for users to combine rivers. I want Reuters and Wired rivers, for example, but I don't want to go to two places to view their news. Again with standards, we don't have to force readers to make a choice. This means growth for the alternate-Twitter, which is the potential of news moving to rivers.
        Standardization is something the tech industry has a hard time with. But my experience with news and RSS is that it's not as much of a problem with publishing. Once we had the NYT on board, all the other pubs followed, compatibly, without the usual fighting that happens in tech.
          However now that they have been hiring programmers, lots of them, they're becoming more like the tech industry, in not-positive ways.
        I offer the format we're using for rivers. It's a simple jQuery template, and an equally simple JSON format. The template was designed by an open community in a Google Group a couple of years ago. I designed the JSON format to help define the problem for the group. It was a wonderfully successful open collaboration. I hope other people just use it as-is.
      2. Open the doors.
        This part, I believe, will be difficult for news organizations. But, if you want to compete with Twitter, you have to include bloggers in your stream. I don't mean reporters who call themselves bloggers, rather people who have expertise or experience that makes them the kind of people reporters like to quote. People whose ideas you think are dangerous. More of that.
        News needs reforming, literally, it needs to be formed again around the new reality -- we all have printing presses. News will never reform itself until it feels the pressure from the sources, where it matters most, on the screens of their readers.
        We need to have one environment where professional reporters, sources and critics co-mingle their thoughts. We don't need a Public Editor as much as we need The Public. That's why Twitter has been so popular, but it's unfortunate that the news industry has been unwilling to meet them there.
  Blogging 2.0
        Georgia
        160%
    I wrote a piece in August 2012 which I posted on Medium entitled We Could Make History, in which I proposed that we get together and create a new API to connect authoring tools to publishing environments.
    At the time I thought it was a long shot, but worth putting it out there in case anyone was listening at Medium, or elsewhere. That's why I made it openly. And why I put the post on Medium.
    Today I'm writing this post on my own blogging platform, which is more or less some scaffolding I put together to hook my outliner up to the web, so I could publish, before we had something real that others could use.
    Now I can make a more concrete proposal because Fargo is visible, people can better imagine what I'm talking about.
    1. I don't like the idea of writing something to have it visible in only one place.
    2. Sometimes I find that a comment I wrote in one place is really a blog post, but why should it stop being a comment?
    3. Copy/paste is an awful synch protocol. It's 2013. We can do better! In fact we live in a time of great progress in sychronization, thanks to Dropbox. Publishing should make the leap into the future as well.
    4. Software now runs in the browser, written in JavaScript. It's indistinguishable from desktop software. So any protocol we come up with must work equally well with JS apps running in the browser.
    5. Meanwhile there are a number of projects underway to bring blogging up to date. But they're doing it without APIs and without feeds. Why? That's not really progress.
    6. We were able to hook up Fargo to WordPress, largely to show what's possible. But we had to set up a proxy server so that our JS app running in the browser could call their server. This is a waste of resources and does not scale.
    7. We will have a for-real CMS running on a server. It will do things that are new, that none of the other publishing platforms do. But there will still be things they do that we don't. APIs are needed. But I'd prefer to work with others to come up with the API, rather than do both ends myself. If we do it that way we get there sooner, better.
    8. I'm pretty sure there will be APIs here. But I'd rather there just be one. We had that worked out pretty well in Blogging 1.0. But let's do it even better in 2.0.
    9. Who wants to go first? :-)
  Community Feed in Fargo 0.59
    More about Fargo 0.59.
  Levy on BigCo innovation
    Levy: "To really think big, you can't be at a big company."
    I was amazed that these words came from Steven Levy, former Newsweek tech reporter, and late of Wired. He's spent a career supporting the myth not just that big ideas can come from big companies, but that they only come from big companies.
    He was paraphrasing Evan Williams, founder of Twitter and Blogger. But it's still an amazing transformation.
    Now, I don't expect the press to all of a sudden start reporting on where big ideas actually come from. But it's nice to be able to point to the truth, just once, from such a source.
    BTW, we're thinking very big at Small Picture. :-)
  Q&A w/Brent re River of News
        Palatino
    On April 11, Brent Simmons sent an email, included below. My words are indented beneath his in italic.
        true
        none
        italic
    I like the river of news style of feed reading, despite having once written an RSS reader that doesn't use that style.
    But I'm not actually 100% sure what the technical definition is. I'm not trying to be obtuse about this -- I want to be sure I understand.
    I think it's something like this, but I'm not sure which parts are optional, and I might be missing things.
    1. It presents a list of articles from multiple feeds in a scrollable list.
      Yes.
    2. There might be multiple scrollable lists -- tabs of some kind.
      Not required, but you can do it that way (I have it with my mediahackers site). But each one is a river, not the whole thing.
    3. Items in the list are sorted in reverse-chronological order by arrival date (date the feed scanner saw the item) rather than by pubDate. (True?)
      True. By arrival date. pubDate is not important for ordering.
    4. Items are presented with title, link, and an excerpt. The excerpt should be just long enough to be meaningful (around 280 characters).
      You could leave out the excerpt and it would still be a river. The important thing is that the excerpt be of determinate length, and short enough so you can see a lot of items on screen at the same time.
    5. It handles edited items by ____? (I don't know. Does it show them again?)
      Does not show edited items again.
    6. There is no notion of read/unread whatsoever, and thus no unread counts.
      Correct. No notion of read/unread.
    7. There is no notion of starred (or flagged, or saved) items whatsoever. (Users can blog, send to a read-it-later service, etc. as they normally would for any web page.)
      Not true -- you can do whatever you want there. I include a RT link on my items. Just as long as it's small and doesn't interfere with skimming.
    8. A river of news feed scanner outputs river.js data. (Is this optional? Could it be RSS?)
      Not required. It would however be useful to have a standard here. I want to write all my displayers in JS running in the browser.
    9. Do river-of-news readers have to be web pages? Could an iOS or Mac app qualify, if it met all the criteria?
      Of course it could be an IOS app.
      The main idea aren't the details, but the way its used. I can scroll back to the point where I hit something I seen. Quickly. My memory is perfectly capable of telling me I've seen something before. You can rely on it, people can do this.
  11th hour for news nets
    Michael Wolff comments on the job ad that Twitter is running, looking for a manager of news.
    He suggests existing news execs, and that's probably the kind of person Twitter is looking for for this job.
    It's a head-fake. This guy is a figure-head. He or she will be working with media companies, speaking at conferences, talking about how Twitter is helping media companies succeed in the age of realtime Internet-delivered news. He or she is a feel-good ambassador to the news industry. A person handing out complementary samples of pasta and baked goods while the real action is elsewhere.
    The job is a bedtime story. News will be as it always was, with familiar faces and jobs, just with a new delivery system.
    Meanwhile, the news system of the future is booting up all around Twitter, which is and always has been a coral reef. They need a new shipwreck to build around, and this time the sunken ship is the remains of the news industry.
    Even at this late hour, I have a recommendation to any player in the news industry.
    1. Create a river of news and put it on your home page.
    2. Include all the news from your own organization, but include news from bloggers in your community.
    3. Include the feeds of your competitors.
    4. Deliver the best news product you can with today's technology. You can link from the river to stuff behind your paywall, if you must, but the river itself must be freely accessible. Think of it as a river of ads for full-length stories.
    5. No 140-char limit. Pick a higher number. There should still be a limit to the length of a synopsis. 500 characters is plenty. Most NYT synopses are much shorter than that.
    6. Make nice with Twitter. You can do a head-fake too. :-)
  Managing expectations
    In software, mis-managed expectation can be as damning as it is in sports and politics.
    For example, coming into a political debate, each side tries to portray the other as vastly superior, in every way. If you can get the expectation low enough for your guy, he or she might "win" just by showing up.
    In sport, where the outcome is measured more definitely, in points on a scoreboard, you manage expectation to play with the mind of your opponent. An over-confident adversary might relax, and create openings. The Knicks almost lost to the Celtics that way.
    In software, I've seen it happen over and over. I've never had to deal with too-high expectations, but my competitors have. The first time I encountered it, with competition from a much-bigger Lotus Development, I was scared. But when we survived the competition without a scratch, I learned that just because everyone thinks you're going to lose, don't necessarily make it so.
    I wasn't happy to see the expectations so high for the vaporware product Diaspora. The kids behind it were too young and inexperienced to know how much work there is in creating a finished usable product. Academia, which generally doesn't have much respect for commercial development, doesn't help. The result was awful.
    Coach Bill Walsh of the 49ers had this down. Before a big game he'd always pump up the skill and courage of his opponent. Why not? Maybe they'll get over-confident. Either way, if he wins, he just vanquished a superior adversary. And if they lost, he gets to shrug it off with an I-told-you-so.
    In sport, politics or software, no one cares how great you think you are. What matters is what happens on the playing field. Did you win or lose? And did you do it with grace?
  RFC: Markdown and outliners
    I've had Markdown on my to-do list for a few months, and the other day, with a bit of blank space in my worklist, I decided to give it a shot.
    It was amazingly easy to integrate into our JavaScript app. I just downloaded the source for Pagedown, the Markdown interpreter used by Stack Overflow. I put it into a file on our server, and included it in Fargo. Added a command to the File menu, and came up with a simple way to generate it for users. The whole thing was done in a couple of hours.
    Now we need people who know Markdown and outliners to take a look at this, try it out and relatively quickly, before there's an installed base to break, figure out if there's anything special we need to do, because this is an outliner and not a straight text editor.
    Here are a couple of considerations:
    1. Should we generate one or two return chars at the end of every outline heading? At first we did one, then thought better and generated two, but now we're back at one. Pretty sure one is the right answer. We often think of a headline as a paragraph, but sometimes headlines are titles. Markdown views titles and paragraphs very differently.
    2. Indentation. I thought at first that we should generate a tab for every level, but backed out of that idea quickly because Markdown treats tabs as very special characters. Everything deeper than level 0 would be seen as preformatted code. Not the desired outcome.
    So I wonder if there have been any others who have integrated outlining and Markdown before? If so, what did they do here?
    See the Fargo docs for an idea how it works from a user's standpoint.
    I welcome any comments from Markdown experts (I am anything but that).
  Fargo and Markdown
    A quick note about a new development with our Fargo outliner.
    Fargo now has a Markdown processor baked-in. This means that a user can write a Markdown-formatted outline, and generate HTML from it, with a single command in the File menu.
      We're using the open source Pagedown library.
    Markdown and text go together, by design. Outliners are text editors, a special kind that understand structure. There is a structure to Markdown, as there is structure to HTML, but so far as we know, none of the Markdown editors have been outliners.
    How the connection with outlines and Markdown will proceed is an unknown. By baking in Markdown we're asking a simple question. How does this work? We hope to hear from users and other smart people who have ideas.
    This feature is available in Fargo 0.55, which is now released on the site.
    Let's have fun! :-)
  The Knicks as a metaphor
    A number of Knicks players did something extremely stupid when they dressed in black for last night's game, saying they were dressing for the Celtics' funeral. These guys may be talented athletes, but they don't understand sports. Amazingly. How could they get that far in the NBA without understanding that you don't celebrate until you win. I know they're young. I wonder if they've ever heard about Game 6 of the 1986 World Series.
    Sports, if it teaches us anything, it's how to struggle against our folly. How not to tempt fate. How to manage our own presence.
    Look at the incredible baskets these guys make. But they only make them when they're grounded, in the moment, feeling the energy, whatever it is. So JR Smith started celebrating after they had a solid lead in Game 3. He got ejected, and suspended, and not only wasn't there to help in Game 4, he broke the bubble around the Knicks, that had been around the team since they emerged from an awful funk in February. Now we have to wonder if they can get it back.
    The Celtics, last night, walking off the court, may have helped the Knicks get back in the groove, repeating trash talk about Carmelo's wife. I'm just theorizing, lip-reading. But maybe he'll get angry and really want to win. That's probably all it takes.
    Meanwhile in Oklahoma City, the Thunder coach thought he could sneak by the Rockets with a trick. Oh how sad. Kevin Durant who I thought was a true fighter, is instead mired in self-pity. And the Rockets, a young, smart, admirable -- wonderful group of young men -- are pushing every one of their buttons, artfully. They might pull out the upset. Amazing parallels between the Celtics and the Rockets. One team old, one young. Both not going out peacefully.
    All this is a metaphor for my former friend Mike Arrington, who may be the JR Smith of tech. He was celebrating the demise of RSS while the body was still breathing. He had no clue that he had won, or that anyone was keeping score.
    Technology isn't all that different from basketball. There's teamwork, and bubbles of energy, and franchises. RSS is not something that dies, any more than the NBA dies. Players come and go, there are generations -- the Patrick Ewing Knicks and the Bernard King Knicks. Now we have the Carmelo Anthony Knicks. But RSS, like the NBA is bigger than me or Mike. He doesn't get to say it's dead. RSS just laughs, shrugs it off and keeps on going.
  The Fargo-WordPress connection
    My outliner is an authoring tool. I think of it as the hub of a wheel with lots of spokes. At the end of each spoke is a way to communicate.
    Some of the spokes lead to private places, for example, the worknotes I share with my programming partner. No one else sees those. But then there are blog posts, like the one you're reading now. At the end of this spoke is software I wrote that renders an outline in this form. I'm one of a small number of people, today, using that method of rendering.
    Yesterday we released a spoke that leads to WordPress, the popular open source blogging environment. You can now use Fargo to create and edit posts in WordPress. This works in two ways:
      1. You can use the outliner to organize a library of posts you want to be able to access quickly.
      2. You can use the outliner to structure each blog post.
        By default each level is represented in the blog post by indentation. But we also add CSS styles to each paragraph that indicate what level they are at. So a skilled CSS designer can set it up so that level indentation does much more to control the appearance of the text. I expect lots of interesting stuff to develop here.
    Here are the docs for the feature, and a list of recent new posts written in Fargo.
    Here's a homemade video demo of the new Fargo-WordPress connection.
    Over time you'll see us add more connection, and of course offer a general way for anyone to add new spokes to the wheel. And because we're using an open format, it'll even be possible to hook other outliners up to the same connections.
    For anyone who cares, this is how you bootstrap a new standard, a coral reef for authoring and rendering.
    PS: This is what the post looks like in WordPress. :-)
June 2013
  The quiet war in tech
    The war is over what information you and I get, and what information they get.
    As we get less, they get more. As we lose control, they gain it.
    In this war, the governments have more in common than they have differences. The Chinese probably could destroy our banking system, and we could probably destroy theirs, but they don't want that, and our government doesn't either. They're really on the same side.
    What they want is to keep order, I really believe that. The order that keeps the rich rich, and more or less ignores the challenges we all face in keeping our species alive on this planet. I understand the sentiment. There's so much to comprehend, if you want to have any kind of quality of life, you have to compartmentalize. If you look at preserving order, you can't pay attention to climate change.
    I think though we all know the precarious system of banking and computer networks isn't going to keep running forever. There's going to be a meltdown. We had one in 2008, and it looks like we just re-inflated the bubble temporarily, bought a little time, it's just going to get us back to where we were, only this time the pop will be bigger.
    If you were President of the United States, and you saw a certain probability of this happening, you'd re-up on the side of preserving order. That means you have to be prepared for the day when people go to the ATM and find their bank account is inaccessible. When it happens to everyone even. How are the rich people going to enjoy their lifestyles when that kind of chaos is going on? It seems quite possible we'll live to see this happen.
    It's all tech, top to bottom. The banking system is tech. The military is tech. And in that context, it's not surprising that our, the people's, information access systems are really weak compared to the ones the governments have. That's no accident. Our tools have been getting more precarious, thanks to bugs introduced by the browser vendors (if they're not deliberate, they're incredibly incompetent, your choice). And Google captured almost all the tech of RSS, only to shut it down. Just as things show some sign of coming back to life, now Facebook sounds like they'd like to have their turn at pwning the open public news flow. Please, if you make a feed, and you read this, keep making the feed as-is, no matter what Facebook asks you to do to it. By now it should be obvious that the big tech companies are not our friends. They're more like the government than they are like you and me. Maybe not their fault, maybe they didn't see it coming, but I doubt they'd deny that they're there now.
    JavaScript is another item that we should be thinking about. Google is developing the same kind of power over the programming language of the Internet that they had over RSS. Over time they're likely to move their implementation of JS away from the standard. I've spent most of the last year programming in JS, and I think there's a lot to be said for making the language smaller and more efficient. But I'm a newbie, and if I had spent the last five years developing in it, the last thing I'd want to hear is that the language itself is considered a moving target. So, net-net, we have to insist that for now at least JS stay what it is. I don't trust anything about Google to do this right. They may think they know what they're doing, but they led us right into control by the government. That's a mess that needs undoing, and they shouldn't be creating any more messes.
    One more note. I said a while back that if you want to understand politics you have to become deeply immersed in tech. The political reporters and bloggers have been totally too casual about that, even the smart relatively open-minded ones, and that even includes Glenn Greenwald. Is he really prepared to listen to Snowden, or can he just report an approximation of what Snowden tells him? It's the latter, because as smart as Greenwald is, he hasn't been spending the last N years schooling himself in the technology that we've built our existence around.
    So think about it, how are we going to boot up the intelligence we need to make sense of this situation in time to make a difference?
    Serious question, and heavy times.
  The Michael Jordan of X
    I turned 58 last month, and that means we're getting within striking distance of 60. Actually I'm getting within striking distance of 60. It's a bit of a shock, actually. Inside I feel 19. Or maybe 30. But 58? 60. OMG. Ohhh.
    But Monday night just before Game 7 of the Eastern Division Championship, I solved a problem that I had been thinking about for at least 20 years. It had to do with templating in content management systems. It came to me as we re-approached a problem I had approached several times before in earlier products. This time, I saw the way around the conundrum that had evaded me before. I don't think this is because I'm smarter than I was when I was 38 or 48, rather it's because I have the 20 years of experience that I didn't have then.
    The next little bit is a story that is not about the people involved, Fred Wilson, John Doerr and Michael Jordan, it's illustrative. I have the greatest respect and admiration for all three of them, not just for their accomplishments in the past, but for what they are doing today. All three are very much alive. And all three are still taking chances, learning, and doing new things.
    On Twitter, I saw Wilson refer to Doerr as The Michael Jordan of VC. Something bothered me about this. So I pondered it and realized the problem. How I got there was by changing some of the names, a couple of times and thinking in analogies.
    1. I imagined Matt Mullenweg saying I was The Michael Jordan of Software. This wasn't hard, because Matt said something similar a few weeks ago. No doubt said with genuine admiration, it exposed something inside that's imho incorrect. He said that it's amazing that I keep writing software, many years after I no longer had to. I imagine when Matt looks at me, he hopes that he will have the drive to create when he's my age (he's about 30 years younger than me). But I'd rather if Matt ignored my age and my financial circumstances, and looked at the actual software I'm writing -- today -- not in the past. I would prefer if he said: I think Dave's new software is interesting, but I don't understand it. Or I think Dave's software is revolutionary and it will have impact on all software being developed today. Or something that reflected my status as an active player, maybe even an active superstar. But I think conventional thinking shuts off that train of thought.
      And btw, if you look to basketball as an example, the young guys always study the work of people who came before them. The young Knick Iman Schumpert is a great example and inspiration. In an interview I saw him explain in great detail the players who he was borrowing style from. In tech, we tend to throw all that away. We won't always do it, as the art matures we'll understand that we're borrowing from the past, and then become receptive to learning from prior art. But first we have to cure ourselves of the idea that people are obsolete so early. Even basketball, where the bodies can't compete after 40, manages to use the skill and experience of the veterans, as coaches, advisers, trainers.
      Also, I know that what Matt said was a compliment. But it also had meaning. It's possible for something to be both a compliment and worth examining.
    2. I had an experience on Twitter with Joshua Benton, someone who I admire and think highly of, who I know hasn't used my new software. This came up in a discussion. I more or less asked him to check out my software before declaring blogging dead. It may not have sounded like that to him and it may have been said more awkwardly (140 char limit). His response was like Matt's. I was using your software in 1990 he said. Nice. So I'm The Michael Jordan of Software. But I'm not because I'm still pushing it. Inventing new ways to approach the rim. New ways to stun and amaze. But you'll never see it if you don't look.
      My dream is that Benton would do 1/4 the analysis he did of Evan Williams' new software. I think I've earned a good look, and some thought.
    3. And that led me to the final analogy that nailed it. What if LeBron James said that Tim Duncan is The Michael Jordan of Basketball. Wishful thinking! The two men are about to face off in a classic series of the ages in the NBA finals. Game 1 is tonight. It's the old sin of sport and business. Don't celebrate until you win. That's a good way to inspire the competition and undermine your fighting spirit. We saw that happen with the Knicks this season, when JR Smith, thinking the Knicks had won, celebrated by elbowing an opponent. In the face! He was suspended for a game (that the Knicks lost), and more importantly threw his energy out the window. The Knicks were embarassed by the Indiana Pacers in a short series that they never really were in. And Smith was in a funk the rest of the short Knicks run. Every Knicks fan knows this story. ;-(
    I learn a lot from sports, I really do. I think it's an incredible teacher of human spirit, in a very compact form. Things that may take years or even decades to play out in tech, often happen in just a few minutes in an NBA playoff game.
    If I were Matt, I would watch that attitude. Because Old Dave might still have a trick or two. Software is not like basketball in that way. I have no stake in the competition between Doerr and Wilson (I assume they still see each other as competitiors). I will root for Doerr now, because I always like an underdog, the same way I rooted for Wilson when he was coming up. And tonight I will definitely be rooting for the Spurs and Tim Duncan, even though LeBron was smart enough not to make any grandiose claims about the obsolescence of his rival. ;-)
  Let's not repeat the Google Reader mistake
    We're getting ready to do the blogging part of our software at Small Picture. We've done a review of the evolution of my own blog, Scripting News, over the years. It was good to go over it, because it became clear that as Google Reader came to dominate in feed reading, it forced my blog, and presumably many others, to conform to its limits. Features were removed from my blog because they confused Google Reader. And when we tried to reach out to them, the answer was that they didn't have enough people on their team to listen. When that I happened I knew we were in a bad place.
    But now we're seeing a rebirth of blogging software, other people have noted it, not just me. And along with it, later in the process, perhaps we can have a rebirth of feed aggregators. But we can't do it if a single company dominates the reader market. Yet some reports indicate that's where we're going.
    I have a plan, if that should happen, if on July 1 we substitute one dominant feed reader for another. My products will produce full-fidelity RSS, that gives us and our users the chance to be fully creative, as we were in the early days of blogging and feed-reading. We won't try to live within the limits of a dominant feed reader. If they can't read our feeds, sorry.
    Users say "oh we're just users we can do what we want." That's nice, but not true. It's like saying I'm a car driver, I don't care about climate change, so I can burn as much fuel as I want. Yeah, I suppose it's true. There is no law that limits the amount of carbon you burn. But someday you or your kids will not be able to breathe. Same with RSS and blogging. If you want to keep using this stuff, you can't just repeat the same mistake. The new dominant player may be very nice, the people may have good hearts, and mean well, but they might be holding back innovation -- or worse, as Google was, taking out innovation and forcing a kind of dull no-growth uniformity.
  Writers, designers and programmers
    Writers can write in spaces we control, or we can write in spaces others control. We can spread our writing around, so one story appears in many places, or we can put each story in one place and distribute pointers to it.
    There are tradeoffs. If I write a piece and post it on Huffington or Medium, the theory is that it gets more circulation, our ideas get more exposure, or we get some kind of reputation benefit. Medium is a place where good writers write. Therefore if my story appears there, that leaves an impression that I'm a good writer. Huffington makes it look like I'm a journalist. Same with Forbes these days. But the reps quickly catch up with facts. Pretty much anyone can have an account on any of these systems. And as soon as you see a crude rant show up on one of them, you understand that the name isn't about quality anymore. The value in the name dissipates quickly.
    I've written for several of these pubs, and I don't think my stories get any more play there than they do here, on my blog.
    Huffington plays games with flow. If you ever get a hit story, they use it to deliver flow to stories written by their own people on that topic. Now that hardly seems fair, given that they don't reciprocate by delivering flow to your less popular stories. When this happened, when I had a hit on Huffington, that was the last time I posted anything there.
    When you think about it, if these guys are smart, it has to be that way. They're not going to let big flow come into their servers without monetizing it. So if you don't get much flow from them for your so-so articles and if they siphon off flow from your hits, why should put your work there? It's not a good deal.
    Medium has a slightly different proposition. I have put a few stories there over the last few months, some of my best pieces (they got me to think about them that way -- good for them), but they didn't get any more flow than they did here. They have an excellent stats system so you can see. Their hook is that their tools are nice and HTML5-pretty. They feel good to write with. That's nice. But could you get the same thing outside of Medium? Of course. This is not hard to do. But, key point, we have to work together, to iterate there.
    If good writers work with good designers and programmers we can keep building so that independence continues to be the basic value of the web. Otherwise we're returning the independence we got from the web to another generation of AOLs.
    That's the writer's story. Programmers have a similar one. The web is where we don't have our work controlled by Apple or Google, where we can create exactly what we want for our users. The stuff we believe they'll love. For example one of the most popular features in my new product Fargo would be disallowed if we tried to push it through Apple's store. That's why it's written in JavaScript and runs in a browser.
    I think that if you're a writer, you're hurting your own interest by not working with independent designers and programmers, long-term. And the leaders, the people who advise other writers on what they should be doing, I think they're hurting us even more by leading the parade into the new AOLs. Same with teachers of writers.
    This isn't about any one writer, designer or programmer, it's about all of us. Remember how far the open web has taken us. Let's not abandon it now. It can keep delivering, but only if we work together and feed our creativity and passion into it.
    Writers, designers and programmers. FTW! :-)
  Servermatrix becomes IBM
    About ten years go, seriously, I signed up at Servermatrix and created three or four servers. The first podcasting servers were there. Podmonster1 and 2 I think were their names. A lot of the old UserLand sites are still running there.
    Servermatrix was something of a breakthrough in its day. Previously, to get hosting, I had to buy a box and colocate it at some place with good net connectivity, electricity, air conditioning, etc. What they did was make renting a server almost as easy as buying something on Amazon.
    I still have one server running there, with all the stuff I'm too busy lazy to port.
    Then a few years ago Servermatrix got bought by a company called Softlayer.
    Their emails were a little different, but I just let them charge my credit card, and tried to forget about the server still running there. Mostly I was able to do that.
    Then this morning I got an email saying Softlayer was bought by IBM.
    Now I have a server at IBM.
    Not a big deal, just worth observing.
  NYT redesign
    Over the last few days or weeks, not sure, I've noticed a new very readable look to articles on the NYT website. Very welcome change. Then this morning I noticed that there's an extensive navigation system in the left sidebar. Only thing I'd like better is if they had an outliner interface for it, that I could expand/collapse my way through. Here's a screen shot showing the opinion section open to show the columnists. Three panels.
  How to cut down on flopping
    The NBA added rules at the beginning of the 2012-2013 season that were intended to cut down on flopping.
      Flopping is when a player acts, convincingly, as if he's been fouled.
      It's a form of acting.
      When viewed on replay sometimes there's absolutely no contact, but it looks like there was.
      The flopping player goes down, clutching his head, rolling over repeatedly, to call attention to the "offense" by the refs.
    Not sure how well it worked during the regular season, but it's not working in the playoffs. The stakes are so high, the players are willing to pay the fines if it means they can get a call to go their way. These games are often so close that a single possession can determine the outcome.
    It's probably even become part of the strategy of the game, and it's easy to imagine the coaches and the players, talking about it privately of course, maybe even in coded language.
    But if the coaches were penalized along with the players, it would likely curtail the flopping, maybe even stop it, esp if suspensions were added to the penalty, earlier in the process.
    It would change the dynamics if the coach could get suspended. It would mean that if the coach thought the player was doing it, he wouldn't put him in the game. It would get the coach on the side of the league and the fans, in stopping the practice.
    And the financial penalties would matter more to the coach, because they pay them for every player, and coaches don't make as much as the players do.
  Second CitiBike ride
    I took my second ride today, this time checking in at the station at 54th and 8th Ave.
    I knew how to do it this time, so I was out of there in no time.
    I forgot to adjust the seat. Stopped a few blocks into the ride and did so.
    However, the seat didn't stay up. I had to stop every few blocks to yank it back up.
    Eventually I got tired of this and just left it low. I felt like an adult riding a kid's bike.
    I guess that's the big question, how well will the system hold up against NYC wear and tear. Everything is still bright and shiny, but eventually it's going to be like everything else in NYC, functional but not too clean. ;-)
    We love NY, yes we do. But...
    The second ride was not as much fun as the first.
  Workflowy supports OPML!
    I just got a note from Ulf Gjerdingen saying that Workflowy now supports OPML.
    I had to check it out.
    So I went to my outline in Workflowy. Chose Export. And sure enough, there's a new radio button where you can choose OPML.
    Of course I wanted to see if Fargo could read it. So here's what I did.
      1. Opened TextEdit.
      2. Chose File/New.
      3. Paste.
      4. Format as Text.
      5. Save into my Dropbox/Apps/Fargo folder.
      6. Switch into Fargo.
      7. Open the file.
      8. It worked!
    A happy day is when there's more interop. :-)
    Thanks Workflowy! :-)
December 2013
  Twitter as a public notepad
    I don't know what came over me this morning, but I got an idea after watching a speech by Elizabeth Warren on YouTube. I was in tears, the ideas were so simple and compelling, and so rarely talked about. We are a country of people, not corporations -- but we've lost track of that, and we're stacking the deck against the people. But then I remembered, she hasn't said anything about the NSA spying on the American people. One idea led to another, and people responded, and I kept going. I wanted to get all of it down here in one place, before moving on into 2014.
    The tweets
      Watching Elizabeth Warren's speech at the DNC, literally in tears she's so great, except -- what has she said about NSA spying on Americans?
      Same thing with Ezra Klein. What an up-and-comer. So smart. Always has the right answer. Except on NSA spying on Americans. Crickets.
      I live a few blocks from Times Square. It's already crazy here. Why do people stand in the street? Most don't get to see the ball drop.
      My opinion about the NSA. Politics in the US stops until it's over. Nothing. It's unacceptable. Outrageous. Fascist. Un-American.
      The @paulg story is opportunism by Gawker and this new publication. Headline should read: Graham is not a politician. That's the real story.
      Truth: @paulg has a narrow view of who can make a contribution in tech. However: That's his right as an investor and human being.
      For example, I'd like @paulg to tell the students who come to Startup School that being an entrepreneur isn't the only way to contribute.
      I was forced to be an entrepreneur when I was young because there was no other way to be creative. Wasn't a good fit. Yet I did contribute.
      It's always been a struggle. To this day people describe me as an entrepreneur. I am not an entrepreneur.
      People say I'm a lousy entrepreneur. True! I'm also a lousy polo player.
      If I were in my teens today, Zuck would not be my role model.
      You know who would be my role model? Banksy! :-)
      Evan Williams is an entrepreneur. Aaron Levie is an entrepreneur. James Hong. Nothing wrong with being an entrepreneur.
      But -- don't expect entrepreneurs to love your creativity. It's not what they do.
      One of the good things about the Gawker-created mess is that we can talk about @paulg. In other times, VCs are very much a forbidden topic.
      Online discourse would work better if it was always understood that there's a difference between The Truth and Your Opinion.
      It's time for the Knicks to call Phil Jackson.
  Blogging matters
    I read a long post this morning about what it's like to be a nurse, and found it incredibly interesting. It filled in a perspective that I had not heard. And yet I spent lots of time talking with nurses during my father's long hospital stay in 2002, and my own -- the same year.
    Back then, I had an epiphany about people who work in hospitals, who work in conditions most of us find incomprehensible, helping people in unimaginable pain, unimaginable until it's time for you to deal with it. The epiphany is that it must be wonderful to see the good you do, so clearly. In my own field, software development, it can be hard to feel how you're helping. In fact you get a lot of people sharing pain with you they can't find other outlets for. I learned in reading the post that it's the same in nursing.
    While their work is gratifying and grounding, it's also grueling and abusive. She told the story so well, so personally. Yet in the comments people found many things to complain about. She just shared her point of view, wrote a blog post, and it was good, and of course the trolls gave her hell for it.
    It's important to feel free to tell your story even if it cues up other people's permission to be jerks. Oh this person is showing vulnerability. Let's make her pay! I get it all the time. I've been getting it since I started blogging in 1994. I still do it, because it's what I do. I couldn't stop, even though I've tried, any more than I could stop breathing.
    I don't have a solution, other than to say it helps to stand beside people who put themselves out there. The world is rough. That doesn't mean you can't share what you see. It just means it's important to feel the support. I want to provide what little of that I can, through this post.
    What bloggers are guilty of -- always -- is telling their story imperfectly. It's the imperfections that make it interesting, and human -- and worth it.
    Keep on truckin!
    It's not like anyone gets out of this alive. ;-)
    "cheesecake"
    #description "A nurse tells her story eloquently and with passion, and the trolls swoop in, of course."
    #backgroundImage "https://dl.dropbox.com/s/vot98qznk57okqw/nursingStudents.jpg"
    #subheadColor "white"
  Tech products of the year
    This year's BOTY choice was such a big hit, the idea crossed my mind that I have a couple of products that distinguished themselves in my life in 2013, and what the heck, why not have a POTY to go with the BOTY! :-)
    The thought came to me while I was on a walk today in Central Park, listening to Grateful Dead music through one of the products, and played by the other one.
    I said man, I finally have this figured out after many years of walking and listening, I have a rig that's worth talking about it's so good.
    First the headphones. I like to say I buy headphones the way some women I've known buy shoes. I have a closet shelf full of them. Most of them I tried out for a few days or maybe a week or two and put them away, still in search of the ideal set.
    But after I bought the Velodyne vFree headphones I not only stopped buying new phones, I starting giving the old ones away to friends. And these were some great listening devices. But none of them put it all together like the Velodyne.
    First, they are wireless Bluetooth headphones. You wouldn't believe how much of a mess those wires are for me. Always getting tangled and knotted. Limiting movement. Pulling on my ears and the device. Now I look at people listening on their iPods on the subway and think that in two years the wires will all be gone. Once you try it this way there's no going back.
    Also, they're loud enough, and the sound quality is great. A lot of good headphones need an amplifier when used with a mobile device. Not sure why, but it's observable. I guess these headphones, because they have their own power source, have their own amp. Regardless, you don't miss anything with these guys, and music has the feel it's supposed to. And it's a clean sound, maybe a little heavy on the bass, but I like that way. But not so much as some others. ;-)
    Another thing that's great about wireless is you can wear them around the house without carrying the player with you.
    Now there are problems with wireless. You have to remember to keep it charged. But that's a discipline we've all learned by now. It's just one more device. It takes the same kind of USB cable that Kindles and Google phones do. You probably already have a few. And the Bluetooth connection sometimes drops, but for some reason for me now not so much as it did in the beginning. It feels like my devices have learned to find each other. I know that can't be true, but...
    Product #2
    Now the other device is the new iPad Mini. I got one with 64GB and LTE. I used Verizon because I already have a T-Mobile device (my Nexus 5), and this gives me a bit of redundancy that may come in handy. Both devices tether. Glad we got over that argument! ;-)
    I bought an iPad Air when it came out and loved it, but that got handed down, because I very much wanted to try an iPad that fits in my jacket pocket, which the Mini most definitely does. I miss the larger screen sometimes, but I love the portability. With a few tweaks, I can see not carrying a phone. But remember, it's winter and cold, so I'm pretty much always wearing a jacket. We'll see how it works in summer, when I'm back doing daily bike rides in summer clothes.
    But the iPad Air is as rational and lovely a product as the Velodyne, and of course the two go together perfectly, and connect over an open standard, so it's a religion-conformant combination. At the end of the year, it's clear that these two products made the most difference to me, and appeal to my tastes and lifestyle almost perfectly.
    It might get better in 2014, I hope so, but it was worth noting that near-perfection has been achieved this year.
    BTW, when I bought the Velodyne in April I paid $299. They're selling on Amazon now for $119. Wow.
    PS: As I am working on the transition to a new CMS, I'm producing some blog posts in both environments, to get experience, and get a sense of what features are needed. Here's the new version of this post, in case you're interested in such things. ;-)
  GitHub Pages
    GitHub's Pages service seems ready-made for Fargo, so we're hooking them up. Here's how and why. In November I asked for a simple web server connected to Dropbox. I needed this for the upcoming version of Fargo. Until a couple of days ago we didn't have an answer.
    The Pages service works does what we need. It means that users will have to learn how to use GitHub. Yes, it's technical, and will be hard for some users. But it's a beginning. We'll make it easier.
    It's good. A place to start building.
    PS: Just for fun I put a version of this announcement on my GitHub-hosted site.
  Microsoft and netbooks
    Just read a piece in ComputerWorld about the success of Google's Chromebooks and how that's bad news for Microsoft. This is where I say "I told you so."
    Microsoft had this market zipped up, with the netbooks, tiny inexpensive notebooks that ran Windows XP, had lots of USB ports, wifi, a camera, long battery life. These were incredible computers. I bought three of them over the course of the craze, bought one for my mom, and urged everyone else to get one. Meanwhile, Microsoft was making noises that they didn't approve. I couldn't believe it. Here they were getting lifted up by a gift from god, and they were saying it wasn't good enough. This is a company that had killed its own laptop business by not caring about malware.
    When Vista came out, an awful operating system, they forced the netbooks to use it, when they should have dropped the price on XP to $0 to own the whole market instead of sharing it with Linux. They should have ran a victory lap. Fixed the bugs in XP, downsized their OS development group, and paid a huge dividend to shareholders.
    Netbooks were wonderful, but they weren't good enough for Microsoft. Now the Google Chromebook is cleaning up the market that Microsoft should own.
    We all lost here. Because the new netbooks, from Google and Apple, are closed systems, where the netbooks were wide open. I could access my file server from my netbook. I could put any software on it, or take it off, same with music and movies. Apple and Google are running gulags, the netbooks were Woodstock. That probably was the back-channel reason why Microsoft struggled so mightily to kill them. They were more interested in pleasing the entertainment industry than users.
    PS: I have two iPads, and buy them for my friends and family. I gave a friend a Chromebook because I thought it was perfect for what she was doing, reading books and watching Netflix. I just wish netbooks hadn't been so badly treated by the tech industry, because they were great promising products.
  My blogging story
    Justin Hall of links.net asked me to do an audio recording about blogging.
    I answered some of his questions, but as usual, talked mostly about what I wanted to. ;-)
    Which is a big part of the blogging story imho.
    Here's the audio, 24 minutes, hope you enjoy.
    PS: This also adds to the thread started by Walter Isaacson about the origins of the Internet.
  Blogger of the Year
    I spend the last month of each year thinking about who I want to honor as the person who best embodies the spirit of blogging. I always want to do something unusual, something that makes you think, that stretches the boundaries of blogging, but illustrates something about blogging that's essential, and perhaps not fully appreciated. And -- this year -- celebrates success! :-)
    This year's Blogger of the Year writes for the NY Times. In the past I would not have so easily thought you could both be a blogger and work at a mainstream publication. But this year our guy did something remarkable. He used his platform, his pulpit, to change the world in a measurable, significant way.
    Nick Bilton decided that it was time to ask a question that the FAA didn't want to deal with, or had no way to deal with, or couldn't deal with for some reason. Political organizations often get stuck. The individuals inside may know it's time to act, but they can't pull it together.
    Bilton asked a simple question that all of us who fly have asked. Would the plane crash if I kept reading a book on my iPad while the plane takes off? If not, why do I have to turn it off?
    He asked this question for the first time in a post in November 2011, and the decision was made late this year, and now we're all flying with this one inconvenience removed. Sure, it's not like solving global warming, or avoiding the next banking crisis, or even getting good connectivity in Manhattan, but it's progress! And it shows the power of an individual and of a news organization to create change, to act as instigator, a provocateur, a problem-solver.
    Thank you Nick Bilton for making our lives a little better, and using your blogging voice to accomplish it.
  We could douse Internet mobs
    Don't kick a man when he's down.
    If that were the rule. If kicking a person when they're down was considered as awful as the things you knock people down for, that would end it.
    Make the punishment fit the crime, and stop there. And maybe if we wanted to be fair, adopt a rule like innocent until proven guilty, or try to see it from their side, or we understand that sometimes people tweet when they're: 1. Drunk. 2. Tired. 3. Lonely. 4. Feeling unloved. 5. Or neurotic. 6. Being human.
    I once saw a pundit with hundreds of thousands of followers call a mob victim an asshole and people who I thought well of (before this) praised him as being a saint.
    As Worf might say, sir you have no honor.
    There must be a New Year's resolution in here somewhere.
    Happy Holidays!
  Be a man
    "Be a man" are the three most destructive words you can say to a boy or a man.
    Because it really means: Die inside. Betray yourself. Fuck off.
    Men Stay Silent in 1998 was all about this idea. It has been a consistent theme of my blogging going all the way back to the beginning.
    Please watch this video. It's important.
  The next Scripting News CMS
    I'm working on the next CMS for Scripting News and then for Fargo.
    Here's a blog post created using the new system, it'll give you an idea what's coming.
    Happy holidays everyone! :-)
    Dave
  No company is going to stand up to a mob
    Impossible scenario: The Twitter mob chooses someone to make an example of. They go after that person's job. The company says "We're standing behind our employee." It'll never happen. Companies have to make the right business decision. And that means firing the radioactive person and replacing them with someone who is not radioactive.
      Standing behind the employee would just fuel the rage, and cause the company itself to become the target of the mob, probably even more than the employee. Boycott. The management would be fired, and replaced by people who will do the right thing for the business. Which is why no company will stand up to the mob.
    A few weeks ago one of the maintainers of node.js was fired because he didn't accept a check-in that would have made language in the code be gender neutral (at least that was my read of it as an outside observer). There was some question whether he understood what was being asked of him because English wasn't his native language. What an ugly scene, for so little, from someone who was so generous!
    I have been surrounded like this myself, many times, over the years. Believe me, the mob has tried to get me fired. If I had had a real job I'm sure they would have. When I was the CEO of a company, the mob went after our families. These are not principled acts. Don't kid yourself. If they think they can get you fired for having the wrong political opinion, they will.
    I've been told that "Free speech has consequences." Everything has consequences, like hounding people for practicing free speech. The consequence is that people won't speak. Great. What a cruel joke if the greatest communication medium ever invented was used to stifle communication.
  With much love!
  About the tech backlash
    I don't know anything for sure, and maybe the people who live in working class neighborhoods in San Francisco and the East Bay are the only ones who have a gripe with the people of tech, but my gut says this is just the start.
    I think the busses are incredibly good symbols of the problem with tech. They have these big windows, that you can see out of, but I don't think the people inside spend much time thinking about what's on the other side of them. The people of tech have an abstract and incorrect idea of what it's like to be outside their bubble.
    I first encountered this in a town hall meeting I went to at Apple in the late 80s. I was one of several speakers, and I went last. I had been asked to tell what it was like to be a developer for Apple's products. I had been an Apple developer for a long time, then. I worked with their first developer relations guy in 1980.
    I had very much idealized what it must be like to work at Apple. I imagined it was great! And I knew that my life sucked. Now here was the surprise, they felt the same way. Being a developer must be wonderful! Everything is taken care of for you. All you have to do is put up some dialogs, use our code, and in a few weeks you get rich! And you don't have to deal with the asshole execs. And whatever other grief comes from working in a large organization (which I now understand much better, but still from a distance). Of course none of this has anything to do with what it's like to be a developer. Our paychecks are iffy. We don't have health insurance. You always break our stuff because you don't care or understand. Most of us go out of business leaving the founders unemployed and broken. Etc etc.
    Now tech is much bigger today than it was then, and much more pervasive -- and it affects far more people's lives. And people read the news, and they know that the companies are helping the government spy on us. Those busses are such excellent symbols. When are they going to come out of the busses and find out what it's like for the rest of us. Not their idealized view of who we are, but who we really are.
    Sadly, all that's really needed here is some public relations pablum. Some feel-good ads on the Superbowl that glorify the users, not the products. Have your employees show up at charity events, and make sure there are reporters there too. With a little time and money, the problem could be "solved" in a superficial way.
    I don't know what the real answer is. It's impossible for everyone to understand everyone else's perspective. But the people who live in SF and Oakland who are being driven out of their homes have a real gripe. They probably like to live where they live, like you they have friends and family nearby, a job perhaps, and moving to Walnut Creek or Petaluma isn't what they want to do. And the rest of us who use your stuff, and don't like to be pushed around either, are feeling a little sympathy for the protesters.
  What's the best messaging software to install on an iPad?
    I want to get my iPad connected up to SMS and Google's chat system (I use an Android phone, at least for now), and whatever else people are likely to want to use. I've always found this horribly confusing. I want to get it right.
    I have a Google Voice account, btw -- and I use it.
    Should I install Google's chat app on the iPad (it's now called Hangouts, I wonder what it will be called next year, and what scams it will drag me into).
    I want something that's easy to set up, that I can recommend to friends and most important family members.
  Questions for reporters to ponder
    Is a reporter still a reporter if he or she owns stock in company he or she works for?
    Does it matter how much stock the reporter has?
    When reporting, how does the reporter keep his or her ownership from influencing the journalistic work?
    Should they recuse themselves from writing stories that might increase or reduce the value of their stock?
    When a publisher says dealing with sources is entirely up to the reporters, does that still work if the reporter is a co-owner of the publication?
    Can you wear the hats of reporter and owner at the same time and still think of yourself as a reporter?
    Are the legal protections for owners different from those of a reporter?
    When you get a subpoena, can an owner protect sources?
    Will an owner aggressively pursue the truth? Or profits? What if there's a conflict?
  What if the Knicks had kept Jeremy Lin?
    It's so funny, here we are almost two years since Linsanity, and the Knicks are a complete disaster. So what if the Knicks had kept Lin? It's a trick question, because it wouldn't have saved the Knicks, it wouldn't have even helped, but it probably would have destroyed Lin. He'd be where Raymond Felton or J.R. Smith are today. Wasted in body and spirit.
    I saw a picture yesterday in an article about how to cope if you're the fan of an NBA team that sucks. There are so many of them. Not many as bad as the Knicks, but this is a year of extremes. Either you suck terribly, or you're great. And the distribution is mostly East vs West. Western teams are kicking ass. And for the most part the ass they're kicking is Eastern ass.
    Anyway, back to the picture. It was a really sweet photoshop of LeBron James in a Knicks uniform. I had to look three times before my brain could parse it. What if LeBron had chosen the Knicks instead of Miami? Another trick question. He wouldn't be LeBron, the smartest and most driven player in the NBA (in addition to being the strongest athlete) today. LeBron wouldn't choose the Knicks because he had a choice. He went with the team with Pat Riley as CEO. And the owner, whoever he is, either just as smart as Riley and James, or he's smart enough to let them run the show.
    Were it only so in NYC. We are stuck as a basketball town because one of the owners is absent, and the other is vain, over-confident, and as the Oracle says of Neo in the Matrix, "not too bright." It really is a toxic combination.
    NYC, the richest city in still the richest country in the world. We have all the nicest things you can imagine, but we can't have a great NBA team because the guy who owns it thinks like a small-town boy. Could we trade teams with, say, Houston -- a town that has no appreciation for basketball? Or Indianapolis? They could probably use the money. What could we give almost any city in the US to take Dolan off our hands so we can engineer a good team, if not in 2013, or even 2017, maybe in say -- 10 years?
    Because we're never going to get there with Dolan.
    BTW, Carmelo Anthony is a wonderful player, and he's smart and he really cares. This is what's so great about basketball, it's an intimate sport. The players don't wear masks. And there are only five playing at a time. You get to study them. The Knicks are stuck in hell, and it's really no player's fault. A team is not the sum of the parts. You can't do math on the players on a team. The Knicks are proof of that. What the Knicks are missing is drive. You have to have talent, think as a unit, be smart, that's enough to get you on the court. Now what's your ambition? It's not what you say your ambition is, because Melo says his is to win a championship. But it's laughable when he says it. I'm sure he wants to be on a team that wins a championship. That means he has to hook up with a guy like LeBron. Years ago he was too young and lacked the confidence to let a stronger person boss him around. I think that's what the Knicks struggle is really about. The wearing-down of Carmelo's pride, and the circus sideshow, the comic relief, provided by Dolan.
    Anyway it's fun to think about basketball, and more fun to write about it because none of it matters one bit. ;-)
  Jeru's tapes relocated
    I did several workshops with Jeru Kabbal in the mid-late 90s.
    I did a website for him, and archived his tapes when he died in 2000.
    Also a transcript of one of his talks.
    When I was preserving his site, I saw that the links to his tapes were broken. I had let a domain lapse. Then the other day I came across them in an archive, and put them in a safe place in a folder on scripting.com. I figure if any of my sites survive over time, it's this one.
    Here are pointers to the tapes, in MP3 format.
      Sunrise of the Soul.
      Relationships, a tool for clarity.
      Quantum Light Breath.
      Manifesting.
      Deciding to Wake Up.
    Jeru's teachings helped put things in better perspective for me, maybe his wisdom can help other people too, over time. :-)
    "cheesecake"
  HTTPS exploration continues
    On Tuesday I posted a question -- how to serve HTTPS from an S3 bucket?
    Several people suggested using CloudFront or CloudFlare. So yesterday I tried both.
    These are not reviews. I'm just briefly reporting the results. I'm an HTTPS newbie. I'm looking for more info, and other options.
    CloudFront
      CloudFront is an Amazon service. Setup takes about five minutes, then about 20 minutes for them to provision it.
      First, I set up a new bucket called tmp.scripting.com. I put a single file in it, hello.html, which contains a single line of JS, alert ("Hello World").
      Then I went to the CloudFront panel in AWS, and created a new distribution. There's a big dialog with lots of options, but most of the defaults are fine. Choose one of your buckets, it assigns a domain name for you to use to access your distribution. You can provide a CNAME -- I did -- testsecure.scripting.com, pointing to the domain they provided. You can choose HTTPS, which I did (the point of the experiment). I don't have a certificate, and I am new to HTTPS.
      I was able to access hello.html via ordinary HTTP, and over HTTPS using Amazon's domain, but not using my domain. This method will not work for hosting Fargo in a bucket that can be accessed over HTTPS without (as I understand it) spending $600 a month.
      Sticker shock. I wish the big companies had left OAuth as-is, complicated for sure, but widely deployed. An individual developer can't spend that much money to jump through a hoop for large platform companies.
      Hope we can do something to lower the barrier for independent developers. Amazon or Dropbox could do something here. My opinion: removing barriers to deploying static JavaScript apps is good for business.
    CloudFlare
      This service may be closer to doing what I need, but to find out I have to give them my credit card info, and I wish I didn't have to do that just to find out if it would work.
      CloudFlare wants a whole domain to play with, which isn't a problem -- I have many that I'm not doing anything with. I gave them one and created a sub-domain, put an index file in it, a static HTML page that says hello.
      To set it up, you go through a series of steps where you turn over DNS to them.
      Now, it's not clear that they actually did anything -- because when I access the page I get the same headers that I got before I CloudFlare'd it.
      Regardless, to get HTTPS you have to give them $20 a month. And it's not clear if that's on top of the $600 per month you have to pay for the certificate. (My guess that it is.)
  Facebook's problematic ads
    Facebook's inline ads look too much like posts.
    They start with names of people you know and like.
    For example, here's a screen shot.
    Can you easily tell which one is the ad?
    This is a problem.
  Reporters threatened by bloggers, version 2013
    This argument has been going on ever since a blogger crawled up on land and said Hello World. Reporters project the qualities of reporting on blogging, and find it fails. Sigh. Because blogging !== reporting. Not the same thing. Not used the same way. Different qualities.
    I'm participating in a thread on Facebook on this subject, and just posted this bit, trying to put the matter to rest, for the 18th time in 19 years. Here goes.
      I don't like blanket statements about bloggers, just as [pros] probably don't like blanket statements about book writers, or essayists, interviewers, op-ed writers, radio personalities. There are all kinds. But each medium has its strengths. When you project the qualities of another medium on blogging, you'll find it wanting. That's not much of a revelation. But if we tried to judge NPR reporting, for example, on the standards of blogging, it would be found lacking as well.
      Blogging was never able to do what a reporter does. It's not what it's about. It's about empowering the people you cite as sources to go directly to each other. That creates a flow that reporters can use. They are using it now, but didn't get that at the beginning. That, to me, means that blogging has totally achieved its purpose.
    I really think that's all there is to it. NBA players gossip openly with each other, providing fodder for sports reporters. Same with Angela Merkel, the President of the United States, would-be Presidents, the Pope. They all communicate publicly with each other, openly -- and reporters do better work because of it. That's the story. Wrap it up and ship it. ;-)
    "cheesecake"
  Why I believe in academia
    An off-list conversation with Ann Greenberg.
    Ann: In reply to Restarting Kleiner, I mostly hated college, I found there was so much self congratulatory indulgence, brown-nosing and rigid hierarchy. Let's face it, the rich and powerful in any institution try to leverage the creativity and upward desires of the poor and weak. All the while calling it nurturance. But because of the strings, great art cannot be cultivated that way because it can never be self-critical.
    Dave: Me too. But I loved grad school because I picked the right subject, and I went to a school that focused on doing, not writing or pontificating. Then, after a career as an entrepreneur I went back to university and was able to create a revolution using the resources of the campus and other faculty. So I have had very positive experiences, even though as an undergrad I was not part of the club, as you experienced.
  Why Microsoft's tablets didn't work
    There are ads all over Manhattan for Microsoft's tablets.
    They have to position against the iPad because that's the first thing anyone thinks of when they think about a Microsoft tablet. How is it different from an iPad?
    Microsoft's answer is that it's serious and for business.
    Not very compelling, because I don't understand how a tablet could be for one or the other. Microsoft's tablets have less software than Apple's. In order for it to be more serious it would have to have software that Apple doesn't. I believe it's the other way around.
    But there are applications that Apple's tablet should be doing well that it isn't. It's really shitty for watching TV. If you want to watch a live program on an iPad, like a sporting event, if you want to use the tablet as a second screen, you need to have a second tablet! Because switching to a different app puts the TV app to sleep. So you can't look something up on the web while watching a game.
    Now I know it's technically possible for a tablet to allow you to access one app while another app continues to run. I used to be able to do this on netbooks. I was also able to access a file server, so I didn't have to have a copy of a video to be able to watch it. Hey even today there are plenty of things worth watching that aren't on Netflix. And Netflix works just like TV on an iPad. You have to switch in to watch it, so you need a second iPad to get a second screen.
    Why doesn't Microsoft make their tablet really good at this, and position accordingly. Assuming Apple doesn't fix the problem too soon for that. ;-)
  How to serve HTTPS from an S3 bucket?
    I've been transitioning all my content to static hosting on Amazon S3. It's the perfect way for me to store stuff for serving. Very low cost, and much more reliable and hassle-free than running my own servers, which I have been doing (and continue to) since the beginning of the web, 1994 or so.
    I'd love to completely get out of the business of running servers, but that's not likely to ever happen. But the last thing I want to do is move content that's in S3 into a space where I have to run the server to keep it on the air. I refuse to do that!
    So I want to figure out how to serve HTTPS on S3.
    PS: I see that it is possible if I use Amazon's name as the host. Really, this is not an option for apps like Fargo. I need to maintain the branding. If you redirect to amazon.com when you use Fargo, well that just doesn't work
  Yes Dave, I remember when JFK died
    Intro: Reporters should be working tirelessly to get an outcome like Watergate's. Both were about the government spying in the United States, but the latest scandal is much larger. I really don't see how the NSA survives this. We need massive government reformation. Yet the press is complicit. And this reporter wants to blame the generations that lived through Vietnam and Watergate for their complicity! What?
    Dave Weigel has the most ridiculous theory about why 60 Minutes has turned into a PR mouthpiece for the NSA. It goes like this. People who remember where they were when JFK died use Viagra and watch 60 Minutes.
    That's where he leaves it blank for us to fill in ourselves with various unspecified ageist theories. Presumably, I guess, people who are my age or older (I was 8 years old when the tragic event happened) are so scared of everything that we need to be reassured that the government is really okay and looking out for us after all.
    Now Dave, sit on my knee while explain to you, s l o w l y, how this really works.
    People a little older than me were drafted and sent to Vietnam. I missed the draft by a year. Many of them came back from the war with a very bad feeling about the American government. More than a few of the rest of us marched on Washington to try to end the lunacy. A few years later, President Nixon was caught wiretapping the Democratic National Headquarters in DC. You're probably too young to remember this too. Look it up. After an attempt to cover it up, making it much worse, he was the first and only US President to resign in disgrace. If you think that people who lived through all that have a lot of faith in the government, well you should go back to school because you got nothing from your expensive education.
    PS: People much older than me are still making a contribution. So fuck your ageism.
  It works: Hello World for Dropbox
    Thanks to Steve Marx who is a developer advocate at Dropbox, we have a very nice and simple Hello World app for Dropbox.
    As promised, I've packaged it up so people who come along later have it easier than I did. ;-)
    0. Before starting, think of a name for your app, and find a server with https where you can store an HTML file. I used the public folder of my Dropbox account, but I started my account a long time ago when you could access these files directly over the web. If you started your account more recently, you won't be able to use that feature.
    1. Visit the Dropbox app setup page. Click the big Create app button in the upper right corner. Screen shot.
    2. Click on the Dropbox API app option, Files and datastores, Yes, your app can be limited to its own, private folder, and enter the name of the app you decided on in step #0. Here's a screen shot with the options chosen correctly. When you're ready, take a deep breath and click the Create app button.
      Make sure your app doesn't have the word Dropbox in its name, as illustrated in my screen shot. That doesn't fit their branding guidelines and they'll refuse to create it.
    3. Copy your App key, you'll need it later, and enter the OAuth redirect URIs. This part is a little tricky. You need to enter the exact address of the web page containing your app, which you haven't created yet. It must begin with https://, as indicated in the prompt. Here's a screen shot with the two parts highlighted.
      Also click the Enable additional users button, if you anticipate that other people will use this app.
    4. Here's my Hello World app. Do a View-Source in your browser. Copy the text and paste it into an editor. Replace my app key with yours. Screen shot. Save. Do whatever you need to get it into your https server folder.
    5. Pray.
    6. Access your copy of the app over the web. With any luck you'll be redirected to the Dropbox site to have your app authorized. When you do so, the page reloads, and a dialog appears saying the file was written.
    7. Look in your Dropbox/apps folder. You should see a new sub-folder, with one file in it, hello.txt. That's it! When this works you can pat yourself on the back, because you've written a Dropbox app! :-)
  Restarting Kleiner
    I read a piece in Pando about the restart at Kleiner Perkins, which was, when I was an active entrepreneur, the leading Silicon Valley venture capitalist. Now John Doerr, who was the leader of KP back in the day, at age 62, is coming back to lead the restart.
    What I would I do if I were JD? I love puzzles like this. How would I zig to the zag of Andreessen or Union Square or Spark, the new premier brands in tech VC?
    I may come up with other ideas, and I'd be interested in hearing what you guys think (other than negativism, which is totally uninteresting to me).
    Go back to universities
      If you're doing a restart, go back to the roots, where VC got started in the first place.
      It grew out of the boiling cauldron of post-war tech, Stanford University. This was the original keiretsu. And it happened again in the boom of the late 90s, though not so much in the current boom.
      Tech needs a farm system. Teachers who guide young minds in thinking creatively about the raw materials of progress.
    And open source
      Remember where Bill Joy came from, and the legacy he took with him. Three letters: B, S and D. This process works. So why did we stop?
      A university should be home to at least one special open source project that goes on for years, decades, generations. Every class adds something to the project. One year it's documentation. Next year it's test suites. Evangelism. Porting to new platforms. Developing a new format or protocol.
      Software is a process. Let the structure of the project reflect that.
      Software is also art. It's not first and foremost about returns for VC. But that comes soon, when the first class graduates. Some of them will have ideas about commercializing the project. That's when we turn to the investors who generously funded the project initially. And of course the companies they start contribute back into the process that they were founded in. Five companies, then fifty, all feeding off the same flow of innovation.
      The role of the VC is to be the opportunists, and feed back proceeds into the the project, and to tithe a certain portion of their profits back into refreshing the portfolio of new tech to be opportunized. (A new word, one a VC would like!)
    Do it differently
      You wouldn't not leave a tip for good service when you go out to eat at a fine restaurant. Now why wouldn't you do the same for great open source projects that make your ventures fly? Of course you would! This is the brilliant idea, imho, that has escaped all previous generations of investors. You want to buy a presence with the next generation of up-and-comers. This is your goodwill. Where your great PE ratio comes from. Who will they want to finance their startup? The one that's famous for funding the leading new open source platforms of the day. That means planting lots of seeds over long periods of time.
    That's where I would start
      Look for successful entrepreneurs who are ready to start their academic careers and teach what they know to bright-eyed, young, eager, optimistic genius students, with their whole lives ahead of them and everything to prove.
      Silicon Valley seems to think that academia is obsolete. They're wrong. Bet contrarian.
    The farm system
      VCs like to eat the seed corn. That's where I'd zig to the zag of VC. Where others eat, you invest. And reap the profits with the generations to come of great tech leaders.
  We've just begun to explore rivers
    Alexis Madrigal has a widely-cited piece suggesting that we may have seen "peak rivers" in 2013. (He calls them streams, but streams and rivers are the same thing.)
    I think we're just getting started. We've created just a few big flows, commercialized them, and they're somewhat clogged, but that doesn't mean that river transport is done for. We may find the leading flows, Facebook and Twitter, to be too sensational, commercial, or superficial. Perhaps not enough to sink our minds into, but that doesn't mean some information isn't best presented as a flow.
    Consider news about the NBA. Every night there are scores, reports of injuries, rumors. The next morning, gossip, analysis, stats, trivia, more rumors. There's a very predictable beat to sports news. Lends itself to a river. Yet, I just got my river going last week! I've barely begun to understand the new experience.
    I think we'll discover many more uses for reverse-chronologic flows in 2014, 2015 and so on. It's a very basic format. The teletype was a river. Stock tickers are rivers. That doesn't mean there aren't databases, and books, think pieces, taxonomies. A river is just one structure, but it's a good one, and we don't throw good structures out.
    PS: Interesting his piece appears on The Atlantic, another body of water.
    PPS: Think of a river as a format, like "romantic comedy" or "spy thriller." They keep making them, generation after generation. They change with the times and technology, but the formats are in our brains, not in any one medium.
    PPPS: Check out nbariver.com and it's accompanying Twitter feed, @nbariver.
  Hello World for Dropbox apps?
    I want a very simple testbed for Dropbox apps written in straight JavaScript. Nothing extra. Just: 1. Get authorized. 2. Write a file. 3. Nothing more! ;-)
    Using exactly the best practices that Dropbox wants us to use. I should be able to have something running in ten minutes, or less. Nothing but JavaScript and HTML. No pre-processors. No complicated builds. Let's drop the learning curve.
    For the record, these are the docs I've been puzzling over:
      Getting Started Guide for dropbox.js.
      Built-in OAuth Drivers.
      Checkbox.js, a sample app.
    This is just a first step. Then we'll take another, and another. :-)
    "cheesecake"
    PS: Thanks to Steve Marx, I have a Hello World app for Dropbox and wrote a blog post explaining how to do it yourself.
  mysilo.com?
    Yesterday's Joy of Tech sounds familiar.
    I wrote about this in October. In item #2: "I'm getting to know someone new and I can tell she's going to be a good friend. So after our meeting a couple of weeks ago, the question is -- how are we going to communicate. I see her on Facebook. But that isn't my preferred way to communicate, for a variety of reasons. Only after a few days of negotiating, in a total fog, we decide to use email. It seems that could have happened much more quickly."
    Communication is getting more difficult. Every time we invent a new variant of email, IM, Flickr, Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, Skype, etc -- we're never going to stop inventing them -- the problem gets worse. At some point this is going to be bad for business. Maybe it already has.
    It seems obvious that at some point there will be a way to cross boundaries between silos more easily. Maybe we'll have personal silos?
  Using GitHub to share Frontier code
    When Brent Simmons was talking about storing object databases in the file system on the Frontier-user list, I had a nagging feeling I had done something in this area. I had. Not even that long ago.
    Here's the story.
    I have a tool called gitHub.root that periodically checks the contents of a set of odb's you specify and exports any changed scripts to a folder structure, designed to by shared on GitHub.
    I'm not releasing that tool at this time, because I want to do another review. But I am USING it, to release the code for another tool, this one is current, and you can download it from the Tools Catalog page in the OPML Editor website (choose Tools Catalog from the Misc menu). It works. I'm using it all the time. It's called superSync. It really is super and it does a nice job of syncing local folders to locations on Amazon S3. I have some software in the pipe that needs this functionality.
    Anyway, it's both a Tool and a GitHub repo.
    https://github.com/scripting/superSync/tree/master
    The docs are right there, in the Readme.md file.
    I'm not taking pull requests, this is just for sharing, and you're welcome to fork it and do with it as you please. MIT License.
  WordPress supports rss.js
    WordPress now supports rss.js.
    What this means is that you can access the flow of new posts from a JavaScript app running in the browser without any special server software. It makes it more efficient while preserving know-how already in developers' brains. Why have a new way of doing something we already know how to do? Exactly! ;-)
    This also means interop will be easy, and makes it possible to have new blogging tools that are compatible with WordPress in new interesting ways.
    May not mean much to end-users. By the time developers deliver features based on this stuff it'll be baked into the platform ten levels below the user interface. But that doesn't mean it's not important.
    It's like having a new subway tunnel in NYC. Eventually we'll be able to use it, and when we do it won't look like this. But we'll be able to get places we weren't able to get to, so easily, before.
    It's a good thing. ;-)
    "cheesecake"
    PS: I don't think this is available (yet) on wordpress.com.
  Twitter: Blocking is too crude
    Yesterday Twitter changed the way the Block command works, only to change it back in a couple of hours after an outcry from people who liked it the way it was.
    I welcomed the change, because it weakened the Block command, which was and now is again the only way to delete a tweet that you find offensive.
    In 2011, I wrote: "Blocking has the side-effect of making me invisible to the person I'm blocking. This is totally unnecessary."
    I would prefer if Twitter would give me the ability to remove specific tweets from my Replies tab. That's it. Why, after all these years, does Twitter not have this feature? I can't imagine it's that hard to implement? Maybe it is.
    A couple of other ideas:
      1. I'd like the option of muting someone, and leave Block as it is.
      2. It would be nice to be able to mute someone for a day, week or month.
      3. Same with Block.
  A legitimate use for "with" statement
    Non-programmers: This is esoteric. You can safely skip this post. :-)
    Now, as a programmer, I hate the with statement. I never use them. Back when I did they were the source of many ridiculous bugs. Saving a few characters in the source while obscuring the meaning of the code. Not a good tradeoff.
    However, there is a legitimate use for a with statement, and it's disturbing to see that it's been deprecated in JavaScript. I hope this does not mean that there will ever be a version of JavaScript that doesn't have it.
    Here's when you need it: When you're implementing a macro language.
      with (context) {eval (macro)}
    It's the same use-case as the much-maligned eval function.
      eval used to have a second param, btw, that allowed the caller to provide a context that the code runs in. They took this off, but I wish they hadn't. (Scroll to the bottom of this Mozilla tech note for the historical note.)
      We added these to Frontier, and were able to do wonderful stuff, like XML-RPC for example.
    Imho, eval and with should only be used by people implementing macro environments.
    But they are useful. And both with and eval should exist.
  This new Google mail feature is interesting and/or disturbing in many ways
    I was getting ready to post an email to a group I'm part of, and was sidetracked by a popup that said I could send $20 to "Mary Green."
    Here's why it's interesting and/or disturbing
      Google has become a bank. The transition is complete.
      Isn't this something like BitCoin?
      They're putting ads in my own email before I write it? How is that not spam?
      Get me the fuck out of here.
    Here's why I'm freaking out
      Lately Google has been taking liberties with my email far more than I ever gave them permission to. Yeah, I'm sure legally I did -- or I'm sure they think I did.
      They make messages disappear as I click on them in the iPad version of GMail. They filter important messages to new tabs they invented, without asking me. Now they're invading a writing space with ads? What??
      I like that they add features to GMail, but they're really pushing us around, and it's not cool.
  How Facebook can diversify
    I've been using Facebook for a few months, and I'm sorry I ever stopped using it. It's an important product to understand because so many people use it. If I want to participate in the evolution of post-Facebook technology, I have to have a good idea of what Facebook is. I made Mistake #1 that technologists make. I ain't perfect. :-)
      I also thought the iPad was a dud, to show how wrong I can be.
    Now I think I understand what Facebook is and isn't. It is a place to post pictures of family and friends, to keep people posted on what's up with you. People who you have personal relationships with. It's different from Twitter and LinkedIn, the former is for news, and the latter is for professional relationships. There probably isn't anything unique to each technology that makes it better or worse suited to one of these applications, rather it's the users who have decided how to position them.
    Position. That's a very important word, and an idea that all technologists should study and understand. I first focused on it in a great book by Al Ries and Jack Trout called Positioning, the Battle for Your Mind. An even better place to start is the more refined Marketing Warfare, which explores the same ideas as Positioning, viewed as warfare, with the principles of Clausewitz, the great Polish general and writer, as the structure to hang the story off.
    What Ries and Trout would tell Mark Zuckerberg, who wants Facebook to be doing what Twitter is doing, is that it can't and it won't. But there is a way to compete with Twitter -- start a new product, with a different name, and position it clearly in the users' minds as a new better Twitter. With some feature Twitter doesn't have, or better, one that Twitter can't have -- that has high value for users.
    The classic example in the world of Ries and Trout are the Cola Wars. At the beginning, Coke was #1 and there really was no #2. Until Pepsi discovered that people, if given a choice, would buy as much cola as they could. If the competition sold a tasty cola beverage in a 6.5-ounce bottle, touting it as the perfect size for all, offer a 12-ounce bottle at the same price. And voila, a strong #2 is born. People really did want more. And get this -- Coke had a huge installed base of vending machines that could only serve the smaller bottles. Ooops. ;-)
    So if I were advising Zuck, I'd say this. Quietly off on the side have a few of your best developers do a total clone of Twitter, but instead of a 140-character limit, make it 240 characters. Add a few nice features beyond that, like the ability to delete a message in your inbox, to get rid of turds without having to block the sender, and offer it up as your answer to Twitter. Leave Facebook right where it is, as the family-friendly networking environment. The DisneyLand of the online world. The next Arab Spring can happen on your Twitter clone.
  NSA chooses the wrong question
    Important piece in ComputerWorld quoting General Keith Alexander, director of the NSA.
      The NSA's bulk collection of U.S. telephone records is the "least intrusive" way to track suspected terrorists' communications with people in the U.S., General Keith Alexander said, defending the NSA's mass data collection and surveillance programs to the U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee.
      "If we can come up with a better way, we ought to put it on the table and argue our way through it," Alexander said. "There is no other way that we know of to connect the dots."
    Clever technique to direct the questioning where he wants it to go. But...
    That isn't where I'd begin the questioning. And I don't have any questions for a specific US general, rather for the US in general.
    Do we want to trade off freedom for security? Because that's what we're giving up. Then, if we decide we'd forgo the freedom, and that has to be more than a majority that chooses it, then we can talk about what the best methods are to gather data.
    We never had the first discussion. We never decided to take the kinds of risks the NSA is taking, in secret, on our behalf (supposedly) with our freedom.
    BTW, I'm no expert, but I don't think the Constitution gives us the option to forego freedom. Which is wise, because how could we decide to do it? Certainly someone would object.
  Five Word Tech Horrors
    One more post then I have to go.
    Last night there was a tweet-fest with this tag: #fiveWordTechHorrors.
    I kept thinking of new ones. I wanted to remember all of them here.
    So here they are...
      It works on my machine.
      One hundred forty character limit.
      I read it on Valleywag.
      Can my mother use it?
      Robert Scoble thinks it's cool.
      Jeff Bezos buys Washington Post.
    And I retweeted these:
      Just learn how to code! -- Alexia Tsotsis.
      Does it work in IE? -- Jeremy Spitzberg.
  Yes, servers can be end-user
    These days there's an unfortunate assumption that servers have to be for programmers only. They do not.
    On the Mac in the 1990s, we had HTTP, FTP, email servers that were totally end-user. Launch the app, fill in a few blanks in a dialog, or just accept the defaults, and you've got a server.
    What happened was tragic. On his return, Steve Jobs wiped the whole market out with one move, by bundling Unix servers with the OS. The message was clear. Servers are not for users.
    In their defense, they might not have even known there was an ecosystem. Those were days of wiping the slate clean. Apple never really noticed the developers they had attracted. We left, shaking our heads about what could have been.
    Well the art isn't lost. We still know how to do it.
  Would you tweet for hot cocoa?
    A niche in net marketing that hasn't yet been filled.
    I'm hanging out at the skating rink in Central Park, watching the skaters.
    Take a picture, post it to Twitter. "Enjoying the view at the skating rink."
    Or, if I see a sign, tweet with #wollman and get a free hot cocoa.
    My location has to be attached, so they know which table to bring the cocoa to.
    Easy way to encourage first-person tweeting.
    This has got to be the next step, imho.
    Sorry to have mentioned it. ;-)
    "cheesecake"
  A missing net construct
    I want to be able to pay a price to reserve a domain for perpetuity.
    That way we'd be able to build structures that had more longevity.
    Right now everything is relatively ephemeral.
    This is the kind of thing a service bureau could do.
    Don't need to wait for ICANN to do it.
    Or an "Internet Banker" would do (another missing construct).
  Learning to code will not make you rich (or particularly powerful)
    I used to evangelize blogging the way people now promote the idea that everyone should "learn to code." I never said learning to blog would mean people would listen to you -- they're separate things. Blogging, imho, is good to do even if no one but you reads what you write. You formulate your thoughts in a different, more complete way, when you write as if someone else could understand them. But people didn't hear that. They thought if they blogged they would become influential. That people would read them. And when they realized this wasn't so, there was a backlash.
    I think when people hear "Learn To Code" they think "Get rich like Zuck or Steve Jobs." When they learn to code their next question likely will be: "Where do I collect my millions of dollars?" Of course most people who code, if they make any money at all, make a modest living. When you reach a certain age, you're put out to pasture to fend for yourself. People seem to think "coding" is a young person's activity (even though it isn't), and if you're lucky enough to get a job doing it, you'll have to find something else to do when you're 35 or so, and that's not going to be so easy.
    Learning to code is good if you have a calling, if you feel it's what you must do to express yourself. If you have ideas that you can implement in code that no one else is doing. Or if you just love the puzzles that programming is constantly presenting you with. You have to have a certain amount of self-hatred to love programming, btw, because it's a grind. And to do it well you have to have a lot of all of these things.
    You might think that by learning to code you get to be the Man Behind the Curtain, the all-powerful person who makes the digital world work. But that's not what coding is about. If you want power, and I've said this many times -- rather than learn to code -- first learn to run a server. That's real power. And it's far easier than programming. You can learn to run a server in a few days or weeks. There's not much to it. Servers are just computers, like a laptop, that are always on and have a net connection that never goes away. They run software that's a little different from the stuff you run, but if you can install a word processor or a graphics program, you can learn how to run a web server. And you will be able to publish whatever you want. But then you kind of have to be a blogger to appreciate that, so we're back to the beginning.
    Also, running a server is a good gateway to becoming a programmer. Sooner or later you'll want to customize your server and that's done (drumroll please) with programming! ;-)
  New podcast
    Yesterday I did a 1-hour podcast interview with Megan Murray and Euan Semple.
    I really like the way it came out. We hit on a lot of important points. And I got to pontificate a bit on art, education, and media hacking. And punch cards.
    I'm subscribing to their podcast. ;-)
  Journalism and rich people: "We move in their world, but it is their world."
    A great story from The Paper, a 1994 movie starring Michael Keaton, Glenn Close, Marisa Tomei, Randy Quaid and Robert Duvall.
    The characters played by Duvall and Close are in this scene.
    Bernie: In '68, a bunch of us went to cover the Olympics in Grenoble. Decided to go to the best restaurant in town. Now, the menu didn't have any prices, but we were all on expense accounts so we figured, fuck it, got drunk. Well, somehow there ended up being, I don't know, fifteen or sixteen of us at the table, and when the check came - ooooo, it was nine thousand dollars.
    Alicia: Whoa.
    Bernie: Yeah. [chuckles] So, now we're all starting to point fingers, we're trying to figure out who invited who. And just when it was starting to get really embarrassing, this funny-lookin' old guy at the next table calls the maitre-d over. [mimics writing] Ehhhh, he did a couple of squiggly lines on a napkin, signed his name, winked at us - that was it. The old guy was Pablo Picasso, and that napkin paid our bill.
    Alicia: Did I miss the segue here, Bernie? What's the point?
    Bernie: Well, the people we cover - we move in their world but it is their world. You can't live like them, Alicia. You'll never keep up. Now, if you try and make this job about the money, you'll be nothing but miserable, 'cause we don't get the money - never have, never will.
  Looking for great NBA feeds
    Last week I started an NBA River.
    I'm loving it. It's already improved my appreciation for the sport.
    To build the river, I visited the newspaper sites of the home cities of all the major teams and found their feeds, and thankfully -- most of the have feeds for their team.
    I added national pubs like USA Today and Sports Illustrated. And I asked a friend who works at the NBA for pointers to his favorite blogs. Now I want to open the appeal up more broadly.
    If you have a favorite NBA blog or journo, please send me a pointer, either by posting a comment here or by email at dave dot winer at gmail dot com.
    I'm looking for great commentary and observations, whether from fans or reporters. Biased is definitely okay.
    Thanks!
  Pando is doing journalism
    This piece on Pando is an example of real journalism that is so rare in tech. A vendor makes an assertion that doesn't sound right to a reporter. So he gets the story on his own. It isn't a story created by a vendor. It isn't a subject that the vendor wants to discuss. It informs the reader how the market is developing, despite what the vendor wants us to think. And it says, in the headline, that the vendor is doing what all vendors do, leading reporters astray. And why shouldn't they? The tech press generally lets them get away with it.
    The Pando piece taught me something, painted a picture I didn't have before. And most important, it makes their case. I'm left wanting to know more, for sure, but all details. I got the kind of overview a good journalistic effort should provide.
    Add to this that Pando, alone among tech pubs, has been willing to ask challenging questions about the new Omidyar news company. That's the state of tech journalism in 2013. Now where are the other tech pubs on the Omidyar story?
    I said to Paul Carr, a reporter at Pando, that I was surprised, and he asked why. I thought Pando was the worst of the insider tech news sites. I saw them as a PR mouthpiece for the Silicon Valley investor community. That they've been willing to challenge Omidyar, a tech multi-billionaire, and AirBNB, another huge Silicon Valley success, says that they're wanting to do journalism, not just get rich. Which, by the way, is probably why you read so little about Omidyar's company in other tech pubs.
    Update: Maybe Pando is hedging a bit. ;-)
  To Feedly readers
    Apparently Feedly is changing links to content on blogs and news sources to point at their own pages. I want Scripting News readers to know, if they use Feedly, they will be missing all kinds of good stuff we're doing here.
    If that's what they (people reading my site through Feedly) want, then it's okay with me. What's not okay is if Feedly somehow represents their pages as mine. If that's what they're doing, or planning on doing, then I ask you to find another way of reading my site.
    There's no excuse for representing links to other people's writing as your own. It's one of the ugliest sides of the web. That Feedly, which has up to now been a fairly classy company, would contemplate this, makes me think they must not understand.
  The Indiana Jones Programming Method
    There's a bug in my outliner.
    It's an encoding bug. I write something, save it -- everything's cool. But if I reload the app, thus forcing the file to reload, what I get back isn't what I put in. It shows up when I'm writing complex code that does stuff with string constants. It has to reach a certain level of complexity and use single and double quotes, left angle brackets and equal signs. I have been unable to trap it. Probably because my focus is elsewhere. When it comes to encoding issues, the mind always is elsewhere if you know what I mean. ;-)
    Anyway, I decided I would work around the problem instead of trying to find and fix it. Even this was problematic. Every approach I came up with fell into the same trap. Until I thought of another approach entirely -- if this editor is screwing with the text, I'll use another one that doesn't have the problem. I saved that file in a folder and now load the code in via a script element in the head of the document. Hey it's a better solution anyway, reusable code! At least I tell myself that. But it works. So there's that. ;-)
    I call it the Indiana Jones Method, after that famous scene in the first Indiana Jones movie, where Indiana comes face to face with a sword-wielding giant in the bazaar. The giant is twice his size. And he's got a huge sword. And he's good with it. There's a crowd. Foreboding music plays. How the hell will Indiana get out of this one!
    I don't want to spoil it in case you haven't seen the movie. But it's clever. He does it much the way I solved this programming problem.
    "cheesecake"
  What got into the Knicks?
    The Knicks were tied for the worst record in the NBA going into the Thursday night game with the Nets. But now they've won the last two games both by blowout scores.
    What happened? I think you have to take it at face value. Carmelo Anthony figured something out that has up to now eluded him -- that he plays on a team. I know that sounds flip or sarcastic, but it's actually the most direct way to say it. I'm sure he's a very smart guy (again, no sarcasm) because to perform at the level he does requires not just great physical ability, he's got to have a great computer upstairs. But things elude even very smart people. I speak from experience, with all possible humility. Sometimes the truth is hiding in plain sight.
    It is very easy to defend against the Knicks if there is only one strong shooter on the team. So when Melo is the only one connecting, the Knicks lose. Over time, they start losing a lot. That's what happened in the first sixteen games in this season. What happened in the Nets game, and it worked, is that other guys got hot, and Melo let them have the ball.
    If the Knicks want to try a really radical approach now, they might cast Melo not as a forward, rather as the point guard. It's his job to bring the ball back on the offense. Then he calls the play and gets the ball to the open man. He's watching the defense as much as the offense. Who have they left open. Bing. That's the guy. That's a good next approach, imho in redesigning the Knicks with the current roster. Don't trade anyone.
    The last two games have been fun to watch. That's all I ask for as a fan. Sure it would be nice if the Knicks were to go deep into the playoffs. But I know I'm going to see good basketball in the last couple of rounds no matter who makes it. In the meantime, they're my neighborhood team. They play just down the street. It would be nice if their games were fun and interesting to watch.
    In any case nice job! :-)
    PS: Now that I have an NBA river, I'm getting more of the good gossip. I realized I needed it when my building super knew more about the Knicks than I did because he reads the NY Post. Even though their politics are offensive, their Knicks reporting is good. Anyway, they say that Melo is trying to recruit Rajon Rondo from the Celtics to play on the Knicks. That actually would be a good move, imho. A strong fast even explosive point guard to go with Melo would probably work really well. Like OKC with Westbrook and Durant. You need both to make it work. I think oddly, the Knicks would be much better off if they had kept Jeremy Lin, and if Melo had been willing to work with him (he was clearly offended by his presence). But Rondo, Melo and Chandler (if he gets healthy) would be a pretty awesome combination.
  Wish: A JavaScript shell that talks to Evernote
    I could put some really nice software in it.
    Two-way communication in and out. I send a structure across to Evernote representing a notebook, get one back. I give the user a nice browser-based notebook editor. Totally ready to do this.
    Help me.
  You want power? Run a server
    Lots of people want to learn to code these days, and that's great.
    However, as a 40-year programmer, I think it would be even more useful if people learned how to run a server first.
    That's real power, because with a server you can communicate without going through Facebook's filter.
    It's really not that hard to do, or expensive.
    Run your own server. That's power.
    PS: Or use Evernote. They don't publish a feed at all. It's a good platform to build on, imho.
  Inside Llewyn Davis
    A new Coen Brothers movie!
    Luckily I had hit a milestone on my latest development project, and it opened today in NYC, in two theaters, so I took off and walked downtown to see Inside Llewyn Davis on Broadway and 14th St. It was the right place to see this movie because that's the neighborhood where it largely takes place, fifty years ago.
    What to say? It's not like any other Coen Brothers movie. It's not a slapstick comedy like Raising Phoenix or Fargo or Burn After Reading. It's not as dark as No Country for Old Men, but it is a dark movie.
    Is it worth seeing? Of course. It's beautifully made, with lots of music, and small roles for big stars like Justin Timberlake, John Goodman and F Murray Abraham. Goodman's role was especially good, so depraved. Deeply depraved.
    There's a lot of symbolism in this movie that I'm going to have to think about.
    A nice touch, they gave us a CD with the soundtrack. We've been saying this for a long time, movie producers ought to upgrade the experience with something you can only get if you go to the movie. However, a memory stick would have worked better for me.
    Go to this movie if: 1. You are a devoted Coen Brothers fan as I am or 2. You love folk music or 3. You love NY. I was living in the East Village when the movie was made, so the locations are mostly quite familiar to me. I went for a walk in the Village after seeing the movie, to complete the experience.
    And here's the NY Times review, which I can now read. ;-)
  The NSA on a helicopter
    I've now had two back-and-forths with Glenn Greenwald on Twitter, and I gotta say this guy stonewalls like Nixon. Like a politician who's hiding something and who is trying to confuse matters so that you don't know which end is up.
    He asks what's the difference between the Washington Post getting a copy of the Snowden Docs and his startup getting one? Well, we know something about the Washington Post, and we don't know very much about his new venture. To a man as smart as Greenwald this must be obvious. I've seen him dodge a barrage of hard-ass questions on TV shows. His brain functions at a high-enough level that he certainly knows it's a bullshit question. And he must know what the issue is, but he'd dodging it.
      BTW, I didn't know the Washington Post and the NY Times had complete copies of the Snowden Docs.
    He says they haven't started yet, why can't we leave them alone until they do. Well, it's not so much about his company, which I said would be interesting but not questionable if it weren't for the Snowden Docs. He says there are fourteen hires at NewCo and only two have anything to do with Snowden. But the Snowden Docs are their biggest "hire." The elephant in the room. Why doesn't Greenwald see it? (I'm sure he does.)
    Finally Omidyar weighs in, saying "reporters manage and control their relationships with sensitive sources, not owners." But I don't think Greenwald is just a reporter at NewCo. My primary question has been this -- is he a principal or a mere employee. Different rules apply in either case. His role at the company is a basic question that they won't answer.
    Last night I read a series of posts on an anonymous bloggers' site named Tarzie, and saw that this is an ongoing story that I'm coming to late. I never wanted to dig in this deeply. I thought of myself as a sort-of friend and ally of Greenwald and Omidyar (I am an actual friend of one of their hires, Jay Rosen). I just wanted answers to basic questions about the way the Snowden Docs are being handled, and deal with questions that would inevitably come up, from less friendly sources. At this point I'm no friend of this venture's. I think it's ill-conceived at best, and at worst, a way of Greenwald et al sacrificing the truth behind the Snowden Docs to help build their personal wealth and influence.
    This is a very important point. There's a scandal revealed by the Snowden Docs. It should result in reform in the US government, really the world government, because the disease seems to infect all of them. If it doesn't happen, because the custodians of the docs were more focused on getting rich (or richer), then that's a terrible outcome and one that's as corrupt as the corruption that Snowden exposed.
    They are often compared to Woodward and Bernstein, but remember what the outcome was there. Nixon resigned. A new President. A country shamed, and a long period of healing, that may not even be over yet. At least we addressed the problem. I was alive then, and was old enough to understand what was going on. The situation was untenable. Had Nixon stayed, the result would have been worse. He had to go.
    In a parallel sense, if the Constitution is to mean anything as we go forward, the NSA has to get on a helicopter like Nixon did, and ride off into the sunset. And it looks less likely, and it also looks like Greenwald et al are complicit. This is not good.
    I don't care one bit about their company. I care about the truth coming out and correcting the situation. If they aren't going to do it, they must get out of the way, without further delay.
  1963: No-deference reporting
    One of the things I enjoyed the most about the CBS re-run of the coverage of the 1963 assassination of President Kennedy was how little deference there was to news sources by the reporters. They asked the questions I would have had asked, as the story developed. Nothing about how people feel or what the "optics" are.
    In a follow-up int erview with Walter Cronkite with Terry Gross in 1993, he explains how hard it was for him to put aside his own feelings to do his job, but he was satisfied that he had. This was 24 years before the famous scene in Broadcast News (1987) where William Hurt airs emotions that he doesn't have.
  The Snowden leaks and the billionaire
    A quick follow-up to Sunday's post.
    There's still a question that's unresolved, and it wouldn't be important, or anyone's business really, if it weren't for the documents leaked by Edward Snowden, that were and presumably still are part of this new venture. If it was just Greenwald, Omidyar & Co -- it would certainly be interesting, but it wouldn't be so questionable (I use that term literally, no implication of wrong-doing, just saying that it's something that we have real questions about).
    The main question is this: What happened?
    The NSA documents still seem to reside at the Guardian. Are there now two copies, one with Greenwald and one with his (former) employer? Does he still write for the Guardian? I'm not clear about that either. What's his status at the Omidyar company? Is he a journalist-only, or is he also a principal of the company? When he speaks, is he a company spokesperson or a journalist discussing his journalistic work? Will we know when he's wearing which of these hats, if he actually has two?
    Again, this wouldn't be important if he were writing about the Knicks or the weather, but he's reporting on issues of importance to people all over the world. How this is handled, the custody of the Snowden documents, and what's to become of them, is the matter of importance. It's not just important to the government and Greenwald, it's important to everyone. And it's not okay to just brush the questions aside, as they have, so far.
    I can't imagine Greenwald accepting the answers his company gave to the questions we asked here. Regardless, I don't accept them. They're valid questions, and deserve a thoughtful response.
  To rebuild or add another boolean?
    I just added this to my non-existent coding diary, and the specifics won't make much sense to anyone but me. But the experience would be immediately recognizable to anyone who has worked on a complex project for any length of time. As usual, ignore what you don't understand. ;-)
    I recognized the pattern, there was spaghetti starting to envelop my new CMS code. This happens when you add special cases by adding boolean parameters to routines. That happens because when you wrote the high level code initially you didn't fully understand the problem.
    The question is did you leave yourself the room in the schedule and with regard to potential breakage to actually rebuild the code so it correctly achieves its purpose? So when you read the code it looks like the pseudocode you'd write when conceiving it? If it's complicated enough and important enough -- it's worth the time to factor and re-factor until it reads like documentation of its functionality.
    Too often you can't go back and re-engineer it, and you live with the bad construction. Then the code is fragile its whole life, so you don't build new layers on top of it, or if you do they're either inefficient or missing obviously valuable features.
    I decided to rebuild this time. The problem was confusion over how and when index files would be built. What I realized was the code was optimized for minimizing the amount of stack building. When I got to that point in the rebuild, I added a cache, so the upper level code could be totally simple and natural. It worked!
    Now the question is can I use the software for its intended purpose? I was able to do that before. Can I still do that?
    See also: We Make Shitty Software.
  New York should revoke Dolan's license
    I know the Dolan family owns the Knicks, but they don't own New York.
    They can keep playing here if they want, but if they want to call the team the New York Knicks, they have to sell the team to someone who will build something New York-like, something that works, and isn't built around one very inadequate person's ego.
    If anything about New York has been constant for all its history is scale, longevity, audacity, philosophy and sheer excellence when compared to the rest of the country. The Knicks make more sense in a city that's famous for humiliating itself. I'll leave that to your imagination. But they've had their chance. It's time for the Dolans and New York to take leave of each other.
    Maybe Staten Island wants them?
  How do they make coconut oil?
    I've started to eat coconut oil on the recommendation of a friend. I'm on my third jar of the stuff, each from a different manufacturer. I was reading the label on the most recent purchase, they told a nice story of how they make the stuff. You can see little bits of coconut in the oil, which is solid at room temperature and doesn't require refrigeration. Then I wondered what the factory looks like and and the process of making it. Then I realized in the times we live in, it would be totally reasonable to be able to go to their website and watch a video, perhaps taken by an objective third party, that shows the factory is like, and how they make it. I would find that interesting. It seems totally possible, and if companies start doing it, it could be a reason to buy their product.
  Greenwald, Pando, the hero and the billionaire
    A quick note about the Pando piece and Glenn Greenwald, Edward Snowden and the new journalism startup founded by Greenwald and Pierre Omidyar.
    1. Is Greenwald a principal in the new journalism company, or an employee?
    2. Of course it would have been impossible for Snowden to profit from the leaks, or even be compensated for them.
    3. So while, of course, it's not wrong for Greenwald to be paid for his journalism work, it does seem wrong for him to get rich off it, in this case.
    4. Would Omidyar have rushed to start a business with Greenwald if he didn't have the scoop on the Snowden leaks? No one knows for sure, but in journalism appearances are important.
    5. I am a longtime fan of Greenwald's and honestly I've never liked Pando -- but I did not like the way Greenwald dismissed their criticism. I thought they asked important questions. It didn't seem likely other journalists would, given their conflict of interest. As Greenwald himself said, reporters would likely be interested in working for a fresh startup founded by an Internet billionaire. I don't think people take this into account, but reporters tend to go easy on rich tech people because they're potential employers. Reporters are human beings too.
    6. How news organizations deal with criticism is crucial. This is not a good start!
January 2014
  AWS/node.js question
    I'm looking for sample code that sets the "website-redirect-location" property of an S3 object using the AWS toolkit for node.js.
    Here's the code I wrote that does not succeed in setting the property on the object.
    s3.putObject ({Bucket: "scripting.com", Key: "hello.html", WebsiteRedirectLocation: "http://amazon.com/"});
    I've stared at the code, tried all kinds of permutations, but there really isn't that much I can change.
    If anyone has working code for this please let me know. I have a really cool feature waiting for this to work. ;-)
  Wealth does not make you smarter
    #backgroundImage "http://static.scripting.com/larryKing/images/2014/01/31/mansion.jpg"
    #description "This is my take-away from the Tom Perkins story."
    This thread began in a Facebook post by Mike Godwin, who is the Godwin in Godwin's Law. I know Mike. He's a regular East Bay liberal lawyer type. Not rich, as far as I know, intellectual, opinionated, left-leaning, and a longtime netizen, which is why he's so famous for creating the law, which came out of various flamewars on the pre-web Internet. He's a good guy to converse with, he's smart, edgy, opinionated, challenging -- all good things when it comes to learning and having fun in conversation.
    He was commenting on a Krugman post entitled Godwin Help Us, a line he stole from Jonathan Chait, referring to the Tom Perkins mess. I commented, which brought my friend Chuck Shotton into the thread, with a link to a Scott Adams post that takes a contrarian view to conventional wisdom about the Perkins mess. He says Perkins is a smart guy, and has seen many trends before others, that's why he got so rich (good point) and that while his choice of Nazi metaphor is distracting, it's not totally impossible that the rich will be demonized as the source of all our pain, as Jews were in the Holocaust.
    As a Jew myself, whose family fled the Nazis, I have always had mixed feelings about Godwin's Law, even though I like Mike. It's been used to shut down discussion of fascism and repression, and even a resurgence of Nazism, and it's contrary to my grandfather's admonition, a man who fought to save his family from the Nazis, that we never forget.
    Anyway, that's all preamble.
    Tom Perkins does have a point, but that's not what I think of first. I think of what wealth does to people over time. Wealth buys distance. I learned this when I participated in a Kleiner-Perkins IPO in the late 80s, and became rich myself. I did what lots of newly rich tech people do, I bought a big house on a lot of land in Woodside. Pool, hot tub, lots of room for big parties, which I had fairly regularly. It wasn't a terrible lifestyle, but I saw where it was going, and I didn't like it. So when I had a chance to change things, I sold the house and downscaled my lifestyle dramatically. I now live in a Manhattan apartment. A nice one, for sure, but it's just two rooms, a small kitchen and bath. I ride the subway. I don't like possessions. I don't enjoy being distant from humanity.
    Richness, over time, warps your perspective. You tend to only associate with other rich people, the non-rich people you meet are often employees or service people. The rich reinforce each others' belief that they're the smartest people around, otherwise they wouldn't be so rich, right?
    Thinking gets inbred, fragile, cloistered. I've seen it happen to people of my own generation. You have to work at staying in the flow of humanity. Poor people do the opposite, dream of being separated from all that humanity. The trick, imho, is to strike a balance, if you can. And being well-off financially gives you the option. You don't have to choose to be cut off from humanity. I find I'm much happier if I'm more immersed in it, less separated. I think this is because it's reality. No matter how much money you have you still have just one body, and it ages at the same rate as all other bodies, and it does all the same things. Bill Gates used to say when he flew coach instead of first class, that he gets there at the same time. I admire that. Why? Because it's true!
    When I lived on the estate, I dreamed of having a house on an ordinary street with people coming and going, and stopping on the street to talk with neighbors. It's so funny how people are that way, the grass is always greener, even if you have the largest, greenest, fullest lawn around. I think the super-rich have an inkling deep inside that they'd do better as people if they got out of the limo and helicopter and had a drink or threw a football with a few ordinary people, not just for PR but for real. I think we're built that way, a social species, and for most, to be super-rich is to be cut off from that.
    Sometimes ordinary people, not rich, act like they're inbred rich people. I think that's what the Fox News phenomenon is all about, and why people vote Republican. But I don't think being rich equates to being smart. Over time, the more you live rich, I think it actually makes you less intelligent.
  The ideal Node.js starter platform
    How to...
    1. Create an account, enter a username and password.
    2. Go to my GitHub project, click on Settings, click on Service Hooks.
    3. Click on the name of your platform, enter your credentials from step 1, and click a checkbox to activate.
    4. Go back to the platform to see my app running.
    To update the app, update the GitHub project. "Continuous deploy."
    This is as simple as it can be, and if you do it, I will use your service, and more important, if it's reliable and affordable (say $10 per month), I'll recommend it to my readers and users of my software and of course I will use it myself.
    Of course it has to be reliable and perform reasonably. Scaling -- not such a big issue. The idea is to have people running their own apps in the cloud, for them, and their friends, or a workgroup in a corporate setting.
  The browser and spaces after periods
    #backgroundImage "http://static.scripting.com/larryKing/images/2014/01/30/tbl.jpg"
    #description "I love it when technology gets something right!"
    A great thread on Facebook started by my friend Elisa Camahort Page.
    She pointed to a Slate piece by Farhad Manjoo (another friend!) that says you should never put two spaces after a period that ends a sentence. I certainly agree, and while I was taught by my typing teacher in 7th grade, Mr Corwin, to type two spaces, I learned later in life this was a mistake.
    Anyway, I pointed out that the web agrees. You can type as many spaces after periods as you like, the browser will only show one.
    I demo'd this with a comment, and added four spaces after each period. The browser only showed one space, even though Facebook dutifully sent four.
    I love it when technology gets something right. ;-)
    I suggested giving Tim Berners-Lee a big hug next time you see him. Or it might have been Marc Andreessen who made this call.
  Rebooting the Cobalt Qube?
    This came up in a comment on yesterday's post.
    I used to have a Cobalt Qube, many years ago. I even hosted scripting.com on it, as a static site. It ran Linux and Apache, but I never accessed it through the command line. It had a very nice selection of server software pre-installed, and a web-based admin app, that was also very nice. Easy to use. And way ahead of its time, I think.
    It was a great start, but it was never finished, as far as I know. That was 15 years ago. By now we should have a fantastic web-based admin app for Linux. It's a very important, imho, missing piece.
    I would love to participate in a community effort to catch up to where we were with the Qube, and then go way past where it was.
  I'm becoming a Node.js developer
    A little over a year ago I switched my primary development platform to browser-based JavaScript. Fargo came out of that, and soon there will be Fargo 2.
    But we needed a solid back-end, and we didn't have one as of the end of the summer. It was obvious that it had to run in Node.js. I made a bunch of approaches, but it didn't come together until my longtime friend Brent Simmons gave me a Hello World server app in Node. That was what I needed.
    Now I've been immersed in Node on Unix for the last few weeks. Last time I seriously used Unix was in the late 70s when I was a computer science grad student at UW-Madison. Unix is still the same, but the tools have developed, deepened. It's a little like time travel for me, having missed about 34 intervening years. ;-)
    The Unix docs rarely put it together for you. I need to do X. Fumble around, and read a bunch of Stack Overflow pages, but I'm still not getting it. Or maybe I'm more acclimated to the client side, and I just have to develop stronger sea legs on server JS. I'll let you know.
    Dan MacTough, also a longtime friend, helped guide me through the Unix/Node setup. I started by reading the code he released on GitHub, and eventually we Skyped so I could ask a series of questions. Every answer saved me days.
    Now I have a server on an Amazon EC2 Ubuntu micro instance. It's running my fargoPublisher prototype. I have a pretty smooth deploy method with a folder shared between my desktop and the server, and the Macintosh Terminal program. I can upload a changed version of the software and reload the app in a few commands, a few seconds.
    I miss the easy setup I had in Frontier. I could have a table of scripts that all ran concurrently. They could attach themselves to a port and off we go. Servers were easy to write and deploy. I want that same smoothness on Unix.
    Ideally I'd like a browser-based Node app that let me manage a list of concurrently running Node apps. A checkbox next to each enables or disables (load or unload as necessary). Stats about each app, how long it's been running, how many hits its taken, etc. I want it to "just work" of course, which is most definitely not the Unix way. ;-)
    I'm also considering various hosted setups. But I like having my own server. I'm trying to do it without a GUI interface, all through web interfaces and the command line.
  The future was more exciting
    #description "Why the tech backlash is happening now."
    For decades the future of tech was far more exciting than the present. The potential was overwhelming to people who got a glimpse of it.
    But a lot of that potential has now been realized. It has been incorporated into the structure of society. You know -- digital natives, for example. Kids who learn to use iPads before they can walk. Today, we all use the devices only visionaries dared to dream of just a short while ago.
    And that if you project out into the future, where tech is going is fairly depressing. You can thank Facebook and Google and the NSA for that.
    Why are protesters invading the privacy of tech people? Just by asking the question that way, it's kind of obvious, no?
    The Washington Post is right, it's time for tech to come down to earth. We've heard all the hype, we were part of the dream that made you so rich. Now, we have to deal with the aftermath, not just us, but you too.
    BTW, I emailed myself a copy of the image via GMail. Google doesn't offer a way for me to download it, I can only share it via Google Plus. I'll figure out some way to get it on my website not yours, but in the meantime, oy.
    #backgroundImage "http://static.scripting.com/larryKing/images/2014/01/27/frenchRevolution.jpg"
  What we should give reporters hell over
    Should reporters apologize for running stories that people find offensive? Hell no.
    When GrantLand apologized they set a bad precedent, and they weakened journalism for everyone. GrantLand got hit by a pressure group that didn't like the story. There's nothing special about "The Internet." Is it common procedure for reporters to apologize when they offend a pressure group? I didn't think so.
    Here's how I see it. They took a risk, the subject of their piece committed suicide, and we don't know why. It could be the shame of being outed publicly, as some people say. Or it could have been the shame of having lied, committed fraud, and possibly going to jail. There are all kinds of theories, but the truth is that we don't know.
    It's okay for you to be hurt by reporting, to be enraged by it, to want to do something about it, but that can happen when a reporter is just doing their job. They don't have to apologize or retract, or make you feel good.
    However there are times when we should give reporters hell -- when they lie, either overtly, or by not outing a lie. That's the one cardinal sin of reporting, and it happens all the time, and we let them get away with it.
    When a source lies in front of you and you don't challenge it, when you give it credence, when you accept its premise, this is a reporter committing malpractice. And the consequences can be devastating. I don't use that word lightly.
    For example, in the run-up to the war in Iraq, reporters knew that it was a trumped-up war, that there was no actual connection between the terrorism of 9/11 and Iraq. This was Bush being opportunistic. He wanted to attack Iraq, for whatever reason, and used 9/11 as an excuse. Anyone who was paying attention knew this. Yet supposedly credible journalists, ones who still insist on our respect (including Bill Keller, btw, the subject of another recent Internet controversy), went along with the lies, and never acknowledged or apologized for all the death they caused. Those deaths are largely faceless and nameless. We don't know about their struggles. We don't empathize with them or their families. They were caught in our hypocrisy.
    Of course every death is tragic and sad and deserves our sympathy. But a reporter's job is not to avoid tragedy, quite the opposite -- their job is to out it, to make it visible, to tell us what's happening, so we can act on it.
    When we make reporting an evil, we're asking to be lied to. We're asking reporters to ignore their responsibility for fear of offending us. That's not reporting. And that's a choice you may want to make, but it's not my choice.
    Previously: Suicide and reporting.
  Suicide and reporting
    There was a recent controversy on the net about a GrantLand reporter, a golf putter, an inventor, and a suicide. A lot was said about it, but what have we learned? If the subject of your piece says they'll commit suicide if you don't stop, what do you do? I've been there -- had a subject say he would kill himself if I didn't stop, and I decided to stop. Here was my thought process.
    1. Is the guy bluffing? Probably. My judgement call.
    2. What if he's not bluffing, I run the story, and he kills himself?
    3. It would ruin my life. I'd never get over it.
    4. Don't run the piece.
    How do I feel about it now? I don't even remember what it was about. But I never forgot the moment reading the email that threatened suicide. Too heavy for me. I'm out of here.
    Now, I'm not a real reporter, I'm a blogger. I can do my job, developing software, without having to deal with this issue. But reporters write stories every day that may indirectly or even directly lead to deaths, and we don't call them out for it. It's one of the costs of doing business for reporters. I can think of lots of examples -- reporting on terrorism or war, drug research, or even traffic safety. What about the early stories about AIDS? The lead up to war in Iraq? See an earlier piece from today about the extinction of species. If your writing covers an environmental calamity as it's happening you might be involved in the death of millions of people.
    Should we stop reporting? Obviously not. This is a complicated issue. It can't be simplified, it's really hard for me to see it in black and white, evil and good, savvy or clueless. Sometimes you get away with it, and other times the shit hits the fan.
    One of the common beliefs of entrepreneurship is that if you never take a risk you can never be great. This is true of everything -- also reporting. If a story has a terrible outcome, does that mean you shouldn't run it? Wow, that's actually impossible to say.
  GitHub and Dropbox do not mix
    I learned something today.
    1. Never put GitHub-managed folders in Dropbox folders because Git creates temporary and/or invisible files in folders, and Dropbox may do things that trigger unintended actions or side-effects in Git, causing random havoc which is not what you want. ;-)
    2. If you get in trouble because you put a GitHub-managed folder in Dropbox, and you're using the Mac client, you can unhook from the repo by clicking on the word Repositories in the main window, right-click on the repo you are having trouble with, remove it. Then re-add it by going to the GitHub website, and click on the Clone in Desktop button to load it into the Mac desktop client.
    I am putting this in a blog post so I can find it next time I get into this situation and forget how to get out of it. And in the meantime I'm moving my folders out of Dropbox hoping to never get here again! :-)
    "cheesecake"
  Radical thinking about humanity
    Yesterday on a walk through frigid Central Park, I listened to a New Yorker podcast interview with Elizabeth Kolbert about how things are going on Planet Earth re extinction of species. The short answer: "Not so good." We seem to be in the middle of the Sixth Extinction, which is also the title of her book.
    Until recently, it was thought that Great Extinctions didn't happen, that evolution was a slow methodical process, but it was proven by a Berkeley scientist, Walter Alvarez, that the Cretaceous era came to an end because of a meteor hitting the planet. We know this because meteors have lots of iridium and our planet does not. And there's a layer of iridium in the fossil record right around the time of the extinction of the dinosaurs.
    The podcast had a couple of ideas that shook the foundation of my thinking. I like it when that happens, even if I don't like the message these revelations carry.
    First, there's nothing special about humanity. We've only been here about 200,000 years. Long enough to destroy everything, but in the grand scheme of things, when the destruction is finished, the planet will probably evolve new species, a different cast of characters, that do what we do, more or less. It may take tens or hundreds of millions of years to clean up after us. But this is not a problem for the planet. It has the time.
    We may be insignificant, but what we are doing re destruction of the planet's ecology is unprecedented. It's never before happened here. We don't know about other planets elsewhere in our galaxy or the universe. But we're in the process of recreating climates that haven't existed on earth for 50 million years. That's something. Not something to be proud of, of course.
    Second, the mundane things we do every day, the example she provided was driving to get groceries, are actually totally extraordinary. When we get in the car to run errands we're burning the bodies of animals that lived millions of years ago. We're moving the carbon from their bodies from deep below the earth, into the atmosphere and the oceans, transforming them. Destroying old habitats, and creating new ones. This is not something that "natural" processes do. You need a supposedly intelligent species to do this.
    Her book is coming out next month. Asked if she was suggesting things we might do to solve the problem, in the book, she says she is deliberately not doing that. My guess is the reason for that is the next epiphany that hit me after digesting a bit of the podcast.
    Third, there is nothing we can do. We might as well enjoy consuming the last resources of the planet, and perhaps should turn our attention to leaving an adequate record of our civilization for the next one to come along, millions of years from now, in the hope of helping them avoid the catastrophe that ended us.
    BTW, in case you're feeling guilty -- don't. This process was not caused by anything we consciously did. Certainly not anything you or I did. Just the existence of a species capable of doing such big things was probably enough to destroy life on the planet. You can listen to the podcast and let me know if you hear anything different. It seems this story is full of revelations about our reality.
  30th Anniversary of Mac
    #backgroundImage "http://static.scripting.com/larryKing/images/2014/01/24/jobs.gif"
    #description "The Mac was introduced on January 24, 1984. I was there."
    #subheadColor "white"
    January 24, 1984. It was a wonderful day, the culmination of a couple of years work by my startup company, Living Videotext. Our big public announcement would come on the same day the Mac rolled out. 30 years ago today.
    I had hired my brother and future sister-in-law to help with the development. We had a Macintosh in our office. It was a huge secret at the time, but we showed it to our best friends anyway, swearing them to secrecy (now it can be told). I remember my first look at a Macintosh, I knew I was going in to see it, but nothing could prepare me for the surprise, the feeling you get when you look at a baby or a puppy or kitten -- this thing is cute and gorgeous and new and filled with potential. Most important it spoke directly to me and said "I am the perfect place to put your software."
    Up till then, I had been working on Unix systems, and then the Apple II and IBM PC. I loved the little computers, because they were all mine to use as I wished. On the earlier, bigger machines, you had to share them with other users and programmers. The machine felt far away, but with the Apple II, it was right there.
    The Mac had that feeling too, but it was also elegant and simple and brilliant. The type of people who would love this machine would also love what I was making, an idea processor.
    ThinkTank, which I had been developing until then on the Apple II and IBM PC, was a tool for organizing your thoughts on a computer screen. You could create an outline, then indent, move an item up a list, or out a level. Flesh out the details, and quickly record a top-level idea you had overlooked.
    Our tool was designed to add what would eventually be called "agility" to your thought process. The ability to quickly revise as you learned more about the problem. Outlines on paper were rigid, but outlines on a computer screen -- they could fly!
    The problem was, you weren't inside the outline on an Apple II or an IBM PC, you were above it. You couldn't move an item with your hands, you had to trick a "cursor" into doing what you wanted. The big feature the Mac had that was new then was the mouse. You could directly manipulate your ideas that way.
    It's no coincidence that the earliest experimenter in the area we were commercializing, Doug Engelbart, was also the inventor of the mouse. We had been hearing about mice, I had even used one in a demo at Xerox PARC, but now, with the Mac -- I had one on my desk. I loved the Mac at first sight, but the foundation of our long-term relationship was the mouse (30 years later, I'm writing this story in my outliner, on a Mac, with a mouse).
    The rollout on January 24th was like a college graduation ceremony. There were the fratboys, the insiders, the football players, and developers played a role too. We praised their product, their achievement, and they showed off our work. Apple took a serious stake in the success of software on their platform. They also had strong opinions about how our software should work, which in hindsight were almost all good ideas. The idea of user interface standards were at the time controversial. Today, you'll get no argument from me. It's better to have one way to do things, than have two or more, no matter how much better the new ones are.
    That day, I was on a panel of developers, talking to the press about the new machine. We were all gushing, all excited to be there. I still get goosebumps thinking about it today.
    My startup, when the Mac came out, made most of its money off IBM PC software. By 1986, with the help of Bill Campbell at Apple, we got Macs for every employee at our growing company, and our board of directors, and the die was cast -- we became a Mac software company. The Mac was berry berry good to me (a dated reference to a fictional character from the 80s on SNL).
    But the Mac, while it was a brilliant vision, and it's gestalt so lovely, was in its first incarnation, a flawed product. It didn't have enough memory for a machine with so much graphic potential. The screen was tiny, as were the floppy disks. The product came at a time when personal computers were getting hard drives, but the Mac had no ability to expand. The mouse was wonderful, but sometimes you need cursor keys. The first Mac didn't have them. The Mac was a statement, that's for sure -- but it wasn't a very usable statement, at least in its first incarnation.
    Now that was all fixed, in relatively short order. By 1986 the Mac had arrow keys, a bigger screen, more memory, and most important an expansion capability. Then it was supremely usable, and kicked butt in the market.
    But what about the long-term historical perspective of the Mac. There, the verdict is not so good. Most of the hype about the 30th Anniversary has left out this part. True, all personal computers to follow were basically copies of the Mac, some good, some not so good. The ideas were very valid, and have stood the test of time. But it's the missed opportunities caused by the Mac's insistence on being right about everything, even when the Mac was wrong, that caused the fractures in the marketplace that are still visible today in the UI of software, and in the confusion of non-expert users.
    Try this out sometime with a friend who is a casual computer user who has a WordPress blog. Ask them to choose a command from a menu, and see which one they choose. There are three menu systems on the screen at the same time! One for the operating system, one for the browser, and one for the web app. This is not simple and not easy to use, and is the result of Apple's proprietary networking, way back in the 80s, that forced the innovation in networking, that was the manifest destiny of personal computers, to route around the closed-off networking protocols of the Macintosh. Had Apple, instead of keeping the right to create networking software for itself almost exclusively, because their APIs were so confusing, taken the opposite approach -- that their APIs were not proprietary and could be cloned by other manufacturers freely, and built on by software developers, again, freely, the networks we use today would work in vastly different and imho, much better ways. We'd also be much further along. In many ways, the networking user interfaces we use today are inferior to the ones we used on the Mac in the 80s.
    There were a handful of companies that had mastered the Apple networking stack at the time. Reese Jones' Farallon, Andrew Singer's Think Technologies. A pair of developers who made an email app the was bought by Microsoft and became their mail product (the founder of that company, Steve Ullman, was a real visionary). And Don Brown at CE Software with QuickMail. I tried to work with all of them, but it wasn't enough of a critical mass to make a market. I deperately wanted networking for MORE, my outliner. I felt it wasn't complete without it. Had Apple been less restrictive, my career would have been much more interesting. We have the networking today that I wanted then. But it was a long time coming.
    The web should have happened on the Mac. We had the best software, the best developers, the best platform, no 640K limit (don't laugh, software on the PC was limited in how far it could grow). We had it all, but the Apple culture wouldn't let us use it.
    I love the Mac. I love what it did for me, it gave me a lot of freedom I wouldn't have gotten any other way. However, it stopped short of where it could have gone, and in doing so, I hope serves as a lesson for future generations of technologists. When someone argues for reserving the best stuff for your employees, tell them to stop screwing with your success. As the famous Apple evangelist Guy Kawasaki said, Let a thousand flowers bloom. Love the developers and the random chaos the bring to you, and be ready for the love that will flow around your platform. It's the only way it works.
    This article appeared as part of CNET's coverage of the 30th anniversary of the Mac.
  I heart Node
    I topped off my Node project today.
    I'll be writing about it more tomorrow, in the meantime I wanted to note that I love programming in this mode. The tools are great, and it is a wonderful environment, made that way by programmers who share their work generously.
    The quality of the work is very impressive. And the commitment to no breakage also refreshing in this day and age.
    #backgroundImage "http://static.scripting.com/larryKing/images/2014/01/23/iloveny.gif"
    #description "And JavaScript, and new shit. :-)"
  How many menus?
    A few weeks ago I was trying to help a friend, over the phone, edit on a Mac. Choose this command from a menu, I said. Click on this window, bring the Finder to the front, choose an application, etc. It didn't work. I'm sure you've been through this many times, maybe on both ends.
    I had a similar experience this week trying to set up a Node app on a hosting service. The page of instructions was filled with concepts that are strange to me. When I finally figured it out, I only needed to know a small fraction of what was on the instruction page to get it done. Same thing was happening. A bunch of worlds weren't fitting together. The complexity comes from the imperfections of the fit.
    Here's a screen shot of the first scenario.
    Count the different apps that are running, and in what platform. There's a web platform. There are WordPress docs that behave a lot like apps. It's a platform too. There's the Apple menu. If you click on the desktop that will bring the Finder to the front. And the file system. How many different worlds! And they're all so different. Yet they're all on the computer screen at the same time.
    I was thinking about this while working on a piece that will run tomorrow on CNET, talking about the history of the Mac, and how a fateful decision by the platform vendor, to keep their networking protocols closed, caused at least one of these fractures. There were other events, where a platform didn't evolve in the way the world wanted to go, and voila, there's yet another paradigm a new user has to master.
    So the question was, was the Mac a success or a failure? I guess it depends on what the goal was. I thought, at the time, the goal was utter simplicity, ease of use, and access. Jobs fought against the cursor keys to keep his vision pure. They were unneeded complexity, so they weren't there. The computer For the Rest of Us. Well if that was the goal, then a lot of the things Apple did, in later years, thwarted it.
    I say this with love and admiration for the platform. Writing the piece reminded me of how magnificent the first Mac was, how many doors it blew open. All the minds that were reached, and imaginations. Computers were wonderful and lovely before the Mac. But the Mac made them accessible to people who didn't want to invest their lives in using them. That's what For the Rest of Us meant.
    But thirty years out, we can now draw some conclusions. A lot of it is history. Its influence is in the past.
    More tomorrow. ;-)
  The "battle" for life
    One of the things that came up in the discussion surrounding the Kellers' pieces and the story of Lisa Adams, was the concept of people battling a disease. I read more about this in a blog post by Peggy Orenstein. All these pieces raised the ire of people on the net, but in the midst of all the heat, there was some small enlightenment, something that I've experienced myself, an idea that isn't much talked about.
    As longtime readers of this blog know, I was seriously ill in 2002. I had emergency heart surgery that saved my life, followed by a long recovery, and a decision to stop trying to be an entrepreneur. I gave up a lot of struggles in that period of my life, and it was a good thing. More important it was right for me.
    But I didn't write about another struggle, during the recovery period, with myself, to find the will to go on living. For a lot of people who haven't been through something like this, it must seem very abstract, but it's quite real when it's you in the body that's having a basic integrity crisis -- that is -- do we have the will to hold it together for more years of life, or is this the end? I actually said the words to a doctor, and got an understanding response, to my surprise. I never talked about it with any of my friends or family members. They wouldn't have heard it, and sometimes when people don't want to hear things, it can get ugly quickly. So you learn, as the person whose life is in the balance, to say nothing.
    I watched this process in 2009, when my father who was a cancer survivor, decided to stop non-palliative treatment. He made the decision in April of that year, and in October he was dead. We spent a lot of time together in that period, more than we ever have as adults. I never questioned his decision. For him, it was the right thing to do. Doctors told us that he could fight (there's that word again) for a few more years of life, but his life, in his own estimation, wasn't worth it. It's very hard for a young, healthy person to understand that you can get to this place. It's not "giving up" -- that's not what it feels like. It is actually much simpler -- you're making a decision.
    It seems most people most of the time avoid making decisions about the direction of their lives. My father certainly did. I certainly did. But what makes these periods so full of growth is that the decisions are inescapable. You must choose. Left or right. And the further you go, the more information you have about each of the branches, but at the end of one of them is something we have no information about at all. That's why it's so fear-inducing. And why it's easier for the healthy and young to think that when they get to this point of their lives, all they have to do is "fight" to avoid having to decide. But it doesn't work like that.
    It's good to have these concepts out in the public sphere. So some good, imho, came from the Keller pieces. I think it's always like that. When fear rises, it's a good time to step back and reflect and find the source of the fear. Because right there, at exactly that point is where you have the greatest opportunity to learn, and grow.
    That's why it pays to listen to people who are in a decisive place in their lives. They are learning, and growing -- living! -- right up to the very last breath. They don't always want to teach and share. My father liked his morphine, and to tell stories about how much my mother meant to him. I saw this as his way to say he is lovable, look -- someone thought I was okay. I heard him, the best I could.
    There's no good or bad outcome. In the end we all lose, imho it's better to discount that right now, and give up the struggle to win, and just accept the time you have left as yours to use as you see fit. You can take the treatment, or not. Neither should come with any judgement from others.
    "cheesecake"
  I do believe
    Posted by Banksy on Twitter.
  Fifty years of love
    The day I met her, about ten years ago, maybe a little less, I knew we'd be friends for life. We share so much. When I see her, which is not nearly often enough, it's as if we've never been apart. She cracks me up. And she falls for my pranks. We disagree about things, mostly judgements -- was this a great movie, or not so hot. She likes movies I don't. Maybe sometimes vice versa. (I actually can't think of a movie she didn't like, but once she answered, when I asked if she liked a movie, that L'il Salty liked it. He's 8 years old. A man of discerning tastes for sure, but still a boy.)
    I call her Lisa Simpson, and joke with her about it, because even though she's very Santa Cruz hippie dippie, she likes messy violent movies (as Lisa likes Itchy and Scratchy). Inexplicable!
    Most important we share a philosophy of life, although we express it in vastly different ways, which isn't surprising, because I have a very large body, and she has a very small one. But the spirit contained within that cute little package is as big as a million Grand Canyons. Probably bigger.
    I wrote a blog post about NakedJen many years before I met her.
    She also feels free to call herself a fairy. I had never met a self-professed fairy before. I made up a little poem for her about that when we rode on the Staten Island Ferry. I said she could be the First Fairy off the Ferry. Okay I guess you had to have been there.
    She also loves NBA basketball, and the Knicks. How the hell did that happen! ;-)
    It's funny, I knew she'd love the movie Her when I saw it, when I heard a bit of dialog between Samantha and Theodore, near the end. It was practically straight out of the NakedJen playbook. She says the heart is not like a box that fills up. It expands the more you love. I felt this idea perfectly sums up the philosophy of my very dear and lovely friend Ms Jen. Like all perfect truths it makes my heart swell and my eyes to tear.
    I asked her yesterday if she was going to be open about being 50, and she said yes. I'm not surprised, but I had to ask. She said it's amazing that she made it this far. I know what she means. I too am amazed, and happy to know her, for she has filled my heart with love, which I feel right now as I write this, and many many times over the years. So...
    Happy birthday Ms Jenny! :-)
    With much love, your best pal,
    Davey
    #backgroundImage "http://static.scripting.com/larryKing/images/2014/01/21/jen.jpg"
    #description "NakedJen was born 50 years ago today!"
  Why I like Node
    I've long-ago gotten over the shock of how you have to stack callbacks in JavaScript. I kind of like the puzzles now, but I sure didn't at the beginning, because I strive to make my code read like the pseudocode that would be used to describe it. And there's no way to do that with JS. So Node is off the hook, it's not its fault JS is that way.
    I really like the way package.json works. I like the docs that are available for all the elements. As a metadata guy (I played a role in defining RSS and XML-RPC), I appreciate a good set of names that covers all the bases.
    And Node is a network of code. I've never seen this so well-developed. We did stuff like this in the Frontier community, but this is better, and of course it should be -- it's 2014 not 1994. ;-)
    I just put together a routine that makes an HTTP request taking a URL as a parameter. It came together nicely. I used a URL parser written by Steven Levithan and the example in the nodejs.org docs.
      Update: Probably should be using the url package.
    I still have to decide how I'm going to parse my XML, or if I will. What I need to do can be accomplished with string search, and maybe bringing in a whole XML engine is too much. I just need to get a value from the <head> section of an OPML document. Not a big deal. And I see Dan MacTough has already written a routine for parsing an OPML document. So I have footsteps to follow.
    Nodejitsu is actually something I think we could write a Poets tutorial for that would be a lot simpler than setting up an EC2 instance, as we did with the earlier poets doc. You just have to tell GitHub your Nodejitsu username and password. Then the connection is made. Adding environment variables is no more difficult than editing the attributes of a headline in Fargo.
    Where I'm trying to get to with this is a simple server app that acts as a storage backend for the next release of Fargo. I want something I can give to anyone who wants to run their own server. Mine will be in JS and run in Node. I'll probably provide a howto for Nodejitsu. I'm using the MIT license for this code. Nothing fancy here (by design). Just a way for a user's outliner to say "here's some static HTML, please make it accessible over the web."
    Node will do this nicely. ;-)
  Nodejitsu and GitHub
    I had an idea that I should be able to manage a public Node.js deployment entirely from within GitHub, without having to install a Unix virtual machine.
    It turns out that Nodejitsu does exactly what I wanted-- but their documentation is a horror (at least for a newbie like me). It's actually just a few easy steps to connect the two.
    You have to go to the Settings page on your GitHub project. Then click on the Service Hooks tab, then Nodejitsu.
    Fill in your username and password, check Active, and click Update Settings.
    If you switch over to Nodejitsu there will be a new app in your list of apps.
    You can make a change in GitHub and it automatically appears in Nodejitsu.
    Restart the app to make the changes appear.
    Now I have to figure out how npm works over there, or if it does. ;-)
    #### Update #1
      I got stuck much earlier.
      I tried to deploy my own repository, and entered my username and password, as above, but I keep getting a message saying that I am not me.
      Here's an example.
      I don't think this has anything to do with the username and password (esp because there's another error message for incorrect username and password). It's some kind of permissions thing, but I have no idea what needs configuring. About ready to look for another way to deploy. Oy.
    #### Update #2
      Never mind.
      The script I deployed just did a console.log ("hello") and exited.
      For some reason Nodejitsu sees that as an error and gives a mystifying error message. Par for the course for Unix software, imho. ;-)
      On that theory, I deployed Brent's test server, the one that returns blue or green, and it works. For a little while at least this link will launch Brent's app.
    #### Update #3
      The next questions:
        How do I do jQuery stuff in node? I want to use the same XML processing code on the server that I use in the client, if possible.
        How do I do the equivalent of npm? I have to load the Amazon libraries. There must be a howto somewhere.
      Notes
        It looks like you specify the packages you need in the package.json file.
    #### Update #4
      The Nodejitsu app just wrote a file to an S3 bucket. (7:23PM, Niners up 3-0.)
      I have it writing a new test file every time someone accesses the page. For some reason it writes two or three files for every hit. Maybe it's because my browser is looking for icon files or some other weird stuff. Probably.
      Here's an example of one of the test files. (As with the other files it may disappear after a while.) And here's the source code of the server app that writes to S3.
      Niners up 10-3.
  The new look of Scripting News
    #description "With a new more powerful CMS."
    Earlier this month I switched this site over to yet another new CMS. This one has a bunch of new templating and scripting features, and is written in JavaScript, and has unique scaling advantages. I will be writing about the new CMS, at much length, when the software is released.
    I wanted to note that I have a new template that is patterned after the look of the Medium site. I really like the look of their posts, as do many other people. I especially like the way it uses the image at the top of the page. I've always loved using images in the right margin of my posts, now I can play with much larger ones at the top of the posts. It makes blogging a lot more fun, for me -- and I hope you like it too. (I know the subhead can be hard to read. Still thinking about what to do about that.)
    There's a "drawer" in the left margin, which you can access by clicking on the little "hamburger" icon in the upper left corner. The menu items can be clicked to reveal previous articles, links to related sites, my rivers and GitHub repos. I'm still working on that part of the design. Actually I'm still working on it all. ;-)
    I wanted to give credit for the design inspiration.
    "Only steal from the best."
    I do have a choice of templates for each post, and I imagine most posts will use the plain "outline" template, suitable for starting discussions (an example). I expect I'll use the new format for special occasions, like this one. ;-)
    As always Scripting News is about scripting, and news -- and the intersection between the two. And play and pushing the leading edge, and keeping us all independent and hopefully for a little while still, free.
    Let's have fun!
    "cheesecake"
    #backgroundImage "http://static.scripting.com/larryKing/images/2013/12/28/lloyd.jpg"
    #subheadColor "white"
  Is Apple disruptive?
    Interesting discussion on Twitter with Matt Yglesias about whether Apple is disruptive. Here's what I learned.
    Every product is both disruptive and constructive.
    It disrupts someone's business model, and adds new art.
    Apple's products disrupted the media industry. And they also add new art. Going back to the early Macintosh, when Apple included networking, built-in, not as an option -- I understood they would make investments to create markets, not just ride on others' investments.
    So... I'd say on balance there's been more new art in Apple's efforts and less disruption. Actually when you think about it, successful companies are mostly constructive. ;-)
    #backgroundImage "http://static.scripting.com/larryKing/images/2014/01/18/jobs.gif"
    #description "They strike a balance between disruption and construction."
    #subheadColor "white"
  Internet shaming
    In the years after 9/11, it wasn't worth the effort to suggest that Iraq didn't have anything to do with the terrorism. The United States did some very bad things based on this big lie. Anyone who tried to raise the issue, while there was still time to do something about it, was shouted down or fired. If you raise the question now people shrug it off. Nothing you can do.
    The Internet, which held such promise for opening the world to different ways of thinking, is getting smaller. This is as important as the fight over net neutrality, or NSA surveillance. Our tolerance of ideas that scare us will keep us from solving the problems we have, because that's the mechanism for progress -- listening and understanding new information and points of view.
  When will it end?
    The Internet is so good at organizing. But these days I see it being used to organize in a way that is stifling of free speech, by people who I thought stood for free speech. I wonder why they don't see the obvious contradiction. It never comes up in their pieces. They call people condescending and tone-deaf, not realizing those are relative concepts, saying as much about the listener as the speaker (that they are control-oriented and intolerant of other points of view).
    No need to apply this to any specific incident, there have been so many.
    And to be clear, people who are propositioned by others in unwelcome ways are totally entitled to be offended and angry, and to express that anger. People who are written off as almost dead should be outraged by that, and are entitled to our support. People who hear their race, gender or age group characterized in unfair ways should be allowed to object (and imho this includes, whites and men, btw).
    It's the people who use these events to gain attention for themselves, who pile on and turn an incident into a trial-by-Internet, who try to get people fired and sometimes succeed, those people are wrong. Especially when they are academics, people who have devoted their lives to the free exchange of ideas and the scientific method.
    The Internet is a great tool for good, but it is an equally good tool for bad.
    I'd like to, someday, be part of a solution to this problem. I think it is solvable, but there has to be a will to do it.
    Thanks for listening.
  Dropbox is back
    Dropbox went down on Friday night, just as I was making some changes to the Fargo code.
    It came back for most users later that night, but the API and other parts of the system were out until this morning.
    I'm about to leave town for a little vacation, but I was glad to see Dropbox is back up and so is Fargo. Whew! :-)
  Rachel Maddow's theory
    I just watched the 17-minute opening of last night's Rachel Maddow show.
    It's her job to stretch out a simple idea into 17 minutes, but it's painful to watch.
    Let me save you some time...
    Synopsis
      The crazy shutdown of the GWB had nothing to do with the endorsement of the mayor of Fort Lee, New Jersey.
      It was about the NJ State Supreme Court and the State Senate and Christie of course.
      In 2010, Christie refused to re-appoint a judge.
      The NY Times ran an editorial.
      The NJ State Senate was livid.
      They refused to approve of Christie's appointments to replace him.
      He refuses to re-appoint a Republican member of the court, the wife of a member of his administration, not wanting to put her through the approval process by "animals."
      The Democratic leader of the Senate represents (drumroll please) Fort Lee.
      All this came to a head on August 12, the day before of the famous email saying it was time for Fort Lee to have "some traffic problems."
    Sidebar
      Fort Lee was a punchline in a standard SNL skit in the early years.
      Roseanne Rosannadanna, played by Gilda Radner, would always respond to letters from "Richard Feder of Fort Lee, New Jersey."
      I'm pretty sure this has nothing to do with the Christie scandal. ;-)
  ThinkTank ad from 1984
    Scott Knaster clipped this from the first issue of MacWorld, 1/24/84.
    We had chutzpah then. And something new that we were proud of, but kind of at a loss to explain it in words. It's true to this day, outlining is still hard to explain. But it's still pretty damn useful! ;-)
    Update: My mom, inspired by this archeological find, went digging for her own ThinkTank relics. She found a small quilt she did back then of the ThinkTank logo. It used to hang on the wall in my office at Living Videotext back in the old days in the 2432 Charleston Rd, Mountain View, CA.
  Local Storage made desktop JS
    Until late last year (2013, Happy New Year) when I needed to write a little utility script that would do a housekeeping task on the net for me, I would write it in Frontier.
    But then something changed. I realized I could write them in JavaScript to run in the browser on a local machine or even one of my server machines. It really doesn't matter where they run. I didn't think too much about it when I was writing them, but just realized that what made it possible was the HTML 5 idea, localStorage. Without it, a bit of code running on the desktop would need a server to remember its state. Now the local machine has that ability, and why not, disk space is super cheap, at least relative to what it used to cost.
    The most useful utilities so far have acted as a bridge between RSS and Twitter. It's how my linkblogging tool connects with it now. And it is still relying on a server for the final step.
    My old friend Jeff Sandquist, who used to be the lead developer guy at Microsoft, is now doing that at Twitter. I keep telling Jeff I have no interest in doing anything on top of Twitter, but then I keep doing things on top of Twitter. Oy! Yes, they could make it better. I shouldn't need a proxy to talk to their server. My desktop JS should be able to talk directly to their server.
    Where do I think this will go? Well, there's no question you could write a full RSS aggregator to run on the desktop in the browser, even on a tablet or a phone. Decentralization is now much much easier than it ever has been, and it's coming at a good time, with all the michegas from the NSA.
    #description "Without local storage, a bit of code running on the desktop would need a server to remember its state."
    #flMapHeader "true"
    #mapLatitude "37.7764095"
    #mapLongitude "-122.4177325"
    #mapType "roadmap"
    #mapZoom "14"
    #titleColor "DarkOliveGreen"
    #subheadColor "DarkOliveGreen"
  Cold weather
    #description "Extreme cold is nice, maybe -- for one day."
    We got our taste of the bitter cold the rest of the country has been experiencing. According to the weather forecast, it'll start warming up tomorrow, and by Sunday it'll be 50. So we got just the minimum. I understand this has been going on for weeks in the Midwest.
    I forgot how cold 5 degrees can be. I went out wearing two layers over my whole body and still I was freezing cold, until I had been walking for about a half-hour, which is when it started being fun.
    But I'm glad it'll be in the 20s tomorrow. And I feel quite differently about the cold weather now.
    #backgroundImage "http://static.scripting.com/larryKing/images/2013/12/16/icyBoathouse.jpg"
  Achievement
    As you may know I'm working on a new CMS.
    I've been talking about its existence fairly openly since the project started, I guess it was in October? I'll have to go back and look.
    Up till now, I've been "using" it, but not for anything the public can read. However, with this post, that has changed.
    The text you're reading here is flowing out to the web in a new way.
    It's a milestone, an achievement, an ending, in a sense. Because this CMS is what I was trying to develop many many years ago, when I started blogging.
    To me, the two things, the software development and the blogging, are one and the same. That's why my site is called Scripting News. It's about scripting, and it is the result of scripting. It's news, and it's the thing used to build news.
    Now, let's see if it worked! :-0
    "cheesecake"
    PS: It did! ;-)
  Greenwald clarifies, I screwed up
    First, I am sorry for posting this tweet. I screwed up. In the tweet, I said that the only thing transparent about Glenn Greenwald is his stonewalling. The article which I was linking to, on the New York Magazine website, provided quotes from a Greenwald piece, without reporting the substance. In the piece they were citing, Greenwald answered the most important question I had been calling on him to answer. I had not read the Greenwald piece when I wrote that tweet. That was a mistake.
    In his post, he said, unequivocally, that he owns no stock in either of the Omidyar ventures, one which is a non-profit for journalism and the other a for-profit tech company. Not that there would be anything wrong with owning stock, but it is something that needed disclosure, something that I have explained over and over in a series of posts late last year, none of which got this response from Greenwald or any of the other principals in the new company.
    There are still other issues. Why the delay in saying he had no stock? And by item #4 in the Greenwald post, we're back to the normal Greenwald approach, over-stating his critics' concerns. At best, this is his lawyerly alter-ego popping up. At worst it makes me think he's still hiding important stuff. Not everyone is out to get him. I was a Greenwald defender and fan until I was introduced to Greenwald the Stone Wall.
    An important point, the Snowden documents don't belong to him or the Omidyar ventures. They don't belong to Snowden. They belong to the people of the United States. We have a huge stake in what's done with them. In normal times we'd trust the government to look out for the people's interest, but this is about the government abusing that trust. Greenwald is dancing with high charge explosives. We deserve his full devotion to this story. Why is now a good time for him to be involved in a startup? Why not wait until the Snowden disclosures are complete? Or if he must be involved in a startup, which I know from experience is a hugely time-consuming thing, why not pass the torch to another reporter, or group of reporters? Greenwald's newest response is that we're asking for a complete and immediate dump of the documents. I'm not asking for that! I don't know anyone else who is. What I do want to see is an honest, fair, complete, expedient and urgent disclosure of that information. Perhaps he should start a new venture just to disclose the information in those documents. These are the questions behind the questions about Greenwald's ownership position in the Omidyar companies.
    Transparency is not easy, but when you are occupying a seat of historic importance, with our future at stake, we insist that you take that responsibility seriously. And saying you are, when your actions don't indicate that you are, is not a good answer.
  If you say it in public, it's quotable
    If I tweet that my butt hurts, and some company thinks that helps them sell their product, they can say "Dave Winer says his butt hurts," and on what grounds could I object?
    If someone says something, and someone else says they said it, I'm sorry but you don't have any recourse, if you're the Pope, the President or nobody in particular.
    I think we cross a line on Facebook however, when they imply that someone likes a product because they clicked on Like in relation to it. We all know, including the people at Facebook, that there are many other reasons to click Like even if "Like!" isn't what you had in mind. They're being hypocritical and expedient by equating the two, and earning negative goodwill, that may well haunt Mr. Zuckerberg in the afterlife. :-)
    And, if a NY Times movie critic says he likes the music of Llewyn Davis on Twitter, the movie company can say he said so.
    And it's ridiculous to think that Twitter, a company, for crying out loud, has any standing here! They can put whatever they want in their Terms of Service, this is speech. They don't get to make rules about speech that happens outside their network.
    I don't think I'm out on a limb here at all. I'm not a lawyer, but I think I understand the basic rules about speech.
  Burning brain cells
    Software burns brain cells when it does something different from what you expected, and before you realize your thoughts are going the wrong way, you go too far, and going back hurts your head.
    The pain comes from brain cells that are committing suicide because they're so frustrated, all they can think to do is end it all.
    It's like lurching at the end of a rope when it breaks while you're playing tug of war, except it turns out it wasn't a rope at all, it was a bar fight.
    Using a computer always puts you at the edge of a haze, managing more complexity than your poor brain can handle. An overload caused by a misdirection == burning brain cells.
    Nothing new. Software has been doing it since Day One, I'm sure. I mention it because it happens all the time on Facebook. You're reading a message from a friend and then your brain slams shut because it realizes it's actually an ad!
    It's good I suppose for the advertiser and Facebook, but it's not good for my poor brain. Or yours either. And maybe ultimately it'll be bad for Zuck when we all get to the afterlife and get to tell him what we think about it. ;-)
    Thanks for listening.
  The shadow of 157 W 57th St
    I went for a walk, of course, in the fantastic cold and brilliantly clear post-snow Central Park today. Here's a picture that gives you an idea of the glory of the day.
    Now here's a contrasting picture, of a popular sledding hill, in the shadow of 157 W 57th St, the first of the new skyscrapers to go up on the south end of the park.
    You can see how dramatic the difference is on a sunny day.
    This shadow is emerging as a political issue in NYC.
  "Content" is here to stay
    I read Tim Bray's piece about the word content, and I agree. It betrays a point of view. If you're a writer, and someone refers to your work as "content" -- well that's like telling a painter his work is wall-covering. Yes technically, it's accurate -- your painting does cover the wall, Mr Rembrandt and Ms O'Keeffe. But there's also the inspiration. The joy. The dread, the lessons learned, the life lived, the gains and losses. The feeling. All that can be used to cover a wall, or provide a surface for ads to run. But calling it wall-covering doesn't capture its fullness.
    Yet there are times when you have to think of a painting as wall-covering -- if you're implementing a wall management system, and you need to account for people hanging all kinds of content on it, paintings, frescoes, posters, quilts, light -- incandescent and candles. Even chairs are wall-covering of a sort. Chandeliers, while they don't hang on a wall do provide light. Viewed that way all art is a wall-covering. It's the engineering view, while it does subtract the art from the art, it's a valid and useful point of view too.
    I've spent a good part of my career working on Content Management software, and I'm also a writer, so I see it from both sides. Should I say the C in CMS stands for Creativity? Does that help you understand what it does, or make writers feel better for producing fungible slurry of ad-supporting letters, numbers and punctuation? It doesn't mean a thing to this writer.
    There is lots of duality in human language. There's the mother who is also a sister and a daughter. A car that is both a method of transportation and a source of revenue for mechanics and car dealers.
    So in some contexts, my writing is art. And in others, it's content.
  Twitter as a public notepad, day 3
    One of the commenters on yesterday's piece asked if Storify would be up to helping Twitter be a "public notepad." At first I thought no -- it's not about curating your own posts, but then I took another look and the answer is -- yes, you can use it to gather and publish your own ideas, you just have to be determined to find the way to do it.
    How to
      Go to storify.com and log in using your Twitter account.
      Click on the big green Create Story button.
      Click on the Twitter icon at the top of the right panel.
      Click on User.
      Enter your Twitter handle.
      Now your tweets are in the right panel. Screen shot.
      You can drag your "notepad" posts from the right panel into the left.
      You can even change the order (you'll likely have to if you want them to be in chronological order).
      Give it a title, and publish and you're ready to go.
    It's a lot of steps
      Here's the "story" I created.
      http://storify.com/davewiner/my-morning-tweets
      But -- it's easier than doing it manually, which makes it worth doing.
      However -- I would prefer if it were more compact, if it didn't make such a big deal of wrapping my words in the Twitter-approved envelope. It makes it even harder to follow the flow than it is in my timeline, which is hard to do because it's in the wrong order in the timeline!
      This is not Storify's fault. Twitter's terms of use force them to do it. Not optimal for the writer, however.
  What would a "public notepad" do?
    First question of the new year.
    Yesterday I wrote about using Twitter as a "public notepad."
    Sure, the note-putting part of it was great. One item after another in rapid-fire, with the ability of people to add or comment. Most of it was pretty civil because.. Well I don't know why.
    But when it came time to gather it all up and present it as a matter of record, that was a lot of hard work, and the result wasn't very satisfying.
    So how would it work?
February 2014
  The future of news, part II
    A 14-minute podcast follow-up to the previous podcast on the future of news.
    #### Notes
    2000: How to make money on the Internet.
    2009: Natural Born Bloggers.
    We gave everyone a broadcast station and a printing press.
    Not everyone does it.
    Say 1 percent are NBBs.
    They all can do it, but most don't want to.
    News orgs will be machines for processing huge amounts of news, adding/teaching quality.
    Evan Williams is doing this at Medium.
    But I don't like that he has a bottleneck, that his publishing system requires that you write and store your writing on his servers.
  Facebook vs Twitter in conversation
    Here's a great A-B example.
    I posted the same image to Twitter and Facebook.
    On Twitter, a nothing.
    On Facebook, a discussion!
    #### It's even worse
    Many of the comments I get on Twitter are really for someone else -- they're responding to the headline of a link I've posted, that I didn't write.
    And they're very often not responding to the story, just to the headline. And they respond as if I'm the author. Always leads to misunderstanding. Example.
    And 140-characters is a severe limit for people who are good writers, for people who aren't good writers (i.e. most people) it's impossible to understand what they mean.
    So you have to ask for clarification, if you have the patience, and the follow-ups are usually just as cryptic.
    I think Twitter is a failed experiment. Something about its limits needs to be eased. Or maybe it's time to start over, with a different idea altogether.
    #### Another A-B example
    A Facebook discussion emanating from a picture of me as a grad student in 1977, programming in the Unix lab at UW-Madison.
    The same picture posted on Twitter.
  It's all about point of view
    Other people's long distance travel is virtually instantaneous.
    For example, I just saw a post from NakedJen saying that she's leaving Paris. I expect to see a post from her in a few minutes saying she's home in Salt Lake City.
    You'll see. It'll happen almost in the blink of an eye!
    #backgroundImage "http://static.scripting.com/larryKing/images/2014/01/21/jen.jpg"
  An almost perfect hit
    Speaking of perfectly targeted ads.
    Here's a screen shot of a NYT article about Raymond Felton of the Knicks.
    And in the right margin an ad for a tech conference put on by O'Reilly.
    I would put in my profile something like this: "No more offers of tech conferences that don't include speaking offers."
    That would be what Doc Searls calls a "conversation."
    We're getting closer. ;-)
    #### Pbump's story
    Reminds me of a story about me, John Doerr, Google and Philip Bump.
    A long time ago I wrote a story about John Doerr, and it ranked very high on Google in a search for John Doerr. I joked that my investment in Doerr was doing well. As if "owning" him on Google had some dollar value.
    Philip Bump, a clever dude, bought an adword next to that search, knowing that I would look at it, and the ad said "Hey Dave Winer..." I laughed. But that's as perfect as targeting can get. He had a market of one. And I actually did see it and loved the attention. ;-)
    He now writes for The Atlantic, and he told me the story when I went down there to visit last year.
  Perfectly targeted ads
    In today's podcast/blog post this line is the one that resonated most with people.
      Perfectly targeted ads are just information.
    But it's not the first time this idea has appeared on scripting.com.
    In 2006, I wrote a piece entitled "Making money with ads? Not much longer..."
    Here's the key paragraph:
      When they finish the process of better and better targeted advertising, that's when the whole idea of advertising will go poof, will disappear. If it's perfectly targeted, it isn't advertising, it's information. Information is welcome, advertising is offensive. Who wants to pay to create information that's discarded? Who wants to pay to be a nuisance? Wouldn't it be better to pay to get the information to the people who want it? Are you afraid no one wants your information? Then maybe you'd better do some research and make a product that people actually want to know about.
  The future of news
    I read two pieces today that stimulated a 14-minute podcast.
    #### The two pieces
    1. Jeff Jarvis: Philanthropy and news.
    2. Marc Andreessen on the future of the news business.
    #### Basic ideas
    1. 20th century news was about information flowing through small numbers of reporters to large numbers of readers.
    2. This was necessitated by the technology, which was one-to-many.
    3. 21st century technology doesn't have this limit.
    4. Advertising is evolving, it's becoming more like a todo list to follow up on the things you're interested in.
    5. Eventually you will be able to write your own queries, and have companies make offers to you. This is the model Doc Searls has been talking about for years.
    6. Perfectly targeted ads are just information.
    7. News organizations will evolve too.
    8. Their mission is to make information flow effective.
    9. To facilitate, as before, but with far more writers. Open, like Wikipedia is open.
    10. The quality of a news org will be in its writing, research, integrity. Their challenge is to scale that to meet the demand, and the capabilities of the new technology.
    11. Old thinking -- news writing is exclusive.
    12. New way -- news is written by many (but nowhere near everyone).
    13. The power of a news organization is limited by the capacity of the wires. An organization like the NYT has more than a small interest in making the infrastructure of Manhattan world class. Right now it's far from it.
    #### Comments
    1. It's kind of amazing that Bloomberg of all people didn't get this. He was a three-term mayor, while NYC fell far behind the rest of the world.
  Melo's creativity
    I'm a Knicks fan. I spent the winter in denial, but gradually as the season progressed, I realized I was following them more closely than any other team. And identifying with their ups and downs. And this year of course it's been mostly downs. It's okay. I was a Mets fan too. ;-)
    I have some weird theories about the fortunes of the Knicks. I think last year they did well because they had Jason Kidd at guard. It seems like a very long time ago. This year, they have a void at point guard. And their star, Carmelo Anthony, needs a great point guard to work with. Pretty simple reason for this. Someone has to know who else is hot on the floor and make sure they get the ball almost as much as Melo. Otherwise the other team just double or even triple-teams Melo. It's easy to defend a team that has just one shooter, even if he's the best shooter in the league, as it is pretty clear Melo is (either #1 or #2).
    But Kidd turned 40 last season, so they knew it couldn't last. If Melo had been a bit more open-minded, I think he would have seen that Jeremy Lin, with his sharp eyes and mind, would have been a good student of Kidd's and a good distributor of the ball for a team that tends to rely too much on Melo.
    I think this is a lesson for everyone in business or sport, anywhere creativity and seizing the moment matters. Don't always look for the answer where you expect it. Lin wasn't one of Melo's classmates from 2003. Melo is a superstar. But he could have forged a partnership with Lin, made him his little buddy, and and built from there. It's amazing to see what Houston was able to do with creativity, and how it led to their signing of two players who, if they were playing with Melo, might have made New York, along with Anthony, a championship contender. The Knicks might not have been able to afford Dwight Howard and James Harden, but then New York is the center stage in the basketball world, and Houston is a backwater. But they're a backwater with a team we would love to have in New York.
    #backgroundImage "http://static.scripting.com/larryKing/images/2014/02/25/meloLin.gif"
    #description "Don't always look for the answer where you expect it."
  A conference of technologists
    I've spent the last couple of years learning about JavaScript development in the browser and on servers. Now I wish I could go back in time and talk to myself five years ago and explain the weirdness of this kind of programming. It would have saved a lot of time and wasted confusion.
    I'd like to go to a conference once a year, where I hear from people who are developing apps in other environments, and have them explain the significance of their work, relying on my understanding of basic computer science principles. I understand databases, network protocols, languages, user interface, web apps, content management.
    Here's an example, where Brent Simmons explains how he's working on his new database synchronization technology.
    We have lots of conferences for tech marketers and investors. We have conferences for specific technologies, and various companies have developer conferences. O'Reilly has tried to cut across the disciplines, but they don't welcome everyone equally.
    I want the kind of conference they have in academia, once a year, where leading technologists get together for a few days, get on stage and tell us what they've discovered and developed. I know we need this because I find huge gaps in what I know about.
    I can understand things much more quickly if they're explained by people who know what they're talking about. I want to meet the leaders of other communities, shake their hands, and get to know them, so we can work together more effectively in the future.
  What's better than exporting?
    People like blogging software that allows them to export their content.
    In Fargo 2 we do that, and take it one step further. Your content is always exported. It's the only format for the content.
    For example, here's the exported content of Scripting News.
    #### How did I get it?
    1. Click on the tab with Scripting News content.
    2. Choose Get Public Link from the File menu.
    3. Click OK to confirm.
    4. Copy the URL.
    5. Paste it into the post.
    It took about five seconds. ;-)
    #### Philosophy
    We are radical about empowering users. It's your content. You shouldn't have to export it.
  Paragraph-level permalinks
    Update: I changed the way they work. I am now happy with the way they look. :-)
    I used to have a feature on Scripting News that I called paragraph-level permalinks, but other people called them WinerLinks, because I was apparently the first to have them. Whatever you call them, they're nice to have. And I heard from a few people that they missed them, so I put the feature on my to-do list.
    Notice that this post has them. Over in the right margin, you should see little purple hashes. If you click on one, it'll open the page scrolled to that paragraph.
    They're useful if you want to comment elsewhere on a specific part of a post. Since I want to encourage people to do that, I like the idea of these links. What I don't like is how distracting they are. I like the feature, but I'd like to have it be less visible.
    For that I ask you, Ms or Mr Designer, to give it a try. Mock up a page with these links and try to come up with something that looks better.
    PS: To see how distracting they can be, look at a longer post as an example.
    Update #2: I tweaked the implementation to use the first characters of the first five words in the paragraph to form the permalink. This allows you to reorder the paragraphs without breaking links. However, if you change any of the first five words, the links break too. Trade-offs, always. This idea was stolen from the NYT implementation of paragraph-level permalinks.
  Win-wins with Facebook?
    On Friday I wrote about Google, yesterday about Facebook.
    Today I want to write about my blog and formats it uses to connect with others, and how that might work with Facebook and Google -- at the same time.
    I'm "still" posting on my blog, and have no plans to stop. In fact, I hope to help other people get back into their own blogs. I think we can reboot a little, maybe not in a huge way, but blogging as an activity could use a little love, a little sprucing up, some spring cleaning. There are a lot of cobwebs in the blogosphere. People have left junk around that isn't getting used anymore. And we could use some fresh ideas about how to connect stuff up.
    But while all that rebooting is happening, maybe Facebook et al could help facilitate the reboot? After all, they employ programmers and researchers who need to share knowledge with each other, and need places to record their ideas where they can find them again, and where others working in the same field can find them.
    One way they could help is by adopting some of the standards of the blogosphere, so their content can integrate with ours. For example, if I paste the URL of an RSS feed or an OPML file into a Facebook post, they could do something nice with it. Today they don't, at all. I discovered this yesterday by accident when I pasted a link to an RSS feed into a Facebook post. I just tried an experiment and pasted a link to an OPML file, the canonical test outline -- states.opml, into Facebook. Again, nothing happened. OPML with its ability to structure information for presentation, would be a perfect complement to Facebook. Both are outgrowths of graph theory, a subject that I studied as a college student many years ago (it was so funny to see Facebook use the terminology of my once-obscure avocation).
    If Facebook supported OPML and RSS, we could probably find some interesting ways to integrate our tools with their environment. That's how we're going to fix this silo problem, by knocking down some of the walls. If they'll let our content in, without having it hosted on their servers, it can have a dual life. "Out here" it can be indexed by Google and shared among other interested people, over long periods of time. And inside Facebook, we can share our thoughts with our friends and family, so they can keep up with what we're doing.
    During the last few months, I would occasionally share my development progress with my Facebook friends. They were some of my most popular posts. Possibly because what I do is so much in vogue these days, there's so much curiosity about how software developers work. I love this. I've always had to wave my hands when people ask what I do, while their eyes glaze over. But these days it's quite different.
    I want to keep using Facebook, but my professional work must be done on the web, or it doesn't work. Perhaps we can make that a win-win?
  Why people like Facebook
    People like Facebook because when they post something there, they get responses from people they care about.
    Another thing: When I post a picture on Facebook, it looks magnificent. Far better than it used to look on Flickr, which was pretty good, at one time. These days Flickr is an embarrassment. The only reason I post pictures there at all is because it's hooked into my archival system.
    Anyway, what this tells me is that Team Blogosphere has to deliver great people to our blogs, people with ideas, and people who are sympathetic, not the usual trolls who pick at every scab they can find. I'm fairly optimistic about this because I get great engagement at Scripting News, most of the time, and the trolls don't bother because they know I delete their turds without a second thought. :-)
    The answer to having a great web outside of Facebook, to accumulate knowledge that works for all of us, for a long time to come depends not only on getting Google on our side again, but also in taking matters into our own hands, and solving problems instead of arguing about stuff.
    I'm going to keep learning why people like Facebook, to build our to-do list and then start asking people for ideas and help.
    #backgroundImage "http://static.scripting.com/larryKing/images/2014/02/22/zuck.gif"
    #description "Let's add stuff to the to-do list for Team Blogosphere."
  Podcast: The technology of Fargo 2
    A 28-minute podcast that tells the story of how Fargo 1 led to Fargo 2.
  Facebook != the web
    Okay so people who used to blog now prefer to post their observations on Facebook for the immediate interaction of it. I know what they mean now that I've been using Facebook for a few months. Hearing the likes and the comments is a kind of Pavlovian reward. It's true, I know the feeling.
    But Facebook's search engine sucks, I hear. Nowhere near as good as Google's. So while you're getting more likes over there, you're not creating an archive, or a resource for others.
    So that kind of settles it. If you're doing serious work, knowledge accumulation, relating to other people's work, the kind of stuff researchers, developers and academics do, Facebook is a dead-end. It's good for sharing pictures of the kids with grandma, but not for sharing your ideas to be referenced later. And you can share links to your stories on Facebook, just don't expect to be able to find them later, that way.
    That's why Stack Exchange, for example, is on the web and not on Facebook. Without Google, there's no point accumulating knowledge. Wikipedia couldn't happen on Facebook.
    For that, you still need the web and Google's search engine.
  Why are people bored with blogging?
    You hear it so much -- I never blog anymore. I just post on Facebook. Etc etc.
    It just occurred to me why that is. The blogging tools developers aren't giving the users anything new and/or interesting to do.
    Maybe that's why there was so much interest in Ghost. At least it looks different.
    Since when does a software category survive without introducing new stuff every so often?
    Is this as good as it gets?
    Or maybe I'm missing something.
    Set me straight. ;-)
  How Google missed the boat
    I had a thought the other day that Google could have achieved its goals much more directly and quickly by gradually embracing and extending the existing social fabric of the web, that they were basically owners of and more or less still are.
    Their search engine was and still is the glue that holds the web together. So, why didn't they build around that?
    They should have gradually enhanced the glue, offering tools that shore up its deficiencies.
    Where others, Twitter and Facebook, notably -- delivered functionality that depended on centralizing the content of the web, Google should have built around decentralization with caching, and new standards for helping content be viewed in many contexts, many different renderings.
    The nascent standards were there as early as 2001. I was writing about this at the time, urging them to help us with RSS and OPML. You know what they did instead. We're still waiting for them to help us be independent of all the centralized services, which whether they like it or not, is what they do.
    They had everything needed to help make it work, they just had to build architectures not products. Google Reader should have been a structure that welcomed apps connecting to it, running on App Engine of course. Hack at the APIs until they're simple, but also deploy AMIs that run in Amazon's cloud. And on the other side, disassemble Blogger into its components, open sourcing it all, and provide APIs, that get simpler over time, to cover the other side of content creation. And as before, the software is all open source, and available as App Engine modules and Amazon AMIs.
    It's dawning on smart people now that we collectively made a mistake in turning over the judgement of what we see to Facebook and probably to Twitter (we don't know what they're doing or planning to do with the content flowing through their servers). I made the same mistake. The technology of the last 10 years should have all been open to experimentation by developers without locking users in. There are a lot of developers who believe in this. It's central to the mission of WhatsApp, btw, so if you doubted that it could be lucrative, you should think again.
    It's not too late. But they have to help us, and not be so cynical about the power of individuals. I think that's more evident today than it ever was. Their biggest mistake was their attitude about the rest of us.
    See also: Why people like Facebook.
    #description "Their biggest mistake was their attitude about the rest of us."
    #backgroundImage "http://static.scripting.com/larryKing/images/2014/02/20/ship.jpg"
  Why I heart Heroku
    I'm sure there are many reasons, but this is the one I'm thinking about today as I deployed Fargo 2.
    Now that I have my server running in Node, and deployed on Heroku, adding more server capacity is as simple as it can possibly be.
    I love this power, never had it before. Deploying additional instances was always a huge process. They've really factored the UI so that even for a geek like me, there's no effort involved. See how it works, it'll make you laugh. ;-)
  Fargo 2 Day! :-)
    Today's the day that Fargo 2 became the only Fargo.
    Now starts the process of showing everyone all the cool stuff it can do because the CMS is in the user's machine not in a central server. And I look forward to helping lots of people get their publishing systems up and running, so it isn't all dependent on me.
    It all works so well because of JavaScript and Node.js. These are great tools and environments. Made greater because they are becoming the standard platform for app deployment. My free Heroku server is running smoothly. And when I need more power, I can just slide the scroll bar to deploy more instances. I've been wanting to develop this way for many years. We never got there with Frontier. That's life! :-)
    Anyway, here's the blog post to Fargo users announcing the change.
    Lots more to come in the weeks and months ahead now that this is no longer just a development project, it's now a platform.
    "cheesecake"
  A new Fargo video
    The original quick-start video was too long. Too much preamble. I was violating my own rules for good demos.
    So in preparation for Fargo 2, which is now in the bag, awaiting a little more burn-in, before the switch gets flipped, I did a new much shorter video, with the same content.
    It's the quickest way to create a blog and write your first post. Here's the video.
  Sandberg-Diment's 1983 ThinkTank review
    Last week I was telling the story of how the NY Times played a big role in getting my first company, Living Videotext, off the ground. It was 1983, and I had just shipped the Apple II version of ThinkTank, a product that's actually a lot like Fargo. I was having trouble getting anyone to look at it. I was pestering Erik Sandberg-Diment at the Times because I was reading his software column, then a very new thing for such a mainstream publication. I felt he'd get the idea, because he approached software from a non-traditional point of view. He was the kind of person I had made ThinkTank for. I could just feel it.
    His review came out at almost the exact moment I was giving up, and getting ready to look for a real job. I looked up the review today, it's in the Times archive, and read it again, 31 years later. The computer industry still doesn't understand outlining software, and Erik's review still cuts through all that, especially the last paragraph:
    It was after running the tutorial that I came upon what may be one of the best uses of all for Think Tank, and it's not any of the myriad organizational tasks stressed by the program's producers. Rather, it's simply putting people at ease using a personal computer for something besides games. Think Tank is so easy to use, and so relatively errorproof, that even a first-timer feels as if he's in charge of the computer, instead of the other way around. And being in charge of the computer is what enables you to do with it things you may never have thought of doing before.
    Bing! ;-)
  Fargo 2 update
    I've been dealing with a really bad cold for almost a week. I got really sick last Thursday, and spent a few days sleeping and watching Netflix series. I started feeling better yesterday, and today I felt much better, but still called-in sick. I've learned over the years that my downfall when managing colds is that I declare victory too soon, and then relapse and lose more days. So I spent an extra day reading and sleeping and doing a little light writing and thinking work.
    One of the little projects I did was a review of the to-do list for Fargo 2 today and decided that nothing on it is important enough to wait for, so the next mini-project will be to archive Fargo 1 and make 2 the default. It'll still be marked a BETA to alert users to be extra cautious and make backups periodically.
    After this release, I'll be free to start new projects, or pick up some others that were on the back-burner, something I'm really looking forward to. I love Fargo, I use it all the time, but I'm itching to create something brand new.
    #backgroundImage "http://static.scripting.com/larryKing/images/2014/02/18/fargo.jpg"
    #description "My next project will be to archive Fargo 1 and make 2 the default."
  How I think about Bootstrap
    There's a brief thread on Twitter with interesting participants from different parts of the web design world. Not sure exactly where I fit in, but I found I had a perspective to offer, and decided to write a post instead of a sequence of 140-character chunks.
    The idea of Bootstrap, as I see it, is to add a layer of standardization between the app developer and the "hardware," in this case, the user interface offered by the modern HTML 5 web browser. When you view it this way, there's nothing controversial about it. It's what engineers always do. When we see complicated chaos, we try to figure out what's really going on, and produce a simplified and rational view of it. Then all the code that rides on top of the new layer can also be rational and relatively simple.
    I want to tie-off the details of how menus work, for example, in one place, and once done, I never have to do it again. But there's another view of it. If there's only one place I do menus, and we have a rational abstraction of what a menu is, then we can slip in a whole other implementation behind it, and the upper-level code, unaware of the change, will still work.
    Even better if a large base of software agrees on how menus are done. Then people can create tools for authoring menus. So we get to a higher level. Something everyone had to do for themselves at one point, now is part of the toolkit that everyone can build on.
    This is how all software is built. Bootstrap is just another instance of this process, and a much-needed one.
    Another example, when I write Mac software, I don't get to say how menus or dialogs work. That's up to the operating system. That makes the developer's life easier, but it makes the user's life easier too. If you only have to learn how to use one type of menu, you can learn to use more types of software. Why waste time learning two ways to do something so common and simple?
    Same with dialogs, typefaces, layout, the details of style-creating. Almost everything you see on this website, scripting.com, flows through Bootstrap in some way.
    Over time the innovations of the past become commodities, and then are baked into the OS, creating room for innovation at a higher level. When software is flowing properly, this should be a process that's repeated frequently. Never too soon, never before the pattern of use has emerged, but hopefully not too late. We are ready for what Bootstrap does. It's good that it exists, and I think it's something everyone should build on.
  Netflix and the serial discussion problem
    One thing you hear a lot when the subject of Netflix series comes up is that unlike other popular series, such as True Detective and Game of Thrones, is that there's no long-lasting online discussion of binge-watched series because of spoilers and because everyone progresses through the series at a different rate and at different times. For example, I just binged my way through Orange is the New Black many months after the series premiered. There's no online place for me to discuss these shows.
    It occurs to me that the one entity that could neatly solve this problem is Netflix itself. They know where you're at in the series, and what would be a spoiler or not. So they could offer, at the end of an episode, to whisk you off to an a place where you could read commentary that was current up to exactly that point in the series, and no further. No spoilers. You get the sequential-ness that people get from non-binge-watched shows. A perfect feature that Netflix could offer that really no one else is as well-positioned to offer.
    PS: Who's your favorite Orange is the New Black character? Mine is Alex. Makes me wish I could be a lesbian and have a girlfriend like her. (I have a couple of women friends who Alex reminds me of. One is married (to a man), and one I lost track of many years ago.)
  Netflix
    I've had a cold for the last week, which has knocked me out pretty thoroughly. Lots of sleep, hot tea, a little writing and coding here and there when I feel unfuzzy, but most of the time, my brain isn't up to very rigorous thinking. I've come to terms with this. I'm a person who's used to moving toward a goal at almost all times. It's a bit distressing for me to be still. But it's also good. ;-)
    I felt very lucky to get sick at almost the exact moment a new Netflix series came online, House of Cards, season 2. I had watched both the first season on Netflix and the BBC show it's based on. I thought the second season on Netflix was pretty awful. Lots of scenes that were obviously stretched out, presumably because they didn't have enough plot to fill the allotted time, or maybe enough money to fund the production. I watched because I had nothing better to do, but I wasn't impressed, or particularly entertained.
    When it was over, there was a void. What to do to fill the time now? A good friend suggested Orange is the New Black, so I gave it a try. It was a little slow and stupid at first. I really wasn't all that interested in a girly show about a yuppie who goes to prison for a year, but by the second and third episode, it was clear it wasn't that. It is a comedy, there are lots of LOL moments, but it's also a great story, with hugely compelling and interesting characters, and the acting is fantastic. By the time the season is over, you have a real kinship with many of the characters, they all have depth, including the main character who most people seem to dislike, but I think that's kind of the point. She's going through a morphing process. Finding out who she really is. Prison is removing the yuppie veneer one step at a time. It's really great television, right up there with the best. Makes you wonder why it isn't the show everyone is talking about and House of Cards is?
  A chain of beating hearts
    There's a chain of beating hearts connecting back in time from you to a fish that crawled onto land, one of your many ancestors.
    Here's another interesting idea. That entire chain is entirely female, all the way to the last link, and if you're a woman, including the last link.
  Twitter is not good for support
    Sometimes I get questions on Twitter about Fargo or some earlier software I did.
    I don't think it's good to use Twitter for support. Here's why.
    1. Twitter doesn't create a record. So if someone else has the problem in the future, they won't benefit from the information posted in response to your question.
    2. You're only asking one person. I may not know the answer, but some other user might.
    3. Only one person is reading your question. That means we can't easily find out if other people are experiencing the problem, and may be able to provide more information.
    4. 140 characters is usually not enough space to describe a problem. And the answer almost never fits in 140 characters.
    That's why when people ask for help on Twitter, I always ask them to post the question on the mail list.
  Tail recursion in JavaScript
    I love JavaScript. I don't know why but I do.
    However if you want to loop over an indeterminate-size list of URLs to find out when each page last changed, it seemed hard -- until I remembered tail recursion, which is pretty simple -- but I don't see many people talking about it. So I thought I'd write it up.
    #### Here's how it works
    1. Arrange all the URLs in an array.
    2. Write a routine that reads one URL.
    3. When it completes, it recursively calls itself for the next item in the array.
    4. When you fall off the array, return.
    <%reader ("https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/36518280/misc/tailRecursionDemo.opml")%>
  We own the Snowden docs
    An excerpt from a piece that ran here on January 7.
    The Snowden documents don't belong to Greenwald or the Omidyar ventures. They don't belong to Snowden. They belong to the people of the United States. We have a huge stake in what's done with them. In normal times we'd trust the government to look out for the people's interest, but this is about the government abusing that trust.
  npm becomes a VC-backed company?
    Did you see this?
    http://blog.npmjs.org/post/76320673650/funding
    Now, I'm a node newbie as you know, so I don't know if this is weird or not, but it seems weird to me, that a public resource like npm would become a company.
    Do you have an opinion about this?
    I'm having a blast working in node and connecting it up with stuff running in the browser. Lots of improvements in the last few days to the Fargo Publisher project (the server for Fargo 2).
    It's a very nice little world. And Heroku is a total gift to a guy like me. You might find it useful too. You can deploy as many apps as you want for free, and as long as they're low volume (not sure exactly what that mean) they stay free.
    Dave
  Why Fargo 2 technology is exciting
    Fargo 2, the next version of Fargo, is in beta, and pretty close to release. The major change in this release is the CMS isn't in the server, it's in the static app that runs on the user's desktop.
    In the traditional model for content management, Model #1 in the diagram, most of the hard work is done on the server and there's a lightweight client written in JavaScript, that runs in the browser. The client assists the user in navigating a menu system for setting options and editing articles and images. Examples of apps that work this way are WordPress, Tumblr, Blogger, Ghost, basically most blogging and content management software.
    Because the heavy lifting is done on the server, and it's managing lots of users' sites, the servers are expensive. Huge data centers, with air conditioning and staff.
    A different model has always been possible, Model #2 above. My earlier company, UserLand, pioneered this with Radio UserLand in January 2002. It put the heart of the CMS on the user's machine, in a separate app you had to download and install. At the time there was no "cloud" for us to tap into, no Amazon S3 or EC2, or Dropbox, for us to leverage. But it worked! Radio was a popular product, even though the user was running a little server on their desktop (and most had no idea they were).
    Today we can do even better, because the browser running JavaScript is a very powerful environment. Installing a CMS on your machine can be done simply by loading a page. No software to install. It's really amazing when you think about it. (But not so amazing if you think how long it took to get here.)
    Model #2 has very little downside today compared to 2002. The cloud is ubiquitous and reliable. The software runs in the browser, no app to install. And today's machines are hugely powerful and can render a modest size website in a second or less (really). It's fast.
    The big win in doing it this way is that you can have a much richer interface for editing and managing content, because the work is distributed. As a result in Fargo 2, you can edit a whole website in a single outline. This is a first, a breakthrough. (I've been working toward this since starting my blog almost 20 years ago.)
    The new Fargo does almost all the work that a server-based CMS such as WordPress and Tumblr does. It relies on a tiny public component, called Fargo Publisher, which has been released under the MIT license. The protocol it uses is open, so other back-ends can be implemented, and other "static" software like Fargo can use it to help the user publish their work. I will document the protocol when it settles down, which will happen soon.
    We've already documented how to install this server software on Heroku. ;-)
    This is going to be incredible.
  Raised to believe women are saints
    My maternal grandmother instilled this in me, and I'm pretty sure it was reinforced by my mother, and certainly by the culture around us, television, movies, radio, books, magazines, etc. I loved culture and media as a kid, much more than math and science. And I only had a brother, no sisters. People actually said out loud that specific women were saints, esp when they were probably the opposite. Sugar and spice and everything nice. As a kid I believed it and not at a superficial level.
    I remember saying to my grandmother I wished men could be more like women. I cringe when I think of that now. What a betrayal of myself and my gender. When I've told that story to women friends they are surprised, even shocked, probably because they had never considered what gender must look like from the point of view of a boy.
    I think a lot of people of my generation were raised like this. We don't think of ourselves in a good way. We don't speak up for each other, often we don't speak up for ourselves. We go quiet at the first sign of conflict.
    If you listen to men talk about this among ourselves -- you might find the reasons surprising. I'm not going to go into them here. It's off topic from the question I want to ask.
    Anyway, I eventually learned that women are not saints, they're people -- with varying qualities, just like men. Women will be the first to tell you that other women are jerks. Then come the stories! What a trip. I've seen it up close at rare moments when I was in the middle of competitive women. It was nice to have the attention, but I quickly understood it wasn't about me. I was being used as a pawn in politics between women. And the battles can be very bare knuckle and the losers end up in a bad bad place. Who knew! I was raised to believe these people are saints.
    A few years ago I came across an audio tape of my grandmother, after she was gone for 30 years. I get goosebumps thinking about it. As a man, I understood much better how manipulative she was. As I kid, I accepted her reality, as kids do of their caregivers. I can see much more clearly now how my view of the world was shaped by hers, and it was not a nice vision.
    If all this is true, and women are people, not saints -- then why in Internet discourse are we asked to act as if they are? When will people talk about genders without the PR and closer to reality?
    This is a striking facet of the debate about the Mia Farrow/Woody Allen family.
    Isn't it likely that the blame for the mess is shared equally among the adults, and the children are paying the price for the adults inability to act like reasonable people?
    Isn't this how it always is in families? The adults act irresponsibly and the kids are left to pick up the pieces and try to make sense of their lives, the best they can.
    Every family has problems. I'm glad my family's problems are not discussed in public like this. As people get older, and new generations replace the old, there are opportunities to do better, consciously -- to decide not to let the ghosts run our lives.
    Anyway, that's where I'm going to stop. I put a picture of a wholesome family at the top of this post. Ponder it please, and think about how different real life is from that image. I'd like to see more of the real stuff in discourse on the Internet, and in the pages of the NY Times, and less of the fantasy. Just one man's opinion. ;-)
    "cheesecake"
    #backgroundImage "http://static.scripting.com/larryKing/images/2013/12/24/wonderfulLife.jpg"
    #description "And I learned later they are not. :-)"
  The Chinese New Year and fireworks
    I was impressed by the story that pollution has gotten so bad in China that there was a huge drop in fireworks sales for the New Year celebration.
    It was impressive that an environmental problem could get so bad that people would reduce consumption.
    Usually we shrug off the problem as being impossible to deal with, and continue consuming. I do it too, so I'm not preaching.
    I guess if you can't breathe there really isn't much fun in adding more smoke to the atmosphere.
    #backgroundImage "http://static.scripting.com/larryKing/images/2014/02/07/fireworks.jpg"
    #description "Pollution can get so bad that people reduce consumption."
  Platishers
    My friend Jonathan Glick has a piece at Re/Code about the rise of what he calls "platishers."
    A mashup of platform and publisher. Nice bit of word-work. ;-)
    It's a nice but not a new idea. The 2014 version is closed, in the sense that content can not be shared between platforms. When I write something on Nick Denton's platform, I'm giving it to him. Same when I put it on Evan Williams's platform. It's only a good deal if you get something in return.
    Some people will get more flow, as Twitter bumped the follower-counts for people they wanted to incentivize (maybe they did the opposite for people they don't like). Ultimately platforms that are closed-off serve as training wheels for the open systems that follow, in the normal cycle of technology.
    Also, Scripting News was a platisher that formed the early blogosphere from its readership. We didn't hold them close, that wasn't the point. We wanted to change the topology of journalism, and learn from the transition.
    Ultimately if Nick and Evan make it easier for people to get into publishing, they'll be providing a service. But to expect to hold on to them, that'll be what makes them want to go away. Imho of course. ;-)
  Heroku How To
    In 2009 I wrote a tutorial called EC2 for Poets, and updated it in 2012. I wanted to see if it was possible to teach regular computer users to set up and run a server. I felt that setting up a server could be no more complex than installing and learning how to use PhotoShop (something I have never mastered) or a spreadsheet.
    Lately I've become interested in Node.js. I've learned how to write Node apps, and have a couple of simple ones running, and doing things for me and some courageous users.
    And the question comes up -- how easy is it to set up a Node server?
    The answer -- pretty easy, once you know how to.
    So that's what I'd like to do now. Tell you how to do it.
    With the caveat that I've just learned myself, with the expert and patient guidance of a long-time friend -- Eric Kidd. He's really the author of these instructions, I've just tested them and written them down.
    #### You're using a Mac, I hope
    I'm writing these instructions assuming you're using a Mac. It'll work similarly if you're using Linux, and I'm told there are some small differences if you're on Windows. I haven't tried it there.
    #### Before starting
    Create an account on heroku.com. In this regard it works like every other site, so I won't insult your intelligence by giving you detailed instructions for this part of the experiment.
    #### Launch Terminal
    In the Applications folder, there's a program called Terminal. Launch it. This is how you communicate with Heroku from your computer.
    Install the Heroku toolbelt. Follow the instructions on the Heroku site.
    #### Get my example app
    I have a simple Node app called fargoPublisher. Download the project using this link. Unzip it. Change the name of the folder to fargoPublisher.
    It doesn't matter where you put the folder, but we're going to have to refer to it later, so let's assume you put it on a disk named myworld.
    #### Name your app
    You need to come up with a unique name for your app, one that isn't used elsewhere in Heroku. It could be a little tricky, but you'll get an error message if you choose one that someone else is using. In the instructions below, I use the name purplenutter.
    #### Magic incantations
    Type these commands in the Terminal app, exactly as they appear here.
    cd /myworld/fargopublisher
    git init
    git add package.json publisher.js
    git commit -m "Initial source code"
    heroku create purplenutter
    git push heroku master
    #### Did it work?
    If it worked you should get a confirmation message from Heroku.
    And your app, if it was named purplenutter, will be at http://purplenutter.herokuapp.com/.
    #### Setting environment variables
    There's one more step to getting the app running for real, if you want to, you have to set a couple of environment variables so that it can write to your S3 bucket instead of mine (assuming you have an Amazon account).
    There are four variables you have to set: the AWS access key ID, and secret access key, the path to a folder in one of your buckets, and a domain name. To test out whether the app is running you don't have to supply real values, just something -- so the program can access them.
    You set an environment variable like this:
    heroku config:set AWS_ACCESS_KEY_ID=OHBEAUTIFUL --app purplenutter
    heroku config:set AWS_SECRET_ACCESS_KEY=FORSPACIOUSSKIES --app purplenutter
    heroku config:set fpHostingPath=/mybucket/users/ --app purplenutter
    heroku config:set fpDataPath=/mybucket/data/ --app purplenutter
    heroku config:set fpDomain=helloworld.com --app purplenutter
    Enter each of these commands into the Terminal app.
    Each time you do it, your app will restart.
    #### The proof it's running
    Enter this into your browser, substituting the name of your app:
    http://purplenutter.herokuapp.com/version
    You should get back a number, something like 0.59. If so -- it's running!
    You should also visit your app on the Heroku site. To do so, go to the Apps page, and click on the link to your app. You're such a geek! A successful one! :-)
    #### What if you make a change?
    No app is ever finished, you'll want to add features, fix bugs.
    When you've made a change, here's the prayer you need to tell Heroku-san.
    git commit -a -m "Update"
    git push heroku master
    #### It's free
    It's really cool that Heroku will run this server for you for free, for as long as you want. If your service becomes popular then you have to pay them to run it. But as long as it's just for you and some friends it's free.
    #### Amazon S3 and Heroku
    I've been building my apps to work with Amazon S3 for storage. It think it's a really good combination. My apps store their state in S3 objects, which are fast and really cheap to store and serve. And I'm pretty sure Heroku runs in Amazon's cloud, so access is very fast.
    #### Git and Heroku
    Eric sent me an email after I got my app running, explaining how Git and Heroku work together. These are literally Eric's words, I just pasted them in here and formatted them.
    Git stores your source code in a repository. This contains all your files, their history, your commit messages, etc.
    Repositories come in two flavors:
      Local repositories. These look like ordinary directories of source code, but they contain a hidden ".git" directory with all your history and metadata. For example, when we run "git init" in fargoCounters, it creates a directory "fargoCounters/.git" and fills it with various things.
      Remote repositories. These are basically a bare version of your ".git" directory, without a surrounding directory full of source code. By convention, these are named something like "fargoCounters.git", and they typically live on a server somewhere. You can have any number of remote repositories: maybe none, maybe one on GitHub, maybe a bunch.
    When you "commit" changes, they go into your local repository.
    When you "push" changes, it takes the changes that were committed to your local repository and copies them to a remote repository. When you "pull" changes, you copy from a remote repository into your local repository. Using push and pull, you could move code around between several remote repositories, which is very useful for a team. For example, I could create my own fargoPublisher repository will a bunch of changes, and you could "pull" from my remote repository to your local repository, and then (if you like the changes), you could "push" them to your repositories on GitHub and Heroku.
    Heroku basically acts like a magic remote repository for your app. You commit changes to your local repository, and push them to Heroku using 'git push heroku master'. But unlike a regular remote repository, when Heroku receives your changes, it automatically recompiles your app, deploys it to a server, and restarts your app using the new code.
    Git is frankly a pain in the ass, but once you finally get used to it, it's pretty nice, because it makes it easy to share changes. And GitHub is excellent. In a perfect world, git would be easier to understand, but our world is definitely imperfect. And on the bright side, at least git is standard in the Node.js and Ruby communities, so you only need to figure it out once and then you can use it for all kinds of stuff. It's better to have once slightly ugly solution that everybody uses than to have 37 different solutions that lock in the users.
    #### Questions?
    That's what the comments section is for, below.
    Happy Heroku-ing my new geek friend! :-)
    PS: One of the reasons I wanted to list all the steps was so we could shorten the list. I explained the process in this post.
  Public shaming is worth a look
    I love movies. It hasn't been a lifelong thing for me, it started in 2002, when I had heart surgery and began a six-month recovery. I took a lot of Vicodin, and didn't do much more than watch movies for the months of June, July and August of 2002. It was then that I discovered Turner Classic Movies. I had cable service, but never had enough time to look through all the channels. Having nothing better to do, I watched movies. (BTW, that's not exactly true. These were also my first months as an ex-smoker.)
    One of the great things about TCM is they have special months, focusing on one actor, or a period, or a style of movie, and cover it in great detail. August 2002 was Joan Crawford Month, and I watched every one of the movies they played. In her first talking movie, in 1929, she sang and danced and smiled, she was so cute and charming and young. In 1932, she played a girl stranded on a Pacific island, victimized by other people's morality in Rain. Also in 1932, in Grand Hotel, she plays a secretary who is seduced by a seedy old married dude. In 1939, she played a leading role in The Women, which had a cast of women only. No men. They talk about the men, fight over them, divorce them, remarry, all of that, without any men on screen or with lines. She plays the woman that all the other women hate. The beginning of the Crawford persona. In the 40s she developed into a business person in Mildred Pierce, and many other characters. I think her last great movie was What Ever Happened to Baby Jane?, with Bette Davis. In this movie, she's old, and kind of dumb, and a little sweet. At least that's how I remember it.
    Joan Crawford had her accuser, her adopted daughter, who wrote a book called Mommie Dearest, which became a movie, with Faye Dunaway playing Joan Crawford. The book came out in 1978, the movie in 1981. Here's a piece in the NYT in 1998, which gives an idea of how it shook out, 20 years after the book came out.
    I wasn't a Crawford fan when all that happened. I never would have looked if I hadn't been on my back in need of something to explore, to study, to occupy my mind while my body was healing. And I'm so glad I did.
    Whether Crawford abused her daughter or not, to me, is not connected to her work as an actor. Abuse isn't something that exists in a vacuum. Who was the victim? I have no idea. Each generation tries to do the best they can, but the gifts of previous generations can be hard to overcome. Where does the blame start? And what if Crawford's daughter was taking advantage of her dead mother, who wasn't able to tell her side of it? If we want to stop abuse, imho, the best thing we can do is all of us become conscious and develop a deep sense of fairness, and practice it, systematically, and without passion. Step back and take a deep breath, and stop treating people as symbols, and you'll be doing a lot to stop abuse.
    I didn't love all of Crawford's movies, but I loved enough of them. Same with Woody Allen. His early movies are funny, often deep, personal, and are just plain great story-telling and movie-making. I can't believe supposedly serious people hold Manhattan up as evidence of some kind of wrong-doing! It's a brilliant story, beautifully told. The young woman, played by Mariel Hemingway, provided a perfect foil for the childishness of the adults. She was kind, thoughtful, cared about herself. I thought she was a role model for how someone should conduct themselves in love. She gets the last word, and leaves Woody standing at the door of her apartment, realizing it's time for him to grow up. Now don't get confused about whose words are whose -- that's Woody Allen speaking through the young Ms Hemingway. He's talking about himself to himself. The critics, these are supposed to be smart people. Why don't they get this?
    He made a series of great movies, but he hasn't made one, in my opinion, since Vicky Cristina Barcelona. The Paris movie -- what was that about? And the latest one, Blue Jasmine, was a imho a waste of time, even though many people loved it.
    There's no doubt that Mia Farrow, his ex, is trying to destroy his legacy. She's been pretty open about it. In what way does that protect women against abuse? You can't heal your pain by using it to destroy. She isn't in a high moral position. She decided this should become a public issue. Okay, then her motives deserve a look too, as Christina Crawford's motives were examined after the publication of Mommie Dearest.
    Woody Allen's art, no matter what his crimes, or how tarnished his name becomes, stands. It's no longer his or Farrow's -- it belongs to all of us, for perpetuity, like Joan Crawford's work. Some of it is human expression at its best. Other bits, not so much. But it's not Farrow's or Kristof's to dispose of. And we also have to consider the possibility that they are cynically using Allen, and the rest of us, for some purpose that's not good for anyone but them.
    I've been told not to touch this, that there's danger here for me. That's exactly why I have to write about it. I've even been told this by journalists! I guess that's how powerful the Internet shaming machine is. Cross them, and they'll find a way to abuse you, even if all you did was question their motives.
    PS: The Front -- a 1976 Allen movie -- is a cautionary tale for the era of Internet shaming we're entering.
    #backgroundImage "http://static.scripting.com/larryKing/images/2014/02/06/davisCrawford.jpg"
    #description "Woody Allen's art, no matter what his crimes, or how tarnished his name becomes, stands."
  Roadmap for Microsoft
    I've been thinking about Microsoft for a long time. My first visit there was in 1981, when the IBM/Microsoft PC was about to come out. I was aware of the machine because I worked at a software company that was in the loop. I was blown away by the possibility of a machine with 640K of memory! Up till then, the most I had to work with was 48K on an Apple II. 64K if you had a "language card."
    Back then Microsoft wasn't the center of the software world, but they did eventually, briefly become that, in the early-mid 1990s. But the Internet proved to be too complex a competitor. Their efforts to dominate it, to turn the Web into a feature of Office, were doomed to fail. And it's only gotten worse, as they lost their Windows dominance of the desktop because they failed to respond to the malware crisis of the mid-2000's. The bad news didn't end there, as they tried to morph Windows into a tablet operating system. It became an inadequate desktop OS and an unacceptable tablet OS.
    For Microsoft to get back in the game, they have to return to an earlier playbook, when they weren't dominant in anything. They must recognize technology that has momentum, independent of Microsoft, and invest in it. When another technology comes along, one that gains momentum on its own, repeat the investment. Buy stock in promising startups. Microsoft can profit from the growth of the market, but they must not try to make their own efforts dominant. At the first hint of an internal Strategy Tax switch direction.
    Large tech companies that flirted with dominance only to learn that can't happen for any extended period have a simple dual role -- 1. provide infrastructure to scale, appropriate to their massive financial resources, and 2. act as investment banker that spreads lots of technology seeds, and feeds the ones that show promise.
    It's easy to win with that strategy. It won't impress reporters who are looking for sizzle, but that's the proper role of startups. A mature tech company, which Microsoft clearly is, does not deliver breakthroughs, but it can profit hugely from developing a sense of where they are and investing appropriately.
    A good sign that Microsoft is going this way is if they lay off massive numbers of programmers. They simply don't need them. Most of the money they've invested in software in the last couple of decades has been wasted. Feed the cash to startups and encourage your programmers to join them. Microsoft becomes a proper elder statesman in the tech industry.
    Make Windows run faster and leaner and cheaper. Make standard infrastructure that supports the new static application model that's developing, and invest in small teams, outside of your organizational influence (in other words leave them alone).
    #description "Large tech companies that flirted with dominance have a simple dual role."
    #flMapHeader "true"
    #mapLatitude "47.673988"
    #mapLongitude "-122.121512"
    #mapType "roadmap"
    #mapZoom "13"
    #titleColor "DarkGreen"
    #subheadColor "DarkGreen"
  Giving FIOS a bad name
    Please read this piece by David Raphael.
    Summary: They're slowing down access to AWS. If you host your application there, your readers and users get lower performance. Their reason, presumably is that they want Amazon or Netflix to pay to get the performance back (Netflix runs on AWS).
    I had FIOS for a year when I lived in lower Manhattan. It was wonderful. Symmetric bandwidth. The same speed up and down. This is the Internet as it was meant to be. I can create large media objects and consume them. Other service providers, Comcast and Time-Warner for example, see us as listeners, not speakers. But FIOS is different, better.
    Until today I envied anyone who had FIOS. Today, I think they're crashing their good name.
    This is an outgrowth of a recent court decision that says they can do this.
    But they probably will re-think it if it gets them the bad name they deserve.
  Hacking at complexity
    Take some job you do a lot and write down the steps. Number them, 1, 2, 3 etc. Then step back and look at the list and think. The same way you might think about an interesting crossword puzzle, or a bridge game. A SimCity. Your goal is to eliminate steps.
    I find that if there's an underlying simplicity to the problem, if it's possible to simplify, you'll figure it out.
    Now, of course sometimes to simplify you have to cut off options. Another way of thinking about this is you're paving a cowpath. Look to see what people do the most, where the path is most worn, where the tracks are deepest -- where the taverns and hotels went up. These are the places where it pays to smooth things out.
    A great example of this was Think C in the early days of the Mac. Think C had a shorter learning curve than a powerful command-line tool with a shell language. That was the downside. On the upside -- you could start having fun sooner. And the downside wasn't all that bad, because patterns had emerged, they were basically codifying and supporting processes Mac programmers were already using.
    I think we're in the process of creating the cowpaths now, in the emerging environment of static apps and server-side JavaScript. It's an interesting time to think about it, because development models are simplifying on their own, and with a little willfulness we could get there faster.
    Here's an A vs B to consider. I have a Node app to deploy. You could create an EC2 instance, or you could run on Heroku or Nodejitsu. In one case you get the full flexibility of a virtual PC. All the options. But it's still interesting to be able to drop a JS file in a folder, type a few commands at the shell, and have it run in its own process on a machine you don't have to even think about.
    Ultimately, I'd like to be able to deploy by choosing the Save command from a File menu in my editor. That would be the easiest. A 1-step deploy. ;-)
  Doc's vision of commerce
    Everywhere I go on the web I'm seeing an ad for Google Cloud Platform.
    I actually have clicked on the link a few times. (Might be the first time I've ever clicked on an ad link.)
    Their algorithms have correctly inferred that I'm actively making decisions in this area now. And those decisions will influence my spending for (knock wood) many months or years into the future. They may even influence the purchasing decisions of other server users. In other words, it's a good time for them to be flooding me with their Good News. ;-)
    My longtime friend Doc Searls has a vision for commerce on the Internet that's very much two-way. If you recall, Doc is the guy who famously coined the term "Markets are Conversations." Here's what Doc means, in the context of Google's Cloud Platform and me.
    Dear Google -- I find the idea of your Cloud Platform very appealing. But I can't use it, because I'm doing all my server-side development in Node.js at this time, and it's missing from what you offer in Cloud Platform.
    This omission seems interesting, because it's Google's JavaScript technology that makes Node.js possible! Maybe you have a different vision for how JS code should run in the cloud? Or perhaps you don't feel that JS makes sense in a server environment? Or perhaps you think JS is an egregious hack, and you want to, for strategic reasons, to push the other runtimes? If any of that is true, I would like to urge you not to give into that kind of thinking! The market has spoken, there's a lot of development energy going into Node. You could even say it's the consensus platform for server development going forward.
    Short version: If you supported Node.js, I would probably be a customer. ;-)
    That's me, the market, responding to the persistent offer that Google keeps making. They could save their money on the ads aimed at me, I'm already sold on the idea. However, until they support Node, I can't be a customer.
    Sincerely,
    The other side of the market
    Update: People tell me that Google's Compute Engine has Node.js. A quick search didn't uncover any docs explaining how it works.
    #backgroundImage "http://static.scripting.com/larryKing/images/2014/02/03/clouds.jpg"
    #description "Doc Searls famously said 'Markets are Conversations.'"
March 2014
  Technology and evolution, day 2
    A quick followup to Technology and Evolution.
    The apparent paradox, eyes that evolved underwater can't re-evolve when life moves to air, has many parallels in software. Thanks to all the commenters who provided explanations. I needed quite a few approaches from different perspectives in order to understand.
    A couple of examples from the world of software.
    A very long time ago, there was a famous rich entrepreneur who would, every so often, make a pronouncement of intention to revolutionize the world. This way, then next year -- another way, and the year after that yet another. The press, who loves rich tech people, to them it's the best kind of catnip -- touted his vision as the next wave. That he never delivered didn't seem to dampen their enthusiasm. Artificial intelligence! Object oriented! No forget all that -- something else -- new and daring and fantastic!!
    Bill Gates complained, as did others who shipped real software, with customers -- for naught. All the hype was drowning out the legitimate innovations, which were, as always, coming in small increments from people who weren't as famous or rich or fabulous keynote speakers. (Gates eventually learned to sing along with the tune of the times, his breakthrough was more breath-takingly fabulous any anyone else's.)
    A second example -- Google Reader. It squatted in RSS Land, and forced all other players to become clients for its undocumented API. They didn't fund the project. No one at Google loved it. For years it stopped any of the incremental progress that could have come through small, evolution-like mutations. When they finally shut it down, a bit of progress, competition, came back. Survival of the fittest? We don't yet know how this will turn out.
  Technology and Evolution
    I touched on this yesterday, writing about Cosmos and evolution, and how I had the feeling that I wanted to "Do that!" -- when thinking about evolution. I know this may sound weird but I think we're not just subject to evolution, but we are also agents of evolution. In other words, evolution acts through us. Things we do intuitively are in the service of evolution. It's obviously true for some things, like sex -- that to us seems like an act of pleasure, at another level it's about procreating, and at yet another level it's about competition between our genes to form or influence the next generation of humans. But I think there's an even higher level of service, that our intellectual creativity is an evolutionary process as well.
    If you look at the evolution of programming languages, you'll see a parental lineage going back to "the beginning." Algol borrowed ideas from Fortran, and C and Pascal from Algol, and Python, JavaScript are also Algol-like. I'm sure this is partially because the designers of the languages grew up using the predecessors. It's why our habits in America are familiar to Europeans and others probably to Africans and Asians, because our ancestors brought their familiar ways with them when they emigrated. Why should they change just because they live on a different continent? Same with languages. If "while" meant something in one language, it's not very useful if it means something else in a new language.
    But there's another reason for a language to make small evolutionary changes relative to the languages that came before -- it's because they arrive in an environment that must be ready to use them. Languages that depart radically from prior art will have a hard time getting uptake because they are familiar to no one. That's why change is necessarily gradual. It's why we still use QWERTY keyboards instead of a superior design.
    One of the most striking ideas in Cosmos, and a new one to me, is that evolution never goes back and re-invents something. Once there's a basic design for an eye, Tyson teaches, all eyes from then on work that way. This was less than optimal, he says, because eyes evolved when animals only lived under water. Because our eyes are largely made of water, there is distortion when they're used in air that isn't present in water. Basically fish have better vision than birds, reptiles and mammals. Why can't evolution go back and re-do the design of eyes now that they are used in air? I don't understand, but I find the idea fascinating.
    Anyway, I think we'd do better if we were more careful about discontinuity in software environments. More people want to use computers in a mobile context today. Why does that mean that our languages have to change? Apple's C-based language is no better or worse than JavaScript, yet there are significant differences in the languages, ones that are difficult if not impossible to factor into a common interface. It means that change comes at a price, we lose capabilities we had before, unnecessarily, just because we want to use iPhones in addition to Macs.
    It would all work better, imho, if we used natural evolution to form basic principles for software evolution. That developers not place so much emphasis on changing the world, and more on careful and thoughtful evolution. Only steal from the best, is a very good design principle, imho -- as well as Postel's Law -- strive to interop, of course, but also strive to make interop easy.
  Podcast: Different-size bits of content
    There's been a lot of change at scripting.com in the last few weeks, and now that the dust is settling, I want to explain my thinking, using the new site structure as an example.
    21-minute podcast.
  Unpopular truths
    A point that's very hard to make on the Internet, even if you tiptoe up to it, is that employers are people too, and they make decisions the way all people do, with a lot of input from lawyers and public opinion of course. As I said in the piece, if that story took place in 2014 instead of 1985, public opinion would have been a much larger factor. And, age discrimination, which was the subject of the story, today, is just beginning to be a topic of public concern.
    Today ageism is prevalent. A lot of the abuse I took in response to that piece was ageist. For whatever reason this is a form of hate that is openly tolerated. We all get to deal with this one, if you live long enough, so there's some satisfaction in knowing that at some point people who hurt others based on age will learn what it feels like to be on the receiving end. However, it would be better if it just stopped, of course. ;-)
    I don't remember writing the paragraph that caused so much fury, it was at the end of a long piece. I write much as if I were giving a talk at a conference, with a light edit after the first pass. But reading the words in the paragraph, clearly I anticipated abuse, because I disclaimed exactly what people accused me of. It would ridiculous for me to advocate age discrimination, not only because I am exactly the opposite kind of person who does that (for good reason, I did eight years of therapy to understand why I am like this) but also because at 58, I deal with a lot of ageism myself. No matter, the howlers found their handle, and they howled away, all kind of nasty shit -- fiction -- about who I am. It's okay -- I'm used to it, because I've been blogging now for almost 20 years.
    It's okay, but in another way it's totally not okay. According a few very controlling people there's only one set of opinions that are valid. It's taboo to say that an employer who feels unjustly penalized might avoid risk and try to hire people who couldn't make claims of discrimination. It's obviously true if you just think a little. What happens in press releases and legal filings isn't always exactly what happens in the minds of people making the decisions.
    Fact: Some portion of the wrongful termination suits are scams. Maybe it's a very low percentage. I doubt if anyone knows, because we're not allowed to discuss it in public. I do know that in this one case, the only time I've had to deal with this, it was a scam. Every time someone points a finger, no matter what the howlers on the Internet say, all reasonable people wonder if the accusations are true. If a friend is accused of sexual harassment, for example, someone you know and trust, and they swear they didn't do it, would there be no doubt? If not, then we're giving too much power to people to ruin the lives of others. Because sometimes there is harassment, and other times it goes the other way, the abuse flows from the accuser to the accused.
    These things are discussed privately all the time. I believe in opening up discourse, that's why I deliberately challenge these limits. If there's a truth that's taboo, I'm the kind of person who wants to talk about it in public. We're at a point in human evolution where we desperately need to be truthful with ourselves. A small number of people controlling everyone else, preventing them from speaking, that's exactly the wrong direction for us to be going in.
    That's why blogging is so important, and why we should protect the speech of people with unpopular ideas and opinions. I believe the things we least want to hear are the ones we most need to hear.
  Best way to parse XML in Node.js?
    1. I have a sizable base of code that does stuff with XML written in JavaScript that runs in the browser.
    2. I want to run some of the code on a server, running in Node.js.
    3. I've created a layer between jQuery and my software. I would like to use it as-is if possible, or if not, make the fewest modifications possible.
    4. I hoped I would be able to access XML structures in the server app using jQuery or something exactly like it. Why? Well, I'm far from the first person through this space. I assume other developers want the same ability to write XML-processing code that runs in both places, without having to convert it.
    5. So, how to do it? I've asked a couple of programming friends who are fairly expert in JavaScript and the question seems to stump them. There are of course ways to walk over XML structures, but not jQuery.
    6. I thought then I should post this question publicly and ask for advice from readers of this blog.
    Update: For some reason I don't see people recommending this. Why? Or maybe I'm missing something?
  The second guy makes the standard
    Another thing about standards that most people don't realize is that it's not the first guy who makes the standard, it's the second guy.
    Seth Godin calls him Guy #3 because in his video it was the third guy who made the dance movement happen, not the first or the second. But it's the same story, very graphically demonstrated. Go watch the video, it'll inspire you, I'm sure of it.
    #### How I tell the story
    When I tell the story it goes like this. Someone has to stand up and say "This is the way we'll do it." Usually the second guy says "Fuck you, this is the way to do it" and proposes a method that's not compatible with the first guy. We don't get a standard. That's why they're so rare.
    However had he said "Excellent, let's make our stuff work together!" then boom, it works. You get a standard. It's the cooperative nature of the second guy that gets the ball rolling down the hill. It makes it much harder for the next guy to blaze his own trail.
    So the second guy can't kill the standard, exactly -- but he can ratify it. The second position is imho the more powerful one. :-)
    #### How this applies to RSS
    In 1997 I came up with a syndication format for my blog, and implemented it.
    Early in 1999, Netscape came up with an incompatible format. They were the usual second guy. I guess they figured, we work for a big company, so we don't have to pay attention.
    At first, for a brief moment, I was angry. But then I saw how to turn it around.
    I said OK -- I'll do it your way. So I got to be the first guy and the second guy. ;-)
    It worked. My blogging software which a lot of people were using, was compatible with the format Netscape proposed, which a handful of big pubs were using. A level playing field and a small but critical mass. From there, I think -- it was pretty much assured that something would happen. That it was so huge was due to a very powerful user coming on board.
  Users make standards
    In my experience, users make standards, although I'm fairly sure that they don't understand that they do.
    1. RSS coalesced around RSS 2.0 because that's the version the New York Times feeds used.
    2. Podcasting became a phenomenon because NPR used the RSS 2.0 enclosure format to distribute its radio programs over the net.
    I don't think either of those would have happened without the support of these two leading editorial organizations. At the time, there were very few programmers in either shop (2002 for the RSS and 2004 for podcasting). So you don't need to spend a lot of money to have major influence.
    In the first case, the Times gave the rest of the news world something to emulate, and that's exactly what they did. And NPR was and is such a huge part of the podcast-like content, that whatever they did was bound to be the standard.
    In each case there was a single decision-maker, someone who was listened to and respected in their organization. Martin Nisenholtz at the Times, and Tony Kahn at NPR.
    If I wanted to displace an installed standard like RSS (I don't of course) I wouldn't look to nerds to make it happen. I'd look for an editorial organization that for whatever reason agrees that RSS needs to be replaced. I don't guess you'd find many. Hard to imagine why they would care. :-)
    "cheesecake"
    Update: Scott Gatz, in a tweet: "When we integrated RSS into MyYahoo, we called media cos & showed them NYT & the RSS2.0 spec, we also made all our own feeds 2.0." Exactly what I would have done in his shoes. When you see the opportunity of a new standard, jump on board with both feet. Each level has its own rain-makers. Scott and his team at Yahoo also, certainly, brought RSS 2.0 to new highs. We all won because of their contribution. ;-)
    There's more: The second guy makes the standard.
  They love horse shit
    These horse shit lovers were stationed on the island in the middle of 59th St at the southwest entrance to Central Park. I love the audacity and honesty of New Yorkers. They love horse shit and they don't mind if you know it.
    Horse shit is pretty popular, judging by the amount of it in the world, esp on the Internets. But most horse shit purveyors are not so honest as to hold up a sign advocating their passion.
    Seriously -- the new mayor should pick his battles. The horses of Central Park are lovely throwbacks. Sure they shit on our streets. But it's a vestige of Old New York. In a city that sheds its past, quickly without nostalgia, it's nice to see one small tradition persist. What the fuck, let the horses shit, and we'll deal with it. NYers are good at dealing with horse shit. ;-)
    Update: Here's a picture of one of the controversial horses.
  Civilization is made of interop
    Interop is the most precious thing.
    Interop means that I can give you a text file, and you will have a program that can open it. Interop means you can pull into any gas station and put fuel in your car. Interop means you can give me $100 and I'll give you my Knicks ticket, and when you go to the arena, they will let you in.
    In each of these cases, text files, gasoline, pump nozzles, cash, tickets -- you're using the fact that long ago people agreed to do things the same way so that multiple vendors could provide a product or service. So an entire industry could develop. Interop is all around us, it's why things work, when they do.
    Imho they should teach interop in business school, because without it there would be no business. But when it comes to tech, people who are supposedly experts in business seem not to understand the first thing about it.
    In the land of the web, the basis for interop is fragile. We have a few formats and protocols that make it work. Yet all around us are tech companies undermining it, far too many to list. You'd do better by asking which tech companies are doing anything to improve interop -- there aren't many.
    Take a stand for interop. Not throwing out interop for something that will supposedly be much better some time in the future. When you have interop, protect it and nurture it, because it's the least likely thing to happen. Once you let it go, it's pretty much impossible to get it back.
  The "noteblog" format
    I say the new "Scripting News" is a "noteblog," to differentiate it from a Twitter stream and a WordPress, Blogger or Tumblr-style blog.
    The new format is inspired by the pre-2006 format of Scripting News.
    I switched from that format because:
    1. Google Reader didn't like my feed with little snippets, they insisted that a blog post be a title, link and description.
    2. Twitter looked like the future, with their API and Internet-scale notification system.
    Now Google Reader is gone, and Twitter doesn't look like the future anymore. Most of my ideas don't fit into 140 chars, and the Twitter API stopped being a place to build new user experiences.
    Now that Fargo 2 is maturing, I brought back the shorter posts, and mix them with links, to writing on my own site, and elsewhere.
    For writing that's not full enough to be a blog post, but too full to fit into 140.
    I would call them medium posts, but someone else already thought of that. ;-)
    "curly"
  How to ask for help with software
    1. When reporting a problem, say what you were doing, what you expected to happen and what actually happened.
    2. Sometimes a screen shot helps.
    3. Re-read the docs before posting. This can save time. If you become known in a community as someone who checks first, people will be quicker to pitch in and help. And it goes the other way too. If you get a rep for being someone who doesn't use the docs before asking for help, people will be less inclined to help.
    5. Asking technical questions on Twitter, with its 140-character limit, often makes it impossible for you to include necessary details. Abrvtns r cnfsng. And since you don't know what the answer will be, it's hard to know in advance if it will fit in 140 characters. Use the mail list.
    6. Use a mail list also because this allows many possible people to help you, not just one, and it creates a record that might help someone else in the future. If you send private mail, only one person can help, and no searchable record is created.
    7. Almost no one likes support work. The pay sucks, if there is any! They do it because they want you to be successful, and recognize that everyone needs a little help at times. Because they believe in the product, maybe because they wrote the product. In many cases, especially with open source software, no one is obligated to help.
    8. Before posting a question, read it yourself and ask if you would understand it. If not, add more info. Remember other people are not there with you so they can't see what's on your screen.
    3. If it's "Fargo", include a pointer to the OPML file if you think that could help someone trying to understand what might have gone wrong.
    PS: As an experiment, I cross-posted this on Facebook and Medium.
  How I did the bookmarklet
    I just posted a link to the test version of Fargo 1.51 which has support for linkblogging, and support for the bookmarklet that we discussed on Scripting News last week.
    Now that it's out there I can show you how I did it.
    #### The intermediate app
    The trick is this -- the bookmarklet calls an app running in a web page on fargo.io.
    This is where the app is: http://fargo.io/misc/bookmarklet/.
    Here's a screen shot of the source of the app.
    Because that app comes from the same domain as the Fargo app, when they're running on your machine they share a local storage namespace.
    The app writes the query string to localStorage.fargoSearchString, and it quits.
    Once a second, Fargo looks for localStorage.fargoSearchString. When it shows up, it copies it, deletes it, and then parses it, and adds the link to the designated linkblog outline.
    #### Why it works
    We just communicated with a running app without having to relaunch it. Which of course with a major piece of software like Fargo is a fairly big deal -- far too much work to do for a single link. But the intermediate app is just a few lines of text. No big deal loading it just to send a message to Fargo.
  Every programmer should have an open source project
    I don't think I've ever said this, but I've believed it for a long time. I think every programmer should contribute to at least one open source project. And use them of course, and answer newbie questions, and generally be involved in elevating the platforms we use.
    There's been an amazing amount of that going on in the JavaScript world. It's really something. There's the web for documentation, much of it on Stack Exchange, it seems. I like W3schools, though I know a lot of people think it's cheesy. Their examples work, and they have the facts I need, and not a lot of fluff (yeah there are a few ads, but they're not intrusive).
    And there's at least a good beginning for almost all the pieces you need. There are some things missing. But now it feels like a land rush, that in a year or two there will be projects covering every area of interest.
    I think long-term this is how teams are going to form. I don't see teams being put together by recruiters working for investors, as much as it has been in the past.
    When I meet a programmer, one of the first questions I ask, after asking what languages they use and what platforms they work on, is what open source projects they contribute to.
    #### Ideas...
    A few thoughts off the top of my head.
    I think we really need a good River of News aggregator for Node. I plan to work on that. And a better way of browsing S3 structures. The tools we have there are really inadequate. The Amazon web interface is full of gotchas. We could do so much better there, imho.
    I would also love to find someone to work with me on a reincarnation of Share Your OPML. It solves a huge problem for the blogosphere. And it's the kind of thing that should definitely be open source.
    PS: Dave Briggs says "not just for programmers," and of course I agree. ;-)
  What would an open Secret look like?
    1. I like Secret.
    2. I was going to ask them to make an API.
    3. They won't have one (pretty sure).
    3. Even if they did have one, it wouldn't be safe to build on, unless it was somehow irrevocable, which is hard to imagine.
    4. What if I made one?
    4. Could that work?
    4. What would that be??
    5. An open Secret?
    6. Could it work as an open system?
    7. Or does it require a VC-backed company to make it work?
  Internet justice
    If you've been reading my blog for the last month or so you'll know that I've been exploring the differences between Twitter, Facebook and blogging. And trying to figure out what we need to do to revive the independence of the web, because that's something I'm committed to. In writing these posts I've heard from a lot of people, including people whose blogs I used to read, before they stopped updating them. There are lots of reasons they stopped. One reason you hear a lot is they couldn't stand the verbal beating they took for writing publicly. For whatever reason, Facebook is a safer place to talk with people in a friendly way. That's too bad, because Facebook is a corporate thing. Their algorithms choose what you read in a way that's optimized to make them money, and we've learned lately, provide information about us to the government. And probably other things we wouldn't like if we knew what they were. Of course they don't tell us. They don't have to.
    I've been blogging for almost 20 years, and I never stopped blogging (though I wanted to at times) -- because I felt it was worth the small price of having to hear from people who don't have a nice thing to say. People who, in the name of standing up for one group say that I'm a terrible person because I belong to a group they don't like (white, male, over-50, maybe some of it is anti-semitism, though they generally aren't open about that). I have women friends who blog who were attacked because they are women. I'm sure everyone gets it from some group who have decided they are bad. Democrats get it from Republicans, Republicans from Democrats (yes, I know Dems think they're all sweetness and light, but that's not true). The Internet, which we thought was a panacea because it offered free communication, turns out to also be a place of misery also because of the free communication. I love the freedom of the Internet, so I take the insults in order to keep the potential for freedom alive.
    Bullying isn't anything new. It always works like this. Separate someone, make them stand alone, and attack anyone who stands with them. But if you ignore the attacks, they'll stop. If you want the communication to work, you just have to say something like this to a bully. "I may not like what Mr X is saying, but I'll stand with his right to say it." Or some variant of that. The bullies always back down, if it's more than one or two people.
    This suggests a possible solution to the problem. When someone has a grievance and wants to use the Internet to air it -- fine -- it's good for that. But then others should produce a summary of the problem, in dispassionate bullet points, so that everyone else can form an opinion. And then a strict rule would be enforced, anyone who comments is free to do so without attack. That would help us identify real issues, and would help people get over the fear they have, and it's pervasive and chilling, to say what they think, but are scared to do so because they fear being attacked.
    That's the thing we have to get past. We can't stop people from attacking, but we have to make it safe for people to comment on the unfairness of the attacks. Lately, btw -- I've been seeing this start to work on a new service called Secret, where people can comment without anyone knowing their gender, race, age, social or monetary status. Without any history to use against them. The ideas stand alone, not pinned to a gender or race or status. It's really amazing how quickly you can cut through the bullshit with a little real anonymity. Some people write it off, thinking it's too easy to use to attack people with impunity (and that's very true, it can). But the same mechanism can be used to tell the attackers to fuck off. I've seen this, first-hand, and it made me laugh out loud to see something you never see in the public web, people talking back to bullies! So net-net I think it's a good thing, not a bad one.
    I've gotten skewered recently for asking why there are so few women programmers, and suggesting that traits of men might make us more suited for being programmers. It may or may not be true, but people say things like that with the genders flipped, all the time, and people nod their heads, no howling or shrieking. So the people who attacked at least lack perspective, haven't learned that little gender-flipping trick, and I wish they would. If you can say women are better at some things, it stands to reason that men must be better at some things too. :-)
    Then yesterday I was vilified for saying that when you hire someone who is not male and young you run the risk of being scammed the way I was in the story I was telling. There was no hidden agenda. I was in no way advocating that people do that. It was an off the cuff comment in a blog post. Not a manifesto or legal document. Not a lot of thought went into it. And by the way, it's obviously true! So all these people made all that anger over something that, if I had been a different gender, they might have applauded. Now that's seriously fucked up (and sexist, btw).
    This is also a blog post. I started at the beginning and wrote down the page. Nothing got reorganized, but I did go back and do a light edit (I tend to use too many words in the first draft, so I take some of them out in the edit process). You're reading what comes from one person's mind. Nothing more than that. And I change my mind, but never from people's attacks. If you want to work with me, start from a more reasonable place -- like this is another human being, with his own experiences, that lead to these ideas, and maybe we both can learn something from an interchange. If you can do that, then you'll be doing a lot to help our Internet work better, imho.
    Seriously, thanks for listening. ;-)
    "curly"
  A celebratory podcast!
    Good news!
    A bunch of feed readers support title-less feed items.
    So it's not going to be as big a problem as I anticipated.
    Here's a 15-minute podcast explaining how we got here, and how the market is likely to evolve from this point.
    Bottom-line: Competition is good. ;-)
  Roy Wildstein
    I've never known anyone named Roy Wildstein.
    Otherwise, everything in this story happened.
    In 1985 I was running a struggling tech startup in Mountain View, CA. I was the founder and CEO. Working two jobs. During the day I ran the company, and at night, along with my brother, I ran development. I had a group of people working for me on one project, and Peter had another group working on another set of projects.
    I hired this guy Roy Wildstein to work on an idea I wanted to explore, doing a set of experiments with user experience. I hoped to iterate with him. He would work on a new approach during the day, and that evening I'd review the progress, and plan out the next day's work. I had had success with this approach before, on both sides -- as the programmer implementing someone else's vision, and with a person implementing my ideas, rapidly, so we could design in a fluid way.
    Roy couldn't do it. I'd come back a day later, and he'd have nothing. The day after that, nothing. "I'm thinking about it," he'd say. Or he'd do a drawing and show it to me a day later asking if that's what I meant.
    So I gave up on that idea, and gave him something else to work on. A much simpler project. Let's get him some success I thought, let him see how much fun it is to get some interaction going. This time we were working on a new pointing device one of the computer manufacturers was coming out with. Again, no result from Roy. Lots of talk about how he needs to think a lot before he writes code. I wouldn't understand his process, he said to me (he was about 20 years older). After a few weeks with no output, I was ready to give him something smaller.
    I kept giving him smaller and smaller jobs. There were never any results. Lots of frustrated emails about how he didn't enjoy working with me, and I wasn't helping him do his job as other "managers" had done for him in the past. I didn't see myself as a manager, more a collaborator, fellow worker, thinker -- I wanted his work to fit in with what the other people were doing, what the other developers were doing, and what we could sell to users and to the other people in our company. I felt this guy was lucky to be teamed up with the CEO, but he didn't like it.
    Okay, let's try having him work with someone else. Again, same story. I keep wondering why doesn't he quit.
    Finally, I had enough. I fired him.
    A few days later, I got a certified letter from an attorney. The charge, age discrimination. I had never seen anything like it. I showed it to my board and lawyer, of course, and here's what I learned, something that Roy clearly understood before he started working at my company. I could choose to fight it, and I would lose. In doing so I'd incur hundreds of thousands of dollars in legal bills, would spend days in depositions and in court, and I'd still have to pay. I could fight, because he was ripping us off -- or I could pay, and move on. Of course I chose to pay. No one in business, where you're fighting fires all the time, wants to take on an optional fight that has negative upside. If I did that, I would have been pushed aside by the board, and they would have been right to do it. You run a company to do great things and make money. There's really no other reason to do it, imho.
    If this all had happened in 2014 instead of 1985, it would have been all over Twitter, and in addition to having to pay the humiliating settlement to make it go away, we would also be damaged in the eyes of the public, and wouldn't be able to tell our side of it. We'd have trouble hiring good developers. It's possible we would attract more Roy Wildsteins.
    I don't know if there's any solution to this. I certainly don't advocate not hiring people Roy's age -- I'm now older than he was then. But every time a company hires someone who is not a young male, they run the risk that the new hire isn't there to work, rather is there to scam you.
    I did run into Roy again, 10 or 15 years later. I was at Apple for a visit, walking through the cafeteria mid-afternoon. It was mostly empty. And off in a corner there was Roy, by himself, reading a book. I thought there must be a lot of people at a big company like Apple, ducking out of meetings, hiding from their co-workers, being a low-intensity problem for some "manager." Roy somehow makes it easier for them not to fire him, just leave him to collect his salary and not do very much else.
    PS: If you have something to say about this piece, take the time to write a blog post and do something good for the web. ;-)
    PPS: I would never advocate, nor have I ever practiced hiring only young males. Anyone who says that is wrong. (This is a story about me hiring someone who is not a young male. And I am myself not a young male -- fully disclosed in the very paragraph people are howling about.)
  Title-less items in my feed
    When I did the transition to the new format of "Scripting News" over the weekend, I decided for the moment not to change the format of the feed. However I will do it, eventually -- and it's almost certain not to work well in some feed readers, maybe most of them.
    One of the reasons I wanted to give it a little extra time is to create a time for feed reader devs who care to make the small changes necessary to accommodate title-less items.
    #### Example #1
    http://scripting.com/noteblog.xml
    This is the feed for the noteblog. You probably should not subscribe to this feed because it will stop updating when the next transition happens. But it's an example of the kinds of items that will show up in the main feed.
    #### Example #2
    http://links.scripting.com/rss.xml
    This is my original linkblog feed, going back to 2010.
    All the items in this feed are title-less.
    #### Background
    If developers want to handle the coming changes in Scripting News these two examples should be enough to make these feeds work in your software.
    I explained the changes, and the reasons in this March 9 post.
    #### Update
    Mike Rodriquez reports that Newsblur supports title-less feed items.
    Here's how Chrome deals with title-less items. Not optimal! :-(
    And here's how River 3 deals with title-less items.
    Feedly handles them a lot like Chrome.
  New Scripting News
    Last night I flipped the switch and deployed the new version of Scripting News. I said in the inaugural post that on Sunday morning I'd start to make a list of all the things that were broken. It's a good thing I put that disclaimer in there, because there's lots of stuff that needs attention. :-)
    I started this post so there would be a place for people to comment on problems, and to suggest solutions. There are lots of people who know more CSS and JavaScript than I do. Your help is much appreciated.
    #### Problems
    1. When you click on a permalink (example), the top of the item is scrolled off the top of the screen. This problem is caused, clearly, by the fixed navbar.
    2. The social media links that are supposed to appear in the right corner of the navbar are not visible. I tried playing around with everything to figure out what the problem is.
    3. When you use a permalink to go to a headline that has no subs, it erroneously puts a down-pointing wedge adjacent to the item, on the wrong (right) side of it. Example.
    4. It looks terrible on my tablet. Looks great on phone and desktop.
    5. In the preliminary docs I refer to the type as noteblog, but in the code it's called a stream. Noteblog is a better term. But the software wants me to call them streams.
    6. The Stories menu is all kablooey on the noteblog site. This is because everything is a story, which is not cool. :-(
    #### Remember
    It's even worse than it appears! :-)
  Indieweb and RSS
    If this article about feeds on the IndieWeb wiki represents their philosophy, then their name is wrong -- they're not about independence, because feeds give us independence.
    For whatever reason these people seem to want a web without RSS.
    Obviously that's not a cause I can support. ;-)
    #### Update #1
    Principles: "With IndieWebCamp we've specifically chosen to encourage and embrace a diversity of approaches/implementations."
    That's good! :-)
    But it's clearly in conflict with the Feeds page.
    #### Update #2
    Over the last 8 years or so, we've been caught between Twitter and Google Reader.
    Each has been doing its part to redefine what a blog is. And the intersection between the two spaces is empty. Which has led to problems. :-(
    1. Twitter's idea of a blog post is limited to 140 chars, has no titles and resides on their server.
    2. Google Reader's idea of a blog post is something that must have a title, is of unlimited length, and resides both on their server and yours (which imho is a good thing).
    Our job, in the coming years, is to heal this.
    To define what a blog is, independent of the commercial vendors.
    Consensus is formed in the market, not on mail lists or in meetups. If the people who call themselves the Indieweb can get uptake for the formats they would like to replace RSS with, then everyone will support them. Until then, we use what works -- for us. And that should not preclude people from working together.
    That would be my manifesto for independence on the web in 2014.
    "curly"
  Looking back to 2001
    The new Scripting News, coming soon (I promise!) is heavily influenced by the Scripting News of 2001. I like the way this blog used to work -- before Google Reader and Twitter. It was a mix of both kinds of blog posts -- 1. Short snippets with a couple of links, or 2. An essay, like the one you're reading right now.
    Things got confusing for a while (years, actually) and it wasn't clear what role blogs were supposed to play in a "real-time" world defined by Twitter and Facebook and to a lesser extent Google Reader (probably due to their lack of enthusiasm for blogging, had they loved it I think GR would have been equal to either of the other two, after all it was the FriendFeed guys who blazed the trail for Facebook, as they iterated over new ideas for RSS apps).
    All I ask you to do today is go back to 2001 -- a big moment in the history of blogging. The archive page is in reverse-chronologic order, so you might want to start at the bottom and scroll up.
    http://scripting.com/2001/09.html
    That's the kind of flow I am going to have again. I've been blogging in this form, off on the side, since March 2. To me it isn't theoretical that it will work, I already know it will.
    And it's a modern approach, using JavaScript and CSS, and eventually will have a node.js server component to connect systems together in new ways -- the kinds of places Google would have gone if (again) they had loved Reader.
    Tomorrow may be the day the switch flips. Or perhaps the day after. ;-)
    Still diggin!
    "curly"
  It's okay to ignore the commercial motive
    There was a lovely video making the rounds a couple of days ago.
    20 pairs of gorgeous strangers making out. Then it came out that they were actors and it was an ad.
    People questioned the good feeling.
    I think it makes sense to ignore the story, because the reason it feels great is that we empathize and remember times when we've been there, and the body can't tell the difference so it releases the chemical that makes you feel all happy and great when you're making out with someone desirable.
    The action isn't happening on the screen it's happening in your blood and your brain. You're getting high, and it's lovely. Who cares *how* it happened. :-)
  Caught betw Twitter & Google Reader
    As I'm reaching completion on the new features of Fargo I'm doing, I realize that I'm no I'm no longer accepting the limits of Twitter or Google Reader.
    These two products had us in a vise-like grip.
    Twitter says our posts don't have titles, and can't be longer than 140 chars. And Google Reader said our posts had to have titles, and could be unlimited in length.
    This is why my world is fractured, and so is yours.
    If you no longer accept the limits, after all Google Reader killed itself, and Twitter hasn't moved since it started up, there are some pent-up cool things you can do.
    Software can be a fog of war. But when the fog lifts, well that can be a great time. ;-)
  Time waits for no one
    #description "The actor who plays Bert Cooper on Mad Men has been around for a long time."
    Robert Morse, the actor who plays Bert Cooper on Mad Men was the star of How To Succeed in Business Without Really Trying, which was a hit musical from the 1960s. It was both a Broadway play and a movie.
    This came up in a post on Facebook by Michael Swaine. He wondered how a young fan of Mad Men would feel about this. I suggested they might listen to an old Rolling Stones song.
    #### Mind bomb!
    Here's something really twisted about Robert Morse/Bert Cooper. The movie, How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying came out in 1967, which is roughly the time when Mad Men was taking place. The world of Sterling Cooper is contemporary with the movie.
    That's a mind bomb. I'm sure the people who run the TV show are aware of this. I'm surprised they didn't have the movie show up in the story of the TV show. Wouldn't it be cool if an actor playing Robert Morse met Bert Cooper? Would the world have blown up? Is that like the butterfly in the famous Ray Bradbury short story?
    O the humanity! :-)
    #### But wait there's more!
    This is the first Scripting News post that's rendered specially so it should look good on a mobile device.
    I know I know, it took a long time. That's why the title of this post is so relevant! ;-)
    "cheesecake"
    #backgroundImage "https://dl.dropbox.com/s/6u11thlvgr78996/howtoColor.jpg"
    #subheadColor "white"
  Challenge: A Fargo bookmarklet
    Here's a technical problem I don't yet know how to solve.
    I want to make a bookmarklet that will add a link to the current "Fargo" outline.
    I don't think it's possible. What do you think?
  Mail outage
    If you sent mail to scriptingnews2mail@gmail.com in the last year, I didn't get it.
    I heard from someone who sent an important email to that account, and it wasn't forwarded to my main account. Just checked, and the forwarding was disabled. I turned it back on.
    Sorry for the outage. There's some really interesting stuff in there I wasn't seeing. :-(
  Conferences for thinkers
    I heard one of the panelists at SXSW today talk about it being a thinkers conference. I thought that was worth a short post, because imho if you exclude even one thought from the flow, it's no longer about thinking -- it's about keeping the promoters happy. That's a skill too, of course, but it's not much about thinking.
    I mention this about SXSW because I've asked numerous times to be included in the thinking that goes on there, and my ideas have definitely appeared on their stage, many times -- but the promoters say they were offended in some way by something I said (probably something very much like this).
    It's a great conference for launching products. And that's why I have, at times, wanted to present my ideas there. We still need a great tech conference for people who want to cooperate with others -- and market. Both are possible at the same time, as long as it's done with care.
    I've put my ideas to the test on this, I ran four conferences in the early days of blogging. They were good events, I got a lot out of them, and I hear that other people did as well. ;-)
    Anyway, I'm not making a big deal about it, I never have. Things are what they are.
  Opacity in CSS background images
    This is a follow-up to last week's CSS design question.
    I wanted the ability to put a background image on any of the sections of the page.
    I naively assumed that there would be an opacity property on the background image, but it turns out that's not so.
    I did some research, got in touch with Nicolas Gallagher, who's been very helpful with CSS questions in the past, and arrived at an easy solution.
    #### Demo...
    Here's a page that demonstrates.
    #### Question...
    I want the text to "pop" better. This isn't readable enough.
    I've thought about giving an opacity to the text, and increasing the show-through of the background image. But I wanted to put this out as a mini-design challenge, in case some of the readers have an idea how it might work. ;-)
    Thanks in advance for any suggestions.
    #### Update
    Here's the second version of the demo.
    Thanks for all the great feedback, esp from Alec Perkins.
    I took the opacity off the background, added a new div containing just the text, and gave it a white background with an opacity of .85. Added a little padding, and a border.
    I tried it with a drop shadow on the border, and rounded corners, but I prefer this look.
  Change coming in RSS feed
    At some point, soon, the Scripting News feed will have items without titles. The body of these items are in their descriptions, as explained in the RSS 2.0 spec.
    An item may represent a "story" -- much like a story in a newspaper or magazine; if so its description is a synopsis of the story, and the link points to the full story. An item may also be complete in itself, if so, the description contains the text (entity-encoded HTML is allowed; see examples), and the link and title may be omitted. All elements of an item are optional, however at least one of title or description must be present.
    #### How we got here
    Scripting News started in this format, and Frontier News before it.
    Manila, the first CMS to produce RSS feeds, supported title-less items in feeds.
    In 2006, Google Reader had gained dominance, and didn't support title-less posts. As a result Scripting News didn't look great in their reader, so there was pressure on me to change. At the same time Twitter came along, and fully adopted the idea of posts without titles, so I split my blogging into two pieces, one on Twitter and my linkblog, and the other, just the essays that appeared on Scripting News before. Scripting News, the first blog to have a feed, conformed to Google Reader's omission (a kind way of putting it) or bug (more fair). Scripting News became Google's idea of what a blog is. Ugh.
    I felt this was okay as long as Twitter held promise for being a revolutionary Internet-scale notification service with a powerful API. But they've backed off that. Their service hasn't improved in a long time. I didn't realize how much I missed doing the intermediate-length posts until I started using Facebook regularly. But stuff I post there has no lasting value. So I need a better place for that kind of writing, so why not use my own blog? Of course that's the right answer. :-)
    #### Undoing the mistake
    I'm undoing the mistake I made in 2006. And that means you may either find that your RSS reader supports my feed, or it doesn't. I'm not going to let them hold me back. If you can't read my feed in their tools, then you can switch to one that works properly, read the site in a web browser, or don't read it at all. :-(
    I'm sorry it has to be this way, but reader developers have been deciding arbitrarily not to support an important part of the RSS standard. I want to use the feature, I was using it long before any of them existed, and it's easy for them to support. Just a little bit of thinking and a little bit of coding.
  My templates are open source
    As I was working on Fargo 2, I got more comfortable with GitHub, and did something I've always wanted to do -- I released the templates for the core types in as open source. I hope at some point (now?) this will help get a design community booted up around Fargo.
    Why? Well I'm all thumbs when it comes to CSS. But I love the results that great designers can produce with it. "Fargo" is a design platform, and the templates, released as open source, can make that work as a real community.
    For example, I had trouble making Disqus comments work with the medium template, so I tabled it. I never have gotten back to it. Maybe someone else has the patience or know-how to make it work.
    To make this work, you have to learn how to use Fargo as a CMS. And that's another benefit. If we can have a platform that's equally comfortable for writers, programmers and designers, then we really have something. This is something we had working well in the early blogging communities, with my own Manila and Radio, as well as with Blogger, Movable Type, Tumblr. We can have it again, with the benefits of modern browsers and servers. :-)
    The templates are released in OPML and plain text. If you want to edit them in Fargo, of course you'd use the OPML. If you figure out a way to make it work when editing as plain text, more power to you, I still want to share.
    Also this may seem like gibberish today, but I hope in a few months it'll seem easy. ;-)
  Newsweek's breakthrough
    Yesterday started with a breakthrough -- Newsweek, the beleaguered, mostly forgotten news pub, had done a bit of investigative journalism, and had found the great Satoshi Nakamoto. The virtuoso technologist, sociologist and economist who came up with BitCoin. Strike one for journalism! They still have the right stuff.
    By the end of the day -- the breakthrough was a black eye. The good news was now bad news for Newsweek and for journalism. This, in all likelihood, was not the man. Not only was Newsweek wrong, they were spectacularly wrong, wrong on the cover, using up one of their last bits of credibility. From now on will Newsweek be anything but a punchline?
    But what does this say about investigative journalism in the future, when the rest of us can quickly evaluate the cover of Newsweek and find it lacking? And how many wrong stories of the past stood, because there was no Internet to expose them?
    In my own field, I can tell you that most of the stories Newsweek ran about tech were based on huge omissions. Their typical tech story was about a titan fighting to control the future, when the truth is they were fighting a losing battle against obsolescence. But the MSM never reports this, because they have too much regard for money and many of them want jobs working for the moguls they write about.
    We still hear it, in the last gasps of 20th century journalism -- in the stories we don't read about moguls who are starting news companies (the reporters don't write them). They still worship money, when all money can do is buy you big houses, cars and spouses, lots of them, sports teams, and offices full of journalists.
  Fargo as v2.0 of the Metaweblog API
    I read an interesting piece by Brent Simmons yesterday about his passion for creating blogging systems. He's thinking about doing a quick one, running in node.js. As I read the piece I recognized a lot of the ideas as ones that we've already implemented in Fargo Publisher, which is an open source, MIT licensed, node.js app.
    1. My first thought was wouldn't it be great if Brent used Fargo Publisher as a starting point? That way we might get some new features, maybe some bug fixes, and more users. Having two pieces of software resting on top of an API gives it a much better chance to gain traction.
    2. My second thought was that he was planning on using the Metaweblog API, something I designed in 2002, to build on the Blogger API. But we've gone so much further in the intervening 12 years. Metaweblog views each post as a document, but Fargo views a whole website as a document. Suppose you had a computer that could only deal with one file at a time, and one came along that could have as many open windows as you want? Wouldn't you want to at least try it?
    In that way Fargo 2 is the next step after Metaweblog. Yes, it's too bad progress happens so slowly in tech. 12 years for such a simple evolution. But at least it happened. It would be a shame if we had to wait another 12 years for adoption by users, esp very advanced ones like my longtime buddy, Brent. ;-)
  Snowden, Banksy, Satoshi Nakamoto
    These are the tech heroes of our day.
    Snowden sacrificed to change our point of view of everything electronic. We had become too complacent, our blinders were on, we couldn't talk about the reality of the networks we are using.
    Banksy uses new media to communicate strong messages via art.
    Satoshi Nakamoto hacks the structure of our economic system, with pure tech.
    These people are real media hackers, with very different approaches. They inspire and create and don't give a shit what Political Correctness says.
  CSS design question
    There's a generic kind of site, a product home page, divided into sub-pages.
    Each sub-page has a different background color or image, and uses a different kind of layout, and format and fonts. They are like panels in a brochure. You scroll through the site with the mouse on the desktop, or by flicking with your index finger on a tablet or a phone.
    I've got one example of this kind of site.
    Question #1 -- Does this kind of site have a name?
    Question #2 -- Are there any good how-to's on setting one of these up? Or generic examples? I just don't know what they're called or I could probably find them on my own.
    Obviously I want to make a "Fargo" template for this kind of site, to make it easy for writers and graphic designers to create them quickly. I, myself, have an application for this kind of site.
    Thanks in advance for pointers. ;-)
    #### Update
    A simple demo page illustrating the ideas.
    Thanks for all the suggestions from commenters.
    It's really very simple. Several fixed-height divs, styled as a table, containing a block of text that's styled as a table-cell.
  Recalculating graphics
    My brother was in town a few weeks ago. We went to a Brooklyn Nets game on the subway and got lost and had to take a cab to Barclays in the snow and cold. It may not sound like fun but it was. ;-)
    We talked about how various software projects turned out. I had a memory of a product we did that never shipped, it was called Broadway, or Boxes & Arrows, or PowWow, it had a lot of names over the years. The idea was this -- if you wanted to do layout right, presentation-type layout, you have to have graphics that have relationships to each other that persist, even as the objects are moved and resized.
    So I could say that box A and box B are always centered relative to each other. When I move one the other would also move to maintain the relationship.
    This was meant to be a tool people would use to create designs for PowerPoint-like presentations, designs that other people would use, and that would look good even if they had just a little text here and a lot of text there, or the other way around. Designers would set it up so there were rules that made it look great either way.
    It followed the usual formula for software platforms. The authoring tool trades off ease-of-learning for power. The runtime must be trivially simple to use. Ways for people who invest to pack knowledge into their designs, and have it blossom to delight the neophyte.
    (Sounds like something Walt Frazier might say.)
    Whenever I have to do tedious layout of web pages, and find in the end the result is unsatisfactory and fragile I think of how it really should be done, and hope someday we make a popular platform that has these recalculating graphics in all their glory.
    And I think it's also the way we'll ultimately solve the "responsive design" question.
    #backgroundImage "http://static.scripting.com/larryKing/images/2014/03/05/pierceRondo.jpg"
    #description "Graphics that have relationships to each other that persist."
  Dig we must!
    I'm working on a new scheme for the scripting.com home page.
    "cheesecake"
  The canonical Knicks fan
  Why blogging is an amateur thing
    A few days ago I tweeted: "Professional blogging --> no. It can be incidental. A professional reporter can blog. But being a blogger is not a professional thing."
    At the time, I promised I'd write a blog post to explain. This is that post.
    1. It is possible for a professional reporter to blog, even when they're doing their job as a reporter. But it is not a professional act. A reporter might blog about what they learn being a reporter, or covering a certain story. The reporter is an expert on reporting, at least. But a reporter could also be an expert at model trains. Or skiing. Or even be a kibitzer about politics or sports. Expertise comes at all levels. Let's not judge someone as not being expert enough. If you have something to say, it's cool to say it, and a blog is a great place to say it.
    2. However, a blogger is not a reporter who uses WordPress. Yes it's a blogging system, but it's also a content management system, fully capable of running the web presence of all sizes of news organizations. How your writing is transmitted to readers has nothing to do with the act of writing news. It's a trivial distinction.
    3. What's the harm in letting reporters call themselves bloggers? Well, we need a word for a person who shares his or her expertise for free. And we have such a word -- blogger, which derives from the word weblog which was coined by an early blogger, Jorn Barger, and shortened by Peter Merholz to blog and adopted by the community, years before reporters started calling themselves bloggers.
    4. We need a word for what we do because it is an important activity. You can't understand how news works today without understanding the role that bloggers play. So in a sense professional reporters hurt themselves by usurping a term that meant something before they applied it to themselves.
    5. Why are bloggers important to reporters? Bloggers are your sources. They are the people who previous generations of reporters had to reach by telephone. These days reporters can skim hundreds of perspectives on the web, prioritized by search engines. The reach of reporters in the age of blogging is far greater that it was in the age of the telephone. Understanding this synergy is key to understanding how news will evolve in the future.
    6. But the real reason to let amateurs have this word is it's the right thing to do. It's fair. Reporters already have a word to describe what they do. Let us keep ours.
    See also: Why blog?
  Knight News Challenge
    This season's Knight News Challenge is going to fund projects that strengthen the free and open Internet. That's what we're doing at Small Picture and in the Fargo community.
    I think that's a great idea! And I'd like to flip things around a bit. I'd like to help people who want to use Fargo, or the open source publisher software or outliner component, to do projects that help strengthen the Internet, and apply to Knight for funding.
    Or maybe developing some compatible services on Dropbox, using templates, OPML or RSS. Or even making node.js servers easier for tech-savvy users to deploy.
    Maybe you want to do JavaScript toolkit that flattens-out the various storage APIs: Box, Google Drive, Microsoft, Dropbox, etc?
    It's a nice coincidence that Knight is focused on this now. If you have an idea you'd like to work on with our support or technology, either send me an email, or post a comment below. :-)
    I have a dream of having a real-world (not online) conference next summer with 15 teams working on these projects, and looking for all kinds of great ways to connect them together. I even have a venue in mind, and when you hear what it is it'll blow your mind.
    "cheesecake"
  Why blog?
    A blog post has lasting value.
    A tweet stream is more ephemeral, it can evaporate almost instantly.
    Not saying that quick comments shouldn't be tweeted, but when you figure something out that's not trivial, if it has value, you're wasting it if you put it on Twitter or Facebook.
    The mission of blogging is to empower all of us to go directly to each other with our expertise. So if you know something as well as anyone else, or you learn something or know something that should be shared, then you should share it on your blog.
    Blogging needs your help. There's cobwebs in the blogosphere. I want to dust everything off, and start linking our stuff together, and get some developer energy flowing, and let's do some new stuff.
    Blogging is a good idea. Most people aren't compelled to share their ideas, thinking, knowledge and expertise. But if you're one of them, please use the tools, or if they fall into disuse, we'll just have to invent them again. Let's keep it growing. :-)
  About software deals
    1. Software is a process.
    2. It's never finished. There are always bugs to fix, features to add.
    3. Usually, when one company buys another, they buy the software, not the process.
    4. It would be more realistic to contract with a developer or group of developers the way book publishers contract with authors, or studios contract with directors. You buy N books, or movies, or albums. Then the creative person gives you what they contracted for.
    5. Don't try to hire employees to make products. You need to be able to take creative risks. It's hard to do within a corporation. By "hard to do" I mean impossible. ;-)
    6. Unlike movies, books, music -- software continually evolves. So even if the initial creator moves on, there always has to be the equivalent of a show runner that stays with the product, the kind of person who does what Vince Gilligan did on Breaking Bad, for example.
    7. I've now moved on from two products, one through acquisition and one by passing off to a new management team. Both times the product died.
    8. I'm still trying to figure this out. ;-)
  Me, in Madison, in 1977
    A throwbackthursday picture of me as a grad student at UW-Madison in 1977 or so, programming on a Unix system, probably working on my first outliner. :-)
    There was a nice Facebook thread re this picture.
April 2014
  Why outliners?
    Everywhere in computers you see hierarchies.
    If they're everywhere, then invest in a tool that edits and displays hierarchies really well.
    Jack up the UI of the system, and get the editor/displayer deep in the OS, underneath everything.
    And make everything everywhere editable or viewable with the hierarchy editor.
    And hierarchy editor is just another term for outliner.
    Voila! :-)
    PS: If you want to try one, check out littleoutliner.com.
  Podcast: How to create open standards
    Check out this post by Chris Saad about the open standards process. My comment was that it's not hard to do open standards, but you have to be prepared to give something up.
    In this 22-minute rambling podcast I explain how to do it. You have to meet three criteria:
    1. You must have a hot product.
    2. You must have competitors wanting to enter your market.
    3. You have to be willing to compete without lock-in.
    This is easy, but dangerous! You might lose the market.
    I have had this experience, with XML-RPC, SOAP and RSS, and that's what I talk about in the podcast. The web, HTTP and HTML, also met all three criteria, and their creator Tim Berners-Lee, was happy to make the world a better place, because his invention, which made a lot of other people fantastically wealthy, did not earn him a fortune. He was very generous and I think had his priorities straight. We desperately needed what he had developed, and it's far from clear that the format and protocol of the web would have caught on had it been captured by a single company. Further, it's unlikely it would have attracted investment and without that, what chance would his ideas have had?
    I also talk, briefly, about Medium, and my wish to have a service that does what it does without lock-in. I'm pretty sure we can do it. We just have to have the will to. I know Ev doesn't believe in free movement of users, well I'm not if that's it, but the service is a silo, and I'm still of the belief that users are smart, and eventually they will choose freedom over lock-in, esp if the cost is sufficiently low.
  NakedJen's new blog
    I'm helping NakedJen out with her new blog. The old one was on TypePad. They wanted $15 a month to keep the site going, and that was more than she felt was fair, so she let it go. Of course I was on her case to get back to blogging. I missed her rambly emotive blog posts. I love the way her mind works. I felt bad reading her posts on Facebook, where they insist she's not NakedJen. So we set up a Fargo blog for her, and she's been writing there the last few days.
    http://nakedjen.smallpict.com/
    We set it up so her domain, nakedjen.com, which she still owns, redirects to the new site.
    Also, she uses Feedburner, which usually makes me groan, but this time it turned out well, because it lasted longer than TypePad for Jen. So we told Feedburner to look for her feed at this address:
    http://nakedjen.com/rss.xml
    Which redirects to the Fargo-generated feed.
    At some point we will probably do another mapping to have her site hosted at nakedjen.com, so it's better to not include .smallpict in the address, and let the redirect work for now.
    But the really important thing is my good pal NakedJen is back blogging!
    See also: NakedJen and word-wrap.
  NakedJen and word-wrap
    I was talking with NakedJen today and it occurred to me that she might not know about word wrapping. She was putting hard returns at the end of every line in "Fargo". This meant that when she wanted to remove a few words, she had to manually rewrap the lines below. I showed how, if she just continued to type at the end of a line, the computer would do the wrapping for her. It was a revelation! She had been using computers 25 years without knowing they could do this.
    When you think about it, it makes sense -- if you learned how to write on a typewriter it might never occur to you. That's how I learned to write, and the early Unix text editors I used couldn't wrap. But the first writing tool I developed on the Apple II did it automatically. I remember the code was hard to write esp on a low-power machine like the Apple II. But I've never even documented the feature it seemed so basic to me.
    You might check with friends to be sure they know about word wrap. Be sure you know about it. :-)
  Google Glass smells bad
    Scoble was at Coachella, an outdoor concert, and took his Google Glass off. Scoble did that. The original whore of Glass. He tells an interesting story. People don't like the association.
    How I think of it: Google Glass has a bad smell. It's connected to the bus protests in SF. All the publicity about the 1 percent and the NSA news, Google gets black eyes all the time and never grows from it. Just like Microsoft in the 90s. People who think of themselves as super geniuses are awful at listening.
    The message is this: 1. We love technology. 2. But we want to be creative with it, not be owned by it. 3. It was once cool to have billions of dollars. 4. Now, having all that money makes you something we don't understand, or like.
    So wearing Google Glass says something about the person wearing it. You're owned and you don't mind if everyone knows. Even worse, you're an agent of ownedness. Because you're wearing that bad-smelling thing, the rest of us start to stink. Get away with that.
    Now it's ironic that Scoble kind of gave Glass the bad smell in the first place. But that's the way it goes in the real world. For all the billions Google has, they have to do PR just like everyone else. For every Scoble they need five LeBrons to polish the image.
    BTW, there's something really offensive about a super-rich company asking people to pay $1500 to beta-test their product. And this isn't just any super-rich company, it's the iconic one. The one people think of first when they think of super-rich. Did it ever occur to them that they might actually pay people to do their testing?? Like it's some kind of privilege to use an unfinished product? And what happens when 1.0 ships? Does everyone get a free upgrade? Or do they have to pay all over again?
  Bare-bones Heroku do
    Every time I want to start up a new Heroku app, I go through the same process, and I thought rather than figure it out every time, I'd just document it here once, and look it up.
    Note: This is more general than my Heroku How To, which shows you how to set up a Fargo Publisher app. This is for any app.
    1. Come up with a name. Write it down. I'm using bingBing33 for this howto.
    2. Create a folder to hold the app. Say it's /myworld/bingBing33/
    3. Save your JavaScript file in there, say it's main.js.
    4. Create a package.json file in the folder. Follow the pattern in this file.
    In Terminal, enter these commands:
    cd /myworld/bingBing33
    git init
    git add package.json main.js
    git commit -m "Initial source code"
    heroku create bingBing33
    git push heroku master
    Your app should be running. If not, type heroku logs at the command prompt to see what happened.
    To set an environment variable:
    heroku config:set myvariable=somevalue --app bingBing33
    When you make a change:
    git commit -a -m "Update"
    git push heroku master
  WordPress-to-OPML source
    As promised, I have released the source for the server that converts a WordPress blog into a single "Fargo"-editable outline. It's written in JavaScript and runs in node.js.
    The format is OPML, which has many other uses.
    It's provided under the MIT license.
    https://github.com/scripting/wp2opml
    BTW, you'll find a link to this server and all my other source releases in the GitHub menu at the top of every post on this blog.
  WordPress to OPML, working!
    Fargo 1.54 is out.
    It's the first version with the ability to download a WordPress site as a single Fargo outline.
    I will release the source code for this project. It's written in JavaScript, runs in node.js. The format is OPML, but the server app could put out any format you like, with modifications of course. I want to do a some testing before releasing it.
    As a demo, here's the OPML source for the Rebooting the News site.
    This release has no user interface largely because I'm not sure what kind of UI it should have. I want to see how it works for users first before nailing that down.
    #### Questions?
    Since this feature might also be of interest to WordPress users (and developers) who are not using "Fargo", feel free to ask questions in the comments below. I use WordPress too, so I'm interested in comments from other users. ;-)
    #### Update -- source release
    As promised, I've released the source for the server.
  How the cloud should work
    There are lots of clouds. The one I'm thinking of is the one that Amazon runs, and that so many are trying to catch up to. Here's a list of ideas the next-layer-up will have.
    1. The basic unit shouldn't be a CPU, it should be an app. They are like the apps that run on your iPhone, but they run on a server, not on a hand-held device.
    2. I sign on to my account and see a list of my apps.
    3. To create a new app, click a button called New App. A dialog appears, asking what template I want to use (by template I mean GitHub repository, but that's something designers/programmers worry about). A configuration dialog appears, one created by the template designer. Checkboxes, text areas etc. These set the environment variables that configure the app.
    4. Storage is handled in a simplified S3-like store, without the quirks of S3. Static, web-accessible storage. Nicely configurable with user dialogs. Works like a file system and a web server. And it has an interactive mode that works like a file system (after all these years S3 still doesn't have one, because it's basically not possible).
    5. Double-click on an app to get a readout of what it's doing. Something like the Google Analytics dashboard pops up. I can see what kind of traffic it's getting. Look at how it's doing with its resources. Is a database filling up? Is response time okay? Has it been up continuously. This is what people who run server apps want to be able to see at a glance.
    6. If I want to add more resources, steal the slider from Heroku (see the video demo). The more resources the app uses, the more you pay. In times of peak load scale it up. When things quiet down, you can slide it back down.
    This is what the simplified layer will look like. We can build so much more complex stuff when the basics that bog down deploying and maintaining servers gets simplified and commoditized.
  The press isn't getting Heartbleed
    This is like a slow motion 9/11 -- it really is that serious.
    No one is alarmed. The companies that should be safing-up their servers are moving too slowly.
    This is very much like the buildup to the war in Iraq when the media didn't carry the real story.
    Only this time there is a lot that we should be doing that we aren't doing.
    #### What we should be doing
    1. Locating and updating the vulnerable servers.
    There is no number 2.
    Changing passwords is security theater. It doesn't fix anything if hackers have access to your passwords, they have access to the new ones too.
    #### What we should be doing: Specifics
    In a comment below, I outlined a plan. I thought it should be in the post itself.
    1. First, I think we need leadership. Then we need to have a surefire way to discover vulnerable servers. You have to figure the hacking community is working quickly to figure out how to do this, if they haven't already done so.
    2. Then we have to enlist the help of users in discovering those servers.
    3. A simple feature added quickly to all the major browsers that lights up when you're on a server that's not secure. And that event goes into a database, and that information is quickly shared with the owner of the system, when they can be located (some are not going to be easily located).
    4. Then again, if we had some leadership we could just isolate those systems. Cut them off the net, so that they themselves can be damaged, but they can't be used themselves to cause damage. Again I'm sure we're falling behind the bad guys as we speak. Of course they aren't running press releases. That's probably the major reason the press isn't carrying any of the urgent messages that need to get out there.
    5. A Kickstarter project, that was immediately funded to do this work would be a good sign. Then we have to get the Netcraft people involved, and Schneier, and maybe a few other organizations that are good at communicating with programmers -- O'Reilly, the developer programs at the big tech companies -- Google, Apple, Facebook, Amazon, Microsoft, Twitter, Oracle, IBM, Salesforce, etc. Stack Exchange, Hacker News, Slashdot.
    6. The goal is to develop a communication system, quickly, to help locate and fix the vulnerable systems. And then brace for what comes next.
  Mansplaining
    1. It's a gender-specific putdown, like saying a woman is emotional, or a black person "uppity."
    2. Not only is it rude, unfair, and a lot of other negative things, it also says that the accuser has no real objection to what the person is saying. If they did, why resort to an ad hominem attack.
    3. If you're being lectured at, condescended to, how about walking away?
    4. The term is also wildly misused. How could a blog post be mansplaining? Yet I've heard it said many times that a blog post is. (You're not cornered, you can always hit the Back button, and it's not making any assumptions about gender of the reader, blog posts are read by people of all genders, races, ages etc.)
    5. Women do it too.
    6. I've read all the literature on it. No need to send pointers. ;-)
    7. If the term is a feminist ideal, to label a bad behavior so people can see it, it has backfired. The term is most often used to shut people up, to shame them.
  Old-time laptops
    In the early-mid 80s the art of laptop computers was just getting started.
    That's a picture of the TRS 80 Model 100.
    It ran Microsoft software, if I remember correctly -- couldn't run what we now call "apps." But it had a little word processor and a BASIC interpreter, and could connect up to your desktop computer. I owned one, but never really used it. I was an Apple II guy at the time, about to transition to the IBM PC.
    My first real laptop was the DG One. I was one of its early developers. Really made an impression. It was a real computer. Quite heavy, almost in what was then called the luggable category. The great thing about it was that it was not an almost-clone of the IBM PC, it was an exact clone. That meant it had lots of software. The near-compatible computers of the day all withered on the vine.
  Reading Ted Nelson on an iPhone
    Yesterday I wrote I was doing stuff with XML-RPC, but didn't say what I was doing.
    I hit a conceptual stopping point on a user interface project I've been working on, inspired by Jay Rosen's use of Fargo as a presentation tool in his talk last week in Austin. I needed to move from the UI to the machine room, to plumbing and wiring and some of it, in computer networking terms, quite ancient! ;-)
    Sometimes that helps clear the mind, switching what kind of puzzle you're working on. So if you hit a conceptual wall working on the user-facing stuff, switch gears and do some work on the plumbing.
    My interest is in letting people use Fargo to edit whole WordPress blogs. So I started breaking the problem up into bits, and found that there really isn't a whole lot to it. Fargo can already create WordPress blog posts, and edit them of course. All I should have to do is 1. create the data structure that Fargo creates, and 2. effectively fool it into believing it had created it too. And that led me to creating a WordPress-to-OPML utility app, in JavaScript, of course (I already have lots of stuff like that in the OPML Editor).
    And that led me to various approaches for talking to WordPress from JavaScript clients, but I hit CORS walls, and decided that it would be better to put this code on a server, esp since I've mastered the setting up of new node.js apps on Heroku. At first I found several packages that use XML-RPC to communicate with WordPress. I smiled when I saw the MetaWeblog API calls from the late 90s in a node.js wrapper. I suppose that's like reading Ted Nelson's book on an iPhone. Amazingly it not only works, in both cases -- but works really well! Some bits of technology move forward into the future, others don't.
    It was so gratifying to come back after having left the world of XML-RPC, basically when I started doing app development on top of Twitter, I was using it as a I used to use XML-RPC. Now I find not only has WordPress continued to support their XML-RPC interfaces, but they have enhanced them. I was expecting a long slog to get the connection working, but it happened so quickly, just a few minutes, that it threw me off-balance.
    Now I'm working my way through various example websites. I have it completely working with my concord test site.
    I'm looking at all the WordPress blogs I have close at hand to see if they work with the new utility. I hit some problems with the Rebooting the News blog, which brings me full circle back to Jay. There are problems, so I'm reading the old posts as I work through it. More memories. Funny how there's a time for digging new holes, and then there's a time for going back to see how the ones I dug years ago are doing. Happy to report, everything still appears to be there. ;-)
  Weekend linkblog posts
    I haven't yet combined the linkblog feed with the main Scripting News feed. I want to give aggregator developers a bit more time to learn how to deal with title-less feed items. But if you're subscribed to this feed, I wrote a few mini-essays on the home page yesterday that you might want to read. Here's the link.
  Podcast: What the Fuck!
    I did a five-minute podcast with a revised idea of what the Internet is in light of what we've learned in the last week. It's not anything like what we imagined it was.
    What to do? See the title of this post for a suggestion. ;-)
    "curly"
  Interapplication communication in JavaScript
    How are we going to do interapplication communication between apps written in JavaScript running on the same machine?
    #### I use localStorage
    The client app stores a string in known location. The server watches that location. When a string shows up, convert it to uppercase, delete the string, and store the new string in another known location.
    The client app is watching that location, when a value shows up, it displays it for the user.
    #### A limit
    There is a limit -- the two apps have to originate from the same domain, because only apps from the same domain can share space in localStorage.
    #### Example app
    The example app is in a GitHub repository.
    https://github.com/scripting/interAppComm
    Download the client and server and drag them into your browser.
    Enter a string in the client. Click the Submit button. See the result.
    #### Seeing is believing
    Some people don't believe this works. It does.
    I've deployed it in a real-world app, and there have been no support issues.
    And with this demo, you can see with your own eyes.
  Dropbox tone-deaf? Hardly
    TechDirt has a story calling Dropbox "tone-deaf" for adding Condoleezza Rice to their board of directors, given that she played a central role in creating the surveillance state that we now find ourselves in. (Yesterday Ed Bott said the same on Twitter. I argued with him. A more detailed version of the argument follows.)
    Tone-deaf is an interesting idea. Literally it means that someone can't carry a tune. Using it as a metaphor for a company, I think they're saying they have an integrity issue. Dropbox seems to be a company we can trust to fight the government on our behalf. Hiring Rice seems contrary to that and to the interests of its users. They aren't what they say they are, therefore they're tone-deaf.
    But it's only tone-deaf if you were expecting a different tune. I think it's refreshingly honest and open. It tells the users that it's very important for Dropbox to have a way to communicate with governments at a very high level. Someone has to rep the company at meetings that are now taking place regularly where new rules are being created to govern the Internet. Private rules that we may not know anything about.
    The net never was as open and liberal as it seemed to us. That's what we learned from Snowden's leaks. Every large tech company is quickly becoming part of the governmental structure of the world. Eric Schmidt, for example, travels with a former aide to the US Secretary of State. I'm sure at times when he meets with world leaders he's carrying messages for our government and vice versa.
    That's the reality. Dropbox could have tried to hide it from users, but they chose not to. That appears to be in harmony with other tech companies. We may not like the song they're singing, but it's not tone-deaf.
  Secret may be the next thing
    #### Twitter and Facebook
    Twitter and Facebook are part of my "rotation." When I take a break from work, I go to each to see what's up. It's a habit, like checking email was a decade ago. I check even though there's usually not much there of interest.
    I don't have any early-days memories of Facebook, because I wasn't part of its early adopter crowd. But I was there for the beginning of Twitter. And I remember what an eye-opening experience it was. All of a sudden the lives of the people I related to on the web were opening up to me. I could see where people go, even learn about their families. But then the experience got diluted, as I followed more people, and more people, strangers, talked to me as I tweeted. The experience re-formed into a sort of social media haze, people promoting this and that. Although we don't call it spam, that's really what most of what's on Twitter is.
    #### Napster
    I tried Napster in the winter of 2000, found nothing there of interest, but I was looking for a specific song on June 18. Father and Son, by Cat Stevens. (It was Father's Day.) I had just heard it on the radio, and wanted to hear it again. Back then, if you can believe it, this was a problem. Unless I had a song in my personal collection of CDs I had bought at a record store, the best I could do was wait until it came on the radio again. Then I had a thought -- maybe it's on Napster. It was. That, and everything else. In the period between my first and second visits, the system had boomed with people of my age, and now our music was there too. It was an amazing experience to be able to browse old tunes the way I browsed the web. I wrote about it, a lot. The experience of music had been transformed. People were talking about music in the supermarket and airports! This was new.
    Father and Son still reaches inside me to find the confusion that reigned between my father and myself when I was younger. I'm 58 now, but the Dave-of-17 is still very much alive inside, and is moved by that song. "From the moment I could talk I was ordered to listen." That's the power of a new medium, in this case, Napster.
    #### Secret
    Now it may be Secret's turn. True, there's no API, and no web client. It's not politically correct. It's possible that there can't be an API for a service that tries to deliver anonymity. I don't know. All that said, I'm having the kind of experience with it that I had in the early days of Napster and Twitter. I'm learning things, meeting people and hearing things from them they could never say if we knew who they are. Sure there's a lot of the first time thrills that come from saying nasty shit about people we all know. I've even read nasty shit about me. Big deal. The first time people used SimCity they destroyed the built-in cities. That's fun for an hour or so, then you try building a city, and that was fun (for me at least) for years.
    Secret is not in my rotation yet, I have to remember to check it. But when I do, it gives me lots to ponder, makes me want to ask questions, and gets me thinking about who else is in this world, and how different some of them are from me. Sure the stories are probably mostly fiction, but this is what people dream about -- their fantasies. Who they would like to be. They do something no one can afford to do on their blog or on Twitter or Facebook, they show vulnerability. And that's interesting, and in Internet communities, new.
    PS: There are cats all over this piece. The logo of both Secret and Napster are cats. And Cat Stevens wrote the song that got me into Napster.
  Heartbleed is serious
    I'm not waiting for various businesses to contact me, I'm contacting them asking if they're vulnerable and if so what's the plan.
    Changing your password is not a fix. Every site that is using a version of OpenSSL that has the bug has to be updated or patched. Obviously, the sooner the better.
    Technical details here including the C code for the bug and the fix.
    So far I've only heard from only a couple of very seriously technical sites, pubnub.com and oauth.io. It's not clear if credit card companies, online stores like Amazon, banks and brokerage firms, are vulnerable, and if so how quickly they're installing the patched software. We're in that awful period where the vulnerability has been fully documented publicly. No one knows if any hackers were aware of the problem before it was discovered, but there is no doubt the bad guys know about it now.
    This is one of the reasons why the Internet of Things hype is so scary. Right now, in 2014, our entire financial system is accessible through a compromised system. That's bad enough. But what happens when our bodies are wired to the net. And our cars, homes, everything. It's great to think about when everything is working and everyone plays nice. But if you know anything about software and networks you know that's a naive dream.
  Ideas for Google Glass
    A couple of ideas, probably not even close to original, but I wanted to get them down.
    1. I go for a walk every day, or try to -- and I usually take a podcast with me. This American Life, Planet Money, something from the New Yorker, or the NY Times. I'd like to take an episode of Nurse Jackie with me, a TV show. It seems like it would be a perfect application for GG. I could keep my eyes focused both on the show and where I'm walking. (I hope!)
    2. Scoble got a new toy -- a drone with a beautiful video camera. While the drone is flying, you can watch it on your iPhone. But wouldn't it work much better with GG? I want to use my hands to control the drone, and the effect of having my vision being directly wired to the "vision" of the drone would probably be amazing. Esp if it were 3D (which suggests using something like Oculus). It might give you a real sense that you're flying.
  What's the cost of failure?
    You could spend months or years to know that your approach is correct before trying it. If the cost of failure is high, say you're firing a rocket into space, then you want to put enough time into being sure you're right. But if it doesn't take long, and it's easy to revert, why not try it and see what happens?
    I do this in programming all the time. Whether something works or not is data. I don't like to leave a solution in place that I don't understand, so I will usually do the work to know it's correct. But it's easier, less stressful, and takes less time if you already know it works.
    And of course if it doesn't work, that's data too. ;-)
  How to do new things
    The best way to learn something is to start doing it. Don't wait for full knowledge to come to you. Often it won't. Just pretend you know what you're doing, and hit the walls. That helps define the shape of the problem. Make it small enough that you can start solving it right now, without waiting. Each part of the problem is smaller than the whole thing. And tell yourself you can do it, because you can.
    #### A story
    Back in 1994, I wanted desperately to learn how to create and update a website. I was reading all the docs I could get my hands on, and at the time there wasn't very much.
    I read and read, but somehow it just didn't come together. I understood the intent of each HTML tag. But how to actually get that into a place where the browser, at the time Mosaic, could get to it? I kept looking for the answer, but I wasn't finding it.
    Until one day I found a service at Ohio State University that you could send mail to containing HTML and it would put it on the web and send you back the URL via email. I tried sending a simple message -- Hello World -- to the Ohio mailbox. It sent back a URL and when I went to the page, it just contained the text. I think I got it, I said to myself. I tried another experiment. I went to the HotWired website, did a view-source, copied the text to the clipboard and sent it to the Ohio mailbox. It sent back a URL and when I went there I saw a facsimile of the Wired site, with broken images. I understood. I didn't know what was happening back in Ohio, but I understood this much: I was sending it text and it was putting it "on the web," whatever that meant.
    #### What are the questions?
    Now I know what question to ask. How did the Ohio mailbot get my text on the web? From there, the whole thing just came to me, and I understood that the web is so simple it can be hard to understand. There really is nothing but files and folders and a piece of software running on port 80. Sometimes the problem is you don't know what questions to ask. Solving part of the problem could uncover them.
    The basic method is ths. Figure out what's on the way there, do a few of them -- puzzle over it, try out an idea, if that doesn't work, try another. Feel your way around in the dark, try to find the shape of the thing you're looking for.
    I've called this method Divide and Conquer at times. Same idea.
  How to display title-less feed items
    I've written previously about why title-less feed items exist. In a nutshell, some posts are so short they don't have titles. Prime example: Tweets.
    Sometime soon the Scripting News feed will have title-less items. If you develop feed reading software and want to offer Scripting News links and posts to your readers, your software must be prepared to handle title-less items.
    This piece shows how a feed reader can intelligently handle items with and without titles.
    #### Terminology
    For this howto we may need up to four ingredients from a feed item: title, link, description, guid. When displaying the item, we need up to two bits: headline and body. Depending on what's in the item, the headline might link to something, or just be bare text linking to nothing.
    #### How to
    If the item has a title, the headline is the title.
    If the item has no title, but has a description, the headline is the first N characters of the description. The value of N is up to you, based on how you lay the items out on a page, or if it's a river. In this case the body is empty. We've already used the description once. This is where a few aggregators repeat the text. There's no need to do this, it's unsightly, confusing, and shows lack of care for the reader.
    The headline usually links to something. If the item has a link element, the headline links to that. If it has a guid, but no link and the guid is a permalink, the headline links to the guid. If it has no link, no guid, or the guid is not a permalink, then the headline is bare text, it's not an anchor element.
    If the item has no title and no description, it's not valid RSS -- skip it.
    #### Examples
    1. An item with a title, link and description.
    2. An item from a linkblog feed, has no title. The same item in my feed.
    3. How Chrome displays my linkblog feed. :-(
    4. A river that's made up of feeds with a mixture of titled and title-less items.
    #### RFC
    This is the method I've used in all my river software going back to 1999. They have all been able to handle title-less items. However, I wrote this howto from memory, not from code, so there might be omissions, mistakes or typos. Corrections are appreciated.
    Disclaimer: This isn't a standards body convening in the comments here. I just wrote a howto to help people out, not to begin a "process" or to debate. The Scripting News comment guidelines apply. Use your own space for essays, posts, opinions, screeds, memes, rants, etc that don't fit the guidelines. Thanks! :-)
  What if litmus tests become common?
    You're applying for a job.
    On the application they want to know your position on various human rights issues.
    You believe your values don't match the "correct" answers for this employer. Do you...
      Lie about your values.
      Answer truthfully, knowing you won't get the job.
      Refuse to answer.
      Walk out of the interview and call a lawyer.
  My Prop 8 blog post from 2008
    Yesterday I was going to write a post trying to explain what it was like for me when I first met a man who was married to another man, but I found that I didn't need to. I had written a post in 2008, just after Prop 8 passed, where I told the story. In 2008 I had the politically-correct opinion for today, but in a way I wish I hadn't. I resent anyone trying to force me to think one way or another. And retroactively!
    This is one of the reasons writing a blog is so important. I wanted to remember that moment, just after Prop 8 had passed, because I was sure change would happen, and things would flip around. Because I have the post, I have no doubt what I was thinking at the time.
    The obvious point -- eventually the shock will dissipate, and there will be a time when people don't understand why something like Prop 8 would pass. Transitions like this take time. There's no other way. But this change is coming, for sure.
    It shouldn't be so hard to remember what it was like before we changed. This is a skill we need to use and develop, if we want to avoid mistakes of the past and make progress on the vexing problems before us.
    When I was a kid, if you had asked me would the US ever again fight an optional war, I would have said no. Not after the misery of Vietnam. But not only did we do it, we did it while the generation that grew up with Vietnam was in power.
    Now that the Mozilla conflict has been resolved, perhaps now would be a good time to reflect not so much on what's right and wrong, because we all have different values about that, and they change, but on what outcome we want.
    Suppose in eight years we have in-your-face evidence that we've destroyed the climate. Millions of people displaced, homeless, everywhere, on every continent. What will we do? Find and punish the people who stood in the way of preventing this? Or will we get on with saving what we can of our lives? Obviously the second choice is the best answer.
    We're at a point where we can change re same-sex marriage and CEOs of corporations, and litmus tests, etc. Political diversity and freedom of expression are at stake, regardless of what the advocates tell you. If you haven't spoken up, now would be a good time to. Only people with extreme positions tend to speak on these matters. And that's why most of us get caught in the middle of their fighting, without really understanding what it's about. This is one of those times when it would be good to say what you stand for.
    BTW, remember the guidelines for comments. Add a fact or simple perspective, no speeches, or posts-in-comments. Use your own space to be passionate. Comments are just for simple, not personal, ideas.
  Politics necessarily creates divisions
    A few years ago a friend switched parties, went from being a Democrat to a Republican. Usually not a big deal, but in this case it was, because he was a political operative, a guy who works on campaigns. When you have a defection like that, the danger is that all the secrets of one party are transferred to the other. If it's high-level enough, and you change the labels to country names, this becomes a crime punishable by death. It's serious stuff.
    But where do you draw the line? How much politics does there have to be in what you do for it to be wrong to have positions that are unpopular to enough people to make your employment a problem. I suppose it depends on how involved your company is in politics, and how important you are to the company. If you're not very important then the inconvenience doesn't have to be very great.
    #### About Eich
    On to the resignation of Brendan Eich as CEO of Mozilla, announced earlier today.
    Had Mozilla been an executive recruiting firm, had Eich given to a political cause that advocated job discrimination against a class of people, it's hard to see how he could continue in that job and still have the trust of people in that class. But Mozilla isn't in that business, and the law that Eich supported was about marriage, not jobs.
    #### What about JavaScript?
    Eich is also the creator of JavaScript, a popular language that's the runtime environment of the web. Was his leadership in that role also questioned, and will he be able to continue to lead? If so, why the difference? Are we willing to throw out a standard when it turns out the guy who created it has incorrect political positions? Is there a litmus test for contributing to open source software? And if you wanted to fire him, how would you do it?
    #### Retribution?
    We haven't heard from people who still support the position of Prop 8, but they are out there, and some of them are politically active, and aren't ashamed to make their position known. Are you concerned that there might be retribution? (Update: They've noticed.)
    What about other highly moral political positions? What if you can't be pro-choice and be the CEO of a major corporation? There's a major political party that won't elect people who are pro-choice. There are many states where that party is the majority. They control a branch of Congress, and might win the other one in the election later this year. They have lots of money to fund campaigns and pay off politicians. If you supported the removal of Eich as CEO of Mozilla, how would you feel if the CEO of another company was removed because he or she contributed to a pro-choice cause?
    #### An approved dry cleaner
    Will you have to know the politics of every person you do business with in the future? What if your barber gave to a cause you don't support? Your doctor? How close a relationship does it have to be for their politics to be approved by whoever you look to approval for?
    On the other side, if you want to be a supplier or goods or services, will you have to be as neutral as a Supreme Court nominee, in order to have a job, make a contribution? I know that's extreme, but I want to know where the line is.
    #### This will become weary
    The Internet is very powerful, we're learning. I think we just crossed a line that we should have avoided. There was no need to force out Eich. Prop 8 was overturned, same-sex marriage is legal in a lot of states now, and is on its way to being legal everywhere. People may have forgotten how quickly this change happened. In 2008, when Eich made the contribution, the proposition passed in California. It wasn't a minority opinion. So if change happens again, and maybe it's not the kind of change you like, anyone who gave to any political cause is in danger.
    I think we'll be dealing with this for a long time to come. Right now victory must seem sweet to the people who wanted Eich out. But, I think before this is over, everyone, on all sides, will be weary of it.
    #### About comments
    This piece is not an invitation to re-litigate Eich's advocacy in the comments here.
    I haven't said anything about it, pro or con, so if you want talk about his ideas, do it on your blog, not mine.
    Update: After a while, all comments are from people who just paste in their standard talking points. So I just turned off comments. We've had ample opportunity to hear people's ideas on how a CEO should behave. That's not what this blog post is about.
May 2014
  Brent's story of UserLand
    Last night Brent Simmons posted his story of UserLand.
    It's interesting to hear the story from his point of view. There are lots of things I would add, or correct, but I don't have the time right now. Perhaps at some point we should do a podcast together to talk about this stuff. I think that would give you a better idea of what it was like there. It was the talking that mattered as much as the coding.
    I got a lot of my best ideas in rambling conversations with Brent that would go like this. "Here's how it's always been done, so let's do it that way." Or, "Here's how it's always been done and isn't that fucked up." Or, "Here's how it's always been done, and I just thought of a much better way to do it!" That's the best part of being on a team with really good people. They lead you all over the map, having other minds there makes mine work so much better. ;-)
    One of my favorite movies, Any Given Sunday, is all about that. It's not exactly a surprising story, so I'm going to take a chance at spoiling it. At the end, Al Pacino and Jamie Foxx have just won something. They're talking about the future, and Pacino, the coach, the older guy explains that the great thing about football isn't any of the things people think it is. It's the comradeship, the being part of a cause, working with other people you love, on things you believe in. It's about the people you work with more than anything. If you haven't seen the movie, and you work on a development team, I highly recommend it. It might give you a more full appreciation for the people you work with.
    One thing I want to add to Brent's story is why I wanted to work with him.
    I had learned in the past that you don't hire people based on their résumés. Instead, put out an invitation, and see who shows up. That's one reason open source projects are so useful. I think every serious programmer should be part of one, and every university should sponsor one. Because they attract a lot of people, and you get to try working with all of them. And if there's someone you work with very well, and no one really understands why this happens, then just work with them. Don't question the logic of it, go with the flow.
    That's why I, as Brent says, "gave him a chance." It wasn't really like that. I already knew we worked well together. So we just kept working together. For a bunch of years. I would always be happy to work with Brent on something, it really doesn't matter what. And I still start open source projects hoping to find more people like Brent I can work with. It's helpful if you already know computer science concepts, but we can work with any skill set, as long as you have intelligence, drive, a sense of humor, and a reasonable desire to be perfect (as in we make shitty software, and know this version has bugs but it's shipping).
    BTW, to put "Fargo" in perspective -- it's the continuation of all the web authoring and content management work we were doing at UserLand. Specifically, it's the realization of the idea of Clay Basket, one of the pieces Brent left out of his list, interestingly. Possibly because that's the project where I met Andre Radke, another one of the guys who joined our team. Clay Basket's idea was that you could use the same outline you use to write the documents and the code to organize the site. It was a good idea then, but now it really works. All these ideas take time. That's another big lesson. There's a continuous stream of trying ideas out, learning from the experience, and feeding that back into the next effort.
    Frontier, the software we were working on, still very much exists, and is very useful, it's just called the OPML Editor now. Same software, different configuration. I'm using Fargo to write this post, but when I go back to programming in a few minutes I'll be using Frontier. On a Mac. It may not use the most recent internal technology of the Mac OS, but I don't know or care. It works just as well on today's Macs as it did on the ones that we used when Brent moved on. It must feel like a memory to Brent, but it's still very much in the here-and-now for me.
    I'm using Frontier to write Node.js code. And "over there" on the Node machine, man do I miss the simple ability to watch the data of the app change in real time while the app is running. That's just one of the things that we achieved in our integration that will someday show up in "modern" development tools, if we stop ripping up the pavement every ten years and starting over. I love programming in JavaScript, but deep inside I don't trust it. In a few years there will be something "better" that isn't really better, and a new thing that does what JSON does because it will have gotten crowded with lots of packages with conflicts and too much to learn, as XML did. The ideas that we explored and developed in Frontier will be there for you all to use, when it's time. ;-)
    PS: Here's a picture of Brent and myself with James Tauber and Tim Bray in 2000, in New Orleans, I think.
  A new image service
    I want a simple web service that takes three basic parameters:
    1. An image.
    2. A piece of text.
    3. Options.
    And returns an image with the text drawn over the image, configured by the options.
    In the first version there can be very few options. Maybe none.
    The text is centered vertically and horizontally. There could be an option to left or right justify or center the text. Options for font, size, style, color, shadow.
    Default would be centered/centered. Arial (or other nice sans-serif font). White. A black drop-shadow.
    A good example of an app that does this, but not for the web, is Secret. Here's an example of a Secret card, with a bit of text super-imposed on an image.
  Podcast about front pages
    A 14-minute podcast about front pages, tweets, getting fired, rivers.
    The users drifted away from the NYT front page, yet the organization remains structured around it. In many ways it's the front page, and the sections, that define who they are. And then the front page was no longer wanted.
    News has always been a river. The front page model was necessary when the pulse to the news was daily. But behind that, the news has always been a flow. The reporters take the flow and turn it into a front page.
    To even observe that there has been a fundamental change is enough to get you in trouble, and most people don't want any more trouble than they have. This is esp true for employees. And most people at the Times probably like their jobs and want to keep them. That's why the fundamental change has to be realized outside their organization, made to seem friendly and then at some point can be adopted by them.
    Every org has to deal with that. For Twitter the whole place is structured around the 140-char limit. No one knows what lies on the other side, and who wants to even find out! Things are okay. And also, as with the Times, most people who work at Twitter want to keep their jobs.
    But -- and here's where things break -- with users, the front page and the 140-char limit are not sacred. They are comfortable. But no one will fire you for saying you think otherwise.
  Middle-of-the-night thoughts on news
    I read the NY Times all the time these days. It used to be just in the morning, or when I had some idle time during the day. I often would take the paper to breakfast or lunch. I don't do that so much these days.
    Because I'm always reading it, maybe that's why it's so disturbing to see all the chaos behind the curtain at the Times. It sounds like it's falling apart. That's not great. And then it occurs to me that the entire news industry has been heading to this cliff, almost as if they figure at the end they'll get a reprieve. Perhaps government funding, or an idea will come from nowhere and magically save the day. That's not a good plan. I've seen people try that, and it generally doesn't work, in real life.
    I wonder why they don't move more in the direction everything is going? As soon as Twitter proved they had a good mechanism for news delivery, which was an idea that was available to everyone, every news organization should have started their own experiment (because Twitter always has been just an experiment, maybe the news people don't see that). It's still not too late, and there's nothing to lose. Let's remake the NYT home page as a river. It will work a lot better than the current home page, and it will also attract interest from the world. And it can be iterated in so many ways. Not just technically but with content. Rivers should be seen as editorial products. A news organization should create a river just like they create an editorial workflow. It's the equivalent of that, but on the visible side of the curtain.
    BTW, most of what I read from the Times comes from the River which my software generates for me. This really should be a page on the NYT website, probably the home page. It's the Twitter view of the NYT (without Twitter).
    Also, start some noteblogs. Develop stories in-place as events take place. Make it so a reader can come in for a snapshot at any time and get caught up. There's lots of experimentation going on in this area. We should all be playing around with ideas.
    Structures of news. Think of it that way. We've invented some new ones -- blogs, rivers, Twitter, Facebook, podcasts, chat, eBay, AirBNB, WikiPedia. The list goes on. There are still more to invent. It's all worth doing.
    But most important, the reporters should show us how they work -- teach us how to do what they do. I know this may seem counter-intuitive, but it's on the path to the future. We'll teach you what we know too. We need a lot more of everything, because there's so much more happening. No one knows where this leads, that's why it's so much fun! :-)
  I did the feed switchover for scripting.com RSS
    Read the post here.
    If there are any problems, or you have questions about how it works, you can post a comment here.
    Still diggin!
    "curly"
  "He'll probably miss"
    Last night's basketball was amazing. It was also terrible, because I was pulling for the Rockets, I love that team. It looked like they had won yesterday's game. But the Blazers got the ball with .9 seconds left, just enough time to catch the ball and shoot.
    The ball came in. As it was being passed the announcer said "A three wins the game" -- I hadn't had time to realize that, and as he was saying it, Damian Lillard, the hot Portland point guard, aims, shoots and the ball, it arcs, floats, the place goes silent, and swooooosh it goes right in the bucket. But there was enough time between the shot and the basket to think "He'll probably miss," only to realize less than a second later that it was all over. The Rockets go home and Portland moves on. Oh how I wished it had gone the other way! :-(
    It was an amazing moment for the sheer drama, and personality of it. The Blazers have great fans, and young Lillard is a real character and basketball star. But a Houston win would have made it amazing for another reason. It would have meant on Sunday there would be three game 7's, as there are three game 7's today. Each game 7 has a winner and a loser, like every game, but with the difference that there is no tomorrow for the team that loses. It's all or nothing, win or go home.
    No matter what, it's been the most incredible postseason. Sometimes end of season games are boring, but not this year. There haven't been any big upsets yet. Dallas, Memphis, Atlanta -- these teams, if they win, will knock out one of the leading contenders for this year's title -- San Antonio, Oklahoma City and Indiana. The other two games are closer matches: the Clippers vs the Warriors and the Raptors vs the Nets. It will be stunning if one of the losers is one of the league leaders. Something we'll enjoy seeing, for sure -- with the hope that maybe one of the remaining teams will go on to beat the favorite to win the title, Miami.
    As I wrote yesterday, it's a total burnout, in some sense I can't wait till it's over, because the pressure is so great. But it's the reason this is sport is imho the best one out there. It all comes down to the clutch, do you have it or do you choke. The teams that are left at this point have a lot of, as Walt Frazier would say, tenacity. We'll be talking about these games for years to come. And the games tonight and tomorrow are where it all comes to a head.
  Raised by refugees
    My parents and grandparents were all refugees. When I think about their stories, and then hear my ideas are not important because of who I am, I am reminded that I've been hearing this pretty much my whole life. I haven't complained about it, and I'm not complaining now. Just know that no one has it easy. There are reasons to hate everyone. And if you want to do something with your life, you have to overcome those people and their "reasons."
    I am a programmer. I think I'm one of the best out there, and I don't qualify that by saying "of my generation." It's true I didn't start until I was 18, and some of the younger folk started when they were very small. But there are advantages to my perspective. I understand, in a personal way, how much of what we use today came to be. And I know that some ideas we've left behind still have value. And of course I have all the experience, which the young people discount, of course, because they don't have it. ;-)
    I was very lucky to be born in the United States. That I will cop to. I was lucky that my parents and grandparents fought to give me and my brother a better life than they had. But after that, everything I've accomplished was because I fought hard against people who wanted to keep that success from me.
    I read this story by a young Princeton undergrad. I can tell we don't share a lot of the same politics, but I am in total agreement with what he wrote, and appalled that there are teachers at Princeton that use the unfair "check your privilege" idea in argument with people whose minds and confidence aren't yet fully developed. I'm delighted to see that this young dude isn't having any of it, and has chosen to write publicly about it, and in doing so has set a great example.
    We'll get so much further with love and acceptance than we will by trying to invalidate ideas because you don't like where they came from. I'll work with anyone, no matter what their gender or background, if they think well, and work hard. If you can get behind that idea, there's nothing we can't do.
June 2014
  Extrapolating
    I was once at a workshop at a California hippie community.
    About 20 people seated in a circle. I had just done some "sharing" when a younger guy, across the room, said to me that he respected wisdom, not age. He said that wisdom can happen at any age. I wasn't sure what this meant, exactly, so I probed.
    Does that mean you think you understand everything that I do? I was about twice his age, at the time. He said yes, absolutely. I asked if he had learned anything since he was 14. He said of course. I didn't know anything then. I asked why do you think learning stops at your age?
    He was about 20, I was about 40. I had been through my 20s and 30s, two decades where huge change happens to almost everyone. You'd have to be a hermit, never have been in a relationship, had a job, had a family member get sick or die, or any of the myriad events that stretch our humanity and make us deeper more significant people. Maybe someone in prison, or someone who was doing heroin every day, maybe they might make it through these years without learning.
    Update: I forgot, I started and sold a company in my 20s and 30s. ;-)
    Now that I'm getting close to 60, with another 20 years under my belt, I have to say the process most definitely continues. I actually have fewer struggles today than I did 20 years ago, even though looking at my circumstances you might think the opposite is true.
    I know who I am at this age. Every day I wake up doing something I want to do, not worrying so much about the things I might be missing, or what other people think of me. I've had to help a parent die, came very close to dying myself. I've moved four times since I was 40. I thought I might be settling then, but life isn't like that.
    People who are twenty are blessed with strength, stamina, health, booming sexuality. At the same workshop one young man complained that he got erections at awkward times. If only I had such problems! I said to him. Someday you'll think it's funny, you could see he got it, and was actually kind of proud of his prowess (of course, we all are).
    I think the moral of the story is there are blessings and challenges at all ages, but there are differences. As we get older, we may think we remember what it was like to be younger, but I think we idealize it more than we realize, and overlook the doubts that you have when you're younger, the confusion. And when we're young, I think we're scared of aging, so we tend to push it away as much as possible, hoping it won't afflict us. I think we'd all do better if we just accept each other as we are, as individuals, and let each of us make the contributions we want to make, without so much fuss.
  HTML canvas with drawImage
    I'm pulling what little is left of my hair out over this one.
    Here's an example page.
    Here's the source of the page in a gist.
    The question, why doesn't the image scale to exactly fill the canvas?
    Any help would be much appreciated. ;-)
    #### Don Park got the answer
    RT @davewiner it's because canvas element's dimensions are unspecified. add width="800" height="500" to the 'canvas' tag in HTML
    He's right, here's the corrected version of the page.
  Fred Wilson's tweetstorm about tweetstorms
    1/ The thing that's interesting about #tweetstorms is that they turn Twitter into a blogging platform with several unique characteristics
    2/ Instead of prose the posts are bursts of unique thoughts in sequence
    3/ And each thought has its own comment thread
    4/ Like @tumblr but few other traditional blogging platforms, Twitter comes w/ a built in follow model which insures your posts will be read
    5/ But possibly the most interesting & unique aspect of #Tweetstorms is you are posting in real time and the reader experience is real time
    6/ Which creates this anticipatory reading experience that is unlike anything I've experienced in online publishing
    7/ Like @replies and #hashtahgs, #tweetstorms are emergent behavior created by users (hattip to @pmarca )
    9/ If #teeetstorms were more discoverable, consumable & permanent, @twitter would have an entirely new product and mkt oppty that is native
    10/ EOTS (end of #tweetstorm)
    #### I would be remiss...
    If I didn't mention "Little Pork Chop", the easiest and most powerful way to tweetstorm!
    It's fun too. :kiss:
  Wordnik API from JavaScript made easy
    I wrote a post on June 22 asking about a thesaurus web service, and quickly heard back about the Wordnik API.
    Yesterday I got a chance to try it out, but their sample code for JavaScript was hard to wade through. It was easier to start from scratch and use jQuery to call their service, which luckily has CORS set up so it can be called directly from code running in the browser. No need for an intermediate proxy server. This is the modern way to do APIs.
    Here's the demo app I put together to show you how it works. And the JavaScript source code in a gist. I'm using the api key they use in their demos. Of course if you're going to deploy something using this API you should get your own key.
    I'll have a nice app that uses Wordnik on Monday, the one I described in the June 22 blog post. It's every bit as much fun as I imagined it would be. :-)
    Thanks to the Wordnik people for putting this out there. I love playing with words, and they've provided a very rich environment for doing that.
  The pressure on blogging
    It's amazing, given all the ways blogs have been sliced up in the last decade, that the word still means anything and there's anyone doing it. Think about it.
    1. Twitter said a blog post was 140 characters and had no title.
    2. Google Reader said a blog post has a title, and contains full text, unlimited in length.
    3. The NY Times (and other journalists) say reporters are bloggers.
    Between these three very powerful authorities, each pushing blogging in a different direction without regard to the others, and without regard to the people who do it, there was almost nothing left for blogging to be.
    You can see that in the evolution of my blog, "Scripting News". Before Google Reader and Twitter it was a mix of short title-less items, and longer essays, some with comments others without.
    Look at the archive page for March 2001 for an idea. (I picked that month at random.)
    With the demise of Google Reader, I finally decided I'd had enough of being pushed around, and went back to the mixed format, which caused some trouble with the successors to Google Reader, but I decided not to care.
    Now with the NYT dropping the pretense they are blogging, we've gotten rid of another slice. And Twitter, could help us out by dropping the 140-char limit and go ahead and let readers have the full text of blog posts in-line, without leaving Twitter. I really don't see any harm in it, and I wonder why it's taking so long to take this fairly obvious step.
    Blogging started as a very irreverent thing. If it's going to be anything as we go forward, we have to stop caring what other entities think we are and focus on what we think we are.
    PS: This post is a followup to the earlier I know what a blog is.
  I know what a blog is
    A blog is the unedited voice of a person.
    The lack of editing is central, because it's one person who's responsible for every word. When you click the Publish button you should feel butterflies, at least sometimes, because there's no one to pass the buck to. If someone else wrote the headline, or did a copy edit, or even reviewed what you wrote and critiqued it before it went out, it's still writing, but it is not a blog.
    I wrote that in 2003. Later, when reporters started erroneously claiming to be blogging, I tried to explain that bloggers are their sources, going directly to the readers. Blogging doesn't eliminate what reporters do, but it changes it. Now, instead of making five phone calls to find out what experts think, you can do a search, read a bunch of posts, and then write. It makes it possible for a reporter to do more thorough research, more quickly. Any source that didn't put their ideas on a blog would become more or less inaccessible to reporters.
    But reporters continued to, erroneously, claim they were blogging.
    Now the NY Times is shutting down half of the sites they call blogs, and this is causing some unnecessary confusion and consternation.
    The Times never had blogs. It would have been wonderful if they had, but they merely used blogging software in their editorial process. Perhaps their blogs were only lightly edited by others, but they were edited. When they were writing about their expertise, and they weren't also professional reporters, there might have been a little blogging going on. But mainly they were doing what writers at the NY Times do -- reporting.
    It's an important distinction because we need a word for what we do. The word we used was usurped by people who clearly felt threatened by blogging. I'm glad the Times is dropping the pretense that they were blogging. Hopefully they can exit with as little fanfare as possible, and let us continue to try to develop this art, without their interference.
    One more note, blogging is under pressure for a variety of other reasons. A lot of people started doing it thinking it would make them money. Those people have exited. Facebook is giving bloggers a tough choice. You get more engagement on Facebook. But you own your words on your blog, and you create a record. I hope that at some point we can work something out with Facebook to have the best of both worlds at all times. So blogging can prosper and people can have all the engagement that Facebook can provide. A real win-win is possible here. I'm hopeful. ;-)
    #### Updates
    Update #1: The pressure on blogging.
    Update #2: Farhad Manjoo who is a columnist at the Times says he mostly agrees, but that Krugman is a blogger, and I agree. He is. I don't doubt for a second that his words go straight from his keyboard to the site, and he has great expertise that is not as a reporter (he's a Nobel laureate economist). So the rule is not without exception.
    Mostly agree with @davewiner: "The Times never had blogs." http://t.co/Y9yHtULN1o (some exceptions, Krugman most prominently)
  Note to press people re Happy Friends
    An update on a new product I shipped on Tuesday night called "Happy Friends".
    1. It's a mailbox-style reader for Twitter.
    2. It's also an outliner, so you can organize the tweets you read into any kind of list you like, including structure (lists within lists).
    3. It's a JavaScript app that runs in the browser, coupled with a server app written in node.js. So it's all JavaScript from top to bottom. The server component runs on Heroku.
    3. It's going to hook into "Fargo", which is a powerful web CMS, among other things. This means it will be possible to publish tweets on web pages with flexibility never-before attainable. And we'll do this being faithful to Twitter's guidelines for publishing tweets. You'll probably want to use this tool in your work.
    8. Here's a screen shot of Happy Friends in action.
    5. Here's a narrative of how the product came to be.
    6. Here's a getting started doc.
    7. Here's a video that shows how it works.
    7. If you have questions, my email address is dave@smallpicture.com.
    I hope you like "Happy Friends"! :kiss:
    Dave Winer
  Slingshot, apparency and early adopter platforms
    What I like about Slingshot is that it gives me little slices of people's lives, like Twitter did in the early days, and now no longer can because we all follow too many people.
    If you want to understand products like this, you have to go through the steps. It's not apparent at first how it will evolve. The lack of apparency is what makes it evolve in interesting ways. At first, the people have no idea what to do with it, but you have to post something or you can't participate. So, at first, people just take pictures of the nearest thing at hand. A coffee cup. A kid. Lots of dogs!
    But then you're out and about and you see something outside your usual environment. It becomes one of your Slingshot tokens. I do it, and I can see other people doing it too.
    It's good for early-adopter types. People who dismissed it are missing something. Just like Secret, btw, which ebbs and flows. Sometimes it stagnates, or gets caught in a certain way. Then boom, another door opens, and we're trying out new ideas.
    I love platforms that attract early adopter types. That's why it took me so long to glom on to Facebook, because it was already established before I got a chance to play. Which is kind of ironic, because I was on the Harvard campus, with a valid identity, to be one of the first people that used Facebook when it started up. But I was miles away, figuratively, booting up my own network of bloggers and podcasters.
    PS: I'm always a contributor on early systems. I like that I get to hear from people I love who usually stay silent on these systems. Makes me feel like I'm getting more for my effort.
  A thesaurus web service?
    A long time ago I was working on an outliner, and happened to come across the source text for a thesaurus and made a wonderful combination of the two, useful when trying to name products, for example. Or just when you want to play around with words. :bulb:
    #### How it works
    Type a word into a headline. Say for example "friend." Double-click on the headline to expand it. The software would automatically fill in the synonyms for the word. Double-click on any of these words to get its synonyms. Pretty simple, and very useful.
    #### Proposed API
    I call your web service with one parameter, a word.
    You return a list of synonyms.
  If you say racist things..
    It's Sunday morning, slept in -- as I was making breakfast, I had WNYC on the radio, the show -- On The Media. They were talking about an upcoming Supreme Court case on violent threats vs free speech on the Internet, when host Brooke Gladstone says: "A bunch of principally old white male justices are going to be adjudicating an issue in which there are both gender and racial stakes."
    I had to listen again to be sure I heard it correctly.
    It used to be, in my own lifetime and experience, you could say things like that about blacks or Jews and get knowing nods. In all cases, no matter what the excuse, racism is racism and sexism is sexism. It really doesn't matter that the race is white and the gender is male or the people are "old."
    Racism and sexism always come with excuses. However, if you say racist things, you're a racist.
    It's time to call people on this, for both pragmatic and moral reasons.
    Pragmatically, you can't win a political and social battle if you alienate huge groups of people based solely on their age, gender and race. And morally, you have no ground to stand on if you oppose racism and sexism for certain groups but actively promote it against others. You aren't actually against racism and sexism. You, like the people you say you oppose, use racism and sexism to achieve your purposes. Which is, at least partially, to perpetuate racism and sexism.
    When I read that women deserve respect, I agree. I also agree with a broader statement -- people deserve respect. That includes children and seniors. Women and men. Blacks, Hispanics, Asians, and yes, old white men on the Supreme Court.
    People love racism and sexism so much they're willing to contort themselves to excuse it. Why not give it up, accept people as individuals.
    PS: Five of the justices are white men. Four are not. Whether they are old is a matter of opinion.
  Fixing comments? That's not the problem
    Today the NYT, Washington Post and Mozilla announced that they're working on a platform for comments. Here's what I think about that.
    1. It's hard to imagine it would be better than Disqus or Stack Exchange. Why not go to a commercial vendor with experience to solve this problem? What expertise or developed software does Mozilla have? Are they very good at managing this kind of development? At least the companies in this market are ongoing enterprises that have shaken out the bugs in their process. Mozilla, as we've seen recently, is a mess.
    2. I don't think this is the problem to solve. What both news organizations need to do, have needed to do since the web took off 20 years ago, is find a way to get the expertise of their sources to flow directly through their publications. In the mid-late 90s this could have quickly and easily been accomplished by hosting a reliable blogging platform. Then, as your reporters do their jobs, they would have a much bigger array of expertise to tap, better organized, and the volume and quality of their work would go up. But that opportunity was missed, as Blogger and then WordPress and Tumblr grew to fill the need.
    3. No matter! The opportunity is still there. Facebook and Twitter haven't managed to capture the flow of expertise yet. The Times & Post would be very lucky if they turn out to have two years to spend on research with Mozilla. Maybe they will be that lucky, they have been so far. But I don't like the bet if I'm Bezos or Sulzberger.
    4. I recommend: Get a list of the sites the editorial people at the Times and the Post read. I'd try to automate the process so the list is huge and inclusive. Aggregate them into a river. There's your community of bloggers. Publish the river on your home page. Read what they write, and share it with your readers. This will immediately have huge influence on the both the blogosphere that you include and the ones you don't. Include your competitors. (This is the same philosophy that Yahoo used to grow their news presence in the early days of "RSS", people would happily go to Yahoo to find out what's new on CNN or MSNBC. Basic web principle, people return to places that send them away.)
    5. Constantly recalc the list of feeds that make up your rivers, and segment them over time into business sports, international, theater, food, politics, tech, the usual categories.
    6. You need to grow. We need you to grow. Time is really of the essence. The method most people use to get news is broken (if it's important it will find me). What finds us via Twitter is mostly crap. We need to get good at find lots of great relevant writing by experts. That's what we're not doing. Building a better commenting system, which is doubtful, really doesn't help us very much, esp since it probably won't be better than the commercial systems that are available today.
  Thinking out loud about Frontier
    Brent Simmons, my former programming partner at UserLand, has been thinking out loud about rebooting Frontier. I've read his comments, let them sink in, and just emailed him a response. It makes sense to keep it all public, so here's a lightly-edited version of the email.
    1. I get that you want it running on the Mac. I like the Mac, but I don't want to bet exclusively on it. I like JavaScript as a platform for that reason. (And of course JS code can run beautifully on the Mac, I think.)
    2. I think the db-level code in Frontier is worth re-using. I didn't invent the allocation algorithm, it was in Knuth's book on algorithms. It's really stood up well over time. All it really needs imho is to be ported to JavaScript, and have the address size increased from 16 bits to 64 or even 128. That wouldn't add a lot of overhead, and it would leave the 2GB limit in the dust.
    3. From there, I'd suggest factoring the outliner from Frontier, and polishing it up, really make it shine as a cross-platform thing.
    That's where I started with Frontier in 1988. First the database, then the outliner and then I mixed and remixed. Those are the two core components.
  My take on Slingshot
    Yesterday Facebook announced and released Slingshot, a mobile app for iOS and Android, which is presented as their answer to Snapchat, plus more.
    It's an instance of what I was talking about in the Wired interview. "There are a lot more possibilities with media now than there have been for the past few decades, and so the question is: what combinations of media actually work, and which don’t? It’s a process involving experimentation, learning, feedback, verification. Sometimes you try an idea out and it doesn’t work, and a few years later it does, because the environment is different."
    Slingshot is a combination of media that as far as I know hasn't been tried before.
    Key: In order to view a friend's picture or movie, you have to post one of your own. You respond without knowing what you're responding to. This network has a different kind of symmetry, and I'm not sure I understand the theory of it, why it's supposed to work, but it flies in the face of something I learned in the early years of blogging. There's a reason only a small percentage of people blog. It's because most people aren't bloggers. I know that sounds circuitous, but it's so pervasive and inexorable that I came to think that there must be a gene for blogging.
    Most of my friends are literate and intelligent people and all of them have something to say. I thought the reason they didn't blog was it was too hard. So I hacked at the complexity until it was easy. Blogging got as simple as it could be. Yet most of them would post an item or two, just to show they cared I guess, and then the blog would lay dormant.
    A very small number would keep at it. People like Doc Searls, Dan Gillmor, Scoble, my uncle, eventually my mother. Me. ;-)
    Julia Child, media star of the 1960s who felt everyone could learn to cook well, was a blogger before there was blogging. "Americans should understand French cooking, says Julia. It's hard, she says, but you can do it. So, did she just wring her hands and wish for it? No, she took matters into her own hands and made it happen. That's the spirit we love!"
    I came up with a term for this phenomenon: NBB or Natural Born Blogger.
    These people were blogging before there were blogs. Highly motivated for some reason to speak publicly about what they see. "Everyone must know this," they say to themselves. And they shout whatever it is loudly, repeatedly, from every corner and window. They bore you, annoy you. They care what you think, up to a point. They want you to see something the way they see it.
    I learned that I have to make tools for these people, and devise easy ways for the rest, the watchers and kibitzers, to participate. That's probably why Twitter has so many participants, relative to blogging. It became trivially simple to grunt or snort approval or disapproval. Twitter is the ultimate "Let's Go Mets" medium (or Knicks, Heat, Spurs, Snowden, feminism, etc).
    What's missing now is a good connection between Twitter/Facebook and blogging, so the NBBs can entertain the rest effectively. We're doing it with both hands tied behind our back. The first network to really make this work will clean up, imho.
    Now back to Slingshot. It seems to be saying that symmetry can work. That I will be sufficiently motivated to see a picture of what Scoble is eating, or what James is watching, or where Ann is flying, to show each of them What I'm Doing. I'm really skeptical about this and believe that if they want this to work they'll have to relax the rule. But let's see how it goes.
    The good news: they're doing some first class media hacking at Facebook. At least we'll all learn if in 2014 there are enough blogger types to fill a network like this. And if they've put the hurdle low enough that fans, the grunters and snorters will be able to get over the bar.
  Translation of Wired/Italy interview
    A very nice interview with Wired reporter Fabio Chiusi at the State of the Net conference in Trieste on Saturday, translated from Italian to English.
    Dave Winer: We can’t live in a world that doesn’t have Facebook
    One of the most influential web personalities talks about the web, social networks and the NSA scandal
    Trieste – Dave Winer has been defined in many ways: “The father of blogging and of feed readers”, “One of the most important people for the evolution of online media”, one of the 25 most influential people on the web, according to Fortune. Still, as I meet him at State of the Net in Trieste for a chat about the influence of new technologies on journalism and democracy, you get the feeling that you’re not really dealing with a “guru”, but rather with a person who likes to think out loud, provoke and mix considerations that are the result of years of experience and sudden intuitions.
    Winer, in short, is the incarnation of his idea of information as a stream that is constant and bare, without filters or mediation. As Jeff Jarvis wrote back in 2006 describing his project – which is still up-to-date, as we’ll see – related to “rivers of news”. “Just news, sir, and let it flow”. Honesty allows Winer to go beyond being politically correct, something that ruins many interviews; soft tones, thinking that even if you don’t necessarily agree on a conclusion, preconditions ought to be taken into consideration.
    At State of the Net you defined yourself as a software developer: “Every morning, when I wake up, I write code”. But the code you’ve written, and are currently writing, has also changed the way we understand the ecosystem of information and of online conversations.
    “I make tools. But I’m not only a programmer: the best term for what I do I believe is ‘media hacker’. There are a lot more possibilities with media now than there have been for the past few decades, and so the question is: what combinations of media actually work, and which don’t? It’s a process involving experimentation, learning, feedback, verification. Sometimes you try an idea out and it doesn’t work, and a few years later it does, because the environment is different.”
    Can you give us an example?
    “Podcasting. We experimented with this for the first time at the beginning of 2001 and nothing particular happened. Maybe someone read about it, but it wasn’t understood. We continued for a few years to try approaching the tool in new ways, until in 2004 it began to work. Before that moment it wouldn’t have happened, in part because we made it look like it was hard to do and should have made it look easy. Also, in 2004 there was iPod, while there wasn’t in 2001. And so we started working with Chris Liebing [Lydon] at NPR: he was great, we did a whole series together. They became very popular. Then I did one myself, and suddenly everyone started to copy me. Which was fine, because getting everybody to do it was what I was trying to achieve.”
    Today, what would you try to “get everybody to do” in journalism?
    “A lot of things. One that I have persistently tried to get people do is to operate ‘rivers’. A ‘river’ collects all of a reader’s blogs and information sources and aggregates them into a news flow. I believe that many newspapers are not systematic in the way they consume news. And for many readers if a story isn’t on Twitter it doesn’t exist. But it isn’t true. There are a lot of things out there that we don’t read about and from which we would benefit. This is part one. Part two is that newspapers themselves could share their ‘rivers’ with readers. For you Wired people, for example, they would include the blogs that are Wired-like, what your reporters are reading, what influences them. It would have an impact on readers and on the editorial line. Over time, the flow would build up, and it would maybe end up being the biggest single change that any single newspaper can do. Many, however, do not want to use it because it would end up competing with the writers. ‘It would cut our own throat’, they say. But in the long term their throats will be cut anyway so you might as well capture the change and do it in a creative way. And think about where all this could lead because it’s only a first step and we don’t know which others might follow.”
    Can you give us an example of an editorial project that you think is innovative?
    “Quartz, which has implemented my outliner, Fargo. It’s a very innovative organization, managed by brilliant people. But ‘innovation’ and ‘news’ are two words that I don’t usually put together. What’s certainly true is that a lot of editorial projects like to define themselves as innovative: Vox, for example.”
    Nate Silver’s FiveThirtyEight?
    “Ah, he’s great. Since he left The New York Times I haven’t been following him closely, though. But he’ll be back in the limelight for midterm elections in the United States, later this year. What he says about experts is terribly true: they’re only filling space, they have no insight. They’re talking about their own opinions, not about what the public thinks, which has a no value whatsoever. I just stopped paying attention to that kind of journalism.”
    And how is technological journalism doing?
    “I think it’s very mediocre. More than anything else, it’s about money: it matters more than technology. And this is definitely hurting technology. The problem is that we don’t have a way to spread information about things that are really new: I do them all the time, and don’t get any coverage. When I launched Little Porkchop - a program that allows you to translate posts exceeding 140 characters in planned series of tweets, which are numbered and sent automatically at a rate of one per second - a few weeks ago, I got a lot of coverage, but because it’s about Twitter and because it’s controversial. I didn’t know, when I wrote it, that it wasn’t going to be considered an improvement in the use of Twitter. But I don’t care.”
    Still here in Trieste you said that blogging platforms ought to be updated. How?
    “Fargo is my most concise statement of how blogging ought to be updated. At the beginning the basic idea was to make it easier to edit a page: making your changes, hitting a button, submitting them. It wasn’t obvious at all, we had to work to get there. But there is much more to blogs and to websites then just a page. On WordPress to get from one post to another you have to exit the post, move to the next, choose to edit it... and in the meantime, you’ve completely lost the possibility to edit the previous one.”
    And instead?
    “You can build a website editor such as Fargo that will enable you to change every piece of text without having to switch contexts, without having to navigate anywhere: just put the cursor over the text, click, expand it, make your changes, then close it up. That is where we’re going to go. If there’s any health at all to the technology industry, there will be a complete rewrite of how blogging software works, and that will be the basic idea: to view a whole website in a single document. But the leading blogging platforms aren’t paying any attention whatsoever, same for the press. Quartz is using it, but you can see it. Instead, the result ought to be invisible, a natural reading experience, seamless.”
    Another thing from your speech at State of the Net, on Facebook: “We can’t do anything about it, it’s like time”. In accordance with the same logic we might say: “We can’t do anything against digital mass surveillance, it’s like time.” [Note: I think I said it's like weather, not time.]
    “We can’t live in a world without Facebook. And we can’t live in a world without mass surveillance: I don’t think there is a way out. If I stood up and said, ‘Hey, NSA, stop spying on us!’, what effect would that have? None. Sure, it’s terrible that our government can’t control itself, but they were caught with their hands in our affairs and they’re not doing anything about it. And I don’t know what it takes. Snowden might have thought, and the rest of us might have thought, that once exposed there would be mass outrage. But there wasn’t, and I don’t think there will be.
    Snowden says that the solution is technological: encryption.
    “I don’t think so. If there were a technological solution, they would outlaw it. I believe that as of now we are living on the brink of fascism, on a worldwide basis. And the illusion that we had in the early days of the Web, that we’d broken free, was just that, an illusion. Governments were happy to let us believe that: why interfere with the illusion of freedom? And if we ever tried to do anything to get out of the prison they’ve put us in, then they’ll clamp down, and then we’ll really feel the weight of the fascism. The thing is that I don’t think there is a memory anymore of how bad that can be. Of course, I’m sure they remember in East Germany. But the United States had flirted with fascism in the McCarthy era, without ever really going beyond that. My grandfather had warned me about this, he explained to me exactly what fascism was. He told me that it nearly destroyed his life: during the war he had to escape from Eastern Europe to save his life. I realized back then how awful it is to live in a repressive society, and I think that if you think that the penalty for crossing a government is that kind of repression, then you already live in it: it’s already dominating you. And I believe that we’ve already there. Here in the U.S. we thought we were solving the problem by electing Obama. Nothing could be further from the truth: Obama is just a tool of whatever is really running our lives. We have to do our best with what we have, and I think none of us has enough power to stop all this.”
    It’s hard to still believe in an open and free internet, with these premises.
    “It is. I’ll keep acting as if it were: I don’t think I have all that much to lose.”
  LPC v0.49 gets total tweet count
    After seeing Steven Sinofsky's tweetstorm from earlier today, I was motivated to add support to "Little Pork Chop" for a much-requested feature that I had trouble wrapping my brain around.
    The feature: Include the total count of tweets in each tweet.
    The reason I had trouble figuring it out: you seem to need the number before you have it. But somehow, automatically, it seems to figure it out. First you see the incorrect sequence, with missing total counts, then it adjusts itself, adds the counts, and seems to rewrap everything so it just works.
    It even works when you get to 10. I assume it will also work when you get to 100, though I haven't tried it.
    #### How to recalc
    If you think the counts are wrong, enter a space, anywhere, pause, then delete it. This will cause everything to recalc. After the recalc the numbers should adjust.
    #### Demo
    Here's a demo of a tweetstorm produced with the new version.
    #### How to turn it off
    There's a pref that lets you turn the feature off. It's in the Prefix panel. Just clear the checkbox and click OK and the total counts will not be generated, the software will work as in previous versions.
  Life without a smartphone
    I never did get a net connection for my T-Mobile iPhone in Italy.
    I learned how dependent I had become on maps, email and texting while getting around.
    For example, I went on a walk to find the synagogue in Trieste. I must have come close to it, but I didn't find it. The streets in the city aren't well marked with signs, and without a net connection my phone maps were of no use. I couldn't text to get help locating it. I had to turn around and go back. Luckily that meant going downhill, finding my hotel was quite easy. (Just walk downhill.)
    In the old days before iPhones I would have had a paper map with me. That was how I explored Florence and Rome years ago. But these days I don't even think of it till it's too late.
    I also had Cyclemeter with me, it tracked my walk. But while the GPS was working, apparently, somewhat -- it couldn't show me where I went. I wanted to see how close I came, after the fact. It was able to tell me how long I was out, what the temperature was (it was hot, I knew that) and how many miles I walked. (Update: The website doesn't have the time or miles, but the phone did
    A cautionary tale? Not really. But still interesting to see how progress sometimes leaves us worse off than we were before.
    Update: All of a sudden Cyclemeter is showing the route! Whoa. Maybe someone kicked the computer up there in the cloud! (Just kidding, I know it doesn't work that way.) So you can see that I didn't come anywhere close to the synagogue. I took a seriously wrong turn. Oh well, it was an interesting walk anyway. ;-)
    Update: An annoying "feature" of iPhone map apps. When you open the app, either Google or Apple, it refreshes the display. If there's no net connection, you get a blank screen, losing whatever map you had. So if you set things up beforehand with a map of where you're going, thinking it might be useful even if you don't have a connection, you lose it just as you need it most. Really awful design. Why throw away information if you don't have anything to replace it with?
  Little Pork Chop 0.48
    Why shouldn't Little Pork Chop make it easy to put a #hashtag at the end of every tweet? Or asked another way, suppose you wanted to put a tag on every tweet. Without it being handled by the software, I don't think there's a non-tedious way to do it.
    So now there's new Tag settings panel, where you can enter a tag that appears at the end of every tweet. You can leave off the # if you like, we'll add it for you. If you don't want a tag, leave it empty (the default value).
    When it spreads the tweets, it allocates space for the tag. You'll see it in the preview. And the tags will be present when you post the tweets. Demo.
    Not much more to say. A pretty simple feature! :-)
  Little Pork Chop 0.45
    1. Important if you post to a private Twitter feed via "Little Pork Chop". There's a new feed of all items posted to Twitter, available as a public JSON file. If you don't want your tweets included in the feed, click on the gear in the panel to the left of edit box, click on the Feed panel, uncheck the box, and click OK. Screen shot.
    2. There's a new pref that lets you change the string that appears after the number before each tweet. Previously this was hard-coded as a colon. Now it's something you can change, and it defaults to "/" which is the character most people are using. To do so, click on the gear in the panel to the left of the text editing box, and click on Prefix. Set the text as you want it, then click OK. Screen shot.
    3. The JSON feed is available for developers to build on. Let me know if you come up with an interesting way to browse it, or hook it up to another network, or whatever. :-)
    4. You can enter HTML markup in your tweets. In previous versions the markup would go straight into the tweet array, which would make them invisible. Obviously not good. Now we neuter the HTML and everything can be seen.
    5. As before the version number appears in the upper right corner of the screen, but now if there are release notes that go with that version, they are linked to from the version number.
    6. It now handles words that are longer than 140 characters.
    7. There's a link to the initial product announcement in the product control box under the product slogan "The easiest way to tweet a storm!"
  Little Pork Chop 0.42
    Good morning!
    I announced a new product, Little Pork Chop, late last night.
    I had it done, wasn't sure who to leak it to, so I just pulled the trigger and let everyone in. The result has been great! Lots of enthusiasm, only a little nay-saying, lots of people giving it a try.
    Also a few feature requests and bug reports, which I've tried to address in 0.42 which is now out.
    1. You can see the version number in the upper right corner of the screen, if you're in doubt about which version you're running. Click Reload to get the latest.
    2. There's a new Prefs dialog. You can access it through the gear icon in the product control box. Right now there's just one pref, but that's the hardest one to do. Adding new prefs will be easy in coming releases.
    3. Threading. We now make the second tweet a reply to the first, and so on down the stream. That way if you view the first tweet, you'll see a nice little essay. This isn't something I thought of doing, the credit for that goes to Eric Florenzano. It was a really great idea. Example.
    4. A pref to send the tweets in reverse order. This means they will show up in the tweet stream, visually, in the order you wrote them. It's easier to read that way. However, a caveat -- that will make the threading, mentioned in the previous section, go in reverse order too. So it's your choice. One of the two ways of reading will be in reverse order and the other one will be in easier to read order. I've set the pref so that threading is correct, which is imho more in the natural flow of things.
    5. I dropped the # from the beginning of each tweet. Not only does it get us back a character, but it avoids confusion with #hashtags, which came first. I wasn't thinking when I wrote this, I was just putting numbers in front of text. Thanks to Rasmus Vuori for pointing this out.
    6. I did a little fussing trying to make it work on an smartphone-size screen. Didn't get there. It'll work, eventually. ;-)
  The easiest way to tweet a storm!
    I've been playing around with browser-based Twitter writing tools for a while, and finally have something to show for it. A cool little app called Little Pork Chop.
    http://little.porkchop.io/
    Say you have a complicated idea to express, too much to fit in a 140-character tweet. Go to Little Pork Chop, and type it in. Edit it, tweak it up. As you're typing you'll see a preview of how it's going to break up your text into 140-character tweets. You can add a "hard" return anywhere to cause it to start a new one.
    Do a little editing. Think about it a bit. Are you ready?
    If so, hit the blue button and Little Pork Chop sends your tweets out to the world, one per second. No delays.
    As I developed it, I sent lots of tweets to my test account. And early this afternoon, it was ready for me to trust it with my main Twitter account. I put out two mini-storms, nothing like a @pmarca burst, and everyone seemed to be happy. No clue, apparently that I was using anything special to do it.
    #### Important
    We don't retain any information about you, nor do we retain any ability to post to Twitter, or read anything from your Twitter account. That information is stored locally only on your own computer. You can erase it simply by signing off.
    If you use Little Pork Chop to post to a private Twitter feed, read this important note.
    #### Why Little Pork Chop?
    1. There's a bigger pork chop lurking in the shadows. ;-)
    2. I like the name.
    3. It has the word "chop" in it, which is what it does -- chops your tweets into delicious 140-character morsels.
    #### Version 0.42
    A new version is out with lots of fixes and features.
    #### Version 0.48
    New version supports hashtags.
    #### Questions?
    If you have any questions or comments, post them below.
    Please read the comment guidelines to be sure you're not spamming us. Thanks! :-)
  What is a River of News aggregator?
    River of News is a kind of RSS aggregator.
    Items are presented in reverse-chronologic order.
    Each item has a headline, short description, a link to the story, links to the website and feed it came from, a link to its enclosure if it has one, when it was published, when it appeared in the river.
    #### It does not have full text of articles
    It does not have the full text of the article. Text is truncated to less than 500 characters. Markup is removed from the description text.
    #### Items are grouped by feed
    If more than one item from a feed is gathered in a single read of the feed, they are grouped together, so that the feed information is not repeated for each item.
    #### Browsing via the vertical scrollbar
    It's designed so it can be browsed by dragging the thumb of the scrollbar up and down. The eye is very good at scanning this way. That's why each item is roughly the same size as all the others: to facilitate scanning.
    If it requires more interaction than simply scrolling, it is not a River of News. A perfectly fine feed reader can be built that works in other ways, but if it does not have this feature, it is not a River of News.
    #### Examples
    Here's a screen shot of an item from a River of News aggregator.
    Here's an example of a collection of rivers, one in each tab.
    #### A new product!
    River4, a river of news aggregator, was first released on June 4, 2014.
July 2014
  People need an online "nest" they own
    I just got back from a weeklong break from development. It's good for me to do this, it's also good for my development work. Because try as I may, I don't stop thinking about new projects or how to evolve existing ones.
    One thing I kept coming back to is there is a missing piece in the online mix. And if it existed, and I'm not saying it will, or it can, lots of interesting new software would be possible.
    I know people are always tempted to say that these things exist, but the ones that come close are all missing a vital piece or two, or more.
    #### Think of it as a personal nest in the cloud
    1. It behaves like a disk attached to a desktop computer, but it is virtual, it lives in the cloud.
    2. It's private, except for a section clearly labeled as public. Much like the Dropbox public folder.
    3. The public space has a name, one for each user. You can use the name assigned to you by the service, something like dave.theservice.com, or you can map a custom domain or sub-domain to it that you purchase or rent.
    4. It's yours. You pay for it. It's a service provided to you by a business. The user agreement is approved by the Consumer Union and the ACLU. No research on you. No gathering of information about you. It's simple storage. That's why you have to pay for it. I don't think it would cost very much, however. Probably less than most people spend on coffee, for example.
    5. The service is fungible. Every provider offers exactly the same basic service as the others. The differences are in performance, price, and ancillary features. (This ensures you can easily switch vendors if you don't like the service you're getting from one.)
    6. There's an API, and an identity system. You can give permission to an app to access a piece of your storage. You can give as many apps access to pieces as you like, so there can be shared space between apps. So you might have a graphics app that can deposit pictures in a sub-structure that is also managed by a CMS.
    7. Needless to say it's high availability, scales flawlessly, and performs fantastically. No slowdowns, bottlenecks. No special deals betw infrastructure providers.
    #### If it existed
    There would be great apps we could create today. Because it doesn't, these great apps are harder, and all have potential fatal flaws.
    #### Example app
    See this post on the Scripting News home page for an idea for how this technology would be applied.
  Scott Adams is right
    I want to heartily endorse this Scott Adams piece, especially the part about politics:
    When it comes to politics, humans are joiners, not thinkers. reason a computer can't have a political conversation is because politics is not a subset of intelligence. It is dogma, bias, inertia, fear, and a whole lot of misunderstanding. If you wanted to program a computer to duplicate human intelligence in politics you would have to make the computer an idiot that agreed with whatever group it belonged regardless of the facts or logic of the situation.
    If you insisted on making your computer rational, all it would ever say is stuff such as "I don't have enough information to make a decision. Let's legalize weed in Colorado and see what happens. If it works there, I favor legalizing it everywhere." In other words, you can program a computer to recommend gathering relevant information before making political decisions, which is totally reasonable and intelligent, but 99% of humans would vehemently disagree with that approach. Intelligent opinions from machines would fail the Turing test because irrational humans wouldn't recognize it as intelligent.
    I like to say I am a Party of One. I think for myself, and make my mind up. This seems to confuse people. But I'm confused why anyone with a mind would delegate their thinking to anyone else.
  How many Facebook users know what RSS is?
    The tech industry has a set of questions that are really talking points that "prove" that there's no reason to support RSS in publishing products. I've heard it ever since RSS started taking off about 15 years ago, so my answers are well-rehearsed.
    Amazingly the essence of the questions are captured in a 140-character tweet from Internet entrepreneur Jonathan Abrams. He says: "Over 1 billion people on the Internet read news. What percentage of those people use RSS? What percentage know what it is?"
    I don't like Twitter debates, they never accomplish anything. I prefer to spread out in a blog post and bloviate at length. I invite Mr Abrams to do the same. ;-)
    First, I don't have percentages on any of these things, I doubt if Mr Abrams does either. But they're not really questions are they? I guess he's really saying that 1 billion people get their news from Facebook. So why bother with anything else?
    #### But how does the news get to Facebook?
    Most people on the Internet don't use JSON and have never heard of it. So by Abrams' calculation it doesn't matter either. But it does very much matter! The last few steps in the process of getting news from reporters to readers involves publishing it as either JSON or HTML. It's pretty much got to be one or the other. How many of those people even know what JSON or HTML are? Probably very few. No one is losing any sleep over this. Or sponsoring public service campaigns to educate people on the importance of JSON. It's not a huge problem.
    See, the point isn't how many people know about RSS. If I lift the hood on a car I see a bunch of boxes and tubes and stuff and I have no idea what any of them do. But I know how to put the key in the ignition, put my foot on the brake and start the car. I can do all kinds of great stuff with a car without understanding its equivalent of JSON.
    #### Cars and gasoline
    Once, a long time ago, I was cleaning a bunch of parts of a VW bus I was putting together at my uncle's farm in Florida. I was using gasoline to do the cleanup (it's a great solvent). At the end I was left with a bit of dirty gasoline and had no idea what to do with it. So I decided to see what would happen if I lit it on fire. Bad idea. The tiny little coffee can with a tiny little bit of gasoline in it exploded! Made a huge sound and I felt it all over my body. I still remember it. I had been putting this stuff in my car for years without any clue as to how powerful it was. If I had thought about it a bit, I might have figured it out, but I had no need to.
    Same thing with RSS. The power of RSS is that everyone uses it to move news around. Abrams' startup Nuzzel wouldn't work without RSS, any more than my car will work without gasoline. He should be singing its praises and helping it work better, not picking fights.
    #### If RSS had an ego (it doesn't)
    And by the way I don't own RSS, so you're not hurting my feelings if you dis it. But you do make me think less of you. And if you're in tech and your business depends on RSS, I question your ability as an entrepreneur.
    One more thing, on RSS's behalf, as if it had an ego, which it doesn't. Facebook might have a billion users, but I'd be willing to bet that RSS has a lot more users than Nuzzle. So even in terms that matter in the warped culture of Silicon Valley, Abrams should have a little more respect for it. ;-)
  Where's Circa's RSS feed?
    I was reading an interesting story on Circa earlier today and thought that I should try adding their news to my river. Unfortunately they don't appear to have feeds. They have a myriad of other ways to follow them, but RSS is not one of them. I looked in the HTML source, in case the option was there, just not offered through the UI. It wasn't.
    #### Why I want it
    To me, subscribing to a feed is a commitment, but a small one. If the feed provides too much uninteresting stuff, it's easy for me to unsub. So when I see an interesting source, I usually will add it to my input flow and see what I get. I did that the other day with the New Yorker, when they dropped their firewall. I often do it for blogs I find an interesting post on.
    #### Why it's good for them
    I often point to stories I find interesting in my Twitter stream, and in my linkblog feed. I don't have a huge number of followers, compared to some, but a good story could get a few hundred reads from people who follow me.
    However if I never see the story the chances of me pushing a link to it are close to zero. The only way I saw the link to today's story was by chance in the flood of stuff that comes at me via Twitter.
    I wanted to up the level of commitment to Circa from near-zero to something not insignificant. Their answer was sorry, we can't let you do that. (I infer this because there's no way a tech-informed pub like Circa never considered having RSS feeds, they must have decided for whatever reason not to have them.)
    I think they're overlooking something that's almost no cost to them and has a significant upside.
    #### Response from Matt Galligan
    Matt Galligan is CEO of Circa. He wrote a post, on Medium, that explains why they don't have feeds, at this time.
    #### My comments
    I think he's over-thinking it. An item in an RSS feed is an ad that says come here and read more if you're interested. Earlier today I never would have known they had an article about a blogger being jailed in China for "rumor mongering" if I hadn't seen it linked to on Twitter, by Circa. Once I knew the article was there, I clicked and read it. If they have added stuff to it since I would have no way of knowing because Twitter, where I read the link, doesn't have that ability. Which is exactly how RSS works.
    If they're ready to share links via Twitter, then imho they're ready to share them via RSS. We've been doing this so long, I don't believe that some magic answer is going to jump out that's going to make all the things Matt wants to do with RSS obvious how to do. It's basically Twitter, without the big company in the middle. Keep it simple.
    Also, please get a blog, and use it. Why are you driving traffic to Evan Williams' site?
  How to mirror my iPad on a TV?
    I have an iPad and have movies I can play in the Video app.
    I want to project the movies on a TV set.
    I have the following hardware:
    1. Apple TV, but I can't find the remote, and without that you can't set up the Remote app, which would be my first choice. I want to see if I can avoid a trip to the Apple Store and the $20 expense of buying another remote.
    2. Chromecast. I also have a variety of Android devices I can play video from in case they you can use a Chromecast to mirror an Android screen and not an iOS screen.
    3. Amazon Fire. See the comment for Chromecast.
    I'm sure most people will tell me to go get the Apple TV remote, but first I really want to explore the Android approach. I can't believe Google or Amazon missed this.
    Ideas??
    #### It works!
    1. Predictably no one wanted to talk about Chromecast or Amazon Fire.
    2. I went to the Apple Store on 5th Ave and got a new remote for Apple TV.
    3. Got everything all set up, or so I thought, but still no AirPlay icon on either of my iOS devices. Checked everything N times.
    4. Then realroz suggested perhaps not everything is fully updated. The iPhone and iPad were, but not the Apple TV. I hadn't been using it. That was the problem. Once it was updated the AirPlay icon showed up on both iOS devices, and I was able to play stuff in the Video app. Bingo. The perfect travel companion. ;-)
    #### Comment
    On the ride back from the Apple Store on a CitiBike, I thought, this should be a lot easier. I have the most popular phone in the world. The device is made by the company that makes that phone. I should be able to pair the two devices the way you do with Bluetooth and it should "just work." All this michegas is ridiculous.
    And what was Google thinking? Here was their huge opportunity to get into the iPhone installed base of users. Make it that easy to connect the devices and boom, you're in. Not that they won't be in eventually anyway (imho). I'm still holding my Apple shares however, so don't tell me I hate Apple. ;-)
  I have more feeds than I can manage
    #### Here's a list of the flows I have now.
    1. The stories I write on Scripting News.
    2. My linkblog. (I bet a lot of people don't know about that one.)
    3. Tweets.
    4. Facebook posts.
    5. Little Cards. (I don't have a feed for these yet.)
    And no doubt more to come.
    #### I want to get a handle on it
    I've always accepted the chaos, but now I want to try to get it under control.
    Let's see what happens.
    #### As if to prove my point
    Saturday evening: I just had a burst of creativity on Facebook.
    I wrote four posts that belong on Facebook because they are about Facebook. But I must have them as part of my stream so everyone can see them, people who read my blog, people who follow me on Twitter, and people who read my feed in a feed reader.
    Here are links to the four posts (that don't have titles, because believe it or not Facebook posts, which very much could use titles, don't have them).
    1. Rex should read this post Mike wrote about cycling in Kansas.
    2. Scoble is missing his calling.
    3. The Facebook editor is dangerous to ideas!
    4.A reprise on this post, in the context of Facebook. (A sort of meta post.)
    "cheesecake"
  I like to RT
    #### Documenting a practice
    I like to RT. And because of that, after I write a piece, especially a long complicated one, I watch to see what soundbites people quote. If you pick something I thought was interesting, it's a pretty immediate RT.
    I see this as a win-win. I can reward people who read and appreciate my writing. And I get to find out what parts people through were worth remembering.
    Because of the way Twitter works, it's good to beat the drum a few times for every story. And this way it involves more people, which is one of the cool things about social media.
  Gobal JavaScript for loop index
    I just learned that this:
    for (i = 0; i < subs.length; i++)
    Is very different from:
    for (var i = 0; i < subs.length; i++)
    Especially if it's in a recursive routine.
    In the first case, i is a global. In the second it's local.
    You might argue that the first case is useless and the language should only allow locals in that spot.
    But this is JavaScript.
    There should be a special smiley that you put after that last sentence. ;-)
  How good is my mind?
    In a discussion on Twitter a couple of nights ago, Farhad Manjoo asked if my ability to adapt to new things has diminished as I've grown older. As you can see in the thread, I did not like the question. I still don't, because teaching your mind to accept new things is something you get better at, if it's core to what you do, as it is for me.
    And so many of the ideas I've had, and implemented, have been lying on the shelf because the opposite is true, the world doesn't adapt to new things very quickly. It's easy to get ahead of where the world is. And that's not a good thing if you want people to work with you. Usually what I say makes no sense to most people, but ten or fifteen years later they're all doing it.
    It's also frustrating because it's Farhad's job, as a columnist at the NYT, to accelerate the understanding of new technology. He's still new there, so we don't know what he's going to do with that power. But in his previous work at other publications he's been very good at that, so he's worth arguing with. :-)
    My challenge has never been to get my mind to adapt to new things, rather to package the things it notices in such a way that others will see them and understand. (That's why my focus these days is on software snacks -- little chotchkas that enter the mind easily and lead you to ideas you might not have thought of before.)
    The story of blogging and podcasting and RSS is like that. As is outlining, idea processing, organizing what you know in malleable structures on a computer. That's something most people haven't a glimmer that they can do it on a computer. But it's really good at it. I've had commercial quality software that does this since 1984. If there's one thing I want to accomplish is helping people use computers to add to their intellect. The rest of it is all peripheral to that.
    Basic answer: Yes, I'm very good at adapting to new things. If I've lost any capacity there, I'm still far ahead of most other people in this area. It's not something I worry about, even a bit, because I work on it all the time. I'm constantly checking myself, playing Monday Morning Quarterback on my mistakes, and learning how to keep my mind more open so I don't miss things as often.
    #### Adventures with JavaScript
    All this occurred to me as I'm writing a new river displayer that hooks into the Twitter API and a Node.js server (that I wrote), that's doing all this shit asynchronously, and before I ran any code I realized that the call to the API would fail because the object it's supposed to operate on doesn't exist yet. "I'll have to use a queue," I said to myself.
    Why is this interesting? Well I've learned something new in the last couple of years -- how to think like the JavaScript runtime. And ask anyone who knows, nothing in 40 years of programming in Algol-like languages could possibly prepare me for this twisted way of thinking! I remember my surprise, awe, and abject horror and even rage when I first learned that the system couldn't manage to wait for a call to return before returning to me. That I would have to manage this myself. But over time, I've come to love it, in a masochistic sort of way, the way someone loves to be tortured in just the right place with just the right touch. ;-)
    #### Humor in programming
    There is humor in programming culture, because that's all we have sometimes. Early in my career I had a programming job working on the 39th floor of the Empire State Building in Manhattan, a few blocks from where I live now. It was late at night and I had no idea where the problem was in the system I was working on. We had a timesharing facility in New Jersey. The problem could be there. It could be in the communication link between us (this was 1977, that was an function that programmers had to worry about). Or it could be somewhere in the office on the 39th floor. I eventually figured it out, but while I was fretting about it, I was thinking they shouldn't let programmers work in tall buildings with windows that open.
    Programming humor is fatalistic. It's like Jewish humor, dark, pessimistic, but that's what makes it so funny. You know, "it's even worse than it appears."
    So when Farhad asked the question I got frustrated. How do I even begin to answer this question when he has no idea what it's like to do what I do. Maybe the thing I have to do is to explain how I do what I do. That's going to take some time. And the trick is going to be getting anyone to read it. :heart_eyes_cat:
    #### It's not a nice question
    One final thought to Farhad. Would you ask a person in your own profession if they had a lesser ability to adapt to new things? Do you ask that of Walt Mossberg, for example? Seems central to what he does, no? How about Dan Rather, who is in his 80s. I don't think you would ask him that, and if you did, it probably wouldn't be in public. It's a pretty embarrassing question.
  Why "coding" is the wrong word
    To say a developer is a coder would be like saying a composer is a note-writer.
    Or a violinist is a string-plucker.
    A surgeon is a person who cuts you open.
    An architect is a person who draws stuff on paper.
    All of these describe a trivial manifestation of what's actually going on, creativity.
  My latest software snacks
    5. "Radio3" -- Linkblogging to RSS, Facebook and Twitter.
    1. "Little Pork Chop" -- The easiest way to tweet a storm.
    2. "Happy Friends" -- A mailbox-style reader for Twitter.
    3. "Little Card Editor" -- Tabloid-style text and pics, for Facebook and Twitter.
    4. "Thesaurus Land" -- a simple online thesaurus in an outline.
    5. "Little Facebook Editor" -- write and revise blog posts on Facebook, and WordPress.
  Movies for me at 20
    I have a friend who's 20, a guy, like me. I know him through is father, since he was a little boy, and we've always gotten along grandly. He was a really funny kid, but now he's an earnest 20-year-old. But still at his core a really good friend.
    Anyway, we've been to two Mets games in the last couple of weeks, happy to report that as a result now the Mets are winning. They seem to be energized by our presence. Love that. But I would still enjoy it if they sucked. That's part of what make the Mets philosophy so robust, rugged and enduring.
    The conversation got around to movies, and it turns out this young guy hasn't seen a lot of the movies that at least I think were very basic to forming the culture we now live in, the one he's growing up into. So I started making a list. As it turns out the best way to explain it is these are the movies I would recommend to myself, if I were 20 today. I keep adding items to the list, so there's no way I would claim it's complete.
    #### Here's the list
      2001
      Amadeus
      Annie Hall
      Any Given Sunday
      Apocalypse Now
      As Good as it Gets
      Big Lebowski
      Blade Runner
      Chinatown
      Contact
      Dr Strangelove
      Fantastic Mr Fox
      Fargo
      Fight Club
      Forrest Gump
      Ghostbusters
      Godfather I and II
      Goodfellas
      Good Will Hunting
      Groundhog Day
      Hannah and Her Sisters
      Heat
      Jackie Brown
      Jaws
      Kill Bill
      Lawrence of Arabia
      Manhattan
      Moonstruck
      No Country for Old Men
      One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest
      Peggy Sue Got Married
      Platoon
      Prizzi's Honor
      Pulp Fiction
      Reservoir Dogs
      Rushmore
      Scarface
      Silence of the Lambs
      Sixth Sense
      Stand By Me
      The Excorcist
      The Departed
      The Matrix
      The Royal Tenenbaums
      The Shining
      There Will Be Blood
      Traffic
      Waynes World
      When Harry Met Sally
      Who Framed Roger Rabbit?
  Why age in software is bullshit
    It goes like this.
    1. Dave sure is shipping a lot of stuff.
    2. And that's amazing considering how old he is.
    Okay that's bullshit. I'll tell you why.
    It's because of my age that I can ship so much stuff.
    I have a huge toolkit of solved problems, both on my computer and in my mind.
    I've done all this stuff, 18 times before. I still do new things, but there are lots of struggles behind me. I know how to write a language interpreter, database, scheduler, a program editor, a presentation program, outliner, operating system, text editor, browser, aggregator, content management system, blogging tools, draw program. All kinds of servers. And even more important, I know how things fit together, big things. I've created a few standards. Not everything you could do in a career, but pretty close to it.
    So you all need to get over this. People who love to create software will be doing it a lot longer than you think. And if you think this is something that only young people can do, you are wrong.
    #### Updates
    2. My latest software snacks.
    1. Why "coding" is the wrong word.
  How blogs create competition for pros
    A short piece, with an important distinction.
    Reading this NY Times piece about Brooklyn blogs, I was struck by two things.
    1. When blogs merge, they immediately stop being blogs. It's not an individual effort anymore, and that's the crucial part of being a blog, it has to be the voice of a person, not an organization. Yes, you can have blogs inside news organizations, Krugman is a great example of that. But the NY Times, where his blog posts appear, is not a blog because of that.
    2. The Times is, in my experience, unable to write about blogs with respect. They've been diminutive, dismissive, condescending. I'm sure there are exceptions, I haven't read every story at the NYT about blogs. But I've never read a piece about blogs and came away from it thinking, hey that was insightful, I really learned something there. Mostly what I learn is that the Times, collectively, is scared of blogs. It really shows.
    Is this like two basketball players being dismissive of each other, something you almost never hear? Usually it's the opposite, they pump up the competition. Why? Well it's good sportmanship, for one thing. It also shows you're not scared of them, because respect indicates the opposite of fear. It also sets expectations. If they are great, then you really accomplished something. A classic example of win-win.
    Blogs are the sources of journalists, going directly to the readers. And that's how blogging creates competition, by unbundling what journalists do, making it possible for information-seekers to go straight to the sources, without an intermediary. And when the intermediary adds so much noise to the story, why not go around them?
    So blogs are close to being competition for pros. So it would be smart to stop the snark, and try to understand why blogs are useful to you, and the readers, and show appropriate respect. Reporters make a mistake in thinking blogs are somehow lesser than they are. We are a part of what they do, when things are working smoothly. And we provide an alternative to what they do, when they are not.
  Why Little Card Editor is so much fun!
    I said in a tweet the other day that I made "Little Pork Chop" for @pmarca, and I made "Happy Friends" for people who like mailbox-style readers, and "Thesaurus Land" for people who love words, but I made "Little Card Editor" for me! :-)
    It's true. I have so much fun with it. And I can tell you why..
    1. I get to be a headline writer like the people at the NY Daily News or NY Post. The big tabloid headlines, with a huge picture behind them.
    2. It's the sweet part of the web. Most people don't want to read your article. But they love big pictures with a few big, snarky words. Here the 140-character limit works because it's really 1140 characters, because as we know a picture is worth 1000 words. ;-)
    3. I've always loved adding pictures to my blog posts. I have a way of shopping for pictures on Google image search, but Little Card Editor lets me use that skill in a whole new way. I try to get pictures with proper licenses, they have the ability to do that, and Wikipedia is a great source for those kinds of pictures.
    Anyway most of you haven't read even this far, so that's it! :-)
  JavaScript memory management question
    First, up front -- I am an experienced language developer and a programmer. So I know about memory management and garbage collection. I've seen lots of different kinds of heaps. And I implemented the garbage collector in Frontier, a runtime environment that has been in use constantly since 1992.
    So I don't need an explanation of dynamic languages and memory management.
    But I have a question about JavaScript garbage collection. ;-)
    Here's the scenario
      The content management system in "Fargo" has a stack that manages the attributes of pages as they are rendered, resulting in something called the pagetable. There's scoping in this attribute system.
      1. At the base of the stack are the values that are global to all Fargo users.
      2. Next level up are values that are global to this Fargo user.
      3. Then the values at the top level of the outline containing the document being rendered.
      4. Then each of the levels leading to the document. So you can have values that are local to a given year, month or day, or to a specific post. (These are less common, but you do end up using these too.)
      A value at a higher level in the stack overrides a value with same name at a lower level. So I may have set the default background color for all my blogs as whitesmoke, but want it to be yellow for one document.
      Because you might render more than one page in a given build, I keep these structs in a global cache, while the rendering is happening, and release them when the rendering is done.
      If you're experienced with JavaScript you probably know that it's the last statement that I have questions about. Take as a given that these structures must be global (or attached to the window structure in the browser, same thing).
      How can I be confident that I've released them when the build is done?
    Specifics
      var cmsNodeStackCache = new Array ();
      Is the global. It's an array of objects, some quite large.
      How can I force all of its storage to be reclaimed?
      I don't care if it's reclaimed now or at some time in the future, what I care about is that it is logically empty. When I go look for something in that array, after emptying it, I can be guaranteed that I won't find it.
      I have seen behavior that more or less proves that my current method of emptying it is not in fact emptying it. This is what I do:
      while (cmsNodeStackCache.length > 0) {cmsNodeStackCache.pop ();}
      To Fargo users: This is why values seem to mysteriously "leak" from one website to another.
    Idea
      I've been reading whatever I can find on the subject and the answer I see most is basically "Dear programmer you have nothing to worry about, just forget about reclaiming your structure, as soon as there are no pointers to it, the JS runtime will do it for you."
      That has led me to believe that perhaps the way to do the reclaiming is simply:
      cmsNodeStackCache = null;
      That way anything in the array will no longer have anything pointing to it, and we can trust the runtime to do the reclaiming? Does this make sense?
    Update
      I asked Brendan Eich what he thought: "Setting the global to null should work but it is too easy via closure over-capture to leak. Search for JS leak detector devtools."
  What's coming in WordPress 4.0?
    I see that a new version of WordPress is in beta.
    I found this list of new features, but am surprised that a full-point release would be so limited.
    I imagine that quite a few of this blog's readers are also WordPress users, so I thought it made sense to ask here, if anyone had a sense of what's coming in the new release beyond those features?
    Here's a Google News search.
    Otherwise, where is the motion in blogging software? Tumblr? Ghost?
  Did Amazon leverage their APIs in Zocalo?
    Today Amazon announced a file storage service meant to compete with Dropbox, Box et al.
    I read the announcement looking for a clue as to whether Zocalo built on their strength in APIs, specifically the deeply entrenched Amazon S3 service. What if you can program your organization's file storage system using APIs that you already know? Few APIs are more familiar to more programmers than S3.
    I sent an email to Amazon asking about this, haven't heard back. Curious if anyone knows.
  What's the point?
    Occasionally, especially lately, people say something like this: "It's great that you do all this cool stuff, but I don't see the point."
    The point is really simple. I'm a software developer. I decided that's what I wanted to do when I was in my late teens, early 20s. I never ask myself why I do it. When it clicked for me at that young age, it was like it probably is for a person who plays tennis professionally, or who plays in a band. We don't question the point of them doing what they do, so why do people question what I do?
    I probably know the answer. They see software development as a job. If you don't have to work at it, why do you?
    I never felt that software was a job. For me, strange as it may seem, it was a calling. I had great stuff to do. And I'm not finished. So that's the point.
    I've been doing it all along. Only now people can see it. Because the platform I'm working on is one that almost everyone uses. It took a lot of effort to get here, I had to give up a lot of good work to do it. But it was worth it.
    To me, it's gratifying to have people use my software and for me to hear what they want, the walls they hit, so I can see how to evolve it. That's data, and it informs my work. These are puzzles that I love. To me software is a performing art. I do it even if I'm the only one using the software. But it's much much better if there are others. The more, the better.
    That's why it is frustrating to develop something to the point where it's going to take off, and then have people try to take it away from me. Sometimes it's people who work for me who have done it. Other times it's venture capitalists, who fund other people to continue my work (usually with pretty disastrous results). And other times it's big companies who take it over, and as we've seen there, usually with bad results too.
    I'd like once to be able to finish a thought. To see it through to the end. To the point where there are no more features to add, no more bugs to fix. Sort of the way Jackson Pollack felt when he looked at one of his paintings. Or when LeBron James wins an NBA title. To reach closure. To win.
    I think in a few decades it'll be seen as normal as any other human art form. But change comes slowly. I get that.
    Update: More thoughts, the following day.
  Why the Facebook API works better for me
    Yesterday I wrote a piece that compared the APIs of Twitter and Facebook. I said it took 3 months to do with Twitter what took 4 days with Facebook, but I didn't say why it was so much easier with Facebook. Mea culpa!
    1. First, it's important to know that I'm developing in JavaScript in the browser.
    2. If I don't have to write server software then it goes much more quickly.
    3. With Twitter, I can't call directly to their API from the browser. I have to write an intermediate server app that calls on my behalf, and call that.
    4. So I create a server app, and a simple interface for my JavaScript code running in the browser. That's what took the 3 months. I had to work in another environment, Node.js. I was still coding in JavaScript, and I already had a couple of projects under my belt in Node, so while some of the 3 months was spent learning Node, I already knew how to build Node-based server apps when I started.
    5. Why it was faster: No need to write that server app for Facebook. They did all the work. This is called factoring, and it works much like factoring in algebra. By the time I saw their API it had a simple in-browser JavaScript interface, that works more or less like the one I built for Twitter, for myself. That's why I zoooooomed through the Facebook project. :heart_eyes_cat:
    6. Another advantage of the Facebook approach (which is also used by Dropbox, and recently by Amazon web services) is that because I don't have to run a server, I don't have to buy more server resources if my app becomes popular. They take care of the scaling for me. Which seems fair, they're already going to have to scale their server to accommodate my users. Why do both of us have to do it? Answer: it's duplicate effort. No need.
    I've written about this before. I believe in static JavaScript apps. It's the way to go. Services like Twitter, WordPress and Evernote would do well to make it easy for browser-based apps to call directly to their servers. Imho, of course. ;-)
  Comparing APIs
    A brief post that I feel uniquely qualified to write, because I just spend 3 months wrangling with the current Twitter API, and got more or less the same functionality from Facebook in four days.
    When Twitter was starting up, the API was a thing of simplistic beauty. You could get from start to Hello World in minutes. The years went by and Twitter changed a lot of things, and now the API is a minefield of difficulties. However, as a sufficiently motivated developer, I went through them. And got to where I needed to get.
    A few days ago, I looked at my list of things to do that might involve a little investment, having dealt with most of the necessary fixes for the four products I'm maintaining (Fargo, Little Pork Chop, Happy Friends and Little Card Editor). It was a holiday weekend, a time that's good for digging in to complex problems. I decided I should at least look at the Facebook API to scope out how much work it would be.
    To my surprise, and pleasure -- the scouting mission turned quickly into a production mission. I was able, in a few minutes to get a JavaScript app to connect to Facebook, and post a simple Hello World message. So I decided to go further, and see what it would take to post a picture to Facebook. There, the docs were a bit more scarce, and the posts on Stack Exchange more confusing. But eventually I found a good example, and after a few hours of fiddling around with it, I got it to post a picture to Facebook. (The big problem it turns out was base64 decoding, the internal JavaScript decoder wasn't doing the right thing, but it all worked when I included a bit of developer-written code.)
    Then came the gnarly problem of figuring out how to arrange the user interface of "Little Card Editor" so instead of just logging into one web service, you could use two. I needed to do this without confusing users to the point of despair. Whether I accomplished that or not will be determined by the users, who now have their hands on the product, Little Card Editor 0.54.
    I'm really good at letting big companies know when they screw up (see the previous post) so it's only fair to be equally vocal when they do an outstanding job. Someone at Facebook wants developers to be successful with their platform. I thoroughly enjoyed this work. To be fair I also enjoyed working with Twitter's API (I'm a glutton for tough technical problems). But there's nothing like breaking through on a super valuable connection in almost no time.
    So thanks Facebook, really good work! :-)
    Update: Why the Facebook API works better for me.
  About Facebook users and Facebook
    Briefly, why the recent Facebook eruption is unlike all previous ones.
    0. We need a name for this event.
    1. Conducting tests on humans without their consent is unethical for doctors and academics. Nothing vague about this. And there are good reasons for it. Testing can do harm.
    2. You say that A-B testing is done all the time on websites. Well, perhaps people should have to consent to that too. But this was different. They were testing the Facebook newsfeed. That's not like Amazon testing a product page to find out which one gets more business. People know they're being sold products there. They willfully chose to go to Amazon to be sold. Choice is very clear.
    3. The newsfeed is in dangerous territory. People *thought* they had an idea what it was. But this news raises questions, things people clearly don't want to have to think about.
    4. Am I reading ads? Yes, I know that. That's clear.
    5. Am I reading ideas and news from friends? Yes, I can see that too.
    6. Am I being tested like a lab rat in a science experiment? Well, that's not obvious at all, until now. And I don't like the idea. I feel important. I am the center of my own universe. I think somehow Facebook doesn't understand that I am a person, just like they are. In fact, now I'm *sure* of it.
    7. That last one is probably the biggest issue for Facebook. If they want their service to work, long-term, they have to have suspension of disbelief, like a good book or movie. You're inducing a trance. We're being captured by the story. If the real story is scientists in lab coats, with notebooks, measuring us like lab rats, well that might be good for a while, a social network for lab rats, but I'm going to probably not spend ALL my time there, and probably only if I'm sort of kinky and into S&M a little.
    8. Ideally, you want the user not to think about Facebook at all. To get lost in the story of their own timeline. To feel as if this was something created just for him or her, with knowledge of what makes them special, and with care and love. It's impossible (I think) for an algorithm to love you, but it should feel that way.
    9. So that's the problem. Facebook just broke the fourth wall. Of a sudden we see the man behind the curtain. And it's ugly and arrogant and condescending and all around not a nice feeling.
    10. To make matters worse the COO says they didn't want to upset us. Implying that the mistake was that we found out they're doing it. Well, at least we know she's not being coached by PR people.
    11. I'm not a PR consultant myself, and I don't really like PR. What I'd like instead is for Facebook to sober up a bit and come to grips with what it has accomplished and the responsibility that comes with it. More than anything FB has a bad case of hubris. Sure, you're talented, and special in many ways. But no human being can be so deep and smart and strong as to understand a social network with this many people using it. It was a huge accomplishment to create it, and huge every day it keeps running, but beyond that, the network is being created by the users. And when you get involved with the network in such a plainly disrespectful way, you break the implicit contract with the users, that you will just facilitate, and let them create their own experience here.
    12. Facebook needs something like the code of ethics that news organizations have, if you want to keep the trust of users. That's the main conclusion. And clean house, people who don't understand the role of facilitator, and feel like gods, should go. That's the downfall of all tech companies, its seems. This feeling that you're a new kind of human. You are not. Every generation thinks it is, only to find out it's not true.
    PS: This was originally posted on Facebook.
  Today's phototweets
    I'm playing around with a new kind of tweet. 140 chars super-imposed on a photo. Very simple. And designed to fit right into what's got impact today on Twitter. I'll be talking about this kind of communication a lot.
    You know what I'm going to say. http://t.co/fDF4CAg79R
    Ballmer says wait till next year! ;-) http://t.co/NohMcn5MjD
    There are all kinds of people in the world. Some run for President. http://t.co/JxiKpfsdde
    Knicks fans know the feeling. http://t.co/8cELLet42p
    This is a Scoble. http://t.co/iNGbzQfRpD
    Lebron is sad. http://t.co/ihZmUSuXoT
    Istanbul. http://t.co/ALeY1u66kN
    This is called Scoble. http://t.co/53dhxZAb8Y
    Reality can be complex. http://t.co/Li7NSpUs8g
    Yet another test! ;-) http://t.co/VOBG4Vb8Au
    Another test! ;-) http://t.co/1p8ZOFccW3
    This is a test. http://t.co/5VtkafLwKM
    This is a test. http://t.co/7JnIwV2Dyz
    You know nothing. http://t.co/eb42msXZWf
    GO USAAAAAAAA! http://t.co/Hb9Tswrjd9
    GO USAAAA! http://t.co/1o1Lve83Vm
    My name is John McCain. That's my story and I'm sticking to it. http://t.co/HA5Y3u4epV
    Hello World
  Twitter API update_with_media
    I had such good success with the question about the HTML canvas element and drawImage, I thought it might be a good idea to bring my next vexing problem to the "Scripting News" brain trust. Maybe you guys can help me get over this hump as well. (I've already dumped all the details on Dan MacTough, so I'm in a good place for asking the question more broadly.)
    #### Setting the stage
    Basically, I want to send a tweet with an attached image.
    I have the PNG in memory on the client side, the result of calling canvas.toDataURL ().
    The result is good. I've tried writing it to disk and it shows correctly in a browser.
    I can send it up to the server as the body of a POST. What shows up there is a correct PNG image with a little bit of info at the front, data:image/png;base64, indicating that it's a PNG and it's base64 encoded. If I delete the prefix and write the file to disk it's a good PNG file.
    #### Lost in streamland
    A caveat, I have written lots of code that uses the Node.js request package, successfully, but this is the first time I've used it to create a multipart form, as required by the Twitter API routine. I'm pretty sure that's why I'm getting hung up.
    Another caveat, I use the node-twitter-api package to interface to the Twitter API. It's been an enormous help. But the comment at the bottom of the docs page about update_with_media is cryptic. I have tried using it to do this job, but it doesn't work. When I looked at the code, I found it was virtually identical to the other examples I was looking at.
    #### The server code
    Here's a gist containing the code that's running on the server.
    body is the body of the POST message described in the first section.
    #### Prior art
    This is the post I'm modeling my code after.
    If you look at the CoffeeScript example he cites, they're doing some really fancy shit I don't understand to create a stream.
    form.append('media[]', fs.createReadStream(path.normalize(file_path)))
    That's the magic incantation I'm trying to recreate (assuming this code works, I have no proof that it actually does).
    Problem is I don't have a file path.
    I have the result of calling canvas.toDataURL (). Here's the code from the client that's calling this bit of server code.
    #### I guess this is the question
    I have a buffer. It seems the call to form.append ("media[]" needs a parameter that's of a different type. Not sure what that type is, or how to create it. I don't want to write a file, because I have the whole PNG in memory. It seems ridiculous to write a file. Regardless, I've tried that (I'm desperate) and it didn't work.
    BTW, here's a screen shot of the error I get when I run this code, any variant of it, on Heroku in Node.
    I'm in over my head. I've tried reading the code of request and the form-data package.
    I just want to send an image to Twitter. ;-)
    #### There were three problems
    The code now works.
    In this comment I explain the three problems.
    Here's a gist containing the correct code.
August 2014
  A note to browser-makers
    I've been working almost exclusively on apps that run in web pages for the last couple of years. Because of this I'm pretty sure I see a way that browsers could be smarter about loading these apps.
    Consider an app that's launched by a bookmarklet.
    The user is likely to accumulate more than one tab running this app if they use it a lot.
    Each of these tabs has a copy of the app's data in memory. It's possible to keep them in synch using localStorage. It's pretty cool the way that works. It's not hard.
    But it would be even better if there's a way to signal to the browser to re-use tabs for this app. So if there's already a tab that contains this page, just bring it to the front and reload it.
    It would be nicer for the user, and perhaps a little more reliable.
  How to stimulate the open web
    In macroeconomics they teach about stimulus. If you want the economy to grow, increase government spending. Print money, use it to hire people, hopefully to do productive work, that creates capital. Education, road building, clean air and water, renewable energy, these are all investments that a society can make that pays dividends in growth, efficiency and happiness, for a long time to come.
    The Internet was such a creation. The US military made the initial investment, followed by universities. The result was a booming economy 40 years later. But now, a few years after that, the Internet is becoming owned by corporations, which are behaving as all corporations do. They've monetized the once public resource, and they've hired lobbyists, and their former employees are holding important government positions, overseeing their former employers. They're locking themselves in. This is no longer the Internet we loved. But it's not over yet, not if we invest in the open web.
    Re-level the playing field
      Create systems that are ambivalent about the open or closed web. If I create a tool that's good at posting content to Facebook and Twitter, it should also post to RSS feeds, which exist outside the context of any corporation. Now other generous and innovative people can build systems that work differently from Facebook and Twitter, using these feeds as the basis, and the investors will have another pile of technology they can monetize.
      If you don't like the way the algorithms in Twitter and Facebook work, then this is how to counteract that. Re-create the level playing field we used to have. Stimulate the open web. Give us something new to play with. It isn't "either/or" -- it's "and."
      The key point is this -- in everything we do we must treat the open web as equal to the private networks. Maybe we don't have to depend on the government to do this for us, maybe we can be a bit more systematic about encouraging the wild chaos of the open network, knowing that it leads to new tools and new opportunity to profit.
  Come on a bike ride with me!
    A 480p video I did with Hyperlapse of a ride around Central Park today.
    It was a beautiful day, and because it's the middle of a holiday weekend, the road was jammed with riders, many of whom were not too familiar with the route.
    But I love what Hyperlapse makes possible. I've never felt a GoPro would be worth it, but I could just use my iPhone. I already had the mount for it on the bike.
  Why Zocalo plus S3 would be amazing
    Zocalo is Amazon's cloud-based file system, like Dropbox or Google Drive.
    Amazon S3 is a storage system. You put files up there and can access them either publicly over the web or privately through an API, or both. It's cheap, highly available static storage, and has been around a long time and works well, it's in a lot of developers' toolkits. I use it in all my stuff. This page you're reading right now is coming from S3.
    If the two were combined, if you could access Zocalo storage from S3, either reading or writing, you'd have a space that is shared by users, real end-users who are not developers, people who generally can't or won't get over the hurdles to become an S3 user. They would have all the benefits of using S3 without of the complexities.
    We already have some of that with Dropbox. But there's a key feature S3 has that Dropbox does not, the ability to put domain names on S3 locations. So we can make it simple to access as well, and the users can control the content. If they want to get off S3 someday they can do it, just by redirecting the domain. And short domain names are much simpler than the long Dropbox URLs which look very fragile. Here's an example.
    So while Zocalo is far from the most popular cloud-based file system, it has a feature none of the others can offer, access through the S3 APIs. I asked when the service was announced in July, both privately and publicly, but never found out. I hope the answer is yes, or if not, they're working on this. It would be incredible.
    #### Update
    Alternatively, I would totally welcome any of the other vendors in this space to do the same. But I think compatibility with the S3 API is central. There's a huge installed base of know-how. And the API is quite stable.
    Or, Dropbox letting us put domain names on folders, that would also be killer. ;-)
  What I learn from my bike
    I read this piece about what bike riding taught Jeremy Dowsett about white privilege.
    I'm both white and a bike rider, and I know what he's talking about. I ride in NYC, so I'm an urban rider. We have lots of bike lanes, but they aren't respected by drivers and pedestrians. Delivery trucks park in the bike lane on narrow streets, forcing me to merge with car traffic. They even do it on fairly steep hills, where I'm moving much more slowly than the cars. This is something subtle that I'm sure is missed by most drivers. They take up the same amount of space, and they're moving fast, and they obviously feel pain when I move into "their" space, but did they notice that the space reserved for me is occupied by a UPS truck? Sometimes by a cop van. I've even been lectured by a cop who was blocking the bike lane on safe riding procedures. "Yes sir," I said. This is NYC where cops are obeyed, not talked back to (except on my blog).
    I've been hit by cars twice. Once when I was a kid, and once a couple of years ago. In each case I was riding too bravely, blamed myself, but also in each case the driver was asserting rights that weren't his. When I'm riding I'm at a disadvantage. I make up for it, or try to, by being especially alert. I've also found that sometimes it's dangerous not to be assertive, it can leave you in a place where you're much more vulnerable than if you take what's yours by law. But more often the right answer is to accept indignity and move on, and save the fight for a battle I have a chance of winning.
    Another thing riding teaches is the power of the wind. Before I was fully aware of how powerful a force the wind is on bike riders, I was always surprised at the turnaround point on a ride to discover that I had been riding with the wind at my back. I didn't know! Usually the feeling is one of power and fitness. "All this riding has really paid off, I feel so much stronger," I would think, when that wasn't what was going on. I just had the wind at my back. And conversely, riding into a head wind can be miserable. It feels like you're a fish swimming upstream, and if you think of air as a fluid, that's exactly what you're doing.
    You don't feel a tail wind so much if you're getting it, but when the wind is working against you it's everything.
  What "coder" means and why it's bad
    A story
      August 1941, London.
      Winston Churchill has an urgent message for Franklin Roosevelt.
      He calls his assistant, someone named Jones, who takes dictation.
      "Franklin, we need your help!" says Churchill, which Jones dutifully records on paper.
      Jones rushes down 8 flights of stairs to the sub-sub-basement, where a Navy coder named Richardson is waiting at her desk in front of a telegraph key. Jones gives Richardson the paper, and she translates the English sentence into a series of Morse code dashes and dots.
      Meanwhile in Washington, Richardson's American counterpart, Davis, also a coder, writes down the decoded message as Jones, back in London, keys it in. Davis then delivers it to Roosevelt's assistant, Parker, who wakes up the President and gives him Churchill's message.
    Discussion
      The act of turning the English words into Morse code is coding.
      That is what coder means. Someone who encodes things.
      There was a time when you'd write your code on big sheets of paper, and then sit down at a machine called a keypunch, and transfer the instructions from paper to 80-column cards with holes, that machines could read. It would be fair to call this coding. But we haven't done development that way for a very long time!
      Developing software involves a lot of thinking, and trial and error, learning, experimenting, listening to users, getting feedback and trying new approaches. The coding part of it, if we still did it, which we don't, would be a relatively insignificant part of the job.
    Why it matters
      One of the big problems in the tech world has been a lack of understanding of how developers work. If you watched a programmer doing his or her work, you might not see much happening. Most of what we do is intellectual, and isn't visible. It's thinking work. Reading. Learning. Listening.
      A lot of managers think that programming is a menial job, and hire people accordingly. They value subservience. That's where the word coder comes from, and why it's so bad. In the world of PHB's, the thinking is done by non-technical managers, who then tell the coders what to code. They see themselves as Churchill and the coder as a mechanic who translates their words from human language to computer language. This is not what is happening. And it makes it harder for developers to do the real important and difficult work of making systems that work for the people who use them.
      One of the reasons software is so often crap is this lack of understanding. Now they want to create a whole generation of coders, automatons who will take orders from PHB's. This is not a formula for success.
  Oppose Time-Warner/Comcast
    When a Time-Warner outage knocks millions offline, it's a reminder that centralization makes the net fragile. That's why it might not be the *best* idea to let the merger of TWC and Comcast to go through. Maybe it's to their advantage to grow bigger, but given the monopoly each has in the areas they serve, it's definitely not to our advantage.
    I speak from experience. I had a terrible time dealing with Comcast in Berkeley because I am a software developer, and sometimes my experiments would have bugs and do lots more net access than others. A simple way to monitor network usage would have fixed the problem. But there was no incentive for Comcast to find out what was going on. They warned me once, then shut me off. I was stuck with DSL because they own the cable wires to my house.
    I now use TWC. With the merger, guess who becomes my network service provider? Talk about having no choice. Moving clear across the country didn't save me from the beast.
    Let's exercise a little self-interest here, people -- speak up. Let's stop this.
  The missing people of Burning Man
    I have no real clear idea of who among my online friends are at Burning Man. I know that NakedJen is there. I'm sure quite a few others are as well, because things are really quiet this week on Facebook.
    I'm sure the stories are intense, because of the rains, and the closing of the site yesterday, and the mud, and who knows what else. Where did people sleep last night? Are they having a Burning Man experience, while not *at* Burning Man?
    What is really strange is that in this time when we get pictures of every cheeseburger and salad that people have for lunch, there is no play by play of what's going on in Nevada. We're left to wonder what's going on. Which is a rare thing, and assuming everyone is okay, a kind of nice throwback to the way things were before everything and everyone all were so wired.
  Getting rid of Gmail tabs
    Remember when Gmail added the Social and Promotions tab, how sick it was that you couldn't get rid of it? Well, turns out you can.
    Choose Configure inbox from the settings menu, screen shot at the right, and then voila, a dialog comes up that lets you remove them.
    Google will be happy to know that I did not turn them off. But just knowing that I can made it less of a burnout feature.
    They could have told me about that, like they tell me about the things they want me to know about. ;-)
  Why work with Facebook?
    I'm already getting bits of backlash, people disapproving of me working with Facebook. Their reasons are predictable, and not necessarily wrong, but imho missing the big picture.
    So I thought I would write the answer to this question that's probably going to be a FAQ.
    #### Background
    I'm working on a way to publish content to blogs and Facebook simultaneously. So that writers don't have to choose between Facebook and their blog, they can publish to both. And when they make a change, it changes in both places.
    To make this work, some Facebook API features have to be documented, and some added, and bugs fixed. And there are some nice-to-have things that will make it a really excellent platform for blogging tools. I'm working on the developer side of this, with people at Facebook working on the platform side. It's something I've done before, successfully, with other platform vendors and publishers including Microsoft, Apple, Netscape and the New York Times.
    I've already produced a demo app that shows how an external blogging editor would work, and provided a bit of sample JavaScript code that accesses the new call that makes this possible.
    #### Bullet points
    Now, why?
    1. When I have a blog post to write, I have a dilemma. Do I post to my blog, or to Facebook? The blog has advantages. It's a complete archive of my writing. It's relatively easy to find an old post. It's indexed by search engines. It can be quoted on Wikipedia, and easily linked to from Twitter. On the other hand, Facebook delivers more readers and engagement. And despite all the advantages of blogging, Facebook is winning.
    3. It's not just blogs that feel this heat, so do journalism sites. Ones that connect well to Facebook get rich, ones that don't, don't. It's a generalization, but trends are made out of generalizations.
    4. The more it happens, the more it's going to happen.
    5. Trying to reverse the trend is not something anyone can think their way to. Maybe there's a way to get lucky, to create some instantly popular form of content that doesn't work with Facebook well. Like Whatsapp, or Instagram, or Oculus. And even so, Facebook adapts. They're really smart and gutsy and I admire the way they do it. Most companies by the time they get to Facebook's size are less agile.
    6. I asked Google for an API like the one Facebook provided. They said no. Twitter isn't a candidate, though they have a good API, the 140-character limit means I never have to choose between posting on my blog or Twitter. I asked Medium to work with me on this. Didn't get an answer.
    7. I don't think Facebook is hurt by a vibrant competitive market in publishing tools that post to Facebook and post elsewhere, simultaneously. This is where development happens fastest, without the huge installed base to bring along. If this is cut off, that cuts off growth. I think we've already been dealing with this, for a long time. I believe if Facebook opens up more, the lights will start coming back on in new content management tools.
    8. So the web and Facebook can co-exist and feed off each others' growth. Seems like a win-win. Facebook readers get higher fidelity content, more beautiful, easier to read. It's more effective for authors. And blogs and news organizations can easily publish and maintain their content in two or more places. When you're liveblogging an event, for example, you can't manually copy and paste every time something new happens.
    9. Like others, I tried for a few years to live in a world without Facebook. I deleted my account, around the time Diaspora started. I forget why I was fed up, but I was. Did I think that my withdrawing from Facebook would hurt them? No, I didn't. Did I think I could continue as if Facebook didn't exist? I tried not to think about that.
    10. Facebook does exist. Trying to pretend it doesn't makes your world smaller, and if you're making blogging software, makes it harder to find users.
    11. Earlier this year, I created a new Facebook account, at the urging of a friend. I'm glad I did. I like Facebook. And now I don't feel bad about that, because there is a door open that I needed to have opened.
    2. I've been working non-stop for the last 20 years on blogging software. Even though my newest product is wonderful in many ways, very few people look at it, and even fewer use it. When reporters write about recent innovations in blogging, my product is not mentioned. For me at least, blogging as a market is moribund. It was either add something to the mix, to change the market, or give up.
    12. I want to continue making great blogging tools. And I want lots of people to use them. So these steps are on my path. I can't succeed without doing this. If you can create a market even a fraction as big as Facebook's that delivers the readers and engagement, then I'll do the same with your platform, if you want to work together. I try to accept what is, and have the most fun I can doing what I love to do. And for now this is it.
    #### Update
    A new release of Little Facebook Editor makes it possible to post to WordPress and Facebook simultaneously, and keep the two versions updated as you save your changes.
  How the storage system should work
    Since this is the one part of the next steps doc that doesn't have to be implemented by Facebook, I thought it would be a good idea to say exactly how it would work, and then maybe someone else could make a miracle show up on GitHub that does exactly this. ;-)
    1. Works in Node.js. (Because that's the dev platform I use.)
    2. Has two calls, setData and getData.
    3. Each call takes four params: facebookUserId, facebookAccessToken, path and flPrivate. The first two should be self-evident. path is a relative path for the data. It can include slashes, in which case the server automatically creates folders for any that don't already exist. The fourth, flPrivate, is a boolean, if true, the data to be returned comes from a private place that can only be accessed through the file system of the server and through the getData call to the server. If it's false, then the data is stored in a publicly accessible place, and the URL of the object is part of the returned struct.
    4. Each call returns a struct that indicates success or failure. If it worked, then it also returns the data if it's a get, or the URL if it's not private.
    5. The data that my apps will use will be JSON, HTML or XML. For the private stuff it'll all be JSON, the public stuff will be a mix.
    I have this API already implemented using Twitter credentials, so I'm fairly sure it's sufficient for my needs. I use Amazon S3 for both private and public storage.
    #### Actual function calls
    These function headers come from my Twitter library. I just changed "tw" to "fb" in the names.
    function fbGetFile (relpath, flIncludeBody, flPrivate, callback)
    function fbUploadFile (relpath, filedata, type, flPrivate, callback)
    flIncludeBody, boolean: if false we return metadata about the file, but not the file content. This is the equiv of a HEAD request in HTTP.
  Next steps in the Facebook collaboration
    Doug Purdy, a manager at Facebook, asked what should the next steps be in the collaboration, in our effort to turn Facebook into a fantastic publishing surface for blogging tools to hook up to. I made sure that he wanted the ideas in public, so here they are.
    Markdown support
      Just a preprocessor between the API and the storage system.
      There are lots of Markdown processors out there for all platforms.
      Prior art too, Stack Overflow and Github support Markdown on user-submitted posts.
      It's even possible to put the Markdown processor in the client, then the server would probably need to have a filter that checks against illegal forms of HTML. But it seems you already have one. But the new one would have to be more complex (to let some markup through and not other).
      A very sizable installed base of writers understands Markdown.
      It would signal respect for practical standards. I love that Markdown was basically the brainchild of two people, not some huge standards group. That's why it's so nice and simple. It's opinionated, personal. All of which is good! :-)
      But the biggest benefit is that it makes Facebook posts visibly more interesting.
      Makes people ask "How'd they do that!"
    Links
      Markdown support would give us hyperlinks, but they're so important they're worth calling out separately. Without the ability to link, we're not really doing web stuff.
    Titles
      Clearly not all posts have titles, short ones, tweet-length or a little longer, don't need them. But some posts like the one you're reading now, not only have titles, but they have sections that have titles.
    Storage
      Little Facebook Editor needs a place to store the user's history and prefs. For now I'm using HTML 5 localStorage, but it has well-known disadvantages. If I access my Facebook account from different locations, from a tablet or a laptop or phone, the history and prefs should go with me. But without a simple server-based storage system, this is not possible.
      This problem could be solved a number of ways, and we don't need Facebook to do this, but it's a problem every developer would have to solve on their own, which makes it a good candidate for putting into the platform. It could also be solved by providing a simple server app that hooks into Facebook's identity system to provide storage. I've already done this with Twitter logins, but it's not a quick project.
      Update: I wrote up the functionality .
    Store content "source code" for each post
      I edit my content in an outliner, and the content is rendered to HTML. As with programming, there's source (the outline) and object code (the HTML). The easiest and most logical place to store the source code is with the post itself. That way we can just ask for the source, open it in the editor and the user can make changes and save.
      Experience has shown that when the content and rendering use the same navigation system, the blogging environment is an order of magnitude simpler. This was the initial breakthrough that made blogging possible for non-programmers in the late 90s, with the advent of the Edit This Page button. Without it, the user had to master two navigation systems, and understand the relationship between the two.
    These are just next steps
      Obviously there will be a lot more that can be done. But these are good places to start, good next steps. And ranked in order of desirability and my best guess as to what's the quickest hit, and easiest to implement.
    Cross-posted
      This article is cross-posted on Facebook (manually, for now).
  The dog days of summer
    We're in the final stretch of the summer, and things are about as slow as they ever get in tech news.
    That's why Tuesday's blockbuster, that you can publish to Facebook, and update the posts (the key new feature) didn't make much of a splash.
    People also aren't expecting news about Facebook to come from this direction. But it is a big deal. And there will be, Murphy-willing, more great stuff that follows.
    Working with Facebook
      I should also say that I have been meeting with people from Facebook now for about three months. The collaboration has been excellent. Reminds me of the work I did with Microsoft in the late 90s that led to "XML-RPC". There was magic there, and there's magic now.
    My goal
      I want Facebook to become a first class publishing surface, accessible from tools that run outside the Facebook environment. With this, the tools can overcome one major objection, that they don't connect with the powerful engagement features of Facebook, and the huge user base. And, even more important, it will make it possible for new tools to gain traction, because users will not have to choose between an attractive idea and all their readers and friends. They can have both.
    Other platforms
      I would be surprised if WordPress and Tumblr don't implement this connection, making it possible to hot-link content from their environment to Facebook. They already implement the other direction, supporting APIs that allow tools to publish into them. This should be something every publishing platform supports. By showing everyone the demo app, you now know what to ask for, and what to show the developers if they don't believe.
      Pro tip: The JavaScript source code for the connection.
    Users -- don't accept lock-in
      As users, there's no reason to publish to a locked-up environment. You shouldn't be doing it. If you can't get content into the platform from the outside, or get it out once it's in there, then you should stay away. It's bad for the web. I rarely point to articles on such platforms. And you shouldn't put your best ideas in there.
      Getting Facebook onboard here eliminates any possible excuse a publishing platform might have.
      But it's summertime, and most people won't hear this. No problem. We'll keep shipping new software and moving into new niches created by this opening.
  What dreams mean
    The other night I had a dream that I ran into a programmer I hadn't seen for 20 years. I asked what he was up to, he says Y2K work. Puzzled, one would think all the Y2K bugs had already been shaken out. He said he works for insurance companies. A lot of policies have exclusions for damage caused by Y2K bugs. So they employ consultants to investigate and then testify in court. He was such a consultant, and made a good living at it.
    Funny thing: All this happened in my mind. It invented the idea of insurance companies with Y2K exclusions. Yet it hid that idea from my dreaming consciousness, so it could be entertained by the idea.
    I don't understand how this could work, how I could be so genuinely surprised.
  Podcasting grew out of blogging
    There's no way to separate them.
    You couldn't have had podcasting without a lot of things coming together.
    1. Networks of writers who shared links. Blogging.
    2. A protocol for moving links around a network. HTTP.
    3. Something to attach links and recordings to. RSS.
    4. A standard format for recording. MP3.
    5. Inexpensive, easy to use playback devices, that could hook up to all this. iPod.
    You might argue that we still haven't gotten all the pieces needed for it to really work. But one thing is for sure, none of the pieces existed when the famous patent troll claims to have invented podcasting.
    Maybe we should reach not for a victory but for understanding. The patent system is making decisions about technological processes it doesn't understand. No wonder it gets it so wrong.
  New software coming
    I have a new piece of software coming later today that is based on a surprising feature in the Facebook API. And because of this feature, Facebook is actually a lot more open than people think it is.
    One of my big goals has been to create a blogging system that could post to both my own blog and Facebook. This is the holy grail, because I want to keep a record in my space, as well as get the engagement you get from posting to Facebook.
    I want the two versions to stay in sync, so when I make a change, it appears in both places.
    And with this discovery, found with the help of some great people who work at Facebook, we will now be able to do all that.
    I wanted to get a test version of this up as soon as possible. That's the software I'm getting ready to release. It works. I've been using it the last couple of days for all the test messages you've seen. And I'm using it right now to write this post.
  An alternate view of Jay Rosen's demo
    On Facebook, Jay Rosen is doing what I thought was an experiment or demo of a quirk of Facebook's algorithm. He begins a post there with a phrase like this: "You guys, exciting personal news, I'm moving to New York!"
    Then he quickly explains, he was "messing" with Facebook's algorithm.
    He's done this three times, at least, and now I'm genuinely confused, fooled, and burnt out, on this tactic, which (here's the alternate view) amounts to spam.
    I have other friends who did this, and I unfollowed them. I now have to remember to look at their timeline, and when I do, I see more of the same spammy attempts to game Facebook's algorithm.
    Problem is -- the people who read your posts are your friends. They are real people, not eyeballs. You may resent what Facebook is doing, but you're confusing people you like in the process, and eventually, if you keep doing it, sending them away (not in a good way).
    I think the way to look at this is that each of these systems have their quirks, things they're good for, things they're not good at. You have to trust the people who really care will find their way to you using the best system for getting the best of Jay.
    One more comment.
    This is what was behind yesterday's post where I said it's up to the news people to lead us, at least partially, to the news system of the future. If you leave it to the tech people, you'll get more of what you now realize you don't like (but have actually been getting all along).
    Let's fix this. Set some examples. Tech people are really good following. We love to steal ideas. Give us some of yours, in real working examples. I've found that's the best way to nudge technology in the direction you want it to go.
  News organizations should be focused on where they get their news from
    One thing that's changed in the age of news on the net is that not only can we report the news more quickly, we can be informed of it more quickly as well. Everyone who takes an interest becomes part of the process. Every time an article is forwarded, shared, retweeted, liked, posted, whatever you call it, that's a signal to some piece of software, otherwise known as an "algorithm" (something reporters seem to have just now discovered) that this item is of interest to someone. Knowing who that is, and who that influences is what makes one algorithm better than another.
    Each news organization, in the future, will compete not only to get the best news out of their newsroom, but more quietly perhaps, who will have the best news flowing into their room. I've been evangelizing this for years, you should should be working on this, leaving it less to chance, and connect yourself up in a systematic way, to those news sources you respect and whose authority you value. This obviously should include bloggers (see my definition) as well as other news organizations.
    I've tried to set an example, by being open with my sources. This is where where I get my news. Twitter and Facebook pale in comparison. Techmeme is way slower. They show stories many hours, sometimes days, after they appear in my flow. Twitter tends to focus on the sensational, Facebook on the personal. They're all getting to the same place, I think. But journalism plays a role here, that up till now, it has not.
    There should be a lot of competition here, and imho we should be a lot further ahead of where we are.
    Journalists: Twitter does not have to be the last word in Internet-based news flow. Play what-if. Dream. Innovate! Imagine what would be the best inflow for you and then build it. Work with developers if you don't have the skills yourself. We should have a lot more flow of ideas between technologists and users of news technology.
    It's up to journalists to make journalism on the net work. Technology can only take us so far. After that, it's how the technology is used that matters.
  An alternate view of Robin Williams' suicide
    Maybe Robin Williams' suicide wasn't an act of depression, perhaps it was a sane, rational, even wise decision. A choice. We don't know because he didn't leave a message. But that's okay, most people who die don't, and a lot more people end their own lives than we recognize.
    Sometimes life is over, or it's changing so radically, that the story-teller of our life, ourself, decides the ending shouldn't come after years of suffering, rather the end should come when the great part of life is over. And Robin Williams certainly had a great life, even if he did a lot of drugs, and was often unhappy. I don't think there's any doubt that he delighted in sharing his brilliance, and when he was on, he really did shine bright.
    He decided early-on to lead a creative life. And he always did the best he could with what he had. I love the pictures of him as a mime in Central Park in the early 70s. I spent a lot of time there myself then, it's possible that I saw him. It's so perfect that he, a student, at the time never a guest on The Tonight Show, still found a way to be Robin Williams. What an inspiration. Don't wait to be creative. Do it now.
    He wasn't always on as a performer, but he stretched, tried all kinds of roles. He wasn't limited by his money. There are countless stories of him with other much less famous, rich, or accomplished people. I think that's really important. For a lot of people creativity dies when they achieve success. But truly creative people just are creative with the extra tools and toys successful people get to play with. Williams was the latter kind of successful person.
    He had a great life. It was over. (Said in hindsight.)
    Sometimes, for some people, in some circumstances, they get to say when it's over, and have the courage to act on it.
    That's another theory about his death. I don't know if it's correct, but I haven't seen anyone else put it out there, so I wanted to.
  Someone will make a trillion with this idea
    Spoiler ahead. Be warned..
    In the movie Peggy Sue Got Married, there's a moment where she walks into a store and asks if panty hose has been invented yet. This imho is one of those kinds of products, and you and I are living now in the past, where it hasn't been invented yet.
    #### Setup
    As you're walking around in the world you have your point of view, and everyone else has their point of view. If you could see things through other people's eyes that would be pretty fantastic. So much so, that it'll spawn a new genre of art, a new media type, like YouTube videos or Vine 6-second videos, Instagram photos.
    #### The product
    You can record images or video as you travel around and I can become you either in real-time or in a simulated real-time. I can watch you watch a place that I'm in. So I just capture what I see and you capture what you see, but I can be you and vice versa, at any time.
    I like it because it goes places. A room with people doing this all of a sudden has another level of meta to it, where you watch people watch people watch people etc. And it's all done with technology that already exists, audio, video, the Internet.
  My architecture is called RSS
    Yesterday Johannes Ernst asked on Twitter: "So what do *you* call this architecture where your data is on your site, running the code you want, with your own terms."
    It was a complex question, so I said I'd answer it in a blog post, not on Twitter, where the 140-character limit would inevitably lead to abbreviation and misunderstanding.
    #### My architecture
    My architecture is called "RSS".
    There's no limit on the data I can attach to my RSS feed, and since I'm already producing one, and lots of people are already subscribed to it, and it's a widely understood format, there really never was any other choice.
    I've created a namespace that extends RSS that adds features that have become necessary since RSS 2.0 was frozen in 2002. Notably the <source:account> element that I use to point to my Twitter and Facebook accounts.
    My podcasts are included in that feed.
    I have a separate feed for my Little Cards. I'd really like that to be merged with my main feed. Hopefully soon. ;-)
    #### Why RSS is the obvious choice
    One of the things I said to Johannes earlier in this thread is that before formats matter you need three things: 1. Software. 2. Content. 3. Users. RSS has all three, so it's the obvious choice for evolving blogs.
  What language to learn?
    When people ask what language to learn first, I say JavaScript. The runtime is on everyone's machine, everyone can run your software.
    This emphasizes that the point of writing software is to create something for people to use. Any other language requires them to install software on their system. But JavaScript gives you immediate access to everyone who uses any make or model desktop computer, laptop, or mobile phone, in one language, one runtime, nothing to install.
    Really hard to beat that.
    PS: Yes it's a bizarre language, but show me one that isn't. ;-)
  What does a blog do in 2014?
    Like all people with blogs, in 2014, mine has been going through an identity crisis.
    How we got here
      1. My blog used to have long messages and short ones. The short ones have gone to Twitter.
      2. I get better "engagement" on Facebook, so I post there.
      3. I have a linkblog, and I have Little Cards.
      4. I do podcasts.
      5. There's always new stuff I'm trying out, and sometimes some gain traction. There should be a place for these too.
    Organizing randomness
      Today there are lots of ways to scatter all kinds of stuff to the wind. If you do a search on a person, you'll get a lot of random stuff, but for most people there's no single place that represents the person.
      So for me, until further notice, my blog is where all my scatterings come together. Usually it'll just be stuff that I've created, but occasionally I'll point to something from someone else that's connected to what I do. For example, yesterday I pointed to an improvement a user made to "River4". Since I wrote River4, I am proud of this accomplishment, and want to have it be part of my record.
    Google-plus was supposed to this
      In the grand plan of Google, the default search engine, each person was supposed to be represented by that person's Google Plus profile. But it didn't work, just try a few searches for people and you can see. Google Plus profiles, when they do show up, are pretty lean. They aren't gardens that people invest a lot of energy in.
      For people famous enough to have Wikipedia pages, they serve pretty well, but it doesn't keep you current on the person, and the profile must adhere to the strict rules of Wikipedia. But I'm also interested in the highly opinionated version of the person, presented by the actual person.
      Jonathan Glick pointed out that this is something like what RebelMouse proposes to do. But if that was their goal it fails the Google test too, it doesn't turn up that often near the top of searches for random people (assuming they have profiles on that site). And as was pointed out by Dan Gillmor, it's not something you want companies to use the usual ad-based revenue scheme for, because that inevitably suffers from the problems of Twitter, Facebook, Instagram et al -- too much scattering. The one place, for people who care enough to have a place, has to be independent of tech industry business models.
    It can work
      If we can get some hooks into the big services that people use, or take better advantage of the ones that already exist (I'm just one person, for now at least) this can work. We can have a blog be a person, while that person maintains a presence in a lot of different places.
  Installing Facebook Messenger
    I am installing Facebook's new Messenger app on my iPhone, despite all the objections people have. Scoble says it has features I will like. I'm aware their terms of use are ridiculously one-sided, but I'm pretty sure Google and Apple also have access to all the same information. Based on the tips Google Now has for me, how could they not be spying on me, basically all the time?
    People do freak out too much, imho -- but the companies also could have a more gentle bedside manner. A little story. When I was starting Living Videotext, my book keeper, a wise woman who seemed very old at the time (she was probably younger than I am now) gave me advice which I not only remember and follow, I also pass it on. "Hit people with a feather instead of a stick," she said. There's always a gentler way to say something. Try to emphasize the benefit, instead of the cost. It's pretty basic common sense, but it's surprising how often young people need to hear this. Maybe some old people too. :-)
    Anyway, I'm going to try Messenger, and will report back if there's anything notable about it.
  Two common delusions
    1. The grass is greener over there.
    2. I'm the only one with pain.
    These two delusions, basically jealousy and narcissism, are the cause of a lot of misunderstandings and needless suffering.
  Men Stay Silent, 2014 edition
    I don't re-run pieces on Scripting News, as some blogs do, but I do point to them when they're relevant, like Men Stay Silent, written in 1998. I found myself thinking of the last part of the piece in relation to Robin Williams.
      Men stay silent. We manipulate symbols to express ourselves. We bottle up who we are. We try to achieve the vision the world has for us, whether it's true or not.
    Robin Williams was much-loved, and that was no accident, he worked hard at it. When you laughed so hard it hurt, that was your body saying, wow I really love this guy!
      Williams might have been the most love-seeking person on the planet, the most demonstrative at proving he was worthy of love.
    It's the symbols. If he had said directly what we wouldn't let him say, because of his gender, age, etc -- it would have gone like this. "I need to know you love me. I need to feel that connection. I need to get your eyes to laugh in ways I can't get my own to. I need to see in you what I feel myself, and can't. That I am worthy of love."
    Human beings come in all sizes and shapes on the outside, but on the inside our motives are basically the same. We want to know we'll be fed and housed and not cast out in the cold, to starve and freeze to death. The tactics we use to obtain that sense of security vary, but the goal is the same.
    I hope you'll read the 1998 piece because a lot of what it says is exposed in our thoughts and feelings around Williams' death. Thanks.
  An opportunity to change journalism
    The template
      One reporter goes first. A template is created.
      Then every news organization and columnist repeats the story, also repeating the perspective, errors and omissions in the original.
      Maybe it's human nature. Maybe at one point, when there were just regional papers, it was necessary. But it's always been a bad practice.
    Inbred punditocracy
      Another related problem -- they mostly quote a small group of professional quote-givers. It leads to inbred thinking and missed opportunities, huge ones.
      It's why Nate Silver was so successful in the last two national elections. He spurned the pundits, found his own sources, and reported accordingly, and with notable accuracy.
    New processes, please
      When you're redesigning the process of journalism, don't just create new technology, create new reporting processes. Otherwise you end up with the same old garbage in a shiny new package.
  Why do we fear death?
    You might say it's just logical, it makes sense to be scared of the great unknown. But maybe it's just that evolution made us this way. Perhaps fear of death is a survival trait.
    Think about it. Two humans are born, one is scared of death, the other is okay with it. Which has a greater chance of surviving to reproduce? It seems obvious.
    So maybe there isn't really anything to fear?
  Robin Williams
    I'm sure a lot of other people have been watching Robin Williams comedy the last couple of days. Some of it I hadn't seen before and is kickass. But it's now got a sad quality it didn't have before, because we know how the story ends.
    My first reaction on hearing of his suicide was disbelief. I had been thinking about him just a few days ago, and thought it was remarkable that he brought such obvious joy to everything he did. Now I see that was just on the surface, that underneath it, he dealt with demons. Maybe they were the same demons we all face, maybe they were different. I immediately want to know his story. What were his parents like? Did they love him? I wonder. Williams might have been the most love-seeking person on the planet, the most demonstrative at proving he was worthy of love. How does a person develop that way? What was opposite his personality that it formed in such a way?
    I've lost people close to me, and even with those it's very hard to get past the narcissist response, even when you're aware of it, and fighting it. I did that when my uncle died in 2003. After the initial shock I said to myself that I'm going to not make this about me. I couldn't. Same when my father died in 2009. Try as hard as you can, you don't know what the experience was. What his experience was in the last minutes of life. Was he aware of it? Did he decide to end it? How sad it must have been. To have a mind and know there was no future, that time had run out.
    I still believe that no one wants to die. But I do know what it's like to be indifferent to life. I experienced it after my heart surgery in 2002. The recovery was so long, and required major changes in lifestyle, and without cigarettes to numb me out, I didn't know if I could deal with it. I guess I must have gotten over it, because the train is rolling again. I'm sure I'll be back there, before too long. I've had scares since, and I freak out just like I did back then.
    People say that depressed people should speak out, but there's huge hypocrisy in that, for almost everyone. They don't really want to hear about your problems. There are too many people in the world, even too many people in a family, for there to be room for anyone to really make their struggles an issue for others.
    The meaning we can take from all death is that the time to love is when we're living. After death it's not love anymore, it's some weird kind of fear of our own mortality. We can't love Robin Williams now, there is no more Robin Williams in this world. He's only a memory, and you can't get a hug from a memory, there's no inspiration in his life story, because he gave up. I can't even watch his comedy without thinking of the suffering it was masking. Maybe someday that will change, but I suspect, based on past experience that it won't.
  How to center in CSS
    Here's a page that has a bit of text that's centered both horizontally and vertically. You can resize the browser window and it'll move so it stays centered.
    If you're interested in why it works, or how it works, here's a page that explains. I've spent years looking for this answer, getting all kinds of confusing advice. This is simple, makes sense, and best of all, it works. ;-)
    Pro-tip: If you want it off-center, change the percentages in the container style.
    Update: This is an example of a page I want this feature for.
  How do you post links to Twitter?
    A little informal market research...
    Suppose you're reading something on a blog or news site, or a great article on Wikipedia, and decide you want to share it with your followers on Twitter.
    How do you do it??
    #### Example narrative
    Here's how I do it.
    1. I have a bookmarklet installed in the chrome of my browser. I click it.
    2. Radio2 comes to the front, with a form pre-filled with the title of the article, scraped from the HTML, and a shortened URL.
    3. I do a little editing, as necessary.
    4. Click the Post button.
    5. It's saved to an RSS feed, and published on my linkblog page.
    6. It's also posted to my Twitter account.
    #### How do you do it?
    Please post a comment that explains.
    I want to know how other people do this.
    Thanks! :-)
  Media leaders never accept change gracefully
    We've seen a lot of changes in media since the advent of the personal computer. And through it all, when media leaders have seen it coming, they have tried to create an acceptable change, only to eventually be forced into the inevitable change, one they don't want.
    A great example of this, so dramatic someone should make a movie about it, was the change predicted by Napster in 2000. It happened so suddenly, unlike most technological shifts, that if you were alive then, you almost certainly remember the euphoria. People were talking about music in supermarkets and on airplanes. Why? Because a power that had once been reserved to radio stations, the power to program music, was now available to everyone.
    I became an advocate for, and poster child for users of Napster. My first experience, which was mocked by music publishers and professional musicians, was on Father's Day in 2000, when I heard a song on the radio that reached me emotionally, in a huge way. I wanted to hear it again, immediately, before the mood passed. I looked on Napster. There it was. And I got to listen to it within seconds. That in a nutshell was the innovation, if you care to call it that. I think of it as a dam breaking. A technical limit imposed by copyright owners, that wasn't necessary from a technological standpoint. Database technology and Internet connectivity had advanced enough, years before 2000, to make the old record store-based distribution system obsolete. All it took was a nervy young dude, who felt he had nothing to lose, to break down the barrier.
    The copyright owners were able to shut down Napster, legally, but the idea of users programming their own music had escaped and today people think nothing of it, using Spotify, Pandora or whatever -- to get the music they want when they want it. Has the music industry been able to adapt? No, or somewhat, it's not clear yet. But there are no guarantees, when your business is based on a temporary technological limit. When the limit is erased, so is your business model.
    Napster and the music industry is just one example. It's happening everywhere, in every medium. The latest eruption is in books, with Amazon saying that e-books should be cheaper, and book publishers saying something else (not clear to me what they're saying).
    To figure out if it's a lost cause, if eventually a new equilibrium will create a path around your paywall, ask yourself if it's inevitable that the limit you depend on will always be there. If not, then you'd probably be better off accepting the change as soon as possible. And don't try to create an acceptable level of change, as the news industry is still doing. Only the full change predicted by the technology has a chance of finding a new balance.
    It can be hard to do this. Especially when an industry has convinced itself that it is, itself, the disruptive change. This happened to Microsoft in the 90s, when the Internet forever changed the way software is developed. Their reaction was to try to capture all the newness of the Internet in their software stacks, Windows and Office. It worked for a while, until they felt they had the insurrection quelled and took their eye off the ball, and their products were overwhelmed by malware. Since they weren't using the Internet the way their users were, they didn't see it, or if they did, didn't recognize it as their problem. Apple was no more tuned in than Microsoft, they were just lucky that their OS was not dominant, therefore not targeted by the malware makers. That's how the shift away from Windows started.
    Books have gotten easier to buy and read using electronic technology. All you have to do to see that is to buy a book on a Kindle and compare the experience to buying a book in a bookstore, the act that the Kindle replaces. It uses a tiny bit of Internet bandwidth to transfer a book from a server to a reader. The user experience, esp for 700-page books (an experience I tried recently with a paperback and found impossible), is vastly superior. You can carry your library with you everywhere. The cost, of course, will go down. Perhaps that means less money for publishers and authors. So you have to figure out what the world will look like after this change is complete, and prepare for that world. Longing for the world as it was before the change is pointless. Lots of people have done that, argued for it, but it never seems to work out for them.
  My blog doesn't need an editor
    A brief note. As you know Twitter has a 140-char limit. This causes me, all the time, to cut words out of sentences, and that changes their meaning, leads to misunderstandings, and most important reduces the complexity of ideas that can be expressed.
    I have a great sentence in the previous piece that really sums it up. Unfortunately it's more than 140 characters. Another limit on expression, this one so obvious and in your face that we almost don't even notice it. I hate the limit. I hate the idea of the limit. We don't need tech companies as platform vendors, they suck at freedom, and we sure as hell don't need them as our editors.
  My blog doesn't need HTTPS
    I've looked into it, and it just isn't worth the expense and complications.
    Yet Google thinks it's so important that I support HTTPS that they're willing to penalize sites, in their search ranking algorithm, that don't use it. As far as I can see, the two things have nothing to do with each other. Could a spam site support HTTPS? Sure, and you can expect they all will, because they exist solely to get rank in search engines, and Google is #1.
    Could Google have other reasons for wanting to penalize sites that don't have HTTPS? Sure, because it helps drive content to their farms, Google Plus and Blogger, and probably a number of others, all of which of course support HTTPS.
    And this enhances lock-in for Google, because it's economic for them to implement HTTPS for their domains, and that will encourage people who move their content to Google servers to use Google domains, because HTTPS is implemented on a domain level.
    We've already encountered this with Amazon S3, which is where the content for this blog is hosted. I could have HTTPS, immediately, if I was willing to use this URL for this post, instead of this one. The latter address gives me flexibility. If a better way of hosting content comes along, I can move my content there, and none of my links break. I've done this many times over the 20 years this site has been in existence. The first URL is irrevocably tied to Amazon. Which is where the lock-in would come from, if I went that way. No fault of Amazon's because they're happy to let me continue to host my content with HTTP. If they were to force me to switch to HTTPS, as Google is trying to, they would be driving me to lock-in, as Google is doing.
    Maybe this is all very innocent, maybe Google just wants a more secure web, and they aren't trying to move content off independent blogs and onto their servers. No matter, it has the same effect, regardless what their intentions are. It doesn't matter to me whether they're evil or not. What matters is that this is yet another reason to give up on independence and trust big tech companies with being the platform vendor that the Internet supposedly doesn't have.
    When they come asking for support for net neutrality, as if it were a public good, I remember that my interests and Google's are often opposite. Unless you're a Google officer or shareholder, you should also keep that in mind.
    PS: My blog doesn't need an editor, either.
  Someday Flickr will die
    Doc Searls has a long piece with lots of fear in it, and as someone who decided early-on that my creativity would exist more or less only in computer bits, it's fear that I share.
    #### Flickr, Frontier and HTTPS
    Like Doc, I too got onboard early with Flickr. I felt somewhat covered because I had scripts that ran in "Frontier" that archived my Flickr photos in an S3 bucket. This code died earlier this year when Flickr transitioned to HTTPS. Frontier doesn't do HTTPS, actually it does, but it's a pain in the butt to convert to it, and my focus is in JavaScript now, so I just let the app fail.
    It's still running, calling Flickr every ten minutes to see if I uploaded anything new. Flickr is telling it each time that it's no longer willing to speak to it. The program does not understand, so it keeps asking, as if Flickr were listening. If I remembered which server it's on I would put it out of its misery. But I find it symbolic and hopeful and kind of poetic, so I don't do anything at all.
    #### Long-lived orgs
    I still think the ideal way to approach this problem is to get an endowment for a project to create a more robust personal web and do it in conjunction with a long-lived institution, most likely a university. Harvard, where both Doc and I worked for a while has been around since the 1600s. It seems if any entity will still be around in a few hundred years, it'd be a university like Harvard. Or perhaps the University of Colorado. Oxford. Etc.
    #### Do you remember Pan Am?
    I recently re-watched 2001 A Space Odyssey. It was an interesting experience. The story is slow and you're left to put the pieces together and it's art so I assume it means something different to everyone who watches it.
    The last time I watched it was probably in the 1980s, well before 2001. Now it's just as long after 2001. We still haven't sent men to Saturn, nor do we have colonies on the moon. But many of the things that seemed futuristic when the movie was made now seem horribly dated. Example: They thought they were being cute by showing us how the future would transform then-familiar brands like Pan Am and Howard Johnson's, both of which are now extinct.
    Pan Am was a classy airline we dreamed of flying, all over the world, back when flying was something dreamy. Howard Johnson's was a ubiquitous chain of orange-topped roadside restaurants that served delicious fried clams. Now it's a chain of motels that supposedly makes you smarter. Clever advertising, but an obvious lie. ;-)
    Gets you thinking about what's really lasting!
    PS: Ooops the hotels that make you smarter are Holiday Inns, another iconic brand from the 60s.
  Summer Streets in NYC
    I did the Summer Streets ride in NYC today.
    On three days each year, you can ride from 72nd and Park to the Brooklyn Bridge, without cars.
    Now, it's not necessarily as wonderful as it sounds, cause bike riders and pedestrians can be fairly mindless, so you have to ride even more carefully than you would if there were just cars, cabs, buses and pedestrians (and a sprinkling of other bikes) -- the normal fare on NYC streets.
    But there are moments on the ride that are just bliss. Riding down the hill from 34th St to 14th St weaving in and out, without stopping, is a rush.
    I thought I would get up at 7AM and beat the crowd, but that didn't happen. Instead I got out just as it was ending, so it wasn't all that bad. And I rode back uptown on the Hudson River bike path, which is practically empty, or so it felt today.
  Answers to Oz's questions
    A New Yorker piece begins with two questions from Israeli author Amos Oz.
    1. What would you do if your neighbor across the street sits down on the balcony, puts his little boy on his lap, and starts shooting machine-gun fire into your nursery?
    2. What would you do if your neighbor across the street digs a tunnel from his nursery to your nursery in order to blow up your home or in order to kidnap your family?
    #### The answers
    He doesn't answer the questions, but the questions do have answers.
    1. Build a shield that prevents his bullets from reaching you and your children.
    2. Find the tunnels and close them. (And by the way we don't know the reasons the tunnels were built, so you should leave that part out of a hypothetical.)
    #### There are other points of view
    Ask the question from the Palestinian point of view too.
    Suppose a larger more powerful country, one that had an army (yours doesn't), had you surrounded, controlled your borders, was starving you, and regularly shot into your city randomly and killed huge numbers of your people, including civilians.
    Would you fight back?
    #### What about Syria and Iraq?
    Israel's supporters often ask why aren't we so upset about what Syria is doing to its people. It's the kind of question, if a child asked it, you would explain that the two situations have nothing to do with each other. If one child behaves badly, that doesn't excuse another child's bad behavior.
    Further, Israel is my country's ally, and even further, I am Jewish. My opinion about Israel, therefore, matters a lot more than my opinion about Syria.
    My country has called for Assad to leave, but so far we have not called for Netanyahu to. So our response to Syria has been stronger and more negative. And our culpability is greater with Israel because we arm you, give you financial aid, and guarantee your survival. So if you do something awful and immoral, and unwise, we are to blame alongside you. So the two situations, while they may appear on the surface to be similar are actually like night and day.
    I've also been asked to explain Iraq. If it's okay for the US to invade Iraq, and kill or cause the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Iraqis, who are we to complain when Israel does that to Palestinians. There is an answer to this question too. When my country went to war in Iraq, you bet we objected. And voted accordingly, and eventually elected a government that turned it around, and got us out of that morass. Israel's situation is different, which is another reason it's not a great question. You have to live with the Palestinians. And so far you're not doing that very well. It's time to try a different way of thinking, and to start that you have to listen to other points of view.
    #### Re comments
    I'm not interested in hosting a debate on the usual topics here. Please read the comment guidelines. If you have a short simple idea or fact to add, please post a comment. If you have a speech to make, use your own blog. And if you want to make a personal statement or accusation, again, use your blog, not mine. Thanks.
  An icon that means Publish
    I need an icon that means "Publish the thing the cursor points to."
    #### How it works
    I put the cursor on a headline in an outline. The headline contains the title of a short rant that I want to publish. Underneath it are a few paragraphs that form the body of the item.
    I click the Publish icon in the left margin, and a confirmation dialog appears asking "Do you want to publish this item?" If you click OK, it is published.
    The verb is Publish. There's no other word that works.
    #### A candidate
    I'm thinking of using the Paragraph symbol -- <%icon ("paragraph")%>.
    I like it because it is a P, but with a twist. With a tool tip you could quickly learn that it means publish this.
    #### The candidates
    If you want to brainstorm this, have a look at the collection of Font Awesome icons. Any of those could be used easily, from a technical standpoint.
September 2014
  My manifesto for web writing
    Om Malik said it best: "The obsessive coverage of Ello is less about Ello. Instead it really is about our growing dissatisfaction with the state of social networks."
    That's a *great* summary of the piece that follows, which I will manually cross-post to a bunch of different places, for reasons that will become obvious as you read it. Which I hope you do. ;-)
    I'm trying to get my writing to take place in my space, with my tools. That way I can tweak them and make them work better. And have the writing distributed and automatically updated in all the different places people want to read it. Today, for me, that means posting to my blog, to Facebook, posting a link to Twitter, and putting it out on my linkblog feed.
    But when a new system shows up without an API, as several have, that means I can't push my writing to them, unless I use their editor to write it, or resort to copy/paste. In 2014, it's ridiculous that I can't automate that. I was writing scripts that did that kind of stuff when I was a grad student in the late 70s.
    The web of 2014 is in the middle of a huge battle to force people to write the stuff in the same place people read it. Whether you hate advertising or not doesn't matter, it's all part of the same system. You make me, as a writer, choose either to give it all to you, or none to you. And yet the underlying network that doesn't have these limits.
    What do other people want? Maybe they can write about it. I know what I want. I want to be a powerful communicator. Maybe I'd be willing to sacrifice some of the power if one of these guys was offering to pay me. But so far the money goes to their founders and a few others, and tiny amounts of money go to professional writers and academics. So our work is a labor of love. But here's the problem -- I don't feel love for any of these environments. Quite the opposite. I know what's possible, and I resent the fact that they're deliberately thwarting it. I do love the web, and all that it enables. But if I use the web to communicate, I forgo access to all the people who have locked themselves into the silos.
    My option, which is also probably yours, is to accept the worst deal possible: really weak writing tools with confusing interfaces, no standards, and very narrow access to your thinking by others, restricted by who's looking at their silo when it happens to come out. This is a *terrible* deal.
    I really want to, now more than ever, build an open network of writing and ideas. I'd be happy to use great writing tools, and be able to distribute my ideas exclusively to other people who value freedom. To me, that's a fair trade-off.
    PS: Why services launch without APIs.
  Cuban cottages in Jamaica
    Many years ago, I was riding in a cab from Montego Bay to visit my uncle who lived in Negril.
    The driver pointed out a development of new cottages, about 20 or so. He said they were all new, with modern fixtures, plumbing, electricity, well-built, designed to survive a hurricane. But no one wanted to live in them.
    Of course I asked why. He said they were built by the Cubans, as part of a development deal with the Jamaican government. He said the houses were great, but they didn't have back doors.
    I thought about it and then realized why they were that way, and why that was a problem.
  20-year milestone coming soon
    It's almost 20 years since I wrote my first blog post.
    It wasn't called a blog then, but that's what it turns out it was.
    I've been thinking about how to mark the occasion, thought of possibly having a Bloggercon, somewhere, but that hasn't happened, it takes time to plan those things.
    Instead I'm thinking about which pieces, after 20 years of blogging, have the most value.
    I posted a link to one of them a few minutes ago, Transcendental Money. It's an idea I got from my uncle, Ken Kiesler, who asked me that question once, and it really made me think. So I passed it on.
    Then there was Don's Amazing Puzzle. That was a good one. Or Bill Gates vs the Internet, if only because it represents raw epiphany, and no hesitation. I just wrote it, published it, and let the shit hit the fan. It was a liberating experience. And that was the point. No one needs to approve these things. Blog posts are from a single person at a moment in time. Like a fresco painting. Not a lot of fussing or editing, or even thinking. Just say what you see. Turns out what I saw in that moment was exactly right. For that moment in time. Later on, the cruft would come back, and then be ripped up, only to come back yet again. This is a lesson the tech industry keeps re-learning. Maybe it's more than tech, maybe it's what we do as a species.
    There's way too much in the archive to read between now and October 7. But if you have a piece that meant something to you, send me a pointer, to dave.winer@gmail.com. Or you can post a comment here. I'll have a look, and give it some thought. Even better if you write about it on your blog, and send me a pointer to that. I'm still an old-fashioned web idealist. After all these years. ;-)
    #### Favorites
    Jay Rosen likes Edit This Page (1999).
    Michael Rubin likes Accept & Respect (1995).
    Vitor Conceicao likes Platform is Chinese Household (1994) among others.
    Tim Strehle wrote a blog post linking to a couple of more recent pieces.
    Bill Soistmann likes How to make money on the Internet (2000).
    #### My choices
    Home page: "People come back to places that send them away" (2005)
  When do you have enough money?
    Bill Simmons was suspended by ESPN for calling the commissioner of the NFL a liar. Of course he was lying. Every time an exec opens his or her mouth, they're lying. They're all telling TV stories. It's their job to lie. But Bill Simmons, presumably, has put away enough money so he doesn't need the ESPN job. He could keep his podcast and start a new blog, and continue telling the truth. The question isn't whether or not ESPN will let its columnists tell the truth, they won't because they can't, and still keep the relationships they have with the leagues. The question is this -- does Simmons need more money? If not, if I were him, I'd go ahead and tell the truth. Let another system develop. I think very quickly people will choose to go the way of the truth. It's a lot more interesting.
    I ask the same question of entrepreneurs who have cashed out for enough money to live comfortably for the rest of their lives. They could do their next venture not based on the standard tech industry model of enticing users to give their love to a network that just wants to turn them into unpaid liars. Because that's what the tech business model is based on. Creating lots of people who repeat the lies, while trying to sound controversial. There are so many professors and journalists willing to sign up for that, they might get paid a few bucks, in order to lead everyone else into doing it for free.
    The question for the entrepreneurs is this -- why? If you already have a billion dollars, why not try to break the mold, and create a network where everyone is free to say whatever they like, and if they don't like your service, if they find it too confining, they can take their ideas with them? It's a shame more people, once they've achieved a certain amount of success, don't give freedom a try. Not just for their users, but for themselves too.
    I guess basically people get comfort from the constraints other people put on them. Otherwise, why not just break out? The really interesting thing to watch is if Simmons, having broke the rules once, decides to fuck the rules, and take a permanent leave from ESPN.
  What will a linkblog look like in 2015?
    I'm still mostly a CSS newbie, but I'm kind of functional, I can build a UI with it, and not create a total mess. But I'm still mostly designing stuff that's like the interfaces I was doing before I was really using CSS.
    I want to do a grand redesign of my web presence. I've got all these bits scattered all over the place, and am gradually bringing them together. There are good elements in all the approaches I have, but I need to really do this one right -- my linkblog. Where everything I publish online will at least be linked to, if not be fully present. There's going to be a lot of new stuff coming together here.
    Normally I'd hunt around looking for prior art, and I have, but there really isn't anything good that I want to emulate. Product Hunt is kind of the state of the art in linkblogs, but there isn't that much there. Sidebar.io is also nice. Tumblr, of course.
    What I'd like to do is find a way to ask the CSS hacker community to look at this problem with me, and if possible help make decisions about how this should work. If it works, maybe there will be something to go into Bootstrap or stand alongside it.
    The bigger question is how can we create cross-discipline collaborations? I would know who to talk to if I wanted someone to review a new namespace for RSS, but don't have way to ask for help for the things I most need help with, like CSS.
    It seems if we could figure this out, we could have lots of these kinds of collaborations.
  Now there's an image in my river!
    #### Links
    1. You can check out the rivers here.
    2. The source namespace is documented, somewhat.
    3. Here's the Little Card Editor feed that has the content I was demoing.
    4. Some of my software snacks.
    5. And my linkblog feed.
  The NYT has a pulse! (Sort of)
    Today an announcement that the NY Times has added a feature to their home page called Watching. It's a linkblog, pointing into the NYT, at fresh news, articles in development, stuff that hasn't made it to the home page yet.
    It occupies a corner of the home page. I think that eventually they'll make it the whole front. We know now that the home pages of news sites like the Times, when they are set up like the front page of a print newspaper, are something most users skip. I always have. I've had the Times in a river since 2002 (actually before that, we found a back door to their syndicated content). Why should an online news site be organized the same way a print home page is? It shouldn't.
    Want to know how I get my NYT news? It occupies its own panel in my personal river of news (its redesign was released yesterday, a coincidence).
    I would love to have a lab like the NYT, with its millions of readers, to play with. It's painful to watch their slow evolution, when you're sure you know where it will end up.
    This is big clue to the future NYT, there's a reason why people like to get their news from Twitter instead of the home page. We like chaos. It's the same reason news people like to watch the stories come in over the wire. A sense that you've found the pulse. News should be like that. The print front page was a necessary accommodation to the way the news product was manufactured before the net. Today it's purely vestigial. Get rid of it, you're almost there, now go the whole way.
    PS: Looks like the Times sort of had a river on AOL back in the 90s.
  Waiter, there's a tweet in my river!
    #### A new feature in my river
    #### Notes
    1. You can try out the river for yourself.
    2. The tweets come from my linkblog feed, which I create with "Radio3".
    3. In the video I say Radio UserLand was a linkblogging tool. It was that, but it was also a general purpose blog editor, and river of news aggregator. It came out in 2002. Radio2 was very much like Radio3, but it was server-based. Radio3 is written in JavaScript, and while there's a server component running in Node.js, most of the code is in the browser, as it is with the reader (demo'd above).
    4. The aggregator that generates the river, which is in an open format, is also a Node.js server application called "River4". It's open source.
    5. Also there's "Fargo" but let's not get into that now. ;-)
    0. Download the demo as a .mov.
    Lots of software coming together here to make this all work.
    "curly"
  Yesterday's march and the Roosevelts
    Tell us what we can do to make a difference, and we'll do it.
    That's what the people of the United States must have been saying when Franklin Roosevelt took office in 1933, because when he led, the people took action, and things got better. What we were suffering from, under Hoover, was a lack of leadership at a time when we desperately needed it.
    Now people are looking for a message to take away from yesterday's huge march in Manhattan. It's the same message. We desperately want to make a difference. Look at what we can do without leadership. Imagine what we could accomplish if we elected someone to lead us who had vision, and could communicate that vision, in the form of something we can act on.
    And the amazing thing about the problem we face is that it will respond to mass action, in fact that is exactly what's needed.
    So that's the takeaway. If we had leadership, we would do better.
    PS: I highly recommend the Ken Burns series, The Roosevelts.
  Marching to the beat
    I caught up with this marching drum band toward the end of today's climate march in NYC. They were over the top great.
  The lost art of software testing
    I remember when I first encountered a software tester. I had just signed up with a publisher, and they employed testers, and one was assigned to my product. His first report was a total shocker. He found so many problems with my product. I thought some of them were really petty, some indicated he didn't understand the product, and in a very few cases he found real bugs.
    Over time, though, my point of view shifted. Petty problems or not, I wanted to know how my product worked for real people who weren't working on the code. Here was someone whose job it was to tell me. Things he didn't understand about the product were the most important for me, as the developer, to know about. Why? Because it's not about algorithms, or coding, these are the mistakes we made in the 70s, it's actually about creating functionality that real people can use, with minimum effort. It's all good data. And having a great tester on a team pretty much guarantees you won't ship garbage. (It can happen.)
    A tester approaches a product as a user would, and does the things that occur to users. All the time taking notes. After that, the tester goes through the docs, and tests them too. Do they accurately describe the product? In what ways did I get lost?
    A tester gives you all the information she has that could help you find the problem and fix it. And when you ask for more, the questions are answered clearly and directly.
    When I started a company, and had developers working for me, we always had testers on the shipping team. They didn't report to the developers, they reported through an entirely different structure, direct to me, the CEO. I wanted to hear the unvarnished truth about our products, and I wanted to be sure the developers were hearing it too.
    I think all developers go through the initial hatred of the tester, feeling unloved, and depressed because the labor of our love is so awfully buggy, broken and badly designed! Oh. But you eventually come to see that knowledge is power. It's where the we make shitty software idea came from. I get it. Our software sucks. Now let's make it suck a little less. ;-)
    What got me going on this thread was a comment under my narrative about my new iPhone 6, a few days ago. He complimented me for doing a good job. I said it's not unusual, it's the kind of thing any software tester could do. And then I realized that my blogging about products is very much like a tester's reports. And perhaps that's why the developers of the products I write about get so angry with me. "He should know that's not the way the product works! Oh that's just petty." See. But if you really embrace the experience of other people, people not schooled in the details of your implementation, you can learn how to make your work easier to absorb, and therefore more effective at what it's designed to do. This would be a better place for budding computer programmers to start. First, learn how to be a great user.
    PS: Google, would you please fix the clipboard in Chrome! Being forced to restart the browser just to link to something is such a huge step backwards and so un-weblike.
    PPS: Another idea, people who write about tech should also be schooled in software testing. A lot of the ridiculous ignorant ideas that take root in the press would be snuffed out. They listen to developers too much, as they tell you how great the products are. Sure it's interesting to hear the developers' stories, but it's equally important to hear what the products are like to use.
  iOS 8 is doing something with RSS
    The earlier version of iOS would display an error dialog if you click on an RSS feed in Safari. Now it offers to let you subscribe to it as a podcast feed? Very strange behavior. Is this accurate?
  Update on Chrome breakage
    My longtime tech buddy Chuck Shotton urged me to install the Canary version of Google Chrome, in the hope that the clipboard and debugger would work properly in this version.
    Sorry to report, the clipboard is broken in the same way it is in the 32-bit version, and the debugger is worse. I can't get it to set a breakpoint in the proper place, and when it stops, it doesn't stop anywhere near where I managed to set it. I'm debugging the way I used to debug 35 years ago, with printf statements (it's called console.log in JavaScript).
    Not that the other browsers are more reliable.
  RiverBrowser doing something new!
  Why reporters must not be cheerleaders
    Yesterday, Andy DeSoto, a graduate student at Washington University, who I know to be a serious person, asked how I reconcile my various opinions about Apple. I was in the middle of a fangasm, enjoying my first day with a great new Apple product, the iPhone 6. It really lifted my spirits in exactly the way I always hope these products will. As I said in the write-up, the experience made everything feel new and smart. Even a bike ride on 57th St in the middle of a business day felt special. That's something. And it was clearly coming through in the piece.
    Andy asked, if it's true that the Apple product is wonderful, what's wrong with reporters reacting as a fan would, by cheering at the press conference, in a standing ovation. Now, in the sobriety of the following morning, I'd like to answer Andy's question.
    #### I am a user, not a reporter
    First, I am not a reporter. So there's no hypocrisy in my writing glowingly about a product I just plunked down $800 plus tax for (I bought the unlocked version of the iPhone 6, with 64GB). There would be something wrong if I didn't love the product. That's a lot of money to spend for a dud.
    #### An analogy
    I recently watched an old episode of Law & Order where the accused murderer tried to excuse the act, by saying he did it so he could continue to send money to Israel. He was Jewish, as was his lawyer, and the judge. And the lawyer packed the jury with Jews, people he felt would be sympathetic to the argument. And the defense lawyer was very good. He had McCoy convinced he was about to lose the trial, even though the defendant was obviously guilty (he had more or less confessed).
    McCoy gave an incredibly good closing argument. He told the jurors that it was okay if they felt love for Israel, if they admired the defendant for supporting Israel, but this was America, and they were charged with deciding an American case, under American law. That the defendant, his wife, his attorney, and the judge were all obsessed with Israel was irrelevant to the case. They had to decide guilty or not guilty based on what happened in New York, not Tel Aviv. The jury came back with a guilty verdict. That's the right, satisfying outcome, no matter how you feel about the Jewish cause (and the case was much more compelling than I make it sound here).
    Another example. In the 90s, just as the web was taking off, Congress passed and the President signed a law that severely limited the First Amendment on the Internet, in the name of protecting children from pornography. Luckily the courts intervened, and declared the law unconstitutional. Don't they love children? Doesn't matter. The First Amendment clearly applies to the Internet, they said. And Congress can't do what they just did. Thank goodness they weren't fanboys for Internet Decency, as the President and Congress were.
    #### Why reporters can't be cheerleaders
    I think by now, I've made my case.
    If journalism is to mean anything, we need sober and dispassionate observers, who stay seated when everyone else is cheering. Why? Because that's what they're paid to do. We need to have the facts, not just the emotions. And we need every competitor to feel that in every product launch they have a chance to win, and for some (like Apple) they must feel that they can lose. When journalists are so obviously in the bag, standing up and giving a rousing ovation to what is a nice, but hardly revolutionary product, that's just plain wrong.
    It's also important because of the huge power a company like Apple has over our freedom. They decide whether or not applications can ship. And often those apps are tied to our ability to communicate and share information. If Apple decides to curtail our speech, don't you want reporters to be free to tell us that's what's happening? In the current system, I would place almost no trust in the reporters, given the way they report on Apple. It's a corrupt system, and the reporters are complicit.
    How does this relate to a customer enjoying the first day with a new Apple product? Not at all.
  New iPhone observations
    #### Beautiful video
      Here's a video of the same scene in the photo below. Really sweet.
    #### It takes a really nice photo
      Here's a picture of the fountain in Central Park.
      It has more pixels than that Flickr rendering. If you want to see them all, there's a menu in the lower right corner of the page that lets you access them.
    #### Image stabilization didn't work
      I did a Hyperlapse video of a ride through Central Park, and for some reason, the image stabilization didn't work. Not sure if this is a problem with the software or the camera.
      I have uploaded the video to YouTube. Again, the image quality is pretty incredible. But it might make you nauseous to view it. ;-)
    #### It makes everything feel new
      Hard to describe, but my desk, my house, the Mac, it all feels new.
      It's like a drug in a way. I can't account for it, but it's nice! :-)
    #### It feels big
      Right now I'm glad I didn't get the 6-Plus.
      The 6 feels very big. It's hard to reach some of the spots you have to reach. I imagine that the 6-Plus is a two-handed affair.
    #### T-Mobile question
      I have the iPhone 6 restored from backup and running.
      I got an unlocked T-Mobile phone. It appears to have a connection to T-Mobile, but I haven't set anything up with them yet.
      Trying to figure out if I should swap in the SIM from the old phone, or try somehow to activate it through software or their website.
      Hmmm.
      Update: I just swapped the SIM cards. Seemed the easiest thing to do.
  Facebook is not for news, yet
    A few weeks ago I was riding on the Hudson River bike path, when a man who I was getting ready to pass pulled to the left, waved his right hand, in a gesture that meant he wanted me to pass on the right. So I did, but as I passed, he swerved to the right and almost hit me. I had to stop. He said loudly, in a heavy French accent, "You must pass on the left." I said, "You told me to pass on the right," and I took off.
    I have no idea what he was thinking, but I can tell you this, he had no business telling me how to ride a bike in New York City. Maybe where he comes from, the signal he gave means "I will run into you if you pass on the right." But we aren't in France, or Montreal, or where ever. We are in NYC.
    The whole business about Facebook and Ferguson, to anyone who uses Facebook regularly, was nonsense, like the French bike rider in NYC. Facebook is not where you go for breaking news. They would like it to be that, but it is not. If you want fast news, go to Twitter, or turn on CNN. That's what those communities do.
    Even if you saw every update from all the people you follow on Facebook, in real time, you still wouldn't get breaking news. And I'm not sure what purpose that would serve. Facebook as it is now, is useful. If you want to understand you have to use it.
  It wouldn't kill Twitter to do text
    Twitter supports beautiful pictures and video. Each tweet comes with a huge amount of metadata. Would it spoil the magic of Twitter to accept a few paragraphs of text along with a tweet the same way it works for pictures and videos? Nicely tucked away, until the reader clicks on it. The same way a link works, but without the need for a new tab.
    It's such a simple and much-needed feature, if we want to create a network of peers, so that Twitter can stand alongside Facebook and the open web as places writers can post their ideas. This is a short post (the one you're reading right now). It wouldn't hurt anything if it were on Twitter in addition to being on my blog.
    Dick Costolo, let me buy you a cup of coffee sometime. Let's talk about this. It's important for the health of the web, and honestly important for your company too.
  Why we give it up for Apple
    A short while ago I lamented that I no longer lust for any material possessions as I did when I was a kid. I used to spend endless hours flipping through catalogs imagining how cool it would be to have this or that. Usually sports equipment or sound gear. This was before people had computers. But now I want for nothing.
    There was a period when I still didn't own everything Apple sells. But a few years ago I maxed that out, and now the only times I'm wanting, and it's a lovely feeling, is the week between pre-ordering a new gadget, and the time it arrives. This is the only time I get that child-like feeling of possession-lust. And we're in it now, and it's great.
  Riding south on the Hudson path
  The frenzy of online
    It's all become way too frenetic. Too much noise. Everything is an ad. No one reads anything. It's just a segue, a cue. Cut to commercial. I'm here! Listen! Hear me!
    The other night I was drinking beers, watching the Niners lose to the Bears, in a Mets-like way, when all of a sudden I was deluged under a wave of Scoble on Facebook. I had expressed a few ideas during the day that Scoble apparently was offended by, even though imho he misunderstood the point of each of them. Take one example. I pointed to a Seth Godin piece that I loved that said if you give up your keyboard you give up your power. He wasn't saying that virtual keyboards are no good. Though that's how Scoble (and honestly quite a few others) responded. He was saying (to me) let's not turn the Internet into another television. Not that TV doesn't have its place. I like a football game on a Sunday evening. Especially at a new stadium in my former hometown. And the Niners, the only football team I love. Even though Bill Walsh, Jerry Rice and Joe Montana are long-gone from the franchise.
    Anyway, I didn't acquiesce to Scoble's viewpoint. I didn't really argue either. I'm coming to see Facebook as a reincarnation of the bulletin-board culture I was part of in the early 80s. I don't really care for online arguments. I'm always hoping to find someone with a lantern, to show me the way to something delicious or interesting. Someone who misunderstands the premise of an interesting post is not itself interesting to me.
    I just wanted to kibitz a little on Twitter and Facebook while slowly getting drunk watching the Niners debacle, when I got hit by the flood of Scoble. I don't know exactly what he did, but I didn't want it. So I blocked him. This is what I do on Twitter when people act like dicks. It worked. The Scoble flood stopped. But that wasn't the end of it.
    Whatever. I've unfollowed a number of people on Facebook who are real-life friends who I'd rather not have unfollowed, but I had become part of some weird pseudo business model of theirs. Getting tagged in messages only to find out there was nothing there for me or about me. Someone saying "I wonder what my friend Dave Winer thinks about this." Oh geez. So I unfollow them and try to remember to enter their name in the search box. And if it persists, I block them. I've set my tolerance level relatively low on this kind of bullshit.
    This isn't communication, or sharing. It's growing more and more frenetic every day, it seems. And more pointless. I want a network that sheds light on things, not calls attention to nothing.
  Chrome clipboard and debugger breakage
    Lately I've been having huge problems with the clipboard and the debugger.
    1. The clipboard just stops working. Copy does nothing. Forcing the browser to quit and relaunch clears the problem, but it's just a matter of time before it breaks again.
    2. Another one, that's really impacting my programming work, is setting breakpoints in the debugger. I click on a location but another location highlights. Or I set a breakpoint, and it stops somewhere else. I totally depend on the debugger for validating my code.
    Chrome version 37.0.2062.120. Mac OS 10.8.2.
    #### Am I the only one?
    I've generally not been writing about these problems, but finally decided this is too much. I need to get some input from other developers. Am I the only one seeing these problems? I don't want to join a developer list for Chrome. I would be happy with a browser that worked and never updated.
  One way I keep the trolls at bay
    The other day I found myself posting something to Facebook that I would never post on Twitter. The reason, because abusive responses would come immediately on Twitter, and to be honest, they hurt, so I leave Twitter out of the mix for these kinds of messages.
    I know it's fucked up, because I know people through Twitter who aren't connected on Facebook who would likely get some comfort to know that other people see the same thing they do.
    I wrote recently about a new level of spam, that shows up in real life too. Trollish behavior can only really happen where you're confined to a small space with no way to leave. Otherwise, just go. Maybe Facebook works a little better at roping off the abuse. Or maybe the trolls haven't found me there yet.
    Since this is the topic du jour, and it's a good one, I thought I'd make a small contribution.
  What should TAG Heuer do?
    Over the weekend news that TAG Heuer, the famous watch company, about what they play to do re Apple Watch. There weren't any specifics, other than they don't plan to roll over for Apple the way others have, notably Nikon and Canon in digital cameras, Blackberry in smart phones, Windows in operating systems.
    #### Glad to hear it
    Then I wondered what they would do? Would they make a mistake like the one Canon made, and leave out a crucial feature? Canon may have taken better pictures, but if you look at the steps a person goes through to upload a picture, if there's good communication built into the camera, you can shorten the process significantly. And that's what technology integration is all about. How effortless can you make it to do something that lots of people want to do, something compelling.
    They have to offer something elegant and simple, and not in any way compromise the value of their product. TAG Heuer, like all high end watches, sells style, feel, look, image. If they release an even slightly flawed product they'll not only not meet Apple in the market, but they'll tarnish their already famous-for-quality product.
    #### Criteria
    1. The new TAG Heuer watch must look like the original. It's already perfect. Don't screw with perfection.
    2. They should not try to make their watch run an operating system with a user interface. Apple has a multi-decade head start here. The only other choice is to use Android, which while popular, has a schlocky feel that's not compatible with the TAG Heuer brand.
    3. They need to zig to Apple's zag. Apple is going to bring along their entire developer community. Which means their watch has to have a complex UI so users can access a lot of different apps. Instead focus. Do one thing exceptionally and provably well.
    4. Don't put the OS on the watch. Instead, add a hardware interface, and connect via Bluetooth, to some really smooth proprietary software that runs on Android, iOS and desktop operating systems.
    4. What should it do? Not very much. But something a significant number of people want to do.
    #### Punchline
    I'd either buy or license technology from FitBit or Jawbone.
    Build it into a new low-end TAG Heuer watch.
    Do it carefully, with excellent design throughout. The new packaging should be better and simpler and more elegant than Apple's. That's the mistake all of Apple's vanquished competitors made, thinking that the dressing was not important. It really is.
    #### Why FitBit?
    The hard stuff is already developed, the human interface.
    There's a market for it. People love their FitBits. They talk about them all the time. It's a possible successor to Apple, esp given that the market that Apple is entering barely exists.
    #### What Apple should do
    Buy out FitBit and Jawbone if they think it would pass an antitrust test (it shouldn't) so they aren't available for a watch company to merge with.
  What do nice Internet users do?
    1. They comment on other people's posts.
    2. They like other people's posts.
    3. They share them.
    4. They don't always talk about themselves.
    5. They have kind words for other people.
    6. They help other people without expecting anything in return.
    7. Even so, they reciprocate when people help them out.
    8. They add positive energy to the net.
    9. They always try to see things from other people's point of view.
    10. They genuinely listen.
    11. They stand up for people who are being hunted.
    12. They read posts before responding to them.
  I'm a Narrate Your Work guy
    When I started blogging I wanted to create a record of my ideas, and my work, so I could go back later and learn from what I got right and wrong.
    These days I'm confused about where and how to narrate. Twitter is no good, because there's no easy way to find old ideas, and almost anything worth explaining requires more than 140 characters. It's hard to find stuff written years ago on my blog but with the help of a search engine I'm able to piece things together somewhat.
    Facebook doesn't have the 140 character limit, but it's just as hard to find old stuff there. However with Facebook, I have an editor with a History menu. So things I want to be able to go back to quickly I use that editor for. But it only holds the last 25 items. They scroll off.
    I have a blog, and use it, for big ideas, and I try to use it for small ones too. That's why I did the noteblog stuff earlier this year. But I tend to post noteblog-like things more to Facebook now.
    I don't have a place to liveblog. I'm still thinking about how I want to do that.
    Same with listicles. Yes, I want to do them too, and I want to provide ordinary users a way to do that, as with everything I do in content, at least eventually.
    I have a card editor, and a tweet chopper. I have a mailbox-style reader for Twitter, so I can monitor people I want to keep an eye on. Useful.
    But I'm very much scattered. Looking for a way to bring it all together in one place and distribute things where I want them to go.
    I reallllly resent places that suck in content without allowing it to hook into my content system. I'm trying to figure a way to force them to open up or replace them with something that's open to begin with. When I see people I respect from the open world post on such places I wonder what the hell they're thinking. ;-)
    Anyway Narrate My Work is a frenzy now. I want it to calm the cuss down.
  A store I'd like someone to operate
    Suppose I have a great domain name. I'm only using two or three sub-domains myself. I'd be happy to sell sub-domains to other people, for a price, of course.
    I don't have the interest or ability to operate the store. However, if someone else is willing to operate it, I'll provide a domain name, and I'll market the domain as something other people can buy sub-domains on.
    You can have 30% of the revenue I generate in exchange for operating my store.
    #### How it's implemented
    I buy the domain on a service like Hover or GoDaddy or Google's new domain service. Amazon just opened one up too.
    I create an account on your service. You operate the DNS for the domain. I set it up so the names point to your DNS server.
    There's now a "store" on your site for this domain. I can edit the text of of the home page, kind of like a Kickstarter page. I tell the story of the domain. Point to some of the other sites that use it. Say what I think it means, and the role I plan to play in it.
    Anyone else can buy a sub-domain. They pay $1 a year for it (or whatever price I set, which could fluctuate). My customers can edit a landing page, or point the sub-domain to another server. Give me the same kinds of prefs that I have for a mail list on Google Groups. It can be public or require my permission to buy a sub, or whatever people can think of. Maybe it's only open to people whose last name is Smith.
    #### Caveat
    The important thing is that I can move the whole domain to another service at any time, automatically. The list of names that are registered under my domain must be available in a text-based format. Transferring should be almost as easy as entering new values for name servers in a web form.
    Each purchaser of a sub-domain is free to re-locate any time they want. Zero lock-in anywhere. As is the tradition in DNS.
    But if you operate a good service, this is the kind of thing people are likely to want to set and forget. It's an annuity. But not without risk (as it should be).
    This is going to be a big business. You can be the founder of it. I want to be a customer.
  How Radio3 helps the open web
    In yesterday's post I said it's great that the users care about the open "flat" net. This begs the question, if you care, what can you do?
    #### What can you do?
    1. Use a tool like "Radio3", which can post to the corporate networks as well as to the open Internet. This way we get a chance to use your links to bootstrap new open networks. You sacrifice nothing, your posts still go to your current subscribers. And independent developers, and startups can try out new ideas. Your tweets and posts can fuel innovation.
    1. Write your blog posts in places where you control the domain name of your site. If you can't put your name on your content, don't use it. That means you can't move it if you don't like what your host is doing with your words.
    1. If a blogging platform won't let you post from outside through an API, don't use it.
    2. Start thinking about running your own news service, combining content from the feeds of people whose links you find valuable. That's why item #1 is so important, so that we all have access to each others' links.
    #### Think of the web as an ecosystem
    Plant a tree, drive an energy efficient car, adopt a rescue pet, don't smoke. These are the kinds of things we do to keep the planet and our bodies healthy. The web needs your help too. It's not hard, and it's fun to work with other people, and it either costs nothing or very little.
    If you've profited from the open web, put back a portion of your earnings to make sure it's here for future generations.
  It's great that users care now
    There was a time not long ago when developers would say "But it's better if it's open!" and users, even influential ones, would say that's something you idealists care about, we're okay with what we get on Twitter. Now the users are sounding more like us, as they start to understand the importance of having control over what comes to them, and who sees what they write. For a sampling, read the quotes in this NY Times piece, posted Wednesday.
    But making Facebook the issue is still imho missing the point. Facebook is programming the flow because that's what Facebook does. Wanting it to be otherwise would be like wishing that CNN didn't have commercials. Hey these days they have commercials at baseball games, when you paid for the ticket! Commercials are everywhere. And "they" decide what you see. (At the last Mets game I went to, they showed a Dunkin Donuts commercial between innings instead of a replay of a fantastic double steal that happened in the previous inning. That's how bad the commercial programming situation has become.)
    In TV news, there's supposed to be a Chinese wall separating the news from advertising. I think we all know that these days the wall is largely gone, and that what you're seeing on TV news these days is heavily commercial.
    The Internet has different economics than TV. There isn't a need for advertisers to act as intermediaries. But when you choose to see your news filtered by Facebook or Twitter, you may get something good, but it will be programmed. And unlike TV news, they never promised or even implied there would be a Chinese wall. This is hard for a lot of non-technical people to understand, I guess, but I don't know why. Did you think Exxon would proactively prevent oil spills, or the banks would pay back all the people they cheated in the bank bust of 2008 because it's the right thing to do? Why do you infer idealism for the owners of social networks? They're businesses, run like businesses, with shareholders who would fire management at the first sign of softness. The idealism, the fairness, you project onto the people who designed these systems is one they've never claimed.
    We still have to create the ideal news system, we don't have it yet, that's what the users are starting to realize, I think. As developers, we know a lot more about it now than we did ten years ago. And we also know how to bootstrap a new network using the existing networks. The economics of the net are so different from broadcast, that it actually is possible to solve this problem. We know how to do it.
    There are so many problems we can't easily solve, like climate change, or preventing another banking meltdown. This however isn't one of them. All we have to do to get to the promised land is listen to each other. But that seems to be an insurmountable hurdle.
  Riding down the Hudson
  Like screaming into a big barrel
    Communicating these days is like yelling into a big barrel that amplifies your voice. But it's frustrating, because while your voice is really loud, no one is listening. Because everyone else is doing it, all the time.
    #### You can't give it away
    I tried over the last few days to give a car away to charity. I entered a web form, it seemed very competent, so by the time I hit the final Submit, I felt good about the gift. But immediately after I got an email with all the things they wanted me to do to complete the transaction, some raised huge flags, and some directly contradicted the advice of various websites, including Consumer Reports, which I totally trust.
    I asked them to call me. They didn't. I did finally get a call this morning, two days later, saying they went to pick the car up and couldn't do it because I wasn't there. Okay, that was one of the reasons I wanted to communicate with them. But it was just one.
    And remember, I was trying to give them a car. For free. If you can't get someone's attention then, when can you?
    #### How can this work?
    This is just the way it works these days. It's normal. I have a dozen experiences like that every day. I write a one line email and the response comes back that indicates the person didn't read that one line. How much more concise can one be?
    How can we do business this way? How can we live this way?
    #### Probably won't get better
    I just re-watched the great Connections series with James Burke. If you want to know how civilization was built, you should watch it. It's not as simple as you imagine. Anyway in the last episode, which was recorded in 1979, he talks about how fast life is, and how it's only going to get worse. How are we going to adapt, he wants to know. He's a very smart man. He asked the right question. We never came up with an answer.
  Thanks Macworld!
    Today Macworld Magazine officially ended, after a 30-year run.
    I just want to take a moment to show gratitude for the spirit of the early days of the Mac, much of which we invested in Macworld. I remember seeing the lines for software at ComputerWare in Palo Alto, thinking this could work. We could have a community of software-makers and users who loved each other. We could make tools for them, and they would tell their friends.
    The focal points for the then-young industry were the print publications: Macworld, MacUser and MacWEEK, all of which are gone now. Dave Bunnell, Dan Farber, Dave Ushijima, Steven Levy believed in what we were doing, I couldn't believe they did, and they reported on our accomplishments, and reviewed our products, not always favorably, of course.
    Some us are gone now, those of us who remain have gray hair, and fond memories. Macworld was good to us. Just wanted to say thanks! :-)
  Which Markdown do you use?
    A question for developers.
    I'm interested in learning which versions of Markdown people are using in their apps that support Markdown. I should have asked this question before. It'll help us understand the state of Markdown now.
    I'll kick off the thread with a comment about Fargo's use of Markdown.
  Knight library challenge
    The Knight Foundation just posted a new challenge. This time they're looking for ideas about what libraries can do to help their community. Here's what I wrote.
    #### Future-safe communities
    Libraries should maintain the digital archive for their community.
    Anything written on the web, by a member of their community, or about their community, should be part of the archive.
    The question it should answer is this: What happened in this community in this period of time?
    I've written a lot about this, under the heading of "future-safe archives." It's a real problem for the web. We are not creating anything like a permanent record.
    This is probably the first piece.
  Apple Pay is the big deal
    Some thoughts about yesterday's Apple announcements.
    First a message to the Apple fanboys, who obviously crave attention. The reason we criticize your beloved Apple is to learn and to share ideas. I love to go back and read things I wrote about previous product intros from Apple and others, especially when I was wrong, to learn about my intuition and judgement. I get better at this each time, and make better product decisions of my own. And if you don't like it, write your own blog post! :-)
    #### Apple Watch is zzzz
    The Apple Watch was basically paying a debt, and it's not a product Steve Jobs would have shipped. The debt is that the new Apple management has to show investors that they can ship something new. It probably indicates that they don't have anything better in the pipe, and that's fine. It could be at this point in history there aren't any new devices that make sense. I find myself with a glut of devices, my desk drawer is full of them. That expresses my wish that there's something new I can buy that'll be as interesting as the first smart phones (and Apple's wasn't my first, or even the most exciting, though it is what I use now).
    If Apple wanted to ship a product that is as incredibly potent as the iPod was, they should disrupt something that doesn't want to be disrupted, but desperately needs it. If Apple had a device that could create journalism that was exciting, individualistic, intelligent, thought-provoking, to compete with the dead-eyes stuff that passes for journalism, then they'd have an iPod-like product that said to the music industry, which was in a similar place in 2001, to get the fuck out of the way. Apple said each song costs $0.99. No more albums. We are your distribution, and by the way fuck off. A few years later all the record stores were gone and the power in music had shifted from Hollywood to Cupertino.
    That isn't really something a company can do -- it's something Steve Jobs could do, because the man had chutzpah, and he was hugely smart, and had a sense that life was too short to waste trying to make idiots happy.
    #### Apple is now a bank
    The way we pay for stuff today is as archaic as the way we bought music before Napster and the iPod. A few years ago, it was clear that all the big tech companies were going to become banks. What else could they possibly do with the piles of cash they were accumulating? They're going to lend it to us, and we're going to pay them interest. Over time, the fact that they make hardware or support customers, or have retail stores, will be interesting anachronistic sidelines. Apple, Amazon and Google investors will judge their companies on how well they work as financial institutions. It's something investors understand, and the money you make in finance comes without the headaches of having to actually make anything.
    Apple has hundreds of millions of credit card numbers, and they'll be useful until they completely replace the banks. Apple is bigger than any of them, and has bank-sized financial resources. And the way we pay for stuff today with little plastic cards, some with chips on them, is backwards. The chips in our phones are much more capable. And putting them on our wrist in a big form factor isn't interesting. They will be embedded in our keychain next, and then in our actual bodies. It won't be much longer before we are at least part computer.
    Anyway, Apple will be a much better bank than BofA, Citibank or Chase. Consumers will have more rights from Apple than we were given by the bankers and their Washington cronies. Apple still is a fucked up mega-corporation, but they don't have any reason not to treat us a little better than the guys they're replacing. It'll make for the feel-good Christmas commercial, this year and every year from now on.
    #### Bigger iPhones
    Yeah, no surprise. They're iPhones. We know exactly what they are.
  Another level of spam
    There's a difference between seeing an ad on a website, and an audible ad that starts playing an hour after you visited, when it's among 20 hidden tabs in one of the windows you opened on a search for something, and long forgot about. And it starts playing during a phone conversation.
    Or, sitting on a NYC subway and having a performer of some kind come into the car and play, loudly, in front of you. With the doors closed so you can't escape. While you were in the middle of reading something. It happens all the time now. Tourists love it, that's why it keeps happening. The locals have to live with it, and after the thirtieth time, it's not even remotely sympathetic. You're a captive non-volunteer for this random person's business model. Life imitating the Internet.
    Or when a friend on Facebook decides you are a "target" for repeated news about a product you aren't interested in. There are some circumstances, for the reader, for your friend, where The Algorithm that's so despised is doing its job. But the friend seems to find a way around it, and the spam resumes.
    In the last case, there is an exit, but it's one your friends don't want to take -- blocking you. So when you aggressively spam your friends, you actually hurt your cause, not help it, because eventually the frustration gets too great, and you do block them. Without any guilt whatsoever.
    Spam is annoying. Whatever this kind of spam is called it's infuriating.
  So I'm siding with Gruber
    I posted a link on Facebook to a section of a Reddit discussion about the future of Markdown. In that thread, a programmer laments that there is no formal grammar for Markdown. This was totally predictable. Once the format is in play, the extent to which theorists will want to debate it is almost boundless. By the time it's over, Markdown will be Lisp. Maybe that should be a corollary for Godwin's Law, except about format wars on the Internet.
    Dan Lyons, tech writer who was Fake Steve Jobs and most recently a writer for Season 2 of the HBO show Silicon Valley, asked if I was siding with Gruber. I wrote a string of Andreessen-like comments (only in format, not in substance) and thought it would be good to put them here verbatim.
    #### Dan Lyons: So you are siding with Gruber?
    Yes, completely.
    Really what I'm doing is siding with Markdown.
    We owe a debt of gratitude to Gruber, for creating Markdown and doing such a great job of getting it established.
    Now it is what it is. A bunch of programmers fighting over who gets to be the Holy Father of Markdown is only going to create confusion, it won't actually change what Markdown *is*.
    Programmers always underestimate deployment, and think they can wave a magic wand and get everyone to upgrade.
    It's actually nothing like that. Once the investment is made, and years have gone by, no one wants to go back and dig out old infrastructure and replace it with something else. Esp when there's doubtful improvement.
    There are still water pipes running under the streets of NYC that were put here by the Dutch (I might be exaggerating, but not by much).
    Markdown is like that. Installed.
    For better or worse.
    Even huge companies like Microsoft, who can hire consultants and analysts, make these kinds of mistakes.
    You know the people who wanted to changed RSS blamed me for not being willing to bend. I kept telling them it isn't me, go try to convince eveyrone who's got RSS generators or readers that they need to change everything. If you can do that, then you can have your way. I have nothing to do with it.
    Except that I happened to be one of the people with generators and readers of RSS, and the last thing I wanted to do is rip up the pavement and start over just cause some people on a mail list thought there was a "better" way to do it.
    Once they finished with their rewrite, it was remarkably like the thing they were trying to replace.
    Except with different names for the same things. BFD.
  I write apps in JavaScript that run in the browser
    Brent Simmons is doing a survey of opinion on how people develop Internet apps these days. It's been invaluable, even though I don't understand most of what people are saying. I guess that's because today there are so many different competing models for development. I want to add to the discussion by telling how I do it these days.
    #### How I do it these days
    When I want to write something new, I open up my editor, and enter the address of a folder in one of my S3 buckets. Underneath that I paste in the shell of an HTML page, which I have ready to insert with a single choice from my editor's Bookmarks menu.
    I go to the <script> section and start writing routines. Just as if I were going to run it from my desktop, which in a very real sense I am. It's just that today my desktop exists mostly in my mind. Which is (actually) where it always has been. The icons they put on the desktop of the Mac are just to give you something to hook into, intellectually. You just need a place to store stuff and that includes data and code. Same old same old.
    I've been doing this for two years, and I keep raising the level of my work environment. I recently got to the point where saving data globally for a user is every bit as easy as it ever was to save data locally on the users' hard disk. So my model really is indistinguishable from the way we used to develop desktop apps. Except now my apps run in the browser, which means they run anywhere I can get at them through the web. On any of my devices. And I use that fact all the time.
    What else to say? JavaScript is in every way a first class development language like C. I wouldn't do development any other way these days.
    I do also write server apps, I have to, sometimes, but only when the APIs I use require me to. A couple of services stand out in not in any way making me do that: 1. Dropbox and 2. Facebook. Between the two Facebook's API is the simpler, and yet it's incredibly powerful. If you want an example of how easy it can be, spend a couple of days learning how to post a Hello World item to your own timeline on Facebook. Actually if you're programming in JavaScript in the browser, I'd be surprised if it took you more than an hour to get it going.
    PS: I wrote this post in "Fargo" which is an app that runs in the browser. It has no server. All the storage is in Dropbox. Runs great.
    #### Update -- Brent's post
    Brent Simmons has posted a summary and asks a question. "I don’t think Dave is using any of the frameworks like Backbone, Ember, or Angular. (jQuery maybe? I don’t know.) He does use Bootstrap, I believe."
    I use Bootstrap, jQuery and Font Awesome in all my apps.
    Here's what's in my "basicIncludes" macro. This is code I call like built-in verbs in Frontier.
    BTW, I have a macro language. It's been a long time since I had one of those in my code environment. I use it judiciously, carefully. One of the lessons I learned at UserLand is not to move your toolkit too quickly, or you end up living with your mistakes, basically forever.
  Email to Gruber
    This started out as an email to John Gruber, the originator and community leader of Markdown, but then I thought it would be good to make it public. So here it is.
    John, the forkers seem to feel they've conceded enough by changing the name to "Common Markdown." What if they don't back down?
    #### Step around the problem?
    I think the problem could be sent to the future by choosing a codename for the project now, something like Venice, Sundance or Toronto.
    When it reaches completion, there can be an open discussion among all interested parties about whether it should be called Markdown, with the final call made by Gruber.
    I'm pretty sure by then it will be very famous using its codename, and we will have stepped around the problem.
    But what if they don't back down?
    #### Markdown 2.0?
    John, you have to decide how much you care. If you do care, then you probably should do Markdown 2.0. Fully backward compatible. Get some powerful allies. That's pretty much what I did with "RSS", and it stopped the debates.
    Then we added a new application for RSS, they totally didn't see it coming, and didn't understand it when it came out. That ended all the problems. By 2004, four years after the fork, it was all put back together, the format was frozen, we had an extension protocol so the community could move forward.
    It wasn't all great, because we couldn't add the features we needed to let RSS do what Twitter does (one-click subscription was the big thing) so RSS basically became infrastructure, which isn't terrible for an XML-based format. Kind of what's it's destiny probably always was.
    But it was a shitty way to spend four years. Probably it was a shitty experience for everyone involved. But in the end we got a useful format, and a bunch of great stuff happened that couldn't have happened otherwise.
    #### Community-building for Markdown
    The website could be much nicer, please! How about dark characters on a light background? How about bigger type? Two very quick simple upgrades that would probably increase user happiness by 100 percent. Please! :-)
    Also give people a way to contribute creative juice to the success of the Markdown platform. With Bootstrap that was themes. Github has repositories. WordPress has plugins. RSS of course has feeds. Every one of these things, while not in any way interfering with the solidity of the core, adds value to the platform, and strength to the community.
    I wrote a blog post when I started the integration of Markdown with "Fargo", asking for ideas on how expand and collapse should work in Markdown. Perhaps that's your new application. I would still love to explore this idea.
    #### Markdown != RSS
    I don't see this as exactly as parallel to the experience with "RSS", btw. Markdown is in a much stronger position than RSS was when the RDF fork happened. RSS had existed for three years at that point, and they weren't hugely productive. It was still mostly potential and quite vulnerable. Markdown has been around ten years, without any controversy (at least that I've been aware of). So this fork has a long way to go before it can legitimately claim to be The One True Markdown.
    #### Big picture
    It's sad that this has to happen again. It's not just that it hurts Markdown, and in the past hurt RSS, but it makes every new format vulnerable to hijacking by big tech companies. And if that happens too early, that means we can't make any progress.
  Let Markdown be Markdown
    The Rolling Stones openly copied American blues musicians.
    But they came up with their own name, which left them free to develop their own style, following whatever direction their art pulled them in.
    And in 1981, the Rolling Stones got together with Muddy Waters to perform the blues classic Please Don't Go. What a thrill to see Mick Jagger, Keith Richards, Ron Wood paying respect to Muddy Waters. How awkward it would have been if they all had the same name.
    Whatever comes after Markdown should be as respectful as the Rolling Stones were to Muddy Waters. It seems so simple.
    #### Update
    I posted a comment on Jeff Atwood's post.
    Follow-up post: Email to Gruber.
  How popular will Facebook's API be?
    Back when we started podcasting, Doc Searls or Rex Hammock, or maybe both of them, looked up the word on Google, and made note of the number of hits, thinking that someday there would be millions. Sometimes you get a feeling something is going to be big. Podcasting was of course one of those things.
    Here's a question like that for you to think about.
    Two years from now, what percentage of the posts on Facebook will come through the API vs being entered directly in the Facebook app or through the website?
    It'll be a function of two things: 1. How much functionality shows through the Facebook API. 2. How much interest there is among developers.
    Without #1 there won't be much #2. I know some pundits think developers won't trust Facebook (I've heard them say this privately). I think developers are fools for fresh new territory to explore, even if they are vulnerable when they do it. Trust doesn't really enter into it. We'll "trust" Facebook because the idea is so juicy. Developers are on a perpetual trail of tears. But *sometimes* we do get to have some fun.
    Anyway I think the number will be large. I think the Facebook people are very excited about what can happen with more power showing through the API. And the API is already quite good and easy to understand, and works wonderfully with browser-based JavaScript apps, as well as or better than Dropbox.
    So I'm going to say: 40% after two years, with the line pointing upward toward 80% in five. And part of me thinks that's conservative. ;-)
  Words I say to myself as I program
    Do you ever listen to yourself as you program, I mean listen to the words and phrases you say, to yourself, as you're working? I've been aware that I do this, for years -- but only recently been listing them. Here's what I have so far.
    1. Thank you or thanks. When I do a set of steps, run it, and it works, I generally say thanks as I move on to the next step.
    2. Another word I say when something works is "Bing!" -- a happy, self-impressed version of "Thank you." This predates the Microsoft search engine. In fact I used to put that expression on posts on Scripting News, and Microsoft people read it. Never mind. They're welcome to use it. Public domain. ;-)
    3. This is one I've started saying recently: "Whenever you're ready." I say it when something I just caused to happen is taking longer than I think it should. Sometimes these things never happen. You end up moving on before it happens, going to dig in to learn what caused my app to fall over and die.
    4. This one is classic. I used to say Ptahhhhh! in place of Bing! or Thanks! I never understood where it came from till one day I was staring at a bit of code that didn't work (you end up doing this a lot, ask anyone) and noticed:
    var pta = html.getPageTableAddress ();
    This was a very common bit of code that appears at the top of any routine that's responding to a request over the web. It's getting the globals for the request. My subconscious was watching, probably had no idea what "pta" means, but it wanted to create a connection so it caused me to say Ptahhh! in my brain.
  RSS ties all my stuff together
    Just beneath the surface...
    Every component and tool I make connects to all the others through "RSS".
    There's an invisible content network under all these snacks and tools.
    For example, here's the RSS feed for my Radio3 linkflow.
      http://radio3.io/users/davewiner/rss.xml
    Here's the RSS feed for my Little Cards.
      http://littlecardeditor.com/users/davewiner/rss.xml
    For Scripting News.
      http://scripting.com/rss.xml
    If you're curious and technically inclined there's lots of interesting stuff in those feeds.
    And that's just the start. I have a few more RSS tricks and snacks coming.
    Basically everything I do, eventually, has a feed.
    PS: The file format for Fargo is an open format too, called OPML. It's also the format used to share subscription lists for feeds. OPML is a magic format. And in the new extension I have created for RSS, you can include a bit of OPML in an item. This is going to expand our horizons in some interesting ways, imho.
  Why I love programming
    1. I love puzzles.
    2. I love Rube Goldberg contraptions.
    3. I love solving problems (I have an inner-Columbo).
    4. People are the biggest piece of the puzzle (again Columbo).
    5. It teaches me about myself and my limited vision and imagination (if I had unlimited vision and imagination, I would never program a bug, and if I did it would take me 0 seconds to find it).
    6. I yearn to work together with great minds. Programming gives me that, when I use someone's API. And when the API anticipates my needs, and is instantly understandable, I feel the soul of another artist is present. I imagine this is how musicians feel when they play another musician's song or symphony.
    I'm sure there's more to it. But today I'm working on a "lite" problem, and I'll figure it out, but right now I'm enjoying the fact that I don't get it. ;-)
    Back to work Dave!
  Meryl Streep's anthem
    The anthem
      "I no longer have patience for certain things, not because I’ve become arrogant, but simply because I reached a point in my life where I do not want to waste more time with what displeases me or hurts me. I have no patience for cynicism, excessive criticism and demands of any nature. I lost the will to please those who do not like me, to love those who do not love me and to smile at those who do not want to smile at me. I no longer spend a single minute on those who lie or want to manipulate. I decided not to coexist anymore with pretense, hypocrisy, dishonesty and cheap praise. I do not tolerate selective erudition nor academic arrogance. I do not adjust either to popular gossiping. I hate conflict and comparisons. I believe in a world of opposites and that’s why I avoid people with rigid and inflexible personalities. In friendship I dislike the lack of loyalty and betrayal. I do not get along with those who do not know how to give a compliment or a word of encouragement. Exaggerations bore me and I have difficulty accepting those who do not like animals. And on top of everything I have no patience for anyone who does not deserve my patience."
    Online rules
      I like it as "rules of the road" for online discourse. When a troll posts something to your mail list and then complains that you're censoring him when he gets moderated, think of what Meryl Streep says. Because the truth is no one has time to deal with hostility. We all know when people are standing in our way. Just step around them and ignore their complaints. They're not trying to help.
  Another bike movie in Hyperlapse
    This time south on the Hudson River bike path, going downtown from the mid-50s to just below Houston St. It was bright sunshine and very hot. Parts of the movie are very white! :-(
  Mail list for Radio3 users
    I started a mail list for Radio3 users.
    https://groups.google.com/forum/#!forum/radio3
    If you're interested in being among the first users of this new cross-platform linkblogging tool, please join the list.
    I'll start posting links to docs, probably tomorrow morning.
    Here we go! :-)
  Facebook's algorithm isn't news
    I haven't been using Facebook since the beginning, so I can't tell when they added the algorithm. My guess is that when they got the news feed, it had an algorithm. It was certainly there in January 2012 when I wrote about it in this piece:
    Another example to consider is Facebook. No one outside Facebook understands how their algorithm works. How do they decide which stories you'll see and which aren't important enough for you? I suspect it has something to do with what will make them money, both short-term and long-term. How they decide is completely opaque.
    Facebook's algorithm is not news. And it's not bad. Truth is every way of accessing the news has an algorithm. Before the Internet, what was on the front page of the NYT was determined by a human-implemented algorithm, that was in no way transparent. We had to trust the editors of the paper the same way users of Facebook trust them.
    #### No algorithm is an algorithm
    I use a river of news to read the sources I consider interesting and/or authoritative. There the algorithm is simple reverse chronology. I suspect this is the algorithm most news users want. No filtering, no deciding what's important. Just the news as it comes in. The software for this is open source, is easy for anyone with a bit of programming experience to set up. They should run this at the Guardian and Columbia University. Setting up a river should be required for any journalism student today, imho.
    But the river is an algorithm too, a simple one. Who decides what feeds go into the river? I do, no one else. If you read my river, you have to trust me to have put the "right" sources into the mix.
    #### Is Facebook really for news?
    Also, Facebook has never claimed, as far as I know, that it's a good place to go to keep up on the news. I don't think that will always be true. But complaining how Facebook determines what's news is not that different from complaining about how your barber or hair stylist does it. What you're getting is what your friends think is important, mixed with what a for-profit company thinks is.
    #### The reporters were lazy
    The thing that's absolutely infuriating is that the reporters and journalism professors who complain, people who are supposed to be watching this for us, weren't paying attention. They invite Dick Costolo to keynote their conferences, to tell them how wonderful their futures were, to tell them what they wanted to hear, of course. He never said he wouldn't compete. If you go back and read his words carefully, he always had an out. Things like "It's not in our interest to compete," or "we have no intention, at this time, to compete."
    I know what it's like to hear what you want because I'm a software developer who has listened to platform vendor pitches hoping, believing, desperately they didn't really want to eat my lunch. But over time I've learned they always do want it and eventually try to take it. The good news is they don't always succeed.
    #### Twitter is competition for the news industry
    The news industry should have seen Twitter for what it was, competition. And reacted the way they do to competitors -- compete! There should have been a NY Times river, a Guardian river, a CNN one, a Tow Center river. Or maybe they should have done something like Hulu where they band together and compete. Why didn't Rupert Murdoch see this coming? Did he think he'd be able to buy Twitter? Maybe he can. You, reporters, and thought leaders, should have been thinking this way. If you read my blog over the years, you would have.
    I have no sympathy for sour grapes at this time. The news industry is changing rapidly, in ways that must be very disconcerting to reporters and professors. But the change was gradual, and foreseeable. Now the tech industry controls what we see. We have to do the best we can with what we have. And don't think there's anything you can do about the algorithms, because there isn't. They have always been there, and always will.
    Bottom line: quit complaining, get off your butts, compete.
October 2014
  Getting Hello Node-Webkit to work
    I've tried five different ways to get started with Node-Webkit, but haven't gotten the hello world app to work yet. I really want to get going with this, so I thought I'd just detail the steps I took, and provide the actual example app, and maybe someone else will tell me what I'm doing wrong. Thanks in advance. ;-)
    These are the instructions I was following in this narrative.
    1. I am running Mac OS X 10.8.2.
    2. Downloaded the 64-bit binary from the GitHub site.
    3. Opened the zip file with the Mac's Archive Utility. Renamed the folder to nw.
    4. Created a new folder called myNodeWebkitApps, and copied the nw folder into it.
    5. Created a new Hello World folder, containing two files: package.json and index.html.
    6. Using the Finder right-click menu, I selected both files, and created a zip archive containing both files, but not the containing folder. I renamed the file app.nw.
    7. I opened the node-webkit app. Noted that the file type or app.nw changed, as the docs said it would.
    8. I double-clicked on app.nw. I do not see the Hello World message, as predicted by the docs. I just see the default window display. Screen shot.
    There don't appear to be any debugging commands I can use to figure out what went wrong. There were no error messages.
    #### Update: Problem solved
    Simon Olsberg left a comment below that had the answer.
    It seems a recent update of Node-Webkit broke the Mac version? Going back to 0.8.6 solved the problem. Now I'm getting my Hello World message in the window.
    You can get 0.8.6 as of this writing (Nov 1, 2014) from the download page.
    #### Update: Follow-up post
    BTW, see the follow-up post, about how to organize the app I'm working on. Looking for more good advice. ;-)
  Blogging isn't just writing
    Last weekend I flipped the switch on the new version of Scripting News. It's a return to a previous format, this time built on standards. Each tab is rendered when the user loads the page from an XML or JSON file stored anywhere on the public Internet.
    The formats are: "RSS", "OPML", "River.js" and a new one, for the linkblog, generated by "Radio3". I think when the dust settles, and that's what I'm working on now, settling things down, this may become a popular way to do a personal web presence.
    It's more than a blog. It's also a feed reader. Isn't that weird? Well, when you think about it, isn't that what a blog is??
    #### It's more than writing
    Anyway, as the guy writing for this site, I am delighted! What I love about it is that now my photos and cards and links all get equal billing with my essays. That was the goal all along. To put a picture on Scripting News I just have to post it to Flickr. There are lots of ways to do that. So now Flickr is part of my publishing system. I wonder what they think of that at Yahoo?
    Blogging isn't just about writing anymore, if it ever was.
    #### It's great for writing
    And the writing is much more the way I wanted it to be. Get an idea, click an icon, start typing, publish, revise. That's the workflow. As simple as possible, and recognize that there needs to be a point where the writing is published, and revisions after that need to be easy and flow, in a different way from the initial composition of the story. I'm writing this now in "Fargo", but it could be in any OPML-capable outliner. That's also important. A tools ecosystem can develop because the formats are open.
    #### Insta-roadmap
    Anyway, we're getting much closer now to the noteblog idea. Should have some new software for this, soon, I hope.
  LeBron's head
    None of the commentators on TNT last night got what must have been going through LeBron's head. They were talking about how dreamy it was, here he is back in Cleveland, and he must be choking up because it's such a meaningful moment. Is that a tear in his eye?
    Yeah, I'm sure that wasn't it. If I were him this is what I'd have been emoting about. "WTF did I just do. Miami was okay. We could have won another title or two. But this shit? For what? Cleveland. Oh man. What did I do!"
    Anyway, the Knicks won. That probably won't happen again, in this lifetime. ;-)
  Apple software gets worse
    I've been having trouble with wifi on my iPad ever since I did the 8.0 upgrade, then the 8.0.1 upgrade. Before that, it worked fine, except I couldn't log on to my Facebook account through the Facebook app, I had to go in through the web. It was never able to "connect to the server," through the system settings. I tried everything, including completely flattening the system, and starting over. I accepted the lower functionality. None of my other iOS devices had this problem.
    So I decided to upgrade to 8.1 today to see if we could get rid of the wifi problem. After failing to verify the update twice, I rebooted the iPad, something that cures a lot of its problems, but now it asked me to connect the iPad up to iTunes. So I did. It said the iPad was in "recovery mode" and I had to do a fresh install of the OS. I tried two more times, got the same result. So I did a fresh install. Then restored from a backup (no indication what the dates are on the backups, wouldn't it be nice if it just offered the latest, and options to get even older ones).
    Now I have an iPad with none of my data on it. No I don't trust iCloud (do you blame me).
    The commercials are still funny, but in a way not, because today's Apple software is so much like the PC they used to ridicule. There really is no silver bullet in software, you just have to test, and be conservative in your changes, if you want to keep from breaking your users.
    PS: The Facebook app still doesn't work.
  Developing better developers
    About universities and open source projects, and why they go together.
    1. We want to teach technology in university.
    2. So far this has meant teaching programming basics. Which is good, everyone needs to know how to write a little code. It's like teaching chemistry to doctors.
    3. But there's so much more to technology. There's a whole spectrum of activities needed to make software (the code) become useful and responsible to humanity.
    4. There's nowhere to go to learn how to create a standard. Or how to write a great bug report. Or how to explain stuff to users, and feed back what we learn into the design of the product.
    5. How about the full spectrum of possible products? What recipes haven't we tried?
    6. We can even teach how to be creative. There are processes for this. Software design isn't different from any other kind of design.
    7. University should not only be about student projects. We should give students experience with the real thing, production software, used by actual people. When you make changes you can break users. Let's teach the next generation of developers how not to do that. Again, there are techniques and methods for this. We've been around this block.
    University has a role to play in software. These are our most long-lived institutions. People should come in and out of university all through their lives. The projects we work on when we're students can be the ones we continue to work on in our careers, when we take a sabbatical and when we retire. We should be constantly sharing and recycling the knowledge we gain.
    Education has been struggling to find a role in technology, but to me, the role is very clear. Teaching, through practice, and research -- developing new knowledge.
    Every university should host an open source project. It should be a process that lasts decades, spans generations. The goal is two-fold: Add to our technology, and to develop better developers.
  Which Internet do you want?
    I would like to be part of the Internet where people say what they think, no matter how different, or offensive it may be to some people. Why? I care what people think.
    I find I can learn from lots of points of views, even ones I don't support, although having ideas I object to repeated over and over ad nauseam is not what I have in mind.
    The actual Internet I use is becoming a monoculture, where only certain points of view are tolerated. More and more so every year. This totally sucks.
    If you force people to stop expressing ideas you don't like, that doesn't mean they go away. And if you can't hear what other people think, you can never change your mind. And you're probably wrong about a few things too, as we all are. ;-)
  Throwback Thursday
    This picture was taken at Davos on January 27, 2000.
    It's notable because I was wearing a suit, as is the custom, in a ski resort in the Swiss Alps.
    I know it doesn't make a whole lot of sense to me either. ;-)
    PS: A blog post I wrote from Davos, two days later. Pretty sure I wasn't wearing a suit when I wrote that piece.
    PPS: I'm not wearing a suit now.
  1939 from Gandhi to Hitler
  Broken clipboards
    The clipboard in Chrome/Mac is getting worse not better.
    Basically there are times when Copy just doesn't work. The way to work around it is to create a new tab, set up the tab so that the text you want to copy is selected, and do it again. It might work.
    Repeat until it does work. Sometimes copying stuff to the clipboard, an operation that shouldn't require any conscious effort for an experienced user such as myself, takes minutes.
    That's Chrome on the Mac. Now Safari on the iPad, another of my mainstays, can't copy and paste.
    This is such a basic important operation for a computer, to be able to copy an idea from one place to insert it into another. This kind of breakage simply is not acceptable. Yet what choice do we have other than to accept it. It may seem like a small annoyance, but it's a very huge change in the way computers work. And not something anyone else is likely to ask about. So I thought I should.
  20 years later, platforms are still Chinese households
    On October 29, 1994 I wrote an emotional piece about being a developer for Apple.
    I had just read an Amy Tan novel about life in China many years ago, and found a lot in common with the life of Mac developers in 1994. Developers cook the meals, care for the babies, and don't ask for much in return. Apple was in trouble, my theory went, because the developers weren't getting enough love.
    "A platform is a Chinese household. One rich husband. Lots of wives. If the husband abuses one wife, it hurts all the wives. All of sudden food starts getting cold. The bed is empty. All of a sudden husband isn't so rich."
    Today Apple has recovered. The platform isn't exactly a happy household, but it's better than it was then. Twitter has the problem Apple had then.
    The more things change, the more they stay the same, someone once said.
    #### Example
    Here's an excellent example of the mistake many platform vendors make.
    IBM is not a developer that will help Twitter overcome the obstacles in its way. The devs that matter are people, not huge companies.
    Apple made that mistake too, parading out partnerships with Borland and IBM, and overlooking the developers, including Microsoft, btw -- who were cooking the meals.
  Ebola is not like heart disease
    People don't understand how Ebola is different from heart disease, cancer and diabetes, often-cited examples that will kill more people this year than Ebola will. Even in Africa, right now, Ebola isn't likely to kill that many people before the end of the year.
    But the big killer diseases are chronic. They are very predictable. Not only do they kill a lot of people, but we know, with a high degree of certainty, how many they will kill, and who is at risk to die from these diseases, now. But none of that is true for Ebola. What we do in the next weeks will matter a lot in determining the outcome. Ebola, could, unless we're smart and aggressive, kill a lot of people long before they'll die from the chronic diseases.
    Wired has a must-read article that explains why the near-future could be very dark if we're not smart now. Ebola is more of a present threat than climate change. They also explain that the secondary effects of an outbreak, even far away from North America, could be devastating. It's a world economy. Our borders don't mean nearly as much as they used to. An Ebola outbreak in Malaysia, India or China, could cause a world wide depression.
    Right now, resources directed at containing Ebola in Africa would be money well-spent.
  A roadmap for the news industry
    Re what the news industry should do about Facebook, please read David Carr's piece, and my own piece, and then here's a very simple four-step plan.
    1. Say yes to Facebook, because it's distribution, and you need it. They reach people you don't. It's found money.
    2. Build an industry news system, as Hulu was for the television industry, to be sure there's a way for you to get news to your followers, independent of the tech industry. The software it develops should be non-proprietary, so it's possible there will be many Hulus-For-News.
    3. Each news organization reaches into their own communities, however they are defined, geographically or by interest, and brings in the best amateur writers and news makers, to tell their own stories. Become a coral reef for news in your community. It's not the paywall that's keeping you from growing as it is the story-wall. News is no longer an elite thing, everyone can do it.
    4. With that in mind, work with local school districts and universities to teach basic journalism skills to students at all levels. This is more important than teaching kids to "code." Everyone has a story to tell, and we can all learn to do it better. What passes for opinion on the net is primitive. Let's work together to upgrade the news experience no matter who's doing the writing.
  What's the best desktop node.js shell?
    I have a node.js app that could easily run on the desktop using the local file system, as well as running on a server.
    I want to package it up so it's super simple for a regular user to install and run it. No installing of runtimes. Just download an app, double-click, and start editing, and configuring via web forms. It can't run in the browser, because it has to access the local file system.
    So I'm looking into using either atom-shell or node-webkit.
    If either of them had a simple Hello World app that I could run and start working with right away, without having to wade through docs by trial and error, I probably would go with that one first.
    I'm looking for advice from the people who read my blog who have used one or both of these toolkits. The result will be a new capability for the open web. So you're helping a good cause. ;-)
  What does Facebook want?
    Last night NYT columnist David Carr ran a piece that outlined the prospect of the news industry working with Facebook.
    He is a wonderful writer, and came up with a fantastic metaphor for Facebook. "For publishers, Facebook is a bit like that big dog galloping toward you in the park. More often than not, it's hard to tell whether he wants to play with you or eat you."
    #### A disclaimer
    First a disclaimer. I am under non-disclosure with Facebook, and have been meeting and talking with people from the company about their news strategy since April. I have not been paid for this, so I'm still an independent developer. I am creating software designed to fit into the new ecosystem that Facebook is contemplating. That ecosystem is a lot like the one I designed years ago around "RSS".
    Now, the fact that I'm able to work with them tells you something about what Facebook is doing, and how they're doing it. If they were planning on eating the news industry, I would ask for a lot of money to help them do it. I might take the money, because the news industry is so frustratingly unable to chart their own future. And we do need news. And maybe the news industry isn't the best way forward for news in the coming years. One has to consider all the possibilities, even an independent developer and blogger such as myself.
    But so far I am optimistic about the changes that are coming.
    #### What does Facebook want?
    First, Facebook isn't a dog, so let's get that out of the way. ;-)
    Facebook is a huge social network with 1.3 billion users. It runs amazingly fast for something so grand, and is almost never down. It's an unprecedented technical accomplishment, akin to a moon mission or a self-driving car. All those data centers responding to all our interactions, so quickly. That's never happened before on the scale that Facebook operates.
    But in addition to sharing selfies and family events, it can also be a fantastic news delivery system. It can, but it isn't yet that. Sure there are news stories on Facebook, but the designers there envision something much greater.
    So what does Facebook want? News, that's what they want.
    #### How will it turn out?
    Do they know how it will turn out? I'm sure they don't. They didn't get to be Facebook by answering all the questions up front before embarking on a technological journey. They put something out there, see if it sticks, learn from the users' experience, change the product, etc etc. How do I know this? Because it's the same process every other person who designs software uses. We don't know how things will turn out, any more than the manager of the Giants knows the outcome of a World Series game before it starts. You just put your best team on the field and see what happens.
    What Facebook wants is lots of news to give their users. And of course they want to put advertising next to the news, as always, and they are willing to share revenue with the news people and software developers.
    #### What does the NYT want?
    While I think I understand what Facebook wants, I'm pretty sure I don't understand what Carr's employer, the New York Times, wants. They hire engineers, but they're more like producers. They aren't building a news system to compete with Twitter or Facebook.
    Unlike Facebook, authoring for the Times is still an exclusive thing. I can put something up on Facebook, and there's at least a chance of a million people reading it. I have no idea how to post a story to the NYT website, being deliberately naive about it. Being a realist I understand this is a club I can't be part of unless I'm invited in.
    #### Should the Times work with Facebook?
    I don't know. The Times hasn't articulated a clear strategy. I don't know what they're doing, so it's hard to know whether it makes sense for them to work with Facebook. But, it's hard to imagine a scenario where they can afford to say anything other than an enthusiastic Yes! to the offer to collaborate. I certainly said yes when they asked me, without a moment's hesitation.
    #### Why did I say yes?
    Well, I wrote a blog post about that, of course.
    The short answer is this. Like it or not, Facebook exists.
    Sure I remember a time when they didn't. Had I done things differently perhaps I could be where Zuckerberg is now. But that isn't what I wanted. I envisioned a world where there were lots of totally independent Internet-based news orgs and bloggers, on a level playing field, all learning from each other, and gradually, iteratively inventing the future of news.
    But it didn't work out that way, for whatever reason. Now Facebook exists, and they are offering to work with us. How can you say no?
    #### If you say yes, is it over?
    I don't think so.
    Go back a few years, when YouTube was first gaining prominence, and consider the panic that went through the television industry. They found an answer, Hulu. And then Netflix, which is a fair compromise.
    A lot of the TV industry remains intact, in fact it's flourishing. Quite possibly the same way that Facebook and the news industry can co-exist. But we need a Hulu for news, and lots of smaller hubs, analogous to the movie industry's festivals. Open news rooms. Places for independent news efforts to flourish. Bloggers and YouTubers, we're really the same thing. And these days you see a lot of YouTube on networks, on the nightly news and entertainment shows. News has to go through a similar transition. It has to become less exclusive, less elite. This rigidness is doing more harm than Carr's imaginary dog could ever do.
    #### Update
    Here's a four-step roadmap for the news industry.
  Remembering Mookie
    Game 6 of the 1986 World Series.
    This was the most thrilling moment in sports for me, and there can never be one that tops it, because as Mookie says, I remember exactly where I was when it happened, and who I was with.
    I was watching the game with my father and brother in my brother's apartment in Palo Alto. My father would have been about my age now. What I remember most about it was my father rolling around on the floor in disbelief as the game got more and more weird. You have to understand something. My dad was not known for being casual or having a great sense of humor. But what a moment.
    Your browser does not support iframes.
    I'm so glad the MLB decided to make a video about this. Until now you couldn't find it on the web. Every time one showed up they made them take it down.
    Oh Mookie. I'd sing God Bless Mookie if it worked as well as God Bless Hunter Pence.
  Scripting News v0.41
    Since my blog is now a software product, it makes sense that it should have a version number. Today's release is v0.41. You can see the version number in the upper right corner of the menu bar. It's not visible when viewed on a phone, however -- since the phone version doesn't have a menu bar.
    #### The Notes tab
    I'm not going to get in the habit of posting update notes here as blog posts, that would be way too meta. The blog is for other things, or so it seems to me, at this time. That's why one of the features introduced in 0.41 is the new Notes tab. It's a reprise on an old standby, my worknotes outline, which I was in the habit of maintaining for a couple of years, but it fell by the wayside when I moved over to JavaScript coding.
    Now it makes a new appearance, hopefully for the duration. It's the implementation of a basic good idea, Narrate Your Work, something I wrote about in 2009, but something I've believed in ever since I started working on software. It's a good idea to slow down enough to tell the story of what you're doing, at least in outline form.
    #### Other features and tweaks
    1. If you add a tab param to the url, and name one of the tabs, that will be the tab that's displayed. So if you want to send someone to my River tab, this is the address you'd use.
    2. The menu bar at the top of the page is fixed as you scroll vertically.
    3. Images now appear in the blog tab. This is something I forgot to do in the conversion.
  God bless Hunter Pence
    What a great game last night, especially if you like the Giants, which I do. I can imagine if you're a Royals fan you probably didn't think so. But that's the way it goes. I can't say I hope your team wins tonight, because I don't. I love the Giants, and I especially love Hunter Pence.
    Last night was when I flipped the switch for the new "Scripting News" home page. I've been dreaming of this page for a long time. I wanted to bring together all the news projects I've been doing over the last year in one place. I gotta say it hangs together nicely.
    One of the cards I did last night, during the singing of God Bless America, was a version of the idea with Hunter Pence in place of America. This turned out to be my favorite card of the night. I wanted to say why I liked it so much.
    1. Hunter Pence is radically great, in every way. He has a pure joy in baseball. All the World Series players have this. You can see it. But with Pence it's especially strong. Like Mookie Wilson had it. Pence is a philosopher.
    2. I love my country, but detest the singing of God Bless America at baseball games, especially at the "world" series. A lot of the people on the field and in the stands are not from America. Some of them may not even like America. And we have always stood for inclusion, as a I recall from my grade school lessons in history. But singing about God and America is just wrong. Especially since it's always about war. Baseball is a fun sport. To hitch it up to such a corrupt cause spoils the whole thing.
    So I'm going to sing God bless Hunter Pence when they sing God Bless America from now on. It's like Alice's Restaurant.
  Welcome to the new Scripting News
    It took a long time to get here!
    There are six tabs, and three menus, in the new interface.
    #### The six tabs
    1. Blog -- essays from "Scripting News" that I write in "Fargo".
    2. Photos -- from my Flickr feed.
    3. Links -- from "Radio3".
    4. Cards -- from "Little Card Editor".
    5. River -- from "River4".
    6. About -- which I wrote in the OPML Editor, for old times sake. ;-)
    #### Why so many tabs?
    I create lots of different kinds of content. I write, I take pictures, and make cards, and curate news. I select feeds to form a river.
    All of it should come together in a place that represents me, online, as a person.
    Scattering it all over the place is cool! As long as there's one place where it all comes together. That is this place, my blog, "scripting news".
    #### The menus
    They seem kind of self-explanatory. I expect to add more to the menus.
    #### It's a feed reader
    If you like software, and this is a blog about software, among other things, what's interesting is that there isn't actually any content in the home page. Three of the tabs are built from RSS feeds: Blog, Photos and Cards. The Links tab comes from a JSON file that Radio3 outputs, and the River tab uses the River.js file that River4 outputs, again in JSON. The About tab is in OPML, of course.
    It's more of an application than a web page, but I guess that's the way we do things these days.
    #### Should work well on phones, tablets
    This part is getting pretty routine. Give it a try, let me know how it goes.
  The NYT wants crowd-sourced
    I want crowd-speaks.
    Yes I am part of a crowd. Undifferentiated slurry of humanity, with collective wisdom and intelligence and blah blah blah etc etc.
    What I want is my name under your masthead. And the same opportunity for anyone with integrity, an idea and a little expertise. The floodgates have been open for 15 to 20 years.
    There's still an opportunity to make some of that stand out from the rest using the NYT brand. But you have to give up some or most of the elitism, but not the intelligence and integrity.
  I'd rather see silo-free than ad-free
    Ello has taken a pledge to be ad-free.
    I'd prefer a stronger pledge, to make the pathways in and out, easy and open, always.
    That way I can hook it up to any flow I want in either direction.
    It's like have a fire exit in a movie theater. It's makes it possible for people to invest without fear.
  Twitter's announcements from a web developer's perspective
    I watched most of yesterday's press announcements about Twitter's new toolkits for developers. I know they can't do everything, but I was surprised that they're more or less leaving the Twitter API as-is, at least based on what I heard yesterday. There are so many people I'd like to gossip with this about, and I know I won't get the chance, so here's a blog post instead.
    I develop in JavaScript in the browser and on the server in the node.js environment. Between these two platforms, you need a lot of glue to connect a UI in the browser to services running on twitter.com. It could be a lot simpler, as the JavaScript toolkits from Facebook and Dropbox are, two other services I've adapted to. They do more of the work for you. And they're all missing some of what the others do.
    I really want a service that does what all three of them do. Every app needs identity and storage. Not necessarily a lot of storage. A megabyte is a lot of space for an outline, which is basically an XML document. With the amount of space used by a few pictures, something Twitter and Facebook already do for users, without limits, a huge range of interesting apps could be written. Today we have to do that for ourselves. It would be easier for everyone if the platforms did it too.
    There's a big void out there, someone should fill it. If Twitter had it would have made 2015 a more interesting year, imho.
  What I want from a blogging platform
    I want to be able to write down a short idea, one or two paragraphs, hit Publish (or the equivalent) and move on to the next thing.
    When I publish it should...
    1. Appear on my home page.
    2. A link should be sent to Twitter.
    3. The full text should be sent to Facebook or/or WordPress, including a link back to the original post. Revisions to the post flow to Facebook and WordPress.
    4. Be included in my RSS feed, with full text.
    The most important thing is it be quick. I lose good ideas because there's no place to put them, or if I put them on Facebook I'd lose them shortly after they scroll off (why is it so hard to find stuff on FB). I need to be able to open my outliner, hit the Big Plus, enter my idea and get back to what I was doing. Quick.
    This is essential for my blog and also for my worknotes outline.
  How art works
    I had an interesting conversation on Facebook yesterday with Joey DeVilla. It was actually kind of an argument, but it reached a satisfying conclusion, and I think the story includes an important lesson on how to interpret art.
    1. I had written a piece that I knew would be controversial when I wrote it. That's okay, that's one of the things that makes a story good.
    2. It was a story of when I was a CEO of a tech startup, a long time ago. We had an employee sue us for wrongful termination.
    3. It was probably a setup. The guy had sued previous employers, it turns out, though I didn't know it at the time. It never showed up in the reference checks we did, probably because lawyers advise against telling future prospective employers about these things, thus provoking a new lawsuit. And often settlements include mutual non-disclosure agreements.
    4. We didn't terminate him because he was older, he was fired because he wasn't doing any work. We were a small company, and struggling, and this was before VCs gave startups lots of runway. Once we got our initial investment, that was it, we were on our own to either make it or not. We couldn't afford to have any developers on staff who weren't producing.
    5. I told the story because most CEOs don't blog, and when they do, they are subject to legal and PR constraints that make it unlikely that anyone will ever tell this kind of story publicly.
    6. My CEO days are behind me, so I can afford to tell the story of how CEOs make these kinds of decisions. I wanted to provide that point of view, add it to the mix, so people could understand one simple idea. That not all complaints by employees are valid. Sometimes the employees are scammers.
    7. Joey thought I was saying that employers should age-discriminate! Oy. Nothing could be further from the truth. He said this was bad because I myself was 58 at the time (I'm now 59). I said to him, yesterday, that should have been a clue that he had drawn a conclusion about my thinking that was incorrect. Since he's not a CEO himself, and he does not think like one (a good thing, imho) I guess this wasn't obvious.
    8. This makes it good art, because it caused a strong reaction from which we both could learn about ourselves and each other. Unfortunately his complaint came at a time when I was in the middle of a mob of assholes, and I could have used a friend, instead of yet another person who made me out to be evil when I was just telling my story, which is what I do, as a blogger.
    9. Art is about what you see when you look in the mirror. A good work of art causes you to see something about yourself that you didn't see before. Anything that causes a reaction is art. Even if the reaction is "That's not art."
    10. I love Joey. I really do. He's funny and smart, and he plays the accordion. And the thing that makes our friendship strong is that we're both willing to admit when we made a mistake. I remembered, incorrectly, that he had written a whole post excoriating me, when it was just a sentence. It was a sentence that hurt, but it was just a sentence.
  Why I say yes to Twitter
    I read Marco Arment's post yesterday about Twitter from a developer's point of view. I agree with all he said, but came to a different conclusion.
    1. Yes, Twitter screwed its developers, but...
    2. Apple did too. I was a Mac developer in the 90s, and Apple did a series of reversals, for the same reasons Twitter did. Changes in management. Stock market pressures. Corporate confusion. The return of the founder. First System 6 was to be "it," then Copland, then NextStep, and finally they bundled apps that, they said, made ours obsolete. They didn't, but that wouldn't have mattered. So we left. And like Marco, re Twitter, stayed away.
    3. But Marco is an Apple developer. I'm sure he doesn't overlook their past transgressions, but if you want to make software for a corporate platform, these are the risks. They all will eventually screw you. Is it worth it anyway? That's for each of us to decide.
    4. I make news software. Given what I do, I have to work with Twitter. The only other options are to change what I do, or to retire. I've tried that. But I keep coming back. I like what I do.
    5. My approach is to have more than one leg. I send news to Facebook, to RSS and to the web via HTML. If Twitter screws us again, I'll still have the other legs. And, because the other legs are there, I think Twitter is less likely to screw us.
    6. Also, I'd bet on this: Twitter is not going to screw us in the short term. They need us as much as we need them. Independent developers are where wholly new ideas come from. You can't hire people to do that to work inside companies. They are subject to the mess that companies are, always. Twitter is no exception. Just look at history. It's always independent developers that break through. Twitter desperately needs this. Their internal development has to go in a certain direction. With developers creating new stuff, they have a chance at some new ideas developing around their platform. The more limits they put out there, the less chance there is. Do they understand this? I don't know. I hope so.
    7. They are a public company, and I have a voice. I can talk to users, other developers, their competitors, the press. If Twitter reverses, again, visibly, it won't be a quiet thing, as it was last time. They're in a different place now. And when it happens, assuming it does, while I am still developing, the world will be in a different place too. It's impossible to foresee how it will go, but it almost certainly will not go the way it did last time.
    8. Corporate platforms always have this problem. The best thing is for us all to invest in our collective interest, and create alternate ways to flow news that are not centralized, where there's no company that can shut us down. I would argue that long-term this is even in Twitter's interest, but Marco -- you and I and every other independent developer, we have collective interests. We'll do better if we, in addition to supporting the corporate platforms that we have to, also invest in open platforms that work alongside them.
    Update: The full text of this post appears on Facebook.
  Why I started blogging in 1994
    I'm getting to re-read my early "DaveNet" pieces, in sequence, as the month of October rolls out. These were the first posts, where I was trying out ideas to see what works. But behind it all there's a story I needed to get out. It wasn't even the story of how the Internet kicks butt (though that was the subtext to a lot of the pieces).
    The real reason I was writing was:
    1. I was a Mac developer.
    2. I had a heavy investment in writing Mac software.
    3. The Mac was the best machine for creating content for the web.
    4. The Mac was losing, in the press, and with developers.
    5. But there was still a lot of Mac software, and it was still better than anything you could get on Windows. Far better, because the OS had years on Microsoft, as did the developer base.
    6. Now get this, even though the Mac was still ahead, the press was reporting the conventional wisdom: Mac is dead. Reason: No new software.
    7. But that was crap. The reporters knew it was crap. Because they were all using Macs (there were exceptions, people who covered Microsoft, for example). And they didn't do this out of the goodness of their hearts. They did it because if they were to use Windows, they'd be leaving a lot of stuff they need behind.
    8. But what they were saying *was* killing the Mac.
    9. I wanted to keep playing, and I did not want to port my software to Windows (I eventually did, only when it was clear that Apple was abandoning our platform, in favor of NextStep. After all we had been through with them, if it meant porting, I'd port to Windows, and get off Apple's trail for developers.)
    10. Key point -- the blogosphere was created out of a story that the press was telling that was damaging, costly, and untrue. Had the press responded creatively to the Internet, and said "Geez this reshuffles the deck, we thought Apple was dead, but look, they've actually got a big lead" -- I could have stuck to writing software.
    11. Never mind, because Apple never accepted the advantage they had in the web. They had good reasons -- everything they stood for was violated by the web. The Mac was a graphic computer. The web had GIFs and JPEGs, but aside from that it was entirely text based. It was a Unix developer's dream. And a graphic developer's nightmare.
    12. I'll go where ever the action is. If I have to learn how to develop graphic apps, so be it. If I have to learn HTML, okay I'll do that too. But Apple wasn't like that. They saw the web, didn't like it, and said no thanks.
    13. Needless to say all this made great fodder for a blog. And that's why DaveNet and then Scripting News, were so successful and inspired so many others to do it. I thought I was making web content management systems. But to make that work, we needed to have content that needed management, in other words, blogs.
    Thanks for listening!!
    PS: This piece started as a Facebook post.
  Maybe we should slow down?
    Think about the tradeoffs.
    1. We can fly anywhere in the world in 24 hours.
    2. But all this flying is contributing to climate change.
    3. And it may someday serve as a transmission system for a virus that could kill large numbers of humans quickly.
    4. Maybe we're moving too much and too fast for our own good.
  Twitter's timeline is changing
    I've been following the controversy over Twitter using an algorithm, like Facebook, to determine what people see in the timeline. I don't mind them doing this, and recognize that most people I know disagree. They think the timeline should remain pure.
    #### Comments
    3. The new-user experience for Twitter has always been confusing. It's totally understandable that the company wants to fix it.
    1. The timeline never has been pure. Even if they gamed the system only to give more followers to people they like, that still makes the timeline not-pure. Twitter does not have and never has had an arm's length relationship to the content.
    2. Most people who follow you aren't around to see what you post, when you post it. People post items more than once to make up for this. So they are creating their own algorithm, tinkering with the purity of the feed. Even if Twitter didn't change how it works now, it's still a highly artificial experience, based on people learning how to game the system.
    4. Why not have two modes. One for experts, and one for newbies. The newcomers get a highly algorithmic, maybe even editorially curated feed, so that Twitter seems more interesting to them. The old-timers can continue to use the system as-is. And newbies who become experts can self-graduate through a preference.
    5. Think of the expert-level system as the newsroom, where people work on stories, and entertain, anger and mystify each other with wisecracks, snorts and grunts, all of which are over the heads of new users, and likely over the heads of most experts too. Speaking from experience there. ;-)
    6. The kind of functionality people ask for would work if Twitter were an open system, subject to competition. Then we could have all kinds of choices of how to sample the news, a market would develop for different methods, and we'd see better news reading systems develop. But Twitter is a closed ecosystem, only one company can try out new ideas. Okay, so why complain when they try something new? How many years do we have to wait to develop new interfaces?
    7. The people who want Twitter to be pure really want a platform without a platform vendor. The web already is that. If you want a commercial and centralized system like Twitter, it can't work like an open system, and it's unreasonable to demand that it does.
  Ebola is fearful for good reason
    Ebola is a highly communicable virus, and if this isn't the one that races through the population killing huge numbers of humans, it's the harbinger of one that will, at some point, emerge.
    Before Ebola became more than a potential problem in the US, I wondered if our journalists shouldn't do more to inform us about it. What to do if we come in contact with it? How communicable it is. How quickly does it evolve? How is it transmitted? Who is contagious?
    I emailed with a journalist friend, suggesting that their publication, famous for deep background pieces, write about Ebola. A citizen's kit, the basic info everyone needs about deadly communicable disease. Now, of course, in the middle of the hysteria, there are plenty of them. Now it's too late to prevent the virus from appearing in the US. Now the issue is to how to prevent it from spreading.
    We know the government is ineffective at managing crises before they become disasters. So why shouldn't journalism fill the void? Isn't that their job?
    I posted a link to Shepard Smith's "calm down get a flu shot" speech. It's true, flu does kill more people each year in the US than Ebola has killed so far world wide. The key phrase is "so far." It has the potential to be much more deadly than flu. For an individual, Ebola is far more deadly than flu. It's good to be calm, but also good to be realistic.
    Fighting an infestation is easier when it's localized. Information, now, is a much better defense against Ebola than hazmat suits and more hospital beds, will be later, if it escapes containment.
  River4 in the browser?
    I just had a radical idea. I don't think "River4" could run in the browser without some support routines from the server. But I don't actually think it needs that many. Just basic read and write functionality. All the parsing of XML and JSON are built-in to the browser. If it were possible, we'd be able to tap into a lot of unused CPU power and it would be incredibly easy to install, just load a web page, and you're up and running.
  I got my receiver problem worked out
    A few days ago I observed that today's receivers are massive klooges. I hoped in posting that to be shown it wasn't true, and there are exceptions. Turns out at least two brands that have consumer-level products, Denon and Marantz, have receivers that are designed with the reality of HDMI built-in. Their back panels give the named labels to HDMI ports. There are still a couple of RCA type jacks in case you have an old phonograph or reel-to-reel tape around. Here are a couple of examples.
    #### There's an easier and cheaper solution
    I got an excellent suggestion from John Pettit. Look at the back of the TV set, Mr Dave. Look at all those HDMI inputs. So plug all your stuff in there. Now guess what, there's an RCA output option, so plug that into one of the input RCAs on the old receiver that's powering the great tower speakers. It worked. It took a while to find an input that was right for the output the TV was producing, I think it was the CD input.
    #### No Mac Mini in new setup
    All is good except one thing. The Mac Mini apparently isn't putting audio out through HDMI. So the Mac Mini will no longer be a place for me to play videos. Instead I'll go via AirPlay to my Apple TV that does put audio out on HDMI. Now the question is will all my iPhone software work with it. I already found that the Time Warner app doesn't. The crucial one is the NBA app, so I can watch this season's games using my online-only League Pass. With that, and the ability to play videos on the iPhone, and the set top box that's already plugged into the TV, I'm a super happy camper.
  Someone had to go first
    #### Why blogging is difficult
    Because blogging gives everyone a platform to speak, it quickly became one of the most flamy ways to communicate on the net. Anyone who stood up was going to get a lot of attention, and by attention, I mean shit.
    Bloggers are accessible. And bloggers tend to think everyone has a right to speak. And the trolls, and they were everywhere, took advantage of that.
    We're no longer that naive. And blogging has natural defenses against trolling. If you want to speak, you can use your own soapbox. I don't have to share mine, if you aren't behaving. We use that feature now, we didn't use it so much before.
    #### Undoing the silos
    If we had the cloud technologies of today when the blogosphere started, we'd never have needed the silos. Today, I think silos serve a purpose, I don't want to see them go away. At the same time, we need a much stronger independent blogging world, for the art, the truth, and the software. We need room to experiment, and we need a place where we can say what we really see. There isn't enough of that.
    #### Someone had to go first
    2009: "Bloggers go first. If there's a blogger around you don't have to wait for a volunteer."
    I am a programmer and a blogger. In both these roles, I like to go first. If there's a juicy idea out there to explore, I'm on it! That's the role I played in the birth of blogging, starting on October 7, 1994. All of a sudden it became clear that the way had opened for individual personal publishing. I wanted to figure out how it worked.
    Because the power of the press belongs to people who have one, I realized how huge a change this was. Now publishing costs were zero. The only thing that stood in the way were basic practices for writers and programmers.
    As Walter Isaacson points out, innovators need to be both humanitarians and scientists, we have to touch the human spirit, and be masters of the scientific method. In the bootstrap of blogging it was enormously important that I was both a writer and a programmer. We had to learn to write for this new medium, and we had to figure out how the software worked.
    I was lucky in 1994 that I was completely free to explore, and that the world was ready to make this leap. So I began a trip, that led to something wonderful , every bit as big as I thought it might be back then.
    So here we are deeply in the second 20 years. I have an idea I'm exploring, and with any luck it'll get us back on track in the personal ownership of the press. Let's have fun!
    #### A note of thanks
    I know it's awkward for a journalist to be thanked for writing what they see. No thanks are necessary. When we write it's because we believe it's true, and it needs to be said. But sometimes a piece is so important, and so good, and has been so anxiously awaited, that you have to break out and say the words.
    I don't think I've ever met John Naughton, but I am a fan of his writing. So many times I've read his pieces in the Guardian and thought, finally someone understands this, or finally someone is willing to say what needs to be said.
    So it's very gratifying to get the first real unqualified recognition for my 20-year body of work in both prose and software, for the role it played in getting this new art going.
    Thank you.
  A diff betw Twitter & Facebook
    I've been using Radio3 for a couple of months now. For me the biggest new thing is that it can simultaneously post links to Twitter and Facebook. The posting of links to Facebook is new for me.
    I always push a link to an original piece on Twitter a few times, because people might not be there when the link is first published. I see a lot of other people doing this too. But there's a difference with Facebook, because every time a post gets a like, a share or a comment, it goes back to the top of the queue for people who follow me. Because there are comments on posts, I don't want a second link on Facebook, because that splits the discussion, so I frequently rush over to Facebook and delete the duplicate. (Obviously this is a cow path that needs paving.)
    This is a benefit of the much-disliked Algorithm of Facebook. It effectively re-runs posts for you automatically.
    PS: With short posts like this, I prefer to put the whole text of the post on Facebook. Much more likely to be read, it seems.
  The backs of receivers today suck
    I've been looking at home entertainment receivers, trying to find one that's designed for the world we live in. They all take the same approach, and they're all, imho wrong. Just look at the back panels. Here's an example.
    Forget about the connections for the speakers. There's basically one way to do it, each speaker gets a pair of wires. It's straightforward, as simple as possible.
    Where it goes crazy is on input. All the round plugs are RCA-type jacks. They have labels like Tuner, CD, VCR 1 and VCR 2 (so you can copy them, I guess), DVD. Basically all these devices are gone, obsolete, we don't use them anymore. But get this, those are the names of the devices you select on the front panel! So who has devices that have RCA jacks? I don't have a single one. All my devices use HDMI. And yes, they have HDMI jacks above, but none of them can be selected on the front panel or by the remote. What? Suppose I have a computer, a Mac Mini, a Wii, an Apple TV, a Chrome TV, XBOX. Then I have to figure out to tell it that the AppleTV is actually my DVD player, just so I can select it using the remote. And my Chromecast dongle is a VCR.
    Etc etc. Wouldn't it make a lot more sense to create a receiver that just has HDMI inputs, no RCA jacks, and make the labels #1, #2, #3 etc. Forget about hard-coding the names of the devices. I doubt I'll have any of these devices in 5 years. They'll have new names and they'll do different things. The times they are a changing.
    And I haven't even mentioned how you set up the HDMI output jack to give it a name you can use.
    It's all a hack and a klooge, and it sucks. They all work this way. I haven't found a single manufacturer that makes a receiver that works the way our A/V world works today. I'm writing this in the hopes that you'll send me pointers to ones that work right. (BTW, I know about Sonos. I can't use it because I already have great speakers, and I have a small apartment, Sonos is not for me.) I want a simple-as-possible consumer product that weighs a few pounds and doesn't take up a lot of space, and can be set up without going crazy. I'd like to be able to set it up from my desktop via a web browser.
  A priesthood of sources
    Dean Baquet, the top editorial guy at the NYT has a Twitter account, but hasn't used it much. What got me to look at his account was a puzzling statement he made about Twitter creating a priesthood, like the editorial priesthood that already exists at the NYT.
    #### A Twitter priesthood?
    People with millions of followers on Twitter do define a new kind of elite. But they're mostly celebrities, people who are famous for singing or because they're beautiful or great actors. They may be a priesthood, but one that a person such as Baquet could probably ignore. Except for a few NBA players (I'm a big fan) I do.
    #### Twitter is like a telephone
    Not using Twitter puts him and his organization at a disadvantage.
    Today it's a basic way for reporters to get information from sources. Imagine a reporter in the 1970s who refused use a telephone. To get a quote they'd have to meet at a bar, or in an underground garage. It's hard to imagine.
    I'm assuming that the executive editor at the NYT does at least some reporting himself. It's possible it's a completely administrative position, then maybe he doesn't need to use it. But he's a leader, an example-setter. If the reporters at the Times are expected to compete in the news environment of 2014, it seems their leader must show them the way, not stand in the way.
    #### The sources are on Twitter
    A person who never leaves the office, or never uses a telephone, or never asks a question on Twitter is not reporting. You can only get so much news from your own mind. If you're doing that, you're a source, not a reporter. And probably not a very good source at that. To be informed, you have to go where the people are speaking. And these days, like it or not, the sources are on Twitter.
    PS: I own no Twitter stock. I'm not happy that news is centered on Twitter. I think trusting such a vital function to a single for-profit company is a bad thing.
  Young technologists love lock-in?
    Earlier today I was reminded of how ridiculous it is when people say there's a difference between the way young technologists and old technologists think. I was told that young technologists don't like "RSS", and would prefer to do a one-off API (where they can require an app key, which allows them to turn off competitors). I thought to myself, lock-in is not new. People of my generation did it. We even hated it when previous generations used lock-in to keep us in our place. Of course it backfired. Their lock-in just forced us to create personal computers, which were totally incompatible with their computers. Guess who had to adapt in the end? Heh.
    So now it's the young people who don't want to support open formats! Imho it's not so much that they're young, it's that they're scared. They worry that, if they provide open access to the data their systems accumulate, no one will come to their website, therefore no one will be able to enjoy their lock-in, thereby justifying their multi-million dollar valuations. Why should we care? Problem isn't that they're young, the problem is they have a too-thin value-add to support the kind of investment they've taken on.
    Since VCs are now investing in news startups, they are really testing the value of lock-in. I wonder how many of the new crop of VCs understand how this has shaken out in the past. I remember when RSS was just getting started, there were all kinds of fancy content management APIs, some were even in the process of being standardized. They all very quickly evaporated when RSS took hold. The difference between a four-screen spec and a bookshelf. Because you need all that complexity to hide all the lock-in. There was no place for lock-in in RSS. It was too obvious how it worked. ;-)
    I think the VCs do a disservice to young technologists. When I was young, I would have said no thanks to lock-in. I'm not going to be so dishonest as to create tools that offer users no choice. I want to win because my stuff is deep and powerful and performs fantastically and has the features users want. Why? I chose my profession because I love what I do. There are lots of ways to make money. I'm not looking for scams and shortcuts.
    We'll see what happens. The long term is a bitch, and it has a tendency to plow under get-rich-quick schemes and I know you think it's idealistic but evolution only builds on open formats and protocols. That's how technology layers. It's true some patents hold, and some lock-in gets built on. Look at PDF for example. But there's a reason HTML took us places PDF never could. The ability of anyone to do anything they wanted to, without having their API key revoked. That's a big enabler of creativity, to use terminology VCs understand.
  Source code in CMSes
    For years I've had a hard time explaining to people that there was a difference between the text that an author creates and the rendering of the text on the page. In the outlining world it's obvious, I create text with a structure that is reflected in HTML in any number of different ways, yet the original text, the source code, only represents structure in one way. Since most people don't write in outliners, the idea was hard to grasp.
    But there was a much more obvious way to explain it, using Markdown as the example. If you've ever entered the special characters that Markdown defines, you of course get that there's a difference between the original and the rendering. So, a CMS that understands Markdown must preserve the source code for the author. If WordPress supported Markdown, for example, it must have a way of storing the source in addition to the rendered text.
  20 years of blogging
    Mike Arrington once said they would erect a statue in my honor in Palo Alto. I said it'll never happen. A couple of years later the same guy asked me why everyone hates me so much. Or something like that. In both cases I'm paraphrasing. How did one person, me, end up being so loved yet despised at the same time? Or maybe just misunderstood.
    I've learned that creating new stuff is a great way to get people to hate you. To create stuff you have to take a stand. You have to say "This is the way to do it." That pisses almost everyone off. People who think it should be done the other way hate you. And people who think it should be done the same way hate you too, because it was their idea, not yours.
    It's funny because when I was growing up, the image in media was the opposite. Invent a new mousetrap and the world will beat a path to your door. Not likely. You should create stuff because you enjoy being creative, because you have the creative impulse. Not because you expect to be loved for it.
    #### Blogging is about people
    In 20 years of blogging and developing software for blogging, you meet a lot of people, and some of them do share love with you. To me that was always the wonder of blogging. I remember very clearly, in 1999 or 2000, looking at a blogroll and seeing dozens of names, mostly people I had never heard of, all of whom had blogs. It was at that moment that I realized that it had worked. But I was in for a rude shock when I clicked the links, they were all talking about me, and they didn't like me! Oy.
    It's hard to accept, when you're expecting accolades, to find that the accolades come in the form of rotten tomatoes, hurled at maximum velocity, at your virtual body parts. But there it is. People express love in weird ways. I was once at a workshop in Northern California, experiencing the same thing in realspace. I lamented, but was told later that I was the most loved person in the room. Go figure.
    #### Aaron
    I've written very little about Aaron Swartz, because I felt it would be unseemly to talk in public about him, after he did what he did to himself, when I had no way to understand it. I still don't. Like everyone, I get depressed at times, and have even contemplated what he did, but I always back off, thinking it might be better tomorrow, and it always is, at least for me. I held on to it until I had a chance to think, and it seems that the 20-year milestone is a good time to honor his memory, a time when it might not seem self-serving.
    He has been called the Internet's child, and I think that's fair. I knew him as well as anyone when he was young and seeking attention on the RSS-Dev mail list. It was not a happy place, in my experience, like a lot of households young boys grow up in. I don't really know what he was trying to do there. But it was often in conflict with what I was trying to do. He was very good at Internet conflict! And intelligent. BTW, intelligent people are always intelligent. Age is not a determinant of intellect, in my experience.
    I did him the honor he asked for, and treated him as a responsible person. One of the great things about the Internet is that our bodies are the same size here, and if you want to play with the adults, there's nothing stopping a young person from doing so. That was Aaron, for sure. A young person who wanted to be an adult.
    I have no idea what happened. Maybe I'll find out when it's my turn to go. Did I ever think I would survive him? Never crossed my mind.
    #### Blogging for freedom
    Blogging is a platform for free people. We've seen people distort what blogging means to the point where blogging is a job for some. I never thought of it that way. It's a way to tell your story, to share what you see, to process it, draw conclusions, and move on. It's like a fresco painting. Or an interview with a reporter. It's quick, it's over, and it's done with.
    #### Blogging billionaires
    Blogging has created a few billionaires. I hope some of them realize they can give back to the freedom of the platform, and not just use their financial power to make even more money. You can choose to go another way. Honestly, I don't understand why they don't.
    #### No one ever got fired...
    Blogging makes you unemployable. I haven't had a real job since I started blogging. I would love to create a publishing platform for millions of people. I think I know how to do it. I would love to teach young developers how to think, to train their minds to creatively solve problems. But I haven't gotten a chance, and probably never will. There are always safer people to hire. So I look with envy at Frank Gehry, an 85-year-old architect who has been hired to create a high tech campus. And realize that's not going to happen for me.
    A friend asked why. I thought about it a bit, and asked if she had ever heard "No one ever got fired for buying IBM." This was a big idea when I was young. The safe bet was to buy IBM. If the systems crashed or lost data or were impossible to use, everyone would understand you had done the best you could. But if you bought an off-brand, forget it. You'd get fired, as the slogan predicted. So people bought IBM, not the other brand.
    Well I'm the other brand. If you hire me, and I say something on my blog your boss doesn't like, you'll be fired along with me. I understand. I want to let people know that writing publicly does not come without costs. You'll be lonely. There are so many things I want to do that I can't because of this rule.
    #### Why I keep going
    Every day I try to do some development work on my projects, but I see the end coming, not too far away. I don't think I'll be digging any great new holes in the future, but I do want to wrap up all the stuff I've started. That's what the last few years have been about. I want to have great open publishing tools, that don't require you to give everything you have to a billionaire in the hopes of getting a little attention.
    Maybe it won't go anywhere. Maybe it'll all be swept aside, forgotten, along with so many other dreams of so many other people who thought they could make a difference.
    #### 20 years
    In one way 20 years doesn't seem like that much time. But to an individual it is huge. A lot has happened in this time. I've accomplished most of what I set out to, and that's something I'm grateful for.
    I was looking for something to quote in one of the thousands of pieces (I haven't counted, that's just how it feels to me) I've written, but this morning, Anthony Baker posted a quote from Eleanor Roosevelt that does it better than I possibly could.
    To be mature you have to realize what you value most. It is extraordinary to discover that comparatively few people reach this level of maturity. They seem never to have paused to consider what has value for them. They spend great effort and sometimes make great sacrifices for values that, fundamentally, meet no real needs of their own. Perhaps they have imbibed the values of their particular profession or job, of their community or their neighbors, of their parents or family. Not to arrive at a clear understanding of one’s own values is a tragic waste. You have missed the whole point of what life is for.
    #### No comments
    I've turned off comments for this post. Please, if you have something to say, write a blog post. It'll be the best way for you to help the cause. Thanks! ;-)
  Why developers should use Facebook
    Emailing with yet another guy I used to work with a long time ago, the question of why he should use Facebook comes up. I sent him a pointer to my long-winded personal piece, but then realized it could be a lot shorter, when talking to another developer.
    #### Why, as a developer, you should use Facebook
    You probably have another active 20 or 30 years as a developer (I know you say 10, but I'd bet you won't want to hang it up in 10).
    The people you compete with, many will have grown up with Facebook, the way you grew up with cable TV.
    It's just there, part of the environment. The fact that you remember a time before Facebook will be an advantage, but you can't let your competitors have the advantage of understanding Facebook and you don't.
    That's why you're hurting yourself if you don't use it.
  My programming environment
    I just described, in email, how I develop to a guy I used to work with a very long time ago. It was so concise, I felt it should be in the archive.
    #### How I program
    I program in the OPML Editor. I have a suite that makes it one button to deploy all the changed objects in my outline to public spaces on S3, ready to run. It's amazingly fast.
    I have debugging on the client but not the server. But I am radical about pushing functionality to the edge, and using the server just to make up for deficiencies in other APIs that prevent them from being called from the client. So it hasn't been that much of a problem.
    This environment is so primitive compared to Frontier, but everyone can use it, so that's why I work here. People think I've been incredibly productive, the truth is I've done all this stuff before, so it goes quickly the third or fourth time.
  Are Twitter and Facebook silos?
    Summary: Yes.
    Now the background.
    #### Why they appear not to be silos
    It's confusing because they both have APIs. Facebook even has outgoing RSS feeds.
    Through the APIs I can post remotely, in fact, my new product "Radio3" can post to both, along with WordPress and its own RSS feed.
    So if both are all API'd-up, how could they be silos?
    #### First a story
    Jeff Bezos has an annual writer's conference. Until this year, no one but the writers knew about it, but because of the conflict Amazon is having with publishers, it came out.
    Now get this, one author, Hugh Howey, is so cool, that because he supports Amazon in their battle with publishers, declined the coveted invitation this year, so he could support Amazon without the appearance that the support was bought.
    He said, quoted in a NY Times piece:
    "I asked not to be invited back this year, as I want to be able to speak my mind and not have any hint of a quid pro quo," he wrote in an email.
    That is so cool and powerful.
    #### To use their APIs, you are compromised
    Both Twitter and Facebook can and will exercise their right to kick you off the system, for whatever reason, without explanation or warning. This means you try temper your criticism of them, if you make software that uses their APIs.
    That's not a good thing. Software developers want to make decisions about the software based on what's good for users, not what will keep you from getting booted from the platform. It's analogous to doctors wanting to prescribe appropriate medication, not drugs pushed on them by the pharmaceuticals industry.
    Further, in this day and age, everyone should blog. Now I know not everyone does, but I am and always will, as long as I'm breathing, be a blogger. It's just in my nature to say what I see. I'm not a quiet person. ;-)
    So what if I think that Facebook did something shitty? Will I say it? Good question. Right now I have a filter. You have to assume that I won't say what I think about Facebook because I'm building software that depends on their continued approval. Same with Twitter. Either of them could shut me off in a moment, with no explanation. That is what they call a chilling effect, and it's why both are silos.
    #### Freedom can't be partial
    Either you're free or you're not. People who develop for platforms that are controlled by corporations are not free to say whatever they want. And freedom is an important part of not being a silo.
    While Hugh Howey is brave, he still isn't free, btw, because Amazon is a silo too. I guess only the Internet is not a silo, which is what makes it so precious. It's the platform without a platform vendor and that's a big deal.
  Why I generally don't tag
    In Twitter or Facebook you can tag people, by using the @ syntax to refer to them.
    What that means is:
    1. Other people can find the person. It's the equivalent of linking in these systems.
    2. The person being talked about will see it.
    The first effect is good, always, the second, often is not.
    #### Tagging is loud
    When you tag someone, you're saying "Look at what I said about you." Then the question is, did the person you're tagging enjoy the experience?
    I like to know, of course, when I'm being talked about, for my work, even being called out for something the author doesn't like, assuming they say so in a respectful way. But that often isn't why people use tagging.
    The other day, a Twitter user said he was unfollowing me, sadly, because blah blah blah. He tagged me in the tweet. Did I need to see this? No. In fact, I have a motto that covers this situation: Don't slam the door on the way out.
    Leave quietly, that's the classy thing to do. That way you're sure what you're doing is leaving, and not punishing, or asking for an apology, asking the person to change, or asking to be talked out of leaving. If you're doing any of those things, have the guts to say it directly. By not tagging the person you blame, you're making sure you're leaving for the reasons you say you are.
    Another related motto from my longtime friend David Jacobs: No old tomatoes. Which means, no ultimatums. For the same reason as not slamming the door on the way out. If you're wanting to leave, just go. No drama. No negotiating. It's tough not to lay it out. But ultimatums, as tagging often is, are powerless. Imagine what it would feel like to have your bluff called, and then skip the bluff altogether.
    #### Tagging as spam
    Another reason people tag is to spam you. They put your tag in a message about their new video, or an article they wrote, or a post they want you to link to.
    #### An example
    The other day I mentioned Jay Rosen in a blog post, and linked to a piece he wrote. I didn't tag him, in my post, or in the follow up discussion on Twitter or Facebook. I'm not tagging him here. Will he see this? If he was meant to, in some karmic sense, he will. But I'm not going to force it. Let the network do its thing. It's usually pretty good at it.
    #### Muting as the anti-tag
    BTW, the new Mute command on Twitter is an antidote to unwanted tagging. People who tag too much should take note. If you tag someone gratuitously, now, you might get muted. ;-)
  Bloggers who made a difference
    When this blog started up I was trying to understand what the new publishing power would mean. One piece, written in February 1995, Billions of Websites, I think captured it best. The idea wasn't to start a single thing, rather to empower anyone to say what they see.
    Granted, I was a bit more optimistic than I am now. Today my optimism today is tempered by the understanding that human beings are always human no matter how great our tools are. :-)
    Anyway, with the 20-year mark just two days away, I'm starting a list of bloggers who, 20 years later, made a difference in moving our species onto this medium we call the web. That's what I'm thinking about today and tomorrow. Who made a difference?
    #### Caveat
    BTW, my list of bloggers who made a difference is not even close to balanced on a gender, race or age basis. I'm not going to tweak the list, I'm not going to add bloggers I don't read or who haven't influenced me. But I will invite people to make their own lists, and tell us who made a difference to you. That's the bloggers way of doing things, imho. Come as you are, and let's work together. And since I'm sure this will piss some people off, please read the comment guidelines, before adding your two cents. :-)
  Must-watch: Connections
    If you want to understand innovators, about the actual of character of the persistent folk who bring out new stuff, watch the James Burke series Connections. It's magnificent.
    Told as a series of stories about how a minor feature of something led to another unanticipated thing, possibly far in the future, and another, over many years, decades, even centuries, leading to the accidental collection of things we use everyday.
    Each is the story of one major area of innovation: Telecommunications, computers, jet engines, plastics, rockets, television, the atomic bomb and the production line. They can trace their roots in an uninterrupted chain of creativity to the beginning of history. Nothing was pre-ordained, and very few if any of the innovators, no matter how great, foresaw how their work would eventually be used.
    Great vision is one thing, and creating new technology is another. There's not much actual glory in it, Burke says. And his stories, totally fascinating, prove it.
    I've watched the series several times. It was the most influential of anything I've read or viewed in guiding my work as a technology developer. He's so right, it's about the connections. People building on the ideas of all that came before. I summarize it with the motto "Only steal from the best."
    #### Episode 4
    #### Why it's so fascinating
    The series was created in 1979. So enough time has passed so we know how some of it has turned out. Burke actually got most of it right. There certainly was a lot of food for thought about the progression of technology through times of great change. This was a snapshot before most of the stuff we're using now came online. Email systems were still in a nascent form. There was no web, and personal computers barely existed. Yet Burke understood that computer technology wasn't just about operating airlines and billing systems and would be central to personal communication.
    #### How to get
    For a while the whole series was available on YouTube, for free, with the blessings of Mr Burke. But it's been withdrawn, apparently due to a copyright claim by the BBC. However, good news -- you can still download the series via BitTorrent.
    You can get it on Amazon for $99 as a set of 5 DVDs. I wonder what Mr Burke would say about this, in the age of downloads and streaming. And the book is also available on Amazon, as a paperback or for Kindle.
  One more thing
    There's been a steady series of alternate Facebooks, and none of them have put it all together, nor do most of them deserve the support and optimism of users, of which there appears to be enough to get something off the ground.
    #### Checklist
    In my humble opinion to make a social network worth supporting by idealistic users it must:
    1. Be possible for anyone to run a server.
    2. Accept content authored externally.
    3. Not lock users in.
    4. Be easy to set up and use.
    5. Be fun and interesting.
    6. Not have limits to expression.
    7. Not try to replace existing social networks.
    These are just some ideas off the top of my head.
    #### Advertising is okay!
    Note there's no mention of advertising. Because there's no lock-in, there can be presentation environments that have ads, and those that don't. All permutations are possible.
    Also, it's very difficult to guarantee no ads. What happens when users start posting ads? What do you do then? Is it still ad-free? (I think not.)
    #### We're working on it
    I am doing my part, making tools that are gathered around a set of open standards, RSS, OPML and River.js. I'm not the only one. As soon as what we're doing gets easy enough, and the users are willing to accept the tradeoffs of using a non-corporate-owned network (there are some, but also great advantages to balance them), then we will reach liftoff. Will it be Facebook? No. I like Facebook. I want to build off its ubiquity and their great servers. Trying to wall something off and pretend Facebook doesn't exist is emphatically not my strategy.
    The title of this piece is a bit misleading, I realize after finishing writing it. ;-)
  What is Ello?
    Ello is an interesting new microblogging system with a quirky user interface that a lot of tech insiders have joined and are using. It looks like it's going to gain critical mass, that is develop a community that comes back for news and to post their own short ads (that's how I see most of the traffic on the social networks).
    #### Silo
    It is a silo. There is no API for posting from external editors, and no way to get content out of it. They do say that the latter is on their roadmap.
    #### Ads
    They have said they'll never use ads, however it's not clear whether or not they will sell users' info to advertisers, which would make it part of the Internet advertising system. An example, you're discussing motels in Palo Alto on Ello and start seeing ads for motels in Palo Alto on other sites.
    The fact that they don't display ads is a minor consideration, in fact it would be more transparent if they did. I had a similar concern for wordpress.com. They were putting ads on blogs for people reading sites, but the authors didn't see the ads. I think they fixed this, and now if there are ads on the site, everyone sees them, so no one is misled into thinking a site is ad-free.
    #### Ello vs Facebook
    In a Facebook post earlier today I declared a moratorium on the debate as to whether Ello kills Facebook.
    I am @d1 on Ello.
  Newsmakers have stories to tell
    This is a story in little packets. I would have published it as a tweetstorm, if Twitter allowed greater-than-140 character ideas. As you can see some of the ideas here use more than the allotted 140.
    2. NY Times layoffs vs Derek Jeter's startup. Interesting contrast of events, with lots of meaning in the contrast. Two lines on a graph crossing. Professional reporters going off the bottom of the graph, as new writers, the sources (in sports) come on.
    3. News orgs like to say they don't tell our stories, but in fact they do.
    4. The people want to tell their stories directly, without interpretation by reporters, who don't understand the language of the business or sport or technology they're reporting on. They sensationalize, for their own reasons, and thus distort. You don't have to be a sports superstar like Jeter to see this.
    5. Writing on the Internet is being strangled by silos and all the weird formats for social networks. Twitter limits posts to 140. Facebook has no length limit, but also no linking or style, or titles for posts. A new one, Ello, comes along, it's a silo, and everyone is distracted by their message of no-ads.
    6. Google Reader, whose effect is still felt, said all posts must have titles. Twitter, growing up at the same time, said posts must not have titles. Even without technical lock-in, these two platforms divided writing on the web into two completely disjoint silos.
    7. We don't need to get rid of ads. What we need is just one copy of everything, in a canonical location, with any number of different styles of presentation, that can be routed anywhere. And we need great writers nurturing people who have stories to tell.
    8. Know any great writers? The NYT employs some, they're about to let 100 of them go. If they would just restructure, and lighten up about who gets to write for the masthead, they would be busting out at the seams, and we would be on track for solving some of the problems that only great communication, expertise and intellect can solve. But for the limited imaginations of the custodians of these institutions, we'd be much further along. And the desire to control everything by the VCs and their employees.
    9. Of all the things the NYT could do to matter in the new digital age, really the only thing I want is to have a chance to write under their byline. Today, there's no chance of it. They favor people unlike me, for some reason, but I feel my ideas are as good as or better than the ones they run, and repeat over and over. The fact that I can't get in means everything. I am a good writer, and my ideas are worth listening to. I'm confident in this.
    10. The only way for news organizations to exist in the future is to embrace the new writers who do things other than write. We are on the same side. Yet they have tried to stay above it in some way. They can't stay above it. They have to find a way to maintain the quality of their masthead while expanding the base of people who write for it, by a few orders of magnitude.
    11. The people who say it can't happen, who say "Forbes tried it" are losers. At some point you have to say "I heard you before, we tried it your way, and look what's happening." And if they still won't get out of the way, step around them.
    11. Jeter has the right idea. The Times could have done this years ago, they should have, I've been urging them to do it, both privately and publicly. But sports is only one segment, and there should be lots of great places for sports people to tell their stories, with help from people who are experts in story-telling.
    12. News is restructuring. If you insist on the same structure as in the past, you will be washed away.
November 2014
  Journalism going forward
    Maybe in the future, journalism will come to mean people who seek out news that is not fed by Algorithm. They use tools that give more direct control over what they see. The thing to know is that the tech industry cannot operate these for you for free. That's the bad news. The good news is that they run for pennies a day for whole organizations, and can be shared with your readers for a few pennies more.
    The technical ability to run these "news aggregator" systems is about the same as setting up and running a laptop computer. The technology is already accessible and getting more so. With the emphasis these days on "learning to code" I don't see what the barrier is, other than possibly fear of exploring technology on your own, without the support and approval of multi-billion dollar companies.
    But techies who are your friends can and will help you. People who want you to succeed. The mistake is viewing tech as a monolith. As if everyone in tech saw the world the same way, had the same goals, and were willing to burn up the web to make a few more bucks. Some of us think enough money is enough. ;-)
    Anyway running an aggregator certainly is much simpler than learning to code.
    #### The role of J-schools
    One thing I'm sure of is that J-schools should be teaching students the basic technology now. That would do more to strengthen both journalism and the Internet, which are allies in getting people the information they need, imho, more than anything else.
    And we should get workshops going everywhere there are news organizations, the way we taught people about blogging in 2003 and 2004. The idea that you can run your own timeline is one that must spread, and to do that we have to show people how to do it.
    #### What does victory look like?
    BTW, the picture in the margin of Knick players Jeremy Lin and Carmelo Anthony, in 2012, begrudgingly acknowledging each other, is how I visualize tech and journalism. This team did not win the championship. I'll try to dig up a good picture of what that looks like.
    That's the kind of inclusive victory I'm looking for. Sure big tech companies can participate. But the Internet should achieve its destiny of providing great timely news to people who care without waiting for the tech industry to do what is probably an impossible transformation. I want to live to see this happen! If you love news, you should want it too.
  Chrome is dying, day 4
    See the previous pieces in this thread.
    Today, I have to say that unfortunately, while turning off automatic plug-ins did significantly decrease the instances of clipboard failure in Chrome/Mac, they are still there.
    At this point, I don't think the problem is going to go away until Google decides it's time to make it go away.
    #### Why this problem persists
    I'm learning a lot about how the tech industry works today from this example. I was very naive, apparently.
    The reason this bug is not a high priority is that it is only a problem for people who use the web to write. People who just watch YouTube videos and click on links in Twitter or Facebook, they don't use the clipboard. They probably don't even know it exists.
    Basically if a bug interferes with your ability to watch advertising, it's high priority. If not, well, someone can work on that in their "spare time." Said with a wink and a nudge. ;-)
    And when someone gets too close to saying this in public, flame them, hoping they will think it's not worth the trouble.
    #### What do do?
    It seems there's enough economic interest in the web to find a few million a year to keep a fork of WebKit nice and solid and working well across all versions of Mac OS. Based on the theory that PBS hasn't had a huge negative effect on commercial TV over the years, the tech industry might not even try to sabotage it. ;-)
    As much as I don't care about advertising, personally, I have to say that in order for this idea to work, this version would have to specifically not support advertisers' interests. They're what's making the web crazy right now.
  What I'm thankful for
    I love to learn, and therefore the most important people to me are teachers.
    And as with most things today, the teachers aren't just the ones with the titles. There is information and lessons to be learned everywhere you look.
    So in 2014, I have to say -- it's teachers I am most thankful for.
  A hidden Mac paint program
    I didn't know that every Mac comes with a simple paint program built-in, until I asked for advice on getting a new one. It's part of the Preview application. Here's how to access it.
    #### How to
    1. Copy an image to the clipboard.
    2. Launch the Preview app.
    3. Choose New from Clipboard from the File menu.
    4. When the image window opens, click on the toolbox icon to enable the editing features. Screen shot.
    5. You should see a row of icons.
    #### What I was looking for
    I use a paint program basically to edit small sidebar images for my blog and for screen shots to document my software. These are the features I need.
    1. Resize an image, usually scaling.
    2. Make the background transparent.
    3. Draw an arrow on the image.
    4. Save as either GIF, JPG or PNG.
    The Preview app can do all this and more. And the other features don't seem to get in the way.
    I'm still figuring out how to fit it into my workflow.
  Happy Thanksgiving!
  Your beliefs are bupkis
    From Banksy. Never more relevant.
  Turn off Flash in Chrome
    Yesterday I followed Tracy Hern's advice and turned off the Flash plug-in in Chrome/Mac, and things are now running faster and in less memory.
    Haven't had a clipboard failure since. Of course that's not yet proof that the problem is gone. But it's a good sign.
    #### How to
    Choose Preferences from the Chrome menu.
    At the bottom of the page, click on Show advanced settings.
    Click on the Content settings button.
    Scroll down to Plug-ins.
    Choose Click to play from the set of radio buttons.
    Click on the Done button.
    #### What this means
    Now, when you visit a web page with Flash movies, instead of seeing a preview, you'll see the image of a jigsaw puzzle piece. If you want to watch the movie, click the image.
    Feels really good. I'm not a big fan of movies that start playing while I'm reading, so I like this way of working.
    #### Recommendation to Google
    Why not ship Chrome with this setting by default.
    iOS users are already accustomed to a world without Flash. Presumably many of us are also Mac users. It's a much more humane way to use the web, without videos starting up automatically while you're doing other stuff. It seems that the human being sitting in front of the computer should decide whether or not they want to watch a movie. I imagine advertisers wouldn't like this. Maybe if you like your users more there will be more of them to see the ads.
  How to rebuild journalism
    I read Emily Bell's speech and her piece in the Guardian over the weekend. They fairly well reflect what you hear from journalism pundits these days.
    I don't think they know how to listen to technology. They of course, being journalists, focus on the money. But there's a lot of open tech available for them to use. They don't look there.
    It's like the blind men and the elephants, or Don's Amazing Puzzle (try it!). You see what you expect to see. Journalism is conservative. It wants things to stay the same. Tech is the opposite. It's invested only in upheaval. There's your conflict.
    The story of the last 20 years has been the story of the collision of journalism and tech. I've been working on this for my entire 40-plus year career as a software developer and writer -- what happens to story-telling when the tools of publishing are available to everyone.
    Journalism stood by while blogging took root. They covered it, but largely dismissed it. They ignored "RSS". They ignored everything, including the threat to their art. I warned them many times, here on scripting.com, that they would regret letting the tech industry own their distribution system. But that's what happened. Without any resistance whatsoever. Journalism let tech move in and take over.
    Yet tech has been a lot more generous than I thought they (we) would be. Perhaps because they understand as little about journalism as journalism understands about tech. Or perhaps because they want journalism to be independent of tech. Hard to know.
    The Algorithm
      Facebook's algorithm is something they don't like. Lots to say about that.
      1. Most of them don't use Facebook. Which would be similar to not liking Google if you didn't use Google. Most of them do use Google, so will understand what this means, I hope.
      2. The results you get from "the algorithm" is a function of how you trained it. If, on the day of the Ferguson shooting (the canonical example Bell and others cite) you were, like me, a lover of news, your feed would have had lots of stuff about Ferguson in it. (BTW, have you watched the network news shows recently? Lots of YouTube videos and pie-eating contests.)
      3. Journalism has an opaque algorithm too. None of its users has any idea how they decide what is and isn't news.
      4. Facebook hasn't really gotten into news yet. They are actively developing new technology in this area. To judge it on its ability to deliver news would be like judging the NYC Subway on its ability to deliver news. It's for people, today, more than it is for news. However, expect that to change.
      5. I have been listening to Facebook people carefully. Reading the tea leaves, getting to know their developers. I believe they really want to work with you. Yet not very many journalists have expressed much interest. I think this is a big mistake. When someone offers to work with me, my first response is to say yes. I wasn't always this way, I had to train myself to do it, after watching lots of opportunities pass me by because I wasn't ready enough to work with others.
      6. One thing you can learn from the process of tech is to study your competition, don't ignore them. Use the software yourself, understand its strengths and weaknesses before you attack. Journalism hasn't done any of this, which is odd, because that's supposed to be their job, understanding things that matter.
    How to rebuild
      1. If I were running a news organization today, accepting that we let the tech industry own our distribution system, I would first incorporate it into my plans by flowing all my headlines through Twitter and Facebook, and then start to create our own distribution system to stand alongside the tech industry distribution system.
      2. The first mover doesn't always win. That's a big lesson. Use what you know about news to build the best news system you can, and then learn from your users, and iterate. My first version of a product usually doesn't work very well. My second one works better. By the time I've done it the third or fourth time I usually hit the mark pretty well.
      3. I would not rush to the government and make demands. That is just plain wrong. If your children behaved that way, before trying to work things out with each other, you'd send them back to at least try to find their own peace. You should have enough self-respect to do that yourself. I am sure the Bezos-owned Washington Post will not be seeking government protection from Twitter and Facebook.
      4. It's also not right because there's so much potential right now. It's not time to lock it down and regulate. It's time for tech and journalism to behave responsibly and respectfully of themselves and each other.
      5. We have enough open formats and protocols to build a dozen news distribution systems with all kinds of algorithms. We have bright-eyed J-school students who are excited about the future of news. Even some graybeards such as myself are still totally excited about the future. Come on, let's use the tools we have. Feed your headlines and stories into Facebook and Twitter, you have to do that -- they exist and billions of people use them -- but also into new systems for news distribution. There is room for lots of different approaches. We're at the beginning of something new, at a time of exciting possibilities. Let that excitement be reflected in your thinking.
  My two tech motivations
    1. I want to keep the things that are open open.
    2. I want to make more things that are open.
    I need more surface to develop on. I don't at this time work inside a big company. Maybe the only way to play with the good toys is to hook up with one. The more things in #1 keep breaking the harder it is to be independent.
    Otherwise when people guess my motivations, and they do often, they err wildly. I'm not "for" or "against" anyone. I am not fighting a moral battle. I don't care if anyone else is good or bad. That's for God to decide.
    Think of me as a showrunner or a movie producer. I have shows I want to make. I need good platforms to make them on. I can't afford to worry about anything else, I already have a full plate.
  Everything is broken
    #### Remember when Microsoft won
    BTW, the same thing happened with Microsoft when they "won" the browser wars. Quality went to hell. It got so bad we all switched to Macs. Think that can't happen again? I hope you're wrong.
    #### iTunes
    I can't copy files from my main Mac to my iPhone so I have to set it up on my laptop which, for some reason, is able to copy files to my iPhone.
    I copy some songs over there, but it says it's waiting for something to happen. No problem. I let it have an hour to get 12 songs copied. When I come back, it's still waiting.
    Here's the screen.
    This is typical. It never works twice the same way. I'm always having to figure out little ways to trick it into COPYING FILES ONTO THE DEVICE. It's not like this is some exotic function, this is what the software was DESIGNED TO DO. I put that in caps to commemorate the many wasted hours I've spent trying to get this expensive shit to do its job.
    I really feel like these products are garbage. Junk. Worthless piece of crap.
    Thank you for listening.
  Little Pork Chop's corner-turn
    The transition of "Little Pork Chop" to a whitelist-based app has been a great success.
    Basically people are using it for short-form blogging via Twitter.
    I get to learn from watching how they use it. I'm already getting ideas.
    Everyone wins. :kiss:
  Best geeklove commercial ever
  Quick review of Interstellar
    I loved Interstellar.
    I liked the story, the acting, the visual effects, the role that love and science play in the story, the scale of it. I never rolled my eyes once. I was in the story from beginning to end. All these are unusual for me. Most movies have me snickering at least a little. Not this one. I was really touched by it.
    I have also seen 2001 again recently, this summer. This movie is every bit as good as 2001, which was also a lovely movie. But not quite as moving as this one. People who think Interstellar isn't as good might be remembering 2001 as better than it was.
  Chrome is dying, day 3
    I have been using Chrome 39 on my Mac for a couple of days. At first it looked like the problems with the clipboard had been solved, but it's pretty clear that it's still pretty badly broken. I no longer think there's any chance that it's "just me" -- for a few reasons.
    1. After writing about it publicly, I've heard from lots of other people saying they've been experiencing clipboard errors too.
    2. I got a new computer last week, installed a fresh copy of Chrome, and the problem came with all that change. So if it were my doing, it would have to have survived a lot of changes in environment, including a new version of the operating system.
    I have been working on server apps for the last few days so I haven't had a chance yet to try the debugger in the new version, so I have no info to add there.
    #### Google's appalling behavior
    I just want to add a note that I totally object to the smearing campaign Google is running against me. I'm a user, blogger and developer, not your enemy. I really only want Google to keep this browser working, so I can get my work done, as well as others, and for the health of the web. I have a lot of experience with big companies, including Google, smearing critics. I think most other people are clued-in too. Please call off your flamers. Thanks.
  Stuck in the middle
    The latest Uber "scandal" makes a few things clear, to me at least.
    1. The tech industry needs to change, to adjust to the reality that it's no longer a startup industry. Our products are used everywhere. They are infrastructure, culture, part of our work and family lives, our intellectual, financial and emotional lives.
    2. Tech products are utilities, not miracles.
    3. The people who develop the products are creative people, some of them, and some are engineers. We are not gods. Never were. But we used to like to hear that we were.
    2. The press obliged. They love the money. Not because they get the money, they don't. But it's easier to follow the money than it is to understand the technology. So they report the mystique of the genius that creates our gee-whiz tech. That might have made sense in the 70s and 80s, but not now. Tech is the fabric of our civilization. It's not a mystery.
    3. Sources now have the power of the press. There is nothing surprising or wrong with the idea of a tech company investigating reporters. The idea that only reporters have the ability to publish is a 20th century idea. Now anyone who wants to speak can start a blog or a podcast and get up and speak.
    4. What do the reporters fear will be discovered about them? The biggest most obvious truth is that most of them are lazy and report the same story everyone else does. They wait for the press release. How can you tell? Just watch the river. It's amazing how a story "breaks" across all the different tech pubs at the same time. There are only a handful of publications that do real reporting. Most of what we get are repurposed press releases.
    5. So where the tech industry has to grow up, the tech press has to earn its keep. There are plenty of stories that never get covered. Why is Chrome such a buggy slow browser? Maybe the web would do better if someone in tech loved it. Why will Google go to such lengths to smear a blogger (me) who reports on it? The press cares when they get slimed (or potentially get slimed, it was just an idea that the Uber exec uttered, not a plan, or any kind of disclosure). The users know that Google is letting us down with Chrome. Don't the tech reporters use this product? Don't they notice that the quality is slipping? Why not write about it? That's a really good question. If the answer is they fear upsetting people at Google, then it's a much bigger deal than an Uber exec expressing frustration with some very awful reporting they've had to endure.
    6. Yes, Uber is right. Sorry. They have every right to be upset about the "coverage" that Pando is doing. What an embarrassment for the industry. That the tech press is willing to go to war over Pando, just shows how ridiculous the whole thing has gotten. How would you feel if an editorial series blasted you for being an "asshole," literally -- that's the word they used to describe Uber management. Not just in passing, as the key idea in a campaign. If we want the industry to grow up, the press has to grow up too. Name-calling is not something anyone should defend.
    7. We need to be thinking and deciding, and not just for the short-term. Our work is important for the future of our civilization. Let's get serious about what we're doing. It's important. We should have fun, but let's behave like what we do matters, because it does.
    #### Stuck in the middle with you
    The title of this piece comes from a Stealers Wheel song from the 1970s.
    Clowns to the left, jokers to the right, etc etc.
    "curly"
  A museum piece that still works
    In March 2007, I was doing a lot of experimenting with Twitter and news. I wanted to see how they fit together. So I hooked up the flow of the NYT to a Twitter channel. It was great!
    3/16/2007: "Because Twitter has a public API that allows anyone to add a feature, and because the NY Times offers its content as a set of feeds, I was able to whip up a connection between the two in a few hours. That's the power of open APIs."
    #### It's running again
    It kept updating through 2010, when it stopped. I don't know exactly why, but I always wanted to get it going again, and finally it is.
    http://twitter.com/nyt
    Today I'm using "River4" running on Heroku, with a tiny node.js app running on a spare machine in my Manhattan apartment, a short distance from NYT headquarters. It bridges the NYT content flow with Twitter's servers.
    It's nice the way small and big systems fit together, still -- in 2014, as they did in 2007. Some things don't change, and that's good!
    #### All the news...
    All you'll ever see in this stream are links to stories on the NYT website. I hope they don't mind, this is kind of a museum piece, and it's nice to have it running once again! :-)
    It's also a loop back to the beginnings of RSS, which were made possible by the Times, thanks to the trust Martin Nisenholtz had in us. Once again, another dividend of collaborative development. ;-)
  Chrome is dying, day 2
    1. At the urging of several commenters, I switched back to the normal Chrome build, and trashed the Canary build. However I wasn't running Canary because I wanted to be bleeding edge, quite the opposite. The main Chrome thread has serious breakage in the clipboard and debugger, and as a developer I depend on both. It's been that way since early summer. Switching to Canary was an act of desperation. Using Chrome to develop my software has been a nightmare. Debugging is integral to my workflow.
    2. Once I switched off Canary, the crashing-on-closing-tabs behavior went away. Yes!
    3. However the clipboard is still broken, if anything it's worse than before. I haven't done any development since yesterday so I can't report on the debugger. (I use Safari for debugging, its debugger works perfectly, as Chrome's used to.)
    4. A Google developer advocate contacted me on Twitter. Far from helpful. He wanted to prove something about me, instead of helping with problems with Google's software. Editorial: No company should let themselves be repped that way, ever, under any circumstances, even if the product is free. A lot of users are inclined to believe problems are their fault. I'm no different, except I've been doing this for a long time, and know about this trick.
    5. I am not intimidated. I will keep telling the story. Having been confronted instead of helped by Google only convinces me more that users need to communicate among ourselves.
    6. Firefox is worse, btw. Flaming users is part of their organizational culture. I walked away from Firefox, and I'm not going back. Ugliest company I've ever seen, and they got what they wanted, me not using their product. Win-win. ;-)
    #### Demo of the clipboard problem
    #### Update
    See the next post in this thread.
  Redskins ==> Americans
    1. It seems obvious that the Washington Redskins will change their name sometime in the near future. The name of the team is a disgrace. It's not just relevant to their fans, but should take into account the feelings of everyone who has to listen to sports reports that include this eyesore of a name, every week during the football season.
    2. It's a vestige of previous generations. It's impossible for me to understand how they could choose such a name. Basically, we invade a country, kill off most of the people, move the rest to the worst land on the continent, and that's not enough of a humiliation. We have to name sports teams after them, with disrespectful names.
    3. Imagine they named a team the Phoenix Jew Boys. Or the Seattle Greasers. The Atlanta Honkies. With the appropriate imagery. Even that wouldn't capture the humiliation, because we more or less leave Jews, Italians and other Americans of European descent alone to live in peace. We're not occupying their homeland, after all.
    4. The name is going to change. To think otherwise would be to think that Obamacare is going to disappear, or gay marriage will become illegal once again, or that in a few years marijuana won't be legal everywhere. It's going to change so why not change it now, and avoid the prolonged misery of it?
    5. I propose changing the name to the Washington Americans. It's a good choice for a variety of reasons. The rhythm of the name fits into conversation the same way the old name did. Washington is the nation's capital. The name isn't used for any other major league sports franchise, not that that would be a deal-stopper if it was (the Cardinals, Giants are prior art). Even better, it could be said to be a continuity, after all the Native Americans who the team was named after were before any others, Americans. They are the original Americans. In one move we, all of us, could turn decades of insult into "we get it."
    6. Canadians or Mexicans could conceivably disagree, as they are also Americans. We could ask them not to object, for the sake of undoing an ugly period in United States sports culture.
  Chrome is dying
    I don't usually like death metaphors for software but it really seems to apply to Chrome on the Mac. It just keeps getting more and more impossible to use.
    #### The latest awfulness
    1. Closing tabs causes the browser to crash. Fairly regularly and reproducibly.
    2. Unfortunately I left a few tabs open with YouTube videos. And some of my normal web pages start playing audio when they are loaded. This is a trick they use, something they sell to advertisers. It's awful-on-awful.
    3. There's the catch. When I relaunch the browser I have to listen to the videos all over again. And eventually I will forget the commandment Thou Shalt Not Close Tabs, and around we go again!
    4. Meanwhile the work I was trying to do when the browser crashed is lost.
    #### It gets worse not better
    If this were the only problem in Chrome I'd probably shrug it off, and find a workaround. But it's just one in a series of problems, that as far as I can tell are not getting fixed, that pile up that make the browser more useless than the ones I was using in 1994 when I started using the web (when they had an excuse for being this awful).
    #### Canary is a bad choice of a codename
    And yes, I am using Chrome/Canary, after being told that the classic Chrome isn't being maintained. Believe me, this version is no better than the one they have left to die.
    PS: I ask you, again -- could this possibly be the browser the people in Google use? If so, get your priorities straight. Before you invent intelligent computers, could you PLEASE make a freaking browser that works.
    PPS: When it crashed I was in the process of writing a Stack Overflow question about a security issue with Chrome. Hopefully I will be able to finish it this time. ;-)
    PPPS: All the crashy awfulness of today's system software is why I'm not looking forward to using the software created by today's Learn To Code And Get Rich kiddies. I'm sure they're teaching them how not to break users. (Sarcasm)
    PPPPS: See the next post in this thread. And a third.
  She just wants a Grammy!
  A smart phone with no phone
    I don't want to run "apps" and I don't need a phone. I want a hand held device that has storage, a CPU, a web browser, JavaScript.
    No iTunes. Just hook it up via USB and write or read via the file system. Write scripts to automate synchronization or if you don't care, do it by hand.
    A net connection via LTE or whatever T-Mobile is selling. No contract. Wifi.
    That's it. I don't have to hook it up to Google's or Apple's cloud. I can use it to play music, videos or podcasts. And of course it has a camera, and a microphone, so I can record podcasts and movies to share.
    A platform for geeks. A RISC-type approach. I don't like the fragility of the platforms Apple and Google are making. This isn't for a neophyte. It's for pros. People who don't need or want their hands held when using a hand-held.
  UserTalk in JavaScript?
    Now that I'm pretty comfortable with node.js, I had a thought that it might be fun to write a UserTalk interpreter in JavaScript, and port db.c from Frontier, and run manila.root under node.js. It'd be kind of like running MacWrite in the browser. ;-)
    You'd have to have been around here a while to understand how weird that would be! In maybe a fun way.
    Still diggin!
    "curly"
  Manila lives!
    Jake Savin was doing some work with Manila, and reached a milestone, where he had it running pretty smoothly in the OPML Editor. Over the last few days we released all the parts, both for manila.root and opml.root and he says Manila runs pretty well, again. Which is great. It's a great piece of software, and part of the lizard brain of the blogosphere, it has been around since 1999, and has been brought up to date.
    Jake posted instructions on how to update an existing installation, or create a new one.
  The kind of feminism I support
    I posted this in a comment in a Facebook thread. I wanted to make it a bit more visible.
    Dale, when I see people on the net being gentle and kind and loving in supporting women's rights, I push it with every ounce of flow I have. People don't get inflamed with gentleness, but that's how minds get changed. No one is inspired to creativity by intimidation. I'd like to see the guy express himself, and be happy on such a great day, and have him feel all our support, than see shame. That is such a bug. Men have lots of love to give. Yet that is so unaccepted.
  Citizen Omidyar
    Today kicks off the Newsgeist unconference in Phoenix. It's been anticipated because First Look founders Glenn Greenwald and Pierre Omidyar will meet face to face for the first time. It really will be their first look (sorry). So you will see a lot of pictures, and they will be a topic of conversation, because the pair made huge headlines last year when they teamed up.
    I have to admit I was envious of the people who originally were tapped to be part of the Omidyar news venture. Why? Well he was putting in a huge amount of money, $250 million, signalling he was serious about doing something huge. Also because Omidyar, as founder of eBay, is one of the pioneers of the Internet as a social medium. I figured if anyone believed in the idea of a distributed source-based news system, it would be Omidyar. Just look at eBay for an idea how this might have worked.
    Instead Omidyar went with the most elite of the elite in the news world. It was like the scene in Citizen Kane where the character played by Orson Welles hires the entire editorial staff of the leading NY newspaper and installs them in his news venture. The main difference is that in the fictional story it worked. Omidyar's venture is crumbling.
    When the reporters went to First Look their output dried up. Maybe they were waiting for software, if so, it should have been great, given Omidyar's background and the resources he threw at it. But there's no visibility there. We have very little idea what happened. But we do know that despite their promises, the Snowden revelations slowed.
    They had everything going for them, money, attention, lots of great content, great writers, yet nothing happened? Why? This could be a good story. I hope someone gets it.
  Where do you put your curly braces?
    Brent doesn't like } else { -- and neither do I. Yuck!
    Here's how I do it, illustrated in a screen shot.
    I write code in an outliner. This is the only way it works, from an editing standpoint.
  Facebook as blog surface, cont'd
    We were talking about this here in August. I want to revisit this idea, after a few months of development and thought.
    1. Consider this A-B comparison: A post on my blog. The same post on Facebook.
    2. Goal: Make it possible to post, on Facebook, the same content. It should look as good as it does on my blog, and be as functional.
    3. Minimally this means two features must be supported: 1. Every post can have a title. 2. I need to be able to link from within a post.
    4. Without the ability to link, I am not writing. I started writing when the web came along. I have never written without the ability to link. It's part of how I think.
    5. Linking is more than that, it's an obligation, a requirement, a commitment.
    5. Nice-to-have: simple markdown formatting. Beyond that, I would stop, let a year go by, see what develops. Then revisit with a few simple upgrades.
    6. The sooner we get these features the sooner we can start building a serious content world around Facebook. I'm really looking forward to doing this.
    7. If you want to set up a testbed, please feel free to use my blog feed. ;-)
  Jeremy Lin was a coral reef
    1. Jeremy Lin was the reason I got back into Knicks basketball.
    2. What a thrill. And what a story. On the verge of being cut. Last chance. And he gets in the groove. And the Knicks start winning!
    3. Their winning ways continue, even after he left. Why? Because he showed them they can win. They didn't really need his play, as much as they needed evidence that winning was possible.
    4. But the owner was too cheap to pay him what he was worth. They should have paid him all they had to. In retrospect, were any of the players they did keep, including the famous Melo, worth the $25 million over three years that Lin was paid by Houston.
    5. Houston. What a shitty team they turned out to be. Not.
    6. But they got Lin off their payroll, just in time to fail to sign Chris Bosh and Marc Gasol (or was it Pau, I forget). They deserve to lose, but they're still coasting on the love of Lin, and they're kicking butt this year. I have to admit Dwight Howard has a lot of joy in him too, and James Harden is an awesome player who was under-appreciated at OKC.
    7. The point is this. The Knicks have now reverted to where they were before Linsanity. Phil Jackson is no Jeremy Lin. He's a franchise, the most-elite-of-the-elite. He can't scrape bottom and pull himself, and the team up, by his fingernails, because he is the winningest coach in NBA history. Expectations are going the wrong way.
    8. Melo. Oh Melo really blew it. He should have taken a pay cut and gone to Chicago, where he could have been among players of equal skill to him. Maybe Derek Rose isn't going to come back (you have to wonder), but Noah! He's as much a coral reef as Lin is/was.
    8. Melo is not a team leader. He would be a great #2 to someone like Noah or even Harden. Someone with guts and drive and fire in his belly. Someone who is holding on by his fingernails. Put Melo on a team with Lance Stephenson. That's might wake him up. I don't think Melo gets this. He is not a 1. He is a 2.
    9. It's too late to bring Lin back to NYC.
    10. The best thing to do, for the Knicks, if it were possible, would be to trade everyone they can, for cash. Put the rest on waivers. Bring up 12 players from the D-league. And at least let's have some fun the Garden this year. Maybe one of those 12 will shine like Lin. The team, which includes supposedly one of the best all-time players in the NBA can't even beat Orlando, at home, when they're rested. If you ever needed proof it was time to cash it in, there you have it.
    11. There's no love here. And basketball, as Lin taught us, is really all about love. Sorry to the people who think it's your track record, or your skill. They are all very skilled. Every one of them. The Knicks are losing, and will continue to lose, for the simple reason that they have already lost.
  Does tech have critics?
    I believe any art requires criticism, preferably by people who have some idea about what they're criticizing. That's why I feel I'm doing a service to my fellow tech people, by showing them what their work looks like from another perspective. I've never claimed, nor do I believe, that mine was the best perspective, that there isn't room for others. (I wish they would return the favor. I generally ship new products to silence. No reaction, no feedback, nothing.)
    If the tech industry does have critics, I think they don't try very hard, or take many risks. This has been a coddled craft, people accustomed to getting their way, never hearing words they don't like. But the work is now so mainstream, it requires the kind of criticism that other mainstream arts get.
    PS: There's a scene in the current Birdman movie (spoiler) that shows how powerful criticism can be. (I don't recommend that extreme.)
    PPS: What tech doesn't have and desperately needs is: Festivals. Such a huge missing piece.
  Netflix neutrality
    There's a lot of bullshit flying around about net neutrality.
    The issue is not whether you will be able to get to Google or read your email, or see your tweets, or all the other ridiculous issues that have been attached to this. Honestly these are Karl Rove-level scare tactics, and are hugely hypocritical. (Because the proponents operate services that tilt the table in favor of others. They wouldn't stand up to a net neutrality test themselves.)
    The issue is if Netflix should have to pay Comcast to stream videos to you, if you're a Comcast subscriber. Now they do pay for that. I don't see the Internet suffering. And I am a Netflix user but not a Netflix shareholder. Netflix is just trying to get a better deal, to save a few cents per user per month, and using us as pawns.
    To the cable companies, who currently charge a subscription fee for basic service and premium services like HBO and ESPN, Netflix is a competitor. If you watch movies on Netflix you are likely not using their pay-per-view service. Taken to its extreme, and we certainly heading there, all video will be streaming, and the subscription services will die off, and Comcast will lose a huge chunk of revenue. Yet they will still have to operate the same network services, whether you're subscribing or not. They have a point. Why shouldn't Netflix pay them to deliver their video? HBO does.
    Disclaimer: I hate Comcast. For good cause.
    But my hatred of them doesn't blind me to the greed of the Netflixes. Pay the tariff. Please. And stop trying to use Internet users to save you money. Save the silver bullet for times when the Internet really needs our help. I'd have to say that I hate Netflix even more than Comcast for trying to use the goodwill for the net in pursuit of more profits.
    #### When to act
    Now, if you ever have to pay an access fee to read a random blog, that's another story. But that's not what this is about.
  "We're breaking your city. Deal with it."
    Imagine if, after spending ten years building the new World Trade Center in NYC, the developer sees a tweet from the current mayor of the city saying "I'm so glad that the NYC Street Authority has adopted semantic versioning." You click the link, and see something you can't believe. They're remapping the streets of the city.
    A friendly message from the Streets Commissioner:
    "Don't worry, all your favorite streets will still be there in the new version, New York City 8.0. But we've improved things. Broadway will run east-west instead of the old inefficient north-south route. Now it will connect the Hudson and East rivers! You'll be able to use Broadway to get to Brooklyn or New Jersey. We encourage developers to build new tunnels that cross these two wonderful third party opportunities."
    There are other changes. The subway system is being phased out. You think to yourself, oh, now there won't be any way for the people who work in the WTC to get here. That might be a problem.
    But the worst thing of all, you notice, where your building stands, the new plan calls for a sewage treatment plant. You check your spam folder and find an email informing you of the change. They hope you enjoy the transition. There are lots of spots available in the new roadmap. The former site of Grand Central Terminal. The spot where Yankee Stadium now stands. Two great examples. There's lots of space in Wyoming! We hope your development team enjoys moving your 100-story building to one of these fantastic spots.
    #### Of course cities don't work like this
    They can't. Buildings require major capital investment, and years of work to build. Infrastructure forms around them. Broadway is an old street dating back to when New York was a Dutch colony. Even if all the buildings in Lower Manhattan were to disappear overnight, I have no doubt the new ones will respect the location of Broadway. That's why cities like New York grow. If they worked as described above, they'd be wastelands.
    #### But software does
    This kind of breakage is routine in software. Most people don't understand software, even the people who own the software and the people who use it, who depend on it. It's unnecessary. I don't know why we put up with it. It's why progress is so elusive. Why we lose so much software every few years. It's the excuse big companies offer for their ageism. It's insidious, wasteful, lazy, corrupt and selfish.
    PS: Buildings do sometimes have to move. One that I worked in did, when the university wanted to build a great new hall where it stood. It was a historic landmark so it had to be preserved. Here's a photo set that documents the building on the move. It's a very weird sight.
  No tweet stands alone
    Twitter is a very simplistic blogging system.
    When you read something that doesn't make sense, before you ask what it means, click on the author's name and read the sequence that led to it, in reverse order.
    This is the most basic Twitter-literacy skill.
  Everything real requires compromise
    The other day in a thread on Facebook, a friend of a friend asked why I use the Mac if it's so much trouble to go through an upgrade. My first response to the guy, who I know is a Linux user, is "That's easy for you to say."
    Then I thought about it some more, and realized there are weird things about his life too. He has a great job, but he works for an organization that does a lot of awful things. I wouldn't ask why he accepts what must be a moral dilemma. But it's a similar question to the one he asked. Yes Apple sucks, and they fuck over their users regularly, but what's the alternative? (Before you answer, read the whole story.)
    I use Macs for the same reason I use Facebook (and so does this guy, btw). In a perfect world all our work would be distributed, and it would all come together in a variety of forms, allowing freedoms we don't have with a centralized system. But we don't live in that world, and you know what -- that world might not even work. It's like the people in Republican states, always voting for "less government." If they really got their wish (don't worry the people who promise it don't really mean it) their lives would be miserable. Probably a lot of them would die. We accept a lot of compromise just to exist on our planet in 2014. The planet couldn't support so many people any other way. Hey it can't even really support all the people, even with all the compromising we do.
    My friend's friend is an academic. I was in academia too, and it's easy to gloss over the contradictions in academic life, and look outside the bubble you live in and think of everyone else as flawed. An old wise teacher once said it's easy to find inner peace living at the top of a mountain, with nothing to bug you, but most of us don't live that way, nor would we likely want to.
    I wanted to say to this friend of a friend, and now am doing so through my blog, we all make compromises. I use Macs because I want to make software that's relevant to Mac users. I could achieve PC nirvana, because I write software I actually have the ability that few people do, but my work would be relevant to far fewer people. I've made sacrifices over the years so my work can be relevant. I can't make good software working outside the world my users work in. I have to experience it as they do. That's why I use Macs, and why I use Facebook -- because they exist.
    PS: I use Linux too, btw. And Windows. :-)
    PPS: I realize it's the same reason I love and use Central Park. It's a place of beauty that belongs to everyone. Without the people it would just be some land. It wouldn't be a millionth as interesting.
    PPPS: Accepting moral compromise is like submission.
  Use Dropbox in place of iTunes
    I never was able to get iTunes to let me add new podcasts or delete old ones from my iPhone 6. And the problem is with the iPhone, because when I plugged it into my old un-Yosemitized MacBook Air, it wouldn't let me copy or delete stuff there either.
    Somehow the whole Apple ecosystem is convinced that my iPhone, now that it has been connected to the new iMac, is no longer worthy of being edited? Who knows, and who has the patience to figure it out? Not me. (I'm sure some people do, more power to you.)
    #### Innovation born of desperation
    But.. I desperately wanted to listen to episode 7 of the Serial podcast yesterday, so I had to figure out a way to get the MP3 onto my phone, and I did figure it out, and it's not a bad solution. I used Dropbox. I simply created a new top-level sub-folder of my Dropbox folder, and copied the podcasts into it. A couple of minutes later, it's all there on the iPhone, and ready to listen to.
    The only hitch is that Dropbox has to be given permission to connect to the Internet via my cell connection, if you want it to play the audio while you're away from your wifi network, which is kind of the whole point of having a mobile device. Why you can't download the MP3s once and listen to them as long as you want without Dropbox having to sync, well that's a mystery to me.
    I'm concerned that Dropbox, with this permission, will try to upload movies over my T-Mobile connection while I'm away from home. What a waste that would be. I like that it syncs with my Dropbox folder, but there's absolutely no urgency to it. I would much prefer if it would just use my relatively cheap home wifi connection, and not use up my quota on T-Mobile.
    However, I'm happy. I trust that Dropbox won't screw around with their users the way Apple does with iTunes users.
    Update: Ted Howard in a comment says that if you star an item Dropbox will cache it locally. Perfect, exactly what I was looking for.
    #### If only iTunes were as Farhad describes
    Over on Facebook, Michael Markman pointed to a NYT <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2014/10/23/technology/personaltech/devices-with-yosemite-and-ios-8-operating-systems-seamlessly-connect-in-apples-ecosystem.html?ribbon-ad-idx=9&rref=technology%2Fpersonaltech&module=Ribbon&version=context&region=Header&action=click&contentCollection=Personal+Tech&pgtype=article">piece by Farhad Manjoo where he says:
    >Over the last few months, Apple has introduced a series of devices that work best as part of an integrated lineup. Apple is no longer making lonely individual products. Its phones, tablets, computers and the mobile and desktop operating systems that run them are blending into a single, inseparable whole.
    The centerpiece of that "inseparable whole" is iTunes! I think he's reporting conventional wisdom, which has yet to catch up to reality. Apple's famous Reality Distortion Field still has some power left.
    PS: This is something Android does better. There, you just copy stuff on to your device through the file system. No crazy-ass buggy broken user-hostile software to get in the middle.
  iTunes is broken, again
    #### I can't add or delete songs, edit a playlist
    None of the commands that would let me add a playlist or add or delete item to/from an existing playlist are enabled or present in menus they should be in.
    I looked through Preferences for a clue. I can't find the status screen for the device, the one with tabs that let you get to the apps and other stuff on the phone. Or to see how much space is left. That might have offered a clue why it thinks my device is locked?
    I was able to locate the sidebar, that's well documented on the web. It's the first hidden thing you have to find. And this is not the first time they've hidden it from us (so we know to look, first thing).
    #### Idea: Maybe I can use Dropbox instead of iTunes?
    I tried copying the podcast I really want to listen to into a folder on Dropbox. I'm sure it will show up on the iPhone. The question is, will I be able to play it from within the Dropbox app? If so, I can skip using iTunes altogether, forever! Ohhh that would be nice.
    #### How to prevent iPhoto from opening?
    iPhoto opens whenever I plug in the iPhone. That's not cool. How do I stop that?
    #### Note
    This is why I keep at least one computer on the old OS. If I can't figure out how to get iTunes to work on Yosemite, or if I want to move on and you know do my real work, I can just use my laptop to keep my iPhone and iPad loaded with the podcasts and music I want to hear.
    #### Venting
    First: sigh.
    Every time I "upgrade" to a new version of iTunes, I have to figure out all over again how to trick it into letting me manage the expensive Apple devices I use that can only be managed by iTunes.
    You gotta wonder how Apple sells so many of these devices. Maybe that's why people don't use desktops so much, because they are so useless at managing the devices?
    iTunes is amazingly bad software that just gets worse. At least Android lets you manage a remote device as if it were an external drive. They punt on the whole idea of managing it. Better approach than Apple's where the user is apparently seen as an enemy. To be harassed until they finally give up and just access everything through Apple's store? Could that be the motive?
    "cheesecake"
  The pure joy of Lance Stephenson
    A buzzer-beater by Lance Stephenson, who now plays for Charlotte.
    Remember this is the first week of the season. The game doesn't really matter. It's pure joy. It's so infectious. I want what he's having! ;-)
    PS: That. That's what the Knicks need.
  Let's get together
  Migrating to new iMac
    I have been using an iMac for most of my work for a long time, and since the new 5K Retina iMac came out I've been tempted. I picked a milestone in my development work for a reward, reached it last week, so I went ahead. It just got here today. Exciting. But!
    1. It's normally very easy to migrate, but this time they threw a curveball at me. In order to use the Migration Assistant, I have to upgrade the previous machine (the one I'm typing this on) to the latest Mac OS. That's exactly what I don't want to do. This is my safety net against incompatibilities in the new version of the OS. The old one is running 10.8.2. Now I have to figure out a Plan B.
    2. I do have a Time Machine backup, but I've never tried migrating using that method. I think that's my best Plan B. I have it hooked up now, and it found the disk, and it's copying. 1 hour and 27 minutes remaining. A lot of that is crap of course. ;-)
    3. The disadvantage to this migration method is that the apps don't come along for the ride. And the toolbar at the bottom of the screen doesn't have your apps in it. Not sure what else is missing. This is going to be a major pain in the butt, as I have to re-install all the apps I depend on. Some like the Heroku Toolchain, were not easy to install and took a lot of trial and error. Ugh.
    4. I created a file-sharing connection between the two computers, and am copying applications across. Not sure if this works. The first one I'm trying is Google Canary. (It works. Even remembered my open tabs.)
    5. Now let's try a hard one? Dropbox. I'll let you know. (It worked too. I wonder if it has to download all its files since those were backed up by Time Machine.)
    6. I'm now copying all the apps I use fairly regularly, or might want to have a copy of. That's a couple of gigs, so it'll take some time.
    7. It seems to me -- the one thing that should remain constant over OS versions is the protocol used by Migration Assistant. Wouldn't that make sense? I have apps that might not work on the new OS, which is why I cannot upgrade the old machine. Not until I'm sure I'll be able to use the new one for my development work. This is my main work machine, and you know what I do right? I'm not spending all my time kibitzing on the web. ;-)
    8. I've now switched the two computers. The old one is in the other room, the new one is in front of me. I can tell you one thing, the text in the browser is much sharper. Feels good! :-)
    9. I have a second monitor that worked with the old Mac but there isn't a place to plug it in on the back of this one. I don't need a lot of resolution on that display, I use it to run my various monitoring apps, to show me what's going on on my websites and servers. I might just put the old Mac in its place, let it run the monitoring apps. Hmmm.
    10. Never mind. I thought the adapter didn't fit, but it does. My second monitor works just fine with the new iMac.
  Twitter loves Little Pork Chop!

    @davewiner We just created a Tweet Storm using your very handy tool PorkChop. Thanks for helping us out! pic.twitter.com/nqsUqv6pzo
    — TwitterDev (@TwitterDev) November 7, 2014

    This makes my day!
    I'm glad you all like "Little Pork Chop". :-)
    And thanks to Jeff Sandquist, Twitter's (relatively) new developer guy for helping to spread the word. I've known Jeff for many years, when he was at Microsoft, in a similar job.
  The state of the Twitter platform
    When I started blogging in 1994 the consensus was "there's no new software for the Mac." So when you showed reporters new Mac software it didn't register.
    We're all in a perpetual haze, we see what we expect to see. We expect there are no new Twitter apps, so even if there are, we don't see them.
    I tried an experiment in the summer. I developed a few software snacks, useful tools for people who use Twitter seriously, to see if there was any life in the Twitter platform. I think they're good stuff. Useful. Filling necessary gaps. But except for one article in TechCrunch about Little Pork Chop they didn't generate any interest in the press, where the consensus is as it was with the Mac 20 years ago. No. New. Apps.
    But as we saw with the Mac, this can be turned around. I think it's worth it to do so. Twitter still has unique capabilities. When it started I hoped it would be an Internet-scale notification system. It's even more possible today, because of its stability and ubiquity. Many of the people I'd like to have on my network are already on Twitter.
    If Twitter wants new apps, it seems to me, they have to tell people there are new apps, bang the drum repeatedly to penetrate the fog. That's the way the human mind works. ;-)
    Technically, there's nothing wrong with the Twitter platform that a little developer support and evangelism, marketing and love, couldn't solve.
  Dropbox+Microsoft tweetstorm
    Basically: :thumbsup:
    I did a tweetstorm, by hand, this afternoon about this. Sorry I don't have time to make it a full blog post. I'm just going to copy/paste the contents of the tweets.
    1. This Dropbox+Office thing is the kind of thing Microsoft used to do very well. So what if we don't own the platform. We can get users.
    2. A lot of other companies wouldn't do it, and the Microsoft of the last decade was one of them.
    3. Google could have cut them off with their Docs product. They left an opening for Microsoft, and good for them for seeing it and jumping in.
    4. And for Dropbox, in an instant they have matched and passed Google, and neutralized their threat. Google left the door open for them too.
    5. My guess, this is Billg's idea. Straight out of his playbook. ;-)
    6. Other products like this Microsoft did: The CP/M card. All their Mac products. And their mouse worked with all WP's not just Word.
    7. So the next thing for Microsoft to do: Take Flickr's business. 1. Clone the API, including feeds. 2. Court developers.
    8. You want to win the hearts of developers? Pour resources into moribund markets and get them going again.
    9. Speaking of moribund markets. Ahem. http://twitter.com/
  Bringing back HyperCard
    When people say we should bring back HyperCard now, I think we're actually quite close to it right now with the HTML and JavaScript. All you'd really have to do is:
    1. Create a UI design toolkit that allows you to draw a user interface with divs that can have background-images that are bitmaps; and that's already a feature of HTML.
    2. Create an object class accessible through scripts that mirrors the object structure of HyperCard. You just have to get out the manual and clone what they had.
    In other words, it's just a slight variant on the web. Definitely worth doing if there are people who would develop in this environment who find HTML-plus-JavaScript not easy enough to understand.
    I'm not in any way a good person to lead this, btw. I didn't spend much time with HyperCard, I was a C programmer at the time, and working directly with the Macintosh operating system, without an intermediate layer. I created a different environment, Frontier, that never got a graphic design tool (we tried) so when the web came along it was a perfect fit for us. In other words, I went in a slightly different direction in the early 90s.
    I think my friend Ted Howard tried to do this a while back??
  Your grudges are yours
    Please don't use the Internet to hunt people you don't like.
    Your grudges are yours, own them, and stop hurting people.
  Male vulnerability
    One of my favorite movies of all time, possibly the best movie ever made, has a scene that has had me thinking for years. Two characters, one played by Vera Farmiga, and the other by Leonardo DiCaprio. Midway through the scene she says: "I have to say your vulnerability is really freaking me out right now." A pause. She asks: "Is it real?" He says he thinks it is.
    First, it's great that she checked. When you have an impression of someone else, possibly you're tuning into something about them, but more likely you're projecting. So it's good to check. She plays a psychiatrist in the movie so it would be appropriate for her character not to make an assumption.
    So, he's vulnerable. If you knew the circumstances (no spoilers) you'd know it made perfect sense for him to feel that way. But in most movies, the man is tough, he faces the challenge head-on without fear. In real life if we did that, we'd be likely be dead.
    When you're vulnerable, it's good to feel it. It's a survival mechanism. Evolution made us that way. When you're walking across an open savanna, you are vulnerable. There could be a lion hiding in any tree, ready to kill you and eat you. Keep your eyes open and be ready to run.
    But in our society people are like Ms Farmiga's character, freaked out by male vulnerability, but not as clean about it as she is.
    We are told to be strong, be a man, man up. Be happy with what you have, but don't be too happy. :-)
    As a man, I don't mind being strong for others, being a source of protection, but inside I'm just like you. So are your sons and brothers and fathers and uncles.
    We have to find a good compromise. A way to be true to who we are, and have people's expectations of who we are come closer to the reality.
    PS: This started as a Facebook post. It got a lot of likes, but predictably, not many comments. Why? I assume because it's written by a man and shows vulnerability. ;-)
  TranceFest 2.0
    #### Tell the story of this picture
    Who are these people? They're obviously on CNN. Is it the usual he-said-she-said format? It looks like the man is speaking. Beyond that, I think each of us interprets it differently, depending on a lot of factors.
    Rules: You can't hear the words they're actually saying, so you have to make them up. What they really said is of no importance. It's what you think is going on that will be revealing, about your point of view. It won't actually say anything about the people in the picture. ;-)
    Try as best as you can to be nice about it. You can't be respectful because I'm asking you to make up a story. Please don't make it about me, I wasn't there, I'm not any of the people in front of or behind the camera. Thank you in advance.
    #### I did this once before
    In July 2000 I posted a picture of Bill Gates talking, with people who work for him listening, some attentively, others not. I asked readers to tell a story. Who are the people in the picture. What just happened. What's about to happen? It was really interesting, but not as interesting, imho as this one.
    I called that experiment a TranceFest. This is the second one, hence the title of this post. ;-)
  How I started programming
    I was 18, a college student, math major, in 1974.
    A circular went around to all math students, we're teaching computer programming, sign up for the class if you're interested. Here's the thought that went through my head. "This is something I might be able to get a job doing." So I signed up. That was it. I learned how to do it, but it wasn't much fun because the way we worked with the computer involved a lot of time waiting. If you left out a double-quote, it could take hours to find out. Fix it and wait for a few more hours. And you only had a budget of a certain amount of computer time. Once, doing a project for a professor I ran out. So I did the work by hand. It took a half hour to do what I had failed to do in days of programming and waiting. That's where we were in the mid-70s.
    After school I got a job in NYC as a programmer. We had interactive terminals. Type a line of BASIC and get an immediate result. Change it a little, different result. We still had budgets of time then, the company I worked for was in the time-sharing business. It was economically impossible for some organizations to buy their own computers, they cost millions. So we let them run their apps on our computers. My job was to write custom programs for big customers. When their programs ran, the company might get $10,000 per day for the service. My time was a freebie. I wasn't encouraged to make my programs efficient, but I did anyway, to the best of my ability. All this on hardware that had far less capacity than the iPhone you carry around today in your pocket. Computers were still very expensive.
    After that I went to grad school where we had Unix. Where these other systems had been major hacks, things plugged into other things without much thought, Unix was a perfectly balanced system. You could see this even reading the source code. It taught me to aspire someday to writing code with such clarity and simplicity. I arrived at that place after about 20 years of trial and error. Now I always put the extra effort in to factor code, and go for max simplicity. That means I can build ever-taller towers of technology.
    After grad school, in 1979, prices had dropped enough so that I could buy my own computer, and I did! It was really cool. 64K of memory, Z80 processor, two 8-inch floppy drives, running the UCSD P-system on top of CP/M. I wrote my second outliner there, and a relational database, and integrated them. What a thrill to make all that software work, in my living room.
    Then I moved to California in 1979, to Mountain View, and hooked up with one of the early software publishers. I got to know people at Apple, Atari, at the local computer store (which was our hangout) and I was still working on the P-System, only now on an Apple II.
    It's been getting better and better all the time. Today I just have to click a button on the code I'm editing, and it's immediately deployed to the public Internet. I reload my web page, and I've installed the new version. Time between tests is so short that I can afford to try lots of stuff out. It's pretty great. And btw, no one gets to say what I can and can't deploy, which is as it should be.
  Now that Hello-Node-Webkit works...
    Simon Olsberg had the answer, in a comment on the original post. He explained why I had been unable to get started with Node-Webkit on the Mac. I just had to use an older version, everything started working. Excellent.
    Now, the next question is this, what next? :-)
    I have a desired end-result, "River4" running on the desktop, so that it's easy to set up for a moderately technical user. River4 is a now a faceless server app. It reads a set of OPML subscription lists, then reads the feeds in the lists, and produces a set of "River.js" files, corresponding to each OPML subscription list.
    It maintains a folder structure of JSON files, representing the status of each list, feed, river, and of the server overall. I've zipped the current folder on one of my test machines so, if you're interested, you can download it and browse around and think about what's going on.
    And of course you can install and run your own "River4", on a server or on your desktop, using file system storage, or storing all the files on S3. It's quite solid, I've been running my installation since April, as have a few other people.
    #### Who is this for?
    Target user: A current-day J-school student.
    Someone with a professional interest in news, with time to explore a new approach.
    #### Back to 2002
    In 2002, my company, UserLand, shipped a desktop aggregator called "Radio UserLand". It worked more or less as described above, only it used the Frontier object database to store all the feed and list data. There was no River.js format then. It only had an HTML interface for reading the news stream it aggregated. You used web forms to configure it. This was the product that got all the other "RSS" activity going. It was a coral reef.
    #### I want to do the same thing
    Now I want to take the "River4" server and bring it to the desktop, with a browser-based interface, using all the tools we have now, which are of course 12 years richer than the ones we had in 2002 (that's a joke, the tools are better, but there was a lot of time spent treading water waiting for a lot of things to settle down).
    #### What I want to do
    1. I know how to write a user interface in JavaScript running in the browser.
    2. I know how to write a faceless server app running in Node.js.
    3. Now we want to combine the two, without creating an unmaintainable monster.
    #### Any thoughts?
    Have you created a Node-Webkit masterpiece?
    How to avoid creating a monster?
    I'm just using straight JS, no frameworks.
    Simple is the best. Maybe I should just communicate using the HTTP interface, and not call any routines directly in the server? Thinking that's the best way to go, then the same browser-based app could be used locally or remote. There would have to be a compelling reason to not do it that way.
    What do you think??
December 2014
  For review: Noderunner
    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.
  Did the back-turning police think it through?
    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?
    4. 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.
    5. 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.
    6. 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.
    7. 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.
    8. 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.
  Blogger of the Year (2014)
    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.
  Play Kobe? Or win?
    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.
  Fit in or reach for the stars?
    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.
  Who's going to bring NYC together?
    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.
  Zuck at 22 was wrong
    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. :-)
  Networking has costs
    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.
  Twitter and Facebook aren't working
    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.
  NYPD are the people
    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?
  What if the RIAA had embraced Napster?
    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.
  Heroku deploy puzzle
    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!
  How "dislike" might work
    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.
    5. 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.)
    5. 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.
    6. See also: 1-877-KARS-4-KIDS.
    6. 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!
    7. 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. ;-)
  I know Ben
    #### 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
    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.
  Have a cuppa tea
    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.
  We make tools
    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.
  What "product" means in tech
    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?
  Very good analysis by Jay
    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.
  Where are the protests?
    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.
  What do to do about NYPD
    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.
  The power of juries
    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.
  I gave $100 to Wikipedia
    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.
  An idea for comments
    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.
  David Carr's sad story
    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.
  River4 progress report
    I have to admit my programming stagnated most of the month of November. It happens sometimes. Maybe I should keep a diary. I tend to only report on finished work here on my blog. Still looking for the right way to do this.
    I don't ride in the winter. Instead I go for a 40-minute walk every day. That means I get to listen to podcasts. Yesterday I listened to a Terry Gross interview with author Richard Ford. When he thinks of something he wants to remember he writes it on a 3-by-5 index card. They are unorganized. When his mind is idling they give him ideas.
    I'm the same way with my todo outline. But when I'm stagnating, I forget to put stuff in there. When I'm firing on all cylinders, my list is full of interesting stuff, and is well organized. And lots of stuff goes from todo to done every day. Well I'm back in that groove now, at least for a while. ;-)
    #### Radio1 and River1
    In 2000 I did a project called My.UserLand on the Desktop. That became Radio UserLand in 2002. It was a blogging tool and RSS aggregator. That's a little too humble. It was the RSS aggregator that got the whole market going. When people say I "invented" RSS that's not right. What I did was make RSS easy to use.
    Radio UserLand, which was also Radio1/River1, was interesting in a couple of other ways.
    1. It was an HTTP server that ran on the desktop. Most users had no idea. But when you installed it, the first thing it did was open a web page. If you looked at the URL it began with http://127.0.0.1:5337/. The server it was talking to was the app you just launched. No one cared, which is how, as a software designer, I wanted it to be.
    2. It had a core feature called upstreaming, which was a precursor to Dropbox (not that the Dropbox guys ever heard of it, I bet they didn't). There was a folder on your desktop that Radio stored stuff into, and another thread also running in Radio that watched that folder for changes, and uploaded them to a server we ran, which was eventually released as a free (as in beer) product, so people could run their own Radio networks behind a firewall. (It did something that today "Fargo" does with Dropbox, it rendered the content before uploading it, putting the CPU burden at the edge of the net.)
    All this ran in the "Frontier" environment, a Windows and Mac runtime and development system built around an object database, outliner, language, threading system, etc. It was very powerful, still is. I use it as part of my development system on my 5K iMac I just got (thanks to heroic porting by Ted Howard).
    #### River4 on the desktop
    It's all a big loop I tell you!
    River4 will, as Radio UserLand did, run on the desktop. It will contain a web server, that will be even more invisible to the user.
    It runs in Node.js, which as you may know, is a perfectly fine desktop runtime environment in addition to running great in "the cloud." "River4" has already shipped in its server form. The goal here is to, using node-webkit, create a totally end-user experience. Something that anyone who used Radio1 could use. Is that progress? Well, yes -- because River4 can do a bunch of things River1 couldn't. However, it's incredibly slow progress. What got in the way? Well personal stuff and market stuff. At least we're getting back to somewhere interesting.
    #### The simplest algorithm
    If you're one of those people who don't like algorithms deciding what news you get, this is your antidote. It's got the simplest algorithm possible, a reverse-chronologic list of new stories from the feeds you're subscribed to.
    And it's all GPL'd open source so if you want to see for yourself you can. And if you want to write a fancier algorithm, using my code as a starting point, please do! Just know that whatever you create with this code you have to share with everyone.
    #### I'm still hard at work
    I'll let you know when this is ready to use. ;-)
January 2015
  Dynamic metadata in web pages
    Here's the scenario..
    1. I have a web app that's used to display content dynamically. The page containing the app is static, stored in an S3 bucket.
    2. The app doesn't have any data in it, just code and a few DOM objects. It's a liveblog reader. Think of it as a container that can be used to display lots of different stuff.
    3. When it starts up, it loads the data from a file, displays it.
    4. The URL parameter contains the ID of an item within the file it's displaying. It moves the cursor there. Here's an example, a post about cheese.
    6. The user then posts the link on Facebook, the one from #4 above. The user thinks they're posting a link to their story, not to my app. They barely realize my app exists. It's all about what they've written.
    7. When Facebook displays the post, I readers to see a description of the item that's being pointed to, what readers will see when they click the link.
    8. So what I need to do is change the og:url, og:title, og:description, and og:image elements in the <head> when the app starts up. And (this is what doesn't work) have Facebook recognize the changes.
    9. I want links to items to be passed around the net just like all links are. I could of course provide a programmatic way to post a link to Facebook, and that could have whatever info I want it to, but -- I love the magical scraping FB does. I just want it to get it right. ;-)
    #### Update
    Here's a demo app that illustrates.
    And a Facebook post about the feature.
    And I'm accumulating notes here on my liveblog. This shit is useful! :-)
  Why grudges don't work
    I was just chatting with a friend, and was reminded of a value that's really important. Everyone should start every conversation with a clean slate with the other person. If you're holding a grudge of any kind, ideally, that's been aired, and heard, and dealt with. I know this is an ideal, but the closer you are to it, the more value there is in the friendship.
    If you can get through years of hanging out with someone, and yet still at the beginning of every interaction you can say the slate is clean, then you really have something.
    It also works for people you've never met. If you let other people's grudges interfere with your perception of someone else, then you're not going to have the best interaction possible. The more the grudges color things, the more you're interacting with the grudge, and less with the real person, who might not even have any knowledge of it!
    Often, people don't bring their problems with other people to the person, they spread them around behind their back. You shouldn't let that kind of gossip interfere with your potential relationship. Again, that's an ideal to strive for. We're all human.
    On the other hand it means you have to be ready to hear from someone about something they feel wronged by. And after that if they can say "it's now been dealt with" you can get back to being buddies.
    The behind-your-back part of it can be really insidious. A couple of times people have asked me "Why does everyone say you're a dick." If that happens to you, please -- you do not have to respond to it. Or respond by pushing your glasses down your nose and look at the other person and say "Really?" Try an eye-roll. You are not responsible for the grudges people spread about you.
    Also, many things that become grudges are really not worth worrying about at all. Remember how small we are and how short life is, and ask yourself if you can just let this one go, and not get full acceptance from the person who hurt you. Maybe this is a person who's worth it.
    I tried an experiment a few years ago. Someone who had hurt my feelings came up in conversation with someone else, in public. So I said the other person was a very generous, wise and sweet person. Guess what happened. That's exactly what they turned into! I never got "closure" on the perceived offense. I'm sure had I confronted the person it would have just deepened the wound, for both of us. Instead, it was put aside, as an experiment, and something really interesting blossomed in its place. No regrets.
    The point is this -- the resolution can come from you. You don't have to wait for the other person to give it to you, in order to get back on the "good friends" track. But there are other related lessons, and you always have to keep your eyes and ears open, and memory is important -- you should watch for repeat behavior. But it is possible to move on from a hurt without a confrontation. It often is the only way.
    The people I admire most are the ones who I am sure have never had a grudge with me. I can think of a few such people. I never have to worry that I need to clear the air. Those people are what I think of as best friends. ;-)
    PS: This idea was expressed in a more light-hearted way in a piece I wrote in 1995. Scroll down to the heading "A new form of social behavior." I attract a lot of hate, of course I know it. I can hear their voices in my head, as I write something that people will object to. I guess part of who you are is determined by what you do in response to those voices. Too often I give into them. When I was first starting out writing on the net, I wasn't so familliar with the voice, so my writing had a breezier more fun style to it. The hate grinds you down. I don't know how to avoid it. But I wish I could.
  How snow is supposed to work
    Back in the old days we'd have our snow storm, and everyone would go about their business until school was cancelled, then we'd get a holiday for sledding and shoveling, and life would be exciting and interesting for a while, then the snow would get cleared, we'd go back to school, and everyone got grouchy again, and that was that until the next time.
    Nowadays the fun lasts a few minutes then the grouchy people get on TV and everyone gets all serious and grouchy, and it's like well why even bother.
  JavaScript type coercion fail
    If you're not into JavaScript, please ignore. :-)
    I just spent an hour learning that this doesn't work in JavaScript:
    var x = 12; alert (x.toLowerCase ());
    Instead you have to say:
    var x = 12; alert (x.toString ().toLowerCase ());
    #### Why?
    This seems counter to the philosophy of JavaScript, which strives to make sense of everything, no matter how convoluted. In this case it's fairly obvious what I wanted to do.
    Only in very special circumstances in the code I'm working on is x a number. And when it is, converting it to lowercase, which should be a no-op, fails.
    It doesn't help that Chrome's debugger is totally borked, and I had to resort to println debugging, which I used to do before there were source debuggers.
    #### Can't fix
    BTW, I would never advocate changing the behavior. Too deep, huge breakage potential.
  Of course I use Facebook
    Imagine if you were a popular musician in the 1960s, someone who started in the 40s or 50s. Looking forward to a decade or more of performing, then retiring. Then, British Invasion. So tell me, what do you do? Curl up in a ball and pretend it didn't happen? Or.. It's music! This is what you do. So what if I remember a time when there were no Beatles or Rolling Stones. It's music. And that's what I do. And I steal from the best. And here's some good music. So of course I want to understand it. And learn from it. And adapt. You think you can't learn from people who are younger than you? You're wrong. So of course I use Facebook. Because it's a fixture. It will heavily influence the new systems of the decades to come. And I'm making some of those. So I need to be influenced if I want to be part of the future. That's why I use it, and if you don't and you're serious about this stuff, you're wrong. (Sometimes ideas and people are wrong, as much as I don't like to judge. There are things people do that lead them away from what they want.)
  What's wrong with surge pricing?
    I don't get it. Not joking.
    Imagine you're standing outside in the cold. It's snowing. You have to get somewhere. You need a ride. Of course more people want a ride when it's cold and snowing. So you wait and wait.
    Now, tell me, really, while you're waiting for a ride that's never going to come -- does this thought never cross your mind -- I'd pay more just to get a ride now?
    That's what surge pricing is about. When there aren't enough cars to meet demand, the price goes up. Price-conscious people take public transit or a fixed-price cab. And presumably more drivers head over to where there's a greater demand, so they can get rides, and make more money. I guess if Uber really wanted to do it right, they'd let people bid on the price. So you could get a ride at the normal price. But only if someone wanted to provide a ride at that price. That would be the total VRM solution.
    Surge pricing isn't a great name for what it is, a market.
  A note about blogging
    A good blog exists independently of people reading it.
    Even if no one read my blog, I'd still write it. Not exactly sure why. Maybe it's something like this -- I would still cook even if I was the only person eating.
    I write because I am a writer. It would be the same if I was being paid for writing vs doing it for free, which is pretty much how I've always blogged. There was a brief time when pieces I wrote here were edited and published by Wired. But I still wrote the same stuff.
    Some people seem to feel the need to justify blogging, blogging is still alive they say, but it's actually more than alive blogging is a cultural fixture. Thriving. Read this piece in today's NYT about two Japanese hostages in Syria. They both kept blogs, and their writing informed the reporter. This is why we don't need interviews so much these days. If you have something to say you should be blogging it. (And the hostages weren't available for interviews, in fact one is dead.)
    Recently I've been writing stuff on Facebook, because the engagement level there is so high. But I've found that if you want people who don't use Facebook to read you, and there are important people who don't, you have to put it somewhere else, and for me that's here on my blog.
  Where are the Twitter utilities?
    Amit Agarwal: "Wouldn’t it be nice if Twitter had an Export button? You search for something, maybe a trending #hashtag or your brand name, and all the matching tweets would get saved in a spreadsheet. And the archive would update itself as new matching tweets are posted on Twitter in the future. Twitter is unlikely to provide you an option to save search results directly."
    The last sentence got me thinking.
    What if MS-DOS hadn't allowed you to write applications for it? How long would it have lasted relative to other operating systems? Not very long, I think. It used to be that operating environments were all about the apps. I don't think things have really changed now, it just may take longer for users to realize the potential of add-ons. And Twitter is most definitely a platform, and lots of people use it.
    Advertising has meant that the companies that run platforms are measured differently than earlier platform companies. Oracle, Amazon, Microsoft and Apple work differently from Twitter.
    So what becomes of Twitter? Here's my opinion and it's only that. Long-term it's not viable for obvious Twitter utilities to be cut off. The opportunities will become too great, and it will eventually spawn competition. And the utilities will be exciting, as if someone all of a sudden turned on a spigot for creativity. People will say "D'oh why didn't anyone think of that before!" And the answer will be they did, but somehow they never got made.
    #### Why should they care??
    Why should Twitter care if people use their platform as a note-taking tool? That's what would happen if utilities like Mr Agarwal's were commonplace. I would post an item to Twitter and have it flow right to my to-do list. Or I could take input from users of my product through another hashtag and have it flow right to the Issues tab on the GitHub repository for the software. These kinds of connections are incredibly valuable.
    Yet there's question among developers as to whether Twitter even allows them. That's how screwed up communication is right now. If developers don't believe they'll be permitted to support Twitter as a platform by Twitter itself, what chance is there of them investing in it? Not very much.
    #### If you build it they will come
    But this problem is easily solved, if you believe. I've decided that, if we need to, we can reason with the people who run Twitter. If they don't lose from people enhancing their platform, why should they object? Maybe Twitter-as-a-platform is still viable? I chose to believe it is, in the spirit of Peter Pan, if enough people believe, it becomes real. In software that actually is the way it works! :-)
    Peter Pan: "All the world is made of faith, and trust, and pixie dust."
  Knicks basketball is back!
    I loved watching the Knicks game last night. I know they only beat the lowly Orlando Magic, but they won, and it was a nice game, played with heart, by both sides. That's fundamentally what I get out of basketball. Winning is great for sure, but it really isn't why I watch. I love the SPORT.
    I especially like the personal side of the sport. The Knicks weren't led out of the slump by a veteran star elite player. No! They were led by three players on ten-day contracts. The heart of it.
    I also like that the Knicks management knew these three guys would make a difference. I think that must be Phil Jackson's basketball IQ at work. These are the guys we got in exchange for JR and Iman, and some technical stuff I don't fully grok.
    I also think it's great that Melo played with the new crew, and was willing to pass the ball when he was double-teamed, and that Galloway hit another clutch three pointer when it mattered.
    For the last couple of months the Knicks have been disintegrating, spectacularly. I kept watching, if only to see how far they could go before hitting bottom. I can't say for sure that this is real, but there are signs of life. I still have the paper bag on my head, but I can perhaps see a day when I take it off. ;-)
  2015 server software
    I wrote a piece at the very end of 2014 saying that early this year I would ship a bunch of "little focused server apps that do one thing well." I called them "snacks," because the first ones were little cool utilities you could use quickly. Not a full meal, but a nice appetizer perhaps or a dessert.
    The last one, nodeStorage, I knew would be a little deep, perhaps esoteric, so I rolled them out roughly in order of immediate utility, or as Colbert might say, snackyness. Sorry. :-)
    #### Here are the apps...
    At this point, most of them are out there, so it made sense to list them so that people could see them all in one place. It gives me something to point to when I talk about the collection of apps. So here they are:
    1. nodeStorage -- a simple Amazon S3 storage system based on Twitter identity implemented in Node.js.
    2. pagePark -- a folder-based HTTP server that serves static and dynamic pages.
    3. nodeRunner -- a Node.js app that runs scripts every second, minute, hour or day, each group in its own folder. Great when used with Dropbox or equivalent.
    4. tweetsToRss -- a Node.js app that periodically reads a Twitter account and generates a high-quality RSS feed from it. Can be configured to process multiple accounts into multiple feeds.
    5. listicle -- the software used in the Cluetrain listicle.
    6. macwrite -- a simple demo app for nodeStorage.
    #### River4 etc
    These are just the apps I've released in the last month. I was pretty busy during the previous year (2014). You can see all my open source releases on the index page on GitHub.
    Still diggin! ;-)
    "cheesecake"
  Is this The Singularity?
    Had a dream last night where I was debugging some CSS in Chrome.
    The computer was behaving strangely, but that's CSS.
    On awakening I realized my mind played all the parts, including the computer, Chrome, and CSS.
    Probably time for a vacation. ;-)
    "curly"
  Gun debaters
    One way to deal with a sarcastic troll. Overlook that they're being sarcastic and take them at face value. Ask them to support their statement.
    You think driving kills more people than guns?
    Okay. Then let's license drivers. Require them to take training courses. And pass tests to prove they can use a car safely. And make places where you can't bring a car, so it's safe for people to have picnics or take a walk or ride a bike without fear of being mowed down by a car. We shouldn't allow cars on sidewalks, for example. And on ball fields and playgrounds.
    You could try to prove that cars don't kill more people than guns, maybe they do maybe they don't. But activities that are dangerous even lethal must be regulated in a densely populated world. Might have made sense when people were scattered about. But we live close to each other, that means guns are often used without much thought or need.
    We really need to consider, soberly and seriously, without sarcasm and ridiculous analogies, if we really get anything in return for the death and fear guns cause.
  nodeStorage now!
    All apps need storage.
    Developers have to do too much work to make something simple. If you want to make a text editor, how much work should you have to do to get something that works for users? I felt it was too much work.
    I asked a few vendors to add this feature to their identity servers. I don't think they understood the problem. Probably because they had never tried to create a product from scratch, using what was available to developers working on the net. I don't know why. But I couldn't get through.
    #### The demo app
    I called the demo app MacWrite because it plays the same role as MacWrite and MacPaint did in the early days of the Mac toolbox. It's a coral reef, code you can crib to create your own apps.
    http://macwrite.org/
    We provide the full source for this app so developers can get started quickly. I don't see why you should have to wade through a bunch of docs, and use trial and error to figure out how to put your app together. I'm a developer myself so I understand the need to get started quickly! :-)
    #### The server app
    So I made a nice Node.js toolkit that made it super-easy to add storage to browser-based JavaScript apps. So you can store users' prefs and documents. You could build a nice publishing system around it. I've built a couple. And a mailbox-style reader for Twitter. And more stuff that's still to come. It's called nodeStorage.
    Here's the toolkit. MIT licensed.
    https://github.com/scripting/nodeStorage
    Let's have fun! ;-)
  All apps need storage
    All apps need to be able to store information on behalf of the user. We've had a couple of different approaches to work with that don't require an identity system -- cookies and local storage. These are good but the data is bound to a machine, not to a person. So if you went to a different machine, you'd have to start over.
    So what then? If you use a social network's identity system, you only get to store stuff in their data structures. For example, with Facebook, which has a very simple and elegant toolkit, you can create all kinds of messages. But what if you want to store some prefs on behalf of the user? Or the source code for the content? You have to start over from zero.
    I needed a server app for my in-browser JavaScript apps that did both identity and storage. So I made one. And then put the effort in to make a super simple API, debugged it, tested it with other developers, and put it together as an MIT-licensed open source package.
    Three core technologies: Node.js for the runtime, Twitter for identity, and S3 for storage.
    Coming soon! :-)
    "curly"
    PS: I cross-posted this on Facebook. In the comments I wrote what's sure to be the next post in this series.
  Why I went with Twitter and S3
    Last week I wrote about my coming server product. Today we gave the software to the first round of testers, to see what they think and if it works for them. It's always good to do some reality checking.
    I was just mailing with a friend and he noted that we hadn't reinvented core technology, storage and identity. This is part of my philosophy and I thought it was worth publishing the ideas on my blog.
    I went with Twitter and S3 because they are debugged, run at scale, they work, now.
    The big problem with software is to conserve complexity. There's only so much your brain can handle. The more you package up behind simple APIs, the higher you can build your castle. That's how we get higher level software. Unfortunately people are always coming along and wrecking the foundations!
    For now Node.js, JavaScript, S3 and Twitter seem pretty solid.
    More news sooooon. ;-)
    "curly"
  How VRM works
    Doc Searls has been writing and talking about VRM for many years. It's an acronym of course, for Vendor Relationship Management. It's the same thing as CRM, but viewed from the other side. We, as customers, see ourselves at the center of the universe, surrounded by a sea of vendors who have an imperfect ability to serve our wants and needs. Through VRM we hope to change them so they do our bidding better.
    #### An example
    I have a kink in my neck. So I stretch more to try to get the pain to abate. Yesterday morning, at the start of work, I stretched more than I ever have, or perhaps the stretching was cumulative, because this time my desk chair broke. A broken desk chair for an aching back and neck is exactly what you don't want.
    I am in the endgame of a product shipment, so I'd pay good money to solve this problem as quickly as possible.
    I am also in the middle of Manhattan, surrounded by office buildings and office supply stores. There must be a suitable chair for sale within a couple of blocks of where I sit. In my broken chair. With money burning a hole in my pocket. With an aching neck and back.
    #### Stuck with Google (for now)
    In today's world, I am stuck with Google to try to find the product I need. Of course, it didn't work. I ended up ordering a chair from Amazon, after asking my friends on Facebook for a recommendation. That part worked. I got a bunch of advice, and decided to go with Philip Greenspun's suggestion of a Steelcase chair. $900 plus tax from Amazon, plus $35 to get it here tomorrow. Not bad. A few years ago my poor back would have been suffering for much longer. A few years from now such suffering will seem quaint.
    #### How it will work
    In a post-VRM world, I would register a need.
    1. I need an office chair.
    2. Something my friends like.
    3. Time is super important.
    4. You must deliver.
    5. Does it require assembly? Please do that for me.
    I think that's about it. After registering the need, the offers would start flooding in almost immediately, assuming I'm right and there are suitable chairs nearby. Perhaps someone even has a used one so I could save a few bucks?
    #### Punchline
    VRM has a funny technical-sounding name, but it is the way of the future.
  How to get smaller
    I'm sure every person thinks they're at the end of evolution, that the next thing that happens, hopefully not until shortly after their death, in their sleep, of natural causes (of course) is that the world becomes uninhabitable. But I think for those of us who are alive now, it's more true than it's ever been.
    My grandparents probably thought this, having lived through the Great Depression, and survived World War II, only to find that the death of the species was imminent and locked-in, any day now, because of nuclear weapons and ICBMs. The threat hasn't gone away, but somehow we have avoided disaster.
    We think tech is the future. That our destiny is to learn how to transport our minds into cyber bodies, and live forever. And maybe if we knew how to sustain life here we would achieve that destiny. But everything happens in context. The context for all the great stuff we're creating with computers is that our species is not tenable. Unless there's big change, immediately, we don't survive to put our minds into cyber-bodies. We don't even survive to build huge empty apartment buildings on Central Park, or to have a winter olympics or a Superbowl, or presidential elections. We. Don't. Survive. That has to be the primary issue now, and until it's resolved.
    Further, if we are going to put minds into cyber-bodies, they shouldn't be ours. Our programming has led us to where we are. Evolution, survival of the fittest, competitiveness. All this was good for the first 99 percent of human existence. But now we need a new kind of mind, one that does not view the self as all-important. It's such a foreign idea, so hard to explain in words, precisely because our minds were designed to reject the idea of personal sacrifice. Our goal, which was a good one from an evolution standpoint, was to suck up as much resources as we can, so our offspring will have a better chance when fighting with nature, and competing against the other people's offspring. This can no longer be the way we do things.
    We need fewer people. We need to devise new systems for life support. New ways of thinking. In many ways we have to reverse the impulse that got us here. We have always been trying to get bigger. Now we have to learn, very quickly, how to get smaller.
    Computers with human minds is just a diversion, like all of what we do with computers. We have to work on us, now, and make some big changes.
    If you want to read more on this, I highly recommend this op-ed in yesterday's NYT. One of the best things I've read on climate change. The ideas aren't new, we've had plenty of time to see this coming. But it's time to stop viewing the crisis as off in the future. It's already our present.
  Ancient Mac About boxes
    A great site that has all kinds of About boxes for Mac apps from the 80s.
    I wanted to know, where are my babies -- ThinkTank and MORE?
    Well, Bill Heyman can still run them on his Mac, so he did the screen shots and posted them on Facebook.
    I'm copying them here so they will be easily found in my archive too.
    #### More, there's more!
    Also to celebrate I fixed outliners.com which had gone off the air.
    Still diggin! :-)
  The coming server product
    Here's a tease, a roadmap, an idea of what's coming next.
    Basically I'm releasing the server component of "Radio3" as open source. It's also the back-end for all my latest software. They're all using the same server. Gives you an idea of the kinds of apps you can develop with it. It's pretty versatile, and the apps have a fairly small set of needs from the backend. That's the great thing about JavaScript in the browser.
    The software has been running solid since the summer. I'm doing a careful code review, and lots of factoring and thinking. Getting help from people on the new server-snacks mail list.
    I want to turn Twitter or something like it into a solid powerful development platform with storage. Without the limits the major vendors put on their backends.
    I think there's a convergence of server features happening. Storage, identity and content management are the three big pieces. All the leading tech companies have two, none have all three.
    This is a beautiful architecture, it really works. JavaScript is great, and with the right back-end, you can easily create solid end-user stuff in the browser. The problem isn't going to be technology, I have that -- the problem will be communication. No one is expecting anything new here, anything like this.
    #### Further thoughts
    Content management can run entirely in the browser. This is something we proved in "Fargo". So all we need to centralize is identity and storage.
  Bunk is the best
    Lately I've seen the actor Wendell Pierce in three shows: The Wire (he plays Bunk), Law and Order (a Nigerian chief) and Selma.
    It would be great if they cast him as the star of something serious, like playing Martin Luther King in Selma. He'd play it totally straight, but there would be moments when the lovable, funny and righteous Bunk character surfaces. He doesn't really even have to say anything, you'd just know whatever he's thinking is funny and that would be fun all on its own. Some actors are like that.
  Tonight's meetup in NYC
    Too many people RSVP'd for the restaurant we were going to use for tonight's meetup so there's a new location: Pop Pub, 83 University Place, between 11th and 12th St at 7PM.
    <iframe src="https://www.google.com/maps/embed?pb=!1m14!1m8!1m3!1d3023.2989250933542!2d-73.9928888!3d40.7334475!3m2!1i1024!2i768!4f13.1!3m3!1m2!1s0x89c25999bbda4e49%3A0x6479e0bf6dbac373!2s83+University+Pl%2C+New+York%2C+NY+10003!5e0!3m2!1sen!2sus!4v1421255313960" width="400" height="300" frameborder="0" style="border:0">
    #### No business models, please
    Hopefully this will be the first of many meetups. This one is just for schmoozing and eating, no agenda, no speeches. Only for writers and developers, please no entrepreneurs, VCs or business models. Just people who create stuff for the net. ;-)
  O listicle! My listicle!
    Part of the promise of doing the Cluetrain Listicle was to generalize it so that anyone could create one, even if they aren't Doc and Dave the two Cluetrain dudes. Turns out it was a very simple process to generalize it.
    #### The new thing
    Here's the GitHub repository:
    https://github.com/scripting/listicle
    #### And a demo
    This is the thing on that repo, above, as something you can open in the browser.
    http://listicle.io/demo/
    The picture in the background is Walt Whitman, the famous American poet.
    He wrote a poem entitled O Captain my Captain, which is how the name of this piece came about. He's also one of Doc's favorite poets. ;-)
    #### Tour
    1. Start the tour by looking at the JSON file.
    2. If you like to look at JavaScript, have a look at the home page. The interesting thing about it is there is no content in there! Unlike most HTML pages, it's just a skeleton. The flesh comes from the JSON file, the JavaScript code just hangs the flesh on the skeleton.
    3. You want to learn how to code? It doesn't get much simpler than this, at least for real-world examples. Please, use my code to learn from. That's one of the reasons I put it out there. To help budding developers, of all ages, genders, races, or country of origin.
    4. If you want to create your own listicle, and you have a way to get files onto the public web, download the repository folder to your local computer, unzip it, edit the JSON file, upload both files to a folder on the web, then open the HTML file in the browser. You should see your content instead of mine.
    5. Iterate. Scratch your head. Try another approach, until it works. That's how programmers do. ;-)
    #### Questions?
    Just post a comment here. Keep it simple. Kudos, hat tips, thanks and mazel tovs are very welcome. ;-)
    Let's have fun!
    "curly"
    PS: David Weinberger wrote this up on his blog. Thanks!
  Should machines think like humans?
    Lately I've been thinking about the idea of planting human intelligence in a computer. If you had asked me about it ten years ago I would have said it'll never happen, but now I'm not so sure.
    First, some kind of thinking is already in computers, almost invisibly. Here's an example. I type a lot of text into the browser, Chrome, and it's talking back to the Google servers and is constantly evaluating what I type.
    Over time it gets better at showing stuff that needs correcting. It started with spelling errors. Now it understands proper names and it can highlight some bad grammar.
    Examples:
    1. Its sunny today. (Not flagged, but it should be, the correct word is a contraction, "it's" for "it is.")
    2. Bill Gates got her hair done today. (Bill Gates is masculine, should be flagged it should be "his hair.")
    1. I object on principal. (Flagged with a gray underline. Good!)
    2. Marylin Monroe. (Red underline, name misspelled.)
    3. Yesterday I eat some food. (Not flagged, but "eat" is the wrong tense.)
    4. The dog to the moon flew. (Bad grammar, not flagged.)
    So this is good. I like it when my computers make my work smarter, automatically without me having to do anything. But I'm not sure this is thinking. It's a lot like data processing, something computers have been doing since the beginning.
    The tough question is can we make computers think like a human and if we can should we want to? Much of what humans act on is unconscious emotion, not thought, based on how things feel. Should we teach computers to do that? Is that what we had in mind when we talk about computers thinking?
    Pop out and look at the big picture. What's been accomplished with human thought? Where did all this thinking lead us to? An over-populated unsustainable civilization. More thinking like that? I hope not! :-)
    I'd like to know what people working on machine intelligence plan to have their computers think about and if they're really trying to get them to think like humans.
  Straight talk
    Freedom-building software exists, there are developers who create it, and more who want to. But there isn't a distribution system for it. No way to spread the word when new stuff comes out. I'm not talking about developer tools, frameworks and environments. I'm talking about things users use.
    I said this to Doc and Dave yesterday, but it really has to be said to everyone. It's like Peter Pan. If you believe in it, it will happen. You just have to be part of the network of users that beats the drum for good software that treats you with respect.
    Look at the network Mac software has: John Gruber, Marco Arment, TidBits, and those are just the top guys. There's a whole network behind them of people who share news about cool new products. We need that for web-like software and until it happens we'll still be at the starting gate.
  Good RSS from Twitter
    Here's a new bit of software for technical people who work in news organizations.
    #### The story
    A news org has a flow in Twitter that isn't being reflected in "RSS".
    I think it's best to use a tool like "Radio3" to flow the links to Twitter, Facebook and RSS at the same time. But most news orgs already post directly to Twitter, so if we want their news flow to be part of the open network, we're going to have to help.
    #### The new thing
    Here's the new thing: tweetsToRss, an open source Node.js utility that produces good RSS from Twitter.
    It's technical. To set it up you have to create an app on apps.twitter.com, and you have to have a machine somewhere you can run it on. The machine does not have to be a server. If you run it on Heroku it won't cost anything to run.
    I included an example of the RSS it generates.
    #### History
    Twitter supported RSS a few years back, but it had to work with Google Reader, and it didn't understand the kind of communication that Twitter did. They insisted on items having both titles and descriptions, but tweets are simpler, by design. Now Google Reader is gone, and Twitter is no longer new. This problem, today, has a solution. So I solved it.
    #### Roadmap
    tweetsToRss is a crucial piece of code. It's possible to create an easy-to-use service building on it, but I've just provided, today, a foundation for one. The glue needed to get started. A for-pay service that required no expertise or machine to run the software, might make a good Kickstarter project. I'm thinking about it.
    We've got a mail list with lots of good people. If you have a question you can post a comment here, or join us on the list.
  Dear Doc and Dave
    I love what you guys are doing, and what we did together over the first week of the new year. Now let's do more! :-)
    Please, let's get a process going where users write about software that builds net freedom. Fun, easy to use stuff, and stuff for masters of plumbing and wiring.
    We already have plenty of PR for the stuff that siphons off and monetizes freedom. Look at Techmeme, or any of the VC-backed conferences. Product Hunt. Etc.
    We need balance. It's so great to hear from people who love the kind of software that builds freedom, but when we ship new stuff, no one writes about it.
    You guys are so good at communicating, and you provide the necessary independent perspective. I can write about how wonderful my stuff is but that always comes with the grain of salt -- of course he loves it, he must have some way to screw us with it. Even if I won't do that, and don't want to do it, and am willing to pay for it out of my own pocket. They still suspect something's up.
    So please, we need your help. Let's get a new community of software and freedom lovers. And lets reward developers who create stuff that respects our freedom, with more users. This is how we build the net we want.
    Remember we used to talk about Users and developers, party together? Remember what we got done with that. It still works. Help us. ;-)
  A Sunday afternoon mini-snack
    I wrote a little Node.js script that reads my Twitter account and creates a nice little Twitter feed from it.
    http://lucky.wtf/davetwitterfeed.xml
    Yes, I plan to release the code free for use by anyone.
  Do you love the Talking Heads?
    If so, here's a real treat. A full concert from 1980.
  The 2015 Knicks, a true NY team
    First, have a look at this story about the Knicks fans who wore bags over their heads at the game last night. This is NY sports at its best. We are not the city of pennant winners and world champions. The Yankees? Feh. The 1962 Mets! The 2015 Knicks! I'm glad to have lived to see both. We are the city of fantastic losers with a great sense of humor. Players like Quincy Acy and Choo Choo Coleman. We don't need Derek to be coaching the Knicks now, we need Casey.
    #### Let's have fun!
    If the Knicks management had a sense of humor:
    1. They would hand out paper bags as you go into the Garden. I would actually pay money to go to a Knicks game if they did this.
    2. Even better if the players wore bags over their heads.
    3. Then they could sell you bags with players numbers on it.
    If we're going to hose the season, we might as well have fun! :-)
  Next Wednesday in NYC
    Lots of new stuff coming in the new year, already two server snacks, more on the way.
    Today's Cluetrain Listicle will yield a new desktop snack, hopefully soon.
    I've been working with Brandon Diamond and others at Facebook for a while, hopefully something will come from it in the next few months. New publishing systems, not just targeted at Facebook and Twitter, but also strengthening the open web. For me, that's not optional.
    It's time to start hanging out. So next Wednesday night, come join Youyoung Lee from Huffington Post, Brandon and myself at Le Pain Quotidien on Broadway and 11th St, in NYC, 7PM, if you're around and you're a writer or a developer, come have coffee and let's chat. No entrepreneurs please, no business models, elevator pitches. Just people who create.
  A Cluetrain listicle
    The first Monday in the new year, I went for a walk and lunch with Doc Searls here in New York. It's always great to see him. Our conversations are at a level I don't get to with anyone else.
    #### An anthem
    We talked about a project he was working on with David Weinberger, sort of a reprise to the 1999 classic Cluetrain Manifesto, one of the major anthems of the early blogosphere.
    Doc told me that the new project was a set of 121 ideas expressed in a phrase or a sentence, one after the other, numbered. I immediately saw how it fit into a project I have in process, called listicle.io. Lists are great! Why should linkbaiters have all the fun. What about you and me?
    Then it hit me square between the eyes, what Doc and Dr Dave had is a listicle.
    #### They had a listicle
    I love moon mission projects, esp with smart creative people like these two. A moon mission is has a very specific goal, that you head toward like a crazy fool, and don't notice when you invent new technology along the way, until after it's done. Much of the good work I've done was in that mode.
    So I set to work to create the listicle for their new rules.
    http://listicle.io/cluetrain/
    I think it speaks for itself! :-)
    #### The data is open
    It's just a static browser-based JavaScript app. No server.
    It runs off a simple JSON list that Doc and Dave edit, save in Dropbox, where my app then reads it when it loads the listicle.
    Here's the JSON file. If you want, you too can write a browser for this format! They've made the data available to anyone who wants to play with it. Go forth and render!
    And soon I hope to release an editor that makes it easy to create listicles from an outline.
  I am not Muslim
    1. I am not a Muslim, so what Muslims believe and what I believe are not the same thing.
    2. The story of religion as told by the Quran and the two versions of the Bible are nice stories, but have no basis in reality. They are bedtime stories our ancestors left for us so we wouldn't have to live paralyzed with fear over what dying means.
    3. We are all searching for meaning in our lives. My guess is that if we actually knew the answer it would be horribly depressing to our egos. The answer isn't to force your will on other people , instead learn to live with uncertainty.
    4. We aren't going to die so you can keep believing in the lies your religion tells you. Much better if you let your religion die and join the rest of us and develop a sense of humor about the fact that your life has no meaning in any sense that you would understand (or me either).
    5. While I wrote this I developed hiccups.
    6. I think this is God telling me I'm on the right track. :-)
  France
  Is Google Analytics down?
    In the last 24 hours Google Analytics stopped working for me. They're reporting zero or one people reading something on one of my sites. It's usually a bit more than that. ;-)
    Are other people are seeing this, or is it just me?
    PS: It gets even more bizarre. Reporting zero active users, yet showing a handful of pages being read.
    PPS: As of Thurs morning it seems to be working again. ;-)
  Source code for content
    Source code for content is a really important idea.
    Markdown provides a really good example.
    Consider this very small Markdown document.
    That's the source code.
    Then there's the rendering of that code.
    ####A simple message
    I am feeling happy today.
    A content system has to store both versions. Yet blogging software generally doesn't offer that capability through their APIs. If an app wants to store the source (and it must) it has to find another place to store it. Every piece of software that publishes, and that's most software, needs the ability to store the source. So the user can edit it and have it re-rendered.
    The analogy to source and object code is near-perfect. Instead of compiling the code, we render it. The equivalent of the object code is called a rendering. I've added the ability to store the source in RSS in a new namespace I've defined, and it's supported in "Fargo" and all my software snacks. It allows for different renderings of the same content at the other end of the pipe or in the future. Why shouldn't you be able to view content I create in 2015 in full fidelity in 2030?
    That's the idea.
    The importance will be fully visible when the third server snack ships, sometime in the next few weeks. (The first two are "Noderunner" and "PagePark".)
  reported.ly will have no web presence
    reported.ly is part First Look, the news company startup by Pierre Omidyar. They announced today that they will not exist on the web, only on sites like Twitter, Facebook, Medium, Reddit. No feed, no http address.
    It's worth putting down this marker, to see how this turns out. Will they add a feed? Will they eventually want their own web presence?
    Where will the revenue will come from if the readers find them primarily (for now only) on sites that don't provide a way for users to sell ads.
    Today the domain reported.ly redirects to a Medium page. A Google search turns up almost nothing related to the effort because the word "reportedly" means something, reportedly. ;-)
  PagePark for review
    The second server snack, PagePark, is ready for review.
    If you're a Node.js programmer, or have run Node.js apps, I would appreciate your help testing the setup. Comments, questions -- suggestions, even a code review, are welcome.
    The pointer to the app is on the server-snacks mail list.
  The magic of working together
    I usually don't offer advice to people specifically, but in this case, software developer Joshua Schachter asked, and I had an answer ready, so I did offer some advice.
    The question: "What should I do for 2015? Join bigco, become professional investor, start a new thing?"
    I said: "Build something that's compatible with another developer's work."
    1. I've been preaching this for most of my career.
    2. It's okay to be a developer. Even after a success. Imagine if the Beatles, after touring the US in 1964, decided to become professional investors or join a bigco? We'd never have had Revolver, Sgt Pepper's, the White Album, etc. Why should you stop developing just because you had a success? You're good at it. Don't you like creating new software? If so, why not do more?
    3. Does it have to be in the context of a company? In other creative things, people don't think in terms of companies. Collaborations are great. Actors, writers, directors, editors team up to make a movie. Sure there are companies involved, but the creative act isn't thought of as a corporate thing (I know some people will say it is, you're entitled to your opinion too.) There's something to be said for writing on your own. You get to do it at your own pace. Go back and re-factor to create a better foundation. Your second hit can be something you do slowly and carefully. Or if you get inspired, you can do it in a weekend. You have freedom now you didn't have the first time around.
    4. The magic of compatibility between products, that's a big part of what I do this for. All the great stuff is built around agreements between developers to let users move data between the products. It's not always because the people are visionaries or idealists, sometimes it just happens that way. Schachter's past developments benefitted from the compatibility the web offered in the 1990s (he developed de.licio.us, the first popular web-based bookmark manager).
    5. Users are excited about developers working together. Especially now. We're at the end of a cycle that evolved into very big silos. It's really incredibly easy to bootstrap a new layer, just takes a few developers, working independently, deciding to work together. If you haven't got anything better to do, why not indulge in doing something outrageously powerful? Might not make you the most money. But all good art is motivated by something other than money, again my opinion. ;-)
    6. I spent a couple of days recently working on a collaboration between two longtime friends, David Weinberger and Doc Searls, authors of the Cluetrain Manifesto. The project will come out soon. When I mentioned this on Facebook on Jan 1, there was so much support for the idea. And we were able to make something that would have other uses beyond this one project. Just by following the software where it led us. It may not be that information wants to be free, but software does. Working together, building on each others' strengths, if you can do it, is incredibly rewarding.
    7. I would gladly plug my stuff into Josh's project if he does one. He (or anyone else) could plug into mine by supporting RSS or OPML, or just flavors of JSON. Lots of ways to hook up. I added support for the Facebook API in two days. I use Twitter identity in most of my web apps. "Fargo" hooks into Dropbox.
    PS: This piece was cross-posted on Facebook.
  Dropbox plus Heroku
    After spending most of a year working in Node.js on Heroku, I decided to try with a standalone Linux server on Linode. The next server-snack needs the ability to map a root domain to the server, something like noderunner.org. CNAMEs aren't enough for this application. So I couldn't do the work on Heroku.
    This is the first time I've worked in Node.js where the filesystem API worked. Heroku servers don't have a filesystem. You have to do your storage somewhere else, like Amazon S3. Which works great, but isn't quite as convenient or well-supported by software as the filesystem.
    Then it dawned on me that Heroku and Dropbox would make an excellent combination. Not in the usual way, through the Dropbox API. Why not hook Dropbox up to the fs.* verbs? After all, Dropbox is a filesystem. Why shouldn't it be the filesystem that Heroku never had?
    Of course the usual caveats apply. It may already exist. Or it might not be possible for some reason I don't understand. Just thought I should share the idea. It would be a really interesting way to work with server apps.
    PS: By Dropbox, I mean any service that shares files, like Google Drive, Microsoft OneDrive, Box, etc. And by Heroku, I mean any service that runs Node.js apps in the cloud.
    PPS: There are so many pairs of cloud services that would be so much better if they were integrated. Another example: storage (like S3) plus content management, would allow you to store the source for a page in the same structure as the rendered version of the page.
  #flPgfPermaLinks "false"
  Marco wants Noderunner

    Yesterday, Marco Arment asked this question on Twitter:
    "I’m not tied to setTimeout/setInterval, but how else do people use a persistent Node process to run functions every so often?"

    Last week I shipped a piece of software that's the perfect answer to this question, "Noderunner".
    Put the scripts you want to run in specially named folders, everySecond, everyMinute, everyHour, overnight, and "Noderunner" runs them when it's their time. The scripts aren't cached, so you can change them, add or delete, without restarting the app.
    I made it because I needed it. ;-)
  Fireworks over Central Park
    I was watching the fireworks last night over Central Park. As usual, a big WTF, I never got the big deal about fireworks. Until I did something new with it. I grabbed a pair of binoculars, and that changed everything! The details I had missed before. It's a total trip. Then I realized this is what it's going to be like taking movies in a few years. When I tried to capture the fireworks on my iPhone 6, what came out was grainy and ugly. Nothing near as beautiful and 3D as what I was seeing through the binoculars. Soon, we'll have devices that can capture more or less exactly what we see and share it with others. That'll be an interesting day.
  Dick C
    I asked a few friends whose opinions matter, privately, what it is that Dick Costolo has done that makes investors want him out. The consensus is this -- he's not a product guy. But that doesn't mean he's not a good CEO. People seem to like working for him. I think with a few changes it can all work just fine. And the fact that Twitter is not run by product can be a plus not a minus.
    I've never met Costolo. Why is that? I would travel to SF to meet with him. I am a product guy. A lot of the core ideas in Twitter were developed in the blogosphere, and that's where my influence was maximum. Back when we had an open platform that no one controlled. So the first part of cleaning this stuff up, DC should start meeting with people whose ideas he's been building on. Let's start talking. We may not understand each other at first, so we should meet again until we do.
    Second, let's get the developer community going again. It's far from impossible. Twitter has a good API, and the service is a lot more reliable today than it was when it had an excited developer community. I've heard that investors won't back Twitter-based startups. So what. It doesn't take very much money to get something going, esp now that we have services like Heroku and EC2 to build on. I like the idea that I don't have to compete with a bunch of frothy bubble-based startups. And the browser as an app platform has grown enormously. Lots of good new tech to build on if Twitter were more encouraging of developers.
    Earlier, I mentioned that it could be an asset for Twitter not to be product-driven. That eliminates basic conflict with developers. A problem every platform has. The more the platform depends on developers, the more concern there is that the employees of the company will interfere. Twitter has, ironically, a great track record there. Unfortunately they nuked the developers. And that's why you see such a dearth of new ideas in the Twitter community.
    It would be easy to re-stoke the fires. Why don't we do that in 2015, rather than the alternative, which is almost certainly Twitter being acquired by Microsoft or Yahoo, the equiv of the Knicks in the software world. (Sorry I am a huge NBA fan who lives in NYC.)
    We could do it.
February 2015
  Problem with Scripting News in Firefox?
    I was working with Doc Searls this afternoon, and saw how "Scripting News" looks in the version of Firefox he has running on his laptop. It looks awful. One tab is visible all scrunched up in a corner of the window.
    I have the latest Firefox on my Mac and it looks fine. All the tabs are where they are. If you're seeing the problem on your system and have any idea what the problem might be, please leave a comment below. It really bothers me that what Doc is seeing is so awful.
  Excuse the sales pitch
    First, thank you for reading this blog.
    Now I want to try to sell you on an idea.
    The idea: Supporting the open web.
    Everywhere you look things are getting siloized, but for some reason, I must be an idiot, but I keep making software that gives users the freedom to choose. If my software isn't the best for you, now or at any time in the future, you can switch to whatever you like.
    I make it because I dream of a world where individuals have power over their own lives, and can help inform each other, and not be owned by companies who just want to sell them stuff they don't want or need.
    An example. I helped create podcasting. I never made a dime off of it. But I love that all these great podcasts are available to all of us, so when I ride the subway or take a walk in the city, I get to learn from these people. Having the medium exist is sometimes enough of a reward. (And of course I love to make money, it's one of my favorite things! I have definitely not taken an oath of poverty.)
    I work hard. And I stay focused on what I do. But my ideas don't really get heard that much. And that's a shame, because if lots of people used my software, that would encourage more people to make software like it, and eventually we'd be back where we were not that long ago, with you in charge of your own web presence.
    Anyway, I'm almost finished. I spent two years porting everything I care about to run in Node.js and in the browser. I don't plan to dig any more big holes. This is basically it.
    What can you do? Well honestly, if you see something you think is empowering or useful here on my blog, please tell people about it. The tech press will not be covering it, so you can't find out about it that way. It would be a shame to have put all this effort into creating great exciting open software, only to have very few people ever hear about it.
    Thanks again for reading my blog, and I hope to be making software for you and your friends for a long time to come. :-)
    PS: The place to watch, for the new stuff, the stuff that has the most potential of rewriting the rules of the web, is on my new liveblog. That's where I'm telling the story I think is so important.
  This, this! is why we love basketball
    Hear what Kobe Bryant thinks.
  Comments on the Node Foundation
    Eran Hammer posted a long piece yesterday about why he does not support a Node Foundation.
    I am a relative newcomer to Node, having started developing in it a little over a year ago. I've shipped a number of products in Node. All my new server software is running in Node, most of it on Heroku. I love Node. Even though it's a pain in the ass in some ways, I've come to adore the pain, the problems are like crossword puzzles. I feel a real sense of accomplishment when I figure it out.
    The server component of my liveblog is running in Node, for example.
    I am new to Node but I also have a lot of experience with the dynamics Hammer is talking about, in my work with RSS, XML-RPC and SOAP. What he says is right. When you get big companies in the loop, the motives change from what they were when it was just a bunch of ambitious engineers trying to build an open underpinning for the software they're working on. All of a sudden their strategies start determining which way the standard goes. That often means obfuscating simple technology, because if it's really simple, they won't be able to sell expensive consulting contracts. He was right to single out IBM. That's their main business. "RSS" hurt their publishing business because it turned something incomprehensible into something trivial to understand. Who needs to pay $500K per year for a consulting contract to advise them on such transparent technology? They lost business.
    IBM, Sun and Microsoft, through the W3C, made SOAP utterly incomprehensible. Why? I assume because they wanted to be able to claim standards-compliance without having to deal with all that messy interop. ;-)
    As I see it Node was born out of a very simple idea. Here's this great JavaScript interpreter. Wouldn't it be great to write server apps in it, in addition to code that runs in the browser? After that, a few libraries came along, that factored out things everyone had to do, almost like device drivers in a way. The filesystem, sending and receiving HTTP requests. Parsing various standard content types. Somehow there didn't end up being eight different versions of the core functionality. That's where the greatness of Node comes from. We may look back on this having been the golden age of Node.
    There are reasons why, once a technology becomes popular, it's very hard to add new functionality. All the newcomers want to make a name for themselves by authoring one of the standard packages. Everyone has an idea how it should be done, and won't compromise. So what happens is very predictable, and NOT BAD. The environment stops growing. I saw that happening in RSS, as all the fighting over which way to rip up the pavement and start over took over the mail lists. So when RSS 2.0 came out I froze it. No more innovation. That's it. It's finished. If you want to do new stuff, start a module (very much like the NPM packages of Node). Luckily, at that moment, I had the power to do that, as Joyent did with Node, when embarking on this ill-advised foundation track.
    Now there are many things about Node culture that I don't understand, being a newbie, as I am. But based on what I know about technology evolution from other contexts, the lack of motion at Joyent wasn't a problem, it was realistic. It was what I, as a removed-from-the-fray developer want. I want this platform to stay what it is. I want to rock and roll in my software, not be broken every time someone decides we should hit the ball from one side of the plate, then the other, then back to the original. Nerd debates about technology never end, until someone puts their foot down and says, no more debates, it's done. And the confusion in those debates is always manipulated by the BigCo's who have motives that we'd be happier not really understanding. I know I would be. Nightmarish stuff.
    I love Node. I want it to be solid, that's the most important thing to me. I'd love to see a list, in a very simple newbie-friendly language, that explains what it is that Node needs so desperately to justify both the fork, and the establishment of this foundation. Seems to me we might be pining for the good old days of last year before too long. ;-(
    PS: Hat-tip to the io.js guys. In the RSS world, the forkers claimed the right to the name. At least you guys had the grace to start with a new name, so as not to cause the kind of confusion the RSS community had to deal with.
  My 'Narrate Your Work' page
    I now finally have a Narrate Your Work public page.
    http://reader.liveblog.co/davewiner
    This has been a goal of mine for many years.
    I had a worknotes outline a few years back, but it wasn't like this.
    It was published. This is just what I type as I type it.
    I still have another level of project management in an outline that is not public, can't be, because it contains private information.
    But I'm going to move more and more into the liveblog.
    Also looking forward to actually liveblogging a live event with it. If I knew/cared more about the Oscars I would have done that. Maybe the NBA playoffs? We'll see.
  How to fix the Internet economy
    Suppose you watched a movie illegally, because it was convenient to watch it at home, and you feel like a jerk for not paying the $15 for a seat in the theater.
    There are lots of reasons not to go to a theater. Poor sound quality. People who bring infants to the theater, or talk about the movie loudly as if we were in their living room.
    #### What if?
    What if there was a way to pay for the movie, after-the-fact?
    No movie chain is going to do this, so why not start a proxy for them?
    1. You'd log into a central site, if you're new, enter your credit card info
    2. Navigate to the page for the movie you just watched.
    3. Click the box, and click OK, and you've paid the fee.
    I don't think it should be a voluntary amount. It should the the price of a ticket, either the average price, or the price at a theater local to you (think about this). This isn't charity, it's about convenience. You're not trying to avoid paying for the movie-watching experience, or negotiate a better price.
    #### Where does the money go?
    This is where it gets interesting.
    At first, at least, no movie company is going to want this to exist. They might try to sue it out of existence. In the meantime, the money goes into escrow accounts, earning interest, to be paid to the rights-holder, when they demand it. Who is the rights holder? That's probably a large part of what will be litigated.
    It would be like the lottery, the jackpot would keep growing, and the pressure would build (think about shareholders) to just take the money. And if that were to happen, we would have a whole new way of doing content on the Internet, for pay. ;-)
    #### Why?
    It's a way to bootstrap a new economy, one that will be useful in other contexts.
    For example, I was just reminded that I could pay the New Yorker $1 per month to read all their articles. I would totally do this. If I didn't have to create an account, and give them all my info, and be subject to all the marketing these guys do. The price isn't just $1 a month. That's just what you pay so they can begin to aggressively upsell you. But I'd like to give them the money.
    We need a middle-man here, some entity that doesn't belong to the vendors or the users. It cares equally for both. This would ultimately be good for the vendors, because the system is very inefficient.
  Question about JavaScript and XML
    Update: I came up with a different solution, so this is no longer a priority for me.
    I want to write a routine that emojifies an OPML file.
    https://gist.github.com/scripting/bcd76324a27b5567874b
    It takes OPML text as input, parses it, walks the whole structure, and emojifies the text, and then replaces the original text with the new text.
    At the end of the traversal, it re-serializes the XML text, and returns it.
    However, I get an error at the crucial point, the call to serializeToString.
    Uncaught TypeError: Failed to execute 'serializeToString' on 'XMLSerializer': Invalid node value.
  Good fences make good neighbors
    This is really a very simple idea, but a hard one for a lot of people to grasp, probably due to the way our culture mystifies personal relationships. In the classic romance, the Other is only thought to really love you if they can anticipate your every need. If they can read your mind. This is actually an infantile version of love. A parent has to be able to discern the needs of an infant who doesn't have language to explain that his or her diaper needs changing, or has gas, or feels vulnerable and needs a hug, or whatever. It's a guessing game, but there's no choice. But once we develop language, you no longer have to guess what The Other is feeling, he or she can tell you.
    There's a great scene in one of my favorite movies, As Good As It Gets, where Melvin is doing something very sweet for Verdell, the dog. An observer says "I want to be treated like that." What she's really saying is she misses being a baby. It's a fine feeling, because it really was, for many of us, great being an infant. But it's a bad basis for an adult relationship.
    "Good fences make good neighbors" comes from a famous Robert Frost poem, and I think he's being ironic, but it's still true. If you want to really love someone, you have to always recognize that they are a separate person, and unless you ask, you do not know how they're feeling, or what they really mean, etc. The opposite is true. Unless you've said something, clearly, your husband or wife has no idea what you think. It's so boring to have to say everything, but that's how you stay sane and build trust.
    Imagine a relationship as a circle, and draw a vertical line through it. On one side, write the other person's name, and write your name on the other side. You stay in your side, and they stay in theirs. You can touch, share, admire each other, tell jokes, share truths, but only from your side of the line. Once you put your presence in their body and start talking about what they think or see, you've just been invasive. It's a form of abuse, a violation, a psychic rape. Most relationships are complete sloshes, with people all over the place all the time, you never know who's where when. No wonder no one trusts each other! You can't trust someone if you never know when they'll show up inside your body, without permission.
    Over the years, I've kept friendships with people who are good at this separation. It's how we get to be intimate, because it's safe to do so. The ones that have fallen away are those where the Other thinks they know what you really mean, even if it isn't anything you said or did. As Melvin said in As Good As It Gets, "this is exhausting." Keeping the Other on their side of the line, after a while, gets too much, and you choose to spend your time with other Others.
    As Sting sang: "If you love someone set them free."
    Same idea.
    PS: I've been doing most of my writing last week on my Liveblog. I love it. At this point I think I will migrate my blog over there. Same old story on Scripting News, it's always in motion. For now if you want to keep up on my writing, you have to follow both blogs. There's a new tab on Scripting News with the full contents of the liveblog. So you don't have to travel very far to keep up. And of course the liveblog has an RSS feed.
    PSS: This post is not about you. ;-)
  Scripting News is a feed reader
    I like to think my blog is interesting because of what I write here, but it's also interesting in how it works. And this is something, I think, anyone with a little experience in HTML can appreciate.
    If you open most web pages of news sites, you'll see a combination of markup, things in <angle brackets> that tell the browser how to present stuff, and the text that makes up the page. Do a view-source on the home page of the New York Times for example.
    If you do the same thing on the home page of Scripting News, you'll see something quite different. The content isn't there. Look more closely, near the top, there's a section of script code that says where it is:

    var urlRss = "http://scripting.com/essayblog.xml";
    var urlRiver = "http://rss.scripting.com/rivers/iowa.js";
    var urlLiveblog = "http://liveblog.co/users/davewiner/rss.xml";
    var urlCardFeed = "http://littlecardeditor.com/users/davewiner/rss.xml";
    var urlFlickrFeed = "http://api.flickr.com/services/feeds/photos_public.gne?id=22221172@N00&lang=en-us&format=rss_200";
    var urlAbout = "http://scripting.com/abouttab.opml";

    Each tab on the home page displays a feed, each from a different source of content: my main blog, liveblog, cards, Flickr photos, links, river, and an outline with information about the site.
    In other words: Scripting News looks like a blog, but it's actually a feed reader. ;-)
  A new tab on Scripting News
    This is so recursive, I can't tell you how confused I am, I can only imagine how confused others are. But it works, so here goes.
    I just added a new tab to Scripting News, called Liveblog.
    It is based on the RSS feed for my liveblog.
    The liveblog, as its name suggests, is faster than Scripting News. It contains notes from my work, ideas that are too long for tweets, or that I want to come back to later.
    The liveblog is more casual than "Scripting News". Not sure what that says about Scripting News. I've always wanted it to be loose and friendly, but there you go. I am posting regularly to the liveblog now, so if you want to follow me, that should be on my home page too, it seems.
    Hopefully at some point there will be a "singularity" event where it all collapses down to one thing. But for now, all my feeds meet up on scripting.com.
    And yes, I plan to release the liveblog software. But it's a tricky bit, and I want to get it right before letting it out in the wild. It's can be hard to change software after it's released, and I'm still learning a lot about this.
    PS: It seems like today is a good day to take a screen shot of the Scripting News home page. Continuously updated since 1997.
    PPS: Thanks to my friend Hugh MacLeod for the excellent cartoon in the right margin of this post, from the early days of blogging.
  myword.io on iPhone 6
    I think "myword.io" finally looks good on a phone.

  The meaning of life
  "WTF let's give it a try" is the meaning of life, imho. ;-)

    Yesterday I introduced two people on Facebook, people who I thought would very likely get off on each other's imaginations, humor, positive outlook. So of course I introduced them. I think there's real magic possible in these things.
    There are billions of minds on our mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam. Very few of them ever get to engage. Maybe the secret of life is that there is a truth that can only be uncovered if two people connect and share something. They might not even know what it is. One person has a lock, the other a key.
    Random things happen leading you to think of other things, and then you end up back where you started. Earlier in the day I had lost a huge file because I was editing it in a buggy app, still in development. Then, on Facebook, a question pops up. Maybe Google might have my lost OPML file in a cache somewhere. That led me on a train of thought back to 2002, when I published a post saying how cool it would be if Google would not only index OPML, but understand it. A very small amount of code would have been needed, but it isn't any code I could have written. They would have had to do it. So I did my best to explain why it would be a great idea. These things almost never happen, either no one is listening, or they think I'm too insignificant to matter (the fallacy of working at a huge company, they forget that people are the same size no matter where they work).
    My whole career I've been asking for small favors from platform vendors, almost always being turned down, and then spending 5 or 10 years doing what they do just so I can put the teeny little bit of code in there that I wanted. Often the reason given is security, but it's usually not really that. It's being too busy to listen (I understand, me too, sometimes). Or a perception about the significance of the person doing the asking.
    Maybe the two lovely people I introduced on Facebook, in collaboration, will figure out how to make something like this work. I think they're both the kind of people who would just say "WTF let's give it a try" if someone made a suggestion. I watch for that in people. It's the rarest quality, but they're the only people you can actually do stuff with! ;-)
    BTW it would still be fucking awesome if Google would parse and display OPML. I have a great editor for it. And we need services to run at scale doing intelligent things with these structures. Oh the fun we could (still) have! I never give up. :-)
    PS: There were a few times people said yes to these kinds of things and incredible stuff did actually result. One was the NYT and permission to use their content for RSS. Another was Microsoft and XML-RPC, which led to the idea of websites having APIs. Something that's still shaking up the tech world today (though few people talk about it). NPR adopting podcasting is in the same class.
    PPS: It happened in the inverse when Adam Curry tried repeatedly to get me to build a framework for podcasting in Frontier (long before it was called podcasting, btw). My mind was pretty closed to the idea, at first. But to both our credit, he persisted and eventually I heard what he was saying.
    PPPS: A few days ago I wrote about awards for technology. Let's add another award. Best combination of ideas. Don't just reward people for being brilliant or brave, reward them for working with other people. The more diverse the interests, the more rewarding. ;-)

  Doors and extra bedrooms
  Why much of the time programmers are re-doing what someone already did.

    Explaining "myword.io" yesterday, to Doc, in a tweet: "Ev built a nice house but didn't put a door on it. So I built one so I could have a door." This happens a lot in software, it turns out. Then I tweeted "This happened with Matt Mullenweg's house too. I needed a door, he wouldn't add it, so I had to build the whole house just to get the door."
    That was necessarily abbreviated to fit in 140 chars. More accurately, I needed an extra bedroom for each post so the source code for the post could be stored alongside the rendered version.
    #### Why the source code?
    So what really happened without all the metaphors? :-)
    In the case of WordPress, let's say you want to make a great blog post editor, but you don't want to have to write a whole blogging system, or you want to let people use it with WordPress which is incredibly popular.
    So the user creates a post, saves it, we render it, then send it to the blogging platform, WordPress. The author makes some changes, and it's still good, we just tell WordPress to update the post. But what happens if two weeks from now, the editor is long-closed, or the user is on another system, and they need to update the post? No can do. Because I don't have the source code for the post.
    I can get the rendered version from WordPress, but we were working at a higher level. If we had had a place to put the source, alongside the rendered version, we would have been in business.
    #### I asked, nicely I hope
    I asked that WordPress allow me to store a bit of data along with the post. They did consider the idea, but explained that this might create security issues, so they couldn't do it. So I build a whole CMS, so I could have the editor I wanted. This post is written using that CMS.
    #### The missing front-door on Medium
    Re Ev's product, Medium -- I wanted a front door so I could hook their great rendering engine into my writing environment. I really shouldn't be doing what I'm doing with "myword.io", they should just provide an easy way for other tools to hook in.
    What I have is 90 percent of the effect people are looking for, and it's good for the web. An ecosystem could develop around it. I know Ev doesn't believe in software ecosystems. Fine. Let's see if he's right.
    I know there are great CSS guys out there who don't work for him. "myword.io" is open source, so anything can happen. And maybe writers will help this part of the web stay free from Silicon Valley siloization. I know it's a dream, but I'm a dreamer. ;-)
  It's time to finish Twitter
    #### Tweets are objects
    Twitter calls them tweets, but in programming terms, they are objects.
    Objects have attributes. If an object has a picture attached to it, that should not be represented as part of the text attribute of the object. There should be a separate attribute for each picture. Yet, totally for historic reasons, that's how it works in Twitter.
    Note that in the API they are objects. It's just in the UI that they aren't. That seems wrong.
    #### Hyperlinks are mature technology, let's use them
    When Twitter was invented we already had conventions for embedding addresses in text. They are called hyperlinks. I think Twitter's designers should decide if they want to have hyperlinks, and if so they should support them the way the web does. There was no good reason to make it work differently. I guess at the time Twitter had problems scaling their servers, so that's where their attention was focused. But those days are behind us.
    #### Neaten up tweets, get rid of the dangling URLs
    Seriously, the onboarding process of Twitter is made more difficult and confusing for people because of all those URLs dangling all over the place. When showing a non-technical user Twitter you have to tell them to ignore those things. Or try to explain why some tweets have two URLs and what they mean. It's 2015. It's almost ten years. Wouldn't it be great to finish this product, really, before it turns ten?
    Make images an attribute (actually in some cases I think they are). Or allow text to be hyperlinked. Even better: do both.
    #### 140 character limit? Give it up
    And while you're at it, let us put more than 140 chars in a tweet. Yes I know the drill, it's supposed to be better if people are forced to be concise. To which I say "Have you looked at your timeline recently?" There are lots of ways to not be concise, and people are using all of them. Give it up. It's over. And btw there are plenty of important, good ideas that require more than 140.
    #### Hashtags are intimidating, they could be easy, even fun
    Another thing: It should be easy to ask Twitter what a given hashtag means. If necessary use Mechanical Turk to implement this. In this area, Twitter is mysterious and difficult for newbies and experts alike. These are easy fixes. At some point Twitter stopped improving. Use some of the resources you have to fix them! It's long overdue.
    Hashtags are not some obscure technical artifact, as they were when Twitter started. They are now part of human language. Look at ads on buses if you don't believe me. I think baseballs have hashtags on them now!
    If Twitter made hashtags easy people would cheer hooray! when Dick Costolo walked into a room. (Not that they don't already.) Hey you could even make the definitions funny. ;-)

  The Dude hates The Eagles
  One of the best scenes in any movie, ever.

    This kind of shit happens all the time.
  David Carr
    We met on October 16 last year at a theater district bar in NYC.
    It was a getting-to-know-you meeting. Lively conversation, even though our points of view were very far apart. I liked him. It's so sad that he's gone.
    Whenever a Carr column popped up in my river I read it from beginning to end.
  Something fun I whipped up
    I have a new writing tool I'm working on and wanted it to be easy to create beautiful essay pages from it, like Medium. But Medium doesn't have an API. So I made an essay-viewer that has one. ;-)
    http://myword.io/
    Now, I'm not a great CSS hacker. That's obvious. But all that's needed is a framework to get started. That's the idea.
    I'm going to keep iterating over it. I really like the way it feels. And if you have any ideas on how to improve it, please feel free to fork. ;-)
    #### How to make an essay of your own
    1. It's not pretty. :-)
    2. You have to type in a technical language called JSON. It makes sense and it's pretty simple, but it's also exacting. If you misplace a quote or a comma it will fail. If you've been thinking you want to learn to code, this would be a very easy way to start. (Another way of saying that programming isn't easy.)
    3. You must have a way of storing a file in a public place with an http:// address. I like to use the Public folder in Dropbox.
    4. Start with one of the example JSON files, for example this one.
    5. Edit it, and upload it. Suppose the new address is this: http://someaddress.com/my.json

    6. You can get myword.io to display it with this URL:
    http://myword.io/url=?http://someaddress.com/my.json

    That's really all there is to it!
    #### An example that works
    http://myword.io/?url=http://liveblog.co/misc/demo.json
  No one hears the anti-vaxxers
    Note: Small spoiler re Boyhood movie at the very end.
    I read a story on Joey de Villa's blog yesterday about an over-55 community in Florida where people have wild consensual sex all the time. Being over 55 myself I have to say it sounded interesting.
    I'm getting ready for something different. I like programming, and I'll keep doing it for sure, as long as my right arm holds up (I'm having pretty radical RSI pain right now). But I'm not trying to change the world, or make a billion dollars. I have no expectation that I can change the world, and no great ideas on how to do it either. And I don't need more money than I have saved, I think. The stock market been berry berry good to me. (You have to be of a certain age to get that joke.)
    Anyway the retirement community story said something. They've thought of everything by now. There isn't room to be innovative in lifestyle anymore. Back when I was a kid, that's what we thought we were doing. Creating something new in life. But the hippies are either gone or very old. Did you see what Joni Mitchell says about Bob Dylan? She looks like my grandmother! There's just a cranky old person being cranky. No the hippies didn't really break through in lifestyle. We all got old anyway. ;-)
    Here's the thing: it's got to be even worse for young people with kids today. That feeling that everything is all figured out. There isn't any need for me to think up anything creative to do with my life. If I try, I just find out that someone thought of it long ago, and it has a price tag. So you look for little ways you can be different. Unfortunately not vaccinating kids turned out to be one of them. It could have been not eating cheese, something harmless. But it was vaccinating kids.
    I thought Obama understood this, btw, and had ideas for how to involve all of us in making the world work better. If the US can elect a black president, can't we lead the world in making a difference, as people? Nah, he didn't get any big ideas until Year 6 of his presidency, when it's almost too late. And his big ideas didn't turn out to be very great either. Just that he could be an asshole to the Republicans and they might relate to that, appreciate that, respect that. It was true back at the beginning and he should have been doing that all along. And it would have been nice if each of us had a way to feel our life had meaning, that we were making a difference, and being creative, heard and understood -- by someone, anyone. I think that's the real crisis of our times, in the first world at least.
    The mom in Boyhood said it best: "I just thought there would be more."
  We could have an open, user-controlled, ad-free Facebook
    The other day my dear friend NakedJen was waking up to the power Facebook has because we use their system. She saw an endorsement by her friend, in the right margin on Facebook, of a product. It had her picture on it. She wondered if her friend had been paid for the endorsement, or even consulted. While I don't know for sure, I think the answer is "neither." Facebook has the right to do that. I'm sure it's in the user agreement. Which we all agree to, or we wouldn't be using Facebook.
    The conversation continued.
    I told her that I had stayed off Facebook for years because I didn't want to appear to endorse this system. But eventually the battle was lost, and my holding out wasn't accomplishing anything other than cutting me off from a social phenomenon. If I wanted to develop software in a post-Facebook world, if I didn't understand Facebook, my software would be missing an important historic precedent. Facebook exists, and nothing I can do can change that. So I might as well join the party, and I did, and no regrets.
    Thing is, we've already ceded this kind of power to Google with video via YouTube. I heard a report on NPR on Sunday that was very depressing, an interview with a musician saying that YouTube had given her an agreement, take it or leave it, that said either you sign everything over to us, or you can't be part of YouTube. I didn't get the full story, just the gist. She said she thought the Internet was going to free us from the music industry. But it didn't do that. The music industry has rebooted, on the Internet. The money just flows to different bank accounts now.
    You can see the process of ceding control happening right now, as essayists post their stories on Medium instead of their own blogs. There seems to be an assumption that you get more flow if you do this. I kind of doubt it. But even if there were more flow, you're ultimately forcing all of us to accept a deal that's probably going to be as bad as or worse than the one Facebook and YouTube have given us. Why? Because the lawyers and entrepreneurs of tech are learning, and they're getting better at grabbing, and users are not acting in their self-interest, any more than they were when Facebook and YouTube were taking over.
    But even today it's not too late. Because economically and technically, we could reproduce what we have on Facebook on open systems, where everyone controls their own space, without signing over the kinds of rights that make users feel used. We saw some of the enthusiasm when Diaspora launched a few years ago, but they were college students, and weren't realistic about how to bootstrap such a system. You might say But Zuck was a college student when he booted up Facebook. But that system got to grow slowly, and their mistakes weren't exposed so quickly because they were small when they happened. If you wanted to boot up something that would do what Facebook does, today, you'd have to be prepared for a much bigger user community, almost immediately.
    But what is Facebook, really? Where is the value in it, and is that so hard to reproduce? Seems to me it's basically a discussion board with a network data structure called "the graph." It's FriendFeed 2.0 (the current Facebook was designed by the creator of FriendFeed). There doesn't appear to be any rocket science in there. Maybe there is and I'm missing something. (There's no mystery to a graph. When I was a math undergrad I studied graph theory and wrote software that processed graphs. Long before there was a Facebook.)
    Economically, there are huge economic resources that can be marshalled by users pooling their money. This isn't speculative, the money does flow. And I don't think each Facebook user consumes all that much in the way of computing and storage resources. $100 a year perhaps? Would you be willing to pay that to control your online destiny? You probably pay half that each month to your ISP.
    It seems to me that all that's needed is the will to do it. By a few developers, and by a few users, to get a bootstrap started.
    I'm not advocating anything. This isn't a proposal of any kind. But I thought about this the other day and asked myself the question -- is it possible? And I decided it is possible. So I thought, being a blogger and a developer and a user, as I am, that I should say that.
  Honoring developers and products
    This began as an outline on my liveblog, but I felt the idea deserved more attention.
    The Crunchies are a product of what I call the VC-based tech industry. But that's not the only tech industry. There's so much more going on here than bankers and advertising. I started making a list of awards I'd like to see, here it is, with some ideas.
    Open format and protocol of the year
      Past honorees would include HTTP and BitCoin, as examples.
      Hackathons please include these among your commercial sponsors' APIs. It's important to build around open formats and protocols too.
    Hall of Fame
      People or products that influenced all that came after. We have a lot of catching up to do here. For me, the big ones are the C programming language, the PDP-11 machine architecture, Unix, Visicalc, 1-2-3, the Macintosh and IBM PC, Mosaic, Flickr, Twitter.
      Like sporting halls of fame, we should also include leaders who made a difference, and journalists who covered our work intelligently and with care.
    Giving back
      Giving money to hospitals is great. But let's honor technologists who got rich and gave back to the ecosystem that produced the technology that made their work possible. This would be pure philanthropy, not embrace and extend. There is very little of this, but awarding it would create incentives for there to be more.
    User trust
      What company gave the users freedom to switch. The bigger the trust, the more we want to honor you.
    Best commercial API
      We hardly ever compare them. Last year I discovered there was a huge diff betw Twitter's and Facebook's APIs.
  Help with Twitter metadata?
    Here's a link to my new liveblog software (still very much in development).
    Try viewing that link in Twitter's card validator.
    I see an error that isn't help me to figure out what's wrong.
    ERROR: FetchError:exceeded 4.seconds to Portal.Pink-constructor-safecore while waiting for a response for the request, including retries (if applicable) (Card error)
    If you have experience with Twitter card metadata, do you have any ideas about how I can get this working? I'd really like to have links look as good in Twitter as they do in Facebook. (That's a requirement, not a like.)
    Thanks in advance!
    "curly"
    #### Update -- found the problem
    Marco Fabbri confirmed the metadata was valid by storing it on another server and it validated. He said to check if I was getting a call from twitterbot. His theory was my Heroku server was blacklisted because of another app running on the same physical machine. This theory turned out not to be correct, but it led me to the fix.
    1. I was getting a request from Twitterbot, for /robots.txt.
    2. My little server app wasn't doing anything special for that file, and it thought it was a twitter user, so it tried to fetch its reader app, opml file, etc, and got lost.
    3. Twitter got a timeout for the /robots.txt call.
    4. It barfed.
    The fix.
    1. Add a special case for "/robots.txt" and return a 404.
    Result -- twitter love! :-)
  The unedited voice of a person
    People use blogs primarily to discuss one question -- what is a blog? The discussion will continue as long as there are blogs.
    It's no different from other media, all they ever talk about is what they are. We got dinged by the NY Times because all bloggers talked about at the DNC was other bloggers. But what were they busy doing -- talking about other reporters, except when they were talking about bloggers -- talking about bloggers.
    Nothing wrong with it.
    In the early days we joked that they were watching us watch them watch us watch them. And so on.
    In 2003, when I was beginning my stint as a fellow at Berkman Center, since I was going to be doing stuff with blogs, I felt it necessary to start by explaining what makes a blog a blog, and I concluded it wasn't so much the form, although most blogs seem to follow a similar form, nor was it the content, rather it was the voice.
    If it was one voice, unedited, not determined by group-think -- then it was a blog, no matter what form it took. If it was the result of group-think, with lots of ass-covering and offense avoiding, then it's not. Things like spelling and grammatic errors were okay, in fact they helped convince one that it was unedited. (Dogma 2000 expressed this very concisely.)
    Do comments make it a blog? Do the lack of comments make it not a blog? Well actually, my opinion is different from many, but it still is my opinion that it does not follow that a blog must have comments, in fact, to the extent that comments interfere with the natural expression of the unedited voice of an individual, comments may act to make something not a blog.
    We already had mail lists before we had blogs. The whole notion that blogs should evolve to become mail lists seems to waste the blogs. Comments are very much mail-list-like things. A few voices can drown out all others. The cool thing about blogs is that while they may be quiet, and it may be hard to find what you're looking for, at least you can say what you think without being shouted down. This makes it possible for unpopular ideas to be expressed. And if you know history, the most important ideas often are the unpopular ones.
    Me, I like diversity of opinion. I learn from the extremes. You think evolution is a liberal plot? Okay, I disagree, but I think you should have the right to say it, and further you should have a place to say it. You think global warming is a lie? Speak your mind brother. You thought the war in Iraq was a bad idea? Thank god you had a place you could say that. That's what's important about blogs, not that people can comment on your ideas. As long as they can start their own blog, there will be no shortage of places to comment. What there is always a shortage of, however, is courage to say the exceptional thing, to be an individual, to stand up for your beliefs, even if they aren't popular.
    I sat next to Steven Levy the other night at dinner in NY. He volunteered that in his whole career he had never written a word that wasn't approved of by someone else, until he started a blog. I applaud him for crossing the line. I give him a lot of credit for writing without a safety net. It really is different. Comments wouldn't make the difference, what makes the difference is standing alone, with your ideas out there, with no one else to fault for those ideas. They are your responsibility, and yours alone.
    For me, the big rush came when I started publishing DaveNet essays in late 1994. I would revise and edit, for an hour maybe more, before hitting the Send button. Once I did that, there was no turning back. The idea was out there, with my name on it. All the disclaimers (I called the essays "Amusing rants from Dave Winer's desktop") wouldn't help, if the ideas were bad, they were mine. But if they were good, they were mine too. That's what makes something blog-like, imho.
    Note: This is a re-run of a post from 2007. On-topic in light of the "blogging is dead" debate. This is what a blog is, imho. DW
  Silicon Valley and diversity
    Last week a cover story on Newsweek about gender-based discrimination in Silicon Valley. The articles linked into the topic on Techmeme mostly had the same opinion:
    1. The image on the cover is bad.
    2. It helps perpetuate sexism in the tech industry.
    Silicon Valley is a void of diversity in many ways, not just in gender.
    A rousing chorus of "everything's great as long as we're getting richer" rah-rahism. It's a lot like bubbles of the past. Even if there are women in tech, it's still a monoculture, one business model iterated over a matrix of attributes. Uber for diapers. Cloud-based funeral homes. All with the same approach to business.
    At some point, eventually, we have to look outside of Silicon Valley for tech leadership.
  Why nodeStorage is a big deal
    This is the story of "nodeStorage".
    In April last year I decided it was time for me to get my Twitter act together in my new JavaScript-based work environment. Back when I was working primarily in "Frontier", and before the great breakup with Twitter and app developers, I had a pretty easy Twitter programming interface. I wanted the same thing for apps written in JavaScript in the browser.
    It took a total of about two months from beginning to end to get it all working and to get a few apps built on top of it to prove that I had a complete interface.
    Then I got interested in Facebook, and realized I'd have to do the same thing for it, and when I started I figured it would take about two months, the same amount of time I had spent on Twitter. Nope. It took two days. That's because Facebook had written a special library for browser-based JavaScript apps that hides all the details of connecting with Facebook from the browser.
    #### This has value
    At that point I realized that what I had in my glue for Twitter had value on its own. There was no other Node.js package that was as complete or easy. So I spent some time cleaning it up and adding S3-based storage (all apps need storage), and last month I released it as MIT-licensed open source.
    That's "nodeStorage".
    #### Why it's a big deal
    1. It makes Twitter as easy to program in browser-based JavaScript as Facebook.
    2. It adds storage, which even Facebook doesn't offer.
    It takes the Twitter API, which was significantly less easy than Facebook's and gives it parity, and adds an essential feature, making app development on top of the Twitter API incredibly easy and most important complete for app-building.
    Now, I understand some people feel burned by Twitter, and don't want to risk building on its API, but "nodeStorage" takes a lot of the risk out of it. And I don't think today's Twitter is as concerned about app developers as the earlier version was.
    Anyway, that's the story! If you're looking for an easy way to get started with the Twitter API and you can deploy a Node.js app, then "nodeStorage" is probably what you're looking for.
  I have time in SF today
    There wasn't much response to this post, so I won't be doing the office hours this afternoon in the city. Thanks to those who did respond. I'm always happy to look at products created by people who read this site, so please feel free to send me links via email. Thanks!
    I'm thinking of holding informal "office hours" at a coffee place south of market this afternoon. If you have an interest, we could talk about your development project (esp if it's JavaScript) or talk about open formats and protocols, or my various projects, or other tech stuff. Thinking mainly of "Scripting News" readers. And please no trolls. If you have an interest, send me an email -- dave.winer@gmail.com.
  To Seahawks fans re 12th Man
    Seahawks fans -- remember the 12th man concept?
    That means there is no "they."
    Maybe it was a dumb call. It's a test. Do you own it or complain like a mere fan. If you're on board, there's always next year.
    Spoken as a Mets/Knicks fan, with no illusions about what that means. ;-)
  To journalists re blogging
    Bloggers are your sources. You'd be hard-pressed to do your job if your sources didn't blog about what they do.
    Look at your stories. How many of them are about what someone said in a blog post or a tweet. A public utterance that made news. Or helped support your research.
    Reporters have been trying to write off blogging since the beginning. They're doing it again. This is not news. ;-)
    Blogging isn't going to stop as long as people have something to say.
  Bad experience at Alamo at SFO
    Rented a car at Alamo at SFO.
    The guy asked if I wanted to buy their collision insurance, I said no. The guy asked "isn't this a business trip?" I asked why he wanted to know. He said if it's a business trip that I wasn't paying for, I should buy the insurance, because my personal car insurance wouldn't cover it. I said that's fine, but I don't want it.
    He kept pressing and I told him to move on, finally saying how I was taking care of the insurance, and who was paying for the car was none of his business. He then said something incredibly personal, about not liking my manners. I asked if this was a technique to get people to buy their insurance. He said I shouldn't raise my voice. I said he should do his job. I guess I didn't sound too friendly when I told him to mind his business. That's how it goes when you keep pressing a customer who said no, over and over.
    The guy's name is Jonas. I think the whole thing is a sales trick. People are confused about insurance, and by saying something that sounds definitive, as he did, he gets people to say WTF give me the extra coverage.
    I went to the trouble to check with my insurance company about this specific situation and they said there's absolutely no reason to buy their insurance.
    I liked Alamo, because you get to pick out your own car. I think that's neat. But you always have a choice, and the prices are all the same anyway, so I won't be using Alamo anymore. I told Jonas I would write this up, and I meant it.
    Cross-posted on Facebook and Yelp.
    Postscript: Shortly after I returned the car (Wednesday morning) I got a call from an apologetic Alamo service rep who assured me this is not the way they do business. I said I hope not. Glad that we now have this power to share info about vendors who don't treat customers well. Hopefully they'll train their reps that any customer could be a blogger so they have to treat them all well .
March 2015
  Podcast: Staring into watches
    A 5-minute podcast speculating on new social behavior with Apple watches on Manhattan streets. Will people stop staring into their phone and stare into a watch instead? Now their eyes will be pointing down, instead of out, unless they're going to hold their wrists up at eye level? Or perhaps people will stare into the watch and the phone at the same time. If you put your watch on your left wrist and hold your phone in your right hand, it might just work. Either way, the success or failure of Apple's watch will be seen in the streets of Manhattan in a few weeks. Listen to this hilarity-cast for the scoop.
  This is an April Fool-free zone
    There are no joke posts here, and there won't be.
    I'd love to see other blogs and news sites make that statement.
    See also: This is not an April Fool joke.
  What's the best JavaScript editor?

    On March 23, I posted a short-term roadmap for "MyWord Editor", including this:
    The editor is a plain pre-HTML5 <textarea>. There are lots of great projects underway to do beautiful full-featured text editing in JavaScript. I did a survey of them last week, and have reached out privately to some of the authors of these tools. I want to get great text editing in MWE. But first I wanted to get the open source release out there.
    The editor is now released, people have successfully gotten their own servers running, and yesterday I released the first version of templating. I'd say the train is rolling.

    #### What's the best text editor?
    Now I'd like to swing back to the question of text editing.
    There are lots of editors to choose from. They all presumably have advantages and disadvantages. I'd like to host a discussion here. What would be the best editor to use?
    #### Discussion
    The two I looked at most closely were medium.js and Dante.
    The genre of editor that makes the most sense is one that's trying to mirror the Medium feature set. That's what both these editors aim to do.
    But there are other drop-in editors written in JavaScript. I wanted to cast a net as wide as possible to see what would come back.
    This is a decision lots of other people have had to make.
    For example, what does Ghost use? I assume WordPress wrote their own? Did they? Tumblr?
    They all had to make the same decision.
    #### Update 4/2/15
    I decided to put a very low-tech plug-in architecture in MWE.
    You can read about it here.
    In a word, the architecture is this: fork. ;-)
  This is not an April Fool joke
    We're coming up on that awful day on the web when anything you read might be a joke. The jokes are never funny, usually they say something bad about someone the author doesn't like. Haha just a joke.
    It's pretty horrible for a reader. All this week, every article with a seemingly sensational headline, will have to be checked to see if it might be a joke. Here's the first one I was bit by today.
    BGR: Meerkat is dying – and it’s taking U.S. tech journalism with it.
    Is it real? I think it is. There don't seem to be any obvious lies in the piece. But the conclusion is way over the top. Nothing is dying, that's pure hype. And if US tech journalism is dying, it's been happening for a long time, Meerkat could hardly be the cause.
    I don't think it's funny, I don't think news orgs should play this game. It's as if a bank decided one day, as a joke, to take all the money from your account and give it to someone else. Haha it's a joke.
    Imagine going to GMail on April 1, and finding someone else's email there instead of yours.
    The press only has one product, facts. They twist things, every day, to make the news seem more interesting or important than it is, but one day of the year, this Wednesday, they outright lie. Not in every piece, so you have to always be on the alert. It's as if an airline deliberately crashed a random plane into a mountain as a joke. The goal of a news organization is to inform. On April 1, they crash instead.
    If you're a news organization, on March 30, preparing your annual joke, how about do everyone a favor, skip it this year.
  The purpose of the Internet
    Facebook thinks the purpose of the Internet is to be The Matrix. A sort of lifeboat or ark for people whose lives must consume no more than a watt or two of electricity and some protein slurry.
    I propose that the purpose of the Internet is to create a place for people of intellect to work together to create a greater consciousness for the species, so we can make the changes we need in order to survive, with some purpose beyond mere existence.
    So I think the purpose of the Internet is to save our species from self-destruction.
    It's the only tool we have whose purpose is not yet fully decided.
    And survival is the only problem we have that we must solve.
  As usual Seth is right
    In this piece Seth Godin says that your negative internal voice is a permanent fixture. Nothing you can do can get it to leave you alone. But there is an answer. Surround that voice with lots of love, it's the perfect antidote.
    I learned how to do this myself a number of years ago.
    I would drop something, and in the instant after, as it's falling, my dark inner voice would judge me. "Idiot!" it would say. Before I learned to challenge the voice, something I never dared do as a child, it would take over. The idea would fester and bloom and become other kinds of negativity.
    Instead, as soon as I regain my composure, I call up another voice, my inner adult loving voice. "I love David very much," the voice would say, firmly, almost fiercely, "and he is not an idiot, he's a very smart, good, nice person, and I want you to stop saying that about him."
    It works, I'm happy to report. The dark voice is a coward. It only picks on little kids. Confronted with a powerful adult it sleeks off to hide until the next moment of weakness.
    I had a teacher who showed us how to do this. There were exercises that included punishment for the dark voice. I would lock mine in a bathroom in the basement of the house I grew up in, and make him pour a bowl of spaghetti on his own head. In my imagination, as I locked the door I'd tell him to stay there and think about it a while.
  12-minute podcast
    A short podcast on the future of everything, The Matrix, Facebook, virtual reality, empathy, getting real for once in our species. ;-)
  Data mining on Twitter favorites
    These days people do a lot more Favoriting that RTing.
    Seems to me there should be some system built on Favoriting in Twitter.
    A new tab where I see all the most favorited tweets from people I follow?
  The Internet of Internets
    Backlash85: "How would you feel about an alternative to the current internet?"
    I love this idea but I'm not sure what it means.
    Maybe, like a new namespace?
    Start over with a parallel .com and .net?
    I really like the idea.
    TCP/IP over IP.
    Internet of Internets!
    We didn't like the way this one turned out.
    Start a new one!
    New rules. ;-)
  Great thing about software
    In software you can "drop it in and see what happens" and if it explodes into a billion pieces, you know you have to go back and re-think it. I keep having to remind myself that software is different. There's zero cost to an explosion, if you have a backup copy of everything of course.
  Empathy
    Thanks to Dean Hachamovich for the pointer.
  Who drives you?
    Silicon Valley proposes to drive our cars for us. I guess that's okay.
    Silicon Valley theorizes about putting our minds in software containers and storing them in computer memory, to be woken up when there's something for us to do, or think about, or perhaps see.
    But what would there be to see or do or think about in a world where everyone else is in a computer's memory. Have you seen many beautiful megabytes recently? Honey come look at the glorious pixel I just found. Of course you'll only be able to "see" it from the other side of the glass, looking out.
    Maybe we'll be able to hear each others' thoughts?
    There's a watch coming. But it will be a short-lived product, because soon we won't have wrists to put them on.
    So in a world where we're woken up to see or think, or do something, but there's nothing to see or do, or think about, I guess there won't be any reason to wake up.
    When it's all said and done, we might just end our species because we ran out of things to think about or do or see. Something to think about. Or do something about.
    PS: I think this whole upload-your-brain thing is a trick. Once they get you up there, they'll just turn the computer off and that's that.
  Silo-free is not enough
    In a comment under my last piece, Drew Kime asks a question that needs asking.
    "What is it about WordPress that you see as siloed?"
    The answer might surprise you. Nothing. WordPress is silo-free.
    1. It has an open API. A couple of them.
    2. It's a good API. I know, because I designed the first one. ;-)
    3. WordPress is open source.
    4. Users can download their data.
    5. It supports "RSS".
    "So, if WordPress is silo-free, there must be something about MyWord that makes it worth doing, or you wouldn't be doing it," I can imagine Mr Kime asking, as a follow-up.
    #### Silo-free is not enough
    This question also came up in Phil Windley's latest MyWord post, where he introduced the editor with: "I can see you yawning. You're thinking 'Another blogging tool? Spare me!'" He went on to explain how MWE is radically silo-free.
    But there's another reason I'm doing the MyWord blogging platform, which I explained in a comment.
    MyWord Editor is going to be competitive in ease-of-use and power with the other blogging systems. The reason to use it won't be the unique architecture, for most people. It'll be that it's the best blogging system. This is something I know about, and I'm not happy with the way blogging tools have evolved.
    The pull-quote: "I'm not happy with the way blogging tools have evolved."
    Imagine if you took Medium, added features so it was a complete blogging system, and made it radically silo-free, and then add more features that amount to some of the evolution blogging would have made during its frozen period, the last ten years or so, and you'll have a pretty good idea of what I want to do with MWE.
    #### Blogging is frozen
    There haven't been new features in blogging in a long time. Where's the excitement? It looks to me like there's been no effort made to factor the user interface, to simplify and group functionality so the first-time user isn't confronted with the full feature set, left on his or her own to figure out where to go to create a new post or edit an existing one. Blogging platforms can be both easier and more powerful, I know because I've made blogging platforms that were.
    Basically I got tired of waiting for today's blogging world to catch up to 2002. I figured out what was needed to win, and then set about doing it.
    I have no ambition to start a company. I like to make software. I'm happy to keep going as we have been going. I think JavaScript is a wonderful platform, with apps running in the browser, and in Node.js on the server. It's a more fluid technology world today than it was in 2002 the last time I shipped a blogging platform.
    I would also happily team up with companies who think this is a great opportunity. That blogging has stagnated too long, and that there must be ways to reinvigorate the market. I don't like taking shots at WordPress, but honestly I think it's stuck. I'm happy to talk with entrepreneurs who have ideas on how to create money-making businesses from an exciting user-oriented, user-empowering, radically silo-free open source blogging platform! Blogging needs a kick in the butt. I propose to give it one. With love. :kiss:
    Anyway, to Drew, thanks for asking the question. I doubt if you were expecting this much of an answer, but the question needed asking, and I wanted to answer it.
    PS: Here's an idea of what a MyWord post looks like.
  "Radically silo-free"
    Over on Facebook and on Twitter I posted a thought, that software could be "radically silo-free."
    David Eyes asked what it means. I referred him to my blog, I said "scroll to the bottom and then read up." That's because this idea is so fresh that I hadn't yet written a post explaining. I thought I probably should.
    #### First mention
    First, I said I was going to hold up the release of "MyWord Editor" because I wanted it to be silo-free from the start. Then I spent a week doing that. While that was happening, I made a list of things that would make software silo-free, and I did all of them. I wanted to consciously, mindfully, create something that perfectly illustrated freedom from silos, or came as close as I possibly could to the ideal. In that post I defined the term.
    "Silo-free" means you can host your blog, and its editor, on your domain. I may offer a service that runs the software, but there will be no monopoly, and it will be entirely open source, before anything ships publicly.
    #### Second mention
    In the post announcing the open source release of MyWorld Editor, I included a section listing the ways it was silo-free, fleshing out the idea from the earlier post. And from that list, comes my definition.
    1. Has an open API. Easily cloned on both sides (that's what open means in this context).
    2. It's a good API, it does more than the app needs. So you're not limited by the functionality of MyWord Editor. You can make something from this API that is very different, new, innovative, ground-breaking.
    3. You get the source, under a liberal license. No secrets. You don't have to reinvent anything I've done.
    4. Users can download all their data, with a simple command. No permission needed, no complex hoops to jump through. Choose a command, there's your data. Copy, paste, you've just moved.
    5. Supports RSS 2.0. That means your ideas can plug into other systems, not just mine.
    There may be other ways to be silo-free. Share your ideas.
    #### Why it's "radical"
    In that post I explained why the software was "radical".
    These days blogging tools try to lock you into their business model, and lock other developers out. I have the freedom to do what I want, so I decided to take the exact opposite approach. I don't want to lock people in and make them dependent on me. Instead, I want to learn from thinkers and writers and developers. I want to engage with other minds. Making money, at this stage of my career, is not so interesting to me. I'd much rather make ideas, and new working relationships, and friends.
    I guess you could say I believe there are other reasons to make software, other than making money. Some people like to drive racecars when they get rich. What I want is to drive my own Internet, and for you to drive yours too. ;-)
  The best frameworks are apps
    The best software frameworks are apps that do things users care about.
    Back in the 80s it was dBASE and then FoxBase. 1-2-3 had a macro language, it was weak, but it was widely used because 1-2-3 was so popular with users.
    Today it's WordPress.
    And Slack is doing interesting things with their APIs.
    Twitter too, but that got kind of muddied-up.
    The best one of all of course is JavaScript, a very bizarre language in a totally underpowered environment that reaches into every nook and cranny of the modern world. It's an awful environment, you'd never design one that worked that way, but the draw of all those users makes up for its sins.
    Flickr had a wonderful API, still does, but Stewart left the house before it could really blossom as a community thing. See Slack, above.
    Chatting with Brent Schlender the other day, I commented that Steve Jobs' politics and mine are exactly opposite. Jobs was an elitist, all his products were as Doc said in 1997, works of art, to be appreciated for their aesthetics. I am a populist and a plumber. Interesting that this dimension of software is largely unexplored. I hope our species survives long enough to study it. ;-)
    BTW, when ESR saw XML-RPC he said it was just like Unix. Nicest thing anyone could ever say. When I learned Unix in the mid-late 70s, and studied the source code, I aspired to someday write code like that. So well factored it reads like its own documentation.
    Today, I'm mainly concerned with getting some outside-the-silos flow going with people I like to read. If we get (back) there, I will consider it a victory. :-)
  Journalism must compete
    My friend Jay Rosen asks for comments on Facebook's request that content providers give them access to the full text of their stories. A NYT report earlier this week said that Buzzfeed, the NY Times and National Geographic were among the first publications that had agreed to do this.
    I've commented on this many times over the years. The news industry could have seen it coming, prepared, already had a distribution system in place to close off the opportunity for tech. They didn't. That's still what they have to do. And it doesn't seem like it's too late, yet.
    #### My advice
    1. Do the deal with Facebook. They have access to 1.4 billion people, that's huge. There's never been a news distribution system even remotely like it. How can you not try to use this system? It's as if you were a world-class skier and the Olympics asked you to compete. You of course would thank them for the honor, and go.
    2. At the same time, be part of an independent news system, one that's not captured by any company, that does what Facebook hopes to do. It's too soon to throw in the towel. The technology already exists to do this, easily. (Even the lowly Knicks show up to compete every night, in theory at least, and sometimes they embarrass the current world champs.)
    3. There's good reason to think the independent system will be much better than the Facebook-captured one, because it can offer things that no captive system can, independence and some measure of objectivity. Don't miss that Facebook has become a newsworthy entity. Expect this to develop over the years, as their audience grows to cover every person on the planet. No one can fully trust them. And you should trust the people, your readers, to know that. Offer something interesting and independent. It may never reach the size of Facebook, but it can be a sustainable, and growing service.
    4. Partner with Twitter. Encourage them to support full content as Facebook is doing. That means relaxing the 140-char limit.
    5. Run your own river on what used to be your home page. The smart ones will point not just to stories on your site, but everywhere there's news. Include all the sources your people read. You can't compete with Facebook and Twitter with a system that only contains your stories. Stop thinking so linearly. People return to places that send them away.
    6. Expand. Have a goal to have twice as many sources reporting on your site every year. Accept that the roles for your current editorial people will change as they grow to lead teams, to teach large number of sources how to go direct to readers, with integrity. (Jay: Teach this new role in J-school.)
    7. You have to become more like Facebook, but please only the good high-integrity parts. No snickering. There are a lot of good people who work at Facebook, people who really care. Some of them used to work for you. Listen and learn from them. News is changing. Be the change.
  MyWord Editor is open source
    Last week I said we'd wait to open up MyWord Editor for use by everyone until it was fully silo-free. Today the wait is over. We're ready to begin a journey, that hopefully will add new life to the open blogging world.
    A shot in the arm for the open web. A way for JavaScript developers to collaborate on a new fun project. A way to escape from the silos that threaten to turn us into commercial robots, consumers and promoters, when we aspire to be thinkers and doers. :-)
    https://github.com/scripting/myWordEditor
    #### It's radical software
    These days blogging tools try to lock you into their business model, and lock other developers out. I have the freedom to do what I want, so I decided to take the exact opposite approach. I don't want to lock people in and make them dependent on me. Instead, I want to learn from thinkers and writers and developers. I want to engage with other minds. Making money, at this stage of my career, is not so interesting to me. I'd much rather make ideas, and new working relationships, and friends.
    #### Here's the plan
    1. I know MyWord Editor is not as good as it could be, as good as it will be, once we get the ball rolling. The editor is a plain pre-HTML5 <textarea>. There are lots of great projects underway to do beautiful full-featured text editing in JavaScript. I did a survey of them last week, and have reached out privately to some of the authors of these tools. I want to get great text editing in MWE. But first I wanted to get the open source release out there.
    2. It's pretty easy to get your own MWE instance up and running. I've included instructions on how to set it up in the readme. There's a mail list where people can help.
    3. I am operating a server myself, but please think of it as a demo. I do not want to be in the hosting business. Anything you post there could disappear at any time. The best way to use MWE as a blogging tool is to set up your own server, or pool your resources with other people to set up a server. Especially with free services like Heroku, it's very inexpensive to operate a server, and fun, enabling, and you're helping the web when you do it. Remember silos are bad, even ones operated by people you like! :-)
    4. I have tons of features I want to add. I have a huge set of debugged concepts from previous blogging systems I've done, dating back over 20 years. I'd like to add them all to MyWord. But first people have to use it. It's no fun to add features to a product no one uses it.
    5. Remember, if the past is a guide, the tech press will not write about this. So if you want people to know, you'll have to tell them. Please spread the word. Let's make something great happen, all of us, working together, to build the web we want.
    6. If you believe you can fly, you can! :-)
    #### Silo-free
    Here are all the ways "MyWord Editor" is silo-free:
    1. There's an open API that connects the in-browser app to the server. So you can replace the app. Or the server. Or both. ;-)
    2. Because there's an open API, you can build anything you want at either end. You're not limited by my vision of what's possible. Let a thousand flowers bloom.
    2. The app is provided in source, MIT license. So there are no secrets. And you can use my source as the starting point for your own editor.
    3. The server is provided in source, MIT license. No secrets, etc.
    4. The app has a command that downloads all your content in JSON, so you can move your data from one server to another, at any time. If any instance removes this command, alarms should ring out all over the land. It's your content, ladies and gentlemen, not theirs.
    5. Of course every MyWord user has a great full-featured RSS 2.0 feed. We love RSS and it feeds us and we feed it, it's doing great, and anyone who disses it is a mean rotten silo-lover. :-)
    #### Thank you Twitter
    Twitter is doing a good deed, by allowing us to use their service for identity. They have an excellent API, and their servers are reliable. And I think they're fair about what they allow and don't allow.
    We're not in any way trying to usurp their business. And if there's more good stuff out there on the web, that's more stuff for people to point to from their Twitter feeds. I use Twitter, so do a lot of other people.
  Beautiful JavaScript editors
    I spent some time over the last couple of weeks surveying the amazing collection of Medium-like editors written in JavaScript. All open source, some very good. It's just amazing to see the collective energy and ambition of the JavaScript community. I've been programming a long time, on a lot of platforms, and have never seen anything like this.
    I thought about integrating one of these toolkits with "MyWord Editor", currently in development. I put together testbeds for the most promising ones, ZenPen and its derivatives, Dante and medium.js. They're all on the right track, each has advantages, but imho what they all were missing was a way to enable a motivated user to run a Medium-like blogging service with their editor as the centerpiece. A next-gen blogging system, built with JavaScript, with elegance and beauty at the center. Key point: this is achievable, within easy striking distance, in the spring of 2015.
    I decided that rather than pick one beautiful simple editor, I'd sprint to the finish line with the standard pre-HTML5 <textarea> editor, release the whole thing as open source, and let the community decide what to do. There appear to be some front-runners, projects that are active and ambitious, going somewhere. I want to make it easy for people to work with me, rather than be in the position to choose a "winner" at this time, based on incomplete info.
    With all the incredible open energy in the JavaScript world, I don't doubt we can move the leading edge forward, if we have the will to work together. I'm putting out my best invitation. I have a great back-end, perfectly suited to host a blogging environment (I have some experience with this), and a rudimentary editor. Let's see where we can go from here.
    I expect to ship my editor next week.
  MyWord Editor: silo-free from start
    I came back from my trip early this week, ready to ship MyWord Editor. But I decided to make it silo-free from the start. So I had a little more work to do before release.
    "Silo-free" means you can host your blog, and its editor, on your domain. I may offer a service that runs the software, but there will be no monopoly, and it will be entirely open source, before anything ships publicly.
    I could have gone another way, and put up my own hosting service, as I have done with my software snacks, Little Pork Chop, Happy Friends, Radio3, Little Card Editor etc. None of those are open source, however they all run on the nodeStorage platform, which is.
    I want MyWord Editor to make a very strong anti-silo statement. And even though it might make more sense from a development standpoint to do it in stages, it would muddy the message to have it be a silo when it's released. So we're going a little more slowly, to make a big strong, impossible-to-miss statement. Silos are not user-friendly. We don't want them. Not even for one version.
    We'll start testing the software over the weekend, and hope to have a first public release early next week.
    PS: Here's an example of a document published by MWE.
  When will 140-char wall come down?
    Yesterday I ran a piece where I said Twitter's 140-char limit is probably in its final days. It's gotten a lot of attention.
    Next question: When will the change be announced? Imho, it's not hard to read those tea-leaves either.
    Facebook is having a developer conference next Wednesday and Thursday. It's likely that they will talk about their plans for news distribution at this conference.
    David Carr ran an article in the NY Times last October that previewed the pitch we'll likely hear. They want publishers to post full content to Facebook. In return they are willing to share ad revenue with the publishers.
    The reason this is so important? In a mobile environment, clicking on a link to read a story is a very big price. We all know that mobile is where Facebook's growth is coming from. News reading on mobile can become much more fluid. That's what Facebook wants to do.
    So, with Facebook getting full content from at least some publishers, and the announcements likely coming next week, does Twitter really want to explain the magic of 140, and ancient limits of SMS, or would they rather have an equivalent proposition for publishers? Smartphones aren't just the future, they're here, now. It seems like this is the moment to say 140 was nice, it got us to where we are, but now because of mobile, we have to get more text from publishers, if only to remain competitive with Facebook in the one area Twitter still has an advantage (for now) -- news, especially mobile news.
    Still reading tea-leaves. I have no direct info, but if Twitter doesn't make the change now, they will be too late. My bet: It'll happen before Facebook's announcements next week.
  A Medium-size hole in Twitter
    Some people call "vendor sports" what I call it tea-leaf reading. I've been doing it for decades. I like to watch, and guess, based on incomplete information, what the various forces in the tech industry are doing.
    A lot of times you can discern what big companies are doing, the same way astrophysicists discern the existence of black holes, by the effects they have on smaller more visible entities.
    In this case, I think perhaps Twitter is getting ready to bust through the 140-character limit. Why? Because Medium appears to have given up on merging with them. How can I tell that? Well, because they went straight after Twitter, by introducing a timeline, and short Tweet-like messages, without the 140-character limit. This was Medium blinking. I was really surprised they did this. Up to that point I thought Medium was a juggernaut. That they were cleaning up. Apparently not. Apparently they needed to tap into greater growth potential. And if anyone is likely not to be overly respectful of Twitter's internal engine, it's the founder. He knows how the sausage factory really works, where the bodies are buried, etc. The stuff that we don't know.
    I always thought Medium's manifest destiny was to be acquired by or to acquire Twitter (in the same way NeXT acquired Apple in 1997). The founder returns, bringing with him a feature that users are likely to adore. I said it this way: "There's a Medium-size hole in Twitter." I thought that was funny. Funny because it was so true.
    I imagine, via tea-leaf-reading, that Dick told Ev, "Sorry dude, we decided to make vs buy, you want too much money, so we decided to build our own Medium clone inside Twitter." Much the way they said that Bit.ly wanted too much for their URL-shortener five years ago.
    One way or the other. imho, the 140-char wall is not long for the world.
    PS: I thought it would be interesting to tweet a link to this piece in Medium. I had to do it by hand of course, would be nice to hook it up to "Radio3" via API. :+1:
    PPS: When will the 140-char wall come down? See this follow-up post.
  What is lock-out?
    As users, we're all familiar with the idea of lock-in.
    A service starts. They offer something attractive. We use it. And later find out that we can't move without leaving behind everything we created there.
    That's lock-in.
    Lock-out applies to developers.
    A service starts, offers something attractive to users. But it has no API. It can't share its data with any other application. It can't receive data either. If a user wants to create something, they have to use their editor. And if they like the editor, they can't use it to create something that lives elsewhere. The creation and serving are bound together in a closed system. No other software can enter.
    A system with APIs is part of a network of software. One without APIs stands alone. If you get an idea for a feature that would make a world of difference, you can't implement it unless they offer you a job, and once inside, let you do it. And don't cancel the project before it's done. And it isn't taken over by someone else in a organization shift. There's a reason big companies don't create new stuff, they are subject to rules that individual creators aren't. They aren't free to try new ideas out.
    I guess all industries have lock-out. The moneyed people own everything, and in order to create, you have to fit in. And most really creative people don't.
    Then you have systems that are not locked-out, like Twitter and Facebook, but are subject to revision at any moment. This is imho better than not having APIs at all. At least the world can get a glimpse at the idea before it's shut down. In a fully locked-out system, new ideas are stillborn.
    The good news is the costs on the net today are so low that there really is no technologic or economic reason for lock-out. And so many developers want to make open source contributions. It's really just a matter of organizing the work to create open alternatives to the locked-up systems created by the tech industry. We need user-oriented frameworks for free systems. This is the one area where open rebellion is not only legal, it's encouraged. At least if you listen to and believe the proponents of free markets. We're going to find out.
    I wrote a story on my liveblog on Monday about my personal experiences with lock-out.
    Also see an offer I made to Medium when they started, in 2012. They could lead a new wave of silo-free writing for the web.
  The next version of myword.io
    I've had it in the back of my head for a while that I should just go all the way with a simple browser-based blog post editor, that with a single click would produce a modern essay page, like the ones Medium puts out. After all, when I complain that people post their essays in a locked-up silo, what are the easy alternatives?
    Tumblr is trying to get there, apparently, but there's still a lot more to Tumblr than there is to Medium. So it's not immediately obvious how to substitute one for the other. And immediate obviousness is required for the limited attention we have these days. Miniscule attention, actually.
    Last Monday I decided to spend a few days taking myword.io to the next step. To add an editor that publishes stories to their own static pages. I have a very good back-end, written in Node.js, that's all set up to do this. I started with the MacWrite demo program, and it took five days to get all the way through it. I can now publish from the browser to a static web page, with simplicity and beauty.
    Now, the editor is not as good as Medium's. Mine doesn't have comments, for example. But this will serve as a way for people to relatively easily participate in the open web, without locking into a silo. And if it proves popular, there can be more versions. :-)
    Not sure when I will open this up, but I wanted to put it out there that it is coming.
    PS: As always this will likely not get covered by the tech press, so if you want people to know about it, you'll have to tell them.
  JavaScript in-browser almost complete
    As you may know, I've become a JavaScript-in-the-browser developer. My liveblog is an example of that. It's an app, just like the stuff we used to develop for Mac and Windows, but it runs in the browser.
    The browser is a complete app environment except for one crucial piece: storage. It has a simple facility called localStorage, which almost fits the bill, comes close, but ultimately doesn't do what people want.
    I have solved the problem in a generic and open source way. In a very popular server platform, Node.js. However it's not widely known that this problem has been solved.
    Try this little app, as a demo: http://macwrite.org/.
    You can sign in, write some text, save it, sign out.
    And then sign in from a different machine, and voila, the text you entered is there.
    From that little bit of functionality you can build anything.
    I have a new app in development, very simple, and brain-dead obvious, and useful, that builds on this. Hopefully at that point the lights will start to come on, oh shit, we're ready to build the next layer of the Internet. It really is that big a deal. And you don't need VC backing to participate. One developer, one person, can build something useful in a week. I've just done that myself. The service will virtually run itself at almost no cost, for a lot of users. That's an interesting place to be.
  Every reporter should be able to start a blog
    Please read Ken Silverstein's piece, his story of First Look Media.
    Watching them stay silent for so long, I suspected they lacked basic publishing ability. It made no sense to me. You can set up a blog on wordpress.com or Tumblr, with a custom domain, in at most a couple of hours. Anyone with basic tech knowledge could do this.
    With all the talk about learning to code, and the digital native generation, it's kind of appalling that they can't do something as basic as create their own blog, to navigate around any blockage from their management.
    Silverstein says, as others have, that there was no prohibition on publishing, they just didn't have a way to do it. To me, that's like saying in 1992 that you couldn't print a document on a laser printer because your boss wouldn't come and choose the New command from the File menu.
    There's a basic failure of technological literacy here.
    Or so it seems to this outside observer.
    #### The tech could be easier
    We're caught in the same trap tech was caught in when I started programming in the mid-70s. There was a priesthood that had no incentive to make things easier, and a built-in belief that things couldn't be easier. My generation had a different vision, we worked on ease-of-use.
    WordPress, which is the choice most professional organizations make these days for publishing, never was that easy to begin with. They missed some obvious ideas that were available to be stolen from the previous generation of blogging software. And over the years, a priesthood has developed, and the software has become even more intimidating to the newbie non-technical user.
    It's time to loop back the other way. Yes, some reporters should already be able to climb over the hurdles. They just aren't that high, and the current generation of journalists have had computers in their lives, all their lives.
    But ease of use, and ease of getting started is something the tech industry should be working on. Yes, it might put you out of a job, but if you don't do it, someone else will. And further, you're supposed to do that -- in the name of progress, and in this case, since it's about publishing, freedom.
April 2015
  "Reproducible"
    A few weeks back, Doc posted a mysterious message to our support list, saying that blank headlines were showing up in his outline, and wanted to know if we knew what the problem was.
    This is the kind of "bug report" that makes programming for users so frustrating. You hear a user is losing data, but have absolutely no idea how to reproduce the problem. It's something you've never seen the software do, can't imagine it actually doing. The description sounds like magic, but nothing in software happens by magic, all programmers will tell you. I believe it's happening but I have no idea why.
    Anyway, the problem was still happening. We needed to get to the bottom of it. So I added a bit of instrumentation to the app. Every second it would look at all the headlines in the outline and count the number of empty ones, displaying the result on the screen. If it was greater than zero the message would show up in red. I wanted to be sure Doc would see it, the instant it happened.
    I called him on Skype and said he should use the software as normal, and when he saw the number go above zero, to stop and think What Did I Just Do, and write me an email. This was my hope to try to get somewhere in the vicinity of reproducible.
    He said it's reporting 9 empty headlines now. Okay, go through the outline, find them and fix them. Get that number down to 0 so we can start debugging.
    So he did, and we talked a bit about this process while he was doing it.
    Then when he was done, he was mousing around the outline and it happened. A headline disappeared.
    I said loudly, now stop! Don't touch anything. Key question: What were you doing?
    He said he was scrolling around the outline and scrolled back to the top and that was when he discovered the headline was empty.
    Turns out it was very important just how he was scrolling around. He was using Pageup and Pagedown, two keys I never use. But for Doc they're central. And when he'd press Pageup or Pagedown, it would wipe out the bar cursor headline. Bing!
    Would it do it on my machine? Drumroll please -- yes it would. So now the bug was trapped. I told Doc we had arrived at the Holy Moment in debugging -- reproducibility. I told him "reproducible" is the programmer's favorite word. If you can tell me the steps to reproduce the problem, then I can find it and fix it. Until it's reproducible all I can do is share your frustration.
    There's a lot more to say about this. I asked Doc to write this up from his point of view. For me it was a breakthrough. Finally, a user who is working on the team with me, to help make the software work better.
  Scoble asks about the Facebook API
    Over on Facebook, my friend Robert Scoble asked how I feel about changes Facebook is making in developer access to the social graph. It was such an interesting question that I did a 10-minute podcast answering the question. Hope you find it interesting! :-)
  Great "Blue Sky" platforms
    #### The hairball
    Our current platform is a mess:
    1. CSS.
    2. HTML.
    3. JavaScript.
    4. A server.
    Think of how much you have to learn to become "full stack" in this world.
    At least four different syntaxes, and a CSS preprocessor.
    HTML is XML. JavaScript is like C or Pascal. The server could be written in any number of different languages. And JSON. None of them are going away.
    I've been working in this world for many years, and right now would be at a loss to write a canonical "hello world" app.
    What a Tower of Babel. What an opportunity to topple it, esp given all the people these days who want to program.
    #### It grows when it's simple
    The big strides in tech happen when the platform gets reduced to simplicity. Examples include:
    1. Unix with C.
    2. Apple II with UCSD P-System.
    3. MS-DOS with Turbo Pascal.
    4. The Web with a plain text editor.
    #### I call these blue sky platforms
    In all these systems, lifting the hood is child's play.
    Typing and modifying "Hello World" is easy. From there, there are no huge cliffs in the way of becoming a master.
    1995: "A platform must have potential, or open space. I call this blue sky."
    #### Digging out of the mess
    We can get back to blue sky any time we want.
    I would start from Node.js and build out.
    The web browser, as currently configured would have to be replaced by something that's thoughtfully designed. Or maybe a platform built on top of CSS+HTML+JavaScript, hiding it behind a factored interface? Not sure. But we'll never have great growth until we factor out the huge hairball sitting between ideas and implementation.
  I would have hired Doug Engelbart
    I've heard it said, and thought myself, that of course I wouldn't have hired a 50-something developer when I was running my 20-something startup.
    But then I just realized that if Doug Engelbart had wanted to work for Living Videotext or UserLand I would have hired him in an instant. Can you imagine. To have the guy who pioneered the technology we were commercializing around to mentor me and my developers? I would have jumped at the opportunity.
    So the answer is, it depends. If it was a random employee type who hadn't done much with his or her career, I probably wouldn't have been very interested. But if it was someone who had created the foundation we were working on, that would have been different.
    Guy Kawasaki: "Good people hire people better than themselves."
    #### Update
    I wrote a follow-up to this piece on May 6.
  Imagine all the people
  My Apple Watch podcast
    I've made a dozen or more visits to the Apple Store website hoping to buy an Apple Watch and each time coming up empty and as confused as ever.
    This 12-minute podcast tells the story.
    BTW, here's a screen shot of the Apple website, referred to in the podcast.
  Should Boston bid on the Olympics?
    When I was chatting with Chris earlier today, the subject of the Olympics and Boston came up. Should Boston bid?
    #### My two cents
    Boston should not try to host the Olympics, in fact no one should. With climate change, a new venue for the Olympics every four years is an extravagance we can't afford. Sure it's a drop in the bucket but it's an important and symbolic drop in the bucket.
    Build one great Olympic facility, designed to be usable for 100 years. Hold all future Olympics there.
    It's like the United Nations. We don't build a new skyscraper every four years. We built one really good one, and use it every time we need the UN.
  5-minute podcast
    I was talking with Chris Lydon about the idea of a 5-minute podcast.
    Then Doc Searls asked a question that I thought could easily be answered in 5.
    I was right, but I rambled too much and it turned into a 6.5-minute podcast.
    Next time we'll do better! :-)
  The open tech of Podcatch.com
    On Friday, as you may know, I made "podcatch.com" public.
    It's a quick way to find a great podcast to listen to, now. Without subscribing.
    The list of feeds is curated, it originated from the feeds my Facebook friends liked the most. In that I think it's a prototype for how social networks can be used to create new flows that aren't complicated or hard to use or appreciate. I think, btw, this is the holy grail Twitter has been looking for.
    #### The JavaScript environment
    What I haven't talked about yet is all the great open technology it builds on. Stuff that's available to anyone to use to create new apps. One of the amazing things about developing in JavaScript in 2015, and hasn't been well-appreciated yet, is how deep and generous the developer community is, to itself. I've never seen anything like this.
    #### Technologies we use
    So here's a partial list of technologies I'm using to make this work, all of which are open source and available to all, free of charge and on equal terms.
    1. Font-Awesome for the icons.
    2. Bootstrap Toolkit for the CSS framework.
    3. jQuery to make access to the DOM uniform across browsers.
    3. snap.js manages the sidebar in the app (new feature today).
    5. River4, manages subscriptions, river generation and browsing.
    4. Feedparser does all the feed parsing for River4.
    5. OPMLparser reads the subscription lists for River4.
    9. "RSS" is what podcasting is built on, of course.
    7. Node.js runs the custom back-end Podcatch software and River4.
    8. NPM supports the building of the backend bits.
    6. V8 which is the JavaScript interpreter in Node.js.
    8. HTML5 has an <audio> element we use to play the podcasts.
    9. Google Fonts for Oswald and Ubuntu.
    #### Thanks!
    Thanks to all the generous developers (with a caveat that I am thanking myself for River4 and RSS, I know it's weird).
    I'm sure this list will grow as I remember more bits of generosity that I'm building on.
    #### This tech makes people rich
    BTW, one of the reasons I listed the open tech that podcatch.com builds on is to increase the visibility of these essential components.
    For entrepreneurs and VCs who have made billions from tech, you should know that this would not be possible without the generous work of people who mostly do it for love, with no expected remuneration.
    If you think you support open tech and are not actively supporting this work, you're not. Sometimes you have to tell truth to power. This is one of the truths that has not been well-told.
  The new WTC elevator
    One of the things I love about NYC history is the layering and the continuity. It's how I think software should evolve too. We rip up our software cities too easily, because we don't like the arrangement of the streets, forgetting that there are real people living and working in our cities.
    So I totally got off on the elevator movie that takes you to the 102nd floor observation deck in the new WTC tower. It shows you how the city evolved from nothing to a small Dutch settlement at the tip of Manhattan (south of the WTC site) to the huge metropolis it is today. You even get a look, briefly, at the ill-fated tower that came down on 9/11.
    But there are mistakes, as has been observed, and one howler that as far as I know has not been reported yet. Here's the problem. They show the Brooklyn Bridge, clearly, in 1825. But it wasn't finished until 1883.
  T-Mobile travails
    I was taking an early morning walk in Manhattan this morning when the fourth wall popped with T-Mobile. I was dropped out of The Matrix and smack in the mire of post-millennial mobile access.
    My recently-upgraded T-Mobile account was missing a vital feature. I found out about it just as I was getting ready to use a service that requires a net connection.
    The 20-minute story in a podcast.
  The future of journalism
    There's a future-of-journalism conference in Austin. I'd like to insert a recipe, if I can, for the future of journalism.
    1. Start by solving problems. In all likelihood the geography you serve (if you are geography-based) has awful Internet connectivity. Before doing anything else, you must take ownership of that problem. If your readers have lousy Internet they will not be full participants in the world-wide news system. NYT, NYP, NYDN take note please.
    2. Work on your collective rolodex. That is the definition of who you are. The better it is the better you are. I'd be surprised if many current news orgs see it that way. But they will. (By the way you can start on this step before the previous step is complete. It might take years, even decades.)
    3. Make sure you have in your rolodex a field called "Feed" and in that field include the address of your source's RSS (or Atom I don't care) feed. You're going to need it in step 4.
    4. Make a river out of those feeds. Start watching that river. Tell your sources about the river, give them the address. About five minutes after that you will be jumping up and down with excitement. Five minutes after that it will be on your home page.
    5. Congratulations, you now have a future. ;-)
  Introducing Podcatch.com
    I was bored with my podcasts. I subscribed to a dozen different feeds, but was only listening to two shows. Sometimes I'd leave the house with nothing interesting on my phone. I muddled along, thinking this was the best I could do. Then came Serial, and all of sudden podcasting was exciting again. I looked forward to every week's installment the same way I look forward to a weekly Game of Thrones or Mad Men.
    #### A fog of podcasts
    What followed was an explosion of new podcasts, or so it seemed, but which were the good ones? I did what everyone does, I asked my friends. I saw my friends asking. I asked again. Sometimes I found something interesting to listen to, but usually not something I wanted to subscribe to. That got me thinking.
    Subscribing may be the wrong way to look at it. When I want a podcast I don't want to subscribe. I want to listen. All the time between the want and the fulfillment seems like work. Why is this so hard.
    #### I tried an experiment
    Standing on the street in Manhattan, with my iPhone 6 and a good net connection, how long would it take me to find something to listen to.
    In other words, how long after having the idea "I want a podcast" did it take to fulfill it. Standing out there in the cold. Feeling like an idiot, fussing with my phone.
    How long? A lot longer than it should.
    #### An idea from Vox
    Then I read an article in Vox that listed 26 podcasts I should be listening to. There's the answer. Almost. If they had a page that followed all these podcasts, I could go there, click a play button and be listening in an instant. Someone with good judgement chose these shows, and I bet one or two of them are good in any week. But that place didn't exist.
    #### Another experiment
    I asked my friends on Facebook to recommend their favorite podcasts. I figured if we were friends, or friends-of-friends, some of our interests would overlap. But I did more than ask, I engaged. And I didn't ask for feeds, I was willing to do the research to go from the title of the podcast to the RSS feed.
    I set up a river, customized it so there was a player for each item, and linked it up with Facebook comments, so the resulting conversations would feed back into my relationships.
    #### The product
    As Apple says about their products, it has magic. It's simple, it's probably not what you expect, but it really works. When I go there, I find new ideas, feelings, perspectives, entertainment.
    That's "podcatch.com".
    And now it's public. You can use it too!
    "cheesecake"
    PS: This is the product in Podcasting 2.0.
  It's their world we just live in it
    Something funny happens when I put my iPhone 6 and my Nexus 6 together on my desk (charging them up).
    The iPhone tries to pay the Nexus using ApplePay.
    I just realized how funny this is. Why does the iPhone (Apple) think it owes the Nexus (Google) money?
    Next time it happens I'm going to make note of how much money the iPhone thinks it owes the Nexus.
  Software and free hardware
    I just saw that JJ Abrams has an Apple Watch.
    You know there was a time when I would have had that.
    When Apple gave early access to hardware to developers who created software for their platform. I was, at one time, one of those people.
    I used to have a motto back then: "Software is made of free hardware."
    What was cool is that it worked the other way too. Hardware is made out of free software. But that was hard to say because of piracy, could be too easily misunderstood. Still, it's true.
    And it makes me wonder if there isn't still a position for a company to do what Apple used to do, cultivate relationships with software-makers.
    Pretty sure JJ doesn't write too much software. ;-)
  This is a test...
    For the next sixty seconds this station will conduct a test of the Emergency Podcasting System. Had this been an actual podcast you would have been instructed to do whatever it is you do when you listen to a podcast.
  Podcasting 2.0
    In 2001, when I designed the protocols for podcasting, we were using a different Internet:
    1. Net connections were so slow that the click-wait problem was interfering with people using big media objects, and
    2. The mobile devices that could play podcasts weren't able to communicate.
    So we designed a protocol that would make it easy for your desktop computer to gather up the media objects and move them to your mobile device, probably something like an iPod, which, by the way, didn't exist yet.
    We got ahead of where the technology actually was. But it turned out well. Today there's an explosion of podcast content, all of it formed around the blueprint we put out 14 years ago.
    #### Today's net is better
    But the world today is different, and as a result I believe we can make podcasting much easier and richer for the listener. We can remove steps, and provide more variety.
    1. The net we use today is fast. When you click to listen to a 40-minute podcast, it's downloaded in a few seconds. And it starts playing immediately. No click-wait.
    2. The net goes with us almost everywhere with inexpensive mobile devices.
    Given that reality, one would design podcast listening software somewhat differently.
    #### The problem is discovery
    We're all looking for the next great podcast, not something to subscribe to necessarily, that's work -- rather something enjoyable, interesting, stimulating, thought-provoking and most important -- *now!*
    #### The perfect podcast client
    Here's how the perfect podcast client would work, imho.
    1. No preparation. When I'm leaving the house, I have lots of things on my mind. I spend time loading up my phone with fresh podcasts, when I have the time, but sometimes I'm in a rush and leave with nothing interesting on my phone.
    2. Lots of interesting shows. That's a key point. I'm less interested in subscribing to a series of shows than I am in listening to a single good episode.
    3. Social connection. I like to listen to the same shows my friends are listening to, because I love having someone to discuss these things with.
    4. Variety. I had gotten into a groove, listening to a few podcasts regularly because I could count on them being interesting to me. Mostly Planet Money and Fresh Air, with a very rare RadioLab, or a NYT Book Review podcast. But there's a lot more out there, I'm finding, now that I have easy access to more variety.
    5. Immediate. When I decide to listen I want to listen now. It should be as easy to start listening to an episode of a podcast as it is to start watching a different show on my cable TV set-top box.
    6. Ephemeral. You listen to a podcast once, and that's it. Yet the devices we use for playback are designed for music, which is not ephemeral.
    #### Where from here
    For a while I evangelized editorial organizations to create this product, but they either didn't understand the need, or didn't think there was an opportunity? More likely they don't think like a software developer. When I see an opportunity to make things work better, I want it to happen right now. Even if I don't have time to do the work myself.
    Well, I finally got tired of waiting. I've made the software. I'm using it now, as are a few friends. We're smoothing things out and should have something for everyone to use soon.
    We're going to start with the shows my friends recommended, when I asked them, on Facebook. If it proves useful to others, we may branch out to including shows your friends like. And on and on. I think this is the way podcasting was meant to evolve, starting in 2015.
    #### Update
    The product is "Podcatch.com".
    A blog post explaining how the product came to be.
  HBO should release all of G-O-T
    This is one of those moments when you look back 10 years later and say this is the point where HBO should have crushed the competition before it can get too big. The competition being Netflix and Amazon who are changing the way HBO-like series are viewed. Like Game of Thrones. Which officially starts its fifth season tonight with one episode.
    Maybe last night's leak was HBO testing the waters, to see what would happen with viewership tonight. I have a funny feeling it will just increase it. Game of Thrones, of which I am a devotee, requires two and sometimes three viewings to absorb all the delicious viscousness, depravity, betrayal, lust and insanity.
    Last month Microsoft admitted it might open source Windows. Today that seems like a whimper rather than the audacious hellacious move it would have been 10 or 15 years ago. Today who cares. The action is elsewhere. The time to be bold is when you're at your peak. Unfortunately so many in business wait till it's too late.
    I'm sure Stannis Baratheon, Cersei Lannister or Jon Snow wouldn't hesitate.
    "cheesecake"
  Registrars are our natural ally
    In the Get-"Scoble"-On-The-Web thread on Facebook we tripped across something that's worth noting on the blog.
    1. First Joseph Rooks pointed to a program Namecheap is running to encourage students to create more web content. Makes sense. More content, more names.
    2. I said: "Joseph you make a really good point I hadn't thought of. Our natural allies in this are the domain registrars. Their fate and that of the open web are one and the same."
    3. Out here in developer-land we're creating tools that make the open web a richer writing environment. Things that need names. ;-)
    There might be other natural allies of the open web. Have to think about it. And thanks to Joseph for the interesting tangent.
  A new job description
    I started pushing links to followers shortly after I started blogging. First there was the Frontier News page, then that migrated to the home page of scripting.com, then we came up with RSS, and aggregators, and made the jump to Twitter and Facebook.
    All along I've been aware that there's an art to this. There are chances to insert humor and mystery into the flow. Why did he point to that? And you could comment. I put short little one or two-word phrases after posts, sometimes even in a different voice, all meant to provoke a response inside the reader. A personal one, different for each reader.
    Anyway, as Twitter and Facebook turn more to news, and hopefully at some point other news orgs will invest in their own infrastructure for this, let's think about how to better develop this art. Some way to discuss it. If you do this, do a blog post with your ideas.
  Users can be project managers
    In the Facebook discussion Scoble said he's just a user. I guess he meant that as a user, how could he contribute to an open development project. I hope he didn't mean that users just suck energy from product development and never put it back.
    Fact: We need users to help drive the process of development.
    Here's a great example.
    I was so focused on writing code that I missed that "MyWord Editor" still needed a way to do a home page. A user (who happens also to be a programmer) called me on Skype and said we needed to look at this. D'oh! Of course.
    So I did some work and threw it back over the fence to the users in the form of some working code and ideas. If the feature is going to happen it needs to be driven by users. An ambitious developer can only go so far.
    When I talk with startups I try to emphasize this. You need good users at the beginning to help you see how the product works for them. Communicating with them, listening and feeding back is the way you get from version 1 to a polished powerful product.
  Scoble, re-join the open web!
    I got into a long conversation with Robert Scoble on Facebook earlier today. I asked him, as I always do when I get a chance, to put some of his writing on the open web. Not all, just some. Start a WordPress or Tumblr blog for example.
    Not sure why he won't do this, but I'll tell you why I want him to.
    If he did, we'd see the weakness in the model, very clearly. But using the Facebook and Twitter APIs, we might be able to fix it. We could make it so that the open web gets a chance to distribute his ideas, as well as Facebook or some other commercial service (he seems to use many of them).
    Not sure what direct benefit would be for Scoble, other than to know that he gave back a little of the flow that the web has given him. A bit of the attention. Maybe developers can do something with this. But if the people that other people read, like Scoble, don't do this, there's little chance we'll have an open ecosystem for ideas much longer.
    This is what we, as adults, do. We pay a little more than we have to, to help good rise above other kinds of human nature. When you go out for a meal, you don't have to tip, but we do anyway (at least in the US, different traditions elsewhere). We all try to give to charity when we can, and help out people, again when we can. Why? Because it feels good. This is one of the things human beings do.
    We need the people who the web has made rich and/or famous to step up and do their part to make sure there is an open web for years, decades, for generations to come.
    I liken the VC-based tech industry, which Scoble is very much a part of, to the coal industry before we became aware of the damage that fossil fuel does to the climate. In tech, we're early on this, but now is the time to catch the problem before it's much more expensive and takes more time to fix. I said this to Bill Gates as he was amassing his fortune, that a little kindness to the ecosystem now will go much further than all the philanthropy you promise later. I say it to Zuckerberg, and Jeff Bezos, and to Robert Scoble. Be a leader. Show people that freedom matters. Show the tech industry too. Eventually they're going to want more open formats and protocols to build on. How are we going to make them without users like Scoble helping out. We can't create in a vacuum, without users.
    Obviously I posted this on my blog. I could have put it on Facebook. I ask Scoble, if he has a response, to do the same. Put your response on a new blog you start, on Tumblr if you like, it's part of the Silicon Valley ecosystem, or WordPress, another company that's raised huge VC. Let's accentuate the good that tech does, by supporting it. Thanks for listening.
    PS: Robert is already helping the open web by letting me use him as a foil for this discussion. Whether or not he does it, people understand the idea of a Scoble pitching in to help the web that helped him so much. Now they know how important it is that they follow the leadership that Scoble could be providing.
    PPS: I ask Tim Berners-Lee to join me in asking Scoble to come back.
  Twitter's advertising model
    This has happened a few times for me.
    1. I follow a company.
    2. They start advertising on Twitter.
    3. Now, every time I go to Twitter, their ad is at the top of the page. The same message. I've read it a dozen times. I do not want to keep reading it.
    4. I have a choice, I can get rid of the ad by unfollowing them. I do it with regret, because there was a reason I chose to follow them. I am interested, and I want to keep up on what they're doing. So maybe I don't unfollow at first, or the second or third time. But eventually it seems I always do. I keep meaning to write this post to make sure Twitter and the advertisers understand this.
    5. Because of this I am reluctant to advertise. I was thinking about doing it when I come out with a new product. I think Twitter could be part of my promotion, but...
  Node.js programming question
    I've got a bit of node.js code that downloads an MP3 podcast, saves it to a file.
    However, none of the MP3 players I have will do anything with it. So somehow in the process of downloading and saving, it's losing some data.
    In the code below, url points to this file.
    <%includeOutliner ("https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/36518280/misc/requestMp3Example.opml")%>
    #### Update
    Thanks to Kyle Davis in a comment below, we have the solution.
  News à la carte?
    Doc Searls has a simple idea.
    When he travels he buys newspapers. He can read any paper without buying a subscription. Why didn't this decades-old tradition make it to the web? Maybe it should?
    #### My thoughts
    It's always interesting to consider new ideas. But this one is too late.
    What people want is articles now. Linked into a river somewhere.
    1. Facebook is a river.
    2. Twitter is a river.
    The only question as far as I’m concerned if The Rest of Us get a river.
    "cheesecake"
  How I got my first iPhone
    I posted this on Facebook last year, and forgot about it until someone Liked it yesterday. Since today is the day all the journalist reviews of the Apple Watch come out, I thought it would be interesting to present this from a user/developer who has to buy his own Apple hardware. And wait.
    It was June 29, 2007. I was a happy Blackberry user. And I was pissed at Apple for creating such a closed phone. I wanted their phone to run Mac software so I could put Frontier on it, and write apps in my scripting language with its object database and great TCP stack. Instead, they said no apps, just make web pages (turns out this was a Jobsian deflection, otherwise known as a lie).
    So I decided to sit this one out. Then I got a call from Scoble. He and Patrick, who was still a cute little kid, had waited overnight and were the first people in line at the Palo Alto Apple store. I was in Berkeley. Scoble said if I came with the cash, he would get me an iPhone. I sighed. OK, I guess this is it. So I went to the bank, got the cash, drove down to the valley, and was in the middle of the incredible media frenzy when Scoble and Patrick came out of the store, to the applause of the Apple people. He threw me my phone, while he did TV interviews. I felt a little churlish, but the first thing I did was go across the street to a coffee shop, and set it up.
    I never used the Blackberry again.
    #### The Apple Watch reviews
    Reading the reviews of the Apple Watch makes me want to hate the product. I don't like the reporters getting the first shot. I know who they are. They are the people who applaud and cheer at Apple press events. And who won't write anything too real for fear of not getting a review unit next time.
    If Apple blacklisted the WSJ reviewer, for example, how long could he keep his job? You can't do good journalism that way. Gotta wonder why there isn't a Columbia Journalism School investigation of that? In this case it isn't just Rolling Stone, it's a whole industry that is being covered with conflicted ethics.
    The system reeks. Apple should ship the products and let everyone have a chance to review them at the same time. Including people who don't get invited to their press events.
    And any reporter or news org with a sliver of self-respect should return the invites to Apple press events.
    PS: I own a fair amount of Apple stock.
  Talking about our mistakes
    Well the Badgers lost last night, and it was a heart-breaker. But it was also a great basketball game. So much to learn, even in a loss. Which leads me to another interesting topic.
    In tech, we seem to never talk about our mistakes. But we should. Not only because we keep making them, but we keep making them worse and worse.
    A really interesting tweet from Rob Beschizza this morning. "Dijkstra might have been wrong about BASIC, but telling beginner coders to learn HTML and CSS is like telling chess players to eat wood."
    #### What if...
    I wonder what would have happened if tech had evolved differently. What if instead of Apple adopting Hypercard as the future though it ignored almost everything that was good about the Mac, what if they had embraced something radically different, like Turbo Pascal. And what if networking on the Mac platform had been as easy as HTTP, five years before. We could have had both graphic operating systems and networking emanating from the same place of simplicity. Then a novice programmer would be presented a development environment where Hello World was as simple as typing writeline ("hello world") instead of the mess that of today's stack..
    #### CSS, HTML, JavaScript
    Today a beginning coder has to deal with a programming environment with three different incompatible languages with very different styles. Why? No one really thought about it. We didn't use the best ingredients we had at the time, for some reason. Why isn't QuickDraw part of the full-stack developers toolkit? Why did we throw that know-how out? And can we avoid doing that in the future?
    We never get dug in on a platform for long enough to actually fix the annoyances. Before that happens the pavement has been ripped up and the streets run in different places and directions, and the buildings we were using to store our data are cut off from the grid.
    #### We don't talk about our mistakes
    Back to basketball, it's as every class of one and done freshmen were running the NCAA instead of 40-year coaches. We in tech, in an art that matters from an economic and societal standpoint, it's everything we build around, we throw out what we've learned every decade or so. And start over. That's a scandal. We don't talk about it because.. why??
    Probably because no one cares as long as we're creating a few billionaires every year, it must all be working, right?
    Hah. No it's not. ;-)
    PS: You see this happening today as some podcasts forget to publish RSS feeds with enclosures. Most still do. We should encourage them to stick with it, because this is a good thing from stacks-of-the-past.
  Tonight, everyone's a Badger!
    First, as an alum of the University of Wisconsin, let me say Go Bucky!
    What a thrill to watch Wisconsin beat Kentucky in the semi-final on Saturday. The level of play was amazing. I loved that many of the Wisconsin players come from Wisconsin, and are seniors. Unlike Duke, their opponent tonight, which is largely a 1-year stop-off point on the way to the NBA. A national team of soon-to-be-pros. "One and done."
    Yesterday afternoon, I saw the Oklahoma City Thunder play the Houston Rockets, another spectacular game, pitting two very different leading players, both guards, at the absolute peak of their game, James Harden and Russell Westbrook. It's clear that the young college players, while great in their own way, have a long way to go before they can play at this level. Almost no one does. They fly and twist and mislead, and make you gasp they're so light and agile. Another thrill.
    Finally last night a game between the New York Knicks and the Philadelphia 76ers, two of the worst teams in the NBA, both going absolutely nowhere. I don't want to go into all the weirdness, but in some ways for these teams, losing is winning and winning is losing. It was basketball at its most laborious and lackadaisical. Worth watching just for its obscurity. This is how far you can fall and still be in the NBA.
    It's worth mentioning because a bit of trivia came up during the Knicks game. There are three current Knicks who played in an NCAA Final. To fall so far. I couldn't think of one. I didn't believe there were any. The answer: 1. Carmelo Anthony of course (doh) on Syracuse in 2003. 2. Cole Aldrich played with Kansas in 2008. 3. Lance Thomas with Duke in 2010.
    If you watch the Final game tonight, as you watch those wonderful young players, some of whom must imagine glory like Harden or Westbrook in their future, but for many this is the highest they'll reach. The NBA is filled with guys who played in the NCAA finals, wondering what happened.
  Forking as a plug-in API
    In the back of my mind while exploring all the JavaScript editors we could use as the primary text editor in MyWord I was thinking wouldn't it be cool if there was a way to do plug-in editors. That way the sysop of a MyWord site could decide on one editor, or even give users a choice. Maybe even for each post a different editor!
    This is something developers always do. We abstract. We have to do it, internally we have to figure out how many levels of options a user can have for pretty much everything. Can you have more than one file open? Can the OS have more than one user? Can you do one task at a time or many?
    Joel Spolsky wrote about this in a humorous way in the early days of blogging, he called people who over-abstract architecture astronauts. Benji Smith wrote a fantasy about abstraction, very funny and so true.
    If JavaScript had an easy way to do plug-ins on the client side I probably would have done an architecture, but like the editor situation there are a number of different approaches, and none of them have gained consensus, none appear to be a quick half-day thing. I got spoiled in Frontier. Architectures are cheap when all the data and code are in object databases.
    Anyway, I found an Indiana Jones way to do it, it's almost as good as an official plug-in method. Fork one file in the MyWord Editor repository and replace it with your editor code. Should be able to do anything with it. You're laughing. I've become a Unix dev. Haha. I am laughing too. Now you have to rebuild my app to extend it. A few years ago I would have sworn I would never do this.
    I have a feeling we'll figure out a better way later. Or perhaps we side-step the issue by finding one JavaScript editor that's good enough to make our standard, without worrying so much about choice. It's always good to have choice, of course, but there are always other things to do, and if you had choice on everything, then you wouldn't have anything. Just frameworks. (Which is what seems to be happening elsewhere in JavaScriptLand nowadays.)
  Offense on principle
    I was telling a story the other day about shaming on the net, and how far we had gotten from the ideal, and quoted a correspondent of this column from a post in November 1994. I had written a story a few days earlier comparing software platforms to Chinese households and had expressed pleasure that I had not been excoriated for stepping up to the line of political correctness.
    In 1994 my blog posts were sent via email in addition to being posted on the web. One of my correspondents, a self-described "ardent feminist" said something profound. "I try not to get offended on principle." I still remember getting the email, however unfortunately I don't remember who sent it.
    #### I try not to take offense on principle
    That one sentence carries so much information about the process of taking offense that has been dominating discourse on the net. There are two levels beyond the ideal:
    1. Taking offense on principle. I wasn't actually offended in a body chemistry way by what you said, but I thought it through and realize I should be offended, so I act offended.
    2. Even worse, I thought it through and realize I could be offended. Since being offended is the position of power in net discourse (what did I actually win?) I look for a false context in order to act as if I was offended. Sigh. In other words, not only isn't your body hurting with offense, but you can't think your way to being offended. You have to find a way to cast my words, different from my intent, to act offended.
    #### Pick your battles
    These days, much of what passes for rage on the net falls into the second category.
    It would be so much better if people only expressed offense when it's real pain they're experiencing, and then only when absolutely necessary. "Pick your battles carefully" is another useful motto. The air is already thick with offense. Can you in some way provide an antidote?
  It's the powerlessness, dummy!
    Yesterday Marc Benioff, CEO of Salesforce, said this: "There is a third political party emerging in this country called: 'CEOs.' More than 100 are already involved in turning Indiana around!"
    Something about that didn't feel right, so I said so. A discussion ensued.
    What is it that doesn't feel right? Well, who owns the other two political parties, if he's starting the third one? Same people. So if we're going to start another political party, shouldn't it be one where my voice matters?
    It's so fucked up. Here's a guy who is interviewed on TV, has a conference that takes over the city of SF. He donates to hospitals and they change the name to Benioff, as if it were a member of his family. He is one of the most listened-to people there are. And now he's boasting, on Facebook of all places (one of the few places it feels like my voice might matter just a bit, I know it's an illusion, planned by psychiatrists) that he's formed the third party and guess who it represents? The same people as the other two.
    You could say that's just the way it is, and that's the way it always has been, but it doesn't mean I have to like it, and it doesn't mean it's always going to be that way.
    I don't like tech, for this reason. They've so simplified the world, it's just what matters to them that matters. 100 CEOs signed the petition. That's the size of the world for Benioff. I know his PR people say otherwise, but I think a little truth just leaked out there.
    One more thing: You want a real crusade Mr Benioff -- let's get rid of Citizens United and restore some of the power to the people. That would show real conviction.
    PS: Liz Gannes calls out the tech leaders for hypocrisy. She makes a good point. While they're taking political action against Indiana discriminating against gays, they're not doing much about gender discrimination in tech. However, no mention of age discrimination in her piece, and in another piece by the same author today she refers to seniors as "old fogies." Tech, including reporters, needs to learn something more basic -- respect for people.
  Mired in muck
    Disclaimer: Although it's April 1, this is not a joke.
    I used to look at the net and see nothing but blue sky. Now my eyes look around and all I see is muck! :-)
    I suppose I get listened to more than most people, but I still feel unheard. Like life is futile. I have good ideas, but the world ignores them. It's hard to find a way to contribute that suits my talents.
    The times in my life when I've been happiest is when I've been surrounded by friends doing interesting things, growing, accomplishing stuff, while I was doing the same. However, it's been a long time since I've experienced that.
    Why mention this today? Because of this crazy stuff happening in Indiana and elsewhere in the US, where they're trying to figure out how they can be who they are, express themselves, when no one cares what they think. So they grab at options that make no sense. "We're not discriminating" they say. But they can't be so ignorant to see that that's exactly what they're doing. They don't like us and we don't like them, but I think we're suffering from the same malaise.
    Why do people shame other people on the net? Because (I theorize) it's one of the few forms of power left to them. One of the few ways their ideas are considered valid. It's a channel for expressiveness, a gesture that might seem to have meaning.
    Why do people troll on comments? Speak silly talking points they got from Fox News or MSNBC? This is one area where there is equivalence, the "left" and "right" both do this. Seek out each other for a permanent argument. My guess is they do it because it gives them a simulated nutrient-free sort of relevance.
    Why do people line up to buy Apple devices that will give them joy for almost no time (that's my experience). Why do I buy stuff from Amazon, when the arrival of the thing brings me no happiness?
    It's the same thing. Our lives lack meaning. We all have certain struggles to overcome. It's funny how when we have those struggles, we forget our unhappiness, or dissatisfaction with our existence. It's only in boredom and idleness, something we're sure to have a lot more of in the future, that we feel this empty frustration, of pushing against nothing. No achievement possible.
    Yesterday I asked Facebook to put Markdown in their CMS, sooner rather than later. They almost certainly won't do it. But for a moment I felt relevant. Almost as soon as I clicked Post I felt stupid.
    Even Jeremy Lin can't rise out of it! If only the Knicks had kept D'Antoni and said goodbye to Melo. Even the heroes that might give us hope can't rise out of the muck.
    I do know the answer, btw. Stop going it alone. Work with others. Instead of reproducing what someone else did, include it. Even if it's harder. We are a social species. We need to collaborate to give our lives meaning. We forgot that somewhere along the line.
    And for crying out loud stop picking on gay people. Geez.
May 2015
  My website in a Dropbox
    I wanted to mark a milestone. I finally have a web server running out of a Dropbox folder. I tried doing this with Apache a few years ago, but there was something about how Apache worked that drove Dropbox crazy. Or vice versa.
    Now I have my own web server, written in JavaScript, built out of Node.js core packages. It's really fast and reliable, and I pretty much know exactly what it's doing. There was never a problem with Dropbox. We just read the files from the server. We update our own stats files, but that doesn't seem to be too much for Dropbox to handle. (It is using up a lot of CPU cycles on the server, according to the Top command, so I'm thinking about turning Dropbox off when I'm not actively developing.)
    Why it's so cool -- all my tools work with the filesystem. It's even more widely supported than Git. And there's no difference between the original content and the stuff that's being served. If I want to edit one of the files in my website, I just open it in an editor, make the changes and save. It's like having the server on my machine, without actually having the server on my machine.
    The server is called "PagePark". Of all my latest tools, it's my favorite. I love tweaking it, adding little shortcuts. Things that make it work really well for the kind of content I serve.
  What would you do if you woke up one morning and there was no Internet?
    I asked this question on Facebook and Twitter, and got a variety of answers.
    I think there are two "correct" answers.
    1. Start a new Internet.
    2. Cry.
    Most people say they would go do normal things that don't involve the Internet, but I think the world would take a long time to adjust. Many of us remember a world without the Internet, but we don't remember a world without the Internet that used to have the Internet.
    A question that reveals the problem is to wonder what would happen if you woke up one morning and found there was no electricity. Not much would happen in the world as it's currently configured without electricity, even though there was a time when it worked fine without it.
    I think the Internet is sufficiently integrated into our civilization at this point that if it were to be removed, it would be such an enormous shock to our economy that.. well, that's why #2 is also a correct answer. ;-)
    I'd like to think we could quickly boot up a new net. That's more likely than rebooting electricity because a lot of people who built the initial Internet are still alive and would know how to layer things so it could come back pretty quickly. Assuming the electric grid isn't dependent on the Internet. Which is itself a good question.
  Apple Watch liveblog notes
    I got my Apple Watch last week, and I pretty much love it.
    I started taking notes on my exploration on my liveblog, which was designed for cumulative projects like this one. I wanted to be sure readers of "Scripting News" know about this.
    http://liveblog.co/users/davewiner/2015/05/13/appleWatchNotes.html
    Your comments and suggestions are welcome.
  Something doesn't smell right about the rush to "deprecate" HTTP
    Google and Mozilla and others want force all non-HTTPS sites to become HTTPS.
    And while the name HTTPS sounds a lot like HTTP, it's actually a lot more complex and fraught with problems. If what they want to do ever happens, much of the independent web will disappear.
    1. First, the problem as I understand it, is that some ISPs are gathering data about the content flowing through their routers, inserting ads and cookies and otherwise modifying content. I agree of course that this is a bad thing.
    2. Going to HTTPS does not get rid of all possible ways of snooping and modifying content. A toolbar, for example, hooking in after the content is decrypted, could change the content. Google tried to do this at one point in the evolution of the web. And even if you couldn't do it with a toolbar, Google and Mozilla both own popular browsers. They could modify content any time they want. HTTPS won't protect us against their snooping and interference. Why are we supposed to trust them more than an ISP? I don't actually trust them that much, btw.
    3. Key point: If you care about whether ISPs modify your content, you can move to HTTPS on your own. You don't need Mozilla or Google to force you to do it.
    4. It also depends on how much you care. Sure in a perfect world I'd want to stop all of it on all my content, but in that perfect world I would have infinite time to do all the work to convert all my websites. I don't have infinite time, and neither do you. I try to pick my battles more carefully. You can waste a lot of time doing something because it seems the right thing to do and end up accomplishing nothing.
    5. What I care about is that sufficiently motivated people will be able to find my archive in the future. I don't think the odds are actually very good, for a lot of reasons. This is just the newest.
    6. Given that a vast amount of content likely won't move, Google and Mozilla are contemplating far more vandalism to the web than any of the ISPs they're trying to short-circuit.
    7. Aren't there other less draconian methods to try first? How about making it illegal where it is not and working with government to enforce the laws? How about developing competition that doesn't do it, so everyone has a choice? That's the way Google is changing how ISPs work in the US. Why not elsewhere? How about developing a kind of encryption that does not require websites to do anything? I don't know if it's possible, but I haven't heard any discussion of that.
    8. Couldn't you use a VPN to tunnel through the nasty ISPs?
    9. This is why we need to overthrow the tech industry as a governing body. It's run by people who shoot first and ask questions later. This is an awful way to be having this discussion, after the decision is made, without any recourse? This is the best argument for taking this power away from the plutocrats in tech.
  Deprecating HTTP
    This is for all the people who say there is no tech journalism that covers real tech issues, as opposed to reviewing the latest gadget from Apple. If there were such a tech press (and there isn't) they would be all over this idea of deprecating HTTP.
    Understanding this is something anyone with a high school education can do. It's no more difficult than grammar or world history. You might have to read a sentence twice, or look something up, but if you have even a modest education, you can understand this.
    1. HTTP is a protocol. It describes a way for two pieces of software to communicate with each other. The software could be running on the same machine, or on machines on opposite sides of the world.
    2. HTTP was created by Tim Berners-Lee at the same time he created HTML, which is a file format.
    3. The two things, put together, form what we call The Web.
    4. Both are remarkably simple, that's the magic. Everything that came before that tried to solve these problems was complicated. Because the designers saw the problem as larger than it actually was, or they brought along ulterior motives, by making it complex they expected to retain control of the flow it created.
    5. The simple format is always the open format. The complex format tends to be proprietary.
    6. HTML plus HTTP spawned a new industry. Out of that industry today's tech giants grew. Google, Facebook, Amazon. And the old tech giants adapted, or they went away.
    7. I loved HTML plus HTTP because it meant that I could put up a server without getting permission from anyone. Up to that point, if you wanted to make something that anyone could access from anywhere, you had to work for a big company. And they never would hire a person like me to speak on their platforms. I might say something like what Bill Simmons said about the NFL commissioner. ;-)
    8. Corporate-land is basically an agreement among people to get rich and not tell the truth. The two things are related. If you told the truth the money wouldn't be there. And if you make a lot of money you want to hide the truth about how you're making it. Nothing wrong with that! It's one of the opposing forces.
    9. The other opposing force is journalism. Sources having the guts to tell the truth, forgoing big financial rewards, in the cause of building something that's truthful.
    10. In tech there's a huge tension between money and truth, because our products are made out of the truth. I like to say: "You can't lie to a compiler." That means what you tell the computer to do, it will do, exactly as you said. It doesn't understand winks and nudges. So if you want something to happen in tech, ultimately, someone is telling the truth.
    11. Mozilla says they want to "deprecate" HTTP. They throw up a lot of smoke about this, it's confusing, you might think, but it's just to hide a truth. Deprecate means destroy. HTTP is how we get the ability to put up servers without asking anyone for permission to do so. In the future they contemplate, that freedom is gone.
    12. You think The Algorithm is a slippery slope? This is a real slippery slope. I have tried to get the necessary permissions needed to run a "secure" version of my blog, and I hit dead ends. I wonder why this is. Is this, to Mozilla, a bug, or a feature? :-)
    13. But it's not just Mozilla that wants to do this. Google really wants to do this. And Google is the scary one. Mozilla can say "deprecate" and the web just laughs. But if Google says it, then it's time to start wondering how to go underground.
    14. I definitely won't make this transition. I'm tired of re-tooling. My content will disappear, going back to the beginning of the blogosphere. Along with it will go the sites of relatives I'm keeping online. And former blogging communities whose content I'm keeping around, because I think it's the right thing to do. And I'm just one tiny part of this wonderful thing called the web we've all been working on for over 20 years.
    15. There's no reason connections to my blog need to be "secure," at least not at this time. Perhaps at some point, when Verizon adding cookies to track mobile users, or Comcast is inserting ads, or Google is linking from my text to their pages, all of which has happened, btw. These are the very people who want to make all our communication "secure." Secure like a hen living in a fox-guarded house.
    16. The tech industry is not your friend, unless you're willing to tell an untruthful story and you're trying to get rich. Then perhaps they are your friend. But if you just want to write a blog post every now and then, you need to look further for the truth, because they ain't tellin it.
  How to have a future
    The journalism world is having a fit of depression today as they learn that their something they've actually known for years: their distribution system is owned by the tech industry.
    There is a solution. Start rebuilding your distribution system around the Internet. Instead of broadcasting to an audience, feed a community back to itself. Be distributors. Understand that you are not making the news. Your job always has been distribution.
    #### It's all about your rolodex
    1. Gather all the rolodexes in your organization and merge them into a database.
    2. Be sure you have a field in your database called "Feed" and in that field save the address of your source's RSS or Atom feed.
    3. Make a river out of those feeds. Start watching that river. Tell your sources about the river, give them the address. About five minutes after that you will be jumping up and down with excitement.
    4. Make it your home page.
    That's it. You've now created a future. Live in it, and learn from it, and evolve accordingly. There are no parachutes, no single well-defined path all news orgs will go down. You have to make it up as you go.
    However, until you get your river going, you will still be in the print era. Any effort you make there is wasted, it's not how news works today or in the future. We live in an era where sources have direct access to people who want the news. The sources are learning how to use that power. You have to find new relevance.
    #### You can use River4
    "River4" is an open source aggregator written in JavaScript that does all that you need to get started. I wrote it, so you know it's good. ;-)
    #### One more thing
    If you're a journalism educator, please make sure every new journalist you graduate has the ability to run a server, install blogging and river software. People should not be scared of this technology. It's not hard, and is more immediately valuable than learning to "code" -- it should be a prerequisite.
  Facebook's Instant Articles
    A few items related to Facebook's Instant Articles announcement that came in the middle of the night.
    1. I was briefed on this project last summer.
    2. It got me interested in the Facebook API.
    3. People who use Facebook want this. How do I know? When I post full text of stories on FB they read it and comment. When I post a link to my blog post, they still comment, but very often without having read the piece. As a writer I can only take so much of this!
    4. The place to put this functionality is in the CMS or blogging tools. If I were FB, I would have gone to the toolmakers first. Made sure there was broad support. Why do they care so much about the big brands? Maybe there's something strategic about this. Do the big brands really move first, fast, with confidence and innovation? Or are they driven by fear of missing out? Which motivation creates better user experience? (In my experience love is where creativity comes from, not fear.)
    5. I was told last summer that they were building on RSS. Of course that's a good thing, if true. It means that the content could flow not just to Facebook, but anywhere that's prepared to receive it. This creates many interesting options. In this, Facebook is being a good corporate citizen and Friend to the Open Web (with the qualification that I don't know for sure if it is true).
    6. I have asked for access to the tech now that it's out, but got rejected!
    7. I hope they change their mind.
    8. Bloggers matter, imho as much as any professional reporter. I want parity for bloggers. In this way they are not being a friend of the open web.
    9. The NYT, National Geographic, Buzzfeed, et al, are right to publish their content to Facebook in full. It's one of the big places where people who read news congregate. But they should also quickly develop new channels that are not dependent on the tech industry.
    10. Journalism pundits will re-litigate the michegas over The Algorithm. The time to debate that was when it was new, five years ago. It's done now. The next thing is whether or not the news industry invests in its own future, or lets the tech industry continue to own it. The Algorithm wouldn't have mattered if journalism had done its job. I guess that's where my frustration comes from reading the hot angry frustrated powerless pieces by Jay Rosen, Zeynep Tufekci and Emily Bell. Where were you when this was news? And why are you missing the current issue? Why are you always five years late? Yes I was ringing the bells about this then. Now it's time to finally compete with Facebook and Twitter. It might already be too late, but it might not be.
  Why I moved off Heroku
    I really appreciate the service that Heroku runs. It was a very easy way for me to get started in Node.js, and also very affordable! I kept marveling at what a great deal it was, gushed publicly about it, and paid them the highest honor, I developed my software around their architecture, so it would be really easy to deploy my stuff on Heroku.
    My basic idea is that back-ends for software are very small things. They just move data out of the app, which runs in the browser on the user's desktop, to a storage place, and back out later. That's all the server has to do.
    I designed it so that each app has its own server. That way if one of my apps got really popular, it wouldn't interfere with the others. This is ideal for developers, to have scaling be a totally fluid thing. That's why you want to chop the pieces as small as you can. Rather than try to host ten apps on a server, give each app their own server, no matter how small and insignificant. It's a design that can only work for a system like Heroku. It was really a breakthrough.
    But, they changed their pricing so as to really discourage this architecture. It's possible they weren't even aware how their change would affect us. I didn't hide the design, I wrote lots of posts about it. I emailed with people there. I even met with their CEO on a trip to California to talk about how I saw their service and to learn how they were planning to evolve it. I kept emailing them asking if they were sure this is the deal and thanking them for their generosity.
    But once they changed, I had to change. It no longer made sense to have lots of individual servers, one for each app. With the new economics. I'd have to bundle them up, the old way, where one server is running N apps. And if one gets successful, there's a bunch of manual work to set things up so it gets more resources without slowing the other apps down. Scaling is no longer a matter of sliding a slider on a browser interface. I wish it were.
    Anyway it's up to them to decide how to price their service. And it was up to me to migrate when they changed their pricing. It was a pretty hellacious weekend here, lots of stress, but it's not bad. It's kind of like a basketball player has to get really intense to make it through the playoffs. This was a very high wire balancing act. But it was a good thing to do, now I have a much better understanding of what I've done. I've moved code I wrote when I was a total newcomer to Node.js. It wasn't a horrible experience!
    And now I'm back on solid ground (knock wood, praise Murphy) I look forward to getting back to the stuff I really love, making new idea processing software that networks people in incredible new ways! :-)
    PS: A little more perspective in a post on my liveblog.
  Hello Fargo users
    This is a quick heads-up, there were major changes in the servers over the weekend. But if all went well, you should see no changes in the performance of "Fargo".
    Basically, I moved the back-end, Fargo Publisher, from Heroku to a server in Amazon's cloud. This is a lot like the move that Berkman made a few years back when they hoisted their building on Mass Ave and moved it a few blocks away, and re-planted it. It's as if all the scholars in the offices just went home for the weekend and came back to find their offices in a new location. Hopefully all the electric is properly hooked up, and the Internet, the bathrooms. Business as usual, they say. We hope.
    Knock wood, praise Murphy, I am not a lawyer.
    Dave
    PS: There will be a new version of "Fargo Publisher", shortly, if everything works. Haaha. ;-)
  I would have hired Doug, but..
    Philip Greenspun wrote a post on his Harvard blog about MIT grads over 50 having a hard time finding work. In his post he cites a piece I wrote about how I would have hired Doug Engelbart, when I was running my first startup in the 80s. His piece is getting a lot of traffic. That's good. I'm glad people are thinking about this.
    My saying I would have hired Doug Engelbart in the 1980s means nothing about the job market in 2015. What I would have done in 1985 is irrelevant today. I'm not hiring. And I'm pretty sure my counterpart in 2015 doesn't feel the way I might have felt then.
    I might have hired Engelbart because his work laid the foundation for the work we were doing at Living Videotext. He felt his work wasn't finished. We could have helped him achieve his vision, and he could have helped us make our software more useful. Perhaps we could have skipped years of evolution, avoiding the blind alleys he had to back out of in his earlier work.
    Now the big wheel has turned and today I'm in the situation Engelbart was in in the 80s. Unlike Engelbart, I have re-tooled. I now work in JavaScript in the browser and on the server. I had to walk away from the codebase that I loved. I understood that the price of relevance is to give up fighting at some point and settle for a partial victory. I think I was right in the development environment I created. But right doesn't mean the world uses what you created. Maybe 20 or 30 years from now these ideas will have gained traction. I won't be programming then. I almost certainly won't even be alive.
    I turned 60 over the weekend. It's a tough birthday, or it was for me. I didn't want to have it in public, so I told Facebook not to announce it. I think younger people don't understand. I finally think I understand how they don't understand. The ones that love me say I'm really young, and I appreciate that. I think they mean my thinking is flexible, and I'm excited about the future, like a young person might be. But the clock ticks in predictable ways. My body is that of a 60 year-old. And the world treats me as one as well. Most people can't see or feel the enthusiasm an older person has. Or they don't believe. Or they don't think.
    Like Engelbart in the 80s, I feel my work is not done. I still pump out ideas executed in software at an amazing clip. I wonder why people don't wonder how I do it. The processes I use, investing in good tools and underpinnings, and paying attention to good features of other people's software, makes it easy and quick to try out new ideas. Some of them are really worth it. Look at the list of achievements on the smallpicture.com home page for an idea.
    I want to share what I know. I want people to use my products. There's not that much road in front of me to get the work done. I'm pretty sure that there will be a lot left on my plate when I finally hang em up for the last time. I guess that's a sign of a rich and productive creative life. ;-)
    PS: An earlier version of this post, on my liveblog, became the top item on Hacker News. Quite an interesting discussion ensued, with no slamming. Coooool. ;-)
  If not now, when?
  Professional users
    I love testers. Great testers are essential. Or you could look at them as professional users. Or something else. But without them, software projects flounder.
    One of the things I said to Doc yesterday is that if you can write a good bug report you'll do better as a user, because the problems you're hitting will move to the front of the queue. If I, as a developer, get a set of reproducible steps, that show how to recreate the problem, and steps work on my machine, I can usually fix the problem straight away. And I like to fix problems in my code.
    The best user/tester I've ever worked with was Terry Teague. He had a day job at Apple as a tester, but contributed his time for free to various developer projects. We were lucky to have him as part of our team on Frontier. When we were preparing a new release, he'd put the product through its paces, and his bug reports were the best, hands down. Never seen anything like it. His steps-to-reproduce were clear, easy to follow, and almost always failed on my machine (failure in this case is success).
    Unfortunately Terry died in 2005. And he's never been replaced.
    We should be teaching young people how to be great users. How to contribute to the projects that make them more effective at doing what they do. The best form of contribution is to communicate clearly about ways the software isn't working.
    There's a common, incorrect, belief that users don't matter, they can't do anything to help open source projects. Nothing could be further from the truth. Just having one user put a bit of serious concentrated time in working on my product made a huge difference for me as a developer. If Doc hadn't been willing to come to the phone and work with me, the problem would still be in the software. Who knows how many users suffered silently with this, or worse, just stopped using the product because they thought it was sabotaging their work (in a way it was). And how many more problems are waiting to be discovered, waiting until a user cares enough to get to the bottom of what input is producing the bad output.
    Bottom-line: Software needs users to care about it.
June 2015
  To make a long story short
    We need a better way to do discourse on the net.
    See the longer version.
  It's not left vs right
    Yesterday's post was intended to be humorous. I don't doubt that algorithms could figure out what most people say on Facebook, and do our speechifying for us. The point behind the humor is this: No issues are so black and white that your template for discourse will spit out a useful statement just by skimming a story.
    This dumbing-down of discourse is not just present in social networks, but it's also in the news. The NYT says the victories for "the left" now present opportunities to pivot for the right. Well, the victories of this last week are not for the right or the left, and some of it wasn't a victory at all.
    1. In what way are nine people slaughtered in a church in Charleston a victory for the left? Sometimes you can go too far in tallying these things up as scores for one side or another. It was not a victory for anyone, it was a tragedy, for everyone -- everyone who is not a sociopath.
    2. Government shouldn't be in the marriage business. That would have been my decision if I were on the Supreme Court. The net-effect would be the same as what came out of the court last week. I don't see how my opinion about this is left? It's actually fairly conservative.
    3. But I haven't forgotten that our society and those of all other western countries, not too long ago, didn't allow homosexuality to even exist in public, much less ratify their right to marry. It's still shocking to see two men holding hands walking down the street in the city. I don't mind being shocked, I actually like it. It's a reminder that this was a choice we made, to open our minds, to change. The fact that we can do this, so quickly, makes me optimistic about other changes, other comforts we have to give up.
    4. For example, we have to accept that it's okay not to procreate. It's actually a good thing for the human species if there were fewer of us. Let's have a holiday for people who choose not to be fathers or mothers.
    5. Or that people over a certain age are still alive and part of the world, and have aspirations, knowledge, experience, rights and want to make a contribution, too. How is that left vs right? Everyone ages.
    Maybe it's time to give up that there is such a thing as "the left" or "the right". That each of us has the right and obligation to think and decide for ourselves. And for crying out loud, just because someone disagrees with you on one issue that doesn't mean they're bad, or that they might not agree with you on others. Remember how much we all have changed in the last few years.
    We still have a long way to go, and framing things as a never ending battle between two non-existent forces isn't going to help us. It would be nice if social networks could help us evolve out of this mess. I still think the potential is there. But first we have to have the will to change.
  Facebook is about news, in a weird way
    Each bit of news potentially fires up a moral parade, where people recite prepared speeches.
    Often the speeches begin explaining how what someone said is like this other thing, then basically recites a canned story about that thing.
    You could give each story a number, and just type the number. The computer (Facebook) could then get the text and insert it into the comment for you. Discourse could happen much faster.
    Eventually Facebook could predict what you'll say and just say it for you. Like the self-driving cars Google is making. You'd sign onto Facebook and see in your notification drop down menu "You have commented on Betsy Guernsey's post."
    You could read it if you like, but eventually you will know that Facebook correctly stated your opinion.
  Dropbox could be king of the one-page app
    In 2013 when we were getting our browser-based outliner ready, Les Orchard, a longtime reader of this blog, and contributor to our community (he wrote the initial S3 glue for Frontier, a huge gift), suggested we look at using Dropbox as our storage system.
    I was already a serious Dropbox user, and loved how it virtualized my file system. Using Dropbox meant I could go anywhere, with a laptop, and have access to my full work environment. This was part of the dream of using networks since I started using them in the 70s. Dropbox was a big piece of the puzzle.
    But Les had shown me how Dropbox could be even more.
    #### Fargo, my Dropbox-based writing environment
    We hooked our outliner up to their file system, and shipped it. That's "Fargo".
    I'm using Fargo to write this. "Scripting News", my blog, is a Fargo site.
    Later, I put a content management system in Fargo, so you could now publish a website without any extra server software. It still amazes me that this experiment worked.
    Now I read articles that Dropbox is facing increased competition from Microsoft and Google. They need something extra, something different from the Office suites both companies offer. Imho it should be of the web, using the most modern approach to development, the single-page JavaScript app.
    #### Developers, developers, developers
    I think independent developers have the key to giving them a competitive edge.
    There's a universe of possible one-page apps and a vast sea of developer creativity to tap into. They just have to help create the market, a little more than they already have.
  PagePark and OPML
    The other day I released "riverBrowser", a JavaScript toolkit, for browser apps, that renders JSONP files produced by River4.
    I also released "outlineBrowser". It does for JSON outlines what riverBrowser does for rivers. The two are a pair, because outlines can appear in rivers, you need both to display a river. I wanted to separate them, however, because outlines can appear outside of rivers.
    With outlineBrowser, I could add a feature to "PagePark", my easy to use Node.js web server. Now, if you put an OPML file in any folder that's served by PagePark, renders it through a user-specified template and it's then passed through outlineBrowser. The result is quite functional if not yet beautiful. It also handles includes, which is fairly difficult to do in JavaScript, with all the async michegas, but I figured out how to do it, and it works.
    I have tons of content in this format. "Frontier", "OPML Editor" and "Fargo" outlines are all stored in OPML. It's the standard format for RSS subscription lists. There's a lot of OPML out there. And PagePark should be able to do a nice job with all of it. ;-)
    Slowly and surely it's coming together. :-)
    PS: Here's a short demo of an outline in a river.
  A spilled cup of coffee
    This morning I spilled a whole cup of coffee, a big one, on my work desk. The one with all my computers and wires and disks.
    I immediately went into action, throwing everything of value off the desk as quickly as I could, including both my cell phones, an iPhone and a Nexus 6.
    I then cleaned up the mess, thankfully none of the equipment appears to be damaged, and I went and read for a while. To try to calm my nerves.
    Then, I got a phone call. My iPad was ringing. Someone was calling my iPhone, it said. But where is the iPhone???
    I still can't find it. Oy.
    Eventually the battery will die, and when that happens, how will I find it. And I have this great Apple Watch that's useless without the iPhone.
    Oy. Oy. Oy.
    PS: Shortly after publishing this, I found it. It was in the pile of rags I used to mop up the mess. Whew.
    PPS: There are little dried drops of coffee on my monitors.
  Key concept of the open web: Working Together
    This morning there were two excellent essays from leaders of the open web, David Weinberger, one of the Cluetrain guys, and a longtime friend and colleague, and Dries Buyteart, founder of Drupal and software entrepreneur. Both are beautifully written and honest appraisals of why the open web is losing to the silos.
    Both are optimistic and doing the best they can to help the open web be the powerhouse we all thought it was a few years ago. And the one we still hope it can be.
    I would like to elaborate.
    #### Working together
    The promise of the open web was and is this: collaboration.
    But it's always been a promise, and many have acted in their own self-interest only, and forgot that in order for the open web to thrive we must feed it.
    They have taken out of the web without putting back.
    Use it or lose it. That applies to muscles as much as it does to the open web.
    #### The rule of working together
    Working together means this: If someone else has a good-enough way to do something, rather than reinvent what they do, incorporate what they do into what you do.
    There's a flipside. If I have to reinvent your whole product just to get a feature, you're not part of the open web.
    #### An example of working together
    When I was getting started writing server software in JavaScript, I had a thought not unlike the thought that probably happens at many silo companies. The process went like this: I'm going to need an RSS feed parser. A friend of mine, Dan MacTough, had created one and released it as open source. I found it confusing. So I decided that this was important enough that I should have "my own" feed parser.
    However, before I started writing my own, I sat myself down and asked if it would be better for everyone if I created yet another feed parser, or if I used Dan's. I decided, no matter how much work it would be to learn his way of doing it, even if it took longer to use his than to create my own (which also would have been more fun) I would be doing good for the net if I just used his. So I did. No regrets. I still don't understand how it works internally, but I've helped build a network of software, instead of creating another software island.
    And in practical terms, an island is just as isolating as a silo.
    #### Working together means APIs
    One of the things that's wrong in today's software is people tend to leave off the APIs. Or, if they're VC-funded, they're likely to have the APIs in the beginning, to help attract users and developers, but as they want to become profitable, they restrict the APIs. So much so that many developers no longer trust corporate APIs. Me too. I much prefer open cloneable APIs, with more than one implementer. That makes it impossible for a platform to screw its users and developers, because if they do, no problem -- I'll just use another one.
    One company that's generating a huge unicorn-level market cap is Slack. Hats off to Stewart Butterfield, the founder, and his team, who seem to have managed to create something that's both part of the open web and enormously profitable for investors. Please study this Ms and Mr Venture Capital. Note that strangling your community isn't the only way to get rich.
    #### Working together means using open software
    This is the hardest one to explain, because users seem to think they have no power re the open web and no responsibility. But the toys you love, Facebook, Instagram, SnapChat, etc, couldn't have existed if they couldn't have siphoned power from the open web. If you think the toys are getting more similar and perhaps a bit boring, this is why: there hasn't been enough investment in open web tech in the last few years. Not enough know-how for the merchandisers to commercialize.
    When a developer ships a tool that doesn't lock you in, it's worth using it, even if there is a "free" one that works a little better or has a nicer design. Because the open one, the one that lets you leave when you want to, preserves freedom, and the others consume it.
    It's really rare in today's world when a normal person has such power to affect the outcome, but every software developer needs users. Even just a few. Without users, how can you tune your software up to fit people who think differently from yourself. And creating new software, at this point in the evolution of this art, is still relatively easy and inexpensive. So a few users can be very powerful, but you have to choose to be. That choice is itself an act of creativity, and working-together.
    #### How silos can help
    Make it easy for people to post to your site and to sites they, the users, control.
    For example, Facebook posts are notoriously difficult to find after they've scrolled too far down the timeline, or aren't favored by the algorithm.
    Yes, Facebook let's you download your archive, but what if we could echo our writing to a personal blog, as we're writing or updating? One that would provide us or our children and grandchildren a place to look up our writing years or decades from now?
    It's likely this would increase use of Facebook, because people would post stuff there to make notes to themselves and future generations. It certainly wouldn't hurt. And since Facebook has profited so enormously from the open work of others, it would be a mitzvah, something good they can do to help repay the generosity of those who came before them.
    #### Summary
    I'm illustrating the idea of working together by pointing to Dries' and David's pieces at the beginning of this post, and then elaborating on the ideas they present. I could have left the links off and pretended I was the only person thinking this way. But that wouldn't have been very powerful, and it wouldn't have helped the open web.
    When you have a choice, instead of re-inventing someone else's work, use it.
    That's the simplest and most powerful way to help the open web.
  For comatose Knicks fans everywhere
    When you wake from a multi-year coma and your first question is Are the Knicks the NBA champions? I have created a wonderful and easy to use site that will give you the answer in an instant!
    http://aretheknickschampions.com/
    It probably won't require updating for years, if ever.
    It was inspired by Scott Knaster's fan site for the Warriors.
    It was also the content of my 100,000th tweet.
  The confederate flag is a hate crime
    I spent a some time in northeast Florida a few years back. Every so often a bit of the rural culture would show up there, though mostly it is an expensive coastal enclave, separate from the rural South in central Florida and south Georgia. The confederate flags didn't bother me much, I was told they were about heritage, and who cares if people in the South want to remember the Civil War as a rebellion, not a war to keep slaves.
    I didn't wonder what it would be like to be black and see this symbol of their enslavement in everyday life, until I saw a man with a swastika tattoo in a convenience store in Palatka, an inland town. His van also had swastikas, confederate flags, slogans about white power. Then I understood how disturbing it must be to be black and to live among people who advocated your extermination so openly. The swastika conveys all that, for my people.
    Disturbing, until last week when nine black people were killed in a church in Charleston, by someone with the same political values as the man in the Palatka parking lot. Now they're killing more than a random man, they're killing women too, in a church. Good people, really the best of America. Dead. In the cause of hate.
    As long as the confederate flag is a symbol of government in the South, flown over one state capital, in the flag of another, on state-issued license plates, the message is clear to white supremacists. We are with you. And that's why, as long as the confederate flag is a symbol of government in the South, the South itself is a hate crime.
    I know there are good people in the South, thoughtful people, who care about others. Think about it this way. As long as the rest of America tolerates this hate, we're standing with you, in inaction.
  Fargo blogs and rssCloud
    This is a test post to verify that the implementation of rssCloud in "Fargo" works.
    When it works, you will be able to get instant updates to Scripting News, for example, if your RSS reader supports the rssCloud interface.
    "River4" supports rssCloud, as does WordPress.
    Fargo v1.71 is now released.
    #### How to test
    1. Make a change to one of your public outlines.
    2. Look at the RSS feed. View source if the browser is hiding the XML.
    3. There should be a <cloud> element in the feed.
    #### Scripting News
    My blog, Scripting News, is published with Fargo.
    Here's the feed.
  riverBrowser open source release
    Rivers are very important structures in my 2015 world, as it's shaping up.
    They appear on the home pages of Scripting News, Podcatch.com. Subsets of rivers are on every page rendered by Liveblog.
    Rivers are not only important here, but they also form the central structures of Twitter and Facebook.
    Doing a good job of generating and viewing rivers is a pretty big deal. However, until now my work in this area was not organized. This open source release in an attempt to add organization.
    #### GitHub repo
    Here's a link to the GitHub repository for riverBrowser.
    The readme explains how to call its main routine, httpGetRiver.
    #### Sites that use this toolkit
    I've converted most of my river sites to use the new toolkit, including:
    1. "Scripting News"
    2. Podcatch
    3. TechBlast (a new site for tech news)
    4. Radio's Rivers (my original collection of rivers)
    #### The other side
    Rivers are an open format, defined by the spec on riverjs.org.
    "River4", a Node.js aggregator that's also open source, generates rivers.
    #### Still to-do
    The rivers that are integrated in River4 have not yet been updated. I wanted to give the community a chance to review the implementation here, and try it out on their own rivers, before taking a chance on breaking people's installations. So this review is important if you want a relatively breakage-free update.
  Give up the Confederate flag
    Imagine if Germany flew the swastika over its main government building.
    That's pretty much analogous to South Carolina flying the Confederate flag over their state capitol building.
    Also, the official state flag of Mississippi contains the confederate flag within it. Alabama and Florida have the bars.
  Why aren't the BigCo's converging on JavaScript?
    Everywhere I look individual programmers are getting on board with JavaScript. It really is something. After a couple of decades of fragmentation in the development world, we now have what I called, in 1995, a consensus platform. Chances are pretty good if you and I are working on server code, we're both working in Node.js. And if you and I are writing code that runs in the browser, the chances are 100 percent that we are both working in JavaScript.
    Yet almost all the big companies are trying to create their own languages, presumably with proprietary or patent secret sauces, that are not JavaScript.
    If we were healthy as an industry in ways that we are clearly not, we would see this coming-together as an opportunity to become more efficient. We'd be looking for opportunities to factor redundancy from our platforms, for example reducing our reliance on CSS and HTML, and perhaps eliminating the need for server code. These are serious possibilities. There isn't much functionality left that must be on the server. If we concentrated real hard, we could make those go away.
    But the BigCo's seem to want the chaos? And as a result they'll need lots more programmers to maintain all the incompatible stacks. I don't think this is driven by business needs, rather it's programmers trying to be sure they continue to have jobs. Re-inventing stuff that already works pretty well. Job security.
    Reminds me of all the incompatible BigCo networking products that were swept off the table by the emergence of the web as the consensus platform in the early 90s. JavaScript is that strong a force in 2015.
  Dropbox's new "Requests" feature
    This sounds like a really useful feature.
    How it works: You set up a request on dropbox.com, and people can send you files via a web form. They show up in a folder in your Dropbox.
    For example, here's a request where I ask for a nice picture. I emphasize the word nice. Thank you. Let's see what happens. :-)
    I can see this becoming part of a CMS.
    Any other ideas??
    PS: Paolo Valdemarin uploaded this pic probably from BloggerCon IV, with Marc Canter, Susan Mernit, Richard MacManus, Mike Arrington, Steve Gillmor, Lisa Williams and myself.
  Social networking without spoilers
    Posted on Facebook yesterday.
    What if you could put a dialog-based spoiler alert on a post.
    You wouldn't be able to read the comments until you confirm that you know there are spoilers below, and be given a chance to know what the spoilers relate to.
    Or -- even better -- I could say the post is only visible to people who have declared in their prefs that they've already seen the season finale of Game of Thrones season 5.
    Think of all the new metadata you'll get. :-)
    Of course if HBO NOW had community features, it would be killer there, because they would know that you've already seen the episode, without the user doing anything. Or Amazon or Netflix, for their shows.
  Why it's wrong for a white person to self-declare as black
    In an op-ed piece in today's NY Times Tamara Winfrey Harris explains: "Racial identity cannot be fluid as long as the definition of whiteness is fixed."
    It's rare that a moral argument has such a precise and simple resolution. You can only go one way if it makes sense to go the other.
    Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, who is over 7 feet tall, made a similar analogy in a Time essay. You can allow a white person to self-declare as black, if he can self-declare as 5 foot 8 inches tall.
    We may want to live in a world where a black person could decide to be treated as if they were white, but we do not live in that world.
    In other words, there are some things about us that are immutable.
  Uber is not so great
    I posted this on Facebook on Sunday, and sent it to Uber via email. Haven't heard back from them.
    I didn't rent a car in Seattle last week, I thought I'd do better with Uber.
    I took a total of three trips, one of them was pretty bad, and the other two were fine.
    The bad one involved two drivers.
    #### The first car smelled of cigarettes
    The first car that arrived smelled of cigarette smoke. As a former smoker, I don't like the smell of cigarettes, especially stale smoke. I told the driver that he should probably have smoked outside, not in the car, and I asked if I could get out of the car and get another ride. They charged me for the ride, even though we didn't go anywhere, but I sent an email asking that they issue a credit and they did.
    #### The driver of the second car drove to the wrong place
    The second car smelled okay, but the driver took me to the wrong address way out in Woodinville. As he was pulling away, after I got out of the car, I realized I wasn't where I was supposed to be and got back in the car, told him about the mistake, and requested that he drive me to the correct address.
    He said that I would have to pay for another trip. I said that was wrong, because I had given Uber the correct address, and verified it, and showed him, over and over. But he seemed to forget each time and kept demanding that I pay. I told him I was going to rate him at one star, he said I shouldn't threaten him, and I said that wasn't a threat, that was my right. So he took me there.
    It was a good thing I had some time to kill at the airport just now, otherwise I probably wouldn't have noticed that he requested that Uber charge me for the extra trip, and they did. Although to their credit, the email did say I could contest it. Of course I did.
    Under normal circumstances I never would have noticed the email with the extra fare, so I decided to write this up publicly. Two bad Uber rides in one day. I haven't used Uber that much, but I've never rated a driver anything other than 5. Two one-star ratings in one day. Not very good.
    #### Follow-up
    As of Tuesday night, as far as I know I'm still paying for the mistake the driver of the second car made. Haven't heard back from Uber. It's not that much money, but it's kind of disgusting that the guy wouldn't make good in the first place, and then lied about whether he was making good. I gave the driver a 1-star rating so that should help others be warned, but why Uber is holding on to the money? Well, I'm not going to use them again after this experience.
  Editing APIs for Wikis?
    #### Blog editing APIs
    One of the things we did in the early blogging days was come up with a web API that made it possible to hook up a desktop editor to a blog. This allowed the full fidelity of the graphic desktop to be applied to blog post editing.
    There were a few iterations of this API before we arrived at the Metaweblog API, which was supported by all the major blogging tools, Blogger, Movable Type, WordPress and my own products, Radio UserLand and Manila.
    #### Editing APIs for Wikis?
    So if blogs have editing APIs, are there equivalent APIs for wikis??
    I did a little searching and asked a few friends, and so far, I don't think they came together as well as they did in the blogging world, but it seems there would be value creating the link between desktop editors and wiki software on a server. I could hook up an outliner, for example, to the GitHub wiki. Or to Ward Cunningham's new Federated Wiki. If the goal is to get the RSS and blogging worlds and everything that's adjacent to them to hook up with the Wiki world, it seems that editing APIs might a promising place to start.
    So let's figure this out. What's out there to build on, or to serve as prior art?
  Should LeBron be MVP even if the Cavs lose?
    In a word, no. He's a force of nature. A wonderful leader and role model. An amazing basketball player. But not the series MVP.
    As any player will tell you, the competition is about winning, as a team, and if your team doesn't win, you might have been valuable, but you're not the most valuable. Almost by definition.
    So you know where my loyalties lie, I've been rooting for the Cavs because they feel very much like the Knicks, grown up and working right. With leadership, not dabblers and daydreamers. People with their bodies in the actual game, on the court, and driving to victory.
    I love LeBron for making JR Smith and Iman Shumpert better players. I hope the team stays together next year and thereafter, so he can work his magic with their talent. They weren't getting that on the Knicks, obviously. There were times when the Knicks did bring out the spark they both have, basically when they had older players around who could teach them. Melo is not that guy. But Jason Kidd was. And Rasheed Wallace and Marcus Camby, Kenyon Martin, lots of them. The Knicks loaded up on veterans. I didn't understand why then, but I do now, now that I've seen what a difference teaming with LeBron has made. JR is a great technical player but he gets lost in his own mind (famously). And Iman is a very young player, with lots of talent. I could go on and on about this for pages.
    Imho, the obvious choice for MVP is Steph Curry, that is, if the Warriors win, and I want to keep emphasizing that, it hasn't happened yet. It might not turn out that way. All it has to take imho is JR Smith having two halfs like yesterday's first half. At home, in Cleveland that would have made the game turn out the other way, and we would be having a different conversation. With JR hitting his threes, the Cavs would be unstoppable.
    Ooops, I promised not to talk more about the Cavs/Knicks.
    Steph Curry should win, because he was the difference in all the games the Warriors won. It was his spark, the dramatic beautiful shots. He is the most elegant, smooth, smart and lethal point guard I've ever seen. He's poetry in motion, when it's working. But he's also young, and it's easy to get inside his head, and make all that confidence work against the elegance. To be the Curry he must be to win the title, he had to sober up. He has. Now we get to the real part of the competition. It really is not over. Not yet.
    But if it is, and the Warriors win tomorrow, the way they won on Sunday, the creative and interesting choice for MVP, that says something about how the game really works, would be, please hear me out, Andre Iguodala. Until they started him, the Warriors couldn't get around the Cavs on defense, they couldn't get good enough looks for their bomb throwers. With him in the game, they still had a lot of trouble, but they got just enough further for Curry to take his ridiculous circus shots, that happen to go in.
    If "most valuable" means "made the difference" then it really is Iguodala.
  The People's Browser
    I wrote a tweet yesterday, from the airplane home from Seattle, just to see what would happen. I also posted it on Facebook. It was a conclusion I reached after reading Brent Simmons' latest post, which included a section about HTTP deprecation.
    #### Here's what Brent said
    "What upsets me about this issue in general is that it’s anti-democratic: it can make writing for the web more expensive and difficult for individuals. As a writer, reader, and open web partisan I dislike everything that shifts power away from people and toward entities with greater resources. What you end up with is corporate speech rather than the voices we know and love and need to hear."
    I've written about this issue, here and here.
    #### It's about our speech
    In the tweet, people thought I was writing about protecting whistleblowers, or circumventing the control of the entertainment industry, both worthy causes. But what I am protecting is much more fundamental -- the right of the people to use the web as a space to speak their mind without interference from government and corporations. It's as fundamental as the First Amendment of the US Constitution. I've created dozens of websites over the 20-plus years I've been writing on the web that don't support HTTPS and never will. It would be too much work, and too expensive, and would cede control of the content to yet another administrative body. I refuse. You should too.
    #### Let's study Wikipedia
    I would love to see a study of links emanating from Wikipedia that are HTTP vs HTTPS. The equivalent of an environmental impact study that companies are required to create when they want to alter the environment for commercial purposes.
    Let's see if we can even find the owners of those sites to ask them when they're going to invest the time to support HTTPS. If they don't understand what's involved, offer to teach them, see if they are willing to listen, or can even comprehend what's required of them. How much more will it cost, and do they feel the cost is justified, and will they actually pay? And who will they be paying the money to, that is, who stands to profit from this change?
    I suspect you'll never find a person responsible for most of the content, much less find a plan to migrate to HTTPS. Under the planned deprecation, all those sites will become inaccessible. Why? What's their crime? And what would be at risk at allowing continued access? (Answer, none and none.)
    #### This has gone too far
    Tech companies are totally out of control, and people are too naive about the use of the Internet, too trusting, too believing of the commercials and PR. Yes we love tech products, but please don't turn that into trust of the people running the companies. They totally do not deserve it.
    #### Mozilla? Don't make me laugh
    Some have suggested that Mozilla could be the People's Browser. Hah! Mozilla is one of the leaders in the effort to throw away open access to the web. They are the worst of the worst. Don't fall for the PR. They are driving the change, as much as Google is. They should be on the other side, speaking up for and protecting the people.
    #### Two webs
    The People's Browser very simply, will never require HTTPS. It will work with HTTPS, but it will never not work with HTTP. It would be very simple for Chrome or Firefox to be this browser, by simply making this pledge. Then we won't have to go to all the effort required to route around them.
    #### Why are they doing this?
    I don't know. I'm shaking my head. I don't want to even think what's kind of obvious, much less say it out loud.
  An exciting west coast trip
    I'm winding up a west coast trip that took me to Portland and Seattle over the last week. Lots of interesting meetings, and along the way a number of developments that inspire new thinking.
    #### Allen & Ward
    I spent two days in Portland as the guest of Allen and Rebecca Wirfs-Brock. The purpose of the trip was to get me together with Ward Cunningham, the guy who invented the wiki. He has a fascinating story, and because he's not much of a writer himself, I'm not sure if it's been told. He and I think and work a lot alike, and have been working in parallel on flip sides of the same idea since the mid-90s, without ever meeting (indicating that there may be a conference missing in the tech world). We're already working on a couple of projects and thinking about a bunch more. The goal is to connect our work in interesting new ways. And since we both abhor lock-in, and love working with other developers, the connections will be open, and our products subject to replacement. That is one way new standards are developed.
    Allen Wirfs-Brock works on a different kind of standard. He's the editor of the new JavaScript spec. What a thrill to meet someone in his position. Me, the JavaScript newbie, got to ask the super-expert how to do the things I want to do. He knows. Allen and Ward have both been around even longer than I have, so the stories were fantastic.
    One thing I came away with is a wish that I had made this trip, and met Ward, a long time ago. My life would have been vastly different, for the better.
    #### Changes at Twitter
    On the train Thursday from Portland to Seattle, Twitter announced an end to the 140-char limit for DMs, and also announced that CEO Dick Costolo was stepping down, being replaced, at least in the interim, by Twitter founder Jack Dorsey.
    I'm glad they got rid of the 140-char limit, at least in DMs.
    I have had a chance to think, if I was the new czar of Twitter, what I would do, and it would be this. I'd list all the limits for users and devs, and one by one, erase them. I would move Twitter into position to be the ultimate open platform for realtime communication. I would make some unretractable commitments to developers, by releasing lots of the basic Twitter technology as open source, so it could be immediately federated. It might take some time to do it well, and we would take the necessary time. It would guarantee that we'd always have the highest performance, most reliable notification system, or we'd be replaced. Honestly, I'd bet that over time we would be replaced. But the Internet still needs an identity system. And for that, I'd charge users a small yearly fee to maintain an identity that could participate in the global network that Twitter would now define. That would cut back on a bunch of initiatives, so some of the current Twitter employees would go on to start new companies. I'd invest in them, so we could participate in their upside. This would prepare Twitter for mid-life. It's no longer a startup. And now it's time to serve as a true coral reef, as an operating environment, as an organization, and as a bank account. I know this is a radical re-shaping, and it may only be possible if Twitter is acquired, and basically taken private, and I wouldn't have a problem with that as long as one of the terms of the deal is that all this would happen. The idea is to get Twitter back on track to being globally significant. To realize the potential it had when it was a startup almost ten years ago.
    If the acquirer were Google, btw, I'm pretty sure they'd be happy to go this route, because no matter what their future is tied directly to the future of the open web, and the open web is suffering because of all the silos. One of them is Twitter. Desiloizing Twitter would be a brilliant move, it would strengthen the open web, create vast new developer opportunities, and investment opportunities for the new owners. Google, of course, has much more cash than Twitter, and already realizes that it needs to diversify. Here's a great way to add fuel to the fire.
    Of course no one is hiring me to run Twitter, so this is all a fancy dream. But it's fun to speculate! :-)
    #### Apple and RSS
    One more idea then I have to go.
    Yesterday I, and a bunch of other bloggers, got an email from Apple saying they wanted to use our RSS feeds in their new Apple News product. There were a few conditions, very reasonable, and an easy opt-out. I was very happy to see this, and glad to have this blog participate.
    Earlier in the week when they announced Apple News, it appeared as if we would have to convert our feeds to conform to Apple's guidelines. I wasn't planning on doing that. But it's great that Apple is accepting RSS as-is, and making that support very public.
    Now I think of people who thought there was no reason to have a blog and an RSS feed. To get this distribution, apparently, you need to be here. Apple just gave the open web a big boost. A big surprise, and much appreciated. :-)
  Scripting News in Apple News
    I just got a very nice email from Apple saying they are including "Scripting News" in Apple News, and they offer me a chance to opt-out. But if I don't mind (of course I don't) I don't have to do anything. Delighted that they have accepted the spirit of RSS, at least so far.
  What changes at Medium and Yahoo Pipes teach us about the persistence of the web
    Yesterday I did a review of the feeds I follow for tech news, and posted a request to Facebook for people to recommend their favorites. In this review I came across a "MegaFeed" for Glenn Fleishman, a blogger who also writes for a number of publishers. The feed is stitched together by Yahoo Pipes, a service that has been around for many years. They announced last week that the site will close in September. There is a discussion on Yahoo's support forum.
    I wondered what will happen to the people who follow feeds produced by Yahoo Pipes? Yahoo doesn't say they'll provide free redirection, but it would be good for the web if they did. However, even if they did provide redirection, where would people redirect to? Because Yahoo was a big company people trusted and their service was free, little if any competition developed for Yahoo Pipes. Either way, it's a clear example of why it's not good to depend on free commercial services to form critical parts of your content infrastructure.
    Then I read stories on BuzzFeed, Business Insider and Fortune about recent changes at Medium, another site where people post their ideas, instead of posting to a blog that they pay for and control.
    When people post to Medium they think about exposure for their ideas today, but imho they should also be thinking about how people are going to find their ideas in the future. There's no guarantee that Medium won't shift strategy again, or shut down. It happens all the time in the tech world. With no way to dual-host content, and no guarantee of future redirection, Medium is not a very future-safe place to post.
    But even sites like Tumblr and WordPress.com that look stable are still subject to corporate changes or disappearance.
    What we need, and still don't have, is a systematic way of publishing to the future. Such a system would allow you to pay a fixed sum to keep your content at a specific address for the foreseeable future. No one can make a guarantee, we don't know what the future holds, but every effort has to be made, upfront, to be sure that the content has the best chance to survive as long as possible.
    It would be nice if a visionary entrepreneur would get involved, and an educational institution, perhaps, and/or an insurance company, the kinds of organizations our society creates to be long-lived. It would be great to get input from Stewart Brand and his colleagues at the LongNow Foundation.
    I've said this many times, it bears saying again. I've been aware of this problem for a long time, and I'm hosting a lot of archives that should be preserved long-term. I want them to be, I'd be willing to bequeath the funds in my will to keep the content going for the indefinite future, but today there is no way to do it, as far as I know.
    PS: People always say archive.org is the answer. Of course I'm aware of that excellent and wonderful service. But long-lived content is not the same thing as having a snapshot. We're building networks here. Archive.org is a museum. I'm very glad it exists. I want something different, a way for the actual content and the networks they're part of, to persist.
    PPS: An after-the-fact open source release of Yahoo Pipes probably isn't an answer.
  Throwback to 2001
    This picture was taken in my office in 2001.
    This is when RSS was just taking off. We were working on Radio 8.
    I like the Windex bottle. I kept it near to clean the monitor and my glasses. I was a smoker then, so I guess things got smokey?
    Gumby was part of the entourage. ;-)
  The rssCloud docs...
    I did a bad thing, I let the domain rsscloud.org lapse.
    When I did that, all the rssCloud docs fell off the web. ;-(
    We need them back, so I bought rsscloud.co. It isn't perfect but most of the docs now work.
    #### The main pages
    home.rsscloud.co
    publisher.rsscloud.co
    walkthrough.rsscloud.co
    cribsheet.rsscloud.co
    tool.rsscloud.co
    #### rssCloud in JavaScript
    Also, Andrew Shell released the first version of his rssCloud-server implementation for Node.js.
    This is a big milestone. Thank you Andrew. ;-)
  Connecting Slack with RSS
    I set up a test channel on Slack and hooked it up to the Hacker News "firehose" feed, which is fairly high volume. About 20 or 30 posts per hour. I wanted to see how fast it would update.
    I also wrote a small Node.js app that reads the same feed and posts to another Slack channel, as a control. It will post at most one item per minute. So they come out fairly steadily as long as more items are being posted to Hacker News.
    I have also set up an IFTTT recipe to read the feed and see how it compares.
    #### Update #1
    It took about 1/2 hour for IFTTT to push a dozen items to our group at once.
    #### Update #2
    Another 1/4 hour another storm of updates from IFTTT.
    Still nothing from Slack's RSS bot.
    My Node app is chugging along, posting one item a minute.
    #### Update #3 -- 12:20PM Eastern
    It's been over an hour and still nothing from Slack.
    #### Update #4 -- 2:40PM Eastern
    We are now getting updates from Slack's native RSS support.
    They do more than report headlines, they're scraping the articles that are being linked to from the HN firehose feed.
    But they're doing that with some of the links we push from the Node.js app.
    And now it's been a couple of hours since the IFTTT bot has posted any new stuff, yet the feed is updating continually.
    Then as if by magic a small flood of IFTTT posts from the feed.
    Early conclusions: Slack's native integration is slow and bursty. IFTTT is more regular but bursty. Lots of messages all at once. Neither is ideal for a frequently updating feed.
  How I try to work with journalists
    I read this piece by Charles Arthur thinking maybe this is the breakthrough. Maybe we can start this discussion in earnest. Maybe in fact a lot was gained by putting programmers and journalists in the same room, if only to prove that's not the way to do it! :-)
    Here's how I think it should work, and I think the germ of the idea is there in Charles' piece. He says he is an amateur programmer. He can do some PHP and AppleScript. In the past he's worked a bit in COBOL and C++. That's awesome. We can use that.
    How about if we make great tools that are designed for people like Charles to create their own wonderful web projects.
    Two good things could come from it.
    1. They might make some good software. Don't doubt it. One of my best programmer buddies was a lawyer. He had a good programmer mind, but hadn't really exercised it. Now he teaches me stuff about Node.js. By giving ever-easier and less complex development tools to people who aren't developers, we're going to as a result find some of them are better devs than they are journalists. I believe those people will be uniquely able to listen to journalists, because inside their own mind there is one. ;-)
    2. They might create a breakthrough. It might also be an egregious hack, that you can't believe a human mind could possibly do it so wrong, but it might still be a great idea! That's exactly how Adam Curry showed me how to do the "last yard" idea he wanted to do that resulted in podcasting. He took my source code, and hacked it in awful egregious ways (I can't say that enough) but it did something I had not thought of. He had tried to explain it in words, but couldn't get through my thick skull. But showing me that he believed in the idea enough to so thoroughly humiliate himself was enough to get me to listen.
    There probably are other great reasons, but these are two that I have personally experienced, so can vouch for the fact that they're real.
    So believing this, for a very long time actually, I have been working at trying to lower the barriers. I called one of my companies UserLand, because I wanted the users more involved in creating software.
    I have shipped a bunch of tools that make it easy for an inspired user to cobble together their own web server, their own CMS, without the limits of the software that was created by a priesthood, one that's invested in keeping things complicated and inaccessible. (I'm sure journalists are familiar with the idea of an elite priesthood.)
    That's why I say to Charles, to think of all programmers as having the same outlook, the same goals, is as ridiculous as thinking all columnists and reporters do. I want you to win. Most of the others don't really care if you do or don't.
    I keep saying this, let's work together. Maybe now we can?