A weekly podcast on technology with Marshall Kirkpatrick and Dave Winer.

Bad Hair Day #2

After a 1-week hiatus (Dave was traveling), a new Bad Hair Day podcast was recorded at 7PM on July 2, 2009.

Warning: There's a 1-minute bad spot starting at minute 4.

Marshall wrote the show notes, which follow.

Open Source Bridge conference launched this year to replace the O'Reilly Open Source Conference in Portland, Oregon. People came from all over the country and liked it.

Dave went to the Reboot conference. European, young, web related, beer.

Personal Democracy Forum conference. Marshall reported on LINK the Sunlight Foundation's Transparency Corps http://transparencycorps.org/, like Mechanical Turk for small tasks to make government data more transparent. Unfortunately, most other people are not excited about these kinds of projects.

Should governments offer APIs? The man who offered the counterpoint, arguing that APIs are another level of interpretation and contrary to the top priority of total transparency, is Clay Johnson, director of Sunlight Labs. Johnson and others argue that full raw data needs to be offered.

Marshall discussed a research project he's doing with Chris Cameron, RWW researcher. Looking at Twitter investors and who they have made political donations to - do those who tend to give to Democrats use Twitter differently than those who give to Republicans. Watch for a forthcoming blog post on this.

Dave discusses Etsy's inclusion on the Twitter Suggested User List and the fact that Fred Wilson has invested in both Etsy and Twitter. Dave asks for research to be done to discover patterns like this.

Marshall says being on the Suggested Users List doesn't have clearly tangible value - Dave laughs and Marshall feels silly for offering such an argument.

Marshall talks about how it's all about being able to extract data from open tweets. Offers iAte, a restaurant review site built by Tweets, as an example. It was demoed at Demolicious.

Dave says Twitter is becoming less useful for him. Mentions Scoble's blog post saying that Tweets just don't have the permanence that blog posts do. [can't find that blog post]

Marshall says the Twitter on Google Greasemonkey script is super useful. We discuss all the press around Bing's inclusion of selected popular users' Tweets in search results. Here's a Twitter on Bing Greasemonkey script that came out the day Bing launched. If Greasemonkey is new to you, here's a tutorial on how to use it in less than 5 minutes. Dave doesn't use it but Marshall swears by it. (Go try it!!)

Marshall says Twitter still rocks his world. Explains that he uses it by using the Firefox plug-in Drag and Drop Zones in conjunction with Google Custom Search Engines and the Twitter and Google Greasemonkey script.

FriendFeed launched real time search today. Dave says Steve Gillmor must be happy. Marshall discussed this blog post about it. Dave says it's all about FriendFeed having unique access to the Twitter fire-hose.

Dave talks about how FriendFeed has got to start importing and exporting OPML files, like the dearly departed Share Your OPML project.

Marshall sheds a tear for the lack of enthusiasm OPML has been received with - sharing a bound collection of dynamic topical resources is an act of poetry. Why haven't other people taken it up? Dave says the impulse to share isn't the kind of thing that most people have. Marshall disagrees and references Bre Petis's post about how sharing is the number one disruptive force on the web these days. (Dave agrees, but somehow this didn't make it into Marshall's show notes. :-)

Dave says FriendFeed is driving him crazy. He says that FriendFeed should make a toolkit for building Twitter-type sites.

And then the show concludes!

badHair09Jul02.mp3 (binary/octet-stream, 10.4MB) Thursday, July 2, 2009.