Fri, 02 May 2003 10:55:24 GMT

Lance Knobel: "They still don't get it."

Fri, 02 May 2003 10:57:01 GMT

The Guardian interviews William Gibson on blogging.

Fri, 02 May 2003 10:58:15 GMT

Mini-editorial on the RIAA suing students. I don't have to buy music. It's not a necessity of life. You can use the courts to punish the students, and they may help you, but nothing says anyone has to buy your product. Your monopoly may be worth nothing. Something to think about.

Fri, 02 May 2003 10:47:53 GMT

BBC: "Weblog writers around the world are joining forces to protest against the detention of a fellow blogger."

Fri, 02 May 2003 11:49:39 GMT

I'm off to NYC, then Denver. Don't expect much here in the next few days and you won't be disappointed. Have a great day everyone!

It's my birthday

Fri, 02 May 2003 09:54:44 GMT

48 great years, let's hope for a few more. The last year has been interesting, to say the least. I have a huge hole in the middle of my chest, the healing is done, the doctors say, but the feeling is not back yet. I got a lot older in the last year. Yesterday I had to show my drivers license at a drug store, and the clerk couldn't believe it was me. I'm greyer and weaker, but I'm still here. ";->"

322 days no smoking!

On birthdays you get to indulge. My Internet-based indulgence is going to be to try to put a stop to the flamewars on various mail lists, weblogs and publications. On the Syndication list, I ask that if someone attacks another person's integrity that everyone ask that person to stop. It shouldn't have to fall to the person being attacked, that's how it becomes a flamewar. If we adopt this simple algorithm we'll get to a respectful place we've never been able to get to in the RSS community, quickly. This actually would work on almost any mail list, come to think of it.

To Mark Pilgrim and Jeffrey Zeldman, both of whom wrote publicly and critically about me last week, clearly without checking the facts, I am not running UserLand (as I've said many times on this page). I quit after my heart surgery last summer, on doctor's advice. I am now a fellow at Berkman Center at Harvard University, where my job is to help people start weblogs. I can't tell them what browser to use, nor would they listen if I did. They mostly use MSIE, a few use Netscape 4, I haven't seen any Opera's or Mozilla's. Yet somehow our sites have to look good in all these browsers, and they use CSS, as much as they possibly can. I put a break tag and a blockquote in the default theme to work around a bug in MSIE. The problem I was ranting about was about the relationship between people like me and designers like you. I was saying you guys stopped listening and stopped caring. Your rants proved my point, more eloquently than I possibly could have. You were ranting about someone else, not me. I am using CSS. I gave up the battle a long time ago. Now you guys listen carefully -- it's past time for you to give up the battle too.

To O'Reilly, stop begrudging me authorship credit for RSS. It's obvious on its face that I co-authored the format. All the arguments you use against that also work against Netscape's participation, yet you say they created it exclusively. They didn't. The Independent got it right. UserLand went first, 1.5 years before Netscape. Then Netscape released RSS 0.90. We pressured them into working with us. They yielded and the result was RSS 0.91, which we then both got behind. That's what really happened. It's time for O'Reilly to return to doing what it does so well, publishing objective books and running objective conferences. It was a bad idea for O'Reilly to take sides. Everyone I talk to about this privately says I can't let it rest. So I waited until my birthday. Let's settle this amicably, like the ladies and gentlemen that we are.

Scripting News

It's my birthday