Scripting News

Mon, 10 Nov 2003 01:46:34 GMT

Joi Ito is becoming a cranky old man. Welcome!

Mon, 10 Nov 2003 01:55:35 GMT

Jim Moore is at Dean HQ in Vermont. My two cents. Take the money. Let the voters tell you what the sacrament is. They drafted Dean. Like all successful boomtime IPOs, Dean just happened to be in the right place when the lightning struck. It didn't impart any special wisdom. What do you do? Relax and enjoy the ride. In other words, there's not much you can do. (Postscript: I suggested to Jim in a phone talk that they do something more creative with the money than buying television ads. Anything but giving the money to Viacom, GE, Disney, Fox, Time Warner.)

Mon, 10 Nov 2003 02:06:01 GMT

Marc Nozell blogs Joe Lieberman campaigning in NH.

Sun, 09 Nov 2003 22:14:08 GMT

Wired: "Linus Torvalds wants me to believe he's too boring."

Sun, 09 Nov 2003 21:58:57 GMT

I find this report really interesting. It shows where the readers of the Scripting News archive are coming from. The top two are domains at Harvard, I assume they're crawlers of some kind. Then crawlers from Teoma, Google, then users and more crawlers. It's been a while since I've had a clients readout.

Sun, 09 Nov 2003 14:05:21 GMT

SecurityFocus has two new RSS feeds.

Sun, 09 Nov 2003 21:50:06 GMT

SmartMoney magazine has 12 feeds.

Sun, 09 Nov 2003 19:25:16 GMT

Lessig: "It is ok to bend the truth, but only in one way."

Sun, 09 Nov 2003 17:14:33 GMT

I can't recall being as excited about a piece of software since I was working on Manila in 1999. Part of the puzzle is finished. The items in the RSS feed for this weblog can be routed to categories. Now to the back-end. As the page is published, we watch for items with categories, and route them to the appropriate place. So if you want to get caught up on all the news from the Edwards campaign, there will be a place for that. Now of course a grad student could be working specifically on news of Edwards, maybe even on the press bus with Edwards. Maybe two grad students. Maybe thirty-two. And maybe the student who's working on Boston weather comes across something relevant to Edwards-watchers. This shouldn't be a problem. I told my friend Adam Curry in an email, the idea is that I can write for 100 weblogs, and 100 people can write for a specific weblog. We can get the overhead very low. This is how we're going to scale up to cover the 2004 election. It's a moon mission. Each user will get some new software and an assignment. It'll be a project like 24 Hours of Democracy in 1996, a demo of neat net tricks and a way for people with weblog skills to make a difference. And of course if an event like 9/11 comes along, we'll be that much better prepared to cover it.

Sun, 09 Nov 2003 14:26:34 GMT

"When we were listening to the radio, we were part of the free world, if only for a few moments, whether the system we lived under liked it or not," says Simonyi, 51. "Rock and roll, culturally speaking, was a decisive element in loosening up communist societies and bringing them closer to a world of freedom."

Sun, 09 Nov 2003 10:21:30 GMT

Sunday night forecast: "Clear and cold. Lows 18 to 23."

Sun, 09 Nov 2003 10:38:39 GMT

Reminder to self: Watch for Paolo's comments on changes to Scripting News RSS.

Sun, 09 Nov 2003 11:12:19 GMT

The user interface for category routing is a right-click popup menu. Put the cursor on an item, right-click, choose a category, mouse-up. Repeat if necessary. My personal taxonomy is edited in an outliner, and exchanged in OPML. Now the trick is to use it, and keep the taxonomy up to date. And of course to build out the back-end.

Sun, 09 Nov 2003 10:54:16 GMT

Stirring Cory Doctorow piece on the evil Broadcast Flag.