Scripting News

Now that I'm home

Fri, 12 Oct 2007 18:25:14 GMT

I have to tell Virgin America that I'm not going to be on the flight tomorrow morning. That's proving more difficult than you might imagine. I logged into my account on their website, and it seems to have forgotten about my reservation, even though I just got an email reminding me to check in. Okay, so I called their reservation line, navigated through voicemail, and received a message that due to heavy call volume they can't talk to me, and hung up! Oh man, that's not cool.

So what should I do now? I thought maybe I should call Xeni or Cory or Peter, since I know all of them and they're now spokespersons for the airline. Heh. Okay I'm not going to do that. But I thought about it for a second or two and decided to just blog it instead.

Now I have to talk to American Airlines to see about getting them to pay for the hotel in Dallas last night. Lotsa luck! (Predictably, they said I didn't read the fine print, so I paid for my hotel room and that's that. Now what to do with all the miles I have on this airline that I'm never going to use.)

One more stop -- Expedia, to see if I can get a refund for two nights in New York that I didn't use. What do you think?? Hmmm. Well, Expedia wins the prize! I'm getting a refund for two nights in NY that I didn't use. I asked where she was -- the Philippines. I congratulated her for working for a good company, that made her quite happy. I make a point of thanking these poor people when they help me.

I'm pretty sure I'll get a credit from Virgin America when they actually decide to talk to me, or when the website recognizes me, whichever comes first.

Later: I did get through to Virgin America, and they gave me a credit for the unused portion of the trip, which I can apply to a trip anytime in the next year. Not a bad outcome.

Early morning twits

Fri, 12 Oct 2007 08:47:57 GMT

Someday every story in the NYT will be blogged thoroughly before it runs.

Lane Hartwell loves what she do. (32)

If Fred Wilson feels like chopped liver, I must be liver spots. (63)

Okay it was overly optimistic of me to set my computer's clock to pacific time. (79)

Scott Beale says the next disaster will be twittered. It was. (62)

Mike Arrington is at his best when angry. (41)

NYT OPML. (10)

American Airlines are mother fcukers. (37)

Techmeme is still a spam-filled cesspool. (41)

After twitting and blogging about chopped liver, now i have a jones for chopped liver, at 4:06AM. Oh the humanity. (114)

PS: All are less than 140 chars. (32)

Improvements to twittergram.com/picstream

Fri, 12 Oct 2007 10:41:56 GMT

While waiting for airport security to open at DFW, I made a few small improvements to the picstream page.

1. If a picture is wider than 500 pixels, scale it.

2. Only the 100 most recent pics are shown.

3. They have numbers next to them.

http://www.twittergram.com/picstream

Jack-in to CNN while eating breakfast

Fri, 12 Oct 2007 11:00:50 GMT

Visit at the NY Times

Thu, 11 Oct 2007 18:24:25 GMT

Today I had a visit at the NY Times with a couple of tech guys, got a tour of the newsroom and now have a fairly good idea of what's available on the Times site these days and got some pointers of places to look for interesting possibilities.

One of the intriguing spots was this blog...

http://open.nytimes.com/

http://open.blogs.nytimes.com/rss2.xml

"A blog about open source technology at The New York Times, written by and primarily for developers."

This is something new.

"All the code that's fit to printf."

I had noticed that the Times has some pretty rich metadata. Do a View Source on any story. Wouldn't it be cool if that data were included in their RSS 2.0 feed? The category element is designed for exactly that kind of data. And I wondered if there is a master taxonomy somewhere. I'd love to see it.

Anyway, this is just the beginning of a conversation. Derek and Jacob have their hearts in our world, and even though the Times still feels as if it's "over there." Perhaps someday it may not feel so far away.

American Airlines ripoff

Fri, 12 Oct 2007 01:23:52 GMT

No two ways about it, American Airlines ripped me off.

The facts. My flight from Newark to Dallas was delayed by bad weather.

We were 1/2 hour late getting into Dallas. I only had 45 minutes to make the connection if we were on time, so I just had 15 minutes. I got to the gate for my SF flight with five minutes to spare. But the doors were closed, and they had given my seat away.

Now, in their computer, they knew I was coming. Why did they give my seat away? I guess they were betting that I wouldn't make it. Seems they could have told me that before I pushed it to get there with 5 minutes to spare.

Then the guy behind the counter told me I could standby on the next flight, in three hours. No guarantee I'd get a seat. I have a lot of miles on American. I choose to fly American because they treat me well, probably because of all the miles. But it's at times like this, when they treat me like garbage, that I see how it really works. Rather than take the chance of flying with an empty seat, they gave my seat to someone else.

I went down to the Admirals Club and called their 800 number and was treated well, but I knew I couldn't make a seat appear tonight. I'm staying in Dallas tonight, paying for it myself (they wouldn't pay), they got me on the first flight to SFO tomorrow morning. Not standing by.

But it doesn't change the fact that they gave my seat away while they knew I was trying to get to the gate, and I was only late because their flight was late. Miles or no miles, I think my good feelings for American are finally gone (it's not the first time I was told to go to hell by the airline, btw).

New York's Finest (and friends)

Thu, 11 Oct 2007 14:22:13 GMT

Click on the pic for detail.

Today's links

Wed, 10 Oct 2007 20:06:12 GMT

Pizza, salad and spaghetti with Alan Levy of BlogTalkRadio at John's Pizzeria, 260 W 44th.

Adam Engst: "My initial reaction to Twitter was that it was utterly inane, but I was basing my opinion on the public timeline that show posts from all Twitter users and on the Twittervision service that plots messages from Twitter users on a map of the world."

Newsroom at CUNY

Wed, 10 Oct 2007 20:47:42 GMT

I've become fascinated by newsrooms, and they have an interesting setup at CUNY where the Networked Journalism conference took place.

So I got out the video camera and took a brief tour.

How to create an IRC backchannel?

Wed, 10 Oct 2007 14:49:10 GMT

Micah Sifry sent an email asking if I could create an IRC channel for this conference. Good idea, except I don't know how to do it. I've always depended on Kevin Marks to create them for my conferences.

But it can't be that hard, right? Let's see if we can figure it out. If you have a clue, please post a comment here.

Okay, here's a clue from the mirc faq: "A channel is automatically created as soon as the first person joins it. If you join a channel and you find your name as the only one there, you just created that channel. Channels on IRC are dynamic in the sense that anyone can create a new channel, and a channel disappears when the last person leaves it."

Okay, so I logged onto a channel whose name I made up.

It's called netjny at irc.freenode.net.

Come join me and let's see if we can chat.

How we're twisted, day 2

Wed, 10 Oct 2007 12:49:14 GMT

I am absolutely delighted to see a piece by Scoble on top of Techmeme, one which explains how flow works in the tech blogosphere. There's also a piece on Valleywag. My piece yesterday may have started a ball rolling. Everyone who's been pointed to by TechCrunch who tracks referrers knows that the site may be high-ranked, but it doesn't generate so many click-throughs. It used to be very different, a link from TechCrunch would deliver 2000 readers in the first hour. Yesterday, I was linked to by TechCrunch, and there were 33 click-throughs, total.

Techmeme, on the other hand, is steadily increasing. I never said, never implied, never thought otherwise, despite what The Guardian says. I don't know why people think that paper is so authoritative, they make a lot of (big) mistakes. For me a top link on Techmeme is worth 1000 hits. That's a lot of hits for me, and they're highly qualified, exactly the kind of people I want to communicate with.

BTW, the Guardian, which links to me from the piece, has delivered 12 hits in a few hours.

I am impressed with Techmeme's rise. I think it's because a fair number of people look to it for the news of the day in tech, a role TechCrunch used to play. I think the sites compete, and I think Techmeme is winning. It's one of the reasons why I suggested to TechCrunch that they try turning off Techmeme, to force people to at least skim their site.

I don't like the Leaderboard, because it perpetuates a myth, but since we've been writing about it, perhaps expectation is getting closer to reality. Being highly rated on that list (which my site is, btw) isn't saying very much about the power and influence of the site. Same is true for Technorati's list. Maybe now it's time to start a discussion about what makes a site powerful, or just go back to blogging, telling our story, and stop trying to be so important.

PS: Today will probably be a big blogging day, because I'm going to a blogging conference about networked journalism. I expect to take many pictures which will be posted to Twitter.

All the pics that's fit to twit

Wed, 10 Oct 2007 01:23:47 GMT

Last night while way too jetlagged I decided to add a feature that accumulates all the pictures that TwitterGram flows from Flickr to Twitter. Apparently I got away with it. Here they are...

http://www.twittergram.com/picstream

Obviously some more work is needed, but it's already a fun way to get an idea of who's using TwitterGram and what their lives are like.

Thanks to the Flickr API and the Twitter API.

Bing!

Today is Jaiku Day in TwitterLand

Tue, 09 Oct 2007 17:54:57 GMT

Congratulations to the folks at Jaiku for their deal to be acquired by Google.

I happened, by chance, to be at lunch today with Fred Wilson of Union Square Ventures, the lead venture investor in Twitter, when we got the news (via Twitter, naturally). I called out to him at the counter, while he was ordering our food. "Fred, Google bought Jaiku."

The big win of course would be if Jaiku supported the Twitter API in a plug-compatible way. Then all our apps that work with Twitter would work with Google's new tool.

http://jaiku.com/api (Doesn't appear to be a clone of the Twitter API, but they do have an XML-RPC interface, which of course we like.)

Scoble called while we were at lunch, saying this isn't about Twitter, it's about Facebook. Probably so.

In any case, our world changed today, while we were in a cab on our way to lunch.

Here I am on Jaiku:

http://davewiner.jaiku.com/

How we're twisted by the top-100 lists

Tue, 09 Oct 2007 07:30:24 GMT

There are now two top 100 lists in the tech blogosphere, Technorati's and Techmeme's.

Mike Arrington's site, TechCrunch, appears high on both lists, it's #4 on Technorati and #1 on Techmeme.

Feedburner reports that 609K people subscribe to the TechCrunch feed.

When I got a prominent link from a TechCrunch piece on September 30, it generated 228 hits (according to Google Analytics). Now it could be there was some other reason less than 1 in 1000 of the readers clicked on the link, or it may be that these sources are over-reporting the influence of TechCrunch.

In other words, there may be some kind of bubble going on here.

It could be that the position it occupies on these lists is largely "game" because there are non-editorial incentives for blogs to point to TechCrunch, esp in the Techmeme cloud. Since Arrington's pieces tend to rise to the top of the page, pieces that link to them become more visible (they show up in the Discussion links), and the chances that another blogger is going to point to them go up. All it takes is one or two of those pointers to promote your piece to the top level, and that really boosts your visibility, and now that the Leaderboard is there, it could make that status semi-permanent, creating an even greater incentive to point. So people can and do, at least sometimes, point to TechCrunch not because they think one of their pieces is worthy of a comment for its own sake, rather because it gives them status and flow, and if they're running ads on their site, money.

The only way TechCrunch could be sure that this wasn't the reason people point is if they put a line in their robots.txt file that keeps Techmeme from crawling the site. Then we would know that when someone points it isn't for the Techmeme flow and status, because there would be none. Maybe they will do that. Honestly, I think it would be great for the tech blogosphere if they did. It would force more of those 609K people to use their subscriptions, rather than depend on Techmeme to find the important TechCrunch pieces. In other words it might actually have the effect of boosting the influence of TechCrunch. No matter, that's up to Mike and Heather, I'm just speculating.

And in case anyone accuses me of spamming Techmeme with this piece, I've added a line to my robots.txt file that tells Techmeme that it is not permitted to crawl my site. So you won't see this piece on Techmeme, nor any other stuff I may write today. And no one will point to this piece for the TM juice it provides, because it doesn't provide any. It might be a refreshing break!

PS: I turned off TechMeme, as an experiment, on January 24, and turned it back on on April 12.

PPS: At 2:43PM today's TechCrunch piece linking to this site generated 22 hits. I remember when a link from TechCrunch would deliver 2000 hits in the first hour.

PPPS: I turned TechMeme back on. No one accused me of spamming them. Happy.

I now hold APPL

Mon, 08 Oct 2007 18:57:22 GMT

Disclaimer...

I decided, after giving it much thought, to buy 300 shares of Apple. I think it's a good long-term investment. And I spend so much on Apple products, maybe this is a way to recoup some of that money, or maybe to spend even more. BTW, the share price is approx $165, so that's about $50K worth of stock.

Wish us luck!

Baseball can teach us about life

Mon, 08 Oct 2007 17:20:14 GMT

No kidding. I posted this in a comment on a fellow Mets fan's blog. He was responding to Jeff Pulver's poem about the 2007 season. I waxed philosophic. (Of course.)

I like Jeff's post, I said, but I'd add that it would have worked out better if the Mets had sucked more at the beginning of the season and been strong at the end than the way it worked out.

But I was lucky, I started loving the bums when they sucked 162 games a year, every year. Those were the Mets I fell in love with, those are the Mets I miss.

Choo Choo Coleman, Rod Kanehl, Bud Harrelson, Frank Thomas, Marv Throneberry, Ed Kranepool, Ed Charles, Bob Shaw (lived next door to us in Queens, mowed his lawn as a kid!), Gil Hodges, Duke Snyder, and on and on. Tommy Agee! Casey Stengel! These were the canonical Mets. They're smiling down from heaven or wherever they are (some are still with us, for sure) thinking how appropriate that the Mets disappointed this crop of fans, who actually expect them to win because that ain't the way it works!!

The Mets are about poetry, philosophy, drama and love.

Only winning when winning helps accentuate the above.

And baseball can teach us about life -- I'm serious about it. Because no matter how much fun life is, we all end up losing in the end. Sorry to be the bearer of bad news, but it is the truth. Enjoy it while you got it, cause it ain't gonna last.

You Gotta Believe is a better slogan during the season than after, when all the lessons of the previous season are available, and belief is pointless, because we now have knowledge. We know how it turned out, it's no longer a matter of believing.

To me, the perfect Met is Mookie. Because he's the bridge between the Lost Mets, the ones who'll never come back, and hope that at least some of the hapless wonderful loving spirit of that team is still with us.

I'm afraid, however, that next season may be the last season of hope, because it's the last year the Mets will play in Shea Stadium. They won't move far, to a stadium they're building in the parking lot. My first choice would have been they always play in the home stadium, like the Cubs or the Red Sox. I enjoyed ridiculing Seattle for destroying their own stadium, asking if a church ever destroys a sacred shrine, but now it's happening to the Mets. Maybe someone in charge will come to their senses and think of the good thing we have going in Shea Stadium, and instead aim the wrecking ball at the new stadium when the time comes. Or it could be that I've outgrown baseball then, and it's time to move on to whatever comes next.

iPhone web is faster in NY

Mon, 08 Oct 2007 16:09:54 GMT

An observable phenomenon.

Web access on AT&T's network is much faster in NY than it is in the Bay Area.

I was refreshing web pages as quickly as I do on wifi at home.

I find this interesting.

MacBook Pro reboots on cover close

Mon, 08 Oct 2007 16:10:46 GMT

Twice in the last two days I've had my MacBook Pro reboot when I close the cover and put it away. The trick I've discovered, and share for all to follow is to put the laptop down before closing the cover. That way the disk won't get jarred when the MacBook is going to sleep. Apparently if there's a problem in sleeping it just restarts. Not 100 percent sure this will always cure the problem but it did work twice for me. Interested in knowing if the theory is correct.

A juicy TwitterGram tech problem

Mon, 08 Oct 2007 15:45:56 GMT

I love an interesting technical problem, esp one that's about human behavior, and how to give people what they want even when it puts stress on a system.

Okay so here's the problem.

1. I recently opened the Flickr-to-Twitter feature of Twittergram.

2. A bunch of new users came on, some of whom don't understand the feature in all its fullness (not their problem, it's mine).

3. A user uploads 150 pictures in five minutes.

4. Dutifully, Twittergram sends notifications to all his followers, one at a time, creating 150 tweets, pissing them off, probably causing a few of them to send him nasty private tweets, and some probably unceremoniously unsub.

4a. In the future, when there are 200,000 Twittergram users, this will piss off the folks at Twitter when they realize they're spending a million dollars a year sending junk messages to people who don't want them.

5. Something must be done to regulate this.

Here's a screen shot that illustrates.

I have some thoughts, I'm interested in what the readers of this blog think. Post your comments here.

October weather?

Mon, 08 Oct 2007 02:20:41 GMT