Scripting News

A life lesson

Sun, 21 Oct 2007 16:24:03 GMT

It's not often you learn a life lesson without any pain, but that happened this week, starting with a blog post by Fred Wilson, that I've now applied twice, once successfully, and the second time, we'll find out.

Fred is a venture capitalist. An important part of his job is evaluating and deciding on opportunities to invest. For every company he invests in, he turns down many more. So how do you turn someone down without being personal? Well, you probably can't. So a lot of VCs side-step the problem and never turn anyone down, they just stop returning calls, or blame their partners.

Fred decided to tell people the truth -- not only that he's not going to invest, he'll also tell you why. I think this is a good idea (here's the lesson) because the person might be able to fix the problem, and Fred will get to invest, and the person's idea will get a chance to become a company.

I tried it yesterday in a negotiation at a furniture store, and it worked.

First, when buying furniture you're expected to negotiate, the sticker price is just a starting point. But I hate to negotiate, even though I know I have to. When I hesitated about whether I would make the purchase, the sales person said "Of course you get a ten percent discount." And if I said 15 percent? She said sure. I said to my companion, I bet she would have gone to 20. I looked at the sales person, she put a pained look on her face and said okay.

I didn't feel sorry for her, because they'll still make 40 percent of what I pay as gross profit, if the percentages are the same as when I sold software through retail in the 80s.

Then I decided to add a couple of lamps to the purchase. She said of course since those are accessories I would only get ten percent off. I grumbled to my companion, thought about it for a bit, and said "I'll pay, but I feel really bad about this." I thought some more and decided I wouldn't shop there again.

Then I thought of Fred and his policy of telling the truth, so I told the sales person that I'd not shop there again. She gave me 20 percent off. Telling the truth was the right thing to do because it gave her a chance to fix the problem and keep me as a customer. And I still feel a little slimed, knowing what I know about retail and margins, and I may not shop there again anyway. But that's another lesson.

Guy Kawasaki: The Top Ten Lies of Venture Capitalists.

College Ave furniture store

Sat, 20 Oct 2007 23:58:35 GMT

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Problems with expand/collapse

Sat, 20 Oct 2007 19:48:26 GMT

Last night I changed the way Scripting News is rendered in HTML, and while it works in Firefox on the Mac (the browser that I use) it is broken in a bunch of others. This afternoon I'm going to try to get it working everywhere.

The advice from readers, some of it quite confusing, starts here.

I've got MSIE 6 running in Parallels, so as I go I'm testing there and in Firefox/Mac.

Here are the changes I'm making, in order...

1. Apparently the <a name="xxx"> element is causing a problem, the purpose of it is to enable permalinks to work within the archive pages, Colin suggests making this the name of the <div>, so that's what I did. (This got today's elements expanding and collapsing in IE, but not older days. Very weird.)

2. In the stylesheet, added width:400px; to both .show and .hide and padding-left:15px; to .show. (That successfully widened the body of each post in MSIE.)

3. I eliminated the table I was using to indent the body text. (Now the older days expand and collapse. Hurrah!)

4. Added another 5 pixels of padding for a little bit more indenting.

5. At this point it appears to work in both MSIE 6 and Firefox/Mac. I will now download Opera and try it there. (Downloaded and installed, but I can't get it to display any web pages including scripting.com. Very very strange. If you have Opera installed, could you try clicking on the pluses and minuses on scripting.com and let me know if it works. Apparently it does.)

6. Removed some old CSS and Javascript includes from the head section.

7. Added "min-width:400px;" to the .hide style, per Colin's advice.

Validating the validator

Sat, 20 Oct 2007 03:21:20 GMT

Todd Cochrane noticed that feedvalidator.org is reporting problems with feeds it used to pass. I checked it out and verified the problems he reported. As far as I can see there's nothing wrong with Todd's feed, imho the validator should not be warning about the problems it's warning about. Please, would the maintainers of the validator check this out and make whatever corrections are necessary. Thanks!!

Thanks to Colin Faulkingham

Sat, 20 Oct 2007 02:57:47 GMT

I added his expand/collapse code to the HTML rendering of Scripting News, per my recent request.

It seems to work nicely.

Does it work in Opera? Please let me know.

LobbyCon 2.0 predicts the Newsroom of the Future

Fri, 19 Oct 2007 17:16:13 GMT

The lobby of the Palace Hotel was a hub of activity after lunch yesterday. The picture to the right hardly does it justice. A constant stream of friends, a wide variety of ages and backgrounds, flowed through.

It was unlike anything I had seen before, likely because this conference was held in downtown SF, and not San Diego or Phoenix, and a facet of what we'll have when the Newsroom of the Future is up and running. Every city will have one, but San Francisco will probably be first.

Here's a video I took last week at CUNY that gives another perspective. Lots of tables, video screens, a stage, radio and TV equipment. What you can't see is that the room was saturated with wifi, and while it didn't have a huge presence on the Internet, it could have.

Today's new toy

Fri, 19 Oct 2007 14:47:33 GMT

Today's new (developer's) toy is an OPML 2.0 rendering of the NY Times keywords list. Have fun!

A mighty torrent of news!

Fri, 19 Oct 2007 13:23:53 GMT

Doc: "A year from now every newspaper will have a newsriver."

I think so too because: 1. The idea is so compelling and 2. It's so easy to implement.

Thanks so much to Doc Searls for writing a great evangelical piece about the power of rivers. The stream is turning into a current, and soon really will be a river.

It¹s so weird to see rivers show up in Facebook, and Twitter is just a big river of all the people you¹re following.

The idea is actually a descendent of the teletype terminals that used to be in the movies (and for all I know in actual newsrooms). The news was printed on scrolls of paper, and when a new story came in it would push the older stories onto the floor. You could catch up on the news by scrolling back through the news. Cary Grant, Rosalind Russell, Katherine Hepburn did it. We¹ll all be doing it soon enough. And it really helps to get other people singing the song, esp from within the hallowed halls of Harvard.

The more attention we get focused on it, the more other developers will tune in.

And what may not be so clear from the narrative is that this project got its start from a meeting I had with some technical people at the Times last week in NY. Like most organizations, it's not of one mind, there are people who are scared of what comes next but there are others who know that the Times has to change. By opening up their internal data to me, all kinds of interesting stuff can happen. We've been here before. The Times are the unsung heroes of RSS, without them it never would have solidified, with the publishing industry falling in behind the Times. It was this consensus that created critical mass for RSS 2.0 in 2002 and 2003.

I really hope some of this stuff feeds back into the Times support of RSS. And as you have seen, there are now lots of new opportunities in user interface for news. This is what I do, when I'm in my "flow" -- we're there now again, with a new toy to build and then play with, every day.

Betsy Devine: "Dave Winer has been improving the New York Times for as long as I¹ve known him."

Phil Windley: "With more sources, who are themselves continuously updating, the keyword river could be as dynamic as you¹d want it to be."

The Boston Red Sox

Fri, 19 Oct 2007 13:56:14 GMT

If I were an American League fan there's little doubt that I would be a Red Sox fan. They have it all. Fenway Park. The Green Monster. The Curse of the Bambino. And an ancient legacy of sucking and when it looks like they're not sucking so bad, blowing it in the worst way possible at the last possible moment. The drama of the Red Sox, the agony of their fans. The only more hapless team in baseball is my beloved New York Mets. (And possibly the Chicago Cubs.)

Before last night's game they were down 3-1 in the ALCS, but they won, and now they're down 3-2. These are long odds, but with the Red Sox, you never know. (They were down 3-0 in 2004 and came back, amazingly, to beat the Yankees, a sweet wonderful humiliating defeat.)

For some reason, last night I thought of Aaron Copland's Appalachian Spring as an appropriate anthem for this moment in Red Sox time. The pioneers have their ups and downs, theres's still hope, but they've suffered greatly. I think of Dowbrigade, hunkered down, feeling sure his team will exceed his worst expectation of disaster.

With the Red Sox, as with Jerry Garcia and Scripting News, it's even worse than it appears!

A new view of NY Times news

Thu, 18 Oct 2007 14:01:06 GMT

After spending a day with the old keyword page, and getting bored with it, I came up with a new way to look at news, something I've not tried before, that might be fun and/or useful

http://nytimesriver.com/keywords.html

Since it's likely to change again soon, here's a screen shot.

How it works. Every hour, as usual, it does the nytimesriver scan. Every story is linked to in the database undern all the keywords it references. Then the report, in HTML, is prepared, with the keywords in the left column, and links to all the stories in the right colum. The list is sorted by number of references, the keywords with the most references appear at the top of the list.

So today, baseball is the top item, with 15 references. The teams, the Cleveland Indians and Colorado Rockies, rank high. For some reason (heh) the Boston Red Sox don't appear, even though they're still in it, and the Yankees, even though they've been eliminated (yay!) are near the top at position 10.

It's another leaderboard! (Oh shit.)

The stories age, and are removed after 24 hours. After all this is news, not olds.

If you have comments, post them under the screen shot, linked above.

PS: Note that since the list just started up today, the initial stories, even though some are already 24 hours old, will remain in the queue until tomorrow morning at this time. So the list will be artificially fat today, it'll thin down tomorrow.

North Berkeley BART station

Thu, 18 Oct 2007 23:16:34 GMT

Robert Scoble

Thu, 18 Oct 2007 20:37:55 GMT

Ted Leonsis

Thu, 18 Oct 2007 18:51:16 GMT

Help, I need really solid expand-collapse code

Thu, 18 Oct 2007 13:25:40 GMT

I really need a rock-solid expand-collapse display that I can integrate with Scripting News.

If you're reading this in RSS, flip over to the home page and have a look. See how the pluses and minuses work? There are a bunch of problems:

1. Doesn't work in Opera. Deal-stopper. Opera users are cool folk.

2. I don't like the indentation. I want the text flush-left.

3. Takes too long to display. I want it to be instantaneous.

4. Must be multi-level. I haven't tested the code I'm using with more than two levels.

I know it can be much better, because I see it done better in lots of places.

Looking for help from people who know their Javascript. Me, I'm into other things (obviously).

Mock up a Scripting News home page with your code, and post a pointer, and we'll test it out. When it's done, everyone will be able to use it.

BTW, I know there are people from the Radio community that have stuff in this area, I just don't know how well supported the stuff is these days. It's been a while.

Colin Faulkingham has a mockup that works in Opera, etc.

More NY Times digging

Thu, 18 Oct 2007 13:07:25 GMT

Before heading over to the Web 2.0 conference at the Palace Hotel in SF this morning, I couldn't resist doing some more digging into alternate user interfaces for news reading based on the NY Times keywords.

One thing I learned the hard way is that when you access the Times site from a script (not through a browser) if you try to read an article that's too old (not sure what the time limit is) it tries to redirect you to a login page (which is pretty pointless considering that there's no human being around to log in). I hit this problem yesterday, and then hit it again this morning, but couldn't remember what the problem was. So by writing it up this time I hope to remember.

No doubt some debunked hack journalist posing as a tech industry mogul will slander me for this, but the ~~asshat~~ asshole has no idea how blogging works, and who the fuck cares what he thinks anyway.

"cheesecake"

NY Times topics in OPML, the mother lode?

Thu, 18 Oct 2007 00:59:03 GMT

Amyloo was digging around the NY Times code weblog and found this OPML file, weighing in at a monstrous 3.3MB that contains some mysterious but rich data about the NY Times and a guide to using the Times to cover special topics that I don't think anyone outside the Times knew existed, but there it is, in a public folder, so lets have a look.

1. There are 10522 top-level headlines. There's no structure to the OPML, it's absolutely flat.

Here's an HTML rendering of the list: timestopics.html.

2. It's a subscription list. Each item has four attributes, type, title, htmlUrl and xmlUrl.

3. The htmlUrl for each element points to a page of stories for the topic. For example, here's a page of stories about table tennis. On that page is a link to an RSS 2.0 feed containing the same information.

4. The xmlUrl links for at least some of the elements are broken, the error appears to be very simple, if you replace the ampersand with a question mark, it works.

If you look around at the topics you'll see it's an incredibly rich set of data. Here are just some of the topics that begin with the letter T: Tableware, Taste, Tattoos, Tax Credits, Tax Evasion, Taxation, Taxicabs and Taxicab Drivers, Tea, Teachers and School Employees, TED Conference News, Teflon, Telephones and Telecommunications, Television, Television Sets, Table Tennis, Terra Cotta, Terrorism, Tests and Testing, Textbooks, Thanksgiving Day.

NY Times metadata

Wed, 17 Oct 2007 19:54:06 GMT

If you do a View Source on a NY Times story, you'll see that there's lots of metadata in the HTML, including keywords for most of the of the stories.

Behind the keywords is a taxonomy that I haven't seen, but would like to. I asked them to make this public, both at my meeting there last Thursday and in a phone talk this morning. I think there could be a lot of value in the Times taxonomy, it might even set a standard.

In the meantime, I wrote a script last night that tracks the keywords in NY Times stories as they flow through the nytimesriver application. Here's a report that's updated once per hour.

http://nytimesriver.com/keywords.html

Obviously it would be interesting to be able to click on the keywords to see what articles reference each of the keywords. And it would also be nice to have a cumulative list and a daily list. Right now all we have is the cumulative version.

But it's still pretty interesting, bordering on fascinating to think of the possibilities if they provide the framework behind these keywords.

When the pros try to figure out how what they do will continue to make sense after the Internet achieves all its promise, this may be an example. The metadata is generated by librarians, and we don't as yet have our own librarians in the blogosphere (though some might disagree). And it's possible that after a release of the taxonomy that something like Wikipedia may happen, with the public taking over maintenence of the taxonomy. No one knows what will happen, but one thing seems clear, there can be value in a news organization beyond the reporting and editing it does.

Unsung flow-builders

Wed, 17 Oct 2007 14:27:56 GMT

Over the last week, I've been writing about the disconnect between flow and rank. Paradoxically, sites that are ranked high don't always deliver a lot of hits when they link to you.

On the flipside, there are some sites that are rarely on Top 100 lists, or talked about very much, that deliver substantial flow. Two of them stand out, one a veteran site, and the other a relative newcomer.

1. Daring Fireball is a thoughtful blog written by John Gruber that focuses on the Macintosh. Since I've returned to the Mac in 2005, and have been writing more about Mac issues, I've started getting links from this site, and when I do, they usually send between 1000 and 2000 readers my way. And they're generally interesting people with useful information and ideas. I follow Gruber on Twitter and have learned that he is a Phillies fan and therefore disappointed this year. His posts are interesting there too, and irreverent, which I like of course.

2. A Digg-like memetracker, news.ycombinator.com is in the same league as TechMeme, about 1000 hits for a highly ranked piece. I don't know much about the site, I'm not a regular reader, and I don't know much about the people who visit from this site.

iPhone SDK coming in Feb

Wed, 17 Oct 2007 16:32:21 GMT

Apple announced that there will be an SDK for the iPhone.

Hooray!

Funny sign at Web 2.0

Wed, 17 Oct 2007 21:56:12 GMT

Thanks to Bijan Sabet!