Scripting News

New search tool

Wed, 24 Oct 2007 22:27:24 GMT

I replaced the Google-based search tool in the right margin with one from Lijit.

Screen shot.

I found the Google one took up too much space, and I couldn't easily configure it, I never used it, and I grimaced every time I saw it (it felt like an eyesore).

Let's see if this one works better, it sure looks better.

The regal Silicon Valley

Wed, 24 Oct 2007 22:28:55 GMT

Watching various people (on Twitter) get on an airplane to go to Hawaii to an insider invite-only Silicon Valley conference, and thinking about the various business ideas the valley is floating these days, advertising, and how valuations work, and how unaccustomed the insiders are at having their ideas challenged, I came to a few rapid-fire conclusions last night on Twitter. (One good reason to follow me on Twitter is I tend to blurt out things there that would get me in trouble here on my blog.)

Twit #1: "I have a theory that 'user generated content' is a last-gasp of the regal outlook of silicon valley, where we're all chumps or slaves." (Before UGC we were just supposed to be eyeballs, consuming their shovelware, buying stuff we see in ads. They had to adjust their thinking when it became apparent that we were also interested in creating, though we're positioned as generators not creators.)

Twit #2: "The role of the tech industry is to create tools and players. To enable creativity, not harness and control it." (I think this is when it all works best.)

Twit #3: "If you're scared to hear what people really think you're not prepared for the world you live in." (I finally figured this one out. The reason so many people in SV say I can't be trusted (it's observable) is because I'm equally likely to say your product sucks as I am to say it's great. This is a culture raised on Gee Whiz editorial coverage, the adulation of MSM. When blogs came along they had to hear that not everyone thinks they're so wonderful all the time. Who would you hate most but the guy who pushed the tools that made everyone with an opinion so audible. And would you expect such a person to keep his opinion to himself? Heh.)

Even though I think this, I know I'm actually full of shit...

Guy Kawasaki asked me once why so many people say I'm not a nice person, when in fact I am. If I saw you on the street I'd smile and say hello. I stop when someone is in the crosswalk. Nothing makes me happier than making a tool that people enjoy. I try to listen to everyone, and I don't care how much money you have. I never answered Guy's question, but here it is. If you asked me why some individual person thinks something, I'd say you'd have to ask them. That's basic respect. Let people speak for themselves. If you ask me why 100 people think something, I'm even more clueless.

BTW, Guy and I weren't friends for a long time after being good friends for a long time. I much prefer having him as a friend, I missed his company while we weren't talking. He doesn't suffer fools, and he's the first person to question his own thinking if someone says he's wrong. I've seen him do it, and I was totally impressed. People like that figure stuff out. People who don't want to learn about bugs in their thinking go through life with a lot of bugs. Today, and beyond, everyone has great tools for saying what they think. If you can't stand to hear it, you're not going to like the future very much, sorry to say.

Your living room on the Internet?

Wed, 24 Oct 2007 17:38:28 GMT

Click To Play

Doing a new build of the OPML Editor

Wed, 24 Oct 2007 16:19:31 GMT

The next stop on my tour of development projects is to ship some new software that runs inside the OPML Editor. The software is designed to run on a Mac Mini that's attached to a big screen HD-TV. So the way the OPML Editor boots up now is inappropriate for this application. It presents a dialog and opens a weblog editing window. Instead this app interfaces through a web browser, and runs in the background.

So I need to come up with a way to not run the startup code for the weblog editor. I'll be taking my notes here, so that later when I want to do the same thing for another project I'll know how to do it. And since the OPML Editor is open source, the notes can apply to other people's projects if they want to do something similar.

1. How do you create a plain text file using the software Apple ships with the Mac OS? The TextEdit app doesn't have that option, amazingly. I found one very ugly way to do it. Open a .txt file. Then the options on the Save dialog give you a way to save as plain text. The real answer: It's a preference.

2. The OPML Editor will have an opmlStartupCommands.txt file in the application folder. The first line will set user.prefs.flStartupDotOpml to false. dotOpmlThread.script watches for this, and if it's present and set false, it won't start up.

3. Add this to the to-do list. I need to get Bonjour working inside the OPML Editor, with the minimum of fuss.

I never metadata I didn't like

Wed, 24 Oct 2007 15:17:29 GMT

Jacob Harris leads this piece about the metadata of the NY Times with the corniest tech quote I've ever heard.

I heart corny quotes.

Jim Forbes evacuated in San Diego

Wed, 24 Oct 2007 14:04:35 GMT

A retired reporter, Jim Forbes, was evacuated from his mountain home near San Diego, and tells the story on his blog.

Did TechCrunch screw a source?

Wed, 24 Oct 2007 14:16:53 GMT

Nelson Minar says he likes TechCrunch, but they're not journalists so be careful what you say to a TC reporter at a party. He cites two examples where he feels they acted unethically.

In one example, the reporter seems to use off the record comments exactly as they are supposed to. Most non-disclosures require that you keep the information confidential, but only until someone else discloses the information to you. If you get it from another source, on the record or off the record, the NDA is no longer enforceable. In this case they got confirmation from three off the record sources.

The other is just an example of a dumb story, not a violation of journalistic ethics. To say that a big company told a lie is hardly news. If it were about something material and not the age of one of the founders, then it would be newsworthy. But it's not an example of an integrity breach. (You can make a mistake and still have integrity. It's only a problem if you knew it was wrong when you wrote it.)

Imho, too much is made of whether someone is a journalist or not. You read reports like this one from a high reputation news organization, written by a journalist, that contain no information but leave a sensational impression for people who don't know technology well enough to know that the reporter is talking nonsense. I'd rather read the opinion of a non-journalist who knows the subject and can defend his or her position, and clearly discloses their interest in the subject. At least I'd learn something, and no one would be misled into believing they were getting "news."

However I do applaud what Nelson wrote because he had the guts to openly criticize TechCrunch. People from outside Silicon Valley must wonder why hardly anyone does, given that they are at or near the top of most lists ranking tech news sources. Why should they be immune to examination? Answer -- they shouldn't.

I wish TechMeme had an item-level opt-out

Wed, 24 Oct 2007 14:41:15 GMT

Of course people would like to have an item-level opt-in, to guarantee a post would earn a top position on TechMeme, but obviously that's impractical, so why not give us the power to say please don't include this story in TechMeme, it's too meta.

When I say a piece is too meta, it's not news, it's news about news, what the Big Media guys call a process story. For example, I would prefer to not have this piece, the one you're reading right now, on TechMeme. It's now meta-meta, because I'm talking about the meta-ness of the piece. You can see this could go on forever, now I'm in meta-meta-meta mode. For a brief moment I went into quadruple meta mode. (Sometimes I get so deep into a joke I wonder if people are still with me.)

Seriously, some pieces just shouldn't be on TechMeme. And I know which ones those are. So instead of making me turn off the TM spider for my whole site, why not give me a way to say "Stop TechMeme spider, this item is off-limits." We could come up with a TechMeme namespace for RSS 2.0. I'd be happy to help.

Namaste!

TechMeme for the NY Times?

Tue, 23 Oct 2007 17:51:01 GMT

A few notes on the NY Times outline...

1. I switched it back to the frequency sort, having tried it as an alphabetized list for about 18 hours. Now I want to see what happens with it flipped around so the most frequent keyword bins appear first.

2. Not sure, but I think it will empty out later this afternoon, as yesterday's stories expire, and before tomorrow's stories ship.

3. It seems that at least some people have bookmarked the site and are refreshing it. If so, I'm glad -- because that's the way these pages are most useful, they tell you something about what changed. Remember this is "news" not olds.

4. The outline view is something like TechMeme for the Times news flow. Not exactly because the keywords are assigned by people. Unseen news mavens. Where do they reside? Are they on the upper floors or in the basement of the NY Times skyscraper on 8th Ave, or somewhere inbetween? Maybe they work out of their homes. My mind wants to visualize these people, but I have nothing to cling to. It's not an algorithm that's determining where things sort out, it's people. Otherwise known as editors? Or are they librarians?

5. Do you bookmark the outline or the river? I'm a river guy for sure. I wonder about other people.

6. Francine Hardway twitted at me: "Times River is awesome on my iPhone! Was reading it while waiting for eye surgery and it was very distracting." Amen. That's the big secret. I wish there were a way to get everyone to look at the river on their cell phone. Eyes would open.

7. Thinking about integrating the two views, cross-relating them. Not sure exactly what I'll try first. That's why I wanted to let it settle in for a bit before moving in a other directions.

8. Of course, I know that if this ever becomes a "real" product, the user is going to control the view he or she wants to be the default. But for right now I'm experimenting. I want to see what people think. Enough people were asking for an alpha view that I wanted to see what would happen when I gave it to them, and if anyone would scream. Screaming isn't a bad thing, it's data.

Wii, day one

Tue, 23 Oct 2007 19:13:29 GMT

My new toy arrived late yesterday, too late for this weary boy to want to set it up. This morning I put it on my to-do list. Item #3. Set up Wii. So that's what I did.

I have a receiver that's connected to the other new toy, a Samsung 52-inch HDTV, and the Wii connected up to the receiver, and the receiver was already connected through component video to the TV, and when I cycled through the inputs on the TV's remote, voila, there's the Wii. Smooth as can be!

And that's where we got stuck. I installed everything according to the instructions or so I thought. A screen comes up saying you should press the middle key on the remote which I did, and it chirped kindly, and then presented a screen asking me to confirm that I speak English and no matter what key I press, nothing happens. Nada. It just sits there. I'm ready to bowl, play tennis, design Mii, whatever cooool things you can do with a Wii, but that's where we are.

Okay. We'll get past this. I hope. :-)

Update: I called the 800-number for support, and they had me go through a trouble-shooting procedure, that was actually fairly interesting. I explain it in this picture, which indicates that the sensor bar appears to be okay.

Update #2: I tried standing on a chair, moved 10 feet back, 15 feet, even 20 feet. Moved the receiver to the bottom of the screen. No cursor shows up. Rebooted a dozen times, resynched three or four. Something is screwy here, but I'm no closer to knowing what it is. :-(

Here's a movie that demos the situation.

Click To Play

Stop

Wed, 24 Oct 2007 01:25:09 GMT

Good morning!

Tue, 23 Oct 2007 12:42:01 GMT

After an intense week with the NY Times metadata, I'm going to put it down for a bit, take care of some other stuff, and put together some downloads of other software I've developed over the last few months so they can move to the next stage. I also want to set up the new toy today and see what that's like. And then I got an email from Jason Etheridge, who is listening to all the Morning Coffee Note podcasts, and finds that quite a few of them are missing. More in a minute.

Missing MCNs

Tue, 23 Oct 2007 13:02:14 GMT

Jason Etheridge has been working his way through the archive of Morning Coffee Notes podcasts, and has found a bunch are missing. I'm going through the list, using archive.org, local backups, Google, and whatever else I can think of, to try to find the missing MP3s. These are the ones I haven't found yet. (I'll update the list as I work through it, so hit refresh periodically.)

http://static.podcatch.com/manila/gems/un/TS20041107.mp3

http://static.podcatch.com/manila/gems/un/cnNov1.mp3

http://static.podcatch.com/manila/gems/un/TS20041028.mp3

http://static.podcatch.com/manila/gems/un/cnOct16.mp3 *

http://leoville.tv/tlr/KFIAdamCurry.mp3

http://static.scripting.com/blogs/gems/dnc/cnOct7.mp3 *

http://static.scripting.com/blogs/gems/dnc/cnSept27a.mp3 *

* Denotes a file archive.org says they have but can't access because of technical difficulties.

Of course, if you have any clues about rescuing these files, or have a copy of them on your local system, please let me know.

Rescued MCNs

Tue, 23 Oct 2007 13:58:40 GMT

Here's a list of Morning Coffee Notes podcasts that we have been able to rescue, so far.

http://static.podcatch.com/manila/gems/un/niccoToothStory.mp3

http://static.podcatch.com/manila/gems/un/gg.mp3

http://static.podcatch.com/manila/gems/un/davewineraudiocomment.mp3

http://static.podcatch.com/manila/gems/un/cnOct18.mp3

http://static.podcatch.com/manila/gems/un/BillRiski200410201copy.mp3

http://static.podcatch.com/manila/gems/un/TS-2004-10-28.mp3

In-process MCNs

Tue, 23 Oct 2007 15:32:54 GMT

Lost podcasts that I've found, but haven't been able to upload yet.

http://www.komonews.com/radio/audio/herb_tip_111004.mp3

http://media.skybuilders.com/Lydon/Dean.Q&A.Aug.03.mp3

The next toy

Tue, 23 Oct 2007 03:03:37 GMT

Something new in News

Mon, 22 Oct 2007 16:23:24 GMT

It's not very often that you see something new in News.

News is not exactly new technology, but when personal computers came along, and then widespread networking, it created a whole new playing field for news, that has shaken things up for most of my life. Change comes in fits at starts. First there was the web, then RSS, and now I think we're on the cusp of another bit of change.

If you want to see what I think it looks like, check out the home page of nytimesriver.com. But that's not the end of the story. A flat completely chronologic view of news probably isn't enough. And earlier this month at a meeting in NY, two engineers at the NY Times set me off in a new direction, with a very simple bit of advice. They told me to look in the HTML source code of their stories. When I did I saw they had applied a taxonomy to their news flow, and this opened the door to what I would like to show you today -- an outline view of the news.

http://nytimesriver.com/outline/

I believe it's fairly self-explanatory.

The topics are arranged in order of frequency in today's news.

In a previous rendering, the stories were shown in a histogram, but this view I think is much better. You can still see how many pieces relate to the indicated topic, but by clicking on the plus next to each topic, you can actually see the headlines and descriptions, and if you want more you can click through to the full stories. (Initially, the outline was sorted by frequency, with the most frequently occurring keyword appearing first. I changed it, based on feedback, to be alphabetic.)

Now, there's still more to do, I showed this to a number of people during the weekend and got some excellent clues on ideas to pursue next, and I will do that. Further, in the process of exploring this, I've been shown the work of other developers who discovered the keywords on their own, and one in particular is very interesting. I'm hoping that these projects will come public so I can show them to you and tell you what I think they mean.

This is what I live for, professionally -- the sense of being somewhere with great unexplored potential, a virgin landscape of the intellect. I'm never happier than when I get to play in such a place.

Dan Gillmor: "Dave Winer has been exploring a superb news resource, exploring the depth and breadth of the New York TimesŒ data-stream."

Bijan Sabet: Dave's River of News.

Scott Rosenberg: Remixing news.

Om Malik: A new way to view news.

Please comment on the screen shot page.

It pays to keep an eye on Comcast

Mon, 22 Oct 2007 19:30:02 GMT

Over the weekend there were several reports that confirm that Comcast is interfering with their customers' use of BitTorrent. This raises several more questions and concerns.

1. There are infringing uses of BitTorrent, for sure, but why is Comcast taking the role of enforcer against the interest of their customers. Just a question, but not likely to get an answer, because Comcast officially denies they're doing anything, even though employees (apparently) are confirming, not for attribution, that they are.

2. What about non-infringing uses of BitTorrent? Can their algorithms tell if someone is using BitTorrent to share mamterial that they have the legal right to distribute? If not, how do they justify interfering with their customers' use of the Internet?

3. And perhaps most disturbing, what does this say for the future? Perhaps someday it will be deemed inappropriate for people to publish content to the Internet, if so, could Comcast take steps to block that activity? How different is this from interfering with BitTorrent?

It pays to have a clean garbage disposal

Mon, 22 Oct 2007 17:44:57 GMT

Another nugget I thought would be good to share.

I came home from my trip to NY and there was a pretty bad stink in the kitchen.

Smelled like garbage.

It didn't take long to zero in on the source -- the garbage disposal.

I tried pouring all kinds of cleaning stuff down the drain, to no avail, the smell didn't go away.

Then I did a search on the Internet, found a variety of suggestions, and felt pretty sure that I'd have to call a plumber because they all seemed to assume skills and/or tools I didn't have. Instead I tried a very simple idea and amazingly it worked.

1. Put a drain stopper in the disposal so no water can flow out through the bottom

2. Fill the sink with hot water mixed with soap and chlorine bleach. The hotter the water the better.

3. With the water running put one hand on the stopper and the other on the switch, as you pull out the stopper, turn on the switch. (Be sure to do it in that order, to keep your hand from getting chopped up!)

4. Let all the water run out of the sink and leave the water running as long as there's suds.

5. Repeat two or three times. Wait a day or two. With any luck the smell will be gone.

The reason this works is that junk gets stuck on the walls of the drain, and since it's garbage, it rots and stinks. By immersing it in soapy water, the junk gets dislodged and goes down the drain and out of your life.

It pays to mull things over

Mon, 22 Oct 2007 15:52:03 GMT

I just figured something out, and it's the kind of thing that's best said publicly, even though it's likely to: 1. Be misunderstood and 2. Upset some people.

But since it's all about this blog it really is best to air it here.

First what triggered the epiphany.

I was over at Loic Le Meur's house in San Francisco yesterday having lunch with his family and friends. We were all drinking wine (very good wine of course), enjoying the view, and talking about this and that, when the subject turned to Mike Arrington. Loic said that Mike told him that we used to be best friends. I couldn't figure out what that meant, because our friendship was the business kind of friendship not the personal kind. What does it mean to be best friends in that way? And how does that relate to having a blog? It never occurred to me that friendship meant that (here's the epiphany) that I would only say positive things about Mike's business. It didn't occur to me until I heard Loic's side of a blog-fight that I saw happen from a distance, with Sam Sethi, Mike and Loic.

Complicated? You bet. Too complicated. An unspoken deal that I never agreed to.

When Mike was starting TechCrunch, I pointed to his blog all the time, with glowing praise, because I was truly impressed with what he was doing and because I wanted to encourage other people to do it too. I wanted people to write about technology products based on how they used them, not based on alliances, investment, posturing of execs, the crappy stuff that means almost nothing to users, and imho is just a substitute for actually understanding the technology. Mike was approaching products the way I felt they should be approached. Hence the praise.

Fact is, my opinion of Mike, as a person, hasn't changed much in the last couple of years. He has a personal charm and charisma that not everyone finds appealing, but I do. I like hanging out with the guy.

However, that doesn't mean that if my opinion of TechCrunch, his business, isn't uniformly positive (and of course these days it is actually fairly negative) that I will withhold it. But it's also part of Mike's way of dealing with people that he sees criticism as betrayal. I just don't see it that way. I've had the shit kicked out of me so many times, and as a programmer I understand that criticism is necessary to perfect a user interface, even to get the damned thing working, that even when it hurts, I have to push the hurt aside and listen to what people are saying, and try to respond to it. Professionalism demands it.

Anyway, one of the reasons I want to write this now is that I've written about Loic's business here a couple of times in very positive terms. I don't want anyone, esp Loic, to assume that this will always be so. If they get in the way of other creative people, or otherwise act as a poor example of entrepreneurship in technology, of course I will write about it, and will say what I think. I would expect Loic and people at his company to take what I write to heart, and consider it. My feelings won't be hurt if they don't do what I say. (People almost never do.)

Same as when I said Facebook sucks. Or when I criticize Techmeme. This isn't in any way meant to reflect on the quality of the people at Facebook (some of whom I know to be outstanding people of high principle) or Gabe Rivera who I know to be a very smart and competent and honorable person. It's possible to critcize someone's work and still admire the person. My epiphany is that a lot of people who thought were my friend, didn't understand this very basic thing about me.

8/17/07: Friendship and blogging.