Scripting News

This says it all

Fri, 02 Nov 2007 03:55:44 GMT

Dare Obasanjo, who works at Microsoft, says that Google has transformed itself into "Microsoft of Old."

It seems true, with a bit of Sun and Java thrown in as well.

It's the hurt of the software industry, moving away from serving users, and getting spun in its own drama.

It's not much longer before something totally new sprouts, quietly, out of sight, and re-energizes the people who care about the purpose of technology, which is to enable and empower, not limit and cripple.

We lifted Google on our shoulders as our vision of what was good about the web. They're so far from that ideal these days.

MySpace and Google, where's the beef??

Thu, 01 Nov 2007 21:50:15 GMT

I had a lunch in SF, so I missed the rush of news today.

Scoble called while I was driving east on the Bay Bridge. Apparently he was the only blogger at the press conference. He channeled inquiries from people on Twitter to the participants in the conference, while he captured video live on Kyte. I know a lot of "real" journalists and academics who study journalism don't use Twitter, they should, it's an amazing tool for exchanging fast-breaking information, in other words, news.

Anyway...

Mike Arrington posits: "Google may have just come out of nowhere and checkmated Facebook in the social networking power struggle."

Hmmm.

Imho, Google has a long way to go to build the base of users and developers connected using the new protocol that is the subject of all this chest-thumping. Do they exist in any tangible form? How much of a moving target are they? It's like proclaiming the new owners of A-Rod's contract as the winners of the 2008 World Series. Only in tech, a persistently immature industry, could such an idea be aired seriously (assuming Mike is actually serious).

I hope that the Facebook people, many of whom have never been in the middle of a tech PR war, don't overreact. Me, I've been around this block so many times and it's boring. Let's see some software then I'll let you know if this means anything. But Google is keeping people like me far away, which suggests that there may actually be no "there" there.

Lack of updates disclaimed, explained

Thu, 01 Nov 2007 18:28:56 GMT

I've been head-down on a test version of some new software, really serious about it, and if I do say so myself (Murphy please forgive me) I love the way it works.

Meanwhile...

Jay Rosen is onto something. Beat reporting and social networks of people who know the beat and want better reporting. Please help him if you can.

Want to see a great movie? You're in luck. One is playing at a theater near you. Went to see Michael Clayton yesterday and was thrilled. George Clooney is becoming a really great actor, getting parts that refine his skills and make me look forward to see what's coming next. Pay attention as the plot unfolds, at first it's confusing but it intrigues. Eventually it all comes together, maybe just a bit too neatly.

Trying to figure out exactly who Clooney is like. The Times reviewer said he's like Warren Beatty, another actor who really delivers, but I was thinking bigger -- perhaps Clark Gable or Cary Grant. He has that kind of presence. Michael Clayton might be his North by Northwest.

Using Wordpress as an OPML Manager

Wed, 31 Oct 2007 17:36:09 GMT

Panayotis Vryonis sent an email saying I might be interested in what he's doing. He was right about that!

He's got Wordpress serving OPML to Nokia's podcatcher, apparently it supports dynamic OPML (what we call reading lists), a very powerful and useful feature.

Well, well, well..

Look at how well all these things work together!

Wordpress, Nokia, OPML, podcasting, and a developer out there where ever he is.

We didn't have a big press conference, or leak something to the NY Times or TechCrunch There was no grand announcement of an alliance. We didn't threaten anyone, or undermine anyone, or any of that. We all just said Hey this might be useful why don't you give it a try.

Gotta love it.

PS: We need a logo for loving OPML like the ones we have for RSS. Anyone want to give it a go?

A bit about Open Social

Wed, 31 Oct 2007 14:11:38 GMT

Standards devised by one tech company whose main purpose is to undermine another tech company, usually don't work.

In this case it's Google trying to undermine Facebook.

And I don't think it's going to work.

What would be exciting and uplifting, a real game-changer -- Internet companies giving users full control of their data.

When Google makes their announcement on Thursday, the question they should be asked by everyone is -- How much of my data are you letting me control today? That's pretty much all that matters to anyone, imho.

1996: "How much happier we would be if instead of crippling each other with fear, we competed to empower each others' creativity."

Think about all the frees and opens and what they reveal

Wed, 31 Oct 2007 15:59:03 GMT

Okay now we have Open Social to add to a long list of Opens and Frees.

Open Source -- let's see your source code.

Open Doc -- let's get rid of Office.

Open ID -- let's see your users.

Free Beer -- Web 2.0.

Free Software -- no code-level lock-in.

These aren't good or bad, they just serve someone's interest without thinking about the users' interest (at best) or counter to the users' interest (at worst).

Which suggests maybe it's time to get to the point.

Free Users.

Let my people go!

A milestone for nytimesriver.com

Wed, 31 Oct 2007 00:38:26 GMT

nytimesriver is on the first page of results when you search for "NY Times" on Google.

http://google.com/search?q=ny+times

I find that amazing. Maybe because we don't sell links (or take ads).

Marc Canter isn't disclosed

Tue, 30 Oct 2007 23:14:47 GMT

Google hasn't sworn him to secrecy so he can speculate on what Maka Maka is.

Okay the new Wii works better, but...

Tue, 30 Oct 2007 20:44:04 GMT

I got past the initial screen this time...

http://mp3.twittergram.com/davewiner/gram02286.mp3

Any help on how to get a stuck disk unstuck in a Wii would be much appreciated.

Look: You can open it and push the disk out manually!

First look at Pownce's API

Tue, 30 Oct 2007 13:26:43 GMT

A twit last night from Scoble points to a page of docs on a new API for Pownce. Of course I want to check it out, since Pownce is roughly comparable to Twitter, which I use every day, and there is some functionality I'd like to see in the Twitter API. If that functionality is present in Pownce's API, it seems more likely that it will show up eventually in Twitter's.

First, the API is maybe 1/3 complete. If you scroll to the end of the page you'll see a list of areas that haven't yet been covered. The ability to post and read friends-only notes are very important, you can't implement a client without those interfaces.

Examples of things you can do with the API, right now. Click on the link to see the XML that Pownce returns.

1. Get the most recent 10 public notes.

2. Get the most recent 10 public notes from Veronica Belmont.

3. Get my public profile.

4. Get my "first" 100 friends and fans.

Steve Rubel lets one rip!

Tue, 30 Oct 2007 05:35:41 GMT

He had some Wheaties this morning for sure.

My advice...

1. Remember to have fun.

2. We're all bozos on this bus.

3. We're all barking farting chihuahuas.

4. I make shitty software and so do you.

5. It's even worse than it appears.

6. You never learn anything hanging with the same people.

7. Thank heaven for little girls. (A repeat of #6.)

8. It's later than you think.

9. It's not like anyone gets out of this alive.

It's all about context

Mon, 29 Oct 2007 14:03:11 GMT

A comment by Lane Becker on Scott Rosenberg's blog...

"I've been using Winer's nytimesriver on my iPhone screen for weeks now, and it¹s far and away the best interface when you're reading on a mobile device."

"Which is the point: it's all about context. It's not either/or, and it's not just different readers wanting different things. sometimes it's the same reader wanting different things at different times, in different situations."

Exactly right. I use nytimesriver on my iPhone or Blackberry, but I don't use it on my desktop, where I prefer an interface with more controls. The small screen of a mobile device demands something simpler.

Slowly the word is getting out. I'd like to do it faster. It would be great if the TImes itself looked at this. If they can write about installation art in their lobby, why not tell their readers about a new way of reading Times news on a mobile device?

The Times was a leader in RSS too, but never reported on it. Perhaps there's a blind spot.

And it's also all about point of view

Mon, 29 Oct 2007 16:31:02 GMT

Good software designers get out of their bodies and become users of software. Because ultimately you don't design software to express yourself, you design it to be useful.

The point of news, as with software, is to be useful to the person using it.

Sorry, it's not about employing editors. Scott Rosenberg, a writer and editor of news can be forgiven for seeing it from his own point of view, but we users of news don't share that point of view. To me, as a software designer, it's no surprise that there are lots of ways to view news. That there used to be one main way to do it is also not a surprise, there were technical limits, that aren't there anymore.

The skill of laying out a paper presentation of the day's news on a big sheet of paper is now an obsolete craft. The only reason we needed people to do that in the past was that was the only way to get written news to massive numbers of users of written news. Now that computer monitors are cheap, and we have little computers that can get us news that fits in our pocket, we can try out lots of ways of arranging it, and maybe we'll even discover something new.

Newly rescued Morning Coffee Notes

Mon, 29 Oct 2007 17:56:01 GMT

http://mp3.morningcoffeenotes.com/rescued/cnOct5.mp3

http://mp3.morningcoffeenotes.com/rescued/cnOct6.mp3

http://mp3.morningcoffeenotes.com/rescued/cnOct7.mp3

http://mp3.morningcoffeenotes.com/rescued/cnSept11.mp3

http://mp3.morningcoffeenotes.com/rescued/cnSept27a.mp3

Geek dad and Junior the geek

Mon, 29 Oct 2007 03:48:23 GMT

At Fry's this afternoon, where I bought two 500GB Firewire drives for $169 each.

Which it turns out I needed because after I got home all three external drives attached to my desktop were reported as damaged beyond repair by the new Mac OS. Coincidence? Lucky that I had exactly the hardware I needed to dig out of the mess? Who knows!

Funny thing is it's taking over 10 hours to do the copying. It won't finish until tomorrow morning, Murphy-willing. When the disks got big, all of a sudden restoring from backups takes a lonnnng time.

Terminal commands to nuke the 3D dock in Leopard

Sun, 28 Oct 2007 20:24:20 GMT

And recapture some valuable screen real estate and a portion of your sanity.

defaults write com.apple.Dock no-glass -boolean YES
killall Dock

Screen shot.

Thanks to Mark Johnson for the tip.

Okay so it's not user friendly

Sun, 28 Oct 2007 18:27:47 GMT

Thanks Yahoo!

Sat, 27 Oct 2007 20:38:42 GMT

The numbers are up at nytimesriver.com.

Here's why. It's the top link on Yahoo under newspapers.

Two hops off the directory home page.

Very nice!!

Yahoo!

PS: What's next? Link love from the NYT itself?

Dear lord of Leopard...

Sun, 28 Oct 2007 01:19:12 GMT

I want my white menubar back.

I think the idea of the translucent menubar is wrong.

Here's a screen shot.

See how dark it is in the upper-right corner. You look in that corner all the time, it's where the clock is, it's where you see how much battery you have left, how good your wifi signal is, etc. We don't have much room for a dashboard on these machines, but that's where it is. If it changes appearance just because I changed the desktop image, that's new and unexpected behavior, and it can make it hard to read for people with old eyes. And for what purpose? It makes the desktop background choice something that impacts a crucial part of the user interface.

I want an option to have a white menu bar.

1996: "I came here to get my work done."

My Friendfeed coordinates

Sun, 28 Oct 2007 04:16:01 GMT

It's kind of like Facebook's feed for people who don't do Facebook.

http://friendfeed.com/davew

It seems pretty cool.