Scripting News

Library of Congress Flickr feed

Thu, 17 Jan 2008 01:50:10 GMT

Wow, this is really really coooooool.

The Library of Congress is partnering with Flickr, releasing pictures that it believes are not copyrighted, through Flickr.

One of the fantastic side-effects of that is that there's an RSS 2.0 feed of those pictures that connects perfectly to FlickrFan.

If you click on this link on the machine that FlickrFan is running on, you'll automatically subcribe to the Library of Congress feed on Flickr.

This is one of those moments when the standards are working, really well.

PS: If for some reason it doesn't work, try clicking on this link to get the latest update (v0.42), then click on the link above again.

Video for tomorrow?

Thu, 17 Jan 2008 00:49:53 GMT

I know it's the last minute, but it's worth a try...

A number of people have asked if there will be live or recorded video for tomorrow's FlickrFan demo at Yahoo in SF.

The answer -- yes, if we can find a way to do it.

If you have a camera and laptop and are willing to webcast it tomorrow, please post a note here in the comments, or just show up tomorrow a few minutes early.

A decentralized Twitter?

Wed, 16 Jan 2008 18:43:27 GMT

Andrew Baron is a smart guy, and he's not a techy, so when he explains technical issues he does it in a way non-technical people can understand.

Dembot: "If you hosted your own Twitter, just like you host your own website, you could put your twitter anywhere."

Twitter is doing us a service, with its lack of stability, in illustrating the dangers of centralized systems. We do need to figure out how to build a Twitter-like system with all the advantages of centralization and none of the disadvantages.

And like Andrew, intuitively, it seems to me we could do it with RSS. Of course RSS is not very nice to edit by hand, so a little bit of software would be needed to handle the editing. We would also need a place to store our RSS (easy and cheap), and a discovery mechanism, but none of this is impossible or even very hard, considering that Twitter already exists. If it didn't, discovery would be a mess. Because it does, discovery would just be inconvenient, and would require foresight -- the kind of foresight that tells you to keep a bunch of bottled water in the garage so you won't die when there's a big earthquake. You do have bottled water in the garage?

The problem is, of course, when Twitter goes down, it's too late to use Twitter to bootstrap the decentralized Twitter-like system. Heh. Just like after the earthquake it's too late to go to Safeway and buy a crate of Aquafina.

Larry Dignan: "Twitter is a classic case of a neat little tool that wasn't built to scale but now has to because it has become a big deal."

Today's links

Wed, 16 Jan 2008 16:57:43 GMT

Tomorrow in SF: First public demo of FlickrFan.

Congrats to Scoble on his new job at Fast Company.

Gcast: "Record your podcast via a toll-free call from any phone."

New app, day 2

Tue, 15 Jan 2008 20:03:32 GMT

This landing page is part of the new app that I'm working on, which is a tool for subscribing to and downloading podcasts, otherwise known as a podcatcher.

When you set a pref in this app, links to new podcasts are posted to a Twitter account as they arrive, so that people you know can know what you're listening to, and may choose to listen themselves. There's a place to comment, of course.

The cool thing about it, I think, is that if you share a podcast and I do, they both point to the same landing page, so our communities intermix based on who liked that podcast. Who knows where this goes? But it's interesting, imho.

PS: Just as we had a cooool partner for the launch of the photocatching app, we have a surprise for the podcatching app too, and it's probably not what you think it is.

PPS: We're still hoping and waiting for Payloads for Twitter.

Happy birthday, Martin Luther King

Tue, 15 Jan 2008 20:44:30 GMT

Mac fatigue

Tue, 15 Jan 2008 21:14:54 GMT

Initially I wrote in my keynotepost that I'd buy one of the new MacBooks for sure, then a minute later I selected the sentence, hit backspace and save. A commenter asked why.

Mac fatigue. 2007 was a fun year, I spent a lot of money on Mac stuff, and then found at the end of the year that they're a shit company that treated me like shit. Left a really ugly feeling, really sore about that.

So when I thought of all the extra expenses, a second battery (later: ooops, no can do), AppleCare, and then the likelihood that it was going to break, and then I'd be stuck waiting for a repair wondering where my data was going, I thought maybe I won't be so quick this time.

Also the fact that the stock market looks like it's about to crash probably contributed to the feeling. :-(

Steve Jobs keynote

Tue, 15 Jan 2008 17:21:57 GMT

I'm "watching" it from home.

A few minutes before it started someone on Twitter asked how long before the rate of updates on Twitter brought it down.

Well, it's down now (9:22AM).

I'm watching the updates on Engadget, far from an optimal experience. Somone ought to make live-blogging a bit easier on the reader.

So far he's announced "Time Capsule" -- a hardware device that backs up any Mac in the house over wifi. It's like a router with a hard drive.

The market is down, and so is Apple, almost 4 points at 175 at 9:30AM.

They've sold 4 million iPhones. As an Apple shareholder that makes me happy.

5 million Leopards. He quotes quotemills, Mossberg and Pogue.

Twitter is still down at 9:37AM.

Maybe they took the system down so they could demo it at Moscone without any load?

http://www.macrumorslive.com/ -- much better! Thanks!!

Movies on iTunes, this is what Netflix was worried about. Lots of questions. Only 1000 titles. 30 days after release on DVD. What's the quality? HD? I don't think Netflix has much to worry about, they have much more than 1000 titles (I think I've probably already watched 1000 movies on my Netflix account) and they get them the day they come out on DVD, and ahem, I have to say this, so does BitTorrent. Hollywood is still scared of the net. They didn't give a great deal to Steve, or so it seems.

Ahhh -- AppleTV 2.0. No need to synch with a desktop or laptop. Why don't they just sell the Mac Mini. Perfect product for the living room.

Community movie features. Just like Netflix.

Just checked Twitter at 9:52AM -- it's up.

More stuff about AppleTV. It's a software upgrade. Does pictures from Flickr and .Mac. That's good everybody, good. RSS everywhere.

At 10:05AM, Twitter is dead again.

I see they came out with a thin sub-notebook, MacBook Air.

drop.io/tradesecrets

Tue, 15 Jan 2008 23:36:50 GMT

Eleven days ago I wrote a blog post describing a call-in service that I'd like to use to create a podcast with my friend and fellow blogger Robert Scoble.

A new service (or one that I just became aware of) comes achingly close to doing what I want. Maybe it goes all the way there, but I've not seen how to do it.

First, here's how it works.

1. Call 646-495-9201 x 49763.

2. Talk.

3. Hangup.

There will be a new recording here.

http://drop.io/tradesecrets

Looks good!

But there are two problems.

1. The RSS feed doesn't have an enclosure, and even if you were willing to scrape the HTML there's no pointer to an MP3 file.

2. There's no pointer to an MP3 file on the landing page, although there appears to be one if you don't look at the HTML source. Tricky. It was enough to get Mike Arrington at Techcrunch to think it was there. I have a call into Mike to discuss.

A caveat, I am also in touch with the folks at BlogTalkRadio. I want this service, and we're close to having it now. drop.io doesn't go quite far enough, they clearly want to drive traffic to their site, and appear unwilling to let the MP3 out into the wild.

Interesting stuff!!

Update: I did a podcast with Robert and Patrick Scoble using drop.io. I was able to download the MP3, although it pretty well hidden, and upload it to my S3 account.

About to ship a new app

Mon, 14 Jan 2008 18:40:58 GMT

Once you ship a product you immediately start getting feedback, and if you're paying attention you can easily find the trends.

One of the big pieces of feedback about FlickrFan relates to branding. When you download the app and mount the disk image, where's FlickrFan? It isn't until after you figure out that you need to open the folder and click on the OPML app that you see FlickrFan. (I need to add a Readme file that makes this much more obvious.)

I knew this would be confusing. I could have renamed everything FlickrFan, it wouldn't have taken much work, or testing, and the chance for breakage was nil, since it was a new product.

I didn't do it for a simple reason, the engine that runs FlickrFan will run other apps, and I knew I would be shipping one such app within a matter of weeks. Once there's a second app running in the same engine, it may still be confusing. But there will be more after that.

Maybe there won't be millions of users, but my goal is to bootstrap a community of networked living rooms. For that I don't need more than a couple hundred households who want to play and I already have that.

I will soon tell you more about the new app, and if you're paying attention on my Twitter feed, you'll get a pretty clear idea of where this is going. It's all about communities, social features and big media. FlickrFan is about beautiful pictures on high def TV. The next one is about...

Stay tuned!

East coast snow pics

Mon, 14 Jan 2008 16:22:01 GMT

It's snowing in Boston (where else?).

Here are some pictures from my friends on Twitter.

CKelly in Cambridge, MA.

Brad Searles in Allston, MA.

Colin Grady found these pics, unknown location.

Ethan Bodnar has snow pics from Connecticut.

Corey Goldberg from Back Bay, Boston.

Heh. It's snowing in Italy too.

If you have snow pictures or stories, please post a comment below.

The place on the Net for Flix

Mon, 14 Jan 2008 01:19:09 GMT

They are running for the hills but the end of the trail is Little Big Horn, where Custer made his last stand, and lost his life. Of course the Indians didn't do too well either.

AP: "Girding for a potential threat from Apple Inc., online DVD rental service Netflix Inc. is lifting its limits on how long most subscribers can watch movies and television shows over high-speed Internet connections."

Please oh Netflix strategy gods, get a copy of Marketing Warfare and read it.

Netflix owns what used to be a great hill, for some it might still be one, the movies-by-mail hill.

They obviously feel they need to be in the Internet movie business, and in that they have a huge head start that they aren't using. They are being too damned fair to their competitors.

Give the users the ability to grant other sites access to their movie ratings. Build Netflix into the social network of movies. You're already there, but you need to make every other social network connect up to Netflix. You need to be the hub for movie-watching on the net. You're lucky that so far that's what you are. But soon you will have to fight for that too, and then it will be too late to try to force your competitors to connect to your site. They will have data that you want. Then the nature of the negotiating will change. Right now you have the data. Use that power!

Make the ~~users~~ everyone think of Netflix as the place on the Net for Flix.

How Hillary hit a nerve

Sun, 13 Jan 2008 14:31:01 GMT

She may or may not have been acting, but either way, when she sighed in New Hampshire and almost broke out in tears, and said how she feared that our country was heading from a bad place to a much worse place, she came close to expressing how many of us feel. Close but not quite there, because unlike the rest of us, she has a chance of being able to do something about it. The rest of us, Republican or Democrat, are going to have to sit by, and hope (there's Obama's word) that someone else can straighten out the mess, and really means it when they say that's what they want to do.

Meanwhile...

On Twitter, a reminder from Republican diehards from the south, of the supposed discourse we've had over the last five years.

"Cut and run."

"Micromanage."

It's all positioning, appealing to fear. Of course I don't want to cut and run. Nor do I want to micromanage.

Can we macromanage, or do we have to shut up and watch?

Our president used the term World War III, he actually spoke the words, as an optional American-started thing. This is the horror that makes us feel like HIllary did that day in New Hampshire.

In the sixties, the hardhats used to yell "America love it or leave it" to protestors. They had no clue about the country they were defending. Its strength is that you can love it, disagree with the people who run it, and not leave it. Even better, come Election Day, you can overthrow them, in a bloodless coup, and march down Pennsyvlania Avenue to celebrate. It's all right there in the Constitution. (But you don't get to hang the guy you overthrew.)

Watching the Republican debate in Myrtle Beach, SC on Thurs night, the loutness of the Republicans was striking. First, the way they shouted down Ron Paul, who like HIllary, raised questions that most of us have. Why are we in Iraq? They laughed when he asked. Not only didn't any of them answer it, but none of them had the presence to realize that the majority of Americans who wonder the same thing might be offended by their laughter. I certainly was. When did dismissing an opinion you don't like become a proper response for someone seeking our vote? Any one of them could have said "I may not agree with Ron Paul, but please let him speak, and let him have our respect." Any of the others could have closed the deal in that moment. None of them had the guts to do it.

I also was struck by the gungho rhetoric about going to war with Iran. It was like one of those war movies where the young guys rush to sign up wanting to teach the Kaiser a lesson, or the Commies or whoever the demon du jour is. The movies almost always teach that war is hell, by the time the war is actually underway everyone wishes it were over. The way wars start is with spit and vinegar, vim and vigor, talk of pride and honor, but they quickly devolve to misery, futility, death, devastation. My generation learned that early-on, with Vietnam. I don't remember anyone thinking we should be there. I missed being drafted by luck. I thought for sure that my generation would never choose to go to war. I was wrong. But I didn't imagine that, after creating such a quagmire in Iraq, which we still haven't extracted ourselves from, we would be so quick to conjure up another futile war.

War with Iran is a crazy, crazy idea. All evidence is that Iran has actually been trying to work with us since 9/11. Even if they weren't, as Ron Paul says, they're a third world country, no threat to us. That the Republicans would contemplate war with Iran, with such colorful gunghoisms (gates of hell, introduce them to their virgins), this is where HIllary hit the nerve. Could we be in for another four years of lunacy? Will those who object be called unpatriotic?

Could a Republican actually win this year? Who thought Bush could actually be re-elected at this time in 2004?

I heard on one of the Sunday talk shows that the reason Republicans don't like Ron Paul is they think he's anti-American. I've listened to him, if you take him at face-value, which I do, his ideas seem radical, unimplementable, but un-American? He's fervently pro-American. He says we should fix our own house, it's falling apart, instead of trying to control others (which doesn't work). How would we feel if our country were occupied by foreign troops? Would we do everything we can to expel them? (Of course.) Why should we expect any other country to be different? I've been saying the same thing since our invasion of Iraq in 2003. Ron Paul has the guts to say the madness is mad. He's the only one in either party who does that, though Obama comes close, and in her New Hampshire moment Hillary did too.

I want someone to win my vote by telling me how good I am, not how bad the other guy is. I see through it, I know the Dems don't want to micromanage, they don't wake up in the morning looking for ways to lose. I know they're not cowards. All this sloganeering has done is make us weary of ourselves. I want to get started fixing things, if not now -- when? That's the nerve that Hillary hit.

Political links

Sat, 12 Jan 2008 03:11:05 GMT

Salon: "What Huckabee has lacked is a top-level adviser to layer some intellectual heft and policy realism onto the candidate's make-it-up-every-morning improvisational style."

NY Times: "The Democratic presidential primary in New York on Feb 5 is shaping up as the state's most competitive since 1992."

Amazon SimpleDB followup

Sat, 12 Jan 2008 01:10:33 GMT

I spent a few days over the last week trying to get a connection between Frontier and Amazon's SimpleDB.

I got connections going with: CreateDomain, DeleteDomain, ListDomains. They all use the same basic code to handle authentication, and all three work.

But I hit a dead-end with the PutAttributes call. At first I thought I had found a problem on their end, because their JavaScript scratchpad app (a life-saver) had exactly the same problem as my code. I got in touch with the Amazon people, they asked me to download a new version of the scratchpad app, and it worked, but of course my app still doesn't. I compared my parameter list to theirs, and except for the signature and time-stamp they are identical. So there's something wrong with my code, clearly.

Here's a link to a plain text listing of the code. All four of the interface routines use this code to call the Amazon web service. This is the place the problem almost certainly is.

And here's the interface for PutAttributes.

As often happens, the geeky readers of this blog may spot the mistake that I don't, so all suggestions are welcome. I really want to get past this and start building applications that connect with this new web service.

Update: Problem solved? I got an email from my contact at Amazon, he suggested maybe I wasn't sorting the parameters before generating the signature. I checked, he was right. At one point I had been sorting them, but in an attempt to solve another problem, took a different approach which left the parameters not-sorted. Had I taken another look at the docs I would have seen that the params must be sorted before generating the signature. When I re-coded it so that they were sorted, PutAttributes worked! Heh. So now I have to do some more testing to be sure I really have the answer, but it looks pretty good.

The debate about the worth of podcasting

Fri, 11 Jan 2008 16:44:27 GMT

There's a mini-debate going on about whether podcasting is a success or worth it, or whatever, I'm not sure exactly what the issue is, but it's framed this way --> if you can't get advertisers to hitch a ride on your podcast then podcasting is not worth much if anything.

I'm having a slow Friday so far, it's cloudy and chilly here in the Bay Area, we're in the January doldrums, so I thought maybe I could liven things up a bit by saying both sides of this argument are wrong.

Let me explain.

My phone doesn't have a business model. Neither does my porch. I still like having a phone and a porch because they help me meet new people and communicate with people I know. Same with my blog and podcast.

Meanwhile...

There's another mini-debate about bloggers playing pranks at CES. The Gizmodo guys ran around with some gadgets that turn TV sets off. At CES is this a big deal because much of what goes on there is TV. They were being assholes, interfering with people's ability to do their jobs and make a living. As a result bloggers get a bad rep.

The problem is that they're not bloggers, they're reporters and they work for a company that's not a blog, it's a publication. Publishing stuff on the web with blogging software says nothing about the people and what they write.

A blogger is person who has an idea, expertise or opinion who wants to convey that to other people. The unedited voice of a person. What makes a blogger interesting is that they do something other than writing a blog. If all you do is write a blog, and if you want or need to make money from your blogging, it's really hard to distinguish what you're doing from what professionals who don't use the web (are there any left?) do.

Same with podcasting.

I do a podcast from time to time because I want to say something. Whether I can run an ad on my podcast means nothing to me because I would never do it. And if I went crazy and let someone put an ad on there, it would only be to reciprocate for them having hosted the podcast, as a way of paying for the podcast itself (I'm contemplating doing exactly that right now so I had to include the disclaimer). I would never burden my podcasting with the task of supporting me. It's not why I podcast.

We keep having this argument. Amateurism is good and there's lots of it. Professional writers and broadcasters probably have a place, I don't know, it's not my problem. But let's be clear blogging and podcasting exist independent of a professional's ability to eek out a living using the tools of blogging and podcasting.

Now I'm going to try to get some work done.

Bob Stepno: "Podcasting lets people sing to each other again."

See also: Podcasting News, Mashable.

What if you had a $300,000 hole in your pocket?

Fri, 11 Jan 2008 00:55:22 GMT

Chris Brogan asks a question...

What if you had $300K to spend on a luxury, an impulse buy, not something you need, what would you spend it on?

I just answered -- I'd buy 30 full-page ads in the NY Times.

What would you buy?

FlickrFan update

Thu, 10 Jan 2008 18:10:15 GMT

I can see from the public list that a number of FlickrFans aren't updating. The most recent version is 0.41.

If you want to get current, click on this link on the machine the software is running on:

http://127.0.0.1:5337/photofan/updateNow

If there are subsequent problems, please post a comment here.

Still diggin!

Worth watching every so often

Thu, 10 Jan 2008 23:23:00 GMT

What if our political process became conscious?

Wed, 09 Jan 2008 18:44:19 GMT

I think something pretty amazing may be happening with our political process that mirrors what's happening on the Internet, in the blogosphere. I've been talking about it on and off since the Howard Dean candidacy in 2003, which I think most people misread or misunderstood, seeing it only in the existing context of how it can be used to make a candidate more competitive in raising money to buy ads to run on TV. Perhaps that's what was going on from the candidates' point of view, but it was not what was going on from our side of the tube. What was happening was we were flexing our political muscles using a new tool for organizing, the Internet. We were waking up, saying Hello World to the candidates. One of them heard us, Dean, although he misunderstood what we were saying.

It's as if we, collectively were tapping a microphone and tentatively asking "Is this thing on?"

Anyway...

Let's summarize what's happened so far in the 2008 political process.

1. We had a long run-up of a year or so, with candidate debates, lots of punditry, two front-runners, one in each party, Hillary Clinton and Rudy Giuliani.

2. The Democrats outraised the Republicans for the first time in a long time. Obama actually raised more money than Clinton did.

3. Huckabee, a candidate who raised little money, and who was never considered a front-runner, won the Iowa caucus on the Republican side. Money didn't choose the winner in Iowa for the Republicans.

4. McCain, a candidate who in the end spent very little money and had almost no organization, who had long since been forgotten as a front-runner, won the Republican primary in New Hampshire. Again, money didn't choose the winner in NH for the Republicans.

Now, in the aftermath of New Hampshire, the pundits on TV, most notoriously Chris Matthews on MSNBC, are quickly snapping back with new crazy theories on why what happened happened, but we shouldn't believe them or pay much attention, because they don't see what's happening in the electorate. Neither does Clinton, but the Republicans may be beginning to get a clue (and Clinton will soon too).

My belief: The electorate is waking up. Maybe it's just my hope speaking. Can't tell yet.

The electorate doesn't need messages, just as Doc says there is no demand for messages. What the electorate needs is to hire someone to lead us for the four years between elections. It needs someone who will ground our collective behavior in something resembling reality, so we deal with the problems that are collectively in front of us: 1. The honor and prestige of our country (the equivalent of goodwill for companies, settle the wars we started, accept that we have to protect against terrorism, stop hyping it in terms of conventional warfare, that's insulting). 2. The integrity of our homes (everything from disaster response to changing behavior on a global level to respond to global warming). 3. Caring for ourselves (health, education, protecting the Constitution).

We've gone crazy in the last seven years. The 2004 election was amazingly crazy. The candidates appeared to be running for President of Iraq, that's all they talked about, what was good for the people of Iraq. The lunacy of the electorate is that we didn't throw it back in their faces saying "Let us know when you have something to say about the USA."

We need to communicate with each other and with the pols and pundits without going through the polling process. When they quote blogs on TV they're quoting people who used to be print columnists who now publish on the Internet. That changes nothing.

I'm not expecting very much from people who live "Inside the Beltway." I don't live there, never have, don't even like visiting the place. To me it's much like the arrogance of Silicon Valley. You can't pop out every four years get us to vote for you and then go back into your nest. Politics belongs to all of us, in this country, the people are the government. We really lost our way, now it's time to come back. It's the change that's happening in everything, decentralization, disintermediation. Obama speaks of a plurality, his campaign isn't about a mere election, it's about changing the way we do things.

My advice to candidates going back to Dean was and is to start implementing the change you seek before the election, while you have the full attention of the electorate. Ask us to give money, not to buy ads, but to buy health insurance for 50,000 uninsured people in a particular state, so we can see how powerful we are collectively, how we can do good, starting right now. We yearn for this, to feel our muscles flex collectively, and individually to make a difference, not just in your hype, but in real terms. Hillary Clinton could have gotten up yesterday and said "There's no time to waste. We can't wait until January 2009 to solve the problems. Let's start right now."

Maybe she won't get elected, but getting us organized now would make it more likely.

JFK: "Ask not what your country can do for you, ask what you can do for your country."

See how that works??