Scripting News

That's right the women are smarter

Fri, 08 Feb 2008 03:13:28 GMT

Not sure where I heard this, but if Bill can be the first black president, then Barack can be the first woman president.

Pass it on.

"cheesecake"

This could be a nightmare

Thu, 07 Feb 2008 21:43:19 GMT

In a year the Democrats should win the White House in a walk, we've got a perfect storm that could put a Republican there.

With the Republican nominee all but decided, the Democrats are split down the middle across racial, gender, economic and age lines.

So we have three parties, not two, and the Republicans are spouting the same old fear about war and security while they advocate raping the Constitution and spending us into oblivion. Four more years of spitting and swearing while our economy goes from second rate to third world.

How will this get resolved?

Oy?

Alex G: "It will get resolved same way all other elections are -- with Americans getting shafted in the ass."

Paul Ding: "I think Hillary will drop out of the race long before Pennsylvania votes."

Shall we spy on Valleywag?

Thu, 07 Feb 2008 21:47:31 GMT

We know who they go after, but who won't they touch and why?

It would be easy to put together a scorecard and a list of Web 2.0 luminaries who haven't graced their pages.

We might find out who's sleeping with the editors of Valleywag.

Should Yahoo accept Microsoft's offer?

Wed, 06 Feb 2008 17:27:56 GMT

Mike Arrington is doing a great job of laying out the options for Yahoo wrt Microsoft's offer to buy them out. He's written two pieces that helped put it together for me. Mike clearly has great sources in the investment banking community and among potential buyers of Yahoo, and is actively talking with them. He's got a business lawyer's mind and, as you know I'm sure, he's spent the last few years immersed in web applications.

Bottom-line: Yahoo's three choices are: 1. Tough it out alone. 2. Sell advertising rights to Google. 3. Accept Microsoft's offer.

Mike argues that option 1 would result in shareholder lawsuits and in the end would get Yahoo nowhere because they'd end up selling to Microsoft eventually. Option 2 would enable them to pay a major cash dividend to their shareholders, making up for the lost windfall coming from Microsoft's offer. Options 2 and 3 have the risk of being rejected by government regulators.

Now, as a member of Yahoo's developer community, and generally a respector of Yahoo (is that a word) -- I say take the deal. I don't think Yahoo has ever had leadership that has been up to navigating the treacherous waters of tech industry economics and politics. At least with the Microsoft acquisition they would get one -- Ray Ozzie. He's a guy you can sit across the table from and plot something out and he can deliver. I've had many good meetings with Yahoo people, but rarely have they resulted in action. From my own selfish point of view, Microsoft owning Yahoo might mean that Ray makes more trips to the Bay Area (figuratively) and when he sits down, we can talk about new open interfaces and developer programs for Yahoo properties.

I've read most of the commentary on the Yahoo deal, and the other piece that made an impression was Mark Cuban's. He says that Yahoo should accept the Microsoft deal because it would give them the breathing room they need re Wall Street. He argues that the market has always allowed Microsoft to sink resources into developing markets, and that's exactly what Yahoo needs to become the organization that it has been trying to be. Instead, the market treats Yahoo as a comp to Google, but Yahoo doesn't have the economics of Google, so that's, long-term, a losing battle.

There's one more reason I think Yahoo should sell to Microsoft -- the fatigue of the people. The company has been wobbly too long. If they don't take the Microsoft offer it's going to be a long wobbly decline and the shareholders will be right to be angry. Here's their chance to get out, it's time, so just do it.

PS: Open postscript -- Turn Yahoo into The RSS Powerhouse in every way. Build all new systems around RSS. If it isn't RSS it doesn't fly.

Update: Henry Blodget spots a glitch in the Microsoft offer.

Pay now or pay later

Tue, 05 Feb 2008 22:47:50 GMT

Paul Ding: "You don't have to change the oil in your car. You can always replace the engine instead. Works the same way with health care."

Great essay on the cost heath care.

Been here before

Tue, 05 Feb 2008 18:57:00 GMT

Allfacebook: "Last night the MySpace platform went live. This follows the launch of Bebo and Google will begin providing support to OpenSocial developers."

I've had a long career in an industry with incredibly short cycles. I've been to this place before.

As O'Neill says above, platform wars are raging, this time the front line is in social networking. 20 years ago the front was in basic networking protocols, before that software to operate laser printers. What always happens is a low-tech winner emerges, a consensus platform, usually not from the biggest company.

Guidelines: Simplicity rules. You'll know it when you see it.

Until then, I'm going to keep doing what I've been doing.

It would be great if someone developed a network address book with a simple API that everyone could build on. An event system built on it. Either fully distributed or hosted by a company we trust. That's what we're waiting for.

Agence France-Presse in FlickrFan

Mon, 04 Feb 2008 18:47:56 GMT

We have some big news today for FlickrFan users, a major new source of high-def photography for the networked living room. They come from Agence France-Presse, one of the world's great news organizations, and a fantastic source of high-resolution news photography.

I met with Agence France-Presse when I was in Paris in December, introduced them to FlickrFan and explained what we were doing with the Associated Press. They got excited, it took a little while to work out the technical details, but now we're ready to go. The updates are all out, here's the howto for FlickrFan users.

Change #30: Agence France-Presse photos in FlickrFan.

There were unique challenges in this project because their flow is huge. Yesterday we got over 3000 new photos. Because there are so many, I asked my friend Matt Mullenweg, if his company Automattic could help us out with server space and bandwidth, and he said yes. The AFP pictures are hosted on wordpress.com. Many thanks to Matt and his company for helping us out. To the extent we're bootstrapping a new use of the net, which I hope is what we're doing, Matt's company has made the kind of contribution we'd like to see more companies make. Usually the companies are happy to make the money, but not willing to help out with the bootstrap, which often costs money. Matt has always been a great guy and a visionary. I thank him and hope that FlickrFan users find an appropriate way to thank him too.

And also, please consider the generosity of Associated Press and Agence France-Presse. We all hope that there's a market here, a way to monetize the flow of high-resolution photography to enrich and inform. Other content companies have been reluctant to take a chance on the Internet, we saw that in the early days of RSS and podcasting. I feel that these two media companies are playing the same pioneering role that the New York Times played with RSS 2.0 and NPR played in podcasting. Associated Press and Agence France-Presse deserve our respect and admiration for steping out, for going first, this is how new Internet activities get going. This is what we call market leadership, the real kind. Bravo!!

And this couldn't come at a better time, with tomorrow being Super Tuesday here in the USA. Think of all the great photographs we're going to get in the next few days!

Kevin Tofel helped test the feed over the weekend.

Philosophy in Boston

Mon, 04 Feb 2008 19:18:56 GMT

Tim Jarrett understands what I'm saying.

What a great Superbowl, and what an opportunity for Boston sports fans to learn the value in losing.

What? Value in losing? You bet.

It wasn't that long ago when Boston was one of the best cities in the USA for sports precisely because Boston teams were such spectacular losers. I'll never forget the misery of the Dowbrigade after the Red Sox lost something (or did they win, I forget). They must have lost because he swore he'd never let them break his heart again the way they had for his whole life (he's about my age).

Losing teaches you that there's more to life than winning, and that's the best lesson possible and it's the one lesson you keep needing to learn over and over until you lose everything, which like it or not is what we all do in the end.

People write poetry about losing, great music is composed about lost causes. Who writes an ode to winning? They're too busy getting drunk or getting laid.

Never have I loved a team more or felt more kinship with my fellow fans than when our team goes down in flames after a season of great ups and downs. No doubt there are no smiles or tears of joy in Boston today. But there is hope. And that, even when you win, is all that's left after a great season.

Campaign moments

Mon, 04 Feb 2008 17:10:59 GMT

Yesterday CNN's Ballot Bowl, which continues to be an excellent and very useful program, ended with Caroline Kennedy at a campaign rally in Los Angeles. She was introducing Oprah, and they had to cut to a tape of Thursday's debate, which struck me as odd. I totally wanted to hear what Oprah had to say.

Update: Oprah at UCLA on YouTube.

Later in the car driving to a SuperBowl party at the Scobles in Half Moon Bay, I listened to the debate which was being broadcast on KQED, the local NPR station, and I was struck by how intelligent the two Democratic candidates are. I had totally missed that the first time, when I watched it live, I was paying too much attention to Twitter, and I was looking for the zinger. They had a thoughtful debate, both candidates were very well-informed. At one point I imagined Obama saying, "There you go again, see that's what I'm talking about" and saying how lucky he was to have an opponent who is so intelligent and thoughtful.

We are lucky. After eight years of Republican appeals to our naivete it is refreshing to be talked to as adults on TV by political leaders.

In contrast, the Repubican field is a mess. The front-runner, McCain is a petulant angry sore-winner, he argues about nothing. Ron Paul tells the truth, and they laugh at him. Huckabee cracks jokes about how irrelevant he has become. While the Dems were talking about real stuff, and arguing the fine points, the Republicans have been reduced to talking about nonsense like being a foot soldier in the Reagan Revolution and waving the white flag of surrender. Obama is right when he says the wheels have come off the Straight Talk Express.

I want Obama for President. I'd love to see Hillary as Secretary of Health, Education and Welfare, so she can drive the effort, this time for real, for universal health care. The difference this time is that it's one of the central issues of the campaign. It's going to happen this time if a Democrat is elected. We have to make sure of that.

This piece is cross-posted on the Huffington Post.

Obama live in Boise

Sat, 02 Feb 2008 16:27:58 GMT

Blogs win the LongNow bet

Sat, 02 Feb 2008 00:55:29 GMT

Decision: Blogs vs. New York Times.

For the last couple of weeks I've been emailing with people from the LongNow Foundation and Martin Nisenholtz of the NY Times, to determine who won the bet.

Ultimately we asked the foundation to consider all the arguments and make the decision.

They published their decision today. It's well worth reading because it answers some of the questions raised by the bet, for example, what is a blog, and how does Wikipedia relate to blogging. I don't agree with everything in the decision, but I do like the result -- we won.

The beneficiary of the bet? The World Wide Web Consortium. I chose them as the charity to receive the proceeds if I won the bet because web standards are what make it all work and the W3C is central to standards on the web.

Best feel-good picture of 2007

Fri, 01 Feb 2008 22:24:19 GMT

Okay, a few days ago I wrote a review of the Diving Bell and the Butterfly saying it could be the best picture of 2007, but even so you might want to skip it because the truth it reveals might be something you don't want to look at. It's a fine picture, but a tough one.

Another wonderful but tough picture is No Country for Old Men. It's one of those movies that leaves so much unresolved that you walk out of the theater not sure which foot goes in front of the other. On a second viewing it makes much more sense. The world isn't necessarily as crazy as it at first seemed.

But there's a movie that is also incredibly well crafted, and gets better every time you think about it -- Juno. I didn't realize how much I liked it until I heard someone compare it to Little Miss Sunshine, a movie that I did not enjoy, unlike everyone else it seems. I loved Juno because it organizes its sweetness into love for one person, the star of the movie, Juno. But everyone, no matter how dorky or clueless (and some of the adults are truly dorky and clueless) shares the love. The movie has a wholeness, an unqualified goodness, you not only walk out of the theater in love with Juno and everyone else in the movie, but your heart is warmed for everyone, including yourself. It's that good.

All three remind how good movies can be.

And there were some not-too-bad movies at the end of 2007, for example, Atonement, which some didn't like, but I did. 3:10 to Yuma is a well-crafted genre picture. Michael Clayton was a perfect showcase for the talents of George Clooney. Great acting and a simple story in The Savages.

Which one was the best? I'd hate to have to choose!

Yahoo + Microsoft

Fri, 01 Feb 2008 17:26:39 GMT

Should Yahoo accept Microsoft's offer?

Sure. What else do they have to do?

Most tech companies are pretty aimless, people think there's a grand plan to Apple or Google, but I bet there isn't. They just throw stuff up on the wall, if it sticks, do version 2.0.

Does Yahoo + Microsoft make sense?

Nahh. It's like the dead leading the blind.

The only reason the deal makes sense is because it's the only thing either company could do that anyone might possibly care about.

It would make more sense for Twitter to acquire Yahoo. At least then they'd get some servers that could stay up for 24 hours straight.

Anyway, I might have been too hard on em. But then again...

PS: To those who think Twitter couldn't acquire Yahoo, I might have agreed until we saw NeXT "buy" Apple.

PPS: Scott Rosenberg sees it as "a path to failure for both companies."

PPPS: Scoble thinks it's interesting.

Why does Twitter go down?

Thu, 31 Jan 2008 15:46:11 GMT

Over the last 24 hours Twitter has been down as much as it's been up. As always this gives us a reason to think about what the world would be like without Twitter and then those of us who are engineers or would-be engineers, start thinking about ways to fix the problem, whatever it is.

The Twitter folk say that the recent problems are related to an infrastructure overhaul. Of course I believe them, I take it at face-value. I think the MacWorld Expo outage was about traffic, I don't think last night's Republican debate took Twitter down.

Anyway, I'd like to really understand what's going on behind the scenes at Twitter, Inc. They say they're confident the new infrastructure will hold up better, I'd like to understand why. Can we have a meeting, with a few people from the tech community who actively use Twitter and a few people from the company, to be briefed on what's going on. The same way the President briefs Congress when there's some kind of international crisis.

Twitter wouldn't exist without its users. Everyone wants to know what's going on. Let's have some real honest direct communication?

PS: I was going to post a link to this on Twitter, but arrrrgh!

PPS: I'd like to try the Jabber interface. Does anyone have a server I could have an account on. Yes, I know Gmail is a Jabber server, but I want to run scripts against it, and they use interfaces my scripting environment doesn't support.

PPPS: Andrew Baron's Twitter-down art colletion.

Who is Gore for?

Thu, 31 Jan 2008 19:03:51 GMT

David Weinberger asks a question I've been wondering about, who does Al Gore endorse for President in 2008?

Micro-Digg, oy -- honeypot for idiots

Thu, 31 Jan 2008 16:02:20 GMT

I should have known...

The idiots want to rule the Reddit I started for Scripting News readers. I couldn't figure out how to delete it, and while trying, I deleted my account, so forget the experiment, and if anyone at Reddit is listening, could you please delete it for me. (I sent an email but there was no response.)

Still diggin!

FlickrFan belongs in schools

Tue, 29 Jan 2008 19:45:19 GMT

Lance Knobel: "I'd install FlickrFan in every middle school and high school social studies class. I guarantee it would provoke endless discussion and ensure engagement in the issues of the day."

I totally agree. It would be great to see it at checkout lines in supermarkets and on kiosks in BART stations too.

Covering eTech in March

Tue, 29 Jan 2008 19:49:54 GMT

I'll be covering the eTech conference in San Diego in early March. It's been a few years, last time I went was just before my surgery in 2002. I'll be going as a blogger, not presenting. Many thanks to O'Reilly for approving the press pass. I look forward to catching up with many old friends.

Light posting

Tue, 29 Jan 2008 18:17:35 GMT

I have a juicy project I'm working on, a new source of great pics for FlickrFan. In the meantime Stan Krute did a new version of the Obama poster, to the right, with the "Progress" swapped out and "Make change" in its place.

Update: Jim Posner suggested the original was better, on reflection I agree, so I switched it back.

I'm a California voter for Obama

Tue, 29 Jan 2008 01:57:27 GMT

I've got an Obama poster in the right margin of the home page of Scripting News. It'll stay there for the duration as a virtual equivalent of one of those signs people put on their front lawns. I live in California, one of the Super Tuesday states and I'm an Obama voter. That's what the poster means. Pass it on.

After Google indexes Scripting News, this query will have exactly one match. Right now it has none. Let's load up Google with lots of blogs with Californians voting for Obama. And of course every other state in the union.

PS: This is where I got the poster.