Scripting News

MP3 of Sun-Times meeting with Obama

Sat, 15 Mar 2008 06:20:38 GMT

Obama had a "extensive 80-minute interview" with the Chicago Sun-Times (I think earlier today) to answer all their questions about his relationship with Tony Rezko. Following is an MP3 of the meeting, provided by the Sun-Times.

http://www.suntimes.com/images/cds/MP3/031408obama.mp3

You can receive these MP3s in your podcatcher by subscribing to the RSS 2.0 feed with enclosures for this weblog.

PS: He did a similar interview with the Chicago Tribune.

Northeast-style racism

Fri, 14 Mar 2008 18:23:00 GMT

I grew up in the northeast, not far from where Geraldine Ferraro lives, and I recognize the racism of the northeast, where people nod knowingly that blacks who are competing with whites have been given some kind of advantage that makes it possible for an inferior person to compete with a superior one.

It's easy to trigger this kind of logic in a northeastern white supremicist, just say that a black guy wouldn't be there if he weren't black.

You can say "It's True," in a tone that says that disagreement is naive. "Of course," you are supposed to say.

I've seen Jews and Catholics do this, two types of people who have themselves been victimized by stereotypes.

But it's all lunacy, and definitely not true when you're talking about the leader for the Democratic Party nomination for President.

It's lunacy but it's lunacy that works. All around the northeast, esp in Pennsylvania, people are talking around the kitchen table, saying of course he wouldn't be there if he weren't black, and identifying with Hillary Clinton, a white person who's about to lose her job (one she was never elected to) to a black person, unfairly.

Someday America will grow out of this lunacy, and will stop judging people based on their race. That Obama is a very serious candidate for President says a lot about him, but it says even more about us, that the racism of Ferraro and the northeasterners who reason as she does, is falling into the background.

How Internet news should work

Fri, 14 Mar 2008 21:06:38 GMT

By the mid-90s I became accustomed to reading news on the web. So much so that I cancelled subscriptions to the NY Times and Wall Street Journal because most days I'd never take the papers out of the plastic bags they were delivered in.

Getting news on the web was so much more efficient. I'd read the TImes and local papers and News.com, Infoworld, MacWeek, and a bunch of other industry publications. This was before blogging, before RSS.

How I'd do it -- I'd go to a site, News.com for example, and scan for articles that interested me. I'd do this every hour or so, I'd rely on memory and link color to determine if an article was new or not. Being a software developer, every time I thought of better ways to do this, if only...

Then in 1999 something great happened, a bunch of tech industry publications, working with Netscape, started publishing titles, descriptions and links to stories in RSS. I immediately put together a web application that scanned these "feeds" periodically, and put the new stories at the top of the page, pushing down the older ones. Then, to do my hourly news trawl, I'd just have to start at the top of the page, and read down until I came to something I had seen before. I thought of this as "automated web surfing." It took the labor out of the hunting and pecking I had been doing before.

This is, imho, the way news should work on the Internet. I've had this argument many times with people at the NY Times and other big news organizations who feel that part of what they do is to prioritize and organize the news into a front page backed by sections. They feel the Internet versions of their news should work this way, as their print versions do.

But you see them break out of this model sometimes when news happens in the middle of the day. When William F Buckley died last week, there was an item at the top of the home page, in red letters, with the news of Buckley's death. What if two or three big events had happened that day? What would they do then?

We've already seen news organizations when the rush of news is too great, adopt the blogging style of news -- the New Orleans Times-Picayune didn't allow tradition to get in the way of reporting Katrina, they turned their news flow into a blog.

I think every newspaper on the web should at least offer the reader a choice of a reverse-chronological view of the news. I think they would find most readers would use this view, most editors would too.

I was inspired to write this today because Scott Karp at Publishing 2.0 has come to basically the same conclusion. I think we may finally be coming to the tipping point for news publishing on the web. I hope so.

Links for 03/14/2008

Fri, 14 Mar 2008 21:50:05 GMT

Apple's iPhone developer rejection letter.

Obama is live on Countdown tonight.

Candidate MP3s progress

Thu, 13 Mar 2008 18:28:36 GMT

Progress to report on the MP3s of candidate conference calls.

The Washington bureau of McClatchy has produced an RSS 2.0 feed with enclosures for some of the calls.

http://www.mcclatchydc.com/250/index.xml

We still need a feed with all the calls. We're missing some of the most important ones. But we're making progress, and thanks to the folks at McClatchy for pitching in.

Now bloggers have a chance to listen to the campaign spinners in their own words, without interpretation.

Update: USA Today posts 2 minutes of a Clinton conference call today saying: "we want to make sure you get the full context." No. Wrong. Incorrect. To get the context we'd need the MP3 of the full conference call. Come on guys, let's get over this gatekeeping. We'll all do better if thousands of bloggers can listen to these calls.

McClatchy has the full conference call.

2/20/08: "Where can I get MP3s of all the conference calls, the day they happen, in full, not spun through the reporters."

2/21/08: "Four years from now we'll look back at this in amazement that there was a day when campaigns hid their words and ideas behind the filters of the press."

FriendFeed gets interesting

Thu, 13 Mar 2008 19:22:09 GMT

After opening to the public a week ago, a lot more people are showing up on FriendFeed, and it's got features the others don't have. The others? Yeah -- it's competitive with things like: Twitter, Facebook, Jaiku and Pownce. And it's simple and minimalist like Twitter, yet it fully embraces everything else out there that has a feed. Can you post to FF? Yes, and you won't see those posts on Twitter. Not sure about the other places.

http://friendfeed.com/davew

Network apps are getting really interesting, and it's all different variants on the River of News aggregator and RSS, going back to My.UserLand in 1999, almost 10 years ago.

I love to see this stuff finally take root so virally.

Now I gotta get Kawasaki to see the light on RofN.

Obama for President

Thu, 13 Mar 2008 18:23:42 GMT

Bluetooth headset for Mac?

Thu, 13 Mar 2008 13:51:39 GMT

I've been doing my interviews with a new USB headset I bought on Saturday at Fry's. It's pretty good, except there's a hum, and the volume is pretty low, so the person I'm interviewing comes through louder than I do.

I'd like to nail the quality issue, so I've been looking into other choices for USB headsets.

Then I wondered if the Bluetooth headsets for cell phones work with Macs?

I read some of the product descriptions on Amazon, and it's not clear. They say they work with Skype, so that must mean they work with laptops and desktops, right?

So the question -- is anyone using a Bluetooth headset with a Mac? If you use a USB headset is there one you recommend or don't?

Update #1: Based on advice from early commenters I ordered a Sennheiser USB headset from Amazon. I figure if any of them are high quality this one is, I'm definitely going to buy a Bluetooth headset, I've never owned one, I figure I should try it out, they're not very expensive. I do have Bluetooth headphones from Motorola, courtesy of Sprint. So I'll try those out with the Mac now that I know they're supposed to work.

Update #2: Here's the Bluetooth headset I'm getting.

Update #3: Chuck Shotton got the Bluetooth headset I'm getting.

TWiT follow-up

Thu, 13 Mar 2008 15:05:15 GMT

I was a guest on Leo LaPorte's TWiT a couple of Sundays ago. It was fun, we had an interesting discussion about a lot of things, including the ideal podcast player device.

I've gotten a bunch of email from people who use Nokia cell phones and their N800 and N810, and say they do what I was asking about.

Could be so.

I bought a N800 but never got it working in any meaningful way. I think it's a really poorly designed product. Does it have a podcatcher? Never found it. Never even got it to connect to my wifi reliably. After putting in a bunch of hours I gave up -- I wasn't getting anywhere. The Nokia guys told me they were going to send me a phone with a podcatcher built-in but they never did. It's a little too expensive for me to buy one just to find out what the software does. And as I said the N800 was a real bad experience. And I'm not going to shell out $400-plus just to find out if the N810 is more usable than the N800. If they want to send a review unit I'll try it out (I've already told this to their rep).

To their credit, Nokia actually does coordinate with bloggers, almost none of the other device and hardware manufacturers do, so my ability to review stuff is limited by what I'd pay money for. Not a bad limit btw, there's an implied endorsement of products I had to pay for to review.

Olbermann special comment

Thu, 13 Mar 2008 01:58:30 GMT

Fantastic 10-minute essay by Countdown's Keith Olbermann about the racism of Geraldine Ferraro and how it reflects on Clinton and her supporters. Here's the audio.

http://sundaygang.com/misc/olbermann.mp3

He hits all the major points, clearly, powerfully and leaves HRC a way to regain the respect of Americans for whom racial politics are unacceptable.

I would never stand by and say nothing when people tried to keep an African-American in his or her place, as the Clintons have repeatedly tried to do with Obama. It was over exactly this issue that I went with Obama, after comments made by President Clinton during the race for South Carolina.

1/24/08: "There are good reasons why the first lady (or first spouse) isn't actively involved in running the government, so we don't have to understand how good their marriage is, and they get a tiny bit of privacy."

I can't imagine any American, no matter what party they belong to, supporting the racial arrogance of Ferraro. But I go further than Olbermann, I think Clinton should return the money that Ferraro has raised, and not accept any further funds. It's not enough to reject and denounce racism, you also must not profit from it.

Wedging the electorate

Wed, 12 Mar 2008 23:39:49 GMT

There's no mystery why race keeps coming up in the Democratic race, injected by the Clintons. If they can get white people to vote white and blacks to vote black, they win.

I recorded a very brief podcast on my daily walk that explains.

http://mp3.twittergram.com/davewiner/gram05272.mp3

Twitter is not a chatroom

Wed, 12 Mar 2008 21:30:06 GMT

When you want a chatroom, use IRC...

http://sundaygang.com/dave/twitterIsNotAChatroom.mp3

Links for 03/12/2008

Wed, 12 Mar 2008 21:40:47 GMT

War in Iran before Bush leaves?

Hillary for Republican Veep?

Tue, 11 Mar 2008 20:36:13 GMT

You love Hillary and you love McCain.

They're both ready from Day One to cross the threshold as Commander-In-Chief.

Isn't it terrible that you have to choose one over the other?

http://mccainclinton.us/

Well, maybe you don't have to choose!

PS: Vote for the new Republic dream team on Digg!

Links for 03/11/2008

Wed, 12 Mar 2008 00:40:00 GMT

Texas caucus results won't be available until March 29.

Video of Ferarro on Fox News, explaining her racial comments about Obama.

Google announces layoffs. (Not a typo.)

ReadWriteWeb on Twine: "Feels half baked."

Ads should show Obama doing things, actively leading.

Interview with Scoble

Tue, 11 Mar 2008 15:24:59 GMT

15-minute interview with Scoble mostly about conferences and the SXSW "trainwreck" interview of Mark Zuckerberg by BusinessWeek reporter Sarah Lacy.

http://sundaygang.com/dave/scobleInterview.mp3

I have a laundry list of questions that we didn't get to, so I want to do another basic background interview with Scoble.

Note: I had trouble with this recording, since I lowered the bitrate in Audio Hijack Pro, it produced an M4A file instead of an MP3. I had to learn how to do the conversion. It turns out that iTunes has this capability built-in.

Nicco's site, day 2

Tue, 11 Mar 2008 16:30:11 GMT

A commenter notes: "SonicWALL has [Nicco's] site classified as pornography."

It appears Google is at the root of all the trouble.

The final finale of The Wire

Tue, 11 Mar 2008 16:05:47 GMT

It was great. Very satisfying in most ways, and predictable when it was not.

I love it when they finish something great so well.

Mazel tov!!

Interview with Guy Kawasaki

Tue, 11 Mar 2008 00:04:47 GMT

20-minute interview with evangelist Guy Kawasaki on Microsoft, Twitter, SXSW, how to do interviews, Apple, RSS.

http://sundaygang.com/dave/guyKawasakiInterview.mp3

Picture of Guy's MacBook Air with hookups.

My notes for the Kawasaki interview.

You can subscribe to my podcasts using this feed.

Who should I interview next?

Tue, 11 Mar 2008 02:16:02 GMT

I have a great rig here and I'm learning how to use it.

I can interview any willing interviewee with a telephone. I can do the interview when I'm at my desktop, or with somewhat less fidelity, using my iPhone from the road.

I like the 15-20 minute format.

I've interviewed Guy Kawasaki, Joe Trippi, Steve Gillmor, Marc Canter, Jay Rosen, Scott Rosenberg, George Lakoff.

Who should I interview next?

PS: Lots of great suggestions. I'm interested in either talking with people I know well, because it's easy for me to pull a good story out of them. Or people who have a new product, esp one related to products I use. Or people involved with national politics because that's a current focus for me. Better if there are people who mix all these.