Scripting News

Who owns your comments?

Tue, 10 Jun 2008 02:25:51 GMT

Last week, in the rush of news and new features in NewsJunk.com, I got an email from Daniel Ha, the guy who develops Disqus, the commenting software we use at Scripting News.

I say "we" because it very literally is a we thing. When you place a comment on my blog, you're adding something to the record here, but you're also adding to the library of your written work.

So the question is: "Who owns the comment?"

I gave it some thought, before reading Daniel's essay -- and I decided that it's a mutual thing. I own the collection of comments on my blog, and you own the comments you've placed on my blog and all others. I should be able to back up a complete set of comments on my blog, and also back up a copy of all comments I've placed on all blogs.

Technically it's not easy or even possible in most contexts, but with Disqus it certainly is.

Then I read Daniel's piece and found that he more or less came to the same conclusion.

Breaking news: There are crazy people on the Internet

Mon, 09 Jun 2008 17:50:21 GMT

I loved the headline on this Salon piece so much I had to retweet it. And I'd add -- this article explains why the only people who pay attention to right-wing bloggers these days are other right-wing bloggers. In 2004 they beat Kerry by being the crabby bastard idiots of the Internet. Time for a new schtick, we figured that one out.

Not live-blogging the SteveNote

Mon, 09 Jun 2008 16:33:30 GMT

I'm probably the only one who isn't.

And I'm probably going to have to buy a new iPhone later today, I have no idea.

In the meantime it's really upsetting watching all the geek journos scrambling for scraps.

Which raises a simple question.

1. Why don't they broadcast Apple keynotes on MSNBC or CNN? All this makeshift jury-rigged michegas. It was cute for a while, but this has been going on for 25 years!

Of course someone must be live-screening it via Qik or somesuch. If you know of any please post a comment here.

Yahoo Live has over 2700 viewers. The quality sucks.

I'm watching another one that so far has pretty good quality, so sorry I'm not going to advertise a link. :-(

No I'm not going to pay-per-view for an infomercial! Geez Louise. What is it about Apple that inspires such insipid submission.

Blow up the Beltway

Sun, 08 Jun 2008 18:24:02 GMT

In US politics they talk about Inside The Beltway the same way the tech industry talks about Silicon Valley.

Now, people may question whether Barack Obama really wants to connect with the power of the whole nation, or if once he gets elected he'll be an Inside The Beltway guy. I don't know if he will or he won't. I'm old enough to know that it's an important question, because I've seen bright young idealistic people get taken over by the systems they proposed to dismantle. But I also believe that it's the nature of the times to decentralize, so if Obama has the guts, and there's every reason to believe he does, it should actually work, imho.

Frank Rich, in his column in today's NY Times, explains that, on Tuesday night, Hillary Clinton and John McCain gave the same speech. Clinton's was better rehearsed, it's the same one she's been giving for months, the "fairy tale" speech that Bill Clinton gave in New Hampshire. The "angels will sing" speech she gave in Ohio and the "shame on you Barack Obama" speech in Pennsylvania. Someone taught McCain how to laugh, but it's falling apart like a Botox injection, turning into something else, something nasty. Both of them were echoing the same sentiment as the president from the previous century when he ached out loud -- "Give me a break."

People who saw the Internet as a fund-raising phenomenon after the Dean campaign were missing the point, as we said over and over, and I think at first Obama missed it too -- but he has a young, flexible and ambitious mind. When Clinton said in one of the debates that he must not only denounce Lewis Farrakhan, he must also reject him, you could see his eyes light up (at 5:52 in the video) -- Okay cooool, he said "I reject him!" So when the Internet proved it could deliver minds and bodies in addition to dollars and cents, who was Young Obama to argue?

This is the kind of flexibility you rarely see in anyone, esp in someone as young as Obama. Always look for ways to submit, to surrender. Decide what's important to you and give up on everything else. Who cares what word you want to use -- you want me to reject, then I reject!

Only Steal From The Best.

(Fired up! Ready to go!)

Obama will go to Iraq as Lindsey Graham and Joe Lieberman demand, but he will also go to Europe and we'll get to see, on TV, how Obama plays overseas. This will hopefully get him more votes at home, as people here yearn to be part of the rest of the world, not just push it around. There will be Barack portraits hanging in barber shops in Milwaukee, Birmingham and Bozeman, as well as Tokyo and Buenos Aires, perhaps even Cairo and Jakarta.

But back to my point. As much as I believe in the idea of Obama, if he doesn't live up to it, I'll still believe in the idea, because I always have. I don't want to be an insider, I don't want the insiders to rule, I don't want there to be insiders at all. I want to distribute opportunity and acknowledge intelligence and goodness where ever it appears. I fought against the centralized Inside The Beltway way of doing things in Silicon Valley, and we won. Of course a new aristocracy pops up but their power is as thin as the people whose power got popped in every bubble that came before.

The Internet destabilizes every hierarchy it contacts. It erases every barrier to entry. The only way to win is to point off-site, in every way you can think of. Win by offering better value, not by locking users in. People will become instant refugees to escape your clutches. Think you're immune? Think again.

Update: Papa Doc approves.

Update: Cross-posted at Huffington.

Update: Micah Sifry and Patrick Ruffini agree Obama's use of the Internet deserves more attention.

Signs of life at Twitter

Sun, 08 Jun 2008 23:37:54 GMT

It's great to see Twitter preparing for the onslaught of traffic that's certain to come with tomorrow's Apple event in San Francisco. Update: Something interesting is going on between Twitter and Summize re the WWDC tomorrow.

McCain gets a free ride?

Sun, 08 Jun 2008 23:16:25 GMT

I was just talking with Nicco about next steps with NewsJunk and the conversation turned to a piece that ran today in the Daily Mail in the U.K. about John McCain's first wife.

It appeared on NewsJunk earlier today and it's been one of the most popular clicks, but there's been nothing about it in the American press.

http://x.newsjunk.com/E0

I'll likely catch hell for promoting the piece cause it's kind of smutty, not a very high-road thing, but then McCain is running for President and there is a legit issue -- if Rev Wright was such an important story, because it raised questions about the judgment of a leading candidate, why isn't this story, which does the same thing for McCain, creating waves here in the U.S.?

IRC for Hillary Exit Speech

Sat, 07 Jun 2008 15:56:10 GMT

Are you watching Hillary's speech this morning?

irc://irc.freenode.net/#exitHillary

Come join the IRC channel!

Plan B

Fri, 06 Jun 2008 20:15:26 GMT

On May 22, I wrote: "I must have a Plan B, because I intend to build a business that depends on this service."

I was referring to Twitter, and the business is NewsJunk.com.

Rafe Needleman takes it a step further, suggesting today that Twitter shut down completely until it's ready to provide reliable service.

He talks about what we're all seeing, the upward momentum is gone, the new idea every 24 hours that so inspired us is a distant memory. Now we're going the other way. When I log onto Twitter these days, it's empty, quiet, a ghost town.

People wondered what would replace it. It's becoming clear the answer to that is the worst possible one -- nothing. The energy of Twitter is evaporating. Which is terrible, because it replaced decentralized systems built around our blogs, which are now quiet, they sleep with Twitter. It was a bad deal.

The lesson we keep learning, over and over, is that centralized systems don't work. If they get wildly popular as Twitter did, they break, as Twitter did.

FriendFeed is not Plan B, however it has turned into the place where people congregate to discuss the need for a Plan B.

Meanwhile the culture of Silicon Valley prevents people from saying anything negative about their friends. It prevents people who could take first steps toward routing around the outage to route around it. Where are the architects with guts? I don't think they use Twitter.

I've proposed in a back-channel that Twitter (the company) reconceive itself as a directory, patterened after Network Solutions, that facilitates a federation of Twitter competitors, so lots of different approaches can be tried out. I still think this is the only workable way to bootstrap a much bigger more robust network.

Is Microsoft reinventing upstreaming?

Fri, 06 Jun 2008 14:40:41 GMT

Amyloo thinks so.

It's ironic, and a shame, that this didn't happen much sooner.

Upstreaming was built on XML-RPC, a technology we co-developed with Microsoft in the late 90s.

Did HRC lose to sexism?

Fri, 06 Jun 2008 06:31:10 GMT

This question will be asked for years to come, no doubt.

I don't have any deep insights to offer, at least not at this time, but I do have a superficial one.

Yesterday I saw an interview with a woman who said it was sexism, and offered an example. Why is it she asked, that we referred to her as Hillary and referred to the others as Obama, McCain, Romney, etc.

She said that was an indication of sexism.

Maybe so, but I can offer two explanations that have nothing to do with sexism.

1. She was called Hillary because "Clinton" would be confusing. There are two Clintons, one is a former President, and until recently Clinton would refer to Bill Clinton not Hillary Clinton. Now, I think she's established herself as an equal to her ex-President husband, so maybe next she time runs we'll call her Clinton. I've been trying to do that in my writing, actually.

2. But there's an even more convincing reason. She calls herself Hillary. Look at the signage for her campaign. The ads, the banners, the buttons. They all say Hillary, not Clinton. I noticed this in the same segment, they had a campaign rally and there was a sea of Hillary. My guess is that they made a marketing decision, that reason #1 above dictated the brand being Hillary and not Clinton.

I don't want to be a sexist so I'll try to refer to her as HRC. I want to be properly respectful. Though I supported Obama and still do. And I chose him, initially, over HRC, because I thought she and her husband were appealing to racism, even being racist themselves. I will never go for that, as much as I would have chosen her over Obama if I thought he was appealing to sexism.

NewsJunk.com update

Thu, 05 Jun 2008 20:16:16 GMT

What a week!

I've been having the time of my life this week, writing code and watching the political news fly by. So much to think about and ponder, and with the new tools, I have the best seat on the Interweb. Which I am happy to share with everyone else.

http://newsjunk.com/

Several developments in the last few days to report.

1. There's now a Top-25 list of most clicked on stories.

http://newsjunk.com/counts.html

The community is still very small, but it's big enough so you can see some interests develop. Crafting a good headline is definitely good for flow. (The list is rebuilt every 10 minutes, stories fall off the list after 24 hours.)

2. We've now got a bunch of podcast feeds in the rotation. On Sunday morning we'll have the three political news shows, Meet the Press, Face the Nation and This Week. On Fridays, On the Media. When they cover political topics, Fresh Air. Same with Bill Moyers.

3. The podcasts flow through all the channels, the RSS feed has enclosures, the Twitter feed points to the MP3s as does the FriendFeed.

4. The editorial system will soon have an API so content sites can directly notify NewsJunk of hot stories. Some sites will flow directly onto the home page. If you work at one of the top political sites and would like to coordinate, please send an email. It'll work much like weblogs.com pinging in 1999.

5. I have many feature requests for the feeds of the various news sites. Some are perfect, like Salon, Slate, the NY Times. Others are so broken as to be useless. Many are inbetween.

Where does all this go? It seems to me we're defining a new kind of news site that makes sense in the context of 2008. When we started talking about it, a couple of years ago, it was an Open Campaign Briefing Book, patterned after the physical books they published every day at Dean for America where Nicco worked. But it's advancing beyond that. I'm not aware of any campaigns using our resource yet, but please let me know if you know of any.

I want to add a commenting system, but I'm not sure at what level to do it. With the simplicity of Disqus, we could easily add it at a variety of levels. I'm thinking of opening a comment thread for every day. Thinking before doing anything.

My first 'Get A Clue' post for Obama

Thu, 05 Jun 2008 21:12:24 GMT

Dear Mr. Obama,

I applied for credentials to the Democratic Convention and was turned down.

Okay, I can accept rejection -- have a great party, I'll watch it on TV.

But could you ask your people at the Democratic Party to stop sending me press releases about things that are happening there. It's so tacky. I can't come cause you said no. There's no point rubbing it in.

Thanks in advance.

Dave

New York is Hillary Country

Wed, 04 Jun 2008 20:17:22 GMT

When I arrived NY in mid-May, I asked the cab driver, a black man, who he voted for in the primary. He said Hillary. Of course, I thought. He said everyone in NY likes Hillary.

When I bought the NY Times today, thinking it would be a MEN WALK ON MOON type historic banner headline, I should have known they would play down the history of it, and play up the Hillary of it.

Click on the pic above to get the full extent of the Times' (lack of) historic perspective.

PS: The Chicago Tribune sees the history.

Yahoo Address Book API

Wed, 04 Jun 2008 16:49:18 GMT

This looks interesting, making a note here because I want to come back to this.

Is anyone building on it? If so, how's it going?

Why gas is so expensive

Wed, 04 Jun 2008 13:09:47 GMT

We're sending all the dollars we can print to China.

What do you think they buy with the dollars?

1. Cars.

2. Highways.

3. Gasoline.

4. Inflation (for us).

BTW, the Chinese "still live in an $80 per barrel oil environment," (thanks to government subsidies).

PS: This was inspired by a thread started by Steve Rubel on FriendFeed.

The Jackie Robinson of Politics

Wed, 04 Jun 2008 03:39:39 GMT

It's hard for a man to compete against a woman. You can see it in the speech that Obama gave tonight, he went right at McCain, in a way he never could have against Hillary Clinton, even though she was incredibly tough on him during the primary campaign.

Political competition between men and women is like everything else between men and women. We defer to women, we are protective of women, and we won't stand for a man attacking a woman, even symbolically. And like everything else in gender relations, the women have better PR, men almost never speak for their gender (I do, but it's rare). It's now finally become a matter for the highest level of political competition, and it's so taboo, you'll see that I will likely be attacked for stating an opinion. I've withheld it this long because I didn't want it to be tied up in the competition between Obama and Clinton, now it's clear that is over (one can hope) and we can see clearly the difference between it and the upcoming one between two men. The two contests will be very different, I think anyone can see that.

Oddly, the awkwardness of compeittion betw men and women disadvantages both, the woman is seen as not being serious, and the man is seen as being weak. Obviously because the man is not taking the woman seriously (by withholding serious competition) and the man is being weak.

Obama will continue to defer to Clinton, they'll maintain the traditional gender roles, but we'll forgive him if he doesn't pay her much attention from this point on. He has a battle to fight, one which more and more of us will want him to win, I predict.

Obama was the perfect candidate to compete with a woman for President, for the same reasons he's a perfect black candidate. His anger is supressed, the same way it was for Jackie Robinson. Obama is the Jackie Robinson of politics. In the same way the first black major leage player had to soak up everyone's rage and express none of his own, no one votes for an angry black man,, at least not yet (we will eventually) and anger expressed by a man for a woman is not tolerated either.

Put a note aside until the next Presidential election where there's a serious woman canddiate, hopefully a visionary woman who understands this issue, and can communicate about it the way Obama was able to communicate about race. Let's create a level playing field, let's not tolerate sexism, in either direction -- and let both candidates be fully competitive. When a husband protests that his wife isn't being well-respected, as Bill Clinton did in this election, let's ask him to stand aside and let his wife fight her own battles. And let's not require one candidate to send flowers to the other, competitors only have to be gracious in defeat or victory, not while the fight is ongoing.

BTW, I have MP3s of each of the three candidates' speeches tonight. Unfortunately the McCain speech was interrupted when the polls closed in South Dakota, putting Obama over the top for the Democratic nomination. All the networks interrupted McCain.

1. McCain's speech.

2. Clinton's speech.

3. Obama's speech.

It's all happening right now

Tue, 03 Jun 2008 16:45:30 GMT

Superdelegates are announcing for Obama.

http://newsjunk.com/

Calif Senator Diane Feinstein says it's time for Clinton to quit. (She's a Clinton supporter.)

AP has a story saying she will do that, but it's being denied by Clinton officials.

I know this sounds like an ad, but it's all there on NewsJunk this morning. I'm watching it unfold as I'm improving the code.

Marc Ambinder: "One very senior Democrat who has not endorsed Obama advises the Clinton campaign to divert the campaign's charter from New York to Minnesota today, to join Sen. Obama on stage."

AP calls it for Obama. "The first black candidate ever to lead his party into a fall campaign for the White House."

Brief editorial.

Bill Clinton's Macaca Moment

Tue, 03 Jun 2008 12:06:08 GMT

Yesterday during the rush of news and the initial rollout of NewsJunk.com a story flew by that Bill Clinton had said some pretty nasty things about Todd Perdum, the author of a Vanity Fair slam piece about him.

This morning, I heard for the first time that:

1. There's audio of his remarks.

2. It was recorded on a rope line after a Bill Clinton campaign event.

3. They didn't allow reporters on the rope lines, to avoid BC getting quoted saying the kind of thing he was quoted saying yesterday (apparently he talks candidly with people on rope lines).

4. The person who recorded his comments was the same person who recorded Barack Obama's controversial comments about poor people in Pennsylvania, a person they identified as a "citizen journalist."

Now, I hope to get the audio (got it, it's part of the Huffington Post report, below), and I found the reporter's name, Mayhill Fowler, but I had to search for it. In the report this morning on MSNBC, they didn't identify her. I kept waiting for them to say her name, but they never did. I think it's not only disrespectful, it's unethical to cite a source without identifying it, unless there was a prior agreement that the source was off the record. As you can see from the report, the reporter clearly wants credit.

In the next segment Katrina vanden Heuvel, editor of The Nation, argued with passion that HRC lost, at least in part, because of sexism. I thought this was an incredible contrast. Where is the respect? Just because someone isn't a credentialed member of the press corps, she must remain nameless? Why didn't KVH tune into this (Fowler is a woman, in addition to being an amateur reporter).

Mayhill Fowler's report on Huffington.

They talked earlier, on the Morning Joe show, how Bill Clinton is old school and hasn't learned how things have changed since his last campaign in 1996. KVH asked if everyone remembered Macaca? I do, of course, it's how Jim Webb came to be the Senator from Virginia. Did we ever hear the name of the reporter who videotaped it? I don't recall that I ever did. He not only shot the video, but he was the focus of the story, he was the one who George Allen called Macaca.

This should be a lesson to all handlers and would-be political leaders. You're basically always on the record, unless you're talking with one or two people who have agreed in advance that you're not, and even then you have to be careful. I've learned this in the blogosphere, it's why industry parties are uncomfortable for me. I don't think of myself as a public figure, but every conversation is subject to reporting. I've even had conversations with people who were, without disclosing it, streaming video and audio of it, live to viewers on the net. It first happened when I visited the office of a competitor in the late 90s, believe it or not.

I don't like it, but this is the world we live in. But parts of it I do like. I think we should get behind the facade presented by the comfortable relationship betw Washington reporters and the political leaders they cover. There's too much control of the political process by the press, and that's too easily manipulated by the candidates. We'll see that play out in the fall as two favorites of the press, Obama and McCain, compete.

Update: A report on the MSNBC's website by Mark Murray begins: "The same Huffington Post reporter who broke the Obama 'bitter' story got a new scoop yesterday..." Mayhill Fowler's name does not appear in the 8-paragraph report, though they take a swipe at her ethics ("she didn't identify herself as a reporter and said she disliked the article when asking for his reaction").

Update: Cross-posted at Huffington.

NewsJunk.com

Mon, 02 Jun 2008 19:42:56 GMT

My next big project is NewsJunk.com.

The name comes from the people it is designed to serve, news junkies.

So we've gone beyond mere users, now we're making tools for serious users.

This is turning out to be a broad project that will involve lots of people, and I will have much more to write about it over the coming weeks. But the news is happening so fast now, and we're bringing tools on as fast as we can, so I'll have to wait for the philosophy.

For now there are five main ways to consume the flow:

1. Refresh the home page periodically.

2. Subscribe to the RSS feed.

3. Follow it on Twitter.

4. Befriend it on FriendFeed.

5. Watch for developments on the weblog.

There will be more ways, for sure, soooon!

Still diggin!

Update: Nicco's post on NewsJunk.

Owen Thomas speaks in Berkeley

Mon, 02 Jun 2008 19:21:57 GMT

Just got an email from Sylvia...

Why does Silicon Valley need its own gossip rag? Come find out Wednesday, June 18, from noon to 1:30 at the Berkeley Rep on Addison between Shattuck and Milvia in Berkeley. It's $12 at the door for a delicious meal and a chance to hear Valleywag editor in chief and founder Owen Thomas dish it out on the dubiously fact-checked doings of our digerati. Thomas will be taking questions, so feel free to ask away.

RSVP to whoisylvia at aol dot com.