Scripting News

One word to describe John McCain?

Sun, 15 Jun 2008 22:50:08 GMT

Pew Research did a survey where they asked people to provide one word to sum up their feelings about John McCain. You can read this Baltimore Sun piece about the survey, but I wanted to invite readers of this weblog to answer the question, and perhaps provide an explanation. My answer follows.

"Disappointment" is my word.

I know it may seem hard to believe, given how much I've campaigned for Barack Obama this year, but there was a time, in 2000, when I almost wanted McCain to be president. I didn't think Gore vs Bush offered meaningful difference (in hindsight I see this was wrong), and I saw McCain and his straight talk as the best hope for a meaningful Presidential election. I saw what happened to him in South Carolina and became more convinced that both parties had nominated the wrong person.

Then, when he supported Bush in 2000 and again in 2004, I stopped believing in his independence. I want to vote for a candidate who, as the CEO of a company is responsible to the shareholders (at least in theory) -- is responsible to American voters and taxpayers. The Republicans didn't have a candidate running this year who fit that bill, although I, and many others, believed the John McCain of Y2K was that candidate.

So, I don't think "old," technically, is the right word -- and if "lost his way" were one word instead of three, I might have said that. My view of McCain is best summed up as "disappointment." At one time he had potential, but he sold it out in favor of cynicism.

I'd also note that my view in 2000 was probably wrong. Now that he's the presumptive Republican nominee, I've learned more about him, and see that his past is checkered with compromise. It seems more likely that in 2000 he had a good sales pitch, and wasn't what he appeared to be.

PS: I wrote a disclaimer on politics in September 2000, which I stand by almost 8 years later.

PPS: The other thing that disappointed me was the end of the last episode of BSG, which aired on Friday. I want more. But this was the last episode before the final run of 10 that might not air until next year. And we still don't know who final Cylon is. Oy.

Who will fill Russert's shoes?

Sat, 14 Jun 2008 20:01:57 GMT

We're sitting around NewsJunk HQ, talking politics and wondering when the discussion is going to turn to the game of musical chairs that must be playing out at NBC.

Think about it this way -- suppose a Presidential candidate died suddenly, can you imagine that the talking heads at CNN, NBC and Fox wouldn't, between heartfelt sympathy for the family, be speculating at who the party would nominate in place of the fallen leader? Would it be Romney or Huckabee, Clinton or Edwards, or maybe someone else entirely?

More than 24 hours after Russert's sudden passing, we haven't yet heard any speculation, so we thought we might as well raise the question and run down some possibilities.

1. Keith Olbermann. Af first we thought he'd be a shoe-in, he's batting cleanup at MSNBC, he's personally responsible for them passing Fox in ratings, but he's not a terrific inteviewer, and is seen as highly partisan. It's possible that he could lead NBC at some time, a few years after the election, but not now.

2. Chuck Todd is the rising young star at NBC News, and would be my personal choice. He's a no-nonsense political reporter, respects the Internet and bloggers. When he comes on everyone listens. But he's probably too young and too new to network news to fill Russert's shoes.

3. David Gregory seems most likely to get the job, he's covered the White House for six years, famously stood up to Scott McClellan, but frankly -- he's boring. Gregory would be a good choice if you think the Republican will win in the fall, but if it's Obama, you want someone bright and young and a little wet behind the ears, like Todd.

4. Andrea Mitchell is the most senior of the reporter-analysts at NBC News, and if Gregory doesn't get it, she probably will.

5. Chris Matthews probably thinks he should get it, but he won't. Same with Morning Joe.

6. Tom Brokaw will certainly fill in on Sunday, and maybe for a couple of weeks while the dust settles at NBC, but he's the emeritus anchor at NBC, and not likely to want to come back into the fray. They'll save him for big interviews and to deliver the obits on NBC.

We're assuming they would promote from within. If not, consider Wolf Blitzer, David Gergen, George Stephanopoulous, Chris Wallace, Anderson Cooper, Gwen Ifil, Bill Moyers, Charlie Rose and my favorite dark horse, Aaron Brown (whose contract with CNN has just expired).

Update: Cross-posted at Huffington.

Caught in Comcast's gears

Thu, 12 Jun 2008 22:06:36 GMT

Another Comcast user is nabbed for using too much of their service (top tenth of one percent). He doesn't use Twitter so he doesn't know how to get a human being in the loop. Hopefully this post will do the job.

They still have Nazis running customer service at Comcast. They really need to take a look at how they treat their customers. One of these days the customers are going to start caring and might even have choices.

Picture of the day

Thu, 12 Jun 2008 18:50:24 GMT

Now remind me, how many trillions have we borrowed to install and prop up the guy on the right?

And what were we told about people who talk to the guy on the left? (And they're doing more than talking, aren't they?)

Ask Bush or Lieberman what they see here.

What's the prize for "winning" in Iraq?

I'd love to hear the story.

It's like a Rorschach test.

Have some fun...

Put a thought balloon over Ahmadinejad's head.

What's he thinking?

MP3 of Olbermann's special comment

Fri, 13 Jun 2008 01:06:55 GMT

Here's an MP3 of Keith Olbermann's special comment tonight to John McCain, re getting out of Iraq.

Top-5 stories on NewsJunk.com

Thu, 12 Jun 2008 19:34:58 GMT

A few random thoughts

Wed, 11 Jun 2008 01:46:10 GMT

1. Wouldn't it be cool if the vetting process for potential VP's were an open process, blogged about by the parties in real-time? Remove indirection from the trial-balloons. And it's not as if the press isn't already doing their own vetting.

2. A user of NewsJunk asked for a mobile version, so we created one. Not much more to say about it other than it works really well on an iPhone, Blackberry, Treo, Nokia, etc. and looks boring on a desktop computer.

3. I have never been so informed about political news as I am now that I am involved in NewsJunk. As with podcasting, which was a success for me because my iPod overflows with interesting podcasts -- Mission Accomplished! It's all gravy from here.

4. NewsJunk seems to fill a void. It's been running for a couple of weeks, and so far no one has sent a pointer that says "Here's a site that does the same thing." Of course now I'll get a dozen, but I doubt if they do.

5. Wonkette wins the prize for most interesting 'lite' story of the day. Turns out that when the First Lady travels, she takes an Airstream trailer with her. And she hangs out in the trailer during flights. They have a picture of the trailer installed in a military transport plane. What's in the trailer? (Update: Interior pictures here.)

6. Before you think ill of her, she did something very gracious yesterday, coming to the defense of Michelle Obama, explaining what she clearly meant, and undermining the meanies who would make an innocent comment into a "cause" for outrage. As I said yesterday, we're onto the M.O. of the crabby right wing bastards. Find a new schtick.

7. An amazing story that almost makes me feel sympathetic for the President, he says to the Times of London that he regrets his legacy as a man who wanted war.

8. Representative Dennis Kucinich proposed 35 articles of impeachment today against President Bush.

9. The Top-25 page continues to do an excellent job of culling interesting stories.

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.