Scripting News

What is whoisi.com?

Thu, 26 Jun 2008 22:46:47 GMT

This site showed up in my referrer logs.

http://whoisi.com/p/216

http://whoisi.com/p/755

Not sure what to make of it. Looks quite interesting.

I hadn't heard of it till today, but I see it's being discussed on Twitter.

Here are some other people...

http://whoisi.com/p/459

I think I get it -- it's a wiki-like FriendFeed?

http://whoisi.com/p/683

http://whoisi.com/p/141

The opportunities for abuse abound (but there are obvious ways to fix things, if you claim your own person, and correct the links). It's very clever. Why didn't I think of it??

One of the things I love about it is that it does the right thing with RSS descriptions. Bravo!!

"cheesecake"

Some things shouldn't be joked about

Thu, 26 Jun 2008 22:32:03 GMT

It's been suggested that McCain made a good choice in hiring a comedian to write about Barack Obama for their campaign webiste. I humbly disagree.

There are some things that you shouldn't joke about. For example, tech support. How would you feel if your server had crashed and it turns out your ISP was playing a joke on you. Come on lighten up! Read the Cluetrain.

Or suppose your doctor was playing a joke on you when you went in for your prostate exam and hid a little treasure for you to find. Relax! It's a joke!

Presidents have buttons that launch missles that destroy the world. Their power is even greater than doctors and tech support people. It's better if they stick to telling us what they think without misdirection. Imho.

Good news or bad?

Thu, 26 Jun 2008 20:25:07 GMT

I just signed on to Twitter and there were two status messages waiting for me and that was it. The entire Twitterverse had shrunk down to Charlene Li and Josh Bancroft. This is a new idea. An interesting plot for a science fiction movie? Or a sad comment on the times? I hope they like each other? Maybe one is a Republican and the other is a Democrat? I wonder what their offspring would look like?

John McCain's RSS feed

Thu, 26 Jun 2008 19:40:39 GMT

I forget how I stumbled across John McCain's RSS feed, but I've been reading it regularly for some time. Occasionally they have a post written in the candidate's name, but usually the stories are written by staffers.

I was hoping, when I found it, that I could learn more about the candidate, but mostly they use the feed to take shots at Barack Obama. A lot of it is very embarassing stuff, not for Obama, but for McCain. How could a candidate of his stoop to sarcasm bordering on bitterness. It sounds terrible, like they've already lost, know it, and all they have left to support their candidate is -- what? Do they think that undecided voters would be swayed by snark?

I'd like to see them use the feed to comment on current events, as they sometimes do. For example, today the Supreme Court released its first interpretation of the 2nd Amendment. No matter how you look at it, this is historic. It's not quite as big as overturning Roe v Wade, but it's in the ballpark. McCain ran a piece about the news that stated their position, and contrasted it to (their interpretation of) Obama's, without insulting the reader's intelligence. It was published in the candidate's name. Good use of the feed.

Later in the day they published a hard to parse piece that starts out as a criticism of Karl Rove and then attempts to defend Obama for rewriting the Declaration of Independence! And at first I thought they were serious in their denunciation of Rove, which would, imho, be a very smart thing politically. But that wasn't their point, at all. I don't think Obama has said anything about the Declaration, I guess this was a weak attempt at humor? If so, it didn't work. Screen shot. This piece was written by Michael Goldfarb. Not sure who he is.

I guess my message to McCain is this --> being President is serious stuff, and if you don't take it seriously, how could you expect anyone to support you?

BTW, the same criticism goes to Daily Kos and Redstate, two highly partisan blogs at opposite ends of the spectrum. I hardly ever refer people to either blog, because they always take cheap shots along with stating their interpretation of current events. But they're just blogs, two of many. McCain is just one of two major party candidates for President. There's a big difference.

PS: If anyone knows of an equivalent Obama feed, please let me know!

Silicon Valley as second grade

Thu, 26 Jun 2008 15:50:42 GMT

Posting a link to Shel Israel's piece here yesterday accelerated the discussion, of course. Most of the discussion that I've participated in has been on FriendFeed. I also talked for about 45 minutes last night with Mike Arrington. It was a surprisingly friendly conversation, I had forgotten how much I like and respect him. After sleeping on it, I've had a chance to distill my own thinking. Here's some of it.

First, when I became aware of how the videos were hurting Shel, I stopped watching. All I could think about is how mean this community had become. Most people had never heard of Shel before, he's not really a celebrity. That was until these people decided to make an example of him, and turned his name into a bad joke, which became more well known than the real person. Shel is far from rich, and this isn't just hurting him financially, it's breaking him, though he's too proud to say so.

Now they've gone after me too, but it's not so easy to hurt me. I've been trashed plenty, and I think most people whose opinions I care about know that I am not what they say I am, which can be pretty awful stuff.

As Duncan Riley said, one of the few bloggers who has been willing to come to Shel's defense publicly: "If I was Shel, I wouldn't be coping at all, in fact I'd probably fall to complete pieces." True. It's enough to wither your spirit. Not the satire itself, but the people who say they're friends who don't offer support. That's what really hurts. That's one of the things I tried to convey to Mike last night. I offer the same to several other people I'd like to call friends again.

When a friend is in trouble and asks for help, you don't turn your back. In fact, I'd go so far as to say that when a stranger is in trouble and asks for help you don't turn your back.

Satire that's based on hurting people stops being funny to most people pretty quickly. People who support it really need to stop and think how they're contributing to other people's misery, and whether it's still fun after realizing that. I believe that most people are good at their core, and when they give it some thought, will help us turn this corner and get to the next level. We've sunk really really low. Time to pull ourselves out.

PS: If you think writing this was easy, think again.

PPS: The First Amendment says you have the right to say (almost) whatever you want. But it doesn't say anyone has to listen.

California weather

Thu, 26 Jun 2008 03:10:47 GMT

Just a few days ago we were sweltering with near-100 degree heat, and today, it's so cold out we have the furnace on. I'll take the cold weather any day, but it would be nice to settle into a summer weather pattern at some point.

Arrington, Feldman & Israel

Thu, 26 Jun 2008 00:35:56 GMT

I'm forwarding this link to my readers, without comment, at this time. Please read it and give it your consideration.

Shel Israel: About Loren Feldman & Michael Arrington.

Thanks, Dave

Can Twitter become ubiquitous?

Tue, 24 Jun 2008 20:42:15 GMT

First today's news: Twitter announced investments from Spark and Bezos. Bijan Sabet will become a Twitter board member. They haven't announced a business model, their approach is to get big and stable and figure it out later. Unlike some, I don't see any problem with this approach. Lots of companies have made their investors very happy (and users) with such an approach.

Disclaimer: I have two friends on Twitter's board -- Sabet and Fred Wilson. Yet, I say exactly what I think about the company, as a user and a developer. I don't think Bijan or Fred would have it any other way.

Mike Arrington: "If they can get the platform stable, I believe they will eventually become as ubiquitous as email, instant messaging, sms and other forms of communication."

This is an interesting idea that deserves serious discussion.

I agree that Twitter is that useful that it could become as ubuiquitous and valuable as email, IM and SMS. However, they have to become a fully open platform before that can happen. I don't believe it will become ubiquitous in its current form. The platform owner has too much power. And there are disturbing indications that it may take more power. The fact that they can do this unilaterally is the big limit on Twitter's growth. It will be hard for investors to risk on new ideas that build on Twitter knowing that the company can foreclose on them at any time.

6/21/08: "I was forwarded an email yesterday posted by a Twitter employee to their developer mailing list that suggests that once Twitter is healthy the terms will change, requiring developers to get a license from the company to use data that previously was available without a license. This is exactly what developers hate, because Twitter gets to decide how much competition they want, they can reserve markets for themselves, even ones they're not serving. No one should have this power, it's not a healthy situation for anyone, not even Twitter, imho. Can't help but think they're killing the goose that laid the golden egg here. Also feels a bit screwy that we helped them build their network, for free (isn't it funny people only look at how they give stuff away) -- only to find that now they want to take back what was open about it."

It's actually worse than I said on Saturday. They can decide retroactively to take over markets that were once the province of developers. Now, that can't happen in email or IM -- there's no single vendor that has the power to destroy businesses without even launching a product. At this stage in the market development, that's too much power. Bijan and Fred, ask yourselves what guarantee you'd need from Twitter to feel comfortable investing in its aftermarket. I don't think you'd settle for anything less than complete freedom, upfront, before you invest a dime.

Getting NewsJunk through IM

Tue, 24 Jun 2008 18:37:46 GMT

I haven't tried it, but this comes recommended...

http://www.imfeeds.com/

Since there's a NewsJunk RSS feed, it should work.

I'm going to try it now. Please let me know if it works for you.

Update #1: It was pretty easy to join.

Update #2: I signed up to follow the NewsJunk RSS feed. It took a while but a new item showed up. And like FriendFeed, they ignore the RSS <description> element, which is a mistake, I think. Here's a screen shot.

Okay, there was a short description that went with that item. Why not push it down the line?

How to push stories to NewsJunk using del.icio.us

Tue, 24 Jun 2008 16:42:56 GMT

Underneath its simple user interface there's a lot of RSS that goes into NewsJunk. It's like flour to cake or ice to hockey. The product is more than RSS, but without it, it wouldn't be happening.

As you know I've been re-exploring del.icio.us, yesterday I asked if it could do what FriendFeed does, keep a feed synched with its internal structure, and found out that the only way to do this was to write a script. I decided not to do that, at this time, but I did write a script that made our FriendFeed support much better. It wasn't refreshing often enough, only once an hour, which makes the news not-so-fresh. And it bothered me that even though FF can display longish bits of text, more than Twitter, the descriptions in RSS feeds were ignored. Well, if you use the FriendFeed API, you can get around both of these problems. It took a couple of hours to connect NewsJunk to FF through their API, and it's really nice. Highly recommended.

Another dividend of this exploration is that I hooked up my inbound del.icio.us links feed to NewsJunk so there's a way for anyone, through del.icio.us, to add a story to the input flow, just send a link to "for/scripting".

However, there's no guarantee that it will appear in the output flow, we're a very focused site, our only interest is US national politics. We're willing to wander off-topic for a moment or two, for example when George Carlin died on Sunday, that story was added to the flow. When OPEC meets to talk about oil prices, that's grist for our mill, because oil prices are a huge issue in the 2008 election. And when a NASA scientist says that this, now, is the last minute to take drastic action to head off a global warming disaster, we put that in too, because while it isn't a major campaign issue, perhaps it should?

The basic qualification for inclusion is the same as for a blog -- would an informed person want to be aware of this fact or point of view? That's why we run outrageous claims from both sides, because even if you support the candidate they're defaming, you should still know what they're saying about your guy.

Also, the better FriendFeed interface gives us a place to discuss news events. I notice that people are starting to do that, and I think it's great! Use all the tools and learn from them and each other. This is how politics and the Internet move forward, we think we're right on the leading edge, and want to keep pushing.

I may have found Scoble's hook

Tue, 24 Jun 2008 01:30:21 GMT

Heh. I've been wondering when Scoble would discover NewsJunk. I think today I finally baited the hook, dropped the line, and he took the bait. Maybe!

I've been deliberately not trying to get my "friends" in Silicon Valley to write about my new offering because I want to see how well they pick up on things outside their own Beltway. I love these guys, Om, Arrington, Scoble, Gillmor, but I want to earn my flow, not be given it. I think NewsJunk is good enough for them to care about it all on its own, not as some kind of favor to me.

Now here's how I baited Scoble...

I was tuned in to his QikCast of his panel at PDF in NY, and heard him say that Memeorandum was the fastest way to get breaking political news just like Techmeme in the tech blogosphere. I posted a twit, disagreeing, I don't think Memeorandum is good at fast-breaking news, it has a 24-hour cycle, and top stories tend to stick there for the full cycle, keeping other less phenomenal stories that we see quickly in NewsJunk from showing up there at all.

Sometimes they show up 24 hours after they happen! That's just not good enough for news in a political year. That's why we started NewsJunk -- to scratch the itch that Nicco and I (and many others) had. We tried to imagine the news system that Chuck Todd deserved, or Joe Trippi, David Axelrod, Josh Marshall or even Barack Obama himself. (McCain, only being "aware" of the Internet is not in a position to use it).

The theory being that if it's good enough for a pro, it would also be good enough for a schmuck like me.

And Nicco is a pro. Not in Silicon Valley but inside the Beltway. And he's my buddy, and a programmer (he led the tech team at Dean For America in 2004).

So I hope it also works for Scoble.

Remember Scoble? That's who this story is about.

Scoble said to me he gets most of his news from Summize and FriendFeed.

Bing!

Now you gotta know that we designed NewsJunk in the post-Twitter world, and we use this stuff, seriously, so of course you can get NewsJunk in FriendFeed.

http://friendfeed.com/newsjunk

And what do you think Summize summizes? Twitter!

We supported Twitter on Day One.

We got you covered Scoble old dude!

"cheesecake"

del.icio.us question

Mon, 23 Jun 2008 17:36:49 GMT

I've started to use del.icio.us recently, as part of the editorial flow for NewsJunk, and it's making me think of ways of integrating the two.

Now, I understand how I can get an RSS feed out of del.icio.us, the question is -- how do I get one in?

I want all the stories that show up in the NewsJunk feed to become one of my bookmarks on del.icio.us, much as they flow through to FriendFeed.

Is there a way to do this?

Update: From the comments it's very clear they don't have the feature. I'm not going to write a script, it was only of passing interest, in no way is it mission critical. The functionality is already in FriendFeed. I just thought there might be an easy way to provide NewJunk headlines to people through del.icio.us. Thanks for all the great advice!

Rethinking the conference

Sun, 22 Jun 2008 16:30:35 GMT

"Why are you going to that conference?" asks Jack.

"Just to hang out with the people," says Jill.

It's a cliche and nothing new. As long as I've been going to conferences, almost 30 years, that's what people say, and do. Everyone's in the room for the first few speeches and panels, but their eyes are fixed on their laptops. And after an hour or so, most of the people are out in the hallway.

So, when I was designing my own conference in 2003, I decided to do something different -- I moved the conference out of the hallway and into the meeting room. Or you can think of it the other way around. I tried to imagine what a conference would be like if you held it in the hallway.

We reserved a suite of five classrooms and recruited Discussion Leaders (DLs), and tried to explain the format on the phone. I asked the DLs to think of the entire room as a panel. Two of them, well-intentioned, had recruited a few people they knew and asked them to come to the front. I rotated between the rooms, when I saw this, I asked the people in the front to take seats in the body. I made the DL stand in front, and lead the discussion. I remember the instant Jeff Jarvis, for example, understood what I was looking for -- he ran with it, as far as I could tell everyone had a grand time (Jarvis is a fantastic DL). By the time the day was over, the format had been worked out, and get this -- the hallways were empty! The conversations that used to happen in the hallway were now happening in the conference.

There's so much to say about this. And at one time or another I think I've said it all, as have others. Why people continue to have the old kind of conference where the room empties out and the "good stuff" happens in the hallway is a mystery to me.

So why does it work?

Well, for one thing, the DL is encouraged to call on people. So you have to stay on your toes.

The lights stay on.

No Powerpoints.

And you'd be surprised to find out that some people you've never heard of actually have something to say. You get to meet new people this way. That's one of the reasons people go to conferences, no? Also there are people who conference promoters avoid because they upset sponsors. Why should you or I care about that? Wouldn't you like to hear what they think? (Maybe we should just have a conference with only people who sponsors don't like. Heh.)

When doesn't it work?

If people in the "audience" feel they have a right to speak, to drone on and on, like a person on one of the old-style panels. No one has that right, the DL is fully empowered to pick the speakers, in real time, even interrupt people, cut them off, take the discussion in completely new directions. This often rubs people the wrong way, but it has to work this way, otherwise the discussion repeats in loops and gets caught in one of several traps that all open unstructured discussions die in. (The classic -- "How do I make money doing this?" as if the only things worth doing are ones that you make money. We often choose to do things that cost money -- going out to eat, buying a present for someone you like, filling up the gas tank, paying the mortgage, going to a conference, paying taxes, paying lawyers.)

It takes a lot of perseverance to make this new kind of conference work, but it's worth doing. You can really solve problems this way. At the upcoming PDF conference in NY (starts tomorrow) they could have a DL-based session about the issues raised in the recent AP fracas. Or what becomes of campaign finance reform. What to do if Bush attacks Iran before he leaves office. These are just a few juicy political discussions that people might have opinions about.

The assumption behind this approach, which used to be called "unconference" before the name was usurped by a very different kind of conference, is that the eloquence and intelligence in the room are distributed not concentrated. People who usually speak at these things are not the only ones with something to say. If you want people to be bored and frustrated, put them in a seat in a dark auditorium and force them to listen to five people drone on about how they are great, have it tough, how the hard problems can't be solved but we have to solve them anyway, or god knows what they're talking about sometimes. As Marc Canter used to say "When you turn the lights out, someone just fell asleep."

I think conferences can be places where people wake up instead of falling asleep. I've seen it happen. I hope we can do some more of these, I hope someday they become the norm in conferences.

Update: No lining up behind a mike waiting for your turn to speak, when it's your turn, the mike comes to you. When people line up they expect to speak in the order they're lined up in, and that ruins the whole thing. They also write speeches in their head while they're waiting, get nervous, and you end up with the same kind of BS you get in panel discussions

Julia Allison: "Discussions are how I learn best."

Dancers in the park

Sat, 21 Jun 2008 23:21:49 GMT

Morning coffee notes

Sat, 21 Jun 2008 15:22:16 GMT

It's going to be another scorcher here in Berkeley and the rest of the Bay Area. You can just feel it. Everything is still hot from yesterday, no time for things to cool off, and while the low humidity means that the outside temp is in the 60s, as soon as the sun rises it's going to get hot again. No buffer.

BTW, to people from Austin and Florida, even the northeast, who say this is nothing, they deal with much worse -- you have air conditioning. Almost no one does in the Bay Area. So when it gets hot, it just gets hot. Indoors and out.

Yesterday the AP-blogger crisis ended. I still think the blogosphere over-reacted, I don't think there was ever a chance that the AP would pursue the case, but it's right to be concerned that it's not over yet. It seems the AP wants to protect their headline and lead paragraphs (why do they call it "lede" -- makes no sense to me). If you take a step back and think of them instead of you for a moment (hard to do, I know) -- this is the most expensive copy they have, the most crafted. As a writer myself (Jay Rosen says so) I respect the quality of writing in heds and ledes. As a blogger and a user of sites that aggregate them, though, I see the other side.

It also seems that fair use is on their side, btw. The headline and lead paragraph summarize what's in the body of the article. If you're reacting to the whole article then just link to it, as I link to Saul Hansell's article in the previous paragraph. On the other hand, in most cases the pubs want you to link to their article enough to give up a bit of their rights. It's like companies don't object if you publish their commercials on YouTube, the more exposure the better. But the AP is a bit of an albatross, they make nothing on flow, they are in the licensing business. So this battle may just be about AP and Reuters, not USA Today and the NY Times, which use a different business model.

What would be great is to have a discussion, even an argument, without the posturing and breast-beating. It's all bluffing, a play for more attention, page-reads, flow, money.

Anyway...

The AP issue is fertile ground for a blogger shitstorm, but there are other issues worth looking at. However if technology is at issue, most users (and most bloggers are users not developers) say "You fix it" -- never stopping to realize that developers have interests too, and my interests might be different from that of a big company or a company that wants to be big. The BigCos take advantage of that confusion. Very often it's the users who get screwed in the process.

I was forwarded an email yesterday posted by a Twitter employee to their developer mailing list that suggests that once Twitter is healthy the terms will change, requiring developers to get a license from the company to use data that previously was available without a license. This is exactly what developers hate, because Twitter gets to decide how much competition they want, they can reserve markets for themselves, even ones they're not serving. No one should have this power, it's not a healthy situation for anyone, not even Twitter, imho. Can't help but think they're killing the goose that laid the golden egg here. Also feels a bit screwy that we helped them build their network, for free (isn't it funny people only look at how they give stuff away) -- only to find that now they want to take back what was open about it.

Twitter lost a lot of momentum with users in the last months. Now is not the time, as the service appears to be coming back on line, to introduce doubt about its future. It has lots of that. We need more certainty.

Newsweek poll results

Fri, 20 Jun 2008 21:26:44 GMT

I don't generally report polls here, but this one is too stunning not to report. The link came to us via Pollster.com, it's currently the top item on NewsJunk, but it hasn't been reported yet on CNN or MSNBC.

The Newsweek numbers: Obama 51%, McCain 36%.

As they say on Newsweek -- he got his bounce.

A note to Obama supporters, of whom I am one, it isn't over until there's an election and that won't happen until November. But this could be the big turning point.

Update from Doc Searls

Sat, 21 Jun 2008 00:41:15 GMT

Doc says he's not being courageous, just fighting for his life in a Boston hospital and blogging the whole thing, trusting the universe that everything's going to work out. Good news, it is! He's sucking ice chips and may get out as soon as Sunday. Keep on truckin big dude.

Heat wave

Fri, 20 Jun 2008 22:26:49 GMT

It's not usually this hot in Berkeley.

Four or five days like this a year. Whew. Hard to stay cool. Not used to this.

DNC plan B -- It worked!

Fri, 20 Jun 2008 00:09:06 GMT

I want to go to the Democratic National Convention in Denver in August -- where they will nominate Barack Obama. It was only four years ago when Obama addressed the blogger's breakfast and we all wondered who is this guy, and then he gave the keynote, a rousing speech that served as the platform for the 2008 campaign (he probably knew exactly what he was doing, even then). Now he's the leader of the party, and I really hope on his way to being the next President of the United States.

So I applied to be a blogger at this instance of the DNC, after having done exactly that at the 2004 convention in Boston. I was turned down. No matter, I bounced back and asked if I could still participate in the convention as press, and guess what -- they said okay. So I'm going to Denver. Yehi!

BTW, I still have conventionbloggers.com. Even though I'm not a blogger, I could still pretend.

Hat's off to Doc

Thu, 19 Jun 2008 19:53:48 GMT

Doc Searls has been fighting to regain his health in a Boston-area hospital. You can read all about it on his blog. I admire his courage in exposing so much of his struggle publicly. I've never been exactly where he is, when I had my one-week hospital stay six years ago (in exactly this period of June) when I got out of surgery I was seriously weak, but already in much better health than I was before the surgery. I was relatively young and fit, so the recovery was more or less a straight line, with few setbacks. As you get older it becomes more of a struggle. If you're not in good shape it's more of a struggle. Eventually, no matter how well you care for yourself, you'll lose the battle, and gravity pulls you into the ground. That's what Doc is fighting. A sequence of events that could kill him. It seems he's gaining. A mutual friend has visited him and says he's going to survive this, but it's not a pretty picture.

I admire that Doc has the courage to document the experience, for everyone. I fought for privacy in 2002, only sharing what was happening with close family and friends. A few readers figured out what hospital I was at and called, I really resented the intrusion. For me the lines between personal and public life are sacred, and never crossed. As a friend of Doc's I appreciate the information, I would much rather be in the loop than guess his condition. But I could certainly understand if he didn't want to share the data with the world, esp if it interfered with his recovery.

He's not the first to document such a struggle, but he is the first of my friends to do it. Bravo Doc, and best wishes for a speedy recovery. Seriously.