Scripting News

Beautiful autumn day

Thu, 13 Nov 2008 23:12:44 GMT

Some days California is a spectacular place to be!

Online advertising is now dead

Thu, 13 Nov 2008 19:40:20 GMT

I've been saying it for as long as people have been building businesses on advertising on the web, it's not a longterm thing. Now we're at the end of the road.

Assuming the economy comes back from the recession-depression thing that it's in now, when it does, we will have completely moved on from advertising.

The web will still be used for commercial purposes, people will still buy things from Amazon and Amazon-like sites, but they will find information for products as they do now, by searching for it, and finding out what other people think, not by clicking on ads and buying things on the pages they link to.

No one needs advertising, and there are much better ways to sell products.

It's the first thing companies cut when business dries up, and it'll be completely forgotten when the economy comes back. Growth will come from putting your commercial information where people will find it when they're looking and that won't cost anything.

Remember that perfectly targeted advertising is just information.

I'll give you an example.

The other day I broke the carafe on my Cuisinart coffee maker. Looked up the model on Amazon, found the related entry ("people who bought this also bought this") -- and there it is. Click the Buy Now button, whole transaction from breakage of carafe to the order, about 5 minutes. No advertising involved.

When I bought the coffee maker originally I had no idea that Cuisinart even makes one. I was of course aware of the brand, did they advertise to make me aware of it? Not sure, I don't recall ever seeing one, but they probably did run an ad somewhere. That kind of advertising might have a future of some kind. But I chose this brand of coffee maker because people who had one really liked it, and the other brands, their users didn't like them so much. I wanted hot coffee that stayed fresh, and was willing to pay extra for it. I should have known they make fragile carafes and overcharge for replacements, but they got me.

Today's most interesting political story

Thu, 13 Nov 2008 17:48:35 GMT

Washington Post: "For Iran's leaders, the only state of affairs worse than poor relations with the United States may be improved relations."

Let this be a lesson to our hawkish friends. When you growl at your enemies, you might be helping them. If you say "Okay let's talk," all of a sudden it's hard for them to get the support of their people.

Around the world, everyone with Internet access watched our election, and much as we were fixed on it, so were they. The techniques Obama used in North Carolina, Indiana and Missouri will work just as well in Russia, China, Iran, Venezuela and with the citizens of our friends, India, Japan, France and Germany.

That's why leaders of all those countries should be heeding the lessons of the 2008 election here in the US. This was not just a turning point for one country, it was a turning point for politics everywhere.

Conference-going in the 21st century

Thu, 13 Nov 2008 17:01:18 GMT

A friend is at the NewTeeVee conference in San Francisco, and I was thinking about going myself, I'm sure I could sneak in, but decided to stay in Berkeley when Steve Garfield posted a link to the video stream, which I'm watching now.

It's very good quality. And while the conference is going on, I'm doing the same thing I'd do if I was there -- browsing the web, posting items to Twitter and FriendFeed, and listening with about 1/12th of my mind.

It's all the same. Life is good!

Text On Rails

Thu, 13 Nov 2008 03:17:08 GMT

You could fill an outline... with what some people don't grok about outlines!

Via Scott Rosenberg, a post from a guy who loves outlines, worrying about a guy who doesn't.

Truth is this: Outliners don't force you to do anything, and they are the opposite of rigid, and people who say they are, probably have only written outlines on paper and have never used an outliner on a computer.

I know a lot about this -- there probably are just a handful of people on the planet who have invested any effort in convincing people to use outliners, and I'm one of them.

I still use an outliner, I'm using one right now to write this. I never do any serious writing in anything else. The ability to move stuff around with the mouse is very important to me. It frees me from worrying about order because I can edit it. It has the opposite effect of imposing rigidness on my work, it makes it fluid.

After years of selling RSS, I came up with this phrase to explain it -- Automated Web Surfing.

In the same way, after years of talking about outlines, really decades -- this is what I came up with -- Text on Rails.

Why I care what the Republicans do

Thu, 13 Nov 2008 01:37:51 GMT

In technology and government, really everything, I like two-party systems. It keeps everyone on their toes, and keeps the customer front and center (or voter, same thing). That's why I care.

In a comment on an earlier post, a reader asks if the Republicans really deserve to survive or if I have had any Republican heroes. The answer is who cares whether they deserve to survive, that isn't for me to decide. Or looked at another way, if the Republicans don't deserve to survive, neither do the Democrats. Neither party has been any good, not in my lifetime, probably never.

If you doubt me, read Glenn Greenwald's latest in Salon. That should scare the shit out of you if you think the Democrats, even with President Obama, are so great. They aren't. They might be pigs every bit as corrupt as the Republicans have been. We're going to watch this very carefully with a skeptical eye.

Truth is -- like many people, if not everyone -- until Obama, my vote has always gone to the lesser of two evils. Someday I look forward maybe to choosing between two honorable, competent, adult, intelligent candidates. Can't do that without a second party, and right now the Republicans are what we got.

I'm not going to work for them, and I didn't work for the Democrats. I was tempted to go out and canvas for Obama, but I just gave money and wrote what I think here on my blog and on Twitter and FriendFeed and anywhere else people would listen. But I kept my record clean. I am not part of a party, even though I am political.

What should the Republicans do?

Wed, 12 Nov 2008 19:03:17 GMT

As the Democrats take power and the Republicans move out, it's pretty obvious that the Republicans must decentralize and build and do it using the Internet.

And please emphasize self-respect and respect of others, to attract people with good intentions and brains. The kind of mindless arguing that Republicans have become famous for has chased away all the people who know how to find creative solutions to problems. You need to attract the people with ideas in order to get their ideas.

I said it over and over during the campaign, but I don't know how many people believed me, now maybe you will -- I am not a Democrat. I don't care which party wins, what I care about is that we, as Americans, act intelligently and make the best of the opportunities we have. I think there are a lot of people like me.

I'd like to see the parties compete for our support. We've done pretty well with the Democrats, now it's time to help the Republicans, if they want it. The first thing: you're going to have to give up and disavow the loutishness. No way anyone with self-respect is going to associate with that.

Here's another clue, I was able to get into the DNC twice in the last two cycles, and wasn't able to get into the RNC either time. Maybe you need to take a look at how you've set up your gates and who you're keeping out and why.

Obama's shit sandwich

Wed, 12 Nov 2008 17:26:04 GMT

On the other hand...

There's this great scene in The Wire, I'm going to have to look it up and at least get the audio online, where Carcetti, the newly elected mayor, is having breakfast with a long-retired former mayor.

He explains that on his first day in office he was kicking back in the beautiful mayor's office thinking how great it was to finally be here when his aides came in with a lovely plate and on it was a shit sandwich. They handed it to him saying "This is for you."

Basically the story is that for the guy on top, every day is a series of eating shit sandwiches in a beautiful office.

I thought of this when I read this WSJ article about the first crisis waiting for the new President, and how the current President said "no deal" when Obama asked him to have a taste. Bush basically was saying: "Obama man that's your shit not mine."

Now, it is a beautiful office.

Is Obama truly world-wide?

Wed, 12 Nov 2008 15:17:22 GMT

Part of the appeal of Obama, at least to this voter, is what our choice said to the rest of the world about us. But there was more to it, and now it's time to talk about that.

Ryan Lizza wrote a fantastic piece in the New Yorker, like all of his campaign pieces for the 2008 election. The closing paragraph sums up something really important about Obama.

After one of the Clinton debates he said: "'I am not a great candidate now, but I am going to figure out how to be a great candidate.' One of Obama's achievements as a politician is that he somehow managed to emerge intact, after navigating two years of a modern and occasionally absurd Presidential race, while also becoming a great candidate. On Election Night, as he once again invoked the words of Lincoln, he seemed to be saying that he was going to figure out how to be a great President."

Lizza was also on FreshAir yesterday. Highly recommended.

So now the question is of course how does Obama become a great President.

The two crises he has to deal with are: 1. The huge financial bubble that just burst and 2. Overpopulation, energy, global warming (all of which are really a single problem).

Neither of these problems have an American solution. Even if he were absolute dictator of the United States, he wouldn't be able to solve them. He could prop up American institutions and home owners, nationalize all the industries, we'd work on infrastructure, education and health care, but he'd still have to make deals with other countries to buy our debt to finance those efforts.

He can and absolutely should take steps to cut our use of oil, of course it makes no difference whether the oil comes from Alaska or Venezuela, that was an outright lie by the Republicans during the election. But, again, it's a world wide thing, in order for our planet to continue to sustain life, we must cut carbon emissions, and ultimately to do that, we must get population under control.

So how can President Obama be a great President, given this scenario? It's pretty obvious that he's going to have to keep campaigning, on a world wide level, and doing it the same way he did it in the US, with everyone, in their own way, pulling together toward a common goal. Sell the people of the world on the idea of a sustainable planet and a fair, distributed economy that serves the people, and then show them how they can play a role in solving the problem.

That last phrase is the most important part. In the last century people may or may not have wanted to be couch potatoes and eyeballs, I don't care to debate that -- but it's not true in this century. Its fascinating to watch so many pundits flail around trying to understand what just happened, when it's obvious. Government became active and inclusive, at least for the moment.

Now the challenge for Obama, that will determine whether or not he's great, is two-fold: 1. Will he get absorbed by the internal momentum of Washington and lose his connection with the people; and 2. Will he extend the momentum of the campaign to the world that's reachable through the Internet, and organize it in the same way he organized the US electorate toward a shared purpose of making life on the planet sustainable. If he can do both, he will not only have been a great President, but will have become the greatest political leader in history. And the amazing thing about our times is that its conceivable, because of our new distributed communication tools, it's possible.

Getting this on the record

Wed, 12 Nov 2008 02:02:02 GMT

Sometimes I just make predictions to friends verbally and forget to put them on the blog, to get them on the record. So...

I stand by my prediction that Bush, if he doesn't end up in jail, will be a very happy ex-president.

Check out this CNN piece about his regrets. There will be more like that.

I think Bush never really wanted to be President, I think he wanted to run for President. He was a very good campaigner, you really could see this during the 2004 campaign. On the stump, his timing was perfect, he was a fantastic speaker. I wonder if McC didn't make a big mistake by not having Bush go out for him this year (glad he didn't!). Anyway, once the campaign was over and he had to be President again, he was stumbling and bumbling and tripping over his words, as usual.

This point is emphasized in the Oliver Stone movie. He's the dog who caught the car. Now what? That's the part Bush wasn't so good at.

But as an ex-President life will be one big Texas BBQ with non-alchoholic beer. He can read a book every once in a while, watch a game, have some of his friends over, tell everyone they're doing a heckuva a job, and not have to worry about the shit he had to worry about.

You could see it clearly when he was hanging out at the Olympics this summer. Man, he was having a great time, he looked fantastic, confident, tan, relaxed. Until Putin reared his head and brought him back to reality and then a few weeks later so did the economy.

Now he just has to make a deal with Obama for a pardon (heh wonder how that's going) and in a couple of years he can go on a book tour to sell his memoir and I bet everyone will be nostalgic for the guy, amazing as that might seem now. Things kind of work out that way.

If only ads were so direct

Tue, 11 Nov 2008 22:19:55 GMT

From the excellent Bushian farce Idiocracy.

unsummits and more

Tue, 11 Nov 2008 21:52:58 GMT

Don Ball reports that there was an unsummit in Minneapolis in October, along the lines of what was discussed in my Sunday post. They even grabbed the .org version of the domain. I think there's a movement here to create a parallel universe that focuses on getting things done.

Dan Farber on the search for the national CTO.

I wasted two hours this morning not getting ProxyPass to work in Apache on Windows. Kept getting an error as Apache was starting up. As always with Apache, the docs don't tell you everything you need to know. You know what we need? A version of Apache with the GUI configurator, like the one WebStar had on the Mac. Man, that was an easy server to set up. Just launch the app and plop some files in the folder and you're off and running.

Speaking of easy configurators -- you know what EC2 needs? Well it's interesting, but most of the settings you need to fuss with are exactly those you need to set up a router. It's spooky the problems are so close. I would do a deal with D-Link, that as far as I know has the nicest browser-based UI to make a version of their software for EC2, or just copy the UI. Amazon understands mass market products, and EC2 is a mass-market product just waiting to be productized. I think there's a lot of money being left on the table here.

And while we're talking deals for EC2, how about rounding out the offering and do a deal with Apple to get a Mac version of EC2 running in the Amazon cloud. Wouldn't that be cool?

New conference format: The unsummit

Sun, 09 Nov 2008 19:16:07 GMT

I've never liked the idea of conferences calling themselves "summits." Too often they are self-parodies. Too self-important. And often anything but summits, excluding people who would be at a summit if there ever were one.

Even with nations it isn't always obvious who belongs at a summit. If you want to have a summit of the most powerful nations on earth, you'd have to include Russia, China, the US. But what about India? They have more people than either Russia or the US, and they have nukes now, and a fast-growing economy (at least before Sept). But if you have India don't you have to have Pakistan? You see where this is headed. Maybe they should just call them meetings and be done with summitry even at the world level.

If they call something a summit it probably isn't one.

It's esp ironic to have pseudo-summitry in the world of Web 2.0, where the whole point of the technology is to decentralize and distribute power.

The other day at lunch a friend was talking about "the blogosphere" as if it were centered in San Francisco. I know other people who think it's centered in Washington. I wonder how many centers "the blogosphere" has.

I'm tempted, every time I hear a summit coming up, to have a parallel unsummit nearby. I thought I could reserve the domain, but someone else (smart!) had the same idea in a completely different industry.

When people have a summit they're assuming for themselves the right to say whose opinion matters and whose doesn't. As my mother used to say, if they have to do that to feel good about themselves, it's probably not worth it to be part of their little group. Okay mom, you were right about that one.

I tend to mis-spell summits as submits, as if when saying it you had a cold. Submission, now there's something worth having an unsummit about!

There's actually a lot to say about submission. It's one of those cool things you don't think is cool at first. I wrote a piece about submission in 1999. Young people tend to struggle against submission, but you're born to submit. You submit to gravity from day one. It's possible, with enough energy, to escape it, but in normal times we're quite happy to submit to gravity and have all our friends and belongings submit to it as well.

And of course that's just the beginning of submission. In the end we all submit to the grim reaper. That's just how it is. And I think the folk who have summits are fighting the inevitable as well, sooner or later no one cares what any of us thought, the world goes on. As a great French philosopher once said, "The graveyards are full of indispensable men." In much the same way, so are summits.

So the unsummit would begin with a word of thanks for the bounty of ideas and experience before us, and the doors would be open to all who wish to contribute.

Links for the day

Sun, 09 Nov 2008 19:15:41 GMT

Charles Krauthammer on Obama: "A president with the political intelligence of a Bill Clinton harnessed to the steely self-discipline of a Vladimir Putin. (I say this admiringly.) With these qualities, Obama will now bestride the political stage as largely as did Reagan."

Yahoo user interface library. I must learn how to use some of these tools. They look very interesting.

PJ O'Rourke, a conservative, explains how "We Blew It." He's still blowing. Try self-deprecating humor, make fun of your own clothes. Explain why we shouldn't care about natural resources. You guys have some debugging to do, you've realized it, and that's a good first step. Now it's time to join the 21st century and start concerning yourself with some of the issues of today, not the version of today that Reagan envisioned. Turns out his vision wasn't all that accurate, imho.

China unveiled a $586 billion economic stimulus plan. Until now they had been stimulating our economy more than theirs. This is a big change.

Apache can act as a front-end for machines with a single IP address and multiple apps serving over HTTP. I knew it could do this, but I didn't know how.

Amazon EC2/Windows update

Sat, 08 Nov 2008 18:22:00 GMT

A few observations after a full week of using for real deployed applications.

1. It works. No problems, absolutely reliable.

2. The docs could be vastly improved. They should take a "Hello World" approach, and tell you the minimum you need to know to get a Notepad window up. Since it runs Windows and so many people use Windows, this could be a mass-market product. The idea of having a virtual computer running "up there" is really powerful and it shouldn't just be for programmers.

3. In the end, the cost isn't prohibitive. I'm paying $300 a month for two colocated servers. I expect to pay about $200 a month for the same service at Amazon. I probably wouldn't switch just for the cost savings, but for the extra reliability, I'll take it.

4. They make a big deal about how the servers can disappear, but in the week it's been running, it hasn't gone down once.

5. One bother is that you only get one IP address per machine. I really could use three or four. On my colo service I get five. Yes, I know I can set things up so that addresses are delegated, but it's a PITA.

Obama's decency

Fri, 07 Nov 2008 22:40:42 GMT

Conservative blogger and lawyer Patterico makes the case for Obama's decency. He admits that all the evidence could be dismissed as tactics to win an election, but then so could anything anyone does be so dismissed. I went through the same process in deciding about Obama, saw the same evidence, while looking for the slightest crack -- never saw it. He's a tough politician, but he doesn't cut corners.

There are a lot of good people in the world, I know quite a few, but what's remarkable about Obama:

1. He's risen so high. When asked today what Presidents he's turned to for advice since winning the election, he offered, with a smile -- Lincoln. As the therapist in The West Wing observed to the fictional President Jed Bartlet, "This is a hell of a curve you get graded on now." But even that's not the most impressive thing.

Update: I had to find the scene. Here's the MP3. Great stuff. Season 3, Episode 13 at minute 37 approx.

2. There are a lot of good decent people in the world, but few of them get credit for it. Obama gets credit. Now, what kind of example will this provide, and how will it change things? Are we looking at an antidote to cynicism? It's clear to me that unless we can create a strain of idealism, we're not going to come through the challenges ahead.

In a piece I wrote earlier today, talking about volunteerism replacing professionalism in journalism, I don't think many people reading it believed that people will work to make our world better without being paid. This has always frustrated me, because the evidence is everywhere that people do. We just elected a President through millions of selfless acts on the part of millions, yet people still doubt that selflessness exists and is so powerful.

I don't know why but today has been a rough day for me. Haven't been this aimless in a long time. Something needs to be processed and I'm not sure what it is. Coming to grips with what's next is not easy, I guess.

Time for a walk!

PS: The Economist doesn't know the first thing about blogging.

PPS: StumbleUpon discovered MockCain.com today.

New moderator for Meet the Press?

Fri, 07 Nov 2008 16:33:57 GMT

If you recall, Tom Brokaw signed on to moderate MTP through the election. I thought he did mostly a good job, an improvement over the previous management. A couple of times I thought he crossed the line into advocacy, but on the whole, well done.

Now the big question -- who's next?

People I hope it's not: Andrea Mitchell (boring, petty, insidery, bird-like). David Gregory (just boring).

Someone I could live with: Chuck Todd, would bring excellent guests on the show, he has everyone's respect. But he's a numbers guy and numbers aren't the game now that the election is over. You need someone who's better at political nuance. He's better as a sidekick than the main act.

Someone else I could live with: Mika Brzezinski, co-host of Morning Joe, starting to step out on her own, subbing for Gregory (whose show has a new name indicating he's probably not the choice for MTP). She is intelligent, experienced, and has been in the background too much for all the talent she has.

Now the person I really want who they'll never pick: Aaron Brown. I can't say enough about his interviewing style, intelligent, humorous, disarming, he's the kind of guy you'd like to spill the beans to and then realize you just screwed yourself. My benchmark for this job is who would Lindsay Graham have a hard time bullshitting. Only one answer there -- Aaron Brown.

Like I said, it'll never happen. :-(

Changing the way we do news

Fri, 07 Nov 2008 15:47:58 GMT

What didn't change in the 2008 election is the way news flowed. This is a big disappointment to me and something that causes great concern. I see the newspapers dying, and the broacast media failing to do news, and I want to evolve to the next thing, but it doesn't seem that's the way it'll go. Instead we're likely to see a sudden collapse, and a void, much like the financial collapse in September. This would be tragic, unneccesary, a very bad for us.

The next thing, btw, involves the same spirit of volunteerism that drove the Obama campaign. It should be possible for a citizen like you or me to take a one month leave of absence, just like doing jury duty, and go to a news story and camp out and cover it. It's not so hard to do. If a citizen can be trained to render a life and death decision (sometimes) fairly and carefully, we can also learn to get "Just the facts ma'am" and report the news alongside the pros. In case the pros should either disappear or fail to be professional.

In order to do this we're going to need the cooperation of the people who the press covers, for example, a new administration taking office. But unless they get this big idea real soon, it can't happen.

People are thinking too small, imho. Bloggers in the White House briefing room? Of course. But if the same gatekeeping applies, you're just going to have people who get through the gates. There's really no difference betw a columnist that works for the Washington Post and one who writes for Talking Point Memo. Yet some how we should feel that we're being better represented by the latter? I don't. They're still gatekeepers, and people like you and me are on the outside looking in, getting the news they want to give us, through their lens, from their perspective, and missing a lot of what's going on and what matters. The only way to turn the system upside down is to just do it, and have a system whereby fresh blood comes in, systematically.

It's been flattering when people have said I should be the country's CTO. First of all, it isn't going to happen, and second, I'm not a good candidate. Most of the technology you'd need to be a good CTO is stuff I just use, and am not an expert at. (That said, one of the first things our new CTO should do is uncover and expose the games Comcast and other big Internet vendors are playing with public access to the net. We paid for the development of the net through tax dollars, they can use it, like everyone else but it's not their place to throttle or control it.)

The job I really want is designing and implementing an open platform for news for our government, and of course that would quickly become the way of doing news in all walks of life. We need something fast here, even the strongest news organizations are seriously undermined and could disappear within months. Just having a blogger inside the new administration is not nearly enough.

Anyway, I'm thinking that a flash conference in NY, DC or Cambridge, like the one we did after the 2004 election at Stanford, might be a good idea. Last night I asked Jay Rosen at NYU what he thought of this, and he was positive. We might do it. I'm thinking about new non-BloggerCon formats, that get people talking about specific ideas as opposed to having wide-ranging discussions. I think we've now learned enough about blogging and public media to work on the next level of change.

Postpartem blues

Fri, 07 Nov 2008 15:40:35 GMT

What a rush the last few days have been.

Geez, never mind the last few days -- it's been going on since January, since the Iowa Caucus. A continuing stream of "Wait For This" spans of time. First it was New Hampshire, then Super Tuesday, then Texas and Ohio. Then a month of downtime, followed by Pennsylvania and the early May primaries (can't remember what states they were) finally Indiana and North Carolina, and Tim Russert proclaiming we now know who the Democratic nominee will be. Whew.

I think at that time we really knew who the next President would be, but who cares. There were ways to pretend at least that the stuff between then and now mattered.

Now it's all over and I know what has to come next. No matter what the expectation, built up over so much time, can't be matched by reality. Like many others, I imagine, it's time now to look elsewhere for meaning. We will have an African-American president, a Democrat, a smart man with big ambition. It'll be interesting to watch him, but not all-consuming as it was.

What comes next? I honestly don't know.

A new way to use the Internet

Thu, 06 Nov 2008 19:36:20 GMT

After years of intense opinionating...

Watching some newborn puppies sleep.