Scripting News

Sometimes it's better to say nothing

Fri, 03 Jul 2009 01:30:16 GMT

I've started to write blog posts three times today and gave up each of the three times because...

It's impossible to write coherently when your mind is scrambled by jetlag!

It's hard for me to finish a sentence coherently or even remember if I've used the word coherenent, or even spell it right, or finish the sentence without getting hung up if coherent is actually the right word to use, and where did it come from and why is that the word I thought to use anyway.

This post was going somewhere.

I thought I had discovered the algorithm for fighting jetlag in both directions.

Flying west to east, time your arrival so that it's bedtime locally when you arrive so you can go to bed and when you wake it will be the proper time to wake for the place you're in. Fine, as far as it goes, but... It doesn't mean your body thinks it should be asleep at what it perceives to be two in the afternoon.

Coming home, arrive at 1AM and schedule something for 9AM so you have to get by with 8 hours sleep at roughly the time everyone else sleeps. No problem waking up at 4AM! (First sign of a problem.) Then when I return at noon I figure I'll just catch up on a couple hours but I can't fall asleep. (Maybe it's working!) Now as the time for the podcast arrives I realize my mind is complete Jell-o. I've tried to write three blog posts today, easy ones, and given up each time. And now I'm at the beginning of the piece again. Looping.

All this led me to post this tweet earlier today.

Good advice.

The longest day

Wed, 01 Jul 2009 23:30:33 GMT

Europe sleeps while I write this.

I arrived in Chicago a short while ago, it's 6:30PM here and 1:30AM back where I came from. In about four hours I will have been up for 24 hours. Given my state of burnout I'll avoid saying anything challenging. Simply: It's always good to be back in the USA.

At this moment in an overseas trip I always play California Girls by the Beach Boys.

Also: All my gadgets work here. MyFi, and data roaming on my iPhone.

The neatest thing on the SAS flight from Copenhagen -- they have cameras pointing out the cockpit and toward the ground from under the plane. Pretty neat for takeoff and landing. Unfortunately there were clouds almost the whole way up over Sweden into Iceland and Greenland and northern Canada.

One more flight, a sprint from Chicago to SFO and then a cab to Berkeley. I get in so late that BART isn't running that late. Yeah I know, it isn't really a mass transit system. Rub it in.

While you were asleep, from Copenhagen

Wed, 01 Jul 2009 08:31:10 GMT

Another in a continuing series of overnight dispatches from your faithful European correspondent, me!

This time I'm coming to you from the SAS business class lounge at CPH, a real treat. Often on my European travels I end up exiting through Amsterdam or London with time to kill at Schipol or Heathrow, and they are completely chaotic toon-town messes. In comparison, the pace at CPH is leisurely and the Danish of course are great designers, so the place is super-comfortable and pleasing to the eye.

While you, in the US, were asleep -- I left Berlin, and created some memories in a set of photos on Flickr. Click on the picture below to see the set.

In two days in Berlin you can do nothing but scratch the surface of one of its many surfaces.

Berlin is to Germany what New York and Washington are to the US. It's both the capital and the cultural and business center. The place is bathing in history, and change. Just 20 years ago when the wall came down, the place was very different. Now what remains of the division is in photographs and video. I stayed in what used to be the eastern sector, but you couldn't tell. It was hard to imagine how the plush surroundings had been transformed so quickly. Perhaps the Soviet system wasn't so austere?

I spent all of yesterday afternoon at the German History Museum, listening to the official story of the war and the wall from their point of view. There were some not-so-surprising surprises. They talk about losing the war. Where I come from, we talk about winning. They don't present their soldiers as heroes. How can a society survive that, I wonder. I did see one statue of a WWII era German soldier, just one. It left me with a sick feeling. The memorial to victims of the Holocaust also was very moving.

There also is a Soviet War Memorial in Berlin.

Berlin is indeed where it happened. I don't have any special insights, nothing to offer that hasn't been said a million times before. The only difference is to feel it you have to put yourself inside it.

I followed a Russian tour group for a few minutes yesterday as they soaked in the history of their WWII victory. Some of them seemed old enough to remember. There were many Americans and British and French accents. Seems a lot of other people are curious to see what's in Berlin.

Everywhere you go in Berlin they're rebuilding. Many of the big tourist spots I saw just re-opened three or four years ago. The Brandenberg Gate and part of the plaza behind it were in the middle of the dead zone between the East and the West.

Maybe there will be more conclusions, this all seems quite rough right now.

PS: On a less heavy note, I had a delicious currywurst and last night there was a beautiful sunset.

There's a missing product

Wed, 01 Jul 2009 09:28:01 GMT

There's a missing product in the social networking space. I'm going to try to describe it, but I think it may be hard. But I'm willing to give it a go.

A little over a week ago I got an email from a very good friend in Europe asking if it was true that I was going to Reboot. I replied with an email saying it was. And I thought to myself, I thought by posting that fact to Twitter four or five times that I would have informed him of this. It is not his fault. There's a missing product.

Yesterday, I was trying to figure out what to do with the four hours downtime between flights in CPH, so I posted a note to Twitter hoping someone with some time to spare that was interesting would respond. I got two responses to my blog post, when it was two hours into the downtime. It's not their fault. There's a missing product.

Here's what I think the missing product would do.

It would allow me to make announcements the way companies make announcements. The announcements would have good metadata attached, and would be stored in a database. People who follow me in this system are saying "I want to know everything Dave announces." Key words in that sentence: Know and Dave. I don't just want these facts to stream by in a river. I want Dave's name to go bold in a short list of people I choose to follow. Unlike a river, where I want volume and don't care about missing an item, in this product the oppositie is true. I place high value on not missing anything. I want to know literally everything Dave announces. (Or Paolo or Karin or you get the idea.)

I started to get a clue that such a product was needed when I started the FOD feed on Twitter. It monitors the blogs of people who are so important to me that I never want to miss one of their posts. People like NakedJen, Jay Rosen, Sylvia Paull, Doc Searls, Robert Scoble, Fred Wilson and Michael Gartenberg, and people I don't even know personally like Paul Krugman and Nate Silver. It was a success. It has kept me in these people's loops, and it required them to do nothing special. Now I'm thinking about what comes next when I want other people to do something similar with me.

It may be that just monitoring blog posts is enough. Tweets are too cheap, but keeping track of people through blogs may be just right.

Still thinking about it.

What of Woodstein in the Rebooted World

Tue, 30 Jun 2009 13:16:05 GMT

Every time I write about Sources Go Direct, like clockwork, someone asks how will we get Woodward & Bernstein reporting without great reporters sniffing around for stories that bring down Presidents.

Never mind that it only happened once and hasn't happened since. Only Richard Nixon has been forced from office by the press (or anyone) and it turns out that had W&B not been sleuthing, the NYT had the story too, but they blew it. So it's possible that without W&B, Nixon would have remained in office. However it's hard to imagine that he could have been worse than Bush II, who the press of today did not bring down. (A fact the defenders of projournos never address.)

Anyway...

In the rebooted world, Deep Throat, the source, might go direct -- anonymously, using a proxy server, possibly -- and a Twitter account created for just such a purpose. BTW, I don't assume there won't be reporters in the rebooted world, but I do assume the sources will be able to go direct if they choose to. And in this case I don't see why they wouldn't.

If we're lucky enough to have a Woodstein out there digging, let's hope we have the sense to listen to them. And if we don't get blessed or if the economics of projourno crumbles, and Deep Throat wants us all to know how screwed the President is, let's make sure that anonymous pathways exist so they can say what they know and stay in place to keep reporting.

I write this from Berlin, a place that has seen huge change, many times, in the last 100 years. The kind of change that would make Americans weep with fear.

While you were sleeping, from Berlin

Tue, 30 Jun 2009 07:11:20 GMT

It's 9:11AM as I write this, and back home in California, it's just after midnight. I've done this so many times, but it still seems something of a miracle. How a day can be starting and another day be ending, all at the same time.

Glad to see Scoble blogging again. I predict a return to blogging as people discover the power of being able to finish a thought, and to link to another site without going through an intermediary. Once again people will discover the power of Small Pieces, Loosely Joined.

Chris Anderson is right, of course -- and uses a device to bait the press to object. Good way to sell books, perhaps, but I'd rather he'd not taken the shortcut. Malcolm Gladwell objects, and my friend Howard Weaver says that Gladwell got it right. I don't agree. When you think of news as a business, except in very unusual circumstances, the sources never got paid. So the news was always free, it was the reporting of it that cost.

What Anderson calls "Free" -- we in Rebooting The News call Sources Go Direct. Absolutely nothing strange about it. The Internet always disintermediates. Did you see the "media" in the middle of that word? It's the middle that's hurt in the new world. Sorry. The new world pays the source, indirectly, and obviates the middleman.

Following up on yesterday's piece about Wikipedia, I wrote it, unintentionally, so that people reacted to the bit that's uncontroversial and missed the controversy. Of course it's good that the reporter escaped and his life was spared. Who could think otherwise.

Here's the controversy:

"What about when information on Wikipedia, true or not, hurts people in other ways? Why shouldn't anyone be able to get whatever they want redacted?"

Clearly some people can get stuff redacted sometimes.

Who, and under what circumstances?

Further, no one has that power over the web. Would it be better if Wikipedia worked like the web?

Your Berlin correspondent

Mon, 29 Jun 2009 08:33:49 GMT

I always get a cold at about this point in a Europe trip. The jetlag must weaken me, and all the walking and sweating and temperature changes, and so forth -- I get sick. And I always do the same thing, go right through it. I'll have time to get over it when I get home.

Right now I'm spending my first full day in Berlin. So far I like it.

Two news items caught my eye this morning. One a controversy in the press over whether the President had the right to call on a Huffington reporter second in his last press conference, when it seemed as if the President had an idea what kind of question he might ask. Did anyone breach some ethical requirement.

A much bigger issue, I haven't heard any reporter ask about, yet it is no less incestuous than the previous issue. Did the press do anything wrong in covering up the kidnap of a NY Times reporter by the Taliban? Assuming it wasn't wrong (since no one seems concerned) what is over the line? What kind of person wouldn't receive this kind of favor? And then this morning we learn, from the NY Times, that Wikipedia did the same thing, and it was a much more complex affair. And this raises all kinds of other questions. What about when information on Wikipedia, true or not, hurts people in other ways? Why shouldn't anyone be able to get whatever they want redacted? I don't think there's a bit of difference between news organziations and Wikipedia. And let's hope they're ready with an answer, or are they just making it up as they go along?

My feeling, Wikipedia suffers from the same centralization of authority as Twitter. No one should have the power that Jimmy Wales has, to shut down Wikipedia as a conduit for truth. It appears from the NYT story that, at times, they had verification that the reporter had been kidnapped. At that point, they had no choice but to include it, whether it jeopardized the reporter's life or not. It's a line you can't define, there must be many situations where the presence of information on Wikipedia puts people at risk, just as information on the web puts people at risk. The difference is there is no central authority on what belongs on the web, and there is one on Wikipedia.

Same problem on Twitter. Reading Fred Wilson's interview with John Battelle, I'm horrified at how involved the management of Twitter feels in the flow of information and ideas on Twitter. If it were just the web, it wouldn't matter -- his opinion is just one person's opinion, and it can be balanced by other people's point of view. But in Twitter, some people's opinions are much more important than others' and Fred is one of those most important people. This is unacceptable. There's no other word for it. I have a feeling that when the reporters on Twitter are aware of this they won't like it either, but so far I don't think they are.

Last night, unable to sleep due to jetlag, I watched Lives of Others, a movie set in East Berlin. It was a beautiful movie about the contradictions that come up when thoughtful people are tasked with controlling the lives of other thoughtful people. This is where we're going in Wikipedia and Twitter.

Arrived in Berlin

Sun, 28 Jun 2009 14:28:25 GMT

Amyloo pointed out that arriving in a new city would have been a blog post three years ago. She's right. I think it deserves a blog post this year as well.

Yesterday I completed my third visit to Copenhagen with a visit to an ancient castle in Helsignor, where Shakespeare set Hamlet.

From there we went to an incredible art museum on the shore of the sound that Copenhagen is on. I took a bunch of pictures.

Finally we went to dinner at a nice restaurant in Christiania, an outlaw community within Copenhagen

Today, after breakfast with Thomas Madsen-Mygdal, I left for Berlin, which I can already tell is a spectacularly beautiful city, even though I've only been here an hour. I'm staying at the Grand, a beautifully restored historic hotel where one of my favorite movies of the 1930s was set. Getting off the elevator, I laughed because I immediately recognized it as a set where Joan Crawford, Greta Garbo and John and Lionel Barrymore performed their magic. It's a gorgeous hotel. I can't imagine it looked any nicer in 1932.

I have a very pragmatic reason for wanting to post something on the blog. I am here in a strange city on my own. Reaching out to any readers of this blog, let's have a dinner. I'm here for three nights. I love beer. I hear there's some good beer here!

The myth of perfection

Thu, 25 Jun 2009 09:37:24 GMT

Myth: Twitter is perfect. If you change even one thing its magic disappears.

Apple products are often thought to be perfect. Steve Jobs had a lot of people convinced that video had no place on the iPod, until he revealed the iPod with video. All of a sudden it was the Number One most sought-after feature.

The myth of perfection is mostly skillful marketing.

The reality: We Make Shitty Software.

Software is a process. It's never done. "Our software is shitty," the honest hard-working developer says. "But watch, we'll make it less shitty." You're buying a process not perfection.

This has practical applications. In the last Rebooting The News podcast, toward the end, the subject of changing Twitter came up. When I was able to convince Jay that Twitter could be changed, he said his #1 most desired feature was to be able to edit a tweet.

Twitter will get more features. Bugs will be fixed. You can be sure of that.

One of the most obvious features it will get, and I'd bet really soon, are groups, which are similar to features already implemented by some of the clients.

What's your number one most desired feature?

PS: This discussion is a continuation to the the piece I wrote earlier this week about the 140-character limit.

Good morning Copenhagen

Thu, 25 Jun 2009 02:41:53 GMT

I think I must have been Danish in a former life because when I arrive in Copenhagen there's something familiar about it, comfortable, nice. You get a sense that people live well here, don't know what it is, but Copenhagen puts me in a good mood.

Tell you another thing, if you can time your arrival for 7 or 8PM you can do the nicest thing re jetlag -- immediately go to sleep for a full 8 hours and if it's midsummer, almost never have it go dark on you! That way if you get up at 3AM it feels like 6AM back home in California, but that's pretty disorienting because it's actually 6PM.

The right way to think about the trip from SF to Copenhagen: The flight takes 10 hours, real time. Add another 9 hours lost to timezones, and it's at least a 19 hour trip, including the fact that you have to go through somewhere else to get here. Neither city is large enough to have direct flights between them.

Arrived in Frankfurt

Wed, 24 Jun 2009 14:38:35 GMT

Tim O'Reilly should speak for himself

Wed, 24 Jun 2009 01:42:32 GMT

Tim O'Reilly says: "At the end of the day, folks like Scoble and Winer are unhappy because they aren't on the list. It doesn't feel fair to them, so they do the next best thing, seeking publicity by complaining about it."

That's not true.It's far more complex than that. O'Reilly should stick to speaking for himself.

I'm writing this on a plane that's boarding now, heading for Frankfurt from San Francisco, so obviously this is not a debate I will be able to take part in, but I did want to clear this up.

PS: Sprint MiFi is wonderful. I left it on in my knapsack which is in the overhead compartment. Scoble called on my iPhone to alert me to this. I whipped out my netbook and launched my editor and quickly wrote a blog post. We live in wonderful times.

Heading to Europe

Tue, 23 Jun 2009 21:21:29 GMT

I'm leaving tonight for Copenhagen to participate in the Reboot conference. This will be my third Reboot. It's a very nice group of people, very far away from Silicon Valley, and I always have fun. Looking forward to partying with Thomas and his posse and Paolo, Stowe, and everyone else. I'll be leading a talk on Thursday evening on Rebooting the News.

After Copenhagen, I'll spend three days in Berlin, then head back to the US via Chicago on July 1.

See you on the other side of the world, tomorrow night!

PS: I recorded a podcast with Phil Windley of IT Conversations last Monday. A little bit of time has gone by but I think it's pretty good. We talked about the technical side of Rebooting the News.

River of News in CSS, designer's release

Tue, 23 Jun 2009 16:52:06 GMT

I wrote my first RSS aggregator in 1999.

Believe it or not the core of that aggregator is what's behind the aggregator I've been shipping in the OPML Editor. Since then I've written all kinds of specialized aggregators, and it turns out it's not that much work these days.

Rather than live with all the decisions I've made over the last 10 years, I started over. The result is River2.

I just completed the first version, which I'm calling the "designer's release."

Every design element can be changed through CSS.

You just save your change, refresh the page, see the result.

The web server runs on your desktop, inside the OPML Editor.

To get an idea of what you're working with, my copy of River2 saves its home page to a public server every ten minutes. Yours will look like this too, until you change the design!

So if you're interested in designing the look of a River of News aggregator, it's ready for you to try it out.

http://newsriver.org/river2

If you have questions or comments, leave them here, or in the comment section on the page above.

Be sweet, don't retweet

Tue, 23 Jun 2009 18:43:15 GMT

That's like Be Kind Rewind.

And of course everyone retweeted this and everyone clicked.

Nothing here. Move along.

Why 140 chars is like 48K

Tue, 23 Jun 2009 13:51:44 GMT

I love telling stories, especially ones with happy endings.

Once upon a time, way back in the early 80s, a young man (me) had written a program called ThinkTank. It ran on the Apple II, which only had 48K of memory -- not very much when you consider that an average PC today has 1 gigabyte -- or 21,845 times the memory if you can believe that!

That's like comparing a single 140-char tweet to the Library of Congress.

The Apple II had an infintesmally small memory, but its disk was a little larger. So the operating system I used, the UCSD P-System, did "overlays," which allowed big chunks of code to stay on disk until they were needed. When code in an overlay was called, the OS would throw out another chunk of code and replace it with the one you called. So, in the worst case, if a command needed code in two overlays to solve a problem that involved looping, the disk light would stay on for a long time while the computer "thrashed" out the answer.

This isn't unlike the way an Amazon Kindle keeps part of your library on its computer and part of it on the Kindle itself. When you want to read one of the books on their computer it just downloads it again, replacing something you haven't read in a while.

This business of writing code in overlays was very taxing to the developer, because thrashing wasn't very good for the usability of the code, so you're always moving code between overlays, or making a copy of an often-used routine, all to prevent the disk light from coming on and thrashing the app (and its user) to a standstill.

This clever code-writing is a lot like writing 140-character tweets today. You delete and abbreviate, throw out important ideas, all to fit into that tight little space. And then your readers, like the disk light, thrash with confusion, and think you're a fool, because you have to be a genius and a mind-reader to figure out the gibberish you wrote to fit in 140. Oy!!

So, with the app in the Apple II days, it was often too much trouble to add the feature. With Twitter, it's often easier just to say nothing. And that's not the goal of blogging, macro or micro. The goal is to provide a platform for saying what you have to say, not for not saying what you have to say!

Anyway, the Apple II story had a happy ending. It was called the IBM PC. Instead of 48K it had 640K. So when I recompiled my app for that machine I just threw out the overlays and let all the code reside in memory and the thing ran like a bat out of hell! I was finally able to finish the features I wanted, and instead of thinking the program just had potential, people loved it, and it sold, and we raised money, and everyone was happy.

The End.

Update: If 140 is too little, what's the right number?

If 140 is too little, what's the right number?

Tue, 23 Jun 2009 14:33:55 GMT

Jonathan Edman tweets: "I deeply understand how crippling 140c is, but what is the right number? Don't you run into the same problem at almost any num?"

Since my answer is too long to fit in 140 chars, I answered here.

Jonathan, I don't know what the "right" number is, but I have some ideas.

First, almost anything above 140 would be seen by power Twitter users as an improvement, and a cause for celebration. It would be a sign that someone is listening. And it would immediately give us relief. It's as if, in 1981, Apple found a way to give us 72K instead of 48K. There would be a burst of creativity like the Summer of Love.

Now, here's what I would do first, to try to come up with the right number.

Read the feeds of the NY Times, BBC, and a few other professional news sources for a few weeks, and count the characters in the <description> elements of each <item>. Average the number. Double it. That's what I would go with.

The theory being, if professional writers can summarize a whole news article in, X characters, then the average person should be able to express an idea in 2X characters.

In my new River of News, I cut the intros off at 280 chars, arbitrarily, and it seems to work pretty well. Previous versions included full posts, and that was a problem, because some sites, like OpenLeft, write whole books in their posts. I also strip out markup. I'm tired of all the huge pictures people are throwing into the river. I see it as a gimmick to try to get more attention. I say let their ideas compete with everyone else's on a level playing field.

Rebooting The News #14

Mon, 22 Jun 2009 18:35:49 GMT

Show notes here.

MP3 here.

Feed here.

Covering a small city

Sun, 21 Jun 2009 22:44:12 GMT

For InBerkeley.com.

I was walking on Solano Ave approaching Alameda when I saw a few people looking at an accident scene down the block.

Several fire trucks, a police car blocking traffic. I could see a bicycle and an ambulance. The other people didn't know what had happened beyond that there had been an accident.

I took a picture of course.

So now it's an hour later, I'm at the computer, and poking around the City of Berkeley website, the fire department, police, Alta Bates Hospital, and come up with nothing. There's no record of what happened, or is there?

if there is a log -- where is it?

If not, who do I talk with about getting one going?

It seems this is the most basic beginning to having an effective local website.

Update: There is a public information officer in Berkeley.

Update: Berkeley Crimelog. (!)

Live-blogging at MSM

Sat, 20 Jun 2009 14:25:11 GMT

It's great that the MSM has adopted blogging tools to cover the Tehran protests, which seem to be ending, perhaps tragically.

I'm watching Andrew Sullivan, the NY Times, the Guardian and Huffington. All are doing a fantastic job.

However, for next time -- can I suggest that they create an RSS feed for each flow where each mini-post is its own <item>. That way we could easily follow multiple flows without having to refresh all those pages.

Scripting News started as a link blog, so you'll find plenty of prior art looking at its archive. Here's a folder that contains the RSS archive for 2003. (View source, today's browsers totally mangle the display of XML, in the name of progress. Oy.)

A screen shot for the 10/13/03 page.