Scripting News

Any Wordpress blog can be cloud-enabled

Tue, 08 Sep 2009 02:48:40 GMT

This is worth a special post.

Wordpress did two things today.

1. They enabled rssCloud support on wordpress.com. This means that any weblog hosted on their server can publish real-time. This is the announcement that got all the attention.

2. But equally important is that you can install the rssCloud plug-in on any Wordpress blog that you host and it adds a cloud element to your feed and handles notifications for subscribers. That's how we got InBerkeley.com to be cloud-enabled. It takes a couple of minutes and you're ready to go.

http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/rsscloud/

Tease! Tease! Tease!

Mon, 07 Sep 2009 19:57:57 GMT

This is one of many millions of blogs on wordpress.com.

Here is its RSS feed.

View source on that.

Notice anything interesting?

ReadWriteWeb: "All blogs on the WordPress.com platform and any WordPress.org blogs that opt-in will now make instant updates available to any RSS readers subscribed to a new feature called RSSCloud. There is currently only one RSS aggregator that supports RSSCloud, Dave Winer's brand-new reader River2. That will probably change very soon."

Apparently for some people this is the first time they're hearing about the <cloud> element in RSS. It first appeared in January 2001 and was part of RSS 0.92, and of course RSS 2.0.. It was fully supported in Radio UserLand 8.0 and Manila.

Also, many thanks to Matt Mullenweg and Toni Schneider at Automattic, and the rest of the guys. It's so cool to have them in the tech industry. We all owe them a lot for their support of open formats and protocols.

InBerkeley is cloud-enabled. And it works! Real-time, baby.

Any Wordpress blog can be cloud-enabled, not just the ones on wordpress.com. I wonder which major tech blog is going to be first to go cloud.

Also it would be great if Twitter clients, such as Seesmic and Brizzly, would start thinking about supporting rssCloud.

Don't forget there's an rssCloud meetup at UC-Berkeley on Wednesday at 7PM.

Test post

Mon, 07 Sep 2009 22:43:16 GMT

please ignore

An rssCloud case study: Brizzly & Seesmic

Sun, 06 Sep 2009 14:46:35 GMT

There's a lot of sides to a bootstrap. The idea is to take a something that's highly integrated and break it into pieces. Connect the pieces with open formats, and then show people how to compete. Then each of the pieces becomes a market where users have choice. And when users have choice, competitors must work hard to please them.

It's how we got RSS going in the first place. Netscape got a few content companies to create feeds. They created an aggregator, which we competed with. Two aggregators, that meant more, for sure. And then we made our blogging software produce feeds and worked with lots of publishers. Now blogging software updates millions of feeds every day. But at one point there were just a half-dozen feeds and two aggregators.

There's lots of competition in the market for Twitter clients. There's a raging battle between a dozen teams all of whom are vying for your attention. Each of them wants to produce the product that attracts the most users. However at the center of the market there is no competition, so improvements come slowly. Our goal is to change that.

Now, two excellent examples of clients are Seesmic and Brizzly. There are many others but these are the two that I use, so I am most familiar with them. Here are screen shots of the two products. (Click on the thumbs to see larger versions.)

There are two ways they can support rssCloud, and help the bootstrap give more choice to users, and potentially free themselves to create more features without having to wait for Twitter.

1. Allow your users to subscribe to cloud-enabled feeds. Right now, most of those are the 1151 feeds of the people I subscribe to. But soon (knock wood) there will be many thousands more, content that you can't get from Twitter. So supporting cloud-enabled feeds now could buy you a head-start on your competition in October or November.

2. Publish each user's stream of 140-character messages as cloud-enabled feeds, in addition to pushing them through Twitter. Several reasons to do this. First, you provide them a backup, which may be a feature that's of value to them. And they might be able to share their content with 140-character networks formed by others, including Facebook, Yahoo, Google, who knows who. Open formats and protocols create lots of options. Maybe you want to start your own little network of users independent of Twitter. I can tell you -- I do! (And will.)

Brizzly and Seesmic may not want to do this now. After all it is a holiday weekend in the US. But you never know what the future holds, and it doesn't take much time to think about it.

RSS has no Fail Whale

Sat, 05 Sep 2009 14:35:20 GMT

First, thanks to Fred Wilson and Bijan Sabet for standing up for RSS. You don't have to be a tech scholar to know that RSS is like XML or HTML or HTTP or text files. It's fabric, permanent, it ain't going anywhere. It's not like the Norweigian Blue, it isn't pining for the fjords or pushing up daisies. Let's keep a sense of humor and a sense of perspective. Some people look at life and see death. I look at life and try to be happy, cause yeah someday we all die, but that day hasn't come yet. (Knock wood and Praise Murphy.)

William Mougayar suggested in a comment on Fred's post that Twitter could have a button that allowed you to add any RSS feed to your Twitter stream.

I said "if they did that they'd have to absorb a significant share of the RSS flow, and that's the problem and why it's ludicrous to think that RSS is anything but the elephant in the room and the 800-pound gorilla combined."

"You can see it in the famous TechCrunch leak piece of the internal Twitter docs. They know they can't handle the load.

"That's why a distributed approach is the only one with any hope of working. The reason RSS could grow so huge is the same reason HTML and HTTP could, it's not centralized. That was the mistake Feedburner made. They thought 'Oh we can make a killing by snarfing up all the RSS.' No way Jose. That's a losing proposition. Luckily they got Google to give them $100 mill before the house of cards collapsed. They too put the brakes on growth."

Talking with Scoble last night, he offered that Twitter would have to grow to the size of Google to handle all of RSS. I agreed, but said it would be worse. Twitter would have to grow to be the size of Google overnight and without a revenue stream. Google got to grow with the web. Twitter wouldn't have that luxury relative to RSS. It became a giant long before Twitter even existed.

Which brings us to the Fail Whale.

RSS has grown in a fairly orderly fashion, quietly, without daily articles in the NY Times, or appearances on Oprah, or proclamations by athletes and movie stars. It also grew to huge size without a Fail Whale. RSS, in over ten years, has never gone down. Think about that for a moment. That's because it was designed for growth from day one. Getting on the RSS bus can be as simple as putting a file on your Apache server. It's just another rendering of your content flow. It requires a fairly small commitment, you don't need tens of millions of dollars of venture capital to build out an RSS network. You can rent it from Amazon at pennies per gigabyte.

Anyone who thinks Twitter could replace RSS doesn't understand the scale of the two things. Twitter is a fairly new company that has had trouble meeting the remarkable growth it has achieved. I use Twitter all the time, and I love it. I find that RSS and Twitter are a good combination. And I think news people create controversy for the same reason journalists have always sold war -- it gets people to read their journals, and their ads, and it makes them money. That's all that's going on here.

Interestingly, rather than Twitter absorbing RSS, it may go the other way. Perhaps RSS will absorb Twitter. That's the idea behind rssCloud. That a lot can be gained by creating a loosely-coupled 140-character network. Sure there will be tradeoffs, it'll take up to a minute for you to see your friends' updates. But there would be a lot of advantages, for example -- while one component of the network can fail, the whole thing is as resilient and distributed as the Internet.

All the angst over Atom

Sat, 05 Sep 2009 15:55:26 GMT

Yesterday at around 5PM, I added the code to the OPML Editor to support Atom 1.0 in River2, my new River of News aggregator. The coding took about an hour.

I tested it on some feeds from Blogger and Google News, fixed a few bugs, and burned it in overnight. It appears to work perfectly. So I released it this morning a little before 9AM.

The point? There were years of strife in the RSS world over this. In the end it took less than 24 hours, beginning to end, to support the new format. We could have saved all that angst. A new format isn't that big a deal.

1151 cloud-enabled feeds

Fri, 04 Sep 2009 18:59:41 GMT

I just added a changes.xml for my rssCloud server.

http://static.scripting.com/rsscloud/changes.xml

Now you'll see a whole bunch of cloud-enabled feeds that weren't there before. They're feeds for the 1151 people and organizations that I follow on Twitter.

They're automatically produced by an app that I've had running since the beginning of 2009 that keeps an XML-based backup for everyone I follow. This is just another form of that stream.

If you follow any of these people in River2, and you have notification turned on, you'll get updates within a minute, knock wood.

This is another piece of the loosely-coupled 140 character network.

Another way of saying this is if I follow you on Twitter, you now have a cloud-enabled feed. Try updating on Twitter, and refreshing changes.xml in a minute. If all goes well you should see your feed at the top of the list.

For a lot of users looking in, this probably means as much as the pictures of the Bay Bridge being taken apart and put back together. But when it's done, you'll be able to drive a car across it! :-)

A personal request

Fri, 04 Sep 2009 19:45:49 GMT

First, it's wonderful that so many people are trying out River2. I really mean that. Thanks for giving it a try.

But please post your questions on the Howto page so it's possible other people could help with the answer. Thanks.

I'm just one person, and ideally I should be able to spend my time fixing bugs, writing docs, and building new stuff. If I have to support every user personally, well that just doesn't scale. :-)

Let's have fun!

River2 is ready

Thu, 03 Sep 2009 22:58:09 GMT

Or as ready as it'll ever be. :-)

http://newsriver.org/river2

It's an aggregator that runs on your desktop and supports reading lists, rssCloud and is a podcatcher.

I'm sure there are bugs and know there are still features to come, but I and others are using it all the time to keep up with what's new in RSS feedland, and to download podcasts, and as more cloud-aware apps come online, we're going to need software that can subscribe to the. That's what River2 is for.

If you have questions or comments, post them here or on the howto linked above.

Here we go and good luck to all of us!

PS: Now I've hit my first milestone due before the rssCloud meetup next Wednesday. I have a few others to cross off the list. Wish me luck!

Hire execs who love the product

Thu, 03 Sep 2009 18:37:52 GMT

I've been in and around the tech industry since 1976, which makes me a 33-year veteran. The industry loops every 5 to 10 years so I've seen something like five or six iterations. There are some mistakes they make over and over. Wish I could tap them on the shoulder and say Don't Do It but it wouldn't make a diff. Every crop of entrepreneurs thinks it's different. They never are, but they have to learn that for themselves.

One thing they do over and over is hire execs who don't love the product.

It's as if the guy who ran professional football didn't like football. Or if Valentino Rossi didn't love MotoGP. Or the CEO of a vintner didn't like wine. Or if Alice Waters who runs Chez Panisse and is Berkeley's most famous entrepreneur didn't have a passion for great food.

Yet Twitter just hired a COO who has one of the most out-of-whack follows-to-follower ratios out there. He follows 40 and is followed by 650,263. This is probably why his RSS company, Feedburner, made it to be acquired by Google and then crashed. It wasn't built on a foundation of love for RSS (I can attest to that) and while the people of Twitter use it and they have very passionate users, the execs at Twitter, at best, dabble. And now we know they hire dabblers. (An instance of A people hiring A people and B people hiring C people?)

When your ratio of follows to followers is 0.00006151 it's inevitable that you see Twitter as a stage like the one Barack Obama stood on in Berlin or in Denver. "I'm up here," he must think, and "they're out there." His ability to understand how people see his product is limited because his view is of users as little dots, and he and his 40 insider friends loom large.

I've sat in board meetings listening to other board members explain our users, having never met one, having never used the product. Needless to say their advice is pretty general and usually wasn't very useful.

I've had it explained to me that cancer doctors don't have to get cancer to be good doctors, and of course I agree. But using a product like Twitter is supposed to be a joy. It's supposed to be an expansive thing, not a life-threatening one. And I'd add, every company that viewed its own products with fear fails. If you make a product that is not a disease and you treat it like one, people will find some other place to congregate.

Why I love my Sony Walkman

Thu, 03 Sep 2009 17:43:36 GMT

My mother has a friend who was raving about the new Sony Walkman, so I bought two, one for Mom and one for me. They're not expensive, and I've never been happy with the way my iPod worked for podcasts, which is 90 percent of the use I have for them.

Do I like it? I do! I've been using the Walkman ever since, and the iPod has become a hard disk for my BMW (which has an iPod interface).

I like the Walkman because it works way better, for me, than the iPod does.

The Walkman connects easily to both Mac and Windows without any weird dialogs that warn me that it's about to erase everything on the device. It presents as a disk drive. I copy files into the Podcasts sub-folder of the Music folder. When I'm out, I click the top-level Music icon then choose Folder, and navigate to the file I want and it plays. Click Next to go to the next one.

Back at home, next time I load it up, I just empty out the folder and copy in a new batch of podcasts. Or if I'm on the road with my Windows XP netbook, or traveling with my 13 inch MacBook Pro. Or in my office using my iMac. Or at a friend's house. You get the idea. It's totally not fussy about what you connect it to, and it never gets an idea that it knows better what should be on your device than you do.

My iPod ends up with all kinds of junk on it because even though I've been using one for seven years and I still don't understand how it works. I understood the Sony the first time I used it and it's never thrown a curveball at me. A few weeks ago I had to post here to find out how to get my iPhone out of shuffle mode.

Apple really does do nice user interfaces, but I think they either don't understand users, or don't like or trust them. The Walkman has lots of nice features, but it's nicest feature is that it's really simple.

BTW, last time I was in NY I saw that my mom had taken it with her on a walk and asked if she knew how to put new stuff on it, and she said yes. I consider this a major victory for tech!

Anyway it might not be for you. But a lot of people don't know that Sony now makes a good MP3 player. Hopefully I've done my part to help correct that.

RSS in your TV set

Thu, 03 Sep 2009 09:42:34 GMT

I am up late writing docs for the next River2 release and just got an email from Amazon about a new Samsung TV that has a built-in RSS reader. Here's a video report from CES 2008 where the TV was announced.

RSS is part of the fabric of the Internet which is now a feature of TVs. It's so cooool.

Is River of News enough?

Wed, 02 Sep 2009 18:43:39 GMT

For what seems like many years I was a lonely voice in the wilderness, whispering at first "River of News" then speaking more loudly and finally shouting from the rooftops, but people wouldn't listen. Developers patterned their "news readers" after email programs. Each feed was a box, and like a mail program it would tell you how many unread messages there were. "This is wrong!" I would say -- RSS is not mail.

Well in 2006 or so, things turned in the other direction and rivers showed up everwhere. They call them streams, lifestreams, etc, but they're all the same basic idea. Park yourself on the riverbank and watch the news flow by. If you miss something, not to worry, if it's important some new story will refer to it.

Then an interesting experiment, the AnnArbor.com switched its home page to be a river. Wonderful, fantastic, futuristic. A long time ago I predicted the front page of every news site would be a river. But now Joshua Benton at Nieman Lab asks, basically, is a River enough? Do you need some other structure to hang the news on? Yes, imho, you do.

The question comes up on Twitter, when you want to know the context of a tweet, because sometimes people string them together. 140 characters isn't enough to express a full idea, so you write three or four. By the time you're at number four, someone has usually tweeted you back asking what you mean. The answer is in #1 or #2 of the 4-tweet sequence. If you answer the question, you'll just beget more questions, so you hope the person is savvy enough to click on your name and read your full stream to get the context.

In the 1980s I ran a system called LBBS on an Apple II in my living room. We had the exact same problem, and found a neat solution. At first the structure was strictly hierarchic. The sysop, me, would start a discussion area, and users would post questions or assertions as first-level subs. People would respond, and those would appear in reverse chronologic order as second-level subs. Responses to those would be third-level and so on. This was an early threaded discussion system. But how to find the new stuff? For that I added what I called a Msg Scanner, a reverse-chronolic browser that ignored structure. It would keep a bookmark for every user, a high-water-mark, and when you'd jump into the scanner that's where you'd start. You'd keep hitting Next until you reached the newest message. And here's the cool thing -- when you wanted to see the context, just type / and you'd switch over into the hierarchic structure, on the same message.

News will work the same way, except someone who is skilled at organizing stuff will figure out where each piece goes in the hierarchy. This will provide the context, and you will also be able to find out What's New.

Anyone who used the LBBS in 1981, that's 28 years ago, will understand, but in this world it's still a new idea.

I wrote a narrative of this development process in 1988 when I was starting up UserLand Software.

Sorry I still hate Comcast

Wed, 02 Sep 2009 16:05:21 GMT

Hate is a word I've tried to wipe from my vocabulary, along with need. You don't really need more than air, food, water, a warm place to sleep, basic medical care. There are lots of things that are nice to have, like hugs and kisses and great sound systems and business-class-or-better. But needs are pretty basic things.

Hate? People throw that word around far too casually. The other day a rep of SXSW said that I had hated on them because I suggested they were taking money to keep me off the speakers list since 1998 or so. I had asked many times why I couldn't get in, and was met with a stone wall. So like all human beings, my mind filled in the blanks. I asked to be enlightened, if it wasn't a payoff, what was it? I offered to run a retraction if they would tell me the real reason. Stone wall again. Oh well. I don't hate them. The word I would use to describe my feeling about SXSW is frustrated.

But Comcast? I think that's the real thing. I'll tell you why.

Love and hate have a mathematical relationship:

hate = love + betrayed

I would love to have Comcast service, but I would never sign up for it again unless they apologized for the treating me so badly. And while most companies apologize when they screw up, I have a feeling that Comcast thinks I should apologize to them. And that ain't never going to happen.

Why write about this today? Well they're getting a lot of kudos because they try to fix their fuckups with reps who use Twitter to find unhappy customers. When I got fired as a Comcast customer, I was in contact with their Twitter caretakers. Not only couldn't they stop the Comcast machine from chewing me up and spitting me out, they had the gall to say they liked me while they were doing it! Now that's really asking for the hate.

Imagine a girlfriend dumping you, hard, and while she's doing it saying she likes you. Well fuck that shit bitch. <-- There's the hate.

But their service is much faster than my AT&T DSL. I pay my bills, in full and on time (as I did with Comcast), and they don't have Twitter accounts. They never cut me off (knock wood), and I never have to talk to a Twitter rep who likes me. Maybe I'm weird but that's kind of how I like to do business.

Learning from the fire of 1991

Wed, 02 Sep 2009 14:45:39 GMT

Fires are on the minds of Californians, esp ones who live in the hills, like the ones in Berkeley and Oakland.

In 1991 these hills burned. I watched the fire, safely, from a friends' deck on Potrero Hill. It seemed far away, but now I live here.

In the RTN podcast on Monday I asked Doc Searls if we could learn from the fires in Southern California.

Today, on InBerkeley, I ask if there are any old-timers who were here during the fire of 1991 who would share what they learned.

rssCloud meetup at UC Berkeley, Sept 9

Tue, 01 Sep 2009 00:20:36 GMT

The first rssCloud meetup in NYC in July was a great success.

Now we're ready for rssCloud Meetup 2.0, on Wednedsay September 9, 7-9PM at 110 South Hall on the UC-Berkeley campus. South Hall is the gothic brick building in the center of the UC Berkeley campus, just across from the iconic clock tower.

It's a 15-minute walk from the downtown BART station.

The meetup is open to all, but primarily for developers. The goal is to bootstrap the loosely-coupled 140 character message network. One that's open on all sides, so anyone can add an aggregator, cloud server or authoring tool, yet still have the feel of a centralized system. There may be tradeoffs, but the benefits of not having a company at the center of the network should create great opportunities for news organizations, innovative developers, designers, businesses, and users everywhere. Twitter is great, but we want something that works better for all of us.

We hope to see one or more new implementations come online before or at the meetup.

The way it'll work is: 1. I'll talk for 20-25 minutes, review the walkthrough, technology, philosophy, then briefly answer questions. 2. We'll go around the room and people will say what they're doing, and what kinds of help they could use. 3. Then an open discussion, and we adjourn.

There will be free wifi, but if it's like the NYC meetup you won't need it. This is a complex and interesting topic that seems to hold people's attention. But it's California and you never know, so bring your laptop, just in case.

If you know you're going to be there, please post a comment on this blog post.

Thanks to the UC Berkeley School of Information for generously offering to host this event.

Wanted: A simple DNS app for Mac or Windows

Sun, 30 Aug 2009 17:24:43 GMT

In the early-mid-90s there was a Mac desktop app that was a Domain Name Server. Here's how you'd set it up.

1. Put it in your Startup Items folder so it would launch at startup.

2. When it booted a window opens with a list of all the domains it was managing. Of course initially it was empty. You could click on the name of any of them to edit the settings in a dialog. There was a place to edit the name of the domain. A place to add an A record or a CNAME. (In other words it works more or less the same as any web app we use to manage DNS.)

3. An Add button at the bottom of the window. Click it and a dialog like the one in #2 would appear, except all the fields would be blank.

4. There was a text file that also configured the server, in fact the dialogs above just served to add, remove or change the text in the file. I suspect the file was in a standard format that all DNS's use.

Anticipating what people are going to say, yes, I know there's a DNS built into the Mac, but it doesn't have a graphic interface and the instructions for setting it up are ridiculous. I think the one on Windows has a graphic UI, but I can't find any comprehensible instructions that explain how to set it up.

A college classmate, Sandy Wilbourn, who I think of as a brother, is an expert in DNS, and he says the app I'm looking for doesn't exist. I threatened to write it myself, he advised against it. Oh man. What is it with these simple web services that we're allowed to use them through a web app, but they don't want us running our own. I'm going to run my own DNS at some point, and I'd rather do it sooner than later.

Someone is going to ask why I need to do this. I have a good reason. You can either take my word or pay me $1000 and I'll explain.

Update: Chuck Shotton points to MenAndMice's server for Windows, and JY points to CutEdge's server for Mac. Both appear to fit the bill. Thanks guys!!

Joe Hewitt on Bad Hair Day at 7PM

Fri, 28 Aug 2009 00:57:29 GMT

Our special guest for the Bad Hair Day podcast at 7PM Pacific is Joe Hewitt the author of Facebook for the iPhone. What a great day to talk with Joe!

You can listen live on BlogTalkRadio.

I had lunch with him yesterday in Santa Cruz. I said that if Facebook wanted to compete with Twitter they needed a vastly simpler version of Facebook. Little did I know that 24 hours later I'd be looking at it.

If you have any questions for Joe, please post them as comments here, and Marshall and I will try to get to them.

You can listen to the show live on BlogTalkRadio, and of course it will be available as a podcast from the badhair.us site.

Here we go!

My one sentence review of the Facebook iPhone app

Thu, 27 Aug 2009 22:13:17 GMT

I wish the desktop version of Facebook was this simple, fast and elegant.

Update: Believe it or not I actually had lunch yesterday with Joe Hewitt, the developer of this app. I said that if Facebook wanted to compete with Twitter they needed a vastly simpler version of Facebook. Little did I know that 24 hours later I'd be looking at it.

Another screen shot shows why a simplified Facebook kicks Twitter's butt.

Health care in a nutshell

Thu, 27 Aug 2009 19:38:34 GMT

Health care is a lot like a fire department or police department. You never know when it's your house that's going to be on fire, that's why everyone pays equally for protection, and the person whose house burns gets the "benefit" if you can call having your house burn a benefit (or getting very sick).

The main difference is that very few houses burn, but eventually everyone needs life-saving or end-of-life care. Every responsible person must pay for care, and basically only the truly rich (multi-millionaires) can afford to self-insure.

If you assume that everyone has to pay for health insurance, then the question is how much do you want to pay. In the US, our current system costs 16% of GDP and we get less care, in some cases much less care than other rich countries that pay as little as 9% of their GDP.

So we're making poor choices here.

Obama's plan is less comprehensive than the German, Canadian, French or Japanese plans. In each of these other rich countries, health insurance is a non-profit business. That doesn't mean insurance companies don't make money, they do, but not from health insurance. Obama isn't promoting that (although it's not clear why).

And for 40 million Americans they might as well live in the third world, for them health care is based on their ability to pay out of pocket. As long as they just get colds, they survive. As soon as they need more care, they either go bankrupt or become disabled, or die. This is their country too, they get a vote in how our system works. You're related to some of these people (unless you have no family). They're the ones who should be standing in anger at the town halls. And they're not all poor, many of them are middle class or upper middle class, they just happen to not be profitable for the insurance industry. These are the people whose houses burn to the ground when they catch fire.

The people who would vote against universal health insurance are stupidly cocky, because they will all need health care some day and for many of them it will not be there. Sometimes they're people who don't smoke or aren't obese, who don't have any personal bad habits. People get sick for a lot of reasons that no one understands. Maybe just bad luck or bad genes. In the wrong place at the wrong time.

Bottom-line, we could spend a lot less money on health care and take care of everyone. Instead we're opting on the worst approach, we spend a lot more, and a huge portion of the populace isn't cared for and the rest of us are treated not as patients but as profit centers. If you happen to need health care, you can't get it. This is some kind of way to run a country? Yikes.

If you want to understand what our options are, I highly recommend listening to the FreshAir interview with T.R. Reid, who has just written a book on health care systems around the world.