Scripting News

Middle-of-the-week check-in

Wed, 07 Oct 2009 16:01:12 GMT

Just writing to say that Scripting News is on a hiatus this week. Not sure when I'll be writing again. But I'm still here, doing the best I can.

And thanks to everyone who wrote for the kind wishes.

Live from Virgin America #24

Sun, 04 Oct 2009 01:37:22 GMT

I'm flying back to NY to be with the family.

At first I thought -- sheez no big deal, I'll do the live podcast with Jay at 4PM at the SF Hilton. Then I called Jay and he said I should get to the airport and head home. I gave it a second or two of thought and realized he's right. This is no time to be talking about rebooting the news. It's time to reboot the family.

An aside, if anyone is at ONA09 and can record the event, it would be great. Of course I was going to do that, but I'll be over Wyoming or Nevada when it happens.

I thought of Bruce Sterling's inspirational talk at the Reboot conference in Copenhagen earlier this year. I'll try to paraphrase what he said. 1. If you could travel lighter you'd be happier. 2. Most people know this and wish they could get rid of stuff. 3. But you won't do it until something huge happens to disrupt your life. A divorce, you lose your job. A parent dies. Yup. Sterling goes on to say that you should make a list of things you'll drop when the disruption comes. I don't have a list.

Usually I have a day or more to prepare for a trip, and I usually don't forget anything major. Heck I usually don't forget anything at all. Not this time. I left a bunch of things on the dining room table. And I realizedI left my iPhone in the car about 1/2 hour before the flight was due to start boarding. So I made a dash out to the parking garage, got the phone and went back through security. With plenty of time to spare.

So much for my iPhone divorce.

It still hasn't hit me.

Life still feels pretty normal, even though I'm flying cross country again after returning home two days ago. I got a call from Andrew Baron who lost his father in similar circumstances earlier this year. There's some kind of bond between Andrew and myself. I wonder if his father and my father are hanging out where ever fathers go after they die.

If there is an afterlife, I guess it's timeless. Or time flashes by really fast. In the time it takes us to live a day they live three centuries. So for my dad and Andrew's dad it must be 2300 or something like that. To my father I'm already long-dead. A few days ago he said that soon he'd be pushing up daisies. I told him I'd be there a few days after him. In the virtual sense.

Who knows what comes next. I have a feeling there's a lot of that coming up.

Susan Kitchens and I live parallel lives too. Guess what, her father was born in 1929 too. And he's in hospice, as my father was. And she predicts he won't make it through 2009. There have been other big parallels in our lives.

The person sitting next to me on this flight, a nurse who lost her parents years ago, said it really hits you three months after it happens. Maybe. Right now I'm still standing at the plate with the bat in my hands and the pitch is coming out of the pitcher's hand in super-slow motion and I'm waiting for it to come at me so I can swing. Will I swing and miss, or hit a line drive, or hit it out of the park? Or something we don't even have a word for.

I know this -- when I was a little kid and realized that someday I'd lose a parent, it froze me with fear. Now, decades later it has happened. I'm not frozen at all. I'm in motion. Flying across the country on Virgin America #24.

A Flickr set of photos taken out the window of the flight.

Father's Day

Sat, 03 Oct 2009 16:04:22 GMT

I spent most of last week in NY, visiting my parents.

My father has been gravely ill, and as it turns out this was my last visit to see him.

This morning he died.

He's had a long decline and plenty of time to prepare for the end. This week we talked honestly and openly about the big things. In June, on his 80th birthday I wrote to him that he was my hero. There was a lot of forgiveness in that statement, over the years, we had focused too much on the bad times, and not enough on the time at the beginning and at the end, which were good, loving, generous and fair.

There's no doubt my father loved the little boy who looked up to him. There's no doubt we both had trouble adjusting to the man who took the little boy's place.

I was lucky that my father lived so long. Yet today there is a huge void, a puzzle, an unknown. How do you fill the space occupied by someone who looms so large.

My father fought for my life when I was young and had a ruptured appendix.

When he discovered the beauty of outliners he said the nicest thing a father can say about a son -- "Every day is father's day."

We searched for my father, lost in the melee after the 9/11 attacks. His picture only appeared that once on Scripting News.

Leon Winer was born on June 17, 1929 and died on October 3, 2009.

He will be missed by his family.

My web site is my space

Sat, 03 Oct 2009 14:59:52 GMT

ThirdVoice was small and never got large.

As long as very few people used it, it was no threat to free speech, but...

What if Microsoft, who made the dominant web browser at the time, decided to either acquire ThirdVoice or create their own?

Then almost everyone who read my site would see the commentary first. Imho, that most definitely would have changed the web, for the worse.

If we hadn't objected to ThirdVoice that would have provided all the excuse Microsoft needed.

And Microsoft did try to muck around with web content. But they backed down when the web community strenuously objected.

Now fast-forward to Google and its Toolbar and the cutely named SideWiki. Clever trick. Could have named it PuppySidebar. Now we'd be seeming to criticize puppies. Some people must think that Google's neo-ThirdVoice is actually a wiki, but of course it's nothing like a wiki.

And Google has more staying power than ThirdVoice. And they have ambitions to be the leading browser vendor and they have a chance. Then someday soon we may have the ability to annotate any page on the web. Sounds great that way, but do you want everyone viewing the annotated view of your writing? I don't.

Phil Windley, who is (I guess) a libertarian, thinks everyone should have the right to view the web any way they want. Who could argue with that. He says my website is not a place, instead I should look at the components. It's actually a collection of documents that can be transferred from one machine to another over a network. But his bank account, like my website, is just a collection of documents that can be transferred from one machine to another over a network. I doubt if Phil thinks we ought to be able to use his money any way we'd like. Maybe he does. He's surprised me before.

We buy into illusions that virtual things are real all the time. Our way of life depends on it. The pieces of paper in our wallet used to be redeemable for bars of gold. They were virtual then, now they're not even that because the linkage to gold no longer exists. Even the wood, glass and concrete that makes up a "house" is something that is given meaning by a piece of paper that says Phil owns it, and not a poor family in downtown Salt Lake City. Why should he get to live in that collection of wood and concrete, stay warm in the Utah winter, when other people are cold and go hungry? Because we have conventions. And Phil, even though he doesn't trust government, depends on government to keep him in his house. Otherwise he would surely be out on the street. (Not saying that would be right, it just illustrates that the world isn't so harsh as to say that we have no say in how what we own is used.)

I don't mind if a small group of people wants to annotate my writing, off on the side, without effecting how other people read it. But that's not what Google is proposing, long-term, to do here. We have to object at the beginning, or we'll have no standing later. My website expresses my point of view. I get to take risky positions, ones that are complicated to explain because I know that here, unlike almost everywhere else, I get to finish a thought. There are so many places for "conversation" -- virtually everywhere. I like my website because it is not one of those places. And yes Phil it is a place, every bit as much as your collection of wood and concrete is.

This really is my intellectual home. And I think the government should protect it, the same way the government protects my bank account. If Google wants comments, great, put it on their own site. But unless I ask for it, stay out of my space.

Advice on recording tomorrow's podcast?

Fri, 02 Oct 2009 13:55:48 GMT

Tomorrow we're doing a live Rebooting The News podcast at the SF Hilton. It's going to present an interesting challenge because it will be in a room with a number of people talking, and without spending a lot of money on new equipment, I have to get them all on the recording with a single mike.

Which leads to this: omnidirectional microphone.

I'd like to have the room set up as a big conference room with seats around a table, and a single microphone in the middle of the table.

There will be no time for sound checks, it has to work the first time.

Whatever I buy has to be here by tomorrow mid-day. If it's not here, we'll have to go on without it.

It would also be nice to webcast it through BlogTalkRadio and perhaps Ustream or similar services.

One possibility, admittely low-tech, is to have everyone call in on their cell phones!

Any advice people have would be quite welcome.

Why Flickr should do realtime RSS

Fri, 02 Oct 2009 02:57:47 GMT

1. Flickr comes from Yahoo.

2. Yahoo used to be a source of innovation.

3. Twitter defines realtime.

4. Twitter doesn't do pictures.

5. Flickr is all about pictures.

6. Flickr already supports RSS, nicely.

7. RSS lets anyone play realtime.

8. Flickr gets to do it more openly than Twitter.

9. With pictures.

10. It's innovative and new and interesting and pretty easy. (But not trivial.)

11. A way for Yahoo to do something useful, interesting and innovative.

12. An example of a realtime photo feed. Note the use of Yahoo's Media-RSS extension.

Reboot the News at ONA09

Thu, 01 Oct 2009 15:10:36 GMT

Jay and I decided we wanted to do a live podcast at ONA09 so much we rented our own room. And it's open to the public, even if you're not going to ONA09.

Here's the deal. Come to the SF Hilton at 4PM on Saturday and look for "Rebooting The News" on the TV screen in the lobby. Or you can follow me or Jay on Twitter, we'll certainly advertise our location. Be sure to be there before 4:10PM. We'll all sit around a conference room table and reboot the news.

No punditry, or savvy church-goers, just talk about how the news will work after the new system is fully rebooted.

Flying cross-country

Thu, 01 Oct 2009 14:02:52 GMT

I'm flying today from JFK to SFO.

Trying something new, taking pictures as we go, as cloud cover permits, and uploading them in realtime.

I have enough people in my loop so that almost anywhere I post a picture of, someone is in the the picture, and a few people can tell me exactly where it is. I learned this on the west-east trip last week, when I took a picture in the middle of Colorado that turned out to be in Ouray County near Telluride. I've been there! Beaufiful country.

Here's the Flickr set of pics taken today.

Realtime interactive social media. Whatever you call it, it's really coool.

Two proposed rssCloud additions

Thu, 01 Oct 2009 13:50:27 GMT

On Tuesday I outlined the next steps on two proposed changes to the rssCloud walkthrough document.

I plan to implement these changes shortly. Joseph Scott of Wordpress, who proposed the second change, has said he will also implement them in his software.

Also see the short-term roadmap I posted last Friday.

An open reboot on Saturday

Tue, 29 Sep 2009 15:22:05 GMT

We're going to combine this week's Rebooting the News with next week's and do it Saturday afternoon live in San Francisco. Jay will be in town for the Online News Association meeting, and of course I live a BART ride away in Berkeley, so we'll meet at 4:30PM and do a 75-minute Rebooting the News special, and you're invited!

We're looking for a place that's very near to the Hilton. If you have a conference room nearby, within say a 5 minute walk, would you like to host this small meetup? We'd find an appropriate way to thank you in the podcast.

Also, please post a comment below if you'd like to come. Can't guarantee how much room we'll have, we may end up doing it at a Starbuck's!

Why no Twitter clients with an API?

Tue, 29 Sep 2009 12:10:28 GMT

Scoble says the iPhone version of Tweetie is so excellent that it might be the one everyone switches to. I don't know about that, I'm seriously considering a divorce from my iPhone, so I don't care so much about iPhone apps.

He specifically calls out Seesmic who doesn't yet have an iPhone app.

While I use my iPhone for tethering (and won't install the 3.1 upgrade because it would kill that) -- Scoble is tethered to his iPhone for everything. He does all his tweeting and friendfeeding from the iPhone. I find this both amazing and ridiculous. So many compromises. I guess Scoble values connectivity above all else, and wants to travel light.

He really wants a curating application, which I have, it's the app that manages my 40 Twits page. I've released it as open source, and set up an account for Scbole, but it doesn't work on the iPhone because it depends on a bookmarklet and I guess they don't work on the iPhone? I don't know enough about it to say for sure.

Bookmarklets make a lot of things possible. If they don't work on the iPhone then Apple should get to it and make them work. (Apparently they do.)

So Scoble is taking another tack to get what he wants. He's trying to scare Seesmic into providing the "curation" feature for him in their non-existent iPhone app. It would be simple, just a slight variant on retweeting. Maybe they don't want to do it because retweeting will soon get an overhaul. (And imho will finally work as it always should have.)

Which brings me to the point of the piece. Maybe Twitter clients are now mature and competitive enough of a market that they should support plug-ins of their own. It's the way things go. They are pretty much plug-ins themselves, but then so is Twitter a plug-in for the Internet, which is the end of the chain (it's not a plug-in for anything).

If Seesmic supported plug-ins then they wouldn't have to wait for their competitors to beat them in the market before they implemented something. They wouldn't have to worry if it pissed off Ev or Biz, they could just shrug it off as something a developer did (whatever it is that pissed them off).

It may be impossible for them to support plug-ins, if so, many apologies. But in case it's not, it could be the way to answer all of Scoble's feature requests. "There's a plug-in for that."

A cloud-enabled podcast feed

Mon, 28 Sep 2009 20:33:53 GMT

In the early days of podcasting, in January 2001, we got the bootstrap started with a feed of Grateful Dead songs. Every day or so I added a song to the feed, in case anyone was interested in writing an application that grabbed audio enclosures from feeds. I needed something to test with because Radio UserLand, which we were working on at the time, had the capability.

It took a few years for podcasting to catch on, but having that example feed made a difference. You have to start somewhere.

Now in 2009 we're trying to bootstrap a network of realtime feeds, and it's going pretty well so far. Podcasts are implemented with RSS too, and while we have excellent examples of realtime photo feeds, we don't yet have a realtime feed with audio.

So a week or so ago I started exploring options, and thought I'd use the Grateful Dead again, until JY suggested using a fast-updating audio feed from the Internet Archive. I took one look and realized this was it. It took a bit of a coding to check it periodically to see if it has updated, add a cloud element and notify one of my cloud servers. Now it's done.

http://static.newsriver.org/archiveOrg/podcastRss.xml

So if you're working on podcatching software give it a try.

Since River2 is a podcatcher, it automatically works with this feed.

TechCrunch is cloud-enabled!

Sat, 26 Sep 2009 13:55:23 GMT

It's a cause for celebration every time a feed is cloud-enabled, but it's a special victory when a large tech news site takes the leap. The first to do so was GigaOm, which became a source of realtime updates on the same day that WordPress got the feature. Now the second big brick falls into place -- TechCrunch.

I've been emailing with their new CTO Nik Cubrilovic, for the last month. This morning I got an email from him saying their service was up.

I added the TechCrunch feed to my River2 aggregator, and it worked exactly as it should!

Here's a screen capture of the Log page from River2.

1. I subscribe to the feed.

2. River2 requests notification from TechCrunch.

3. They check out its notification handler, and apparently like what they see.

4. They accept my request.

5. My River2 logs the registration.

Now when TechCrunch posts a new article my aggregator will be directly notified, will read the feed, and will immediately post the new item to my home page. All this should happen, if everything is working, in a few seconds.

Thanks TechCrunch for supporting rssCloud!

PS: Last night I posted an rssCloud status report.

Where we're at with rssCloud

Sat, 26 Sep 2009 02:46:00 GMT

A brief report on where we're at with rssCloudLand as September winds down.

It's been a great summer. In July, we got busy rebooting the RSS cloud, based on the experience in 2001 and 2002, with lessons learned, and a lot more success than we had seven years ago.

Based on the walkthrough document, the community has shipped multiple implementations of all three sides of the interface.

1. There have been many implementations of the cloud software, including my own rssCloud.root and wordpress.com and the plug-in that turns every standalong WordPress installation into an rssCloud server. Total number of installations: millions.

2. Lots of feeds and authoring systems numbering in the millions. Example real-time podcast feeds and photo feeds.

3. Not so many aggregators. So far only two -- first my own River2 and LazyFeed. There many more on the way. I hope one or two Twitter clients will ship rssCloud support in the month of October.

What next?

I have four immediate priorities:

1. Features that will make it possible for Google Reader and other large scale aggregators to wire into rssCloud. These are technical features, to most users they are details, but nonetheless are important. It must be possible for a server to register a notification request using a domain name, on behalf of another server. And along with this feature, most developers believe a stronger verification process is needed. I am one of them. Yet it must remain simple to implement, so the barrier to entry is as low as possible. There have been proposals in both these areas.

2. Long-polling proxies for clients running on systems behind NATs or firewalls. This technology is well-understood, and a number of developers are working on solutions. I hope when code emerges, there will be an effort to make their interfaces compatible, so maximum interop can be achieved.

3. Conventions for naming, so that URLs can be mapped to names that are managed by DNS, the naming system of the Internet itself. I've done a simple experiment in this area to get myself educated on the issues and learn how users and developers see this.

4. A high-level user-oriented vision statement for rssCloud with a roadmap for developers and marketers. My goal is to create an open loosely-coupled message network that achieves more or less what Twitter does, but in a decentralized manner. It must use the architecture of the Internet to achieve what Twitter achieves in a centralized fashion. No doubt there will be tradeoffs, some things the open network will do better, and other things that the centralized one will. This is similar to previous layers of the Internet, where systems like AOL and CompuServe provided more sophisticated features, where the World Wide Web was more low-tech, more basic. Both ways of doing things have advantages and survive to this day.

Comments, questions and suggestions are welcome.

Arrington in the airport

Fri, 25 Sep 2009 01:23:08 GMT

A question for DNS gurus out there in InternetLand

Thu, 24 Sep 2009 04:55:45 GMT

I bought a cool domain for a project I'm working on, r2.ly.

It takes Libya forever to approve these things, but they finally have, and I've changed the DNS to ns1.slicehost.com and ns2.slicehost.com (where I now have an account, with DNS control) but I can't tell what's going wrong cause I don't really know how to debug DNS.

I just know that it's not resolving on any of my machines.

Can you tell what the problem is with it?

And if you solve the problem you get to call me stupid in the comments and I won't moderate it out.

I want to divorce my iPhone

Wed, 23 Sep 2009 18:02:02 GMT

The iPhone is so totally not my spiritual soulmate.

I refuse to become dependent on apps grown in their environment. To me it's like contributing to the enslavement of my brother and sister programmers. I don't care how sexy the environment is as a user or a developer, the fact that Apple holds up apps and rejects them often because they compete with their own software is to me like buying a coat made of the skins of endangered species. I won't use iPhone apps for ecological reasons.

I use my iPhone as a: 1. Phone. 2: Camera that can communicate (very valuable feature to me). 3. A Bluetooth tethering device for places my Sprint MiFi doesn't work (and that's a lot of places).

For that I pay about $100 per month. I think I'm being ripped off. (Sure of it.)

Okay Scripting News readers -- tell me I'm crazy but I want a divorce. Enough of this bullshit.

But I need a phone that does 1, 2 and 3.

What will I fall in love with?

PS: I have my contacts in GMail. Must be able to synch with them. One of my favorite iPhone features.

PPS: I never use it as an iPod. I prefer my Walkman.

Sharing links in the River2 community

Wed, 23 Sep 2009 12:54:56 GMT

A new feature makes it easy to share links to stories from the River2 news page to followers on Twitter.

http://newsriver.org/r2ly.html

It also maintains a Top 40 list for River2 users.

This feature is itself a bootstrap since one of the key ingredients are the people using it. Just the right number and the right kind (thoughtful, passionate, forgiving, visionary) are needed. The result can be an editorial product in its own right. And the first experiences will ~~probably~~ certainly suggest the second and third level of features.

Bootstrapping is for users too. In fact at some point, without users participating, the bootstrap stops. You have to wait until they show up, or keep trying to figure out what it will take to entice them to participate.

I realized something yesterday, that bootstrapping is hard because you have to use things that don't exist yet.

I often use bridges as metaphors to describe bootstraps in software. Here goes..

People hardly notice driving across the Golden Gate Bridge, they might notice the scenery, or the walkers or bike riders, or think about the oncoming traffic. But one day, a long time ago, someone stood on one side or the other -- in San Francisco or Marin -- and looked at the Golden Gate (which was the waterway before it was the bridge) and thought "I bet we could put a bridge here." Nice thought, but then what? What's the first step? And when that doesn't work, what's the next first step? Long before there's a bridge, someone has to make the trip in a bucket hanging from a cable. Today, River2 users are those kinds of people.

I've been having an on-and-off discussion with Marshall about this. He's been frustrated by the software. I understand. But I need people like him to struggle through it, tell me what went wrong, so I can try to fix it, and then tell me if it worked. The rewards mostly come from within, to know that you played a role in making something new happen. In this case it will be a distributed loosely-coupled 140-character message network that is free from YWFFTMMR. And there might be business opportunities to provide services to users. No one's saying you can't get rich. But it has to be fair, and people should always have lots of choice.

One more note -- it's taking a long time for the domain I'll use, r2.ly, to come through the registration process. So to begin with we'll use a teamrss.com domain to share links. If you see one of these on Twitter it's coming from this part of River2.

What is the real-time web?

Tue, 22 Sep 2009 22:49:44 GMT

Four words: It Happens Without Waiting.

Narrative: Today I wrote a piece about the Berkeley Public Library on InBerkeley.Com. I wanted to find a pointer to the library website, so I switched over to Google. Looked up Berkeley Public Library. My piece, publshed less than a minute earlier. was the first item. Real-time web. (True story.)

The SUL as a tool to control news?

Tue, 22 Sep 2009 12:29:43 GMT

SUL is Twitter's Suggested Users List.

It's a group of approximately 500 Twitter users who are "suggested" to new users when they create an account. The stated purpose is to provide people to watch when you're starting out. But are there other purposes? Could it be used to reward positive coverage and punish negative coverage? I think we now have some data on that.

There's no doubt that Twitter has received a lot of help from the press, and much of it is genuine enthusiasm for a communication tool that at least hints at the future of news.

Many of the suggested users are news organizations, reporters, columnists, marketers, and as a result, most have over a million followers. Almost all of the top tech news organizations are on the list. And TechCrunch was one of them until something happened in July as is evident in this TwitterCounter graph.

Compare this to the graph for Mashable, over the same period.

And plotted on the same graph.

It's pretty clear something happened in July.

We know this much -- TechCrunch was dropped from the Suggested User List, right around the time their follower count started heading down. As to why, we can only speculate that it was because they ran a piece that Twitter didn't like.

7/16/09: Twitter's Internal Strategy Laid Bare: To Be "The Pulse Of The Planet."

People have always questioned whether there was a connection between being on the list and not being too critical of Twitter. At this point, there isn't much doubt that the connection is there.