Random notes from the road

Tuesday, August 7, 2007 by Dave Winer.

The Photos-to-Twitter experiment worked.  

Of course the first stop, Crater Lake, had very limited cell coverage, but I learned something about the iPhone as I drove out of the national park, when it finally found a good cell connect, it sent the mail waiting in my outbox on its own. The Blackberry does that, but somehow I didn't expect the iPhone, a very young product, to do it too. Good move. 

About 60 people of the 1700 or so who are subscribed to my Twitter feed looked at each photo. So I guess that answers the question a few people asked, why am I doing this? I'm doing it because I'm a nerd and a reporter, and about 60 people are interested. If I hear a beautiful song, or see a beautiful picture, my first impulse is to share it. It's just the way I'm built. And like everything else we do, it's a proof of concept and a road test before a moon mission. Someday we may depend on having this kind of immediacy in communication. Oddly enough that's what I was thinking when pushing RSS forward. I'll be cool to have this when there's an emergency. Even though it's mission critical for no one, Crater Lake is gorgeous and impressive, hope the pics captured that, and the desert in central Oregon may be surprising to people, and the beauty of the Columbia Gorge, in the middle of all that desert. 

Isn't this technology great! I'm looking at the Columbia River flowing past my hotel room, but electronically, I never left home. 

Today's travels will take me to Mount St. Helens and Mount Rainier, before checking into my hotel in Issaquah, where I'm staying two nights before checking into Gnomedex on the waterfront in downtown Seattle. 

PS: Can't wait to hear what Apple's announcing today.