Summer 2008 road trip
Wednesday, August 20, 2008 by Dave Winer.
This is Dave coming to you from Salt Lake City, UT. 
I'm on my Summer 2008 road trip. Started yesterday at 4AM, and got me into SLC at about 4PM.
Stops include Laramie, WY; Boulder CO and on to Denver on Sunday for the Democratic National Convention. Then four days of watching, listening, talking, and thinking and then back on the road to do it all again!
I tried to set up a LAN in my car, to no avail. There isn't much Sprint EVDO on the road between Reno and Salt Lake. No matter, as it turns out there isn't much I want to say to or hear from the net while on the road.
I listened to an excellent Gillmor Gang podcast with Marc Canter and Evan Prodromou of identi.ca. I agree with Steve that identi.ca must do what Twitter does, and the things Twitter stopped doing (like the hugely important XMPP gateway) but no more.
If a user has to stop and think whether they should use 140 characters or 250 because this micro-message might go through a gateway to Twitter, well, that's the end of identi.ca right there. Doesn't make it through most people's annoyance filter. Maybe later, when and if identi.ca takes over the world, but it hasn't happened yet, so for now, do what Twitter does -- and no more.
Also, Twitter does have a hard limit of 140 characters per message. Here's an example. I wrote a script to send a 250 character tweet to Twitter. Here's what showed up on Twitter. 140 characters and no URL linking to an addendum.
Let's try the same on identi.ca. Good, it works identically. (Hence its name.) Keep it that way!
To Steve, there have been URIs for individual twits for a long time. That's not something new with the threading features in Twitter.
I loved that Kevin Marks always has one more half-baked BigCo replacement for something we've in the LittleGuy world have had working for years. Evan does an excellent job of taking it up the butt (I mean that as a compliment) -- BOGU is the way of the software world esp when you're being evangelized by IBM (in the 80s), Microsoft (in the 90s) or Google (in the 00s).
Marc and Steve have great rapport, as good as anything I've heard in podcasting. And Marc, I left a voicemail for you, but given the way the phone company works, you probably won't get it for a few days. Say hi to Doc for me! 
There's something really spooky about listening to a podcast with these guys interspersed with doing Bluetooth cellphone calls to them at the same time! Oh man, technology is amazing.
Anyway, I am posting pics to Flickr (and Twitter) fairly regularly.
Today I hang out with NakedJen in Salt Lake and might have a meal with Phil Windley and then tomorrow it's back on the road heading into Wyoming.
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"The protoblogger." - NY Times.
"The father of modern-day content distribution." - PC World.
One of BusinessWeek's 25 Most Influential People on the Web. "Helped popularize blogging, podcasting and RSS." - Time.
"The father of blogging and RSS." - BBC.
"RSS was born in 1997 out of the confluence of Dave Winer's 'Really Simple Syndication' technology, used to push out blog updates, and Netscape's 'Rich Site Summary', which allowed users to create custom Netscape home pages with regularly updated data flows." - Tim O'Reilly.
Dave Winer, 53, pioneered the development of weblogs, syndication (RSS), podcasting, outlining, and web content management software; former contributing editor at Wired Magazine, research fellow at Harvard Law School, entrepreneur, and investor in web media companies. A native New Yorker, he received a Master's in Computer Science from the University of Wisconsin, a Bachelor's in Mathematics from Tulane University and currently lives in Berkeley, California.
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