It's the holiday season, maybe that's why it took a full day for the discussion to get underway about Tumblr's implementation of the Twitter API. But it is rolling now, and going in several interesting directions.

Fred Wilson, who is a Twitter board member and a major investor in Tumblr, wrote a post on his blog asking for a discussion among his readers, who tend to view the tech world from an investor's perspective.

It's great that APIs finally have become an issue for financial people. They're also important for media people because they open doors in the news business as well. In this week's Rebooting The News, Jay asked me to explain what it means for WordPress to implement the Twitter API. The podcast was recorded before we knew that Tumblr was working on matching WordPress. If you're confused by all this michegas, listening to the podcast might help.

On October 17 I wrote The Internet Abhors a Funnel. In a sense all these new implementations of the Twitter API tend to lessen the importance of teh Funnel. And in addition to strengthening the position of WordPress and Tumblr, it also strengthens Google and Microsoft, because their search engines can become more complete than Twitter's, by making deals with the new players for access to their firehoses.

Stowe Boyd asks this question from another point of view. How do you follow someone on Tumblr from Twitter and vice versa? I have two answers for that: 1. That further strengthens the position of centralizers, Google and Microsoft. 2. That's what Realtime RSS is for, the concept behind rssCloud and PubSubHubBub. 3. Twitter can and probably still should position itself as the Network Solutions of this space, as I outlined in my 2007 piece that broke Twitter down into its components.

 12/18/2009; 8:14:16 AM  

Just like there are no atheists in foxholes there are no Republicans who are uninsured and critically ill.

 12/17/2009; 3:04:36 PM  

Marco at Tumblr says that he was inspired by the "seriously clever" use of the Twitter API by WordPress. Of course I was too. When they came out with it I wondered out loud if the Twitter API is now an open standard.

Well, less than a week later, Tumblr now has implemented the Twitter API, and as a result you can use any Twitter-compatible tool to post to and read from Tumblr.

Marco's post explains.

Let's pause here to let that sink in.

Wow. Unbelievable. Fantastic. Awesome.

Conventional wisdom says that open standards are created by endless deliberations among experts and big tech companies, and those do sometimes gain traction.

But this is how it usually happens: Someone goes first. No one thinks of it as an open standard. Then someone clones it. All of a sudden people get ideas. Inspired, someone goes third. At this point it's inevitable that there will be a fourth and fifth and so on.

It's also inevitable that Twitter tools vendors will start testing their products with WordPress and Tumblr, and hopefully report bugs and have them fixed.

And the brilliant minds of the developers and users of WordPress and Tumblr will have their say in the evolution of this new art.

All of a sudden things are exciting again!!

PS: If Facebook were to implement the Twitter API that would be it. We'd have another FTP or HTTP or RSS.

 12/17/2009; 9:06:08 AM  

I get more than my share of flack from Google which is really strange because I am a person and they are a multi-billion dollar empire that employs thousands of people.

Sometimes I even win when they try to make me lose.

But you gotta wonder why a big company like Google wants me to lose. Wouldn't it be easier if they outsourced some of the innovation and got the seal of approval you get when someone who's truly independent says there's nothing up your sleeve? Otherwise I'm almost sure there is a hidden agenda. Esp when patents surface on stuff they didn't invent.

Had the same problem with Microsoft, multiple times. Funny how no one makes the pilgrimage to Redmond these days. It seems to me the rest of the world has a say in teh future Mr Google. I said this to Microsoft and now I say it to you. Relax. Kick back. You're going to make 40-plus percent of all the profit that comes from any growth we, outside of Google, are able to create. Maybe even more. You won't get any more growth if you insist on controlling every bit that goes over the wire, in fact you'll get less, because the more you impede overall growth, the less you will grow.

Of course I can't prove this, but it was definitely the right call in the layer before yours. Somehow I think it's a fundamental rule of the growth of the net. The current leader will always try to control growth, and thus slit its own throat. Call that Gates' Law, because he both discovered it (as it applied to IBM) and fell victim to it (in his struggle to control the web).

BTW, to Aaron Swartz, who says Google is much less of a sociopath than Microsoft. I don't actually think so. Microsoft wasn't as bad as you seem to think. They didn't interfere with 99 percent of all Windows apps. They certainly never tried to control the platform anywhere as completely as Apple tries to control iPhone apps today. I think it's very nice of Google not to screw around with search results. I also think if they did, they'd instantly fall apart.

Another BTW, in showing us the future Google Toolbar and Feedburner, yesterday, Google presented a classic Embrace & Extend. You can tweet your links to Twitter, and a number of other places. At some point they will add Google's Twitter clone to the list (unless they acquire Twitter of course). No matter what it will be the default. You can feel its presence. Not a bad thing. A way of reminding Twitter that they are still very much one of us. Might end up being a very good thing.

 12/15/2009; 9:14:32 AM  

Lots of interesting developments yesterday, and I'm glad to have a front row seat. Actually in some cases I have a seat in the dressing room, so I have to be pretty careful about what I say.

First, New York has become much more interesting in the tech world. I spent just two days hopping from rock to rock, and didn't land on most of them, but wow, there's something going on there.

In New York as on the west coast, some companies are built to flip, meaning they don't intend to be standalone companies. They were just building features or market share, intending to be bought by a big company, probably Google.

Pretty sure that bit.ly, a company I played a role in founding, was running a Build To Flip plan. I think we found out yesterday that it didn't work.

I think in general, even if your plan is to flip, you should run a company as if no one will buy it. That your liquidity will come in the form of profit from sales of services and products to users. It's good discipline. Keeps the team focused on who and what's important.

Had bit.ly been running such a program, they would be a lot further along with Bit.ly Pro, a service they announced yesterday, probably in response to Google's announcement of their URL-shortener. (If it wasn't a response it was an incredible coincidence in timing.)

My issue with bit.ly is the instability it adds to an already-fragile Internet. They removed one element of the fragility yesterday, or showed how they plan to remove it. You don't want every link on the realtime net to go through one domain. Now you can have your links go through your own domain. But I have a better deal with Adjix, one that removes the other part of the stability problem -- they also mirror my data to a bucket that I own on Amazon S3. So, if god forbid something bad should happen to Adjix or Joe Moreno, I just point the r2.ly domain at the bucket and everything keeps working. No broken links. Should both Amazon and Adjix fail, and there's still an Internet (a fair question) I can take the data and move it to another server and it will work just as well there. All it depends on is Apache or some other static HTTP server. When bit.ly does that, they will really have a Pro version. This announcement is a Band Aid, to stop the bleeding after Google (presumably) said no to buying them.

Back to New York.

The big question I have for the brilliant young tech startups of New York is this -- are you trying to become an outpost of Silicon Valley or are you wanting to build a new layer on tech, independent of the west coast?

BTW, it's not all a rotten mess on the west coast. I have become a huge admirer of Matt Mullenweg and Automattic in the last year (not that I wasn't already smitten before). They did two beautifully disrupting things in 2009 all while growing their freemium cash-generating business -- they implemented rssCloud and the Twitter API. And the year still ain't over.

 12/15/2009; 7:26:39 AM  

They should start using it in their own products.

For example, Google Maps has the ability to generate a link to the map you're viewing, suitable for sharing with others. But the URL is a monster mess. Why not make it short?

I first suggested this in November 2007.

Also: It's about time Twitter put the fork in URL shorteners for good and transported links as metadata of the tweet, as they do for geo data, the post time, etc. Why are they sacrificing the stability of the web to keep bit.ly alive. I still don't get it.

 12/14/2009; 2:08:49 PM  

I've spent the week in NY on business and family stuff, having a nice time, but I didn't bring warm-enough clothes.

We're definitely in transition here, I now write for a lot of places, and Scripting News has become very quiet.

Pointers to all my writing can be found on protoblogger.com.

 12/11/2009; 5:32:58 AM  

In October I wrote a post looking for a home for books written by my great-uncle Arno Schmidt. The books were left to us by his sister, my grandomother, who was keeping them for him in the US.

Turns out most American universities with a German Studies department already have complete sets of his writing.

However, Timm Menke of Portland State University posted an enthusiastic comment under my post. We exchanged emails, talked on the phone and we quickly decided that they would provide the best home for his work in the US.

Yesterday the books arrived in Portland. If anyone is looking for a good collection of Arno Schmidt's work in the US, selected by the author, you should look to Portland State University.

 12/11/2009; 5:36:21 AM  

TorrentFreak has a piece today talking about my efforts to sort out the differences in the RSS used by various BitTorrent websites.

I also posted some ideas for a Torrent namespace that can be used in RSS, or any other XML-based format that accepts extensions, such as Atom and OPML 2.0.

On the Droidie site I look at what it will take to make it the perfect podcatcher.

And a think piece on Protoblogger on the tension between doing something big and getting rich. This will lead to a followup piece that talks about creating incentives for people who don't want to go the corporate route. There really isn't that much money at stake but the really large ideas suffer if they get caught up inside corporations.

Twitter has been down now for about 1/2 hour. 3:30PM Pacific. Oy -- we're so dependent on it. Where would you go now to find out what's up? status.twitter.com has nothing about an outage. (Postscript: It was down for just about 1/2 hour. TechCrunch has a story about it.)

 12/6/2009; 3:19:25 PM  

As usual, check out protoblogger.com for a list of all the stories I write on the various sites I write for.

Here's a subset, the ones I don't think you should miss.

1. I'm sorry but we need government.

2. Ideas for a BitTorrent namespace.

3. What does the J-school of the Future look like?

4. Consumer Reports rates cell phone service in the US.

5. We need: A programmable Twitter client.

 12/4/2009; 8:55:28 AM  

This morning Google announced that they're now running a free DNS for everyone to use.

The IP addresses: 8.8.8.8 and 8.8.4.4.

Interesting and unexpected.

Why? Obviously they get a lot of data -- all the sites we're visiting.

Have you tried it? If not, why not?

If so, how is it? They say it's faster -- is it?

They say they won't screw with it. Do you believe them?

Update: I'm using it here on my LAN. Just changed the configuration of my router, so all my machines will start using their DNS.

 12/3/2009; 11:21:55 AM  

I just wrote a piece about the J-school of the Future over on Rebootnews. After writing it, I sent a note to Doc Searls and JP Rangaswami of British Telecom, both of whom are participating in the Supernova conference in San Francisco. (I listened to JP's talk on the webcast and was, as usual, impressed with his thinking.)

I asked JP if any of the technologists he employs could explain why technology is important. It was kind of a challenge, because I find that so many people who call themselves technologists don't have an answer to that question. His talk was about this subject, so I thought it was fair to bring it up. Had I been interviewing him I would have.

Anyway, the answer: Technology is important because it empowers people. That's where you start. Not in novelty or neatness, not in the fact that it changes things, because it might change things by disempowering. Change is not in itself a valid reason for anything.

The only reason to have technology is that it gives people power to change things for the better. Note that the technology is not the subject of that sentence, people are.

I don't think you can even begin to be a technologist if you don't have a passionate view about technology's importance. It has to be the reason you're doing it. Not because you have an aptitude for it, or want to make a lot of money, or want to change the world, or prove yourself or show your father (uncle, mother, sister, brother, best friend) that you have the stuff to make it. None of those things make a technologist.

If you're not thinking about people, all the time, in everything you do, then you're not a technologist.

Usually I put an "imho" at the end of statements like that, but this one is so important, I'm leaving it off.

 12/2/2009; 12:26:54 PM  

It would do more or less exactly what the twitter.com website does. Same prefs, same commands, same user experience. Think Apache for the Twitter user interface.

In my explorations of a hypothetical decentralized Twitter, at first I thought the clients would be where decentralization would happen. But, lately I've come to realize that it probably won't happen there because as the market has evolved they've become too dependent on Twitter Corp, and are unlikely to do anything that might threaten a friendly relationship with the company.

I saw this first-hand in the Mac software market in the early 90s. Even when it would have been in the interests of developers to work with each other, each of them tried to do special deals with Apple. Of course no one really got those deals, so we all went down. But it's human nature to think you're special and if you play nice with the platform vendor, they'll play nice with you. And the platform vendor may totally mean to be nice, but they can't help acting in their own self-interest and that almost always is at the expense of the developers.

So if the commercial developers can't or won't break free of the platform vendor, let's create an open source client that can be repurposed in as many different ways as we, as individuals want. Some of us may want to do deals with Twitter Corp, and that's fine -- but others may wish to embark on paths that are independent of Twitter. They wouldn't try to guess what would make the platform vendor happy, and instead follow the grain of the Internet, or go where the users want to go, or some users, or to scratch their own itch. Some may want to be part of the Cathedral and others part of the Bazaar. :-)

I'm not even 100 percent sure what I'm asking for, but I'll know it when I see it. Probably a JavaScript framework that comes with a Twitter timeline object. So displaying a timeline is automatic as are the user interactions. So any kind of client, one written in any language -- Python, Perl, Java, JavaScript, PHP, C, etc -- could store data in it. It wouldn't know anything about the Twitter API. It would be up to the applications to put data in the structure.

It would do more or less exactly what the twitter.com website does. Same prefs, same commands, same user experience. Think Apache for the Twitter user interface. It would, of course, be programmable through a user scripting language.

Having this one component would let a thousand flowers bloom in exactly the place where we need them to bloom. The key thing is to find out what would happen if we could take a path that was not designed to please the platform vendor. Note I carefully did not say "to piss off the platform vendor." I really do mean to chart courses that are independent of the vendor.

What would be even cooler is if one of the client vendors decided to release their code under the GPL. Or, even better would be if Twitter Corp did it. That would be hugely disruptive and would likely lead to some very serious innovation. :-)

 12/1/2009; 10:13:52 AM  

BBC: "A Twitter feed set up by a Dutch teenager as a hobby has been taken over by Microsoft news channel MSNBC.com."

The report emphasizes the rate that the feed is growing, by 3000 to 4000 followers per day. What it doesn't say is that the feed is on Twitter's Suggested Users List, and that growth is normal for feeds on the list, even ones that aren't run by prodigious teens.

Editorial comment: Might as well say that a Dutch teenager amazes his parents by traveling from Europe to America in a matter of hours. Without saying that he booked a flight on KLM. :-)

We live in a time of pseudo news.

Another observation. It would be interesting to know how much Microsoft paid for his feed. That would, right there, establish the monetary value of SUL placement.

 12/1/2009; 11:30:47 AM  

Things are transitioning in DaveLand.

http://dw.posterous.com/how-to-find-all-my-writing

Dig we must!



 11/29/2009; 12:15:35 PM  

My new blogging method is to post stuff where ever it might make sense to do so, and hoping to be able to bring it all back together through various mechanisms.

In the last couple of days I've written three pieces I think Scripting News readers would want to see:

1. Reviewing the RSS generated by BitTorrent sites. The goal to help improve the quality and uniformity of their metadata, perhaps to allow more distributed applications to be built around BitTorrent, and perhaps make the network more robust and useful, and potentially more lucrative for the content owners. But where I'm starting is with the obvious fixes, and there's lots to do.

2. We need a programmable Twitter client. It took me a long time to figure this out, but I think it would be a huge accelerator. Turn over the tools of innovation to power users. It's always been this way, but somehow in the last couple of decades we've forgotten that programming tools belong to users too. Unix, DOS, Lotus, Emacs, dBASE, all pointed this way. Time to go back to our roots.

3. Journos as Ski Patrol. I've been explaining the "reboot" in news by comparing it to skiing in the 50s and 60s, when the amateurs arrived, changing the sport forever.

Tech note -- the first piece was written on a WordPress site, the second on a Tumblr site and the third on my Posterous. My authoring tools let me write for all these platforms, in exactly the same way. All are excellent products, but their capabilities are different.

 11/28/2009; 10:52:27 AM  

Well our family Thanksgiving feast is over, and it was a major success.

Everyone got along, though there were a few moments where, in the past, things might have flamed out.

There are two reasons why this year was special.

1. We learned this year how important we are to each other.

2. The advent of Shea Stadium Rules.

Maybe I don't even need to explain them to you.

I think baseball people get this. And mine is a family of baseball people.

Just to be complete.. There's no fighting in Shea Stadium among Mets fans. We may fight with fans of the other guys, but when you cut to the core, a guy wearing a Mets hat is family. There's a deep bond we share. It goes much deeper than words. So while we may disagree, when we're in Shea Stadium, we don't fight.

So, in a family gathering, just invoke the same rules you do inside your team's ballpark.

What else needs to be said other than it works. It really does. Give it a try.

PS: When I explained it to a longtime friend who is a Cubs fan, he understood immediately. Of course he calls them Wrigley Field Rules.

 11/27/2009; 1:31:45 PM  

Yesterday the popular Mininova search engine for BitTorrent radically cut back its service.

Previously, they indexed torrents for all programming that was submitted, without concern for who owned the copyright. A Dutch court ruled that they could no longer do that. So now they only index torrents where copyright ownership can be validated. Note the Mininova never stored the content, just links to files that pointed to the content.

Probably some uses of the site were illegal, in some jurisdictions, even though the mainstream media has generally been saying all uses are illegal. For example, consider this BBC article.

I often used Mininova to locate downloads of BBC programming. I've watched excellent dramatic series such as State of Play and documentaries on black holes, Darwin, wars, you name it. I also used Mininova to find PBS shows such as Frontline, Bill Moyers and Nova.

For example, last night I watched an episode of Frontline about credit and debit cards that would be hugely more powerful if everyone who had a credit or debit card would watch. It opened my eyes. An hour totally well spent.

I don't know how the BBC and PBS feel about this. Part of the purpose of this essay is to put the question out there. Since neither network charges directly for programming, is there any reason not to make the programming freely available over BitTorrent?

I've been trying to figure out the best way to ask this question, and decided that making a public appeal to both PBS and BBC was the best approach. Please consider making your content available, with your permission, via BitTorrent.

 11/27/2009; 12:40:36 PM  

You were warned.

http://blog.rsscloud.org/post/259781743/fake-popularity-stats-for-real-time-feeds

Hope you like!

 11/27/2009; 2:24:38 PM  

Over the years, starting in 1994, I've written Thanksgiving messages. Essays, lists, whatever. Every year the message is the same. Thanks. It's a message that never goes out of style.

Thanksgiving is the best holiday. You don't have to believe in any particular god to be part of it, or even believe in god at all.

This holiday includes everyone. All you have to do to participate is be thankful.

We have other inclusive holidays. July 4. Veterans Day. Martin Luther King's birthday. But Thanksgiving is the one that's about thanks.

This being the year of Twitter lists, I made a list of the people on Twitter who I'm thankful for. It's a dynamic thing. I'll be adding to it over the next few days but I'm not going to point to it though, because it'll be a short-lived thing.

Rather than make a big list here on the blog, I've whittled my Thanksgiving thought down to one idea that I'd like to express thanks for. The mystery of life.

At some point in childhood we realize we don't have a clue what existence is about, or the limits of existence. I think everyone reaches this point, whether or not they believe in god or an after-life. I think religion is a way to bundle up the confusion in a box and put it Over There so we can get on with living.

Every so often something happens, a family member or friend dies, and that makes the confusion come front and center. And once in a lifetime someone as close as a father dies, and that floors you. You get knocked down, and as you come back up, you're not the same person you were before. The mystery of life and the question of existence after life, they're always there, but they loom much larger after a loss.

I am not a member of the church of "I Know There's Nothing" after death. My father, however, was a member. He said he knew there was nothing.

Me, I'm a mystic about What It All Means.

I celebrate the mystery of it.

I think, by extrapolation, that every species thinks it's the highest form of life. Largely because they can't experience the existence of higher forms of life, even when they're there.

An example. Think about a bird. We think we're more conscious and more intelligent than a bird. Maybe we are. But is the bird aware that we exist? Not sure about that. Maybe we're like weather to birds? Or earthquakes or locusts. Does the bird acknowlege our superior intellect? More doubtful. Now just go down the hierarchy a few steps and sooner or later you reach a species that isn't aware that we exist. And assume it's true that we are superior, that means that a superior form exists for them that they are not aware of. So now put your focus on the human species. How could it be that we are the most advanced species there is? That would seem pretty lucky. And if we weren't the most advanced, if there were superior beings walking among us, would we even be aware of them? I think we wouldn't.

8/28/96: "Do they have bee priests and doctors to provide spiritual context, or to shrug their shoulders and say that nothing can be done?"

And with mysteries that we can identify but have no clue how to explain (like the conflicting theories of the universe that apply in black holes) -- is it impossible that there are species in the universe who have figured it out? And if they have, what capabilities does that knowledge give them that we can't even imagine?

Think back to the human species before Einstein formulated the Theory of Relativity. In some ways we haven't changed, but in others, we're a whole new species just because of that one discovery.

Physicists believe there is a theory that pulls all existence together into a single framework, and it's not hard to imagine that the knowledge that flows from that theory will lift our species to a new level. Maybe right there, at that moment, we will become a higher form of life? Hard to know until it happens.

Okay, so what does all this mean?

Well, there's an arrogance to saying you know that there's no existence before or after life. That our soul, the core of our being, our awareness, is just wasted when we die. That there is no purpose to living. No purpose at all. It's arrogant to think you know that. Because the fact is you don't know.

It also betrays a pessimism that is all too common in our species. Maybe it's just survivors and refugees like my father who had this pessimism. Hard to know.

I think it's clear that the only rational answer to all the questions that our species is not yet equipped to answer: Who Knows. Put them in a box, over there, close the box and go on living. And once a year, on Thanksgiving Day, thank the box, and hug someone close to you, eat too much food, watch some TV, go for a walk and get ready for Christmas.

Happy Thanksgiving everybody!

 11/26/2009; 9:30:42 AM  

Why make an exception for geographic data or which app created the tweet or which tweet it's in response to, or that it was retweeted by 7 people and who they are? Or who wrote it? And when?

These bits of data all live outside the 140 character "limit."

Every good idea people come up with for Twitter involves latching a new piece of metadata to a tweet. And in the middle you have a conflicted, slow and arbitrary (and opaque) decision-making process, controlled by one company.

Shouldn't the architecture of tweets be open to any kind of data that anyone thinks of?

If you make a Twitter client please, start pushing your users' updates to a RSS feed on a server outside of twitter.com. It's just a backup. That's the first easy small step down the path of free evolution. Once someone does that, there are more steps.

To get an idea of what's possible, I recommend reading A better design for Twitter retweets. Wouldn't it be great if we didn't have to wait for Twitter Corp to try this out?

 11/25/2009; 11:06:15 AM  

Yesterday I got my LifeLiner tool working with Tumblr. Still some rough edges, but it's more or less doing the same stuff I have been doing with WordPress.

The goal is to have a single feed that captures all my online writing.

Moving toward what I call the Loosely-coupled 140 character message network.

Yesterday I also spoke with the lead developer at Posterous. We worked out an addition to their API that would make my software work with theirs. Got a note late last night night saying the feature was in. Today I'll test it, and if it works I hope to report that I have Posterous working with LifeLiner.

Meanwhile, TechCrunch has caught onto the idea I borrowed from Steve Rubel, almost. They noted that WordPress was growing while Twitter's growth has (perhaps temporarily) stalled.

The phenomenon is not, as some have said, the "death" of blogging (I hate that word!) -- rather huge growth in blogging at the low-end as NBBs discover its joys through Twitter and Facebook. Perhaps very few of them will want more, but even a few is a lot! Expect a huge surge in medium-range and high-end blogging in the coming years, with products like Tumblr and Posterous and WordPress perfectly poised to capture the growth.

Two things the Twitter guys should, imho, be thinking about:

1. How can they capture this growth as people move up-scale? Should they have a blogging network of their own? Or...

2. As people branch out they're not going to want to give up their networks on Twitter. An alternate to #1 is to fully open the Twitter architecture before the flow around it builds. The Internet routes around a funnel, which is largely what Twitter is, because it's too limiting for what users want to do. Maybe not today, but it's easy to see the day coming.

Historically it always seems to work this way. A company boots up a new activity, then people get familiar with it and want all the power and don't need the training wheels. An industry appears where there used to be a company.

More news.. The TypePad guys have also gotten in touch with news that they have a new simplified REST-style API coming for their new "micro" service. I was actually looking for it.

I totally get the sense that there's a critical mass developing. All these companies are competing fiercely, and they're sharp and focused and hungry. And attaining some success.

I got a note from David Karp at Tumblr saying that for the first time his site is in the top 100 of all sites on the Internet. That's pretty amazing and something to be proud of. Congrats!

One step at a time. This has been a pretty good week for getting things to work together.

I'll keep you posted as things progress.

 11/25/2009; 8:44:44 AM  

Like everyone else, I'm peripherally following the fur flying about Murdoch thinking about whether or not to block Google from searching his news sites. In the background I keep wondering if this isn't all a misunderstanding. I mean, do a lot of people get their news on Google? That's a question.

Okay I know I'm not average, so I don't mean to say my experience is statistically significant. For all I know everyone else is getting their news on Google. But I really don't think so. Here's what I think.

I think other sites grabbed most of the flow in news before Google got around to doing news, and such habits are hard to break. I guess that Yahoo is still the leader in online news and CNN and MSN are #2 and #3. After that, there's a lot of noise. Somewhere down there is Google. In the dust.

People say silly things like Google would be nothing without the NY Times, but it wasn't until relatively recently that the Times let Google index their news stories. I know this because I had a Long Bet with Martin Nisenholtz that I won more or less by default. Times articles couldn't show up in the ranks on Google because the Times wouldn't let them! It was dumb not just cause it meant that Martin lost the bet, but it was dumb because they let Wikipedia become the authority on so many topics that the Times would have done a better job at, imho. And they were throwing away flow, and flow is money.

So I think a lot of this debate is uninformed and generating a bit of heat and not much else. Kind of like a lot of what passes for news these days.

 11/24/2009; 7:19:45 PM  

Not everyone was born to blog, but some people were.

Pity the poor NBB who was born before there were blogs. You can imagine this person wandering the planet with some unspecified sense of purpose. Scratching his or her head, wondering what exactly it is they were supposed to do with their lives.

Of course that's a joke, because this instinct had many ways to be satisfied before there were blogs, but it wasn't as easy as it is for people today.

I tripped across this in trying to puzzle out what was disturbing about the Julie & Julia biopic. Both main characters were clearly NBBs, and perhaps both deserved their own movies. Smooshing the stories together made for a confusing mess. I was more interested in Julia Child, the proto-proto-blogger, the blogger before there were bloggers, because her spirit is what NBBs everywhere do.

Americans should understand French cooking, says Julia. It's hard, she says, but you can do it. So, did she just wring her hands and wish for it? No, she took matters into her own hands (a phrase Jay thought was pivotal) and made it happen. That's the spirit we love!

It seems that the spirit of blogging and the spirit of America are wrapped up in each other somehow.

This came up in yesterday's Rebooting the News, which if I do say so myself, was one of our best. We get into the subjectives of what makes natural-born blogger. Here are some of the ideas.

1. An NBB doesn't wait for permission.

2. A NBB explains things, even when they don't understand. An NBB is often proved wrong, to which the NBB shrugs his or her shoulders and says something like Shit happens.

3. NBBs go first. If there's an NBB around you don't have to wait for a volunteer.

4. NBBs err on the side of saying too much. If you find yourself wishing someone would just STFU you're very likely looking at an NBB.

NBBs annoy the hell out of you. And if they're good, they get you to think. There's the big value in having us around. We foster thinking.

When I say someone is a Natural Born Blogger, it's the highest praise I know. I am not annoyed by them, but I know that often people are annoyed by me. I don't plan to change.

So who are some NBBs? My mother, for one. It's where I got my NBB gene. I never had to explain to her why she should blog, she just knew. The mechanics of blogging software weren't so natural to her, but she eventually figured it out.

Robert Scoble is a total NBB. He has an opinion about everything. I often want to strangle him, but then I realize sheez he has a point.

Dan Gillmor, Doc Searls, Jeff Jarvis and Howard Weaver are NBBs. Most good reporters are, but I suspect most of the true NBBs in journalism left about 10 years ago. I was schooled in how the web worked by the striking news writers in the Bay Area in 1994. We came across this in our podcast yesterday. Good reporters and good bloggers == same thing.

In American history, Thomas Jefferson and Ralph Waldo Emerson were bloggers. Who else? You tell me.

 11/24/2009; 8:12:34 AM  

I continue to work on my new editorial system. Whether it will see the light of day remains to be seen. I'm finding it useful and may at some point publish the tools. In the meantime, I'm learning a lot about the various publishing environments.

I supported WordPress right off the bat.

Then I wanted to do Posterous, but they are missing one parameter on their API for editing a post. As a result you can post something but if the user wants to revise it, they have no choice but to do it through the web interface, can't do it through the API. Tumblr doesn't have this limit, nor does WordPress. I have gotten in touch with the Posterous team and made the feature request. I've also checked with Steve Rubel, the most famous (imho) Posterous user to confirm that there are no desktop editing tools for Posterous. Confirmed. Without this simple addition to the API, it would be impossible.

I know I am putting pressure on them to add the feature. But it's in a good cause. I want to enable people to use their product in the same way they use the other publishing environments.

Talking with Steve earlier today he says something obvious that's worth repeating. There is a position between the lightweight Twitter and the heavyweight WordPress. And Tumblr, Posterous and now TypePad are positioning themselves right there. I expect this sweet spot to become more important over time. Twitter is, no doubt, introducing a great number of people to the joys of blogging. When they want more, some of them will certainly move to these "lite" blogging tools.

 11/23/2009; 2:32:21 PM  

I assumed that because we elected Obama to end the war in Iraq that it went without saying that the war in Afghanistan would be ended as well.

Apparently not so.

The President is now considering an escalation of the war in Afghanistan.

I can't imagine he will not face substantial opposition in the US and elsewhere, if the answer is escalation. I will be working to change this, and if it means working against the Democrats and the President, so be it.

 11/23/2009; 1:02:30 PM  

I've now seen two movies that had bloggers in leading roles.

1. State of Play. A remake of a brilliant BBC series that was so bad, that portrayed the blogger in such a superficial and humiliating fashion, that I actually walked out in disgust. (A movie has to be very bad for me to walk out on it.)

2. Julie and Julia. I saw it last night, and stayed to the end. I was just as angry at the way they portrayed the blogger, but it turns out for an opposite reason. In this case the dishonesty was reversed, the blogger wasn't at all heroic, and they misrepresented the hero, Julia Child, who was, in many ways more of a true blogger than the blogger! Kind of funny how that works.

A blogger isn't just someone who uses blogging software, at least not to me. A blogger is someone who takes matters into his or her own hands. Someone who sees a problem that no one is trying to solve, one that desperately needs solving, that begs to be solved, and because the tools are so inexpensive that they no longer present a barrier, they are available to the heroic individual. As far as I can tell, Julia Child was just such a person. Blogging software didn't exist when she was pioneering, but it seems that if it did she would have used it.

Julie used blogging, but Julia was a natural-born blogger.

The dishonesty in the story was how they portrayed Julia Child's reaction to Julie Powell's writing. They didn't explain why she disapproved. If you just went by what the movie said you could easily think she was bitter or closed-minded or jealous of young Julie. Luckily the archive is still on the web, and a simple Google search turned up the answer. Julia Child considered The Julie/Julia Project a stunt. She said of Powell: "She would never really describe the end results, how delicious it was, and what she learned." There's a lot more in a Publisher Weekly interview with Judith Jones, Child's editor at Knopf. Now, that makes sense!

I'd love to see a movie that captures the heroic spirit of blogging. Like all inspiration, it's rare, but that's why it's worth making a movie about. The story of the nobility of blogging largely remains, imho, untold.

 11/22/2009; 2:54:52 PM