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Outage update. Our Linux server appears to be infected with a worm. Until we completely back it up to a new server (installed yesterday) the outages will continue. At that point we'll have an extra static server at Exodus. Update at 5:15PM. The backup is complete. At 7PM there will be a planned outage on the static server, as we try to nuke the worm. If it works, everything should be back up by 8PM. If not, we go to plan B, and remap DNS to point to the new server. That will take as long as it takes for the DNS changes to percolate. Survey: "Will the number of weblogs continue to grow organically, or will there be a big spurt of explosive growth?" "Google's Genius?" asks Sam Ruby. "To pick a wire format for which there are dozens of toolkits poised to directly translate the protocol into readily consumable bits." Yes. Finally, a screen shot of PythonCard. It looks like you could do a kickass blogging tool with it. A particularly tricky virus. Who wouldn't want to know about an email to The World Bank that bounced. But wait a minute. I didn't send an email to them. Cute. Mike Chambers points to the Macromedia Developer Resources XML feed. A few weeks ago, as we were getting ready to flow the NY Times content through Radio's news aggegrator, we also released a driver for Macromedia's feed. So if you're running Radio now, you can subscribe to the feed by clicking here. Giles Bateman: "If the judge took away Internet Explorer (the weapon MS used in the crime for which they have been convicted) and barred them from further development for the Internet (appropriate, given the nature of the crime), Microsoft's monopoly power would dissolve on the spot." Amen. Alan Reiter is blogging the Technologic wireless conference in San Francisco.
James Hong: "Dave is like the BigCo of weblogs." Heh. Marc Barrot continues his work on activeRenderer. John Robb: "Radio is a fully decentralized system. Even better, it provides you with a complete back-up of your weblog on your desktop and the ability to add to your weblog while disconnected. Given that it is decentralized, you can opt to self-host your weblog at your ISP or on your corporate Intranet in under a minute." I posted this to correct some incorrect information that's floating around. We worked really hard for a couple of years to build a completely decentralized system. It takes a few minutes to post an incorrect analysis of the product, and then that floats around out there, and hurts our business. Play fair. Our product isn't perfect, for sure, but don't ding us for not doing things the product does do. Roland Tanglao: "I don't understand what the big deal is about moving your weblog from Radio to another system to avoid centralization problems." Note the URL on Roland's weblog. On the discussion thread at Burning Bird, the source of the incorrect information, Simon Fell says: "You're not tied to hosting at Userland with Radio." It's so obviously true. Here's a screen shot of the FTP prefs page in Radio. Just click on the checkbox, enter your information, and it upstreams where ever you want. Also a little-known fact, you can serve from the machine you author on. If you're running Radio, try clicking on this link. Navigate through the calendar. It works. For a low traffic site, or a site on an Intranet behind a firewall, you might even want to use it this way. Radio has a lot of power that we don't push, be careful when you say it can't do something, because there's a pretty good chance it can. NY Times: Fun With Your Zip Program. "Using little more than the zipping programs found on most personal computers, [Italian scientists] can easily distinguish between texts written in 10 different languages and almost unfailingly tell which of a large group of texts were written by the same author." Chilling Effects Clearinghouse. "Have you received a letter asking you to remove information from a Web site or to stop engaging in an activity? Are you concerned about liability for information that someone else posted to your online forum?" 250 emails this morning. Only four contained content. The rest were spam and viruses.
DaveNet: Making friends with Hollywood. Scott Johnson: Marketing Software When You Are a Small Company. James Hong: "It's disappointing that HotOrNot.com didn't get nominated for a Webby Award." Colin Faulkingham: "All I need now is a super groovy Radio client and we are off and running." I hope some enterprising Radio developer writes glue to help get Colin's project flowing. I'd do it myself, but I haven't got the time in the next few days. Let's make this a community barn-raising. He's got a great start. Help all of us out and let's take the next step. Thanks! Phillip Pearson notes that a Google search for Scientology now returns Operation Clambake as the first match. Sjoerd offers another view of REST vs RPC. I have yet another. There's a seed of the debates of the early 90s over AppleScript syntax, which if you go deeper into, you'll see is the REST philosophy, viewed through a different lens, at a different time. Lots of nouns, just a few verbs. I don't want to reignite the flames after all these years, but I should say that I was on the RPC side then too. Who wants a lot of nouns. I like man pages that tell you what the parameters are and what each of the procedures returns. I don't believe in super flexible interfaces, I like enumerated entry points. Check out the verb set for our programming environment. Maybe there are two schools of thought. It's been one of the most interesting days yet. An outage, some personal stuff (sorry I don't do that here) and then I got an email, from a lawyer at the Church of Scientology wanting us to remove their copyrighted material from one of the free sites we host. I looked at the site, and they may have a point. There is some blockquoted material, the author claims that it comes from a Scientology document, or does it? Is it fair use? The passage is fairly long. I am not a lawyer. And unlike Google, we are playing the role of an ISP, although we don't derive any revenue from hosting the site. Further I'm not that interested in Scientology and I have a few other things on my mind. Anyway I sent an email to the author of the site, Bill St Clair, asking if it is copyrighted material from Scientology. I think that's the appropriate first step. Jon Udell: The Google API is a Two-Way Street. "So don't ask only what Google can do for you. Ask also what you can do for Google, and for the Web, by making the most of the metadata you publish." FWIW, they should be running articles like Udell's on XML.Com. I took a screen shot of their home page today for reference in a couple of years. How far from pragmatic. This stuff is deploying now. Developers are excited. None of that comes through at XML.Com. InfoWorld interviews Macromedia's Kevin Lynch on Web Services. Another day of outages on our main static server. Jake is down at Exodus to investigate. Lawrence explains what this outage means for people using Radio who upstream to our community server. Motley Fool: 12 Myths About AOL. News.Com: "While Macromedia executives tout one of the company's biggest product launches ever--Web design tool Dreamweaver MX--company lawyers will be in court for the beginning of a contentious patent suit against Adobe." Adam Curry's mom: "Yikes! I don't even know what RSS feed is. All I know is: I'm up and running - and it's fun. Yes, Adam, you're allowed a smile and an 'I told you so.'" USA Today: "Hundreds of Internet radio stations plan to go silent Wednesday to protest proposed record-label royalty payments they say would endanger their industry." Mike Chambers has a Flash weblog. Zeldman reviews the new Dreamweaver. "You had to jump through hoops to make Dreamweaver 4 support current web standards. Dreamweaver MX Preview Release came out today, offering vastly improved support for CSS, XHTML, and accessibility." Dave Ely: "Web Services was a really bad name." Steve Gillmor reports on Stop Energy among the Bigs. Matt Brown's Dreamweaver Blog. "This is probably the most exciting day in the last 18 months for a lot of people involved with Dreamweaver. I am convinced that this is the best release of Dreamweaver yet without a doubt." Susan Kitchens: "John W Dean made this announcement: He's gonna reveal the identity of Deep Throat on June 17th." NY Times: Why Gates Won't Apologize. "Asked by the states' lawyer whether his company had done anything to address the court's finding that Microsoft illegally commingled the code of its Explorer browser with Windows, Mr. Gates said repeatedly that he had made it easy for computer makers to remove the Explorer icon from the desktop." Last year on this day I was reading Breaking Windows and writing about the Strategy Tax that we all pay, whether we work at Microsoft or not. On this day in 1997, I posted a retraction and apology. When you screw up there's no harm in admitting it. It's raining today. Very nice. The garden just loves it. Lots of planting last week, everybody says "Good timing Dave!" All my new friends, and the old ones too, say how happy they are wth the unusual spring rain. Good deal. Marc Barrot makes progress with his activeRenderer. Keith Ballinger explains his dislike for RPC. Seth Dillingham documents an ancient optimization.
Sheila Lennon at the Providence Journal has a weblog. "'Bottom-up' journalism from the pros." Rogers Cadenhead: "The give-and-take of weblogs lends itself to fast corrections from readers and other webloggers." Sam Ruby: "I'm now convinced that one can architect a system in accordance to the principles of REST and then implement that system using RPC style, HTTP transport, POST binding, SOAP. In fact, I'll go further and state that the GoogleSearch is an instance of this." One less thing to worry about. A Hollywood-friendly application of the Internet: distribution of movie trailers. Note that some news sites have trailers linked to their reviews. This is a perfect application for Radio, we would link to the trailer as an RSS enclosure, also linked to the source, with a title and a short description. Users' machines download the trailers overnight. No click-wait. Higher resolution. I'd like to do a deal with the movie studios similar to the one we have with the NY Times. We'd be happy to help them sell their product. A win-win. Who should I talk to? 1/11/01, Payloads for RSS. "I thought that video on the Internet was a loser for three reasons, that build on each other: 1. When I click on a link to view some video, I have to wait. 2. The wait is longer than the video. (In other words I have to wait two minutes for ten seconds of video.) 3. The quality is horrible."
We had an outage this morning, cleared around 9:30AM. The main Radio Community Server was down, Weblogs.Com was not updating, everything else was running okay. We've been having problems with our static server, trying to fix them, but well, maybe it's not so fixed. Oy. Someday we'll be completely decentralized. I look forward to that day. Dave Polaschek reports from Minnesota that it's snowing again, and his knee went out so he's been watching a lot of movies, and he rates them. That's useful because there are so many boring movies out there. Keith Ballinger: "I hate using SOAP for RPC." Why? What email has become. 2/3 spam. 1/5 viruses. A bunch of ad hominems, sprinkled with a few interesting messages. Morning coffee music For some reason for the last two weeks I've had Bruce Springsteen's Thunder Road rolling around in my head.
"There were ghosts in the eyes of all the boys you sent away. They haunt this dusty beach road in the skeleton frames of burned out Chevrolets. They scream your name at night in the street. Your graduation gown lies in rags at their feet. "I've got this guitar and I've learned how to make it talk. "And in the lonely cool before dawn you hear their engines roaring on, but when you get to the porch they're gone on the wind,. So Mary climb in. It's a town full of losers and I'm pulling out of here to win."
Heads-up: We're doing some maintenance on a static server this evening at 7:30PM Pacific for about 30 minutes. There will be an outage for Radio.Weblogs.Com sites, UserLand mailing lists and Weblogs.Com. You may also notice some broken images on Manila sites hosted by UserLand. Back to scripting. I've heard a lot of people say that SOAP was designed to circumvent firewalls. In fact, that wasn't one of the goals for SOAP. We chose HTTP because it was broadly supported in scripting environments, and we wanted the lowest possible barrier to adoption. It was also done with respect, don't reinvent something that already works. You can pick up the trail, starting in the strategies and goals section of the XML-RPC spec. We knew some would say that firewall circumvention was a motive, we talked about it, we used HTTP because it was a good match for what we wanted to do. Faisal Jawdat: "With the influx of new 'bloggers' over the course of the past few months, I've created a handy key to help newbies understand what they'll be doing." Really nice outline browser by Marc Barrot. "thinkusaalignright"Report on the responses to my Sharon Must Go piece posted yesterday. A few predictable name-calling emails saying (I guess) that the only way to solve the problem is to kill Palestinians. I generally don't respond, because being warlike in an email seems kind of contradictory. If you have such a will to die for your cause, go fight and good luck, but email is a tool for people who wish to reason and think. Imho, you can't do violence in email, yet some people persist in trying. Other more thoughful responses ask me to see it from the point of view of an Israeli, and that's fine, we've done a lot of that for a long time, now try to see it from the point of view of an American. Israel is a distributor of American power. If it weren't for the US, we assume, Israel would not exist. It certainly has no hope of peace without help from the US. If I have doubts about exactly what we would be going to war to protect, I imagine a few other Americans do too. I think we've made a big mistake by letting the Israeli point of view dominate the discourse. We are two separate countries.
The New York Times autoblog is proving quite useful. Whenever it updates, it pings Weblogs.Com, so I don't have to go looking anywhere special to see that there's something new. It just updated a few minutes ago at 10:15AM. Now that's weird, because mid Saturday morning on the west coast seems the least likely time for it to update unless there's some news breaking. During the day last week they would post AP reports on news that's happening in real-time, like Gates' testimony in Washington. Today they posted a deep piece on US strategy re Iraq that's dated tomorrow, so it's for the Sunday paper. We get it on the Web long before it appears in print. It's worth reading. Quite an article. And the autoblog idea is proving itself every day. BTW, it's just incredible that I get to play with new delivery systems for such excellent content. I still can't believe that the Times trusts me with this stuff. Thanks! Howard Greenstein: "Paul McCartney not only looked great, but he sounded amazing. So I decided to take out my Ipaq and capture the concert in 15 second snippets." NY Times: "The United States economy is showing signs of life. So why is the stock market still acting the part of the deadbeat?" Happy Tutor: "Perhaps Userland could solicit Social Venture Funding. In addition to economic survival and growth, the company seeks to create a true free-market of ideas on the web, in which peers work with peers, or as citizens, rather than as passive recipients of broadcast, mass-cult, copyrighted content. Rather than rich branded messages, or monopolies that lock us all in the trunk of brand-think, Userland creates the infrastructure that lets a thousand flowers bloom, a good democratic (actually Maoist) ideal. Userland sustains the info-commons -- what Dave calls 'the two-way web.'" Brian Lenihan: "I smelled like a rotting corpse but nobody said anything. Amazing." Lawrence posted three print-friendly versions of Frontier tutorials from 1999. The first tutorial walks through the website framework, the lizard brain that forms the underpinnings of Manila and Radio; the second covers scripting and the third is an appendix. Something I've wondered about. "Every screen reader except OutSpoken for Macintosh can handle tables quite adequately, so go ahead and use them." Berco Beute wrote his own blogging software using Jini.
Essay: Sharon must go. Salon: "Sen. Fritz Hollings is pushing a bill that supposedly safeguards online privacy -- but actually gives intrusive marketers a green light."
On this day two years ago SOAP 1.1 was announced. LM Orchard blogs Chris Heschong quoting Ken MacLeod, a proponent (?) of REST: "the only thing holding us back is a marshalling standard." Oy. John Burkhardt, who works at Groove, has been tasked with integrating Groove with the rest of the Internet, via SOAP. Matt Pope also works at Groove and has a Radio weblog, which bodes well, I hope, for Steve Gillmor's vision. To the Groove guys, I think RSS 0.92 is a good first step on the path to interop between Radio and Groove. Here's a walkthrough I did earlier this month showing how the pieces in our publish-subscribe system fit together. Tim Bray sent a screen shot of Chimera, a Mac OS X browser that does anti-aliased text. Looks really nice. Time.Com has an article about Mozilla. How many factual errors can you spot in the lead paragraph? Radio updates heads-up A heads-up to Radio users who are interested in the technology of root updates. We're getting ready to deploy a new updates system, one that's based on statically served files, not XML-RPC. It'll be a two-step corner-turn. First we'll release new parts that implement the workstation side of the new updates process, but to turn it on you'll have to manually edit an object database cell. Everyone at UserLand will turn this on, and we'll ask courageous programmer-type Radio users to do this too (if there's a failure, to get back online for updates, you'll probably have to do something programmerish). We'll cross our fingers and hope for the best, and fix any problems that surface. After a few-days of burn-in, we'll send out an update that sets the object database cell for everyone, and the corner-turn will be complete. Why are we doing this? It's another step on the path to full decentralization. The work that our server is doing now will be done on the workstation in the future. The static files will be served on Apache, at first, then if need be, will be moved to a more sophisticated server that's capable of bringing more bandwidth online by just adding more iron. Still diggin!
Meg Hourihan: My experience using personas. Wired: "Kazaa, the largest file-trading network running, has a new business plan that includes a subscription service, audio and video media advertising and an offshore tax haven." Cydney Gillis: "I am not John Markoff." In April 2001, Sun prepared a Jxta assault against Microsoft. It's more interesting today than it was then because it was so boring then, but seemed so interesting to some. Sylvia Nasar, the author of A Beautiful Mind, is speaking at Stanford on May 1. News.Com: Hackers turn tables on file-swapping firms. This should make the RIAA shiver. Who are they going to sue out of business now?
Collin Faulkingham posted a spec for the discussion group web service he's working on. Zoe: "Do for email what Google did for the Web." Dan Shafer explains in greater detail why he thinks PythonCard on the Mac is such a big deal. Scott Johnson: "Its just amazing how quickly a real community can get something done when they think its important." Mark Baker: "I agree completely." Edd Dumbill: "It is past time that the W3C called an end to its involvement in web services. Despite the name, web services have increasingly little to do with the Web as we know it, and those at the forefront of its development seem to have little fondness for the W3C or its technologies." I want to be really clear that I do not endorse Edd's position. His focus is wrong, imho. Look at what the independent developers are doing. That's what matters. Edd is a consistent source of what I call "Stop Energy." The reason all this is coming to a head now is that there is a lot of motion. He and his friends have been able so far to control the news coming out of the XML world. I always believed that would break at some point. Now it has. That's good. The XML.Com philosophy is far too centralized, and relied on BigCo's and the W3C for innovation. I don't think Edd has been around the block enough times to know that it's hopeless to expect that to happen. Innovation comes from independents. My rebuttal, posted last night, applies to Edd's piece too. RFC: What is Stop Energy? Thanks to Groove News for this pointer to a clear statement on competition from a Groove person. A NY Times reporter discovers that, with software, it's often even worse than it appears.
Paul Prescod: Google's Gaffe. "I take the SOAP-ifying of Google as a sign that the web services hype has now reached overdrive." Rebuttal: "SOAP is, as Prescod acknowledges, a juggernaut. It's better, imho, to accept that it's here, above all the objections that have been raised. Every service that comes online is potentially a killer app for the next layer of the Internet, one that's not confined to HTML browsing. I'm sure that somewhere in this space is huge growth of knowledge-sharing made possible by tools that work better for more people. That's where the prize is, in the activation of minds." Vint Cerf: "The Internet is for everyone." Colin Faulkingham: "The DGWS server is a lot like a Group Weblog but structured more like an actual Discussion Group." AP: Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates said Wednesday the company has not tried to figure out how to remove elements of its Windows operating system, because the task would be impossible." Andrew Orlowski: "Remember: this is the plea for clemency from a convicted criminal." Craig Burton: "He lied. He knows that he lied. Nothing new." Dan Gillmor: "I created a quickie weblog for a symposium in Beijing this week and updated it live from the podium as I was speaking. Eyes went wide as people saw themselves show up on the Web." Dan Shafer: "My favorite new app development environment, PythonCard, is about to meet up with my favorite new operating system, Mac OS X." Wealth Bondage: "Perhaps Userland could solicit Social Venture Funding." Kur5hin: "Media giant (and MPAA and RIAA member) Viant conducted an extensively detailed study of filesharing last year. It's an excellent analysis of the current state of various types of filesharing systems as well as an overview of the legal and technical issues surrounding each." I'm glad that Clay Shirky has stopped saying that BigCo's and Web Services are one and the same thing. Now he says that SOAP (what about XML-RPC, Clay) is an essential ingredient of decentralization. For that he gets a half a bing. But he doesn't say what it will do for people. He would have gotten the full bing if he had a weblog. That's the next step in ShirkyLand. (Yes, I'm cheeky and I don't know my place.) CNN: "Google needs to get untentative," says Dave Winer, the CEO of Userland Software and an influential online essayist. "They need to grow, and developers are central to that. They become your sales force. Google has the two magic ingredients that developers love: users and potential." Paolo and his team have a beta of a new Radio tool that does shared outlines. Darrell Smith is the CTO of Morpheus. James Hong: "How did Jake know what I was up to?" Scott Mace: "How many of you reading this have experienced Launch.Com?" Philip Pearson created a PHP implementation of xmlStorageSystem. "This may seem like a completely pointless project, seeing as RCS is already more or less free, and PyCS does everything pretty well already. However, neither of them will run on your $10 hosting account that only allows CGI and PHP. This will." With three implementations, I started a new sub-directory for xmlStorageSystem. LM Orchard: "When subscribed to 100+ RSS feeds, it's like I'm floating in this N-dimensional space where I can overhear voices from hundreds of rooms without being overwhelmed. When something triggers some of my mental filters and watchwords, I click the link and delve deeper." Mike Deem: "The people who run Microsoft could decide to delete all the source code and go home. Microsoft is a private enterprise run for fun and profit. If you take the fun and profit out of it, why bother?" On this day last year: "The time to ask the question about Microsoft truly being open isn't now, when they have everything to gain from openness, but when they achieve dominance in the market. At that point, without government intervention, or self-imposed restraint, you can be sure it's going to close up." Evan Williams: "Some days—usually Mondays—I wish I had someone to tell me what I should be doing. I mean besides thousands of Blogger users." I finally saw A Beautiful Mind yesterday. Very sweet movie. Maybe there's only one good idea in a lifetime. The rest of it is a struggle to see what's real and tune out what's not.
Radio's Outliner: How to write an HTML page in the outliner. News.Com interviews the Brains Behind Kazaa. Jon Udell: "As blogspace evolves all around us, new forms of writing appear." Cydney Gillis: Did Gates lie? AP: "Gates argued that the penalties would keep Microsoft from releasing timely security updates." Jacob Reider is looking for benevolence in business.
Rob McNair-Huff, editor of MacNet Journal, has a public outline of Mac OS X apps by category that tracks the development of each product. This is beyond what the tech pubs used to do. They'd publish snapshots of markets, that were useful, but didn't change over time. This is very cool.
Scott Johnson: "Write a renderer in PHP." Phillip Pearson: "Why not just render them when they're generated?" Truth is as strange as fiction. Brent Simmons found an outliner in AppleWorks. Apparently it's a pretty good one. Martin Traumwind has a graphic Java browser for Google relationships. 4/2399: "Airport security has stopped hijacking." Ooops. Matt Goyer: "It even works in Opera.. Damn I'm good!" Howard's Zope Notes: "Thanks Guido!" Kevin Stewart: "Microsoft already 'supports' modular versions of Windows with Windows CE and Windows NT Embedded. They allowed a form of Chinese Menu construction of those OSes. Which supports my vote that Gates is misleading the court. Just my $0.02." The battle for the Web continues Good morning. A small flood of mail about yesterday's Microsoft survey. Some comments follow. When I read the account of Gates' testimony yesterday I dashed off an email to people at Microsoft who I consider friends. I'm still willing to help Microsoft, but first we have to deal with the mess. Here are some facts. 1. MS has the dominant Web browser. 2. They got there illegally. They were convicted. 3. We're in the penalty phase now. My belief: The conviction was the correct result. Now they must come up with a penalty that is appropriate, that will prevent Microsoft and future would-be Microsofts from using a monopoly in one technology to gain a monopoly in another. To allow juggernauts like Netscape a little breathing room to learn and make mistakes before they have to deal with a monopoly that acts willfully to cut off their air supply. To make Microsoft a better platform vendor, with more developers, with more new ideas being tried out. To help developers and their investors trust the market, without illegal and unethical interference from Microsoft. On strictly pragmatic terms, if Microsoft isn't lying when it says it wants developers for its new platform, they should welcome the opportunity to get its developer relations back on track. Yesterday's survey says that at least people who read Scripting News, many of whom are developers, don't trust them. You can try to rationalize it any way you want, but a majority said clearly that they believe Gates lied about something that is central to the issues at hand. Arguing with me is pointless. The problem is deep. A major correction now is something that a Microsoft that's thinking long-term should welcome. Microsoft clearly doesn't have any vision for the Web other than owning and controlling and freezing it. As Web developers, it was our air supply that Microsoft cut off. The correct solution is to decouple the Web from Microsoft in a permanent and non-revokable way. It should be done in a way that causes the least possible disruption of service for users, while creating the maximum possibility for competition. For Microsoft to argue fairness is ridiculous. They are not qualified to argue about fairness. 7/12/01: Restoring competition to the browser market.
DaveNet: How to be a revolution. "You can't undermine by trying to dictate the terms, you have to do it by invading at night, slipping in the back door unnoticed. Then when the old folks wake up, it's too damned late." Emergent Music is the "seed of a new, better, music industry." Dan Bricklin comments on the NY Times auto-blog. "This type of news feed, with reverse-chronological headlines, summaries, and links to articles in real-time, is good for catching up. It's different than a normal news page, sorted by what's most important, where the new stuff may be at the bottom. Breaking stories have frequent updates, and they show up as that." Steve Pilgrim: "I've been prowling the weblog world today." Fred von Lohman: "The BPDG standard is not about stopping piracy. It's about Hollywood regaining some measure of control over what you can and can't do with television. It's about cramming the VCR genie back in the bottle, and giving Hollywood the power to bring new technologies to heel before they can deliver new capabilities to consumers." Roland Piquepaille: Political Shocker in France. InfoWorld: Gates testifies in remedy hearing.
Survey: Is Gates Lying? Mike Deem: "When simplifying for mass consumption any issue as complex as this one, one could 'spin' it in any number of ways without abandoning the 'truth.' Gates is spinning this one in the way that is best for Microsoft's bottom line. It is his responsibility to Microsoft's share holders to do this." I responded "Mike, while I'm not a lawyer, I don't think it's legal to spin when you're under oath. I think it's required that you tell the truth." Steve Gillmor: Google, Dave and Ozzie. Great article Steve. This is the InfoWorld I used to love. An inspirational article. I won't give up on Groove yet. If they open it up so that Radio can participate in their network without jumping into the box, we'll be all over it, as we are on the Google API.
I added a sixth disclaimer to the docs for the Google-to-XML-RPC gateway. "UserLand does not keep a copy of the keys that pass through this server. We don't use this information in any way, and will not do so in the future."
Paul Nakada: "Links are the weblog equivalent of venture capital, except, without the strings. We just got funding for this blog today!" Hehe. Here's a second round. Lots of discussion of deep-link philosophy. Here's another analogy. Suppose I told you about this great book. Read it, but read the last chapter first, and if you want you can skip the rest. Would that land me in court? Another one. Suppose I'm writing a scholarly paper. Two years ago another scholar published a copyrighted book on a different but related topic. On page 49 he discusses an experiment he conducted that I want to base part of my argument on. I put a footnote on my citation, telling my readers to look on page 49 of his book. Did I just violate his copyright? BTW, if you're a friendly lawyer (there are some) read today's NY Times article about Bertelsmann and let me know what's up with the antitrust case against the BigCo's of the music industry. It seems they don't want us to look at that. Let's look at that. Howard Kurtz: Who Cares What You Think? Blog, and Find Out. Steve MacLaughlin: Taking the "R" Out of Free. On this day last year: "I write software for guys like Doc."
DaveNet: The Mind of Google. "I started to feel like I was interacting with something with a mind. Of course Google doesn't have one, but it does a fantastic job of tapping into our collective minds." NY Times: "If Bertelsmann buys Napster, it will have two of its divisions on opposite sides of a serious legal divide, with billions of dollars in damages at stake." Ernie the Attorney: "If all I do is point someone to a location on the web, then what have I done that triggers the copyright laws? I haven't made a 'copy' of anything." ResearchBuzz found a semi-documented Google feature, searching by date. Sam Gentile ran a great rant about C programmers trying to understand programming with a runtime. "This is not Windows. This is not COM." True. Hey it would be interesting to see a feature-comparison of runtimes. Microsoft has some features we don't, and vice versa. Hal Plotkin: "Targeting a handful of specific lawmakers for defeat makes a lot more sense than putting a bunch of geeks on planes." Wired: "Joining Hollings as co-sponsors of the CBDTPA are one Republican and four Democrats: Ted Stevens (R-Alaska), Daniel Inouye (D-Hawaii), John Breaux (D-Louisana) and Dianne Feinstein (D-California)." Paul Snively: "Rather than defending our future, they are selling it out from beneath us."
Steve Zellers: "I'm definitely in Dave's camp on this." Paul Snively: "Adam and Dave are talking about two different things that are often used to accomplish the same result." Last year on this day: "The subjects of the press are now doing their own press. Does this strike you, as it does me, as a loop? Why is it necessary? Haven't we been here before? Isn't this what happened with mainframes when personal computers came along? How secure were the mainframe people when faced with a horde of Apple developers with nothing to lose. They were dismissive, for sure, I was there (so was Bricklin) but it didn't matter. The users could do it for themselves. And then that's what happened." Scottish Lass: "With the dawning of the age of the Google Outline Browser all three predictions are now given earthly form and the wise shall heed the goodness unleashed on all mankind by the guardians of the 'G'. Those whose arms sit at right angles to a body that neither sleeps nor eats shall be the bringers of a new age of knowledge sharing and enlightenment." Hehe. 2/15/98: Meet an Outliner. "I had to experience the usefulness of an outliner before I could envision using one, to advantage, myself."
Wired News revisits the issue of deep linking. Tony Bowden did a G.O.B. in Perl.
Radio's Outliner: Google Outline Browser. "It's a different way to crawl through The Mind of Google."
BTW, this is very much like something I played around with in MORE in the 80s. We licensed a thesaurus. I wired it into the outliner. Type in a word. Double-click to see its synonyms. Repeat until exploration is done. It was a great way to think up product names. Browsing Google the same way is different. Sjoerd Visscher did a G.O.B. in HTML. He also offers some possible insight into Sam Ruby's light bulb. I added the three G.O.B.s to the apps sub-directory. I came across the word telegraphy in dictionary.com as I was Google Outline Browsing, and found many of the related pages were mine! Somehow it seems to have figured something out about me, or how I am perceived. The Mind of Google. Adam Curry is GOB'ing too! David Watson is combining Google with Swing. David Davies released a new version of his assetManager tool for Radio. Adam Curry released the long-awaited picture of his helicopter flight crew.
On this day in 1999, Jakob Nielsen advised that we were stuck with old browsers until 2003. Coool. Only eight more months. On this day in 1998, Bob Atkinson, one of the designers of XML-RPC, said that the debate over HTTP-POST was a red herring. Chuck Shotton agreed. "No disrespect to Jeff Allen, but his comments are FUD." The debate continues to surface from time to time on mail lists and weblogs. Kazaa, Morpheus, Brilliant What really happened between Kazaa and Morpheus? Who owns Brilliant? I stopped watching Music-on-the-Internet when Napster was shut down. I'm back in the loop again, reading, asking questions, learning. I am not running the software on my desktop yet. Are you? 3/4/02, News.Com: Morpheus' downfall: Bills weren't paid. 4/8/02, Register: "Since late last year KaZaA downloads have contained 'sleeper' software which let Brilliant Digital Entertainment, a 3D advertising and modelling software start-up to activate Altnet, its own P2P network." 4/18/02, Wired: "Kazaa users, angered by the network's inclusion of secretly embedded spyware, can now connect to the peer-to-peer network using a hacked version of the application called Kazaa Lite." Who do you trust? The Wired article, linked above, may be the worst news yet for the RIAA. Their theory so far has been that they can shut down music sharing by shutting down companies like Napster, MP3.Com, Morpheus and Kazaa; and whatever pops up next. Their technologists seem to be telling them that there is no such thing as decentralized file sharing. But what if there is? And the music industry strategy may have a twist. Consider this possibility, and it's just a possibility. As they say on TV, this story is based on real events, but the story itself is fiction, real people are not portrayed. Let's say a popular music sharing network starts up. Call it Music For The People Networks (MFTPN). It's popular, millions of people download and use the software. MFTPN is low on money (of course) so a group of Hollywood producers, (apparent) renegades, start a new venture to capitalize on the flow of creative material over the Internet. They approach MFTPN, and say "Include our software in the package and we'll give you $3 million, no questions asked." MFTPN reviews the software and sees that it is what it appears to be, and says yes. But there's a back door, because the software can update itself over the Internet. Now behind the scenes, the renegade Hollywood group is actually funded by Disney, AOL and other members of the RIAA. Why would they give so much money to fund a company who develops software that they so despise? Fade to commercial. Tune in next week for the next episode
On a lighter note, from Wes Felter, "Some home-brewed Ethernet addresses I've seen: 0xFE:ED:BA:BE:F0:0D (describing Calista Flockhart?) 0xDE:AD:BE:EF:CA:FE (time for a steak?) 0xDE:AD:CA:FE:BA:BE (must be a Java-hater)." Steve Zellers: "0xC0CAC01A 0xADD511FE" David Johnson: Building an Open Source J2EE Weblogger. Hmmm. Kinda looks familiar. WSJ: "AOL Time Warner Inc., whose online service is struggling to hold on to customers who want high-speed Internet access, is rethinking its cornerstone strategy of promoting such broadband access nationwide. The move calls into doubt one of the main goals of the merger that brought the Internet and media colossus into existence." News.Com: "In yet another test of new services, Google is quietly wading into the expert-advice market, a lackluster business that proved too taxing for some former Net highfliers." Mozilla 1.0 Release Candidate 1. Sean Gallagher: "I just finished doing an immersion in the ebXML specifications for an article I've been working on." Talking with Jon Udell, he tells me that there's a white-on-orange XML icon for the RSS feed of O'Reilly's Safari website. It tells you when a new book appears on the Safari service. Seth Dillingham: "Customers who buy gifts for their vendors? Just six months ago, I would have said that such things don't happen, but Brian is the second customer to do it this year." | |||||||||||||||||||||||||
