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Announcing: The RadioPoint Tool. "It turns the outliner into a presentation authoring program." A few notes on RadioPoint. As weblogs are showing up at conferences, it makes sense to integrate presentation software into the weblog software. Create your slides before-hand, link the presentation to your weblog so people can get a preview. No need to bring a laptop, just find a Web browser on stage, click on the link, and start talking. Next question -- can you control how they look? Yes, there's a template for all presentations, and any presentation can have its own template. I spent a full day working on the default template, studying ideas from the people who volunteered. It's CSS-based, but there's also a table. I hope people start exchanging templates. Paolo already has a template for people to use. Thanks Paolo, as always, a pleasure working with you. A new macro and howto shows Radio users how to add a link element to weblog and category home pages, pointing to their associated RSS feeds. The equivalent feature is now available for Manila. We also have two changes to our aggregator in testing, when released, Radio will know how to process the link elements. UC Berkeley has a class for Weblogs in the School of Journalism. Thinking ahead to Sept 11, 2002. I'm giving a keynote on Web Services for Publishers at Seybold in SF. It's a 1.5 hour session. I want to do a bunch of demos of developers' products, especially Macintosh software (Seybold is a heavily Mac show, Apple has baked-in support in OS X.) If you have ideas, let me know. It's time to start planning this. Brent has an interesting theory about Rumsfeld's visit to India and Pakistan. "Rumsfeld is letting those guys know that if they prepare their nuclear missiles for launch the U.S. military will take those missiles out." BTW, I think they're sending Rumsfeld because Powell struck out in the Middle East. Adam Gaffin: "Welcome to Network World Fusion's exclusive Superblog. Starting Monday, June 3, Edge Managing Editor Jim Duffy and Senior Editor Tim Greene will use this new medium to post news updates, analysis and comments directly from the show." InfoWorld: FBI gets new Web searching powers. Sam Ruby: Beyond Backlinks. Mike Chambers: "The Flash community has been getting pretty excited about Flash and RSS lately."
Interesting piece about "blogonomics" -- but it's not about advertising. It's the inverse of advertising. The economic revolution of blogging is about manufacturers giving up on advertising and going direct, talking to their users, and their competitors' users, as if they were people and not abstract beings (aka "consumers"). And that won't be enough either. They'll also have to listen to the users. (BTW, that doesn't mean they have to do what the users tell them to do, nor is that always a good idea, it's not so simple and linear.) Real-time weblogs: "Include users in your idea of what the press is, listen, and tune your message, and your marketing automatically gets more efficient. There's not much time to waste, professional journalists are learning about and adopting the new technology. Any technology vendor that isn't also using these techniques to market is going to wake up in a very strange world in a couple of quarters." Jennifer Foote Sweeney: "What's so funny about peace, love and understanding?"
Today's survey: "What are you looking for?" Ted Nelson: "Today's nightmarish new world is controlled by 'webmasters', tekkies unlikely to understand the niceties of text issues and preoccupied with the Web's exploding alphabet soup of embedded formats."
Paolo: "I'm managing 13 weblogs from a single window." Extra credit: "What will you settle for?" Here's a good idea. Danny O'Brien has a weblog. He's a writes for the London Sunday Times and NTK. He's also famous for being the guy-on-the-right in the pic on my personal page (the guy-on-the-left is John Foster). BBC: "Controversial rapper Eminem's latest album is topping the US charts, but he has made an unwanted entry into a chart of computer users." Least favorite feature of Windows. When it restarts after crashing, all my visited links become unvisited. Jon Udell's last column for BYTE, Personal RSS Aggregators, is rising through the ranks on Daypop. This is good to see. Unlike weblogs, aggregators don't leave much of a visible trail to follow. Alan Reiter: "Many WiFi experts think the U.S. is the WiFi leader. We're the leader in software development and new business models, but not in hotspot implementation. In Korea, there will be 25,000 hotspots in perhaps a year. In the U.S. we now have 1-2,000 hotspots." My session description for the Open Source conf is up. Boing Boing has an RSS feed. I'm subscribed. After reading Cory's comment on Boing Boing, I decided to mirror tinsel.swf on scripting.com, to help spread out the bandwidth cost. Millions of people should see the cartoon and sing the song. I've already listened to it at least 35 times. It's okay to brainwash yourself, btw. Based on yesterday's survey results, I hope we can put to rest the debate about weblogs wiping out the pros. Zero people chose that one. Hey it was a kind of one-sided debate, and perhaps points to a bug in the pro's process. Not everything is a fight to the death. Interesting. Nick Denton's three favorite TV shows happen to be my three favorites, in fact they're the only shows I like. Last night The West Wing wasn't on after last week's fabulous season finale. What a shame. I didn't tune into this show until its third season (I think) and there are so many episodes I haven't seen. Why not find some way to monetize this, I'd happily pay for it. As I've said many times before, there aren't enough ways to spend money on things that bring pleasure. Maybe Nick is a member of my karass? John Robb: "Now I can publish to Italy and the US by clicking a single check box below my editing screen." Susan Kitchens is touring Kennedy Space Center, with pics. Want to know when I update Scripting News? Here's the data. Updated every hour on the hour. The numbers are cumulative, starting Monday of this week. We have .com, .net, .org, .edu. How about .person? I've decided don't want a Pocket PC. I don't want an iPod either. I want an all-digital Walkman that connects easily to my LAN, using 802.11b. $500. Anyone want to make one for me? I didn't think so. Ryan Greene says the Terapin Mine is what I'm looking for. Looks nice. Does it have an FM receiver. Brad Wilson: "Can you imagine what a cow the RIAA would have.." Why?
Maybe Friedman is a member of my karass? There's lots of September 11 "news" in the news. Memorial Day. The FBI thing. And they're finishing up at Ground Zero (I actually thought that had already happened). Anyway, there was a report on NPR this morning about a woman who lost her husband in the disaster. They found his car, it was parked in the garage, and was mostly undamaged. They called her, and she came down, for a ceremony to open the trunk. There was a present in the trunk. September 11 is her birthday. Keola's Take On NetFlix. "I gave up on them after only two months (one free and one paid). It wasn't their fault, but it just took too darn long for some DVDs to get here. Some got here in three days, others took close to two weeks (we're in Hawai'i)."
Guest DaveNet: The New Economy. Survey: "Will blogs wipe out professional journalists?" Red Hat is getting some patents, and while they disclaim using them against open source developers, they reserve the right to use them against other developers, even ones who pose no patent threat to them. JD Lasica. "News percolates up from weblogs into the mainstream media." Oy. "On May 25, at 1:58 PM EST, YACCS received its 1,000,000th comment!" There are a million blogs in the naked city. Jon Udell: "[Radio's] built-in RSS aggregator has changed how I process information in a dramatic way." A birthday poem for Craig Burton from his granddaughter. Doc: "Fifty-two degrees. Rain. Wind." I get my news of Groove from Jeroen Bekkers. I read his site every time it updates. They're doing some wild and crazy things. Notably, connecting Groove to Radio Community Server and OPML. At first I thought -- oh my god -- I'm going to have to serve all those Groove users. Then I relaxed. Let's give it a try. It wasn't how I initially thought we'd connect, but if it works, let's go for it. Blockbuster Takes On Netflix: "Blockbuster claims to have locations within a 10-minute drive of 64 percent of the U.S. population." Thanks to Philip Bump for the excellent animated badge for the fantastic EFF cartoon about the CBDTPA. Brian Yoder: "For several years the bigcos have been asking What is the role for billion dollar companies in the Internet media market? and the correct answer Almost none." Henry Porter: "For the first time since the Cuban missile crisis, nuclear war is not a distant threat but a real possibility and the lives of 12 million people are at risk." Wired: Besieged ISP Restores Pearl Vid. Although I do not want to watch the video myself, it should be available to those who do. The FBI had no basis or right to ask for its removal. Thanks to the ISP for standing up to the govt. Chuck Shotton demonstrates the power of the Web as a whistle-blowing environment open to all citizens. Taking back the mouse Ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls, tell all your friends about the CBDTPA!!
Guest DaveNet: A Personal Look at Blogging. Steve Gillmor: "At the intersection of two disruptive technologies lies the Bermuda Triangle of the Digital Age. Wi-Fi (802.11 wireless communications) and Weblogs (the untethered journalism of the immediate) are comingling to produce an intoxicating blend of chaos and innovation." Almost parenthetically, in the piece linked to above, Steve announces that Jon Udell is now writing for InfoWorld. Best wishes to both Jon and his new colleagues. David Hyatt: "The single biggest contributor to Mozilla 1.0, and without a doubt the driving force without which Mozilla would not have been possible, is AOL." Survey: How do you find new stuff to read on the Web?
A sign of the times. There's an iPod weblog, and it's good. Meta Linker: "The future of the internet may be reciprocal linking, the semantic web, a whole self-organising mesh of information that encompasses everything. But let's be honest - it's not going to happen tomorrow." Jon Udell: Social networking in Radiospace. Great job Jon. Very interesting stuff. Derek Powazek: "Writing on the Web can be more like conversation than performance." Real-time weblogs: "So many new ways of flowing ideas become possible when the audience members have voices. They cease to be an audience in any recognizable sense." Matt Mower: Creating communities from thin air. I spotted this before seeing Jon's piece. Amazing how these thing synchronize. Larry McVoy: "I've never bought into the open source model as a self sustaining model for all software." Tristan Taormino: "I don't want any state legislature telling me how I can or cannot come." New software. Radio 8.0.8 is out. If you're running a fully updated Radio, there's no need to upgrade, you've already got all the parts. And a new macro for editing a blogroll in the outliner. Jake is coordinating, and observing. I tried it out on my Radio weblog. I keep forgetting to remind everyone about Tuesdays and what you do then. Take a programmer to lunch. If you're in the Northern Hemisphere, the weather is probably nice enough to eat outside. Look at the flowers. Listen to the birdies sing. Ask a few questions. Listen to the answers. Make a feature request. Eat. Drink. Teach. Learn. I want to do more guest pieces, let's spread the flow, and get more voices talking about the new power of people who use the Internet to create and publish, not just read and consume. BTW, today's piece is the 1000th DaveNet. Started in 1994. Still going strong. Takes a lickin, keeps on tickin. John Robb: "Individuals, armed with the Internet, will continue to chip away at the old moats and barriers corporations have erected in order to gain pricing power." At my request, Paolo published a Mac OS X script that keeps Radio running. Two years ago on this day -- pics from Paolo's hometown. Last year on this day: "In ten hours, just enough time to make your butt itch, you can travel over the top of the world from London to San Francisco and form an instant comparison. California is paradise. Not saying Europe isn't great, but it ain't California. Nine times out of ten I'm glad to be home." Adventures with software Part One. Over the weekend, Robert Scoble, who now works at NEC, brought me one of their palmtop computers to try out. I have one immediate application for it, I want to put MP3s on the computer and listen to them on my daily walk. I also like the idea of listening to audio books. The setup sounded ideal. When you dock the palmtop, a folder shows up on the desktop. Any files you copy into the folder are copied to the palmtop. This is called ActiveSync. So this morning I plugged it all in. It started out pretty well. A dialog popped up. New Hardware Found. Do I want to search for the driver. OK. Inserted the CD. It found it. Excellent. Install. Restart. I looked all over the place for the folder. Nowhere to be found. Opened setup.exe on the CD. It wants to install Outlook. I don't want Outlook. Scoble says I have to install it. Grrr. OK. Midway through the install it says it can't find a file. Do I want to Cancel. No. Can't find the file. Do I want to Cancel. No. Can't find the file. Do I want to Cancel. Yes. The first two letters of the activation code, ironically, are FQ. I should have had a clue what was coming. Part Two. Called Scoble. Got some good advice. Unplug the device. Restart the desktop machine. Follow the install instructions exactly. I did. Bingo. It works. So far. Fingers crossed. (It seems to matter that the device be unplugged at a certain point in the installation. The prompts don't say this.) Also, I did not need Outlook. Postscript. Why did I think it would work if I did what the software told me to do? Because I was trained by the Macintosh where things like this just work. Next step: Figuring out how to play music on the palmtop. Does WinAmp run there? How do I get apps onto the thing? Of course I want to know how I write apps for it too.
Marc Barrot's outline weblog keeps getting cooler. Alex Cox: But who are the real pirates? Buzz Bruggeman wonders (out loud) if there's a way to visualize 802.11b traffic at a conference. Ken Dow: "I'm happy to announce another series of Manila courses this July in Toronto, along with the first session of my new 'Weblogging with Radio Userland' course." Andrew Orlowski: "On balance however, we'd rate the likelihood of an Apple iBrowser as pretty outstandingly remote. Despite the sound technical and political advantages we've outlined above, it's a long-term commitment that only the brave would make. A temporary insurgency can turn into a full-scale Vietnam, if you're not careful." I had to look three times at the URL of this blog. This morning I did an initial pass on code to algorithmically generate a time-to-live element for a new RSS version of Scripting News. Nick Denton: "Anyone else noticed how the two whistleblowers of our time - Coleen Rowley of the FBI and Sherron Watkins of Enron - are both women?" Jeremy Bowers is close to getting Radio/Win to run on Linux with WINE. Miguel de Icaza has an RSS feed for updates on the MONO project. To subscribe to it in Radio, click here. (Of course Radio must be running for this to work.) Paolo started an Italian version of his weblog. Buongiorno a tutti! Flip it around Paul Andrews: "Macromedia's bloggers want to have it both ways. They don't want to be seen as shills. At the same time, they are loath to bite the hand that feeds them. As one Macromedia manager told me, he would never criticize the company or tout a competitor's products on his blog, 'or I'd probably be fired.'" I had longer comments here earlier, but here's a demo that makes the point much more concisely. A hypothetical reporter: "Seattle Times reporters want to have it both ways. They don't want to be seen as shills. At the same time, they are loath to bite the hand that feeds them. As one Times columnist told me, he would never criticize the company or tout a competitor's products in his column, 'or I'd probably be fired.'" New format for permalinks on Scripting News If you hold your mouse over one of the permalink icons above, you'll see that the permalinks are less random. In the past, we used an MD5 encoding of the text in the item to generate the permalink. People said they looked weird and corporate, but they worked, unless I edited the text of the item, which would change the value of the permalink and break any incoming links. So.. The new way of doing permalinks required a hook in Radio's outliner that attaches an attribute to each headline that says when it was created. When generating the permalink, we use this, if it's available, yielding a shorter and human-meaningful permalink. And now I can edit the content of an item without breaking incoming links. This is part of an overhaul I'm doing of my own content management process, allowing me to generate a clean RSS representation of what's on Scripting News.
The NY Times tells the riveting story of the last hours of people who died in the World Trade Center. Washington Post on Radio: "The program, its templates and other elements work smoothly, and you can go from downloading the program to publishing your thoughts on the Web during a coffee break." Thanks! Wired: "Some [ads] even crawl over content, forcing you to simply wait helplessly for the nightmare to end." Jeff Barr gathered statistics on the use of various elements in RSS feeds processed by his Syndic8 service. Inference If Mr X says A, he must also mean B. This is an example of inference in conversation. But look closely at "must also mean" before you hold X responsible for B. If your own filters, your point of view, lead you to the inference, it's probably wrong. Never has this been more clear when the only form of communication is electronic. Likely facts: The two parties have different points of view. Mr Y, the observer, has a different set of experiences and expectations than Mr X. So if we want to get somewhere, avoid concluding that B follows from A. As Dan Gillmor says: "If your mom says she loves you, check it out." Software and standards work requires this discipline. "You can't lie to a compiler." The West Wing A dozen stories beautifully woven together. A stage play as the backdrop. Fantastic music. An ill-fated love affair. The characters ooze integrity. The president makes the right decision. The best line when the president meets his adversary. "I decided to kick your ass when you said.." We cheer for President Bartlett, as we would have for Bill Clinton, had he faced Dubya in the Y2K election. New characters enter left, and old ones exit right. We are in awe. Simply put, the season finale of The West Wing was the best single hour of television ever. Written without coffee! Good morning sports fans. Another local story. Went to the grocery store to get some coffee and food and wine. At the checkout counter the clerk says "Oh the tourists." I said "Tourists? I didn't know we got tourists here." It turns out we do. They stop in and ask if there's anything to see. She says "Oh yeah, there's highway 280, go check it out." I had the same experience on the other side when I came to Silicon Valley for the first time in the late 70s. I kept driving around looking for something to see. There's nothing to see. A lot of freeways, Denny's, and not a whole lot more. Stanford has a couple of museums. Winchester Mystery House. Lots of geeks. Ask Scoble, he was born here. My trip to Google on Friday was great. First I took the tour. Lots of geek toys. Lots of press clippings. A nice graph showing flow. Then we sat down and talked software. This is not Netscape. They're playing long-term, they've got real technology (Netscape's was all quick hacks). I pushed six things and gave them a heads-up on an seventh. Here they are. 1. Spell-checker web service. 2. Pings from CMSes for more currency. 3. Google On The Desktop. 4. An API to access page rank. 5. OPML and directories (instead of two or three directories, millions). 6. RSS feeds for their news flows. 7. Gnutella as a decentralized distribution method.
I had a great talk this afternoon with Darrell Smith, the CTO of Streamcast, the company that makes Morpheus. When we get together we talk for hours. Darrell just bought three Mac OS X machines. He said it felt like a homecoming. He's been looking for another platform to support with his software. Anyway, we went far and wide and swung around to desktop websites, a subject near and dear to my heart. He wondered why more Mac developers weren't using the combo of PHP and Apache that comes bundled with every Mac. I think it's just a matter of time before Unix developers get there. Users like apps that run in the browser. When I read Brent's idea for an app that walks through different parts of the Unix underneath the Mac desktop I thought "that's a pretty natural application for Apache and PHP."
Buzz Bruggeman tells his side of the PC Forum real-time weblog story. "I kept checking the guys’ blogs, only to note that the whine factor from Nacchio had been turned up about 8 'Nacchs', and here I was reading where he had sold about $337 million of Qwest stock while it sunk like a stone." I've started a new mail list for review of the Radio UserLand chapters in the O'Reilly weblog book. Some of the initial comments on the radio-dev list were quite alarming. I don't have the time or will to get deep into this, but I wanted to provide a venue for people who care to help Scott and his editors get the story right. I'm only pointing to this page because it's on a Manila site. JD Lasica: AOL Time Warner: Time to Grow Up, Fast. Debate: Scoble v Johnson. Should Scott use Windows XP? Thomas Beutel: Browsing Recursive URLs in Outlines. Sony, Sony, Sony Matt Goyer: "Telling someone to draw on their CD with a pen could mean you'll spend the rest of your life in jail." Sony: "Burn data, music and images on CDs or watch DVDs at home or on the go." RIAA member list: "..Sony Broadway, Sony Music, Sony Classical, Sony Direct, Sony Discos, Sony Masterworks, Sony Music Special Products, Sony Music US (Latin), Sony Portrait, Sony Wonder.."
Scott Johnson: The Radio Chapters for the O'Reilly Book.
Peter Rukavina did an airline browser, much like the one I did for Google. You start at an airport (I entered SFO) and it responds with the airports you can get to from there. Click on one of those and repeat. He has a navigator for the Star Alliance (most of the world) and Air Canada. This is an interesting thread. Anita Roddick takes issue with Google's ad policies. "It began on Monday when I posted a short comment on this site about Malkovich's public threat to shoot Scottish MP George Galloway and Independent reporter Robert Fisk. In that three-sentence notice, I called Malkovich a 'vomitous worm.'" John Markoff: "The video game industry is in a remarkable boom." New Scientist: "All around us are tiny doors that lead to the rest of the universe." Steve Jenson started a RSS Best Practices wiki page. Jonah Goldberg: Attack of the Blogs. "Depending on whom you believe, blogging is either having its 15 minutes of fame right now or these 15 minutes actually constitute the opening scene of a new thousand-year bloggian reich." Yeah but the 15 minutes has been over two years. Microsoft may yet get me to install Windows XP. I'd choose the "non-Microsoft" configuration because I'm a conscious software user. When given a choice, I prefer to use products created by independent software developers because I know that I depend on competitive markets for new features that are responsive to my wants. Too bad they have to be dragged into court and drag the industry through a debilitating process to get them to do what they should have done in the first place, offer choice to users. Also, to be clear, this doesn't go nearly far enough for me. I want the browser separated from Microsoft. They have too much control of the Web. The Web is too important to be owned by one company. Scoble wonders how I post so early. Why do the birds sing? Why do the roosters crow? (One of my neighbors has roosters.) The sun comes up, strrrrretch, coffee, post. Bing. Three years ago today I wrote a piece called Edit This Page, where I outlined what we were doing with Manila, which was in development at the time. I had just done a demo for Dan Gillmor. Dan would become one of the poster boys for browser-based journalism. Here's the key quote: "Writing for the web is too damned hard. It turns you into a bookkeeper. I've got files all over my hard disk and their counterparts on the server. I can't keep track of them! When I'm reading a web page that I wrote, if I spot a mistake, I have to execute 23 complicated error-prone steps to make the change." Today we take it for granted that editing starts in the browser, but in 1999 it was a new idea. Two years ago today I was in Trieste. Paolo says "It's time for you to come visit again." True. Early morning dance bloggin I got an email from Thomas Madsen-Mygdal saying he enjoyed the energy in yesterday's DaveNet. It's true, I was in a pretty free space when I wrote it. But if you think that piece had strong energy, check this one out, written on this day four years ago. "What better way to have fun than to laugh at the funky body you have?" Uhhh huh. Hey. Pocky. Way. Dude. I own Hey Pocky Way on Google. Without a doubt. The Grateful Dead covered the song. Feel good music. In your soul. Gonna make your body rock and roll. Oh yeah. Fodder for the wiener boys! Hey guys, you can dance too. It ain't hard. Lalalala. Cooooool. Aieeee. Bees in my hair. Wheee! Wouldn't it be great if weblogs had music. If only we could all dance together. The F2F blog-athon I'm working on getting space for 125 bloggers at Stanford for a half-day blogathon. We'll dance then for sure. And we'll figure out how to fill a room with people with minds and great energy for new software for the revival of Silicon Valley. Bring your Bibles and get ready for some thumpin. Or Bing you Bibles and do some humpin.
DaveNet: Real-time weblogs. Wired: "The FBI has ordered an Internet provider to cease distributing the unedited video of journalist Daniel Pearl being brutally murdered." Aaron Swartz: "Google's API is great, but it's missing the really juicy information: a page's PageRank." Agreed. I'd like to use it on Weblogs.Com. Also, I'm having lunch at Google tomorrow. I'll be sure to mention this. And if you're at Google tomorrow, look for me and say hi. I'll be the guy with a Vaio looking for a power outlet. After talking with Doc this morning, I want a comparative review of laptops for blogging conferences. What's the ideal computer for real-time weblogs? I found the Sony Vaio wasn't really the right laptop. Short-lived battery. Doc says the Apple TiBook is wide, and that makes a big difference. Lots of screen real estate, it spreads out on the lap more easily than a smaller computer. The 802.11b support is dreamy, says Doc, when it comes on it latches on to the strongest signal. No control panels to fuss with? Paul Andrews: News by the People, for the People. Business Week: For Venture Capitalists, Paradise Lost. Washington Post: Open-Source Fight Flares At Pentagon. Did JY have an epiphany? Ben Hammersley is taking notes on the evolution of RSS. He's also got space for comments on that page. Snewp "indexes almost 6,000 sources every day, continually gathering news headlines from around the globe to provide a distinct twist to the standard search portal." I should be in Europe right now. Damn. SOAP and Radio Community Server This note is about the SOAP interface for Radio Community Server. It's a little complicated if you don't know much or care about how Radio desktops connect to centralized services like file storage, referer tracking, etc. Radio connects via XML-RPC, that's is how all the Radio users connect to the community server. In the rush to get Radio 8 out late last year, we broke the SOAP interface. Luckily, the breakage was easy to fix. We just had to change the name of the parameter on one of the entrypoints. Since XML-RPC doesn't use named parameters, there is no breakage issue, which we have confirmed by deploying the change. This news is probably only of interest to SOAP developers who want to connect to Radio Community Server. A small possibly null set, at this time, because the interface hasn't worked since late last year. Sam Ruby, a developer on the Apache SOAP implementation, has offered to do WSDL files for the SOAP interface, that's how we discovered the outage. Thanks Sam. We like fixing bugs almost as much as we like creating them. "It's even worse than it appears."
News.Com: "A legal fight that has pitted file-swapping software companies Kazaa BV and StreamCast Networks against big record labels and movie studios is collapsing as the small companies run out of funds." NY Times: Netflix IPO Raises $82.5 million. Last week I spent some time talking with Ben Hammersley, the British tech journalist who's working on O'Reilly's book on XML-based content syndication with RSS. Yesterday we emailed back and forth several times. My last email to Ben yesterday attempted to answer this question, how does RSS 0.9x evolve? Gina Barton: What is a Journalist? Sean Gallagher: "So what's the future? Smaller magazines. More niche publications. More magazines with a limited life span. Fewer issues, with content online to keep readers hooked in between. More web, less frequent hardcopy." CNET reviews Netscape 7 Preview Release 1. More idea flow from Jeroen Bekker on opening Groove to the Web. "Investigate simple solutions to publish selective content from a Groovespace you would like to make available to a broader audience." Jenny the Librarian: "And I wouldn't necessarily have to leave my current session in order to be part of a second, concurrent one. I could monitor the blog, chat session, or video stream. It would be a conference version of TV's picture-in-picture." Exactly. And let's go further. You wouldn't even need to be at the conference to do all that. Linear thinking asks "Why would anyone want to go to the conference then?" I know because I was pushing two leading conferences in the software industry to open up, just to have real-time weblog-style reports on the conference website so people who weren't attending could know about the new stuff announced at a conference. (My efforts failed, btw.) I believe conference providers could raise the prices for attending in meatspace, if the public could attend virtually for free. Being there counts for everything. If you're not there, you can't make any news yourself (kind of self-evident). The first conference that fully opened up via the Internet would be historic, and wildly successful, imho. Jim Zellmer observes that Microsoft has recently acquired two companies, Great Plains and Navision, that have excellent developer communities. Megnut: "Reading weblogs has made me greedy for access to a constant stream of nuggets from the brains of those I admire." Amen. Ed Cone: "The elders of the blogging tribe are generous with their links." Two reasons I don't generally link to Andrew Sullivan. He rarely points to other bloggers, if ever (today he disclaims it). Second reason. No permalinks. Today he discovered them. Hope! On the other hand, I totally agree that we have no obligation to point at anything. BlackHoleBrain: "Round, naked, mindless, boneless, fried chicken blobs." Wired: "The mole turned out to be one of the show's most trusted characters." On Metafilter: "If only Nina could have killed Jack at the end." That would have been cool. I'm thinking seriously about wiping the template for this weblog and starting over. I'd make it look like DaveNet looks now. A more serious look. Easier to read perhaps.
Paolo: "In the very unlikely case that for some reason I have your IP address, there could be a message for you in the yellow box on the right of this page." Screen shot. Rick Klau found a Palm outliner that understands OPML. This is very cool. That outliner could plug into our content system in a variety of ways. Steve MacLaughlin: "It's easy to draw a big bulls-eye on the record companies, and to rant and rave about how they're screwing the artists." Hey Apple has developers A remarkable article in BusinessWeek about Mac developers and Apple. A constant theme in the early days of this weblog and my column. And, it's even worse than it appears. Sometimes Apple says it has matched a developer and taken over its market, when it's not even true. Everyone loses, the platform, the developer, and the platform vendor. Amelio's Apple was no better. It's Internet strategy was OpenDoc, Cyberdog and Quicktime. Terrible strategy. Developers were leading in content management, totally ahead of Windows. The article is also remarkable because it cites Rob McNair-Huff's weblog. Nice. One more thing, it's also cool because, according to the article, small commercial developers exist. This has been a big outage for quite a few years. Perhaps Microsoft could have the same epiphany about its market. Sometimes small developers break through where the platform vendor is clueless. I've seen it happen. What a difference Five years ago today: "Microsoft does the developer game absolutely as well as they can, but they should be easy to compete with. Realistic developers understand that Microsoft is a growth machine, so if you're lucky enough to build a bonfire within Microsoft's reach, even a small one, they're going to try to build one of their own, just like yours. They have to do it, it's in their genetics, it's in their business plan." Five years ago Microsoft had the best developer program in the business. Today, after a series of utterly stupid gaffes in developer relations, they're losing to Apple, and that's ridiculous, because Apple is everything that a developer company is not. Microsoft fell into the trap of believing it was the whore (quoting JLG) when the only viable developer strategy for a company as large as MS is to be the flashiest pimp on the block. That Apple can make such serious inroads with developers is testimony to the disarray at Microsoft. How did this happen? First the browser wars, then the Java wars, then the confusion over the .NET strategy, and the icing on the cake -- the antitrust conviction. Of course it's not over until it's over. I ran into David Stutz of Microsoft at the O'Reilly conf and talked with him about this stuff. He said some high-level people at Microsoft are saying what I've been saying. I said let's set up a meeting. There's no time like now to get the developer thing working again.
Thomas Friedman: "Let's make a deal: We won't criticize the administration for not anticipating 9/11 if it won't terrorize the country by now predicting every possible nightmare scenario." Another idea for conference surfing. You can log into a session in realtime. An IRC channel for each session. And one for the whole conference. So you can say "Hey my session is boring, are any of the others interesting?" Could lead to a mass exodus. Clearly we've just begun to explore the possibilities.
6/11/00: "One day the trend may be trend-free. That will be an interesting day, as we all struggle to prove that our software is 100 percent pure and free of all trends."
An idea worth passing along. On Ecademy, pwainewright says: "[O'Reilly] could have encouraged these real-time bloggers to subscribe RSS feeds of their blogs to an aggregated 'event blog', effectively pooling all the commentary and attracting more participants into the feedback process." Good idea. Perhaps we can try this at the Open Source Convention in July. A simple registry open to all attendees. Give us the URLs of your RSS feeds. An aggregator runs once an hour, reads all the feeds, and spits out a communal event-based blog, with pointers to the originals. Easy to implement with current technology. Nathan Torkington at O'Reilly likes this idea. And hey, he just started a Radio weblog. Looks like this year's Open Source Convention is going to have some good weblogs. USA Today: "Morgan Stanley estimates that US companies threw away $130 billion in the past two years on unneeded software and other technology." Eric Alterman starts a weblog on MSNBC. Reuters: "Technology buffs have cracked music publishing giant Sony Music's elaborate disc copy-protection technology with a decidedly low-tech method: scribbling around the rim of a disk with a felt-tip marker." Hossein Derakhshan: "There are about 1000 Persian weblogs." Internet News: "The United States Copyright Office on Tuesday rejected an arbitration panel ruling on Webcasting royalty rates, a decision that is sure to rankle the recording industry and bring smiles to the face of Internet radio executives nationwide." Keith Teare received a letter from Microsoft, which he published on his weblog, which among other things, demands that he stop publishing his weblog. A new multi-author weblog by three lawyers, for lawyers. Ben Hammersley has a story about weblogs in the UK Guardian today. A good trend, another BigPub piece that isn't dismissive of amateurs, and doesn't predict the end of the world for professional writers. Tim Jarrett quotes Justin Hall: "A friend at Deloitte & Touche asked me to talk with these kids about my career as a freelance writer. And so I stood up in front of them and shared. 'I'm homeless, in debt, and my clothes smell because I live out of a beater car.' And they looked at me confused and a loud little girl with long thin braids in a bright pink parka down in front during the second section said, 'Why should we listen to you then?' and I said, 'because I do what I want and I love my life.'"
Google: Glossary, Sets, Voice Search, Keyboard Shortcuts. Survey: Which new GoogleApp do you like best? This article by Ed Cone about blogging is worth pointing to a second time. An insightful review of the blogging experience by a professional reporter. Rich Salz had a really good idea which I'm thinking about adding to my list of ideas for evolving RSS (with credit of course). This is what Rich said. "If you 'recommended' that the Major spring thunderstorm in Northern California. Fantastic and unusual. The hills were just turning brown. I bet they go emerald green now, probably well into June. Lovely. We get a second spring. 802.11b: "It's been more than a year since home users started buying Wi-Fi in huge amounts, and the software cycle still shows an orientation towards the techiest-of-the-techie. And even we can't figure it out." Rich Salz examines WSDL. Doc: "What do you call a blogger who won't link?" John Robb: "Patriotism is the last defense of cowards." Jeroen Bekkers, a Groove developer, reports a breakthrough. They can now post from a Groove space to a Radio weblog using the Blogger API. Bravo! Jesse Shanks on using OmniOutliner to edit AppleScripts. Ideas for RSS Evolution: "Sjoerd Visscher and Rahul Dave both offered the same convincing argument for global IDs instead of local ones, so I flipped it back."
News.Com: "Microsoft plans to announce on Monday revamped software that could make it easier for businesses to build portal Web sites." Rick Klau is looking for an OPML displayer for his Palm.
Here's my (new) standard response: As one of the designers of SOAP and XML-RPC, imho, they were designed to make it easy to connect applications using the Internet as the transport. In practice, messages are often sent between apps running on the same machine. This is an important technology for people who develop software for users, it allows us to substitute easy to use graphic tools, where appropriate, for browser-based interfaces. Quiheng Hu: "Microsoft is a highly respected Corporation in the world as well as in China." News.Com: Paid content comes to Kazaa. Last year on this day: Faking a death online. Two years ago, the best picture I've ever taken.
Richard Doherty: "By Christmas, Microsoft could become the nation's fourth-largest phone company."
The best defense is to flood the network with clearly non-infringing content, to follow Dr Lessig's lead, and make sure that all the good First Amendment bits are in the mix, ready to be shut down when these laws pass. Jake: "If we're too lazy, numb, frightened, or self-censored to ask the important questions and share what we learn with each other, we might as well sign over what's left of our civil rights right now. It will be a lot easier to lose them, than it will be to get them back." Amen. Madhu Menon: Why I love pop-up ads. I'm back to work on the slideshow stuff. Glad I took a breather. After seeing lots of PowerPoint slideshows at the conference last week, I find the HTML stuff functional, but pretty plain-jane. Then I thought I should allow for the possibility of Flash renderings of slideshows. I need a Radio script that takes an OPML file and turns it, somehow, into a SWF file. Here's an example, if anyone wants to give it a try. I think it's actually a pretty important connection. Wouldn't it be great to have a boring technical slideshow on a background like this one. | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||
