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Permanent link to archive for Friday, May 17, 2002. Friday, May 17, 2002

Register: "When Napster was underground, it was king." 

Elvis Costello: "I won't get any older, now the angels wanna wear my red shoes." 

Wired: "The movie studios win again." 

A picture named feinstein.gifWilliam Grosso nails it. "I've become something very close to a single-issue voter. Diane Feinstein, my local senator, is on Disney's side. She is a co-sponsor of S. 2048 and that means I probably won't be voting for her in the next election." Amen to that. Same here. These people work for us, they need a reminder.  

A sweet blurb from Marc Hedlund who spotted me at the conference this week. I wish we had had a chance to talk Marc. Next time! 

Earlier today I asked for a RSS browser in Flash. It's humble, but it's a beginning.  

My new favorite soft drink is Sanpellegrino Aranciata. I can guzzle the stuff. So much sugar, I allow myself one can for every trip to the store. Very sweet, slightly bitter, and delicious. 

AP: 1999 Report Warned of Suicide Hijack. That no one cared is no surprise. We weren't paying attention. After Sept 11, people found all kinds of reports on the Web, in public, that warned what Al Qaeda was up to, before the disaster. Hey we're back asleep again. The reports could be out there, but we wouldn't see them. The issue isn't with the government, it's with all of us. We don't want to hear bad news. 

Danish translation of an article I wrote about weblogs. 

Monday: "Tomorrow we're going to release a new tool.." Sorry. It didn't happen. Soon. 

A picture named andyGrovesDisembodiedHead.gifSometime in 2002 we should have a conference with premeditated (not ad hoc) bloggability. On stage four bloggers in a panel. In the audience, bloggers with tables, power strips, laptops. A microphone on every desktop. Projected on screen the blog of one of the people in the audience, the designated official blogger. That's a hard job, btw. Doc is good at it. I found out I'm not particularly good at it. I write too much. I get too distracted. I talk too much too. When I'm in the audience I'm a lean-over-and-whisper type guy. Occasionally I'm willing to line up at a mike (I did it once at this week's conference). To continue the fantasy, we'd all get in free, and our hotel bill would be paid, by sponsors who want to sell us stuff. This year it would be a bit of a gamble for them. Next year, a sure bet. If you've got a product to sell you want the bloggers to know about it. Even better, you want to listen to the bloggers to find out what kinds of products they want.  

News.Com: Bertelsmann buys Napster for $8 million

GARBO is coooooool.  

A Flash weblog from Matt Rice.  

A picture named charlie.gifIt's great to see all the Flash weblogs come online. Of course the next thing is a weblog that's rendered in Flash. It's like Charlie the Tuna. Starkist don't want tuna with good taste, they want tuna what taste good. 

First step: Write an RSS browser in Flash. 

Chris Kaminski enters the slideshow-design sweepstakes. He says his template is designed for Gecko-based browsers, but it looks pretty good in MSIE/Windows. 

John Sumser: A dozen things we know about blogs

Yesterday Creative Commons was announced. I just browsed the site quickly looking for a spec describing the XML format they're using. Megnut suggested that if blogging tools make it easy for people to declare their intentions and automatically generate the XML, that would be a good thing. I'm into helping if I can. First I gotta find the spec. Postscript: Matt Haughey sent an email saying they're still working on it. 

A picture named antena.gifIt's all about point of view. Two bloggers can look at the same event and see two different things. That's why it's good to have a variety of views of the same event. Think of it as triangulation, a technique I learned from a friend who was into hacking AM radio in the 70s. He put a transmitter in the trunk of his car and sang along with the music on his car stereo. He'd jam WABC in NY, which was the top teen station then (it might still be for all I know). The FCC had a hard time finding him, because they use a truck to find radio hackers. How to draw it. Put a dot on a piece of paper. That's the pirate radio station. Put another dot on the paper. That's the FCC truck. Draw a line from the truck to the station. Now move the truck to any other point, it could be just a few blocks away. Draw a line from the truck to the station. Bing. You now know where it is. But this assumes the station didn't move. Oooops. Rob Fahrni explains this visually. My friend thwarted them for some time, and it was a low power transmitter so you had to be close to where he was driving to hear it. I don't know if he ever got caught. Now in blogging, we like triangulation. You can see the yin and the yang. Find out what developers think and what the users think. 

Werbach: "The piece was dumbed-down in the editorial process, which commonly happens when writing for monthly magazines."  

A picture named pepsiblue.gifDr Lessig tells a story. He wrote a scholarly paper. He launched a copy of Morpheus and put his paper in the shared folder. Went home for the weekend. On Monday he comes into the office and his computer is disconnected. Stanford security had paid him a visit. "That's illegal," they said. Heh. He's the expert on what's legal. He wrote the stuff. He wanted to share it. Gotcha. 

Paul Simon: "Every where I go I get slandered, libeled. Hear words I never heard in the Bible." 

Elvis Costello: "I said I'm so happy I could die. She said drop dead, and left with another guy." 

I just searched for the lyrics to the Costello song above, it's called Red Shoes, but every link on Google is broken. Looks like ASCAP or RIAA have been sending demand letters? Let's try the Paul Simon search. No problem there. Lots of matches. Paul Simon is cool. Elvis Costello is.. Uhh, I can't bring myself to say it.  

Frank Sinatra: "It takes a long time to heal a broken heart. It's happened to all of us and never gets any easier. I understand, however, that playing one of my albums can help." 

Here's an asshole who actually likes spam. Yeah, the Net is becoming TV. The good stuff, Elvis' lyrics are going. But the pop-up ads are getting worse and worse. OK, according to the asshole it's a commercial medium. That's a watch-phrase. Pretty soon they're going to be saying that if you want to use the Internet you can only go to the bathroom while reading content. 

Kizna is "dedicated to creating secure solutions for improving communications between individuals and beyond the corporate firewall." 

     

Last update: Friday, May 17, 2002 at 8:01 PM Eastern.

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