Wednesday, July 31, 2002

Guest DaveNet: What We're Doing When We Blog. "As weblog readers, we respond with frequent visits, and we are rewarded with fresh content." 

Reuters: "Blue-chip stocks staged a late rally." 

Motley Fool: "In 1999, Microsoft spent $2.9 billion in stock buybacks; in 2000, $4.9 billion; and last year, a whopping $6.1 billion, all of which intended to hide the dilution from stock option grants." 

Seth Dillingham: "I feel as if Macrobyte was hit by a truck last Thursday, and was in a coma until early this morning." 

Chuq Von Rospach has been operating sports sites and mail lists for a long time and has some really good advice for other people wanting to do the same. 

Hewlett Packard has no honor.  

Tom Negrino: "If you've paid any attention to the tech market, you probably noticed that things aren't real good out there for anyone except Microsoft and Dell." 

Radio Free Blogistan: "blog meme tipping point metablog." 

Thanks to Bump for the link to the Oddpost weblog. Neat-o. 

Bryan Bell ships four new Manila themes, CSS-based, perfectly outline structured, and validating. 

Newsday: "Major League Baseball forced a 6-year-old Mets Web site, started by an upstate fan when he was 14, to shut down yesterday after league officials said it illegally used registered team and league trademarks and profited from the team's name." 

A Yankees fan gets his digs. Oh geez. See what they've done. Seriously, the suspension of disbelief is blown when the lawyers take over. How cold of the Mets to shut down young Bryan and his friends. I really have been a fan since 1962. The Mets are a young team, too young to screw around this way. On the subway, coming home after Game 5 of the Subway Series, I heard an older man say to a young Mets fan who was in tears -- "Son, if you're going to be a Mets fan your heart is going to get broken, a lot." The Mets will break your heart, every time. That's why we care. When the Mets win, it means something, for all of us. I loved the Mets without reservation when I was a boy (I'm 47 now). Later I learned they were a corporation, as selfish and stupid as any other. I try to overlook that, when I can.  

Kevin Werbach: "As its now being deployed, 'broadband' is too slow, too expensive, too asymmetric, and too restricted to be the driver of economic growth." 

Scott Mace: "Don't call it broadband." 

Jenny the Librarian on ebooks. "The biggest obstacle to the implementation of ebooks in any type of library is that we play virtually no part in the creation, publication, or dissemination cycle so we are completely dependent on vendors, publishers, organizations, and authors to provide us with digital content." 

Cory is back! "Didja miss me?" Yes.  

David Watson: "Very little really usable software has come from people who are willing to work for six figures." That's true too. 

John Robb: "With Bill Clinton's political machine behind him, he is likely to sweep the field of contenders in 2004 and face W in the fall." 

Ink-stainers, while starting to get a clue, still see themselves at the center of the conversation. Thanks to Glenn for the pointer to Howard Kurtz's admonition to his colleagues to listen to weblogs. "Some media critics dismiss bloggers as self-indulgent cranks. That's a mistake. They now provide a kind of instant feedback loop for media corporations that came of age in an era of one-way communications." Uhhh Howard, we're not here for the corporations. 

Lance Knobel: "He focuses mostly on outpourings from bloggers on the right of the political spectrum." 

On this day last year, O'Reilly lost one of its editors.  

What is a weblog? 

Some good news. I've been given permission to republish Meg Hourihan's excellent essay on weblogs. At the time it came out I was getting ready to write something similar, it was the right time for the weblog world to define weblogs, because so many journalists had been trying to do it. Meg did such a great job, and I want to carry more voices through DaveNet, so I asked her, and then her editor at O'Reilly for permission, and this morning they said yes.

From there, I want to start an outline about what a weblog is, because there's more to say. Maybe it'll be a three-column table. In column 1, a topic. For example: Fact-checking. In the second column, how centralized journalism does it; and in the third column, how it works in the weblog world. That way, if someone understands how fact-checking works in the print world, they have a basis for understanding how it works when done in the open.

Perhaps you see more errors in weblogs, but they can get corrected quickly. I guess the diff is that you can see the process in weblogs. Some people say this is a bad thing, but I think it's good. When I see writing that's too polished, where the grammar is too perfect, I am suspicious that at a deeper level it has been sanitized and dumbed-down. I like getting my news and opinion straight from the source without the middleman.

Another row. In column 1, "Research". In column 2, "A reporter spends two weeks interviewing experts, with transcription errors, dumbing-down, etc added." In column 3, "Experts spend a lifetime trying new ideas, learning from their mistakes, and learning how to explain their philosophy. Weblogs let them publish their ideas without intermediaries."

Arguing on the Internet 

Maybe it was a brush-with-mortality that gave me the perspective to see more clearly something that had been lurking around on the edge of my consciousness. Here it is, do with it what you want.

So much of the debate on the Internet seems aimed to so thoroughly discredit (or humiliate?) someone so that everyone will instantly stop listening to that person.

Such a position leaves no room for subtlety or complexity.

No one is so devoid of intelligence or soul. Not even a serial murderer, convicted and sentenced to death, has as little grace as the fools who argue this way say.

Greg Hanek explained this to me in an email last night when he raised the issue of honor, in re discourse on the Internet.

Aha! How come I never viewed it that way. A good retort to a flamer.

You have no honor.

Heh.

Scott 

I saw the honor-free arguing style in a new way when I saw Scott Rosenberg confronted by one of his detractors. Sheez, don't they know how hard it is being Scott? He does it cheerfully and honestly, oozing integrity, holding up far more of the Internet than he probably ever bargained for.

Tuesday, July 30, 2002

Apparently the NY Mets couldn't find a way to compromise with some of the team's most dedicated fans. A sad day for New York baseball. What would Mookie say?? 

Salon: "Listen's $10-per-month Rhapsody service has a fantastic interface, and, since it has content from all five labels, you can find much of what you'd like on it. You can listen to any song as often as you'd like -- an option that gives a taste of what a perfect subscription service would feel like. The only trouble is, Listen won't let you burn -- and, as one file trader asked, 'Who wants to be stuck listening to shit at their computer?'"  

Martin Schwimmer, a trademark attorney and Mets fan, weighs in on Bryan Hoch's MetsOnline situation. 

Joel Klein, Microsoft's chief prosecutor in the Clinton Administration, is named chancellor of New York's public school system. 

It's been one week since Salon's blogs booted up. Scott Rosenberg posts a progress report.  

FarrFeed: "I love this stuff." 

I know this isn't big news for most of you, but I'm no longer the first Dave on Google. Maybe someday I will be, again. :-( 

Well, yesterday I went for my 30-day post op review (it was actually 38 days after I was discharged) and there was good news and bad news. The good news is that I'm healing quickly. My body is very strong and doing really well. My blood pressure is great. Heart rate is great. Cholesterol needs work and I have to lose a bunch of weight, and of course I can't smoke. Now the bad news. I have to be a saint for the rest of my life. I knew this day was coming. As I start to feel better, I want to relax. That ain't going to happen. Oy. Here's my old theme song. "Don't ask me to be Mister Clean, cause baby I don't know how." I need a new song. Oh mama.  

Ed Cone's got the blogging bug: "I filed my N&R column about the bad proposed corporate hacking bill. It will run on Sunday -- it's an early deadline no matter what, but after blogging for a few months it's almost painful to wait so long. I feel like just posting it now, or scooping myself with the best parts....but patience is a virtue." Hehe. 

Historian Stephen Ambrose, who is interviewed on the PBS News Hour today: "You can do whatever the hell you want. Who's going to criticize you? And if they do, what the hell do you care?"  

Radio Free Blogistan: Blogger vs Radio. 

Reuters: "Stocks briefly extended their losses in late morning trading on Tuesday, biting into Monday's monster rally." 

Thanks to Glenn Reynolds for the link to metsonline.net. As a Mets fan since 1962, I think it's great that sites like this exist and are flourishing. Like Bryan Hoch, the webmaster, I also run websites as a labor of love, and know there isn't generally a whole lot of money left over after you pay for bandwidth. I totally believe Hoch, a college student, when he says he isn't making money. The site clearly disclaims that it is not representative of the Mets or Major League Baseball. If you go deeper you see that Hoch contributed his time for free to help the Mets improve their own site, before all sites were taken over by MLB in 2001 (what a bad idea, why can't teams differentiate themselves based on the quality of their community sites). Now of course there's another side to it, so let's keep an open mind. But to the owners of the Mets, please remember, it's the fans that make it work, and it's pretty clear that this website is from the fans, for the fans and the team, and that's a good thing. 

Postscript: I've been emailing with Bryan, and asked if the local NY press has taken up his cause. He says: "Not yet. You can help by calling any one of the major metro papers (Post, Daily News, Times, Newsday)." More.. Ernie the Attorney is looking into this. "LSU Law School is suing one of its students for trademark infringement over a website that he maintains. The site is called lsulaw.com, and it includes a school calendar, law-related links and comments by Douglas Dorhauer, some of them critical of the law school." 

Bret Fausett, yesterday: "It's hard to imagine a more complete win than what ICANN Director Karl Auerbach received today from Los Angeles Superior Court Judge Dzintra Janavs." 

James Jarrett wonders where is his blog flow? 

Mark Crane writes: "Woke up early the other morning, and started listening to a BBC special on the Silicon Valley. Suddenly I heard the voice of Dave Winer, and he sounded like this mellow California hippy-geek. You should do a DaveNet that is just a stream of you reading the essay. Hearing the Dave voice totally changed my perceptions of the Dave Winer experience." It's true, I have a pretty soft voice. I laugh a lot too. Many people are surprised.  

OSCON, last week, has done its job and stirred the embers of the Great Open Source Debate of the 1990s. I found myself writing in an email yesterday: "Very little really usable software has come from people who are willing to work for $0. (I chose my words carefully, infrastructure is another matter entirely.) Further, it's weird to say, as Richard Stallman does, that by coercing programmers to work for $0 that that's freedom. To me it seems obvious that that's slavery."  

Washington Post: "Operated for years by Internet addressing giant VeriSign Inc., dot-org is slated to get a new landlord in October when VeriSign relinquishes its hold on the domain." 

Two years ago on this day: "The best standard is the one with the most users." 

Ponder yesterday's riddle. Then click on the solution.  

Monday, July 29, 2002

NY Times: "Stock prices staged a broad, strong advance." 

Phillip Pearson did an ecosystem crawler starting with the Scripting News blogroll. Here are the results. Nice. Thanks! 

Ernie the Attorney has a directory of lawyers with weblogs. 

Steve Gillmor on why trusting Microsoft is not the best idea.  

The Top-100 weblogs report for Salon is starting to get interesting. 

And Scott Rosenberg puts to rest, once and for all, the question of whether or not blogging is journalism. "Bloggers can be journalists any time they practice journalism by actually trying to find out the truth about a story. A journalist can be a blogger by installing some blogging software and beginning to post. These words should be labels for activities, not badges of tribal fealty." Ta-dahh, and duh. 

Glenn Reynolds comments on Delaware Senator Joe Biden's new entertainment-industry-friendly bill. "These legislative initiatives aren't just about copyright. They're about building a regime that's hostile to content that comes from anyone other than Big Media suppliers." 

US News: "Keep an eye on bloggers." 

News.Com: "The Recording Industry Association of America's Web site was unreachable over the weekend due to a denial-of-service attack." Prediction: A new law that stops all HTTP requests because we might be doing a DoS against the RIAA. Hillary Rosen says the new law is "innovative." 

Blogmapper "lets you associate blog entries with hot spots on a map. When you click on the spots, the entries appear." 

Here's an example of an RSS 0.91 file containing the location encoding. Not sure yet how you generate the Points. 

All of a sudden DaveNet is getting lots of hits from the main weblogs page in Google's directory. Hmmm.  

John Robb points out that Scripting News is a highly rated technology weblog according to the Google directory. 

Happy 55th to Papa Doc. Two other 55-year-olds: Rob Reiner and Arnold Schwarzenegger. How do I know? Maureen Dowd wrote a column about Meathead and the Terminator facing off in the 2006 California governor's race. 

Is Adam Curry is a corporate MoFo? Look it up. And what a coincidence. I taught that exact word to Young Patrick Scoble yesterday. He's going to Portland, OR today to teach it to his cousin.  

NY Times: "The creator of a Web site whose name is a vulgarism for 'failed company' said he would roll out a new site called InternalMemos.com." 

Warning: Silly joke 

A Hispanic mathematician has two penises.

One is named José.

What is the other one named?

Answer tomorrow.

The value of the truth? 

I received another book to review over the weekend. This one is about web services. It's a college textbook. I skimmed five chapters. Without saying who the author or publisher is, so no one can say I have a bone to pick with them, and with the disclaimer that the story they tell is totally flattering to me and UserLand, they got the story wrong.

Now I know what I'm "supposed" to say. Since they gave me so much credit, I'm supposed to be happy with it. But I'm not. I think books and magazine and news articles should at least try to tell the story as it actually happened, not embellish it, or change it, or whatever they do.

The author clearly worked from this document. But he says that I designed XML-RPC, by myself, in frustration with the slow process of SOAP at Microsoft. Well, that's just not true. XML-RPC is a snapshot of SOAP taken in 1998. When it was designed it was not intended to be frozen, it was designed to be evolved. That it evolved so much as to be unrecognizable from what eventually was called SOAP might be interesting to some people. But XML-RPC did not come from left field. It was the earliest public version of SOAP. As far as I know, none of the people who were involved would tell a story that contradicts that.

If you read a Newsweek account of the development of a new Macintosh, what are the chances that the story bears any resemblance to what happened? If you read a Fortune story about Microsoft is there any truth to it? And how far back does this tradition go? Was there any truth to the history books we read when we were children? Does anyone try to tell the story as it happened or is everyone just trying to sell books and articles?

Smoking update 

Thanks to Mark Pilgrim for the kind wishes and great tutorial.

I just re-read the I'm Not A Smoker bit he points to, and thought I should post an update. My mind no longer seems so interested in solving problems by smoking cigarettes. There are still things that make me think of smoking, but not the things people warn about. Here's an example. I think "Wouldn't it be nice to rent a house on the east coast of Florida for the winter and do a lot of body surfing?" My mind thinks: Cigarettes! I issue a correction. "No cigarettes, sorry."

Okay, so I can deal with that one. Now, here's another automatic response. I'm on my walk, pumping lots of oxygen, turning it into carbon dioxide, and feeling really good. My mind generates a limiting comment. "But you're killing yourself by smoking." A moment of depression. Then I remember: "No I'm not!" In other words I'm not doing anything overt to kill myself now. A nice difference.

If you've never smoked you have no idea how weird it is.

Sunday, July 28, 2002

In mid-June, Megnut wrote a definitive piece entitled What We're Doing When We Blog. So many others skim the surface and make superficial statements about weblogs, but miss that there is something going on both at a techical level, and at a democracy and citizenship level. Weblogs are deceptively simple and not easy to grasp. They give a voice to people with big experience. Lots more to say about this.  

I got a great political action plan from an anonymous wage slave in the entertainment industry. Well worth reading, contains some stimulating thoughts. Thanks! 

Don Larson sent a letter to his Congressperson.  

Eric Norlin is getting pounded by wiener boys. Our best wishes to Eric. I find wearing garlic wards them off.  

Remember what it was like being a teen, looking for role models, trying on other people's lives as one might try on a shirt, hat, or pair of sunglasses. It's really interesting to watch that process, in real-time, on young Aaron Swartz's weblog. He's self-aware as he tries on Richard Stallman's life. "How human Stallman is. As people asked him long questions he would practice his dance steps. He'd make jokes about everything. I could really see being him." The rest of the post is interesting too. I totally don't get how writing software for users and not giving it all away is anti-freedom, but that's not the point of this link. Live and let live. To each his own. Big wheel keep on turning. 

Mo Nickles: "Safire also has a tendency to 'crown' etymologies (as opposed to coin): he'll claim one as the source of a word or phrase, rather than the likely source." 

SJ Merc: Ailing valley searches its soul. Let's stop feeling sorry for ourselves. We're still the technology capital. Let's make some products and have fun. The 90s really sucked here. We lost our way. It was better in the 80s, before our leaders became rock stars. Make technology products. 

NY Times: Venture Capitalists Are Taking the Gloves Off. What a bunch of losers. The VCs should be apologizing for wrecking the high tech business, instead they're getting tough. Route around them.  

Dan Gillmor: "If you or I asked Congress for permission to legally hack other people's computers, we'd be laughed off Capitol Hill. Then we'd be investigated by the FBI and every other agency concerned with criminal violations of privacy and security." 

Steve Michel: "Sign me up, I'll contribute whatever I can." 

Did you watch the miner's rescue last night? What a surprise. CNN was betting on one of two unhappy endings. 1. They'd all be dead; or 2. There would be nothing there. What a surprise, they were all there, alive and in good health, rescued quickly and in the hospital recovering. A real-life story where everything went right. Ye-hi. 

NY Times: "Each emerging miner, gleaming wet and grimy, was ordered by medical workers to lie down on a stretcher, even if he felt like dancing." 

On this day two years ago Napster got a reprieve. Want to see what happy looks like on the Web? Check it out. 

Saturday, July 27, 2002

Eric Albert outlines a very reasonable plan for political action re Internet users' rights and the Berman bill. This is exactly the kind of input this political neophyte needs. Thanks! 

Another kickass 1-hour walk today. This time I pushed for more vigor, it didn't hurt. Took the iPod with me, the tunes were very excellent. Thanks to the community for the gift. Now it's really making a diff.  

Thanks to Phil Windley for posting this feature request from the bulletin-board at OSCON. Working on it.  

A NY Times weblog article by Glenn Fleishman that I missed due to surgery.  

Ernie the Attorney: "The copyright owner has to notify the Department of Justice 7 days in advance of taking action." 

New to the blogging ecosystem, I'm a Crawly Amphibian, with 31 points, whatever that means. I'm going to learn about this now. I get it. It's like the Weblogs.Com Top-100, with InstaPundit's and VodkaPundit's blogrolls as the starting point. Nick Denton is an Adorable Little Rodent. Heh. Doc Searls is a Marauding Marsupial. It's interesting, because it's only one of several ecosystems. In their world I'm Hard To Get. I assume this means I don't point to many of the sites in their world. In my original ecosystem I bet I'm a total Link Slut.  

Here's an idea we have to implement on Weblogs.Com. 

Sheila: "I've been an ex-smoker since April 12, 1997." 1932 days. 

Radio Free Blogistan has a bunch of stuff yesterday and today comparing Radio, LiveJournal and Movable Type. 

I just read on David Watson's weblog that he was having trouble editing the templates for his Radio weblog using the browser form. Perhaps he didn't know that you can edit the templates in any text editor. Open the www sub-folder of the Radio folder, and look for #template.txt. Open it in your favorite editor, make a change, save, refresh your desktop website home page in the browser. If you don't like what you see, bring the editor to the front, choose Undo, save, refresh. The browser interface is there for newbies and for light tweaks. For serious template work, use a real text editor, you won't be sorry. Screen shot. 

Slate: "Until recently, it's been difficult for a computer to ask a Web site for information." 

Ed Cone: "Howard Berman, the other sponsor, also appears to be running unopposed." 

Roland Piquepaille: "Peek-a-Booty allows people in Beijing to surf the Web freely." 

In the Sunday NY Times, William Safire explains "blog." This takes the concept to a high level of acceptance in the English language (at least American English). I've been here before. In the 80s, with my brother, we got credit for "laptop" from Safire, but told the researcher that the word was already in use in the industry when we wrote about laptops in Byte in 1982 or so. I learned then that Safire is the authority on American English. So blog is now a very real word. It will be in the Oxford English Dictionary, and Safire has written it up. We all did something real. Jorn Barger, Blogger, the Frontier community. Congrats to one and all! 

Jorn Barger: "Everyone should keep a weblog, if they have any interest in sharing their opinions with others." Amen. 

Peter Merholz: "Does anyone know of any printed references to 'blog' in 1999 that discuss its coinage?" 

Mary Wehmeier is going to a picnic in the San Fernando Valley this weekend, with a bunch of people who work in the entertainment industry in Howard Berman's congressional district. She points out something that's visible on the map of Berman's district --> a lot of the big entertainment companies are there. Of course, that's why he's their water boy! But the voters are the people who work at the companies. If they think their bosses are screwing the Internet here's the chance to send a message to Michael Eisner and Sumner Redstone. Feel powerless? If you're a voter in the San Fernando Valley, you aren't. 

The San Fernando Library may prove a good resource for information about Berman's district.  

Doc Searls comes from Coble's district in North Carolina.  

Zappa: "Is that a real poncho or is that a Sears poncho?" 

Prince: "Ha, toy, I don't serve ribs." 

Friday, July 26, 2002

DaveNet: Hollywood wants the right to hack your computer 

AP: Stocks Close Up With Solid Advance. 

Bing! We got lucky. Ed Cone lives in North Carolina's 6th District. I think once I'm fully recovered, I'm going to devote myself to working with Ed, and people in the San Fernando Valley, to correct the problem in Washington. I gotta believe we can eliminate one or two Congressmen to make the point that computer users can't be taken for granted. Can we raise $5 million for this? It would be worth it.  

Donald Larson suggested a name for our $5 million campaign group. iVote. It's cute. iDoVote. Believe me, that scares politicians. Wear a button saying you vote and they fucking listen. I kid you not. 

BTW, I did my 1-hour walk today. And I went for the gusto. I got to the turning point where if I turn left I go up three hills in succession. It was those three hills that got me into the hospital and under the knife in June. Today I did them. No pain, no shortness of breath. Just a sweaty strong body. Man do I feel good!! 

Questions questions questions. Can a small record label run a virus too, or just the monopolies? How about a software company? How about the Department of Justice? Can they install a virus on our systems to look for terrorism and report it back to the FBI? Do you think that would be constitutional? What if there's a conflict betw a record label's virus and a car dealer's virus, which one survives? Can a record label rent space in its virus to do someone else's bidding? Could they put an advertisement in their virus? Can I go to the bathroom while a virus is running? What information on my hard disk is private? What if I record my own MP3, can they erase that? Who pays for the bandwidth the virus uses? Does their virus have an implicit shrinkwrap agreement? Can Symantec defend against Hollywood's virus? Could an irate user write a virus that seeks out Michael Eisner's computer and destroys his data? What about Jack Valenti's computer? Hillary Rosen? Can we read their data? Do we have any privacy remaining after this law is passed? 

Howard Berman: "I rise today to introduce legislation that will help stop peer-to-peer piracy." I rise in response to say you really stepped in it Berman. Everybody knows that viruses are bad. Welcome to the next Enron-level scandal. Maybe we can clean up Congress in November, if so, you're going to be the poster boy Howard. 

The Register says that the MPAA's Jack Valenti is hedging on the Berman bill. "Somehow, Valenti failed to impress on the over-eager Berman's mind that this legislation is for media giants only." 

Amy Wohl: "This is yet another example of corrupt politicians, paid by wealthy constituents to enact unfair laws." 

Do you live in California's 26th Congressional District? Or do you live in North Carolina's 6th District? Florida's 19th District? 

Eric Norlin: "Palladium can prevent the Bill that this DaveNet is disgusted with." So can voters taking responsibility for their Representatives. We don't have to trust Bill Gates to prevent this Bill. We can just vote the bastards out of office. Every member of the House is up for re-election in three months.  

Dave Cullen: "Three different leads I wrote for the same story, published on the NYT op-ed page June 15. You tell me which one you prefer." 

Doc: "I'll be speaking in Dave's slot." Good choice. Doc's going to talk about the philosophy we share -- Ask not what the Internet can do for you, ask what you can do for the Internet. This is, as Martha Stewart says, A Good Thing. I only wish the US Congress could get behind that. Otherwise we're going to have to kill a lot of companies in Hollywood, and vote a lot of openly corrupt bums out of office. It ain't going to be pretty. By the way, that's our right as consumers and citizens. We're allowed to invoke the death penalty at a corporate and congressional level. The question is, do we have the courage to do it. (They're betting we don't.) 

Kevin Werbach: "Anyone know of a good change notification tools that still exists?" 

Christian Science: The Web didn't kill libraries. Cool! 

Happy 59th birthday to Mick Jagger! 

Today's song: Mother's Little Helper. "'Mother needs something today, to calm her down; and though she's not really ill, there's a little yellow pill.." 

AP: "Rep. Howard L. Berman, D-Calif., formally proposed legislation that would give the industry unprecedented new authority to secretly hack into consumers' computers or knock them off-line entirely if they are caught downloading copyrighted material." If this bill becomes law I'm going to join Saddam Hussein in calling for the destruction of the United States. 

Bonus song: "If I had me a shotgun, I'd blow you straight to Hell." 

A brief editorial. Commercial radio sucks. I want to program my own music. I am not a pirate. Fuck you. I've bought all the music I use, first on vinyl, then on cassette, then on CD. I'll pay again. PS: I vote. 

Russell Beattie: "Would you like to do some AudioBlogging?" 

Mary Wehmeier has a list of radio stations silenced by CARP. It's a very lonnnng list.  

My representative: Eshoo. Senators: Feinstein, Boxer. 

Dear asshole 

Pet peeve. People who send emails to people quitting smoking that explain how hard it is to quit, and how in all likelihood, you'll fail. These people are total assholes. Even worse, they're lying. Don't believe them. When you get such an email send them an email back with a pointer to this post.

Dear asshole. Stop discouraging my friend. He (or she) is quitting smoking in order to live a longer, happier life. I totally support that. Your bullshit is interfering. Please stop now and have a nice day.

It's easy to quit. The first week it's physical, after that, it's all in your mind. When you want a cigarette, acknowledge that. "My mind is telling me that it wants a cigarette." Breathe. In and out. Again and again. Walk around. Drink some water. Chew on pen. Breathe. The desire passes. Resume your life. You can do it.

BTW, this is a non-smoking weblog since June 14, 2002.

42 days!

Thursday, July 25, 2002

Paul Andrews: "I'd feel more optimistic about R&D at Microsoft if the company could point to a single successful original product to emerge from R&D expenditure." 

NY Times: "The stock market fell today as it struggled to hold on to some of Wednesday's stunning gains after two weeks of severe losses." Dow down 5. 

News.Com: ACLU to put DMCA on Trial. "I don't want to go to jail," said Edelman, who graduated from Harvard in June, and who plans to study law there this fall. "I want to go to law school."  

A couple of weeks ago I said I don't understand books about weblogs. Double-click. How do you write about a book about the Web if it isn't on the Web? All you can do is write a very short review, unless you want to try to explain what the book is saying. Well, writing for weblogs doesn't work that way. I want to link to the source so you can read for yourself exactly what they're saying, not my paraphrasing of it. If all I can do is link to a page where you can buy the book, well, okay, I'll do that once or maybe twice, but if it's on the Web, and indexed by search engines, it can come up over and over. So I think the BlogRoots folks did the right thing. Their book will be studied, examined, probed and questioned by the weblog community, as they release chapters on a regular basis over the coming weeks. Will their book sell? We'll find out when it's published. I'll buy a copy to support the idea of books being dual-published on the Web and in print. It's a good idea, in general, but it's essential for books about the Web. 

Health note. I will not be going to San Diego for the Open Source Convention. Best wishes to the people who are there. It sounds like a great show. The O'Reilly people have been very helpful and understanding. My next public appearance in the industry will be at Seybold, on Sept 11 in San Francisco where I will lead a discussion about web services in the publishing industry. Amazon and Google are confirmed, we're now working on Apple and Microsoft.  

SJ Merc on the last days of Gene Kan's life. 

InfoWorld: "Microsoft's Bill Gates kicked off the company's annual Financial Analysts Day here Thursday by announcing the company will boost R&D spending by 20 percent from $4.3 billion in FY 02 to $5.2 billion in FY 03."  

NY Times: "Microsoft is now locked in competition with small start-up companies that originally pioneered the Web services field." I assume Markoff means UserLand, although we're hardly a startup and I don't see anyone locked in competition with them over web services. Microsoft clearly does not understand what they're used for. With all possible humility, if they want to get going in a productive direction with this stuff, let's reconvene the group that started the work in 1998, and plot out the next steps. No doubt the development and runtime environment that MS has developed in the interim will play a role, but there's more to it, and less, than Microsoft said there is, two years ago. There's a killer demo the reporters and analysts (and users) should be seeing, but aren't.  

Frank Schaap wrote an evangelical essay about directions for Salon and weblogs. 

According to results from last night's survey, the stock market has not hit bottom. Hold or sell, say the voters. John Robb says a contrarian would buy on the results of this survey, but that the summer months are not a good bet for a rebound. 

NY Times: Setting Up a Weblog. Q. How do I set up a Weblog of my own? 

Note to the Times. A correction. Weblogs.Org is not a UserLand site. It's confusing, perhaps because the site is managed with Radio and uses the default theme for Radio sites, but it is owned by Dan Geiser, one of our customers. It'll be interesting to see how the Times handles this. 

Weblogs and health 

Glenn Reynolds sent me a pointer to Andrea See's quit-smoking weblog. I believe in this. For me, writing this weblog while I'm recuperating is very good therapy. If you've never smoked you might not understand. I'll try to explain.

When you're smoking, the cigarettes tell you many lies, including this one: "If you ever stop, you won't be able to do the things you love to do." Well, needless to say, I can write prose without smoking, I've proved that right here on Scripting News. I haven't tried to write code yet without it, but I'm sure I can do that too.

Here's another interesting angle. I started smoking when I was a virgin. So until I quit, on 6/14/02, I had never had sex as a non-smoker. I won't go into details, but it's quite a bit better without the cigarettes.

Begging for peace 

I tried a new approach last night with some of the leading flamers and their friends -- an appeal to pity.

I begged "Can the flamers take a vacation please. I am recuperating from serious surgery. If you have an ounce of kindness, now would be a good time to deploy it."

It's starting to get ridiculous, there is no mail list or discussion group I can participate in without the flamers tracking me down. And they were trying to interfere with the new Salon weblogs project. These guys are real soldiers. I show some weakness, and they attack. Man.

Postscript. Two of them, believe it or not, are pushing back on this simple request. Oy.

Richard Rybolt: "There will be a time when loud-mouthed, incompetent people seem to be getting the best of you. When that happens, you only have to be patient and wait for them to self destruct. It never fails."

Wednesday, July 24, 2002

DaveNet: Our Deal with Salon.  

Survey: Are we at a market bottom? 

WorldCom Magazine has a great article on blogging. 

Rob Fahrni, who works for Microsoft, asks an interesting question. Answer: Any time. Tomorrow? Let's get Steve and John talking.  

Scott Rosenberg is a NBB. (Natural Born Blogger.) 

Shane Michaelson wants web services for eBay. 

I just had the weirdest (nice) experience this afternoon. I went out for my daily walk. I'm up to 45 minutes now. A big SUV stops and I'm greeted by a smiling man. It's my cardiologist. He says "We always check up on our patients." Heh. Of course it was just a coincidence. I love my daily walks. At the beginning they're hard and painful. By the end I'm feeling just great. Another fifteen minutes and I'm exercising the amount I want to, and then it's time to up the speed and distance. 

Evan Williams: "I'm at my wits end trying to keep my life and business and web sites minimally functioning." 

BTW, a note to the wiener boys. Check out Evan's post congratulating us and Salon on the deal. He sees it as a win for the weblog world, and I do too. A few people have tried to stir up shit betw us and Pyra, but it's never existed. I like Evan, we've always gotten along, at a personal level, and that's been going on for a long time, and I don't see it stopping any time soon. 

News.Com quotes Microsoft's Bill Gates saying that .NET hasn't achieved the goals they set two years ago.  

Reuters: "Investors rummaged through the wreckage left by the financial storm that has hit Wall Street in recent weeks, looking for bargain stocks after the market was slammed to five-year lows." The Dow closed up 488. 

BBC: "Biggest one day gain in almost 15 years." 

I guess the market likes the deal we did with Salon!  

AP: "AOL disclosed that the SEC was looking into a series of transactions that boosted the company's revenues." 

Sean Gallagher: "I tried the other day to explain what web services were to a non-technical friend. His eyes wandered. He grew distracted. A shiny object captured his attention. I gave up." Uh huh. 

The BlogRoots authors are publishing their book on the Web, in its entirety. Chapter 8, Using Blogs in Business, is online now. Excellent. 

Warren Buffet: "CEO's don't need 'independent' directors, oversight committees or auditors absolutely free of conflicts of interest. They simply need to do what's right." 

Glenn Reynolds: "Dude, I'm gettin' screwed." 

Press release: "Salon Media Group, in partnership with UserLand Software, today announced the launch of Salon Blogs, a new service that will allow Salon's users to publish their own weblogs through Salon." 

Scott Rosenberg: "One reason I'm glad Salon and UserLand are working together is that, from what I can see, both are independent companies, survivors in fields dominated by unresponsive giants, and both are driven foremost by passion -- on Salon's part, for good online journalism, and on UserLand's part, for great software." Amen. 

Liz: "Weblog. SalonWeblog. The mind boggles, so it does." 

News.Com: "Congress is about to consider an entertainment industry proposal that would authorize copyright holders to disable PCs used for illicit file trading." 

Beau Lebens did something obvious that no one else thought of -- he put a REST-style interface on the Google API. Heh. 

A reminder that KDE supports XML-RPC, and was on board very early in the process. Since then I have become friends with the ever-present and effervescent Miguel de Icaza of Gnome, who is driving a lot of open source resources behind Microsoft's new operating system. KDE may not have a champion like Miguel, but their heart is in the right place. Thanks for the support. 

Gerd Kortuem of the Wearable Computing Lab at the Univ of Oregon writes: "You might be interested to know that the regular Scripting News mailing I receive are classified as spam by SpamAssassin, an Unix-based spam mail filter." Thanks. 

John, Jake and Lawrence: This is going to be a FAQ.  

People with good hearts 

About a year ago talking with John Robb I lamented that I get so much hate mail. John said "Dave you're a rock star." I didn't like that answer, but he was right. With thousands of readers, there are a couple of dozen who think I write just for them, and they hate me and what I say, and express it constantly and in great volume. But when I got sick, I learned a lot, not just about myself and people who were friends, but people who had been my most vocal and at times unfair and abusive critics.

I said to one of my detractors, in a private email, after he expressed concern on my return from the hospital: "Life matters, right?" and he agreed. He probably would have been one of the people to join the latest Dave-bash-fest over on Queso, in normal times, but he didn't participate this time around. These are the silent signs of progress, worth noting. The person knows who he is, and presumably will read this. Thank you, from the bottom of my heart. If you'd like to acknowledge this on your weblog, I'd be happy to point to it.

There are other signs of people with good hearts. I am glad to see people put their animus aside. That's how we heal. Let's agree that life is more important than anything, without it there's nothing to discuss, no progress can be made.

Being kind to each other doesn't have to interfere with being true to ourselves; please let's do the extra work to find out where the anger is coming from, and try not to be angry at someone, esp not me. It's okay to have anger, just don't direct it at anything or anyone, that's a better way to go. Nobody's perfect, especially not me. So if you find an imperfection, try to love it. I'm not your father or mother, sister or brother, you don't know me very well. Express yourself, but keep a respectful distance, and all will be well.

Finally there's a myth that men are strong, we can take it. Well, I learned in a new way in June that that isn't true. My body came close to breaking, but thankfully it didn't. I got another chance. I'm not going to waste my remaining time arguing with a small number of selfish people. I have love to give for people who want to heal themselves. But for people who want to hurt me, I have nothing more to give.

Tuesday, July 23, 2002

Scott Rosenberg, Salon's managing editor, has a new weblog, and it's very nice. I've known Scott for quite a few years, he wrote one of the first articles about weblogs, in May 1999. His weblog is edited with Radio UserLand, and that makes me proud. You can subscribe to Scott's weblog with Radio's news aggregator. Stay tuned for more Salon weblog links.  

Jake: "So far I have yet to notice any problems, but if you happen to see something go wrong, click the comment link below, and let us know." 

Phillip Pearson is keeping a running commentary on the new blogs appearing at blogs.salon.com. 

Heh heh *cough* tease *cough* heh heh. 

Something to relax about -- today the Dow Jones went down by less than 100 points. Meanwhile, famous Jewish author Chaim Potok died at 73; and the war in the Middle East is escalating. There's been much discussion why we hold Israel to a higher standard than others. The reason is that we're their closest ally, and our values must be reflected in their actions, if they want to continue to enjoy our support. 

Best wishes to Jim Roepcke's dad, who just went through some heavy-duty surgery.  

Here's something interesting. The Hot-Or-Not folks are now rating weblogs. Nice. 

Jon Udell: "To turn knowledge into some kind of deprecated highbrow fantasy seems a terrible shame." Amen. 

Reuters: "People are thinking why buy it today when you can buy it cheaper tomorrow." 

Roland Piquepaille tunes into the subtext in Bill Gates's email to millions of Internet users last week.  

Patrick Logan and Sam Gentile push back on Paul Andrews' assessment of .NET. Perhaps I can shed some light. Paul is a user and a journalist, not a developer. Two years ago Microsoft started making a lot of claims about .NET including some specific ship dates and features, that they have missed. Paul isn't responsible for explaining to readers the why's and wherefore's, and it's good that he is checking up on their delivery, so perhaps next time big companies like MS make grand proclamations about their dominance, they'll be taken with a few more grains of salt, and not clear the landscape of all innovation until they ship, or fail to. It's happened over and over. Paul has been around the loop enough to have seen it a few times. And he's generally a Microsoft booster, not a detractor. 

BTW, a note to people who don't like criticism, and this is not about Microsoft, who generally takes it pretty well, all things considered. If you get some criticism, that's not a bad thing. Try to listen. On the other hand, if you're giving criticism, don't make it personal unless really is. Most people try to do the best they can. Even Bill Gates probably thought they were going to ship a revolution with .NET in a quarter or two. Human beings make mistakes, all of us.  

BBC: "US shares opened slightly higher on Tuesday, but have got a very long way to climb to recover the previous day's heavy falls." 

Mary Wehmeier: "I am an AOL Surviver." 

Mike Chambers: "I am going to be testing a simple Flash Communication Server app on Wednesday (July 24) at 1PM Eastern, and need some (a lot) of people to join to see how it handles the bandwidth. The app basically allows me to broadcast to everyone who is connected." 

Greg Burch is a Macromedia engineer with a new weblog.  

Disclaimer 

Please take note. I edit in public. You may catch me saying something that I change my mind about later. When I see it on SN it looks different than when I type it in my outliner.

You may not like this. Your sole recourse is to complain about it, over and over, in every possible forum, and say I'm corrupt or that you're threatened by this, but (key point) that won't change the way I write.

I strongly suggest that people who don't like this immediately stop reading this site.

JY: "Some times you'll have to make a disclaimer that you can go and have a pee between 2 posts." I disclaim that too. Thanks for the reminder!

Paolo wonders if there is or was a rule that Web writing can't change. I responded in the comments section of his post.

"I think the moral of the story is that being too relative in your writing is bad form. If your work depends on other work not changing, you're not loosely coupled. If one were to write a definition of the Web, loose coupling would be part of it."

Check with David Weinberger, if you don't believe me.

Memory lane 

On this day last year, Noah Shachtman of Wired News wondered if Napster was the answer. "We may look back and say, 'If there had been a way for the music companies to come to peace with Napster, then we might be at a very different, (better) place,'" one label executive said, requesting anonymity. "I'm worried that some of the offerings (the labels are coming up with) might be too little, too late." Yup yup yup yup yup. It's as if the personal computer revolution had been halted in its tracks by an organization hell-bent on making sure spreadsheets and word processors never gained traction.

On this day three years ago, Scott Rosenberg of Salon reported on an Industry Standard conference he attended, which, with the benefit of hindsight, was one of the last dotcom-boom conferences. What a trip that was. It's great that Salon's archives are still there to tell the story, even if the Standard is gone, and so are many of the people in the story.

"Revenues? We don't need no stinkin' revenues!"

Monday, July 22, 2002

BBC report on warchalking. 

Two new Radio themes from Bryan Bell, inspired by Movable Type's templates. 

Mark Pilgrim's series of articles about accessibility becomes a Web-based book. 

NY Times: "After a small rally when the market opened, stocks resumed their sharp decline today and then attempted to recover." 

Hey I was named the 16th most powerful person in IT this year, between Tim O'Reilly and Miguel de Icaza. They say that even though we worked with Microsoft on SOAP long before it was fashionable, I still give them hell for making it proprietary. I guess that's kind of a short hand for saying that I don't mind criticizing them, when it's called for, because that's one of the few things that Microsoft hasn't done as far as I know. 

NY Times: What Will Halt the Skid on Wall Street? 

USA Today: "More than 200 Internet-based radio stations have shut down because of a royalty fee that takes effect in September, and more are closing daily." 

InfoWorld: AOL Time Warner struggles to avoid hard fall. 

Self-induced fall. Briefly, to recount. The bubble of the 90s was due to misdirected enthusiasm over technology. AOL, a leader, hasn't kept pace. Microsoft will overtake them if they don't refocus on giving new features and performance to users. The music industry, of which AOL is a major player, holds some if not all of the keys. They refuse to use them to give the users what they want. AOL should also be investing heavily in writable-web technology. When we look back five years from now, after MS forecloses on the music industry for pennies on the dollar, we'll realize that AOL, like Netscape, actually had the lead when it capitulated. If anyone at AOL understands this it's Steve Case. I wonder if anyone is listening to him there. I wonder if he has the stomach for it, given the recent tragedy in his family. 

Anil Dash: "Dear whomever replaces Bob Pittman.." 

Information Week: Are You Blogging Yet? 

BBC: Segway scooter gets UK airing. 

John Hiler wrote a very long article about different kinds of blogging software and tries to piece together the history. Some things he says Perl got first actually were done first in Manila, in the seminal year of 1999. And you don't need to buy Manila to get comments in your Radio weblog, the service is included in the $39.95. Jorn Barger, the person credited with coining the term "weblog" used the NewsPage suite in Frontier, he didn't do his weblog by hand as Hiler says. It's possible that Jorn still uses Frontier. I suspect there are (many) other factual errors in this very long piece, but I also suspect that Hiler would be willing to correct them. The source of many of his errors appears to be Rebecca Blood's history of weblogs, which he references and points to. We're going to be fixing her bugs for years to come it seems. 

Congrats to Groove and Microsoft on their latest deal. "Groove Workspace provides offline access to SharePoint information and collaboration while providing end-users a simple and secure means to move that experience across firewalls, without the need to deploy servers in the DMZ." 

Interesting thread on Ben Hammersley's syndication weblog. A competitor takes issue with a feature of Radio, we let people post weblog items that don't have a title and/or link. Of course users can include a title and link, but they don't have to. Lots of people, myself included, post items to our weblogs that don't have obvious titles, and may link to two or more other pages (and sometimes none). The thread eventually got to the core of the issue. Coool. 

NY Times: "The Internet may not be doing so great on Wall Street, but it's doing great on Main Street."  

Paul Andrews: "What happened to .NET? Microsoft's flagship strategy for 'any time, anywhere computing from any device' has sunk like a stone. By now we were supposed to be seeing initial .NET applications, but the new rallying cry seems to be for Palladium, a security initiative that has met with the same skepticism and resistance from the developer community that .NET inspired. At its worst, Palladium looks to be a sop to Hollywood and its efforts to control digital content." 

BBC: "Just as still video camera discs and laser discs have become mere technological curiosities in less than a decade, it's a sure bet than many of the storage media that are used today - cartridges with names like Jaz, Zip, Syquest, Bernoulli, state of the art CD-R and DVD-R discs, and the tiny SmartMedia, Compact Flash, Memory Stick, Secure Digital, Multi Media Card, and MicroDrive storage cards - will be obsolete and hard to access in a few decades' time."