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Halley: "There is always the feeling that everyone else is having a blast and you're the only idiot without a date, without a cool outfit, without a place to go and definitely without someone to kiss." The thing I like about Lessig is that he has original ideas and he puts his money where his mouth is. In this post he offers a solution to spam, and says if it doesn't work he'll resign his job. Thanks to the Trademark Blog for the pointer to Mecca-Cola, the soft drink for Muslims who want to boycott Coca-Cola. I subscribed to the Trademark Blog last week. Great stuff. NY Times: "The biggest boost for Mecca-Cola, says Mr. Mathlouthi, a French citizen who immigrated from his native Tunisia in 1977, would be war in Iraq." Lessig: "Where is the political party that demands respect for principles that I thought were fundamental." Karlin Lillington picks up the same theme in the Irish Times. 'If you've done nothing wrong, you don't have to worry." Sounds like fascism. I bet they make the trains run on time too. BlogTalk, the European conference on weblogs in May 2003, is developing nicely. BBC: Wireless net takes over homes. Mark Pilgrim: The tag soup of a new generation. Fried Cellphone?
An interesting article about weblogs at O'Reilly. Thanks for the balanced view of the history of RSS, and thanks for demo'ing weblogs through Radio UserLand. Jon Udell: "I invented another bookmarklet." Don Park explains what he means by a Blog Guest. A great postcard from last year on this day. I don't remember what we were so mad at Bush about then, but anger can be such a beautiful thing. And three years ago we were counting down the final minutes before the Y2K meltdown, and just in case the world survived, singing great old songs about time going by. Today was a very light day because I took a one-day trip to Boston. That's one of the cool things about being parked in NYC. Boston is just a 35-minute plane ride away.
Matthew Thomas: When good interfaces go crufty. NY Times: "An upstart company, Lindows.com, is trying to persuade the Federal District Court in Seattle to invalidate Microsoft's trademark on Windows." Luscious chicken gravy in a handy can. Good gravy! According to Greenpeace, Franco-American Chicken Gravy probably has genetically engineered ingredients. This is not a major surprise to those who remember the 1960s, as I do. Sam Ruby welcomes Ken Coar to the world of weblogs. Simon Fell: WSDL Wizard for PocketSOAP 2.0 RC1. There seems to be not much news today. The US is threatening North Korea and North Korea says So what. Probably like a lot of families right around now. Thanks to Daniel Berlinger for the link to this eBay-to-RSS Python script. What a nice idea. Last year on this day I had what I now admit was a great idea that I didn't pursue. With all the talk about what to put at Ground Zero, I wondered how great it would be to move Shea Stadium there. Ask San Francisco if it's wonderful having a baseball stadium in its downtown. PacBell Park is a nice stadium for sure, but it isn't Shea.
Damsel in distress: "Problem solved!" One year ago today: " If you can't make sense of the spec in 10 minutes no one is going to use it so you can safely ignore it." Two years ago today MailToTheFuture got an XML-RPC interface. As far as I know it still works. And who says there are no Web Services. Hah.
Frank Luntz: "Only in the fictional world of 'The West Wing' do Democrats win elections these days." NY Times: "A religious sect that contends that space travelers created the human race by cloning themselves declared today that the first cloned human had been born." Mark Gardner: "Here's my template for Blogger users to generate RSS 2.0." Rick Klau is editing Radio outlines on his Palm. Jeneane Sessum has a moblog wishlist. John Robb: "We all live in Pottersville." Mark Pilgrim and Sam Ruby are doing something interesting with the element in HTML. Russell Beattie: "Am I the only one who wonders why glossy magazines publish all their content online?" Paul Boutin found a "screen shot of Groove-based software that could look for potential terrorist attacks, to go with the NY Times article on P2P and XML being used for the Total Information Awareness project." A must-read article in today's NY Times about the hole in the ozone layer over Antarctica. It's larger than North America and has doubled in size in the 20 years since it was discovered. The lifestyle of people at the southern end of South America has already changed. "We feel like we are rabbits in a laboratory experiment," said Ivan Mansilla Vera, 36, an engineer and father of two young children. "Nobody knows what is going to happen to us." Wired: "British Pathe has put more than 3500 hours of its old newsreels online." A new category for my RSS directory lists apps that do something interesting with RSS but are not an aggregator or a content management tool. If you have such a utility or know of one, please use the suggest-a-link feature to let me know about it. Thanks! Tom Bradford, two years ago, in a great ramble. "Standards bodies suck, plain and simple." Five years ago today Scripting News became an XML application. This was the beginning of one of the two roads that would join to form RSS 0.91, in 1999.
John Robb: "Everyone who rides a Segway, wants to own a Segway." A few additions to my RSS directory this afternoon. On this day three years ago, Time chose the Person of the Century for the 20th century, which was then drawing to a close. KUKU Raadio in Estonia has a tool for Manila that does mail-to-weblog. It's a dig-out day in NYC. Lots of snow and ice on the ground. Sunny. Show us your snow pics. It's also the day after Christmas. No more Santas, no more Christmas music till Thanksgiving. Something to be thankful for. My father winked at me today. He has never done that before. Proving that he still has the ability to astonish.
It's a blizzard! Fan-tas-tic. I just drove back from the hospital. Huge snow. Still small accumulations. Very beautiful. White Christmas. You bet. Update, 7:40PM Eastern. Much more accumulation. Still coming down in bucketloads. Maybe 7 inches on the ground. Everything is so white. The trees are totally laden with snow, the wind is howling, the lights on the street reflect off the snow, it's night, but it's light. Update, 10:30PM Eastern. Snow slowing down. Lots of wind. Lots of snow on the ground. Ed Cone (in NJ): "Lots of snow, already more than the 6 inches the TV is now telling us we will get here, as much as our kids have ever seen outside a ski resort." Halley (in Boston): "It's snowing like heck here " Daniel (in Westchester): "Murphy got me good this time." Bump: "Driving doesn't look too pretty here in Connecticut." Not that we're counting, but we are. I just looked at the server monitor app I installed a couple of years ago and saw that one of our servers has taken over 99 million hits. That's a lot. Hey, if you want to mail to your weblog and you use Radio, no need to wait. It's had the feature since the product was released on 1/11/02. All you need is a mail account for it to use and then turn it on and you're ready to go. It works. No problem. Washington Post: "In the Commerce Committee, which holds sway over a clutch of high-tech issues, Arizona Republican John McCain's return to the chairmanship could shift the balance in key debates over broadband and electronic copyright protection." Matthew Hindman: How the Web Will Change Campaigns. 12/6/02: "That weblogs would play a role in the toppling of a major US political leader, is growth from the top down, and it's happening very quickly." Halley is having many firsts this Christmas. Scoble is playing with a NEC Tablet computer. "This thing might ruin your marriage." (He works for NEC.)
Here's some more lack-of-news-news. It didn't snow in NY overnight. What's up with that. They were predicting Sierra-style snow for upstate NY and some snow for the city. Come on. Snow! Update -- Andy Kriger informs me that it did snow in NYC, starting about 11PM last night, but it didn't stick. He says it was heavy snow. Now there's some news. Okay we're on a roll now. Paolo: "Radio 9 rocks!"
Still no snow in NY (10:10PM Eastern). Saw a fine movie this evening. So many scenes of people in hospitals on ventilators. It's so weird that's what my life revolves around right now. AP: White Chrristmas from Coast to Coast. News.Com: "Yahoo's buyout of search firm Inktomi is meant to fend off the growing competitive threat from Google." Aaron Swartz's report on his first ride on a Segway. My first (and only) ride on a Segway, a little over a year ago. Twas the night before Christmas, and all through the house, not a creature was stirring, not even a mouse. Bart Simpson: "This is the time of year when people of all faiths get together to worship Jesus."
News.Com: Microsoft ordered to carry Java. TS Elliot: "Immature poets imitate; mature poets steal." Chris Gulker: "It used to be 'Microsoft steals ideas and crushes companies,' now it's 'Scott McNealy says Microsoft steals ideas and crushes companies.' There's a big difference." Ernie the Attorney: "Great musicians know that perfection isn't possible, and even though they strive for it, they also strive for something greater, that is more readily attainable: Passion. But, of course, that has nothing to do with copyright law." An update on my father's health, below. Yes JD, I do indeed use a news aggregator. Jon Udell: "The 115 columns I wrote for BYTE.com are now restored to the public Web." Press release: Yahoo to acquire Inktomi. Clearly they're getting ready to kick Google off their portal. According to the Register, Microsoft is lining up to buy Macromedia. It's Flash they want. I have some time to spare this morning, and thought of an interesting thing to do. I'm going to figure out which Creative Commons license should apply to the module I designed last week, and then, following Denise Howell's advice (she's a lawyer) apply it. The first thing I did was run the CC license chooser, it suggested the attribution license. My intent is to let people do anything they want with my module, change it, enhance it, commercialize it, but I want credit for originating it. The next step is to get a bit of HTML code to put on the page. The CC site supplies this code here. I added it to a section at the end of the module. Comments, questions and suggestions are welcome. Bump: "My brother and I discovered that someone in our parent's neighborhood has a WiFi network that we can connect to." Interesting. I did the same thing, flipped around. I bought a Linksys wireless router for my parents' house in Queens, if the neighbors are clever, they'll find it. Lots of spare bandwidth on the cable modem. The router was only $135 incl tax. It's very fast, and it's nice to be able to write without having to use my father's office upstairs. Wired: "It's been said that newspapers write the first draft of history, but now there are blogs. These days, online scribes often get the news before it's fit to print." Sean McGrath: "Do we need a way of representing anti-links?" Here's a screen shot of the subscriptions page of our desktop aggregator taken on this day two years ago. On this day five years ago I got new glasses. When I get back to California new glasses should be waiting for me, Murphy-willing. Every five years one should radically alter one's vision. Why not? Dad update Today I spent hours and hours at the hospital with my father. His health took a dramatic turn for the worse late last week. It's a long story, one I might write a book about, but I'm sure it wouldn't be the first. It's one of the oldest stories in the world. I have lots of notes that I've been sharing with family and close friends. In his haze have come some of the sweetest things my father has said in a long time. Yesterday he asked if I wanted to go to the zoo with him. Of course I do. Today he looked at me and asked What's the concept? I said I don't know, I asked him to tell me what the concept is. Yesterday he turned to my mother and said in a loud assertive voice -- Let's get out of here right now. Where would you like to go? To a Chinese restaurant. What would you get? Chinese orange soda. My father is a PhD and a college professor. A man with a deep and powerful mind. A mind that now is somewhere else. Some wise person said that our parents teach us so much, and the last thing they teach us is -- and there I have to leave it blank. I don't yet know what the last thing my father will teach me is, but one thing's for certain, even as his health is failing, he is sharing so much with me, and in ways so much more than he has since I was a child. His eyes are a gentle brown. He is a handsome man. Somehow it's been 40 years or more since he let me look into his eyes and study them. Now he welcomes me. His guard used to be so high, now it is all the way down. It's an honor to be able to return the gift of care he gave me, and if you ever doubt if it's great to be so needed, it is.
NY Times: "Although Dr Poindexter's system has come under widespread criticism from Congress and civil liberties groups, a prototype is already in place and has been used in tests by military intelligence organizations." I am so jealous. Aaron Swartz has a Segway! Oy. Sylvia Paull wrote to say Picasso said "Bad artists copy. Good artists steal." Not quite the same as Only steal from the best, which is more respectful. If you steal an idea from me, that's high praise because you're saying I'm the best, and you're also saying something nice about the quality of your own work. Ernie the Attorney: Outline of Law Blogs. Ingo Rammer: "Exchange Server 2000 rocks. Within a couple of hours, I've been able to render my weblog posts directly from an Exchange public folder."
Time's Persons Of The Year. Whistleblowers at WorldCom, Enron and the FBI, Cynthia Cooper, Sherron Watkins and Colleen Rowley. John Robb: "I would be willing to pay $60 to have a couple pilots on board." Joshua Allen: "It became a mission of mine to discover why only Germans seemed to be able to crack the Chinese auto market, but I only found more mysteries." Brent Simmons: "That‘s why RSD is nice. It means you can be up-and-running quickly, rather than having to first go nuts. Better to skip the going nuts part." Nick Denton: "For unintended humor, there's nothing better than Metafilter."
Denise Howell: A Lawyer Licenses Her Weblog. Today marks the beginning of winter and the shortest day of the year in the Northern Hemisphere. From here the days just get longer, until June, when they start getting shorter again. Any day now Time will announce their Person of the Year. John Robb: "Why can't email have a shortcuts feature?" Guardian: "It's the latest trend in weblogging: moblogging - or posting thoughts to your weblog from wherever you might be, via mobile phone or handheld device." Wired: "A federal agency's request for commentary on a controversial digital copyright law drew a boatload of criticism from respondents who asked for new limitations on the far-reaching statute." Adam Curry: "Is it just me, or is iCal an incredibly good looking piece of crap?" Is is software? Lessig: "Creative reuse of creative content is what CC is all about." I first met Lessig just after a speech he gave at Esther's a few years ago. The question he raised, which was much on my mind at the time (and still is), is what can we do about software patents. I had what was, then, a unique theory -- that software and writing are the same thing. You can't patent the plot of a novel, so why should you be able to patent the plot of a piece of software. Because I can (and do) put macros in Web pages, and because I can (and do) write extensive prose in my source code (I like long comments, some code I write is just like a weblog) -- there is no reasonable line between prose and software. I am both a writer and a programmer. I believe I could find an example to contradict any distinction. It's interesting to see the discussion about CC go in this direction. Of course RSS isn't software. Until you look at the What is Scripting News: "Only steal from the best is a motto I have stolen from some great writer whose name I don't know." Jon Udell says it is software. One year ago today: Balderdash!
Brent Simmons reports a crashing bug in Apple's implementation of XML-RPC that shows up in UserLand's implementation of the MetaWeblog API. Jake Savin responds with a workaround in Radio. Thanks to Doc for the link to this press release from Marriott saying they're WiFi'ing 400 of their hotels in the US, UK and Germany. "It is the largest deployment of wireless high-speed internet access in the hotel industry." AP: "Trent Lott will step down as Senate Republican leader." Google News query for Trent Lott and weblogs. Glenn Reynolds: "The hinterlands are full of bloggers who don't care whether Trent Lott is nice to them or not. That makes them different from the Washington press." Heh. Cynthia Webb: "Blogs were the hot story of 2002, the year when blogging caught the eye of the mainstream press in a big way and pundits began to recognize blogs as useful tools for everything from venting about politics to raving about a favorite band." Sam Ruby: SOAP by Example. "This document provides a working example of a functional SOAP client, using only HTTP and XML DOM modules. " Denise Howell, who is an attorney and blogger, answers questions about Creative Commons from a blogger's perspective. A new weblog by Chris Locke, aka Rageboy, at Corante, which which is mysteriously "based in New York, backed by private money, staffed by experts in their respective fields, and determined to provide you with the best possible service and keep you coming back." Perhaps Chris can explain? BTW, for those who are following me geographically, I'm in NY, blogging under an assumed name. Actually I'm visiting my dad, who is better, much better. More about that later. Not a whole lot going on this morning. I suppose that's understandable, with the Christmas holidays ramping up. Thinking about what to do in the New Year. I have a lot of things on my plate that I've let go since the summer. But there's still time. Now I'm going to trawl around looking for stuff to point at, and then take it easy for a bit. There's this great song by Leon Redbone. Leon Redbone: Lazy Bones. "You'll never get your corn meal made, layin in the noon day shade." Hey, thanks to Larry Bolef for informing me that Lazy Bones was actually written by Johnny Mercer and Hoagy Carmichael. Here are the full lyrics. And a Real Audio recording. Sam Ruby will probably appreciate this loose definition of continuity in software standards from this day in Y2K. Knowing Sam, at some point in the future, Murphy-willing, he will use this example to "prove" I'm wrong about something. There's even a chance that he will be right and I was wrong. Scoble enumerates the signs your company is failing. BTW, I think Paul McCartney has a point. I always thought John was the cool Beatle. He wouldn't have begrudged Paul top billing on the songs he wrote, like Yesterday or Let It Be, esp over 20 years after his death. Come on Yoko, give peace a chance. Shelley Powers: "When you look for the idealist they've moved on to another part of the world, to drop yet another idealism bomb on some unsuspecting poor sod." Despite what some people say, it would be relatively easy for terrorists to shut down the Internet and in doing so create major communication outages all over the world.
Matt Croydon: "How do the Creative Commons licenses interact with open source licenses such as the GPL, BSD, MIT, etc?" Ed Cone: "W is making chicken salad out of that chickenshit dropped by Trent Lott." Scott Rosenberg:"As AOL pursues its patent on instant messaging, people all over the Net are assembling examples of "prior art" -- instant-messaging-like systems that long predated AOL's." Rick Klau found a list of RSS files hosted by Blogger. Mark Pilgrim: What is RSS? John Robb: "Somewhere in Arizona circa 2015. He he." Jon Udell: "When somebody wrote yesterday asking whether the LibraryLookup code was licensed for public-domain use, I realized this was the perfect opportunity to try out the Creative Commons licensing procedure." Rich Salz: From XML-RPC to SOAP, A Migration Guide. Washington Post: "Since many bloggers have no background in publishing, they often come to the medium unaware of the rules that apply."
The creativeCommons RSS 2.0 module is now deployable. Thanks to everyone who commented, most of them were incorporated into the spec. At this point you may use the module in RSS feeds, and thanks to the magic of namespaces, as an extra bonus, you may also include them in other XML formats that are not RSS 2.0.
Thanks to Matt Croydon and Josh Lucas for the pointer to Strangeberry, a startup of Marimba alumni, who just released a LPGL implementation of Rendezvous for Java. What an interesting combination. Last year on this day: "If you didn't have a sense of humor before, aging gives you one." On 12/17/00, Doc Searls coined the term "blogrolling." A perfect demo of the Creative Commons thesis. I got an email from an editor at a major book publisher. They want to include my picture of Napster's Shawn Fanning in a book on computer history. I want to let them do this, but I don't want to pay a lawyer to review their agreement. Why should it cost me money to be generous? See how Lessig's mind works. He's going to make the lawyers work for a living. I took a bunch of pics at Napster in June 2000. ZDNet: "Intergraph has filed suit against Dell Computer, Gateway and Hewlett-Packard, alleging that the PC companies violated its patents by incorporating Pentium-family processors into their computers." Be sure to watch the Creative Commons animation. It explains the purpose of the CC licenses. Without them, everything is assumed to have a (restrictive) copyright. The CC licenses allow people to release their intellectual property into the public domain, with or without constraints. This is innovation, believe it or not. The animation explains it very well. VC Bothra: "Every hour we scan changes.xml for updated blogs and index them for BlogStreet's search engine " Andrew Orlowski: "What Spring does is what we wish Apple had been bold enough to do with OS X, and make a really radical departure from the 2D file/folder office automation metaphor of the 1970s into a more loosely structured and spontaneous UI more appropriate to an always-connected world." Mac Net Journal interviews Spring developer Robb Beal. NY Times: Harvard Advertises for People Abducted by Aliens. Ken Hirsch: "I really dislike the fact that all blogs are in reverse chronological order." Trawling around referer logs early this morning led me to this unfinished partial essay entitled What Is RSS? written in August 1999. Sometimes unedited writing is the best stuff.
News.Com: "America Online has quietly secured a patent that could shake up the competitive landscape for instant messaging software." JY Stervinou read on Joi Ito's blog that I asked Google's Sergey Brin if he would read the changes.xml file from weblogs.com to make Google's index even more just-in-time. I asked in public after asking privately several times. Brin seemed genuinely interested. The people at Supernova definitely wanted it. I hope it happens. News.Com: Elcomsoft Not Guilty. IETF: Using XML-RPC in BEEP. Interesting. Matthew Langham: Last-minute business RSS. Tim Knip has Groove talking to Radio. Apparently it was quite a bit of work. I'm surprised because Radio has a BDG-compliant SOAP implementation, and that's a very big target and it's totally frozen. I guess it's no secret that I feel that as new implementations come online they should be tested with the ones that came before and they should interop. Several changes for the non-RDF module for copyright licenses. The changes allow the example file to pass through the validator, and allow authors to use licenses not from Creative Commons. This is the last call for comments, later today, if there are no problems, I plan to remove the caveat from the status section. Mary Jo Foley: "Could Microsoft be working behind the scenes on another new programming language?" Daniel Berlinger: Proposed changes for RSD v0.7. BlogTalk is a European weblog conference set for May 2003, in Vienna, Austria. The Boston Globe surveys (some of) Boston's weblogs. Wired: "She was told her butt would be out of harm's way in 24 hours." Before I go back to sleep (it's 2:40AM) I'll leave you with a pointer to an essay I published on this day in 1999, before the milennium rollover. It's a really nice one, and even though we're not rolling over on such a big level this time, much of what's there still applies. This is a tough time of year for everyone. Cut everyone some slack, including yourself. And when possible, use your programmer mind in a positive way. Look for ways to make it easier for our less technical friends, and look for shortcuts, and don't fight Murphy. "A deep breath and a smile and keep on truckin!" Matthew Thomas suggests that the license element in the creativeCommons RSS module have an href attribute that points to the license instead of the value of the element doing the pointing. His reasoning is that the URL isn't meant to be read by humans and therefore should be an attribute. I had never heard that before, and at first dismissed it, but then thought, hmm, that's an interesting idea. If you feel strongly one way or the other please post a message. Another person who works in the middle of the California night is Italy's Paolo Valdemarin. Today he has an essay that explains the work they're doing on "topic maps" which is exactly what I was calling "timeless weblogs." It's the intersection of OPML and RSS and it's cool. I've not implemented it, they have. I look forward to trying it. I love working in the middle of the night (it's 1:30AM) because my time coincides with people like Phillip Pearson, who is a very generous programmer in New Zealand, on the other side of the Pacific Ocean, and that's fcuking far away. Tonight Phillip asks if we'd like a search engine for weblogs, written in Python, as part of his community server, and the answer is absolutely, please, it's a much requested feature, especially if it performs well and stays up without too much fuss and/or muss. I didn't make it SF last night for the Creative Commons party. Lots of accidents on the road, chalk it up to a weather outage. I hope the launch was great. Sorry I wasn't there! Thanks to Adam Curry once again for being the most excellent guinea pig. Or viewed another way, canary in a coalmine. He's trying out my new weblog outliner, and noticing that his copy of Rado is doing a lot of work at the top of every minute. Other people are likely to notice this too, especially if you've got a lot of Tools installed. On a modern OS like Windows 2000, XP or Mac OS X, you won't notice it in other apps, but you will notice it in the Radio app. When you're using the outliner, you're typing in the Radio app, quite possibly for the first time. In Adam's case, I guess it's been a while since he worked in the Radio environment. The solution is to uninstall Tools one by one until you figure out which one is using all the cycles. Or get a second computer for the myrid of background tasks running on your behalf. I'm about to do that myself. Canary in a Coalmine: "First to fall over when the atmosphere is less than perfect"
DaveNet: Lott tripped by bloggers? Mena Trott: "We'll be adding RSD support to the default templates in the next version of MT." Bravo! Joi Ito: "As everyone begins to add feature sets, grow more quickly and become more commercial, the ability for everyone to maintain compatibility and still compete will be a difficult but important effort." True. Warchalking is chosen by the NY Times as one of the ideas of the year. Carolyn Myss: "Have you ever wondered what your mission in life is supposed to be?" Chris Gulker: "At the half-empty Jing Jing, solicitous management rearranged table after table as bloggers rolled in." Jon Udell: "Fast-Talk Communications' revolutionary phonetic indexing and search technology brings the magic of full-text search to the formerly opaque realms of audio recordings and video soundtracks." A milestone today, My Weblog Outliner has a tester, Adam Curry. I'm waiting to hear from him if it worked. My notes are on my Radio weblog, written with MWO of course. Just checking, it still works with Moveable Type. News.Com: "Microsoft has yet to disclose the proprietary dialect, or underlying schema, of the XML used in Office 11." Tim Bray, via email, re the News.Com article, above: "This story is just silly and technically illiterate. The XML tags are already in the hands of thousands of beta developers. XML is an open and quite self-describing file format. Who needs the damn schema? If MS sent the schema and I was writing the software to parse this stuff, I wouldn't trust the lousy schema for a second, I'd work off the data anyhow. The schema might be a little help in documenting what's going on if MS structured it cleanly and commented it copiously and kept it up to date with the releases of the software. I'm not holding my breath given all the other schemas I've worked with." Sean McGrath: "I want to believe, I really do but I'm not falling for the 'It's in XML so its completely open ya know' mullarky and neither should you." Smart man. The last version of Office made the same claim, and a lot of us believed them, until we saw the files, which were a bunch of gobbledygook, and no easier to parse than a binary file. PS: I'd love to see an example of one or two of the Office 11 files, and be able to share them with my readers. Creative Commons launch Creative Commons press release. "People want to bridge the public domain with the realm of private copyrights," said Stanford Law Professor and Creative Commons Chairman Lawrence Lessig. This morning Creative Commons opened up a formerly private part of their site containing enumerations of the different licenses they support. It's very simple. A document, a weblog, a RSS file, a PDF or whatever, can specify which license applies. On the CC site, they tell you how to do it with RDF, but I'm interested in a solution that can be used in RSS 2.0 files, so we can in turn add a user interface to Rado and Manila (and others can do it for other authoring tools) that tie into the CC system. I totally support the idea of lawyers helping creative people instead of controlling us, but I can't convert everything I do to RDF to show my support. Tonight is their launch. I'm going to it. If we can get a namespace defined and vetted today, I can announce our support tonight.So here's the RFC. Have a read, and post comments on the discussion group or send via email. Thanks. RFC: creativeCommons RSS Module. "A RSS module that adds an element at the <channel> or <item> level that specifies which Creative Commons license applies."
A new storm is blowing in. Hope the power stays on, if not, I'll see you as soon as it comes back. Namaste y'all! NY Times: "Al Gore has decided against running for president in 2004, according to associates of Mr. Gore. Mr. Gore will announce his decision in an interview on 60 Minutes tonight, according to those sources." Frontier 9.1b2 for MacOS X is available. Wired: The Outlook Killer? "Mitch Kapor isn't trying to take on Microsoft. His ambitions are bigger: He wants to spark a software revolution." Joi Ito joins the Weblogs in Meatspace discussion from his weblog in Japan. Sam Ruby is on a roll. His blog is incredibly useful these days. Bravo. Keep up the good work. 12/15/97: Real-World XML. "Everyone talks in hushed tones about XML. Shhh. It's exciting! But what does it do?"
6/2/02: How to create a directory in Radio's Outliner. Demo. Here's a screen shot of the outliner in Radio editing the directory on SoapWare.Org, which is a Manila site. All Manila sites have the Yahoo-style directory browser, built-in. Mr Barrett: "From my airplane window last night, I saw fireworks over a small midwestern town." On this day in Y2K, Susan Kitchens grandpa turned 100. Meanwhile in NY in 2002, my father is eating solid food, sitting up, and completely breathing on his own. Wired: "Evil," says Google CEO Eric Schmidt, "is what Sergey says is evil." Ringnalda: "The comment spammers won by making me look at every comment on every weblog with a jaundiced eye." Lights back on at 12:18PM Pacific. A 22-hour outage. One of the longer ones. We're having an unusually potent winter storm in Calif. Expect more outages as the day goes by.
Mitch Kapor tries to take the high road, but Wired puts him on the low one -- with "10 Things I Hate about Outlook." Oy. Same old stuff. Apparently it's impossible for anyone to do anything without it being about Microsoft. This is what a true monopoly looks like, in the mind of supposed journalists. I see the same thing re open source. The world is very simple. There's Microsoft and there's open source. They're like two puppets beating up on each other. Mitch tells us that they won't let him not be the kind of puppet they want him to be. Hey at least they know he exists. This, by the way, is why weblogs are so important. They allow us to route around this outage. Speaking of outages, the power just went out. It was already a pretty tough day. Just got tougher. New feature: Support for RSD in Manila. I just uploaded a script that takes a url to the home page of a website and then tells you what editing protocols it supports. This is the beginning of the build-out on the other side of the interface, primarily for Radio, when using its outliner to edit posts on a weblog. It'll work with Manila or Radio because they support RSD. Hopefully other back-end blogging tools will support RSD, it's easy -- it took me a couple of hours to do it for Radio, and then Jake did it for Manila in about the same amount of time. The point of the exercise is to make it easy for writers to use writing tools with powerful weblog backends. It's a perfect fit for Moveable Type. I know at least one MT user who is already waiting for it. Douglas Rushkoff: "Are Republicans like Bush really racist?" Jon Udell: "If your local public (or college) library is one of the nearly 900 Innovative Interfaces' Web-enabled libraries listed below, drag its link to your browser's link toolbar." News.Com: "Will 'Sims Online' alter gaming world?" Julian Bond: "Right now the WiFi hotspot market feels like the early days of cellphones. There's no market leader. There's no roaming agreements. There's wild variations in pricing." NY Times: "The Internet will represent 30 percent of Lands' End's holiday sales, up from 25 percent last year." Sean McGrath: "I've come to believe that APIs are at their best encapsulating purely algorithmic behaviour." Halley's son: "What is it, Mom?" Answer: Your best friend, and your worst enemy. A milestone day No smoking for six months! In my dreams I'm still an occasional (and very guilty-feeling) smoker. In meatspace, I'm a non-smoker. I've stood in line at the grocery store thinking of saying "Two packs of Marlboro Lights please." I've hung out, outside a party, where everyone was smoking, and thought of introducing myself to someone, striking up a conversation, and saying Hey, can I have a smoke? (Knowing that smokers always say yes; misery loves company.) I've gotten up from the computer to get a handful of peanuts when I really want a smoke. I've practiced deep breathing, and also gotten kudos from friends, doctors and women, who say they could never believe I was actually a smoker. I was. I'm not now. One day at time. String enough days together and Bing, six months, no smoking, Dave. I never thought those three concepts would belong together. But there you are. Life sure is strange. Feels good.
New feature: Support for RSD in Radio UserLand. Sam Ruby reviews RSD. Tim O'Reilly: "Any time someone uses the term 'piracy' or 'theft' in the context of online file sharing, please remind them to use the correct legal term: 'copyright infringement.'" Scott Rosenberg: "Henry Kissinger just announced that he's resigning from the 9/11 investigation commission President Bush appointed him to lead." Billy Joel: "The New York Times, The Daily News." Lance Knobel: "The Rhetorica weblog wants to document the ways in which weblogs kept the Trent Lott story alive." Jon Udell: "Recombinant growth is the way forward." Newsweek: The World According to Google. An old Metafilter thread about Don's Amazing Puzzle showed up in my referrers. Worth a second (or third) look. Dear Blogger, re APIs. Please support the MetaWeblog API, and then work slowly with other backend and tool developers to evolve it so we all just have to support one API. Evan Williams: "If we thought the MetaWeblog API suited our needs, we would gladly adopt it." All of a sudden a transit strike in NYC doesn't seem very far away. I'll be going back east soon, staying for a while this time. I would be remiss if I didn't comment on the latest installment of The West Wing. This one was about fathers, and the way their children remember them; and how the children, when they are adults, deal with it, and the guilt that fathers feel. The show ends with a collaboration between Leo and Josh on the eve of Christmas Eve, and you get a whole new idea of their relationship. Leo is the father that Josh no longer has. Wow. This is filled with emotion for me, because my own father continues to rally in NY, he's sitting up now, totally off the respirator, and quite cranky and confused. His lights are coming back on. It'll be quite a while before we're doing stuff together, and he's still not out of trouble, but man I'm glad he's doing so much better. Steven Vore sent an email reminding of the episode where Josh is getting back into the flow after being shot. Leo tells him the story of a man in a deep hole. His friend comes along and jumps into the hole with him. The man in the holes says "Why the heck did you do that, now we both have to get out of the hole." And his friend responds, "I've been here before, I can show you how to do it." That was a clue that Leo and Josh have a special relationship and I thank Steven for pointing that out. I had forgotten that story. But this time I think it's Leo who needs more help. Which is another life-lesson, eventually the son can help the father. A beautiful moment. Some sons (and fathers) are lucky enough to get there. Carly Simon: "My father sits at night with no lights on; his cigarette glows in the dark."
Doc: "Blogs are outlines, and blogging is a form of outlining." John Burkhardt: "We've setup this initiative in Arlington to provide WiFi all over the town. And it's free!!!" News.Com: "Builders of the Mono open-source development project released an update on Tuesday that will let programmers write Microsoft .Net applications for Linux and Unix operating systems." Sam Ruby comments on version 2.0 of the Blogger API. Ben Trott of Moveable Type comments on the 2.0 API. Thanks to Josh Lucas for the pointer to XML-RPC for JXTA. A great essay by Tim O'Reilly on piracy. Read it. He clearly knows what he's talking about. An interesting hallway conversation at the Supernova conference with Howard Rheingold and Chao Lam from OSAF and myself. We were talking about Larry Lessig and the public back-and-forth we had a few months back. With the benefit of some distance in time, now it's more clearly understood. On legal matters, I'll go to Lessig for advice; but not on matters of software development. I would like him to ask me, a person with decades of experience both developing software and working with others who do, how software development works; and we can combine what we know, and our shared philosophy and goals to make things better. When we do that, that's respect and power. Perhaps that's been the bone of contention betw myself and Tim O'Reilly, as well. On matters of book publishing, he's the best thinker we've got in the technology business. His article reads like a person who spends many of his waking hours thinking about these issues, talking with other people, observing, reading his business's numbers. Now, software hasn't gotten that kind of respect. I have a lot of examples of that. If we can carve out a niche for software expertise, after all, it's an art that's been practiced for generations now, we can move forward faster. The other side of the coin on piracy. What he says is very true. In my case, when you need solid health insurance, because you had heart surgery six months ago, you can't depend on the economics of a small software company to keep you viable as a human being. Think about the life you live, as a software developer, and how romantic the adventure is, until you can't afford it anymore. NY Times: The WiFi Boom. Wired: Segway Owners a Small, Happy Club. Phillip Pearson: "Prototyping a very fast XML-RPC server." Today's song: "John Jacob Jingleheimer Schmidt. That's my name too." BTW, for people who think the woman's movement started in the 60s, check out The Women, a movie made in the best movie year ever, 1939. Norma Shearer gives a speech to her mother about how things were different, back when women were considered chattel. Now they're equal to men, says Shearer's character. While a feminist could make a reasonable argument that the movie is sexist, it also carries the feminist message, strongly, in the 30s, way way before I was told (when I was a kid) that it existed. Women of my mother's generation (she was seven when the movie was made) said the same thing Shearer said, quite a few years later. The data is out there, feminism was brewing for a while if only in Hollywood. BTW, this is the same movie where Joan Crawford says "They asked for me by name? Why!" And her colleague responds "Maybe they're slumming." It's a totally gorgeous movie, on the circuit at TCM, watch it if you get a chance. Tons of gorgeous women. Two favorites: Rosalind Russell and Paulette Goddard. According to Reuters, rumors abound that Microsoft is bidding on Rational (last week IBM announced they were acquiring them) and on long-time rival Borland. Looks like the market for development tools is hot, especially in light of the disappointing price Trellix got for its content tools in yesterday's announcement. You have to wonder why Trellix took $9 million, when their last round raised $35. Someone took a bath there. A wet one!
DaveNet: Weblogs In Meatspace. The NY Times calls on Bush to fire Trent Lott. Salon: "Pete Rose met with commissioner Bud Selig in Milwaukee two weeks ago to discuss the career hits leader's possible reinstatement to baseball." When you miss an important email because your mailbox is full of spam, you can send a letter to Alan Ralsky, 6747 Minnow Pond Drive, West Bloomfield, MI 48322. He's one of the leading suppliers of spam services, and runs a very profitable business according to the Detroit Free Press. Thanks to Jason Levine for collating the info. I plan to send Ralsky a hand-written letter tonight, and any other time I have something to say about spam. Finally, there's someone to complain to about this. John Robb: "There are over 1,000 schools worldwide (Caltech, Berkeley, Harvard, Dartmouth, Innsbruck, Vanderbilt, Cambridge, Iowa, Middlebury, Washington, Nebraska Public Schools, Denver Public Schools, and many more) using UserLand's Manila." Dan Bricklin: "This afternoon, Interland announced that they have signed a deal to acquire Trellix Corporation, the company that I founded." Mark Hurst interviews AOL's vice-president of community services, Rick Robinson, and asks if they're going to get into weblogs. Justin Klubnik has a t-shirt design based on the meatspace motif. It's surprisingly tasteful. Dave Sifry: "BTW, we're from Lawn Guyland." FYI, Saturday is the six-month anniversary of my quitting smoking. Eric Norlin is blogging CNET's web services conference. Memigo is a "website for news junkies." This NYT article caught my eye in re the latest DaveNet piece. False alarm. We're experiencing technical difficulties. Comments on WIM: Ed Cone, Shelley Powers, Ryan Irelan, Paolo Valdemarin, Sam Ruby. Lite discussion on the BloggerDev list about the new version of the API. People are treading carefully. Me too.
Another cool song: "Though grown-ups might look at him with fright, the children all love him so."
Pyra has posted the preliminary docs for Blogger API 2.0. IT World: "RSS is a veritable hive of activity and innovation." Jon Udell: Scripting Groove Web Services. Matt Pope:"When I finally went to bed, a solution came to mind as soon as my head hit the pillow and I couldn't stop thinking about it (and thus I couldn't go to sleep). Integration of Radio with Groove, using Groove Web Services, would further decentralize Radio in a way that would allow real-time blogging from machines not running Radio. I want it." Phil Ringnalda: "It's so twisty that it makes my head spin." Ben Hammersley: "Brrr, yee hah, brrr, yee hah, brrrrr." Howard Hansen: "My Congressman needs a weblog, so does yours." According to an unusual post on the BloggerDev list last week, we should expect a developer preview of the new version of the Blogger API sometime today. Popdex is like Blogdex and Daypop, but they plan to weight the links, as Google uses PageRank to give value to links. Ad for a movie we can wait to see. Notes from Supernova I'm going to take my notes here today. The first speaker is Dan Gillmor. He's taking the place of Clay Shirky whose flight from NY was cancelled. Dan is talking about Journalism 3.01b2. That's funny. He'd giving the presentation he gave at the Emerging Tech Conf earlier this year. I saw that presentation. It's still good. Dan focuses on Sept 11, reminding me that Sept 11 was also a technological watershed. I'm sitting next to Mitch Ratcliffe today, and he's taking down everything Dan is saying. For the play by play go over to Mitch's site. Dinner report
Hey the nicest moment of the evening, even though it was horribly embarassing, was the enthusiastic round of applause I got when I walked into the restaurant and saw the scene. The cool thing about weblogs is that today in 2002, it attracts the nicest, smartest, and most ambitious people. We kicked butt at the conference during the day, leading Kevin Werbach to say that bloggers rule the world, or something like that, to which I say It's about time y'all figured that out and stop sending PR people to explain technology to us, and be prepared to answer the tough questions, and also be prepared to build on our work. Nothing is more frustrating than a BigCo who sends a glad-hander to tell you how they're going to fail at reinventing everything you had working three years ago. At the dinner a list circulated and instead of signing our names we all entered the URLs of our blogs. Very good. I hope that somehow makes it on to the Web today. After dinner a few of us went for coffee where we ran into Megnut, Cory Doctorow and Lisa Rein who is in town for the Elcomsoft vs Adobe trial. I asked who she's covering it for. "Myself," she said with a confident grin. I felt like I had asked a stupid question, which of course I had. Long Islanders One of the cool things about Dave Sifry is that he's from Long Island. I'm from Queens, basically, through NJ and the Bronx, and of course Long Islanders don't think of people from Queens as being from Long Island, but technically, we qualify. Just look at a map. It's all one island, or if you're from there and speak the gutteral local lingo, one gisland. Anyway, Dave and I hit if off right away, probably because we share this culture, we could almost be family. Watching Mitch Kapor speak yesterday I had the same feeling, but stronger. We could be cousins. Mitch is from Long Gisland too (I think, if he's not he should be). When I raised my hand to ask Mitch a question he called on me in a very kind way, asking me first how long he and I had been friends. It's been a long time, I think we met first at the 1979 West Coast Computer Faire, when Dan Fylstra had hired him to be the New Product Manager at Personal Software. That's a lot of continuity. I think it says something about Mitch's longevity, and perhaps my own, that 23 years later we're still kicking around, trying out new ideas, having people listen to what we have to say, etc etc. I think it's super important that what Mitch knows get into the software system of the early 21st Century. I don't care if it's open source or commercial, his mind is very unique and talented, and I want his software.
Don't forget the dinner tonight. Spicy Noodles.
The theme of today's conference was decentralization. The first time the term appeared in DaveNet was in the first piece of 2001. That's another DaveNet tradition, like the Thanksgiving essays. I try to make the first essay of each year somehow express the most important idea of the year-ahead. It's always a guess. Some years I nailed it, desktop websites were the big idea of 2001, as we prepared Radio 8 for the market (it shipped in January 2002). And Werbach was right to pick it as the theme for the future in software-based technology. There's so much power on the desktops, both in the machine CPU and the human CPU, that isn't being well used in the centralized Internet architecture. In this year's first piece I tried to find the sweet spot between commercial and open source. When do you give it away and when do you keep it to yourself. It seems the essay has already stood the test of time. Doc quoted it today at the Werbach conference. That's strong validation, imho. Blogistan: "Anything I post after this is gravy." Rohit Khare just got up an announced a new open source publish-subscribe module for Apache from KnowNow. Chris Gulker is figuring out what makes a weblog popular. "If you want more readers, you should become famous and, lacking that, write frequent, long posts about stuff that you know well. Encourage inbound links, but don't worry about outbound." Shelley Powers: "Not enough blacks and women coming to your meeting? No Problem! Order a couple of black female Diversity Dolls and you've solved two problems with one purchase. You can't beat that! Need to show religious diversity? No problem! Rent a Priest Diversity Doll!" Karl Jacob from Cloudmark is speaking. Jeremy Allaire just gave a remote speech from Newton, MA. It didn't work very well. Others blogging this conference: Jeremy Allaire, Mitch Ratcliffe, Doc Searls, JD Lasica, Dan Gillmor, Cory Doctorow, Glenn Fleishman.
Scoble: "I'm so decentralized that I couldn't go to the decentralization event of the year." Don't worry Scoble, it's the usual lies. Nothing happening here. Good morning and welcome to my live notes from the Supernova conference. The 802.11 works pretty well, the room is full, lots of good schmoozing, lots of gray hair. (Note, later -- I stopped realtime blogging. I'm too active a participant for that to work very well.) Brad Neuburg is looking for a ride from the East Bay for tonight's dinner in Palo Alto. Lance Knobel on US Treasury Secretary-designate John Snow. AP: "United Airlines, reeling from two years of heavy losses and unable to pay off nearly $1 billion in debt that comes due this week, filed for federal bankruptcy court protection Monday." Steven Vore: "Friend-of-a-friend has a 12-year old daughter who's run away from home this past week. According to the daughter's friend, she's chatting via AIM with other friends." Last year on this day I started work on the 2001 awards. Pretty good Sopranos last night eh? An industry conference
Am I the only one who thinks we're not going back to the way things used to work? This conf is too close to the kinds of conferences we used to have before it all came crashing down. It's as if Esther passed the baton to Kevin, who used to be a key planner of her conferences. But does anything actually happen other than congratulations you're still here this year at these conferences? Is it in poor taste to say that I wouldn't go if it weren't 15 minutes away and a freebie for me because I'm speaking? Yeah, it is in poor taste, but I have to say it anyway. Maybe the conference will exceed my expectations. Right now they're pretty low. I think we're all way too worried how each of us looks, and not enough worried about where we're going. I think this has always been true, ever since Visicalc, but we had enough momentum to hide our vanity and make it seem as if all the bluster somehow mattered. Perhaps this conference will be the turning of the tide, perhaps a real conversation will happen, not in the hallways, but in the conference room. Perhaps we'll leave with ideas for our software, not fear from having our ideas taken and implemented by other people who are more popular, or richer, or whatever. There's so much about the schedule that's reminiscent of conferences of previous decades. Many of the names are different, but the faith in large companies persists, and the value of not speaking the truth (your truth, there's no absolute) continues. Kevin asks me to ask questions from the audience, and I say no, that's not what I do anymore. Been there done that, hate the way it works. If there's 802.11b and a good power outlet I'll try to blog it. Doc Searls will be there, and he's the best at realtime blogging. We'll probably have fun, and who knows, maybe this conference will be the new beginning so many of us are hoping for.
NY Times on Internet access on commercial airlines. Lufthansa and British Airways are going first for flights betw Washington and Frankfurt and New York and London. Phil Windley: "To achieve results, you've got to do something. If you do something, you'll make mistakes. Mistakes are, by definition, a process violation." Tim O'Reilly makes a guest appearance on Burning Bird, in defense of Clay Shirky's Social Software Summit. The man is talking Big news from NY -- Dad is talking. First two questions he asked. Can I have some soda, and what happened to my head? Okay he can't have soda because he's being fed intravenously, and his head is probably the only part of his body he can feel. He's almost totally breathing on his own now, and his spirit, according to those who are there, is great. That's how life works, the will to live is the most impressive thing. Now the next challenges present. We're going to need an "acute pulmonary care facility" that can do extensive physical therapy, in Queens or Nassau County, so we can visit easily. Mom says "he is very motivated and his recovery should be swift and successful." I'm sure she's right. Dad has always been a real fighter. If you have any ideas on facilities, please let me know. Halley: "We were all praying for Dave Winer's dad today who's getting better and better by the day. We love praying for folks like that -- the comeback kids."
BetaNews: "AOL has disbanded the Magic Carpet product team and refocused limited resources on its core subscription and advertising businesses. This leaves the Internet giant with no viable alternative to Microsoft's Passport authentication service in implementation, which currently boasts 200 million accounts."
John Robb: "The English language version of Pravda looks like a weblog." Ed Cone: "Almost a quarter-million people in our part of North Carolina are still without electricity." Miguel Octavio is covering the revolution in Venezuela. Sam Ruby reports on RSS in the world of night clubs. Check out the bio page for Jon Stevens. That could be my bio page. So many idiots floating around thinking you can infer tone from an email post. I've met Jon face to face. He's an opinionated guy. But where it really counts, the code he ships is good, he's smart and generous. That's about all you can tell from online communication. Is someone nice or not? Can't say. Don't care. I'm not god or Santa Claus. Rob Fahrni: "Sun shouldn't get special treatment." Leander Kahney: "Boy, did I get a lot of hate e-mail following the latest series of articles about Mac loyalty."
Shelley Powers: "Photo after photo showing this homogeneous social gathering made up almost exclusively of white, educated, upper-middle or upper class, 30-50 year old males." John Robb: "Clay Shirky's conference on social software didn't use any social software to share what they learned with the rest of us."
DaveNet: How to revive AOL. Frontier News: "New beta releases of both Frontier and Radio UserLand for Mac OS X are now available." Paul Boutin: "'CD quality' is a term audio engineers use sarcastically." Alan Reiter: "John Markoff is one of the premier technology writers in the United States, but he seems to have problems with accurately reporting my quotes and my business." Lance Knobel isn't surprised at today's economic shakeup in the Bush cabinet. "After the smarts of the Rubin and Summers tenures in the '90s, O'Neill's two years of bumbling has been a particular let down. Lindsay has inspired as much confidence as O'Neill." BTW, to reporters who cover warbloggers, or used to -- Lance is a speech writer for UK Prime Minister Tony Blair. He's a former editor of the World Economic Forum's WorldLink magazine, and former program director for the WEF annual meeting at Davos. An American who's been living in London for (I think) about 20 years. Smart guy. Definitely going places. Jumped on board the blogwagon first chance he got. Jon Udell: Script locally, publish globally. A judge likens MS's removal of Java to clubbing a competitor in the knees. I've never understood why Sun has a right to bundle its language with Windows. Sheez, I'd love to bundle Radio with Windows. How about it? Why aren't they clubbing me in the knees? What makes Java so special? I think Radio is much better. Looks like ole Halley is going to get a lot of teapots for Christmas. I could use one too. Maybe I'll get some of the overflow. Last year: "It's nice to see another alpha male gain total acceptance in his alpha-ness." Monday Blogger Dinner in Palo Alto
News.Com reports on a new WiFi company funded by Intel, IBM and AT&T. Jennifer Klyse: "I want to build a service that allows individuals to monitor, on a daily or weekly basis, all official activity of their elected officials in Washington." Amen. NY Times: "AOL's decision to emphasize its $14.95 bring-your-own-access plan is in many ways an admission of defeat." Last year on this day XML Magazine published an interview where I was fairly lucid and high energy. Lots of topics covered. An interesting snapshot. Halley: "And you thought all that he and Moneypenny were doing in the back room was hanging up his coat and checking to see if his revolver were loaded."
Faisal thinks our plan for AOL and MP3s makes sense, and adds that AOL and Apple should do a music deal. Of course, makes total sense. Sjoerd asks why files.xml isn't directory.opml. Happy third birthday to Queso, one of the first Manila sites. How about a blogger New Years in NYC? Scoble has already proposed it, he'll be in NY over the holiday. Every time I see a post from Adam Curry I think, man it's been too long since we did the NY tour. It's halfway between Europe and California. It's got a wintry feel to it. Now I'm not totally sure about it myself, but what do you think? Willing to get on a plane to blog in all our faces? I'm getting in the habit of watching The West Wing on Thurs morning over coffee as the sun is rising. First I have to write something technical. Then I get to indulge. Viva Tivo!
New Radio feature: Proxy Exceptions. Scoble: "You can't sell me on your religion. They all stink." Daniel Berlinger: "Why wasn't the Web built on FTP?" Today's song: "I'm walking in my winter underwear." Sam Ruby feeds back on files.xml. That reminds me of a joke they told about Lotus and Ashton-Tate at Comdex in 1980-something. Their booths were across the aisle from each other. The rivalry was intense. People would jump ship to work for the competitor at the trade show. One guy, a particularly famous quoteable guy, who really didn't know much about software, quit one to work for the other. The buzz around the show was that the average IQ of both companies went up.
Rafe Colburn: "Using a quick IMDB search, Jason Schultz discovered that 93% of the movies released from 1927-1946 are currently unavailable." With all the buzz about CityBlogs, you gotta wonder if people have heard of Craig's List, which was preceded by SanFranZiskGo. Back in 1994, Brian Zisk probably wasn't the first to realize that city-based websites would cut into the business of local newspapers. Brian went on to do other things, and Craig Newmark made it work. Wired: "The secret of Apple's success may have less to do with its innovative products than with the image that the company has created through skillful marketing campaigns." Russell Beattie reviews the Genecast RSS-to-NNTP gateway. Apparently it works. Good news. Abe Fettig routes RSS to POP3 and other places (in the future). Phil Ringnalda: "With a newsreader, you're just reading a bunch of weblogs with the sidebars stripped off, all on one page. With an aggregator, you can force all your friends and idols to get together and write a collaborative weblog, even if they don't know each other (or do, and can't stand each other)." Doc Searls: "I see my blog as a kind of fireplace." Last year on this day: "If Sun really had the answer, they should have blasted RMI toolkits into every development environment known to man." Three years ago today EditThisPage.Com got its start. Karlin Lillington contemplates reinstalling Windows XP.
Scoble: "Tivo has completely changed my life." Back from NY at noon. I'm getting good at the cross-continental thing. Lucked out and got a window seat, with an empty seat next to me. This time the iPod ran out of juice over Nevada. I suspect it's because I let my dad use it to listen to If I Were A Rich Man in the hospital. I figured that was in the spirit of the iPod gift. Glad to be back. The weather is nice. Sunshine. High sixties. Relatively warm. Compared to NY. When I travel I like to read The NY Times and The Economist cover to cover. This time the most bizarre story was about North Korean leader Kim Jong Il. He's like a character out of Atlas Shrugged. While his people starve eating dirt and tree bark, he leads a train across Russia, flying in delicacies and prostitutes. He says African countries exaggerate their AIDS cases to help them get more money from from the west. I guess he should know. NY Times: "Jonathan Miller, the recently named chairman of the AOL division, will disclose the latest plans to turn around AOL in a four-hour briefing with investors in New York." News.Com preview of today's AOL presentation. Brent Simmons shows how NetNewsWire will interface to AppleScript. Is this the kind of thing people using RSS feeds want? I'm curious. Personally, I've been using RSS feeds for over three years, and have only rarely wanted to do this kind of scripting, mostly to see how various forms of RSS are doing. And in those cases I'd go directly to the XML feeds, not use the database Radio's aggregator maintains. I wonder if there are any gold nuggets in there, killer apps for scripting and syndication. I suspect if they're there, Brent will find them. Reminder, the bootstrap of Blog Browsers continues. This was originally a Brent-Dave collaboration, but other people are now working on browsers, and other blogging tools are producing archives in a compatible format. Travel day Today's a travel day, returning to California from New York. I have an early morning flight that gets me into SFO roughly midday. Dad is doing better. Yesterday they turned down his respirator so he did roughly half his own breathing, so there was no time for writing or mouthing words, all his energy went into breathing. If you haven't been doing it on your own for weeks the muscles get weak, it's very hard work. Right now I wish I weren't leaving, but it's time to take care of my own business. Other family members are here and are coming and I'll be back soon. When I get back to California there will be many interesting things to do. December is always a fun month in Silicon Valley, and this year is shaping up no different. Seasons greetings and see you back in California.
Reverse cowgirl: "Can't cyberspace be free of the old crybabying of feminist wanna-be victims who spend too much time and too much ink bleating and pointing at one more forum in which they've decided men are keeping women down?" Hey the Daypop Top 40 is back. Life can now resume. One of my favorite new blogs is 101-365. Great pics, wonderful attitude. It's snowing on Jeremy Zawodny in Ohio. He's returning to California tomorrow too. Today's my last day in NY for this trip. Hey if you've never tried NY, give it a whirl. It's a very rational city. The geography is tiny compared to California. That point came home clearly flying into JFK on Thanksgiving evening, crossing the Hudson seeing the George Washington Bridge to the left, and then have the whole damned city open up, from the north Bronx, to eastern Queens, to southern Brooklyn; mid-town and Wall Street, all no bigger than a bunch of cornfields in Nebraska. You can see it all in one eyefull. It takes ten minutes to get almost anywhere in Manhattan by cab or subway. 25 minutes if you want to go to a suburb (and there's no traffic). The food is cheap and excellent. Most of the city is lower and middle class, so you can live reasonably well on not too much money. And it's a melting pot. New cultures mixing together from all over the world. My parents' neighborhood is turning Korean, where we used to live in Jackson Heights is Central and South American. Indian and Chinese are around Main Street. And that's just in Queens. Who knows what's going on elsewhere in the city. BlogGazer is Phillip Pearson's blog browser for Windows. Here in NY, ReplayTV is running radio ads that say the reason to get their product is because you can skip the ads. This is surprising, and probably not a good idea long-term. They also say in the rush-talk at the end of the commercial that they can change the functionality of the product, presumably through the phone-home connection. I doubt if many of the listeners realize this could mean removal of the feature they bought the product for. It seems like they're upping the stakes in the battle between Hollywood and Silicon Valley, with the TV watchers of NY as pawns caught in the middle. Thanks everyone for all the great ideas and advice on communicating with my father. I'm going to get a sheet of paper with all the letters of the alphabet, and give him a pointer so he can spell out words. There were lots of other ideas. We're going to go for the low-tech and relatively easy ones, like finding someone in the ICU who can read lips. We know all the people in the ICU because Dad was there for a few weeks. We all go through this one way or the other. Our parents never stop teaching. And there's no end to what we can learn from each other. Thanks!
This is the lightest day on the Web in recent memory. A good day to take a nap, watch some TV, read a book. If you write something interesting send me a pointer. There's not enough to point to today. Michael Fraase: The call that changed my life. This evening I had a fantastic visit with my father in the hospital. He's alert, communicative, sweet beyond belief, grateful, and very alive. But. He can't talk. He wants his laptop, but he isn't strong enough to type. He tried to mouthe words, but I can't read lips. This is so frustrating. How do we communicate? If you have an idea, send me an email. How can I learn to read lips quickly? Are there consultants you can hire who are lip readers? Matt Mower: "When trying to handle feeds from multiple blogs, inevitably, as Mikel points out, we will reach the situation where people using different words to mean the same topic. This will be a problem, but hopefully not as a big of a problem as it could be. It is for this reason that I have been tracking XFML so carefully. With XFML we have the ability to say 'A's topic X is the same as B's topic Y'. liveTopics already does XFML." What is XFML? Jeremy Bowers posts two messages on BitTorrent on the Radio-Dev list. BitTorrent: "The key to cheap file distribution is to tap the unutilized upload capacity of your customers." A promising new anonymous weblog. Check out the tagline. Interesting hexadecimal name. Actually Manila shipped three years ago today.
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: One more thing, click on the pic of Doc above to immediately be transported into the alternate universe of 
It's hard to find much news on Christmas Day. Even so, 
Daniel Berlinger's 
Last week there was a meeting at Clay Shirky's in NY to talk about social software, whatever that is. By coincidence I was in NY, for other reasons. There were at least a few bloggers at Clay's meeting. Why is no one is talking about it? Postscript: The Internet is so cool. I did a search for Social Software on Google, and here's a 
