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DaveNet: Never underestimate Steve Case. Business Week: "The next round of globalization is sending upscale jobs offshore. They include basic research, chip design, engineering -- even financial analysis." Russell Beattie: Qwerty Phone Keypad. Interesting idea. Wired: "Ex-Apple programmer Jim Speth is about to release new open-source software that lets a select group of users share files over the Internet." Scott Knaster sends word that the Space Shuttle will be visible in the Bay Area as it's landing tomorrow. 1/31/00 was a sunny day, in Davos. David Heller: HTML's Time is Over. Let's Move On. Mark Pilgrim: "I have no idea what I’m going to do with myself." Scoble asks an important question. "Patient A has a troupe of 20 people with her, and at least five stay around the clock to pray for her. Patient B only has two people with her, and they don't stay around the clock. If something goes wrong with both patients at the same time, and there's only one surgeon available, which one gets the surgery done first?" There's no doubt that Patient A gets the help. Having spent a lot of time in hospitals in the last year, this is well-known among families. It's why I spent so much time in the hospital with my father. If the nurses and doctors get to know you, your friend or relative gets better care. No doubt about it. Adam's family
Interesting that they speak both Dutch and English at Adam's house. January 31 How time flies. Tomorrow is the beginning of the second month of the year. My hippie uncle, the guy who lives in Jamaica, is ten years older than me. He says it keeps getting worse. I know. Oy.
An image of an old geezer sitting in a rocking chair on a front porch appears, and I understand what he's saying. "Rush, rush, rush, that's all young people do," says the old geezer (in an Abe Simpson-like voice). But there's wisdom in the rants of a silly old man. First the old guy's body doesn't rush so well anymore. All the aches and pains. They quiet down if he just sits and watches. Young people don't have those pains. He doesn't remember. But time is rushing by fast enough. Old folk may know how to stop and savor a moment, just hold it, and appreciate it for what it is, without thinking of the future (which old people don't have) or the past (there's more of that all the time). I'm not really old yet, but I'm not young anymore. I'm one of those inbetweeners. Not just starting, but not finished. January 31. What a weird thought.
DaveNet: Meet The Peking Duck. New RSS Howto: How to support enclosures in aggregators. Don Park: "In Korea, secret PIN is often used to protect credit cards, cash cards, and bank accounts. Unfortunately, most people don't treat PIN as a personal secret and not only share it with others but routinely asks for it." Just got an email from a reporter saying we underhype RSS. I seriously had not considered that possibility. No sarcasm. NY Times: "All of AOL Time Warner's high-flying initiatives of the last two years have amounted to a $100 billion mistake." The Economist profiles the FCC's Michael Powell. I signed up for the Stanford spectrum policy conference, March 1-2. Cory Doctorow: "The city of San Diego recently dropped $23,000 on a Googlebox." Timothy Appnel: The Next Generation of TrackBack. Welcome to the first annual Nude Blog Awards. Juice is an "alternate browser with built-in support for Google's search API." Blogistan: "I'm no fan of the National Review, but this Jonah Goldberg image cracked me up." 2/3/95: "SuperBowl beer commercials are aimed at people who are drunk." Davos: "This year's hot ticket was apparently an invitation-only Super Bowl party, hosted by Bill and Chelsea Clinton."
BBC: "A total of 27 new sites will be opened at Welcome Break service stations, while 36 Hilton hotels will offer hotspots in their lobbies. Business travellers will also be able to log on at Heathrow, Gatwick, Stansted and Aberdeen airports." 0xDECAFBAD: "If I've heard of you, can I list you as a friend? If I've emailed you once or twice?" Jake Savin: "Now for a little code clean-up, some docs and a beta release."
Peking Duck: "I've been trying to access The New York Times and the Washington Post all morning, only to get the Cannot Find Server message for both sites." Tripod now has weblogs. Great stuff tonight on the Salon blogs. News.Com is supporting guids in their RSS feeds. Yes. We've got forward motion. Bing bing bing. Here's a clue why Steve Case stepped down when he did. $99 billion lost in 2002. Oy oy oy. Sjoerd Visscher: "I now include the referrers using XInclude." I've always wanted an Jake Savin: "I'm working on a new backup/restore feature for Radio UserLand, and have hit a bit of a snag." For sale: ZDNet Tech Update staff. Joi Ito: "If you need to get inebriated to 'bond' you've got a psychological problem."
Some people think that not going to war is a prescription for nuclear war. Sorry for not representing that pov in the above. It is a possibility I suppose. Another possibility is using the goodwill we've gotten with Hussein's neighbors to solve some other problem that saves lives instead of killing people. Wouldn't that blow people's minds? But don't pay attention to me, when it comes to war I'm usually the one arguing against it. I guess I was wrong about Kosovo, for example. I thought it was another Vietnam, for sure. It wasn't. Ever wonder how viruses get their names? It looks pretty random. The reporters need a handle for each virus. So why don't we use a system like the one they use for hurricanes and typhoons? First a woman's name, then a man's name, starting with A, then B, round and round we go. It's good because we don't let the virus writer add a name to the common vocabulary. Why should they get rewarded for being jerks, or worse. What do you think? Lawrence Lee: "Most virus companies seem to follow the CARO virus naming convention developed in 1991 by Fridrik Skulason, Alan Solomon and Vesselin Bontchev." To Tom Matrullo who wonders what good RSS is if it just shovels the same old crap he reads in newspapers. Tom, t's better than that. Much. RSS creates a level playing field that's open to all. Amateurs and pros, young and old, rich and poor, the homeless, the uninsured and people with AIDS, you name it -- they all can slug it out for readers in the same venue. If you subscribe to Scripting News, today you've already heard about a new peer-to-peer network, you've learned a little math, and read an amusing Glenn Fleishman piece about skiing in Montana (if you clicked) and heard that Dubya is borrowing a few lies (oops lines) from Teddy Roosevelt. And it's not even 7AM. Sure the NY Times, BBC, News.Com, etc are all worth reading. But now you're getting more variety, and they're getting competition, which are good things, imho. Another way to look at it. A old style journalist interviews a couple dozen people for a week, and then produces an article that you can read in five minutes. He includes a few quotes. That's one way to do it. Another way is DIY or Do It Yourself. A news event. I think to myself "Who would know what this means?" I go to their weblog. See what they think. Link to them from my weblog. Then I think of another person. I go to their weblog. Etc etc. This is good because it routes around the soundbite-creating and dumbing-it-down processes. Who cares if the expert said it in a clever way (actually I do care). But what I really want is to know what they really think, not what the editors of the pub want me to hear. The Open Content Network is a "collaborative effort to help deliver large, freely-downloadable content using peer-to-peer technology." Jason DeFillippo: "I am blogholio!" Scott Rosenberg illustrates the difference between mean and median in Bush's hype about tax cuts. "This average is a convenient fiction; it's a statistic that exists only because the enormous benefits accruing to the dividend-owning super-rich skew the 'average' -- and camouflage the fact that the cuts most middle class taxpayers will receive under Bush's proposal are piddling." If you've written an article about RSS recently, please suggest a link in the section of the RSS directory. I included JD Lasica's article because, imho, RSS is not just for geeks anymore. But it is still for geeks too. I'm working this morning on the developer evangelism I promised yesterday. RSS Feeds for the Fusebox.Org Forums. Glenn Fleishman: "Yeah, well, none of us have jobs!"
Jon Udell: "A lot of this stuff is much worse than it needs to be."
Only Scripting News asks "What will you do while Dubya gives his speech tonight?" Jing Jing, home of Spicy Noodles, has a website. I've booked my next trip east. I'll be in NY betw Feb 5-7, then Boston betw Feb 8-11, and back in NY betw Feb 12-16. The beginning and ending dates are fixed, but the time betw Boston and NY is flexible. I'm looking into getting a classroom for an evening session open to all Boston-area bloggers to talk about whatever we want to talk about. Here's an idea of how these meetings work. BTW, the round trip air fare betw SFO and JFK was $340; that's non-stop on a major airline. Michael Winser is one of the developers of Microsoft's Web browser. He was a frequent contributor here during the browser wars of the 90s. What he says about performance of HTML tables is authoritative. "There's only one solution: change the problem," he says. One of the more interesting ideas in Cosmos is that we might live inside a black hole. It's one way to grapple with the finiteness of the universe. "Where does the universe end?" asks the student. "Is there a wall, and if so, what's on the other side?" Well, if you lived inside a black hole you might ask the same questions. Exactly the same questions. Reuters: "Kazaa said Tuesday that it had countersued film and music companies seeking to shut it down, alleging antitrust violations and overzealous copyright protection." News.Com: "Opera Software says the future of its Mac browser is clouded now that Apple is producing its own." Douglas Bowman's markover for Weblogs.Com. Very nice! Simon Willison cracks the nut as well. 8:30AM Pacific: I applied Bowman's design to Weblogs.Com. The text is a little small, but otherwise it's great. It's much faster at refreshing than the table-based design. Wired: "Anyone can contribute an article to the Wikipedia." Count the errors in this BBC article, starting with the title which does not describe what the article contains. NY Times: Worm Hits Microsoft, Which Ignored Own Advice. Adam explains how his weblog became part of his TV show. Lunch in Switzerland Lance Knobel: "As I write this, my friends in Davos will be making their way up the mountain for the annual highlight of the meeting: the Schatzalp lunch. The lunch is on the 'snow terrace' of the Schatzalp Hotel, which has the faded grandeur you'd expect of the former sanitorium and setting of Mann's Magic Mountain. Sadly, it looks like today there won't be much of a view." This gives me goosebumps. The venue of the Schatzalp lunch is a slice of heaven on earth. Photo. In 2000, the year I attended, the dotcom bubble was still very much inflated, probably at its peak. I was one of a handful of people from the Land Of Dotcom, so the investment bankers wanted to hear what I thought about this or that or the something else. For me that peaked at the Schatzalp. Neither will probably ever happen again. But what a grand day that was! Oh man. RSS enclosures My next tutorial for RSS developers is going to be about enclosures. These are do-it-yourself things, with the goal of helping developers of weblog tools, aggregators and news readers support the feature. So far I've done tutorials for comments and guids. The next is enclosures.
Adam Curry: Welcome to the Payload Channel. I'm going to use this opportunity to write a new browser-based enclosure function for Radio that notifies you in a module in the Status Center when new enclosures have arrived. CSS, a black hole Reading through the first batch of email this morning. People responding to the query about a CSS version of Weblogs.Com are asking why I want to nuke the table. Performance. I explained it. If it's not possible to get that kind of layout with CSS, just say so. But this is not a religious thing. Believe me. I explained that too. Makes me wonder if people bothered to read my request before writing (long) responses. Bravo. Gary Taylor understood what I was asking for. It's probably not cross-browser though. I think I give up on CSS. It's a black hole. Andreas Helstrom suggested splitting it up into multiple pages. That's probably the most workable solution that works in every browser without support headaches into the next millennium. Onward! Wait a minute. It looks like Dave Polaschek nailed it.
Matt Croydon: "If a redesign happens and everyone is reading via RSS, did a redesign happen?" Jeneane Sessum: "How to quit smoking? It's time."
Cory Doctorow: "iCommune, the iTunes sharing/streaming plugin that Apple nastygrammed out of existence a couple weeks ago is back, though it's not clear if the author is doing this in defiance of Apple or not." Adam Curry: "I see the combination of RSS enclosures being used to hand off a url to a BitTorrent file, that automatically joins that file's network, downloads all relevant bits into the right places and notifies the subscriber of the new goodies." News.Com: "AOL is testing a new instant-chat robot that answers questions from AIM users about weather and stocks." A question for CSS design gurus. What's the best you can do with a table that has three columns like the one on Weblogs.Com. Let's see an example. I'd like the page to look good and load fast. Postscript: No one seems to understand -- I want to do weblogs.com without a table. Column 1 is the number, column 2 is the name of the weblog. Column 3 is the time it last updated. Look at the page. People say "But it's a table, that's what tables are for." I understand and usually agree -- but in this case -- the table is so long that some other way of displaying it might be much more usable. It's something of a scaling issue, not a religious or philosophical one.
Business 2.0: "Get ready for moblogging." MacWhispers: "Apple is near a beta release of their long-rumored professional word processing application." It really annoyed me that the list behind Weblogs.Com was imperfectly sorted. I thought this was because pings were coming in while the table was being sorted, but when I fixed it so this couldn't happen, it didn't get any better. That was a few months ago. Today I took another look and understood the problem more clearly. The code that produces the list doesn't even try to sort the list. It just happens to be close-to-sorted because another thread needed it sorted and did the work. But an indeterminate amount of time can pass between the two threads being called. So I changed the code in Radio Community Server to cache the table, and to lock a semaphore during the sort. The net result is that there's a little more lag between a ping and appearance on the page, but it's now perfectly sorted (unless it's not). Praise Murphy! Be careful what you promise. Wired: "A voracious worm that spread over the weekend appears to be under control. Meanwhile, conspiracy fans are having a field day trying to guess who released it and why." NY Times: Crime Is Soaring in Cyberspace. SF Chronicle: "Hundreds of police with riot gear, squad cars and helicopters were no match for larger numbers of troublemakers in scattered locations along International Boulevard who set fires, smashed windows and destroyed property, including a McDonald's restaurant that was ransacked and partially burned." Gnome-Girl: "Survived the Oakland raids and stampedes last night. Fires everywhere, outraged fans go ballistic but I lived to tell about it." Three years ago today I arrived in Davos. I attended a session on the size of the universe. "It was in this session that jetlag caught up with me. I was trying to figure out what time it was back home, and fell asleep doing that simple task. I woke myself up by reminding myself how exciting this place is." I remember when Old people are cursed by memories. So much bullshit begins with "I remember when." We can't help it, so forgive us. We do think there are common themes of life that we all go through. Think about it this way. We don't all have the same experience in puberty, but then again, we do. At the end, you're ready to have sex and make babies. There's lots of stuff ahead of you like that. Really. IM and weblogs Lots of great stuff in the thread on Instant Messaging and weblogs. Russ Lipton, as usual kicks big ass. Don Park too. Russ says each item on a weblog could form a chatroom for a few hours or days after it's posted. Keep a transcript. Allow the blogger the usual controls to keep spam, abusive posts and off-topic stuff off. Don says blogging is IM Slow.
What's the connection between IM and weblogs?
Dino Morelli hit a deal-stopper working on a schema for RSS 2.0. The problem is that each NY Times: "Newspapers are engaged in technological one-upmanship over 'AstroTurf' letters to the editor that look like authentic grass-roots responses from readers but are not."
Economist: "The best way to foster creativity in the digital age is to overhaul current copyright laws." John Rhodes: "Why not use RSS feeds to keep customers aware of new products and services?" NY Times: Scooters for Technophiles. Google Weblog: "In SearchKing v Google the judge has denied SearchKing's request for preliminary injuction. In other words, SearchKing asked for their PageRank to be put back to where it was while the trial was being held, and the judge said no." Smokers only
I remember a conversation I had on the "smoking deck" of a resort I go to. Smoking is prohibited everywhere but there. I was talking with a man in his early 20s. We were talking about nothing at all, just one of the heaviest subjects between young and old (I was in my early 40s at the time). The question was, why do you, Dave, think you're smarter than me? Or put it another way -- hey old dude -- you don't know shit. Which, of course, is mostly what young people have to say to old people. (Or so it seems.) So is it true, am I smarter than the young guy? Now, of course, I don't know the answer. I couldn't unless there was some objective measure of smartness. So all I can do is have an opinion. But that doesn't mean I can't use the scientific method to form the opinion. So I asked my young friend some questions. How old are you now? 22. Do you know more than when you were 18. Oh sure! No comparison, I was really stupid then. How about at 15? I was just a kid, I didn't know anything. (I move in for the kill.) Do you think learning stops at 22? Answer: Of course it doesn't. You learn things in your late 20s that you can't imagine in your early 20s. And the early 30s have their lessons, as do the mid 30s and the late 30s (oh boy!) and then the early 40s. And some of the learning is pegged to other people's experiences. Like when one of your parents dies. Or a child goes to college. Or things out of your control (bypass surgery). Ask a really old person about this. One of the sweetest things about life is that you can always learn, right up to the moment you die. And that's part of what's most enjoyable about being human. For some reason, if we can find the pure learning, it's a joyful thing, whether or not we ever get to use what we learn. BTW, my young companion basically said that learning does stop at 22. I wish I had his phone number or email address, he's probably about 27 now. I'd like to ask the obvious follow-up question.
Google Village: "Who are you optimizing your site for?" East Broadway Ron notices that spam sometimes tells a story in the subjects, when viewed in sequence. I've noticed this too! Would a meta-blog formed from the top sites of the day be interesting? SQL virus reports
Reports: CNN, BBC, Slashdot, Beta News, Google, AP, Reuters. Lawrence Lee: "Here's a chart from the Internet Traffic Report with global packet loss for the past 24 hours." Freedom.Org: "Quick fix is to firewall port 1434/UDP traffic, and reboot the affected SQL servers." Slashdot: "If you run Microsoft SQL Server, make sure the public Internet can't access it." Beta News: "The attack used a buffer overflow to execute code on a vulnerable SQL Server, causing that system to randomly seek out other computers to infect and in the process consume massive amounts of bandwidth." Jason Levine: "The worm generated an average of 2,815 packets a second, or roughly 170,000 packets a minute." My bet with Martin Observation. In 2003, when we want to, we can beat the NY Times, on a technical subject. Their report just appeared in their RSS feed, for the home page (so they thought it was an important story), but -- they don't have their own report, it's from AP. Presumably they will have a full Times-authored story in the Sunday edition. In contrast, when I checked at 6:30AM Pacific, Slashdot had the whole thing, cause and cure, and while I asked for and got lots more links from Scripting News readers, Slashdot already had the story from the main angle. One wonders why the AP report couldn't also include the cure, it's one sentence, sure it wouldn't mean anything to most people, but to the people who need the information, it could make a huge difference. The Internet is a set of interdependencies. We all depend on each other, never can you see that more clearly than when a virus attack is underway. Anyway, good job, World Wide Web, and hats off to Slashdot. Now, if I'm going to win the bet with Martin in 2007 (which I plan to), we're going to need to be that good not just in technology, but in everything. Earlier links Anne Bradstreet: "If we had no winter, the spring would not be so pleasant: if we did not sometimes taste of adversity, prosperity would not be so welcome." Doc: "I ride the Asymptote to Oblivion." An excellent Jamie Zawinski rant on Linux usability. Wired: "For a fee of $10 to $13, the service, called Live Phish, features specially designed cover art and provides soundboard-quality downloadable recordings of Phish concerts less than 48 hours after a performance." Rahul Dave: "With comments you don't care about identity, just that the person is a real person, not a spam bot." UserLand's mail server is down. No mail. Interesting feeling. It must be in the water (or air). My friend Cory Doctorow is having mail problems too. Carl Sagan I got new glasses. Interesting experience. The prescription is better at short distances, like for reading books and computer screens, but not as good at long distance as my old glasses. I figure the glitches will fix themselves. We'll see.
Without stars there would be no silicon (the stuff our planet is made from), or carbon (the stuff we're made from). Sagan's writing is so great. He has a way of making all my problems seem so unimportant. The last time I read his book he was still alive. He died at a young age of cancer. What a sweet man he was, so smart, so generous. America's medical system Doctor to a young man, just 27 years old. "I have bad news, good news, and bad news." First the bad news. You have a terminal disease. Without treatment, you will die. Now the good news. There's a drug that will hold back the disease. Unless there's a cure, you will have to take it for the rest of your life. Now the bad news. The drug costs $700 per month. Your insurance will cover it. But if you get fired or laid off, eventually you will have to pay for it out of your own pocket, or die. This is a real story.
Evangelism: "Guids are not just for geeks anymore." Here's a page that ranks RSS feeds by the amount of new bits they deliver to Radio users, both today and over time. I haven't looked at that page in a long time. Surprised more people aren't getting news from the NY Times and BBC. Perhaps that's because they deliver their news in spurts at the end of the day. Each spurt per user only counts for one. You score higher if you deliver news steadily. Phillip Torrone got a phone call today from Woz. Elwyn Jenkins: "Have you got your Google Word?" Peter Van Dijck: Introduction to XFML. Today is the first birthday of the XML coffee mug! News.Com: Font maker plans open-source typeface. Sounds like Uncle Ito's session at Davos went well. Popdex "offers the ability to host TrackBack threads." Berklee: "I'm curious about identity theft as well."
Evangelism: "RSS 2.0 has a neat feature that allows an item to link to comments about that item. Content tools and aggregators can support this feature, allowing people to comment directly from the aggregator." Fredrik Lundh's Python RSS reader supports the comments feature described above. Excellent. NY Times: "The Senate voted today to bar deployment of a Pentagon project to search for terrorists by scanning information in Internet mail and in the commercial databases of health, financial and travel companies here and abroad."
News.Com: "The market for XML-based content-lifecycle products -- software and services that allow content to be easily reused in a number of formats -- will grow tenfold to $11.6 billion in annual revenue by 2008, according to a report released Thursday." JD Lasica: "Instead of the hunt and peck of Web surfing, you can download or buy a small program that turns your computer into a voracious media hub, letting you snag headlines and news updates as if you were commanding the anchor desk at CNN." JD does something extremely cool, on his weblog he provides full transcripts of the interviews he did for the piece. Much more interesting. Very nice. Someday all reporters will do this. Hey maybe they'll skip writing the polished piece, esp when the article isn't appearing in print. Let's have a weblog that covers identity theft from the point of view of an honest person wanting to be as safe as possible. I read an article somewhere that common criminals are turning from violent mugging to identity theft. Less messy, less work, less risk, higher yields. We also need a weblog about how to get good health care in the US. The weblog should be a collaboration between users and medical professionals. I got excellent responses to yesterday's rant. I hope we can get some of this energy to flow through the public Web.
Mary Jo: "Microsoft may find itself on the wrong side of the sneaker-wearing partner in Boies, Schiller & Flexner."
I find it striking that the meeting of Middle East foreign ministers, to avoid war in Iraq, is being held in Turkey, not in Davos. What a difference a few years makes. When I was there in 2000 you'd stumble across hallway meetings between high-level US, Israeli and Palestinian reps, and the show closed with beautiful ceremony with Yassir Arafat and Shimon Peres. "Peace is hard work," Peres said. Lance's report, not from Davos 2003. NY Times: "Until the Golden Gate Bridge and Bay Bridge eclipsed ferry traffic in the 30's, the building was the crossroads of San Francisco." Seth Dillingham: "If I was a spammer, I'd think this was a gift!"
Had a really interesting meeting this afternoon with famous investment banker and venture capitalist Bill Hambrecht. I'm interested in meeting more people who were part of the early Silicon Valley, before the dotcom boom. Hambrecht was the initial investor in Adobe, in 1982. He tells lots of Adobe stories. Fascinating stuff. PC Mag reviews Apple's new Web browser. Mark Pilgrim: Parsing RSS At All Costs. Interesting discussion about validating RSS; happy ending. Paolo: "In Italy nobody pays prescription drugs."
Scott Rosenberg: "For Salon, or any other standalone independent that needs to pay not only for content but for bandwidth and software and health plans for employees and so forth, some variation on the subscription plan is the only way to go." Wired: "There are a lot more voters downloading music than there are music company executives," Hayes warned. "If the RIAA was my client, I'd advise them to think this one through again." On this day in 1998, Netscape threw all their balls in the air. Roe v Wade On this day 30 years ago, the US Supreme Court issued its decision in Roe v Wade, forever changing US law, culture, society, lifestyles, and setting in motion a philosophical debate that continues to this day. Whether you're pro-life or pro-choice, or somewhere inbetween, this may be a moment to pause and perhaps listen, to understand that there are points of view other than your own, and hard questions that do not have simple answers. There appears to be no mention of Roe v Wade on the Supreme Court's website. I thought this was notable. $400 a month Prescription drugs cost a lot. Yesterday I refilled just one of my must-have prescriptions, the kind of stuff I have to take for the rest of my life or else I die. I have health insurance, for now, but the co-pay is pretty high. I asked what it would cost if I didn't have insurance. $400 per month. And that's just one drug. How do people pay for this? How does the government justify going to war in Iraq. Where are the priorities. If Bush had to pay $400 per month for one drug, out of his own pocket, I can't imagine he'd have too much bandwidth left for Saddam Hussein. Okay, five minutes later I've already gotten a flame. No, I didn't know they were so expensive. Sue me. Part of the philosophy of weblogs is that we don't mind sharing epiphanies, even if it makes us look stupid, to some. So, why was I so clueless? Because I've had good health insurance and good health, no reason to learn, or be concerned. It's easy to look the other way when it's someone else's problem. I'm just human, no claims of sainthood here.
News.Com: "A federal judge on Tuesday ordered Verizon Communications to disclose the identity of an alleged peer-to-peer pirate in a legal decision that could make it easier for the music industry to crack down on file swapping." Daypop weblog: "There are 3000 more weblogs in the index which brings the total number of sites spidered to 10,500." Lance redesigns Davos Newbies, but keeps the name. I think he's right to do it, the old design, a Garrett Vreeland beauty, was showing its age. And as Lance says, he's no longer a Davos insider. But the spirit of Davos is something to attach to, and just as Scripting News isn't just about scripting -- but rather a philosophy that started with scripting -- Davos Newbies makes sense as the name for Lance's weblog. It's been a three-year run, and remains a must-read for me. Every time he updates I'm there, with a sweaty mouse finger, anxious to see what Lance has to say.
Now, on the other hand, it would be worth $40 per year, to me, to be able to offload the news aggregator to a centralized server. I expect I'll do a lot of traveling this year, with all kinds of net connections, some not very good. But is it a good business for UserLand to go into? I would advise against it. Keep selling desktop news aggregators. It's proven that people will pay for software that runs on their own machine. They expect to get centralized services for free. That's the problem Blogger has. Lots of users. Lots of free users. Evan responds. Of course if there had been any money in NewsBlogger you could have hired someone to add the bandwidth to grow the idea. And My.UserLand did get commercialized -- it's the aggregator in Radio. Same software. Peking Duck: "Nice guys always finish last in Beijing." Bryan did a kickass Harvard theme for Radio. Wildgrape NewsDesk is a "simple and fast RSS reader for Microsoft .Net." Minor update to the RSS 2.0 spec. Two years ago today: "I'm Uncle Sam, that's who I am. Been hidin' out in a rock and roll band." Jon Udell: "It's cool to see that JavaScript can be as Perlishly terse as this." Seth Dillingham: Thread-based Global Variables in UserTalk. The callbacks for the Radio RSS-generator are released. Gnome-Girl: "I can be a complicated communicator." News.Com: "When Yahoo began selling premium services, the move was ridiculed by analysts." Jeff Kandt added a RSS feed for comments on each post. Tim Bray on RSS Tim Bray wrote a think piece about RSS. My comments follow. There's a misunderstanding in Tim's piece about UserLand's aggregator. Radio runs on the desktop, just like NNW -- its user interface is HTTP/HTML, so you read it in a browser, but you're talking to a server on 127.0.0.1. Therefore the scaling issues for both products are identical, but imho, manageable. Tim said in his lead paragraph to expect breakage, but I'm going to be a stinker. No breakage. Period.
Trial balloon: "A simple addition to discussion group software makes it easy for a user to go to one place to monitor all conversations he or she is part of." Simon Willison asks what to do when soneone hijacks an identity in weblog comments. I just improved Sunday's RSS-generator-for-Radio so that callbacks can now generate attributes on elements. As they say, still diggin. Bryan Bell is working on a theme for Harvard weblogs. I'm trying it out. I want it to be more dramatic. Harvard is the crimson school. I'm going to look for a really definitive Harvard website. If you find one send me some email. Check this out. My.Harvard.Edu. Wow. I bet they'll like RSS. Paul Boutin found the Republican astroturf generator. Lance: "Will I suffer withdrawal pangs from not going to Davos this week?" SourceID is "an open project site for Digital Identity ideas, protocols & software." This is an interesting site. Slashdot: "Kevin Mitnick is getting back online and can start taking email tomorrow, January 21." Jenny: "I will never buy SimCity 4 because I can tell how addictive it is just from the web site."
John Burkhardt shares his angst about SUVs. Tucker Goodrich: "This innocuous little fly just invites being peed upon." Wired: "The fact that movie and consumer electronics industry groups are not in on the new alliance is notable." Start me up Good morning. A few notes on starting up my weblog. It's 4:40AM Pacific, which is 1:40PM in Paris. In a few minutes I'm going to be interviewed by a German newspaper in London. The first W in WWW stands for World. No kidding. I go to my Manila site and Flip Home Page. Then I click on the Edit With Radio button. I bring the Radio app to the front. There's the outline. I choose SN Rules from the Boilerplate sub-menu of the Bookmarks menu in Radio. It adds the rules you see in the screen shot. (Or you will see when I link it in after taking it.) But I get ahead of myself. Then I add a new headline. Start me up. It's the first line of a Rolling Stones song. One that they sang in their HBO concert in NYC on Saturday night, which I watched on Sunday, thanks to my TiVO. No commercials to skip, by the way, so no BigCo exec to piss off. Paid for, out of my $70 per month fee to Hollywood and GM. Why do I always mention this? Becuase I pay them every damned month so they can get on TV and call me a pirate. Huh? Oy. Anyway. Then I have a blank outline. Unlike some writers, I love a blank slate and never have trouble filling it. My psyche generates lots of stuff. I try to filter out the angst. I've learned that's not popular. It's still there of course, just filtered. A day has begun. Ahhh. More Stones lyrics: "My eyes dilate, my lips go green. My hands are greasy. She's a mean, mean machine."
For review: How to extend Radio's RSS generator. NY Times: "The evidence is now overwhelming that Linux, once a symbol of software's counterculture, has become a mainstream technology."
Digital Hit is blogging the Golden Globe awards. Zawodny: My stuff is where? Exactly. Peking Duck, a weblog from Beijing, is totally right on. Every time I post a comment on a weblog I have to remember to go back and see if anyone followed up. We have to figure a way to automate this. Agree or disagree?
For some reason I thought of Brent when I saw this. David Weinberger: Open Spectrum FAQ. "Imagine rather than having to worry about how much 'bandwidth' is enough, everyone had unlimited access to bits so that the size of what you communicate simply didn't matter." According to dweb.blogspot.com, Pyra changed the IP address for blogspot, so people in China can now access all the sites hosted there. Of course the Chinese censors are certain to figure out what's going on. Postscript: Several readers have pointed out that China controls its own DNS, so it has blocked the Dweb site at that level. Tri-Valley Herald: "Protesters marched up Market Street to the Civic Center, where celebrity speakers including actor Martin Sheen and singers Bonnie Raitt and Joan Baez addressed the crowd." An actor who plays the President, gives a speech at a real demonstration. That crosses a line. Three years ago today Hedy Lamarr died.
Reuters: "A top music industry representative says Internet service providers will be asked to pay up for giving their customers access to free song-swapping sites." Key phrase: Substantial non-infringing use. NY Times: "A New York court has ruled that Network Associates, a maker of popular antivirus and computer security software, may not require people who buy the software to get permission from the company before publishing reviews of its products." Lessig proposes a small tax on fifty-year-old copyrights. | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
