|
|||||||||||||||||||||||||
Jim Allchin: "Google's a very nice system, but compared to my vision, it's pathetic." Google CEO Eric Schmidt is presenting at PARC on March 6. Wonder if he thinks Allchin's vision is pathetic. The Blogger-Google FAQ. "The people at Google have done a great job over the years making sure their search results are honest and objective and there's no reason they would change that policy for Blogger or anyone else."
Tim Bray has a weblog. Good idea! Ernie is keeping a list of attorneys with RSS feeds. Ralph Nader: "The United States spends more than $1 billion annually to examine patents. Despite this expenditure, the Patent Office has become a glorified diploma mill, routinely granting rights that should never have been issued. The patents wouldn't stand up in court, but they're expensive to litigate. So why are we forcing developing countries to follow our lead when we don't do a good job ourselves?"
I treated myself to a copy of SimCity 4 to play on my new computer, but Nelson Minar says it's not a very good piece of software. I used to waste so much time building cities. I'll still give it a try, but I suspect he's right based on my experience with other follow-ons to SimCity. (Postscript: I installed it, the program launched -- very confusing. Couldn't figure out how to quit the app. Ctrl-Alt-Delete worked.) Harvard Crimson on weblogs This morning, the Crimson, Harvard's student newspaper, has an article about what we're doing with weblogs. The author, a freshman named Sam J Lin, interviewed John Palfrey, Matthew Yglesias and myself. One factual error -- we don't need to install servers all over the campus, the one server we already have can do about 1000 weblogs, so it'll be a while before we need more hardware. I loved the closing paragraph, the author of the piece has a weblog, so he's a believer (I added him to the directory) but his editor must have insisted that he get a negative spin on it. Matthew of course, immediately blogged it, demonstrating the power of the medium. I wouldn't be surprised if Sam blogged it too. (Postscript: he did.) Now of course I have to wonder -- does the Crimson have an RSS feed? Another possible itinerary Writing about my cross-country drive is good for the soul. I talked about the northern route, below, now let's talk about the southern route. Stop in Phoenix where I have a dinner invite, catch some baseball, then cross New Mexico and Texas, swing into New Orleans for some gumbo with Ernie the Attorney, drive across the Florida panhandle and stop in to see Rogers Cadenhead, south of St Augustine and then dump my body in the Atlantic Ocean and body surf. That's the soul part. Then drive north up I-95 and do a North Carolina tour, maybe even have dinner with Howard Coble! Then on to DC, put on my warm winter clothes and head north to New York and swing into Boston. Sweet man
Middle of the night wakeup I read comments from Jason Kottke and Martin Schwimmer yesterday that changed my thinking about Google. Also two reports on News.Com, one about a new ad program on Google, and another on a new patent that has been issued to them, apparently their first one. Then I read the excellent Google Village commentary (that site is so good). Put it all together, and Google has changed. Kottke is right, it is no longer a search engine. He gets one thing wrong, there is nothing more they can do to improve the search engine with Blogger content, unless they ignore changes.xml from weblogs.com, but I bet that's exactly what they're doing. I suppose it's not immoral, but get this -- it's not web-like. Google started as a response to bloat and non-weblike-behavior among the search engines. At least that's what we hoped they were. They never actually said. This is what their success is built on, we perceive their love of the Web. Now it becomes clearer, thanks to Martin's comments, that they just want to put ads on our stuff. Why didn't I see that before. Joi Ito sent me an email last night saying that UserLand should insist that Google include Radio and Manila (and Movable Type) sites in their ad program. I responded by asking Joi if he wanted ads on his weblog. He said no. I thought that was interesting because I don't want them either. I don't know why I don't want them, perhaps if I could make some real money doing it, but I don't think anyone is going to offer me that. And if they did, I would wonder what they want in return. Really, no kidding. And in a way I didn't like to be asked the question about UserLand, because I'm going the other way. Google came out of academia, so did I, a generation before. Now I'm going back. What has become of the commercial world is a mockery of my dreams for it. It's going around in loops. Now what the world needs to replace Google is a Google like the one that we fell in love with, one that's working for the greater good, that points off site for no reason other than it's the right place to point to. Now with their patents, and their captured content, Google is no longer that. It's a loop because five years ago you could have said exactly the same about Alta Vista or Infoseek, after they became more than a just search engine. Anyway, as with all middle of the night screeds, it's quite possible that I'll see the light in the morning and realize this was wrong or paranoid, or whatever. Postscript: Another possibility -- we could just ignore the ads. A northern route? I've now got dinner invitations in Wisconsin, Illinois and Indiana. This suggests a northern route for my cross-country drive. There would be some closure to stopping in Madison on the way back east. When I moved to California in 1979, my departure point was East Johnson Street in Madison.
Newsweek: Blogman Becomes Harvardman. Heh. Lessig: "American software developers will continue to choke on software patents." Wouldn't you know it, just as I'm moving out of town, they add Jing Jing to the menu at Waiters on Wheels. Praise Murphy! News.Com: Google's search for new ad revenue. BBC: "A chain of UK internet cafes is offering low-cost wireless net access at its branches." David Davies: Mobile blogging how-to guide.
On this day two years ago Bill Humphries found NASDAQ feeds in XML. They're still there and they still work. I'm giving a seminar at Dartmouth on May 9 entitled "Internet protocols for the Web as a writing environment." Interesting timing, because it was five years ago, to the day, that I wrote the piece that inspired XML-RPC and SOAP. "It's RPC over HTTP via XML. I believe it's the next protocol for runtimes." It's striking how fast the new community aggregator is. It's only subscribed to 18 feeds but it usually completes scans in less than ten seconds. I figure this is because it's on a fast local network that's close to a backbone. Credit where it's due As with many "firsts" on the Web, the current moblog craze was well-explored last year and the year before and likely the year before that. David Davies, last year, for example, blogged from the crowd at a football match, and from inside a plane. The fact that so many things are new so many times is a good thing, even though to those who came before it can be very irritating to see people claim credit for inventing what you thought you invented. Here's why it's good. Because ideas get improved, and made relevant in new contexts. It's why patents in software are so dangerous and so unlikely to be deserved. I explained it once quite concisely. "Everything on the Internet is just like something else. Or if it's any good it's just like everything else." And I have a motto to go with this, of course. "Only steal from the best."
Reuters: Blog publishers stealing Web limelight. I'm not pro-war, but all the estimates of what it would cost to win the war I've heard are missing one thing. We can pay for reconstructing Iraq by pumping oil. We can also pay ourselves back for the cost of the war.
BBC: "Pioneer 10, the first of only four spacecraft to leave our Solar System, has sent its last signal." Paul Boutin is moving to NYC this weekend. Looking for a job in Spartanburg, South Carolina? It's now a weblog with an RSS 2.0 feed, a first, as far as I know, and a very valid application of RSS. Steve Ivy writes: "JobMart.com has RSS Feeds of each of their databases." Aaron Cope reports that the Perl jobs site has had feeds for "as long as I can remember." UserLand is offering storage upgrades for Radio users. Jeff Bezos, the founder and CEO of Amazon was issued a patent yesterday pertaining to discussion group software. Kottke: "When companies get big, do they just naturally turn into bullies or is it a conscious decision?" On this day in Y2K, Manila got a plug-in architecture. RSS for liberal arts majors Not enough people are using RSS aggregators. So far it's mostly been for people with a substantial investment in information, engineers, librarians, lawyers. A lot more people, even people with liberal arts degrees, would use the software, if they knew how valuable it is.
Each Manila site has one or more managing editors, contributing editors, content editors and members. The ME's can decide how public the site is, it could be totally private, members only, or some sections can be private. In this model, the MEs decide what feeds the community subscribes to. Then, using the same aggregator that's built into Radio, every hour, Manila reads the subscribed-to feeds, and they come together on the aggregator page on the Manila site. Each site on a server can subscribe to any number of feeds. If two sites subscribe to the same feed, it's actually only read once each hour. This optimization was surprisingly easy given Manila's internal architecture. Anyway, a rough prototype of this is up and running at Harvard. You're welcome to try it out, even bookmark it. I still have a lot of work to do here. I want to have a page that shows you which feeds it's reading. The Prefs panel hasn't even started yet. Lots of work to do, but it is usable. Now if you've been curious about what it's like to run an aggregator of your own, check out this one which we're running for you. Web services for the people In the News.Com interview that ran yesterday, I repeated an oft-repeated mantra. "The corporate application of Web services is perfectly valid. There's nothing wrong with using the Internet as way of moving money and purchase orders around. But that's not all there is, and it's not even the most interesting application. The way I see Web services is as a way of connecting server applications with writing tools for the purposes of creating weblogs." It really is very simple. SOAP is glue that connects apps with rich user interfaces to gutsy faceless back-ends running on the Internet. It unplugs the bathtubs so you don't have to get into the trunk while the big guys do the driving. You can ride up front with Bill and his friends. BTW, News.Com says "Web logs" and the rest of us say "weblogs." When quoting myself through News.Com I take the liberty of correcting the spelling.
News.Com: Blogging Comes to Harvard. ABA Journal: "I’ve started getting fan mail now,” says Martin Schwimmer, publisher of the weblog called the Trademark Blog. “It’s safe to say that I got virtually no fan letters when I was just a trademark lawyer.” Scott Rosenberg's piece about the Davos reporter who got caught saying what she really thinks. Sterling Hughes: "Overture, Inktomi and Google will battle it out, and Inktomi is going to get creamed." Matt Brown of Macromedia shows how to use Dreamweaver with Radio, thanks to Paolo and eVectors. "Blogging is cool," says Matt. 256 days since I quit smoking. Yeah, I'm a programmer. Sue me. This evening I got something working that I've wanted for quite some time. A community RSS aggregator in Manila. I'll explain it in the morning. I still have another programming project tonight -- to get Radio working with Audblog. We've got the wire we need on the server side, now I have to try to call it from the workstation and see if it works. Fingers crossed. (Postscript: Worked the first time.) Praise Murphy. And Jake has an announcement, but I'm going to let him make it first on the Radio UserLand mail list before pointing to it here. There's gotta be a reward for being in the loop. Jake took some great pics of my house and dumpster #2. Ars Technica: "We're probably Harvard's oldest blog, and we're certainly its most popular." Now I know for a fact that Ashcroft is crazy. With all the problems in the world, they go after people who sell hash pipes and bongs. Geez Louise.
Daypop Word Bursts are "heightened usage of certain words in weblogs within the last couple days." This is News Quakes, "world news for the lazy," brought to you by the makers of Info Breakfast. LA Times: Internet users drive South Korean politics. News.Com: "Overture Services plans to acquire the Web search services of Fast Search & Transfer, another sign that it intends to compete more strongly on the Internet search market." Phil Ringnalda has implemented the white-on-orange XML icon in the more politically correct PNG format. Dylan Greene did the button in CSS, which is precisely as politically correct as the PNG version. Ev plays the age card Evan Williams says: "I hope I'm not that cynical when I'm older, just because I've been around the block a few times," about me, quoted here. Heh. I could play the age card too, in the reverse direction, but I won't. Google is cut from the same cloth as every other Silicon Valley company. They hire from the same talent pool. I saw that last year when we were coordinating on the Google API. They're actually a bit dumber than earlier companies because the dotcom thing was such an incredible distortion field, there isn't any prior art on how to coexist anymore. So they think they're the center of the universe, and get a lot of reinforcement for that, but it ain't true. It looks like they're going down the predictable path. So what. If you got stock Ev you're going to get a lot of Kleiner Perkins money, and I hope you invest it wisely. Okay there's a tiny little bit of reverse "age card" stuff. Please forgive me. I mean well. Selling out Now to the substance of what Ev said. I only noticed it after I got rid of the dirty ageist bit in his post. Ev says "Blogger Sells Out, some guy says. Dave, of course, agrees. Sigh." A lot of entrepreneurs who sell out have a problem dealing with it. Even though they sold out they don't think they did. When I sold out in 1987, I went through the same thing. I am going through it now, living in a house that I sold. Did I sell out? Yes I did. It was raining yesterday and I was thinking how much the garden would love the rain in a couple of months when the sun returns. Ah ah. It won't be my garden then. For all I know the new owner will have already torn down the house and turned the garden into a dirty mess. It's his garden now to do with as he pleases. I don't think he really cares about it, he might not even know it exists. That's how selling a company works too. I was paid a lot of money to give it up. I sold out. Just like Evan did. Fact, not theory. I knew this about my company a few moments after signing the papers to merge it with Symantec in 1987. Immediately the mood changed. I was given an order. I gulped. It's so strange. Why is he giving me an order? Oh that's right, I work for him now. Oy. This will strike Evan at some point, and I hope he blogs about it. He would make history in doing so. Why weblogs are cool Imagine a News.Com or NY Times article about the deal we're talking about. I might be able to get a sound bite in there, but that would be it. There would likely be a transcription error, so maybe I'd be quoted saying something I don't agree with, and it would also likely not be my best quote. But most important, people reading the article would not likely find out what I really think. And if new information was revealed over time, or for some reason my perspective shifted, that would not be part of the article because they only do one article about any given news event. Because I have a weblog, I can write about it at length, several times. I can write until I'm finished. If you don't care, that's cool too, you can hit the Back button. But I get to say what I want, and I can get it right, and if I don't there's a fresh empty page tomorrow that I'm going to fill, Murphy-willing of course.
James Duff shows shows how to add RSS 2.0
This weekend I'll be at the Stanford Spectrum Conference. Don Park: Rebooting the Examiner with P2P Journalism. Lance Knobel: "Demos, one of the most interesting policy think tanks in the UK, has created a weblog for its staff to note ideas and developments, called the Greenhouse." Maybe the skirt story was a hoax. I've heard people say they don't like self-indulgent weblogs, where people talk about feelings, so if you're one of those, look the other way. Today a huge wave of regret swamped me; about leaving California, selling the house, moving east. My friends, my habits, the things I got so bored with, all of a sudden seemed so dear. Nothing more to say. I'm sure it will pass, and the excitement will return, but today was a sad, rainy, sweetly melancholy day.
Doug Fox reviews Alan Meckler's new weblog. Jamie Lewis of The Burton Group has a weblog. Slashdot on blogging from a cellphone.
Valenti's case might make some sense to honorable people if he worked for a moral industry. But it's built around a lie, which he repeats often -- that we're taking money out of the mouths of artists if we don't pay for the music we use. We've already figured out that almost no money goes to the artists. If you reform your industry, your moral appeal might have some weight with honest people. Thanks to Jake Savin and Jeff Cheney for helping load up dumpster #2 yesterday. Later today I'll order the third and last one. The garage is totally empty. I ended up keeping about five boxes of stuff from a big two-car garage loaded to the rafters with the detritus of 23 years in Silicon Valley. A triumph for weblogs? Steve MacLaughlin: "Some bloggers think this is a big win for weblogging. As if Google's acquisition of Blogger should be viewed as a triumph for the weblogging medium. It's not. It's just one company deciding they can take out the little guy for some printed paper, and the little guy gets released from his silicon handcuffs. It's just another company that you thought was different proving that they're just like all the other sell outs." My comment. Steve, anyone who knows anything about Silicon Valley knew that Google would be no different. John Doerr, a man who I consider a friend, is in the business of IPOs. He doesn't back companies for the good of the Internet, although I'm sure he doesn't mind if they are good for the Internet. But that's not why he invests. You never heard of Google before he gave them $25 million to buy all those great servers. They are going public, for sure, with the hottest IPO since Netscape (another Doerr deal), as soon as the market is receptive. I've tried to be straight about this, for a long time, but people didn't want to hear it. Part of the weblog phenomenon is opening up the back rooms so they're visible to the public. I've been an insider in the Valley since I arrived in Sept 1979. I had no illusions about Google. They were and are a wonderful search engine. Larry and Sergey are great technologists and entrepreneurs. And then as they grow, they hire out of the general talent pool of Silicon Valley, and become just like all the other companies here that you've heard of, that have come and gone. It's all one big thing. W2K server issue We're burning in a new installation of Frontier 9 on a Windows 2000 server at Harvard, and after running for a while the server starts refusing requests. I have not seen this behavior before on other systems. Here's a narrative. 1. I tried to refresh the home page and got an error. 2. I tried again, and it worked. 3. I tried again and it failed. 4. I quit Frontier and restarted it. 5. Frontier's internal server didn't initialize. When I tried to do it manually I got this error: Can't bind to listen stream because TCP/IP error code 10048 -- Address already in use. This is the key to the problem. What does this mean? Is some other program using some resource that Frontier needs? When I quit Frontier did it fail to release a resource? 6. I tried quitting and restarting Frontier again. Same error. 7. At this point the server is not responding at all. So restarted the machine. 8. It worked, the server is taking hits again. Now, obviously I'm not going to be able to restart the machine whenever it gets in this loop. Has anyone seen this error before? Any ideas what the cause is? A workaround? Praise Murphy! Your humble servant, Dave Workaround? After I posted the note above, I did a search for the error message, and the top item was a thread on the Radio UserLand discussion group from a smart user who had exactly the same problem. Jake suggested a fix that worked. Net-net, next time this situation rears its ugly head on the Harvard server, we will try the fix in Frontier and see if it helps. If so, I'll add a startup script that makes sure user.inetd.listens is empty, and we can move on to the next deal-stopper. Jason Levine hit the same problem, saying it was a "socket pooling" issue with IIS, and found a workaround. It's possible the whole thing could be nabbed by turning off IIS on the Harvard machine. I don't want IIS in the loop in any way. There's a possible difference between this server and the servers that UserLand runs. Fix? It turns out IIS was running on that machine. We turned it off. That should nail it.
NY Times: "People with knowledge of the deal, which gave Pyra founders and investors shares in privately held Google, say it was signed without any real plan as to how the two companies would work together." Daypop now has a ranking algorithm. Dan Chan explains. Jeff Walsh: Blogging and Journalism. Don Park: "Blogspace is a massive ant colony." Glenn Fleishman: "In representing blogs to a non-blogging audience, reporters seem drawn to sweep them into a single heap." Cleaning out the garage, I came across a column I wrote for Infoworld in 1982. I just typed it into my weblog so I wouldn't lose it again. I find it really interesting to see how many of my writing gestures were already established 21 years ago. Yet it's very anachronistic, deliberately so. 256K chips were unthinkable in 1982. Heh. Projection screens were rare. But syntax errors are still with us. Steve Zellers: "It makes me cringe when Dave talks about throwing out lots of junk." Five years ago today, Vignette, a competitor, opened a demo app that rendered Scripting News in their environment using the XML format of the day. This was an important milestone on the road to RSS 0.91. Nelson Minar: "Trillian Pro has an RSS plug-in that delivers blog content to your IM client." According to Bruce Loebrich, Trillian only reads RSS 0.91, and not 2.0. Joey deVilla, the accordian guy, exposes a new sexy thing going on in Japan. You won't believe your eyes, and you'd be right not to. How did I miss the charity wet T-shirt contest among the blogging babes? Noah Yesterday I mentioned talking with Noah Glass, but I didn't mention that Noah is the owner and developer of the audio blogging tool I linked to yesterday. He said he was doing something called OddBlog. Hadn't heard of it. He said "you wrote about it on Scripting News." Oh shit Alzheimer's again. "I write about lots of things," I said, "my memory ain't what it used to be." He said "you wrote about it today." Gulp. It's really getting bad. I asked for the name again. He said OddBlog. I looked at the site. "Ohhhh AudBlog," I said. There's problem number one, the name. It's descriptive, not memorable, and impossible to pronounce. Problem number two, which I reported yesterday, is that it only works with Blogger. After talking with Noah, I understand why. Blogger is centralized, making configuration easy. Radio is not centralized, and further the user might be behind a firewall or NAT and unable to receive an XML-RPC call, which is how Noah's software works. One solution, and it's not a very pretty one, is to do a mail-to-weblog, or use instant messaging (AIM or Jabber), but then the user might not have the features enabled, or want them enabled. I suggested that we work this out with Brent Simmons, who has had to traverse many of these issues in his work on NetNewsWire. Probably for Radio users the only option that will work is some kind of polling in the opposite direction, or just send me an email and I'll do the copy-paste. Of course, some wankers out there have given me shit for criticizing Noah's product. Comes with the territory. Alan Kay said that Macintosh was the first computer worth criticizing. I love Noah and he knows that. I've always admired his spirit, and AudBlog (change the name please!) reflects that. I want it to be a success so I tell him how I think it can be better, or in this case, made to work at all. To those who think they're better software designers, I quote Scoop Nisker. "If you don't like the news go out and make some of your own."
Ernie the Attorney: "Goddammit. I need a Macintosh!" The sign guy at Shea was great. On opening day in the bozo years before 1969 after the first pitch he'd hold up a sign that said Wait Till Next Year. Everyone laughed. It was so true.
Scott Loftesness is onto something. Weblogs at the Palo Alto Daily News. Ooooh that's a good idea. MailEdit is a Mail-to-Weblog callback tool "that allows remote posting of entries to your Radio-managed weblog." East Broadway Ron: "I am sure that in some culture there is either a good or bad omen if there is snow on your wedding day." NY Times: "Sun's quandary is that its business appears to be alarmingly dependent on high-cost, proprietary hardware at a time when technology trends and customers seem to be headed in the other direction -- toward inexpensive, PC-based hardware that is more like an industrial commodity." Scoble reviews Alan Meckler's new weblog. Pam: "I've been hit up all day by kids wanting me to do audio blogs with them." She uses an audio blogging tool from Macromedia. Oliver Wrede: "The hierarchyTemplates Plug-In enables additional templates for Manila sites." Doug Ransom: "Has anyone exposed an RSS feed from Microsoft Sharepoint Team Services?" SF Chronicle: "The San Francisco Examiner laid off most of its editorial staff Friday." Don Park: "It would be great if Examiner can be turned into an outlet for the best blogspace can offer." What's new in Python 2.3.
It isn't exactly what I've been waiting for. I think they're doing too much, I don't want them posting to my weblog, I want them to send me a URL of the MP3 they create via email, and I'll link to it from my weblog. If someone with a weblog can't manage that, it ain't much of a weblog. Joi Ito: "A story about how Ivan, a meme, is created by Alice and makes his way through weblog space." On this day in 1996, Bill Gates wrote an essay for me. They're starting to show previews on HBO for the next season of Six Feet Under, which starts next weekend. I love that show. Here's something even cooler. Kathy Bates, is in the cast now. Excellent. Maybe she'll do a nude scene like the one she did in About Schmidt. On this day in 1999, an essay that explains the breakthrough that led to Manila. "We're working on a new breed of content management software, putting the editorial tools right where the writers want them, in the web browser. When they're looking at a bit of text it's just a matter of clicking on a button to edit it. As a writer, this is what I've always wanted when working on the web. Remembering two locations, one for the browser and one on my local desktop, is too taxing for my mind. The flow stops, I have to use my brain to find the stuff to edit, and you'd be amazed how many times that extra work makes me forget why I was going there in the first place." There was a screen shot included in the piece. I got an upset email from Jacob Levy asking if George Matesky knew I was broadcasting the fact that I was considering hiring him. Heh. There really was a George Matesky, but he died before I was born. He was a semi-famous anarchist who blew up phone booths in New York. One of the first terrorists. 2/22/01: "The art that comes from competition, once gone can't be synthesized, it must be recreated." I got a little pushback, from a couple of people, about the idea of competing with Google, expressed in the current DaveNet. I think some people see competition as a negative thing, but I don't. I believe in its power. I respect my competitors. You can learn the most from competitors. They understand you better than your friends. NY Times: In Utah, Nature's Skyline. I'm really yearning to get on the road.
A directory of Manila hosting services. OJR: "I want to cry for Salon.com, but somehow the tears won't flow." Scott Rosenberg: "It's this kind of careful vetting of sources that has made the OJR into the power that it is today." ideaForest does Manila hosting for $6 per month. Brian Buck channeling The Band: "Take a load off Fanny, take a load for free, take a load off Fanny, and you put the load, put the load, put the load, right on me." Join Chris Gulker and wife Linda on a monastic retreat in rural Massachusetts. Dumpster #1 is almost full, so I ordered #2 to arrive tomorrow. Already planning on how to be more economical with space in the second one. I think two may end up being enough. Dana Blankenhorn: "Most analysis of yesterday's FCC decision on telephone regulation is 100% wrong." Jon Udell lists ten things we should know about Microsoft's InfoPath. Here's what it looks like. News.Com: "Inktomi has lengthened its arrangement to provide search results for Microsoft's MSN Web portal, quashing speculation that the software giant would scrap the deal out of competitive concerns." Twice in the last two days I've heard people say that Manila costs $900. Yes it's true, if you want to operate your own server, you can license Manila for $899 and host 1000 sites on that server, making the cost less than $1 per site. If you're not interested in 1000 sites, you can get Manila hosting from weblogger.com for $9.95 per month per site. They even do template design and static rendering. Compare this to hosting options for any other easy to use content management system. I think you'll find it's quite competitive. Let's compare apples to apples. Smart informed experts should be armed with all the info. I had dinner last night with Gnome-Girl. Two years ago today: "Last summer I fell in love with music again, thanks to Napster. I had my checkbook out, along with ideas for new ways to experience music using the Internet. Software, music, networking, playlists, writing and community. What a killer combo. Everyone was excited. People were talking about music in supermarkets." Kevin Werbach explains what the FCC was thinking.
DaveNet: Comments on the Google-Blogger deal. When I was cleaning out the garage I found a story I wrote in the early 80s, missing the first page, unfortunately. It was better than I remembered. I almost threw out what I thought was a random issue of PC Mag, until I looked more closely and saw it was the first issue, volume 1, number 1. Marc Barrot is rendering RSS in an outline in a browser. My first dumpster has arrived. I made a dent in the piles of garbage in just one part of the house, barely covering the bottom of the 20 cubic yard dumpster. I estimate I'll need four of these before the house is ready to move. Filling a dumpster is good exercise! Sweating. I like it. Danny Sullivan: "Google has long said it has no intention of becoming a portal, but so far, it's hard not to see the acquisition of Blogger as adding a portal feature in the same way that Yahoo did when it bought GeoCities." Douglas Rushkoff: "It's a little unsettling that Blogger is now a Google venture." Jon Udell: "NewsGator is a fabulous hack." It's so sad to see what's become of WebMonkey. Business 2.0: "The Blogger hosting service will become faster and more reliable when it's moved to Google servers, and millions of people who have never given a thought to blogs will be exposed to them when they visit Google." AP: "The practice of showing commercials before the start of movies defrauds the public and should be stopped, according to lawsuits filed against two movie theater chains." Bravo! Ernie the Attorney: The three stages of blog-awareness. Search Engine Watch: "Google is Marcia Brady, the family member who seemingly gets more attention than the others." Phil Ringnalda drools over a Movable Type plug-in that adds a feature that Manila had at its first release, over 3 years ago. Paolo: "This morning I have learned that the father of my friend and partner, Simone, has suddenly died." Prayers to Simone and his family.
Ted Turner: "Only a bullet will stop me." News.Com: "Require anything that has antipiracy technology built in to be clearly labeled and let consumers decide at the cash register." Makes sense. InfoWorld: Microsoft acquires Virtual PC from Connectix. Jeremy Allaire: "As RSS 2.0 gains traction and the content moves from being simple text content to richly tagged meta-data and more or less structured content, what's the proper productivity interface for digesting all that data?" Megnut: "Beware the false blog software." Heh. News.Com: "A Merrill Lynch analyst on Wednesday voiced concerns about Microsoft's response to the growing popularity of open-source software, echoing statements made by a former Microsoft executive last week." Sterling Hughes: "Google is not a horrible monster, but it is also not an entity to be worshipped. It is a for-profit company that develops a quality product, and it isn't yet evil. That's a big accomplishment." Mary Jo: Microsoft Tests the Blogging-Tool Waters. Patrick Grote: "Google should be concerned about AlltheWeb." TechCentralStation: "It's time to turn over part of the responsibility for Homeland Security to 'smart mobs.'" Tara Sue: "Ladies, we must stop raising assholes, or at least stop having sex with them." BBC: "Hundreds of large companies are being sent a guide by the music industry warning them that staff are downloading music illegally over the internet." Don Park: "When you start a fight, make sure you have someone around to stop it." Scoble: "My boss's boss tells me that weblogs are all the rage at the Demo Conference. He asked me to brief him on the topic." Google don't blink
BTW, anyone who believes that Google actually owns the Web should remember that Microsoft owns the browser. Google is a good search engine and blogging tool. We don't know how they will connect them yet. I bet they don't either. Note to Teoma. If you want to compete with Google, you must have image search. Adam asks if Teoma should have an XML-RPC API, and the answer is of course. And it should go further than the Google API. Of course the Google API should go further than the Google API too.
Forbes: Google Goes Blog-Crazy. Online Journalism Review reports on a workshop at Columbia to teach journalists how to write for the Web using Photoshop and Dreamweaver, which are excellent graphic design tools. Weblog tools are more appropriate for writers.
Jamie Kellner, the Turner exec credited with the quote about bathrooms and personal video recorders, has stepped down. Here are the docs that explain how to add popup comment windows to a Manila weblog. I'm also asking Jake to add email notification for comment posts. We should be able to make that work for Radio as well. Joi Ito goes blog-crazy too. "I'm enjoying dragging Doc and Dave around and watching the other blogs wiggle as they follow Doc and Dave around." A list of "known blogs authored by known (or suspected) Microsoft employees." I got a great email from Brigham Stevens who I knew when he was at Marimba in the mid-90s. He reminded me that I gave him $5 to buy an ad on his Commentary Channel, which was a futuristic application of Marimba's technology. He saved the dollar, until he hit some tough times and used it to buy lunch. Good deal. Anyway Brigham wants to know why I'm going to Boston. Fair question. If you've been out of the loop you might not know that I am now a Fellow at the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard University. Brigham says he remembers parties at my house before the DotCom boom and bust. I miss Arthur and Sammy and President Kimmie. Those were the good old days. But there are plenty of good old days to come! Mena Trott (co-author of Movable Type) on the Google-Blogger deal: "The purchase has made an already active space even more exciting and we can only imagine that there will be a flurry of developments in the upcoming months." Signed the papers This morning we had a little ceremony where I signed the papers to sell my house. Tomorrow the money will arrive in my bank account. No more mortgage payments or property taxes. I have sixty days to vacate. Now the next big thing to do is to decide what to do with all the crap I've accumulated, then drive to Boston. Whew. February 18 over the years Last year on this day Evan Williams said: "It's hard to believe there are people at Google who don't get the Web." The year before that, on this day, Glenn Fleishman wrote about Google acquiring DejaNews, and thereby rescuing 500 million early UseNet postings. On this day in Y2K, Montana News Daily, a Manila site that doesn't update anymore, said: "I never thought of Charles Kuralt as a lady killer." Me neither. Voila, a perspective shift. The thing that weblogs are so good at. Guys if you want to get laid you can have an egghead as a role model. Nice. Relaxing. Girls, it's okay to love a geek, even lust for one. One more. On this day in 1995, I wrote an essay that people still read, that predicted weblogs. Comments in Manila As my attention is turning to Harvard, it's also returning to Manila. It's a good piece of software but there are a few obvious modernizations needed. For example, the Discuss link on every news item really should be Comments with the number of comments in parens. When you click on the link a window should pop up, with the comments for that post. After you close the window the number should change. It's actually turned out to be quite easy because we already have Manila set up as a comment server for Radio. Jake is completing this tonight, and I should be able to test it this morning, Murphy-willing of course.
Radio: How to backup and restore your weblog. BTW, there's a cool bonus app in there. Blog Browsers. The format Radio uses to back up the weblog is a familiar one. Wired: "Frugality is Oddpost's hallmark." Denver Post: "It came as a shock to many Japanese Americans when Rep Howard Coble recently told a talk-radio audience in North Carolina that he agreed with the internment of Japanese Americans during World War II." Bob Frankston on Boston driving. Gary Secondino: "The fun starts when multiple Goofy Space-Shot Asshole drivers converge into one spot." Behold Oddpost 2.0 -- and thus the answer to the question -- What became of Oddpost? It lives.
Ed Cone: "Howard Coble has once again run afoul of the Weblog Nation." Instapundit picks up the Coble story via Ed. That's great. It'll get the story distribution through the DC pundit crowd now.
Microsoft's Matt Williams compares Sharepoint to weblog tools. BTW, to Matt, UserLand's products run on all versions of Windows (and Mac). You don't have to use Unix. Also, both products, Radio and Manila, are also more than weblogs.
I've always wondered if Mr Straw knows that his name is the title of a Grateful Dead song. This is why weblogs are so revolutionary. Just kidding. I got a form response from American Airlines to my letter. | |||||||||||||||||||||||||
On my way out of town I happened to stop at a light and saw a former landlord. I gave him the finger. At first he didn't see it and he waved with a smile. Then he did and returned the gesture. So if there's any unity or balance, perhaps Bill Kozak will be standing on East Johnson when I drive back in to Madtown, with his middle finger raised, and when he sees me, he will smile and wave. 
