Saturday, May 31, 2003

Scoble: "Our products are too freaking hard to use." 

8/26/99: "Bill Gates, Steve Ballmer, check this out. You have less to fear from Sun, Netscape or AOL. Your worst enemy is in the corridors of Redmond. Go set up one of your own boxes. Do it all yourself. Your eyes will open." 

Responses to comments on the weblog article. 

Hanan Cohen reports that Google-Israel has been broken since May 5. 

I was interviewed yesterday by a researcher at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government for a case study on the role weblogs played in the downfall of Trent Lott. The study should be out in a month or so, and will be made public. They charge for the studies, I'm going to ask them to make this one available on the Web, since it's about the Web. 

Dan Gillmor: "...Wall Street Journal's All Things Digital conference made reporters promise that all sessions were off the record unless the speakers specifically agreed to put the comments on the record. Regular conference attendees were under no such restraint, and as a result we have coverage from the audience, not the journalists." 

Aaron Cope makes a valuable point, but does it in a harsh way. His point is well-taken. A weblog clearly does not have to order the posts strictly chronologically. If I believed that, then Scripting News would not be a weblog. 

Wes Felter: "I looked at the WASTE design document and as I suspected the protocol is a piece of junk." 

blogjsim is an instant messaging plug-in for blojsom.  

Ernie the Attorney: "Maybe Jobs is right to factor mortality into his marketing strategy." 

News.Com: "When we sense that a person is making an effort to copy the way that we speak, we tend to like that person more, they believed." 

Jason Shellen has a wireless photo blog. 

Don Park: "CSS heavy web pages on display at CSS Zen Garden look great." 

Morning coffee notes 

An old tradition is new again!

Greetings from New York City. Easy drive from Cambridge. Left at 4AM. Found a great oldies station from Hartford, CT. The first song they played was It Don't Come Easy by Ringo Starr. "Gotta pay your dues if you want to sing the blues." The cool thing about the song is that George Harrison, Eric Clapton and Stephen Stills are performing too. That's what I liked the most about Ringo, he needed a little help from his friends, and he appreciated it too.

Another cool thing about driving to NY is when you get close enough to see big green Interstate highway signs that say New York City. For some reason I giggle when I see one. I'm used to seeing San Francisco, even Los Angeles and Reno on these signs. But a freeway sign for New York City? Skyscrapers and everything.

Okay both the WinerLog guys were at OSCOM, and they both behaved fairly badly. The stalking is starting to happen in meatspace now, and that's not fun. Pretty soon I'm going to bring the cops into it. Beware wiener boys, you're getting too close. You both have reps to lose. Nuf said, hopefully.

I think I've got the key for speaking with a Boston accent. Deprecate the R's. So Hartford becomes Hatfod. That's all there is to it, except when you really want to get it you should let just a hint of an R back. Also, reading the highway signs I kept seeing Oxford, which I wanted to write as a hex number: oXF08D. Okay, the 8 doesn't really work. But any word that begins with OX is a candidate for easy hexing.

We're getting close to June 14, when, last year, to people who read this site I just disappeared. "Lots of non-Internet stuff going on," I said then. To me it was the day I quit smoking, and also the day I checked into the hospital (when I wrote that post I didn't know for sure I'd have to go into the hospital, but I wasn't surprised when I did). Shortly after my reappearance, Seth Dillingham said something really nice and very memorable. And for sure, on May 31, 2002 I had chest pain, and was in denial on how sick I really was. Let me share that lesson with you. If you have a pain inside your chest where your heart is, go to see a doctor now, don't think you can exercise your way out of the corner. It doesn't work that way.

Friday, May 30, 2003

Essay: What makes a weblog a weblog? In progress. 

News.Com: "A day after developers at America Online's Nullsoft unit quietly released file-sharing software, AOL pulled the link to the product from the subsidiary's Web site." 

Here's the source: waste.zip. Gnu General Public License. 

Ed Cone links to a story from Mark Tosczak, a NY Times stringer, on getting credit for his work. "The real problem with the Times policy on stringers is that it's counter to what a newspaper is supposed to be all about: the truth." 

Tony Byrne of CMS Watch stopped by to say hello. He says that there are successful 40-person software companies. In my talk yesterday I said this was a species of software developer with a lot of power, a beast of the 80s, extinct this century.  

9AM: I'm listening to Jon Udell's keynote at OSCOM. The net connection works (obviously). Of course he's talking about things I love. Apparently he went over his allotted time, I wanted to ask him to comment on the opportunities for open source projects to integrate with commercial software. Jon is in a unique position to talk about that. 

How I wrote WMAWAW 

I did something different with this piece, I didn't publish it for a few months. I started writing it as soon as I got to Cambridge in March. We did about ten Thursday night sessions. I polished my skills as a user, and watched other people learn weblogs, saw what they got, and didn't. I asked other people for ideas of what made weblogs different from professional pubs and Wikis. I thought, and I wrote, and deleted, and wrote some more. In other words, I did something rather unlike a weblog to try to get to the core of what one is. So if you ever doubt that I believe in other forms of writing, put that to rest. There are occasions when you want to spend a fair amount of time reflecting and editing. Some writing that isn't like a fresco, writ in quick-dry plaster.

Thursday, May 29, 2003

MSNBC: Microsoft, AOL settle browser suit. MS pays AOL $750 million. Web developers get $0. Web users get a buggy browser. Looks like AOL is switching back to MSIE. Rob Enderle is quoted in article, says AOL is divesting Netscape. Huh? Article written by Jon Bonne, the guy I debated. 

Other reports: AP, News.Com. 

Donna got the soundbite at my OSCOM keynote today. There's something for everyone, whether you like Bill Gates or Richard Stallman, or neither. Before that I told the story of how XML-RPC came to be, and how Eric Raymond liked it so much. Then I hazarded a guess that if Eric had dinner with Bob Atkinson, one of the co-designers of XML-RPC, that they'd agree on a lot, and probably enjoy each others' company, even though Bob is a senior guy at (you guessed it) Microsoft. Had I chosen a song for the keynote it would have been Give Peace a Chance. And in honor of Bob Hope's 100th birthday we could have played Thanks for the Memories. 

Caleb Crain: Tea in Iraq. 

News.Com: "SCO Group Chief Executive Darl McBride said a published report that his company may take legal action against Linux founder Linus Torvalds was overstated." 

Nullsoft: "WASTE is a software product and protocol that enables secure distributed communication for small (on the order of 10-50 nodes) trusted groups of users." 

Good news. Brent Simmons is editing Rogers Cadenhead's book about Radio. He tripped over system.verbs.apps.google, which is new since he worked on the code. It is kind of funny, in the old days apps were things that ran on your computer. They still are, but after SOAP and XML-RPC they could just as easily be running on a server farm. The Google verbs are damned useful, I used them to construct my weblog search engine, which I use several times every day. 

Alan MacCormack: The True Costs of Software. 

It's Thursday and we will be having our usual Thursday evening weblog writers session. 

Mark Leighton Fisher: "I am agnostic about Open Source vs Closed Source." 

Daily Princetonian: "This past semester, the nationwide debate over file-sharing and online music theft hit the University in a personal way as the Recording Industry Association of America, a trade group representing the interests of the major record labels, sued sophomore Daniel Peng for what could have been billions of dollars." 

BBC: "Apple is clamping down on piracy by imposing restrictions on the way that music downloaded from its iTunes service can be shared." 

Not much response yet to my piece about weblogs, RSS and blogging APIs. This is an area where users can have great influence, now. Later, probably not. I've tried to explain the issues in non-technical terms, yet of course as soon as words like APIs and XML appear a lot of ordinary people tune out. But this is where the politics of the software world is played. And later, when it's AOL vs Microsoft in the blogging wars, you can be sure that users will have absolutely no say in the outcome. 

Survey: Will blogs wipe out professional journalists? 

That's a re-run of a survey we did one year ago today. The results then were quite interesting, and I wanted to see if, one year later, anything had changed. 

Register: "Whirling Dervishes Software, the company founded by Windows API expert Henk Devos, claims to have broken Microsoft's monopoly on applications that reside in Windows Explorer." 

I've given Tim Bray his share of grief, but in this piece about the state of CSS, he nails it. I esp like the bit about rocket science. Right on.  

4/17/03: This is simple, and it does what I want. 

NY Times: "Some of Mr. Bragg's colleagues on the national staff had exchanged phone calls and e-mail messages, angered by comments from Mr. Bragg suggesting that it was routine for Times correspondents to rely on freelance contributors to do the bulk of the reporting on some articles." 

Wednesday, May 28, 2003

Thoughts on blogging formats and protocols in May 2003. As OSCOM starts, the issues of interop betw content management tools is very hot in the open source world thanks to work by Paul Everitt and Gregor Rothfuss. By making my position public about the equivalent issues in the weblog world, I will be joining with them in requesting that we put aside our differences (I'm not sure there are any) and establish a set of principles on how we build from here.  

David Weinberger tells an interesting story about domain names and people's names. How do you find a childhood friend on the Web? he wonders. I had an related experience yesterday. May 27 is the birthday of a childhood friend of mine, Mitchell Stern. There's no good reason for me to remember his birthday, but I do. So yesterday I looked him up on Google. The first hit took me to a guy about the right age, living in about the right place, but on further inspection I noted that (gullp) he died. It's his obituary. Since there's no year on it, it's impossible to know if it's the Mitchell Stern I knew as a kid. Not much more too say other than it really spooked me. 

Karlin has a date and location for an Irish bloggers get-together in Dublin. 

Scoble is starting to understand his new relationship with the rest of the world. "You anti-Microsoft'ers will love this.."  

Three years ago today, twenty-two pictures from Venezia, fourteen pictures from Firenze. 

Four years ago: "Salon (justifiably) brags that they've matured to the point where they could send a reporter to Yugoslavia. But the web was already there. People on the ground all over the world. Some of them are great writers and have passion for the truth and aren't serving the same masters that the bigtimes at WSJ, NYT and CNN. And most of them don't have websites, yet, largely because it is too complicated and expensive to have one. When this bubble bursts we'll get a new burst of diversity in thought and vision on the web." 

A must-read by Joshua Allen about CXO's and leaf-nodes on the weblog tree. 

Tuesday, May 27, 2003

DaveNet: Who will pay, part 2. 

A new Manila theme from Bryan Bell.  

Cory Doctorow reports on an Apple update that makes it so that iTunes can only stream to people on the same subnet.  

News.Com: Apple limits iTunes file sharing. 

Tim, we solved that problem, in March last year. Why not use the system we put in place. All you gotta do is ask. Or use Google. The first hit points to the rankings page. Click on any of the links to see who's subscribing. And get this -- this isn't just for Radio users, we created an open system that anyone can ping. Do they? I don't know. Ask them. 

Jon Udell called it The RSS stock exchange. 

NY Times: "Steve Case, mastermind of America Online's record-breaking acquisition of Time Warner, has begun to talk favorably of undoing the deal by spinning off AOL, according to two senior executives from the company who have spoken with him." 

Jack Nicholson: "You want the truth? You can't handle the truth." 

Chris Sells: "Imagine a company run as a strict meritocracy that's one of the most important and profitable in it's industry." 

Zen Garden: "A demonstration of what can be accomplished visually through CSS–based design." 

News.Com: File swapping shifts up a gear. 

Preparing for OSCOM 

On Thursday I'm giving a keynote at the Open Source Content Management conference, or OSCOM.

When: Thursday May 29, at 9:15AM.

Where: Ames Courtroom in Austin Hall at Harvard Law.

Bookmark list for OSCOM keynote. In progress.

Monday, May 26, 2003

A correction to Saturday's DaveNet. "In the 60s and 70s at Stanford University, professors worked with students to find ideas worth implementing. Financiers invested, and gave back to the university so the next generation of technology entrepreneurs could be educated, nutured and launched." It wasn't clear that financiers invested in the companies started by the students, not in the work done at the universities. The bug was caught by Marvin Minsky of MIT. (!) 

I rented a house today in Newton. It's a 1920's house on a quiet street, close to restaurants and movies. Beautiful New England garden. It's about a 20-minute drive to the office, not as convenient as living in Cambridge, but very sweet.  

Over at Paolo's we're working on a definition of mensch. Using my wingy-dingy new search engine, I found a great reference, a mini-article entitled Oh Lieberman, which should have been entitled Oy Lieberman.  

There's something sweet about an old-timey Manila site. Thanks to Doc Searls for the link. He met up with the proprietor of that site at a place in NYC called Alt.Coffee on Avenue A in Manhattan. I made a note of that because it looks like I'll be in NY next weekend, with the usual disclaimers, Murphy-willing, ianal but I work with some, etc etc. 

William Safire: "The future formation of American public opinion has fallen into the lap of an ambitious 36-year-old lawyer whose name you have never heard." 

Sam Ruby: "What took time was trying to find something that would work in IE. And failing that, finding something that wouldn't look like crap in IE." 

Paolo: "We went from overpriced, millions of dollars, useless software to underpriced, almost free, useful software." 

Karlin: "How about a blog get-together somewhere in Dublin in the coming weeks?" 

Oliver Wrede: Weblogs and Discourse. 

Steve Gillmor is back. No one told me. Happy. 

Who will pay, part 2 

There's been a bit of discussion about my last DaveNet piece, mostly users talking about what they're willing to pay, as if they have all the power. They don't.

The power of the software developer not to develop is largely silent, so people don't consider it. Sure the original author may toil at a money-losing labor-of-love long past the point where it has been proven not to be viable, but what about the people he or she is not hiring, the manual writers, testers, more programmers, a sales person, a marketing person perhaps, to work on ease of use and to keep the website current. How about a couple of tech support people (so they can take a vacation once in a while, it's a tough job). It goes without saying, I hope, that these people don't work for free. So if you don't want to pay, you can't have any of it.

(Microsoft of course has enough money to give the Web browser away, but that's not free -- the cost is we all become MS developers and users, whether or not we wanted to; and they don't keep developing it. So we paid a really big price. They probably pay a big price too, the cost to develop the software is lost, for sure; but less visible are all the new ideas that can't develop without a competitive browser market. I've said this a million times, one more time won't hurt. As the biggest player in the software business, by default most of the growth goes to them. So if we don't grow, they don't either.)

(I have a new search engine that allows me to find all my posts that contain the term locked trunk. I didn't want to use the term above because a few Microsoft people with weblogs have been trying to neuter the term by spreading the meme that I lock them in a trunk, a ludicrous idea, given that I'm just one person with a relatively small bank account, and they're 50,000 people, with tens of billions of dollars in the bank, and the ability to get more billions any day if that should prove not to be enough. Oh and another detail in my defense, I've never been convicted of antitrust.)

A professional software organization for a well-supported product has 10-20 people, maybe as many as 30 to 40. So when you hear yourself complaining about software quality, think about how much money the developer of the product has to fully support it. Could you run a car in the Indy 500 with no money? You could try, and that's what a lot of software developers do, to no avail. Sooner or later you have to pay the bills. It costs money to live. That's as true of software as it is of people.

When I say there's no money for software, that's not a literal statement, btw. Sure there is some money. When you buy a new computer you probably pay a few hundred dollars for software, most of it going to Microsoft. So they've figured out how to get money to flow. And if you pay $10 or $20 to use a piece of software, the software isn't paid for if the software isn't generating enough money to be fully supported or developed. You can certainly feel good about giving the money, but you're probably not going to get what you want or think you deserve in the way of support or upgrades for that kind of money.

Let's say you spend 100 hours a year using a piece of software and assume your time is worth $50 per hour. So that's $5000 of your time flowing through the software. How much self-respect is there in paying nothing for software that leverages so much of your time?

It gets worse. If you're like most people you're paying bills and buying stuff using software. So even if you don't want to pay for the time-leverage software delivers, would you pay money to keep your money safe? Mark my words, as a software engineer, there's a security meltdown coming. Our money-handling system is not secure. Look into identity theft, esp if you're a software engineer. What happens when someone else spends your money? Do you think you're liable for that? Check it out. (In most cases you are.)

It just seems silly. I pay $1 to ride the subway downtown. It costs $300 to fly to NY and back (two hours in the air). A cab ride to the airport -- $40. My monthly rent is in the thousands. Medical insurance about $10,000 per year. Everything costs money. So does software. Don't fool yourself.

If you don't pay, the bottom-line is that you lose. It may look like you're not losing, but you are. If you paid nothing for health care, you'd likely die sooner. If you pay nothing for software, you probably won't die from it, but you may lose data, you're virtually certain to waste time, and at some point, money.

Sunday, May 25, 2003

Slightly Bent: "Where are all the leaked screenshots and information on the next version of Internet Explorer?" 

NY Times: Prospecting for Gold Among the Photo Blogs. 

4 thoughts on a thoughtful Sunday. 1. I want to learn how PhotoBlogs work. 2. Why don't a small number of users of the popular weblog tools work together to create an authoritative review of the category and show us how the products compare. I'm working on a taxonomy of weblogs for the two conferences I'm keynoting in the next two weeks.You can start there if you want but you probably don't need my help. Users taking the lead, it would be a first. Why not? 3. Next question. Why can't you get real pizza outside of NYC? No one has a good explanation why that is. But it's true nonetheless. Here I sit 4 hours by car from NY, if I want a good pizza, I have to go there, they don't make it here. Same with bagels and cheesecake, and pastrami. 4. Isn't it time for the search engines to implement something like siteChanges.xml? Think of all the bandwidth that's wasted by search engines looking for changes on pages that never change. So many sites these days use content management. A little coordination would keep all our bandwidth bills down and make the SEs a tiny bit more JIT. 

I don't know if this means anything but there are no stories on Google News about Colorado Governor Bill Owens's veto of the state "Super-DMCA" law. They link to one press release from the Music Indistry (sic) News Network commending the governor for the veto. Is this the same kind of thing as CBS (owned by Viacom), ABC (owned by Disney) and NBC (owned by GE) not reporting the FCC handover of local media to big media conglomerates like CBS, ABC and NBC? 

Robert Wiener writes to say that searching for Colorado and veto gets a bunch of hits on Google. BTW, I wasn't thinking Google might have been holding back, I was thinking the newspapers were.  

Zawodny: "PageRank stopped working really well when people began to understand how PageRank worked." 

Speaking of Google, I was kind of bored and wanted to see how my investment in John Doerr was doing, so I fired up Google, and lo and behold, my story is #3. It's above the fold now. Back in the dotcom boom that might have been a funding event.  

The last few articles on Russell Beattie's weblog have been outstanding. I just sent him an email of compliments, but then realized I should do it here too.  

Chris Pirillo: Don't Kill the Shareware Industry. 

Adam Kalsey: Anatomy of a Meme. 

It took me a while to trip over the easy user interface for the button maker. Hey it's really easy.  

Don Park: "Go Daddy Go!" 

Ole Eichorn reviews Moving Mount Fuji, a book on technical interviews at Microsoft. Read the examples. He provides the answers. Finally. Now maybe I can get a job in Redmond. Just kidding.  

Let's not waste our chance 

Something clicked for me. The weblog world, in general, often isn't any better than the professional pubs.

I wonder why some weblogs so openly say things that are just plain wrong, that are so easily refuted, without presenting the opposing data, or even suggesting it might exist with a disclaimer like imho, or ymmv, or ianal.

Most places I don't expect journalism, but some places I do, and they disappoint often enough to make it noteworthy. They say things that sound like they did a thorough investigation, but did they? How would they respond if challenged? Is it more important that their readers think they're right than actually being right?

One thread on a respected blogger's site gives the whole weblog tools market to one of the companies. Is this based on analysis that's better than a quote mill for the Big Pubs? Is it based on features, or any deep understanding of how the products work, or the economics of the market? I have data that contradicts theirs, fairly superficial stuff -- why, on investigation didn't they uncover it?

If this kind of thinking rules, we've traded one corrupt and inept system for another. We must not let this happen. We have a chance to make it better, let's not waste it.

3/2/02: Assembly-Line Journalism.

Saturday, May 24, 2003

DaveNet: Who will pay for software? 

New pics from inside Starbucks in Cambridge. 

Don't click here if you don't like pics of fat naked women telling a funny story.  

BBC: "Jodi Plumb, 15, from Mansfield, Nottinghamshire, was horrified to discover an entire site had been created to insult and threaten her. The site contained abuse concerning her weight and even had a date for her 'death'." 

Ellen Ullman: "To listen to Mr Engelbart that day almost five years ago was to realize that the computer industry, when it started, was not simply about becoming a chief executive or retiring on stock options at 35. It was to remember that real innovation -- the stuff that made computers so much more than 'crummy factors of production' -- comes from mysterious places, wild people, dreamers and tinkerers, and to remember all the skepticism they had to endure." 

3/24/99: "Writing for the web is too damned hard." 

3/24/98: "I saw a fat naked woman dancing at an amateur talent show. I had to look." 

Sjoerd: "It is noisy outside, and 2 riot police cars are racing by, because ADO Den Haag has won the 1st division soccer leage. In the meantime I'm going to continue the RDF conversation." 

BBC: "A healthy baby has been born after developing in its mother's liver instead of in the womb." 

Friday, May 23, 2003

Lessig suggests a fun weekend project at Starbucks. 

Pics from outside Starbucks in Cambridge on Mass Ave between Harvard and Porter Squares. 

Steve Minutillo takes us to a Starbucks in Taipei.  

Sean Bonner was taking pics at a Starbucks in Los Angeles before it was the stylish thing to do. 

Steve Mallett: "I think the jig is up. These folks were acting way too cool about me taking their photos." 

Flying over Boston or NY it's astonishing how much real estate is used to house dead people. It's taboo to ask whether the land could be put to better use. Now, in this article on the front page of today's NY Times, the city of Charlotte, NC is considering just that question. 

Jerry Zucker gave the commencement address at my alma mater, Wisconsin. "If you have a dream, now is the time to pursue it, before you buy furniture." I concur. I have no regrets at 48 being a vagabond. I actually enjoy paying bills now. Every time I do it I revel in how simple my life has become. He's right. Don't buy furniture. Rent.  

10/14/00: "BTW, to people who think OPML is weird, we do weird things at UserLand, and then they become mainstream." 

Ed Cone: "The blogosphere should be crackling over the story of Tom DeLay and the runaway Texas legislators, but it's not, at least not yet." 

Paul Boutin is going back to California. 

Brent Simmons: "Dave Winer took a chance on me many years ago, and it was great for me. I sometimes call myself a graduate of UserLand University." I had an algorithm. I started a project and asked for volunteers. Then I hired the smartest guy who was easy to work with, Brent.  

My thoughts re Tim Bray's thread on RDF. 

Sam Ruby: "While it was greatly maligned, RSS 0.90 really wasn't all that much different from RSS today. What it got right was that things like titles were represented as