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Pictures from last night's party in SF. Bob Stepno demos rich editing with Firebird/Mac in Radio. My Chris Lydon interview gets a recommendation from the Command Post weblog. Mail-to-weblog for Manila beta.
Reminder: Dinner, 5:30PM, Henry's Hunan, 924 Sansome. Today's song: "I'd be safe and warm if I was in L.A." The Apple Computer History Weblog. East coast blackout as seen from space? I bought a Creative Labs MuVo player, 128MB, for $129 at CompUSA, so I could listen to the Chris Lydon interviews on my daily walks. Trivially simple to use, just plug it into the USB port, copy the MP3 files across. David Weinberger wonders about plural nouns for bloggers. I like bevy myself. Funny reading east coast bloggers in the morning from the west coast. Everyone here is still asleep, except me. Even Starbucks isn't open yet. I forgot how beautiful it is Last night, walking around Pacific Heights after dinner, I was struck by all the For Rent signs on all kinds of beautiful homes in dramatically beautiful places. It was chilly and foggy, I wore a sweater and a jacket, in August. What a difference from the hot muggy weather in Boston. The prices are much more reasonable than I remember. Later, coming back, I realized that the hotel I'm in, a luxurious Union Square hotel, is virtually empty. Then I read this NY Times article about how cheap travel to SF is, and then it hit me. This place has become a bargain. I was talking on the walk last night about how nice it would be to live in one of those Pacific Heights apartments for a year, until I realized "There's no Harvard here." It would be a relaxing year, reading books, driving to the wine country. A year of retirement, perhaps. Or with the cheap air fare, a pied a terre, a few thousand miles from home?
Essay: Tips for Candidates re Weblogs. Jake specs the comment notification feature for Manila. Slashdot reports that AOL is blocking all links from LiveJournal sites. If you live in the US, you have about 24 hours left to register in the National Do Not Call database. I just did. Mary Jo Foley says the number of Microsoft bloggers is growing exponentially.
AP: "Through the years, the presumptive front-runners have discovered that Labor Day is either the beginning of the glide path to the nomination and the White House or the time they acquire a giant bull's-eye on their back."
Chris Lydon interviews Robert Fisk from Beirut. "We went to war based on lies." The Guardian reports that Tony Blair has an email address. Don Park: "Unless I am mistaken, RDF fragments are being inserted automatically by Radio Trackback script. Yikes." Michael Feldman: "Putting a huge dick shot on the front of my Blog where my mother could see it, even if it is growing out of an arm, is over the line."
Steve Outing: With Email Dying, RSS Offers Alternative. JY Stervinou translated the RSS 2.0 spec to French. Burningbird: "I never thought I would get to the point of welcoming emails offering to enlarge either my penis or breasts." Andrew Grumet debugs Instapundit's RSS feed. First the good news. My hotel has high speed Internet, and email works. The bad news? Over 1300 messages.
Today's song: "California, here I come." Mail meltdown, again. Don Park's weblog is one year old today. Here's his hello world post. Thanks Don, it's been a very interesting year. Congrats to Halley on the her clarity of vision. 12/24/97: "My hearing feels sharper too." On this day in 1999, I stated my vision for RSS, and asked others to express theirs. Paolo notes a problem with Yahoo's feeds, announced last night. They flow a huge amount of stuff, even if you just subscribe to one feed, there might be dozens of new stories each hour. Maybe this is just something to get used to. I remember the NY Times felt strange that way too at the beginning, now it's very normal to get several dozen stories in one update. There's another concern, linkrot. Links into Yahoo News rot relatively quickly, as compared to News.Com, for example, which is near perfect. So, until I hear something has changed, I'm going to use Yahoo to read news but try hard not to point to stories on Yahoo from my weblog. Wired: "Come September, Silicon Valley commuters will be able to log on from the train. The first wireless Internet access from a rail line in the United States was bound to happen here where most commuters tote laptops." Mail meltdown, again 600 messages waiting this morning. My DSL line hasn't been doing well the last 24 hours, and that means mail gets even more unreliable, and overnight it overloaded again, even though I have Eudora checking every five minutes. So if you sent me an email overnight, there's a pretty good chance I won't see it. Same for the rest of today. Not sure what I can do, but it sure makes planning a trip to Calif pretty hard without reliable email. About 9AM, I'm giving up on email for now. If you need to reach me before I leave, I'm on AIM, screen name scriptingnews. Please use it sparingly. If you can't reach me there, try scriptingnews2.
Yahoo News in RSS. Major bing! Tiny Yahoo Coffee Mugs make it easy to subscribe to the new feeds in Radio UserLand. John Palfrey, who is a lawyer, analyzes Yahoo's unusual terms of use for their feeds. Jeremy Zawodny: "RSS is alive at well at Yahoo. Watch for more in the future." I just got an email asking me what "bing" means. Dinner on Saturday will be at 5:30PM Pacific at Henry's Hunan on Sansome near Broadway, in beautiful sunny SF. This will make sure that Scoble and I and anyone else who's invited have time to eat, and make it over to the Pirillo's for their house cooling party.
Graeme Foster reports that PopHeadlines, an aggregator, supports enclosures. Added it to the appropriate lists. The move to Harvard scrambled the rankings for RSS on Google. I guess they don't follow redirects? Hmmm. BlogHerald says Yahoo is shopping for a blogging tools company. BBC: "A court rules that an injunction against posting online code for copying DVDs does not violate freedom of speech." MetaWeblog API: "It is now safe to deploy applications based on this spec." What a beautiful remembrance of Doc's mother. "And now, as she so often said, it's time to get back to work." Wired: "Global geeks getting an MIT education." Jake Savin: "I'm writing in my browser, and loving it all over again. Writing this post feels a lot like writing in Manila for the first time, and that feels really good."
News.Com: AOL launches blogging service. Susan Mernit: "According to an insider, AOL Journals already has about 7000 users."
A new feature on the Harvard weblog server. When someone posts a comment on your weblog, your notification list receives an email containing information about the comment. Previously this feature was only available for discussion group posts, not comments. Does the BBC plan to release their old programs or just the new stuff? I wonder if NPR in the US will follow? PBS? I'd double my annual contribution. Think of the new software we could write once there was a sizable flow of content that could be channeled. Next question. Is there yet a good MP3 player that connects through USB and is relatively easy to operate and relatively inexpensive? Michael Feldman stumbled across the original Manila logo. I have no idea who the guy with the gray beard is. Greenspun: "Best of all, the menu at McDonald's won't tempt you into excess. The sandwiches aren't all that delicious." News.Com: "By digitizing its huge archive of programs and making some shows available free on the Net, the BBC hopes to help usher in a second, public-minded phase of the digital revolution." News.Com: "Imagine the negative fallout if RIAA ends up suing a family member of Rep Lamar Smith, who chairs a crucial copyright subcommittee -- or a music industry executive who secretly hangs out on Grokster every evening." Paolo: "I have tried importing quite a few PowerPoint presentations to Keynote, it doesn't only work, they usually improve."
How long before the candidates collect Cluetrainers. I'd love to see Gephardt or Kucinich invite Rageboy to travel with them, or even just have a power lunch in Boulder. All aboard. Next stop the White House!
Postel's Law has two parts. Andrew Thomas: "Welcome to MIT. When you move into your new rooms and set up your computers, make sure your lawyer is on speed dial." David Weinberger is blogging the Dean campaign, from the press bus. Six posts so far. 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6. Important: He has endorsed Dean. BBC: "Greg Dyke, director general of the BBC, has announced plans to give the public full access to all the corporation's programme archives." Cory Doctorow Boston Globe op-ed on Net politics. Tuesday morning I'm going to take the Do Not Deploy caveat off the MetaWeblog API spec. If there are any deal-stoppers, please let me know about them in the next couple of days. Sun has a tutorial on RSS, including software that parses RSS files from Java.
NYT Magazine profile of Harvard president Larry Summers. Two years ago today we opened a Manila site that made it possible for developers to test their implementation of the Blogger API against UserLand's. People are still posting to it, two years later. That's a thorough test! Three years ago: "If you think your shit doesn't stink, I recommend getting a second opinion."
Scoble will be in California next weeked so he can have dinner on August 30 in San Francisco. Can you join us? According to Michael Feldman, tomorrow is Goth's Day at Disneyland in Anaheim. Consultation for the Independent Review of BBC Online. They have excellent support for RSS, now would be a good time to tell the UK government how much we appreciate that. BBC article on the review process. It looks like Eudora is sufficiently better at dealing with overload than Outlook Express. Now I have to figure out how to configure it to send mail, not just read it, and figure out how the filters work beyond filtering on who a message is from, who it is to, or what its subject is (sometimes I have to filter on CC alone). Chris Heilman's revised California governor's list. Wired: "At 2:30 PM., Hypponen said 19 of the 20 servers that would have been used to launch the attack had been blocked." BTW, the SoBig virus sounds like the tricks Coble and Berman were trying to make legal for the music industry last year. Imagine if the law had passed.
Microdoc: "The way we have developed the Internet is creating the biggest economic, social and cultural time-bomb of the century." Jake: "The WYSIWYG editor for Mozilla has been released for both Radio and Manila." Stateline.Org: Bloggers Train Sites On State Governments. Halley Suitt: "I've just published a piece on blogging in Harvard Business Review." Congrats! Steve Gillmor: "What I'm really looking for is a private Google, where I can find random notes without exposing them publicly." 2/3/02: "An easy to install HTTP server that communicates with the mother ship via XML and can search the local area network as effectively as the whole Internet." Michael Feldman: "I almost came out and told you about the little voice inside my head whispering insistently that, finally, this was the year." 11/24/01: "Red Sox fans must know, by now, that it ain't gonna happen." Reuters: "Computer security experts raced to beat the clock Friday as the super-potent Sobig.F e-mail virus threatened to unleash a crippling barrage of data across the Internet." Register: "The prolific mass-mailing Sobig-F email worm, which has flooded computer users this week, could attempt to download a Trojan horse tonight, anti-virus companies are warning."
Chris Lydon has three audio excerpts from the Howard Dean presentation on Wednesday night in Manchester. I've included each of the audio excerpts below as enclosures, in today's Scripting News RSS feed. Enclosure-aware aggregators will automatically download them so you don't have to wait for them to download. 1. Dean's 24-minute talk, in its entirety. 3. Chris's "open ended sampling" of the crowd. I've started a list of aggregators that understand RSS enclosures. Right now I only know of two, but I hope that changes soon. Enclosures are, imho, a really big part of where RSS will go. Phil Wolff's "plant requirements" for BloggerCon, in response to Bob Doyle's message that the Pound Hall rooms don't have WiFi. They will, one way or another. I hope Wendy and Robyn can see this, because (per the post below) my email is totally broken. Email is still broken. I'm trying Eudora, it seems to work a little better than Outlook Express, but of course it's totally strange and all my filters are gone. It doesn't work better enough to use it instead of Outlook. The solution may be switching to Fastmail. In the meantime I'm missing boatloads of email. Thanks for all the great tips in the comments on last night's message. If you're trying to dig out of the quagmire, you may find some good advice here. Adam Curry: "This is where we get to sneak RSS into the email jet-wash." The only people I can communicate with are people who send and receive over RSS. Adam will probably see my comment on his post in about 40 minutes or so in his aggregator. Adam reports that the spam-free test worked. Bing. We communicated without seeing a single spam or virus-generated email. Just like the good old days, before email melted and evaporated.
The email situation has gotten so bad I'm actually starting to get an idea on how to route around it. It's pretty radical. JY Stervinou suggests using TMDA on the server. Lawrence, what do you think? Dwight Shih recommends Fastmail. Michael Feldman: Copyright Questions from a Blogger. PoliticsNH.Com is excellent. Added to the list of NH newspapers. They have a calendar for all candidate appearances in NH. Now all I wish for is an RSS feed. Ten years ago, she was one of three M.I.T. graduates in their 20's who were profiled in The New York Times as women who might change the face of the computer industry. Zawodny: "After spending most of the day on the problem of 'how to find the RSS feed (if there is one) given a URL' I've come to the conclusion that it's a pain in the ass." An XML guru wants to outlaw markup in RSS descriptions. Chuq Von Rospach: "We're going to end up with two protocols that do the same thing." Four years ago today I got my outliner saving directly to a discussion group message, via XML-RPC. Over 2000 messages are waiting. Perhaps its time to give up on the mail client software I've been using. Adam Curry: "Just don't email me at all." BBC: "Sobig F had been written by a spammer looking for ways to get past spam filters."
We saw Edwards and Dean today, I'll have pictures in the morning. In the meantime, over 800 messages accumulated in my mailbox, and my mailer is incapable of dealing with it. So if you sent me mail, I probably won't get it until tomorrow afternoon. Sorry. A new Manila theme from Bryan Bell.
Chris Heilman: Faces of the California Candidates. Wash Post: Bush Campaign Reaching Out to Bloggers. Blog Graham is the weblog of Presidential hopeful Bob Graham. It's fairly awful.
Kevin Werbach: "Either email is broken, Microsoft's email software is broken, or those two statements are the same." Scott Rosenberg: "Where do you want to go today? Anywhere but Outlook!" Jesse Ross in the Berkman Geekroom explains how the SoBig virus works. Question of the day: Is email broken? Dave Hyatt responds to the problem with Safari and Chris Lydon's site. BBC: "E-mail inboxes are being clogged by a new version of the Sobig Windows virus." Garth Kidd says poptool, a Python app, helps get rid of spammy messages. Scott Johnson is working with Chris Pirillo on a tutorial about aggregators. Happy wedding anniversary to Andre and Andrea. And many spicy noodles! This morning 650 messages accumulated overnight, and my email program, Outlook Express, one which millions of people use, can't download them without crapping out. On the other end is an uspecified mail server, and inbetween is Verizon DSL. They must all be getting hammered by this week's virus. Until yesterday this setup could handle the email I'm getting. Today it took one hour to coax 650 messages out of the server, tons of duplicates, and most of them contain viruses. I'm looking for one or two vital messages in this group of 650, and there are always some people trying to contact me through email. The only logical thing to do is to give up on email. Nothing is going to make this better. In a bind.
Pito Salas: "Can your mother use RSS?" Schedule for candidates in NH. Tomorrow it's Edwards and Dean with Chris Lydon and possibly Halley. Jim Moore is thinking about BloggerCon.
The world as a blog. "Weblogs.com + Geocoding + RSS." New pictures of rooms for the Sunday Birds-Of-Feather meetings, to inspire you to think of great sessions we can have on October 5. I'm at the office downloading my email, getting tons of virus-carrying emails. Back from New Hampshire at 12:30PM. Catching up. Mail server is hobbling along. Oy. When I have more than 2000 messages to download, my emailer-server combo can't cope. I have to download them in 10-20 message groups. When the reader fails, I have to download the messages again, so I have huge numbers of duplicates. Whether the problem is in the server, the client, or somewhere between is a mystery to me. I've spent almost three hours at it, and still have over 1700 messages to go. If you have any ideas, comment here -- don't send email. I give up. I'm going into the office and try to download my mail using the fast Harvard net connection. It's worked before. Wish me luck! Chris Lydon: "Why aren't we holding American media responsible for 'sexed up' intelligence on Saddam's WMDs?" Wired: "Presidential hopeful Howard Dean may be receiving kudos for his use of the Internet as a fundraising tool, but he's getting raised eyebrows for a pair of junk e-mails allegedly sent by his campaign staff last week." Ptypes: "Dave is a very smart guy and a responsible leader of the weblog community. What better way to gain respect for blogging vis-a-vis professional journalism than to have Dave Winer covering the candidates." Wow that's nice. Thanks.
The key point, the one not to miss, is that anyone can do this. Today's Rotary session was open to the public. We paid $10 each so we could eat, but if we didn't want to eat the cost would have been $0. The candidates want to talk to you. If you can get yourself to New Hampshire or Iowa you can participate in the political process as any local voter does.
WSJ: "Is Google slipping?" My questions for Presidential candidates. NHPR has a series on the Presidential primary. Gnome-Girl: "Doesn't anyone else think monthly 4 day weekends would boost our morale for work?" Comments here on Wired's article on news aggregators. Text of email sent to BloggerCon subscribers. Good morning. Up early, excited about my first trip to see a presidential candidate in NH, Bob Graham. The talk is in Manchester, New Hampshire's largest city. Approx one hour drive from my front door. Dean Landsman says Yes to an Outlines and the Web BOF at BloggerCon. Michael Feldman, who's been to a couple of Thursdays at Berkman, has a great weblog. Hard to classify. I'm a regular reader. Keep going! Two years ago: "If you ever get the blues, try getting your car washed." Three years ago, nodetypes were rolled out. They explain how the type attribute on an OPML outline element works, triggering a callback mechanism in the outliner, which allows it to route to the proper code to process an expand operation. That allows an outliner to be used to browse resources that aren't in memory, that can be located anywhere on the Internet. We got it working for RSS, and it was beautiful. It still works today. Maybe soon it will be time for this innovation to be used by users. Wired on Aggregators Wired News: "At heart, RSS is simply a specification that a site uses to produce a page of XML code. The code breaks up each entry or story on a website by title, description and direct link. An aggregator then determines how to display that output in a reader." Comments. I love how Wired side-stepped the issues around all the angst among techies about whether it's RDF or not. I suspect that the RDF people might not be very happy. But it really hurts forward motion to have the reporters try to cover the pie fight. So on that, thanks Wired, you said there was trouble, but kept going anyway. That's what I did too. That's the right way to go. Now, I'm not happy that neither this article or Dan Gillmor's piece yesterday, mentioned Radio UserLand. It's a very fine aggregator, and if it wasn't the first, it certainly predated all the ones they did mention. It's in very wide use. I think it's still the best one out there. So I feel sad when an article appears about the category Radio pioneered, over a lot of naysayer's objections, and it isn't even mentioned. There are two schools of thought about aggregators. One says that they should work like a mail reader, the other that it should work like a weblog. The former shows you each feed as a separate thing, the latter shows all articles in reverse-chronologic order, grouping them by time. Imho we already have enough mail readers, wire up RSS to email and you're done. Who needs another piece of software to do what an already-existing category does so well. But the latter, which is the approach I used in Radio's aggregator, works incredibly well. People who are just using mail-reader style aggregators are really missing something. Articles that only write about mail reader aggregators are also missing something. Reporters, here's a new category of software, scoop your competitors, get the real story, not the easy one.
Why I'm going to see the candidates in New Hampshire.
Dan Gillmor: RSS Hitting Critical Mass. Steve Kirks: "Send Steve to BloggerCon!" Yeah! Phil Ringnalda on BlogStreet and BlogLines. Should I do a 1.5 hour session on October 5 on Outlining and the Web? Pito Salas: "There are a few good blog readers out there but there's lots of room for innovation." Today's song: "When you walk in a dream but you know you're not dreaming, signore." Dan Grigsby: "I've put together a service to send out alerts via AIM whenever someone reads a blog entry."
NY Times: Ohio Lines Failed Before Blackout. David Hoggard: "Is this a wonderful country or what?" Last year on this day, Instant Messaging in Frontier/Radio. Three years ago in the Atlantic Monthly: "Rampant music piracy may hurt musicians less than they fear. The real threat -- to listeners and, conceivably, democracy itself -- is the music industry's reaction to it." A picture of Doc's mom, in 1943 (approx) after catching two big fish in Alaska. Hey she's a cutie. Of course, I knew that. She looks like Doc. Duh. Lydon, CSS, Safari Michael Dalling writes: "I think I know why the links aren't clickable in Safari." He ran Chris's site through the HTML validator and found the problem in an anchor element, before line 361, and that it's fixed by HTML Tidy, but he hasn't been able to find it. Neither have I. Matthew Morse writes: "It looks the same in Safari and in Mozilla, but the links don't work. That can be fixed by removing the float:left; line from #content in the style declaration. It doesn't appear to impact the layout." Bob Stepno: Communal Debugging. Kool Aid, Scoble, Gillmor
What is Dan is saying? That Microsoft is like Jonestown? That Scoble has stopped thinking for himself? That Scoble is forced to say something dishonorable or unethical on his weblog to keep his job? Gillmor doesn't substantiate it. My opinion, Scoble tells us more about Microsoft than Dan has told us about his employer. We supposedly have a blogger inside one of the biggest media companies in the world, yet we are no better informed about media companies. I think Scoble does a good job of balancing his employer's interests against the interests of his readers. According to Google Answers, they didn't actually drink Kool Aid at Jonestown.
Thanks to Paul Boutin for a pointer to this MSNBC article with advice from citizens of Baghdad on blackouts. "Maybe there are followers of Saddam Hussein who are sabotaging their power stations." Dan Gillmor says he might vote for Schwarzenegger. Dann Sheridan: "Bye, bye VCR." Something about Chris Lydon's weblog doesn't look right in Safari on Mac OS X. It clearly has something to do with the CSS. Any suggestions are welcome, I can't test it in that configuration. Thanks!
Harold Gilchrist suggests an Audioblogging BOF on October 5. I think it's a good idea. I bet Chris Lydon and Bob Doyle would participate. Let me know if you'd come to Cambridge for a 1.5 hour discussion of audioblogging (and of course whatever else is discussed on the 5th). Tim Aiello: "I'm attempting to map the timeline of the power outage." BBC: "Former Ugandan dictator Idi Amin has died of multiple organ failure in hospital in Saudi Arabia." Thanks to Don Park for the pointer to Flame Warriors, a fantastic taxonomy of various roles people play on mail lists, with excellent illustrations. CamWorld: The Great Blackout of 2003.
Chris Heilman: "This is a sorted and annotated list of all 135 candidates in California's special recall election." Weblogger, a commercial Manila hosting service, got a great review in PC Mag. I run a Manila hosting service too. BTW, Jake has mail-to-weblog coded for Manila. PC Mag likes the feature. It'll be there soon.
Where the candidates are the week of August 18. Today's song: "The blue bulldog howls 'Boo-la, boo-la, boo!'" I put together a grid to visualize Day 2 at BloggerCon. Think of groups you'd like to get together in a Pound Hall classroom. They're large rooms, with comfortable seating. Also on Monday I'm going to New Hampshire to find some presidential candidates. I'll stay overnight somewhere in NH and return to Tuesday afternoon for a local host committee dinner in Cambridge. It'll be my first time covering the presidential campaign on location. Jim Moore says he may come along. I think Halley from Halley's Comment is coming too. If you're in Massachusetts, Vermont, Maine, or New Hampshire, next week is the week to converge on NH with our laptops and digital cameras to capture the scene. There's lots of stuff happening in Iowa next week too. It's time to stop talking, time to start doing. Rolling Stone: RSS 2.0. Surf the Net with Kids has a new RSS 0.91 feed. It's a "guide to the hidden educational gems of the Web, written for kids, parents and teachers." More here. 416 new feeds from PRWeb. Subscribed to the main feed, with the "top" press releases. RSS 0.91. Martin Schwimmer: "Pampers don't need electricity." Julie Powell: "I wonder how Julia passed the time during the blackout of 77?" NY Times: "Frantically calling across town and around the country to find out the scope of the power failure, they were trapped in a news event they were trying to cover."
Henry Wong: "Meatless political Web blogs don't spell the end of the Internet, just as Hillary Clinton's meatless memoir doesn't spell the end of books." BBC: Power failures hit US and Canada. NYC, Detroit, Toronto, Ottawa, Cleveland, Toledo, NJ, Connecticut. No evidence of terrorism says NY mayor Bloomberg. Overload on power grid? Hot in Boston. We have power. CNN: "Much of Midtown Manhattan and Wall Street was shut down. All area airports and the Long Island Railroad were also affected." Microsoft: What you should know about the Blaster worm. Another game of 20 Questions, Weblog Style! Seth Dillingham got the correct answer. BBC: "Scientist Sir Isaac Newton has triumphed in a poll searching for the greatest Briton." Halley is looking for a new "Printer-Copier-Fax-Scanner-Nutcracker." Sam Ruby has an interesting thread on quantifying the RDF Tax. I just posted a lengthy comment. BusinessWeek interviews Jim Clark on Silicon Valley's funk. Rogers Cadenhead posted a new chapter from his upcoming Sam's book on Radio UserLand. He says the book is getting the attention of his publisher because of the number of pre-orders it has received. Jenny Levine: How to Add Navigator Links in Radio. What's up with a comprehensive list of aggregators that doesn't include Radio or Manila? (Postscript: They're there now. Thanks.) Thanks to John Robb for the pointer to a Linksys product that displays pictures, movies and music from a desktop computer on a TV using 802.11. Perfecto. News.Com: "Since applets and plug-ins are also a key feature of other Web browsers, the Eolas decision could affect Microsoft's competitors in the browser market." Another reason weblogs are important in education, in today's NY Times. They help kids become better writers. | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
