Weblog Archive >  2003 >  August Previous/Next


Scripting News, the weblog started in 1997 that bootstrapped the blogging revolution.
 

Permanent link to archive for Sunday, August 31, 2003. Sunday, August 31, 2003

Pictures from last night's party in SF. Permanent link to this item in the archive.

Bob Stepno demos rich editing with Firebird/Mac in Radio. Permanent link to this item in the archive.

My Chris Lydon interview gets a recommendation from the Command Post weblog.  Permanent link to this item in the archive.

Mail-to-weblog for Manila beta. Permanent link to this item in the archive.


Permanent link to archive for Saturday, August 30, 2003. Saturday, August 30, 2003

Reminder: Dinner, 5:30PM, Henry's Hunan, 924 SansomePermanent link to this item in the archive.

Today's song: "I'd be safe and warm if I was in L.A." Permanent link to this item in the archive.

The Apple Computer History WeblogPermanent link to this item in the archive.

East coast blackout as seen from space? Permanent link to this item in the archive.

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. Permanent link to this item in the archive.

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. Permanent link to this item in the archive.

I forgot how beautiful it is Permanent link to this item in the archive.

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?


Permanent link to archive for Friday, August 29, 2003. Friday, August 29, 2003

Essay: Tips for Candidates re WeblogsPermanent link to this item in the archive.

Jake specs the comment notification feature for Manila. Permanent link to this item in the archive.

Slashdot reports that AOL is blocking all links from LiveJournal sites. Permanent link to this item in the archive.

If you live in the US, you have about 24 hours left to register in the National Do Not Call database. I just did.  Permanent link to this item in the archive.

Mary Jo Foley says the number of Microsoft bloggers is growing exponentially. Permanent link to this item in the archive.

Chris LydonAll the Lydon interviews through August, in one download. Behrl, Cone, Daily Kos, Dean, Fisk, Gleick, Kinzer, Powell, Preacher, Reynolds, Scarry, Searls, Sifry, Slugger, Toynbee, Volokh, Weinberger, and yours truly. Catch up in a single 203MB download; suitable for beach listening.  Permanent link to this item in the archive.

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." Permanent link to this item in the archive.


Permanent link to archive for Thursday, August 28, 2003. Thursday, August 28, 2003

Chris Lydon interviews Robert Fisk from Beirut. "We went to war based on lies." Permanent link to this item in the archive.

The Guardian reports that Tony Blair has an email address. Permanent link to this item in the archive.

Don Park: "Unless I am mistaken, RDF fragments are being inserted automatically by Radio Trackback script. Yikes." Permanent link to this item in the archive.

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." Permanent link to this item in the archive.

Parking MeterHad lunch today with Kevin Marks at Jing Jing in Palo Alto. I'm writing this from the Starbucks on University Ave. Steve Gillmor called to say that my RSS feed wasn't updating. Sorry about that. It is now. I'm drinking a venti iced coffee. It's sunny and cool outside. Life is good. Today's song: "The West Coast has the sunshine, and the girls all get so tan.." Ed Cone reports that "whining works" when trying to get information from the Edwards campaign on how they're restructuring their campaign around the Internet. From what Ed says it sounds like a half-step, not a leap--frog, which is what they need to do to challenge Howard Dean. Meanwhile Betsy Devine whines that I am too tough on her guy, Howard Dean. Not sure what she's talking about, but Betsy, I want an election in 2004, not a rout. If Dean is going to be the Democratic nominee (not a foregone conclusion just yet), he has to use the Internet more effectively. Suggested next step, teach your reps how to advocate for your cause, with cheerful respect.  Permanent link to this item in the archive.

A picture named shah.jpgI read Stephen Kinzer's All the Shah's Men on the flight today. It's the story of the coup that threw out a budding democracy in Iran in the early 1950's in a vain attempt to restore the British oil monopoly. He explains some history that puzzled lots of Americans, in the late 70s in the Iranian revolution, why did they hate us so much? It turns out it wasn't hate as much as it was fear -- fear that we'd do to them in 1979 what we did in 1953 -- bring back the Shah. Maybe we did the right thing, Kinzer posits -- the doubt lingers, perhaps the Soviets would have taken over from Mossadegh if we hadn't thrown him out. In retrospect it seems less likely. We could have saved a few decades and supported democracy in Iran in the 50s. But that's not what the US was doing then. Are we doing it now? Permanent link to this item in the archive.

Steve Outing: With Email Dying, RSS Offers AlternativePermanent link to this item in the archive.

JY Stervinou translated the RSS 2.0 spec to French. Permanent link to this item in the archive.

Burningbird: "I never thought I would get to the point of welcoming emails offering to enlarge either my penis or breasts." Permanent link to this item in the archive.

Andrew Grumet debugs Instapundit's RSS feed.  Permanent link to this item in the archive.

First the good news. My hotel has high speed Internet, and email works. The bad news? Over 1300 messages.  Permanent link to this item in the archive.


Permanent link to archive for Wednesday, August 27, 2003. Wednesday, August 27, 2003

Today's song: "California, here I come."  Permanent link to this item in the archive.

Mail meltdown, againPermanent link to this item in the archive.

Don Park's weblog is one year old today. Here's his hello world post. Thanks Don, it's been a very interesting year.  Permanent link to this item in the archive.

Congrats to Halley on the her clarity of vision.  Permanent link to this item in the archive.

12/24/97: "My hearing feels sharper too." Permanent link to this item in the archive.

On this day in 1999, I stated my vision for RSS, and asked others to express theirs.  Permanent link to this item in the archive.

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. Permanent link to this item in the archive.

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." Permanent link to this item in the archive.

Mail meltdown, again Permanent link to this item in the archive.

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.


Permanent link to archive for Tuesday, August 26, 2003. Tuesday, August 26, 2003

Yahoo News in RSS. Major bing! Permanent link to this item in the archive.

Tiny Yahoo Coffee Mugs make it easy to subscribe to the new feeds in Radio UserLand. Permanent link to this item in the archive.

John Palfrey, who is a lawyer, analyzes Yahoo's unusual terms of use for their feeds. Permanent link to this item in the archive.

Jeremy Zawodny: "RSS is alive at well at Yahoo. Watch for more in the future." Permanent link to this item in the archive.

I just got an email asking me what "bing" means.  Permanent link to this item in the archive.

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. Permanent link to this item in the archive.

A picture named edwards.jpgEd Cone says John Edwards could use a clue about the Web, calling it "that big stick Howard Dean is beating the crap out of you with." So true, and Dean doesn't even use it that well. The first candidate that helps voters publish their own stories and ideas and drive the campaign is the one who really captures the energy of the Web. So far Dean has used the Web to raise money to spend on big rallies and TV ads. That's using the Web in kind of a nasty way. But he also helps people find what's good inside themselves. That's why people give him the money. I want a candidate to use the Web to listen. It doesn't take much money to do that. Permanent link to this item in the archive.

Graeme Foster reports that PopHeadlines, an aggregator, supports enclosures. Added it to the appropriate listsPermanent link to this item in the archive.

The move to Harvard scrambled the rankings for RSS on Google. I guess they don't follow redirects? Hmmm. Permanent link to this item in the archive.

BlogHerald says Yahoo is shopping for a blogging tools company. Permanent link to this item in the archive.

BBC: "A court rules that an injunction against posting online code for copying DVDs does not violate freedom of speech." Permanent link to this item in the archive.

MetaWeblog API: "It is now safe to deploy applications based on this spec." Permanent link to this item in the archive.

What a beautiful remembrance of Doc's mother. "And now, as she so often said, it's time to get back to work." Permanent link to this item in the archive.

Wired: "Global geeks getting an MIT education." Permanent link to this item in the archive.

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." Permanent link to this item in the archive.

A picture named dean.jpgFYI, I got a press advisory this morning, via email, from the Dean campaign. That's very cool. Someone decided that even though I write for a weblog, I count as a press person. The advisory contained Dean's schedule for Saturday, a full day of campaigning in New Hampshire. Let's hope the other candidates tune in and start inviting people with weblogs to visit with their campaign. Permanent link to this item in the archive.


Permanent link to archive for Monday, August 25, 2003. Monday, August 25, 2003

News.Com: AOL launches blogging servicePermanent link to this item in the archive.

Susan Mernit: "According to an insider, AOL Journals already has about 7000 users." Permanent link to this item in the archive.

RSS in my heart.Here's a new RSS feed for the New Hampshire presidential schedule. There are probably only five people who will care about this, but for those five people, it's an incredibly useful feed. (I was one of those people, that's why I did the coding.) Permanent link to this item in the archive.

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. Permanent link to this item in the archive.

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? Permanent link to this item in the archive.

Michael Feldman stumbled across the original Manila logo. I have no idea who the guy with the gray beard is. Permanent link to this item in the archive.

Greenspun: "Best of all, the menu at McDonald's won't tempt you into excess. The sandwiches aren't all that delicious." Permanent link to this item in the archive.

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." Permanent link to this item in the archive.

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." Permanent link to this item in the archive.

Paolo: "I have tried importing quite a few PowerPoint presentations to Keynote, it doesn't only work, they usually improve." Permanent link to this item in the archive.

A picture named docMom.jpgAt least two Cluetrain authors took big trips this weekend. David Weinberger was the first blogger to travel with the press on a Presidential campaign tour, with the caveat that he isn't independent, he's sort of a House Blogger. And Doc Searls went to North Carolina to deliver the eulogy at his mother's funeral. As one might expect, Doc has a bunch of stories about it, and a story about stories. God bless Doc and his family -- no matter what the age, it must be hard losing a parent. Permanent link to this item in the archive.

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! Permanent link to this item in the archive.


Permanent link to archive for Sunday, August 24, 2003. Sunday, August 24, 2003

Postel's Law has two parts. Permanent link to this item in the archive.

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." Permanent link to this item in the archive.

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.  Permanent link to this item in the archive.

BBC: "Greg Dyke, director general of the BBC, has announced plans to give the public full access to all the corporation's programme archives." Permanent link to this item in the archive.

Cory Doctorow Boston Globe op-ed on Net politics. Permanent link to this item in the archive.

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. Permanent link to this item in the archive.

Sun has a tutorial on RSS, including software that parses RSS files from Java.  Permanent link to this item in the archive.

A picture named newton.jpgChris Lydon interviews James Gleick on his biography of Sir Isaac Newton. "Almost everything we know about apples and moons in motion and at rest, about time, space, gravity, inertia, differential and integral calculus, occurred to Isaac Newton in his early twenties, working in isolation through the London plague years of 1665 and 1666." Permanent link to this item in the archive.

NYT Magazine profile of Harvard president Larry Summers. Permanent link to this item in the archive.

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!  Permanent link to this item in the archive.

Three years ago: "If you think your shit doesn't stink, I recommend getting a second opinion." Permanent link to this item in the archive.


Permanent link to archive for Saturday, August 23, 2003. Saturday, August 23, 2003

Scoble will be in California next weeked so he can have dinner on August 30 in San Francisco. Can you join us? Permanent link to this item in the archive.

According to Michael Feldman, tomorrow is Goth's Day at Disneyland in Anaheim. Permanent link to this item in the archive.

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. Permanent link to this item in the archive.

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).  Permanent link to this item in the archive.

Chris Heilman's revised California governor's list. Permanent link to this item in the archive.

Wired: "At 2:30 PM., Hypponen said 19 of the 20 servers that would have been used to launch the attack had been blocked." Permanent link to this item in the archive.

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. Permanent link to this item in the archive.


Permanent link to archive for Friday, August 22, 2003. Friday, August 22, 2003

Microdoc: "The way we have developed the Internet is creating the biggest economic, social and cultural time-bomb of the century." Permanent link to this item in the archive.

Jake: "The WYSIWYG editor for Mozilla has been released for both Radio and Manila." Permanent link to this item in the archive.

Stateline.Org: Bloggers Train Sites On State GovernmentsPermanent link to this item in the archive.

Halley Suitt: "I've just published a piece on blogging in Harvard Business Review." Congrats! Permanent link to this item in the archive.

Steve Gillmor: "What I'm really looking for is a private Google, where I can find random notes without exposing them publicly." Permanent link to this item in the archive.

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." Permanent link to this item in the archive.

Michael Feldman: "I almost came out and told you about the little voice inside my head whispering insistently that, finally, this was the year." Permanent link to this item in the archive.

11/24/01: "Red Sox fans must know, by now, that it ain't gonna happen." Permanent link to this item in the archive.

Yahoo! Korea Blog Permanent link to this item in the archive.

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." Permanent link to this item in the archive.

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." Permanent link to this item in the archive.

A picture named dietpepsi.gifI'll be in San Francisco Thursday through Saturday, for a brief business trip and a visit with a couple of friends. This time I'll be staying in the city. I'll have a car. Maybe a Chinese dinner at Henry's Hunan on Saturday, August 30? Chris, you want to co-host? (Just my luck he'll be in LA.) My email is still not working very well, although Eudora is much better at handling errors than Outlook Express. I may actually be able to start communicating via email again soon. Also I got an incredible fare via hotwire.com, including car and hotel, on American Airlines and Budget car rental. Total price including four nights at a first class hotel, $915. Amazing. I had checked out American Airlines first, and the round trip alone was $2300. Permanent link to this item in the archive.

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. Permanent link to this item in the archive.

1. Dean's 24-minute talk, in its entirety. Permanent link to this item in the archive.

2. Q&A with the candidate. Permanent link to this item in the archive.

3. Chris's "open ended sampling" of the crowd. Permanent link to this item in the archive.

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. Permanent link to this item in the archive.

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. Permanent link to this item in the archive.

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. Permanent link to this item in the archive.

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. Permanent link to this item in the archive.

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. Permanent link to this item in the archive.


Permanent link to archive for Thursday, August 21, 2003. Thursday, August 21, 2003

A picture named littleJoe.jpgPictures from visits with John Edwards and Howard Dean in Concord and Manchester yesterday. Jim Moore and Besty Devine were at the Dean speech. CNN's Jeff Greenfield was at both. Lieberman's car is totally funny. A minor disaster happened to my car, which is not funny at all.  Permanent link to this item in the archive.

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. Permanent link to this item in the archive.

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." Permanent link to this item in the archive.

An XML guru wants to outlaw markup in RSS descriptions.  Permanent link to this item in the archive.

Chuq Von Rospach: "We're going to end up with two protocols that do the same thing." Permanent link to this item in the archive.

Four years ago today I got my outliner saving directly to a discussion group message, via XML-RPC.  Permanent link to this item in the archive.

Over 2000 messages are waiting. Perhaps its time to give up on the mail client software I've been using. Permanent link to this item in the archive.

Adam Curry: "Just don't email me at all." Permanent link to this item in the archive.

BBC: "Sobig F had been written by a spammer looking for ways to get past spam filters." Permanent link to this item in the archive.


Permanent link to archive for Wednesday, August 20, 2003. Wednesday, August 20, 2003

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. Permanent link to this item in the archive.

A new Manila theme from Bryan Bell. Permanent link to this item in the archive.

THINK!Day Two of Scripting News coverage of the New Hampshire primary campaign begins with a trip to see John Edwards at 2:15PM in Concord, and then Howard Dean at a house party at 7PM in Manchester. My first report may be online between the two events, if we can find our way back to that great Internet cafe in Manchester (and they're open). Chris Lydon is my partner for this field trip, so there may be audio, and once again I won't have to ask the questions (which is good). Permanent link to this item in the archive.

Chris Heilman: Faces of the California CandidatesPermanent link to this item in the archive.

Wash Post: Bush Campaign Reaching Out to BloggersPermanent link to this item in the archive.

Blog Graham is the weblog of Presidential hopeful Bob Graham. It's fairly awful. Permanent link to this item in the archive.

A picture named isThatDoc.jpgDoc Searls: "We went to Mantoloking Beach almost every day, and sometimes swam in the beaches and lagoons of Kettle Creek or the Metedeconk River on Barnegat Bay. We'd go fishing and crabbing in small boats. Almost every day on the way home we'd stop at a roadside farm stand, buy tomatoes and corn, and enjoy the best suppers I remember. We'd ride our bikes to the little general store about a mile away, buy comic books and come home to read them on our bunk beds. We'd graze on blueberries, three varieties of which comprised the entire forest floor. We'd build tree houses and play hide-and-seek in the woods. Bedtime came when the whip-poor-wills started calling. We fell asleep to a cacaphony of tree frogs and crickets." Permanent link to this item in the archive.

Kevin Werbach: "Either email is broken, Microsoft's email software is broken, or those two statements are the same." Permanent link to this item in the archive.

Scott Rosenberg: "Where do you want to go today? Anywhere but Outlook!" Permanent link to this item in the archive.

Jesse Ross in the Berkman Geekroom explains how the SoBig virus works. Permanent link to this item in the archive.

Question of the day: Is email broken? Permanent link to this item in the archive.

Dave Hyatt responds to the problem with Safari and Chris Lydon's site. Permanent link to this item in the archive.

BBC: "E-mail inboxes are being clogged by a new version of the Sobig Windows virus." Permanent link to this item in the archive.

Garth Kidd says poptool, a Python app, helps get rid of spammy messages. Permanent link to this item in the archive.

Scott Johnson is working with Chris Pirillo on a tutorial about aggregators.  Permanent link to this item in the archive.

Happy wedding anniversary to Andre and Andrea. And many spicy noodles! Permanent link to this item in the archive.

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. Permanent link to this item in the archive.


Permanent link to archive for Tuesday, August 19, 2003. Tuesday, August 19, 2003

Pito Salas: "Can your mother use RSS?" 

Schedule for candidates in NH. Tomorrow it's Edwards and Dean with Chris Lydon and possibly Halley. Permanent link to this item in the archive.

Jim Moore is thinking about BloggerCon. Permanent link to this item in the archive.

RSS in my heart.An experiment with RSS enclosures. If this works, users who subscribe to my feed with an enclosure-aware aggregator will have an MP3 of the interview Chris Lydon did with me last month, with no click-wait.  Permanent link to this item in the archive.

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 emailsPermanent link to this item in the archive.

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.  Permanent link to this item in the archive.

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! Permanent link to this item in the archive.

Chris Lydon: "Why aren't we holding American media responsible for 'sexed up' intelligence on Saddam's WMDs?" Permanent link to this item in the archive.

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." Permanent link to this item in the archive.

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. Permanent link to this item in the archive.


Permanent link to archive for Monday, August 18, 2003. Monday, August 18, 2003

A picture named halleySmall.jpgPictures from Bob Graham talk at Rotary Club of Manchester, NH. Assembled in an Internet Cafe on Elm Street in Manchester NH. Halley and I had lunch with the Rotary Club, and heard Bob Graham speak. Lots to digest. Halley's using one of their desktops for $6 per hour. I'm using my 802.11 laptop and that's free. An excellent high-speed connection. Praise Murphy. Permanent link to this item in the archive.

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.  Permanent link to this item in the archive.

A picture named blueDressWoman.jpgI haven't read Halley's comments yet, but here's my take on the event. Graham is a serious politician, he had several opportunities to stick his foot in his mouth, but stayed serious, only joked in a self-deprecating way. He was perfect. He would inspire confidence in a time of crisis, much more so than Gore or Bush did. But he's cut from the same cloth as Clinton, fighting for the center, insisting on saying nothing. His homilies were hackneyed and dishonest, for example he repeated the story pols love to tell, about passing on debt to the next generations, as if anyone who thought borrowing for growth meant they don't love his grandchildren. It's misleading, the grandchildren get to live in a richer world because of the debt we create today. I guess I'm on a mission to find a politician who will talk to adults as adults. But he was on TV, the cameras were there, so he gave a speech filled with soundbites. Look at my style. I'm a solid man. No substance. I didn't ask any questions. I'll say my piece here on the Web for now. BTW, Halley sat next to a Rotarian named Tom. He told her the room was filled with Republicans. Heh. Permanent link to this item in the archive.

WSJ: "Is Google slipping?" Permanent link to this item in the archive.

My questions for Presidential candidates. Permanent link to this item in the archive.

NHPR has a series on the Presidential primary. Permanent link to this item in the archive.

Gnome-Girl: "Doesn't anyone else think monthly 4 day weekends would boost our morale for work?"  Permanent link to this item in the archive.

Comments here on Wired's article on news aggregators. Permanent link to this item in the archive.

Text of email sent to BloggerCon subscribers. Permanent link to this item in the archive.

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. Permanent link to this item in the archive.

Dean Landsman says Yes to an Outlines and the Web BOF at BloggerCon. Permanent link to this item in the archive.

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! Permanent link to this item in the archive.

Two years ago: "If you ever get the blues, try getting your car washed." Permanent link to this item in the archive.

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. Permanent link to this item in the archive.

Wired on Aggregators Permanent link to this item in the archive.

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.


Permanent link to archive for Sunday, August 17, 2003. Sunday, August 17, 2003

Why I'm going to see the candidates in New Hampshire. Permanent link to this item in the archive.

A picture named schwartzie.jpgOne of the candidates I hope to meet next week is John Edwards. This NY Times piece says his campaign may be failing. Kerry's Iowa chairman, Jerry Crawford, is quoted, saying of Edwards: "He was one of the ones I was worried about earlier. Not now. The big mystery of this campaign is why he isn't connecting. He's a very talented guy. He's got great raw material." They talk about the candidate using the language of Hollywood. Are they substantial thinkers or people with great vision, or even great problem-solvers? Edwards has an extensive schedule in New Hampshire next week. He may not be in the race in September.  Permanent link to this item in the archive.

Dan Gillmor: RSS Hitting Critical MassPermanent link to this item in the archive.

Steve Kirks: "Send Steve to BloggerCon!" Yeah! Permanent link to this item in the archive.

Phil Ringnalda on BlogStreet and BlogLines. Permanent link to this item in the archive.

Should I do a 1.5 hour session on October 5 on Outlining and the Web? Permanent link to this item in the archive.

Pito Salas: "There are a few good blog readers out there but there's lots of room for innovation." Permanent link to this item in the archive.

Today's song: "When you walk in a dream but you know you're not dreaming, signore." Permanent link to this item in the archive.

Dan Grigsby: "I've put together a service to send out alerts via AIM whenever someone reads a blog entry." Permanent link to this item in the archive.

A picture named cher.jpgThree great lines from Moonstruck. Cher says "Snap out of it!" as she slaps Nicholas Cage after he says he loves her. Later when telling her mother that she's going to marry him, the mama (Olympia Dukakis) asks if she loves him. "I love him terrible, ma," she says. The mama says "That's too bad." Grandpa weeps when Danny Aiello comes back from Italy to find his brother is marrying his fiance. Mama asks why he's crying (probably thinking they were tears of joy of course) and he says "I'm so confused!" Permanent link to this item in the archive.

NY Times: Ohio Lines Failed Before BlackoutPermanent link to this item in the archive.

David Hoggard: "Is this a wonderful country or what?" Permanent link to this item in the archive.

Last year on this day, Instant Messaging in Frontier/Radio. Permanent link to this item in the archive.

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." Permanent link to this item in the archive.

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. Permanent link to this item in the archive.

Lydon, CSS, Safari Permanent link to this item in the archive.

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 Permanent link to this item in the archive.

I gave this line from Dan Gillmor a couple of days of thought: "Robert Scoble is a good guy, and he's good for Microsoft. But there's a some kool-aid seeping out of this piece."

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.


Permanent link to archive for Saturday, August 16, 2003. Saturday, August 16, 2003

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." Permanent link to this item in the archive.

Dan Gillmor says he might vote for Schwarzenegger. Permanent link to this item in the archive.

Dann Sheridan: "Bye, bye VCR." Permanent link to this item in the archive.

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! Permanent link to this item in the archive.

Scripting News is #1 in Blogstreet's Top 100. Thanks!!I'm working on the Subscriptions Harmonizer this weekend. One of the things I want is for the central app to give me a way to view all my subscriptions, to add and delete subs, and to offer a way to aggregate subs.  Permanent link to this item in the archive.

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). Permanent link to this item in the archive.

Tim Aiello: "I'm attempting to map the timeline of the power outage." Permanent link to this item in the archive.

BBC: "Former Ugandan dictator Idi Amin has died of multiple organ failure in hospital in Saudi Arabia." Permanent link to this item in the archive.

Thanks to Don Park for the pointer to Flame Warriors, a fantastic taxonomy of various roles people play on mail lists, with excellent illustrations. Permanent link to this item in the archive.

CamWorld: The Great Blackout of 2003Permanent link to this item in the archive.


Permanent link to archive for Friday, August 15, 2003. Friday, August 15, 2003

Chris Heilman: "This is a sorted and annotated list of all 135 candidates in California's special recall election." Permanent link to this item in the archive.

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. Permanent link to this item in the archive.

A picture named egg.gifHere's a rough outline of changes we're making to BloggerCon pricing. It's still in draft mode. Official rollout date is Monday. If you're the kind of person who likes to read finished stuff, please wait till Monday. BTW, I just got the scholarship form working.  Permanent link to this item in the archive.

Where the candidates are the week of August 18. Permanent link to this item in the archive.

Today's song: "The blue bulldog howls 'Boo-la, boo-la, boo!'"  Permanent link to this item in the archive.

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.  Permanent link to this item in the archive.

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. Permanent link to this item in the archive.

Rolling Stone: RSS 2.0Permanent link to this item in the archive.

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 herePermanent link to this item in the archive.

416 new feeds from PRWeb. Subscribed to the main feed, with the "top" press releases. RSS 0.91. Permanent link to this item in the archive.

Martin Schwimmer: "Pampers don't need electricity." Permanent link to this item in the archive.

Julie Powell: "I wonder how Julia passed the time during the blackout of 77?" Permanent link to this item in the archive.

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." Permanent link to this item in the archive.


Permanent link to archive for Thursday, August 14, 2003. Thursday, August 14, 2003

A picture named dietpepsi.gifEconomist: Golden blogs. I knew this was going to turn out badly. Factual errors. Blogger had a commercial version before Google acquired them. The person who interviewed me didn't get that there is a difference between a discussion group and a weblog. Tony Perkins runs a DG. Nice, but it's not a weblog. Amateurism is an important part of blogging. Look at the three sites Chris Lydon profiled most recently and the blogs Salon is hosting for a comp with Perkins' project. The Economist used to have a thoughtful tech reporter. He moved on, replaced with cynicism. However, it's nice that they pointed to me, so I could comment on the piece.  Permanent link to this item in the archive.

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." Permanent link to this item in the archive.

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. Permanent link to this item in the archive.

CNN: "Much of Midtown Manhattan and Wall Street was shut down. All area airports and the Long Island Railroad were also affected." Permanent link to this item in the archive.

Microsoft: What you should know about the Blaster wormPermanent link to this item in the archive.

Another game of 20 Questions, Weblog Style! Permanent link to this item in the archive.

Seth Dillingham got the correct answerPermanent link to this item in the archive.

BBC: "Scientist Sir Isaac Newton has triumphed in a poll searching for the greatest Briton." Permanent link to this item in the archive.

Halley is looking for a new "Printer-Copier-Fax-Scanner-Nutcracker." Permanent link to this item in the archive.

Sam Ruby has an interesting thread on quantifying the RDF Tax. I just posted a lengthy comment.  Permanent link to this item in the archive.

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. Permanent link to this item in the archive.

Jenny Levine: How to Add Navigator Links in RadioPermanent link to this item in the archive.

What's up with a comprehensive list of aggregators that doesn't include Radio or Manila? (Postscript: They're there now. Thanks.) Permanent link to this item in the archive.

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. Permanent link to this item in the archive.

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." Permanent link to this item in the archive.

Another reason weblogs are important in education, in today's NY Times. They help kids become better writers.  Permanent link to this item in the archive.

On this day last year weblogs.com's high water mark passed 1000. Today it's over 4000. Permanent link to this item in the archive.


Permanent link to archive for Wednesday, August 13, 2003. Wednesday, August 13, 2003

DaveNet: Nutch, an open source search enginePermanent link to this item in the archive.

Paul Nakada, via email: "It appears that the coding muscle for Nutch is Doug Cutting, the author of Lucene, an Apache Project open source search engine. We use it here at salesforce and have a huge amount of respect for Doug's coding." Permanent link to this item in the archive.

NY Times: "Can Johnny Blog?" Permanent link to this item in the archive.

John Palfrey: "I'm not sure there's ever been a conference at the Berkman Center that has received so much attention as BloggerCon has two months before it's actually happening." Permanent link to this item in the archive.

Chris Lydon interviews the Real Live Preacher. "He's a Baptist minister in South Texas who started a blog as a sort of personal refuge from his church -- a confessional place where he could voice some of the doubt and confusion in his life, or so he thought." Side-note, we're using a new CSS-based theme on Chris's site, should be easier to read.  Permanent link to this item in the archive.

Remember my father who was so sick late last year and early this year? He and my mom just got back from a hiking trip in Switzerland. The Miracle Man. Permanent link to this item in the archive.

Simon St Laurent did a Plain Old XML rendition of a FOAF file, which is usually coded in RDF. I admit, I tried the same thing, with similar (good) results. I bet almost anyone who had done a little HTML, the low-tech stuff, could understand what's up here. As everyone who cares knows, I find the extra RDF bits to be noisy and fluffy (not funky). Permanent link to this item in the archive.

Microdoc News remains one of my favorite sites. Permanent link to this item in the archive.

Dan Gillmor links to four Microsoft job openings with the word blog in the description.  Permanent link to this item in the archive.

Der Schockwellenreiter: Was ist RSS? Permanent link to this item in the archive.

GROKLAW is following SCO.  Permanent link to this item in the archive.

A picture named mrMonopoly.jpgMaureen Dowd says that because some boring pols are using weblogs poorly that the genre is doomed. First, I agree about the blogs and said so in Monday's column. "There are plenty of candidates with weblogs, they are mostly pointless, dull and uninteresting, now. It will get interesting when voters with weblogs make their presence felt with the candidates, and then (get this) invent new candidates." Lots of boring candidates use telephones too. Permanent link to this item in the archive.

I was telling Chris yesterday that 99 out of 100 Times articles about blogs go like this. 1. Do blogs mean the end of journalism as we know it? 2. No. Dowd has a new angle. 1. Do candidate blogs mean the end of blogging as we know it? This time the answer appears to be yes? Heh. Permanent link to this item in the archive.

Daniel Bright: RSS 2.0 using XmlTextWriterPermanent link to this item in the archive.

Adam Curry: To Collect and ServePermanent link to this item in the archive.

Two years ago today we celebrated the Blogger API. Permanent link to this item in the archive.

Scoble is hosting a blogger's dinner in Seattle tonight. Permanent link to this item in the archive.

Paul Boutin: "If wireless Internet access is such a hot technology, why is it such a dud business?" Permanent link to this item in the archive.

No fleecing Permanent link to this item in the archive.

Andrew Orlowski reports on the pricing of BloggerCon.

As I explained, publicly, I'm not being paid to do BloggerCon. His story says that I am going to "fleece" people who come, which means "To defraud of money or property; swindle." This is a really ugly accusation, and factually incorrect. Doesn't Andrew say that professional reporters are good at getting the facts right? What happened to his extensive fact-checking network?

Last June Andrew asked me to correct a story I ran about the Register. He was earnest and insistent -- my article could do real damage to his publication, he said. I gave it some thought and ran a retraction and apology. I didn't want to be responsible for the Register going under. That's how you do it, Andrew argued, when you get the facts wrong. I only had his word that I had the facts wrong, I had two sources who said I had it right. I decided to trust Andrew.


Permanent link to archive for Tuesday, August 12, 2003. Tuesday, August 12, 2003

Tim O'Reilly, via email, re this post: "Actually, Nutch has no ambitions to dethrone Google. It's just trying to provide an open source reference implementation of search to help keep Google and other search engines honest, by letting people compare the results of an engine whose algorithms and methodologies are transparent and accessible. It also aims to give a platform for people outside of the search heavyweights to research new search algorithms." Permanent link to this item in the archive.

Geoff Heard has been marshalling MORE 3.1 docs. He has PDFs of the full manual. This is pretty incredible. Released in 1991, MORE works on today's Macs. You can download the software for free on outliners.com. Permanent link to this item in the archive.

News.Com: "McDonald's said it plans to sell Internet access inside 100 locations in the Chicago and Milwaukee areas." Permanent link to this item in the archive.

Charles Cooper: Here we go againPermanent link to this item in the archive.

DeanSpace: Why Use DeanSpace? Permanent link to this item in the archive.

Thanks to Ole Eichorn for finding a bug in my RSS feed. The guid needed to be adjusted by three hours in order to be a permalink. It was a good guid (say that five times fast) but it was not pointing to anything on Scripting News. The bug was introduced when I moved from California to Boston in March. At first I thought Ole was being anal retentive, and told him so (not in those words of course) but he was right. It takes great courage to persist, and Ole clearly has great courage. Thank you. Now my permalinks should work. Praise Murphy! Permanent link to this item in the archive.

Speaking of Ole, here's one of my favorite Ole and Lena jokes. Permanent link to this item in the archive.

Howto: Generate an RSS 2.0 feed for Typepad

EFF: "You could spend up to five years in prison, pay a $250,000 fine and lose your right to vote for trading a single copyrighted song if the Author, Consumer and Computer Owner Protection and Security Act is passed by Congress." Permanent link to this item in the archive.

The XML-RPC Man. Arf arf!Greg Hanek explains why the XML-RPC site is getting so much traffic. "Do a Google search on 'RPC' and see what is at the top of the list. The latest nasty worm (aka LoveSan, MSBlast) that affects Windows users takes advantage of the RPC hole that exists before applying one of the many WinOS patches. It is currently running amok, and causing many people a great deal of distress, and I suspect many folks are trying to use google to find out what RPC is." Permanent link to this item in the archive.

News.Com: Is ZIP coming undone? Permanent link to this item in the archive.

Sadly, this year I will not write about the BeesPermanent link to this item in the archive.

Google now has a built-in calculator. Coool. How about a built-in dishwasher? Permanent link to this item in the archive.

The XML-RPC site is getting a lot more traffic lately. Nothing's changing, just lots more hits. And the referers don't reveal anything. Not sure what's happening there. Permanent link to this item in the archive.

Google names eight enterprise customers of their search appliance: Pfizer, the US Army, the city of San Diego, Xerox, Hitachi Data Systems, Nextel Communications, Procter & Gamble and Discovery Communications. Permanent link to this item in the archive.

A picture named randombbccolumnist.jpgBBC: "The earliest bloggers have been at it for two years now." Yet another idiotic piece about how much better the pros are than amateurs. A basic fact like this, so easy to check. The earliest bloggers have been "at it" since 1994, for almost nine years. No signs of it slowing down. Wishful thinking, perhaps? Permanent link to this item in the archive.

Seth Finkelstein solved the puzzle on 20 Questions. A person who is both animal and vegetable. Read the comments to find out who it is. Permanent link to this item in the archive.

Godin: "What is it about ubiquity that breeds contempt?" Permanent link to this item in the archive.

Ted Leung writes about jury duty. It's like watching a courtroom drama on TV, but the camera is in a weird place. I wrote about my experience with jury duty in 1996. Permanent link to this item in the archive.

Hello World.Want to know what I'm subscribed to? Here's my subs file, in OPML. Here's the same list rendered in HTML. I'm going to do some more work on this tomorrow.  Permanent link to this item in the archive.

Great piece by Tim Bray that explains how designers should use XML. He describes the Worse Is Better school of XML format design. The names we use for elements are the worst-possible names, but they allow our software to interoperate. Namespaces create elements with names with colons in them. I bet Tim agrees that funky feeds, even if they're valid RSS, hurt interop. So much of this is obvious, yet we spend years arguing about it.  Permanent link to this item in the archive.


Permanent link to archive for Monday, August 11, 2003. Monday, August 11, 2003

DaveNet: The 2004 ElectionPermanent link to this item in the archive.

20 Questions -- Weblog Style!  Permanent link to this item in the archive.

If I understood Dutch I could tell you what this page says. Permanent link to this item in the archive.

Marcus Mauller translatesPermanent link to this item in the archive.

NY Times: "A federal judge in Boston said yesterday that there was mounting evidence innocent people were being executed. But he declined to rule the death penalty unconstitutional." Permanent link to this item in the archive.

ComputerWorld: "A federal judge ruled on Friday that two universities do not have to comply with subpoenas requesting that they hand over the identities of students who could be illegally sharing music online." Permanent link to this item in the archive.

Greenspun: "Think about all the poor people currently being housed in cities, occupying housing that could be sold to rich yuppies who would pay huge property tax." Permanent link to this item in the archive.

Greensboro has a candidate with a candidate weblog, written by the candidate. RSS feed? YupPermanent link to this item in the archive.

My new list of candidate schedulesPermanent link to this item in the archive.

Howard Dean's campaign schedule. Very nicely done! Permanent link to this item in the archive.

ABC News's The Note is tantalizingly complete, but almost useless because it shows you where the candidates will be today only. That's great if a a candidate is going to be in Boston and I can shuffle around my day. We need the same depth of coverage for a week going forward. Permanent link to this item in the archive.

Gary Price summarizes a Business 2.0 article about an open source search engine that aims to dethrone Google.  Permanent link to this item in the archive.

Brian Buck: "Can't wait for that first day in September when the sky turns from gray haze to clean dry air." Amen.  Permanent link to this item in the archive.

Jake's got a wizzy editor working in Radio and Manila in Mozilla on Mac. What a relief. Now when people ask where's the wizzy editor for the Mac there will be an answer. Permanent link to this item in the archive.

Jevon MacDonald designed a namespace for comments included in an RSS feed. He also provides an example feed. I linked his page into the sub-directory on the RSS 2.0 site. Permanent link to this item in the archive.

One of the concerns Mark Pilgrim expressed about Daniel Berlinger's RSD spec is that he was hosting it on his own server. It's simple to remove the objection. I asked Daniel if he would let me mirror a copy of his spec, and he said yes.  Permanent link to this item in the archive.

NY Times: "Is there any advantage in having been ahead of the crowd now that just about every telecommunications company is rushing into the Wi-Fi wireless world?" Permanent link to this item in the archive.

MSDN: Creating an RSS News Aggregator with ASP.NETPermanent link to this item in the archive.


Permanent link to archive for Sunday, August 10, 2003. Sunday, August 10, 2003

Sponsorship at BloggerCon Permanent link to this item in the archive.

A picture named egg.gifThe cost of BloggerCon has been much-discussed in the last few days. Last night Christina Schulman, who has worked as a conference coordinator, sent an email asking for details, which I quickly provided. I cc'd the email to the BloggerCon mail list.

Second, I got an email on Thursday from Glenn Fleishman saying he couldn't attend, the cost was just too high. On Friday I got an excited email from Glenn, he had found a personal sponsor who wanted someone to be at BloggerCon on their behalf. I don't know who our benefactor is, yet, but thank you! It's a win-win for sure. Having Glenn at our weblog conference is a big deal. I also sent an email to the list to be sure everyone who was interested could benefit from the idea.

We are looking for the usual sponsorships, bronze, silver, gold, platinum, etc (contact John Palfrey) but this raises the issue of micro-sponsorships, where we match a corporation who wants to be in the loop on weblogs with an experienced blogger who can make a real contribution to the first academic conference on weblogs.

Frida Permanent link to this item in the archive.

A picture named frida.jpgLast night I watched Frida, a beautiful movie about art. I am a big fan of the two main characters in the movie, Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera. I love the style of their art, the Mexican themes and colors, their joy of life, the solitary suffering. The thing that was so cool about the movie is that it came from Hollywood and didn't fit into the usual mindless template that they repeat over and over, inspired by Star Wars. And they exposed the theme that's the secret to bliss between the genders. See the apparent flaws as the source of beauty.

Who pulls the strings in the Atom community? Permanent link to this item in the archive.

Yesterday I pointed to Mark Pilgrim's slam of RSD, a format that's been widely adopted on both sides of the blogging APIs. Pilgrim made it personal, by attacking the person who authored the spec, Daniel Berlinger, as if you could reduce a popular format to a person, and then defeat the format by enflaming the author of the spec. It's the usual trick, use the person's name in a flame enough times, and the casual reader thinks it's the person you're writing about who's flaming. Now that they're not coming after me, it's pretty clear what's going on. And I'm reading the archive carefully enough to notice who's saying what, and I'm not falling for the trick.

Then Sam Ruby stepped in, contradicted Pilgrim, and tried to take the attention off the back-channel, the not-visible conversations. It became totally clear, as RSD was thrown out, that decisions were being made in places no one could see except for Sam's friends. Sam explains how that works: "What's important is that no final decisions are made 'offline'." The key word is "final." Later he will be able to claim that he never said it was an open process. The correct statement, if the process were to have some kind of balance, for all kinds of developers, not just ones that can afford full-time developers flying around the world to meetings, would be "No decisions are made offline." Sam must agree to that before anyone should accept that his process is open, fair, or even has a chance of working.

Now, I admit I haven't been following the Wiki, but I have been reading Sam's weblog, and the Formerly Echo weblog run by Danny Ayers, and following the mail list, and I have not seen a single contribution from the Blogger or Movable Type people. Are they not participating? Or is their participation entirely back-channel? Who else is is not visibly participating? I want to know who's pulling the strings. If it's open, I should have all the information that Sam has, or some reasonable portion of it. Sam says you can't have it all, it would be impractial. Of course. But he's not providing any information. There's a big difference.

Extra: Read the first comment in response to this Rich Salz piece about the "grass roots" API. The fascinating angle on all this reinvention is that none of these people create weblog CMSes, aggregators or editors. Where are all the people who do that? Why are none of them participating in the public discussions?


Permanent link to archive for Saturday, August 09, 2003. Saturday, August 09, 2003

Click here for more about the California recall. Permanent link to this item in the archive.

This NY Times report makes it sound like politics in Calif is melting down. Permanent link to this item in the archive.

Blogging the bloggers blogging the 2004 election. Permanent link to this item in the archive.

AOL hired a pied piper for their weblogs. Smart.  Permanent link to this item in the archive.

Gary Price reports on IBM's "Google on steroids." Permanent link to this item in the archive.

How power is wielded in the Atom developer community.  Permanent link to this item in the archive.

DeanSpace is an "open development community providing powerful web-tools, quality support, and expert advice to Howard Dean's grassroots supporters." SubscribedPermanent link to this item in the archive.

A picture named gassee.jpgPhil meet Anand. You both want to do something about scaling for syndication. Me too. Phil, think RSS, it's the installed base leader. Nothing else is even in the game. Permanent link to this item in the archive.

1/5/97: "We talked about HyperCard, which was then the most powerful scripting software for the Macintosh. I said (of course) that our software would be much more sophisticated than HyperCard, more for geeks, but simpler, deeper, faster, more useful. Jean-Louis encouraged me to tell him more. I did. I like talking to JLG because he likes geek talk. So then he asked me a question that I still think about. He asked, 'Would it be all right with you, if in the meantime, we continued to sell HyperCard?' I laughed! I'm laughing now. It's a funny question!" Permanent link to this item in the archive.

Nikon has an 802.11 camera. Exactly right. Thanks to Jason DeFilippo for the pointerPermanent link to this item in the archive.

Dennis Kucinich will be at the opening of his NH campaign headquarters, in Manchester, on Monday morning, 9AM-10:30AM. He spoke in SF at 401 Van Ness, at 7:30AM Pacific, Austin, TX tonight. Permanent link to this item in the archive.

Senator Bob Graham is touring Iowa by car this month. Permanent link to this item in the archive.

This is me in first grade. Click for the big pictureI started a directory with scheduling info on the 2004 campaign. After a bit of searching, I hit paydirt. The Nashua Telegraph has a special site with news of the campaign, updated daily, weblog style, and (bing bing) they have a very nice RSS feed to go with it; subscribed.  Permanent link to this item in the archive.

Anand: "Does anyone know about any implementation based on the cloud sub-element in RSS 2.0?" Permanent link to this item in the archive.

Jake reports a fix in Radio's implementation of Trackback. Permanent link to this item in the archive.

Mark Pilgrim's bug report. Just a bug, not a conspiracy. Permanent link to this item in the archive.

Lockergnome's RSS resource. SubscribedPermanent link to this item in the archive.

Edd Dumbill explains why he likes RDF, still. Permanent link to this item in the archive.

Jon Udell: "There is an ongoing controversy in the XML world about the use of a feature called namespaces." Permanent link to this item in the archive.

Two years ago: "People always ask 'Where were you when Kennedy was shot?' This is where I was." Permanent link to this item in the archive.


Permanent link to archive for Friday, August 08, 2003. Friday, August 08, 2003

BBC: "United States President George W Bush has added to the drama of California's recall election by saying movie star Arnold Schwarzenegger would make a good governor." Permanent link to this item in the archive.

Parking meter.If you're interested in weblog APIs, please review the new MetaWeblog API spec. Today it moved from my test site to the XML-RPC site, replacing the spec from 2002 (which has been archived). It's important to review this for accuracy and completeness now, I'd like to finish this rev in a week or two. There haven't been any comments for quite some time, so perhaps we're almost done. After it's frozen, as you know, it will be too late.  Permanent link to this item in the archive.

Steve Gillmor: "Clay Shirky is the Adlai Stevenson of Team RSS." Permanent link to this item in the archive.

Dan Gillmor on Microsoft's blogging software. "This strikes me as no threat to the current and upcoming end-user tools from the vendors we use today." Permanent link to this item in the archive.

Andrew Grumet has a philosophy of aggregators that matches mine. The three-pane "feed reader" is a disaster, it's merely recreating a mess I want to run away from. I like having a new queue every few hours.  Permanent link to this item in the archive.

Adam Curry on a Dutch ISP using RSS for trouble tickets. Permanent link to this item in the archive.

Jon Udell: "Let's stop punishing RSS syndication for its success by asking it to carry the whole burden of XML usage in the semantic Web." Amen. Permanent link to this item in the archive.

Happy Birthday to InstaPundit and many happy returns! Permanent link to this item in the archive.

It turns out the Blogger API is two years old today too! Permanent link to this item in the archive.

All Things Considered: '"Theoretically, pages on the Web are governed by standards -- rules about how they are built, how computers read their instructions and display them." Permanent link to this item in the archive.

Dann Sheridan: "Since installing a new firewall on the home network last night, I haven't been able to publish to my site because my firewall thinks it is being attacked by Radio." Permanent link to this item in the archive.

Cone: "Limbaugh’s show prep no doubt includes weblogs." Permanent link to this item in the archive.

Oh geez, Notepad popupsPermanent link to this item in the archive.

Amit Dubey, via email: "After the Liberal Party Convention this November, Paul Martin will likely become Canada's next Prime Minister (some pollsters report he has the support of about 80% of the delegates). He also is a blogger." 

Zawodny: "Ever wanted to talk directly to the Yahoo! Search team in an open forum? Well, now you can." Permanent link to this item in the archive.

Four years ago today, a milestone piece on standards in instant messaging, in News.Com.  Permanent link to this item in the archive.

How dorky is an application used by three people that hits one of my sites 10K times a day? Sometimes I wish the kids would just grow up. Or if that's not possible, at least leave home. Or if that's not possible, die. Permanent link to this item in the archive.

 Permanent link to this item in the archive.


Permanent link to archive for Thursday, August 07, 2003. Thursday, August 07, 2003

Welcome to another Thursday night at Berkman. 

The BloggerCon site has a delightful new lookPermanent link to this item in the archive.

Scoble signs Hillary Clinton. The deal of the century. Permanent link to this item in the archive.

Another celebrity pol for Scoble to sign. Permanent link to this item in the archive.

Ptypes says "Howard Dean is a body-double of Lee Harvey Oswald." Permanent link to this item in the archive.

Michael Feldman is a Harvard blogger. "Every day I try to post one thing that makes me laugh and one thing that makes me think," says Michael. 

Tonight's song: "In the town where I was born, lived a man who sailed the sea. And he told us of his life, in the land of submarines." 

Julie Powell: "I like the idea that eating well is a universal right, and that you can do it in the midst of the daily Hell that most of us live, especially when you live in an outer borough of New York City." Permanent link to this item in the archive.

Chris and Julie doing the interview. 

Greenspun: "'Welcome to the West Coast,' said the friendly woman at Travis Air Force Base Approach before handing me off to the Napa airport tower." Permanent link to this item in the archive.

Lessig, a lawyer, asks: "Is it impossible to imagine the lawyers ever on the side of innovation?"  Permanent link to this item in the archive.

Thanks to Mat Wrigley for the pointer to the full Dogma 2000 website. I replaced the link in the blogroll on Scripting News so that search engines will have a better chance of finding it. 

Don Park: "I hope many people get nosebleed from this and the previous post." Permanent link to this item in the archive.

Halley Suitt is a member of the local host committee for BloggerCon. In the invite I referred to her as author Halley Suitt. Her first post today is a reminder why that is such an accurate description. She should write a book, she's so good. Permanent link to this item in the archive.

August 2001: Exploring the Blues.  Permanent link to this item in the archive.

NY Times: "Some colleges now let freshmen pick their own roommates in an online roommate-selection system that works on the same principles as computer dating." Permanent link to this item in the archive.

BBC: "Microsoft has announced that new versions of its mouse will be fitted with wheels that tilt as well as roll." Permanent link to this item in the archive.

Kottke took a look at all the flavors of RSS and figured out what's been going on. This stuff isn't that hard.  Permanent link to this item in the archive.

Andrew Orlowski is having another acid flashback, this time about Apple and Sun. Based on his previous track record give it a 10 percent chance of having any substance at all. But it's still an interesting idea, isn't it? Permanent link to this item in the archive.

IdiotDev: "Hey what would a game look like that used RSS as its engine?" Permanent link to this item in the archive.

Google News Alerts "are sent by email when news articles appear online that match the topics you specify." Permanent link to this item in the archive.

Pffft.Microdoc News: "With the implementation of Google News Alerts I am becoming increasingly aware that Google Inc is fast becoming an Internet Services Company with search being an attractive core, but certainly not the main game." Permanent link to this item in the archive.

John Palfrey says Tim Bray missed his point. Permanent link to this item in the archive.

Jeremy Zawodny says Google's PageRank is broken.  Permanent link to this item in the archive.

Last year on this day: "I still dream of smoking, but even in my dreams I have become an ex-smoker." Permanent link to this item in the archive.


Permanent link to archive for Wednesday, August 06, 2003. Wednesday, August 06, 2003

BBC: "Arnold Schwarzenegger has announced that he will run as a Republican candidate for governor of California." Permanent link to this item in the archive.

Hossein Derakhshan, an Iranian, says that RSS can be used to route around government censorship.  Permanent link to this item in the archive.

Viswanath Gondi: Google for Privacy Conscious UsersPermanent link to this item in the archive.

NY Times: "The AOL 9 upgrade is the least cocky, most customer-focused overhaul in a long time." Permanent link to this item in the archive.

PC World: "Meet your next Web-based time-saver: customized news feeds that give news junkies their fix quickly and easily, without their having to scour the Web for all the latest bulletins. Called RSS, this standard could radically change the way you gather and manage information online." Permanent link to this item in the archive.

RSS in my heart.Apple reports on a Phish festival. "Phish headlined a three-day festival which attracted 70,000+ fans. In addition to performing, the band set up a tent where fans could make their own free custom mix CD of live Phish tracks with iTunes. Phish also rented a 100,000-watt radio station, completely driven by iTunes, and broadcast from the event commercial-free." I found this story through Apple's RSS feed. See the business model? Keeping fans informed of what's going on with the products (and bands) that they love. Apple is using our technology masterfully to tell people how Phish is using theirs. Permanent link to this item in the archive.

Essay: "RSS is a billion-dollar format. If you objectively look at all the content that flows through it you'll see that, like Apple in 1983, it can't be stopped. It doesn't matter who wants to stop it." Permanent link to this item in the archive.

Phil Wolff interviews Steve Rose, the author of RSSJobs. Permanent link to this item in the archive.

Bryan and Paolo reveal Radio's biggest secret. Heh. Permanent link to this item in the archive.

BTW, I use Radio to edit my Manila sites, including the templates and content, as Bryan does. I can't imagine editing the components of a website any other way.  Permanent link to this item in the archive.

Ben Adida, an MIT grad student with a Harvard weblog.  Permanent link to this item in the archive.

Tracy Adams: "I wrote this entry without typing." Permanent link to this item in the archive.

Nutch is a "nascent effort to implement an open-source web search engine." Permanent link to this item in the archive.

Jon Udell: "I'm not saying that I want to put RDF into RSS." Permanent link to this item in the archive.

In his second piece of the day, Jon Udell asks RDF advocates what's wrong with Plain Old Metadata. Permanent link to this item in the archive.

NY Times: "Over the last 20 years the nation's housing market has been cleaved in two, and the break has helped create two very different economies in one country." Permanent link to this item in the archive.

Click on the campaign button. Thanks. Permanent link to this item in the archive.

The picture above is art. What does it mean? Click on the pic. Do you know any more? Who is wKen? Who is speaking? What does your mind say? That's the art. Did you click on the Gnome-Girl link? If so, at what point did you decide not to get involved? Or did you? (Big juicy kiss to GG, love you baby.)  Permanent link to this item in the archive.

Now what do I see? I see weblog art. The button represents the Come As You Are philosophy of Dogma 2000. Web Energy forever. Yeha, he mis-spelled Governor. And I mis-spelled yeah. Let's hope it was an accident.  Permanent link to this item in the archive.

Rageboy: "A month or so ago, maybe it was last year... No. It was June." Permanent link to this item in the archive.


Permanent link to archive for Tuesday, August 05, 2003. Tuesday, August 05, 2003

Ed Cone: "Senator John Edwards has responded to some questions submitted to his office by EdCone.com. Here’s what he has to say in a weblog-exclusive email interview." Permanent link to this item in the archive.

Jonathan Zittrain: The Copyright Cage. "Bars can't have TVs bigger than 55 inches. Teddy bears can't include tape decks. Girl Scouts who sing Puff, the Magic Dragon owe royalties." Permanent link to this item in the archive.

Jon Udell on relative links in RSS feeds with comments from Brent Simmons and Sam Ruby. Permanent link to this item in the archive.

Wes Felter: "One thing you can do with a news aggregator is watch things propagate through the blogosphere." Permanent link to this item in the archive.

Tom Daschle: "My driving tour began with a visit to the Community Health Center in Rapid City."  Permanent link to this item in the archive.

Daschle talks about health care and insurance. This is much on my mind these days. I just signed up for Harvard's health plan yesterday. It's much cheaper than the COBRA plan I was on (it expires next month). Also, I've gotten lots of email after yesterday's News.Com piece, all of it sympathetic. Thanks. I guess most people didn't know how vicious the bashing had gotten. It's pretty bad and it's been going on for years. Yesterday the bad stuff was exposed in a way that lots of good people could see.  Permanent link to this item in the archive.

Dan Gillmor: "I'm spending several days at the Vermont headquarters of the Howard Dean presidential campaign, studying a breakthrough in American politics." Permanent link to this item in the archive.

RSS in my heart.Okay, if you don't like to think about porn, avert your eyes. There's going to be a big for-pay business around sex movies delivered via RSS, using enclosures and Adam Curry's brilliant idea for time-shifted downloads. The algorithm is implemented in Radio, and probably no other aggregator, at this time. Instead of grainy little postage-stamp-size Quicktimes that take forever to download, you'll get full-screen digital movies and no click-wait. There's real money to be made here.  Permanent link to this item in the archive.

Still thinking about Art Interludes at BloggerCon. Looking for the intersection between art, weblogs and a face-to-face conference. How can we bring art into BC? Permanent link to this item in the archive.

Glenn Fleishman: "The future has finally arrived with Hydra from The Coding Monkeys in Germany." Permanent link to this item in the archive.

Howl is Rendezvous for Windows and Linux. Permanent link to this item in the archive.

Paolo: "What I would like next? A renderer for Radio which replicates the easy to use 'wiki punctuation' that many wiki apps use." Permanent link to this item in the archive.

Doc Searls: "Dean is totally upstaging all the other Democrats by picking fund-raising fights with the Bush campaign. And the press is eating it up." Permanent link to this item in the archive.

NY Times: "Lieberman warned that nominating Howard Dean as the Democrat to face President Bush in 2004 would be 'a ticket to nowhere.'" Permanent link to this item in the archive.

Essay: Pointers are cheapPermanent link to this item in the archive.


Permanent link to archive for Monday, August 04, 2003. Monday, August 04, 2003

Register: Novell buys Ximian. Wow. Permanent link to this item in the archive.

Oracle has three new RSS 2.0 feeds and a Radio weblog.  Permanent link to this item in the archive.

Jake reports that Trackback for Radio is now released.  Permanent link to this item in the archive.

Evhead: "Google is not a famousness-ranking-by-first-name engine. It's a search engine." Bummer. Permanent link to this item in the archive.

An article in News.Com, while extremely incendiary, may be seen as the last gasp in the Great RSS War of 2003.  Permanent link to this item in the archive.

John Palfrey: "The substance that seems to matter most is some combination of the following: openness on the Net; interoperability; true consumer and technologist choice; and effectiveness and stability of the technology." Permanent link to this item in the archive.

Hey Sam, RSS is great.A response to Sam Ruby's comment about namespaces in the News.Com article. The only other comment I can see worth responding to right away is Mark Pilgrim's comment about RSS being controlled by a single vendor. It's simply not true. UserLand transferred, for free, all of its IP in RSS to a non-profit who then licensed it under the Creative Commons. In what way is it controlled by a single vendor? What more could UserLand have done? Permanent link to this item in the archive.

NY Times: "To lie effectively, one has to have a notion that other people have minds and can be deceived." Permanent link to this item in the archive.

A letter to Palfrey, Ruby, Bray, Pilgrim, cc'd Festa. Permanent link to this item in the archive.

A heads up. Tim Bray says the News.Com reporter left out something important. I said "Hey Tim, you have a weblog, what are you waiting for?" He said he'll write it up. I don't want to steal his thunder, it's quite along the lines of the letter I sent, linked to above. Look forward to linking to it tomorrow. Permanent link to this item in the archive.

Charles Cooper, also in News.Com: "Whether that ends the feuding with folks who have very different ideas about how to advance the spec is anyone's guess. But it strikes me as laudable. Instead of opting for a proprietary land grab, a company that was an RSS tools builder freely gave up its guardianship to a nonprofit trust." Permanent link to this item in the archive.

Diego Doval comments on the move to Harvard, today's News.Com article, and working on Pie-Echo-Whatever.  Permanent link to this item in the archive.

Paolo: "Hydra is cool." Permanent link to this item in the archive.

My Radio weblog now has Trackback.  Permanent link to this item in the archive.

Three years ago: "The Republicans nominated a presidential candidate that some say knows as much about the world as an 'average TWA pilot.'" Permanent link to this item in the archive.

NY Times: "The online edition of The New York Post, which is owned by the News Corporation, ran an article last month about a murder in which the victim's body parts were packed in a suitcase, and Google served up an ad for a luggage dealer." Permanent link to this item in the archive.

NY Times: "On Saturday, a flash mob collected near the American Embassy in Berlin, and far from deriding Iraqi policies or some other momentous topic, they wore silly hats, waved flags and popped Champagne." Permanent link to this item in the archive.

Scoble: "So, how do you get people back to work? Easy: provide incentives for rich people to invest their money in new companies." If someone asked if they should invest in RSS, which so many developers seem to have creative ideas about now, what would you say? What incentives would make it worth the risk?  Permanent link to this item in the archive.

RSSJobs allows you to "create and save searches for Monster, Dice, HotJobs,and more in one location, then delivers the results to your favorite RSS Reader." Permanent link to this item in the archive.

Scott Reynen: "This utility will take a monster.com or hotjobs.com job search URL and produce an RSS feed of the results." Permanent link to this item in the archive.


Permanent link to archive for Sunday, August 03, 2003. Sunday, August 03, 2003

A picture named john.gifJob For John: "Last Thursday, July 24th I was downsized from my job of 3 years at a software company. Later the same day I heard that President Bush's economic team would be doing a bus tour through Wisconsin and Minnesota this week touting Bush's tax cut and its prosperous economic effects. 'What a bunch of BS. I'd like to give their PR tour a dose of reality,' is what I thought. So I packed up the minivan and decided to follow their bus around the countryside and talk to whoever would listen about the real facts -- that this economy stinks, and Bush's tax cuts are making it worse." Permanent link to this item in the archive.

Don Park: "It is a great feeling just being here." Permanent link to this item in the archive.

NY Times: In DSpace, Ideas Are ForeverPermanent link to this item in the archive.

Dan Gillmor: "In the past month, I've done my part to undermine a monopoly. How? By making phone calls."  Permanent link to this item in the archive.

Chris Pirillo: "E-mail is a polluted medium." Permanent link to this item in the archive.

Chris Heilman: Summer in Southern CaliforniaPermanent link to this item in the archive.

Error-handling in MetaWeblog API Permanent link to this item in the archive.

I added a new note in the comments section of the MetaWeblog API spec explaining that errors are handled through the fault-reporting procedure described in the XML-RPC spec. Comment on the mail list, or in the comment section of this weblog post.

Technography at Berkman Permanent link to this item in the archive.

I've been gently introducing technography to the Thursday evening weblog writers group. A scenario. I put up an outline and ask "How would we know if we were successful in New Hampshire." People start blurting out ideas. I note them in a projected outline that everyone can see. The conversation stalls after the list fills up (this always seems to happen, people get evaluative too quickly). I add a dozen blank lines in the middle of the list, after sorting it by the size of the idea (big ones go at the bottom, little ones at the top). Then the ideas start flowing again.

Two XMLs, sliced and diced Permanent link to this item in the archive.

I've been discussing two different ways of approaching XML. At XML Devcon, talking with Peter Drayton and Brian Jepson, I postulated that there are people who love XML for its technical intricacy, and people who use XML because it is a convenient way to move info between apps. Brian pointed out that the latter is the Worse-Is-Better philosophy or POGE, the Principle Of Good Enough.

Last night I realized there may be another way of describing the dichotomy, people who think of XML as a programming space, and people who think of it as a literary space. I am generally in the latter group. It's why I shudder when I see namespaces in an otherwise understandable-as-literature XML doc. There is no equivalent of namespaces in prose or poetry.

Let's say you could step back in time and rename the Dublin Core, what could you call it so that it would read well in any XML document? Nothing. A colon has a completely different meaning in writing. Nothing you name it could make it read well.

Being important Permanent link to this item in the archive.

Bloggers who never flame anyone and don't have blogrolls (or don't make a big deal about them) may take a long time to become "important" -- but if they stand out because of the quality of their ideas, and the ideas they insipire, they can attain a kind of longevity that has value, like the giants whose shoulders Sir Isaac Newton stood on.

Think orgasmically Permanent link to this item in the archive.

Did you know that you can be intellectually sensual in your interactions with other people? It's virtually impossible to find anyone who wants to play this way, but a good university offers the possibility that other people came there who want to collaborate, truly. The sexual metaphors make some people uncomfortable, maybe most people -- but I kind of believe that God gave birds orgasms when they migrate in the spring and fall; and that's why I feel so good when I have an idea that mixes well with the world. I wrote this thinking about Betsy Devine. I have no doubt she fully understands what I'm talking about. Very few people do, and I think most of them (seem to be) are women.


Permanent link to archive for Saturday, August 02, 2003. Saturday, August 02, 2003

Sir Alec Issigonis: "A camel is a horse designed by committee."  Permanent link to this item in the archive.

A picture named bos.gifBert Bos: "'Design by committee' has a bad name (specs that are a patchwork of inconsistent solutions, often redundant, and thus too big and too hard to learn), but in reality it doesn't automatically produce bad results." Permanent link to this item in the archive.

Mark Twain: "In the first place, God made idiots. That was for practice. Then he made school boards."  Permanent link to this item in the archive.

A picture named heinlein.gifRobert Heinlein: "An artist can look at a pretty girl and see the old woman she will become. A better artist can look at an old woman and see the pretty girl she used to be. A great artist can look at an old woman, portray her exactly as she is, and force the viewer to se the pretty girl she used to be, more than that, he can make anyone with the sensitivity of an armadillo see that this lovely young girl is still alive, prisoned inside her ruined body. He can make you feel the quiet endless tragedy that there was never a girl born who ever grew older than eighteen in her heart." Permanent link to this item in the archive.

Rob Fahrni: "If Blogger would implement the MetaWeblog API I could get titles to show up in my posts without editing my entries from their web UI." Permanent link to this item in the archive.

William Grosso: "I like RSS, but I have reservations." Permanent link to this item in the archive.

STkoutline imports and exports OPML files. Permanent link to this item in the archive.

Two years ago a couple of jokes, suitable for the whole family. Permanent link to this item in the archive.

How to name a product Permanent link to this item in the archive.

1. Make a list of adjectives that apply to the product, things you want to convey in the name. If you don't have such a list you'll never know how to judge the potential names you come up with.

2. Using a thesaurus look up some of the adjectives. Let your mind wander. It's important to play at this stage. Think of people who exemplify the traits listed in step 1. Think of places. Historical periods. Don't be linear. Call a friend and read off the list in step 1 and ask them to blurt out any words they think of. Make up words that convey the adjectives.

3. Now go into evaluative mode on the list from step 2. Cross off words that are descriptive. Those won't pass muster as trademarks. Keep proper names. Made-up words are especially good. At any point you can jump back to step 1 or 2, and add to your lists. (In fact if you don't I suspect your process isn't working very well.)

4. Look up the words from step 3 on a search engine. Cross off names that are products, formats, standards, or in any way are associated with your industry, no matter how remote. Save yourself grief later.

5. Pass the list from step 4 over to a trademark attorney to check them in the USPTO database.


Permanent link to archive for Friday, August 01, 2003. Friday, August 01, 2003

RSS in my heart.Draft: MetaWeblog API Spec. This is the unified spec, ready for developer review. Includes a provision for appkey transmission to meet one of the objections Google has with using the API with Blogger. Now is the time to review the spec for errors, things that aren't clear, omissions, deal-stoppers, but not for religious purity. I'd love to get Google on board with support of this API, I know it's not likely (not sure why), but I don't give up easily.  Permanent link to this item in the archive.

Chris Lydon takes us on the road, to blogging from Belfast, Northern Ireland.  Permanent link to this item in the archive.

iRATE radio is a "collaborative filtering client/server mp3 player/downloader." Permanent link to this item in the archive.

Ed Cone: "Trudeau is less than pleased with the redaction." Permanent link to this item in the archive.

The first BloggerCon invites go out next week. Be sure you get one by signing up here. Permanent link to this item in the archive.

Tom Daschle: "Welcome to my travel web log." Permanent link to this item in the archive.

Hey it sounds like JPalfrey is having a great time at Oxford. Permanent link to this item in the archive.

The sky just opened up. An east coast summer thunderstorm. Wow. Haven't seen one of those in decades. Permanent link to this item in the archive.

A picture named tivo.gifMichael Gartenberg says dump the TiVO, get a Media Center XP. "I can copy my recorded shows to my laptop for viewing when I'm on the road (great way to catch up on the West Wing and 24) and also archive the shows to standard DVDs." Too late for me, I'm finally getting a new TiVO this afternoon.  Permanent link to this item in the archive.

Arrgh. DirecTV called at 5PM saying they wouldn't be here to install my dish and TiVO betw 1PM and 5PM as scheduled. They want to reschedule for a week from tomorrow. Grrr. I'm inclined to say no.  Permanent link to this item in the archive.

If Amazon were giving out developer awards, onfocus should get one.  Permanent link to this item in the archive.

Tim O'Reilly on Moneyball: "I'm not a big baseball fan, but this book is a revelation. Anyone in business should read it. It describes the superior results that come when you throw away what you think you know, the accepted wisdom of an industry, and rebuild your efforts around a deeper understanding of what matters in your success." Thanks to Ben Matasar for the pointer to Tim's interview. Permanent link to this item in the archive.

Dann Sheridan is looking for weblogs that specialize in storage issues. Storage is "one of the deepest, darkest geek sanctuaries in technology," says Dann. Permanent link to this item in the archive.

Two years ago: "Twenty years ago, in August 1981, the first IBM PC rolled off the assembly line and said Hello World." Permanent link to this item in the archive.

Young Steve Jobs in 1984. Quicktime. Permanent link to this item in the archive.

Economist: "Mr Mundie is unambiguously the secretary of state of the United States of Windows." Permanent link to this item in the archive.

AP: "Harvard Law School is planning to put more than a million documents from the Nuremberg trials on the Internet, allowing ready access to records of hearings into the war crimes of Adolf Hitler's Third Reich." Permanent link to this item in the archive.

Jesse Ross: Cloning a computer with free softwarePermanent link to this item in the archive.

     

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