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Off to NYC. May update later. Have fun! Scoble deals with the Microsoft blogger who got fired. "I've learned over and over in my career that whenever someone gets fired, you rarely know the whole story." The Edwards weblog has an RSS feed. Microdoc: Why Google Will Never Partner with Microsoft. 10/16/03: "As I get older, I keep getting reminders that there's less time to correct mistakes, so I strive to make fewer." Thanks to Megnut for the pointer to Boing Boing, which has been having hosting issues. Andrew is using Radio's outliner to post to Movable Type. Ed Cone: "I'm dressing up as a middle-aged man in a t-shirt and shorts." 23 new feeds from ABC News.
Economist: How good is Google? Via Rob, via Gregor a very good explanation of weblogs from Andrew (in May).
The Thursday meeting is on, however I will not be there tonight. A chance for the group to run itself. I want a salon in Cambridge in mid-November. And Chris wants to launch a new website. There's lots of talent in the room. I'll be back next Thursday. Scripting News dinner in NYC on Saturday? What do you think? I'm going down tomorrow afternoon, staying for the weekend. Maybe this time we should have it at Junior's in Brooklyn? Given the last minute I guess we'd have a light turnout. Here's a survey. Click Yes if you'd come. MSNBC: Blogger dismissed from Microsoft. Scott Rosenberg on the rush of venture capital into social software companies like Friendster. Andrew posts the specs for the machines we ordered today. Ed Cone: "Dave wants to take a road-show version of BloggerCon to San Francisco and maybe New York. Great idea, but I hate to see the rest of the country left on the other side of a digital divide. There's only one Dave, but there are a lot of us who have learned from him and with him, and we should be doing the same thing wherever we are." Bill Koslosky: Pictures taken with the Treo 600. One of the ideas I'm trying in the new design for Scripting News is that everything is an outline. To kick it off, here's the On-This-Day-In outline. It's a work in progress. NASA: "Arctic perennial sea ice has been decreasing at a rate of 9 percent per decade since the 1970s." An old demo: "According to our records you are not funky." Okay the West Wing has gotten lame since Aaron Sorkin left, but it's still the WW. Can you see the seed of the sequel? Jessica Baumgart, a Berkman-Thursday regular, says she's heard that Tufts wants a blogging program like the one we have at Harvard Law School.
Great feedback in response to last night's trial balloon for a mid-November salon to gather knowledge about citizen weblogs and democracy. Why so soon? The political season in NH will be moving into high gear. The primary is in January. December is the holiday month (of course we'll be working). That's the thinking behind mid-November. As with the early October confab, this one would be webcast. The new Scripting News archive is deployed. Yesterday I flipped the switch and redirected from the old archive into the new one (both are still being maintained, praise Murphy). The really big change will be coming shortly, when the home page changes to the new format, and becomes just a page in a directory, containing my blogroll, etc. The new design is very spartan. I showed it to Chris Lydon yesterday and he got it immediately. Even though the design looks nothing like Scripting News, he still immediately recognized it as being Scripting News. What did they used to say when something works the first time? Bing.
Part two of Chris Lydon's interview with Stirling Newberry. Manila: Password-protected RSS feeds. Jay Rosen: "Case closed."
Steve MacLaughlin gets the skinny on Nick Denton's new Fleshbot. Rogers Cadenhead has a list of weblogs covering the California fires. Diego Doval: "As open as people can be on their weblogs, there is really no substitute for knowing the person." Jim Roepcke blogs Tim O'Reilly talking about Mac OS X. Essay: "To me, standing up to help a person being attacked is the best we can do. If it's the US government or a BigCo trying to keep people from talking about them, or a lout with a website, trashing good people's reputations."
Google Toolbar gives my weblog a page rank of zero. Thanks to Ole Eichorn for the screen shot. I'm sure this is just a bug, and not something deliberate. He says that Glenn Reynolds gets a 7, his own blog gets a 6, Scoble gets an 7. Danny Sullivan of Search Engine Watch explains: "I show you as 8 out of 10. The toolbar has been notorious over the past few months of failing to show ratings or correct ratings for all types of sites."
Jay Rosen reports that the Siegal Report, the results of the NY Times investigation of itself after the Jayson Blair incident, has gone 404. For the non-technical, this means it's gone, the links don't work. He suggests that finding out what happened should be the first priority for the Times' Public Editor, named yesterday. Pioneer has a new combination TiVo/DVD burner that lets you burn TV shows to DVD. "Sadly, I fear it won't be legal for long," says Wes Felter. I'm just about ready to flip the switch on the new archive for Scripting News. We've also made major progress on bringing a new management team on board for UserLand. Hope to have the deal ready to announce next week. And to celebrate 500 days of No Smoking Dave, I placed an order for two new servers, to run in a new cage here in Boston. This is where I'm going to put various specs and public services that are currently running at UserLand, so the new team can focus on Manila and Radio. Murphy-willing there will be quite a few changes, for the better, in the remaining weeks of 2003. Taegan Goddard: "Karl Rove wants to run against Dean." Jon Udell: "Microsoft is pitching a Windows-only UI renderer that targets 2006-era desktops and notebooks, while allowing MSIE to stagnate. I can see how and why they arrived at this strategy, but it doesn't seem to be the kind of Web/GUI convergence I'm looking for." A data point in the Great Google Blog Experiment. This weblog, presumably because it's run by the Boston Globe, is included in Google News. So the owners of Blogger, and the company that loves the Web, is tilting the table in favor of people whose main qualification are the ink stains on their keyboards. It is ironic, isn't it? A report from the Blogger's BOF at Microsoft's PDC. Ed Cone on presidential spin re Iraq.
This is what passes for respect among Unix fans. It's also the first clear statement that Red Hat closed the huge security holes that were present three years ago. I stand corrected. Mea culpa. Anyway, the Linux community has been plagued by flamers for ages, it's deeply integrated in the culture, so much so that they had to write an Advocacy Howto, to have some hope of attracting ordinary users. Unfortunately it is widely ignored. That's also part of making shitty software, having an arrogant, xenophobic, user-hostile community. Don Park has a picture of the LA fires from space and the wind that causes them. "It's the Santa Ana wind, high deserts' middlefinger to Pacific Ocean." What weblogs are news? Every so often I hear from a person with a weblog who has asked to be included in Google News, was turned down, and is not happy about it. I understand this must be difficult for Google, how do they decide? Some of their choices are puzzling. And it seems to matter what CMS is used. If it's weblog software, it can't be included, if they use a more expensive CMS, they can? If it's one person writing, they can't; if there's more than one they can? Here's what they say when rejecting a site for inclusion in Google News: "Thank you for your email. We have reviewed [url] but can not include it in Google News at this time. We currently do not include news-related blogs. If there is a non-blog news site associated with this movement, we would be happy to review it. We appreciate you taking the time to contact us and will log your site for consideration should our constraints change." Has your site been turned down by Google News? Comment here. Doc Searls is also interested in this question.
Joshua Brauer: "Should web crawlers respect robots.txt files on government sites?"
Don Park: "Scoble, give us a screenshot that will pop my eyeballs, something that justifies all the hype." Feedster has a special page of PDC news. Jeremy Allaire is reporting from the PDC. It seems after skimming the various reports, that the innovation in Longhorn is in the plumbing. I'm with Don Park, I haven't seen anything that gets me going. I think it's interesting that Don Box's demos were about posting to his weblog. Note that Microsoft doesn't run videos that make real weblog software look hopelessly out of date, like Apple did with Marc Canter's software (and mine, btw). Ten developer relations points for MS. However, there's got to be something better they can do with all the R&D money they spend. This feels like a reinvention, and wheel-spinning. Can't tell for sure. Scoble, is there a technical summary of what was announced? One that doesn't assume too much depth in Microsoft lingo? Gina Smith, one the regulars in our San Francisco gang now has a weblog and it's gooood. She's had an incredible life. Here's a picture of Gina interviewing Walter Cronkite. And lookin good addressing the Steel Industry in 1999. Question. The Columbia Journalism Review article about the history of weblogs is wrong. They don't list the author's email address or provide a place for comments. I've posted two public notices here on my weblog. No response. What's the next step? I think the CJR is authoritative. If so, we must get this corrected, asap. Do I channel this through Harvard? If so, how? (Postscript: I believe I now have the author's email address thanks to Seth Finkelstein. I have sent an email. I'll keep you posted on how it goes.)
AP: "Howard Dean is maintaining his lead among likely voters in the New Hampshire presidential primary, despite the entrance of retired Army Gen. Wesley Clark into the race, according to a new poll." Josh Marshall: "No More Contributions!" Peter Rukavina on the CBC and RSS. Jon Udell on Apple's Knowledge Navigator vision. Marc Canter: "Apple sucked the energy out of the nascent multimeida industry by making promises that were unachievable." Kicking Ass, the DNC weblog, on robots.txt disabling of caches on White House pages about Iraq. Interesting point. Now would be an appopriate time to ask the Democrats if they will have a different policy should a Democrat be elected to the White House in 2004.
Wired: DirecTV Takes No Prisoners. "A non-smoking weblog for 500 days." NY Times: "With Cable TV at MIT, Who Needs Napster?" Andrew Grumet (at MIT): "The project looks to me like a legal hack more than anything else." Lessig likes the idea: "Most universities have a blanket license for music distributed on campus." Gary Wolf wants to know what you think of the Dean campaign. News.Com interview with a Canadian law professor on issues related to "cyberpiracy." Halley Suitt narrates a user's experience with a new piece of software. Last year on this day: Weblogs.Com for RSS.
Thanks to Canada
My presentation, which closed the conference, will be available on MP3, I'm told. Highlight, the interviewer, Andrew Cochran, was rolling through Scripting News mottos, and when he said "It's even worse than it appears," the crowd broke into laughter. This is the first confirmation that other people see the irony. It's an elegant motto. Also, they called people who participated in the conference "delegates," which I think is a really good phrase-turn. So much better than "audience" which is a word I'm trying to strike from my vocabulary. About a half-hour drive from Charlottetown (pronounced Charle-town), at the seaside resort of Cavendish (mostly closed now for the winter) was the Zap Your PRAM conference, put on by young geeks from PEI, of which there are quite a few, and unlike geeks elsewhere, they have plenty of work. I got a ride from Jevon MacDonald, who reminded me of Nicolai, the kind geek who drove me from the Copenhagen airport to Reboot a few years back. I had dinner with two beautiful and super-smart librarians on Saturday night, Lisa Sloniowski and Mita Sen-Roy, and Art Rhyno, Lisa and Mita's house geek, and Stephen Regoczei, a professor from Trent, and we sang Alice's Restaurant and Que Sera Sera. Yes, we had a little to drink. Just a little. I especially enjoyed Rob Patterson's talk about the philosophical context of weblogs, and we're going to do some broadcast collaborations with John Muir from Trent Radio. There was lots of love in both rooms, had a great time, thanks to Canada, our friendly neighbor to the north. I invited everyone to come to a Thursday at Harvard and let's work together to tie our universities and libraries together, and create new business opportunities for everyone. Canada is close. Let's have fun.
I'm at the Zap Your PRAM conference in Cavendish, PEI. Scoble is in Los Angeles for the Microsoft devcon. Rob Patterson is talking about how blogging is like a torpedo to a battleship. Jevon drove me here from the NextMedia conference. Pic. John Muir of Trent Radio is speaking about his radio station. I'm talking with Mark Hemphill, who's a local, no blog. Says they have one of the longest bridges in the world, over ice-covered water. People here live way up north, but seem pretty normal to me. Buzz just walked up and introduced himself. He came from Florida. Some people came from Germany, lots of video cameras, good sense of humor. Buzz says I have to check out his blog. What is the Peer Site Network?
Good morning. Sorry for the lack of updates -- busy being a conference-goer. Timo Soininen, the CEO of Sulake, the company that does Habbo Hotel is speaking now. "Massively multi-player games." Social and casual gaming. "Everyone can play." What is there.com? ZeD is a "synapse-teasing space where the yin of the Web slips seamlessly into the yang of TV, and back again." NY Times: Broken-down Yanks tottering on the edge. BBC: Google nearly ready to float.
Pictures from the nextMEDIA conference. I'm going to add pictures to this list weblog-style, in reverse-chronologic order. I've made it to the nextMEDIA conference. Easy trip. The afternoon keynote is about to begin. When they asked me to speak I knew I'd be looking for something to do after BloggerCon. It's a media conference, we're watching videos right now as the warm up for the keynote, just like the Apple developer conferences I used to go to, except there are a lot more women at this show. I don't know who these people are. Lots of Candians, that's for sure. I learned at registration that it's okay if I call myself an American. These people all work for big media companies. Lots of money here. What do they think of blogs. I have no idea! I just took a bunch of pictures of the room so you can see who's here. Ashley Highfield of the BBC is our keynote. He is talking about half-steps, still thinking in terms of "audience" and high production values. He says we're about at a tipping point, but I wonder if he's the point of the tip. His new video player has DRM built-in. I wonder why -- his content doesn't need it. He says they're starting with nature programs -- why? Because chimps and giraffes don't have agents. Amateurs don't either. The BBC doesn't need the DRM, unless I'm missing something, it's disappointing that they're using it. Chris Heilman: "Debbie asked 'What does RAW format mean?'" Scoble: How to Hate Microsoft. As I write this at 7AM Eastern, it's snowing in Boston. The first snow of the year gets me out of bed, just like a kid. New England townies snicker about the newbie. "He's a fucking retahd," they say. Last year on this day: "I called both of the creators of the RSS Validator yesterday, Mark Pilgrim and Sam Ruby, to congratulate them on a very nicely done piece of software and to thank them for making a very positive contribution to the success of RSS."
48 hours later, and the Columbia Journalism Review still has the history of weblogs wrong. Betsy Devine is now working for Feedster. Scott and Betsy are both wonderful, sweet people. Is it a surprise? Yes it is! Well, I stand corrected. London blogger's meetup with Dan Gillmor. In five days it'll be 500 days since I quit smoking. I still have guilty dreams, but in reality, haven't had a single cigarette in all that time. Not one. Off to Canada tomorrow. Prince Edward Island. Media conference -- Friday & Saturday. Bloggers conference -- Sunday. Weather: Cloudy, high of 56, low of 42. Yossi Vardi's talk, reviewed by John Palfrey, is available in several formats, including MP3.
Playing with a new template for the Scripting archive. Blog of Ages is a blog about a book called Book of Ages. Redhead: "I saw Condoleezza Rice on Oprah. She seemed like a lovely person. It kills me to see her following Dubya around. It kills me." Why? Because she's a beautiful soft-spoken intelligent successful woman? More. Kaye Trammel: How do you blog an event? Motley Fool interviews Yahoo CEO Terry Semel. RSSWeather forecast for tonight: "Showers changing to snow showers near midnight."
Three years ago: "Welll, the Mets lost, and I'm sure I'm not the first to say they deserved to lose." Rice is a clue Condoleezza Rice is a clue, like Colin Powell. It isn't how they look, or how they act, it's what they do that matters. Powell lied when he went before the UN to talk about the weapons of mass destruction. I assumed he was telling the truth. My mistake. So many people choose their candidates on warm fuzzies. Rice, even though she's beautiful, soft-spoken and intelligent, is every bit as nasty as Rumsfeld. The lesson they teach is important. Count the F's. How about that sexism. Why are we willing to hate Rumsfeld, but so surprised when hating the beautiful, feminine Rice is just as correct? This isn't about Rice, or Powell, or Rumsfeld or the President. It's about you. What happens when the snake oil salesperson is a beautiful woman? For extra credit -- How many Americans have been executed since Karla Faye Tucker? How many of them were beautiful women? How many did we care about?
News.Com interviews Blogger's Evan Williams. Simon Fell: "What is sa.windows.com and why is my XP box talking to it?" Rosen: "O’Reilly blows up a lot. He is wired for argument and controversy because he is willing to fight the spin of others with righteous spin of his own." Ed Blogger 2003 in SF -- Nov 22-23. Chris Lydon interviews Meetup founder Scott Heiferman. Added to special Lydon RSS feed with enclosures. Jeff Jarvis lists ways weblogs can be useful to professional reporters. 5/7/02: "I can't speak for all amateurs who blog, but I would like to see more pros use the technology." In October 1998 I had a month-at-a-glance archive page. I'd like to have that feature again. I wonder what happened to it. Google and DMOZ, day 2 BTW, about yesterday's Google story -- I got an email from Nate Tyler in Google PR saying he's looking into it. I reviewed the situation as a user would. The pages don't say that Google isn't responsible for the content, in fact they brand the directory pages very clearly as being a Google product. Same thing with the DMOZ results they integrate with the search results. If Google asked my advice (they haven't) I would say it's time to do directories right, break the link with DMOZ, it was never the right answer, let's apply the logic of the Web to directories, and get something that works in place, work with librarians and developers, but unlike Yahoo, don't hire them, any more than you hire bloggers to write Web pages for the search engine. I think in the end we'll find that it's a software bug. But as one correspondent put it so well, "If this were an isolated mistake, okay, mistake, we all make them. But there is a trend here. Google is not a cute little company with great technology any more, they are now a big company with too much power." TiVO, again So I went ahead and gave DirecTV the extra $5 per month so I could use the DVR I had already paid for, and it's great. I can watch the News Hour in ten minutes, skipping not only the commercials, but the parts where the talking heads drone on. I re-subbed to Six Feet Under, the Sopranos, West Wing; and added K Street, which I've heard so much about. I've watched two old movies and one new one. I still have my Netflix subscription, but am wondering if I need it. They're sending me a movie I just saw on HBO. Ooops. I find that I want Netflix to just upload the movies to my DVR. Anyway, net-net, I don't like dealing with the DirecTV company, but I love the product, esp TCM, which I really missed. Crazy graphic
Ed Cone: "The most powerful piece of software inside Microsoft may be the $40 application from a tiny vendor called Userland that Robert Scoble uses to write his weblog." Lots of people are tuning into NYU journalism professor Jay Rosen. If you want more, check out the interview Chris Lydon did with him at BloggerCon. It's great great stuff.
Andrew Grumet: "Does this sound crazy enough that it just might work?" Yes. Google's directory of weblog tools. None of the tools I wrote made the list. Centralized directories on the Web are like buggy whips for cars. Let's fix this bug. Google, this makes you look like a total asshole company. Your tool is listed first, and your competitor's tools aren't listed at all. When will it become too embarassing to support this antiquated model. When I first posted that I thought it was just a repurposing-DMOZ-problem, so it was a question of how Google looked, not anything they had actually done. But then Seth Dillingham posted a pointer showing that Radio UserLand is actually on the DMOZ list for weblog tools, so Google modified the list to take Radio out. This is surprising, and imho, requires an explanation. Did they modify it? If so why? And do they modify search results to favor their products and services? This is scary stuff.
Sander van de Donk asks about sub-feeds in RSS. Wired profiles Harvard cardiologist Mark Keating, who believes that human bodies can be taught to regenerate hearts, livers and kidneys. Maybe Gregg Easterbrook said the stupid things about Jewish execs in Hollywood for the obvious reason, to get more flow for his weblog. It wouldn't be the first time that happened. Four years ago today: "One would think that, by now, with the Internet and 'convergence' that I would have my choice of talk-tracks. Why couldn't I do the play by play myself? Instead of making stupid comments about people and history, instead we'd make metaphysical observations. 'I wonder what God meant by that?' Dave the announcer would ask. We'd call a random fan to ask his opinion. 'Sir, are you watching the game?' I'd ask. 'What did that last play mean to you?'" Not much metaphysics in last night's game. The play by play. Yankees up to bat. Score runs. Marlins up. No runs. How to decentralize directories 1. Decide on a format for a directory. It should be XML-based so people can use any text tool to edit them. I designed OPML for this purpose, but if you want to use another format, I won't fight you on it. This is too important to have the usual fight over the bits on the wire. 2. Build software that renders data in this format as if it were a Yahoo or DMOZ directory. All environments should have well-tested efficient renderers, commercial and open source. 3. When this software encounters a node that includes another directory, include its hierarchy in that directory. These inclusions are what determine page rank, just like links in HTML pages. 4. If you run a search engine, index these files. Use page rank to determine which is shown first. Don't segregate these files, include them in the returns for HTML and all other formats you support. 5. Evangelize. Get academics, librarians, researchers, etc to produce data in this this format. Link and organize.
Ed Cone: "Real bloggers read blogs." Jay Rosen lists ten conservative things about weblogs. A new Berkman blogger, Andrew MacLaughlin. Red Sox Haiku Dot Com. "Going, going, gone. In the eleventh inning. Winter has begun." Diego Doval writes about the Dublin blogger's meeting. Three years ago: Transcendental Money.
Jim Moore: "Why have just one World Series?"
Easterbrook: "Disney's CEO, Michael Eisner, is Jewish; the chief of Miramax, Harvey Weinstein, is Jewish. Yes, there are plenty of Christian and other Hollywood executives who worship money above all else, promoting for profit the adulation of violence. Does that make it right for Jewish executives to worship money above all else, by promoting for profit the adulation of violence?" Don Park asks if it's really anti-semitism. I offer a perspective. We don't know if it is or it isn't. But Jews are sensitive to any sign of anti-semitism, for good reasons.
Here's an example of an ambitiously titled weblog with a small number of readers, that works. I read it whenever it updates. There's value for me. I'm glad he publishes it. What else matters, exactly?
I have a story to go with that. I'm fairly tall -- 6 foot 2. When I was in college sometimes I'd go out drinking with other students. Quite a few times a really short (drunk) guy would pick a fight with me. It was never a problem, I'd just put my hand on his head, and keep him at a distance where his fists couldn't reach me. Some little guys love to fight, they pick on the biggest guy around. It's usually not the best idea. Dowbrigade: "The outcome of the game and the fate of the Red Sox season depended on what I, the Dowbrigade, did during the next few crucial moments." NY Times: "The editorial page editor, Bob McManus, prepared two editorials well before the end of the game -- one if the Yankees won, the other if they lost -- each written in such a way that it needed no editing to reflect the exact score or game details." Two years ago I won Wired's top prize as technology innovator of the year. Three years ago: "The Mets even in the bozo years, knew that we were in the eye of the storm, or the center of the universe, whatever you want to call it."
Greenspun: "Do we live in an age of wimpy enemies?"
Via John Palfrey, news that Berkman director Terry Fisher has been honored with a named chair. That's a big deal, think of it as super-tenure. Congrats to prof Fisher.
Right now as we speak DirecTV is being installed in my house. Pray Murphy it may actually work. TiVO too.
Megnut: "Silently, numbly, we exchanged good byes, murmured hopes for next year, next year, and I walked home alone." Elizabeth Spiers says Markoff doesn't read many blogs. I'd love to hear Chris Lydon moderate a discussion between John Markoff and Jay Rosen. Lessig: "When they write the account of the 2004 campaign, it will include at least one word that has never appeared in any presidential history: blog." Well, the Cubs lost and the Red Sox lost. Question. Why didn't we see that coming?? Doc picks the Marlins in the World Series. Hey, I still have my motto, ABTY. Jason Levine: "Bill Buckner must be breathing a sigh of relief today." Werbach: "100 songs in your pocket ain't bad when the same device is also your phone, organizer, camera, and wireless email tool." NY Times: "This winter in New England, the fans will question why Boston Manager Grady Little left Pedro Martinez in for a pounding in the eighth inning."
I watched most of last night's game with Michael Feldman at Bombay Club, an Indian restaurant. Finally in the eighth inning he had enough, we left, I drove home, now it's tied 5-5 in the eleventh. The Red Sox are an emotional experience unlike anything I've ever seen. Lots of Yankees fans around Harvard Square. Not me. I hate the Yankees. It's not over yet. (Postscript: Yes it is, and the Sox lost.) DirecTV Bastards Postscript on DirecTV installation: It works but not TiVO because they require a full-time phone connection, but with my DSL, I gave up on the voice line a long time ago. This is new, my DirecTV in Calif didn't require the phone connect. Plus they want to charge me $5 per month for the priviledge of recording. They didn't tell me up front that I couldn't record without the phone link or extra charge. It's strictly copy protection, they want to be sure you don't record a show and then take the unit over to a friend's house to play back. So I have the equivalent of cable, for a lot more money. And a one year commit. Bastards.
Mark Bernstein: "The knights of the keyboard were the first bloggers." Jay Rosen: What's Radical About the Weblog Form in Journalism? Emerson scholar Cornel West added to the special Lydon RSS feed with enclosures
8/28/01: "I really like making software for librarians." Paul Boutin explains 21st Century Web Directories.
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Our Harvard weblog 
AP: 
After last week's meeting, I wrote a new 
At dinner last night, one of our regulars, 
Heard on the radio, from a Red Sox fan: "I thought 86 was bad but this is worse." 
