Sunday, November 30, 2003

Scripting News via email should be working again, at least the sending part. Sorry for the outage. I've been doing a complete rewrite my content system, this is one of the last parts to come back online. If you're getting 80,000 copies of this message, remember, Murphy runs this show, not me.  

Rockbox is "more intuitive" firmware for Archos boxes, which are famous for their awful user interface, or so I'm hearing. How bad could it be, he wonders. Out loud. Foolishly. 

Thanks to Vitamin C, echinacea and lots of rest, my first cold of the winter appears to be over. I exercised today. Sinuses are clear. Generally feel pretty good. What a change from the old days when I was a smoker, when a cold meant a multi-week recovery. And, the premonition that winter had begun was false, today was a New Orleans winter day more than a Boston one. To celebrate, here's the season's first Christmas Tree. Ho ho ho.  

Philip Miseldine explores Googlism.  

Don Park wrote a great tutorial on BitTorrent. "A shocking ISP bill won't wipe the slashdotted smile off your face at the end of the month." 

At the meeting with Dave Sifry and Kevin Marks last week, we had a long discussion about doing development in the open. I said that it was really important that we do so. I told Kevin, on the drive down to San Jose, that I feel we're at a turning point in the weblog world, either we're going to be like every other hierarchy that's ever been, with secret deals, lots of impediments to progress, eventual stagnation; or we're going to overcome that. I've been through this before, many times. The early days of the Apple II market held great promise, then the IBM PC, then the Mac, then the Web. And so it goes. Nothing ever seems to change. Either you're in or out, and if you're out, sometimes you can't even tell until it's too late. I don't want to be part of that. So if Sifry has competitors, I want them to know how to be compatible with me. Same if I have competitors. So what if it helps the other guy. There are worse things. Anyway, with that preamble, Dave and Kevin, check out the category element on this feed. It tells you all you need to know to understand the context. Here's a screen shot in case that link goes 404 (very likely). 

There may be another law here. It goes something like this. When you meet in private with someone else to talk about something other people are interested in, we all lose. So, for example, if Pete should go to a private meeting where something relevant to Paul is discussed, and Paul doesn't know about it, Paul's knowledge can't be applied to the process. He may be off doing something that assumes it's not being done, and he may be wasting huge amounts of time, or may end up competing in an area he'd prefer to partner in. Now there's nothing that says you can't tell me something in confidence, I have to be able to accept that, but it's at the point of intersection, where we make Thing A work with Thing B, that open-ness is so important. That way a guy out in left field can break through. You don't have to know The Right People in order to be empowered to do something important. And left field is where The Good Stuff always comes from. 

I'm gradually restarting my Channel Z development work. It's slow after a one week break. Today's project is to do category-level RSS feeds. For example, here's the feed for Mottos. Basically you throw a dot-xml at the end of the URL to get the RSS rendering. Don't subscribe yet, still diggin, breakage ahead, praise Murphy, IANAL, my mother loves me, etc.  

I downloaded and installed BitTorrent, but I'm mystified. Where is it? How do I invoke it? I want to get a copy of a Beatles song (that I've already purchased on vinyl and CD, btw). How would I go about doing that? And if all else should fail, how the heck do I uninstall the thing? 

Tim Bray did an investigation of BitTorrent. 

I started a BitTorrent category. 

According to Jason Shellen at Google, their new API will ship in about two weeks. "There is a light at the end of the tunnel."  

Redhead: "Good grief, tomorrow is December."  

Greg Ritter sends a pointer to the Archos Jukebox FM Recorder MP3 player. 20GB hard drive, records off the radio, speech. About $250. Looks like a great deal, better than the 256MB Creative Rhomba I wrote up yesterday. 

BBC: "A Chinese student arrested for criticising the Communist Party on the internet has been released from prison." 

Xiao Qiang told us about this weblog at the dinner in Berkeley on Tuesday. 10 million daily visitors.  

Steve Gillmor: "A game at which Microsoft excels -- the waiting game. Clone, wait, collaborate, extend, wait, repeat, rinse, dry. But now comes RSS -- and the rules may have changed. First, the enemy is now scattered, behind rocks, in startups, open source, virtual coalitions that pop up on IM and video conferencing, and a myriad loosely coupled evolutionary steps forward." Sounds like Crichton's emergent nano-threat. 

Chris Phoenix: "Imagine a horror story about baseball, in which the batter keeps hitting the ball hard enough to kill the fans. The story might be entertaining, but it's obviously unrealistic." 

Don Park: "If your head gets too big, go stand in line at the nearest DMV for an hour." 

Saturday, November 29, 2003

On this day four years ago, Manila shipped. 

NY Times review of CBS movie on the Reagans. "Anyone eagerly anticipating or dreading a hatchet job on the 40th president is bound to feel confounded." 

Paul Boutin wrote the most concise FAQ on The Broadcast Flag so far. Thanks! 

New header graphic. As with the previous header, a road in the western US, heading off to infinity. I took this picture on March 10 of this year, on the first day of my cross-country drive, and wrote about it on March 19. "It's got all the elements." Here's the original picture, before cropping and enhancement and adding the title. I added it to the list of header graphics. 

This is the product I was looking for earlier this year. Ultra-portable MP3 player, radio, voice recorder, that can record radio. Under $200 for 256MB. USB port interface. On the other hand, I'd like it better if the same features were available in a 20GB hard drive-based unit.  

Note to John Palfrey -- wouldn't it be great if this site had an RSS feed. And this one. It's funny how I had to go to Calif to clarify my mission in Cambridge. I now get it. We're meant to string virtual wire through all the campuses and to work with any group that wants to work with us. It's remarkable how compact and manageable the Stanford campus is compared to ours, which is spread all over the Boston area. We need connective technology more than most campuses. So it's getting clearer. The first stage was getting a blogging initiative going. Second stage is to upgrade the campus network to do syndication and aggregation. And at the same time, of course, string wire to our friends at Stanford and MIT. As we used to say and stil do -- Bing.  

Halley: "Isn't time to stop holding back, and by stepping up to it, make one of these guys electable?" Amen. I found myself falling into the electable trap, when a Kucinich rep approached me at a party on my just-completed trip to California. I really don't like Kucinich, I've heard him interviewed on the radio, several times, and I think he's sleazy. That's just my impression. But if you go look at his policies, they're actually pretty good. But instead of saying "I don't really like the guy," I said "He's not electable," and thereby broke one of my own cardinal rules. At this stage it doesn't matter if someone is electable or not. We should be discussing issues now, investigating, digging, before we cast our votes next year. Any candidate that exposes issues worth talking about is doing his or her job very well. 

I just got an alert from the National Weather Services's RSS feed for Massachusetts. "A band of snow showers across interior Massachusetts and southern New Hampshire." Where did the snow come from? Partially from "plumes of lake-effect-snow from western New York climbing over the Berkshires." It's not snowing in Boston yet, but it feels like it'll start any minute. I just got the chill walking outside. This is the beginning of winter. 

Still sick this morning, but better. Pumping Vitamin C and Echinacea. Alka-Seltzer Cold Remedy, tastes terrible, but works wonders. Reading the latest Michael Crichton novel. I'm sure technically it's nonsense, but it's a good story. A good clue that it's nonsense is that he completely botches his explanation of recursion (a procedure that calls itself). Why don't they have technical reviewers of these books, before publication, so at least he could get the basics right and people could learn a little while reading a fun story.  

Friday, November 28, 2003

Back in Boston safely. Wet and warm here. Easy flight. Just checked. The Bush weblog has been updated with news of the President's trip to Baghdad.  

Good morning. Today is a travel day, heading out from SFO to BOS. Got a bad cold, coughing sneezing, sniffling. Luckily there's no one sitting next to me, according to Orbitz.  

Travel is never going to be the same. I stayed in a deluxe hotel on the peninsula, in a plush room that has to rent for $300 a night. But I paid $65 a night. This is because I used a computer network to do my bidding. In the past I'd have to call eight hotels to get their rates, and none of them would know that I was talking to any others, so I'd just get their average price. Or call a travel agent, and get directed to the hotel that gives them the best commission, not necessarily the best located hotel, or the one with the best deal for me. Now I can get multiple bids on the same hotel, even, and consider hundreds of options before making my decision. When people say the Internet wasn't revolutionary, they must not be paying attention. It gave us the power, where the industry used to have it. The power of better information, and that can translate into nicer accomodations for much less money.  

Not much going on today. Thought I'd mention that the Bush weblog still doesn't have anything about Bush's trip to Baghdad. Not that I thought it was much of a blog before, now it's clear.  

Thursday, November 27, 2003

BBC: Bush makes secret visit to Iraq. 

An International Herald-Tribune report provides details of the stunning trip. 

The Bush weblog has no info about the trip. 

DaveNet: Thanks in the U.S.A. 

My favorite piece of the year, it got me so much sweet email. And of course while the title says it's about beauty in women, it's really about beauty in general. We have so much in common. We all feel unappreciated, and left out. No one likes being talked-down-to by others, but it's especially humilating when a member of the opposite sex does it. Women have so much more power today than they did in the past, but do they use it wisely? We're getting close to the end of a year, which means we're getting close to a new year. When we flip the page, let's try to create more win-wins and not be so picky about who we get help from. If someone offers a hand in friendship, try to take it, even if it isn't exactly the person you wanted it from, or on exactly the terms you wanted it.  

Don Park has a unique idea about selling laptops at retail. 

Betsy Devine is cooking Thanksgiving dinner, a complex affair, back in Cambridge. I'm sure her dinner will be very cool.  

Mark Cuban: "If we can't compete with some guy sneaking a camera into the theater, or a blurry, encoded, postage stamp-sized file, then please -- just shoot us." 

Wednesday, November 26, 2003

Spent the afternoon with Dave Sifry and Kevin Marks talking about Technorati and Channel Z. I think it's going to be a very interesting collaboration. Steve Gillmor popped over to join the discussion for about an hour. 

Paolo surveys the different blogging taxonomies popping up. 

Here's how my blogging taxonomy works. I use the RSS 2.0 category element to specify the category, and a popup hierarchic menu to select categories, and an outliner to edit my taxonomy. Paul Boutin, at last night's dinner asked me to write it up whitepaper-style, and I wll do that very soon, probably next week.  

Fortune: Can Google Grow Up? 

It's looking like this is going to be the first Thanksgiving since I started writing on the Web that I won't write a Thanksgiving piece. I am very thankful for many things, I'm just very very busy driving all over the Bay Area, visiting, schmoozing, etc. The place is so beautiful, the air so clear, the temperature so comfortable. I knew it was a nice place when I lived here, but I lacked the perspective to see in what way it was so nice. This morning, driving to a breakfast in Palo Alto at Il Fornaio, I had a flash that this is like San Luis Obispo. A college town, but very compact, clean, and rich. Cambridge isn't like that, Harvard very different from Stanford. There are campuses all over Boston. Stanford is all in one place. Palo Alto has so many fine places to eat, and htere's parking everywhere. Couldn't be more different. 

Larry Lessig is too kind; but we did have fun at Stanford on Monday. At the end of the talk Larry came up with a big grin, I guess his trademark pessimism is fading a little now that he's a new dad, and told me that Stanford is going to be hosting blogs for incoming law students starting next year. This is great news of course. We're going to connect our weblog networks in some really interesting ways, I hope. Along with another big university who's blogging program is just about ready to reveal. At dinner last night I sat next to Xiao Qiang, a fellow at UC-Berkeley's school of journalism, and suggested we do the same with their student weblogs. I would make the same offer to Jay Rosen at NYU. Let's link up our networks of bloggers. I told Xiao this is beginning to sound like the way the Internet itself started. Is a new network booting up, one built on ideas as much as technology? One where users are the architects. It could be that the university environment, with these new bright-eyed leaders, is the perfect petrie dish for new Internet culture.  

Derek Slater, our young hero who took on the high tech company hiding behind the DMCA, who was let off the hook by Harvard, has now, apparently, been completely vindicated, as Diebold has withdrawn its complaint. A hearty bravo to Derek and all who stood with him. It's nice to win one, once in a while.  

Bryan Bell's report on the EdBlogger conference. 

Tuesday, November 25, 2003

Mary Hodder: "One librarian is simply stating regularly when there are no warrants, so that when there is no statement of anything, people will know there is a warrant that has been served." 

Tonight's dinner, King Tsin, Berkeley, 7PM. 

News.Com: "Eugene Kleiner, a pioneer of venture capital in Silicon Valley and co-founder of Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, has died at the age of 80." 

I was interviewed for Austrian radio about Google.  

BTW, talking with a colleague at Harvard a few days ago, he said he had heard a rumor that I had had a massive heart attack. It's not true. I had surgery in the summer of 2002 to correct a condition that was life-threatening, but I didn't have a heart attack. My heart is in relatively good shape, all things considered. I'm sure this was just innocent gossip, at least I hope so. Also, I finally was able to convince IBM to take my money, and I bought the new laptop, a T40, at a good discount. I'll let you know how it goes. 

John Palfrey: "Copyright is not meant to be used as a weapon to stifle free speech." 

Wired: Congress Expands FBI Spying Power. 

Yesterday's talk at Stanford went very well. Larry Lessig was in the front row, there was a good mix of Stanford students, faculty, and Scripting News people. I talked for about twenty minutes, and then we had a discussion. They asked tough questions, one of which I declined to answer, but on reflection, I could have. I had said that lack-of-reciprocation is common in the weblog world, but rarely talked about. Person A delivers flow to Person B, but B doesn't point to A. I was asked for an example, but declined. I didn't want to take any specific person to task on this, my point would have been lost. But I could have talked about a class of websites that receive lots of pointers and rarely point back -- newspaper sites. Anyway, thanks to Larry and Lauren Gelman for inviting me to speak, and to Stuart Rosenberg for arranging. I had a great time. I think the door is open now for some new collaboration between our respective schools, and that would be great. And after a couple of years of emailing back and forth with Larry Lessig, and reading his weblog, and coming to have great respect for him, it was good to exchange ideas face-to-face. 

I've spent a bunch of time with Scoble in the last couple of days. We went computer shopping on Sunday, and then he came to Stanford Law School yesterday. He has a story to tell about computer retailing and why Best Buy couldn't take the money out of my pocket and give me a shiny new laptop. He was listening, in a way that the salesperson at BB wasn't. And he knows what I want, an Ikea like experience. Make sure I find what I came for. That's hard to do, but that's what it takes. 

Monday, November 24, 2003

NY Times: "Gen Wesley K Clark's campaign for the Democratic nomination for president, which has gone for seven weeks without a campaign manager, announced on Monday that it had hired Paul Johnson, the manager of Senator Bob Graham's short presidential campaign, to fill that role." 

Palfrey blogs Volokh's talk on Crime-Facilitating-Speech. 

Powazek says the Globe got his quotes wrong too. It's a new world ladies and gentlemen. In the old days, the BigPubs would put words in your mouth, and what could you do? Today each of us have a platform to tell our own story, so when they screw it up, we can run a correction, immediately. 

k-collector is an "enterprise news aggregator that leverages the power of shared topics to present new ways of finding and combining the real knowledge in your organisation." 

The Crimson reports that Derek Slater will not be disciplined. That's great. Derek sent an email saying that he didn't even have to tell them about it, they found out by following his weblog. It's starting to work. Next step, getting the Crimson on board with RSS support. 

Michael Jackson's newsroom, with a list of stories in reverse-chronologic order. He's starting a weblog so that his story can get out directly from the source.  

John Palfrey on the Federal anti-spam law that just passed the House. 

Jim Moore is looking for Iowa weblogs. 

A picture of Uncle Vava in front of a picture of an ancient ancestor of ours from The Old Country. He's Hershe Schechter, from Ukraine. So much time passed, so much technology. Sent to me by my uncle's friend Clay Stratton of St Augustine, FL. My brother has a picture of our grandfather, Rudy Kiesler, wearing a cowboy hat, posing with some southern cops outside an old Eastern Airlines prop plane, from the 1950s. It's a total trip. I've asked that it be scanned for the archive. 

Much ado about Google 

Oy I was afraid when I spoke with Hiawatha Bray that he'd get it wrong. The direct quotes are accurate, I did say what he quotes me as saying. But when he paraphrases he puts words in my mouth that I don't agree with. I'm not scared Google is going to "crush" UserLand. What an ugly word. I think their approach is more likely to hurt Google itself than anyone else.

Bottom-line, I said Google screwed up by putting Blogger on the toolbar, a few weeks after promising they wouldn't do anything to favor Blogger. It made it impossible to trust them, and their business is built on trust. Google could have helped the whole blogging community, and it's not clear why they didn't -- it's not as if they make any money off Blogger, it's a freebie. They did the small, selfish thing. That's why I think they don't have what it takes to be a leader.

About Hiawatha Bray, the Boston Globe and professional journalists in general, this piece is a perfect demo why I hold them in such low regard. He's really writing a column, he thinks they pull "stunts" and "crush" small competitors, but instead of having the guts to say it himself, he puts the words in my mouth. He should become a columnist, write opinion pieces, or become a software industry leader, and test his ideas in the market.

Two Jewish Guys Joke 

First a disclaimer, I am Jewish.

Two Jewish guys were walking down the street and passed a Catholic church.

A sign out front says "Convert to Catholicism today and we'll pay you $100."

One guy says "That's it, I'm converting now."

The other guy says: "What do you mean, you'd throw out your faith, your people, just for money?"

He says: "It's a lot of money."

So he goes in the church. His friend can't believe it so he waits outside. When he comes out he says "Is it true, did they give you the money?"

He says: "Is that all you people ever think about?"

Sunday, November 23, 2003

NY Times: "Some have said that Republicans were violating a presidential promise not to use the campaign against terrorism for political gain." 

Adam Curry: "It's interesting to examine a culture that mounts cameras on smart bombs to view the kill on the 6 o'clock news, but freaks out if a nipple of a [female] breast is flashed on TV." 

PocketRSS is a "Today Screen plugin and stand-alone application which allows a quick and easy method of displaying various types of RSS/OPML compliant data on your Today Screen." 

Rest of trip notes 

Tomorrow I'm speaking at Larry Lessig's class at Stanford Law School about weblogs, the election of 2004, outliners, Hollywood vs Silicon Valley, what we're doing at Berkman, and anything else Larry wants to talk about. We've been having great productive email exchanges for about a year now, it'll be great to have a conversation in person, in front of a group of students. It's free and open to the public. 12:30PM. As people to help you find the Moot Court Room. Scripting News readers are welcome to participate.

Tuesday evening in Berkeley Sylvia Paull is hosting a dinner in my honor, this will be the first Scripting News dinner in the East Bay. King Tsin, 7PM. Again, this is open, but please send me an email if you're coming so I can forward it to Sylvia so she can reserve a place for you. I imagine that we can accomodate people who don't.

I didn't buy a new laptop today. The selection at Best Buy was abysmal. I didn't want to buy one at Fry's because there is no Fry's in Boston, if I need service. I did get to hang out with Scoble and Son, we went to Ikea, and had Swedish Meatballs. I ran into a Bloggerconner in the lobby of Ikea. That's the funny thing about BloggerCon, I keep running into people you met there.

Morning notes 

Goooood morning from California!

This computer is almost completely hosed. I may have to go to Fry's today and pay retail on a new one. Oy. The dysfunction is funny -- text doesn't display in places you know it should. But then it's amazing that the most iffy bit of technology, Channel Z, is working just fine, praise Murphy.

It's been that kind of trip. The flight cross country was supposed to be jammed full but it was only 2/3 full, and the middle seat in my row was empty. They had a nice movie, which I didn't watch because I was reading an even better book. The guy next to me was a Silicon Valley entrepreneur from Taiwan whose company makes thin clients. Interesting stories. But when I got to SFO the car rental company, Thrifty, said I was a no-show and they had given my car to someone else. And they were sold out. So tired. I just stood there at the counter and said I wasn't leaving until they gave me a car. They gave me one. Drove down the peninsula and my hotel room is great. So it's been a yin-yang trip. If it holds up, the next one should be a goodie. Anyway it'll be a light day here for sure.

Saturday, November 22, 2003

Two years ago: "How many Californians does it take to screw in a light bulb?" 

Good morning early morning coffee drinkers. Hope you're enjoying your early morning coffee.  

Today should be made a national holiday. John F Kennedy Day. He was the man who said "Ask not what your country can do for you, ask what you can do for your country." What a stunningly beautiful and simple nation-building idea. As they would say these days, He Got It. 

Speaking of coffee, Outlook Express is toast, which goes well with coffee. I spent two hours this morning trying to get it to stop telling me it can't open a reply window because it was out of memory. I don't have MSBlast, I checked, running tools from Symantec and Network Associates. I even went so far as to re-install the browser and the mail client. Along the way I installed Firebird and reactivated my Yahoo Mail account and configured it to check my mail accounts. I had to use Firebird to upgrade MSIE because it would keep crashing on Microsoft.Com. Talk about irony. Anyway goodbye Outlook Express, at least for now. And Firebird does look as nice as everyone says it does. I'm going to use it for a while.  

One of the things I'm going to do while I'm traveling is rearrange my blogroll, expand it, and group things. I've already begun. Now that I have an infinite amount of space and the potential for infinite structure, I'm able to think much bigger. So far I like it. Feels expansive. 

I have no idea what Steve Gillmor is arguing with John Dvorak about. He (Dvorak) obviously hasn't checked his facts. Whatever. It's great to see Steve at his new gig at eWeek. Hey Steve, let's have a cup of coffee next week when I'm in the Bay Area. I gotta show you how all this category stuff works. Like Lisa said yesterday, we chop the meat up into little bits so you can eat it with chopsticks.  

The plan for the new software, whose codename is Channel Z, is for me to burn in the editing tool for the next week while visiting the Bay Area, and if all goes well to start a very small beta group on Monday or Tuesday of the following week (December 1) and then offer it to all who come to the Thursday meeting (the 4th). Eventually it will be released broadly and we'll work with others to make authoring tools in other environments (such as OmniOutliner, Joe, Flash, WebOutliner) and back-ends (lots of places). On the back-end if you have code that processes RSS (with categories) and OPML, you're basically ready to go. We're gearing up to cover a big story and to be ready to cover one that may come along any day. The idea is to broaden the pipe, make writing for the Web more powerful and make the structures we build richer, have more lasting value, and integrate with each other in interesting ways.  

Some have suggested that I go to the meeting of educational bloggers happening in SF today and tomorrow (I'm traveling today, but I'll be in Bay Area tomorrow). After giving it serious consideration, I've decided not to go. Here's why. UserLand has a new management team, five new people, with all kinds of experience operating technology companies, selling and marketing, product development. They're in rapid learning mode, talking to as many people as possible. I'm going to spend a lot of time with them next week transferring as much as possible of what I know about the product, the users, the potential. A few of them are going to the meeting tomorrow, including Jake. If I go, people may get the wrong idea. I want to help the new team, I don't want to steal their thunder. I want you all to learn how to work with each other, and the best way for me to do that is to step back and let it happen. So I send these very excellent people to you with much love. Go forth and make big things happen. Some of the best people in BloggerLand will be there today and tomorrow. So exciting. 

Friday, November 21, 2003

New feature: Previous/Next links through archive. 

Lisa Williams talks about the software I demoed last night.  

Chris Lydon interviews Dean campaign manager Joe Trippi. Highly recommended that other campaigns at all levels listen to this interview. There's no reason you can't do the same. It's a fundamentally different philosophy for a campaign, and whether you agree with Dean's policies or not, whether he gets nominated or elected, we all have a stake in its success. After listening to the interview I believe Trippi would agree with that. 

National Weather Service alerts are available in RSS 2.0. Bing! 

I subscribed to the feed for Massachusetts. "There are no active watches, warnings or advisories." 

I just did a total brain transplant on my CMS. Let's see if this shows up. It did. Now I'll route this to a category, Fun/Neat Net Tricks. And this post showed up. Amazing. I can't believe it. Now let's see if I can edit the cats. Yup. Now the directory shell. Try adding a movie. That worked too. Let's see if pictures work. Yes ma'am. Here's Joe Trippi's Diet Pepsi. Now I'm going to have to disappear for a bit to add code that does static rendering of the the HTML and RSS versions. This stuff isn't on www.scripting.com yet. Now it is. Have to hook up the static RSS feed. Testing. 1-2-3. All is good. 

David Galbraith: "Things that aren't really search engines, like Amazon and Ebay, or the classification of species for that matter, would be useless without some kind of ontology." 

Actually I agree with Galbraith on this one, now that I've read the rebuttals to Shirky's piece. I agree with Shirky about how shrill and offensive the priests of the Semantic Web are, but I believe in taxonomy, which I guess is the same thing as ontology. And I know it works for a different reason than Galbraith -- I wrote outliners in the 80s and 90s and am building on them now, and they are nothing more than personal ontology editors. So there. They key is to take the rigidness out of it, and to throw out the people who think everything anyone else invents is junk. Hierarchies are good, if you don't expect too much of them. 

Scott Rosenberg: "What 'some are now attacking the president for,' of course, is not for 'attacking the terrorists' but for his foolhardy and foundering invasion of Iraq." 

I was trawling various referrer logs, and came across Richard Stallman's personal site, where he points to something I wrote. We've certainly gotten into a few heated discussions, but when it comes to keeping the Internet free of ownership by media companies, we're on the same side. I like. 

Simply Live Anywhere: "You need the power of a heavy jetliner to get an idea off the ground." 

It took me a while to figure out who Moose is. It's Jessica the Librarian, a Thursday night regular. Moose? 

Press release: "Weblog software leader Six Apart and NIFTY, one of Japan's leading ISPs, have announced a licensing agreement to provide Six Apart's popular TypePad weblogging service to over five million NIFTY subscribers in Japan." 

My four year old Sony Vaio is too old, the CPU is slow, the OS is out of date, and it's thrashing awfully, and I feel like treating myself to something new. Dave Jacobs says I should get a ThinkPad, and after talking with a couple of other people I decided to buy one since I can get a huge discount through Harvard. I called their order line, and in ten minutes we had zeroed in on the unit. Fast, lots of memory, great warranty. The guy puts me on hold to confirm they have it in stock, and never comes back. Twenty minutes later the phone system offers me five choices that make no sense. I hit Operator. The guy has no idea, and unlike the first guy, who was pure IBM (competent) the second guy is like jello. Can't get him to help me. So I say goodbye and call back, and wait another twenty minutes. This would be a perfect IBM commercial. BTW, lots of the glitches are things that could be fixed if they hired a user to tell them how silly, repetitive and even contradictory the phone messages are. And the music they play, pretty sexy stuff. At IBM? The world has gone crazy. It's official. 

Andrew's looking for a new laptop too. 

Friendster user on Friendster: "...the fantasy that we are all rock stars, that everyone's ass looks great in leather, that everyone is sexy." 

Today's song: "I want the world to change for me!" 

A Seattle reporter who covers Microsoft has an alternate view of ApacheCon, including Chris Pirillo's keynote. On the other hand, Doc Searls says it reminded him of BloggerCon. 

Thursday, November 20, 2003

Packed house tonight. This is going to be something, a beta group for a new software product at a university that meets once a week. Even in the old days, in the 80s, I never had so much contact with users. Off to a great start. BTW, I'd love to read other people's accounts of tonight's meeting. 

My talk at Stanford Law School is at 12:30PM on Monday. Open to the public. Depending on how it goes tonight, I may demo the new authoring system I'm working on.  

Bill Joy: "Open source doesn't assist the initial creative act." 

My demo list for this evening's meeting. 

Chris Sells explains how Longhorn SDK annotations work.  

Dave Pollard: "I'm just trying to save the world. Someone else will have to save the blogosphere." 

Jon Udell: Working with Bayesian Categorizers. 

Fascinating map shows where each of the candidates' money comes from. 

Just the barest hint of a clue over in Jack Valenti Land. Hey Jack, people are watching first-run movies on the Internet right now. But, this is a good sign, the entertainment industry is trying to market to customers, selling a benefit. But there's no benefit to copy protection, not for people who use the stuff, in fact it's a negative feature. Yeah I know the rationales, been there done that, went to Comdex, but in the end the customers aren't that stupid. 

BTW, I know I'm really rude when it comes to talking about entertainment industry execs. No, I wouldn't like it if people talked about me that way in public. When I read someone saying Dave Winer has the barest hint of a clue, I think, yeah sure, what makes him so smart. Okay, I need to express my inner-arrogance. Many apologies to Jack Valenti, who surely is a fine human being, for using him as my foil. No kidding. 

Now, on the other hand, Jack dreams of modifying our operating systems, hard drives, networks, routers, servers, you name it -- so that he can tell us which bits we can copy. This rewrite makes the Y2K corner-turn look tiny in comparison. The cost is incomprehensible. Does that make him an asshole? You bet. 

Five years ago today: "How much thinking goes on on the Internet?" 

Michael Feldman's tutorial is a great resource for people learning how to use Manila. 

It's really great to see O'Reilly embrace RSS 2.0. The power of two growing platforms, Microsoft's Longhorn and Really Simple Syndication.  

Tim Bray: "Jean Paoli called last week to tip me off about the release of the MS Office XML schema-ware." 

I just noticed that Al Gore looks a lot like Robert Scoble. 

Yesterday I met someone who had not read Kurt Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse Five. I expressed envy. I wish I had not read it so I could read it again for the first time. A delicious book. Then it occurred to me that some of you might not have read it either. You have no excuse now.  

Here's the NY Times review, published in 1969. The book came up in conversation because it offers a reasonable and highly optimistic view of existence. No one is actually dead, they're just reliving the important moments of their lives, maybe the not-so-important ones too. A philosophy that suggests that you should pack life with lots of interesting moments because you're going to be experiencing them for eternity. In this view, deja vu is a little leakage in the matrix (as it is in The Matrix). 

Wednesday, November 19, 2003

It seems Lessig and Jay Rosen would have a lot to talk about. Both of them understood where I was coming from in my request for candidates to take a position on keeping the Internet free of control of the media companies. I didn't mean, as some thought, to keep it free of the reporters employed by the media companies, I'm not worried about that. I am worried about devices like The Broadcast Flag and other proposals (remember Berman-Coble) that would give the entertainment industry the power to shackle the computers, and invade the privacy of computer users (even remove data from our computers). Now it may be hopeless, as both Lessig and Rosen have observed, and so what? My job isn't to figure out which of the lesser of two evils to vote for. It's still so early in the process, now it's time to identify the important issues, and then ask any of the candidates if they want my vote. They may all say no, this time. But I'm demonstrating how the electoral process will work after we've flipped it around. If you're reasonably young and healthy I believe you will live to see the day. I just put the stakes in the ground so I can laugh then and say I Told You So.  

ScottR isn't sure BillG is telling the truth about Google. 

Every new piece of software I write begins with a document written by Bull Mancuso. 

Hey the government of Canada has RSS feeds. They're pretty good, not bad at all, but they call their feeds 0.91 but use features only available in 2.0. I'm hesitant to criticize, because after all it's the thought that counts. But my aggregator will ignore the cool 2.0 stuff because it takes the version seriously. Best thing to do is to just change the version number to 2.0 and accept a hearty thanks from your neighbors to the south. And thanks to Lawrence for the pointers (he's Canadian).  

Paolo: "Now: do we want to give all this power to a company?" 

intraVnews is a "state of the art news aggregator that turns Microsoft Outlook into a news reader." 

BloggerCon was like a fairy tale, a dream come true. I still review it in my mind every day, all the special moments, all the cool people who came. Charlie Nesson's convocation, the essential Harvard man, welcomed everyone with such love and enthusiasm. People don't know this about Harvard, but it can be a very very kind place, despite its reputation for great history and great achievement. I introduced some of my favorites -- Cluetrain author David Weinberger, my brother Peter Winer, Craig Cline from Seybold, the great designer Bryan Bell. I was so proud to welcome these people, esp my brother because our family has been through so much in the last year. Someone I didn't know before BloggerCon is Jay Rosen. His contribution is still bearing fruit. Every time I read a Rosen piece I'm cheering, yes yes, that's right, keep going. And there was a guy who came from Germany, who found out about the conference only two days before it happened, and he was consistently the jolliest fellow. He seemed truly delighted to learn about blogs, and to be at the Con. Well, today he sent a pointer to his new weblog, and it's as positive and cheerful as the man himself (whose name I don't know). 

An aside. BloggerCon was not a summit. It never occurred to any of us to call it a summit. Conference promoters who use the term are telling you the opposite; they're leaving some important people out, and they hope you won't notice. A perfect case in point is the upcoming summit for news and XML. Where are the publishers and tech companies who use RSS 0.91 and 2.0. This, by most estimates, is over 75 percent of the market. Make-believe summitry. "In the world as we wish it looked this is who would be at a summit." There have been technology summits where not a single delegate was an active programmer. The word has been abused to the point where it's meaningless. It's time, in the technology business, for people to start setting realisitc expectations. Nothing is going to instantly change the world. A summit that's exclusive is not a summit. Open minds, open meetings, that's the way to go. 

Jeremy Zawodny: Is Google The Next DNS? 

Three years ago today: "Authoring a directory is a lot like maintaining a weblog. On a weblog you post on a timely basis, but links fall off the bottom. On a directory you save the valuable non-time-based links. There's the fundamental difference between a weblog and a directory. A weblog has the current stuff, and a directory has the permanent stuff. Connecting the two structures is an interesting user interface problem, and a social one. I have to prime the pump, to get people interested in doing their own directories, I guess I have to create directory envy." 

NY Times: "Getting a job in the Valley is easy, if you're perfect." 

SJ Merc: "Tech insider Dave Winer, an inveterate blogger and fellow at Harvard Law School, said he was surprised that Polese stayed at Marimba as long as she did." 

Dan Gillmor reports that Good Morning Silicion Valley now has an RSS feed. 

Guardian: "Music blogs are free from the business plans and targeted readerships that determine the content of commercial publications." 

Gotta play with this some more: GoogleRace.Com. 

Jay Rosen: "Ed Cone explains exactly why Howard Dean's 'open style' of politics is a big deal--and a big story--whether he or not he wins. " 

NY Times: "The swirl of interviews, documentaries and specials building up to Nov. 22 are not really about the 40th anniversary of the Kennedy assassination. They commemorate the 40th anniversary of television: the day a young, vigorous medium was swept into power and forever changed American culture and politics." 

It's a beautiful morning! 

Tuesday, November 18, 2003

Just got a call from a reporter with news that Kim Polese will step down as chairman of Marimba. 

I am going to demo my new content system at the Thursday meeting, day after tomorrow. If you're in the area and want to see what's up, please be there at 7PM. I'll probably demo it Monday at Stanford Law School at noon. Boths sessions are free and open to the public. Weblogs, outlining, knowledge trees, RSS, OPML, XML-RPC.  

Berkman geek Ethan Zuckerman has a script that scans news sites and counts the number of times each country is mentioned. He used the script to create colorful maps of the world where blue is cold (not too many mentions) and red is hot (lots). No surprises, Western Europe, China, Canada and Australia are hot (he didn't rate the US) -- Africa, Central Asia, Eastern Europe and South America are cold. Ethan has a plan, to use blogging in the blue places to increase their profile. He gave a brief talk about this today at the Berkman fellows lunch.  

Muscle-boy's fix for California's money woes -- get a loan.  

Don Park: "Ebichu is a cute housekeeping hamster who is fiercely loyal to her undeserving master." 

Daily Kos: Bloggers at DNC convention. "Handing out press passes to bloggers is a no-brainer, and something we could easily get from the DNC. However, we want to go one better, in effect putting together a convention-within-a-convention for left-leaning bloggers." 

Good thing the convention is in the summer or else you might have to suffer through Kerry playing hockey. (Enclosed in the RSS feed.) 

Andrew has questions about Apache and Windows. 

Wired: "Microsoft plans to introduce a song-downloading service next year that will compete with similar offerings from Apple Computer, Roxio's Napster and others." 

Ed Cone: The Marketing of a President. 

3 News: "I stepped out of the serene lake of Sufi Shire and, a few days later, found myself in the deal room of a $100 million corporate acquisition. Talk about whiplash." 

Idly.Org: Porn Sites Hiding Behind Blogs. 

Another summit you weren't invited to. 

Two years ago: "Of course if you don't even try to make software that other people use, it can't be very shitty." 

Three years ago: "Dimpled chads." 

Also on that day: "Dogma 2000 isn't worth to think about it -- it's just a behavior of well stuffed guys." 

That was quite a day. Al Gore looks snippy and Dubya looks dorky wearing a presidential cowboy hat.  

Weblogs.Com was hatched on this day in 1999. 

Last night I heard an interview with Zell Miller. Senator from Georgia, Democrat. He says because the nine Dems running for Pres don't have southern chops, he's going to vote for Bush. Man he must be the life of the party. And he says he respects Dean because he figured out how to raise money on the Internet. La-de-dah. Perhaps it's time for the Democratic Party to get just a little bit more picky? 

Jon Udell: "Every major software system has, at its core, what Dave Winer likes to call a lizard brain."  

Scoble says that MyWallop, Microsoft Research's foray into blogging and social networking, will support RSS 2.0. Another Scoble post that you shouldn't miss if you work at Microsoft. He's right. Microsoft should support RSS across all its websites, asap. It would be a communication revolution for the company, with key customers, developers, the press. The strange thing about it is that I know the day will come when they do this. When you know something, it's frustrating to have to wait.  

Update on categorizing in my new weblog authoring setup. I'm sticking with it, because it's just barely easy enough. I would like it to be easier. This might be the perfect place for a voice interface, because of the limited vocabulary. How that might work -- for example -- put the cursor on the post above. Hit the Voice-Cat button at the top of the window. Say "Technology slash Microsoft. Pause. Technology slash Blogging tools. Pause. Technology slash Formats and protocols slash RSS slash General." Click the button again. Would that be easier? I'd have to try it and see. 

BTW, to see the results of the categorization, click here. 

Brief Morning Coffee Notes 

Good morning spores fans. Pretty nice day. Drinkin coffee. Thinking about the day ahead.

Monday, November 17, 2003

I'd like to call your attention to an idea for the campaigns of leading Presidential candidates. I'd like them to stand up for the Internet, to say that, if elected, they will do everything they can to protect it from control of the big media companies. "Both Clark and Dean have raised prodigious amounts of money on the Internet. Now, how about using that money to keep the Internet free." 

Jay Rosen: "At most five percent of Americans actually mattered to the operatives who ran the campaign. And what do the lucky five percent get? Ads!" 

2/22/00: How to Win the Presidency on the Internet. 

I had a mockup of an ad for McCain. 

Bill Gates: "We've never been in any talks with Google about any acquisition thing in any way, shape or form." 

John Robb: "Google's KPCB hype machine must just be clearing its throat for the IPO." 

The possibility that talk of Microsoft buying Google was hype hadn't occurred to me until I read John's post, above. And I would have rejected the theory if I hadn't read another piece in the last few days that said that Netscape's bluster about killing Microsoft served KPCB, it made the Netscape IPO super-hot, and that made them billions of dollars. Previously I had taken them at face value, assuming their goal with Netscape was to build a real company, and that they were surprised when the stock took off, but why assume that? Maybe they were hyping all along and Andreessen was just following orders. In any case with Gates on the record saying there were no discussions about Microsoft acquiring Google, one has to wonder, how did the rumor start? 

Arnold Kling: "If you're Jim Clark or Kleiner-Perkins, you can make a lot of money by convincing Wall Street that you are going to be the next Microsoft, even if you have no way of achieving that objective. So you 'moon Microsoft' to pump up the stock, and then sell it. I think that there was a lot of that going on with Netscape." 

Doerr: "Believe it or not, the Internet is actually underhyped."  

Nick Denton: "I don't want to see some VC's invest idiot money in idiot people at idiot companies." 

Wired: Social Nets Find Friends in VCs. 

Statistics on the growth of the blogosphere from Technorati. 

Newsbot: Will it support RSS? 

Adam Curry: "We produce the show entirely in Radio's outliner." 

Calpundit explains how to point to NY Times articles without linkrot. "It's a bit klunky, but since we bloggers link to the Times frequently I thought I'd pass it along." 

This idea is going to backfire. Better to send music CDs to record company execs, cut them in half so they can't re-sell them, and send an unmistakable message that the gravy train is drying up. Sending email with huge enclosures is a horrible abuse of the Net.  

Des Moines Register on candidate weblogs. 

Toronto Star: "It was a gift from the propaganda gods. Just two problems: It didn't happen that way, and the designated hero, Pte Jessica Lynch, refuses to say it did." 

Screen shots of a three-pane aggregator, RSS Bandit.  

Serious problems with the transfer of power from west to east last night, so we flipped the switch back, and will try again in a couple of days after some more testing. 

Sunday, November 16, 2003

BlogTalk 2.0 will be held in Vienna, Austria, July 5-6. 

Tomalak's Realm is five years old today. Thanks Lawrence! 

Everyone's testing their sites on SurfControl today. Scripting is considered "Computing & Internet."  

Today's song: "Gonna put up my antennae." 

Mitch Kapor's weblog goes on hiatus. 

New graphic. This picture was taken in Sierraville, CA on July 4, 2000. I started a list of previous graphics. You can always find a description of the current graphic at the bottom of the page.  

NY Times: "During an election season increasingly defined by grass-roots organizing, Iowa is the hottest place to be for ambitious young campaign workers." 

Jennifer Howard: "A year ago, I barely knew what blogs were. Within a few months, they'd become a staple of my daily media diet." Dowbrigade comments. 

Flip-switch day