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This year's song: "He was playing real good for free."
Paul Boutin: 101 Ways to Save the Internet. A story about stories inspired by Big Fish. Four years ago: "That's it for this millennium!" One of the cool things about New Years is we get a new year in the On This Day In list. Okay, it's not really that cool.
Pet peeve: Print pubs that mis-spell Dan Gillmor's name. Every time I see it, and it happens a lot, I wonder what happened to all the editing that supposedly is backing up every print article. Are you your stories? Warning -- if you're the type of person who doesn't watch movie trailers and you haven't seen Big Fish, skip this section. On the other hand, I promise not to reveal anything about the movie that isn't in the trailer. Tim Burton, the director and producer of Big Fish, is a master story-teller. Is there anything more to Tim Burton than his stories? Suppose I met him at a party and asked "Who are you really, I mean without the stories?" Could he give a meaningful answer? I suspect Burton is telling us, in Big Fish, no. Speaking through one of his characters he says "I can be who ever you want me to be." My uncle, who died a few months ago, was a big story-teller. We used to joke when he'd start to tell a story that we'd heard dozens of times -- oh that's story number 278,291. In his stories, as with all our stories, he's the hero, he overcomes great odds to prevail, in a funny, lesson-learning way. Today my uncle is dead and guess what, there's nothing more to him now than his stories, and our stories about him. Do any of them have anything to do with who the true man was? See, that's really hard to say. We seem to think there's more to a person, that you can sort of lift up the floorboard, and underneath the stories, find the soul, the essence of the person. But I'm beginning to wonder. Could it be that our purpose is to tell a story, and that the better lived a life is, the better the story that survives after you're gone? The story behind this movie really gets you thinking. And that kind of story, for me, is the very best kind.
BBC: "The inventor of the world wide web, Tim Berners-Lee, has been awarded a knighthood for his pioneering work." Jay Rosen: "Ordinarily we make New Year's Resolutions for ourselves, not for other people." Brent Simmons: "I except 2004 to be fun."
BBC: "More people looked for information about the file-swapping program Kazaa than anything else on the net in 2003." Wired: "Gibson's maverick CEO wants to shove Ethernet up your ax and rock the music world." InfoWorld: "Phil Goldman, the founder and chief executive officer of Mailblocks and one of the founders of WebTV Networks has died at age 39, according to a statement released by the company on Sunday." SF Chronicle: "A fitness nut, Mr Goldman seemed in excellent health, said those who knew him. After a long night of programming, Mr Goldman often headed over to Gold's Gym to lift weights, Perlman recalled. He was also notoriously careful about his diet." Kay Trammel picks up on the Universal Story ID idea.
Harvard Magazine profiles our humble little community. Today's movie -- Big Fish. One word review: Wonderful. Mike Walsh: "I wish there were a Universal Story ID Number in the blogosphere." Andrew Grumet: "The first Getting Started with Weblogs class will be held a week from tomorrow at MIT Sloan, building E52." Edwards received the endorsement of Hootie & the Blowfish. Over the Christmas holiday I started a new moderated mail list for people who use RSS. It's off to a great start. No flames of course, and lots of good ideas, and a discussion about feeds with excerpts. Taegan Goddard: "If you have ever wondered why a campaign can spend $1,000,000 or more on television advertising and still be in the single-digits in the polls, you need to read this." USA Today: "This will be the year downloadable music goes legitimate," says Dave Fester, general manager of Microsoft's digital media division. Betsy Devine: "On December 13, President George W. Bush signed a big chunk of Patriot II into law -- but the 'major media' were focused on Saddam's spider hole." Betsy, something to think about -- did any of the Democratic Presidential candidates alert us? "thinkUsaAlignRight"BTW, Wired News had an article about it in late November, I pointed to it and Jason Lefkowitz got angry and went into motion. I've heard Republican spin masters say that we need a positive optimistic vision for the future, not people who are angry about the past. Remember, when you hear that bullshit, they're not wanting you to think about the Fourth and First Amendments which are being dismantled. Do you think Uncle Sam was angry about Pearl Harbor or the Nazis? Yeah I'm angry. And that's the correct way to be. The Scotsman: "Every political animal -- from George W Bush downwards -- began to notice the potential for communicating directly with voters without irritating media types getting in the way. The political weblog was born." A rambling essay on friendship, the Dean campaign, ping-spam. With any luck, glossary elements are now expanded as the RSS feed is being generated. If so, this should show up as a smiley when you read it in your aggregator.
Scoble: "Why didn't Silicon Valley happen in Kansas?" mobileRSS is a "Web-based client for reading RSS feeds." For 10 points, write a caption for this picture of a moose kissing a kitten. The Wikipedia, an incredible resource, needs $20K to stay afloat. The Unofficial Kerry for President Blog. Karl Rove's unofficial blog.
Also on that day: "In the end the only teams that matter are the Cubs, Red Sox and of course the Mets." Elvis Mitchell's ten best movies of 2003. Kaye Trammel: "You don't have to try be gendered on your blog -- chances are that it just happens naturally. After all, that is what being gendered is all about." Sarah Leonard, spokeswoman for the Dean campaign: "What you're seeing is a career politician desperate to save his political career." Here's a question. When the campaigning politician talks to the press they do it separately from their pep rallies for voters. Why? I'd like to hear what they say to the reporters. Wouldn't a grass roots campaign like Dean do that? Jim Moore, I wonder what you think about this. Is that true to the Second Superpower concept, which you developed?
The audio from my talk at Stanford is available. At a restaurant in Queens today an Asian woman lugging a suitcase goes from table to table offering DVDs for $5. Movies that are currently in the theaters. I had never seen this before. I found it disheartening. Calling this piracy is totally fair, imho. Jim Moore, the "newly appointed Director of Internet and Information Services for the Dean campaign" responds to my Wednesday editorial. Note that Jim and I are both fellows at Berkman Center. The Unisphere in Flushing Meadow Park, in Queens. Six years ago today: "A new Scripting News feature. Soooon, you'll be able to hook up to the news flow thru XML." Boston Globe: "McGovern, now 81, places himself, and Dean, 'right in the mainstream of the Democratic Party' on all issues besides the wars each have opposed." Paul Krugman: "I don't know why some journalists seem so concerned about politicians' clothes as opposed to, say, their policy proposals. But unless you're a fashion reporter, obsessing about clothes is an insult to your readers' intelligence." Bing!
Microsoft has announced a unique approach to stopping spam. "For any piece of e-mail I send, it will take a small amount computing power of about 10 to 20 seconds. When you see that proof, you treat that message with more priority." Normal email senders won't notice the delay and filters on your mail client will be able to tell high priority mail from low priority spam. Very clever. I was briefed on it a few months ago, and as long as they are making the technique freely available I support it. If it's another patent gateway I'm afraid we're just trading the evil of spam for another evil. Which is lesser is a good question. The RSS-User mail list is a miracle. It's the first time, to my knowledge, that there's been a discussion of RSS that wasn't dominated by developers. All I'm doing so far is approving messages, I just posted a couple at the start. I won't let through messages that are developer issues or ad hominems. Should have done this a long time ago. BTW, on some blogs they're saying my stint at Berkman is about to run out. Although I've asked them to run corrections, they haven't. So I'll correct it here. My fellowship goes through the end of next semester, and we're working on plans that go beyond that. Nothing in life is certain of course, but I hope to be employed by Harvard for quite some time, Murphy-willing of course. BBC: "The prospects for the Beagle 2 lander on Mars look increasingly gloomy after a radio sweep of the planet failed to detect any sign of the UK-built probe." Steve Pomeroy: "Another fun (though scary) computer-generated Xmas song is this MBrola test file." Dare Obasanjo: "My day job involves reading or writing specs all day. Most of the specs I read either were produced by the W3C or by folks within Microsoft. Every one of them contains contradictions, ambiguities and lack crucial information for determining in edge cases. Some are better than others but they all are never well-defined enough. Every spec has errata." Today's song: "Oh the weather outside is frightful.." Computer rendition of Let It Snow. Demo of the Creative Rhomba for my parents. Here's me singing Let It Snow (it's not snowing in NY today). Happy holidays boys and girls!
My next challenge -- figure out how to get my Sony DSC-P9 camera to connect to my IBM laptop over USB. In the past, when I used a Sony laptop I could just pop the memory stick out of the camera and plop it into the laptop. The IBM, as far as I know, doesn't have a memory stick slot. So when I plug the USB cable in, nothing shows up on the desktop. I assume this means I have to install some software on the laptop. (Postscript: I just had to turn the camera on. D'oh!)
BBC: No Mars signal from Beagle probe. Philadelphia Inquirer: "Air France canceled six flights between Paris and Los Angeles yesterday after U.S. intelligence reports indicated that al-Qaeda might be planning to hijack aircraft for a Sept 11-style suicide attack, US officials said." Channel Z status -- I'm using it every day, in fact I'm using it to write this post. At some point I plan to put in another month or so of intense work, not sure exactly when. Now I'm gaining experience as a user. And my experience as a developer with thousands of users of new Web authoring software has taught me to go slow at this stage. Once deployed, the demands of users get overwhelming quickly. B52s: "I am living on Channel Z." Me too! Followup on yesterday's editorial There's been a bunch of comment on my editorial yesterday, most of it missing the point, widely. Candidates have to earn my vote, and they won't if they say one thing and do another. They don't stand a chance competing with commercial software developers, yet that's exactly what two leading candidates are doing. Further, the software market in America is depressed, and I think that's partly caused by people expecting to get software for free. A candidate who wanted to help software jobs come back to NH, a high-tech state, could do something right now to help. No need to wait till they're elected. And I don't agree with people who say the candidate's job is to get elected. Sure, that's probably the way the candidate views it. But I'm not a candidate, I'm a member of the electorate and a taxpayer. I've yet to vote in a presidential election that means something. I'd like to, someday. I honestly don't think this is the year, but I'm doing my part to shift the focus to the voters and away from 60-second TV commercials. What are you doing? BTW, Dean is a very average candidate. His handlers ought to tell him to answer questions frankly. He got a question about the airplane they were using and tax dodges. He was asked if the story was true and he said No, and didn't comment further. He said some really nasty personal things about George Bush and John Kerry, kind of schoolyard stuff. Not something you'd expect from a Presidential candidate. That people are rallying around this guy gives you an idea how desperate we are for leadership. I think we can do better, much better. About open source being un-American --> wrong. It's almost totally American. Think about all the big open source titles, projects all led by Americans (or Fins living in America). Sometimes I wonder if these people even bother to read the things they critique. Some critics have pointed out that I've done plenty of software for free. True. In fact, since 1988 I've only done software for free. Did it make me happy? No. I yearn to be paid for software again. I've learned, the hard way, that people don't appreciate stuff they get for nothing. Jay McCarthy: "The point should not be to get elected to office. The point should be to be the person who the people want to be in office. Don't convince them, be their voice."
Antoin O Lachtnain: "I gave up smoking quite a while back, and I have been meaning to take it up again now for some years. MyWireService "delivers the headlines and summaries to you in an easy to scan page." Went to a Broadway matinee, it was great, a musical, lots of fun! The RSS-User mail list is off to a great start with 81 members. It works because it's moderated. All the posts have been about feeds and howtos, no politics, no personal attacks. Bush officials tell holiday stories, including Karl Rove reading Santa's New Reindeer. Requres Real (video). NY Times: "Gephardt's aides say he has to win Iowa to have any hope of gaining the Democratic nomination." Editorial Wired: "If we're still in the race in a few months, I think you'll see a tremendous amount of development." Wouldn't it be great if Dean and Clark went after Viacom, ClearChannel and Time-Warner, instead of the tiny companies that make blogging and social networking tools. I find myself hoping they get their asses kicked, hard. I don't expect much of Bush, but I doubt seriously that he would undermine the mostly American software industry by competing with it with free software. Makes the Dems' pitch about exporting American high-tech jobs to India fairly hollow (NH is a high-tech state, so it has been an issue). One of the reasons American programmers aren't competing here (in America) is that users expect to get software for free, and in that environment little new stuff gets created, and we have to keep creating to justify the greater amount of money we make (over Indians). But if all we make are commodities, then Indians working for low pay beat Americans working for free. (People who work for free have no incentive to please users, or even create usable software.) How sad to see two leading Democrats fall for, even feed the lie that they can create user-oriented software for free. Shame on both Dean and Clark. They went after the little guy. Who wants a president who does that. Not me. Still looking for someone worth supporting.
NY Times: "The federal government said this evening that the first suspected case of so-called mad cow disease had been discovered in the United States." A new Manila macro, available only on Harvard's server (for now) is a clone of the Radio macro that displays recent blog posts. Amazingly, my test site has become an authority on Gretchen Pirillo. Still have the number one slot for John Doerr. And the number one Dave. Lessig: "Enough already!" Highly recommend Mort Sahl on NPR's Fresh Air today. Scott Rosenberg: "Today's open-minded kids are tomorrow's democratic majority." Bryan Bell's viral marketing scheme for the Central California Falcon Club. Update at 6:30PM. It's over. Whew. All the services are turned back on. Update at 4:30PM. First the good news. Shanti Braford responded to my emails. It's not a denial-of-service attack, it's just a buggy bot. The bad news -- the flood continues unabated. About five requests per second. A huge waste of bandwidth and money. I was about to begin a day away from the computer, and decided to check my server log, and saw tens of thousands of accesses by a bot at 69.10.144.111 of a single file. It's reading a fairly large file about 100K times per hour. I entered the IP address in my browser. This usually doesn't get you anything but this time it got me an empty Movable Type weblog for "Shanti Braford." I looked up this person on Google, and found that he is the author of Popdex. So this probably isn't a denial of service attack, rather a script with a bug -- a bug that's costing me a boatload of money. If you're friends with Mr Braford please call him up and ask him to kill the script. In the meantime I've temporarily removed the file (sorry) to help minimize the damage.
Dowbrigade: "Dean has reached the Pact-with-the-Devil stage of his political ascension, and how he handles it will go a long way toward determining the ultimate impact of his campaign, if not its objective success."
NY Times profile of Elizabeth Spiers. As an experiment, I put Google AdSense ads on the weblogs.com home page. Immediately it makes me laugh. "Handmade Leather Journals." The perfect gift for the blogger who has everything. I started a moderated mail list for people who use RSS, either as a publisher or reading feeds in an aggregator. The list is moderated to keep it on topic and away from personal issues. It's just about using RSS, not debating its merits or other formats that may be like RSS. I wanted to have this list to get ready for the session I'm doing at RSS Winterfest, below, and of course if it's an active resource it'll be around for a long time after that. Scott Rosenberg: "Our office tower just started swaying. Stopped now. Seems like there was just a medium-size quake in the Bay Area." AP: "An earthquake estimated at magnitude 6.5 rocked California from Los Angeles to San Francisco on Monday, collapsing downtown buildings in one town near the epicenter, causing several unspecified injuries in the region and a widespread blackout." Reuters: "Ralph Nader said he wants to make another White House bid in 2004 and will announce a decision next month." You can tell Ralph to run, or not, in this Web form. In Salon, Scott Rosenberg explains how Microsoft is using weblogs to spawn a culture around the Longhorn version of Windows, in development. You have to get a free day pass or buy a subscription to read Scott's column.
Lessig's on a roll. Lots of interesting posts today. Go get em. Taegan Goddard reports on a poll showing Dean leading narrowly in a crowded field in South Carolina. "Dean leads with 16 percent and is followed by Wesley Clark at 12 percent, Al Sharpton at 12 percent, and John Edwards at 11 percent. " Jon Udell: "XML documents, flowing through XML plumbing, can now deliver very real and tangible benefits." The Clarkbot is a "Perl script written by Rick Heller. It searches the Feedster RSS search engine for references to "Wesley Clark" To be picked up by the Clarkbot, a blog must generate an RSS Feed, and that feed must be listed with Feedster."
Ed Cone: "North Carolina should be a great proving ground for Internet campaigning at a state level." Two years ago today Brent Simmons said: "I'm 200, you're 200." It's cool because you have to know HTTP to get it. The Guardian's A-Team blogger list. Phillip Pearson: "I wrote a Python script that downloads a web page, then examines all linked pages to try to find their RSS feeds." Back from New Hampshire with pics of Dean and Lieberman. Jessica Baumgart's notes on yesterday's trip to NH.
Off to see Dean (6:30PM) and Lieberman (7:45PM). Al Gore's son is arrested for pot posession. It would be really cool if one of the Democratic candidates could explain why marijuana is illegal. Jon Postel: "Be liberal in what you accept, and conservative in what you send." Chronicle: "A massive San Francisco power outage on one of the busiest shopping days of the year turned the normal chaos of the Saturday before Christmas into surreal confusion -- disrupting traffic, shutting down two transit stations and disorienting thousands of suburbanites who visit the city only a few times a year." Marshall McLuhan: "The medium is the message." John F Kennedy: "Ask not what your country can do for you, ask what you can do for your country." Unknown philosopher: "Only steal from the best." Today is the first day of winter and the shortest day of the year. Bloggable campaign events today in NH. Dean, Lieberman, Clark. Frank Rich: "The political establishment has been blindsided by the Internet's growing sophistication as a political tool -- and therefore blindsided by the Dean campaign -- much as the music industry establishment was by file sharing and the major movie studios were by The Blair Witch Project, the amateurish under-$100,000 movie that turned viral marketing on the Web into a financial mother lode." Karlin Lillington reviews Radio UserLand. New version of mainResponder.respond for Frontier users, adds ETag support and optimizes all pages served by mainResponder.
Pictures taken at Clark and Gephardt talks today.
Off to see Clark (1PM) and Gephardt (3PM) in NH today. The eyes of Joi Ito oversee weblogs.com.
Erika Stutzman: "The University of North Carolina's School of Journalism and Mass Communication is hosting a Weblogs in Journalism seminar in January, yet another sign that the online journals and forums are starting to mature." The Blogosphere and the Holidays
One of the things I like about this time of year is that so many people seem to have a time to do interesting and fun things. It's like everyone gets a mini-sabbatical. It's time to go to a game, to the movies, a museum, out to a long lunch or visit with a few bloggers you haven't stayed in touch with. Next week I'm going to be in NYC. Maybe there will be an opportunity to do some or all of that. Randy Charles Morin sent a question about this. Does the blogosphere pick up or go on holiday during the holidays? Here's what I said. 1. I don't have any data, but I do have subjectives. 2. The actual flow goes down, around the 25th way down. 3. But the volume of real work goes up, because people have time for projects that require attention or thinking, which they have more of in the coming two-three weeks. I've done some of my best work in this period in years past. My first two XML projects, siteChanges.xml and scriptingNews format (which became half of RSS 0.91) were hatched in December 1997. Last year in this time period I helped my parents get through a tough time. I was telling my brother yesterday that I have fond memories of this, it gave me a strong sense of purpose, and a sense that I made a difference. That also happened during the holidays last year. So mostly the holidays are good. I especially like it when stress isn't a big part of it.
David Davies: "Let's see those video moblogs!"
Chris Lydon interviews Larry Lessig. Just listened to it, great stuff. Reminder -- there's a special RSS feed for Lydon interviews, with enclosures, that can automatically be downloaded overnight by enclosure-aware aggregators and feed readers. RealAudio archive for last night's webcast. In MP3 format. Fantastic story by Zeldman of the beautiful website for a Semantic Web conference. Is it semantic? No, but it is beautiful.
This is a test post. There was an error when I tried to demo routing to weblogs.com last night and the error recovery was inadequate (it left around an invalid structure). So I fixed it so it cleans up after itself, and tried again, and this time it worked. Next time there's an error it'll recover better, and also will leave around a message for me so I can tell what went wrong. It wasn't broken, it just wasn't prepared for something to go wrong. News.Com: "What is the impact for peer-to-peer fans of a court decision that knocks back the recording industry's legal strategy for tracking down and suing alleged file swappers?"
Ryan: "So here's a kiss, for Joey and for Wendy. You've just shown me another beautiful side of the Internet." John Palfrey comments on the Verizon decision. Donna Wentworth has a roundup of articles on the news. BBC: "There was more bad news for the record labels, this time from the Dutch Supreme Court." The Dean weblogs ping changes.xml for RSS feeds. Here's howto have your RSS feed included in the flow, even if it's not a Dean blog. NY Times: "The broad presidential powers invoked by the Bush administration after the Sept 11 attacks to detain suspected terrorists are now being challenged by the courts."
Announcing: Dean Community News.
News.Com: "RealNetworks sued Microsoft on antitrust charges." Cook Report: "The unusually strong approval numbers among his fellow Republicans builds Bush a very high floor, but the equally strong degree of opposition among Democrats constructs an unusually low ceiling." Kaye Trammell: Why the Fox Searchlight Pictures Blog Sucks. NY Times: "Google, the Internet search engine, has begun an experiment with book publishers in which the contents of the first chapters of books, reviews or other bibliographic information is indexed and made available to Web surfers."
PS: Please don't construe this as an endorsement by Berkman Center, Harvard Law School, or myself for any particular candidate. Sorry if this is a bummer, but that's very very important. Rebecca Blood on weblogs. John Palfrey on ICANN. Doc Searls on presentations. Clay Shirky on the RIAA. Jay Rosen on journalism I've got a total kickass demo for tonight's Berkman meeting, which is on, and Murphy-willing will be webcast. Boston Globe: "IDG World Expo, the Framingham company that is moving its flagship MacWorld Expo convention from New York to Boston, said yesterday that it is doing the same with another of its technology industry trade shows in 2005." La Fing interviews Chris Pirillo and JY Stervinou about RSS. Wired: "Voter advocate Bev Harris alleged Tuesday that managers of a subsidiary of Diebold, one of the country's largest voting equipment vendors, included a cocaine trafficker, a man who conducted fraudulent stock transactions and a programmer jailed for falsifying computer records." On this day last year Daniel Berlinger's Really Simple Discoverability format went 1.0. Two years ago: "As your body ages you learn in many ways that your shit does stink. It's a constant reminder. If you didn't have a sense of humor before, aging gives you one." Fastbuzz is a new centralized RSS aggregator. NY Times: "Better coffee a millionaire's money can't buy."
Changes.xml for RSS feeds. "It seems that aggregators and feed readers can make good use of the flow of changes, to discover new feeds that may interest readers; and to optimize polling." Today's song: "It was a night like this forty million years ago." I dialed into one of my servers to be greeted by an error window that made me wonder "How does it know?" BBC: "Film fans who have just seen the final installment of The Lord of the Rings trilogy have been heaping praise on the much-anticipated movie." Brent Simmons: "The MetaWeblog API does exactly what I need." If you hate the Yankees, as I do, please click on this link, but before you do so, swallow your coffee. Here's how I'm handling apps that request changes.xml too often. The rule is that you may access changes.xml three times an hour. After that you'll get a 503 Service Unavailable response. I also included a Retry-After response header. FreshMeat has a new XML-RPC interface.
Source code for user.html.renderers.top10, the script that renders yesterday's 10 reasons RSS rules. If you know about outline renderers in Frontier or Radio, you can do the same thing. Reminder, here's the feed of New Hampshire candidate appearances thanks to PoliticsNH.Com. The primary is about a month away (42 days to be exact). If anyone asks if there are any applications of RSS that are temporary, tell them about this one. Randy Charles Morin
On the Atom-Syntax list, RCM said: "In the next month, I'll present a framework based on Atom API called PaSSAPI that will implement both the Atom syntax and RSS over the Atom API. Then you can choose to do whatever pleases yourself." Choosing whatever pleases yourself sounds good on paper, but in practice it's bad. The #2 cool thing about RSS is that you can implement it in an afternoon. An API based on doing Whatever Pleases Yourself is something only a large company can pretend to implement, because no one can fully implement such an API. No one will believe that a sole practitioner or even a smallish team could cover all the variability in a platform like OpenDoc or SOAP, or what Atom is shaping up to be. If you want it to really fly, simplify. Use the guideline if it can't be implemented in an afternoon, it isn't going to fly. The Blogger API and the MetaWeblog API both could be implemented that quickly. Imho, the smartest thing would be to require XML-RPC, and then forget about SOAP and REST. We've already heard from people who flip it around, force every tool to support SOAP and REST and make XML-RPC optional, but none of them have anything invested in the installed base, so of course they want to change everything. Anyone who had already implemented the Blogger API or the MetaWeblog API would want to keep their investment. Even when a big established platform vendor does something like this, it usually fails. I've seen Apple, Microsoft even IBM try. Only in very unusual circumstances do you get enough support from developers to make an incompatible corner-turn, a discontinuity. Even Mac OS X had to run unaltered Mac apps. Learn from them, Luke; don't repeat the mistakes. And to Randy thanks for the good juju you've been spreading around.
Top 10 reasons why RSS rules. Just got news that I've been nominated for another Wired award, for my work with RSS. I love getting nominated. I just love it. I really do. Meet the new team at UserLand. Scott Young is CEO. Scott Rosenberg at Salon welcomes the new team, as does Scoble. New category: Technology/UserLand/Management. Eric Raymond: "A textual protocol tends to future-proof your system." This just in. Saddam was turning into Santa. "Watch out Easter bunny, you're next," says President Bush.
New weblogs.com feature shows cumulative high water, starting today. BTW, I now have a feed you can subscribe to with all the news about weblogs.com. FCC Commissioner Michael Copps: "Anyone could access the Internet, with any kind of computer, for any type of application, and read or say pretty much what they wanted. This Internet may be dying." CNET reviews my new laptop. How did they know? Ars Technica reviews it too, calling it an "object of geek desire." A fresh start for Weblogs.Com. "Quietly, over the last few days, with help from Lawrence Lee at UserLand, I took weblogs.com for a ride across the country, from UserLand's hosting service in California to my personal colo'd server in the Boston area." Re changes.xml, any application that reads more often than once an hour should be using shortChanges.xml (it contains the last five minutes of changes only).
Steve Gillmor: "Hi ho hi ho disruptively we go."
How to deal with slashes that appear in category names in RSS feeds? I had the problem myself, when I named a category Homilies/Mottos. Tim Bray agrees that slashes should be encoded. Lance Knobel comments on the Dean foreign policy team. Jason Lefkowitz is fighting back against Patriot Act expansion. Desktop Dean is a "free Dean for America mini-RSS aggregator." Suggestion: Include my Dean feed in the default subs. NY Times: "Baghdad is a place that feeds on rumors." Redhead: "I'm hoping my voice will reach South Carolina." Ed Cone: "If you don't need to fight a war, but you fight | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
I went to 
First, if this time of year makes you cheerful, have a happy. I'm pretty ambivalent. There are some things I like and some things I don't. I see the pressure to buy for what it is. Pressure, which I don't like, and commercialism, which I also don't like. I love buying nice things, but almost no one knows how to do that for me like I do. I suspect that's true of everyone. 
I was joking with a friend about doing a new format, MCS, an acronym for More Complex Syndication. Here's how you'd cook it. When Atom starts settling down, make a list of features it has that aren't present in RSS 2.0. Then copy the RSS 2.0 spec, creating a new document. Do a search and replace, changing the string RSS to MCS. Replace the Roadmap section with a single acronym, 
More about tonight's demo. I'll explain how the Dean campaign is using the Internet in ways you didn't know about, and that I didn't know about until last night. My eyes popped when I saw what they were doing. Jay Rosen, whose nephew Zack is the Dean developer, got a sneak preview. "Very exciting Dave. Mega cool. Did Zack help with this?" To which I said: "Yes he did, but due to the power of standards, he didn't know he did. ;->" That's the way it's supposed to work. Open level playing field. Anyone who wants to can innovate. Small pieces, loosely joined. Tune in to tonight's webcast. The app I'm demoing is a Web app so you'll be able to follow along from home. 7PM Eastern. 
