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On this day seven years ago a weblog called Scripting News first appeared. Kinja, a new centralized RSS aggregator, is open for business. NY Times article. Nick Denton explains. I heard about Google mail on Paul Harvey's radio broadcast, then it got a mention on the CBS radio hourly news. A fee gigabyte and integration with the search engine. That's cool. Raises the bar for Yahoo, Microsoft, AOL, etc. Something really is amiss with my content management system. Sorry for the missing posts for the last days of March. I should be able to restore from the RSS archive when I get back to Boston.
Arrived safely in Florida. It's sunny and warm, of course. No Internet in hotel, despite what they advertised. This time I forgot to pack something, the power adapter for my IBM T40 laptop. Tomorrow I'm going to see if I can buy one, but I'm not holding my breath. Basically have two hours of battery for the rest of the week. Guess that's good. I'll do a lot of reading. No battery required for that of course. Berkman's Urs Gasser released a study of Apple's iTunes. Russell Beattie reviews Diego Doval's Clever Cactus P2P app. John Battelle details changes to Google, released today. Note to people who are raving about FutureMe. It's been done before. We're going to move MTTF to a scripting.com server sometime in the next few weeks. I was quoted in a Tampa Tribune article about Google. My quote didn't quite fit with their theme. Oh la. For the record, Google isn't suffering too much for being commercial. Although some of where Alta Vista went wrong is evident in their strategy. Florida is a battleground state in the US presidential election this fall. Lots of Bush-Cheney ads on the radio on the drive here from Orlando. They paint Kerry as a taxer. They have an ad with a supposed Bostoner (he makes fun of his own accent) talking about how Kerry likes to tax, tax, tax. Made me think I should move to Florida until November, so I can vote for Kerry in the fall in a place where my vote means something. Bush makes me totally sick. Bush decided to create a huge deficit. Kind of like a tax. Dave Pollard explains how to increase your weblog's traffic. Andrew Grumet's plan for the Infrastructure session at BloggerCon. Eleven new Boston Globe feeds.
BBC: "A handful of UK libraries are to offer wi-fi laptops to visitors so that they can browse the internet." NY Times: "Prince's love-hate relationship with the mainstream music industry takes another turn today as he opens his online Musicology Download Store, turning his back on download services like Napster, Rhapsody and Apple's iTunes."
Andrew reports new feeds at LegalTorrents.
AKMA: Why Churches Should Have Websites. Ed Cone won't run for Congress this year. Dowbrigade: "Oy vey, we're getting too old for this." Julie Leung: "Thanks to Dave Winer's blog I now know I can let my kids be creative with their snacking."
Here's a sign of hope. The Open Directory Project is going to do something with RSS, not sure what, but it's a good sign, if only just a start. Here's what I would like them to do. 1. Associate a feed with a level of the hierarchy, so someone can subscribe to a category, and anything that appeared in that category would show up in the reader's aggregator as new. 1a. Associate a feed with a level in the other direction, so that news can be routed to a category in the directory. So, to the left, you'd see the stuff that doesn't change often, and in a box to the right is the new stuff. 2. Let an author maintain a whole level of the directory with RSS. 3. What about more than one level? We thought of that too, it's called OPML. 4. After adopting RSS and OPML, implement inclusion, meaning you can point to an OPML file anywhere a node can appear and the content of that OPML is included in the directory as if it were part of the directory. 5. From there, the whole thing will be unbundled, let the search engines understand an OPML file and display the as Yahoo-like directories. Another thing on my to-do list, write a how-to for aggregator developers on password-protected feeds. It came up in an interview I did with an InfoWorld reporter. I told him how Radio does it, he asked if other aggregators handle username-passwords in RSS feed URLs, and I said I don't know. What we did with Radio is use the standard way of including a username-password in a URL, and then looked for places where subscriptions are exported, and turned off exporting of those URLs. That's about all there is to it if your HTTP engine understand usernames and passwords. More RSS stuff from Russia. Aggreg8 is an "easy way of keep track of all your favourite websites without visiting each of them individually." I had huge trouble dealing with Travelocity on my mid-March California trip, and unfortunately the trouble is not over yet. Got my credit card bill, and they double-billed me for the hotel. An extra $521.49 for them, from me. Called them up, waited on hold a half-hour (as usual) and they didn't have a record of the trip. A supervisor will email me on Tues with the status of the refund. This does not inspire confidence. The man on the phone insisted that he was helping me. In what way? I wanted to know. They took money from me, and I'm trying to get them to give it back. Helping me would be accidentally giving me money. Fat chance of that! AKMA had a great idea, a bunch of bloggers each record one chapter of Lessig's new book and put it together into an audio book. It's a rainy day here in Boston, so I did chapter eleven, entitled Chimera. I found a very nice sound recording program, it works quite well. It's not exactly RSS that breaks through Chinese censorship, it's centralized aggregators that act as a proxy. Clever. Dowbrigade, a good human being, has a crisis that involves cats. I'd offer a home for them if I wasn't traveling so much in the next two months. Last night NPR's On Point focused on Google. Microsoft Research is having an invitation-only conference on social computing next week. Read about it at Scoble's. List of participants. Kevin Schofield explains why it's exclusive.
Five years ago today: "If you've got a losing strategy, the best tactic is to admit defeat asap and get on with it."
Wired: "A draft bill obtained by Wired News recently circulated among members of the House judiciary committee that would make it much easier for the Justice Department to pursue criminal prosecutions against file sharers by lowering the burden of proof. The bill also would seek penalties of fines and prison time of up to ten years for file sharing."
Google News search for BlogBot. ZD Net UK has a gazillion RSS feeds. I have some writing to do this weekend so I can spend next week in Florida. I bought several books today for beach reading. The big one is Ghost Wars by Steve Coll. It was recommended to me by a reader, and I had heard an interview with the author on NPR and thought it was interesting. I almost bought Richard Clarke's book, but I'll read Ghost Wars first. Sooz may have found the place for our party for the evening of April 17. We're also going to have hosted dinners on the night before the conference at restaurants around the Cambridge area, or possibly at the Durgin Park restaurant at Faneiul Hall in Boston. Seattle Post-Intelligencer: "MSN Blogbot." Tim Oren eulogizes HyperCard, which was retired this week. More Russian RSS. Reuters: "Boeing on Thursday announced pricing for its Connexion high-speed Internet service that will soon enable travelers to surf the Web or send messages to friends or co-workers while cruising at 30,000 feet." Steve Ballmer: "We have a lot of guys who are really smart about search." Steve Gillmor to Steve Ballmer: "Steve, you need to support RSS." "thinkusaalignright"Political Wire reviews how the White House is gunning for Richard Clarke. I've heard a half-dozen interviews with Clarke. He comes off as an intelligent, respectful, and not overly arrogant critic, not just of the White House policies re terrorism and Iraq, but also himself. Listening to his interview with NPR's Terry Gross, I thought -- wouldn't it be great if the White House offered up someone as thoughtful as Clarke, then we could have the kind of election some of us want, one where the issues are debated with integrity, and each of us makes an intelligent choice with our vote. No such luck, even if the White House spokespeople are intelligent (no doubt they are), they're acting like thugs and appealing to the worst in us. Shame. According to the Bush people, the only reason a man like Clarke would speak up is to sell books, to get a Democrat elected, or to get a new job. It might have all those effects and their criticism would still fail to address the key point of Clarke's testimony (under oath, btw), that the White House has diverted our resources and attention from defending against terrorism, before and after 9/11. That's the amazing part. There's some way to explain not focusing on terrorism before 9/11, but how can they explain that they're doing so little to defend the US against future acts of terrorism? Reuters: "Noticed those little orange boxes on the Web lately with the letters XML?" Frontier developers in Europe take note. Jeff Jarvis opens a discussion of the business of weblogs for the April 17 conference. Phil Wolff: "I don't have time to try a million beers." Ananova: "Picking your nose and eating it is one of the best ways to stay healthy, according to a top Austrian doctor." Will Richardson: Blogging and RSS. Andrew Grumet: "Control by a few gives you a chance at achieving conceptual integrity."
Dowbrigade: "There are a number of computers strewn around the Greater Boston area which are busily downloading and compiling further digital detritus for our possible perusal, as we STILL have over 30 gigs of available space on our hard drive."
Tonight's meeting will not be webcast, but we are using IRC. Important note for people coming to the Thursday evening meeting at Berkman -- it's in a different location tonight, in Pound Hall room 201. If you're facing Baker House from the front of the building Pound is the big building to the right (there's one other Georgian house between). Pound 201 is on the second floor of course. Bring your laptop with WiFi. How to write for the BloggerCon site. Jay Rosen describes the discussion he will lead at BloggerCon. "If you show up, you are a participant." Scott Rosenberg: "Clarke's words exposed a deep emotional vacuum in the Bush administration's handling of 9/11." Lance Knobel: "The article in The Guardian, which paints Atom as the solution and RSS 2.0 as the problem, does not indicate that Hammersley is parti pris." Parti pris: "An inclination for or against something or someone that affects judgment; prejudice or bias." Phil Ringnalda: "TypeKey isn't really about authentication, so much as a way to make comment moderation actually work." Larry Lessig's new book, Free Culture, is available for free download under a Creative Commons license. His reviews page has an RSS feed.
US News and World Report supports RSS. Bing! Rogers Cadenhead reviews the Guardian's latest article about RSS. Barlow: "I did a little amateur actuarial analysis in Excel and found that the fatality rate among my 100 closest friends was right up there with rock stars and private pilots." Scott Johnson reports that Feedster now supports enclosures. I don't know what Yandex is, but it's Russian and it supports RSS. BloggerCon: Shirky's Power Law.
Marcus Lillkvist, a reporter for the Wall Street Journal, is researching a story and would like to talk with non-technical people who use RSS, to keep current on subjects like gardening, travel, health; i.e. non-geek subjects. Please send an email if you fit the bill, and I'll forward it to Marcus. Doc Searls: "They crush statues with every sentence they write." Kaye Trammel: "If you are going to be in or around Gainesville on April 1, then consider coming to this free symposium." Believe it or not, I will be. What an amazing coincidence. Kind of like being in Charlottetown at the same time they were having a weblog conference on the other side of the island. Reuters: AOL sees future in Web standards. Fred Kaplan: "I have no doubt that Richard Clarke, the former National Security Council official who has launched a broadside against President Bush's counterterrorism policies, is telling the truth about every single charge." Chapter 5 of Dan Gillmor's book is up for review.
People seem to like the Baby Squirrels piece. I thought I'd get flamed mercilessly for this one. Weird. BBC: "Microsoft must pay a fine of $613 million for abusing its dominant market position, the EU has ordered."
Wired's story about the Rave award winners for 2004. NY Times: "Phishing attacks, in which criminals send fraudulent e-mail to steal private information from people, are growing rapidly." Blogger dinner in Chicago tonight.
Wired: Why RSS Is Everywhere. David Galbraith: "Bloglines doesn't do what I want." NY Times: "NASA's Mars rover Opportunity is resting on what was once a salty, rippling body of water, project scientists announced today." Craig Burton: Yet Another Namespace. Shelley Powers comments on Six Apart's new FAQ.
Harvard is hosting the iLaw conference, May 13-15. John Palfrey, the executive director at Berkman says they want bloggers to be part of the conference. The conference costs almost $2000, so we're offering a few scholarships for people-who-blog with an interest in Internet law. If you'd like to participate, please send me an email and I'll forward it to the organizers. Political Wire: Kerry owns five homes. NewsWatcher is a "new free RSS reader for Windows that includes the unique Vision interface developed by Scopeware and Dr David Gelernter." Thursday's meeting will be in Pound 201 at 7PM. We're going to test the new WiFi in preparation for BloggerCon, and also be sure everyone has an idea of what the facility is like. If you're in the area this Thurs, please come, we'll have more room than usual. Bring a friend and a laptop. Six Apart publishes a long FAQ about TypeKey. Comments here. Lots of great info on yesterday's C-for-Windows thread. Membership systems I just wrote something in an email that bears repeating publicly. I did my first membership system in LBBS in 1982, twenty-two years ago. The most recent one I did was in Radio Community Server, in 2002. Before that I did one that's still in use in Manila, it's part of mainResponder, the underpinnings of several groupware systems built in Frontier. If and when we get our hands on the Six Apart API, I plan to wire up the mainResponder membership system to that API. I would do this for the same reason I quickly implemented support for the Blogger API in 2001, even though we already had the richer ManilaRPC interface. The reason is so simple it's hard for some people to understand. When someone else moves, if you do it the same way you're well on your way to bootstrapping a standard, and having a standard is good. The only reservation I have about Six Apart is past experience with Trackback -- they changed their mind a few times, and didn't evolve the protocol very cleanly, so it was extra hard to implement and the docs were confusingly out of synch with the practice. I'm encouraged that this time they're going slowly, presumably reviewing the protocol several times, and when it's finally released it will be something they're prepared to evolve from in a compatible (ie non-breaking) way. BTW, at some point someone is going to say use LDAP. It also occurs to me that directory maven Craig Burton will likely have an opinion about this. And the PingID people. What do they think? Is Microsoft whispering sweet nothings into Six Apart's ear about Passport? And has the latest software czar at Sun made the call about using Liberty Alliance? This ain't Kansas anymore Toto.
BloggerCon for Newbies. "No panels, no PowerPoints, no speakers."
Dowbrigade: Buy High, Sell Low. I want to do some C programming on Windows. Really I'd give NPR another $20 if they'd give me a special frequency to tune to without the stinkin pledge drive. They are so pathetic. Helllp.
Help Andrew benchmark BitTorrent by downloading a file right now. (You must have BitTorrent installed.) What do you think of the new Scripting News header graphic? 5/11/03: Glue for Technorati API. Doug Kaye interviews Mary Jo Foley, Bram Cohen and Andrew Grumet. He also has an enclosure-enabled RSS feed. Very nice! Wolverhampton Grammar School publishes a RSS feed.
1/20/03: The "You Know Me" Button. 7/14/01: Distributed membership and preferences. 9/19/99: Prefs Distribution thru XML-RPC. Congrats to Technorati on shipping their beta. Can you still hate your enemy when she has a voice. "I want the Fifth Amendment right not to testify against Sarah, and to protect our private correspondence from subpoena, the same as other spouses." Adam Curry says he says he disagrees with me about Iraq, but I'm not entirely sure we do. $100+ billion can go a long way to making people happy, even if some of their friends and relatives are dead, injured or homeless, and their country is occupied. We're spending money we don't have. At some point our creditors will tell us we've been living too rich and that Iraq is something we can't afford. I'd be surprised if they like us very much after we leave.
BloggerCon essay: "At any time the person being interviewed could press a button and the show would switch into Reality Mode." The first BloggerCon II grid is up. "Experience has shown that people will take this the wrong way, as cast in concrete, and will make plans based on it, and will be very upset when it changes. It will change. It's for discussion purposes only." Best wishes to Seth Dillingham and family on dealing with the sudden accidental death of his step-son Shane. I had two emails just bounce because somehow my IP address is listead at Spews.Org. Must have just happened. I'll deal with it in the morning. Adam Curry on rssfeeds.nl: "Beautiful search engine for feeds." Steven Levy: "Sergey Brin and Larry Page don't seem ruffled at all." We all use Google, for sure, but we all used Netscape too. Google misses the same clues that Netscape did, and like Netscape makes enemies where they should be cultivating relationships. Google needs to transition into a leader, once Microsoft has made their move it will be too late. This Economist cover is an anti-war person's dream. Via JRobb. Telegraph: "One hour into the six-and-a-half hour flight, and at 30,000ft above the Sahara Desert, Mrs Eduwa began to go into labour." John's Jottings summarizes the discussion about Six Apart's TypeKey. Shelley Powers calls it the Patriot Act of weblogging. Idly.Org defends Six Apart from yours truly. Anyway, if TypeKey is anything new it's a breakthrough. I've been puzzling about this stuff for years. Some people say there's something brilliant here. If so, that's great, but until I understand how it works, I'm from Missouri. Jay Allen: "With the TypeKey authentication services and other great features of MT 3.0, it looks like there will no longer be a need for MT-Blacklist’s continued development." MetaFilter thread on TypeKey. The questions I asked yesterday are unanswered. 7/17/00: How to share a membership group. Tommy Trussell: "For the next pair you buy, try the New Balance Factory Outlet at the former New Balance factory in Brighton." Florida trip: March 29 (Monday) through April 2 (Friday). Flying in and out of Orlando, staying in St Augustine. New header graphic, the tunnel on I-70 in Glenwood Canyon.
NY Times: "The biggest punk scenes are in capitalist countries like the U.S., Canada and Japan. I haven't heard of any new North Korean punk bands coming out. There's no scene in Iran." Went to see a really scary movie this afternoon. I hate movies about mountain climbing. Complete list of ComputerWorld RSS feeds. Questions for SixApart re their upcoming authentication system. More questions from Jeff Jarvis. Andrew Grumet: "RssReader is TiVo-resident software that displays the contents of an RSS feed on your television." As a person who has heart disease, let me tell you, this story is a total eye-opener. I had the surgery they say I didn't need, but I also have radically low cholesterol, healthy blood pressure, and I quit smoking. Two years ago today we offered New York Times feeds to Radio users for the first time. "Yesterday I said that today's news would be for people who love poetry, books, movies, art, education, food, fashion, health, travel and technology. I left something out. It's also for people who love The Mets."
Don Park: "I got a chance to test drive Groove 3.0 beta today." I bought a new external hard drive for backups. A picture of my Massachusetts desktop. Water bottle, Diet Coke, cell phone; no ashtray. (1336 days no smoking.) New Balance Quad-E size 11.5 walking shoes. Get some at Nordstrom in Palo Alto. Under $100. Shelley Powers sends a pointer to Joe's New Balance Outlet. They have a better price, and I don't have to fly across country. Pictures from a hike in Redwood City on Tuesday.
Greenspun: "Maybe Linux really is secretly funded by Microsoft." Morbus previews SixApart's centralized membership system that proposes to stop comment spam. VarChars reviews Yahoo's RSS reader. Fast Company: "Robert Scoble may well be one of the most powerful people in Redmond right now." Dowbrigade is going to Peru and Ecuador.
Joe Trippi was on The Connection. Gavin Sheridan has received a claim of libel from John Gray, author of Men are from Mars, Women are from Venus. The question is about Gray's PhD, which is mentioned numerous times on his bio page. But they don't say where his PhD is from. 7/22/01: "It can be hard for a Martian to listen when the Venutian is feeling bad." BBC: "The spread of wi-fi is being hampered by increasing complex and incompatible products." Ben Hammersley's article is up. I think it's better to put the past behind us and see how we can make more powerful software now and in the future, for users. BTW, the Guardian has a nice simple RSS 0.91 feed. The Kerry campaign calls on the Bloggers of the World to unite.
Thursday night meeting is being webcast and IRC'd. Daily Kos: How to apply for press credentials at DNC. Somebody had a great idea to do Poster Sessions. Anyone want to help. John Stafford: RSS and the Military. Zawodny announces ten new entertainment feeds from Yahoo. It's articles like this that make me glad I can still subscribe to Evhead. Steve Gillmor: "Three years after Ray Ozzie resurfaced with Groove Networks Inc, he's back with a sweeping redesign." Chris Sells reviews four California theme parks. Dan Gillmor interviews Mark Cuban about weblogs. I have a much higher opinion of Cuban after reading his comments. I saw the 60 Minutes profile of him, but it was not as interesting. Much better to hear what a person thinks, in his own words, esp if he's interesting, as Cuban is. I've definitely got the travel bug. I want to book another four-day trip somewhere warm. Maybe Florida next. Amsterdam in late April? Miami Herald: "If Harvard Law School hosts a conference on some topic, it must be reasonably acceptable and mainstream, right?" NY Post: "By putting information one click away instead of dozens, supporters hope RSS is the cure for RSI." De Digital Revolutie: "RSS ken je waarschijnlijk wel van websites zoals Kranten.com en Krantenkoppen.be die altijd de recente nieuwskoppen van andere sites op hun homepage hebben staan." One year ago today I completed my cross-country drive. Four years later, it's still fun to blow up the Kingdome. A discussion group thread from this day in 1999 about the (then new) RSS tester web app. Interesting to see who was participating in the RSS community five years ago.
8:55PM Eastern arrived home. What a contrast. Landed in the middle of a blizzard. It was in the 70s and 80s in Calif. Hot and sweet-smelling air. We're having a lite blizzard here in the Boston area. No drifts and not a big accumulatioin, but it's still strange. I'm more comfortable here than there, though. I get to wear enough clothes here. Over there, I felt overdressed. Okay I know I'm late for this party, but I'm in SFO using T-Mobile wireless, did an aggregator run, downloaded my Slashdot tunes into the elegance of RSS-plus-BitTorrent. Ed Cone on running for Congress. Rick Klau reviews Mark Cuban's weblog. Mike Walsh schmoozes David Kay at a Harvard Square Dunkin Donuts. Two years ago today: "Obviously there are differences between the genders." Boston Globe: "A major late-season snow storm bore down on the region last night." Jim Moore has a picture of the snow. Halley's Comment: "And it's STILL snowing!" Boston University has a really cool webcam. It's live-motion. The art in webcams has been moving unbeknownst to me. Anyway you can see the snow. Not so much as it sounds in the press or in the suburbs. (Halley, Jim and I all live in the burbs.) News.Com: "On Wednesday, the Web search company will unveil Google Local."
Joseph Palmer: "Me, a marketing guy? I don't think so." Political Wire quotes the Washington Post: "For many Americans, the election will be like a faraway war.." Scott Rosenberg: "Those darn Spanish voters -- they just don't do what George Bush wants them to do." I found a really nice Starbucks to check email and do a little lite blogging. It's on Ralston Ave in (I think) Belmont, CA, just off Highway 92 on the way to Half Moon Bay. Did a hike in an old favorite spot and had lunch with friends on the water in Foster City. It's official, this is a beautiful place, easy to live in. I found today that I miss my swimming pool. That's the first time I realized that since I left just about a year ago. It's funny you can come back to the place you left, and it looks different in some ways, and exactly as you remembered it in others.
The Boston Globe says they misquoted Kerry, but the Bush attack doesn't let up. The more they focus on the mistaken Kerry quote, the more it makes you think how it must look to foreign leaders. The US owes everyone a big mea culpa. We went to war, unprovoked, the first time in our history. Now the simplest way to say we were wrong, if Bush won't do it, is to elect Kerry. If Bush were smart, he'd change the subject, fast. Robert Cox: "The New York Times has withdrawn its DMCA take-down notice and acknowledged that The National Debate's New York Times Columnist Correction page is a parody and therefore protected under the First Amendement." Simon Carless: RSS and BitTorrent, Sitting in a Tree. Jay Rosen: "A new study from the Kennedy School pinpoints what happened between Big Media and the blogs in the case of Trent Lott." BBC: "It may be possible to build a technically better search engine but it will be difficult to make people love it." Scoble: "I'm sure that tomorrow we'll be back slinging mud at each other, although I'm pretty sure that won't bring our customers any better technology." Boston Globe: Dirty grout around tub can be scrubbed clean. This discussion on Joel Spolsky's site showed up in my Referrers. Congratulations to Bram Cohen on winning the Software Developer Rave Award last night. Steve Jobs won the Tech Renegade (top) award. I got a sneak peek at next year's Danger Hiptop, with a built-in browser showing Scripting News. Their marketing guy (I think) has been at the last two the Rave Awards I've been at, and always has something interesting that he sneaks. It seems he just does it for me, but I'm sure he's just good at making it seem that way. A storm is moving into the Boston area tomorrow through the end of the week. It seems totally impossible given the weather in San Francisco, that it could be snowing anywhere now. I fly back on Wednesday, it looks like the arrival might be a bit rough. Lots of candidates for header graphics on this day last year.
Wired: "A demo publishing system launched Friday by a popular programmer and blogger merges two of this season's hottest tech fads -- RSS news syndication and BitTorrent file sharing -- to create a cheap publishing system for what its author calls 'big media objects.'" CNN: "It is called 'RSS' for 'really simple syndication.'" A comprehensive list of all of CNET's RSS feeds.
Rebecca MacKinnon points to several reports that China is cracking down on bloggers. Chapter two of Dan Gillmor's book is up. He tells his side of a meeting that I remember very well. As we were working on Manila in the spring of 1999, I was keeping Dan briefed step by step, but it didn't really come together until we had a demo at his office at the Merc. He, along with my uncle and Jamis MacNiven at Buck's became our first users that summer. Dan's class at the University of Hong Kong was among the first educational institutions, if not the first, to do weblogs. Zylom Games has an interesting RSS 2.0 module. "To allow partners to construct their own pages, while still maintaining the flexibility of the gamelist and realtime player-numbers.." Thanks to BoingBoing for the pointer to this very cool application of RSS, which shows the last five entries on the Kerry weblog, adjacent to the last five entries on the Bush blog. Congrats to The Accordian Guy for being such a good sport, and super triple congats to BoingBoing for their three huge weblog awards. It must be a great feeling! Ed Cone is considering a run against Howard Coble in the North Carolina sixth. I'd endorse Cone over Coble any day of the week. If nothing else it'll be a great moon mission for using the Web to run a local race. Ben Hammersley, on behalf of the Guardian newspaper, asks a few questions about the peace proposal I made last week. 3/15/99: "Scripting News is the first site to support RSS." | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
I'm spending this whole week in 
Went to the movies this afternoon, saw 
I wrote this session description as an example for the discussion leaders, who will generally write their own descriptions, and refine them based on comments. Each description, as they become available, will be in a weblog post where people can comment. The sessions can begin long before the actual conference. I will send invitations to experts asking them to participate, even if they will not be physically present on the 17th. 
The Bush 
About John Gray and his PhD. It seems he did get his degree from a mail order university and it wasn't a "real" degree, and to the extent that he claims to be a PhD (broadly) it does appear to be a fraud. His book is still good, and I'd recommend it even if he weren't a PhD. But I do admit that back when I thought his PhD was real, somehow it seemed the book was more substantial. Should he have pressed his claim through a lawyer? No, it was a mistake, because it was dishonest to claim a PhD in the first place. Look at it this way, if he wasn't ashamed about where his PhD came from, why doesn't it say where it came from on his 
I had lunch today with Craig Cline, Steve Gillmor and Alex Cohen. It was a very lively memorable discussion. 
