Sunday, April 25, 2004

Scoble: "Lately people have been asking me 'how or when does weblogging and/or syndication go mainstream?' It goes mainstream when everyone in society gets passionate about something." 

Britt Blaser and Micah Sifry are having a vigorous Web conversation about whether bloggers are editors or journalists. Sometimes I think bloggers are burned-out jet-lagged world travellers full of rijsttafel, broodjes, and Heineken. 

Michael Levin says listening to me on audio is better than Dr Demento. Cool. I used to listen to Dr Demento all the time when I was in college.  

Lots of emails saying that my power supply can probably do 220 volts, so I just need to find something that will snap onto the US plug arrangement to make it work with the two-pin European style.  

Greetings from Central Europe! 

To calibrate, when it's 3:20PM here, it's 9:20AM in Boston, and 6:20AM in California. As predicted, no sleep on the plane. Got into Amsterdam via train from the airport at 8AM local time, waited in the hotel lobby, met some people from the UK, went to breakfast, waited some more in the hotel lobby, they took pity on me and gave me the first available room at 10:30AM, I showered and slept and woke up at 3PM or so, and immediately (of course) had to figure out how to get online.

Which proved to be a puzzle. They had no power on the airplane last night, but I read about it in the online magazine. They said sometimes you have to pull the battery on your laptop to get it work because the laptop-plus-battery consumes too much juice, but the laptop-itself is okay. When I plugged the laptop into the converter, the light on the power-brick would pulse and the machine would start up and then hibernate, over and over. I tried to charge my iPod and it wouldn't charge. So I tried pulling the battery on the laptop and voila, it runs. So I am able to get online (for 17.5 euro a day, what a ripoff) but my battery isn't charging, which is a problem I have to solve. Any suggestions, send them here.

So why do you tune into Radio Dave? I hope it's for insights like this. When you arrive in Europe, as I did today, you realize how strange the place you live is. We don't have wind mills. We don't have great train stations under our airports. We don't have giant ferris wheels in the central square of our nation's capital to celebrate our queen, and we don't have a queen. But I'll tell you one thing we share. TCP/IP and 802.11b. Amidst all the childish squabbling of tech companies and their infantile engineers, and pundits who steer markets toward higher consulting fees (for them), we managed to get some really nice compatibility. My power adapter may not work here, but my XML-RPC stack does.

Channel Z is innovative 

I went looking for a pointer for Channel Z and noted two things.

Google knows I'm in the Netherlands. This is irritating. I may be in the Netherlands, but I don't speak Dutch. How do I tell it to stop being so smart and just give me Google-As-Usual for a guy from the US who likes the Mets.

Second, when I searched for Channel Z the top hit was a post from a guy at O'Reilly complaining that I stole the idea from him. What utter nonsense. The idea of hierarchic directories certainly predates blogging tools. Manila has had a hierarchic directory browser since 2000. And everything in Channel Z is edited in an outliner, and as far as I know no other blogging tool has one, and if it does, was it really the first outliner? I did my first outliner in 1978. Doug Engelbart did one before. I think that's about it.