Wednesday, June 30, 2004

Apple: "Rendezvous is now available on Windows 2000 and XP." 

Wes Felter: "I'd like to remind everyone that Rendezvous libraries for Linux, Windows, and Java have existed for months." 

Daring Fireball dismisses the idea that Apple ripped off Konfabulator. There actually is some validity to the developer complaint, and there's a lot to be said for licking your wounds quietly esp when you produce software of great utility but limited depth. What's good is that developers are starting to care about other developers. That's important. Create strategies together that build on each others' strengths. There's no power in complaining about Apple, of course they can add features to their OS, esp ones that link back to the Macintosh of 1984. But if you all viewed the Mac OS as a collaborative development platform, you could market your stuff independent of Apple. Now that would be much more revolutionary than a pretty collection of useful widgets. (Which has been done before over and over ad nauseum.) 

1997: "My pitch to programmers, which is far more revolutionary than any programming language or operating system can be, is to look for understanding where you find it, work with people you want to work with, and don't waste time with people who won't listen and aren't grounded in the truth." 

A few days ago Rogers asked what stories were lurking in the 3000-plus websites that used to be hosted on weblogs.com. Well I had trouble sleeping, so I started poking around, and came across this site with pictures of a hippie wedding in Oregon. Interesting. One of the guys looks just like Jake Savin. Oh wow, that's Jake's brother. He's getting married. There's Jake! Wow. Lots of pictures, and people wrote their stories about the wedding on the blog, including Jake's mom, who gave us some really good advice when my dad was sick (she's a doctor). There you go Rogers, a story. Real people.  

BBC: "The US Federal Reserve has raised interest rates by a quarter percentage point, in a widely-anticipated move." 

Now some of the mail has been very gratifying, coming from Republicans, who also dislike Moore, and now seem a little more interested in what I think about the war and related issues. That's how Moore can do some good, we can find the common ground that connects us, as Americans. Basic fact -- we have to live with each other. Moore doesn't offer us a way to do that. By extrapolation, Republicans with minds should openly distance themselves from the right-wing anti-intellectuals (some of whom run this country, btw). It's time to think, how are we going to avoid a debacle like the election of 2000? Seriously, we're headed for a replay.  

RSS Birds-of-a-Feather at the WWDC tonight in SF. 

Steve Gillmor interviews Sun president Jonathan Schwartz. 

Alex Halavais: Really Sexy Sindication. 

Some asshole talking on his cellphone got creamed. 

Haacked: Dave Winer Misses The Point With Fahrenheit 9/11. 

Who was it who said that "I disagree with everything he says but I'll fight to the death for his right to say it." 

Thanks to Brian Hampson: "The phrase 'I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it' is widely attributed to Voltaire, but cannot be found in his writings. With good reason. The phrase was invented by a later author as an epitome of his attitude. " 

A little bird whispered in my ear that I'm on the list of bloggers who will get credentials for the Democratic National Convention in Boston, July 26-29. 

I'm getting a lot of interesting mail about the piece about Michael Moore below. This stuff should be on blogs somewhere so other people can read it. I can't put up a comment thread because there are also some really abusive opinions in the mix. If you didn't call me a four-letter word, it's not abusive. And you can be a former reader, no problemmo, I already have a lot of readers, I can afford to lose some.  

Steve Rubel: "RSS today feels like the Web 1994." 

Mozilla Foundation press release on a new plug-in architecture, also supported by Macromedia, Apple, Sun, Opera, "...to extend the Netscape Plugin Application Program Interface in a manner that allows greater interactivity with plugins such as Flash, Shockwave, QuickTime and Java, resulting in a richer, more interactive web." 

Engadget: "A new bit of software called Place Lab uses triangulation of signal strength from the three nearest hotspots to determine location." 

Bill Seitz recommends taking the ferry to see the minor league Staten Island Yankees. 

EFF: The Patent Busting Project. 

Microsoft opened up their bug reporting system for Visual Studio. You can report a bug, which isn't exactly a new feature, but you can review their bug database, which is quite unusual. They also came out with a development environment for beginning programmers called Visual Studio Express, and sample apps, including an RSS 2.0 screen saver in C#.  

6/30/01: "KnowNow used to know what they don't seem to now know. " 

Moore's tactics 

Nicholas Kristof: "Insults and rage impede understanding." Amen.

About the Michael Moore movie, Farenheit 9/11. I haven't seen it and I don't plan to. I'm an American before I'm a member of any political party, and I have more invested in the intelligence of our decision-making process than in any one decision. I'd rather re-elect Bush than elect a president based on Moore's politics.

"thinkusaalignright"Yesterday on NPR they played an excerpt where he confronts members of Congress and asks if they would send their children to fight in Iraq. What a ridiculous question. No parent will say yes to that question. You could have asked that question on the Capitol steps during World War II and they still wouldn't say yes. See how this cheapens the question of whether we should be in Iraq? In a smart world, we wouldn't be there, but it isn't because Congress people won't say yes when confronted by a camera crew.

Moore is the worst of American politics, an opportunist, an anti-intellectual.

Vote no on Moore.

Another name on the list 

Steve Kirks: "Kleenex has become interchangeable with tissue and now RSS has done the same with syndicated content. Now, we can move on to the next step: doing something great with the tools available."

I had a similar thought this morning as I checked the new posts on the Atom-Syntax list, and reading the Scripting News archive from one year ago, when the flamefest that launched Atom was still raging. I was reminded of the student strikes we'd do in the late 60s and early 70s. First have an organizing meeting with the steering committee, print up the leaflets, hand them out, march somewhere, sit-in the lobby of the school, maybe get on TV, whatever, and then what? They were great affairs while we were expressing our outrage, but in the end, we had to go back to school, get good grades, get accepted at good colleges, etc etc. We possibly helped end the war sooner, in some way (although the right-wingers said we did the opposite). It certainly was a lot more fun than sitting in a classroom, getting good grades, etc. We used to joke that we didn't do too many strikes in the winter, mostly they were in April and May when the weather was too good to be caught up inside a classroom.

Anyway, seeing the list of formats that Apple supports, RSS 0.91, RSS 1.0, RSS 2.0, Atom, I sighed on behalf of Atom and poor not-respected-by-geeks RSS. Reminds me of what my doctor said when I showed up for an annual checkup five pounds heavier than the year before. I shrugged it off, not too bad I said. She said "But you're going in the wrong direction." Sure, people say that it doesn't matter how many formats there are, but it actually does matter, even for users, as I've said repeatedly, every new format is another brick in the wall of Barrier To Entry, and that means less choice, but it also might make it harder for efforts that build on RSS to get started. I'll give you an example.

Yesterday, I got a note about a great BitTorrent-with-RSS application. I saw the URL to the feed, and groaned. It's RDF. Now, all the BT+RSS apps have been built around RSS 2.0 because it has the enclosure element, and we'd never, as far as I know, anticipated that the RSS confusion would creep into this space. I looked at the file to see how they did it, and whoa, it's a 2.0 file, even though on the outside it says it's RDF. Once you combine RSS with other things, which definitely should be happening more, you add another dimension with the two other flavors. Instead of having to do something once, you have to do it three times. And that's more than three times the trouble, which makes it less than one-third as likely to happen. Imagine going to the BitTorrent people with that problem. "Call us back when you make your mind up," they might reasonably say.

Anyway, when it's all said and done, there will be another flavor of RSS, another name on the list, more work to do, not too bad. If my doctor were here she'd say "But you're going in the wrong direction."

Tuesday, June 29, 2004

Here's a great idea. RSS 2.0 feeds for kids, from Yahoo! Nice. 

Jonathan Schwartz of Sun has a weblog. He's the #2 guy. 

Okay here's an idea. I'm going to be in NYC much of July. Who wants to go to a Mets game? 

Outliners.com poster: "I am re-posting this which was posted just prior to the whatever-it-was-that-happened of outliners.com." It got knocked off the air by the problems with weblogs.com, and the resulting flood of traffic.  

Metafilter thread: "Pompous sociopath or not, you've got to admit, he pretty much has us pegged." 

BTW, the topic of discussion on Metafilter has meandered into a quote of mine from a MF thread in Y2K where I introduced myself by saying everyone there is full of shit. I'm afraid they might have misunderstood me. All my friends are full of shit at one time or another. All of yours are too. I did a search of the term on this weblog and came up with some good hits. Some people are proud to be full of shit (these are people I admire, like Scoble) and then some people will take offense if you say they're full of shit (names withheld). My attitude is that if you say I'm full of shit that's a sign of respect, because you're acknowledging that I exist.  

9/20/03: "There's little point arguing about whether I'm full of shit or not. I am. It's demonstrable." 

See, Don Park says I'm full of shit, and I point to him. There's some kind of invisible brotherhood between Koreans and NY Jews. Not sure what it is, but we get along in some basic way that's very mysterious. 

Dan Gillmor reports on Apple's announcements. 

I like William Grosso and point to him often, at least in part because he might be the only O'Reilly author who reads my site, but every time I link to him, I'm reminded that O'Reilly doesn't support RSS 2.0. On Sunday I asked "What are you going to do help the tech-weblog world get back on its feet?" One thing O'Reilly (the company) could do is accept that RSS 2.0 is here to stay, and help to close the wounds that keep us all from working together. "Ask not what the Internet can do for you, ask what you can do for the Internet." 

Grosso is great because he notices irony in software. For example, yesterday he found out about Apple's RSS reader that might crowd NetNewsWire, by reading about it in NetNewsWire. The software is fair, and has no ego. "There's something spiritual about computers," 1997. 

News.Com: When standards don't apply. "A growing roster of de facto standards is testing the need for bureaucratic agencies and design-by-committee technologies." 

Gary Lerhaupt writes: "Etree.org has converted their RSS feed to support BitTorrent enclosures. Etree is an awesome repository of legal concerts (Phish, Grateful Dead, etc). I'm downloading my last Phish show from my TV as we speak." 

News.Com got it right. The current standards organizations have the wrong strategy, they get in the way of progress instead of fostering it. After years of studying this, I now think we need a new standards organization that adopts de facto standards, like BitTorrent and RSS, OPML, XML-RPC, the ones with market momentum, that have proven their value. The current SO's form committees and bureaucracies, that's their purpose it seems, and by the time they're ready with a format or protocol, their proposal is too complex and too late.  

Dan Bricklin: "I've just posted the 1.0 version of my ListGarden RSS Generator Program." 

eWeek on Apple's RSS offerings, announced yesterday. 

I got an email from Scott Love who I used to work with at Living Videotext in the 80s. He said something really nice and I want to thank him, but there's no return address on the email. So Scott if you see this, send me your email address or phone number, I'd love to catch up.  

Yesterday I posted a note saying I'm looking for work. I've gotten a bunch of interesting responses, not with offers, but with ideas about what I should do next. Someone said I should be an entrepreneur-in-residence at a VC firm. Interesting idea. Yesterday I had dinner with a friend who's well-connected in financial circles in Boston and Silicon Valley to talk about something like that. We surveyed the landscape of companies doing stuff in and around the technologies I've worked on. Aggregators, blogging, formats, protocols, etc. It turns out I do have a pretty good understanding of the companies, products and individuals. But I'm not sure if EIR is the right thing, because honestly I don't see myself putting in the 18 hour days, seven day weeks, to crank out the 1.0s. I said I wished we had hooked up five years ago when that's what I was doing. I've also got a possible career in academia, with a good credential on my resume, the 1.5 year stint at Berkman Center. It's true, I love to teach. Maybe some place exotic like New Mexico or Geneva. I leave Boston on Sunday. It's making me sad. Really, no shit. But it's also exciting. When a big tree falls, it leaves room for new growth. Someone said that once..  

8/14/98: "Like the big tree that fell last March, the death of a huge human being like Jerry Garcia frees up a huge amount of space. Once there was a tree, now there are seedlings. After the sadness, there will be huge creativity." 

CBS Marketwatch profile of Craig Newmark of Craigslist. 

Chris Heilman comments on the lack of user interface consistency in today's Mac apps. "But connecting diverse software is RSS's main job, right?" he asks. Yes, and that's a good way to put it, and that's why UI consistency is so important.  

What to do when the platform vendor "validates" your product by copying it and announcing it will bundle the copy with the OS. I love what Konfabultor did, kick them in the ass, hard, with their own humor. "Cupertino, start your photocopiers." It's funny because that's what Apple said yesterday to poke Microsoft in the ribs (in a nice way of course). That's often been the lie around Apple, that they invent and Microsoft steals. I like to tell the story of how Mac scripting software came to be. I was in the audience at a Bill Gates speech in the early 80s in Palo Alto where he described a system-level scripting language for a personal computer, connecting various apps, a spreadsheet, word processor, plotting app. I made a note. That's a good idea. A few years later I started work on such a program. Showed it to Apple. Next thing you know, Apple has this great idea. A system-level scripting language for a personal computer, connecting various apps, a spreadsheet... 

5/6/98: "Competition with humor is the best idea." 

From the If It Weren't So Sad It Would Be Funny Department 

NY Times: "They're copying our concepts," Mr. Jobs said. "I'd kind of like to get credit sometime."

The irony gets deeper and twistier. Paul Boutin notes that the NY Times misquoted Apple's ripoff of "Gentlemen start your engines." I suppose he gave Indianapolis 500 appropriate credit for copying their concept?

Monday, June 28, 2004

Apple: "Safari RSS, a new version of Apple’s innovative web browser that provides instant access to the most current RSS information on the web." 

Apple also announced Tiger Server, which includes David Czarnecki's Blojsom weblog CMS bundled, an XML-RPC interface, as well as publishing content in RSS. 

Here's a really cool demo of their RSS reader. Based on squinting at this demo, it appears they did it right. It's not three-pane, it's one panel, with the items displayed, from all your feeds, in reverse chronologic order. This is the most efficient way to read for the user. A lot of designers think RSS readers should work just like mail apps, but that's too inefficient. With mail you need to keep spam and mail list content segregated. For news, you need a different interface. I've been saying it for years, the Apple designers apparently didn't get sucked into the design mistake so many have. One thing I wish Apple had done differently is respect the white-on-orange icon. Such a small thing, but so important. One would think Apple, of all, would understand the value of consistent user interface. 

5/24/99: "Let's study User Interface again." 

And thus begins the developer dance, how this is good for the market, etc. I expect we'll be hearing a lot of this, first among Mac developers, and then inevitably, among Windows developers. I don't know what's going to happen. Maybe the few cross-platform aggregators or centralized aggregators will be what's left standing, although Yahoo and MSN and Google, at least one of them must be preparing a competent aggregator or RSS-based blogging tool (Google's still doesn't support RSS.) With Apple bundling a blogging back-end, that market changes too, don't miss that. What does Microsoft have planned here? I'm sure there are companies that would happily sell them what they need to enter the market quickly.  

Now a commercial message. As of Thursday I've got lots of free time. I am available for consulting on strategies related to RSS, blogging, aggregators, etc. I'm not cheap, but you'll get your money's worth.  

Bryan Bell has notes from MacRumors about the RSS capabilities of Safari. Apparently you can search the contents of the feeds. This is something Steve Gillmor has been asking for, for ages. Feedster on the Desktop. Of course it can only search the feeds you're subscribed to. Already got a call from a reporter wanting to know if Microsoft can be far behind. Yeah, probably not too far behind.  

A note from inside Apple's WWDC: "Jobs is showing off Safari's built in RSS reader at the keynote right now." I've gotten a boatload of email about this. Have they turned on WiFi in the hall? How about a screen shot? 

Essay: How to avoid flamewars. I added a second section, on what to do when you're on the receiving end of a flame. 

Something I'd like to say to the universe, and everyone in it. "I've had a perfectly awful June, and I did my best to do well by everyone, including you, believe it or not." 

Mary Jo Foley: "This Web site is not Gates' foray into blogging."  

NY Times: "In a surprise, secret ceremony that was hastily convened to decrease the chances of more violence, United States officials today handed over sovereignty to Iraqi leaders, formally ending the American occupation two days earlier than scheduled." 

The NY Times is now providing its own RSS feeds, with several new categories including media and advertising, most-emailed, real estate, theater, Times on the Trail, multimedia, theater, Circuits, Week in Review and the Sunday magazine section. Unfortunately the education, dining and wine feeds and perhaps others are gone. The continuing feeds redirect, so most aggregators should adust automatically. 

Some feedback on the new feeds. Why do the author names have to be in uppercase, and why include the word By in the name? I've become such a aggregator-potato when it comes to my NYT feeds, any change makes me want to read the Daily News (well, not really). I care who the author is, but please, uppercase is like SCREAMING at me, and my aggregator already inserts the word "by" so now I get "by by" followed by by some guy's NAME in upper case. Not good human factors. 

Last year on this day Tim Bray had the right idea about what Atom should be. (It was called Echo then.) I found it interesting to write down his goals, and see how the Atom project has deviated, which is now on track to reinvent NewsML or ICE, anything but Really Simple Syndication.  

Bray's nine goals for Atom, in a top-10 list.  

What he proposed and what I later proposed are remarkably close. "Can we put aside our differences now, and come up with a format that honors the work that's been done in the past and today and makes it possible for things to be better in the future, without the wasted energy that comes from disagreement and disrespect?" 

Interesting RSS support from LabourStart. "Where trade unionists start their day on the net." 

Frank Rich: The Best Goebbels of All? 

Sunday, June 27, 2004

Recent movies: Lost In Translation, In America, 21 Grams, Fog of War, Big Fish, Finding Nemo, The Ruling Class. Listed roughly in the order that I liked them. The last three were repeats, Big Fish was great to see a second time, but Finding Nemo seemed really shallow (the turtles were great of course) and The Ruling Class, a great movie for its day, is finally dated. Lost In Translation, which I had not seen, deserved all its accolade. A gorgeous flowing light story, more of a mood piece, richly photographed, emotionally grabbing, sweet. I wish the character with the bad heart in 21 Grams didn't smoke, that really hurt to watch. In America, just a nice movie. Etc etc.  

Just for fun, a table that ranks the free-hosted weblogs.com sites by the number of hits that were redirected to each. Gives a rough idea of where the traffic is going. 

A must-listen-to segment of NPR's On The Media about the new reality of the music industry and the role the Internet plays in keeping fans of Wilco and RadioHead supplied with the latest tunes from the bands. Do they pay if they like the music? Yeah they do.  

Screen shot of Bush website with Hitler image. 

Bush is an awful leader, but so far there's no indication that he's comparable to Hitler. But he's running an ad with pictures of Hitler, between pictures of John Kerry, Al Gore, Richard Gephardt and Howard Dean. How could someone want to win so badly that he would be willing to do that? What are we supposed to think about this? Does he know that Americans have families who were murdered by Hitler? Is this what compassionate conservativism is? What does he stand for? This should be question #1 at the next Bush press conference. 

The mail I'm getting says that Bush is responding to MoveOn. Okay, let's consider that. If there was a need to respond to MoveOn, why did they interlace images of leading Democrats and why is the response coming now? And why not just respond, say it's wrong, instead of using the pictures of Hitler? It's a horrible ad, kind of a joke, with the sweet music in the background at the end, and the word Compassion at the top of the screen. I don't care who went first, that's a school yard argument. Bush is President of the United States. What's next, images of concentration camp victims? Millions of people died at Hitler's hand, many relatives of Americans. That imagery does not belong in that space. Period.  

Scott McNulty raises a valid question about my comments here today and in January. 

One of my favorite blogs is Geek News Central. 

Next question. There's a vacancy to fill on the RSS Advisory Board. I just had a talk with Rogers about that. Do you have any suggestions? Send him an email, or send one to me. It's mostly advocacy, helping people get their feeds up, answering questions, trying to helping users.  

Postel and XML 

One reason to keep the number of formats small, and require strict XML compliance, is to keep the barriers to entry low, so that little hacks are possible. For example, three years ago we were working on ways to circumvent Microsoft's Smart Tags, a horrible idea. It was one of the few times I've ever seen a company being so openly evil, thumbing their nose at the legal system, the Bill of Rights, publishers and writers, and any semblance of fair competition. I had to write a filter that would process every page to add a meta tag that would tell Microsoft to keep their "smart" tags off the page. Because HTML was such a bloody mess, the script couldn't just parse it and add the metadata where it was needed, it had to use string pattern matching and guess where to put the data, and usually it was right, but sometimes not.

When I first learned about XML in 1997, I thought I understood that we were going to fix this problem with HTML, and require that processors be strict about rejecting not-well-formed feeds. I was surprised to find that not all developers feel this way. I think it's wrong that some aggregators work around well-formedness problems in feeds. These guys are building barriers to entry. They say users don't care, but the users should care, and if we state our case clearly and respectfully, they can.

I've seen people say there's no harm in having a third syndication format, so I tried out an idea, what about a fourth? They say no, we don't need it. I agree. I didn't think we needed a second or third either, and still don't. The more formats, the more chance for lock-in. Watch out for companies that only care about interop with Microsoft, that's how the promise of SOAP was destroyed. And watch out for Microsoft, when they come into this space, let's be sure they don't invent their own format and make vague promises about interop. I'm sure even my friends at Microsoft can appreciate the concern. Not everyone at MS understands why the developer community is important. If ever it was in doubt, pause at this moment, and reflect on how the pub-sub application came to be. None of the big companies had anything to do with it. Sure, some of them will buy their way into it. And some are going to bully their way in. But maybe some will get in by producing excellent software that performs great, and doesn't try to win by locking out individual developers.

Postel's Law has two parts. This is something a lot of people don't want you to look at, they only want you to think about the first part, the part which XML says is not a great idea -- be liberal in what you accept. This tends to favor the big guys who have the resources to catch up, and then the chutzpah to throw a big fat hairball into the middle of the market, one that no one else can handle. Maybe Postel didn't live in a world where these big companies could create such big messes, but I have had to deal with them, many times in my career, and they usually end competitive markets. A lot of well-intentioned people in the syndication community don't have the benefit of this experience, and we may have to learn this once again for their benefit. I hope not.

But the second part of Postel's Law is brilliant, and if we believed in it and bet on it, we'd never have to deal with the flaws in the first part. If we looked for ways to reduce variability, to do things the same way whenever possible, we'd keep the barriers low, keep the flow of cool hacks high, and be prepared to face any challenge that might come our way. Then we could compete to empower users, not own them.

1996: "How much happier we would be if instead of crippling each other with fear, we competed to empower each others' creativity."

PS: Watch out for people who make this personal. If you accept that kind of discourse, you deserve the technology you get.

Saturday, June 26, 2004

Paul Boutin on the Syndication panel at Supernova. "A crowd like this gets really frustrated when the Wi-Fi drops out during a conference and knocks out their back channel." 

Dave Rogers, who seems to be a source of peace in the community, added a thoughtful post in the thread on Burning Bird. Even the flames don't seem so heavy today. I responded to Dave's post with another. At the end I said: "I offered my role in the future of RSS up as a deposit to prove my intentions were serious. What are you willing to ante up with?" I thought that question was worth asking here, to the leaders of our community who may not see the thread. What are you going to do help the tech-weblog world get back on its feet? "Ask not what the Internet can do for you, ask what you can do for the Internet." By the way, in playing the ask-not game, it's okay to think of things other people can do to help, and then ask them to do it.  

Rogers Cadenhead writes another embarassing testimonial to my role in the development of RSS. 

Jessica Baumgart presented blogging to librarians at the Harvard Business School. She also reports that the Thursday group will continue, with the next meeting on July 8.  

Andrew Grumet understands how we got to where we are with RSS today. I heard Bill Kearney say the same thing in an audio roundtable on Doug Kaye's site. Asked why RSS had been so successful, he said "It's open." Kearney has been very critical of my work in many areas for many years, especially RSS. There was a time when most of the people who produced RSS and used RSS did it with my software. At that point there would have been an option to close it up, and not allow others to enter the market. But that was never what I wanted to do. I've always believed in the power of developers working together. I still hold out some hope for that. By stepping aside, I remove one oft-stated reason for people not working together. How ironic, that the thing I wanted most, may only be possible without me. Anyway, life is filled with mysteries. I'm having lunch today with Scott Johnson of Feedster. Maybe I'll hear something strange there too. 

A note to Shelley Powers about the last devastating flamefest.  

Wired: "Visitors get a piece of code that's designed to retrieve from a Russian website software that records a person's keystrokes." 

On 6/26/97, the US Supreme Court overturned the Communications Decency Act. The First Amendment applies to the Internet. There was a party in cyberspace, and in San Francisco.` 

Friday, June 25, 2004

The US Department of Education has an RSS feed. 

Government Technology magazine also has one. 

AP: "Users can search their computers for the files Kk32.dll or Surf.dat to see if they are infected. Removal tools are available from major anti-virus vendors." 

An announcement. After giving it much thought, I've decided to resign from the RSS Advisory Board, effective July 1. I feel that the process for clarifying the spec is now well-understood by the existing members, and we have started a positive working relationship with several leading aggregator developers. Frankly, most of the time I was spending on the board has been in avoiding and dealing with flamers, which as others have noted is not a good use of my time. Now that I'm leaving Harvard, I want to spend much of my technical work time on the open source release of the Frontier kernel and other forward-looking projects. I want to be out of the business of avoiding flames, if possible. I wish the continuing members of the board the very best, and of course I will continue to be a huge booster of RSS and syndication technology, and I will offer my opinion, through this blog, naturally, as always.  

Steve Gillmor calls this "graduation day" for Dave. I like that. Thanks! 

The kudos are appreciated: Tristan Louis, Daniel Berlinger. 

Mark Bernstein: "Let's not drive the good people away; instead, let's get rid of these old pizza boxes." 

Shelley Powers: "People have stopped listening to me because I shout." 

AP: "Al-Qaida-linked terror groups and their sympathizers have in recent months made a big splash on the Internet, making it their communications channel of choice. They're benefiting from free discussion boards, e-mail accounts and other online forums for propaganda, recruitment, fund-raising and even planning." 

Scott Rosenberg: Blogs, bosses and bucks. 

Time's coolest website is Bloglines, a centralized RSS aggregator. 

BBC: "Users are being told to avoid using Internet Explorer until Microsoft patches a serious security hole in it. ...the list of compromised sites involves banks, auction and price comparison firms and is growing fast." 

InfoWorld: "Microsoft acknowledged Thursday that IIS, a component of the Windows 2000 Server, and holes in the Internet Explorer Web browser are being used in widespread attacks that are compromising Web pages and using them as launching pads for malicious computer code." 

Robert Scoble at Microsoft writes to ask that I point to their security site, which will be "updated all weekend long with the latest info." 

Last night was the last Thursday night meeting at Berkman that I'll chair. The group may go on, or may not. At this time it's not clear. When it came time to say goodbye, it was very emotional, in a nice way. I tried to remember all the people who had come through the weekly meetings, many of whom never met each other because their times didn't overlap. The meetings were "come as you are" and "we're just folks." I'm told this is unusual for Harvard. I like Harvard very much, but sometimes it's good to loosen the tie and just hang out. If the blogging at Berkman accomplished that, and opened up the university just a little, then it was an outrageous success. Most important are the friendships that were created around the process, far too many people for me to talk about, but you can be sure they'll appear in the pages of this blog as long as I am writing. People ask me what I'll do next. For that, let me quote myself: 

5/7/97: "When a friend changes you can find the bond that's connecting you at a deeper level. The surface stuff isn't a good thing to depend on. Physical bodies change as they grow. So do emotional bodies and intellectual ones. Take a deep breath. People move, life is more like a wild dance than a ceremony. You just can't tell what's coming next." 

Read that whole piece if you have the time. It's one of my best and it's stood the test of time, imho. 

Seattle Times reports that Bill Gates may start a weblog. "Bill's blog won't be all business." 

Tim Jarrett: "Being linked by Bill will become the holy grail of blogging at Microsoft and will somewhat diminish the thrill of getting linked by Scoble." 

Wired: "No matter how careful you are, one of these days you will get a spyware infestation." 

Watched The Fog of War starring former US Secretary of Defense, Robert MacNamara. More interesting than I thought it would be. One bit of history it revealed about the Vietnam war is that the enemy, the North Vietnamese, thought they were re-fighting a war for independence with colonial France, that's why they were such a fierce enemy. The US was fighting a war with the USSR and China to prevent communist dominance of all of southeast Asia and all small nations in the world. The famous Domino Theory. The former Vietnamese foreign minister reveals that they hated the Chinese, and had been at war with them for a thousand years. MacNamara says if they had known this, the Vietnam war never would have happened.  

Thursday, June 24, 2004

Dinner tonight, Bombay Club, Harvard Square, 7PM. Please RSVP. 

Rogers: "How many other stories are hiding in the 20 databases, 3,000 sites, and 50,000 pages that made up Weblogs.Com?" 

Ed Cone blogs Al Gore saying the Bush foreign policy is failing because Dubya loves bumper sticker slogans and fails to grasp subtle ideas. It's also why Silicon Valley is lost somewhere between Dubuque and Detriot, floating down the river to Bangalore. 

Christoph Jaggi writes: "Infoweek.ch, the leading Swiss bi-weekly IT-magazine now supports RSS due to reader requests!!!!" 

Hospitality Net supports RSS.  

Just got back from Lexingon, MA; home of the shot heard round the world. Myself, I got four shots, of novicaine, in my mouth. I talk like half my mouth is filled with cotton. That's how it feels too. What was remarkable about Lexington today is how overflowing with teens it was. I guess today was the last day of school. They were all out with their yearbooks, and bikes, shorts, summer clothes, buzzing with excitement about the first day of summer vacation and their lives ahead of them. It was hot. These are the princes and princesses of the United States, going to good colleges, all of them. With straight teeth and all their shots, they're as ready as any children to take their place in the global economy.  

My keynote speech for the Supernova conference, which begins in Santa Clara today. I couldn't be there, but thanks to the blogosphere I was able to give a speech anyway, a virtual one. Please read it, and consider that now might be the time for the blogosphere to change Silicon Valley, to add integrity, to return to "an engineering mecca, a land of the truth revealed by the ones and the zeros." 

Zawodny: "RSS looks like one of the better bets this year." 

Wes Felter: "I wonder why people who are actually working on open-source Java are not on the panel." 

Bob Stepno: Five More RSS Feed Readers. 

One year ago today the BBC released 68 new RSS 0.91 feeds, with an open, permanent and free archive, no membership required. This changed the syndication world in a big way. And the fact that they were 0.91 and not 2.0, I would come to learn, made not one bit of difference. The way the BBC publishes, there isn't anything in 2.0 I can think of that would improve on their feeds.  

On this day five years ago I explained how syndication and aggregation works to DaveNet readers. There were three Manila sites at that time. Scripting News, Buck's Woodside, and The Great VaVaVoom. Quite a bootstrap would happen in our world in the coming year.  

Talking with Mark Berstein yesterday, he was the first person to talk with me about the central role Scripting News has played in bootstrapping the weblog community. I've been aware of it, of course, when I started there were no weblogs, but every other blog after mine had an example, either this site, or some site or sites that learned from it. But the really chilling thing Mark noted was that when people break away, they often do it in a way that seems vengeful, which is where the No good deed goes unpunished feeling comes from. Lots of examples of this. I said to Mark I don't begrudge people their need to break away, but why not do it in a nice way, like point back to me as you pass me in the Technorati rankings? Send some flow back to your old teacher? Then I remembered, that I wasn't entirely without a mentor in this. I owe many of the ideas and encouragement I received to Doug Engelbart, an engineer who, whether you know it or not, you owe a lot to, too. When you want to change the world, I've noted, the best way to do it is to lead by example. So thanks Doug for being not only a great generous thinker, but a personal inspiration. Your work has made a huge difference to me and many others. A true bootstrap. With much love, thank you. 

Which reminds me, I must show Philip Greenspun an outliner. It's possible he's never seen one! 

Wednesday, June 23, 2004

AP: "All is right again in blog land." Whew. 

Thanks to Wired and AP for their help getting the news out. The blogs carried rumors and panic, and when it was clear that the panic was wrong, didn't carry the correction. This time the pros beat the crap out of the blogs in a story about blogs. Something to think about. This time they fact-checked your ass. Am I angry about this? Yeah, you bet I am.  

Technology.Updates.Com looks interesting. Lots of RSS feeds.  

Reuters: "Jason Smathers of Harpers Ferry, West Virginia, has been charged with stealing a list of 92 million AOL customer screen names and selling them to Internet marketer Sean Dunaway of Las Vegas." 

ComputerWorld: "Jonathan Schwartz, Sun's president, has said he is concerned that Java might fork into incompatible versions if it were made open-source, undermining Java's 'write once, run anywhere' capability." 

Ralph Nader "...abhors high-tech, uses a manual typewriter..." 

Wired: "What was decried as the death of a blog universe when Dave Winer shut down free blog host Weblogs.com turned out to be little more than a four-day server outage surrounded by a heck of a flame war." 

News.Com: "Computer trade show Comdex, once the biggest event on the tech calendar, has been canceled this year," 

Tomorrow at 7PM, a bloggers dinner in Cambridge. It's kind of sad, this will be my last Thursday at Harvard, but what the heck, we had a dinner when I came to town, let's have one as I leave. It's at the Bombay Club in Harvard Square. Please post a note here if you're coming, we'll call the restaurant tomorrow afternoon to tell them how many to expect. We'll sing a song, make a toast, praise Murphy. 

BBC: "Dr Mockapetris came up with the DNS system 21 years ago while he was a scientist on the Arpanet project." 

Hacking Netflix: "I think most companies don’t get blogs yet." 

Don Park: Murder She Wrote. 

Mark Bernstein on comments and trackback. A thoughtful post but I don't agree, last week's events happened on blogs, not in comments or through trackback.  

One difference between what happened to SixApart and what happened to me, is that I came to their defense, and they joined the mob. I'll still come to their defense in the future, when I think the community needs moderation, but I won't forget what they did, trying to hustle new business with the people whose sites were stranded. That totally increased the pressure, because the users were the ones who weren't freaking. And how much was at stake? Hmmm. Project the revenue from a couple hundred people with free weblogs. Some kind of gold mine? An amazing lack of perspective. I saw other competitors do horrible things that week. Only Evan Williams did the right thing, he did what he could to put it in perspective. I won't ever forget that either. Thanks again. Mark, this is what we need more of. People with the courage to stand in front of the mob and tell them to stand down. You want to solve the problem? That's how. 

Another difference was they were talking to customers about money, and I was finished hosting free sites after four years of free service. Another diff: SixApart is a company and I'm a person.  

Tuesday, June 22, 2004

An important note about weblogs.com redirection.  

Perrspectives: Google's Gag Order. 

Nick Bradbury: "The error message only appears if you upgrade a cracked version of FeedDemon 1.0." 

One hundred and ten Supernovans are meeting to eat dinner tomorrow in Santa Clara, CA. $25.  

Doc Searls is considering a BloggerCon-like con for ITers. 

Jason Kottke: "Get the hell out of my way, I'm coming through." 

Ed Foster: "In a recent weblog item, I talked about the owner of a new PC who had to pay $149 for Dell support to tell her how to change a default setting in Outlook. This spurred quite a debate among readers about just who was to blame." 

Rogers Cadenhead: "When Buzzword.Com was launched last week, I had a feeling that the good news about restoring service to Weblogs.Com users would have more trouble getting around than the original, over-the-top reports of a blogger's 9/11." 

Two years ago, a site hosted by Paolo Valdemarin with get well messages. Last week's shitstorm exactly coincided with my health failure two years ago. Maybe the echo chamber of the blogosphere is deeper than we previously thought? 

SpaceShipOne launched the "first private manned mission to space." 

Paul Boutin will moderate the syndication panel at SuperNova on Thursday with Scott Rosenberg, David Sifry, and Tim Bray, who is one of two chairs of the Atom working group. 

Halley Suitt: Blog Murder. 

Monday, June 21, 2004

Business Week: Blogging With The Boss's Blessing. 

Microsoft Research, new feeds: News, Downloads, Publications. 

The BBC has a special RSS feed for Wimbledon tennis. 

Andrew is including Atom elements in an RSS 2.0 feed. "This approach may prove valuable to feed producers with RSS 2.0 feeds who only need one or two capabilities that RSS doesn't provide, such as the ability to hide authors' email addresses. It has the advantages of compatibility, of not breaking subscription links, of not increasing the total number of feed files the producer has to manage, and it should only require minor edits to the existing feed-producing code."  

See Andrew's comments. Some aggregators already support this idea! 

According to RSS in Government, US Senator Joseph Biden is the first member of the Senate to use RSS to distribute news. It's a nice-lookin feed, clean non-funky 2.0.  

Slashdot: Torrentocracy = RSS + BitTorrent + Your TV. 

Engadget: "Send us your best guess for what big announcement Apple might be making at their Worldwide Developers Conference a week from today." 

Turmoil in 2 tech communities: Perl, Java. 

Another outage is cleared, outliners.com, an important community site, it was down for about a week, in the server switchover. I've finally had time to start looking at other outages. Still having problems updating scripting.com, that's next on the list. Moving out of Boston in 9 days. No more having other people set my priorities. Enough of that. 

This AP article about bloggers at the Democratic convention should disgust anyone who believes in the First Amendment, and by the way, it probably strongly indicates why no news ever comes from either of the major conventions. They only want bloggers who will carry the party's message. Smart move. (Sorry for the sarcasm.) And these are the people who run the country when a Democrat is elected. They should invite the most offensive Republican bloggers to cover Kerry, and the most annoying Democratic bloggers to cover Dubya. When will they learn, you can't bore the voters and hope to win. Embrace the blogs, it's the last chance this country has for some real politics. Geez Louise. (I guess I didn't really want to cover it after all. Hey.) 

What are the names of each of the Chinese house wives? 

Greg Reinacker, author of NewsGator, will speak at Supernova later this week in Santa Clara. He's talking about RSS on a panel about email. Hey wish I could be there with you, but I wasn't invited.  

BTW, I've decided if I'm going to get trashed for being an asshole, I might as well tell you what I think. Makes no difference either way. And I saw American Splendor over the weekend and agree with what Pekar said about the Letterman audience. If you're part of an audience, run run run get out of there. Do something with your life. It's passing you by. No more audiences. No more bedtime stories. Got an email that said if they're shooting at you must be doing something right. Go do something worth getting shot for.  

Two years ago today I stumbled home, a big hole in the middle of my chest, weak as a kitten. First thing I did when I got home? Boot the computer and check the mail, do an aggregator run, post to the blog. I think Scoble calls this the digital lifestyle. Hehe. One thing I remember about that day is how awful a smoker's house smells. A lot of changes took place in that week.  

Now that I don't have a TV, again, I am for the first time in my adult life, 100 percent drug-free. Hey, now I get to say something I've always hated when other people say it. I'm just high on life. And if you ever doubted that TV is an addiction, let me tell you, it surely is. The same thought patterns apply. My mind goes into idle, and snaps into "I'll just watch some TV" mode. Just like I used to solve problems by smoking a cigarette. Yup. Now I guess my only crutch is this laptop. Is that an addiction. Hmmm. Maybe it is, but if so it's like breathing air. I don't plan to give this one up.  

Sunday, June 20, 2004

Here's a picture of fourteen Macintosh software developers grinning at an Apple executive that appeared on the cover a 1989 software catalog.  

I recorded Bill Clinton on 60 Minutes, audio only, as broadcast on WBZ-AM Boston. Commercials included. 

So I did another audio recording, and now I can't get a DVD to play. I tried re-doing Darryl's instructions, but no luck. I want a button that says "I'd like to play a DVD now, dammit, set it up so it works." If you have any fresh ideas, please let me know. The problem is Windows is still taking audio input from the microphone. I want it to play the audio from the DVD. 

I got a truly luxurious present for my parents, who are hard to buy for, especially my father, who doesn't hide his feelings about presents. I don't think, until this weekend, I had ever given him a present that he really liked. And it was surprising to me that he liked this one, because it wasn't exactly an intentional present. Sound weird? Keep reading.  

Dan Bricklin went to a reunion of people who worked on the Multics operating system. The name Unix derives from the name Multics. Unix is one "ic." Get it? And then Linux is derived from Unix, it's Linus's "ix." This is good, it's called standing on the shoulders of giants. It's respectful. There's another family of ancient operating systems (let's see if I get this right). First there was RT-11, then RSTS and CP/M, then MS-DOS (also known as PC-DOS, same thing), and finally MS-Windows. They all shared the same command structure, and at least for CP/M and MS-DOS and Windows, a common API. Windows went much further, and RSTS was multi-tasking. So while the Unix thread was scaling down, the RT-11 thread was beefing up. Meantime Macintosh OS was a wholly different thread, and it was not well-known that the pretty icons rested on a fairly powerful and well-designed DOS with a simple multi-tasking design. It worked. We were able to build interapplication communication on it.  

Command Post reports that bloggers will cover the Democratic National Convention in Boston next month. I've applied, haven't heard back yet. I wonder if the print and broadcast people know if they're approved.  

Thanks to a poster named Darryl who helped get my laptop audio working again, I was able to watch the full American Splendor, a great movie, and a parable for the blogging lifestyle. I love how the two characters Pekar and Letterman bounced off each other. Pekar shows humans as they really are, frail, scared, lonely, but also vulnerable, sweet and loving. Letterman throws him a softball, tell us about all the great projects you're working on. Pekar asks what he's talking about. He's a file clerk, always will be a file clerk, and hopes to have a few years of health between retirement and death. That's American Splendor. It's not pretty but it's real. A blogger's anthem. Very cool. 

Andrew is working on a project involving both RSS and Atom, and has some questions about content encoding in Atom.  

I am still wanting to watch American Splendor on my ThinkPad running Windows XP, and haven't had any luck. Help! 

Saturday, June 19, 2004

SpywareInfo RSS 2.0 feed. Subscribed. 

Help, I can't play music on my ThinkPad running XP. 

Jon Udell on the Google PC. 

NY Times reviews Bill Clinton's memoir. 

One of my own weblogs, not updated since November 2002, was in the lifeboat, and was rescued. It's interesting to see the old sites. Many of them were deliberately shuttered by the people who created them. Makes an interesting story. I wonder if anyone will be interested.  

Technical update on the hosting transition.  

I'm still getting billed for some items from my Europe trip in April. The wonderful cell phone I rented, for one week, cost (sit down) $472.53. Holy shit. Now some of that has to be the terrible exchange rate from dollars to euros. And some of it is a total ripoff. Oy. I better get a phone that works in Europe. Andrew has one. He says T-Mobile is the way to go. Postscript: Christoph Jaggi explains. 

Today we added a link to encoding examples for descriptions in the RSS 2.0 specification. 

Better late than never. Don Park is a friend.  

Scoble: "When there are technology users in pain, we should do whatever we can to take care of them." 

Wes Felter posted a thoughtful response last night, and I posted a response to his. 

Jeneane Sessum: "A 9/11 of sorts for the weblogs.com bloggers." 

Matt Haughey snapped this picture. Did things get blown out of proportion? Vastly. No sites were lost, nothing was murdered, all the data is safe, it was nothing like 9/11, the users are okay, a bunch of people showed how nasty and selfish they can be, we were hit by Slashdot traffic and trolls at a time when our server was already buckling under the load, and we were finding it impossible to communicate with the people who were affected. The press did a quick superficial job. Now we're over the rough spot. One can hope that next time it happens people aren't so quick to believe the lies and hysterics, and that people who understand technology stick around and help clear up the bullshit. 

Friday, June 18, 2004

I just did a check on the new server that's hosting the weblogs.com sites, and everything looks fine. Rogers has written a FAQ that explains what's going on. Here's a list of all 3018 sites on the new server. And a page that creates a backup copy of a site (please please use it). So the first part of the transition is complete. Unless something goes wrong, there's only one more step, which will happen gradually over the next week, redirecting the old URLs to the new ones. We have to do this slowly and watch carefully because this will put the stress on the system that caused the outage last weekend. We may have to optimize, or only redirect the sites that are being maintained. No matter what they'll get the highest priority. But the biggest part of the transition is now complete. Happy. Thanks to Rogers for adopting the bloggers, and thanks to the users of weblogs.com for their patience and understanding. I am sorry for the rough ride, I wish it had been smoother. We all learned a lot, and that's cool, and for the most part we're all still friends. I think the weblogs.com community will go in new interesting directions now, being reborn in fire isn't necessarily a bad thing. I'm definitely part of the community, and will help any way I can.  

Some things work and I have no idea how. For example, here's a page that ranks sites on buzzword.com by hits today and hits since June 16 (when the server was started up). How is this being maintained? Even though I wrote all the code, I have no idea! Oy. I'll dig into it later.  

IdeaForest.Net is offering Manila hosting for $3 per month. "You don't need a PhD in HTML." Amen. 

BBC: "A group of retired US diplomats and generals has condemned the foreign policy of the Bush administration as ideological and callously indifferent." 

FCC: The History of the Internet.