Tuesday, August 31, 2004

Arrived safely in Brandon, Manitoba. Great drive, went through the geographic center of North America, in Rugby, ND; then turned due north. So east-west-wise I'm roughly equidistant from NY and Seattle. Tomorrow I turn west and head for Saskatchewan. At the end of my drive today, bored with Gore Vidal's book about Adams, Washington and Jefferson, I bit the bullet and started getting caught up on Adam Curry's Source Code radio program. I knew it would be trouble because I immediately wanted to do my own audio show in response. What was even weirder is that Adam included a clip of The Gillmor Gang, which I had also been avoiding, because I want to get away from all that michegas for a bit, but no such luck. I'm already back in the thick of it. I'll probably do an audio blog post before the night is out. Damn.  

Obviously: An upcoming version of the iPod platform will play postage-stamp-size Quicktime movies like the ones I'm doing from the road.  

Movie #1: Adam Curry talking about Steve Gillmor while I'm driving in Manitoba. Does geography matter at all any more? Or time? Adam recorded his talk in Belgium a week ago. Steve recorded his before that, presumably in California.  

Movie #2: Singing along with the Beatles while driving in Manitoba. 

Movie #3: A windmill on US-2 in North Dakota. 

Photos: Grand Forks to Brandon, Manitoba. 

I missed the debate about the accuracy of Wikipedia, but let me get my two cents in anyway. The librarian was right to raise the question. However, I find that on some subjects that I have expertise on, it does a remarkably good job, better than most professional journalists. But on other subjects, it only represents one point of view. When others try to balance it, their notes are deleted. This is the inherent weakness in the Wiki model, the consensus isn't always correct, esp when some people want to have their point of view prevail above all others.  

Remind me to tell you about the bizarre ways hotels make you connect to the Internet. There are only two correct ways to do it. 1. Support WiFi (easiest by far). 2. Have an Ethernet jack on the wall behind the desk. For a bonus point, include a cable. The room I'm in tonight actually has a PC in it, as if anyone who cares about the Internet travels without a laptop. I had to get a support person to come up and reconfigure it so I could connect with my laptop. I asked how often she has to do this. Basically for every customer, she said. Why not give in and just let us plug directly in. She was absolutely sure there was some magic reason the hotel wanted you to use their computer. I told her I was sure the computer would be gone in no more than a year. She looked at me like I was a clueless old coot (which of course I am).  

Progress report on the Frontier open source release. 

Good morning from Grand Forks, North Dakota. Lots of pictures filed in the last few days, from Wisconsin and Minnesota, green pictures, lots of water, a little farming here and there. I took these pictures knowing that soon, in my drive west, the dominant color would change from green to brown. Out here the states stack, north-south-wise. North Dakota, South Dakota, Nebraska, Kansas, Oklahoma, Texas. They're all green in the east and brown in the west. Same thing in Canada, or so I hear. I've never been to this part of Canada. I'll have brown pictures, possibly by the end of the day. So enjoy the green, it ain't gonna last.  

I wonder if you noticed how much closer the sky seems "out here" than it seems on the coasts. It's weird because we're not at a very high elevation, but yet somehow it feels as if the sky is closer.  

Pleasure Boat Captains for Truth: "The man couldn't hold his liquor." 

USA Today on Republican convention bloggers. "'Bloggers' corner' is situated next to 'radio row,' where stations conduct live broadcasts around the clock." 

Progress report on the Frontier open source release 

We're getting close to the open source release of Frontier. I believe it will happen before the end of September.

Technically, the software is ready to go. Andre Radke, who was the last full-time maintainer of the code at UserLand, up until four years ago, when he returned to be a full-time physics grad student, did the work to get the code ready. Steve Zellers at Apple has also been participating. I see Andre and Steve as the two leaders of the project once the release has taken place. I trust both of them, I can't imagine two better people to entrust this project to. I see myself as playing an advisory role, writing scripts to test new versions, and representing Frontier as a legal entity.

The one remaining issue to decide is the license agreement. I guess this has always been so, but now it's the crucial decision, once it's made, the release can proceed. Here's my current thinking, after having talked with several lawyers with experience in open source software, and having read up on various approaches, this is what I've come up with. (Note I am not a lawyer, I am posting this so that lawyers can comment publicly.)

1. No breakage. I want old scripts continue to run in new environments. A lot has been invested in code that runs in the Frontier environment, one of the reasons to release the kernel as source is so that those apps will run better, in more operating systems. I want to limit incentives for people to fork based on compatibility. I don't want to create a dozen semi-clones of Frontier, rather I want to incentivize people to add to the culture, add new features, fix user interface bugs, but not to break apps.

2. I want it to be possible to create a commercial business from the code base. However, I want the general rule to be that if you make an improvement to the code, you must share it on equal terms.

I think these two goals clearly imply a base license that's GPL-like, with an option for a more liberal license, for either a cash fee, or an agreement to remain compatible, or a combination of fee and agreement. This is a derivative of the MySQL license system.

I'm looking for feedback from lawyers who have experience with open source licenses, and developers who have released code under open source licenses, and people who have used code under open source licenses. The best form of feedback is in public, on a weblog, so you can send a URL and I can point to it. I'm not opening a comment thread on this becuase it's sure to only attract unconstructive comments.

Note that we are not trying to shake up the world, or change what anyone does, or kill anything, or necessarily even create anything. So comments that say things like "This will never kill Apache" or "Python already has too much of a lead" while quite common, always miss the point.

For an idea of why I'm releasing Frontier as open source, please refer to this article I wrote in May.

Monday, August 30, 2004

Greenspun dropped his land line in favor of VOIP. 

Do you like the car movies? I do, but I'm not sure why. 

Pictures from the University of North Dakota campus. 

Movies from the campus: Walking, welcoming, watering. 

Today's first round of pictures take us into North Dakota, barely, in Grand Forks, just over the Minnesota border. Driving on US-2 today through a pretty empty and wet part of Minnesota. I saw a sign on a creek that shocked me. Since I've become a river buff, you have no idea how exciting that was. A hundred miles later, a field of sunflowers. Arrive in town in time for a walk on the campus of the University of North Dakota, and then vegging out in front of the Republican National Convention. Finally, how far north is Grand Rapids? Well, Fargo is south of here. Heh.  

Julie Leung wants tips on hiking opportunities on long car trips too. I've discovered two things. Smallish towns like Ashland are great. Walk 20 minutes down Main St, make a right on First, walk 10 minutes, make a right on 8th Avenue, and zig-zag back to the car exactly an hour later. And you get to see all the neighborhoods (hopefully they're nice, but you can drive around first to make sure they are). Second tip. University campuses are perfect for walks. They're usually pretty well-kept, and designed for walking. The interesting thing about the university here in Grand Forks is that they have this network of interior walkways, just like Duluth. It gets so cold here that it's not practical to walk outside to get from building to building. That's where I'm headed right now.  

Phil Haack shows what happens when XML nerds protest.  

Lake Superior this morning from my hotel room. 

Apparently President Bush called Iraq a "catastrophic success." 

I'm listening to David McCullough's biography of Harry Truman, as read by the author. Fantastic. I've finally found a can't-put-it-down audio book.  

Mary Jo on the Longhorn decision. 

The Channel 9 guys have video of Jim Allchin explaining the decision. 

BTW, "Hard core" means "death march." It's the same trap that Apple fell into with Copland. The devteam was always in death march mode, when one impossible ship date was missed, they scheduled another impossible ship date. When you ask a Microsoft person to say what Longhorn is supposed to do, you get rambly hand-wavy words that mean nothing. A product with a purpose has a two-sentence description that gets everyone so excited they can't wait. Longhorn isn't designed to solve anyone's problems. I think they all know it, but they can't say it out loud because they've all drunk the Kool Aid on this.  

Wired: "Microsoft announces Longhorn, its next version of Windows, will meet its 2006 release date. But to deliver on time for corporate client contracts, a key component -- the underlying file system for the software -- will be missing." 

Scoble summarizes the blogger reaction. 

NeroSoft TimeTrax "records songs from your XM PCR satellite radio directly onto your PC in MP3 format!" 

Sunday, August 29, 2004

Taegan says most forecasts call for a Bush win in November. 

Peter Rukavina has a scraped RSS feed of books he has checked out of the library. 

6PM Central Time, arrived at hotel in Duluth, MN. Had a great drive today, walked on the shore of Lake Superior in Ashland, WI. Did an audio blog post, photos, a movie. Northwestern Wisconsin is spectacularly beautiful, my pictures don't begin to do it justice.  

Northwestern Wisconsin driving pics.  

A roadside movie, first a car passes in one direction, then, well, I don't want to give away the plot.  

Today's audio blog post was done while driving north in Wisconsin. I didn't end up making it as far as International Falls today, and I didn't take US 51 all the way north. I cut west on state roads, and then headed north, then west. Anyway, this blog post is about why Internet access while traveling is going to be free, soon. And I explain how weblogs will make money, far more money than you can make through an advertising model. As the Silicon Valley money people get interested in weblogs and making money, this is becoming again an hot topic. It's not about replicating models from the print and TV world. I lay it out pretty clearly. Designed for people who manage big multinational businesses. Nothing really technical here.  

Meanwhile back in NYC there were demonstrations. My mom went to the big march and took pictures.  

Good morning, what a lovely day for a drive. Temp in the low 50s, bright blue clear sky. Sweater weather. Up early, let's go. To regular readers, it may not be possible for me to get a net connection tonight. I'll be back on the Web as soon as I can. Have a great Sunday! 

Lots of newly scanned blogs in the RNC aggregator. 

The DNC aggregator is still catching some good posts.  

Rex Hammock is covering the RNC from the inside. 

Jim Armstrong: "The name of the guy that bombed Sterling Hall was Karlton Armstrong." 

On the Interstate highway system in the US, they tell you about all the fast food restaurants at every exit. And they have places to walk a dog at every rest area. But what about pointers to places for humans to get a bit of exercise? "You're about to pass a great state park and they have a free hiking trail for Interstate drivers. Spend one hour exercising, you'll enjoy being cooped up in the car more." And how about a special extra big ad on the freeway for restaurants that offer something tasty and healthy? (And even bigger if it has caffeine in it.) And while we're at it, pass a law that every gas station must stock extra large bags of pistachio nuts. 

Saturday, August 28, 2004

GmailFS provides a "mountable Linux filesystem which uses your Gmail account as its storage medium." 

I just reviewed the pics from Paducah and realized I didn't point out something important. It's located at the confluence of the Tennessee River and the Ohio River. You can see the two rivers in this picture. After they join the new river is called the Ohio River. Downstream about 20 miles or so, the Ohio becomes part of the Mississippi.  

It's wet and cold here in Madtown. I hear it's been that way much of the summer. Part of me wants to turn south, buy the cottage at the beach, get the T1 line and cover the election from what's likely to be ground zero. I've always wanted to live on the beach. Hmmm. 

New header graphic. Full picture taken on July 26.  

Jeff Sandquist is from Saskatchewan.  

Engadget discovered that Apple is hiding something.  

Ed Cone's report on the Piedmont blog conference.  

It was an unconference, and the people liked it.  

More Madison campus pictures on a cloudy rainy day.  

The government of Alberta supports RSS.  

Looks like the next stop will be Winnipeg, then across Saskatchewan, Alberta, into Vancouver and back into the US near Seattle.  

Canada has an excellent online atlas. 

Friday, August 27, 2004

Former Lt Governor of Texas Ben Barnes explains that he helped George Bush get out of serving in Vietnam.  

I'm pooped, but I'm going to get some coffee in me, and get caught up on the RNC community site. There have been lots of requests for sites to be included. At this time I'm only going to include sites written by people who are actually covering the RNC from inside the convention. I may, if there's time, do a special page aggregating sites that are covering the RNC from outside. BTW, two buses left Madison today for NYC carrying protestors. Just like the good old days!  

If your site is not included, and it should be, please read the instructions carefully, and then post a comment with the four bits of info. Thanks.  

Rogers Cadenhead on weblog hosting. "All existing weblogs will be hosted for free, as long as they've been updated at least once in 2004." 

More pictures from Madison, this time the house I shared with nine other roommates. It was a magic place, and it's more or less unchanged. 437 West Wilson Street. The only major change I could see is that the garden, where my Wisconsin-bred roommates planted all kinds of vegetables, is grown over. It's been 26 years. Given enough time, bright-eyed young grad students turn into old farts, and lovingly tended gardens become forests.  

Movie taken on the patio behind the Union on Lake Mendota. 

Still pictures from an early morning walking tour of the UW campus in Madison. One thing I learned, in a really stark way, I totally overestimate the quality of my memory. I drove past a place I used to live while I was watching for it carefully. A place I walked to and drove to hundreds of times. Totally missed it. I also remembered Madison being dirtier and poorer than it is. Memories of opinions. Perhaps my point of view then was more priviledged somehow, or my tolerance for grunge has gone up. Anyway some of my memories of this place were sweet and are not going away. I remember loving my work like I never have since. And I remember walking home late at night in sub-zero temperatures, full of enthusiasm for life, to a bed already warmed by a 19-year old girl I was in love with. It was a sweet life, but one filled with puzzles. I lived two blocks from the minor league baseball stadium. Why didn't I ever go to a game? (I think their name was the Muskies.) State St is still there, and the Parthenon is too. I drank coffee on the patio behind the Union watching the boats on the lake. But my memory is so incomplete. I could drive right by the Computer Science building and not recognize it. (I did.) 

Reminder to self. Next time in Madison stay at the Edgewater. 

Trivia. Locals have affectionate names for the two local papers. The Crap Times, and the Wisconsin State Urinal. They're both owned by the same company. Wisconsites have a cornball sense of humor. Makes sense because the state makes a lot of corn.  

Don Park's weblog is two years old today. Happy! 

On this day five years ago, I stated my vision for RSS which contains a simple explanation why RSS is different from CDF. RSS files are expected to change several times a day. CDF describes a site structure that changes rarely if ever. Perhaps that would be useful if it had been followed-through-on by Microsoft (it wasn't). But that's different from RSS which flows news through a fixed point, something you can subscribe to.  

MIT student: "Your blog's comments section continues to amaze. It's like some kind of zoo, but with idiots instead of exotic animals." 

Zawodny discusses the difference betw feed search and regular search.  

Jay Rosen: "There are jittery people in the networks, trying not to be the cause of anything." 

Jessica The Librarian talks about merging weblogs and file management. I think the extra bit you need is an organization-level search engine.  

Thursday, August 26, 2004

Photo tour of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.  

Today's first movie has all the basic elements of a Quicktime movie in a moving car: Music, rain, wind shield wipers, trucks, other cars.  

A second driving movie with the same elements. 

Wired: RSS attracts really serious money. 

WSJ: Meet the Bloggers, Part 2. 

Looks like the Madison farmer's market it still there. It was an incredible deal. This is just the right time of year. Are you in Madison? If so, send me an email, and let's go for a walk and get some brats, drink a few Points or Leinies. I'll be there later today.  

Brendan Eich: "There is no way Firefox would ship without View/Source or any other UI that goes back to Netscape 1." 

RNC Watch: "Cabbies Against Bush are offering free rides to Kennedy or Newark Airport for any delegate who will fly to Iraq to fight." 

Wednesday, August 25, 2004

George Bush: "I was not prepared to shoot my eardrum out with a shotgun in order to get a deferment. Nor was I willing to go to Canada. So I chose to better myself by learning how to fly airplanes." 

NY Times: Bush Campaign's Top Outside Lawyer Resigns. 

More movies from today's travels. Here's a bridge across the Tennessee River at the border between Georgia and Tennessee. Now a movie with the view out the front window as I drive up I-24 in Tennessee. Another driving movie, this one with trucks. A third and final driving movie, no trucks this time, but some incredibly threatening clouds in the background. The sky eventually opened up, and I drove for two hours in the deluge. That was reallly tiring.  

Still pictures from Florida to lovely downtown Paducah, Kentucky, a very strange place. Okay, you ask, why is it so strange? First, it's in a very powerful place, at the confluence of two huge rivers, the Ohio and the Tennessee, just before the Ohio merges with the Mississippi. So you're looking at a very large part of the flow from the eastern half of North America, east of the Continental Divide. But the town is dead, or so it seems, but here's what's really weird, someone spent a lot of money trying to get it to come back to life, but it didn't work. They have a huge empty hotel and convention center. A huge and empty farmer's market. Some really nice looking empty restaurants. Shops and boutiques, well-stocked, open, empty. Lots of for sale signs. A Republican headquarters. An eerie feeling. And it was hugely hot and humid. While I was there the sky opened up, I took shelter, then it was over and five minutes later the sidewalks were dry, that's how hot it was.  

If you're waiting for an email from me, I can't send email. There's some kind of firewall here at the hotel or at their ISP that seems to be blocking port 25. A funny thing happened while I was talking with the support guy at the ISP. He asked what mail server I was talking to. I said mail.userland.com. He said "That's weird because that's one of Dave Winer's servers." I said "I am Dave Winer." He said they usually don't get famous people coming through this small town in southern Illinois. Me, I was surprised that anyone in southern Illinois knows who I am. Maybe there's a new career lurking in there for me somewhere? Too tired to figure it out. 

TA is a brand of truck stop in the US, here's a list of outlets. They have WiFi at many of their locations. The prices are quite good compared to what you pay at airports and Starbucks. $1.49 for an hour. $4.49 for 24 hours. 62 days for $22.49, 365 days for $169.99. If you're a trucker, what a great deal. Eventually air travelers will get the same deal or better. (This stuff should really be free, come on, we know how little it costs to provide.) 

Mary Hodder: "BloggerCon was radical." 

If you're looking for Internet access on I-75 in north Georgia, your best bet is Calhoun. I stopped at a bunch of exits before Calhoun, no Internet anywhere. But every hotel in Calhoun has free in-room Internet. I guess once one has it they all have to. It'd be really cool to have a map of the US with big red dots on all the Calhoun-like towns.  

Fact: Kerry overplayed his Vietnam experience and Karl Rove is making him pay for it. Rove's MO is well-known, attack the opponent's strength, not his weakness. Apparently Kerry's team doesn't have anyone in Rove's league, or we'd be talking about how Bush dodged the draft. Do the Dems have anyone in his league? Probably. Why not ask for some help?  

BTW, when I say Bush dodged the draft, I say that with the greatest respect. He should be proud of it, and should explain why he did it and help our national healing instead of supporting assholes who keep the wound festering. Dodging the draft is what young men were doing in the late 60s and early 70s. You got out of the draft any way you could. I have a clue what it must feel like, I missed the draft by one year, had a low lottery number and shitty grades. Kids just a couple of years older were going to Canada to get out of the draft. Vietnam was a lot like Iraq, a totally optional war, a war that killed lots of young Americans, and was built on Presidential lies, a Democratic president, btw. 

One more BTW, the Swift-Boat-Guys-Who-Lie is George Bush, President of the United States. I'm not stupid, and I wasn't born yesterday. It's so obvious. Let's get that fact on the table and out in the open and get on with it. What a crock that he seems to think we don't know. Amazing. 

Sylvia Paull, a friend from Berkeley, says: "Don't ever think of moving to Florida! What would you do for coffee, man?" Well, they have a Starbucks in St Augustine, and a Barnes and Noble, and NPR too. It's not quite as backwards as you might think. Also, to add to the global database of knoweldge, there's a Starbucks at Exit 62 on Interstate 75 in Georgia. A surprising place for a Starbucks? Yeah, for sure. But get this. McDonald's has southern style ice tea, sweetened and unsweetened, and it's about half the price of Starbuck's iced coffee, which I was starting to get tired of. The McDon's tea has lots of caffeine. Another trick to stay alert while driving long distance, pistachio nuts. An open bag keeps me going for miles and miles. And you don't have to stop for lunch.  

Thanks for all the great mail about yesterday's Scripting. People seemed to like it. That's cool. I like the movies of the birds, and the man on the bike and the waves. There's something magic about beaches, and that beach is the best in the US. Steve Hooker, from the UK, asked how long the beach is, because it seemed quite long to him. Steve, sit down before reading this. It's a thousand miles long, and runs up and down the coast from Miami to North Carolina and the Jersey Shore, Long Island to Cape Cod. That's the east coast of the US. It's all one great fcuking beach.  

Tuesday, August 24, 2004

Steve Gillmor: The G-Spot. 

Feature request for Yahoo. If I ask for driving directions from St Aug to Madison, how about an icon I can click for hotels that are about 1/2 way that have free high-speed Internet? And another I click for any Starbucks that are within ten minutes from my route? This is one of those things you know we're going to have in two years, but of course I want it now.  

Three years ago Manila supported the Blogger API. Still does.  

Wired: "BugMeNot.com, a site that helps web users get around website registration roadblocks, is back up after disappearing for several days because of server hosting issues." 

Sunrise beach walk 

It gets hot here early, so I've been taking my daily walks earlier and earlier. Today I was up before dawn and thought this must be the best time of all to walk. Turns out that was totally true.

When I left it was dark. I got onto the beach, and while I could see in front of my feet, I couldn't make out the houses that line the beach. As I walked, it got lighter, and now I could make out two people walking from a house to the water, about a two-block walk, the beach is very wide.

Then more light, revealing people everywhere! It seems I'm not the only person with this idea (why do we always think we're the only smart ones). I walk and walk. Oh man.

I thought to bring my camera, so you can experience this too. This time I deliberately took some movies. Here are three. 1. Some birds wading in the tide; 2. A man on a bicycle and 3. A bit of surf and nothing more. (There is an annoying click on the audio, not sure what it comes from, I was holding the camera quietly, or so I thought.)

And then here are some stills. I shot them at double resolution, but the HTML image elements reduce them in size. I don't have the patience to store two versions of the pictures, so if you're bandwidth-constrained don't click on the link, and if you already did, I apologize.

Right now, with fresh sweaty endorphins running through my system, and the inspiration of a beautiful sunrise shared with other souls who are similarly inspired, I think this is the finest place in the world, a place made just for Uncle Dave.

Florida round-up 

This morning I make my exit from Florida, for now.

This type of travel, a long road trip with lots of stops, means lots of arrivals and departures, and at this stage in life I have lots of places I can go where there are friends, aquaintances, and especially in the case of Florida, memories -- to first say hello to, then goodbye.

I used to come here when I was a college and grad student, but when I moved to California warm weather wasn't such a novelty, and Florida seemed so far away, so small. I didn't come back again until just a couple of years ago on a road trip through the state from Miami to St Augustine and back with Uncle Vava, one in which we luckily took a tour of his property east of Crescent Beach on the Intercoastal. Some part of me sensed this would be the last time, and that I would visit next after his demise, a premonition that came true far too soon.

Yesterday I got a check for most of my share of his estate and I looked at real estate. This part of Florida, for all the growth, and the growth has been enormous, is still very reasonable. A nice three bedroom, two bath house can be bought for less than $300,000; easy walking distance from the beach, most amenities (most houses don't have pools, and none have hot tubs).

The sense I get from this trip is that people are so temporary but the things we build last much longer. When I was a kid, I didn't understand how such big things as a beach front condo complex can get built, but now I do. The people who make the finance decisions don't understand life any better than I do, they just have been taught a formula for what makes a good investment, and what doesn't, and the formula is tried and true, it expresses something mathematical about the nature of our species, as a community, and it's stood the test of time. I've learned it first on a relatively large scale, in California real estate, and now in a much more manageable size, Florida real estate. I've learned that I could afford an equally lovely slice of Planet Earth here, now, for much less money than my slice of California cost in 1992. And as a bonus there's a very swimmable beach nearby.

The tradeoff of course is that there aren't very many Internet heavy weights nearby, but maybe that's a blessing, and for the money I save, I could buy my own T1 line and be as close as you can get to them anyway.

Part of me is tempted to write the check for a down payment and call the movers in San Jose and have all my stuff brought here out of storage. But I'm going to resist the temptation, for now at least, and drive north and west, but mostly north. My next stop, Murphy-willing, and assuming a last-minute gig to cover the RNC in NYC doesn't materialize, is Madison, Wisconsin, and then over the Canadian Rockies, a passage I've never before made and one I totally look forward to, ending in Seattle by Labor Day for Bumbershoot.

Monetizing the blogosphere 

Meanwhile back in California, they're paving paradise and putting up a parking lot. With a pink hotel, a boutique, and a swinging hot spot. (With thanks to Joni Mitchell.)

Everywhere you look the blogosphere is being hitched to business models, none of them very creative, nothing more than rehashes of what was tried in the 90s, and in some cases worked, but in no cases yielded anything that behaved like a weblog.

The only reason to publish a weblog, imho, is if you have a passion for something and want to make sure people hear what you have to say about it. You have to be pro-flow, anything that restricts flow is un-blog-like, and will yield a newspaper, a magazine, a professional publication, something very different from a blog. (Sure there are also the personal diaries, which are mostly ways of saying Hey I'm Here, and I'm not sure my model for a blog is much different, so nothing is very simple, or hard and fast.)

I suppose it was inevitable, and I guess it's okay. I just find that I'm repelled by the idea of raising multiple millions of dollars for a business where the tools can be had so cheaply. What are you going to charge for? Hmmm. I think I shouldn't have to pay for that.

Anyway, I keep getting requests to link to some silly things, like sites taking their content out of their RSS feed. When this happens it sends a chill deep into my body, a sense that this is what was wrong with Silicon Valley in the 80s and 90s, but it wasn't so easy to see as it is now.

Weblogs started out, I thought, as a fun project to push neat ideas into the world, but maybe they were always supposed to be a news magazine that made money. No matter, I don't think very many who read blogs in RSS will change and start reading them on the Web so we can see the ads. As usual, that's a benefit for the publisher, not for me. I understand why they want me to do it, but have they given me any reason to want it?

Maybe I'm reading this wrong. Hope so.

I have a mind, I also have eyeballs, but I'd prefer if you think of me as a mind.

Monday, August 23, 2004

The US Department of Education supports RSS. Bing! 

John Edwards: "The moment of truth came and went, and the President still couldn't bring himself to do the right thing." 

Jay Rosen: "It's sad. That's my comment on the Swift Boat Veterans campaign to impeach the honor of John Kerry and question whether he deserved his medals." 

Rogers Cadenhead: "Pilgrim's article provides a nice tutorial on how to normalize URLs for use as guid values, but he neglects to mention a salient fact: This solves a problem that no one is having." 

Michael Fraase: "A transplant surgeon called from the University of Minnesota this morning to tell me they had a cadaver kidney for me (I’ve been on the transplant list for four-and-a-half years). 'I’ll pass,' I said in a quiet but steady voice. 'Call the next person on the list.'" 

NPR: "Ads attacking Sen John Kerry for lying about his Vietnam War record -- an accusation that is unproved -- appear to be eroding Kerry's standing in polls of independent voters and veterans." 

BBC: Messaging spam heads for your PC. 

Mark Pilgrim article about RSS 2.0 guids. In theory yes people could do guids wrong, but in practice they work and are one of the most useful additions in 2.0. Guids help aggregators know for sure that they've seen an item, so they don't waste the user's time by showing it again. I wrote a howto for guids. "A convenience that many users will appreciate, especially people who are in a hurry."  

Don Park says it well. "I want Bush out and someone else in." 

Sunday, August 22, 2004

Pictures taken today at St Augustine Beach, FL. Life is good. 

I love my Nikon CoolPix 3200, it's like a Brownie for the 21st century, but sometimes its user interface confuses me and instead of taking a photo, I take a Quicktime movie. For example, here's one I took in one of the BloggerCon classrooms at Stanford. And here's another taken on a trail in Shenandoah National Park.  

John Battelle outlines the conference he's running Oct 5-7 in SF. 

AP: "She said she was going down to George Boudreaux's store and have him whip up some of that butt paste."  

Buttpaste.Com: "It's not just for diaper rash anymore!" 

Bush: "We say to those tyrants who believe they can blackmail America and the free world: 'You fire, we're going to shoot it down.'"  

Okay, let's play it out. Suppose Kim Jong Il, the Dear Leader of North Korea, was listening. So he fires a missle at Tokyo and then goes on TV as the missile is launched and says "We fired. Shoot it down." That would be funny except a lot of Japanese would die because we don't have any way to shoot the damned thing down.  

Time: "Kerry has offered only vague criticisms and an increasingly implausible promise to lure our allies into the chaos." 

Saturday, August 21, 2004

NY Times: "Negative ads also pay dividends beyond what campaigns actually spend on them by getting more attention in the news media. The debate about the Swift boat ad, which accused Mr. Kerry of lying to get his war medals, has played out for weeks on talk radio and cable news, meaning it was played over and over at no cost to the group running it." 

BOP: "New York is unfriendly territory for Bush Republicans." 

Heads-up to DNC bloggers. 

Wired: "The International Olympic Committee is barring competitors, as well as coaches, support personnel and other officials, from writing firsthand accounts for news and other websites." 

Thanks to a recommendation from Adam Curry, in one of his audio blog posts, I've become a subscriber to audible.com. The first book I'm reading is Timeline by Michael Crichton, also a Curry recommendation. Also downloaded a new Gillmor Gang.  

I had a piece here about friendship and blogging, but pulled it for more thought. I kept thinking of exceptions. Oy. 

Don Park on the Google IPO 

Don asks what's the big deal. His point of view is interesting.

It's very true that Google has failed to keep up with the "search engine optimization" tricks that cause links to porn sites to show up on our Referers pages and blog post comments. As we've said here several times, and thought many more, Google is the place where this practice should be stopped. It's because of Google that our sites are littered with links to these offensive sites that have nothing to do with ours. If they're smart enough to come up with tricks like Google News and Local Google, why can't their search engine recognize comment and referer spam and not use it in determining page rank? Of course they can. Why don't they? I'd love to hear an explanation. Better yet, I'd love to see them fix it. It's a bug in Google's software.

Maybe secretly Google really doesn't like blogs. Maybe it's not so secret. They still haven't deigned to support the standard format for syndication, as every other tech company and major publisher has. Why Google has a stake in breaking the standard is another puzzle. How does this relate to Don't Be Evil. We've asked this question a few times, only to be met with the usual Google stone wall.

This is not a public company but they have public stock now. And while they think they're real special, like Don Park, I'm not so sure they are. I made $800 on my Google stock yesterday, that paid for my hotel and gas and then some. But I'm paying for their deafness in other, imho more important ways. This is a company that desperately needs competition, and I hope they rise to it, instead of folding, as the previous Silicon Valley wunderkind (with the same backers) did.

Midnight Why Am I Up? Notes 

Every night on this trip I wake up at approx 2AM. I have no idea why. I get up for a couple of hours, do some writing, or programming, then go back to sleep. I can't recall this happening before. Maybe it's because I'm drinking more coffee than usual? Not sure. Anyway, I'm up, and writing.

I heard a report on NPR yesterday as I was leaving Harrisonburg about the seige in Najaf in Iraq, and how it's a lot more serious than most reports indicate. They interviewed a Washington Post reporter who was embedded with the US troops there. Defying Sean Hannity and his flock who think I should turn my mind off (no I'm not a liberal), this makes sense.

The Imam Ali shrine at Najaf is one of the most meaningful places in Islam. We don't have anything remotely like it in the US, because our culture is so young. This place is like Yankee Stadium to a Yankees fan, or Disneyland to a Disney fanatic. And this doesn't begin to explain the value to Muslims. It's like one of the historic Jewish or Christian places in Israel.

In science fiction, even very bad science fiction, they teach you how to take what you know about one set of circumstances and apply it to another. To see why this is such a mess, all you have to do is apply the sci fi mindset. How would you feel if there was an Islamic army driving down every main street in every town in America? I wouldn't like it, and I bet you wouldn't either.

Friday, August 20, 2004

JoongAng Daily: "The wrestling match between the media and the blog is as exciting as anything we could hope to see in the Olympics." 

I had lunch today with Ed Cone at Stamey's in Greensboro, NC. 

Kaye Trammell is looking for a list of RNC bloggers. I have one. 

Harvard Business School has an RSS feed. That feels good.  

News.Com: "Gates has spent hundreds of millions of dollars to have his best programmers build a free update to an operating system that many people still don't want." 

PC World: Blogging Across America. 

Last year on this day, Chris Lydon and I went on a road trip to New Hampshire to see John Edwards and Howard Dean campaign for the Democratic presidential nomination. Betsy Devine and Jim Moore turned up at the Dean event. 

Greenspun: "The worst book that I've read during this trip around Japan is William Gibson's Pattern Recognition." 

I'm looking for Republican bloggers who will be at the RNC. 

Changes to ConventionBloggers.Com in preparation for the RNC. 

Why am I, a person who plans to vote Democratic, running an aggregator for Republicans? 1. The software is apolitical, it's equally useful for Republicans and Democrats. 2. The Republicans are the party of Alexander Hamilton, Abraham Lincoln and Teddy Roosevelt. In other words, there's a lot to respect there, a tradition of intelligence, courage, fairness, vision. 3. We will have to work together after the election. Cross-party work is important to create a unified United States. It would be un-American if we all agreed on everything. But we have to agree on some things, or we aren't a country. The First Amendment is one of those things. Voltaire, who wasn't an American, said "I do not agree with what you have to say, but I'll defend to the death your right to say it." We need more of that in the USA. The Convention Bloggers site is my humble contribution. 

For the sake of simplicity I attribute the quote above to Voltaire, knowing that there is a controversy about this.  

New York City has a special site for protestors coming to the RNC.  

NY Times: "Among Google's 2300 employees there are now an estimated 1000 millionaires." 

Thursday, August 19, 2004

US Court of Appeals determines that distributors of peer-to-peer file-sharing software are not liable for copyright infringements by users. 

Wired: "Peer-to-peer file-sharing services Morpheus and Grokster are legal, a federal appeals court ruled Thursday." 

An episode of the Computer Chronicles from 1988. "PC users were ecstatic over the introduction of 32 bit processors and CPUs running at the blazing speed of 33 megahertz." 

I just got a heads-up that UserLand is beta-testing Atom 0.3 support for the Radio/Manila aggregator. This is a huge deal, because there are quite a few RNC feeds that are from Blogger sites, and they only have Atom feeds. The authors don't understand why we can't process them on conventionbloggers.com. Now, hopefully, we can.  

Pictures from Shenandoah National Park (and Harrisonburg). 

Next stop on my cross-country travels -- three days in St Augustine. I checked, the storm didn't upset St John's County, it's normal hot summer weather there. Three days on the beach will be good for my soul. Also plan to look up some of my uncle's friends, and see if Rogers is around. Then after that, it's probably Pensacola, then New Orleans, and then, well, I'm not sure.  

BBC: Google shares rocket on first day. 

On its first day of public trading, Google is up $15.33 or 18 percent.  

I put in a buy order for 100 shares. Tomorrow I'll be a Google shareholder. That's a disclaimer. 

Today: Shenandoah National Park. 

References: Hiking trails, Skyline Drive map.  

I signed up for the Google auction as soon as possible, probably within the first hour that the server was open for business. I got all the emails, and there were a lot of them, announcing a revised prospectus, revised pricing, a hold from the SEC, a release, etc. But I never got an email saying here's where you go to bid. So I never did. Maybe other people missed that email too, or maybe I didn't do something I needed to do to get registered. I saw other people writing about how their brokers wouldn't work with them. I totally missed the part where I had to get a broker (I already have one). Anyway, when the stock opens for trading today, I'll probably buy a few shares, esp since the auction didn't make the price go through the roof. If other people missed out on the bidding as I did, $85 may be a low price. 

A slight change in plan re BloggerCon registration. To be sure there's room for Stanford students and faculty we're going to start the wait list at 250 instead of 300. As I write this, there are 242 people registered, so we're very close to sold out, but that's probably mostly technical, since some of the first 250 are sure not to show. And the turnout has been spectacular, there will be lots of expertise at the conference, we should be able to answer some good questions, share a lot of knowledge, and otherwise have a great time.  

A great Scoble rant about a Dan Gillmor review of SP2.  

In rural Virginia, the Bible that comes with the room isn't in a drawer in the night stand, it's on the desk, next to the lamp, and it has a catchy title. 

Russell Beattie says what many of us are thinking about MP3 blogs.  

BBC: "Google's IPO share price is set at $85, the bottom of its projected range, as the internet search engine goes public." 

Wednesday, August 18, 2004

Remember Walter Mears, the retired AP reporter who came out of retirement to blog the Democratic National Convention? Well, we found his blog. And he was interviewed on WNYC this afternoon about what it's like to blog. I'm listening now, it was coming on just as I was getting out of range of NY radio. 

Progress report on BloggerCon III registration. 

Today I begin my drive south and west. It's not looking good for a Florida visit, where they're still digging out after the hurricane. My first stop is in Harrisonburg, Virginia. Should be there tonight. I'm trying to plan ahead by one or two days so I can get Internet connections at each stop, and enough time to catch up on email and news. It's a weird time to be working on a conference, but weird is good. I'll probably be in Seattle for Labor Day and the Bumbershoot festival. After that I don't know, I'll probably hang out on the west coast through the conference on Nov 6.  

Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute has an RSS feed. 

Boston University has an RSS feed too. 

With all the negative press Google is getting, you gotta wonder if having a solid developer program might have helped their IPO just a little. If so, it's a shame, because it wouldn't have cost a dime, developers were and probably still are anxious to take a ride on the Google Wave.  

Two years ago today: "For those who are new to Scripting News, Morning Coffee Notes are notes I take, in the morning, while drinking coffee." 

BBC: "Google lowered the price range of its planned share sale to $85-$95, as it awaits approval from regulators." 

Dowbrigade reviews the Olympic sport of synchronized diving. 

Tuesday, August 17, 2004

BloggerCon III invitation is posted.  

How to register: 1. Become a member of the site. 2. Fill in the registration form. We have a blogroll of participants, in HTML and OPML.  

Random pictures from my recent Bay Area trip, including a pic of Steve Gillmor taken at our audio coffee clatch, Dave Jacobs, myself, classrooms at Stanford we'll use at BloggerCon, and people who came to eat spicy Scripting Noodles. My apologies to my food-mates, by the time we got to the restaurant I was totally talked out, having just led a three hour discussion of convention blogging before the dinner. Three hours of talking leaves me pretty well kaput. 

Of course there is no such thing as a perfect conflict-free date for a conference, and there are some other things happening on the chosen day, but I'm sure any other Saturday would be much worse, so barring any last-minute emergencies we're going to freeze the date for BloggerCon III at November 6. Don't buy your non-refundable plane tickets yet, and don't stop the mail delivery, but you could give a heads-up to the baby sitter, and definitely mark the calendar, in pencil.  

Political Wire: Astroturf is Back. 

CBS MW summary page for GOOG. 

Hacking Netflix reports on a geek who scrapes his queue into a feed.  

Cadenhead: Walter Cronkite spit in my Web. 

Gizmodo: "...the first legal music downloading price war." 

Big Dave Jacobs still needs a kidney. It's been a rough year in the Jacobs house, but The Big Guy is hanging in there. Anyway, after teaching his youngest kid to lip fart last week, I have to make amends by pointing to a walk for PKD that Dave's wife Amy is taking on September 19. She and Dave want to find a cure before any of their four kids, each of whom has a 50-50 chance of having the disease, gets symptomatic. You can help by sponsoring Amy's walk. 

Here's an example feed from RSSCalendar. Looks pretty good. 

BTW another nice thing about SP2 is no more popups. Really. They're gone. Nice. 

Wired: "Wired News will no longer capitalize the 'I' in internet." 

Buzz: "It will be 2-5 days before my power gets turned back on." 

Sun bids for the Unix users HP left behind. 

Monday, August 16, 2004

BloggerCon III date: November 6, 2004. 

Another November 7 activity -- the Vintage Computer Festival at the Computer History Museum in lovely Mountain View.  

CBS MW: "Google says it wants to complete its initial public offering on Tuesday night." 

News.Com: RSS gets down to business. Using RSS for calendars is not a new idea, but it's a very good use for RSS. Basically you subscribe to a calendar, and then add items in the future. The feed shows you the items that have been scheduled for that day. It's like MailToTheFuture for aggregators. 

Rebecca MacKinnon is coming. Excellent. She says there's a 5K race for charity at Stanford the next day. 

Hotels reasonably close to Stanford. Almost all have free high-speed Internet. We should probably choose a default show hotel so it's easy to stay at the same place.  

Scoble asks if people are interested in a bus tour the day after. 

In progress: Getting in the loop. 

New mail list for BloggerCon III. 

Dan Gillmor: "Count me in. Hope I can help." You just did.  

Another rule about BloggerCon. Everyone is invited and the cost is $0. So it's the antithesis of the classic Silicon Valley conference, whose goal is to be exclusive, where participation, even as a member of the audience, is a priviledge conferred on the few. No disrespect to that model of conferences, because I supported them myself, and helped Stewart Alsop with Agenda and Demo. Stewart is an expert craftsman of exclusivity, and it worked well in the eighties and early nineties. But with the turn to blogs there's a new kind of filter in place, courage. Do you have the guts to put your ideas out there, to be tested in a public forum, without a brand or masthead over your name to cushion the fall if you get it wrong or say something that offends a powerful person? And do you have the guts to come to a conference where there is no pecking order, where your ideas might actually be heard and acted on? There's safety in being powerless, but would you like to try being powerful instead? That's the challenge of BloggerCon. The members of exclusive clubs are welcome, but first-come-first-serve.  

This Con is filled with contrasts. Hatched in The People's Republic of Cambridge, where open and free makes so much sense, we now go to the heart of the technology industry, the incubator of Silicon Valley, Stanford University, symbol of what John Doerr called "greatest legal accumulation of wealth in human history," and say Let's start over, get back to our beginng. The Homebrew Computer Club, where so many of the pioneers of personal computers got their start, was also a figment of Stanford's great imagination. Forget the money for a moment, and let's focus on what we can do, working together, to create a better future.  

We've picked a tentative date for BloggerCon III in Palo Alto. After some coffee, I'll post a news item on the newly relocated BloggerCon site, and then get to work porting the registration app. Once that's up, I'll send a brief email to the people who attended participated in previous BloggerCons. The goal is to say "unless there's a huge problem which we don't forsee this is the date." Your job is to say if we've missed a huge problem. It's all part of the unconference concept. Do it yourself conference management. If you want a great conference you can help.