Sunday, October 31, 2004

Survey #1: Who will win the election? 

Survey #2: When will we know the result? 

On Tuesday at 9AM Pacific, we'll re-open enrollment for BloggerCon for 75 people. There's not much science to this, just a gut feel that our current registration list has at least 75 no-shows. We're getting a lot of requests from people about this, but I don't know many of them, and have no way to decide. So we'll add another 75, and then get on with the conference. 

An excellent six-day forecast. Lots of sun, warm, no rain. Whew.  

If Kerry wins on Tuesday, I have my headline written. 

Marc Canter doesn't want to do a podcast because there's no place to put metadata. He's right, it's a shame to not pass on the data, when we have it. Okay why does that happen? Because the people who could do something about it don't want to work with each other. Pretty simple. It took a lot of arm-twisting and patience to get the developers to even consider adding enclosure support to aggregators, and so far the only blogging tool that has it is Radio. Marc, you'd be a great podcaster. Get over it, worse is better, and let's add your voice to the conversation. Help the users, who are listening, figure out how to explain to the vendors why they need it. 

Newsweek: "The insurgents, by most accounts, are winning. Even Secretary of State Colin Powell has acknowledged this privately to friends in recent weeks." 

MP3 of the Australian podcast documentary. 

A very important post if you want to record or webcast BloggerCon. We have special support for people who want to tap into the audio stream.  

EVP: Kerry 283, Bush 246. 

The Boston Globe captures the history of the Red Sox win. "Pesky was the stand-in for all of the Towne Teamers who'd gotten to the World Series and fell short." 

Ed Cone: "On Wednesday I will wake up. No matter who wins, the dog will have insinuated herself onto the bed. The kids will need feeding before school." 

According to Johns Hopkins University, 100,000 Iraqi civillians have died in the war. If you're an American you know how we feel about the 3000 who died in the World Trade Center. 100,000 is a much bigger number. Is an Iraqi life is worth less than an American's? Give that some thought. 

The day after tomorrow is the one day we are not powerless. We don't have to stand by and do nothing. We can fix the problem.  

"thinkusaalignright"Richard Carter via email: "I think you should stop sitting on the fence and tell us which candidate Scripting News endorses." Good idea. Scripting News endorses John Kerry for President. To be fair, Richard put a smiley at the end of his request. But I thought it was a good chance to get in another plug for Kerry. I'm reading Seymour Hersh's Chain of Command. I don't think most people know that Bush has thrown out the Geneva Convention for dealing with prisoners of war. We think of ourselves as the good guys, but we're not the good guys now, if we ever were. Bush may make you feel good, but it's not real. And there's a practical side to it. Next time our troops are held prisoner, it would be a stretch to expect they would be treated humanely according to the Geneva Convention. That's one of the reasons we support it, it's a way of protecting our soliders from torture. Also last night on MSNBC, finally saw a recount of the faceoff between Kerry and Nixon in the early 70s. Kerry was proven right. The Calley massacre was uncovered while the controversy was going on, as were the Pentagon Papers. This should have been covered when the Swift Boat ads were running. An amazing lapse in journalism.  

Podcasting was discussed on Australian national radio. 

My Polling Site: "We offer a free nonpartison web based service to help voters find their polling site in four clicks or less." 

BTW, I didn't mention yesterday that it was one week to BloggerCon. That's when things start to get interesting! (As in the Chinese proverb/curse about living in "interesting" times.) So today it's just six days to BloggerCon (and two to the election.) The last big project for me to complete is the Food For Thought dinners at 8PM on Saturday night (November 6). We'll have eight tables of 15-20 people each, each led by a discussion leader, much like the daily sessions, but you get to eat too. Sylvia Paull and Enoch Choi chose the restaurants, all are adjacent to the Stanford campus and all are reasonably priced. If more than 150 people want to participate we can reserve more tables. The restaurants have all been very helpful in not requiring deposits. I'll put up a signup form later today. 

Also, did I say I'm driving to Silicon Valley? It's true. On Tuesday I vote, then hop in the car and head south. And Scoble-be-damned, I'm keeping my Streets and Trips with GPS, even though Microsoft did screw the Web by sucking up all the browser energy and locking it in a trunk. Why can't I have a nice toy? Yesterday I drove around Washington State, what a beautiful day (sorry no pics) with my GPS. It worked. Now I want to get a new car that has it built in. I can't imagine driving without it. You can be much more adventurous, no matter how hard you try to get lost, you just can't do it. Wow. That's for me.  

Saturday, October 30, 2004

Free idea: A BitTorrent screen saver? When your system goes idle, all the Torrents you've downloaded pop up and start serving.  

The day before Jon Stewart appeared on CNN Crossfire, he spoke for an hour on C-SPAN to an audience of media people. Of course it's available as a Torrent. Thanks to Ryan Tate for the pointer. 

Roland Piquepaille: Le Monde endorses John Kerry. 

Russell Beattie is hosting a copy of Farenheit 9-11. 

Cory Doctorow: "Apple's spending money seeing to it that features are removed from your iPod." 

Dowbrigade: "Boston awoke today to dark threatening skies laid thick on a cold, raw mist, a steady drizzle coating the streets with a slick shiny sheen. Despite that fact, up to five million long-frustrated Red Sox fans are expected to jam the streets of the city for the triumphant World Series victory parade." 

Adam Curry: "Being someone's wing-man goes beyond a partnership." 

Blogging tools and enclosures. "We've been trying to get aggregator developers to support RSS 2.0 enclosures, but I've never written a piece explaining how I think developers of blogging tools should support enclosures." 

Friday, October 29, 2004

"thinkusaalignright"I watched CNN and MSNBC this evening, two networks that seemed somewhat fair, and had to turn them off, in disgust. They're spinning heavy for Bush, basically saying he won the election with the Osama speech. No polls to back them up. Pure spin, pure manipulation, first by bin Laden, then by the TV networks. This reeks of the Dean Scream. Maybe much worse. 

For review and testing: Podcast debugger. 

Aaron Brown, on CNN, about the US: "Not exactly bin Laden country." 

Three years ago today Scoble rolled and totaled his car, and walked.  

Lots to think about in bin Laden's message. When he says we're responsible for what the country does, he's right, and that's something only one candidate said, and it wasn't Bush or Kerry.  

Excerpts of a translation of bin Laden's message by Aljazeera. 

Please read this piece, written in 2001, if you're planning on being at the Making Money session at BloggerCon III, eight days from today. "Dell Computer started in Michael's dorm room." 

I went for a walk today, of course; with my iPod, of course. I thought I was going to listen to a podcast, but I didn't. Instead I listened to some RIAA-owned music. It was like eating chocolate cake, with chocolate sauce, and whipped cream. I'll get back on the bandwagon tomorrow.  

US Department of State supports RSS 2.0.  

Okay it took a while to figure this one out, but the appearance of Osama bin Laden on TV so close to the election is a reminder that Bush went after the wrong guy. Osama is still free, and thumbing his nose at the US. How can Bush say he's tough on terror with a straight face with Uncle Osama hogging the news cycle, probably from now to Election Day. Now let's just hope bin Laden is just giving a stump speech and this isn't notice that thousands of Americans are about to die.  

Today's big political news, Osama bin Laden speaks to the American people. What does it mean? What a twist. October surprise. 

BBC: "Arabic TV station al-Jazeera has broadcast a videotape in which Osama Bin Laden threatens fresh attacks on the US." 

Survey: "Which of the two major party candidates will use the bin Laden appearance to score political points?" 

This site is a brainchild of Prof Larry Lessig at Stanford Law School. 

The new word for the day is enblogment.  

To the geeks -- what impresses users? Interop. 

Here's why we must throw Bush out of office. The big moment came when Colin Powell went before the UN to explain why it was time to go to war with Iraq. That's when the impeachment proceedings should have started, in hindsight. Unfortunately we didn't know then that they were lying. Blame us for believing that our President wouldn't unilaterally go to war based on a lie. That's criminal. He should go to jail. Sorry Republicans, you nominated the wrong guy. 

If we don't get rid of Bush, we've just ratified a new form of government for the US. What comes next on that road? Kerry is definitely the conservative candidate for President. No doubt about that. 

Our Department of Homeland Security is going after a toy store in Oregon. A bomb plot? Anthrax? Funding terrorists? Nah. "Agents went to Pufferbelly based on a trademark infringement complaint filed in the agency's intellectual property rights center in Washington, DC." 

Capsule review of this week's West Wing, which I was able to watch after getting the Divx codec. There's a surprise ending. A small amount of good acting, something happened to one character, but I wish they had all gone for that walk in the woods. The current WW writers don't understand their characters. They never say or do anything that isn't TV-tested crap. I didn't even shed a tear for the character who went for the walk. That's how poor the show is. I used to cry effusively at the old WW eighteen times per episode. Feh. I'll still watch it if only for the scenery, but it used to be such a great show, now it's so incredibly mediocre.  

Should we do this the old-fashioned way? 

Adam Curry is my friend, and that's not a small thing for me, but it's not true that he solely invented podcasting. We were doing it at Harvard almost a year before Adam's first podcast. I started doing regular podcasts myself in June of this year. I did a podcast from the T at the DNC, and from Interstate 25 in New Mexico. All this before Adam started the Daily Source Code in August.

Now that the buzz has grown so much, which is basically a good thing, the distortion level has gotten super-high and Adam is becoming the sole inventor of the art and technology. Part of me doesn't care, but some of the stories that are coming out are incredibly mean. That I mind, a lot. (Sorry, I'm not going to point to them.) There have always been a lot of hitchhikers, even hijackers, as a format or protocol or activity becomes popular, but Adam isn't one of those people. We've been working on this together since Y2K. He's supported everything I've done, and vice versa. We're friends, and I hope to work with him for many years to come.

There's another angle to this. The iPodder software was the first software to handle enclosures specially for iPods, but Radio UserLand had support for time-shifted enclosures in its first release in January 2002. So to say that iPodder was the first software to enable podcasting, would be taking a fairly narrow view of what podcasting is. Even though Adam gives me credit for the RSS work I did, he didn't actually give me credit for the software, or for the podcasts we did at Harvard in 2003, and my own personal podcast stream starting this summer.

So there's this question out there -- should we just overlook that the story being passed around is wrong, and getting wronger every day, or should the bloggers and podcasters care to have the real story get out there? I'm tired of fighting for credit, but I'm equally tired of inventing stuff and popularizing stuff, which is really hard work, and having other people make the money and get the credit. More than tired, exhausted. And I'm already getting trashed for the work I've done here, believe it or not. That's more than tiring, more than exhausting, that's harrowing.

Time to go for a walk and listen to Woz talk about the early days of hacking and Apple.

Thursday, October 28, 2004

A new Trade Secrets podcast.  

Economist: "As Mr Bush has often said, there is a need in life for accountability. He has refused to impose it himself, and so voters should, in our view, impose it on him, given a viable alternative. John Kerry, for all the doubts about him, would be in a better position to carry on with America's great tasks." 

I didn't get to watch last night's West Wing, but I hear it's pretty radical. Anyone have a Torrent I can download? (Got one. Downloading from TVTorrents. It's also available here, here and here.) Next problem, I've downloaded the file from TVTorrents, its name is ww.hdtv-lol.avi. I tried playing it in Windows Media Player, it can't find the codec. Same with every other player on my ThinkPad and my Sony Vaio. What am I missing? I really want to see what happened to Leo. A clue, I can hear the audio fine, just no video. 

Larry Lessig will lead a BloggerCon session on law and blogging. 

Minnesota Public Radio: "Former Minnesota Gov Jesse Ventura is silent no more on why he's supporting John Kerry for president." 

Inquirer: "Get ready, baby, it's The Dawn & Drew Show." 

Dawn & Drew will be at BloggerCon. 

Watching the Kerry rally in Madison, gives me goose bumps. They say it's the largest political rally ever in Wisconsin. Bruce Springsteen will play.  

Political Wire: "What if you show up to vote next Tuesday and election workers say you are not registered?" 

Boston Globe: "A sprawling Nation of fans can finally exhale." 

BBC: "The official re-election site of President George W Bush is blocking visits from overseas users for 'security reasons'." 

Netcraft: "Many thousands of people living outside the US who were previously unaware of the site are now earnestly seeking out ways of accessing it." 

Russell Beattie offers a theory why Apple isn't running movies on iPods. 

Wednesday, October 27, 2004

A note of congratulations to our brothers and sisters in Boston. May the Bambino rest in peace. Philosophy rules! Love, Dave 

Northwest Public Radio joins the podcast community. 

BBC: New Florida vote scandal feared. 

Today I got a postcard, an official notice of voter registration from King County, State of Washington, USA, telling me where to vote next Tuesday. So it worked -- I get to cast a vote that counts in the Presidential election. 

NY Times: New food for IPods.  

Earlier today I had a note here asking why I wasn't interviewed for the NY Times piece above. The reporter contacted me, said he had tried to reach me. I apologized for not getting back to him. Overall the piece was pretty good. They use the word podcast without remark. And it was one of the first Times pieces to mention RSS.  

Slate: XM vs the IPod. 

Many thanks to Bradbury Software, makers of the FeedDemon aggregator, for a $1000 donation to BloggerCon; joining Adam Curry, AP, Google and Bloglines as primary sponsors of the conference. Thanks to all!  

Netcraft: "The official campaign web site for US President George W Bush appears to be rejecting web requests from outside the United States." 

Paolo: "It's true. I can't get on the site." 

BBC: "The blocking does not appear to be due to an attack by vandals or malicious hackers, but as a result of a policy decision by the Bush camp." 

NY Times piece on blogging on Madison Avenue. 

BBC: "A US airline attendant is fighting for her job after she was suspended over postings on her blog." 

Morning Coffee Notes, Day 2 

In this crazy mixed up day and age, Kerry is a gun-totin liberal, and Bush is a tax-and-spend compassionate conservative.

"thinkusaalignright"BTW, when Bush says he's a tax cutter, there's a little bit of sleight of hand going on there. A deficit is a form of tax. A rising deficit is a rising tax. At some point, unless he's planning on going bankrupt, we're going to have to pay back all the money we're pouring into Iraq. And unlike spending on education, health care, or infrastructure, there's no resulting growth to fund the payback. The money for Iraq is coming out of our pockets, one way or the other, sooner or later. I have a feeling it's not going to come in the form of higher taxes for his patrons. And when they say deficits will be paid for by our children and grandchildren, that's wishful thinking. Many economists believe the bill will come due while you and I are alive.

I remain skeptical of Kerry. Given the huge problems caused by Bush, wouldn't it be something if he had proposals that had a chance of making sure those problems don't plague a Kerry Administration. Some form of extra accountability if he should break a major commitment, as Bush did about going to war in Iraq. (I agree with Kerry, I remember the spin at the time the Senate voted to authorize the war, the President was clear that this was just an option, not a plan.) How can we make sure we're not just replacing one bad actor with another? Really, Kerry hasn't offered us anything substantial here.

The comedian Dennis Miller, who has turned into a Republican (amazing) was on some talk show yesterday and said something pretty reasonable. If Kerry is elected, he's going to get behind Kerry, because he'll be the President. Since I'm voting for Kerry, I can balance his promise, by saying if Kerry is elected, I plan to get on his case and stay on it all through his term. We've had enough horrible government. We must be suspicious of these guys, no matter what party they're from. Now, to be perfectly straight, I don't think I could support a re-elected George Bush. I stood behind him after we were attacked, this is the American thing to do, it's one of the reasons our country is so great. But enough already. We're so divided because of Bush that people are actually talking openly about civil war after the election. This is no good. I find myself ready to say to our friends in Europe and Asia, it's time for you guys to plan your invasion of the US. We need a lot of help here. One more time, we can solve this problem ourselves, but so far we've missed every opportunity to do so.

Tuesday, October 26, 2004

Forrester Research RSS feeds.  

Got an email tonight from a Republican reader noting that I hadn't had much to say about the election in the last 24 hours. Okay, let's fix that. Remember when Bush and his spin-meisters were nailing Kerry and his team for not showing enough respect for the puppet government of Allawi in Iraq? Well, from the department of biting the hand that's up your butt, Allawi today blamed the Bush administration for failing to protect the fifty Iraqi soldiers who were massacred a couple of days ago. Now, Dubya, do you mind if we join you in wondering if Iraq is worth the grief? 

Five years ago Dan Gillmor's blog started. That was a happy day here too, finally we had recruited a real ink-stained ree-por-tuh to help give credibilty to this new medium. Five years. Man, time sure flies! Regret: We don't have an archive of the first couple of years of Dan's blog. 

Marc Nozell sent an audio message confirming that MS is using a descendent of a DEC voice syntheizer on its voicemail system.  

Schedule update: I'll be in NYC 11/22-27. Then in early December I'll be on the road again, not sure where I'll be headed this time, maybe back to Canada, maybe south, maybe both. I have to be in Cambridge for a conference at Harvard on 12/10. Where will I fly out of? No idea.  

Watching Game 3 of the World Series, man the Red Sox look like the new Yankees. Even when there's an error that puts Cardinal runners on second and third with no out, they shut them down. However, even if they win tonight's game and go up 3 games to 0, we can't say it's almost over, that would be asking for it, the way the Yankees asked for it in the ALCS. 

Geek News warns not to use an aggregator at a Hilton hotel. Interesting story. Usually those problems seem to be limited to one hotel, not a chain. I've used aggregators at a few Hilton Garden Inns without problems. They're actually some of the best-wired hotels. 

New geekish feature on ipodder.org. 

Capsule review of Feedburner. The cool thing about RSS is that it decentralizes news flow, it levels the playing field so bloggers and pros can compete. Feedburner centralizes RSS without any apparent business model. This is scary because at some point they will need to have a business model, and then what. Will they put ads in your feeds? (Ole Eichorn says they already put ads in the feeds.) What if you don't like them? How do you opt out? Have they said they will redirect users where ever you want them to go? If so, do you really trust that? I've read their terms of service, have you? It seems to say they can discontinue serving your feed at any time, without notice. No guarantee that you can opt out without losing all your subscribers. This is what's wrong with building a network around a centralized node. What are you getting in return? Statistics. That's cool. But we can figure out other ways to do that. They route around the format wars. Yuck. What we need is for the format wars to end, not for profiteers to monetize them. 

FutureTense: "Researchers with the National Cybersecurity Alliance and America Online have found most consumers perceive themselves to be safe online, even when they have no firewall protection, outdated antivirus software and dozens of spyware and adware programs secretly running on their computers. 

It's still raining at Stanford, a little more than 1.5 weeks before BloggerCon. I haven't ordered the lunch yet, because if it's raining, we don't have any place to actually eat it. Everybody, think dry. Think sun. Rain rain go away, come again any time after November 6! 

An old-style Morning Coffee Notes 

BBC says the "search wars" are coming to the desktop. It's hard to believe I was so excited just a couple of weeks ago, fully expecting there was a goldmine of data to be found on my local hard disk, only to find that most of the stuff Google could find was either spam or virus email. I don't use Office, I'm religious about that, I won't use any non-Internet Microsoft product until they start investing again in MSIE. I don't hold out much hope, but it's the least I can do for the Web. Seems Google is just as fixated on Microsoft as Microsoft is, because not only don't they index Radio's object database, they don't even provide a way for me to write a driver to help them index it. Since most of my content is in that format, that's probably what's holding me back from getting any real value from GDS.

But Google, don't rush, because I've already learned, long ago, if I want to be able to search something I just need to publish it, and eventually it'll show up in Google. I just have to be willing to share it with the world. In a way this is a Lessig-like scheme to get me to CC my content so it can be part of his cool new website. But of course the website we all want to be part of is... Google (not the one on my desktop by the way). So basically search is just where it needs to be, after all. We didn't really need it on our desktop where it potentially exposes all our passwords and secret desires, which of course we don't want exposed.

I'm on a roll. This is an old-style Morning Coffee Notes, the kind we did before we were doing audio blog posts, before they were called podcasts, back when we couldn't find any software to record our voices (seriously, PCs came with microphones, but search high and lo, hither and yon, there was no software to actually use the microphones in a most basic way).

[Kevin Marks says I could have found a software tool to record from a mike on Windows, dating back to 1992, by asking instead of searching.]

Anyway, in the podcast with Scoble (rhymes with noble) I noticed he was telling a story about Microsoft (his employer) differently for the public than he had told me privately. I called him on it. Then I observed that I do that sometimes myself. He laughed, he knew what I was talking about. There's a certain book publisher in Sebastapol that you're not supposed to criticize. I've done that too many times, and as a result am not invited to participate in their confabs. They've used this tactic to go into areas I care very much about, sometimes even claiming that open work comes out of these exclusive events.

Now there's no good reason for me to accept a conflict of interest here, it's not like they're offering me a life-saving medical treatment in return for my silence, and even if they were, I would be required to disclaim that. So, no more of that. If you go to their conferences, and don't mind that they're closed events, only O'Reilly friends welcome, well, then you and I belong to different Webs, that's about all there is to say about it. But if they excluded you, I'd stand up for you, by not going, and saying clearly why I wasn't. Too many people who think of me as a friend look the other way. That hasn't been cool for quite some time, now it's not cool publicly either. I'll sleep better knowing I've leveled with you all, and I really don't care if O'Reilly, Dougherty and Dornfest don't like it. They obviously don't care what I think (or maybe they care too much).

Scoble stays up late 

He sent me an email, reminding me that I had ordered a copy of Streets & Trips with GPS for my new Sony laptop (which runs Windows XP). Okay, like you, like Scoble, I'm full of shit, but at least I'm honest, so I'll return it as soon as it arrives. He's right, I can't support Microsoft and as much as I'd like to have the new toy, it'll be better for the Web if I don't have it.

He also says they're upgrading MSIE, but it takes 12 months for the work to complete. I've been led down that path so many times before, no matter how much I like Scoble, I just don't believe it.

Which leads me to the next, probably most important, point. One of Scoble's bosses, Vic Gundotra, once asked me why I'm so harshly critical of Microsoft but generally stay away from criticizing (his example) Apple. I gave him an honest answer, but a coward's answer. It's because there's no support for being critical of Apple, and there's all kinds of support for being critical of Microsoft.

Well, this is about as dishonest as you can get, and we've got to stop this if we have any hope of creating a useful medium here. The medium we've set up is far too easy to control through intimidation. If we ever tread outside of the safe territory of trashing Microsoft, we lose all support, at a time when we need much more support.

And Scoble can do his part to help his employer. When I read his glowing reports from O'Reilly events, it's really hard to think of him as a friend. Sylvia Paull, who's helping with BloggerCon, and has been a friend for 20 years, once said this: "I don't go to parties my friends aren't welcome at." This is a good principle, and as good a definition of the spirit of the Web as I've ever heard. And if Microsoft wants to be treated fairly, and who doesn't, they have to start by treating other people fairly.

And there's a practical side of it. If we agreed that no one is above examination, then we'd see more truth, and we'd get somewhere instead of just looping around and around. Doc Searls is both a proponent of the Cluetrain, and a big looker-in-the-other-direction. At BloggerCon, one of the things I'd like to talk about is meaning what we say and examining our own bullshit. If someone says "Look I found a bug in your software," is that good news or bad? The Cluetrain says it's good news. So does programming culture. So does Microsoft's old culture (one which almost doesn't exist anymore). We have a few among us who don't want to be talked about, yet want to dominate the conversation. We must tell them no.

Further, when they tell you there's more to it, there isn't. And when they say there's a flaw in my personality, perhaps they're right, but listening to Air America yesterday for the first time, I heard a caller say that Jesus was a liberal. She provided a few quotes, including this one. "Let the one without sin cast the first stone."

Judith Miller 

Don't be shocked, there's more!

A couple of weeks ago, Martin Nisenholtz at the NY Times asked me and a few other bloggers to look at the case of Judith Miller, a reporter at the Times, a famous one, who may go to jail to protect a source. He asked me to read an editorial, written by the publisher of the paper, and say what I think. I only told half the story then, wanting to think before presenting the other side.

Last night on the CNN program NewsNight, Aaron Brown, the host, interviewed Miller in a very long segment. I didn't time it, but I think it was probably ten minutes. He said at the outset that he and Miller are friends, and judging by the friendly nature of the conversation, it's a good thing he disclaimed it, because it was completely apparent.

I've been watching a lot of CNN and MSNBC lately, with the election so close, and this presentation was striking in its calmness, and thoughtfulness. Two intelligent people, talking about an important issue with big implications, with plenty of time, talking slowly, explaining themselves carefully. There was something disturbing about it, they weren't shouting. There was no opposition. No one was disagreeing with her. How unlike CNN. How wrong of CNN. How wrong of the the Times to support this.

On examination, where does the Times derive its right to deny the court order? Does the Times feel that I, an ordinary citizen, would have to comply with such an order? If I would, then what's the legal difference between a Times reporter and a blogger? Does that mean that Times reporters would have to be licensed by the state? Does the Times really support this idea? I hope not.

Fact is, sometimes the public need for information trumps a writer's guarantee of privacy to sources. Why should Miller be able to offer anonymity if a blogger can't? The Constitution does not give special status or protection to reporters. The First Amendment applies to all, not just people with a press badge. They were right to bring this to the blogosphere, but they were wrong in assuming we wouldn't probe and ask the questions they likely don't have answers for. They should join this discussion. They haven't so far.

And even now there's more to it, but this is where I want to stop and see if there's a response.

Monday, October 25, 2004

Eric Rice is exploring using Skype for podcasts. 

It was great to see Bill Clinton campaigning for John Kerry today. For so many reasons. First, he's the most skillful political speaker we have, in either party. Watching him at work is like watching a skilled artist, when we've had to tolerate such second-stringers, in Bush and Cheney and yes, Kerry and Edwards. Second, it's great to see him look so well! I have some idea what he's been through. This particular disease and its treatment help deepen people and bring on a sense of purpose and impatience. Let's get it done, now. Third, he will help the cause and raise the level of the debate. It's good to see him standing up for and behind John Kerry. In the early days of the Edwards partnership, Kerry was awkward, but you can see how he has grown as a leader. And Clinton's frailty, his vulnerability, works. Kerry, who actually is older than Clinton, can be seen as relying on and at the same time supporting the weaker but more experienced man. I like it because it works. Finally, so many years after Clinton's scandal, it's time to forgive the man. Enough time has passed, he's suffered enough, he's good enough. As they say, when Clinton lied no one died. Those were simpler times. It feels good to see Clinton doing so well because it feels so good to forgive. 

The world's oldest man is a Red Sox fan.  

If your desktop aggregator supports enclosures, you can subscribe to this feed to get a pretty healthy percentage of the new podcasts. And if you're a thick-headed PC columnist, you might try the HTML version as a fairly idiot-proof user interface for finding the new MP3s. You can even copy them to your iPod or iPod-alike using the Windows file system. One more thing, it's not just for Mac users, I only use Windows machines, but if Kerry wins the election I'll get a nice new Mac.  

Computerworld: "The biggest challenge for the open-source community is that there are too few open-source developers, according to Michael Tiemann, vice president of open-source affairs at Red Hat Inc." 

CBC is doing a podcast of Tod Maffin's radio show. Here's an episode he did explaining RSS.  

A podcast feed for Air America's Morning Sedition show. AA doesn't have very broad distribution in the US, but this feed solves the problem for people in cities that don't have a local station. Coooool.  

NY Times: Clinton Gets Rock Star's Welcome in Philadelphia. 

Adam Curry sends a screen shot of the OPML directory from iPodder.org integrated with the new iPodderX app.  

SF Chronicle article about RSS. Apparently RSS was a big topic at the Web 2.0 conference earlier this month. "At Web 2.0, a recent Internet conference in San Francisco, the acronym was omnipresent, referred to countless times on the stage and in the hallways." I think perhaps it's time for an open conference about the future of RSS. The Web 2.0 conference was exclusive. You had to be friends with a few rich and powerful people to be on stage there. This is not a good way to run an open standard, I think every reasonable person would agree with that.  

Scoble comments on yesterday's podcast in a blog post.  

ABC: "A gaunt former President Clinton does not think he is taking a risk by hitting the campaign trail for Democratic presidential hopeful John Kerry so soon after undergoing quadruple heart bypass surgery." 

AP: "A smiling, energetic former President Clinton campaigned for Democratic Sen. John Kerry on Monday just seven weeks after undergoing heart surgery, telling a cheering crowd of thousands that Kerry 'is going to make America the comeback country.'" 

Eight days before the election, who would you vote for? 

Want a podcast with bite-size enclosures? Pete Prodoehl fills the bill. 

I'm doing some work on audio.weblogs.com this morning. This post has an enclosure attached, which you can see in the RSS feed. 

Sunday, October 24, 2004

Since arriving in Seattle I've wanted to do a podcast with Scoble. Today, before World Series game 2, we recorded a one hour six minute show. 

Geek News: "This is the best Podcast I have listened to yet." 

10/2/04: Anatomy of an iPodder. 

Sounds like a breakthrough in Adam Curry Land. 

The OPML blogroll of people participating in BloggerCon.  

Julie Leung: "Diaper-changing is one of my areas of expertise." 

Des Moines Register: "Yes, Kerry is liberal. But what's to fear from a liberal president? That he would run big deficits? That he would increase federal spending? That he would expand the power of the federal government over individuals' lives? Nothing Kerry could do could top what President Bush has already done in those realms." 

Rory Blyth: "A song isn't just lyrics." 

Saturday, October 23, 2004

Excellent first game of the series. Red Sox win 11-9 on a two-run home run in the bottom of the 8th. Lots of errors, lots of hits, base-running; even an injury. First post-curse Red Sox game, it's got a nice feel to it. The Yankees are sittin this one out. Happy about that!  

Schedule for the World Series. Go Red Sox! 

NY Times: Identities Stolen in Seconds. 

Dave Slusher on dim lights in the blogging world who stand "so close to the tree they fail to notice they are in a forest." 

In today's Daily Source Code, Adam ran a segment from KOMO about the homeless in Seattle. At the exact moment this was on, I was walking through Pioneer Square, which is ground zero for the homeless. 

Phishing has reached new levels of sophistication. Everything about this email looks real, and it gets your hackles up because it appears someone is taking money from your Paypal account to buy a game. The link that suggests you report fraud looks like a Paypal link, unless you mouse over it, and notice that it's not. I don't think I will ever give my PP password to a site without manually typing in the URL into my browser. Maybe I could create a rule like that for the browser to obey. Maybe now that Microsoft's ambitions with Passport have waned they can have an architecture in their browser for identity, something that Paypal and other Internet financial entities could tie into. Just a thought. 

David Weinberger: "I am a social putz." Me too. Great story.  

Carl Franklin defends podcasting as a medium.  

Another thing you can do at BloggerCon -- meet someone special, fall in love, get engaged...  

AKMA: "I’m available to make matches and read aloud from analyses of copyright law at weddings, funerals, and bar mitzvahs." 

Mary Hodder: "...the seller of the wedding invite doesn't want to attend because she doesn't like the bride and hasn't seen the groom since he started seeing the bride two years before." 

Is the White House is revising the record on the website that we (the taxpayers) pay for? 

When I signed on to the group phone call for The Gillmor Gang yesterday, Steve said they had three special surprise guests, members of The Firesign Theater. They were my high school heroes, but that was a long time ago, a really long time ago. Had the Firesign guys kept up? Well, apparently so. It took a few minutes to get going, they talked about underground radio in NY and LA in the 60s, Adam and I talked about podcasting today. Then we all joined in a chorus of The Good Days Are Back Again, with a refrain of For Now, For Now, For Now, For Now. I haven't listened to this show myself, yet, but I bet it's pretty good. 

I bought 100 shares of Google when it was $100. Yesterday it closed at $172.43. Paid all my rent in Seattle so far, and then some.  

Friday, October 22, 2004

Who do you vote for? You don't have to be a US citizen to vote here. 

CBS Marketwatch reviewer says iPodder ain't ready for real users.  

Lance Knobel feels a Kerry victory, but EVP has swung back to Bush. Adam and I recorded a Gillmor Gang episode today with three surprise guests, childhood heroes of mine, who got the podcast concept, totally, in less than an hour. Dit dit dit. This just in. More rain in California. The lunch on November 6 is still scheduled outdoors. When planning the event we thought luck would be on our side, the rains don't really start until December, right? Hmmm. Don't bet on it, especially in a year when the Boston Red Sox beat the New York Yankees in the post-season. Huh? Did that really happen? 

Sign up page for the Friday night dinner. You must be a registered for the conference and signed on to the site. The cost is $25 per person. 7PM, Friday November 5 at Ming's in Palo Alto. If you have questions or comments please post them on the sign up page. 

CBS: "Will Google reach $200 in a month?" 

Check this out. There's a new aggregated blog page where the leaders of Microsoft's developer division post. That's interesting in its own right, but there's something else that caught my eye, an OPML file listing all the execs blogs. What's cool about this is that Adam could include a link to this in his directory and it would automatically recalc when Microsoft added or removed a blog from their OPML doc. And his directory would reflect any hierarchy in the Microsoft OPML document (it doesn't have any now). Finally, I can comment on other people's use of OPML, and show how it can be used to create a distributed directory with multiple authors and no bottlenecks. Folks, this is the way directories will become useful, we just have to get the MSN guys to tune into this. (And Google.) 

According to Greg Linden, Google is opening an office in Kirkland, right down the road from Redmond.  

The third $1000 donor for BloggerCon III is Bloglines. They run an excellent centralized aggregator that combines the feeds of the weblog world with the feeds of the pros, allowing users to create a customized news flow. They've grown quite a bit in the last few years, and it's great that Mark Fletcher, the creator of Bloglines will be at the conference, and has been so generous, along with the AP and Google, in supporting it. Thanks!  

Enoch Choi will lead the Medical Bloggers discussion at BloggerCon. 

Is editorial independence a core value of the Web? 

Voices of Iraq is a movie filmed by the people of Iraq. 

This feed from the Internet Archive is almost a podcast feed. If it had an enclosure element for each song, an iPodder app would be able to subscribe to it and keep an iPod in synch with the feed. All the content in the feed is available under a Creative Commons license. 

Dowbrigade: "Last night 21-year-old Emerson College journalism major Victoria Snelgrove was killed when hit in the eye by a pepper spray ball fired by Boston Police." 

Microsoft PC enthusiasts are rebuilding their cars with Windows XP computers in their dash. Scoble has a video report on the Channel 9 website. DVD player, wifi, GPS, hooked up to the car sound system, all digital until the sound comes out the speakers. A microphone on the steering wheel. No aggregator, yet. Touch screen. 

The Channel 9 report reminded me that I wanted Microsoft Streets & Trips with GPS, so I ordered it today. It'll go well with my new ultralite laptop. I'm driving to BloggerCon, the day after the election.  

Thursday, October 21, 2004

Today's audio blog post about music, baseball, music, downtown freeways, Steve Wozniak, indie music and the Grateful Dead.  

In today's podcast I said the Houston Astros have to win. I was wrong. The St Louis Cardinals had to win. It's an old-time World Series, Boston vs St Louis. I guess that means Texas ain't in it. Okay with me.  

John Kerry killed a poor defenseless goose today to show that he likes guns. I'll vote for him anyway. And I like the way it routes around the NRA which has shown its colors. It's not about protecting the 2nd Amendment, because Kerry supports it. They're using their members for something else. Good for Kerry for calling their bluff. If Bush can run as a compassionate conservative, no reason Kerry can't run as a gun-totin liberal. It's about time the liberals started kicking some butt. Or shooting it.  

NY Times: "Eliot Spitzer, the New York State attorney general, has recently taken on a procession of corporate powers from Wall Street analysts to mutual funds to insurance brokers. Now he is casting his eyes on the music industry, particularly its practices for influencing what songs are heard on the public airwaves." 

We got another $1000 donation today. As has become customary, the announcement will come tomorrow. The Friday night dinner, Nov 5, will be at Ming's Palace in Palo Alto at 7PM. We'll have a signup page tomorrow. The cost is $30 per person but we may subsidize it to get the cost down so more people can come. We have room for 80 people.  

BBC: "The Iranian journalists' union has held a meeting to protest at the arrests of eight webloggers and reformist newspaper journalists in recent months." 

Now for the surprise. Yesterday we got a $1000 donation from Google. This is great because there are so many ways the weblog community and Google can cooperate to make the World Wide Web work better, and help people get the information they're looking for, faster and faster. Bloggers create the knowledge on the Web, and Google helps us find it. We've had our differences, mostly about technical issues, and for now, we still do -- but when it comes to learning about and supporting the blogosphere, we're on the same side. So it's with great pleasure that I thank Google for their financial support of BloggerCon, and look forward to their participation in the event. 

Some further comments about the Google donation. 

Thanks to Ross Rader, Doc Searls, Frank Paynter, Hank Barry, Jay Dedman, Scott Owens, John Furrier, Kona Cooker, Patrick Ritchie, Zoltan Der, Doug Kaye, Aldo Castaneda, Alex Williams and Mark Fletcher for their generous donations to BloggerCon.  

NY Times: "Real anger is as rare on television as real discussion." 

When I see Dick Cheney on TV I wonder if he's really running for vice-president of the United States, or vice-president of the sixth grade. With his wife laughing in the background as he takes cheap personal shots at a man who very well might be President of the United States shortly, I feel sad for my country that this is the best we've been able to elect to the second highest office in our country. Shame on Cheney, shame on the Republicans, shame on us. 

Jon Gordon interviews Mitch Altman, the designer of TV-B-Gone. 

The Wall Street Journal explores the world of Iraqi weblogs. 

I went to an interesting blogger's dinner last night at the Pike Brewery. We watched the end of the Red Sox game, met some Republicans (arrgh), a Libertarian candidate for Secretary of State, and a father-son podcasting team. Listening to their review of the Clusty search engine right now. 

Today's Scripting News is dedicated to miracles. When you live long enough you learn that miracles happen; in fact they happen all the time, you just have to keep your eyes open, and be willing to see them. Today in Boston, even a small child in kindergarten has lived long enough to see the Boston Red Sox defeat the mighty Yankees, something I never thought I'd be able to write, not in this lifetime. And who could not see the miracle in last night's victory? The Red Sox did what the Mets could not do, and they did it with such style, such force of character, and in the end, so decisively. Hats off to the Sox. Now it's okay, for a moment, for the fans to think that victory in the World Series will be theirs. Having disposed of the terrible foe, wouldn't it be something to see them face their former ace, Roger Clemens, in a cold, snowy game 7 in Boston? Could they win such a game? Could they? That's the amazing thing about baseball, you won't know till it happens. We could live to see that. And you'll see that there's another miracle, much smaller, that we can celebrate later today. The next big donor to the BloggerCon cause. 

Speaking of miracles, Lance Knobel notes that former US president Bill Clinton is well enough after heart surgery, to make a campaign appearance with John Kerry on Monday in Philadelphia. Lance also notes that President Bush is scheduled for a day of rest on Saturday, fueling speculation that the long-expected October surprise will be a Bush visit to Iraq or Afghanistan.  

UndergroundClips links to and reviews the CBC's unauthorized biography of Dick Cheney. (346MB) 

Another miracle on this day of miracles, Julie Leung and Adam Curry discover they have many things in common. 

Yesterday, talking with Marcus Mauller, we figured out how to integrate BitTorrent with Manila. The key is to do it through Gems. In a special Manila site on a server running the BitTorrent software, when you upload a Gem to that site, it automatically generates a meta file, and links to it in the Gems table listing. It's the perfect user interface. The content creator needs to know nothing about the difficult process of Torrent-izing a media file, the URL is handled the same way the non-Torrent URL is handled.  

Wednesday, October 20, 2004

Some great news! We got a $1000 donation today from The Associated Press. This is very welcome, both because we need the money, but also it's great that AP wants to help the bloggers. We have another $1000 donation in process from a big tech company, one which I think people will find surprising. I know I was surprised and pleased that old wounds are healing, and the blogosphere is uniting, in a very nice way. BloggerCon is that kind of event. It's so open, it makes people want to come in. Another cool thing is that we're getting these sponsorships without making editorial concessions. At the second BC, we went looking for financial help from the big tech companies (because we did away with the admission fee), and found that we would have to give them speaking slots, without telling the people they were paying for the slots. I wouldn't do these deals, although I had learned this is standard practice for tech industry conferences. These contributions are coming without any concessions. There will be people participating from AP, and other companies, and they participate like anyone else (no commercials, though), and they get our special thanks for helping the bloggers. That's the way it should work, imho. 

AP: "Boston blew away decades of defeat with four sweet swings." 

History was made tonight. The Boston Red Sox beat the NY Yankees in the seventh game of the ALCS. It's the first time the Yankees have lost a championship series. And the first time a team has come back from a 3-0 deficit in post-season play. And for Boston it's a major step in reversing the curse. Congrats to the Red Sox and their fans. 

Tim Madden has created podcast buttons for people to use.  

KGW, a television station in Portland, Oregon, has RSS feeds. 

And KPTV, the Fox affiliate in Portland also has RSS feeds. Amazing. 

WAGM, a television station in Presque Isle, Maine, has an RSS feed. 

Henry Earl is jail. How do I know? His RSS feed says so. 

MPR has a podcast feed of Jon Gordon's Future Tense. Bing! 

Marc Canter: "...I hated the idea of buying your way onto a panel." 

New feature: If you do a search on the Baltimore Sun website, you'll see a beautiful white-on-orange XML icon providing the search results in RSS. Subscribe to the feed to peform the search every time your aggregator updates. Don't you wish Google did this? 

Tonight is the season premiere of The West Wing, and the previews look good, but I won't be watching it. Game 7 of the ALCS is on at the same time, but I won't be watching that either. There's a political bloggers meetup at Pike Place Market tonight. I'll be drinking beer wondering what I'm missing as the Red Sox put the Yankees in the history books as the first team to ever lose a series after going up 3-0. And if you believe that, you don't know the Red Sox.  

NY Times: "The Yankees are one loss from sinking to an inglorious place in baseball history. Their fans beat them to it last night." 

EVP: Kerry 291, Bush 247. Deee-lish! 

Bob Stepno explains podcasting. 

Yesterday I tried an experiment, and included an enclosure that points to a QuickTime movie, to see what would happen. Mark Woods has a report. iTunes sort-of understands QuickTime, but iPods do not. 

Jeff Walsh writes, re Band of Citizens: "A lot of multimedia pros got together to create a positive site focusing on why they feel Kerry is the best candidate. The best thing is that anyone can send in a video, and it will appear on the site, just has to be positive about why someone is voting for Kerry, no Bush-bashing allowed." 

Tuesday, October 19, 2004

Watching the American League playoff with the New York Yankees and the Boston Red Sox, who were down to their final three outs at one point in the series and could tie the series 3-3 with a win tonight. They're up 4-0 in the top of the fourth. Just tuned in. Hope to bring them good luck. I hate the Yankees who have two on with no outs and their slugger Matsui coming to bat. Are you watching? Red Sox win. Game 7 tomorrow. 

Over the last couple of days I've helped a bunch of people debug their podcast feeds so they will work with audio.weblogs.com. Here are a few common problems and the cures. 

Thanks to Jeff Clavier, George MacDonald, Lance Knobel, Lisa Williams, Jack Mancilla and David Sifry for their generous donations to BloggerCon III.  

Announcing: Audio.Weblogs.Com. It shows the newest podcasts, in reverse chronologic order, the same way weblogs.com shows the most recently updated weblogs. Now you can sample the work of the podcast community before installing an iPodder app. Podcasters, you can ping via XML-RPC, the same way you ping weblogs.com (all the major weblog apps are compatible) or through a Web form. There's even an RSS feed that contains the most recent 100 podcasts, and if your desktop aggregator is enclosure-aware, you'll even get all the podcasts (but watch out it can add up to quite a bit of disk space). 

Since the Friday dinner and Saturday lunches will be outdoors, we'd appreciate it if it would stop raining in California as soon as possible.  

Orlowski: "The living room TV of the future will look a lot like Google." 

A classic Scoble corporate